Russ C/Daniel W: hospitals in Oceans Eleven Who: Russ C and Daniel W What: Visiting people who don't bite. Part II. When: Way back-dated. Warnings: Language, from start.
Russ’s area of town didn’t pretend there was anything more to sex than the violence of it. His corner of Gotham was family homes cheek-by-jowl with sightless apartment blocks climbing toward the city’s gray dreary sky and sex was acknowledged, in the smear of glitter on a woman’s cheek as she came home late with a coat over the top of her clothes, or in a man’s twisted shirt collar before he returned to his family. Everyone had sex. Gotham PD - or maybe the mob, or maybe the crooked politicians - thought of it as a tool, to manipulate.
Russ had once thought obsession and challenge reasonable motivations to do things. Obsession was how you wound up in the same fight over and over again or being stitched up in an emergency room. But the man in the bed didn’t look inclined toward fights that didn’t cease and he rolled over the notion of love like something faintly unusual on the tongue. “He says?” The keen blue of his eyes found Daniel’s once again, the eyebrows lifted. “So he explained it that way? Love can fuck you up.”
And Russ thought it didn’t matter if it was a secret or it wasn’t. Revenge could be taken even without the other person knowing it was revenge, the way you shoved meaning into an action you would have perhaps taken whether you intended to or you didn’t. Big and shocked didn’t do anything to convince Russ, and he shook his head. “Yeah, okay. You ain’t mad. You’re just thinking about it over and over trying to figure out why he did it.”
One good thing everyone could say about Daniel, was that he didn’t think of sex as a tool when he was having it. Once he got in the mood, all that thought went right out of his head. There was plenty of calculation leading up to it, of course, but for Daniel, coupling was a sharp hit of heat and intimacy that (as his new friend would say) was probably more romantic than anything a Hallmark card would come up with.
“He says,” Daniel repeated, confirming. He met Russ’ eyes without qualm, his own also blue, but the shallow tinge of a low sky, clean and sharp. “Love does. That is, I think, part of the definition.” Absolutely a poet, down deep where he liked to think it didn’t show. “I am not sure exactly what he said at the time.” Too fucked up on drink and laudanum, really. But he remembered strange things: the carpet, and the line of Lin’s profile, and the way he folded his legs, and the spots where their knees had met.
“Did it!” Daniel’s eyebrows jumped with surprise again. He took the earbud out of his ear (quite delicately, as if it was made of glass) and gently coiled the wire together on his lap, hoarding it close in his palms in case Russ was thinking of re-appropriating it. “No, I don’t wonder. He said it because he feels it.”
Russ wasn’t Gotham PD and he was too transparent about how he felt to be manipulative. Sex was gut-instinct attraction and the attraction was obvious and the motivation was obvious and when you got down to skin and skin there was little that could be hidden, anyway. You were honest when you were fucking, at least, if you were present. Russ’s thoughts wandered briefly over the variety of reasons you could fuck up and fuck someone without thinking about it: alcohol, drugs, being so mad you collided into attraction without stopping. He didn’t think Lin was an addict: he was too on the fucking nose all the time and Daniel and Sam were too clear and present examples of why not to do it. Mad? Maybe.
He didn’t understand how love equated to wanting to be with someone else. His confusion was mirrored in the solid blue gaze but he wasn’t a poet, or a philosopher or educated and the man in the bed wrote shit people read which probably meant he understood stuff. “But you’re clear that it was about love. And you know he feels that way about you. Would you go and pick someone else up if you love him? What’s the problem here?”
Russ had no intention of taking the iPod away from Daniel: he was too self-evidently pleased that the iPod had gone down reasonably well and he watched Daniel make clear his appropriation of it with a small, pleased look that surfaced on the miasma of thinking that Lin, love and Daniel and men together brought. “Because it looks from here like you gotta problem with it.”
“I don’t know how he feels, exactly. I know what he says. And now I know what he does.” Daniel brought up one hand and ran three fingers over his bottom lip, which was dry and chapped. “Not that it’s a surprise.” Daniel gave Russell a wry smile. “You might not be able to tell, but Lin is undoubtedly hot property in certain circles.” Daniel liked the idea of Russell staring in total confusion as Lin danced around in the center of a glitter-filled galaxy. It was completely absurd, and he liked it.
“I’m not picking anybody up right now.” Daniel put out a palm and patted the bed. “He’s got me locked up in here tight.” With an exaggerated show, Daniel leaned back onto his pillows, the ipod still protectively settled in his lap. “I used to do it to him. All’s fair in love and war.”
Daniel didn’t look like he was ready to pick anyone up even if he could get out of the hospital bed. Russ made a not-entirely-subtle study of the waxy color of Daniel’s skin beneath the lights - although hospitals made everyone look worse but his examination came to a halt as he tried to think about Lin as a hot property. The confusion surfaced without any attempt at hiding it. “My brother,” he told Daniel, “Is gay. Into men.” Like there was another kind of gay out there for men, where you were a man who wasn’t into men. “But I don’t get the difference between hot property and a fix-you-up.” The smile was self-deprecating.
“You worried he’ll do it again?” Daniel was stuck, whether because he was sick or to help him: Russ imagined Daniel, like Sam, in therapy following a hospital stay and Daniel’s sarcasm cutting everyone in proximity to shreds. “What do you mean, you did it to him? Fucked around?”
Russ underestimated Daniel. Most people did. He didn’t look like all that much, with his blue eyes and his soft face, but in the right environment, Daniel could always find someone willing to play. He was good at understanding what people wanted, and while he couldn’t always be that, he could help them pretend for a very, very short while. That was the way it used to be: impress with money, brains, tongue, and that one person drunk enough or lonely enough…
Of course, Daniel had new fears and new problems these days.
Daniel wondered what this unfortunate gay sibling had to do with the conversation, but he waited and got there. Daniel was (apparently) just that type of gay man that wasn’t always into men. He didn’t sound concerned. “Locked him up.. It’s a scary world out there. He stayed with me a long time. Hot property, remember?”
Russ didn’t know Daniel had ever been into women - or that in fact, he still might be. He certainly underestimated Daniel, but Daniel operated in a world that was so remote from the one of grease and oil and an inability to put anything into words that the underestimation was a frame of reference that simply didn’t align - although Russ’s ability to construct even the most temporary of relationships with people was almost entirely based on a notional understanding of what they wanted and what he could deliver. The fragility of love - the fact that it went beyond the transactional give-and-take of being capable of servicing a need - was almost entirely a mystery.
The unfortunate gay sibling understood male-to-male attraction and Russ didn’t, but his eyebrows lifted when Daniel said he’d locked him up. “You dragged him back and kept him there against his will?” His drawl was skeptical: Lin had seemed real set on being where it was Daniel was and he thought Lin was too smart for that syndrome thing, with captors. “You’re making it sound like you made him be with you. But you didn’t, did you?”
“No. But he was afraid, and I certainly didn’t make him feel better. I wanted him nearby.” Daniel rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling in a parody of thought. “I wanted him for myself. He’s entertaining. Smart.” Daniel’s cool blue eyes went down from the ceiling to Russell. “No offense, but you would bore me silly in eight hours. Lin is different. It was good for me to have him around. Mine.” Daniel put up his hand, deliberately disturbing, out in front of his face, and snatched casually at the air. “With Lin, it’s pretty easy to do that. He wants to be appreciated. He’s intrigued by what is hard to reach. So now he loves me, and he’s enough mine that I’m in his head when he tries to get away from me.” Daniel’s knuckles went white, relaxed, then went white again, as he flexed his fist over and over again. His eyes glittered. “It’s not a good thing for him.” He dropped his hand down through the air.
There were not many relationships in Russ’s immediate vicinity that were template examples of how they worked. But the implied selfishness in the man in the bed did not immediately line up with the bond that had tied him stubbornly to the younger, beyond tea and tea-cups and visitors and laudanum. Russ’s shoulder eased an inch or two down against the back of the seat and he listened to Daniel’s reasons why. “No offense,” he echoed, with the expansive shrug and the lilt of a grin that was more relaxed than Russ had expected in a hospital with Daniel, “But you ain’t my type either.”
But there were many reasons someone could be jammed inside your skull and wouldn’t be evicted, even if you wanted them to be. The iPod was forgotten now, so was the mission to come in with gossip and entertain Daniel, even the prickly sense that he was exposed under the keen blue of Daniel’s eyes. “You think you made him, instead of him feeling that way?” It was a guess. “Or you figure you ain’t worth it? That he should want to keep you out of his head, get the fuck away?”
Daniel would be extremely surprised to find Russell’s understanding of relationships to be a healthy one, and by contrast, Daniel had been around the world enough times to acknowledge the existence of love and its many forms. He knew what a good relationship looked like, and had never even attempted to find one himself. In order for a relationship to be healthy, the people in it needed to be healthy too.
Daniel grinned a grin that was reminiscent of some particularly toothy sea creatures. “No offense taken,” he replied, deliberately easy.
As for all the inquiries about Lin, Daniel simply shrugged, and turned his attention downward once more, fiddling with the click-wheel. “Ask him.”
Russ didn’t know one thing about relationships that wasn’t a cautionary tale on how not to go about them but he didn’t think that list of questions was for Lin. That, that bitter piece of whatever was in Daniel that Daniel knew was there, it was biting but its teeth were inside rather than out. He didn’t mind grins that looked dangerous. The man in the bed wasn’t capable of taking a swing at him and Russ wasn’t insightful enough to realize Daniel could probably read him as easily as a third-grade primer and could do more damage with that than a fist.
“Yeah, okay.” The fiddling said drop it, as much as the attitude did and Russ opened a pocket in the jacket and extracted two candy-bars, the kind bought from vending machines the world over. He dropped one onto the blanket in the vicinity of Daniel’s knee and said, unruffled, “I’d ask him, but I’m in here, with you. And I know I gotta bore you stupid and it ain’t gonna take eight hours to get you there. But I hate hospitals and I figure anyone stuck in one is probably bored stupid already. And I got told you liked gossip. So I’m going to get fucking comfortable, yeah?”
And it didn’t matter if the man in the bed wanted company and it didn’t matter that Russ could still hear the squeak and the squish of the nurses passing through the antiseptic-clean hall outside and the rhythm of the machines was still going. The shark hadn’t bitten, the sarcasm hadn’t been withering enough or maybe Daniel just wanted another body in the room for long enough to get bored with it. He’d wait out the next round of meds or the crashing in of sleep and he’d bail after and that was OK.