Loren knows not what he's done. (skelterhelter) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-05-19 00:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | tate langdon, violet harmon |
Who: Loren & Jules.
What: Talking, realizing that Jules has Violet in his head.
Where: Loren's apartment.
When: After his meeting with Meredith, so last weekend.
Warnings: Language.
Things could have gone worse with Meredith. Loren tried not to think about it or turn back around after dipping out of her apartment and into the cover of darkness for the walk home, but perhaps he could have handled things better. Maybe it was the crying, he'd never really been sure what to do when girls started crying. Admittedly, at Caesar's they were usually beyond drunk when the crying happened. Lamenting on daddy issues and not being pushed around in their own kitchenette by yours truly, but that's why Loren had hung around for longer than anticipated, to ensure she wasn't too shaken by his personal brand of wake-up call. Maybe he should have taken a cab on the way home, considering that he'd had to deal with her longer than expected and was now crossing into the hour and fifteen minute range. Of course, pleasing Jules' timeline wasn't really at the forefront of his mind, either. He'd done what he could to direct her, but it was on Meredith now, and Loren tried to pretend that he wasn't going to be following her and dropping in unannounced during most of his free time. He had no hobbies, no family, no friends, only his obsession.
It was past the one hour marker when Loren hit the concrete stairs of his apartment building, warm night air making his unzipped hoodie flap like black devil wings at his side. The sleeves were pushed up in a pleated ruche to each elbow, which made the blood on his left wrist stand out like a scarlet letter against the lean muscle of a pale forearm. The lights in the ceiling of the building's walkway were harsh, casting shadows in his stubble and putting a glint on the flash of bared fangs as he teethed the edge of his lip in reminiscence. Loren dug into the back pocket of his graying jeans for his key while still cresting the stairs, cursing under his breath when a rough brush of denim against his wrist reminded him of the recent nail gouges.
Jules didn’t like being played for a fool, and he realized before the hour was even up that he’d fallen for the wrong address. He realized it soon as he approached the building, on account of Violet piping up in his head about Hannah having stayed there with Loren. It came with the confession that Violet had tried to burn the place down, but the damn girl wasn’t an arsonist, and Jules wondered why teenagers were so complicated. Violet and Tate were a mess, and his biggest concern was that neither of them were ever gonna grow out of that terrible stage they were in. Not that Jules was much older, but he felt old as Methuselah with those two around. Bottom line was simple: Loren had given his own apartment address, and Jules was ornery as sin over it.
Seeing as Jules knew precisely which apartment belonged to Mr. Prone To Fits Of Rage, he picked the lock and let himself on in. Violet, in his mind, was all kinds of quiet about being back there, but Jules was fit to be tied, and he wandered into the kitchen like he owned it. He found a beer, and he popped it, and he took a long sip of the swill. That was the bad thing about being a cook; it turned taste buds all kinds of snobby. He was dressed in jeans and a wife beater, was Jules, hair pulled half back and glitter on his nails. He heard someone rounding the stairs, and he figured it was Loren, and he got himself ready for one hell of a tantrum soon as that door opened.
His key snagged metal in the lock, but Loren paused upon realizing that the door was already unlocked. For the life of him, he couldn't remember if he'd locked it or not upon leaving for Meredith's.. but surely he had. He nudged the door open with the blackened toe of his boot, witnessing the unveiling of the familiarity of this tomb. Very few things had changed since Hannah left. Her religious books were still composed into neat stacks against pale living room walls. There was a note tacked to the freezer, an ancient reminder that breakfast was in the microwave. The fridge interior was likely a horrorshow for Jules, nothing but beer and half a carton of milk well past its expiration date. Not surprisingly, if one went wandering to Loren's closet, a dead girl's dresses would still be hanging. The apartment had quite literally become a memorial, a tribute to some of the only memories that Loren actually had a hold on.
Loren hesitated in the entryway, trying to determine what was different. Something was. Frost blue eyes rounded corners as Loren worked his arms out of the clotted sleeves of his jacket, dropping the black cotton on the back of a chair in passing. His tee shirt was dark blue with a smear of blood near the ribs where he'd accidentally swiped his wounded wrist.
Jules was leaning, casual as you like, against the wall, and he smelled the blood before he saw it. You didn’t go spending a lifetime around fresh meat without knowing the smell of blood, and it was the same on creatures as folk, don’t let no one tell you different. He shoved away from the wall with a lean hip, and the movement brought sound in the crypt. “Forget all about me, while you were off making things bleed, honey?” he asked, arms crossed over his chest, expression unimpressed, even in the shadows. “You fool man,” he added, walking forward and crossing the space with less caution than he should. He reached for Loren, then, for that bloodied shirt, for a wrist, knuckles, wanting to see what was his red, and what red belonged to that stupid fool girl who got herself involved in something that wasn’t playing.
The wrangling sound of footsteps weren't deft enough for Loren to miss, rather they seemed sturdy and rolling in on a tide of hotheaded anger. He momentarily regretted giving his gun to Meredith, but his nerves settled low once more when he rounded the corner to see nobody but Jules against the wall. He wasn't entirely surprised. He'd been on edge, hackles up like any dog ready to scrap over territory, but that all went away when the blond boy came waltzing closer. Loren frowned at the tug to his shirt, and claimed its fabric back with a rough jerk. "I'm the one bleeding, so don't get all I told you so on me." The blood stood out dark against the belly of his wrist. "I didn't hurt her." Although the tension in his scruffy jaw said he didn't hurt her much. He didn't bother asking how Jules had gotten in here, it didn't take much imagination. Noting the open beer, he smirked. "Make yourself at home."
Jules ignored all that bluster, and he closed his fingers around Loren’s unhurt wrist and dragged the man into the apartment’s kitchen. A flick of his hand turned on the loud overhead lights, and Jules didn’t even flinch back from the brightness. “You go on and take off that shirt,” he said with another tug to the fabric that had been removed from his grip earlier, “and let me see what needs cleaning,” he said, letting go and kicking out a chair as he walked to the sink and started running water. He spoke louder, voice easy to hear over the towel he was dampening. “I wanna hear what you did, and if you tell me, I’ll tell you what I found out while you were lying to me about where you were at.” In his mind, Violet was saying Tate would pull the same kind of nonsense, and he wasn’t really in the mood to be hearing that right now. Hannah might have thought that Loren walked on water, but Jules knew better; a man was just a man, come the end of the day.
"I'm not a goddamn child," came that gravel voice from between clenched teeth. In the end, Loren followed into the kitchen because resisting like an ignorant hound on the end of a leash seemed petty. "Nothing needs cleaning." Although he fingered the blood on his shirt because he wasn't sure if Jules meant that or the weeping wound. Loren didn't take off his shirt, but certainly fastened his attention on Jules when he mentioned finding something out. Loren straightened visibly, damn near salivating with the urge to demand an answer. "I talked to her, determined what she knew about him.. which was, admittedly, fucking nothing." Then, as a quick addendum, "I didn't hurt her. She's fine." Drawing a breath, he moved for the fridge and pulled the door open briefly enough to get himself a beer. It was cheap and domestic, the cap spun off in his palm. "I gave her a gun." She certainly could have shot him in the back if she'd been the vengeful type, especially after the rough hand he'd given her.. but she hadn't. Loren wasn't sure if that was necessarily a good thing.
Jules let him do all that talking and beer grabbing, and he tugged the man’s hand forward once he’d found himself a chair and tugged it opposite Loren’s. Jules’ thighs were spread, knees apart, posture nothing but male just then, but the hands on Loren’s wrist were long and graceful and with nails polished pink. He touched the damp towel to the wound, and he quirked a brow without looking up through the pale blond hair that fell across his eyes. “You planning on telling me how this happened then?” he asked, because there were too many claims about folks not being hurt for all this bleeding. “She’s a stupid girl,” he added, thinking the last thing that child needed was a gun. She was likely to shoot the mailman as herself. “I talked to that anon that was warning her off. Turns out he’s through the door, the man warning off, and not in Las Vegas.” He left it at that, waiting to see how Loren replied.
Loren took a seat and nursed that hops tonic while Jules cleaned his wrist. The abrasions were a deep quartet, mimicking the claw marks of a panicked thing caught in a trap. Still, it had already stopped bleeding for the most part by the time that wet towel touched down. Loren frowned, coasting the guncarved pad of his thumb thoughtfully along the grainy bloodstain on his shirt. "She scratched me." He said it with a nonchalance that conveyed such things could be expected, as if he was talking about a cat. Loren's wince had nothing to do with the gouges in his wrist when he sighed and dropped his head back to watch the ceiling. Inferring that such a general answer might not be enough to sate Jules, he said more. "She said she wouldn't let herself be killed, so I... had to see what she'd do." After a moment and few more swigs, Loren leveled faded eyes on his nurse while considering what was said about the anon. "Just a nice guy, or does he know the killer?"
“Loren, the immediate response to someone telling you they won’t let themselves be killed ain’t to try to kill them,” Jules replied, holding pressure to the claw marks now that he knew they weren’t deep enough to cause trouble. He reached behind himself for the roll of napkins, which he set on the table at his elbow. And, a second later, he was pressing one of the dry sheets to Loren’s wrist. “What were you even trying to accomplish. Girl can’t be trusted, no matter what you think now. She’s the same as always, and I been warning her off since day one. Hasn’t changed a thing,” he said of Meredith. He sighed, and he stole Loren’s beer and took his own swig from it. “Nah, I think he’s got the killer in his head. And before you go demanding, I got no idea who he is behind the door, which door he’s in, nothing. I do know he’s warning the girl on account of not wanting anyone else did, which says something for him.”
There was definite disapproval blazing in his eyes when Jules confiscated his beer, but Loren didn't fight to get it back in his possession. He conceded to the loss quite easily, actually. Just drew a lazy half sigh of an inhale and slouched lower in his chair, playing barely attentive to the doctoring of his wrist. "I wanted to see for myself what she knew." There was an unexpected hiss through closed teeth when the dry scratch of a napkin brushed the wounds. "Did you even fucking ask?" Incredulous, he hunched forward to stare at Jules. "You think he's got the killer in his head?"
Jules wasn’t sure if there were bandaids in this place, but Violet provided an easy answer, muttering something about Hannah’s back and her own arms. Jules took Loren’s free hand, and he pressed it to the napkin. Then, like nothing, he walked right over to where Hannah had stashed a box of colorful bandaids and carried them back to the table. “Didn’t need to. He was spouting too much about self preservation for that. Man knows you want to kill whoever did in Hannah. He’s trying to help, while saving his own hide. He hasn’t dropped anon once, and he ain’t going to,” Jules assured Loren, all while he started unwrapping a pink bandaid.
He watched Jules make a soundless discovery of bandaids that Loren hadn't even known were in his apartment, and it failed to register for a moment. Bandaids made sense, and his bullet-scarred memory didn't allow for him to wonder over their origin. Not at first. He accepted their existence with the same patient vacancy that he accepted most things, it was a trademark of security and bodyguards everywhere. Don't ask questions. Don't dig deep. He watched the strip of pink as it laid against his skin and frowned over how sure Jules sounded about the anon. "Everyone makes a mistake eventually." The anon would slip, and when it happened, Loren wouldn't be far behind. Suddenly it occurred to him to ask, and Loren's expression scrunched over the sight of the bandaids before he reached out to wrench the box from Jules' hand. "Where the hell did these come from?"
“They were tucked in the bathroom, beneath the sink,” was Jules’ unthinking reply, as he grabbed back the box. “Don’t you go fussing at me. I’m almost done,” he said, as he pressed another bandaid to a claw mark and smoothed the edges with his fingers. “Folks mess up, sure. You don’t think you’re gonna mess up, honey? You want it too bad, and you’ll pull the whole damn world down for one man. Don’t go fixating, Loren. Nothing good’s gonna come of it,” he said plainly, and there was worry in his voice. He’d gone and made himself too obvious by talking to the anon, and to Meredith, and while he wasn’t real worried about Loren - not with Tate in his head - he wasn’t sure the other man wouldn’t feed him over like a lamb to the slaughter if it meant catching the man in the desert. He pushed his chair back, completely unaware of Loren’s notice of his foreknowledge of where the bandaids were.
"How long have you been in my apartment?" The inquiry rose on a bland, non threatening wave. Jules must have been digging around for quite awhile, much longer than what it would have taken to simply scrounge up a beer. The box of bandaids was little, and while Loren's cabinets weren't exactly brimming with knick knacks and supplies.. he didn't think that such a container would have been easy to stumble upon. Not if Loren himself couldn't even remembering seeing the damn thing. That devil-etched jaw twitched into something tight, teeth ready to grind into bones and steel when Jules started in on a subject Loren didn't have the time to think about. Was it possible that he'd mess up, slip up, fuck up? Of course it was, but that didn't mean he was just going to sit around and do nothing. His blood wouldn't allow it, the war hammer surge of his heartbeat captivated him. It wouldn't slow, it wouldn't relent, it raged on with the flickering memory reel behind his eyes. Hannah's smile, those hideous gray dresses, the dead glaze of her eyes.. over and over again. "I don't care," he finally ground out. The truth rode his rocky words. He'd take all of Las Vegas down in flames and bones if he had to. There was no stopping, no slowing.. there was only the end. And when it came, it might not have been a happy one, but he wouldn't be able to live with anything less.
Jules didn’t think nothing of that bland inquiry. “Since you were supposed to get yourself here,” he said, which was true and non-specific. He finished his bandaging, and he looked up at the man opposite him. “I know you don’t care, but you think that boy rattling around in your head’s gonna be pleased if you’re dead? You think I’m gonna be real thrilled if you bring that damn monster calling? You think that dumb girl wants to end up dug deep in a desert and flayed apart while she’s still conscious? No, honey, no one wants that. So we do this smart this time. You don’t send some child to talk to a madman, like you did with Hannah. You control your own anger to see it right, because I sure as hell don’t want history repeating itself.” He pushed the chair back and stood, riled enough not to be measuring his words like he maybe should. He put his hands on the table beside Loren, and he leaned real close to Loren’s face. “Whatever you think that man can do, you can’t even come close to imagining what it’s really like, so you listen to me good, honey. We’re not doing this wild.” And there was fear there, in Jules’ blue eyes, because he knew talking to that damn anon through the door was getting too close, talking to the fool girl was getting too close, and he’d promised himself he wasn’t doing none of that.
Loren turned the box of bandaids over in his hand, and the facts came to him slowly. Loren wasn't quick. Maybe he had been once, before the bullet and the coma.. but now cognition came to him in strange, stagnant tides. The way wreckage and bottled love letters washed ashore after a storm. As a man, Loren was erratic flickers in temper and fuzzy knowledge of words. His frequent misspellings bordered on dyslexia and his horrible grasp with names had offended at least half of the cocktail waitresses at Caesar's to date. But sometimes the small things hit him hard enough to grip like nails through his palms. Loren hadn't purchased these bandaids. He'd never stored them in this apartment, but he had seen them before. On Hannah. Neglecting the bloodstain on his shirt, which he'd been unconsciously rubbing between his fingers, his dusty blue eyes rolled up to meet Jules when the boy leaned so close. Personal space invaded, Loren didn't so much as twitch. His stare was as serious as a swing from Death's own scythe. "How about you start telling me the truth." Nobody would know those kinds of details unless they'd actually been there. Nobody would know where to find these bandaids unless they'd been the one to stash them. His expression was careful, empty and vast as an over salted sea. "Now."
Jules was never careful, and he was sure never empty, and that’s probably why he was in this whole mess. Someone else would have let sleeping dogs be. They wouldn’t have hunted Loren down, and they wouldn’t have gone talking to no anons. They would have saved their own hide, and let it be. But Jules was all kinds of messy feelings and thinking that wasn’t real clear when he was invested, and he was invested in this stupid lug of a man with the slow thoughts all filtering in behind his eyes. “You planning on tossing me against a wall if I don’t mind you?” he asked, all sass and the same attitude that had served him so well with the bullies that had come after him for being too pretty when he was a teenager in skirts and eyeliner. “Is that an order, honey? You planning on roughing me up like you did that dumb girl?” He scoffed, because he didn’t think Loren intended to do anything of the sort. He moved away, and he tossed the towel in the sink, turning his back to Loren as he rinsed it out and wrung it dry.
"No," the word was a lonely thing, like a girl left out in the desert to die. It was a harsh syllable, a note of broken glass and wincing grit. It was such a small word, but despite everything else, there was still room for bitterness. It seeped from between his clenched teeth like tar. Maybe he had pushed Jules into a wall, and maybe he had shaken Meredith up with a rough hand, but nobody got hurt. Maybe he couldn't control it completely, but nobody got hurt. He needed this, he needed the bliss of a bloody end, and nobody was letting that happen. Nobody wanted to tell him anything, or they knew so little themselves that it was fucking maddening. Loren could feel it slipping through his fingers all over again. Just as he'd once hoped that he could save Hannah, now he had to hope that he could avenge her. "Tell me how you knew where the bandaids were, Jules.." There was no threat, no hangman's growl. Just a tension that it took a moment for him a swallow down, a building ache that said he knew. There was a sad fondness that overtook Loren expression as he watched Jules rinse the towel out in the sink. As if seeing this young man - with his whiteblond hair and ridiculous nail polish - was even more proof that Hannah was truly gone.
Jules didn’t turn when Loren voiced that lonely word, the one that sounded like it was all alone with a whole lot of nothing to go alongside it. He just kept on wringing out a towel that was long dry, and he didn’t respond to the question about the bandaids either. He didn’t do it to be ornery, keeping quiet. He did it because he could tell Loren already knew exactly how Jules knew the things he did. Didn’t take a whole lot of sussing, did it? Violet was through the door, which meant she must be living in someone, and wasn’t it just a coincidence how sudden Jules had popped up? No, Jules just turned off the sink and draped the towel over the faucet, taking longer with it that he needed to, like smoothing out the wrinkles was gonna do a damn bit of good. After a few seconds longer of stewing, Jules turned around and crossed the small kitchen. He touched a hand to Loren’s hip, dragged it over Loren’s belly and to his other side, and then he walked past him and toward the living room and the door. “Quit risking too much,” was all he said as he moved, no admissions and no confessions, just a plea in the statement. “I’m not gonna stop you from getting him, but you do it smart. We’re already blinking on that radar, and I don’t wanna blink, honey.”
For Loren, there were no steps of retreat when Jules risked a brush of contact. None of the frowns that would have been so at home before, none of the brow-knotting confusion. He didn't even drop those icecap eyes down to regard the touch at all, his attention stayed on the wayward young man who suddenly seemed more cryptic than he had ten minutes prior. Maybe that was because Loren knew the truth now, or at least suspected it strongly. Jules never confirmed it, but he never denied it either. There was a strange dryness planing on his tongue. It was nothing like want, but rather a fumbling anxiety that left him more confused than any of Jules' lighthearted flirtation ever had. "Wait," Loren finally fell into motion when the other met with the door for a means of escape. "Let me walk you home." It's what he would have done for Hannah.
Jules turned at the door, and he looked Loren over. “I’m not anywhere near as naive or gullible at that child, honey. I’m not gonna walk into trouble on a trip across the way. You just make sure you don’t drag us both there with your good intentions.” He knew Loren wanted an answers, and he wanted to give them, but an equally strong part of him didn’t wanna talk about it, didn’t want to bring it around again and make it real. He had enough trouble with that in his nightmares, all without calling them up with words that wouldn’t make either of them feel even a smidge better. He lingered, and he gave Loren a long look over; he was a pretty thing of a man, Loren, especially with that worry creasing his brow. He tugged his rosary from around his neck, the one he’d tried to press into Loren’s palm in the kitchen at Caesar’s, and he expected Loren to actually catch the thing this time. Maybe there was some connection, all that faith Hannah had and Jules’ own upbringing, but Jules didn’t think on it too long or too hard. A second later, he was out the door, despite the fact that it was real tempting to just stay put.