log: marina & russ Who: Marina & Russ & Nathan What: Russ drops by to take Nathan out. Where: Marina's place in Gotham. When: Recentlyish. Warnings: Attitude.
The door was fixed. The return to her place had been at least cushioned by that reality. Marina slept soundly that first night, and the world continued to turn despite her lingering bad mood. Despite a night before spent blowing smoke at the stars, Marina retired and got up early(for her). It seemed natural and genetic to be irritated by men. The early memories of her mother were bitter and then sweet; screaming French and shopping sprees. Her father, by contrast, was melody and books. He never raised his voice, he never scolded her. She remembered her father like one would reflect on the acts of a benevolent god. Wise and warm.
There was yogurt for breakfast. Nathan complained because it didn't have marshmallows or sprinkles or any of the cute stuff that the yogurt at his daycare had. Marina smoked her cigarettes and watched news from the television while answering Nathan's questions in shotty German(which Nathan did not understand), and eventually she was rewarded with quiet with Nathan begrudgingly took to his yogurt with a spoon. There was a rousing building of trains after that, with tracks that they made span the entire kitchen floor. At one point, they laid a banana peel with a drawn face on the tracks, and Nathan played the hero in rescue.
He took a nap around one, and Marina did some quick wire transfers for her employers while the afternoon rolled in.
Morning was unfamiliar on all the days Russ didn’t have to roll into work and sometimes, the days when he did. He woke late, with the gritty aftertaste of late-night beer on the backs of his teeth and the heavy before-rain feeling of dislike emanating through the house, thick and sweaty. He kicked off the tangle of bedsheets, ignored any impetus to make the fucking bed and left with a bang of the front door on cheap hinges, shower-damp under clean cotton. It was two in the afternoon, warm over his shoulders and the truck from the garage parked high on the curb. Marina would hate it same way she hated the fucking bike and for all the reasons she’d liked that thing back before Nathan had been an argument at the end of a non-stop chain of them.
Afternoon, then as the rust-lagged rattle-stop of the engine choked itself out beside Marina’s place in a cacophony of smoke and exhaust, country-radio dying to a thin steel-stringed whine with a twist of the dial. Russ lit a cigarette inside the shell of the hub, then stubbed it out again with an annoyed exhale of breath, hard through his nose. The kid. Accommodating was like learning how to ride a bike, wobbly as fuck to begin with and picking the foot up off the ground was bad fucking news. But the cigarette was ash before it was smoked, and the clatter of the door slamming preceded boots on solid sidewalk.
He lit up on the doorstep instead, a cendrillon of smoke curled from corner of the mouth, cigarette wedged between lip and tooth and banged the door with knuckles remarkably unbruised. He hadn’t fought and he hadn’t fucked, he was clean and he was sober if hungover, and the smoke was a vice Russ didn’t consider as one at all. He waited on the doorstep amid pots and plants, smelling like uncertainty, cheap shower soap and cigarettes and leather and waiting for a kid who didn’t even know he was his to open the door.
The first thing that Marina needed to buy after the looting took place was a television. She figured, begrudgingly, that it was time to upgrade beyond the antique moving-nightmare that was her previous friend. That thing had been encased in wood and weighed too much to ever be put against another wall in the living room(even in that feng shui book she pocketed from the Gotham Library suggested facing west). Now, something slim and shiny black was in its place. Marina never would have bought it for herself, but when you help your boss unload a semi full of electronics otherwise destined for Sears, the tips are usually plentiful and too big to carry. There was also a new blender in the kitchen, still in its box.
There was some ladies talk show on, the kind where older women squawked like hens over politics and celebrities. Marina watched it with one eye half-drawn in a reluctant squint while she painted her toenails neon green. It was kind of like watching science fiction, and she was more than a little transfixed by the high definition display when that door pounding began.
She stubbed out her cigarette, capped the nail polish, and walked carefully to the door with all of her weight resting back on her heels like that might save her from having to paint a nail twice. She gave Russ the once over with cool eyes through the latched chain, those few inches of view enough to showcase his scrubbed clean and consistently brusque mood. She shut the door, unlatched the chain, and pulled it open before turning to make her way back to the couch without a word.
Of course, the silence lasted only a few seconds before she pursed her mouth and contemplated, untwisting the nail polish cap mechanically. "Where are you gonna take him?"
Russ dropped the cigarette end to smoulder on the tile outside, the absent crush of heel into ash as he stepped over the doorway. Marina’s place always smelled like perfume, cigarettes and spice, and the inhale of breath put this visit the same place as all the other times, familiar right down to the first time he’d smelled it. Boots over hardwood, and he glanced at the TV, new and far too fucking good for someone who did god knows what everyday: stolen, probably. Russ took a long breath, counted to three and rotated on his back foot to look around. He dug his hands deep into his pockets, balled fists against his thighs.
“Kid’s movie.” And he wasn’t fucking telling her he’d looked in the paper at the listings, read off reviews in the kitchen with his back to where Ford was sulking from the couch, tried to think what the fuck a five year old wanted. He liked movies that were simple, the world was fucking saved, things blew up maybe a couple times, and the girl was hot. He figured maybe that wasn’t the kind of movie you took a kid to.
“Door works.” It came out more jagged than he meant it to, broken glass shaved to a point. The old aggravation did not flare to life the way it used to: being crammed the fuck in to a garage for over a week had made it real fucking clear Shane was an ass but not deliberate. Instead it was like an old bruise, yellowed dark. Pure fucking Marina.
"Ha!" The laughter came in the form of a riptide, unavoidable and pitched deadly from the den of her throat. Marina tilted her head back, dark hair spinning stories of witch smoke down her back, like a maned wolf set to howl at the moon. But of course, there was no moon, and she was no louve. "That's fucking hilarious." And she lowered the little paintbrush to her toes again, masterfully applying a second coat of neon.
The idea of Russ, with his dirty boots, his blunt fingers stained with nicotine now(but sometimes the lifeblood of cars and sometimes the warmth of memory), him sitting through a children's movie. Him, sharing popcorn. Him, standing in line for tickets with all of the moms who wore ugly cardigans. Marina drew a breath like a chuckle, the humor winding down as she heard Nathan in the other room, dresser drawers pulling open and then closing with an excited bang. He enjoyed day trips to markets and music stores, Marina thought he'd be maybe even more ecstatic when he found out about a movie. She wrinkled her nose against the idea and the fumes of nail polish.
"You'll make sure he wears a seatbelt?" She asked the words carefully, concentrating on her toes rather than lifting eyes to look at Russ. If she focused on getting the paint just right, she wouldn't feel so conflicted. She really didn't want to process any of the anxious worry at all, she wasn't drunk enough to enjoy the injustice of it. She wasn't going to scream and curse, not in front of Nathan. It left her feeling quite lost, muddy with uncertainty on how to proceed. She simultaneously wanted Nathan to hurry the fuck up and never leave. Marina didn't like the idea of not being there. She hadn't had a choice before, during the riots, but now the outside world was calm and bright, it was a beautiful afternoon, and Marina thought that somehow made it worse.
Distracted with all of those thoughts, she belatedly realized that the brush was too laden with paint, and a glob of green was now dripping down the side of her foot. She tried to clean it up with the pad of her thumb, and succeeded in smudging the polish altogether. Marina cursed under her breath, extensive and French, before she flopped back against the couch. Defeated by lacquer and this monumental situation, she looked up at Russ where he stood.
He could hear the kid in the distance, the thud-slam thoughtless fucking noise of little kids rattling through rooms like ball-bearings bouncing over floors. His mouth tugged beneath the scrape and scruff of blond-burned beard: yeah, okay, being fucked up and close with Nathan enough to know how the kid giggled and the five second warning before he slid into exhausted, sulky screaming, that was OK. He folded his arms across his chest, leaned against the nearest wall and ignored the noise from the TV, but that little huff of breath from the corner and he turned, expecting some kind of spit and spite from the woman painting her nails neon. It was familiar and not familiar, like rolling glass over the flat of his hand: he’d sat there so many times, the smell of cooling tea and acetone in the air, watching the arch of her feet flex. Russ’s shoulders wedged further back against the wall, his mouth pulled down.
“Yeah, he’ll wear a fucking seatbelt.” He hadn’t thought about it past where to take the kid: seatbelts had been like the Easter bunny and Santa Claus, they hadn’t put in an appearance when he’d been young enough to need them. Maybe he wouldn’t tell Marina Nathan had ridden around that mad dash to the garage with only Sam’s arm to hold him in, giggling like it was a game.
He yawned, rubbed the meat of his thumb over the hasp of his jaw. The place was comfortable, even if it wasn’t the place. History hadn’t soaked the walls with arguments and laughter, the neighbors didn’t know them as Trouble. That was pure Marina now. His eyes slid sideways over her at that mini-tidal wave of French, the spill of polish caught.
“You ain’t had problems with that shit before.” She painted her toenails middle of the fucking night, he’d sworn about the sheets.
Possession had always been an issue, formed in a childhood spent collecting baubles. Transient beds exchanged for something real; Marina's sheets always smelled the same(sandalwood and ginger), and never like the rotation of lived-in foster homes from her youth. Gone were the days of wearing hand me downs intended for the girls who'd been there before her. Marina, once eightteen, had carved out a life for herself that didn't allow for the rules of strangers. She didn't abide by bedtimes or disapproving stares. For a year, she'd spoke anything but English, and she permanently did away with the niceties of please and thank you. She knew what it was like to be wanted by strangers, the couples who'd tried to adopt her when she was smaller, and when she was older, it was the men who looked past the warnings in favor of her lipstick. She'd never made it easy for them, not then or now, and if there had ever been an illusion of her being perfect, Marina demolished in broken glass and witchy laughter. The point was that this life was hers, nobody else's, and she didn't have to make a damn thing comfortable to anyone else. In fact, she worked pretty damn hard to ensure the opposite.
Nathan had been hers. The DNA was split between Marina and the man before her, but Nathan was being built in her image. She didn't fucking like Russ coming around to fuck up all of her hard work, thats what it came down to if boiled long enough. It was selfish and stemmed from a craving for control in a life that seemed to lack it entirely, but thats how it was. There were a lot of other questions and concerns tangled up in the mess, ones that obscured the artery issue and let her feel a little more justified when she focused on them.
Russ was going to fuck this up, there was no way he couldn't. He wasn't a man made for unselfish endeavors, and Marina didn't think that he'd done stability a day in his life for a fucking reason. Garage work wasn't exactly the kind of gig that brought pensions and Roth IRAs. And so what if she didn't want to give him a chance? So fucking what if that wasn't fair to Russ. Russ was an adult, she needed to think about the consequences for Nathan. The only problem was that she hadn't figured out how to prevent this, she'd contemplated it hard all day, but had come up with nothing, and now it was happening.
Marina made a face at him, petulant annoyance as she tended the edge of her smeared paintjob with a thumbnail. "How about you mind your own damn business," she snapped over the tail end of his nail polish criticisms. Green fingers snatched up a new cigarette from the open pack on the dining room table, and she eyed Russ hard through the flame of her lighter as that first drag bespelled her lungs. Through the haze of her exhale, she saw Nathan round the corner into the living room, and she swept the gray away with a wave of her hand before setting the cigarette down in a ceramic ashtray so that she could acquire a hug.
Nathan hitched that little blue backpack onto his shoulder and came closer, hugging Marina with a little chin wedged into her neck while he eyed Russ from over her shoulder. Baby blue eyes and springy curls.
Russ didn’t define the kid who had sticky sneakers and a tiny blue backpack into a division of mine-and-hers. He’d left that behind, along with vague resentment that had lingered like stale cigarette smoke before it had blown the hell away and a sense that this was as breakable as thin china, the kind of cups Marina used to drink tar out of and pitch at his head when he said the wrong (right) thing. Nathan wasn’t breakable. He wasn’t a fuck-up and he wasn’t ten and eating white-bread frozen at the back of the freezer by the slice because his mom wasn’t passed out drunk. He had shoes, he had clothes, he talked good even if he talked in two languages. And maybe he didn’t have a retirement plan and he didn’t have anything more than hourly income and no fucking college degree but the kid wasn’t getting anything better shaped like a dad and the thought of that kicked Russ hard in the solar plexus with blunt-toed boots when he wasn’t fucking thinking at all.
He was gonna screw it up. He didn’t understand French, and he wasn’t fucking around and Marina was like nitrate, ready to go off any second and he didn’t know anymore if it was because the only way they’d worked anything out had been in skin and sweat or because she wanted to claw his fucking eyes out but it didn’t fucking matter because part of his paycheck went to a kid who looked so much like his kid brother he could see the shadow of Ford’s own grin, and he’d forgotten most of what not-wanting him felt like the same way empty is far-away when you’re full for a week straight.
He watched Nathan press his cheek against Marina’s, curls tangled together and when the kid slid down, blue backpack lolling on his shoulder, he beckoned, dropping some in height to a knee and it felt fucking awkward but the prompt drew the kid like sliding something into place and the warm weight wrapped itself around his neck. “Hey kid,” he heard his own voice gruff, hasp in his throat warm as smoke, and ruffled a hand through all that fucking curl.
When Nathan pulled away, compelled by Russ' hello, Marina settled back into the couch with an elbow dug sharp into the plush arm. She let her cigarette spiral gray, growing an endless point of ash while it sat forgotten in the tray. Painted feet were propped precariously on the other arm of the couch with the intention of letting her toes dry, and she let a hand become her pillow while her arm folded like carefree. She wasn't going to throw a fit, she wasn't.
The siren gold fleck of her eyes went from predatory to soft as her stare slid from Russ to Nathan, who was opening his backpack to try and show Russ all of the varied and important things he was bringing with him. Marina knew from experience that the bag would contain some hodgepodge of action figures, card decks with missings royalty, and goldfish crackers. "Your inhaler," Marina reminded him, with a nod dropped to the coffee table where the little blue and white device sat amongst the ashtray, some candles, and the green nailpolish. Nathan picked it up with an annoyed huff that she could only assume he'd learned from the tv.
The kid had transferred something sticky that didn’t rub off as Russ rolled his palm over the ass of his jeans trying unsuccessfully to get rid of it. Yeah, just about every plastic figurine on the planet was crammed in there, like they were gonna play soldiers during the commercials that started before the feature and goldfish crackers as if movie multiplexes didn’t have food. Russ supposed Marina had laid an arbitrary ban on all things external, fake-buttered popcorn and candy that came in boxes, instead of half-crumbled crackers that crumbed up the bottom of the bag.
“He use that thing often?” He couldn’t remember him or his sister having trouble much with breathing. Fighting, yeah, until he got hit enough to learn how. Reading, for sure and school was a mixed up pile of problems. But breathing? Lungs worked fine. Ford didn’t seem like he had trouble that way either. The kid looked robust, nearly fucking six and solid, the inhaler was alien and medical, a warning taken along with them for the ride.
“Bring him back later,” another run of careless fingers through curls: Russ didn’t notice the grin upturned to him at his side. He was looking at Marina, coiled in discontent with her cigarette gone to grey. “We’ll be fine.”
When Russ asked after the inhaler, she said no without saying anything. A purse of her mouth, thoughtful and negative when she shook her head. He'd been doing well for awhile now, and he hadn't needed to use the inhaler once since they'd come to Gotham. Marina didn't think the grim fucking weather had a damn thing to do with it, but she was also keenly aware of the fact that cold fronts hadn't even begun to set in yet. Wet winters could bring a whole new set of problems along for the ride. The dry heat of the desert had been ideal for Nathan's lungs, but there'd been issues regardless. The doctors told her that resistance and strength came with age, and she reached over to kill what remained of her cigarette in the tray. Smoke wasn't going to help, and inopportune guilt pinged around like a pinball in her chest, lighting up her eyes with an annoyance that had nothing to do with Russ, even if thats where her stare landed.
"Yeah, well just text me or something before that." She sat up, collected her cigarettes and glanced around for her sunglasses before leaning down to fish their black lacquer from beneath the lip of the sofa. "I'm going out."
He couldn’t picture a world where she was in: where she hung around like smoke in the air and the smell of stale coffee layered over booze and sugar-sweet cereal. The inhaler was a talisman, one that reminded Russ better than brown-paper-envelope bills through the mail that Nathan was sick, maybe made wrong (and some part of him was discolored with guilt, fear yellow as nicotine-cling that all that wishing he’d never become had done him wrong somehow). But the kid by his hip who was watching his mom like maybe wariness didn’t need to be learned, it just was was stocky the way he remembered being as a kid, square like he couldn’t be knocked over easy.
He picked up Nathan, one arm tucking him in at his side like a football. It was easier than it looked, warm weight and the smell of warm plastic, bubblegum-sweet kids shampoo and something beneath it that was just real young and real trusting. They’d go figure this shit out alongside a movie Disney had put out to torture people who still appreciated a good fucking movie, and maybe McDonalds. Anything had to be better than shut into a garage, with a whole bunch of people who didn’t want to be there.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, dismissing the idea: the kid was with him, he was perfectly fucking safe. Russ shrugged as best he could with an armful of kid, “See you.” The door didn’t slam behind them, it barely caught on the latch and then - with a drift of a kid’s laughter - it slammed closed.
Leaving the apartment meant wearing shoes, and shoes made a necessity of dry nails. Marina, as a result, was forced to walk the apartment for ten minutes with hands on her hips and a brewing anxiety that deepened through her chest until it radiated bone. She peeked out of windows like the chance of glimpsing Russ' failure could be caught this early on so that everything might be called off. But she couldn't see Russ and Nathan, or she'd waited too long to look. In the end, all she could do was wait. She made it about five minutes before slipping on some heels, dry polish or no. And even if she didn't know where she was going, anywhere had to be better than a lonely apartment. She locked the door(thx Shane), lit a cigarette on her way out the building, and hit the sidewalk for a long walk.