cv (ephemeras) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-14 23:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | gwen stacy, robin hood |
Who: Sam and Russ
What: A ride to work
Where: Seven's → the garage
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Language
The bike that hummed down the road was scratched-up paintwork and metal polished to a loving shine, dings and all. It hugged the corners, figure crouched over it like a man with his hands against a horse’s mouth, like the bike could breathe and think and stretch out, eating road until there was dredged-out pale blue sky and road and the bike and not much else. You didn’t stop, watch traffic but you watched this if you knew what you were looking at, steel muscle and corded man across it. The address had come through without a problem, Sam’s number flashing up next to it. String of digits, no name - you knew someone enough to want to keep them in there, you knew the name attached to them. Fancy fucking place, way out of his neighborhood, all sprawling places cold-eyed with money. The kind of place kids got tidied out the way and the drugs were snowy-white like perfection, like they didn’t piss and shit and sick themselves stupid over them like everyone else. Didn’t seem like Goldilocks’ neighborhood either; she was rough-edged like unfiled iron but she was blunt about it, not iron pretending to be gold.
The bike didn’t purr but it sang, throaty joy at full-throttle choked down to nothing as boots hit the dust and Russ swung himself off and he rolled the bike onto the stand like it was thoughtless ease to do so. He was sun-touched warmth, desert-beaten tan and rough blond stood in squinting scrutiny on the edge of the gates; big fuck-off black ones designed to keep the dregs tucked beyond reach, keep the silage, the gutters from overflowing from Sin City proper right up to the sandy-colored stone of the house. He stood, and his hands were tensed like impatience and uncertainty; Russ was the kind of man who dealt comfortably from within a well-worn groove, a rut of things done often enough and always the same that he had rubbed a track to roll along. He knew the seedy-sticky dark of Vegas, where money didn’t much change hands so much as perpetually slide across worn green baize from one to the next with the next cut of cards, he knew the diners where you didn’t order except what the waitress looked in the mood for. There was no sunshine cling to him, it slid over battered leather jacket and flannel shirt beneath and it gave him over, merely making the eyes a little darker against the blond graze of stubble he hadn’t bothered with.
He leaned on the bell, certain as the sun had been, and he shoved his hands into his denim pockets, like maybe he might be called at, asked to turn them out if he didn’t. Russ was a column of impatient, irrational dislike for low-squatting houses with the glint of water from in-back, the kind of place you bought with blood or you bought with sin but you never owned out-right.
Seven's place was nothing impressive to Sam. Sure, it was sweet and rigged up, but after Aria she wasn't all that impressed by rich places. The girl she had been a year earlier would have believed she'd found the fucking promised land in all that marble and leather, but Sam wasn't that girl anymore. She knew that was the girl that Russ remembered and, yeah, she would give anything to get her back. That so wasn't happening, though, and she was finally settling into that reality.
She'd been at Seven's less than 24-hours when Russ showed up on the bike. She'd spent most of her time after leaving the hospital asleep, and she really wasn't ready to go work anywhere, but she needed cash. Whatever the fuck else was wrong with her, she was still resilient. She'd learned that lesson early. And, anyway, how hard could it be to answer some phones? The paperwork and writing, that she was worried about, but maybe there wouldn't be much of it. And she'd been practicing. The doctors had said she would need to relearn how to work her fingers, and that she might need surgery eventually, but she'd managed a child's scratch since then, and she figured it would just have to be good enough. It was a garage, yeah? It wasn't like she was going to be writing things for customers or anything.
But still, she wasn't expecting a bike, and the thought of having to sit that close to anyone fucking terrified her. She was late coming out of the house because of it. She stood at the window for a few long minutes, trying to figure out if she could even hold onto him with the pain that still radiated from her bandaged wrists. Fuck. She considered just not going to the door. She considered letting him wail on that bell until Seven went out and told him to fuck himself. But, yeah, she couldn't do that. He'd hooked her up with a job, even though he didn't trust her not to steal from the till; she couldn't pay him back like that.
So, she went to the door in jeans that she'd borrowed from Seven and held in place with an equally borrowed belt that she'd cut a fresh hole in, so the pants would sit at her hips. She had a tank on underneath the unmarked grey sweatshirt they'd given her at the hospital, sleeves reaching the tips of her fingers. Her sneakers were bleach-blood cleaned, and she smelled of antiseptic, her hair in braids and dark circles beneath her eyes. Her arms were wrapped around her waist in a universal posture of defensiveness as soon as she closed the door behind herself.
She didn't look at him; she looked a the bike. "Sweet ride."
He didn’t think of women. Didn’t hold onto them after they were done - same reason their phone numbers slid into nothing, crumpled paper napkins and receipts tossed into the same bin that he dumped out the dregs of dinner into; Russ did not permit them to intrude into a home that was solid mediocrity and entrenched understanding. He did not expect, either. Expecting meant hope or it meant help, it meant seeing expectation held up like tissue paper to strong light and burned right through, til you were aching the way seven did, empty belly and a bruise to take to bed with you til you’d learned your lesson right enough. People were expectation walking around, Russ didn’t know what he’d thought would walk right up to that ritzy door and spit itself out. Sam had been a bag of coat-hangers stuffed into overalls the last time, skinny-strong. Talk enough of addicts on the journals to sift through the murk, bring back barely-left alone memories of carpets stinking, of the deep, death-stupor people can fall into when they drink enough or snort enough to blow through their own capacity for life. Of the cold, squishy texture of a cloth in his hand, and mopping up a stained carpet because of helpless, hopeless, little-boy need. He had that too, right where expectation lived and he squinted in pale sunshine as the door cracked some fifteen minutes after he’d leaned on the bell, when he was getting good and pissed, ready to deal with a boss who weren’t the type to deal well with promises Russ didn’t want to make.
She was upright. Wasn’t much but he let go a hiss of breath, kind of sound he listened to when tires were fucked, and she wasn’t soft blond hair and a grin like tombstones and laughter or hips and wrists in worn-out denim, she was a twig in someone else’s clothes; sweltered like a little kid playing dress-up and two braids stuck down the side. Denim pooled over her feet, and Russ didn’t know the expensive kind from the cheap, whether the sweatshirt cost the damn same as the jeans but he’d forgotten more about little girls that looked like that than he wanted to remember, and it tightened his mouth, reflexive against the tide that was dammed memory, bobbing up against its borders.
“You look like you fell into someone else’s wardrobe,” he said, “What, you were getting the old itch but no cash left lying around?” Russ’s voice when he chose, in bars with women he didn’t know mostly, could be warm. It sounded like coffee, like there could have been bitterness there, a harshness that he’d stirred cream into. He didn’t say one word about the crazy fucking family demanding questions, and he bent over the bike, still warm and ticking and he yanked out from the pannier a pair of gloves that were heavy-worn leather, thick at the palms and at the thumb where protection was warranted and he held them out.
“The Goldilocks thing is just a name, blondie. You taking it too far?”
"Asshole. Yeah, no, I just haven't been home, and until I get paid I can't buy shit. You want me to lift your wallet, I'll be glad to," Sam shot back, though it took longer than it should have. It was like a catch in a recording, something sticking before she remembered to be a hardass about what he'd said, and maybe that warm tone added to that hitch. And, yeah, she knew what she looked like; she just didn't care. It was like sleeping nearly the entire day; she didn't care. She'd work the fucking day through, and then she'd head to rehab and therapy, and she'd come sleep again. It kept her busy, kept her mind off things, and kept her from wallowing in the withdrawal ache that made her stomach turn over on itself, while making her teeth and bones ache at the same fucking time. She was even sapped of the fucking energy to cry now, so fuck how she looked. He was lucky she was clean and standing there.
She walked slow to the bike, like getting there was a chore, and she stood there as he bent over and pulled those gloves out. She had no clue why he was handing them to her, but she didn't reach out and take them. She didn't want to fat finger the things, and he just got a look. "What the fuck are those for?" she asked, and maybe she was just stalling now, but she couldn't help it. Her heart was pounding like a drum in her chest, and she was starting to wonder if all of this was a bad fucking idea. Maybe she should just go back inside and hide in Seven's guest rooms for the rest of her life. Yeah, sure, that sounded pretty great just then, actually.
The question about her hair made her unwrap her arm from around her waist, and she reached up and touched the end of one long braid with cold fingers. "Shut up. It keeps it from tangling," she said of the thick locks that loved to work themselves into knots. The braids had been wound up by a nurse the day before, and she hadn't let them out yet.
She didn’t tick right. When the guys came down to the garage, they were belligerent. Wanted to know where and how and why the fucking engines weren’t right, how long it would take to fix them, wanted the details before you had the hood right open and your hands slick with oil like a fucking doctor at a delivery. They wouldn’t take, over their shiny-metal open guts, that you just knew, seen enough parts to put together a whole, to hear what wasn’t there. Sometimes it was just the engine weren’t ticking right, and finding out the why would mean hours stood over the thing with the radio leaking bad Latino pop music and the comfortable warm sense of being at home, fingers butting up against engineering. The sunshine found all the pale in Sam, washed-gold hair and little-girl shadow, was unforgiving and Russ didn’t need to think about the parts of it (the vomit, the bruised look to the way she moved, like she’d got real intimate with cold tile and a bathroom stall for a while, the scrubbed-clean polish that comes of stains you don’t want seen) to know Sam didn’t tick right, right then.
He stood back where he was, tall and still and he folded his arms, the creak of worn leather and the soap-and-coffee smell of having woken recent enough for it to be fresh, and his mouth pulled itself back into the same flat line of disinterest. Didn’t care about the particulars, he’d caught the episode, didn’t need the re-run. “Wallet’s empty, kid, when you’re around,” he said, like she’d been sharp, like she was knife-blade fine instead of battered. “Wouldn’t give you a five dollar bill for a bet,” Russ was almost cheerful in his rudeness.
He let her Look, and he stared right back, belligerent normality; “They’re fucking hamburgers, thought you could use a fucking meal, what do they fucking look like? Gloves. Cold on a bike.” Russ lifted his chin, and he looked back down at her, stubble and sleep still clinging to him like it hadn’t been that far away. With the construction site gone, the mornings had folded into nothing and the poker game the night before had been an attempt to claw back a little of what Hood had taken.
“You look young,” he said, and the cream was back, like they were stood somewhere that wasn’t outside some rich fucker’s house, like he knew nothing at all, watching her play with her pigtails like she was eight and they’d been tied by someone who didn’t know how. “Tie fucking ribbons on the end, send you to pre-school.” Russ grinned, sharp, brief, hard - like it wasn’t effort that had nothing to do with Sam at all.
Sam knew she wasn't acting right, but fuck if she could do anything about it. She knew, too, that most people didn't notice. Curse a little, put a little bad attitude forward, and the world bought it - hook, line and sinker. She'd been playing that game for a year, really playing at it, and it had served her well until recently. And now, now she just couldn't keep up the fucking facade. She needed time, she thought. She needed to just hide somewhere until she felt like herself again, instead of like this empty shell of a thing. She was considering going back to Shrink Jack. He'd give her all kinds of medicinal padding to get her through. He wouldn't make her face it cold turkey. And maybe she wanted to curl up with someone who'd let her cry it the fuck out, but that wasn't her life, and she just needed to man up about this crap, starting now.
She grabbed the gloves, and she managed to keep her grip on them. Slipping them on beneath the sweatshirt sleeves was harder, and she turned while she did it, profile and a stroll around the fucking bike, until they were over the white bandages on her wrists. "I'm not that young. Fuck, you," she countered. She felt a lot older than her twenty-two years, that was for fucking sure.
But then she was faced with that fucking bike. Fuck.
"Ok, so, I have some fucking issues with-" She paused, and she floundered for the word. Sam had graduated from high school, and the remainder of her education came from the internet. She wasn't smart, but she wasn't stupid either. "I have issues with proximity." Yeah, ok, good word. It sounded removed and unemotional, even though he would realize that definitely hadn't been the case when they fucked. "So, you need to just fucking sit there and let me take my time getting on that thing," she explained, flexing her fingers inside the gloves and shifting from one bleached sneaker to the next. She looked nervous, all nostrils that flared and eyes wide, but there wasn't any other fucking option, and she wasn't one for backing down from her own fear.
Proximity. There was a minute when Russ’s mind supplied him with a kaleidoscope, skin-warmed sheets and tangled limbs, laughter somewhere into the slope of his shoulder, digging nails and vocal demands, knotted selves and the spilled-ink blue of eye. Proximity..
“Whatever.” He shrugged with shoulders that were very slack and he ambled around the side of the bike, more attention paid to it than the girl in front of it.Russ shoved his hands in his pockets and he dug out his own gloves; thinner, worn on the palms and blistered at the knuckles, the leather split and threading like an overripe peach threatening bursting. He leaned over the bike, smoothed over a scratch to the metalwork like he could nudge it out of existence with a small, furrowed look and when he swung his leg over the bike it was easy, slow and comfortable. His boots were worker boots, heavy steel-toed and scuffed, and the black had worn away at the heels and along the sides, like he’d kicked too many pieces of metal, like they were about worn away. They were comfortable anyway and he liked them, and new boots were a fucking pain to break in. Russ rested experimentally, his toes flat on the ground and the bike rolled off the central stand and bounced, wheels flat on the road.
The engine roiled. It made a thick, throaty sound, almost like it was happy to be alive; Russ smiled too like it was reflex, like he wasn’t thinking about smiling or not smiling at all, the gentle throb of the metal and the ticking over of the engine. It was comfortable, the bike, and he sat there, not looking at Sam at all and he yanked on the gloves, hard and fast and fastened them, tight. Russ inched forward, ready as a solo rider. The seat was low and it was wide enough, there was room for a bigger person to slide right back but Sam wasn’t big and she didn’t ride.
“Feet on the little pedals,” Russ said, and he looked at the road, dirty stretch of asphalt ahead.
His reaction was exactly what she needed it to be and, ok, he could be like Daniel, yeah? She could just test shit out with him, just like she had with the rich, drunk bastard she'd met at a party last year. She exhaled hard, an indication that this was not easy. But, yeah, she finally moved forward, forgetting to give him shit about the need to remind her of the pedals. It was probably an indication that something was fucking wrong, that silence, if he needed any additional indications at this point.
She slid her leg over the back, really fucking careful not to touch him while she did it. The loose pants made it easy to throw her leg over wide, and she was fine until her feet didn't reach the ground on the swing-over. She braced one foot on a pedal, and then she tried to reach back and hold onto the edge of the seat. But, fuck, that hurt, and she actually hissed at the unintentional fuck up. Tears welled in her eyes, but there was no way she was going to fucking cry. She just grit her teeth, and she reminded him of what he'd agreed to. "Just wait." No, she didn't want any fucking help, thanks.
It took at least three minutes for her to move again, which she knew because she was counting her way through it. Then, she shifted her weight fully onto the seat, and she braced the back of her forearms against his back as she tried to calm the fuck down. Ok, yeah, not so bad. She exhaled again, and then her arms slid around his waist. She didn't hold on, so much as she used pressure to stay put, and she sure didn't lean against his fucking back, though she knew that would come with the bike moving.
The air smelled like bleach from her sneakers and blood from beneath the bandages, but nothing red seeped through her sweatshirt, and she finally cursed beneath her breath. "Go, and don't fucking ask."
The engine made a choking kind of sound, an impatient cough and Russ said nothing but he wrapped his hands around the bars a little tighter and the leather of his gloves pulled across his hands. He said nothing about the copper-sour smell and he said nothing of the weight on the back of the bike and how it slid, rebalanced as Sam shuffled closer. Russ was impatient as his bike, he didn’t like sitting outside the rich man’s house (Russ assumed it was a man, so far all he knew of Sam and the folks she got involved with were men and he made this assumption with not a refusal but a lack of recognition of the truth of his own addition to it) and it made him restless and tetchy, to sit there like he wasn’t going to breathe wrong. He didn’t want to talk about it either, and he’d waited until she was a weight balanced enough to take her.
The engine complained, it bitched at being made to sit, and Russ leaned over it and toward the road; he gave her worn, warm leather back and the soap-and-coffee smell until it was swept to nothing by the bite of the cold wind either side of them. The need for the gloves was clear; if you weren’t smashed up against one another until your bodies were one line, your hands were holding on, and you got cold, real quick. He took corners slow, not fast, and the bike took them inelegantly, Russ leaned as little as he could into the corners, and he rode like it was just him, until the tension crept out of his rigid spine, until he was as relaxed as Russ knew how to be. The rich people’s houses, they bled out into one long line of sand colored stone and white paint, until they blurred down to the dirty parts of town, where without the neon painting pretty colors you could see the cracks, the grit. Turned right past the crossroads that led on up to his own place, hunkered down there amid all that like it was home or as close to home as it got, and on up, back to where the traffic slowed to occasional, and the garage laid itself along like gray spread and beacon.
The bike rumbled, Russ pulled in alongside a tarpaulin-draped car shape, to the side and he drew up careful, into the overhang, where the rain couldn’t reach and the dust couldn’t kick up and wreck the paint. Weren’t much wrecking it could do these days, but his boot came down and he steadied the bike against it, and he waited.
She was glad of the wind-whip silence, and she was glad of the need to concentrate on staying on, staying put, staying still. It kept her from freaking the fuck out how she wanted to, and she'd never been more grateful of anything in her life.
As soon as the bike stopped, she jumped off. Literally, she jumped. Her leg caught on the seat at her haste, but she caught her balance easily enough on the tarpaulin-draped car, all elbow and hip catching her weight. Space, that was the one thing she wanted more than anything just then, and she realized she wasn't going to be able to do this shit without something to take the edge off; she'd have to call Jack. Fuck.
She took a few distancing steps, and then she peeled the gloves off, careful to mind the sleeves of the sweatshirt and keep them down. She tossed them at him, acting like she hadn't just freaked the fuck out, like she hadn't just completely lost her shit. But she was already figuring out that he wouldn't ask. He reminded her of Seven so much just then, and she wondered what it meant, the fact that she'd decided to hide herself in people who gave a shit, and just didn't say they gave a shit.
"Yeah, so, point me at the office," she finally said. "Paperwork, yeah?" It wasn't a thank you, not in any normal language, but it still was. Yeah.
“Careful of the fucking car,” Russ said and it wasn’t mild and it didn’t have cream in it, but it wasn’t careful of Sam right then. What was under the tarp was worth ten grand to a crazy billionaire, maybe twenty, if he got it right, and Russ didn’t like money close by but he liked the thought of it. He liked the idea of being able to pack up and go, enough money for no worries, and to scrub clean the taint of not having money. The bike teetered; all that metal and solid force weighted down to just one foot. It was goddamn lucky he was tall, because if he weren’t, she’d have had them both over, bike and Russ and sanding down scratches was a pain in the fucking ass. He didn’t touch her, but he picked up the gloves, one-two, and he folded them back into his coat pocket with care, like maybe he’d forget them if he didn’t, like they weren’t carried around real often but had been a thought. He rolled the bike up onto its stand and he flung the tarp again, like he was tucking a kid under a blanket with more care than Russ would have given a real kid.
He stood then, with the sun at his back and leaching all the light out of him and he squinted at her. He looked long, at the sweatshirt tugged down over the heels of her palms and the blond hair twizzled into pigtails and the scuffed-pale toes of her sneakers, blank like he wasn’t looking at anything at all. He was grizzled blond and sharp blue eyes and there was nothing soft to Russ, nothing that fit itself over the broad shoulders and made him comforting in the slightest. He looked at the sweatshirt last, and that didn’t make sense until it did, overlong sleeves and the puddle of denim at her feet. Russ looked at her the way he looked at the parts of a car, and he started walking, toward the overhang and the cars and the faint grind of metal on metal and the rhythmic swing of music beneath it all, like he expected her to fall in.
“Paperwork,” he confirmed, with a nod of the head. “Maybe phones. Don’t know. Ain’t much to do, owner fucking hates paperwork so it’s a damn mess. Never find anything so we don’t bother, mostly. Not much comes through.” It looked busy, the garage, it looked like a couple of men rather than a handful - handfuls were for weekends - but the car stripped down to almost nothing in the center of the garage was painful-bare and one man bent to the tires like he was taking those, too. The wind scooted along the ground some, it flapped at a newspaper that someone had forgotten out on the tarmac and the garage was open to it, relied on the portable heater and men working hard to keep it warm. Russ veered right instead of left, opened a door in the lean-to long-side the garage, and he pushed in, all awkward height and breadth in a door too small.
The office inside was small. It was warm, the way the other wasn’t, and the sun patterned through the dust on the windows. It was a mess, scattered papers weighted down a desk with splayed feet, looked like it might collapse under itself, and a carburetor, wet with oil, sat on top of a bunch of forms that looked kinda like they might be important, til someone shoved them into the trash. The music, loud in the garage, spilled under the door, quieter, and there was a swivel chair and a beat-up leather couch in the corner, where sometimes he’d sprawl out in the night, if he’d stayed too late to get home, eyes raw, scarred by too many boots and too many parts thrown over it, and a fridge where some of the guys kept their shit. There was a sliding door, through into the garage, but it was shut. Heat bled through the windows and Russ shifted, the leather of his jacket creaked.
“Office,” he said, and he shrugged.