[It really is fascinating hearing Stephen talk this way and it's not something Hakkyuu takes for granted for a moment because he knows at any moment something might feel too exposed and Stephen could clam up with a sharp subject change and decide never to touch anything even remotely in this quadrant of discussion again. It's what Hakkyuu would certainly do if he felt too close to being seen in ways he didn't want.
But it's also hard to tell how Stephen is faring on the inside because for Hakkyuu's part this is all fine.
His eyes drift back to Stephen as he speaks, taking in his points and giving a small nod.]
See, that's why folks like us cope a little better with this place, I think. Some shit happens, some of it's even enjoyable, but it just sorta... is. Others I think go through a lot of whiplash about this stuff with overexposure or something.
Personally, I can take it or leave it, the kink-specific stuff. Like, it's fine--[He pauses, putting the rest of his own sandwich down too and taking a gulp of the soup instead before continuing]--but none of it is typically what I'd have sought out back home and that's not because I'm shy or don't know where to find it. Sure, I'll probably get something out of it and I like new experiences, but I don't want to just get strung up and flogged for the sake of it. It's about who I'm doing it with and... why, I guess.
[His lips quirk to the side in a facial version of a shrug since some of this stuff he hasn't even talked through properly out loud, and certainly not for a while.]
But sex itself seems plenty up your alley. That about the shape of it?
[ he's nodding as hakkyuu explains himself. it all clicks in tidily with what he knows about the man himself, an articulation of something whose rough contours stephen had already implicitly understood within his first day in the city. hakkyuu isn't into the window dressing; stephen, though prone to showmanship, isn't into structure. and neither of them deal in awkwardness. ]
Mmm. More so here than at home, obviously. I could use more hobbies.
[There's a low chuckle as he puts his soup to the side as well for not, something to come back to later.]
Can't hurt. Seems like the other thing people do to pass time here—get or fix up a house, start a business, throw a party.
[He dusts his hands off and wipes his mouth with a paper napkin.]
So why not, join the local deep-throater's chorus or get into strap-on half marathon running. Sky's the limit during your interdimensional vacation to sex town. Since, let's be real, for folks like us that's all this really is.
[ stephen snorts at start a business, hold a party - mundanities that he has so far refused to indulge in this city. for one thing, stephen has two advanced degrees; he’s not about to sit behind a record store counter, even if the discounts do appeal. for another, he hasn’t given into the temptation to nest or hold dinner parties, not really. if there’s a party at your house, it’s your house, and duplicity remains far from any place stephen would deign to call home or get cozy in. if he’d ever come close it was under the same roof as hakkyuu and vrenille and the other him and loki, and that had been a quick and passing dream.
even if it had been good. even if it had come dangerously close to being something he liked or needed, especially when what ended up awaiting him at home was the raw wound of the world after the infinity war, misadventure after misadventure, his slowly expanding solitude. ]
I’ll think about it.
[ contemplative. and then, apropos of nothing - ]
When I texted Vrenille the other day, he said he owned the Arena. How long has that been a thing?
[Slinging an arm over the back of the chair after that rhetorical question, Hakkyuu's eyes shift left toward the ceiling as he thinks.]
Tracing it back, probably... Year and a half, two years? There's some grey area.
Basically, he got two gangster types as subs last year, Ed and Oswald. Ed was here first, so was a guy called Victor Zsasz--not the same Victor Zsasz who is here now, mind, different Zsasz. Multiverse shit.
Anyway, Zsasz inherented the Arena at some point. Ed and Zsasz were close so Zsasz puts Ed down on the lease of the Arena. When Oswald showed up, best I can tell, he was Zsasz's boss back in their world, so when he showed up, Zsasz added Oswald on the lease too.
Zsasz left, Arena defaults to the other two. Vrenille was their Dominant, but it's in name only since Oswald and Ed run the place.
Oswald... That little bird man's got one heck of an ambitious streak, ended up building a small empire as a sub in under three months between the Arena and a club in Insincerity.
When Ed left, Oswald outsourced the Arena to Jacob--you met Jaocb, right? Anyway, by that point Oswald "owns" the Arena in everything but the paperwork, which is under Vrenille, with Jaocb running it so Oswald could go do whatever bird-business shit he was running. Now he's gone, it's under Jacob, and still in Vrenille's name.
So Vrenille owns it, but he's never had much to do with it. Hell, I probably know more about it than him at this point, but only because making people spit their teeth out hasn't really changed while the management has been dancing around.
[ stephen hums along as hakkyuu explains, mentally filing away important details for later. ]
I’m no businessman, but the cycles of ownership in this town seem pretty unusual with all the comings and goings. It’s a wonder they let people open anything at all.
[ he drains the soup carton and vanishes it without so much as a gesture, then reaches for the coffee again. hilariously, he re-chills the can with his fingertips and presses it against a different bruise in his side with a grimace. the marks on him are all fingerprints, and slight too, nothing excessive or otherwise suggestive of the kind of handling stephen wouldn’t be able to take; they’re also all below the neck, probably by request. the use of the can is more informality that stephen doesn’t manage with most people. ]
I’ll probably check in at some point, so as long as the general principles haven’t changed ...
I mean, it's a gym by day and a fight club by night with sex on the side or middle depending on your preferences. Unless they added culinary courses to make it The Arena: Grill'n'Spill, the functions of the place aren't really going to change a whole lot.
[He doesn't say anything about the tell-tale marks on Stephen's body that speak to some rough handling and instead opts to let the conversation flow around the elephant in the room, but he watches, traces the purple flourishes with his eyes and mentally maps out the palm span of the guy Stephen was with. A superheroics build, Stephen had suggested, but Hakkyuu can only picture an average-sized Norn man--the towering race of humanoids with homesteads in the Shiverpeaks of Tyria that tend to stand nine-foot and taller with varying degrees of sideways mass. He sort of forgets a lot of humans don't have that kind of reference.]
But you should. Come check it out, I mean. See if the locker rooms have the old glory hole fixtures or if they've added new ones. And, hey, I'm there most days. Every other at best--always open to regular dance partners if you wanna join me.
[He lets the sharper, teasing smirk buff out slight then, setting Stephen with a steadier stare.]
[ sorry, he’s covering his face with his other hand so he can laugh some more. this is stupid, they’re stupid. duncan was a gentleman through and through but riding his dick for two hours was stupid.
sometimes stupid is fine. better, on occasion, than having to worry about the state of the world. ]
[The sound of Stephen just laughing like that is something, inadvertently, that Hakkyuu wants to bottle. He missed hearing it. Missing hear echoes of it around the Manor produced by something Hakkyuu has said or done himself, or by something witty Vrenille has done, something endearingly pompous that Loki said, and many other combinations around and in-between.
It's always dangerous to appreciate Duplicity, but its people like Stephen and moments like this that Hakkyuu truly treasures, holds close to his chest and looks down at when the storm is raging all around. There was always a chance he wouldn't hear it again too, that another version of Stephen would show up and this version never come through again, but he's here--ass sore and bruised up, talking about nothing and everything.
Yeah, Hakkyuu would bottle that up if he could. But for now he watches and listens, still and quiet compared to the fidgety chatty version of himself as he just wants to absorb as much of the moment as he can. After all, we can't all have photographic memories.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
But it's also hard to tell how Stephen is faring on the inside because for Hakkyuu's part this is all fine.
His eyes drift back to Stephen as he speaks, taking in his points and giving a small nod.]
See, that's why folks like us cope a little better with this place, I think. Some shit happens, some of it's even enjoyable, but it just sorta... is. Others I think go through a lot of whiplash about this stuff with overexposure or something.
Personally, I can take it or leave it, the kink-specific stuff. Like, it's fine--[He pauses, putting the rest of his own sandwich down too and taking a gulp of the soup instead before continuing]--but none of it is typically what I'd have sought out back home and that's not because I'm shy or don't know where to find it. Sure, I'll probably get something out of it and I like new experiences, but I don't want to just get strung up and flogged for the sake of it. It's about who I'm doing it with and... why, I guess.
[His lips quirk to the side in a facial version of a shrug since some of this stuff he hasn't even talked through properly out loud, and certainly not for a while.]
But sex itself seems plenty up your alley. That about the shape of it?
no subject
Mmm. More so here than at home, obviously. I could use more hobbies.
[ just gonna apply himself to the soup for now. ]
no subject
Can't hurt. Seems like the other thing people do to pass time here—get or fix up a house, start a business, throw a party.
[He dusts his hands off and wipes his mouth with a paper napkin.]
So why not, join the local deep-throater's chorus or get into strap-on half marathon running. Sky's the limit during your interdimensional vacation to sex town. Since, let's be real, for folks like us that's all this really is.
no subject
even if it had been good. even if it had come dangerously close to being something he liked or needed, especially when what ended up awaiting him at home was the raw wound of the world after the infinity war, misadventure after misadventure, his slowly expanding solitude. ]
I’ll think about it.
[ contemplative. and then, apropos of nothing - ]
When I texted Vrenille the other day, he said he owned the Arena. How long has that been a thing?
no subject
[Slinging an arm over the back of the chair after that rhetorical question, Hakkyuu's eyes shift left toward the ceiling as he thinks.]
Tracing it back, probably... Year and a half, two years? There's some grey area.
Basically, he got two gangster types as subs last year, Ed and Oswald. Ed was here first, so was a guy called Victor Zsasz--not the same Victor Zsasz who is here now, mind, different Zsasz. Multiverse shit.
Anyway, Zsasz inherented the Arena at some point. Ed and Zsasz were close so Zsasz puts Ed down on the lease of the Arena. When Oswald showed up, best I can tell, he was Zsasz's boss back in their world, so when he showed up, Zsasz added Oswald on the lease too.
Zsasz left, Arena defaults to the other two. Vrenille was their Dominant, but it's in name only since Oswald and Ed run the place.
Oswald... That little bird man's got one heck of an ambitious streak, ended up building a small empire as a sub in under three months between the Arena and a club in Insincerity.
When Ed left, Oswald outsourced the Arena to Jacob--you met Jaocb, right? Anyway, by that point Oswald "owns" the Arena in everything but the paperwork, which is under Vrenille, with Jaocb running it so Oswald could go do whatever bird-business shit he was running. Now he's gone, it's under Jacob, and still in Vrenille's name.
So Vrenille owns it, but he's never had much to do with it. Hell, I probably know more about it than him at this point, but only because making people spit their teeth out hasn't really changed while the management has been dancing around.
no subject
I’m no businessman, but the cycles of ownership in this town seem pretty unusual with all the comings and goings. It’s a wonder they let people open anything at all.
[ he drains the soup carton and vanishes it without so much as a gesture, then reaches for the coffee again. hilariously, he re-chills the can with his fingertips and presses it against a different bruise in his side with a grimace. the marks on him are all fingerprints, and slight too, nothing excessive or otherwise suggestive of the kind of handling stephen wouldn’t be able to take; they’re also all below the neck, probably by request. the use of the can is more informality that stephen doesn’t manage with most people. ]
I’ll probably check in at some point, so as long as the general principles haven’t changed ...
no subject
[He doesn't say anything about the tell-tale marks on Stephen's body that speak to some rough handling and instead opts to let the conversation flow around the elephant in the room, but he watches, traces the purple flourishes with his eyes and mentally maps out the palm span of the guy Stephen was with. A superheroics build, Stephen had suggested, but Hakkyuu can only picture an average-sized Norn man--the towering race of humanoids with homesteads in the Shiverpeaks of Tyria that tend to stand nine-foot and taller with varying degrees of sideways mass. He sort of forgets a lot of humans don't have that kind of reference.]
But you should. Come check it out, I mean. See if the locker rooms have the old glory hole fixtures or if they've added new ones. And, hey, I'm there most days. Every other at best--always open to regular dance partners if you wanna join me.
[He lets the sharper, teasing smirk buff out slight then, setting Stephen with a steadier stare.]
You should.
no subject
Sounds fun. Already got stabbed back in that exam room, maybe if it happens more I’ll finally develop a taste for it.
[ wink :D ]
no subject
He... stabbed you?
no subject
With his nightmare dick, Hakkyuu. We can’t both not be firing on all cylinders.
no subject
no subject
sometimes stupid is fine. better, on occasion, than having to worry about the state of the world. ]
no subject
It's always dangerous to appreciate Duplicity, but its people like Stephen and moments like this that Hakkyuu truly treasures, holds close to his chest and looks down at when the storm is raging all around. There was always a chance he wouldn't hear it again too, that another version of Stephen would show up and this version never come through again, but he's here--ass sore and bruised up, talking about nothing and everything.
Yeah, Hakkyuu would bottle that up if he could. But for now he watches and listens, still and quiet compared to the fidgety chatty version of himself as he just wants to absorb as much of the moment as he can. After all, we can't all have photographic memories.]