Who: Neenerfire (Neal and Neena) What: Neal moves in, it's Srs Bsns Talk Times When: Today! Where: Clarice, Neena and (now) Neal's house. Rating/Warnings: PG-13 for super spy stuff. Status: Complete!
So far, the tour of ‘Chez Neena and Blink’ had been pretty ordinary. Neena had taken Neal around the second floor, showing off the room that was his, and the bathroom (that would also be his, since Neena and Clarice used the one in the master bedroom). She’d shown him the cabinets in their gigantic kitchen that he could use, and the shelves on the fridge for things he didn’t want them eating. The living room, where they stored the remotes and playstation controllers.
Everything was completely pristine, of course, and Clarice had taken great pains to keep the decore slick and elegant. Nothing was out of place. It almost looked like no one lived there at all. Of course, Neena was to blame for that. Neal already knew she had her quirks. It was a pretty big deal to invite him into her personal space like this.
There was one last thing she needed to show him, though, and it was also a pretty big deal. The stairs up to the second floor lead to a long space of wall with one door off to the side. Nothing else was visible - the hallway bent off towards the back of the house, like an L shape. The longer part of the L, around the corner, lead to the rooms he’d already seen.
“Okay, so… there’s actually a thing I need to mention, and this is kind of a big deal. I think you’ve got enough big boy pants to handle it, though, so here we go.” Neena said, as she headed to that one singular door. She opened it up and motioned him through it.
This room, which looked like it had been a third bedroom at some point, had been converted into a training room. There were no windows, and the walls had been soundproofed. There was various gymnastics equipment, some punching bags, and a few target dummies, “Me and Clarice train in this room, and you’re welcome to use this, too.”
Probably, plenty of people had training rooms in their houses. That wasn’t that big a deal, and it wasn’t immediately obvious what point Neena was trying to make.
Moving in with Neena and her sparkly, brand new wife wasn’t something Neal expected, but he’d lived in the OC long enough by now to know that if you tried to predict your life from week to week, you’d pretty much get nowhere. So when she offered, after the trashed and looted apartment - when he had zilch to his name - he took her up on it. A couple days with Regina, straightening stuff out and transitioning, and then he’d moved in the little amount of shit he had. Not much, considering ransacked. That had been a thing.
The place was great though. Really, really nice - and he had to admit, he was ready for something beyond a bachelor pad-type apartment. Those got lonely sometimes.
Seeing the training room, he whistled, obviously impressed. “I like it,” he flashed her one of his easygoing, crooked grins. “And trust me, the big boy pants mean I can handle anything. So lay it on me.” The shit he’d been through in just the past month had prepared him sufficiently.
That was pretty true. Neal had been through and seen enough shit in his life to be pretty prepared for anything. Neena didn’t really think that what she had to say was going to come as that big of a surprise, considering.
She nodded, and walked over to the left wall of the room. It looked like there was a door that lead to a closet of some kind, but when she opened it there was another door on the other side, “We’ll get your biometrics scanned into the system, and I’ll get you a code to use to access this room. It’s pretty important that you have some.”
She pressed her hand against a panel that also had numbers on it, and the door swung silently open. It was metal and obviously thickly reinforced; Neena walked through that, and motioned for Neal to follow her.
Into the safe room. Yup, that was a thing. a room that was padded on the inside and thickly reinforced, that would survive a fire, gunshots, and bombings. The room wasn’t overly large. There were a few bunks to sleep in, a locker filled with rations, and Neena’s gun safe. A tall safe, as tall as she was, with a biometric lock on it. A series of monitors lined the back wall; Cameras were watching the stairwell, garage, and main living areas. There was also another door that lead right out into the hallway, but it was completely hidden from sight.
“So uhm… welcome to the safe room. We have one of those. To camp out in.”
Biometrics scanned - okay, that was some serious stuff. Neal’s eyebrows lifted curiously, but he didn’t say anything yet. He just listened to Neena’s explanation and, well, surprisingly? It resonated with him. Given where they were living, and what happened here (potential alien invasions, gender swapping, superpowers gone awry, or big ugly crime waves) as opposed to other happy places in the state, having a safe room was probably one of the smartest ideas he’d ever heard.
He took a look around, carefully, checking out the cameras and the footage for just a moment. “How often do you use it?” he asked, just trying to get a gage of the frequency there. “I mean...is it because of OC stuff, that you guys have this, or...or do you expect shit to hit the fan?”
Because it could be either, really. Or both. Both at the same time.
"We've never had to use it yet, except for the fact that I also use it as an armory." Neena tapped her fingers against the gun safe, to emphasize what she meant, then leaned back against it. She was trying her best to stay casual because she didn't want to scare him off.
"This house was actually custom built by someone else who used to work in black ops. She expected shit to hit the fan regularly. That’s why there’s soundproofing in the walls and kevlar lined along the wall in the stairwell. It's a thing among people in my business. We like to be prepared, you know. And I did just say people in my business, because the truth is that the gun store was a front. I'm actually... working for a government agency. I do top secret stuff."
Oh. Oh. Top secret stuff. It all began to make sense now, to Neal, a hell of a lot of more sense - because this room really was like something out of a spy film. Or what he’d expect people in that particular industry to be equipped with. “Wow,” he chuckled, gravelly, a hand lifting to rub the back of his neck. “So you’re like...a super spy?”
Neena the Secret Agent. Yeah, he could see it. Maybe that explained why she was kind of blasé about her gun shop. Because it wasn’t really high on the priority list, in the scheme of things.
“I promise not to come in here a lot, I mean, I don’t want to interfere with your work or anything,” he added as a disclaimer. Neal knew of an agency in the OC that handled things when shit got real, because there had to be something in place to deal with the fallout and making sure the US military didn’t bomb the place for being such a weird threat but he never really dug in past that. It wasn’t his thing.
"Well, I'm more like a black ops agent for a clandestine agency that doesn't exist," Neena corrected, with a bit of a smirk, "But no, you SHOULD come in here as often as you need to. You won't get in my way, I'm only in here when I need weapons. And if you need weapons, this is a good place to start, too. You should also store the ones you have in here. Or I can fit you with just a small one for your own gun in your room."
She took a deep breath, and let it out, "So yeah... Plus sometimes if you feel like the world is too big or you can't handle your shit. Sitting in here with the door closed feels safe. Which is nice. Sometimes I still crawl into my closet, instead, since it's closer."
That was a thing a lot of people with PTSD did, though Neena wasn’t outright admitting that she had it. Mainly, she understood the behaviour of people who’d Seen Things and Been Through Shit, and she wanted Neal to feel comfortable with himself, just in case.
Truth be told, he had a good number of weapons. More than he’d expect he’d need, but with the whole increase in crime situation they just kind of began accumulating. “I’ll store mine here too, then,” he nodded. “It’d be nice to have a place for them.”
And the other truth was that he understood PTSD. He was caught in the maze of it himself, and it felt like a quagmire that he wasn’t certain he could ever find his way through because the more he struggled the more he got sucked back in - it was quicksand, the worst kind. “Yeah, it’s...safety is good. Sometimes I still feel like I’m on that fucking stone slab, you know? I try and lay back and...” The phantom pain of knives; he felt it in his arms and legs where the scars were, and the one long scar on his chest. It was difficult for him to rest, to actually sleep. There were a lot of moments where he really did feel like he couldn’t handle his shit but then he reminded himself to just take it one day at a time.
Which was really all anyone could do. Neena nodded. Her tone seemed a bit softer, "Yeah, I know. Not exactly the same thing, obviously, but I get it. I think you'll find that everyone who lives here has a hard time sleeping at some point. There are still times where I wake up and go straight for a weapon. It's why the pistol in my bedroom has a holster lock. I have to work a bit harder to get to it."
She turned away from him and pressed her thumb against the digital pad on the safe, then swung it open. There were a series of sniper rifles stored on the door, and a tall area on the inside of it that had various hunting rifles and shotguns. On the other side were a series of drawers and shelves. Ammunition took up the top 3, and some of the drawers had key codes on them, "The ones with codes on them are mine. I keep documents and my collector's pistols in them. But you can have this drawer here for your pistols or any documents you have. I'll get you some cases for them. And you're free to use the ammunition, just restock it. Anything bigger can go on the tall side."
Well, at least Neal was in good company here, when it came to the effects of insomnia. Honestly, moving in with Neena and Clarice was probably the best thing for him - he didn’t think he wanted another apartment, by himself, something that was just another few walls, ceilings, and floors in a building and not an actual home. He’d liked the previous apartment, but it hadn’t been anything he was particularly attached to.
Peeking into the safe, he took a quick inventory of what it was inside it - and where he could put his own crap. There were a couple sidearm pistols in his collection, and he had a sniper rifle as well. Definitely some important documents also, like the ones he’d filched in Boston when he’d gone to find Henry. His crossbow with the silver bolts, the ones he used as a ‘just in case’ during full moons, had been stolen along with most of his other shit. “Sounds good to me,” he grinned slightly. “We’ll be ready for the next apocalypse, huh? And you never know, it could be along sooner than we think.”
That made Neena laugh, "You can never be too prepared. Though if it's zombies I hear the best bet is a shotgun and some distance. And you definitely don't want to use the flamethrower."
She seriously did have a flamethrower. She indicated it, though it was obviously not loaded at the moment. There was just something amazingly primal about lighting things on fire, though she preferred guns for actual human targets. She giggled a bit, remembering the last time she'd used one to scare a bounty into coming in, and rubbed her hands together. Then she swung the door shut and tapped at the panel on the safe, "Bring your pretty little thumb over here so we can thumbprint you. I'll give you a piece of paper later with the access code, too, in case the thumb scanner is being a little bitch. But yeah, if there ever IS an apocalypse I also have a safe house in Canada that Clarice knows to port people to. So if you ever wake up in a log cabin, that's where you are."
Okay, what the hell? Neal actually laughed, a surprised rough sound. “Damn, you’ve taken the Girl Scout ‘be prepared’ motto to a whole other level, haven’t you.” Neena wrote more than just the handbook on that. But hey, it was good to know that - should he ever open his eyes and see something better suited for a lumberjack - he’d know where he was in case things got a little too insane here. And he wouldn’t put anything past this place. This whole...reality, or wherever they were.
Thumb print scanner though, he could do that too. He held out his hand, asking her, “How long do I need to keep it there? Do you need my blood too?” That was a joke. Sort of. “Consider this my official moving in, celebratory kickoff.”
What better way to commemorate a new place than to get your biometrics scanned?
"Like I said, when you're in my line of work. I've basically been doing some version of this since I was twenty-one or so, so YOU do the math," She sounded amused, though, and she was also happy he seemed to be taking this so well. "Just hold it there until the thing beeps, and then we can have celebratory drinks while I take some blood and tissue samples."
That last part sounded so casual that it was almost believable, but she was still smirking and clearly she was joking. Hopefully.
"I've got a bottle of Devil's Cut downstairs we can open up. It's always fun to start drinking before Clarice gets home so she can be grumpy about it."
Neal did as he was told, thumb pressed in and he held it there until the telltale beep sounded. Wow, he felt so...secret agent. Then he almost made a quip about how if Neena wanted his blood she should have just poured some into a jar when he bled out all over the slab in Regina’s crypt, but that was a bit morbid. Bourbon, molasses-smooth and liquid smoke, was a much better thing to focus on.
“That sounds great,” he said, rolling his shoulders, an exhale of relief. It’d be a nice way to wind down - he’d just been so tense lately, what with recent disconcerting events. Felt like the knots would trip up even the most skilled masseuse. “I’m sure Clarice is adorable when she’s grumpy. Hey, I said I was gonna hug you next time I saw you - “
Now, he meant now. In the saferoom, amidst the cameras and arsenal of weapons, he pulled her into one of those bear hugs and kissed the top of her head. “Thanks for all this.” Neena gave off the impression she was forged from iron, but deep down? He saw all that squish.
What squish, there was no squish. Neena was all iron, all the time. Except when he hugged her like that, and smooched the top of her head. The hug lingered a little long for someone who hated hugs as much as she professed to. She might even have looked a little teary-eyed when she pulled away. It was almost as if she needed one as badly as he did.
But that moment was over quickly, and she grinned at him, "You're welcome. How else am I supposed to keep an eye on you, eh? I turn my back for five minutes and everything goes to hell."
“I know, I know,” Neal groaned dramatically, but he was grinning about it. The sad truth really was that as soon as someone turned their back for five minutes, something catastrophic was going to happen. Lately, that seemed to be the way of things for all of them, no thanks to the influx of criminals infesting the OC like weeds. It may not have seemed strategic, but to Neal it was - this was just meant to rile the masses. The big bosses were planning something behind the smokescreen, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
Hopefully they could cut it off at the pass.
“Okay, time for a refreshment break.” He stepped aside to let Neena lead the way back downstairs. “We’ll only turn our backs for four and a half minutes. Should be fine.” Yeah, that was definitely the way of things now. Here in their happy home. Funny enough, he still wouldn’t trade it for anything.