Orrie likes arrows (sagittal) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-04-27 23:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | green arrow, lady |
Who: Valerie and Orin
What: A fight
Where: Aubade
When: Immediately after this call
Warnings: None
Orin was livid. He was livid in an unthinking, unreasonable way. Under normal circumstances, he would have forced himself to calm the hell down before going to see her. But he just didn’t have that kind of patience right then.
And so it was, that he glared at the phone when Valerie hung up on him, and he stormed out of Monarch Industries without bothering to cancel his afternoon appointments or tell anyone where the hell he was going. His instructions to the driver were harsh and curt, none of his usual tease and laughter, and the man did not talk to his employer the entire way to Aubade - neither did the doorman. They knew better.
He opened the door to the apartment hard enough to make it hit the wall as it swung, and there was no doubt that he was fit to be tied when he called out her name.
“VALERIE.”
Valerie started in her lounge chair on the front porch, where she was enjoying the sudden abatement on the rain with a vibrant sundress under a small sweater. The radio was on, and the sober-sounding announcer was talking about the Dalai Lama’s recent political cessation. Movement on through the glass saw Valerie turn to see what the ruckus was, but when Orin made no moves of panic or distress, she simply turned back around again. Valerie would not be called like a dog.
He saw her through the glass, and he expected a response. When he got nothing more than an unimpressed glance and a quick look away, he stormed forward. He was dressed for work, gray slacks and a white shirt, and he came through the door with a shove and a thunderous expression. “Did you not hear me calling?” he demanded, knowing that a deaf person could have heard him calling for her.
Valerie had a lemonade and Vanity Fair. She wore sunglasses even though the sky was relatively gray, and as always she had spent time on her appearance even though there was no one except the binocular-handy to see. The dark lenses lifted upward, unimpressed. “Did you not hear me ignoring you?”
“I’M NOT PAYING YOU TO IGNORE ME,” Orin said, red-faced and realizing it was the wrong thing to say, even as the words came out of his mouth.
Valerie’s mouth opened in a tiny little gasp, and then she reached over for her glass and threw the contents at him with a wide jerk of her hand. Sour lemon and sugar water went everywhere, and she picked up her magazine off her lap so she could stand and wave it at him as she shouted. “Excuse me?!”
The lemonade was unexpected, and he managed to only grind his eyes shut to keep the tart liquid from getting into them. By the time he had wiped the liquid away from his eyes, she was waving the magazine and shouting. He didn’t think when he grabbed the Vanity Fair away from her, and he didn’t think when his fingers closed on her wrist. He hauled her forward, and he grit his teeth. “Woman,” he said, and there was supposed to be something after that, but hell if he could remember it given the combination of anger and woman and closeness.
She quivered against him, and the lemonade was cold, so she had a very brief moment of regret for dumping it on him. She was not afraid of him, however, briefly forgetting the fear in the wake of his attack on the murderer on television, and she pulled her chin up in her face. “I am not your dog, Orin Monarch. I do not come when you call or jump when you bark. You want someone to look pretty, fine but I will not be locked up, or kicked aside, or ignored in favor of your media stunts when they result in guns being shot at me!” Her voice spiraled up into a quite admirable shriek.
“I was giving a press conference,” he said, shoving her away without any force when she blamed him for the man in Aubade. “I didn’t have a damn thing to do with the man in the lobby,” he insisted, though it was hollow and empty, and the self-blame was so thick in the words that it was impossible to miss. He walked away from her, turned and went inside, and he didn’t say a damn thing else. He’d finally managed to convince himself that it wasn’t his fault, the dead men, to convince himself of the damn lie.
“Not that,” Valerie said, still spitting mad and ignoring his sudden dejection in her own pursuit of confrontation. She stalked after him, kicking the (fortunately plastic) glass aside so it spun on the pavement behind her. “Your little night on the town afterward while we were stashed in a hole in the wall.”
“I did that to keep you both SAFE,” he yelled over his shoulder, heading up the stairs without looking back at her.
“I KNOW,” she shouted right back, treading practically on his heels. “You think that makes it better?!”
He turned at the top of the stairs, leaving her no choice but to walk into him. “YES.”
She did, and then she poked him in the chest. “Well it doesn’t.”
“I think you are going to let me protect your ass how I see fit, or you’re leaving.”
“Fine! I don’t need you and your cages, then! Get out of my way, I need another shirt.” She shoved at his shoulder, which was built like a boulder.
He didn’t move; he didn’t even try. “Is it better to let you die? That it?”
“That is not it. But I will not be moved like a suitcase! Either I am part of your life or I am not!” Frustrated, she hit him with a palm, not hard.
He closed his hands on her upper arms, strong and tight. “You have got to let me do what I have to do to keep you safe,” he said, trying to make her understand, trying to make her listen. “I can’t be responsible for anyone dying. Not you, not Willow. I’ll send you both the hell away if you don’t let me protect you.”
She didn’t like being held still, but after a brief initial struggle in which he didn’t hurt her, she didn’t yank away. They were also on a stairway, and she didn’t want to fall, even on accident. “I just said, you wouldn’t be. You point a gun at me, Monarch?” She gave him a look like she thought he was mad for saying so.
“My idea of responsibility and yours idea of responsibility is different, and we’re just going to have to go with mine, since it’s my damn guilt we’re talking about,” Orin insisted, not letting go of her.
“What’s the point in being guilty for what someone else did?” she asked, darkened lashes fluttering quickly in confusion as she turned her chin to get a better look at his eyes.
“It happened at my press conference, and it happened because some fool got it in their minds I might be the damn Bat. That makes it my fault,” he said, letting go of her arms and walking past her onto the second level. His back was to her. “And it doesn’t matter. What matters is you doing what I say without giving me shit when things like this happen.”
Valerie let him wander up, and she followed after, speaking as she went. “You’re not the Bat, so you can’t control what men think.”
Intent on her purpose despite Orin’s studied refusal to cooperate, Valerie had worked closely with the interior decorator and created a rectangle of floor-to-ceiling soundless glass. When the curtains (gauze, white) were drawn back, there was still the illusion of Orin’s open apartment and glass windows, just with a bed and low dresser, painted white with a tiny lavender flower design. She let him go where he would and peeled off the lemonade-damp sweater as she crossed the room. “Kennedy died in Texas, you think it was the governor’s fault?”
He spun on her. “THIS IS DIFFERENT,” he yelled, frustrated with his inability to make her understand without baring his soul in a way he had no intention of doing, at least not as Orin Monarch. He walked to the balcony, and he looked out the window that overlooked the Sound. He should go to the damn island for a few days. Get away, clear his head of all this damn shit that had been happening.
Valerie jumped again, startled at the return transition to bellowing, but anger flared quickly. She stopped in the act of peeling off the thin shirt too. “What’s different about it?!” When he whirled around to the balcony, she made she made a ‘tsk’ sound of frustrated distaste and rounded the corner into her ‘room’. The curtains were open.
“The man was trying to shoot me,” he said, not raising his voice, but still audible. “It should be me that was dead. I’m not having anyone else taking a bullet with my name on it. That bullet that hit Kennedy, it was for Kennedy.”
She was audible too, door open, as she dug through the dresser for another shirt, back to him. “There is no reason you should be dead, Orin Monarch. One madman does not a death sentence make.”
“No, but someone’s dead because they took my bullet.”
“Someone’s dead because they took Fitzpatrick’s bullet, darling,” she said, naming the shooter with full awareness of the situation. She found a purple shirt and pulled it down over the pink bra before spinning unconsciously to find a full-length mirror that wasn’t there. She humphed through her teeth, and then sat on her bed to get rid of the wet skirt.
He walked away from the window, and he stopped outside her open door as she got rid of the skirt. He was still wet, sticky with lemonade, and he’d made no move to change. “Meant for me.”
“That makes you lucky, not guilty. Ugh, that was silk.” She gave the skirt a regretful stroke of her palm and laid it out before crouching on long pale legs in front of her dresser for something equally comfortable.
“You can buy more damn silk,” he said, the frustration audible in his voice. “Someone is DEAD because I’m standing here. How the hell is that not supposed to make me feel guilty?”
“Because it isn’t because you’re standing there.” She stepped into linen slacks and looked down at the button. They were pale cream and she liked it with the purple. “It’s because one madman decided to try to kill another madman in a costume when he didn’t even know who or what he was shooting at. That’s not your fault, Orin.”
“You can’t understand,” he said, and it wasn’t angry. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t comprehend what he felt. He reminded himself that he’d chosen her because she wouldn’t understand, because she was resilient in a way that didn’t allow for altruistic guilt. She’d never understand Arrow, which he was already perfectly aware of, and he felt more alone right then than he had in all those years in the middle of the ocean. “It’s the shooter’s fault, too, but that doesn’t absolve me.”
Valerie sat down again on the end of her bed, just out of arm’s reach. She gave him a bird’s look, sideways and curious. “You have a complex,” she said, seriously.
He smacked his hand against the glass pane beside the door. “Do not minimize this. It matters to me. It might not matter to you, dammit, but it matters to ME.”
She looked surprised. “I’m not. I’m serious, Orin. You’ve got some kind of guilt complex, because you can’t possibly hold yourself responsible for what one madman did. Or... or you can, but you shouldn’t.”
He considered arguing, or trying to explain. Considered it and discounted it. He smacked his hand against the glass again, and he turned back into his own open space. He pulled off the tie and the white shirt with angry, jerky motions, and the pants were discarded just as quickly. He wandered back in his boxer briefs, and he pointed a finger at her. “You can go back out whenever you damn well please,” he told her, before spinning around to search for clean clothing.
Valerie leaned in her doorway, folding her arms across her chest and watching him move. Maybe it was because she hadn’t paid much attention to what Orin was doing outside of her curtain, but she hadn’t noticed he had quite that much muscle. She never saw him work out. She frowned at him, but didn’t immediately reply.
He slipped on a pair of khakis and a fresh shirt, and he turned when he felt his gaze on her, slipping his tie into place and fighting to get it folded over itself correctly in his frustration. “What?” he asked her, finally, after two tries.
Valerie picked herself up out of her lean and moved around her glass wall to stand in front of him. She hesitated a moment, looking at the height of his shoulders in comparison to hers, and then she reached up for the tie. She concentrated on it as she spoke, measuring it out to the proper length. “When do you have time to go to the gym?”
He froze, which was stupid, in retrospect. But he did freeze - entirely. “I have a gym at Monarch,” he told her, which was true. “What? You think I spend my days over there in meetings?” he asked, forcing his lips into a shadow of a lecherous grin. “The sauna and shower come in real handy, too, honey.”
“The more excuses you have to be clean,” Valerie said, neutral enough. The forced smile looked rather painful, and her brows tilted speculatively. She didn’t ask another question, however, she just stood there and folded the tie over her hand into his shirt collar and around again, thinking.
He watched her face, his temper calming enough that he could take in the intelligence there, the attention to detail, the things he missed when he was angry. He realized, in that moment, that she might recognize his body in a way that the rest of Seattle wouldn’t, recognize him as Arrow for that reason alone, and he pulled the tie from between her fingers and stepped away. “I got to get back to work.”
The tie came undone as he pulled away, but she didn’t protest or pursue. “To go to meetings,” she said, repeating his words. The implied doubt was not in her tone, and she looked at the tie loose on his shirt. For a moment, she didn’t move, and then she reached for it again, not quickly, but with intent.
“Because I just have to be there or the board gets real antsy,” he said, realizing it was a contradiction and damn if he could do anything about it now. He took her hands, her wrists, without any pressure, and he pushed her just a bit away from him. She was too close, and too much touching would fill in the blanks her eyes hadn’t. “I’m going. You make sure you take one of the guards if you go out,” he said.
Manicured fingertips didn’t quite reach the silk, and her hands were loosed and relaxed as he used the pressure to push her back. It wasn’t strong enough to really get her away, though, and she pursued again, eyes troubled, perhaps not reaching for the tie, but something else.
That pursuit made him even more nervous, and he reached for the keys and moved around her, intending to get away like someone running from something they very much feared. It didn’t make him look any less suspicious, and he realized he was going to have to do something monumentally stupid to get her off whatever scent she was on. He knew women; they got a look in their eye when they thought they’d figured out something real meaningful about you.
She stopped as he snaked around her like a guilty child, turning her hip and then her shoulders. She made a soft huff into the line of the golden hair at her cheek. “What, are you afraid of me, all of a sudden? You can’t leave like that. Come here.”
He stopped at the top of the stairs. “I’m not scared of you, woman, I just don’t like whatever’s brewing in your eyes, and I got to be going,” he said, but he didn’t actually start moving again.
Her eyes went cool and wide in a long, drawn out blink. “You call me that like it’s an insult,” she said, venturing forward again toward him as her gaze started to go dangerous and narrowed. Two Southern gentlemen with a build quite like that was a hard coincidence to ignore.
Dangerous and narrowed. Check. He knew that look on a woman’s face, and he knew it only meant trouble. It came with things held over your head. Those things generally involved money or husbands, but he knew this wasn’t about either of those things. “Shit,” he cursed, turning and heading down the stairs.
That sealed it. Valerie was too stunned to be angry quite yet, and she stood there, in the middle of the big, empty room, as the door to the apartment slammed. At least a minute passed before she moved, and only then it was to move around in a slow circle and stare at all those windows. “That bastard.”