Adam Malloy ≡ Julio Richter (groundassault) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2015-11-30 19:52:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | adam malloy, billie pappas |
Who: Adam Malloy, Billie Pappas, & OPEN to innocent bystanders (feel free to have any characters who might be present drop by in the comments to witness this glorious display)
What: No-Shave November is over; Adam loses the beard.
Where: The Agency’s front lobby
When: Monday, November 30; afternoon
Warnings: Mild violence, language
If you asked Adam, he couldn’t say that he was happy, but that didn’t mean much. Adam hadn’t been happy for years, it wasn’t something that having a job, friends, and a girlfriend was going to be able to actually fix. What he could say was that some parts of his life made him pretty happy, which was more than he’d had. Drinks with Connor and Colin. Testing out whatever Q was working on in R&D. Dropping in on security to tease Colby. Ganging up with Quinn to give Connor shit about not touching anything in X-Factor Investigations’ office. Finally cracking something on a case, and the sense of victory when all of it came together and they could solve someone’s problem. He’d added, grudgingly at first but later nothing but glad, mastering using Ric’s powers in a new way and feeling the earth embrace him like the mother he remembered from before his sister disappeared. Before he’d recovered from the cure and heard Ric’s voice in his head again, everything had seemed like unrelenting bleakness, so much of it that he couldn’t even be sad or upset anymore, just tired. Now, there were bright spots, ones that he could remember when everything started looking dim again. Sure, maybe his girlfriend wasn’t one of those, and maybe he knew for a fact that he didn’t love her, maybe didn’t even like her all of the time, but that didn’t mean anything. Not everyone could be a bright spot in his life, and Billie was usually more like a thunderstorm, anyway.
She was going to be even more of one than usual in a few more minutes, too. It wasn’t like she and Adam had any plans that night, but Adam had figured out that Billie expected him to be at her beck and call any time she wanted him, whether he was at work at the Agency, at X-Factor, out with the guys, or (most rarely) completely free. It had been easier to just go along with it, at first, and after that, Adam hadn’t really known how to break that habit… not that he’d let her get away with dragging him away from work when he was actually doing something important. Sure, she was pretty. She was a model. That didn’t mean that he was going to follow her around like a puppy and do tricks for her attention. Adam had other things going on in his life, and those other things were a lot more important than walking her dog or getting her a latte. Maybe that made it seem like he wasn’t really that into her, but…. yeah, actually, he had nothing. He already knew Billie wasn’t the great love of his life, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t enjoy having her there for the moment. Sometimes. When she wasn’t trying to be a controlling bitch.
It was tempting to sneak out of the Agency without alerting her, or even just walk out the front door and hope that she would be too busy to call him over, but Adam manned up and approached the desk. “Hey, babe, I’ve got some stuff to do with the guys tonight. Work stuff.” Some of it was work stuff. Most of it was supposed to be drinking and bullshitting about work. That meant it still counted as work stuff, though, right? As far as Billie needed to know, anyway. “I might just crash on Connor’s couch, if it runs too late.” So there’d be no meeting up with her later and having to explain the beer on his breath. Yeah, Adam knew this made him a shitty boyfriend. There were days when he couldn’t stop thinking about how shitty a boyfriend he was being to her, and hating himself for it. This was not one of those days.