thomas brandon iii ; batman (bystealth) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-12-14 20:47:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, lois lane |
Who: Max & Thomas
What: Fuzzy worry &c.
Where: Thomas’ Batcave warehouse. Or one of ‘em, anyway.
When: Oh, it’s complicated, but the evening of the day Luke was rescued.
Warnings: Zip.
Max, admittedly, still wasn’t sure if Thomas meant he wanted to see her if it was safe to do so or if he wanted to see her safe. But she hadn’t slept in days, and she had been worried in a way she had never been during a job, and she was wound nervous tight, and so she assumed the former and discounted the latter, at least for the time being.
She’d worked with a lot of people who hadn’t made it home from missions, but no one was stupid enough to get close to anyone on that team. Hell, they moved everyone around before and after missions, just to keep connections from being forged. If someone had to be left behind to save the mission, they had to be left behind, and it wouldn’t do to have anyone wailing and insisting they be saved. This was different, and it was unfamiliar, and it scared the fuck out of her and made her feel helpless in a way that made her want to crawl out of her own skin.
The drive to the coordinates felt like endlessness, like something long awaited that couldn’t come quick enough, and she banged the flat of her palm against the steering wheel. She was too damn invested, especially when no one had promised her a damn thing about how this would all turn out; it didn’t make her drive any slower, that realization, and she opened the door to the truck before even taking the key out of the ignition.
She’d never been to the warehouse before, though she knew Thomas had one he worked out of, and she knew he’d have the thing wired to heaven and back with surveillance. She walked to the door, and she tried the knob.
It didn’t work at first, responding with a dull, uninterested thud of a solid bolt in its steel frame, but a second later there was an electronic buzzing noise, and the door clicked open into her hand. This entrance was not the front entrance at all, but a second one by the loading dock, and it led directly into the garage. The nondescript dark car sat cold and dry, and various mechanic’s supplies and locked metal wardrobes lined the walls.
White warehouse lighting edged the door ahead, however, and she couldn’t be halfway through the garage before it opened, framing Thomas. He looked eternal in his “not at work” grays, and he glanced behind her at the door shutting with another secure buzz before looking closer. “It’s warmer in here,” he suggested, frowning with concern at the wet and her fatigued appearance.
As greetings went, it wasn’t exactly Hallmark material, but she was so damn glad to see him standing on his own two feet after the suit had come off that she didn’t much care. She knew perfectly well how kevlar could hide fatal wounds until it was taken off, and she knew all about the internal damage that could come from a gunshot wound in armor. But he was standing there, looking as infuriatingly normal as ever. Like he hadn’t just spent three days of hell doing god knows what, like the reality hadn’t existed that Luke wouldn’t be found alive, like everything hadn’t stopped for the span of seventy-two hours. He was all grey calm with a touch of concern for the cold?? “Dammit, Brandon,” she said, keeping her voice a low hiss, since she didn’t know where Luke was. The volume did nothing to temper her reaction, though, which was to rush forward as soon as the door latched and wrap her arms around his neck with sheer relief, as raw and as heavy as the snow damp coat she wore. She knew there was a bruise somewhere, but she couldn't remember where right then, and she clung to him a little too tight, the grip almost painful, even with her small stature and build.
Thomas was surprised at this reaction, though he should not have been, because he wasn’t accustomed to people being concerned about him. Just as he wasn’t accustomed to anyone knowing what he was up to, or where he was. He didn’t retreat from her advance, and the warning sign of his last name just made his eyebrows tilt in faint confusion. She caught him in the doorway, and he had enough presence of mind to catch her up so she didn’t fall over, but when she hung from his neck and made him bend a little with her weight he made a faint sound of discomfort. Then, as he set her on her feet, pain. “Are you alright?” He tried to get a look at her face to see if there was something seriously wrong he’d missed.
The sound of discomfort was enough to make her let go, even without him setting her on her feet. Her arms unwound from around his neck, and she looked from one shoulder to the other, looking for some sign of injury through the eternal grey. She was getting him something in another damn color for Christmas. She unwound the scarf from her neck, and she worked her way out of the heavy, wet coat, not caring where the damn thing fell. Underneath, she was wearing a dry sweater and jeans that rode just below her belly, and there was no doubt that she was starting to show. Not that it mattered to her right then. Her fingers immediately went to the buttons of his shirt, shaking, frantic movements, even if her words were military calm-tempered. “Which shoulder?” she asked, even as her fingers pushed at fabric.
He made as if to grab for the coat, but she interfered, and he frowned a little deeper that she was not wrapped up from chin to toes in more adequate winter-wear, though what he might consider adequate, who knows. His shoulders were an even line, a vast improvement from two months past when his shoulder hadn't been attached to the rest of him. "Back," he said, shifting uncomfortably under the assault but taking this to be a strange maternal thing recently come over her. The black and blue was still deep and dark under his shoulder blade on the right, spreading at twice the area of her hand, and it had not even begun to ease into green, indicating damage that would have put into mind fears for hematoma and internal bleeding, if he haven't been so sure that Jane would tell him if he was likely to die soon. "Jane said it was fine," he said, looking back over his now bared shoulder at it. (Not that he could see any of it.)
As soon as he told her where the injury was, she pushed the shirt off his shoulders and walked around behind him, tugging it low to his back. She was much shorter than he was, and the bruise was above eye level, but that didn't do a damn thing to obscure her view of it. Max knew bruises. She knew that a bruise that dark was exceptionally fucking deep, and she knew that so much damage beneath Kevlar meant the gunshot had to have been from ridiculously close fucking range. More than that, it meant he hadn't been paying a damn bit of attention to whoever was behind him with the gun. "They were right on fucking top of you," she said, a waver of anger in her voice. They could have aimed a little higher, and he wouldn't be fucking standing there. Her fingers shook as she touched the edge of the bruise. "That had to take you down," she said, because she knew what the impact of that kind of shot was too.
"Yes," he said with some chagrin, as if she had just pointed out that his shirt was on backwards. "I was distracted." Four assailants, all armed. He reflected that it would be unwise to tell her about going down the hallway with all those bullets going over his head. She looked angry enough. He actually flinched when she put her fingertips against his skin, a very un-Thomas-like movement, made all the more obvious because he was without his usual fluid grace.
When he flinched, she slid her arm around his waist from behind, and she pressed her cheek against his other, unmarred shoulder. It was unhesitating, unapologetic, because it had nothing to do with thinking and everything to do with feeling. “You stupid fucking bastard,” she said, and it was a whisper in the quiet of the room. “You didn’t even fucking look, did you? You just ran in there like you were fucking invincible.” She sounded scared and angry, and it was all wrapped up in the hush of understanding. She sighed. “You’re a good man, in case I haven’t fucking told you already.”
Embarrassed by this honest emotion, worsened by the fact his arms were largely trapped by the shirt and he wasn't used to his mistakes being so obvious, Thomas made some vague sound in the back of his throat and then said, "He shouldn't have been able to get back up so quickly." He shifted a little to replace the shirt; he didn't want Luke to see the bruise. He turned around in the embrace and took a step back to try to bring her out of the cold garage. "Has it been bad?" he asked, referring to the public furor.
She could tell she’d made him uncomfortable, though she assumed it was her actions that had done it, not anything she’d said. She had a difficult time with this sort of physical affection, and the pulling away was acutely noticeable to her. She cleared her thought awkwardly, all the old uncertainties rushing back, and she wrapped her arms around her stomach. “The press are all over the place,” she told him, because they were. “Bathos is pretty fucking bad, and I’m guessing Aubade is worse. I haven’t been over there since it got locked down,” she admitted, referring to neither place as home. “I’ve been at the warehouse for the past three days.”
From his expression, he didn’t like that very much. He didn’t heckle her about it, however, feeling as if he’d done that to death for the present. Thomas was the wrong person to look for physical affection from, or indeed, affection of any kind, but he did care about her, even if it usually ended up as disapproving frowns and comments about how cold it was. He took her hand and got her into the larger warehouse, which honestly wasn’t much warmer. He forgot she had not seen the interior before, a large open space that was combined training dojo, hospital, office, lab, library and closet, and sat her on the office chair, which was probably the most comfortable chair in the room. All the monitors were humming with crime reports and silent, digital statistics. “You don’t have somewhere you can stay? With a friend? There’s only one bed here.” Luke wasn’t immediately within sight, but Thomas wasn’t speaking very loud and he glanced toward the enclosed office at one end of the building.
She gave the space a look that was cursory quick. Under other circumstances, she probably would have bossed her way out of the chair to look around, but she those would have been other circumstances entirely. It was finally settling in that maybe he really hadn’t wanted her to come, that maybe she had convinced herself that his words meant what she wanted them to mean, instead of what they did mean. “I can handle the press, Brandon,” she said. “I’m one of them, remember? I suggested Monroe stay with Copeland for a few days, and once it calms down, I’ll go back to Bathos.” She was still looking out over the large space in an unseeing way as she said it, and she looked back at him a moment later. “You didn’t want me to come, did you?” she asked.
He hesitated, glanced at the office again, and said, “It’s not comfortable here. It’s dangerous to come and go. This isn’t Aubade; I can’t explain my presence here with any viability.” He couldn’t protect her here. Here, even being present was dangerous.
He didn’t want her to have to handle the press, but he couldn’t deny that what she said was true. While he was no longer distracted by his name in print, hers--or worse, her picture--was a distracting representation of his influence on her life, and he didn’t like it. It was the same with Luke.
She shook her head slowly. She never would have broached this topic if the circumstances weren’t what they were, but she was tired, and she was worked up from three days of stress and imagining the worse and no sleep. Waiting for word that the people you care about are dead, it was a hard thing to take, and she had no friends to hold her hand through it, and she couldn’t blaze out there and be useful like he could. She had spent three terrified days in a warehouse, alone, fearing the worse. So she shook her head slowly. “No, Thomas,” she said, trying to find a way to phrase it that might make him understand. “I know the logistics. I get that the perimeter is dangerous, that it isn’t secure for me to come and go from here, that I might be followed and we’d have a significantly problematic security breach. I know all that. I want to know if you wanted to see me. It’s going on four days now; did you want to see me?”
Thomas stood back. There was a stool not far away, but it was sitting in the lab area of the warehouse, a good ten yards away, so he just stood there. Unlike her, none of his fatigue showed, and none of his fear or worry did either. He had not told anyone of the girl, or how he felt responsible for what had happened to her and Luke, for something so small and paltry as money. He had received information, given orders, investigated possibilities. The biggest possibility had been a ransomed corpse, and he had done what he could to remove some of his feeling from that absolute reality.
"I had to find Luke," he said.
She moved to her feet as soon as he spoke, and she closed the distance between them until she was right in front of him. “I know,” she said, looking up into those fathomless grey eyes. “I know you did. And the only reason I’m not screaming my head off at you for taking that bullet is because I know you’d do anything to save him. That’s who you are, and it’s what I respect so fucking much about you, and you love that kid more than anything.” She said it without any jealousy, because she didn’t feel any. How he was with Luke, it never ceased to amaze her, and she cupped his cheeks. “I know, Thomas,” she reiterated, a little softer. “I know. And he’s safe now. You got him out, and he’s safe,” she told him. She knew disassociation even better than she knew the effect of bullets on kevlar, and she knew coming back from it after, it wasn’t always as easy thing. “It was okay to freak the fuck out. Hell, I’m still freaked the fuck out.” She paused a moment. “And this wasn’t your fucking fault. Whoever did this, it was their fault, not yours. Whether you want me here or not, that doesn’t change.”
“For three days he wasn’t,” he replied, in the precise same tone, keeping his voice low. The gray eyes dimmed as he dropped them. “She tortured them. For three days, I couldn’t find him.” He dropped his chin as if the weight of this knowledge was too much for him, and leaned his forehead on hers. “I didn’t think I would find him. Not alive. After the first twenty-four...”
She traced his cheekbones with her fingers, the move one entirely comforting, touch for the sake of this vulnerability that was so seldom seen in this man. She had known there was more than one person, thanks to Oracle’s slip, but that wasn’t important right then. “But you did find him,” she said, softly fierce. “There is no one in the fucking world who would go to the lengths you would to protect people you care about, Thomas, and that’s why he’s here, why he’s safe. He’s going to be fine,” she assured him just as surely. She didn’t ask if he’d killed the woman, because she knew better, knew he wouldn’t, even if he wanted to - and she felt it was perfectly normal to want to. What made him different, special was that he didn’t act on all the anger she knew was inside him.
“If this keeps happening to the people I care about, one day it won’t be enough, Max.” He took the backs of her elbows and pulled her gently closer, though she could really come no nearer. “One day, it won’t be fine. I don’t even know if he’s fine now.” He took a breath, only one, and then attempted to recover the iron control. “You should talk to him.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist when he pulled her closer, and she was soft and warm in a way she wasn’t before. He was still as solid as he always had been, all strength and muscle and weapon, and she sighed as she pressed her cheek to the center of his chest. “Is he awake?” she asked. “I’ve been there,” she admitted reluctantly, “where he is. I know what it feels like.” She looked back up at him once the words were done, her brown gaze certain. “You are not to take this on yourself,” she said protectively; protective of him. “You can’t control what sick people do, Thomas, and you can’t blame yourself for their shit. He could have been the rich kid of any wealthy person. He’s just lucky he was your rich kid, because you got him home.”
“He wouldn’t be rich if it wasn’t for me,” Thomas said, failing to see the irony that the comment would be a boast in any other circumstance. He just didn’t think that way, however, and he touched her hair briefly with the very tips of his fingers before making a gentle move to pull away. “He will be in a moment. But you’re alright?” Looking into her face. “You need to rest. You’re supposed to be taking care of yourself.” He smiled just a little bit and touched her shoulder with his palm. He tried not to think of how much Max knew about this situation. He’d never let her leave.
“I’m fine,” she said, the fact that she was using his eternal phrase wasn’t lost on her. She chuckled a little, and she tried to do better than that. “I haven’t slept, and I spent two days with Roger and Corvus asking questions. We got a lot of useful stuff, though, I hope?” she asked, white vans and witnesses about ice boxes. She didn’t wait for his answer, though, because something had led him where he needed to be, and that was what mattered. “I’m tired, yeah, but it was the fucking worry that killed me,” she admitted. “Maybe I can get a good night’s sleep after today.” She looked up at him when he touched her shoulder, because he was even less comfortable with random touching than she was, and she smiled at him. “You’re going to need to practice that, you know,” she said.
“You need to sleep,” he ordered, sounding appropriately demanding over a solid layer of concern. “After you talk to Luke I’ll take you home.” Logic, right. No sign as to which residence he was referring to as “home” but they could talk about it later. He made no reply to the comment about practicing, but she got the corner of his mouth to twitch as he turned and gently swept an arm behind her to direct her toward the office. Before she did he looked down at her belly with a strange, foreign look on his face, and then he gave her a little nudge.
She actually laughed at his order to sleep, a fond-warm husky thing of a sound, and she touched his cheek as he ushered toward the door. “If you think I can sleep when you’re out there risking your fucking life for days on end, you don’t know me. And even if you’d been sitting at home and twiddling your thumbs, Luke being missing would have kept me awake too. I worry about you,” she said. “Deal,” she added, stretching up and giving him a quick kiss once he’d nudged her to the door, having caught the foreign look, her fingers cupping his cheeks, gratefulness in the chaste brush of lips. “Thanks for coming back okay,” she said quietly, almost embarrassed at the sentiment, and then she pushed through the door.