Re: Nick & Wren: Fortunes
Nick smiled slow in lamplight. It was a sprawl of mouth, that smile. It ticked up the lefthand corner of his mouth and pulled the right over along with it, lazy and inclined toward laughter even without a damn sound. Nick and truth had a hazy acquaintance, enemies, lovers, kicked each other out of bed often enough sometimes he forgot which truth he was living.
You were supposed to bedrock yourself in the present, working U/C. Wife, kids, a house with a mortgage you had to keep punching a timesheet for to root yourself in the present, wouldn't let the water-line sink high above your head and lose you some air. He'd had a girlfriend who was a wife without a rock on her finger and kids were some point long in the future, when he was done with liquidity and cash for beer on weekends. But Nick had taken on other skin since he'd been old enough to know it was a good idea. First time wearing his own consistently in a while without the bandana of belonging somewhere he had to remember and he knew enough to know that felt almost as wrong as the inability to get his ass upward.
He watched her eyes instead of her face, because her face was pretty enough to get drawn into and he figured that was part of why people sat listening to fantasy spun up like the cotton-candy out front. She laughed, and his own mouth sketched out response; yeah it was funny. He didn't remember the last point the truth had been better than the fantasy. Was like that for most people, or maybe his world had shrunk since the bullet in the spine.
"I know my past," Nick acknowledged, a dip of the chin to the chest and a study of his own useless knees. "And call me a vegetarian at a steak dinner, but I want to call into question the usefulness of the past. Can't do nothing with it. If you can learn from it, then hey, freebie with purchase but most of the time you're so far off in the present you've forgotten where the hell it was you stood to do the dumb-ass thing you did in the first place. How do you relate to that? I know I don't." But the flicker of his smile was a strobe-light, and it flinted sharp when she closed in on something. Throw enough darts in the dark, you hit on something.
Hell, no one could run from the past, it followed you along and around. But here? His past was somewhere around six foot and mad as hell.
"Me to it. I'm not a passive kind of guy. You can see how it all works out? Lie to me and I'll know, because I know the fuckers involved and I can tell you how it'll all work out." That grin again, coaxing now. "And it's not pretty."