Jason Todd is (thelazarus) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-06-27 23:49:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | christine daae, red hood |
Who: Jack and Sam
What: A chance meeting at a junkyard.
Where: A nearby junkyard
When: ~Recently
The exoskeleton was done, and Sam knew she couldn’t hide at the Ranch much longer. Oh, Tiffani wasn’t going to give her shit about staying, and Tristan would insist she could crash as long as she needed to, but Sam grew up in a world where taking advantage wasn’t something anyone did. Sleeping on a couch? Sure, but every room at the Ranch was needed for business, and she’d been hogging one since the morning after the fucking incident at the hotel. So, she had to figure out what the hell she was going to do with herself. She wanted to go back to the Aria, but she had no idea where the hell things stood with Neil lately. She wanted to find out, but finding out meant asking, and asking meant letting him know she gave a shit, and she still wasn’t good at that whole emotional conversation thing. Christine, chattier now that she’d gotten over being dumped on her ass and left homeless, insisted conversations were the way to go. Sam wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but she was the only person Sam could actually be open with in Las Vegas. And wasn’t that saying something? When your current best friend was someone in your own head? Way to fucking go, Sam.
She’d left the Ranch early, because she needed to get out into the world if she was going to leave the Ranch for good. Somehow, hookers were safer to be around than anything else these days, and that was another fucked up truth. But, after a beer for breakfast, she forced herself out of the house. She borrowed the truck again, and she drove down to the junkyard, though she didn’t actually expect to be hauling anything that would be big enough to need the truck bed. Truth was that walking meant bumping into more people, and she wanted to actually try for a sober outing today. Awesome life, huh? When making it out the door straight was an accomplishment. But so be it, and she had smoked half a pack of cheap generics by the time she reached the junkyard and paid the pull fee.
She was dressed in grey camos, heavy work boots and a gray tank top, and even with her arms bare the 100 degree heat was making her sweat. She pulled her honey hair into a messy topknot, and she set to work pulling a particularly stunning slice of old metal from a discarded table. It was detailed work, because she didn’t want to crack the seams as she separated the metal from the wood it was nestled into with a chisel. The metal bore fragments of amber and black embedded in its flat surface, and she kept running her gloved hand over the bumpy stones, already thinking of what she could do with them. Her ipod buds were tucked into her ears, and music Beauty Underneath blared loudly enough to escape the earbuds.
Jack was worried. For his friends, for what the business they were into would mean for their boy. There were only a few things he could count on to always take his mind off his concerns. Music was one of them, and he’d been thinking about going back to that, but not just yet - the time didn’t seem right for it, for whatever reason. He still took a guitar with him as he moved from place to place, but for the past few years it hadn’t done much more than gather dust in various apartments.
The other, more direct, requiring less thought and more predictable results, was tuning up his car. He was down to just the bike now, but that needed work too, and it gave him an excuse to get out of the house for a while. He felt a bit guilty being gone long these days, considering that Wren and Luke had been kind enough to give him a place to stay on the condition he look after Gus. It wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t really. Jack was fond of the boy, and interested in keeping any more misery out of the couple’s lives. Every time he left Gus with his nanny, he worried that it would be the moment someone took to go after him, and thus, unless Luke was around, he generally didn’t leave at all.
Today, he was using his window of free time to pick up some odds and ends for the bike. He’d been working on it on and off since he’d come to Las Vegas. It had been neglected while he’d been living in Georgia and could walk almost anywhere, and was still in need of a few more parts to tighten up its performance and make sure it wasn’t going to just dissolve going around a corner one of these days.
Jack paid the fee, and stepped into the maze of junk. It was a hot one and the place was mostly deserted. He didn’t mind the heat, personally, even though he drew a few stares for his unwillingness to wear anything less revealing than a long-sleeved shirt. He worked his way through alleys of metal and parts, the glare of the sun beating down hot and bright, blinking off the scraps and half-blinding him before too long.
He came around a corner and looked up just in time to avoid stepping into a girl with her hair pulled up behind her, working at a piece of metal in the stack. “Sorry,” He said, backing up a step, his eyes lingering for a moment on the scrap she was working out. The stones caught the light in a peculiar way. It was strangely beautiful, actually, diamond in the rough. The girl had a similar effect. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a woman anywhere near the junkyard. “I was watching the metal and not where I was going.”
Her reaction to his unexpected approach wasn’t exactly welcoming. With the ipod buds in her ears, she didn’t hear him coming before rounded the corner, and she didn’t have a fucking clue what he was saying once he did come into view, even though she could tell his lips were moving and forming words. But even when the ipod buds slipped out of her ears, which they did when she turned quickly, she couldn’t tell what the fuck he was saying. Her pupils went wide with fear, and her pulse sped up, and she could hear the blood pounding in her ears. She brandished the chisel for a second, and then it all caught up with her, and she glanced down at the impromptu weapon.
“Fuck.” Her voice was Jersey rich, angry, and she paced in a tight circle before stopping and looking at him again, lowering the chisel. “Yeah, hey, sorry,” she managed, and she sounded somewhat calmer. It was a new habit, straightening the tank top at her shoulder to make sure the beginning of the scar didn’t show (it did, but only for a second), and she dragged a dirty, gloved hand through her hair, tugging it free of the topknot and leaving it to tumble in waves over her shoulders. “Fuck,” she repeated, quieter this time.
Jack was relatively accustomed to people reacting badly to him at this point, particularly when he came up on them unexpectedly. He hadn't even noticed the earbuds until she pulled them out, which probably accounted for her surprise - sort of. The brandishing of the chisel, though, that spoke to a different kind of paranoia altogether, and he held a hand up in front of him, palm out, to indicate he meant her no harm. He dropped it when she lowered the chisel. "Not at all. I shouldn't have snuck up on you, unintentional or not."
Jack spotted the scar at her shoulder, fresh and pink. That explained the chisel and the brief but intense flare of fear he'd seen, or at least he thought it did. He brought his eyes up from her shoulder quickly, though. He knew better than to stare at other people's scars. "I'm sorry," he said again. That likely should have been the moment where he walked away and left her alone, but it just wasn't in him. As usual, he had to make sure there wasn't something he could do. "Are you alright?"
It took a few seconds, but she eventually shook her head, messy hair going all over the fucking place. “No, seriously. Don’t fucking apologize. I have to get over this shit someday. How about you go around the corner and scare the crap out of me until I don’t react?” She gave him a wicked smirk, something more suited to her oddly un-American features than the fear from moments earlier. “Not your fault,” she added earnestly, and she was the last person to judge someone based on how they looked, not given where she grew up and her own unwillingness to conform to societal bullshit. Defiantly, she tucked the chisel under her arm, and she tugged off one of her gloves and held out a hand that was burn-calloused along the palm and fingertips. “Sam. Sorry I almost chiseled you in the neck, baby.”
Her flat honesty was a surprise, but a pleasant one. "I mean, if it would help..." he said, with a smile. He took her hand, and shook it. It had only taken about five seconds, but she was already not what he'd expected. "Jack. No need to apologise, since you decided not to go through with it, and we both have that to celebrate." He felt the callouses as he released her hand, and it was an easy enough jump to make considering what she was pulling out of the pile. "You work with metal?" he guessed, gesturing to the studded scrap. "It's a nice piece. If you see anything that looks like it belongs on an engine, let me know."
"I bet you say that to all the girls," was Sam's reply, her smirk softening into a grin as she shook his hand. She looked down at her fingers a second later, and she shrugged her shoulders. "I guess I shouldn't have missed my last manicure," she quipped, knowing her hands were calloused-scratched and not really minding it. "I weld," she added, looking down at the piece she'd been chiseling at. "It's a nice piece, huh?" she asked, and there was challenge in her eyes when she looked back at him. Nice was one of those words Sam hated. It said nothing, felt nothing, it lived in that emotional void of Neil's that made her want to force him to scream until his voice went hoarse. "Nice?" she repeated because, yeah, he might have missed her disapproval. She was small, curvy and blonde, but she could give one hell of a challenge-face, and so she did as she slid the glove back on. "If it looks worth keeping, I won't let you know," she admitted, her smile teasing, but truth behind the words. "What can I say? I'm possessive of shit I like."
He laughed. “And then I wonder why they don’t call again,”he said. Sam’s disapproval didn’t seem to faze Jack, who looked down at the hunk of metal as if he’d missed her distaste entirely. “I like the stones,” he added simply, by way of a calm apology and an explanation for his remark. It had needled her for some reason, though he had no idea why. “What do you weld?” he asked, because of ‘nice’ was nonspecific, so was her declaration of profession. He smiled a little when she promised to keep the best for herself. “My mistake,” he said, just as easily as before. “I forgot that the first rule of the scrap yard isn’t sharing.” He wasn’t the sort of man to fight her on that one.
"Might want to work on the one-liners, baby," Sam replied and, like all of her bite if you spent time with her, a smile followed, making it obvious the insult wasn't actually meant. She crouched back in front of the table, and she resumed her work on the edges of metal that held the strip of stones to what remained of the table. Her grip was sure and, yeah, so she kept glancing over at him to ensure he wasn't going to charge at her or anything, but she couldn't help that. After a few seconds of it, she pointed the chisel at him. "Don't fucking mention it," she said of her obvious fear, because pretending it didn't exist was totally the course of the day. "I get paid to weld anything - construction, mostly - but I do less utilitarian shit for pleasure. You a mechanic?"
Jack shrugged when Sam commanded that he not say anything about her continuing fear. He wanted to ask, wanted to know, but then again, did he really? "In a manner of speaking," he said, watching her attack the metal with the chisel and prise it away. "I don't know that I would identify myself as one, when I was introducing myself, for instance. Human beings are more than what they do to put food on the table, after all. But I fix cars," he said, with that same small smile, the one that said he knew how he sounded, and went on that way anyway. "What do you make? When you're being less utilitarian."
She rolled her eyes when he started getting all philosophical about what human beings were and weren't. "Yeah? I didn't know they gave out free philosophy lessons at the junkyard these days. What else do you think about human beings? And am I allowed to disagree, or are you an expert?" she asked, her expression entertained enough to make it pretty obvious she disagreed with whatever the hell she wanted to, whenever the hell she wanted to. "Human beings are whatever the fuck they feel like being. If they define themselves by what puts food on the table, baby, who are you to judge?" she asked, and shrugged at his question about what she made. "That's subjective. Some might say art, some might say junk, and if being a mechanic doesn't define you, then what does?"
"I don't think anyone would go so far as to call me an expert on anything," Jack said. "And you're likely right. Some people do define themselves by their jobs. I don't, but I don't judge someone who does." He shrugged. "Everything is subjective," he said. "You proved that when you refuted my point. What matters is your own subjective view, however. If you believed your art was junk, you wouldn't make it. I couldn't answer any question you asked me if I always took what other people believe into account, because every question would have a thousand equally viable answers and none of them would mean enough to be a truthful reply." He smiled still. "That said - I have no idea. I used to think I knew, but I don't anymore. Is that an acceptable answer, in your subjective opinion?"
She stopped chiseling, and she straightened, shoving stray strands of gold away from her face as she looked at him. She wondered where the scar was from, sure, but she wasn't about to ask, not now. "Bullshit," she said, her inky gaze challenging, a smile still on her lips. "I could think my art was junk and still make it, because it's all about needing to make something, not about it being good enough for other people to see. And don't give me that 'is that an acceptable answer' crap. Passive aggressive much, baby?" she asked, leaning back against the table and crossing her arms over her belly. "Alright, so give it to me fucking straight, and without all that philosophy shit. Plain answers." She wiggled her fingers at him without uncrossing her arms in a gesture of bring it.
"Not passive aggressive," he said. "Just engaging in debate. Fair is fair, I think." Jack watched her turn and lean and challenge with her posture and her gaze, and he wondered at where it came from. If he had to guess, it predated that fresh scar on her shoulder, so where? He kept his hands inside his pockets, where they couldn't make her jumpy, and looked back at her. All that challenge met placidity, and thought. What really defined him wasn't really the sort of thing one could tell someone they'd just met. "Doing what I can to help other people," he said, fully aware she wouldn't be satisfied by the vagueness of that. "I help my friends as best I can when they're in need, which has been quite a bit, lately. I help strangers whenever I have the opportunity to do so. I look for things to do to make other people's lives better. Or keep them from getting any worse, I suppose, that’s more accurate." His smile widened a fraction. "It's not a very good answer, I know. It's not exciting or definite. But there isn't much else I care about anymore." Now that was honest, and flatly so. There had been things he'd really burned for once upon a time, but they were all dead, or gone, or the fire had simply died away. Passion had never done anything but tear him apart. He was likely better off without it. “Your will to create, is that what defines you? Or is it something else?”
"That's about other people. Not about you," she said after listening to his explanation. "You haven't said a thing about what makes you tick, baby." His widening smile didn't change that, though it did acknowledge that he knew it was a copout reply, which made her go a little easier on him. "Just tell me you don't fucking walk around like a calm river all the time with no ripples, and I might forgive you for handing me a line." She wasn't philosophy or higher thought. She was doing, and fuck everything else. Being inside drove her insane, and sitting still made her nervous and antsy. It just wasn't her to be as calm as he was being, and it reminded her of Neil's constant fucking calm, which just made her want to poke at him more. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, which she smacked against the metal table a few times before tapping one out and lighting it. "Let me guess? Not a smoker?" she asked, because helping everyone didn't go with smoking in her mind. "Why the long sleeves?" she asked bluntly, not respecting whatever the fuck he was hiding. Yeah, no, Sam wasn't about ignoring the elephant in the room. And if she didn't answer his question? So fucking be it.
"Is it?" Jack asked. She was right, of course, but that was what he had. What he had was other people. There was nothing else left. "I don't," he confessed. "But it takes more than it used to." No, before it hadn't taken a thing. He'd screamed himself hoarse, and beaten his hands bloody, and it hadn't made a difference. It hadn't changed anything.
Jack watched her tap out a cigarette, and at her guess, extended a hand for a cigarette. "Not much," he said. He'd smoked when he was younger, but he hadn't smoked for years. He wasn't going to start up again any time soon, not when he had a four year old to keep an eye on, but a single cigarette wasn't too awful a sin. It wasn't as if he was worried about his health. The blunt question as to why he was covered up was unexpected. Most people put it down as eccentricity and didn't ask. "Some scars are easier to hide than others," he said. He gestured vaguely upward, at his face, but then glanced to her shoulder. Not as specific as he was sure she wanted, but it was true.
"You don't like my answers, but you won't give me any at all," Jack said. Yes, he'd noticed that she'd dodged the question, and he wasn't going to let her get away with it.
"It is," she assured him, handing over the cigarette with a look that said she thought he was just taking the thing to fuck with her. But whatever. She flicked the lighter, her own cigarette between her lips as she waited to light his. She was smaller than him, soft and curved and shorter, and she had to close the gap between them and stretch to keep the flame from flickering out, but she considered it a challenge and, yeah, so today was all about challenges.
She watched him as he glanced to her shoulder. Alright, so she deserved that. "Somebody cut you open for kicks too?" she asked, as if it was a badge of honor, surviving all that hotel bullshit, and maybe it was. It was a new way to look at it, and she kind of liked it. She tucked the lighter away, and she crouched in front of the table again and resumed her chiseling. He was at her back, but alright, maybe she could deal with it.
"What makes me? What defines me?" she asked, because that was the question she was avoiding, right? "Feeling things. I don't sit, and I don't wait, and I don't read, and I don't watch. I live, and fuck everything else." And that was true, at least. It came with a flash of her inky blue eyes, a challenge that he contradict her. A yeah, try it, baby.
"They didn't cut me, but something like that, yes." Jack wasn't really thinking about himself, though. He was rolling what she'd said over in his head. For kicks - what did that mean? What kind of a crime had it been? Had it been someone she knew? He studied her strangely delicate features as she leaned in and lit the cigarette, then took a careful drag. It had been years since his last smoke, and the burn was pleasant and familiar, one of those reassuring realities that never changed.
Her blue eyes flashed up, and his mismatched ones looked back, meeting that endless challenge squarely. "Good," he said. He took another drag, smoke drifting up through the heat and bringing even more haze to the air. "I met someone recently who told me she wanted that, that she wanted to burn and feel everything that strongly, but she couldn't, no matter how she tried. I told her that burning like that never brought me anywhere that made me happy except once, and never again after that, so I let it go. But not everyone is me, and someone has to be alive for people like her, who can't."
She stopped chiseling every so often to ash the cigarette, and she looked up when he mentioned meeting someone who wanted to burn. "Yeah? I've been trying to get someone I know to burn for months. Haven't made any fucking progress," she admitted, a shrug of her shoulders following the statement. "Or he just doesn't burn for me. Whatever." But it didn't sound like she meant it, that whatever, and, yeah, she had totally turned into a chick somewhere along the line. Fucking Las Vegas.
She grabbed the piece of metal, pried free now, and she held it up to take a good look at it in the overhead lights that lit up the junkyard. Not bad. Yeah, it would work. She looked at him a second later. "That's more fucking bullshit. You want to be numb. You aren't," she said, pointing the chisel at him. "Maybe it's shoved the fuck away somewhere, baby, but don't lie to yourself. I know smooth waters, and you're choppy as a fucking hurricane."
She stubbed the cigarette out beneath her shoe, and then she shoved the plate of metal into the bag she carried over her shoulder. "If he didn't cut you, what did he do? Smash your skull in?" She glanced at his sleeves again, because one thing didn't explain the other. "Someone told me recently that I should just wear my scars with pride, and make everyone else fuck off if they don't like it. I'll sell you that advice for a nickel."
"I know that feeling," Jack said, though he doubted it was what she actually wanted to hear, and took another drag rather than say anything else.
"You're right," he said. "I can't argue with it. But I'm trying, nonetheless." No, he wasn't as peaceful as he wanted to be. Finding very little in the world worth caring for was different than not knowing how, and the anger hadn't really disappeared, it was just better managed, better buried.
"Good guess," Jack said, eyes lighting briefly behind the cigarette with a pain as old as it was strong. That had never gone away - he didn't think it was ever going to. Whoever had said that time healed all wounds didn't know what all wounds were like. "I'll take it. I already do, though." He smiled. "I'm aware colored contacts exist, you know." He could wear one, and cover the scar with makeup - lord knew he knew how - but he didn't. The practical reason was simple enough: no one looked twice at the man with a facial scar when someone without one had been seen committing a crime. But it was, in a way, just for him as well. It was a reminder, and it was part of him, whether he liked it or not. There was no sense in hiding.
As for the scars on his arms - some things were still private in this world, private wounds and private shames. "Did they catch him?" he asked.
He agreed with every fucking thing, which just made her want to shake him. She laughed instead, and she shook her head. "The universe put you here to drive me fucking crazy, didn't it?" she asked, and she pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of him without permission. Fuck permission. "Got a name to go with the mug?" she asked, her fingers still on the buttons. And, yeah, so maybe she was procrastinating, trying not to answer his question. Whatever, she didn't feel like getting into the fact that, no, they hadn't caught anybody. And, no, they never would. Yeah, no, not having that discussion. "I better bail. You got a phone, a journal, somewhere to write my name down in case you decide you want to actually live again?"
Jack began to protest, but by then she'd already taken a picture of him, and what did it matter, anyway? "Corvus is the last name. Jack is the first, but you have that one already." He didn't call her out this time, on not answering his question. The avoidance was an answer in and of itself.
Jack reached into his back pocket and removed a small rust red leatherjournal. He hardly ever went anywhere without it, these days. He flipped it open to a clean page, one where writing wasn't making its way down the margins in an invisible hand, and passed it to her. A small pencil was secured in a loop of leather on the side. "You're very generous, considering the universe put me here to drive you crazy."
She didn't realize it was a journal, not the same kind she had, because the page was blank. She wrote her name - Sam Alexander - And she scribbled her number beside it. Yeah, okay, so she managed to meet some fucker at a junkyard, and she managed to talk to him without killing him, and she managed to exchange numbers. Not bad. She added his information to her cell, along with his picture, and she winked at him when he said she was generous. "I am, aren't I?" she teased, and she felt better about shit. Ok, so maybe moving forward could happen. She turned, bag slung over her shoulder, and she smiled as she lit a fresh cigarette. Not bad.