Trip Ryker (silvertongued) wrote in the_dome, @ 2013-11-19 23:12:00 |
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Entry tags: | 04-14-2017, kenzie, kenzie and mannix, mannix |
Sharing a Smoke
Who: Kenzie and Mannix
When: Evening
Where: The brothel
Kenzie had wandered once she left Lance, but not for very long. It was cold outside, and windy and raining and she hadn’t taken her jacket from the house. For about fifteen seconds she walked in the direction of the greenhouse, but she didn’t feel comfortable being around Skylar when she felt down and miserable. So Kenzie had changed course and finally arrived at the brothel. Walking inside, she shivered and shut the door behind her as rain dripped from her clothes and hair to the floor.
Walking into the house, she saw the fire ahead, with some of the other girls huddled around, warming themselves in front of the flames and laughing about… whatever it was they laughed about. Kenzie didn’t talk to them often. She rubbed her arms and wondered if Mannix was around. Or someone familiar. She thought about finding a room to sleep in for a while, at least.
With the temperature dropping the way it was, Mannix had spent the afternoon making sure everyone was comfortable, that there was a fire in every fireplace and that there was soup in the kitchen. His job wasn’t hard, but it did require that all the girls in the house be happy. For the moment they seemed fine, all gathered in the living room area, reading or chatting, seemingly content. He was on his way down from upstairs when he saw Kenzie come in, dripping wet.
“Hey,” he frowned. “You’re gonna catch a cold. Come dry off.” He started to usher her towards the living area, then thought better of it, taking in her smeared makeup, and instead led her towards the basement. The fire was going down there as well, but there was a bit more privacy.
Kenzie looked up to see Mannix, feeling mild relief. Without a word, she followed him downstairs, her hands clenched tightly together, as if to brace against the cold still coursing through her body. Kenzie was drawn to the warmth, and she stood in front of it for a moment or two before looking over at Mannix. "Looks like a slow day." Obviously. It was rare to see almost all the girls hanging around together.
“Most people aren’t hard up enough to go out in this,” he said, coming to stand by her. Just because he was naturally cold didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy the warmth. “What’s going on with you?” he asked, cutting straight to the point. If she didn’t want to talk about it, fine, but he was at least going to ask.
Kenzie rubbed her hands up and down her forearms again, trying not to shiver too badly. It had probably been stupid to go out into this weather, but she would have strangled Lance if she stayed home. "Lance," she said simply, not wanting to go into too much detail. "His girlfriend, or whatever, came over. I was rude to her, and she was rude to me. Which isn't a big deal. I might have apologized eventually. But he put me down in front of her. Made me feel stupid." Which was something her dad used to do, and Kenzie would have thought Lance would have realized that, but he seemed totally oblivious to shit. Kenzie huffed out a breath and looked up at Mannix. "Things start to feel heavy when you can't even depend on your family to be there anymore."
“Want me to kill ‘em for you?” Mannix asked with a little smirk. He wouldn’t really, because she might regret it, and because that would go completely against his attempts to be good in the dome. Plus, Lance wasn’t all that bad. It just annoyed him that the guy had managed to upset Kenzie. “I’m sure he’s still there for you. Don’t give up on him entirely.”
"No." Kenzie snickered softly. She might feel like strangling Lance sometimes, but literal death was probably too much. He was all she had. Shivering again, Kenzie glanced at Mannix. "I know. I'm just angry with him. I guess I don't get it. Why guys change when there's a pretty girl around. He must really like her if he's going to be a dick to me." Because Lance didn't usually talk to her that way, regardless of who was nearby.
He was glad to get a little snicker out of her and a decline on the offer. It was much easier than trying to talk her out of killing someone, which would’ve been worrisome for other reasons. “It’s usually just you and him, right?” Mannix asked, pulling out a cigarette and then offering her one. “I doubt he’s had to make the choice before, you versus someone else. If you two don’t get along, it can be hard to balance. Lily almost always sides with whatever boy toy she’s with at the moment, no matter how much he treats her like shit. It’s infuriating.”
The sight of a cigarette brought new life into Kenzie’s eyes and she took it gratefully. Leave it Mannix to always know what she needed before she said it. “Usually, yeah. And it’s not that we don’t get along. I’ve only talked to Zania once before today. But I got defensive and said some stuff and she got mad. I’ve been having a shit day anyway, so none of it helped my mood.” Kenzie was aware that she was as much to blame for the situation as Zania was, but it hurt that Lance immediately called her a child just to keep Zania around. It clearly wasn’t just sex if he was willing to put Kenzie down to keep Zania from getting angry. Kenzie lifted the cigarette up to her lips and arched a dark brow. “Some girls like to be treated like shit. There’s not a whole lot you can do to change that.”
Mannix lit her cigarette for her, then lit his own, taking a deep draw off it as he listened to her situation. He didn’t know Zania well enough to give any good advice pertaining to her, but he thought it was probably a good idea for Kenzie to leave and cool off, even if that meant getting out of her own house. “I don’t think they like being treated like shit,” he observed. “I just don’t think they always realize when it’s happening. They focus on the positives and ignore the rest.” He wasn’t saying it was healthy, just that most girls didn’t want to be in abusive relationships. “But that’s not really what I was saying. It was a bad comparison on my part. I meant that it’s usually easier to patch things up with family, so he’s more likely to defend the one he’s got a bigger chance of losing permanently.”
Kenzie was pretty sure some women knew what kind of relationship they were in, and not every abusive relationship was merely one sided. But she understood what Mannix was saying. Kenzie took a drag off her cigarette as she frowned, staring ahead thoughtfully before she shook her head. "I don't like that. He can always find another girl to fuck. I'm supposed to be his family. It's just always been me and him. I just don't like how quickly he put me down in front of her, that's all." She shrugged, wanting to try and blow it off. But after that morning and the talk they'd had, it stung that Lance made her feel so shitty around Zania. Kenzie knew some of it was her fault, but still. Kenzie reached up to pinch at a strand of hair, watching water drip from the end of it. "I guess maybe it could be that it's more than just fucking. But I don't like that thought either."
“Asshole,” he muttered, though he wouldn’t hold it against Lance. They all had it in them, at least some of the time. It just took the right situation to bring it out. “Talk to him about it again when she’s not there. And if he still doesn’t get it, kick his ass.” Because defending the girl he liked was one thing, but putting down his cousin to do so was another. Not that Mannix didn’t fight with family, but he had the feeling the dynamic between Lance and Kenzie was different than he had with Jack or Lily. “What’s wrong with that?” He knew why he normally avoided relationships, but he doubted anyone had the same story as him, nor did that extend to his family.
Kenzie shrugged again, focused on her cigarette for a moment. She doubted Lance cared much at the moment. He was home with Zania, alone, and probably getting naked right about now. She wasn't going to let him blow off her feelings now and then pretend to care about them later, after he had gotten what he wanted. Screw that. Kenzie exhaled a steady stream of smoke before her gaze ticked to Mannix. "Because if he falls for her, I'll probably end up alone. He keeps telling me he's not capable of being in love with someone, but I don't think that's true." Even if she wished it was. "Sometimes relationships can change people."
“There’s a lot of space between fuck buddy and being in love,” he said, pulling an ashtray off the coffee table to sit between them. “What’s your definition of alone?” He often felt like alone was safe, like it kept himself and others from getting hurt. But if she meant alone physically, that was different. On the road, he’d never been alone. Jack was always there to watch his back. There were different ways to be lonely, some of which included having people around but all at arm’s length.
"Yeah, but unless both people are on the same page, it could escalate quickly into more than a fuck buddy," Kenzie said as she stretched her legs. "And Zania wants a relationship. So either Lance strings her along, then dumps her when he starts to feel too much pressure, or he caves and commits to her. It's harder to back away when feelings start, when you're locked in and can't leave." She paused, took another hit from her cigarette and continued. "Lance is the only person who really means something to me. I don't know what will happen if he actually falls for her. I'm afraid all of his attention will shift to Zania and I'll feel left behind. If he can't even step back and see how he treated me because he was more worried about her feelings, what's gonna happen if his feelings for her get deeper?" Her lips twitched briefly and she shot Mannix a slightly wary look. "And since when did you start feeling like some makeshift therapist. I don't mean to dump all this shit on you. I should probably just let it go. I was just afraid being in the dome would change things, and now it feels like things are changing and I don't like it."
Mannix gave a little laugh as he exhaled smoke into the air. “I don’t really have any answers. I’m no good at relationships myself. But being stuck here, you start to grow attached to people. You break your own rules.” Lance wasn’t the only one feeling that pressure and Mannix wasn’t all that sure it was a good thing. Sometimes he wanted those relationships, enjoyed the camaraderie, but other times they felt damaging to the careful walls he’d built. When he let people in, he left room for them to hurt him. It wasn’t a vulnerability he was comfortable with. “You don’t know that he’ll fall for her, but if he does? You deal with it then. Can’t do anything about it till it happens, right?”
For the first time since the dome doors closed, Kenzie began to wonder if something was wrong with her. Sure, she had people she liked in the dome. A few people, anyway. But she wasn't sure she could say she was attached to them. Maybe she was so used to keeping people out that it just came naturally to her now. "Seems like everyone's breaking their own rules but me," she murmured before reaching down to flick some ash from her cigarette. "There's plenty I could do about it," she said simply, not wanting to dwell too long on her inability to really care about someone who wasn't a blood relative. It had never bothered her before and she saw no reason to let it bother her now. "I could finish them off within twenty four hours, if I really wanted to. But I won't, 'cause I love Lance. He already accused me of trying to ruin things for him." She smirked a little at Mannix. "I wish I had your kind of mentality. I don't deal well with things that make me unhappy."
“Eh, it’s good to be able to adapt, but you never know. You may be the only one that’s really better off.” He was starting to notice a trend and it wasn’t very comforting. For everyone that took a chance, that tried to reach out and connect, someone eventually got hurt. Maybe they learned from it, but he had little confidence that anything really lasted. Since being in the dome, he’d seen December and Mickey fall apart, then Lily and Mickey, which barely got started before Mickey got pushed aside again. Now there was Lance and Kenzie, who he did think would hold out over Lance and Zania. Family that had stuck by each other for that long tended to do so, even if Kenzie had little faith it would. “It’d just push him farther away if you ruined things for him,” he pointed out. “And I don’t know that my mentality’s any better. I just don’t see the point in fighting a fight that hasn’t begun yet. If it bothers you that much, you need a distraction.”
She could adapt to almost any situation, to a degree, but Kenzie didn't want to let her guard down long enough to become emotionally invested in someone. "I know," Kenzie said, studying the tip of her cigarette before looking over at him again. "I wouldn't do that to him, even if I wanted to." She grinned briefly. "I thought I had a distraction, but he's been distracted by someone else too. It's all very dramatic," Kenzie said, amusement dancing in her eyes. "No idea where he stands on anything, to be honest, because he's not good at making decisions at all, and seems like he'd just let the women around him tell him what to do. I'd say I need a no strings attached distraction, but that's mostly what you are."
“My distraction isn’t what it used to be,” he said with a small quirk of his lips. He figured it was about time to give up on December, let her come to him if she was really interested in maintaining anything. He liked her, more than he liked most people, but he also didn’t like being disappointed. It would be easier to maintain a friendship with her if he could find himself another distraction. “Sex isn’t the only distraction out there is,” Mannix said. “But there’s no zombies in the dome, so you can’t get the rush from killing them. And the town’s too small to start a proper fight and walk away from it without people knowing you were there.”
To Kenzie, sex was the best kind of distraction, as long as it was good sex. She had taking things from people, but that was also harder to do in the Dome. Not that it really stopped her, but it was such a temporary thrill. "So no fighting, no zombie killing...so what else is there besides sex?" She smirked, nearly finished with her cigarette now. "I don't knit. I don't think I have the right amount of patience to sit through a movie." She couldn't read, so books were off the table. "I guess I'll just have to make my own brand of fun, if I get restless enough."
“I don’t know,” he laughed, stubbing out his cigarette and turning his attention to Kenzie. He could start something here easily, strip her down and take her here by the fire. It would be good, but where was the challenge in that? She just wasn’t what he was looking for, at least not tonight. Despite all his new powers and everything around him, Mannix was growing bored. “I’m thinking about starting a fight anyways just to see what they do to me. Or maybe tracking down some douchebag and testing out ways to change him into a vampire. I’m sure that makes me some kind of psychopath, but I need something to do with my time.”
The challenge would have probably been in that Kenzie didn't want to have sex with him. She wasn't feeling in the mood after the day she'd had, and the weather didn't make things any better for her. But she could relate to his boredom, because she had been feeling it herself lately. And boredom was usually when Kenzie started getting into trouble. "You should," Kenzie said simply, crossing her ankles, feeling warmer by the fire despite her damp clothes. "I don't think you're a psychopath. Sometimes you got to take adrenaline any way you can. Plus, you're a vampire now." She arched a brow and stubbed her own cigarette out. "Does that, like, heighten your violent tendencies at all?"
“More than they already were? I don’t think so, but I was already pretty well stacked on that hand.” If that had happened, someone would definitely be dead by now. Mannix didn’t know who, but he doubted he’d have successfully held off like he had. “That’s what I miss, though. The rush. Being on the edge and knowing the danger, but pushing forward anyways.” Trusting his own instincts and trusting Jack to have his back, or being there to have Jack’s back. It didn’t matter which. He missed it all. “If there were banks to rob, like back in the day? I’d take it.”
Releasing a loud sigh, Kenzie nodded. She knew exactly how he felt. She very rarely got violent unless she needed to, but yes, she missed the rush of being outside the dome, of stealing, of manipulating a situation to her benefit. “You could rob plenty of places, only trouble is, there’s nowhere to run.” Which he already knew. Kenzie rubbed her hands up and down her forearms. “People here seem to have a different mentality than what I’m used to out there… they like order. Doin’ everything by the book. It’s not… it’s not challenging. Sometimes it’s too easy to get what I want, you know?”
“Yeah, they know our faces and, even if we hide ‘em, it’s too easy to figure out who it might be,” Mannix agreed. Which meant robbing some place just for the fun of it wasn’t a good idea. There wasn’t even anything he wanted enough to steal it. “I know. I’m just not sure what a good challenge would be out here.” And talking about it didn’t seem to be getting him any closer. So instead he stretched out and put his hands under his head, laying down by the fire. “What were your favorite things to lift out there?”
Her body was warming quickly by the fire, and Kenzie could feel her muscles start to relax some. The cigarette had helped ease her nerves and anger, and she lifted her hairs to grab her hair, twisting it around to plop on top of her head before grinning at Mannix. “I don’t have a preference to what I take. Sometimes I just feel the need to take something, so it could be something stupidly simple, like somebody’s pen when they’re not looking. But sometimes I see something really pretty, or interesting… and I want it. I don’t care how I get it, but I want it. My uncle called it a… uh… c...compulsion,” Kenzie said, finally remembering the word. “If I’m drawn to something enough, I get kind of obsessive about it. Plus, it’s just fun sometimes to see if I can get away with taking something without getting caught. Or if I do get caught, which doesn’t happen all that much, how I get out of it.”
“What’ve you stolen from me?” he asked with a little smirk. He didn’t think Kenzie had managed to lift something directly off him, but she’d been around enough that she could’ve easily taken something when he wasn’t looking. The question was did she take something that mattered or something random. Because they were traders beforehand, Mannix and Jack had a lot of odd stuff, but they’d managed to sell that which was valuable that they didn’t want for themselves.
Kenzie placed the tip of her tongue against her upper lip, fighting her smile. "Nothing important. I took a silver lighter awhile ago, with some kind of symbol engraved on the side. I like lighters. I have a lot of them. But that's it." She had liked the look of it and it had been easy to swipe. Kenzie always took things that could fit easily in her pockets.
“I wondered where that one had gone,” Mannix said with a little laugh. He had a number of lighters as well. He’d liked the silver one, but it stopped being the one he carried on a regular basis when it began to burn werewolves. The last thing he wanted was to offer his brother a smoke and burn his fingers. “You know about the werewolves?” he asked, looking up at her. He didn’t recall mentioning it, but if she knew about him, he kind of figured she should have a better idea of who and what was out there.
Smirking, Kenzie shrugged. She liked having something that belonged to Mannix, even if it didn't have much value. Kenzie didn't take things for their monetary worth. His mention of werewolves drew her eyes to his face and she nodded. "And ghosts. Weird how I never knew any of these things existed until I got stuck in here. Is someone you know a werewolf?"
“Yeah, I know a few,” Mannix said, since he’d seen the lot of them down at the werewolf encampment on the night of the full moon. He wasn’t going to give Jack away, preferring to keep that little tidbit to himself for now. If Jack wanted Kenzie to know, he’d tell her. “Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and zombies. It makes me wonder what else we should prepare for, and if there’s really any way to prepare for it. And I can’t decide if it’s the dome that’s making these things show up or if the whole world has really just gotten that weird.”
"I don't know. What other kind of weird shit is there? Was it here already? Because there's no way in or out, right? So I don't know," she said again. Kenzie was itching for another cigarette. Then she looked at Mannix, her dark brows drawn together briefly. "What do you mean by the dome? The people in charge? Or the dome itself? How could it do these things?"
“It’s probably gonna sound crazy, but yeah, the dome, the closed environment. Were these things trapped inside with us and we’re seeing it because there’s no way to avoid it, or are they being introduced for another reason,” Mannix said thoughtfully. The first option was more likely, but he wasn’t going to completely rule out conspiracy theories. It was the perfect place to use people as lab rats if someone wanted to. “How can the sun go out? There’s a lot of things we can’t explain, more than before the zombies, anyways.”
Kenzie nodded. “Yeah, that sounds crazy. But crazy doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. That’s just… it feels weird trying to think of it as maybe being true. But even if stuff like that was just trapped inside with us, that still means at some point they got inside and no one noticed. I don’t like the idea of someone, or something, having control over this kind of stuff. Like, making it happen.” Turning Mannix into a vampire, or being into a werewolf. Kenzie sighed and closed her eyes, exhausted from the day. “Just don’t want them touching me. Ever.”
“Hopefully that much can be avoided,” Mannix said, shutting his eyes. Unless there was another batch of wolves or bats coming through, Kenzie should be safe from those, or that was his hope. Even if they did show up again, staying inside would help prevent either. A part of him hoped everyone was safe, that they wouldn’t have to deal with this again, but another part of him wanted the excitement. If there were a way to have the distraction, yet keep everyone safe, he would take it. Unfortunately, he didn’t think he was going to be that lucky.