Colt Byron // Colin Craven (cravened) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-10-12 20:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | colin craven |
Who: Joss and Colt
What: A collision
Where: Aubade
When: This week
Warnings: None, unless crazy and cranky count?
Colt had felt tense the entire remainder of the day after the encounter with Severin in the park. He’d returned home that evening, careful to usher Erin ahead of him where she would not witness his movements, after dropping Erin off at Bathos. He hadn’t said much; he’d just kept his arm around her to keep her quiet, which generally worked fairly well, he’d found.
Upon returning to Aubade, he’d called his father’s case worker, the prosecuting lawyer that had handled his father’s case, his own lawyer and the warden. Once he was reassured, repeatedly, that his father was precisely where he should be, he’d downed the better part of a bottle of disgustingly expensive whiskey, and he’d gone to sleep.
Physical therapy the following morning resulted in a thrown chair, a fleeing therapist, and a pounding head. It also resulted in a package waiting for him in the Aubade mail room, and he’d showered and dressed in jeans and nothing else to go retrieve it; he paid enough money to live in the damn building, they could tolerate his damn eccentricities, he thought.
The mail room was as opulent as everything else in the building, all pale creams and marble coldness, and the box - a tiny thing wrapped in brown paper - looked out of place with its scrawled child’s handwriting across the front. It fit into the palm of his hand, and he shoved it deep in the pocket of his jeans before turning around, leaning heavily on his cane and heading back out to the lobby, intent on catching the elevator back upstairs before he was required to socialize with anyone.
She had lost days. They fractured, unraveled at the seams as hours spiraled beyond her fingertips and laughed at her, like birds. She had lost days, and when Joss woke in the quiet white stillness of the middle of the morning, her hands working at the edges of the coverlet as though grasping for a pencil that was not there, she didn’t know which one it was. The apartment was a delicate wreckage of an ode to sanity: thin, china teacups scattered across surfaces, books thrown down as though the contents were a crucifixion, the windows open wide and a damp, chilly breeze winding through and around as though the owner had tried so hard to wake herself up she was willing to make herself quite cold to do so. Joss stood in the middle of it, with her hands quite tight against her sides, and then in the very small spot in the very centre of the devastation, where the storm of books and cast-aside blankets met the tide of pens and paper scattered by the wind that blew about the curtains, she sat curled, dragged the journal into her lap and began trying. To no use -- once invited, they raged about her head, they sang like sirens and they tried to wind sweet hands around her wrists and tug her down. Dazed, tired, too wrung out to care, Joss fled once again.
On feet soft as a poem, down she crept and left behind sanctuary-that-was-not once a small offering of crumpled paper and crossings out had been made at the altar: a prayer for a day’s grace, no stumbling over roots that were not there or gazing at stars that did not shine beneath a solid roof. The post-room had not been visited yet this week: no haul of candy-colored envelopes with flower-bright handwriting, the wistful sighs of those in love with fantasy whilst firmly rooted in reality. Perhaps that was best, remind her she was writer, could help her wield the pen like sword -- Joss, bare-foot and tangled dark hair, made the choice to dip inside, seeing her grail in a sack full of post, she did not notice Colt until collision.
His hand flew to his pocket, immediately intent on protecting the small package within, and he dropped his cane as he reached to steady her. It was a futile attempt, something done instinctively and without thought. (If he’d thought about it, he wouldn’t have even tried to balance two people when he barely managed one.) His hand closed on her wrist, and his legs crumpled beneath him, and they were both lost to gravity.
His hip landed hard, jagged heavy on the floor, and his groan of pain was something sharp and loud, uncontrolled and undeniable. It took him a minute to work through the pain enough to drag himself against the wall, his breathing shallow and fast. “Woman, look where you’re going next time,” he managed to growl, his hand moving to his pocket again, assuring safety for the tiny box contained within.
People reaching -- hands and worried faces and noises louder, brighter than she’d heard for days -- the dropping of the cane made a hard sound against the floor and the cry was strangled and died in Joss’s throat before it got much further, another on her lips, as a heavy hand settled on her wrist (like iron, like a trap, like ‘hush, time for medicine’) There was no questioning reality, nor acknowledgment of friend not foe -- only the tangling together and falling and it was only in the low and deep moan of someone quite human (quite hurt) that Joss, scrabbling back and away, knew the difference. She watched him, eyes wide and wet and a white and drawn look to her face, quite aghast. To their knees they brought people, dragging depths of souls and dredging things, she and stories, but this was not them and she was not she, and he did not deserve it.
“I’m sorry!” It was a gasp of attrition, a plea, she grasped for the cane, hand rummaging against the tile to give it back -- perhaps with cane, he would limp about and shout, perhaps he would be the same, everything was falling, like castles crumbling, like skies -- a deep and ominous crack, and Joss turned her head in terror: wide-veined structural fault, running through the marble of the wall. Castles falling, would hers too? She pulled her knees tight against her chest, buried her face against them, no, no, not real.
“Just- just shut up a minute, Joss,” Colt growled, a pained sound through gritted teeth. He recognized her, even through the throb he had grown increasingly familiar with over the past five years, the one that said shattered edges of bone, too delicate to screw or set, had shifted against transplanted tissue and foreign metal. That veins grafted and bypassed, constantly treated for rejection, had been jarred. Nothing new, and yet something he always forgot the acute agony of until it happened again.
Colt looked at her through pain bleary eyes, and he noticed the way her own gaze looked, unfocused. It reminded him of how his father looked right before he lost touch with everything real, everything tangible, and it bothered him more than the red-hot pain or the fact that he could not stand, even with the cane she held out to him.
He grabbed the cane, his fingers closing around it, and he looked at her. “Woman, what the hell is going on inside that head of yours?”
Questions like pinching fingers, rummaging around and delighting in the mess -- like untidy drawers thrown open for inspection, hair-ribbons and stockings raveled round together, things that could be taken out, held up, explanation demanded for, ’Joss, I’m waiting’ -- would they question him? Would they take down his statement and put it into ink and paper, write down and wind his words like manacles around her, weave them into ropes to drown her? Tick-tock, time a-running on to chase her down and bind her up, take her back where stories couldn’t find her, never let her leave. Mice, a bright-eyed, twitching-nosed plague of them, rattling through the walls, hickory-dickory-dock and a burst of them against the floor -- Joss’s scream was choked off tight, a gasp of breath that had hands wound in tight against her, the cane sliding away limply without question.
She sat, hunched up against her knees like a comma against the paper might, her face pressed tight against the silk of her skirt as it crumpled between her fingers where she’d curled them into the fabric. Eyes closed -- open, make it go away, not real -- a mouth dry as dusts and paper, and it took several minutes before Joss uncurled enough for her head to lift up and for her to look back at him with unsteady eyes.
“You wouldn’t like it. Best not to invite yourself,” she told him, in the way of someone issuing a warning about a bad party, one with curling sandwiches and a distracted hostess -- a warning as onerous as something simple as that. “I’m sorry I made you fall.” The mice had run, the cracks gone -- breathing steadying once again, a little of Joss’s clarity began to restore itself.
He leaned his head back against the wall, and he cursed, closed his eyes, cursed again. “You gone ‘round the damn bend,” he said, more to himself than to her, and he put the end of the cane on the floor, and he tested lifting himself. A groan later, a failed attempt, and he was breathing hard, no further along than he was when he began. “You didn’t mean to make me fall,” he said reluctantly, because it was easier to be mad at her than to admit she wasn’t to blame for his sorry state. “Come on over here,” he finally added, because the alternative was having someone walk up on him, sprawled out on the floor of the lobby like a damn invalid.
The clatter of them hadn’t summoned anyone as yet: the lobby’s hall was still wide and bare but it was still a moment or two before she moved, unwound herself from the little ball across the way from him. And then -- across the marble, small white feet padded into view, slow and careful, the path picked across a wide expanse of floor as though she were watchful of dangers in the crossing that no one else could see. She stood there, quite still, as though a sound might send her fleeing, as though running were the first instinct and only knowing him kept her there, all rumpled silk skirt and tangled, tumbled hair that had fallen out of a braid sometime before. It was a moment, tight and tense with the desperate want to run and run, before she crouched in front of him and her hand held out to help.
Her features were composed but strangely so, as though she were imitating the way people looked calm, had read it out of a book but it wasn’t a true kind of peace -- the soft serenity that had made her up even when exploring his room and rummaging his things -- even as he’d bellowed at her -- was not there at all, but instead a blank sort of quiet that was like a screen deliberately drawn across the light that was Joss, all oddities hidden but everything else besides. It was locked in, locked down, as though the terror she’d been gripped in only moments prior had been replaced with a mute kind of misery at being caught in it, a lost sort of look that resigned itself to being trapped, and she hadn’t said one word yet, not even a protest at the declaration of madness -- if Joss disagreed, she wasn’t saying so, but then, she wasn’t saying anything at all.
Reluctantly, Colt took her arm and used her for balance, as a larger version of the cane without bearing any of his weight. He kept that, the weight, at his back, against the wall beside the elevator. He gritted his teeth and sweat dotted his brow, and he groaned loudly enough to draw the attention of the guard at the front desk. “Get the fuck out of here,” he yelled at the man, ignoring the confusion in the eyes of the newcomer who had seen Colt just moments earlier in the mailroom.
The guard didn’t move away. He just looked at Joss, an inquiry on his face, his hand on the radio at his hip. It was clear the young man wasn’t going to leave without Joss’ reassurance that everything was fine. Colt cursed, let go Joss’ hand, and used his shoulder against the wall to guide himself into the elevator, remaining upright while doing so. He pushed the elevator button. “Are you coming?” he asked Joss gruffly, and why he cared if the insane girl followed was anyone’s guess. Maybe it was her familiarity, maybe the unfocused haze she had been trying to hide, the fight to quash the madness, reminded him of being young. Whatever the reason, he waited before pushing the button to close the door, his shoulders back against the elevator’s wall, the cane useless in his hand.
The curse seemed to throb through the air like he’d hit her: Joss jolted beneath Colt’s grip, a tremor as if she hadn’t noticed the guard’s approach or anything at all beyond one step in front of the other, her head bowed like something wilting. Startled, she seemed to wake a little from the not-quite stupor, and she looked at the guard with wide eyes with the way of someone seeing him for the first time -- and not the man she’d exchanged words with on going in and out for the last month and a half. He peered at her and Joss’s gaze flickered to Colt and the remembered half-warmth in the elevator -- and for a moment, she stood there, wrist loosed from Colt’s grasp and balanced between elevator and guard, like she’d been cut free of her mooring and not quite certain of the current, bobbed there. Then,
“It’s all right.” The words were barely more than a whisper, but they were saturated in story: something swelled in them -- Joss tasted it as if it were honey, a little smile as if it were rich in her mouth and louder, “You don’t need to worry. We fell down and now we’re up again. There’s no need to worry,” she repeated, the cadence of her voice quite sweet and the lilt of the storyteller leaving no room for argument. Quite delicately, she stepped inside the elevator doors, and the confusion, the worry on the guard’s face was closed away as the doors slid closed with a soft chime, and she was stood beside him quite straight -- before sagging against the wall, quite exhausted. Why was it happening?
“Please,” she found the words on her tongue, didn’t dare look, please -- and then there was nothing left, no words came, they’d fled and left her wrung out and tired once again and she was quite aware of the gritty feeling of nothing in her head and the coldness of the floor with nothing other than a plea for something she couldn’t put to speech.
Even through the pain, Colt knew this woman needed help, and he cursed and reached out a hand to touch her shoulder in an awkward sort of exhausted show of affection as the elevator doors closed. “It’s going to be alright, Joss. Just, calm yourself down. We’ll call for Erin once we get upstairs, and she’ll know what to do.” It might have sounded like he was suggesting Erin come help him; he wasn’t. Joss looked a million times worse than when he’d last seen her, the loose hair clinging to her cheeks adding to the feeling of helpless madness on the woman’s face, and he wasn’t enough of a callous asshole to send her off on her own like that. “Just, breathe deep and we’ll be fine, you hear?” the last was asked in a tone that was as military as he could manage with the shards of pain throbbing in his leg.
“You’re hurt.” It was a wondering sort of speaking, as though she’d only just noticed (and perhaps she had) and she looked at him as though waking up and confused. It was Colt but without a hat, without shouting -- why wasn’t he shouting? -- and bare like the blue men but without the smiles. He leaned there with his cane (like a tree) to hold him up -- a tree -- roots wriggled out through marble, bursting through stone, curled themselves deep into the floor of the elevator, grew and sprouted, heavy and green and spreading.
Joss’s eyes were wide and fearful and not looking at Colt at all now but past him, at something that wasn’t there-but-was. She was quite white, a good deal thinner than she had been the last time they’d spoken and as her chest rose and fell with ragged breaths -- her lips moved constantly, a wordless something continually spoken, not real, not real, “Not real.”
Colt looked over his shoulder, even as the elevator doors opened. “There isn’t a thing there. Come on, now. We’ll get you inside, and you can touch everything in the apartment in that infuriating way you like to do, and we’ll call Erin.” When he moved toward her, the pain fired (pulsing, pulsing, hot, pulsing) up along his ruined shin and past his knee, to where the dead veins were already sending red, angry lines toward the surface. “Move,” he growled.
A growl of a voice that rebounded against the metal walls, deep and low and building menace in the sound of it. The screech of cane-on-tile was a sharp predator’s cry, swooping low to take her off, the lurching advance of him was not Colt at all but a dark something dragging him --
Joss was already pricked for running, on the balls of her feet ready to dart free of the box of an elevator and when Colt moved toward her, Joss moved as commanded -- but not out of the way, not toward the apartment to touch and explore and make herself quite at home. Instead with a desperate look thrown him, that seemed pleading forgiveness and was terror all at once, she was off and running, wild-animal flight and all bare feet and hair through the corridors of the Aubade as if she’d never stop.
Colt cursed, and he hobbled heavily to the elevator door, taking note of which direction she ran off in. Then, he stepped out into the hall, leaning heavily against the wall, and he pulled out his cellphone.
Get over here, Erin.