Eames (plagiaristic) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-10-06 07:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | alfred pennyworth, iron man |
Who: Saint and Preston (or 'Ash')
What: Attempted rescue
Where: Saint's apartment
When: Backdated to immediately post this
Ratings: Talk of violence?
The apartment was not difficult to find. Saint did not make himself difficult to find; the name was easy and it stood out on paperwork with an easy signature that leaned a little to the left, and looped on the S and the y. It was normally a clean place to be, very light and very bare but presently the place was in the kind of uproar suited to stumbling in, tracking dirt and blood across hardwood floor. Saint was not aware precisely of how he had made it home; there was less cash in his wallet than there had been initially, which pointed toward a taxi at some point and he had a dim memory of voices beyond the under-water sound that had been ruptured ear-drum and the dizzy lurch as he’d tried to stagger in the right direction. He had got through the door and he had left it unlocked - the key was still lodged in the inner door, up the flight of stairs inside - and he had sat because his knees felt as if they had suddenly become liquid.
He had not tried to look in the mirror that had been shoved at the back of the cupboard under the sink. Saint was not overly vain; he liked the way he looked in the simple way of someone who has never been uncomfortable in their skin much at all unless attention has been drawn to them, but he did not think he would like to see himself presently. His jaw was purpling and angry, swollen on the right side and his nose had crumpled; breathing through it felt like drawing in air through damp cotton. Drawing a breath at all was like trying to drag a piece of silk past a set of knives all pointed inward, and the shirt he had worn to the casino had torn, the stitches had burst along the right side underneath his arm. He was wearing a great deal of dirt, and a lot of stickiness Saint was not sure was blood or something nastier. He was oozing, and Saint considered this very unpleasant, but he also doubted his ability to take down the photographs in the shower and also to stand up long enough to wash the worst of it off. He sat, instead.
Sound was swimming beneath a dull sort of roaring that he attributed, vaguely, to some kind of shock. He had groped through the cupboards just long enough to find rubbing alcohol and bandaids when he had thought this might be helpful - and when he had realized neither would do anything at all about the breathing or the way he was squinting out of his right eye as if the world had narrowed through a periscope, he had given up and begun rummaging for something that could take the edge off, an extremely dusty bottle of whiskey. Both the whiskey and the rubbing alcohol and the bandaids had been discarded, and now he sat, very still, as the new voice in the back of his head told him comprehensively (and quietly) how much of an idiot he was.
Preston’s voice was in the phone and at the door at the same time, accompanied by a tapping and the sound of Saint’s name. Preston had successfully kept his temper to himself, not an impossible feat as Preston didn’t have much of a temper, but still difficult enough. Preston handled difficulty by forcing it out into the real world, where it had causes and effects, physical movements like planets whisking around each other out in the void. There, all problems were linked to actions, and could be solved in the same way. Actions were what made things happen, not thinking, not emotion. He couldn’t and didn’t shut it all off, but there was no doubt that in the long term, Preston assumed his actions meant more than what he felt.
When there was not an immediate answer on the door, Preston put his fingers out and pushed it gently inward. On his way out of the office, he had done several things: he checked out a gun from the locker in back and he had also taken a Company car. Neither were in general use, or issued specifically for him. They were for covers and cover stories, each with a different history on paper and in fact. Preston knew how to safely wear and use a gun, but he had never shot anyone and never wanted to shoot anyone--except once, and that person didn’t have a face. It helped that Preston was the one that did the paperwork, so he filled out a sheet and put it in his own inbox, where he could promptly take it back out again when he returned with the goods.
Preston didn’t take the gun out. He left it in the holster under his right arm and moved into the apartment, cautious but not really expecting anyone to jump out at him. He took the key out of the lock, put it in his pocket, and then shut and locked the door behind him. “Saint,” he repeated, moving farther into the foreign apartment and wishing, not for the first time, that he lived in the middle of the woods somewhere no one knew his name. There was sound coming from an interior hallway door, which Preston guessed was the bathroom. He moved down the hallway, the comfortable leather shoes easy and businesslike on the hard floor.
The bathroom door framed the tall, suited figure, and Preston’s face as he tried to ascertain how bad the damage was could not be described.
The apartment was clean lines and white. It looked like it hadn’t been much lived in and what living there had been had more to do with the scattered camera equipment than it did anything more. There were discarded things here and there, clutter on the table drawn close enough to the sole couch in the center room that served as living space as well as studio, but the feel of it was new, unlived in. There was a jacket tossed down, the soft wool-blend blazer he had had with him at the casino, near the door but it was beginning to stiffen with the nasty liquid from the dumpsters out back, along with the blood and Saint hadn’t given it a second’s thought.
He was seated on the lip of the bathtub when Ash appeared. The phone had been balanced against the sink, and the haphazard paraphernalia gathered was strewn around the edge, jostling for space with very few personal effects and a large container suited to bathing photographs leaned on its side. Saint did not look unduly startled that Ash had managed to get in, he was hazy on exactly where it was the apartment manager was and how often his key could be used, but Ash had sounded so certain of his own ability to get inside the place that Saint didn’t doubt it. He thought about where the certainty came from, the clarity of confidence in a man who was as able to become wallpaper as he was to hold opinions on things, briefly, but his head began to pound and he hadn’t thought of it much after that. He looked up, and the entirety of the night made itself evident in the vivid and ugly color across his face, the busted nose and along his right cheekbone and the scraped up graze on his left where he’d had his face pressed down into the ground. He was wearing a shirt a great deal nicer than the one he had when they’d met, except blood (presumably from the nose) had slid down the collar and massed a stain at where the shirt buttoned. Saint could not tell from the way Ash composed himself, long certain lines in the door-frame, what exactly the damage was or how bad. He had convinced himself nearly entirely that it would be very much less than it felt with each torn-silk breath in, and that eventually the pain-pills would take the edge down from something searing to something that would allow for sleep. But looking at Ash from the sill of the bathtub, with the photos clustered to dry along a string above his head strung from one side of the shower rail to the wall, Saint could tell nothing at all.
“That was quick,” his voice had thickened into something likely affected by the busted nose and the ragged way he was pulling in breath, shallow and short. The brown eyes were vague but relief flickered briefly but evidently, in them; Alfred had been both comprehensive and succinct on the subject. Saint was surprised by both how the narrow, interesting face was so very clearly composed and how much its appearance was welcomed and then he tried standing up, and regretted it very quickly.
Presto moved forward with impressive speed, because given the bloody, ragged state of Saint's face and visible clothing, it was no great surprise that standing up would be an unlikely development. Preston's long left arm caught Saint high across the chest but below the clavicle, somewhere he thought he was least likely to do more damage. Preston was not muscled or strong, but he was dead sober and healthy. He crossed the bathroom and stopped Saint's fall with competent surety it was the right thing to do. The metallic sting of blood cut through the air with enough strength to hit Preston's gag reflex. He suppressed it and made his voice steady. "Easy."
Rather than attempting to push Saint back down onto the edge of the tub, Preston carefully supported the man upright and let his gaze travel down to the drops of blood on the floor and the road rash that ripped the expensive silk. Preston's estimation of Saint's clothing was based only on one encounter, not a pattern, but it seemed odd he would bother. "Okay. We're going to get you to a hospital." Preston steadied his feet. "Can you move or should I call an ambulance?" Preston had to fight to keep his voice even, but he had a lot of practice at it.
It was not immediately apparent whether Saint was sober or not. He smelled strongly of the alley behind the casino; trash and dirt and blood and strong alcohol but whether that was he or his clothes that reeked could not be determined until he lifted his head and his eyes were clear but the pupils bloomed black with impact. He might have been struck by the speed with which Ash crossed the bathroom floor, expensively leather shoes on cheap formica, but instead he could feel the moment before his own weight toppled against that of Ash’s, both the cut-strings softness of his knees as he swayed into the support and the absolute certainty of its intent. Then in the next moment his body adjusted itself to this new alignment and reminded him that every bit of him could still hurt just as effectively in this position as the previous one. He was both intensely grateful and immediately the kind of embarrassed when incompetent, and he took his weight off the length of Ash’s arm and struggled toward the wall and the tile.
“Can’t. No hospitals,” Saint’s voice was strong, even if the edges of his words had blurred one into the next into something far too muzzy to sound like him to his own ears. “They’ll ask. Who.” He put his hand to his nose gingerly, as if discovering he was bleeding once again, and leaned heavily against the wall once more. “Don’t need an ambulance.” They’d ask and the story would go and the ragged sensation when he drew breath would disappear as well. He blinked at Preston, his eyes dark in a face very sallow and bloodless beneath the lights. “Wren was supposed to bring pain killers. Something. I don’t need more than band aids.” And whiskey. But that didn’t seem to be working.
Preston wouldn’t allow Saint to pull away. He had a longer arm and more muscle at the moment, and he simply would not let go. He pulled very gently on Saint’s torso and body, bracing himself and simply refusing to move as Saint tried to pull away toward the wall. After a moment Preston allowed Saint the illusion of holding his own weight up against the wall, but he did not step away. Preston blinked quickly against the strong, almost isopropyl scent of alcohol.
“Saint. You’re coming to a hospital. If you don’t want to say who it was, don’t fuckin’ say.” It was extremely Boston and savored strongly of disapproval. “I will tell this Wren where you are. Stop being stubborn and come on.” He took a short step, turning to watch the wan face and bloody ears. “You could be bleeding in your brain,” he said, sharply, making a hissing sound like a cat as he drew in his next breath and rearranging his shoulder under Saint’s. “Band-aids aren’t going to cut it unless you can get a CT scan around here. You don’t come and I’m calling an ambulance anyway.” Preston’s tone made the threat real. Fact.
The accommodation of the wall was minimal; Saint appreciated the coolness of the tile and its reassuring solidity as his head whirled like the floor was shifting beneath his feet. The dull roaring in his ears convinced him for a minute that if he moved any further, he was going to hit the deck and embarrass himself completely and his vision blurred, the room’s sharp edges softening like a photograph developing too dark. Alfred, whoever he was, was the faint sense of disapproval in the furthest recess of his skull. He could hear Ash, a notional sort of hearing that was like listening to a conversation on the other side of a door, and when the sound sharpened beneath the rush of his own pulse and became clear again, he found his own shoulder wedged over that of Ash’s, and the wiry solidity of the other man more accommodating than the wall had been.
Saint doubted Wren liked hospitals, they kept the kind of records that no-one who had ever needed to hide would like. He didn’t know what bleeding in his brain would feel like, but he didn’t doubt for a minute the threat, there was something far more substantive to it than Ash’s focus or even the solid arm holding him upright. “I don’t need an ambulance,” the words felt cottony-thick on his tongue but they were clearer, slower as Saint was careful. That sounded better. And then he drew another breath that shuddered as it caught against the jagged edges of all that torn-silk where his lungs were meant to be, stopped in his throat and inadvertently he pushed down against Ash’s shoulder. “I’ll go.”
“Good,” Preston said, shortly, as if Saint had just agreed to pay his bills on time. “My car is out the door, not too far. If you’re not going to let me call an ambulance then we need to walk.” It would be better if he could move Saint out the door into the hallway anyway, as Preston was left-handed and the gun under his right arm made it difficult to support the other man without the holster digging uncomfortably into his ribs. “Not too fast now. Come on.” Preston took another step, and with careful, awkward drifts, managed to maneuver Saint out of the bathroom. The smell of alley and spilled liquor was less now and the smell of blood a little stronger. Preston suppressed a sneeze.
As they moved, Preston began to regret giving in on the ambulance point. If something happened to Saint between here and there, Preston had absolutely no idea what to do. Call Bo probably, not that the useless man would be any help at all. (This was unkind and Preston ignored his own mind when it informed him he was being uncharitable.) “Screw the story, you should turn these guys in anyway,” he muttered, pulling Saint’s front door open and glancing out into the hallway as if they were under siege.
Saint experimented with walking. His feet felt rubbery, slack, as if putting one in front of the other was a task filled with difficulty he hadn’t contemplated previously. Saint could not remember the last time he had hit anyone at all (the answer was never, but Saint groped for it in the very bottom of a thick and foggy mind and decided it wasn’t needed right then) and if he had done so, he had been bad enough at it that hitting someone or being hit had never upscaled to a full-blown fight. He knew, in the shambling shuffle that was his arm looped over Ash’s and the slow drip of his own blood onto the clean sweep of Ash’s shirt front, that it wasn’t something he wanted to try again.
He looked at the stairs, doubtfully. Saint didn’t mind them usually, took them two at a time at a lope of long legs that made stairs look like a very small thing at all, but now they seemed impossible. He thought Ash’s quick look was more about the neighbors and how appalling someone dripping blood in the hall might be, and said, “They won’t care. Probably come home worse,” in a thick sort of way to reassure him. He did not regret the lack of ambulance and he tried to take more of his own weight onto his feet as if to make clear that it was unnecessary.
Preston didn’t give a damn about any neighbors. It hadn’t even occurred to him, and his expression was the direct result of the assumption that it was Saint’s attackers that wouldn’t care about what they were coming home to. Personally, Preston thought that if you came home to two cops that were going to take you downtown on assault charges, you’d fucking care. You should, anyway. Preston was doing his best not to make it a personal need to see that happen. Personal needs got Preston into trouble on a regular basis.
Out in the hall, Preston made sure Saint’s door was closed and locked behind them. It wouldn’t do Saint any good to have anyone break in, and if the door was standing open the blood and the mess might bring the police to the wrong conclusions. “If this is too much just tell me and I’ll get the paramedics here.” Preston’s cologne, green and citrus, struggled with the metallic tinge of pain on the air between them as he readjusted his grip. “My name really is Ash, you know,” Preston said, just because it was the first thing that came out of his mouth and he realized what a daunting sight those stairs were. “For some reason it was the only thing I could think of, even if I don’t use it anymore. I shouldn’t have told you. First step.”
The keys jangled in Saint’s peripheral hearing and he made no move to take them; the apartment was small and it was bare, the only things worth taking from it were the cameras and he was distantly glad that Ash had thought of locking the place as something that needed doing. Saint had not thought overmuch about the sort of neighborhood he was looking for beyond a need for movement and color, and the kind of light that came through the windows but he was dimly aware (as a man whose attitude and calm managed to carry him past most trouble without noticing it) that it was not somewhere one left doors open and dropped by on neighbors. He put a tentative hand out against the wall instead, the thin width of the staircase enough for two but barely and that was good just now, that meant he could press some of his own weight out against the arm that had been jammed under his own body and remained uninjured, and take a little off Ash himself.
“Oh,” Saint lifted his eyes away from the stairs, and he smiled briefly, tight threads of pained tension at the corners of his mouth but the fog in the glassy look he gave Ash registered a little of surprise, “Is it? I thought,” and he made a sharp sound, back of the throat stifled, as they edged down onto the first step that swallowed up whatever it was he’d thought in white-hot sensation. It was no worse than he’d imagined it would be, but at the same time, imagination wasn’t close, Saint was discovering, to what the reality was like. The grassy-clean smell of Ash’s cologne was beneath the metallic cling of the blood and he drew deep enough breath to catch at it instead, something determinedly less surreal. “I thought it wasn’t real.”
“It isn’t real anymore.” The impossibility of that statement went right over Preston’s head. It was thoughtless, but he refused to acknowledge how illogical it was. It was not the kind of thing Preston would have said if he was at all paying attention to what he was saying.
Preston and Saint stopped on the second step. Preston could have let go and Saint would have slidden down the stairs in a boneless scarecrow fall, but he was thinking at that point maybe that was the only way they were going to get down there. That pained little gasp scared Preston into a complete stop, and he held the other man up on the narrow strip of stair, looking down at the steps through the gloom. “I should call the paramedics. You can’t even walk.” It was not angry, only worried. “We should call people with a damn stretcher.” True to his word, Preston bent his knees in an attempt to set Saint on the stair in somewhat of a sitting position. Preston’s shoulders were so broad that he had to turn and step down a step in order for them both to fit between the walls on either side.
“JARVIS?” Preston said into the empty air. Both hands were still occupied. It was time for drastic measures. The phone in his pocket lit up so blue it shone through the cotton and made the gunmetal glow.
Saint was aware that it felt increasingly like pulling through water to stand upright and that he was upright in no small part due to Ash himself. He wanted to do something with the small piece he had been given, that puzzle piece that was ‘it isn’t real anymore’, but his mind wouldn’t hold onto it for long enough to do anything but acknowledge it was there. It was preoccupied, primarily with how much it hurt. There had been no sports teams in Saint’s history - his shoulders weren’t as broad as Ash’s and the narrow stair never bothered him, he was lean and sparse and there were no broken bones when you were careful and you chose quiet things. His body did not know what to do with the pain, with how it fractured like star-fire around each breath in, and how vividly he could feel each rib as if they were fingers of a fist closing in around his lungs, how he could feel his skin as if it were too small for him.
The air was very full of the damp, metal smell of blood and it had swallowed up the pleasant green smell Saint had been trying to smell instead; his shirt was beginning to get damp and warm again too and he tried very hard to ignore what that meant which was more easily done as his knees folded beneath him like a marionette when he was propped on the stairs. “I can make it.” Saint was as certain of this as he was shocked by how much things hurt, it was not dying and he’d managed to walk up the stairs, hadn’t he? The carpet was too old and the light was too little to see the clotted footsteps from his journey upward. He leaned his head against the wall and he closed his eyes, and the strong, blue light bled under his eyelids.
“Who’s JARVIS?”
While he had the genes, Preston didn’t have the confidence or the coordination to be an athlete. His knees got in the way when he tried to run, and when he reached for something he always seemed to put his fingers just short or just past whatever it was he meant to grab. Now, keeping a firm hold so he didn’t drop Saint and make it worse, Preston temporarily ignored Saint’s question and spoke into the empty air again. “JARVIS, I need you to call 911, talk to the operator and ask for paramedics and an ambulance at this address. Say someone is hurt but don’t stay on the line. Scramble routing.”
And a very cool, clipped British voice replied, “Yes, sir,” as if he had just ordered a cup of tea. The AI remained silent, dialing the call and carrying on a conversation with a human without anyone being the wiser. It was a short, simple conversation, and depending on traffic Preston estimated they had about five to seven minutes. It wasn’t a good neighborhood.
“JARVIS is the computer in my phone. Tony’s computer.” Loosening his grip now that Saint was sitting, Preston bent down and stared into Saint’s face. Cool fingers rested flat on the side of Saint’s neck. “Saint. Stay awake.”
Saint heard the command and its answer with the calm acceptance of foreign (Door-side) technology that was partially muggy comprehension. Had he been fully alert, there would have been a question and then another and the clear blue light that emanated from Ash’s pocket and the neutral voice with its short vowels that accompanied it would have been in itself fascinating. Saint studied the light (it was at a reasonable proximity to sight-line) and let the blue push itself under his eyelids until it merged with the soft, velvet dark there. He would have argued it was unnecessary, but sitting down had meant all the pain temporarily in retreat given that he was upright and trying to move, had come back in a vigorous rush. Alfred, whose voice, Saint thought, sounded close enough to the computer that they could know each other (Alfred thought very little of this) said nothing that could be latched onto as words, but a general air of disapproval could be felt, like pins and needles in his hands.
“I’m awake.” Saint’s head jerked obediently upward, his eyes opened slowly and with effort. “Tony is ...who you have through the door.” Saint did not know who ‘Tony’ was and Alfred did not know either, but it was something to think about that wasn’t about how much it hurt just then. The press of Ash’s fingers was welcomely cool if insistent; from this angle, Saint thought through the thick cotton that somehow made it difficult to think at all, he would have been more interesting to photograph. There was too little light to look properly. “And JARVIS is in your pocket. I’m sorry.” Saint blinked thickly. “I didn’t think. Thank you for coming.”
Another twenty seconds passed. Preston rotated slowly so he could sit down next to Saint. He had to sit on the stair just above him to keep the man upright and avoid jamming his shoulder into the railing. His jacket flapped open and closed, and the faintly wrinkled white Oxford shirt savored of old cigarette smoke and dry male sweat under that green. “Yes, Tony is through the door. The computer is in my pocket. He usually doesn’t talk, I try to keep it quiet so people don’t start wondering about the tech I’m carrying around. Certain people would notice.”
Preston kept one hand on Saint’s shoulder, close to his neck, and dared to shut his eyes long enough to take a breath, trusting that Saint would live through the intervening ten seconds. “I’m not sure what you would have been thinking about,” Preston said, mostly just to keep talking. Tony was dead quiet, like he usually was, and Preston had forgotten that he should be waiting for the hero to start wisecracking. “Just a couple minutes and some people will come give us a hand down the stairs.”
The railings creaked at any pressure at all and they creaked now as Ash eased down behind him and the air belled out with the weight of someone else, distinct sense that interrupted the long line of the stairs as something impossible. Saint had closed his eyes but the green and the cigarette smoke was given added presence; the sitting was unpleasant in that his rib-cage was acutely aware of the effort of each breath in but it was also a lack of movement that allowed an expectation of how much it would hurt just then. Expectation helped a great deal; Saint opened his eyes. “Who are certain people?”
The door at the end of the hall was thin. It was not anything except a deterrent to people breaking in, as it would likely splinter if serious force were applied and the locks were old and easily broken. But there was glass above the door, a pane of window, up too high to see anything but the sky and the color of the building opposite; Saint waited for it to begin to change, to flare. Currently it was untainted dim, dark blue. “Do you like him? Tony?” The prospect of ambulances, of emergency personnel loudly efficient and the bleak sterility of hospital was now inevitable, however little Saint liked the prospect. “Have you had others?”
“Just people I work with,” Preston said evasively, lifting his free hand to the back of his neck and applying pressure where the knobs of his spine sank deeply into knots on the inside of his shoulders. “If it ever occurs to them to look up from their own lives, which is fairly unlikely, fortunately.” Preston didn’t think that anyone in that office would notice if he came in with his pants inside out, though he was feeling a little more generous with Gabe these days, thanks to the present of some very fine French wine. Preston was the first to admit that he could be fairly easy.
“Tony is…” Preston’s eyes slid to either side as he examined his feelings about the man. “Fine. Quiet, really, which is sort of strange. But he is flexible about letting me live my own life and so far he hasn’t done anything wildly dangerous. I haven’t been.. I mean I haven’t had any others.” Preston coughed. “No. But I think Tony has, which is probably why he is quiet.”
A siren wail blipped harshly into the paper-thin walls, and Preston stood up so he could move quickly down the stairs and open the exterior door for the paramedics.
Saint did not wonder how the people Ash worked with could be so oblivious; it was understood, he had realized at the first meeting where Ash had tried very hard to disappear into nothing and still be present and he did not question it now. He did wonder about Tony, and why exactly ‘wildly dangerous’ was the first way of describing him, but Saint had spent little enough time with comic books to know who exactly Tony was. He had been about to ask who Tony was, but the light turned red, a muddy, stronger kind of color than the crystalline light from Tony’s tech and the next minute, Ash was a brush of cigarettes and the green, clean smell past him and the small hallway seemed very full of people.
They were friendly in the efficient, brusque way Saint had expected (had he expected much at all) and it was relief that made him close his eyes, that he was (he had begun to doubt) going to get down the stairs. The ministrations were quick and they were gentle-handed, and the width of the stairs presented only the smallest of problems, overcome with speed. Strapped down to a stretcher, Saint lost whatever gainliness he’d had left. The medic who surveyed the stairs as if checking nothing had been left behind, looked at Preston with the kind of calm that emanated like light from a candle. “Are you coming?”
Preston pulled his coat closed and did one of the buttons low over his navel to hide the strange shape under his elbow. He had a license to carry but he didn’t want to deal with questions and until he had time to come up with a reason to be armed. He’d leave the firearm in the trunk of the car in a lockbox, and it would be safe enough in the hospital parking lot.
Holding on to his calm while Saint was moved and keeping a sharp eye out for the slight movement of his chest, Preston gave the medic a short, hard nod. “I’m coming. I’ll follow you in my car.” He waited for the medics to precede him and rattled Saint’s keys in his pocket. He was in deep now.