miles baines: riff-raff! street rat! (mimicks) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-03-02 02:59:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !log, loch lemach, miles baines |
but she's no lady; she's just mean and cruel to be kind.
Who: Loch Lemach & Miles Baines
What: Miles finally leaves the clinic and goes home, only to find an expected intruder.
Where: His apartment.
When: Very late February, after this and this.
Rating: Foul language.
Status: Complete!
He came limping and hobbling down the street. Lionel had offered to help him home, but Miles had instead written himself out of the clinic without notice, discharging himself and making his laboured way across the district and back to his drab home, alone. The man fumbled with his keys on the stoop—then took a slight pause to run his hand along the doorjamb. He made a thoughtful noise. The door unlatched, Miles nudging it open and stepping into the darkened room. The glass in the front window was new, the carpet torn up and replaced with hardwood, all renovations courtesy the Coulombe estate. Much like his false-facing, the apartment might change with its shifting bones and guts, but it was still home. Miles pushed the door back with his shoulder, leaning against it. Completely unsurprised, he could see a familiar silhouette on the sofa with one bright smouldering ember in the darkness, the dull red pinprick of a cigarette in the shadows. “Hullo, Loch,” he said. In the half-light, she let him have a glimpse of a smile. “How’d you know it was me? Is it cause I forgot to trash your apartment before sitting down for a smoke?” “In a nutshell.” His overnight kit (one of many; he was always packed for a quick getaway) hit the floor. “You missed the string at the door, however, so I knew someone had been here. On the other hand, anyone else would have been far more blatant and clumsy.” Loch nodded her head, acknowledging the compliment. “Thought I’d let you have some warning,” she said. It was not her first time sneaking into Miles’ apartment, nor her second―it had been a regular occurrence, easier than arranging a date and time when she needed something from him. The last time she had done it, they had still been together, for some definition of the term. She sunk back into the couch, relaxing as much as she dared in a bid to pretend that little detail had escaped her. “So what’s the story?” “Story?” Miles echoed innocently, as he limped towards the kitchenette, rummaged about for a glass of water (not whiskey or wine, then), and returned to the living room. Despite having been released on a physiker’s recommendation, he was still moving slower than usual, his mercurial frenetic energy blunted into a dull haze. Still dodging the question: “It’s good to be home,” he said, sinking onto the other end of the sofa with a contented sigh. “In a pristine, mostly untouched—” a significant look to the blonde, “and fully functional apartment. Clinics are shit. No bloody privacy.” She raised her eyebrows at Miles’ choice of drink. “Your alcohol stash remains untouched, if you were wondering.” After a moment, she produced the silver cigarette case from her inner pocket and offered it to Miles. “Didn’t like your physiker, then? Too brusque about getting you out of that shining armor?” “It was practically lewd. If I had to wager a guess, the man harboured an attraction for me.” She laughed. His hand hovered uncertainly over the case for a second—it was an effective method to poison someone, but then again, what did she have to gain in doing so tonight? For once, they weren’t competing nor doing business nor setting their sights on the same prize: they were simply Miles and Loch, same as usual. So he grudgingly plucked one of the cigarettes like a flower from a bouquet, then found a box of matches in his pocket and snapped one of them into flame. Their smoke trailed towards the ceiling and Miles’ eyesight eventually adjusted to the mellow gloom. He could’ve lit the endtable lamp (also newly replaced), but it would have thrown the scene into sharp relief, pooling light where he wasn’t entirely certain he wanted it to be (discolouration around his eye, the glimmer of white bandages beneath his collar, the expression on Loch’s face). No, these two could work in the darkness instead, as they so often did. “It’s fucking unfair, is what it is. Thomas came out of it with hardly a scratch, while I’m hospitalised. Throws some wrenches into the works, to say the least.” “Ain’t so bad if you can walk around.” In the dark, she could only guess at the extent of his injuries by the strain in his usually fluid movements, the occasional wince. “If you’d stayed at the clinic, could be you’d have died of boredom before you died of your wounds. And to perish under your physiker’s smoldering gaze…” She trailed off with a low chuckle. “He did have a very good smoulder.” Miles alternated sipping at his water and dragging on his cigarette, sinking back into the lumpy sofa. “And I didn’t know you were such a concerned citizen or gossip hound, either. Unless you’re also here to destroy my bathroom or—” beat, “fall asleep in my bed.” The words hung in the air between them for a moment. Loch exhaled a plume of smoke, watched it coil in front of them. “As I recall,” she said, smirking, “you knew of a few much more interesting uses for a bed, last time I was over.” The last time. That sentence coiled its way around his spine, a cold fist tightening on his bones. “Hmm. True,” Miles said mildly, watching her over the pair of embers between them. The thought was distracting: it threatened throwing everything askew, lurching his world quite firmly to the left, as it always did where Loch Lemach was concerned. Instead, he finally chose to tell her the story. “Thomas and I were doing some reconnaissance outside of Emillion, at a horrid little border town up in the mountains. Wildebarrow. We were on our way back when…” A vague little gesture of the hand, somehow striving to encompass clay golem reaching into the carriage and striving to rearrange our internal organs. “Golem smashes right through the carriage. All hell at the palings. We were shit tired and just wanted to get home, Faram swear it. I don’t know how all these do-gooder city heroes manage it, time and time again—did you know that some people had to run all the way out of the city and to the battle? It was a long run, too, quite a ways off.” Miles shook his head. “Madness.” On a stage the story would have elicited more than a few laughs, and once the injuries had healed she had no doubt Miles and Tom would end up in a bar somewhere blowing the story out of proportion to entertain an audience. A story of accidental heroism―complete with, she assumed, abundant flailing―was what she had expected from them. What she had not expected was for Miles to relinquish the tale so easily―but there was an old chestnut, the razzle dazzle. Offer something in order to deflect attention from something else you’d rather avoid. She smiled, not because of the story, but because of what the alternative to it had been, and what he had offered to avoid it. Had he been unaffected, a diversionary tactic would have been unnecessary. “Ain’t it just,” she said. “Better watch out for giant monsters, in the future. Gotta take care of that handsome face of yours, or your fans’ll be crying around the streets. Make a damn racket, too.” Beware both giant monsters and vipers in the sheets, he thought, but then said: “They can be so unbelievably tedious. I’m amazed they weren’t lined up on my doorstep, to be honest; I did receive a few get-well cards at the clinic. I used them as bookmarks while studying a play.” “How very devoted they are,” Loch said. “Keep an eye out, they’ll be sneaking into your house next.” He chuckled. “Been there, done that.” Miles took another rattling intake of the cigarette (his lungs still twinged with pain, the ribs still healing) and then found himself skittering back towards their previous topic, the man compulsively and impulsively unable to stray from wet paint or a big red button. “And you? Would you cry in the streets?” “Not in the streets where everyone could see me. But perhaps where they couldn’t.” She smiled, every word carefully chosen and delivered. “Not that we’ll ever find out, I hope.” He nodded, silently acknowledging the efficacy of that response: each word like a machinist’s delicately-constructed bomb, officially betraying nothing, unofficially confirming everything. It had evolved into a private language between them by this point, each gesture and omission speaking volumes. And it seemed Miles was satisfied with that answer, whatever it was. “I’ll continue doing my very best to avoid giant monsters and fire elementals, preserve my handsome face, dodge fanatical fans, and generally keep trouble very firmly fixed in the rear-view mirror. It’s not my cup of tea. I’d take a back-alley stabbing over this” a theatrical sweep of the hand, indicating his bandaged and woebegotten self, “any day.” Loch laughed. “Again: alleys, interesting uses. But take a walk around the Tenements after nightfall with a purse of coin in hand, if you’re set on getting stabbed.” She shifted, seeming for a moment as though she might lean closer to Miles. Instead, she stood up. “I’ll leave you to your convalescing. Put the string back in its place on my way out and everything.” She gave him a mock bow and a smile, and stubbed out her cigarette on the ashtray on the table. “Maybe I’ll even send you a card.” “Seal it with a kiss, if you’re to truly mimic the others. No poisonous vapours, however: I’m onto you.” Miles instinctively rose, following her movements as he expertly balanced both glass and cigarette in the same hand. He didn’t need to lead Loch to the exit (it was a small apartment, and she knew the layout well), but did so anyway. The ghost of times gone past dogged him as they went—last time, their steps would have tripped towards the bedroom. They’d had dozens of different encounters in his home or hers, ending under the knife or under the sheets, and often the difference was a mere flip of the coin. But tonight Miles Baines was tired and sapped, and Loch Lemach was just another memory dissolving into the night as he shut the door behind her. |