Who: Sam & Liam What: A sleepover at the Aria Where: Neil's suite at the Aria When: Recent! Warnings/Rating: None
In hindsight, it might have been better if Sam had sent a car for Liam, giving him a firmer deadlines from which to leave the motel he had set up camp in, as left to his own devices, he simply procrastinated. A shower, though he failed to shave, and after that he simply dawdled as though he was resistant to going to stay with Sam, and by association, Neil. He wasn’t entirely sure where his reluctance stemmed from, and deep down, Liam knew it was something that wasn’t natural for him, but with everything that had occurred in the past several months, he wasn’t entirely sure what was natural for him any longer. But that was something to think on later, so Liam shoveled that all to the back of his thoughts and closed the door on it.
It didn’t take long to gather the few things he had grabbed when he left Seven’s, just a bag’s worth of stuff, and then he was checking out of the shabby motel and waiting for the cab to take him to the Aria. Sitting in the backseat of the cab, Liam thumbed through his phone, the missed calls from his mother that he needed to return, the last call logged from Seven the night everything had exploded. His thumb hesitated over the call log, debating his course of action, and then he called up the number and let it ring, Seven’s familiar baritone welcome in his ear.
But the conversation that followed was anything but welcome. By the time the cab pulled up outside the Aria, Liam was barely holding it together. A handful of bills were given to the driver before he hauled his duffle out, standing for a long moment on the sidewalk outside the building, blue eyes bloodshot, cheeks ruddy from that moment where he had lost it. He felt half there, half alive as he walked to the building and let the front desk know, in a voice gone rough with emotion, that he was there for Sam Alexander, and could they please let her know?
Sam was wondering if Liam had changed his mind; it wouldn't have surprised her if he had. He did a lot of fucked up shit she couldn't predict these days, and she had stopped trying somewhere along the line. And, yeah, so maybe Neil hadn't sounded thrilled about Liam crashing, but Sam knew Neil wasn't going to say no. No was the kind of strong word that Neil saved for really special occasions, and Liam crashing in her old bedroom wasn't a big enough deal to warrant it. And, yeah, so maybe she was a little worried. Liam was all turned the fuck around lately, and she was way too emotional by half. But she was hoping that being on her own home turf would make things easier to deal with.
When the doorman rang up, she told him to put Liam on the elevator that led to the 59th floor of the south tower, where Neil's suite took up most of the hallway. She propped the door, so Liam didn't need to knock, and she ran upstairs to change into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, foregoing the comfort of boxers and one of Neil's stolen shirts in order to hide how much fucking weight she was still losing. There was an italian opera playing through the suite's speakers, and the bar was conspicuously empty. She was working on some small detail work in the living room, and there was a blanket thrown in the middle of the floor with small strips of metal and a micro soldering kit abandoned alongside it.
The elevator ride up to the 59th floor took longer than Liam had expected, or maybe it was just the way the world was lagging around him. Fingers gripped the strap of his duffle tightly as he exited the lift, for a moment leaving him standing in the hallway with no idea as to where he was supposed to go. But the propped open door and the sound of opera making its way out gave him a clue, and without a word, Liam moved in that direction. He pushed the door open quietly, eased it shut with his heel, glancing around the suite for a long while, still in silence. It was a far cry from the motel room he had just vacated, as far removed from it as he could possibly imagine, and it made him feel remarkably out of place. He hadn’t shaved in days, his clothes were rumpled, shoes covered in desert dust, and for a moment, Liam wanted nothing more than to go home. Not to Seven’s, not even to the place he had shared with Nick. No, he longed for home, for his mother, for Mississippi, for things that didn’t demand anything of him other than what he was capable of giving.
Holding his duffle tight, he made his way towards the sounds of life in the suite, chewing on his bottom lip as he caught sight of Sam at work in the middle of the living room. Seeing her there brought a small smile to his lips, just a ghost of what it normally was. “Hey,” he offered quietly, lifting a free hand in greeting.
"Hey. Neil's at the office," she replied, just settling back onto the blanket and crossing her legs. She nodded to the spiral staircase. "Your room's at the end of the hall, to the right," she explained, hoping it would make him feel more at home to find his own space right away. "Throw your shit down, then come tell me why you look like fucking shit," she added, because she might be caught up in her own crap, but she could tell something had happened - and recently, if Liam's face was any indication. And, yeah, she couldn't remember the days when every meeting with Liam hadn't been because something had gone fucked up in his life. She'd thought he was so stable at first, but life was a bitch, and the man standing in front of her was a good reminder that shit could always be worse. "There's no booze, but there's other shit to drink in the fridge," she explained. "We call the concierge for food," she admitted. "Just dial zero on any of the phones." And it sounded weird coming from her, that kind of easy-money life, but she was used to it now. She reached back to the end table, and she grabbed the spare keycard and tossed it over to him.
For a moment, Liam simply lingered there in the living room, listening to her instructions, the information she rattled off without hardly thinking about it. Reaching out, he caught the keycard that was thrown his direction, turning it over in his hand before tucking it into his pocket alongside his journal, someplace safe he wouldn’t simply drop it and leave it. “Thanks,” he offered in response to everything that she had to say, though that didn’t really begin to cover any of it. “I’m- I’ll go put my bag down, and come back downstairs.” And with that, Liam disappeared up the spiraling staircase, fingers gliding over the handrail.
The suite was large and luxurious in a way that Seven’s wasn’t, but that wasn’t to say that Seven lived badly. It was just different means of luxury, Liam found, as he found the room Sam had designated as his own. He didn’t take any time to look it over, simply dropping his bag on the bed before returning to the living room, dropping down to sit nearby but out of the way of where she was working. “You fit in well here,” Liam commented, legs crossed in front of him indian-style, hands clasped together. “I mean, you look comfortable here. Happy.” And he was honestly glad for that. Sam deserved that, Liam believed, no matter the moments they fought, he always wanted the best for her.
She watched him go, her expression turning more worried once his back was turned. She wanted to help him, but fuck if she knew how, not when she didn't even know how to help herself. She wasn't lying when she told Neil she would contact his shrink, but she wasn't sure Jack could do shit for Liam. Nothing he'd done so far had helped; Liam was worse than he'd been in the whole time Sam had known him. Not that she was much better, but she was pretty sure Liam was actually doing the shit the doctor ordered, unlike her. No, she didn't have a whole lot of fucking faith in the doc, but she had no idea who else could help Liam out. And the shit with Seven and the gun had made her reluctant to go to the person she normally would have gone to for help if Liam was fucked. And, yeah, she knew she wasn't in any state to help anyone herself. It was a shitty situation all around.
She was working on a small piece of metal when he came back, the torch burn-red and her face bent over a tiny stand holding the hot bronze. She set the torch aside when he sat, and she left the metal (which now bore a detailed, recessed leaf) to cool. "Yeah?" she asked incredulously, because she was a white-trash girl through and through, French genetics or not. "I don't think I fit in, but I like it," she admitted of the suite. She didn't have any burning desire to find an apartment or a house, and she felt like things might finally be getting a little better, for the first time in over half a year. "You look like shit, baby. Tell me what happened?" Because she might not be able to fix anything for him, but she could listen.
“Keycards to get in, calling the concierge for food, this suite? You don’t even bat an eye when talking about it. I’d say you fit in quite nicely.” Liam didn’t necessarily think that was a bad thing, this level of comfort she was displaying. After the torch had been set aside, Liam edged closer towards what she was working on, not daring to touch it because he was intelligent enough to recognize that the metal wouldn’t cool that quickly. Cold, hard metal, warmed up, formed into something beautiful; it reminded him, in ways, of the one who had formed it. For a moment, his expression softened, a callback to something last summer, before everything had started to crumble. “I’ve always admired people who can do things like that,” Liam confessed quietly. He had never been good with his hands, words had always been his paint, prose the landscape he formed, but left with something physical, he never managed to create anything even remotely like this. “What’s it going to be?” He turned to look towards Sam, his expression open, edging towards relaxed.
When the conversation came back round to him, the tension in his shoulders returned, and Liam looked away, somewhere just to the side of Sam, focused on a far wall. “I honestly don’t even know what to say about it anymore,” Liam said quietly, and then he was burying his head in his hands, fingers pressing back into shaggy dark hair that had long since gone past needing a cut. “I’m just really tired, Sam. Tired.” It was such a simple way to put it all, but it didn’t even begin to touch the iceberg of everything that was going on. A sliver above the surface, enormous in its scope, but there was so much more going on beneath that Liam couldn’t even wrap his thoughts around it. He knew Sam meant well in asking him here, in asking what was wrong, but didn’t she have her own set of problems to deal with? Part of him just wanted to talk about her, about what he had missed during that month they hadn’t spoken, because worrying about her, that was easier.
"I'm young," Sam replied. "I adapt quick." But yeah, she liked the suite; it felt like home. And in Sam's life, there weren't a lot of places that could boast that. She looked down at the metal when his expression softened. "Thanks. It gets my mind off everything. Is writing like that for you?" she asked, the question more honest and straightforward than she normally posed. But, yeah, she assumed it was kind of the same thing, writing and her art. And she was finally at the point where she was willing to call it art, and not just something she did to pass the time. It was the one thing that was completely out of place in the high-roller suite, her gear - well, that and the girl wielding it. As for what it was going to be, she shrugged. "Not sure yet. Just started. I don't usually work this small, so it might end up getting melted down into nothing, or being part of something big. I'm considering glass work, but I need to learn how to blow glass for that." And she was considering a lot of things, honestly. It was one of the reasons she wanted to lower her dose of meds. She wanted to do shit, and she just didn't have the fucking energy to, not with her appetite gone and a constant desire to sleep looming over her head.
She watched the tension return to his shoulders, and she watched him as he looked away. "Liam, fucking dish. Talking helps, and I'm feeling pretty fucking even today," which didn't happen very often. "So, take advantage of it, and just babble at me." But being tired, she got that, and she gave him a nod. "When you're depressed, everything feels exhausting. Seriously, getting up to piss, getting dressed, even hopping in the shower. Maybe it's time to see a new doctor, baby." But of course she had no one to fucking recommend, no one she knew who might be better than Jack. All she knew was that Liam was getting worse and worse, that he was practically falling apart in front of her eyes, and she wasn't unselfish or stable enough to be the one who fixed him. But she wanted him fixed, and therein lay the problem.
Some days, Liam forgot that Sam was younger than him. Perhaps it came from knowing her for nearly a year, or maybe it was just getting used to her presence in his life. But there were moments like these where he was reminded of it, and it had him looking at her a little differently. The last year had been rocky for them both, struggles left and right, and he had to admire her for getting through it like she had. Liam had never considered himself to be a particularly weak person, but looking back at his life, he had never really struggled with anything. It wasn’t that his life had been easy, but it hadn’t been hard, not like it had been during the past six months. It seemed like a lifetime ago where things were simple. He wrote. He traveled. He had his roots down in Mississippi, and things were simple. He could barely remember when life had been like that, and that thought worried him more than he cared to admit.
“Yeah, it’s kind of like that for me.” Though with his latest project, the project he had hoped would be therapeutic, it was turning into more of a nightmare than anything else. “I’m trying to write something about what happened between me and Tristan,” Liam explained after a moment’s consideration about whether or not to tell her about his new project. “You know that I went to her to do some quote, unquote, research about this kind of stuff,” Liam added a moment later, complete with the air quotes. “So I decided to try and write about it. Write it out, get it out of me.” He let out a sigh, his shoulders sinking, fingers pressing against the rug, toying with the nap of the fabric. “I think it’s starting to bite me in the ass, Sam.” His lips pressed together for a moment before he was able to drag his gaze back to her, bloodshot with dark circles beneath his eyes. “Would you make me something? If I asked you to?” Brows raised up expectantly, but the expression lasted only a handful of seconds before it faded away, the conversation going to the problem at hand.
Liam was quiet for some time, and while he appreciated the offer to talk, it was hard. Harder than he would have imagined given his love of words, of telling stories. But this was personal, and he had never been one to ramble on about himself without thinking, and that was, essentially, what Sam was wanting him to do. He brought a hand up, chewing on his thumb for a moment before he let out a sigh, unfolding his legs and stretching out on the floor, hands beside him, bracing him up. “After everything that happened with Tristan,” Liam finally began, his gaze fixed somewhere far past Sam, just over her shoulder, “Seven was safe. His home was safe, and now...” Liam trailed off, eyes falling shut. “I just don’t feel it anymore. Safe. Stable. I don’t even have a home right now, Sam. Seven doesn’t want me back, or he does, but he doesn’t, I don’t know. Did you know he deals drugs?” Those eyes opened then, finally steadying on Sam. “Yeah. I didn’t realise that. And I’ve been living with him for how long now?” Liam let out a laugh, hoarse, slightly hysterical. “I don’t know anything about him. Not like I thought I did, and it scares me.”
Sam picked up the cool metal, and she pressed it between her fingers until the edges curved in around the leaf, and until the tiny square became the leaf and stopped being a square entirely. She was listening while she worked, and the sturdy metal beneath her fingers kept her from interrupting him, despite how much she fucking wanted to. She didn't think the book thing was a good idea, not from a fictional standpoint, not yet, but she didn't look up until he asked if she would make him something. "Yeah, sure, but I get to pick," she said. She wasn't a commercial artist, and she didn't take commissions, but she could definitely make something for the man across from her. Something to ground him, maybe. Yeah, and the more she thought about it, the more she liked it. Pale metal, interwoven with blue. She'd need to get her hands on on something blue. Not glass; too fucking delicate. She wanted something solid after all the shit Liam was going through.
"Ok, the book first," she said after listening to the rest, after watching him chew on his thumb and laugh that hysterical laugh. "You writing this fucking book right now, it would be like me deciding I wanted to weld with heroin, to make some fucking point. I need distance from that shit, and you need distance from what happened with Boss, baby," she said. She wasn't a shrink, and maybe her advice wasn't the best, but it wasn't like the doc was managing to do any better, was he? As for Seven dealing drugs, that didn't hit Sam as hard as it might some people. Clarissa had dealt, and Sam had done her fair share before everything went to shit. It was always her back-up money source - or it had been. Yeah, no, she wasn't surprised. But that was a far cry from pulling a gun on someone. "I don't care about him dealing. I care about him pulling a fucking gun on you, and I care about him being unstable. How about a roommate, Liam? Let Seven work his shit out for now, and find someone you like to live with?" Because, yeah, not knowing Seven was a dealer, that was a big thing. Where did he get his supplies? Was he tied into anything else? Because most dealers were.
“I wouldn’t dream of demanding something in particular from you,” Liam responded, a sliver of a smile pulling up the corner of his lips. It was a hollow expression, barely reaching those blue eyes, but it was a smile nonetheless. Liam knew that anything she made for him would be something he would appreciate. “In advance, thank you,” because he really did appreciate it. No matter how they had behaved when they first met, Sam had turned into one of his nearest friends. Whatever it was that she ended up making for him, Liam looked forward to it.
As Sam continued on about her thoughts regarding the book, Liam had to admit that what she said made sense. He had thought that writing it out would help him get some of the stuff out of his system, but it was doing the opposite; instead, he was reliving every moment of it, dwelling on it, letting it drag him down, and even he had to say that it wasn’t working the way he thought it might. But then Sam mentioned the heroin, and that word, how she said she needed distance from it, that dragged his attention back from himself and onto her. “Did something happen to you, Sam? Something I don’t know about?” Liam knew there was; Neil had made that all but obvious without giving any of the details, and he had been meaning to ask, but every conversation he seemed to have with her had degraded into something hostile. As for Seven...
“Seven’s unstable because he tried something someone wanted him to peddle. I don’t know what it was, don’t even think he knows. That’s why he pulled thee-” And Liam broke off then, his lips pressing into a thin line as that mental image came back to visit him once more. “Maybe I just need to get my own place. Stop relying on everyone like I have been. My own place with several deadbolts.” No one to bother him, he could write in peace, or simply sleep until nothing mattered.
"I get to dump a beer over your head as payment," she joked, her own thoughts unknowingly going to the same fucking place his did. It seemed so fucking long ago that they'd met in the hallway of Passages. "Fucking look at us," she said, using the metal in her hand to motion to him, then to her. "We're both so fucking different from last year." She grinned. She shrugged. "And so the same." She looked up when he asked if something happened to her, and she gave him a look that was all come the fuck on. Sam knew most of her friends were self-absorbed, but she also knew she looked like shit. Forty pounds, dark circles, and general malaise. "Don't," she warned him. She'd said all she was going to say, and that's as far as she was going with her own, personal confession time.
Sam stayed quiet while Liam pressed his lips together. She was worried about the fucker, and she'd lost confidence in his fucking shrink. She didn't trust Seven anymore, and she knew better than to think she could fix anybody. Sure, she was loyal, but she petered out really fucking fast when trouble came close, and they both knew that. His own apartment sounded like a good idea, as long as he didn't hole up in the place and fucking die. "Yeah, that's not a bad idea," she finally agreed. "Chill out here for a week first, though," she suggested. Because, yeah, some time might help calm him down. "Neil's literally gone all fucking day, so you'll have plenty of time to get your shit together, baby."
The mention of the beer had Liam laughing, because it was true. Different, and still the same. “Except for my nose. It’s never going to be the same as before you broke it.” His grin showed that he was joking, and then when her expression changed, that look that spoke volumes without saying a word, Liam simply nodded in response. It was easy enough to figure out what had gone on, but he supposed that she needed some people in her life that didn’t see her for the problems, but saw her for her, and he was happy enough to be that person.
“I just don’t want to overstay my welcome. You’ve always been good to me, and I appreciate everything you’ve done. More than I could possibly put into words.” He drew quiet, sitting up and leaning forward over his legs, hands in his lap. “Thank you,” Liam finally said, his voice quiet, gaze sliding over to her. He drew in a deep breath, let it out, shakier than he would have preferred, but life was going in directions he didn’t necessarily prefer. “If you get too annoyed with me, I’ll go back to that motel. Don’t be afraid to kick me out if you need to.”
"It adds character," she said of his uneven nose, a gap-toothed grin coming with the claim. It was followed up by a dismissive noise when he said he didn't want to overstay his welcome. She was more concerned about Neil than herself, but even that wasn't a big worry. "Shut the fuck up. If I get annoyed with you, I'll just kick you in the shin or dump a bucket of ice over your head while you sleep." She put the cooled metal down, and she picked up the small torch and used it to point at him. "In the meantime, the beds really are fucking heaven, and there's some amazing opera in the sound systems built in every room. The view," she added, motioning behind her, "is seriously fucking awesome, and no one is going to shoot at you here. Take a few days, chill the fuck out, and figure out where you go from here." It was what she had to offer. At the end of the day, it was what she liked most about this fucking place (other than Neil). It was so high up above the city, and the wall-to-ceiling view made the entire world light up at night. It was quiet and awesome, and it felt safe. If she could give him that, then maybe it would be enough. God knows her faith in shrinks was out the window, and she had lost her faith in pharmaceuticals a long time ago. Yeah, this was it. "Now, go get some roach-free rest, huh? I'll order us something to eat once it gets dark, and I still have some stupid DVD to watch that I got for Christmas. You can keep me company, if you're up for it."
When she put it that way, it seemed so simple that he couldn’t find anything in it to argue about. So instead, he simply nodded his head, unable to help the grin as she explained the place and everything it had to offer. “How can I argue with that?” Liam asked, pushing himself up to his feet, joints cracking as he stretched. “Wake me up when the food gets here, and we’ll watch something together. All right?” And then he moved over, dropping a kiss on the top of her head, a murmured ‘thank you’, and then he disappeared up that spiraling staircase towards the beds that she promised were heavenly.