Who: Colt and Erin What: Fighting and making up - In other words, what they always do. Where: The Academy When: Fuzzy timeline, sometime earlier this week. Warnings: Nothing that they couldn't show on prime time.
Colt wasn’t in the best of moods. First, Erin had gone off with the photographer, and then she’d gone off with the inspector. The photographer, green around the gills, hadn’t been an issue. The inspector, however, and Erin’s teasing texts, had been. Despite Erin’s belief, however, Colt hadn’t threatened or reported the man when he’d called his supervisor; he’d just offered money to make the man go away, and he might have expressed a desire to have Erin returned to his damn office.
All things considered, he felt he’d been pretty generous. That didn’t mean he had any delusions about Erin’s reaction to the whole affair. She’d stamp, and look adorable while doing it. She’d yell, and look adorable while doing. And she’d lecture him about the need to run a legal business, and she’d look adorable while doing it.
He should be in a good mood. Unfortunately, the length of the day had worn him down, and he was sitting behind his desk, tapping his cane on the wooden surface impatiently. He hadn’t brought his pain pills along, and physical therapy had been exhausting that morning, and Erin still wasn’t back.
He bellowed her name, and he banged the cane against the desk loudly.
Erin wasn’t impressed with Colt’s temper tantrums. Every time things didn’t go exactly the way he wanted, he threw money at the problem until nobody listened to her any more, and she was quite tired of it. “Up to here,” was how her mother would say it. Only her mother could toss her head and look elegant while she was having a temper tantrum, and Erin knew she would probably only look young and ineffectual. She was too annoyed to care.
“If we get students in here and you do that, I swear I will buy a plane ticket to another country,” she said viciously, stepping into the study and closing the door with a sharp wham. The uninteresting green suit didn’t detract from her obvious anger, and it was clear that if the word “adorable” actually crossed his lips, she might strangle him by the shirt collar.
Her show of anger, the flurry of green and the bright flush of her cheeks, along with the threat, entirely sapped Colt’s anger away. His expression went from annoyed to entertained in the span of a few seconds, and he leaned back in his chair and left the cane resting across the top of the desk. He would have asked her to slam the door again, just to watch it again, but he had a suspicion that would run her off. He tried not to push too hard, did Colt. “You coming with me?” he asked, a harmless, teasing smile on his face.
"No I am not going anywhere with you," she said, entirely unmoved by whatever her wishes might have been five minutes ago. She stopped in the middle of the room and surveyed him behind that ridiculous desk. "Are you going to let me do this job right, or are you going to do it yourself? If you're going to be bribing people, this is not the kind of project that I want to be part of." She was in a fine fury this time, and she wasn't getting anywhere near him to keep the conversation about business. His condescending little smile made her grit her teeth.
She was worked up, and he suspected it was the kind of worked up that might result in him doing a whole lot of groveling after the fact. It was self preservation that made him sit forward and rest his hand on the cane. "I've controlled things from the time I could walk, Erin, and it's damn hard for me to sit here doing a whole lot of nothing, while you make do for me. I made a donation to a county agency, and it made me feel like I was accomplishing something from behind this damn desk." The condescending smile was gone, but so was any other hint of happiness. He resented being pushed into confessions of weakness, and it showed.
"I can't walk around this damn school, Erin," he said, not looking at her when he said it. he looked out the window, his fingers closing so tightly around the cane that his knuckles went white with it.
At least the condescension was gone. Her temper was not so easily defused, however. "And what, may I ask, is keeping you behind that desk?" She gave the cane a very pointed look. "You are too caught up in what you want to accomplish. If you aren't willing to get out and do it, the you can damn well get out of the way while other people do it. I was teasing you about the stupid inspector and you know it."
"I refuse to look up at people from a wheelchair," he fairly growled. Her lack of pity made him blunt, direct and loud. His eyes were hard and dark with anger and lost pride, and he shoved the cane off the desk with a loud clatter of wood on wood.
Not quite as ruthlessly as before, but still impatient with him for taking his temper out on her. "There are a lot of people who get around that don't walk, Colt." Her eyes were bright and serious, and he wasn't getting any pity out of her. A good thing, since it was probably the last thing he wanted.
"I look up at people all the time," she snapped back. "Because I am short." She took a couple precautionary steps back from the desk in case he decided to throw something else, but not with any real sense of retreat. "You don't want to, fine. Sit there."
"Being short is NOT the same," he said loudly. That actually made him angry. "You don't have to take a cocktail of drugs just to get through the day because you're short."
"Do the drugs prevent you from moving?" she countered, just as loudly. Something about Colt made the otherwise even-keeled Erin raise her voice, and sometimes she felt contrary even when he wasn't saying anything of importance. He had this annoying military habit of shouting over people as if it would remove their resistance. "Because they're not preventing you from shouting at me and throwing things at people."
"You don't understand," he said, almost visibly shutting down. Just this, just coming here was something that made Colt feel extremely vulnerable, and vulnerability made him even louder and more impossible than normal.
Erin braced her feet. "So explain it to me."
"Why?" he asked angrily, looking back at her. "So you can tell me it's like being short?" There was a whole lot of hurt in the question, and he looked back at her as he asked it.
With a type of willful, intentional calm. "It was a metaphor, Colt. I'm saying that if you want to get around, all that is really stopping you is your silly pride, and you're the only one that cares about that kind of thing." She glared at him.
Colt knew she didn't understand what it meant to be a man, and she definitely didn't know what it meant to be a military man. "No one respects a cripple," he said with a healthy dose of self-loathing.
Erin pressed her lips together at this uncharacteristic show of passivity. "Don't be ridiculous. People respect you because of what you do, now how high off the ground you are. Besides, you shout and throw things too much to be ignored. I know."
"You don't understand men, Erin," Colt insisted.
She thought this was a barb at her experience--both emotional and physical--and it hurt. She stiffened. "Maybe not," she said, with new coldness. "It's more important what other people think to men, is it? Enlighten me."
He tried to answer her, but he couldn’t put it into words. Communication had never been Colt’s strong suit, even before he’d been injured. He’d always been the sort to grab and take, rather than to persuade with words and flowery speech. He gritted his teeth. “I’m sending you down to Fort Lewis for the day,” he finally said, because she had to see it to understand.
Erin was gathering her defenses, which were failing her under her misconception of his last assault. "No," she said, outright. "I'm not going anywhere." What the blue blazes he thought she would do in a Fort, she had no idea, but he wasn't going to have an easy time sending her away.
“Do you want to understand me or not?” he asked, his eyes intense on hers. He was trying, dammit, trying harder than he had in years, and it showed on the lines of his face, the combination of stress and pain and something like tentative hope. He wasn’t very good at it, at trying, but he wanted to with her, wanted her to understand. And if he couldn’t tell her, he’d show her.
She hesitated, but her resolve returned. She wasn't sure about him, he changed too much from unpredictable temper to the most infuriating power plays, and she felt... She wasn't sure. Angry. Maybe just angry to cover for the rest of it. She didn't trust him. "Nobody at that fort is any different than you."
"And understanding me isn't something you want to do?" he asked, because that's what she was saying, wasn't it? She was so damn sure she was right, and she didn't listen. "Dammit, Erin, get over here."
"No," she said, stubbornly, ignoring his version of a come hither by tightening her defensive grip on her arms. He was going to charm her out of her opinion, was he? Not likely. "We are talking about this. Why wont you at least try to get out?"
"Will you try to understand for a change if I do?" he asked, sounding hurt and rubbing at his temples as he spoke.
"I am trying," she snapped, stung.
He sounded tired, and he sounded stretched thin when he spoke, pain lingering just beyond his words, which were quieter, calmer. “Come here,” he said again. “I just want to talk to you,” he assured her. “And I’m a damn sight calmer when you’re close; come here.”
The genuine concern for him was starting to make it past the anger. She had just said she would try, though, even if he wouldn't. Her arms loosened from the tight fold and, carefully, she edged around the desk to lean precariously against its surface. "You never just talk," she grumbled softly, eyes down at his knees.
He reached out a hand.
He leaned forward, reached to take her hand. When his fingers closed around hers, he tugged her toward him with a grip that was strong and sure. It made him feel more in control, that tug, and the control soothed him. "I'm here, aren't I?" he asked her. "Sitting here, outside my apartment, and trying to do something. So don't say I'm not trying, woman." Even the word woman was softer, more an endearment than anything else.
She had to admit that this was true, and she was always less angry at him when he managed to get ahold of her, something she was well aware of. It concerned her because she worried that she always let him get away with things just because she liked being touched, and somewhere in there she knew that wasn't the way to have a relationship. "I guess you are," she conceded grudgingly, perching feather light at the end of his chair and leaning in to touch her lips to his jaw and leaving the familiar tickle of eyelashes on his skin. "Yelling is not the way to take over things, though. Stop going over my head. You can be effective without making me ineffective, can't you?" An earnest chocolate gaze into his face.
The kiss to his jaw went a long way toward soothing him, and he slid his hand down and let it rest warm and solid at the small of her back. "I feel ineffective when I can't do things for myself, Erin," he admitted, and the confession obviously cost him. He tensed perceptibly, waiting for her to invalidate what he'd just said.
"Yes," she said, looking at him gravely. "I know." She offered him a smile for using her name. "It isn't as if we are short on things to do, Colt. Must you do everything? I do still have a job, even if I'm not letting you pay me for it."
He ran his hand over her back, up and down in slow sweeps of fingers on fabric. “We’re partners,” he corrected, but he sounded less angry, less in a temper. “Erin, let me explain something to you,” he told her, and he used the hand on her back to tumble her into his lap. “I take pain pills all day long, just to get by. They make me aggressive, and they make my moods go all over the damn place. I can’t stop taking them, even if I wanted to, or I’d never get on my feet again. I’m doing physical therapy for the first time in years, and it makes me so exhausted I can barely sit up come the end of the day.” He tucked her hair back with his free hand, the one that wasn’t sliding up to her shoulders and back down as he spoke. “Getting angry with me, it doesn’t change a thing. I am trying. I’m trying more than I have in five years; cut a man some slack, woman.”
She was willing to be tumbled. That was the problem. Her weight settled evenly over his lap, practiced, and she aligned her side to his. She put both arms around his neck and said seriously, “I didn’t know what they did, all your pills.” She tried not to be concerned, it was obvious. In Erin’s experience, pills turned the mind off. Her mother took sedatives when they could be drunk from a little pharmaceutical bottle. She found them distasteful but mysterious, the way many felt about arcane substances they did not understand. “You didn’t tell me you were going to therapy.”
The arms around his neck made him forget anything and everything. “Hush, woman,” he said, and he dipped his head and found her lips. They could talk about therapy later; right now, he had other things in mind.