Orrie likes arrows (sagittal) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-04-18 00:56:00 |
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Entry tags: | green arrow, lady, snafu |
Who: Orrie, Valerie, Dante
What: Aftermath
Where: Aubade
When: The day of the lobby shooting
Warnings: None
It had been Dante’s compatriot who had pulled a gun, ready to fire on the man in the lobby, and Dante himself who had pinned Valerie to the side of the elevator. He was the human shield after all, and the wall that had gone up around them in that moment, totally unseen, would have more than protected her from any gunfire. But the doors slid shut without incident, and five minutes later they were back at the apartment.
Dante had left the other man positioned outside the apartment, and placed himself inside. The door was broken now, a circumstance that would never have needed to come about if she’d just let one of them inside in the first place. Now that he had made it inside the apartment, however, he was going to stay precisely where he was, sitting at a table, gun holstered comfortably at his hip, waiting. His hands rested on the table, fingers tapping together. Looking around, he idly wondered if Orin Monarch had chosen this place because it looked like a rich man’s home, or because all rich men liked the same things. It was a philosophical conundrum. The place was all white sparseness and deceptively expensive objects he supposed were meant to impress women. He couldn’t imagine spending money on most of the things in this apartment. The blonde, maybe. The rest of it seemed unnecessary. He could, however, appreciate the view of the bay, expansive and slate colored under the cloudy sky, and he followed the lines of the waves with eyes of a similar shade, light for the tone of his skin, silver and still.
To Valerie, the men Monarch had sent had been faceless, representations of more restrictions set up because of some crazy claim, one among so many pointless others that Valerie hadn’t seen the threat. True, she’d been chafing the self-imposed restraints, and she resented any others that Orin set up with perhaps undue fervency. She’d fit the apartment very well, groomed, expensive, but simple. She was bright enough in the Spring Gucci that she looked at home in all that glass and sky, but right now she wasn’t doing a lot of floating in the clouds.
Since they’d returned back upstairs, Valerie had done a lot of silent but panicked crying at the corner of one of the padded hammocks. She didn’t do any screaming, just weeping with a gasp or two here and there. She’d answered the phone and had a brief conversation, but hung up not long after. Now she just sat still, and instead of insisting they leave again, she sniffed occasionally into a kleenex.
Dante could only ignore a woman crying like that for so long. He turned his head from the view out the window, watching her, sitting facing away from him and sniffling into her kleenex. She seemed to have calmed down some, and he chose to interpret his employer's rules about interacting with her as being unclear. He considered, for a moment, offering her a smoke, but that was a selfish impulse - he wanted to have one, and she didn't much seem the type for smoking. He had heard her speaking on the phone with someone's secretary - Monarch's, he assumed.
"He ain't gone crazy," Dante said, and there was something of the quality of a statue finally piping up and deciding to speak. He hadn't said anything else to her - so far, the man outside had done all the negotiating with her, all the arguing, save for a few quick, rapid fire statements from Dante when the elevator door had opened up on the first floor.
Valerie was one of those rare souls that quit smoking in an age when no one did anything but smoke; the fifties was all tar and ash and fake homes, in her mind. Still, Valerie guarded her health jealously, and she hadn’t had a cigarette in decades. She turned her cellphone--a relatively plain model that she’d been able to learn--in her fingers mindlessly and tried not to think.
She jumped when he spoke up. He’d never spoken to her directly before, not in her memory, and she turned her head all the way around to see where the words had come from. The red-rimmed eyes went wide at him. “What?”
Dante stared back at her, deep-set eyes ringed by seemingly perpetual dark circles. "You said he looked mad," he said. He'd overheard her phone conversation - of course he had. He'd been sitting across the room while she held it. "That wasn't mad, cher. Just a man lost his self-control. Nothing for you to worry yourself about." S sounds slipped under his tongue into soft D's, his speech a low roll of sound. He pulled his lighter from his pocket and set it on the table, flipping the lid open with light fingers and snapping it shut again, deceiving his craving that he might have a cigarette any time.
Valerie recognized the speech as Southern, but nothing like Arrow's, and no more beyond that. She turned slightly in the hammock, the man beyond seeming to her incomprehensible. She didn't know what kind of person would take a bullet for money, up until this point, it seemed that bodyguards were paid for risk, not performance. "How do I know he won't lose control again someday?" There was a little hitch in her breath, but she wasn't hysterical. The television was still on, switching stories between the Monarch press room and the Aubade lobby, but the flickering picture had no accompanying sound.
Dante shrugged, spinning the lighter around on the table with one finger. "Took murder for him to lose it this time. You plan on killing anybody anytime soon?" He turned a little more toward her, leaning back a little. He wasn't a particularly tall man, but he didn't have to be. The lean muscle under his t-shirt and jacket lent themselves to a confidence in strength, and he had yet to meet the man who could stare him down. People didn't tend to meet his eyes for long, not liking what they found in his steady, unflinching gaze, or what they saw reflected back at them. "I don't think you got much to worry about, otherwise."
Valerie wasn't interested in proving anything to herself or anyone else, and she didn't even attempt to maintain the gaze. "I think you're wrong about that. Worrying, I mean." Then, changing the topic gracelessly, she said, "I never thought anyone would actually give their life for mine." She didn't appear to hear the cliche.
Dante took the change in subject in stride, and didn't demand she elaborate. Instead, he gave up the pretense of not smoking. She was right, after all - he was here to keep her safe from bullets, not stand between her and secondhand smoke. He pulled a slightly crushed, half-empty pack of cigarettes from his pocket. "When you been in the military, you get used to the concept," he said, tapping a cigarette from the pack and lighting it. "It's like gambling. Roulette. I get through it unharmed, I get paid. If the ball falls on black and I lose, them's the breaks."
Valerie watched him with the cigarette but she made no objection, nor did she lean forward as if she craved one. “You’re not afraid of death?” she asked, a foreign concept to her. Just ending, sudden and unstoppable, was one of Valerie’s greatest fears.
Dante smiled at her. He thought about five different wars, and of the succession of higher ups asking him why he kept coming back, without promotion and without fail. “No,” he said, taking a drag from his cigarette before pulling it from his mouth with two fingers. “Seen it enough times. There ain’t nothing so frightening about death. Some men better off dead than they were living. It can be more of a blessing than you think. And anyway, you get old enough, you realize it’s no use being scared of what you can’t control. It’s like trying to grab hold of a tornado and turn it back from your house.” His smile went rueful at some inner thought. “Or holding your hands up at a flood.”
Orin had finally reached the door to his apartment, after stopping to talk to a myriad of people, and he didn’t bother knocking. He greeted the guard, and he slipped the key in the lock without knocking. He didn’t see Willow, immediately. He didn’t see Valerie, and he took the steps to the second level two-at-a-time, bellowing as he went. “VALERIE.” Pause. “WILLOW.”
Dante turned toward the stairs. "She's up here," he called, tapping the ash from the cigarette into a dish that happened to be nearby. He wasn't ruffled by the heavy steps on the staircase or the shouting. The man was entitled to be worried about his fiancee.
Entitled was a good word for Orin Monarch. Valerie twitched again at the first bellow, but by the second, she was leaning into the television’s reflection and carefully dabbing her eyes so it didn’t smudge her remaining makeup. She was still raw and red-eyed but she made the best of it, and turned to face the door.
Orin stopped at the landing, and he took in Valerie’s appearance, the fact that she was safe, and then he looked around for Willow. He didn’t ask if the girl was there; he just walked into the space and threw open the balcony doors before turning back to them. “Where is she?” he demanded, in a tone that said he was thisclose to snapping.
Valerie shook her head. “I haven’t seen her all day. She’s not here.” She did an admirable job of using a steady voice, and she kept her heels (void of shoes, at the moment) dug into the floor as he whipped past.
Orin listened to what she said, and then he spun on Dante. “You go find her. Willow Cooper-Delaney on the forums. You find her, and you bring her back here,” he told Dante. The fact that he wanted her safe was understood, undeniable in the tone of his voice. “Now,” he added, as if it was necessary.
"Done and done," Dante said, watching to see if Valerie followed orders. He didn't know who the girl was, but being a bodyguard hardly required being kept in the loop about that sort of thing. There was a girl he was supposed to get back safely. That was all there was to it. He put his cigarette out in the dish and slid off of the chair. "You'll get a call when I got her found," he said, walking past him to the stairs.
Behind Orin’s back, Valerie had slowly, almost without realizing it, slid back down into sitting, the hammock deep enough that her knees were before her chest and the vibrant blue of the dress simply made her face look a little more pale. “It didn’t take you long to get out,” she said, sounding slightly dazed and distant. People with money were beyond the law, and Valerie realized this. She was just making conversation.
“My cousin worked things,” Orin said, dragging a hand through his hair and walking over to the hammock. He put his hand on the netting above her shoulders, fingers slipping into the holes and gripping too tight, belying the fact that he was about as far from calm as a person could be. “We’re leaving,” he told her. Plain, simple. “Get your things.”
Valerie lifted and dropped her chin. Yes, of course, Adam had worked things. The Morgensterns could do... whatever they wanted, she supposed. She heard he was running for mayor and wondered why he bothered. As Orin came and leaned close Valerie unconsciously shifted away, about an inch until she stopped, now folded nearly in half and looking small. Her eyes moved of their own volition to his hands, looking for some sign of the violence she’d just seen. “I don’t want to go out there,” she said, not fierce, but denying the possibility.
Orin noticed the flinch. He noticed it on a level that went beyond seeing. It was connected, in his mind (in that moment), to a dead boy with an arrow through his chest, and his parents, and the man at the press conference, and he stepped back as quickly as he’d stepped forward. His hand moved away as her vision closed on his fingers, and he walked the remainder of the way to the window. “We’ll get guards. Hayley already rented a place. You and Willow will be safer there,” he said, monotone words that reassured. “Go on and get your things, woman. I’m not going near you.”
“There are guards here,” Valerie said, resistant but not stubborn. She watched him move away, but she did not unwind and none of the tension left her. “What difference does it make if we go somewhere else? They might only follow.” Her voice rose slightly as she fought off a very useless panic, and fortunately she recognized it as such and shut it down. “What happened there?” If he turned, she was pointing at the screen, still mutely flickering reports of what had happened for the sane portions of Seattle’s population that was just tuning in.
Orin didn’t need to look at the screen. “Man tried to shoot me at the press conference. Killed a reporter instead. The man downstairs wanted the Bat to come out. He’s dead, too.” He said it with a flat sort of lack of emotion, fingers gripped tightly at his side the only indication he felt anything about what had happened. “The apartment isn’t in my name, and we’re not telling anyone you’re going there. It’ll be safe because Orin damn Monarch and Thomas damn Brandon don’t live there,” he explained, finally turning to look at her. “I’m doing another statement next week, but for now, you move.”
Valerie shook her head. Some threads of gold were coming down out of the twist she’d pinned it in, and despite the day and the tear-chafed redness on cheeks and eyes, there was still a reserved, undefinable glow. It would wear off in a week or so. “I don’t want to leave.” She was watching his hands again.
The anger, there just under the surface, rose and shattered. “YOU ARE GOING,” he roared.
The anger surprised her. She jumped, but not out of fear. She got up on her feet. It seemed wiser. “No! I’m not going to let you... ship me off anywhere you like!”
“It’s a damn apartment across town, not prison,” Orin yelled back. “And you’re going, or I’m breaking this damn contract. I’m not letting you get hurt on my account, and that’s final. You either take it or you leave it, Val.”
“You think I want to get hurt? I just got shot at!” She pointed at the door as if any moment another gunman would come bursting in. “But that didn’t have anything to do with you!” She made her eyes round at him, all but scoffing. “Unless you are the Bat.”
“I’m no damn Bat, but it doesn’t matter to these men,” Orin said. “This isn’t a choice, Val,” Orin said, his tone entirely serious. “Choice is yours if this thing goes on or not. I’m trying to keep people from shooting at you, so quit being so damn difficult and grab what you need.”
“I want to stay here,” she said again, eyes watering and threatening to spill. “If you put me out on the street it’s just going to make it worse.”
“WE ARE MOVING TO ANOTHER APARTMENT TEMPORARILY,” Orin yelled, all bellow and anger and roar, tense from the conversation with Brandon and the deaths. “It isn’t SAFE here.”
Valerie took an angry step forward, pointing at his chest even though he was several feet away, and she opened her mouth--but then stopped. “Wait,” she said. “We? You are coming?”
“Not officially, but I’ll go there to sleep. Woman, I got no interest in dying. Not any more than you do. So shake your ass, and pack some things, and quit giving me lip,” Orin said, pointing toward the closet and the things she had inside. “Just humor a man and do it, Val. Please.”
She didn’t move. “You’re coming too?” she repeated, as if she did not believe what he’d said.
He nodded, not making any comment about how long he was actually going to be there, or how often he was going to stay, but it wasn’t a lie. He’d go with them, under cover of dark, and make sure they were safe and settled. “Go on and pack, honey,” he said again, quieter this time, but somehow more resigned and flat.
Valerie stared at him. “Alright.” She started to turn, just the beginning of movement in a shift of her hip and a tilt of her head, but she stopped and didn’t break the stare. It was a short, empty pause. She didn’t ask him how he was, just like he had not asked her how she was. She looked once more at his hands, dropped now to his side, and then gave a little shake of her head. One palm came up to smear the new tears away, and she moved toward the closet to fold some clothes into a bag that still sat open from the last time she moved.