Participants:
| Scene Title | Ask Me |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Wounds are stitched and petty revenge is agreed to. |
| Date | May 12, 2011 |
There's about three hundred and fifty dollars worth of shirt tossed like a rag over the arm of an armchair, and the reason's apparently in the blotchy red stain of bleeding at the shoulder, dully rust-coloured on the fine silver, metallic threads. The white wife-beater left to wear is substantially less expensive, gone wine-red near the bite mark on his shoulder, the neat circle of human teeth driven through fabric and into flesh an ugly thing and revealed to the world as Logan peels off hastily patched over bandaging, taped in place by his own self until such a time that Kozlow wakes up from wherever he's fallen asleep — not here, it seems — and he can tell him whether or not he needs to.
Amputate. Hopefully not. Early morning sunlight is beginning to shine through the windows bleakly, the air made hazy thanks to the smoke accummulated from a cigarette half-spent and held in place at the corner of Logan's mouth. He has a graze, freshly discovered, red along the side of his hand and bleeding minute beads of red, and it's this he studies once he drops the stained square of bandaging.
The metal suitcase is kicked under the coffee table. He hasn't slept, but he wears nocturnal sleepiness well, with exception to the shadows beneath his eyes that are both a symptom of sleeplessness and genetic.
The click of the front door reveals not Kozlow returning to roost but one of the other occupants that should be upstairs. Head bowed down and busily working a damp rag over pale hands, Delia doesn't notice the man in the living room. At least not right away. Colorful canvas slip ons are peeled off and as she stoops to pick them up, she spots his feet.
It's unusual but at the moment, she's wearing all of her own clothing. Loose fitting jeans, a light t-shirt, and a cardigan layered over top. Her feet without shoes are bare, revealing a recent pedicure. The fingers hooked into the heels of the shoes have a matching mani. Her hair is left loose and recently cut. Apparently someone's been pampering or being pampered. Faint smudges of black underneath both eyes is rubbed away as soon as they lift toward Logan's face.
"Mister Logan, I— " her head pivots toward the front door and then back to him or more importantly, the stain on his shirt. "What happened?" Her voice is kept low as to avoid waking Tania or hearing the grumble of an old dog whose sleep is interrupted. "Did you get into a fight?"
"Sort've."
It wasn't much of a fight to speak of, nor was it one Logan picked. For once. As far as he knows. He isn't looking up at her immediately, preoccupied with the inspecting of wounds, although the only serious and stark one would be the mark bitten into his shoulder. His gun, also, sits upon the coffee table, the holster dangling beneath the leather jacket hung in the hallway. He looks up at her, bleary and inattentive, preparing to dismiss— until he remembers some of the context that had been obliterated by the meeting that ensued. But not quite. "I got attacked," he clarifies, voice as sharp as his stare becomes as he gets to his feet, physically relaxed and lazy for all that his voice isn't.
Quiet, though, sleep-rough. "Does the name Amadeus Deckard mean anything to you?" he asks, expecting the answer to be what he imagines it to be.
"Attacked.." The word is repeated in a whisper while russet eyebrows dip down to hood her eyes. "Amadeus Deckard, he's— " One shoulder lifts to shrug and she shakes her head as if to indicate nothing, at least nothing to her. "He's obsessive, impulsive, repulsive— damaged. It could be the prison time he served, he tried to 'get with' me last year." Her hands are raised to hook fingers into the air around the two words. She looks down at the floor in response to the stare, the omega to his alpha.
"Let me get a clean cloth and my kit, I can stitch if you need them." A quiet offer to fix the damage that's beginning to cause her visible guilt. "I saw him outside the house one day," Delia admits as though in confession. "Tania and I were taking Rhett and Cheza for a morning walk. Did— He didn't break in, did he?" Her head lifts suddenly to jerk a glance up the stairs before turning back to him, wide eyed and upper lip curled in a worried grimace.
Logan pauses, as if indecisive, before he moves to sit back down on the sofa, inhaling a lungful of smoke and letting it linger there, burning his lungs, before exhaled in a cloud of white, quick to rise. "No, but he followed me, I think, to the Rookery. Jumped me and kept going on about how I was whoring you out, or— some such nonsense. I hardly need to trick women into being prostitutes." Not that he could if he wanted to, anyway, not anymore. A head tilt is meant to indicate permission — go get the kit — as he skritches fingers at the nape of his neck, eyes closing heavy.
"'salright though, I was rescued. By someone who sounds like they know you too. You have an unusual fucking array of friends, you realise."
Halfway up the stairs already, Delia bristles at the word friends and pauses, turning to look back down at him. Lips downturned in an unpleasant frown, she parts them to take a breath and perhaps argue. She doesn't, only because it's difficult for her to determine the nature of the comment. Her feet carry her up the rest of the steps, three at a time. It would be easy to track her by sound as her footsteps tromp across the ceiling; down the hall, into her bedroom, then to the lavatory to run the water and slam a cupboard door shut, then she's out again. Back less than a minute later, the redhead returns by sliding down the bannister.
"I don't know why he thinks what he does, I told him that I wasn't. He doesn't listen." The kit is plunked down onto the coffee table and twisted so the gun is hidden from her view. She kneels onto the sofa next to him. Using still wet hands to pick at the strap of his wife beater, Delia attempts to peel it away from the wound and down his shoulder.
Her hands are batted away — not hard. Firm, lazy, a cattish swat that leads to him taking off the stained article of clothing entirely rather than fuss with it. It's dirty, after all, and pitched in the direction of his shirt. Done, somehow, without knocking free his cigarette to tumble. Silver glitters shiny around his throat, a loose chain of a necklace that lacks any pendants or attached meaning other than, it's pretty. No new scars, just the older ones on his stomach she already knows about, and no new bruises save for one mark at his back, vaguely knee shaped. This done, Logan stills, elbows on his knees and cigarette between fingers.
"Will I need anything for it?" he asks, a glance at the mark. "Who knows what the fuck that kid's carrying around? If I get anything, I'll kill him myself."
A humourless promise, lacking even dry sarcasm.
He flicks ash into glass ashtray on the table. "Who's the queer that stopped him? Said his name's Calvin. Knows you're into Nicholas."
"Are you current on all your shots?" The questioning answer to whatever Amadeus is carrying isn't reassuring. "He's been to prison, so I don't know if he's carrying anything." Delia's tone is neutral as she pauses, unwrapping an alcohol swab from its little packet. She edges a little closer, placing a knee somewhere behind him to grab a better angle to begin cleaning the blood from his skin. "Tetanus, hepatitis— those are the most likely."
She's careful around the wound itself, attempting not to allow the pad to sting into the bite marks. It's discarded before a new one is procured and run over the crimson circle. "Calvin is one of the others… Have you had any strange dreams? Not mine, from somewhere else. They feel like a memory, like you're actually living that moment."
One of the others doesn't register on Logan's radar, but he's also too tired to really give it the time of day without Delia's prompting. He's still and unflinching beneath her touches to the wound, save for the tension lining up his spine that she can read at this distance. But he's suffered worse things, including the bite inflicted itself, fresh bruises wreathing break the skin is broken. "No," he says, but then thinks about it for a second. "Well. Maybe. Ages ago. I figured it was one've yours, actually. Made to— distract me from— " He gestured, hand making a dismissive circle, trailing smoke.
"What's usually going on," he settles with. "What's it got to do with anything?"
"They're from the future, the dream is a memory that you haven't had yet." Delia stops to discard the last alcohol wipe and places both hands next to the little breaks, searching the longer ones for depth. "The one who's giving them is my s— my daughter, my youngest one. She came back from 2040, with Calvin and some others." Her lips smack as she swallows, dry from nervousness and fingers trembling just a little as she reaches into the kit for sutures.
"One of my dreams, I had a daughter named Beth, she died before she turned one, from the flu. Nick brought me to her grave but he wasn't her father. For a while, I thought she might have been yours because— " She smiles a little and shrugs one shoulder as she prepares the needle. "What happened in their past, it's changed a lot. I don't think I ever got lost where they're from… either way, Beth is never going to be born. Benji is mine and Nick's but there he left us."
Logan fortunately does not see or feel the tremor of her fingers — but he does glance back at the needle being prepped, a hand going up to bid her to wait before he stands up. He returns not a few moments later, with a half a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand, already sipping from it by the time he's wandering back to his spot and sitting back down, keeping the relevant arm still against setting the injury to bleed again. The alcohol will help two things. The bite of a needle pulling thread, and whatever it is Delia is talking about. Not that he can throw stones in glass houses.
"I've one of them. A bit different, mind. I haven't seen him in months and maybe I hallucinated the whole thing, but I went back and— I was supposed to do something. But— "
And he quits, right there. It's too complicated to say easily, especially when Logan's vocabulary is only so tailored towards talking about time travel, and creating a son, and being a bad father because he was from the future. "Never mind." He lapses, then, into thoughtful silence, absorbing what she's said — a little selfish in leaving her with half-information and not readily sharing what's on his mind, or what happened, but there you go. He takes a deep swig of whiskey.
"Nick wanted to know if I'd heard from or seen Calvin since my birthday. He's looking for him, I think." It's idle chatter, meant to distract both of them as she pierces the skin for the first time. Whatever Logan was about to say before he brushes it off is accepted with a small nod and she doesn't push for more. A gentle tug brings the thread through and it's tied off and clipped before she moves to the next tooth mark. "You won't need more than three or four stitches, most of the breaks aren't deep."
Her breathing slows and deepens as she leans in closer to work on the next one. The smell of the whiskey combined with smoke and the stale scent of yesterday's cologne on his skin somehow soothing. "He told me not to go looking for Calvin, he said he was dangerous but he says that about a lot of people."
Like Logan.
There's a slight, quiet thunk of glass to skin as he leans forehead against the slope of the whiskey bottle, around when the needle takes its first bite. "He does," Logan agrees, voice muttered and rough. For a few more moments, he concentrates on his own breathing as opposed to the little pierces the needle makes, pausing only to lift his head enough to take a sip of aclohol, the bottle strangled round the neck in locked hand. "Well that explains some things." Actually, it explains next to nothing, but at least provides Logan with a context to work from. Makes connections out of coincidences, semi-convinces him that he's not at the end of an elaborate dupe by Heller to test his loyalty.
A last breath of cigarette smoke, before he ashes out the cigarette completely. "I'd never picture myself in this city still by 20-fucking-40," is a mild observation, despite the interjection of bad words.
"You're still alive though," the quiet response is short like the quick snip of scissors as the last of the stitches is tied off and Delia moves away. She busies herself with picking up the scraps of thread, discarded swabs, placing them all in the plastic bag the sutures came in for disposal. Left for later. Flopping back against the cushions, she leans her head to study the ceiling for a moment before her eyelids slide halfway down. "If it makes any difference, I'm glad you are."
She's still for a little while, listening to the rattle of Logan's breathing before she tilts her head enough to look at him out of the corner of her eye. "I want to hurt him," there's a twinge of guilt that turns to anger, played out on her features by the appearance of a small crease between her eyebrows. "I want to make him pay for doing this to you."
"Because he did it for you?"
Carefully, Logan sits back, wincing at the slightest pressure up near the bite mark, but it subsides, allows him to settle, Jack Daniels nestled between his thighs, scars on his stomach white, and all bone laziness as he lets his head rest back. Nothing in the room he has to worry about exposing his throat to. The corner of his mouth curls — a smile, showing teeth. "I did worse when I was his age. Or younger, maybe. Boys like that, too much energy for too little to do. It's why they made computer games." He opens an eye enough to peer at her out the corner of it, before closing both again. "I'll do the hurting if he crosses my way again. Don't worry about a thing like that."
"He didn't. He did it for himself, like the dog in the manger from that story. He couldn't eat the hay so he wouldn't let the cows have it."
Her forehead smooths when she draws a long breath in, letting it loose in a cleansing sigh. Then she shifts to push herself to sit forward with her elbows on her knees and her face cupped in her palms. Almost like how he was sitting earlier, without the Jack. "What should I worry about?" A strange question for anyone to ask. It's almost as if she's carefree but she's not, not by far. "Not that I want to worry but I want to help you, with anything you need.
"Amadeus— " her grimace of distaste reappears for the brief moment it takes to speak his name, "— it would make me feel better if I did something about it instead of just…" Her hand swirls through the hair near her head before her palm slides back up against her cheek. "Just growing horrible little roses. They're supposed to be big, fabulous…"
"The kind of thing I want to sic on Amadeus involves someone taking his own baseball bat from him and seeing how he likes getting his legs threatened."
Logan's had enough of that kind of thing. Delia has, at least, seen the twisted scarring on at least one of his limbs. But he's looking at her now, and after a second, pulls himself to be nearer, a hand going to bury fingers into her hair, testing the softer quality of freshly treated locks against his palm as he regards her profile. "But of course," he says, slower, "that what with him run off, the likelihood of me spending any time looking for him's a bit low. And if you want to hurt him— if you want to drill into that thick skull of his what you've been saying all along, who you like, what you do— "
Despite the hour, it's only polite to share — he angles the Jack for her to partake, should she choose to. "You could simply do what you do best. What you promised to me you'd do, if I asked you to."
She reaches for the bottle and curling her fingers around the neck just as he had when he was drinking from it. Eying it for a moment when she brings it back, she tips it to her lips to take a small swig. Delia can't contain the shiver that runs down her spine in conjunction to the liquid sliding down her throat.
"Dream?" The Jack is held out toward him again as she tries to hide the sour look on her face from the taste of it. It's not an easy liquor to start with, at least for her. "You haven't asked, for anything. I've been waiting and practicing. I think I've gotten better at hiding when I want to but— when are you going to ask?" Rather than looking at his face, her eyes rove his lanky form. They pause at the scarring along his stomach only to drift further until she reaches his knees. Then it's a quick flit back to study his green eyes.
Her lips twitch at one corner in an attempt to smile but it drops, ending in the slight curve of serenity. To either his credit or the Jack's, she's not tensing under his hand. Likely the liquor gives her the courage to just relax instead of staying on guard.
"I'm asking now. Why else would I bring it up, when you're— "
Impatience edges warm in his voice, which is why Logan simply puts down the sentence before it can finish, withdrawing his touch from her hair with a matter-of-fact wriggle of his fingers to free them of auburn tendrils. The offered bottle is tugged out of her hands with the same manner, one last sip drawn from it before it's capped off, and set aside. "You've helped me sleep, like you said you would. I've not made new enemies that need your work until last night. I'm so sorry that this bores you. Thanks for the stitches." Motions fluid, Logan pushes himself up to stand, lazily bending to reach and grab suitcase, a metallic thing that dangles heavy at his hand.
He moves to snag up ruined clothing on his way from the sofa, back to her with its fresh sutures, beads of moisture shining up his long, bruised spine. "To answer your question, I'll ask you when I bloody well need you."
"It doesn't bore me," Delia counters, pushing to a stand. Her eyebrows angle sharply as she regards Logan's form again, this time standing. Grabbing her kit and the bag bound for the trash, she crosses his path and stops directly in front of him. "You just told me not to worry about him, I didn't understand what you wanted just now. It was contradictory."
Her jaw tenses with frustration and she inhales sharply, exhaling in a huff complete with pursed lips before continuing. "I like living here. I like living with you. It doesn't bore me."
With that, she takes long strides toward the kitchen. Her bare feet don't make enough noise as she attempts a dramatic exit but no matter. "Since you did ask— " she finishes vocally instead of through the stomps of a spoiled teenager, "— I'll make him suffer. You'll see… I'll make you proud."
There's a warning flash of chill in green eyes as she squares at him, matching aggression with silence and the same in kind, just a still, more coiled version — and she's out of range by the time he's considering anything more physical. By the time she's walking away, Logan releases some of it through simply rolling his eyes skywards. He did. Tell her not to worry. And then when she wanted to worry, he amended it. But of course. It is, though, too early to discuss the particulars of grammar, and he chooses silence over yelling back at her across the house.
He wants to sleep. Investment in the situation frizzled in stupid irritation, and he has more money in his hand than he currently knows what to do with. Ditching ruined shirts for the bottle of Jack, it's this he instead collects with him on the way to bed, the only response she's getting being the creak of climbed stairs.