francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-09 21:30:00 |
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Entry tags: | hoban washburne, plot: switch, zoe washburne |
Who: Olivia Landon & Lin Alesi
What: Not hating each other
Where: Serenity
When: After Lin is sexiled; during the switch plot
Warnings/Rating: Olivia is drunk, Lin swears a lot; muddled emotions; frustration; liquor
He’d been kicked out again. Motherfucker. Winnie had stumbled into the bunk she shared with Lin not ten minutes ago and had told him, with an accompanying hiccup no less, she needed the room. Alone. That was it. No explanation. Just a hand pointing to the ladder asking him to go. And when he resisted being tossed out of his own quarters, because, excuse her, he was fucking reading, his friend threatened, in no uncertain terms, to put him in a headlock until he cried. So, fine, he went. Asshole. Lin found himself making his way back to the common area before he really decided on what to do. But, that had been where Winnie had found him, homeless and sleepy, that first night, so, who knew? Maybe some other kind soul would take pity on him and he wouldn’t have to sleep on the table. If not, well, then he’d sleep on the table. The boy sighed, his shoulders sinking, and began removing his weather-worn outer shirt (Hawaiian, of course) for use as a pillow as he continued his trek. With his feet ringing heavy on the metal floor and the wadded up shirt in hand, he stomped into the dining room, where the lights were dimmed down low and - oh, Jesus Christ. There was someone at the table. Lin’s hand went to his heart and he squinted in the semi-darkness at the form barely outlined against the wall. Oh. Olivia. Awesome. “Ah, if it isn't my arch nemesis. Good evening,” Lin said seriously, giving her an eyebrow raise, as he rounded the table, giving it a wide-berth, as he went to the cupboards. The woman still made him uneasy. She was just so serious and it was no secret she wasn’t too keen on the boy who shared his headspace with Wash. They were, in truth, polar opposites (he was funny; she wasn’t, etc.). But, he wasn’t about to not acknowledge her. He wasn’t rude. There was little polarity to Olivia that was left. She was sat at the table and her spine was not straight in the slightest but the mellow, bell-curve of a true slouch. She had Zoe’s boots propped up, right foot crossed over left on the lip of another chair and she was slumped down in her own seat until the leather vest had creaked and creased to begrudging comfort. There was a glass that was within reach of the brush of her hand but both hands were slack on the table-top, loose and empty. She was not asleep, but she had the deep relaxation of one who has drunk enough for languidity to look natural on someone who has no capability for it normally and is at least three glasses away from stupor. She turned her head toward the door - footsteps on metal were neither light nor unobtrusive, and she looked at Lin very deliberately. “It’s you. Please state your absolute lack of intention to talk about your long-standing interest in someone who won’t sleep with you, or leave.” Olivia’s voice was very flat, usually and had the diamond-cut precision of contractual agreements. This was a drawl, an arid-dry roll of words across tongue and teeth that were measured and slow and were almost too-careful in not sliding together. “I have no intention of providing counsel whilst drinking.” The half-empty bottle stood to attention on the broad slab of a table. It was not that Olivia actively disliked Lin; she gave him little to no consideration, Lin being neither a client nor an active presence within her own life. She did not understand Lin and she did not find him funny and the two combined into an imposing regularity of a particular kind of small headache every time she encountered his assault on the forums. She was wary of him, in a way that Olivia was wary of pop-culture and of teenagers and of things like Justin Bieber; phenomenons she had little time for and about which she cared even less. She looked at him now, half-lidded eyes and a posture that was not remotely regular and perhaps there was a vague air of squaring up to a threat. “I’m no one’s arch nemesis,” she said, seriously. She said everything seriously. She reminded him strongly of a mother - a particularly uncaring mother. Lin all but rolled his eyes as he turned toward the cupboards. All the food was kept higher up in the small, square drawers that lined the shelves like a grid. Of course, everything was just out of reach. He tossed Wash's shirt to the side with a sigh. The boy then pulled himself up onto the counter, planted his knees there, like a child snooping for the sugary cereals kept hidden away by overprotective (but not protective enough not to buy such food in the first place) parents, and dipped his hand inside of a half-open drawer for a protein packet. He slid back onto the floor, landing there with as much weight as he could - just to annoy the dubious woman at the table. The metal rang underfoot. Had he known Justin Bieber was being used in conjunction with him, even if only in thought, he probably would have thrown the little silvery package of foodstuffs at the woman's head. There was a certain amount of underestimation and assumption that came with meeting someone for the first time when you acted and spoke as Lin did - which is to say, like a fourteen year old girl who knew a lot about sex and swore a lot. Others trivialized his pop culture knowledge, his silly gifs and quips, and formed their own opinions, based solely on superficial aspects of him, as to his intelligence and general worth. He was used to that. But Justin Bieber? He deserved the benefit of the doubt on that one. Lin ripped the packet open with his teeth and came to take a seat across the dark table from Olivia. She didn't want him there, and that was enough of a reason to stay - well, that, and having nowhere else to go. The boy's eyes flicked, with checked curiosity, from the glass near her empty hand, to the bottle, to the slope of Olivia's shoulders and her position of choice in the chair opposite. He took a bite of the protein and said nothing as he chewed it. Eventually, after he'd swallowed, Lin lifted his shoulders in a shrug, as if to say 'suit yourself, you crazy, stern gunslinger.' "Just what kind of counsel might one seek from you? Deets on some IRS loopholes?" Asked the pilot dryly, mimicking the flatness and cut of her tone quite well. He folded a corner of the silver packaging over itself with idle fingers and glanced up at Olivia. Was she drunk? It dawned on him then that she'd been the one drinking with Winnie. He squinted through the dimness. "Just what tax advice did you give to Winnie that got her so worked up? She kicked me out. We both know filing together means bigger savings." Olivia snorted. It was a small sound but it was not ladylike and it was not contained, it was a very clear expression of how she felt. Olivia was not overly given to them - not in public - but she did it now with a very clear lack of care in expressing herself at all. “Do they have much use for the IRS in space?” He seemed to know far more than any other about the ship, about the bizarre coincidence of selves that correlated to a motley crew and a small blond who carried guns like they were her favorite purse. He was eating something that looked positively revolting from silver-plastic, and Olivia cocked an eyebrow, watching the progression with the kind of unstinting fascination people give car accidents and televised operations. “I can’t see there being an awful lot to tax here,” a dubious, slow look around the room with the least amount of effort expended in so doing; Olivia was comfortable, it was the first time she’d been comfortable since the Door had thrust her into this rather than giving her the numb blackness of lost time. “I told her to ball up and stop pining over someone.” She winced, at the heaviness of his tread and there was a clink and a distinctly liquid sound. “If you are lovelorn, take it elsewhere.” The snort amused Lin. He liked it when people did things that didn’t suit them - or that flew in the face of expectations others had regarding them, and snorting, coming from Olivia, was one of those things. The boy smiled, and genuinely, around the hunk of protein, then struggled with the food for a moment because, goddamn, it was hard to chew and it clung to his teeth and the roof of his mouth unpleasantly. It wasn’t quite tasteless. It was vaguely bread-y, but denser. And though he was growing accustomed to it, it wasn’t any easier to eat the sixth time than it was the first. Finally, he managed to clear his mouth, just as the woman across the table poured herself another drink. A wisecrack about Browncoats versus Big Government was on the tip of Lin’s tongue, but it died there the moment she brought up him being ‘lovelorn.’ Like, first of all, what the fuck year did she think it was? They had gone into the future, not the fucking past. And even in the present - the 2013 present - no one used that word who wasn’t either in a Brontë sisters reenactment or one of those weird kids who liked steampunk (jk, Lin liked steampunk). And second of all, didn’t ‘lovelorn’ imply unrequited love? This was not a fucking Shakespeare play. And even if he were lovelorn, why on Earth - or whatever the phrase was now - did she think he’d bring his problems to the table - to the table she was sitting at, anyway? He wasn’t the one drinking heavily, was he? (Still, good on Winnie. If she had sexiled him because someone (Toby?) was actually going to come over, then he could deal with sleeping in the cavern of a kitchen.) “Reached your daily quota, have you?” Asked Lin, scratching the back of his head, the protein still in hand. Crumbs of the seemingly inedible block cascaded down the back of his neck and scurried into his shirt. Why, Lord? He sighed and tried to brush them away, but gave up after a second or two. Whatever. His attention returned to Olivia, to her silhouette that sat drinking and observing, so coolly, across the length of the wide table. “Could I at least have my palm read?” Lin extended his arm into the swath of space between them expectantly, palm open and facing upward. Olivia was half-slit eyes and a watchful sort of look beneath almost-shut eyelids. Her eyes were a soft color, warm hazel and gold but as Olivia was so very rarely considered a warm or soft person few people noticed. She tucked her hand against her elbow and the other held the glass against her lips as she watched him with the silver-wrapped substance, a bizarre squirrel gnawing mid-common room. It was, she decided, peculiarly unappetizing and she far preferred the space liquor to its food. “Absolutely hit the limit,” she said smoothly, with all the precision of someone well used to holding off whatever was felt in favor of what was required. This time it was not temper, but tipsiness. “If you must exacerbate frustration with yearning, you have only yourself to blame.” She waved away the open palm. “That one was free,” she declared. The hunk of protein was abandoned on the tabletop as Lin offered his hand for a reading. He grinned and withdrew the offending limb when Olivia brushed him away. Leaning farther forward and scooting to the edge of his chair, the boy moved to prop his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand. He gazed at the woman steadily in the dim light, once again observing the way she sat, so contained and radiating a certain kind of need for control, it seemed to Lin. But that was just a guess. She wasn’t exactly generous with her warmth, in any case. Not as far as he could tell. The boy’s eyes dropped to the notched, imperfect wood of the table (it was nice to have something organic in the metal shell hurtling through nothingness, anyway) and followed the swirls of grain for a long moment, circling the knots there. The ship continued its trek through the Black and the common room that held the two fragile, little people was filled with the reverberating, sad sort of humming heard most often on a plane or in a car - that strange, mechanized yawning. Speaking of yawning. Lin pressed a hand to his mouth in a half-hearted attempt to stifle his own. Ugh. He wanted a bed. His gaze moved back to Olivia and he returned to his former position, elbow, chin, and all that. “You’re very generous.” Lin supplied a smile that pretended to be genuine, though his tone was intentionally flippant, all as he mimed putting that little nugget of wisdom in his pocket for later. He then glanced from the glass to the bottle again, and again back to the woman. She had to be drunk. Or tipsy as balls. Even if Winnie had had half of what was missing from the bottle, there was a lot more air than liquid in there. Then again, he knew nothing about her. Maybe she had a liver like iron like everyone else he knew. “And I hear you. Yearning is just gauche. Passé as fuck. I, for one, never stoop to such. If I like someone, bam, we’re married 24 hours later or I’m a monkey’s uncle.” Dark eyebrows peaked, topping off an open expression on the boy’s face. “Are there a lot of monkeys that can claim you as avuncular, or just one, multiple times over?” Olivia had a rich voice, sonorous. It was mellow, the way nice voices are when quiet, when just a hint of them is permitted to be heard. It was the kind of voice that would roll off the metal walls and echo, molten amber and it was dry just then, a hitch to it that suggested laughter, and curled eyebrows without her having to make a single move. She didn’t think the kid (and this was how she thought of Lin, ‘the kid’, in the same way she’d seen Winnie as a woman and not a cop) had been drinking. He moved too much and his mind jittered too quickly for her to keep up, and the patter was tiring but not tiresome - not quite yet. “There’s a place for yearning,” Olivia said as if it were fact, a book that she was reading from rather than opinion. She did this often enough that it sounded like habit or at least as if she knew enough to carry it off, “Thirteen, fourteen. But one should have ceased by the age of thirty. Know what you want, and take it. It’s that easy.” She tipped her glass and she sipped a little, thoughtfully. It was of course, not quite that easy but less complicated than yearning made it seem. "Just one monkey at a time. I don't do multiples. Too many Christmas presents." There was no hesitation in the answer; it rang of truth and certainty as much as the woman's own statement about yearning, each sentence bitten off sharply. It would have been easy to assume Lin had considered the nature of his simian nieces and nephews long before, maybe in the quieter moments of his day, his words came so quickly on the heels of Olivia's question. But, he hadn't. It was just -the air in the common area was starting to take on that syrupy feeling, the kind that tugged so gently at the cerebellum, that he associated with sleepiness or intoxication and he didn't want it. He didn't want to be tired. Lin dug the heels of his palms into his eyes and tipped himself upright in his chair, spine meeting the rigid back of the thing, and his face pointing toward the ceiling. He made a sound of irritation and tried to rub the exhaustion away. When he finished (he was unsuccessful) and looked back to Olivia, his eyes were bright and edged with red. "Oh. Is that how you do it? Take it? I'm 28. Does that mean I'm in the clear?" The boy didn't slouch forward again. He angled his chin, so slightly, back toward the table so he could look at Olivia. "Because I was lying before. I yearn all the fucking time." Olivia made a noise that was like air sliding out of an enclosure, all pained frustration and irritation made vocal. She slid in her chair and it was a boneless, easy movement like pouring oil, until her elbows were on the table’s surface and she had buried her head in her arms. She was not readily able to make gestures like this often; the suits and blouses were polished and smart but restrictive. Zoe’s range of motion, for all the leather, was far freer and Olivia had reached the point of intoxication where that appealed. “God save me,” it was a little muffled, “I’m on a ship driven by a child who yearns.” She hadn’t given a thought to Lin and his repartee beyond the early and determined establishment of boundaries; ‘this is my room and not yours, you may have everything except my room’, and so forth. It had been with the discipline of having to build relationships quickly and without doubt and there had been little room for personal appreciation. Now he looked wrung-out, as though the ship and the drone of the automatic air filtering, were drawing some of himself with it. She inched out of the protection of her own arms, suspicious eyes and the curve of a mouth, “Yearning doesn’t make it any more likely to happen, for god’s sake. It happens if you do something.” Lin laughed when the woman deflated across from him, all of her composure gone as the air pushed from her lungs in a sigh. She tucked herself up tight, head in her arms, and she stayed there, just for a minute. The ship hummed around them, tireless and eternal. The boy took the moment of distraction to push himself to his feet, quietly - so quietly, and stretch across the width of the table to take the bottle. He pulled it back with him, quick and nimble, before he was caught. He had it to his lips, a swallow of whatever the fuck disgusting space alcohol shit this was splashing down his throat, when she appealed to God. Why did this shit burn? What sick bastard stumbled upon shit like this and thought it fit for human consumption? Lin grimaced, coughed, then smiled as innocently as he could with his throat on fire, his eyes watering, when Olivia picked her head up from the table. The sound of glass on wood spoke under the woman's words. The bottle was left sitting. "Excuse yourself, I'm an adult that yearns," he said unconvincingly through the tears and coughs. Lin gave himself a moment, then, once he could speak again and didn't feel like his throat was constricting, he cocked one dark eyebrow. Olivia confused him the more he talked her. But he was glad to see - her spread out on the table before him, squinting at him suspiciously - that she wasn't always as contained as she made herself seem. "No. Of course not. But not everything one does has to be practical, does it?" The question was rhetorical. The boy waved it away, then, because he was a masochist, fetched up the bottle a second time. He peered into its depths. There wasn't much left now. He took another drink. This one went down a little easier. Lin's dark eyes glittered as he gazed intently at the woman and grinned. Whatever she'd said before about her quota had been forgotten, it seemed - as had his determination to not seek counsel from her. Liquid sloshed at the bottom of the bottle as the boy moved it from hand to hand. "What do you do if the object of your affection slams the door in your face, so to speak?" He was genuinely curious. For no specific reason. It was just any advice was useful when it came to shit like this. “I haven’t got the time for metaphor,” Olivia said as loftily as any woman can who is sprawled halfway across a table and whose blood alcohol level was probably sifting around terrifying. “What the hell does slamming the door mean? Won’t have sex with you, doesn’t love you, doesn’t respond to voodoo doll prodding?” There was an element of exasperation, of cataloguing a list of non-events from a number of would-be yearners. She eyed the bottle suspiciously, and she reached across, and took it back, pouring a neat measure into the glass and then (with reluctance) passing the bottle itself back over. “Everyone does things for a reason,” she palmed the glass, and she looked at Lin with the lazy elegance of a woman who knows how to move but doesn’t feel like it. “Work out why, then take.” Well, she certainly wasn't wrong. Everyone had their own reasons as to why they acted like a dumbfuck, right? Right. But that didn't mean he liked it. Lin sighed, not bothering to react at all when Olivia stole the bottle away from him. When it was passed back to him, he took it with both hands and held it in his lap, still moving it from hand to hand, as he thought. His eyes dropped from the woman, and for a moment there, he was silent. (Olivia had just witnessed a rare happening. Too bad there was no team from National Geographic there to document the monumental event.) "I just don't get it. The Voodoo Lady at the International House of Mojo said it'd work," said Lin in a mock whine. (Monkey Island? Anyone?) He made a sound of disgust, then took another long drink of the gasoline or whatever. Her questions seeking more detail were ignored. The boy looked back to Olivia, his eyes mirroring the distrust that hers had shown with when she'd reached for the bottle. "What does 'yearning' mean? Like, lustful yearning or what? Because that I know how to handle. You just gotta dance and make some witty comments, bat your eyelashes, and then you're set. It's the other kind that bothers me." He shrugged. Olivia pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers. At the bank it was a common gesture. It meant ‘running out of patience’ and tiredness, it meant frustration that wasn’t voiced. “It means,” she said with the too-careful enunciation of the drunk, “Pining. Wanting something you can’t have and not manning the fuck up about it.” Manning the fuck up was not, in Olivia’s estimation, purely a male activity. It simply meant pushing back one’s natural inclination to whine - never an attractive quality - and handling it. She drank from her glass and she didn’t flicker; the burning had worn off long before. “Why do you need a dictionary definition?” "For science," mumbled Lin ineffectually, no conviction behind his words. Definitions were truly important to him, however. What he did - taking what others said and twisting it all around into a joke - was all based on the fact that there were so many different ways to interpret and stretch and change the words everyone took for granted, trusting the implicit, socially agreed upon definition to hold in all situations, which was just boring. So, to define 'yearning' was to be able to more fully understand the concepts they were discussing and attempt to extrapolate advice therefrom. He blinked away the tears that rose again when he polished off the bottle and watched Olivia over-enunciate with interest. He was tempted to point out that she had just conflated 'yearning' with 'pining,' which she had literally just defined as 'wanting something you can't have (and not doing anything about it)' - that begged the question, to his mind, if you couldn't have it, how were you supposed to take it? Why the hell not whine if you were upset? It didn't mean you had to roll around on the ground in an eternal pity party, but he figured it was okay to feel bad for yourself every once in awhile, especially if something - or someone - you wanted slipped your grasp. - But, the boy said nothing about that, not oblivious to the fact that Olivia would have no qualms about smashing him over the head with the bottle if he continued to nitpick. "That's what you do then. You man the fuck up and you take what you want. Is that it?" Lin sounded doubtful. It wasn't that he didn't trust Olivia to kick ass - it was just that... he didn't know. Something rang false in the words to him. It was just so.. so... He frowned. "That sounds like some gross oversimplification to me. Sure, you can say, 'find out why that bastard X slammed the proverbial door in your proverbial face, then bash through that shit and go for the man,' but there's all this other bullshit everywhere else that makes that little thing - the 'find out why' - a fucking lifelong goal. Like, --" He pretended to grope for words. (All very calculated, you see. Just in case.) "He's drunk all the time, for example. Ain't nobody got time for that." Olivia sighed. It was a very simple sound to respond to such a flood of complexity but Olivia was both tired and languid and the languidity hid a little of the tiredness but absolutely none of the unwillingness to wade into someone else’s complications. “You talk too much,” she said placidly, as if the very act of listening to Lin were similar to reading Crime and Punishment. “If he’s drunk all the time -” (no comment was made as to ‘he’, whether Olivia did not care, had understood that Lin was likely that way inclined or simply hadn’t picked up on it, was irrelevant) “Then likely he’s emotionally as unavailable as one can be off the cliff-face of irresponsibility.” She observed Lin over the rim of her glass. “Exactly what it is you want distills how much time you put into things.” Drunk all the time sounded far too familiar; with particular slanty handwriting in mind, Olivia frowned. “If you are pining for Daniel, you will be a disappointed and unfulfilled corpse.” Lin scoffed at what was, to him, an insult. Talked too much. Ha. He'd never been the sort content with meting out only what was needed or asked for and nothing more - in any aspect of his life. It was something he was often criticized for, yes. For some reason he'd never understood, he was expected to be stoic and to believe, as everyone else did, that quantity and quality, especially when it came to words, which were still exalted, in many ways, as some kind of innately wonderful human creation, were mutually exclusive. So, not every word he spoke was akin to the laying of zeitgeisty hands, bound to be penned in the Big Book O' World History. And so he said a lot of trivial, inane shit. But, so what? If that was too much for some people, then they could go fuck themselves with a cactus, because Lin didn’t need their shit. - The boy fully intended to say as much to Olivia when her frown and the words that followed it stopped him. That was probably suspicious. Immediately, the boy busied himself with bringing his legs up onto the chair so he could sit, with them pressed to the table and his chin settled in the little valley created there between his knees. He took his time. When he finally did turn his gaze back to Olivia, there was only confusion and curiosity mingling in his eyes. Some of it genuine. It occurred to him then that the woman knew a lot more than she let on - or rather, it occurred to him that she wasn't like him and that she didn't verbally vomit every scrap of knowledge at random. "Uh, no. I’m not," was all he said in an indignant singsong, before pressing his lips into a line and looking away. He couldn't hold eye contact. It was like she was staring into his fucking soul. Not that he was pining after anyone, or yearning, or lovelorn. Head turned toward the cupboards, resting on the arms he’d draped over his knees, he spoke very lightly, his own voice muffled by the crook of his elbow: "I’m an egalitarian. I pine after all drunk men equally." The rearranging of limbs looked like some assembling of a Rubix cube; a complicated and finicky process that ended when Lin was so entwined with himself that it looked like a yoga pose. Olivia watched interestedly, and the faint line of liquid left in her glass dropped once more as she watched him contort in his chair, a sulky swami. It did not occur to Olivia that talking each and every thought that came into your head was a particular life choice; she was aware that she had chosen at a fairly early age (eight) that to conceal a little of what you were feeling meant fewer people being aware when you had had those delicate constructions crushed beneath their own well-intentioned actions. It had grown from there, but the liquor had made her both sleepy and less inhibited, and she leaned her head in her palms and she looked at Lin who seemed to be trying for humor and falling a little short (perhaps because he was tied up in a human knot on the seat of his chair) and she pursed her lips. “Bullshit,” she said calmly and she finished her glass. There was nothing more and nothing less; did it seem strange to Olivia that Daniel inspired affection in the heart of one very odd young man? Not entirely; Daniel did a lot of things, mostly because he could but partially by accident and seemed happy with almost none of them. She said nothing else because it was neither in Olivia to taunt or to make real judgments; she also had no desire to know more than the absolute minimum about the likely rotating door within Daniel’s bedroom. "Fine, not all drunk men. Just the cute ones," replied Lin flippantly, meaningless words tossed off the cuff, as he continued to gaze at the wall for a moment. She didn't mince words, but he sure as fuck did. Finally, he sighed and turned his head to fit his chin on the length of a forearm, his eyes finding Olivia's, along with her pursed lips and the angle to which she held her head in her palms. The room was so dark. Normally, he preferred low lights to overhead, blinding shit, but this was ridiculous. It was like the ship was trying to lull them to sleep in its belly. Lin sniffed. He reached forward, knees biting into the edge of the table, to draw the protein and its packaging closer and then he set to creasing it again. Maybe it was bullshit. Well, no. It was definitely bullshit. Lin was not an egalitarian when it came to drunks. But, she was right in that, he was an adult, wasn't he? Maybe he should stop acting like such a fucking baby all the time then. The boy's bottom lip protruded just slightly into a puzzled pout and his brow furrowed as he reasoned with himself internally. It was the same old thing, wasn't it? It was easy enough to blow off the haters, but when you wanted someone to like you - in whatever way, romantic or platonic or whatever - suddenly, life became this complicated Escher drawing, where you could think you were walking up the stairs, but then, the next thing you knew, you'd be hanging upside down on them, going down. And for all his talk, Lin cared about people liking him. He knew he was off-putting, so the few that managed to look past that, cute drunks or not, ...well, yeah, you get the idea. Was that pathetic? Maybe. He never was a good judge of things like that. It took a moment for the boy to realize he'd been sitting there in semi-silence. It just wasn't something that happened often in the company of other people. He scratched the back of his head and looked up from his hands to Olivia. "He's kind of a bastard," he said thoughtfully, squinting across the table. Then there was a beat and a realization. Lin frowned. "Wait, how do you know Daniel?" Olivia laughed. It was a soft sound, heavy with tiredness and it was suited for dark places and quiet, still people. “I don’t know Daniel,” she said to Lin because she didn’t. She had seen the bent and fractured spine of a book on a shelf but she had not read it, had not flipped through pages. Just the first few pages, the contents list, perhaps; it was too similar a story, she’d read something close to it before. “Isn’t everyone in Vegas a bastard?” she countered, and there was something slow, and ponderous to Olivia’s words - less measured, more the drifting of thoughts, the simplicity of almost-sleep. He was pouting; God, she hated pouting. “Cheer up, Lin,” she said, commanding with a current of cheerful sitting obnoxiously beneath the imperiousness. “If you can’t fuck them, you can’t be screwed by them.” It was a sentiment to live by, not often voiced by Olivia but it did, in the interim. Lin was not pouting. He had a pout on his lips, fine. But he wasn’t pouting. He was engaged in very rigorous intellectual endeavors of the mind and his bottom lip happened to protrude at the same time. The boy’s eyes narrowed at the ‘I don’t know Daniel’ and his frown deepened. Being purposefully obtuse was his fucking game. She was intentionally taking his question at face value. Obviously she knew him in some way or she wouldn’t have fucking brought him up. Still, he said nothing until the woman chirruped at him to cheer up and then offered him some more sage life advice. Now it was his turn to splay forward onto the table, pushing the protein to the side. He set his chin firmly on the chinked wood and glared up at her like the insolent little boy he was. “Bullshit.” He hadn’t had even a third of the bottle of the space petrol, but he could feel it sloshing there behind his eyes, filling his head with bubbles and lightness. He blinked slowly. Olivia squared her elbows and she squared herself, all strong obstinate lines and woman behind them. She looked at Lin as if he were very young and very small (which he looked, to Olivia) and she looked at him as though she were amused by his bewilderment, which she was. “To which?” It was an arch little statement and she looked at him as though daring him to pick. Closing his eyes just briefly, Lin inhaled, and when he opened them to look back up at Olivia, he just shook his head, pivoting it on his chin. He was aware of the small joy she was getting out of his pain and he couldn’t help but smile, just a little crack of a grin, at that. The boy stretched his arms forward across the wood of the table without moving anything else. They didn’t reach Olivia, but that wasn’t his goal. No. He was making an open-palmed gesture of appeal. “So you don’t know Daniel biblically or deeply as a human being or whatever. But, you know enough about him to know he’s a drunk - admittedly not a well-hidden detail, but still. You know him enough to know that he’s a dead end. So, I say: bullshit.” His hands smacked together with finality and he withdrew them back to his sides. A small smile writ itself across Olivia’s face. It was a gesture, one that was as much about undoing and unbinding as it was her own yielding in the face of Lin’s general attempt at appeal. She ignored the gesture and she leaned back in her chair and one boot crossed over another with a thunk of heels, onto the edge of an empty chair. “Aren’t all drunks dead ends?” she said, as if it were an open question, as if it were a statement or a hypothesis expressed to an empty room as much as to a half-drunk, half-exhausted boy at the end of a table. “What’s bullshit about it?” A hand cut through the air, Olivia dismissive. Involuntarily, Lin’s lips curved upward to mirror Olivia’s, before he stopped them and frowned. He watched her shift positions, heard the heavy sound of her boots on the chair, and lifted an eyebrow in response. His face dropped back into its neutral expression a second later. “I don’t know, man. I wasn’t totally lying when I said that I like cute drunks. My ex-boyfriend is one of them.” The boy’s shoulders shrugged weakly as his eyes dragged along the surface of the table idly, only making their way back to Olivia when he said flatly, “What’s bullshit about it is that you do know him, jackass.” Casual insults were an unthinking addition that peppered most of Lin’s conversations, just more words to throw in with the colloquialisms and pop culture references, and they were rarely meaningful. He didn’t really have any strong feelings about Olivia, not when it came to whether or not she was truly a jackass. She had been called worse. She had been called a great deal worse by richer, brattier young men and Olivia gave Lin a cold, hard look that was much like someone calling a dog to heel. “I’m in banking. Daniel is a client.” It was not a lengthy explanation, it was not even extrapolating upon the very difficulty that was Daniel. Mr Webster, in Olivia’s opinion, enjoyed being difficult. He was perverse on purpose and she had not the inclination nor the necessary interest to find out why. Lin, with his pouting and his childish little slump at the end of the table was less irritating than initially estimated. Daniel was like the ten year old with a magnifying glass who burned ants to see them die. “Haven’t you learned your lesson?” Drunks were, Olivia knew, largely irresponsible, selfish and immature. This, and the empty bottle on the table had been consumed in no small part by Olivia. Control was something to be admired, to be enjoyed. Daniel, Olivia thought, eyeing Lin with visible doubt, could quite easily break someone such as Lin, were it to occur to him. The steely response the blasé, cheeky name calling earned him had Lin looking back down to the table like a good dog. He was in no mood to try to be especially defiant. He picked at a cut in the wood, scratching out little splinters to amuse himself as Olivia spoke, terse and to the point as ever. (Her control was admirable. In her shoes, Lin would have been on his back somewhere, probably singing a Backstreet Boy’s song with no pants on or something.) And when he finally did reestablish eye contact, it was only reluctantly, if not a touch petulantly. “Apparently not.” The boy sighed. He flattened his palms to the table and propped himself up somewhat, so he wasn’t just lying there like a slightly intoxicated, lovelorn kitten with a thing for drunk dudes. He smiled and his tone returned to its usual brassy buoyancy. It was more a defense mechanism than anything else when it came to conversations like this. If they kept at it, he would just feel bad and that wasn’t fun. Not that he didn’t appreciate being humored by the calm woman with the iron liver. He did. But.. humor was easier. “What can I say? I like sloppy charm.” “Oh God,” Olivia’s despair was evident. The boots uncrossed and she dragged herself up with a boneless sort of grace. Her head had begun to swim, tiredness and the drink beginning to war. “If you’re going to talk about that, I’m going to bed.” First Winnie, now Lin. Was space a terrific joke of people knotted together, predominantly focused on who they wanted to sleep with? Olivia was not impressed. “What?” Feigned innocence covered Lin’s face, only betrayed by the amusement that gathered around his eyes. He shrugged exaggeratedly. He would have argued that he had never once indicated that he wanted to sleep with anyone, so, no. Space was not a terrific joke of hedonists. But, he wasn’t aware of the evaluation, so it didn’t matter. The boy slid out of his own chair, unfolding in parts - legs first, torso, arms, shoulders, until he stood on his feet. Then he went over to the drawers where he’d abandoned If she was off to bed, then he could have the the room and try to sleep himself - though whether or not that would actually happen - the sleeping, he wasn’t so sure. The booze brought his eyelids down heavily, but it didn’t stop his mind from buzzing around every flower of possibility that bloomed in his head. “We could always talk about your flaws, if you want. I have every intention of providing counsel whilst drinking,” he quipped, mimicking Olivia's earlier words, accompanied now with the same deceptive smile as before, returning to his chair and shoving the wadded shirt behind his head. Olivia was a cloud of dark hair, heavy boot treads and the faintest smell of space alcohol. “No thanks,” was a drifted passing retreat, Lin left with the room and she to find the bunk and sleep it off. Still reclining, his eyes slowly sliding shut, Lin shouted after the woman's retreating form, calling several echoes into existence as he did so. "Okay, Olivia, but if you ever want to talk, I'm here for you!" lol. He was hilarious. |