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(no subject)

Who: Martin and Ben
What: Coffee meet up.
When: After their forum communication.
Where: Coffee shop.
Rating/Warnings: None likely.

He doesn't really have time to return to his apartment, change, and make his arranged meeting with Martin at the coffee shop. So he shows up in work clothes and for him work clothes are a pair of super stretchy ice skating pants that, without skates, are a little too long, a really dumb t-shirt, and sneakers.

He is there on time, though, even a little bit early. Since he doesn't quite know what Martin looks like, he's hanging around outside and when he sees someone who also appears to be searching he approaches with a smile. "Are you Martin?"

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They make an odd pair indeed: Martin also fresh from the office in dun corduroy pants and a white dress shirt under a maroon sweater vest. He laughs a little at the t-shirt as he holds out a hand.

"Got it in one, Ben. ... And now I suppose I don't have to ask what you teach."

He looks, and is, confused for just a moment but then happens to look down. At that point he remembers what his shirt says and laughs. "No, you don't, not at all, though it does leave it harder for me to ask what you do."

He moves to the door and holds it open for Martin, staying out of the way so he can enter.

"I'd say you managed well enough, even so," he quips, stepping through and then taking the door in turn for Ben. "I'm a cardiothoracic surgeon: heart, lungs, throat. Everything that makes your blood and your oxygen move, basically."

"Every time I encounter someone with that level of education and an important job I feel compelled to point out I got a degree... I just haven't used it. I've clearly got some kind of inferiority complex happening." He smiles easily as he says it though and leads the way to the counter so they can get their drinks, with every intention of paying for both of them.

He chuckles softly. "A man's work is not his measure so much as his deeds. I don't know if I read that somewhere or just heard it, but ... I suppose I don't have to be able to cite it to believe it's true."

He glances up at the menu, narrowing his eyes in concentration. It's early evening, not quite time for decaf, but a bit late for espresso. It makes ordering an interesting puzzle. Then again, he doesn't think he has any patients critical enough at the moment that he might have to expect an early morning emergency call ...

He probably looks like he's far more serious about this coffee thing than he should be.

"mm. But how thoroughly can you separate a man's deeds from his work?" He can get philosophical with the best of them.

Though watching Martin try to work out the trouble of coffee bemuses him. He, meanwhile, just orders black coffee to which he intends to dump stevia in.

"Well, that's where the tricky part is, I admit." He decides, screw it, if he ends up being up until 3 AM, that's his lot in life, and he'll steal a nap whenever he can over the course of the next day. He's had worse 'day-after' experiences with far more potent beverages, after all. He orders a cappuccino, then gestures toward the small cluster of tables near the door.

"In here or outside? ... I suppose I always based the thought on the fact that work isn't everything, but there are those folks who really do devote their whole lives to it. I can't say they're worthless by any stretch of the imagination..."

"Let's go outside. More people passing by, and fewer staying to hear enough of a conversation to get curious."

He's already moving that way, opening the door for Martin on his way through. "Pick a table. Any table."

"Wise choice," he compliments him as he follows, heading for a table next to the window on the corner. It's situated well enough to keep from being completely overheard - muffled from inside the shop by the glass, masked from anyone nearby outside by the traffic and city clamor. He pulls out a chair with a scrape of iron legs on concrete, and sits.

"Now then, where were we?"

"I don't think we'd gotten further than deciding to meet up in person so we could talk, but I'm pretty prepared to go with that - or start asking you deep philosophical questions as an ice breaker?" There's a hint of warm, gentle, humor in there.

"Either one is perfectly fine by me. I feel like by the time you get to be my age, small talk is a little overdone." He gives him a teasing smile that matches the tone of Ben's humor and curls his hands around his coffee cup.

"How about we combine the two: What do you think it happening to us?" Which was maybe not philosophical directly but all the theories tangled into personal belief systems, so.

"Now that... is definitely something that's been on my mind." Martin gives Ben a wry smile over the rim of his coffee before taking a sip, foam lodging in the edges of his moustache. He catches it with his lower lip, the gesture segueing into a thoughtful frown.

"When I first visited that other place, Bostiev? I wondered if we were all just displaced from the worlds we were remembering. But the more I think about it, I realize that would take an awful lot of doing. Giving us all a whole new lifetime and backing it up? ... If the Bureau is surprised by each time a new Different person begins to remember things ... They logically don't have the resources to start all this, or they'd have been monitoring us from the get go."

"I strongly dislike the Bureau, but I'm inclined to agree with you. I also think my dislike comes from negative associations to them." Ie: he gets a memory, doesn't like it, and he associates the two strongly. "Which leaves the question of where the kriff the memories are coming from. And that I cannot begin to explain. I sure as heck can't explain why I have scars and physical objects from those memories."

"That's the other thing that's got me flummoxed," he agrees. "I can't say I've gotten any phantom injuries, but I know a handful of folks who have, and ... it makes me wonder if I should start looking into quantum theories a bit more."

He pauses, looking at the city life milling around them, completely unaware and happy with the single life they're aware of. He wonders how many more of them have Different memories somewhere in the ether, just waiting to resurface and displace them just as quickly as he and Ben were. Lives turned inside out in the blink of an eye.

"Then, of course, I just Google the stuff and even the Wikipedia article makes my eyes cross, so. That's out for me." He laughs, and takes another sip of his coffee.

"Don't look at me," he says, with a laugh. "I'm just a figure skater. I'm pretty sure being smart is against the code of ethics." That is... absolutely not true, but he really does not understand. "Would quantum physics explain the objects? Would anything? Because I have a light saber. That will cut through metal."

"It .... may? I'm really not certain, but it seems like the closest thing my mind can come up with." His eyes widen and he raises his eyebrows in an exaggerated 'yikes' sort of face before continuing quietly. "As if, I don't know, this saber of yours exists in some other dimension out there and just ... slipped through some weird leak. It all starts to sound like something out of Star Trek after long enough, and that's about when I stop thinking about it and just start reminding myself to only take what's in front of me at face value. Conjecture's just ... too much, at this point, I think. We'd need to know more."

He pauses, his cheerful demeanor returning fast enough. "... What did you cut to realize it could do that? Nothing that voided your security deposit, I hope!"

"As curious as I am, you're right about conjecture. I also think why is pretty irrelevant in dealing with what, especially right now." Because it was pretty constant and continual and the first priority had to be just dealing with it.

"And no, my security deposit's fine. I went off into the back ally of my job and played with it. My forearms may never recover from the workout, but I learned some interesting things."

He nodded in response to the remark about conjecture, more focused now on the story of the laser saber. "Playing on the job, Ben, tsk tsk." He winked. "What exactly did you learn?"

"That it's really hot, really efficient, probably does not exist in our reality, at least at that size, and generates an awful lot of torque." He loves that thing though. He's actually grinning when he talks about it.

The grin is infectious. "I hope you didn't burn yourself on it, then. It sounds like the sort of thing people pretend sticks are as children. No wonder you're having fun learning about it. ... All I've had to the day are a couple of new memories. No items randomly appearing."

That answer makes his laugh. "It's very much a toy. A dangerous toy, but a toy." He should not see it that way, but he does. "What were the memories of?"

There's nothing wrong with adults enjoying toys. He had a colleague who legitimately had one of those little putting greens in his office, after all. He was about to mention it when Ben asked about the memories, and that switched his train of thought to another track without hesitation.

"In the first, I was chained to a wall and my hands were tied, but the room I was in was very well-furnished. Yet I still told someone in the room I was a surgeon. A disgraced one, but a surgeon. ... The other was even more surreal: I was standing in the middle of a riot, talking on a cell phone as though it were the subway at rush hour." He frowned. "And even all that doesn't seem the strangest part to me: it's that the man I was speaking to in the first memory was my son, and a third memory was an argument with a woman I've never seen in my life. I've never been married, never had a relationship serious enough for children, but this boy - no, he was a man... he was nearly through his twenties."

"It is really, really disorienting. I wish I could say it gets less so with time, but I grieved for a man I've never met, feel like the father to a guy who is, here, a few years younger than me. I'm an ice skater with vivid memories of cutting a guy in half. It's... strange and I don't know what to do with any of it. I wish the support groups were more active, but given the location and organizers...."

He wasn't going to be using them much. "I will say that I hope your wife and son don't show up here and I'm sorry you belong to this particular group. Thought here are some fantastic people among us."

"Cutting someone in half." His eyes widen. It should be a moment of shock, of disgust. Why does he, then, feel so damned interested, instead?

Martin licks his lips, finds them suddenly dry, and takes another drink of his coffee. "We may just need to have a few meetings of our own, then. Maybe if anyone else is amenable, we can rotate meeting at each other's places. I know New York isn't big on apartment size, but if nothing else, there's my practice's waiting room after hours."

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