Gabriel Reed (matchesmade) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-11-14 13:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | jane foster, narcissa black |
Who: Gabriel and Lucy Reed
What: A lunch-date to catch up on old times goes wrong when name-sale turns up trouble.
Where: A restaurant in town
Warnings: Violence
The place Gabriel had picked was small but it was lively. It was a cafe, the kind where they served meals that had no fuss, no additional garnishing, no parsley everywhere and you could recognize what was written on the menu. People were pushing inside and seated at the booths, but he’d looked at the narrow walkways between the booths and thought of his cane and pointed to a table outside where the sun was kept off by a wide awning. There were fewer people out here, the tables were small and round and jostled together but if he sat close enough to the street and turned his chair enough, he could keep his leg out straight where it hurt less and see her when she walked up.
Gabe figured he’d know her when she walked on by. Lucy had been eighteen the last time he’d been at the Reeds (and he thought of it like that, like ‘the Reeds’, rather than home - it had been an awkward fit when he’d been a boy, and they’d accepted it would be so, the Reeds didn’t push him to be more than what he was and he didn’t ask them to be more than parents who’d picked him up when he was too grown for parents really at all). She’d been tall then, with a lot of dark hair and the kind of smile that could light up a room when it came, and he didn’t think he’d changed that much, when he looked in the mirror. By twenty, he’d had muscle and broad shoulders and clear dark eyes, and now he’d added a little bit more muscle and gray in the dark hair, but the shoulders were as broad and the eyes were clear. He hadn’t forgotten the leg, but he left his cane leaning against the table, easy and he was jeans beneath the soft blue shirt, jeans that hid the support he wore around his knee.
He ordered a beer, just the one and he sat back at the table and watched the street move past, with the lazy interest that was just a little too sharp as it flicked past possible women who walked looking like they might be Lucy all grown up.
Lucy normally had a nice healthy level of energy. The engaging kind that looked people in the eyes, said thank you to cashiers (and meant it) and smiled at little kids when they glanced her way. It was warm without being oppressive. Inviting without nagging. She was one of the biologists who spent most of her spare time working with different organizations to get shit done, so the natural warmth refined and molded to her personality permanently. Lucy was proud of it the way Narcissa was proud of her ability to waltz with the grace of a queen.
But, today all that energy turned into something nervous and jittery. She fumbled her car keys. She forgot her wallet halfway out to her car. She checked her hair in every reflective surface she could find. Lucy couldn’t remember the last time she felt like this and knew it was unnecessary. Gabe should have been the nervous one (though he never, ever would be) and if anything she should have planned to walk in there, bitch him out for years of leaving her in the dark and maybe throw something. Lucy always wanted to storm out of somewhere well populated and this was a good excuse, after all.
None of that was in the cards, though and Lucy was old enough to realize that. She was a sucker for family. And baby pictures. Gabe lucked out.
Lucy missed Gabe the first time she hurriedly walked through the front door in jeans, a plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves and an oversized western bag that smelled like a Texas leather shop. She took off her aviator glasses, sighed with a hopeful smile and then wandered around until she didn’t find her older brother anyway. Her stomach dropped and she thought of simply waiting inside near the door like a chump before a wandering hostess saw her lost look and pointed her towards the outdoor seating. Deciding this was going to be an all or nothing scenario, Lucy put her brave face back on and stepped back outside.
She recognized Gabe instantly.
“Hi,” Lucy’s voice rose a little higher and she grinned. “Gabe! Hi!” She pushed past the other people and tables towards him. “Don’t get up.” She spotted the cane right off and extended her arms and bent down for a hug. “Hey, big brother.”
He had not expected it to be her. He had lost her - one of many women who at a lunch hour at a popular spot, strolled in with the kind of confidence that did not scan over the outside seating with the urgent, worried purpose of someone who did not know who they were meeting. Gabriel had seen her; had noted the straight spine and the dark hair that spilled against that plaid but he hadn’t flagged her down - the uncertainty as to who she was too indistinct. He was not nervous, or he didn’t think he was, he had run ops with nothing but a crackling piece in his ear and the certainty he would be carved into pieces if he were caught. He had no reason to be nervous - but he had been pulling the napkin into long pieces, pleats of soft, shrilled paper that were scattered over his lap when he heard her voice. Gabriel blinked, looked up.
She was taller. Her eyes lit her face - they always had, but Gabriel was surprised and a little discomforted just how much, how greatly the woman resembled the eighteen year old and how little she appeared to have left it behind. As he had. He watched the clatter of tables drawn back out of her way, of people who shuffled to make room for her path and as she leaned, he reached with the same stiffened uncertainty that had been normal once, natural once - that still was, aside from an agency filled with covers, with other people to slide into and embrace. “Lucy.” Gabriel’s jacket was open, the bulge of the holster (there was always a holster) tucked in the room between armpit and rib-cage and concealed, and the material creased, light and expensive as he held her carefully. The expression was immutable, unchanged - pleasant, but with the preservation of distance - the smile was small, careful.
He hadn’t been called anything close to ‘big brother’ in two decades.
“I didn’t know if you’d come. Do you want something?” Gabe indicated the bottle that sat in front of him, flat of his palm stretched out.
Lucy didn’t expect her big brother to jump up and down in joy to see her and truly was just glad he didn’t seem disappointed that she had shown up. Her badgering of him on the journals (or what she perceived as badgering) might have lead him here with the sort of reluctance that people tried to hide when they had better things to do. Lucy’s mind wandered back to the niece and nephew she didn’t know about until a couple weeks ago and she wondered if she could ever make it up to them now and become the coolest aunt ever. “Yeah, if a waiter comes back around I’ll have an ice tea.” She said, obviously not eager to bother her brother enough to go get her anything.
Then she flopped down on the chair across from him, lugged the bag off her shoulder the way women do when they take the time to complain about sores and aches without actually going to the doctor about it. “Thanks for meeting with me. I know family can be annoying and a little pestering, but that’s our job, right?” Her smile twitched into a momentary frown before resolving into a pleasant look. When she was younger, it was a lot harder for Lucy to pull punches or smile when she didn’t want to. Years of working with redneck hunters and crazed hippies to get anything done on the conservation side of her job polished a lot of those extroverted blemishes.
She was a study in casual, this woman who had grown tall and was marked by years passing. Gabriel saw the feathering of the skin at the corners of her eyes, the way her hair slid like water against her shoulders with an artless femininity the young Lucy Reed would not have possessed. She had grown into herself, he thought, and noted the smile despite the certainty that studied casualty was at least partially a front. She did not shout. She did not throw his beer at the nearest wall. Gabriel had reached toward the tempestuous, sought out the temperamental in seeking contrast to his own metered pace. It was pleasantly unpredicted that she slid into the seat across from him without something breaking.
Family. Gabriel’s composure did not splinter. His weight listed left, he inched one hand below the table and it returned with a worn leather wallet. They sold hundreds of the things all over the country, it was not expensive and there were no identifiers. He had known since the last trip back that he would not be leaving America, new name and new identity to put inside along with the cards and the bills. He was still a cypher; the photos he took out with careful fingers were softened at the edges from use but they were not creased across the faces, a sign that their home was not truly the wallet. He put them down on the surface, spun them with the edge of his forefinger toward her.
The girl in one was pretty. She was pretty in a way that would be sharp, when she was older, but the brittle loveliness in her bone-structure was softened by childhood. She had a pert look on her face as if she were scolding the camera man, and she had turned her right side toward the frame with the knowing of a woman much older. The second photograph was of a boy, smaller, darker. He was uncertain and he met the photographer head on. Gabriel tapped the first, “Ophelia,” the second, “Ernest.”
Lucy loved looking at pictures in a way that most single women her age hated. She never wanted kids and wasn’t much for the married type, but she loved babies and happiness and smiles that looked like smiles she had seen before. “Oh, those are the worst names.” Lucy shot Gabe a toothy grin and laughed. “But, the prettiest little kids I’ve ever seen.” She reached to run the tip of her finger across the side of the photograph. Both of them looked a little too serious for Lucy’s taste. She tried to imagine them finger painting and singing and running through the wild. Maybe the older one. The girl who seemed to see more than she should have.
The younger Reed looked up to Gabe, all happiness and that rebellious teasing he had known for years condensed into one affectionate smile. “Are they with you? Or their mother?” She asked cautiously in that way that people do when the try to leave the window open if someone wanted to throw the subject out like bad bath water. It was so difficult for her to figure out the right lines and boundaries to keep Gabe talking to her. When she was a kid, it didn’t matter so much. They shared the same house. Even if he got fed up with her, Lucy could come running with a book in her hands and one of those sorry smiles that was so difficult to say no to.
Gabriel did not smile naturally. He had learned, in the Reed house, what natural smiles looked like. They had all smiled at him, awkward boy with thin, broad shoulders like a coat-hanger and bulky broad hands, and he had echoed until he had learned how it looked. Long hours in the mirror had taught him to mimic. He smiled now. It looked easier than it had done, two decades previous. It looked as though he knew how. He spun the photographs around with the tip of his index finger and he looked at Phee and Ernie as if he were new to their faces. There was a great deal of Eloise in them, their faces too small for his own blocky features. They were sharp, refined. He imagined them as delicate, like china figurines.
“They’re Phee and Ernie,” he said, cheerfully acknowledging the ridiculous of names that had been chosen for what they referenced. He had thought Ophelia dreadful, but Gabriel had also been late, Eloise halfway through a labor that had been terrible and frightening, until had the doctor asked whether he preferred his wife or his child, Gabriel would have said irrevocably the former rather than the latter; capable of killing without blinking he had gone white enough that the nurse had said something. Lu had looked at him like he was reading her lines from the audience.
“They live with me. Their mother is,” a short pause. No one ever asked; no one ever thought it was a good idea to ask. Children alone with their father meant something had gone quite wrong. “Ill,” he said carefully.
Lucy nodded quickly and sat back in her chair, eyes out into the wilderness as she tried to imagine the kind of childhood these babies had. What kind of ill their mom was. Lucy was a smart girl with a nice enough imagination, but once she wandered into bad territory she rolled up her jeans and waded out as fast as she could. A sort of emotional cowardice that the sort of woman who charmed grizzly bears shouldn’t have had. Or maybe all bear wranglers got skittish around feelings and what not. A ghost of a laugh barely shook her shoulders at the thought and she looked back at Gabe.
“Do you need help with them? I’m great with kids.” Lucy tilted her head, one shoulder up as if she were challenging him to say otherwise. “I won’t even force them to go outside right away.” Lucy pointed at him, wagging her finger to punctuate her perfect pitch. What parent wouldn’t want to give their kid to eager 30 something that could give their energy a run for its money? But, then she decided she was getting ahead of herself. Too eager, like her parents could be, to form a family and make it into a big loving mess. “How’s work? What’s with the leg? How’d you meet this wife of yours?” A flurry of questions all at once without any care which one was answered first or at all.
The Lucy he imagined was great with children. She had been great with children barely more than a kid herself; Gabriel looked at her along the sweating brown glass of the beer bottle, found the threads of growing older along with the inexplicable energy of youth that had not dampened, and then the smile - hesitant, not quite all the way there - wiped itself away at a barrage of questions much like enemy fire. He set the bottle down onto the table’s edge, twisted the mouth of it between his fingers and studied the photographs instead. Phee smirked at him from within a white border, Ernie was forever a moment away from sucking his thumb. Gabriel knew them now, the way he had never known them, when they were shrieking glee tossed over his shoulder for a handful of days, weeks. Now they sulked, they were quiet, they tossed peas at one another over the dinner table. He loved them, in the same unextinguishable way he had loved Eloise, the thought of it not being so was impossible now.
“I met her at a party,” he said, choosing the least difficult of the questions. “We were married ten years.” Were. The statement fell into the negative space, an understanding drawn together in awkward pause. The wallet slid out of his pocket, another - much more crumpled - photograph drawn from the inner fold. The man in it stood taller, without a limp. The woman was porcelain, a lamp-light that drew the eye. Gabriel did not provide explanation as to why he carried a photograph with him of her.
“I always need help with them. They’ve got a nanny, a German woman who is terrifyingly good with them,” a mellow, warm laugh had begun to penetrate the words; Gabriel’s shoulders unwinched, the muscles unclenched. The children were easy, they lacked demand. Everyone, Gabriel was beginning to understand, liked them and if they did not, they said so immediately.
Lucy was grateful that at least some questions were answered and she reached across the table. Her hands were palms down, fingers curled out a little in an invitation for Gabe to take one or both if he wanted. She wished with every part of her that she was angry at him. That she’d lecture about family and what he owed her and these babies being away from their aunt who would love them who already loved them. But, she couldn’t. Life was beautiful. Those kids were beautiful. And, she really missed her brother.
“I’m really glad you have them. Even if it was through a screwy marriage.” She told him with a smile. “And, I’m really glad I get to see you again.” Despite Lucy’s natural warmth, a trait passed down to her from securely middle class parents, she was still nervous telling Gabe so frankly that he was missed. She didn’t think it would hit him the way it was supposed to. Like sending a thank you card to someone and worrying they didn’t like the bear hugging the heart pillow on the cover.
Gabriel did not appear to notice the gesture, the hand that crept across the table like a peace offering. He did not reach out, his own hands were heavy but relaxed at the edge of the table, but he smiled and this again, lifted a little beyond the curl of his mouth to the creases at the corners of his eyes. He had looked like a man when young enough to be a boy, and he looked no different now. He had been about to say ‘I’m glad to see you too’, in the way people demanded when they said something pleasant, but he was interrupted by the distinct and instantly recognisable, quiet pop-pop-pop of a gun being fired and the thin whistle of air. Old training kicked in, and the table over-turned as Gabe grasped her outstretched hand by the wrist and yanked downward in an efficient but not entirely painless move that took them both hard to the floor. Bullets pock-marked the glass above their heads and the plated window split and shattered, to the screams of suddenly-aware diners.
“Stay down,” there was pressure from his palm on her shoulder, command rather than request. The chaos at the table-side was ugly; people screaming, some running, some getting low, some simply panicking. A shot fired once more - too accurate, as it embedded in the wood to his right, for anything but sniper fire. “Don’t run. Lucy, don’t run.”
Lucy wasn’t one to panic easy. She frequently looked wild cats and bears and bees in the face without an inch of jitters (animals noticed fear and that made them more dangerous than normal). But, whatever just happened, that pop pop of sniper fire, wasn’t anything she could look at and calmly recount the latin name for. There was no knowledge and therefore she felt an overwhelming sense of pure, unfiltered fear. “What the fuck!” She screamed at him despite easily following whatever he told her to do. Lucy was allowed to be upset and scared, but she also knew to hold onto a lifeboat when she was so far out of her depth there was no swimming back to shore without help.
So, she was a good little sister. She hunched and curled as small as she could wherever he requested and didn’t move. She didn’t move one inch. “What the fuck. What the fuck.” Lucy repeated, this time at a small whisper like someone firing a rubber band gun into a pillow. She covered her head, barely looking up at Gabe and waited for a way out from the only person at the restaurant who knew what he was doing.
This was not a mission. There was no voice in his ear, calm in a far-away office, swiveling in a chair as they studied maps and electronic imaging and tapped into surveillance to provide him with a view of all that was going on, an action plan, a way of moving forward. Adrenaline had swept sweetly clear through Gabriel’s bloodstream and the leg didn’t twinge and ache any more. Time had slowed to the seconds between the abrupt rapport of the bullets, and the noise of the shrieking, screaming. He jabbed the table’s central stand with his foot and it clattered over, a shove sent it so that the round table-top leaned outward rather than inward, a barricade that was makeshift at best. “Someone’s firing,” he said, the same calm of children’s nightmares in the middle of the night, “But there are too many people.”
It would be easy to shove Lucy into the horde of screaming, terrified diners - Gabriel noticed no shots fired into the mass teeming out of the doors to his right. Some diners were still in the restaurant, cowering under tables, and there was a back entrance there, blocked off by the restaurant itself. A sniper would be high up, but a sniper was at the mercy of the wind and of the light, and if he could get both of them to the back of the restaurant, he could call in the cavalry. “We’re going to shuffle. Slide right. And then on my count, you’re going to run in. Get beyond the glass, towards the back.” He sounded calm still, as if it were nothing. As if it were war-games, played out by children with plastic controls in their hands. “Don’t stop and don’t look around.”
He found her hand, beneath the debris of broken glass and chipped brick and squeezed, briefly. “I need you to shuffle. Keep low. Beneath the tables.”
“So, okay, they’re really shooting at us.” Lucy said with a laugh that was nervous and almost sounded like a sob. All those silly musings that her big brother was actually a wanted criminal who married his way into the mafia seemed all too real now. Suddenly that barrage of questions she hit him earlier with? Lucy did not want to even know. “You’re so lucky I’m not peeing myself right now.” She tried to joke and then shuffle, shuffled where he told her with great care to keep her head down. Lucy was ready to run, her whole body tensed like it wasn’t going to stop running until she found a forest somewhere out here in the desert or a laboratory she could hide behind a keycode in. But, her mind managed to tell her that doing anything that Gabe didn’t instruct would get herself killed. That she’d have to be patient and this bullshit was almost over.
Her hand gripped Gabe’s arm and she looked at him with all the fury and anger of an independent woman in her 30’s with the rug pulled out from under her. “Ready.” She whispered and then bowed her head down, not willing to look at him. Only willing to book it out of there with the speed of a thousand Geococcyx Californianus.
“They’re shooting,” Gabriel said with all the misplaced circumspection of a man who is very clearly without excuse or cover but one who is determined to maintain it, “I would prefer that it wasn’t at us.” They had slid across the line of the tables, where the door had once been propped open, plate glass and a hiss of air-conditioning to seep into the Vegas heat. It was more dangerous to run second. Movement first would catch the sniper’s eye but unless he was very good, he would not be as responsive. The throng of people pushing and shoving had dissipated and there was a very far-off wail of sirens. “Lucy. On my count. Three, two, one,” and he disentangled his hand and gave a push to her shoulder, the order very clear in his voice, and the expectation it would be obeyed.
She whispered the three, two, one with him and let the push to her shoulder rocket her off towards the inside of the restaurant. Lucy might have been scared just enough to almost pee herself, but she sure as hell could take an order if it meant she was going to have another BBQ or spend the night tracking coyotes. As fast as her feet would carry her, she raced inside, past the rows of tables and scurrying customers until she found a safe, dark corner in the back. It took everything she had not to just keep running, to bolt out the kitchen into the back street to trail the rest of the crowd until she found someone who would drive her all the way to the DRI forever if she felt like it.
And, Lucy decided as she crumpled up in a corner, that she didn’t like feeling useless. That she hadn’t felt useless in a very long time and there was a good reason for that. It made her angry enough to start crying, but she didn’t. Just a couple empty, dry sobs into the palm of her hand and she waited for it all to be over. Hand pressed up against her lips, eyes wide with a pure hate for anything that wasn’t natural science.
He watched her go. He watched her disappear with the swooping dip of his stomach that was all reluctance at a civilian dragged into what Gabriel acknowledged was either coincidence, or his fault. The gunman flared a rapid one-two of fire but Lucy was gone, in through the mouth of the restaurant and swallowed and he could only hope that she stayed where she was damn well told until he could call HQ. It was more difficult now. It was always more difficult now. The leg was a mess, of scar-tissue and twisted knee cap, and more metal than bone in the damn thing. It was painful enough that he still took a handful of painkillers with his coffee, and painful enough that he hadn’t even tried to walk on it since the physio had told him bluntly he’d never be walking on it again.
He put palms down on the ground and he patted for the cane but it was long lost, knocked beneath the mess. He dragged the leg behind him into a crouch, and winched his weight over his other knee, until there was enough pressure to push off, to give him some momentum to stagger toward the restaurant doors, and Gabriel waited. He waited for the moment between breaths when his heart stilled from its yammer in his chest, and quieted for the second between beats - and then he ran.
He stumbled. Almost immediately he stumbled, and the weight thrown down onto his leg was enough to send fire coursing up from foot to hip, setting his knee alight, but the weight was enough to propel him forward. Gunfire, brisk staccato in the air, and he threw up his arm to block his head - his shoulder burned, high up and more shots sailed past him, embedded in the floorboards of the restaurant’s entrance way as he fell forward, toward the floor, but beyond the doors, within the cover of the restaurant itself. Gabriel crawled forward, an efficiency of movement, and he was digging out his cell-phone from his pocket when he made it to the corner Lucy was crouched in, white-edged and terrified and clamped down.