Re: Comic Book Heroes: Alex/Holly/Billy
Alex leaned back against the hold shelves as the other two picked up on the Walking Dead conversation and watched them, catching up his coffee mug in one hand, taking a sip from the chipped rim. Black and sweet, but cold and growing bitter, he didn't care. The jolt of sugar and caffeine was required in obviously addictive quantities. If anyone watched him through the course of a day, they would be surprised he wasn't straight-up humming like a Hitachi Magic Wand. No instead, it brought him to a place that was just...even. With a huge assist from nicotine. A place he would be able - mostly - to endure a day of whatever this life threw at him.
In the way that Billy inhabited a space, Alex had a talent for shrinking into it and blending in. It was both attack strategy and defense mechanism. Be seen when you want, by the right eyes, be invisible when you didn't want. Family of five pulls into the rest stop, kids shouting and dad and mom trying to herd them efficiently toward the bathrooms so they don't waste time on their way to Mount Rushmore or whatever? Pull into yourself, head down, hood on head and just ignore them so they ignore you. No threat, just a kid and maybe he's with one someone in the other cars parked there. Long-haul trucker, when the sun's gone down? Shift posture, meet his eye, slink into the bathroom after him. It had become second nature. So he blended a little bit, here, not moving too far off, keeping his head up so he could still be social and part of the conversation, and just watched the other two for a moment: Billy: open and friendly, chatty, radiating that kind of warmth that wasn't merely physical. Holly: big and hulking to a guy like Alex, but not radiating immediate threat. Just looking tired. And see, no threat. He was chuckling a little and smiling a little and then just kind of throwing out words which seemed to lift Alex out of his slouch and flat onto his feet, standing up straight like he'd been a puppet lifted on its strings. After a too long pause he moved that into sort of pushing off the shelving behind him and propelling himself back to the main counter, setting the mug down and cupping it with both hands like he was trying to soak in the residual warmth the glazed ceramic held.
Look, Alex had known romance in precisely two forms: ambush declarations of love and those tricks who tried to get a little more than what they paid for, maybe with an arm around the shoulder or by buying him a meal. The prices had been negotiable, sure, but the services were firm. That was a piece of himself he'd desperately fought to hold onto, no matter how much he needed the money, and then that bastard in Iowa had stolen it anyway. No, the idea that Tandy had been in any way flirting with him (for comics-related benefits or not) was kind of ridiculous. A joke - that's why Holly had laughed. They'd hardly even talked about comics. No, instead, Tandy had asked about Alex himself, had drawn him out and gotten him to talk about things he otherwise might not have, as minor as they seemed: who he was, where he'd been. That's all it had been, whatever it was. Just words on a screen and if Alex had found himself looking for Tandy's replies first, well, whatever. Just words on a screen, dude.