Neil Donovan is (incharge) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-12 03:11:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: marvel comics, harry osborn, norman osborn, plot: switch |
Who: Neil and teen!Elise
What: Booze and blanket forts.
Where: Osborn mansion.
When: During switch plot.
Warnings/Rating: None really.
For some reason, Goblin didn’t snatch back control once he was finished talking to Sam. He could have, oh, that much was obvious. The worst part, Neil thought, was the fact that it gloated, dangling the power it held over his head as a mocking reminder of just how helpless he was. What had started as a voice after Norman experimented on himself had progressed to a terrifying degree, far beyond the point of sanity, and he was woefully unequipped to handle it. He wasn’t Norman Osborn. He wasn’t strong. His willpower was pathetic, to put it nicely, and he might as well have been a puppet for all he good he was worth.
It made him wish Louis had just killed him. It made him wish someone else would, but he couldn’t have what he wanted, even though being self-aware made him want to tear himself apart.
Instead, he did the next best thing. Sam had warned him off of getting drunk, but what the hell? If the sadistic thing in his head was going to force him to stick around for a little while longer, he might as well get a head start on drinking himself into a coma. That ruled out Oscorp, and the only other place Neil could think of where he’d be blessedly alone was Norman’s mansion. Plus, the guy was stupidly rich; he’d have the good stuff, no cheap booze in sight. There would be no one to make him talk, no reminders of what he’d done and the vast expanse of nothing that waited for him once the world was set right again. He wanted the crazy out of his head, but he didn’t actually want to go back to his life in Vegas, not that there would be much of one waiting for him when he returned.
Norman’s key (though he supposed it was his, at least for now) got him inside, past the gates and security intended to ensure only the Osborns and approved guests stepped one foot on the property, and he slammed the door shut behind him, the sound echoing throughout the mansion. He didn’t bother being quiet, because he saw no need to, and his footsteps were like thunder as he searched for Norman’s best stash. “C’mon, asshole,” he muttered, rifling through cabinets and drawers with unsteady desperation. “I know you keep your stash around here somewhere.”
The mansion wasn't as barren as it seemed. Upstairs, a starlit hurricane masqueraded as a princess. She gouged through every closet until plastic-sheathed suits accumulated mass graves along mahogany hallways. Empty wine bottles rolled like ghost ships across a tiled floor, where bathwater and pine soap bubbles pooled in the shape of elf slender footprints. Rougeless kiss prints decorated every steamy mirror alongside fingertip doodles depicting bubble hearts and stick figure hanged men. Elise hadn't been able to figure out the record player in the study, and that kept the Osborn home quiet like a ghost town. Perfect for the echoing of intrusive gunslingers and profane tumbleweeds. The sound wasn't so alarming, Elisewas expecting Sam and maybe Iris at some point.
While he was pillaging the kitchen for hard liquor, she popped out from around a polished edge of cabinetry with a clicking tongue. Her hair was darker than she was used to, no longer the salt foam blond that she favored in adulthood. Now her halo was rust and soil, tombstone granite made up the blue in her eyes. She'd started a tie collection while upstairs; now there were a few around her neck and a couple strung like a hippie headband in her wet hair. "What are you looking after?" She chirped up from behind him while stepping forward to haul on the refrigerator door. Reaching inside, she stole a handful of grapes and began the mannerless process of cramming them into her mouth. Most people would probably have been frightened of coming across a complete stranger in their kitchen. But this wasn't Elise's kitchen, and any concept she had for what was unusual these days had pretty much gotten flung out the window on the day her diary started writing back.
If Neil had been paying even the least bit of attention to his surroundings, which he wasn’t, he might have picked up on hints that suggested he wasn’t alone as he thought. Fortunately, unless it was the not-Spider or the kid with the Venom suit, a teenager posed no threat at all, nor did he pose a threat to her. So intent on his search was he that her presence caught him off guard, resulting in a jar rolling off the shelf and crashing to the floor. He cursed, side-stepping the glass despite the fact that he was wearing shoes and didn’t actually need to worry, and turned to face the owner of the voice, tensed and wary like a dog believing it was about to be struck. But this girl wasn’t Louis, nor did she appear to be there for him based on her nonchalant attitude and interest in the fridge. He stared for a long, long moment, trying to determine whether she actually was vaguely familiar or his mind was playing tricks on him. From somewhere in the back of his mind, Norman bristled at the presence of a stranger, but Goblin didn’t particularly care just then, and so Neil was able to keep control.
“Alcohol,” he said, after a few beats of silence. “The guy who lives here has expensive taste, and it’s not like he’s going to be using it anytime soon.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and straightened up with only a shadow of pain in his expression; being slammed against a wall had left his back mottled with bruises. “Who are you?”
Moving for the other side of the kitchen, Elise chewed her grapes. For an alternate comic book dimension, she was pleased to discover that the fruit tasted the same. With a free hand to assist her, Elise hopped back against the countertop so that her legs dangled like dead weight off the tiled edge. The kitchen had the feel of a sterilized space station. This was probably the most interaction it'd seen in the last decade. The Osborns didn't really seem like the type to settle in for heartwarming Sunday dinners.
Noting the momentarily pained expression on his face, she immediately understood the notion of ransacking a mansion for alcohol instead of valuables. Not that she had any sense of ownership or responsibility toward this place, her eclectic destruction of the upstairs saw to that. Elise motioned toward the large, stainless steel freezer while chewing on juicy green flesh, "There's some chilling in there." She couldn't remember what kind of liquor it was, but had taken sure note of it for later. It seemed like later had come. Twisting on the counter, she reached behind herself to nudge open one of the cabinets. Pulling a pair of drinking glasses out, she shrugged.
"I'm Elise Daley." Not that he should have any idea who she was, he didn't really seem like the type of guy to pick up an issue of Italian Vogue. It occurred to her that he might actually be from this side, but she wasn't sure how likely something like that was. "I know the Osborn boy." In a matter of speaking.
"You know the killer Goblin man?" She asked with no sense of filter, jangling one of the empty glasses at him for retrieval.
Being in the same room as another person, knowing what he was capable of, knowing what he’d done, felt strange. Wrong, even. Neil thought the right thing to do would be to warn her and tell her to leave, but he didn’t want to risk angering the monster when it currently seemed so docile and provoking it into seizing control. She looked so casual, perched on the countertop, legs dangling and chewing on her grapes. He wondered if it was just a typical teenage instinct to adapt, or something else that had her so at ease in the mansion, which was clearly no warm, fuzzy household full of love and smiles. “Thanks,” he said, when she indicated the location of the booze, and he turned to open the freezer and pull out the first bottle he saw. He wasn’t picky; as long as it was alcohol, he’d drink the whole damn thing.
He nudged the freezer shut and looked over his shoulder, bottle in hand. Maybe exchanging names wasn’t the best idea, but what the hell, right? Sam had probably let everyone know he was the guy with the psycho in his head anyway. The cat was undoubtedly out of the bag by this point. “I’m Neil Donovan.” He thought he might have remembered an Elise from somewhere, but he couldn’t think of where; everything was mixed up here. What he did focus on, though, was her mention of knowing the Osborn boy. If she was connected to Harry somehow, then she was safe. Untouchable. Norman would never let anyone hurt his kid, himself included. “You know the Osborn boy,” he repeated. “Good. That’s good.” She had no idea how good.
Hearing him referred to as the ‘killer Goblin man’, so bluntly, was almost refreshing. The truth was, past a certain point. “Yeah,” he said, taking one of the proffered glasses. “I do. I wish I didn’t, but I do, and that’s why I’m here.” He held up the bottle, indicating the motivation behind his desire to drown himself in booze as he opened it and poured himself a generous glass full. He set the bottle down, in case she wanted some for herself, and tossed back a mouthful. It had been so long since he’d broken his sobriety, and damn, it felt good.
Elise was horrible with names, it was a common deficiency with artists. It wasn't because she was too self-absorbed to care, although that might have been part of it. At the very center of Elise, at her nuclear unstable core, she was too romantic to function. She saw people as prototypes and built their lives for them, regardless of any basis in reality. Her attraction to people was biased and mutated, sprung from a little green amoeba of an idea. It was her right as an artist, to see what she wanted and to expand upon it. She created fairytale backstories for people based on their eye color. When she was a teenager, she could spend an entire Sunday on the city bus, reimaging people's lives in the details that most people overlooked. The woman with the soot under her nails was having a love affair with a time traveling, Victorian-era chimney sweep. The young man with the bruise under his eye and the duffel bag over his shoulder was on the run from hypocritical pirate parents, off to retrieve his handsome lover from seminary school. If any of these passersby ever introduced themselves to her. it was cast into the fog of backstage. Who had time for that kind of reality?
So maybe it was selfish, but it was unavoidable. For Elise, names were usually forsaken for facts - or that which her theatrical mind regarded as a critical(which rarely were facts). The journals made this kind of thinking more difficult, because she was forced to attach names to the people that she met and not just pretty merit badges of happenstance. Sam was now Sam, although it would have been easy for Elise to solely classify her as the girl with sloe gin eyes and junkyard hands. Iris was forced to be Iris rather than a complicated memory of scarf silk and wet skin. For a long time after she'd first met Billy, she recalled him as notes of music.
So while Sam had surely mentioned Neil, Elise had never been forced to give the guy a face. She could imagine him however she liked.. and a bruised up guy with the wet appetite of a sailor didn't really fit the bill. Sam's beau could be somebody who mirrored her perfectly. An artist with paint up to the elbows and fiendishly foul mouth. "Neil Donovan," she repeated in experiment while splashing some liquor into her own cup. "That's an expensive name," she decided. There was a great deal of history that she could concoct for him. Elise drew her knees up and tucked her legs in as she took a sip of the liquor. Their styles of imbibing were black and white. She'd never been the type that drank to get drunk.
"Well, he's not here so I think we're in luck." No goblins in sight. "Did you have a rough night?" Her English was more than decent, but the accent was undeniable.
Neil knew very little about Elise save for what Sam had told him, but all those details were as good as gone now, insignificant memories tucked so far back in his mind that it wasn’t even worth the effort required to pull them out again. As for being Sam’s beau, he was pretty sure that ship had sailed. They weren’t going to be able to get past this. He knew, whatever her teenage self might claim, that it wasn’t going to happen, and he was already imagining scenarios in which she found her way into Daniel’s arms and he remained perpetually drunk in order to avoid having to deal with the consequences of having Norman fucking Osborn and his crazy pal sharing his skull. This? This was just the beginning. He’d keep himself so wasted that even when Norman did go through the door, he’d be drunk too, and he wouldn’t be able to pull off any murderous schemes or devious plots he’d inevitably cook up once his sanity was once again out the window.
See? It was a win/win solution. Booze would take care of everything.
“Old money,” he said of his name being expensive. “My old man put a lot of importance on family legacy. So did his, and so on and so forth.” He waved his glass around before downing the rest, and immediately poured himself a refill. The less time spent sober, the better, and he couldn’t bring himself to give enough of a damn to keep from getting drunk around a teenager. The house was huge; she could always go off elsewhere if she wanted to. She was safe from him. He laughed when she said Osborn wasn’t here, because she was just as wrong in a way as she was right. “No, I don’t think you have to worry about him showing up,” he chuckled, the sound muffled as he took another drink. In his opinion, ‘rough night’ was an understatement, and he paled for a moment as he recalled what he--Goblin--had done to Sam, and the way Louis had looked at him, like they were strangers and not family at all.
“Yeah,” he said, and he took another, deeper gulp of chilled liquid in order to keep his hands from shaking. “Rough night. You could say that. I hate this fucking place.”
She brightened visibly when he began to regale her with the history of his family. Neil might not have had much flair for telling stories, but that was alright. Elise had a florid imagination, she could fill in the gaps with sparkle and intrigue. "I'm adopted," she offered with no prodding from him. If the subject was a dark one, Elise didn't seem aware of it. She even managed to push the envelope for what was considered pleasant conversation topics. "My real mother died." This bombshell was paired with a game of charades. She held up her index finger like a pistol and fired dramatically at herself, sound effects calling for a "Pow." Her mother hadn't actually killed herself, but Elise was entitled to artistic interpretation.
She dropped her hand in order to collect her glass, then took a wincing sip. Blinking the kerosene fumes away, she straightened "This place isn't so bad, but I've just been in here. And I guess I'm used to entertaining myself, I've been under house arrest for months." Elise chattered on with no semblance of stopping.. until, suddenly, she did.
"You know what would make you feel better?" Deadpan serious with babydoll blue eyes. "Building a blanket fort." Knocking back the rest of what was in her glass, she hopped off of the countertop. Collecting the bottle of booze for safe keeping, she then raced for the living room with a sense of purpose and paramedic urgency. "Come on!"
Neil blinked and stared, attempting to figure out why Elise saw the need to share the fact that she was adopted. He hadn’t realized they were swapping tales about themselves, and the mention of his father’s importance on the family name had been more offhand than anything else. “My brother Louis is adopted,” he said, for lack of anything else to contribute. But Louis hated him now, and probably would have burned him to a near crisp if Sam hadn’t been around to intervene. He was even less equipped to do anything with the newfound information that her mother had died, and the accompanying hand gestures to suggest suicide had him emptying the rest of his glass and refilling it seconds later. Drinking was his newfound solution to everything. “Sorry about your mom.” It was probably much, much too late, since Elise wasn’t actually a teenager anymore, but ‘sorry’ usually followed news of death, old or new.
Smart girl, staying inside. He should’ve followed her example. Part of him wondered why she’d been under house arrest, and he considered asking, but instead he just took another drink. He could feel Goblin inside his head, pacing like a caged animal, but the locks would hold this time, and already his mind was going blissfully fuzzy, making it easier to forget. Forgetting was good. On the heels of that came not feeling, which was even better.
He thought he might have misheard her when she mentioned a blanket fort. No, he was sure he had, but then she was taking off for the living room with booze in hand, and if nothing else he followed her for the bottle. She had it, he wanted it; that was logic for you. “I never really built blanket forts as a kid,” he slurred, glass in hand. “We weren’t that kind of family. How’s it going to make me feel better?”
"I haven't built one since I was a kinder, but I remember that it always made me feel better." Maybe that is what's wrong with her now, not enough childish architecture to chase away the malaise. Although she'd forgotten her glass back in the kitchen, Elise was perfectly capable of taking a sip from the bottle's neck. The astringent brew burned so good. When Neil followed into the spacious living room, Elise turned and cautiously extended the bottle of liquor toward him. Her slate eyes were grave, as if she were entrusting him with government secrets or some frail newborn. "Don't drink it all," she warned. He seemed like the type that was ambitious enough to try. She'd always had a strange allegiance to boozers. Different symptoms, same grand disease. They kept it a secret, just like she did. Part of her envied alcoholics, their means of self-destruction was more socially acceptable than her own. Not that she would have traded. Liver failure just wasn't glamorously tragic enough for her.
With an ambitious twirl, she raced up the stairs and vanished down a hallway. A series of thuds and slamming doors was evidence of her productivity even before she reappeared loaded down with a dozen forms of bedding. Most of it got kicked down the stairs as she didn't quite trust her tipsy self not to trip and break her neck on the way back down. A quartet of feather pillows were flung from the upstairs and into his direction, "Catch!"
Once back at ground zero, Elise hauled her catch closer with an exhausted heave. After dropping the collection of bedding onto the center of the living room's Persian rug, she stepped back for a panoptic view of her building supplies. "If this is going to be your first fort, you're going to have to name it." It was like pirate ships in that way. She seemed entirely authoritative on the subject, and it must have been evident by now that she wasn't somebody that most people risked arguing with. Positioning herself behind the ornate sofa, she put all of her weight against one corner in order to start pushing it across the floor to a more desirable locale. She didn't stop with the busy work when she spoke again, and she didn't look at him. "You don't have to say you're sorry, you know? About my mother.. I know that is what people say when they do not know what to say."
Maybe Elise had a point with her whole blanket fort theory. God forbid he or any of his siblings had used furniture for their own means; his parents would have thrown a fit. Being expected to act like miniature adults as soon as they learned how to speak and navigate on their own didn’t leave much time for childhood antics, at least not under their own roof, which was why he’d found his fun elsewhere. The temptation to grab the bottle and down it, despite her warnings, was nearly overwhelming, but he managed to refrain. That would just be rude, and considering the fact that anyone else would have thrown the bottle at his face, he wasn’t going to piss off the one person who could actually stand to be in his presence. Granted, Elise didn’t know what he’d done, but that was just a minor detail. “I won’t,” he promised, tossing back what was left in his glass so he could trade it out for the bottle.
And, true to his word, he didn’t. Even though she was off collecting pillows and blankets and whatever the hell else, leaving him the perfect opportunity, Neil only took a couple of deep gulps and then forced himself to put the bottle down. The world was a warm, fuzzy blur, and that was good enough for the moment. Even better, the voice in his head had taken on a similarly fuzzy quality. He didn’t follow her up the stairs, but he did linger at the bottom, listening to the sounds of movement and slamming doors and bedding appearing from above. Due to his diminishing sobriety, the sudden influx of pillows in his direction caused him to stumble backwards, but he managed to catch two-- though that was more luck than skill. Still, victory was victory, and that warranted another swig from the bottle.
He let the pillows drop, a vague thought that maybe he should do more to help passing through his mind before being dismissed. The less he did, the better; he’d already done enough, hadn’t he? “How do you name a fort?” Naming pets, sure, he could do that. He’d named his toys way back when. But a fort? Maybe he could make it his evil villain lair. Or a jail cell constructed of pillows and blankets. He watched her push the couch around for a couple of seconds before shuffling across the floor to help, though his version of help mostly consisted of leaning his weight against the opposite corner of the couch and expecting it to move. She was shrewd, for a teenager, and Neil looked up as he thought about how sorry had become an excuse and lost what it really meant along the way. “I know,” he admitted. “Sounds better than saying nothing. Sorry’s never enough anyway, even when you mean it.”
As for naming the fort, Elise shrugged cluelessly. "Maybe you have to name it after a woman, like they do ships. For the good luck." Not that it seemed like many bad things could befall them here, cursed luck or otherwise. The outside world might have been one of Goblinesque violence, but the Osborn estate had proved to be boozy good times.
The fort came along slowly. Sheets stretched over the backs of chairs and weighed down with porcelain lamps. Elise carpeted the floor beneath with many of the pillows and a couple of fluffy down comforters. The back of the sofa offered a sturdy wall for part of the fort, and Elise tore the cushions from that furniture in order to add to the collection of cozy bedding underneath. She didn't seem to rely on Neil for much in the construction as he was admittedly out of practice when it came to these kinds of things, but she didn't refuse him any contribution to the grand design. All in all, it was massive and sloppy, like all great blanket forts were. "Come on," she called before darting into a seam between a couple of wall blankets.
Inside, they were safe. Everything had a soft glow in the womb of pale sheets, a layer of cotton gauze between them and the lights of the real world on the other side. Elise manipulated the blankets into a thick cushion, and many of the pillows became a stacked wall on one side. The ceiling hung low, brushing the top of her head until she flopped onto her side. Elise drew one of the blankets up to her chin with a yawn. "You could just name it something beautiful, if there is a word you find beautiful."
Once vertical, the alcohol really went to her head and she found that she had to close her eyes for a moment to keep the blanketed world from spinning. "Meins ware.. Torschlusspanik." She tripped into German easily, momentarily unaware of how confusing it could be given the lack of context and the abundance of alcohol. She opened one eye to look at him, although her voice was thick with sleep. "I do not think English has a word like this. It translates literally to door close panic. It is the fear, the panic when it suddenly occurs to you. That you are older and you haven't accomplished all that you wanted to in your life, that you likely never will - the doors of opportunity are closing and there's not a thing you can do about it. Door close panic." She closed her eyes again with a murmur, "When I feel like that, I need a blanket fort. I think we all do."
After that, she was quiet for a long enough time that it must have seemed like she'd drifted off to sleep. Neil seemed quiet as well, and with her eyes closed, she could not be sure of whether or not he was awake, but she spoke up anyway. "You can stay here.. we'll be safe here."
Neil contemplated the thought of naming the fort after a woman, but the only woman he might have chosen was one whose name he couldn’t quite manage to actually say aloud. Not after what he’d done to her. Instead he shrugged helplessly, and alternated between rather pathetic attempts at assisting with the fort’s construction and making the alcohol level in the bottle shrink bit by bit. He had no basis of comparison for blanket and pillow forts, so when it was finally completed, after what seemed like a blur, he looked and saw a masterpiece despite the fact that there really wasn’t much to it at all.
He didn’t follow her immediately inside, pausing to take one last swig from the bottle before regretfully leaving it behind and venturing into the fort. His movements were unsteady, sloppy even, but he was very, very careful to ensure that he didn’t cause their creation to come crashing down around them as he turned and twisted until he was curled up on his side, into a ball, like making himself smaller might help him disappear entirely. He liked the fact that they seemed closed off from the rest of the world, blankets and pillows suddenly becoming thick, heavily enforced walls to keep them safe from the bad things that waited outside. Everything was fuzzy, and he felt lightheaded, but he didn’t mind. “A beautiful word,” he slurred, thoughtful. “My grandmother s-spoke Gaelic, and when I was a kid I thought everything she said was beautiful, but I can’t remember anything now.” He sounded sad about it, and he squeezed his eyes shut, as though that might help him remember, but his mind was too booze-soaked to offer up any pertinent memories. The German confused him, and he blinked at her, woozy, wondering if he’d misheard or if she’d really spoken a different language. He listened to her explanation of what the funny words meant, and he found himself nodding along. “Door close panic,” he repeated. “I know that. I know that feeling. I feel it a lot.” When he felt like that, he often tended to find his solace in a bottle, but maybe a fort wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe he could try hiding away from the world next time, or maybe not; booze brought with it forgetfulness, however temporary, and he wanted that.
The quiet was nice. Everything before had been so loud, both inside and out of his head, but now it wasn’t. Goblin wasn’t saying much, and the alcohol numbed his presence so Neil couldn’t feel it; he could barely feel a thing. Years could have passed in silence, and he wouldn’t have known, or particularly cared. His eyes were open, closed, then open again; he couldn’t really control what they did. “Okay,” he agreed drowsily, his voice thick with booze and weariness. “Okay. I like it here. Thanks, Elise.” Another sigh, and he curled up more tightly. “Safe,” he repeated in a whisper. Safe was good. And maybe, when he woke up, this would all have been one long, horrible nightmare.