Nathaniel Posey (twentytwenty) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2016-09-06 12:39:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2019 [07] july, mary-june greenling, nathan posey |
Who: Nathaniel Posey and Babs Greenling
Where: LBJ Health Center
What: Nathan checks in, and they get talking about marriages.
When: [backdated] July 6th, 2019; mid-day
The new clinic was something. Not near as big as the UMCB, but scrubbed clean and smelling of the faint antiseptic scent that Nathan associated with medical facilities. Fortunately he didn’t need any care, was just there out of curiosity, and a hankering to talk to Babs face to face. Of the tiny blonde women in his life, she was the one that had less conversational land mines associated with her lately. Not that life with Savannah was exceptionally difficult, but he kept getting swept into moments of deja vu, where it felt like they were kids again, incapable of communicating right. Then there was the Pete thing. Nathan didn’t feel that weird about it, but he knew once his sister got word it would be a lot more difficult to explain away or apologize for than any of the other stupid things he’d done while he was three sheets. But pushing that all to the back of his brain for the time being, Nathan sidled up to the front desk, leaned an elbow on the corner and smiled at the unfamiliar face seated just behind it. “Mind pointin’ me in the direction of Nurse Greenling?” he asked, and warmed his smile even more when she nodded and pointed down a hallway. “Three doors down, on the left.” Even though he could have wasted a few more minutes flirting (she was cute, okay), he straightened with a nod and made his way to the door he’d been directed to. Without a knock, he stepped just inside the threshold and scanned the room until he spotted a familiar blonde head. “Ms. Greenling, I'd love it if you could give a statement on the plans for this facility,” he said, and took care to mask his accent as best he could. “The whole of Austin wants to know why more than one medical facility is necessary for a population much smaller than the original numbers of the city.” He couldn’t mask his dumb smile, however. Babs was busy. Running a clinic that wasn’t just a random part of a library or tent in the desert was totally new to her. At the Mayo Clinic she’d been in the ER as a nurse, here she was damn near an admin. People had already started coming in for all sorts of ailments, and while it was nice to have actual medical equipement helping out, she couldn’t keep track of all of them. She needed a bigger staff, more supplies- and a lack of journalists. So when the ‘journalist’ strode in and began to ask her questions, Babs didn’t even turn around to face him. She huffed, her hair stuck up in a bun held together by a pen, her blue scrubs looking wrinkled and her hands sticky from sweat. She held one up and over her head, the middle digit up in a firm gesture. “There’s your statement, and that’s Captain Greenling,” Babs said, her South Carolina accent seeming angrier as she scooped up an armful of clipboards from a counter and turned to walk right past the journalist. “Now get out of my clini- Nathan Posey, I ought to tan you!” “But you won’t,” Nathan countered as he hooked his thumbs on his back pockets, dumb smile still in place. Assured that if he had set her off he’d really know it. “Nice statement though. That the one you gave the other guy?” He raised his brows at her, then unhooked one thumb and held out his hand as an offer to take some of the clipboards she’d loaded herself down with. “Y’all thought about some security at the doors, to keep ‘em outta your hair?” “Not in public, but in private I’d grab a damn switch and show you a few things about being rude,” Babs said- but with Nathan her bark was far worse than her bite. She was small and mighty, but she wasn’t about to go around actually acting on her immediate instincts with those she cared for. Allowing him to take some of the clipboards, she led him down a hallways towards a few offices- one of which had her name on the door (Captain Greenling, of course- not Babs, or even her true full name she’d never told anyone at all). “I’d love to get some security here, but that would involve being able to pay them with more than thanks and medical care when they need it,” Babs pointed out, pushing the door open with her shoulder. The office was bigger than the one she’d kept at LBJ, but somehow she’d still managed to drag her desk and books from the library. There was a dog bed in the corner, but no dog. Kaleo was still with TJ, not that she was bringing that up to anyone. “What do you need, Nathan?” “I need somethin’ in order to stop in?” he countered as he set his stack of clipboards on an open space on her desk, then rested his weight on the corner. “Can’t I just do it to see how you’re settlin’’? Maybe ask y’all about your 4th?” If he had to hasten a guess he’d guess that hers was at least more responsible than his. “Do anythin’ fun?” Nathan noticed the dog bed in the corner, and it triggered a question he’d been meaning to ask since the 9th, but hadn’t gotten around to, but instead of tacking it on to the others he filed it away for later. Nobody he knew really liked having to answer a multitude of things all at once. Babs looked at him, raising one brow when he brought up the fourth of July. Had he been at the party? Had he seen her hug Teddy, and maybe made the connection? It wasn’t as if there were many other men who fit the bill for having been Babs’s ex-husband. She’d never been private about the fact that her past life had been firmly based in the military, and TJ was a vet. Jesus. She was crystal clear, wasn’t she? “I went to the party, not for long. Not really my scene,” she said, sitting on the edge of the desk and trying to ignore how her feet didn’t quite touch the floor when she did that. “What about you, Nathan? Anything fun up your sleeve?” It was hard to accept that maybe her friend just wanted to see her to be a good friend. It was hard to accept that maybe, just maybe, she cared about Nathan as much as she’d cared about her own brother once. “Talkin’ to you is usually a hoot, so I figured I’d do that for a while,” Nathan replied as he moved a few things around on her desk without thinking, then moved them back to where he thought they’d been sitting. “Got in all my trouble makin’ over the holiday, so I reckon I better behave for a few weeks to balance it out.” He’d mellowed with age, but drunk posting on the freenet wasn’t something he considered responsible adult behavior, and he doubted very many others did either. Then because he could only leave something alone for so long he asked, “You ever get things sorted?” and made a motion towards the empty bed. “Y’know, with whatever lead you had.” Babs sat at her desk moving the things Nathan had touched to the exact spots they’d been in before. She was awful particular about her things- and to be honest, the office was more of a personal space than her own ‘apartment’ was across the way. She only went there for the sake of people not complaining that she had no life outside of work. Even if work was what kept Babs going. But the mention of Kaleo stilled her hand. She leaned back in her chair, her heart aching for her dog. The big, dumb, loveable mastiff mutt had been her constant friend since the early days of her marriage. Hell, he’d saved her life more than once when the zombie attacks had been really bad. “Yeah, I know where he is. I know he’s safe and being cared for, and that one day I’ll get him back. Just have to sort it out with Teddy first.” Nathan whistled low and raised his eyebrows. “Didn’t know the ex was kickin’ ‘round Austin.” But maybe Babs hadn’t either, before Kaleo went missing. “That trumps anythin’ I was gonna throw on the table.” Drunkenly kissing Pete and living with the fear of Savannah finding that tidbit out paled in comparison. “You wanna talk?” She wasn’t a talker, he’d learned that, but he offered all the same. Talking had never been encouraged in her life: as a child in the south where boys had been prized so much higher than girls. As a nurse where only the voices of doctors mattered. As a victim of sexual harassment, hushed by all around her. As a woman in the military who had been all but told that it was a privilege for her to be there, and a right for the men. She wanted that to be all the reasons she didn’t want to talk, but deeper than that, she didn’t want to admit to what she felt. “I didn’t know he was either,” Babs admitted, scratching her throat and turning her head just enough to look at Nathan again. “It isn’t like anything is going to happen. TJ wouldn’t hurt me.” “Not really what I was thinkin’,” Nathan responded candidly. Babs ex being some kind of trouble hadn't been at the front of his mind. “Just,” he paused. “It was probably a real kick in the gut, yeah?” If he found out Paige was in Austin he figured he'd reel a little, even if their history was nothing like the history the Greenling’s carried between them. But again, he wasn't going to push her to say anything she didn't want to. Staying in her good graces mattered more than some kind of office heart to heart. “You know, I've got an ex-wife,” he offered, just to keep the both of them from lapsing into silence. That, and he couldn't recall if Babs knew that. There was a squishy ball on her desk. It was meant for stress, but mostly Babs had been using it to pelt against the door in a pitcher’s pose. It would force the door close all the way when people left it ajar, and it made her stretch a little. Move her body a little bit. It felt good. Not she picked it up and slowly tossed it between her hands, only stopping when Nathan said he had an ex. “I didn’t know,” Babs said, arching a brow. “And let me guess- she broke your heart, stole your money, and is a good for nothin’ bitch? That’s the ex-wife story I usually hear. Or heard.” Babs put the ball down, letting it roll across the wood. “Just- sit. There’s a folding chair in the corner, Nathan. You look too damn tall.” He made a face, but moved and resettled in the folding chair, slouched with his long limbs sprawled out in front of him. “It ain’t nothin’ like that, much as I hate to disappoint.” Pushing a hand through his hair, he weighed for only a handful of seconds whether he wanted to unload even the most basic of details on her. It wasn’t like it painted him in the best light. “I was the bastard. Took her for granted ‘cause I was too busy with my own things, so by the time I realized somethin’ was wrong I didn’t think there was anythin’ I could do about it.” His features contorted into a self-deprecating smile. “I know you’re so surprised that I was some kind of a idiot.” The stillness that overcame Babs when Nathan spoke felt oddly filling. She had known Nathan for a while now, but they’d never talked deeply. Not as deeply as this, not as quietly or so ready to be honest. Well, maybe Nathan had done it before: but Babs never had. “Well, that will do it,” Babs finally said, sitting up a little straighter. She paused, watching her friend, deciding if she could tell the story: the whole story. “I like to blame the fact he slept with another woman to why we broke up. But if the zombies hadn’t happened, we would have divorced before then. He wanted kids, I was scared to have them. So when I found out he was shooting blanks, I was so damn happy. We had a fight, and I threw it in his face- I told him I wanted to thank god that we couldn’t have kids.” Surprised by the rare nugget of personal information Babs offered him, Nathan knew his face said it all. He’d never been good at keeping his thoughts under his hat, even if he never said them, they were always written into his raised eyebrows or his tensed jaw. “That was the end of it, huh?” He thought there was probably more between that fight and the other story, but hell if he was going to push to hear it. It was enough that she’d told him that much. “S’funny how you think marriage’s gonna be a cakewalk ‘til you’re in it.” “You said it,” Babs mumbled, trying to remember the last time she’d enjoyed being a wife. The last time she hadn’t felt like she was wasting away in a marriage that wasn’t fit for the light of day. Had it been when they’d bought the house and had felt the thrill of ownership? Adopting the dog? Cuddling late at night when Babs got off of a long shift and fell into bed? What had it been? Seeing him again, in Pickens? Had that been it? “When did you decide to end it?” she asked. “Wasn’t me,” he replied with a wan smile. “Paige was the one that had enough nerve to say it was over.” There were a whole mess of things that Nathan would do differently now, but that came with years of growing up that he just hadn’t had back then. “Used to say that she sideswiped me with divorce papers, but the writin’ was there for a year, maybe two before we split in 2011.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, some days.” And other days it felt like more than a lifetime ago. “It ain’t all bad, though. For one reason or another she agreed when I said I wanted to try at bein’ friends.” “Well. It’s harder to be friends than to try to be,” Babs said, her words seeming to edge on the all too familiar accidental insult or harsh words she was oddly adept at hashing out. “But if anyone could manage it, I guess it would be you.” It was the nearest Babs gave to a compliment. Nathan grinned in return, but wisely kept his mouth shut. She leaned over her desk a little bit, her elbows on the surface as she took a great sigh and shut her eyes for a moment. “The world is ending and I’m sad my marriage crumbled without me noticing it. Until I blew it all the fuck up.” The grin Nathan had been wearing dropped quickly as he leaned forward, elbows on knees. “We can’t be wringin’ our hands about the world all the time, Babs. We're allowed to be upset about our own non-walker related problems once in awhile,” he pointed out, before he stood and stretched. “C’mon, you should show me ‘round this place though.” It felt like the right thing to suggest, to get both of their minds off of the things that they couldn’t change. Then after a moment or two of some thought, he added, “It might not be as fucked as you think, if he’s talkin’ to you, darlin’.” |