michael's sure sirius is (flearidden) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-08-19 19:41:00 |
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Entry tags: | catwoman, sirius black |
Who: Wren and Michael
What: Introductions, a chat about Doors, and the problem of photography.
Where: on the bus as the wheels go 'round and 'round.
When: Say yesterday. Unless Epi doesn't. Then say something else.
Warnings/Rating: Fairly safe, maybe a touch of language, some mature allusions.
Wren took the bus to and from TAPS most days. They had a car now, an old thing that Luke had found cheap when Gus had gone to live with him, but gas was expensive, and she still didn't like driving. She used the car as little as she could and, when it was just her, she preferred the travel methods of her youth. She didn't fear the people at bus stops, haggard and frazzled and hiding from the world in their headphones and worn-page books that cost 50 cents in a bargain bin. She didn't fear the homeless people who rode the buses in loops, until a driver tired of them taking up space. The people she sat with on those benches, beneath the unforgiving Vegas sun, they couldn't afford Kindles or Ipads, and she felt at home with them. Even when she'd been living in Caesars, a suite and a driver and expensive food, she'd still been one of these people. She'd grown up with skinned knees and concrete-burned feet. That was something that no one could ever take out of her, no matter how things twisted, no matter how things changed.
She rode this route every day, and she'd been doing it for months. Since before her time in the tent, two months earlier, when she'd lost twenty pounds on her small, 5'3 frame. Then her skin had been leathery brown from the sun, and her hair had been just as dark. She'd been elbows and collarbones, and she'd been river water and faded dresses. Now, months later, she was plump. Those twenty pounds back and more, and more every day. She was blonde again, pale and pale, freckles along her nose and grey eyes that scanned the world with an eternally slow patience that never seemed to fade. Her dress was designer once, but these days it was thrift store and white with tiny blue flowers, a sundress gone too tight along her chest and hips, and faded flats that she swung in the breezeless air as she waited at the bus stop. Her hair was pulled back, and the corner of her mouth boasted a Gotham bruise that she'd covered as best she could.
She had her nose in a book at first, after settling into a seat by the window. The pages were crisp and new, and the subject was the history of photography. There was a very, very old camera over one of her shoulders, and she had no purse or bag with her. She tucked her transit card into her pocket, where keys jingled, and she began to read. But her interest waned after a few seconds, nausea hitting her when her eyes tried to focus in tandem with the bus' jerking motions. She looked up then, and she noticed the familiar man that rode the same route she did nearly every day.
Setting the book in her lap, she tipped her head and offered him a small smile.
Michael didn’t put anything in his ears. It wasn’t just the impracticality of buying one of these iThings when he didn’t have a credit card; it was that he wanted to stay aware of his surroundings and what people were saying about him. It wasn’t possible to do that when you were listening to music so loud the guy next to you could hear it, so Michael’s ears were bare and stayed that way, regardless of how boring the daily commute was. Usually he got on the bus and got off the bus, and in between he watched the road and the faces of those who got on and off, idly watching for anyone who looked as if they were searching for a face. Michael didn’t expect anyone to try to pin him on the bus, but it was what he would have done if he was hunting someone and just wanted to talk. There was nowhere to run, and it was a bad place to make a scene. He thought of that every time he sat down on the sticky curved seats.
As he mounted the last step, head ducked down to prevent his skull from cracking open on the roof after he paid his fare, he caught the eye of the blonde sitting on the outside of the third row. Michael was not used to people seeking out his gaze. He was a big man, well on his way to seven feet and thickly muscled. People had called him a giant before and it was not entirely an exaggeration; it was one of the more troublesome things that kept him from blending in, besides the straight nose and the thoroughly black eyes. Warm, generous looking women with scrappy blonde hair did not go out of their way to meet his eyes in most situations. However, he recognized her as one of the many faces that rode the bus regularly, and after a pause of surprise in which he blinked twice, he started to give her a vague sort of nod--and then his eyes traveled down to the camera dangling down under her arm. His expression closed and some of his sharp features seemed to grow even sharper, and he looked away.
The only free seat was the one across the aisle from her, and it was a good thing, because Michael had such length of leg that cramming himself into a bus seat usually required the use of half an aisle. Nobody dared complain about one of his dirty running shoes stretching out over the sheet of tramped rubber; not when they got a look at the size of his shoulders and the set of his face. He folded himself into the seat, widening out his knees and putting out one of his heels a row in front of him. He turned his head automatically to look at her across the aisle, not able to prevent it. His hair was pared down to brown stubs, and his ears stuck out a little against the rather delicate shape of his skull under tanned skin, only increasing the vague allusion to dangerous people who tattooed their faces. He put his palms out in front of him, spreading down across his grease splotched jeans. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt despite the heat of the day, and regarded her over the bulge of his forearm.
It was not precisely a friendly gaze.
She didn't look down or away. Her gaze wasn't aggressive. Even in her moments of aggression, Wren didn't look like anything to worry about. She was small, soft and pale. She had no sharp corners - not now that she was healthy - and her smile was a curious thing, full of questions and devoid of any fear. He was big, but she knew that wasn't what made someone frightening. Silver had taught her that years ago, and she scooted away from the window and toward the inner seat, which had just been vacated, as if the memory of the other man had made the decision for her.
There was still an aisle between them, but she didn't have to speak loudly to be heard, and she crossed her ankles and leaned just a little more, the scent of lemons and vanilla (applied too liberally) carrying with the movement. "Hi," she said, and she sounded like nothing. She had learned French before English, but none of that carried in her voice. She was the unaccented Keys. Too south to be Southern, too salty to sound like anything at all but sea-husk on a voice that was lower than it really should have been for her features. Where she was soft and delicate, cheap over something vulnerable, her voice was raspy and strange, something not quite right about it. "We're on here at the same time," she said of the bus.
She'd never been good at meeting people. Clients, yes, she was good at those. She could tell what kind of sex a man wanted in minutes, and she could turn ice cold with a crop in her hand in seconds. She could work out what kind of mistress would hold a wealthy man's attention with only a conversation or two, and she could make out a cop in one sentence. But meeting people, talking to people without the safety of sex, it was something she was awkward at. She reached down and played with the hem of her skirt, twisting it nervously until it caught on the small diamond of her engagement ring, and she looked up at him from beneath lashes and pale brown brows. "Is that a really strange way to say hi?" she asked. And there was something to the way she held her shoulders that said she would flee easily. That she would crawl back against the window just as easily as she'd ventured into the proximity of the aisle, should he growl or fuss at her.
It was difficult to imagine such a big man fussing. His bottomless black eyes moved from the aisle, to her fidgeting hand, to the insignificant chip of a diamond, and then slowly back up to her face. Finally, moving with almost deliberate slowness through the lurch of the bus accelerating into the heat of the desert, his gaze rested on the bruise where it lingered on the corner of her mouth. His own expression didn’t melt, but some of the unfriendliness eased out of the position of his shoulders. He wasn’t close enough to communicate scent, and the lingering smell of the grease grill and cold coffee stayed near to his skin under the clean shirt he changed before leaving the diner. He had time to go home and shower between jobs, and sometimes he caught a two hour nap before he hit the late shift at a local trucking company. He sat back as much as he was able in his chair.
“Hi,” he said. He had a voice like a dusty old carpet, muffled and faintly hissing with the sound of his voice reverberating through disused muscle. It would have been better used for shouting, but he didn’t do that much, and that was clear. There was no need for her to shrink like a wilted daisy. He looked away from her now, toward the front of the bus and over the simultaneously swaying heads of the various fatigued occupants.
If she attempted to analyze him with the knowledge of her previous profession, she would have a difficult time. He didn’t respond to the newly revealed thigh as she twisted her fingers in her hem, and he looked at no one woman (or man) longer than any other. He acted as if he was on a very distant island and everyone else was just on the opposite shore. Idly, he smoothed his palm down the long length of his thigh again, and then shot a glance sideways at her camera. It looked old. He didn’t know if old cameras didn’t work, or if they just belonged to eccentric photographers. Photographers made Michael angry the way few other things did. He hated journalists, strongly disliked private investigators, and abhorred the government, but photographers always earned a special detestation in the cool cockles of his heart. He had not yet decided if she was a (professional) photographer. He found this unlikely.
She didn't even realize that she was as attuned to body language as she was. That would have required more introspection than she possessed - or, maybe than she realized she possessed. All she knew was that something had made him more at ease. She didn't know if it was something around his mouth, something in the way he held his shoulders, but there was something, and it made her less inclined to immediately scoot away. She watched him sit back, her grey gaze traveling to his long legs and to how uncomfortable he looked in the cramped space. He was so tall, she knew, from watching him board the bus. Feet and feet taller than her, or so it seemed, and she wondered if he couldn't afford a car with more room than the bus' tiny seats offered. She tended to believe other people shared her recent financial hardships, just like she'd believed people shared her windfalls in years past. It was, again, a narrow and tiny view, and she tried to imagine him in a big car with a large steering wheel and air conditioning that blew bright cold against his face.
She tried to memorize his voice. She was a tactile thing. She was a tangible creature, and sounds and sights and the feel of things beneath her fingers guided her understanding of the world. He sounded like a man who didn't growl, and that surprised her. She expected booming volume, given his size. She was pleased to be surprised, and it showed in the pale light that lit her face, like a child who had received an unexpected gift. She bit her lip, and wondered what else to say. She wished she was like normal people. People who could make small talk without it being about blowjobs or riding crops. The glance at the camera caught her notice, though, and she was glad to have something else to say to him.
She lifted the camera, the strap falling off her shoulder and revealing more bruises against pale skin. "Isn't it pretty?" she asked. She still thought of the camera as something beautiful, something magical that caught emotions in mid-flight. There was wonderment in her eyes, and she looked through the finder and looked at him. She didn't snap a picture. She didn't even twitch a finger to the button. She lowered the camera a second later, and she ran a thumb along its edge. "I'm just learning. Do you know how?" she asked.
It was hard to imagine Michael at ease in any situation. He was so large that watching him traverse the world was like watching a cat try to fit in a shoebox, never graceful and perpetually awkward, though he seemed like he should be more capable of grace given the way he fit together when he was not confined to the seat and to the contents of the crowd. All the same, his loose blue shirt was already touched with sweat at the height of his back, and he made no move to roll up his sleeves or do anything except sit stubbornly through the heat, waiting out the ride no matter where it was going. The singular determination was also catlike, though there was nothing else blaringly feline about him while he was sitting there swaying with the bus passengers.
She had his entire attention when she lifted the camera again. It honed in on her like a predator’s narrowing eyes, and rather than hunching down and tensing for some kind of spring, he lashed out a paw that was probably capable of holding her entire face in its palm. It didn’t come for her, the big hand, but rather pushed out toward the camera, blocking its baleful glass stare as it came up toward him. He moved like it was about to burn him if he let it, and he was throwing up an arm to try to prevent it from searing his face before he had a chance to prevent it. His breath went backward through his teeth as he inhaled hard on the hot air and bent his head rapidly, dodging an invisible blow.
His fingers stopped just short of touching the plastic ring around the glass eye, an effort, as he was capable of reaching all the way past it to her, if he chose. The fingers flexed. He wanted to break the camera, and the sudden anger made him bare his teeth to the world. “Don’t,” he said. With his gusty voice it came out like the wind sighing hard against canvas. His hand dropped as the camera did. His dark eyes chilled in her direction, and the nature of the warning was unmistakable, but his eyes moved down from her face to her shoulder, and then back.
Wren had known all types of men. She'd known the charming kind of man that turned out to be less than charming once the door closed behind him. She'd met small men with more cruelty that she'd been able to imagine, and she'd met big men that were gentle as teddy bears. She'd met men that never smiled, and she'd met men that always did. She'd met enough of men in her life to know that whatever they showed her wasn't necessarily the truth. She didn't trust. She was really, really terrible at trust. Trust was something born over years, after enough time had passed that she no longer expected anything to hurt. It had taken years with Silver, years with Luke, years with Jack. Men like Thierry always came when she least expected them, and no one was exempt, even family. But she didn't flinch when his hard came toward her, despite all that. She'd outgrown flinching at eight, the first time someone had cornered her in her bedroom, a heel slammed against his foot and a scream at the top of the lungs for her maman. If there was something she'd learned, it was not to show fear. And she'd done it so very long that it had become part of her. Terror was something she pushed far down, and that only certain people saw, and there was none of it on the sweltering bus that rocked back and forth as it reached a stop, and as people filed in and out obliviously.
"I wasn't going to," she said, tugging the camera away and setting it onto her lap. She almost fumbled it, but she managed not to, and she just looked at him instead with that kind of blank and wide-eyed curiosity that seemed better suited to a child that was just learning how things around them worked. "Why don't you like it?" she asked. Luke had disliked pictures, and maybe this man - the bus rider - disliked them too. She didn't automatically assume everyone was going to react to things in the same way she did; she knew better. "I wasn't going to," she reiterated, the repetition intended to be soothing.
His big legs moving insect-like to and fro on the isle, Michael looked again at the camera. He stared at it like it was soon to turn into something else, there in front of his eyes. When it did not immediately catch fire, he answered without hearing himself do it. “They lie.” The response came from the top of his lungs, where it had been waiting to spring out of his throat, fully formed.
There had been many cameras in Michael’s youth, and all of them had lied. There had been nice sittings in department store studios; lies. There had been spontaneous shots playing at the park, at school, on a vacation to the beach; more lies. No cameras were allowed to capture the truth, at least, not those in the houses of Michael’s youth. Different cameras had managed that, big popping ones that came for him much later. And even the photos that told the truth were just grisly pictures in two dimensions, a bunch of lines and shadows on sticky paper. The real truth, the visceral truth that was flesh and blood and pain, that truth only Michael had, locked up in his skin, in his skull. Michael and his father.
Michael blinked. “It’s a funny shape.” The cameras he had seen were sleeker and blacker. He looked at the book she held, then back at the camera.
"I have a friend whose pictures don't lie," she said easily. "They aren't always pretty, but they don't lie," she clarified. "I showed one to my husband," she said, unthinkingly twisting the rings on her fingers as she spoke, "and he hated it, because it was the truth." She was still embarrassed about that, and it showed on features that paled slightly at the memory. "It was an old picture, from when things weren't very good." She went quiet a moment, her memories drifting to that picture and the other ones like it that she'd never ask Saint for. She understood why Luke had hated the picture, she did, but there was still something to it that made her want to curl up and scoot next to the window again. She fought that desire, because she was pretty sure the strange man that barely fit in the seat would stop talking to her if she did that, and she didn't want him to.
When he said the camera was a funny shape, she looked down at it. "It's old. I have a cheap one that's digital, but I like this one better. It feels so heavy, and I think something that captures memories should be heavy." It was strange philosophy, but she'd never gone to any kind of school that made her examine her own thoughts and check them against accepted dogma. She liked the way the camera felt between her fingers, and there was really nothing more to it than that. "With the digital one, I can snap fifty pictures in order to find the right one. With this, I just shoot, and I find out later what I caught." It was a whimsical approach, and surely nothing a journalist or professional would say, but she didn't realize it at all. "Do you want to see one?" she asked of a photograph, and she reached for the pocket of her dress and pulled out an envelope that was tucked there, alongside her keys. Inside the envelope, there was a photograph, and she pulled it from its protective cover.
She held the small 3x5 photograph out to him nervously, not sure he would take it from her fingers as she stretched her arm across the aisle. Off-center, there was a girl from TAPS. She had red hair in riotous curls and bright green eyes. There were bruises eclipsing the freckles on one side of her face, and the beginnings of a brightly blue tattooed fish were visible at the curve of her throat. She was young, not yet out of her teens, and she had her head tipped back. She was laughing, the girl, at something offscreen. She was all teeth, big and alternating shades of faded yellow, and a red tongue that went for days. It wasn't a pretty laugh, but it was real and raw, and Wren loved the picture. She'd promised the girl a copy, and she'd tucked it into her pocket so she wouldn't forget it.
Michael returned his gaze to the front of the bus, watching the road grind away under the tires out of sight, listening to the creak of the axles under his weight. Someone’s tinny music was audible from somewhere in the back, and a man four rows away was muttering to himself. Michael waited through the noise, and then looked back at her when she mentioned her husband. He was curious to see her reaction on this topic, as he had made some assumptions about the bruises she was wearing like they were going out of style. The twisting of the rings spoke to him of some dissatisfaction or nervousness with the relationship, and it didn’t altogether surprise him, but he expected her to lie about the discomfort, and she attempted no such thing. She was very obvious, this woman. He approved. “Weren’t very good for what? For him?” The dusty voice cracked toward the end, like the husk off an ear of corn.
Michael showed one eyetooth in obvious dislike of the idea that anything should be capturing memories, though he did agree that they were heavy. They only got heavier as the years went on. His mouth set low on his face and grew vaguely bleak as he thought about it, then drew away. His left hand wandered down his right shoulder and into the crook of his right arm, screwing the tips of his fingers into the weak fabric bunching there. It was a faintly disturbing habit, because he simply left his hand there and worked at that one spot, as if there was an itch deep down under his skin near the bone he would never reach.
He didn’t think that having the random pick of somebody else’s memories was all that wonderful, nor whimsical. Reluctantly, he slowly turned his head over his shoulder so that his chin was nearly touching the mound of muscle that made up his shoulder. He had to shift his weight to take the photo, but he did, even if it was reluctant. He held the square of paper in the tips of his fingers and concentrated on the woman in it. He did not find her attractive, nor unattractive. He had to work to care about her at all, but the fish on her neck, the folds of blue scales in rounded pattern and in blaring ultraviolet color... that he liked. He handed it back.
“Nobody wants to be in photos that tell the truth,” Michael said.
"For me," she said honestly of why the version of her in Saint's old photograph had bothered Luke. "I was living on the street then, and I was sick," she admitted. "It bothered him to see it. It didn't bother me." And maybe that said more about her than anything else, the fact that seeing that stark reality in her own image was no frightening thing. She wasn't schooled, and she wasn't intelligent, but she'd come to understand herself over the years. The smile she gave him said as much. For all the bruises and the fidgeting with rings, her eyes were clear and not at all unhappy. There was a tension to her shoulders, but that had to do with secrets and decisions that needed to be made, and not with the life she led. "Pictures now are better," she admitted. "I have a little boy," she said with a grin, not yet twenty-five and no lines marring her pale features yet. "He's about to turn five. I have a house, and I have bed, and there's food on the table, and I have a husband I love very much." And it was easy, confessions to this long limbed stranger that looked at her like he'd forget her the moment she stepped out into the Las Vegas swelter.
She watched him as he examined the photograph and, from the first flick of his eyes downward, she could tell that he didn't see the same things she saw in the woman's gaping mouth and the upward tilt of her smiling eyes. "When she came in at first, all she did was cry," she said of the young woman in the photograph, her thumb brushing over the image when it was handed back to her. That smile was a hard-won thing, the one in the picture, and now they'd never forget it. No matter how things went, and no matter if the girl went back to her abusive pimp and the drugs that kept her tethered to a life on the street, that smile had happened. The moment had happened.
"I don't mind it," she said of photos that told the truth. "I don't see the truth very clearly sometimes, and I don't want to forget them," she assured him. "You don't like the truth?" she asked, because that was the conclusion she came to. If he didn't want to see it, maybe he didn't like it.
Michael gave her a penetrating look that was harmless in its obvious intent. He was trying to see the girl living on the street sick, and it didn’t immediately surface. He could see it, of course, in his mind’s eye, in his imagination, though Michael was not a creative soul. He saw no real purpose in seeing her as she had been, didn’t care for that particular truth, but he nodded to show that he understood what she meant. He thought her husband wouldn’t like to imagine her anything but what she was: his, probably. But she seemed content with the situation. For Michael (at present) that was enough. He didn’t feel the need to dig deep to strip away everything until he found out where the pain was; she was a girl on the bus.
Michael watched her face when she talked about her son. His mother had been able to say all those things when he had been four going on five, all the way down to the happy smile. This woman looked younger than his mom had been, but when you’re nearly five, everyone looks tall and ancient. That is, when they don’t embody bone-deep terror.
They were speaking of the woman in the photo again. Michael took a moment to remember why. “Came in,” he said. “Where did she come in?” Michael didn’t live in moments. He lived in the present, but he had no special value for it except in contrast to where he had been before. He would not necessarily call himself ‘happy,’ but he knew unhappy, and this wasn’t it.
She was oblivious to his musings. She had a preconceived notion of how people saw her, and she'd never really managed to shake it, even as she changed and outgrew it. Sex, uneducated, poor, and sex was always first. And while her dress was old enough that it was obvious she had no money, the rest might not be as immediately evident these days. But she still felt it beneath her skin, and it was still who she was if she was scratched hard enough. It was still her, and it was how she assumed she was viewed by everyone. She let him look, and she didn't look away, accustomed to being regarded. He didn't look at her like she could be bought or taken, and she liked that about him. It made him smaller, somehow, in her mind's eye. His legs shorter, his shoulders less defined and dangerous.
"I volunteer at a rescue for trafficked sex workers," she explained. Volunteered, despite the threadbare shoes that said it would have been better to have a paying job, something that allowed for unworn soles and a dress that wasn't fraying at the hem. She made the claim with pride, with something like possessive ownership. TAPS wasn't hers, but it was fulfilling, and she loved her work there. "I think they're going to hire me on in a few months," she said, and there was more than pride there. There was accomplishment, like it was a special thing for someone to offer her a job. And it was. It was a job without crops or nudity or sex, one where no one cared what she looked like when she walked through the door, and one where no one tried to touch her while she was inside. She smiled. "Where do you work?" she asked, not sure at all if he would actually answer. He liked questions more than answers, but most people did. Nearly everyone did.
Michael knew people had value. It wasn’t what they offered, in sex or skill, or how they looked. It was who they were. It was something Michael had been able to understand even when his parents did not, and it was why he believed the things his father told him about the old possibilities trying to escape the things that had been done to him. To Michael, young and old, it made sense that hurt people would want to also hurt. He did, after all. Being dead couldn’t make anyone that different.
Michael was working down the inside of his forearm now, flexing around the edge of his elbow, massaging stiff scar tissue. It went around in circles along his flesh. He was thinking of their names, but she distracted him. His father’s voice drifted down into a cold circle where deep black sand heaped on his mind, and Michael blinked white lights down and up again. His fingers stilled.
“Diner called Captain’s. I cook.” He saw no danger in sharing this. He was not difficult to find if you knew which bus to take. He was running, but not right this moment. This moment, he had a job. He looked at her. “Why would you want to work with people who have such bad memories? Why are you taking pictures of it?” It was a little distasteful to him, but he was willing to ask, to assume he might not understand.
She watched the movement of his fingers with curiosity and a birdlike tip of her head. Her gaze was nearly unblinking with interest, and she was a wide-eyed thing that was encountering something new. Sometimes, she was too quiet, and sometimes she looked too long, and she knew it made people uncomfortable around her. Strange and otherworldly, people had said. But she was just curious, and it took her a few seconds longer to look back at his face. "I'm only good at soups," she said of cooking. "My maman only made soups. She would make some that took nearly days, and she'd do everything from scratch, and she taught me. I'm really bad at everything else," she admitted. Anything that needed to be fried or grilled, anything that wasn't hours in a pot and loving stirring, those things she was really, really bad at.
His question about memories surprised her. "Everyone has memories, no matter where you work. Why wouldn't I want to work with people who had bad things happen to them?" she asked, and there was an almost steely firmness to her soft voice then. "They're just people who had bad things happen, and I like helping them. I got away from those bad things, and it's easier to hear someone who's been there tell you there's a way out somewhere. People who haven't been there, they don't know. They think they do, but they don't, not really. But why would memories keep me from them?" she asked, so much confusion in the question that it made her appear somehow younger. "I don't take pictures without asking. Some of these girls, no one has ever wanted to take a picture of them. Of their bodies, yes, but not of them." She shrugged a little bit, hoping he would understand.
He followed her gaze to his arm, blinked, and took the muscle support away from its weight with an abrupt snap decision. Both arms impacted against the rest of his body, sliding off one thigh, and anybody else probably would have slid sideways, but he was proportional and only let out an annoyed gust of air that sounded as dusty as the rest of him. He noticed she said “mother” differently than most people, and gave her a faintly inquisitive expression rather than interrupting her. A faint smile creased his expression at the ramble about soup, which was neither here nor there. “I said I cooked, I didn’t say I cooked good,” he said, not noticing the grammatical faux pas and letting the smile spread a little farther, the implication being that perhaps he did, after all, cook well.
“If you ask before you take your pictures, there’s no guarantee that’s truth, then. They lie. And everybody might have memories, but nobody at the diner wants to go on about their tragic past lives in the middle of the dinner rush at Captain’s,” he said, reasonably, the creaky voice clearing a little as he expended the extra effort for a longer sentence and more clarity of meaning. She was very literal, and Michael didn’t realize that he was the opposite. Extended conversations weren’t exactly common in his every day life, it was obvious. He understood perfectly about the difference between taking a picture of a person and not a body. Perfectly.
She blinked quickly when he moved his arm like he did, and her gaze lifted to his face, a question there. His reaction made her assume he didn't like being looked at, and it explained his issue with the camera in a way that made her carefully tuck it aside, so he wouldn't need to think about it too much. She changed the way she looked at him, too. She kept her gaze to his face, or to the facets of the bus, or to the scenery going by. No more wandering grey that took in his long legs to his wide shoulders. She knew how to modulate her behavior; she'd made a living off it forever, even if it hadn't been a very good living. "If they pay you, you must not be too bad," she said simply, and she liked the smile he gave her after his statement. "Maybe you're even good a little," she suggested.
"I asked her," she said of the girl in the photograph. "I asked her at the beginning of the day, and that picture is from late at night. I don't think she remembered or even knew I was watching then," she admitted. She was new at this. New enough that she didn't know about consent forms or selling images. She just snapped, and that was all. She hadn't even thought about doing something with it yet, well, not beyond some fuzzy notion about the girls at TAPS, and the girls on the streets, and what it would be like for people to really see that world. "I think it's different where I work. These girls don't have memories yet. They're not ready for a place like the diner. They just took a first step, a tiny one, and they all talk, even the ones that think they don't."
Michael didn’t like being stared at, true, but only by people who thought they knew what he was. This woman didn’t have a clue, and that was comforting. She could stare at him all she liked, and still never see any of the possibilities seething right under his skin and pressing at his scars. She wouldn’t be able to see his soul. She would talk about cooking. Michael only look blandly back, and after a moment, actually smiled again. She was making an effort now to avoid his eye. “They would pay anyone who did not set fire to the grease,” he said, reasonably, but he was transparently pleased at her theoretical assessment of his skill.
“She didn’t remember you were watching. So this is not a lie because she was not...” he paused for a moment to search for a word, loosely interlocking his large knuckles in the hollow between his thighs and the seat, “...posing.” Posing was why bodies did not speak any truths.
Michael actually turned his shaved head entirely to look at her fully. It presented both sides of his face, the full attention of his dark eyes and the set of his mouth. He was somewhat carefully groomed despite his size, though there was a spot high on his left cheek where his beard didn’t even begin to grow. It quivered whenever he flexed his jaw down in a frown of control. “Why would they not be ready for the diner?”
"I worked in a restaurant for a month," she said, clarifying a moment later. "A diner. It was really, really terrible, and I had a really handsy boss," she admitted, naming off a dive that was so far off-strip that only hard-up locals and truckers went there. "I didn't like it," she added unnecessarily. And maybe it was all about what people could handle, because TAPS, where everything was anger and tears and near-constant fear of the men banging their fists at the door, TAPS didn't bother her at all. Other volunteers - young ones who thought they knew things from reading about them in books - came in for one shift, and they never came back.
She considered his comment about posing, and she nodded. "I think so. I used to take pictures of my little boy posing. I'd make him sit where I wanted, and I'd make him smile at the camera, and it was never really him. Once I stopped making him sit still, I started getting really, really good pictures. Capturing him reading a book is so much more real than making him sit and give me a made-up smile." And it was easy to talk to this man, and that was such a nice change. She'd been having trouble with that again, lately. Talking. She and MK could barely make it through a conversation these days, and Silver was gone, and those were the only people (other than Luke) who she could really just talk at.
His question about the girls was an unexpected one, and she gave herself a second to try to figure out why it surprised her so much. "Working a real job is hard, after working on the streets for a long time. All the girls have trouble with it, and most of them are hooked on something and half in love with their pimps. I couldn't manage it. I tried. I tried that diner, and I tried some other places, and it was just so easy to fall back on what I did before. Sometimes, I still slip. It's just hard," she said truthfully, and she was aware that this was the most honest conversation she'd had with anyone in a very, very long time.
"Do you like it there?" she asked of his diner.
Michael’s dark eyes widened slightly in understanding about this problem with diners. He was not especially fond of his place of work, but they continued to employ him and it paid the bills, so he did not hate it, either. He wanted to work somewhere cleaner and cook better food more carefully, but he wasn’t stupid enough to ask or look for it where it wasn’t to be found. He had no formal training, nothing but interest, a greasy apron, and library books. He could dream about it, though. Michael liked having dreams that were his own. He said, “Nobody is handsy with me at Captain’s.” He was smiling as he said it, because the idea of anyone daring to touch him was almost as funny as what would happen if they tried.
Michael turned his head to look back out over the many heads. His voice became contained and even more thready than before. His words were nearly lost in the screech of brakes. “Never make your son pose.” The bus had lurched to a stop, and he was lucky, because there was a man coming down the aisle and Michael could turn his glower on him when he paused in consideration of the blonde woman’s window seat. The man kept going toward the back.
Michael said, “Slip. You make it sound like a drug habit.” He sighed his wheezy sigh, and he didn’t say it as if he disbelieved her. “I suppose I can see that. Slipping back into bad habits.” The smile was gone like it had never been. “That why your husband hits you?” Michael lifted one of his massive hands and extended two slender fingers to tap at the corner of his mouth while he indicated hers.
She couldn't help but smile when he said no one was handsy with him. It was a bright smile, sweet beneath the cracked lip and pale skin. She didn't smile like that often, not away from home, and it changed her face entirely, the loss of the distrust that always hovered there like some pale shadow of the past. "Maybe if I grow a little taller," she suggested of her own, potentially non-handsy life. She never joked, and it came out sounding a little too deadpan, but the smile gave it away for what it was.
The force in the comment about Gus posing made the smile fade as quickly as the sun before an unexpected shower. She looked at him again, curiously, forgetting not to. Gus didn't mind the camera. He squirmed, and he wasn't very good at acting natural, but he didn't seem frightened of it like he did of nearly everything else in the world that was human, not some zoo animal or Luke. She assumed the Johnsons hadn't taken any pictures of him, and while she lamented not having anything to remember his babyhood, she was glad he wasn't scared of the lens she was so quickly learning to love. "Okay," she agreed, that old submissive side rearing its head like it always did when she wasn't sure about something, when someone forceful and male ordered her around.
"It is like a habit," she began, tentatively this time, but the question about Luke beating her made her head snap up quickly. "He doesn't," she said, and her fingers moved to a bruise at her shoulder. And she didn't know this man. She didn't know anything about him, but exonerating Luke was suddenly really, really important. Okay, so they'd gotten rougher with each other lately, but that was all consensual, and the marks that were visible on her face had nothing to do with Luke at all. She raised her fingers to her split lip. "There's this hotel I go to. Things get rough there sometimes," she said, assuming he'd think it was some S&M club, but that was better than thinking Luke beat her.
Michael smiled when she suggested that height may have some difference in how she was treated, as if, perhaps, a little height might really matter. It was a somewhat grim smile, and it was funny to him, though not funny because he didn’t know exactly what kind of treatment unwary, pretty blondes received, even if they were very tall indeed. People who couldn’t defend themselves were his father’s possibilities... but as Michael thought about it, he had to acknowledge that even the people who might have a chance at defending themselves were possibilities too. Everyone was a potential victim. It just depended on the killer that waited...
Michael blinked strongly, sweeping away the glaring lenses he saw in his mind. For some reason red thread kept dividing the space behind his eyes. It was a common image, he saw it when he was awake and closed his eyes. Some people said they saw stars; Michael saw red thread.
He was watching her intently as she touched her face to see what he saw, and his own fingers carved through the air to either side, drawing the path of a feather drifting down through the air in front of his face. His eyebrows hitched gently upwards. “A hotel. For married people?” He knew of the hotel, but he didn’t show it, not just then. It was obvious by his face that his interest was clear, and that he was holding something like recognition back. He was not so good at non-reaction.
Oddly enough, Wren didn't think of killers. She'd killed three people in her life. She regretted none of them, and they didn't keep her up nights. She didn't consider herself a murderer, and she didn't fear murderers. She feared nothing for herself, not really, not even cruel men and their cruelties. She feared for others. For Luke. For Gus. For nightmares that might kill the baby in her womb. She feared the things she knew to fear, and that was all about singular, dedicated acts of violence. She had no idea this man, with his long legs and his strange smile, was thinking about killers either. It never even occurred to her, and that odd innocence showed on her face, a contradiction to her very, very filthy past.
Something in his expression told her that he knew the hotel wasn't for married people, but she didn't answer right away. She fidgeted with the hem of her dress nervously, and she worried her lower lip red, and she looked around before she spoke, as if to make sure no one was listening. Things were different now, and she had so many things to lose if the wrong person overheard her and decided she was mad. Gus, Luke's job, and she looked back at him carefully, looked at him for a long time before speaking. "Not for couples. A lot of people go there, but it's not for couples. It's for-" Here she paused, trying to think of a metaphor But she just wasn't smart enough for metaphors, not in that schoolbook way, and she sighed. "It's for people who like to talk about movies and books and comics, but it's invitation only. They give you a journal, and you meet people through it." She bit her lip harder. "My name's Wren," she finished.
Automatically, he turned his head to look where she did as she scanned the crowd. He wasn’t expecting to see anyone she knew, or anyone that was listening all that closely. Even if the people around them were eavesdropping, there was not so much for them to hear, he thought. No one was looking at him, and he didn’t expect them to. As a general rule, people tended to avoid Michael’s gaze, perhaps because it came from a very long way up. This was the more likely theory. Prey almost never noticed when a predator was around, not unless the predator was very stupid or careless. Michael might not have been all that smart, but he wasn’t careless. He pondered the crowd for a little while. He couldn’t imagine what there was to fear from them as opposed to someone or something giving you bruises you couldn’t prevent.
Michael’s strong jaw had relaxed for this portion of the conversation, and the sharp planes of his face seemed to ease in the fluttering fairy lights bouncing off the tall Vegas buildings in the distance. He was comfortable waiting for her eventual response, as whenever he looked over he could tell she was thinking about whether or not she wanted to craft a response at all. When she did, he didn’t hide his surprise. His eyes widened out slightly and looked blacker than ever.
“I’m Michael.” His name was no great gift, and he had no hesitancy giving it. Michael worked the flat of his palm down the length of his thigh again, ending on the top of his knee. He stared blindly at the back of the head in front of him, and then, cautiously, almost delicately, he added, “Kay.” A moment more and he clarified what he meant: “Michael K.”
Michael was taking the existence of the hotel and the British voice with relative calm. He’d been expecting to go crazy for years now, and if this was all that it was going to be (an annoying but powerless voice who assumed it was a trick or a dream) then the relief was powerful enough to be tangible. No annoying voice like this was going to convince him to do anything he didn’t want to do, and his father had been quintessentially himself despite his many deadly “identities.” Michael found the book with the many people writing to be more interesting than the doors, but perhaps that was because, in his experience, nothing happened in the doors. You stepped in, and then a while later, appeared to step out again, with nothing in between. There were no tricks, dreams, or voices for him.
She noticed that he wasn't impatient, and that surprised her too. She was accustomed to her laziness making people around her impatient. It was just one of the things about her that didn't fit just right, and she'd given up trying to fix it a very long time ago. She noticed the widening of his eyes, too, and she couldn't help but smile a little bit. "Michael," she said, trying the name out and deciding it suited him. "H," she added a second later. "Wren H."
She leaned forward then, like a girl sharing a secret, and her youth shown through in that moment. For all that she'd done terrible things, and for all that there was more filth beneath her pale skin than she'd ever tell, she looked young then, mid-secret telling and conspiracy lighting up her nothing-grey eyes. "Is yours good?" she asked. Whenever she met someone new from the hotel, she had the urge to cross her fingers and hope they weren't in Gotham. Somewhere quiet, somewhere safe, somewhere bad things didn't happen, that was what she hoped for people. "Mine is from somewhere dangerous, and that's why-" She motioned to her lip. But, truthfully, Gotham had been better lately. She never got notes from Selina anymore, and Luke didn't mention problems with her and Bruce, and she could only assume that the older version of Selina that she had now didn't involve herself in things. Even when Luke had been gone for a month recently, Selina hadn't insisted on crossing. Things were different now, and she thought maybe they were better. Sadder, maybe, but better.
She considered telling him to be careful. He considered telling him about Silver, and she considered telling him that he could die. She'd done that a lot after losing Silver, but she'd found that no one wanted to hear it. She considered telling him that, like her uncle, he could become evil and terrible. But she didn't tell him, and she looked up as the bus rocked to yet another stop, ensuring no one was listening. "Can I talk to you there?" she asked tentatively of the journals.
Michael nodded tentatively at her additional information, and also to give her permission to use it to talk to him at another time. (That she wanted to was a little odd, but he accepted it without further question.) It was a little like being in a special club with passwords, and Michael found he liked that sense of inclusiveness. He leaned back in the seat, pressing down with the heels of his running shoes, aligning his spine to the fragrant pseudo-leather of the old seat cover, and he reminded himself that he had always been good at keeping secrets. The British voice had an opinion, but he always did, and Michael was very good at ignoring him with the depthless blackness with which he surrounded thoughts he did not want to have. He thought of it as the “opposite of wool,” and had since he was very small.
Michael had to think about what she could possibly mean by “good.” It was such a subjective word, and he didn’t think she meant to ask after the strange voice’s health. After a moment of searching through the alternatives, Michael eventually shrugged and asked, “What do you mean by ‘good,’? You want to know if he is a good person or a bad person? Or if he wants me to do dangerous things?” He was aware that this sounded completely crazy, but it was a public bus, and he wasn’t worried about what the people surrounding him thought. They didn’t know who he was and had no reason to find out.
Safety was always found in a crowd for Michael.
She smiled at that tentative nod. It was a muted smile, but a genuine, a slight parting of clouds in the grey of her eyes. It wasn't that she was lonely, because she wasn't, but she was having such a hard time with her friends lately, and it was nice to meet someone who she didn't need to tiptoe around yet.
When he asked what she meant by good, she touched two fingers to her lip. "Someone who'll give you things like this," she explained. She didn't immediately think he had anyone who would make him do bad things, though she likely should have. She'd seen it happen with Thierry, and Selina and Ivy had landed Brielle in jail for a decade. She knew it could happen, but she didn't immediately think it. She worried instead. Worried about aches and injuries and things. "In my door, sometimes really bad things happen and people are stuck there for a month. People die there. People come back here hurt." She was rambling, and she knew it, fingers in the hem of her skirt. Her gaze lifted again, and she looked a little sorry that she'd let her mouth run. "I don't mean to scare you," she said apologetically.
She bit her lip, and one of her fingers danced along the edge of the camera. She didn't really look for safety. She didn't look for it in crowds, and she didn't look for it in doors. She seldom looked for it in people at all. Safety wasn't a given, and she'd known that since she'd been very, very small. But she noticed he didn't seem to care if anyone heard. She did worry about people hearing. She wondered if that just meant he didn't have things to lose. She hadn't cared once upon a time, a long time ago. Now, she cared. She cared so much, and she looked around, making sure no one had listened.
Michael watched the street pass by. One of them was leaving soon, but he couldn’t remember just which stop was hers. He had no need to brace himself for the hiss of brakes as the bus screamed under them alongside the next curb, his feet were so far from the underside of his hips that there was no impact. Idly his spine moved in a swaying motion, as if he was only a monstrously large science skeleton with no more resistance to gravity.
“You mean someone who gets hit. I don’t know yet. Probably. He is annoying.” Michael said this all with a slight smile, as he was grateful that his voice was only annoying. Madness had such capabilities, twisted capabilities that hung the moon and sang songs about bleach. He could hear one of them in his mind, sing-song, scrub scrub scrub, the cow jumps over the moon.... Michael noticed the annoying British voice went abruptly silent. Good to know.
It was significant that Michael was supremely unbothered by the prospect that people died on the other side of the door. This was not a revelation for him. People died everywhere. They dropped as steadily as flies. “A month. He comes back in a day.” The bus turned toward a new street and the setting sun splashed through the windshield, hitting Michael in the face. He let his eyes shutter slightly, as if napping.
Her stop was next, and she shifted a little as the bus turned, indicating her eventual departure with unhurried movements that spoke of familiarity with the route and how long it would take to get to the next slowdown. She watched the way his body moved in the seat, and she wished there was a way to capture that movement, but it was an idly passing thought and nothing serious. She would like to capture him with his eyes closed, but she wouldn't ask, not after his reaction to the camera. So, she was left watching, a curious little bird with her head tipped just so. "Someone who gets hit. Someone who gets into trouble." It was clarification, but maybe he wouldn't understand if he wasn't from Gotham; she didn't know any other people who came through with bruises all the time. Well, Silver had, but no one else.
She expected some reaction to the possibility of death, but she didn't get any. And she wondered, but maybe not as much as a normal person would. She was dulled things, and she didn't automatically assume that everyone else who was dulled to life's bad things was bad. Sometimes life just made you broken, and she knew that better than anyone. She didn't blame the little girl she had been for the things that had happened to her, and she knew those things had made her what she was. And she knew that what she was would always be a little wrong. It scared her, but not in a way that made her dangerous to good people, and so she just looked at him, no judgement in her wide-grey gaze. "Sometimes things get messed up, and it's not just a day. And sometimes they can control us, and they can keep going back in without letting us go. Not for everyone, though," she admitted, hoping it would serve as a balm.
Michael reflected. He knew what troublemakers looked like, and he generally was able to predict their behavior, but that was based on a certain segment of the population. He didn’t know anyone from England, and every once and a while the voice said things that Michael didn’t understand, most of them accusations and theories that made no more Mark on Michael than footsteps in the sand. Michael thought the man behind the door was likely to be a troublemaker, as he seemed both confident and competent, but he couldn’t be sure. “Could be,” he decided, nodding slightly with this determination. “Hard to tell yet. We’ll have to see.”
He still showed no sign of concern, no trace of worry, at the prospect that some foreign personage might do him damage in some foreign place. Michael was large and intimidating, and no one had managed to physically damage him in a very long time. He spent half of his few spare hours lifting and running, and he was as physically big as he could be without succumbing to drugs. What could this person possibly do to him?
Michael frowned as the bus slid once more to a stop, as he had taken most of the intervening time to consider the voice and the problems she proposed. “This one can’t control me.” That was the only thing she said that really bothered him. He pressed his mouth flat until the pressure made it disappear.
She remembered a time when things like Doors didn't worry her. Before Luke had come back, before Gus had come home, before babies and nightmares and things she couldn't do anything about. Then, she hadn't cared what happened in the hotel, and she missed his willingness to wait and see. She was past waiting, past seeing, and she lived in a place of worry that clouded her grey eyes and took her sleep away. But she was glad for him. Glad for that lack of terror, and she thought maybe he would be okay. It was that old wish, really, for a good Door, a quiet Door, peace and nothing to be afraid of.
"I hope it's okay," she said, looking up as the bus slid to her stop. She pulled the cord belatedly, but she didn't need to worry. There were plenty of people getting off just then, and she stood in the aisle and looked down at him, her fingers curling around the edge of his seat, just over his shoulder, balance as the bus swayed with the movement of feet, of women collecting children and of older people fighting with their walkers and canes to reach the nearby casino before anyone else did.
"I'm glad he can't control you," she added a moment later, hesitation and a smile down at him. "Mine can. She can do whatever she wants, but she doesn't anymore," she admitted of Selina, and it made her think she should leave the other woman a note. Maybe it was time for an olive branch, and it wouldn't hurt to warn her to be careful. She knew, thanks to Evie, that being pregnant here didn't mean being pregnant through the Door, but there were still risks if Selina got hurt badly and something carried over. Her fingers drifted to her belly, and she had to shake her head to get her thoughts back into the present. "It was nice meeting you officially, Michael," she said, and it was a honest statement, truth, and she realized it was the first time she hadn't needed to look up at his face. She smiled a little more. "Thank you for keeping me company," she added, someone shoving impatiently from behind and causing her to notice the empty space in front of her, leading to the bus door. She moved.
Michael’s expectations weren’t the same as most, to him there was no such thing as a place that was only peace and contained no deep shadow fears. All worlds everywhere had things to frighten and intimidate, a food chain with some people on the bottom and some at the top. This was because all worlds must be inhabited by people, and people ate each other the way dogs did, only fiercer and with no excuse. Michael had limited imagination, and if you told him some worlds were not inhabited by humans, but by aliens, it would be an abstract concept, a touch of little green men and Area 52. Michael was so thoroughly grounded his feet were three inches deep in mud.
He showed no discomfort as she slid away and out into the aisle. It was not very often that people looked down upon him. He examined her plump calm face and his eye was again drawn to the bruising. He gave her an easy smile, unworried, unintimidated, and yet somehow not without fear. “No one would want to control me. It would not be pleasant. I don’t think you need to worry.” He did not say that he would worry, only the suggestion that she might, without his reassurance. Michael himself, wedged into his seat on the public bus, had darker thing on his mind.
He reached out an arm like a tent pole and picked up the photography book that she had left sitting on the seat, not even stretching a shoulder to pluck it up and hand it to her as she was swept down the aisleway. “Bye,” he said, calmly, watching her depart and then, inevitably, returning his eyes to the vague road ahead, stretching out into the gathering darkness.