Who: Daniel and Sam What: Oh... you know... coffee... (Part I) Where: Daniel’s at Turnberry Place When: After their conversation about take-out... that never actually gets eaten. Warnings/Rating: Language (We blame it on Sam.)
Things always got worse before they got better, and Sam was no fucking exception. After her visit to Jack - and the subsequent loss of Christine - life had turned into one long bender, one that she was only just surfacing from. She knew it was out of control, and she knew she had to go back to Jack and let him know she'd let things spiral even worse than before, but she wasn't scared enough for at yet, and the lecturing girl in her head was only making her more determined to dig her heels in and resist. But the truth was that down, underneath all that stubbornness, she wanted things to calm down, to change; she just had no fucking clue how to pull it off. But the recent crowd she'd hooked up with only made her more acutely aware of it. MK was a fucking wreck, and even Neil couldn't put the bottle down lately.
None of that had anything to do with her appearance at Turnberry, though. No, she felt like shit about Daniel and Christine, even though she'd been against the whole thing from the start. And, yeah, maybe it stung a little, but she still liked the guy. He was as fucked up as the rest of them, and screwed up people needed to stay together. So, she grabbed the takeway she'd ordered from the concierge, and she let herself up to the penthouse with much less show of defiance than in the past. She was getting used to being in rich places, and the chip she carried on her shoulder had smoothed out considerably because of it.
She knocked on Daniel's door, a grey hoodie over a wife beater, hood pulled over her blonde hair, and a pair of men's running shorts paired with flip flops and toenails painted bright blue. She wasn't trying to impress, because she'd tried that recently, and it had ended up smacking her in the face. Yeah, no more being what she thought other people wanted. It never worked out anyway, so fuck it.
There were no soaring voices coming from within, no soft tinkling of recorded piano music, not even the rattle drone of newsmen’s voices. With the silence, a stillness snuck under the door of Daniel’s apartment and pervaded even the hall carpet that led the short way to the elevator, bringing with it a stubborn sense of stagnant absence, a refusal to be present, to act, to do anything except exist, until time itself took that away. It smelled of a dead library abandoned to the cold, and only the determined pumping of the air conditioning kept the hallway from verging on graveyard stillness.
There was a considerable delay after Sam’s knock struck vibrations into the calm, but eventually there was a rustling from deep within. A longer delay, and the unmistakable sound of the water pump working and rushing through the walls before the rustling got closer and finally turned into the steps of a man. He pulled open the door abruptly, obviously with full expectation that she would still be standing there. His nostrils flared as he took in the scent of what she had brought, and then he looked at her, tipping his chin to peer under the hood.
Daniel looked alarmingly sharp, pupils wide enough to push the sapphire blue out of his gaze into thin rings of shining awareness. He was never dead sober, but he was recently clean-shaven and his dark curls clung wet to his forehead and neck. For the first time his eyes were not blood-shot, nor was his breath that of a freshly pickled corpse. He held his head up and he looked down at her without boasting the height for it, playing the role of the self-possessed with astonishing accuracy. For a moment he regarded her as if trying to remember why he had allowed this meeting in the first place, and then he gave a little shrug of surrender. “Hey.” He pushed open the door and stepped back to let her through into the clutter of old newspapers, leather books, and dusty glasses. It was dim as a cave, and the black-and-teal furniture hunched under the assault of the mess.
She smelled of the curry that was in the bag looped over her arm, of soup and cold fish, and she almost dropped the entire fucking bag of it when he showed up looking somewhat human. She'd seen Daniel twice before, and he'd been either fucked up or very fucked up during those encounters. This was different, the damp curls and the sharp eyes, and she gave him a look that was all quirk of brow and incredulity. "You look different," she said plainly, shoving back the hoodie when he peered under it, then stepping inside and past him when he let her in.
The inside of the penthouse looked pretty much the same as always, dust and paper and books, and Sam set the bag on the coffee table, after shoving aside the collected items there. She flopped on the couch a second later, unzipping the hoodie, but leaving it on, not wanting to deal with explanations about track marks or the scar the wife beater did a shitty job of hiding. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair was a tangle-briar mess, but that was all fucking Tristan's fault. She needed to talk to someone about that shit, but this wasn't the time, and so she just kicked off her flip flops and tugged her feet up onto the cushions. "Miss her?" she asked instead, of Christine, because she did. Maybe no one else missed people who left their minds, but she did. She'd felt like she had something grounding her with the opera singer, and she was just now realizing that maybe Christine had been a more stabilizing force than she'd realized.
Daniel waited until she was in before he shut the door, and it returned the room to a state of dim waiting that was absolutely oppressive. The air was frigid with air conditioning, expensively wet and cold, and Daniel watched her maneuver familiarly around his space. He had no objection when she shoved the mess of newspapers aside, and he ran the tips of his fingers through his still-dripping curls. A little shiver touched his spine as a drop from the shower water ran down the back of his neck. “It’s the sweater,” he said, deadpan, pulling on the loose wool-weave that he wore over his usual thin white shirt. Same jeans, no shoes, but clean, mostly sober, and wearing a sweater. The increased wet ink look to his hair and close shave made Daniel look like a scrawny coyote about to pounce.
Daniel circled around the couch to meet her somewhere in the middle, and he bent down over a side table to pick up a mug of coffee and whiskey, both air temperature because he couldn’t be bothered to make a fresh pot halfway through the day. He surveyed her over it and lied with razor-edged aggression. “Miss whom?” He said the last consonant, too, as if using the grammar might crush the idea of it hurting him out of reality entirely.
The look she shot him when he said it was the sweater called bullshit, and she watched him move around the coffee table like a curiously lazy cat - all eyes, and barely any movement of her head. She waited until he was seated beside her, and then she leaned over and stole his mug, knowing perfectly well that anything inside would be spiked. She touched the mug to her lips, and then she handed it back after a long sip. "Yeah, baby, don't try that shit with me. I pretend everything is perfectly fucking dandy from the moment I wake up, to the moment I finally crash at night. I know bullshit when I see it."
She leaned forward, and she sifted through the plastic bag, the scent of curry mixing and dancing with the dust on the air, and she could almost visualize it as music. Fucking Christine. "But you're cleaner and more sober than I've ever seen you, so maybe something halfway decent is going on. Dish?" she asked, finding the container she wanted and pulling it out and uncovering the Tom Kha Ghai and taking a sip from the edge, not bothering with a spoon. She slurped, and then she pressed her lips together. "I miss her too. It's like losing someone I could never lie to, and who liked me in spite of it."
She had to yank the mug to get it out of his fingers, for he clung to it and tried to move away, not keen on sharing his vices with the people foolish enough to move into his immediate area. The whiskey was expensive and smooth, but it took up more of the cup than the coffee did, and it was full, implying he just hadn’t had time to get really drunk yet. He gave an annoyed hissing sound when she took it, and when he got it back he sat in an armchair rather than next to her on the couch to curl his hands protectively around it. He sat in a low slump but awkwardly, not used to sitting on this particular piece of furniture.
His journal was to one side under a heap of paper and junk mail, a slim black gel pen set deep into its neatly creased pages, and the most recent newspaper (Le Monde) positioned nearby, implying that he usually sat or sprawled on the couch she was sitting on, and also that he had lately come back, and not had time to go through the journal. Stacks of books six deep clustered under the coffee table, and the view was of one wall and a heavily covered window. He put his bare feet up on the corner of the coffee table, narrow feet, clean and pale. “Just got back from the door. Sobers me up faster than a cold shower,” he said, deciding he would prefer to discuss that than his lost songbird.
She rolled her eyes when he fought her for the cup, and she rolled her eyes again when he settled into the armchair. It was like being a little girl again, when boys thought girls had cooties and refused to go near them. The thought made her smile, because her family had been morally corrupt and broke as anything, but she still had some good memories of being a kid in Jersey. Sometimes, she missed it. The simplicity of it all. Life was so much fucking easier when all you had to worry about was someone putting food on the table, and how fucked up was that?
"So we're ignoring her," she said of his obvious subject change, not playing the social niceties game and pretending she didn't realize. "Yeah, ok, sure. We can pretend she didn't exist. Sure." She paused, as if she really did intend to do that - and maybe she did. But she leaned forward and put the soup down a second later. "Do you think we're to blame? For a whole fucking door's worth of people just disappearing? I guess it's better that it was everyone. Imagine if you loved someone, and they just fucking vanished because we didn't have room in our heads for them anymore?" So much for keeping her cool. The fact that someone sobering was going on in his door registered, but she'd been holding this shit in about Christine since it happened, and since he was the only other person who'd really cared about her as something more than a fucking trophy, well, she couldn't hold her tongue around him. And fuck that. Sam was shit at holding her tongue anyway.
Daniel settled deeper into his chair, a king on his throne, completely uncaring of his appearance, her appearance, and anything but what was in his cup and in his head. His expression did a visible contortion when she spoke of ignoring Christine and her existence. He might want to do it, but saying that she was gone, irrevocably, hurt him in a most visible way. Daniel did not have all the walls such men should, as isolation and intent had broken most of them down. He took a deep drink out of the coffee, displaying a nick at his throat that still boasted a smear of dark blood.
“No. Doesn’t have anything to do with us. Too random. No unifying connection between all of us and all of them.” His blue eyes came open, sharp as newly shattered glass melting in the desert sun. “Unless something happened to her, or that disfigured bastard in the opera house. Something big, something traumatic. Are you keeping something like that from me?” He never straightened from his position in the chair, but he had so many sharp edges without his usual half-bottle in him.
"Yeah? Then why did the whole fucking door shift? I talked to the people who had Nadir and Meg, and they switched too. It's like the whole thing just stopped existing," she said, and she sounded forlorn, lost-young, and what the fuck? "Not that it's a big deal," she added, but it just fell flat, and she groaned. There had to be someone she didn't have to hide shit from, and it's not like he was going to go anywhere and tell anyone anything. "They wanted to kill you. It's probably for the best," she said, and she followed it up with a shrug. "IDK, baby, I just hope she's happier than she was, even if it sucks for us." Which was what it came down to, right?
She shoved off the couch a second later. "I'm not keeping shit from you, baby. Why would I?" she asked, even as she crossed the room and headed toward the kitchen, as if she had every right to wander around his space without supervision. "Is there more cold coffee where that came from?" she asked, because she wasn't going to fight him for that mug again. It had too much whiskey for her to layer on the pills in her system.
Daniel curved up, contorting like a spring, and then he set forward, pushing the mug away so it sat alone, askew on the support of so many newspapers. It was empty. “Yeah, I know what they were planning,” he said, sounding both resigned and tired. The whiskey was going to hit him soon enough, but he’d only had about two glasses and it was going to take more than that to even get him to slurring territory. Right now he’d take whatever just to get some of the edge off the bitterness that was starting to press through the linen confines of his upper thoughts.
He accepted that there was no traumatic event, no sign that they could have detected early, and he even gave up on the enticing idea that there would be someone to blame for all this. He did miss her, and it hurt the longer that Sam was there, talking about it. Daniel avoided looking at his journal. “Make a new pot,” he said, rising to his feet awkwardly and stretching a kink out of his neck. He came around the edge of the living room and joined her in the kitchen, leaning one hip on the counter and watching her move around in the smaller space without immediate comment.
Sam was the opposite of domestic. She was gas station coffees and instant from a jar. Even in the suite, the coffee was just there, normally started by Neil before he left for work; she just mooched, she didn't actually brew. And, yeah, so she could work a cheap, Walmart coffeemaker without trouble, but nothing state of the art, so she was hoping for a standard 12-cup, something without frills or a custom carafe. She looked around the kitchen, wondering where the fuck to start, and she threw him a grateful look when he followed her in. "Your kitchen, baby. Your brew," which helped her save face, and she slid up on the counter and waited for him to do whatever he needed to do. It's not like she knew where he stored anything.
"So, Neil has some fucking psycho now, but he won't tell me who; he had Phantom before. Liam is in the insane asylum, so fuck if I know what's happening with him. Aiden, he had Nadir, has some other psycho villain, and Zee just won't fucking say, so..." She shrugged, and she realized it was scarier now, being alone in a door with no one she could really fall back on if things went bad. Sure, Louis was there with Loki, but Louis was as weak as bitches came, and Loki wasn't exactly an ally. She gave him a look, curiosity covering a need to just clear the air with someone. "Your person ever change?" She shoved the sleeves of her hoodie back, the fading track marks on her arm dark against her pale skin.
By contrast, Daniel was shockingly domestic when there was no one around to see. You couldn't be a world-traveling bachelor without learning how to make a decent pot of soup or a cup of good coffee, just like you couldn't get away without discovering just the right way to open a bottle of wine or sniff good scotch. The sharp gaze watched her pick herself up off the floor and on to his counter, and for a second he just leaned where he was and watched the bizarrely youthful blue flip flops dangle a foot off his cool stone tile. After a few seconds, Daniel pushed off the wall and came inside. There were no more lights here than anywhere else, but it was obvious he could have navigated it blind.
He listened as he moved in, putting out a negligent hand and flicking on black-and-silver coffee maker worth a few hundred but not a Frenchman's good opinion. It was a drip machine and he twisted the sodden grinds from the last pot into the filter before he tossed them into a trash bin hidden in a side drawer. The bin was empty with a new liner, implying that despite the mess Daniel did pay some semblance of attention to his kitchen. "Don't think so. Didn't go near the hotel for a while," he answered, looking up at her from under a heavy fringe of curl and crossing the kitchen to stand directly in front of her, eyes level. He stood there for a second to get her used to the fact he was there, and then he put a palm on either of her knees and pressed them apart. He turned his head a few millimeters to one side and said smoothly, "You're sitting on the filters." The blue eyes were getting dark again, but a different kind of dark.
She watched him move around with an attentiveness that was impolite. So, she'd never learned not to stare, so what. She was curious about what he was doing, especially since seeing him sober enough to actually maneuver anything but the couch was a new thing. She thought about movement, about welding something, and she hadn't managed anything worth mentioning since the tree outside of Gardens. And fuck if that didn't get her thinking about Tristan, and she only half listened when he mentioned not going to the hotel for a while. He was standing in front of her before she realized it, and she had to blink her inky blue eyes twice to focus on his face. His hand on her knees made her start slightly, but not nearly as much as it would have a month earlier, and she just quirked a brow when he said she was sitting on the filters. "Yeah?" she asked, all teasing and smirk. "And that's your best way of getting to them?" Her bare knees, legs and thighs were smooth, and she leaned back, hands on the counter, to let him get at the filters.
Daniel pulled a drawer out, missing either side of her shins by millimeters, and smiled to himself as he fished out one of the unbleached paper filters from the package, where it lay atop various bric-a-brac. He closed the drawer and turned away, but not without a final caress along the outside of her left leg as he passed. He returned to the machine and set the filter in before taking apart a circular electric coffee grinder. The presence of the grinder next to a large bin of cheap ready-ground implied he didn’t bother grinding all that often. “So who are you now?” he asked, his back to her, digging his fingers into a freshly unsealed bag of coffee beans with obvious hedonistic pleasure.
"I'm me," she said, though she knew that wasn't what he meant. She watched the coffee bean fondling with a quirked brow. "So, that's what gets you going?" she teased easily. Daniel was easy, it was as simple as that. She didn't want anything from him, and she wasn't trying to figure him the fuck out every single second, and he wasn't going to go running to people and telling them about her damage. Yeah, it was nice, and she leaned her head back against the cabinets and regarded him from under heavy-lidded eyes. "You mean my new door? Gwen. She's a teenage nerd who thinks she knows everything about fucking everything. Since we're sharing, what's going on with you?" Because, yeah, no, there was something different about him, and she didn't think it could be blamed on Christine's disappearance. "Meet someone?" she asked, a nudge of flip flop to his hip and a gap-tooth grin.
Daniel let the dark-roasted beans slide smoothly through his fingers and into the grinder’s little cup, brushing his palms together afterward and giving her a rather canine look of disapproval when she teased him about it. The grinder conquered all conversation with its high-pitched whine for several seconds before Daniel tapped the machine upside-down on the counter and expertly poured the fresh grounds into the filter before setting the mechanism aside and returning to where she sat. “Nothing going on.” And it was the truth. “Lost money. Made money. New neighbor. New accountant. Alter being a bitch. Usual.” He lazed over the counter on the outside of her thigh and offered her the cup that fitted into the grinder, speckled with dark grounds and emitting a rich, impossibly tender aroma. “Smells good. That doesn’t get you going, what does?”
It was probably the most direct answer she'd ever gotten from him about anything. Sure, it was brief, but it was honest. No questions thrown back at her, and no attempt not to answer by twisting shit or being a pain in her ass. Fuck the coffee and whether or not it got her going, because she was too busy staring at him like he'd just sprouted a horn from the middle of his forehead, lips parted and the edge of her gapped front teeth visible. "Ok, seriously, you need to slouch in a chair and have trouble following the conversation or something, because otherwise I don't know what the fuck to do with you," she said honestly. "What's the alter doing?" she asked, and it was definitely a question that was all about testing the waters to see how up-front he would be, rather than any indication that she had theories about his alter. "Oh, and coffee doesn't get me going, baby," she teased, and she waggled her eyebrows in an intentionally exaggerated manner.
It was true. Without enough liquor in him to dull his awareness of his own faults, Daniel was intensely difficult to fathom while still being disconcertingly up front. He could lie with the same facility that he spoke truths, and everything about him was the carved multilayer marble of his upbringing. He smiled slowly through her pseudo-criticism about his usual behavior. He’d only had a glass and he’d have more soon enough, but something about the Beast’s metabolism seemed to make the alcohol something to acquire, not something to desire. He had time to get drunk, and he was enjoying Sam’s reaction as long as the conversation didn’t get too close. “He’s sulking,” Daniel answered, taking his chest up in a long arch along his spine and heading back to the coffee maker.
"Well, at least you aren't any better about giving descriptions. Some things haven't changed," she said, because he's sulking could mean absolutely fucking anything. "So, talk without me having to pull fucking teeth, baby," she said, unwilling to humor him like she did when he was drunk. Then, she gave him the benefit doubt. Now? Now, he was being intentionally fucking vague.
With a clatter and a punch of buttons, the coffee maker began to brew with an effusive gurgle. Daniel opened a cupboard and pulled out two mugs, both of them the same blue teal of the furniture that he had never bothered to remove or replace. He peered in one and blew out dust with a single puff of breath that dislodged his curls on his forehead. Swinging both into one hand he crossed to her side of the kitchen and ran water over both. “He’s making more enemies. Seems like he’s good at that. And too stupid not to realize why.”
"Going to tell me who he is?" she asked, not really expecting him to. But maybe he'd surprise her. He was good at doing that today. Fuck, maybe she'd actually get a real conversation out of the fucker. Didn't hurt to try, right? "So, that chick in Italy, how did you know you loved her?" she asked, and her voice went more quiet and strangely respectful, even with the language, which was less than respectful. She sighed, and she actually let him see the guilty apology on her features. "Sorry - The woman in Italy," she corrected, making an effort. She slid off the counter, and tugged out a chair at the table and sat down there instead, waiting for him to bring her the coffee, her expression tired-young and curious, one leg tucked under her and the flip flops abandoned halfway between the counter and the table.
Daniel shoved away the coffee cups with a clatter. The sound of ceramic on hollow stainless steel was so loud in the otherwise dead quiet apartment that it echoed off the tile and the ceiling and rattled his head and every thought in it. He had forgotten she had questions about Italy, natural questions that he didn’t want to hear, much less answer. He twisted, and everything about the soft sweater and the deftly clean-shaven curve of his face implied unassuming trust, but then he moved, and there was nothing soft or trustworthy about him. He moved down the edge of the counter and then to the table, and he put one hand behind her shoulder on the chair as he dropped down into an easy crouch. Daniel stroked one hand up her thigh again, this time diverting his gaze so he could see exactly what he was doing. His fingers curved along the inside of her leg, not the outside, the caress neither slow nor casual. “He’s from a fairy tale.” His eyes were exceptionally blue.
She quirked a brow when those coffee cups clattered, because that hadn't been on the agenda. Clattering cups? Yeah, not the same as cups they could drink from. She was busy trying to figure that out when he moved. Her face was all youthful surprise. She was at a serious fucking disadvantage where Daniel was concerned. Drunk, he made plenty of sense. Like this? She had no idea what to expect from him. When he crouched, her expression turned questioning, all what the fuck? in the tip of her head. She actually turned slightly to look at the hand on the chair, and she looked back when his hand stroked her thigh. "Yeah?" she asked, regaining her composure enough to slide forward in the seat, closer, her ass against the edge. "You going to tell me who, or are you going to keep trying to distract me? Because you're distracting as fuck, baby, but you're definitely doing it on purpose."
Like this, Daniel was a shark in the water, and not just because he could lie well. No, it was because he didn’t have to lie. He could use the truth to get what he wanted, and his needs were exceptionally simple. He pushed his weight forward easily so he was resting on his knees and not his ankles. He didn’t move when she shifted forward, and as a consequence the short slide of his fingers into the ragged hem of her shorts was without real pressure until his eyes met hers again and he tightened his grip on her leg. “Why would I keep it from you? You can talk to the big bastard if you want to.” He leaned in, rising on his knees so they were almost level, and tilted his head so his lips just brushed hers. Whiskey, cold coffee, toothpaste mint. “I can’t help it if you’re distracted.”
Her eyes drifted shut, because fuck if she was immune. She wasn't completely straight, but she hadn't come looking for this either, and none of it mattered when he was intentionally being a fucking rake. "You want me to quit asking about her," she said knowingly, but it was still breathless, even in the assertion. She expected him to jump back when she made the claim, to act like she'd burned him. She already knew he hated her getting close; even a street girl like her could tell that. "Shut the fuck up. You have too much practice distracting girls like me." She figured he'd slummed plenty of times, this guy. Maybe to piss off the establishment, maybe to piss off his parents, but oh, yeah, he definitely had. "You're fucking dangerous, and you know it." It sounded oddly like a compliment, and she ran calloused fingertips along his jaw, her inky eyes opening as the touch became more solid, nothing of the delicate girl or elegant woman in the solid scratch of her ruined fingertips.
“Nothing dangerous here.” He tasted her lips, enjoyed them briefly, and pulled away to brush again. There were hints of teeth on the edge of his consonants, and he took a hand off the back of the kitchen chair and sank it into the taut tendons up the side of her neck. He twisted his head and tasted her mouth again, longer this time, using the grip on her leg to pull her just a few millimeters closer. He had her teetering on the chair now, and he was winding his fingers into the fine hair at the back of her neck. “I barely go anywhere. I’m not going to hurt you.” A faint growl, exceptionally human, high in his throat and more amusement than power. “You can leave the castle whenever you want.” He drew her knee around his rib cage, tight bones under the woven fabric of his sweater. He breathed light, touching her cheek with breath warmer than his fingers and softer than his lips.