Who: Viv & Elias. What: First meetings that resemble war. Where: Elias' suite at the Bellagio. When: Good question. Recently works! Warnings: LANGUAGE FOR DAYS.
Viv watched a lot of old western movies when she was growing up. Local cable only played a certain caliber of cinema in those late night hours all the way out in Ol' Miss. She never took an interest in the beginning, but didn't much mind either. Like any girl, she'd a probably preferred a Disney princess at that age, but she also knew to appreciate the kind of thing that kept her brothers entertained and out of her hair. In time, she grew to enjoy them as well. Kind of half watching through the kitchen enclave of their shitty duplex. Making popcorn while a grainy, black n' white Clark Gable shot his pistol in the air to startle the injuns. That always made her laugh, knowing her mother and all. The raw Comanche hybrid could have skinned even Clark Gable with just a glance, set him on fire with just a kiss, and buried him without so much as a word. She was something else.
But those old movies prepared her, because Viv wasn't afraid of a showdown. Even if it was one concocted in her own mind, between the preening and pearly smile of a dominatrix in the midst of a power play.. and, well, whatever Viv was. This was Sherlock's fault, or the artist's fault, certainly Irene's fault, and basically anybody's fault but Viv's. She was angry when she tore out of the Desert Moon like a mob of pitchfork wielding alligators were on her tail. Irene didn't much appreciate when Viv dropped into these doldrums of emotional wildcard status - it happened more than was comfortable - and she was murmuring cool, crisp instructions to soothe her, to bring the woman back to the mount of advantage. During all of this, Vivienne was waving her cigarette in the air and shouting at absolutely nobody like a goddamned madwoman in the parking lot. The leather-skinned vultures surrounding the pool all pulled down their Gucci knock-off sunglasses to watch, one might have even called the cops.
After scarring a few children and finally quieting Irene while elaborating on a good half dozen ways that she could kindly fuck herself, Viv got in the car. She exhaled dandelion bangs out of her eyes and twisted the rear view to assess the damage of her hangover. Apparently she couldn't just stay drunk and stupid forever.. there really was no sign of higher power in Las Vegas, none at all. Cramming some Jackie O sunglasses on her face and punching the gas pedal with her glitter jellied sandal, that busted Datsun took a hundred lives in its hands as it cruised toward the main strip.
Bellagio, Irene whispered. "I know where I'm going!" Viv's snap was half-rabid, and she dropped her cigarette out the window in order to take a two handed grip of the wheel. Something to keep her from strangling herself. Vivienne only knew she was going to the Bellagio because of Irene, actually. There were only so many artists living in the city, after all, and it wasn't difficult to narrow Elias into the playbill slot. He was only heavily advertised in local art circles, galleries, and pamphlets. But even in knowing the hotel, how was she going to find him? In the end, it only involved a hundred bucks slipped to the doorman for the secrets to fall. Irene was so full of suggestions for flirtation instead, but dignity was hard to come by when you were strolling into the lion's den. Women walking around with half million dollar gems on their ears and fingers.. and then there was Viv, looking like some transvestite prostitute got dressed by a toddler. In the dark. Wearing a crocheted halter and the only pair of decaying denim shorts that she seemed to own. Hideous plastic sandals slapped their way across the gleaming tile, all the way to the elevator. Their assault was muffled down the stretch of carpeted hall, but she made up for it with a bang-bang-bang of her fist against the door that the man directed her to.
Elias opened the door. He was not the kind of man you would expect to answer a door painted quite as white, or carved as elaborately, as the one that was now in his hand. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and there was a smell of hotel soap and soft water steam about him that suggested he’d recently walked out of the bathroom. The jeans he was wearing were slightly askew on hips more bone than flesh, as if he’d just given them a good yank. Elias himself was even more anti-Bellagio than his clothing. His bones were long and sharply configured, like piled on matchsticks; his muscle mostly gristle, meant to grind and hold against rather than bulge and hoist; and his skin, the sickly yellowish pale of a man that hadn’t been in the sun in several weeks, was marked with so much ink that there was more black than yellow there.
The tattoos were not designed to resemble organic forms at all, but rather they were composed of lines almost geometric, formulaic in their elegance. Angles wound outward as unfolding parabolas sprouted over his shoulders and arms. Newer lines of inky black crossed over his chest and confused the faded pictures of old Gothic print spelling out a word in Spanish. Shifting lines of varying thickness embraced his elbows and wrapped around his wrists, concealing a lot of scar tissue that thickened the skin of his forearms and the backs of his hands in strange places. Standing back, as she was, it was clear that the disapparate lines weren’t lines at all; they were wings.
Elias stared at her from tired but polite hollow eyes. He hadn’t actually gotten around to shaving yet, it was obvious. He blinked. “Who are you?”
When he opened the door, Viv was already pushing bug-eyed lenses into dandelion froth hair boasting muddy roots in a half-written betrayal of some kind of peroxide involvement. There was a one-eyed squint down the hallway, half expecting some kind of security breach alarms to start going off. This hotel probably had its own swat team for security. Although before she could worry about it for too long, the door opened. Viv was forced to glance up, immediately regretting not planning for some kind of heels. Something about him surprised her, that much was obvious for a brief boot-trodden butterfly flutter of a second. Maybe it was the skin or the tattoos, but Vivienne was not regularly crushed by surprise. A smarter woman might have backpeddled, but she just kind of stared at him with a wide spread of shadow smudged lids and crushed petal eyes. Then her features scrunched to revel a dip in the waters of distaste, disgust, something. Something comfortable.
Irene had a suggestion, and it made the blond flinch into action. Swiping nicotine stained fingers across one eye like pirates that tried in vain to alleviate migraines. "Viv." Then she was cramming forward and pushing her way past him. Because unless he was going to try and stop her, she was going inside. "We need to talk."
Elias blinked. He didn’t know any Viv; nothing immediately came to mind, and Sherlock was almost entirely absent, as he had been for days now, ever since Elias hit his stride with the painting. He stood back as she shoved her way in, hardly intimidated or worried by such a woman, not really thinking about what possibilities could possibly bring her here, because he didn’t have the presence of mind to do so. He had just finished a painting, and his mind was therefore like a recently twisted sponge, only just now trying to find shape again, accepting new knowledge with a reluctance that spoke of days of total concentration on something else.
The entire suite had recently been cleaned, as he’d allowed housekeeping up that morning, but the furniture was still askew in strange places, and the tiled floor just in front of the half-circle of windows had been cleared for the painting. It was a massive, two paneled thing, shorter than a man but longer than Elias’ arms when stretched to either side. Though the painting was almost entirely gray, black, and red, the color dominated the canvas, giving abstract impressions using watercolor layers and delicate charcoal lines. Low geometric squares clustered at the bottom of the canvas, giving the impression of dozens of city rooftops as seen from above, all different heights and depths. Spatters of black and rust red seemed to erupt from the buildings and long lines not unlike the ones inked on the artist’s skin slid sideways off the edge of the panels.
“Talk about what?” asked Elias, from behind her. He shut the door.
The suite was nice, but Vivienne had spent most of her life not being impressed by all things shiny. They weren't destined for her. Not in this life, and not in the next fifty if karma had anything to say about it. She regularly hypothesized about the strangest things, like where she ranked on the totem pole of recreation. Her conclusions weren't comforting, but it didn't really stop her. Kind of like how she imagined her lungs were already black, but the worry just made her light up as a result. She breezed toward the windows immediately, arms at her side in leisure. A barracuda sensing blood, she approached the canvas. "About.."
He didn't know her name, which Irene found more distressing than V ever would. Sherlock was supposed to be so smart and all, he hadn't connected the dots yet? Or was he even present anymore? The hangover made it easier to tune Irene out somehow, but it just felt like trading one devil for another. Having no idea what she was looking at, Viv tried to concentrate on the painting. The sheer size of it was impressive, although Vivienne naively assumed that paintings were traditionally just the size of a poster anyway. The shapes and the splotches gave an illusion of depth that she found disorienting. It made her stomach drop - or maybe that was the hangover - and she had to turn away.
Realizing her pause, she shook some blond out of her eyes and approached a chair that had been pushed off to the side. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket and fit one on to her mouth without permission, although she did not light it. Not yet. "About Mr. Holmes" She punctuated such an announcement with a dandy sprawl into the chair, folding her legs over one of the arms so that she could sit in it sideways and observe him.
No one had seen the completed painting yet, and Elias watched her reaction with concentrated interest. He was not the kind of man to depend on the opinions of others, and his financial success and popularity had taken him by surprise. The continual mystery about his works--in that he refused to say what they were about or explain anything about them other than what they were made of--served only to increase his popularity, but that wasn't why he did it. One look at Elias would tell anyone that he simply wasn't manipulative enough for that. Down to the bone, he was relatively simple, and there was nothing about him that was fear of people or their opinions.
Either Sherlock wasn't present to supply information that he and Irene would consider obvious, or Elias was a very good actor. He advanced after her into the living room, possessing a natural and yet not entirely attractive grace, a sliding way of putting long limbs of where he wanted them to go, and waiting for everything else to catch up. He went down the stairs, glanced at the painting thoughtfully, and then moved around the perimeter of the room toward her. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and handed it to her. It was silver, one of those reloadable zippos, scratched to hell on one side but also possessing a recent welded engraving on the other side. Something beautiful and spiralling. It did not exactly suit him.
He sat down in the neighboring chair, knees wide, unconcerned about his lack of shirt. His expression had become thoughtful, and he dug a pack of his own cigarettes out of his pocket while he waited for his lighter back. "Oh yeah? What about him?"
What the hell was going on here? She accepted that this was his suite and all, but he seemed entirely too comfortable. He was practically zen. It did not mash at all with whatever preconceived notions she'd had about him, and like the painting, she found it a little unsettling. Viv took the lighter with a sidelong cast of eyes gone suspicious, her attention followed him in a slow creep to his chair. At least he smoked, that made him somewhat easier to swallow, he could stay. For now. Viv derailed into silence while she unfolded the zippo. The metal wheel went spinning in a kick of flame, after which she clicked the contraption shut and tossed it his way. She sprawled back, digging an elbow into the chair's cushioned arm for support. "Does he talk to you?" She kicked a foot and dangled that plastic pink slipper from her toes, eyeing him with no alleviation. Her stare was some malt blend of confusion and suspicion. Was Viv the only one actually plagued by her counterpart?
Elias had his cigarettes in his right hand and tried to catch the lighter in his left. He did, but bobbled it and let it fall into his lap while he finished tapping out a smoke with the other hand. He stuck it in between first and third fingers and then reached up a tapered thumb and rubbed at his eyebrow. Elias' hands were the only thing about him possessed of true classical beauty, but even they possessed slashes of old white scars down the back, under the knuckles.
He gave a little bark of sour amusement. "Usually won’t shut up. Months of him talking at me, actually. But he’s not home right now.” It might have been different if she had shown some discomfort with him, with the tattoos or the bare chest--but then again, perhaps not. Elias was coming down off of a very unique high, and he was far more volatile than usual. He lit up, watching her. There was something faintly unfriendly about him. “Can I take a message?”
Now this was interesting, and Viv stapled that cigarette securely on the corner of her mouth as she scrambled into sitting. She brought up bare legs and folded them beneath herself, losing a shoe in the process, but not caring. The subtle lacquer of his unfriendliness was more comforting than anything thus far, and her attention on him was unrelenting. "How?" She ignored his offer of playing secretary and gold dust fingers fluttered beside her head in a schizophrenic's manner of silencing the invisible. "How did you get him to go away?"
Elias was matching up this woman with Noah’s description, and though Noah struck him as naive to the point of stupidity sometimes, that wasn’t the kid’s fault. He expected a little more of a sleek seductress than this woman, though, something more like Irene, and so his unfriendliness stayed a mild aura for the moment. He raised both eyebrows at her. Elias’ eyes were even darker than his hair, darker than his ink, ripe with sardonic amusement, the kind that martyrs wear when they figure out the joke’s on them. He took in a black inhale of his cigarette and then stuck out two faintly smoking fingers, indicating the painting wordlessly as his answer.
At first, she didn't think he was going to tell her at all. That he was going to keep such a secret all to himself. She tried to imagine what she would do if that was the case, and really couldn't decide. Throwing him out the window seemed a little extreme. Her attention moved at a starving pace to follow the point of his fingers, and her expression slipped into confusion. "He doesn't like the painting?" She took a rough drag off her cigarette. "I mean, I can see why, but that doesn't make any sense. I do things all day long that Irene doesn't like." Viv gestured to her fallen slipper with with a tip of her cigarette's cherry end. The Dora the Explorer glitter jellies, for example.
Elias showed his teeth in something that was probably meant to approximate a grin. “Yeah, no. I concentrate when I work and this one took me...” Elias looked around, as if a calendar might suddenly come dancing out of the miniature kitchen and tell him what day it was. “...A few weeks or something... to get it right. He stopped talking sometime after the first few, I think. I wasn’t paying attention.” Elias’ mind had been filled with colors, perspective, shapes, and emotions. None of those things appealed to Sherlock, and days of it was probably the equivalent of torture. He’d been silent for a while now. Elias took a drag of the cigarette and surveyed Viv through the smoke. “What’s the problem with Irene?”
Oh, how could she even begin to explain the Irene problem? A psychiatrist probably would have had a field day with all of Viv's disgust that rooted from Irene's very existence. It could even be argued that she hated her for the sake of hating her. But really, the dominatrix was a paragon of everything that Viv stood against. Money, good taste, sex that didn't involve the prerequisite of a half bottle of liquor. "She thinks she's the boss," Viv finally said. Perhaps realizing how petty that sounded, Vivienne drew a despondent inhale and shifted fretfully in her chair, kicking her other shoe to the floor in the process. She'd always had a problem with sitting still. "I'm tired of her trying to boss me around." Which was unfortunate because Viv's coming here in the first place had been Irene's idea. As if just now realizing this, she bared her teeth at the window in a displeased grimace. "I can't paint." Which probably wouldn't work on Irene anyway, so what the hell was she going to do?
Elias’ dark eyes dropped to the shoe, and then back up to her, slowly, without haste. “Trying. Trying is good. So she’s not always succeeding.” Elias smiled, very small, very flat, and hissed out smoke. “So which one of you screwed over Noah? You, or her?” There was no tension, nothing of danger about him. Sherlock was all energy, and when he was anger, cold, striking steel, but not Elias. He was just a guy with extravagant ink and stained fingertips with a cigarette.
Viv just wanted her gone, she wasn't herself anymore. Or maybe she was, she didn't know. She felt crazy and irrational all of the time. Emotional, which Irene insisted had nothing to do with her. Viv didn't like racing down this trail, but it was difficult to stop once she got started. It always began the same way, with her ranting silently about how she just wanted a little bit of normalcy, and with Irene's closing argument that no, what she wanted was to be sterilized, forever alone, even from something that had become a part of herself. It was probably true, but who wanted to hear that kind of shit? Viv flicked ashes on the floor throughout this brief, internal dialogue until Noah was mentioned. "What?!" She reeled back, and couldn't have been more surprised if the aforementioned young man had just walked through the door himself. How did he know..
"That gossipy queen!" Viv cast her feet to the tiled floor in a harsh one-two slap, struggling to cram her shoes back on. "Screwed him over? Fuck you, you don't know the first thing about it!" He didn't have to be angry at all, she had enough to burn both of them.
Elias was up on his feet so fast that there was nothing that had been threatening in that room until that moment. He still had his cigarette in his hand, and he still didn’t have shirt or shoes, but he was all pissed off anger without a bullet to chew on, and he wasn’t going to let her storm off on it. He rotated so that the painting was just at an angle behind him, and it looked like a long drop from hell a short trip from his left foot. “No? Tell me, then. Because I think maybe it was you that threw him out of the car, you hiding in the dark, and you making him feel like shit for giving a damn about your trailer park ass.” There goes that zen thing, and the easy comfort, too. Elias didn’t come from a place where you made nice with people who crossed you or your people.
Good, she was starting to get a little too comfortable with all the small talk. Viv smirked with a laugh that was half formed, but it was more sour than anything when she took that final drag off of her cigarette before dropping its remains to the tile below. "Yeah, that was me, and he fucking deserved that shit in the car for thinking I was trying to get in his pants when I was just being a good samaritan - for the first time in my entire life - and driving his raggedy ass home." As for the other stuff, it was difficult to defend, but the good thing was that Viv didn't have to defend herself. "I didn't ask him to care about me!"
Elias snorted, entirely unsympathetic. The cigarette was smoking in his hand and he didn’t lift it again to his face, nor seem to even notice when she dropped hers on his floor. “You can’t blame him for that. Like he’s had that much practice caring about anybody, and so he got hopeful, you didn’t need to be a fucking bitch about it to his raggedy ass.” It was a hiss, and Elias had plenty of dislike painted on his face for her to see even more clearly than if it had been on canvas. “But I bet you enjoyed it a little bit too much, huh?”
Viv stiffened and stopped fighting with her shoes long enough to water down the need to go at him with bare knuckles. She barely managed, both hands curled into skinny fists before she crammed a finger of accusation in his direction. "The hell I did!" The words ran hot to keep from sounding raw. This guy didn't know her, didn't know how long she'd cried after having to be so mean, but it wasn't any of his business. "What would you have had me do, huh? Screwed him and let him down gently?" God, she wanted another cigarette. Viv very nearly reached for one before realizing that she would have to borrow his lighter again. Fresh anger lit up the muddy brown of her eyes. "That was Irene's suggestion, it's always her suggestion. Why the hell do you think she wanted me to come here?" Finally, she got her other shoe on. It was more difficult in the midst of an argument than she would have expected, but success at last had her spinning for the door. "I was cursed at that goddamn party, he fell in love with something that didn't exist, and I tried, but he didn't understand. I couldn't fix it!" So she just broke it into a million pieces.
Elias wouldn’t be on his feet if he wasn’t ready for a fight. He wasn’t afraid of Viv’s little fists, nor would he have been afraid if they were four times larger or four times faster. When Elias was young women did their share of fighting and nobody seemed to think it was necessary not to hit back just because the assailant was female. He watched her righteous anger without reaction, but he was, in the end, faintly surprised to see that it was genuine. He pushed aside the new knowledge that Irene wanted to be here (he couldn’t imagine why) and focused on the issue at hand. “Maybe it wasn’t broken. Did you even give him a chance, or you weren’t interested to begin with?”
She hesitated after making it a couple of plastic paces, those tacky shoes slapping in the time of a war drum farewell. She itched to throw something, and longed for the blitzkrieg serenity of her motel hovel, where plenty of oddities tore up the floor like a minefield. His question had her turning thought, and doe-wide eyes bled into determined gashes. Viv fished another cigarette out just for something to do, and her fingers shook. "I'm too old for him, and you know it." If Elias knew so much about everything, he'd know that. Noah didn't need to be trading out one middle aged harpy for another.
Her scrounging for another cigarette had him remembering the one in his hand, and he finally moved from the center of the sitting room off to one side, where there was an ashtray, and he deposited the cigarette there, letting it lean and cool. “I know he’s probably too young for you, yeah,” Elias said, hardly caring. “He’s got this way he thinks it should go, in his head, like a little kid. But you didn’t answer my question.”
She teethed the edge of a chapped lip and shook her head, words getting lost in the sour mash denial of the truth. She looked out the window, ignoring the painting entirely in favor of the sky. It looked almost too blue, just as harsh and accusing as everything else. She didn't want to say it, but it came out anyway. "I wanted to be her." All that playing in the dark had very little to do with Noah, really. He'd been there to witness it and be a part of it, but she'd been trying to get her hands on something else, something long gone. Viv sniffed, summer shoulders rolling back as she swallowed down the claustrophobic, strangling sensation that inopportune emotion could sometimes bring. Witch hazel eyes befell him again, stoic with the follow-up admission. "But I couldn't."
Elias brought his head up slowly, a motion that encompassed head, chest, and shoulders. He might have been good with his facial expressions, but without clothing it was very clear which direction his thoughts tended to move. The shift of his feet and very slight softening around the corners of his dark eyes indicated understanding, though not sympathy. He made a quiet sound, something like, “ah.” He gave her a second to recover herself and then twitched both brows up, just slightly. “And you explain that to him?”
There was a sturdy regality in the way she stood, despite the plastic disco flats. Of course, her name commanded it. "I don't owe him anything." There was a scowl in her brow and a lemon rind twist of her mouth, waiting for him to contradict that. She didn't owe Noah attention, or sex, or even the decency of an explanation. It was easier this way, for Viv.
Elias didn’t even blink. “Yeah, you do. You owe him an explanation. It doesn’t cost you anything except two seconds that you’re not a bitch.” Elias turned away, awkwardly stretching his back in a spiral to either side. There’d been a kink in it since he finished the painting, and he hadn’t managed to work it out yet. He reached back down for his cigarette and sat again, this time on the other side of the painting.
Her stare tightened on him when he turned away from her, shooting dirty hazel daggers at his back. Not being a bitch for two seconds actually sounded like a great deal of cost to her. Why did men always think that they knew what was best in any given situation? Should she be nice and risk a continuance of the crush or just burn everything down? The answer seemed pretty obvious to her, but Viv intended to show Elias the light. See, she just didn't care. "He didn't deserve me." Dead pan. Where did she even get this shit? Her mother, probably. The next words came softer, her eyes following him to the chair, "He'll get over it."
“He’s just a kid,” Elias snapped, the loose curve of his spine belying his obvious irritation and dislike. “And all the women he’s known is his disgusting fucking step-mother and you. You think he’s going to bounce on back from that because you’ve decided it’s too hard to talk to him about it?” Elias’ voice was dripping with disdain, and he made a kind of coughing noise he would use to get something bitter off his tongue. “If you’re looking for me to pat you on the back, you’re going to stand there for a long time.”
Her reaction came slowly, as she had to remind herself into blinking. "Relax." The word ran on its own, loaded with enough nuclear animosity to obliterate its typical connotations. "I'm not looking for you to do a goddamn thing." He'd already been functionally useless in helping her with Irene - and she didn't need his fucking help anyway - to hell with him. Train of thought tailspinned for a fraction of a second until she shook her head, wild banshee blond obscuring her face and detuning her gorgon eyes from him as she headed back out his door. Not another word.