the_lawless (the_lawless) wrote in the_colony, @ 2010-05-13 07:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | ^ week 07, bridget mackenzie, leo parker, | bridget and leo |
Week 7 - Wednesday
Character: Bridget and Leo
Location: Siena Suites, Lobby
Summary: In the early morning hours when Bridget can't sleep after a nightmare, she finds Leo in the lobby where the two share sodas and ideas.
Rating: PG for scary dreams.
Bridget shifted uncomfortably in her sleep, a frown clear on her face as her dreams recalled unpleasant memories...
"Hang in there sis, you're doing great," Bridget squeezed her twin's hand and put a wet cloth on her forehead to help keep her cool. Her sister had been in labor for over twelve hours now, and Bridget was getting worried. Despite her words of encouragement it was obvious that Calleigh was having trouble. If it went much longer the doctors would probably insist on a c-section.
Calleigh just groaned as another contraction rippled through her. "I can't!"
"Yes you can!" Bridget insisted, her tone almost desperate. "You're going to deliver these babies and you'll be fine, you'll see." The very idea of losing her sister was terrifying to Bridget, they'd just lost their mother weeks before to the same swine flu virus that Calleigh battled now at the same time she was trying to bring new life into the world. Calleigh's husband was fighting the flu as well, and had been kept out of the operating room.
Suddenly her perspective shifted as the dream changed to nightmare. Now she was the one with the enormous belly, lying helplessly on her back in a dimly lit room someplace that she didn't recognize. Her whole body ached, most especially her lower back, and she was tired, so very tired.
"She's not going to make it," A man's voice sounded behind her, almost bored. "She's been in labor most of the day and no closer to squeezing out the brats than when she started."
"Go ahead then, if she's not going to survive to have more then she's no good to us now." The second voice was also a man's, but she didn't recognize either of them.
A man with a bloodstained gown came into view but shadows obscured his face. A flash caught her eye and she focused on the scalpel in his hand, gleaming in the dim light. Bridget tracked it with a growing sense of terror as it moved toward the top of her rounded belly. "This will all be over soon."
"No!" Bridget sat bolt upright, chest heaving and a whimper escaping her throat as she woke from the nightmare. She wrapped her arms around her middle and tried to calm down. "Just a nightmare Bridget," She told herself, "not real." That was the worst one yet, she could only hope that they settled down and went away once she felt more secure here at the Colony.
There was no going back to sleep for a while after that. She stared up at the ceiling for a few minutes debating whether to just lie there until sleep did reclaim her, or get up and get out of her suite for a while before trying to go back to bed. The idea of just lying there alone with her thoughts and worries didn't appeal to her, and a few minutes later she was up and about.
After a shower and a quick bite to eat to satisfy a growling stomach Bridget stepped outside into the cool predawn air. It was still pitch black out aside from the overhead lights in the walkway and the light pollution from Las Vegas in general, and she idly wondered how much longer Vegas would keep the brilliant lights glowing with no one left to maintain them as she made her way downstairs toward the lobby. Hopefully someone would be down there who felt like talking, otherwise she might end up playing a game of pool by herself.
It was the first time that Leo had been on guard duty without Walker in tow since he'd joined the colony, which was probably for the better. He'd been given a lot to think about the night before, some of which was weighing very heavily on his mind, leaving him distracted enough without having to tend to the little boy. Of course, there was still that edge of worry, and though he trusted Alice wholly and completely he couldn't help but think about outside factors that she would be helpless against. Typical parent.
Alice was right. Leo needed some time to himself whether he knew it or not, and he was going to have to start letting the others help him out.
He was stationed behind that tall lobby desk, a deck of card splayed in front of him in a game of solitaire, but when he spotted the faint outline of a figure in the darkness outside, Leo reached for the shotgun under the desk and held it fast in his lap as the stranger approached the lobby.
The historian. He recognized her right away, her facial structure unmistakable even in the low light that flooded outside from the lobby windows. Leo had seen her in passing countless times, but had never introduced himself; well-known for his tendency to keep to himself. Leo watched as she came through the door, sitting still as a stone with his gun in his lap and his free hand rested on a few of his playing cards.
Leo's alertness hadn't gone unnoticed, and Bridget appreciated that he was keeping watch over their supplies. Word would get out sooner or later about the group and their store of riches, so it was good to have at least some security keeping an eye on things.
"I see I'm not the only one up and about," she offered with a smile as she entered the lobby. "You're Leo, right? Hope you don't mind me barging in like this, I couldn't sleep and decided to get out of my suite for a while."
"Nah, it's fine," he admitted with a brief half-smile of his own, studying Bridget from a distance. Having company while on guard duty was sometimes a welcomed treat. It made the time go by faster, and on nights like tonight that's exactly what he needed. Leo put the shotgun away and turned his attention back to his cards, sliding them together into a whole deck again before he shuffled them. "You're... Bridget?" He'd remembered her name from the meeting, and from the occasional mention of her here and there. Leo didn't used to be good at names, but now there were so few to remember.
"That's right," Bridget acknowledged as she came around to the back of the front desk and pulled the other chair toward him. They'd run across each other once or twice but hadn't actually interacted before now. "You've got a little boy living with you, right? I think his name is Walker."
She eyed the shuffling cards, glad to have something and someone to pass the time with. Maybe after a hand or two she would try and force herself to go upstairs and get more sleep. Proper rest was important, she knew that, especially now that she was pregnant. It was just hard to do when you woke up from nightmares after a few hours.
"Yeah," Leo nodded. He gave the cards one last shuffle and watched as she decided to join him. Though there was a slight sense of discomfort that came over him when Bridget pulled up a chair, whether it was because he didn't know her or because she mentioned Walker, he scratched at the back of his neck and started dealing the cards. The last time he'd played cards with another person was when Jared was forced to stay the night with him, and that seemed like a long, long time ago.
"You know much about kids?" he asked. It was nice being able to talk to Alice about Walker, because she actually knew what she was talking about. Hopefully, Bridget would follow a similar trend.
"Only some babysitting of my oldest brother's kid and some of my younger cousins," Bridget responded, not sure if that was a help or not. She'd come around to the other side mainly to let Leo keep his view unobstructed, and the desk allowed for some small protection if something bad were to happen. "I haven't had any of my own yet. He seems a nice little boy from what I've seen." Very odd that he hadn't said a word yet, but they all dealt with the trauma of the end of the world in their own way.
"Alice suggested I talk to you about him, actually." Bridget hadn't planned on having a discussion about teaching, but the opportunity was there and she might as well get it out of the way. "She wondered if I might be able to tutor him."
"Do you think you can?" Leo looked up at her and pushed her cards a little closer. His eyes occasionally strayed to look outside and scan the darkness. "You know he doesn't talk, right?"
"I don't know, but I can try. My focus was more on undergraduates than gradeschoolers to be honest, but there's no such thing as a University anymore." Bridget took up her cards, looking them over before glancing back up at Leo. "What are we playing?"
Leo shrugged his shoulders slightly and looked at the cards in his hands. "I dunno. Blackjack, I guess," he offered the girl another smirk. He had to admire her honesty and oddly enough he appreciated her uncertainty. People who were overly optimistic, in Leo's opinion, were being unrealistic and setting everyone up for a heap of disappointment. With a glance up in her direction, he laid down a card and started stumbling his way over idle chit-chat. "So... ya like it here so far?"
Bridget studied her cards, then the one Leo had on the table, and tossed one of her own. She didn't think she was so good at idle chitchat either, especially after that nightmare, but she'd give it a shot. "Yes, compared to how I've been living the last several months it's a huge improvement. Everyone seems nice, and more importantly, sane. Relatively speaking that is." Nobody was completely unscathed.
"Yeah," Leo agreed with a bit of a smirk, but the expression dwindled as he thought more on Bridget's past and what it might have been like. Even though he didn't used to be so nosy, now Leo had developed a taste for getting bits and pieces of peoples' stories and putting them all together. These were the people he'd been living with, and he wanted to know all he could about each of them. "So why can't you sleep?"
It was obvious in the way he said it, and the perpetually exhausted facade Leo always seemed to be bearing these days that the man himself slept very little.
"I sleep like a baby," Bridget defended herself with a wry smile, "I wake up crying every couple hours." She shrugged, not really wanting to go into detail but figured the man deserved some explanation. Some of it she chalked up to hormones from the pregnancy, but the rest... "Bad dreams mostly. Revisiting past events and nightmares of bad things that could happen in the future." Dying in childbirth or having the children cut out of her, for example.
"I still manage to get some sleep, but it's in chunks."
He couldn't help but half-smile at Bridget's clever play on words, but other than that all Leo did was nod. The hand he'd dealt himself was a pile of crap and he eyed it with nothing less than disdain. "It'll get better, once you get your mind on something else." Leo didn't really know what he was talking about, but he was trying to be reassuring.
Bridget huffed, not sure whether to be comforted or amused at the reassurance. It wasn't like he knew what most of the nightmares were about after all. "Hope so," she finally said after a moment. "So what about you? Same as me or are you just an insomniac in general?"
"Both, I guess." Leo placed another card on the desk and drew from the pile. "I've always had trouble with sleep, ever since I was a teenager," he glanced up at her and brushed a bit of his hair behind his ear, but it came sliding right back into his face. Maybe Alice was right. He needed a haircut. "But it's gotten a hundred times worse since... well, you know."
"Yeah," Bridget looked down at her cards rather than meet his eyes. She'd seen and done things in the past year that she'd never imagined in her wildest dreams or nightmares during normal times. "It's a tough thing, living through the end of civilization as we knew it." The young woman drew a card from the deck, then grimaced before placing it immediately on the discard pile.
Leo straightened a little in his seat, having finally picked a decent card the last time, and got rid of one of the more pathetic ones. "Yeah," he echoed. "And this place is great and all, but everyone's crazy if they think it's gonna stay that way. When they finally give word that it's time to go, I'll be the first one out the door."
"We will have to leave eventually," Bridget nodded in agreement. She eyed his discard with interest and picked it up from the pile, replacing it with one of her own. "I'll be happy to enjoy the creature comforts as long as we can though. A few years from now we might look back on this place fondly."
"Probaby," Leo admitted. It wasn't that he didn't like the suites, he was just worried that people would get soft; forget that outside of their little sanctuary were several patches of hell that were only going to spread across the country. Of course, it was possible that Leo was projecting. He was the one who kept letting his guard down. Then he added with a half-smile, "the kid sure likes it here. I know that much."
"Who can blame him?" Bridget smiled. "For a kid his age this has to be paradise. No school to worry about, all the video games he can play and all the DVDs he can watch, a pool, what's not to like?" Of course, there was the matter of his parents being dead and all the things he had to have seen on the road, and Bridget's smile faded a little as she thought about it.
"As much as any place can be a paradise anyway."
Watching Bridget as he traded a few cards on the desktop, his smile was slighter than hers but it faded just the same. Their thoughts were obviously running along parallel tracks. Leo leaned back in his tall chair, resting the cards in his hand against his stomach while he spoke.
"Walker's smart. Real smart," he added. "And bored most the time. I guess if you think you can help him learn a new thing or two it sure isn't going to hurt anything."
"Well, we can try it and see what happens." Bridget was glad for the slight change in subject and latched onto it eagerly. "Searle suggested that I try to make it a game for Walker to help get his interest. Maybe it will get him talking, who knows?" She wasn't going to try and force the boy to talk, that much was certain. He'd start again in his own time eventually. Until then she'd try to work around it as best she could.
It was hard to concentrate on the cards, and she frowned when she looked down at her hand again. "I think you're going to whip me at this game."
"I think we both suck," he smirked and tossed his horrible hand on the desktop like he'd given up completely. Leo thought a little more about what Bridget said, and then a little about Searle. He'd seen the kid around the complex but had never made any effort to talk to him again. His trusting nature made Leo somehow uncomfortable. "I can't think straight anyways."
"I'm too tired to concentrate on my cards I think," Bridget shrugged and tossed her cards. "Maybe we can try the game again when we're both more awake." She put a hand over her mouth to cover up her yawn. With a little luck she'd be able to fall back asleep soon, but it was too soon after the nightmare to try.
"Are you up here every night? All by yourself?"
"Yeah." Leo gathered the cards into a semi-organized stack and shuffled them just for the sake of having something to do with his hands. "Well," he corrected himself, "Me an' Walker, usually. But he's staying with Alice tonight. First time I spent a night away from him, actually." He forced a smirk and tried not to linger too much on that particular though. Alice had assured him a dozen times that the kid would be fine, but still.
"Aww," Bridget couldn't help the smirk that crossed her face. "Letting baby out of your sight for the first time, that's so sweet." It might not quite be the same thing, but his reaction was so cute she couldn't stop herself from making the comparison.
Leo snorted and rolled his eyes, but his expression was less forced now and more sincere. He slumped back in his chair, letting Bridget have fun at his expense. Normally, he might have taken offense at her tone, but there was nothing about this woman that made Leo feel the need to get defensive about anything.
"And probably not the last," he said. "I've been told I need time to myself." Leo raised his brows and watched Bridget, awaiting her response.
"Probably can't hurt, though I don't think pulling the graveyard shift for guard duty qualifies as a 'Daddy's Night Out'." Bridget's amusement was clear, but she eased up on the teasing a little. "I don't know what would qualify these days unless you had a hot date with somebody." She had no idea if he had hooked up with anyone or not, but he must trust Alice quite a bit to allow Walker to stay overnight in her suite.
"Hot date," he said, bemused. "Yeah, dinner and a movie, right?" Leo smirked some, considering there probably hadn't been a functioning matinee in months upon months. But there was a new confidence in his voice, a kind of smugness; a possible revelation that he might not have had any 'hot dates', but he did have a somebody. "You've been at the suites a little while now," Leo commented. "Any hot dates lined up yet?"
Bridget's smile faded away, Jake's absence and probable death brought front and center. "No, no hot dates." She said quietly, wrapping her arms around her middle. It had only been two months, no respectable widow would start looking at other guys that way after two months.
Leo went silent, his own expression fading into sobriety the moment hers had. Had he been the apologizing sort, he would have expressed it right away, despite not knowing exactly what he had said wrong. He had a pretty good imagination, though, and didn't press with any questions. Instead, he grew awkwardly quiet and shuffled his deck of cards, his gaze shifting between Bridget and the window.
"So, movies." Bridget spoke up after a few minutes silence spent pulling herself back together. "Have you told Zoe what sort of movies you'd want to see if she does a movie night?"
"Not really," he answered. Leo couldn't help but think back on his singular encounter with Zoe, where neither one had exactly mentioned movie night. Grateful for the change of subject, Leo slid down from his seat and moved to grab a small cooler from under the desk, where he'd stashed a couple of sodas. They weren't freezing cold, as Leo had wanted to use a minimal amount of ice, but they weren't warm, either. Producing two cans of 7-Up, he offered one across the desk.
"Movie night's a stupid idea," Leo confessed.
Bridget accepted the can eagerly, it had been months since she'd had a soft drink and who knew if she'd ever have another? "A stupid idea? What makes you say that?"
"We've got more important things to worry about." Leo popped open his can and took a drink, setting the soda down on the desk before he sat back down. "It just seems like a silly waste of time, I dunno." He thought a little more on it and added, "... just seems like everyone keeps forgetting--" Leo cut himself off, not sure how to formulate his thoughts to words. "I dunno."
"I don't forget," Bridget shook her head before taking a sip of her own drink. "I don't think it would be possible for me to forget. But we all need a little time now and then where it isn't so front and center."
"Well, the craziest shit happens when you least expected," Leo replied. "At least from what I can figure. It's when your guard is down that you get the biggest shockers. Any other time you can be bracing yourself." Of course, that could get exhausting, and Leo was the best example of that.
"We all need a little down time Leo," Bridget insisted. She was a little surprised at herself defending ZoƩ's idea, but it made sense to her. "If we all stay on guard 100% of the time we'll crack up. As long as we have someone on guard duty to keep an eye out we'll be all right." She hoped so anyway.
"Then let me be the one to volunteer," he smirked. "For guard duty, I mean."
"You can't do it all the time, Leo," Bridget protested. "I'm sure you'd want to see a movie with Walker at least once wouldn't you? We might not get a chance to do this much longer. Once we move electricity is probably going to be scarce." Or non existent, but she tried not to think about that.
He hadn't ever really thought about it like that, probably because he wasn't really a parent. Leo had stopped to consider, from time to time, that Walker would probably grow up without the things that most kids had--or used to have. True, they watched plenty of movies over at Alice's place, but it was possible that they'd never get that theater experience again.
"Maybe," Leo said, for the sake of stubborn pride. It was a lot easier than admitting to being wrong, and he still wasn't entirely sure he was wrong in the first place.
"That's the spirit." Bridget recognized the 'I'm a man, I'm not going to admit I'm wrong' tone in Leo's voice but chose to ignore it. "Nobody's saying you should do it all the time, just that maybe you should try it."
Smirking softly, Leo took another drink of his soda and suddenly found himself wishing that it was something else. Something with alcohol, to be specific, even though he had turned down a drink at Alice's a few hours earlier.
"What we really need around here," he only half-joked, "is a fully stocked bar." Taking another couple of drinks from the can, he set it down on the desktop and leaned forward to rest his forearms on his knees.
"I'm sure you could find some booze around here," Bridget rolled her eyes, "what with all the nightclubs and casinos. If the rest of you are willing to humor me on expending time and gas on books then I'm sure we can figure something out on liquor."
"You'd be surprised," Leo answered, obviously experienced in the topic. "I think drugs and alcohol must have been the first things pillaged from this city." Most of it was stolen away during riots in those last days, if Vegas was anything like most of the other cities Leo had passed through.
"Who would have thought Sin City would have a scarcity of drugs and alcohol?" Bridget shook her head in disbelief.
"I know," the man smirked some and tilted his can toward Bridget's in a mock toast. "Let's put that stuff at the top of the list."