Who: Drake and Cerise What: A friendly chat. Where: Some parking lot. When: Recently, before Sid rolls into town. Warnings/Rating: Little bit of hostility. And swears.
Finding Drake wasn't a problem. She'd worked and slept beside his brother for years, and the Wallace men had similar patterns encrypted in their very blood, whether they accepted it or not. Despite her inevitable success, this was not a detail she wanted to be assigned to. Her dislike for Drake was overshadowed only by his hatred for her. Not that she could really blame him, which made it so much worse. Cerise knew she was headfucked, and her perspective on other people was always a little skewed.. but if there was one thing she understood, it was all the reasons that somebody might harbor resentment toward her. She hated herself enough that imagining all of the reasons that somebody else might was fucking easy. She'd turned Drake's brother onto hard drugs, more than once. She'd betrayed his brother, more than once. Not to mention that she was currently living with the man responsible for the epic pruning of his family tree.
But things were different now than they had been while in Seattle. She was different. Still a little strung out, and definitely not as physical as she'd been back then, but she also wasn't as blind. Cerise hated Ian too. Just as much as she loved him, really -- and if that wasn't the title of her own personal sitcom, she didn't know what was. It was a familiar sensation, to despise or be despised by the people she cared about. She didn't care about Drake, so being hated by him was easy by comparison when she thought about Jack.
God, she didn't want to think about Jack. Not now.
The only reason she was even doing this was as a favor to Drake, as unlikely as it seemed. He needed to sleep with one eye open if he didn't want to wake up in a bed of fire. She might not have liked the guy, but she didn't want to see him destroyed any further by the monster they shared. She wished that everybody would just leave Ian alone instead of continuously painting targets on their backs. But nobody ever learned anything the easy way. Truthfully, she didn't want to ever deny Ian something that he specifically requested from her, but she could have pretended to have been worse at this than she actually was. Ian probably wouldn't have bought that, though. Some things were just like riding a bike, and finding people who didn't want to be found was just one of those things.
Not that Drake made it hard. It seemed to her that the man was too recklessly confident to ever bother with hiding appropriately. Although it made sense in the end because she knew that the only reason Drake had come to Las Vegas was for war with Ian. Nobody was going to believe that he stopped in town for a David Copperfield magic show, so why pretend anything less? Honestly, she was a little surprised(and disappointed) that Drake hadn't made his move yet. Maybe he wasn't as reckless as she remembered.
The sun was still up when she followed him to a sparsely populated parking lot. There was a gas station on one corner and a hardware store on the other, with a bar and a couple of sandwich places in between. She didn't pay attention to which direction he walked, because she wasn't following him inside. This inevitable reunion was going to take place under open desert sky, which was turning orange on one side and deep purple on the other. Climbing onto the trunk of his car, she reclined back to watch the sunset and wait. She was a little bit older, but not much had changed aside from that. She still didn't look quite healthy, although the desert heat had given her more freckles than pallor. She was still a little too skinny, khaki shorts and hatchet hips. Her hair was long and dark, curls weighed down by a recent shower with no sign that she'd ever learned how to do anything more complicated than vaguely brush it. She had an arm cast across her eyes with a bruise on the elbow that matched the greenish, aged bruises on her knees. Those knees were up and bent, distressed reeboks planted on the warm steel of his trunk, just like her back was. She seemed to be resting, possibly napping, but obviously waiting for him to return.
Nine times out of ten, Drake’s destination would have been the bar.
He preferred to drink on his own, store-bought booze and the seclusion of his shitty motel room, but sometimes he’d give into the old, dusty nostalgia and find some dive to haunt, complete with tacky carpeting, peeling chairs, and a jukebox that went out of style decades ago. He’d smoke, because in places like that no one gave a shit, and he’d nurse the same drink for hours, and then he’d head home and practically drown himself in alcohol just so he could sleep for more than a couple hours. Pills had stopped working a while ago, and he hadn’t wanted to end up addicted to some prescription shit anyway. No, booze and cigarettes, those were his vices. No less harmful, but after what Sid had gone through he’d stayed the fuck away from drugs, didn’t matter if it was meth or heroin or pretty little pills a forged doctor’s note could cough up. Blacking out didn’t always help the nightmares that had plagued him ever since the fire that brought him here, but nothing in the goddamn world could fix those and he wasn’t wasting time on bullshit therapy. If Sid were around, or Zari, maybe they’d push, but they were far, far away, living their lives, and he hadn’t had any real contact with either in years. They were better off that way, especially Sid; he didn’t need his fucked up older brother dragging him back down again. He’d never do that to the one family member he had left. He’d do what his dad never could; let him go, let him live a normal life, and take care of shit himself in order to protect him.
Now, he didn’t actually drink in public; since finding out Ian was alive and kicking, he didn’t trust a damn thing. He’d still pass the time, maybe see what he could dig up, but inebriation happened behind closed doors. On this particular occasion, however, he’d gone into the hardware store. Tagging along on that little rescue mission had really messed with him; being so close to Ian and yet unable to kill him was near unbearable. He’d tried to get in, of course, but the bastard had chosen a rich, gated community with guards and fences and he hadn’t been able to fight past the obstacles. That wasn’t enough to deter him, though. No, he thought a lot about his next move, about digging up Ian’s network and following his web. He’d known his system back in Seattle, and he’d spent the past few days doing the same here in Vegas. He plotted, and he thought; he thought about Iris, thought about other property Ian owned, because he sure as hell wasn’t conducting illegal activity in Summerlin, and he thought about Cerise. Once, maybe, he would have been above using live people as bait, but not anymore. Once, when he was just a kid, he’d stood and watched his house burn, knowing that his mother burned with it. That had fractured him, like a porcelain little figure falling off a shelf and breaking. He’d been put back together, with only a fine line of glue and a couple hairline cracks left behind. Then, watching the little boy he’d loved more than himself be slaughtered before his eyes had broken him again, the damage more severe this time, more difficult to hide. But, again, he’d been put back together, and it happened again, when he held his father and watched his life bleed out onto the ground he kneeled upon. In the end, it was Rome’s death that had broken him for the last time. Rome, the little brother who’d followed him loyally, who’d trusted him, who’d been the one thing he thought he’d gotten right. Now, he was an ugly mess of cracks and fractures, pieces missing, sloppily glued back together.
Maybe he’d always been a little crazy, but he was a different kind of animal now. Feral and reckless, yes, but with a sort of manic clarity that still allowed him to think, to plan, to act with an insane brand of logic that made everything sharp and hyper-bright in his mind. No, he wasn’t as careful as he’d once been; otherwise, Cerise would have had a hell of a time tracking him down. But he wasn’t trying to hide. He didn’t give a shit about lurking in the shadows, not until it was time. See, Ian knew he was coming. He knew he was out there. But what he didn’t know, and wouldn’t know, was when and how.
Drake exited the hardware store with a bag, but it wasn’t transparent and thus bystanders (not that there were many) would have been unable to make out its contents. Even in the desert heat, he wore dirty, torn jeans and boots that resembled a blue-collar worker’s, a faded shirt, and a jacket that was likely faux-leather and had seen better days overtop. Since his car was one of few in the sparsely populated lot, it wasn’t difficult to spot, and he saw that his vehicle had an unwanted addition from feet away. His steps slowed, but he didn’t stop; the gun he always carried on him (unlicensed, but fuck that) a heady safety measure. Besides, if Ian had sent someone to kill him, he doubted they’d be waiting for him on the trunk of his goddamn car. Once he got close enough, he saw it was a woman; a few more steps, and familiarity crept in. There were some faces he never forgot, and Cerise’s was one of them, even with her arm half-covering her face. Maybe, in another life, he and Cerise might shared drinks in a bar or crossed paths in a diner, but in this life Drake didn’t forgive or forget, and there was no love lost between him and the woman sprawled out on his car. She might have been as much a victim as anyone else, but she’d fucked up Sid too badly for him to overcome his animosity. In short, he didn’t like her, didn’t trust her, and her presence made him immediately suspicious of her intentions. Somehow, he doubted she was here to catch up.
“Y’know, if you wanted to say hi, you could’ve just called, Cerise.” It was a scornful greeting, with some derision thrown in for good measure, as if the way he glared down at her wasn’t indicative enough of how little time had changed his opinion of her.
She didn't move her arm at first, and she didn't even open her eyes when she spoke, "I might have if I wasn't so sure you'd hang up on my ass the first chance you got." Then her freckled arm dropped, and she tilted her dark head to regard him. Her auburn curls were beginning to frizz in the dry heat. The years hadn't been hard on her physically, if one discounted all of the scars. She'd never smoked and she rarely drank unless she was with Kellan, so maybe the hard drugs hadn't been so rough on her. She hadn't talked to Kellan in what felt like months, but that was for the best with everything going on now. He'd undoubtedly turn up dead sooner rather than later if she did. Cerise didn't know a whole lot of people that were still alive, so she tried to keep the list long when she could. Slowly, and with movements entirely non threatening, she sat up and dropped her legs off the side of his car with an idle swing.
"Its been a long time," she said. Cerise lifted a hand to shield her eyes faintly from the goldenrod glare of a setting sun, and her eyes searched his face. Despite herself, she was mapping out any likenesses between him and the brother she'd once loved, but she lowered her hand a moment later while abandoning the experiment. Some people were best forgotten.
"Why are you here?" She sounded tired when she asked the question, like she already knew the answer. Like she'd seen this particular movie so many times already she was hoping with both fingers crossed for a new ending.
Drake cocked his head to the side and grinned. “Aw, you know me so well.” Because, in all honesty, he would have hung up on her ass as soon as he found out it was her. Back in Seattle, he’d only tolerated Cerise for his brother. Sid had loved her, for some unknown fucking reason, even after all the bullshit she’d put him through, and so loyalty to his flesh and blood had prevailed. But Sid wasn’t here, and he no longer had any obligation to play nice. As far as he knew, she was shacked up all nice and pretty with Ian. That left her with only one of two options: get the fuck out of his way when the time came, or go down with the bastard. Frankly, he didn’t care either way.
“Not long enough,” he remarked disdainfully. During the duration of this conversation, however long that might be, he had absolutely no intention of mentioning Sid, regardless of Jack’s little suggestion.”I’m here to get into my damn car and drive home.” The motel wasn’t home, not by a longshot, but he wasn’t giving her specifics and ‘home’ was the only word vague enough that came to mind. He knew damn well that wasn’t what she’d meant, but he wasn’t in the mood to give her a straight answer right off the bat. “And anyway, I should be asking you the same fucking question. You’re on my car. What, did daddy send you to see if you could get on my good side?” He had no real understanding of the relationship that existed between Ian and Cerise, aside from the fact that it was supremely fucked up, but he didn’t doubt that she’d know who he was referring to.
Cerise had never hated Drake, he'd always had such a well-founded argument for hating her, after all. But for a moment, she did. His words were sarcastic, and the grin was too.. but.. there was a hint of his brother ghosting in the edges of that smile and it felt like a spear into some unnecessary organ that evolution should have taken away years ago. Her green eyes watched his mouth, and there was a half a second where they nearly watered, but then the fondness tightened into a stern glare. "You have a good side?" The question rode mocking derision as Cerise planted her palms into the desert warmed metal of his car's frame and pushed forward, skinny hips sliding off and shoes planting in chipped asphalt below.
Although before they could get into another of their notorious spitting matches, she shook her head. "Yeah, he sent me.. but only to follow you, not to talk to you." This chat was on her time, and she wanted to get it done before another one of Lucian's hounds, masquerading as men, came sniffing around. Cerise looked so fucking tired, even if she looked sober. Drake must have only seen her clean a couple of times, and he probably didn't know the difference between long clean and new clean.. but it didn't take a genius, which was a plus for him. Still, when she lifted her eyes to him, the green was clear enough to haunt a gas chamber. Coherent, accusatory, and just a little hurt. "I want to know what fucking happened in Seattle.. I want to know why he's still alive."
Her voice fractured at the end, and Cerise squeezed her eyes shut because fury was better. She could stand being hated by everything and everyone.. she couldn't stand getting sad. Sometimes it felt like the stronger move to be the bad guy. "He promised me," she hissed between her teeth. Sid had told her it was all going to be okay, and she'd fucking believed him.
Brothers they were, but Drake didn’t think there was much of Sid in him these days. Not that he’d been able to see his brother in himself before; no, when he’d looked in the mirror he saw his father, and then later he just saw himself, a mass of flesh and bone and failure and guilt, death and blood, slipping sanity and mania. Had he known that Cerise saw even a hint of Sid in him, that she wanted to, he would have bristled with a defensive sort of anger as much as he would have thought her an idiot, more of one than he already did for shacking up with Ian so quickly after his return to life. “Ha-ha. Like you know a damn thing about good sides,” he sneered, and he could feel the prickle of familiarity in the hurtled barb; they’d had their fair share of verbal spars and traded insults, and for a second he thought he could close his eyes and imagine being back in Seattle, younger and angrier, where Cerise was only the woman who’d had a hand in destroying his brother and nothing else.
Her honesty was, admittedly, not wholly expected, but he gave no sign of any outward reaction. Ian sending her to tail him, now that didn’t come as a surprise. In fact, he was glad the bastard had gotten someone to follow him. That meant that he was worried, and if he was worried, it suggested an acknowledgement that Drake did indeed pose a threat, despite his cocky bullshit on the journals. “Of course he did. How fucking predictable.” But if Cerise was going against orders, well, she was either going all the way with the manipulation angle or there was something important enough she wanted to discuss that she’d risk being found out. Looking at her now, with some of the haze of hatred and disdain that clouded his gaze lifted, he saw that she didn’t look strung out, not like he’d remembered her being back in Seattle when both she and Sid were caught in a cycle of getting clean and falling back into drugs, more the latter than the former. And here he’d thought Ian would get her hooked right away, if she wasn’t already. Maybe he was trying a different tactic this time around. When she said she wanted to know what had gone down in Seattle, that she wanted to know why, his expression darkened into something twisted and hard, lips curling into a scowl.
“Are you fucking serious, Cerise? You think I’d be here if I knew?” He’d gone over it a thousand times in his mind since finding out that Ian was still alive; more, even. Every step that led them to the man who clearly hadn’t been Ian, and Iris, what had transpired, his death, the fire to burn his body. Over and over, and he still couldn’t figure it out. He didn’t know, and it made him want to dig his fingers into his skin and tear himself apart. “He promised because he thought he was dead. We both did. I don’t know how the fuck he pulled it off, okay? So if you came here for some explanation, you’re shit out of luck,” he snapped. “And if you’re so damn disappointed that he’s not dead, why the hell are you back with him? What pretty little lies did he feed you this time, huh?”
Back then, Cerise had just barely coming out of a coma when Drake and Sid had allegedly killed Ian, so there was no way for her to know what had gone down. Truthfully, if she'd known that Iris had been present at the time of Ian's supposed death, Cerise would have been over there interrogating her.. although she was forced to admit in this moment that it didn't matter. Something had gone wrong and Ian was still alive. Or it was like she'd always suspected, he simply couldn't be killed. She found herself focusing on a patch of Drake's shirt, trying to recreate a hundred different ways this could have gone differently, like the many different patterns in the thread. But.. again, it didn't matter. They were here now, and it was just like she'd always feared when she was so young; there was no escape.
Despite the fervent paranoia, she didn't want to believe that Sid would have lied to her, not about something like this. Even if he'd been nothing but a walking evasion from the truth since the day she met him.. not this, anything but this. "You didn't go alone?" Her green eyes were vulnerable with want, the desire for him to tell her something that she already knew wasn't true. "You didn't just tell him it was done, didn't just make him believe it?" Because she thought Drake might do that. She certainly would have. Told Sid it was all taken care of so that she could go face the monster alone, and if she walked away alive..what was the harm in a little, white lie?
Cerise knew Drake loved his brother, she couldn't fault him for that. To her, Sidney was easy to love. When Drake demanded to know why Cerise was back with Ian, she gave him an expression of momentarily knotted eyebrows and alarmed confusion. He didn't get it? Then a second later, it was gone. She didn't explain, it wasn't worth it. He was too moral to understand.
Goddammit, he didn’t have the patience for this. Standing around rehashing the details of past mistakes wouldn’t fix them now, and it wouldn’t change the fact that Ian was very much alive and still as much of a sadistic bastard as he’d been in Seattle. “No, I didn’t go alone,” he said, practically spitting out the words in his agitated state. “He was with me, Cerise. He saw what I saw. We both thought it was done. If I’d have been able to do it on my own and keep him out of it, I would have, but it didn’t fucking work out that way.” He’d always seek to protect his brother, despite the cost to himself. Lying about Ian’s death, though, was something he would never have done. He wouldn’t fuck something like that up and then just walk away and pretend it was over. “I’d never lie to him about something like that,” he snarled. “If I hadn’t thought Ian was dead, I would’ve gone back and done it right and then this wouldn’t be happening.” Strangely enough, even though Sid had been with him, he didn’t blame his brother for their failure in killing Ian; he only blamed himself.
He gave Cerise a long, searching look before shaking his head in disgust. Of course she was back with Ian; he expected as much. Maybe people like Sid and Jack could see some good in her, but when Drake looked at her, all he saw was poison. She infected everyone she touched and was too easily manipulated by people like Ian. “Here’s the thing,” he began, after her silence had stretched on long enough to indicate that she wasn’t going to be explaining herself. “I’m going to kill him. One way or another, I’m gonna do it, so you can either stay the hell out of my way or go down with him. Got it?”
Drake didn't have to understand the reasons that Cerise did what she did. Even if she drew him a picture, he wouldn't grasp it. Cerise sure as hell wasn't going to waste her time trying to justify herself to somebody who hated her. Besides, Drake could think what he wanted about her, but the facts spoke for themselves. Cerise did what Ian asked, and everybody she cared about was still alive. Could Drake say the same thing about himself?
She kicked some sand off the edge of her shoe, watching it ghost over the asphalt before he swore that he was going to kill Ian. That made her laugh. It wasn't a happy sound, it was dry and decayed and just over everything and over everyone. "Yeah, I've heard that before."
Cerise skirted around Drake, plenty aware that there were going to be no warm goodbyes between them. "Try not to get yourself killed in the process." That tended to run in the family.
Openly defying Ian had gotten virtually his entire family killed, but Drake doubted that submitting to the evil sonofabitch’s whims would’ve saved any of them. No, he didn’t trust anything that had come or would come out of that man’s mouth; people were playthings to him, nothing more. Whatever immunity Cerise thought the people she cared about had was a lie, a pretty illusion to keep her in line. It wouldn’t last. He’d do just about anything to keep his loved ones safe, though he could count the number of people who fell into that category on one hand, but he wouldn’t become Ian’s lap dog. Not when, in the end, it wouldn’t make a damn difference. Sid was living proof of that.
His expression twisted into an ugly, pained snarl when she laughed, and it took all his self-restraint to keep himself from lashing out at her. “This time I’ll get it right,” he hissed, anger making his chest tight. “Don’t worry about me, sweetheart. I’m not dying anytime soon. Once I’ve drained every last drop out of that bastard’s body, then we can talk.” He didn’t try to stop her, didn’t care to, and he unlocked the driver’s side door with far more force than was necessary and tossed his bag into the passenger’s seat. One hand on the door, half in the car, Drake paused and looked over his shoulder.
“Fair warning. If I catch you tailing me, I will shoot you.” With that, he slid into the driver’s seat, slammed the door shut, and a few seconds later peeled out of the parking lot in the wake of a revved engine and squealing tires.