erin gracewater . {mary lennox} (marigoldsinarow) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-09-08 00:16:00 |
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Entry tags: | colin craven, mary lennox |
Who: Erin & Colt
What: Oh, the amount of fuzz you would expect from two characters from The Secret Garden.
Where: Colt's Apartment, Aubade 106.
When: The morning after this.
Warnings: A lot of fluff, archaic silliness, and poetic squishiness. Consider yourself warned.
Colt had spent a sleepless night in the study’s recliner. The bedroom furniture had been delivered, a book had been delivered, breakfast had been delivered, and still Erin slept. He had watched her throughout the evening, wondering when the hell he’d begun caring. He’d glanced back at the desk throughout the evening, the desk where the most recent letter from his son sat unopened in the top drawer, but he did not reach for the letter. He just kept turning his attention back to the woman on the mattress, the woman who was finally sleeping with a peaceful calm, and when the run rose gathered the book and placed it on the desk, alongside the delivered breakfast. He ran a shower, and he shaved and he dressed, and he did it all with an uneven, painful gait that was reminiscent of something out of a child’s nightmare. By the time he made it back to the recliner he was exhausted, and the coffee had grown cold, and Erin still slept. He fought to keep his eyes open, to watch her, but he drifted off to sleep within minutes, the sounds of his none-too-soft snores filling the study.
When Erin slept she didn’t move, and she didn’t curl up, but she breathed a lot deeper and the severity and tension drained out of her until most of the barriers were gone and it was just tiredness and stillness. Once her phone beeped (in the very early morning) but it wasn’t a persistent ring and her briefcase sufficiently muffled the sound that she didn’t even stir. When she woke up to a very sonorous, very male sound, she turned over and looked at the ceiling.
Erin wasn’t prone to drinking, but she’d indulged a few times, and those few times were enough to make her wary of the entire thing. She was relatively small in stature and pale of skin, and it turned out that she was a bit of a lightweight, too. The morning after always left her with a bit of a headache, a slightly churning stomach and more fatigue than she’d gone to sleep with. She felt like that now. She sat up, but it was with a great deal of difficulty, and she looked down at her marred hands and knees with a feeling like disappointment. She was not so very fixed after all.
Lifting her head as she tried to finger-comb her hair out of her face, she turned her attention to Colt, who was, for once, not glaring at her over a desk. She just sat there and looked at him for a while, sometimes thinking about trying to rise, but mostly just... not.
Colt wasn’t a light sleeper, not by any means. As long as the painkiller dosage was high enough, he was generally content to sleep away as much of his life as he could manage. In fact, he made sure the painkiller dosage was high enough for that very reason. Today, however, was an exception. He was sleeping lightly, not at all restfully, and after a few long minutes of feeling someone looking at him, he opened his eyes.
The first thing he noticed was that she looked tired and pale. Paler? More tired? He remembered what that damn nurse had said, and he sat up quickly, reaching down for the leg rest of the recliner and letting it do the work of becoming upright for him. (It was the reason he slept in the damn chair; a recommendation years ago by the NCO Academy physical therapist.) It helped preserve his dignity, the ease of movement, and when he rested his elbows on his knees and grasped his hands between them, it was with an ease that belied Toby’s claim from the prior night.
“We’re going to have to call that damn nurse back,” he said after a long, long minute of pensive silence, silence which was spent cursing the universe for sending him this woman, cursing silently - of course.
Her expression, usually so serene, so sure, was faintly clouded. It was as if she was reading his thoughts with the serious brown eyes, and she wasn’t angry at him about it. She was a lot easier to deal with when she was angry, or being sour, or ordering bits and pieces of his life around while constantly reminding him that it was his idea. Her eyes did flick down from his face to his feet and back up again, a gesture she tried to hide, but once the survey was done she said, evenly but without volume, “You don’t have to.”
She decided she was going to get up, and while she wished he wasn’t going to watch to see if she staggered, she was too proud to ask him not to. So she pulled her bruised knees under her and pushed up with a hand on the wall. She really did look a fright, and her grimace seemed to indicate that she felt like one, too. “I’m going to use your shower,” she announced, not looking at him.
“Like hell you are,” he said, reaching for her. There wasn’t the normal venom in the command, the spoiled volume that spoke to plain orneriness and nothing else. His normal anger was stubborn, knowingly impossible, a carefully constructed wall of mean and hate. This edict was born of worry, and it was entirely evident. He reached for her arms, and he didn’t lose his balance on the large recliner. He was stronger than her, even out of practice like he was, and it was nothing to drag her to him with large hands on the fragile paper-like skin of her delicate forearms.
She resisted, but not very well. He was much stronger than she at that point, and she gave so quickly that it was almost a fall into his lap. Her skin was alarmingly cool, and she made a vague sound of frustration, like a bird annoyed at a stick for not fitting into the nest. “Oh, ugh, I must smell awful.”
That actually made him chuckle. “Pretty much,” he agreed, but he wrapped his arms around her anyway. The damage to his leg was primarily below the kneecap, but the surgeries had ruined him to the hip on that side, made the hip joint a creaking and aching thing, the knee useless at normal bending and the muscles between difficult to keep built up without constant therapy he refused to participate in any longer. Still, she was a nothing little thing in his arms, and she was easy to settle on his lap with the recliner’s generous support. His arms were strong in a way the rest of him was not, even after a year of little use, and she wasn’t going anywhere unless he let her go. “You’re cold,” he said unnecessarily, the words uncommonly kind, if gruff.
She was so surprised by the successive sound of the amusement, which actually made her turn her chin and stare at him with alarm, and the affectionate curve of his arms that she literally sat there in silent astonishment for a good ten seconds. She didn’t smell so bad as she thought, mostly of the old green of the florist shop and faint salty sweat and tears, but still she could not think why he had chosen now to give a damn. Not being the kind of woman that allowed such things as petty surprise get the best of her, Erin turned a little in his arms to get a better look at his lined face and her expression was one of earnest concentration as she tried to understand him. She did look pale; not the same deathly pale as she had before, but the thumbprints under her eyes were starting to show again and the brown hair only set the pallor in heavier contrast. “I am sorry I am cold, but it is not my fault.” Who was this man, and what had he done with Colt Byron when she was not looking?
Colt had been a very different man once upon a time. True, conversation and emotions were never his strong point, and he had daddy issues that would last until the grave, but he’d done just fine with a pretty set of legs and Erin was (normally) a very pretty set of legs. He chuckled again, slightly entertained by her very obvious inability to know how the hell to handle him, and he tucked a strand of hair behind her ears. “How the hell are we going to get you washed up and into bed without you killing yourself dead, woman, if we can’t call the impossible nurse?”
“We!” she repeated, with a little undignified squeak of alarm. Despite her modern heels and serious dress, Erin had been a young girl for a rather long time, and though that time had not been exactly moral, it certainly hadn’t exposed her to more than was strictly necessary for a ten-year-old child to know. Erin’s growing up had come rather late, and she had difficulty adjusting her sensibilities at times. “I assure you I can stand,” she said, stubbornly, and she opened her mouth to point out that she was very much more equipped to judge whether or not she was killing herself than he, when he set a bit of her hair to rights and touched one ear, much more gently than she ever would have given him credit for. She was struck silent again so visibly that her mouth was still open.
The only thing that kept Colt from chuckling at the picture she painted, sitting there on his lap with her mouth open in a little o of surprise was his worry for her. But still he smiled, the corners of his mouth tugging up in an unfamiliar way or, rather, in a way long forgotten by muscles under skin. He had a problem, however, in that he coudn’t actually get up and force her into the bathroom, not without her seeing his monstrosity of a gait, and it was the only thing that kept the reformed rake from once upon a time inside him from carrying her to the bathtub and stripping her naked - for entirely platonic reasons, of course. He touched his fingers to her parted lips, unable to help himself with a woman so near for the first time in what seemed a lifetime. He was going to have to send her into the damn invalid bath and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
She had no idea what to do with the sudden turning of the tables, the abrupt gentleness in the back of his eyes so close to hers. She was used to him yelling at her, and she was rather fond of yelling back, and a few moments before she woke she had been quite certain that they disliked each other quite heartily. She was beginning to think that was not the case, and she hadn’t the slightest idea what she was supposed to do about it. He was her employer; wasn’t this sort of thing... well. Untoward? She thought it was. Only she didn’t. Not right then. She was not overhasty to get up. He was worried about her, he had said, She actually believed him now, and her dry lips moved against the pads of his fingers. “You really shouldn’t worry,” She said it as if she worried him worrying might be detrimental to his health.
The only thing that kept him from kissing those dry lips was the reality of who he was outside the chair. The fact that she was weak, that she wasn’t thinking clearly, that she wouldn’t even be in his lap if it wasn’t for what had happened, all of that crossed his mind, but it didn’t dominate the decision. No, his own shattered pride did that, and he brushed his fingers across her lips one last time, and then he sat back. “The bathroom at the next wall, it’s got somewhere for you to sit while you wash up,” he told her. “And there’s a robe behind the door.” He said it all matter of fact, as if the confession didn’t cost him his masculinity in her eyes, and then he lowered a hand to her hip and nudged her. “Hold onto the damn wall along the way, woman.”
She didn’t interpret the lean into the recliner as rejection. For all her bustling and her archaic mannerisms, Erin’s definitions of social interaction were pretty basic, and they were now in an entirely different arena than they had been before. She still smelled and she still wanted a shower, but she also wanted to know what he thought he was doing with her in his lap and why he did it. To their credit, both of them, it didn’t once occur to her that he was just trying to take advantage of her. Erin didn’t think of herself as all that weak, and she didn’t think of Colt as quite that crass. (Shocking, yes.)
The subsequent release of pressure on her arm and the touch to her lips left Erin feeling mildly irritated at him for derailing the conversation, which had just become interesting. She shut her eyes a little with a sigh that he probably felt under his chin, and then she slid away, but not without brushing a cheek against his chin and leaving faint butterfly kisses along his jaw before she was back on her feet again. With only a slight wobble and a waver, she disappeared around the corner.
He was so shocked by the damn butterfly kisses that he didn’t even yell at her about holding onto the damn wall. It wasn’t until the water had started running in the bathroom that he even stopped to think about what had just happened. And then, just like the man he was, he refused to think about it entirely. Colt wasn’t prone to deep thoughts and self assessments. There was a woman, she was attractive, she’d been on his lap, and it was only his leg that was ruined, thank you very much, not the rest of him. Of course he was worried about her. She worked for him, and she was a damn fool of a reckless creature who needed minding, and she had a nice set of legs on her. The thinking stopped there, and he got off the recliner and lumbered over to the desk, sitting behind it with a groan.
In the bathroom, Erin caught her breath with a lean against the sink, and she looked with concern and curiosity at the small chair in the bathtub. She remembered Toby’s words clearly, and though she increasingly felt as if she was trying to think through cotton, she recognized Colt’s reaction as being entirely defensive. She sighed at him, resisted shaking her head (since it would then swim about dangerously) and set about trying to bathe without ruining her bandages. It didn’t work, in the end, and she had to cut the ones on her hands off with scissors, and it was awkward because her palms were rather cut up too, and you don’t know how difficult it is to cut something with scissors until you’ve got some rather deep scratches on your palms. The bandages went in the trash, along with everything she’d been wearing when she walked into that florist’s shop. She took a rather long time, and sat under the hot water to shake a little while where no one was watching. When she came out she felt rather prune-y, more tired, but at least better smelling. She stole a very masculine comb from out of one of the drawers, put on the robe (which smelled a great deal like Byron and oakish whiskey), and went back to the study. She used the wall--and it was a good thing, too.
When she reappeared she couldn’t help but imagine that she looked ten years old again, and she had detested being ten years old before the first fifty years had gone by. In the antiquated style of her first nurses she had a great long length of hair, which she did not cut and which was now hopelessly tangled about her shoulders and down her back. The robe was altogether too big for her, brushing the floor beside her heels and displaying a rather deep V of white that she kept tugging closed. She gave him a curious tip of her head when she noticed he had moved behind the desk, but she didn’t comment, and instead moved inward with her uneven sway.
Oh, that V of white was the first thing that drew his attention when she walked in the room. He could pretend it was the uneven sway of her walk, or the way the bruises of exhaustion seemed to be blossoming beneath her eyes, or how lost she looked in the oversized robe. But no, no, it was the V of whiteness that held his attention for a moment too long. Colt was, after all, a man. One who had just realized the woman in his study was wearing nothing but him metaphorically speaking, and who felt smug desire in that reality. He swallowed, reigned in his inner teenager, and he pointed to the vacated recliner. “Sit.” One word, a little too gruff.
She gave him a very sour look redolent of her inner teenager, as that was where she was going anyway and she resented him sitting there like a rajah and watching her try to do stupid things like walk upright without feeling like she was wearing cement shoes. Finally she climbed into the recliner, pulled her legs up under her, and curled like a cat beneath the robe. She started using his comb on the wet tangles of her hair, ends first, working up. She started somewhere around her hips and seemed content to ignore him during the process.
He watched her, and it was the sort of watching that came from starvation and little else. A woman in a man’s space, a woman as delicate and otherworldly as Erin was, it made a man feel more man, more masculine, more alive, and Colt couldn’t take his eyes off her. He didn’t interrupt, didn’t curse or boss or damn anything. He followed the movement of the brush, and he imagined her out of the robe, and he didn’t feel the slightest bit of guilt in it.
Erin liked combing her hair, and she generally used the time to think over the events of the day previous while they weren’t so madcap and hurried. Erin was not used to being hurried, and she didn’t know what everyone saw in it. She conformed, of course; she was punctual and neat and clockwork chronological when she scheduled, but that was business, and everyone knew that business was day to day. These thoughts were not business, and they were more harrowing and scattered than those she normally dealt with, but her hair was very tangled and the comb was not very good. After quite a lot of thought and combing, she abruptly looked up to shake off the grim memory of the hard yank to her scalp where she’d just inadvertently pulled, and said, rather unsteadily, “You don’t mind if I stay?”
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he said, more his normal reaction and tone than before she’d left for the bath. “You need someone to look out for you, woman.” It wasn’t exactly the truth. She did, after all, need someone to look out for her, but it went beyond that. Dammit. “I need you to start the damn school, and you’re going to get yourself killed on your own.” Still, his words didn’t have the bite they normally did. Maybe it was because she looked so fragile sitting there, engulfed by chair and robe and that long soft hair. Maybe.
She was undisturbed, as ever, by all this gruffness. “I think we may have to find a replacement,” she said, almost dreamily, beginning to comb again. She did it very slowly in favor of her hands, working through bits of tangle inches at a time. Her mouth compressed a little. She wasn’t going to tell him she didn’t think she could work, but essentially--she just had.
“We aren’t finding a replacement,” he said instantly, firmly. “You have a contract.” And she did, but that wasn’t why he was insisting. “Dammit, woman, giving up is not an option. Where is all that impossible gumption you carry around with you in that ridiculous briefcase?”
She was entirely too calm. “Stop calling me ‘woman.’” She lifted the damp comb and pointed across the room where the Corbinian had left her case, much worse for wear and trampled by various paramedics and doctor-like personages.
He almost laughed when she pointed at the briefcase - almost. He didn’t, though, in the end. He leaned his arms on the desk, and he looked at her with pure honesty. “I will buy that annoying nurse if it’s what it takes to keep you on your feet, you hear me?” It was more Colt than Colt had been in years, and he realized it somewhere in the back of his mind. At this rate, she’d get him out of the cursed apartment. He scowled briefly.
Erin let her shoulders drop in the robe at the tail end of a shrug, clearly forgetting about it being quite so loose. “You can’t ask her to keep doing that. She really didn’t like it, did you see?” Quite a lot of Erin’s attention had been caught up in Toby in the thirty seconds after she came awake, particularly since Colt had been shouting at her at the time.
“I’ll pay her enough to own that building she lives in,” Colt said, because money was made to fix things like this. This didn’t need to be a wasting illness, not with that nurse around, and Colt was going to make certain she dedicated her damn life to Erin’s well being. He could be a stubborn son-of-a-bitch when it came right down to it, and he didn’t think twice about exerting his influence when he considered it imperative. His father was still rotting in jail because of his stubbornness, and his son was still in Alaska, and that DAMN nurse would make Erin her main priority in life. The End.
Erin looked at him quietly. “She doesn’t work for you. She won’t, remember? She just came to help. And then she left.” Her voice held a hint of scolding in it for that particular stream of behavior, as he had not exactly been the most gracious of hosts.
“I will talk to her,” he said stubbornly, and talk meant yell at and throw money at and boss around.
“You will, but she still won’t come.” Erin’s stalwart criticism appeared to fail for a moment and she said, quietly, looking down at her hand with the comb in it, “Besides, it doesn’t work. Why force her?”
“It worked for awhile, and it’ll keep working while we find the solution,” he said, sitting back in the chair and looking at her again, truly looking, beyond the tempting image she painted in his robe, beyond the soft, teasing glimpses of flesh and softness. She looked tired, and that strange color was returning to her skin, and she looked slightly dazed, not entirely present. He sighed. “Your ability, the dangerous one with the keys. Do you think it has anything to do with that?” he asked, admitting his own ability in the process.
Not quite. Erin brought her head up, surprised. “He told you about that?” She remembered making a key for the Corbinian, a key that was still under the blankets on the mattress, and she glanced inadvertently at it.
He followed her gaze, and then he looked back at her. “What is it?” he asked, not immediately addressing the he that had to be Jack.
“He told you about the key?” She sounded as if she was repeating herself and blinked hard to keep herself present in the conversation.
“Jack?” he asked, not pushing it. She was having trouble focusing on him, and he could check under the mattress once she’d fallen asleep again. “No, Jack didn’t tell me a thing worth telling,” he said honestly. He looked worried, and that’s because he was worried. The longer she talked to him, the more she seemed to be getting lost, and so much of what made her her was her impossible stubbornness. “I can tell what people’s abilities are by touching them,” he explained. “The doctor said this might be related to that. Do you think it is, Erin?” He asked the question with slow deliberateness, the way he imagined he would talk to the small son he’d never seen, the one a world away.
“The key-making?” Erin said, following along this line of thought with confusion. “Making keys never made me sick before. I do it all the time.” She didn’t seem to particularly care that she just admitted to breaking into all kinds of places that she didn’t belong. He had called her Erin, she realized, and she smiled at him without warning.
The smile was so unexpected that he forgot whatever he was going to insist on. She looked entirely different when she smiled, sweet and open and dammit he wanted to get out from behind that desk. He shook his head, clearing his thoughts, concentrating on this and now, because this and now was important. “Do you ever feel like this? Even just a little?”
“I’m just tired,” she insisted, and it had a very familiar ring to it. “Like when you’ve had a long day. And you’re tired. Just more.” She carefully balanced his comb on the arm of the recliner and sank back into it.
“So it’s exhaustion?” he asked, trying to put it all into the framework of a military problem, a strategic recon, a decision on which attack pattern to use. “What makes you feel less tired? Coffee? Sleep? Daytime? Nighttime? Showers?”
Erin took in a deep breath and settled deeper into her (his?) chair. “I don’t know.” It all seemed very obvious to her, having a long day and being tired and... “I go home.”
“You can’t be home alone,” he said, the response instant and immediate. She couldn’t. She could barely make it into the shower without falling over. It was an order, whether she liked it or not. “What do you do once you’re home? We’ll get it set up exactly the same here.”
She tried to think, but she was fading and the recliner was warm and smelled an awful lot like Colt too. “I turn the key and I go in, and then I lock it again. I put my case down, and I make some tea, and then I water my flowers.” Her voice became soft and affectionate, as if she was talking about children. “And sometimes I plant them in different pots and things. And then I go clean... and then dinner.” She closed her eyes.
He listened to her words, and he watched her face, and he smiled at the imagined visual of her interacting with these plants like she cared about them (which she obviously did). It was delicately endearing in a way he hadn’t realized she could be, and he sighed, realizing he was going to give into this bullshit before he even said the words. “We’ll find a way to get you home.”
She smiled a little in her sleep at his sigh, curled a little closer in on herself, and mumbled something that was undoubtedly gratitude but didn’t quite make it into words.
He watched her drowse off to sleep, and then he picked up the phone and started making arrangements. She would be happier at home? Then, dammit, he’d get her home.