entranceway | text; pockets full of stones

[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.

Or they think what works for them works for everyone. People aren't goddam machines. We don't all work the same.

[So many people diagnosing him, telling him what was 'wrong'. Like they knew. Even Red, with all his talk about redemption and salvation--yeah, that might work for him, but not Frank. You have to have something to save first.

He takes the flask, but doesn't drink, yet, just turning it over in his hands, after carefully handing the locket back. It's nt a matter of her trusting him not to lose it--the real trust was her showing it to him in the first place.

He does linger, letting the chain drop back into her hands. He wished he had a picture of his family. Not even to show. Just to have. Something other than his last memories of them. ]

[Evelyn can count on one hand the people she's shared these photographs with over the course of her years here, can pick them out by name, recalling the dates and times. Whether he knows it or not Frank is joining privileged and rarefied company. She can tell in the way he idles over returning the locket that there is a personal longing for something similar. Something tangible, to avoid forgetting.

She understands. She built the archives out of this precise sentiment. What did Frank arrive here with? Himself, and his fury?

His own person, and questionable methods for information extraction. She won't begrudge him.]

No, we don't.

[She fastens the piece of jewelry back around her neck for safekeeping, fingers brushing the clasp before they fall back into her lap. Evelyn doesn't dawdle over the emotional wave he must be wading through but neither does she belittle it.]

You deserve better.

[Now, he takes advantage of the flask, when the locket is safe, back around her neck, hidden under her blouse. He'd left behind pictures of his family, let the burn in his house when he left it, not just ending a chapter in his life, but burning the whole damn book.

It hadn't helped. He still had memories, but sometimes, they weren't comforting, sometimes, they seemed to rip into him again, like waking up from a beautiful dream to a brutal reality, over and over again.

A picture would have tied him to that past, maybe grounded him. He doesn't know. All he knows is that he doesn't have one. And the drink won't change that, but it will be a wedge of time and action between that thought and himself. ]

No. I don't. Not anymore.

[He hands the flask back to her, as if surrendering something else that wasn't his.]

[She didn't misspeak - what Evelyn believes he deserves and what Frank believes he deserves are two entirely different things, the former of which is shaped by a limited perspective of him and the latter perhaps more critical and biased than necessary.

Evelyn doesn't retrieve the flask, letting it cook in his hand while her temple presses harder into the dense mass of his shoulder. Her brow furrows and she struggles with a means of wording what she wants to say, wanting to argue an otherwise moot point but knowing there are other things of interest besides fighting futility.

Burning questions.]

Why are you intent on protecting me? [She finally asks, tired fingers leaving him with the whisky. He needs it more than she does.] I trust you to be honest; don't dress it up in frippery.

[If that isn't the million-dollar question.

The flask becomes, suddenly, fascinating, and he turns it over in his hands a few times. Then a pause, to study the sky. Like the right answer's written on either of those things. ]

Because if what they say is true about the fifth death... [Shit, he's probably already halfway down a wrong road, and there's no turnaround.]

I don't want you to change. [She said no frippery, right? There you go, brutal honesty. ] At all.

[Evelyn waited to ask him this for a reason. Under other (more dangerous, event-related) circumstances the question could have easily been waved away and she would have to accept whatever formulaic reply he gave whether it satisfied or not. Frank mulls it over and Evelyn doesn't press, content to be patient even when patience itself has never been her strong suit.

Practical reasons she expects based upon the execution of his public interrogation - she could die, become dangerous, and none of them would know it, not even Evelyn - and has no illusions about the position in which it has placed her.

But he surprises, with a concession that seems almost impossible to misconstrue into hyperbole.]

...that might be one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.

[ It feels like he was a little cornered, but, hey, she deserved the truth, if she wanted it. It doesn't make up for calling for how he had upset her, with his network post, so if that admission repaired some of the damage, it was worth it. ]

I'm sorry.

[Shit, that sounds idiotic.]

I mean, if that's the nicest, that's a pretty shitty bar someone's set.

[It may have been an extremely rare form of luck, that Frank found himself by-proxy insulting a woman with a lengthy history of offering forgiveness for the sake of moving forward. Nursing a grudge when he's done his damnedest to make up for his error would be counterproductive. The truth is all she's ever asked for.

But in a very unladylike manner Evelyn scoffs, smacking his bicep with the back of her hand - a gentle tap compared to the ear-ringing slap she so generously gave him in Tartarus.]

You're sincere. It's an underappreciated quality.

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