anythingbutblue | (no subject)

He's not sure whether to be insulted by her tone or just glad to see a familiar face. "I live here, Faye. This is my room." He nods to the door he's just closed.

It's really Julia's room. Maybe he'll even tell her that. "Going outside? Did you have fun drinking on my tab?" Now he really is smiling: it doesn't matter to him how much she drank. "I told you I was really bad at poker."

The way she eyes his door is almost suspicious. "You've been living right next door all along?"

Julia, too, she guesses. If they're still sharing a room.

She can't believe she didn't know before now.

But his question puts a small smile on her face. "You win some and lose some, Mister Saxophone. All you need is practice."

Lots of practice, complete with wagering. Against her, of course.

He moves over to where Faye is, setting one hand on the wall on either side of her, leaning forward. "You mean Julia and I haven't been keeping you up at night? We'll have to get working on our noise level."

Backing away, Gren laughs. "But really: you haven't heard the music? I've been trying not to play too loudly late at night. Now that I know you're next door, I might make a different effort to serenade you, Faye. You're a fairy, after all. And fairies deserve beautiful music."

Her eyes get wide and the back of her head brushes against the door, but she's emboldened the minute he backs off.

"You're a pretty big tease for someone who says women aren't his style."

"Death's made me bold." He grins at her. "You'd think with all the people here, I'd have better luck than I do. So I have to turn to teasing, just to keep my skills honed."

The truth is that he's always kind of liked Faye. There's something about her that's attractive, an edge of vulnerability mixed with this veneer of toughness. He liked her even though she shot at him.

He'd never let something as simple as a gun be a stumbling block.

"Right. Just to keep your skills honed."

She finally pulls her gloves on. Even though she doesn't expect to be chipping any nails.

Gren's so strange. To her, he's positive and he's negative, brave and stupid, harmless and dangerous. He advances on her just to fall back again.

And that's not even getting into the physical aspect of it.

She finally steps away from her door. "You going down to the bar?"

She's never heard any music coming from next door. The walls here must be pretty thick.

"I was going to go downstairs, yeah. You want to go with me?"

Even though he doesn't owe it to her, he'll buy her a drink. And he glances at the gloves she's pulled on; she was wearing them that day in Blue Crow when she wanted to take on a whole street gang herself.

"You thinking of beating somebody up?"

Faye smiles sweetly.

"Only if I have to."

She looks down at her coat, taking a few more steps away from her door. "I was going to take a walk." Glancing back at Gren, she puts her hands in her pockets again, balling them into fists. "Don't you ever get restless here?"

A momentary flash of despair crosses his face, but he recovers quickly. "I get restless here all the time, Faye. Every day, every night. I haven't been a real fan of captivity since I was in prison." He keeps pace with her, step for step, and he's not doing it to be threatening; it's almost subconscious and it's certainly unintended.

"Mind if I walk with you? I kind of feel like going outside."

Her eyes dart back over to him; the prison reminder almost gives her pause.

Almost.

But she almost never says she's sorry, especially with any meaning behind it. Now is no exception.

She barely shrugs. "I won't stop you."

It's kind of funny. She can't remember the last time she took a walk just for the sake of taking a walk and had company with her.

Her hands stay buried in her pockets as they go down the stairs. "I never hear you through the wall when you play."

She'd bet he does it pretty often, though.

That last song he played at the Rester House hovers at the back of her mind, and she can't quite remember how it went.

"It's probably a good thing you can't hear me through the wall." He's got a small smile on his face. "I'm working on a new song and it's not there yet, and they always sound terrible until they're further along than this."

As they get to the door, they make the turn into the bar and then straight out the other door leading to the lake. He hasn't got his jacket, but it doesn't matter: he's dead. He's not going to catch a cold and die. He's not going to get sick. None of that stuff even happens to him any more. He knows he's got a weak, weak pulse and he knows he sleeps and eats, but those last two are out of habit more than necessity.

He also knows he's really warm all the time. Maybe it's a counterbalance to Julia's coldness or to the climate on Callisto or maybe it isn't: maybe it's just what death is to him.

What it has to be. Gren stuffs his hands in the front pockets of his pants and they start walking through the dry snow, the full moon up above lighting the path for them.

And then he turns to Faye. "How come you're so angry all the time, Faye?"

Completely surprised, she does stop in her tracks now.

But only for a moment.

"I'm not angry all the time."

And she doesn't think she could be blamed if that really was the case, either.

"You sure seem like it."

He shrugs: he could be wrong, but he doesn't think he is. One thing he knows he brings to the table, no matter which table he sits at, is empathy. His mistakes tend toward being too kind, if there really is such a thing.

It's as nice out here tonight as it was last night when he talked to Charlie, and for a moment he thinks that for a man who says women aren't his style, he sure knows more females than males at this place. Maybe the universe is trying to tell him something, but no: he doubts that. Seriously.

"You know" (but probably she doesn't), "there are a lot of things that've happened to me in my life that I wish were different." He almost tells her that he's told one more person about what happened to him in prison, but she probably doesn't care about that. She's a hard one to read. "And I bet you could say the same thing. I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you or get you back to my couchside confessional or any of that stuff, Faye. I think you're interesting. But I do think you're really mad about a lot of things. So if you ever want to talk about that, I might be a pretty safe person to vent to."

He's not sure why he's offering: maybe it's because he craves human contact so greatly. "You don't have to take me up on it, but if you decide you want to, you can just knock on my door."

"How would Julia feel about that?"

She's not making a dig. Not this time. She liked Julia. But in all this time, she's still never seen Julia around, and Gren's always been so vague about her.

Just like Spike.

Gren does seem like a pretty safe person to vent to, though. She's let that get to her before. And she can guess at a couple of the things in his life he might wish had gone differently.

"Why do you think I'm interesting?" He barely knows anything about her.

He shrugs, almost helplessly. "Because you move with music in your step."

It's the way he sees things, and it's the way he's always seen things, though it's been more acute, for lack of a better term, since he died.

"And I don't think Julia would mind. She's pretty easy-going."

These days, anyway. Part of him thinks it would be really good for Julia to have a female to talk to instead of some man who's only part female; there are things she goes through that he just can't understand, no matter how empathetic he thinks he is.

Julia is... the blues; he's jazz. Every once in a while they mesh really nicely, but they never really understand each other, no matter how much she professes to do so.

She gives him another sideways glance, never fully facing him, and then she smiles, almost skeptically.

"I have music in my step."

Maybe sometimes.

"Thanks for the compliment, Mister Saxophone."

One of her hands closes around the pack of cigarettes sharing that pocket, and she takes a second, hardly pausing, to get one out and light it, the flick of her lighter providing a moment's worth of warmth against her face.

"Where were you born?"

It's not as random a question as it seems.

He shoots her a look of complete surprise, the light from the flame illuminating his eyes in the darkness.

"Mars. Why?"

She shrugs, putting the lighter away, not looking at Gren again.

"Mars, huh? So why did you go to Titan?"

There's this niggling edge of vulnerability that being around Gren gives her, and she's not so sure she wants to lay herself bare again. Regardless of how bare she's seen him, both literally and figuratively.

"You thought I was born on Titan?" Grinning almost fiercely, he shakes his head, letting a moment's silence intervene. "No. I went to Titan because it seemed like a good idea at the time; I was trying to get over being dumped if you really want to know, and distance and the idea of being surrounded by other men sounded pretty good to me."

It's one of his life's patterns, and he sees that with startling clarity for the first time.

"Why'd you become a bounty hunter?"

"I'd have to get paid some serious cash to go to war. I'm just not made for that kind of thing."

Her pace slows a little, but not purposefully. "I haven't been a bounty hunter very long," she admits. "It was almost an accident. The opportunity just fell in my lap."

And when opportunities fall in her lap, she knows to help herself.

"But I had nothing else to do."

"That's kind of how I felt about going to Titan. Looking back on it, there were other things I could have done, but I chose not to do them for a lot of reasons that don't make too much sense now. But I was pretty young and pretty fragile and I really wanted to get away: I don't know. It was an opportunity, I guess."

He stops there, looking out over the lake. It's cold but he's not.

"My heart was kind of broken, and I didn't want to have to think about that. Turned out I thought about it more on Titan than I probably would have at home. I didn't make a very good soldier, but at least I didn't let anyone in my squadron get hurt on my watch. Even if I didn't kill as many enemies as I probably should have."

He didn't know that the relationship that drove him to Titan would be his last. Maybe in a romantic and desolate kind of way he had thoughts of dying in the war, but he never really wanted that at all. Just another silly notion: one of those thoughts that runs through a person's head when things are out of his control.

"What did you do before you became a bounty hunter?" He could ask her questions all night. After all, the time they met he answered a lot questions more than she did.

She pointedly glances over at him once more, raising her cigarette to her mouth. "You distanced yourself from your breakup."

After breathing smoke up into the night air, she looks out at the lake herself.

"Got a reputation. You're not the only one of us who's been wanted, you know."

He laughs quietly, hearing his own words from long ago echoed back at him.

"You have a good memory, Faye."

You distanced yourself from them. You didn't want to be alone, so you left them.

Something like that.

He thinks he learned his lesson the other night about betting when Faye's around, but if he were going to bet, he'd put money on the fact that she sure has been wanted. In more than one way.

"Sometimes," she agrees breezily enough. "I--"

She stops herself, and there's a short silence as she fingers the lighter in her pocket.

"It's funny," she starts again, without much humor. "But for a long time I had amnesia."

"You did?"

He never knew that about her.

"But you don't any more?" That's good, probably. Hopefully.

Maybe.

"No, not really. I don't remember everything, but... I remember enough."

She gives the whole thing an almost delicate shrug of her shoulders.

"I spent a long time wishing I could remember anything about my past and when I finally did, nothing good came of it."

And that's not pessimism. It's the truth, but she doesn't necessarily expect him to realize that.

She doesn't know how he always gets her to tell him things.

He gazes down at her: she looks so petite and almost childlike out here in the moonlight.

She's anything but that and he knows it, but still, he finds her aura fascinating. "I think we all have things in our past we're not really proud of, or happy about, or even things we want to remember." Everyone has amnesia to a degree, but it's usually selective. "But wasn't there anything about your past that meant something to you?"

If not, that's one of the saddest things he's ever heard.

Faye crushes the tip of her cigarette between her fingers, lets it fall to the ground, and even steps on it with the toe of her boot.

"Yeah."

That fountain, her room, that one pleated skirt she used to love so much when she was little, Sally and Amee and Beverly and Li Mei, and running uphill to get to her house.

She can even remember how excited she was to take that shuttle trip.

"It's just that I can't ever go back."

Gren gets a smile from her again. "I guess neither of us is quite what we seem to be."

She starts walking again, slowly, boots crunching through the snow.

He watches her thoughtfully as she walks away, but he hastens to catch up with her. "Faye, stop." Gren puts a hand on her shoulder.

"No one can ever go back."

"Maybe, but you don't know the half of it."

And then she meets his eyes and they're so blue, and she looks away again just as suddenly.

"I'm sorry," she says quietly, almost grudgingly.

It costs her just to say it.

If anyone knows what it's like not to be able to go back to anything near what things were before, it's him.

"It's all right."

He does know the half of it. He knows a lot more about it than she might think. After Titan and prison he couldn't go back either. "My life before the war seems like someone else's story. Like some fantasy. After I escaped from prison, I couldn't go back home with a bounty on my head. And even if I could have, things were different. I was different."

Just like he did that night on Callisto, he reaches for her hand. This time, though, no street gang is chasing after them; the only person she needs protection from is herself. He looks into her eyes.

"I'm sorry you couldn't go back home either."

Surprised, she lets him.

She let him drag her away from those thugs on Callisto, let him take her back to his apartment without knowing anything about him. This is nothing in comparison.

"I told Spike once that I didn't think I'd ever know about my past, and he acted like it didn't matter. I accused him of only saying that because he had one, but he said that I still have a future."

She pulls her hand back. "I don't know why I'm telling you all this."

This is becoming a habit with him.

"Must be my inner preacher inspiring you to disclose all your secrets." He smiles. "I think Spike was right. Not that the past doesn't matter -- if he even said that -- but that you still have a future. Just think of all the opportunities waiting for you to reinvent yourself."

Even gloved, Faye's hand is small in his. He looks down on it like it's the most curious thing he's ever seen, a why am I holding your hand? look on his face. Letting go, he looks away.

"Want a drink or something?" He doesn't look back at her face yet.

"Yeah, that must be it." She barely smiles, glancing in the opposite direction. "You really missed your calling."

It's a tough decision. She knows he's always good for getting her a free drink, but she's already started falling back into the confession mode she'd wanted to avoid.

"You start plying me with drinks and you might get my whole life story out of me."

Both of her hands go back in her pockets.

"I think I'll just go back upstairs and get a shower."

The never-ending supply of hot water is still one of the best things about this place.

She takes a few steps back toward the bar, then turns to glance at Gren again. "I'd tell you to make sure you're not one of those peeping Toms, but I always keep the bathroom door locked when I take my showers."

He laughs, like she's just scored points against him and in a way she has. He's still chuckling as she walks off, and he calls after her.

"Take care, Faye."

Polite, he waits until she's back inside before following. He doesn't want her to think he's stalking or anything. Instead, he turns into the bar and gets himself a cup of tea. He's not cold: it just sounds good.

And when he gets it, he toasts an invisible Faye with his cup before heading back upstairs.