Don Draper (selfmadman) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2013-09-05 08:36:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, don draper, mara jade |
Who: Mara Jade & Don Draper
What: Mara got a memory refresh, Don might have too.
Where: Don’s Apartment
When: 9 August, evening [way backdated]
Rating: moderateish
Status: COMPLETE
Mara Jade had downed a glass of wine before she had left Potts Tower. It had been downed while she’d been getting dressed, and had no doubt slightly influenced the style of dress, which was not her typical tunic and leggings and boots, or SHIELD uniform, but just a tunic, flats, and her hair piled up on her hair and held in place with hairpin (or two or three). She strode down the streets of New York City blending as naturally as if she’d grown up in the city, and in a way, she supposed, after one had grown up on Coruscant, no city was going to put one truly out of place. Her walk held far more confidence than Mara felt. She knew enough to know what had happened, but it didn’t make the waves of emotion any less challenging to stay upright during. Even knowing what she’d known about herself and Luke had not made the emotional memory of what happened easier to take-in during what was meant to be a peaceful nap. But then was ten years of learning, memory, and relationship growth - or not - meant to happen overnight? Wasn’t the point of time passing that time, well passed? And hadn’t things been uncomfortable enough before the kriffing tesseract had decided to smash them up a little more? She knew the building and she knew the apartment she wanted and perhaps it was the wine speaking but she was incredibly thankful that Don had moved out of Potts Tower. Right now she truly wanted to be as far away from the tesseract and reminders of its ways as she could be. She shifted the bottle of wine that she held, and raised a hand to knock on the door, waiting only a moment before she wrapped her knuckles on it again. “Force damned, you’d better be here Don,” she said softly. “And perhaps have something stronger than wine.” Inside, the TV was on. Don lay stretched out on the couch, remote loose in his hand. The first knock caught him mid-commercial, some music video starring a car he'd rewound and replayed and rewound because it was the closest he'd get to grabbing and shaking it. “Be right there!” he called once the knocking persisted, tossing the remote at the coffee table and heaving himself up off the couch. Behind him the TV continued to scatter images like confetti. “Oh,” he said upon pulling open the door. A blink, a smile that was half question. He was in socks, his shirt untucked. Stubble shading his cheeks. Not minutes ago he'd been tired; she'd surprised him out of it. He took her in at a glance then stepped smoothly aside. “You should be careful.” The apartment welcomed light, even at this hour. The city shone in its windows. It made Don feel transparent. “Keep dropping in like this, I might get used to it.” Mara took a step past him and into the depths of the apartment, giving a cursory glance at the television before turning back to face Don. Her mind discarded the fact of his appearance and the suggestion that he hadn’t been expecting company - Of course he hadn’t she hadn’t been expecting this evening either: they were even. “Perhaps you should,” Mara sat down on the sofa, placing the bottle of wine she’d been carrying on the table. “I’ve no fondness for Potts Tower at the moment.” And then she was on her feet once again her back to Don as she strode over to the windows. No doubt Skywalker would tell her to run through some meditation techniques to slow her mind and settle her emotion - and the unbidden thought only increased her irritation. It was utterly implausible for Luke Skywalker in this city to say any such thing but if he did say such a thing he would likely be right and it was difficult to say on a scale of irritating truths which of those would weight more. “I’m so kriffing over the tesseract,” she said flatly. “It bring us here out of nowhere, brings people we know, but whom don’t know us, or do know us and tell us things that happen in our future, or who we didn’t even exist in the same time with, and then it drops us here. It takes some people back, but some of us it leaves - inexplicably - with foreknowledge of what might happen and expects us to just live with the possibility of maybe being here for Force knows how long. And then,” she turned on her heel and faced him. “Then - just when you think maybe you’ve got your feet under you and maybe you’ve got used to life without a spaceship, and your old job, and the people that actually know you because you’ve got a new job, and there are new people who might come close to knowing a bit about you - then it decides to start you all over again.” “Cut it out,” Don snapped, his voice down to residue: thick, dark. Face in a grimace, body in a flinch. He looked helplessly at her. Anger had him by the throat, sat dense in his limbs. “Mara, Jesus”—he sounded stunned—“get ahold of yourself. Don't track this refugee shit into my apartment.” He lurched away from her, almost smacking into a chair. Paused, back rigid, bearing creased as sharply as his shirt, then raised his arm and knocked the chair clattering across the floor. He blew out a breath, reached to steady himself with the table. “I'm trying—” His mouth was dry. The words rattled. He went whole days just living, Potts Tower a minor landmark in his thoughts. There was no Megan, no love that had been wrenched through the Tesseract and so contorted that thinking about his wife was like walking on a twisted ankle. He woke in a bedroom whose view made decoration superfluous. He worked at an agency whose name he'd chosen. He walked mechanically to the couch. Something had deserted him. He sat down and turned off the TV. “I need a drink,” he muttered, shaking his head. Don’s response startled Mara out of her rant. She stared for a moment at the chair, and then looked at Don, and then as if suddenly remembering that she had brought with her the very thing he was requesting she stepped across the apartment and towards his kitchen for something to pour the wine into. As she stepped back across with the two glasses she looked over at Don again. It didn’t take a Jedi to figure out that something she had said has pushed him raw, nor did it take Jedi-senses to make a very wild guess that it was something to do with what she had said. She popped the cork on the bottle and poured two glasses, offering one to Don and keeping the other for herself as she sat back. She was both enough drunk and enough unwilling to back down that she would push forward despite the appearance that it could be dangerous. Then again she had Jedi skills in a way she never had before and Mara fully suspected that if it came to it, she could easily protect herself against the man in front of her - even if she didn’t particularly want it to come to that. “You got a ridiculous bantha pile of memories too didn’t you?” She’d never been one to dance around things and if he threw her out then he threw her out, but he hadn’t thrown her out yet so she decided she’d risk it. The glass was frail in his hand. He'd taken it by the bowl; the stem shot down between his fingers. In his fingertips Don felt an intimation of fracture. Without looking at her he gulped down the wine. Ducked his head and swiped one finger over his mouth as if concealing a wound. He turned his head a fraction, let his gaze sink into her. Thought to shrug but it didn't make it past his eyebrows, raised then lowered in resignation. His face was drawn, expressionless. His anger had left him and left him with nothing. “Months.” It came out a croak. He'd been twisting the wine glass, rubbing the stem in his fingers like a charm. He set it down. “It's been months.” “Kriff,” Mara said softly. She was silent for a moment as pieces of interactions here and there started to fall into place. As the realization set in that his memories had affected him - and that he likely hadn’t spoken to anyone about them - her anger returned. What was this place that pulled them out of their homes, out of time and out of sync with people they cared about and cared for, and then seemed almost gleefully to disallow them to return to keeping in step? She breathed in and raised the wine to her lips drawing on a Jedi meditation technique that felt very much like a brand new pair of shoes that were certainly hers, but weren’t quite comfortable. Jedi weren’t supposed to dwell in anger (and anger had been the primary vessel in which she had traveled to Don’s apartment) but once here, the vessel had been left outside, and now there was only something else. The bizarre companionship of knowing that they were together in this. She poured him another glass of wine. It went without saying that even if he didn’t want it for the moment, it would be needed before the evening was out. “You’ve been hiding,” she said finally. “And here I’ve found you and uncovered you.” A dream of a memory. In an Iowa hotel he'd woken to a woman tangling her fingers in his hair. She'd moved her hand to his cheek. “You're crying.” He was years away, embalmed in a world he'd outlasted and that waited for him. “That didn't happen,” he'd said. Don ignored the flow of wine into his glass. He'd been sitting forward, his body in a dangerous slant. A jaw about to snap shut. Now he leaned back and shifted toward Mara. A moment of equilibrium, his eyes resting on her. He touched her arm lightly at first. He remembered bracing himself against Lane's dangling corpse. Death clenching the man's body as Don gripped him close: the closest they'd be. His fingers closed, his thumb dug into flesh as he kissed her. It was brief but decisive, a kind of recognition. “You have an open invitation,” he said, mouth inches from hers. It wasn’t exactly as if Mara didn’t know what was coming. She had Jedi senses now, and the ability to sense a bit of mood shift. Those senses were still bizarre - like a new pair of shoes one hadn’t quite worn in yet. That off-putting sensation was laced throughout everything tonight: Her being here, her rant about the happened but hadn’t future, and now Don’s lips on hers. The reaction time must have been only a second, but Mara felt as if it were long moments. Moments in which she sat, lips parted, not moving away from him. When had she last been kissed by any man whom she was not deceiving into believing that she was there for some reason other than that which she was. Don was a contradiction to her, both reminding her of people in the Emperor’s Palace, and intriguing her with a dry cynicism that she couldn’t deny relating to - at times she wondered if he didn’t voice some part of what she was thinking and while they could never be together… “At home I’m engaged to be married. At home you’re married.” Was that a yes, or a no? For an instant she had no clue. He had given her an invitation, and while ten years of dream experience was telling her she ought to walk away right now, nine months of living in a land of future ‘maybes’ was leaving her uninterested in futures that had not happened yet. This was not home: She was not home: Neither was he: And nothing either of them could do would change that. Her lips found his and the kiss was pure Mara: confident and commanding. If she'd said his wife's name. Then it might have been different, Megan more than the happiness wrung from his memories on thirsty nights. Urgently Don's hand slid from Mara's arm to her side, fingers splaying as if he'd needed to steady himself. He felt for a second the cavernous shape of their loss. Lowering his eyes he fought a smile that would have been thin as a paper cut and as bloodless. She kissed him with congratulations dying on his tongue. He tipped her into the cushions, wrenched out of the kiss so he could hear her gasp. “I don't feel bad for either of us.” He was always married back home. Never where he was. |