Another dinner party
And to think: Minnie has to do this kind of thing for a living. Moving from one party to the next, circulating and smiling and sipping tiny chill drinks and nibbling tiny chill snacks . . . Jesus wept. I'd go mad and take the butler hostage in exchange for a Big Mac and a plane ride to freedom.
Rossi family cooking is worth it the dinner-party madness, however. If I had any more food in me, Chris would've had to roll me up to my apartment instead of just waving me on after the ride home.
It was a long ride. We didn't say much. We had done our talking on the porch after the bulk of the meal, while his brothers were going at it with his sister over the Miller fiasco. The marriage proposal ended the argument, at least, just as expected. Hell of a mess, after all the glowering and shrieking (she was so pleased! Pity it's never going to happen). I offered to help clean up, but their mother, bless her steel-bound heart, made Gabe do it. And Paul had to do the dishes while the wives were ushered firmly into the living room for coffee and cookies. I think one of the nephews laughed at him. Good for you, kid.
Hell. I wanted to tuck Rossi in, at the end, before we parted ways. Help him somehow. Make it all better. Didn't stick around, though; just thanked him, wished him a good night, and went upstairs. He's a big boy. He'll work it out. I'll be there with another smack if he needs it.
I think that tonight, I'll finally get some sleep without those dreams. I really do.
8/7/2005
Logfile from Leah.
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Night. Though the worst of the summer's heat is far from over, this evening at least has seen fit to loosen its stranglehold on suffering New Yorkers: a breeze skims across the distant water, chasing its cousins through streets and cooling desperate skins. In Brooklyn, lights spill from one of the close-companioned houses that suffocate and press against each other. Lights, the savory smell of home cooking ... and argument, voices crashing and submerging in a tidal wave of familial fury.
On the porch behind, Chris Rossi leans on a wooden rail and watches the distant, city-dimmed stars, smoking a cigarette that would earn his mother's wrath if she smelled it. "--you're a fucking /prick/, Paul!" shouts a woman's voice through the open window, moving with its author across the kitchen's scope. Recriminations follow in short order, muffled: maternal wrath. Don't you use that language in this house, young lady!
Laughter lures Leah outside, sliding her past the door on a tired chuckle and shutting the argument safely behind her once she's out in the open. Freedom. She draws in a breath. "Julia," she informs Paul's brother then, with a low-arched toss of her low-furled voice, "is three minutes shy of throwing the salad bowl at him now. God, it's like coming home, I'll tell you what." And she leans, elbows splayed and hands clasped, on the railing next to Rossi, and sighs over the careful distance between them, "Thanks for the invitation. Homecooking /and/ politics, all at the same meal."
The flinch that straightens Chris at the door's creak eases back into a slouch at recognition; the cigarette, pouched into futile concealment behind fingers' cradle, outs itself again to spin a pale ghost of smoke. "A little home goes a long way," Rossi says wryly, baritone dragging. Eyes flash under the porch light, turned askance to pick out Leah's profile. "Sorry. Lot's been happening. Didn't think Paul and Gabe would get on my back about that perp with company over."
"Shit, /I'm/ not surprised. Well, maybe a little: they don't team up often, do they? Paul's a prick, and Gabe's an asshole, and Julia and your mom will take care of it for you." Leah says it all comfortably, putting the lie to her shoulder's tense span. She stares out in the dark for a minute or two. "--You okay?"
A moment's pause. Chris returns to blank-eyed consideration of the stars. "Yeah. I'm fine." He shifts, his shoulder sinking its weight into the railing's roof-supporting pillar, one foot hooking across his ankle to prop itself by a toe's point. The cigarette flares an angry eye at his drag. "Headache from the gas, but that's about it. --Bad timing. The Rossis at their finest ... but it's not like you've ever seen us at our best, anyway."
Leah is leaning quiet for another minute while she digests words and probes the backyard's safe reaches. Brooklyn is her home, the stars /his/ destination -- not hers. "Helluva thing," she finally says. "Saw a bit on the news -- that Lazzaro's something else, good for him -- and I thought . . . well, yeah. Whatever." She puffs out a breath, lacking smoke's acidic vigor, so she has to make up for it with some of her own. "Fuck Sabella Miller. And don't worrying about me and your family. They're fine. /I'm/ fine. We're all fine. I know where the front door is; I can walk out whenever I want. Probably take your sister with me, just to avoid multiple counts of fratricide while you're off-duty. I'm a good guest that way, admit it."
Teeth flash in a grin that sheds its skin in Chris' voice, tangling with its pitch. "I was kinda impressed you didn't try and rip Gabe's head off over those flowers and chocolates," he admits, smothering the last of his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe. Head bent to the task, over-long hair hiding much of his expression, he tacks on a: "It's been years since Julia's actually hit any of us. Well. A couple of months, anyway. Paul can take care of himself. And ... yeah. Lazzaro's a good guy. Better cop than me, that's for damn sure."
Leah's own lips skin back in feline disdain at the reminder. "I'm sure some patient at a hospital will enjoy them, when I drop them off on the way home. And if he keeps mooning at me over the pasta, /he/ can be that patient. Again." She lets her weight shift more to one elbow, turns with it to face him. Indoor light slants dim gold over a swath of concerned expression, sturdy neck, the shoulder of her cheerful yellow blouse. "Better'n you. Must be a paragon of the police world, then, because from where I'm standing, you've always been pretty damn good yourself, Rossi."
Green eyes, gilded gold by that same light, slant up through the splice of black. Chris straightens. "Ass kisser," he accuses -- but there is amusement in it, however weary. "It's been a ... bad week. Shit. It's been a /fucking/ bad week. The Miller thing was just icing on the cake." A hand jerks, readied to toss the dead butt into the night-swept lawn, only to rethink and recover. Behind them, voices crescendo and culminate in an infuriated shriek and a crash. Rossi winces. "So much for salad."
She doesn't turn to the noise, the pinnacle of one Julia Rossi's frustration. Leah stays on him. Stays with him, with lips pursed and the hand of her supporting arm only just fisted with unconscious tension. "Wasn't hungry for more, anyway," she passes off. "What else, then, besides Miller? I'm listening."
"Couple of bad days at court. Perp we can't nail for murder, though we got him for incest and child abuse. LT's got me working shifts at MA." A tally, ticked off on fingertips' idle drum against the porch railing. Chris leans on his elbow, casting another glance to the dark grass before turning a bleak look back to Leah. "IA's after me. Us." No. Not us. "Beston."
"Chris," Leah says softly, just that, and the hand's a fist, after all.
The stark, set face turns away from Leah's regard, returning to a profile's shadow-limned amorality and concealment. Picked out by a haze of light, Chris' jaw shows tightly drawn and taut against the skin. "Everyone needs a little entertainment," he offers in strained flippancy. "Even IA, I guess. Hagan's got some stick up his ass about us. Anyway. It's been a bad week."
"Well, fuck him, too," but Leah doesn't put much heat into it. She turns, too, after a moment, back into the backyard contemplation. Forearms balance fist against fist past the railing's edge; her head drops a little as she scuffs an idle foot on the porch's boards. Sarcastic peppiness: "Great time for a vacation, huh? Or are you allowed one? The job, the job, always the damn job--"
"The kind of vacation I'll get right now ain't the kind I get to come back from," Rossi says with only the barest grope after humor. It reaches again -- "Think I'd make a good journalist?" There it is. Lips curl, nudged towards a smile's balance. "You sick of hearing about cop shit yet? What's been going on with you? Haven't talked to you in ... days, I guess."
Leah tells him blandly, "You'd be a great journalist. Got the interrogation part of it down pat, and the rest is just bullshitting. Which, I believe, you can also do. Talented man. I'll tuck you under my wing and teach you everything I know." The mica-glitter of her airy words chips away into harder, darker rue. "No, Chris, I'm not sick of hearing about it. You need to get it out of your system post-haste, sounds like . . . and I'd rather have that than some touchy-feely session about /me./" Her head twitches: a shake, or restlessness. "I'm fine, like I said."
Points out one trained interrogator to another, "We never talk about you, and ... touchy-feely? What the hell?" But it is a demoralized Chris Rossi, and he lapses into distraction's arms with the drag of a hand across his face, scrubbing idly at his eyes. "Hagan'll probably try to use this Miller shit to get me to turn evidence on Beston. The Cap's keeping me on the road, out of his reach, I guess. --Hey. Didn't know you knew Doc Grey. The old one. He said to remind you about assha ... asshat, something."
"So I'm not eager to talk about myself, is all," is Leah's tart reply. Can't help it, can never help it-- "Doesn't matter. Ask, and I'll answer, if you really want. Sharing is caring, hurray." Her glance sidelong marks the reemergence of Hagan's shadow, but she moves around it this time. "John Grey? Oh, we just ran into each other at Grand Central Station the other morning. Had breakfast at a crammed little table, talked about this and that." Her voice deepens with wry entertainment: "Taught him a few arcane bits of profanity. He seemed quite taken with 'asshaberdashery.'"
"Never heard that one before," says Rossi, absent-mindedly. (Inside the house, male voices shout at each other in blistering words, while a female one laughs.) "'Asshaberdashery.' Takes too long to say. Insults needs oomph, Canto. You can't go messing around with syllables and shit when you just want to get it out there." The other elbow joins the first on the railing, both hands twining to play pillow to Chris' chin. "/Why/ don't you want to talk about yourself? You and Melcross, you're like peas in a pod."
Leah comments, "Lots of syllables for an academic guy, Rossi. He liked it; let him have it. I stick to the shallow end of the profanity pool, you know that. You've /heard/ that." She bobs her hands together out beyond the railing. Shrugs. "Guess we are, for whatever reason. I'm just not in the habit. And . . . shit. People ask you to talk about yourself, right? And then turn it around and use it against you. Ask your dear /brother/ about that."
Baritone twists, wry and bitter across Brooklyn's pathology. "Which one? Paul or Gabe?" A glance over his shoulder verifies those two elders are still waged in no holds barred battle within, and Chris refocuses with a wrinkled brow and: "Do /I/ do that?"
A dark glance is his answer on the brothers twain -- come /on,/ Christopher -- and Leah caps it with another short, sharp shrug, like a marionette tugged to the breaking point. "No," she says then, "you don't. A lot of people do. I'm used to it. Hell, I'm not interesting. Why would anyone care about /my/ life? I don't have much of the usual chitchat to offer: no job, no husband, no kids, no scandals, no gossip. Just -- me. Hurray," she concludes mordantly, and sinks into the railing's support.
A pause. A wan light. "You're good in bed." Chris helps. Memory slips his baritone into the deeper registers, husky. "/Very/ good in bed."
"So there's that," Leah flips back to him. "Great. I'll remember it for the next time my mom's bending my ear."
"I can bear witness," says the middle Rossi, gravely. Inside, another shout -- Gabe's voice, strident on insult of /paramilitary murdering automatons/ -- and Chris flinches, voice abruptly pressing flat with plucked hostility. "Fuck him. Fuck both of them. I'm heading back to the apartment tonight. Do you need a ride?"
Leah ducks her head at that salvo, too, and mutters, "Oh, /hell,/ yes. I can't imagine how you've managed to survive this long under the same roof. You Rossis are something else." Her voice sketches out wan but genuine laughter. "Just like the Cantos. God, we're a depressingly predictable bunch, aren't we? Cue up the _Godfather_ music, and let us rip."
Despite the hard line of shoulders and face's set, Canto's quip prompts an answering laugh that does much to relax -- however reluctantly -- the lean frame. "We're like a sitcom. We need a laugh track. Let's you and me go find a horse head." he agrees with some amused despair. Untucking himself from the rail at last, he finds his way down the porch to sink into a cushion-swaddled bench, out of the kitchen window's reach. "At some point they'll realize we're not in there and come looking to see if we've murdered each other."
"We're being very quiet," Leah agrees on elbow's turn to follow him, "so we must've already done the deed." A smile rides her voice now, quiet and contained. "I did enjoy dinner, Chris. Really. A chance to get away from my funk, the same damn four walls of my apartment, the TV. I just -- I don't know. I'm a lousy sharer, but I'm standin' here thinking, 'Dammit, why doesn't he talk more about his shit? I can help!'" And mockery, gravid in Brooklyn's twanged vowels: "Hello, my name is Leah Canto, and I'm a hypocrite."
Wrapped in blessed darkness, Chris cants his head at Leah, threading fingers through his hair to prop his head on a palm. Studies her, eyes catching the barest fade of light to throw it back to her, luminous. "I almost woke you up one night," he admits. "One-thirty in the morning. Thought about pounding on your door, making you let me in."
Silence; stillness. Then Leah wonders, "Do I have enough knickknacks near the door to throw at you in such an eventuality? Better go shopping." In the kitchen's half-light, her face is a chiaroscuro mask of mingled entertainment and concern. Again, always: dammit. Concern. She forces her tone light over it, neat as a steeplechaser. "That'd be okay. Do it sometime. I'm usually up Web-surfing or something anyway, and . . . yeah. It's fine." Softer, dragged down to uncertain pillowed depths. "I wouldn't mind, Chris."
"I would've been pretty crappy company," Chris says, free, now that night has him wrapped 'round, to let the full weight of exhaustion draw his baritone down and drown it. A small bubble of wry humor, nonetheless, "--and I was wondering what you'd throw at me. I don't think I would've ducked. Crap. Leah...." He breaks off on a catch of breath. "Crap."
"It's all right." Leah's words, assured and even over that bottomless unsurety, arrive at the bench before she does, on her plain and graceless coiling down beside him. Her hand spiders over his arm, grips his warmly, squeezes. "Chris -- hey. Really. Did I ever tell you that you're some of my favorite company, for the wonders you do for my blood pressure? Ten rounds with you, at the top of our lungs, and I'm a brand-new woman. Can't find that everywhere, you know. I like it."
The answering laugh is shaky, but still a laugh. The arm under her hand stirs, its hand in turn touching her cheek with the backs of fingers in a brief caress. "Contraindicated. Your doctor would kill me if he knew." Chris leans, propping his head against the pale slats of the wall; black hair clings to the wood, casting sun-tanned skin into pallor. "I'll remember that next time. I'd make an appointment if I could. Hagan's getting to me. I think I'm going to have to off him."
Leah slings an arm over the back of the bench, rests her chin on the forearm, and gets comfy with her knee crooked flat on the cushion between them. It supports her flat assertion of, "Don't give him the satisfaction. You ignore his ass, and do your job, and take care of yourself and Beston. Stay /sane,/ Christopher. Stay healthy. And stay alive. I will /not/ have you eaten alive by the NY-fucking-PD. Too much of that in my family; probably too much in yours, too."
"I'll drive over him with the Buick," says Chris, uncharacteristically forlorn. "He's always following me around anyway. I can make it look like an accident. Buick's a good, sturdy car. It could take him out, no snap. --You should've been a cop, Canto. You would've been a good one."
Leah's supporting arm reaches out sly fingers to tease at the back of that too-long hair, the bristle of nape's flesh, the curve of ear's pinna. "Need a body shop afterwards, though," she tells him. "It's like hitting a deer: mess and bent fender. Waste of a good car, if you ask me . . . like me on the force. Ha. Tell me another one, Rossi."
A small sigh susurrates to the touch, mated to the light trace of Chris' hand across Leah's brow, coaxing away the fall of hair. "I got insurance. I could tell them I hit a wild pig. --Christ. Canto. I think I'm in the wrong line of work. Why /did/ you leave the Church?"
A muscle twitches under his touch. Leah tries to smile it away. "Lack of faith. Disillusionment. Boredom. The usual." Her hand retreats, but she turns briefly into his fingers, her eyes closing away even the dim wink of reflected light. "Miracles are shit, Chris, and I'm not sure that God isn't, too. All that pomp and circumstance, not to mention the misogyny and scandals, and for what? It isn't the kind of comfort I realized I needed -- need. I can't get that from religion, and I don't think they're offering, anyway. I'm--" her voice twists as her mouth does "--unclean. Questioner. Heretic. /Woman./"
"You're just fine as a woman," Chris informs, investing the remark with another taste of that earlier heat, just under the surface. His thumb's rough pad slides across her cheek, tracing the smooth curve of skin and the bone that shapes it. "Good enough for me, anyway. --Gabe ever tell you I was going to be a priest, back in the day?"
"No." Leah's breath eases warm into the word; under the caress, it's steady, for now, like the curious poke of opened, openly honest eyes in the dark. "Makes sense, though, now that you mention it. What happened?"
Another small, breath-caught laugh. Chris abandons the support of the wall and drops his head into his hands, elbows pinning to the stools of knees. "Would you fucking believe it?" he asks rhetorically, muffled. "I lost my faith." No capitals there, though the word bears its own fragile grandeur: gaudy, shattered, useless.
Leah murmurs, "Ah, God. Bastard." She stirs towards sitting up, sitting forward, /leaning/ forward; but rests, stays, in the nervy prickle of patience. (Her hand slides firmly under her thigh. /Stay./) "I believe it. And I'm sorry for it." A half-laugh from her. "You've got so much -- so much /surging/ in you, Chris, all that energy that Sabby loves, and I love when it's not battering me, and all that emotion, and depth, and -- yeah. You lost your faith, and you've been missing it ever since? Your cup, my dear, hath been running over because of it, I think."
"Mmf," answers the bowed head, reclusive for an extra moment's peace before Chris shifts, paring free his eyes to stare sightlessly at the even march of the porch's railing. "Joined the Force when I couldn't make myself-- I don't think it comes back, once you lose it. Even if it does ... I couldn't wait. This Farlan case: DA's picking it up on Monday. We couldn't even pin murder on the shit."
"And there might not be a hell waiting for him after this life is over." Leah pauses. "Sucks."
"Riker's," supplies Chris, pinching his eyes closed under fingertips' pressure. "If I can have that, I'll take it. -- You know, those pills the docs gave us? Slept all day yesterday, and I still feel like I haven't had a wink."
Leah allows, "Riker's. Which isn't /bad,/ for hell on earth, but . . . okay. Okay." Her weight shifts again, and now she goes with it, balancing a hand on his shoulder to mold flesh to flesh through cloth's boundaries, and squeeze. "Pills get you only so far, man. You need to sleep in your own bed, your own apartment, and the hell away from your family and . . . everything. Lock yourself in and lock the world /out./"
He responds to the touch, because he is a sensualist, and because he has known that touch before: stirs, and catches the bleeding edge of a smile in his hands. "Medical leave," Chris says wryly. "Hey, Cap. I can't come in because I'm sleepy. --I might be a fucking pansy, but I don't think even I could go down that low. Anyway, I have to go in. Beston's ... and Lazzaro'll need someone to take the heat."
Well, the comfort doesn't last much longer, at those words: with fine Italian exasperation, Leah smacks that supportive hand upside the back of his head. "/No./ Fuck me, Chris, but you are /not/ going to crawl back into the meat grinder like this, not while /I'm/ around. I will lock you in your apartment myself, and sit outside the door to keep you there. Beston's a big boy; so's Lazzaro. They can take care of themselves another day or two. Don't be more of a noble idiot than you have to be, okay?"
"/Fuck/, Canto." Fine, Italian ire jogs into Chris' tired voice at the blow, giving it new energy: like the spank given newborns, from somnolescence to vitality. He straightens, flattening a hand to the back of his head. "What the hell? Who're you calling an idiot? And noble? What the /fuck/?"
Leah grabs his chin to keep his attention around on her. She's fierce as a badger defending its den, now, and her voice is low, trembling frustration. And anxiety. "You're gonna kill yourself if you keep going on, again and again into the breach, dear friend, like stupid fucking Henry on his stupid fucking horse. Sit at home for a while. Medical leave, you said? Use it if you've got it. Don't go back in. They can live without you until you feel better."
"Shakespeare," says Chris, blank. "You're beating me upside the head and quoting /Shakespeare/ at me. Fuck, Canto. Are you insane? Shit. I'm not /dying/, you nutbag. --That /hurt/." Big bad cop. He releases his head and inspects the palm of his hand, checking morbidly for blood. "I'll take a break when I fucking need it. Got that? Where the fuck did you learn your manners? You don't hit the favorite son of your /hostess/."
"Better me than Julia, wouldn't you say? I don't come with a complete set of sprocket wrenches, and you've seen how /those/ babies can fly through the air from her hand." Leah slouches back into the bench's corner, simmering behind a barricade of folded arms. "Sue me for worrying about you. Take care of yourself, then. I'm out. I tried. Whatever, Rossi. Whatever."
Chris reinspects his hand, unconvinced by its serene lack of evidence, then reaches a hand to shape it over her mouth. "Shut up. Just for a second. Try breathing. In and out. Silently. And no hitting or biting," he warns hastily, retreating with all his limbs into his side of the bench. "Christ, you've got a bad temper." Pot? Kettle. Hi.
Retreat's not a bad idea: Leah comes after him, badger-fast. "Next you'll tell me that there are better uses for my mouth than talking," she wrangles out of irritation as she braces herself with a knee up on the bench and a hand on its back. And she leans over him, and she snaps, "I just /cared/ about you for a few seconds there. Sorry. I won't do it again, Mr. Big Manly Man who can't take a little tap to the back of the head /or/ someone trying to protect him from himself."
He is a good cop but not, perhaps, a good tactician. Cornered in his end of the bench by anger and curdling concern, Chris bites back -- too late -- on a startled laugh. "Shit. Canto. You know there're laws against assaulting officers of the law, right? If you leave marks, I'm gonna sue. --Wait. Stop." Hands fold around Leah's upper arms, pressing her back into her own half of the bench; behind them, Rossi's mouth presses a fine, firm line. More gently, then: "I'm sorry, Leah. I am."
Muscles strain instinctively, as they had against Scott Summers, but here and now, all Leah does as she's backed down is growl, "Sure you are. You are /such/ a prickly jerk to be friends with, Rossi." A little amusement has to escape her then, on chuckle's popped bubble. "If we yelled, we'd keep the family happy in there, you know. I can leave marks, too. Wounds to display with pride before the menfolk. Just try me." Her teeth slash a smile's reflection out of the night.
"Not on the face," counters Chris with mock alarm, cautiously releasing her -- albeit with a wary eye. (No, really. Not on the face.) "Julia would laugh herself sick, and Ga-- Mom would kill me," he reminds, realizing a tad belatedly that this would surely prove little deterent. Amusement rouses nonetheless, nibbling at the edges of a wry, "One fight. We were overdue, anyway. I'm serious about being sorry, though."
"I know," and Leah pats his cheek before slumping back into the bench's far corner again. She draws her legs up and hugs them. "I'm sorry, too. Chris. I'm all sharp angles and bitchery these days. You've been missing me at a good time to do so."
Refreshed by the quarrel -- what was that about blood pressure? -- Chris props his head again on his arm's crooked bent, regarding the shadows and light-strewn peaks of her face with grave interest. "What's been going on in Canto-land? Did you land that gig with the Times?"
Leah tries an elaborate shrug of shoulders and tone. "The wheels are turning, but I'm between agents at the moment -- fired her, /finally/ -- and that means it's kinda harder to do a full-court press on 'em. I think they're more interested now in what'll sell actual papers. Web hits don't keep all the advertisers happy. Maybe they could consider me for a columnist's gig. Something'll happen, or it won't. No big deal."
"A big deal for /you/," Chris says unarguably, if unnecessarily. Danger past, he stretches with his free arm to warm one of her knees with his hand, a companionable weight. "You have an idea who you're wanting for your next agent? What else is going on?"
Leah swallows. "Well . . . yes. It is." She makes herself a little smaller, and tips her head away from his hand. "No idea, not yet. I have friends looking for me, though. Count on the good old girls' network to get me hooked up before long," and her voice shimmer with honest warmth. Relief. Comfort. "Nothing else is going on, really. Like I said before: no job, family, gossip, and so on. Not sleeping so great, but the heat, you know."
Fingers pinch the bridge of Chris' nose, spared from the task of support. "I know," he agrees, and for just a second there's that fatigue again, thickening his voice -- but. Around the hand, eyes blink open into reckless, shiny clarity. "If you can't sleep anyway, c'mon by my apartment."
Leah is half-hearted dryness, over a restless shift, and shiny eyes back at him. "Speaking of too much heat, darling."
"I can't sleep either," points out Chris, in a voice that hardens as it goes: tension directed elsewhere, even if present in the here and now. "Fuck Gabe. You said it yourself." Teeth flash, savage. "Standing invitation. --Well, unless there's someone else."
A snort. "No. God. I wish. --Sorry. Not that you aren't more than enough for one woman, but you aren't mine, so." Leah grins into the darkness. "I don't have to worry about your ego, do I?"
Chris makes an dismissive gesture. "Enormous." Grins again, self-deprecating, with less heat than before. "Fantastic. Huge. You know this shit. It's about as big as it can get: untouchable."
Leah reminds him, "Except when it gets a slap upside the head."
"It hurt," Chris reminds, adding (nobly) "I'll live. --You always hit when you get pissed?"
Leah admits, "Only when I need to get the other person's fucking attention. I'm a very bad person."
Chris says, grave, "Yeah. You suck. --You ... sure it's just the heat, Canto?" The hand on her knee tightens, squeezing lightly. "Not sleeping, that is."
. . . Trembling. That's how it always starts, with her. Leah keeps it under grim control, but the clonic waves still chatter at her, reaching prickly tremors into her voice. "It's not." Her head lifts: brave, unconscious defiance. Or challenge. "Sometimes, it's not. Dreams. Sometimes."
Silence from Chris, whose face is momentarily hidden in the shadow of a hand. The one on Leah's leg tenses marginally, bleeding warmth through fabric into skin. Then. "What sort?"
"Don't know. That's the worst part." Leah sighs, and the tremors back off more, into safe and cool distance, somewhere far, far from her little hunched-up ball of miserable heat. "Being chased, running and running, or trying to climb a wall that keeps getting bigger -- shadows chasing me -- the usual nightmares . . . but I wake up out of them, and they go away, and I can't get back to sleep. You know?"
The following, "I know," is a desolate, bleak reply, and Chris sinks back into the comfort of his own body to sigh. "They get better with time, you know. Distance." Unless they're replaced by new ones. "Not that that helps right now. What do you do when you have one?"
Leah quietly rests her head against his hand on her knee. Her cheek /is/ hot. It's also, with eye's slow seep, damp. "Well, they say that you shouldn't stay long in bed if you aren't sleeping, so I try to fall back, and when that doesn't work, I try it out on the couch. Sometimes with the TV, but Jesus. These days, that doesn't help. MRA /and/ jailbreak shit on CNN now, and I'm an addict who can't stop watching." She snorts. "I'll get a TiVo, store up some reality shows to watch instead."
It takes time for that touch of moisture to shiver against skin and the cooling kiss of air. "/Leah/--" breathes Chris, low and startled. He is a Rossi, and their way is the thoughtlessly physical. The bench creaks beneath his slide, flexing under his weight; warm, strong arms wrap around the small knot of body, a lean cheek pressing to the smooth curve of head.
"Oh, it's not /that/ bad," comes out muffled, and Leah's not even shaking much anymore, in his embrace. "Talking helps. And it'll get better, I know that. Is it too late for me to go into the force? Or go back to school? Fuck. I /hate/ my job, Chris. It's just all I'm good at anymore. Or good /for./ Fuck," she says again, tired and soft, and leans into him.
"Join the club," Chris murmurs into that soft hair, voice echoed hollow through the nook of broken peace and dreams, spoken and unspoken, shaped between them. Arms slip, clasping at the wrists; Rossi tugs, angling their bodies together to rock the woman in comfort's balm. "If you want to join the Force, they'll take you. It's in your blood, but --You need a break, kid. Some time. Some help."
Leah snorts again. "Hello, pot? Yes, it's kettle calling. Hello!" She unravels against him, legs nudging legs, her head resting on his chest, supporting an unseeing stare at the house's wall. "We all need breaks, Chris. It's just impossible to get them. I'll . . . just be happy I have a roof over my head, food on the table, wireless Internet access." Another huffed breath pushes amusement into the night, and her face angled into that balm. "And family and friends, of course. Can't forget that."
As though her words were a veritable cue, a crash and a splinter inside the house signals that the argument is still on and in full swing. And full throat, for that matter. "Family," Chris says without enthusiasm, tensing slightly under that onslaught of noise. "Great. How could we live without that? --I'll take a break eventually, Canto. I just have cases. Homicide is undermanned, and MA, and--" Beston. And Lazzaro. And IA. "Let's go to Atlantic City. Piss everyone off. Get married to other people."
"Eventually," she sighs back to him, but doesn't push it. She is a limp and resigned Canto, yea verily, down to the splay of her hands, broad and rough-fingered, on her lap. "--Oh, my mother would like /that./ As long as he's got a pulse, a job, and preferably no more than one head on his shoulders, it's all good. I can settle down and start pumping out babies in no time. I'll make you babysit."
"Marry a girl," suggests the deep-throated Rossi, trading words through his chest's vibrating bell. "It's legal in Massachusetts. I'll drive you; we can pick up Sabitha along the way, unless you've got your eye on someone else. You two looked pretty comfortable at the dinner party." A smile threads its raw silk through his voice at the memory, brushing the nap of his Brooklyn-matted baritone.
Leah sniffs, "Solidarity in the face of the enemy. Yay, sisterhood. We'd be an awful couple, Rossi. We'd fight about politics. She'd leave dirty dishes in the sink. I'd steal the covers. She smokes too much; I drink too much. It'd never work. /And/ my mother's head would explode. Although, granted, that's not a reason against, really." She snickers. "I'll ask Sabby, next time I see her. Unless you beat me to it. /You/ marry her. She likes you."
Rossi tightens again under Leah, a small spasm that etches itself in harsh lines across his face before it is wilfully redrawn. "Nah. I think she's not really ... she doesn't know cops." A lame objection, and he retreats from it a moment before returning to pick at its carcass. "Takes a pretty unusual woman to marry a cop and stay married to him. Like Mom. Julia says she won't do it."
Leah says candidly, "I'd rather be one than marry one. I've seen too many wives at too many funerals. And see? Your sister's the smartest one of you all." She leans back a smile to him; an ankle twines around his. "I'll marry /her./"
"Take her," says Chris on an older brother's twinge of exasperation. "See if you can get her to stop sleeping with cops. Or at least get her to sleep with cops I don't know. Don't know /about/, whichever. --And ... yeah." Funerals. He tastes the word in his mouth without sharing it, and then ... blinks. "Smartest one of us all? What the hell? I'm smart."
"I'll ask her when we go back in. That'll kill the argument dead, count on it." Smugly Leah nestles against him; laughter quivers between them. "You're plenty smart, Rossi. You're a detective, after all, not a uniform. Love you in the dress blues, though. Tasty."
Chris quivers in a laugh. "Haven't been called /that/ in a while. 'Tasty.' Don't know if I like the sound of that. Been a while since I've had to wear the blues, too -- thank God for that, anyway. Last time was ...." A blink. "You were there."
Leah points out, "At least I'm refraining from putting my mouth where my vocabulary is." She does glance at the back door, though, reminded, and start to scoot back to an unoccupied portion of the bench, fussy with the disentanglement. "--Yeah, I was. I'm always there. Can't get rid of me, Chris. I'm the bad penny. The stink in your shoes."
"Terezzi," Chris pursues, sobering at the memory. "From the two-seven. Armed robbery. You were ... related to him somehow, weren't you? Or something. Family friend?" Given her retreat, Rossi absent-mindedly capitulates, loosening his hold on her shoulders to reclaim his original territory, safe from contamination.
"My uncle Jordy's best friend. They grew up together, went through the academy together. Half the family knew him. Good guy. He always had a treat in his pocket for me, growing up. Those little hard caramels in crinkly gold foil." Leah curves a smile lost to the darkness but for its echoes in her voice. "Well. Whenever I bitch about my job, Chris, I remember yours, and I'm grateful. No one's going to be gunning /me/ down in the course of my daily life."
Chris' eyebrow lifts, though he makes no comment. On that, anyway. "Think we should go in?" he asks with wary curiosity, after a silence that betrays nothing but muted conversation from the kitchen window. "Sounds like the fireworks have ended."
Leah looks that way, her expression narrowed in thought. "Yeah, I guess so. I want to be able to go down on bended knee in front of Julia and ask for her hand in marriage while the whole family's still there." She sits up, sits forward, balances on the bench's edge. Scrubs both hands up then down her face. "Thanks for listening. I'm sorry I couldn't do more for you in return than smack you." Pause. "Tough love."
"I bruise easily," Chris informs in doleful tones -- but he is unable to maintain the pose for long, cop's poker face notwithstanding. A flash of teeth proves a grin, and he draws his hand across his face one last time, scrubbing at the betraying signs of strain that will infuriate family inside. "If you want that ride, it still stands. And..." Rare hesitation. "I meant that. About if you can't sleep."
"Yeah." Her hand presses to his shoulder, then falls away. "I know. Thanks, Chris. We'll see." Leah sighs and climbs to her feet. "We'll see. C'mon, let's do this."
Shoulders set in a soldier's sharp-planed line, Chris Rossi telescopes to stand, dropping a passing hand -- heat sprawls, even in that short-lived contact -- on the nape of Leah's neck. "Yeah," he says, wry. Grim. "Bring it on."
[Log ends.]
Rossi family cooking is worth it the dinner-party madness, however. If I had any more food in me, Chris would've had to roll me up to my apartment instead of just waving me on after the ride home.
It was a long ride. We didn't say much. We had done our talking on the porch after the bulk of the meal, while his brothers were going at it with his sister over the Miller fiasco. The marriage proposal ended the argument, at least, just as expected. Hell of a mess, after all the glowering and shrieking (she was so pleased! Pity it's never going to happen). I offered to help clean up, but their mother, bless her steel-bound heart, made Gabe do it. And Paul had to do the dishes while the wives were ushered firmly into the living room for coffee and cookies. I think one of the nephews laughed at him. Good for you, kid.
Hell. I wanted to tuck Rossi in, at the end, before we parted ways. Help him somehow. Make it all better. Didn't stick around, though; just thanked him, wished him a good night, and went upstairs. He's a big boy. He'll work it out. I'll be there with another smack if he needs it.
I think that tonight, I'll finally get some sleep without those dreams. I really do.
8/7/2005
Logfile from Leah.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Night. Though the worst of the summer's heat is far from over, this evening at least has seen fit to loosen its stranglehold on suffering New Yorkers: a breeze skims across the distant water, chasing its cousins through streets and cooling desperate skins. In Brooklyn, lights spill from one of the close-companioned houses that suffocate and press against each other. Lights, the savory smell of home cooking ... and argument, voices crashing and submerging in a tidal wave of familial fury.
On the porch behind, Chris Rossi leans on a wooden rail and watches the distant, city-dimmed stars, smoking a cigarette that would earn his mother's wrath if she smelled it. "--you're a fucking /prick/, Paul!" shouts a woman's voice through the open window, moving with its author across the kitchen's scope. Recriminations follow in short order, muffled: maternal wrath. Don't you use that language in this house, young lady!
Laughter lures Leah outside, sliding her past the door on a tired chuckle and shutting the argument safely behind her once she's out in the open. Freedom. She draws in a breath. "Julia," she informs Paul's brother then, with a low-arched toss of her low-furled voice, "is three minutes shy of throwing the salad bowl at him now. God, it's like coming home, I'll tell you what." And she leans, elbows splayed and hands clasped, on the railing next to Rossi, and sighs over the careful distance between them, "Thanks for the invitation. Homecooking /and/ politics, all at the same meal."
The flinch that straightens Chris at the door's creak eases back into a slouch at recognition; the cigarette, pouched into futile concealment behind fingers' cradle, outs itself again to spin a pale ghost of smoke. "A little home goes a long way," Rossi says wryly, baritone dragging. Eyes flash under the porch light, turned askance to pick out Leah's profile. "Sorry. Lot's been happening. Didn't think Paul and Gabe would get on my back about that perp with company over."
"Shit, /I'm/ not surprised. Well, maybe a little: they don't team up often, do they? Paul's a prick, and Gabe's an asshole, and Julia and your mom will take care of it for you." Leah says it all comfortably, putting the lie to her shoulder's tense span. She stares out in the dark for a minute or two. "--You okay?"
A moment's pause. Chris returns to blank-eyed consideration of the stars. "Yeah. I'm fine." He shifts, his shoulder sinking its weight into the railing's roof-supporting pillar, one foot hooking across his ankle to prop itself by a toe's point. The cigarette flares an angry eye at his drag. "Headache from the gas, but that's about it. --Bad timing. The Rossis at their finest ... but it's not like you've ever seen us at our best, anyway."
Leah is leaning quiet for another minute while she digests words and probes the backyard's safe reaches. Brooklyn is her home, the stars /his/ destination -- not hers. "Helluva thing," she finally says. "Saw a bit on the news -- that Lazzaro's something else, good for him -- and I thought . . . well, yeah. Whatever." She puffs out a breath, lacking smoke's acidic vigor, so she has to make up for it with some of her own. "Fuck Sabella Miller. And don't worrying about me and your family. They're fine. /I'm/ fine. We're all fine. I know where the front door is; I can walk out whenever I want. Probably take your sister with me, just to avoid multiple counts of fratricide while you're off-duty. I'm a good guest that way, admit it."
Teeth flash in a grin that sheds its skin in Chris' voice, tangling with its pitch. "I was kinda impressed you didn't try and rip Gabe's head off over those flowers and chocolates," he admits, smothering the last of his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe. Head bent to the task, over-long hair hiding much of his expression, he tacks on a: "It's been years since Julia's actually hit any of us. Well. A couple of months, anyway. Paul can take care of himself. And ... yeah. Lazzaro's a good guy. Better cop than me, that's for damn sure."
Leah's own lips skin back in feline disdain at the reminder. "I'm sure some patient at a hospital will enjoy them, when I drop them off on the way home. And if he keeps mooning at me over the pasta, /he/ can be that patient. Again." She lets her weight shift more to one elbow, turns with it to face him. Indoor light slants dim gold over a swath of concerned expression, sturdy neck, the shoulder of her cheerful yellow blouse. "Better'n you. Must be a paragon of the police world, then, because from where I'm standing, you've always been pretty damn good yourself, Rossi."
Green eyes, gilded gold by that same light, slant up through the splice of black. Chris straightens. "Ass kisser," he accuses -- but there is amusement in it, however weary. "It's been a ... bad week. Shit. It's been a /fucking/ bad week. The Miller thing was just icing on the cake." A hand jerks, readied to toss the dead butt into the night-swept lawn, only to rethink and recover. Behind them, voices crescendo and culminate in an infuriated shriek and a crash. Rossi winces. "So much for salad."
She doesn't turn to the noise, the pinnacle of one Julia Rossi's frustration. Leah stays on him. Stays with him, with lips pursed and the hand of her supporting arm only just fisted with unconscious tension. "Wasn't hungry for more, anyway," she passes off. "What else, then, besides Miller? I'm listening."
"Couple of bad days at court. Perp we can't nail for murder, though we got him for incest and child abuse. LT's got me working shifts at MA." A tally, ticked off on fingertips' idle drum against the porch railing. Chris leans on his elbow, casting another glance to the dark grass before turning a bleak look back to Leah. "IA's after me. Us." No. Not us. "Beston."
"Chris," Leah says softly, just that, and the hand's a fist, after all.
The stark, set face turns away from Leah's regard, returning to a profile's shadow-limned amorality and concealment. Picked out by a haze of light, Chris' jaw shows tightly drawn and taut against the skin. "Everyone needs a little entertainment," he offers in strained flippancy. "Even IA, I guess. Hagan's got some stick up his ass about us. Anyway. It's been a bad week."
"Well, fuck him, too," but Leah doesn't put much heat into it. She turns, too, after a moment, back into the backyard contemplation. Forearms balance fist against fist past the railing's edge; her head drops a little as she scuffs an idle foot on the porch's boards. Sarcastic peppiness: "Great time for a vacation, huh? Or are you allowed one? The job, the job, always the damn job--"
"The kind of vacation I'll get right now ain't the kind I get to come back from," Rossi says with only the barest grope after humor. It reaches again -- "Think I'd make a good journalist?" There it is. Lips curl, nudged towards a smile's balance. "You sick of hearing about cop shit yet? What's been going on with you? Haven't talked to you in ... days, I guess."
Leah tells him blandly, "You'd be a great journalist. Got the interrogation part of it down pat, and the rest is just bullshitting. Which, I believe, you can also do. Talented man. I'll tuck you under my wing and teach you everything I know." The mica-glitter of her airy words chips away into harder, darker rue. "No, Chris, I'm not sick of hearing about it. You need to get it out of your system post-haste, sounds like . . . and I'd rather have that than some touchy-feely session about /me./" Her head twitches: a shake, or restlessness. "I'm fine, like I said."
Points out one trained interrogator to another, "We never talk about you, and ... touchy-feely? What the hell?" But it is a demoralized Chris Rossi, and he lapses into distraction's arms with the drag of a hand across his face, scrubbing idly at his eyes. "Hagan'll probably try to use this Miller shit to get me to turn evidence on Beston. The Cap's keeping me on the road, out of his reach, I guess. --Hey. Didn't know you knew Doc Grey. The old one. He said to remind you about assha ... asshat, something."
"So I'm not eager to talk about myself, is all," is Leah's tart reply. Can't help it, can never help it-- "Doesn't matter. Ask, and I'll answer, if you really want. Sharing is caring, hurray." Her glance sidelong marks the reemergence of Hagan's shadow, but she moves around it this time. "John Grey? Oh, we just ran into each other at Grand Central Station the other morning. Had breakfast at a crammed little table, talked about this and that." Her voice deepens with wry entertainment: "Taught him a few arcane bits of profanity. He seemed quite taken with 'asshaberdashery.'"
"Never heard that one before," says Rossi, absent-mindedly. (Inside the house, male voices shout at each other in blistering words, while a female one laughs.) "'Asshaberdashery.' Takes too long to say. Insults needs oomph, Canto. You can't go messing around with syllables and shit when you just want to get it out there." The other elbow joins the first on the railing, both hands twining to play pillow to Chris' chin. "/Why/ don't you want to talk about yourself? You and Melcross, you're like peas in a pod."
Leah comments, "Lots of syllables for an academic guy, Rossi. He liked it; let him have it. I stick to the shallow end of the profanity pool, you know that. You've /heard/ that." She bobs her hands together out beyond the railing. Shrugs. "Guess we are, for whatever reason. I'm just not in the habit. And . . . shit. People ask you to talk about yourself, right? And then turn it around and use it against you. Ask your dear /brother/ about that."
Baritone twists, wry and bitter across Brooklyn's pathology. "Which one? Paul or Gabe?" A glance over his shoulder verifies those two elders are still waged in no holds barred battle within, and Chris refocuses with a wrinkled brow and: "Do /I/ do that?"
A dark glance is his answer on the brothers twain -- come /on,/ Christopher -- and Leah caps it with another short, sharp shrug, like a marionette tugged to the breaking point. "No," she says then, "you don't. A lot of people do. I'm used to it. Hell, I'm not interesting. Why would anyone care about /my/ life? I don't have much of the usual chitchat to offer: no job, no husband, no kids, no scandals, no gossip. Just -- me. Hurray," she concludes mordantly, and sinks into the railing's support.
A pause. A wan light. "You're good in bed." Chris helps. Memory slips his baritone into the deeper registers, husky. "/Very/ good in bed."
"So there's that," Leah flips back to him. "Great. I'll remember it for the next time my mom's bending my ear."
"I can bear witness," says the middle Rossi, gravely. Inside, another shout -- Gabe's voice, strident on insult of /paramilitary murdering automatons/ -- and Chris flinches, voice abruptly pressing flat with plucked hostility. "Fuck him. Fuck both of them. I'm heading back to the apartment tonight. Do you need a ride?"
Leah ducks her head at that salvo, too, and mutters, "Oh, /hell,/ yes. I can't imagine how you've managed to survive this long under the same roof. You Rossis are something else." Her voice sketches out wan but genuine laughter. "Just like the Cantos. God, we're a depressingly predictable bunch, aren't we? Cue up the _Godfather_ music, and let us rip."
Despite the hard line of shoulders and face's set, Canto's quip prompts an answering laugh that does much to relax -- however reluctantly -- the lean frame. "We're like a sitcom. We need a laugh track. Let's you and me go find a horse head." he agrees with some amused despair. Untucking himself from the rail at last, he finds his way down the porch to sink into a cushion-swaddled bench, out of the kitchen window's reach. "At some point they'll realize we're not in there and come looking to see if we've murdered each other."
"We're being very quiet," Leah agrees on elbow's turn to follow him, "so we must've already done the deed." A smile rides her voice now, quiet and contained. "I did enjoy dinner, Chris. Really. A chance to get away from my funk, the same damn four walls of my apartment, the TV. I just -- I don't know. I'm a lousy sharer, but I'm standin' here thinking, 'Dammit, why doesn't he talk more about his shit? I can help!'" And mockery, gravid in Brooklyn's twanged vowels: "Hello, my name is Leah Canto, and I'm a hypocrite."
Wrapped in blessed darkness, Chris cants his head at Leah, threading fingers through his hair to prop his head on a palm. Studies her, eyes catching the barest fade of light to throw it back to her, luminous. "I almost woke you up one night," he admits. "One-thirty in the morning. Thought about pounding on your door, making you let me in."
Silence; stillness. Then Leah wonders, "Do I have enough knickknacks near the door to throw at you in such an eventuality? Better go shopping." In the kitchen's half-light, her face is a chiaroscuro mask of mingled entertainment and concern. Again, always: dammit. Concern. She forces her tone light over it, neat as a steeplechaser. "That'd be okay. Do it sometime. I'm usually up Web-surfing or something anyway, and . . . yeah. It's fine." Softer, dragged down to uncertain pillowed depths. "I wouldn't mind, Chris."
"I would've been pretty crappy company," Chris says, free, now that night has him wrapped 'round, to let the full weight of exhaustion draw his baritone down and drown it. A small bubble of wry humor, nonetheless, "--and I was wondering what you'd throw at me. I don't think I would've ducked. Crap. Leah...." He breaks off on a catch of breath. "Crap."
"It's all right." Leah's words, assured and even over that bottomless unsurety, arrive at the bench before she does, on her plain and graceless coiling down beside him. Her hand spiders over his arm, grips his warmly, squeezes. "Chris -- hey. Really. Did I ever tell you that you're some of my favorite company, for the wonders you do for my blood pressure? Ten rounds with you, at the top of our lungs, and I'm a brand-new woman. Can't find that everywhere, you know. I like it."
The answering laugh is shaky, but still a laugh. The arm under her hand stirs, its hand in turn touching her cheek with the backs of fingers in a brief caress. "Contraindicated. Your doctor would kill me if he knew." Chris leans, propping his head against the pale slats of the wall; black hair clings to the wood, casting sun-tanned skin into pallor. "I'll remember that next time. I'd make an appointment if I could. Hagan's getting to me. I think I'm going to have to off him."
Leah slings an arm over the back of the bench, rests her chin on the forearm, and gets comfy with her knee crooked flat on the cushion between them. It supports her flat assertion of, "Don't give him the satisfaction. You ignore his ass, and do your job, and take care of yourself and Beston. Stay /sane,/ Christopher. Stay healthy. And stay alive. I will /not/ have you eaten alive by the NY-fucking-PD. Too much of that in my family; probably too much in yours, too."
"I'll drive over him with the Buick," says Chris, uncharacteristically forlorn. "He's always following me around anyway. I can make it look like an accident. Buick's a good, sturdy car. It could take him out, no snap. --You should've been a cop, Canto. You would've been a good one."
Leah's supporting arm reaches out sly fingers to tease at the back of that too-long hair, the bristle of nape's flesh, the curve of ear's pinna. "Need a body shop afterwards, though," she tells him. "It's like hitting a deer: mess and bent fender. Waste of a good car, if you ask me . . . like me on the force. Ha. Tell me another one, Rossi."
A small sigh susurrates to the touch, mated to the light trace of Chris' hand across Leah's brow, coaxing away the fall of hair. "I got insurance. I could tell them I hit a wild pig. --Christ. Canto. I think I'm in the wrong line of work. Why /did/ you leave the Church?"
A muscle twitches under his touch. Leah tries to smile it away. "Lack of faith. Disillusionment. Boredom. The usual." Her hand retreats, but she turns briefly into his fingers, her eyes closing away even the dim wink of reflected light. "Miracles are shit, Chris, and I'm not sure that God isn't, too. All that pomp and circumstance, not to mention the misogyny and scandals, and for what? It isn't the kind of comfort I realized I needed -- need. I can't get that from religion, and I don't think they're offering, anyway. I'm--" her voice twists as her mouth does "--unclean. Questioner. Heretic. /Woman./"
"You're just fine as a woman," Chris informs, investing the remark with another taste of that earlier heat, just under the surface. His thumb's rough pad slides across her cheek, tracing the smooth curve of skin and the bone that shapes it. "Good enough for me, anyway. --Gabe ever tell you I was going to be a priest, back in the day?"
"No." Leah's breath eases warm into the word; under the caress, it's steady, for now, like the curious poke of opened, openly honest eyes in the dark. "Makes sense, though, now that you mention it. What happened?"
Another small, breath-caught laugh. Chris abandons the support of the wall and drops his head into his hands, elbows pinning to the stools of knees. "Would you fucking believe it?" he asks rhetorically, muffled. "I lost my faith." No capitals there, though the word bears its own fragile grandeur: gaudy, shattered, useless.
Leah murmurs, "Ah, God. Bastard." She stirs towards sitting up, sitting forward, /leaning/ forward; but rests, stays, in the nervy prickle of patience. (Her hand slides firmly under her thigh. /Stay./) "I believe it. And I'm sorry for it." A half-laugh from her. "You've got so much -- so much /surging/ in you, Chris, all that energy that Sabby loves, and I love when it's not battering me, and all that emotion, and depth, and -- yeah. You lost your faith, and you've been missing it ever since? Your cup, my dear, hath been running over because of it, I think."
"Mmf," answers the bowed head, reclusive for an extra moment's peace before Chris shifts, paring free his eyes to stare sightlessly at the even march of the porch's railing. "Joined the Force when I couldn't make myself-- I don't think it comes back, once you lose it. Even if it does ... I couldn't wait. This Farlan case: DA's picking it up on Monday. We couldn't even pin murder on the shit."
"And there might not be a hell waiting for him after this life is over." Leah pauses. "Sucks."
"Riker's," supplies Chris, pinching his eyes closed under fingertips' pressure. "If I can have that, I'll take it. -- You know, those pills the docs gave us? Slept all day yesterday, and I still feel like I haven't had a wink."
Leah allows, "Riker's. Which isn't /bad,/ for hell on earth, but . . . okay. Okay." Her weight shifts again, and now she goes with it, balancing a hand on his shoulder to mold flesh to flesh through cloth's boundaries, and squeeze. "Pills get you only so far, man. You need to sleep in your own bed, your own apartment, and the hell away from your family and . . . everything. Lock yourself in and lock the world /out./"
He responds to the touch, because he is a sensualist, and because he has known that touch before: stirs, and catches the bleeding edge of a smile in his hands. "Medical leave," Chris says wryly. "Hey, Cap. I can't come in because I'm sleepy. --I might be a fucking pansy, but I don't think even I could go down that low. Anyway, I have to go in. Beston's ... and Lazzaro'll need someone to take the heat."
Well, the comfort doesn't last much longer, at those words: with fine Italian exasperation, Leah smacks that supportive hand upside the back of his head. "/No./ Fuck me, Chris, but you are /not/ going to crawl back into the meat grinder like this, not while /I'm/ around. I will lock you in your apartment myself, and sit outside the door to keep you there. Beston's a big boy; so's Lazzaro. They can take care of themselves another day or two. Don't be more of a noble idiot than you have to be, okay?"
"/Fuck/, Canto." Fine, Italian ire jogs into Chris' tired voice at the blow, giving it new energy: like the spank given newborns, from somnolescence to vitality. He straightens, flattening a hand to the back of his head. "What the hell? Who're you calling an idiot? And noble? What the /fuck/?"
Leah grabs his chin to keep his attention around on her. She's fierce as a badger defending its den, now, and her voice is low, trembling frustration. And anxiety. "You're gonna kill yourself if you keep going on, again and again into the breach, dear friend, like stupid fucking Henry on his stupid fucking horse. Sit at home for a while. Medical leave, you said? Use it if you've got it. Don't go back in. They can live without you until you feel better."
"Shakespeare," says Chris, blank. "You're beating me upside the head and quoting /Shakespeare/ at me. Fuck, Canto. Are you insane? Shit. I'm not /dying/, you nutbag. --That /hurt/." Big bad cop. He releases his head and inspects the palm of his hand, checking morbidly for blood. "I'll take a break when I fucking need it. Got that? Where the fuck did you learn your manners? You don't hit the favorite son of your /hostess/."
"Better me than Julia, wouldn't you say? I don't come with a complete set of sprocket wrenches, and you've seen how /those/ babies can fly through the air from her hand." Leah slouches back into the bench's corner, simmering behind a barricade of folded arms. "Sue me for worrying about you. Take care of yourself, then. I'm out. I tried. Whatever, Rossi. Whatever."
Chris reinspects his hand, unconvinced by its serene lack of evidence, then reaches a hand to shape it over her mouth. "Shut up. Just for a second. Try breathing. In and out. Silently. And no hitting or biting," he warns hastily, retreating with all his limbs into his side of the bench. "Christ, you've got a bad temper." Pot? Kettle. Hi.
Retreat's not a bad idea: Leah comes after him, badger-fast. "Next you'll tell me that there are better uses for my mouth than talking," she wrangles out of irritation as she braces herself with a knee up on the bench and a hand on its back. And she leans over him, and she snaps, "I just /cared/ about you for a few seconds there. Sorry. I won't do it again, Mr. Big Manly Man who can't take a little tap to the back of the head /or/ someone trying to protect him from himself."
He is a good cop but not, perhaps, a good tactician. Cornered in his end of the bench by anger and curdling concern, Chris bites back -- too late -- on a startled laugh. "Shit. Canto. You know there're laws against assaulting officers of the law, right? If you leave marks, I'm gonna sue. --Wait. Stop." Hands fold around Leah's upper arms, pressing her back into her own half of the bench; behind them, Rossi's mouth presses a fine, firm line. More gently, then: "I'm sorry, Leah. I am."
Muscles strain instinctively, as they had against Scott Summers, but here and now, all Leah does as she's backed down is growl, "Sure you are. You are /such/ a prickly jerk to be friends with, Rossi." A little amusement has to escape her then, on chuckle's popped bubble. "If we yelled, we'd keep the family happy in there, you know. I can leave marks, too. Wounds to display with pride before the menfolk. Just try me." Her teeth slash a smile's reflection out of the night.
"Not on the face," counters Chris with mock alarm, cautiously releasing her -- albeit with a wary eye. (No, really. Not on the face.) "Julia would laugh herself sick, and Ga-- Mom would kill me," he reminds, realizing a tad belatedly that this would surely prove little deterent. Amusement rouses nonetheless, nibbling at the edges of a wry, "One fight. We were overdue, anyway. I'm serious about being sorry, though."
"I know," and Leah pats his cheek before slumping back into the bench's far corner again. She draws her legs up and hugs them. "I'm sorry, too. Chris. I'm all sharp angles and bitchery these days. You've been missing me at a good time to do so."
Refreshed by the quarrel -- what was that about blood pressure? -- Chris props his head again on his arm's crooked bent, regarding the shadows and light-strewn peaks of her face with grave interest. "What's been going on in Canto-land? Did you land that gig with the Times?"
Leah tries an elaborate shrug of shoulders and tone. "The wheels are turning, but I'm between agents at the moment -- fired her, /finally/ -- and that means it's kinda harder to do a full-court press on 'em. I think they're more interested now in what'll sell actual papers. Web hits don't keep all the advertisers happy. Maybe they could consider me for a columnist's gig. Something'll happen, or it won't. No big deal."
"A big deal for /you/," Chris says unarguably, if unnecessarily. Danger past, he stretches with his free arm to warm one of her knees with his hand, a companionable weight. "You have an idea who you're wanting for your next agent? What else is going on?"
Leah swallows. "Well . . . yes. It is." She makes herself a little smaller, and tips her head away from his hand. "No idea, not yet. I have friends looking for me, though. Count on the good old girls' network to get me hooked up before long," and her voice shimmer with honest warmth. Relief. Comfort. "Nothing else is going on, really. Like I said before: no job, family, gossip, and so on. Not sleeping so great, but the heat, you know."
Fingers pinch the bridge of Chris' nose, spared from the task of support. "I know," he agrees, and for just a second there's that fatigue again, thickening his voice -- but. Around the hand, eyes blink open into reckless, shiny clarity. "If you can't sleep anyway, c'mon by my apartment."
Leah is half-hearted dryness, over a restless shift, and shiny eyes back at him. "Speaking of too much heat, darling."
"I can't sleep either," points out Chris, in a voice that hardens as it goes: tension directed elsewhere, even if present in the here and now. "Fuck Gabe. You said it yourself." Teeth flash, savage. "Standing invitation. --Well, unless there's someone else."
A snort. "No. God. I wish. --Sorry. Not that you aren't more than enough for one woman, but you aren't mine, so." Leah grins into the darkness. "I don't have to worry about your ego, do I?"
Chris makes an dismissive gesture. "Enormous." Grins again, self-deprecating, with less heat than before. "Fantastic. Huge. You know this shit. It's about as big as it can get: untouchable."
Leah reminds him, "Except when it gets a slap upside the head."
"It hurt," Chris reminds, adding (nobly) "I'll live. --You always hit when you get pissed?"
Leah admits, "Only when I need to get the other person's fucking attention. I'm a very bad person."
Chris says, grave, "Yeah. You suck. --You ... sure it's just the heat, Canto?" The hand on her knee tightens, squeezing lightly. "Not sleeping, that is."
. . . Trembling. That's how it always starts, with her. Leah keeps it under grim control, but the clonic waves still chatter at her, reaching prickly tremors into her voice. "It's not." Her head lifts: brave, unconscious defiance. Or challenge. "Sometimes, it's not. Dreams. Sometimes."
Silence from Chris, whose face is momentarily hidden in the shadow of a hand. The one on Leah's leg tenses marginally, bleeding warmth through fabric into skin. Then. "What sort?"
"Don't know. That's the worst part." Leah sighs, and the tremors back off more, into safe and cool distance, somewhere far, far from her little hunched-up ball of miserable heat. "Being chased, running and running, or trying to climb a wall that keeps getting bigger -- shadows chasing me -- the usual nightmares . . . but I wake up out of them, and they go away, and I can't get back to sleep. You know?"
The following, "I know," is a desolate, bleak reply, and Chris sinks back into the comfort of his own body to sigh. "They get better with time, you know. Distance." Unless they're replaced by new ones. "Not that that helps right now. What do you do when you have one?"
Leah quietly rests her head against his hand on her knee. Her cheek /is/ hot. It's also, with eye's slow seep, damp. "Well, they say that you shouldn't stay long in bed if you aren't sleeping, so I try to fall back, and when that doesn't work, I try it out on the couch. Sometimes with the TV, but Jesus. These days, that doesn't help. MRA /and/ jailbreak shit on CNN now, and I'm an addict who can't stop watching." She snorts. "I'll get a TiVo, store up some reality shows to watch instead."
It takes time for that touch of moisture to shiver against skin and the cooling kiss of air. "/Leah/--" breathes Chris, low and startled. He is a Rossi, and their way is the thoughtlessly physical. The bench creaks beneath his slide, flexing under his weight; warm, strong arms wrap around the small knot of body, a lean cheek pressing to the smooth curve of head.
"Oh, it's not /that/ bad," comes out muffled, and Leah's not even shaking much anymore, in his embrace. "Talking helps. And it'll get better, I know that. Is it too late for me to go into the force? Or go back to school? Fuck. I /hate/ my job, Chris. It's just all I'm good at anymore. Or good /for./ Fuck," she says again, tired and soft, and leans into him.
"Join the club," Chris murmurs into that soft hair, voice echoed hollow through the nook of broken peace and dreams, spoken and unspoken, shaped between them. Arms slip, clasping at the wrists; Rossi tugs, angling their bodies together to rock the woman in comfort's balm. "If you want to join the Force, they'll take you. It's in your blood, but --You need a break, kid. Some time. Some help."
Leah snorts again. "Hello, pot? Yes, it's kettle calling. Hello!" She unravels against him, legs nudging legs, her head resting on his chest, supporting an unseeing stare at the house's wall. "We all need breaks, Chris. It's just impossible to get them. I'll . . . just be happy I have a roof over my head, food on the table, wireless Internet access." Another huffed breath pushes amusement into the night, and her face angled into that balm. "And family and friends, of course. Can't forget that."
As though her words were a veritable cue, a crash and a splinter inside the house signals that the argument is still on and in full swing. And full throat, for that matter. "Family," Chris says without enthusiasm, tensing slightly under that onslaught of noise. "Great. How could we live without that? --I'll take a break eventually, Canto. I just have cases. Homicide is undermanned, and MA, and--" Beston. And Lazzaro. And IA. "Let's go to Atlantic City. Piss everyone off. Get married to other people."
"Eventually," she sighs back to him, but doesn't push it. She is a limp and resigned Canto, yea verily, down to the splay of her hands, broad and rough-fingered, on her lap. "--Oh, my mother would like /that./ As long as he's got a pulse, a job, and preferably no more than one head on his shoulders, it's all good. I can settle down and start pumping out babies in no time. I'll make you babysit."
"Marry a girl," suggests the deep-throated Rossi, trading words through his chest's vibrating bell. "It's legal in Massachusetts. I'll drive you; we can pick up Sabitha along the way, unless you've got your eye on someone else. You two looked pretty comfortable at the dinner party." A smile threads its raw silk through his voice at the memory, brushing the nap of his Brooklyn-matted baritone.
Leah sniffs, "Solidarity in the face of the enemy. Yay, sisterhood. We'd be an awful couple, Rossi. We'd fight about politics. She'd leave dirty dishes in the sink. I'd steal the covers. She smokes too much; I drink too much. It'd never work. /And/ my mother's head would explode. Although, granted, that's not a reason against, really." She snickers. "I'll ask Sabby, next time I see her. Unless you beat me to it. /You/ marry her. She likes you."
Rossi tightens again under Leah, a small spasm that etches itself in harsh lines across his face before it is wilfully redrawn. "Nah. I think she's not really ... she doesn't know cops." A lame objection, and he retreats from it a moment before returning to pick at its carcass. "Takes a pretty unusual woman to marry a cop and stay married to him. Like Mom. Julia says she won't do it."
Leah says candidly, "I'd rather be one than marry one. I've seen too many wives at too many funerals. And see? Your sister's the smartest one of you all." She leans back a smile to him; an ankle twines around his. "I'll marry /her./"
"Take her," says Chris on an older brother's twinge of exasperation. "See if you can get her to stop sleeping with cops. Or at least get her to sleep with cops I don't know. Don't know /about/, whichever. --And ... yeah." Funerals. He tastes the word in his mouth without sharing it, and then ... blinks. "Smartest one of us all? What the hell? I'm smart."
"I'll ask her when we go back in. That'll kill the argument dead, count on it." Smugly Leah nestles against him; laughter quivers between them. "You're plenty smart, Rossi. You're a detective, after all, not a uniform. Love you in the dress blues, though. Tasty."
Chris quivers in a laugh. "Haven't been called /that/ in a while. 'Tasty.' Don't know if I like the sound of that. Been a while since I've had to wear the blues, too -- thank God for that, anyway. Last time was ...." A blink. "You were there."
Leah points out, "At least I'm refraining from putting my mouth where my vocabulary is." She does glance at the back door, though, reminded, and start to scoot back to an unoccupied portion of the bench, fussy with the disentanglement. "--Yeah, I was. I'm always there. Can't get rid of me, Chris. I'm the bad penny. The stink in your shoes."
"Terezzi," Chris pursues, sobering at the memory. "From the two-seven. Armed robbery. You were ... related to him somehow, weren't you? Or something. Family friend?" Given her retreat, Rossi absent-mindedly capitulates, loosening his hold on her shoulders to reclaim his original territory, safe from contamination.
"My uncle Jordy's best friend. They grew up together, went through the academy together. Half the family knew him. Good guy. He always had a treat in his pocket for me, growing up. Those little hard caramels in crinkly gold foil." Leah curves a smile lost to the darkness but for its echoes in her voice. "Well. Whenever I bitch about my job, Chris, I remember yours, and I'm grateful. No one's going to be gunning /me/ down in the course of my daily life."
Chris' eyebrow lifts, though he makes no comment. On that, anyway. "Think we should go in?" he asks with wary curiosity, after a silence that betrays nothing but muted conversation from the kitchen window. "Sounds like the fireworks have ended."
Leah looks that way, her expression narrowed in thought. "Yeah, I guess so. I want to be able to go down on bended knee in front of Julia and ask for her hand in marriage while the whole family's still there." She sits up, sits forward, balances on the bench's edge. Scrubs both hands up then down her face. "Thanks for listening. I'm sorry I couldn't do more for you in return than smack you." Pause. "Tough love."
"I bruise easily," Chris informs in doleful tones -- but he is unable to maintain the pose for long, cop's poker face notwithstanding. A flash of teeth proves a grin, and he draws his hand across his face one last time, scrubbing at the betraying signs of strain that will infuriate family inside. "If you want that ride, it still stands. And..." Rare hesitation. "I meant that. About if you can't sleep."
"Yeah." Her hand presses to his shoulder, then falls away. "I know. Thanks, Chris. We'll see." Leah sighs and climbs to her feet. "We'll see. C'mon, let's do this."
Shoulders set in a soldier's sharp-planed line, Chris Rossi telescopes to stand, dropping a passing hand -- heat sprawls, even in that short-lived contact -- on the nape of Leah's neck. "Yeah," he says, wry. Grim. "Bring it on."
[Log ends.]