The Negative Confessions, pt. 3/9
Jun. 23rd, 2009 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serindranaTitle: The Negative Confessions, pt. 3/9
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
serindrana, also known as skepticallittledarling
Series: Last Exile
Characters: Alex, Vincent, Sophia
Words: 5296
Notes: Modern-day AU, focusing on Sophia’s relationships with the two men in her life against the backdrop of family drama. Currently PG...13-ish?
I have not known men who were of no account.
The styrofoam creaked as her fingers clutched at it, instinctively tightening her grip as she juggled three boxes, a purse, and the set of keys she was attempting to search through by touch alone. Finally managing to isolate the one key she needed, she shifted, bracing her hip against the door to better balance herself, and somehow managed to unlock the door, easing it open and sliding inside with the least amount of noise she could manage.
It was somewhere around one in the afternoon and, from a week’s experience, she knew that there was only about a thirty percent chance that he’d be awake. She had tried stopping by to make sure he had breakfast the first few days, but every time she had found him out cold and unresponsive in a deep sleep, either on the couch or (if she were lucky) in his bed. Lunch was a better chance, if only by a little, and he seemed to feel a bit better if he was woken up to deli sandwiches or fresh, greasy pizza from the little run-down shop on the corner. So she set the boxes out on the kitchen counter, finding her own (the smallest, with a half-sandwich, onion rings, and a pickle) and moving it aside. She grabbed two sodas from the fridge (she’d bought them the other day so that he’d have something other than booze to drink), set out a stack of napkins in the hope that maybe he’d use them, this time, and then looked for a long, quiet moment at his door.
This was always the hard part, deciding how best to wake him up. Sometimes he responded best to a harried knock, sometimes to the door opening with a quiet squeak followed by her voice, softly asking him to get up. She decided on the former this time, knocking for fifteen seconds straight. Then she waited, waited until he opened the door, bleary-eyed and shirtless, hair a mess, skin just as sallow as always. Their eyes met for a moment.
“Lunch is in the kitchen.”
“Mm.”
That was his favorite way of communicating with her: a sophisticatedly barbaric system of grunts that she was slowly beginning to understand. This one meant, ‘Okay, give me ten minutes and I’ll be out. Don’t worry about me going back to sleep’. There was a very slight tonal difference between that and, ‘Put it in the fridge, I’m going back to sleep’. Those were, so far, the only two she could distinguish from each other.
She nodded, went back to the kitchen without a word more, perched up on the barstool by the breakfast bar and set about eating her lunch, doing her best not to look over at his door, waiting for him to come out. He’d caught her doing that, once, and had glared, colored slightly (in annoyance or embarrassment, she couldn’t be sure). It didn’t stop her from keeping an eye on his bedroom door, but it did make her more cautious. This time, again, she was able to look away before he noticed her.
Fully dressed now, with his hair sort of combed (probably with his fingers) and his eyes a little less glassy than before, he strode - didn’t shuffle, like she’d expected the first few days - into the kitchen, found the box with his sandwich, started eating while standing at the counter. These meals were more formality and necessity than anything. They rarely exchanged glances, even less frequently words, and, usually, when he was done he would go back to the bathroom or his room or his office and be lost to her until dinner (if she stayed that long).
He never drank in front of her, but she happened to know that the liquor cabinet in his office was starting to run low.
This time, though, when he finished, he used the napkins, cleaned up after himself, and stood, leaning his hip against the counter, looking at her with his arms folded across his chest loosely.
“It’s not part of your job description to feed me.”
“It’s take-out,” she countered, though she was a bit flustered by his sudden need to comment. He’d stopped his sarcastic jabs since she’d started working for him, instead preferring his now customary silence. She’d been disappointed the first few days. “It’s not like I’m cooking dinner for you.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you did, one night.”
“I don’t cook.”
They were staring each other down, Sophia fighting to keep from looking down and away, Alex focused on her without much effort, simply looking at her, through her. She was on the verge of making some inane comment when he broke the silence first. “You don’t have to pretend like you like the job.”
“I’m not pretending that I like it,” she responded, taking a sip of her coke. “It’s just a job. I’m like this at every job I’ve ever had.”
“You always bring your boss lunch?”
“I’ve never been a personal assistant.”
“What are you assisting me with?”
“Remembering to eat.”
The staring contest had resumed, lasting long enough that Sophia finished off her soda.
“I’d fire you, but I don’t think that’s really in my power.”
Sophia straightened at that, frowning. “No, probably not. You’re not quite my boss. It’s not like I’m getting in the way of your working or your drinking, so I’m not sure what the big deal is.”
She expected some caustic remark about her habits, her appearance, anything that would prove he didn’t like having her around (as she already suspected, had suspected since Marius had first suggested this). Instead, he said simply, “You don’t want to be here.”
She colored, shook her head. She ignored that no, she didn’t really want to spend most of her free time sitting in a silent apartment that smelled of disuse and alcohol, instead forming the words, “Sure I do.”
He laughed at her. “You can’t and you don’t. You have a life, I assume, given Vincent and everything.” He waved his hand, shrugged.
“Not much of one. I have a schedule and I have a guy who thinks we’re dating when we’re not.”
That stopped him for a moment. He frowned, lowered his eyes, appeared to be thinking, recalculating. He didn’t ask questions, though, didn’t seek to clarify. Instead, he finally pushed himself up off of the counter and walked back into his office, closing the door behind him and leaving Sophia wondering what, exactly, had just happened.
--
She was singing one of her old songs - the ones from before she knew Vincent and before he’d pressed collaboration - when he slipped in through the front door, unnoticed. He’d gone out without an explanation and returned now with one bottle of wine and two of whiskey. He would have slunk past her as he had done numerous times before, but he paused at the sound of her voice, stiffened first before relaxing, almost weak-kneed, against the door. For a moment, he forgot himself, and watched. Watched and listened as she sang out lyrics (more clumsy than what she had sung at the club) that wove a story about bowers and homes and broken men. For a moment, he wondered if she was singing about him.
The song wasn’t finished, but he was already pulling himself back together, standing up straight and stopping just short of smoothing down the front of his wrinkled shirt. He moved to sneak past her just as he’d planned, but somehow she turned just enough to catch his eye and stopped cold, closing her mouth, not breathing for a long stretch. He didn’t look away until he realized her chest hadn’t fallen with exhalation.
“You’re allowed to breathe, you know,” he muttered, shaking his head and breaking her strange little spell. He was halfway down the hall before he paused, doubled back, and set the bag of bottles on the island. “You wrote that yourself, didn’t you?”
Sophia was still staring at him, a little scared, a lot embarrassed. She nodded. “Uh, yeah- years ago. High school.”
“Before Vincent.” He tilted his head back contemplatively, frowning slightly.
She colored a darker red than before.
“How late are you staying tonight?” He had never bothered to ask her schedule before. She came and went as she pleased and he ignored her as he pleased and it all seemed to work rather well, in his opinion.
“Um.” She pursed her lips, taking the excuse to move, looking down and tapping her foot anxiously. She never liked being caught singing to herself like that, especially not by Alex with his half-lidded but too-sharp eyes. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Until whenever, I guess.” She had a reading on the anthropological theories of language origination, but she had planned to do that in his kitchen, waiting until some arbitrary time when she felt okay leaving.
“Sit down, then. Over there- the couch.” He gestured absently, then went back to his office, closing the door.
She stared after him, then shrugged, laughing weakly and grabbing up her bag. Two months and she still couldn’t make him out half the time, but she supposed that was normal, given how much he confused Vincent on a daily basis. She settled down on the couch, opening her satchel and thumbing through a folder of paper packets, pulling out the only one that wasn’t festooned with Post-Its. Expecting a long, slow night, and not thinking too much of their brief exchange, she began reading.
But she was only halfway down the first page when she heard the door to the office open again, then familiar (if infrequent) footsteps in the hall. She glanced up, adjusting the reading glasses that had taken up a near permanent perch on her nose over the last year or so. Alex came out of the hall, with his own reading glasses (she had never known he wore them) and a yellow legal pad half-filled. He sat down across from her, in the leather armchair she hadn’t dared touch from the scent of single malt that clung to it and marked it as his. His feet up on the coffee table, he took a pen from behind his ear and looked at her with a cocked, expectant eyebrow.
“... Yes, Mr. Rowe?” she finally started, trying to sound as unconfused as possible.
“You,” he said, as if surprised he had to explain, “are going to help me with my writer’s block.”
“Need another pair of hands to push it out of the way?” It was her turn to lift one brow as she set aside her reading and folded her hands primly in her lap. “I don’t think I can help.”
“You’re a writer. You can help. You can help more than Vincent could, if your songs are anything to go by.”
She flushed with barely concealed pride, straightening somewhat. “They’re just songs.” She had to try to be modest, though; it was in her nature to knock herself down two pegs for every one she climbed.
“Yes, but they’re good songs that have more than decent lyrics. Which is more than can be said of the other writer we know.”
“Vincent writes perfectly good songs.”
“Perfectly good is not imperfectly good with rich flaws,” he countered. “Now, you either help me or you get out and don’t come back.”
“This is entrapment.”
“Very good,” he said, coming as close to crooning as his dead voice would let him. “But I’d prefer it if you just saw it as a.... a fun opportunity.”
Sophia nibbled on her lower lip, then sighed, taking off her reading glasses and setting them aside. “Fine. Do you have anything so far?”
She looked different without the glasses. He swallowed, fighting away the fleeting image of a ghost that haunted every line of her face, newly unbroken in his eyes. “Very little. Something wholly depressing about a girl and her grandmother.”
“What’s so depressing?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
Oh, okay. I’ll write your novel for you, Mr. Rowe. “This will be fun,” she sighed, but she couldn’t help but smile as she leaned back and pulled her writer’s idea-kicking boots on.
--
The bottle of wine was empty by the end of the first hour.
“No. I’m not going to write a detective novel. There is no way in hell I’m writing a novel where a little old biddy goes galavanting around trying to solve the murder of her granddaughter. Just- no.”
Sophia reflected for a moment on how much more talkative he seemed to get when he did his drinking amidst company. Or, perhaps not more talkative, but more vehement in his opposition to others’ help. She nearly laughed, instead sitting back and shrugging, propping her feet up on the coffee table. “Okay, fine, not a detective novel, no matter how much fun grandma-noir would be. She could always kill the girl herself somehow. That’d be wholly depressing.”
“Yes, because grandmothers regularly run around wielding kitchen knives and nine millimeters.”
“Well, of course not. If they did, then it wouldn’t be as much of a story.” She licked her lips, looked down at her glass of whiskey she’d barely touched (though he had finished two glasses of it already). He was preparing to retort when she cut in again with an off-handed, “Munchausen’s-by-proxy, then?”
He looked at her, speechless for a long moment, before muttering into his glass, “You are strange.” He paused a moment, then picked up his pencil from where it had nearly escaped between the arm and the seat cushion and made a note somewhere near the bottom of page two that they’d gone through together. “Just Munchausen’s.”
“Wouldn’t explain murder, though.” It was her turn to incline her head questioningly.
“No. But a woman who’s old and dying could develop it if she wants constant reassurance from doctors that she’s doing okay, medically. And a granddaughter who just thinks her grandmother is sickly and dying could go trying to find a way to save her. Sort of a warped hero’s quest.” He was still taking notes, tiny letters on the yellow page, indecipherable half the time.
“Looking for a cure on her own? Sounds a bit like a fantasy novel, Alex.” Somewhere along the line, they’d slipped into first names like a comfortable set of old flannel pajamas. “You don’t write fantasy, Alex, just like you don’t write grandma-noir.”
“Mm. I could if I wanted to,” he said, a bit tersely, then shrugged. “And it doesn’t have to be an actual cure - it could be something flawed, something very dark that she gets caught up in.”
“... Like Satanism?”
“I was thinking more just drugs.”
She laughed, flushed a little, and moved to stretch out along the couch. “Right. I knew that.” That earned an amused snort, the sort she had begun to cherish just a little bit. He tended to be truly amused and not just mocking her when he made that sound. “But if she’s even high-school age, wouldn’t she know better? How old are you planning to make her?”
He shrugged, lifted a brow, and waited for her to draw conclusions. He was already making marks in the margin of his page.
“... You are not going to write a little girl getting caught up in drug deals.”
“And dying along the way - it’s going to be a tragedy.” Sophia was staring at him in muted disbelief. He smirked just a little bit. “But no, not a little girl. Not in actuality, anyway - I’m not prepared to write about stranger danger and men in white vans with cocaine candy. No worries.”
“I’m not sure whether I should be thankful or not. What are you going to do, then? Make her insane? Retarded? I’m not sure you’re going to win many fans killing a girl like that off.”
“Like I said, it’s going to be a tragedy. It’s going to be a terrible death, and the grandmother is going to have to come to terms with what she’s done.”
“If she has Munchausen’s, would she really learn the ‘error of her ways’?”
“Not sure yet. Wouldn’t it be even more of a tragedy if she didn’t?”
“It’d be one of those tragedies assigned in English classes across the country that everybody hates because it’s so depressing. You’re going to rival Hamlet.”
“I’m going to blow Hamlet out of the water.”
“Hubris,” she cautioned, laughed, set her drink aside. “So, do you like this idea?” She stifled a yawn.
“If you’re getting tired, then yes. I like it well enough. It needs some tweaking...”
“It’s going to end up nothing like that, is it.” She couldn’t help but laugh again as she sat up, gathered up her reading glasses and slipped them on with another yawn.
“Probably not, no. But it’s certainly helped.” He actually rose as she did, came over and took up her bag, held it out to her. She took it with an odd little smile on her face. “What?” he asked, frowning slightly.
“Playing at the gentleman?”
“Happens sometimes.”
She took her bag, slung it over her shoulder, spent one second glancing at the clock and the next ten staring at it. “It got late.”
He’d moved off while she stared, was gathering up the empty wine bottle and glasses. Now he looked up at her, cleared his throat in query when she didn’t turn to see his quirked eyebrow.
“Sorry, just- hadn’t really noticed it.”
“Obviously.”
“I helped, though?” It was strange, how much it was beginning to matter that she actually help instead of just taking up space and carrying up food. Especially now, when they had sat talking plot, when he had asked her to work with him, when he had reminded her just how great and strange of a writer he could be just by the way he turned ideas over between them, it mattered more than she’d ever thought it would. Vincent would either be triumphant or stymied. For a night, at least, Alex had improved (though his drinking continued) in mood and behavior, but to get there Sophia hadn’t hesitated to treat him as an equal and ignore the problem altogether. Progress might not have been made at all. But she was happy, proud when he nodded that yes, she had helped a great deal.
She was halfway to the door when she felt his hand on her elbow. She paused, stilled, was paralyzed by the touch for a moment before the lingering warmth of the wine loosened her joints again and she relaxed. “Yeah?”
There was something building up in his eyes, weaving down to his tongue, a storm filled with ice and hail. Sophia recoiled only an inch. “You reminded me-” he breathed out, then clamped down, teeth and tongue freezing with the effort of holding back what threatened. He shook his head, thought a moment, then attempted another approach to quelling the storm. “What do you remember about- about-”
“About Euris?” she asked, quietly, wondering if she should take his hand or get him more whiskey. When he nodded, she attempted to do both at once, but he kept her from going back into the room proper. He didn’t throw off her hand. “Not- not too much. I wasn’t even ten when...”
They danced around it, everybody did. They all danced around that one night, with her father uncaring, her uncle and Alex broken-hearted for creeping past ten years now.
“What do you remember about her?” Alex repeated, breathing out the words with crackling intensity. His eyes were fixed on hers, slightly unfocused. “Tell me. I-I-” His voice cracked and she moved closer, hand tightening on his. He didn’t seem to notice, concentrating on the next words choked down and struggling to get out. “I- I’m starting to forget,” he finally whispered, looking away, pulling away.
“She used to push me on the swing.” It was the first thing that came to mind beyond how she had looked hooked up to all of those machines. She pushed herself back to before Alex had even showed up, when Euris had come over every day after school to look after her. “And she taught me how to play every board game imaginable. She would have been-” She caught herself before she could say ‘a good mother’ or some variation on that theme.
He filled it in himself, though, from the darkening of his expression. She cleared her throat, tried to bring him back again. “She and Marius were actually the ones that put the swing up in the backyard. Dad took it down three or four times before he got fed up and left it. From then on, Euris would push me on it every day and we’d sing songs, because that was how we got to fly every day. And then we’d go to the garden she had helped plant with my mother - we decided it was her memorial garden. And we’d sit there and play games when it was warm enough. I remember around eight or so, I started to wonder if she minded coming every day, but I think she enjoyed it. She was- she was the closest thing to a sister, to real family, that I had. Until she started coming over to take care of me - I was five when that happened, I think, which made her fifteen - I hadn’t realized that I was lonely. Lonely at five...”
“Your father’s an asshole,” he muttered, as if it helped him look just past Euris’s ghost in the corner.
“Businessmen are as a rule, I think.”
He laughed, weakly, retreating into himself to the point where he couldn’t move, could only stand looking at the floor. He stood that way for so long that she began moving towards the door again, only to be stopped by a soft, “Wait.”
“Alex?”
“... Did she love me?” His eyes, his breath, his heart were clinging to her now, the only piece of floating, rotted driftwood in the whole ocean. She paled, looked away, tried to think of some way she could answer. But she’d never seen them together for long enough- it had been so long ago- she had only been nine-
But Euris had stopped coming to babysit her every day and the few times they saw each other after that, Euris had looked calmer than ever, with a small smile always present that spoke of peaceful bliss. She knew that look, now. It was the look Vincent gave her, from time to time, when she let him close, times a thousand. “She did,” Sophia said, with unfamiliar confidence.
He sagged, nodded. “... Of course,” he murmured, trying his best to smile. “That- that’s it. That’s enough.”
Sophia nodded, shifted her bag on her shoulder, and left without another word, the door shutting quietly behind her. He faced the door, remembered how like a ghost she had looked with her glasses set aside, and whispered, “Thank you.”
--
His rages were terrifying. She had gone weeks, just over two months now, without seeing more than the edges of them. He would send her away when they threatened, when they were breaking. She had never had to watch it happen. Now she had been swept up in it and he had focused in on her. There was alcohol on his breath, stronger than normal, and she could smell it because he had her backed against a wall. She had her hands clapped over her ears, eyes squinted half-closed.
“Her fault!” he was shouting, almost screeching, hair a mess and clothes dirty and half-undone. Every night for the last two weeks, since that night where they had sat as colleagues, he had asked her to tell him more stories about Euris. This night - was it only an hour ago? less? - she had told him about the time when Delphine had been lounging in the living room and Euris had spirited Sophia way not to the backyard but to the park down the road, then to Marius’s home for the night. But each time she mentioned that damned pale woman’s name, he’d stiffened, and she hadn’t noticed until it was too late. Finally, he had snapped at her to shut up, had retreated with a slammed door in his wake to his office. She would have left, but she worried about him now, waited to see if he would come out. He had come out, shouting at her, berating her for still behind there. And when she had tried to reach the door, he had cornered her.
“That fucking bitch, it’s her fault Euris is dead, it’s her fault I’m like this, and you had better not ever mention her name again!” He had made that proclamation too many times to count in her frightened haze, and she nodded, whimpered assent again. He slammed a fist into the wall by her head and she yelped, cringing away. “She took everything from me,” he hissed, “and you bring her up to- to-” But now he faltered, tried to find the words, failed and backed away.
“She’s taking everything from me, too,” Sophia whispered, as if to protect herself, to validate herself. He looked at her, the gaze turning into a stare, and then he grabbed her wildly by the shoulders.
“She- she takes everything,” he said, fervently, shaking her and producing a strangled cry. He looked down at her, his hands on her arms, and let go, rubbing his hands together. “Everything.”
Sophia nodded, fighting down the panic to approach him, take his wrist, rub at the soft skin there as she led him over to the chair. She thought of calling Vincent, of calling Marius, but she couldn’t leave him for long enough or think clearly enough to call them. Instead, she knelt at his feet, took his hands even as he fidgeted. “She does. She took Euris from both of us.” The statement had just the slight prosodic tinge of question to it, leading. She didn’t know how Delphine was involved, but she didn’t doubt it to be somehow true.
He latched onto the lead, nodding. “Euris was so angry- so angry about what Delphine was doing to your father and to you- I remember now, it was because of those times she tried to save you. And she was so angry, and she was crying. I was trying to comfort her. Delphine had said something to her- to her and Marius, about how they weren’t a part of your family, that she took precedence and that Euris was to leave you alone. I was trying to comfort her and I didn’t see the other car coming.”
That was right; Alex had been driving when the accident had happened. They’d been hit on the passenger side, towards the back, and Euris had been thrown forward through the windshield while Alex had been caught by the airbags, had only bashed his head on the dashboard. Euris had died, and Alex hadn’t been allowed to hold her hand because he shouldn’t have been driving. Had he been drinking? Was that how they’d explained it?
“And then in the hospital, that woman- she was there. I had only met her a few times, in passing, but Euris hated her so much. And Euris was dying in the other room and she was laughing.”
“She was laughing at me,” Sophia whispered, paling, looking down. “I was there, too- I was that little girl and she laughed because I didn’t want to go with her. She told me I was being a silly little girl. And she laughed at me.”
“She deserves death.”
“She won’t die, not while she has her claws in my father,” Sophia said, swallowing. “She’s his groomed successor to his position, you know. He’d get rid of me sooner than get rid of her, fight for her life if she were to fall ill harder than he would fight for mine.”
“I hate her. I want to rip her apart with my bare hands- have wanted to forever-” His hands were flexing, as if he were envisioning it, and she clamped down harder on them, laced her fingers with his in an attempt to bind him.
“You can’t-”
“Why can’t I? I don’t have anything else. I’ve been dead for ten years - what’s a few decades more in some jail somewhere?”
“You’re not that type of person. You’re not. You’re not that- that frightening.” She kept thinking back to the broken boy in the hall, wishing she had done something more than give him that toy, something that would have kept this anger from erupting. “Besides, Euris- Euris wouldn’t have wanted that. She wouldn’t have wanted for you to sink to that level. Just- protect what you have now from Delphine. Euris would want you to protect, not to attack.”
“I couldn’t protect Euris.”
“... No,” she whispered, unable to fight him on that fact. “But you’re- you’re protecting me, you know.”
He grunted, pulled against her weakly for a moment. “Protecting you? I can’t.”
“She’s at my house every day now, every night. She’s closing in on moving in, Alex, and you and Vincent are giving me my only way out.” She’d been spending more of each day with Alex, more of each night at shows, at practices, trying to run away from Delphine lounging on the couch in a dressing robe. It had been working so far. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of spending the night on Alex’s couch, but knew that then she would have to lie, have to tell her father that she was at Vincent’s, and then Marius would know and Delphine would know and they’d start making plans. All three of them, they all made plans, all the time. Marius just made more bearable plans than the others. “You have to give me this place to come and escape, that’s why you have to stay here.” She wasn’t quite sure why this was working, why telling him to protect her seemed to be softening him, soothing him.
“Vincent can do a better job,” he was muttering, turning his face away from hers.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe, but I don’t like it when he does, not really.”
“I’m an alcoholic wreck of a fucking asshole.”
“Maybe. But I’ll still make sure you eat and tell you stories about Euris and about crazy grandmothers with Munchausen’s.”
He fell silent then, and she with him. He was shivering and she noticed the sickly sheen of tears on his cheeks moments before they fell, moments before he dropped his head down and she let go of his hands so that she could rise up on her knees, gather him up in her arms. She stroked his knotted hair until he fell asleep, breath still rattling, still pungent. And then she sat, sat on the floor with her hands in her lap, palms upturned, so that she could look at them and marvel at what she had done. She had soothed the raving lunatic, had managed to give him some sort of comfort, and she knew now more of him than she knew of her father, of her uncle, of Vincent. She sat on the floor and looked at her hands, looked at him, back and forth for the better part of an hour, before she settled herself in his chair and fell asleep, uncaring of any plots her family might weave.
Authors:
serindrana, also known as skepticallittledarlingSeries: Last Exile
Characters: Alex, Vincent, Sophia
Words: 5296
Notes: Modern-day AU, focusing on Sophia’s relationships with the two men in her life against the backdrop of family drama. Currently PG...13-ish?
I have not known men who were of no account.
The styrofoam creaked as her fingers clutched at it, instinctively tightening her grip as she juggled three boxes, a purse, and the set of keys she was attempting to search through by touch alone. Finally managing to isolate the one key she needed, she shifted, bracing her hip against the door to better balance herself, and somehow managed to unlock the door, easing it open and sliding inside with the least amount of noise she could manage.
It was somewhere around one in the afternoon and, from a week’s experience, she knew that there was only about a thirty percent chance that he’d be awake. She had tried stopping by to make sure he had breakfast the first few days, but every time she had found him out cold and unresponsive in a deep sleep, either on the couch or (if she were lucky) in his bed. Lunch was a better chance, if only by a little, and he seemed to feel a bit better if he was woken up to deli sandwiches or fresh, greasy pizza from the little run-down shop on the corner. So she set the boxes out on the kitchen counter, finding her own (the smallest, with a half-sandwich, onion rings, and a pickle) and moving it aside. She grabbed two sodas from the fridge (she’d bought them the other day so that he’d have something other than booze to drink), set out a stack of napkins in the hope that maybe he’d use them, this time, and then looked for a long, quiet moment at his door.
This was always the hard part, deciding how best to wake him up. Sometimes he responded best to a harried knock, sometimes to the door opening with a quiet squeak followed by her voice, softly asking him to get up. She decided on the former this time, knocking for fifteen seconds straight. Then she waited, waited until he opened the door, bleary-eyed and shirtless, hair a mess, skin just as sallow as always. Their eyes met for a moment.
“Lunch is in the kitchen.”
“Mm.”
That was his favorite way of communicating with her: a sophisticatedly barbaric system of grunts that she was slowly beginning to understand. This one meant, ‘Okay, give me ten minutes and I’ll be out. Don’t worry about me going back to sleep’. There was a very slight tonal difference between that and, ‘Put it in the fridge, I’m going back to sleep’. Those were, so far, the only two she could distinguish from each other.
She nodded, went back to the kitchen without a word more, perched up on the barstool by the breakfast bar and set about eating her lunch, doing her best not to look over at his door, waiting for him to come out. He’d caught her doing that, once, and had glared, colored slightly (in annoyance or embarrassment, she couldn’t be sure). It didn’t stop her from keeping an eye on his bedroom door, but it did make her more cautious. This time, again, she was able to look away before he noticed her.
Fully dressed now, with his hair sort of combed (probably with his fingers) and his eyes a little less glassy than before, he strode - didn’t shuffle, like she’d expected the first few days - into the kitchen, found the box with his sandwich, started eating while standing at the counter. These meals were more formality and necessity than anything. They rarely exchanged glances, even less frequently words, and, usually, when he was done he would go back to the bathroom or his room or his office and be lost to her until dinner (if she stayed that long).
He never drank in front of her, but she happened to know that the liquor cabinet in his office was starting to run low.
This time, though, when he finished, he used the napkins, cleaned up after himself, and stood, leaning his hip against the counter, looking at her with his arms folded across his chest loosely.
“It’s not part of your job description to feed me.”
“It’s take-out,” she countered, though she was a bit flustered by his sudden need to comment. He’d stopped his sarcastic jabs since she’d started working for him, instead preferring his now customary silence. She’d been disappointed the first few days. “It’s not like I’m cooking dinner for you.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you did, one night.”
“I don’t cook.”
They were staring each other down, Sophia fighting to keep from looking down and away, Alex focused on her without much effort, simply looking at her, through her. She was on the verge of making some inane comment when he broke the silence first. “You don’t have to pretend like you like the job.”
“I’m not pretending that I like it,” she responded, taking a sip of her coke. “It’s just a job. I’m like this at every job I’ve ever had.”
“You always bring your boss lunch?”
“I’ve never been a personal assistant.”
“What are you assisting me with?”
“Remembering to eat.”
The staring contest had resumed, lasting long enough that Sophia finished off her soda.
“I’d fire you, but I don’t think that’s really in my power.”
Sophia straightened at that, frowning. “No, probably not. You’re not quite my boss. It’s not like I’m getting in the way of your working or your drinking, so I’m not sure what the big deal is.”
She expected some caustic remark about her habits, her appearance, anything that would prove he didn’t like having her around (as she already suspected, had suspected since Marius had first suggested this). Instead, he said simply, “You don’t want to be here.”
She colored, shook her head. She ignored that no, she didn’t really want to spend most of her free time sitting in a silent apartment that smelled of disuse and alcohol, instead forming the words, “Sure I do.”
He laughed at her. “You can’t and you don’t. You have a life, I assume, given Vincent and everything.” He waved his hand, shrugged.
“Not much of one. I have a schedule and I have a guy who thinks we’re dating when we’re not.”
That stopped him for a moment. He frowned, lowered his eyes, appeared to be thinking, recalculating. He didn’t ask questions, though, didn’t seek to clarify. Instead, he finally pushed himself up off of the counter and walked back into his office, closing the door behind him and leaving Sophia wondering what, exactly, had just happened.
--
She was singing one of her old songs - the ones from before she knew Vincent and before he’d pressed collaboration - when he slipped in through the front door, unnoticed. He’d gone out without an explanation and returned now with one bottle of wine and two of whiskey. He would have slunk past her as he had done numerous times before, but he paused at the sound of her voice, stiffened first before relaxing, almost weak-kneed, against the door. For a moment, he forgot himself, and watched. Watched and listened as she sang out lyrics (more clumsy than what she had sung at the club) that wove a story about bowers and homes and broken men. For a moment, he wondered if she was singing about him.
The song wasn’t finished, but he was already pulling himself back together, standing up straight and stopping just short of smoothing down the front of his wrinkled shirt. He moved to sneak past her just as he’d planned, but somehow she turned just enough to catch his eye and stopped cold, closing her mouth, not breathing for a long stretch. He didn’t look away until he realized her chest hadn’t fallen with exhalation.
“You’re allowed to breathe, you know,” he muttered, shaking his head and breaking her strange little spell. He was halfway down the hall before he paused, doubled back, and set the bag of bottles on the island. “You wrote that yourself, didn’t you?”
Sophia was still staring at him, a little scared, a lot embarrassed. She nodded. “Uh, yeah- years ago. High school.”
“Before Vincent.” He tilted his head back contemplatively, frowning slightly.
She colored a darker red than before.
“How late are you staying tonight?” He had never bothered to ask her schedule before. She came and went as she pleased and he ignored her as he pleased and it all seemed to work rather well, in his opinion.
“Um.” She pursed her lips, taking the excuse to move, looking down and tapping her foot anxiously. She never liked being caught singing to herself like that, especially not by Alex with his half-lidded but too-sharp eyes. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Until whenever, I guess.” She had a reading on the anthropological theories of language origination, but she had planned to do that in his kitchen, waiting until some arbitrary time when she felt okay leaving.
“Sit down, then. Over there- the couch.” He gestured absently, then went back to his office, closing the door.
She stared after him, then shrugged, laughing weakly and grabbing up her bag. Two months and she still couldn’t make him out half the time, but she supposed that was normal, given how much he confused Vincent on a daily basis. She settled down on the couch, opening her satchel and thumbing through a folder of paper packets, pulling out the only one that wasn’t festooned with Post-Its. Expecting a long, slow night, and not thinking too much of their brief exchange, she began reading.
But she was only halfway down the first page when she heard the door to the office open again, then familiar (if infrequent) footsteps in the hall. She glanced up, adjusting the reading glasses that had taken up a near permanent perch on her nose over the last year or so. Alex came out of the hall, with his own reading glasses (she had never known he wore them) and a yellow legal pad half-filled. He sat down across from her, in the leather armchair she hadn’t dared touch from the scent of single malt that clung to it and marked it as his. His feet up on the coffee table, he took a pen from behind his ear and looked at her with a cocked, expectant eyebrow.
“... Yes, Mr. Rowe?” she finally started, trying to sound as unconfused as possible.
“You,” he said, as if surprised he had to explain, “are going to help me with my writer’s block.”
“Need another pair of hands to push it out of the way?” It was her turn to lift one brow as she set aside her reading and folded her hands primly in her lap. “I don’t think I can help.”
“You’re a writer. You can help. You can help more than Vincent could, if your songs are anything to go by.”
She flushed with barely concealed pride, straightening somewhat. “They’re just songs.” She had to try to be modest, though; it was in her nature to knock herself down two pegs for every one she climbed.
“Yes, but they’re good songs that have more than decent lyrics. Which is more than can be said of the other writer we know.”
“Vincent writes perfectly good songs.”
“Perfectly good is not imperfectly good with rich flaws,” he countered. “Now, you either help me or you get out and don’t come back.”
“This is entrapment.”
“Very good,” he said, coming as close to crooning as his dead voice would let him. “But I’d prefer it if you just saw it as a.... a fun opportunity.”
Sophia nibbled on her lower lip, then sighed, taking off her reading glasses and setting them aside. “Fine. Do you have anything so far?”
She looked different without the glasses. He swallowed, fighting away the fleeting image of a ghost that haunted every line of her face, newly unbroken in his eyes. “Very little. Something wholly depressing about a girl and her grandmother.”
“What’s so depressing?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
Oh, okay. I’ll write your novel for you, Mr. Rowe. “This will be fun,” she sighed, but she couldn’t help but smile as she leaned back and pulled her writer’s idea-kicking boots on.
--
The bottle of wine was empty by the end of the first hour.
“No. I’m not going to write a detective novel. There is no way in hell I’m writing a novel where a little old biddy goes galavanting around trying to solve the murder of her granddaughter. Just- no.”
Sophia reflected for a moment on how much more talkative he seemed to get when he did his drinking amidst company. Or, perhaps not more talkative, but more vehement in his opposition to others’ help. She nearly laughed, instead sitting back and shrugging, propping her feet up on the coffee table. “Okay, fine, not a detective novel, no matter how much fun grandma-noir would be. She could always kill the girl herself somehow. That’d be wholly depressing.”
“Yes, because grandmothers regularly run around wielding kitchen knives and nine millimeters.”
“Well, of course not. If they did, then it wouldn’t be as much of a story.” She licked her lips, looked down at her glass of whiskey she’d barely touched (though he had finished two glasses of it already). He was preparing to retort when she cut in again with an off-handed, “Munchausen’s-by-proxy, then?”
He looked at her, speechless for a long moment, before muttering into his glass, “You are strange.” He paused a moment, then picked up his pencil from where it had nearly escaped between the arm and the seat cushion and made a note somewhere near the bottom of page two that they’d gone through together. “Just Munchausen’s.”
“Wouldn’t explain murder, though.” It was her turn to incline her head questioningly.
“No. But a woman who’s old and dying could develop it if she wants constant reassurance from doctors that she’s doing okay, medically. And a granddaughter who just thinks her grandmother is sickly and dying could go trying to find a way to save her. Sort of a warped hero’s quest.” He was still taking notes, tiny letters on the yellow page, indecipherable half the time.
“Looking for a cure on her own? Sounds a bit like a fantasy novel, Alex.” Somewhere along the line, they’d slipped into first names like a comfortable set of old flannel pajamas. “You don’t write fantasy, Alex, just like you don’t write grandma-noir.”
“Mm. I could if I wanted to,” he said, a bit tersely, then shrugged. “And it doesn’t have to be an actual cure - it could be something flawed, something very dark that she gets caught up in.”
“... Like Satanism?”
“I was thinking more just drugs.”
She laughed, flushed a little, and moved to stretch out along the couch. “Right. I knew that.” That earned an amused snort, the sort she had begun to cherish just a little bit. He tended to be truly amused and not just mocking her when he made that sound. “But if she’s even high-school age, wouldn’t she know better? How old are you planning to make her?”
He shrugged, lifted a brow, and waited for her to draw conclusions. He was already making marks in the margin of his page.
“... You are not going to write a little girl getting caught up in drug deals.”
“And dying along the way - it’s going to be a tragedy.” Sophia was staring at him in muted disbelief. He smirked just a little bit. “But no, not a little girl. Not in actuality, anyway - I’m not prepared to write about stranger danger and men in white vans with cocaine candy. No worries.”
“I’m not sure whether I should be thankful or not. What are you going to do, then? Make her insane? Retarded? I’m not sure you’re going to win many fans killing a girl like that off.”
“Like I said, it’s going to be a tragedy. It’s going to be a terrible death, and the grandmother is going to have to come to terms with what she’s done.”
“If she has Munchausen’s, would she really learn the ‘error of her ways’?”
“Not sure yet. Wouldn’t it be even more of a tragedy if she didn’t?”
“It’d be one of those tragedies assigned in English classes across the country that everybody hates because it’s so depressing. You’re going to rival Hamlet.”
“I’m going to blow Hamlet out of the water.”
“Hubris,” she cautioned, laughed, set her drink aside. “So, do you like this idea?” She stifled a yawn.
“If you’re getting tired, then yes. I like it well enough. It needs some tweaking...”
“It’s going to end up nothing like that, is it.” She couldn’t help but laugh again as she sat up, gathered up her reading glasses and slipped them on with another yawn.
“Probably not, no. But it’s certainly helped.” He actually rose as she did, came over and took up her bag, held it out to her. She took it with an odd little smile on her face. “What?” he asked, frowning slightly.
“Playing at the gentleman?”
“Happens sometimes.”
She took her bag, slung it over her shoulder, spent one second glancing at the clock and the next ten staring at it. “It got late.”
He’d moved off while she stared, was gathering up the empty wine bottle and glasses. Now he looked up at her, cleared his throat in query when she didn’t turn to see his quirked eyebrow.
“Sorry, just- hadn’t really noticed it.”
“Obviously.”
“I helped, though?” It was strange, how much it was beginning to matter that she actually help instead of just taking up space and carrying up food. Especially now, when they had sat talking plot, when he had asked her to work with him, when he had reminded her just how great and strange of a writer he could be just by the way he turned ideas over between them, it mattered more than she’d ever thought it would. Vincent would either be triumphant or stymied. For a night, at least, Alex had improved (though his drinking continued) in mood and behavior, but to get there Sophia hadn’t hesitated to treat him as an equal and ignore the problem altogether. Progress might not have been made at all. But she was happy, proud when he nodded that yes, she had helped a great deal.
She was halfway to the door when she felt his hand on her elbow. She paused, stilled, was paralyzed by the touch for a moment before the lingering warmth of the wine loosened her joints again and she relaxed. “Yeah?”
There was something building up in his eyes, weaving down to his tongue, a storm filled with ice and hail. Sophia recoiled only an inch. “You reminded me-” he breathed out, then clamped down, teeth and tongue freezing with the effort of holding back what threatened. He shook his head, thought a moment, then attempted another approach to quelling the storm. “What do you remember about- about-”
“About Euris?” she asked, quietly, wondering if she should take his hand or get him more whiskey. When he nodded, she attempted to do both at once, but he kept her from going back into the room proper. He didn’t throw off her hand. “Not- not too much. I wasn’t even ten when...”
They danced around it, everybody did. They all danced around that one night, with her father uncaring, her uncle and Alex broken-hearted for creeping past ten years now.
“What do you remember about her?” Alex repeated, breathing out the words with crackling intensity. His eyes were fixed on hers, slightly unfocused. “Tell me. I-I-” His voice cracked and she moved closer, hand tightening on his. He didn’t seem to notice, concentrating on the next words choked down and struggling to get out. “I- I’m starting to forget,” he finally whispered, looking away, pulling away.
“She used to push me on the swing.” It was the first thing that came to mind beyond how she had looked hooked up to all of those machines. She pushed herself back to before Alex had even showed up, when Euris had come over every day after school to look after her. “And she taught me how to play every board game imaginable. She would have been-” She caught herself before she could say ‘a good mother’ or some variation on that theme.
He filled it in himself, though, from the darkening of his expression. She cleared her throat, tried to bring him back again. “She and Marius were actually the ones that put the swing up in the backyard. Dad took it down three or four times before he got fed up and left it. From then on, Euris would push me on it every day and we’d sing songs, because that was how we got to fly every day. And then we’d go to the garden she had helped plant with my mother - we decided it was her memorial garden. And we’d sit there and play games when it was warm enough. I remember around eight or so, I started to wonder if she minded coming every day, but I think she enjoyed it. She was- she was the closest thing to a sister, to real family, that I had. Until she started coming over to take care of me - I was five when that happened, I think, which made her fifteen - I hadn’t realized that I was lonely. Lonely at five...”
“Your father’s an asshole,” he muttered, as if it helped him look just past Euris’s ghost in the corner.
“Businessmen are as a rule, I think.”
He laughed, weakly, retreating into himself to the point where he couldn’t move, could only stand looking at the floor. He stood that way for so long that she began moving towards the door again, only to be stopped by a soft, “Wait.”
“Alex?”
“... Did she love me?” His eyes, his breath, his heart were clinging to her now, the only piece of floating, rotted driftwood in the whole ocean. She paled, looked away, tried to think of some way she could answer. But she’d never seen them together for long enough- it had been so long ago- she had only been nine-
But Euris had stopped coming to babysit her every day and the few times they saw each other after that, Euris had looked calmer than ever, with a small smile always present that spoke of peaceful bliss. She knew that look, now. It was the look Vincent gave her, from time to time, when she let him close, times a thousand. “She did,” Sophia said, with unfamiliar confidence.
He sagged, nodded. “... Of course,” he murmured, trying his best to smile. “That- that’s it. That’s enough.”
Sophia nodded, shifted her bag on her shoulder, and left without another word, the door shutting quietly behind her. He faced the door, remembered how like a ghost she had looked with her glasses set aside, and whispered, “Thank you.”
--
His rages were terrifying. She had gone weeks, just over two months now, without seeing more than the edges of them. He would send her away when they threatened, when they were breaking. She had never had to watch it happen. Now she had been swept up in it and he had focused in on her. There was alcohol on his breath, stronger than normal, and she could smell it because he had her backed against a wall. She had her hands clapped over her ears, eyes squinted half-closed.
“Her fault!” he was shouting, almost screeching, hair a mess and clothes dirty and half-undone. Every night for the last two weeks, since that night where they had sat as colleagues, he had asked her to tell him more stories about Euris. This night - was it only an hour ago? less? - she had told him about the time when Delphine had been lounging in the living room and Euris had spirited Sophia way not to the backyard but to the park down the road, then to Marius’s home for the night. But each time she mentioned that damned pale woman’s name, he’d stiffened, and she hadn’t noticed until it was too late. Finally, he had snapped at her to shut up, had retreated with a slammed door in his wake to his office. She would have left, but she worried about him now, waited to see if he would come out. He had come out, shouting at her, berating her for still behind there. And when she had tried to reach the door, he had cornered her.
“That fucking bitch, it’s her fault Euris is dead, it’s her fault I’m like this, and you had better not ever mention her name again!” He had made that proclamation too many times to count in her frightened haze, and she nodded, whimpered assent again. He slammed a fist into the wall by her head and she yelped, cringing away. “She took everything from me,” he hissed, “and you bring her up to- to-” But now he faltered, tried to find the words, failed and backed away.
“She’s taking everything from me, too,” Sophia whispered, as if to protect herself, to validate herself. He looked at her, the gaze turning into a stare, and then he grabbed her wildly by the shoulders.
“She- she takes everything,” he said, fervently, shaking her and producing a strangled cry. He looked down at her, his hands on her arms, and let go, rubbing his hands together. “Everything.”
Sophia nodded, fighting down the panic to approach him, take his wrist, rub at the soft skin there as she led him over to the chair. She thought of calling Vincent, of calling Marius, but she couldn’t leave him for long enough or think clearly enough to call them. Instead, she knelt at his feet, took his hands even as he fidgeted. “She does. She took Euris from both of us.” The statement had just the slight prosodic tinge of question to it, leading. She didn’t know how Delphine was involved, but she didn’t doubt it to be somehow true.
He latched onto the lead, nodding. “Euris was so angry- so angry about what Delphine was doing to your father and to you- I remember now, it was because of those times she tried to save you. And she was so angry, and she was crying. I was trying to comfort her. Delphine had said something to her- to her and Marius, about how they weren’t a part of your family, that she took precedence and that Euris was to leave you alone. I was trying to comfort her and I didn’t see the other car coming.”
That was right; Alex had been driving when the accident had happened. They’d been hit on the passenger side, towards the back, and Euris had been thrown forward through the windshield while Alex had been caught by the airbags, had only bashed his head on the dashboard. Euris had died, and Alex hadn’t been allowed to hold her hand because he shouldn’t have been driving. Had he been drinking? Was that how they’d explained it?
“And then in the hospital, that woman- she was there. I had only met her a few times, in passing, but Euris hated her so much. And Euris was dying in the other room and she was laughing.”
“She was laughing at me,” Sophia whispered, paling, looking down. “I was there, too- I was that little girl and she laughed because I didn’t want to go with her. She told me I was being a silly little girl. And she laughed at me.”
“She deserves death.”
“She won’t die, not while she has her claws in my father,” Sophia said, swallowing. “She’s his groomed successor to his position, you know. He’d get rid of me sooner than get rid of her, fight for her life if she were to fall ill harder than he would fight for mine.”
“I hate her. I want to rip her apart with my bare hands- have wanted to forever-” His hands were flexing, as if he were envisioning it, and she clamped down harder on them, laced her fingers with his in an attempt to bind him.
“You can’t-”
“Why can’t I? I don’t have anything else. I’ve been dead for ten years - what’s a few decades more in some jail somewhere?”
“You’re not that type of person. You’re not. You’re not that- that frightening.” She kept thinking back to the broken boy in the hall, wishing she had done something more than give him that toy, something that would have kept this anger from erupting. “Besides, Euris- Euris wouldn’t have wanted that. She wouldn’t have wanted for you to sink to that level. Just- protect what you have now from Delphine. Euris would want you to protect, not to attack.”
“I couldn’t protect Euris.”
“... No,” she whispered, unable to fight him on that fact. “But you’re- you’re protecting me, you know.”
He grunted, pulled against her weakly for a moment. “Protecting you? I can’t.”
“She’s at my house every day now, every night. She’s closing in on moving in, Alex, and you and Vincent are giving me my only way out.” She’d been spending more of each day with Alex, more of each night at shows, at practices, trying to run away from Delphine lounging on the couch in a dressing robe. It had been working so far. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of spending the night on Alex’s couch, but knew that then she would have to lie, have to tell her father that she was at Vincent’s, and then Marius would know and Delphine would know and they’d start making plans. All three of them, they all made plans, all the time. Marius just made more bearable plans than the others. “You have to give me this place to come and escape, that’s why you have to stay here.” She wasn’t quite sure why this was working, why telling him to protect her seemed to be softening him, soothing him.
“Vincent can do a better job,” he was muttering, turning his face away from hers.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe, but I don’t like it when he does, not really.”
“I’m an alcoholic wreck of a fucking asshole.”
“Maybe. But I’ll still make sure you eat and tell you stories about Euris and about crazy grandmothers with Munchausen’s.”
He fell silent then, and she with him. He was shivering and she noticed the sickly sheen of tears on his cheeks moments before they fell, moments before he dropped his head down and she let go of his hands so that she could rise up on her knees, gather him up in her arms. She stroked his knotted hair until he fell asleep, breath still rattling, still pungent. And then she sat, sat on the floor with her hands in her lap, palms upturned, so that she could look at them and marvel at what she had done. She had soothed the raving lunatic, had managed to give him some sort of comfort, and she knew now more of him than she knew of her father, of her uncle, of Vincent. She sat on the floor and looked at her hands, looked at him, back and forth for the better part of an hour, before she settled herself in his chair and fell asleep, uncaring of any plots her family might weave.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-06-24 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-24 02:21 pm (UTC)I kind of want to write that story, to be honest. It's just crazy and wtf. But I'm not sure I'd be able to do it justice. (Alex himself gets side-tracked while writing it, so we don't see it from him.)