Re: Gotham: Sam & Russ
He blinked at philosophy crammed in over the sticky tables and the menus and the sea of ketchup swirling around her plate in globs of unappetizing red and his mouth quirked just once. And if he hadn't believed it, the walls built between the private and the girl with the pigtails and the mouth and the hands that ran over anything that wasn't nailed the fuck down and out of sight, then yeah, okay that took away the bricks. Russ knew his reality real well. It was everyone else's he fucked up as he waded through. "You learned that shit when you skipped time," thinking it through and it was a building block but a different one. A different construction.
He noticed the shit with the food. He noticed the shit with the food because it was obvious and because he'd watched her get thinner like stripping down to fighting weight to deal with the world. But he leaned his chin in his palm and he ate his own fries one by one and he left the beer untouched because something about frosted glass in the middle of the day looked really fucking good and really shit, like two heartbeats sliding into one after the other. It was small shit, but Daniel's memory and Marina doubled up and played devil-angel in the pit of his stomach and it was easier than reaching for the glass and saying fuck it.
Blunt laid it out on the fucking table and Russ didn't rock back so much as he rolled weight onto his elbow and looked at her across the table. Blunt and he took blunt on easy because there was no insinuation or reading into shit that needed to be done, it was spelled the fuck out.
"The box burned the fuck down," he said, flatly because it had, there wasn't going back to shit, shit had gone and the door had shut. His little sister was a memory of blond hair and pigtails and walking in dust with a piece of bread folded in half over fake butter-spread sprinkled with sugar and he wasn't fucking kidding himself anymore that Sam would keep away the memory of a kid sister he'd walked away from knowing he'd done exactly that. The hotel wasn't even the lit match, it had been Ford who'd stood there with it. The hotel was the gasoline and pigtails didn't mean jack shit.
He looked at her, flannel, denim and give-no-fucks sat on cracking plastic and the puzzle pieces didn't fucking do up to anything. He'd wanted to fuck her when she didn't have a face or a name, when all he'd known was that she wasn't Tats, even if she'd been for a night - just scattered puzzle pieces and a woman who treated being someone else like there was shit to shed off with your skin. He hadn't looked at her like that since she'd been a noisy presence in a garage someplace in Vegas no one could get to anymore and then she'd been messily in love with some man who didn't deserve her. There was a line and it had been drawn somewhere between being mad as shit she'd gotten away with something in a hotel room and and when she'd fallen in love with a man he didn't like for a bunch of different reasons and it shimmered like some kind of heat-wave over asphalt, glazed danger.
"I wanted to fuck you when I didn't know what the fuck you looked like for real except that you weren't a kid with ink up to her fucking tits." Honest and the heat-wave rippled and he leaned back until the plastic squeaked and picked up the glass because the conversation sauntered past philosophy and into blunt and he swallowed. "Now? I ain't your brother. I ain't asking you to fuck me. I asked you if you wanted a burger because I wanted a burger. No double-meaning shit. No little sister crap and no bribe you with a burger for a blow-job in the john shit either. We cool here? Because I wasn't asking you for shit other than company."