capeandcowllogs | A constellation of tears on your lashes

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A constellation of tears on your lashes

WHO: Roy Harper & Laura Kinney
WHERE: Dallas BBQ Restaurant
WHEN: Friday night
WARNINGS: Discussion of non-con/abuse.
SUMMARY: Roy takes Laura on an ill-planned date and talking happens.
FORMAT: Tagger's choice.

Their brief encounter at the auction left Roy with more questions than answers about Laura, though one thing seemed certain: she didn't at all strike him as the roller rink type. It took a little thought, but he'd come up with the barbecue place as an alternative, figuring that there would be good food and tasty frozen drinks, and if they decided to go elsewhere after dinner, it would be a fine preamble.

He'd arranged to pick her up at 8pm and had arrived casually dressed in jeans and a plain red teeshirt. He seemed laid back, much like the establishment. It was busy, but not overwhelming, with the smokey scent of babyback ribs wafting through the air and the laughter of college kids tipsy off daiquiris filling the room. It was fun, and Roy sincerely hoped it would translate to his evening with Laura.

"You gotta try this one drink they've got," he said, pointing to the list of frozen options on the menu. "It's called Miami Vice. It tastes like how being on a vacation feels."

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It was after the third time Roy had to put his arm around her, and Laura found herself staring at a woman who was dancing towards them until she took the hint and moved away, that the mutant sighed faintly in frustration. She wanted to growl at them again, to hit them and drive them away so they would stop messing with her nice time. But she couldn't.

"Maybe we should leave!" She mouthed at him in a half-shout.

He looked at Laura, then to the woman, his green eyes narrowing. Without removing his arm from her, he nodded and began to escort her toward the front door. No need to exit the way they came in, he figured.

Once they were outside and able to hear each other again he dropped his arm from around her and shoved his hands in his back pockets. "Welp. That was sort of a bust. Some people."

She didn't speak again until they were outside, just tossing another somewhat feral glare at the last woman before she was out of sight. Once they were on the street and he let go of her, she stuffed her hands back into the pockets of her own jacket, ducking her head for a moment.

"No it wasn't," she answered with a shake of her head, looking at him.

He studied Laura's face for a long moment before cracking a smile. "Okay. It wasn't. I had a good time."

Other pedestrians began pushing past them on their way in or out of the club and just on the sidewalk in general, so he stepped to the side, nudging Laura to move along with him.

"Hey, you wanna go someplace else maybe? Somewhere a little less... insane?"

She seemed to think over his question carefully, her gaze shifting towards the people coming and going. She didn't have classes to manage until the afternoon tomorrow, and Jessica had made enough teasing comments about the date that she knew the other girl was probably waiting up to hear about it...which meant taking her time and staying out late was allowed in both regards.

So she nodded. "Okay."

Roy seemed satisfied by this, though he wasn't sure what sort of entertainment he could offer in terms of places that weren't bars or nightclubs. He thought then to the little park a few blocks northeast of them, and without saying where they were going, he started off.

Laura didn't seem all that concerned with where they were going. She had a decent gauge of what Roy was capable of (she thought) so she knew she wasn't in any danger...and he didn't smell like he was lying at all tonight.

So she just fell into step next to him, not quite at the same pace since she was tiny compared to him, but close enough, looking around to see where they wound up.

Every so often Roy would steal a sideways glance at her, playing this whole situation as coolly as he could manage. He was nervous or uneasy, but Laura was so unlike the women he surrounded himself with, it was still hard to get a good read on her.

"So," he began, trailing off as they approached a crosswalk. "You got a boyfriend back home or something?"

Laura was genuinely startled by that question, and she glanced over at him for a moment, long enough to be noticed, before looking back at where they were walking.

"No," she finally answered. Whatever mess she and Julian had been was obviously over, and she and Tom had dated for a while but never made it anything official...

"I have never had a boyfriend," she answered finally, carefully.

He was a little surprised by that, though considering her age and life spent in a lab, maybe he shouldn't have been. Still, she was nineteen and had been on her own and in the City for two years. She must have had someone. Hell, by the time he was nineteen, Chesh was already pregnant.

But he shouldn't assume anything about Laura just because he'd grown up too quickly.

"There's nothing wrong with that," he said after a pause. "You're young. You don't need to tie yourself down."

"It is not that," she said with a faint shrug. She wasn't certain what it was, honestly. "I have dated. I am not..." She was about to say 'not a virgin' but decided not to, uncertain precisely why.

"I have spent most of my life fighting. Love has never mattered." It wasn't precisely true, but it was close. "And in the city I have had other priorities." She always had a reason not to do something.

He understood. He was much the same, in some aspects. He'd fought his entire life, put so many other priorities above his own, but instead of closing himself off, he was almost open to a fault. He needed people. He craved connections, both emotional and physical. More than anything in his life, Roy didn't want to be alone. It didn't have to be love. It just had to be... something.

"I was in love once," he said, stretching his arms out. "It was awful."

Congratulations, Roy, that actually made Laura laugh. If softly, mostly out of surprise, and only for a moment. And then she grew as introspective as ever, even as she watched him.

"I don't know if I have ever been in love," she finally decided. Julian was...she didn't know what Julian was. She thought she had loved him. Had she? But so much had happened...

"It's a hard thing to figure out," he said cryptically, internally pouring over the complicated emotions that surrounded people like Cheshire and Donna. Had he really loved either of them? Had he loved them both? Was one more important than the other? Roy wanted one of them to matter more, outdo the other in terms of what she'd meant to him, but when he really, truly thought about it, Jade had been his first love, not Donna. And remembering that made him feel all the more stupid.

"But it's not the end all be all. There's more to life than just being in love. There's more to relationships than that."

She nodded, but whether she was agreeing, or just absorbing the information was hard to say.

"I have never had one of those either," she said with a little shrug. "I'm not sure I can."

"Aw, sweetheart. Anyone can be in a relationship. Hell, the mother of my child is a bonafide sociopath. If she can do it, anyone can." Roy's tone was markedly jovial, but there was something in his words that indicated that he wasn't fooling around. Still, he managed a smile as he gently nudged her with his elbow. "And like I said, there's more to a relationship than just love. You can be friends with somebody first off. That's not nearly as hard as loving them."

"Maybe," she said with a faint nod, looking a bit surprised at the nudge but letting it pass. If she was startled by the sociopath comment it didn't show...she knew how insane relationships with superheroes could be, and he was obviously one.

The word strikes close to home, because she'd been accused of being one once. And lord knew, her body count was evidence enough. "Jessica seems to believe relationships are important. I never agreed."

"I think they're important, too." He was watching Laura more closely now, paying less attention to anyone else on the street. "But loving someone and being in love with them. Those are two different things."

Roy thought of his friends, people he loved like family, people he'd do anything for. There was no romance between him and Garth and Wally and Dick, but he loved them all, like they were all brothers. And even when things had gone sour between him and Donna, he'd never stopped loving her, not once. It was with Cheshire, with Jade, that things got ugly. He'd been in love with her, a connection just as close as the others, but more complex and intimate, in ways he wasn't articulate or romantic enough to express. She'd been the earth and the sky to him, and when she hurt him, it hurt worse than what anyone else could do.

"And physical stuff, you know, that's not strictly about love so much as hormones."

She knew that, rationally. She thought she probably loved Jessica, the girl was as close to a sister as she'd ever really had (outside of her clones she killed) but she would never say that. Jessica probably knew, the girl always seemed to know the right answer when it came to things like that.

Sex though..."Sex always seemed to be about power," she said quietly. It wasn't something she spoke of much, and though she seemed like she had a casual attitude abotu it, she didn't really, she just...didn't process it the way she was supposed to. "Power and release," she decided, looking back over her years in New York. Her expression was probably a bit haunted for a moment.

"I never really enjoyed it." She added.

That was... not what Roy was expecting to hear. Not at all. And he wasn't sure how he was expected to react. Was he supposed to say something supportive and comforting, and risk coming across like an out of touch asshole? Should he play this off and ignore it, like she hadn't said anything at all? Maybe she wasn't even implying what he'd assumed she was, maybe he was misreading this whole thing and she wasn't really saying that her experiences with sex were one-sided and painful.

Regardless, Roy was upset, even if he wasn't certain he had a right to be, and it took him a few seconds to string together something that wasn't an apology. Because, while he was sad for her, having had a terrible experience with something that was, to him, an extremely awesome and important part of the human experience, he didn't want Laura to think that he pitied her. Whatever had happened, she'd gotten through it.

"It's not always about power. I guess it can be, for some people. But I think those people are doing it wrong, if that's all they get from it. Sex is about connecting with somebody. It's about being human, being... alive." He watched Laura carefully, hoping she wouldn't start shrinking again.

There wasn't really a right answer, but Laura knew that, at least. Her life didn't really get right answers, it got solutions and frustrations and ways to deal with them. But she'd made too many mistakes to ever really get to 'right.'

But she'd managed a little bit of happy, really.

But she knew, from the way other people talked about it, that what he was saying wasn't wrong. "Other people think that too," she said in quiet agreement. She wasn't shrinking away, just...thinking. Working it through with a relative strangers because maybe that was easier than trying to figure it out with people that cared.

But she could smell his reactions, feel the way his body changed as he spoke. She had messed it up, and she hadn't meant to. He deserved some sort of explanation, really. But she wasn't certain how to put it.

"It is probably different when you want to have it," she decided, and then some part of her realized what that could mean, besides what she meant, and she sighed. "I...was a prostitute. When I was younger, after I escaped from the lab, before Logan made me join the X-men." Not the whole time, but a lot of it. More than she liked to think about.

Why was she talking about this? It did fee sort of easy to tell him, again maybe because he didn't matter yet, almost like a friendly sounding board. "I have not had sex otherwise. It is probably different." There were times she almost had, with Tom, but she hadn't in the end.

What else could he do but listen? Roy wasn't sure there was anything he could say that could give Laura any sort of comfort or reassurance- he didn't know her well enough to presume she even wanted that from him. Who was he to her besides some jerk that was paying for her? Did she equate him to those horrible men who'd hurt her so badly when she was just a kid? It sort of made him feel dirty, thinking about it. Not because Laura was dirty, because she wasn't, but because he was a man just a degree or two removed from the men who'd treated her like she was an object for power and release.

He wasn't judging her though. He had his own skeletons in his closet, put himself in just as much harm's way as she had. And more than that, he had a girl back home whom he loved like a sister who'd been through something awfully similar to what Laura had. It was a shame Mia wasn't here now, he thought. She'd have something cute to say to make this situation less awkward.

"I know it's different," was what he finally managed, taking that moment, to urge Laura to step aside with him so that he could look her in the eyes as they spoke. "What happened... it wasn't something you wanted. And you don't have anything to replace that yet. But that's okay. Someday you might find someone you like and you'll get to make that choice. And until that day comes, nobody's got the right to put their hands on you unless you tell them to."

For good measure, he dropped his hands to his sides, then mustered a half a smile for show. "Even me. See? I have a healthy sense of respect."

She frowned, though not at him, more at herself and the situation. She hadn't intended the conversation to go this way, and it was obvious from his demeanor he didn't know what to do with it now any more than she did. Although it was sort of a relief to say those things out loud, now that it was done, it was done.

"I don't equate you with them," she finally said. "And I have not been looking for any way to...replace..what I went through." She just preferred to push it aside most of the time. She wasn't ashamed of it or anything, it had just been her life. Her life was generally crummy, but she made the best of it.

"And if I had wanted you to stop touching me, I would have stopped you," she added, with what was probably a slightly more feral than she had intended little smile. What that said about when she was hooking, and how she didn't stop them, she didn't really know.

And then she sighed faintly and shook her head. "This was not how this date was supposed to go." Jessica had told her to have fun, and she had been, and now...this. Oy.

Roy stayed quiet for moment, then reached out to place a hand on Laura's shoulder. It was meant to be reassuring, but he wasn't sure if that was translating or not. He didn't want Laura to feel bad, and he realized that he'd maybe misspoke before. Maybe there wasn't anything he could say to fix this.

"I didn't mean replace it as in make it go away. I meant..." He stopped talking, suddenly deciding that he was just making things a lot worse. "Look, you've opened up to me. It's only fair that I share something with you, right?"

But he hesitated before clearing his throat. His own confessions were less sordid than hers, but no less painful. Roy wasn't ashamed of his past, not really. It made him angry when people thought less of him because of it, so most of the time he just didn't talk about it or even think about it. Though sometimes, sometimes when he was feeling really low and really depressed... sometimes it was really hard to forget how high his highs had been.

"You're not the only one with a past, okay. Lots of people in this world have done things they're not proud of. Myself included." For now, his hands stayed firm on Laura's shoulders.

"You do not need to confess anything," she stated firmly, because she didn't see what she had said as a confession. It was just the truth, and...explanation, perhaps, but not something she saw as inherently wrong.

It wasn't like all the murder, after all.

She didn't pull away, but she looked like she was considering it, watching him carefully. "Perhaps we should discuss something else." She finally decided, her gaze shifting out towards the crowd passing by.

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