Marina Savain prefers (redheels) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-12-22 03:56:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !dc comics, *log, marina savain, russ campbell |
log: marina & russ; christmas wrapping ends badly
Who: Marina & Russ
What: Gift wrapping.
Where: Marina's place in Gotham.
Warnings: Cursing, sad Marina-ness.
He wasn’t in the mood to be summoned. Hell, he wasn’t in the mood for shit but he’d picked up a tree the day after the shit-show of a date and it was sitting in back, green and pine-thick and the smell penetrated even across the hall into the bedroom. Christmas was heading on in like a rush of twinkle-lights and wrapped gifts and he had a couple things already picked up for Nathan: late-night lines in florescent-lit halls behind a line of other weekend-only fathers bleary eyed and smelling of cups of stale coffee.
But he went. Because the kid was six and magic wouldn’t last long, even in a door without the superheroes to take the lion’s share and because he thought about his kid-brother someplace that wasn’t red dust and desert and he thought about Christmas like a candle flame, bright as fuck in Sam’s eyes nearly twenty years after she’d been young enough to believe in it. He went, because the pendulum swing with his ex had stopped spinning in wild, crazy fucking circles and he couldn’t see if it was coming at his fucking head.
He took the bike, a thick rattle-purr through the neighborhood with dusk pressing in damply around him in the smoggy Gotham air. Clear-headed: he wasn’t fucked up and he smelled like the garage, like hot metal and oil and the leather he’d been working with until the text had come through his phone. He knocked instead of opening, a plastic bag crumpled in his hand.
It had been awhile, or it felt like awhile. In Marina's head, which was a blitzkrieg of red wine and purple kush by this point, the world felt like it was on repeat. Break up, make up, tear the stitches out and see the surgeon again. She wasn't trying to fix anything. Marina never broke anything, so what was there to fix? But she'd invited Russ over to wrap presents, and Nathan was spending the night with the Vietnamese twins upstairs that had some video game system he could sync into. The same kind that Russ has gotten Nathan for his birthday, and Marina didn't care. She cared that her little boy had better places to be than with her while she lit candles and colorful lights, but she knew. She remembered being a kid and wanting friends more than Frosty the fucking Snowman, so how could she blame him?
Marina answered the door in a red tank top and jeans. The apartment was overly warm. She was three glasses of wine deep, and it made the soft sand of her skin find a sunset burn in the cheeks. She looked like a good mood, a good time for once. There was silver tinsel draped around her neck like a scarf, and if it itched her, she didn't show it. She was without shoes because she was home, and in the back of the apartment, it smelled like mocha. Chocolate and coffee and patchouli candles. A weird cocktail, the kind that curled the hairs of your nose if you weren't used to it.
"Wasn't sure you were gonna come," Her hip slanted into the doorframe, dragged by the weight of wine and her smile was leonine. Friendly, which was probably suspicious.
"We might run out of fucking tape," she said with a shoulder-dip gesture to the living room. On the couch was a plethora of toys, a few hundred dollars worth of a Toys R Us splurge. Some red and green wrapping paper was rolled out across the carpet, torn. She'd obviously forgone scissors in the name of tearing by hand. But what the hell, it was Christmas. Her windows were circled by whitegold and technicolor, there was a wreath above the TV. The tree in the corner was real and reeked of pine. It had some baubles on it, but mostly more of the tinsel that was similarly draped around Marina's doe skin shoulders.
"Come in," and she reached for him. A little sloppy, way too friendly unless she was hiding a knife behind her back.
He’d been stood on the edge of a knife-edge too long to see warm and not look for the burn to clamp a hand around and sear himself back into remembered danger. The heat bellied out from the door into the hall in gusts of sweet-scented air that dragged memory way on back to candles that were never blown out until they subsided into a puddle of molten wax. He looked past her shoulder at the windblown Christmas within, the pine smell thick and heavy beneath patchouli and chocolate. And if he’d been thinking about a Christmas that would strike a light in Nathan’s face, then his hand in the game was weak because this shit was a full-house: everything that could be crammed in for the holiday was under the roof.
Yeah, friendly was suspicious, it was like a lion purring and shoving itself up against you and the flash of teeth in the curl of its yawn just made you remember the thing could eat you. Russ shrugged off his jacket as the heat wove itself uncomfortably under his flannel shirt collar and came past her into the apartment itself. The pendulum had started swinging again, all the fuck over, and he didn’t know if it was the glass of wine sat on the table or the tinsel but it was that knife-blade winking in twinkle-lights.
“Came for the kid,” he said without venom or censure: it was factual and he said it that way, looking at the devastation of a toy-store exploded over the couch. The plastic bag at his side rumpled, and how the fuck were the contents going to stand the hell up to a spree in multi-colored plastic that lit up and made noise? “You hit a toy store?” he said, disbelieving, and his toe nudged the wrapping paper until it bounced, rolling out in a stretch of red-and-green.
"Yeah, don't I fuckin' know." Everything was about the kid when Russ came around, but Marina supposed in some way that maybe it was better than Russ not coming around at all. Maybe fucking not, she couldn't decide. It wasn't that she missed the days when he would knock on her door with a twelve pack at four in the morning, but at least that had been about her. At least that had been about wanting to see her. Now it was about the kid. The kid who had a name, Nathan. Her kid. She didn't have an issue with Russ blowing money on Nathan, but now that he'd claimed fatherhood, it was like she was getting all scratchy. Shit, maybe that was the tinsel. She shrugged a bit of silver off of her shoulder and gestured her babydaddy into the living room where the toy store cyclone was laid out on the couch in the form of electronic trucks and things that lit up or plugged in. All kinds of shit that Marina didn't understand, but went with because they seemed mostly sold out on the shelves at the time. When she'd been six, her father gave her a raw sapphire for Christmas. Nathan wasn't about that, so she felt almost as lost as Russ did even if she'd never cop to it. Hence the wine. An unopen bottle sat on the coffee table next to a teacup, corkscrew by its side when she gestured to it for him. "Its nice, you can have a glass." Teacup, glass, whatever.
She heard the disbelief in Russ' voice when he noted the toys, and Marina shrugged as she settled onto the carpet beside the paper. "Came into some luck. Most of it is going to say From Santa anyway, so don't go feeling insecure." The wrapping paper rumpled, crumbled under her heels. On the television, Judy Garland was singing some muted color memory about having one's self a merry little Christmas.
Russ knew Marina made her own luck as often as it spun itself into a yellow-brick-road in front of her all by itself. She’d leaned over plenty of card-tables or fucked up pool-games when there’d been cash riding on the outcome and he didn’t think Lady Luck fucked around with toy stores and cash. Russ thought like a mechanic: through each individual rivulet and bend but in their proximity to the whole. He hadn’t wondered where Marina got money for the rent from or how she put food on the table: part of his pay-check slid like magic across the capital-S-system until it hit hers and Marina had managed to spin money out of nothing like it was straw into gold the entire time he’d known her. Now he wondered. This shit was Gotham: money here was stained and crumpled and smelled heavily like rust and copper.
He didn’t sit but he stood and regarded the chaos the same way a man wandering into a labyrinth might hold tight to a piece of fucking string, because this place looked and smelled like old days and the old days were a pack of marked cards: you lost every time you took a gamble on them. He didn’t know Christmas any way outside of movies on TV but the kid looked to have more than enough of a magic-show here to want one at Russ’s place where the rooms were smaller and the tree less tall and the magic came from Walmart strings of lights. Yeah, it wasn’t the presents alone but it made him feel small and Russ shook his head to the teacup-wine like a jade waving a hand to a shill with snake-oil.
“I’m good.” He picked his way through some of the toys, shoved a realm of plastic back and cleared himself a spot on the couch with the detritus of the shopping spree a wave right up to his thigh. Yeah, the games in the bag against his knee looked pretty fucking dumb and the kid was six: plastic everywhere that light up and made noise, the tool-box he’d picked out that was still sitting at home (because some shit was too fucking raw to haul on over and have Marina toss it up and down like knucklebones) was a stupid idea. He was momentarily glad he’d left it behind and irked that he hadn’t thought along the same lines of plastic and noise.
“My shit ain’t gonna take that long.” Eyeing the tsunami of presents.
"Have a fucking drink," she said with scold. Like who was judging him, who was he reporting to? The candles in the kitchen were burning down to herbal wicks and she had tinsel wrapped tight like clothing, come on? Marina leaned to snatch a plastic package of racecars from the foot of the couch, and she started folding it into a torn square piece of wrapping paper as she listened to Judy and ignored his mood. Thats what she took him for, a constant mood. If Russ wasn't smiling, it was a mood.
"If you didn't want to come, you didn't have to." She tore at one of the last strands of tape with her teeth, finished the thing off with a silver bow that stuck and slid it across the ornate carpet so that the present settled somewhere beneath the tree among a couple others. She was quiet in the following moments, shifting onto bluejean knees and splashing part of the one open bottle(which was nearing bottom) into her own mug.
She didn't say anything, she didn't say anything, she did. Harem gold eyes tilted, she looked at Russ with a chin tilted North like the Pole of Santa miracles. That direction, eyes hooded and speculating. "You came here to wrap some presents and not talk, is that it?"
No, he didn’t want a drink. Russ drank whiskey on a good day and beer every other, and the tannin-dark wine was Marina’s thing, not his. He hadn’t drunk anything in a week that hadn’t been two beers in a Vietnamese place and he wasn’t going to start when the clock was twitching backward like Christmas spun out of the hotel. “I don’t want a fucking drink,” he said without heat, and the warmth of the room was heavy, the scent rich. He’d evened the fuck out after the series of aborted phone-calls home, but Marina was catch-22: a fight or the anticipation of one and he wasn’t geared up to strike a light.
“You asked me here to wrap presents, yeah?” His chin notched upward, his blue eyes unambiguously Campbell-clear and he looked around the room deliberately, because that glint of gold was like tinsel on the tree and he didn’t know what the fuck she wanted except that whatever it was, she wasn’t happy. “Or something the fuck else?”
She read him. A little bit drunk, and she still read him like a book of venom. Okay, cool, wind down like a toy tuning its way to the last notes. Music box ballerina going slow, she slumped, her spine laid flat, she kicked the tape away somewhere near her ankle. She laid out on carpet and folded her hands and she watched Judy. His questions made her smile, questions like he wanted to be angry but wasn't and couldn't guess why he wasn't, and something fucking else? "Pa fè sa," she told him. Wine heady and cat content. "Nah," English.
"Wrap your presents, okay?" A brief twist, ribs popping like the rungs of ladders underneath the cotton of her tank when she looked at him. Her hair was curly, kinked and not frothy, which meant it was dirty. A day old wash that spiraled, and she considered him as the movie played on. Did he want to fight? She was too buzzed, she was in too much of a good mood. Sure, she could get there, but she didn't want to, and Marina didn't do anything that she didn't want to do. Her bare heels scrunched at the wrapping paper on the floor as it settled under her calves, her jeaned thighs. If he wanted paper, he'd have to pry it from beneath her, possessive.
"Tell me a story," she demanded while reaching admirably for the cigarettes on the edge of the coffee table. She coudn't quite reach them, but she tried still. Judy was boring her. Russ wasn't Shane, and he wouldn't tell her a story that made her cheer up… but hey, she wasn't in a bad mood, maybe she needed a story to set her off in a worse way.
He’d seen her indolent before, the cat stretched out in sunshine to warm its fur and the mellow of wine and food and fucking until the electricity turned itself down to a dry static hum. Some day, out the fucking past before there was a kid (Russ thought) in the next room asleep and Christmas cluttering the living-room. But the old gut-lurch didn’t kick up, the engine was dead. No, he didn’t want to fight: he didn’t want shit other than Nathan’s smile lit up like the tree. She stretched the fuck out over the paper until even a hint of red and green were crescents under her hips, divots punched into the paper in her outline like a snow-angel in some place where the snow came down other than piss-yellow from smog.
“You’re on the fucking paper,” he told her, and he didn’t reach. He sat, with the plastic bag crumpled at his knee and he waited and he reached just enough to knock the cigarettes off the table into the stretch of her fingers but he held himself clear. Tell me a story and now he stared, the notch of his eyebrows drawn together.
“What the fuck?” No, he wasn’t Shane. And he wasn’t thrust backward into time: good grace had been burned the hell down and pissed on and he mistrusted the stretch of hip and waist the same way he knew she wanted to be looked at. Russ had never told stories in the dead of night, whispered words and promises. He knew good moods that flickered and spiraled like candle-flames in open drafts but he’d never coaxed them out with fairy-tales. Now he stared at her. Her good mood spilled cold water down the back of his neck: there were scars on his wrists from the lion’s snapped teeth.
"I know," she said of being on the paper. Blatant. She wasn't wasted and she wasn't ignorant, she was on the fucking paper, didn't he get it yet? Didn't he get the tinsel draped around her neck? Didn't he get the shrine of her golden body on all that crumpled green? If he squinted his eyes just right, didn't it look like she was lying on a bed of money? Rich, honey. They were millionaires if just for pretend. Who didn't like a game of pretend? Didn't he want -- oh, cigarettes, speaking of want.
Maybe Marina was a little more tipsy than originally thought, because rather than demanding he play house or get out, she collected the pack when it hit the carpet. First prize collection, just what she always wanted. Her wants were immediate, satisfied, and cases were so quick to close. Here. Now. Yes. The cardboard case of cigarettes rattled half full, and she fished a lighter out of her pocket like magic- tada! Deep inhale, embers and smolders and a narrowing of the eyes against those first curls of smoke. She fanned them away from her face.
"Tell me your favorite thing about me, your favorite memory." This time it wasn't a question, and she lifted a bare foot to kick the television into silence. It took a couple jabs of her toes, but she got it, and when she puffed again, she shifted, ashing into her wine coffee mug like there weren't pricey dregs still swirling in the bottom hoping for consumption.
"Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine."
Causation racked up debts along correlation. The pendulum swung out in circles, spinning without gravitational pull. Yeah, he’d figured this show was all for the audience, that the stretch-lean twist of sinew was about display instead of some fuck of a mood that wanted to make wrapping more difficult. What Russ didn’t understand was when the goal-posts had nudged further apart until he couldn’t see the red lines drawn, scuffed out in sand. Why: and he was stone-cold sober, even with sweat beading up in all that hot-house heat. Why rattled like dice inside his head and he couldn’t figure out point A to point B with Marina even with a user’s guide.
“The fuck,” as she hipped across paper to reach the TV and Judy slid into black silence. His favorite things weren’t a list to recite on the back of his tongue and when he looked at her twined on the floor around tinsel like some kind of Christmas gift that had gotten re-addressed in the mail, he wasn’t indolent and sleepy, memory didn’t conjure up a phantasm from Christmas-past.
He stood, the toys scattering from the couch like a quilt. “I’m not doing this.” This was honey swirled around incense, the flies caught in amber. It had been too long, too many fights and a little kid with bright eyes and a cloud of dark hair and he hadn’t lost himself at the bottom of something that made a bad idea seem like Christmas-come-early. “I’ll pick the kid up Sunday.”
She sat up, elbows on carpet until she was upright and no, she wasn't fucked up enough to ignore the way he looked past her. Judy was gone, and her cigarette was lit, and Marina edged off of the paper with an audible crinkle like a wound could be heard out loud. "Wrap your fucking presents," she said.
She moved toward the dining room table with what was left of the bottle of wine already open. I'm not doing this. The garland was shrugged, left on the carpet by the crumpled paper as she sat in a chair. "Do your thing." Since he wanted to do it in silence. She drew hard on her cigarette, and she swigged down the rest of the taste. Marina watched, and her chin tipped into the cusp of her palm while the quiet apartment settled around them.
"Do you," she said in the demand of a voice low. All she felt in this place was emptiness without Nathan, and she watched Russ like instance. Just do it. Don't leave her with nothing again.
The air was acrid-dry with the heat still high and the curls of smoke added to the gloom. It felt like a stage-set, something from Leave it to fucking Beaver, with the mom with gin poured into her tea and the father fucked off with his secretary. It felt like a shirt that didn’t fit and he didn’t know what the fuck she wanted except that something had changed in the space between one phone-call and the next and happy families wasn’t a game he felt like playing.
Nah, fuck the tree and the Judy-silence and the lurking sense that whatever role he’d been handed when he walked in the room, he’d gone off script. Russ didn’t sit, and he didn’t reach for paper. “I’ll do my thing home,” he said and Marina’s demands slid like water over oil. Yeah, he was anticipating the next fucking fight and he was tired of anger that flared like tinder. This, whatever this was, was the start of some shit and he wanted it dowsed the fuck out.
“I’m going.” He paused, at the doorway, and he looked back, the curled-up shape of her in the chair and the cigarette curling wisps of smoke into all that Christmas technicolor. “Have a good one, yeah?” Awkward, but there wasn’t shit all else to say and the scene laid out didn’t have an easy answer.
His vanishing act was a familiar one Marina stumbled in the process of jabbing her cigarette to its filtered death in a shallow, coffee up swill basin of wine. Have a good one? She was hyena laughter at his back although he was already gone, and when she jerked the front door open, Marina didn't see him at all, but she still flung the wine bottle. The almost-empty before it was closest to her when she'd risen in phoenix rage. Red swirl spiraled out of its open top like bloodspray and it painted part of a wall, part of the carpet, shattered on a door jamb. But Russ was gone.
Have a good one. And her laughter was more of a scream when she shouted down the stairs after him, "FUCK YOUR FUCKING GOOD ONES!" Front door slammed and latched. She kicked Judy back onto the screen in passing, but didn't make it much further than that when she curled up on the floor. Crumpled paper and sticky bows, tinsel shredding from too much handling. Marina curled up in the empty house, shit even Judy was crying on TV now. Was nothing sacred anymore? She huffed, elbows in tight, and with a tongue out, she looked upon her Christmas tree with the heartbroken irrationality of a woman who might just burn down all of the things she loved.