entranceway | text; pockets full of stones

Homicide was never on the docket, but I appreciate your concern.

[If he's doing precisely what she knows he's doing - and she has no reason to believe he isn't a man of his word - it's a little pointless to refuse the offer of company.]

I know you're keeping an eye on me. You might as well have a tipple while you're at it.

Figured you were smarter than that.

[Besides, killing everyone tangentially involved was his schtick.

But hey, he could keep an eye on you from a respectful distance. ]

For a while, at least. Till you're ready to be alone.

[Evelyn doesn't know if she's ready to be alone at all. There is a comfort in keeping one's own company, but she is too familiar with the oppressive weight of silence to want to subject herself to it for longer than is healthy.]

The end of the dock. I'll be the one wrapped in the blanket.

ok

[ It's not too long before he finds her, making his footsteps heavy along the dock as he approaches, so she has time to hear him coming.

He sits down, behind her, resting his back against hers, with the blanket between them. ]

Worst part is, all the stuff you're never gonna see. All those first days of school, brushing their teeth, all that shit everyone thinks is boring. You kind of die a little knowing you're not gonna ever have that again. Maybe hate that you didn't appreciate what you had when you had it.

[Yeah, okay so maybe the whole thing is less to spare her from being seen and as much to protect him from it.]

[Footsteps echo against the water under the dock, an audible confirmation of his presence and when he settles behind her Evelyn briefly startles at the contact. Unexpected, but not unwanted, she leans back against him slowly, relaxing.

The support is needed, when she feels like a stiff wind might blow her into the ocean.]

Birthdays. [She says quietly, her voice hoarse. Evelyn clears her throat.] Tying shoes.

[Hearing something in him catch, she shifts to shore up his foundations. This close Evelyn can hear his heart breaking on the words, snapped in two like splintered bone.]

I waited here for years. I should be more grateful for the extra time, any time, but...

[It wasn’t enough. Maybe it’s selfish to want more.]

Fuck 'should'. Most of the people who make that shit up ain't been through half of what you have.

[All those damn psych 'experts' at his trial. Talking about what he was 'going through' like they knew him. And, like this place. Most people could barely imagine outliving their child. How about more than once? ]

Only thing 'should' ever did was give you another stick to beat yourself up with.

[He speaks with such unmitigated, unrepentant conviction that Evelyn can’t help but believe him. She deserves more and this place has done nothing but take from her: memories, people. She feels a smile cross her face despite herself.

Having ripped parts of her nostalgia to shreds over should, that minor satisfaction is poignant.]

I’m tired of feeling bruised.

[Evelyn sighs, sinking into the metaphor full-tilt.]

Sometimes you just- every time you think it’s healing, to getting close, something just tears you open again.

Edited 2017-10-16 23:54 (UTC)

Yeah. Love's like that. Only thing that can get under your skin and tear you up like that.

[His wife knew that all too well. The ones who you love are the only ones who can really truly hurt you.

He shifts, shoulders moving behind her, tilting his head up to look at the night sky.]

There's worse. There's feeling nothing at all.

[Pain stings so much more - agonising, slow, and mournful - from one who is close enough to be surprising, from an individual with whom you have cultivated a deep relationship. Love is putting a knife in someone's hands and giving them a map of the places they can cut the deepest. It's building a house with a person only to have them burn it down around you.]

I remember feeling nothing.

[Evelyn says quietly, turning her head. She catches his jaw in the periphery, as Frank looks up at constellations that have rearranged themselves since she first arrived here.]

The man I told you about, he... [A huff more bitter than sweet, toxins bleeding into her word as she continues.] He broke me. Climbed inside of me hoping to use me as a home, as if I were some mould into which he could press himself to become a better person. Pushed at the seams of me. He's still there.

Sometimes I wonder how much of us is us, after people like that.

Yeah, so you know.

[It's one reason he clung onto the anger so tightly. Without that, he felt nothing, he was just empty, that kind of emptiness that feels like a huge chasm, some faint wind from far down below with a breath of damnation on your neck.

He looks down at his hands for a long moment. ]

With you? Enough. Enough to build something solid on. Enough to feel something with.

[Frank is held upright by a righteous fury and Evelyn is held upright by Frank, who feels less like the construct of tired vengeance and more like the weathered plane of a monument, sand sweeping over the base. Warm, boundless and bare - not Ozymandias, but his downfall.

Struck by his pragmatic response she wonders what is left for him to feel. Evelyn tucks her legs up under her, pulling the blanket around herself and shifting to face the water, head resting against his shoulder.

The sea is hushed but pounds relentless beneath them, and her hands and heart ache from constantly rebuilding.]

Tell me something I don't know.

[Evelyn asks, sincere, and feels as though she has said the words before.]

Tell me something about you.

[He feels her shift, and the soft weight of her head on his shoulder, her long waves tumbling over his shoulder, the back of his neck. It's a gesture of trust he's not sure he's earned.

There's a long stretch of time, just the wind and the water moving. He's trying to think of something. Something that would be interesting.

He's got nothing. ]

...used to play guitar.

[That's the best he can come up with right now.] Wasn't ever good at it, but it felt...nice to be able to make something, you know, good.

Edited 2017-10-17 03:31 (UTC)

[Evelyn doesn't have the luxury of being discerning; even if she did, she wouldn't fear utilising the very support he offered in the first place. Being reckless and hardheaded are within her purview, certainly, but to be negligent of the earnestness in others is a sin all its own.

Frank could have asked after her son and left it at that.

He didn't have to come out to the dock on a brisk autumnal evening to keep her company, regardless of his position on her personal safety. She doesn't entirely believe she's earned that level of dedication from anyone, let alone the man she snapped at over the phone when she was hurt and afraid.

She tries to imagine his gun-callused hands delicately holding the neck of a guitar, picking out chords, fumbling. It's a nice thought.]

You couldn't have been any worse than I was on the pianoforte.

[ She might think he didn't have to. Maybe he wanted the company. Maybe he just didn't want her to have to go through part of it alone. There was a part of grief that was always solitary, but not all of it. Maybe.

He laughs. ]

I don't even know what that is. I'll take your word for it.

Oh. Ah.

[Evelyn laughs with something resembling mild self-consciousness. Having spent the last half-dozen years learning to translate fragments of her world for others, largely in the vernacular, she sometimes forgets that they’re not always on the same page.

Relics from another time peering through the cracks, where her mask of temporal confidence is less formidably sturdy.]

I believe it’s just called a piano, now. I didn’t tickle so much as bang about on the ivories until my instructor and grandmother both gave up.

I know what those are.

[A little defensive, misreading her laugh. He takes a deep breath, lets it out, slowly. ]

Sounds like it's because they wanted you to do it, rather than you.

I’m not teasing you, Frank.

[Gentle, amused. He sounds so hurt she has to swallow another laugh.]

The curse of the aristocracy. There’s a great deal you have to do that you don’t want to.

[Debutante balls. The social season. Begging for the opportunity to go to school to study archaeology, history, language. Her father was instrumental in permitting this sort of indulgence, but it became substantially more difficult after her parents died.]

Yeah.

[Of course she's not. She wouldn't do that. You need to stop projecting, asshole. ]

And what the hell are you supposed to get out of all that shit you don't want to do?

[Because they made him do a lot of stuff he didn't want to do in the Marines, but there was always a goal--being better, stronger, faster. ]

Propriety. A respectable husband.

[There is a certain element of disgust in her tone, an exhaustion with the outdated traditions of another era.

Evelyn understands that the conventions of her time are foreign to modern people, are archaic or crude - she doesn't disagree and fought valiantly for change, eschewing the standards set for her. Fighting tooth and claw for respect in a field unkind to the fairer sex.]

Old-fashioned ideals for old-fashioned people.

There's nothing wrong with a good husband.

[He'd tried to be one. Wasn't sure he'd succeeded. But he takes her point. She'd had no choice. ]

You get any say on who the guy was, at least?

[Evelyn remembers being paraded in front of suitors and hating every second of it, the derogatory glances, murmurs of the half-breed whose mother was a foreigner who married higher than her station. Xenophobia is rampant in the English peerage and it was difficult to be open to marriage when every option was either interested in the money they'd gain or the novelty of courting a half-Egyptian.]

I bucked the system, a bit. [She confesses with a little smile.] Married the man I bailed out of prison. Rick O'Connell.

[She took his name.

For a moment she tips her head, reaching for something around her throat and unclasping it. Evelyn gathers the locket and chain into her hand, knuckles brushing his forearm and depositing the piece of jewelry into his palm. The moon is bright enough to make out two images.]

[He raises an eyebrow at that. She'd mentioned the bail thing before. ]

Hope he remembered that every day of his life. [And treated her right because of it.

He glances at the picture of the guy--big, cornfed, Iowa-looking type. Not what he'd have matched with Evelyn. But his eyes linger on the kid.
His own son had brown hair, but a son was a son and a lost son was a lost son. ]

He looks happy. Your son.

You're damn right he did.

[Frank isn't too far off. Rick wandered over to Cairo by way of Illinois.

Evelyn believed him rude and unlikable and they argued until the bickering period passed, she swayed him with intellect and he her, with loyalty. He fought like Hell for her and held her broken body in the oasis when there was nothing they could do, miles away from anything and anyone. Field medicine was never going to fix internal bleeding.]

He's a disaster, [Evelyn says with tremendous fondness, knowing that Alex takes after her in thrill-seeking and wits alike.] But he's so smart, he picked up ancient Egyptian faster than I did, at his age. Invents all sorts of little mechanisms. [A beat.] I know he's safer at home.

Good man. [He's a big believer in loyalty. Whoever her husband had been, he'd been a lucky son of a bitch. ]

[He can hear, can recognize, the fond exasperation. How many times hat that been him, talking about Lisa: feisty, bossy, opinionated, and so beautiful. He couldn't believe, still that he'd ever deserved her, even for the short time he'd had her.]

Yeah, that doesn't help much. When your kid dies, everyone wants to run in and pat your hand and say shit like 'they're in a better place'. Fuck that. Even if it's true, it doesn't mean that the hole in your heart is any less real.

Like they're trying to make you feel guilty for feeling anything.

Edited 2017-10-18 01:20 (UTC)

[Better place. She wants to scoff. Evelyn has seen the other side, albeit briefly, and already knows it is nowhere she wants to be. The darkness swallowed her up, an empty place between this world and nothingness.]

People who say that have never lost anyone close.

[She says with pointed understanding, and despite Frank's not-insubstantial presence next to her she knows the hollow sensation that eats at him from the inside out. Evelyn reaches for the flask she brought and all but forgot about, offering it to him in exchange for the locket.

(It isn't that she's afraid of him losing it, or dropping it, but they're the only photographs she has of them.)]

They don't know you.

text

Re: text

text

--> action?

this is fine :’)

he's helping! Right?

very much

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject