Re: Gotham: Sam & Russ
He'd sat across from Lou and Sam and watched the way their history parsed out like a rhythm playing point and counter-point, the way he and Ford had ridden off one another like disappointment and anger was as much part of being connected as every-fucking-thing else. They were family, the way family ran like blood. He'd watched Louis's face, watched it contract with worry like he was entitled to be, and yeah Russ didn't reach to pull the pigtails or ruffle her hair, Sam had a bunch of brothers all looking to keep shit away from her door and it felt weird now. He'd had a brother and he'd lost his kid sister somewhere along the way. Now he didn't have either but the mold had broken somewhere along the line and yeah, he didn't need to stop himself from reaching out and pulling pigtails or some shit. She wasn't thirty-something and fragile like a fucking tea-cup in Victorian London and she wasn't a baby but the difference wasn't a lighted match run along sandpaper, it was just curls in wood that twisted around as it grew. It wasn't even Sam.
He grinned without thinking about it, and he ran his palm over the side of the truck after rubbing it along the denim of one thigh: grease glinted but his palm was a clean sweep over paint.
"Engines make fucking sense," he said. It was that easy. You took something apart and you put it back together and it didn't take a lot of thinking. He shrugged, like he'd been no different, no fucking skip in the record but that fucking fingerprint was just Sam all over. He shook his head like he didn't want to fucking laugh and he used the cuff of his sleeve to wipe it off, until the gleam of paint was unmarred. And maybe some of that shit, little as it was made it fucking easy again. Comfortable.
"I'm buying me my own fucking burger," he said and he moved off from beside the truck and yeah, okay he eyed the kid who was pissing around watching instead of doing any fucking work, in passing. "Oil is a - what the fuck you call it, an acquired taste. You can have your own burger." He shouldered past the crowd crammed around the radio and the coffee, and he lifted two jackets off the peg, not just one. "You want one?" The sunlight was sharp and clear and cold as it peeled through the entrance and Gotham outside was Chicago-cold winter.
He left it to her to take one or not, and he said maybe five words to the guy up front who looked like he was in charge of shit, before he was moving off down the concrete toward the entrance and the hiss of traffic over slush out front.