dallas martinez § will scarlett (whatisyourcrime) wrote in ourtrueselves, @ 2010-05-04 01:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | dallas harper, rick martinez |
Who: Rick and Dallas.
What: Dal goes crying to Rick with her problems, with mixed results.
When: [BACKDATED] to late Saturday night.
Where: Rick's place.
Warnings: Language, angst, etc.
Status: COMPLETE.
When they'd gotten back to land, Dallas had broken the news to the other ladies that she didn't think it was a good idea for her to stay. Since she'd seen the post from her brother, she knew she hadn't been much fun, and there was no point in dragging down everyone else. So, she'd passed around hugs, grabbed her bag, and headed to the nearest MTN station to beam herself back home.
Except she didn't go home. She may have bailed on the Mexico trip, but she didn't exactly want to be alone. She went to the next best place, without so much as stopping by her own apartment to drop off her things. Luckily, she had her keys on her, so she didn't have to knock. Dallas dropped her bags off in the front hallway, then went as quietly as she could to the bedroom. She may have had every intention of waking him up, but she really didn't want him to think that she was someone robbing the place before she got the chance.
She hated to get him out of bed in the middle of the night. There was no one else for her to turn to, though, and if she didn't get this off her chest, she was going to end up sitting in her bathtub and crying for the next ten hours or so. Laying a hand on his arm, she gave it a soft squeeze. "Ricky?"
---
Rick was a light sleeper, but Dallas was sneaky enough not to wake him as she entered the house. That was good or she probably would have been greeted with a gun or a sword since he wasn't expecting company tonight. Dallas was supposed to be in Mexico still, but he knew it was her right away. The feel of her hand on his arm was so familiar. As long as they'd known each other, there was still something like a spark whenever they touched. There was also the fact that she was the only female other than his mother who called him "Ricky", so it wasn't likely to be anyone else.
"Dallas?" He looked at the alarm clock next to the bed. 2:15. He'd only gone to bed about an hour before. Obviously fate had other plans for him than getting a good night's sleep though. He yawned and sat up. "What's goin' on, babe? Aren't you supposed to be off getting wasted with all the other loca merry women?"
---
“Yeah, sorry.” She frowned at the headboard, wondering how she was going to explain all this. There was no real reason to get Rick involved with her family drama, other than she just wanted to talk to someone, anyone, about it, and he was her first choice. Her family was on of the few subjects that they’d never discussed at length, mostly because she’d spent years trying to forget how badly she’d handled things. Now, forgetting was going to be impossible.
“I wasn’t exactly the life of the party, after the whole…I decided to come home early.” Dallas shrugged, trying to act like it didn’t make any difference to her. Not that she’d ever been much good at lying when it was important, especially to Rick. “I’m sorry. I know it’s late. I just…I don’t know what to do.”
---
Dallas really wasn't very good at hiding things from him. He could tell this wasn't going to be a short conversation. With a sleepy sigh he scooched over on the bed, making room for her.
"Your brother," he said, stating the obvious. He was curious about that, more than he'd let on on the boards. She never talked about her family. He just knew they weren't around and he hadn't asked for any other details. There wasn't any reason for him to. How had she just vanished like that though? He couldn't imagine being out of touch with his family for six years. It was an odd week when he wasn't talking to Franky for some reason or another. And as much as he pissed him off, as much as Rick never talked about him, he still worried about Joey. There was an obligation to family. You didn't just disappear. "What the hell is up with that?"
---
She sat down on the edge of the bed, fighting the habit that would have had her scooting over to cozy up against him. “Exactly.” God, her brother. He’d barely been a teenager when she’d left. Out of everyone, she’d probably missed him the most, at least in the beginning. She’d gotten good at burying anything and everything that involved her family. Having it all thrown back in her face was going to rip her apart, and she knew it. It had already started to, just during that brief conversation over the internet.
“I kept up with them for the first year. You know, bragging about whatever auditions I could swing or whatever, catching up on family news. But it got harder. Things got bad.” Taking a deep breath, she dragged a hand through her hair. “How could I call my little brother, after I‘d just gotten done blowing some guy in the backseat of his car for cash?” In her head, it had all made sense. She’d been doing what she had to do, and it was much easier to do that if she was all on her own. “Even if I didn’t tell them, even if they never found out….I couldn’t face that.”
---
"No shit they got bad." They weren't exactly living the high life right now, but it wasn't bad, comparatively. He'd seen Dallas at what was probably her lowest point. Hell, he'd probably caused that lowest point. Still. "You still call. They're family. You call. You let your mamá know you're not dead. You make sure your little brother isn't getting into worse trouble than you are." He'd been a solid failure at that last part, but he had tried. He'd fared better than Allan, anyway? Maybe being one of their brothers was just dangerous by definition.
He probably wasn't providing the symathy she was hoping for here, but he just couldn't understand. Dallas was one of the bravest females he knew, and it wasn't like her to do something so... cowardly. I didn't make sense.
---
She was only a little surprised when he snapped at her. “You don’t understand.” Of course he didn’t understand. She’d met his family, and had gotten a whole hell of a lot closer to them in one year than she had to most of her own in her entire lifetime. “They were just waiting for me to fail. My parents. They were waiting for me to admit that I’d gotten in over my head, to come crawling back to them to live the same bullshit life that they were living.”
Dallas sniffed, and blinked back the quickly approaching tears. She didn’t normally cry easily, it had just been a very emotionally trying day. Still, she knew she couldn‘t just take the easy way out and blame her parents. “And I was so fucking ashamed of myself. At least at first. Then another year went by, and another, and I didn’t know what the fuck I would say even if I did pick up the phone. I couldn’t make myself do it, because it was so much easier to live with myself when I didn’t have anyone to answer to.”
---
"I do understand." People had been waiting for him to fail his whole life. There weren't exactly high expectations for the people who grew up in his neighborhood. He'd done his share of stumbling too. Okay, he still did. A lot. But it could have been worse. He told himself that a lot. He could be much worse. As for Dallas, maybe it was because he'd only known her long enough to see positive changes, but it seemed like she had things backwards. "You didn't fail, Dal. You're still here, ain't ya? You're off at the bar every day, breaking your neck for a respectable paycheck. That's more than a lot of people can say for themselves."
He wasn't sure if he felt bad for her or if he was angry at her. "Of course it's easier not to have to answer to anyone. That's how selfishness works." Both. He was definitely feeling a little bit of both. He really couldn't stand to see her all upset though. "But you're not selfish. I know you. You're probably even more altruistic than Will, and he's a complete bleeding heart."
---
She shook her head. “No, I did. I didn’t do what I came here to do. That’s the same thing, isn’t it?” It had felt like the same thing to her, right up until about a year ago. Then slowly but surely she’d become more and more content with the life she’d started building. It wasn’t what she’d come to LA looking for, but she was happy anyway. She had good friends, a steady job, a man in her life that she could count on. She’d even had a family, after the Martinez’s decided to all but adopt her. What the hell else could she ask for?
That didn’t mean that she was quite done feeling sorry for herself yet, though. “I was selfish. I know I was. I wanted more of everything, and it bit me in the ass.” She tried to work up a smile for him. “I’m a different person now than I was then, Rick. I’d almost gotten to the point where I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to face my family again, sometime down the road. They just beat me to it.”
---
"Not exactly." Rick had spent his whole life in LA. People who came here to make it big and fell short were a dime a dozen. That was every waiter, every guy making coffee, every woman in the strip club. Coming to California and not getting famous was about as much of a failure as buying a ticket but not winning the lottery. The odds were about the same anyway.
"Life's shit like that, you don't get to pick your times." He was jaded. It was Dallas's bad luck to be with a cop. That meant he'd heard just about every sob story in the world and run out of sympathy for them a long time ago. It also meant he had a pretty good idea of just how flawed all of humanity was though, so he wasn't going to hold a few flaws against anyone. Especially not her. His words were blunt, but his tone was soft, and he offrered her an encouraging smile. "So, you gonna keep being a coward, or are you going to talk to your brother?"
---
It had to be some fundamental flaw in her make up that had her actually feeling better about herself. She’d known coming here that she wasn’t going to get a ‘it’ll all be okay, baby’ from him. He just wasn’t that kind of guy. Which had to mean that she’d come here knowing full well that he was going to kick her ass over the whole thing. Sympathy was nice and all, but sometimes it didn’t quite cut it, and it certainly wasn’t going to help her sack up enough to deal with her family.
“Yeah, I am.” She’d have to. Austin may have only been a kid when she’d left, but she knew how stubborn Harpers could be. There was no way she was going to get rid of him. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to tell him everything, but I’ll talk to him.” Dallas propped her elbows on her knees and cupped a hand around her chin. “Now I just gotta hope he doesn’t hate me for it.” She hoped he wouldn’t. When she’d left Texas, she’d been a completely different person. If she liked that person a whole lot better than the old one, she prayed that her brother would, too. But Austin wasn‘t the only person whose opinion mattered these days. There was one that mattered a whole hell of a lot more. “You gonna be mad at me for long?"
---
"There's a lot in between not telling him everything and not talking at all. You'll figure it out." He took her hand and gave it a squeeze, the first fully reassuring thing he'd done so far. "Besides, he ain't allowed to hate you. He's your brother. That's how it works. Trust me."
He couldn't stay mad at her. It wasn't his place to be mad at her here anyway, she hadn't done anything to him, other than confuse him, but she did that on a regular basis and he'd gotten pretty used to it. "Well, I got a lot to be mad at you for. Running off to Mexico without me. Waking me up in the middle of the night. You're gonna have to give me another ten or twenty seconds to get over it all."
---
She linked her fingers through is, wanting him to stay close. “Thanks. I hope you’re right.” If Austin did hate her, she wouldn’t be able to blame him. She probably deserved it. But at least she could try to clear the air between them before they went their separate ways again. She owed him that much. Honestly, she probably owed as much to the rest of her family, too. To her parents, and Christi. She was willing to do this particular penance in pieces, though.
“I think I can wait that long.” Out of everything life had dealt her since she came to LA, she could almost say it was a fair trade. Because of this. As much as she might have moped about him to Betty, there was no denying that Rick was the best part of her life. She’d gone to him first for a reason. That had to say something about her life in general, but she didn’t care. It was the truth. “Next time I run off to Mexico, I’ll take you with me. And you can go back to sleep now, baby. I won’t keep you up.”
---
"It's okay." Now that he was up, he really didn't care. She seemed less upset than before, which was good, or he would have had to stop being his normal jerkass self and figured out something to do about it. He'd realized long ago that he'd do pretty much anything for Dallas, and that it was a very lucky thing for him that she didn't realize that or he'd really be in trouble. He leaned back against the headboard. "You gonna stick around?"
---
That was one of the things she found so damn endearing about him. He was always there. He might not always be nice about it, but the moment she needed him, he’d be there, with only the minimum of complaints. After close to five years on her own, she hadn’t gotten over the novelty of having someone she could depend on without question. At least that meant that she never took it for granted. Not on purpose, anyway.
“Yeah, I think I will.” He might not have meant it as an invitation, but that’s how she took it, prying off her shoes and scooting back enough so that she could sit next to him. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for them to crash at each other’s place, even when there wasn’t sex involved. And she was still feeling just off center enough to know that she’d sleep better with him there. “Thanks, Ricky. For not letting me wallow too much.”
---
"Good." It wasn't just a question, and it wasn't an invitation. It was what he said instead of, 'Hey, you should stay.' Because since she was here, there wasn't any reason for her to go. He'd kinda missed her while she'd been gone.
When she moved back he put his arm around her. "I couldn't just let you cry about your problems all night," he teased. "Then we'd never get any sleep."
---
She leaned instinctively in to his hold. Before now, she hadn’t realized just how tired she was. It had been a long day, even before her brother had shown up on the boards. Closing her eyes, she rested her head on his shoulder. At least she was able to end the day like this, no matter how badly it had gone. Chances were, tomorrow would be just as bad. She’d just have to convince Rick to stick around for that, too.
“Mmm. No. I wouldn’t have cried all night, anyway. I’d have worn myself out before then.” She wiped her eyes and laughed. Honestly, this had gone better than she’d hoped. It wouldn’t have taken much for her to break down and bawl all over him. She still might, if things with her brother went badly later. “I’m pretty worn out, anyway.” Dallas grinned over at him. “It takes a lot of energy to keep from getting shot by a drunken Hood.”
---
He didn't think this was resolved, but she seemed to be settled for the moment, so that was good enough. "Well, we can't have that either." Now that he'd basically scolded her about flaking out on her family, her brother had better except her apology and do his part in this reunion. Otherwise Rick was going to have to track him down and give him the same sharp words, but in a much less friendly format. He didn't think it would come to that though. For someone so jaded, he was almost naively optimistic when it came to family.
Rick laughed softly. "Hm, dodging arrows all day, were you? That's what you get for spending your time with lawless rogues. Will you never learn?"
---
"Maybe not all day. Just once. But it was a close call." She smiled foolishly. It was easy to forget how much fun she'd had over the weekend, what with the more recent drama overshadowing everything else. She'd had one hell of a time. Betty was...really something. And it made Will happy, to hang around the Merry Men that she wasn't sleeping with. One day, preferably after Phin and Betty stopped fighting like cats, they'd have to get the whole gang together. They'd probably all end up hospitalized for one reason or another, but it would be worth it.
Yawning, she wrapped an arm around his waist. "Figures I'd wake you up about the time I was ready to go to sleep."
---
"Close calls are okay. No one ended up in jail or in the hospital, I think you can call it a win." He paused and gave her a semi-serious look. "No one did, right?" He didn't know the other women she'd been with well, but he had met Betty, and he did know Robin and John. It was a question worth asking.
"You did time that pretty badly, babe," he said good naturedly. He was ready to go back to sleep himself, if there were no other distractions or crisis. "You always gotta make my life difficult?"
---
That made her laugh. “No. At least not by the time I left.” She wasn’t sure if the other girls had mellowed out at all after her sudden departure. Honestly, she kind of doubted it. Betty knew how to party, and Aimee seemed to have the same skill. Between the two of them, they could probably even convince Charlotte to get in to trouble. She was sad that she was missing it.
She leaned in for a kiss, pleased that he genuinely seemed happier with her. If both he and Austin had been pissed, she wasn’t sure if she would have been able to handle it. “Always. I’d think you’d be used to it by now.” She gave him a quick squeeze before she sank down on the bed. It felt so good to be lying down. “Any other difficultness will have to wait until tomorrow, though. I’m beat.