(no subject)
Mar. 26th, 2013 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gonna_owe_meSteve is really good at avoiding her.
Normally, she probably wouldn't even call it "avoiding." Normally, she would call it his usual M.O. and chalk it up to being a side effect of being halfway around the world from each other. There are times they've gone for months with no contact, and two weeks is barely the blink of an eye, particularly when she's busy and he keeps getting high-profile, high-priority cases.
At least, that's what she hears, when she hears anything at all.
But those weeks and months of zero contact, running silent, off the grid: those days aren't exactly applicable when there are extenuating circumstances such as A. they are living on the same island and B. she knows there's something he really doesn't want to talk to her about.
Ergo, avoidance.
She's not an impatient or nosy person, though, so she lets it slide, for a little while. He clearly needs to get used to the idea himself, and, frankly, so does she. It's not that they haven't stumbled across a situation where one or the other of them was out of commission for their normal arrangement, but in general, those interrupting factors were not potentially career-threatening. Not to the extent of sleeping with a subordinate. Not to the extent of sleeping with a partner. Not seriously.
And it is serious, whether Steve is admitting to it, or not. It's splashed across him like someone doused him in paint and sticky sunlight, in the way he'd magnetized towards the door, the way he'd run out after Danny. Maybe even more because he didn't bring it up until he absolutely had to.
So Steve is avoiding her, and she can sympathize, because this is not a conversation she particularly wants to sit through, either, but it still needs to happen, because, knowing Steve, he hasn't told anyone else and is shutting it back into compartments poorly designed for a situation of this magnitude and complexity.
Which is why, when she called him on the next weekend inferred to be Danny's weekend with Grace, she's given him the benefit of both giving her the slip for two weeks and the peace offering of meeting at a place with really excellent drinks, one of which she has in hand as she sits at a table by an open window, chin in her hand, looking out at the quietly rolling ocean. It's early evening, and she's come off a twelve hour shift, so it's nice to sit, let her thoughts unhinge, ebb and flow with the waves and mild breeze. Wrangling an affirmative had proved to be difficult, but she'd managed it, pointing out that they might as well meet out, seeing as they're definitely going to make it to the restaurant this time.
It strips him of the home field advantage, too, but he's not the only one who knows how to keep a wall at his back and a few tricks up his sleeve.
Normally, she probably wouldn't even call it "avoiding." Normally, she would call it his usual M.O. and chalk it up to being a side effect of being halfway around the world from each other. There are times they've gone for months with no contact, and two weeks is barely the blink of an eye, particularly when she's busy and he keeps getting high-profile, high-priority cases.
At least, that's what she hears, when she hears anything at all.
But those weeks and months of zero contact, running silent, off the grid: those days aren't exactly applicable when there are extenuating circumstances such as A. they are living on the same island and B. she knows there's something he really doesn't want to talk to her about.
Ergo, avoidance.
She's not an impatient or nosy person, though, so she lets it slide, for a little while. He clearly needs to get used to the idea himself, and, frankly, so does she. It's not that they haven't stumbled across a situation where one or the other of them was out of commission for their normal arrangement, but in general, those interrupting factors were not potentially career-threatening. Not to the extent of sleeping with a subordinate. Not to the extent of sleeping with a partner. Not seriously.
And it is serious, whether Steve is admitting to it, or not. It's splashed across him like someone doused him in paint and sticky sunlight, in the way he'd magnetized towards the door, the way he'd run out after Danny. Maybe even more because he didn't bring it up until he absolutely had to.
So Steve is avoiding her, and she can sympathize, because this is not a conversation she particularly wants to sit through, either, but it still needs to happen, because, knowing Steve, he hasn't told anyone else and is shutting it back into compartments poorly designed for a situation of this magnitude and complexity.
Which is why, when she called him on the next weekend inferred to be Danny's weekend with Grace, she's given him the benefit of both giving her the slip for two weeks and the peace offering of meeting at a place with really excellent drinks, one of which she has in hand as she sits at a table by an open window, chin in her hand, looking out at the quietly rolling ocean. It's early evening, and she's come off a twelve hour shift, so it's nice to sit, let her thoughts unhinge, ebb and flow with the waves and mild breeze. Wrangling an affirmative had proved to be difficult, but she'd managed it, pointing out that they might as well meet out, seeing as they're definitely going to make it to the restaurant this time.
It strips him of the home field advantage, too, but he's not the only one who knows how to keep a wall at his back and a few tricks up his sleeve.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-06-08 02:15 pm (UTC)Leaving something in Steve's chest stumbling, bumping along just a step too fast and too dizzy, disoriented, right into the walls, even for all his quiet, stillness. Focused on the way the last breaths take Danny's shoulders exaggeratedly up less and less, as he slips away. Trailing the warmth, still, into Steve's side. Muscles and lower ribs, movements slowly, like they are being pushed through mollasses, before, between one breath and the next that hand on Steve's back succumbs to being boneless and heavy. Laying there only only.
Like Steve, watching him, in clips and flashes until he's gone. Somewhere else. Able to find peace now. Leaving him alone with the night, the waves, the wind, the darkness, those heavy breaths coming into and out of Danny's body. But not alone the way he was supposed to be tonight. Doesn't leave the night any of the ways it was supposed to end. Danny fighting, pleading, giving himself in, over, to something even newer.
Steve doesn't, honestly, think he's tired, or if he is he's so tired it's somewhere out the other side of it. Combined with how watching a spec through vision goggles for a whole shift night of black sky, makes it so easy to just stare at his face in the dark only inches away. Like somehow if he closes his eyes, it'll all change, again, rearrange itself, again, and he barely even know what to do with what keeps being left in his hands at the end. How the outcome keeps break every expectation he walks into this with.
Can't ignore the confused tangle that says it should have gone, be gone, but isn't, and will be, if he just closes his eyes a second.