cassidy moran ; the beast (miroirs) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-11-29 21:13:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast, roxanne |
Who: Cass and Wren
What: A regular argument leaves things broken beyond repair.
Where: Outside Hamartia
When: After this
Warnings: Sad.
Cass wasn’t entirely sure what to think when he received a text from Wren. Every time he spoke to her lately he felt like it was the last time. All they ever seemed to do was fight bitterly with one another. He’d thought about asking her to go to the formal dinner all the same, but had never gotten so far - they’d spent their entire conversation on the forums fighting instead.
Thanksgiving meant little to him. He hadn’t grown up in this country, and as far as he was concerned it was just another Thursday. He’d only had two American thanksgivings, both in college, both with Clara’s family. Since then, he had ignored the holiday the same way he ignored every other one. When he walked up to the front of the Hamartia after climbing out of a cab, it was after a visit to the bookstore to pretend he wasn’t thinking about what was happening at the idiotic formal dinner, and he had a book tucked under his arm.
Wren was waiting outside. She’d left the Thanksgiving dinner feeling lonely, above all else. Her family, her real family hadn’t been in touch in over a month, and everyday that became harder to deal with for her. All the cameras flashing in her face, they did little more than make her question what she wanted out of life. Once upon a time, she’d thought she wanted that very thing, the flashing lights and the opulence. But here she was, wrapped in pink tulle and a cream coat, and all she wanted was to be herself. The dress, lovely as it was, was nothing she normally wore. Too young, too virginal, too innocent. Intentionally so, intentionally concealing. It had been the first time she had felt the need to hide who she was, and she’d spent the entire evening worried it would slip out, in either word or action. It hadn’t, but it had left her feeling strangely hollow.
When she saw Cassidy, she smiled, and she climbed down the steps with snow boots, which were incongruous with the dress and coat, and she smiled at him.
No matter what, when Wren smiled at him like that it was hard not to smile back, at least a little. It was a surprise, but a pleasant one. She looked lovely in the confection of a dress, though not much like herself. Then again, how well did he really know what she was like? "How did the dinner go?" he asked. She looked a little odd, and it wasn't just the dress, but she was smiling, so it couldn't have been all bad. His thoughts immediately turned to wondering if that meant she'd found some new benefactor at the event, and he swatted it away. It wasn't worth it to wonder. It didn't matter, anyway.
She slipped her arm into his, and she turned him toward the hot dog vendor, who was selling his wares despite the holiday and the cold. “I don’t think I would like to be so very rich,” she told him plainly. “There were cameras, and they wouldn’t stop flashing, and I was sure they would know what I was,” she told him. She smiled up at him a moment later. “That didn’t happen, though, because too many people were being dramatic.” She gave him a look that said see, that’s what comes of thinking you’re in love.
The first statement surprised him. He'd seen her apartment, and, chimed his darker thoughts bitterly, she obviously preferred her clients as rich as possible. His brow furrowed when she went on, however. "What you are is better than any of those people with cameras," he said, bristling at the idea that someone might look down their nose at her. "They're vultures, and they are not worth your worry, or your thoughts." He tightened his grip on her arm, just a little, subconsciously.
He caught that look, and decided to pay it no mind. "Dramatic how?"
“None of us are better or worse than anyone else,” she said, a soft certainty in the plain words. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t want to embarrass a friend,” she admitted. She snuggled closer, kicking at a patch of snow with her booted foot, the ends of pink dragging damply in the snow. “My friend, his date ran off in the middle of the meal, and he followed her. The girl you made the kevlar for, she mistakenly made her think something, I think.”
He wasn't so sure about that, but he kept the thought to himself. "Did you get enough to eat?" he asked as they approached the vendor, wondering if the photographers had put her off her appetite and he ought to buy her something.
"I'm sure the paparazzi were thrilled by that display," he said, imagining the flash of cameras as it unfolded. "Your friend and his date, did they patch things up?"
She nodded. “I think so,” she said thoughtfully, because Luke and Bunny had come back. “My other friend left, though, and I think she was upset,” she explained, stopping in front of the vendor’s cart, where there was a line of people waiting for an inexpensive holiday meal. Their clothes marked them for poor, but Wren didn’t move any closer or show any concern. “Then the man throwing the dinner, Thomas Brandon, made a scene with a woman and a man on the dance floor, and the man ran off.” She gave him that look again, the one that dared him to defend love.
This time he caved. "Is that meant to be a statement to me about how wrong I am about the concept of romance? Your friends fighting and Thomas Brandon making an ass of himself in the name of it?" he asked. "No one ever said love wasn't messy, Wren. If you only want things in your life that are clean and simple, you'll never find it."
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying they all hurt each other,” she clarified, and she asked for two hot dogs when she got close to the car, bypassing the turkey legs she’d mentioned before. “If they love each other, why all the hurt feelings and the running?” she asked, looking over at him.
"Because they're human beings, I expect," he said, and paid the vendor for the hot dogs before she had the opportunity to do so. "We make mistakes. We are terribly flawed. People hurt one another - that is a fact of life. Generally speaking, however, people who love one another and hurt one another have just made a mistake somewhere. If the injury is made purposefully, then they never really loved them in the first place."
She took the hot dogs, and she handed him one. She moved away from the cart, but stayed in the cover of the building at their back. “You don’t think people hurt people they care about intentionally?” she asked, because that made love and affection sound super-human, and Wren knew perfectly well that they weren’t any such thing.
"I think that it's not something pure if they do. They might care about the person and hurt them, but if they are hurting them, and they mean to do it, it hardly matters if they care for them. No one should endure that kind of spite simply because the other person thinks they have feelings for them. That is where things start to grow more and more twisted." He regarded the hot dog, trying to figure out which way was best to attack it, and then bit the end off, doing his best to not drop it at the same time. There seemed to be a science to it that he really had no mastery at, but he'd forgotten to eat anything today, so it tasted like a gourmet meal. “A man who beats his wife and claims he still cares for her doesn’t really love her, not the way he perhaps thinks that he does, in his delusion.”
She had no trouble with her own hot dog, having grown accustomed to them in the past few weeks. “Sometimes people say things when they’re hurting, just to hurt other people. Those people don’t love each other?” she asked, honest curiosity in her gaze.
"That's different," he said, then sighed. He was tired of arguing about this endlessly, of constantly needing to offer up new examples and pieces of evidence. "Honestly, I shouldn't be making blanket statements about anything. All I can tell you is that if you'd been in love, you'd understand why people go through the things they do in order to get it. Since you haven't, it's foreign to you. One day it will make sense."
She felt that sigh down to her toes, the fact that he was tired of the same thing over and over again. She threw away the paper holder from the hotdog, and she pressed her cold fingers to his cheek and kissed it. “Happy Thanksgiving, Cassidy,” she said, and there was a finality to it, the kind that came from closing doors when it was time to close them. “I’m sorry I made you come all the way here,” she added apologetically, tugging the hood of her coat up over her brown curls. She gave him one last soft, reluctant smile, and she turned back to Hamartia.
He had no idea what had just happened. They argued all the time - he didn't see why now should be any different, why him expressing exhaustion at chasing the same thing for the thousandth time should make an impact now, but there it was. Somehow, he'd gotten through to her. Wonderful.
"Wren -" but by the time he said her name, she was already walking away.
Well. That was that, then.