Maren is not the first Avenger (backintheworld) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-05-06 19:30:00 |
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Entry tags: | captain america, syrena |
Who: Maren and Hunter
What: Talking
Where: The RV
When: Immediately after Hunter found Hannah's body, before Maren's botched hit. In other words: Recent.
Warnings/Rating: Nope
The crazy tattoo guy didn’t say anything to Hunter on the way back to the trucks. He drove off, and there was something about his face that kept that blue sequin hat from being funny anymore. Hunter didn’t try to say anything, and much later, when he did speak, it was quietly, to the dog or the horses, observing the clear air and the state of the tack. The ranch he was working for wasn’t big on trust, and he hadn’t actually asked permission to borrow a couple of horses and disappear into the dust, but he also chose his employers well, and he knew that the ones meant to be working had been drunk for hours. He rubbed down the horses, set them up with feed, cleaned the tack, stored it, and then left the ranch for his truck. The dog was tired, and he was tired, and for once the fish girl didn’t ask for music. She let him be, and he drove back to Maren’s silver tube. It was very late, and in the distance the cluster of the Strip glistened and pulsed, but here the star quiet appealed to Hunter.
The big, sleek shape of the battered Great Dane rose up from underneath the RV at one end of Maren’s allotted space, but he didn’t see the Collie puppy yet. He pulled back the screen and gave the dogs a horseman’s chirrup as a way of announcing himself to his sister if she was inside.
Maren had showered, and she had calmed. The RV smelled of cigarettes and a hint of metal and flame instead of lemons, but that was the only true sign anything was amiss in the small metal castle she called home. She was behind the curtain that draped her dais, her shape visible as a dark shadow against the back wall. She was curled up on herself, a book against her knees and an attempt of forgetfulness tucked between the ecru pages that crinkled and crackled as he opened the door. She considered setting them on fire, considered the cleansing that might bring, but the thought was gone almost as quickly as it had come, and she merely scooted to the end of the bed and tugged open the curtain in the center.
The collie, which she had named Heathcliff, was beside her on the bed, his wet nose poking out when she parted the drapes of blue. She was dressed as she always was for sleeping - a long, white cotton dress and her hair braided and held at the end with a strip of linen. “You’ve returned,” she said, her tone dramatic, as if his entrance was a greatly anticipated moment in a book.
When she pulled the curtain back, she caught him staring at the silhouette with hollowed eyes, recognizing it as the corkscrew shield she’d used a very, very long time ago. The sight of the dog distracted him, and he turned the gaze to the puppy, incongruous chunk of white fuzz it was. The animals had always been with him, anywhere from three to six of them of various breeds and species, and when she wore her books and retreated, he took off for the woods. He didn’t take off this time, cramped in his slight hunch to keep from crushing his head against the ceiling. He’d stripped off his boots and left them outside, but he was still filthy and visibly tired.
Hunter kept seeing the dead girl with the dark hair and the scarred back of the man digging at her makeshift grave, so he didn’t retreat from his irritation. Instead of moving away, toward the shower, he slid through the makeshift kitchen (all six inches of it) toward her end of the RV. “Yes.”
“We were starting to despair of it,” she said, with more drama than she normally greeted him. She had, in recent days, slipped into a normal speech pattern with him, something she only did with people she trusted. But today it was as it had been, and Heathcliff was the other member of the royal we.
She recognized, too, somewhere in the words that were printed on his face, that he was not as he normally was, and her voice was quiet inquiry, a sovereign asking after the wellbeing of a subject. “Have you been well?” she asked, and she was that sovereign then, safe and removed and words on a page; invincible lest the author erase and start over, which was impossible, as the story was already in the process of being told.
He stared at her a little while, wondering who ‘we’ was, and not really understanding that she was referring to the dog, who shuffled himself forward to the end of the bed and stretched his nose out toward Hunter without actually leaving Maren’s side. Hunter came closer, forced to bend nearly in half until he was at the edge of her bed, and then he sat on something that was most certainly not meant to bear his weight. “Dog needs something to eat,” he said, not as an answer, but in place of a long exhale that was him sitting and attempting to relax all in one movement. Westerbergs did not relax without it being quite intentional or utterly unthinking, and nothing in between. “...Girl’s still out in the desert,” he added a second later, without preamble.
“Heathcliff,” she corrected about the collie, who had eaten most of her toast and drank half her tea. Unless he meant another dog, which was possible; there were quite a few of them. “Heathcliff has consumed part of my breakfast,” she assured him, even as she watched him sit on the edge of the makeshift bed. It creaked and it shifted, and she smiled at him and accommodated him, though she would not do so otherwise.
She paused when he mentioned the girl, and it was like that moment in a book when something entirely unexpected happens. She stared, and she considered not asking him what he meant, because knowledge was the one thing that could never be erased. Once someone knew something, they knew, and there was no turning back from it. “What girl?” she finally asked, and it was all Steve’s urging and Steve’s concern. Steve, who was considering the possibility of turning Maren in for her own crimes, and now he wondered if this brother was a criminal too.
As a matter of fact, Hunter meant his dog, the ugliest, the oldest, the one that had been with him the longest and never left his side. She was scruffy and dun-colored, and he called her Daisy when there was no one around to hear. He stared at his sister until he figured out that Heathcliff was now the name of the collie. He was pleased at this sign of affection, and smiled a small, effortless smile across at her. He picked up a dirty hand and rubbed behind the collie’s ears. He rolled his eyes heavenward in absolute ecstasy.
“The girl I found,” he repeated. “...He found.” He pointed at the collie. “The one I told you about in the book.” He made an odd gesture behind one hip, as if taking the notebook out of his back pocket, though he didn’t. “In the desert.” He thought maybe she was hard of hearing.
Oh, that girl. Maren had ended up in a different book, a different chapter, one where anyone who came to the door would bring additional words to her own story. It took a second, going back to that earlier book, the one with the girl and the desert, and she turned the pages in her mind and wondered, again, what kind of man Hunter was. She looked at him, her eyes dark and intelligent, a reader examining a character come to life from the page. His reaction, the way he looked, how finding this girl had affected him, it made her wonder how he had turned out better than she had. It all seemed wrong right then, and she had to remind herself that this wasn’t her chapter.
She pushed herself to standing, and she motioned to one of the small tin chairs that was tucked beneath the half-table built into the RV wall. “I will make tea,” she offered, because tea was the literary equivalent of a Xanax. She had tea; she did not have Xanax. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, and it was an indication of her own shaken nature, the fact that she didn’t know how to broach this. She grasped at literary straws, seeking out a novel about finding a dead body, but she came up empty, and so she put the kettle on and waited for the whistle, because the whistle was predictable. “Are you going to tell the police?” she knew he wasn’t, but it was a question worth asking.
Hunter didn’t think there was one damn thing about him that was better than his sister, who had always been far and away more intelligent, articulate, and independent than he. There was enough envy there that it would never have occurred to him that she was thinking what she was, and he certainly didn’t understand the point of tea. However, if she wanted tea, then by all means, and he pulled his long legs out of her way. He was coated in a fine red dust that was like bleached brick. He lifted one shoulder up into the seam of his plaid shirt when she asked him if he wanted to talk about it. He would have said no, except that he was surprised to find he did, actually, want to talk about it. He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Hell no. They’ll think I did it. Record like mine?” He realized she didn’t know what his record look like, and shrugged again. “Got caught stealing things a few times. Cops don’t like me.”
It was no surprise to Maren, that confession. When they’d been very young and hiding from demons that wielded belts and hid in syringes, Raegan and the boys had always stolen things. She’d hidden, afraid, just out of sight, scared of repercussions and the kinds of things that happened to villains in the children’s books she read then, the fairy tales. She had stayed clean through college, herself, and she did not finding it surprising that Hunter had continued on the same path that fate seemed to have set them all on. Still, she was fairly sure she still topped the list of criminals in the family, and that didn’t sit well with her. It had nothing to do with Steve, that knowledge, and she pushed it all aside for the teapot and the metal steeping basket.
The tea was an inexpensive black, and she carried two cups out and set their chipped porcelain on the tiny table. “What was it like?” she asked of the girl, the body in the desert, and there was less enthusiasm for the morbid than there normally was there, as if it was real, not something in a book at all.
Hunter watched the process concerning tea with interest, having seen nothing like it before. The puppy did his forepaw shuffle and nosed under Hunter’s elbow, despite the strong smell of horse and all the dust, and Hunter gave the dog a half-hug when Maren’s back was turned. He felt better being in the metal tube with the dog and a living girl, as opposed to out in the dust with a dead one. His face twisted. “Some bastard took her out there and buried her. Looks like she’s standing up in a hole, kind of. You don’t talk to anyone you don’t know,” he told her, sharply, as if this topic was all connected.
The concern surprised her, and she pulled out the metal chair and took a seat, the cup immediately tugged toward her, as safety came from holding the chipped porcelain in her hands. “You should warn Raegan, Hunter, not me.” Which was, to say, she didn’t think murderers should be warned about murderers. Yes, it was only once, but it was still a fresh mistake, and she didn’t quite know how to wipe the scent away. “Was she young?” she asked of the girl, remembering people talking about her on the journals and, again, it was likely telling that she sounded normal, no books or big words. Just Montana and a girl and two chipped cups of tea. “I don’t think it’s safe here for anyone, Hunter,” she added. “Is he nice, your suitor?”
This flood of questions didn’t disturb Hunter. He was used to conversations in which only he (and, perhaps, a dog) took part, and he assumed that whoever he was speaking to would damn well wait for him to catch up. “You warn her.” He didn’t want his first face-to-face conversation with Raegan to be about some psycho killing girls in the desert. “Don’t know how old she was. Got a lot of long hair, guess not too old.” He glanced at Maren’s hair ominously. Hunter took his tea, sipped at it, and found it a lot like drinking hot water. He would have preferred a beer, and eyed it as he said, vaguely, “Suitor?”
Maren didn’t keep beer, though perhaps she should. Before Hunter and Kellan, she couldn’t remember ever having a man in her RV. Perhaps Theo standing on the tiny metal stairs counted, but she preferred not to think of Count Olaf as a man, even after his olive branch of old books that smelled of dust and leather. She didn’t understand why he didn’t want to warn Raegan himself, but she didn’t argue with him about it. They were all going to have dinner together, and she could bring it up then. It was a fitting subject, maybe, for a family reunion. Something pleasant would have been wrong somehow, as if they were tempting fate with good things for it to snatch away. The look to her hair didn’t go unnoticed, but she didn’t tell him that everyone she knew lately killed people; she didn’t think he’d take it well. “Blake,” she said instead.
“Oh.” Another shrug. Hunter seemed to feel it was necessary to preamble all his replies to questions with that movement of his head and shoulder, as if he wanted to footnote every conversation with the warning that he didn’t actually know what he was talking about. “Nice I don’t think is a good word. Weird guy. Rich as sin, fucks around a lot, doesn’t give me a second glance.” Yet there he was, in a spare room. Weird.
It was better topic of conversation than the dead girl buried upright in the desert, and Maren tried to grab it with both hands. After all, it was romantic. How had they met? Why had Blake offered? Was it love at first sight? Was Blake doing the virtuous, gentlemanly thing by keeping his relationship with Hunter pure as it blossomed? She wanted to focus on those things, but she had a hard time, and her mind wandered as she looked out the window. “I went home with someone the other night, an old friend, and second glances don’t necessarily mean happily ever after come morning, Hunter,” she said, as if she was old enough to have any old friends. Her attention didn’t stay there, though, and she looked back him within a moment. “You’re not going to try to find who did it, are you? You didn’t leave anything behind?”
Hunter felt like this seesaw of conversation topic must be some new quirk that his sister had acquired in intervening years. He gazed at her a moment, trying to figure out what was different, but found nothing other than some new shadows under her eyes. Abruptly she felt like a stranger, and Hunter’s face had always been a window to his emotions. Something was wrong. “...No. But I think the guy I took out there is going after whoever. He was pretty upset.”
She didn’t like whatever crossed his face then, but she was much better at hiding things than him. She had hid her fear as a child, and her pain as a teenager, and everything as an adult. She was the same dark circles and calm as she sipped her tea, and she looked at him with concern in her dark eyes. “You shouldn’t be involved.” She didn’t know who had killed this girl, but she knew the Mafia game in Las Vegas was spiking, and she didn’t want Hunter caught in the middle of it. He should return to his suitor, and forget girls in the desert, and sleep nights without the nightmares that plagued her in recent dreams. “You should pretend it never happened, Hunter, like a book you began to read but didn’t finish, and you should walk away from it.”
Hunter continued to give her that long gaze, the one that went too far. He had eyes like her, dark eyes, heavy-lidded as if continually weighed down by bleak things, rarely revealed in vulnerable surprise or innocence. “I don’t want to be involved. But you don’t forget some little girl’s head rotting away in the desert, Maren. What’s about you? There’s somethin’ off.” A different brother would have reached to touch her arm, but Hunter knew better. Westerbergs did not invite contact.
“My work,” was her response, and it was said in a way that did not invite questions. Though, truthfully, she didn’t expect Hunter to respect any boundaries. They’d never been close as children; she’d never been close to any of them, but she knew he wasn’t the kind to stay behind the invisible line she drew in the sand. “Not forgetting isn’t the same as being in danger. That man, he’ll post on the journals again. He is-” She hunted for a comparison, and Steve provided one willingly, which should not have been necessary. “He is Loki. He craves an audience.”
Hunter moved across lines because they were there, to prove he had no respect for them. However, he had nothing to gain by pissing off little Maren, who had, at least, been good to him and his animals. “I noticed. Loki is one of those guys on the journals too. They’re all like that. Puffed up. What do you do for work?”
“Yes. My fiction is from his world,” she said, giving him a sharp look that said he shouldn’t say wonderful things about Captain America just then. “You need to be careful of men like that, the ones who aren’t frightened of being caught. They’ll do anything,” she reasoned, “like the villains in a novel that only can be stopped by death.” The question about work was a touchy one. She didn’t want to lie entirely, because lies were all seen through eventually, even when they were good lies. “I serve as a decoy on occasion.” Not a lie. That was how it all had started, before the spying and the lying and, now, this.
Hunter raised an eyebrow in a way that he thought was sly and arch, but only made him look young and lost. “A assume you don’t mean duck hunting.” He ignored the bit about Loki’s world. Hunter didn’t give a damn about the doors, not really understanding the depth of their significance. Syrena had not yet broached the subject, and she was such a quiet, separate, alien presence that it was usually as if she was not there at all. To Hunter, the doors were as foreign as Tahiti or Timbuktu.
“No. I do not mean duck hunting,” she said simply.
Hunter pressed. “So what are you being decoy for?” he demanded.
“Recently, some takes on the casinos,” she said, though that had ended with Count Olaf. Some small part of her blamed him for this, for what had happened, for what it had come to, but this wasn’t the moment for that, and she simply shrugged elegant shoulders covered in virginal white. “It’s just work, Hunter,” she said, an effort to appease and very young in the braid and white linen. “Are you going to stay tonight?” she asked, and something in her gaze said she wanted him to, even if she knew it might get in the way of his pure knight’s courtship.
Hunter goggled. His sister, working “takes on casinos”? Raegan, the spitfire, maybe, but little Maren? The bookish one? “Yes,” he said, answering the last question only to get it out of the way while his mind tried to wrap around the topic at hand. “But... you? Cons? You were always so smart. I thought you’d be off...” his eyes rolled as he searched around, “teaching, or something.”
“I was recruited at college,” she said, standing and collecting both cups. It was an end to the conversation, you see, and she intended it to be very clear. “I can’t speak of it, Hunter,” she added, falling back into the safe speech patterns of the written words and places that didn’t exist, safe places. “But I would like it if you stayed this evening,” she added, and maybe it would be good for him to. He looked off, and while she didn’t say anything about it, she acknowledged it. “You can bring the dogs in.” The other dogs, the ones she hadn’t adopted for her own and named after a rake on the Moors.
Hunter stared at her a little while longer, but while the bonds of family allowed him to expect her floor for maybe a night, or two if he was pushing it, he didn’t feel it entitled him to her deep secrets--or anything she didn’t want to tell him. When she said she couldn’t speak of it, Hunter presumed that that meant it was too dangerous to tell anyone anything. “Big one is too big. Good outside, guard the place. ...She needs to eat, though.” He meant Daisy, and he willingly left the tea to get halfway upright and edged around the table. He frowned at Maren in a way that communicated his dislike of her career choices, but he didn’t say anything, and he continued to avoid reaching out to her or asking her for anything. He opened the RV door and clicked his tongue at Daisy, and the old dog gave herself a shake and hopped up inside. “Lay down.” The dog pushed herself into the corner and obeyed while Hunter slid along the small space to the shower.