theshot_yougot | (no subject)

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The drive home, one minor breakdown aside, is pleasant and chatty; unusual mostly in being more chatty than usual. Occasionally Leah will let a silence fall for long enough to be comfortable, but she always pushes for a conversation when a topic occurs to her.

She wants to hear him.

When they get to her apartment, she's acting more or less like herself, finding her way from the car to her door, inviting Sam in and immediately heading for the kitchen.

"I don't know about you, but I'm dying for a drink."

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"Sure," she says, with easy indifference that is only belied by the second it takes to say it. "I'll get you blankets."

She puts her now-cold empty cup next to his, and holds them both as if about to get up with them.

But the way he said it, like there was an alternative - an alternative she's still, after all this time, trying to stop herself considering - that's way she doesn't get up to do as she promises.

He'd just been looking at the table and, as a side-effect, her hands on the cups. But when she pauses, Sam looks over at her.

Of course, it's not like she can tell he's looking at her, or has anything else prompting her to end her pause.

Except herself. And she's almost feeling normal right now.

"Right," she says, with a firm, definite nod. "Blankets. You want to take a shower?"

He's still watching her, now frowning slightly. Not in the same frustration from earlier, but worry. She's been through a lot today, a lot more - maybe - than anyone else at that park. She trusted him and she asked him to stay and she thanked him for offering what awkward comfort he was able to.

Maybe it's not right to leave her in the dark, to keep from explaining things. But she likes him and she's the closest thing he's had to a real friend in...

She's the closest thing he's had to a real friend.

"I'm okay," Sam says quietly and, hesitant, puts a hand light on her shoulder. "...are you?"

"I'm going to have a shower."

It's bright - slightly forced in its brightness - and sudden. She grins, and turns her head towards his hand, covering it gently with her own.

"It'll help. I'll be less weird in the morning, I promise."

Sam blinks at her, surprised and no less worried for the brightness. He'd have taken his hand away, too, if she hadn't covered it with her own, like she wanted it there.

"You're not being weird."

Different, maybe. But understandably.

"Feels like it from this end," Leah says.

She lets go of his hand, because that's when she stands. "Do you want anything?"

It's weird, in the sense that it's Leah, acting like a victim. And it's not weird because Sam knows, in a general sense, exactly how to treat people who are suffering.

He lets his hand slip away as soon as she gets up, shaking his head. "I'm fine."

So she gets up, takes the cups into the kitchen, and returns to the living room with the promised blankets.

"You know where everything is. Just do me a favour and don't move anything you don't need? I have to know where things are."

Which he knows, and she never says. But he's staying over, so.

She wishes the alternative to the couch had never been brought up.

Sam hadn't actually meant it like that. He meant alternatives to the couch being the floor, a cot, a sleeping bag in the gym downstairs. The other alternative... hadn't actually occurred to him.

Consciously.

And the weirdest thing that's happened all day, according to the wrinkle between Sam's forehead, is Leah reminding him not to move anything.

"I won't. I promise."

She could see. Now she can't.

Leah hates it. Hates it. Hates being reliant on needing things in a certain way. Hates that she's going through an internalised breakdown so much that she needs someone to be around for her. Hates that somewhere in all this she feels ashamed for something she knows she has no reason to be ashamed about.

"Cheers," she says. "G'night."

Her shower is long, and hot, and involves an awful lot of hairwashing.

(and, Leah is not ashamed to admit, singing. She sings in the shower. She sings Ferry 'Cross the Mersey in the shower.)

It's not a song Sam recognizes. As he unfolds the blankets and makes a place for himself on the couch, he listens, as if the beat of the shower and the voice coming from it were a CD instead of a flesh and blood person.

He tries not to think about it. The couch is comfortable enough, but far too short. Not exactly for lying on when he's quite this much over six feet.

The lights are turned off long before Leah comes out of the shower. Not like she'll mind, Sam's sure. Even if, this morning, she absolutely would have.

Which just gets Sam, lying on his back on the couch, to cover his face with his hands and sigh deeply. He's fucking up. Still.

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