nonelementary (nonelementary) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-05-14 15:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | john watson, mycroft holmes |
Who: Clare and Noah
What: Meeting roommates that don't get along very well.
Where: Red Rock Villas
When: Pretty much any recent time
Warnings/Rating: They get a bit cranky at each other. But no warnings.
Nights were quiet in the new apartment, almost as quiet as they’d been in the old one. Micah often went out to work, and Noah had yet to make an appearance. It left Clare feeling almost like she had her own apartment still, though something that was definitely larger and indeed a bit nicer than her last. Even a nice apartment couldn’t stop the nightmares that still slipped in at times when she was sleeping though. Sometimes they were of the Masquerade, sometimes of the sound of Tate’s laugh after being shot. Sometimes they were old things from childhood, and every once in a great while they were of desert heat and searing pain, sounds of gunshots and shouting. Those, she knew, weren’t hers. But they were real, just the same, and pulled her out of sleep hot and gasping against sand in her lungs.
The nightmares chased her out of bed and out of her bedroom, headed for the kitchen and the warm comfort of hot chocolate. It was indulgent, sure, and in her old life she would have thought of her mother’s sigh, left the chocolate for another time. But things had changed, even just in the past few months, and while still a bit guilty, she felt she deserved a hot chocolate in the face of nighttime terrors.
Normally she would have thrown on a robe, a hoodie, something to cover up, but she was alone in the apartment so she snuck out of her room in just her pajamas: colorful capri pants that ended mid shin, a tank top that dipped in both front and back, more revealing than she’d ever be around other people. Her hair was pulled up as well, and the expanse of her neck and upper back was visible, wounds healed over but still a livid reddish-purple that had yet to fade much at all. The rest of her skin was pale enough to make them stand out like writing on a page. She stood at the stove, attention on the small pot of milk as she heated it. She kept her weight on her left foot, the toes of her right curled under and resting against the floor. It revealed yet another scar, just as red as the others but more jagged, hidden in the wrinkles of the sole of her foot. She sang softly to herself, an old Beatles song that she’d always loved. Her voice was soft but clear enough, something low and fairly pleasant that she would never use in front of someone else. There was a low light on in the kitchen, just the one over the stove, another dim lamp in the livingroom, and then the soft filter of light down the hallway from her bedroom where she’d left the door open instead of closing it off from prying eyes as she so often did. The rest of the apartment was in darkness, not-yet familiar shapes in the corners of rooms. She’d checked that the door was locked more than once since Micah left, and she felt fairly safe in the strange new space.
Noah had arrived at the apartment while she slept. It was his first time there, having spent most of his days - since the incident with Vivienne - through the door, where Mycroft worried about the government and there was nothing for him to concern himself with. It was intended to be a balm, but it didn’t do terribly much in that department. He emerged quite the same as when he left, no better and no worse, and he opted to find his new home, rather than returning to Elias’ hotel. Sulking was best done in private, and he knew Elias had predicted that his mystery woman’s secret was rather more significant than a mole on her cheek or something of a similar ilk.
He heard the sounds from the kitchen and, expecting Micah, he padded out on bare feet to insist upon a jam session or a beer, whichever Micah found the more appealing. He was dressed in striped blue pajama bottoms, and he wore no shirt, only an old medallion of his mother’s pressed to the sleep-warm skin of his chest. His black hair was mussed, and he tried to coax it into remaining out of his face as he entered the kitchen with a sleepy squint. “If you’re to be awake and making a racket, I insist on a song or a beer,” he said, young and British, and only noticing the gender of the girl in the kitchen a moment later.
“Oh, pardon,” he said, realizing his mistake. He eyed the scars - because who wouldn’t? But he didn’t comment on them as Mycroft explained their origin quite succinctly. “You must be Clare.”
The voice was the last thing Clare had expected to hear, and the song was stolen from her throat by a scream. She rarely made any sound as loud as that scream, and she caught it back again as quickly as it had come. The handle of the pot had been in her hand as she swirled it slowly over the burner, and when she screamed, she also turned, the pot clattering on the burner, milk sloshing over and hissing against the hot portions of the stovetop. Her heart instantly began to race as she pressed herself back against the counter’s edge, cutting into her lower back. Her breath ran quick and shaky, and one of her hands reached palm out to keep the intruder away while her other hand clenched fingers around the counter’s edge.
Her name from him did very little to calm her at first, but eventually that, combined with his sleepy, mussed appearance, finally made its way past her panic. Once it did, her arms came back close to her body, self-consciously crossing over her chest as her posture curled in on itself slightly. “...you must be Noah?” Even though she had no idea who else he could be, her voice still tipped up into a question.
Noah considered himself to be as frightening as the Tooth Fairy, or countless other holiday and occasional inventions made to cater to small children, and her reaction left him staring wide-eyed for a moment, uncertain as to what to do about the entire mess. Perhaps he was just doing terribly with women as of late, he thought, bitterly remembering Vivienne, and his attention turned to the stove and the pot and the heat-curdled mess there. He considered backing up and leaving entirely, but Mycroft called him an idiot and insisted he remain, and Noah was in no mood for an argument with the bossy old man who thought he ran the British government as well as the boy in whose head he resided.
He watched her curl in on herself, and he thought of the scars along her back, and he sighed and moved to the sink and the rag tossed alongside it. “There’s little point crying over it,” he joked of the spilled milk, and he pointed to the table. “I’m Noah. Do sit, Clare,” he suggested amiably. Better to clean up the mess before Micah got in a strop about it. Micah got into a strop about nearly everything.
His sigh drew her back out of her curl a bit, and she actually looked directly at him from where she’d begun to avert her eyes - to a corner, to the floor. Instead, she looked at him and shook her head. The comment about crying made her frown, because she wasn’t, wasn’t even close to it. She hadn’t cried in quite a while, in fact. The milk still sizzled, and she reached over to turn off the stove, moving the milk to a different burner. “Stop,” she started, soft and still slightly unsteady, but insistent. “I spilled it, I’ll clean it.” She reached out and took the rag from his hand, subtly careful not to touch him. Once she did, she kept her eyes away from him, realizing that he was in his own pajamas, and not wearing a shirt. A flush stained her cheeks, hard to see in the dim light of the kitchen stove, and she ignored it while she cleaned the milk.
Noah wasn’t about to argue with her about it, not if she insisted, and he rather didn’t want to get her more worked up than she already was. He thought nothing of his own shirtlessness, and he leaned against the opposite counter and crossed his arms loosely over his chest. In no universe did he realize this woman had likely not been with a man; he simply thought nothing of it. “Very well. If you’d rather,” he said of the milk, and he rubbed his bare toes against the tile floor lazily. “Those left quite some scars,” he said of the marks along her back, even as Mycroft groaned in his mind. Alright, fine, so he’d forgot not to mention them in the span of the past five minutes, but it wasn’t like everyone didn’t know the injuries John Watson had suffered. Noah thought it was rather silly, pretending it hadn’t happened.
Clare was uneasy having Noah at her back, and she tried to angle herself as she cleaned, hoping to hide in the dim parts of the kitchen beyond the small area of light, while keeping him in her peripheral vision. He seemed so at ease, though his comfort did nothing to ease her own anxieties. The milk was almost cleaned up by the time Noah’s next comment came, and it earned a suddenly drawn breath from her as the rag paused momentarily above the surface of the stove. That breath was held for a very long, slowly passing moment before she breathed out again quietly, a whisper of air that would have been inaudible in any environment other than the silent apartment kitchen. She finished cleaning the milk, not responding for quite a while, and contemplating not saying anything at all, but she finally crossed to the sink again, back tense under the scars, to rinse out the rag.
Within her mind, the hints of John’s presence were pushing toward annoyance at the comments, something that Clare couldn’t quite follow about Noah and Mycroft and similarities thereof. She let the feelings pass through, and by the time the rag was rinsed and wrung, she’d managed to gather her own thoughts about how to respond. She wished for a hoodie, or a sweater, even a blanket to wrap around herself, but in the end simply folded her own arms over her chest again, guarding herself with them as she turned to face Noah again, halfway across the kitchen and with her back against her own stretch of counter. “Yes,” she replied simply, and gave him a single blink. Her voice was still soft, nothing much assured about it other than the fact that the scars were quite bad, and that she was doing her best to live with them.
Noah realized, somewhere between the stove cleaning and the rinsing of the towel, that Clare was more frightened than he’d originally understood. Perhaps it was his own youth, his own inexperience with women who weren’t a decade or two his senior, but he found himself at a loss as to how to deal with the situation. He was all thumbs, it seemed, when he came to females near his own age, and Mycroft was certainly no help.
Her response, that yes, made him quirk a brow, and he was all British snottiness just then, giving credence to the slumbering John’s opinion of the similarities he and Mycroft shared. “That’s all? Just yes?” he asked, because what was he supposed to say to that? He looked around the kitchen, as if a topic would present itself that wasn’t her scars, but none did. He wished for Elias just then, because Elias would surely know what to say to her. He’d speak of art or something, and she wouldn’t stand across a table as afraid as she obviously was now. “I’ve no desire to harm you,” he offered, unsure as to whether that would help or hinder. “You can’t be this afraid all the time, surely.” Surely.
The snottiness drew another frown across Clare’s face, mostly a single wrinkle between her eyebrows. What did he expect her to say about them? Anything that might possibly slip out wasn’t something she would normally want to say to a complete stranger. Even one that she was going to be sharing an apartment with. Her voice shook, but the fear was cut with subtle irritation for a change, and that likely had more of John in it than it might otherwise. Her words were her own, however, the tone and accent all Midwestern girl. “What else did you expect me to say?” she started, then shifted direction at his next words. “There are plenty of things to be afraid of.”
“I don’t know. Something,” he said, a shrug of his shoulders and arms still over his chest. He was terrible at this, and what did she expect from him? Some sort of grand clarity? “I’m not Elias, you realize. I’ve no idea how to deal with those scars any better than you do.” He sounded bitter about it, which wasn’t terribly nice. Mycroft was cautioning him about being a terrible friend, and Noah didn’t care. He was still burnt about Vivienne, angry to boot, and an altercation in a kitchen over spilled milk might actually make him feel better about the universe. “Yes, well, are you planning on hiding from the bullies forever? Because it will do little good, you realize? You have to quit hiding to get ahead.”
The frown stayed firmly on Clare’s face, and even deepened a bit. Noah wasn’t making sense, and she began to wonder if they were talking at cross purposes. She certainly wasn’t looking for a fight of any sort, but Noah’s words seemed tailor made to irritate her. Her temper was nearly non-existent, and what there was came at a very slow burn, but it was still there. Sometimes. The scars were a sore spot (sometimes literally), and she had to search for actual words. The ones she found were laced with an undercurrent of something sharp, even though they remained soft and polite on the surface. “They’re not something I talk about, Noah.” The sudden mention of Elias baffled her, and she veered from irritation into something confused. “Why would he know how?” The question slipped out quickly, without thought, and was followed by a sigh and something that might almost be described as a frown. “I don’t have any need to ‘get ahead’. And I’m not actually hiding.”
“He’s older and good at this sort of thing,” Noah said of Elias, which was the only reason, really. Thus far, Elias had always helped when no one else could, and Noah saw him as something of an older sibling, perhaps. Not a parent, not as old as that, but as the capable sort that one could turn to when things went terribly wrong. As for not hiding, Noah had a hard time believing someone who spilled milk all over the stove when he walked in the kitchen wasn’t perpetually hiding, and he made a sound that indicated as much. “I’m not in a terribly good mood,” he added belatedly, and it wasn’t quite an apology, but it was the best he could muster just then. He waved his hand, all without uncrossing his arms, as if dismissing the entire topic out of hand. “How are you settling in?” That was surely harmless, wasn’t it?
Clare’s own frown remained on her face for a bit, and she skimmed over Noah’s comments about Elias. She didn’t know either of them well enough to make any sort of determination on who was good at what. Instead, she shook her head and tightened her arms around herself. “I’m not in the best, either.” Especially not with his disbelieving sounds and the arrogance that hid behind every word. She’d dealt with enough people who’d thought themselves better than others to not recognize it in someone else. Whether it was deliberate or not.
She was willing to take the out of a subject shift, however. “I’m fine. It will take some getting used to, though.” Especially when she was without any actual furniture in her room, something she hid by usually keeping the door shut. She knew that Micah was aware - nothing larger than a few boxes had been moved into her room - but she felt better keeping the sight of cardboard and her blanket nest from prying eyes.
Noah had just arrived, and the couch was fine for him until he managed to acquire furniture, which might not be for awhile yet. He’d left his mother’s house with nothing, truly, and he still had no lasting employment to see him through. He’d made this move very much for the woman from the party, but that hardly seemed to matter now. He was left rather with no motivation, no work and nothing to really rouse himself for in the mornings. It was all rather pointless, and perhaps that feeling would fade eventually, even if it didn’t fade just then.
“Yes, well, change always does take getting used to,” was Noah’s response, ineloquent as always with girls. He rubbed his hands against his thighs, over the fabric of the pajama pants, and he nodded toward the stove. “I should let you return to your chocolate,” he suggested, assuming that’s what he’d interrupted.
Clare might not be very good at interacting with people, but she was alright with reading them at times. Being a wallflower had offered her the opportunity to stay to the sides and observe as life and people continued to move around her. Even though she couldn’t see them in herself, she knew signs of awkwardness, hints that people’s thoughts were elsewhere. She could guess when arrogance might be a cover for other things. She watched Noah’s palms slide along his pants and sighed. There was already a mug waiting on the countertop near the stove, but she turned and opened a cabinet door to find another. The ceramic sat on the countertop with a solid click and Clare turned toward the refrigerator in a barefoot stride through the room. Unused to roommates that might actually act like adults, the half-gallon of milk she pulled from the refrigerator had a neat “C” on the label and cap, left there with the permanent marker that resided in the silverware drawer nearby. The pot was refilled, more milk added than had been in it earlier, and reset on the burner.
Her shoulders stayed tense, especially every time she turned her back to him, and she contemplated returning to her room to grab something to cover up with, not only due to the scars but also because she hardly ever showed this much skin to anyone. It was (surprisingly) John that convinced her to stay. He didn’t always understand her modesty and wasn’t fond of their scars either, but in their vague attempts at communication did the best he could to reassure her about such things. It was a strange evolution from his annoyance at her, and had much to do with their shared injuries and the way she’d handled them.
“Might as well stay,” she finally said, after the silence carried on almost too long. It hadn’t taken that long for the milk to heat to a drinkable temperature, and after she combined it with chocolate mix and marshmallows in the mugs, Clare held one out to Noah. “It’s not a beer or a song, but it’s the best I can do.” Clare didn’t want conflict with anyone, but most especially with people she was going to live with, and the hot chocolate was an obvious peace offering. She couldn’t say she liked Noah yet, but there was a world of difference between liking and not being actively hostile toward.
Noah was cranky enough to want a fight, but she was making it rather hard now, and he sighed his displeasure and pulled out a chair. He’d never lived with anyone who wasn’t family (as he counted his stepmother in that number), and he’d never labeled milk or needed to explain his unexpected presence in a kitchen. He wasn’t really certain he was cut out for this life of cohabitation, but he’d little choice, as he’d no employ to speak of. He’d need to find something soon, but he wasn’t truly motivated to do anything at all, which had always been his problem. He’d been rather ostrich with his head in the sand about life, and now he’d no notion what to do with himself.
He took the mug when she offered it, and he took a sip before speaking. “You realize that insulting yourself won’t prevent others from doing it,” he said of her self-critique about song or beer.
Clare had been glad that Noah seemed willing enough to stop the sniping, but the next comment caused her to blink in confusion for a moment. It seemed to be a strange thing to say even if she had felt she’d insulted herself, but she could find nothing in the mental rewind of her words to indicate that she had. Her statement had been truth - she had no beer to offer since she rarely even thought of drinking, and she wasn’t a musician and thus had no song. It left his comment hanging like a strange non sequitur between them in the dim kitchen. She frowned and took a sip from her own mug, staying across the kitchen and still leaning against the counter. “Nothing will prevent some people from it.” She was beginning to think Noah might be one of those people.
“Being fatalistic won’t help matters either,” he said, taking another long sip. The hot chocolate was good, rich and warm. It didn’t come with any memories of home or childhood, but he could enjoy the fact that it didn’t. And the fact that he agreed with her about some people being bullies, no matter what, didn’t go unnoticed; he simply decided not to care about it, thank you very much. “I’m only saying that if you don’t believe in yourself, that if you won’t stand up for yourself, no one will,” he clarified. He was rather tired of his own victim tendencies these days. Seeing them in someone else only made him rather more annoyed. He stood, and he carried his cup to the sink, where he set it to rinse. “And you should be proud of the bloody scars,” he added. “They mean you survived.”
Clare had never been accused of being fatalistic before. She was always the one that was looking on the bright side of things, searching for something good. She may have become slightly more pessimistic since the strange events began in Las Vegas, but it wasn’t something she’d taken especial note of. To be called on it caused her to stare at Noah for a long moment. “There’s a difference between fatalistic and realistic. And despite what other people have said in the past, I’ve always been well aware that awful things happen in this world. That doesn’t mean I think it’s all bad, though.” It was a longer run of words than she’d said to anyone in a while, especially in person, especially in a situation that wasn’t work related. That it was directed toward a half-naked young man while she was just in her pajamas simply made it all the more surreal. Her thought made her more aware again of the state of undress she was in, and she recrossed her arms over her chest.
“I believe there are things I can do, and I do them. I’m not a hero, I’m just trying to make it through like anyone else. And maybe all this has thrown me for a bit of a loop, but I’m doing my best.” She paused, watching him rinse his mug in the sink, but his next words caused her spine to straighten and her frown to return. There was a hint of John in the set of her shoulders, something authoritative and military that was there for a moment and then gone, replaced by an angle of irritation that was female and young. The words had struck both of them, in their own ways, and the hard-to-ignite temper finally flared in Clare’s expression. She set her half-full mug on the counter and actually took a step toward Noah. “You don’t get to tell me how to feel about them. Whatever you think they mean, that’s not for you to decide. When some twisted boy pins you to the ground and carves into your skin, maybe then you can tell me how to feel, but until then, you have no right.” Her hands were shaking by the time she was done, and she turned away to head back to her room, uncertain that she would be able to hear any more without shouting in response.
Noah had been raised in a house where his stepmother walked around in nothing but underwear, and he would have laughed at Clare’s discomfort about what he considered ample clothing. He was unaware of her feelings on the matter, however, and he took the crossing of her arms as normal annoyance in the face of his rather pointed observations. “You’re contradicting yourself,” he said of her thoughts on fatalism versus realism, but he was feeling rather negative toward women himself just then, and perhaps he was rather being a brat about the whole thing. When she showed her teeth about the scars, though, that was rather impressive. At least until she began speaking and made it about comparing scars and hardships. He took his own step forward, eyes dark-maelstrom blue. “You know nothing of my life or my scars. You’ve no idea what I have a right to do, or what I’m capable of doing when pushed. My opinion stands. You’ve a soldier inside you. Act like it.” The last words were called off as she turned away, and he turned as he said them. He needed a bloody fag.