hal savoie . {han solo} (heshotfirst) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-10-12 00:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | han solo, roxanne |
Who: Hal (Han Solo) and Wren (Roxanne)
What: An interesting conversation, (edited) sex, and then an interesting conversation again.
Where: Outside of Hamartia, and then Hal's apartment.
When: After Wren leaves Cass.
Warnings: Obviously some adult implications, but it's mostly fade-to-black.
Hal was coming in from a long work day. Hal’s work days were nights, and this particular one hadn’t been a boring one. Hal preferred boring nights. Boring nights did not feature his employers trying to screw him, they didn’t involve being shot at, and they certainly didn’t involve seeing someone else get shot. Hal just didn’t like it when people got shot, and that was a fact. Even if he was doing the shooting, getting shot just wasn’t a nice way to go. Sometimes he wished he had Charlie’s logic about the matter: he would say, “It just be necessary, Hal,” and then he would give one of those thick-shouldered shrugs.
Hal didn’t care how necessary it was, he still didn’t like it when people got shot, especially if it was a few inches from his face. The worst of it was that neither he or Charlie had been the ones doing the shooting, not right at first. Hal was afraid to look at the back of his shirt because he was pretty sure there was a burnt bullethole back there that maybe missed him by millimeters. It felt like there should be. It was a close call.
Charlie was gone picking up the other back up car, and Hal pulled up onto the street a few sidewalk stretches down from Hamartia. After a crouch to inspect the bulletholes that had taken out the back window and both of his tail-lights, he sighed and initiated a mechanism that kept the hood from being opened or the doors from disengaging. This ride didn’t have a stereo worth stealing, and there was a good chance nobody would bother it. Hal took the gun from under the front seat, made sure the safety was on, tucked it into the hollow of his back under his shirt and started the walk back toward Hamartia. God, he needed a hot shower. He had a lot of grit where grit shouldn’t be.
Wren was on her way back from Cassidy’s.
She’d spoke to Oracle in the car on the way, and she was a little calmer than she had been when she’d left Aubade in a rush of concern and worry, but she was still on edge, still feeling the guilt of having spent a night between soft sheets while her friend was off getting shot.
She tumbled out of the car without waiting for it to stop all the way, even though she had no real purpose. She didn’t know where Robin was, didn’t know who’d shot him; she had nothing to do, really, but she wasn’t thinking logically enough for that. She stepped out onto the sidewalk in in a crumpled cream dress and butter yellow stockings that smelled of sex over scrubbed-clean skin, and she almost collided with Hal.
Her hands on his arms stopped her from running into him entirely, and it took her a moment to register who it was, and a moment later to catch the telltale scent of guns and burnt fabric. Her fingers were clutched around her cellphone, which was still playing the youtube video from the night before, and she looked him over, before even saying anything, her fingers trembling a little. Then she looked up at his face quizzically - a question there.
Hal saw Wren coming even though she didn’t see him; it was hard to miss the flurry of yellow cloth tumbling out of an unfamiliar car, and he was both relaxed and braced by the time she reached him, and his strong familiar arms took her neatly by the elbows and set her back upright on her feet as if she was a small child gone astray. “Where’s de fire, petite?” he asked her, looking down with bemusement and then turning a brow-tilt at the phone, which from this angle he could only see as a little square of moving figures.
She didn’t immediately answer his question. Instead, she handed him the phone, and she walked around behind him, circling around him and back to the front again. When she looked up at him, it was with worry in her eyes, but no chastisement; she understood the danger of what he did, and she wasn’t going to be hypocritical enough to lecture him about it. Still, her fingers had trailed over the burn in the back of the shirt, even as she could hear the distorted sound from the bar playing on the phone between his fingers. “You’re okay?” she asked first, as if saying it made it so. “Charlie?”
“Mais yeah,” he said, distractedly. “Charlie too.” Hal took the phone and looked down at it with his bemusement slowly turning into an obscure gray frown, and finally when the video was done he assembled his thoughts and snapped the phone shut. The video stopped playing. He offered her the phone back, the tips of his fingers a bit muddy and dusty as the rest of him. “Yo’ friends?” he asked, turning inside with her rather than standing out in the street to discuss it.
She slipped the phone into the side pocket of her dress as he moved with her inside, and it made her smile a little, even in the face of all her worry. He was undeniably competent, this man, not asking permission or, she suspected, even thinking things through too deeply before acting on them. She leaned against his side, allowing herself that luxury just this once. “I wasn’t here, and they say he’s okay, Robin, but he’s so careless, and too brave for his own good.” She said it like his braveness was something entirely noble, and like it was something he needed protecting from. She slid her arm around his waist, arm just above the firearm at his back, fingers brushing the gunshot graze on fabric again, and she pressed closer.
Hal was slightly surprised at the close cling, but he didn’t object. Instead of moving off to the side toward the sour-smelling stair, he took her down his hallway and unlocked the door with casual familiarity. “It’s good he’s okay, huh?” Hal reassured, pleasantly. He put a wide warm palm behind her back and gently propelled her ahead of him into the apartment without threat or particular need, and once he had the door firmly closed behind them, he dropped onto the couch with a sigh to remove the heavy, muddy boots. “You in a hurry to go see him?”
She shook her head when he asked about her needing to go see Robin. “No, I’m not in a hurry,” she said, hanging back near the door and watching him pull off the boots. There was no other sound in the apartment, and she suspected no one was home, and she slipped off her own high-heeled boots and walked over to the couch. She let the phone fall onto one of the cushions, her key alongside it, and she curled up on the couch beside him, draping her legs over his thighs a moment, the expensive, embroidered flowers at the top of her garters visible, incongruous with the dirty clothing he wore. “Do you ever want to be safe?” she asked, the question candidly thoughtful. “Safe and quiet and peaceful, even if it’s a calm sort of life, not something that makes you burn hot or feel too much?” she asked, reaching over and touching the lightening hair at his temple.
He arched his brows to himself (head still down to work on the boots) when she said she wasn’t in a hurry, but he didn’t comment directly. It wasn’t in Hal’s nature to do a lot of arguing. He sat back with another end-of-day sigh, though it was early in the morning, and tucked an arm around her knees to shift her legs closer as he dropped his head back. She smelled like sex and some other man, and he was surprised at how much he didn’t care for that. He didn’t let her go, however, and looked up at the ceiling tiredly. “If Ah wanted a life like dat, cher, Ah wouldn’t be doin’ this job.”
She leaned forward, and she kissed beneath his jaw, and then she rested her cheek against the back of the couch as she watched him, her fingers trailing down to the side of his neck. She hadn’t see him since the night of the vigilante meeting, though she knew how he’d been from Charlie, and she wasn’t shy about the fact that she was looking him over. “I was thinking about it this morning,” she told him, “before I found out about my friend. Thinking about stopping, about being safe, about a thousand mornings in an expensive apartment without any dirt on the windows.” She was talking quieter the more she went out, sharing thoughts more than anything else. “But I think the not feeling would kill me more than even this life will.” It was a candid confession, one with no self pity. She felt alive here, on this dirty couch, with this dirty man. It was hard to explain, but that was just the way it was.
Hal was in one piece. He was, at times, proud of his weathered condition, but this was not one of those times. He was tired, and it had been a shitty night. He cared quite a lot about Wren, who he considered a friend, and they had not yet reached the point where he noticed that perhaps the girl might have more than the way of friendship on his mind. “I imagine you could find yo’self a picket fence homme, if you like dat,” he replied, turning to regard her after her fingers trickled down under his jaw, a very sensitive spot, which she would know from familiarity. “Sure you could find a nice one.”
She laughed a little, a soft sound as she regarded him. “Could you imagine a passive life?” she asked him, because she couldn’t. She liked visceral things, yes, expensive bedding, opulent surroundings, dynamic men, freedom. “I don’t want to be caged, Hal,” she told him candidly, and she reached forward to unroll the stockings, her foot propped on his thigh while she did it. “I do two things with my life. I make money, the best way I can, and I help people not get hurt while they make money the best way they can.” It was the closest she’d come to voicing a confession in a very long time.
He watched. He had a thing for anything she put on her thighs, which she very well knew. He was perfectly able to carry on a conversation, however. “You gotta do what you t’ink is best, cher. But Ah can’t help t’inkin’, myself, that you be getting into more than you need to.” The opinion cushioned the criticism. “Yo’ way is a real dangerous way.” Then, almost hesitantly, “Who you been with?”
She started on the other stocking, as she answered him. “I think what I do at night is important, what I do to warn people. I can’t stop doing that; it’s what makes everything okay for me. If not it’s all been meaningless, all the bad things.” She let the stocking fall to the floor, and she reached for the buttons his shirt and started on them slowly, taking long pauses between where her fingers brushed the fabric. “My mother was killed in an alley when I was 15,” she told him, and it might have been practice for telling Charlie eventually, might have just been something she needed to say. “He lives in Aubade,” she went on, not pausing or asking what he meant. “He’s broken, and kind, and has absolutely no idea what to do with me,” she admitted. “I like him, and I want to help him find his way again,” she finished, and it was fond without being attracted, caring without any burn to it.
He didn’t rush her, fingers on the backs of her arms and thumbs idle on the inside of her elbows. He was doing his best to keep any lust out of his expression, because he worried that some of his distaste for the unnamed man from Aubade might come through. She would think it was about her, and it wasn’t, really. It didn’t change how much he was interested in Wren. Much of the contact along his dirt streaked chest helped. He had a few scrapes from sliding on the ground, but nothing serious, just some pink skin and a little extra sensitivity on the edge of his ribs. “Mmm,” he said, in response to the information about the answer to his question. Then he said, “You not worried you gonna end up dead in an alley?” He looked up into her eyes, brows slightly lifted, and it was clear that he worried. Not the can’t-sleep-can’t-eat kind of worry, but the other kind, the concerned kind.
She pushed the shirt off his shoulders, and she slid her legs off his lap, her bare feet landing on the carpet with so much quiet that it was almost nothing. “You need a shower,” she told him in French, a smile around her lips as she reached down for his hand. “One that doesn’t include theft of Charlie’s towels.” She tugged him toward the bathroom, and her voice trailed in front of him, almost disembodied soft in the apartment’s morning light. “I died in an alley when I was sixteen. I’m on borrowed time as it is,” again, a confession without a hint of self-pity to it. “I want to live, Hal, and I want to help people avoid things they’ll never be able to get over.” She looked over at him, smiled softly at the sight of him. “And I want to sit on your bathroom counter while you wash up.”
Hal wouldn’t have minded going farther than the shirt, but it wasn’t a give-all-end-all, so he went along, smiling the vague honey smile, which was only slipped some by fatigue. “Stealin’ Charlie’s towels is sometime’ half the fun, cher.” He left the shirt behind, and he stopped in the door of the bathroom and took the gun out of the small of his back, leaving it on a heap that made up a cluttered side table against the wall.
Yes, it had been a fine chase. The meet had been by the river in three sets of headlights, and Hal had done a bit of bullet dodging with a muddy dive, and then Charlie had needed some time to get into position, so there had been more bullets, and an old contact wasn’t ever going to be contacting him again, and there was another night gone with no pay. The jeans slid with no belt to help them up, and with his usual ham-handedness, Hal picked Wren up by the waist and put her on the counter as requested while he went to pound on the wall to get the hot water running. “Still a risky business, yours,” he said, once the steam started filling up the room.
She wasn’t surprised when he lifted her onto the counter, and she just tugged off the dress and tossed it away, over into the heap of his clothing, and leaned back against the mirror, perfectly comfortable as she hugged her knees to her chest and wearing nothing at all. She let her eyes take him in, the looking a slow thing, unhurried, intentional. She could see the marks of a fight clearer in the dingy lighting, things that would leave bruises and angry spots. “Yours too,” she said as she looked at him, and then her gaze found his warm eyes and she smiled. “Do you think Charlie would mind the bathroom floor getting a little wet?” she asked.
The water was pattering softly now and the sight of her in nothing was even better than her in that dress, and there wasn’t much to smell but the hard water in the air as he came closer, already hard against the jeans. “Probably,” he said, arms coming around her whole and mouth working up the curve of her neck.
***
Later, in the shower, it took her a minute to actually drag her eyes open, to stop shuddering and look at him. She dragged her thumb gently over his lashes, and she gave him a sweet-sated smile, one that was all lazy appreciation and unguarded youth. “You don’t smell like someone shot at you anymore,” she said, the words sounding approving, giving up a little bit of the worry she felt for him, for what he did. “You smell like me.” That was a proud statement, possessive in an almost male way, candid and blunt. He did.
His smile matched hers, but something about it faltered, a bird’s wing change, there and gone, for the briefest moment before he spoke. “And you smell like me.” He leaned in and kissed her generous lips, then he stood up slowly into the water, shutting his eyes against it until it was beating on his shoulders.
It was going to go cold pretty soon, probably. Charlie would be pissed if he came back this way for a shower. He probably wouldn’t, though. He’d get one in the garage, it would be faster. His thoughts wandered a little in that direction, idly holding a hand out to lift her up gently into the water.
She caught the the faltering, but she didn’t grasp the meaning. It would never have occurred to her that he had any issue at all with Cassidy, mainly because she assumed (based on his easy acceptance of the profession) that Hal knew hookers very, very well. That he understood the difference between client and lover, the difference normal people with god-fearing lives couldn’t grasp. She stepped out of the shower, letting herself drip all over Charlie’s clean floor, and she looked down at the puddle at her feet. “If Charlie stops giving me shooting lessons because of the wet floor, you’re going to have to take over,” she said with a quiet smile, teasing, her hand reaching out to drag along the wet skin at his back in precisely the spot the bullet had almost grazed.
Hal soaped his hair and the rest of them, let the water scrub the rest of the night off him, and stepped out after her, not even bothering to glance at the floor. He took a towel--his towel--and handed her another--his towel again, he learned his lesson. He stopped rubbing at his short hair at that and stood entirely upright, staring at her with astonishment through the mist. “Charlie givin’ a ‘tite t’ing like you lessons wit’ a gun?” The accent came out strong in his astonishment, a series of stuttering t’s that he didn’t appear to hear.
She was enjoying the view of him drying his hair, admittedly, and it took a minute to register what all those ts meant. She ignored her own wetness, and she let the towel fall into the puddle on the floor, using it to dry the linoleum under her feet. “I assumed he told you,” she said honestly, because she thought they told each other everything. She hadn’t had many friends in her life, and she assumed friendship was much like it was on television shows, all sharing, all the time. “I left you a necklace once, and he asked me why. He took me fishing, and I asked for shooting lessons,” she admitted. “I knew his sister once,” she added, almost as if she wasn’t certain if she should say as much. “I asked you about his family, remember?”
Hal reeled under all this successive information. Wren was wrong about how much the two men told each other. They were very close friends, which meant, really, that Hal talked a lot of bullshit in Charlie’s general direction, and got two word affirmatives or negatives. Both had found, however, that they enjoyed the other’s company, and they worked very well together. That did not, however, mean that they divulged their deepest secrets like little girls at a sleepover.
Hal shook his head and wrapped the towel around his waist, feet splashing as he moved out into the bedroom for clothes--or no, just to flop on the bed. “Honey, Charlie don’ do much talking. Or fishing or shooting with girls he got no cause to know.” He didn’t sound jealous, just surprised. It honestly did not occur to him to ask if Charlie had made romantic or sexual overtures, because Charlie just didn’t do that kind of thing. “How you know his sister?” A slight narrowing of his eyes meant he was waking up some out of his post-sex complacency, if there had been much to begin with.
She walked past him into the bedroom, mostly dry, and she crawled onto the bed and watched him. Her makeup had washed away in the water and her hair was damp and away from her face, and in the morning light there was a memory of a scar visible from the tip of one ear down to her neck. She crossed her legs, and she was quiet, thinking. “He doesn’t want to know yet, I don’t think,” she said honestly, because she’d give Charlie plenty of opportunity to make the connection, but he hadn’t asked outright. “She died. I knew her before she died.”
Hal gave up on clothes really and just dropped stomach-down on to her, and he groaned into a pillow for a minute, savoring not being upright, and then rolled onto his side to look at her. “Charlie don’t talk about his family,” Hal said, doubtfully. “You better not push too hard in dat direction, cher.” He didn’t, of course, think that Charlie would harm or shout at Wren. When the other man lost his temper he tended to take it somewhere people couldn’t see. Hal reached out with the casual ownership that seemed to take him about Wren’s body in general and pushed her hair away from the scar so he could frown at it.
She looked confused a moment, and then she tugged the wet hair over her cheek, her eyes going wide a moment before returning to normal. “He doesn’t know she’s dead. I didn’t know how to tell him,” she admitted, running a hand over the expanse of his side and him as she spoke. “I tried to get him to talk about his family, about back in Musings. He wouldn’t,” she admitted. “At least not very much.” She didn’t remember much of anything of life before coming over. She’d celebrated her fifth birthday in humanity, and New Orleans was just a memory of hanging greens and sticky warmth to her. She’d tried to remember Charlie, tried to remember him being around, but she couldn’t remember that either. “How old were you when you met him?” she asked, even though she didn’t necessarily expect a response.
He was staring at her and that scar, thoughts rather dark as he theorized what made it, but he did not ask. The caress was appreciated but elicited no special response, only a little more relaxation into the tumbled bedclothes. “Oh no, you ain’t gettin’ Hal into dis mess. You got somet’ing dat needs talking about with Charlie, you go right on ahead.” He raised both palms up comically.
“I want to know about you,” she said with a helpless smile at the imagine of him with his palms in the air. It was true; she was trying to figure out if she’d met him before she could remember. Strangely enough, while she was curious about the concept, she wasn’t particularly bothered by it. She chalked it up to life and the intervening years, and she stretched out beside him, facing him. The sun shone softly through the dirty window, and she kissed his mouth gently.
Hal, on the other hand, didn’t want anything to do with memories, his, hers, or Charlie’s. He groped around for a pillow and curled it up under his head. His palm cradled her jaw again, but it was a casual touch. “Nothin’ to know, cher. Don’ worry yo’self so much about where everyt’ing comes from.” He hesitated uncomfortably, and then he said, “You should just get dis t’ing about Charlie’s sister out in de air and be done wit’ it.”
It was the second time she’d tried to find out about his past, and the second time he’d refused to say anything about it. She knew the look of someone who didn’t want their memories anymore, and she turned her cheek and kissed the palm of his hand with parted lips. “Even if he doesn’t want to know?” she asked, stretching close to his warmth, tucking her head under his chin and appropriating his chest for a pillow.
“Den,” he said, with the air of someone trying desperately to finish something, “he don’ wanna know.” Hal was not going to tell anybody about his past with his friend, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell anybody about Charlie unless Charlie told them himself. This went way beyond towels and into something deeper. “How do you know his sister?” he repeated, seriously, tipping her head back so he could look at her.
She considered lying, but there was something about this strange friendship with Hal (that was founded on not needing to be anything than what they were) that didn’t let her. There was, however, the fact that his perception of her might change once he knew the truth; she thought Hal might be one of those men with morals in strange places. She stayed quiet, and she just looked into his deep brown eyes, not pulling her gaze away.
Hal pressed his mouth together, then shrugged a little, again uncomfortable with the implied intimacy. “Fine, den,” he grumbled. “You work it out wit’ de boy, den, and leave me out of it.” He rolled over once more, face down into the pillow.
She moved out of the way when he rolled over, losing her spot on his chest and little uncertain how to react for a moment (a strange thing for her). She wasn’t the type to cling to a man who didn’t want to be clung to, or to force herself on one that had turned away from her. She sat there, quiet in the still of the room, and then she dragged her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, along his shoulders as she stood. She was quiet as she went to find her clothes, not making a fuss about it as she she slipped the dress on, not bothering with any of the rest.
“Stay safe out there,” she said, soft and even from the door, more than a little bit of training in the calm elegance of the farewell.
He surfaced enough out of sleep to lift his chin off the pillow, and then he waved his hand at her in farewell. “Bonsoir, cher.” Then he promptly fell back to sleep.