Pamela is made of (hemlockandhoney) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-31 22:38:00 |
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There was nothing difficult about pushing through to influence a sleep deprived, heartbroken junkie on the tail end of sobriety. Ivy'd seen enough of them to know that they didn't last, these little vacations. Brief but always recurring. Just a little something to remember the painful truth that life offered before Cerise shut it all off again. The drugs were an escape from the hurt that sang from her heart every time she looked in the mirror, an escape from caring just how useless her life had become. It was easy not to care about anything else when you didn't much care about yourself. Ivy could have despised her for it. That kind of weakness was nothing like herself.. but Ivy didn't hate Cerise. In the beginning she had, she'd hated her not for the death and destruction, but for the wasted potential. There'd been a time when a girl like Cerise could have done so much if she hadn't gotten lost in the needle. Yet Ivy did not blame her anymore. She might not have understood it, but she'd seen enough to know that some people just couldn't help but fall right back into hell. Be it drugs or clowns.
Leaving the DC door, Cerise didn't immediately notice anything off. The fuzzy yo-yo effect in her brain was so much white noise. During the switch, she'd become Ivy, and maybe that barrier was thinner than ever now. Because she could feel the woman, the thing, in her head. A vicious velvet hand wearing her mind like a glove. It was strange and distracting, so much so that she stumbled into a man on her way out of the hotel while he was on his way in. "Shit! Sorry.."
Escape came in many forms. It came in a powder, the now-familiar feeling of the opiate rush, washing away everything else with it’s euphoria, but even that only lasted so long, and that crash, the way everything bottomed out and left him scrambling for another line, Liam didn’t like that. He had no intention of letting himself get addicted to that shit (though that was probably already a foregone conclusion), so escape also came in letting Curt his time through the door. Days could be wasted there, stepping out long enough to avoid the kick before turning right back around to let Curt live where Liam could no longer manage. The finality of his last conversation with Seven, the sound of the dead connection still ringing in his ear, it had been enough to push Liam over some edge where he just couldn’t deal. There wasn’t enough of anything to drown in, so he simply made the decision to let Curt have at it. That was his destination that night when he bumped into the young woman on her way out.
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Liam said after they collided, reaching out to grip her shoulders to keep her steady, bone-thin fingers curling around her shoulders, pale blue eyes catching her gaze. “I wasn’t watching where I was going, either.” Because no matter how gone Liam thought he was, the ability to be anything but a gentleman to those he ran into wouldn’t leave. “You’re alright?”
Her eyes widened at first, some mockup mishmash of terror and fury that came along for the ride with all strange men. He looked weak though. She could probably unfold her knife right into his throat. It wouldn't be the first time, it wouldn't even be the fifth time. Cerise had long ago stopped wondering when her switch got flipped, when she stopped counting the bodies in smoldering ash and rubble. One day it all just faded away when she wasn't looking, kind of the way that she was fading away right now. Changes like that happened so smooth, so slowly that you could just blink and miss it altogether.
"I'm fine," she said with only a fringe of defensiveness. Her bony shoulders were stiff under his hands, but she managed to keep herself from pulling away. She'd spent enough time around predators to know that moving was sometimes the worst thing you would do. But this guy was no wolf. There was a tiredness around his eyes that she almost recognized. That exhausted drag on the eyelids that stayed no matter how much sleep one got.. she'd seen it enough in the mirror over the last fifteen years. She softened immediately, "Are you alright?"
Once he was sure she was fine, steady, not prone to simply folding in half in the doorway of the hotel, Liam released the grip he had on her shoulders. Once upon a time, he might have picked up on the stiffness, the way she held herself in front of him, but those days were a distant memory belonging to someone that wasn’t quite him anymore. A sliver of a smile curved his lips as he gave a nod of his head, sliding his fingers into the safety of his pockets, if only to hide the tremor in his limbs when he wanted nothing more than a little more escape, a little more powder to bury his head in. “Yeah, I’m fine. I was just... going in.” He inclined his head towards the door and everything that lay beyond it, his gaze dragging back towards her a moment later. “Ah,” Liam started a moment later, pulling his right hand from his pocket to extend to her. “Liam. A pleasure.” The soft accent was still present, a Southern drawl that clung to his words no matter how far away from the South he got.
"Cerise," she offered while taking the hand for a brief greeting. Once upon a time, the aliases slid off of her tongue like holy water.. but there wasn't much of a need for those anymore. All of her sins were buried, hidden away from all but her own memory. Almost everyone from her old life was dead, nobody was going to come looking for her. Except for maybe the cops eventually, but that wasn't worrying. Jail sounded a bit like vacation time at this point.
"It makes it easier, doesn't it? Going through the door.." She was talking about the opiate hangover, the chasing of poppy ghosts. Even if she didn't say it, that's what she meant, but Cerise wasn't ever one to put the truth out there like that. She just alluded while glancing back up along the staircase, reminiscing.
Liam’s use was something he was still somewhat uncomfortable with, somewhat shamed by, and even as he gave her hand a brief shake, he had a hard time shaking off how she had known. Because those words alluded to something unsaid, something she recognized in him that he hadn’t even known he’d been exhibiting. But what use in there was denying it? That hadn’t gotten him very far with Seven, and there was little use in lying to someone he didn’t even know. “You can only run so far from yourself before there’s no place else to go,” Liam said quietly in agreement, dipping his chin for just a moment. “And, it’s cheaper. That’s something, I believe.”
She smiled at his honesty. Cheaper, ain't it the truth. "Yeah, yeah it is that." It wasn't that being a drug addict in Vegas was an impossible feat, it was just fucking exhausting. Eventually one's little life revolved around that little, inconvenient thought whether one wanted it to or not. No matter how many meetings one attended or how many church services, that kind of shit didn't go away without leaving behind a nuclear blow-out blur of the cadaver spirit. Even when Cerise had been clean for all that time, it was still there. The thought that sprouted up like a cackling witch when she least expected it. It would be easy to use here or there, easy to score at that drug store, etc. It was a betrayal of the mind, the way those thoughts kept coming like a phantom steamroller driving her into the ground. It never really went away, but it in time it got easier to ignore.
"You still got to come back eventually and face it all.. sometimes puttin' that kind of shit off makes it more difficult.." Hesitating, she glanced his way again. "You know?" Then, perhaps because she could muster some guilt for prying into him, or perhaps because she was a lonely junkie looking for a fucking sign that she wasn't completely alone, she turned to him. "There's some bad people here," even if she was usually likened in that tarpit category. "I can walk you up to your door?" If this was a feat usually reserved for gentlemen on dates, she wasn't aware of it. Cerise had never been on a date, and she didn't know any gentlemen.
Her words held more truth than he would have liked, a bob of his head coming with his agreement. “I keep hoping if I’m gone long enough, I’ll come back and everything that’s been falling to pieces here will have somehow fixed itself.” He’d come back, Seven wouldn’t be pissed, Sam and him might actually go more than a week without fighting, and maybe he could get back on some path to normalcy. It was just a hope, though, and not one he placed much faith into. Liam let out a sigh, his narrow shoulders sinking down, the collar of his shirt loose, bearing more neck and shoulder than it should have. “Are you offering to protect me from the so-called bad people?” he asked, but there was amusement in those pale blue eyes. But even Liam had to admit that company would be good, however brief it was. Too much time had been spent on his own, and that led to thinking and more bad decisions, and he had had more than enough of those as of late. “I’m upstairs. Couple floors. Company is always good.”
"I'm not much good at protecting people," she admitted with a wincing smile. Honestly, she'd been in the opposite business for most of her life. "But we probably stand a better chance if we're more than just one, right?" In a strange way, it felt good to talk to a stranger, to offer her hand and her help. She'd spent too much of her time locking herself away behind dusty motel blinds, and it seemed to her in this moment that not everything in her life had to be torment. Maybe it had something to do with actually being a little clean for once and seeing a guy who had it worse than her. It was a new perspective as there weren't very many people who competed with Cerise for the crown of fucked up royalty. Even if she didn't know Liam, it seemed important to her that Cerise walk him upstairs. Part of her wanted to know where he was going, and while she wasn't sure why, the thought wasn't too strange. Most of the people she knew were from her own door, she thought.
“Two is always better than one.” Liam glanced towards the stairs for a moment, Cerise’s smile still fresh in his thoughts, even with the wincing nature of it. He seemed to be thinking, weighing his options for how next to proceed, but it didn’t take him long to come to a decision. Tilting his head in her direction, he offered his arm, that Southern gentleman cover his mother had crammed into him from the moment he could walk and talk quite evident. “Shall we?” Liam asked, glancing back towards her, lips pulling up in a tired smile. He wasn’t normally a person who had a lot of colour to his skin, but he was beyond pale, dark hair a heavier contrast against that fair skin. The skin beneath his nose was raw and worried at, an easy sign of the kind of things he had gotten up to over the last month. Escape came with its own price, and he seemed ignorant of how it appeared to others.
Cerise stared at the offered arm for a moment with no clue how to proceed. She'd never so much gone to a school dance, and she was a little surprised that people actually did this kind of thing. Then again, if it was entirely out of the ordinary, she had no way of knowing her. Her circle was fairly small and exceedingly shady. But she'd seen Gone With the Wind once, so she at least knew what the gesture meant. She took the offered arm, and slipped her own through. "Sure."
The stairs weren't too agonizing, although Cerise could recall plenty of times when she'd been sick enough that just scaling a single flight had seemed like an impossible task. Right now wasn't so bad, and she momentarily wondered if Ivy's life on the other side of the door was completely stressless, or if the woman was in infinitely better shape. Cerise almost never came out of DC tired or injured. It probably was a little bit of both, she supposed. Nearly as soon as she'd started thinking of Ivy, the thoughts flickered and derailed. The celluloid melted, the record skipped. Her became I, there became home.. although Cerise wasn't initially aware of the strangeness. "What door are you going to?" She needed to know.. for some reason. If the question was too prying or weird, she figured that offering up her own might help the process of honesty along. The fact that such forthrightness was a quick way to get killed or arrested or hunted down like a fucking dog -- what should have been worries were just background noise now. "I'm in the DC door.."
Liam wasn’t nearly as quick moving as he once was, so the stairs were taken slowly, Cerise’s arm tucked in with his own. He didn’t say anything as they walked, at least until they turned the corner to the floor that Marvel’s door occupied, giving her a glance at the question that fell from her lips. It was a strange question, one that he might have hesitated to answer on most days, but at that moment, he hardly cared. He was harmless, Connors was mostly harmless if you discounted the serum, and it was just one person he was telling. “Marvel,” he offered, already pulling out the key card that served as his entrance to the door. “My second door. I kind of miss the first. Raoul might have been a ponce, but he was a comfortable, fancy ponce.” The expression that came to Liam’s face at the mention of the Vicomte was fond, almost sad in its tone. That door might have been a mess, but he felt like he knew what to expect there.
"Mine is the only door I've had," she said wistfully. It was a good door, it was a good home. Even if DC was completely fucked sometimes, she could remember Costa Rica like it was yesterday. The acres of rainforest blooming under her hands. Wait - that wasn't right, she'd never been to Costa Rica. Cerise closed her eyes hard and her nose scrunched as she fought the weird fog in her thoughts. When Liam produced that key, she slumped against the wall, nearly collapsing with a painful, defenseless whimper as she seemed on her way to fainting.
Everything about Raoul, about the Phantom door, about what was going on was forgotten as Cerise let out that whimper. Immediately, his focus was upon her, hands going to her arms to support her, blue eyes wide in worry about the young woman. “Cerise?” he asked, his words thick with concern, pulling her in towards him, keeping her from simply crumpling to the floor. “What happened? Are you-” He almost asked ‘alright’, but the answer to that was obviously a no.
No, shit wasn't alright. She was weak and lifeless for a moment before her arms clung to him, her fingers were the barbs on the vine, latching into his shirt's fabric for support. "Help me," she whispered before the soles of her boots righted on the floor, and her elbow swept up to dig deep in the valley where his neck met his shoulder. After that, it was a little push, a little slam and a little goodnight as Mr. Liam met with the doorjamb for a rough first date.
"Thanks, handsome." Cerise straightened, and there was nothing weak or mild in those gutter green eyes when she swayed down the hallway back toward her own door, her own home. Sliding through her phone, she sent a quick message to Scarecrow, telling him to open up and come get his key.
Maybe it made her a bad person, doing this with the full knowledge of what he intended for that other door. But it wasn't her door, and it wasn't her problem. With the crow away, there were all kinds of fun things she intended to play with in his lab. Curiosity was usually reserved for cats, but right now Ivy twisted herself up in it and absolutely reveled.