Re: Gotham: Sam & Russ
Shit didn't stay the same whether he wanted it to or he didn't. He'd walked away from a night which had gone long and dark and been full of the kind of snapping argument that broke like an electrical storm. Now he wanted shit like days on the calendar and the kid to want to spend time not counting down the minutes until he was back with his mom. He'd wanted shit to stretch out and get comfortable with Ford around, and Ford had gone when the hotel had figured out that was what he, Russ, least wanted. Now Sam. Russ didn't know what the hell he wanted, but uncomfortable wasn't one of them.
He shrugged into his own jacket and he walked quick, boots crunching over the ground and the oil-stains on the toes bleeding into damp until it was all spilled-oil dark. "I didn't think you wanted anything." What Sam wanted Russ figured he'd never know without being told. She'd wanted Neil and she wanted art, but the bones of that walking around were pretty fucking bare. He knew what he'd been told in ink on a page and he looked at her now, the distilled bright blue of Vegas summer and direct as she'd been blunt. He didn't stop, he kept walking and he swung right as the gas station broke out into road.
"When you stopped being a pain in my ass, I liked having you around," he said, mild as if this were not an admittance that was as excruciating as rooting around and extracting an organ instead of a statement. "So looking out for you was habit. But you got a lot of people looking out for you. And you look out for yourself." The lights changed and he moved off across stopped traffic towards a joint squatting over a junction like it was a temporary installation, instead of place that emitted warm, thick, meaty smells every time a door swung. The glass was smoked and the light over the door was fizzled to nothing but it wasn't a bar, just a place that looked like it might be.
"I liked talking to her," he said, both hands in his pockets and a shrug that said obviously. "To you. But I didn't see it because I wasn't looking for you in her or her in you or whatever. The same." He held the door, and a gust of scented warmth hit, rolling over the cold. "So start the fuck over, OK? Nothing weird."