linchpin. [nel + murdoch]

[Nel Sayo]

19th Spring, 510 A.V.


She was pacing from one end of the meager apartment to the other, furiously pacing, her bootheels scuffing across the hardwood floors. Arms folded neatly beneath the subtle swell of her breasts, expression an inscrutable mask of anger, she paced.

Nel had scoured the gambling houses she knew, trying to find him. She'd gone to the docks, to the market, in and out of every whore house from the castle to the gate; wherever he'd gone, she hadn't found him. Dodged knights and ladies, scrambled down alleys and in between bar brawls, spent hours trying to think like he did, but of course that had been impossible, because they were nothing alike.

At the foot of the bed, she'd packed up her travel bag. Everything that was hers, anything that she could have claimed as her own, she'd stuff into the pack, leaving his apartment exactly how it had been on the first night she'd stumbled sleepily across the threshold. She didn't know, exactly, why it seemed to her the right thing to do, leaving. Had no experience with this sort of thing, no precedent to play the situation against, but it seemed to her like leaving was the thing to do. Like this had been the linchpin, and it had toppled. He'd had enough of her; she'd had enough of him. It hadn't been a good idea to begin with, and if she couldn't turn her back on him long enough to enjoy a meal, then what was the point?

Honor and decency and trust, those were things that Nel understood only in the simplest of scenarios. She'd been spoiled by the crew of the Mariner, but a part of her ached to reach out and trust people, to enjoy people, to be able to rely on someone, anyone. But that anyone was not Murdoch, and she mentally shook herself for being stupid enough to think it could have been.

When she heard the key turning in the front door, she stopped pacing and straightened up, watching to see what sort of state he would be in when he entered.

[Murdoch]

Murdoch had heard her pacing steps from the stairwell, and when he entered the apartment he was prepared to deal with her. He expected it, of course, because he knew what he was and he didn't ever try to fool himself on that account.

"Ah, good, you're here," he said, a twitch of a smile flickering across his mouth as he saw just how furious she was. He pulled Sam's coinpurse from where it'd been tucked inside his belt and tossed it over to her. "Just as full as it was when I lifted it," he said with a roll of his eyes.

He padded across to the table, slouching into the chair, and then pulled out another five gold mizas and flattened them on the tabletop before nudging each one towards her with a fingertip. "And your ten percent of my earnings at the card table. Good job, little swan," he said, and it actually sounded like real approval in his voice.

Oh, Doc.

[Nel Sayo]

She caught the purse and had to stop herself from hurling it right back at him. Instead she wound down to shove it into her pack -- after checking, of course, to see how many coins were within. She didn't know how heavy it had been when he'd lifted it off Samael, but she'd remember how much was in it now, to be sure the numbers added up.

"Why did you do that?" she asked sharply, as she straightened back to her full height. "What the hell was that about? Is it me, did I do something? Or are you just an impossible jackass with no care at all for anyone but yourself?"

The approval in his voice only made her angrier, and she stalked over to him and kicked one of his legs, hard.

"I can't make any friends if you keep stealing from them!" she all but shouted down at him.

[Murdoch]

He saw the kick coming and couldn't quite dodge it, pain blossoming across his calf. But he did catch her boot in one hand and sling her backwards, intending to land her on her ass.

"Are you serious?" he hissed back, his smile replaced by disbelieving anger. "You're telling me you actually like that little rube? He's, like, he," he sputtered for a moment, too annoyed to even find an easy way to explain it because it wasn't something he'd ever had to explain before. "He's a target, Nel. He's practically got a tattoo on his forehead that says 'please steal from me.' I figured when he showed up on the doorstep and you asked me to take you to a quiet little dining spot, you'd brought me a job. Shyke, how was I to know you just have awful petching taste."

[Nel Sayo]

She hopped when he shoved her backwards, balance negligible as it ever was, and so did indeed go toppling backwards to skid across the floorboards on her ass. But that wasn't a new sort of situation for Nel, so she just clamored back up to her feet and carried on glaring at him as though he hadn't shoved her anywhere.

"That's because you're so hateful that you don't even know what it's like to have a friend!" she snapped. "It isn't about taste, you brainless ogre! It's about talking to people, being with people, telling stories and having a laugh and not always needing to make money off a person! I invited you so that you wouldn't be alone!"

Because she cared about him, because she liked him, because if he'd gone off with somebody else to have a nice dinner and a nice time, she'd have been lonely. And she'd been fool enough to think that he had those kinds of feelings.

A spark rattled up from the base of her spine, latching its bright fingers into every step of her vertebrae, a knowing that hissed between her teeth before she even understood what she was saying.

"No wonder your brother tried to slit your throat, you deserve to be alone."

[Murdoch]

He'd been in the middle of rolling his eyes at all her talk about friendship and sharing and rainbows and kittens and whatever other naive, girly crap she was going off about.

But the next thing out of her mouth stopped him short.

As quickly as she'd spoken, with much the same instinctual reaction, he rose to his feet and slapped her across the face in one smooth movement. That was all, didn't come after her any further, just planted his feet and glared at her with something dark and dangerous glinting shocks of green into his muddy eyes.

"Watch your tongue, witch," he hissed, barely more than a whisper, and the usual charm that lived in his voice was cold and dead as if it'd never been.

[Nel Sayo]

The force of the slap snapped her head sideways, a spike of pain aching hotly along her jaw and the slope of her cheek. She blinked at the floor, disbelieving, one hand lifting to cradle the side of her face in the same breath as she drew the rapier slung at her hip.

A glint of candlelight across live steel, and she glared hard at him, a sudden age in those fierce blue eyes that had no business being there.

"If you ever hit me again, I'll finish the job," she hissed right back, bending to snatch up her pack from the floor.

She didn't raise the rapier, its point scraping delicately across the floorboards, but the grip she held upon it bespoke of an ability to use it if she had to.

"You're only mad at me because I'm right. I would've stayed with you, but you don't know how to do anything but hurt people."

[Murdoch]

He glanced down at the rapier in her hands, and a sneer pulled at his lips.

"Yes, and you've never hurt anyone, have you, little swan?" he drawled, staring down at her. "Never pillaged a trading vessel and stolen someone's livelihood, never stuck the point of that blade into the heart of a man protecting something from your pirate brothers' greedy hands. Do you even know how many men your brother killed just for the crime of wanting to fuck you, hmm? Because he certainly threatened me with it, and the look in his eyes said he'd followed through before," he said cruelly. So long as the subjects of dead petching brothers was on the table.

He stepped back and collapsed back into his chair, utterly unconcerned with her drawing a blade. She'd try to kill him or she wouldn't, and no kind word on his part would change that. That was how it'd always been, and it'd taken the scar at his throat to teach him that lesson.

"You agreed to help me steal from people, to leave them feeling exactly like you and your little friend felt today. Now because you've arbitrarily decided that this guy is deserving of some sort of moral fortitude, I'm expected to just know not to touch him? You're the psychic," he spat, "not me. So if you want to draw indecipherable lines in the sand of what's right and wrong, you go right ahead, sweetheart, the door's that way," he said with a tilt of his chin. "But don't go blaming me for consistency."

[Nel Sayo]

Her cheeks burned hotly when he went off about Sy and what he may or may not have done to anyone who'd even looked at her funny; he wasn't wrong, either, and she knew it. But that had been a different life, and she'd stopped Sy as many times as she'd been able to, and for all that she'd suffered, at least at the start, she'd felt some sense of entitlement every time blood had been shed, every time she couldn't save someone. Maybe that was wrong, but who was she to judge? Right, wrong...that wasn't ever what it had been about. There'd been no use trying to draw those lines. It had been about...life, and living, and she'd fought just as hard as Murdoch had, harder sometimes, maybe, between the waves and the wild.

She could hear Syon, even now, telling her to slit his throat and run. But there wasn't anywhere for her to run to and she didn't want to kill him. She never wanted to kill anyone.

A hiss, as the rapier found its way back into the scabbard, and she paced over to him and reached unapologetically down, grasping his jaw in the fingertips of one hand so that she could pull his eyes to look up into hers.

The shadow of a bruise had already begun to climb up the pale slope of her cheek. An ache in her eyes that sliced right through his disinterest, his sneer.

"I'm not a psychic," she murmured. "And I'm sorry for what I said. But you knew what you were doing tonight. You did it on purpose. You knew I wasn't trying to con Samael. And you hit me, Doc."

And it had hurt. Nel was quick to bounce back from most things, but maybe not this one. So she let him go and pivoted towards the door. It was that way. She got it.

[Murdoch]

His chin fell again the moment she released it, his eyes hard and cold as they stared at the tabletop and the gold that still lay there untouched.

"You hit me first," he said softly, not even realizing he was going to say it until he heard the words come out. And it was true - her words would leave a mark just as surely as his fingers had left a bruise across her perfect face, and would likely last longer.

For all that she was off her ship, had moved beyond that strangely immoral world of simply trying to live, he hadn't. That was the life he scraped out for himself, as uncertain and dangerous as if the waves rocked beneath the floorboards of his apartment.

But he didn't bother with any feelings of entitlement, drawing lines of right and wrong, because that meant there was some side to be on, some meaning behind it all that he simply didn't ascribe to. He did what he had to to get by, and she'd known that the moment she laid eyes on him. As well to have walked into a slaver's den and expected them to offer her milk and cookies. Of course he'd done it a-purpose. He was there, and so was the opportunity.