Who: Hal and Wren What: A cab ride home Where: En route to Hamartia When: Within a half hour of the vigilante showdown Warnings: None
Wren had appropriated Hal’s cellphone as he argued with Charlie in his ear, as he pulled into traffic, and she’d posted to the forums in search of Oracle. She knew the woman (she supposed it to be a woman) would answer, knew based on the fond way in which Nobody had said her name that it was someone trusted. She felt so much guilt at not staying with her friend (no, her savior), but her last memory of a hospital emergency room was over three years old and horrors she didn’t want to relive. She still had the scars, carefully hidden by a good surgeon and good dental work and good bone setting, there, but visible only to her. She hadn’t been in a hospital since, and as long as Nobody had someone with her (and yes, she trusted Eve to stay) she was willing to take the guilt as a price for staying in the warm, safe confines of the cab that smelled of Hal and blood.
She put the phone back on the car seat. “She’s coming to see her,” she said and she looked at the man across from her. He and Charlie weren’t seeing eye to eye, and she suspected it had something to do with this job and the events of the evening. She turned toward him a little, the pale blonde wig coated in plaster, her face unnaturally pale, even beneath the dirt, his cellphone stained with blood from her fingers. She leaned her cheek against the seat, thankful for the warm lull of the car engine and his voice and solid presence. “Why is he angry?” she asked quietly during a pause, tucking her legs up beside herself on the seat. She dipped her fingers into her boot, and she pulled out a roll of (rent) money that she knew would cover her own fare home. She hadn’t planned on Nobody getting hurt, hadn’t planned on covering Eve, hadn’t planned on the amount of clean up the car would need - but she’d make sure he was paid for the rest after tonight; she didn’t expect him to have to worry about her own injury on top of it all. She rested the roll of bills on the dash, enough to (hopefully) make the past hour worth his while.
“He ain’t angry,” Hal said shortly, coming off his argument with a clipped stubbornness that made the Cajun French sound like a knife through raw meat. Whether or not this was truth was debatable, but judging from Hal’s expression he considered it beside the point. His eyes slid an inch to one side and then back to the road. “You better off gettin’ dat off the dash before it end up on de floor,” he said. He braked at a light, and they sat there in the strange herbal-scented car and Hal looked strange without his usual lurking smile or his distracted flirtations. His hands stayed on the wheel as some of the tension from the job leaked out of him and his head went loose against the headrest.
She watched him, but she didn’t speak right away. The tension reminded her of the last job she’d been on with him, but worse somehow, which she didn’t understand. Charlie wasn’t missing, and no one was chasing them. He didn’t know anyone who had gotten hurt, at least she didn’t think he did. But he was definitely tense. She reached for the money, trying to keep as still as she could while she did it, and she tucked the roll of money into his pocket with one hand. “It’s seven hundred,” she said simply, hoping it would help, and then she rested her cheek against the seat’s back. Once he seemed to relax a little, she reached out her hand, Nobody’s blood dried by now, and she touched his arm. “Sitting ducks,” she admitted without hesitation, soft and open.
“Oui,” he said, eyes dropping to her hand but not looking over at her. He wasn’t angry at her, no, and his answer didn’t have any particular triumph at knowing the right answer before everybody else. “But you all was knowin’ dat goin’ in.” Hal hadn’t been like Charlie, watching through a scope to see what happened, but he had been near enough to hear the charges in the ceiling go off and see the dust cloud. No real response to the money at hand. He didn’t have any principles against taking it, but it wasn’t that important just at the moment.
She took a deep breath, her fingers on his arm a lazy sort of touch for her own comfort and nothing more than that. “Why are you angry?” she finally asked, with her standard candor, just as she’d asked the night they’d met. Hal wore everything he felt on his face and in his posture, and there was something there that was bothering him in a way things hadn’t the night of the coffin job. She realized, then, that maybe he’d been listening somehow, maybe he had someone inside. He had known Eve, and he knew her, and there was no reason to think he didn’t have someone important under that roof. “One person died, but he was a man,” she said, not mincing words, tone soft. “No one else was hurt more than the girl we left at the hospital. Anyone else inside, they got out fine.”
He looked at her for the first time, his expression without sharpness, but still hard and unyielding. “Den you all lucky. Guess Ah’m never gonna get why so many people at one time look ahead and see de train light comin’, but dey don’t get outta de tunnel.” He looked back at the road, took a turn, and pointed the cab’s hood toward Hamartia. No, he hadn’t been listening. He didn’t even know what was being said, and honestly, to him it didn’t matter.
“They were hoping the train wouldn’t come,” she said plainly, not sounding hurt by his words or demeanor. “They were hoping they could find a way to keep whoever was plucking them off like sitting ducks from hurting anyone else.” She shifted a little in the seat, a small whimper escaping her lips as she moved her arm for better support. “It matters to them, saving people, even at cost to themselves. And the one running it, the Bat, he tried to keep everyone safe, as well as he could anyway, with Corbinian’s bad plan. And now Corbinian is dead,” she explained, her soft tone going softer the longer she spoke.
“Ain’t no good plan when you all insistin’ on hiding what you doin’ from each other. You all on de same side, or you ain’t. No wonder you don’t know who to trust.” He turned his head sharply when she made an odd sound, and the cab rumbled ominously with an engine it was not meant to have. “You hurt?!” He had thought all that blood was from the other girl. He hit the brake hard and turned the cab neatly through a two-lane opening and accelerated into a side street where he neatly backed through an old lot with a run down fence that the cab took without difficulty. “We goin’ back to the hospital.”
“The bigger ones are the ones with trust issues. Nobody, Robin and I, we have ways to get in touch, and Eve pretends she doesn’t care, but it’s not the truth. It’s the Bat and Corbinian and Rorschach that are wary, and they should be. No one is going to come after us; they’re going after them,” she said. She would have continued on the subject, but then he ran a fence for no necessary reason that she could see. “Stop,” she said, very softly, her hand on his arm tightening a little. “It’s just a scratch to my shoulder. Nothing I can’t fix at home,” then more softly and a little pleading. “I just want to go back home.”
Hal hit the steering wheel with the heel of his palm in an explosion of not unexpected temper. “Well what you all expect?!” No, the car was still pointing toward the hospital, but he hit the brake hard and the suspension rocked them both forward. “Lemme see where you hurt,” he demanded, angry at her for concealing it from him.
She made a pained sound when the car jarred them. And then she sat forward slowly, with intentional grace, careful to keep herself from swaying with the movement. She motioned to her shoulder. The shirt was long sleeved, stained through and down with blood and ripped from the bullet. The bleeding had stopped during the ride, and the fabric clung to dried blood and skin. “I didn’t want you to feel responsible for me,” she said, and it was clear that was important to her, that she didn’t want the injury to make him feel like he was cornered, even if he couldn’t understand all the words in French. “I can take care of it at home and,” a pause, “I really don’t like hospitals, and I feel safer here.” A whisper and a soft shrug with her good shoulder.
Hal lifted a fist and punched (with restraint) the overhead light so that it flooded the car with warm butter yellow light. He peered close at her shoulder and pulled open the kit again so he could use one of the wipes to actually see what was her blood and what wasn’t. He pulled back and looked hard into her eyes. “You don’t like hospitals,” he repeated. “And doin’ what you do, you ain’t been to a doctor in how long?” Oh, he was mad. His anger was the visible type that bounced off the interior of the car and reflected on his face with a careless, blatant intensity.
The bullet had grazed a sharp, angry line on Wren’s shoulder, but it had gone clean past and there wasn’t any nerve involvement, nothing deep enough to signify possible muscle damage, nothing good cleaning, stitches and bandaging couldn’t fix. She watched his hands on her shoulder, and she forced herself not to whimper or wince, though she couldn’t help a tiny jerk here and there. When he pulled back, she looked back at his face. She’d never seen his eyes like that, and she realized she had somehow landed in dangerous territory. “I haven’t been to a doctor in over three years,” she said truthfully, a shudder of memory coursing through her, “but I go to a clinic for STD checks for long-term clients with bareback privileges,” she assured him softly, using street language that seemed inappropriate coming from her mouth, even with the tawdry attire. No, it wasn’t a doctor, but she suspected that’s what he was referring to.
Nothing she told him made that look go away. Hal was starting to understand that Wren’s occupation wasn’t something that she fell into, or that she chose because she didn’t want or didn’t like something else, or even something she felt she had no choice about. She just didn’t put that much value to her body, and it didn’t much matter to her if it was bleeding or not. Hal put his eyes over the dash and his hands on the wheel. “Yo’ choice.” His foot went down, and the car eased out of the lot back on the original route toward Hamartia.
Her gaze traveled down his leg to his foot on the gas, and then back to up that face that hid nothing at all about what he was thinking. She touched her hand to his arm again, wanting his attention back but not demanding it or asking for it verbally. “Why are you angry?” she asked candidly. She didn’t understand his anger; she’d thought her response would be a good thing. “I was in the hospital for a very long time three years ago, and I don’t like going there if I don’t need to,” she confessed softly.
He had decided not to debate about this any more, and it was obvious in the stubborn set of his jaw. “Ah’m not angry.” He was angry. “You don’ wanna go, don’ go.” Left turn, neat and precise, but possibly a bit sharp.
The turn was definitely sharp, and he was definitely angry. She moved her fingers from his arm to his jaw, the touch soft without being tentative, fingers tracing just under his chin in an attempt to soothe herself (rather than to calm him). Her effort to calm him was as obvious as the day was long and the night dark, and it came in a spoken sentence that was almost too quiet to hear over the car’s hum. “I’ll go to the hospital,” she said gently, fingers passing back up over his stubbled jaw as she spoke the words. And immediately after, without even a hint of pause. “Have you ever been hurt on a job?” she asked quietly. “Not enough to be dangerous, but enough to shake you, to scare you? Where did you want to go after and who did you want to see?”
Hal didn't want to talk about himself. It seemed, to him, entirely beside the point. He didn't quite avoid her question, just gave her a look that said he didn't see how finding a drink and a woman after a near death experience was relevant. "Bothers me you don't take car yo'self," he muttered, driving on.
The look made her smile, the first real smile after all this, and she dragged her fingers through the hair at his temple. She noticed he didn’t turn the car, and she smiled a little at that too. “It’s safe here,” she said, “in the dark. Quiet, and no glaring lights and cold instruments, and I know you’ll get me home safely.” She smiled a little wider. “Plus, I like you,” she said, hand sliding down to rest on his shoulder, contact for the sake of retaining contact. “I try to take care of myself,” she added softly, not a disagreement so much as a reassurance. “Some things are worth risking for,” she finished, very softly, but very surely. A moment later, she grinned, laughed just a little bit. “You don’t go home to Charlie at all when things go bad, do you?”
Hal shook his head. "Nothin' is worth dyin' over." All her pretty book French, the innocent yet sex-slick smiles, none of that made much difference. Everybody bleeds. The contact got no response from him, not unusual when he was on a job. He noticed, but little else. Hal only sighed, bit his tongue about client--hers and his--business, and slowed to a stop across the street from Hamartia.
She thought this had stopped being a job when he’d dropped Nobody and Eve off at the hospital, and in her eyes the realization that she had been wrong about that gleamed and glittered damply for a second.
She slipped her hand away from his arm. “People are,” she said quietly. “To keep people you care about safe, to keep people that are innocent safe, to keep people from going through things you’ve been through, things you don’t want anyone else to have to live after.” She hadn’t really expected him to send her up to her room alone, but she didn’t show that in her face. She just gave him her best, steadiest smile, and she leaned over and kissed his cheek with a lingering sort of gentleness. “I’ll have the rest of the money for you by morning,” she said, mirroring his businesslike demeanor. She opened the door to the cab with sticky, bloodied fingers, and she looked back at him. “Merci,” she said.
She got strange when he wasn't being physical, he noticed. He had no idea why, but he did notice. Maybe it was because she always *was*. He noticed that too. "People take care of demselves, cher," he told her, squinting out at her framed in the passenger door. "You better off lettin' dem get on wit' it." His eyes dropped to her shoulder and back up. "Take care yo'self."
She took all of it to mean he wasn’t interested in anything beyond sex, and when he wasn’t interested in sex (or a job), he wanted her out of his hair. She understood that; she’d known men like that before, and she wasn’t the type to ask him for help he didn’t want to offer. She nodded, and she stayed put, not wanting to sway or teeter where he could see, not wanting him to feel required to offer assistance. She waited until he pulled the cab away, and then she turned toward the building for the uneven walk inside.