winnie and jayne are like (luxandvera) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-25 12:44:00 |
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Entry tags: | jayne cobb, plot: switch, zoe washburne |
Who: Olivia and Winnie
When: Recently!
Where: Aboard Serenity
What: drinking times. girl talk
Warnings: Winnie swearing. Hilarious Olivia quotes.
It was dim black, star-pricked beyond the window that was a silent promise of the truth in it. Olivia sagged at her knees and she sat down on the berth of a bed (surprisingly comfortable, for all the rough-thick blanket folded over the sheets with military corners) and she put a hand - delicate and long-fingered and her own broad palm flat against the smooth metal of the wall and felt its coolness assimilate into her reality. Space. She was in space, in a rattletrap of a ship with a teenage boy at its helm and a host of names she didn’t recognize as absent. For a strong, hot minute Olivia squeezed closed eyes that burned too much for true teariness, against having learned to deal with one alter and presence in the back of her own head and so much accepted reality washed away with the strange, oblique suddenness that this world was wont to give without explanation. No tall, silent and watchful man then. A woman who had an affinity for battered weaponry, leather cracked and rubbed to suppleness in spots, boots that came up to her knees and the kind of clothes that called themselves ‘military’.
The metal rungs of the ladder out of the room slid under her feet; Olivia climbed with the brittle determination of a woman who did neither gyms nor outdoors activities, for whom tramping through snow to a New York subway was exertion. One of her nails - smoothly shaped, glossy - broke and she cursed in an oddly harmonic language before she’d realized she didn’t - wasn’t supposed to know Chinese. It was geometric corridors and her own footsteps ringing on metal floor before she came out into an open, wider area, a long table and the artificial warmth of yellow paint on the walls and the low, softer lighting of something less industrial. “Hello?” Olivia said, and she heard her own voice, un-used to wariness, the single note of dissonance, of fear.
Winnie was the kind of girl who was so used to routine that a vacation on a spaceship should have scared her a little. A self-professed workaholic who couldn’t remember the last time she left Vegas, the little blonde cop knew she should miss home. She knew that instead of playing with Lin and marveling at Jayne’s extensive weapon collection, she should be trying to find a way back. And that guilt, the sort of dragging unrelenting Catholic sort, shifted in the back of her mind like a dog who couldn’t find a comfortable place to sleep. Sometimes she could ignore it, but the only way to properly drown it out was with some decent booze. So decent booze, she went to acquire.
Sitting at just left to the middle of the long wooden table that was all but deserted, Winnie was curled up in a ratty looking wicker chair with her journal flayed open in her hands as she nursed some cheap space alcohol that tasted foreign. While the blonde had always been a tough girl since she was old enough to scrape her knees on pavement, she looked remarkably young just sitting there in ratty jean shorts and an orange, faded shirt that had seen its share of ship repairs and shootouts. And, when her ears perked up at the hello she gave a wide smile to Olivia without thinking about how serious the woman seemed. “Oh, hey! Hi.” Winnie rolled forward in the chair, tossing the journal on the table. “I’m Winnie.” The younger woman almost extended her hand for a shake, but then figured the new arrival wasn’t the kind to really do that. She couldn’t tell, actually and it made her a tad bit nervous. “Do you want some of this? It’s weird as hell, but that seems to be this week’s theme.” Winnie pointed to the bottle on the table and then looked around from her chair to see if there was another glass.
The woman was young, this much Olivia could assess, beyond the college-kid clothes and the sort of t-shirt Olivia used to wear when painting, better soaked through with turpentine and covered in oils than worn out where people might actually see you doing so. She was young and she was blond, both of which were strikes against her (wryly; Olivia knew exactly where her prejudices lay) but she smiled widely and warmly and it surprised Olivia, truly, how much that went to smooth out the ridged, ragged sea of her own response to being caught ship-side, nothing but the dim black ocean of nothing beyond the windows. There were fewer here, the light was warm-gold on yellow walls and the table was bare of anything truly nefarious. Belatedly, Olivia looked at the hand, the overture, and she reached out to shake herself.
It was business-warm, the kind of firmness that was suited to board meetings and conference rooms, and she had dignity about her, despite the knee-high boots (surprisingly comfortable) and the leather vest (less so). She slid into the vacant chair nearby, and she looked at the glass of whatever it was Winnie was drinking. Alcohol seemed sorely necessary. “I think anything that aids with ‘weird as hell’ is probably beneficial at this point.” Olivia took the bottle and - for the first time in probably a good ten years - necked a swallow, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand with a surprisingly ladylike air, and then looked for a glass. The liquid had a bitter taste but it burned as it went, in a pleasing reminder that it was after all, alcoholic. That would do.
“I’m Olivia,” there was a glass that didn’t look dubiously clean - she rubbed it along the knee of her pants, and poured a generous measure. “I have no idea who I’m supposed to be but I loathe the wardrobe.”
Winnie’s handshake was strong, but without the authority that might normally come along with it. She spent so much time being a cop that she rarely turned that light off, even around her family. When she did it was replaced with more warmth and silliness than the badge would allow. “Oh, right. Leather.” Winnie pointed at her, remembering the conversation over the journals. “Wow, you look just like her in that tomb raider outfit.” She had only just started watching the show, but any idiot could tell the resemblance was uncanny. They were a good match, better than Winnie and Jayne and not just for the obvious physical resemblance. “You know, the offer for old t-shirts and cargo pants is still out there.” Winnie said with faux-pride, picking the edges of her dirty shirt with her fingers and shrugging her shoulders like someone showing off their fashion sense.
She scooted forward in her chair, glancing over the journal in front of her before closing it and pushing the thing away. Her mouth screwed up in a proud, Irish smile at Olivia taking a hit right from the bottle and then downed what was left in her glass before sliding it across the table for a refill. “Tell me what you’re missing back in Vegas.” Because Winnie was getting homesick and she needed to know that it wasn’t just her.
It went down a great deal easier as more of it was consumed, Olivia found, and she looked at Winnie with the cultivated sort of blank look that has to be practiced to be truly successful, all cool hazel eyes and strong mouth and no thought at all for the content of a conversation, at the gambit about leather. Finding something that wasn’t - finding something that didn’t cling, or grab or even sit pervasively on the hip and snug on the breast - was virtually impossible and the ill-temper that had worked up rubbed like sandpaper-rasp over skin. The space-alcohol helped, all raw-burn and thick heat in the pit of her stomach, a suitably awful way of getting to grips with this.
“I think getting out of this is as difficult as it likely is getting in,” Olivia said, dry as prairie winds and dust and the glass rolled across her palm. What did she miss? Sanctity of sanity. An order to her own chaos. Being able to see the ground. “Anything that isn’t this,” she settled on, sound and weighted with fact rather than anything like homesickness. Olivia was irritated. It was not remotely the same thing.
Winnie was so used to dealing with people like Olivia in a professional setting. In that scenario, it was best to stick with yes ma’ams and sharp comprehension. This felt a little like she was drinking with a superior, but with all the stakes and repercussions lowered significantly. The young cop didn’t feel obligated to put on a show for Olivia, especially when there was booze involved. So, she gave a bubbling little laugh at her response and shrugged. “I can’t imagine doing this forever.” Winnie liked plenty of stuff about living through the door. Space, goofing off with Lin, guns. All good reasons to just enjoy this wacky switch. It was more about wanting the important parts of her life back.
She reached for more booze, pulling her glass along the surface of the table and brought it to her lips. Winnie wondered where Olivia liked to hold conversations. Was she more comfortable in some posh apartment party with keenly eyed intelligent and wealthy people who were flippant about practically everything? Or did she find those kinds of people annoying, too? The blonde didn’t know. Her time was usually spent reading drunks and people who got caught up in something or other along the strip. In fact, if she ever saw Olivia walking down the street while patrolling, Winnie wasn’t convinced she’d even notice the stern lady.
There was nothing about space that sang to her. It was wide, it was filled with nothing; Olivia felt the way she imagined people did standing on precipice edges, before they fell. It was like danger rushing up to meet her, blood in her ears and her heart pushing against her rib-cage, a warning that went bone-deep. She looked resolutely into the bottom of the glass, and she took at least two swallows before she looked up, her throat raw and fiery but her stomach warm with it. “I hope it isn’t permanent,” but the hotel and its menace, slow and creeping and insidious was rarely permanent. Not in any evident way, just the scoring it left on the people that had passed through its hands.
The blond woman had the bearing of someone much straighter and much taller and broader than she actually was; it was something Olivia assessed with an eye not so much practiced but attuned and her petiteness was swallowed up in the comfortable way she was relaxed. It made Olivia even more aware of the tension that had climbed her spine and drawn her shoulders tight, and when she eased herself - deliberately - she heard the leather move and flex against her rib-cage. It was a novel and not entirely unpleasant sensation.
“I can’t say I ever wanted to visit space,” she observed, lip of the glass to her own mouth and all right, so space had the alcohol to recommend it, even if it did taste a lot like paint thinner smelled.
“Space isn’t really something you think about visiting until it’s too late.” Winnie said, clearly from experience. Before Passages, she didn’t really think about space or aliens or video games or nerdy television shows. She didn’t even really care about the Mass Effect world until Garrus walked through the door and she could see all of it as close to first hand as she could. But, once she did experience it, she was hooked. “It’s not as interesting in a rusty trap like this ship, I’ll give you that.” Winnie shrugged, taking another gulp from her glass without making much of a face. It was hard to tell how many drinks in she was, but there was a faint ruddy color on her cheeks to suggest that it was at least enough to make a freshmen in college passout in the middle of a dorm room party.
Winnie leaned her head back on the chair, looking up at the ceiling of the spaceship, deciding that they’d never really know they were traveling through space if they had been dropped in this room without any prior information. “I don’t know how we’re going to pick up guys in this thing.” Because that was a good priority for a young woman to have. “I don’t even think there’s a lot of places to pick up decent guys in space.” She looked down at Olivia with a smirk. “There’s barely any decent guys in Vegas.”
Passages didn’t let you think of much of anything before it conjured it up, a teeth-bristling nightmare from the very depths of your own terrors. Olivia hadn’t walked through the Door since the mugging outside the bank; she had expected New York in frigid February, snowflakes and the familiar rattle of the subway, the gushing steam vents and isolation in numbers. Not this - a woman who walked like a warrior, by the look of her clothes. She looked at Winnie and she assessed rightly enough the chase of the liquor through her system - warm-rotting away the nightmares and the vague dissonant care that was the ship, that was a nagging sense of responsibility to it, a fondness for it that Olivia stoutly refused to look at. It wasn’t unpleasant, not in the sense of long-haul air journeys and processed air, just a metallic cleanness to it and the hard burn of the liquor itself.
She laughed because it came out of left-field, that anyone would go looking for men on a ship, even less so the men that walked through the Door. In Olivia’s estimation, most of them were mad or sad or something between the two and none of them had a selling point beyond the vague irritation she had for her erstwhile client - she wondered, idly, what he’d become, where he’d walked into and she poured another generous measure into her glass. “Important to you, is it?” she asked, dry as tongue behind teeth, “I can’t say I’ve been looking in Vegas.”
Winnie didn’t exactly run with a crowd that didn’t find hooking up important. It was all part of winding down from a day out on patrol. You go drink with your buddies, you hit on some random stranger in the bar and then rinse, repeat for the next five years. She told herself that she’d eventually settle like the rest of her police force family, but that didn’t feel like anything she wanted to happen soon. “Why not? You’re way hot.” Winnie grinned. “And, I can tell you’re tough. Guys eat that up. I’d wingwoman for you.” Though, there wasn’t anything in her voice that suggested she thought Olivia needed a wingwoman. She probably could just give a guy a look over some wine glass and they’d be hooked.
“I need something to get my mind off guys in Vegas. Between ex-boyfriend who’s a shrink and life-long crush who’s also a shrink, I’m completely screwed in the men department.” Winnie said with a sort of honesty that bloomed from intoxication and being a brash young woman. What did she have to lose? If they were going to be stuck on this ship forever, Olivia would get to know the real Winnie eventually. In fact, it usually only took one good drinking session for people to get the blonde.
Liquor blurred ordinary lines, painted them the hazy gold-gray of memory and social niceties pooling into nothing. Olivia observed above her glass the reddish tint to Winnie’s cheeks, the liquid lilt to her words that ran them into carelessness - she laughed, bright and bold and far too raucous for Olivia of stone-colored suits, of businessmen and accounting books. “I don’t need a wingwoman,” she said, as much to Winnie as the bottom of the glass, and a pleasant fuzzy vagueness settling in. Space had little to recommend it but the hooch. “I manage fine, thank you.” It had been a while - since Fury settled in and spread, cold-fear tendrils vining through her own life until Olivia couldn’t think of dragging someone home, of the clear, almost clinical division of her life and the personal - male or female. Another laugh, slow and rolling - she sounded now like someone who was used to laughing, to volume and sound and the vivid almost tangibility of it, her hand that held the glass drooped.
“Shrinks are too cerebral,” Olivia said, as if she knew, as if she had dated half of New York and all of them the kind that could hold their own in a discussion of literary supplements, modern art and opera. “They’re too busy asking you permission to make things interesting.” And that was usually the problem. Timidity. “I expect the opposite is true. Screwed, that is.” A little half shrug, another measure poured into the glass. Olivia could drink more than most men; there was only the faintest of heat in her cheeks and that could barely be seen.
Winnie gave a loud and short laugh of recognition. Like when someone said something you knew all along, but never really put it to words in your head. Olivia got it right on the nose. These sensitive, thoughtful guys didn’t have any take and even the toughest girl wanted their man to do that even a little. Even some minor pawing would be nice. “It’s not just that.” Winnie lowered her voice to a serious, dry tone like they had entered a whole new level of dishing about men. “They’re so hard to read. I mean, it makes sense. Their whole job is sitting there nodding and listening to people all day, so they probably practice holding back their reactions all the time. But, when you’re talking to some guy, you want to know when you’re making some kind of impact.”
She looked down at her glass, head bubbling like soda pop as she was now very much aware that she was over-sharing just a little too much. But, Olivia didn’t seem to mind. Winnie didn’t give a damn who knew what about her or her personal life, but deep down she didn’t want to go around offending anyone. “What’s your type, Olivia?” Winnie asked after a while, gaze shifting up to rest on the more relaxed, yet still oh-so bad ass in leather in front of her. “I mean- if you don’t mind me asking.” She recovered with a funny half-cocked smile, eyes bright and a little silly.
Olivia didn’t smile - as a rule. It was a rule instituted rather than habit, and it was the splayed corners of her mouth, the laughter still clinging to her like the rule was a badly kept secret rather than anything so solidly concrete as a law. She looked at the contents of the glass and she looked at Winnie and she put one elbow on the edge of the table and leaned her chin into her palm, thoughtfully. “Men who know what they’re doing, and women who don’t. Usually,” she corrected herself. The latter was more a result of type, than an active choice. Women who were undecided about where life was going to take them usually pulled her attention from the sole glass of whiskey she sat nursing, those nights she found a bar stool with the quick determination of those that came with an unspoken agreement to exchange not much more than names. “Although that’s a pleasant surprise, when they do.” The warm bite of humor in a dialogue, unexpected wit. Attention to detail - yes, that was it entirely. Olivia’s smile was a wry twist of a thing, entirely meant for herself.
“Never therapists,” she pronounced, as if it were a judgment from a ruler. Her hand punctuated the statement with her glass. “Men who modulate their responses to you are unbearable and boring.” She was, it occurred to her, somewhat more relaxed about it than she ought to be, but the sleepy-warm burn of whatever the glass held was enough to make the prospect less startling or daunting. Olivia curled her feet up underneath her, the posture not remotely intimidating. “They are generally terrible in bed.”
Winnie tilted her head, short blonde hair falling like a tiny, light scarf over her shoulders. She had never been told that going after the nice sensitive guys was a mistake. Partially because other women probably didn’t want them and Winnie was such a strong, almost masculine lady that it made sense she’d pair up with someone a little more passive. But, here was Olivia. When it came to men she didn’t put up with that shit. “My ex was pretty good.” Winnie said after a little while, thoughtfully swishing the booze in her glass around. “Don’t know about Toby, though.” She gave a vacant look out past Olivia’s shoulder that almost seemed to suggest that Winnie wasn’t even sure if Toby had sex. That was alarming, though not enough to completely cure her of a fifteen year old crush on the poor man.
“I don’t want to end up like one of those girls who puts in a lot of work just trying to get some guy to break down his emotional walls or whatever.” Winnie looked back at Olivia. “This guy I’ve had a crush on since I was in a training bra. His name’s Toby. Nice, quiet, doesn’t bullshit. I like that in a man. He had some fucked up shit happen to him when he was younger, so he had to grow up real fast for his brothers. The problem is he never does anything for himself. I mean I work my ass off, too, but I still know it’s good to let loose. Not this guy.” She shrugged. “If I ask him out on a date, it’ll be awkward. If I try to jump him while he’s at work, cause he never goes home, he’ll think I’m insane.”
Olivia’s chin settled more deeply into her palm; the leather creaked as she eased herself into a more comfortable posture and there was something boneless about it, that was neither the woman who owned the leather nor the woman who walked around board-rooms and sent polite, chastising emails all day. It was a great deal more comfortable, and she stretched one long leg, letting it swing loose, idly and admiring the polished toe of the boot she was wearing. She had never much been one for girl-talk; she had been one of those behind the bleachers rather than discussing it. “Does the man have sex? Or is he sexually as constipated as he sounds?” One eyebrow skimmed upward, Olivia’s voice was lazy-rich with interest. Men rarely turned up in bars, ties loosely knotted and a faintly predatory look to them, if they weren’t interested. It was, after all, part of how one made sense of it, of the rules that there were to it. Olivia shook her head; the loose cloud of her own hair was warm, heavy on her shoulders. “It sounds ridiculous. Tell him. Or don’t - there’s very little insanity to sex.”
“This is dreadful,” she added, as an afterthought, the clink and slosh of liquid in glasses underscoring her words - she’d poured equally as heavy a measure into Winnie’s own. “The story and the drink. What have you been doing? Pining from a distance?” Olivia’s highly unladylike snort expressed exactly what she thought of that.
Winnie closed her eyes and fought back a muffled whine at the mere thought of Toby being some stuttering cold fish in bed. No, that wasn’t anything like she imagined. It was supposed to be sweet and passionate. Every girl wanted to believe that their body alone could ignite a little drive in even the most reserved sort of man. But, maybe that’s all this ever was. Dreaming and blushing like a little girl behind her mother’s skirt. “Well yeah of course he doesn’t know.” Winnie’s cheeks turned a full on pink, the ruddy color predictably spreading to her nose and forehead like any good Irish girl. Now she was a little embarrassed. For such a brazen, loud thing, Winnie did have a couple hiccups in her life. “He’s practically a decade older than me. I think he sees me as one of his other siblings or something horrifying like that.”
And, then, like every young woman with a crush and too much to drink, Winnie felt the sudden urge to drunk text. “You’re totally right.” She said, resolve thinning into her glossy eyes. “I’m in my mid twenties. I can’t keep acting like I’m fifteen and doodle his name in my notebook or something like that.” Winnie finished her drink with a gulp, face screwing up for the first time as her body tried to warn her that was plenty for tonight. “And, you know what? If he’s bad in bed, I’ll take that as a victory, too.” She nodded with resolve, or as much resolve as a drunk blonde chick could have. “Thanks, Olivia. I need to stop asking guys for advice.”
There was a noticeable sound - small, but distinct - at in my mid-twenties - and Olivia’s eyes closed for a brief if heart-felt minute. It was neither mourning her own youth - which had been entirely dissolute as was warranted - nor the pity for the youth before her, blond and flushed and half way toward extremely drunk but more self-pity at being the advice giver. Olivia dispensed wisdom and hangover cures in equal remedy. She was stoic, a vault and unwilling repository for knowledge she did not need nor want to acquire. She did not encourage it. The hand slid up to press long, blunt-polished fingertips to her temples, “Oh God,” Olivia intoned, eyes still shut, “Please do not credit me with advice. Just sleep with him.” It was, after all, the only way to know. It was more than she absolutely wished to give, as advice.
“Save me from the twenties,” Olivia told the glass, almost affectionately. “I do not ever wish to be twenty anything, ever again.” It was time in which one slid from youth to adulthood in unsettling fashion, with a bewildering sense of one’s own importance somehow eliding into nothing at all. “If you doodle his name in any notebooks, burn them. Or do not tell me about them.”
Winnie smirked, rolling her eyes at a very familiar sort of rejection for her age that she had heard older cops and detective say when one of the rookies royally fucked up. It was better than the kind who wanted desperately to go back though, so Olivia won some points for that. Middle aged people who didn’t want to grow up were the worst to be around because they only wanted to feed off the youth as if it’d bring something back for them. The woman could hold her booze, didn’t bullshit and humored Winnie’s personality. That was more than enough for the rookie cop.
“Don’t worry.” She said, sliding the chair back and wobbling to her feet. “I think my doodling days are over.” Winnie gave a firm nod of her head, swiping the journal up from the table and holding it under her arm. “Thanks for drinking with me. Next time I promise less boy talk.” She smiled with her whole mouth, dimpled cheeks bunching up and eyes squinting like her face could only process so many things on it at once. It was adorable and honestly one of the reasons why most people thought she was a stripper cop instead of an actual one. With a wave, she bounded off towards Jayne’s bunk, ready for a night of mistakes and unfathomable awkward conversations.