op (maldito) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-01-06 19:33:00 |
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The bar was raucous. It was filled with men who hadn’t rung in the New Year so much as ringing it out again, one day of a new year, clean as good intentions chalked up and marked off. It wasn’t clean, fresh sawdust on the floor but the peanuts put out in little bowls, even a starving man wouldn’t dig his fingers in and chow down. It smelled like stale sweat and old beer, and a little like clean leather, if he was kidding himself; his own jacket was slung over his knees and the shirt was clean, rolled up to the elbows. Russ sat on a stool three seats in from the door, with the blackened mood of the old year sitting across his shoulders like a real good friend. The garage had shut early, pathetic strings of tinsel trawled over the desk and Boss down for the day, practically the only sighting of her all fucking year. She came with envelopes, under-the-table cash gifts, enough to pay off maybe a bill, if you were one of the guys or buy yourself enough drink to get good and fucking wasted, if you were Russ. Home was Ford, and Ford’s bad mood, which Russ figured was undeserved as all hell, and home was the possibility of Marina showing, good and pissed. If you had nowhere to go that wasn’t going to be invaded, you sat at the worst dive you knew and you drank cheap piss for beer. He was a tall figure and grease-stained in among the rest, a bottle sitting wetly on a napkin in front of him and two empty shot glasses shoved a little ways in from the bar edge. He was two beers in and two shots, and belligerent and there were two gaps either side of him that said he was close to taking a swing at whoever got close enough to let him. He figured whoever the fuck Shane Alexander was, he wouldn’t bother showing, and he figured that was just fine, he’d find someone who didn’t mind a kid brother kicking around the place and bring ‘em on home. Shane Alexander would fucking bother showing. Some fuckhead wanted to wax on about his mom, about his fucking baby sister like he knew 'em well and all, like he knew anything about the other side of his fucking shrimp dick, Shane Alexander would fucking bother showing. He wasn't fucking talk. Never had been. Shane was a man of action, with blood redder than it had any right to be, hot-headed and quicker with a punch than a kind word. He wasn't dry himself. He had a healthful amount of whiskey burning a low flame in his stomach, but not so much that he couldn't rip over the broken asphalt, battered muffler belching black, from Fremont Street to the shitheap Double Down on his bike without batting a fucking eyelash. He had no helmet. He was just about 5'10", but height had nothing to fucking do with it. Lean muscles, weaned on need and anger, Shane broke jaws for a living, twisted arms behind backs and kneed men in the gut before crushing their skulls with the heavy black heels of his boots, chains rattling. Blood crusted brown on the edges of the boot's teeth, just visible above concrete, spattered up, in crime scene fashion, and on the tongue. Today was fucking New Years, yeah, but he had on his leather vest, as always, torn at the sleeves, stitched angel wings on the back. The cold didn't touch him. It wicked over the broil of his skin and hissed in the cold air behind him, got lost in the dazzle of shattered bulbs that glitzed the sidewalks and heads of drunk tourists in a fucking rainbow of color. It would catch him when he slammed the kickstand down and tore his keys from the bike. It held around the back of his neck, gathered around prison ink, under the frayed collar of the vest, down his spine. He paid it no fucking mind. His bare arms were dirt and muscles and scrapes on sun-tanned skin, his knuckles scabbed ruby. And when Shane Alexander walked into the fucking bar, he fit right in. His dark hair sat like a crown, pressed down over skull, lanky from lack of care. But it wasn't that or his clothes that placed him, it was the fucking pissed off look in his eyes that no amount of booze could douse. The floor groaned underfoot and a few men glanced his way. (They looked away just as quick, his ire apparent.) But he knew who he was going for. Some bitch named Russ. He didn't need a description. There was a man, spoiling for a fight, muscles twitching under his fucking fancy shirt, right there at the bar, feet of space around him all the fucking indication Shane needed. He didn't say hello. He wasn't one for introductions. No. He came up, grabbed the man by the back of the head and slammed him face first into the shitty bar, without care for the glass of pisswater that might be there, with only a grunt to announce his entrance. He wasn’t whippet-thin and prison ink didn’t crawl the line of his neck, broken biros jabbed under the skin until twenty-three hours whittled away in a slow-burn of pain and groups drawn out in black on caucasian skin. Russ was broad, muscle built over bone in layered, solid, don’t-fuck-with-me thickness, the breadth of shoulders a memory of a man who’d fucked up and fucked off long before the trailer had played dual soundtrack, reality TV layered under the piping whine of an infant who couldn’t fucking believe this was reality. Russ was deep-set broad, the bronzed color of working under sun long after the kids went back to college, the twitch of fingers that tap-tap-tapped on his bottle, the nudge of his knee on the stool below. What ink scuttled over skin was buried beneath the worn shirt, buttons that winked. He didn’t move an inch when someone big enough to blot the light that swayed over the entrance hurled himself in like this was the last place in the world that poured a beer, and he didn’t move an inch when old boots slammed along warped boards. He wasn’t planning on moving a fucking inch when his head yanked backward, tangled up with the overlong length of his hair in someone else’s fucking fist and slammed downward, wet pulverising of cartilage and an audibly wet splatter of blood over the sticky bar. Russ didn’t say a damn thing, sound strangled up in the back of his throat like he was planning on singing fucking bass - he made a choked, wet sound, blood shifting its rapid sprawl down the back of his throat to runnlets down his chin, and then he grabbed for the wrist of whoever the fuck fought like he’d fucked his mother on the pool table in back, selling tickets five bucks a go. His fingers straggled on solid bone, the wiry hair of a man past thirty, old enough to fight less like a fucking girl. Russ didn’t say a damn thing then either, but he grasped the wrist, and his thumb dug deep into the mesh of veins and bone, the painful point scraped at with the edge of one blunted nail and a sharp twist of the wrist before his other elbow slammed back in the region of the man’s solar plexus. Fuck fighting fair. Fighting fair was for men with something to lose. Fighting fair was for a ring, rubber bands, spectators and judges with a bell, when you had no choice, or you couldn't fight at all. This wasn't fucking fighting fair. This was a free-for-all brawl. This was the springload of muscles unleashed on the bone and meat of another man who deserved nothing fucking less. As a stool swung sideways out from nearby the man with the mashed face, the patrons along the nicked wood of the bar scattered backward like cockroaches from sunlight, little feet pattering, little mouths whining. The toothless bartender ducked by instinct and scuttled away, itchy fingers trying to find the curled cord of the landline, meth-mouth trying to find the words for the voice that would crackle to life in a minute. Shane saw it all playing out around him with the awareness of experience, ripples in a pool of fresh blood on the warehouse floor, man nearby with his brains jellied on the scraps of his skull. Russ' hand came up, big man that he was, and bit into Shane's flesh like a pitbull, never letting loose, jaws locked. He grunted again, this time with some pain flecking the white plates of his teeth. A bit of hot, alcohol-stale breath was forced through his nose and throat with the hollow hit of elbow to chest. It hurt. A bruise would bloom there in its mauve graveyard color, but fuck that. Whatever, yeah? Shane didn't give a fuck. He'd had more fucking bruises and black eyes and broken bones than he cared to count. What was another? What was this? The man could tear his veins out and he wouldn't fucking say a word about. Gritting his teeth, Shane held his ground in soiled boots on soiled floor, bending forward still over the bigger man, all the corded strength of his arms bearing down. He grabbed him around the head with his bare arms and tore him sideways, away from the bar, tipping like timber, like the stool, and with the blood flowing freely still from the man's busted nose, brought his knee up to grind whatever mess was left to pulp. He did it again, huffing, ruthless. His knee was wet with the man's blood. He felt it touch his skin, hot and cold at once. The world went drunken-sideways, slid off the bar like a beer glass shattering on the floor. White light sparked warm and wet behind his eyelids, Russ figured it felt the way electricity looked, sparking up like New Years lights along his veins and nerve endings, pistons grinding on nothing, engine coughing fire. He gasped air, huffed it like an addict for a fix. The guy behind the bar, he saw plenty of fights break out, the ripple-spring of the landline cord was looped in to police, to sirens wailing, to a night spent on a cold floor that stank of someone else’s piss and shit. As Shane’s knee - because who the fuck else came in to start a fight? No one fucking sane - came up one last time, his fingers clawed, soaked in his own blood, around the man’s calf and yanked, the heaved-out grunt of air as he drove the man toward off balance and threw a meaty kind of punch, wild with no direction beyond the grim intention of hitting hard in between the fucking legs . Glass shattered from the bar, splattered beer until it soaked the soles of his shoes - so the fuck what? He couldn’t fucking smell it. The man felt fucking enormous, his arm solidly wiry, muscles laid over bone like the two couldn’t be pulled apart. Blood whistled through Russ’s ears, who the fuck cared what Shane was like, looked like, blood-dimmed vision and the splatter-spray of his own caught across his face like a grim fucking Halloween mask. Yeah, everyone had backed the fuck up, like bar fights weren’t bread and butter, like the New Year wouldn’t bring their own problems. Gorge belled up in his throat, Russ leaned to one side and spat a phlegmy stream of his own choked-up red. He said nothing, his eyes watered, stung and nothing. Fuck that, Shane Alexander wanted to start a fight and it was goddamn war. If the bartender was spitting his black, fucking rotten teeth out, screaming for the cops to come because some redneck fucks were tearing up his bar again, getting blood everywhere and ruining the classy fucking atmosphere, Shane didn't fucking hear him. His blood was rushing, drowning out the world with the focused torrent of the berserk. He could see it—the world—as it flashed, here, then there, an image of chaos in a run-down joint where chaos was as cheap and ordinary as the piss they charged a dollar for and called beer, but he heard nothing but the crunch of bone, felt nothing but the collapse of the man behind his fist. The lash of the blind punch, with the helter-skelter tug of his stance, almost sent Shane to his knees. He lost his balance, but caught the bar with nails biting the wood. The punch hit the inside of his thigh, hard. It fucking hurt. It was the desperate kind, the kind that didn't care where it landed, so long as it landed at all, with all the fury and fear of a man behind them. He'd bitten his tongue too at some point, felt the shreds of the pink flesh, lying like abused tinsel in his mouth, the copper taste of blood welling between his teeth. Almost hobbled, but still up, one knee on the floor, Shane held the man in the headlock, a winch of his arms, one on the top, one on the bottom, under chin, against windpipe. He did nothing more than tighten his hold, crushing the man to his chest. Shane turned his head to the side and spat blood on the floor, somewhere near the fallen stool's leg and Russ' boot. "You need me to keep beating your ass, sunshine?" He spoke into the man's ear, his breathing ragged, a harsh hiss of air and blood. The bar had narrowed in to this particular piece of dirty floor; the bartender making his call winched down behind the bar like someone was fucking raiding the place instead of scuffling on the sawdust, the boots of someone stupid enough not to get gone. Fury pounded in his ears hard enough to drown out the would-be sound of the world around him, air straggled in through a clamped-down throat. And sunshine, sunshine just brought painful clarity and hot, thick anger coursing up from belly to nose. Russ’s elbow slammed back, the solid branch of his shoulder digging the divide between his body and the man behind him, the hammer of bone hitting hard into soft fleshy bits. One-two and his fist slammed upward, heavy pendulum in violent backswing as he aimed without eyesight for the nose. Shane wanted to call him pet names while he choked? Shane fucking Alexander could breathe through blood too. Whatever articulation of blows finally fell home, air rasped back into his lungs like a prison-man seeing sunlight. “Nah,” it sounded like paper over saw-teeth, the heaving up-down of the bulk of his chest, the shirt was soaked dark red, like a woman had tossed her wine at him, “That the best,” breath sucked in past his blood-stained teeth, “Y’can do?” Shane had strong-armed the man to the ground, as best he could, until they were a tangle of brawn and blood. It wasn't an easy feat, the man was big - bigger than he was, and Shane wasn't positioned as well as he would have liked, directly behind to avoid the surefire fucking flail of fists seeking to strike in imitation, water-weak lightning. He was off-kilter, cocked to the side just, bone of shoulder netting his chest as he kept the vice of his arms tight around Russ' bloody skull. So when the elbow came back, charging with horns, as fast as he was, Shane couldn't avoid it. It glanced off a fractured rib like an explosion pinging steel. The elbow to the rib sent out shockwaves of pain and lit a fire in Shane's tarry lungs. He sucked in air through his teeth and barely managed to duck the second wild swing of ham-sized fists. He was grazed. Dizziness erupted like lava. The hairs on his head tore sideways in the break of boozy air. If skin was split, he didn't notice, the pound of adrenaline in his veins a raucous, sour on the pulverized pulp of his tongue. Shane was going fucking easy on the little bitch. If Sam hadn't caught him just before he'd skipped out, if she hadn't listed all the Good fucking Deeds the man had done for her and hers, he'd have a swollen brain and an IV in his arm in the fucking ICU right about now. It didn't take much to send the oldest Alexander flying off the handle. He was used to coming in hard and fast and making it out, doing as much damage in the time he had to fucking ruin someone. But Sam had warned him off. This was a different kind of exercise. Time was pitted against him. With Russ being bigger, the longer time wore on, the more likely it was he'd gain the upper hand. Sure, Shane could probably beat him down again, if he wasn't fucking out; he had experience and speed on the other man. He relied on his muscle as it lent wire to his frame. He wasn't a small man, but he wasn't a fucking Neanderthal. But, time still ticked on, and with gut-level anger kicking in, registering all points on the scale, Shane could tell he couldn't hold for long. Locking his knees, Shane used his weight and the assistance of gravity to fucking pin Russ to the floor, his spine bent, folding the huge man up on himself. But he couldn't hold it. Quickly, he pushed away bodily, back up to his feet, and stumbled backwards, boots dragging in sawdust, toward the open part of the room, where men in their sad fucking cowboy hats watched from beneath ripped brims. "Fuckin' come at me then, bitch." There wasn’t much the man who had landed them in a tin can on the side of the fucking desert had left behind, other than a bellyful and his ma’s bitch of a temper - other than the ringing solidity of bone beneath brawn, the squared and brutal frame that muscle had wrapped itself around. Russ went down the way all big men went down, knees first and rolling onto his hip, with enough nous and enough fights under his belt (sawdust sticking down his front to the bloodied bib of the shirt, someone else’s yacking in the background like blood was something to sick up about over bystander’s shoes) to know how to compensate for bulk. He’d judged a faceless voice on a lit-up, forever buzzing blue screen to be the equivalent of the noisy mosquito of its chime, judged the Alexander brothers interchangeable. Joey was rangy-lean muscle coiled like wire around sparse bones, the kind of restless sparking energy like stripped wires. Shane? Yeah it wasn’t wire, it was cable, heavy-duty wrapped around steel props. His own spine cracked-clicked, vertebrae by vertebrae giving him more shit than Miguel’s wife on pay-day; Russ wasn’t used to knees down on fucking concrete under sawdust, wasn’t used to the slow drip-drip-drip of being caught right off fucking guard sliding down his shirt like a reminder to his own stupidity. Anger bunched and burned, ripped clear of lashed-down tolerance for those sitting elbow-to-elbow with him. Russ didn’t give a fuck it was Sam’s brother, he’d pounded his own brother, he could pound this one. His hips flexed down, the weight of his lower body was as heavy as his upper and he was on his knees in the dense dust and then up. Russ didn’t waste breath on words, he hauled in a ragged, clammy lungful, coppery on his tongue and he hurled himself, head low and the full, solid weight of his body behind his shoulders, air pushed out of the way like water curling around a plug-hole. He threw himself angled toward the man’s hip, to send him back down into the fucking sawdust to see how he liked it, and he threw all the pent-up fury of past months full-tilt at him, like a ball bouncing along the lanes to the pins. There was rage there, open on the gory mutton of Russ' face, lots of it, fucking frothing in spilled blood, rheumy strands between teeth in a hideous grin. Shane considered moving out of range, in a snap of blitzed judgment, with the blink of an eye to tell him the time. Man that big, going that fast wasn't going to have the time to shift his mass before fucking inertia took hold and tore him down to the floor, bones and all. But, he was coming up fast and Shane stood his ground. He tried to brace himself for the impact, knees apart, feet planted firmly, arms open, an angry man's welcoming hug. He flexed his fingers in a taunt, lifted his eyebrows. Come to fucking daddy. What an introduction. Russ hit Shane full-on and the pair of them went over backwards. Shane hit the floor hard, breath gone from flaring lungs, and with a crack of his skull on the softened sawdust that smelled like fucking vomit and blood. Rank as hell. Woozy from tinny, tiny glasses of booze, one after the other after the other, all filling a conversation he hadn't expected to have, and the smash of contact, he saw stars a moment. But, thankfully, muscle memory kicked in and Shane moved to lock his elbow. He shoved it roughly upward, again aiming for the vulnerable blue of the man's throat, to knock him back or knock the wind out of him. His knee contracted under the weight—one was pinned painfully to the floor and his ribs were screaming from the crush, but the other knee was free. He pumped it squarely at Russ' Great Wall of motherfucking China back, right for the candy necklace string of vertebrae. You don't want to fuck with the spine. And while he did that, he used his other hand, pulled into a stony fist, to swing for the chewed up remains of Russ' face because fuck if he was going to stay pinned for long. Generosity of open-wide arms and Russ barreled into them, through them. Shane wasn’t stringy-lean and he didn’t go down like the fuckers in cheap bars, like pins pinging down along a cheap bowling lane. Muscle plowed into a solid fucking wall, the fucking tower of Pisa knocked into a sideways slide that sent them ass over tit backwards, the clatter of a stool that no one had thought to fucking move as it came down along with the ride. Russ registered this as he noted the smell of vomit and of blood coating the back of his throat, the membranous flutter of breath in bypassing ruined nose and hasping through carping throat. In flashes. In moments. Russ did not examine all corners of a situation before putting a heavy boot through the middle, his focus was sledgehammer blunt and hefted with the same imprecise weal. Now? It had zoned in to the motherfucker on the floor, the motherfucker who was simultaneously kids that had gone unwanted for long enough that they knew all the five-finger discounts in a one-trick town you could squeeze a second out of if you were careful, kids that were fucking on the floor so long the tendons in his shoulders were stretched to snapping elastic and Marina’s dark laughter sifting like a cumulus cloud overhead, kids that were small boys with big, honey-colored eyes and the lisping liquid language he remembered half a dozen words of and all of them too filthy for those under the age of twenty-one. Shane, ass down on the floor and that motherfucking sneer across his face like a craggy rock-face, was Marina, panther-slow prowling through the garage until the blitz of noise and the stench of oil and molten rubber was tarred over with the imagined note of her perfume lingering like the bitch of a smile. He was Ford, guilt wadded up like a folded spitball and wedged in the cramped space between ribs and collarbone to choke over, bruise-blue eyes and derision. Hell, he was the big lights and the big city for the first time, dazzled by Sin City decked out in tinsel for his grand arrival and big plans in his back pocket for becoming more than a trailer park’s dust to shake off the boots. He was also Sam’s brother. Small details. Russ had never learned to fight fair. He had been small enough to get picked on long enough to be mean when he got big enough to start fighting back, and he’d been beaten on by grown men early enough to foister resentment like a festering ooze of mad-dog final fucking straw in a pustulous burst, venom through the veins like lightning. He was big enough that he pulled punches in bar fights, over card-games or he picked someone big enough and strong enough that the decks were loaded in the opposite direction, because Russ thought this was a gesture toward fair. Fair had bled out, was the click of cartilage as he turned his head. His back was heaving tires for two decades broad, the wealth of seeded muscle stretched over the capacity of shoulders until he was weighted down. It made him slow as a motherfucking tank, but big. Shane’s hit took him in the cheekbone, which broke like a levy under the weight of a hurricane. He heard this like a pencil snapping in the region of his cheek, pain blunted out by the tarry rush of adrenaline and unleashed anger pumping through his veins. Russ roared. It was an inarticulate sound, the back of the throat meat-raw and the punch he threw was as precise as a sledgehammer’s swing could be, the heavy arc communicated but the speed all nerve-endings sparking and sizzling like an engine stripped bare but coursing along in fifth gear. He didn’t see where it landed. He didn’t know if it landed. He was pounding at the man, fists and knee and feet, like punching out into thick drifts of snow, blood dripping from his own nose in a molasses-thick trail down his own chin in a thick salty stripe he could taste on the insides of his teeth. Russ was beyond caring. He was beyond the realization that he was over-matched and beyond giving a damn that the man belonged to Sam. Sam owned more brothers. She could replace this one. Maybe she wouldn’t miss it. He was beyond whether it hurt and whether it hurt bad enough he was going to spend a shift’s worth of cash sitting on a paper-wrapped table stitched back together. Reason had gone out the fucking window, sayonara and taken sanity with it. Shane knew that surrender. He'd given into bloodlust, to rage that drowned in a gorging rush through nose and throat, blisters bubbling and erupting as it went. He knew the fucking stench of burning flesh, wet pus, fried hair that was nothing more than a fantastical sculpture of ash and violence. It wasn't fucking hard to see Russ was fully unhinged now, a doorway without a door like a jagged jaw bleeding teeth, a man going down and taking the entire, godawful world with him. Whatever Shane had come here for, whatever it had started out as, it was something different now. A dog to be put down. The deluge of fists hammering down in brutal retribution landed once and again, fully breaking the rib that had come in with a hairline fracture. The separation was painful, but it was enough, searing though it was, to push through. He uncurled the soft-red iron of his fist to catch a hit that was coming his way. Shane used his leverage on the collapsed column of Russ' throat, the hard pinch of jugular tube, and the little room he had with his knee, to kick the man back, hard, steel-edge of his boot driving into a soft web of muscle. He spat blood in Russ' ugly fucking face as he did it, salt to the wound, insult to injury to get him the fuck off, veins straining under taut skin as blood gave his skeleton rigidity. One, two, three, four, five. Collar bone, floating ribs, gut cavity, liver, and finally, chin. Bloodying knuckles, scraping scabs free, laceration and a fucking licking, until he could heave Russ off, his teeth cracking together, and find his feet. Shane felt at his rib tenderly with a probing palm pressed precisely. Bruises lined and ruptured, blood led astray. He spat a phlegmy wad a third time, blood and mucus, onto the sawdust. His breath was hard and shallow. "Fucking pussy." He laughed a ragged thing, licking his lips. If the gas tank on Joey's ride had been empty, he could have rode there on the fumes of fucking resentment alone. Sober like bones in a grave, he set the sun at his back and cruised around the block a few times in a half-ditched attempt to come up with something better to do than pump the brakes and actually stop. Fucking Sam, man. Stopping his bike meant drawing up blood gone old and black just for a look at it in the vial. It meant reconnecting with family that was fucking dead to him, and who the hell needed that on New Years? Spoke in the gravel and boots on the concrete, he pushed into the bar a good five minutes too late. Assessing the damage meant blinking against the dim haze of smoke and fucking regret that clouded thick as mercury, but Joey did it with shoulders squaring up and uncertainty over the spit of voices echoing like a blinding dark-flare-light. The actual shitty lighting meant that old eyes still needed some adjusting to the shadows. But he wasn't that old, they adjusted quick. Helen Keller could have fucking Sherlock-assessed the situation. It didn't take much. Scrambling bodies, scattered bar stools, blood. Seeking out Russ was the one thing that helped, since he really had no idea what Shane looked like these days. It didn't take long to decipher who Shane was either, though. The man with gore banded knuckles and a seething laugh that echoed of childhood halloweens spent lighting illegal firecrackers. And even if he should have turned right the fuck around and walked out the door, because the police had likely been called by this time, Joey didn't. He didn't turn around, he fucking dove into the middle. He stepped in and shoved straight at Shane's chest, both palms flat as a fucking semi and just as goddamn solid. "What the fuck are you doing?! Goddamnit, Shane! What the fuck!" Russ didn’t give a shit who Sam fucked. White sheets and smeared eyeliner, the lazy-low laughter beer-laced and sleep so fucking heavy he didn’t rouse for losing the better part of Las Vegas savings - no down payment on a house, no fuzzy feelings for a woman who’d long since picked her path down memory lane, the money would have flittered like all good intentions held up to lit flame like the stench of burning dollar bills. The past was buried beneath reknit scars, and an aria floating above the rasp of metal, Sam was short, blond and news so bad you didn’t read the paper. Somewhere, somehow (back flat on sawdust maybe? Blood was ripe in the air, Russ didn’t know whose) she was a flit in the night and a scared little girl with a big fucking mouth. He didn’t fuck little girls, even if he thought the shit that was, wasn’t doing it right. He slapped one hand down and the sawdust flew - what wasn’t clumped together with blood and phlegm and sticky substances that had been there long before a throwdown that had fuck all to do with Sam at all - and levered upright. His head was ringing, Lady Luck kissed his stinging cheek and fucked right off into the middle distance. He touched fingers to chin gingerly, sticky wet of split skin and the black ache of cracked bone beneath. He pushed off his palm, heaved himself upright as Shane spat venom along with whatever noxious mix of shlocked up bodily fluids joined all the others trampled in beneath the fresh dust. His liver bitched; the stinging pulp of his nose dripped sweat and blood down the front of a shirt that was destined for the fucking trash. An experimental breath in through fragmented pain, the cracked ribs heaved out to accord for lungs that hissed for bloodied air, bellows working beneath the bloated breadth. Yeah, he’d go again. He’d go again and again, until the unhappy milieu, the clotted misery circling the plug hole fucked off. Reason was filaments, a black sky through cracked glass. His weight rocked back on his knee, his windpipe squealed like a set of bagpipes, Russ’s fists closed, the knuckles cracked. And then an uninvited guest joined the fray. Joey. Fight had gone down on cold concrete and friendship forged in grudging beers after, sparks skidding off metal and the ripe smell of scorched rubber. Russ didn’t have friends at work. The Mexicans huddled, like miserable sea-sick fuckers in a lifeboat bobbing close to the edge, paychecks that didn’t stretch across the rift of parenthood and down-payments. He’d been a kid the last time he’d had a friend to run after and Alexander was the kind of fucker he’d think twice before punching in the face again, no hard feelings. Right now? Russ hated the fucker for interrupting, fight chased down to its skin and bones. “Leave,” a breath heaved in and out, lungs struggling against the concertina of broken bone, “It.” Russ tried to rise from the grave of sawdust like old bones with dust in the joints and gore still pink as marrow. He was a fucking ballerina in a tutu of her own blood, marionette strings jerky and inexperienced. Shane stood, wiping sweat and spit away from his upper lip, one hand starred open on a knee as he bent to breathe. He was amused, entertained, foreign blood wetting the leather of his vest, his hair stringy and damp from exertion. But, fuck, he looked a hell of a lot better than the mess on the floor. Someone get a fucking mop. Shane reached for the pack of cigarettes that had been crushed in his front pocket. This place was smoky, despite all the new-fucking-fangled laws that outlawed the practice indoors, but the police were coming anyway, he figured, so why the fuck not? He'd had a hand snaking to his pocket for the silver shell of his old, beat-up lighter when the door opened. Naphtha burned a small flame. Glancing up, the man expected men in uniform, someone brandishing a weapon and screaming at him like he was too fucking stupid to understand shit said at a regular volume. Instead, his brother walked in. Motherfucker. Shane didn't know the exact number of years it'd been since he'd seen Joey, but it was up in the double-digits. Since he left Elizabeth for Vegas. Nearly twenty years? Enough that the boy he knew was only just visible in the man he'd become, that skinny partner-in-crime who fucking stole all of Shane's good sunglasses over the years now some kind of fucker who thought he was something. Fucking funny. Shane didn't remember he was supposed to be upset. For so long, he'd never expected to see anyone in his family again—and the whole book-in-the-mail bullshit was kind of a blur—that the older Alexander only knew he was happy, in his way, to see his fucking brother's face. His sneer twisted on his face, leaning toward a crooked, serpentine smile, only chipped deeper into stone when Joey tilted forward to shove him back, two hands to the bloody vest. He didn't even look at Russ. "Fuck off," he laughed (painfully), one hand waving at Joey like he was nothing more than a fucking fly, shoo and don't bother me. He settled back on his heels, lit the cigarette and sucked on it, cherry and smoke. Idly, the man wiped his knuckles on the hem of his brother's shirt like it was some kind of shared joke. "He's fucking fine." Family time was fun. It was like a fucking flashback. It was like staring down into moldy shadows of his past when he looked at his brother. Shane didn't look like his brother, because those memories were written twenty years back and discarded like crumpled paper tossed into a fire that you pissed on to put out. He tried to figure out if he looked like their Dad, and if that was a reason to dislike him even more. It felt like a good a reason as any for the storm to churn in his head, and so Joey let it. He stared at Shane, who'd been demoted from the archangel ranks of childhood hero and down into the demographic of bastard that Joey didn't even think of as family anymore. He'd stopped thinking of Shane at all a goddamn decade ago, when he'd been five years in at FCI Fairton. The fact that Shane'd decided to crawl out of whatever fucking hole he'd dug for himself twenty years ago didn't have shit to do with family, Joey knew that. It didn't have fuck all to do with Sam or him or the emotional baggage wonder twins. It had to do with not having the fucking decency to stay buried in the past. Distantly, he was aware of other people standing around. The fact that none of them had tried to step in and put a stop to this shit made him glance up and glare briefly at the ones dumb enough to make eye contact. No doubt at least one of them had called the fucking cops. For once in his life, Joey knew what it felt like to not have to be the one to flee the scene of a crime. He glanced over to Russ, and had no idea how that motherfucker was going to run anywhere. "Shut up," he snapped when Russ told him to leave it. Russ and Shane were on the shit list, he didn't care if they were wheezing blood or not. When Shane swiped that blood on his shirt, Joey saw the world through a red lens. He swept the offending hand away with the back of a clenched fist. It'd been a long time since their childhood scraps at the baseball diamond. Shane might have kicked his ass with relative ease when they'd been kids, but that was a fucking lifetime ago. You learned to fight in prison when the stretch was long enough that hardened enemies were unavoidable. You learned to keep your fucking head down, and how tell time without a clock, but that was only the beginning of a seedy, cursed education. In the end, you learned how to fucking fight like you'd stolen the last bit of life in your teeth and getting to the top meant getting away with it clenched like a first place ribbon in bloody knuckles. "Touch me again and I'll lay you out, brother." Because they were going to have more than words one day, that shit had been obvious since the moment that bile and resentful spit welled up on his tongue at the site of Shane's name in the journal. But he wasn't about to start taking swings right now while Russ potentially bled into his lungs over there.. or maybe he still would have if he hadn't been completely certain that the police were coming. Some things were just more important than friendship, after all. Like vendettas. "Get the fuck up," he said to Russ with a tilt of his head that tried to assess whether or not the man needed a hand. "I'm taking you to the fucking hospital." Anger bled like a hematoma into blue eyes, but he couldn't quite decide who he was the most pissed at. Russ turned his head over his left shoulder with all the dignity and fucking grace of being hands on knees and uncertainty as to whether the room ringing around like a goddamn bell was piss-water beer curdling in his veins or the hit to the goddamn head, and hocked blood-flecked phlegm out from deep in his chest. His lungs protested like a flat tire flapping over macadam, he flattened a palm over the worst of the bruises - it felt like being kicked by a truck - winced, and wiped the congealing mess of his nose with the back of his hand, blood clinging like garnets to the little blond hairs that climbed his arm. Brotherhood was a distant concept, Russ knew Ford as a fox-feral circling of suspicion and hero-worship glinting in Campbell-blue eyes. The hero-worship had gone to die, the suspicion had mingled, gone off like bad milk. Russ imagined it would be somewhere close to disappointment now. Whatever the fuck it was, he wasn’t sticking around for the family fucking reunion. Joey was a good guy - but he wasn’t part of the fucking Waltons. “I don’t need the fucking hospital,” Russ ran his tongue along the backs of his teeth, metal rang off intact enamel. He wasn’t sure it was true, but his pride hurt worse than a lacerated liver might, his knees weaker than the tequila behind the bar. The shit of a bartender was hiding out back, the old cord of the phone strung tight as telephone wire. Russ didn’t like jail any more than he liked the hospital, same disinfectant smell stinging up his nostrils, same sense that they wanted to scrub him off existence. “What he said.” He didn’t care that it was Shane that had said it; the rules were now established. Russ was fine. He took a step forward without staggering and considered it progress. “You wanna lay him out though,” an afterthought, a wave of the back of a blood-stained hand, “Be my fucking guest.” Shane used to take Joey scavenging with him. If it was really fucking piddly shit, like scouring the carpet, cupboards, and cracks at home for week-old cookies or crumbs, the littler kids did it. But, when they needed to make a haul—especially one where a younger face than Shane's meant more sympathy, should the situation call for it—Shane took Joey with him. He'd talk to him about taking care of their family, about how they had to do it or no one else fucking would. He'd make it out like it was some grand fucking adventure. They spent a good fucking portion of their childhoods together, pickpocketing, scheming, or just straight up panhandling. They had their share of scraps. Joey was always too fucking careless, it seemed to Shane. But he didn't have the same burden. Not really. Not until Shane left for Vegas maybe. Was that what the fucking venom was about? That he'd left? He'd had to. Joey wasn't so fucking stupid not to know that. Plus, he'd still called. He checked in with their parents and Sam. It wasn't his fucking fault his younger brother was a dipshit and didn't use the phone or that he got put away for fifteen years. The older Alexander brother didn't react as his hand was brusquely pushed aside. He sniffed and turned on one boot heel to watch Russ try walking. (The man was clearly glad he was able to fucking stand. Hallefuckinglujah. The step forward was like a goddamn Christmas miracle.) Shane's blood settled in his veins, Russ' on his knuckles and jacket. Whatever the fuck Joey was pissed about, Shane didn't want to talk about it and he didn't want to use the time-tried method of Alexander communication and difference-settling: more fighting. He didn't doubt that he could lay Joey as flat as Russ, even with his rib broken, prison or fucking not, but—one glance at the fuzz of the fuck's head behind the bar told him—the police were coming and the last fucking thing he needed was to be arrested. He didn't think about Sam, or her words about needles and pills and the reality that painted in loose skin over bones and sightless eyes. He didn't think about Joey throwing his stupid tantrum, or Louis and Iris, the two Not-Alexanders at large. He rubbed an eye, a sudden exhaustion suffocating his muscles with blackness and apathy. "Yeah, whatever. I got shit to do." That was how he said goodbye. It was probably pretty much word for fucking word what he said the day he left Elizabeth. Shane didn't care. He didn't look at the other two men then, as he crossed the room, sawdust and blood clinging to black leather. He didn't acknowledge the onlookers. He just ducked his head and made his way out the door, got on his fucking chopper, and left. Good fucking night. Shane had the right idea, and Joey wasn't far behind. Whether Russ wanted the assistance or not, Joey took hold of one blood splattered arm so that some of the weight was off the wounded. Joey didn't suggest the hospital again, because taking somebody at their word when they said they were fine was a part of the guy code that was written in stone. Besides, they asked questions at hospitals, and nobody needed that right now. Which meant that the only place to take Russ was to his house where he could assumingly suffer through his injuries with some hard liquor and a hot shower. Russ didn't thank him, which was understandable. Joey hadn't done much of anything to stop the fight on time, and afterward he seemed on edge enough that a stray word might have set him off in the wrong direction. So it was just as well. Hell of a way to ring in the New Year. |