PEPPER P. (saltedand) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-08-17 22:54:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | pepper potts, sam winchester |
Who: Russ & Ford Campbell
What: Ford shows for breakfast, Russ is vile, everyone hates everyone
Where: Russ's place
When: Recently
Warnings: Russ.
The changeover in journal had been a while coming. He’d found it fucking inconvenient then, thick leathery pages that crumbled at the edges, he couldn’t shove the book into a pocket or leave it lying around on the workbench without losing bits of the parchment on the inside pocket of his jeans. But writing in the fucking book had been quiet, there hadn’t been a fucking vibrate feature. The device in Russ’s hands now was sleek, tempered steel and impossibly smooth and it buzzed annoyingly blue every single fucking time someone responded to a thing he had to say. It started a thick, pressure-line behind his eyes as he fumbled the device off the bedside table, and it was an ocean-wave pulsating nauseatingly close by as he squinted at his brother’s in-and-out fucking non-committal shit until it was established, yep, Ford was heading over to the house and then he shoved the fucking thing under a pillow where it continued to buzz and dance against the mattress.
Russ’s throat went thick, furry with last night’s beer and the whiskey that had chased it, he stretched his hand experimentally, knuckles stiff and dried blood clinging to the pale-gold hair of his wrist. The phone buzzed at him, like a fucking instrument of torture, like the woman in his head was laughing at him through the device. Bzzzz. Bzzzz. He lay very still, his stomach looped-the-fucking loop like the kind of fairs that showed up at the edge of town, between the people who lived in houses and the park when he’d been a kid, young enough to sneak in. And then he hauled ass to the bathroom to get reacquainted with half his paycheck on the way back up.
By the time Ford had threatened to head over, the small place smelled like coffee, the kind brewed thick and oily and viscous. Russ had scrubbed the worst of the previous night away but the split cheek and the busted up knuckles were starkly pink, dried blood beading where the skin had split over his cheekbone, up close to his right eye. It was jeans and bare feet and the cup of coffee clutched like a drowning man with a life preserver, and standing at the kitchen sink like maybe he wasn’t sure whether the coffee was going to stay down or not. The house was small, it sat hunched at the side of the road like someone with their back curled against the road, all pale stucco and dirty windows, but inside wasn’t bad. It looked like someone lived there who wasn’t much into making shit look pretty but the bike was out front, clearly evident that this was Russ’s place.
The party had taken something away from Ford in its display of something Ford hadn’t even known had been there; a kind of innocence. Ford didn’t like the conscious awareness of that hollow feeling in the place where acceptance might be, and he had much preferred it when that feeling was just part of who he was, and not some big optional maybe in the sky. He shuddered to think about being so focused on a search for something that would never be there, and occupied himself with pleasantly dirty thoughts about Blake, and sometimes March. Most of the latter were only imaginings, but this train of thought got him through the bus ride and some of the anxiety about showing up on Russell’s doorstep. Despite the other man’s rather rough assurances, Ford wasn’t all that sure this meeting would end up as yet another brawl, but he was willing to risk it.
Ford was feeling much better about himself by the time he got off the bus near Russ’ address, which he had located with an old streetmap posted by the bus stop near Turnberry and a healthy dose of hope. After a couple false starts, Ford swam his way through the crippling heat of the mid-morning and found the house with the bike in front of it. It was an actual house, small but sturdy, and to Ford’s eye it was an impressive structure made to withstand the casual assault of unwelcome visitors. The glass was intact in the windows, the paint boasted no graffiti, the door lock was stout against the elements, and when Ford circumnavigated the bike, he saw that it was simultaneously unfettered and untouched.
Ford knocked, his bag over his shoulder. One handle had been duct-taped down to the heavier spread of the dufflebag as time attempted to separate it, the kind given out free at baseball games and labeled with the names of insurance companies and hot dog stands. The bag was about the size of two basketballs and inside was everything Ford owned that wasn’t sitting on his skin. He felt relatively secure there on the doorstep to the small house, and he waited patiently while watching the empty street behind him. The heat lay oppressive on the dark curls, and the blue eyes squinted keenly against the sun.
The party had taken nothing away from Russ that he couldn’t afford; a stretch of time between when he’d been young enough and stupid enough to want things and the point at which he’d been old enough to just reach out and take them and lost the wanting in the taking. He’d been young, younger than the kid on the doorstep and he’d spent the last week aware of his bulk, of height and the way muscle had bound itself around bone and of how age felt when it caught up with you all at once. He was old enough for the house (rented) and he was old enough to look ugly after a night spent drinking and brawling rather than with women (usually, when Russ managed the latter rather than the former, he looked significantly less battered and considerably more cocky). The door rattled and then it opened, and Russ filled the frame, bare shoulders and white vest and the coffee in his hands like it was holding him upright.
He didn’t expect a brawl. His knuckles had stung under the shower from the night before and Russ who had struggled to do more to knock his brother’s unyielding center of mass secretly doubted that if the kid was good and mad, really good and mad, he’d manage it at all. In his head he had a hazy kind of image of the kid between the last time and this time, something that coaxed out the muscle but also the way Ford had a coyote-hungry sort of look to him - the image jarred against the physical reality of Ford stood on the doorstep, that dumb bag slung over his shoulder like it was more than a piece of shit, like it was something. He remembered things, shoving shit that had been vaguely memorable, the carcass of a basketball one of his mom’s boyfriends had got mad at him bouncing off the side of the trailer and had burst, into a cardboard box stashed beneath the fold-down couch in the back. It looked like that, like all kinds of shit shoved into something that would hold it, and Russ blinked against the sun and against the way the hair on the back of his neck crawled to a reluctant stand-still.
“Get off the fucking doorstep then,” he backed up, past rental-bland walls and into the kitchen, the clatter of the coffee pot and the hiss of the faucet signalling coffee was being remade for the second time that day - Russ didn’t know what time it was, but his stomach was lazily lurching from side to side like a landed fish. He was awkward, when he turned, thumbs looped into his jeans and his shoulders curved in like someone flinching. The air-conditioner was small and fucking useless but the cool was mostly limited to the living room just beyond the arch of the kitchen. The house itself was cool, in a drawn-shades way in mid-morning bright.
Ford usually managed to forget how big Russell was in between meetings. For some reason Ford’s mental version of Russell’s voice as he read his messages in the book was considerably colored by a growing impression of capability that made him seem both smaller and cleaner. Ford was stepped back a little so he could look his brother in the eye without craning his neck, but the movement was not out of fear nor an impulsive need to impress. Instead, Ford gave himself a little room and then gave his brother a very guarded, shy smile, the kind that was likely to get your face beat in by people looking for weakness. It had too much vulnerability in it, but Ford was feeling safe, and he let it out.
He greeted Russell with a typically youthful little jerk of his chin up and to the side, a distinct hey that needed no vocalization. Ford was bright-eyed, rested, and he was the one with the faintly smug, “less battered and more laid” air. His eyes ran down Russell’s body to his hands, then back to his face again. Ford was forced to acknowledge that Russell liked to hit and be hit, but he refused to let it sink in just at that moment, so pleased was he to be invited into such sacred territory. Leanly pale despite a rash of peeling sunburn on the crest of both bare shoulders, Ford trotted past, vulpine in the movement of his head to either side as he looked, paused, then looked again.
Ford’s eyes stopped at the air conditioner and he was most visibly impressed: functioning luxury. He pulled at his elbow with the muscles along the back of his arm and let the weight of the bag slide off his shoulder and drop at the extension of his hand. Excessively cheap headphones with wide cups hung down on his collarbone, and they were piping a very distant electric beat steadily into Ford’s silence. Boots heavy as he moved in the general direction of the kitchen (with pauses for verification from Russell), Ford’s limbs moved awkwardly, swinging the bag and looking at least as uncomfortable as Russell. A heavy dose of cautious optimism kept his back straight, and he was hungry enough to quest in the direction of the common refrigerator without actually attempting initial speech. He hadn’t eaten since... (he had to think) the day before yesterday. He couldn’t feel the acid feeling anymore, but his stomach hurt with a familiar hollowness. At this stage of hunger Ford usually got serious about finding something, even if it was just for ninety-nine cents, just so he could think straight. He didn’t touch anything yet, just stopped inside the kitchen and looked around, curious, while waiting for Russell to ask him something so he could begin working on a phrase in response. This is generally the way conversations went.
When Russ smiled it was a deliberate thing, calculated - or it was surprised at smiling, as if the muscles in his face had to be reminded that they worked that way. Ford smiled like someone would kick him for doing so and it lit something like guilt, faint and flickering in the pit of Russ’s stomach without actual understanding as to why it was there at all. He turned his head rather than look at how that smile made him think of dirty carpet and the smell of box mac and cheese, and he sucked down the rest of the cup of coffee in his hand and put the mug down on the clean formica of the side. He wasn’t thinking a whole lot of food; the vague sensation of hunger dulled beneath the cautiousness of nausea and waiting for the caffeine to take the edge off the headache, but he remembered a little of the conversation, enough to jab a thumb toward the fridge, utilitarian and boxy at the end of the row of cabinets.
“Go dig,” he tested the corner of his mouth with the pad of his thumb experimentally, and then gently explored the ridge of his cheek with fingertips; Russ hadn’t looked in the mirror long enough to assess the damage, but he figured it looked like shit, getting beat looked that way. In contrast, the kid looked like someone had fluffed his fucking pillows for him, turndown service and a candy on his pillow, well rested practically rolled off his shoulders. “I ain’t cooking until that’s done,” another jab, this time toward the bubbling of the coffee, “But what you find there, you can eat.” Because even if Ford looked practically jaunty he still looked like he could eat half a fucking diner menu at a sitting. His eyes slid over Ford’s shoulder as he reached out for a cabinet and another mug with a presumption that was either being only half awake or still sobering up from the night prior, and the blistering skin made him smile, brief, sharp - a glance at the curls and the blue eyes.
“Coffee.” The mug smacked down on the formica, and this time the brew smelled less burned-strong than pleasantly aromatic. Russ nudged it toward Ford with the flat of his palm. “Find milk in there.” He lifted his chin toward the fridge, and he sat on one of the scuffed, wooden chairs drawn up to the folding table in the center of the kitchen, his own coffee stubbornly black. The room had, despite the fixtures and fittings, an air of impermanence. There was nothing pinned to the fridge but a shift schedule for work.
At the immediate invitation, Ford moved past Russell entirely and headed for the refrigerator. He smelled clean, for once, not of sweat but of dryer sheets and, bizarrely, of somebody else’s fairly expensive body wash for men. It was not the kind of thing that was to be found in a motel room, a Denny’s, or a construction site, and it was precisely the kind of thing that a very rich dark-haired big mouth would keep in their shower without consciously remembering it was there.
Ford dropped his bag, and it slid against one of the tiny kitchen table legs out of his way, and he bent over to examine the contents of the fridge, only looking over his shoulder long enough to locate where Russell was in the room before looking back. While the big man was fairly battered, it never occurred to Ford that he might have lost. Ford didn’t think Russell got into fights that he was likely to lose, a combination of the assumption that he left before the fight started, or simply pounded anyone who dared cross him. Ford regularly did the former and had always wanted to do the latter.
In the fridge, Ford found a white to-go box from some unknown date and an apple that looked like it had come off a hotel buffet table. He took Russell at his word, turned, and brought his prizes with him back to the table. He didn’t even ask how old the food was; he just started eating it between bites of apple. He kept chewing even while he was reaching for the coffee.
The blue eyes kept making big jumps to the state of Russell’s face and the cuts on his hands. Ford allowed a curious tilt of his own head in a tentative request for information.
Russ wasn’t given overly toward fancy cologne. He was mistrustful of it, the notion that it was too close to perfume and thus something from the realm of femininity, designed to trick a man into smelling like a bunch of flowers was something that had seeped in when young enough for chance remarks by heavily-masculine visitors to slide beneath the skin. He had never been with a woman long enough for gifts of that kind and he rarely spent money beyond the necessities. Ford loped past, angular and peeling in clean white cotton and the smell of him trailed up Russ’s nose and mingled with the coffee in something not entirely unpleasant but certainly unexpected. He smelled like he’d been bathing somewhere that wasn’t cheap slivers of soap crammed together by a discount motel trying to skimp on costs, and the bloodshot blue eyes slitted down as Russ allowed himself to tick that over, slowly.
He hurt, in the slow pulsing in places that had been uncomfortable when he had woken and were now certain of their discomfort and needling toward actual throbbing. His head was as tight as the clamp on the workbench at the garage, squeezing ever tighter, and he rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger and glared at his coffee, resentful that it hadn’t had the desired effect yet.
It was just as well Ford had not and would not voice the wandering thoughts germinating from hero-worship; Russ would have laughed or he would have been angry, because as big as Russ was, he inevitably picked one fight in three he could not win. Of the two of them just then, Russ in crumpled jeans that looked as if they had been slept in (they had) and a shirt with rust-colored smears here and there, he looked the one more likely to be sleeping rough. The kid didn’t interrupt his eating to look at him and he didn’t need words to say something fine with those blue eyes beneath the curls. Russ looked at the carton of two-day-old Chinese food and snorted disgust, and he reached past Ford for a paper package of bacon in the fridge and a carton of eggs, and he set them down on the counter, kicking the fridge closed.
“I argued with someone over what was on his cards,” he said shortly, without looking up from the skillet he’d lifted off a hook on the wall, “Turns out maybe he was right.” A grin, lupine around the teeth, “That time.”
Russell’s appearance did not overly disturb Ford. He was used to the people around him wearing their own blood and sweat for a lot longer than Russell, and Russell didn’t smell. Ford was impressed by the house (a house) and the fridge with its empty surface and full contents. It spoke to him of permanence, and Ford had never known permanence like this. Permanence was another luxury, a new luxury, one that had an unmistakable shine in Ford’s eyes. That sweet blue glowed with it for a moment as he looked at his brother, and then he applied himself to the cold Chinese food again.
Ford was pleased to be provided with information, knowing as he did that his silent questions could very easily be ignored. He put his booted heels down against the floor and scraped the chair forward into the table with his weight. The gesture was simultaneously protective of the food (thoughtless) and invested (intentional). Ford grinned when Russell did, widely. The brash gesture was obvious and clear. He was pleased to be let in on this secret that was not really a secret.
After a few moments more, Ford finished the food that had been left for him. He literally sucked the apple seeds clean as he watched Russell move around the stove. He was salivating over the bacon before the package even tore open, but he focused on the conversation. “W-wuh-was it. W-w-w-wuh-worth it?” He offered a smile that tested the waters, knowing that Russell was hungover and short on temper.
Russ watched Ford swallow without chewing for a couple of fascinated, disgusted minutes with one hip resting right up along the counter and the pan slack in his hands. Ford ate the way Russ remembered it tasting once, like if you didn’t gulp down air along with it, it might be taken out of your damn hands and finished by someone else. Like you’d lose it, if you didn’t hold onto it and the best way to hang on to food was to shove it down, until you felt moderately less like trying to seek some out. His stomach looped a slow and leisurely dip southward and found itself once again, Russ’s mouth felt like cotton, and he looked away from the sight and turned his attention to greased paper and long strips of bacon in hot pan rather than look back down twenty years.
“Maybe,” Russ’s cooking was haphazard and unskilled at best; he knew how to make eggs because a woman somewhere down the line had taught him how, and he knew how to make bacon through trial, error and hunger. Now, with his stomach responding positively to the coffee and suggesting perhaps that it no longer wished to reacquaint itself with the bathroom pan, he cracked half a dozen eggs and tossed them alongside with more enthusiasm than finesse. The look over his shoulder managed to avoid meeting those eyes and the residual guilt that had lurched its way to the surface for a brief, momentary acknowledgment that accompanied all that bright blue, impressed look and Russ smiled like a man playing card-games in a bar for five bucks ago, all brash nonchalance and look-at-me.
“I don’t much remember what the fuck happened,” a grin, sharp at the corners and if he’d expedited a little of the charm, a little bit of the rough polish Russ applied to bars and the people in them he wished to impress, then some of that silent hero-worship was beginning to sink beneath the skin just long enough to be enjoyable and to bother with playing up the rogue. He eyed the clean white breadth of Ford’s shirt, and he looked back down at the pan before he said, “You look kinda different. Who the fuck cleaned you up?”
Ford watched with eyes narrowed in interest, though any other expression was quiet. Ford knew how to cook, the easier stuff like roasted chicken and cheap tuna. He knew because there were enough times that he had no alternative unless he wanted to eat raw. He carefully fished the apple seed out of his mouth and deposited it in the old Chinese box. The apple stem and some sad glints of gelled sauce were still in the container, but that was all. Ford didn’t experience much satisfaction in the consumption of the mess, but his stomach no longer hurt. He found he was thirsty, and pulled his coffee close in a two-handed protective gesture that recalled the paper cup he’d preserved on a cold morning at a construction site several months ago.
Ford noticed that Russell was looking at him without meeting his eyes, but he wasn’t sure what that meant, and made no further attempt to analyze. Coyote-like, he decided to stay on the outskirts and wait for something to develop. The air in the kitchen was firing up with the coming spell of new food, and Ford was leaning forward like a greyhound to a race.
Ford looked down at his white shirt, which, while perhaps not snowy was cleaner than it had been in a while. He put on a look of fabricated innocence. “Ss-s...stayed with a fhu-fuh-f-friend.” He dipped his head to spit out the final fricative. Then he paused, twitched his fingers as if trying to decide, then completed, “Yesterd-d-d-day.” He brightened up, taking this as a good time to mention he had arranged a roof for himself, a stroke of luck worth boasting about, in some ways. Russell didn’t need to know that one friend was different from another. “Sss-staying there. Nice p-p-p-puh-place.” He licked his lips hastily once all these words were completed, and sat back with his coffee.
The vestiges of drunkenness and of the severe and unpleasant headache that it brought in its aftermath clung to Russ like a woman after a really good night, sticky-limbed. He didn’t think starving when he saw Ford lean so close his nose was almost in the damn pan, he just applied an elbow with a grunt, until he was satisfied Ford wasn’t going to start drooling over the bacon before it was done spitting fat and grease all over the damn place. There was a limp sort of dishcloth deposited by the side of the sink, but Russ didn’t look toward it; apparently the place had the cursory cleanliness of someone accustomed to passing over it with an eye for what was obvious and very little understanding of what made something actually clean.
“A friend?” Russ’s eyes had narrowed down to the limits of bloodshot blue and alarm gritted its way through ill-concealed dislike for the notion. Friends didn’t shove up and do your laundry for you, and Russ hadn’t had a friend he liked enough to say ‘plunk down, stay a while, my couch is your bed for the foreseeable future’. He didn’t think it was possible; you bunked with someone, you were giving them something, money or something else. And some measure of that guilt put conveniently away until his head hurt a little less, it did a lazy loop-the-loop, like bile in his throat. If Ford needed a place that badly, why hadn’t he said?
“That ain’t that friend of yours who nearly killed you?” Russ was careless with facts; March had been a danger, March had been dealt with, “I thought you didn’t have friends here,” followed up neatly behind, tact something Russell had only passing acquaintance with, as he pointed the wooden spoon he’d been making a hash of the eggs with at Ford with a faintly bemused air.
Ford didn’t think there was all that much call for the elbow, as he was still technically in his chair, just on two legs rather than four. He fell back with something of a clunk, but his expression was undaunted, implying that the physicality had not been much a threat at all. Eventually he caught the hint after a stray spot of grease burned the back of his arm, and he shifted a little farther away from chef and stove.
Ford caught the drift of the criticism right away and colored up. He didn’t have the kind of skin to hide a blush, and it didn’t help that he self-consciously mussed his hair wherever it met his ears, leaning his shoulders forward over the table to reach. It was a catch 22, because on the one hand yes, it was that friend, on the other hand no, it wasn’t. this was because he’d stayed with one “friend” and was planning on living with the other. He didn’t think Russell would like either one.
Ford fell back on an age old default. He just shrugged.
Russ had never much gone in for blushes. Maybe he’d been young enough and bold enough and stupid enough to never learn or maybe there’d been no damn point by the time he’d been old enough to do anything worth blushing over. That Ford was different - younger, yes but innocent in a half-way fashion that was not being fully grown out of it or maybe just a different temperment altogether had not registered consciously for a man who thought little about such things (and wanted to, even less). But he watched that blush, the pan sizzling and the bacon crisping past ‘perfect’ the way toward ‘done’, with a faint fascination that came down to the way color swept up Ford’s neck and mottled the skin around his ears and then his eyebrows drew themselves together and knit like whatever the hell that ‘friend’ was thinking, he disagreed five different ways.
“You messing around with that one again?” Russ’s incredulousness was the grit in his voice snapping higher, his throat working some as the wooden spoon slammed down on the side and he turned his back to the pan and the grill, arms folded tight up against his body like he was familiarizing himself with the things that made sense. “I ain’t giving you another fucking sex talk.”
Ford was fairly sure that Russell definitely disagreed with what he was thinking, in several different ways. He wouldn’t have explained even if he’d been capable, and he was happy he wasn’t. Instead he stared at the table as if fascinating prophecies were engraved on its cheap surface, and occasionally he pulled at his curls where they grew against his temple. He attempted another look of innocence, but it gave away rapidly at the slam of the spoon and the obvious disapproval.
Ford fired up at once, and this time it wasn’t a blush. He sat up and gave Russell a glare. “N-no,” he said,in a snap that went down into slow motion as it dragged against the back of his teeth. “I g-g-got it the first t-tu-tuh-time.” The dark brows came down and the blue eyes fixed Russell with an aggrieved look meant to be simultaneously annoyed and insulted...with perhaps an undercurrent of real embarrassment. Neither of them had especially enjoyed that conversation. Ford had nightmares about the stupid clinic calling him and telling him there’d been a mistake.
Russ turned his back almost immediately, with the color Ford had managed with ease, now beginning to prickle the back of his neck. Embarrassment wasn’t familiar territory, it was hotly uncomfortable and tight like a too-small shirt across his shoulders and he fidgeted some with the pan and the eggs and swore over the bacon, now crisped to the point of being almost inedible. “You got it the first time, you wouldn’t be fucking around with him,” it sounded like a threat and it sounded like a growl, ground glass and the headache pressing up against his nasal cavity like it was too big for his own skull. He was tired and he wanted more coffee and he wanted the damn bacon to be uncrisped, and he wanted the kid sat at his kitchen table not to say - or not say, in Ford’s case, to blink those big blue eyes like he was fucking innocent - shit that made his blood spike ice with fear he didn’t know to put a name to.
It was careful, his back still turned and shoulders hunched up like he expected something thrown back and the pan sizzling for fresh bacon loud enough to cover the words themselves, make them less distinct. “You needed somewhere to be so badly, you could have just asked.” It was irritable, and it sounded distinctly unpleasant, Russ growling over food as if there were nothing about it that was an offer but a threat.
The sound of Ford’s teeth grinding together as he cursed silently at his stupid tongue and his continuing embarrassment was mostly hidden under the crackle of bacon. He leaned back and forth on his chair, working the back legs to their full ability under his weight, and he spread his knees out under the table, refusing to care about how much space he was taking up in someone else’s kitchen.
Ford turned an even darker, faintly splotchy color around the cheekbones, making them even more prominent and faintly ridiculous in the tiny kitchen. “We aren’t fu-fucking!” He said it not as if he was angry alone, but rather defensive, as if Russell had been critical instead of incorrect. He now had assumed in his mind that they were talking about March and only March. “He s...said I could c-c-c-come... come stay,” he said, with visible effort. “I didn’t ask.” He said this last word as if he had been gravely insulted, and he sat up in his chair with a scrape.
The kitchen felt both at once airless (the hiss of the bacon in the pan and the salty-tasting smoke that was both pleasant-smelling and choking) and too small, two people in a space meant for one and one that was not broad shoulders and solid the way both men in the room were. Russ heard the elongation of syllables stretch themselves into a kind of torture that was almost impressive in its difficulty and he stabbed at the eggs with the wooden spoon with a viciousness that did not make him feel remotely less like an asshole nor better at all about doing it, and he gave up, tipping the pan’s contents onto plates and banging one down in front of the be-purpled Ford.
“Yeah so now he thinks you don’t got a home to go to,” Russ sounded like this was an insult in and of itself, who to, it wasn’t quite clear but it was very certain of the insult. “Why he gotta offer? He ain’t got enough problems to spend his fucking money on?” He’d got an eyeful of an apartment in the blind rage that had sent him to seek out a place all monied guards and elevators where they polished the fingermarks off the buttons. Not much but what he remembered of it (when he allowed himself to remember) was the smooth, unhurried perfection of richness. That March had offered (and Russ had no idea that March and the two were not one and the same) was enough to imply that Russ could not, would not - they were very visibly similar as the blond eyebrows drew together even tighter and the jaw below set solidly, chin squaring pugilistically as Russ slammed down knife and fork for good measure.
“You wanted a fucking place to stay, you had a fucking place to stay.”
It was one thing to eat someone’s leftovers in their fridge, an implied lack of favor and even the vague suggestion that maybe the eating of it prevented anything from going to waste. Having someone else cook for you was something different, something that implied gratitude. It wasn’t really manners, just a few years of being screamed at for being ungrateful for frozen dinners and money for a cheeseburger. Ford looked down at the plate and some of his color faded. He was still hungry, just not desperately hungry, and he tried to be casual about it. This had limited effect, as he was looking for a way to eat without asking for silverware before they were slammed down.
Russell’s mention of home was a very unfortunate nerve to touch. Ford even stopped attempting to eat casually and stopped what he was doing to glare icicles at his brother. “I don’t,” he snapped. There was enough resentment there to carry him all the way through the rest of Russell’s criticism. “This’s y-your place! I’m not a fucking p-p-p-p... p-problem to spend on!” As usual when he had this much anger, Ford’s words kept getting tangled up, making him more frustrated still and causing everything to boil inside. Some of the satisfaction of yelling at someone remained out of Ford’s reach.
Home was not a word Russ used often; it had connotations of apple pie and curtains, of people who lived there who liked the place enough not to want to leave it. He thought of the house as a house, as a convenience of a bed that was comfortable and familiar enough to stretch out in and fall asleep right off and as a place to bring back the occasional woman who didn’t want or didn’t have an apartment to take him home to. He had used it carelessly, it had found its way back into his vocabulary with enough distance between him and frozen dinners and foraging through a purse with one eye on the woman on the couch to see that she’d stay under whilst he furtively lifted ten bucks to pay for groceries and felt like a king in riches. But he didn’t think of it, he caught himself up on yours hurled down like a combative, like lines drawn very swiftly and very clearly, and something of the fight slid itself down Russ’s back and swept itself clear.
His plate sat to the right, on the countertop untouched and he folded his arms back against himself and a blank, nothing look settled itself all plastic sullenness over blue eyes, the pulled-tight mouth. “Always comes right back to that,” it managed to sound like it was at once tired, and guilty and accusative all at once and he looked at all that anger coiled up in a chair, solidly male and solidly livid, and Russ felt the weight of it like accusation heaped across his shoulders, guilt hot on the back of his neck and resentment for feeling it in the first place. “First you show the hell up, then you don’t, then you want shit and then you don’t, what the hell am I supposed to do, read your damn mind?” It built, from the bland nothing to the gritted-teeth of barely-held-onto anger.
The blank expression scared the hell out of Ford. It looked familiar, and he’d seen it on someone else’s face. It wasn’t meant to hide anything, it was just a slackness hung on features to make everything else in the world, including him, matter less. Ford looked down at the eggs again, obviously hungry but not willing to bow to expectation. He didn’t push the plate away but he put the fork down, and his own expression shifted from defensive to guarded, even wary. The frustration settled to a very slow simmer at the back of his eyes. “I d-d-don’t want... want things... anything. I d-d-don’t!”
Ford had only asked if Russell was around, just wanted to see a familiar face, because for all that Blake was an affectionate pair of eyes and a hot ass, he wasn’t familiar and Ford seriously doubted that he much cared. He hadn’t wanted to hurt March, who suddenly seemed fragile, and he hadn’t wanted anything from Russell. The burn at the back of his eyes was starting to make the blues glimmer dangerously, filling in with the sudden, blackening vision that happened when Ford wouldn’t let them spill over. While attempting not to cry, Ford let all the syllables of the next sentence confuse themselves so much that it took him a good thirty seconds to get them out: “I don’t need your... whatever!”
If Russ hadn’t been looking, perhaps he would have latched firmly on to that outright rejection of things that were wanting, of the material objects he had never been in a position to give and very much doubted anyone wanting much of presently. It was dubious worth, the substance of Russell’s material wealth, but he faintly remembered feeling rich the day he’d had sheets on his damn bed instead of going to bed in his clothes and then that day had slid into a series where he had enough food and there was no one who needed anything from him and he had set his hands tight around the flutter of that wingbeat of hope behind his breastbone and held onto it as grimly as he could. If he had been focused on the pan and the grease congealing there, perhaps he would have escaped.
He was not.
He watched Ford’s eyes glisten over with the look of abject dread and faint horror that wore itself readily across his face, the slackening of the mouth and the wary look in his eyes all embarrassment, humiliation and an overwhelming desire for the bottom to drop out of the world and to drag him along with it. “Don’t cry,” Russ said roughly, and whether it was command or plea was unclear, it was a rasping mix of the two, the demand sliding up at the end like a question or maybe someone begging just a little for the situation not to devolve completely past the point of no return. “I was just fucking saying, is all. I told you. I gotta couch. I wasn’t saying nothing ‘bout wanting shit different. March fucking offering. Ain’t he got enough family to bother with?” Another word, used as thoughtlessly as ‘home’. Russ hadn’t coupled himself together with the concept in a good two decades, the embarrassment of someone else stepping in prickled long-lost pride until it rankled, consonants and syllables eliding in the patina of speech from a while before Vegas had smoothed down some of the edges.
Ford’s color now paled to practically transparent. He pushed away from the table, though stayed sitting, his palms braced against the edge and his eyes flat. His mouth closed into a scowl of flat defiance. “I’m n-n-not. I’m not, fucking... t-t-tuh-twelve.” He blinked hard and straightened his shoulders. The stupid red shoes made his chest ache. The good feeling that Blake’s bed had left him was entirely gone.
Ford set his teeth bare and hissed faintly, all bitter anger. “I’m not a b-b-bother. I ain’t... t-t-taking money. I d-don’t fucking need a couch.” He did, but he was in the full swing of denial now. He was even working on convincing himself not to be hungry, but it was not as easy as it should have been, considering the stakes. Ford stood up, not quickly, but haphazardly, trying to put some distance between himself and the eggs. He backed into the kitchen farther rather than going for the door, arms crossed protectively over his chest, the labor-thickened muscle more twine than Russell’s rope. “Wanted t-t-t-to... to come. Say hi.” Ford looked somewhat frantically at the refridgerator. “Don’t need anything.” He wanted to make this point clear. “Not m-m-making you family. Since it’s so...” He searched desperately for a word. “...Hard.”