noteasytobepink | Wheelsy AU ~ Hollywood Nights

"'Cause I don't need a pool, an' they're expensive."

He snapped a photo of his shoe and sighed.

"Dammit. They're also a pain to keep clean, an' attract critters, like deer an' raccoons."

Bill had handled such calls on the job, he didn't need the hassle when off it.

Trying again, Bill managed to take a picture of the room, including the small living space, the door to the bathroom, and the TV. The phone popped up with an address book, and Bill was able to find the station out of the listed contacts.

"Got it. See, ain't much, but it's alright."

"But Bill...pooooool. I could wear a swimsuit, and that young deputy would choke on his own spit, and just think, a nice swim after a long day of work..." Ah, pools. Not that she ever really had them growing up but!

"Yep, I see. It's nice. Hotelish, but nice. Where is the Hollywood glamour and glitz? You alone there?"

"Tell you what, you go on ahead an' start diggin'. Outta have a decent size pool by next summer."

Aluminum crinkled as he finished off his beer and crushed the can, and he got up to go grab another from the mini-fridge.

"I'm alone. An' I don't need glamor an' glitz tonight."

"Bill, I'm hurt. Hurt and offended that you think it'd take me a whole year to dig something that small." Rea;;y? A good size latrine or ditch wasn't too much smaller and it was just a few hours worth of work for a well planned one of those...

Ah, one can down then. "You gonna fill me in or am I going to have to shake it out of you?"

"I'm sorry, just remember to be careful which side of the house you dig on. Wouldn't want you hittin' a sewer line or somethin'."

The new can hissed as he popped the top, and he took a seat in a chair beside the small table in the room.

"Front desk duty really that borin'?" he asked when she threatened him to spill. "Outta be a pack of cards in the drawer there."

"Of course, if I decide to slave away for your future lounging, I shall check things out properly beforehand." Ah, yes, this would be the 'dry' tone.

"And yes, your front desk is boring. So I moved the phone to your desk. You've got a better chair." And it was already broken in! And yes, he could probably guess she had her feet propped up on the desk too!

Her initial thought of 'Who do you think I am, Gambit?' would really be helpful now. Instead she swallowed away the lump in her throat because Morph would have loved it, then sighed. "And well, you know I'll take a good shaking over desk work any day. You think I couldn't shake you with one arm?"

"Don't you go adjustin' nothin', I've got that chair set the way I like it."

Lapsing into silence, he reached over and snagged the whiskey bottle from the nightstand; he poured a drink out into the plastic cup he brought in from the bathroom.

Taking a drink, he swallowed hard, wrestling with what to say.

"Starla isn't comin' back t'Wheelsy." That was somewhere to start.

"I'm not adjusting, I'm...spinning." Now at any rate.

Oh. Hmm. How to handle this one?

"I'm sorry she confirmed that Bill." Because, really, he had to have been thinking about the fact that she might not. If there'd any hope the girl would have been Wheelsy...or Bill would have been out there earlier.

"I really thought she was comin' back."

He did. The facts and evidence might have been pointing in the other direction, but Bill had spent a long, long time blinded by love.

He drained the cup and poured again.

"I just... couldn't see her leavin' for good."

"I know you did, consciously at any rate." She liked to believe the man was bright enough that the subconscious things got in there somewhere. "I did tell you it's more surprising you stayed than the fact the other survivors left Bill." Because no matter how you looked at it, Wheelsy had been a nightmare for a little while, and healthy people didn't live in nightmares.

"Distance is what most people need to start healing. Distance tends to become permanent when they realize how much better they feel elsewhere." People picked up all these things and lived by them really. It just often took a shrink or therapist to help them realize WHY they felt better or worse.

"She said she didn't feel safe, that it wasn't home anymore."

There were times Bill wondered what his staying said about him; if it was a sign of strength or stupidity. He must be stupid, because everyone else saw the benefit in leaving.

"I reckon if you go by that line of thought it'll be better for me that she don't come back."

He hardly believed that, but there was nothing he could do now regardless.

It said, quite frankly, that he was not normal. That he, like a few others with all the proper tendencies, was a hero who lived and dealt with terrible things in ways far different than most. Clarice could relate. That didn't mean she didn't understand how abnormal it was.

"Not her home, true. How would she fit back afterward if you think about it? Can she do the same job and live the same life she once did or have things changed in her so much that it's not a good fit anymore?" 'Home' was a place people often out grew or changed so much that they couldn't fit back into the same holes. That was why people moved Homes. "Wheelsy as it is now doesn't have a place for the shape of puzzle piece she's become."

So to speak anyway.

"I think it'll be better for you to have your answer, yes, because limbo sucks."

"This sucks," he replied, and it bordered on petulant. Everything she was saying made sense, and none of it was helping him.

"I shouldn't've come out here, I shouldn't have tried tellin' her how I felt."

Feel, though it's a feeling tainted with misery, and blackened by the truth.

"Yes, that sucks to, you're right." Life just did that sometimes. "But you had to go, and you had to try. Now you can bleed the wound clean and let things heal." Because she was practical like that.

"You got years of pent up emotion and twisted attraction in you Bill. Enough so, and stewing so long, that it was interfering with your real life instead of the one you wanted in your head."

He drained the plastic cup again, then chased it with his beer.

"Think I'd be better off with the lies in my head, than livin' with knowin' that even as the last man on earth, I never had a chance with her."

Ignorance is bliss, isn't that what they say?

"If she said that she's an idiot," Clarice growled softly. Angry. "She wouldn't know a damn thing about what you'll do when you're the last people alive and it was cruel in any case."

Clarice might have a low opinion of this Starla lady.

"We were for awhile there," he reminded her quietly. "An' I find out all I rated was an 'almost' good enough."

Why bother with a cup, when it was so much easier to drink from the bottle? Bill decided this, and the bottle sloshed as he took a drink and lowered it again.

"Everything that happened, all I went through for her, an' none of it means a god damn thing."

"You were in a limited area and she probably told herself, and you, that because she was embarrassed about being attracted to you after all that messed up stuff." And frankly, civilians were idiots.

Ah, she could hear that bottle over the phone, Bill.

"What else you drinking Bill? That's not beer." Bottles near a phone had a different sound.

"No, that's what she told me tonight, when I asked why we wouldn't work out. She ain't attracted to me at all."

All the banter, the teasing, the long conversations, all this time, he'd been reading things that weren't there, imagining there was something more.

Eying the bottle, he wondered just how good those pointed ears of hers were.

"M'havin' Turkey for dinner."

"Don't let that get to you Bill, you have ample evidence that you're attractive and a fanclub that would love to hit her with sticks for you." Just saying.

Turkey? Turkey...what kind of booze companies were there in this world? Judging by previous 'I need to drink' nights though, she could guess. "Whiskey. Fun. Do I need to come out there and glare at you?"

"Yeah, they see me as a challenge, right?"

Which probably meant he could get laid, but it still left him lonely.

With a dry chuckle, he leaned back in his chair.

"S'a long flight, especially if you gotta switch planes somewhere. Probably be done 'fore you get here."

"Some see you as a challenge, every world gad people like that, but a lot worry about you and think you deserve better." That was just the truth.

And...really Bill? REALLY?!

She snorted into the phone, pulled up the pic he'd sent her, then decided to employ one of the sticks she'd brought to sharpen across the long night. What? Girl needed her weapons.

And teleport facilitators. "I think..." she drawled, looking at him through the rather large, glowing portal, "...that you forget who I am sometimes."

"BWAH!"

Bill teetered on his chair, nearly toppling over before righting it again.

The whiskey bottle he just barely manged to save, and he glared daggers at Clarice.

"That ain't funny."

"Didn't do it to joke," she pointed out. She did it to check on him point in fact and he'd been ridiculously easy to talk into giving her a picture for targeting!

"You're right, this is pretty far away." It was a strain to hold open a portal across that distance. She wasn't crossing through though, just hanging up the phone on her end and leaning back on her chair. "Wanna come home and finish the night shift here?"

Bill hung up his cell, and tossed it onto the tabletop.

"M'not exactly fit for duty here."

She'd be better off dragging the deputy out of the tank, he'd at least had a few hours to sober up some.

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