[fic]
In the spacious, bright, air-conditioned kitchen of Marta Schwartz-nee-Nixon’s house, Marissa munched on her Coco-Puffs with suspicious attention to each mouthful, and Lewis sat on a counter like a small boy and winced as Dick pulled pieces of broken glass out of his bloodied and recently-disinfected foot with a pair of medical tweezers.
“You,” Dick said, putting another tiny fragment of wine bottle into an empty ashtray that was playing hooky as a surgery basin, “are … Lew, I hate to say things like this, you know I do, but you really are an idiot.”
Lewis pulled a face. “I’d forgotten they were there, okay? Something to do with having to rush around collecting people who won’t get on planes like normal human beings.” He hissed in pain as Dick removed a slightly longer piece of glass and examined it with detached interest. “Jeez. Don’t wave that around where I can see it.”
“It’s less than an inch long, Lew. Stop complaining.”
“Size queen,” Lewis muttered, and Dick put his free hand up to his mouth to hide an unexpected smile.
“What fascinates me,” Dick went on, swapping the tweezers for a cotton swab liberally coated with stinging disinfectant - and Lewis couldn’t work out which hurt more, the glass or the chemicals - which he dabbed very gently against the ball of Lewis’s foot with all the concentrated precision of a painter, “is how you managed to avoid doing anything but stubbing your toe while you were out in a bus station full of discarded syringes and broken beer bottles, and then came home and got out of the car and immediately stood on not one but three wine bottles and a nail.”
"I'm talented," Lewis said, screwing his face up in a rictus of slightly exaggerated pain. "Other people find themselves blessed with perfect pitch or hand-eye coordination, I came into this world able to do only two things - drink like a professional and injure myself on innocuous-seeming items." He jerked his foot away from Dick's hands, earning himself an exasperated hiss of in-drawn breath.
"And charm," Marissa said, gulping down a neck-load of over-sugared cereal like a python tackling a medium-sized rabbit.
Both men stared at her.
"Mommy says," Marissa said primly, sinking a floating raft of brown soggy lumps under the increasingly mud-coloured milk, "that for Uncle Lewis to get - "
"Fill your mouth with cereal," Lewis admonished. He let his foot dangle back into Dick's hand, and tried not to cringe as the last of the antiseptic was swiped through the array of tiny cuts. "What time is it?"
Dick dropped the cotton swab into the bin and checked his watch. "Pro-obably time Marissa was on her way to school."
Lewis gave him a very bleary look. "Uh."
Marissa stopped chewing and looked up at them with a worried, expectant expression.
"Go lie down," Dick sighed, taking Marissa's bowl from her.
"Hey, I'm not done - "
"Shut up and get in the riot vehicle," Lewis snapped as he slithered down from the counter and tried to stand on the very narrow portion of his feet that hadn't been perforated. He limped awkwardly across the floor towards the living area and the couch, and Marissa started to giggle. "Shut up."
"You look funny!"
"Shut up or I'll set fire to Lady Rugmunch while you're learning your multiplication tables, wombfreak."
"Lew," Dick said helplessly. He turned to Marissa and said in a worried sort of voice, "Do you … do you have all the things you need for school?"
"I'm not going - "
Lewis draped himself over the end of the couch and made a sound reminiscent of a polar bear in heat. "Go and get in the mobile siege palace, gene-dump. You're not getting out of going to school. You're a kid, that's - oof - " he flopped over onto his back and raised his disinfected feet into the air like a dead tortoise. He squinted back between his knees and found both his niece and his … and Dick giving him disapproving looks that bordered on the scathing. " - that's the deal with life. You go to school and get tortured with algorithms, but you don't have to go to work and be tortured with responsibilities, for which you should find yourself fucking - "
"Lew," Dick sighed, more exasperated than admonishing. Lewis ignored him.
"Well, rugmonster?" he asked, "are you getting in the monster truck with Dick, or am I going to make you miserable?" He stretched and flopped back against the arms of the couch.
Marissa got up slowly and collected her pink backsack, stopping to glare at Lewis, who had his eyes shut, rendering her malevolence wasted. "You're really really really mean," she announced.
"Like your mother never sends you to school when you don't want to go, you little liar," Lewis mumbled without opening his eyes.
By the time Dick and Marissa got to the garage door the deep breaths of sleeping Nixon were quite audible. Dick opened the passenger door and said in a special Talking to Children Voice, "Can you show me how to get to your school?"
Marissa shrugged.
Dick mounted the driver's side and made a minor adjustment to the position of the seat. He tried again. "Do you like school?" he asked, backing out of the garage.
Marissa shrugged again, and silence enveloped them to the end of the street. A women on the sidewalk, jogging in baby pink, watched the huge vehicle pass like a weather front.
"Can we get MacDonald's?" Marissa asked suddenly.
"For breakfast? You just ate."
"Mommy gets me - " Marissa began, braiding the end of her hair absently.
"turn left," the SatNav advised, and Dick gave it a worried look, slightly taken aback.
"I somehow doubt she does," Dick murmured, pulling on the wheel. "Even if she does drive this monstrosity."
"It's not a monster, it's a car," Marissa said with an ample helping of small-girl scorn of the most withering flavour.
"turn right four hundred yards," said the patronising voice of the SatNav.
"Oh," Dick observed. "It's not that far. Maybe we can walk on the way home, hmm?"
"Why?"
"Why not?" Dick asked, taking the right. "It's a nice day, it's not far … it'll do you good."
"Do you say stuff like that to Uncle Lewis?" Marissa picked at the ragged ends of her hair tie.
"Yes," Dick admitted, "although I'd rather hoped that in the, well, the absence of fifteen or so years of alcoholic cynicism, you might, er, be more receptive." On the urging of the SatNav, he turned again.
Marissa's only answer was to snort rather derisively.
When he arrived back at the Schwartz house he found Lewis sprawled on his back the entire length of the couch, the only indication of his having moved the freshly-opened bottle of wine resting on his stomach. Lewis squinted. "How did you find my wonderful niece? Are you ready to break the sad news to your parents that we're not going to be looking for a lesbian with a turkey-baster and some crushing biological alarm clock?" He took a swig from the bottle.
"They already worked that one out," Dick said a trifle primly. "Are you going to use a glass if I give you one?"
"Guess," Lewis suggested.
Dick sighed. "I … I know I don't really get on with children," he said, pinching the bridge of his noise. "I never know what I'm meant to say to them."
"What? Kids are just like small adults," Lewis said cheerfully, "except you can tell them to go to bed when you're bored of them, instead of having to go yourself." He levered himself upright with some considerable effort, wincing. "Speaking of which - coming?"
"It's not …" Dick looked at his watch. "Charming though you undoubtedly are, I don't really want to spend all morning listening to you snore."
Lewis gave him a disappointed look and put the wine bottle down on a coffee table. Dick eyed it warily. "I said nothing about sleeping. Unless you'd rather defile my sister's couch?"
Dick blinked. "Well. The change in the weather seems to have done you some good." He couldn’t help smiling, though the wine bottle looked precarious and the curtains were uniformly open, exposing them to the entire neighbourhood.
"Well?"
"Exactly," Dick grabbed the back of Lewis's neck and kissed him, thought only briefly, "I can't help thinking you're fuelling this about-face with the desire to annoy your sister in some obscure way."
Lewis shrugged and gave him a thoroughly ghastly smile. "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
"For fear of being overpowered by liquor fumes," Dick agreed, but he kept his hand on the back of Lewis's neck.
"Oh you really are a bitch when you get going," Lewis complained. It was a markedly boneless complaint, as Dick idly stroked his nape with two fingers and offered up his most guileless peacekeeping smile.
A moment later Marta's terrifying peroxide neighbour have into view by the front windows, heading purposefully towards the front door. Lewis sagged against Dick and made a frustrated noise. "Fuck's sake, what does she want?"
Dick frowned. "You know her?"
"I got the keys off her," Lewis said, trying to edge around Dick until he was out of sight from the windows, and not getting very far as Dick caught him by both shoulders. "I may have strongly implied that I was a fundamentalist Muslim."
" … I …don't think I'll pursue the supposed sense in that remark," Dick said slowly. "Were you by any chance drunk?"
"Very." Lewis tried again to edge round Dick, but his exit was still blocked. "Oh God. My feet hurt and it's already too bright out there and I don't want to talk to that permatanned witch."
The doorbell rang and Lewis made a sound like an angry Labrador. "I'm going to quote the Qu'ran at her," he warned, aiming a petulant stare at Dick's chin, which was about as high as he could see from that angle.
"You don't know any of the Qu'ran."
"Nor does she. How's she going to tell?"
Dick sighed as the doorbell rang a little more insistently. "Lew, you reek of booze. How could anyone possibly mistake you for a devout Muslim?"
"Well," Lewis said dismissively as the doorbell trilled with unrestrained aggression, "you know what they say - every mile below the Mason-Dixon's a point off your IQ, and we're in Florida."
Dick stared down at him. "Who says that? Apart from your father?"
"Oh, don't go bringing my fucking dad into this," Lewis groaned. The doorbell sounded like an emergency siren by now, and it was reverberating through his head.
"I'll go and talk to the neighbours," Dick said, releasing Lewis's shoulders, "but you're not allowed to drink anymore until this evening. That's the deal." He kissed Lewis on the forehead and all but marched out into the hall as the latter folded back onto the couch and began groping for his shades.
"Good morning," Dick said, pulling the front door open.
"… Mr. … Mr. Nixon?"
Dick hated to give any credence to Lewis's somewhat offensive views about the Floridians but this woman really did have skin like a coral: red and hard and apparently bullet-proof.
"No, I'm his boyfriend. Is there something I can help you with?" He gave her a polite, board-of-governors-are-visiting smile, and the woman looked extremely uncomfortable.
"Does Mrs. Schwartz know you're here?" she asked eventually, apparently relieved to have found some indignation to climb atop.
"I believe Mrs. Schwartz invited me down to join Lewis on the understanding that I could really use a vacation," Dick said wearily. "What can I help you with, Mrs. …?"
"Where's Marissa?"
Dick checked his watch, "It's 9.30am on a Tuesday morning, ma'am, where would you suppose her to be?" He cut in before she could bluster any further in response. "Marissa is in school. Mr. Nixon, if it is he to whom you wish to speak, is currently … indisposed. And I spent all night on a Greyhound listening to an alleged Christian sharing his … less than racially sensitive views with me, so if there's a chance you could make this quick?"
There was a grinding crash from the living room, and Dick tried not to cringe too visibly. Mrs. Thing From Next Door cocked her head but didn't have time to squeeze out a suspicious question before Lewis stumbled and hobbled up behind Dick and said, "My fucking feet. Ow." He glanced at Mrs. Thing From Next Door and made the angry Labrador sound again. "Are you still here?"
"Lew," Dick murmured, although without rancour.
"Oh come on," Lewis grabbed a handful of the back of Dick's shirt and tugged impatiently and somewhat unsteadily upon it. "I want sex, dammit. The rugmonkey's being educated against her will, you don't have any work to do right now and I'm disappointingly sober. Let's push the fucking boat out - " he glared at Mrs. Thing From Next Door. "Are you … wow. You're still here."
"I ought to report you to - " the woman began, incensed beyond real coherence.
"You have my sister's cellphone number," Lewis pointed out. "Call her and see if you can surprise her with something." He was going to say more, but she had already flounced away, leaving him to grin triumphantly as Dick closed the door and tried to stifle his own smile.
Part One, Part Two , Part Three, Part Four
Part Five
Part Six