Six Miles of Vegas (1/3)

[thegeekgene]

Title: Six Miles of Vegas (Part One of Three)
Series: The Vegas Saga
Rating: PG13ish
Word Count: series total of 23,000
Summary: When Michelle's car broke down just outside of Las Vegas, Julian stopped to give her a hand. You can see where this is going.
Notes: Written a couple of years ago for my best friend type person's birthday. As such, it's basically a Mary Sue, though hopefully not a shit one. Features her as the Romantic Heroine, Julian Sands as the Romantic Hero and the guys from Top Gear because that's what I was watching at the time. A representation of me is in here, too, drinking heavily.



It was hot and heavy as the half-way mark of a Harlequin, outside. The air was thick as soup, boiling, hazy, and drugging. A car with a dark interior could knock even the most cold-blooded of men down, on a day like that. No sane person would dare venture outdoors if they could possibly avoid it, on such a day, and Michelle, who was perfectly sane (though there were a lot of times that she wished it weren't so) was looking forward to getting inside and out of it.

She had been driving since the crack of dawn. The temperature had been sky-high then and hadn't stopped rising since. That wouldn't have been so bad- it wasn't like the car had been sitting out in the heat- but the A/C in her old, brick red pick-up truck, which was unreliable at the best of times, had crapped out completely since just south of Chicago. Not such a big deal, that far north, but driving through the less neighborly part of Nevada- well, that was just this of death.

It wasn't quite two in the afternoon and there was next to no one of the lonely desert road that meandered past rich men's mansions- the ones that looked like ranches, but for the suspicious lack of livestock- and into the wrong side of Las Vegas. Twelve miles out, Michelle calculated that she'd seen probably nine people in five cars over the past half hour and, as she wasn't feeling real social, right then, she hoped to God it would stay that way.

Six miles out, that wish bit her on the ass when the engine cut out.



The metal bonnet was too hot to touch with her bare hands- she could tell that just by looking at it- so Michelle grabbed her jacket off the front seat to act as a barrier. On contact, she had a moment of real fear that it might burst into flames, and she leaped backwards. But the hood was safely opened and the jacket lay in tact, unburned, though perhaps a bit dusty, on the ground. A puff of steam, or maybe smoke, rose from the engine bed.

Michelle stared. It seemed to smirk, mocking her for skittishness. Glaring, she stepped forward and stared down, in search of the source. With timing no film maker could have made better, there came another cough of smoke, right into her face.

She jumped backward, again, sputtering, and a thousand acts of violence she'd like to commit flashed through her mind. But none of them were easily translatable from priest to truck so she simply glared. Contemplated kicking the infernal machine, but decided that what little satisfaction such a thing would afford her wouldn't be worth the inevitable pain. So, she just waited for the smoke to clear before taking a deep breath and holding it as she stepped back up to look inside.

As she observed the guts of her truck, unable to touch or get close enough to make a really effective examination due to the heat, she became suddenly conscious of how quiet everything was. The desert it not, as a rule, a particularly noisy place, not even a stone's throw from Las Vegas, but there were always the living noises. The far-off rustle of plants as lizards crept among them, the white noise, a hum almost imperceptible to humans, of bugs going about their business of breathing and buzzing and living. These noises, so soft and so slight and earthy and natural that they go entirely unnoticed by mankind. Until they stop.

And they had stopped, or so it seemed to Michelle. Stopped utterly, falling into nothingness as quickly and easily as she might fall from a tree. She looked up from the engine, glancing over her shoulders and then turning in a slow half-circle, searching, as if silence, like sound, much have a source. She took two steps forward, stepping over her jacket and glanced around, again.

A gust of wind made her fringe fly in her eyes, the greater part of her hair straining at it's bonds, pulling itself loose. she reached up automatically to secure it, just as another, stronger wind swept by her.

The rustle of fabric, stark against a backdrop of quiet and fading wind, caught Michelle's attention. She turned to look and saw her jacket had shifted. She snatched it up quickly when more, still stronger wind, threatened to take it away. Holding it tight against her chest with one arm, and holding her hair away from her face with the opposite hand, she narrowed blue-gray eyes against the wind, and looked out, across the plain, at the low, blackening sky.

She wondered how it was that she hadn't noticed the clouds until now, blissfully unaware that this was the first time she'd taken a moment to look at the sky since the last big storm she'd weathered, some weeks earlier, somewhere in Michigan.

("The wonderful thing about psychological defense mechanisms," a friend had once told her, as they lay side-by-side on the hood of the truck that now cursed her, "is how often we're unaware of them." She had been talking about herself- making sweeping generalizations about the human condition based solely on her own experiences was one of her defenses- but could easily have been referring to Michelle and the sky that was the same in the deserts of Nevada as in Chicago and in Michigan as in New York as in Providence as back home, lying on the truck with Andy as lying in the grass with her little sister as staring out the bedroom window and hoping for better.)

She saw the rain coming, saw it's approach, saw the drops pounding onto the desert floor, staining it dark, a full seven seconds before it was upon her.



A lifetime and a million miles away, Andy was drunk. The sky was the clearest blue she'd seen in a while, without a cloud in it, over the tops of the emerald green mountains. The lake down below was as still, for the most part, and reflected the sky and the trees back like it was something sublime.

The old, orange Volvo sat halfway up the mountain on a plateau of land suspended midway between the water and the sky. It had been there for nearly four hours. Andy had been drinking solidly for three of them. She'd already decided she might as well just stay put for the night. She was stupid enough to allow one of her best friends to vanish into thin air while she slept two feet away but not, apparently, stupid enough to drive drunk.

And that, she mused, was very much a pity. Maybe if the two had been switched out there would be no reason for her to need to know not to drive drunk to begin with. Because if Michelle were still around- if Andy had looked after her like she was supposed to- she'd be getting drunk at home, like a sensible person, or in a hotel room, with the others, like a proper hooligan, as opposed to on a mountain side, like a sailor's wife of days of old, hanging out on the cliffs that afforded her the best view of the horizon, waiting for her husband to come home. Except that there was no horizon, and Andy wasn't married to Michelle, and, on the off-chance her friend did come back, it was rather unlikely she'd do so by boat.

She snorted at the thought, and wondered what Elle would think of that particular comparison. She'd probably look uncomfortable, and then talk pointedly about her real friends, across the pond, for a couple of days. For someone who was supposed to come from a most open-minded society then the States, Elle sure had a lot of trouble with female bonding and meaningless homoeroticism and stuff.

At least she didn't blame Andy for Michelle leaving. That was comforting, even if her confusion over the assignment of blame was more often annoying then endearing. Damn Elle and her determination to apply the concept of free will at every possible opportunity and her inability to blame people for things that they didn't actually do but did, in fact, facilitate.

Andy was just beginning to wonder if Elle's diffidence on the subject could be another product of her upbringing when she became aware of a little beige Ford pulling up level beside the Volvo on whose bonnet she was perched.

"'Lo, Marty," she said, thickly, when she heard the car door open.

"Andy," he replied, coming around to lean against the front of the Volvo.

She glared moodily out at the water and contemplated the wisdom of telling him exactly where he could stick whatever it was he had to say that he was under the mistaken impression might be of interest to her. Deciding the slurring would probably negate the effect of such a statement, she just swallowed some more vodka and hoped he would go away.

He didn't go away. He just stood there, looking annoyed but that didn't mean a hell of a lot, because Marty always looked annoyed. And thinking that reminded Andy of exactly how long she'd known him and exactly how many hours she'd wasted in his presence, and that served to make her even more irate. Andy was a philosophical drunk, for the most part, but when her philosophy was interrupted, she turned into an irate drunk.

Feeling the urge to insult him, somehow, she eventually said, "What the fuck're you driving?" with as much dignity as small, purple-haired people who drive Volvo station wagons and wear Technicolor flannel can manage.

"My mom had the Mustang," he said. "The the fuck are you thinking?"

Andy looked at him hard. When she came close to going cross-eyed, she blinked. "That David Hewlett us surprisingly attractive when he takes his shirt off," she said. "Why?"

"I heard something yesterday," he said, "and I was hoping you could contradict it for me."

Andy took note of the steel in his voice and the deliberate set of his shoulders. She scowled.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Are you really not going back to college, in the fall?" he asked.

"It's not college, Marty," she said. "It's grad school. Could finish that any time. And what business is it of yours?"

"It's my business because Elle is too scared to make it hers," he said.

"And since when do you care what happens to me or Elle?" she snapped.

"Since Michelle ran off and made all of us each other's business, again," he almost shouted.

For a long moment, they glared at each other.

"Fuck you, Marty," Andy said.

"You're going back to school, Andy, if I have to drag you back by your stupid purple pigtails."

There was another stretch of silence, steeped in anger and tension and barely suppressed hostility. Andy ruined it (as she was apt to ruin all manner of moments in ways that were only funny later) with a hiccup.

Marty's expression softened to something like resignation.

"You drunk, Andy?" he asked.

She gave him a crooked half-smile and a sloppy salute with the paper-swathed bottle he hadn't really registered, before.

"Bit," she said.

Marty sighed.

"Let me give you ride home, you idiot," he said.

"What about V?" she asked, petting the bonnet on which she was seated with a fondness far exceeding the normal human-car relationship.

"Your dad can bring you back tomorrow," he said. "Or it can roll into the damned lake, got all I care. If you go in with it and die, suspicion falls on me as the last person to see you and the only person who knows where you are, aside from Elle. Who is, by the way, on her way to Manhattan, right now. Come on."

He reached out, and took hold of Andy's arm. She came close to falling over, as she climbed unsteadily to her feet. She stayed upright more through force of will then assistance. Marty loaded her into the passenger seat of the Ford with minimal protest. She didn't notice when he took the bottle from her and, before he got in the driver's side, he chucked it into the lake.



Michelle was soaked through to the skin within seconds. Her blue tank top stuck to her skin and her jeans felt like they weighed a hundred pounds. Clumps of fringe plastered themselves kindly to her cheeks and forehead. For a long moment she stood, silent and unmoving, as rain water ran over her arms and down her back, following the curve of her spine down to the small of her back. She blinked hard when it tried to drip into her blue-gray eyes and tightened her belt in careful, measured movements when her pants tried to slide down.

Once the urge to cuss and scream and assault her truck for bringing this curse down upon her had subsided, and grim acceptance of her situation had settled over her, she turned back around to face that most evil of vehicles. She couldn't see it particularly well for the rain and the steam it generated upon striking metal. Even two feet away the truck's form was blurred and indistinct. (Was it the rain, she wondered, or was there water in her eyes? It was difficult to be sure.) Hesitantly, she went a little closer, and reached out. Steeling herself to leap backwards, she brushed her fingers to the radiator grill. When they didn't immediately melt off, she relaxed, and pressed her whole hand to it with a smile. The rain had cooled it off substantially. She could touch it, now.

The bonnet went down- there was nothing she could do for it, now- and her jacket hit the windshield with a wet smack when she threw it. Then, she stood, for a while, arms folded across her chest, brooding, and wondering what she ought to do, now.

If she got back into the truck, she would be out of the rain, but she would also be bringing what felt like several gallons of it in with her. Which would not only be highly uncomfortable but would, in all probability, eventually cause the cabin to reek to high heaven. She also might be tempted to drive some place, if she got in, which, taking poor visibility in conjunction with her own highly irritable state, would probably not be a particularly good idea. (Back in the day, it had sometimes bothered Michelle that one side of her internal debates sounded like Andy, but these days it was comforting.) However, if she stayed out in the rain... She would be staying out in the rain. Which was not, she knew, a particularly intelligent thing to do and went against common sense.

This time, with logic and common sense at war, she did kick the truck. Hard.

She had just pulled off her sock to assess the damage she'd done when Salvation pulled up in a black BMW.



Julian had been out for most of the day in question, driving from place to place, determinedly on the trail of an elusive (and, it turned out, very expensive) brand of tea that no store in Las Vegas seemed to stock. He'd been verging on despair when a shop assistant finally took pity on him and pointed him in the direction of a town some thirty miles outside the city proper. She'd said that if he couldn't find the tea there, he might as well give up. She hadn't mentioned that the proprietor was old as sin and out of his mind. Julian had felt himself very lucky to make it out alive and spent a large chunk of the drive back wondering how it was possible to know that much about bergamot oil.

He was not, in general, a tea snob. When the mood took him, he tended to drink whatever could be picked up at the nearest grocery store and a twenty-four pack could last him for two months. His house guest, however, was a connoisseur. He drank what Julian had on hand- all of it- without complaining to his face, but, in the odd hours of the morning, when most likely under the impression his host was asleep, he'd bemoaned the lack of real tea to a friend on the other side of the world.

The friend had apparently told him to stuff it and from there the conversation had degenerated into a rather amusing round of creative name-calling. The last minute or so (Julian was eaves-dropping shamelessly) had been civil and even affectionate as they exchanged farewells, used nick names of mysterious origin and promised to see each other in a week, when the friend in question would fly into Las Vegas to join him in exploiting Julian's hospitality for another week before they left to do something or other in California at which point the house would once again be blessedly empty. Julian was very fond of his friend and wouldn't have let him in the door if he hadn't been, but he was equally fond of his privacy.

The sudden rain didn't surprise Julian all that much. He had been living in Las Vegas for a long time- certainly long enough to be used to how the rains came and went, so he just flipped on the windshield wipers, cut his speed by a third or more and kept on driving.

James, the weather, and bergamot oil were all driven from his mind when he spotted, through the mist and the driving rain, a truck pulled off to the side of the road. It was brick-red and old-fashioned, with the bed enclosed by wooden fencing and a face like Mickey Mouse on a bad day. Standing with it (and why in God's name she not inside it?) was a woman who was paying far more attention to her foot then the on-coming traffic. Which, so be fair, there wasn't a hell of a lot of.

At this speed, Julian had plenty of time to observe all of this and to come to his decision, the latter of which took roughly half a second. He pulled over to try to help.



Michelle watched the BMW pull up in front of her without much hope. Probably the driver would take one took at her sopping wet clothes, her dripping hair, and the blood welling up around her toe-nail and floor it. Some women- skinnier and prettier then her- would look alluring, like this, standing in the pounding rain, soaked through and with hair and clothing plastered to them and clinging in off places, the proverbial damsel in distress. But some women also looked good in Spandex and leather cat suits. Michelle freely admitted that she was not among these women and figured that she probably most closely resembled a particularly badly-groomed hobo. (Which, she mused, wasn't really that far off the mark. But at least she had, or had had, a car.)

The car went into park and there was a pause as the occupant moved around inside. Michelle shoved her shoe back on, sans sock, and ignored the dull ache as she went to the driver's side window. The rain had streaked it thoroughly and the temperature differential between outside and in had caused condensation to build up so she couldn't see though it. For a moment she thought the car might just drive off again and braced herself to jump backwards if it did. (It occurred to her that she had had to make this exact preparation more in the back twenty minutes then she had in her entire life up to this point. She wasn't quite sure how she felt about that.)

But then the window slid smoothly down- a lot smoother then the crank-controlled windows of her own car- and cool air from the A/C hit her. She struggled to keep from shivering as the goosebumps rose on her arms and the back of her neck. The car's interior was black leather and silver- simple, tasteful, and classy. It was the kind of car another old friend, Elle, might've driven, it she hadn't ended up with that Ferrari she loved to much. (A wave of nostalgia rolled over Michelle as she remembered Andy's stony and immovable conviction that her own orange Volvo station wagon was the superior vehicle and her dismissal of any arguments to the contrary as 'enemy propaganda'.)

The driver was also dressed in black- black jeans, and a black t-shirt, but not he kind of black t-shirt Michelle would wear. This was the kind of t-shirt that could be worn with equal ease to the super market or to the Oscars. Or, Michelle thought, on a drive through the desert, picking up damsels in distress. She bit down hard on her laughter as she met the his eyes.

He was, she realized immediately, one hell of an attractive man. His hair was golden blond and done in soft spikes and his skin was the light tan of one who gets that way more by accident then by design. His mouth had an amused tilt to it that said that Michelle looked exactly as bad as she though she did, though hopefully no worse. But it was, as the cliche` goes, his eyes that really slayed her.

They were blue, the deep, dark blue of the ocean you always dreamed about, a blue so real and true that the real sea can never quite live up to it when you get these. Andy had once called Michelle up drunk, during some summer when she was off spending a couple of weeks hanging out with a friend's acting troupe and, when Michelle got on the line, she had launched into lengthy description of The Perfect Sapphire in slurred, wandering detail. She hadn't allowed her friend a chance to speak, but hung up immediately with a heartfelt, "I love you, even if you are a monument to all my inadequacies."

At the time, it had just been confusing (still was, in many ways, as Andy had just blushed and claimed to have no idea what she was talking about when Michelle asked her what the deal was) but now Michelle thought she knew what her friend had meant when she said, "blue like God had only just come up with it and he meant to preserve it, unadulterated and perfect."

She blinked.

"Hi," she said.

"Hello." He grinned at her and waved a hand in greeting. His were about four times the size of Michelle's, but weren't everyone's?

"Having car trouble?" he asked.

"Just a little," Michelle replied. "She's just up and died on me."

"How inconsiderate," he smiled.

She found herself grinning back.

"Especially in this rain," she said. "You know it stopped five minutes before it started?"

"I do now," he said.

"Giving me just enough time to climb out and get far enough from the door that even trying to get back in before getting totally soaked is pointless. She's plotting against me."

He laughed. "Where are you headed?"

Michelle shrugged. "Nowhere in particular," she said. "Just Vegas. I was planning to get a hotel for a couple of days and just hang out. You happen to know the number of a garage that might come tow her in this weather?"

"I just might," he replied. "Have you got a phone."

"Sure I have a phone," she said. "Died two weeks ago, but I've got it."

He laughed, again, and undid his seatbelt.

"All right," he said. He shifted in his seat, lifting his hip, slightly, so he could slip his hand into his pocket with minimal difficulty. The phone he produce was roughly the size of a green bean. Michelle just managed to keep a straight face as dialed and said, "Just a minute."

As it was ringing, he held out his free hand to her. "I'm Julian, by the way," he said.

Michelle took it. It was warm and dry and completely consumed her cold, slick one.

"Michelle," she said.

He nodded, and released her hand with a smile. Then, he frowned, his brows drawing together.

"Well, that's weird," he said, looking at his phone as if it had spilled juice on the sofa.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Says it's dead," he replied. "But that's not right, because it was charging all night, and I should have service out here." He glanced out the window, beyond Michelle. "The storm must be interfering with it."

"Well, crap." Michelle folded her arms across her chest and stepped back from the car window to glare over at her own truck as though this whole situation were it's fault. As if it had broken down, brought on the storm, reeled in this absurdly attractive man just when she was at her very worst, and disrupted cell phone service on purpose, just to spite her. "What am I supposed to do now?"

Julian watched her with an amused smile. He grabbed an umbrella from the back seat and opened it as he got out.

"Any idea what the problem is?" he asked, coming over to stand beside her. She glanced up at the umbrella he had carefully positioned over both of them, regarding it with bemusement. It was pretty much a moot point, by now, as it wasn't as though she could get any wetter.

"I think she just committed suicide," she said, returning her attention to the truck. "Decided that the scrap heap would be kinder fate then putting up with me for any longer."

"So that's a no?" he asked.

"I didn't get much a chance to look at her," she said. "Five minutes, remember? I figure it's something wrong down in the engine itself. Old truck, you know. It was bound to go down, eventually. It was inevitable."

He gave her a sideways glance, blue eyes shining. "Was it?" he asked.

"Well, yeah. Cars are just like people. They've all got to die some day. The only difference is that cars can come back, if you try hard enough."

"Sherlock Holmes came back," Julian observed, innocently.

Michelle gave a startled laugh.

"It explains a lot, when you think about it," he continued, as though he hadn't heard. "Doesn't sleep, only needs fuel every couple of days, remains stationary unless in use. Watson was right- he's not human. He's a car."

Michelle laughed, again, and said, "Well, if that's the case, would you happen to have any cocaine on you? Maybe we can tempt her into action with it."

"Sorry," he said. "Sold the last of it yesterday. But I can give you a ride into the city and you can call a tow truck from there."

Michelle looked at him curiously.

"You promise you're not a serial killer?" she asked.

"Scout's honor."

"Were you actually a Boy Scout?"

"Of course I wasn't. But I'll happily swear on the honor of a Boy Scout that I'm not a murderer, a rapist, a Borg, a Goa'uld or any other type of thug, criminal, or hostile alien you might care to name, nor am I one of Moriarty's henchmen."

Michelle regarded him gravely. "Does the Boy Scout have honor?" she asked.

He didn't answer right away, but gazed seriously off into the distance, as though he were giving the question due consideration.

"You know," he said, eventually, "shocking as it might be, I think this one does."



The tea Julian had bought was excellent. One rather hoped it would have been, as it was about four times as expensive as the stuff he usually bought, but Julian had had his doubts that it would be worth it. He wasn't sure he'd ever been quite so pleased to be proved wrong. Michelle, who had dried off and changed clothes while he called around for a tow truck, agreed, though she was baffled as to why anyone would spend that much on tea.

It turned out that there wasn't a tow truck in the city that was wiling to go out in the storm raging outside (or, if the guys Julian knew weren't willing to, no one was), so the truck was doomed to weather the storm on it's own, with no hope of rescue. When he told her, Michelle didn't curse with the determination of someone who's spent her entire life not cursing in company and wasn't about to start now. She just closed her eyes tight and clenched her fists until her joints ached and took several deep breaths. Julian- who was rather reminded of a certain man of his acquaintance who spent half his time suppressing anger and the other half releasing it at inopportune moments- offered her a cup of tea to take her mind off things.

Mention of tea didn't bring James out of hiding, so Julian figured he must have gone out, and made a pot in case he showed up.

Once they had agreed on the quality of the tea and settled into Julian's tastefully-decorated kitchen to wait out the storm, he finally got around to asking what she was going in Las Vegas. Michelle almost blushed.

"Nothing in particular," she said. "Just passing through. I was in Denver, last week, and Chicago before that, so Vegas just seemed like the natural progression."

"Just wandering?" he asked, looking amused. "Playing tourist?"

"Yeah, pretty much," she replied. The half-lie burned her throat as she spoke it. "Andy, this friend of mine, spent over a month driving around the country and up into Canada with some college friend of hers. And then her and our friend Elle went to New York together, one summer. The way they talked, it just seemed like it'd be fun."

He looked at her a little too hard, then, his sapphire eyes boring holes in her skin. She was suddenly, irrationally convinced that he knew exactly what she was leaving out. (It had sounded like fun, in the phone call and reminisces and the pictures posted to LiveJournal that showed Andy and her cute blond friend, looking a little awkward, unaccustomed to being in front of the camera, and happy. Seeing her friends like that had made her sick with the desire to be there, too. She'd wanted to, God knows how much she had, but not like this...) She blinked hard and found him still looking at her. Blushed when she realized he was waiting for a response.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I had no idea what you just said."

He smiled at her, like that was perfectly fine, and he hadn't expected her to, anyway. She wondered just how much of what he was reading in her face.

"I was just asking why you came all this way alone," he said.

"Andy's working on her Master's," she said, "and Elle's been in and out of the country all summer and she's already seen everything, anyway. And everybody's got a job, you know? It just wasn't practical for anyone else to come."

(All true, all irrelevant, since Andy had spent (and way, presumably, still spending) the whole summer lying out on her front porch with a dog, a lap top, and a cup of iced tea, muttering about 'embracing her Southern roots', and Elle was always offering to take her places and no one had known she was leaving to offer to go with her.)

Julian nodded like he did know, and looked down into his cup with a smile. Michelle took his moment of distraction to shake herself mentally, to try and clear her thoughts.

"Yeah," he said. "I know. I once spent two weeks along in Tokyo because no one wanted to go with me."

"How was it?" Michelle asked, eager to get him on a different subject.

"The cherry blossoms were blooming while I was there," he said, "so it was beautiful, along with being about forty times more crowded then it would normally be."

Michelle wrinkled her nose.

"That would suck," she said.

Julian grinned at her. The spark of attraction she'd felt towards him the first time their eyes met threatened to flare up into a burn. She immediately squashed it.

"Yeah, a little," he said. "But I came away with some great souvenirs. How was Chicago?" he asked, abruptly. "I haven't been up that way in a while."

"It was really nice," she said. "Andy went to college up there, and took us around to all the good, cheap restaurants and things when we visited, so I could find my way around all right. It was a lot better then New York, which would probably have been fun, if I could have actually found anything."

Julian smiled, again, like a prelude to laughter.

"I can see how that would help," he said. "Hopefully, Las Vegas won't be as big a disappointment."

Michelle had just opened her mouth to respond when the front door blew open, loudly. When it slammed shut, again, the sound had a grim finality and brought with it a cool draft that reminded Michelle and Julian that the storm- a constant, fuzzy presence in the background- was still raging, outside. Her hand tightened compulsively around her mug. When she looked up, Julian was looking past her, towards the kitchen door. He was grinning.

"What...?" she began, but was cut off when the door behind her opened.

The man who entered, then, did not really look like he'd been out in the rain so much as he'd been out for a swim. Fully dressed in loose-fitting jeans, and a green striped t-shirt. His dark, slightly over-long hair was plastered to his face and neck just as Michelle's had been, and his sneakers made an unpleasant squelching noise when he walked.

"Hello, James," Julian said, pleasantly.

"Julian." His tone was grim and held a note of resignation as though it was only to be expected that this should happen to him

"Have a nice afternoon?" Julian asked, smile firmly in place.

James shrugged. "Up until the rain started, yes," he said. "Then I started to come back, but got a bit lost. How about you?" He looked at the kettle sitting on the table. "Is that tea?"

"It is," Julian confirmed. "You can have some after you go dry off. And then I'll tell you all about my afternoon, and introduce you to my friend, here."

James blinked, and focused on Michelle for the first time. She had the distinct impression he hadn't noticed her at all, before. His eyes, she saw, were also blue, but a gray-blue, like the edge of a storm cloud drifting across an otherwise clear sky, or a certain type of steel, rather then the liquid sapphire of Julian's.

He grunted. It might have been a greeting or just an acknowledgment of her existence. He squelched out. The door swung shut behind him. Julian managed to wait until they heard him climbing the stair before he started laughing.

"I'm sorry about that," he said, grinning at Michelle, who gave him a bemused smile in return. "That was James. He'd staying with me for a few weeks. Usually he's far more polite, but..." He trailed off with what sounded distressingly like a giggle.

"Faulty sense of direction?" she asked.

He nodded, fondly.

"Beyond faulty," he said. "The man's absolutely hopeless. And it's worse then that, because he's licensed to fly a light air craft."

Julian then regaled her with an enthusiastic retelling of a story he'd heard from a friend of James'- that he had once managed to become hopelessly lost for several hours in his own hometown, not so far from where he lived. After this, they lapsed into a companionable silence and sat for a while, sipping their tea. Several minutes passed before James wandered back in. His feet were bare and his clothing had been exchanged for jeans indistinguishable from the first pair and a t-shirt that was the same as the first, but in blue. His dark hair- which was, Michelle now realized, streaked with gray- had been hastily towel-dried, and bits still clung to his neck. He grabbed a mug from the dish drainer, and filed it from the kettle before turning to Michelle.

"I apologize," he said, holding out his hand. "I'm James."

"Michelle," she said, taking it, briefly.

"May I ask...?" He trailed off, looking to Julian for an explanation.

"Her car broke down, outside of town," Julian said. "I gave her a ride in and called a tow truck."

"Good luck, in this weather," James said, with a smirk. He took a sip of his tea and startled, looking at it with something akin to wonder. He looked back at Julian, who just grinned and waved a hand.

"Much as I'd love to be able to prove you wrong," he began, then trailed off when a loud burst of music and accompanying lyrics saying 'fuck off', came from the next room. James didn't cuss, but looked like he wanted to.

"Excuse me," he said, and headed for source. The music stopped, and Michelle just had time to hear him say, "What in the name of God do you want now?" before the door swung shut, again.

"He's always doing that," Julian said, softly, looking thoughtful. "Getting phone calls at inopportune moments. Like London will fall apart without him."

Michelle recalled weekends at Andy's house, when Elle would insist upon checking her e-mail every half hour and there would always be something to respond to and the late nights when her cell phone rang itself dead with calls from abroad.

"I knew someone like that, once," she said. "She always said she was going to go back home and never come back. But she did come back. I always wondered why."

"Because once you go back, the phone calls stop," Julian replied, sadly. "You only miss people when they're not around."



As promised, Marty had dumped Andy off at home, and fucked off, but only after putting all the booze he could find- even the whiskey that had been in the cabinet since her parent's wedding- up on shelves too high for her reach and then threatening her with a bit of the old ultraviolence if she didn't go back to Chicago, come fall.

Of course, he didn't put it exactly like that, but those were the words that came to mind when Andy reflected on it, laying flat out on the couch in her living room. It made her laugh until her stomach aches which, in turn, made it a little easier to cry, when the tears came. She might've been crying for anything. For shame for what she'd been reduced to, for outrage with herself over letting Michelle go, or for her inability to let go. Or she might have been crying for all of those things and for every other sorry thing that had ever happened in her short life.

Afternoon was just turning into evening, when she roused from her nap, and Andy was sober enough to be annoyed with herself for her theatrics which a vibration started around her ass. She cussed and arched up her hips painfully to pull the phone out of her back pocket, then cursed again when her back creaked like an old lady's.

"Too bloody young for this," she muttered, and was so busy grumbling that she forgot to look at the caller ID.

"What?" she snapped, thinking that whoever it was was going to get their ass kicked if she didn't deem what they had to say important enough to interrupt a perfectly good sulk.

"Well, it's nice to talk to you, too, Captain Sunshine," Vivian replied, and Andy laughed aloud in relief, resolution to kill her caller vanishing as soon as she realized who it was.

Viv was her best friend of five years, her roommate for two years, in their undergraduate days- not her oldest friend, but she often felt like she'd known her forever. In recent days she'd come to see her as the sole bright spot in the abyss her like seemed to have become since Michelle buggered off. Yeah, now that she mentioned it, it was nice to talk to Viv. It almost always was. Not that Andy was actually likely to say that.

"Hey, bitchface," she said, tiredly. Her happiness at hearing Viv's voice was almost always accompanied by an enormous surge of exhaustion, these days. The part of Andy that had minored in Psychology could have analyzed that to death but didn't feel like facing ugly truths, right now. "Did your drama geek friends decide you're too plebeian for them?"

"Nah," Viv said, not sounding the slightest bit offended either by the address or being called plebeian. "They all wanted to get drunk and stoned and have sex tonight, and, since my interest in all those activities it minimal, I figured I'd be better off making sure that you hadn't fallen apart without me around to patch you up. Have you?"

"No more so then the last time we talked," Andy said, with a smirk.

The last time they had talked, Viv had somehow managed to time her call to the very height of a crying jag, this one specifically over Andy's continued inability to get a reasonable prologue written for her novel. With the stress of finishing said novel, which she had been working on for longer then Viv had known her, plus Michelle, plus general loneliness with everybody but Marty (whose relationship with Andy was adversarial, at best) going about their own business, and her parents off on another cruise with no way to contact them, just about anything could set her off. The prologue was a particular sore point because she'd been trying and failing to write it for several years.

"That's a 'yes', then?" Viv said, with a sigh.

"Resoundingly so," Andy confirmed. "But it's not you I'm shattering over, so don't flatter yourself. Though I so feel obligated to point out that you're continued absence is not helping matters."

"I'm sorry, Andy," Viv said. She sounded sincere, was sincere. Was also annoyed that she felt so ineffectual, couldn't be there to help. Andy heard the annoyance in her voice, and felt a stab of anxiety that went straight to her stomach as she wondered if it was directed at her.

"I'd be there if I could," she continued. "But..."

"You've got plays," Andy said. "Yeah, I know. I just miss you, is all."

"I miss you, too, you soppy bitch," Viv replied. "As soon as this run is over, I'm driving down there to keep you company and get you as sick of me as everyone else here is."

"Ain't going to happen," Andy said. "If I'm not sick you by now, I'm probably not going to be. Where are you, again?"

"Denver," Viv said, amused by the way the city always failed to register with her friend. She had to remind her every time they talked. "We just have one more week, and then we're done. Then, you won't be able to get rid of me."

"Shit, Viv, you don't have to drive all that way," Andy said, distressed. "We can meet up, some place."

"No, you need to stay there," Viv replied ."In case your friend shows up, or calls, or something."

"You're going to kill yourself."

"This is friendship, Andy," she said, patiently. "You might have heard of it. It happens, sometimes, when two people are locked in a two hundred square foot box with one another for a couple of years. You know, when they don't resort to murder. This is what it's about."

"Sore backs?" Andy was thinking of her own drive to Chicago. It made her spine ache just thinking about it and she cringed. She could hear Viv rolling her eyes.

"No, idiot, being there. No matter where 'there' happens to be. Up to and including the arm pit of Appalachia."

Andy sighed, mournfully. "Wish I knew where 'there' was for Michelle," she said, more to herself then to Vivian. She closed her eyes. "I would be there in a heartbeat."

Viv gave her a moment to ponder this, before gently redirecting her thoughts to more neutral channels. They talked for a while longer about how the play was going (reasonably well), and how the novel was going (octagonally). Viv noticed Andy carefully avoided mentioning the dreaded prologue, and talked instead about the trials of incorporating secret bases on the moon and immortal serial killers into what had, at it's conception, been an entirely reality-based, if somewhat idealistic, spy novel. They exchanged declarations of affection before hanging up, but didn't say good-bye. They never said good-bye to one another.

Andy fell asleep where she way and tried to remember if she'd ever said good-bye to Michelle. In her fractured, confused dreams, she did. In her dreams, Michelle melted off into the omnipresent mist around the edges of her mind and didn't come back.



It was late in the evening when the rain finally tapered off, leaving a cool haze over Las Vegas. James stood by the window of the upstairs guest room he'd been installed in and looked out over it. He knew that by the time he woke up the next morning the bright sheen across the concrete would have dried to dust. The thought of that made him colder then the rain. He shoved his hands into his pockets and, in an almost imperceptible movement, shook his hair over his face, embarrassed by the wave of nostalgia that washed over him though there was no one there to see it.

He missed London. He missed rain and damp weather that lingered and he missed wearing his sweaters. He missed his cat. Two weeks and he already felt like it had been a lifetime. He wondered bitterly if he would feel worse or better if Richard and Jeremy didn't insist upon calling twelve times a day and asking what time it was there- as if they didn't already know or couldn't easily figure it out on their own- and reminding him of exactly how far from home he was.

After a few more moments of brooding in a manner that he was aware was probably a good deal less romantic then he'd like to have thought, he glanced at the clock and realized that it was just about time for him to start making dinner. (That was Julian's one condition; "Cook for me and you can stay forever. Otherwise, there's a lovely hotel a few blocks down that I can probably get you a deal at." James had chosen to take this as a compliment rather then an indication that his friend was, perhaps, a bit lazy.)

He wandered back downstairs, wondering why so many fictional characters spent so much time brooding. It certainly wasn't any more enjoyable then it sounded, unless the headache it always gave him was an indication that he wasn't doing it right.

Julian and his girl- Michelle, that was it- were still right where they had been when he'd left, empty mugs in front of them on the table, deep in conversation about...

James blinked as their words began to register. What were they talking about?

"...up to the last couple of chapters," Julian was saying, and Michelle nodded enthusiastically.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "I love it up to that point. Then it just degenerated into propaganda. The whole ending was just this long, drawn-out proclamation like, 'Oh, yay, socialism, see how great it is??' It was just pointless."

"I'd say that that was the point," Julian said. "So far as Sinclair was concerned, anyway. All the bad things that happened were just intended to show how evil capitalism is, the world that people actually live in, and then the happy ending was meant to show how great the world would be if we all just embraced socialism and all it entails."

"No," Michelle said. "No way. It was a book, Julian. A novel. The point of a novel is the story it tells. Or it should be, anyway."

She folder her arms and scowled at him. James leaned against the wall beside the door and listened, amused, as they continued to argue the merits of the book and then, completely oblivious to his presence and then, with astonishing speed, moved on to debating the merits of communism, with Michelle declaring herself to be a small-scale communist.

"It's a nice idea," Michelle said. "I mean, total equality. What's not cool about that? But it's just not practical on a large scale..."

James cleared his throat. They both startled and spun around to look at him, appearing stunned to learn that they weren't the only people occupying the planet, let alone the house. He kept his face carefully neutral, vowing to mock Julian only when Michelle had gone.

"It's just about dinner time," he said, looking at Julian. "Is your friend staying?"

Looking at the clock, Julian seemed vaguely surprised it had gotten that late. Michelle stared openly at it, appearing horrified.

"Oh, crap," she said. "I'm so sorry, I-"

Julian cut her off, hurriedly. "It's okay," he said. "You can stay here, tonight. Or, there's a hotel pretty close by, if you prefer, and it's definitely no problem to feed you."

Michelle turned a fascinating shade of red as Julian spoke. James struggled to keep from laughing.

"No," she said, "that's okay, I'll-"

Amusing at the exchange way, James realized it would probably go on indefinitely, if he allowed it, in which case he would never get to eat.

"What do you guys feel like?" he asked, casually, as though the decision had been made. "I'm craving something spicy."

Julian blinked at him. Michelle turned even redder, and pulled on her hair. Neither of them said anything.

"Well," James said, "if you aren't going to choose, it's curry." He went to the spice cabinet and began shifting bottles around, in search of the ones he'd need. "And sitting there staring isn't going to help. If you won't be useful in some way, then you can be gone. I'll call you when it's done."

He found what he needed and turned back around, glaring imperiously.

"Why are you still here?" he asked

Julian hurriedly climbed to his feet, faking a contrite look.

"Right," he said. "I'm sorry." He looked at the girl. "Michelle," he said, "why don't we continue this discussion in the living room."



The place was New York City, around nine the next morning. Manhattan. God, did Elle ever love Manhattan. She had only there for fourteen hours, a solid nine of those spent asleep, and she was already cursing herself for ever leaving. The food, the shopping, the people... The shopping. She smiled to herself as the elevator doors slid smoothly open, revealing the pristine and mostly deserted lobby of her hotel. Well-polished marble gleamed on the walls and on the floors, interrupted only by a few plush, strategically placed rugs.

Elle paid no attention to all this low-key splendor, nor to the tuxedo-clad wage slave who held the swinging glass door for her on the way out. She turned left on the street outside and then right, into her favorite stretch of the city. Smiled as she slid on her designer sun glasses, holding her Hermes bag higher on her shoulder, closer to her body. She felt good. She knew she looked good, in a denim skirt and fitted black sweater, her legs made longer then they were by heels so high they looked like they ought to have induced vertigo.

Her confidence was back. This was her city, after all. This was the way things were supposed to be.

She was just about to go into Saks when her cell phone rang. She paused and stepped away from the doors to answer it.

"Hello?"

"Heya, Elle," Andy sounded exhausted. "What're you up to? In New York, right?"

"Yeah, I am," she said. "I'm out shopping, actually. What's up?"

"Nothing, nothing," Andy replied. "Marty said I'm not allowed to get drunk, today. Viv concurs. I need a third opinion. How about it, babe? Thoughts?"

Elle laughed, a little nervously. She'd never known anyone who talked about love and sex and addiction as openly and honestly as Andy did in any state of sobriety and her recent habit of polling friends on how drunk she ought to get was unsettling. She had hoped Marty might have been able to deal with Andy's depression- whatever his faults, it took a lot to put him truly off-balance.

"Well," she said, "I've never agreed with Marty on anything before. Why should I start now? Go for it."

"Aw," Andy laughed. "Such touching concern for the state of my liver. Thanks, Elle. Hey, have you heard from the girl?"

"Not, not since the last time you asked." The even more recent habit of referring to Michelle solely as 'the girl' was also unsettling. "Have you?"

"No." Andy sighed. It was one of the saddest things Elle had ever heard and that bothered her. "All right," she said, oblivious to Elle's discomfort. "Go spend some money, Elle. See you whenever."

"Bye, Andy."

Elle hung up and put the phone in the very bottom of her bag. On silent. Then, she carefully filed away Andy and her issues in a box headed for the back of her mind and pulled herself up to her full height. So prepared, she went inside to shop.



The hotel Julian had set Michelle up at was nice. Not exactly the Ritz Carlton, of course, but a hell of a lot nicer then the crappy Motel 8's to which she'd become accustomed. For basically the same price, cheaper then some, it was probably the best deal she'd had since Andy told her, "You can stay on the condition we watch the Sentinel together. Back out on that and we are doneski." Michelle had laughed, because where'd that come from, and sitting though three rather ill-plotted hours of a man with long hair and blue eyes being rescued from unlikely situations by his super human partner was better then what she was running away from. It wasn't as bad as she'd come to expect from Andy, whose affection for really awful sci-fi and TV shows canceled after less then a season was close to legendary.

At dinner, the previous evening, James had declared her to be far more charming company than Julian and asked who to talk to to arrange an exchange. Julian had rolled his eyes and replied that he could easily say the same about James and somewhere along the way Michelle had been invited back for breakfast. ("Or lunch," James had said. "Whichever you're awake for." She had been reminded almost painfully of Andy, who'd said nearly identical words, once, and it made her smile.) She thought it impolite to refuse, especially when they both seemed so eager for a diversion.

She had also learned, over the course of the meal, that James had been staying with Julian for slightly less then two weeks, during which time they had spent more time together then in the rest of their five-year acquaintance combined. This had served the duel purpose of giving them a chance to become very good friends (which they had) and to make them very sick of each other. They were not yet at the point of sniping but James, whose candor on the subject startled Michelle and amused Julian, said they were 'verging'.

Michelle responded that she knew the feeling.

She was thinking of Andy and Elle and of how the former often commented that she'd cheerfully kill for the latter on the occasion she wouldn't embrace with equal enthusiasm the opportunity to bash her head in and of Elle's obsession with courtesy and Andy's conviction that emotions are meant to be expressed and reacted to and how the two perspectives could clashed far more frequently when they'd all just been seeing too much of each other for too long a time.

It was at times like that that Andy would resurrect her status as a shut-in by refusing to answer the phone and flooding the Internet with hourly reports on the status of any of her rotating list of anywhere from five to twelve writing projects and Elle jetted off to Britain or Manhattan or Auckland or something to spend money and dress well and Michelle would spend a lot of quality time with her lawn mower and her little sister, who was sixteen, now, and not so little, any more.

But, eventually, no matter how long the intervening period lasted, Andy would get bored and frustrated and call her up to see if she wanted to hang out and then- sometimes even on the same day- Elle would, like clockwork, call and say she was back from where ever and ask how things were and one of them would call the other and, within a few days, they were all back together, again, like nothing had ever happened.

And that was how it went. That was the way they worked. How they had worked for years, with minor alterations for things like drivers' licenses and new accommodations. How they didn't work, now, because Michelle had left them. For the better, of course, but not it occurred to her- did they work, now? Without her?

Those thoughts came to her in flood, both at dinner, when she was forced to excuse herself to the bathroom to fight down the tidal wave of mixed emotions that threatened to take her down and drown her, and as she walked the four blocks back to Julian's place, the next morning. She paused, momentarily, and stared moodily down a gated alley way, for a long while, counting one, two, three, four doors and then a fifth one down at the end. A pretty image, in a minimalistic sort of way. The kind of place Andy might use to set some romance or intrigue. The kind of place Elle might buy an apartment in a city she didn't visit often enough to own a house in. The kind of place Michelle would draw, if she were feeling a bit morose and Poeish. Like she did, then, as she stood with her eyes locked on the farthest door down the way, tugging meditatively at the cross that hung around her neck, as she tried to collect her thoughts.

When the oval doorknob on the door she was watching began to turn, and the door itself began to pull inwards, Michelle snapped out of her daze and started moving, again. Even dragging her feet for the remaining three blocks and stalling for a while, outside, she didn't quite have time so shake her melancholy, and it was a rather moody and introspective Michelle that knocked on Julian's door around ten-thirty that morning.



Andy's first thought upon waking was that she had to save the curiously androgynous Cambodian monarch or the Bagel Alliance would conquer the world.

Her second was that real life had no business in invading really cool dreams.

And her third was that her cat looked a bit like a vampire or perhaps a saber-toothed tiger (they came in calico, right?) and this was both very cool and, well, not, at the same time.

Upon waking more then any other time, Andy's thought processes more closely resembled a car crash then the traditional train, with baggage and bodies strewn about, suitcases popping open and spewing all sort of nasty little secrets all across the freeway and bringing progress to a grinding halt. No true linear thought could be had in the morning, which was just further proof that Terry Pratchett was an alien, no way he did all his writing in the...

Hash browns sound good...

Sometime between finishing off her scrambled eggs and the time her toaster spat out the wheat bread she'd put in, Andy flipped open one of the notebooks that was lying around to a fresh page and drew a mostly straight line down the center in green ink. She headed one side 'KILL' and started off with Jerry Falwell, beside whose name she put a check mark and a smiley face. Next came Fred Phelps, Milton, Michelle, and Elle. The other column was given the title 'KILL FOR'. Vivian started off this list, followed by Michelle and Elle and all her family, by name. She wavered when it came to celebrities and left it at Neil Gaiman and Rohase Piercy.

When her toast popped up, she left her list to get it.

Andy spent a long time considering before writing, in small, precise letters at the top of the page, above even the headers, that the lists were intended only to include homo Sapiens and those presenting themselves as such. She spent an even longer time trying to decide which list to include Marty on, before deciding to just exclude him all together, having no particular desire to do either.

Then, feeling much better and unable to think of anything else she needed to do, that day, Andy went back to bed, leaving her list open on the kitchen table. Jick the Sabre-Toothed Calico took her negligence as permission to take a nap on it.