Dr Jack Roman is (estel_crowned) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-02 11:19:00 |
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Entry tags: | aragorn, garrus vakarian |
Who: Jack and Winnie
What: Drinkin, talkin'
Where: Some dive bar
When: After this
Warnings/Rating: Jack not being shrinky, for once?
Winnie didn’t look like a cop for once. She made sure to take a good long shower after patrol, brushed her hair and even dug out a nice outfit for the night. She knew there wasn’t a point in impressing Jack since he had seen the best and worst of her by now, but sometimes a girl needed to dress up a little. Her black jeans, white lacy tank top and long sleeved ruddy red blouse wasn’t enough to turn heads, but it was miles above the usual stained t-shirts and worn out jeans he was used to seeing her in. If Jack was calling her in for drinks with just the teaser that he had some new found half-sister like this was an afternoon talk show, at least he’d have something nice to look at, right?
She stepped into their favorite dive bar. A dusty, dark, but friendly little place called Sal’s far enough from the strip that you barely realized you were in Las Vegas at all. It felt more like some Old Western saloon updated to modern times. Winnie liked their whiskey and how they never had some fancy craft beer. Just the standards. “Hey, Jack.” Winnie got there a little late, smiling as she pushed a short strand of hair behind her ear. “So, is this the kind of story we’re going to have to get pretty drunk, pretty fast for?” Her smile turned into a goofy grin, opening her arms for a quick hug before they got to drinking.
"This is the kind of story we're going to get pretty drunk, pretty slow for." There was no use in getting drunk too early and the latter half of the story going missing because of it. Jack stood up and got a look at her, smiling at how she had dressed up for him and hugged her tightly. He was used to seeing her in jeans and t-shirts, but he'd seen her cleaned up (she looked damned good cute girl turned classy) and seen her messy and hung over, stained and barely fit for human company (she was still cute then, but he knew better than to ever say that especially if she was actually hungover). Like her, he was wearing a pair of black jeans, but his white button down wasn't lace and was tucked into the waist of his jeans. The long sleeves were rolled up to bare his forearms and the top few buttons were already unfastened.
"You look wonderful," he said quietly, lips to her ear before he let her go and sat back down. He already had one whiskey in front of him that he'd been nursing slowly while he waited for her. Very slowly. "You want to start with whiskey or something else?"
She fought back a grin up at him, pressing her lips together like she was trying to keep a straight face while out on patrol. The number of laps Winnie had to run for smiling when she wasn’t supposed to were really too high to count. “Thanks, handsome.” Winnie said with her tough girl drawl and turned to tap her hands on the bar in a slow drumroll. By then she had the bartender’s attention so she told him, “Whiskey and I’ll work towards beer. I need a buzz.” Like most cops, she needed a couple hours or a stiff drink to really escape the stress of the job. Now with Lin and Garrus around, she had learnt how to put it into a few rounds of some Mass Effect multiplayer, but sometimes that made her more agressive.
“So, give me all the details.” Winnie looked back to Jack as she seemed very comfortable perched on the barstool. She wasn’t particularly comfortable most places. Offices, the hospital, church and supermarkets to name a few. But, a bar? That was more familiar and welcoming than her own sofa sometimes. Blame the Irish blood.
Long ago he'd learned that there were some places Winnie was comfortable at and some she wasn't. He'd been raised in the back of a car for his first few years, then thrust into his father's world of dinner parties and black tie social events. It'd taken more than a few months for him to adjust, and now he could move back and forth between places with little more than a change of clothes and a shower. Though if he did it too often, or too much in a short span of time, he began to wonder who was the real Jack? Was it the one that wore the black tie, pressed and starched, and visited those glittering wives with their equally pressed and starched husbands? Or was the real him in a dingy bar like this, the wood worn from years of use, the beers familiar and the whiskey cheap?
All this was considered in the few seconds it took before the first glass of her whiskey was poured and slid across the surface of the bar to her. "I don't even know how it started," Jack started, looking down into the amber liquid in his glass. "I must have been responding to her about something, on the journals no less." The glass lifted and he took a quick swallow. "She told me then that she was my half sister, but I didn't believe her. I thought she was high as a kite."
Winnie geared herself up for the whiskey, a tiny familiar smirk on her face like she knew it was going to make everything better. Maybe that was the first sign of an alcoholic, but Winnie could wake up in the morning without a drink, so this seemed pretty innocent, right? “Those journals are baaaaad news.” She warned him, wagging her finger as she picked up the whiskey and downed it with a satisfied sound in the back of her throat and a quick flutter of her eyelids. A happy moment passed and then she gave him a serious look. “How did she even know it was you?”
Jack had never thought of the journals as bad news, but maybe she was right. They weren't always good news. "She asked me what the R stood for, since my name prints as Jack R," he started, lifting his glass up to take another swallow of the liquid inside. He let it burn all the way down, relishing the warmth it spread through him before he continued. "Apparently her family told her who her father was." While he hadn't even known it was a possibility that somewhere he might have a half sister. "She knew who I was. At first I thought she was just confused." Or high, but he didn't want to tell Winnie that, he didn't want the law coming after Val.
Winnie gave him a look like she wanted to say this was good news, but any idiot could tell it wasn’t. She tried to wrap her brain around it. Sure, she knew people on the force from broken homes and crooked family trees, but when it came down to it, Winnie was a girl who never had to worry about that kind of stuff. Family was her constant. “Seems kind of weird.” She said finally, waving for a tall glass of beer to wash the whiskey down with. “I mean on one hand, she has the right to try and get to know you because family is important and everything. On the other hand, she’s just a half sister who should have a family of her own.”
She bowed her head in thought, pulling some hair back behind her ears before shaking her head. “And, she’s really related to you? Tests and stuff are golden?” Winnie rested the side of her face on her knuckles, looking up at Jack like she was still trying to get a good read on the situation.
Jack nodded. "I haven't told dad yet, I wanted her to get tested first." To make sure it was true. There were all sorts of cons and scams with people saying they were some long lost sibling, but in this case it was true. "I got the results today." He had a half-sister that was high as a kite and was trying to quit smoking pot. Jack finished off his glass and gestured to the bartender for another.
"I thought it could have been a scam, or her being confused about who I was, but no." His father had slept with a nurse while he had been missing with his mom. His hand scrubbed through his hair, nails against his scalp. "I'd like to get to know her and I get that there's this," he gestured wildly with his hands, "Thing. That we have the right to know one another and she seems really sweet, but my father has a daughter. I never knew there was the possibility that I might have a sibling."
Winnie nodded, eyes unfocusing for a moment as she tried to imagine it happening to her. Awkward. The situation would be almost entirely awkward. “How do you even get to know someone that just gets dropped in on your life? It’s not like friends or coworkers. Friends you like them, you want to be around them. And, coworkers have some kind of common goal. With her, it’s just like Here I am! Let’s exchange Christmas cards.” She wiggled her hands in the air a little with a small smirk his way. Winnie was uncomfortable enough around people she liked, so the lady cop decided that she’d be impossible around a surprise half-sibling.
“Plus, it’s kind of a reminder of how your dad fucked up.” She batted at the newly delivered beer and took a tiny sip off the top before investing in an actual gulp.
"It didn't help that I was fairly sure I didn't like her as soon as we began talking and then she told me." Jack agreed. Once he got past the verbal diarrhea though, Val was a sweet girl, even if she was a bit of a catastrophe. "We didn't exchange Christmas cards, just said Merry Christmas and went on with our lives," he said quietly. Though he knew that his mom had done far worse than cheat on his dad (he remembered those men, usually not their faces, but sometimes their rings, the smell of their breath) she was sick. His father wasn't.
His hand ran through his hair again as the bartender brought back the bottle and refilled his glass. He lifted it up onto it's edge, watching as the liquid tilted against the inside of the tumbler. "It changes what you think you know about a person. I never thought my dad was perfect, but I didn't think he was jumping into the on-call room with a nurse either."
Winnie’s expression dropped to a frown and she moved a little closer to him, just enough that she could momentarily put her hand on his wrist. “People can surprise you in the worst ways, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. Trust me, I’ve seen enough drunk people to know.” She felt guilty. Guilty for having the perfect little family that took Christmas pictures together. Deep down she knew both of her parents were capable of cheating, everyone was, but Winnie knew it would take a lot for that to happen. She gave him a sheepish smile, like she didn’t mean to get so serious and gently took her hand away. Replacing the warmth of his skin with the cool of her beer glass.
“I kind of want to meet her now, though.” Winnie said after a moment. “She sounds like someone I’d never get along with, but if she’s got your genes she can’t be that bad, right?” A long sip of her beer, thoughtfully licking off the foam. “Yeah. We can invite her to some drinking night and I’ll tell you what I think about her. You could give me a list of things you don’t want her to ever know about you so I don’t embarrass you too much.”
The touch and sentiment were both welcome and Jack glanced over at her, knowing that this wasn't her particular area of expertise. Seriousness fit on Winnie like a bad toupee, but Jack knew that as often as she didn't show it, she did care about people, and he gave her a small smile as it to say that he knew when she drew her hand back. "She's, ah," and here was why Jack didn't think it would be a good idea for them to meet. Not yet at least. "She's going through rehab. Or was. I'm not sure if she completed it."
He had a feeling that Val hadn't and if so, asking her to meet Winnie was not going to go well. "I don't want her to know anything that I don't want the whole world knowing," he said dryly as he lifted his glass up and took a swallow. "I don't think she's capable of not saying everything that comes into her head."
A small, dry laugh escaped her throat and she grinned at him. Winnie liked Jack because he could be so honest without being cruel, but he was more of a listener than a chatterbox. Just the thought of those two being related was starting to sound hilarious to watch. And, then she remembered. “Oh!” Her eyes flew open and she turned her body to look at him. “I know her. I mean I don’t know her personally, but she pissed off my friend on the journals. Oh man...” It didn’t sound good and Winnie clearly was trying to think of something nice to say between Lin’s ranting and what she had read about this Val girl on the journals. The pause went on longer than she had intended and instead of even agreeing that she seemed nice, Winnie just took another sip of her beer with raised eyebrows.
“You know...you’re going to hate this. But, you know-” Winnie gave him a serious look with a tilt of her head. “She’s not your responsibility. This rehab thing? Not your problem. I know the shrink part of you wants to help and I get that, but she sounds like she might be too much trouble. Even for you.”
Jack bit back his desire to say that he wasn't surprised that Val pissed someone off. If it hadn't been for the fact that she insisted they were related, he probably wouldn't have spoken to her again. "I know it's not my responsibility," he said quietly, turning towards her. And he did know that. Val wasn't his patient and they were only recently introduced half siblings, but that didn't stop the fact that he wanted to help.
Beyond that was the awareness that he didn't know if he could pursue anything with Val if she was still hooked on something. "I know that. But," and oh was that but going to kill him, "I can't get to know her if she's on something all the time. Then I don't know her at all. And I can't be her doctor, I don't want to be her doc, but I can help her get the help she needs."
Winnie went back to her beer, uncomfortably focusing on the amber color until there wasn’t any left in her glass. She sighed, pushing the empty thing in front of her for a refill. “My sister smokes a lot of pot.” Being a cop would make anyone’s personal life miserable because people were always tip-toeing around like she might call them in to be arrested or simply stop speaking them all together. But, Maggie was her sister, so what was she supposed to do? “As long as she isn’t hurting anyone and it doesn’t interfere with what she wants to do with her life.” Winnie admitted with a shrug, even though guilt hang on every single one of her words. “Being a cop isn’t about justice, it’s about keeping people safe. Val sounds like she’s different. Maggie would never land in rehab, she’s just going to grow out of it.” Fingers crossed.
“Just promise me you’re not going to let this girl make you miserable.” Winnie wagged her finger at Jack with a mock stern expression and a tiny little grin on her lips. “Or I’ll drive her away from you. I bet you I could do it with enough booze in me.”
First things first, Jack was never letting Val near Maggie, that was all they needed. They'd end up hot boxing in his new house or something. "They can never meet," Jack said solemnly, lifting up his tumbler to touch her glass. "Maggie and Val? Never." As much as he tried not to be psychiatrist Jack with Winnie, he couldn't stop it when he saw the look on her face. It had to be hard, being a cop and knowing that. It was part of the reason why he hadn't come right out with Val's addiction -- he didn't want to put her in that spot.
"I won't, Winnie. Promise. As long as you promise to not let yourself get torn up by Maggie." Was there something about little sisters that required them to give their older siblings a hard time? His mouth quirked into a grin at her threat. "I don't think she's a threat to anyone but herself. And anyone that tells her a secret."
“No way in hell.” Winnie agreed with a brighter grin than anything she had flashed him after sitting down and taking her first drink. Okay, so she wasn’t going to turn her little sister in, but that didn’t take away her overbearing big sister rights. Worrying, meddling and even a little controling were the ways older siblings were supposed to show they cared, right? Jack was about to find out all about those joys of having a larger family and Winnie did not envy him one bit. At least she had twenty something years to figure out the big sister thing.
“Deal. And, we can keep each other in check.” She gave a silly little nod and reached to drape her arm around his shoulders for a tiny, strong hug. Irish women got handsy after a little to drink, but this was Winnie opening up. Her affectionate side was buried under all the bad ass, but it was still there. “I’m still totally going to meet her, though. Once she’s doing better.”
Truthfully, it wasn't all that bad compared to some of the other things Winnie had done in the past. Grinning, he wrapped one broad arm around her waist and pulled her into his side. "You can meet her, just give us some time to get to know one another first before I throw her into the deep end of the pool." While it could have been weird, talking about introducing his half-sister to his ex, Jack knew that they were going to remain friends and maybe it was better that way.
Maybe. He gave her an easy, affectionate kiss to her temple before releasing her. "Deal. Now for the good stuff. Did I tell you that I bought some property outside of Vegas?"
Winnie closed her eyes with a smile that looked so much younger than she usually pretended to be. For a girl in her mid twenties, Winnie was mistaken for someone in her thirties more than she liked to admit. Not because she looked particularly old, but people like her had the tendency to carry too much responsibility around with them. But, Jack could sneak out her softer side and damn him for it.
“Like a house?” She said incredulously and a little louder than intended. Enough to turn heads. “Wait, no. Like a ranch?” She joked, still unable to turn her volume back down. The bartender gave her a look and Winnie laughed, bringing her voice down to a near whisper. “I’m imagining you in a cowboy hat. Mmm, Yeah. Yeah, I think I can live with that.”
Jack laughed and shook his head. "No, just land right now. I got a -- right before I came in I finished up the call to buy a trailer. Don't laugh," he started, though he knew she might do it anyway if the urge struck her. "It's one of those old silver things. It's gorgeous." He grinned, twisting the glass back and forth between his fingers.
"No ranch included. Not yet." Though Aragorn, in the back of his mind, let him know that he liked the idea of horses and he did have all that land... Jack shook his head before Aragorn ended up talking him into it. "Just an outdoor shower," he teased her.
“A trailer?” She grinned, holding back a laugh with a big bite of her bottom lip. But, the more she thought about it, the more she liked it. In a rustic sort of way. And, didn’t Joseph live in a trailer? Maybe it was just something old men felt compelled to do. “Actually, that sounds great. But, only if you take it places. I mean what’s the point of a trailer if you aren’t going to do a little traveling?” Winnie never traveled. Once and awhile when she was in high school and her team had tournaments, but her dad was always too busy for some big family vacation out of the state. Once, she had been to New York, but she hated it there. Maybe some old fashioned cross country would be nice though.
Winnie wiggled in her seat at the thought of an outdoor shower. “You just made a big mistake telling me that, pal. My patrol car comes with a sweet pair of binoculars. I’ll invite some of the other lady cops and bring some lawn chairs for the show.”
"Right now, I'm thinking about leaving it on my land." Traveling? Maybe sometime in the future, when Jack wasn't working and when Aragorn was settled. As far as he had traveled for school, he wasn't bitten by the wanderer bug. He liked home. "It can go with you if you want to leave, but it feels..." Free. All the comforts of having a steady abode without being forced to stay in any one place. And, if it happened that he needed to attend a conference somewhere, he could still stay in his own bed and Spot could easily come with him. "Liberating. Or maybe that's just the outdoor showers," he said with a laugh, head tossed back carelessly.
It gained him a look from the bartender, but Jack was too busy grinning. "I feel so objectified. Remind them that I have a vicious attack dog." He paused, just for effect. "Spot might lick them to death or just beat them up with his tail wagging. It's hard to tell," he said with another laugh, ignoring the subsequent look from the bartender.
The dark bar might not hear much laughter, but Jack wasn't in his office, he didn't have to keep every emotion carefully measured and doled out like someone on a strict diet counted out every portion of food. And he was with Winnie. If he tried that with her, she'd find a way to wiggle herself in anyway. "So, besides your recent voyeuristic streak, what's going on with you, Winnie?"
Winnie decided that she liked Jack this way. Sure, she had a thing for sensitive, controlled guys because they so weren’t like anyone she knew on the force or in her own family. But, she didn’t want him to be a shrink around her either. It was good for him, for the both of them, to let loose a little. Especially with a couple drinks under their belt in a dark bar that probably hadn’t heard so much giggling and laughing in weeks. She laughed along, too, loud and unevenly like a girl who was never taught to act womanly or simply failed the classes straight out.
When the conversation turned to her, Winnie didn’t really know what to say. She ducked her head down a little and sipped more of her second beer with a shrug. “Oh, I don’t know.” Winnie sort of wished she had a weird family story to tell him or anything about her personal life that didn’t involve sitting at home playing video games. “They let me patrol alone now that my partner’s gone- taking a break- whatever.” She seemed sad about that, but tried not to show it. “Rookie’s gotta grow up sometime, right?”
The laugh made him grin, his own deeper chuckle mixing into it. That was one of the things he liked about her -- she didn't fit into a box and he didn't want her to. She wasn't the Barbie trophy or like the prim and proper Doctor-and-spouse couples that his father tended to spend too much time around. She was a change and that change was good.
"Yeah? How's that going?" As sad as she seemed about it, Jack thought it'd be good for her too. It had nothing to do with the rookie growing up, but the reality that she was both strong and capable. He believed in her even if he knew the realities of being a cop. Especially with the way things were going in this town. "Are you liking it?"
“It’s a little lonely.” She admitted. “Even if before all they did was pair me with old guys who didn’t talk much, it was better than being out there alone.” Winnie might have been a workaholic, but she was still a people person. A helper. “And, dangerous. A lot more dangerous. They don’t have me walking anything that’ll get a gun shoved in my face regularly, but if something happens to me out there, I’m screewweed.” Still, there wasn’t any complaining in her voice. If her dad could walk a beat alone, if so many of her ancestors could do it, then she could, too. “But, it’s time to take the bull by the horns. It’s time.”
She nodded and finished off her beer with a funny, lopsided grin. “I better get home before I start getting handsy.” Winnie leaned in for a hug and sloppy kiss next to his ear. “This sister...half sister of yours gives you any trouble, you tell her you’ve got a lady cop friend. Okay? I’ll show up in uniform to scare her straight.”
Jack could have smiled at the way she drew the word out, but the thought of Winnie being proverbially screwed wasn't something he found funny. She was capable, yes, and he trusted her, believed in her, but it didn't stop him from telling her to "Stay safe," when she hugged him. "And make sure you pack a red cape in case the bull gets too close." Go out there, but be safe doing it.
"I promise to call you if I need her scared straight," he said, the corners of his mouth beginning to tug upwards as he pressed his own kiss to her cheek. It probably would scare Val straight, right after every single thought in her head came flying out of her mouth. At least she was honest. "Don't be a stranger," he said as he let go of his ex and settled comfortably back into his seat. Finishing off his second drink, he gestured to the bartender again, this time for the tab. He'd asked Winnie out, he'd pay.