Who: Russ & Ford Campbell What: Part two. In which Russ is ridiculous and Ford does not give away Blake When: Recently Where: Russ's place Warning: Russ
Russ pinched the bridge of his nose, finger and thumb and wanted to shove his whole fist inside, maybe stop the headache and the conversation (the yelling match) both. He watched Ford back right up with all the wary uncertainty of expecting some kind of physical interlocution between his damn fridge and stove, and when Ford didn’t throw a fist or a chair, he watched him instead, tension thickly tightening the muscles that roped his neck and shoulders, like a wild animal he’d backed into a corner without figuring out how to kick it out. And then he flinched, not a lot but a whisker’s worth of rippled reaction, like a stone flung wild, maybe by mistake, into a pool so damn big and so damn deep it didn’t have a chance of much else.
With a growl, he picked up his own plate of the eggs massing together and the bacon woefully blackened down one side and he yanked the chair across the floor, dragging the legs until they squealed. When he set down, his weight hit solidly, all four legs hitting the floor at once and his elbows squared on the table. If Ford was going to throw a fit over being made eggs after inviting himself to his house, after picking up with the March kid after nearly getting himself killed the first time (Russ, ambivalent on irrelevancies such as being factually correct) then he, Russ, was going to eat his own damn eggs before they went cold. The headache pulsed at his temples, and he glared once in Ford’s direction.
“Would you shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down?” He managed to make it pained and angry at the same time, the kind of fury that came off in the same waves as the ripe smell of faded alcohol and the warm sweat beneath the soap. “You don’t need anything, my fucking ass.”
Ford didn’t want to obey an obvious order. It was against his code. Even if he had wanted to sit down a few moments before, the prospect was suddenly unattractive. He was angry and defensive, and he didn’t want to sit down at Russell’s table. At the same time, he was both hungry and a little tired, and he didn’t actually want to leave. The only other place he had to be was back in Turnberry, this time to visit yet another penthouse, and he didn’t want to face the guards just now, or wonder at the look on their faces that he was now going up yet a different private elevator to yet another single rich man’s apartment.
Ford moved around the perimeter of the kitchen, circling around to the stove. He picked up one of the pieces of bacon out of the pan, glanced at its blackened state, and then folded it in half and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing slowly. He finally regained his chair, balanced on it, and tried to pretend like he didn’t mind being there. “I d-d-d-don’t,” he said, forcefully as possible, glaring at the top of Russell’s head as he bowed it over the eggs.
Russ ate like he didn’t often have company. The left elbow stayed on the table, a faint air of guarding whatever was on the plate that hung over from much earlier and the right elbow stayed almost entirely on the table so long as the right hand could lever what was on the plate to his mouth without difficulty. He had squared himself down in his chair so far that the breadth and height contributed to a very solid, immoveable appearance; it was his kitchen. He wasn’t throwing a fit and crying - a small, mental shudder at the idea of actual tears; what Russ would have or could have done was beyond the reach of his poor beleaguered brain, struggling beneath the weight of very old guilt, a great deal of alcohol and the faint suspicion it would be better off back in bed and asleep for a handful more hours.
He glared straight back and he grunted noncommittally, the attention primarily focused on the food. The bacon was hot and it was greasy, both things that vastly helped with the pounding at the back of his head and the unease in his stomach that settled after the first four or five bites. Russ no longer expected hunger to reassert itself without significant ability to remedy the situation - but he ate steadily, as if whatever was put in front of him, he would clear the plate unthinkingly without really recalling why.
“So why you gotta need to sleep at March’s?” Russ jabbed his fork with a mixture of aggrieved annoyance that Ford had specifically selected the one individual Russ thought might wish to harm the kid, and the smart-mouthed edge of presenting the absolutely correct truth, a confidence in the answer. “You don’t think it’s fucking good enough here?” The prospect reared its head; Russ’s defensiveness took on an edge of belligerence. The fancy place March lived in probably provided an ass-wiper along with the toilet-paper. You probably had to call him Jeeves. Russ’s mouth twisted down, grim satisfaction at the imagined jibe.
Once he decided that Russell wasn’t watching him and didn’t particularly care about what happened to the first plate he’d slammed down, Ford picked up the fork again. He ate in absolutely record time, so quickly that after he stopped shoveling in eggs and actually swallowed, he felt vaguely sick. He took the last piece of bacon to chew on, making it last and savoring the gristle as it worked under the back of his teeth. Some of the sleek scavenger reappeared in his eyes as he held the bit of meat in two fingers and chewed without haste.
He was tired of Russell being a fucking jerk and decided to stay angry at him, but not pace. He wasn’t angry enough to start a brawl, and the angrier he was, the less likely Russell was to bring up “home” and that hollow feeling in Ford’s ribs. “First t-t-ti-time I fucking buh-b-been here,” Ford snapped back, rolling his eyes theatrically at Russell’s imagined judgment. “S...st-staying ‘cuz I f-feel like it.” His challenging gaze dared Russell to contradict. He refused to feel sorry for him in his hangover, having seen the morning after too many times to trouble himself about someone suffering deserved returns.
Russ paid attention only when Ford decided to pick up the bacon off his plate and eat it with fingers rather than fork and that was cursory at best. That Ford had wolfed the food as if it would walk off his plate if he gave it time was, likely, noted but it was behind the glimmer of bad temper and ill humor that managed to convey itself even if Russ was mechanically shoving food in his mouth for the duration and remained so after Ford was done and ready to pick up the baton, as it were. He had sat down, he had eaten, Russ considered this satisfactory, even if Ford was fucking around with the kid richer than God. (God, in this case, requiring only a basic wage and a decent house, not fucking palaces built in high rise buildings).
He did not care unduly about a great many people. Russ limited care (and what he considered care to be was on a much smaller scale than most) to the absolute essentials; he cared for the coworkers who took his shifts when he didn’t want them and gave them back when he did. Miguel had shit taste in music but he liked the man fine. He had a soft spot for Sam he pretended was not there and he had a creeping notion that Ford, after the horror-show of clinics and conversations he’d rightfully checked out of having long before, was one of them. It was not something he wished to examine close up. Russ had no idea that Blake was the culprit, and had he, the bad humor might have dived even further south. March was bad news for something out of the realm of his own ability to fix. Blake was heartbreak and probably a bad case of the fucking clap walking around on two legs.
“So?” Russ managed to make the time delay between Ford’s arrival in town and the belated invitation sound all Ford’s fault. Russ considered that if Ford was able to track him down to a construction site, Ford could find a damn house. (That this was not exactly how events had come about was again, inconvenient with Russ’s perception of truth). He thought that if March had been sleeping with his little brother, March ought to have fed said little brother - conveniently forgetting that Russ rarely did the latter for any women he brought back and rarer still if he stayed with them, and also that he presently disliked the notion of March doing anything to Ford but waving goodbye.
Ford gave Russell a blatant look of combined disgust and irritation. He was being stupid about this on purpose, and Ford had realized that there wasn’t any particular way to please him. He leveled a blatant glare over the table at Russell, tipping the chair back onto two legs again to balance there, legs spread to ward off any attempt to toss him onto his back... or out of the kitchen entirely. The movement reminded the viewer very much of the relative ages of the two men, and Ford was on the verge of dismissing Russell’s criticism as being predictable because he was older and stupider. Nearing twenty was obviously plenty of life experience to be getting along with, in Ford’s opinion.
Ford didn’t like realizing he couldn’t please Russell because it had to acknowledge the fact that he wanted to, and that hinted rather strongly of dependence. Ford had trained himself out of being dependent on his mother or anyone else, and though he’d been hungry enough to eat whatever was put in front of him five minutes ago, he had the confidence of the young that he would have found something eventually.
Ford twisted the coffee mug around with his fingers, glared at it too, and then drank. He decided to ignore Russell’s challenging question because it didn’t relate to his, Ford’s, previous statement about staying anywhere he wanted, thanks very much. Ford let the silence stretch with a certain satisfaction, for once.
The idea of anyone specifically trying to please him - him, not some other guy that Russ had happened to nudge temporarily out of the way or stand in his light or something - was so foreign to the man that it had not occurred and would not. The all too obvious admiration that reared its head at certain points, the look Ford gave him now and again (less and less, and Russ tried to think that he liked that more than the reverse) burned warm on the back of his neck and made him exceptionally uncomfortable as he looked around for the man Ford seemed to see. Russ wasn’t seeing a damn bit of that now, he scowled at the kid flip-flopping back and forth on the chair like he was trying some circus trick rather than sitting still and his ill-humor settled a little more closely and cleanly-fitted to his skin. That Ford - and far less Russ, for that matter - had had no conception of table manners and would laugh if they were explained, did not matter. He was eating, he was annoyed, and he had decided that this was entirely Ford’s fault.
Nearing twenty was no damn life experience at all, it was practically fucking infancy, and Russ was beginning to think darkly of the way back to the Turnberry building and having a conversation with March’s face with his fists. Why a skinny South boy held so much damn appeal that his brother had gone back for more, he didn’t know and he didn’t think on overmuch; March was clinics and terror and the cleanly bluish look to Ford’s skin when he was so scared he looked sick.
“So?” It was pure elder brother baiting younger, the needling-without-undue-effort of leaning forward, elbows on the table and leveling a look straight over the coffee cup. That Russ fell into it so neatly was not considered at all. Russ thought it entirely relevant to the question at hand, if Ford needed a place to sleep then it was he, Russ who should have been asked to provide it and allowed to grumble in doing so whilst also shifting and making room. That he did not, had not, suggested that the very flimsy underpinnings of something built in the places between fights and hot temper were not solid, nor that the remembered avowal to uphold security for a little sister was still true. It touched - strongly, and without any conscious understanding of how or why - upon the deeply resented sense of honor that had rotted almost to nothing but the remnants of which twinged now.
Ford rocked back and forth on the chair a little more. He had not forgotten the clinic, and he understood that Russell giving him the ride had been an act of generosity. It was why he’d wanted to see him after the mess at the party, why he had been more willing to think of him as shelter when he had only known the man for a few months together. Ford was not so proud as to spurn generosity when he really truly needed it, and the job had been such. A meal was one thing, but a job was another, and Ford had really needed that job.
Ford remembered the reasons he had to be grateful and became even more uncomfortable. “S...so wh-what?” It seemed the problem with the syllabant hiss of an s was consistent, and it stuck like taffy at the top of his mouth regardless of the sentence. His expression fused into mixed resentment and embarrassment, until finally he sighed, and said, grudgingly, “M-m-march. He’ss-dg-just a f-f-friend.” Ford dug a thumb down into the joint between seat and back and looked down at his knees. “B-by himself up there, sick.” Ford tossed up a glare at Russell, daring him to be critical of this new sympathy.
Russ understood sympathy fine when it was rough-edged and rocky and doled out by people with gritted teeth for thanks. He understood sympathy plenty and he thought Ford, with the big blue eyes and the kicked-wolf look to him, probably saw more sympathy than most. Maybe that was what March saw in the kid (Russell resolutely refused to consider whatever else March might see in the kid, this requiring some notional good judgment on March’s behalf). But he thought what Ford saw in March was nothing to do with sympathy, and he thought if March was playing fucking Rapunzel with pneumonia up in his damn ivory tower, then March had money enough for nursemaids. “So he wants a live-in maid?” Russ said with all the deliberate provocation of a jibe thrown not across the table but lobbed somewhere toward Turnberry. “Nice, kid. Real nice. That’s some friend you got there.”
Relationships - hook-ups - were something Russell understood in the plain, blunt language by which he encountered them. He understood attraction and he understood picking up where you’d left off, but he understood hurts and being done wrong in the same absolute simplicity of terms; March had fucked Ford over, had left him thinking of a medical condition that Russ only knew hazily more about than that it meant death one way or another. He had looked it up once and hastily wished he hadn’t, in the time between the clinic and the party and he had become even more stringently convinced that he didn’t want to see or hear or think about March ever again.
“You doing him a good deed, that’s it.” Russ’s voice twisted like broken glass, managing to express the vast sarcastic heights of doubt that were invested into the question.
Ford looked first surprised, then hurt. It was much of the kicked canine there, a sudden elevation of chin and the flinch of his spine in the chair, then his expression falling as all four legs of the chair dropped down onto the old linoleum floor with a screech and a thud. He had, of course, considered that March might want to give him couch space (this is what he assumed, not an actual bed, as such things were generally unheard of without payment of some kind) for some other reason, but March had convinced him with the manner of conversation that this was not the case. March had been evasive and yet honest at the same time, and while Ford didn’t have a lot of analytics on his side, he had been sure that the other man had been telling the truth. Russell’s criticism brought on a brief wave of doubt, however, an uncertainty crossed Ford’s expression before logic reasserted itself. “N-n-no,” he said, aggressively, baring a coyote incisor and fixing him with another glare. “N-n-nobody wuh-would expect me to c-clean.” Of this he was certain, and his expression improved as he reassured himself of this point.
Ford didn’t know why Russell was acting like this, expecting him to assume bedspace in the house he’d never been in until five minutes before. He knew that Russell didn’t like March and he was, in a way, worried that the other man might try to hurt March again, and so he said, with hints of a growl, “I wuh-w-want to s...stay there. S...so leave him alone.”
There was a great deal that Russ assumed people expected from family. He assumed as he did not know, ‘family’ being confined to four temporary walls, a drunk woman and a passing pastiche of boyfriends and a little kid sister who glued herself like a shadow to his heels and had been unglued with the stiff resolve of a teenage boy who looked down the future and saw jail-time or something worse if he stayed. He had only a passing acquaintance with how it worked, expectations, from stories about family and the accompanied whining from men who talked to one another freely with an expectation that they would be understood. Blood was a tenuous connection, thin enough that he had assumed he could break it; blood had countered by handing him a scared kid that looked like he would sick up his terror and a weight of guilt on the back of the neck that was all if you’d stuck around. That Russ had shuffled over, made room for the guilt with the grudging absence of acknowledgment that was anything he especially disliked, did not make a great deal of sense beyond the realm of Russ’s own head. That he expected it to, particularly to the kid in the chair scowling at him like he’d kicked his puppy, was unsurprising.
He opened his mouth, presumably to say something creatively disgusting about March, before Ford got there first. Russ thought it was extremely unfair Ford was associating the two, ‘leave him alone’ being a blanket statement that precluded some educating, possibly with fists, of how little he wanted March to fiddle with his brother. All of this flickered across Russ’s face, a murky kind of doubt as he stared down his brother, angry blue eyes fixed on angry blue eyes.
“He don’t touch you, I don’t touch him,” he said with an air of settling for the very least of the desired list of threats, and he shoved back his chair with a scrape of wood on the much abused linoleum and a clatter of the plates and cutlery gathered and dumped in the sink with a force of movement that was not necessary but had some effect on the tension built up across the broad shoulders.
While rather judgmental and insulting, Russell’s statement was taken as it was intended: a grudging acquiesce. Ford brightened up immediately, pleased he’d managed to “talk Russell into it” when a few seconds ago he’d been sure enough that he wouldn’t need to do any such thing because Russell had no business knowing to begin with. It was also occurring to him that Russell had actually offered couch space as well, even if he hadn’t actually offered exactly. Ford became even brighter, coming in just short of beaming, and he didn’t bother trying to cover up just how pleased with himself he was.
The younger man looked around, turning his curly head from side to side as he took in the empty kitchen. It obviously didn’t occur to him to offer to help clean up, as Ford did the cleaning when things grew mold and there was no one conscious to come in and manage soapy water. “Thought after the p-p-p-p-party you’d sure have a g-g-g... woman here.” He flashed his brother’s back a wide grin, since the battered face probably wouldn’t have won Russell any dates. This seemed a good way of avoiding the return topic of March, and possibly even continuing to conceal the existence of Blake in Ford’s life. Some of the contented well-being scratched itself back up into Ford’s face. It had to be the youth that got him from happy to near tears and back again so quickly.
Russ’s party experiences had been less heart-ache and wishes of home than a youth he hadn’t spent sat in someone else’s house looking like he’d gotten something he hadn’t expected, tied up with a fucking ribbon on top. He glared at Ford the minute all that happy bubbled back up to the surface and he looked for a minute like he might have said something about it, and then fear that that shiny-eyed look might return if he did provided a dubious basis for knowing better. Russ scowled instead, and he turned his back, noisily filling up the sink with exaggerated care and a lot more clashing about than was strictly necessary but was possible now the headache had eased off with the food and coffee in his belly.
The party had been mercifully less of a wrench than most of them; there had been a man with a tie who had wanted very much to knot him up in one of them and Russ was two decades older than the boy he’d been at the party but he liked the thought of ties even less. There had been a woman - briefly, interrupted - but all the talk afterward (there was always talk after a party or event at the hotel and Russ’s curiosity and a certain amount of schadenfraude had him peel through the pages before he said anything about it at all) had cast doubt over whether the woman in the soaked-wet corset had been a woman at all and the least he thought about it, the better.
He snorted now, over the splash of the water, as if a woman were the furthest thing from his mind, as if women were a trouble the likes of which Ford was too young and too stupid to understand. “No,” he said shortly, with all the terse flatness of shutting down further question.
Ford seized on Russell’s obvious discomfort. The chair creaked and all four legs slammed down on the kitchen floor again, and Ford half-stood to see if there was anything else in the bacon pan before casually twisting the chair around and settling spread-eagled over it, his chin on his elbows and his arms over the back. There was no rocking back and forth in this position, but he could train his gaze on Russell’s big shoulders and gauge where best to needle him into talking.
“W-wuh-why not? You s...said on the j-j-j-journals you w-wuh-were looking.” It spoke volumes about Ford’s comfort in the situation that he would even bother trying to force out words to actually needle. Adjusting his headphones around his neck, Ford leaned into his arms again and tipped his head, willing his gaze to grow itchy on Russell’s shoulderblade.
The way Ford was going about the chair and the floor, Russ thought (with increasing irritation that had nothing to do with chairs, floors or crashing about) that Ford maybe had never seen a damn chair before, that maybe when Ford was done he wouldn’t have a chair left. “Would you fucking stop,” and it was a roar, all bluster and exasperation and the annoyed catch of all that frustration with Ford sniffing back after trouble where trouble didn’t need to be, directed toward one poor chair drawn up to the table, thrown over his shoulder.
“It don’t work like that,” that he deigned to answer the question was, he considered, more than enough answer for Ford, and it came with the smug resilience of someone who had been in the trenches, stood looking down the barrel of the enemy’s gun and was in a fair position to tell war-stories. And for good measure, again over his shoulder, “You wouldn’t know nothing about it,” even more smugly than before. It was a jab, and he felt a little better for it, and he stabbed at the plates with the brush with more viciousness truly required. It was nothing to do with looking or wanting or finding; women brought back were a careful balance between drinking enough to take the edge off the week and being insightful enough to see when they’d be trouble. (Trouble, Russ’s definition, meant wanting anything more than an hour or three having fun and then pushing off without so much as a backwards look). There were many in Vegas who were seeking out exactly this, but they were tourists, and Russ had so much acquaintance with the various budget hotel rooms over the city, he half suspected what the hotels actually thought he was doing there.
Far from being frightened or irritated by either the bluster or the comment about ignorance, Ford looked simultaneously confused and curious. The latter was downright dangerous, as it ensured his continuing interest. There wasn’t anything to stop by the time that Russell was shouting at him, and Ford simply looked innocent where he perched on the reversed chair. He raised his chin and one wrist so he could prop one atop the other, and succeeded in looking like a ten-year-old ready to hear a story.
“‘Bout w-wuh-what?” he countered, blinking a few times for good measure and eluding the jab simply by means of innocence. He couldn’t be jealous of this unnamed experience he didn’t know anything about without knowing what it was. He was willing to bet it was something like ‘picking up chicks’ which, besides being possessed of too many tricky consonants to be worth venturing, simply amused Ford. It was far more difficult to pick up vacationing single men that were more likely to take exception to you even coming onto them without a great deal of liquor and noise.
Russ knew virtually nothing about the latter, beyond the initial stint in Vegas when he’d been young enough and pretty enough and quite visibly desperate enough to be appealing to a certain kind, male or female and had spent significant amounts of time proving that interested him absolutely not at all, firstly with protestations and lastly with fists. That he managed tolerance was a byproduct of living in Vegas itself and perhaps a little of the wish to be left entirely alone to do as he liked. It was certainly not a yielding and generous nature. Now he glared at Ford with all the suspicion of someone who believed nothing at all of the innocent act, but the very fact Ford could summon up tears made him more trouble than could potentially be avoided by ignoring it. The debate wore itself visually across Russ’s face, the long minute of standing at the sink with the plate dripping in his hand, glaring at a twenty year old who managed to be both solid and muscled and also look like a damn cherub.
“It’s none of your business,” Russ said in a fantastic absence of logic and sense, but with a wise, ‘I know better’ tone and a surety in his own vast experience and knowledge as he turned back to the sink, with this the only (and utterly unsatisfactory) answer. He couldn’t say anything about the chair once Ford was sitting in it, and after a moment’s splashing around, he reached out for the bacon pan and submerged that was well.
It was the solid, muscled cherub that got Ford laid, and regularly at that, despite being nearly twenty. It got him into clubs he didn’t belong in and into beds that were much more welcoming, as someone who couldn’t afford breakfast usually couldn’t afford an updated fake ID. As Russell pinned him with a suspicious glare, Ford’s amusement ripened and his innocent smile deepened yet further into his cheeks. The edge of his cheekbones merely gave this whole act the scent of the (still more innocent) prankster. He rolled his cheek onto the curve of his bicep and one of the dark curls slid into his eyelashes. He deliberately batted those lashes at Russell. Just to be annoying.
“What isn’t? You g-g-g-g-getting some?” Because that was just what we were talking about a little bit ago, wasn’t it? But in the reverse. And Ford’s growing grin said exactly that. He thought Russell looked very homely over there with his hands wet with soapy water, and he actually laughed into his arm, a muffled sound that was a smirk made audible.
There was a very clearly delined line (unspoken of, of course but very little of what Russ considered hard and fast rules were actually verbalized until someone broke one) between his personal life and his brother’s. He had not invited Ford into his own, he had not done anything past a few public and thus entirely impersonal jibes about strip clubs and women anywhere other than the journals and he considered the entire process of talking a woman into taking him home (or allowing him to take her home) to be one unsuited to serious scrutiny. He had been better at it, half a decade ago, and still better at it when he was in his mid twenties and aware of his own good looks in the same way as the kid sat at the table. In the years between his own masculine prettiness where youth had done something with bone structure and blue eyes to make them interesting, and the present, there was something seedy about Russ. The solid breadth of shoulders were not clean cut, coupled with two days’ lack of shaving and working out of doors much of the time, he looked older than the untroublesome boys in bars looking for a good time and also somehow more interesting - it was something that drew more interest but generally from the sort who would not also melt away after he was done and Russ was more careful these days than he had been even a couple of years back.
The boy at the table, however, he had near shit himself worrying and had no business fucking anyone until he’d acquired a passing knowledge of a pharmacy’s basic line in products, and this managed to convey itself (or some vestige thereof) in the grunt, the plop of cooking instruments back into the sink and the soapy hands balled into fists as he turned back to stare challenge down at the kid snickering like a fucking schoolboy.
“You want to talk pussy?” Russ’s eyebrows shot up, like disbelief had taken a step out with jeering and done a two-step in Russ’s tone. The deliberate slur was a challenge in itself; Russ took a step forward, “You wanna talk about it? First thing is, I don’t dick around same place twice, and I don’t get caught.”