Marina was more prone to counting luck on lottery tickets than finding any kind of saving grace in a steady paycheck. Money came and went like gusts in a storm, and Marina was too transient to try and board things up to be salvaged. Her bank account teetered on a perpetual zero with stacks of cash hidden in oatmeal canisters like normalcy. Functioning that would have only made sense to someone who grew up the way that she did. It didn't seem too odd for her to occasionally switch out the license plate on her car, to get texts in the middle of the night, crooked cops, and envelopes full of money. It felt like nostalgia, Good Housekeeping magazine for the morally fucked. But Gotham wasn't Paris, and it wasn't Cape Town. If Gotham had any charm, Marina couldn't recognize it beneath the soot. And now that winter was settling in, it made humid blood go cold. She wasn't made for these kinds of Northern cities. Her mother always preferred Rio for the winter. Vegas hadn't been bad, it'd been stable in its swelter… but this was frost on thin windowpanes and blankets stacked so thick on Nathan's bed that it must have been crushing. When the heat kicked on, the vents smelled old and musty and Marina hated it. She told Nathan not to get too comfortable. She told his wide eyes and trembling lip the same way her parents had always told her when they tossed stolen trinkets and silk scarves into luggage trunks. There was always some place better to lay one's head, a better scam around the bend.
Not getting comfortable meant not bothering with much of a birthday party. Not getting comfortable meant not making friends. The apartment building wasn't rife with neighbors that had children, aside from a few screaming babies that Marina wasn't inviting for peace of mind. A couple of kids from the Russian babysitter's illegal daycare gig came over. There was chocolate cake, half destroyed on the kitchen table. So now the quartet of children were hyped up on sugar and laughter, and Marina didn't mind so much because their mothers would be along soon to collect them. Nathan's squeal of discovery during a game of hide and seek made Marina glance over her shoulder from where she'd stepped out on the cramped little patio to have a cigarette. She was bundled up in coat and scarf, the first hints of snow whirled in the air and Marina told herself soon, she'd find something better soon. When children raced, rambunctious and shrieking through the living room, they came dangerously close to colliding with that new television, and Marina shouted into the living room, Haitian reprimand. Even if the other kids didn't understand the language, the tone was real clear, and they stopped running, shrinking around the corner toward the bedroom with muffled laughter.
Russ thought of Gotham as home in the same transient sense he had considered Vegas home: it wasn’t, it was dust or dirt, thick heat or sweltering smog but it wasn’t home in a way that twisted you up inside and made you think of white fucking picket fences. It just was a place that was gradually more familiar, crammed fucking streets and a nightlife that lit the place up in neon and red lights. He’d considered leaving, bailing on smog and vigilantes and streets full of violence after dark but there was something a little too clean still about Marvel, like shiny bright people lived shiny bright lives safeguarded by shiny fucking-bright superheroes. Russ didn’t think of himself as the kind superheroes gave a shit about, maybe that was where Gotham strummed on him like a key-change on an out-of-tune guitar.
The garage was a pit and he knew it was a pit: it wasn’t comfortable like a broken-in pair of jeans the way the old place had been. Here, the money smelled like it had been folded some place no one wanted to see it see the light again and the men changed over quick, like parts switched out one for the other. But it put cash in his pocket real easy, and he wasn’t ready to give up on easy right now, not when the other side of the door wasn’t real clear on what it would do for him if he moved on over.
Besides. Marina lived here, a swirl of ink stirred into water, or a grease-stain: intractable and unmoveable. He wasn’t going to ditch Nathan and he wasn’t going to leave the kid behind, not when he’d stuttered over his own name in that stupid fucking card like Russ and Dad were interchangeable when they’d never been before and they never were meant to be at all. He didn’t drive close up to the place, he walked, the subway system rattling on his way out the exit and the bite in the air was colder than any place else he’d lived. Hands in his pockets and soap-fresh instead of the lingering trace of alcohol, and his jaw scraped clean and when he came up the stairs to Marina’s place, he heard the kids behind the door.
He didn’t knock, he opened first, stopping in the midst of a churn of a game of tag played louder and more covered in sugar than he’d ever played that young.
Cold air bit through the living room, it fluttered curtains like the apartment drew a breath from the sliding patio. Like once the front door opened there was room to breathe, and Marina turned from the sliding glass door to glance his way. The profile of a slender warrior wrapped in a patchwork blanket, she looked at Russ in wordless assessment. He looked clean, which she associated with sober, so instead of telling him to get the hell out, Marina flicked her cigarette off the rusty ledge of the patio. The cramped apartment reabsorbed her, and she shut out the cold with metal latched sliding glass. The blanket slumped off her shoulders, a shawl soon to be discarded, and she draped it onto an overstuffed chair like it was part of the upholstery. Her sweater was disco gold, same as the gigantic hoops on her ear lobes. Black jeans. Fuzzy socks instead of heels, like domestic was something to be tried on, weather depending.
She started to walk toward him, but Nathan made it there first. He slid on the carpet in his socks, more animated and talkative than a year ago had allowed for. Six was a lot different than five. In a blink, he was just a little taller, and Marina thought that every day Nathan looked less like her and more like a Campbell. She was trying not to be resentful about it.
"Russ, Russ!" Nathan bounced on socked feet with the kind of excitement that friends brought and parents didn't. Marina never saw him wide-eyed and enthusiastic when she came to pick him up from from his school or the babysitter's. Marina got the yawns and the contemplative requests for dinner and the occasional vibrant story about something learned that day. She watched quietly, positioned only a couple of steps away from the patio door as Nathan grabbed for Russ' hand and smeared him with chocolate. "Come on, we're playing freeze tag, but you have to be quiet because--" And then Nathan glanced over, noticing the mother who had already expressedly said no tag. He paused, innocent but still guilty when he sheepishly said, "Hi, Mom. Russ is here."
"I see that, now why don't you go wash your hands before you ruin Russ' only nice shirt." Nathan smiled wide, one tooth on the bottom wiggling loose with the edge of his tongue, mischief confirmed before he darted down the hallway to probably pretend to wash his hands. "And no running," Marina called after him before her feline gold eyes settled on Russ, quiet once again.
Russ’s smile was slow but it was real the minute that Nathan skidded to a halt in front of him. It spread wide and deep enough to mark out where the dimples were in Ford’s cheeks, the kind of smile that didn’t often see the light beyond smoke-drenched back rooms and drunken hands of cards. Marina looked like domesticity had tangled her up like barbed wire: Russ pictured her in heels and on a wave of perfume and he caught the smell of birthday-cake sugar and candles, cigarette-smoke and incense twisted up together instead. But the second Nathan bounced in front of him like a rubber ball over cement, his attention was drawn, keen and sharp like the blade of a knife.
His hand was smeared sticky with something, but he grinned at that conspiratorial look on the kid’s face, charmed by the idea of a game that was banned from the place and Russ sobered in the same wiped-clean way Nathan did the minute Marina’s approach padded kitty-close enough to take the game away. Russ didn’t see himself in the shape of Nathan’s face or the color of his eyes: he saw Ford and he missed Ford badly enough to want to see him just about any place. Nathan’s wide, easy grin reminded him of Ford’s open one and the tooth wiggling just made him think this shit didn’t need to be complicated.
Marina’s stiletto slid home, his one good shirt mussed from Nathan’s reaching and the look of expectant happiness slid into the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the set of his mouth as Russ turned towards her. “Chocolate, huh?” He looked past her shoulder toward the kitchen, to the debris of the kids, “You make it?” There was some kind of warmth at the back of that: Russ didn’t think Marina could boil fucking water, let alone make a cake from scratch. He wouldn’t have known himself.
There was a coldness in her that gradually melted, never quite obvious until it was just a little more gone. Russ didn't scowl, and Marina uncrossed her arms without landing hands on her hips. There was a high-pitched shriek of laughter from the direction of the children's hide-out down the hall, and Marina glanced that direction briefly while tonguing her lip. Thoughtful, but of reprimand, her lioness slid back to Russ. When he asked about the origin of the cake, her bitch fortitude cracked, segwaying into a silent film smile. No laughter, but amused. "Hell no. I want him to enjoy himself, not get food poisoning." Marina cooked breakfast and late night snacks, she flambeed things that probably weren't ever intended to be flambeed… but anything in between wasn't in her realm of attempting. "Lady down the hall offered, I bought the boxed cake mix."
"You want some? Probably has kid spit all over it." What was it about kids licking frosting from their fingers and going back for more? As long as they kept their hands away from her clothes and her curtains, Marina didn't really care. The raucous children were remanded to Nathan's little part of the apartment anyway. She'd scrub up any stains on the wallpaper later, probably after too much wine at 3 AM.
"Wasn't sure you were going to come by," she added. Marina cocked her head back for a glance to the patio like she was already thinking about another cigarette. Then back to Russ, assessing his body language briefly before she murmured, "You don't look fucked up, at least." She supposed that was something, it was more than she'd furiously given him credit for in the past several days.
Nathan came running through a moment later, interrupting nothing but a budding awkwardness in the living room. He had that little game console in his hand, the one that arrived in the mail the other day, and he waved it at Russ in passing. "Look at what Mama got me, Russ!" And then zoom, he was racing back to his fracas of daycare friends in the other room. Marina, expressionless, looked to Russ again in wait. She didn't look sheepish or guilty, had she ever? But she did tilt her head and teethe her lip like a fearless astronaut prepared to ride directly into the fucking sun. A little shrug of admission substituted for any excuse.
The frost that had set in like winter sweeping closer through Gotham’s streets momentarily cracked: not quite spring but a recidivist autumn setting in. Marina surrounded by kids was still a head-fuck: she’d never been the center of a crowd unless that crowd had been buying her shots and her one hip was cocked against the pool-table in a shitty bar like a loaded gun. The kids shrieked bloody murder, and Russ didn’t crack a grin but he looked thoughtful as his gaze followed Nathan out of the room and he wiped the chocolate mess on his hands on his jeans, a streak of dirt over clean blue denim.
You don’t look fucked up and he wondered why it was and when it was they’d started looking for signs and symptoms, spindled cracks in armor. Marina stood on socked feet and cataloged whether he looked hungover or he didn’t and Russ ran his clean hand over his jaw as if checking for left over stubble. No, he wasn’t fucked up, he wasn’t even laboring under getting over being fucked up. He’d been sober for a straight number of days, longer than he’d been in a stretch. “I said I’d come,” but he didn’t have any kind of bite to it, not when there was no shit being tossed down in the middle of the room. Just Marina looking absurdly like how he’d pictured moms at parties when he was a kid.
And then Nathan flicked past, and when Russ’s clear blue eyes lifted to Marina’s again, there was something cold in them, the winter settling in like snowflakes. Yeah, she’d assumed he wasn’t going to show and either that meant taking credit or maybe she just couldn’t figure out the parent thing. “So,” he said, casual and strained and the furious note held back against his teeth, “You couldn’t figure out what to get him or you just figured you’d take something else from me?”
Marina met his casual expression with one of her own. There were some lines around his eyes, creased like resistance or grit teeth. Marina was no shrinking flower, not even when on trial, not when justification for every sin ran like holy water through her veins. He was pissed, it made his blue eyes arctic even if he didn't raise his voice. Campbell eyes, and she thought about the possibility of one day having Nathan look at her like that. Hating her through heredity, through patronage, through what he might one day misread as a bad upbringing or just not enough of a good one. She looked at Russ' eyes and there was a moment where gravity felt questionable, like she could stare through time and glimpse the day that Nathan too would look at her with cold disappointment, fury clamped tight in his throat. Russ didn't go volatile, and she didn't provoke him for it. There was laughter in the other room, and from where Marina stood, there was only unburied dislike. You couldn’t figure out what to get him or you just figured you’d take something else from me?
She didn't even smile, there was no comedy to be found in his question because it was so fucking absurd. "What the hell have I ever taken from you?" She knew that he couldn't have been talking about the money, after the years of difficulty that his absence, his walking away, had put her through. In Marina's mind, what she'd taken from him had been hers a long time coming, a tax on his capability to be jackass.
"You could have brought it by yourself. Why would I tell him it was from you when I--" Inhale taken, steadying, the stare she planted on him was sharp. Her goldfinch eyes weren't angry, but there was something there. An intensity that burned until she found the rest of her words. "When I never know if you're going to skip out from one day to the next. Get drunk for two weeks or get pissed or just…" She snapped her fingers like vanish. "I don't know where I- we ever stand with you. Your answer to everything is walking away or whatever."
Russ figured mothers and disappointment went hand in hand, the certainty that you grew up and what seemed cool and different and made you someone when you were five and had all the knowledge that the grown-ups had - about paying bills and buying groceries and shit like that - became an anchor to drag at your heels. He had had affection for Marina’s brand of unprecedented chaos: the way she moved through life was like a whirlwind, dust skipped up in her wake. Shit wasn’t boring when Marina was around. But all that stacked up and he looked at the box-mix cake, the socks instead of stiletto-thin heels and somewhere down the line she’d become the kind of mother who tried to keep her kid’s disappointment furled tight.
Yeah, okay. He could understand birthdays needed to be more than crumpled paper and tissue-thin hopes. He’d been six once, and he’d wanted some piece of shit car more than he’d wanted anything in his whole fucking life. He’d known his birthday and he’d watched it pass, held-breath certain something would come at the end and it never had. The gift had been a stretch of thoughts, a collection of ideas before he’d given the fuck up on knowing shit about kids that age and asked but he’d hoped, same way anyone did when they picked out a gift. And it was subsumed, railroaded by birthday celebrations that came with homemade cake. It didn’t make fucking sense: surely Marina knew better about what Nathan wanted, what that car was for him.
“You took that,” he said simply, thumb notching the belt loop as his fingers dug into his pockets and he rocked his weight back over his heels and watched Nathan go. Didn’t have to be a whole lot but that was gone. “I figured he’d want to open presents real early,” Russ was distant, the look in his eyes was somewhere - sometime, probably - far away. “Didn’t think I needed to hand it over for him to know it was from me.”
But it dug, that little spun-out sting with the gold flaring in Marina’s eyes like he’d lit a match to something without giving it a second’s thought. He’d drunk himself clear of Ford’s leaving, the assumption that he was never going to hear from the kid brother again. He hadn’t known it was two weeks: hadn’t fucking cared, either.
“I ain’t walked away from him since before all that shit in the streets went down,” he said and it was cool and simple, distantly factual. They’d screwed themselves up, but they hadn’t screwed the kid over and Russ smiled easily, without buried implication as Nathan scooted on back into the room to wave his new toy and tell him all about his mama’s present.
Maybe Marina was too sober, too clear headed for an end of the day where chaos reigned. But the chaos was a storm of frosting and and the ear-piercing shrieks of children who got away with fun for possibly one of the few, if not the last times in their lives. The Russian babysitter gig was entirely illegal, and it was dirt porridge cheap. Marina had seen the mothers(and very rare father) that dropped their kids off at that place. Some were minimum wage single parents that didn't have a choice for better if they wanted to keep that minimum wage check coming every two weeks, the others were sometimes gone for days on some binge or in jail. The kids here this early evening were not the kind of kids that got to have fun very often, Marina had known enough of their kind in foster care. As for the nice kindergarten Marina had gotten Nathan into? None of those kids' parents were going to venture onto this side of town, free cake or not.
But yeah, Marina was sober enough to get it, or at least think she got it, which was the same thing for her. Did Russ feel like she took his parenting away with that toy? Couldn't he see the way that Nathan lit up like Christmas morning on the days that Russ came around? Didn't he see that Nathan was beginning to look more like Russ and less like her?
"Uncle Russ picked it out for me, bebe. He knew you'd like it." That made Nathan grin his tooth-wiggle grin at Russ, and it felt like a small stab that Marina should have been expecting. Russ was a boy, and boys obviously knew how to pick the best presents for other boys. Marina waved Nathan off, who escaped around the corner with a shrug that said he'd be back after a bit more playtime.
The look she gave Russ wasn't cold, but there was dislike. Dislike from the honesty, from wounds she'd thought were long closed. "I grew up with presents. No reason for them, no holiday needed. My papa would bring me home jewelry and dresses and little crowns just because. All the time," she shrugged like the warmth of his generosity meant nothing now. "When my parents went away, I got nothing ever again. The first foster family I stayed with gave me things too, they wanted me to be comfortable, to like them. And it took me years to realize why I hated them for it… because it wasn't from him. He never contacted me again, looked for, nada." She looked away, reflecting. "He never should have given me shit if he was just going to go away and forget about me."
Inhale taken in, and history lesson obviously over, Marina shrugged like she was over it. "If you want cake, take it with you." He seemed pissed enough, she figured he was probably leaving.
Maybe he was too goddamn tired of trying to redraw the lines and maybe he was just too fucking sober for this shit but Russ’s face was inscrutable as Marina dragged out history, dusted it off and shone it up with the side of her sleeve. Marina’s father had been a shit, and so he was carved out to be the same way. Toss the cards another way and the only parent who’d stuck around long enough to know his name had been just as shitty, just as inclined to dust off her hands and say fuck you. So what? Trying wasn’t fucking good enough until he’d proved years down the line he wasn’t going to walk the fuck away? He hadn’t signed up for kids, and maybe Marina’s father had. His mom hadn’t and she hadn’t even tried. He was tired, and he’d yelled a lot of shit on a street-corner real recent and he didn’t much feel like taking on more.
He didn’t know good kids from bad kids and he didn’t know the difference between kids from the different sides of town, they all yelled the same way and Russ didn’t know what to look for that said they were rich or they were poor or somewhere in between. He grinned at Nathan, companionable as shit, and that lifted real easy, the lines at his mouth and the corners of his eyes dissolving real brief. The kid was funny and the kid was sharp enough to fucking cut you, and when he disappeared, Russ dug both hands back into his pockets.
“Kicking me out my kid’s birthday party?” That shit wasn’t pissy. It wasn’t even etched out of irritation. He sounded reasonable, the kind of question that had one kind of answer and he was watching the kids chase each other the fuck around Marina’s apartment like they figured it was the last fucking time they were gonna have to do it. “Fine. Kid,” and he summoned Nathan with the simple expectation Nathan would come, and he ruffled all those fluffy curls because he was within reach. “Heading out. Save me a game, OK?”
"I wasn't," she started. Her annoyment when it came to Russ was week old bread. She tried to pick the old unsalvageable parts away, scrape off the mold to make it edible, but he just… was Russ. To her, he was the same. She felt different, through life with Nathan and all that brought, but some parts of the world just stayed. And Russ was one of those stagnant forever things that she'd never figured out who to push or pull without detonating him. He didn't even seem angry, Marina could handle angry. She looked at him, gold eyes going antique dull when he summoned Nathan over for a hair-shuffle. Nathan, of course, insisted on a hug against Russ' leg.
It wasn't a stab in the back and it wasn't betrayal. She'd shared with him something personal and something that she might factor into the whys. When his immediate response was to leave, it wasn't a surprise. Rinse, recycle, repeat. He was always leaving when shit didn't go his way or the truth came out. He didn't want to talk to her about his brother being gone, and it lit back to over six years ago when he hadn't wanted to talk about the positive pregnancy test. Just out the door, always.
Loving Nathan made her want to trust that things might be different where he was concerned. But she couldn't count on trust. Not when vanishing for two weeks in a bottle could be shrugged off by Russ like the present was all that mattered and the past never stacked up. Marina had been able to handle when Russ was there and then gone, it was a cycle that worked for her, but it wasn't going to work for a kid. She forced a soft smile down at her son, the boy whose every single important memory she had of him was just her and him like against the world could be sweet. "Go put the rest of the cake in the fridge, baby," she told him in their secret language. And Nathan beamed once more before going to do so.
She didn't even look at Russ when she reached for the shawl blanket from the back of the chair and draped her shoulders in it. She was halfway out onto the patio, lighting up a cigarette when she said, "Yeah well, you know the way out." He always did.