Narrative Who: Sam What: Narrative, back to Vegas, aging Where: The real world, mostly When: Nowish Warnings/Rating: Language
One second, she was in that fucking garage, kids screaming everywhere and such a fucking headache, and the next she was home.
Home, yeah? Like New York. Not even fucking Vegas. New. York.
What. The. Fuck?
She stood there, in the middle of the fucking sidewalk, like some deer in fucking headlights hoping no one would notice her. It was crowded, yeah? And a quick swivel told her she was in Elizabeth.
Ok, not fucking New York. New Jersey.
Yeah, ok, what the fuck? But the hotel had fucked with her for years, yeah? Maybe it was fucking with them all in a different way now. Maybe sending them home was one of the hotel's stupid fucking party tricks. She pressed her tongue to the gap that was reborn between her front teeth, and she walked.
She'd left four years earlier, and she'd been scared to fucking death at the time. Afraid Al would follow her, and that he'd drag her back to a life of domesticity. Which, yeah, didn't sound so terrifying now. Al was like forty, and he was boring as fuck, old fashioned in that Spanish guy way, but he wasn't an asshole or anything. Sure, the man sucked in bed, but she'd had plenty of that over the years too. Whatever. He'd never hit her or anything. Possessive and overprotective, sure, but she'd been fifteen when they got married, and he'd known her pops was just going to sell her off to whoever had the most money in his wallet.
Hindsight was twenty-twenty, they said. She'd never loved Al, but he wasn't a fucking monster, yeah? She wasn't scared to be home, walking between the sagging Elizabeth tenements. She wasn't afraid of moms or pops either. Not anymore, yeah? She wasn't going to run like the scared kid she'd been at twenty.
She still knew the way, and screaming, and hugs and a hot bowl of pasta later, she was asleep in a mattress that was just as ratty as it had been when she was a kid. She looked just the same as she had when she'd left at twenty, and her moms tucked her in with tired hands that shook. But Al hadn't taken the apartment from them when she left, and her moms and dads looked old, yeah? Tired and human. She'd never thought of them as people who aged, but they had, and she abandoned all plans to go back to fucking Vegas. Why? The hotel wasn't there anymore. She knew the hotel wasn't there. Even if this shit wasn't real, her moms had a cough that sounded like too many fucking cigarettes, and her pops was at the bar wasting what little money they had. She'd stay a while. What could it fucking hurt?
Al had remarried. She wasn't sure if that shit was legal, because she wasn't sure they were really divorced, but whatever; Al's wife didn't need to know that. She was Spanish, and they had a two-year old with dark hair and dark eyes, and Sam had cafe with them and watched some servant learn she was rich on a daytime soap. Yeah, ok, and maybe this was what closure felt like.
She went to work at the shop, and pops was hardly ever there, but a few of her brothers were still around. She missed people. Shane and Lou and Cal and Joey. Lin, and she worried how the fuck Daniel was doing. Russ, even though she felt guilty as fuck about lying. Neil, but she knew Neil was gone, yeah? She could look him up here, out in the real world, see where the fuck he'd ended up. He would've checked in during the Gotham bullshit, Pirates or not, so she knew he'd been sent back to wherever, and she was happy for him. It would take time, but she'd get over it, and she didn't reach out to him. Yeah, no, she fucking worked instead.
Paint and body jobs, and she had enough for materials after a few months. She got back to her metals, and she painted with oils that made the whole garage smell, and time passed. It crawled at first, and she cried herself to sleep more fucking times than she wanted to think about. But time passed, and shit hurt less. She wanted to pick up the phone and ring the Donovans less with every week and, eventually, the day came when everything was memories instead of ache.
It took two years to get her first show.
The gallery was in Newark, shitty and unimpressive, but what the fuck ever; it was her show, yeah? Some of her shit sold, and some of the reviews were ass, but there was a real mattress in the apartment now, and her moms had medicine for her cough. Pops was still drunk as a fucking skunk, but he'd never been violent, and she didn't mind him rambling proudly about Shane and Joey and Cal in front of the new spaceheater. She made up shit about how good Tess was, and she told her moms about Iris, who became the best fucking sister ever in her stories. Lou too, and her pops told everyone at the bar about his kids. One's a cop, and the other's a P.I., and life wasn't so fucking bad.
Life was safe, yeah? A little (lot) lonely, but safe, and Jersey sounded like Gotham when Sam stood outside and smoked the cloves that all the fuckers at the shop gave her shit about.
Another year, and she woke one morning and rolled over wondering why the fuck the bed was so hard. They'd moved somewhere nicer, and she had her own room, and she couldn't smell moms' strong coffee brewing.
There were kids screaming and crying, and they weren't coming from one of the other apartments. She opened her eyes, and she recognized the fucking ceiling of Russ' garage, and she groaned. She fucking groaned, but there was a smile forming as she shoved the blankets aside, yeah? Even if she'd never admit that shit.