Re: Gotham: Sam & Russ
It had been long ago enough that Neil's stint as boss had long been subsumed in the internal, shifting memory of the place by a string of Russians, one after the fucking in other in their discontent, sharp Italian suits and the kind of shoes that patted over concrete like they were used to marble floors. Neil was a forgotten stack of paperwork in this place and maybe his absence should have left a yawning chasm but the mob had rushed to fill it, water bleeding through damp sand to blur its outline. Russ hadn't ever thought about loss, or absences, not until Ford's sharply-carved outline had been swiped into nothing.
The noise rose and fell like a flock of birds the minute anything shifted, so when the Doc Martins clipped over cement, Russ was shuffling his ass back out from underneath the underside of the car, furred with rust. He was spackled with oil, and he was already reaching for a rag shoved in his front pocket, and he grinned at her without a hint of regret above that Russ embroidered red on grey.
He looked at her without comment; his blue eyes were keen and sober-clear but didn't linger on the pigtails so much as the denim of the overalls. Yeah, okay: he had habits and he dug himself into them without thinking because shit got easy when it got comfortable and he liked comfortable more than he liked hard. Sam was a bunch of disconnected memories and that was fucking easy - but he looked at her like she was new, an argument from someplace else ringing in his ears and a bunch of scribbled conversations and he looked until he noticed the fucking teenager blatantly staring at her from across the shop, even ass-flat on concrete and mopping the worst of the oil off his palms and fingers.
"Only a problem if I didn't want oil with my burgers," he pushed off the ground with one hand on the side of the paint and sweeping the rag after him until his fingerprints appeared on less-than-glossy paintwork and then disappeared once again. "You keep on your side, you ain't gotta find a liking for it." And a look at the guy trying to fucking be subtle about his shit, and he tossed the dirty cloth in the back of the truck and shoved his own hands in his pockets. "Get the fuck out of here, yeah?"