Disclaimer: I don't own Legion. I make no money off of this.
Water Boot-:-
The diplomats are leaving the room and Winema finds that she had fallen into a daze and she hadn't heard a thing.
She was too busy thinking about everything else. The hideous tie on Rimbor's representative that looks like the tongue of some dead animal, long and red and disgusting had caught her attention first off, followed swiftly by the way the newest female representative from Zarok is staring at the commander of Takron-Galtos in a sort of curious and flirtatious way, and then the whole meeting is a blur and they're all leaving and her lead bodyguard is asking where their next stop is for the day.
This is the third time in as many days that this has happened. Her pausing in time only for it to come hurtling back to the present, leaving her confused and having to go to the room where these meetings were recorded for protection reasons and ask for a copy to look over for later. The man who copied the files for her was getting annoyed and she didn't want to go through this again.
There was just too much on her mind.
"Get my suitcase from the hotel room," Winema tells her guard, hard as brass and twice as cold as she moves out of her chair and doesn't look at the man, "We're going to Rawl."
"Again?" the Guard inquires dubiously, only again to be not acknowledged as she leaves the room.
The trip to the tropic planet is quiet and cramped because the cruiser she usually uses is in the shop for repairs to one of the wings. She and her bodyguards were forced to use a more compact transporter and when she gets out of the stupid thing, in her simple white dress that looked like it should be worn along some shore of the sea, she stretches painfully and orders the guards to stay outside.
She doesn't bother knocking. She simply opens the door and calls out a, "Hello," only to find that the places Londo usually is when she comes (the kitchen, the couch, under the computer console) are unoccupied.
There is a sound vibrating through the place, like rain on a tin roof.
Her lips quirk up and she moves around the place, following the sound, her own steps reverberating through the halls and mixing with the rain noise. It's melodic and serene and calming, an old fashioned slow dance she used to practice with Tinya when she was small, and she keeps her pace until her tall figure stills at a door with steam flowing out of the cracks.
She is tempted, very much so, to bang the door open and scare the crap out of the doctor, but she won't. She's not feeling particularly malicious today. She'll be kind in as much a way as she can around this man she detests and finds interesting at the same instance.
Winema's hand touches the wood three times, her knuckles thin and hard against the somewhat pliant barrier. A hollow sound is a consequence after the knocking in a way that she likes, but also knows that in this point of time, Londo will not like and she repeats the motion again. This time she gets an answer.
"I just got in here," his voice calls out over dripping water, "Come inside or wait an hour."
"Coming in," she replies.
The door opens and she is met by the sight of his bathroom and all it features. So much more feminine than it should have been, but then she recalled, he had admitted to being more or less bisexual. He had some fashion sense, near on par with her own. If that was anything to go by.
It is clean, which is far beyond what she would expect from a mad scientist. Not a trace of mold or mildew anywhere in the nice, wide and long room. The only blemishes are his clothes in a disheveled pile on the floor, smelling of his experiments, most involving oil like the last time, and his boots knocked onto their sides in each corner not inhabited by the shower, sink or toilet. Still, aside from that little distraction, the tiles are a deep grey, the sink in porcelain, square and tall, and the shower takes up half of the place, the toilet, also porcelain, but with a fluffy black lid, seeming to hide behind the sink in sheer awe of the shower. Everything smells like men's cologne, cleaning products and steam.
She sits on the fluffy black toilet lid and he speaks up from behind the dark green shower curtain, not at all surprised that she has come again so quickly.
"You didn't do it, did you?"
"I tried," she answered, honest and annoyed that she is so direct in this issue, "But, then I got to the bar and realized, to my dismay, that I'm the President. I can't have sex with random people and not expect it to get out in the media and those vultures picking on me for months. And now it's affecting my work."
"How so?"
"I keep…I don't know. Falling in and out of time. I start thinking about some random stuff and then all of a sudden, a half hour or more has passed and I find myself stealing video tapes of meetings with very important people so I don't find that I've started a war."
In her explanation, she is making little motions with her hands and his own are raised above the curtain rod. Soap is in one hand and she notices it going up and down and can just guess what he's doing. The sight intrigues her as he answers back without pausing his actions, multi-tasking.
"Intriguing dilemma, but with an easy enough solution."
"And what is that?"
She hears the smirk in his voice, not needing to see it on his face, "Invite a friend over to your Presidential Suite and have sex there. Plenty of security and easy enough to keep a secret."
"All of my friends are married."
"…So?"
She seems to choke on air for a second and then responds quickly and with a voice chortled in humiliation, "So, I'm not going to end a marriage for my own pleasure. I'm not going to be an evil, dirty mistress!"
"If you're not going to take my advice, you could always get hardware."
No thought came with her next action. Just emotion and movement and the shoe in one of the corners being picked up in her little hand, being thrown and then hitting the curtain and followed by a surprised noise by Londo. She hit him in the stomach, and the boot landed on the inside of the shower, just next to his foot.
In the action, the curtain was drawn back, just enough for her to see his hands touch the wall and brace himself a little against the slight pain she has caused. When he bends down to pick up the shoe, they make eye contact and he narrows his eyes at her, looking just a little striking. In a Zeus-descending-from-Olympus sort of way. With chagrin.
He fills the boot with water and she doesn't move when he tosses the thing out through the opening in the curtain, splashing her hair and causing one of the white buns to come loose and let out the black locks trapped inside for the past thirteen hours, ruffled and wet and she laughs, just a little, but true to the laugh itself.
Londo closed the curtain again, but called over through the barrier, not so angry, "You don't need to assault me when I'm joking."
"That was joking?" Winema laughed again, letting the other bun out to make the look balanced.
"Alright, sarcasm," he admits and she can hear some water splash upwards as though he were cupping it with his hands and trapping it before letting it go.
Her hands tread through the tangles in her hair for a moment. There is an image in her head, the one that's been stuck there for the last two days, during her moments in time when she should be thinking of something else, but she can't because it's just so important to her and she can't help but think it should be important to him. She wants to tell it to him, but is a little afraid of what could come after and she puts out a careful selection of words as she speaks again.
"And, aside from the sex thing, there has been something else going on."
"What's that?"
She bites her lip, but answers, "Could I persuade you into not doing anything about it if I tell you?"
The water fills in the silence for a moment. Like a stream filling a fishbowl as time fills a portion of a clock in numbers and springs. She knows that he knows what is to come next, but she wants to talk so badly that she'll wait until he answers correctly.
He finally speaks again, still a careful balance of himself and this person she's getting to know that's hidden behind a shower curtain, "You can. What's going on that has you so distracted?"
Winema rests her head on her hands on her knees and talks, half wistful and half worried, "My daughter brought your son to one of the charity parties I made her come to. He spent the entire time near her, warding off other boys that neither she nor I have been able to like. They're not dating, though. I just thought you might want to know."
Words want to fill his mouth and be set free, but he pushes them down and simply turns off the water. It strains in the pipes with hisses and grinds and is the perfect end to this…whatever this was. He speaks again, cold again. Unfeeling again. But doesn't feel so much like that in spirit.
"I have to get dressed now. Could you come back another time?"
She knows he can't see it, but she nods her head, leaves a cred card on the porcelain sink and says one more thing before leaving.
"Yes. Soon."