f (foundling) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-02-25 23:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | !ocean's eleven, *log, cristián martin-argüelles, sam alexander |
Log, Ocean's Eleven: Sam A & Cris M
Who: Sam Alexander & Cris Martin-Argüelles
What: hugs?
Where: Ocean's 11; Neil's penthouse at the Venetian
When: after this
Warnings/Rating: TBD, likely talk of murder, mentions of suicide, assault, etc. + Sam's language
Vegas sprouted in dry lights, colorful, gaudy and bright under naked, bare-bulbed sun, a city flourishing from desert sand like a lush sprawl of green at the mouth of a long-dead river. The Strip was busy. Tourists, girls in feathers and glittering scales, everything spreading out from the epicenter, flat and flatter. It was nothing like the gray, vertical lines of New York, tight, packed and stacked. No snow caught on the corners of buildings built with without windows, without clocks, so you'd never know what was happening outside, eyes on slots. The people weren't New Yorkers either. They looked at you, fat hands on cameras, like the tourists down in Miami, like they just knew you were native here and do you habla English and could you point them toward a nice local place to eat, you know, the ones only people from around here know about? They smiled in Midwestern slices of white, and Cris felt the weight of the morning's ashes like God's thumb pressing down on him, bending his spine into a protective stoop, shoulders up under inside-out button-up and cold, bloodless hands jammed into his pockets. Too bulky because of the bulletproof vest, he couldn't seem to make himself unnoticeable enough. The backspray of blood that painted his pants had soaked sightless into black, but it dotted his light blue shirt with bright prominence—hence the thing being inside-out, but it was still there. He couldn't take it off. He couldn't walk in his undershirt and a vest down the busy sidewalk, not without scaring people in the broad, watery Southwestern daylight. It was only the social discomfort of talking to someone obviously distraught that kept anyone from approaching him. They started, mouths open and smiles at the ready, but shrank back at the sight of a guy in tears and scuttled away to some other guy they thought looked dark enough to try their butchered Spanish on. Siguió caminando, mind humming numb, the empty creaks of a radiator without gas. He didn't think about Micah. He didn't think about Micah—about how he looked like Sam, dead in the dirt, blood almost black as it gushed endless into a swamp of dark hair, skin so pale it seemed to almost reflect the beat of sun that hung crooked above tents. He didn't think about the bleach stink of cordite, the powder burns that would blister on Neil's hands in open evidence. He didn't think about the close-range ring in his ears, ballistic echo throwing sounds gauzy and the rest of the world in over-sharp relief. He didn't think about the words exchanged after, stilted as they were, or how he just kept saying he was gonna go. Neil went with Louis, okay, and Cris? He was just gonna go. He had to go. So he was just gonna... do that. None of it was new—the iron reek of blood, acetone, gunpowder, the sight of a body lifeless and broken. He'd been there before, too many times. But it kept coming around, claustrophobic: reminders of Sofia and the crunch of the train, Padre and his tongue so swollen it didn't fit in his mouth, and so what if he knew the brain inside the body dead in the dirt was Micah's? So what if the guy needed to be taken down? So what? ¿Y qué? It was a miracle Cris didn't question that he got to the hotel and up to Neil's penthouse, the last block or so one that he almost ran down, bile and misplaced panic in his belly, growing, eating him from the inside out, until he got to that door. Past the guards. Into the gold spill of the living room. He said something in Spanish to—Abuelita. She pointed to the bedroom door and he went to it. He tried the knob. It was locked. The acid agitation roiled up stomach walls, into spout of throat. "Mami—" It was only exercised self-control that kept his voice neutral then. Cris took a deep breath. He wet his lips. "Abrir la puerta." |