Wren and Selina have claws (laminette) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-07-05 02:57:00 |
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Entry tags: | catwoman, iron man |
Who: Wren and Silver
What: Driving to the Hospital That Asks No Questions
Where: Silver's car
When: En route to Wren's visit with MK
Warnings/Rating: Nope
It was a good day for Silver. The sun was out but the air conditioning in his warehouse proved to be up to the task, and he’d spent several happy hours doing nothing but fighting with engine parts. It was one hobby that he and Tony both shared, and the two of them found a happy quiet in the mutual task. It wasn’t wise to have windows in a place meant to be a safehouse, but Silver had limits on spy practicality, a sort of determination to be retired and be new again, so he’d installed skylights on the nearly impossible straight-edge roof. Someone would have to be on a crane in order to see in, and the new plants he had waiting for re-potting would get their sunlight. In air conditioning.
Silver got into the car that was currently operational, a white Audi with new plates, and carefully lodged the small cardboard box containing the sculpted jade plant in it. It was easy to care for and no danger to children or dogs; besides. It was soothing to look at. Not at all considering that someone else might not so readily understand the plant’s function, Silver drove off into the bright Vegas sunlight to pick up Wren.
Wren had just finished talking to Brielle moments before, and she was still keyed up by the time she went downstairs to wait for Silver to arrive.
The stress of the previous days showed own Wren in multiple ways: In the stitches that were visible through her pale, blonde hair, in the bruises on her inner arm from the IVs, in the red teeth marks that marred her ear when she tucked her hair back, and in the dark circles around her eyes from days of sleepless nights worrying about MK and talking to Alexander. She was dressed simply in a white, slim, knee-length sundress and sandals, and she clutched a bag of MK's things beneath her arm.
She had no idea what kind of car to look for, so she just stood there on the sidewalk, a hint of uneven sway left over from the pain in her head, and she worried her lip over the situation with Brielle, and the fact that seeing MK terrified her. On top of all that was the fact that Gus had apparently been hiding beneath a bed for days, and they really needed to find a way to normalize that little boy's life, even if they couldn't seem to normalize their own. At least, now, she felt more secure that Simon wouldn't be running to the police with news of Alexander's death, so that was a worry left behind. She didn't know to worry about Nicholas, didn't know Nicholas knew anything at all, so her thoughts didn't go there.
She fished for her sunglasses out of her bag, but it was a half-hearted attempt at searching, and she went back to concentrating on the cars that sped by. When the white Audi began to slow, she squinted her grey eyes to try to make out the driver and, once she was confident it was Silver, she took a step toward the curb.
Instead of getting out of the car, Silver stuck to his old habit of preserving his identity by staying in the car. The dynamics with Wren had changed, and while he leaned over to pull the passenger door lever and pop the door open for her, he did not slide into park and hold it as she stepped in. He smiled at her as she moved into the vehicle, picking up the open-topped cardboard box with the plant up off her seat as she settled into it, and then handing it to her. Only Silver could cultivate such a smile, all quiet delight at seeing her, and still take in the details of her appearance without shifting his gaze. It was one of the things that really disturbed Tony in his mind, and he said so. Silver ignored him. “Hello.”
She set the bag with MK's things at her feet, and she gave him a confused look as she closed the car door, her attention on the open-topped box before he even handed it over to her. Once he did, she gave him a look over first, ensuring there were no new injuries she was previously unaware of, and then she looked into the box at the plant. "Is this one of those plants that you're supposed to care for with teensy scissors?" she asked, touching a tiny green leaf with her fingertips and then looking over at him again, surprised at the gift, and even more surprised at the choice. Unless- "Who's it for?" she asked, backpedaling on the assumption. "Thank you for coming on such short notice," she added, and she managed to sound fairly calm, despite the maelstrom brewing behind her grey eyes.
Silver interpreted her searching look correctly, but other than the fact his seat was back and he was an inch or so up, with his spine off the support, there was nothing to see. In fact, Silver looked good. Relatively healthy, even cheerful. He hadn’t lost any visible weight (rather had been better at keeping it) and his eyes were calm and bright. His eyebrows tilted upward in bemusement at her question. “It’s for you. And no, it’s not bonsai, but it’s sculpted like one. It doesn’t have to be, they are much easier to take care of. I thought you might like it.” He watched her face to see if she did, but with a small smile and not anxiety.
She didn't notice the difference in the seat, or the fact that his spine was off the support, because she still wasn't anywhere near one-hundred-percent. It was telling, actually, the fact that she didn't notice. She saw him looking healthy and cheerful, and she took it as a blessing amid an ocean of very bad things. The bemusement in his question was met with a small laugh, and she looked down at the plant again. "It isn't a given that it's for me, you know," she told him, " so there's no need to look at me like I'm entertaining." There was no anger in her voice, only a knowing kind of fondness layered over something like ache. "It's pretty. Thank you," she continued a moment later, her expression far off for a moment as she traced one leaf from stem to tip. "It's been a hard morning," she admitted eventually, after her fingers had covered every miniscule bit of green on that particular leaf.
“Why wouldn’t it be for you?” he asked, taking her comment as a chastisement and losing the smile to concentrate on the road as he pulled the car away from the curb. He couldn’t imagine who else he’d bring a plant to, though he had sent something to MK Robinson as both condolence and precaution. There was a very small, almost transparent listening device in the vase, but he hadn’t turned it on. It felt slightly dishonest, which was a truly bizarre feeling for a former spy. If Wren started looking distressed, or if he found confirmation that Alex still lived (unlikely) he’d use it. Wren didn’t look happy, but she wasn’t in terror for her life. “What was the morning like?”
"It could be, but I didn't want to assume," she replied truthfully. "You might have a lot of people you'd bring a plant to, and I might just have been a stop along the way," she said honestly. Wren's life hadn't involved a great many gifts, and she didn't take for granted that things were actually for her. She also didn't even consider that there would be a listening device in anything Silver gave her; she just didn't think of him as a spy. In truth, she would have been surprised to learn he approved of Alexander being dead at all. His reaction to Luke's past meant Wren assumed Silver would never approve of lethal force, and she looked over at him and gave him a genuine (if tired) smile. "But it is lovely. Thank you. I don't have anything like this." And no, she wasn't in terror for her life. Shaky, yes, too pale, yes, but not scared, not then. "I tried to make peace with my cousine, and it went very, very badly," she explained, wondering if discussing personal things was okay. A quirk of her brow as she glanced over at him posed the question silently.
Silver would absolutely put a listening device into something he gave Wren, but only if he felt it was for her safety and absolutely necessary. He hadn’t done it yet and had no intention of doing so. Spying on personal connections was a very bad idea, and a good way to get enticed into making stupid mistakes. He doubted if Wren would forgive him if she found out, too. “Family can be difficult, I hear,” Silver said, generously. “I don’t have any cousins that I know of, but I can imagine.”
"Do you have any family members nearby?" she asked, and the question was really do you have any family members at all? But she had softened it intentionally, since she knew his maman had passed. She knew very little about him, really, but he knew very little about her too. "Can I tell you about it?" she asked, the question cool and calm enough to indicate she wouldn't mind if he said no. She'd always gotten the feeling that Silver would not be particularly interested in hearing about the mess that was her life. But this time it wasn't actually her mess, not beyond her inability to do anything about it. "I don't want you to fix anything," she clarified, just in case.
Silver shook his head. “No, no more family that I’m aware of. It’s possible, my father never mentioned anyone. I never looked into it.” He’d been tempted, when he was much younger, but he never had. The agency probably had, come to think of it. There was probably a file somewhere. Interesting thought. “Of course you can tell me about it. I’ve given the impression you cannot speak to me?” He frowned. This was possible, of course. Tony’s timing was always terrible.
She wondered what that comment said about his family, the fact that his father had never mentioned anyone, and that he'd never looked into it. She knew he'd known his maman, and she wondered if his parents had simply been divorced, or if it was more complicated than that. "Did you want to look into it?" she asked after a thoughtful pause, deciding his comment indicated the question wouldn't be considered prying. She smiled at his question about whether or not he'd given the impression that she couldn't speak to him. "No, but it's messy, and I always got the feeling you didn't like messy very much," she said truthfully.
“I wanted to once, when I was younger, but then I changed my mind. He wasn’t...” Silver thought, considered, and then decided to finish the sentence, “...the best father, and I was angry about it. So I didn’t look for any of his relations because I didn’t want to know them.” He smiled back at her, though it was a little belated. “...So you’re right, I don’t like mess.” He braked, glanced at the mirrors, and slid to a stop at the light.
"I never knew mine, my father," she admitted, but something in her voice said that wasn't something she wanted to think about for very long, and she looked out the window instead. She was quiet as she tried to determine if his dislike of mess meant she should hold her tongue, and in the end she decided that choice was really his to make. "This is messy. Do you still want to listen?" she asked.
Silver shifted back and then forward, stopping himself at the line at the edge of the chair and then straightening to keep his back off the rest. “Yes, if you want to tell me.” He looked at his hand on the steering wheel and spotted a streak of grease he’d missed. Damn, hopefully it didn’t get on his shirt.
She watched his movements, and she wondered at them a little, even as she pressed two fingers to the unforgiving throb in her temple, just below where the stitches began. "My cousine, Brielle, she's the one Luke slept with last year. We haven't spoken since I learned that they decided to keep that a secret from me. I- I tried to make peace with her, because I wanted to move ahead, to leave the past where it was. She told me her husband is trying to kill her, but she won't let me help. I put her up in an apartment last month, after I found out Alexander was blackmailing her, and I offered for her to come stay with me. I even offered a permanent bodyguard, but she won't let anyone help, and I feel- I feel unbelievably impotent, like with MK last week, when I couldn't get to her, even though I knew Alexander had her. I just had to listen, and wait, and walk into his trap, but I couldn't stop it. And with Brielle, I can't do anything at all." She paused, realizing she'd been going on and on without stopping. "She asked if I even noticed when Alexander was blackmailing her for me, if I even noticed, and I tried to get money to her, to make Jack bring her home, but I-" She shook her head, and she looked out the window. "I don't know what to do."
Silver listened through this long speech without a change of expression, the slight frown he wore one of concentration, not disapproval or judgment. “It sounds to me as if you did everything you could. Her betrayal is not going to endear you to her, and you did what you could short of kidnapping her. That was not a possibility for you. What more could you have done. This is that reflex of guilt, because you feel the need to control, to affect. We discussed earlier.” He tipped his head at her. “...I have the same problem, very often. In my profession sometimes you feel you should be able to plan everything. This is not always the case. We cannot always plan, we cannot always predict. We cannot force people to do what we wish.”
"But how do you sit there and know someone is in danger, and not do anything about it?" she asked, wringing her fingers in the hem of her dress and making it plainly evident that she had no idea how to do that. "She's mad at me. She thinks I'm angry without reason, that she did nothing wrong. And we have old problems too. When we were small, she had everything, and I- Well, I wasn't very lucky when it came to things." And at this point she was just talking, her gaze firmly out the window and her expression very far away, somewhere down south where it was salty and humid. "I almost died when I was eight months pregnant, and she had her own problems then, and- I know she doesn't want anything from me, but I sent Jack. She likes Jack, or I thought she did." She sighed. "I haven't tried sending Luke." There was guilt in that confession too.
Silver stopped himself from making a small sound that would have been not only rude, but overly communicative of his opinion of Luke Henry--which, needless to say, was not high. “Because you don’t trust them together. And obviously you have reason. There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy anger. You’re going to feel guilty about that too?” He raised an illustrative eyebrow at her, but smiled to show he was not entirely serious.
She nudged at his shoulder with her hand, no real pressure in the movement, since he was always injured, and who knew what he was hiding from her even then. "She thinks I don't have a right to be angry. I think Luke does too, actually, and I'm not very good at angry. I never really learned that as a child," she admitted, and she slid her hand back to tug lightly on one of the plant's leaves. "I don't think she's a bad person, my cousine, and I know she's in a lot of trouble. My distrust shouldn't mean she gets hurt." She managed to refrain from adding because of me to that sentence, but only just.
“It doesn’t. She is as much responsible for her own well-being as you are. You have done everything you can and offered what you could, but like witness protection, it’s entirely voluntary on her part. You can’t force her.” Not that Silver had any personal experience with the official witness protection program. In his work assets were protected or killed and there wasn’t much of an in between. He paused. “You also have the right to be as angry as you like about anything you like. Why do they imagine you shouldn’t be?”
"Even if she's doing it to spite me?" she asked, because her conversation with Brielle had led her to believe that was the case. She sighed when he asked why she shouldn't be angry. "Luke says he didn't tell me because I had too many things going on, that it was in the past. Brielle thinks she just didn't do anything wrong." She shrugged her shoulders, and she looked out the window for a long, long span of moments, her fingers finding the hem of her white dress and fidgeting with it nervously, and then she looked back at him. "Tell me why you have a new garage?" she asked. He had mentioned a fire, but there had to be more to it than that, knowing him. "And don't tell me no. It's easier to concentrate on that, than it is to think about MK."
Silver thought that a person’s spite was their own problem, and he would have said as much, but he had a feeling there were too much emotions in the situation for anyone to listen to reason. Wren’s close relationships had to be among the most destructive he’d ever heard of. And that was saying something. “It’s really not my story to tell,” Silver said, with that infuriating air he sometimes acquired when he was keeping secrets for some obscure reason of his own. “But I can tell you that I think it has more to do with the other people in the building, not me. The garage I have now isn’t a working one, it’s not a public address.”
She didn't push when he didn't reply to her question, and she just traced her fingertips along the car's window and wished the entire world didn't feel like it was slipping through her fingertips, grains of sand that she had no hope of ever catching and holding onto. The hospital, quiet and private and paid off with Simon's money, was a white nightmare in the distance, and she looked away from it and back at him. "If it isn't a working garage, then why do you have it?" she asked instead, politely leaving the subject of Luke and Brielle behind. She didn't push for the story that wasn't his to tell, but she mentally added it to her list of worries about him, which was growing daily.
“So I’ve got somewhere to live and keep my cars,” he said, smiling at her. The privacy of the hospital had made it more difficult for Silver to pry into medical records. He hadn’t done it yet, since that kind of access would require personal infiltration, and that side of espionage was fairly risky. If caught then getting arrested was probably the worst that could happen, which in the scheme of things probably wasn’t bad, but Wren would then find out, and he could probably kiss that relationship goodbye. So he’d stayed out of the hospital. So far. Except for the bug in the bouquet. Just that.
"And work?" she asked, because living and keeping his cars didn't explain how he paid the bills. She wondered, for the first time, if he was still actively doing whatever it was that they didn't discuss, whatever he'd done before. She was fairly sure, without ever having asked, that it was lethal work, and she wondered how he would feel if he knew about Alexander, about what had happened there. She didn't say anything, though. Instead, she watched the hospital near, and she looked back at him. "Will you wait for me?" she asked, and there was no real reason to be afraid. They wouldn't admit her, not when she was walking in on her own two feet, and she could walk right back out if she couldn't handle it; at least that's what she told herself.
“I actually have kind of a nest egg saved,” Silver admitted, perhaps too readily. “I don’t have to work unless I need to. I’m taking a vacation.” He paused, and his eyes twinkled a little before he groped for his glasses as they turned toward the sun and the hospital. “Except for special circumstances. Why don’t I come in with you?” He peered up at the building as they approached as if he had never seen it before.
If he offered up the information too easily, she didn't notice, too caught up in her own nerves about seeing MK, about being in the hospital at all, about the memories that would come rushing back with the cold, antiseptic air inside the building. She didn't question, and she replied with a noncommittal, "oh," which she followed up with a nod. "Okay, but I'll go in to see her alone," she said, because this was going to be hard enough alone. "You'll wait in the hall?" she asked, and she knew it was a lot to ask. She should have seen if Luke could come with her, but she didn't want him leaving Gus, not after being gone for days. "I owe you," she offered with a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
Silver pulled the car into guest parking and unfastened his seatbelt, twisting cautiously and waiting for her to pull the door open before he did the same and maneuvered himself out, one hand on the roof. The parking lot was a little exposed, but parking lots always were. “I’ll let you know when I want to collect,” he said, cheerfully, meeting her at the front of the car and moving toward the lobby. He was watching her closely out of the edge of one eye, something he was good at doing behind sunglasses.
She was still growing accustomed to the front seat of his cars, and she was still growing accustomed to him not rushing around and opening her door for her, and she hesitated a moment before reaching for the door handle and pushing the car door open herself. She didn't notice him watching her from behind the glasses, but she was too anxious to notice much of anything, her fingers wound up in the hem of her dress at the thighs in a silent statement of nervousness. "Oh?" she asked, remembering what he was referring to a moment later. "Okay. Sorry. I'm nervous," she admitted calmly, and she nodded toward the double doors. "I'll keep it short," she promised, as much for herself as for his offer to wait.
Several circumstances combined to make Silver wait for Wren rather than pulling the door open for her. He was not under her employment at the moment. They were friends, not lovers. And finally, perhaps most importantly, he thought it might do her good to do a few things on her own, just to get her mind off her emotions. It didn’t appear to do much good, though. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you to the room?” he asked, eying the door.
She shook her head, and she did it for much the same reasons that he didn't open the door for her. "No. I need to. She's upset at me, and she won't tell me how much if you're standing there," she explained, because she knew MK, and she knew how MK was around other people, compared to how MK was around her. "I'll be okay," she added with a tired smile. "I'm stronger than you think, but I'm pretty sure I've told you that before." She knew she had.
“I’ll get some bad coffee in the lobby,” he said, slowing to a stop just before the sliding doors. He turned slightly in place, not twisting his back or waist but actually rotating on two feet to scan behind him. He turned back to her, the sunglasses heavy dark glass, but then he smiled. It was very human, and he reached up to touch her cheek with three fingers, a rapid brush of touch. “Go on.”