Loren knows not what he's done. (skelterhelter) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-06-07 21:13:00 |
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Entry tags: | superman, tate langdon, violet harmon |
Who: Jules & Daniel & Loren
What: Loren is an angry father figure because Jules is irresponsible and off tuning the pianos of strange men.
Where: Daniel's pad.
When: Recently.
Warnings: Language.
When Loren's text messages went unanswered, he nursed his annoyance with lukewarm beer and attempted to feed some distraction to the evening news. If I don't turn up alive come morning... Who even says something like that? Although the local news was boasting a really interesting story on flesh eating bacteria, Loren kept glancing at his phone. It did not light up, it did not chime. Whatever, Jules was grown (although barely), and Loren tried not to think about things like knives or coyotes or deserts. He turned up the television's volume in strategy, so that maybe the voice of the anchorwoman with her sunshiney crayola smile could bore deep. His apartment felt cool tonight, although he knew the air outside was stagnant and scorched. Deserts.
Frowning, Loren pushed the refrigerator door open and closed with the toe of his boot, twisting the metal cap off of a new beer that was barely any cooler than the first. It had been a couple of hours since Jules’ text message, and by now Loren was pacing. Far from intoxicated, there was magnetic anger splintering like so much metal through his nerves. It drew on his shoulders, and it made him stretch his neck to the side as he considered the text for one last time. He didn't owe Jules anything, and the revelation was comforting for all the wrong reasons. What did it matter if he interrupted some piano playing? What was that even a euphemism for?
Suddenly set on the idea, Loren dropped that bottle of beer into the sink and snatched the black cotton of a near constant hoodie off of a chair on his way out the door. It didn't take him very long to get across town, and the cab ride was modeled into eerie silence. The idea of confrontation, although he had no reason to justify it, brought about a familiar and predatory churn in his veins. A glass chewing kind of tension that made Loren set his teeth and pop his knuckles while scoping shadows from the backseat of the cab. When the driver pulled up to the building, designating that this was the place, Loren told him to wait ten minutes, although her didn't expect anything he had to say or do would take that long. Just knock, assess, and leave. That was the plan as his boots chewed up bits of gravel, and as he pulled that hood up over the dark shore of his hair. Just knock...
The dark didn’t have much to go, as purple dawn was just showing outside the glittering confines of Turnberry Place, but inside Daniel’s apartment, light was stagnant just like everything else. All the curtains stayed thickly closed, all the standing bottles only got stickier, and the cool air stayed the exact same 75 degree cool. The light inside was blandly yellow, the color of withered pansies, and Daniel reappeared in the hallway looking and feeling like death warmed over. His jaw had a definite shadow, his mouth a craggy, bitter line, and he lurched because his headache didn’t allow for full vision. His brain tried to rattle its way out of his skull, and he blatantly ignored the knock on his way to the kitchen for a glass of horrific warm tap water and a bottle of aspirin that rattled when he walked. “Go the fuck away,” he told the door as he passed it again.
The first knock had been as polite as could be expected of a man back from the deadlands and now half-raised in a city of sin-eating vultures. The second was a single, solid thud. The weight of his fist nailing bent knuckles near the door's seam as Loren leaned close with a seethe of clenched teeth and more bark than should have been necessary this early in the morning. "Open the door.." He didn't like the languid ambivalence of that curse from the other side, and Loren wasn't big on warnings.. especially now that he began to consider the notable lack of Jules' voice from the inside. Then again, how deep did these places run? There was a rattle of anger on the rise, it put a shiver in the ghost of his voice, but maybe that didn't carry through such a thick door. Regardless, this would be his only warning for compliance. Loren took a swift step back, he'd had to kick in plenty of doors at Caesar's; a few overdoses, a few drunks, a few domestic issues. He wasn't about to hesitate now, that gristle and feral burn digging into his patience as he counted silently to five. That's all he'd have, five seconds to cooperate.
Loren had known Daniel for all of ten seconds as a voice beyond a door, and he was about to learn that he almost never cooperated if he could help it. The bark just made his head hurt, which made him angry. He threw the pill bottle at his side of the door, having already extracted what he needed from it, and the phink of the plastic and subsequent rattle-rainfall of the pills falling in all directions was a cursory introduction to a shouted, “No! Go away!” The neighbors were going to love the early morning racket, but Daniel was so hungover he wasn’t entirely sure his stomach still existed. They could bring it on.
So much for counting all the way to five. Once the pills rained against the door like a psionic fling of angry tic tacs - which happened around sometime in the count down between two and three - Loren reared back and drew up the battered denim of one knee. Steel toe counted for something when kicking in doors, and Loren threw all of his weight into this one. The key was to aim near the seam, but just perpendicular to the lock. He wasn't a physicist or a contractor, Loren couldn't even explain how a lock worked in the first place, but somehow he knew - like a forgotten dream - that with the right tools, he could pick one. Not much use the information would do him now, as the heel of his boot collided with a solid crack. If the deadbolt was latched, it would soon be spitting loose shards of wood like a streetfighter spit out teeth. And again, he kicked, sending the pricey entrance swinging wide as buckshot. Quite the introduction, as Loren crowded through the door a second later, all aggression, no smiles.
Daniel clearly had not expected anyone to actually break down his door. (You read about these things but you never expect them to actually happen.) There were plenty of people who didn’t wish Daniel well, but he didn’t know anybody that wanted to actually physically hurt him, so it didn’t occur to him to be afraid. Spitting mad, he circled around so that the striped, overstuffed couch that had come standard with the apartment was between him and the guy that had just kicked in his door. He was swearing in German and telling Loren to do some fairly difficult things that, if anatomically impossible, were at least imaginative. He didn’t have anything else to throw on him, but he was considering it. The “get the fuck out,” he ended the tirade with had some definite German flavoring still attached.
Jules had been working real hard on some beauty sleep after the long night of playing, and he’d been dreaming about places a whole lot greener than Vegas, where there was breeze off the water and leaves that swayed, and where houses were big old white things with wraparound porches. Unfortunately that dream turned into a nightmare once the banging at the door started, close enough to hear, but not close enough to identify real clear. It became the banging of feet just out of sight, and there was a knife whistling in the splitting wood, and he sat up in bed with a start, blond hair a mess and blue shirt all crooked on thin shoulders.
A second later, and Jules realized Daniel was cussing up a storm in some language that was uglier than English, and he wondered who the drunkard had picked a fight with now. He was thinking the mailman, or maybe some neighbor that hadn’t liked the piano playing at all hours, and he took a few seconds to rinse out his mouth and unknot his hair before crankily making his way out into the dusty living room.
Jules was a blue shirt, too big, and leggings, and he blinked sleepily a few times when he saw the broken door and the scene in the living room. “What do you reckon you’re doing?” he asked, crossing the room and clearly talking to Loren as he moved. “And you, hush now. Why didn’t you just open the damn door?” he asked Daniel as he passed him, and he was eying them both like they were misbehaved dogs, and like he was trying to figure out who’d peed on the carpet.
The man on the other side of the door didn't look like some mass murderer, although who ever did? Jules was nowhere in sight, and that was confirmed with a swift detailing of the room while the rich boy prattled on in a language that Loren couldn't understand. Or.. maybe he did, because there was a trigger of distant memory with some far off notes that had him recognizing words that should have been impossible to decipher. The confusion nearly muddled him for a moment before Loren launched forward in preparation to vault the couch if he had to get to the groggy, sneering bastard on the other side. This was a demon harbinger of overpriced apartments and furniture everywhere. "Where is he!" The words were a savage seethe of demand, and it was a very good thing that he'd given his gun to Meredith all those nights before. Because his hands itched and blunt fingers curled into wide knuckled fists. "You tell me what you did to him, or I'll break your goddamn--"
Jules appeared like a ghost at that very moment - all antebellum sleepiness and molasses yawns - and Loren glanced up with enough alarm that it cut his threats short with a guillotine swing. It was a bit like seeing a ghost, considering all of the horrors that had just ran laps through his broken brain in the last fifteen seconds. Loren set his teeth in a steel grit, and the anger oscillated so easy. Those shark blue eyes were all for Jules now, who looked a little sleep-frumpled but not dead. "You forget how to use a fucking phone?!"
Daniel had never been in a real fight in his life--not the kind where someone was actually trying to kill him. Instead he’d been in the pounding kind, the ones where you just dive in to punch somebody and get punched in turn, because afterward you feel like you’d had an effect on the world. Oh yes, Daniel had been in many of those. A great many. All the same, Daniel was not out of this fight yet. He hadn’t gotten more than two hours of sleep and his mind felt like he’d wrapped it in cotton and then thrown it in absinthe, but he wasn’t going to let some asshole tear into his house and drag his pianist out by the hair--which was clearly seconds away from happening.
Daniel started backward away from Loren’s unmistakable intention to vault the couch, ready to go for whatever weapon could be near at hand, when Jules appeared. Both men swiveled to stare at him, and Daniel was just as close to spitting nails as Loren, but a red vein appeared in his forehead and he moved quite deliberately to cut off Jules’ advancement toward the insane neanderthal in his living room. He hadn’t done more than feed the blond coffee and let him bang on the piano, but he was feeling possessive and even in the hangover he was still drunk enough to be confrontational. “And who the fuck are you, his secretary?”
Jules was real fond of old black and white movies; the ones where the men were always posturing, and the women wore pearls and makeup to bed. He was starting to feel like maybe he’d ended up in one, but he wasn’t real sure which one. Loren looked like he’d kill something any minute, and Jules wasn’t Hannah. Jules knew full well that Loren could kill things. Heck, Jules figured Loren might have blood under those fingernails, if someone just looked hard enough. As for Daniel, he was surprising, because Jules didn’t think the man had a lick of fight in him at all, but he was clearly real wrong about that, because Daniel got in the way of him and Loren, which was bordering on being plain crazy. And he was a straight man at that. Well wonders never did cease.
“I was sleeping,” Jules told Loren, because the man didn’t get to go all wild on him on account of his phone being off. He walked up behind Daniel, and his voice was all syrup and sweet mirth in Daniel’s ear. “You realize he can take you, honey?” he asked, because Loren was all feral mutt and Daniel was something bred right and gone lazy. “Loren’s just worried. He knows all kinds of bad things lurk in Las Vegas,” he added, stepping away from both men and dropping onto the couch, all long, willowy limbs. “But if you two wanna tear into each other, you go on. Might be a pretty sight first thing in the morning.” He didn’t mean it, but he figured it would have an impact. “Loren, honey, meet Daniel. Daniel, meet Loren.”
With Jules in the picture, it wasn't difficult to keep the frostbitten chill of his eyes pinned to the blond who spilled onto the couch like languid cream. Although some hardwired need to case every surrounding kept high priority peripheral notes on the man whose door he'd just kicked in. If Jules thought Loren was pissed now, he was going to see an entirely different level if the piano enthusiast pulled out a mystery gun from some antique drawer. There was a natural relief in seeing that Jules was alive and well, but that did nothing the satiate the chaotic maelstrom of bitterness and pent-up aggression. "You send me a fucking text message about coming to hunt this guy down if you turn up dead in the morning?!" Incredulous, Loren shoved the cotton of his hood away from dark hair recently brought to a close shear. Maybe it was something military still lurking in his blood, begging to dig its way out of his amnesia.
"And you don't answer a single fucking text between now and then?" Frustration drew his attention toward Daniel, and then back again to the lounging boy, who was now obviously to blame. "And coming home with strangers, what the hell is--" Cutting himself short, Loren shook his head and pivoted quite suddenly for the door. Fuck this.
Jules was on his feet before Daniel could say anything, and he grabbed Loren’s elbow. “You quit hollering,” he said, voice low in an effort to keep Loren from going off half-cocked and doing something rash. Instead, he tugged on him, all thin bones that really couldn’t do a whole lot of good unless Loren was willing to turn. But he tried, and he motioned to Daniel. “I told you he wanted me to play piano. If I thought he was some desert cutting sadist, I wouldn’t have come,” he said, knowing exactly what Loren feared because, hell, it was the same thing Jules feared each and every single day of his life, every night when he closed his eyes. “I didn’t mean to sleep in, and I didn’t mean to make you go breaking doors.” He tugged on Loren’s elbow. “Sit yourself down, and I’ll make coffee.” He turned his attention to Daniel, and he gave him a look that could sour milk. “You too. Sit.”
In the intervening moments that Jules had moved away, sat, and then got up again, Daniel reassessed the situation. He had thought Loren was some kind of enraged ex-boyfriend, but now new elements were coming to light (desert cutting sadist?!), and they required a ridiculous amount of physical effort to process. He glared at Loren. “You’re fucking paying for that door.” Daniel’s head reminded him how much he drank last night and his rage flickered and went out like a candle in a high wind. His face returned to some of its normal, unhealthy pallor, and he meandered through his furniture again to watch the willow-branch boy attempt to soothe the psycho. He felt apart from the strange little opera until Jules suddenly pinned him with a blue stare. Daniel sat before even thinking to object.
“Desert. The one on the journals.” Daniel surveyed his guests from under a fringe of dark lashes and one thick curl, the combination of which managed to subtract years the alcohol attempted to add. He rubbed his chin on the shoulder of his wrinkled shirt, as if he had not just informed them he had a journal too. “I thought he only liked women...?” he wondered out loud.
Loren's steel eyes deserted hosting the shackled ghost of impending murder, and rather fell to the clutch of skinny fingers at his elbow. Such alien things, nothing like Hannah's. Not even because of the piano length or subtle masculinity in the knuckles, but because the color was off and the gentleness wasn't there. Cooks boasted burns in strange places, small scalds on the tender edges of palms or the tips of fingers. Hannah's hands had always been brushed soft by bible scripture and Catholic ashes. Jules was nothing like Hannah, except for in this obvious tendency to wander off with strangers. The thought started off as a joke, something ironic that maybe his older mind would have pitched as a means of lightening the mood, but that wasn't Loren now.. and all he felt was a strange loss when Jules' grip tugged on his arm.
"I don't want to sit," was all he said. The words lacked their previous hostility, although the mention of that busted door drew the worst kind of crooked smirk. One that said he'd love to argue about something else. "You can afford your own damn door." When the conversation turned the dead girls in deserts, Loren went very still. Somehow, he hadn't expected this turn of tongues, and his attention flicked onto Jules with a note of accusation. This shouldn't be up for discussion.
Jules wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he wasn’t living up to Hannah. He was real sure no one could manage that, no matter how hard they put their mind to it. It was one of the things that drove him plum crazy about Loren, the fact that he took this slip of a child and put her on a pedestal near tall as a building, and that he was willing to sacrifice every last one of them to avenge her. Jules had Hannah dying in his head, but he’d never be that child, no matter how much Loren wanted him to be. And, really, he wasn’t even real sure why Loren was so attached to her anyway. Girl was only human, after all, and maybe Jules was just a little jealous. “You two really going to fuss over a door now?” he asked, another tug to Loren’s arm. “You sit yourself down,” he repeated, and it certainly wasn’t a sweet Catholic child doing the asking. “You stay,” he told Daniel, a tug to that curl on Daniel’s forehead, the one that made him look younger. Oh, he’d caught that look Loren had tossed his way, but Loren brought Hannah into this conversation with his crowing, and Jules was starting to feel cranky as sin. “I can talk about dying in that desert if I please, seeing as it’s in my head all the damn time!” And then he disappeared into the kitchen, a pale huff of blond.
Daniel showed one snarling eyetooth at Loren, just to communicate an adequate amount of disdain. He was about to complain that he didn’t want coffee, he wanted water because his fucking head was splitting open, but Jules had already stormed out and Daniel was trying to translate what he’d just said through the earthquake. He curled a toe around the piano bench’s first leg and shot Loren a keenly assessing look that a drunk should not be able to manage at this time of the morning. “Did he just say dying is in his head? I think that’s what he just said. Tell me that’s some fucking metaphor and you are a bad--ugly--dream.” He didn’t actually expect an answer, and he also didn’t spare another glance at his door. He made a mental note to call security the next time he felt like shouting at somebody, because they weren’t doing their jobs.
"Don't do that, Jules.." The next tug to Loren’s arm initiated a small step forward, something uncertain in a grizzly bear's pace. The words were born rough, nearly a hiss that said Jules didn't deserve to bring up Hannah.. but who else possibly could? Immediately, the tone slipped into something of muted sorrow, the kind that drew a scowl in tight and made the throat clench shut. His brows knit, and Loren stepped forward again because he didn't know not to leave when Jules asked like that. Part of him knew that it was Tate, and the rest refused to acknowledge that he was still trying to force the hologram impression of Hannah onto the blond slip of a boy. Somehow, despite his reluctance, Loren took a seat on a nearby chair. Those blue metal eyes moved slowly to Daniel once more, and his expression spoke volumes about how much he didn't want to discuss this. Then, confusion flickered. "Metaphor?" The scrambled brain chemistry of head trauma left him absent in the face of so many words.
Daniel blanked his mental page on this guy once again and started at the top with he’s stupid. Loren received a long stare, sharp amber threaded with liquor red lines, as Daniel tried to decide whether or not it was an act. Okay, no, not an act. “I’ll take that as a ‘no, it’s not a metaphor.’” Daniel freed one foot and arched back in a tired stretch that made his bones pop in their settings. “Fuck me,” he muttered, referring to his door and the idiot on his couch as much as the hangover. He didn’t move around much, did Daniel, and there was very little to see as he managed to find his feet again and eyed the maze of furniture, trying to decide whether he was going to go for the kitchen to pursue the problem or hide in his bedroom until it went away.
Before Daniel could figure out what to do, and before Loren could figure Daniel out, Jules was back with three mugs of coffee, which he set on the coffee table before sitting himself down on the arm of the sofa. He’d simmered some in the kitchen, and he glanced at the broken down door as he took a sip of his own black-sugar brew. “See, how it is,” he began glancing at Loren while he spoke, eyes bright and blue over the edge of his coffee mug, “is Loren worries about me, and I’m kinda spooked by a whole lot of things, on account of the girl in my head being in someone else’s head before, someone dead. So, no, it ain’t no metaphor,” he said, glancing over at Daniel and giving him a smile. No, Jules wasn’t stupid. It was real unlikely that anyone with that much piano training was unschooled. “Your person in your head got anyone they love something fierce?” Jules asked Daniel, because it was the easiest way for him to explain why someone like Loren gave any kind of damn about someone like him.
Daniel did not smile back. Clark complained fiercely about endangering Lois, but it was an old song, and Daniel ignored him. “Yes,” he said, unkindly. He wanted to make it clear that he would not be charmed into involving himself in anything that was not drinking himself into the grave or wasting money he did not deserve. Moving around the couch again, his bare feet pressed the scattered pills down into the carpet as he progressed toward the door, which was hanging in splinters. If you had asked him the day before, he would have said that it wasn’t possible to break down that door without a small battering ram.
Loren did not reach for his coffee. In fact, his cold eyes refused to acknowledge that there were three mugs at all while his attention pinned Jules in a new, and decidedly unfriendly manner. "This isn't any of his business," the clench of his teeth made the words almost a growl when he ticked his head toward Daniel's direction. Coming home with a stranger was one thing, but relaying the smaller details of a far-from-forgotten murder were another. Especially considering how Loren was far from finished hunting the responsible man down. "I'm not thirsty," he finally said of the coffee. Having yet gone to bed, there was no need for such a stimulant. Then, a moment later, as a sort of appeasement to having ruining Jules' date night, Loren sighed and gave Daniel resolved eyes. "I'll pay for the door."
Jules rolled his eyes, and figured it was fitting, straight men being so damned impossible all the time. It was part of their charm, least that’s what his momma always said. “You’re both the most ornery, straight things I ever did see,” he said plainly, rubbing together burn-rough palms and fingertips with nails painted sky blue. “I was explaining how Loren and I knew each other, and why he was kicking in your door, not asking for your help with anything,” he told Daniel, who looked like they were trying to drag him into an undertow. A second later, he glanced at Loren, who was right on one account, at least. Jules had no intention of telling Daniel about Tate. Dying in the desert, that had nothing to do with anything but Hannah, near as the world knew, and keeping it that way was the goal. “You’d say you weren’t thirsty if you were dying from it,” he told Loren.
After pushing himself up from the arm of the couch, Jules started right on for the door, where he slipped his feet into the boots he’d discarded there the previous night. The dress could stay. It was from the thrift store, and it wasn’t anything worth crying over. He glanced back at the couch, and he sighed with real obvious approval. “Shame you’re both so damn pretty,” he said, before disappearing out the destroyed door.
Standing at the edge of the entryway, Daniel turned back to watch Jules ramble on about this Loren, not so much listening as watching the way the two of them interacted with the space between them. Daniel read restrained violence, limited trust, a dark secret, and mild attraction that seemed more confused than anything, except on Jules’ side. He stepped back as Jules moved past him, not even attempting to hinder his progress, absently scratching an itch at his side through the thin fabric of the pale shirt. He didn’t complain that his clothing was walking out the door, nor say anything in farewell.
He gave Loren a baleful stare, all calf eyes: big, brown, bloodshot and bored. “I’ll fix it myself, don’t come back. Go away.” He went around the edge of the couch, finding his balance and losing it again every couple steps, and started back toward his bedroom, obviously not caring about Loren being left alone in his living room nor who might walk in when he wasn’t watching.
The living room kept Loren for a few moments longer. Hs husky eyes followed Jules out the door, but he made no move to chase after the young man or reprimand him further. There was barely any acknowledgement to Daniel, who vanished into the opulent backdrop of all the sleep and serenity money could by. And there Loren stood, still in the way security - or worse things - could sometimes be. If he were a shark, he'd drown. There was a strange separation of self in this moment, when it was just him and this stranger's things. It felt like it he closed his eyes and reopened them slowly, this could be his suite. That could be his couch and his splintered door. Any moment, he could forget all over again, and he'd not have the plague of worry that came with Jules, the loss of Hannah. Such static glimpses with every blink, Loren sometimes wondered if his life would reboot once more. Another bullet and another coma, or maybe something simpler this time.. maybe he'd just go to sleep and wake up a new monster. It wasn't a good or safe feeling when one couldn't even trust their mind not to play such tricks. Finally, dropping his head and exiting the suite in the direction of the stairs, Loren tossed himself back into the familiarity of stifling night air and the kind of darkness that chewed men into shadows.