Who: Russ & Lex What: Akwardness! Where: Russ' front step. You think I'm joking. When: Recently-ish. Warnings/Rating: There is narrative profanity because Campbells.
Eames did good work, even on a playing field parallel but not identical to his own and from inside of a woman’s head. Lex had been looking for Russ for weeks--four days after Eames lent his attention to the matter, she had not only contact info but contact options. She had the phone number to the garage, but she ended up on his front steps after she got out of work instead. Sat there, bold as brass, waiting until she wasn’t, until she was all fluid shift from seated to standing and a decided march down the sidewalk. Lex moved like she had a purpose, right up until she stopped, stepped to the side and pulled her cell phone out, scrolled through the contacts list until her thumb paused over RC and the number popped up again. She was well on her way to memorizing it through simple exposure. We’ll have you stealing PIN numbers in no time, came the laughing lazy voice that could be expected to comment on such little irrelevancies lately--he was always laughing, the bastard, and if he preened at the insult then perhaps she had thought it with some backhanded fondness. Or perhaps his ego was just that healthy. It was a toss-up.
The forger would laugh at her for lingering over the phone number while ignoring the rest of the issue, would let her shadowbox his rolling sentences to shreds with her sharper, shorter phrases for their mutual amusement while adroitly ignoring the huge fucking non-thing going on right under his nose. Lex huffed out a breath, gave the phone a look that would have outright shattered a lesser electronic, and shoved it back into her bag before retracing her steps. It was a waste of time, this waiting, but it wasn’t like she had anywhere to be--and for all that she hated waiting, Lex was patient when there was reason to be. There was something about just calling out of the blue that sat wrong in her stomach, something about showing up at Russ’ job like she was any customer off the street that sat worse. She didn’t think about why, just sat back down on the steps, right of the center with enough room for people to get by if they needed to, legs stretched out straight so that the back heels of her Docs hit pavement.
Lex just waited for a few minutes, still except for the lazy rhythmic soothing movement of her hands as she twisted her rings, but that didn’t last. Couldn’t last, not even if she was the only person in her head. Certainly not with the easily bored Englishman humming tunelessly--she pulled her sketchbook out, the oversized bag’s only real reason for existence (if the bag had been bought to accommodate a sketchbook but had accumulated a lot of other shit since, if she could theoretically perhaps live out of it for a few days if she needed to, if it was heavier than it needed to be, then that was her fucking business), and flipped to a page at random. And that was how she waited the rest of the time, lower lip caught between her teeth as she wrinkled her nose critically at the paper, pencil flying over it whenever it wasn’t paused, poised just above the page. Lex was not the sort of artist who was regularly transported by her work, or who lost herself in the glorious act of creating--she had a picture in her head and could never quite get it down in reality. She didn’t project peace when she drew--even when a piece was going well, she had an of grudging anticipation.
The garage hadn’t been but half-full all day. Russ had gone in with a twitch to his temper, of sleeping half-sprawled across someone else’s bed just far enough away from the garage to be late, and he’d come out with the pleasant ache in his back of being bent double working the kinks out of a metallic knot of gears that wouldn’t shift, of staring up at the blackened workings from flat on his back on oily concrete and the sticky-slick slide of his fingers over greased metal, until his mood unwound with thick black bitter coffee and the quiet of a day too slow for too many of the guys to get up his ass. The office had been quiet, wasn’t Sam’s day on shift and he’d slid on off the bike and got to work with no visits from would-be brothers or mouthy little blonds and gradually slid into that half-state of self that was calm, the mechanical kind that was soothed by the purring tick of an engine into ease.
Weren’t much to get done otherwise, he’d wiped his hands off on a rag and said goodbye some to the guys taking over for the late afternoon sliding on into evening part of the shift and he’d gone home in clothes still dirty from the day before, the bike kicking up into the rich roar of a well-worked engine. He was a silhouette from the end of the street, the throbbing noise humming out of distance into noise, and he saw the figure sat sideways on his porch step long before he’d got close enough to see who the hell it was. Woman; Russ weren’t much for guessing, but he figured it was a woman and he figured she’d probably dropped by for one of those conversations that were awkward and ugly and cornering, backing him up against his own fucking front step to talk about feelings she hadn’t had the night she’d learnt the route to his place.
The bike pulled in at the scratched-up piece of asphalt next to the house where a backyard maybe ought to have been but wasn’t. By the time Russ swung a leg down, undid the helmet and kicked off the ignition, he was mad, quietly so and the line of his shoulders and back said as much, the thin line of his mouth and flinty-blue of his eyes all uncompromising lack of interest in what tided an angular blond onto his doorstep and what reason she thought she had for being there. She was hunched over something, and he didn’t give a damn what it would be; Russ said little when he was with women and mostly, he kept to lack of promises and thinly-veiled disinterest but some women always took it wrong.
“You waiting for something?” He addressed her from a distance, his voice hard and not encouraging. There was no recognition at all in that, nothing that said he placed her. It was deliberate, even if he’d remembered her phone number, Russ would have sounded like he didn’t.
It was a pretty dumb question, really. Eames didn’t have to say it, Lex didn’t have to say it--they both thought it, near enough in unison for actual dialogue to be redundant. Lex hadn’t turned to watch him ride up, caught up in the vagaries of a recalcitrant angle refusing to manifest itself properly, but the question pulled her attention back out into the ‘real’ world properly. No, she just hung out on strangers’ front steps for the sheer fucking joy of meeting new people, her very own little game of social Russian roulette (Eames thought that might be a little fun. Lex thought Eames was probably dropped as a child). She closed the sketchbook, slid it into the bag--she wasn’t making him wait on purpose, she just wanted to be able to give this her full attention. ‘This’ being--not Russ, but the turn that would put him in her field of view, the sweeping away of the hair that was screening out her surroundings, the moment of his appearance. Not that he wasn’t there, she knew he was.
She didn’t have any silly ideas about needing to underline that fact with her own two eyes--she was pretty sure China and the dark side of the moon were both real even if she’d never seen them (if pressed, she would have expressed more doubt about China--she could see the light side of the moon, after all, and so the reverse stood to reason, but she’d never managed to dig through trailer park grit to China when she was little so for all she really knew it was just a highly convincing fabrication. This was a bit Eames would have thrown in to mix up the story a little--Lex would have found it unnecessarily fanciful. Unnecessary. It wasn’t how things happened, after all: all that happened was that she slid her sketchbook into her bag and slid around to face Russ, one hand sweeping her hair back from her face so that they could see each other fully. Which Eames would have called its own sort of theatricality, no doubt).
“I hate waiting.” She didn’t plan it out--that was just what popped out of her mouth as she looked him over, what her brain threw out as a smokescreen sally while she examined him as if she might have to draw him from memory later, as if she was holding up a picture next to him and comparing a memory she thought she’d lost with a man she had just found (or Eames had found, four days ago--that wasn’t the important specific, she wasn’t young enough to think all the specifics were important anymore). It wasn’t petulant--the words were, but the tone was whitewashed neutral, whatever emotion she had meant to stick behind it lost somewhere in her throat. She’d stopped biting her lip as soon as she stopped drawing but there was a single line between her eyebrows that refused to smooth itself out, just as the hand that had tangled in her hair to draw it back refused to fall neatly away, insisted on tugging out a lock to fiddle with as she looked for touchpoints that might align this-Russ with that-Russ, this-Russ the stranger with the big brother she had let get as gone as he had to be (as gone as he’d chosen to be) until now.
Russ was not as forgetful as he chose to be; line the women up who’d passed through the bedroom in the last handful of months he’d been back in Vegas and they were an insignificant handful with little in common beyond a predisposition toward making bad decisions. Their faces were a familiarity, the kind of nod given over a drink in a bar when it was neither encouraging nor much beyond acknowledgment; I know you, I do not wish to know you anymore and those that interpreted it as an invitation were swiftly dissuaded. The woman sat on his porch step (damaged, the kind of broken he ought to be bothered about but it wasn’t his place so much as it was a bedroom loosely linked to a kitchen and a place to dump his clothes - the kind of differentiation applied by a man who wandered more than he stayed in one place) was familiar for one reason or another; she was angular, the bony knot of her collarbone he supposed he knew but it held no appeal - whoever she was, she’d been a night when he’d been wasted enough not to care and washing up on his doorstep after that meant only that she was worse at making decisions than he’d given her damn credit for.
“Shouldn’t have picked my fucking step, then,” Russ said with the curt disregard of someone very obviously uninterested in hearing or seeing or indeed acknowledging the very fact of waiting on a doorstep. He shifted, weight from one foot to the next and it was awkward and it looked it, the discomfort of awaiting the beginning of her female unburdening that would pain him a great deal until he could push on by her and he shoved his hands very deep into his jeans pockets and scowled at her. He was an outcrop against a fading, well-washed blue sky, all blond hair and tanned skin, denim so streaked with black, it looked almost artful rather than the worse side of filthy. Russ did not mind being pursued within a certain realm, but to his doorstep was quite another. He looked down, at the thin lines of her wrists and at the north-blue of her eyes, and his mouth twisted, like he’d tasted something sour.
“Move,” he said, and he picked a path over her, boots on steps and the rattle of keys at the doorframe with not the slightest knowledge of who she was or her name.
She did move. Stood up, one step down from where he was, bag slung across her back like she might actually mean to leave as instructed, make his life easier and take herself off to wherever she’d come from except that she didn’t, had no intention whatsoever of ever going back to their origins for longer than required to sign whatever paperwork needed to be signed and listen to whatever stories the visiting nurses felt had to be told. “Were you always this rude?” There was a laugh to it, a grin because yes, he had always been that rude--she had found her bearing, something to align her sight along so that the rest of him (large and alien and unwelcoming, not that she’d expected him to be small or familiar or fucking sweet, not that she’d have known him for her own big brother if he had been any of the above) could separate out into familiar and unfamiliar.
Lex had just needed that one toehold, that bit of familiar blunt growl, for the weird unexamined knot in her chest to uncurl and ease out the line in her forehead as it did. She stepped up to the step that he was on with one booted foot, raised herself up so that they were briefly at the same level before dropping back down to where she had been. “How tall did you end up, holy shit.” That height difference was rightandwrong, familiar but strange--Russ ought to be taller than her, of course, it was the way things were, but these proportions were off. It was just because they’d both grown--and she had expected it, but the fact was off kilter from the expectation of the fact, as such things so often are. Lex hadn’t expected to be so oddly pleased about finding Russ. It was throwing her off entirely.
He would have said ‘yes’, would have rounded out the syllable with something short and significantly vulgar, would have turned on the step and asked her if she didn’t remember; Russ when cornered, when backed up the way no man who has grown big enough and vile enough to snap back and show teeth when so put, was awful the way someone who cannot hit his way out of it, can be awful. But lasciviousness, even that designed to cut cruelly (Russ had learned long enough ago that when he wished to unveigl a woman of her innate belief that screwing her senseless invested the night with deeper meaning, he had only to be extremely crude to have her rethink it) dried up. The metallic jitter of the keys went silent; Russ went the kind of still that is readiness, preparation for being hit.
He didn’t have words. Didn’t have them at the best of times but they dried up on his tongue, curling into grit and bitterness blooming in the back of his mouth, acid and sour and at that same sick time, the swaying feeling of being held up very high and dropped until his stomach rolled and sank away from him. He didn’t have to be damn smart to put six and two together and make eight - she’d been eight, pigtails like paint brushes, scrubby-soft either side of her head and exactly that pleased-calculated sound to her voice like she’d done figured out the universe for a second and wanted to be given a gold star.
He swallowed; his mouth was desert-dry. Familiar; familiar enough to knot together thin wrists with bony knees, with too-bright blue eyes and laughter. How tall did you end up? and he’d spent half a year after the first time, too-short jeans around his ankles because he’d fucking grown again, too cheap to spend ten bucks in a thrift store before he’d gotten paid for the next job and then the next.
“Go away,” Russ said. It was soft, it was a threat. The keys rattled once again, the door opened. Russ didn’t turn around.
It was the clearest of dismissals, couldn’t have been plainer if he’d slammed the door in her face. The very fact of it should have hit far harder than it did--it was the sort of thing that she might have heard in her nightmares (might. Never had, of course, nightmares were for kids), except that this wasn’t a nightmare and she wasn’t paralyzed or mute. She was spun for a loop, sure, the dip in Russ’ stomach translating neatly to hers. It wasn’t the ideal outcome--but when the fuck was it ever? Lex grinned at Russ’ back, the completely alien stretch of muscle that was all grown up adult man who had carefully aimed that broad expanse at his family since the first time he said fuck all. What, had she thought she’d get a hug or some shit? The only family member she could clearly remember hugging was Ford (and if there were nebulous warm maybes where she was the smaller hugger, more hugged than hugging, then she wasn’t about to bring them to the front of her mind now when she needed to focus instead of skipping after half-daydreams), and it wasn’t like she was confusing the two of them. Russ hadn’t called.
As grins went, it wasn’t her warmest--and she wasn’t a woman given to ‘warm’ much anyway. It was a curling little thing, small and fierce, that matched thumbs that hooked themselves into belt loops and shoulders that squared themselves in hilariously inadequate imitation of the ones in front of them. “Nah.” He didn’t have to let her in, but he couldn’t toss her off the stoop--or he could, but then she’d sit on the sidewalk facing the house. She had five or six granola bars and a bottle of water. She was good until he had to go to work again, at least. “I’m not the one who does that.” The neutral was careful this time--she wasn’t picking a fight, but she wasn’t prettying anything up either. They didn’t do that. They weren’t pretty. They said go away and they said nah but they never said sorry for being here or I know you didn’t want this to happen.
He flinched. It wasn’t an outright movement, just the inevitable quiver of muscle at the back of the neck and along the line of his shoulders, even as if she’d got a good aim, fired like she knew how it would go. Second time in a goddamn month, someone came waltzing into his places (and now Russ called them his, was possessive in the feral, bared-teeth sense of defending safety rather than property, owned them as his own because to leave them otherwise left them bare for Ford and Lex to walk right on in and get comfortable) and called him out for forgotten sins. This time, though, the voice that lilted right on over his own barely-there demand, all thoughtful-stubborn the way he remembered something small and piping being, had all the subtlety of knife-to-gut.
He turned, the open door at his back; Russ stood and his shoulders and back were carefully edged up against all that space like he was guarding it. The look on his face was old stone, just as carefully blank and the blue eyes had gone hard but livid, like anger licking at the back of him, like fury barely held on in and arms wrapped tight around it like it was a friend. He looked her up and down, all silent taking it on in. Little Lex, with the sleepy-brown tan that said ‘running around outside’ all damn day because the trailer weren’t a place one got down to playing, and the saggy-thin tee-shirt for sleepwear because there was nothing clean. She was tall, good inch or three on - and at this, his throat knotted, even internal workings refused to put the world’s standard on the alcoholic who’d spat ‘em both out into the world and apparently, not got fucked enough to say ‘no’ to thirds. Blond; same blue eyes looking back at him with the solid refusal to fuck off and move. There was nothing feral to Lex, nothing that said she was starving, didn’t have a roof to live under or two bucks to tuck in the back of her pocket; Russ felt neither pity nor anything approaching reluctant desire to help. Ford had been stranger, Lex was simply readjusting the mental picture in his head by twenty years until he was confronted with his own damnable nightmare, stood in black boots on his doorstep with an interested expression and a guilt-trip held to his head like a gun.
“What do you want.” Measured; it sounded like a question that came with the answer ‘money’, or ‘a ride’, and it sounded like he didn’t want to know the answer, like he’d be calculating the way to wriggle on out of it before she’d finished asking it.
If there was one thing Lex had spent her whole damn life ensuring, it was that she always had answer to that question which expressed a distinct lack of dire necessity. Not to be without needs or wants--she wasn’t learned enough to argue whether that was even possible, didn’t have any awareness of any school of thought that might have argued such a state to be desirable and/or attainable. She would have looked askance at such a suggestion, pointed out that she wanted a heated house and needed to breath, pointed out that it wasn’t the drive of nothing in particular that drove her to coax a woman between the sheets or made her fill her cupboards with canned goods. But--Campbell-like in its stubborn inevitability, that but--she would also have bristled (Campbell-like) at the implication that there was anything that she could need that would require outside input (haughty, haughty, chilly little ice queen all spit and fire under cover of indifference).
But not for Russ, the quick upward quirk of the chin that would set her peering down her nose at even those taller than her. Not for Russ, the offended drawl of the island unto itself insulted. Russ got imperiousness, oh yes, got it in spades--Lex all elbows canting out like that could possibly make her look any larger than she was, foot setting itself as if to stamp, her very hair bristling indignation at as her irritation gave the formerly benign flyaways a reason to start and dart away from her head. But the iciness couldn’t quite bring itself about into being. The best she could manage was a curl of the lip. Remoteness was as unattainable now as it had been when she was four and he was the only person in the world who gave a shit about her scraped up knobbly knees. “What, I gotta want something?” If she was offended, it was only in the most dramatic sense of the word.
She rocked back on her heels, just slightly. It was the motion of someone far larger than she was, someone who had weight to throw and was throwing it back. If there was a punch to throw in any sense--literal, symbolic, metaphorical--she wasn’t going to be the asshole throwing it.
It hadn’t been a question loaded with the wariness of someone fitted to fill those wants (needs, yens, little things spotted in the grocery store put up close to the aisle where you paid, where little fingers could grab em and he’d spend half a fucking hour either trying to reason with a five year old or to finding room in the stretched-thin budget) but the adult need to put distance between he and she, to find a rationale to seeking him out (why the fuck now, why not ten years back or forward, putting her at twenty seven made her old enough to look) -- Russ hated the clench in his throat, the sick, slow, gone-away sense to his gut and he spat back that entire uncertainty with the visceral dislike of having past tide up on his doorstep.
“Don’t see why else you’d come,” Russ was careful, was steel-blue certainty that anything else was impossible. Little Lex, left behind to grow up right, wouldn’t be whaled on by would-be stepdads (or father figures for a night; Lou weren’t the marrying kind, even if she did wear rose-fucking-colored glasses about half the men she invited back on home). She’d turned out fine; tall, little thin but she’d run to thin even when she’d been half way up his knee and he’d known for certainty she was eating half a fucking packet of pasta a night. Blond. Russ made emotionless assessment, the same sweeping bland look given a customer with a particularly crappy car. She was fine. That long-ago closed off box opened, rifled briefly, shut once again.
He stood there, stood and waited. Pack up her stuff and go, sketchbook and undeniably Lex-self walking right back on out.
“Not my fault you’re slow as fuck.” Snappy, quick, a jab of a rejoinder with a little skip to the side to go along with it--oh, she was almost settled into the rhythm of it now, the back and forth of small child tagging along at big brother’s heels and rattling off a response, any response to every reply just to keep the conversation going. It could have made her feel gross, juvenile, ridiculous--but it didn’t, it was too comfortable, too easily adjusted upward to fit her increased vocabulary and the more awkward situation. That was the trick, hadn’t that always been the trick? Keep him talking and you’ve got his attention, and then at least he’s not ignoring you--the vague urgency of continuing engagement sat as easy on twenty-seven year old shoulders as it had on younger ones. Lex didn’t need Russ, not in the way she had when she was younger, quite possibly not in any way at all. That didn’t mean that she didn’t remember down in the bones of her communication skills how to keep the man talking if he was at all inclined toward anything but stony silence (that--also didn’t mean she didn’t want his attention, but that was neither here nor there, a Pandora’s box for opening up quietly on the walk back to her apartment, something to peek at and then slam shut where no one could see what the looking did to the set of her mouth).
She resettled her bag, slung across her back in just the way it was designed to fall, as if she were gearing up for a walk but also the only way she could wear it, and eyed him. She wasn’t so much expecting a response as inviting him to be mutually resigned with her to its inevitability.
No, Russ wasn’t going to fall into line. He didn’t know his own damn patterns, he didn’t know that if you pried at the edges enough for attention to flicker, he was caught on the line, self-same way he played other people like a hand of cards at a makeshift poker table. But he stared her down, Campbell-blue eyes stoic, and Campbell-silent, the stand-off as explicit as the smell of white-trash, of something decidedly seedy about relatives stepping up after twenty years. He didn’t want little sis shunting up to his doorstep, didn’t want to invite her in and make a cup of coffee, to pull apart the barely-there weft of a family he’d never much had. He liked Lex fine; as a memory, as a piece of the past he could face thinking about and he didn’t want her snarled up in the present he had now. It was, Russ thought, like coming face to face with a comic book hero as a kid, and finding out they pissed with their pants around their ankles, like anyone else.
“Go home,” he said, and the words felt familiar, flat and even, self-same ones he’d said to Ford not a fortnight before. He wondered, for a half-minute, whether Ford had ratted him out to his sister, and Russ was mad then, whether because he’d thought of Ford as family for a split half-second long enough to saddle him with family’s mean tricks, or because Lex was stood on his doorstop and he didn’t know how or the why, just that he’d been chased to ground. “Take your damn brother and go home,” he said, like he was spelling it as clear as Russ knew how, lining them up together, side by side and snapping a band around them to hold them together.
If Russ held a spot in her mind that was near-neatly bordered off from her everything now, her little reasonable facsimile of a life, if Russ could only be found in her mind when neurons worked weird associative magic that she on no account condoned or encouraged or admitted, then Ford was the near opposite, a bright spot in her brain scan where associations lined up to thread themselves through with the simple fact of him. Russ was past of the amputated variety, Ford was a distant orbiting body but a present, solid one. They were parallel and necessarily unrelated in Lex’s mind, separated by nothing less than everything. She had been Russ’ little sister once upon a time. Ford was her little brother. Each required a somewhat different--Lex, really. Was it possible for the same person to fit into both of those spaces, to be the middle child when there had never been a triad to hold together in the first place? Lex felt a little queasy, actually, as the world rearrranged itself rudely, as it was wont to do just as she got stupidly used to it being one particular way. Finding Russ was one way to set it on its head--but she had done that, had been the force that led to this conclusion, to standing on Russ’ doorstep wondering absently if this was how some people felt when they saw blood, like the floor was slowly pulling itself out from under them.
Hearing about Ford from another person was odd. They communicated via phone call, they met up occasionally when Ford was drifting through--they intersected in ways that precluded the involvement of other people, they were a little pocket universe unto themselves that existed alongside but not quite with other people. It should have been jarring, but there was a strange sort of symmetry to hearing about one brother from the other that Lex didn’t quite mind even as it turned her brain a little inside out. She was staring at Russ, though, while she processed--simply because she had been looking at him when she stopped paying attention to what was going on outside her head. He had clearly been hitting to injure, even if it turned out to be more of a mindfuck than a body blow, and the simple fact of the attempt rankled for some reason in a way his earlier surliness hadn’t.
She wasn’t hurt, and when she snapped back--with a blink, and a return of the stubborn set to her jaw as she tuned back in fully to the situation at hand--she wanted him to know that, that he hadn’t hurt her, that he hadn’t hit hard enough to knock her off his front steps. “Can’t do it, they’re both too fucking big to drag and too stubborn to go where they’re told.”
He read the facial expression for what it was, the truth of lashing blindly toward a weak spot he imagined was there; Russ did not think he had one himself, the one reserved for Lexie Campbell herself had grown over, become inured to general murmurings in its direction, but he assumed she did, he assumed Ford (with narrowed eyes, with the severe care taken when allowing himself to think anything of Ford at all) did. Russ did not wish to feel anything then but he was, to a degree, ashamed of himself and then he was angry that he was ashamed and the truth of that read like sullen displeasure in the whole experience, young woman on his doorstep like it was a place she had any right at all to be.
His lips thinned over; the blue of his eyes burned a little more strongly, as if holding on to all that muted anger could not be contained entirely and required some witness of some kind. He stared her down with the same balefulness given to all, as if she were a stranger and not a little girl he’d dragged up by the ends of her blond hair, and had running at his heels like some kind of duckling or puppy. She was not hurt; he could see that well enough and yet he’d been able to hurt Ford, enough to make him mad. If he could make her mad, perhaps she would leave. Russ’s thoughts boiled down to the sole desire to evict Lex from his doorstep (from his life would be preferable) before he became something other than a mythical figure, a shadow along with fairy-tales told over a bed-side and shoes that you outgrew in a summer.
“You’re an idiot,” he told her, and he put one hand out against the doorjam. It was a very small piece of motion but it was effective, it placed Russ himself as the blockage between himself and the door, “The hell are you coming here for?”
“You’re a paranoid fucker.” She shot it back easy as any tennis player returning a serve, a lob of a volley. Just to keep keep the game going, nothing that would gain a point. “You got rich somehow? Got a lot of people asking for handouts?” The glance she cast around was obvious, performance art at its finest, bright blue cutting to the left and then to the right on the lookout for beggars or borrowers who just failed to materialize on command.
Just because she had a motive didn’t mean that it wasn’t offensive that he assumed that she must. Being nominally correct didn’t validate his entire stance--like Lex hadn’t wanted to find him before, hadn’t held back out of a bizarre amalgamation of permissiveness and ferocious self-control only before Lou’s illness had tipped her hand, had given her an excuse, had provided concrete validation. Lex couldn’t look for Russ just because she wanted to any more than she could have made him stay, once upon a time. Want wasn’t anything like a good reason for fuck all, she knew that. He knew that too--or he’d grown further away from the surly sixteen year old she remembered than she’d thought. But that wasn’t the sort of conversation you could have on a front step without any alcohol involved, not in the least. It wasn’t the sort of conversation Lex could ever contemplate having outside her own head, the thoughts all jumbled and half-articulated.
She drew up to her full height, an exercise in pointlessness even if she hadn’t been standing a few steps below him--she was never going to be taller than Russ, not even in heels far higher than any her eminently practical wardrobe contained. She drew herself up nonetheless, and eyed him as if he was being ridiculous. Because--he was being ridiculous. “Does everyone who shows up at your door get the third degree?”
There were few enough reasons, as Russ knew them, for anyone to go to the trouble of locating anyone else. (This, he had learned, as the half-hopeful kid who had been on the look-out, sick-feeling fear as well as mingled nostalgia for a parent who maybe someday would come by with cops, sirens, pack up, head on home, the first three times he’d run away. Each time, it had been the threat of small dictator rather than adult presence that had dragged him back, reluctant kicking at dust all the way). Lex, blond and benign and pulling her face into an expression both strange due to the alien features and frighteningly familiar, by virtue of her nature as a sibling, precluded at least one. Russell, with the metallic bite of displeasure in the back of the mouth, stared at her blankly, full height bedamned, it came down the nose, along with matching bright blue skepticism.
“No,” he said, flatly. They didn’t show. People knew better, they didn’t come with hands out for something or other, they didn’t come at all. That was how he liked it, it was how things were. Life had organized itself (or been ordered to do so) along the lines of how Russ liked things. She’d fallen into an echo, a mimicry of some argument that felt familiar, the familiar of other people’s memories, of watching a movie of someone else’s memory and calling it your own. Russ edged his heels to the door frame, he glared at her rather than fall into it, into picking up the branch held out of an estranged family tree.
“People don’t come round here.” People. And he wanted very much then for Lex to be people and not she, not blond little girl grown up into obvious adult. It was, Russ decided, worse than Ford. Ford didn’t know anything; Ford had a name, that was all. He eyed her balefully. Lex had far more than a name. “Why the fuck are you in Vegas?”
Said like she was encroaching on his territory, like he’d marked the whole gross-glittering city down on a map as his. Said like there was only room for one Campbell within the city limits. Lex’s grin was thin and half-amused. “I live here.” Quiet-cool, like she had every right to camp out wherever she damn well pleased. Like he didn’t have any say in what she did at all or something, yeah, something just like that. She didn’t sneer it like Lou would have, didn’t leap forward to meet his growl with her own turbulence. No, she just came in close enough to reach out and touch and settled, set up camp. There weren’t any battering rams to accompany her siege. No, she was just going to wait it out, wait him out, like it was inevitable that things eventually go her way, like she was gravity and eventuality instead of just a scrap of memory risen up eerily grown encroaching in on a life that had crafted itself so as to give things like her little foothold.
But she didn’t need a foothold. She wasn’t breaking and entering, she was just casing the joint. All she required was proixmity. She was just sitting on his front step, not inviting herself anywhere the postman couldn’t have paused. “About five months, now.” She wasn’t really sure off the top of her head how long it had been--that was the kind of thing that didn’t stick in her head, absolutes that weren’t useful, things like age differences and birthdays and presidents. She had a fairly good memory for what she could use, for paydays and local tattoo artist’s names and the exact totals of her bills, but the broad watercolor niceties escaped her. She didn’t say it like a question, though. She couldn’t stand people who did that, said facts like they were inviting dispute. She said it like she was sure--and in a way she was. She’d made six rent payments, after all.
She lived here. He’d figured once (young, kind of silly, young enough for that kind of thinking to make sense until you sobered up after) that maybe he’d know them, all of them. He’d figured maybe he’d feel it, if she moved, if she was somewhere other than where he’d left her and then he’d grown up and realized she’d stay the damn same for always, far as he was concerned and maybe that was better, that was how it should be. Lex wouldn’t grow past skinny knees and pigtails, wouldn’t leave wide gray skies and red dirt and he wouldn’t stand in front of her and explain why the hell what he had in his hands was worth letting go of hers. Lived five damn months; Russ frowned - it felt familiar, felt right because five months was long enough to know. He felt light-headed, like growing up twenty years in a minute.
“This ain’t your city,” he said firmly. Stubbornly, like you could make proclamations and have them stick, that Vegas and the neon lights and the tired-sticky sense of waking up the morning after was all his, Ford scuttling in and out the back like a thief. Lex didn’t scuttle. He eyed her, the lines of her as clear and solid as ink on paper. Yeah, Lex was the sprawling kind. She wasn’t timid, she didn’t come up cringing like maybe he’d hit her (and maybe that look in Ford’s eyes, like he was used to getting beat on, maybe that still hung around, made itself real clear and familiar when Russ wasn’t thinking about much else), just long, cool blond leaned up against his door like she was laughing at him. Lexie did that; he remembered.
“What the hell happened?” And he felt himself crumble, just enough, just a little to ask - and the cold iron sweeping on in after it, blissful-blank; no, he didn’t care. Didn’t give a damn for double-wides out in the desert and he didn’t give a damn for the moppet left in it either, parceled up with her mom like they were tied together, umbilical-cord tight. He felt that blankness settle at home, no scowl, not a need. Just cold unfamiliarity.
He was right. It wasn’t her city. Lex didn’t lay claim to it, didn’t feel as if it had any particular hold on her either. She was just living in her apartment, just like she’d lived in trailer parks and tattoo parlor back rooms before. Places didn’t hold on to her. If they tried she shucked them like a duck shaking off rain. She saved her tenacity for other things, or she hadn’t met the right place yet, or maybe she just wasn’t built that way, put together missing the piece that would set down in one particular spot on earth and root deep. It wasn’t something she ever thought about. Eames did, of course--but then, Eames had a lot of time to be all his myriad degrees of homesick lately, and even more time for thinking (Eames wasn’t like Lex, was built just the opposite, could rattle around the whole wide world and never quite escape the feeling that he belonged elsewhere. Eames put down roots like any particularly affable invasive species might, and transplanted himself as readily. In Vegas he missed marshlands and brighter harsher deserts with equal severity).
Generally speaking, Eames tried to avoid deep thinking. It was like a milkshake for the lactose intolerant--he enjoyed it, but it was invariably a bad idea that he regretted in the long run. He admired Lex’s ability to react cleanly to things like Russell--he would have tried to spin the conversation, would have tried to before now, would have gone into it instinctively jockeying for leverage, for reestablishing connections. It would have been the wrong approach, and he would have known it--but it couldn’t be helped, it was just how he was built. There was something oddly zen about lurking in the background and watching Lex not do any of that. Yusuf would have laughed himself sick at the thought of Eames finding inaction appealing--but then, Yusuf laughed at him all the time anyway. It was why they got on.
Vegas wasn’t Lex’s, and wasn’t Eames’ either. Oh, he enjoyed it, he liked it well enough--but it was, strictly speaking, beneath him. There was a delicious sort of irony about being more or less trapped within the city limits--just as there was something a little hysterical about watching Lex’s brain turn over and scramble itself. What the hell hadn’t happened, fuck. Everything had happened--she skidded back on her personal timeline, the flip book of the past decade or so running double-time, triple-time. “Shit.” She drawled it, absent automatic, sheeeeeee drawn out like taffy. Buying time for an impossible answer, like there was a fucking sound bite that would sum it all up neat and sweet. But there wasn’t, of course. Couldn’t be. There'd been a whole story between then and now, and she was shit at breaking things down. "Just--I don't know, life happened." Which was it, really--life had kept rolling on after he was gone. One of her shoulders crooked up, then down. What else had he expected?
He didn’t notice the subtle slide, the byplay beneath the skin - the permeation of little sister (stood tall, stood blond, blandly cheerful on his doorstep like sunshine come home to roost) by older, taller, articulate sub-self, fictional, too - Campbells they were, Campbells stood toe to toe on a doorstep with the same flint-blue eyes fixed on one another but blood running through veins wasn’t knowing. Russ would have felt steadier with the eight year old left behind, all straggled pigtails and bare-foot stubborn. Grown woman, as implacable as Vegas sprawled out on the edge, Russ didn’t know her. He couldn’t catch ahold of the edges of her to pry them up and off, ditch all those snaggling roots that attempted to get comfortable, dig deep.
“Why’d it bring you here?” Solid. Unmoving. He wasn’t going a damn step nearer inside, wasn’t going to invite her (and all Lex brought in on her heels; she’d brought home shit before, half-dead skunk once, ‘look, it’s mine!’ all cheery-bright baby teeth showing and the place had been fucking unlivable beyond the back door) in, show off shabby lifestyle and furniture that hung around from when he’d moved in. There were no dreams to compare to, no way of saying ‘Vegas ain’t what you wanted’. She’d been eight. Lex had wanted to be a fireman and a princess and maybe a Carrington all at the same time. Vegas was close, too close to trailer parks and the bitch that lived in them, thin-stretched rope of memory, thin but tight, like you could choke yourself in it if you got too close.
Why now, Russ wanted to ask, why after Ford and why when Vegas was shared life and half-awake, memories from someone else crawling out of the shadows of the back of his head. Robin had been quiet since the crossover, but he wasn’t dead. But he didn’t, stood shoulders against the door, glared like he was getting ready to get hit.
It was the sort of question younger Lex would have wrinkled up her nose at, the kind of open-ended impossible thing that kept her suspicious and aloof as a cat which, having been once caught unawares by a jack in the box, treated closed cardboard boxes of a middling-small size with healthy avoidant respect just in case forevermore. She didn’t quite devolve back into infancy, however--there was merely a brief flare of the nostrils, an indefinable alteration to the sex of her jaw. “Came up once looking for you and liked it.” She said it cocksure, like people wandered into cities and fell a little in love and decided to stay all the time, like there hadn’t been an English voice and an undifferentiated longing to get her own self gone for once both in play. She answered the version of the question she wanted to, the altogether different ‘why are you here’ because Lex Campbell didn’t ascribe to any of that shit about life bringing people places. People lived life. Life was a passive motherfucker. It didn’t drive anything. She’d brought her own self to Vegas, and she’d decided to stay. Life would have been there still if she’d stayed home, if she’d gone to New York--life was like air. Fucking pointless to think about it--everyone breathed, and everyone lived until they died, but alive was just a state of being and life was just a matter of semantics.
As answers went it was painfully incomplete, left the why of the thing out there nebulous and drifting, but Lou didn’t belong here. Lou was back in the trailer park, steady on the road to dying but traveling painful and slow. Lex left her there as much as she could, pulled her out into daylight only when the home nurses or one of Lou’s few and far between friends-neighbors-acquaintances decided the woman’s daughter needed to hear about such and such (“Don’t that girl ever come home? Weren’t there sons?”). She’d started trying to track Russ and Ford down when it seemed like Lou was on the verge of death---that was different, had an urgency that this slow slog lacked. This was just a continuation of the cancerous life Russ had pointedly amputated himself from. Lex wouldn’t draw his attention to the shit she was still knee-deep in until there was something to tell him about it. A plot twist, a finality, something that was more than the same old detritus just older and dustier and more broke-down. She wasn’t in the business of reminding people of what they’d clearly forgot.
If this was amputation it had been ill-done. Russ stood with the door in his left hand, solidly half-open, half-closed and nary an invitation to that. Amputation had been walking out of a trailer-park and taking nothing with him but the clothes he wore - and being done, finally when he’d stood in a motel bathroom and shaken out that gritty-red dust, like ash after a fire, across the tiles and he’d walked away clean. Clean was no loose ends, was a momma he resolutely didn’t think about and called anything but. Clean wasn’t blond and it wasn’t blue eyed and it weren’t standing on the furthest step, level with his own nose. Had Lex been Ford, Russ would have been wary of closeness, of the healthy distance required to keep from a swing making its mark but he didn’t think Lex was going to hit him now and he didn’t think Lex was angry as Ford - which was no sense at all, given Lex had been a little girl with a smile when he’d walked on away and she wasn’t smiling right now. Ford hadn’t been anything at all.
“Fine,” Russ said. It patently wasn’t fine. There was nothing about it that was fine; Russ loathed any reminder of the trailer-park, had the sick fascination of an accident victim in revisiting it (there had been a girl, a girl who was nothing like The Girl but had had the same lazy-caramel cadence as the park itself and when she’d started talking like she knew, Russ had scrambled backward faster than he’d tailed on out of there) but the trailer park wasn’t flesh and blood on the doorstep. He said ‘fine’ the same way someone else might say ‘go and die’, with the curt cordiality of a stranger. Russ figured if he didn’t let Lex in - the doorway nor familiarity - she would go. Regardless of whether she liked Vegas or not, she would leave and there would be no more invasion. He was not a smart man but he was a stubborn one and it was the set of his jaw and the fold of his fingers over the doorframe. Russ Campbell was not going to give good grace and yield.
If there was a specific difference, a place in them that could be said to clearly demarcate one out as separate from the other, it was that Lex had learned how to play in the gray area between extremes. She had stayed and left all at once, she had achieved with the hand that held the tattoo gun steady while she fucked up just like her brothers had with the one that should have been writing out homework. She cut Lou out of active participation in her life and recognized the woman’s number when it popped up on speed dial, and she knew that not getting invited inside didn’t mean she was going to sidle right back on out of Russ’ life now that she’d made herself known again. Maybe she didn’t have a place in whatever he’d cobbled together for himself--that didn’t matter much. She’d slept in a back room for a year and change, stubborn chin daring anyone to say it out loud and make it real, something that had to be dealt with.
She’d moved right on into another woman’s trailer when she was barely sixteen with nothing but the clothes she’d been wearing and a smile. If Russ thought she needed an invitation, he was sure going to be disappointed. She didn’t need permission to do whatever the fuck she decided she was going to do any more than he did. They were alike that way, eyeing each other across the threshold. Neither one of them was going to give in--neither one of them was built that way, for graceful defeat. If she was going to lose, it’d be screaming--but if she could rewrite the terms, then better yet. Then maybe no one could get what they wanted (that was nothing new), but no one had to lose anything either. Which was just neater, easier--willful free-running penniless prodigals all, Campbell children fought their way uphill from the dingy valley that was Lou’s lack-of-gain and held on to whatever flotsam or jetsam or territory they decided was theirs on the way to away with white knuckles and sunk in teeth.
Clearly she wasn’t getting invited in. That could have mattered, if she let it. But she wouldn’t. It was that easy--reduce the terms of victory down to what you had, and nothing was a less even if calling it a win might be overgenerous. It wasn’t gambler-logic, wouldn’t win her any prizes or card games, but it had gotten her everywhere she’d gotten so far--which was, hey, Vegas. Not too shabby by any old terms, even if she was stuck firmly on the outside staring her destination down until she figured she’d pressed her luck enough and left with a wave that verged on jaunty (because she’d learned obnoxious from the best of the best, from a seventeen year old hot shot cockier than he was bright). It was honest cheer. There wasn’t anything fronted about Lex with Russ, never had been and wasn’t now. Why shouldn’t she be happy? She’d almost been where she wanted to be for a little while, and she had the lay of the land sussed out. That was good enough for now.