Roxie (Wren) Maheu (ex_theredlig387) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-11-23 15:33:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | han solo, roxanne |
Who: Wren and Hal
What: Post-memories run-in and a bar brawl
Where: A bar
When: Last night
Warnings: Not a one
The night after the first wave of memories, and Wren had just finished marking a particularly cruel man in an alley. She looked mussed, her blonde wig tangled, and the microdress she wore over thigh-highs and shiny shoes wrinkled and dirty around the hem. She had her knife, not her whip, strapped to her thigh. She’d come into the bar to hide. It was a good place for it, loud and full of old rock and loud voices. Darts and pool and women with shirts cut above their midriffs selling beer.
She ducked into the bathroom, and she lost the wig, shaking out her own brown wavy hair and staring at herself in the mirror.There was a syringe of ADAM tucked beside her knife, and she’d only used a little, just a touch, just enough to make her ability come easier, and she wasn’t crashing from it yet. Not for another half hour.
She felt herself tonight. None of the terrifying emotions of the memories present, no sadness for family she didn’t have. At least that’s what she told herself, and she left the wig in the garbage and stepped back out into the bar. The Rolling Stones were playing on the jukebox, but she didn’t recognize them, and there was a few couples being loud and dancing on the makeshift space cleared away for a dance floor.
Hal wasn’t on the dance floor. He wasn’t playing pool, either. He was just sitting there against one wall, watching his buddies play, and he wasn’t doing anything but drinking. Not heavy, just a few beers like he sometimes did when he had a day where he wanted to remember why he was living. He saw her when she came in, and he didn’t come after her, he just watched her move in a straight line through the crowd.
He was just cracking his next bottle when she came back out into the crowd again. Nobody noticed she was the same woman except for him, and he didn’t make a move toward her. He turned his head though, tracking her movement, and he knew her instincts were sharp enough to see him after a few seconds of that. He wasn’t going to interrupt if she was working.
She did notice him. It was the prickling at the back of her neck, the one that usually served to let her know a man was looking, that he might be interested in buying, and she looked over her shoulder and sought out the eyes of the watcher. She picked him out easily in the crowd, even against the wall like he was, all broad muscle and older strength, and she smiled and changed course.
She let herself take him in while she approached. He wasn’t working, that much was sure, and he wasn’t thick in the throng of people, and she stopped close enough for him to feel the hem of her dress against the denim of his jeans, and she took his beer out of his hand. “Running away from memories?” she asked him, the question as candid as her smile and the pleasure to see him that was evident in her features.
Now that it was established neither of them were doing business, he smiled to see her and put a comfortable arm around her waist, the way he always did on first seeing her. He didn’t lean down and kiss her like he usually did though, and the smile was clearer as he leaned in to hear what she said. “Just havin’ a drink, cher. Or Ah was.” He gave her waist a little squeeze that caught her up against his hip, teasingly, and then he dropped her back down again. “Rough night?” It was a casual question, and he would take a casual lie if she wanted to give him one.
She noticed the fact that he didn’t kiss her, mainly because Hal was so handsy that she could predict his physical reactions fairly well at this point, even with weeks and weeks between seeing him. The movement that caught her up against his hip made her sway and press, and she finished the beer and handed him back the empty bottle. Her eyes were clear, and she didn’t even consider not asking the question that immediately came to mind when he asked about the rough night. Hal never asked about her work. “What did you see, beau?”
“Dat kind of a private question, non?” He smiled still, a small, slightly drunk smile. He turned and put the bottle on the windowsill behind him, enjoying the cool draft from the window through his t-shirt. “Nothin’ all dat terrible. Dere’s no need to be worryin’ ‘bout me.” He closed one eye in a slow wink and tipped his head toward the bar in the hopes it would call another beer in his direction.
She ran her fingertips over the corner of that slightly drunk smile, and she one upped him on getting the attention of the barkeep, giving him a sweet smile and holding up two fingers. She waited for the beers to come before looking back up at him, and she shifted so her weight was against his hip and thigh, the warm strength of him familiar and solid. “I meant about me. I was wondering if you saw anything about me,” she said, blunt and quiet. “I didn’t see any of yours,” she added, so he wouldn’t worry. She knew that much at least.
He thought about lying to her, but Hal didn’t like lying to women in his bed (whether or not they were actually in his bed at the time). So he waited until the next beers had come, and he tipped his up, and then he said, “Right after yo’ ma died. Real short. Nothin’ important.” He was watching her face as he said it, and the last phrase was meant to be comforting, because he didn’t want to make a big deal about her pain, since it was not any of his business to know it. It worried and surprised him a good deal when he thought that some of his might be flying around.
She watched him as he spoke, his eyes, his shoulders, the way his mouth moved, and she decided he was telling the truth. Whatever he’d seen, it hadn’t involved knives in alleyways or men at all, and that was really all she cared about right then. Her tenseness slid away, and she took another sip of her beer, and she ran her hand along his arm. “I didn’t think the memories were so very bad, but the feelings were. Feeling things that I don’t feel, that weren’t mine,” she admitted.
“Can’t say it was very nice, no,” he agreed with her, taking another deep swig of the beer. He was relieved when she didn’t show any great pain or disturbance at his admission, and honestly that was all that was important to him. She’d only asked him if he’d seen any of hers, not if she’d seen any with her in them, so he didn’t have any guilt omitting the first one from their little chat.
She watched him for a long, long silent period, and she just leaned against him, let him bear the slight weight and the end of the butterfly knife pressing against his thigh. “Why do people want to be in love?” she finally asked, and she’d been thinking about whether to ask it the whole time she’d been standing there. “It’s terrifying, and it doesn’t feel very good, even when things aren’t bad yet. Then they die, and you’re all alone. Why do people want that?” she asked candidly, the curiosity in the question completely genuine.
That surprised a short, choked, humorless laugh out of him. “How de hell do Ah know somet’in like dat?” He turned to look at her as if she had been asking biology questions in English class. He simply didn’t know the subject. He shifted against her, without thinking, and dropped his eyes down her leg to see what the hell that was. “You--” he started, obviously surprised (again). He didn’t finish the question.
The movement had caused her dress to hike past her garter, and the knife and ADAM vial were both visible. She tugged the hem down, and she looked at him with her normal, candid look. “I don’t think you want to know, Hal,” she said, and she knew he didn’t. She expected him to take the out. She would have been entirely surprised if he didn’t. Instead, she took a sip of her beer, and guided the conversation back to safe territory. “I thought you said you’d been in love,” she said. “I got a lot of memories about that, about loving someone. They scared me more than anything terrible ever could,” she admitted.
“Ah said Ah been dere,” he said, with a slightly sour look. “Ah didn’t go sayin’ Ah wanted it at da time. Be a damn fool t’ing to be gettin’ into if you wasn’t payin’ attention.” He raised his eyebrows a little as he looked down at her and her knife and her drugs. He wasn’t sure which of the latter two disturbed him more, but he didn’t put his arm around her again. “What you scared of?”
When he didn’t put his arm around her, her gaze dropped to where his arm had been, and then she very carefully stepped back, not wanting to force the intimacy if he didn’t want it. She was exceptionally tactile, but only when the person she was with wanted it. It explained why she never touched Luke or Quinn, for example, and why she did touch him - or had touched him. She looked up in his face, gaze caressing the rough contour of his jaw, an almost tangible thing. “Losing someone that matters, having them tire or turn away or leave or die. You can’t control that,” she said, and she was smart enough to realize that the statement was apropos, just then.
“Non,” he said, slowly, not nearly drunk enough not to see her take the absence of his advances several steps further into division of space. He gave her a curious little look, wondering what that meant. She was insulted, perhaps? “You can’t control dat. So you gonna avoid bein’ close to anybody, dat right?”
“Not close. In love. They’re different things,” she explained. “I love my friends, and I love Charlie.” A shadow crossed her face with that confession. “And I love you, and all of those things are fine. I don’t expect any of you to love me back, and it doesn’t matter or change how I feel.” She motioned down to her thigh. “If you walk out of here and never talk to me again over this, it won’t change that I care about you. And I haven’t heard from Charlie since I told him, not in months, and it doesn’t change anything about how I feel there either. It hurts, and it would hurt if I lost any of you, but there isn’t any expectation, there isn’t any loss,” and even as she said, it was obvious that it wasn’t really true, that she was justifying in her explanation.
He watched her carefully, leaning on the windowsill, ignoring the clack of balls on the billiard table and the cheers of the rest of the crowd as money is lost and won. “If dat make you feel better, cher,” he said, after a little while, and he straightened and slowly shook his head. “You t’ink a little t’ing like dat gonna make me stop talkin’ to you, yore wrong. But Ah was here t’inkin’ you be a bit smarter dan dat; you haven’t seen what any of that does to a woman? You won’t be workin’ long.” He was talking about the drugs, not the knife, and his distaste was audible.
She looked down at her thigh again, at the that in question, and she pulled out the knife and the vial. The butterfly knife was Charlie’s, distinct and unique in design, and she transferred it to her free hand like it was something beautiful, the twist of her wrist as she opened it in an arch and closed it again a trained, skilled thing. She held it out to him once it was closed, and she held onto the vial with the fingers of her other hand.
Hal wasn’t looking at the knife. He recognized it as Charlie’s only belatedly, and he didn’t even think to move back out of her reach with it. On the contrary, he kept his bottle in hand and shifted from the windowsill, blocking the room’s view of what they were doing. After a second he looked away from the vial, realizing she was offering the knife, and without hesitation he plucked it from her hand and gave it a look. Man, Charlie sure felt for this one. He couldn’t recall ever talking to his friend about family before. It did strange things to him.
She held up the vial then. It was clear in the light of the bar, and there was a tenth of a CC missing from the full dose. “It’s ADAM,’ she told him, as if that made it alright, because in her mind it did. “You get it at the pharmaceutical company. It makes abilities easier to control,” she explained, and then she shook her head. ‘No, not easier to control. It makes it so that whatever unpleasant things happen when you use your ability go away.” She held it out to him, too, lowering it. “It isn’t an illegal drug off the streets. I wouldn’t touch those unless I had to.”
He wouldn’t take it. “I don’t care what it is, or what it does. It doesn’t belong in you any more than dis does.” He jerked his hand upright, turned the knife over in nimble fingers, and flipped out the blade. Up, over, out. The blade gleamed for a split second, and then he reversed the movement. In, under, down. He held it out to her again, again just a handle, blade concealed. “What unpleasant t’ings happen to you when you use yo’ ability, cher?” he asked, eyes intense.
She watched the knife through the movements, watched it dance between his fingers, and she took the handle when he held it out to her. She slipped it back into her garter, and she almost tucked the ADAM back, too, but refrained in the end.
She was just about to explain, in very vague terms, when an angry voice roared from just over her shoulder. She closed her eyes, and she didn’t turn, not right away. The man that was standing there, he was older, almost forty, and with raw, rudimentary lines knifed on one cheek. The design, a bird, was just visible through the bleeding, and she gave Hal a tiny shake of her head, hoping the man would just leave. She didn’t have the wig on, and she’d scrubbed most of the makeup off, and the only thing that could have been familiar was the dress.
Hal just wasn’t drunk enough for all this to slip past him, and he took it all in with one look. His gaze was exceptionally bright and sharp for a moment, and then it flicked hard, unmistakable, to his right, where his jacket was lying over one of the bar stools. He took another gulp of his bottle and took two steps; one step around her so he was facing the man, and one more step so that he was right in front of him, filling his vision.
“Damn!” Hal said, in a very drunken, jovial kind of voice. “You know you got somet’in’ on yo’ face, frere?” All Hal’s friends stopped playing their game to look around with interest.
When Hal put himself between herself and the man, she considered just showing him what the ADAM did, but she didn’t not yet. She turned, and she placed a hand on Hal’s hip, and she tugged on the waistband there. “We should go,” she said, as if she was tugging on someone too drunk to know what they were doing. She smiled a little at the man intending to make it as harmless as possible, but then the man was swinging a fist at Hal’s face, and two men closed flanks behind him, ready to join in the brawl if necessary.
Hal saw that fist coming a mile away, and he was delighted that he got what he wanted. He stepped back, shoving Wren out of the way harder than he meant to, and then he came back in again. The fist swung past him, and Hal’s friends were shouting insults and dropping pool cues to come help, but Hal was neatly pivoting past the man’s shoulder. He turned the rest of the rotation and his elbow came up and slammed into the back of the man’s head. The man made a sound of surprise while simultaneously saying something along the lines of “buh?”
Wren had intended to help, if needed, but she realized (pretty quickly) that Hal was in his element and she was not. She wasn’t a fighter, never had been, and so she backed up as one of the man’s friends grabbed a pool cue and broke it in half over his knee, brandishing it like a lance. Her gaze skimmed the crowd, which was heavily stacked in Hal’s favor, and she inched toward the door, looking for a clear line out, while not letting Hal out of her sight.
There was a riot of noise, the bartender shouting for them to take it outside, Hal’s friends cursing, and something bright that sounded suspiciously like Hal himself laughing. The lance tried to skewer him but he dodged, grabbed it, and popped it back up into the bearer’s face, bloodying his nose, and that was when one of Hal’s larger friends jumped the second attacker, and the whole thing turned into a whirling mass of fists and grunts and cracking furniture.
When the fight turned into a full out brawl, Wren left her space by the wall, and she moved forward just enough to grab Hal’s hand and tug. She could still see the man in the crowd, recognizable by the mark on his cheek, and she scooped Hal’s jacket off the bench as she tugged again. “Let’s go,” she urged in French. “I don’t want to be here when the cops arrive.”
Hal was trying to find a way back into the brawl, which was hard to make out, admittedly, under the number of bodies, but he looked over his shoulder at Wren, and after only a slight pout, gave in. “Oui, allez vous.” He waver-stumbled after her good-naturedly, leaving the wreck behind and grinning at one of his fellows, who gave him a bloody grin back before diving back into the fray.
Outside, she held his jacket out to him, and she stopped just long enough to touch his cheek, where a fist had landed somewhere along the line. “I’m sorry,” she said, even as she looked over his shoulder, worried. She took his hand, not even giving him time to put the jacket on while they stood still, and she ducked into an alley, where it was blessedly dark and quiet, save for the rapidly approaching sound of sirens.