daniel webster (occupation: recluse) (ex_published349) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-07-03 03:21:00 |
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Entry tags: | !ocean's eleven, *log, daniel webster, sam alexander |
Ocean's Eleven - Sam and Daniel
Who: Sam and Daniel
What: Cleaning Daniel up
Where: Sam's place
When: Recently-nowish-fuzzy
Warnings/Rating: Language, some addiction themes
Daniel came down out of the heady clouds of an opium fever dream feeling like his back teeth were revolting against their position and attempting to crawl down the back of his throat toward his spine. Head spinning and mind still reeling from the pretty non-colors of the hundred false spectrums found behind him in the moaning, flea-bitten den, he stumbled out into a London soup fog. He narrowly missed being run down by a monstrosity of rattling carriage wheels that roared out hoofbeats and curses, and reflected as he picked himself out of the gutter that he had been only that close to never waking up again. He had fucking terrible luck, and far more fortitude than anyone might ever gave him credit. Maybe it was the fucking Webster blood, that down-home Plymouth rock New England bullshit; Daniel probably had some starched ancestor that survived seas and dysentery long enough to pass down genetics made to withstand all the abuse of a supreme vengeful God.
Daniel grew more senses as he dragged himself half-blindly through various London streets, picking up the fully disgusting taste of weeks on the back of his tongue, the horrific rancid sea-stench of the fog and his own body mixed, and a mortifying familiar crawl under his fingernails. No one even bothered to try to rob him; it was too clear he didn’t have anything worth the raising of one cudgel, and there was a decent chance he didn’t even look human under a caveman fringe of beard and hellish red eyes narrowed to cracks. It took him most of the night to acquire enough presence of mind to even orient himself in the cracked stone maze of the river city, and not because he wasn’t too proud to beg for help. In this city, people were literally starving in their beds, and he knew better than to beg in these neighborhoods, where he’d be kicked for his trouble.
It took Daniel a couple days to find his way out of the sewer into which he had dropped himself. In the ugly yellow light of a missing dawn he followed the ghost of a dead cat down an alley and through one of the Hotel doors. He fell, and woke up again under a moth-eaten drape, swaddled up on the echoing stone floor of an empty castle, the massive medieval pile still waiting the return of its master with an uncanny expectant hush. Daniel knew the place well, and he cleaned up there with a few hours’ purge and cold water, but the food had all gone to mold. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, and he didn’t know what the hell he had just spent a day throwing up, but he was going to have to eat soon, and he hadn’t the drugs or the fortitude at hand to ignore the need.
He took the edge off with the contents of a bottle he’d left in the kitchen the last time he was there, thinking he would only have a drink or two so he didn’t end up in shudders. He tossed the empty glass into the cold kitchen fireplace and made his way into the Hotel again to find Sam, clawing curving fingers through the short tangle of his beard and hoping blearily he didn’t look too horrible.
Eventually, Sam went home.
In the wake of the shambles she'd wrought, she returned to the crowded little shack by the lake. She waited until she thought the place would be empty, yeah? No Lou, worrying and screaming in the boathouse, fistfuls of blond curls and so much frustration with the mess that was his fucking family. No Cris, there whenever she turned the fuck around, even when she wanted to breathe air that felt like freedom. No Neil, because Neil never went anywhere unless she asked him to, and even then he sighed, as if each footstep was anvils. Yeah, no, she waited.
But she did go home, eventually.
The little service dog was happy to see her, agitated at being denied his purpose in life, and that just made Sam feel guiltier. Guilt was something she so didn't fucking need right now, and she let him out for a run, and then she cleaned, yeah? Because the place was a dusty fucking mess, shit knocked all over by the frustrated pup, and she'd never really gotten to settling shit the way it should be inside, not after the deluge of refugees from Marvel had turned her sanctuary into a Motel 6. But even clean, the place felt weird. Not like the year she'd spent there, quiet, and it wasn't hers anymore or something. Which made no sense, and her therapist would say it was all in her fucking head; but she didn't want to think about therapists. She hadn't been to hers in weeks, not to NA, not to her neurologists, and she didn't want to think too hard about all the fucking disappointed looks she was going to get from black-leather chairs and over little notepads.
Yeah, even clean the place felt wrong, and there wasn't anything to do about it. Because it wasn't the place. It was the girl, standing there in bright leggings, red, and a white man's undershirt that ate her up, consumed her to mid-thigh and elbow. Yellow Docs on her feet, white socks that lipped over and slouched, and her hair up in a messy bun.
Well, at least she was sober in that moment. Win, yeah? She laughed, because, yeah, ok, great.
In the end, it was the need to air shit out that brought her in contact with the man wandering the Hotel in search of her. She wanted to paint, but she wanted to open every fucking door and window in the little hut first, yeah? Leave them open while she went to the boathouse, make the place smell of spring and sunshine. She fought the windows, and it was the mudroom door, tiny and cramped, that opened out into the Hotel. She hadn't intended it to or whatever, so that meant someone was outside.
She peered her head out, blonde tangled around eyes circled with pale mauve, illness against pallid skin and a girl that looked like crying was some permanent fucking condition. "Someone there?"
The first thing Daniel noticed about the place was the incredible proliferation of sunshine, the nearly blinding brightness that glimmered off the white window trim and the fluttering curtains, the door knob, and even made the charming little path and the shrubberies look tidier and greener respectively. He could see the yard through the windows if he turned his head to either side, which he did, for a moment, getting his bearings. The picturesque place was worthy of something out of Home & Gardens (a publication he hadn’t seen since he’d last visited his mother) and the fresh feeling of the warm summer air highlighted the incredible difference between the more sober, itchy present and the sooty, opium-ridden past. His battered lungs were soaking up the oxygen after so long wrapped in the dusty, tacky red carpets of the London den, and he felt a little light headed as he moved into the mudroom.
Or maybe that was the hunger coming back.
"Just me." Daniel hadn’t used his voice in a while, and it came out a croak the first time, but when he tried again the familiar New England rolled off his tongue. He tilted his head sideways, peering at her through tangled curls and a patchy beard. The loose shirt was something gentlemen wore under all those scarves and vests, and with the breeches he’d found in one of Henry’s closets, he looked like a homeless guy outside a Renaissance Faire. He smelled like incense, unhealthy fog and whiskey, which he brought with him in a cloud as he approached her door and made free with it, pushing it open and against her, sure enough of his welcome that he didn’t wait for her to open it for him.
He put an arm out for her shoulders and squinted around the sunny little room through reddened eyes, muttering a formless but affectionate greeting over the top of her head.
She didn't recognize the croak at first. She hadn't heard Daniel's voice in a really long fucking time, and she'd have a hard time actually pinpointing when she'd last seen him. Before her year away, yeah? Not since, but the seizures did a number on her memory sometimes, and shit wasn't as clear as it had been once. Which was hysterical, yeah? Drugs were supposed to kill off cells and detract from who a person was, but for her it was all internal. It was her own head, and some countdown happening there that no one could seem to predict. And she'd been away, yeah? She hadn't taken any of the meds she'd piled on against her regular doctor's orders, all to make herself stronger and more available for Cris. She felt better as a result, clearer, but she knew it meant seizures would come on harder and faster, and all if she got upset, and shit was regularly upsetting lately. She'd need to decide about the meds eventually, but not right now, yeah? Now was Daniel, and the welcome distraction of that voice that took her too long to recognize.
His voice was hard to recognize, and his face wasn't any better. Lost behind tangles and that beard, and looking so much worse than he had in the hospital or whatever. She thought, belatedly, that she'd him last then, hooked up to beeping machinery after a Hotel party, and Lin hiding somewhere in a vending machine to avoid her.
He put an arm out for her shoulder, and she went without thinking. No fucking hesitation in her bones, and she smelled of cleaner, citrus and something that was probably called Spring Fresh. She was insubstantial beneath the engulfing white shirt, fabric smelling of men's cologne, and there wasn't much to the sick girl that was helping him stay aloft. She didn't look cadaverous, not like him, but there was an unearthly fragility to her that was new, some timebomb ticking behind inky eyes and counting down days, the kind of thing popular on runways and associated with waifs and needles. He muttered affection, and she tipped her head back and kissed him quick, with a complaint of fingers against the messy beard. "Sit the fuck down, yeah?" And she was already moving him toward the loveseat in the cramped and garage-sale cluttered living room.
Daniel was so fucked up at this point that time had very little meaning to him. It could have been days, it could have been years, and because the movement between worlds blurred even the movement of sun and daylight, age also lacked weight. He felt disgusting, and the fatigue was crawling up his arms and into his knees with acidic potency that only grew as the minutes went on. This was a constant, the fatigue, and the disgusting was too, though the opiate oblivion had spoiled him with its wooly embrace. Liquor was no longer enough. He was too... himself with liquor. Aware of it, too. His stomach soured.
And yet Sam was there. Soft, warm, and clean. She smelled like another man, a cologne he wasn't sure he knew, but that he disliked on principle. If she had smelled of cologne, and been happy and bright, he probably wouldn't have minded so much. He imagined it gave him a headache as he nuzzled down into her hair, the tight bristles of the beard catching in brittle threads of gold before he pulled away. The kiss he acknowledged as a matter of course, a European thing that brushed by him in a warm breeze of acceptance and affection. It eased some of that horror feeling in his stomach, the fear/longing for the place from which he had come.
He kept hold of her and went without complaint toward the loveseat, but he stalled them a little halfway there. "I'm hungry. You got anything in the cupboards, petite?" She did seem smaller, in a sickly French kind of way. It was appropriate. "Who made you cry?"
"Yeah. Cris filled the cupboards with shit I won't ever eat. Sit, yeah? I'll throw together a plate of something light or whatever. I need to eat something too," she said, a little nudge at him to keep him moving toward the loveseat, because she didn't want to let go of him until she was sure he was sturdy or whatever, which was maybe stupid, because he'd made it there on his own steam, yeah? But she'd never seem him this low, and she was worried. Yeah, ok, she knew low. She knew gutter and street corners and fucking in the backseat for a tar ball, that kind of low, but she tended to associate Daniel's brand of drunk with Neil's brand of drunk, and she'd never seen either man like this.
So, yeah, she nudged easy, and her weight was insubstantial enough that it wasn't going to knock him off balance or anything. "Life. Me. I did it to myself, yeah?" Talking as she moved, and her words like a paintbrush against a blank canvas, thoughtless and even she wasn't sure what was going to be formed with lips against empty air. "Cris wants me to settle down, be in love, be like traditional or something. He's scared of Neil or whatever, and he pushes. Cris, not Neil. Neil doesn't fucking push. So, yeah, I kept telling Cris I needed time, and he kept asking to call me his girlfriend, and then he said we were together or whatever, and shit was fucked up. I was fucked up, coke and a seizure and I freaked. I asked Neil to come to a motel to fuck, and he came, but then said no, and Lou lost his shit, and Cris lost his shit, and Neil ran away. And Neil's girlfriend, she's a piece of fucking work."
A lift of her shoulders. "I'm sick." Maybe that was the most important part, even after all the words-as-paint exerted on the men in her life. "I'm sick, and I just want to BE, and I want it to be enough, yeah? I want where I am to be enough. I want what I think and how I love to be enough."
Something about her bringing him food struck him as wrong. She seemed glassy, transparent around the edges, wispy in a way she had not been before. He remembered a thicker, stronger Sam, with sweaty grease in the generous folds of her skin and easy smiles on unpainted lips. He let her go, and drifted a few steps in the direction toward the loveseat, but in the end he stayed on his feet and trailed after her toward the kitchen and the aforementioned cupboards. The dizziness had not returned, and the sobriety didn’t itch so much when he was concentrating, so he watched her, watched the way she moved under the concealment of the t-shirt she wore.
The displeasure he wore on his mouth was mostly concealed by the beard. He leaned on the counter as soon as it was available in the tiny space, shoulders slightly bowed in a way they had not been before, neck loose atop his spine. His eyes were still in a slight squint against the glare of real life. He listened to this litany of controlling men without immediate comment. It was natural for people like them to be both drawn to and repelled by controlling, stable people with soft interiors. They offered an easy person to lean on and a volatile contrast to their own chemically dependent inhumanity.
Separately, of course, Daniel fucking hated Neil. The man’s constant indecision and tendency to throw money at things from very far away reminded him a great deal of Daniel’s father. Daniel was not naturally violent, but if Neil were to drop dead in front of him, he’d probably do a little dance once he got over the disbelief. It sounded like Cris was the polar opposite, which he should have seen coming.
"What kind of sick?" he asked, still chewing on the rest with obvious thoughtful patience. His fingernails were too long, and kept flexing against the seam of his pants along his left side.
She kept watch on him, inky blue eyes and peripheral vision partially obscured by flaxen lashes, until his hands touched the crowded counter space. The inside of the shack was bright colors and chaos, and he looked somehow more fragile and homeless within it, even in his outdated clothes. She had a fleeting thought that she wanted to paint him, which he would probably fucking hate, but there was something gut-raw about the man at the counter, like he'd finally scraped the bottom of his own insides or something. The blonde girl thought she'd felt how he looked, a year ago, yeah? After Joey, and when oncoming traffic seemed like a better solution than breathing another fucking minute of air.
Certain he wasn't going to teeter, and with Rodin sitting obediently at her feet, little corgi head up in careful concentration, she began the process of putting things together on a plate. She ignored the fridge's black beans and rice in favor of some fruits, white cheese, sweet Cuban ham, olives, a plate that was pretty enough in contrasting colors to be more still life than nutrition or whatever, but she liked composition. She set the plate in front of him, and then she climbed atop the counter as she popped a brightly green olive into her mouth. Another stretch got them both bottles of water, and then she regarded him, yeah? Youth and too much age in her inky blue eyes, and those mauve circles something Kandinsky would have approved of. "Epilepsy. Now, you. How bad do you feel? Bad, yeah?"
Daniel was more human in his fragility. The cold, kingly absent-mindedness of his Vegas days were gone, replaced by a sweet-smelling rot that collapsed the interior of his soul and made him smaller, slightly bent, and duller in the eyes and mouth. Her eyes were more blue than his, and his hands whiter and softer than hers. He didn’t fear oblivion the way he used to, and now the inevitable sense of an end coming failed to bring forth the spike of survivor’s adrenaline that he remembered from those air conditioned days. It was a bad turn. Daniel was too smart to consider traffic when he got finality on the brain.
"Epilepsy. I didn’t know you had that." He looked at her again, both worried and frightened, obviously unsure of what he would do if she were to somehow collapse in tongue-snapping seizures right there on the floor in front of him. "They make medicine for it." A visible frisson of fear moved up his spine, but instead of moving away, he moved closer to her, to reassure himself of her cleanly scent and warm body, as if those things, like proximity, suggested health.
He almost stepped on the dog, which he only just noticed. He reeled back and stared down at it as if she had hired a tiger to lie across her toes. He wasn’t sure it was real, and his eyes flashed edgily up to her face, to see if she saw it too.
Uncertain now whether to take the plate or the bottle, he went for both, one in each hand. Or rather, he left the plate and took a handful of fruit, turning his fist to drop a piece of cantaloupe in his mouth. He hadn’t tasted fruit for months, and was temporarily devoid of speech.
Traffic was unthinking. She'd been more deliberate with a razor in a motel room, but traffic had been madness, and she hadn't been able to deal in that moment. Shit had gotten better, and it was still better, even with everything going on. And she understood, in this way that went down to bone-white, that she was a lot better off than him, even with the metaphorical expiration date on the milk carton that was her body.
"This thing happened with Micah, and I had a seizure," she said blatantly, without making it soft, though she couldn't remember what he knew about Micah's resurgence and death. "It was the drugs and brain injury, yeah? Neil came to get me, took me to the hospital, and it just got worse and worse while I was there. Now, it's a thing. Yeah, there's medicine, but they're all benzos and shit that I'm addicted to, and the hard stuff makes me hallucinate, and that fucks with me. And the seizures haven't fucking stopped. The doctors just keep hoping, yeah? Stress or whatever makes them happen more often. Piece of shit brain." She finished it off with a smile that was sad, something painted blue or whatever, and she'd brought all this shit on herself with the hard drugs; she knew that.
"That's Rodin. He's a service dog, a seizure dog. They can predict seizures twenty minutes before they happen or whatever. He knows where the meds are and to bring them, and he knows to run and get the neighbor." Fond; she loved the dog.
She plucked another olive into her mouth, and she watched him eat the cantaloupe. "We can take a bath after if you want." Ok, she'd had one. Whatever, she wanted to get him clean and shaved and maybe into her bed where it was warm and fucking safe, and she knew Cris wouldn't be about her getting naked with Daniel in a cramped tub, but it wasn't about sex, yeah?
Daniel had been treading this particular path for a long time. His current state was no surprise to him, and it was only that he seemed to have lost his capacity for surprise and honest terror that disturbed him. It was only the loneliness that did not abate, consistently keen, and it was both waking and sleeping he searched for companionship--the innocent kind, shockingly enough, the kind that was presence and response. He didn’t need people to idolize him, but he wanted them to know him. It was a bizarre desire he still could not reconcile with his personality.
Daniel thought "the thing with Micah" was the first one, the one that still gave him needles of rage way in the back of his mind, and he did not pursue details. "Brain injury," Daniel repeated, blinking rapidly in a way that clearly illustrated his lack of understanding of this incident. He hadn’t known she had a fucking brain injury. People didn’t tell him this shit. (Or maybe he’d been on a binge or something at that time. The past was one long blur. It annoyed him that he couldn’t be angry about it for that reason.) After a moment he said, "This place is good for low stress. It’s pretty."
Daniel chewed on the handful of fruit, eating two at a time and not pausing, but he was clearly thinking as he chewed. He smiled at her, leaning on the counter next to her knee and thigh. It was a tired smile, but true enough, and visible through the short mess of beard. "I smell?"
He'd always liked people, yeah? As much as he avoided them in person, reclusive in old Vegas, he'd talked to them all the time on the journals. He talked less now, and she thought that was a bad sign, but she was looking for bad signs all over lately, and mostly the tells were in the ways people had changed. Before Lin, he'd been locked away, but more functional. Lin had worked, yeah? He'd posted and talked to people, and now she didn't even know what the fuck was up with Lin. Like Lou, who seemed to shatter in the slightest breeze lately, Daniel was more fragile now, and Sam really didn't fucking like it. It was hypocrisy, because she was hanging on by the skin of her teeth herself, and she couldn't think of anyone who was stronger now than they'd been a year or two earlier.
She just let him repeat the words - brain injury - like he was tasting them on his tongue, understanding them as they hung in the air, and she looked around the cramped little space when he said the place was pretty. She smiled, sad and fond, her blue eyes lighting on the small dog for a moment, and then settling on the man at the counter again. "Yeah. I thought so too. IDK anymore." She wasn't sure this was permanent, her coming here, but she didn't have anything that felt like a permanent alternative, either, and it was hard to settle on shit when life was a fucking mess.
He was eating, though, and that brought her stupidly simple pleasure, like it meant he was going to defeat the grave and survive the loss of his liver or something. "I was thinking it was a good excuse to get that fucking beard off your face." Grin, gapped teeth, and she looked a little healthier when she smiled.
Daniel’s brain wasn’t much accustomed to hard thinking these days, and his memory wasn’t dependable either. He couldn’t blame Lin for that, just the numerous dreams that kept blurring his reality and the substances he found more appealing for their false sense of antiquity. Opium didn’t have the same taste as opiates. It disturbed him that the addictions Sam tried to avoid were meant to be prescribed medical solutions. There were supposed to be good drugs and bad drugs… for the first time in years he thought of Susan, not a real woman, but the protagonist of his first novel. He could remember writing that question into her mouth: good drugs, and bad drugs.
The reverie took far too much time, and the extended pause of twenty seconds filled with nothing but a vague gaze and a pause of Daniel’s sticky fingers on the edge of the plate went on for longer than he realized. He blinked when it was over, coming out of the interior of his skull. He plucked at another piece of fruit, slowing now, examining it before swallowing it, and favoring the melons because their sugar grains cooled the back of his tongue. Old annoyance flashed in his face when she shortened words to letters, "I Dee Kay," but he was more interested in the conversation, so he said, "How could you not know? Either it’s pretty, or it’s not."
When she mentioned the beard, he brought his fingers up to scratch at it above the point of his chin. He hated it almost as much as she did. The curls, too, though women liked it when his hair was longer. Interest piqued in the faint color behind the ragged fringe of his lashes. "You got some razors around?" It would have to be plural, probably.
She watched him during that silence, blue eyes curious and concerned, a mix of both sentiments captured in azure, and she wondered what was going on in his head. The hallucination mouths had stopped moving for her, but false-light still trailed across the space, strung like Christmas and illuminating his beard-craggy features as he lost himself in something that didn't include her. She frowned, a piece of sweet ham rolled in her fingers and partway to her lips, and she was hopping off the counter by the time his sticky fingers moved once agains the edge of the cheery plate of tiny bites.
But he ate, and he frowned at her, and she was willing to believe that his displeasure meant he was still himself, yeah? That whatever had eaten him from the inside out, it hadn't touched the asshole she'd come to love in Vegas. And that was easy, yeah? Loving Daniel. Saying she loved Daniel. That was easy. There wasn't any pressure, no expectations, no guidelines in someone else's head that she was expected to follow. She was allowed to just feel what she felt, to do what her heart said to do. She realized, standing in that fucking kitchen, that she wanted that feeling to spread wide, like fucking wings, and engulf her entire fucking life. It was childish, maybe, whatever. But it was what she felt. "It's pretty. But people come all the fucking time, yeah? I got it to hide. to have somewhere to go where I controlled the flow of people, and now people come because they worry about me, and it feels like shit isn't mine anymore." All gut, no logic, and that was a good way to describe the girl that rounded the counter as he scratched at his beard.
"I got razors. Scissors too, if you want me to cut your hair." She tipped her head toward the bathroom. "Scared of me, baby?"
Daniel finished most of Cris’ food, not hindered by the hypocrisy, rolling the cheese into the meat and eating with what was probably unwise speed. Fresh food was extremely difficult to find in his London, everything being either stale or cooked within an inch of its afterlife. The opium dens didn’t offer very much in the way of food, because it was rare any of the customers had an appetite for anything but sweet smoke and an escape. At first, Daniel had frequented the high-class places, clean rugs and fallen gentlemen pretending not to recognize each other in the haze, but he was long past such discerning tastes by this point.
Daniel understood the need to hide, most intimately. He was little able to hide from himself these days, but he could hide from the people who were most able to provide an accurate mirror. He didn’t want to see their reaction to him, and he was downright frightened of Lin’s needy acceptance, the boy’s flippant comments that were poorly designed to hide his fears. Daniel didn’t want to see what Lin thought of him, and if he had to disappoint the boy he wanted to do it where he couldn’t see his face. The avoidance was verging on desperate.
Sam was different. His mouth creased again. "Scared? Of you?" His laugh was almost a growl, no energy and all movement. "No, beautiful." English, very American English. "I’m not scared of you. And I’ve got ten times more practice with a straight razor than you." He forgot what she knew and didn’t know.
Sam had never been particular about her taste in drug dens, even from the beginning. MK had introduced her to parties, yeah? Loud affairs where people pretended the music was the draw, but it had been a quick tumble from that pedestal, and Sam just wasn't concerned with location. The only thing she gave about - and this was new - was the quality of the shit going in her veins. Good dealers, because one really bad ride had started the seizures hard, and it was a challenge to find pure shit on street corners. But she was clean in that moment, standing there, in that space and watching Daniel scarf down another man's food, and that was probably good, yeah? One of them needed to be steadier on their feet, and Daniel had been that for her plenty of times in the past.
But Daniel was stronger, yeah? Hiding from Lin or whatever. Sam, for all her mess, always called the people she loved to her quickest.
She grinned when he laughed, and not because that growl was a good laugh or anything. But it was a laugh, and she was willing to be grateful for the little things. His petname, meaningless and comfortable, made her smile, and she took that straight razor comment in an innocent manner. Shaving, yeah? He meant shaving, and they didn't have BIC where he lived. She walked around him, calloused fingers along his shoulders and encouraging him to follow her. It wasn't a long walk, and it would be easier to get him into bed from the bathroom.
The green, small, kitschy bathroom, and she fished under the sink for a pack of razors. The scissors she set alongside on the counter, and she tugged the curtain aside, ready to run the water if he agreed. She sat on the edge of the tub, and she kicked off her boots and rolled down her socks, watching him carefully the entire time, yeah? "You may be better at it, but do you want me to do it anyway?" she asked. "I could use some distraction, yeah? Painting means my hand is hella steady."
Daniel’s goals had changed. Vegas had been about sensory deprivation. London was about oblivion. The dens were different, the drugs were different, the dreams were different. In Daniel’s mind it was a weakening, not a strengthening. The brief stint in which he had been utterly empty of anything except an immediate, Present Self (courtesy of Lin’s Valentine Present, stick to chocolate next time, sweetheart), that had offered Daniel a very dangerous look into how far away he was from happiness.
He followed Sam, more to make her happy than from any real interest in shaving or bathing. The beard itched, but he’d scrubbed off in Henry’s castle some short time ago (yesterday? the day before?) so he didn’t think he was attracting flies. Drifting after her padded steps, avoiding again the dog that seemed to watch him with such a large, dopey grin whenever he looked down at it, Daniel put his hand along her ribs. He thought she was thin under the t-shirt and hiding it well enough, but at least her eyes were gaining a little more life when she smiled at him. One person he wasn’t actively making miserable.
Daniel closed the toilet lid and sat on it, watching her putter around. He eyed the warm water, not overeager to strip to the skin in front of her because he wasn’t sure how bad off he was under his shirt any more than he knew how bad she was. Maybe it would be a couple horror skeletons and skin getting into the water, which would be terrifying. Like he’d been God’s gift even before his visit to the Opium Eaters’ island. Strange, he hadn’t thought of his own appearance in weeks, months. Not since Venice, and he’d been a different man then.
When she mentioned her steady hand, he immediately pushed his palms together and clung to them with the inside of his knees. Daniel did not have a steady anything. He twitched when the dog looked at him. "Yeah, okay. Close the door, steam will make it easier."
Sam just wanted to be happy. It was a stupidly simplistic goal, and it was one she maybe should have outgrown like ten years earlier, but she wasn't particularly complicated, yeah? She loved a lot of people, and she wanted them to love her, and she wanted them to be happy. Life was full of complicated bullshit, and it all rolled downhill, and that shit happened whether you looked for it or not. So, she lived day-to-day, and she lived for the good moments. That was all she wanted, simplistic or not, and it had been a more pervasive need since her brain had turned on her, dying cells with each seizure and some finite number before she lost herself to the disease.
So, yeah, him laughing, that made her smile. Him willingly walking to the bathroom, which she knew was just to humor her, that made her smile too. Soap and water and a clean face, she knew that wouldn't fix his problems, yeah? She wasn't simple that way, but she knew it felt better, being clean or whatever. She knew that from personal experience, after a binge and when she could smell the smack on her own skin. A shower and clean sheets, that was like fucking Heaven.
She watched his hands disappear between his thighs, and she knew about being ashamed to get naked or whatever. Valentine's Day had taken her scars, but she'd spent years hiding inside shirts with long sleeves.
She closed the door, but she didn't start the water right away. Instead, she moved between his thighs, nudging them apart with insignificant pressure, and she took the scissors and began carefully trimming his beard shorter, because that would make it easier to shave, yeah? "So, I ran into Neil's girlfriend at a bar, and we had a huge fucking fight. She was drunk, and Neil's something like seven years sober, and I told her that going home drunk was messed up. I was fucked up, and she called me a dirty little junkie and said I was stupid, that I only understood shit written in crayons. I tried to leave and she yanked my hair, and I wailed on her." It was the beginning of a story.
Sam’s pursuit of happiness was, perhaps, her foremost charm. There was an innocence about the little blonde that would remain even when she was in seizures, when she was naked, high, shaking with the tremors. It was because she wanted to be happy. Truly, sincerely happy, down to her core, not the trivial kind of happy that would just get her through the day, but the real one. Capital H, bonafide happiness, accept no substitutes.
Daniel perched on the toilet lid and watched her move, leaning back slightly so she could lean closer between his knees in an unmistakable gesture of intimacy that went no further. He didn’t even lift his hands to touch her, even when he had to find somewhere else to put them. He just looked up into her face as she concentrated on his chin, smiling ever so slightly and keeping his spine loose and head still without effort.
"Neil has a girlfriend?" Daniel made it sound like they had just begun talking of a recent toxic waste dump. "That is a fucking miracle. Also that she walked away from this encounter with you." Daniel’s eyes gleamed. You could just see the sliver of silver under the red fall of his lids, not much but there, and he was probably inappropriately proud of whatever damage Sam did to Neil, who could hardly deserve the smallest iota of her attention.
Sam laughed a little when Daniel asked about Neil's girlfriend like that, yeah? Like he'd just smelled something really fucking bad. She kept trimming his beard as his eyes gleamed, and she kind of liked feeding him gossip, yeah? If it made his blue eyes brighten like that, and even if the shit came at a cost to her own whatever. "Her name is Meredith. She was around before, yeah? In love with some serial killer or something."
She trimmed, and then she set aside the scissors and started the water, steam building up around them and the mirror going foggy with it. She had razors and shaving cream, and they were Lou's, yeah? Sam didn't fucking shave. In summer, she trimmed or whatever, but she didn't shave anything. She didn't even think she was bohemian or anything; she just didn't like it, and so she was golden hair where most women shaved or waxed. But Lou was staying, and so she started lathering the now-short beard with cream, her fingers calloused and gentle. "So then there was the dream thing, yeah? And she like assaulted Cris or whatever, raped him, and then tried to scare him into not saying. It fucked him up, and now we all hate Meredith, and Neil is hella upset, because he can't stand conflict." She rinsed her fingers, and she reached for the razor. "Well, she keeps running off and almost getting herself killed, yeah? Because Neil spends too much time with me or something, and Cris fucking hates it too, and Cris was pushing me too hard about a relationship, yeah? He wants to be monogamous, and I'm not ready, and so he freaked me out, and I asked Neil to come fuck, and Cris fucked Ash. Ash is Neil's sister."
Daniel scowled, and then tried not to scowl, so he didn’t get his chin cut off. What, he wondered, was so appealing about serial killers? Were they really that good at pretending not to be serial killers, or was there some sort of draw, a need to love something that could never and would never love you back?
After a moment Daniel reflected that was probably the reason he liked cats.
Idly, he rubbed his fingers on his cheek as she paused to switch scissors for razor, watching with a slowly rising feeling of calm and relaxation. It was like singing into hot water, and hot water, like good shaving cream, was in poor supply in 19th century London. Because he his mouth was caked with cream and she was brandishing the razor, he couldn’t actually ask who the "we" was that all hated Meredith, or how his assault (to his credit, Daniel took that quite seriously) might be related to pushing Sam too hard for a relationship. Daniel had no idea how anyone could look at Sam and think she was ready for a relationship of any kind. Relationships were two-way affairs, building blocks, and people like Daniel and Sam were not equipped to support another person.
Lifting his frosted chin to give the razor access to a somewhat grimy neck, Daniel made a soft musing sound of listening assent as the description of this exotic clusterfuck came out in full color.
She let her story fade, concentrating hard on not cutting him with the blade or whatever, and humming Mimi's aria from La La Bohème. She got him shaved, stretching to rinse the razor a bunch of times, and getting a fresh one mid-way through. Then she wiped his face, and she picked up the scissors again and set to trimming his curls. Not good, yeah? Even though she moved around him, straddled one leg and then the other, to get it all even. But she'd never cut anyone's hair before, and his curls were hella fucking springy, yeah? But it was better when she was done, and she pushed the sink-wetted hair from his clean face and looked at him.
He looked thin, wasted, like he needed someone to fucking help him out of this mess, and she knew she wasn't strong enough for it, not alone. But no fucking way was she letting him walk back into the hole he'd come from. Yeah, she was a mess. She'd bought some product, and she'd stashed it. Her fingers were cold, and her head was heavy, and there were trails around the bathroom, fairy rings in the ceiling and stupid shit that she might paint one day, because people called it surreal on canvases. Fantasy, yeah? Not insanity or whatever.
"I like him a lot, Cris. He's good to me, and the fucking is amazing. I just- I'm fucking him all up, yeah? Emotionally or whatever. And IDK what's up with Neil, and even if I decided I want to do him or whatever, he's still Neil. All the annoying passive shit is still there, and he's never going to leave Meredith. IDK if I even want him to." She cupped Daniel's cheeks, kissed one and then the other, and she opted to wet a washcloth and soap it a little, before turning off the faucet. The tub seemed too dangerous for both of them, now that she was standing there and thinking about getting them both in. "Just wash off, and I'll get you something clean to wear." There were plenty of fucking guy clothes around the place. "I could use a nap. Nap with me, yeah?"
The opera was intensely popular with the wealthy in London, but he didn’t spend his money cleaning up for a box or a bench, captured by his appetites and locked away with them. He remembered that now in a way he had not remembered it on his red carpet in the hazy smoke, and found he still had the ability to regret, even fleetingly. Sam’s humming, no great gift and yet unique and pleasant, reminded him of Christine, a little star of light in a very long shadow of the past. What a wasted opportunity she was.
He rubbed his hand over his newly scraped cheek once the second razor was safely gone, enjoying the strange-familiar feel of the newly raw coolness. She was pretty handy at that, he had to admit, and the sharpness of his jaw and paleness of his lips gave him a newly skull-like impression. The shape of Daniel’s head was more defined with the new lack of messy curls, but God knows what would be living in them after a few months in a London gutter. He shook like an itchy dog, shedding stray curls that had fallen into his collar, and only drove them farther down into his loose shirt.
Daniel was already grumbling disapproval about both Cris and Neil, whom he now disliked for different reasons. Cris for asking too much, and Neil for not asking enough. (Which was he to Lin, he wondered?) He glanced over her shoulder at the bath, which was now considerably less daunting, because he felt more safe and less like raw meat than he had when he first walked in. All sense of vanity had left him, to be replaced with fatigue. A nap seemed wise. Being clean also seemed wise. His stomach was still churning a little, but if he slept, he could probable keep everything down. The bath first, and if he didn’t drown, the nap.
"D’accord," he agreed, smiling at her. The smile was more clear without the beard, a soft, uneven spread of lips into the deepening chinks in his newly hollow cheeks. He wasn’t sure how clean his hands were, but he touched her anyway, under one ear, with the curve of his palm. "For a little while."