Dirty Laundry |
Summary: | Eddie and Roubani cross paths in the laundry room. A study in eccentricity. |
Date: | MD029 |
Related Logs: | None |
Players: |
...... |
Laundry Room
Roubani's off-duty clothes are all safely tucked into a washing machine, and so he's in his last resort - sweats. It's too warm in here for the heavy sweatshirt, so that's off and folded on the back of a nearby chair. The tall Ensign has a chair claimed, that obvious from the notebook sitting on it, but he's abandoned it in favour of the floor. Sitting back on one heel, his knee pressed against his chest, Roubani has a piece of light blue chalk in his hand that he's writing on the floor with. Engineering's not going to appreciate this one.
Laundry is not the sort of thing Eddie enjoys, that much is clear as she enters through the hatch. She's got her rucksack held out in front of her, kicking the bag into the room instead of having it hitched over her shoulder. She's in a set of off duties, and normally she wears a sweatshirt even over that to hide her arms, but again, it's too hot in here. Kick, smack, skitter, and a fwooomp and Eddie finally has her bag next to a machine, though a glance is cast curiously over to Roubani. "Didn't your mother ever teach you not to color outside the lines, Rubix?"
Whatever Roubani's doing, he's been at it a while. The floor is covered with mathematical matrices and algebraic symbols, all arranged around a large central sketch of a box and a saddlepoint graph. The drawing is shaded to make it 3-D, and is so hyperrealistic that it seems to have depth in the floor. "Easier to ask forgiveness than permission."
Eddie keeps a half eye on Roubani while she opens up a washmachine and proceeds to pull out horribly wrinkled and terribly musty smelling clothing out of the bag, as if someone shoved it all in there when it was still wet. It's enough to have her crinkling her nose in disgust as she drops it into the machine, and then dumps a healthy amount of detergent in with it. "My sorta philosophy." She declares, letting the lid drop with a clang before she turns to fully appreciate, or gawk, at his work.
"For someone who wants to live like that," Roubani answers in his soft voice, "You have very thin skin." He shifts his weight onto his knees and then onto the other heel, picking up the white chalk and tracing a line of shading from before.
Eddie moves around the outskirts of his drawings, as if almost respectful of it. Fingers hitch up the material of her fatigue pants as she drops into a crouch next to Roubani. "Thin skin or shitty temper. There's a difference." And likely she thinks she has the latter, as she's not harboring any ill will towards the other Ensign. She looks at the drawing for a moment, tilting her head. "You forgot something." She comments, and as he works with the white chaulk, she reaches for the light blue one he used earlier. Before he can protest, she leans forward and quickly sketches a stick figure sliding down the slope of his graph. "There."
Roubani looks bewildered by the addition, sitting back and staring at it for a while. "Uh. Thank you." He sets own the white chalk and scoots backwards on the floor, folding his long legs in. Still watching the drawing as if determined to make some visual sense out of its newest citizen, he says, "Morales, right?"
Eddie grins, her lips spreading wide, it might actually be considered 'pretty' were she inclined to employ it more often. "You're welcome." She says in a satisfied manner, tossing the chalk back down and pressing back to her feet with a dusting of palms against each other. "Yeah. Eddie Morales. I'd ask yours, but I kinda like Rubix." And she wouldn't want anyone to mistake her for actually caring. "We flew that freighter thing together, yeah?"
"Yes." Roubani picks up the paper towel again, meticulously wiping blue stains off his fingertips. "I've seen you on CAP before." He pulls his feet under him without using his hands, standing up only so far as to let him sit on the edge of the chair he'd vacated earlier.
Eddie retreats back to her machine, vaulting up onto the top of it. "So what's all this nonsense anyways?" She looks down the drawing again, now that she has a loftier perspective of it. Tucking her hands beneath her thighs, she bunches her shoulders up around her ears, as if trying to fold in on herself.
"It isn't nonsense," Roubani sets the crumpled paper towel down and stands up, loosely folding his arms. He makes a motion with his foot towards the organised chaos on the floor. "This is a density matrix. It's a self-adjoint positive-semidefinite matrix, of trace one, that describes the statistical state of a quantum system. The quantum-mechanical analogue to a phase-space probability measure. It's actually very beautiful…an attempt to state in definitive terms a system where one doesn't even know with 100 percent certainty which pure quantum state the system is even in."
Eddie's face twitches just a bit, as if she might sneeze or smile, but its hard to tell which, what with the chalk dust in the air. "Toldja. Nonsense." She seems to nod definitively, then pulls her hands back out of their tuck to weasel a pack of crumpled smokes out of her pocket. "At least to some one like me, who always cheated off kids like you in school."
"It's not nonsense," Roubani again defends the point as he stands up, folding his arms loosely over his waist. "It's only a representation of fact, same as E equal m-c squared describes mass-energy equivalence. Like having a taste in your mouth and trying to communicate the flavour to someone else." He shrugs, clearing his throat softly. "Anyway. You could understand it if you wanted to."
Eddie makes a pass of her tongue over her lips, if only to give the paper of her cigarette something to stick to when she thrusts it into a pinch. She pulls out a silver lighter, flicking open the lid by bumping it against her leg on the downstroke, then on the upstroke, the flint wheel is caught my the material of her pants and sparking a flame. She's good at little parlor tricks like that, likely able to tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue as well. If she has enough tenancity to learn those things, maybe she could tackle his phase-space probability matrix thingermadohickey. "Let me guess." She mumbles around the cigarette, pausing to take a deep inhale against the flame of her lighter to start a burning ember on the end of it. "You get off on the physics and mathmatical high of flying, rather than the going fast and shooting things part."
Roubani's brows draw. He looks like this might be the first time someone's ever asked him something like that. "No, not really. I don't 'get off' on it at all. Are we meant to?"
Eddie exhales a lungful of smoke, at the tail end of which there is a cough or a laugh, or some mixture thereof. "If you're doing it right." Just then, the washing machine seems to pick up on the conversation, and switches over to the spin cycle. As it whirs and clunks with the heavy load, Eddie starts to rock in a heavily exaggerated manner as well as give some grossly fake moans.
Roubani stares at her for a few moments before he starts to laugh under his breath. It sounds almost guilty for finding it funny. "What…are you /doing/?"
Eddie settles back down with a deep grin and another drag on her cigarette. That's what you're supposed to do, afterall, after a pleasureable experience. Smoke. "Doin' it right." She tells him simply, "Because when others don't, you have to take matters into your own hands." She pats the washing machine lovingly. "Gonna be a loooooooong tour."
Roubani refolds his arms the other way and clears his throat, very softly. "I shouldn't think you'd have to resort to machinery. I mean, you're very pretty," he states, matter-of-factly.
Kai has arrived.
Eddie snorts to that, which has smoke shooting out of her nose like an angered dragon. "Right." She hops down off the washing machine as it whirs to a stop, giving a shake of her head. Eddie's in a pair of off duties, forgoing the sweatshirt to cover her arms this time as its hot in here. Roubani is in his sweats, though he's peeled off his sweatshirt for the same reason. There's also a nice pretty drawing on the floor, done in chalk, but its way above Eddie's brain power to understand whatever Roubani was illustrating with his saddle graph. "I hold my own, I suppose." She finally concedes, while she shifts laundry from washer to dryer, maybe this time she'll actually make it through the whole drying process.
The floor by Roubani's washer is indeed covered in chalk drawings. A three-dimensional saddle graph and a mess of mathematical computations and matrices surrounding it. Someone's drawn a little stick figure sliding down the side of the graph. He stands by his thumping dryer with his arms neatly folded, talking to Eddie. "I wasn't lying. You have very interesting angles to your face. May I draw you sometime?"
Kai thumps into the laundry room with, believe it or not, a laundry bag slung over one shoulder. He's in the process of digging a tin of detergent out, as he traverses the small room toward a free washer. Both Ensigns receive a polite nod, and maybe, if Roubani's lucky, his chalk diagram doesn't get scuffed with the squad leader's boots.
Eddie glances up as she feels someone pass by, tense for a moment as if it were Roubani sneaking into her personal space. Instead it's Kai thumping by, "Sir." She offers, as if she'll get smacked upside the head of she doesn't. Purely obligatory. Pulling the cigarette from her mouth, and knocking the dryer door closed with a knee, "Gonna memorialize me in chalk, Rubix?" Her tone seems vaguely mocking.
Roubani clears his throat, looking suddenly self-conscious. "No. Never mind." His dryer beeps and he unfolds his arms, turning around to open the panel with a click. The sound of someone's boots makes him glance over his shoulder. "Sir." His eyes stay glued to Kai's feet until he's certain the Captain isn't about to Mess Up The Floor.
She just might, if Kai had any hands free at the moment. Which he doesn't, since he's trying to wrestle his laundry bag and the tub of detergent at the moment. He might've scuffed Roubani's drawing, just a little. "I hope you've got a mop handy, Ensign," is murmured, back turned to the pair as he sorts clothes into the machine.
Well. Roubani made Eddie uncomfortable, she was just returning the favor. Now they can just uncomfortably act like each other doesn't exist. She's getting good at this. Lack of other distractions, her attention turns to Kai while she waits for her laundry to dry. "Aww, Cap. But its so pretty! See? That's you." She tells him, pointing to the stick figure in the middle of it all.
"There's one in the closet, sir." Roubani apparently checked before he decided to make the floor into his personal workstation. He goes on folding his clothes into neat piles on the table.
Kai spares a brief look for the drawing. And, one supposes, the stick figure that's meant to be.. him? Then again, maybe Eddie's just talking out of her ass. "You two have a problem?" he continues. Detergent's portioned out, and the washing machines started, while the Captain turns around and leans back against one of them with his arms folded.
Eddie does tend to talk out of her ass frequently, its true. But she takes on a casual slouch, elbows bracing her up on the machine behind her while she leans. "No problem here, boss man." Yet she says it without casting a glance at Roubani, either.
Roubani rolls a pair of socks into each other, answering Kai, "It appears I may have offended Ensign Morales, sir. I'm not entirely sure."
Kai's gaze settles on Roubani first, then Eddie. His expression's dubious. "Let me clarify, Morales. Am I /going/ to have a problem with you two? I'm your squad captain, not your babysitter. So if there's an issue, it better either be spit out now, or the next time I walk in on you both, you'll be holding hands and singing kumbaya." Yes, he's still watching Eddie.
Eddie flicks her gaze to Roubani, but it slides back to the Captain in short order. "I think I still remember the words." She says smoothly, sticking to her guns that if there is a problem? It's not going to be Kai's problem. "But I'd ask he wash the chalk off his hands first, sir."
Roubani puts the pair of socks down and turns around, finally looking at them both. Or at least Kai. "Sir, it's not necessary to treat Ensign Morales and I like children. I'm sure you have more important, or at least more engaging, things to do."
It's not Eddie, but Nadiv who receives the brunt of Kai's displeased look, with that remark. He watches the Ensign silently for a long moment, then nods to the chalk drawing. "Wash it off." And the answer to him having something more important or engaging to do? Well, he's got to wait for his laundry just like everyone else. And he may as well make the junior officers' lives difficult, while he's at it.
Eddie bites the inside of her cheek, perhaps to keep from smiling or laughing outright. Either way, it looks like she's not going to risk it and turns back to her dryer as if willing it to tumble faster. This time she leans over it with elbows pressed into the metal casing, and continues smoking. Yes. Ha! She's not the one to raise Kai's ire this time.
Roubani's expression remains neutral, even as he keeps eyes evenly on Kai through the senior officer's displeasure. There might be a well-buried streak of hold-your-own in him yet. He lets a pointed second or two go by before answering mildly. "Yes, sir." Turning, he heads away from the two towards the maintenance closet on the far side of the room.
Oddly enough, there's no complaint, no barked order that Roubani hurry up and get to it. Maybe, just maybe, there was a point to this. There's a faint smile after the Ensign turns away to fetch a mop, and the Captain's summoned away by a wireless call over the intercom. Hopefully he won't end up with pink underpants.
Kai has left.
When Kai vacates, like the busy man he is, Eddie starts to laugh. Its not a melodious noise, but rather is scratchy and coarse like she's smoked one too many cigarettes and drank one too many bottles of moonshine. With a little bit of effort she climbs up ontop of the bank of washing machines and puts her hands on her hips. "Am I going to have a problem with you two?" She immitates, trying to look stern with her cigarette waggling precariously between her lips. "I'm not a frakking babysitter!"
Roubani didn't have to go far to get the mop and dampen it. Kai's gone by the time he comes back, and he sets it against the floor a safe distance from his work, folding his long fingers around it. The imitation manages to pull guilty smile onto his face. "He meant well. I suppose."
Eddie plucks the cigarette out of her mouth, if only to gesture towards him with the same hand, pointing. "But you. You my friend. Brilliant. Bravo.." She starts a slow clap of her hands, shaking loose a bit of ash from her cigarette that tumbles to dust the top of the machine she's currently perched up on. "Better you test the Captain's boundries than me. I almost hit him with a shoe once…purely on accident!…and I thought I'd be scrubbing the pilots' Head for a week."
Roubani gets an awkward look as she points at him, looking away. He sets the mop to the edge of his chalk drawings and pushes it forward, making a smooth line of erasure along the edge. Her revelation makes him look up again. "A shoe? How did you almost hit him with a shoe?"
Eddie actually has good sense once in a while, so she's squating, then hopping down off the machine before she dents it or herself with her tomfoolery of bing up there. "It wasn't meant for him, I was aiming for the bloke I was kicking out of my bunk. Adam? Aaron? His name started with an 'a'." She gives a little shrug, more like a roll of her shoulders as if she can't be assed to make the full gesture.
Roubani pushes the mop forward again, and back, the next line of wet trail perfectly meeting the last. "Someone had taken your bunk? That's awfully rude."
Eddie tilts her head, looking blankly to Roubani. "Right. Let's go with that. He was stealing my bunk." To keep herself busy, picks up a piece of laundry he was folding before he got interrupted with mopping instructions. Idly, she starts to twirl the fabric around her finger by the elastic. All fleet issued undergarments pretty much look the same. "Either that, or we just got done frakking and I was done with him."
Roubani keeps his eyes down, so he doesn't notice her touching his stuff. His back partly to her might hide the sudden reddened ears. "Oh. Yes…of course."
Eddie twirls the garment a few more times, before letting it flick back to the pile of things yet to be folded. "Aw, did you just break out the shy? Just a minute ago you wanted to draw the interesting angles of my face. Now I'm back to being a freak, huh?" Ah Eddie, the girl who just can't let sleeping dogs lie.
Roubani pushes the mop along, keeping his eyes on what he's doing. Mopping, how interesting. "You didn't seem like you wanted to be drawn."
Eddie is almost sad to see the little stick figure go to the sweet by and by of mop land. "Yeah well. Maybe I got a problem with sitting still that long." Or maybe she just has Issues. Her machine makes a loud buzz behind her, and is cast an annoyed glance.
"I never said you had to sit still." Roubani gets around the last bit of the drawing, the floor now admirably clean. Bye bye stickman.
Eddie clicks open the door to the dryer, starting to pull out handfulls of clothing and tossing it ontop of the machine unceramoniously. Its a frustrated looking thing, by the way she tosses it up there harder than necessary. "I don't want to be drawn. I don't even like my picture taken. No one wants to look at that shit."
"Okay," Roubani replies, as if she'd simply said she preferred diet soda to regular. "Then I won't. You didn't have to be so oblique before." He sets the mop upright and looks back at his sorting table. There's stuff that's not in the same place he left it, and he just stands there looking at it all.
Eddie starts violently folding her laundry, if such a thing can be done. Slap, crease, snap. She's practically grinding her back teeth into dust. "I don't even know what 'oblique' means." Well maybe she does, but she's got to pick on /something/.
Roubani frowns at his clothes. He picks up the pair of boxers she was twirling, setting them back down in the crumpled place they were before she'd moved them. He even gets the haphazard unfolded position perfect. "It doesn't matter." He glances over his shoulder at her folding. "You don't have to be angry. I'm not going to draw you. I promise."
Eddie snaps at him. "I'm not angry." Which, really only proves the point doesn't it? With her glance over to make sure he's heard, she notices his careful rearrangement of the boxers. Eyes narrow slight, and as if to experiment on a current theory, she reaches over and tugs it out of place again.
"Stop!" Roubani has the same tone of voice one might use at a cat clawing up the leg of the couch. He snatches the boxers from under her fingers, putting them down in their spot again. With the right creases.
Eddie takes a step towards him, smelling weakness or a challenge. Either way, she's reaching out a hand again to rearrange more of his clothing. "Really? What if I do…this?" Something he's folded is being yanked off the stack and thrown back ontop once its unfurled.
Roubani opens and closes his fingers in a manner that looks agitated. He folds his arms and turns away, tensely pacing a few steps over the newly cleaned floor.
Eddie hmms softly. Interesting. But, probably not what she was expecting. For a moment, she looks as if she might regret that decision, and she actually starts fumbling to try and put it back in its right position. "Look, don't be a baby." Though somehow she manages to make it sound like an apology. Almost. "I'm putting it back. I'm putting it back."
Roubani's shoulders move as he breathes through his mouth, then his nose once his lips tightly thin together. Keeping his arms tightly wrapped, he takes a few seconds before he looks back - at the table, not her. The anxiety in his posture calms, though not by very much. "I asked you to stop. Just please, -stop-."
Eddie holds up her hands in capitulation. "Stopping. Stopped. Geeeeez." And she thought /she/ had issues. As if reminded of them, an arm crosses over the other, scratching at a new scab that's reached that annoying point of the healing process. "Don't get your panties in a wad." Haha! That's a joke. See? Because his boxers are all bunched.
Roubani picks up the boxers, plus a shirt and pair of socks that looks like it might've been moved in the shuffling. He tosses them right back into the washing machine and shuts the lid with a bang, dialing up for a small load. By the time that's done his breathing has evened out, and his shoulders are no longer bone-crack tense. He picks up an unfolded shirt and sets about to the task. "You hurt your arm," he comments under his breath.
Eddie just blinks as he actually throws them back in the wash machine. That's like adding insult to injury. She just stares at him for a good long moment, then shakes her head and goes back to sloppily folding her own clothing. "I'm accident prone." She mutters, almost beneath her breath.
Roubani keeps his eyes down on his folding while she stares. One undershirt done, next. "Shouldn't you have picked a profession with fewer sharp edges?"
Eddie is really just balling up her clothes now, in some sort of haphazard fashion. Who cares if her offduties or her undergarments are wrinkled? "Life's full of sharp edges. If I tried to avoid them all, I'd be living in a padded cell. 'sides. Your philosophy is its better to ask forgiveness then permission? Mine is fly it like you stole it."
On the other table, Roubani is practically ironing his undergarments with his hands as he gets them tidied up. The washer nearby starts to chug chug. "How is that, exactly?"
Eddie glances over at him, "How's what? Living life like its too short, so don't frakking waste it? Live it balls to the wall, opened at full throttle, and let the rest of 'em eat your vapor?" What's so hard about that to understand.
There goes a slight blush again. Though at exactly what, who knows. Roubani picks up two socks, rolling them together, and finally looks at her again. "But do you enjoy it? Or do you just do it because that's how pilots are supposed to be?"
Eddie gives a shrug to that, not really knowing how to react, she just sort of closes off again. "Lived like this before the service. No sense in stopping now." Dark eyes drop to her hands, and she just tosses down her shirt with a sigh. "What about you. What were you before you joined up, besides boy genius?"
"I'm not a genius." Roubani rolls up another pair of socks, setting them beside the first. Then he shrugs. "Just a student, nothing special. Why the military? You don't seem very…exuberant about the discipline. I don't mean that offensively. You just don't."
Eddie presses her lips together, as if she's not sure she wants to answer. But then, "My old man. He's a Colonel. Well, retired now. It was either this, or he was going to let the MPs finally cart me off. How the frak was I supposed to know that was an Admiral's car I 'borrowed'."
Roubani's hands pause in the middle of folding a pair of boxers. "Why would you do something like that?"
Eddie can't help but give a smirk to that, the corner of her lips turning up to give her a bit of a mischievious glint. "I was tired of walking?" She offers, as if that's the legitimate reason.
Roubani stares at her for a good long moment, then: "You're joking." It's only after he states this aloud that he allows himself to smile.
Eddie gives a sudden bark of laughter, "Well. Mostly. The other half is that I was dared to do it. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Probably not such a shiny idea in hindsight."
The smile fades. Roubani puts down the folded pair of boxers. "What happened to the person that dared you?"
Eddie sees that smile fade, so she throws up another barrier between them. There's a noncommital grunt and a shrug, obviously who ever it was wasn't significant enough to get a part in this story, or she doesn't care where that person ended up. She reaches for her rucksack, apparently having enough of laundry folding fun.
Roubani seems to think about all that for a while. There's nothing else for him to do. The laundry on the table is folded and the other three pieces are still churning in the washer.
Eddie starts to cram her garments back into the bag, wrinkled is preferable to the musty smell they arrived in. "Yeah. Well." She mutters, knowing the conversation is pretty well killed. "Have fun with your..uh..laundry." She shoulders the bag, keeping her head ducked, her face shadowed by a shock of hair.
Somewhere in that silence, Roubani's thoughts derailed from carjacking back to density matrices. He's watching the floor by now, as if revisiting all that math he'd been working on in his head before Kai told him to wash it off. Her words jarr him and he blinks, refocusing. "Okay. Don't, uh…hit anyone with your shoes." He smiles, as if hoping that'll make the poor stab at humour actually work.
Eddie shifts the strap of her bag a bit on her shoulder to keep it's weight from digging in. "Now what would be the fun in throwing them if I missed all the time? See you around, Rubix." Maybe there was a flash of a smile in there, too, for good measure before she pushes out.