Dylan is armed with (jazzhands) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-24 18:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | dormouse, jabberwocky |
Who: Max & Dylan
What: A meeting of strategy and beer.
Where: Dylan's hotel room.
When: Recently, but mostly before Ian shenanigans.
Warnings: Sleepy cuddles.
It was the booze that made Max call for the cab.
Sober, she would have realized the conversation with McKendrick on the comm had gotten too deep, that she'd given too much away, but she had the better part of a six-pack in her and, despite the increasing lack of painkillers in her system, there was still enough there to make the good, old domestic brew hit harder than it normally would have. Which was the only way to explain the call to the cab company, and the subsequent quick shower and change of clothes. She wasn't drunk. She was relaxed, which was possibly more dangerous. Drunk, she could have excused the entire conversation she'd just had as the booze talking. Now, she was still sober enough to realize she was walking a fine line, one that she'd sworn she wasn't going to walk ever again.
No, she reminded herself. She was thirty, and she was the mother of a six year old, and she was an agent. She could handle McKendrick. This wouldn't turn into Thomas Brandon all over again. McKendrick didn't get involved with colleagues. Hadn't he said that? And he wanted to talk Mexico and the name sale. It would be fine.
And yet there was still something in her stomach that tasted like fear and nervousness, and no amount of spook bravado would make it go away. It wasn't even that she thought he'd be interested in anything more than this bantering friendship that ventured into something he called caring. No, it was that she knew how she got when she cared too much. She could handle any fight in the world, any physical danger, but emotional risk was another matter entirely.
The ride to the Bellagio was quiet, and she kept reminding herself not to think about that dream in the jungle.
She had to give his name at the concierge desk, because she hadn't asked him what room he was in, and the extra distance in the wheelchair from the desk and back to elevators just frazzled her nerves more. The first thing she was doing once she got in there, she decided, was swallow an entire beer to shut up whatever was going on her stomach. She would have preferred to show up on her own feet, but the distance was too long for her newly-lurching walk. Fuck Las Vegas and it's need for everything to be supersized.
Once she stopped the wheelchair at his door, she considered standing up before knocking, but she decided it would look like she was trying too hard. She was here to work. To work, and to drink beer, and the fact that she wanted to see him didn't factor in at all. She knocked high on the door, her hair damp and loose around her shoulders, and a pair of jeans indicating some level of new mobility, since the standard track pants were nowhere in sight. She wore a grey tank and no bra or makeup, and she looked booze-sleepy and, maybe, just a little nervous.
Yeah, there wasn't booze but there would be, eventually. With as much money as the Bellagio's rooms rang for on the till, the concierge generally ensured that their guests got anything their hearts and padded wallets desired. Be it transvestite strippers or Jamaican goat curry, the front desk could track it down and have it at one's door in under an hour. A welcome basket brimming with little, barbie sized bottles of whiskey offered the difficulty level of the hokey pokey by comparison. Actually placing the order for alcohol hadn't occurred to Dylan until a few moments before the knock sounded at the door, he'd been too busy battling his way through a labyrinthine layout of surveillance photos, Tijuana street maps, and three different laptops with three very different screens. One synced up to the Bellagio's oscillating security feed(a twenty-split screen flipping through over four hundred viewpoints), one queued up to a paused game of Starcraft, and one simply running lines of limelit code across a black screen).
He bounded off of the bed in bare feet at the sound of her knock, and when he pulled open the door, he looked like some version of himself that hadn't seen the light of day in a while. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he seemed energetic enough that he must have caught some rest somewhere. Or maybe the quick smile and light bounce on his heels had more to do with the two crumpled cans of energy drink resting on the window sill.
"Hey.." And there goes that grin. That suave bend and dimpled-pinch that could have been dangerous if he'd actually ever learned what to do with it. Her hair was wet, and Dylan didn't know why that made him wonder what it smelled like, because he didn't have to wonder. From a couple feet away, he could tell that it wasn't any of that lily of the valley salon stuff or anything bubblegum strawberry mousse, and not even anything in between. She always smelled like Max, and that was good. He liked the way she smelled. Consciously, he took a step back and pulled the door wide so that she could roll on through. "VIP lane, m'lady," he teased. God knows one of them had to.
Once she was inside, he kicked the door shut behind himself with a nudge from the bare arch of his foot. In drawstring sleep pants of deep gray and a red tee shirt with some screen print of the Millenium Falcon's blueprints, he really shouldn't have been expecting company. Unfortunately, they both probably knew by now that this was dressing up when it came to Dylan.
"Okay,so I'm thinking.." Hopping and bounding and caffeinated beyond reason, he leapt over a couple of strategically laid laptops to pick up a tablet that managed to get buried under his pillow at some point. "I'm thinking I need to go to Mexico." He started scrolling through screens, as if that wasn't a sudden statement that might require explanation.
She wasn't drunk enough not to be observant; a spook was always observant. A soldier was always observant, front line or trenches. She noticed things in slices. The computers. Starcraft. The circles beneath his eyes, and the fact that there was something nerd related on his t-shirt that she couldn't immediately identify. The fact that those were sleep pants, and that sleep pants hadn't ever felt like anything particularly important until that moment. The crumpled cans. The immediate and apparent lack of beer. And, lastly, that grin. That grin, which she stared at longer than was necessary, because she couldn't decide whether she hated the dimpled thing, or whether she just wanted to keep looking; she blamed it on the booze.
When he took the step back, she remembered to roll the wheels on the chair. Alright, so it took a few seconds longer than necessary, but their comm conversation had thrown her off, and the amount of beer and lack of sleep she had going on didn't help. Roll, and she was good with the chair now. It had taken six months, but it was second-nature these days. Walking still took a lot of work, but rolling didn't. And he was right that she didn't smell of anything artificial. Clean and cotton and the barest hint of sweet musk. Female. Nothing more than that. "M'Lady?" she asked, deadpan and a quirk of brown brow as she turned the chair to face him. "How much have you had to drink, agent?" she asked, just a bit of slur remaining in her voice, her grin an easy thing. Banter, that she was good at. It was scratching beneath the surface that terrified her. This she could do.
And then he was talking shop, and it was like a lightswitch. She rolled the chair over to the bed, and she reached for the tablet he was scrolling through. "Why?" she asked, and it was a testament to her inherent trust in his skills that there wasn't any condescension or skepticism in her tone. It was a straight, legitimate question. This was her assignment, but she'd had him loaned to her for a reason; he was good. She respected him. "There better be some beer along with that response," she added, close enough that she could see the individual threads on the shirt he wore. She had the momentary thought that he couldn't be less like Brandon if he tried; she turned her attention back to the screen.
When she asked him how much he'd had to drink, his only response was the brief shuttersnap of a smirk, the kind reserved for inside jokes and amusing thoughts left unsaid. He should have been asking her that, Max's slurs were thick like spun honey, fuzzy cotton balls soaked through with warm alcohol. But he didn't ask her that, and he didn't clue her in as to where his top secret smile had arisen from. He liked it when Max wasn't being so stubborn, which only tended to occur after a couple of beers as far as he could tell. The fact that he was currently beerless and therefore anticipating a bit of bristling energy from her probably had more to do with his smile than anything. It certainly had everything to do with the way he conveniently leaned away from Max as she reached for the tablet. Considering her chair, she couldn't reach as far as she needed to, and he wasn't ready for show and tell just yet. Or maybe he just liked having the upperhand with her for once in a very long while. That smile was difficult to decipher, written with sphinx code. "The beer is en route," he assured while kicking pajama'd legs out for a long stretch down the length of the bed.
Dylan turned pensive when she asked why he needed to go. "I know, if I'd planned this out better, I could have headed down for Spring Break, but.." The story was beginning to unravel, and he was rambling half heartedly while he swiped through whatever was showcased on the tablet's screen. But finally, finally, he leaned toward her, digging an elbow for purchase into the bedding that was almost too soft to be functional. On the screen was a basic map of the northern portion of Mexico, with squares for zooming in on key cities like Monterrey, Tijuana, and the capital. He brought Mexico City and its surrounding area up, where certain districts were highlighted brightly, some were a basic grey, and others were dim to the point of black. The inner city areas were predominantly gray, and the white tended to be the most concentrated around government buildings. For everything else, there was a whole lot of darkness. "This is showing you, basically, what kind of vision we've got down there. We could brighten the thing up by setting up some perimeters, canvassing, and having direct access to some of the grids." Not that he wanted to go down to Mexico. It wasn't the most strategic plan, and sure as hell not the safest.. but it seemed like the most immediate, and potentially the most effective.
He handed the tablet off to her with a grimace that marched across a sigh, he was tired of staring at the thing. "I don't know," he was tired of a lot of shit. Rubbing the heel of a hand across his eyes to alleviate their sleepless ache, he got to the point. "I should have had something solid by now, that's what I know. This shit should be over.. it should have been over months ago. But we're still here, still no fucking idea what's going on, just counting on somebody out there to make a mistake before we're too late."
Despite her demand for the beer, her sleep-lazy gaze said she probably didn't need anything else in her system to keep her mellow, and he was right about the booze helping to make her less stubborn. There were other ways to manage that, but they all came with bad memories of a failed relationship, and she hadn't played that vulnerability game in years. But she was about as chill as Max managed to get, and she just gave him a roll of her charcoal eyes when he tugged the tablet out of her reach. She could have gotten out of the chair right then, just to spite him, because she knew he had no idea that she'd made any kind of real progress with the whole walking thing. But the beer took the edge off enough that she didn't grab the tablet immediately. She let him stretch out instead, a look toward those long, sleep-pant clad legs that would have done any male soldier justice for blatant appreciation, and then her attention was on his face (and on the problem) again.
She listened. She was a better soldier than she was a spook, and she was a better spook than she was a handler, but she was good at listening. It was the first thing a soldier learned out there in the trenches; to listen. She didn't interrupt, and she only occasionally glanced at the shifting panorama on the tablet's screen. She was more interested in what he was saying, and in how he was saying it, than she was in the limited angles and views the tablet showed. "I was down there, McKendrick. I know it's pretty much dark." Not only was it dark, but the cartels were more dangerous than any organized crime family in the United States, even if that wasn't common knowledge. There was a distinct tone of I don't like it in her voice, and she took the tablet when he held it out and swiped through the screens he'd been looking at seconds earlier. She was as frustrated as he was, when it came right down to it. This mark kept moving on them, and she didn't like the implications of that. It meant the market for this name sale was big enough that the sellers were willing to lose a few months in order to creep the price, which meant they had really good names to sell.
She tossed the tablet on the mattress a second later, and she moved her chair until her knees were pressing against the bed. One hand reached out, strong and capable fingers snaking against his wrist and tugging it away from his face. "Hey, this isn't your fault," she said, because she knew he already blamed himself for not being on the original job in December. "We had them, but the Rogue spooked them. I thought I had them as far as Stockholm, but it was a decoy. You're right, they're probably somewhere deep in Mexico, where we can't see. She paused. "You're not going alone." An order.
They both had to know by now that Dylan didn't exactly operate in the strict column of things that Max liked. If that was the case, he surely would have been better company on the ride back from her botched assassination, but that wasn't him. As much as Dylan had been half-raised in the world of manners and manicures, he was still his parents' son, and with the inherent McKendrick sense of responsibility came a complete urge to disregard it. It was something he struggled with everyday, to be or not to be(the golden child). So while he could have strived to please her with nodding along and so much agreement, it.. just wasn't going to happen. Not tonight, and probably not ever.
He conceded to a sour smirk when she said it wasn't his fault, and Dylan caught the expression in the palm of his hand. In the same way that some could hold their jaw with soft(possibly scared) eyes, like letting go of the two day scruff would let the sad come out. It might not have been his fault, but there was an unshakeable sense of guilt that came with being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Finally, he released his frown, although only because the door knocked. The expression melted into a reluctant kind of smile when Dylan straightened, and his attention went in the direction of the knock. "Beer's here."
Then he was kicking away an already crumpled sheet and leaping past her on way to the door.
She realized that he hadn't actually agreed to anything, and she was about to call him on it, when that frown marred his features and guilt overtook him. Max didn't deal with emotions on a daily basis, not anymore, but she knew what they looked like, and she knew what they felt like. She had a six-year old who understood that mommy didn't like crying or talking about feelings, and she was better than she pretended at gauging feelings (both in herself and others). Still, it was always easier for her to be direct, and that expression only tripped her up for a moment, her gun-calloused fingers still on the wrist she'd tugged away from his face. "McKendrick-" she began, but then he was kicking away and going to get the door. She groaned; she didn't bother hiding it. She knew what an agent's guilt could be like. She'd never mourned anyone on this job, because she'd always worked alone, but she'd lost plenty of fellow soldiers before her transfer. She knew what that was like.
While he went to get the beer, she used the armrests of the chair to push herself to standing, and she climbed on the bed and grabbed the tablet he'd discarded. She still didn't like all those dark spots on the screen, and she actually groaned again before tossing the thing aside. She leaned down, damp hair falling along her arm, all the way to her wrist, as she undid one shoe, then the next. No way was she getting drunk and talking about their eventual deaths without being comfortable, not when he was padding around in pajama pants. Her jeans were loose enough to fall to the sharp jut of her hips as she sat back, and she held a hand out for a beer when he closed the door. "You're not going alone," she repeated.
Dylan wouldn't have likened the weight in his head to guilt, although it certainly was. He didn't even consciously liken it to regret(or any of the cousins - anguish, contrition, remorse, and worry). It was just the gnawing hindsight that came with being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which was a familiar experience from his brusque days as an officer. He kind of missed those days now, and it occurred to him in a wave of nostalgia as he went for the door. An unwelcome tide, but an inevitable one. Sometimes he actually missed being that naive, anything seemed possible.
The beer was domestic, labeled in paper gone metallic with colors likened to the flag, and Dylan twisted a cap off in his teeth before spitting it on the floor. The metal pinged off of the sturdy corner of a laptop as he crossed the minefield carpeting back to her. The bucket of ice that housed the rest of the extended family(bottles with labels that varied into other color schemes and higher gravities) came to rest on a nearby desk as Dylan handed off the freshly opened bottle to her before working on a second for himself. The desk wasn't wasn't quite close enough to the bed that he would have been able to simply reach over and claim more bottles as they went along, but all of those energy drinks had put a bit of wanderlust in his legs, and Dylan didn't mind the idea of having to get up again. Although Max had obviously taken his spot in the cushy haystack of pillows.
"You're not going to talk me out of going at all?" He grinned a little while taking a seat on the lofty edge of the mattress beside her legs. Then he shook his head, taking a long pull from the bottle. "I don't know," that confession was soft enough to be a lament. "I'm just.. thinking out loud."
She downed half off the proffered beer with the ease of someone who'd been popping off bottle caps long before the legal drinking age. She'd spent most of her teenage years in Germany and Russia, and no one cared about legal drinking ages in those places, not on bases and outposts. Her childhood had been mostly India, where things had been different, and she hadn't been old enough to drink, but Germany and Russia? They had taught her all about booze, and she'd never forgotten the lesson. She smacked her lips after tipping back half the bottle, already buzzed enough to feel a nice kick as soon as the hops swirled in her stomach. She took another sip as he sat down again, and she used the amber bottle to point at his face, getting close enough with it to almost touch cool glass to skin. "Would you let me?" she asked of talking him out of going, because come on. No one could talk her out of going anywhere, and she assumed all agents - FBI or CIA - were just as stubbornly fearless. Agents that peed themselves didn't last. They left in tears and urine stains, and Max had so wanted to be one of them at the age of 18, when her ROTC days ended and her future began, mapped out in indelible ink that she hadn't chosen.
"I'm not going to talk you out of it," she said, finishing off the bottle and leaning over with surprising ease to put it on the nightstand. There was mobility in that lean, and there was mobility when she scooted forward on the mattress, closer to him, a thigh over his legs and close enough so that he couldn't ignore what he was about to say. "I go with you. You take Corvus for field work. You don't go alone." And maybe they were doomed. It was dark on that tablet screen, and coming home wasn't going to be a given. But if there was a chance? If there was a chance, they had to. "Not taking the chance means the names getting out. The names getting out, means all of our families are at risk. We have to take the chance, if there is one." She paused, and she gave him a serious look, one that spoke of respect. "Is there a chance?"
"Are you asking me to lie to you?" The question came with steepled fingers and church house palms pointed under his chin. Because how could he promise her there was a chance? How could he promise her anything like that? Honestly, he'd been half expecting her to punch him in the face the moment he suggested it, and now it just felt like he was buying time. "I don't know what I'm thinking," he conceded to that with honesty. The words rode on wings of a sigh, although the exhausted expression turned to one of a disgruntled lack of amusement when she mentioned Corvus. "He's not an agent," plainly. Not a real one, and certainly not somebody that Dylan was willing to trust at his back. Was she fucking kidding? He'd read enough of that crossed-out, scratched up, obviously manufactured file to know it was a fabrication for employment. Only a certain kind of person had their life remade for government hire. He took a hard swig of his beer with the graduating case of irritation. Then, he made a point of repeating himself, "Not happening."
"I don't know, Max." He gave her honesty while motioning to the tablet she'd started ignoring. "It's damn near all black, and I don't know."
"I'm asking you to play the strategist for five minutes, hacker. I've walked into places on hunches. I want to know if it's a hunch, or if you think there's a chance. I don't need a guarantee, and I don't want a lie. I want a percentage," she said, strength and determination eclipsing the slur in her voice. She forgot, for the moment, that she hated her limp-lurch walk, and she pushed herself off the bed and paced tightly for a few minutes. It hurt like a bitch, but the pain helped her think, and she glanced back at the tablets as she moved. "Corvus will keep you alive if I tell him to, and that's all that matters right now, agent." When he admitted he didn't know, she stopped moving and reached for another beer, her steps less steady and more visibly difficult once she slowed down and let the adrenaline abate. She handed him the bottle to open as she sat, body bent over itself and her hands rubbing at her hips as she stretched her back until it cracked. "I can't do long distances yet, and I'm not letting you go down there without someone watching your back," she told him honestly, reaching out for the beer. "If you don't take Corvus, you risk my slowness. We don't have anyone else that's fully mobile." Except Tighe, but he was extraction, and she wanted him available for extraction.
Her shoulder bumped his, and she looked over at him. "Your choice."
Dylan wasn't sure if knowing that Corvus would keep him alive because Max told him to was comforting or not. A little of both, he decided while twisting the cap of her beer off. He used knuckles wrapped up in the hem of his shirt, and the fabric became dented with wrinkles and also gained a tiny hole by being implemented, but it hadn't been a very nice shirt to begin with. He started wondering about what kind of clothes he'd need to take to Mexico, and that's when he realized that he'd already decided what his answer was.
"Right now, my visibility is.. maybe fifteen percent, and that's being really generous.. but if I go down there, set up surveillance and hardware in the problem areas, and manage to not get kidnapped by a cartel.. we could be looking at sixty-five percent." Which didn't sound all that reassuring, but Dylan handed the beer off to Max as a consolation prize for a lousy situation.
When she bumped his shoulder, Dylan smiled into his own beer before nudging her right back. "Alright, you're the boss as far as I'm concerned. You want me to go with Jack Corvus, I'll go with him. Anything I should know about my new camping partner?"
She took the beer, and she downed half of it before stopping. She stole one of his tablets a second later, and she logged into Spotify, throwing him a look that said don't even think of mocking me. Thinking with music was easier, a habit that had come with 4 am laps around the neighborhood with earbuds in. Johnny Cash began crooning about walking the line, and she finished the other half of the beer in silence. There was no denying the buzz that had gone past a buzz, but she could still think. Drugs, medication and alcohol were some of the first interrogation tools that soldiers learned to become impervious to, and she'd learned her lessons well. Oh, she was drunk, but she could still reason around the cotton in her brain, especially now that her painkiller load was nearly nil.
When he said she was the boss, she gave him a look that was fondly exasperated. "McKendrick, no one taught you how to take an order without it sounding like you were letting your commanding officer give it, did they?" she asked. As for Corvus? "He'll follow orders. You might even like him," she said because, honestly, outside of Brandon? Everyone did. Which led her right back to the problem of percentages, which she'd ignored for Johnny and the beer. "That percentage still sucks," she finally agreed, "but it's all we have. I'll get the paperwork taken care of. We leave in a week, and they can't see us coming. We fucked them over on those weapons," she reminded him, sounding none to pleased about what she'd thought was a bad judgement call in the first place.
As for the nudge to her shoulder, she glanced over at the contact, then up at his face. Her dark eyes were sleepily unfocused, and she unthinkingly impossibly long fingers to brush a strand of hair away from his temple with gun-calloused fingertips.
Oh, she got a look. Max got a long look when she synced up some music, and Dylan didn't say a word. He didn't really need to, considering how evident it was that he was suppressing a grin. Lips pressed into a thin line, and when that line began to break, he disguised the exposure by the ridge-swirl lip of his bottle. Still wired halfway to the moon on caffeine and guarana, getting drunk wasn't appealing enough to pursue with an avid passion. The alcohol functioned as a means of decompression after drinking the energy drink equivalent of shock treatment. The fact that she chose Johnny Cash made him snort against the bottle for a moment, and that's as close as he got to making a comment about her music choices. He liked the predictability of that, because Max was a woman that was usually so impossible to read. In this, he knew her. He could anticipate her in little ways like that, and it made him feel good to mentally catalog those small details about her. Not just because it was Max and he wanted to know her, but because she was who she was. Spies all had secrets, and it was Dylan's inherent need to draw that curtain back whenever he could.
He nodded agreeably when she commented on the percentage still being worthless.. but anything was better than what they were working with now. "We're not exactly going to blend in," he muttered into his drink. Jack was a borrowed liaison with no formal training and Max was in a wheelchair half of the time, those things greatly reduced their options for cover stories.
Dylan glanced over when she did, meeting her eyes while he defaulted with an encouraging smile. It was important to be confident in the mission even if she was too drunk to appreciate it. His everglade eyes followed the movement of her hand when she reached up to push some of his hair back. He wasn't sure if the touch was romantic or motherly, and he belatedly remember to swallow the mouthful of beer he'd been holding on his tongue, somehow momentarily frozen by her touch. "I know," he rolled his eyes, "I need a haircut.. but my parents were hippies, I have to live on the wild side every now and then."
"Don't make me take you down, agent," she said when he badly hid that grin, but her own expression was light, something that bordered on relaxed and didn't harbor any tension. The song changed to something with more twang, Alan Jackson singing about his next thirty years, and how he was going to do things right this time, and Max tried to decide whether another beer would knock her out. The truth was, she was already most of the way there. She'd gone past the point of caring, and that was the danger line for her. Oh, she wasn't going to jump him; she'd already tried that. But the booze and tiredness made her softer, easier, and she tried to hide that part of herself from people whenever she could manage it. Maybe it was their conversation on the comms, the one about dreams and caring, but her walls weren't securely in place, and she was buzzed enough not to feel the prick of discomfort that came with that. She remembered Daniels' suggestion that she ask him what he wanted, and she discounted the suggestion entirely.
"I'll blend in. I don't know about you two," she said, smirk and certainty. Her olive skin and long, straight, dark hair made Mexico a much easier fit for her than for him. As for the wheelchair? "And I won't be taking the chair," she said, a defiant tip of chin and an equally defiant flare of nostrils. It would be pushing, and it was more than a little bit of a challenge, but she'd already decided, and there wasn't any hope of changing her mind once she'd gotten something into her head. A week. She could be ready in a week. She might need a cane, but she wouldn't be taking the chair.
She pulled her hand back when he rolled his eyes, and she watched that hard swallow of mouth-held beer longer than she had any right to. She groaned, and she flopped back onto the bed, hipbones pronounced between denim and grey, and her hands rubbing at her face as something slow and mournful played. She rubbed her eyes until she was seeing double, a foot on the mattress and her knee bent upward. "I don't know anything about your parents, and I always assumed the hippie thing was you joking. What are- were they like?" she asked, and maybe it was how close Father's Day was in the rear view, maybe it was how tired she was, but the question was genuine, and it sounded genuine.
Dylan could have made a couple more jokes about Mexico and fitting in, but he didn't feel like sarcasm anymore when she made the official statement on retiring her chair. He wanted to ask her if that was a good idea, to push herself like that.. but he was pretty sure he'd know what she'd say to that. He was also fairly certain that she'd just make a point to go further than she had to if he questioned her on it, so he just watched her in silence as she reclined back on the tousled sheets. By now he knew that with Max it was all about proving a point to herself, and not necessarily anyone else. Nothing was going to change her mind overnight, and distantly he was aware of the fact that it wasn't his place to get inquisitive on her decision-making. The plans had just come about tonight, there was still time for a lot of things to change. The case could be over tomorrow if the right intel came in.
Dylan wiggled down alongside her, keeping a pillow between his shoulderblades so that he was at enough of a gentle incline to not pour beer all over himself when he went to take a sip from the bottle. "You wouldn't like them," he said easily when she asked about his parents. Although his eyebrows screwed together a moment later as he really thought about that. "Or.. maybe you would." By that, he really meant that he thought they would like her. She was even more headstrong than they were.
"They're.." Dylan hesitated for a moment while he tried to find the words that would explain it to her. He wasn't sure that he knew how to describe his parents to people who didn't actually know his parents. Surprisingly, people who knew his parents still needed explanations on their behavior quite often. He took another sip before starting. "They're artists, respectively." Dylan hadn't been home in years, and he only now realized that with everything going on, he hadn't even thought to call his mother on Mother's Day. He was probably written out of the will by now, although it wouldn't have been the first time. He took another sip, and refused to sigh.
It was a good thing, him not arguing about the chair. She would have had the fight with him, if he'd brought it up. He might have even gotten her to see some reason. But she wasn't careless, not as a rule, not on the job. Painkiller-driven personal vendettas against arsonists aside, she knew her limits. Tijuana wasn't the Bellagio. She'd been there, and it was tight and narrow, and anything that required long distances would need to be undertaken in a vehicle. The uneven dirt and roads made the chair impractical, and she'd spent the past six months getting back onto her feet. She would hurt, and it would be hard, but she'd get the job done. She was a soldier, when it was all said and done; success was more important than a little pain. She almost reassured him she'd take it easy, whenever possible, because she was surprised at his lack of argument. She kept it to herself, in the end.
Instead, she watched as he wiggled down onto the mattress, and she turned onto her side with a grimace and wince, the normal reaction to bearing weight on her hip. She propped her head up on her hand, and she watched him manage the bottle. She stole that bottle a second later, took her own swig, and gave it back. "For a straightforward guy, you are so fucking hard to understand," she said, booze candid. She was sure he'd just explained his parents to her, but she still didn't get it, and yet there hadn't been big words or convoluted examples. "Artists," she added, because she couldn't actually imagine him coming from creative people. "I was about to say that didn't fit, but maybe it does," she said thoughtfully. "You're patient. That sounds like something artists would be."
She let her cheek rest on a corner of pillow that she tugged out from beneath his head, and she bent one knee to press unintentionally against the outside of his leg. Her eyes closed with a trusting sigh. "The General is your typical military man. My mother didn't have any idea what to do with a five year old that could disassemble and reassemble a firearm in under a minute, so she ignored me and concentrated on Ella. Anyway, the General took me with him when he was stationed from five on, so I wasn't home much. Do you have any siblings?"
"Patient," he snorted into his beer when she passed it back. Blindly, he reached for another on the side table and tucked it into the crook of his arm so that he could open it when they were done with the current one. "When I was nine, I told my father that I didn't need to learn another language because we lived in America. Two months later, he left me in the Charles de Gaulle airport and left it up to me to communicate my way back to the hotel. The cab driver ended up speaking English, but the lesson was learned." There were a lot of stories to tell about his parents, but he didn't know where to start. In the end, he decided they all boiled down to one theme anyway. "I'm nothing like my parents," he murmured while taking another swig and passing the last quarter of it back to her.
"Ella?" He was aware that the name struck a chord of deep familiarity with him, although Dylan did not immediately connect it to his dream. "And no, I was an only child thankfully. My parents were.. very good at throwing parties, but knew nothing about having kids."
She made a sound that was entirely unimpressed, judgemental and disapproving. "I would never leave my daughter in an airport. That was dangerous and calloused," she said, her motherly instincts rearing their head. She knew what scared kids were like, and she couldn't imagine doing that to her child just to teach a lesson. She might have taken months to figure out parenting, but she could be as fierce as a lioness about Amanda's safety. Right then, she decided she didn't like his parents, and the conviction was one that would be hard to shake. "The General would have done the same thing," she admitted a second later, after re-stealing his beer and opening her eyes just briefly enough to take another swig. "But I never would have told him I didn't want to learn another language." It was a telling confession. For all that she was stubborn now, she'd done anything her father wanted as a child, because pleasing him had been the unattainable dream. She downed the last quarter of the beer, and she handed the bottle back before claiming his bicep as an addition to her pilfered pillow corner.
"Ella. My sister. When I was little, I thought mom liked her better because she was blonde, like her. I take after the General, dark skin and hair. Ella's the picture of mom, blonde and this Louisiana accent that doesn't quit. We don't get along." She tried to imagine him in a party setting, and she had a hard time making the image work for her. "Did you hang out near the wall, or did you spike the punch?" she asked. She didn't see him as the playboy socialite, not with all those morals oozing out of his pores.
"Believe me, the punch was plenty spiked without my influence, and with stuff a lot more exotic than anything I could have gotten my hands on." Dylan hadn't bothered with defending the airport incident because it was the headline of lousy parenting, but he also knew that his father didn't operate in the same realm of responsibility(and possibilities) that most people did. Dylan's childhood made it easy to cast judgement on his parents, but he didn't feel like there was a lot of point in that now. The past was the past, and his father wasn't ever going to change.
Dylan dropped the empty bottle off the side of the bed when Max handed it back over, and despite the energy drinks he'd demolished earlier, he felt like he could have closed his eyes for awhile when she took his arm as a pillow. He twisted the soft corner of a pillowcase between his fingers and the movement made muscle cord up in his arm briefly. He didn't think it would disturb her though, and it let some of the energy out. Dylan remained quiet when she described Ella, the mention of blonde hair and an accent making it undeniable that he'd dreamed about the girl, although in a very different way than he'd dreamt about the woman beside him. He suddenly felt awkward, and was secretly glad that Max was likely, and hopefully, too buzzed to notice any changes in his body language.
"Blonde hair is overrated," he finally assured her. "And highlights are damaging to the follicle.. so.."
She wondered if the LSD comment he'd made about his mother was literal, which she hadn't thought it was at the time. She wondered, in that sleep-drunk way, how he ended up being so annoyingly moral, if he was raised in that environment. Maybe it explained why she wasn't a good strategist, because she couldn't see how one thing led to another, not in this case, and especially not drunk like she was. As it was, she didn't even hear the empty bottle hit the ground, and she only vaguely felt the way the muscle beneath her cheek corded and tensed, acknowledging it with a sound that was unthinkingly approving of the strength that came with the movement. His embarrassment, and the changes to his body that came with it, were beyond her notice, and all she did was shift closer, seeking warmth and more comfort. It was a trusting gesture, the way she rolled more fully on her side and pressed her belly against his hip, and she sighed, warm and soft, against the side of his neck as her hand came to rest on his stomach, long, gun-roughened fingers bunching the fabric in an unthinking way
"It's prettier," she said, sleepy-murmur thick, of blonde hair, with a husky laugh that faded off into nothing but more breath against his neck. "You're such a dork," she said, fond and yawn-whispered, and she rolled her hips forward and sighed with pleasure at the solid heat he offered. "Always wanted to be blonde," she added, a vulnerability that would never come without much teeth pulling in the waking, sober world. But she was so far from that now, and she exhaled as her breathing went more even, more sleep-steady.
"Mhm," was all he said, as close to an agreement as he usually came with her. When Max yawned with feline stretches of muscle along the side of his body, Dylan glanced over to look at her. Her eyes were closed, and he watched her breathing for that initial minute, until it deepened into a sleepy cavern of deep breaths and little, dreamcasted sounds. He sighed, glancing around for some fulcrum to untwist himself from her body so that he could get back to work without disturbing her.
Surely he was wide awake, there was no reason his body should have been conditioned to fall asleep before the sun came up. He reached for another beer and worked the cap off with the edge of Max's shirt as she slept. There was no way he could reach a laptop from this position, and so he resigned himself to having a drink. Then, once he'd finished the beer, he anticipated that Max would be in a deep enough sleep that he could move without disturbing her.
He took a sip and flicked the cap across the room, grinning in secret victory when the cap hit a specific bullseye of flowers and fleur de lis that the wallpaper patterned itself after. Halfway through the beer, he closed his eyes, mentally mapping all of the things that he wanted to accomplish tonight. A minute later, the bottle tilted out of his fingers and poured drowsily into the carpet. His cheek dropped onto Max's temple, half nuzzled in her damp hair until morning.