S. L. Rose (rosesisred) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-08-30 21:08:00 |
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The room at the end of the corridor was just about as nice as a girl could make it. It was one of the old on-call rooms, the kind with windows and beds stacked real high that TV shows made out that sexy doctors in white coats made out in, ‘stead of sleeping any. But just about nobody was on call anymore, and if they were, they weren’t doing any sleeping. Before Sammy had got her hands on it, it had been real bare. But Sam, she hated bare more than she cared to make real clear with folks who went off requisitioning, because bare just meant the world had ended and there was no room to think any on how to make things pretty. She’d sacrificed a shirt long back, one she’d mourned over for the looks real skimpy silk got her in bars late nights in Austin. It had been real thin and red and taped over the florescent bars overhead, the light distilled into Sammy’s room was soft, rosy. It was real forgiving of bare, and the room looked a whole lot better when you couldn’t see where the beds had once been screwed into the wall. The bed was all mattress, a mess of blankets and hospital-cotton sheets and a towel flung down and the air smelled like old perfume, floral and sweet. Masked some the smell of dried blood and antiseptic, which clung to her skin and nails, in her hair. (She’d sat in the empty shower-stall with her bucket of water and rubbing and rubbing until every strand was copper-red instead of plastered thick with sweat and the smell of folk dying and Sammy hoped the smell was clean, sharp soap ‘stead of the pungence of chemical. Maybe she’d cried, until her eyelashes stuck together with damp and her throat hurt but all of that washed down the drain along with rusty-colored swirls of water and nobody but nobody would know.) Her hair was damp now, but Cal didn’t care none if it draped wetly against the back of her shirt, ‘stead of pretty and she didn’t care none if he did. Sam, she wasn’t in her underwear as she’d threatened Max, but close enough; a worn-in shirt that hung lower than skirts she’d had in the wardrobe back home, and that was plenty modest, far as she was concerned. Cal, Sam didn’t even pretend to herself she wasn’t fussed over, with death chained on one after another like they all had room to take it, stead of being stretched thin with cope. It was real dark, that peek behind the curtain and didn’t it feel real raw every time he got a look at hers? He’d get mad, she reckoned, ten minutes in, but ten minutes would get her the tequila and a sight of a maddening man who would look at her like she wasn’t all over dirt and blood and that would be enough for a little while. She was combing through wet snarled hair and wincing some, and she didn’t even turn toward the door but hollered some at the tap on the door. He was accustomed to this treatment; the handle twisted and the man bumped the door open with one broad shoulder, entering with a quarter-full bottle (just as promised) cradled in the crook of his arm. No shotglasses tonight: they’d dispensed of those civilities long ago, and he suspected Sammy would likely just go for whatever would get that liquid down her throat fastest. Cal’s gaze caught on the stretch of bare thigh beneath that dangling t-shirt, the coils of wet hair spilling over her shoulders. It was true: he didn’t care one whit, even liked the look of freshly-washed hair, all dark and cool and fresh-smelling. Somewhere over the past couple years, with mere hygiene suffering and scraped away with the blood and dust, the scent of basic shampoo had become strangely tantalising and attractive. A small glimmer of the old world, a whiff of what once was. A reminder. He entered the room she’d turned into her comfortable den, then bumped the door closed with one boot. With the ease of long habit, Cal’s keen eyes picked up on the details: Sammy’s cheeks and hands were noticeably pink, and had that scrubbed-raw texture he associated with the especially Damn Awful Days. “Special delivery,” the man announced crisply, dramatically, “brought by hand, in person, from the Capitol right on down to your doorstep.” A flourish of the bottle, plus the second partial one he’d brought to augment their supply. That was one perk to living in the land of plenty: getting a hold of liquor rations wasn’t all that hard. Especially when he didn’t have a habit to feed, either. Sammy counted on being smarter than most men. Not the kind of smarts that they gave out diplomas at the end of, or the kind of smarts that kept you alive (Cal, he was real sharp like that and she wasn’t -- but a wall of sealed-over hurt kept in plastic kept her from idling long on that) but the kind of smart that knew men. Bare legs, and the shadow of underwear under her shirt and she was counting plenty on Cal not noticing a damn thing about tears or after. She dropped the comb in amongst the tangle of cosmetics by her feet ‘front of the mirror and grinned wide, pivoting neatly on her heels and taking three strides across the room to get at him. Cal wasn’t wrong, she’d take any which way to anaesthetize herself against the world but the liquor under his arm wouldn’t work solo, lest she got real ugly drunk. And Sam, she hated ugly drunk better than anybody. No, the man in front of her was just as much anaesthesia as the tequila he’d brought with him and she dug that in deep where she didn’t have to think about it. She reached up on tiptoe, and kissed him on the side of his mouth, ran fingers against the back of his neck. The man instinctively leaned into the touch, about to twist his head to get closer, but then she’d already minced back out of reach. “Look at that, you came through for me.” And up that close, she could look him over good. He wore dust and dirt and the world outside like it was an uncomfortable coat, and there was a tight look in his eyes she recognized plenty under the mask; reading moods wasn’t difficult when you were practiced at working one another out of them. “Guess I’m real lucky, I got my own hand-delivery service. You ain’t Amazon, but I guess it’s the next best thing. I want to hear how difficult it was to get,” all tease, because Cal wouldn’t do a damn thing about it if it was impossible, she wasn’t a reason to go getting himself in trouble, but Sam always did like pretty, empty words on how many miles a man might go for company as a tease. “Am I supposed to give you a tip?” Grin. “Calvin Prime, at your service.” The man threw off a casual salute (but even if was an afterthought it was still at perfect right angles, his wrist carrying the right rigidity to it, because old habits were hard to break). “As for gratuity, we’ll get there soon enough,” he said mildly, but Cal couldn’t help the smile that grew and bloomed on his face. The look she gave him in return was pert sass. This room was always a refuge: the eye of a storm, a safe haven away from the problems that dogged them outside those doors, the heavy weights that rested on their shoulders. So when Cal sat down on the end of Sammy’s bed and carefully propped up the bottles on the nearest surface, it looked—and felt—like he was shucking the entire outside world, the tension bleeding from those tight, hunched shoulders, his drawn expression. He started removing his shoes and neatly tucking them away in the corner, surprisingly tidy for all his usual dirt-grimed appearance. (Again: old habits died hard.) “Don’t start relyin’ on it, though,” Cal warned. “I think the Department would take issue with me downgrading myself to errand boy.” That was it. She could see the howling horror of the whole damn mess of society tearing itself apart over water and food and basic necessities that turned men into animals, wipe itself off Cal’s shoulders and dump itself down like a wet raincoat ready to be picked up after he was done shutting out the world a while. Sam was real practiced at playing pretend, but her mouth played on his smile like it was a bon-bon on her tongue. Demi didn’t have to remind her long that Cal’s fretting, it brought the man far enough that fighting didn’t do a whole lot more than light a touch-paper practically cracking for a spark. No, man with his sister gone off someplace no good, Sam was real pleased he shed some of the goddamn awful along with his shoes and she didn’t have an itch to yell real loud. “You mind where you put those, soldier-boy. I got a real nice set-up here,” but his space was neater than hers, long as she’d ever known it. Sammy liked to strew things about to show it was home, all that picking up after herself in spick-and-span homes her father liked to keep fresh as a show-room unpicked itself in the twisted outline of a skirt kicked to the side, splayed like flower petals, or a shirt cast off near-enough to the door through to the shower-room. The Department had a lot to answer for, and plenty Sammy could pick a fight over other than the man sitting on her bed doing her errands. “I like it,” she said speculatively, finger tapping on her lower lip and it lost some of the effect maybe, because scrubbed clean had taken the lipstick with it, but she looked him over long and deliberate enough. He watched her back, eyebrows arching over those blue, blue eyes, now twinkling with a sort of knowing amusement as she approached. “I’m imagining a uniform,” she told him seriously, slinging one leg across his lap and sitting his knees, face to face. “A little peaked cap,” she flicked the air above his forehead, “You’d look real fine.” His jeans were real dirty and her bare legs were damp still from the shower, but Sam was betting on shaking off his bad mood some and that was partly worth getting messed over. “You’d have to take it up with my superiors, request a transfer of responsibilities. I’m already pulling double duty with those stupid animals over at the Capitol.” Cal wasn’t going to outright talk about cowshit though, not with a woman settling her weight onto his lap, and his hands slipping up under the edge of that over-large shirt, settling on the angles of her hips and the curve of her ass. It wasn’t a date, he hadn’t treated Sammy to dinner, she wasn’t dolled up in makeup and a lung-constricting dress, he was in simple jeans and a well-worn t-shirt of his own—but this was how they preferred it, anyway. It was how he’d preferred it with Demi. Shields and hackles and defenses lowered just enough to let someone else skitter across them, sharing warmth and comfort for a time. He could have asked her about the day she’d had to propel her to tequila and how she felt about it; she could have asked him about dead colleagues and how he felt about that; but that wasn’t why they were here. So Cal kissed her instead, and his hands tugged her closer. Sam, she didn’t have a word to say over farm animals that didn’t come with laughing. There was a whole lot that wasn’t funny about the need to take on a bunch of cows, or goats or pigs lest they go extinct or the dead folks eat them all up, but like most things that weren’t real filled on up with humor, but something grim and the kind of depressing that settled on the skin like grit after a real long storm somewhere and couldn’t be scrubbed off -- Sammy preferred to skip on around in conversation to the part that could be made elsewise. She hadn’t had a date in months. In two years: since before the lights of the city shut off, since before all the little bars downtown shut their doors, since she’d been laughing, bare-shouldered in something expensive enough to make Daddy wince and plum-lipped and Sam didn’t know how much of that girl was real left. A date, to Sammy Rose, was real smart. It was getting painted head to toe, and looking real pretty and a soft, acquisitive look in a man’s eye when he held out his arm. There wasn’t a whole lot left of Sammy Rose to paint; there were tatters and she didn’t think the paint would hold long enough over those to make it all the way through. And Cal? Cal wasn’t much of a man who dated -- she felt his hand climb her hip, a sprawl of rough palm over bare skin and smiled against his mouth, slid over the creases of rucked denim to fall against him. That wasn’t them, they weren’t that, sure as houses was houses. Didn’t mean him and Demi (a girl knew plenty, ‘specially in a small enough place as Austin shrunk down to a string of shelters) didn’t sting raw, but it shouldn’t and she’d shellacked over that plenty, Revlon red and flirting real hard with Max over a hand of cards long enough to exorcise it out. He didn’t say nothing about dead men, or his sister. She pressed the heel of her palm against his chest, and eased her weight back against his knees. “You owe me a drink, first.” Cal laughed, his ribs vibrating a low rumble against her palm. He didn’t need the drink like she did, or like others he knew did; he had other ways of finding numbing distraction to make everything else recede. This was one of them, and Sammy knew it, and thus knew how to tease him mercilessly. As a parting gift, he hooked a finger into the edge of her underwear, giving them a playful snap as he shifted and she rolled back off. “So pushy,” he said dryly, but the olive branch was catching Sammy’s lips in another lingering kiss before he pulled reluctantly away to start gathering their supplies: the bottles he’d brought, the glasses and soda she’d already set out. “The honour’s all yours, miss bartender,” he said, splaying his hands for her to go ahead (he’d never been good at this part, preferring his drinks neat or as a shot). Maybe sounding a little impatient. Weak elastic zinged her hip, and she let him muss her good, tangled hair and the now-wrinkled shirt as she snagged the bottle from the stack of books that was a tattered, much-thumbed-through nightstand. And if every single one of them was real soft, real sweet stories about a man and a woman loving so hard nothing could tear them down? Sammy hadn’t heard a complaint from the men who’d visited her room. No, he didn’t want the drink but she did. She twisted on his lap, one leg swung over the bolster of his knees, until she was astride and the damp hair that coursed her back blotting damp against his shirt. Sam remembered blood, slick in swathes on cotton sheeting, pooled and everyone in the damn place real nonchalant about it being there. People died, out there beyond the line of shelters, a string of real broken Christmas-tree lights in all that dark. Sam had never witnessed a one, before the damnation had broken out, a plague straight out of church services her momma had dragged her too until she was old enough and cussed enough to argue. Her hands shook some, reaching out for the glass, and she didn’t fuss none with soda, she poured a measure into the glass and swallowed quick. Some things, even a man all dirt and cotton didn’t blot out. Cal, he chased away days by feeling alive, and Sammy couldn’t fault the man none. Did the same thing by and by, but Cal wasn’t tatters any, he was whole even if he was riddled through with bullet-holes and he didn’t need the bottle at all. “You’re going to watch me drink, I’ll charge you a ticket for admission, sugar,” she said around the glass, and pushed some irritation into it, laced on with sugar, ‘stead of frankly fear. Nobody watched Sammy Rose pull the tatters back together with a little liquor for free. She had her back to him, and that was good, plain as Sam saw it. He didn’t watch resolve settle itself like sugar sliding through cream on her face. He made a noise behind her, a sort of grunt of acknowledgment. “Are you kidding? I’m not giving you all of my tequila without sharing, darlin.” “You come on over without stopping?” “Course. Not exactly like there’s much of a scenic route to admire anymore.” That was a bit of a lie; there was the brilliant bright night sky to look at, a post-outbreak sight that still never stopped taking his breath away. Even without the Perseids streaking across the black canvas, the stars still drew people’s attention. Part of him had kept an eye riveted on the streets for more than just geeks on the way here. But he was here now, and his sister was gone, as were two more of his friends, and he’d gained more of a low-grade buzzing frustration in its place. His mind was drifting again. He was thinking, and the very last thing Calvin Davidson wanted to do right now was think. So he stood up and stepped lightly forward, settling into the space behind Sammy’s back, where he could tuck those wet coils of auburn hair out of the way to expose the nape of her neck, the jut of a bared shoulder, where he could press another kiss. “Make me a drink and I’ll drink it just fine.” The tequila was just fine. She’d been real set on fussy when it came to liquor, back when there’d been a whole shelf-ful to turn her nose up at. But it was wet, and it was sharp on her throat on the way down and a warm burn bloomed under the skin of her throat. And that was real good: the smile that was lush and painted red most days lifted as the scrape of Cal’s jaw slid over bared skin. “I can make you one real good,” she told him and the glass set down ‘longside the bottle was empty now, “But yall don’t seem like you got an itch, way I did.” The buttons on the shirt, they slipped real easy and it fell into a warm, empty shape on the floor. “You act like you’re real itchy, just not for tequila.” Sam ran one hand down his chest to the hem of his shirt and hauled, real intent on making Cal forget dead people and tequila both in one. And if he was thinking on his sister while he had his hands bare on her, that was a problem tequila wasn’t gonna fix. But at a touch, as she finally turned around to face him, the rest of his thoughts flew right out that window. Light didn’t filter harsh through the blinds, Sam had worked real hard at making it soft, through white fabric. The morning sunshine wasn’t harsh one bit, it was a haze, over the mess in the room and from early on enough in the morning that most folks woke quick, never mind if they’d only gotten broken sleep. Sammy didn’t wake early, no matter how late they’d been awake, and how much hollering there’d been. She woke in pieces usual, hated waking plenty enough that when she was real comfortable and real warm, she’d sink back in as deliberate as she could. The dreams that were real bad, they were middle of the night, ‘stead of early morning. She’d woken when it was pitch-black, and quiet, when Cal had been fast asleep and under. Her face wet and thrashing some hard enough that Cal had slid over far enough that the space between them felt like a wasteland. Now, with white light filling up the room that smelled like old perfume and sunshine, Sammy was so far asleep she hadn’t moved one bit since she’d fallen that way, back at three am. Wasn’t a whole gulf of space between them no more. Sam was plenty small, but she hadn’t slid on over, her head was in the crook of his shoulder, and her nose was pressed up against his side, and one arm slung over his belly. The sheets were twisted, bunched around her waist and tangled around his legs, and neither of them had more than a scrap of blanket, because the whole damn lot had slid sideways onto the floor somewhere in the middle of the night. And the half-empty tequila bottle, well that was a whole lot emptier than it had been before his delivery trip. The man could always fall asleep quickly and slept light (wartime had taught him that, and post-outbreak life had only reinforced it). Sometimes he woke during her late-night nightmares (and kept his face discreetly turned aside so he wouldn’t see it, lungs rising and falling steadily lest she know), other times he didn’t—tonight he hadn’t—but one thing never changed. Calvin was always the first awake. So when that light drifted in through the windows, there was a moment when his internal ticker finally clicked over and said Yes and It’s time, at which point his eyes suddenly cracked open. Cal woke all at once, with a jolt. Shelter life had calmed him somewhat until there wasn’t so much the actual physical lurch and burst of adrenaline hammering behind his ribs, his waking tempered by the familiar outlines of Sammy’s cluttered, soft, feminine room—but he still couldn’t stop the abrupt way he tended to wake. At this rate, probably never would. It had slowly gone away when he first came home, only for the outbreak to bring it back with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Cal stared up at the ceiling, letting his breathing ease out. Felt the warmth of the woman beside him and wriggled into all the heat his bare skin could offer, limbs to limbs. There were routes and patrols to go over. Only a few minutes awake and he was already starting to consider the to-do list, the long scroll of duties to attend to. He hadn’t drunk nearly as much as she had, but fuck, he wanted coffee. He always wanted coffee. He could spare a bit of time, though. He contented himself by waiting for a little while for Sammy’s own ticker to catch up, shifting slightly and squirming to get comfortable again. Wasn’t nothing you could do about waking slow when what you had for a pillow woke on up all whole. Sammy surfaced like someone long down in the deep, real irritable about being yanked up to air. Her hand closed, scrape of nails over the skin of his chest, and she heaved in air that smelled like stale sweat and warm cotton. “Sakes alive,” her voice was thick with sleep, throaty some, with the kind of purr she’d never have been able to emulate awake however much she tried. Wasn’t nothing she could do about waking up tangled that close although it would horrify Sam plenty when she wasn’t thinking about drifting back off smart-quick. Only times she woke curled around Cal limpet-tight were mornings after the night had squeezed her dry of salt-water, like heat and warmth and the sprawl of a real satisfied man who could hold off day-terrors better than he could the night ones, might save her diving into the murk of another terrible dream. Asleep, Cal didn’t have a mouth on him to protest being thrown into the role of white knights and princes straight out of her nightstand-books, and asleep, he didn’t do nothing to mess it up some. Asleep, he didn’t even know he’d been handed a script and told to stand in the light and look pretty. Middle of the night she could fool herself some she was the kind of girl a man would stand in between nightmare and waking for. Cal had always woken real easy. It was the cussed in him, Sammy figured, there was nothing ‘bout a morning that stood for it good. He’d woken quick, back-straight sitting up long after she’d first met him until either he’d gotten himself real tired out or Austin had wiped off the dust and sweat of travel some, because he’d slept long as she did, a time or two. Before it all ended. “You awake already? Thought I’d plumb shaken that out of you. You’re wriggling something crazy for a pillow.” She burrowed further in, using the weight of his arm to blot out the sunshine, and ran one hand over the spread of ribs. Lot of scars this man wore, and Sammy was real familiar with all of them, even if she hadn’t sussed the stories behind them outta him. His laugh was another lurching movement beneath her head, his chest shaking. Cal let his arm be draped over her head like another pillow, his muscles loose and relaxed for once. The two of them were more comfort than snarling passion these days, but these mornings still had the satisfaction of a good night behind them, and tension drummed out into the ether. His own exorcism of choice. “When I was a kid, they kept saying I had ants in my pants, I couldn’t sit still. ‘cept I’m not wearing any now.” True enough: they were unselfconsciously naked, and it was warm enough in Austin that they didn’t really need those tangles of sheets either. Cal stretched, his spare hand (the one that hadn’t been co-opted by Sammy) arching to cover his mouth and a tremendous yawn, then grind the sleep out of his eyes. Sammy hadn’t been self-conscious about being naked as a jaybird since she’d been small enough most everyone else wasn’t self-conscious either. Her hair was a briar of curls, copper-bright against the sheet and all over snarls and she didn’t smell so fresh but Sam hadn’t met a man who didn’t want to see her naked, and sex wasn’t nothing but getting naked without taking a thing off. She’d gotten real used to getting down to her panties without none of the armor going noplace, and Cal -- well, Sammy figured Cal didn’t even know it was there. She got glimpses past his, plenty. When the fuck was a fight gone south, or maybe lurching toward salvation, because just about the only person at the other side of the outbreak Sam didn’t want to lose was the one making himself real comfortable with her pillow right there. Midst all that yelling, and kisses that felt like blows, she saw snatches of who he was underneath all that cussedness and shucks-ma’am flirting. Something real close to kin, there but Sam hadn’t ever looked at it long, ‘less she looked so long she forgot who she was looking at. No, they were comfort long as the sunshine rose in the sky. Passion took loving, maybe. Passion took feeling, and feeling tore through every fissure you had and if you weren’t whole enough to take it, it found you wanting, smarting with it. Sam, she didn’t want passion and passion wouldn’t want her, even if she invited it in open-armed. “They’re over there someplace, ‘long with the rest of my clothes. Honey, you bring ants into my bed, you better think on never coming back,” sweet as honey, but serious as graves. The room was a respite, it didn’t have one scrap of dirt in it, and it didn’t smell like nothing dead or rotting or medical and she planned on keeping it that way. “You itching to go someplace, you take that pan and the coffee and bring me back some real nice,” imperious as she ordered him about, but she slid her hand over his backside and squeezed some, sweet as you please as she grinned, eyes-shut beneath the weight of his arm. He shook his head, and she could feel the motion more than see it, in the shift of his tendons and muscles beneath her. “I do gotta be someplace,” Cal conceded grudgingly, but his mind was already spinning, bright and clear and alert. He really would be squirming and thrashing soon if he didn’t get going. As nice as the idea of lazing away the morning was, they both knew he didn’t tend to linger when he had work to do. So he peeled himself away from her (they smelled of sweat and sex; he’d have to take a quick shower once he got back to the Capitol) and clambered his way out of the smallish bed, rummaging through the pile of clothes on the floor to find his own. Cal dressed quickly. “I’ll bring you a cup of joe before I head out.” Still obedient, as always. He accepted Sammy bossing him around so long as it wasn’t an imposition; occasionally he dug in his heels which led to the sniping and griping, but whenever they stuck to the small and simple, the two of them rarely had any trouble. Small things weren’t any hassle. (It was the big stuff that rankled. Commitment. Meeting the families. Tying an actual life together. The idea of her being a girlfriend, and he an honest-to-god boyfriend, and the concept of a future—worse now. Neither of them liked baring their souls though they didn’t mind baring their skin. They both knew where they stood.) He always did scramble like the world was waiting on him out front, ‘Can Cal come out to play?’ He had places to be and people who relied on him running like clockwork, way he did. (There wasn’t a damn future, even if she’d been the kind of girl folks brought home to their parents, even if her brother hadn’t gone disappeared into the ether and was probably dead, ‘stead of the kind of man who gave real cheerful, stone-serious lectures. Sam remembered those some, peeking from the stairs when she was in high-school. Wasn’t a damn future to go wishing after.) “You’re real kind,” she said, from the bed and she uncurled slow, sifted amongst the mess on the floor for a shirt that buttoned over that naked, as he slid on back into being Cal the soldier who dealt with the world after it all smashed to pieces by finding the order in it. Sammy, she’d never gotten along with order well, and her day floated ahead, another string of clean-up duty and her skin drying, cracking some round her fingers. He needed to shave, some. And his hair was on end, and he smelled to high heaven (so did she), but Sam had no doubts he’d slide on back into the Capitol, find himself a cog in all that clockwork that ticked on and kept time after the outbreak, like it always had. Some folks, they had places in this world, and they made it look real easy. She’d hate him plenty, if he didn’t trammel up with frustration every now and again. Sam wasn’t made for selflessness, and she wasn’t gratitude on little wings other than when the small selfish place inside of her that howled real loud at midnight, when the world felt real empty and dark got filled up a little. She slid up next to him, padding on bare feet and a goodbye kiss pressed to his shoulder-blade. “You go on. You’re itching to be off. And Cal?” The smile twitched, slid somewhere that wasn’t so knowing, wasn’t so practiced. Looked real young, just then. “You go getting yourself hurt, I’ll kill you my own self.” “You’ve said it a thousand times, and it never stops bein’ true,” he volleyed back cheerfully (the walls were back up). But that fleeting moment still tripped something; Cal paused to swivel and catch her face between two calloused hands, kissing his ex-girlfriend hard and insistent before he disappeared. Then, there was a whirlwind of throwing his coat over one shoulder and quick strides and a door knocked shut behind him, and an empty bottle left behind. Cal was off find the bathroom and fill up some hot water for her coffee, and then he’d be gone—back to being on the clock and facing what the day might bring. |