Jason Todd is (thelazarus) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-01-07 22:42:00 |
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Entry tags: | red hood, two-face |
Who: Jack and Charlie
What: A reunion
Where: A local open mic night at a bar.
When: Before the last plot.
Warnings/Rating: None!
Charlie had a feeling in her stomach like she could remember when a plane descends too fast. Not that she'd been on a plane in years, not since Chicago. Any traveling that had needed to get done in recent time was done in the backseats of cars, on the helm of ferries, and crammed between sad, old men on the seats of city busses. Charlie liked taxicabs the best of all, but that was mostly due to the fact that they were the easiest to dip out of without paying. Genethliacal bad luck insisted that she get caught one day, but that wasn't going to be tonight. Tonight, Charlie felt relatively immortal until it'd been her turn to climb the stage. Her dress was flowered, made less feminine by the jacket of patched denim. She cuffed the sleeves to her elbows, eyeing the modest crowd from beneath mousey hair.
The battology of slurred catcalls and slimey chatter that eclipsed any polite, applauding encomium. It weakened her knees, and made her grateful for the little stool that was positioned beneath the soft blue of the stage light. The MC, on break from between gigs of drink ticket bingo and endless cigarettes, introduced her as Charlie Greene, and most of the patrons ignored her entirely. Which was good, she didn't think she could stomach a sea of wilted, one-eye squint drunks criticizing the improper form with which she held her painted guitar. When she played, it was low and slow. Closed eyes and fingers that strummed up visions of old, blue bayous and the women who walked them in wait for husbands that never came home. The song was Patsy Cline, but Charlie's voice was different, raw at the corners with the kind of loss that had nothing to do with the love in the song. Sometimes she forgoed the words entirely, derailed into humming while she concentrated instead on the strings under her fingers. She was good with the guitar, more confident in it than her voice for a reason.
Halfway through Patsy, she slid into another song, seamlessly experimental. A few people got up from their tables and stuffed some ones into the rusted mouth of a coffee can that sat on the edge of the stage. One old man with cataracts contributed the largess of a crisp five, and Charlie smiled before her hand fell away from the vibrating strings and the sound softened into a dull echo that eventually faded into nothing. Even when she walked up to the bar a moment later, intent on sucking down the complimentary drink that came with performing, she had her guitar close. She had it as close as the coffee can of jingling change and whispering bills, as close as the clothes on her back. Charlie kept everything under her arms, and when she sat at the bar she kept it squarely in front of her in the way that runaways always had one eye on their possessions after being burned too many times by friends that turned out to be thieves.
"You're getting better," the bartender said when he came closer, tilting to explore the wad of cash into her coffee can. Charlie just rolled her eyes, motioning for a shot with twirling fingers, "You just got 'em all drunker than usual tonight." The bartender chuckled, agreeing that that might have been the reason for her improved fortune. Then he poured a few fingers of whiskey into a hollow glass and slid it her way.
Jack had been sitting at the bar listening to the open mic performers since the start of the evening. He had the night off, which was good considering that he was still favoring his bullet-pocked leg. He could have called someone to get a drink, or stayed in with his guitar. Instead, he came to watch people perform.
He didn't really perform, not anymore. Oh, he'd gotten up at open mics once or twice since moving to Las Vegas, mostly at the prompting of other people, but it didn't feel the way it had when he was eighteen and desperate to find an outlet. Maybe it was because he had another vent, now, an outlet that had found him. It was less healthy than music, less creative than songwriting, but it was the path he'd taken, and now his songs all seemed sad and incomplete.
Jack still liked to listen to other people, though, and he sometimes came to the club just for that. He would quietly nurse a beer, listen to bad songs and poetry and the occasional raw, uncut talent, and enjoy the variety of human beings trying to clear something from their bodies with their voices, their pens, their instruments.
By the time Charlie took to the stage he had already been at the bar over an hour, and he was thinking about settling up his tab and heading home. He was pulling his wallet from his pocket when he looked up and saw a ghost under the light, lit with blue, ephemeral and transparently pale, dark hair and dark eyes. He blinked, but she was still there. He looked back to the bartender, who was staring now, expectantly waiting for the cash to settle the bill. Jack set a few bills down and looked back up again, dreading, hoping, one foot into the world and one foot out of it.
It was like a mirage had shimmered away, and he realized then who he was looking at. He had spoken to Charlie on the journals, of course, briefly. But they hadn't made plans to meet, partially because Jack still wasn't sure if it was a good idea. What could he bring into Charlie's life except memories, the worst alongside the best? How could he explain where he'd been, what had happened to the men who had been in the house that night, which ones were buried and which were not? He couldn't tell her about those things, those times, the bleak days in Seattle after death in Detroit. How could he explain the person he'd turned into to a girl he'd helped put up Christmas lights with?
He didn't leave, though. He settled his tab, but he stayed at the bar. Her voice was a ghost all by itself, singing Patsy Cline. His fingers followed muscle memory he knew himself, strumming the way he'd showed her, sitting on the living room floor. She was a catalogue of things he'd decided to forget about, tried not to dream about, left behind.
When she sat down at the bar and chatted with the bartender, he watched her at first, not quite able to speak. As she was now, so much older than he remembered, so much a woman, she was cast in the mold of her sister. To see that tweak to her mouth made his throat catch, briefly, but he shook it off. Charlie deserved better than just comparions to a dead woman. She was her own person, different and unique. That slug of whiskey was enough to make her someone new - someone who wasn't the woman he'd loved, and wasn't the girl he taught to play guitar, either. This chimera of memory and old sensations - he had to open his mouth and get over it.
"Hi," he said. It was the best he could do to get her attention. In the hospital where she'd seen him last, he had laid, wan and scarred, a livid red line arcing across his nose from the blow he took to the back of his head. That was gone now, as if it had never been, but he was not the same man. There was no mistaking that. "I'll buy the next one," he told the bartender, who just rolled his eyes. Now he had to open up the stupid bastard's tab again, just because a pretty girl with a guitar had sidled up to the bar.
"Hi." It was automatic and amused in the disillusioned way that all young woman grew to be after frequenting too many dive bars too late at night, the kinds of places where men expectantly wanted to buy drinks. Charlie was a thief, and she'd grown coldblood out of necessity when it came to shoplifting or ditching cabs, but she knew that taking a drink off of a man was different. Men expected things, and she'd learned well enough that there was just too much trouble in that. Maybe there was a lingering fear in it too, because of what had happened to her sister. Those demons didn't have faces or names, and as a result, they just kind of became everyone if she let herself get scared like that. She didn't get scared very much these days, though. Anger helped. It didn't let a whole lot else in.
"Don't, Frank." Charlie shook her head when the bartender reached for the bottle to get her a refill, a roll of the eyes, and she gave a sidelong glance to the man who'd struck up conversation. Recognition bloomed, but it wasn't immediate. Jack didn't look like she remembered. She didn't remember him like he was in the hospital anyway, she remembered him like a smile in the winter, warm in the cold. He'd seemed so much older to her back then, fucking majestic, but Charlie knew now that such had been the illusion cast by her own youth. Helen and him hadn't been all that much older than she was now. It felt like in a blink all of the gaps were filled in, and even though Jack wasn't the same, her mind made the leap to promise her it was so. She suddenly couldn't remember him looking any younger than this. She stared. "Actually, yeah.. yeah Frank. I'll take it."
The bartender huffed and poured the shot for her. Charlie reached for it blindly, watching Jack. "Hi," she repeated awkwardly.
The scar was gone now, and his face was clean of any suggestion that anything remarkable had ever happened to him at all. The Lazarus Pit had taken care of that. It was a funny thing - he'd been on the verge once, between life and death, stuck in that coma. Officially passing over and then being brought back only seemed fitting, like something had been left unfinished.
Watching Charlie roll her eyes and dismiss before she recognized him said a lot about where she'd been for the long years since he'd last seen her. He remembered confidence a little like that, but she had been so young there was no telling what kind of person she would turn out to be. A good one, he'd been sure, and a smart one. She clearly had a knack for guitar, even then, but he couldn't remember hearing her sing. Not like she had onstage earlier, anyway. Her sister would have been proud of her, and that thought hurt more than he thought it still could.
He smiled a little when she changed her mind about the shot. He glanced up at Frank and slid the bills across that he'd folded to put back in his wallet, before tucking it away in his pocket. "I hope I didn't startle you," he said. "I guess a lot of guys probably try to buy you drinks these days." His smile widened a little, incredulous in the face of time, and he looked down at his hands. "That's a weird thought, I have to be honest with you. I can't say I ever thought I would be old enough to see that.” He looked back up again. He still had the same dark eyes, warm at the surface. Once upon a time he’d been all affection and energy, running full tilt toward something in the future he’d been sure would be good. These days he was so much more still underneath, and under that, an anger you couldn’t swallow down. He’d come to terms with that somewhere along the way, accepted that he’d burned it in so deeply that nothing would cut it out. “You sounded great.” His smile tilted toward amused. “Even if your guitar’s a little out of tune. Not your fault.” He reached across and touched the edge of the fretboard. He suddenly felt outside himself, in a completely different place, like a completely different person. “Just needs some new strings, I think.”
"No, not really," she said of many men buying her drinks. The idea kind of made her laugh, actually. A brief glimpse of Charlene's girlish shadow, whatever remained of the youth that was too green to be hanging around sleaze bars at night. The only reason she was even a quarter of the way flattered was because it was Jack. Charlie thought of people like caricatures, and maybe that's why it was easy for her to fall in love with the idea of homeless musicians and street artists that kept their paint in cans instead of dripping from brushes. Because people became ideas, and ideas did not have complexities, they did not have spectrums of good and bad. They were just one-dimensional images, simple, starkly defined and incapable of straying outside their lines. And when Jack made that assumption about a lot of guys trying to buy her drinks, Charlie imagined that he saw her like one of those women now. Dark women that sat in the corners of bars, protected by a mote of cigarette smoke. That was cool.
After taking the shot, Charlie winced into her sleeve while the warmth radiated. Despite herself, she smiled. She knew that she would see Jack, knew it from the moment that she'd found out he was here. She hadn't really analyzed whether or not she wanted to see him, because off the cuff it seemed like why not? She didn't have to dig past the primary layer and get philosophical about why she might not want to see him. She didn't think it would bring back memories or pain, because what was in the past maybe just stayed there. It seemed really fucked up to look at Jack and think of her sister, so she tried not to. It took Charlie a long moment to look at Jack at all, honestly. Even when she worked up to it, it was with sidelong eyes buried under two day old mascara, and teeth waging war on the edge of a thumb bent at the end of a long line of other bent joints like wrist and elbow.
"Yeah," talking about the guitar was easy. It was a stationary thing, but also a piece of artillery so constant that it might as well have been her own arm. She smiled when he touched the instrument, and it was so real, so genuine in its happiness. It was a smile built from good memories, the only ones she had really. "I've been meaning to buy some," the words were a promise. She didn't want Jack to think that she hadn't been taking care of her present. She'd find a music store around Vegas, and Ping would buy the strings for her, or just steal them, whatever. "How are things here in Vegas?" It wasn't a small question, it wasn't one of those loose, uninterested inquiry into his life offered out of politeness. Charlie really wanted to know. She watched him with eyes that were the living ghost of her sister's.
Whether or not Charlie had been keeping the guitar in top shape didn't worry Jack. The fact that she was still playing it said more than words or wear on the guitar body could, and watching her smile against the burn of the shot made him smile. "Have you been playing all this time?" he asked. It was a strange question that felt a little more raw than it had initially been intended to, and it carried with it all the awkward concern of How have you been?
"Things are good," he answered, with automatic accuracy. "They're good. I'm working for a cyber security firm. Exciting stuff." The lie flowed off his tongue easy as could be, but if there was anybody who didn't need to get mixed up in the world of name sales and espionage, it was Charlie. Jack had enough baggage to fill a steamer trunk, built up in the years since he'd last seen her into a weight that he never seemed to quite be able to cut loose. He wasn't going to make her shoulder it too. He was trying to get out from under it himself, after all, start things new. Her eyes gave him pause, made his throat go dry, and he stared for a half second too long before turning to reopen his tab. He didn't usually have more than one beer, but this seemed like the kind of night for it.
Things were good, though. Or, if not good, they were better. It was only a month now since Cerise had left, and thinking about her still made him feel kind of sick, for not doing better, for not being better, for not understanding faster what he needed to know. The CIA was a mess, and Max was a lost cause at best. In the past, he'd tried to be a friend to her while tamping down on desire, and it hadn't made him the best friend, exactly. These days, since that desire had finally started to fade, it was easier to actually be the friend he'd promised he wouldn't stop being, years ago, when she called him out on it. He had friends, and he had work that kept him busy, and if there were some missing pieces, some lost things, so what? It had been worse, and it could be worse again, and he never, ever forgot it.
"Just sometimes," she said of the playing. Charlie knew that 'all this time' constituted everything between now and when she'd last seen him in Chicago. To Charlie, it seemed like a lifetime, a lifetime spent hustling, and clubbing, and catching busses through cities. A lifetime spent doing all kinds of things besides playing guitar. Which probably explained why when she picked up a guitar now, her playing was patchwork pieces from what she could remember from the radio. Jolene, Jolene and Stairway to Heaven. Ironically, Charlie didn't listen to very much music. She'd never had any CDs, and the only time an MP3 player had been in her hands was the time between it got stolen to the time she unloaded it at a pawn shop for easy cash. Even when she went to shows, it was about things wholly separate from the music. Shows were about laughter and paint and drugs that came in different colors. It made for a good soundtrack, but she was more interested in living the movie.
Charlie wasn't sure what a cyber security firm was, but it sounded technical and important and likely the result of the kind of schooling that took years. "Oh," she said automatically. She accepted the lie with a kind of vacant, naive stare that people took on when they didn't know what questions were supposed to come next. Asking questions about cyber security seemed like a perfect instance to look stupid, and Charlie tended to avoid those situations whenever possible. She didn't want to seem young, nive, or stupid to Jack. So she opted not to say anything else on that. Charlie was quiet a lot, but quietness suited her.
She smiled when Jack reopened his tab, and skinny shoulders rolled with a shrug that settled against the back of the stool, which was metal gone old and painted black. Charlie wasn't a stranger when it came to talking about herself, considering that Ping was her only friend. Most of their conversations relied heavily on Charlie being able to carry their full weight. Between that and her history with speed, Charlie could talk herself in circles if the chemical reaction was right. But Ping wasn't here, and Charlie hadn't touched drugs since coming to Vegas. She tried to think of something to tell Jack about what she'd been up to, and she settled on New York. "I was living in Brooklyn for awhile, actually. Things went south with my Dad, you know." Charlie was actually pretty certain that Jack didn't know, but that was a whole different story that she didn't see the point in telling. "So I moved to the city and thought I'd join a band.. and I did for awhile, but then my boyfriend ended up being an asshole, so I came out here with a friend." Charlie glanced around the bar for a moment, contemplating the sad, lonely stage. "I don't think a lot of musicians come out of Las Vegas.. do they?"
Things had gone south with her dad. What did that even mean? Jack felt another flash of guilt, for not checking up sooner, for not knowing. He should have, but the grief had been great and the need to move even greater. He should have checked in - should have called - but he never did, too wrapped up in his own grief to care about much else.
“Not a lot,” he said, after a moment, turning to face her more fully. “But every once in a while. There are people who want to make their living with music everywhere, even here. And that’s not counting the crooners on the strip.” He glanced past her, following her gaze to the empty stage. “Sorry about your boyfriend,” he said, all the while wondering. What had he been like? Had he been decent? Where had they met? He couldn’t possibly catch up on all the details he’d missed right now, but he felt like trying. “What happened with him?” He knew he ought to take her brushoff at face value and let it go. But he would think about it, wonder what ‘being an asshole’ actually meant. The fact that she was playing it down at all made him jump to a dozen different sordid conclusions. He knew logically that it was probably nothing, that the guy had likely shown his colors as a jerk and that was all. But he had so much to make up for, and if it was more than walking in on him with another girl, and Jack didn’t ask, he would only feel the worse for it later.
"I like the crooners on the strip," she admitted with a laugh. Maybe that was her problem, she lacked a discerning taste and rather invested herself in any kind of singer who had a pulse and some passion. She'd thought the beatboxing Filipino man back at the Bronx Zoo had been a whole new level of genius, but most of her friends had just thought he was weird. The only friend she had anymore was Aran, and Charlie was pretty sure that the girl would go with her anywhere to watch anyone without thinking it was the least bit weird. That partner in crime kind of compliance was one of the reasons that Charlie adored the girl so much. Aran never told her no.
Charlie made a face when Jack voiced that sympathetic apology about the ex-boyfriend. "Don't be sorry, I was so ready for that to be over. I just think I didn't know how to end it for a long time. I didn't have anywhere else to live or anything in New York, and I wasn't going back to my Dad's, so.." She shrugged, thinking that kind of explained the position she'd been in without having to get too specific. She didn't want to bring up the drugs, and not because she thought Jack would disapprove, but she really didn't want him(or anyone) to feel sorry for her. Especially when it had been her own fucked up decisions that had gotten her there. Besides, it was all done with now, she didn't see any point in bringing it back off. She was still young enough that a couple of months ago felt like a lifetime ago, anyway.
She tapped her thumbnail against a chip in the lip of her empty shot glass, considering all of her unasked questions during the brief lull in their conversation. To her, it felt like they weren't talking about the most key element of their lives. Of course, she knew that just because her sister tied them together, Helen didn't necessarily have to be the 'key' element of their lives. People moved on and stuff, people were supposed to. "Its nice to see you again," she finally offered.
"You too," Jack said, leaning slightly over the bar. He had missed Charlie, and that was the truth of it. He'd missed her like he'd missed all the other parts of his old life, the one that didn't exist anymore, like he missed the people in it. Almost all of it was lost now, fallen into disrepair or missing altogether. But here was Charlie, still alive and thriving in her own way, surviving in a way he hadn't been able to after Helen had died. He'd let that death define him, and he wondered if that would be something he'd ever be able to explain to Charlie. Maybe not. Maybe some pieces of the past were better left blank, for her to paint her own visions on. They would, undoubtedly, be better than the truth.