sever ( rinne savage ) . (silencers) wrote in incheck, @ 2010-08-06 23:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, jude maddox, rinne savage |
log: sever & maddox.
Who: Rinne Savage (SEVER) & Jude Maddox.
What: Not up to physical training, Rinne pops into the shooting range.
When: Backdated to just after the Agent Interrogation classes.
RINNE: This morning Rinne had forgone her painkillers. Getting out of bed had been a trial in itself as a result but each day was getting a little better, she could feel small degrees of repair as the week went on, evidenced in her moving from where she'd been lying on the floor of her living room -- she preferred that to the couch which was too forgiving in its tension -- to actually managing to sleep on a mattress. It was just a test to see how she was fairing, pushing the pill bottle away across her nightstand and getting to her feet with a wince and a hiss. There was nothing broken of course, and the bark of her bruised ribs was most definitely worse than the bite, she knew that it felt worse that it was and soon . She'd had cracked ribs before, this was a field day in comparison. After padding around her apartment for a while, testing her limits she strapped herself up again for security and got dressed, deciding to go into the Agency for a few hours. It was the shooting range she ended up in, avoiding the medbay for the time being as she had been since the final practical session for her interrogation class rotation. Rinne whisked her hair back from her face, debating which firearms she wanted to hit the targets with, keeping her eyes out for Maddox. "Hey? Anyone home?" MADDOX: The range had been conspicuously empty the last week or so, and Maddox had been forced to admit, he didn't like it that way. The giggles and squeals of babysitters trying out a firearm for the first time were fucking obnoxious, drilling through his skull like a goddamn siren to avoid his own workplace (and thus Dean was usually left to it, he would agree without guilt). If he had his way, they'd be goddamn banned from the range -- but the agents and handlers, drifting in and out to try out a new weapon or brush up on skills, talking about missions and adventures that tugged gently at his attention until he was listening despite himself -- it was a way of marking time, dividing up the days. There had been one, just one agent who'd wandered in with the loose-legged drunken swagger of too many painkillers but after a plain-worded reprimand, he'd been left to monitor his domain and Maddox prowled the range with the unease of a circus tiger, all too aware that the restlessness would become a demand and content with neither. As the metal door bounced open, handle slamming into the now-ancient gouge in the wall, he was crouched over the broken apart pieces of a rifle, oil and cloth in hands. "Do not fucking operate the fucking machinery while under the fucking influence," he recited flatly, rubbing away the grease with small circular motions. RINNE: As a general rule Rinne didn't like to be on any medication, which was probably part of why she'd given the pill bottle leaned haphazardly against her alarm clock such a dark look this morning; even though she was on home turf and therefore supposedly safer than she would be while on mission overseas she didn't like the idea of anything dulling or altering her senses for extend periods of time. Under the effects of the painkillers the med staff had prescribed everything had been a bendy at the edges, shapes blurred into a soft impression of the world around her, and don't get her wrong, all weekend after the last session she'd been glad of that, lying on her floor with a bucket nearby should the urge to hurl come over her again but now the nausea was gone and the pains were settling from sharp stabs to blunt aches she was sceptical of staying on anything that strong. "Don't worry, I'm clean." She said, grinning at his profanity. "And it's kinda early in the day for me to be knocking back anything stronger than coffee." A hand settled on her hip and she squinted around the place, eyes taking a moment longer to adjust to the lights. "Has it been this quiet all week?" MADDOX: The sharp, acrid smell of gunpowder was missing in the air, a layer of scent the sharpshooter was so used to having clinging inside his nose that the absence registered as just something fraying the edges of his perception. It made him irritable. The gun lay before him, her insides all splayed out like a fucking operation interrupted, tang of oil thick on the tongue like blood, and with a none-too-gentle flick of his hand, he covered her up in the cloth. He placed palms on his thighs, levered himself up with a grunt (and ignoring the marks it left on his jeans) and strolled over to where Rinne stood. She was a stark outline against the hard lights and the empty shooting bench: the bars of florescence weren't very fucking forgiving, picking out the fading bruises in livid purples and yellows and sick greens. "Fuck me. They worked you over something fucking good," he said flatly. Didn't look good on the agents, especially the ones that were -- Maddox picked around in his less extensive vocabulary, fished for a word that suited Rinne's brittle strength and gave up. "Worse than it fucking looks, sweetheart?" Gruff familiarity and he wiped off his hands on his back-pockets, getting up close enough to see. "You need a fucking drink, I've got half a bottle in the desk upstairs," a jerk of his thumb, only half-joking as he made the offer. RINNE: With a careworn grin her head tilted to the side, displaying her ever-so-attractive bruises with a characteristic cock-sure attitude that said she was alright, a posture that had felt tarnished in recent weeks by all the insanity. Rinne hadn't bothered with concealer or other make-up since the interrogation make-up class on the weekend, at first it had hurt to much to go poking her face with that stuff anyway and after that she had been more interested in letting the bruises breathe, or whatever her mother had used to say to her as a kid when she got too rowdy and a fist to the face from the class bully was her reward (usually followed by Rinne pinning the runt to the ground with a swift jab in the solar plexus -- she'd been a rebellious teen). "Doesn't hurt half as bad as it did a few days ago." She plucked at her shirt, casually. "Ribs are still strapped but I've had worse." That time in Japan. That thing in Cambodia. "I'll pass on the bottle this time around. Thanks." Despite his semi-jocular tone she was sincere in her thanks; Rinne liked to think she got along with Maddox pretty well, his attitude certainly didn't put her off and she appreciated the sentiment. MADDOX: Beating up the home-team didn't seem like the kind of activity designed to inspire shitting loyalty -- the reasons for it might be well and good, but for a moment, a certain kind of pity for the interrogator and not just his pupils, flitted through Maddox's thoughts. Hell of a lot of fucking responsibility. That and discomfort; the women of the Agency all seemed to have steel fucking balls and bigger dicks than James fucking Bond, worthy of admiration but still -- Maddox's fingers on Rinne's chin were surprisingly gentle if calloused, the request to tilt her head to one side better to see the evidence of the week's worth of ‘training' in the lightness of his touch. Pretty fucking brutal. But even if emotional cues weren't usually registered, he knew enough to let the issue go and the slight smudge of gun-grease on Rinne's chin was the only thing left as his hands curled back into his pockets. "You're all shitting insane," Maddox said, with the same air of light disbelief he gave most of the Agency shenanigans and that was it. "Why you down here then? Not that I don't appreciate the fucking company," although you never quite knew, with Maddox. The rifle, her sorry state hidden from view now by the cleaning cloth the way a mortician might drape a mangled body for public decency, tugged away at his attention and he bent back down to wrap her back up more securely and put the bundle back with the cleaning supplies in the cabinet for that purpose. RINNE: As a stalwart steel trap of emotion she didn't so much as wince as he tilted her chin to one side to get a better look at the shiner on her cheekbone, a mottled smudge of yellow and green now that the swelling had dissipated and taken the angry reddish pink with it. Since this whole thing had begun with Reynolds and Will teaching them all about interrogation, preparing them for the types of things they might face in the field were they to be captured Rinne had been playing her cards pretty close to her chest; she didn't want to come across as overwrought with emotion, she didn't want to broadcast her turmoil, that wasn't how she did things but any assumption that she was okay with it all, that she wasn't twisted up inside at the smack to the face of what had been endured by someone she loved for six months would be just plain wrong. Rinne just didn't like to shout about the chinks in her armour lest someone decide to ram a sword in there. She pursed her lips some, looking around. "I got fed up of sitting around nursing my bruises. Figured that the shooting range might be missing me." Another grin. "I can't exactly go see Master Li or Roza right now either, so I was thinking I'd get my hands on a P228 and put some holes in a few targets." SIG Sauers were her favourite firearms, the P228 a military issue model. It was nostalgic. MADDOX: There was stoicism and then there were goddamn Agency women and Maddox gave credit where credit was fucking well due. The P228 was not a favorite model of his; of all the military and enforcement-agency issue out there, his personal fucking preference was a souped-up Beretta with a radioactive sight -- could shoot the fucking mites off the wings off shitting flies with that thing, but -- Military types were military types and the scathing remarks that he could have made about Rinne's personal choice of weapon were held back for a time when she looked a little less fucking breakable. "Could fucking pretend the range wasn't your last choice," his voice rumbled but good-naturedly and Maddox strolled over to the racks and cabinets of weaponry and rummaged with a little tuneless whistle until he'd unearthed her request, box of ammo and goggles, with a "Hurt my itty bitty fucking feelings," as he did so and when he turned back it was with a twist of the mouth that could be called a grin. She was capable enough of checking her own weapon, but it was routine; to check the chamber and slide, to squint and fiddle and to make sure the piece he was handing over was in excellent fucking condition and besides -- it was the closest Maddox came to shitting gentlemanly. RINNE: She laughed, her eyebrows rising along with a conciliatory nod. "C'mon you know you're my first stop when I need to blow off steam." Rinna had always had an aptitude for firearms as a teen, her numerous summer boot camps at her father's behest had definitely seen to that. While she didn't shadow him exactly, she came further into the range proper, dark eyes roving over the guns in the racks now that they'd adjusted to the intense florescence overhead. By the time he was checking the fire arm for her she was smiling again, picking her eyes up from where they'd been silently observing his hands going through the motions. "I'll buy your feelings a drink when I don't look like I've got an abusive husband back home, how's that?" MADDOX: There wasn't a fucking man alive who could get away with beating on an agent unless she stood there and took it, and Rinne -- Maddox's gaze flickered over her briefly as he locked the paper targets into hanging clips, until silhouettes dangled and danced in the soft spin of the air-conditioning, their white shapes as yet untouched. Rinne just wasn't the shitting type. "Yeah yeah, you can buy me a drink after you prove you haven't lost your fucking touch," Maddox turned his attention to his own gun, dropping bullets into the clip until they nestled up close like peas in a fucking pod, satisfyingly tidy. "Unless you've been romancing Dean on the sly, haven't fucking seen you in here. Been too shitting busy to visit, Savage?" RINNE: For a long minute after the paper targets went up Rinne looked at them, cradling the gun in her hands and thinking about those faceless outlines, imagining them with features, full limbed and mobile, three-dimensional with thumping hearts and dark eyes, bottomless their sockets. A deep inhale brought the familiar smells of the range through her senses like smelling salts, jostling her out of her accidental introversion; rough charcoal and the cleansing tang of metal, the grease and the faint lingering odour of sweat. "Ha." She deadpanned. "Lost my touch." For a moment she reinspected her gun and then looked up from beneath her brows at Maddox, meaning to answer his question but finding only silence in her mouth at first. Rinne rolled her shoulders. "Something like that. I've had a lot on my mind." MADDOX: You didn't come to Maddox to unburden yourself. He was awkward with words, fumbled with them the way a kid's fingers numb against the trigger, too frightened of what the thing might do to be anything but timid with its use. Wasn't the fucking point of a range, anyway -- emotions had to condense themselves into the simple action of loading the gun, firing and again. You could be angry, you could be fucking broken apart with your heart leaking itself dry but you still had to aim and fire as if your hands weren't shaking and your stomach weren't roiling with something undefinable and your head screaming wordlessly at you. His head bent over his gun, thumb smoothing over the engraving on the grip until Rinne spoke again and then Maddox's head came up, and he hit the button that rolled the targets back to shooting distance. The gun was a comforting weight in his hands, the way a baby might feel nestled against its mother's shoulder - familiar, an extension of himself and a kind of calm settled over Maddox, a sense of completion. "Ready?" RINNE: She wasn't there to unburden herself, Rinne wasn't even sure there was a way to do that. What she was there to do was exactly the thing she had told him initially; to put some holes in some targets. Regardless of everything else that was going on in her life, ignoring the tumults of emotion that raged through her, that left her feeling skinny and raw at night, clutching her sheets to her chest and staring out the slats in her window, and for one moment pretending that she had returned from Asia to things just as she had left them, she would still be here. Rinne would have come to the shooting range, she would have gone to train with Master Li, she would have bullshitted with the other agents, gone to parties and knocked back beers, laughed until her ribs hurt as they recounted stories of things she'd missed. Life would have resumed. Was it better this way? This hard, painful way? To have Will back, close but seeming so very far away? Yes, she thought. Yes it was. What was a little pain compared to that? What was a little heartache to knowing that he was alive? Rinne felt herself chewing on glass sometimes when she spoke like she was so strong and untouchable, like she could handle all of this. She could because she had to. What was her other choice? Flip out like Mindy? Lose her nerve? Scream and shout? Maybe it would make her feel better to rage at something or someone but Rinne didn't do that. That wasn't her. This was her. Cool, calm and collected. Able to handle everything out of necessity and training. This was her, with steady hands and a straight spine with no volcanic expulsion of emotion that would threaten to drag her down into some kind of awful, crippled existence. Rinne wouldn't burden others with her pain or her needs. Everything she felt was kept safe and secure. "Ready." Rinne responded, not looking at Maddox but instead the paper target which she blasted three holes through in a tight, perfect cluster. Ready. |