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Maren is not the first Avenger (backintheworld) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-04-18 19:59:00

Who: Maren and Hunter
What: Sibling reunions
Where: Maren's RV
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: I shall warn for dogs and literature

Maren wasn’t sure how she felt about Hunter being back in town. She’d imagined it a million times, her reunion with her abandoning siblings. In her daydreams, she had waited confidently upon a bed of bones, a crown atop her head and a scepter in her hand. They would crawl and apologize, and it was very much like Joseph’s brothers crossing the desert to beg him for food during the famine. The bible was merely a book, and Maren had read it like all the others. The part about the bones, though, that was improvisation. She didn’t like the idea of sand; it got in too many places. So, yes, she would stand atop bones and skulls, much like the train her suitor wore at the masquerade, and she would acknowledge them, and then she would turn them away. She wasn’t a biblical hero, after all, and she was not particularly forgiving, not anymore.

But daydreams were not reality, and Maren had no bones and no scepter. No crown, and no kingdom that she had saved through conveniently prophetic dreams. She had only an RV, small and silver, the kind the curved at the ends of the roof. Inside, she had a bed behind a curtain, a bench/couch, a small table, a tiny kitchen and a bathroom. It was all robin egg blue, and at night she could pretend the curtains shrouded a bed high in a tower at Hogwarts. But it was not night, and she had no wand to point at Hunter and stupefy him if he reminded her too sharply of a past spent huddled in corners and beneath blankets.

It was not, in summation, as Maren had hoped it would be.

The truck had wheels meant to handle ruts in gravel roads and field mud six inches thick, and maybe it was once green, but right now it was mostly rust and dirt-colored. It jounced and bobbed as it pulled into the RV park, circled, and then parked astride a curb outside a flowerbed. That truck alone was a chunk of awkward family reunions come to stay, and once the cab door opened and two dogs spilled out--a half-grown collie the color of dandelion weeds and a chewed dun-colored mongrel--things did not improve. The young men that dropped out after (it was a good foot and a half to the ground from the cab) landed on two boots that had seen a lot of wear, and he leaned a stringy torso back in to pick up an old green duffle. The cab door closed with a screech and a thud, and Hunter crossed the road to his sister’s residence.

To him, it didn’t seem as if she was doing all that bad for herself. The RV glinted in the Vegas sun, reminding him of tin foil and hot leftovers, and all that pretty, girly blue in the curtains that covered the tiny windows seemed absurdly welcoming. He wasn’t welcome, of course, but he didn’t let that bother him. Hunter was never welcome anywhere he went, and he was good and used to it. Hunter had to be a few inches taller than he’d been when he’d left, a late growthspurt that left him with a stretched, bone-and-tendon look that was nevertheless grit-mean and healthy. He had a squint through his sunglasses and his thick brown hair was combed back with a wide-tooth that left tracks.

The dogs followed him up the walk, sniffing along the edge of the RV supports and flowing around his heels, leading with panting pink tongues low to the ground. Hunter knocked a bare-knuckle knock that was more polite than his truck, his dogs and his clothes all put together.

Maren was looking out the corner of a blue-covered window when the car pulled up, and she watched Hunter tumble out of the driver’s seat like he was heading to a rodeo, dogs in tow. Or, maybe, winter was coming, and it had found its way to her door with country music instead of an iron throne, mutts instead of direwolves. Raegan would approve, and she was left wondering (again) why he hadn’t merely accepted the hospitality of Count Olaf and the hotel that welcomed furry companions.

She opened the door, dressed in a long, white nightgown that came straight out of Little Women, black hair in a braid held in place by a length of cotton. It would have been more impactful, she knew, had a breeze come to blow her skirts and hair while she waited there, on the tin steps that led to her Tara. “I have no stables,” she said, looking at the dogs, and while the words were dreamy, her expression certainly was not. She had no dogs to keep or guard her, and she’d had none when she was very small and left to fend with papercuts and book spines.

Hunter glanced down at the animals. “They can stay out. Siddown,” he told them casually, calling their attention with a snap of his thumb and third finger and pointing to the ground. Both promptly plunked their butts on the ground, with the younger one a little slow to catch up, and gave Maren oblivious doggy smiles.

Maren’s expression had always been dreamy, but she was several feet higher than Hunter had anticipated and there was something about her eyes and her cheeks that were different, even with the braid and the white dress thing she was wearing. At least she didn’t look much like Mom, which was a relief to him, and as the door allowed him admittance he took himself up the step and put one arm out to give her a supremely awkward hug. There was time to move away, and more than enough excuse, as Hunter had plenty of road dust and dog hair sticking to him.

If an RV could be a sanctuary, Maren’s certainly was. Hunter, with his awkward hug and smell of the road was out of place in the curving castle of tin and blue, and he was almost too tall for the low ceiling. Maren stood back, never one to be comfortable with hugs or affection, and she looked at him across the small and crowded space. He did look like their mother, which didn’t make Maren feel any better about anything, and she tried to recall stories about dead matriarchs while she stood there. Maren, herself, took after her father - dark and pale, Spanish lineage near enough in his family tree that it made itself known in features that were strangely non-American, all without proclaiming themselves as anything at all.

She did not soften for the puppy with the smiles, and she just pointed at the tiny, claustrophobic shower that was tucked into the airplane sized bathroom. “Wash up first, please,” she requested, though it wasn’t a request. He smelled like their stepfather, like man and road and dirt, and she thought she might vomit all over his boots.

He was not put out with her for backing away, nor even deeply hurt, and he was almost relieved that he wasn’t going to have to be particularly affectionate, since he wasn’t by nature. He didn’t pursue her for the hug, nor give her a second, stormy glance for doing it. (These were all things their stepfather would do.) His mouth relaxed somewhat, making him younger in the blue dimness, and he glanced over his shoulder to add a particularly emphatic, “Stay,” before ducking under the tin roof and folding up into the inside of a bullet. He did not comment that it was small, as he’d been in smaller, and he put his duffle bag on the floor outside the origami bathroom. He started working his boots off. “How long you been in town?” he asked.

Maren glanced at the dogs, not quite believing they wouldn’t start howling or barking the moment he ducked out of sight, but they stayed, and she finally closed the door behind him and went to sit on the bench-turned-couch. “Not very long. I only graduated from university in December.” Her voice went slightly Georgia south when she said it, a mirror of how everyone at Emory had sounded, and she tipped her head and looked at the duffel bag on the floor of her retreat. He brought reality with him - in that bag, in the boots he was taking off. He was wound up in the past, tied with old fears like sinew under his clothes, and she wasn’t sure there were books enough in the world to pretend otherwise. “Why did you come? Or, rather, what fiction has taken up residence in your mind and brought you here?” She snorted, a quiet and unimpressed sound. “If you have somebody wonderful, I’ll hate you for it.” One more Harry Potter character and she would scream and never stop.

Hunter leaned a hip against the side of the RV to steady his weight while he stripped off gray socks going ratty at the edges. The angle made the cheap mirrored glasses slide out of his shirt pocket, but he stopped what he was doing to look at her from under a lock of his hair that had separated solid from the rest. “You went to university?” he asked, audibly impressed and with a hint of envy in the edges of the syllables. He’d known she was smart, but universities cost money, money he didn’t know was available to her. A second later he shrugged. “Dunno who it is. Hasn’t said her name. Doesn’t say much.”

She watched him like he was a foreign specimen of bird, something long believed extinct that came to roost on a fence one day, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where no one had been expecting it. “Yes. I went on scholarship,” she explained. “I studied English,” which should come as no surprise. It was the same as saying rulers studied war games or the rules of kingship. His comment that the woman in his head was silent only made her envious. Steve never went quiet, and he disapproved of nearly everything, even if he did it in an unfailingly nice tone and with a polite appellation. “You’re lucky,” she said, because she felt it required a response, not because she truly had one. Silence spanned. “Where have you been all this time?” she finally blurted, and it was badly done. Sigh.

Scholarship was an understood concept, but a foreign term, all at the same time, and Hunter chewed on it for a bit while he took off the plaid shirt. His other clothes were dirty, all of them, so he wasn’t wearing anything under the shirt. He wasn’t the least bit shy about it, either, not around his sister, not anybody. He was brown, very brown, but with a farmer’s tanline around his neck and upper arms. Judging by that and the dirt under his nails (which were, oddly, lately stripped of black or blue lacquer), he made what money he could outdoors. “Around. Didn’t stick in one place long, trying to find good jobs. Couple ranches out here that need people who can handle horses, got a recommendation from my last boss.”

Her brother had grown up to be a card carrying member of Brokeback Mountain, and she wondered if his future involved a plaid shirt left behind and tears shed in a straight man’s stairwell. It wouldn’t surprise Maren, not really. Hunter had always been the kind that could be a book, all Brando, unapologetic about it. He was like Raegan that way, but Maren had never been cut from that cloth. She watched him strip into browns and skin, nothing like the man she’d loved and lost in Georgia, and she wondered if the dogs were eating anything they shouldn’t. “This city is dangerous and dirty, and I don’t mean like your dogs and that truck. Did you read the cover before you opened this book, or did you take it off the shelf without any thought to the genre?”

Hunter fit himself into the tiny stall by sliding sideways and ducking, and he took everything but his jeans in with him to get the dirt and sweat out. He could still hear her clear over the sound of the pathetic water pump going, and Hunter was the type to take a cold shower as godsend when it was that or wait for rain in the desert. “What’s john-ruh?” he said, obviously not caring about the answer and a little muffled because he was scrubbing at his hair. “You worried about me in the big scary world?” He was making a very bad joke.

“No,” she said with perfect bluntness. “I envied you in the big, free world.” It wasn’t what he’d been referring to, of course, but she was angry, and roses had thorns that hid themselves in harmless dresses of green. “I’m merely telling you that Las Vegas isn’t mean on the outside, not like our stepfather. It’s mean on the inside, like the villains in stories that no one ever catches. There’s no redemption, and there’s only down the gutters and the traps. You’re better off with Raegan and her mighty protectors, than here with me.” Whether he could hear her or not, it hardly mattered for her soliloquy. Maren had no need of audience or Greek chorus for her truths.

Hunter heard the “no,” and that was the important part. He was currently slipping and sliding as he maneuvered around the box, trying to find some soap. He laughed (Hunter’s laugh was a little high and never went on long, like a sigh) as she went on talking. “I never understood what the hell you were talkin’ about, even then,” he called back, probably completely missing the point. “You’re blood, and maybe Rae is too, but I dunno who these protectors are.” Scrubbing. “Why don’t you ‘splain it?”

“Raegan isn’t our blood,” Maren explained very slowly. She’d already had a conversation with Raegan about how neither of them were family, not anymore, but she didn’t have the energy for that just then. Most of her words were lost on Hunter, who remembered her from a time when she didn’t have words, only pages with ink and letters pressed into the paper. “Raegan’s uncle. Her mother’s brother. That’s generally what an uncle is, Hunter. He runs a hotel on the strip. He’s a savior, Jesus Christ in a suit with a threat on his shoulder and his hand clenched into fists. But he takes care of her, and he gives her a safe place to stay, and when she almost died through her door, he saved her.” That was said reluctantly, because as much as she disliked Theodore-Olaf, she knew he had saved Raegan’s life once, and would likely need to do so again.

Hunter made a thoughtful sound that was lost in a gurgle. The water cut off, and Hunter wrung out the shirts he brought with him into the wet. “...Shit,” he said, into the silence. “Got a towel?” From the sound of his voice he wasn’t taking this all that seriously, but he was thinking on it in the back of his head, trying to figure out what Maren was saying through all this I’m-smart reference garbage. He knew who Jesus Christ was, so there was that. “What do you mean, through her door?”

Maren merely pointed at the closed bathroom door, though he could not see it, because if he just turned around in the claustrophobic space he would find a perfect stack of ocean blue towels above his head, on a wall shelf. She noticed he skipped everything else, everything of merit, of importance, and she decided to stop trying. She didn’t know why she’d begun, really. Those were always her least favorite heroines in the books, the ones who tried after they should have stopped. “There is a hotel. It’s called Passages. You should have a key that opens a door there. Once you walk through the door, you become the person in your mind, and you’re in their world. You aren’t yourself any longer, but you need to be careful - injuries carry.” A pause. “I’m sorry, but the dogs can’t go with you.” Which was the only part of all of it that she actually expected him to note.

There was a thud and a curse as Hunter stood up too quickly and hit his head on the shelf that held the towels. “Shit, ow. Nevermind.” Hunter hung up his shirts (there were three) on any surface he could manage, and then came back out into the main space of the tiny RV with one of the blue towels around his hips. He looked for somewhere to sit, hair slicked back, brown eyes softer without the harsh colors and dirt. “Why the hell would I want to do that?” he asked her, looking into her face and noting her irritation with him. He didn’t know exactly what caused it, but he wasn’t surprised to see it. “What?”

“It’s not you that will want it,” Maren explained. “It’s the fictions, the characters, they want their homes and their lives, and they have a draw that can’t be resisted. At least I can’t resist mine,” she added, more than a hint of a frown passing over her features as she said it. She would love to resist Steve on principle alone, for not being from a literary work, a novel, something she could lose herself in. No, he was from New York, from now, and all he wanted to do was be a soldier; it couldn’t be worse if she’d tried to dream up the worst thing possible. She stood, a roll of her eyes at his question, which she associated with the comment about the dogs. “The dogs can’t go into the hotel where the doors are.”

Hunter didn’t have many scars from his youth, all of them having been rubbed out and hidden by the inevitable normality of time, but there was a cigarette burn between his spine and his shoulderblade, a white mark stretched out from the size of a dime. You wouldn’t know what it was unless you were familiar with that kind of thing--or there when he got it. It was just visible as he leaned back on his newly acquired seat, down from his hairline where he couldn’t reach it. He shrugged. “Mine don’t say much.” He paused. “She wouldn’t mind going home, though,” he conceded, as the voice made herself known. “They got a no pets policy, what?”

“Only people can walk into the hotel, and only people like us, which means the dogs can’t.” She sighed, finally, too tired to keep tormenting him. “Bring them inside for the night,” she offered, the stretched out cigarette burn drawing her attention and making her soften. She hated it, that burn, what it meant, what it brought back, what it represented. Maren had more scars than just a cigarette burn, because she hadn’t run, and she looked down at her bare feet for a moment, just one, before turning for the curtained bed. “There’s coffee in the cupboard, for the morning.”

Hunter hadn’t really been planning on bringing the dogs into this hotel, because he had a kind of feeling (nothing definite, just a feeling) that the girl in his head wasn’t fond of them. She didn’t hate them, but she just didn’t take to them the way he did, and Hunter had a feel for that kind of thing, man or animal. “They’re okay outside. Don’t make noise unless there’s somethin’ to make noise about.” Hunter thought it was friendly of her to offer him coffee, even though he probably would have helped himself without thinking twice about it come morning, and he looked up at the aforementioned cupboard with his hand on the back of his neck to stop his hair from dripping. “Thanks.”