October and the Huntsman have (heartofthewolf) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-24 14:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | faust, huntsman |
Who: Toby & Winnie
What: A reunion
Where: Winnie's Apartment
When: Shortly after Winnie returned
Warnings/Rating: Awkwardness!
It had only taken seeing her post on the journals to push Toby from the relative safety of his office at the hospital to standing in front of her door. He hadn’t bothered to read the responses to her entry, simply wanting to see her, to assure himself that she really was here, that she was safe, and never before had something like this been so important to him. He was not a man who particularly desired romantic companionship, and after the mess that had become of things with Theresa, he felt almost scared to get in another relationship, to fail to help someone yet again like he had failed Theresa. But Winnie was a different crop of people; she didn’t need protecting, but Toby still wanted to make sure she was safe. It was in those moments of panic when she hadn’t shown up to open the door for him, hadn’t answered her cell phone in the days after everything had gone back to normal, that fear that she was gone and he had missed out on something important, that was what had him on her doorstep that evening.
He had come straight from work, still in his khakis and a wrinkled button down shirt, looking more the part of a harried graduate student than a practicing doctor. Dark hair was a mess about his face, glasses in their usual place, his jaw rough with the stubble of two days without shaving. His right hand was still in its brace, a sore reminder of something he would rather forget, but all of that was tossed aside in favor of her. Toby took a moment to catch his breath, to gather himself up before he lifted his left hand and rapped thrice on her door.
Winnie’s apartment was a dark, angry cave that looked like it had been taken over by a particularly careless squatter. Dirty dishes stacked on every open surface, screens on and buzzing, windows closed and curtains messily pulled together, cushions thrown around, bottles left unattended across the floor as if someone had intended on drinking from them again. Winnie hadn’t willfully seen the sun at its fullest in a week now and even if she sometimes stood on her porch with a cigarette and her feet bare, she made sure to go back inside by the time it rose over the dusted horizon. So, when the knock came at the door she almost didn’t even answer. She stayed still on the couch with her magazine and Netflixed anime, subconsciously believing that if she didn’t move it wouldn’t know she was there. But, who was Winnie kidding? If someone wanted to find her all they had to do was beat her door down or circle the nearby bars. She might have been kicked off the force, but Winnie hadn’t kicked that creature of habit yet.
Eventually she slunk towards the door, deep black hair sticking up and sharp like a fan of wire, blue eyes clear and tired, expression muted and serious. She was wearing the same t-shirt she had been for the past two days, a black thing with a cartoon character on it that Toby wouldn’t recognize and bright neon shorts that barely hid anything at all. And, when she opened the door it was sudden and squinting, cigarette hanging from her pale, pink lips as she just stared at him. “Checking on me.” Winnie said without a hello, pulling the cigarette from her lips as she snorted out smoke and looked up his frame. She thought about how men only showed up like that if they felt like she owed them something. And, she did, but Winnie didn’t want anyone touching her for a while. Curling up with Lin on the couch didn’t count.
Toby wasn’t entirely sure what he had been en expecting when Winnie’s door opened. The dark hair was a change he wasn’t entirely prepared for, the cigarette hanging from her lips, even the sound of her voice, it was all strange on someone he had thought he knew so well. Whatever it was he was feeling at that moment didn’t stray to his expression, still as somber and serious as he ever was. “Not checking up on you,” he said, his voice quiet, muted in a way that it wasn’t normally. Because Winnie was one of those people he felt didn’t need checked up on, didn’t need someone to watch over her to make sure she was alright. She was strong, tough as nails, someone who took as good as she gave. It wasn’t that Toby had been worried about her, per se, because coming here, seeing her, verifying that she hadn’t disappeared into the world without a single word of farewell, it was a selfish thing just for him.
“I waited for you,” he finally said, still in those same quiet tones. “We waited in the hall for you to open the door. We waited all night.” And he had, stubborn with the Huntsman, refusing to let him leave until something had happened. It took several hours before they had finally given up, several glances thrown over their shoulder to make sure the door didn’t open suddenly. “What happened, Winnie?”
Winnie tilted her head a little, bringing the cigarette back up to her lips as she crossed her arms and slowly raised an eyebrow. “I was drunk.” And that was all she thought she needed to say. Having Jayne in her blood, not just in her head made her reckless and the more she thought about just randomly hooking up with someone that she knew more like a cousin than anyone she had ever flirted with, the more she wanted to let Jayne have Vegas back. At that point he wasn’t much better than a monkey on her back, clawing for the jewel in the desert and all the good times he could pull out of it. “You shouldn’t have waited that long.” She said simply, blue eyes unapologetic and raw. Winnie spent a lot of time learning to hold all that back at the academy and out there on the force, but now it was just gone.
She stayed in the threshold of her apartment, leaning on the doorframe. “You couldn’t have seriously waited just to hook up.” Winnie observed, eyes narrow and almost suspicious. “Hey I got an idea. Why don’t we act like it was the night I called you and you can tell me what you were going to say.”
The explanation was both too simple to be right and too simple to be wrong. There was more to it, but he didn’t doubt that it boiled down to simply that. Being drunk. But Toby wasn’t a judge of things like that, not in the slightest. He was a quiet thing, understanding and sympathetic, and his feelings were honest, not manufactured somewhere in medical school. “Maybe I shouldn’t have,” he responded quietly. “But I did.” Maybe it was those weeks spent in the Huntsman’s boots, that empty feeling in his chest leaving him numb in places he hadn’t known existed, but Toby knew that it was a selfish thing to close himself off to the world. He was allowed to feel, to express those feelings, and no matter the things that had happened in his past, that didn’t have to define what he did today.
“I don’t remember what I was going to say back then,” Toby said quietly, his tone honest. “And I didn’t wait there simply to hook up, it wasn’t that in the slightest.” He closed his eyes for a moment, reaching up to rub at his forehead with the heel of one hand, trying to gather his thoughts together into something cohesive, that was more than ramblings gone wrong. “I wanted to see you. I missed you. And when you didn’t show up, when I finally realised that you weren’t going to open the door, it felt like I had lost something, someone very important to me.” He opened his eyes, meeting those narrowed blue ones, holding her gaze. “I’ve spent a long time trying to distance myself from people, to hold them at arms length lest something happens. And I don’t want to do that anymore. Particularly with you.” It was hard to say, hard to lay it out there, raw words and emotions.
Winnie made a thoughtful sound in the back of her throat, almost like she didn’t believe him. But, Toby wasn’t malicious and he didn’t bullshit, so the best she could figure was that he was feeling lonely and Winnie had always been there in the wings. Always with a cup of coffee, always with a can do attitude. But, a lot of that was gone now. Emptied out and replaced by the booze and cigarettes. “I was fired.” Winnie said suddenly, knowing that would explain a lot. “After the Vegas switch, I couldn’t explain my absence and my dad assumed it was my drinking, so here I am.” She made a sweeping gesture over her relaxing around the house clothes.
“I know you’re hurting, Toby. I’ve known it for a long time. But, I can’t help you right now. I have a new alter that gives me nightmares, my parents don’t talk to me anymore and I can’t even hang out at the same bars I used to without getting an earful from some cop I knew.” She sucked down the rest of the cigarette, smashed it into the doorframe and then flicked it off into a nearby bush.
Her simple statement of having been fired did explain a lot, but there were still questions he had left unanswered, things he might ask after later, when things weren’t so raw around the edges. Toby didn’t say anything as she flicked the spent cigarette away, giving a shake of his head as she said about him needing help. “I don’t need help, Winnie,” he said quietly, brow furrowing down a few degrees. “I just -” What did he need? Why had he come here? That conversation with her when everything had flipped their worlds upside down had been a strange thing, but it had made him realise something: he wanted her in his life, and not necessarily as a friend, and he refused to believe that the chance had been lost just because some things in their lives had fallen on their heads. “I just want you in my life,” he finally said, whisper soft. “And if you need help, whatever that entails, I want to be there for you.” The words weren’t easy for him to say, but he kept her gaze as he did, unashamed of them.
Winnie gave him an honestly surprised look, stubby fingernails cracked with dark outer space polish holding onto the door that she wouldn’t open for him. She imagined him wandering around her apartment that was littered and not nearly as tidy as she kept her desk or car or uniform and decided that she didn’t want any kind of silent judgement. “You do need help. You’re so tightly wound it took you a drunk message from me to realize how I felt about you. After yeaaars of being oblivious.” Winnie’s voice was harsh and an edge louder than his. She was angry, bitter even, but Toby didn’t deserve most of what was boiling up in her. So she sighed and stepped out of the door to take a seat on the stairs in front of her apartment, looking at him like she expected him to sit by her.
“Look. There’s nothing you can do for me, okay?” Winnie said once he moved closer to her. “Coming here and suddenly being some kind of support for me when I’m not even completely sure who or what I am anymore doesn’t work.”
Toby dropped down onto the stairs beside her, winding fingers around his still-braced hand, thumb running up and down the inside of his wrist. “It wasn’t just that conversation, Winnie,” he said quietly. “It was things that happened during that switch, as you’ve put it, that have had me thinking.” Toby was always one to shut his feeling away, to lock them up deep inside him so he could think clearly, make the best decisions, to move forward without being weighed down with emotions. But being the Huntsman, feeling that emptiness that had existed inside him, it had made a lot of things much more clear than they had been before. He had known, now that he looked at it much more closely, for a long while how Winnie felt about him, but he had never allowed himself the freedom to even consider anything there. Perhaps it was a combination of whom he had grown up to be, the way Theresa had affected him, the way her sudden death had impacted him. But all of it combined had left him as someone who was afraid to open up and feel for fear of something bad happening again. His mother, Theresa, the women he loved never had happy endings.
The Huntsman’s lack of feeling, that lack of anything, even apathy, it had been frightening in ways he hadn’t ever been able to predict, and Toby knew that wasn’t what he wanted in his life. Locking ones’ feelings away might seem like a good solution at the time, but in the end, it only caused more suffering. He needed to talk more, to allow himself to feel more, and that started with the three most important people in his life. And Winnie was one of them.
“I wasn’t oblivious, Winnie,” Toby continued after a moment of quiet, looking down at the steps they sat upon. “I just didn’t want to put myself out there and possibly hurt you. Maybe boiling it down to friendship was easier, but I’m not sure that’s how I still feel. And I’m not saying that I want something now, because I know you’re not in a place to deal with that, and what’s more important to me right now is that you find yourself again.” Turning, he angled himself towards her, head canted slightly to the side, and there was something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t easy to pin down to a single word or definition, but there was an openness there that was new. “But I’m here for you, no matter what. And if I can help you, I want to. This isn’t because I’m worried over what happened, but because I care about you. And that’s not going to change, just like it hasn’t changed in the many years that we’ve known one another.” Toby swallowed hard, over a lump that had risen in his throat. “So I’m here. Whether it’s as a friend, or something more, or maybe nothing at all... I’m here.”
Winnie rested her arms on her knees and ran her fingers through the back of her black, freshly cut hair. Flat nails running over her scalp again and again until it soothed her. “I care about you, too, Toby. You know I do.” She said, looking at her white skin that used to have a little Vegas color, but it had all been bleached out by staying indoors like she was afraid of going outside. “I’m just in a bad place right now. I’m in a real bad place.” Winnie whispered, voice steady like she didn’t have a whole lot of self pity left to cry about. She slowly looked over at him and smirked with a small shake of her head. “You can’t act like we can fix any of that. Or expect anything from me, okay? I don’t- I really don’t want any shrink stuff right now.”
She sat up a little straighter, arms still propped on her knees. “My dad doesn’t call me anymore. Doesn’t even answer the phone if he knows its me.” Winnie sighed, pushing stray pieces of hair back from her face. “Can you believe that? My dad. The one who looked after you boys and taught me everything. I know it’s gunna pass eventually, but that doesn’t really make me put a lot of confidence in anyone else who claaaaims to care about me. You know?”
“I won’t shrink you. I promise.” And those were words he meant. It wasn’t easy for him to step away from what he was, a psychiatrist, but he was starting to learn that applying all that he had learned in school was not the best approach to the people he cared about. It left him impersonal, clinical, and those were the kind of things he needed to separate from who he was and what he did. He didn’t make any approach to touch her, to press a hand against her back, those signs of comfort and consolation that came so naturally to people, but not to him. Instead, he kept himself angled towards her, leaning forward with his forearms braced upon his legs, giving her his undivided attention. “I know you’ll figure something out eventually, and when you do, I’m still going to be here.”
At the news of her father and the lack of communication since everything had happened, Toby gave a small shake of his head. To a patient, he might have said that people can be that way until they know how to process what had happened, but to Winnie, he pushed those words aside. “Yeah, I know,” he said instead, voice quiet. Looking back out towards the sky, Toby let out a long breath, his shoulders sinking down. “Your dad’s a good guy. He’ll come around, pick up the phone. I’m sure he will.” Because Toby had to believe in that. Mr. O’Hara had been one of the few adults that Toby had learned to really rely on. After his father had taken his own life, and his mother disappeared into her room, he was the one that Toby looked to for guidance in a world where he was suddenly expected to be the responsible one. He knew the man would come along, but he was as stubborn as Winnie was, so it would take time.
Turning back towards Winnie, he reached out with his good hand, smoothing down an errant bit of black hair that she had mussed with her fingers. “I like the black on you,” he said quietly. “I really do.”
Winnie didn’t interrupt or try to be a smart ass when he attempted optimism because she had a little bit of it hiding under all the bitterness and hurt. She just nodded gently, tiredly. There was no point in arguing about it or devising some reason why her father suddenly didn’t trust her. Winnie, despite being thrown off the force, had a lot of that academy training still embedded in her. And, a great deal of it taught her to trust her superiors and assume if they didn’t trust her it was because she fucked up. “Yeah.” She said finally and glanced over at him before looking back down at her feet.
When he touched her hair, she nearly jumped out of her skin, giving a sort of snorting giggle that was more blonde Winnie than this new, moody black-haired one. She flashed a teasing grin his way. “You loosened up. I like it.” She wagged a chipped nail close to his face and then bumped his shoulder with hers. “Listen. I’m going to go back to my mope cave for a little while. But, you have permission to call me if you want. Or journals, I guess?” Winnie stood up and moved up one stair back towards her apartment where she could be alone again.
That giggle combined with the teasing grin thrown his way, Toby took them both as a sign that in time, things might approach okay for both of them. “It’s a work in progress,” he commented to her words about him loosening up, because truly, that’s what it was. Baby steps in a direction that would hopefully be better than where he had come from. He gave a grin at the bump of their shoulders, and when she stood, he followed her, stretching up to his full height, the stair putting them closer to the same level. “And you can call me as well. Anytime,” he said quietly. The corner of his mouth lifted in the slightest of smiles, and he stepped down to walk away, but Toby only got two steps before he turned back. Returning to the step he had occupied a moment before, he leaned in to press a chaste kiss to the corner of her mouth, and then he was ducking away before she could throw a swing at him. “I’ll call you soon, Winnie,” Toby promised, shoving his hands deep in the pockets of his khakis, walking backwards long enough to watch her for a few more moments, and then he was disappearing around the corner to his parked vehicle. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that this had solved all of their problems, but it was a step in the right direction.