Colt Byron // Colin Craven (cravened) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-10-10 00:13:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, colin craven |
Who: Colt and Thomas
What: Thomas is ornery; Colt is amused
Where: The Academy
When: A few days before The Academy opens
Warnings: None
Thomas didn’t have an appointment, but he felt that his periodical inspections were a lot better off being spontaneous, because then he didn’t have to call and explain that he wanted an inspection. He suspected Colt Byron would know exactly what he was doing, but that didn’t really matter to him. He didn’t care very much what Colt Byron thought. As long as the man wasn’t going to train a little army, his quirks and peculiarities didn’t matter to Thomas.
The inspection went well--right up until he found the shooting range. It was up to military standards, with all the usual soundproofing and safety precautions. Thomas was livid. What he was supporting--and potentially funding--was a school. There was no reason that the Academy should put a gun in a student’s hand, and the very thought of it made Thomas’ blood go cold and hot over and over again.
He moved past a secretary and a security guard as if both were only so many cardboard cutouts, and the secretary addressed him by name and the guard didn’t know whether or not to stop him. With a collective aura born of generations of command, Thomas Brandon walked into Colt Byron’s office with cold authority, and shut the door smartly on the people bustling after him.
Colt, who had been having a pretty damn good day, all things considered, took Thomas’ barging into his office in stride. His son had sent him a package, he’d learned that Erin took well to being hugged, and he’d had one of his best physical therapy sessions on record that morning. He’d been reassured that his father would not be getting out of jail during his lifetime, and he felt confident The Academy would open on Monday as planned.
The result was that when Thomas walked into the office, as if the devil himself was on his tail, Colt just sat back in his chair, and he didn’t call for security. When security called him, Colt put the call on speaker, and he gave Thomas a smile as he spoke. “Mr. Brandon was just eager to see me. No cause for concern,” he said, pushing the button on the phone and disconnecting the call a moment later. “Want to tell me what has you in a lather?” he asked calmly.
“You want to tell me why there’s a gun range on school property?” Thomas didn’t stop in the middle of the room or in front of the polite chairs. He went right up to the edge of the desk, dominating Colt’s space as he put his palms down on the desk calendar. “Is there an armory on a lower floor that I missed in the plans? Maybe you have a Project Manhattan sitting on the south lawn?” Yes, Thomas was indeed in a lather. His gray eyes were silver bullets of absolute fury, and it radiated off of him in a manner Colt would find most familiar, working with so many strong military personalities. ‘
Colt didn’t sit forward, didn’t raise his voice, he didn’t even sit up straighter in the face of Thomas’ obvious and formidable anger. “It’s for me,” he said plainly. He went on, not giving a pause for interruption. “I realized, about a week back, that I was going to have to take a stance on this whole business of training these kids in weapons. Right around the time we thought Jack was dead, truth be told. See, Jack, he’s no more than a kid in my opinion, and I don’t want to have anything to do with sending those kids to die out there. I’m not going to teach them to shoot a damn thing, Brandon. But I’ve got to protect what’s mine, and I don’t have the room to do it in Aubade.” He spread his hands, as if that was the long and short of it, and then he motioned to the chair behind Thomas. “Have a seat.”
Thomas listened to this, watched for the obvious hints of lying, nervousness, gestures toward false earnestness, movements of the eyes in the direction of the off-hand. He detected none. Slowly he took his hands off the desk, bringing his chin up. He wasn’t entirely convinced, clearly, and he wasn’t giving ground. “I’ll stand.” He folded his arms over his chest. It was a good suit, and a good cut. Better arms.
Colt gave him a look that was entertained, almost as if he was willing to allow the other man the stubbornness of standing when there was a perfectly good chair to be had. “You have anything worth protecting, Brandon?” he asked, reaching into the cigar box on the desk and sitting forward. He took his time taking the silver cigar cutter between his fingers, took his time clipping the end of the expensive cigar with precision. “Something that can’t protect itself?”
No movement. “Get to the point, Byron. I’m just supposed to trust your good will when you would prefer keeping your marksmanship up on school grounds?”
“Do you distrust everyone you meet,” Colt asked, lighting the cigar, unapologetic, “or am I just lucky?” He waved his hand as he put down the match, as if the question didn’t matter, and he took one, two, three puffs. “Erin almost died a few weeks ago. I’m out of practice.”
“With what?” Thomas said, clearly suspicious of this turn of events.
“Self defense,” Colt said, setting the cigar in the ashtray on the desk and finally sitting forward, his arms on the smooth wood. “You see, Brandon, I’m a registered gun owner, which you already know, because you’ve looked up every damn thing in my past worth looking up. I’ve spent the past five years teaching kids how to do things other than wield weapons, and I’m a touch out of practice. Now, we’ve got people getting killed daily, and the next person on the list happens to start with an E. Erin’s got it in her mind she’s invincible; she isn’t. Someone’s got to watch out for her.” He gave Thomas a look, a hard, knowing sort of look. “Surely you know what that’s like.” Thomas looked like the protective sort, the kind that pretended he didn’t give a damn; Colt knew the type. Hell, Colt was the type, generally.
One look at Thomas, and it was obvious he wasn’t very good at pretending to be anything other than what he was. “I heard your employees talking,” he said, watching Colt closely. “Are you pursuing a personal relationship with your project manager, or are you just making a fool of yourself on purpose?” He had heard of the killings, of course. The first body had set off some small alarms, but he’d been distracted by larger killings, more visible killings. He knew that Warda was on it, and he couldn’t pursue every killer personally. He had matched E. Gracewater to her presence on the forums, and he imagined it wouldn’t be hard for anyone else to do the same.
Colt took the question, and the declaration that came with it, in stride. “You think pursuing a fine woman is making a fool of yourself?” he asked, as if the concept was entertaining. “And I don’t see what that has to do with wanting to keep someone I care about safe. I can’t grapple anymore, as well you know, and I can’t go chasing after anything chasing after her. That means I have to work on my distance shooting.” It was all calmly spoken, and in the end he broke into a grin. “Sit yourself down, son, and let’s have us a chat.”
Thomas Brandon did not like being called “son.” He stiffened so much that if you listened hard enough you might be able to hear his bones grinding together. Or maybe that was his teeth. “You are this particular woman’s employer. She owes you her position and her livelihood. Pursuing her is taking advantage of that dependency.” This Academy was turning out to be the exact opposite of what he had hoped. It wasn’t a haven, it was a sinkhole. Who knew what this man had in mind for curriculum, with this kind of HR nightmare. He clearly didn’t think before he did things. He was certainly not someone Thomas liked to imagine armed.
Colt found the anger in this man entertaining. It was a useless sort of deep anger, not like Colt’s own blustering that came and went fast but meant so much nothing. It made Colt wonder if he, himself, looked quite that foolish when he was raising his voice at everyone around him. “Erin worked for me until the first time I tumbled her pretty self into my lap,” he said, reaching for the cigar and sitting back in the seat again. He reached into the drawer, pulled out the paperwork making Erin a partner in The Academy, including the documents that showed her name on the multi-million dollar bank account that funded the endeavor, and he slid it across to Thomas. “I’m still paying her apartment, in case that was of concern as well.” He steepled his fingers.
That made Thomas blink. Not very much made Thomas do nothing but stand there and blink, but that reversal did. He looked at the paperwork, head down and frowning, and then slowly, without looking at the chair, he sat. “Not what I expected,” he said, contemplatively. After a moment he dropped the papers back on the desk and let his shoulders lean back against the chair. Thomas’ anger was never useless, though it was always deep, and he didn’t let it go as easily as Colt did. It was still there, slowly simmering, though now it wasn’t turned in Colt’s direction.
“What made you think I was taking advantage of her, precisely?” Colt asked with unabashed curiosity. “That woman’s a spitfire. She isn’t going to let any man take advantage of her, and you shouldn’t be thinking she would just because she’s got a nice set of legs on her.” He set the cigar in the ashtray, and he folded his hands over his stomach. “Me wanting to protect her, it doesn’t mean she can’t stand on her own two feet, and her making bad judgments, that’s got nothing to do with her being a woman or starting out as my assistant. I’d want to protect her regardless,” he explained, though he would never repeat those words to Erin, not in a million years.
“You are the kind of man that will do a lot to get what you want,” Thomas said. It wasn’t necessarily a compliment. “You didn’t strike me as one that would care a lot about who got hurt in the process.” He turned the flat stare up at the other man over the desk. One day a handful of years ago Thomas was waiting for a meeting to begin and he happened to overhear a conversation between a pair of his board members about himself. ‘Creeps me out,’ one had said to the other. ‘With that creepy dead look of his. Fish eyes.’ This had surprised Thomas, as he put a lot of effort into intimidation when he had a mask on, but not when he didn’t. At some later date he’d caught a look at his eyes after shaving, and surveyed the medium, dull, grayish brown gaze. He didn’t do very much expressing with his eyes, it was true. He had to agree. Fish eyes.
“You don’t know me well enough to make that statement, Brandon,” Colt said, and he sounded critical when he said it. “I hope you don’t go judging everyone like that. Anything in my history lead you to believe I’ve endangered anyone along the way?” He hadn’t, of course. Colt had an exemplary record, one he’d intentionally kept free of even one smudge of shadow to help counter his father’s bad name. “You may not trust me, Brandon, and that’s your right, but I’m a hell of a lot more trustworthy than most of the men you’ll meet out there. I’m just honest about it, and I don’t hide behind designer clothes and good manners.” He grinned. “You need yourself a good woman.”
Thomas’ expression didn’t change. Flat. “I think the fact that you are ready to open this Academy by this time tomorrow says that I know you well enough to make that statement.” Thomas stood up, spine still straight. “No student should be in that range, Byron. Keep your hands off the employees when they’re employees. I’ll see you at the end of the week.” He moved away from the chair.
Colt laughed. “You aren’t my employer, Brandon, but thank you for your concern. I’ll pass it along to Erin, since I think she’d have something to say about me touching any employees.” He sounded entertained, possibly infuriatingly so. “A word of advice - if you find someone you like, fire her and make a move. It’ll do you some good.”
Thomas ignored this advice. Colt was too caught up in his own personal life to have any idea what was going on beyond his doors, it was clear. Thomas thought that if he couldn’t get out of a chair without assistance, he might think that way too.