kellan ziegmann/dean winchester (crossroaded) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-03-23 08:38:00 |
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Entry tags: | dean winchester, sansa stark |
Who: Maren and Kellan
What: Drinking. Talking.
Where: A dive bar on the Vegas limits
When: Recently-ish.
Warnings/Rating: None.
With the heat still rising off the ashpalt black of the roads and the moon vague and hazy in a smoke-stained sky, Kellan made his way into the cool relief of the air-conditioned bar and sighed. Cigarette smoke, stale beer, cheap food deep fried to someone’s idea of perfection … the smells weren’t as strong as they used to be, but they were still there, and it put him almost immediately at ease. A quick glance around the room told him that Maren hadn’t arrived yet, but he was early. He paused at the bar to grab a beer before finding a relatively clean table and sitting down. It was still early enough that the Vegas crowds hadn’t quite reached these dive bars yet; they were busy getting smashed in the glittering lights of the strip’s many opportunities. Later on they’d crowd in here as the closing times started to force them further and further from their starting locations. For the moment, he could drink in peace, if not quiet.
It had been some time since he’d been to Vegas, and the last time he’d stopped here, he’d taken out a fledgling casino at another casino owner’s whim. Competition was a bad thing when space was limited. While all the major places seemed to have reached some sort of tenuous peace with each other, like feudal lords trying to avoid a total massacre of the country, upstarts weren’t tolerated. Usually they were bought out or went broke. Apparently that last time hadn’t quite been the case, and so he’d been asked to do a little work for a very nice paycheck and a few free drinks at the open bar.
And I bet only a couple people died in that? said a voice in the back of his head. You know, just one or two. Maybe three. Four tops. It was a good day for you, huh.
“Yes it was,” Kellan said under his breath. “Nobody died, jackass, so shut up and let me drink.” Right. No evening could be really decent these days. There always had to be something to make it suck, like a whiny brat complaining about his work nonstop. So much for peace.
Maren liked getting away from the strip. The sometimes-fairytale had turned into anything but with the advent of Theodore Winters and her past converging on the solitary highway in the desert, her past come calling; she didn’t intend to be home if it came calling again. The RV would be impossible to move, but she’d do it if she had to. She was hoping, however, that her family would stay away, as they’d done for nearly half a decade. She wasn’t easy to talk to, and they were so swathed in guilt that they couldn’t even see her through the morass. No, she was counting on them staying away. She was counting on being able to keep her home. But jobs on the strip were out of the question right now. Kel was a job and, really, he was someone she liked. He’d always reminded her of someone from an old western, graying hair at his temples and that smile that said he didn’t stay in anyone’s bed come sunrise. Maren, like most youthful readers, had a propensity for the rake archetype.
The bar was a dive. It’s location, close to the most popular brothel in the area, meant it was filled with a lot of men trying to work up the courage to pay for sex, with a lot of men stopping for a drink on the way home to the missus after visiting one of Sherri’s girls. Maren didn’t mind them. In fact, she liked how they looked at her. She could pretend she was Belle walking through a French village, and that their looks meant they thought she was beautiful - which their looks didn’t mean at all.
She spotted him at the table almost immediately, and she wound her way through the press of bodies to join him. She slid into the booth across from him, her long, white sundress covering her flip flop feet and pink toe nails as she propped them beside his chair. “Kel,” she said, dark hair loose and eyes sober. Even with the dress and the long, loose hair, she looked like she’d lived a hard life, she looked capable, and she waved over the waitress and asked for a rum and coke, extra cherries please (ID provided, and finally not a fake one since she’d just turned 21). “He giving you trouble?” she asked of whoever he was talking to. She assumed it was his “fiction,” as she liked to call them. “Mine thinks this place is terrifying.”
Maren was delicate and pale and weathered and so unlike any criminal most people had ever known, and that worked to her advantage nine times out of ten. A delicate girl, even if she looked like life hadn’t been all that kind to her, wouldn’t be questioned so hard or brought in unless there was hard evidence. She was good for distractions and false witnessing, something Kellan legitimately appreciated. Their last run-in had done wonders keeping the cops off his trail, and she was a relatively decent person. He didn’t mind her.
“Huh?” Her question caught him a little off-guard, but he recovered quickly with a shrug. “Not really trouble. He’s just a smartass.” Almost too much of one, even for Kellan, who had a smartass streak himself. “Doesn’t like me or what I do. Likes Vegas, though.” He took a long sip of his beer and glanced at Maren. “Terrifying, huh. I know worse places. Yours got a name? Mine’s Dean, apparently.”
And Dean was quiet, probably judging them both. Kellan ignored the grudging silence and drank in what few minutes, or seconds, of peace he might have before there was another “cutting” remark.
She flipped the sandals off her feet, and curled her toes around the seat edge of his side of the sticky booth. “You aren’t the kind to mind smart asses,” she said, because despite limited interaction with Kellan in the past, she knew he could joke as well as the rest of them. He wasn’t one of those straight laced, serious criminals, not Kel. Her drink came, and she sucked the cherry between her lips, spinning the stem as she listened to him tell her about his Dean. “Book, or movie, or television?” she asked, because that would help her narrow down the moralistic smart ass in Kellan’s mind. How many of those could there really be? It was a unique combination.
“Can I trust you?” she asked, but she followed the question with a smile and the procurement of another cherry from her drink. If there was honor among thieves, she hadn’t found it yet. But no one in her family was likely to talk to Kellan, and if they did he wouldn’t tell on her, not unless there was money on the table. “I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone. She wants to stay away from her door, and she thinks her family will make her go through.” She made a motion with both of her hands, indicating someone ushering another person through a door, and she tied the cherry stem with her teeth before continuing. “Sansa Stark, from that book series that no one finishes because it’s too long. It’s a television show now too,” she said, not actually expecting Kellan to recognize any of those things. “She’s a teenager, her father was just beheaded in front of her, and she’s being held captive by a villain who shows no signs of turning into a beautiful prince if she wakes him from his curse with true love’s kiss.” Her expression went a little sad then. “She thought she loved him. She’s kind of sad actually.”
“Book, movie, or what?” Kellan fell silent as Maren talked about the voice in her head being a girl from a book, someone she could actually recognize and thus learn about. It changed things significantly for Kellan in that moment, and made Dean’s sullen silence freeze momentarily. For the moment, he just sipped at his beer and listened to her speak. A book and a TV show … the word ‘beheaded’ made him think it was probably something fantasy. The idea of a sad romance just made him snort.
Well, he didn’t recognize the name, so this Sansa Stark was safe from him pushing her through the door. With a slight shrug, Kellan leaned back, reached into his jacket pocket, and produced a pack of cigarettes and a tarnished silver lighter.
“That’s how it goes, usually. Romance ends in shit or flowers. Though I’m not speaking from experience.” He lit up in a smooth motion, eyes momentarily shut as he inhaled the smoke. “You probably can’t trust me, but I can say that I’m probably not going to be causing her any problems. Have you gone to look at that hotel yet?” Kellan had, but only briefly; that there had been lights on at three in the morning when the entire place was abandoned weirded him out just enough to make him glance around the first floor before sidling out to continue scoping out a few possible targets.
“What’s his full name?” Maren asked of Dean, thinking it was probably easier to find him that way than anything else. “Everyone is a fiction, from some book or movie or television show. At first, I thought they were only books, and I thought I’d finally read myself insane,” she admitted, which wouldn’t have been surprising. Maren spent an inordinate amount of time in her own head, in daydreams about being a fictional character. If she was going to lose it, that would be the most likely way, and she was certainly pleased to learn that was not the case. His snort made her grin, and she nudged his thigh with her bare foot. “You might have someone caught up in a whirlwind romance in your mind. I wouldn’t snort until you were sure that wasn’t the case,” she said.
She reached across the table and took the tarnished lighter once he was done it, the familiarity one of her odd quirks, along with a lack of respect for personal space. She flicked it, and she dragged one of her fingers over the flame. “I looked at the outside,” she said of the hotel. “I haven’t gone inside. I was afraid I’d get sucked in or something,” she admitted, “and I’m reluctant to that when I’ve promised her she doesn’t need to go in. Anyway, there’s like a dozen Starks running around, all acting like being related in people’s minds means we’re all supposed to love one another out here. I don’t trust anyone that much,” she admitted candidly, much like his own confession about not being trustworthy.
“It doesn’t really pull you in. Not physically.” Just … depending on how curious you were, on how much you wanted to know what was in there, you wound up wandering further and further in. Kellan had gone up one flight of stairs before changing his mind. There’d been so many doors that he knew he’d have gotten lost if he tried going very far. “You’re probably better off avoiding it if your girl doesn’t want to go in.”
Which was the opposite of Dean, really, who was used to haunted shit. The hotel was creepy, they could agree on that much, but that just meant it was promising by Dean’s standards. Plus he wanted to see if there was a door there they could go through. Why else would they have a key? Unless there was a copy of the Impala somewhere around here, and Kellan thought he would have noticed if a car had spontaneously appeared anywhere near him.
Kellan watched as Maren played with his lighter, eyes fixed on the flame as cigarette smoke drifted up between them.
“Everyone, huh.” The name didn’t strike any chords with him. “If you’re sure about that - he says his name is Dean Winchester. He’d prefer I didn’t tell you. He’s a smartass, like I said, with a moral streak and he’s in love with his car.”
I am not in love with my car.
Maren looked up from the lighter when he explained the physics of the hotel. She didn’t want to wander further and further into anything, and she thought he was right about it being better to avoid it altogether. She was curious about the other doors, though, which made it difficult. As a child, she’d lost herself for books in hours, and now the possibility existed of losing herself in a three-dimensional version of her most loved worlds. She wasn’t worried about Sansa’s need to go into the hotel; she was worried about herself. Maybe if she just didn’t tell anyone else, though, the compulsion wouldn’t be as strong, maybe then she could resist it.
Dean Winchester. The name didn’t ring any bells for Maren, and (thankfully) Sansa didn’t know him either, which meant he wasn’t another person from A Song of Ice and Fire. She counted that as a minor blessing. Even if Kellan didn’t recognize Sansa’s source, it was maybe possible his Dean was still from there. But, no, that was safe. “I’ll look him up, if you want,” she offered. She wasn’t sure Kellan wanted to know. At the admission that Dean was in love with his car, Maren merely quirked a brow. “That sounds like something someone rich and vain would do,” she offered, more curious about the man in Kellan’s mind than she had been moments before.
She turned her attention back to the lighter, and she passed her fingers over the flame slowly enough to just be uncomfortable, and then she passed it back and sipped her drink through her straw. “What kind of work is there right now?”
Kellan took his lighter and set it next to the cigarettes, knowing that before the night was over he’d be going through a few more - not out of stress, but just because that was what he did. Smoked like a chimney. Lately he’d wondered of his own volition whether or not he should drop by a doctor at some point, what with the myriad health problems that came with almost forty years of smoking. It might be a good idea. But then again, it might just give him problems he couldn’t solve. Better to be ignorant on that front.
“He’s not rich. Just very attached to his car, for some reason.” He gave Maren a smirk and tapped the ash off the end of his cigarette into the little black tray at hand. “Sure, look him up. Nothing major, just where he’s from, what he’s like. Not that I don’t already know that, but still.” And then the subject of work, one that brought something almost like a smile to his face. “So far, not a lot. I’m not quite finished casing a few places in the city, but there’s at least three buildings I’m aiming for on my own. Plus there’s one or two people looking for help.” By which he meant, as usual, insurance fraud. Old useless buildings with nice settlements if they happened to accidentally burn down. “Nothing on the strip - too noticeable. I should have something set up in a week or so, and probably something that I could use your help with. Just as a witness.”
She nodded when he said there could be a witness job. Those were the ones she did best at. She had the ability to appear perfectly harmless, and it generally worked in everyone’s favor - well, everyone except the victim. “Thank you. Keep me in mind?” She sighed, the sound indicating an upcoming confession, one that she would undoubtedly tell in the most dramatic, storytelling method as possible, as was her wont. She tried to limit her natural tendencies as much as she could when it came to him, but she was slightly terrible at it. “I have the unfortunate pleasure of having been made at the Wynn by the evil villain of tonight’s bedtime story - Theodore Winters. It limits my options at present. He knows my family, you see, and he’s threatened to blacklist me from the entire kingdom he controls.” It was all rather dramatic, but it boiled down to her being grateful for the job offer.
She finished her drink, and she thought about his Dean, about a non-wealthy hero that loved his car. It could work, perhaps, but only if the car had sentimental value. “Who did it belong to before him?” she finally asked. “His steed. The car.”
Kellan raised both eyebrows at Maren’s storybook-type story. He didn’t know a Theodore Winters, which could ostensibly cause problems for him in the future - it wouldn’t be the first time not knowing the criminal scene ahead of time would screw him over - but he wasn’t all that impressed. Blacklisting a barely-twenty-something girl because of her family heritage? He almost ironically applauded, but leaned back and took a long drag instead.
“I don’t know. I assume he bought it off a lot somewhere.” And so Dean’s car was dismissed with a casual wave of the hand - but Dean hadn’t been forthcoming about its origins, so why elaborate? “This Winters guy … he’s got a problem with your family, or with you?” Kellan wasn’t precisely overprotective of anybody, but it couldn’t hurt to know a little about the people you were working with and the people who wanted those people out of commission. “You don’t need to tell me any details, I’m just curious.” Blacklisted … from working in the criminal underworld? This guy had balls if that was the case.
“Me. He caught me trying to cheat a low stakes table, and he thinks I had something to do with a larger take that happened at the same time. He just happens to have my entire family in his back pocket somehow. I don’t know why.” She shrugged her shoulders, up and down in an exaggerated movement, and she tugged an ice cube from her drink and sucked it between her lips. “I don’t know how powerful he is, and everyone I talk to loves him.” Which was true, worrisome. It was like Theodore Winters was the fictional Godfather, but no one could tell her why. She didn’t like it, but there was no immediate solution for it.
“Just, thank you for keeping me in mind in the meantime. Assuming big crime bosses don’t scare you off,” which was silly, because they both knew her primary employer was exactly that kind of person. She slipped her feet from his side of the booth, and she fished for her flip flops without looking beneath the table. “Thanks for the drink, Kel,” she said, an indication she didn’t intend to pay. “I’ll get you the time?” She didn’t have the money to cover that drink; it was one of the reasons she needed a job so badly.
“That sucks.” An understatement, but it was something Kellan couldn’t really sympathize with. He hadn’t had a family in decades, and had never had anybody that could be used as ransom against him. “Big crime bosses have never scared me. Caused me problems, sure, but people who’ve come so far from actually having to fight for their lives … ” He made a vague motion with a shrug. Impress, maybe. Concern, certainly. But scare? There was nothing left for him to be scared of.
He gave her a slightly pained look as she began to clear up her things to leave.
“Sure, fine, but I’m holding this against you.” He said it without any real malice, because a few drinks weren’t a problem. “There’s a few possibilities outside of Vegas, one up in Montana, if you’re interested and willing to go out there. We’d drive separate both ways, but I could spare some bus fare for you. You want me to call you if I’ve got something lined up, or get you on that notebook thing?” It just seemed awkward, and yet … convenient. This kind of thing was impossible to track, after all.
“However you want to handle it,” she said of the job in Montana, which she was definitely interested in. It was her home turf, but she didn’t fear that. She hadn’t heard from her stepfather since she’d left, and she had no expectation of it now. She slid out of the booth, and she walked around to his side. Her dark hair brushed his cheeks as she leaned down without warning and pressed a cherry-rum kiss to the corner of his mouth. “For the drink. And the job. And the talk.” She paused between each sentence, her sundress almost ridiculously whimsical now that she was standing still there, beside him. “The journals,” she said, pulling a tiny scroll out of the pocket of her skirts, small enough to tuck anywhere, really. “I always carry it. It’s small enough,” she admitted, tucking it back a moment later and reciting her current cellphone number, in case he preferred that. “I’ll look up Dean in the meantime and get back to you. I admit, I want to know why he loves his car so much,” and it was obvious the interest was genuine, real; she was curious, and it made her eyes light.
It had been a long time since a woman Maren’s age had kissed Kellan, and it was obvious in the way he stayed perfectly still, glancing at her out of the corner of his eyes with brows still raised, after she did it. It couldn’t have been the alcohol, so it must have been some sort of fondness and her penchant to ignore personal space that made her do it. After a moment’s hesitation, in case she suddenly regretted what she’d done, Kellan turned to face her with a half-grin. Just because it was a surprise and because he didn’t seek it out regularly didn’t mean that kind of attention was bad.
“Anytime,” he said. “I can’t promise steady work, but what there is pays well these days. And I appreciate that.” Sure, he could have looked up Dean on his own, but he didn’t want to bother with it if there wasn’t going to be a worthwhile result. With Maren picking up the important parts, he could go looking if he was interested, or ignore the bastard otherwise. He could hear sarcastic protests trying to downplay any possible interest somewhere in his skull. “It’ll be nice to know if he’ll try to turn me in or something. I’ll send you a note sooner or later - you keep your head down until then.”
Maren wasn’t expecting love sonnets or declarations or kisses in return, so she just rocked back onto her heels and smiled when he half-grinned. She liked Kellan, even if he had no idea what to make of her half the time. She couldn’t hold that against him, because most people didn’t know what to do with her half the time. “Whatever you can give me is enough,” she said truthfully and, after dipping two fingers into her empty glass and fishing out another ice cube, she nodded, sucking the ice between her teeth. “I’ll be in touch within a week. It’ll give me a chance to visit the local library and stores. It’ll be like a field trip, an adventure, hunting down Dean Winchester.” She made it sound like fun, because it was for her. It would likely involve reading - she hoped, and that was always fun.
A second later, she was working her way through the crowd and toward the door, an eccentric, dark haired girl with pale skin, looking like she’d gotten lost and found her way to this dark part of the world.
Kellan watched Maren go, a few thoughts flitting across the front of his mind and then crumbling to ash as he didn’t do anything with them. He’d have confirmations within a week, or at least something more than he already had. It hadn’t been that long since Montana, so he’d have to be careful - keep clean-shaven and maybe go for a hat - unless he wanted a swarm of police still pissed off about that whole breakout thing to descend on him like a brick shithouse. Still, Maren would be able to keep them off his trail for a little while. A nearly-hysterical witness claiming she saw a man running off, then heard a car start and saw the exhaust trails heading out of the city that way, while he himself calmly strolled to the POS borrowed from someone for the week and drove back to Vegas just a little over the speed limit … if nothing else, it’d give him time to get out of the city limits.
She was a nice girl. Might’ve been a shame where she ended up, but she didn’t seem to mind it, and who was he to judge people on their life choices? He’d leave that to the asshole still snarking and bitching in his skull - though Dean was strangely sullen for the moment. Maybe the idea that he was going to be researched and might not be real had finally gotten to him.
With one last long drag, Kellan ground out his cigarette, finished his beer, and flagged down a surly waitress for another one.