Who: Russ & Sam What: Angry! When: Recently Where: The garage Warnings: Language?
It was damn quiet by the time he pulled up and the hoarse purr of the bike cut out down to nothing. Late for Vegas sun to die away to thin gun-gray sky and the warm hum dwindling down to nothing. Radio was still playing, but that didn’t mean a damn thing as Russ put heavy boot down onto solid cement, swung himself off and tugged the tarp over even if he didn’t expect anyone walking on by. By this point, the guys peeled off, scattered like a dropped box of nails -- different directions, the same low, easy kind of laughter that was any group of guys working together long enough to learn what was safe to talk over. Russ didn’t look in the direction of the office, figured Sam had gotten out whilst there were buses enough to carry her back to wherever the hell she was these days, rich guy’s house other side of Vegas with too-clean sneakers smelling like bleach and vinegar.
Wasn’t cautious, even if maybe he should be - Russ didn’t put it past Ford to sneak up on him here, but Lex wasn’t, Lex was all doorsteps and sunny blond smiles and he could take livid, annoyed-skinny kid over tall, angular creatures so far past baby sis of memory, she was almost eclipsed. Yes, if Ford turned up for a fight now the light was licking down low enough to paint shadows across the floor of the garage, pick out all the gleaming chrome in the place, Russ thought he felt damn well placed to pick it first, take out that aggravation felt at family reknitting itself around him like a broken bone healing wrong. He didn’t feel like the bars and he didn’t feel like bringing a woman home, mindlessness of that was too brief and messy, explaining why the hell someone was sat on his front step (as Russ half assumed she would be, suspicion and the feeling like he’d been edged out of his own house) wasn’t something he felt real pleased by. He’d got a car half-way to smashed to work on, something he could lean over and lose time in until it got dark enough that if Lex was squatting on his doorstep she’d be about ready to pack up and head on back wherever she came from.
He flicked on the lights with the hum and blink of fluorescents coming back to life and he switched on the radio to something talky, left it quiet because he didn’t much mind the clatter of tools, the tinkering sounds that meant the garage was productive, meant he had shit to do that wasn’t thinking on over Campbells crawling out the fucking walls like family ties gone trailing he’d meant to get surgical about. He was halfway to set up, tools unrolled on an oily cloth on the cement beside him and a slow, tuneless kind of hum between his teeth, eased beneath the car, and tinkering and he didn’t give a damn whether Ford and Lex fought it out or whether they were close as family knotted tight together so long as both of them stayed the hell away.
Sam was still around.
She'd missed the last bus, yeah, but she didn't give a shit. She was still riding high on feeling fearless; she'd walk home. Or she'd bum money for a cab. Either way, she'd make it back to Future Hope. And if she didn't? So what? She was moving back into Aria in a day or so, and she was leaving the safe haven behind. She'd have to face her shit without soothing walls and a constant shrink to cry on. Before this shit at Midtown, that had freaked her the fuck out. She wasn't ready. She knew she wasn't ready. But her month was up, and she wasn't going to be a pain in Daniel's ass and ask him to fork out thousands of dollars for another month of therapy. So, the shrink would go back to being the one insurance paid for, and physical therapy would do the same. Not that the garage didn't have some benefits; it did. But it wasn't the kind of shit that came from a place like Future Hope, not even close. It was bargain basement, but it was still better than anything Sam had in her life. So, yeah, things were going to change again. But she was cool. Just then, everything was cool.
She'd spent the day filing and billing and getting shit transferred from the stupid paper system the garage had been using, to the computer she'd convinced Boss to buy. Sam sucked at money, hadn't finished high school, and was mostly internet-trained when it came to everything related to grammar. She'd broken her teeth on Phantom of the Opera fanfic, and she'd learned math selling stolen shit on E-Bay, but she could set up a computer and some software. And Russ was right about Boss; she didn't really care much about anything.
The small front office had gone from being a greasy pile of overflowing papers, to being neat. Her iPod was normally plugged into tiny speakers that filled the space with ridiculous amounts of opera, but it was quiet now. She had earbuds in, and Lady Gaga was singing at her about bad fucking romances, and it was only the flick of light behind her that made her realize someone was there. Normally, she would have fucking flipped, still fearing men in the dark. But not just then. And, hey, she really liked the fuckers at the garage. They were all simple, older than her, and they reminded her of the men that had worked at her pops' garage. She'd grown up around loud Cuban men, and she had no problem with these guys. Fuck, they were even sweet to flirt with these days, when she was feeling completely undesirable. She hated that. She wasn't that woman. She wouldn't fucking be that insecure girl, the one that needed a guy to get hard in order to feel worth something.
She pushed her chair back, turned on the light that hadn't been necessary with the glow of the screen and, earbuds getting tugged down to hang around her shoulders, she walked into Russ' space. "Waiting for a relative to wail on?" she asked from the doorway, a ponytail, snug jeans and a white tank, thin grey-fingerless gloves matching the grey UGGs on her feet.
Russ wasn’t one of the sweet guys ready to flirt with and he wasn’t real happy about company either. As the door caught, he figured it was one of the guys come back for later, forgot something or maybe he’d brought back a girl, the kind that got hot about metal and the smell of motor oil. He toed one boot off against the wall, pushed himself on out on the creeper. It was a day off, and late on a Friday when most would head on across to the bar, drink late and maybe take home the party and he was counting on the other guys doing just that. Russ wasn’t dirt and oil-stained, wasn’t worn in and almost done like most guys in the garage on a night, the shirt looked mostly clean and he was shaved recent enough that he’d not rubbed across his chin, dark smears when he puzzled out shit; he’d come here rather than idling and he looked terse, sharp like he didn’t want the kind of company that giggled softly, squeaked like bad upholstery and too many beers from the far corner where the real wreck in the place was.
He saw Sam and momentarily he relaxed; most of the time she was quiet, shut up in the office with some shit blaring on out there that was moderately better to listen to than the permanent Shakira, but not by much. He hadn’t walked on in much, except coffee in the morning, when he didn’t have a word for anyone and he shouldered right on by all the old mess and the dented filing cabinets and he walked on out, hand wrapped tight around the warm mug, waking up in the chilly bleariness of early morning. And then she opened her mouth and the too-sharp look was back, tense like he was waiting for a punch.
“Leave it the fuck alone, Sam,” he said and his voice was muffled, he bent his knees and he slid on back under the car, and the clatter of metal on concrete said he was back working, ignoring Sam - white and grey and very blond beneath the fluorescents.
Sam wasn't deterred. Fuck, no. Even on a bad day, that wouldn't be enough to fend her off. And it wasn't a bad day. She pushed away from the doorway, and she walked over to the car. Once there, she crouched down, forearms on her thighs and tinny music coming from the earbuds that dangled against her white shirt. She couldn't actually see his face, not without craning to the side and looking under the machine, but she knew he would be aggravated by her being so fucking close. He couldn't ignore anything she said that close, and she was counting on that. "Baby, you can't hide down there forever. So, why don't you just roll back the fuck out here and talk to me?" she asked, feeling calm enough to be polite - for her. "I'll just crawl down there if you don't talk, and I don't have one of those fucking roller things, and you know I'll knock into something I shouldn't."
Yeah, ok, so she wasn't too good to threaten him. She wasn't expecting him to be there, but there he was, and she'd be fucked if she wasn't going to poke at whatever was going on with him. Certain people in her life needed fucking prodding. They pretended they didn't give a shit about anyone, and they needed people to needle. She liked people like that. She liked people like that a whole lot fucking more than she liked the people who put their shit all out there, for everyone to see. Maybe she understood fuckers like Russ more. Who the fuck knew? All she knew was that this shit with Ford had seemed like more than his regular assholeness. Because, yeah, Russ? Russ was a motherfucker on the surface, before you got squish-deep. But he wasn't actually a douche, not really. She'd be in jail if he was the kind of asshole he liked to pretend to be. He was cruel - no fucking doubt. But she knew a bark when she heard a fucking bark.
It was darker beneath the car than it was out there, but he could see the dangling ends of blond hair and the swaying earbuds and she’d gone calm, polite like maybe she thought that would make him want to talk about it more. The sound Russ made was back of the throat, derisive. He didn’t want to talk to the kid and he didn’t want to talk to Lex and he wanted to talk about either of them to someone else even less. Sam mostly entertained herself at the garage, rotating carousel of guys who liked to talk soft, liked to laugh with her, liked to get on up close and visit the office more times than they needed coffee (more than any guy needed coffee, if he didn’t want to piss for a year after he was done drinking it). Maybe it was because they thought she was close to Boss, sitting there with all that paperwork and maybe it was because they just liked Sam, short and blond and mouthy but he’d taken to buying his coffee on the way in, waxed paper cup gulped outside McDonalds or wherever, the bike still warm and it meant he got quiet. He’d set her up same way he’d intended to set up Ford, like he wasn’t there at all but Sam wasn’t like Ford.
“This one ain’t worth twenty grand,” Russ said and he gripped the edge of the bumper, used it to nudge the creeper out just enough to look at her, the slide of his fingers on the paintwork oily. “Knock away.” Because she wasn’t Ford, swiping coffee and alien, she wasn’t a double-wide turning up on his own doorstep and the sick taste of fear in the back of his throat, twenty-years-old and ugly, and she wasn’t related. She was nosy, and she was a walking mess (Russ thought this as affectionately as Russ thought anything, but she was a mess he wasn’t sure was going to make it and was surprised each day he did need coffee and saw the office shaking itself together like it had remembered how to run) and she was followed by an army of people who wrote short, blunt things to strangers because they cared.But the neat, utilitarian set-up he had wasn’t shivered to dust by Sam walking on in and playing tinny opera through the walls of the office.
“I’m not hiding, I’m working.” He slid back on out; if the fuel wasn’t getting through properly, it was gonna be in the engine and he didn’t care if Sam took it as an invite. He wiped hands down the side of his jeans and he snicked fingers under the hood, propped it open.
Sam kept to her perch while he gripped the edge of the bumper. She envied his ease with those fucking hands, but the toxin in her system meant she wasn't afraid of never being able to grip like that with her own. Fear was a funny fucking thing; it made everything personal, and Sam knew that better than anyone. Personal shit had made her feel like she was stuck at the end of a tunnel with only one door. She could see that now; she wondered if she would remember the lesson when all this shit was done. "I get the feeling you would have decked the guy for looking at any car wrong, baby. That the value didn't really fucking matter. So, what did it? The fact that he just showed up one day? Or is the more to the story?" she asked, all Jersey round-Os in her words and youthful curiosity. She wasn't afraid to poke the tiger, even if he had a thorn in his fucking paw.
She didn't scoot back when he slid out, and that was a definite change from her behavior around the shop. Sure, she flirted with the guys. She threw their spanish terms of endearments back at them, laced with curse words that made them laugh. She made them coffee, and she smiled warm, gap-toothed smiles at them, but she never got close enough for any of them to fucking touch. It wasn't even intentional, that distance, but it was always there, an echo reminiscent of her reaction to him on that bike.
But she didn't scoot back just then. Fearless and comfortable, she just watched him wipe his hands and reach for the hood latch. She stood then, and she leaned on the edge of the hood, and she looked down on all the fucking wires and parts she didn't understand. She looked, and she saw a million pieces of metal that she could turn into amazing shit, but she didn't understand how any of it went together. But she crossed her arms, and she rested her elbows on the edge, leaning over to do so and not caring about how unladylike the fucking posture was. "You're hiding in work. It's cool. I like hiding in shit too." It wasn't a question. It was a statement. "I have your fucking number, Russ. Quit bullshitting me." She grinned, younger for that gap between her front teeth.
“You’re in my damn light,” Russ said blankly. She was, she was blond curiosity and damn young, resting on the side of the car like she thought answers would be on in there along with a busted fan-belt and maybe fucked up fuel injectors. Russ liked Sam quiet and he liked her at arm’s length, tucked in back in the office and playing opera loud enough that it competed enough with the shitty Spanish music that the guys flicked it off for a while - the opera was less of a fucking headache. She was stood so damn close he leaned round her, because there was a goddamn job he could do and if the shop was quiet whilst he did it, it meant no unwanted visits along with the clientele. Russ, who disliked much of the clientele, was fine when the place was closed and the work could get done. He leaned past, greasy-blackened fingers and concentration and blue eyes firmly focused on the knotted metal of the machine’s engineering, and she didn’t shift out the damn way, she settled in like she was staying.
“It was a twenty grand car,” Russ said, without any sort of preamble and like he was talking to the carburettor and not to Sam at all, “And he kicked it.” That seemed kind of final to Russ; reason and action; and he didn’t care if Sam had spent time shooting the breeze with Ford, he didn’t care if Sam knew the kid’s favorite color or his favorite thing to eat by now, Ford was livid-blue scowl and the velocity of wiry muscle come at him, Ford was a photograph left on a sticky diner table. “No bullshit. Hand me that, if you’re going to stand in my fucking way.” He pointed, curtly and he didn’t look past her to it, he didn’t want a face full of Sam’s bright blond, annoyingly perky self. She was quiet, she liked opera, she’d commandeered the office and she stepped out of the way when he moved round the place, like either she intuited where the hell people were going to go or she just didn’t want to be there when you got there. Now she was none of those damn things.
“There’s no story here. Go home.” Russ looked at her shortly; the florescent light washed out the desert tan and picked out the blond; the blue eyes were very clear and there was none of the warm in them that Sam maybe got more than she should.
Liking Sam quiet wasn't a good thing to like, because it hardly ever fucking happened. Being the baby in a family full of boys meant she made a lot of fucking noise growing up, and she got into a lot of fucking shit she wasn't supposed to. That had changed with the crap that had happened in the past year, but it was all rewind now, fearless inky eyes and a know-it-all smile. She didn't move, even when he bitched about her being in his light. She liked the smell of mechanic's grease, and she liked that burn-rubber smell beneath the hood.
It reminded her of her pops.
Her pops was a happy drunk, but a drunk all the same. He never threw punches. He sold his kids off, and got them all sent to the clink, but he never threw punches. And when shit got real bad, he hid at his garage. It was roomier than the apartment the family lived in, and her mom wouldn't go out there. Sam was used to the smell on all the boys' clothes, on their hands, and on pops, when he was cheer-laughing drunk, rosy cheeks and laughter that wouldn't quit.
"Not your fucking car, baby, and as long as he doesn't dent it, it doesn't matter," she said truthfully. She handed over the wrench when he asked for it, still smelling of hospital antiseptic and bleach when he reached around her.
"Of course there's a fucking story," she said simply. She paused, and she sighed honestly. "I don't want to go home, but I want to go there more than fucking anything." A pause. "I go home Monday."
The garage was big enough that it could have taken Russ’s entire home but he didn’t think of it that way. The garage wasn’t family and it wasn’t memories, nothing personal with the smell of oil and metal, of burned rubber and mostly, if it smelled of much else, old sweat from the guys who weren’t real concerned with smelling shower-fresh around one another. It was vast and it was impersonal, it boiled down to practical cement and a workbench where everything you needed was right there in front of you. Sam was a piece of it he’d given little enough thought to, it was a safe space, she’d needed a safe space, it was a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces didn’t fit damn clear close to together but he’d made them, and when you stood back and looked at it a while, it fit just fine. But Sam wasn’t in the office, out of the way now, she was warmth seeping through, hip flush against him and Russ took a side-step - a little one - just enough to shift on out the way of warmth, of hospital-clean and the acrid antiseptic smell.
He had figured she’d been going on back to the rich guy’s place, the one squatting down on the side of the road like it owned half of Vegas, and he figured that that had been home; she wasn’t talking about him and she wasn’t talking about Ford and Russ wasn’t real receptive to getting chatty usually. Women had a habit of it, of stretching out when the sweat was cooling and the dark was closing in toward dawn, talking in that low, rough kind of way that was intimacy, telling him things like they were shoving dollar bills in a bank, something they could pull out later. There wasn’t much to talk about; things were either how you wanted them or they weren’t, but Sam was Sam, blond and annoying and not quite as fragile, didn’t look like she’d damn break if he breathed on her wrong.
“Oh yeah?” Russ was slow, patient with loosening the no good fuel injector, gentle little movements, all fingers and thumbs. Some of it, maybe, came out across in the voice; it was slow too - warmer, like some of the bite had rubbed away. “What’s wrong with home?” Most people placed real high attachment on home. He looked sideways, over his shoulder at her; she’d acquired a grease stain at the hip, where she’d brushed up past him, dark on all that white and grey.
She lifted an eyebrow when he took that little sidestep. Yeah, ok, that was usually her game. "I don't bite, Russ. You fucking know that." And she didn't. In bed, she was quick. Booze made her calmer, but, yeah, she didn't have a bit of fucking finesse; she was sloppy and honest. It was probably the most honesty anyone ever got out of her, because fuck if she knew how to hide herself on rumpled sheets. She avoided hotel rooms and she never went to houses. He was an boozy exception. Bathrooms, alleys and places where people wouldn't try to get more than an orgasm out of her, those were her places. Feeling vulnerable meant she didn't mess around with hands or mouths more than was necessary; no, she was raw-fast honesty, and she didn't fucking bite. Biting would take too long.
She didn't mind the grease on her shirt. She didn't mind it, like she didn't mind the smell or the guys or the sweat that permeated the place. Past her fingerless gloves, her fingertips were torch-calloused, and there was always dirt beneath her fingernails. Not these days, but normally. Normally, she was dirty fingers and at least one torch burn. Normally, something had just sparked red and burned a hole in her steel-enforced boot, and the smell of hot leather followed her around, metal and grease and dirt. But she was clean just then, save for that smudge. She was considering picking up a torch again, even if she ended up fat-fisting it, like a child did a crayon. "Nothing. Home is fantastic," she said truthfully and, no, it wasn't that squat drug dealer's house, not by a long shot. "I just can't tell if I'm wanted there right now. You know any of those people that are too fucking polite to just tell you to fuck off when they want you gone? Like that."
She hipped him, closing that space he'd put between them a second earlier. "Fucker. Tell me what the deal is with Ford." She grinned, gap-toothed torment. "Is he cute?"
A clatter of metal; Russ lost focus because she’d hopped right on over and back to Ford. He looked up, all creased forehead and blue-eyed glower and a tug to the mouth that was downright unpleasant and he glared at her, not even approaching shoulder-height, nudged right into his damn workspace again. Russ had hung back from the garage til the shouting and the whistling had wrapped up, all that Spanish flying back and forth like birds overhead he could mostly tune out but bothered him when he wanted quiet. He’d stayed out, sitting on the couch and watching the sky dull down from the kind of blue you could see from Vegas and you could see from a double-wide, only there it was the only thing to look at. “You don’t seem like the type to be real bothered with polite,” Russ said sourly, because whether she bit or not, whether Sam was honesty in twisted sheets or not, that was a goddamn year back and Sam was mouthy noise and a lot of people all twined round the fingers of her right hand, Sam crammed in where the light was, until when he bent back over, the corolla-burn of light through blond hair was in the periphery of his vision.
“No deal,” Russ told the carburettor stubbornly, and if he could ease it out without breaking something, maybe there’d be something worth a buck or two under the hood. The car, Russ was steadily becoming aware, was a wreck on four wheels, and it was real unlikely it was going anywhere whether he worked on it all night. “Move on. Who won’t tell you to fuck off? You need practice?” He aimed a look down his shoulder at her, all testy capability and he didn’t wonder, not even for a second, where the hell it was she was that stank of antiseptic and of bleach, of the kind of clean that was scrubbing away things you wanted gone and that were more than the stains they left behind.
“You don’t get out my damn way, I’ll bite.”
"Polite doesn't get people like us anywhere." People like us, because Sam knew Russ came from shit, just like she did. She'd gotten used to the ritzy life her adopted siblings had grown up in. She liked sushi now, and she loved good bedsheets with high fucking thread counts. But she was still that Jersey slum girl at the heart of it, still bad language and bad manners and a huge fucking chip on her shoulder that was supposed to hide anything soft beneath it.
"Bullshit," was her too-cheerful reply, when he said there was no deal with Ford. There was obviously a fucking deal. She straightened, noticing the tinny music coming from her earbuds and tucking one in. She loved this fucking aria; she hummed a few bars, not giving a shit that Russ was there, her voice pretty good after all those singing lessons Christine made her take. She wandered behind him, knowing that would make him twitch. It was a good way to grab back some control, and she wasn't afraid of his fucking bark. "I don't want to move on. I'm not like you, baby." Normally, she wouldn't have admitted that shit, but normally Marvel wasn't fucking with her inhibitions either. "I can tell anyone I want to fuck off," she said truthfully. "Some people aren't really good at that shit. We're fucking assholes, Russ. We say things to get under people's skin. Some people don't want to hurt people, and they don't fucking understand that being polite hurts more sometimes."
Yeah, definitely time to get out, before she spilled all her shit on the garage floor. The prospect didn't scare her just then, but she knew she'd hate this entire fucking conversation later. "Fuck you, baby. You're not going to bite me. No matter what I do," she said, smug and knowing. She stopped her pacing, and she reached out a grey-gloved hand. Her bare fingers met with his upper arm, and she brushed them against his sleeve. The touch was still rough, because she sucked at gentle, but it was a definite caress (of sorts). "Just talk to the fucker, Russ. Without throwing a fucking punch, without intentionally insulting his ass in order to scare him away."
She backed up quick; she wasn't fucking stupid.
She didn’t sound Jersey for the brief minute or three she spent singing, and Russ paused because that didn’t mesh with the garage and it didn’t with Sam either; it was sweet, high and if it sounded like the kind of shit old fuckers listened to whilst drinking the kind of stuff that took twenty years to taste good, it was briefly - starkly - pretty there in the middle of utilitarian concrete and dirty tools and Russ didn’t much wonder about Sam but he wondered for the split second it took for Sam to segue between that and talking about him like she thought she’d read the fucking book. His face narrowed; it set into hard, unpleasant lines. Russ didn’t much like people who made assumptions at the best of times; he could lazily flip off the woman who made a comment about the lack of reading material in his house and he could say a slow, easy ‘fuck you’ to the kind of guys who picked fights in bars when he wasn’t feeling like it, because they saw big, and they saw calloused hands and dirt-streaked clothes and they figured he was good for it. She sounded smug, she sounded like Lex for one sharp second; certain in her own self and Russ wanted to claw it back, along with broken coffee mugs and a car he’d spent more than a year working over because of a fucking door and a fairy-tale hero.
“Fuck you, Sam,” and the metallic clatter was the wrench bouncing off the engine and lost somewhere in the gloom of beneath but Russ wasn’t concerned about the engine, he was damn mad. He reached out against that glancing flitter of fingertips and he reached for her wrist, tall and annoyed, the glare of blue eyes very bright against washed out, faded tan. “You want to play shrink, do it on your own time. You think this is your family, all dis-functional fucking drama and everyone sobs on everyone’s shoulder at the end before the credits, right?” He wasn’t warm-voiced at all, he wasn’t even the edgy tolerance; he was flint grated over metal and set teeth and the spitting, poisonous kind of mad and she wasn’t Lex and she wasn’t Ford, but she was there, prying at it.
“This isn’t your family. I didn’t know the fucker existed til a month ago. Stop trying to fucking meddle.”
She didn't mind when he told her to fuck off. She wasn't even surprised. She was surprised when he let the fucking wrench bounce, though, and it was a good thing she was high on that fucking toxin, or she would have turned tail and run. She yanked her wrist back, and there was something in her eyes that said it was fucking lucky she was scared-numb. She would have swung otherwise, kicked, screamed and overreacted. But it was cool, and she was cool. She just pulled her hand back and let it fall at her side, a hiss at the pull on stitches beneath wool (she was ready for those fucking things to come out Monday).
"I think you're being an ass, baby. Meddling or not, you're acting like a fucking baby, unless you can tell me something else the guy did." She raised her hands, an indication she was going to leave it, and that she sure wasn't expecting a fucking response. "I call it like I see it, Russ. If you don't like it, you can suck my dick." Simple.
She turned, tucking the other earbud in, ready to leave him behind with his car, and she stopped at the door to her office. "Next time you grab for me, I'm going to swing. You're fucking warned." She shut the door, and she closed the light, and she bailed.
The air caught hard around the ruction and it pulled, elastic band strained and snapping. Russ tossed down the dirty oil rag and he swore something colorful and loud until it bounced off the empty walls and he leaned, hands on the edge of the hood and head bowed like it was fucking church, until the tread of footsteps was gone completely, and then he kicked his own damn wreck, because he felt like it.