Stuff

Participants:

abby_icon.gif deckard_icon.gif

Scene Title Stuff
Synopsis Wherein, they talk about stuff. And it seems, some things really just don't change.
Date August 15, 2009

Milwaukee - Comfort Inn

Hotel room.


Deckard is in bed. Shirtless and clean shaven, in the absence of grizzled beard growth he'd look a few years younger if not for the grey dusted thick into his short shorn hair. The lights are off, dim contrast cast in by hazy street ambience through the hotel room's single wide window. His breathing is slow and easy, near shoulder lax under the black twist of a serpent around a tattooed cross. The hotel sheets are drawn up past his waist; the hotel comforter has been kicked off the end of the bed in some vestigal attempt at cleanliness left over from his childhood life as a vaguely normal person. It's a nice night. Can't complain, even if the air conditioning unit runs a little loud and the TV is twenty years old.

"You okay?"

Is she okay? Limbs? Check. head still on her shoulders? Check. "I think so" Comes from the blonde next to him, laying on her side with her half of the sheets covering her up to her underarms. "Don't really know how it's supposed to be, afterward" Not really. Not like she spent her teenage years gossiping in the hallways and in basements around a glass bottle or while picking out prom dresses and talking about how it would be after you became a woman, so to speak.

"Still ache. I can.. see what Xiulan means. What Leonard means now" She looks up, away from his chest and the wall, hair scratching across the average thread count sheets to try and meet his eyes. "you?"

Brows knit slightly at that, Deckard nods as if he understands, which is nice of him if not particularly logical. It seems like the thing to do. When she looks over, it's to catch him looking over at her in vague insecurity, like maybe he should be using this time to hold her or say something romantic or…apologize. It's easier to just lie there, though, especially once she's caught him looking. He refocuses on the ceiling, brows tilted easily enough to echo an mild, "Pretty good."

If she wanted it, at this point, Abby'd likely be trying for it. But she seems content to just shift instead onto her stomach and pillow her head on her arms. She's smaller than him in height, it's even more so apparent when laying side by side. "It was okay?" Maybe there's a small need to be reassured that what they just did, isn't indeed a bad thing, that she wasn't bad.

"what.. happens now? What happens… when we go back" To the city, to their lives. Flint to his random side jobs and scurrying about the city in his dingy suit and her to her scooter and finals, to school.

Her cross glints from the night stand, taken off before anything else. It didn't seem right to wear it then.

"Yes." Deckard says so with conviction more certain than he's capable of offering most things when he isn't yelling at someone. Yes, it was okay. …Then he hesitates. "It was — I mean. It was fine. And — good." He is not used to this conversation flowing in this direction, and stumbles accordingly, right hand curling into the sheets at his side to draw them up a few inches against the whirrrr of recently cut on air conditioning. "I dunno."

Bad answer. There's a rustle when he tips his long face over enough to check on her again, blue eyes pale in reflected light shed down off the ceiling. "You made it sound like there was other stuff going on."

There's no waiting blue. her eyes are hidden behind her lids, pale enough you can barely make out the iris and pupil beneath. She knows what he means. No, more like, who he means.

"Victor"

There's a soft exhale. There's no regret. Not for the last two days no. There's regret because she knows what she's going to do when she gets back, when her finals are over. What she has to do. "You don't need to worry about Victor"

"I'm not worried about Victor. What you do with him is…" your business. Deckard doesn't quite shrug against his pillow, but the implication is there in the way he trails off and frowns dimly to himself. The eyes etched in crudely under his clavicles stay staring at the ceiling while he eyes her, then shifts his attention back over onto the window.

"I meant other stuff that was bothering you. That made you want to go to Wisconsin."

"There's always stuff. I just.." This is not post-coital conversation topics, is it? How screwed up a life are you going back to if you go?

She turns in bed once again, shifting legs till they dip over the edge and she uses her elbow to lever herself up. That bare tattoo'd back shown in full as she reaches for the comforter. The wings that she never got rid of, the stylized cross with it's hazy aura near it's center, the long string of Latin that moves with what few curves she has in black cursive. It starts to disappear under the comforter being wrapped around her torso like a towel. "I have Finals. I can't miss them" Everything else..

Deckard swallows at guilt while he watches her go, chilly eyes tracing up the curve of her back in a way where he can't actually be that guilty, even if he does refocus elsewhere before she can get wherever she's going. She has finals. A sigh sifts out through his sinuses and he reaches over to feel for his watch on the nightstand. "Okay."

But Abigail's not actually getting up. She's turning, bringing her legs up to sit on the end of the bed and watch him as he reaches for the watch.

"I broke Flint. Linderman stuff was.. that last straw. I found.. out from Liz that my shrink.. she got killed by a patient and.. now I don't know what to do. She told me there was some serial killer who was…" Her arms wrap around her knees, resting her chin on the top of them and regards her feet, the fabric covered bumps that they are on the mattress. "Liz said I needed to watch out for things, people. If I started acting strange. Just all of it once. Of John Logan, working for Linderman and.. him hurting Niki" She's not going to cry. He hates it and it makes him uncomfortable so she focuses on the tightness in her chest so that it won't spill up to her eyes.

"Cops and crooks," observed as mildly as such things can be observed, Deckard squints blearily at the hour hand and drops his watch back onto the nightstand more carelessly than he picked it up. The same hand scrubs at his face instead of falling back to the bed, feeling idly after the naked edge of his narrow jaw while he listens to the rest and tries not to frown where she might see. "Why do you care who Linderman hires?" The rest he's less sure about — he can only furrow his brow and rankle his nose at the ceiling until using his hand as a screen stretches on for too long and he lets it fall back into bed with him.
"I don't know"

She shouldn't. not like she's employed by them. She doesn't even really have anything to do with them, other than Robert Caliban and his repeated surfacing when she calls or when he needs to check on her for some reason.

"I don't know why" The bedsheets cover his leg, keeping skin from skin. But it doesn't stop Abby from settling a hand on his shin, from letting her hand drift back and forth, some sort of contact between them. "You know me. I care when I shouldn't"

"It's organized crime. He hires criminals." Pragmatism falls coarse into the still air after the air conditioner has shut off again. Automatically, he breathes a little deeper against the promise of warmer air, chest rising slow and falling slower. "Some of us are worse than others." His toes splay under the sheets past the point of contact, but he doesn't protest or withdraw. "I dunno what to do about the crazy guy or the shrink."

She doesn't know either. It's written all over her face. Two days and a night away from New York and she doesn't know herself. She just watches the movement of his toes beneath the bedsheet before she unfolds herself so that she can slide back up the bed, twist the comforter to cover him as well as her as her body comes to rest alongside him. Head coming to rest on that concave area between the chest and the shoulder. Arm arm across his chest beneath the comforter to curl around his side and one leg inexplicably eases over his, trapping it beneath. Molded to the left side of him.

"I need a rest. Then we can go once more. I don't.. want this weekend to end, but it's going to have to, and we'll have to go back to the city. We should make as much of it as we can, as much as I can"

Still no resistance, though Deckard hikes a brow at the ceiling and moves his arm into a position where it's marginally less likely to fall asleep underneath her while she settles in. There's a flagging touch of something — a healing fizzle that fades out nearly before it's tangible. He can't see much of her face when he tips his chin down enough to try, but tension's easier to feel like this anyway. For his part, he's as laid back as she's ever seen him despite some lingering unease in the way he almost moves a little more but doesn't…quite.

Through the haze of golden hair - tousled by the things they've done that night - blue eyes are open, staring off at the lightly patterned wallpaper of the hotel room. Things have abated in her, settled, found a new equilibrium. Not this though, not with Flint. She still doesn't have the magic answer of what to say to him or worse yet, how to be around him. Whether there will be a next time, is up in the air.


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