Abigail Hobbs is a survivor. (laniidae) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2013-08-08 21:53:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, abigail hobbs, samandriel |
Who: Samandriel & Abigail Lecter.
What: Painting!
When: Right after Samandriel's intro to the comm (8/2ish).
Where: Samandriel's house.
Rating: PG-13 for mentioning of Abigail sleeping with her guardian.
Status: Complete!
Abigail was exhausted. The Dreams were making it hard to sleep, making it hard to breathe. Her father had clients, so she couldn’t take comfort with him. She also didn’t want to worry him with her nightmares. So she went to check on the one person in the whole wide world that made her happier than any other.
That was why she was knocking at Samandriel’s door, purse full of nail polish and a tote bag of homemade gelato that she and her father had made the night before. Samandriel was a little ball of light, and she was excited to see him.
Father was in a meeting with his publisher up in LA and Mother was...well, Samandriel didn’t quite know where she was. At work, he supposed. It really didn’t matter other than he’d been sitting and reading in the expansive quiet of his home when there was a knock at the door. He marked his page and got up.
Really, he hadn’t been expecting to see Abigail there, but he couldn’t be more pleased. “You could’ve just walked in, you know,” he teased gently as he stepped aside to let her in. “It’s practically your house too.”
“That would be rude,” Abigail grinned. She reached out to wrap her arms around him, pulling him close. “I just needed to see you,” she sighed. Shutting the door behind her, she cocked her head to the side. “Your parents are gone?” The house was nearly silent, everything echo-y. It almost felt like a museum.
“As per usual these days,” Samandriel said, hugging her snugly. “And you’ve an invitation to just come in. Do you need me to write it down officially?”
“I do. I’d like it in calligraphy. But seriously, I’d just feel weird coming into a room uninvited.” She ran fingers through her long hair, sighing raggedly. The silk scarf around her neck matched her eyes, and she moved to sit down. “How are you? I don’t know if I’d be okay being alone in such a big house.”
He frowned, but said nothing about the scarf. If she was more comfortable with it on, he’d let her keep it on, but she really didn’t need to. “You’re family,” he said and that was that on that subject. It wasn’t rude.
“A little tired. I should be practicing, but I honestly don’t feel like it so I was rereading Joyce.” Samandriel flopped on the couch. It wasn’t like they were going to be interrupted at any point.
“Portrait of the Artist?” Abigail pulled her legs up to her chest, letting her chin rest on her knees. The scarf wasn’t around her neck to hide her scar on that particular day, but it was on to hide a bruise that couldn’t be anything but the hickey that it was. She didn’t want to talk about it right away, especially since thinking about it still sent shivers down her spine. “If you want, I can massage your hands.” She knew how his fingers could hurt, so she’d taken to rubbing them out, as well as the areas between his fingers whenever she was around him.
“Ulysses, actually.” He looked over at her bag, insatiably curious. “What’d you bring?” he asked, but handed her his hand anyway because he was pretty sure she wasn’t going to let him get away with not giving her something to do while she talked.
“Just some light summer reading?” Abigail massaged the offered hand and smiled. “Pomegranate gelato. Daddy and I made it last night.” Thank god they’d gotten it into the fridge before they’d done rather unspeakable things on the kitchen counter. The gelato was still safe and untainted. “It’s really good, nice and creamy. I thought you might want something sweet.” Her fingers focused on the ball of his hand, rubbing gently.
“I read it last summer,” he confessed quietly, a slight blush tinging his cheeks. “I just wanted to make sure I understood it properly.” Samandriel closed his eyes and sank back into the couch. “It sounds good.” He was, in a way, a bit jealous that her dad actually did things with her still. Some part of Samandriel really did wonder what that was like.
“I don’t know if anyone understands that book,” Abigail smiled. She smiled at the way he seemed to relax. “We should have a sleepover,” she blinked. “We can have the gelato, make a pizza, watch movies and gossip. I brought nail polish, I could do your toes.”
“I don’t think you’re meant to, but I wanted to be able to at least keep up when college comes,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked over at her. “Just not pink this time, okay?”
“God, I hope you don’t get some sort of sadist teacher who assigns Ulysses!” Abigail laughed and snuggled close to him. “I brought forest green for you, actually. And if you don’t like that, there’s a bunch of other colors too.”
“Can we do that kind of bluey green you have?” he asked, shifting his arm over her shoulder to keep her closer. “It’s almost peacock, but not quite.”
“Of course. I love that polish.” She burrowed closer into his arms, letting her head rest on his shoulder. Their unspoken closeness, physical contact without sexual electricity - it was a comfort to her, and she closed her eyes. “I’m so tired,” she murmured, and she sounded far older than her seventeen years.
Samandriel kissed the top of her head, let his nose rest in her hair for a long moment. “More dreams?” he asked softly.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “It’s ... hard, just because the people in my dreams are the people in my life. So when in my dreams my bio dad ... you know.” She let her voice trail off, not wanting to give her dream father’s actions any words. “It messes with my head sometimes.”
He rubbed her shoulder comfortingly, trying to be as much as he could for her. “I worry about what happens if I ever start dreaming,” he confessed softly. He imagined that he probably wouldn’t be anything special there either, but who knew.
“I hope you have good ones. Someone’s bound to, right? Maybe you’ll dream you own an animal shelter where you don’t have to put down any of the animals and you get to cuddle kittens all day.” Abigail’s tone was fond.
“That would be nice,” Samandriel said, smiling softly. “I just hope I’m not some...demon or something, you know? Can you picture that?”
“No, no, baby, you’d be an angel.” Abigail smiled, looking up to kiss his cheek. “No matter what you dream. I haven’t killed anyone, so I’m not a killer. Our dreams can’t define us.”
He smiled at her, kind and gentle. “No, but they can mess with us pretty harshly.”
“My scar hurts sometimes when I wake up,” she confessed. “Like I just got it and the stitches are still in.”
Samandriel stroked his hand through her hair. “I still think you’re beautiful, even despite all this pain. I just...I wish I could take it from you.”
“I don’t. Because if you had my pain, I’d want to take it from you.” That made her giggle, and she sat up a little to remove her scarf. He could see the bruises and scars there. Samandriel wouldn’t judge her.
Samandriel reached to run his thumb gently over one end of the scar. “I’d like to think I could handle it okay.”
Her eyes closed, and she bit her lower lip. “The scar’s not the bad part. The scar’s what dream me deserves,” she whispered.
“No,” Samandriel said, holding her gaze intently. “Nobody deserves this. No matter what they did, nobody. Not you, not dream you, not even Mr. Simpson and he’s pretty much the most obvious bigot I’ve ever met.”
“In my dreams,” Abigail murmured, cuddling closer to him, “I made my biological father kill other girls so he wouldn’t ... “ Really, it was hard to talk about. Her real biological father</i> wouldn’t ever have touched her, somehow in her dreams, he was always touching her. “Eight girls, Samandriel. I deserved some sort of retribution.”
“You don’t make anyone do anything,” Samandriel said. “No one is responsible for anyone else’s choices.”
“I - she, the Abigail in my dreams, she asked him to.” Abigail shook her head. “She asked him to find a way to not touch her, and then she lured the girls to him.”
Samandriel shook his head, pressed a kiss like a benediction to her forehead. “That doesn’t mean anyone deserved it, not you, not her not those girls. Not even him.”
Her blue eyes grew damp with tears, and she buried her head in his neck. “She killed someone too. She gutted him. I don’t know who it is in the dreams, I’ve never seen him before, but I still remember what it felt like.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and genuinely meant it. Then again, it wasn’t like Samandriel ever did anything without all of him. He reached over to the totebag. “Some gelato? Something sweet for both of us?”
She nodded, wiping at her cheeks. As long as she remembered that it was some girl in her dreams and not her, that helped a lot. “I’ll go get spoons, we can eat it out of the container.” She stood up and went to the kitchen.
Samandriel smiled for her, because she needed someone to smile with in her life. “We should paint,” he said as he got the container out of her bag. “Not just my toenails, I mean.”
“Oh?” She smiled as she came back from the kitchen with two spoons. “I’m not very artistic, really. Daddy said he loved it, but I know it was like pulling teeth when he taught me piano.”
Of the pair of them, Samandriel knew he was the one with the artistic interest, but that didn’t seem to matter. “I’m not talking like portraits or whatever. I just mean...throwing paint around.” He shrugged and then smirked deviously at her. “Literally.”
Abigail grinned, her eyebrows quirking up mischievously. “Oh really. Won’t your parents pitch a fit if we get things messy?”
Samandriel shrugged. “It’s my room. It’s not like they’ll even notice and we’ll just use a bunch of sheets and stuff so that Julia doesn’t have to worry about trying to get paint off the floor or something.” Not that Samandriel wouldn’t do his best so that their maid didn’t have to anyway, but it was the principle of the thing.
Sometimes Abigail forgot that they had a maid. It was all very fancy. Granted, Hannibal had a cleaning service that came in once a week, but she was a quiet woman that barely spoke at all; it was almost like she was an extension of the whisper quiet home.
“Okay,” she grinned. “But gelato first. We opened pomegranates for two hours yesterday.” She’d bled a little into the first one, but they’d thrown that one out. She thought. The gelato is people!
“Clearly,” Samandriel said as though not first eating the food she and her dad had so carefully prepared wasn’t something he’d ever considered. He took a bite. It was, predictably, delicious.
Abigail ate slowly and deliberately, eyelids fluttering closed while she savored each bite. She let it melt on her tongue so she could chew the seeds, thinking of how perfect the moment was. It was a temporary escape from her dreams, and when she opened her eyes, she was smiling at Samandriel. “I should just come here when I’m sad,” she chuckled.
“I don’t understand why you don’t more often,” Samandriel said. It was very good gelato, but he enjoyed her company more.
“I’ve been ... I’m dating someone,” she murmured. It almost felt like a betrayal saying that out loud, like at any second Hannibal would come in and tell her that she’d lied to him about never talking about it.
“Yeah?” he asked, picking more at his gelato. “They make you happy?”
“He’s perfect,” she sighed. “I just can’t - I shouldn’t tell anyone who it is, but I know you wouldn’t say anything. He’s older, and I’m seventeen.”
“I know how old you are sweetheart,” he teased. “Look, there’s not going to be much difference between you now and you when you turn eighteen. If you’re in this relationship because you want to be, then I don’t see any reason why anyone should get in trouble.”
“It’s Daddy,” she blurted. She bit her lower lip, looking at her hands. It felt amazing to tell someone, anyone. “I’ve just - I’ve had a crush on him since I was ten when I first saw him, and when he adopted me I was fourteen. It’s not like he raised me.” She was aware it was wrong in the eyes of a lot of people, but it wasn’t to her.
Samandriel couldn’t hide the shock on his face for a moment, just staring at her while he processed this.
He shook his head and found a smile for her. “As long as you’re happy.”
“I am. It’s just that - I knew him before, when my dad was alive. And it was my choice, being with him. I wanted to be with him, and he was the one who kind of felt guilty at first.” She looked at Samandirel, moving to hug him again. “Thank you so much for not judging me. I haven’t told anyone but you, just ... well. Obviously.”
Samandriel nodded. “All I care about is you being happy.” He took a final bite of the gelato and grinned at her.
“I am. A lot.” Abigail tapped the bruises around her neck. “Obviously. And he’s ... kind. I woke up screaming from that dream, the dream where Dad killed me, and Hannibal he just held me and kind of reassured me for a while.”
“That’s what counts,” he said, getting up to go put the gelato in the fridge. “And hey, at least it’s not some new guy I have to share you with.”
“You know I love you. I wished for a long time that you could like me romantically, but I realized you and I are like siblings and that’s already a fantastic relationship.” She smiled as he walked off. “I can’t be the only one to realize how cute you are.”
Samandriel frowned as he came back into the living room. “You had a crush on me?” he asked, almost like he couldn’t really believe it.
“You’re handsome and you’re intelligent, of course I did.” She smiled and covered her face with her hands. “I always wanted you to be my first kiss.” Instead she’d had her first kiss with an Interpol agent she’d bumped into at Starbucks. Hannibal had been rather upset.
“You could’ve just asked,” he said. “I mean...it wouldn’t really have done anything for me, but if it made you happy...”
“I wouldn’t want it to be awkward. And it all worked out all right, really.” She thought of kissing Hannibal and her pale cheeks went a bit pink. “I’m more worried about you not having kissed anyone.”
“Hey, I’ve kissed people,” Samandriel said immediately. “A few. There’s just...not anyone. I’d like for there to be, but there’s never been that spark people talk about. So I don’t worry about it. I’m kind of used to being on my own and if it’s a good day at the shelter I get puppy kisses and kitten cuddles so I think I’m doing alright.”
“Those are pretty awesome.” Abigail had always wanted a pet, but her biological parents had been allergic, and Hannibal wouldn’t have an animal shedding on his good furniture. But she thought about how stupid those people who had kissed Samandriel and let him go were. She thought about how much easier her life would probably be if she could find a boy just like him. “I just worry about you. Sometimes you seem lonely.”
He sat down on the arm of his father’s comfy chair and looked at her. “I’m okay,” he promised. “I have you and I have the shelter and when neither of those things are present I have a whole bunch of dead composers and tedious authors to keep me company.” She was right, though. He was lonely. He just didn’t know how to really talk about it. “And hey, maybe some day someone’ll come and sweep me off my feet, but I’m not looking for it. Or ruling it out.”
She nodded, moving to sit on the arm of said comfy chair. “I’ll come over more. I’ve been kind of ... I don’t know, I think everyone goes a little crazy at the beginning of a relationship. The making out constantly phase or whatever.” They’d gone through high school, they’d seen enough PDAs. “Didn’t you want to paint now? Maybe you can teach me.”
It had to be harder for her, making out in secret and not being able to talk about it with anyone. He worried. Perhaps he shouldn’t have, but he did. At least she could talk to him. “Sure,” he said, smiling. “But we’re going to get you into some different clothes first. If I end up being an accessory to ruining your things, your dad’s going to have some very cross words for me and I’d rather avoid that.”
“Oh, do you like it? He helped pick it out. He’s got better taste than I do half the time.” She still had the final say in things - she wasn’t a mindless puppet - but he’d introduced her to things she’d never thought she’d be able to pull off.
“You could walk around in a garbage bag and still be adorable,” Samandriel responded simply as he led her back down the corridor to his room so see about finding her some clothes to paint in of his. Hopefully he had something that wouldn’t just fall off her hips immediately.
If he had a shirt long enough she could just wear it as a dress. “I don’t want to get your clothes dirty too. I could just wear a garbage bag over my clothes like an apron.” She wasn’t kidding; it was also a good impromptu rain coat!
He frowned at her. “What makes you think I don’t already have clothes for painting in?” he countered coolly.
She laughed at that. “Right, right. I forgot you have a plan for everything.” She tied her long hair into a messy knot at the base of her neck, waiting for him to hand her something to try on.
In the end, it was a pair of sweatpants and an old camp t-shirt that he tossed at her before he proceeded to change into something else himself. What? It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen him mostly naked before.
She changed as well, hoping he didn’t see the scratch marks down her back or her thighs. She didn’t want to tell him what they were from, because she knew he’d blush. The sweatpants were comfortable, and so was the t-shirt, and she fished her glasses out of her purse. She only needed them when she was doing things up close.
Samandriel arched a curious brow. “Put those away, sweetie,” he said, going into his closet to grab a tub with his paint tubes in it and a couple big bristle brushes. While he was in there, he found some old white sheets he’d stashed away for just such an occasion. When he came out of the closet, there was a devious smirk on his face.
“What do you think? Back yard?”
“What, my glasses?” She blinked. “I won’t be able to see up close!” She smiled right back at him after doing what he’d said, even though she didn’t understand. “Sure, that way if we spill anything, it won’t be a big deal.” She liked this devious side of Samandriel. It was cute.
“We’re not doing any detail work,” Samandriel said simply. “Do me a favor and get some water in a tupperware or something?”
“Of course.” She went to find a plastic container that didn’t look like it was used often, and she filled it three fourths full of water, returning to him. “Done.”
Samandriel was already out in the backyard, tacking one sheet between two trees to serve as their canvas for the time being. They were going to have some fun and she was just going to have to like it.
She smiled, setting down the tupperware of water. “Anything I can do to help?” She tugged up the legs on his sweatpants that she was wearing so they were above her knees.
He tossed her a big three inch brush, dumped his paint out of the tub and squirted a few colors onto the lid. “Get your brush soaking wet, pick up some paint and just throw it at the sheet...the paint, not the brush. Unless you want to throw the brush you could do that too.”
Abigail was good at following instructions, and so she proceeded to pick out a sky blue color and do what he’d said. She’d started at the middle, cocking her head to the side and trying different ways to chuck the color at the sheet.
Samandriel went for a dark red, soaked his brush and flung paint at the sheet, using all the considerable strength in his shoulder to manage it.
“Have you been working out?” Abigail couldn’t help but tease a little, grinning when she followed suit.
Samandriel rolled his eyes fondly. “I may be tiny, but I’m not all skin and bones.”
“I never said you were!” She giggled, chunking some paint at him.
“You totally just implied it,” he teased back, laughing. “And I am not your canvas!” But he really wasn’t complaining all that much.
“I did not, I just asked a question!” She liked his laughter, so she tried again.
“You try playing an instrument that requires a lot of upper body work for several hours on end and tell me how your muscles feel after,” he said, trying to dodge the spray of painty water and to get her back in the same movement.
“That’s true.” She eeped and dodged, flailing a little and giggling. “Piano lessons made my forearms hurt when I first started.”
“Exactly,” he replied, turning away from her to grab some orange and throw that at the sheet instead.
“Well, remind me to never ask a cellist to arm wrestle,” Abigail teased. She scrutinized the sheet and moved for more red.
“They wouldn’t risk their hands anyway,” Samandriel replied, grabbing the whole cheap plastic tube of purple, squirting a bunch into the bowl of water and then just tossing the whole thing at the sheet to see what happened.
“Oh, smart,” she said, at least about the cellist and their hands. The purple ended up being pretty, and Abigail started in on some green beneath it to resemble a flower.
This all seemed far too much like painting things suddenly and Samandriel was not allowing that to be what they were doing. It was defeating the point of the exercise. So, he did what any logical person would do; he got the hose, dunked his brush in as much paint as it could hold and decided that actually spraying through it would be the best option.
Which made Abigail giggle. “Are you feeling terribly Pollacky today?” What, it was a verb. She just liked seeing him happy in that moment.
“Yes, I am,” he said, smirking. “And I’m glad to see you’ve been paying attention to my art ramblings during field trips.”
“I figure between you and Daddy I’ll ace my intro to art appreciation come August.” She beamed at him, winking and cleaning off one of her brushes by flicking it at the impromptu canvas. “Really, you guys are the people responsible for me not being a weird ... acultural brute.” She wrinkled her nose.
In response to that, Samandriel had no choice but to get her right in the side with the hose.
She just blinked, eeping loudly and grabbing the bucket and reaching out to chunk it at him, flailing a little to herself. “Eee, Samandriel, you’re getting your own clothes wet!”
“That’s what makes it okay,” he said, trying to dodge out of the way of most of it.
“Oh, okay,” she giggled, wringing out her hair. “You’re silly, and it’s fantastic.”
Samandriel grinned brightly at her. “I know.”