Who: Neil & Sam What: Visits, pt 1. Where: Sam't studio apartment. When: Recently, yo. Warnings/Rating: None.
The studio was a squat, one-story building off the strip. The road was industrial, and the lights were high, overhead and glare white. It was the kind of place the tourists didn't fucking know existed, and it was the kind of place that got busy with manual laborers in the mornings. Warehouse after warehouse, garage bay after garage bay, it was the home of construction workers and mechanics, contractors and builders, and there was a constantly reassuring buzz during the day. For someone else, the large collection of noisy, rough men might have been frightening, but that was the kind of shit Sam grew up around, and it was the kind of shit she knew, and it made days at the studio much fucking easier to deal with than nights with their endless quiet and only her thoughts to distract her from every fucking twig leaf snapping outside. Ian wasn't that kind of man. Ian had never been that kind of man, and the daytime voices didn't make her shrink the way the silence did.
Inside the space was spartan, but Sam didn't really fucking need much. And maybe she'd made it sound like an actual apartment or something, but it wasn't. The couch, chairs, tables, desk and rug had been there when she'd walked in the door, and a small refrigerator in the solitary bathroom with its cramped shower was the only thing that resembled a kitchen. There was a burner on top of the small fridge, but she hadn't bothered to plug the thing in. She wasn't hungry, and the women's shelter that had helped her rent the place had filled the fridge with protein drinks and junk if she wanted to munch on something. Mostly, the thing was filled with dark beers, and empties filled the trash can.
The front room was large, and the walls were lined with a half-dozen things she'd done while in the hospital for the past ten days. All the paintings were huge, women in various stages of drowning, pale and broken things on canvas. The room beyond was filled with welding machinery donated from her last fucking job, and she hadn't touched any of it yet. On the floor, a 5x5-foot canvas was stretched out on a wooden frame, blue swathes of paint splashed across it, and a brush and various paint buckets around it.
The entire space smelled of clove cigarettes and paint thinner and booze sweet. There were bottles of whiskey on the window behind the couch, all in various stages of being opened, and there was a bag of weed on a cushion, a small pipe and a lighter alongside it. But the girl sitting on the floor, in front of the canvas, was sober. She was men's overalls that hung too lose on her frame, and she was a thin, almost indecent white undershirt that had belonged to some male nurse at the hospital. Her hair was loose, messy, because she hadn't wanted to bother with it, not when Ian had insisted on brushing and braiding it all the fucking time, and it hung down her back in tangles. She was barely bruised now, and only the dark circles around her eyes told any kind of real story. The music playing in the space was Cortigani, and it echoed all the way to the door, where a witness protection guard was quick to stop anyone who approached. That would only last for a week, they told her, but it helped just then, even if it wasn't permanent. Either way, there were only a few people on the fucking list, and the guard would let them in if they came.
Returning to sobriety felt like waking up from a long, deep sleep. His throat was perpetually dry, his ears rang, his head ached. The light burned his eyes, but Neil thought that was more a symptom of lurking in the apartment and dark places during the day and hitting the bars at night than his ridiculously high alcohol intake. He’d been sober for a full twenty-four hours and he still felt like shit. It made him want another drink just to numb the feeling, but he dry swallowed a couple of extra-strength aspirin tablets before going to see Sam instead. The world was too sharply in focus for him these days, the weight of what Sam had gone through coupled with Ash’s absence, his new disconnect from Louis, and Ella’s child all but being confirmed dead making him feel like he was caught in a waking nightmare he couldn’t escape. Sometimes he thought back to the days of Erik and Raoul and Christine and wished, painfully so, that they could all just go back to that. Things were simpler then. Before all this shit, before Marvel, before Chloe had showed back up and seemed dead-set on blurring the lines of truth to suit her own needs and before he no longer knew what to say to the man he’d been raised with, the man he called brother but wasn’t sure he still could.
It was all too much, and so he focused on one thing at a time. Right now, that was Sam. He caught a cab rather than driving himself and had it drop him off a couple of blocks away from the address she gave him, and walked the rest of the way. Clad in jeans and one of many plain t-shirts that lined his drawers, he looked normal. Unassuming. Like he hadn’t slept in a couple of days, sure, but a lot of people in Vegas looked that way. He hadn’t even gotten close enough to knock on the studio’s front door before some guy was up in his face, asking him who he was and where he was going, the implication that turning right the fuck around would be best heavy between them before he managed to explain, tugging out his I.D. and explaining that he’d been invited.
Fifteen minutes later, and he was let in. The music hit him first, followed by the sickly sweet smell of booze; that was strongest. He registered the cigarettes and the paint thinner afterward, mostly because he didn’t have a particular craving for either. Step after step brought him closer, and he looked at the space without really looking before he slowed to a stop. “Sam?”
She looked up from her spot on the floor, the movement a slow lift of head that wasn't animal-panicked in the slightest. No deer in fucking headlights, and she'd learned to hide that during her days with Ian. The only indication of fear was the way the blacks of her eyes flared wide for a second, and the way her fingers shook as she put the thick and heavy brush down. She picked a smoking clove up from the ashtray at her knee, and she brought the smoke to her lips and dragged in the burn, all while looking at him. She wasn't going to spook. She'd decided that shit early in the day, and she'd told herself often, over and over, and she thought it might have actually sunk in. Or maybe it was just him, and she wasn't scared of him. Even the shit with Goblin seemed like nothing these days, and how sick and twisted was that?
The blue on her fingers transferred to the cigarette's brown paper, and she noticed it in a slow and belated way that had nothing to do with the dosage of medical drugs in her system. She didn't have any pills at the studio; they were all being tapered down every morning by the fucking nurse that would come by to check on her for the next week, and it helped keep everything even and steady. She wiped the blue paint on her overalls, which were stain covered with different shades of dark oils, and she uncrossed her legs and stood without saying anything. Really, she was waiting for him to fucking turn and run. She hadn't seen anyone she knew since the hospital, when he, Daniel and Lin had run out of her room, and there was a disassociation with how she looked now and how she viewed herself. In truth, she just looked young, tired, thinner and haunted, but she imagined bruises and swelling and distortion. And yet, more than fucking anything, she didn't want him to go.
Lin had spent comment after comment trying to get her to talk about shit, to take hugs and affection and joking and use it all as a fucking bandaid. But that wasn't ever going to work coming from Lin. Coming from Neil, yeah, but she wasn't sure he'd be able to do it. Not that she didn't think he cared. Even if he wasn't interested in fucking her anymore, she still knew he cared. "Yeah?" she finally asked, dropping the smoke into the tray after one last drag. She wanted to make it easy for him. She wanted to say something witty or smart-assed and put him at ease, but it was just like Lin's fucking television jingles - she just couldn't.
Seeing her now was a hell of a lot easier than seeing her in the hospital. That had been jarring, not to mention incredibly painful in a way that hadn’t been the least bit physical, and Neil wasn’t altogether proud of how he’d reacted. But she didn’t look so small and bruised now, more like herself and less like a broken girl who hadn’t wanted him in the room. He wasn’t completely at ease, but he didn’t look ready to bolt either. He could look at her straight, at least, without averting his gaze, and he took a step forward when she stood. “Hey,” he said, and it was lame and it was pathetic but he couldn’t think up anything better as a greeting. “You did all these?” He gestured to the paintings, which might not have been rainbows and fluffy bunnies and bright suns in the sky, but were still pretty damn good.
She paid attention. Her inky blue eyes watched him carefully, looking for anything that even resembled disgust or discomfort. She didn't want to do that shit to him. She didn't want to see that look on his face from the hospital, the one that said he didn't even know how to fucking keep her in his sights. But he didn't look like he was going to be sick to his stomach or anything, so she glanced over her shoulder at the walls when he asked about the paintings. "Yeah," she said simply. She knew the paintings weren't exactly fucking happy, but whenever she tried to force herself to do something positive her brush just wouldn't cooperate, and she'd stopped trying after that first day in the hospital.
She looked back at him, and the look she gave him was a questioning one. She wanted to step closer, or for him to step fucking closer, but she wasn't sure how to actually make that happen, not with him way over there. She inhaled deeply, not even realizing her stress was showing, because she was doing everything she could to keep it together, just so he didn't back right out the fucking door. Be cool was her mantra, and she was starting to realize that shit was going to be harder than she'd anticipated, because all she wanted to do was just hide against his chest. In the end, she nodded toward the couch. "Sit down, yeah?" she asked, moving ahead to clear the pot and pipe from the cushions and setting them on the sill. She sat, crossed legs on the seat cushion and the oversized overalls going tight against her knees.
“They’re good.” It was honest. Simple. People could draw happy, uplifting things that were complete shit, after all, and quality was more important. Besides, Sam needed to paint what felt right to her; he knew that much. He caught that questioning look, and coupled with her inhale, he began to curse himself for not doing more to make her feel at ease or whatever. The space between them seemed gaping but he didn’t know how to close it, not completely. But maybe he was getting ahead of himself by thinking everything could be fixed and wrapped up in one fell swoop. “Yeah, okay,” he said when she nodded towards the couch, that single question prompting him to move forward. His hesitation was fleeting as he considered where, and how, to sit, but in the end he left a little less than a person’s width of space between them on the couch, and his body was angled towards hers.
Again, he found himself drawing a blank, but he had to say something. This was bullshit. She wasn’t a fucking stranger, and neither was he, right? “How’s it been so far? Here, I mean.”
She looked at the paintings when he said they were good. She didn't actually look at them that way. Her metalwork, she knew that was good. She knew she could make some money off that, if she got into making industrial furniture and shit. Industrial, steampunk, that was all hot right now, and people were willing to pay. But it seemed so much work to get into something proactive like that, especially when everything went to shit every few weeks. And she still expected it all to go to shit. Even now, sitting in a place that was actually hers, she thought it was all going to go to shit. "Thanks," she said belatedly, realizing he'd agreed to sit with her, and she watched him approach without looking away. He was fucking uncomfortable. She could tell he was fucking uncomfortable, but that didn't mean she knew how to fucking fix it. Yeah, no, that wasn't exactly true. She knew how to fix it. But she knew what she wanted to do, too, and that crap would freak him out maybe.
So she looked at him when he sat beside her, and she let him talk, waiting to see what he would say to her. She laughed, in the end. It was a hoarse, tired fucking laugh, and it came with a shake of her head and tangled blonde sliding along one shoulder. "You're such a fucking idiot," she said, because he was seriously so fucking shit at this. "It's a wonder you ever managed to get yourself laid, baby," she said somewhat fondly.
He wasn’t expecting that laugh. Maybe he wasn’t good at this whatsoever, but he was trying, and Neil hadn’t thought it was that bad of a starting point. Until she laughed, and he looked at her in surprise until the unexpectedness of the sound wore off and he reluctantly acknowledged the truth in her words. “I know,” he admitted. “I am. I’m a huge, pathetic fucking idiot.” He shrugged, managing to crack a smile. “Hell if I know how it happened. I’m hopeless.” Self-deprecating, but with some humor thrown in. “I want to see you. I want to be here with you. I’m just-- I’m not so good at saying that stuff, you know? Doesn’t mean I don’t feel it, though.” He stopped there, running his hands over his face with a groan before looking over at her again. Yeah, he was probably messing things up again. Nothing out of the ordinary there.
The surprise on his face almost made her laugh again, but she just shook her head, at least he was fucking talking and kind of smiling, which was better than standing there across the room and looking like he wanted to fucking bolt. And yeah, so maybe it was leading into her pretending to be ok, which she hadn't fucking intended to do with him, but maybe it was for the best. She knew no one could deal with the shit that life was piling on them lately, and crying on his shoulder would just make him think she was fucked up, and she'd already decided she was just going to not be fucked up, not as far as anyone she cared about knew. She wasn't sure how well she'd be able to pull it off, but she was going to fucking try. It was the groan that made her reach across the couch cushion and tug one of his hands down from his face. She didn't flinch when she touched him, and there was something strangely fucked up about having accepted all the shit she let Ian do to her. It took away that immediate flinch reflex somehow, because she'd already been scared enough to break, and he wasn't any kind of threat sitting there. "Yeah, I get it," she said of him not being good at talking stuff out. "I know you care, baby," she admitted. She'd always known that. Love, yeah, not that. But caring, absolutely. "There's no fucking rulebook for this," she added. "And I'm ok, yeah?" A lie, but a kind one, she thought, calloused and paint-stained fingers tightening on his wrist with the falsehood.
He dropped his hands when she tugged on his wrist, nearly adopting the same expression of surprise at the feel of her fingers on his skin. Touch was unexpected, though maybe Neil should have realized that he was always the one keeping the distance, assuming she wanted space, without considering that all he was really doing was pushing her away. “Yeah,” he said. “I do care. I care a lot, Sam. I--” He paused for a breath. His conversation with Ella seemed so long ago, decades, and it had seemed so easy while they were talking it over. Here and now, when he’d actually need to say the words, he felt like the biggest idiot on the planet for thinking he was actually capable of it. “I know you’re not okay,” came out instead, a switch of topics while he cursed himself for being such a coward. “You don’t have to pretend with me. I know I’m shit at this, but that doesn’t change anything.” After a moment’s hesitation, he reached out with his free hand and ran his fingertips lightly over her shoulder, almost testing, as much to see what she would do as it was a self-gauge.
She didn't hold her breath after he said he cared, because she didn't actually expect him to say anything else. Once, yeah, maybe she'd thought he was going to tell her that he cared about her in more than a friends with benefits way, but that had been a long fucking time ago, and she didn't expect it anymore. Sure, Lin could insist, Ella could insist, whatever, but she knew what it was like when she was actually in a room with Neil, and she knew better than to keep waiting for that from him. It didn't make it hurt any less, but there was something about just accepting it that made it easier. It was the same reason she believed he'd hooked up with Chloe, and that he'd said the things Ella said he had, because it just made fucking sense. And she'd been fucking ridiculous to ever think a man like him could want something serious from a girl like her. Even before all this shit, she should have known. He would marry Chloe, or someone like Chloe eventually, and that was just fucking that. She was just entertaining, fun - or she had been once - and she was trying really fucking hard to be that way again.
She watched his hand, and she didn't move away, letting his fingers land wherever he wanted to put them, and she grinned just a little, crooked and gap-tooth, when he said he was shit at this. "Baby, it's fine. I'm fine," she told him. A shrug of her shoulders followed. "Ok, maybe not fine, but I will be, yeah? It doesn't have to be weird or whatever. I'm not going to start crying on you or clinging to you or anything." She wanted to, but she wouldn't. She fucking wouldn't, not when he could barely talk to her or touch her.
He would have argued that she wasn’t fine had she not amended her words, because as horrible as he was at this Neil was pretty sure her pretending wouldn’t fix anything. They both kept doing that, kept pretending, and it never did either of them any favors. “I don’t want it to be weird either,” he said, a little too earnestly, his desire to go back to what they had slipping through the cracks. “But-- you don’t make it weird. I do. I mean, look, I want you to be comfortable enough to say whatever you want to say and do whatever you want to do around me.” And it was hard for him to see her hurt, yeah, but he was doing his damndest to keep that reaction from showing if all it was going to do was make things worse. He had no idea she expected him to marry Chloe, because that ship had sailed, and even someone like her was a stretch. Marriage had never been in the cards for him after she’d left, and now he wasn’t interested in the parade of wealthy women he was certain his parents would love to set him up with.
When she didn’t react badly to his hand on her shoulder, he slid his fingers down along her arm until he found hers and gave her hand a light squeeze.
She wasn't surprised when his desire to have everything be cool slid through the cracks. It was what she'd been fighting against since the fucking hospital, yeah? Finding that fucking balance that made everyone think she was fine. Somehow, managing to be ok enough to make them all forget whatever was in the pictures Ian had sent them. She just didn't know fucking how to manage it, and it was easier with some people than others. She might have just kept fucking going for that, if he hadn't mentioned that whole thing about being comfortable, but he did mention it, and the only reason she didn't interrupt his ass was because she was focused on the way his fingers felt sliding along her arm and to her hand.
Neil never really touched her on his own steam. It had been like that since the first night they'd met, where she'd been the one grabbing and touching, and that shit hadn't changed in over a year. She glanced down at his hand, and then she looked back up at his face. "I'm not uncomfortable around you," she said bluntly. "I just don't want you looking at me and thinking about all the shit with Ian, about whatever the fuck he said, or about whatever was in the fucking pictures, or about the hospital," she admitted, her voice catching on Ian's name noticeably. It was simplistic, maybe, and it definitely wasn't the whole fucking story, but not everything could be fixed in a day, how Lin wanted it to, yeah? Baby steps, and she looked back down at his hand, and she squeezed his fingers back twice, testing at first, then more surely.
"Do something more," she urged, wiggling her fingers and wondering if he could actually pull off two proactive things in one conversation. And it was easier to focus on that shit, on his hand and whether or not he could bring himself to touch her.
Okay, well, knowing she wasn’t uncomfortable around him went a long way towards chipping away at the belief that she was. Part of him still wondered if she was just saying that so things wouldn’t be weird, but her follow-up explanation made sense. “I don’t think about that shit when I look at you,” he said, and he realized that sounded too fucking simple, so he amended it a little. “I’m not saying I’m going to forget overnight, but that doesn’t mean I think any differently of you, it just means I still want to kill the bastard.” His voice sharpened, then, but he shoved his anger away and tried not to think of Ian, of what he’d done and how he still evaded capture like some sort of movie villain.
The pressure of her fingers squeezing his was a damn good distraction, and while his hesitation might have once been painfully obvious it was less so now, when she encouraged him to do more. Right, he could do that, and instead of agonizing over what he just acted; his arms went around her waist and he tugged her against him, gently, no real force or demand, just a request.
Her eyes narrowed a little when he said he didn't think about that shit when he looked at her. She wasn't sure she believed him, because she imagined the absolute fucking worst was in those pictures. No one had actually shown them to her, and she'd populated them with each and every fucking horrific thing she could remember from her time with Ian. She imagined them being handed out to everyone she knew, and she imagined that every last one of them had seen her naked and fucked up. She had to squeeze her eyes shut tight to get the thought out of her head, and she opened them again as he was saying he wasn't going to forget overnight. That was honest, and it made her feel better than any fucking soothing shit he might have said. And that sharp tone in his voice, that shit was new. "You're pissed," she said, as if the idea had just hit her. And, yeah, it had. It had never occurred to her that he would be pissed off. Maybe it should have, but it hadn't.
She was expecting a lot of fucking hesitation from her request, because he just wasn't good at taking action, and she knew that. But his arms were around her waist before she even anticipated the feeling of it, and she reacted immediately, without any fucking thought. His tug was gentle, but her knee on his thigh when she uncrossed her knees and moved forward across the couch wasn't gentle at all. Gentle would have required thought, and there wasn't any fucking thought. There was just her arms around his upper arms, and she practically crawled into his lap to cling to him like the world was fucking ending. It was awkward, limbs and nothing seductive or comfortable. It was desperation and too tight a grip and her nose buried against the fabric at his shoulder and her knee digging into his thigh. Lin would have been fucking proud.
Neil had a vague understanding of how much worse the pictures could have been, but that was a place he didn’t let his mind wander to whatsoever, not even a little. What he had seen could be forgotten, eventually, but he’d found that booze was only good at temporary memory loss, nothing permanent. As for being pissed, though, that he could and would answer honestly. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I’ve never fucking hated anyone as much as I hate him. I hope someone kills him before the cops find him, honestly. He doesn’t deserve a trial and that bullshit takes too long anyway.” Maybe he wasn’t capable of doing the things he’d threatened but he could damn well wish that someone else was, and did.
Her reaction was more than he expected, even more than he let himself hope for. The suddenness of it nearly caught him off guard and he just barely managed to keep himself upright. His arms tightened around her, instinctively, as she clung to him, and he leaned his head against hers without saying a word about the knee digging into his thigh or how tightly she was holding onto him. He just held her, quietly, rubbing soothing circles and meaningless patterns on her back with firm, sure strokes.
Even having heard the anger in his voice, she was surprised by the admission. She wanted to ask him if he was pissed at her. Because she'd always prided herself on being a fucking fighter, and yet she hadn't fought shit, had she? But what the fuck was he going to say? Yeah, I'm pissed? No fucking way he would say that, even if he felt it, and it wasn't like she'd cheated on him or something, yeah? Not when they weren't really together and he was seeing other people or whatever. And she had to remind herself that she'd given him the permission for that, yeah? She'd left. At the end of the fucking day, she'd left. She'd walked out, and she'd brought all this shit on herself. So she didn't say a fucking thing about it. And, still, his hate was like a fucking balm somehow. It made her feel better, that he was pissed, because she didn't even have it in her to be pissed off anymore. So, she didn't say anything at all for a few minutes. She just clung to him instead, the strength in his arms something that would have freaked her out a few months earlier. But now it just felt fucking safe, and nothing felt safe lately. And it was the meaningless movement of his hands against her back that finally broke her. When she started crying, it wasn't dainty or attractive or pretty. It was shoulder-wracking sobs and his shirt going damp, and she tried to stop a few times, but that didn't fucking work. She slid down so she wasn't kneeling against his thigh anymore, her knees on the couch cushion between his legs and all her weight against one of his thighs. She had no fucking clue how long it was before she could actually manage words again. "I swear, I was going to act fucking normal," she said tearfully.
That she might think he was angry at her hadn’t even crossed his mind. The depth of his hatred was reserved for Ian, for what he’d done to her and how he’d gloated about it, though he managed to spare some hatred for himself too. Maybe it was a Donovan thing, since he and Louis both had a tendency to blame themselves for not fixing shit, but he didn’t think of it that way. It was just who he was. Self-deprecation was part of the package.
Despite the circumstances, this was the most contact he’d had with her in months, and he was in no hurry to let go. Even when the tears started falling and her sobs were muffled against his shirt, he didn’t try to pull away or go rigid with discomfort. “It’s okay,” he whispered, following it up with more thoughtless endearments, soothing quiet and warmth that he didn’t bother thinking about or obsessing over. He always tried so hard to do the right thing with no success; maybe it was time to stop overthinking every detail. He managed a small laugh when she said she was going to act normal, running his fingers through her hair in a slow, steady motion. “Who says what’s normal and what isn’t? You can act however you want, Sam. I want you to be you, not what you think you have to be.”
She shoved at his shoulder when he laughed, and the sound that accompanied the shoved was an indignant humph. "Laughing when I'm snotting all over you is so not fucking cool," she insisted, cheek back against his shoulder again and, yeah, no, she wasn't pissed or anything, and that was obvious in the maybe-smile that lingered just at the edges of her voice. She let her eyes close when he dragged his fingers through those tangles. A second, at first, as if she expected the Big Bad fucking Wolf to come if she let her guard down, but he didn't and, after verifying that it was still Neil, and that there wasn't a monster in the fucking room, she let her eyes close again, a little longer this time. "I want to be strong," she admitted, lulled by the warmth and safety and the repetitive movement of his fingers. "I want everyone to believe I'm ok, so I don't have to think about shit every single time they look at me. I want Lin to stop trying so fucking hard to make everything a joke, and I want Lou to stop fucking screaming and just not getting it, and I want Joey to stop trying to make me patch shit up with Iris, when all I can think about is Ian calling me by her fucking name." And she was rambling now. Just fucking words, and thoughtless ones at that, but no less true for being unthinking. And so, yeah, none of that shit was about her being her. It wasn't really about her being anything, but there didn't seem to be time for figuring that shit out, not with everything else. Her fingers yanked on his sleeve, the tug an angry, emotional thing.
“Since when have I been cool?” He added extra emphasis on the word, like he was too old for coolness and that sort of thing. “I’m totally lame, baby,” he teased, “I thought you’d figured that out by now.” Getting past the awkward physical non-physical tango had gone a long way towards relaxing him, and now that he knew she wouldn’t bolt when he touched her, well, it was a lot easier to keep doing it. He listened while she spoke, almost afraid to interrupt, as though she might stop talking and clam right up again if he did. In this, his eternal calm was a benefit; it made it easy to keep stroking her hair, to keep from letting her anger and emotion seep through and affect him in response. “You are strong,” he told her, and he said it like he believed it was true. As for people believing she was okay, he didn’t think that was likely to happen anytime soon, as much as she might want it. “Lin’s just dealing the way Lin knows how, and Louis… Louis has a lot of shit to deal with,” he sighed. He frowned when she mentioned Joey, and he had to fight to keep from reacting any further to Ian calling her by Iris’ name. “To hell with Joey. You don’t have to patch shit up with her if you don’t want to, Sam.” Maybe he should have been promoting family love and shit, but fuck that.
She laughed a little when he said he was lame, the teasing making her relax a little more, because it wasn't pushy and it wasn't serious and, yeah, ok, she could deal with that. She shifted her weight until she was sitting between his thighs, her legs draped over one of his, and her arms still loosely would around his shoulders. But it wasn't a deathgrip anymore, even with the residual angry tug on his shirt sleeve being repeated a few times as she sighed and settled her shoulder against his chest and her cheek against his collarbone. "No, I gave in and let him do a lot of fucking shit, Neil. That's not strong. That's fucking giving up," she said, anger at herself seeping into the words. Because, yeah, she could have fought the fucking drugs or whatever, and she could have fought after. She tipped her head up and looked at him after he mentioned Lou, and she caught that frown on his lips. "Joey thinks she's a victim, and maybe I'm just a huge cunt for not seeing it that way," she admitted. She knew she was going to have to do what Joey wanted if she was going to keep her brother, and she really didn't want to fucking think about it, so she reached behind Neil for the hashpipe on the windowsill, and she turned the blown glass between her fingers and wondered if he would freak if she packed the thing. "Tell me about you, yeah? It's more distracting." Not good, maybe, because it was an invitation to tell her about Chloe and Ella or whatever, but she didn't want him to feel pressured into hiding things. "What you've been up to or whatever?"
He’d missed this, he realized. Missed holding her, missed being with her in a way that didn’t come with awkward silences or tears or screaming. “You didn’t give up,” he insisted, one arm around her shoulders and the other draped loosely over her legs. “You’re here, Sam. You survived, and you didn’t let him win. That’s not fucking giving up at all.” He heard the anger in her voice, and he knew she probably blamed herself for not trying harder in stopping Ian from doing whatever he’d done. But he didn’t think of it like that; no, she was strong for just coming through and not shattering into a million pieces. As for Iris, well, maybe he was just less inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, but this wasn’t about fucking Iris. It wasn’t about her at all. “I don’t know if she is or she isn’t, but you don’t have to agree with Joey,” he said, watching as she reached for the pipe. He didn’t say anything, though, not yet, though his brows furrowed slightly as she turned it between her fingers. His life hadn't been all that eventful lately, but he shrugged and nodded when he asked him to talk about himself. "Haven't been doing much," he shrugged. "Got drunk. Talked to Lin. Talked to Louis. Cut things off with Chloe, apparently. And I guess Ella's baby is okay after all, she just doesn't have her back yet."
She gave him a look that was all rolled eyes and disbelief when he said she didn't give up. She would have told him that she wasn't really fucking sure surviving was worth it, but she didn't. The fact that he was actually sitting there and talking with her, she didn't want to fuck it up by getting morose, and she didn't actually want to go down the path of discussing the shit Ian had actually done. So, she just left it at that look, and moved onto Iris, because Iris was an easier topic. "I'm going to lose my brother if I don't figure out how to sit in the same room with her and pretend I don't want to slam her forehead into the nearest doorknob, Neil." She wasn't the type of person to want someone dead, but she'd grown up in a world of bloody noses and scrapes. The problem was that Iris didn't know how to fix shit with her fists, and Sam didn't have any other fucking way to get this particular anger muted. She turned the pipe between her fingers, and she stretched for the bag of weed without moving from her place between his thighs, as she listened to him list off the shit that he'd been up to. "We should go somewhere with Lin that doesn't make him scream or cry," she suggested. "You know, friends or whatever, yeah? He's been screaming at fucking everyone lately." And maybe she should have been concentrating on herself, instead of on Lin, but it was always easier to focus on other people's shit. The comment about Chloe made her give him a quick look. It was admission that he'd been with Chloe, yeah? And maybe they'd just had a fight or something. "Sorry, baby." She flicked the lighter.
Oh, Neil knew that look. He wasn’t always as oblivious as a brick wall, but since she didn’t say anything further neither did he. It’d take more than that to convince him that she was weak, that she’d given up, and he’d fight like hell in a way he rarely did to keep her from submitting entirely to that kind of self-deprecation. As for Joey, well, he was kind of failing spectacularly in the sibling department himself so he really didn’t have any advice that he thought was worth taking. “Louis and I worked out our tension by him punching me in the face and me breaking his nose,” he said, finally. “I’m guessing that wouldn’t work with Iris, though. What do you feel like you need to do to not want to slam her forehead into a doorknob?” In his mind, she had every right to be pissed at Iris and it’d take more than a damn apology to fix shit between them. “Yeah, maybe,” he said of Lin, but he was distracted by the weed and whether or not he should tell her he didn’t think that was a good idea. “We could all use a break. Something fun. I don’t know what the fuck fun is anymore, but we can figure it out.” He hesitated, debated with himself, and finally he just opened his mouth and said what he wanted to say-- well, he said something. “Does it help?” He was talking about the weed, but her apology made him frown in confusion. “Don’t be sorry. I’ve told you, Sam, Chloe and I weren’t together. We were friends, or at least I fucking thought we were, but I don’t think she and I are on the same page.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s better this way, us being nothing.”