faust has (myluckyhat) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-11-14 00:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | captain marvel, mary jane watson |
Who: Adam/MK
When: Recently!
Where: The Mix
What: Marriage proposal and alter change
Warnings: talk of some unpleasant things but generally pretty tame
The Mix was an expensive restaurant over 60 stories high at the Mandalay Casino. It was a grand, open room with white walls, an elegant spiral white staircase in the middle and a circled veil of hanging glass bubbles. The tables were set with white table cloths and accented with a red vase or a red placemat. Crimson on stark white felt appropriate for Adam’s relationship with Maddie K. His own need to keep things clean blotched by her red imperfections. It wasn’t exactly their anniversary, but it was close enough that Adam felt like she could see why he planned on proposing to her now. Planned wasn’t the best word for it. Decided. Adam understood now that there wouldn’t be another woman who clung to him as tightly as MK and the alternative of being completely alone seemed unbearable. There was no Olive to spend his nights with in her geeky hideaway. There wasn’t even a geeky part of him left that mattered. All his comic books sold or burnt to a crisp. All his video games thrown out. All his hobbies forgotten beyond doing drugs and partying with MK whenever he had the chance.
Wasn’t that the singularity that he always wanted? A simple, straightforward life? No, he always wanted to do good and get praised for it the same way that his dead vigilante friend did. He always wanted people to pat him on the back and compliment him for being such a good doctor and an even better friend. Once the possibility of that was gone, along with his younger dreams of becoming a vigilante himself, Adam accepted that simple was the best he could do. Simple was something that he could aim towards. And, a marriage to Maddie K would smooth the rest of the bumps between them enough that they were barely visible on the surface.
Or, so he hoped.
Adam tried to not make a big deal about the night out. He asked Maddie K to wear something nice and the rest would be a surprise. It was probably the most romantic thing he had done in months (a year even) and he had hoped that was enough to make her say yes. The thought of her throwing the ring back in his face gave him a sudden feeling of freedom that didn’t ever go past mild fantasy, but he really did want her to say yes. He wanted that simple life covered in white. By the time the main course was served, Adam was a couple drinks in and feeling a little less concerned what her reaction would be.
“Almost been two years. Can’t believe it.” Adam said from behind his wine glass. His eyes which used to be a clear, cool blue were now blurry and unfocused. He managed a smile at her. One of those thin ones that barely turned the corner of his lips. “Glad I’m here with you.”
Across from Adam sat his intended fiancee-to-be in a simple, but elegant black number with her bright red hair twisted up and away from her face. She leaned her chin in her hand as her elbow rested on the table, her other hand firmly grasping the wine glass with was more than half empty. Her cheeks grew pinker and pinker as she downed glass after glass of expensive wine like it was water, and her plate of food was barely touched through the duration of the meal so far. Little nibbles here and there that would stop her from getting blackout drunk at the dinner table, but not enough to numb the sweet, sweet burn and buzz. Because lately, that was all MK wanted out of life. The burn of booze as it slithered down her throat, the lightheaded dizziness her colorful array of pills shook into her brain, the sharpness and euphoria of her lines of cocaine sniffed in the bathroom just before she left the house tonight. Ever since her encounter with Wren in that baby shower, that was what pretty much every day was -- a drug-fueled haze that pushed out everything else that might not be okay.
The MK Robinson sitting across from Adam might not seem much different on the surface as the one from two years ago, but this MK had lost so much more in the past two years than she had in the preceding five years between Seattle and Vegas. Sure, she used similar methods to cope with the loss of her boy, and she was so far from clean when she arrived in Vegas two years ago. MK had a reputation for just what she was doing right now with the booze and drugs, but somehow it was worse this time around. Well, there were reasons, of course, like the fact that she had finally destroyed her only real friendship in the world. (Aside from Nell, but Nell was never around anymore, was she?) Or, the fact that the man she loved now, the one who taught her that she could love again after losing her boy, wasn’t quite able to switch on a warmth that she needed more desperately than she realized.
She sat there, a shadow of the young woman who arrived in Vegas at nineteen and fell in love with a boy who wanted to save people. A husk of a twenty-seven year old woman who once had the world at her feet.
“Almost two years,” she repeated after draining the rest of her glass. Almost two years and what did she have to show for it? The scars on her arms, the ache in her chest, the void in her womb. Another glass was in order. But before she reached for the bottle, she tilted her head and smiled over at him. “I’m happy, too, Adam. I love you.” And while all of that would have sounded gushing or affectionate from any other couples, MK made it sound perfunctory. Like the two were following a script, and she was just barely inflecting her lines.
“Two years,” she repeated again, softer and more thoughtful as she reached to refill their glasses. “It doesn’t feel that long.” It both did and didn’t. There were a lot of fucked up things packed in the year and a half since she and Adam first slept together on those hotel stairs.
Adam looked into his own wine glass half empty with some expensive wine from the cool stretches of California. No matter where he went, no matter how much he cleaned, there would always be tiny reminders of places he’d rather be than this glittering desert town. Somewhere in California, yes. Somewhere deep in the Napa Valley where he could learn the chemistry of grapes and hide away in cellars. Would Maddie K be happy there? Or would he meet some other woman? A blonde daughter of a winemaker with rosy cheeks and an appreciation for long quiet moments. He’d find her there and be happy.
The good doctor looked up and smiled, his eyes betraying him in a narrowed annoyance like a child upset someone had awoken him from a very good dream.
The way she said I love you felt putting his hand over a candle inside of a jar. It burned, it flicked and then with a puff of smoke it went out. But, that was the problem with their version of love. All the air could be snuffed out and they’d still be here, the flame flickering away like a broken heartbeat. “No.” He said about it not feeling like almost two years, but that no could have been for any of it. No, I’m not happy. No, I don’t love you. No, not two years. He took a sip of that foggy California wine and felt the weight of the box in his suit jacket. He asked himself again if he really was going to propose and, to his own surprise, the answer was still yes.
“Hasn’t been easy.” Adam felt like he had said that a thousand times before. His smile faded into a straight line and he looked at MK. Really looked at her. Once he used to be able to see through all her shadows and even chase away a couple of them, but now that’s all she was. A redhead dressed in black, eyes cradled, arms cut, belly full of shadows. “Love you, too.” Adam said it more like an oath. What used to be nervous excitement that he had finally found someone to fill the parts of him that Seattle had torn out was now muted into dead eyed devotion. A servant to love and to her.
“What do you want to do next year?”
While Adam was mulling over some dreamt up, fictional girl, he wasn’t the only one guilty of emotionally drifting at that table. A few weeks ago, when she was cleaning out the rest of that nursery in her Turnberry apartment, the nostalgia bug bit her, and MK wandered into her bedroom to look through the bins of keepsakes that she managed to hold onto through all the moving around. There wasn’t much, most of it was still in New York at her sister’s house or in storage in Los Angeles. But there was enough there: a wine label from a bottle drank between two girls curled up on a couch on Christmas Day, birthday cards from her niece, pictures of Wren and of her vigilante boy. Eventually, she came across that locket that never left her neck until she began dating Adam. There were a few long moments of her holding it in her hand, wistfully willing the clock to turn back and for him to be alive.
She brought it to Adam’s that night and clutched it as she slept next to him in his bed. Trying not to dream about mechanical spiders or drowning in the Seattle streets.
So, MK might have reamed Adam for thinking of another woman, but she wasn’t absolved from the sin. The locket was still tucked away in her purse, away from his prying eyes but ever present with her. Because she loved both those men, but in different ways, unhealthy ways. Idolizing and romanticizing the dead was just as awful as apologizing for how shitty she and Adam treated each other. She twitched a smile when he reciprocated her love, and she swirled the wine in her glass for a moment in thought. “If we survive the end of this year,” she said, so nihilistic after everything that had happened. MK would actually welcome an end, or rather resign herself to it. It was just the way it was going.
“Travel?” she asked, sipping on her wine again before placing the glass back down and, looking down at her plate, pushing her food around with her fork. “We should travel. And not just to New York to visit my family,” she said, glancing up at him again. “Get away from this place for a bit and hit the fucking recharge button.” MK had no plans for the future. How could she when she could barely hold onto a single moment before spiralling out of control? She supposed she should go back to work, but what kind of model could work with cut up arms and scars across her stomach that proclaimed a name she wanted to forget? Alexander Pierce III splayed across her in a faint declaration that she would never be the same.
Adam couldn’t eat much either. He didn’t play with his food the way MK did and instead let the expensive food simply sit and chill on the plate. Nothing was appetizing and despite his certainty that she would say yes to the proposal, he could feel a nervousness about what the yes would mean. She wanted to travel, which was another way for her to tell him she wanted to escape. Wasn’t that what he wanted, too? “Would like that.” He confirmed with a nod and went for another couple sips of wine until his head started to feel fuzzy again. “Somewhere cold. Snow.” Adam looked past her shoulder at the white that surrounded them, imagined it was an avalanche and these tablecloths were spots of blood left behind by nature’s victims. “Snow would be a good change.”
His eyes focused back on MK and he tried his best to give her a look of love. Those frozen blue eyes rarely melted anymore and even when he attempted to thaw them it came off as insincere. But, this was their love to be trapped in eternity. This was asking her to be with him forever or at least as long as celebrities forevers lasted anymore. “Didn’t want to leave Vegas before. Now, don’t care. Passages ruined our lives. Ruined friendships. Sometimes think it did more damage than Seattle. Want to leave. Should leave.” Adam’s words were honest, but they rang a little false. It wasn’t that he was hiding affection for comic book characters he could never be. It was that he had already devoted himself to being a mobster’s personal doctor here and there really was no running from that. Especially since the money was good.
But, Maddie K didn’t need to hear that because Adam knew that she wouldn’t leave. It was like death. She toyed with the idea, but she was too much of a coward to go through with it. “Like our life here, though?” He asked, making eye contact. “Know it could be better. But, we’re together.” His hand went under the table to touch the box hiding in his pocket. He pressed his fingers on the sharp edge.
MK wrinkled her nose a little at the mention of snow, an expression that would seem natural on any face but just looked comically out of place on hers. Her face was nothing but false smiles and flashes of morose anger lately, so anything out of that seemed wrong. But it wasn’t like Adam, who had become more and more like the Robodoc Mary Jane and the others called him. No, MK Robinson was too human for her own good. Too human, too sensitive, too susceptible to the hurt of the world, and wasn’t Adam so good at taking advantage of that? She didn’t realize it -- or didn’t want to admit it to herself -- that he manipulated her time and time again. No, that was their version of love, too. The obsession, the control, the need.
And who couldn’t say that MK didn’t need a helping hand with her life? She would say all of it was him loving her and that was it. So, even though she hated the snow, anything would be better than the dry desert heat suffocating her to death. Maybe a change of scenery for a little bit would be good for them. Even if it was just for a little bit. “Seasons would be good. When was the last time we saw a tree that wasn’t manufactured and in the middle of a casino?” There was a lilt of teasing in her voice egged on by the wine buzzing in her system, and onlookers could possibly see why the handsome, serious doctor loved the porcelain doll with the cracked skin across from him.
She nibbled on the paltry bit of food on her fork before forgoing the whole thing all together for another sip of wine. She smiled softly, something almost genuine, and she placed the glass back down. “Of course I do. As long as I’ve got you, everything else will be okay. Right?” She knew parts of him wanted out, just like parts of her wanted out, but in a sick need for validation, she desperately wanted him to need her, too.
Adam nodded to confirm that as long as they had each other, everything else would be manageable. There was no getting out. There was no just moving away from Vegas because he had moved from Seattle and that had caught up with him, too. “Right.” He said and then stood up, walked over to her side of the table and slowly lowered down on one knee in such an abrupt fashion it was hard to tell what he was doing until he pulled the light blue box out of his pocket. Adam smiled at her, this time channeling those feelings and memories he otherwise resented. “Maddie K. Can’t imagine being with anyone else except you.” That was a lie, but all the women he imagined were either fantasy or out of his life for good. “Want to spend the rest of my life with you.” Also a lie based on a commitment he had wanted with her before that he couldn’t even begin to understand now. But, if they were going to make a baby work, they could make a marriage work, too.
He opened the box, revealing a Tiffany Embrace ring that had been recommended to him by the woman working at the jewelry shop. Adam, being a man of simplicity, wanted MK to have an expensive enough ring without any strange coloring or anything beyond timeless elegance. In fact, everything he had done that night was by the book romance. Impressive dinner, a nice ring and he even got down on one knee. That was what women wanted, wasn’t? “Marry me?” Adam asked, holding the ring up for her.
MK’s red eyebrows rose high when he stood up without any preface, confused for a split-second about where he was going or what he was doing until he knelt before her and pulled out that little blue box. There were a couple of beats where she stared at him before it all clicked into place in one fell swoop. Ring, Adam on one knee before her, curious onlookers leaning in. And while she could process what he was saying, the tense, practiced and scripted declarations that you’d see in some cliche romance, there was a buzzing in the back of her brain that drowned out everything aside from a panic. How had she gotten here? Where was that young, slight redhead who moved to Seattle to escape everything and didn’t want to be tied down until her vigilante saved her life in more ways than one? Or that broken woman who came to Vegas and couldn’t think of committing to anything, let alone a man? That woman, the woman who thought she needed no validation, died in Seattle, wearing black over an open grave. Or in a one bedroom house in California. She wasn’t sure which.
Turning her body fully towards him, tip of the toe of her expensive heels sliding forward to bump the tip of his own shoe, MK’s brain snapped back to life, and she heard the words marry me fall out of his mouth. And, because she wasn’t the woman anymore who didn’t think she could find anyone else after losing her boy or the woman who didn’t need a man at all, and because she needed validation and attention more than anything now, she smiled brightly, lips curling up into a smile that was genuine for the sake of everyone watching, for him, for herself. This was love, right? Promising yourself to another despite how bad it could be? She’d done it before in the face of seemingly unsurmountable consequences when she told that boy she loved him one night over the phone.
“Yes,” she said, with a nod and a smile as she held her hand out for him to slip the ring on her finger. It wasn’t the most emotional display anyone had seen, but at least she was smiling. That was all they could ask of her. Because this was love, it had to be. The kind of love she thought she deserved, even if it was not the kind she wanted or needed.
Adam smiled back in an unnatural turn of his lips and he wondered if this was enough to sweep all their other problems under the rug at least for a couple months. They could spend all the time they needed making the actual wedding the most overthetop affair and he thought that if they kept hitting the right romantic notes, then they really would be in love. A polite round of applause sounded around him and he wondered if it would have been louder if he had proposed a different way. He wondered (like a black, stretching shadow) if their fallen hero from Seattle would have proposed in such a loving, affectionate fashion that the entire city would stand in a roar of applause for his love for Maddie K.
But, Adam had stopped trying to compete with that ghost. He had taken up work as a mob doctor. He didn’t care about truth or justice or doing the right thing anymore. All those comic books he worshiped as a child were singing him the wrong tune. They told him that if he was smart and noble enough he could be a hero like the dead vigilante in Seattle. He wasn’t good enough to be anyone’s hero. He wasn’t ambitious enough to be anyone’s villain. So, he’d be a decent husband with a good payroll and a nice house and Maddie K could do whatever she wanted with her life as long as she stayed chained to him.
He took the ring out of the box and carefully slipped it on her finger. A brand new, sparkling, clear as water symbol of love. There wasn’t anything else to say and the hungry eyes around them seemed to demand a bigger show of affection, so Adam stood up and carefully bent over to kiss MK gingerly. There was an urge to tell her they would be happy or that he was happy, but instead he just held the side of her face with long, pale fingers and kept the smile she rarely saw as long as he could before it slowly slipped right off.
MK kept her smile up, even if it didn’t reach her dull green eyes at all, and when he slid the ring on her finger, she wiggled it in front of her as if trying to figure out of it were really real. For anyone else, this would be a blissfully happy moment in their lives, one of those things that filled them up with a warmth and joy that couldn’t be matched. But, MK and Adam never functioned the way they were supposed to. They got together through a fucked up hotel party, forged a relationship based on obligation, cried when a baby almost came into the picture. There was nothing textbook about how they interacted with each other, even if they had a disgustingly scripted way of doing things otherwise.
And while most people would want to shout from the roof when they were engaged to be married, the redhead just kept that measured smile across her lips, too. Who would she be shouting to? MK had a lighting fast desire to call up Wren to tell her the news, but she wasn’t friends with her anymore, was she? Not that the blonde would be happy for them anyway, and that had her forget about the whole thing all together. When his smile slipped, hers slowly faded away, too, and she looked up with him with those dull green eyes that didn’t reflect passion anymore. Passion for him, passion for work, passion for living.
“I love you,” she said seriously, less mechanical than before, and she reached up to brush fingers across his chin before dropping the hand altogether.
“Love you, too.” Adam confirmed and then walked back over to his chair and slowly took his seat. He looked at the last few drops of wine left clinging to the inside of his glass and the barely eaten expensive food in front of him and wondered is that it? He didn’t expect balloons to drop from the ceiling or the world to burst out in song once she said yes, but he thought he was supposed to feel different. There was no lightness in his heart. No sudden burst of hope that they could finally get their lives together.
No, marriage didn’t change anything. Marriage would only solidify a feeling that was already there. The only thing it changed was the sudden void of a certain SHIELD agent in his head before it was replaced with a disoriented, female voice gruffly asking how she was supposed to get out.