InsaneJournal

ASHER: Asher had never had any luck with waiting areas. Actually, that was something of an understatement: his reception of reception was almost always so comically bad that it usually resulted in threats of being escorted off the premises amid cowering phone operators and general verbal evisceration. They kept a photo of him at the porter's lodge in Columbia, just in case someone new was manning the desk and didn't know what to expect.

There were times when he was more or less capable of civility, in theory. This was not one of them. He'd known Anne long enough to know when even she was being dangerously worn down, and for all her practicality, there were some things to which logic simply didn't apply. Just because he always expected the worst, didn't mean those around him tended to do the same. And yet, he realized, with the slow shifting of anger to which he was accustomed, that the fresh-faced fratboy behind the counter (no doubt volunteering solely so he could stick it on his résumé next to feeder-of-the-homeless and koala-cuddler) was still sitting and staring at him, even after the second time he'd asked to be buzzed in. Asher took his hands out of the pockets of his long coat, but refrained from making a move to reach across the flimsy partition to break the young deskmonkey's fingers. Instead, he used his relatively long reach for something else: plucking the mint-colored phone from the boy's hand.

"Hello?" Asher said, sandwiching the phone between his shoulder and his year for a moment while he swiveled the phone's body to see the switchboard. "I'm sorry, you've been cut off as a penalty for being a party to this incompetence." He pressed his fingers down on the cradle. Click.

"Now, to business. Gardner, Gardner, Gardner--A., that's what we need." He squinted now, as though only vaguely perturbed by the boy's yelling for security in the backround. Asher pushed the tiny red button next to Anne's placard, the bright white lettering in comparison to most of her contemporaries signifying her newness.

"Anne. Be a dear and free me of this cretinous bump, would you?"

A few seconds later, the light over the restricted ward came on with a flickering buzz, and Asher took his hat by the brim from where he'd set it on the counter and moved through the unlocked door. By the time security showed up, they had to be sent away again.

ANNE: She was perched on the back of her chair, her feet on the seat, hand-and-cigarette idling by the open window high on the wall. Huddled. Tired. Had been that way for a while, though she hadn't been keeping track. Kendra's file was open on her desk, along with the files of several foster families willing to take in a small, traumatized black girl with a violent family background. The Seghers, she knew: she'd placed Michael (eleven, Dominican, single mother had died in a car crash) with them a few months back, and Ernesto (eight, abandoned at three years old) before him; they were good people, but she wasn't sure if they could handle another child. And the Yates: a solid, dependable, infertile couple; he worked in manufacturing, and she was a housewife. Black, which weighed heavily in their favor. Then again, Kendra's recent caretaker had been black. Who was to say the girl wouldn't associate black mothers with black mothers who left?

She tapped ash out the window and leaned forward, fingers (cold and blue-tipped) separating pieces of Kendra's file. Nine years old. Her father had left when she was small, and her mother had died three years previous: pneumonia that escalated in the face of Mrs. Watson's lack of healthcare and stubborn pride. Kendra had been with ACS since she was six. No one had wanted her, at first -- loud and rambunctious and maladjusted, beating up on the other children, refusing to eat for days at a time and then stealing snacks at night. But (Anne had made notes of her progress) she had slowly acclimated to foster life. Did better in school, cooperating with her fostermates, been good to her temporary parents. Finding a permanent placement for her was becoming increasingly difficult as time went on -- Anne had thought the Edisons would be the perfect fit. Mid-thirties, prosperous, happy. They passed their evaluations and screenings with flying colors, and were insistent on taking in a child from less than noteworthy circumstances. Kendra fit the bill; they got on famously. Until, of course, the hospital called to inform her that a 911 had been placed by a distressed nine-year-old who had walked in on a dead woman with half a bottle of pills in her hand.

Anne took another long drag on the cigarette, tapped ash out. Wiped her face. Closed the file. Her intercom rang and a familiar voice came through. A part of her hadn't expected him to come (or even to come so quickly), but another was glad he had. She almost stood up to make an effort at being presentable -- clean the desk, put out the cigarette, close the window -- and found that she couldn't. Weariness had crept in with the cold air and nicotine. These things happened, her coworkers said; people died, and they repaired as best they could.

But there was a nine-year-old sleeping fitfully in the beds outside, and Anne knew better than to think a new mommy and daddy would make things right. She exhaled slowly. Took another smoke.

ASHER: The hall was longer than he would have liked it, papered with small, oddly sad flyers, faded by days in a place where desperate clouds of antiseptic combated the rising tide of the outside. His hat was still in his hand, which was strange on more than one level. The warm lights of the waiting room behind him came through the square of glass on the door like fake sunshine through a church window, and Asher's shadow was eerily long by the time he reached Anne's office. He knocked once, but it was just a perfunctory gesture, as he opened the door immediately after.

Anne looked like a glimpse of the kind of girl boys imagined stood around in the locker rooms in high school, cigaretted hand hanging out the window, all disaffection. Of course, the years turned this into exhaustion, defeat. There was a sharp line between feigned weariness and the real thing. Asher let the door close behind him as naturally as if he were walking into his own home, but with somewhat more tact. Across the room, he placed the Trilby carefully beside her papers, a cursory glance telling him about as much as he needed to know, in addition to what she'd said before he'd stepped off the curb and flagged down a cab in the cold rain.

It was all one motion, really. He took the cigarette from her, between his thumb and his forefinger, and stuck it in the corner of his own mouth. And then, instead of saying what he could, he did what was both most foreign and most accessible to them both, and folded her in an embrace. Given her position on the chair, this was a bit problematic, and she hardly came up to his chest, but it seemed appropriate nonetheless.

ANNE: There you had it. Anne Gardner, Black Canary, reduced to a small, trembling pile in someone's arms. Propriety dictated these sorts of things be handled a certain way. A woman of her upbringing and social standing, regardless her line of work, was not the kind of woman who collapsed into embraces and tears -- or sat smoking on the edge of chairs like a Catholic school girl hiding from nuns, come to that. She made to pull away, a perfunctory movement, and then her shoulders were shaking and her face was warm and wet. Anne, she realized, clutching at any part of Asher she could latch onto, had not been held in a long time by anyone over the age of twelve, and even then, it was to comfort them; never herself.

And yet.

She felt a new wave of grief and exhaustion well up with each effort to swallow her tears, each attempt to offer up some flippant greeting that would nonchalantly drop her brokenness under the bridge, with the other hundreds of things they never spoke about. A small part of her fervently believed he had no right to see her this way, and wanted to act on it; but no matter how much that part clawed to find supremacy over the rest of her tired self, Anne couldn't hold onto it. It slipped and slid out of reach, made slick with tears and sweat and snot and all the things it was fighting to suppress. Even wiping her face was an effort, and, uncomfortable as twisting on the top of the chair was, she resorted to burying her face somewhere in Asher's ribcage and hoping she'd at least stop shaking soon. And then Kendra would crawl back to the top of her thoughts, and she'd be sobbing all over again.

ASHER: Asher was bad at this. But as dismal as he was at comforting, and caring for, the parts of him owned by Rorschach were worse. He'd never been held as Kovacs, not one significant time he could recall. What's more, in this life, his home had been a cold and sterile one, his father too distant and his mother too starved for affection to afford him any of his own. Still, something about this offering was as basic as they came, and he brushed away the clichéd self-pity with an inner roll of his eyes. Perhaps some part of him had meant for this just to be a relatively empty show of solidarity, but he felt the stifled sounds of her grief against his chest and simply held on, letting her fight it out with herself. He was of the firm belief that, whatever happened, she ought to have at least one constant in her life.

After a few minutes, the shaking in her shoulders began to subside and he plucked the cigarette (now burned down by more than half) out of his mouth with his left hand to avoid dropping ash in her hair. For him, the only way of coping--certainly, it was a surprise that he of all people needed techniques on this subject, but it was the truth nonetheless--was to focus on the small and the mundane. The way the smoke drifted up against gravity in a tiny trail and then curlicued into the rest of the air, or the way Anne's hair looked when it was down (or rather, the rare state of mind that this implied), the flecks of brown in the tile beneath his feet or the way the boy at the front desk had yelled at him; these were all bite-sized bits of reality he could use to ignore the larger picture, to approach things from the ground up.

Half the time, he didn't have the energy to examine the rest, particularly as he'd had more than one lifetime to understand the way lives ought to be spent. He took one long drag with thin, hard lips and hollow cheeks and pulled back enough to look down at his friend's--for so he was calling her in his head--tear-streaked face. Asher handed her the cigarette, his face blank enough to signify a kind of understanding.

ANNE: Taking a drag was more effort than it was worth, but it allowed Anne to focus on something else, however briefly. The wet stickiness of her lungs as they fought to take in air and tobacco smoke at once; the work required to keep her trembling fingers still; the goosebumps on her arms -- she'd have to close her window soon. Like Asher, she knew full well that taking things apart was a coping mechanism; she had the degree to prove it. It made actually coping somewhat difficult, mind over matter falling flat on its face.

She tapped ash blankly onto the floor by their feet and took another, shorter puff. Her voice came out a dry, meek croak, weaker than she would have liked. "Thank you," she said quietly, and after a moment added, "for coming." The cigarette went immediately back into her mouth, and her eyes fell back to her papers, both so she wouldn't be so conscious how red-rimmed they were, and for Asher's benefit. They both knew he wasn't the hugging-and-thanking type, even if she was. Being comforted was a strange enough feeling without self-consciousness added in.

ASHER: He just turned his mouth sideways, some kind of sardonic half-smile, a nihilistic attempt at saying--well, we'll live, won't we. Not that he really thought that would buy them anything, but there it was. He turned away, and though it was ostensibly to protect some theoretical embarrassment on her part, the core of it wasn't really clear. Either way, he shed his coat, put it over the arm of the chair, and sat down, the back of his neck landing somewhere in the real estate of Anne's right knee.

"Listen," he said, as though he were going to say something and putting his hand on her shoe with a shade of awkwardness. But there was nothing to listen to: words failed him, for not the first time in his life. There was nothing to hear except ammonia, and yellow light, old halls, stock photographs, lined beds. There was nothing to listen to except for files in filing cabinets, official seals, paperclips, aborted attempts at second chances, a stifled cry. There was nothing to listen to except for re-bleached sheets, badly braided hair, made-up mythologies and glossed-over explanations, intuitive understandings of shielded things, all a lot of goddamned sound and fury.

Asher didn't sigh. He just sat, and they both did, for he didn't know how long.