Jason Todd is (thelazarus) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-01-12 22:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | red hood, regulus black |
Who: Evie and Jack
What: A Christmas tree emergency!
Where: Evie's apartment
When: Right before Christmas
Warnings/Rating: Cuteness?
The situation was probably the most ridiculous thing that had happened to Evie that she could actually laugh at in months. What had started as a desire to make sure her baby had the best first Christmas in the world, had ended up with an 8 foot Douglas Fir lodged in her stairwell. She sat on one of the stairs, had a decent chuckle, and called Jack. Of course she called Jack, he’d been her go to emergency person for the past few months. And while she felt guilty about that, she tried not to feel too guilty today.
Today was funny. She needed today to try and be funny or else she’ll think about the one thing she tried to do to make the perfect first Christmas for her baby and how she lodged a Christmas tree in the stairwell. She had to see the absurdity of it all.
Evie was sitting on the one of the steps, leaning against the wall and drinking a cup of coffee she’d managed to make since she was on the right side of the tree to get into her apartment. The new apartment that was hers and Daisy’s and their own little home that she was determined to make for them. New fresh starts and all. Daisy was with Benedict, so she didn’t worry that she wasn’t okay while she got up to Christmas time antics - but she still hoped to have the tree up and decorated by the time he brought her back. She couldn’t wait to see her face. Even if her face had to see it decorated in the stairwell. That remained to be seen.
She had a full pot of coffee waiting inside for Jack should he make it up the stairs either with the Christmas tree or by climbing over the damn thing. It had been good of him to agree to come help the least she could do was offer coffee. Because she sure as hell didn’t know how to cook and offer a meal of some kind, but coffee. Coffee she could do.
Jack did, in the end, find himself sliding past a douglas fir in the stairwell, scratched in the face and somewhat battered by the time he came out the other side. It hadn’t been hard for him to make the choice to come help Evie with the tree. He was back home again, sent off duty by Max until whatever she was scared of resolved itself, and the school had, for the time being, shuttered its doors. Never a good sign, and he was already girding himself for the worst.
In the mean time, there was nothing to do but stay on high alert and try to keep living as if everything was normal. Doing something Christmasy was sure to help with that. He’d become used to spending Christmas on his own, or visiting friends on the day. This year, though, he was thinking about going home. There were still aunts and uncles to see, living back in Detroit, people who hadn’t heard from him in so long they likely thought he was dead. Every year, he’d resisted the pull to go check on them, to pay due many years missed, when he hadn’t been able to bear the idea of going home. Maybe it was time for that to end. He wasn’t sure what that meant for him - if it was the end of something, or just growing up, or just a sign that it had been well past long enough. Whatever it might be, his old excuses has begun to feel staid indeed.
On the other side of the tree he found Evie, boxed in like a prisoner by her Christmas tree. He couldn’t help but smile. “Doing alright down there?”
Evie heard the ruckus of someone trying to fight the majestic tree and had to smile to herself a little. Once Jack managed his way over she smiled, and stood up. “I have the best intentions,” she said and tilted her head to look at his scratched face and smiled just a bit embarrassingly, “You’ve already been wounded in action,” she said and held her hands up at him palms up, they were a little sticky with sap, a bit dirty, and a bit scratched as well. “Maybe Santa will give us a purple heart.” She looked at the tree and kicked at the trunk a bit, “Or a Congressional Medal of Honor. We’ll earn the damn thing for doing battle with this tree. I think I’ve got a chainsaw inside.” She teased.
Jack grinned down at her. It was nice to see her smiling, even if she did seem a little sheepish about the predicament. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing shameful in trying to give her kid a good Christmas. “I think we need to complete our mission before anybody starts passing out medals,” he said, looking up at the tree. “Alright. So first thing’s first - we’re going to need to tip it. If I can grab hold of the bottom and shift it so it’s not wedged in there anymore, you can grab it at the top, and we can get it out of here. Then we can talk to Santa about awards. Sound good?” He slid toward the gap in the tree again, ready to get underneath the thing if she approved the daring plan.
She shrugged a bit and nodded with a sigh, “I like to plan ahead any time I might win something,” she teased. She watched and listened to his plan and nodded in agreement. “Lift from the knees,” she said taking her spot and planting her feet to help get a good grip. “Don’t worry, if I wind up on my ass it wouldn’t be the first time today,” she said with a laugh. “Tell me when to lift!”
Jack manouvered around until he was positioned underneath the tree’s wedged trunk. As promised, he grabbed hold of it, sliding it out until it was loose and he was supporting its weight. The monster was heavier than it looked. “Did you pick the biggest tree in the lot?” he asked, hoisting it a little higher with a grunt. “Alright,” he said. “Go!”
“I tried to!” she said as brightly as she could through a grunt while she was lifting her end of the tree. She’d dragged it, then it had gotten stuck, and now the real muscles were involved. But she was pretty strong for a tiny thing. “Oh my god I’m regretting that decision,” she said with a chuckle as she pulled. It wedged itself free and there was an “oof” and a few more hilarious noises as she nearly lost her footing trying to walk backwards into the apartment. Luckily she had a place for it. And even though she knocked a picture off the credenza (and promptly stepped on it), and banged her elbow on the door jamb, they were definitely in better shape than she had been on her own. “They’re going to put you on a postage stamp for this, Jack,” she managed to say once the tree was pushed into the apartment.
Of course that left them there standing a gigantic Christmas tree. But it was in the apartment. She peered over the branches, which had knocked her hat off and her long blonde hair was as disheveled as ever. “We can drop it. Or we can try and get it in the stand. Either way there’s coffee waiting patiently to congratulate us on a job well done.”
Jack hefted the tree on his end, struggling with it up the remaining stairs and through the hall. It wasn't exactly the easiest haul he could remember making, but they got there, one shaky step at a time.
By the time the tree was actually inside the apartment he was almost ready to call it, but they would only have to get the thing back up again to get it in the stand - no, they ought to just go for it now. "Let's try the stand," he said, lowering his end a little bit. "We can't stop now, not when we're so close!" He was laughing a little, and truthfully, it was nice just to do something that felt normal. Put a Christmas tree in a stand. In comparison to a lot of the work he'd been doing lately, it was a pleasant reprieve, if a heavy one.
It felt like it had been a long time since Evie had had fun. Honest fun. Most of the fun she had she shared with a baby who was so fun in her own right, but it still felt lonely. This was actual fun with an adult sized human. She heard him laugh a bit and it warmed her like only a bit of fun could ever warm a person. Evie had always loved to laugh, but she loved other people laughing even more. She made her daughter laugh just for the sound of it, and she always found that other people laughing - even a little - was infectious.
Suddenly the situation seemed that much more ridiculous, and she was smiling even through the branches of the tree and she felt like she could have pulled the whole tree up herself for the briefest moment. But she didn’t let him off the hook to test that theory. “Go big or go home, right?” she said raising her eyebrows and grinning. She pushed as he titled the tree down toward the stand and began walking her hands and pushing upward as far as she could. “I’ll meet you in the middle and once its up I’ll shimmy down and tighten the stand. Just make sure you have a good hold on it before I start the shimmying process.” She said as she continued to straighten the tree up.
Once the tree was standing up vertically (it was just a bit more than slightly lopsided), and held up by two pairs of hands and she had met Jack in the middle she attempted to ignore the fact that the branches had knocked yet another picture off the wall. She let out a breathe of air and inhaled sharply again. She stuck her bottom lip out just a bit and blew another puff of air, her lips pushing air upward to blow her blonde hair out of her face. This was clearly hard work. “Ready for the Christmas Tree shimmy?” she asked after she caught her breath.
Evie's smile through the branches of the tree was sweet enough that it reminded Jack feel a little bit more like a whole person. He thought often about what it would be like to try to really make an effort to settle down, like he had once when he had settled with Cerise in Atlanta. She'd found someone else, but he'd found a kind of peace in living a life where he went to the grocery store and fixed cars, and he'd almost been able to forget he'd been anything else.
But the 'almost' was the important part, and in the end that niggling feeling of doubt and the incomplete had driven him all the way to Vegas. He knew now that he would never be wholly satisfied with that life. There had been a time when he'd wanted an unusual existence, wanted to be exceptional, a great musician. Now he wished he could go back to living with someone, and playing in clubs, and working a day job. Something like normalcy that was never going to happen. Moments like this one, though, reminded him there might just be a middle ground somewhere.
Jack grabbed the trunk through the scratching branches. He was already sticky with sap, and by the end of this, every inch of him was going to smell like pine needles. "Okay," he said, once he had a good grip. "Ready."
She nodded at him once firmly, “Alright. I’m going in,” she said as she slowly walked her hands back down the tree and did, indeed, shimmy a little once she got to her knees. She flattened out on her stomach and the wide base of the tree hid half of her body while she crawled under and started messing with the stupid metal keys on the tree stand to get it to hold the tree in place. “Is it straight?” she asked and then laughed, “More importantly do we care?” She grunted and groaned and twisted the keys into place tightly. The sap didn’t make it easy, but she had every home remedy for sap known to man on hand (this wasn’t her first Christmas tree rodeo).
“Is it seaworthy?” she hollered up from the ground even though she was little more than a pair of legs sticking out from under a tree. She was going to have pine needles in her hair until the New Year, she was sure of that.
“Only so much that it doesn’t fall over,” Jack replied, pushing up against the tree to try to get it to some semblance of uprightness. He leaned his full weight against it to keep it parallel to the floor. The last thing they needed was for this behemoth to come crashing to the ground and have the downstairs neighbors call the cops.
“Aye, captain,” Jack called down, with a grin, a real one. He didn’t get that luxury all that often.
Evie made some further interesting noises as she attempted to shimmy out from under the tree (which wasn’t as easy as getting down there), and once she was out from under it and sitting on the floor she looked up first at the tree and then at Jack and smiled. “Well. That was hardly an ordeal at all I can’t imagine what I was complaining about, clearly I’m just making excuses to invite you over,” she said grinning up at him. She couldn’t quite see the top of it from her position down on the ground, and she took a few moments to catch her breath and held her sappy, and slightly scratched hands out to him, “Got one more hoist in you, matey? Because I’m never getting off of this floor. I’ll have to have my father bring Daisy home and she and I will make a go of it under the Christmas tree like elves.”
“I think I can handle one more,” Jack said, reaching down and taking her sap sticky hands in his. He pulled her up from where she sat, her legs folded beneath her. Once she was upright, he released her hands. “Even though the idea of the two of you playing elves under the tree is pretty great.”
So here they were, with a Christmas tree proud against the ceiling, the whole apartment smelling of coffee and pine needles. He was pretty sure he had sap in his hair somewhere, and he probably looked like a manky tree man set loose from the forest, but this still felt like the most Christmaslike moment he’d had in a very long time. “Excuses or not, I think we made it through that ordeal just fine,” he said. “I think someone mentioned coffee?”
She smiled, “Well she definitely has a little Christmas elf outfit, because I couldn’t contain myself,” she admitted halfway between proud of herself and sheepish. She knew that for a while she’d be overcompensating as a parent, but Daisy was only 8 months old. And if there was ever a child to spoil, it was a baby.
Evie knew she looked like a manky tree creature, she’d been fighting the battle since the Christmas tree lot. But she didn’t mind so much once the finished product was up and slightly straight and looking lovely and smelling like Christmas. “Coffee, and then I’ll figure out how I’m going to get the star on top,” she said with a mischievous smile and nodded toward her kitchen.
Evie didn’t cook, when she tried it was a catastrophe, always. So the pots and pans on the racks were mostly for show, and if someone opened the cupboards they’d be appalled to find top of the line gourmet baby food, pop tarts, donuts and microwaveable everything. But she did make coffee and she made it strong and robust. Coffee was her life blood and if there was a vice that she snuck while she had been pregnant it had been coffee and she couldn’t even bother to feel guilty about it. Daisy was fine. Before she set about doing anything she reached under the sink and pulled out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and then grabbed a jar of peanut butter from the cupboard. “Give me your hands,” she said holding her hands out over the sink, “I’m about to blow your mind with sap removal. Or we’ll be sticking to all my coffee mugs. I know a mug hand sounds like a great idea in theory, but think of the downside to a mug hand before you get too excited.”
Jack walked with Evie into the kitchen. He was, admittedly, ready to get the sap off his hands, but he wasn’t expecting the peanut butter and the rubbing alcohol. “This looks like some kind of magic potion, he observed, but he put his hands out over the sink. “Thankfully for you, I had already considered the downside to mug hands. Go right ahead.” He would throw his hands and their sappiness at her mercy, may god have mercy on them both.
Evie turned the sink on, letting the water run until it was warm. And then she set to work. The rubbing alcohol helped with the part of their hands that were a bit sappier than others. Then she set in with the peanut butter which she was able to get on both of their hands. An odd sensation sure, but peanut butter was the best sap remover she had ever encountered, and she had encountered some. And it had the added benefit of having oil in it so it was soft. And squishy. And she was getting a bit lost in the squishyness and squeezing it between both of their fingers and she chuckled. “Sorry,” she said sheepishly and went about finishing the job up. “When I came to live with my papa when I was 12, I spent a lot of time up trees. And rather than the cruel methods my mother was so fond of to get sap removed, my father used peanut butter. And it works better than anything.” She said smiling up at Jack and grabbing a towel and drying his hands almost out of habit (she is a mother after all), she laughed as she realized that she was drying the hands of a grown man and shook her head, she pulled her hair back in the pony tail that had become disheveled in the Christmas tree fiasco and went about making her famous (or at least should be famous) coffee. It brewed quickly, and she poured them each a rather large mug full and gave him the sugar and cream in case he wanted it, she drank hers completely black. And strong.
“Do you want cookies, donuts, or poptarts with your coffee, Jack?” She said opening the cupboard and seeing what their limited options were.
Jack watched Evie busily work at getting the sap off his hands. They were relatively narrow for a man his size, and well calloused. Gun barrels and guitar strings had laced them with pads of thickened skin. He listened to her talk about her father, and the offhand mention of her mother's method for cleaning sap from her skin caught his attention. He didn't pry, but it reminded him how little he knew about her. She'd mentioned before that her childhood had been isolated somehow. Her mother's doing? It sounded like it. "Your father sounds like the smart one," he said lightly, allowing her the opportunity to delve more deeply into it if she liked, but stray from the topic otherwise. Life had been hard enough for her lately without making her revisit the past.
He laughed a little himself when she dried his hands for him, a little incredulous. "Thank you," he said. He added sugar to his coffee, but no cream, and took it from the table with both hands. It was rare to have the opportunity to really enjoy a warm drink in the desert, but the nights were actually respectably cold in the winter, and it still felt like the right season for it. He watched her root around in the cupboard for food. "I'll take a donut, thanks," he said. "You should really open a spa, I think. Coffee, donuts, hand massages, tree sap. This place has everything."
“My mother was not a nice person, she didn’t know how to be a mother, and was involved with the worst kind of men to have around, so escaping up trees was always worth the sap cleanings,” deep as the subject matter was - as harsh as realities could be, Evie had a mischievous smile on her face and downright twinkle in her blue eyes that spoke to an imagination that was still as wild as it had ever been. It was a coping mechanism that worked well for her, when she learned how to have healthy coping mechanisms this had become one of her favorites. Talking about the past, remembering painful events, she always countered it with a happy memory from the exact same week, or even the day if she could. Sometimes it was no more than a delicious breakfast, or a smile from a stranger, or even a sunset that she forced herself to recall. And it made her remember that not every second of her early life had been wrought with dysfunction and pain.
Evie wasn’t afraid of her past, not anymore. She had faced it alone, she’d faced it with her father, with therapy, with Wren and Luke, and eventually with Will. And she knew one day she’d have to face it again with someone else. She didn’t mind talking about it if questions were asked - she didn’t mind talking about it with others if she thought it might help them. But she had moved on from it and part of that was accepting that she had been a little kid and had no control over what had been done to her. But Jack had hit the nail on the head with his simple comment as well. “You’re right,” she said nodding once, “My father is the smart one,” she said proudly. “I would definitely not be standing here right now if it weren’t for him. Sometimes I think everyone must have a tragic backstory - but here we are right? Hanging out in my kitchen drinking coffee and celebrating the mother of all Christmas trees being at least at a seventy-five degree angle from the floor” she said grinning up at him over the rim of her coffee cup as she took a drink.
She took down the box of donuts and a couple of small plates and napkins and set them up, she grabbed a donut and broke it in half before taking a bite. She nodded half excited and pointed to a picture of Daisy that was hanging on the kitchen wall and smiled, “And a cute baby. People will come from miles around to be covered in sap, be fed refined sugars, and listen to calming effects of the 5:03 AM sharp wake up call of the Lowell Baby in her natural habitat.” She took another drink of her coffee, “But we have peanut butter hand massages. I think I just wrote my first TV spot.”
Jack knew a thing or two about facing dysfunction, about facing down things that had happened in the past. There was much that still sat with him, like a splinter just under the skin, but these days it had at least been calloused over. "I think I would have hid in the tree with you," he said, with a small smile. He imagined that Evie would have been a good person to climb trees with, back then. "At least seventy-five," Jack agreed. "Maybe even eighty." He paused. "I think that thought deserves a toast. To dysfunction, and to Christmas trees," he said, and clinked his coffee mug against hers. It was hard to forget, but remembering could be even harder, some days. Though he found it very difficult to live the idea that the past was in the past, he did try, and so he didn’t pry further into Evie’s story of her mother.
He took a donut and a plate, setting down the coffee. "I think peanut butter hand massages are really going to catch on," he said. "They'll be the next big fad. All the spas will have to start offering one, but you'll get to put a sign in your window saying you invented the process, so you will have that, and a baby petting zoo. I don’t have any doubt that your new spa is going to be a huge success.”
Evie didn’t know much about Jack’s past, she felt like a bad friend suddenly - but she assumed they’d get there one day. If he wanted to share, she would listen. If he didn’t, she would understand. But she was curious, and she liked the idea of little Evie having had a friend to climb up trees with. “I think I would have liked that,” she said picturing it in her head for a moment.
“Jack, anytime you need to hide up a tree,” she paused and thought about her statement, “A literal or a figurative tree,” she added, “make sure you call me - I’m still pretty spry,” of course she knew how to climb trees still, and of course she was likely one of the only people over the age of 25 who could honestly say she’d been up a tree in the past two months. And of course if he ever wanted to hide up the figurative tree and chat with someone, or do something ridiculous to forget something, she’d be there. “You have been a great asset to our lives the past 7 months, Jack, when you didn’t have to be. I don’t if I can express appreciation properly, so anytime you want to hide up a tree, just - call me.” She said with profound sincerity, it was written all over her face, she’d be willing to do just about anything for someone she considered part of her strange little world. And Jack had become as important to her as anyone else within those boundaries. “And next time I call you, it won’t be to do any heavy lifting,” she said using her finger to cross her heart, which was pretty standard Evie fare when she really meant something.
She clinked her mug against his, and nodded in agreement, “To dysfunction, and to Christmas trees, two of my favorite things,” she teased with a grin.
She laughed, a real laugh, her head tilted back when he talked about the peanut butter hand massages - and her ridiculous little spa. “All the peanut butter manufacturers will be begging to be my preferred brand. Make sure you write your client testimonial.”