Orrie likes arrows (sagittal) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-04-19 13:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | black canary, green arrow |
Who: Orin and Laura
What: Meeting again under bad circumstances
Where: Pike Street
When: The night of the march
Warnings: Orin being a drunken jerk
Orin was good as his word.
Starting at nine p.m. on the night Thomas Brandon was shot, he went on a bender. It wasn’t a pretend bender. Oh, no. He was going to make this look damn good, and if there was something he could make look damn good it was this.
He dressed in denim and a grey t-shirt that was snug on the arms, and he climbed out of the limo outside Pike’s Brewing Company. By the time he reached Collins he couldn’t walk a straight line. He could still think clear, though. Clear enough to remember why he’d started getting drunk in the first place. The women on his arms were nameless curves, and he kept accruing more of them as he moved. Way he figured it, he’d have a dozen by night’s end. He’d find a place to roll up and die, and then he’d do it again.
He picked up a member of the paparazzi by his second stop. Instead of getting the man moved back and away, he bought him a drink. By Collins, he had three of them on his tail, and they were all laughing about the girls and their impromptu wet t-shirt contest. It was a calm place, Collins, and they found themselves outside sooner rather than later, covered in beer from head-to-foot.
Laura had been working all day, putting together arrangements for the upcoming Easter holiday. The wealthier members of Seattle's society were already hitting her shop for their floral needs. It was a good thing for her, but it was also difficult to deal with when it ended up with her putting in long hours on her feet and running in and out of the back room to deal with even more customers. Not all of them were friendly, especially the last one - a woman that was convinced she wanted lilies, but hated every one Laura showed her. The woman kept her in the shop for nearly an hour after it normally closed for the day.
By the time she finally locked up, arms full of her ledger books and orders for the next day, she was annoyed and simply wanted to be home for the night. Unfortunately, she had to deal with the bar crowds that had flooded the streets with noise. She'd just turned onto Pike Street and saw the group gathered on the sidewalk, a swarm that rotated around a single figure at the center. She didn't care about them, and tried to keep to the wall to get past, but a few of the women on the edge ran into her, smelling of beer and causing her to drop her things on the ground. She cursed loudly and turned to glare at all of them. "Watch it!"
Orin was drunk enough to have a delayed reaction to everything falling at his feet. He stared a moment, and then he uneasily moved to his knees (with too much grace for a drunk man), and he looked up through a mess of hair falling in his face as he looked up at the woman glaring. He registered blonde hair and an angry voice, and he tried to give her his best smile. “Honey, it’s alright. We’ll help you get all situated now.” He looked over his shoulder at the drunken paparazzi. “Won’t we, boys?” he said, reaching a ledger out to her.
It was the voice more than the face that caught Laura's attention. She'd known that Orin Monarch was in Seattle - it was difficult to ignore his presence in the press, much like it was years ago across the country - but she'd hoped that the city was large enough that she'd never run into him. But the low words with the touch of the South was something that she hadn't forgotten over the years, even though she'd tried. It didn't make her anger ease at all, and even caused it to solidify a bit more.
She snatched the ledger from his hand, just barely stopping herself from hitting him with it, and practically hissed at him. "I don't want your help, Orin. Get off your damn knees and out of my face."
The use of his name sobered Orin slightly. He paused in his attempt to reach for something else he’d dropped, and he pushed his sweat-beer damp hair from his face with one hand. He squinted (it was dark), and he swayed as he got to his feet, and then he stared too long for immediate recognition through the booze. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t recognize anyone just then, but he tried. “We slept together?” he asked her, something in the back of his mind saying it was the wrong conclusion to jump to and the wrong thing to say.
This time, she did hit him with the ledger, a good smack to the side of the head. “Go to hell.” She glared at the audience they still had, knowing that her picture would likely end up in some publication soon. It had happened before with her and Orin. Nevertheless, she wasn’t going to give these vultures any more of a show than she already had. She bent to grab a few more of her things that were still on the ground, trying to keep her temper and not look at the infuriating, drunk man in front of her.
He snaked a hand out and grabbed her wrist with more speed than he had any right to have just then. “Hold on, woman. If your panties are in such a bunch, I deserve to know why,” he said, adding. “And you hit me.” It was a belated reaction, and he rubbed his temple and swayed a little unevenly before finding his balance center again. “Let me buy you a drink, and you can tell me why I got you all hot.”
Laura reacted without even thinking, twisting her wrist out of his grasp with an ease that hinted at the time she spent training and practicing in the gym. She would never be as naturally physical as he was, but she worked at it. Plus, he was drunk and she was sober and angry. She bent his wrist in an entirely unnatural angle and stepped closer, her voice quiet enough that anyone around them would have a hard time hearing her. “You don’t deserve anything from me. You gave that up years ago.” She stepped back, retrieving her things that she’d dropped again at his touch.
He wasn’t so drunk that the pain didn’t register as it flared through his wrist. He grunted, but he didn’t pull his hand away from it, and when she let him go he didn’t rub it, didn’t give any indication that she’d hurt him. In fact, the only thing that showed on his face was recognition. “Laura?” he asked, the name almost indistinguishable in the drunken slur of letters. He hadn’t forgotten her, even through the booze he knew that. He considered explaining, but that lasted for only a moment, and he straightened and let her keep collecting the items she’d lost. “Looks like someone found their way west,” he finally added, too many ss in his words.
The slurring and the smell rolling off of him and his group turned Laura’s stomach, and she shook her head as she finally drew herself back up to her full height. She was shorter than he was, but not by too significant of an amount. She could have said the same thing about him finding his own way to the west coast, but instead she just looked him over again. “You’re disgusting.” He’d never been quite this bad when she’d known him before, and she was almost glad he’d left, if this was what he’d become since.
He grabbed her wrist again, risking a movement he wouldn’t have made if he was sober. It was too vulnerable, and it showed his cards too much, but it was all instinct and no thought. “It’s been a real complicated week,” he said, and it sounded pathetic to his own ears. He almost groaned, almost, but the longer he stood there without a drink, the closer he came to sobering. He reminded himself, through cotton and fog, that there was a reason for this. “Some fool reporter got it into his head that I’m a Mask,” he said, a scoff in it, but something more, too, something he wouldn’t have put out there if he was sober.
She looked at him for a long, quiet minute as their “audience” still milled around them. There was part of her - the part that still held a few stubborn positive memories of him - that wanted to believe there was something more to his activity than it appeared. But she’d been too shocked and too hurt by his sudden disappearance to give him the benefit of the doubt now. Her voice carried to whoever was close enough and sober enough to hear, and it aimed to cut. “Not a very good reporter. You’re obviously too pathetic to care about anyone other than yourself. Good thing you’ve found people who are just like you.” She gave a little wave at the group with her free hand, then pulled at her wrist that he still held trapped. “Now let me go so I don’t have to look at you any more.”
He held on a moment longer, tried to hold her gaze, to explain with his eyes somehow. But he stopped himself within seconds, letting her hand dropped. Burnt bridges and the water under them, the saying went. He gave her a mock bow, doffing a nonexistent hat and almost falling over while he did it. He grabbed out for one of the women that had come outside to pout and see what was keeping them, and the grab for balance turned into him pulling the woman tight against his side. He grinned at Laura, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Honey, you liked looking at me just fine if memory serves,” he said, adding a drunken wink to the statement.
The long moment before Orin gave in made Laura pause, remembering past conversations with him and past fights that had ended in making up rather spectacularly. She remembered quiet moments when he’d almost lost the party-boy mask and said something that was actually honest. And in those brief few seconds, he had the same look he’d had then. In that moment, she almost changed her mind, almost believed that maybe there was something more going on.
But then he pulled the other woman close, and his comment made her scowl, a disgusted sound caught in the back of her throat. “Ugh. A mistake I’ve regretted ever since.” She gathered her things close to her chest and finally began to edge around the group, wanting to get away from Orin Monarch and his entourage.
He didn’t pursue; he watched her go with a sort of drunken regret, and then he forced a loud belly laugh for the gathered women and paparazzi, but like everything else that night, the mirth didn’t reach his eyes. He slung an arm over one of the women’s shoulders and led her into the next bar; he needed to be drunker.