InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "You didn't return them?"

likewisconsin (likewisconsin) wrote in snyderville,
@ 2009-11-30 23:33:00

Entry tags:

absalom cooper, madison avery

Who: Cooper and Maddy
What: ~~Wizard angst~~ General distress
Where: Out of doors
When: Sunday evening, post Chase-Escape, pre-Chase-Escape-Discovery
Rating: PG-13
Status: Complete

Madison was attracting attention, and it was decidedly not the good kind. It should've been suspicious that she just strolled out of the warm safety of the prison as the evening cold was setting in, but apparently the guards only took notice if someone barreled towards the gates, flailing wildly.

She didn't need to flail. Pulling a scoped rifle clean from one man's hands and promptly telling him to "fuck yourself into the next fucking zombie apocalypse" did the trick, and pointing the loaded weapon cleared the guards out of sight.

Since then, she'd ignored a few inquiring spectators, not at all interested in their thoughts. Some part of her was smart enough to avoid actually leaving the prison, wandering off at night to blow off some steam, but that didn't mean she was sitting in the grass, picking fucking flowers.

Shooting down zombies in the distance seemed a much better use of both her time and her current weapon. Maddy just so happened to be ignoring how her aim was off. Nobody was around to notice, so what did she care if it took three bullets to bring down a single walking corpse when normally it would've taken one? She was fine. Fucking peachy.

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coopjustcoop
2009-12-01 10:25 pm UTC (link)

Cooper was not in charge of the prison. That was Cincinnati Slim's job, and Coop liked it that way. He wasn't in charge of much of anything nowadays. He took his turn at guarding the gates along with the other surviving police officers and prison trusties, and that was pretty much the extent of his official duties.

Tonight, of course, just had to be different. Tonight when he showed up at the prison gates there were disgruntled mutterings of discontent--rumblings and grumblings that threatened to disturb the fragile peace of the Compton County lock-up. Cooper reckoned Flamingo Girl was just venting her ire on the local zombie population, but by the sound of things he reluctantly concluded that somebody ought to keep an eye on the situation, just in case. That somebody being one Absalom J. Cooper.

Well, he couldn't very well leave it up to the fellow she'd disarmed and told to perform an unnatural sex act... On either himself, or a zombie, or maybe both. Witness reports had varied, but the reaction had been uniformly indignant. Coop sent the complainants off to cool down and ambled over to where Madison was blasting away at a small horde of the undead.

"Nice night for it," he commented blandly. Coop raised his own rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and took a potshot at one of the zombies. Hey, there were plenty to go around.

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likewisconsin
2009-12-01 11:29 pm UTC (link)

Why men thought an upset woman would be willing to share her zombie horde just proved the true distance between the two sexes.

"That's cute," she said, firing and missing before she turned her fiery gaze on Cooper. "Just stroll up and start doing what you want like you have all the rights in the world. Well here's a strange concept! You don't. You have absolutely no right to just walk over here and start laying claim on things that don't belong to you! You're...do you have any fucking idea how presumptuous and rude and chauvinistic that is? I don't need you or your...your fucking help or your approval!"

Now, there was a very good chance that Cooper was hearing a tirade that wasn't aimed properly. Maddy's aim was off, after all. No matter how inbred one could call Snyderville, Cooper wasn't close enough genetically to have earned her current hatred. But he was available and besides, as her rant progressed, her voice dipped with emotion and it was pretty damn obvious that anger wasn't the real fuel behind her shooting spree. She was admitting to nothing, but sometimes even the most emotionally guarded individual couldn't keep everything locked up.

She dropped the gun, which alone was pretty damn uncharacteristic, and turned her back to Cooper. "Go away," Maddy quietly requested, arms wrapped around herself in an alleged act of comfort that really wasn't helping at the moment.

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coopjustcoop
2009-12-02 01:10 am UTC (link)

He couldn't say that her reaction was unexpected. Approach an irate woman and you were likely to get your head bitten off. That wasn't to say that he appreciated the rant. Chauvinistic? Him? Now that was just plain unfair. Didn't he always let Madison have her fair share of the zombies? And the loot? And hell, he'd even let her drive his damn truck!

Any ire that might have been directed Flamingo Girl's way was transferred the instant her voice started to wobble. Somebody had hurt her. Cooper didn't really want to think about what it would take to crack a tough nut like Madison. He clamped down hard on the immediate urge to interrogate her: what happened? Who did this to you?

Instead he took a deep breath and set his gun down, flexing fingers that wanted to ball into fists.

"I do apologize. We always shared 'em before, so..." he let the excuse trail off into silence. Wasn't like she was really upset about the zombie he'd shot.

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likewisconsin
2009-12-02 03:18 am UTC (link)

"So that's permission forever? Really? Because it's not! I don't give a damn what you think. That's not the kind of person I am," she snapped, though it was feeble in comparison to her typical tongue lashings.

Points to Cooper, though. It was pretty impressive how he kept turning into just the right person for Madison to attack. Daddy, past love interests. The man was on a roll. Next he'd be turning into a greasy trucker who thought her ass was fair game for grabbing.

She shook her head, frustrated enough, even if it was unconsciously acknowledged, to turn back to this innocent bystander of a man despite the moist glint tracing the lower half of her eyes. Madison didn't cry, she didn't get hurt, and she didn't have daddy issues. It was that simple, which translated to it really being too complicated for her to handle.

"You're as bad as he is," she said, falling into a more comfortable role of instigator. Cooper didn't need to know who she was referring to. Maddy was just hoping he'd ignore the wet eyes and the wobbly voice and view her assault as a reason to snap back. She shoved him for good measure.

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coopjustcoop
2009-12-03 01:32 am UTC (link)

Cooper wasn't entirely unfamiliar with this kind of conversation. He'd been married twice, and he'd raised a daughter. Let's just say this wasn't the first time he'd been called a bad, bad man.

He was innocent of the accusations Madison was tossing his way. Heck, he wasn't even the guy she was accusing. Baffling and illogical as it was, he could acknowledge his role as a stand-in for the real bad man. Coop tried to tell himself that knowing what was really going on here should make it easier for him to be patient. Instead, he found his temper heating up to match hers.

Then Flamingo Girl pushed him, and though the physical effect was negligible, she managed to hit plenty of emotional buttons.

"Oh I am, am I? And just who is he?" He would never sink so low as to push back, but he wasn't above a little looming.

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likewisconsin
2009-12-03 02:38 am UTC (link)

Cooper played the tall card.

Naturally, Madison reacted by throwing a punch, her aim still leaving something to be desired, but at least she clipped his jaw. That little victory made her happy. For a second, anyway.

"That's none of your fucking business," she told him through her teeth, which further featured her rather illogical approach to this whole emotional crisis. Maddy had just brought the subject up, so punching Cooper for asking for more details wasn't fair. But those dots weren't connecting. They weren't even talking to one another.

Now her cheeks were wet. Because it didn't exactly look like rain, she decided it was best to storm away from Cooper. Quickly. Maybe he'd stay stunned long enough for her to find somewhere to hide. And dry her eyes.

Right. Real fucking likely.

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coopjustcoop
2009-12-03 04:06 am UTC (link)

You know, one of these times she was going to hit him, and he was going to hit back.

It would never happen, but it was extremely satisfying to imagine, if only for a brief instant. He rubbed his jaw.

"I think it is my gol-darned business, if you're going to go around making comparisons," Cooper argued, and instantly berated himself for it. Madison had hauled out her own infuriating variation on the classic 'if you don't know why I'm angry, I'm not going to tell you!' Attempting reason at this point was an exercise in futility if ever there ever was one.

He'd just made up his mind to back off and leave her to cool down on her own when Madison bolted... Right for the prison gates and the waiting horde.

"You better not make me come out there after you," he yelled. The 'young lady' portion of the threat was heavily implied.

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likewisconsin
2009-12-03 11:40 pm UTC (link)

Madison probably needed a good whack to the mouth. Guys really did get what they had coming to them a lot easier than girls. Well, not Cooper, since he didn't deserve anything, but Maddy was stubbornly ignoring any and all footnotes to the conversation.

To say that, on a good day, Maddy was logical was really stretching the truth. She had her share of quirks and ridiculous attributes, many of them making her a hard chick to handle. But, really, she wasn't a moron and, on some yet-to-be-specified good day, she would never willingly march herself out towards a horde without a weapon. With one, sure, but not without.

This was not a good day. The dollar store logic she normally employed was nowhere to be seen. She gave Cooper the finger when he went on about comparisons, and then he shouted some more.

"Or WHAT?!" she yelled back at him, spinning to face Cooper without actually halting her moronic mission toward the prison gate. "You'll drag me back in there? Arrest me? Do you honestly think you can pull out some threat that will be worse than all this...fucking..." More voice wobbling. Maybe some weak sibling of a sob. When her back hit chain-link, Maddy closed her eyes and just shut up.

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coopjustcoop
2009-12-04 01:09 am UTC (link)

"You ain't got a gun," Cooper pointed out, advancing as Madison retreated. She'd lost her usual ability to aim, too, which was even more worrisome, but he didn't say that part out loud.

It rankled that she was taking his honest concern for her safety and twisting it into some kind of power struggle. Truth be told, he was getting a mite tired of her forcing him into the bad guy role. He wasn't her enemy. Truth be told, he liked Flamingo Girl. Sort of. He liked to think they had a good working relationship.

She'd backed herself up to the gates. Cooper didn't waste time on any more chit-chat. He strode up to Madison, wrapped both arms around her, swung her away from the all-too-permeable-to-zombie-teeth-and-claws chain link, and braced for the inevitable struggle. He didn't want to drag Flamingo Girl back into the jail, but that was starting to look like a distinct possibility.

"And I don't make threats," he grumbled for good measure.

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likewisconsin
2009-12-04 02:05 am UTC (link)

Maddy was out of angry pissy girl steam. All that she honestly had left was emotional whiplash and she really was not the kind of person to know what to do with that stuff. Anger was as comfortable as a gun in her hands, but what, was she supposed to weep menacingly in Cooper's general direction? Come on.

If he was expecting a struggle, Cooper was going to be disappointed. She was done. Spent. Drained. He wrapped her up and moved her from the fence and Maddy leaned into him in response.

"Shut up," she threatened, but it was feeble at best and she was too busy curling her hands in the fabric of his jacket to manage a good finger pointing to drive home her sentiments. Sadly, her message of This did not happen wasn't being properly communicated just yet.

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coopjustcoop
2009-12-04 11:01 pm UTC (link)

It was a relief when the fight went out of her, and easy enough to shut up as requested. Cooper reckoned anything he might say would only set Madison off again anyway. Give him a three-hundred pound biker on crystal meth any day of the week! At least the hypothetical biker didn't bring along a lifetime's worth of emotional baggage to clutter up the situation.

That a few of those suitcases might possibly belong to Cooper himself went completely unacknowledged.

It was easy enough to just give Madison a hug, no judgments or strings attached. Everyone could use a hug now and then. Heck, even he could use a hug now and then... And they could follow that up by pretending such a moment had never happened.

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