Neena Thurman is getting too old for this shit (godplaysdice) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2014-12-20 16:53:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, clarice ferguson (blink), neena thurman (domino) |
Who: Clarice, Domino (I'm not sure we ever had a ship name for these two)
What: Clarice hunts Neena down, there's yelling and reconciling.
When: The night of the 15th, December.
Where: A hole in the wall apartment in Germany.
Rating/Warnings: R for Deep Subject Matter and Feels. Triggers for mentions of blood, gun violence, etc. The stuff they've been dealing with since November essentially.
Status: Complete!
The rings turned over and over in her hands as Clarice studied them. She had put herself out on a limb, opened her heart and again she’d been burned. And she’d known it could happen. Part of her had expected it, for weeks and months, but then she’d started to feel secure. Neena wasn’t going to leave her. The only fear she had was Neena not coming home from a mission but it was one she’d learned to accept.
That was before she’d been shot. That was before she’d woken to Neena gone, and a note and the rings left behind. Her fist clenched around the rings and she threw them against the wall. Just when she thought they’d be okay. Just when everything seemed good. This was Neena’s idea of protecting her? Clarice could handle herself most of the time, it wasn’t Neena’s fault she’d been shot!
She didn’t even know what she’d say to Neena if she saw her again. It seemed like a stupid thing to be so torn up over this. But it had hurt, and it still hurt and…she couldn’t even process any of this.
She stared at the rings, and then got up and shuffled to pick them up. She checked to make sure they were okay. “I ought to…”
Several hundred miles away, Neena sat in a rented room. It was a seedy apartment, the kind that tv and movies would connect to drug dealing, prostitution, and spy work. Which was funny, because that's exactly what she'd been in town to do. Natasha had grudgingly sent her to gather some leads, that only after she'd begged her for a reason to get out of town.
The work had been mostly done for days, and she'd spent the interim time doing the second thing she was best at: Crawling into a bottle of alcohol.
At this point, she'd smoked almost all of her cigarettes and drank down almost all of her booze. She was expecting a visit from an informant, which was the only reason she looked halfway presentable. Everything about her life choices sucked. Neena'd given up counting all the things she'd given up and had drunk herself past the point of yelling at herself.
While she waited for the person to check in, she was simply laying on her bed, soaking herself in drunken self-loathing.
Violence wasn’t Clarice’s thing. She could be violent, she’d been violent, she’d done things and seen things and had things done to her but she’d always been able to shake it off and keep going. She was a survivor. Sometimes she felt like people treated her like she was an innocent. Clarice didn’t remember what being innocent felt like. Not after the Sugarman. Not after David Richards, or Hyperion. Not after dreaming about Emma and Selene. Not after the Sentinels and that terrible future.
And not after all the things she’s witnessed since Orange County lost its marbles.
But right now, she wanted to be violent, she wanted to scream, she wanted to show she’d once led a team and she’d been good at it. Self-esteem issues aside.
She wished she could see Neena. To yell at her. She’d even wished on a star, but she was too damn stubborn to actually ask Emma to help. But she had to be somewhere, and maybe if she focused…
BLINK
She gripped her chest, having never had a spontaneous teleport before, let alone one while still suffering from a chest wound.
But there was Neena. She pointed. “You...you...goddamn...stubborn...useles
Oh, there was Clarice. Somewhere in the back of Neena's mind, she'd wondered when this might happen. Her fiance (ex fiance?). The woman screaming at her. The very pink, very angry woman screaming at her was a teleporter, and she was quite capable of catching up with Neena eventually.
She was still laying on her bed staring at the ceiling when Clarice had blinked in. The flash of pink light barely registered in the drunken fog, though there was a momentary quiver of fear deep in her stomach. The last time a light like that had happened, the flash had been followed by a gunshot.
"Is that all you've got?" Her voice was dry, and her words slurred together a bit, "You should be lying down."
“Like you? It’s not like I can...drown myself in…” she waved at the bottle, then flicked her wrist and blinked it away somewhere. Her hand was shaking and she almost sent part of Neena with it. “Fuck you. Fuck you! You ran away, you ran away and you didn’t even talk about it!” Now she was yelling and it hurt like hell but she couldn’t stop now that she started. “Bad things happen, you can’t always...stop it or predict it but...but that’s why you have to … We were doing so good! It wasn’t fair! I was …. I trusted you…”
She wobbled, then sank into a chair and repeated mournfully. “I trusted you.”
This was a lot more yelling than Neena had anticipated, and somewhere underneath the haze her respect for Clarice raised a few notches. It was also turning her on, though she was at least able to recognize how completely inappropriate that kind of feeling was at a time like this.
Some part of her felt like Clarice's words were cutting her open, and maybe if she let herself she'd feel the hurt that was being thrown at her. The guilt was already choking her, and it was hard to climb up out of that to feel much of anything else.
Though she did look over at Clarice when the bottle blinked out of her hand. Damn it. That was her last bottle.
"I knew if I talked about it that you'd talk me out of it. And I can't always stop it or predict it, that's right. So the best way to keep you safe is to not be in your life. That works a little better when you stay in a bed and get better instead of coming after me." Neena's tone was resolved. She'd had that part of the conversation in her head a thousand times before she'd left. The words meant nothing, of course. They felt completely empty.
Clarice waved her hand, the motion sharp and cutting. “Did you even want it? Did you even want us? Because if you don’t want “us” then why would I bother talking you out of leaving?” Didn’t Neena understand? The last thing Clarice ever wanted was to hold her back and domesticate her. entertaining shopping experiences aside. “There’s… there’s a big difference between… forcing you to stay and trying to make you see reason. Never wanted to force you.”
"Of COURSE I--" Neena pulled her hands onto her face and rubbed at it. "I just want you to be safe. Anywhere near me isn't safe. Right here right NOW isn't safe, this place could be stormed any minute. People could have made me and are on their way with reinforcements. You don't know. I don't even know. Fuck, Clarice, it's not like I just buy rings for people I don't care about. I gave you a LOT, you should KNOW how I feel. That doesn't mean we can be together."
It was the harsh reality of their existence, and she felt older than the world when she added, "This is who we are. If you stick around here I'm just going to have more of your blood on my hands."
"You couldn't have ... stopped that. Or done anything about that," Clarice protested. She forced herself onto tired feet and shuffled towards the bed. "I'm always going to be in danger. As long as I'm a mutant, as long as I'm pink, as long as I'm an X-Man or an Exile. It's ...who we are. There's...there's... I was prepared to watch you die. Or to have you not come home. I wasn't..." She sank to her knees several feet from the bed. "Not like this. I need you... I need you to trust me... and I need you to..." Her vision was tunneling but she was determined to say her piece. "I need you to respect me."
"I do--" Neena replied, her voice rough with emotion. These were the emotions she didn't want to feel. They made her weak and vulnerable, and every word Clarice spoke cut through what armor she'd been able to put up.
If they went on like that for too long, Clarice was going to end up killing herself or at least ripping her wounds back open, too. Neena couldn't lay there and pretend she didn't care about that. That would have put her smack into the territory that Neal had described to her in text messages last week; Hell.
Neena still didn't know how love was supposed to survive all this, but if anything said 'too stubborn to quit', Clarice showing up here certainly did. But what the hell were they supposed to do? She couldn't protect Clarice. That was the entire point.
"I don't know how... I'm not prepared to watch you die. I don't know how you can be prepared to watch me die. I don't know if that means you love me more, or if you're just stronger." Neena finally said, while pulling herself up off the bed. She was glad she was sober enough to move steadily. She walked over to Clarice and picked her up in her arms, "I thought I respected you. I thought I trusted you. But... I took this choice away from you. I wanted you to hate me because that would have been easier. I just... I'm a fucking coward."
Maybe Clarice didn’t care if she ripped her wounds back open. It could be symbolic of how much Neena had ripped her heart out. Yeah. That’s what she’d go with. The pink woman ran her fingers through her hair. It annoyed her right now. It wasn’t even in her braids and it was messy and too long and she should just cut it all off to spite Neena.
“You’re a fighter, a spy, a mutant. Maybe I’m not as prepared as I think I am, but I have to expect that you could be taken away from me any time. It’s the...reality we have to live with. Even in the dream world that would be the same, whether you were on my team, or me on yours. At least you’re a better person than you were on my world.”
It wasn’t something that Clarice thought about often. She never really ran into her Domino much and she’d gotten so used to alternate versions of people being different that there were only a few faces that she could still react instinctively to. And there was no Sinister and she tended to avoid Hank McCoy like the plague. Not his fault. She hoped. Although if he dreamed about Dark Beast she might make a night visit.
She took a deep breath, then let it out, resting her head against Neena’s shoulder when she picked her up. “Yeah, you’re a coward. You’re scared of your feelings, you’re scared of hurting. Did you run away because you were scared of me getting hurt again or because you were scared of hurting because I was hurt?”
"There are plenty of feelings I'm not afraid of anymore. I've seen enough shit in my life, I like to think I've mastered most of the emotional spectrum. I can shut it down when it counts. But... Love? It's never been a good experience for me. Not ever. And the hurt that comes with it?" Neena shook her head as she carried Clarice to the bed.
Even holding the woman in her arms like that made her insides quiver and go cold. Clarice's question was dead on and Neena wasn't sure there were any good answers. She didn't think now was the time to give people answers they wanted to hear, either. They were way past that, and Clarice deserved the truth at least.
"It's both. I don't want to see you hurt. No one ever wants to see someone they love get hurt. But it's also the part where all I could do was sit there. It's the part where my luck fucked you over. It's the part where my hands still smell like your blood, and I wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares where you don't make it through. It took me hours to scrub that floor clean and I-- I don't think I can even go into that shop again."
She set Clarice down and started tucking a blanket around her. Her hands were shaking a bit, "And yes. I can't go through that again. It turned me into a quivering pile of helplessness. Losing you would be worse. And that's a new fear. It's not a fear I know how to deal with."
"We've been hurt a lot. Both of us." Clarice closed her eyes as Neena set her down, and she gripped the other woman's arm, as hard as she could. "The only reason I can sleep at night are the painkillers. If I close my eyes I can still feel it. But that's not your fault. I don't blame you. And there are worse things to keep me up at night."
Some things she'd talked to Neena about. Most of those things she had, really. "Anything really loud makes me jump. Makes my chest hurt. I feel...frayed. But that's not your fault either. It's been a feeling I've been dragging behind me since I've known you. You were... you were stitching me back together.” Don’t unravel the thread. But she didn’t say it, because she didn’t want to manipulate Neena. That was the last thing she wanted to do.
"And then, like I do, I went and tore you all apart," Neena replied, sadly. She still hated herself. Clarice was in a hell of a state and it was all her fault, just like everything else was. They so often got caught up in her own shit that it often seemed like Clarice had nothing to deal with, or that she'd already handled her own past so well that it was left behind her.
Neena thought she should have known better. Even the ghosts she'd buried years ago came back to haunt her sometimes. It had to be the same for everyone else. Clarice was younger than her and made it look effortless, but that didn’t mean it actually was. That said a lot about her, and a lot about Neena's place in her life.
She rubbed at her face with her hands and then climbed in next to Clarice, "God, that's everything that's wrong with us right there. I ripped your heart out and here you are, still saying things to make ME feel better. I don't... know how to make that up to you. I don't know if I can."
"I don't know either," she admitted. She didn't curl in against Neena, though she desperately wanted to. She was still mad, and she wanted the other woman to... she wasn't sure. Prove something. She clutched her hands on her chest. "But I can't... we can't keep doing this. I love you so much but I can't ... take much more of this. And yet I wouldn't still be here if I thought it wasn't fixable."
Her life wasn't ever going to be normal. She accepted that, better than some people did. She just tried to work with what hands were dealt her. But Neena was making this a pattern. Clarice just wasn't ready to fold yet. "I wish you'd realize you don't always have to run."
Their relationship had been a very delicate thing for most of the time they'd been together. Neena could look back on the last year and see all the times it had been tested, nearly shattered. Most of those times had been her fault. It was the same in any of her previous relationships, and even in the dreams. You didn't have to become your dream self, that was true, but this was just one of the things that had been similar the entire way through.
She recalled similar conversations with people in the dream world. She remembered a time when she'd told Booker they were 'on a break', just because she'd been too scared of taking those extra steps forward. Neena had told herself then that she just needed time to recover, time to grow up, time to change enough to be of any good to anyone else. Now she wasn't so sure.
Because here they were again, and she was nothing that was good for Clarice. She wanted to keep her old life, she wanted to keep herself intact, she wanted to run when she needed to and do dangerous things and test the limits. Clarice had spent the last year trying to walk on eggshells around her and her needs, and Neena still couldn't put Clarice ahead of her. Maybe she'd never grow up.
"You shouldn't have to take any of this," Neena finally replied. She'd been silent for a few moments while she put together her words. "At some point, the benefit you get from being with me isn’t going to outweigh the costs. How often have you wanted to say something or do something, but you were scared how I'd react? How often do we just... go around in circles... and it's always me being an idiot and me being selfish and you being astonishingly patient. Clarice... loving me is going to kill you. Inside, even."
"I stopped, you know," Clarice whispered. "I used to overthink things, I used to plan things out so you wouldn't be scared away. I used to be scared you'd... run off with Booker. Or Logan. Or someone who wasn't me. Someone who you thought was tougher, or who didn't call you out as much.But I stopped feeling that months ago. It wasn't healthy, for me, for you, for our relationship. You deserved better than me always questioning everything you did."
She'd gotten happier, more confident. And now she was standing on the edge of a cliff and she didn't know if her footing was sure or not. "We have to...compromise. I'm ready to, but you keep holding back."
Clarice squeezed her eyes shut, trying to hide the tears. Talking this much was exhausting, but she couldn't stop and she couldn't back down now. She'd spent nearly a month thinking about this. Working through what she wanted to say and while it wasn't quite what she'd planned, she still needed to say what she was feeling.
When Neena'd texted Neal a few days ago, she'd asked him how it was that love survived any of this. Faith, hope, belief, and maybe a hell of a lot of stubbornness to fight for each other, he'd said. God knew they were both stubborn enough. Neena chewed on her lip a bit and mulled that over. Up until recently, Clarice had probably had the rest of it, too. Hope, faith.
It was her. She didn't have them, "You're right. I have to have... I don't believe in you enough. I don't trust you enough. I run away first so that I don't have to worry about watching you leave. It's always like that. I don't think putting a ring on either of our fingers changed that."
Neena was whispering, too, and she really wished that Clarice hadn't blinked her bottle away. The weight of this conversation was even heavier while she was sober. Her fingers were still trembling a bit when she pulled Clarice into her arms, "What do you need from me? Besides the itchy feet thing."
Clarice leaned into Neena's arms. She smelled like Neena, and some of the drink, but she didn't really mind that smell. "Respect. I'm a fighter too, you know. A good one. I can have your back if you need it. But I can stay away when you need it too." She rested her hand over Neena's heart, opening her eyes to look at it. "I don't want to compromise the missions you're one. But I want... I want to be able to welcome you back. Maybe not like a good little housewife because maybe I'll do dangerous things too. But I want.. I want..."
She pushed herself up to look down at the other woman. "I just want to try to have a life with you for however long the world lets us. The only time I'll ever ask you to give up what you do is when you're not able to do it anymore."
Neena would probably not make it to retirement. Clarice knew that. But there was a small chance... "Some day your body isn't going to be able to keep up anymore. If you're still alive, maybe we could move to Florida with the rest of the old people. Miami is pretty nice."
"I really don't think we're the Florida retirement community type," Neena argued, with a bit of a smirk. She couldn't see herself living to retirement, either, but growing old with Clarice wasn't that scary a thought. Unless they were going to grow old in some place for old people to die in.
"Canada, we'll get a lodge or something. Or maybe somewhere in Europe. Probably more likely is we'll just end up staying here forever but in a bigger house. I can do that, though. I can think about some distant future where I'm not able to do crazy things and we're just together. And I definitely can't see you as a housewife. I know you're capable. I know that in a fair fight, you'd have my back. What happened at the shop wasn't a fair fight. It's just... it's the part where something could happen to you. And I can't control it. Life is always taking everything I-- everything I love."
She ran a hand up Clarice's cheek and cupped it, "Hell I couldn't even take these last two weeks without you. I think you're probably the strongest of all of us."
"Life can't be controlled. I've accepted that." She nuzzled Neena's hand. "We can get ahead of some of it, and prepare, but we can't always. But just... as long as we talk. Like this. More often. Instead of running away or staying silent....We’ll be okay.”
"Talking is usually where I screw things up. I mean, with words. I'm bad at those." Neena replied, jokingly. But her words were sincere and she pulled Clarice back down against her. The other woman had been through enough today and she was extremely worried about her wounds opening up.
"Now rest. I'm not going anywhere - I really am doing work and I have a couple last pieces to do. We can port back tomorrow when I'm done."
Clarice dug her fingers into Neena’s shirt, and nodded against her chest. She mumbled, “I meant to yell more. I did a lot of yelling at thin air.”