Lem Collier (littlelem) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2019-10-31 20:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | #january 2018, lem, lem x vex, vex |
Who: Vex and Lem
When: night, Wednesday, Jan 3rd
Where: home
Status: complete
Wednesday night saw a shift in Vex's mood so sudden it couldn't even be compared to sobering up. One minute he scrubbing furiously at the walls, ready to tear the whole basement up and remodel it in case there was so much as a trace of blood left, the next he was standing there, staring at the filthy rag in his hands, wondering just what the hell was happening. He'd buried the sludgy remains of the werewolf - no small feat given the frost in the ground - and disposed of the barrels, now he wanted to... remodel the basement? All the paranoia and anger just seemed to seep out of him, leaving very little left but confusion. Sure, he was still insane and a little paranoid but it was all back to a normal and more manageable level.
"Oh Jesus Fucking Christ," he grumbled, dumping the rag in the bucket full of hot water at his feet before wiping his hands on his pants. He'd been cleaning so his skin felt raw and gross and his back really hurt from all the hard labor of the day. How had he not noticed that before? He was more than a little ready to just soak in a hot bath for an hour now but then he remembered how he'd treated Lem this morning when he was leaving the house. Barking at her to stay out of the way as he carried barrel after barrel from the basement to the van. He wasn't even sure what he'd said to her at this point but the feeling lingered, that he might have told her she was useless, that she was weak, that he didn't need her. None of that was true and none of that was anything he'd say if he was in his right mind. Did she know that? He groaned again, rubbing at his face with his forearm before moseying to the stairs. Maybe she'd gone over to Nic's house, he wouldn't blame her if she had. He almost hoped she had because then he could take a bath and think before he apologized.
It had been a Bad Day for Lem. The beginning had been okay, waking up with Nic after his strange dream about the cop, then snuggling and sleeping more and the morning fuck, all of that had been really nice. But then she’d gone home and Vex had been a complete raging asshole to her. It had caught Lem completely off guard, and she’d wanted to help him, to help take care of the mess she’d made, but he wouldn’t let her. He’d been really mean about it too, saying things that cut deep. To the depth that only someone who loved you and knew all your tender spots could reach. She’d managed not to cry before he stormed out, but after that Lem had sobbed until her whole body hurt.
Some part of her had been relieved when she heard him come home, but Lem had taken refuge up in her bedroom, locking the door behind her and diving into the layers of blankets to burrow in and cry some more. She probably slept some here and there, but they were fitful naps. Lem didn’t want to go to Nic’s. She didn’t want to speak to anyone or move, she just wanted to not exist under the weight of the quilts. She knew something was Wrong, but she didn’t know what was to blame, or that Vex hadn’t known exactly what he was saying to her. So, she hid. It seemed like the only reasonable solution.
She might be hiding but it was easy for Vex to see she was home. Her coat was draped over the back of the couch, her big army boots splayed near the front door. There was no way she'd go outside without either of those things when it was this cold out. So Vex washed his hands in the kitchen sink, scrubbed his face with warm water and then went searching for her, walking slowly and quietly through the house as if walking gently could somehow make up for how loud and obnoxious he'd been that morning. He knew exactly where she was before he even found her bedroom door locked. It was a feeling, a connection they shared, and whether it was all in his head or not he felt it keenly.
He rapped gently on the door, leaning against the sturdy wood and listening. "Lem?" he said, soft but just loud enough to be heard. "Are you in there, firecracker?" His kept lightly tapping his fingers against the door as he spoke, soundless and soft. "It's me."
As if it would be anyone else. Lem had cringed a bit at the knock, pulling the inner sheet more tightly around herself as if she could hide even more from him. Vex sounded reasonable again, or at least quieter, and even though it was all muffled, she heard him use her nickname. Her face scrunched up in the dark and she buried it in the pillow under her head. Lem wanted to be angry with him; anger was much easier for her to deal with than this sadness that made her chest ache. If he’d been anyone else, she could’ve just kicked him in the nuts and broke his nose and made them square, but it was Vex. Vex who she trusted, Vex who she loved, Vex who she was meant to be with and serve as conduit for. Their work was important, but she’d always felt like they were even closer than that. He’d saved her. But now he didn’t need her, she was just a dumb kid, she should go home to mommy and daddy and leave him alone. Lem felt hot tears stinging her sore eyes again. After a stretch of silence, she yelled, “Go away!” in the vague direction of the door.
Vex stilled only for a moment before he started petting the door again, as if he could soothe Lem somehow by doing so, as if she could feel that gentle touch against the wood on her own skin. "Hear me out first," he said, not quite asking but his voice still sounded pleading. "I just wanna say a couple of things. Maybe three. I haven't counted yet." He listened again, tap-tap-tapping his finger against the door before resuming the stroking. "I'm not sure what's going on, firecracker, but it ain't good. Can't be good, the way it made me talk to you."
Lem shoved the blankets off of her head so she could hear him better, even though she didn’t really want to. She just wanted him to fuck off with his bad mood and leave her alone so she could pout and give him the cold shoulder for forever. Lem briefly considered climbing out the window and disappearing over to Nic’s, but she stayed put in bed. It was warm and comforting there. She frowned as she listened to Vex, a sullen feeling seeping in over the sadness. He sounded normal again, like himself, but Lem wasn’t prepared to forgive him. Not yet, not after what he’d said. Vex apparently had a mental list of things to say, so Lem stayed silent and just listened and stewed.
Maybe it was the mental bond between them, or maybe it was just that he knew her that well, but Vex imagined her climbing out the window too - even if her combat boots were downstairs and she probably had no shoes in her room at the moment. She'd do it, suffer the pain of climbing down the frosty roof barefoot just to get out of talking to him. She was so quiet, he wasn't sure if she was even in there anymore. "Don't go out the window," he said, just in case. "I'll fuck off when you tell me to and you can get your boots and coat if you need it." He was still patting the door lightly, as if that soothing little touch could travel from the wood to her skin. "I'd do anything for you, anything at all. Go lie down in the snow until you forgive me, you know that, right?"
The anger Lem hadn’t been able to feel while Vex was away bubbled up all at once inside of her, like lava flowing up through a volcano, and she let out a feral little growl. He would do anything for her? Was that so? She launched herself out of bed and stomped her way to the bedroom door, unlocking it with shaking fingers before she yanked it open. “You can go lie down at the bottom of the ocean!” she screamed at him, fresh hot tears starting down her cheeks. “You were so mean, and I was just trying to help! You know I can’t go back anywhere! Home is with you, you giant dickturd!” Lem slammed the door shut, only to tug it back open and slam it again three more times. “And I’m not a little kid!,” she shrieked, loud enough to make her throat hurt.
Vex stood very still while she raged, hanging his head and staring at the floor. The door slammed, again, again, and he was amazed yet again at the power of those small lungs of hers. He considered the ocean for a minute but he wouldn't survive that and, no matter how angry she was, he didn't think she really wanted him dead. Not really... Not for long at least. Lying down at the bottom of the ocean sounded good in the abstract and he could imagine the view and sensation of it, if his body wasn't so frail and human. "You're not a little kid," he agreed and his voice was quiet as usual which just seemed deadly quiet compared to her screaming. "And I don't want you to go anywhere. I can't do any of this shit without you."
Lem didn’t want him dead at all, but she’d never been very good at regulating her emotions, and Vex had never hurt her so badly. “Then why did you tell me to fuck off?” she asked, the words coming out more as a plea than a demand. Her breath hitched a little and she swiped impatiently at her wet cheeks. “We don’t do that, we don’t ever ditch out on each other, rem-member? You’re all I h-have!” A small sob escaped Lem and she wanted to slam the door closed again, but she didn’t. She slumped down to sit on the floor instead, pulling the front of her shirt up to rub at her face and smother another couple of small sobs. She didn’t want to cry, dammit, she’d been doing enough of that already.
Vex moved quietly to sit down too, staying on his side of the door in case she wanted to slam it in his face again. "I don't know why I said that," he said. "It's not true." He'd thought about it some and still not found a reason, only hypothesis and he had a feeling it could never be tested and proven. It was better than nothing though so he took a deep breath and went with it. "I think the mark is testing me and I wasn't strong enough. It made me say and do things that I wouldn't say if I was right in the head. I was paranoid and angry, I wanted to kill that woman who broke my phone. I thought I had to kill her. Now I know I don't, now I'm clear again and I think I need to be stronger if I want to carry this gift. Smarter. I'm not even sure if it's a gift or a curse anymore, Lem. That woman... she has it too and she's evil so what the fuck does that mean?" He was rambling now and he caught it before he went on for too long, stopping himself and re-focusing on the here and now. "Lem. All that shit I said? It was just shit. Diarrhea of the mouth, meaningless bullshit I had no control over. You know you're none of those things, you know. Losing you would be like cutting off my arms."
Lem peeked out from her shirt, sniffling. She let the collar drop and wiped at her eyes with her sleeves, quiet for a minute while she digested that. Vex had had manic episodes before, that was just part of who he was. Lem got them too sometimes. But it was true that she couldn’t remember him ever behaving quite like he had earlier. It would make sense that the god mark was affecting him, right? Lem didn’t know why the god would make him be mean to her, but maybe Vex was right and it was some kind of test. Nothing about gods was easy or painless, it seemed. She wanted to believe Vex hadn’t meant what he said, but the part of her that still stung with the abandonment issues she’d carried with her for years didn’t want to trust what he was saying now. Why was it so much easier to believe the bad stuff people said than the good stuff? “But you’re really you now, and you’re not just saying that?” she asked in a small voice, eyeing him warily. He did sound more like Vex. “Promise?”
The problem with that question was that Vex had felt like himself all day. He had no way of knowing, during the episode, that something was wrong. Everything he'd thought and said had made sense to him so who was he to say he was more himself now than he had been earlier? The only solid thing he had to hold onto was that he liked being this version of himself more, the one that wasn't paranoid, the one that loved Lem endlessly, the one who could be calm and think things through and not rub his hands raw because he thought someone was going to come in and see everything he'd ever done wrong. It wasn't the first time he'd been through something similar, he'd tried so many drug cocktails to cure whatever he'd thought was wrong with him and each one had different effects and side-effects. Who was he? That was a philosophical question, a brain-breaking question, a question that could set a man on the path to self destruction. "I promise," he said anyway and that was because this was Lem. Lem anchored him. If he never knew who he was he'd always choose the Vex that Lem wanted and needed, it was at least one constant he could rely on. "And if you still want me to, when you're no longer angry, I will go lie down in the ocean for you."
Lem wanted to tell him to stop, of course she hadn’t meant that, but he’d hurt her by saying things he apparently didn’t mean, so maybe this was a lesson all around. She wiped at her face and then got up onto her hands and knees to crawl through the doorway to him. Lem pushed his arms to make room in his lap, then settled herself on it, wrapping her arms around his torso to cling. “I don’t want you in the ocean,” she murmured into the crook of Vex’s neck. “Unless the god has like ... made you a merman and you’re happy there. Then I’ll come visit you on a boat or something. But I want you with me. I’m sorry I said that, I was just hurt and mad.” Lem sighed and hugged Vex a little tighter. “I’ll try ... if it happens again, where you’re in a mood, I’ll try to remember and remind you it might be another test.” And she would try not to get her heart broken about it.
A beautiful image of Lem on a tiny little rowboat crossed Vex's mind, picturesque and soothing, blue ocean all around her and Vex, a merman but adorned with tentacles instead of just a tail, leaning on her little boat, smoking a cigarette with her. He supposed he couldn’t smoke if he wasn't human, it could be a magical cigarette or something. "I think if I was a merman I could just live in our tub," he grumbled because the thought of living in the ocean wasn't very appealing. He didn't always treat himself well but he appreciated the modern comforts of living as a human. "If I get like that again you punch me in the teeth," he added, winding his arms around her, relieved she was no longer screaming at him, that she was still his firecracker. "I don't plan on failing his tests again."
Lem pictured a merman’d Vex lounging in their tub, griping about this and that, and it was cartoonish enough to make her smile, which felt nice. The ocean did seem like a shitty place to live, at least this far north. Maybe she could get a big tank and transport him down to Florida or something for more pleasant waters ... but all of that was just silly fantasy -- probably? their god was a strange god -- so she tried to focus on the here and now. Lem gave a soft titter at his instruction and gave the base of his neck a gentle bite. “Your face is so hard to reach ... I’ll give you a good ball check instead,” she murmured. It was a joke, but Lem knew he would understand her agreement underneath. As long as it might snap him out of whatever was happening, she would try. Lem didn’t want to go through all this again. “... did it go all right? Getting rid of ... everything?”
"It was hard as hell and should have waited until spring," Vex admitted and he felt a little more relaxed now that she didn't seem as upset anymore. It would take a while to heal what had happened, his firecracker had been through a lot and the last thing she needed was for him to be a jerk to her but it was starting to heal and that was what counted. "But I think it went okay. None of it is really identifiable as human anymore, not after we boiled it..." He stopped there, realizing he should have stopped sooner, not wanting to talk about the remains as human with Lem, she didn't need that particular reminder. Too late now, his mouth got away from him before his thoughts could catch up. "It's all gone," he concluded. "But we have new problems to deal with. Carson called while I was out on the road, told me he had a prophetic dream about the woman I confronted. Her eyes were red in the dream so she might be evil. I don't know what it means yet." He had mentioned that before but not in detail or said anything about how he knew it. Communication was often weird and vague between them but it felt important to be detailed now.
Lem flinched inside a bit at the mental picture that gave her. She’d known what the chemicals inside the barrels were doing, but she didn’t want to imagine what it looked like. It was a small comfort to know that it probably just looked like sludge now, and nobody would be able to trace it back to them. If you had to have somebody clean up after a murder, a former cop was a good person to do it. She focused on the news about Carson, since that was much more pleasant than sludge-bodies, and pulled her face away from Vex’s neck to look at him. “Nic had the same kind of dream!” she said, her expression lighting up with the discovery. “I was sleeping with him so I saw it too. It was a local cop, he said, one of the ones who arrested him back when he was a kid. And he had red eyes. Nic was gonna ask the others if they’d had the same kinds of dreams, and I guess they did. ... are they warnings, do you think?”
"Carson was apprehensive, he said he got - and I quote - the creepiest fucking feeling when he saw her. Of course, despite his condition, he's kind of... vanilla human so that might not mean much. How did Nic feel? Did it seem like a warning to him?" Another cop. Vex might have to put on his metaphorical normal-cop hat and pay a visit to the station some day, figure out who was running this place, get some chatter going one cop to another. It wasn't an uncommon thing to do, living a whole life in the department made it more like visiting distant relatives just to say hi. Problem was, Vex felt so removed from it all, he didn't think it'd feel very genuine and it wasn't like he wanted to offer his help with solving cases - even if they could probably use an old detective around.
Lem twisted her lips to the side in thought. “He seemed ... okay about it. Not scared or anything, just thought it was weird,” she said, giving a little shrug. Nic was a witch though, so he was pretty far from normal vanilla human, so maybe Vex was right and it was just a matter of perspective. So many things were. “He wasn’t sure what it meant, he was gonna talk to the others. He was more surprised that I saw it too. And then we went back to sleep.” Lem hadn’t asked about the dream again, but Nic hadn’t brought it up either, so she’d sort of forgotten about it until Vex brought up Carson’s. It was all so weirdly interconnected. “So I wonder like ... what your lady and Nic’s cop have in common,” she mused, then nibbled on her bottom lip again.
"The lady was hurt in the fog," Vex said while trying to get his thoughts in order and make sense of them. "Maybe Nic's cop was hurt too. That connects us all. If Nic was calm maybe that means the red eyes don't necessarily signal evil, just power... Or maybe she is evil while Nic's cop isn't and that's why Carson was spooked while Nic wasn't." There wasn't a whiteboard big enough for everything spinning around in his noggin but he wanted one anyway. Maybe the basement would make for a good place to put a proper crime solving board for all this madness. It would give him something to think about when he was werewolf sitting too. He would need photos of everyone but it shouldn't be so hard - most people had social media these days.
Lem thought Nic not being freaked out might have just been from being half asleep and not knowing what the fuck anything was, but she didn’t say so. He was magic, but he wasn’t infallible. That was at least one thing she could be realistic about when it came to their relationship. “Maybe he was hurt, yeah,” she agreed with Vex, her eyes on his face. He always looked even more handsome to her when he was thinking deeply about something. “We can find out. He was black, and there can’t be that many black cops around here. Um ... Solomon, I think Nic said? I can ask again if you want.” Lem wasn’t sure how they would approach him if he might be evil, but she guessed they could figure it out when they got there.
"Well that sure narrows it down," Vex said. Even without the name, a black cop would be easy to find. Point Pleasant was many things, diverse was not one of them. "I guess I can go down there, ask if they have any clues on what killed aunt Sarah. They won't have any answers other than animal attack but it's an in, I guess." He could contain some of his crazy even if he was never sure which parts of him were crazy and which weren't. Stick to meat space stuff for now, don't mention AIR, prophecies, gods, visions... It all sounded terribly boring, honestly. "Hell, they might have a facebook page. Most police departments do nowadays, reaching out to the community blah blah blah. Let's go look'em up, shall we?" He cracked a smile finally, rubbing lightly at her back again. It felt good to be a team again, the world was off its axis when they were on opposing sides.
Vex’s smile made a bright one bloom on Lem’s face too. She definitely felt better now, like things had been righted between them, and she wouldn’t let them go so off course again. Her visionary life partner was going through some things, so Lem would just be there to help support him instead of taking it personally. That was what she told herself anyway. She hugged Vex tight for a moment, then crawled out of his lap and hopped up to her feet so they could go start doing research into this problem. Real answers would be slow in coming, she had a feeling, but at least they weren’t facing it alone.