2019-07-30 - When My Heart's An Empty Gun

But I pray for ya, pray for ya
I'll pray, I'll pray, yeah
When all this pain is gone
When all this blood has run
When my heart's an empty gun
When my heart's an empty gun
-- Pray by Bishop Briggs

---

[FS3 Rolls] <FS3> Isabella rolls Firearms: Good Success (7 7 6 5 3)

It has been over a decade since she last patronized the Firing Line, one of the very few indoor gun ranges in Gray Harbor, but she remembers visiting it often while growing up. Some of her earliest trips there have been under the careful supervision of her father, a former Navy captain, who didn't so much as protest when she expressed her desire to learn. From her adolescence to her later teen years, she would occupy the booth at the very end of the range, safety goggles over her eyes and shooting muffs on her ears, her index on the trigger of a manageable pistol - Sig Sauers, Colts or Glocks, while her father stood nearby.

In her late twenties, now, she still knows the rules, and much like riding a bicycle, Isabella Reede remembers every bullet point on the cardboard sign in the range's waiting room, drilled into her memories until recollection is instinct:

Guns shouldn't be loaded until on the firing line and ready to shoot.
Make sure that the muzzle of your gun is pointed down range at all times.
Keep your gun in a case until you're in position on the shooting line.

She reloads the rented pistol, feeling the satisfying snap of the cartridge as it clicks in place, pulling the slide and chambering a round. She positions her body, bone and frame falling in a well-remembered stance; feet apart, one slightly in front of the other, her weapon-hand locked in three places - the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist. Her left hand rises to cup the butt of it, pointer finger resting against the side of it and never the trigger. She has been taught never to let her index anywhere close to it until she truly intends to fire.

Shoot at your target only and never across lanes.

The deafening crack of the shot fills the range, echoing strangely - this late at night, save for those keeping an eye on equipment and ammunition, she is the only one present. Some part of her relishes the accompanying silence, though she does nothing to lift it, content to let it shatter over and over again against the brutal mercies of her bullets. Green-and-gold eyes are narrowed through her visor, her expression stony but focused, every effort concentrated on pouring whatever internal storm she is presently wrestling with into each and every slug she pounds into her human-shaped target a long distance away. She has placed it quite far, but despite the intimidating length, she seems to be having no trouble hitting her mark.

For someone who the city expects to be in mourning, she doesn't look it, whatever pain there is, whatever sadness or unbridled fury, she has managed, so far, to keep it within the impregnable vaults of her, the doors she keeps barricaded against all comers especially when she feels wounded. Though there is bound to be some; she has never given anyone the impression that she is one who represses her temper when she feels the need to unleash it, but perhaps she doesn't feel the need to. Perhaps she has elected to table it while she focused on her father's grief, and assisting him in the transition to a life without his wife, along with his disappeared son.

Perhaps, perhaps.

There isn't a stitch of black on her save for a length of braided ribbon encircling her left wrist - the only sign that her recent loss is real - and now that she has been free of her obsession with the Ring, she has returned to her big city-inspired style, though she is not as brilliantly glamorous as Vivian Glass; she still dresses like any graduate student anywhere, in designer jeans and a long-sleeved creation of delicate Cerulean lace, pulled over a tank top and worn with a wide belt adorned by a buckle meant to be worn sideways and somewhere close to the gentle flare of her left hip. She hardly wears any jewelry, save for one - a moonstone pendant set in white gold, hanging from a chain around her neck and leaving shards of brilliant color against her top. Dark hair is swept up in a loose twist, done up with the kind of feminine ambivalence that leaves it looking fine rather than an actual mess.

She has not been answering any calls, or any texts...save for the person who asked her to meet him here, being a member of the police department and familiar with the ongoing investigation of her mother's murder. She has not replied to any of the letters that she has received since the news of it hit the headlines. Considering the week she has had - possessed, rejected, then suddenly in mourning, it was probably understandable.

Isabella is alone, until she isn't.

Alone with her gun. Alone with her grief, or the lack thereof. Alone with her remembrance. When all this blood has run. When my heart's an empty gun.

He asked her here to see him. Said they had some things to talk about. If you don't mind, Miss Reede. I won't take too much of your time. The GHPD's been run ragged this past few weeks; people dropping like flies, the body count's getting out of hand and nobody has answers.

In this oppressive heat, the rain - any rain - is a blessing. It washes away the grime and makes the trees sing; if only it washed away the blood, too.

Isabella is alone, until she isn't. Until the brisk footsteps at the mouth of the range alert her to the arrival of someone familiar; the cop she'd encountered upon waking on her houseboat. The friend of Alexander Clayton's, if one could use that word. Friend. One might get the impression that Captain de la Vega does not have many of those, and one would probably be right. He tugs on eye and ear protection and positions himself in the next lane over from hers, the firearm holstered in his rig clearly his own. The off duty cop is dressed unremarkably tonight: dark tee shirt, jeans, combat boots that lace up to mid calf. A battered leather jacket that starts to come off with a roll of his shoulders, and that gun rig buckled snug to his bulky frame.

"Not too bad. Though I suggest practicing tabling, and working on your hand speed if you would like to improve." Low voice, warm with an accent that's stubbornly remained despite his time spent in the country.

Grief is there.

He has not known her long, but even those who have had mere brushes with Isabella know that passions run as red as her blood; she doesn't tend to hide that aspect of her at all, quick to laugh, quick to smile, quick to fight with mind, body, or both at once. Quick to anger, also, though whatever capacity for forgiveness she has is a mystery for now. Over a decade estranged from the city of her birth, it was long enough for even the locals to put question marks over her memory - remembering the girl she used to be, but unfamiliar with the woman she is now.

She finishes the clip and while she is aware of Ruiz, she doesn't turn to him just yet. She must put the gun down if she isn't using it, so she does. She engages the safety, she puts it in the case. She lifts those long academic's fingers to draw the shooting muffs from her ears, but keeps the safety goggles on, ribbons of dark hair coming loose at the doing; the better to hear his muffled words. Her eyes have reclaimed their full clarity now, glittering like a cat's in the half-light, and as sharp as a hawk's, and unlike their last encounter in the hospital, she seems to have regained much of her strength - would it be too macabre to think that misery has only fueled the churning furnace within herself? No, but yes, in a way - she can use almost anything to fuel the relentless drive that has launched her as far away from here as possible, and stay that way for ten years and change.

"Captain." Her contralto is lower than its usual wont, a conscious effort to keep her grief as far away from the man standing next to her. Her hungry mind seizes, as always, on the opportunity to learn. Tabling, her hand speed. There is a glance down at her fingers, turning them over, a pinky hooking into the black ribbon around her left wrist. "How do you improve your hand speed?"

Her voice despite its pitch is clear, also. It isn't hollow, or empty.

It has to be there.

He doesn't seem in any rush to gain her attention; certainly not at the cost of her shooting herself in the foot. Or worse. While he waits, his own gun is drawn out of its holster, safetied, and the magazine ejected with a practiced turn of his wrist and dull clack. Practice becomes muscle memory; muscle memory becomes poetry. He's done this so many times, his hands know the trajectories by heart, and would if he were asleep.

Her question gains a glance, and and silence lapses between them as he seems to touch the very edges of her curtailed grief. Like a wake left by a skiff in otherwise calm waters. He drops his gaze again, and finishes counting out his rounds before slotting the magazine back into place with the heel of his palm, and his gun back into its holster.

"Here. I will show you." A smile begins to show itself as he studies those green-gold eyes, then seems to think better of the idea, and is banished to beard scruff. He adjusts his goggles, visually sights downrange for a moment. "You will draw, and attempt to put three shots as close together as possible in under two seconds." His tonguetip touches his lower lip briefly, then withdraws. A little roll of his shoulders to work out any lingering tension, and then complete focus. The next few things happen quite quickly; his arm reaches across his body to where the sig sauer was holstered against his left side, pulls it free and adjusts for muzzle trajectory mid motion. Then three shots shout their brisk report one after the other in quick succession. The first two are quite well-placed, though the third is off by a few inches. It causes him to squint, and make a sound in his throat that might be annoyance.

"Now you try." Safety on, his firearm is shoved back into its holster. A smile, and it might actually hold some warmth this time.

Quick to smile.

The token is faint, a mere curling up of the corners of her mouth. Barely perceptible, but her face mirrors the vestiges of warmth his own holds. She tries; the effort makes it sincere.

She watches the way he moves with all of the open interest of a lifelong student and unrepentant bon vivant, her stare a thing so weighty that it feels tangible against the side of him that is closest to her. She takes in everything; the roll of his shoulder to loosen the muscles there, the easy grip of his fingers and - there - those eyes hardly miss anything as she catches the aspect of the lesson that she knows will be the most challenging bit of all, the way he adjusts the muzzle mid-motion, from when the barrel clears the rig strapped across the breadth of his chest.

Now you try.

Isabella has always been driven by the need to do well, and with this freely given respite from the demons of her own guilt, she replaces the shooting muffs over her ears and picks up her gun. After disengaging the safety, she places it back in the case and waits.

The young woman is swift when she wants to be, her movements brisk but silent, and clearly more physically capable than her delicate looks would suggest; she swims every day, runs if she can't get to the water, appreciates that the demands of her relatively dangerous career require the occasional sacrifice of a plate of pasta in favor of a salad. Fingers draw the gun out of the case and she fires in rapid succession - attempts to adjust in mid-movement. But this is her first time doing this, she has never been taught this method of rapid fire and the slugs, while they manage to hit her target, only hit the parts of it that would be considered minimal wounds. Lips twist in a visible frown, though there is no frustration. Just the desire to try again, and to be better than the initial attempt.

"It's harder than it looks," she confesses to him after she sets her gun down and turns back towards him, perhaps to watch him some more. To learn more.

While Isabella takes her turn, he watches her intently; hungrily, one might consider it. He watches her with the same raptness that she showed him a few moments ago, arms folded across his not-delicate frame; slight set of his jaw that makes his not-delicate profile even more brutish looking.

At its heart, firearms mechanics are all about mathematics. And if you can do those calculations quickly and on the fly, you will stand a better chance of marking your target. Mathematics. Muscle memory. Poetry. "Ve más despacio. You are rushing, and you are tense," he observes. With a flick of his tongue across his lower lip like a cat that's caught the scent of mouse, he prowls in closer.

"May I?" Rather than tell her, he opts to show her; two more steps until he's breached her personal space by a wide margin, and positioned himself behind the younger woman. Hands hovered above her shoulders, so close she can feel the heat radiating off his body and smell the cigarette he smoked on his way over. Pall Malls, if Isabella might be familiar with brands.

You are rushing, and you are tense.

Lips quirk faintly, a touch bladed, a touch wry. Isabella musters up that irrepressible humor no matter the leavings of grief clinging to her wrist, from somewhere deep in the endless wells of the star cradle that houses her spirit. "Honestly, before your text, I was considering a nice, warm evening huddled in a blanket, several bottles of scotch in hand and all the seasons of Sex and the City that I never managed to watch. Maybe if I finished a bottle before coming, I would've been a better shot."

He would feel her tension when he steps up close, when the heat of the front of him washes over the back of her. Her eyes fix forward, waiting to be instructed as her senses are gradually occupied by his presence; it isn't just the Pall Malls she scents on him, but traces of leather and cordite, the most recent cup of coffee he ingested. The solid weight of his hands on her shoulders - this close, there's no way he would miss the subtle coiling of tension over those graceful bones, because Ruiz, for all of his warm smiles, is a predator by trade. A hunter of men, the most dangerous game if Richard Connell's writing could be believed, and she is not without her survival instincts.

But this is brief. Strain slowly unwinds from her and he'd feel her take a breath.

"Show me," she tells him quietly.

Because from her perspective, she is officially at war, and what better way to survive it than to listen to a man who has lived it?

It is a delicate, finely wrought balance they ride. Predator and not-prey. Hunter and survivor. Tension and tension, brittle in their collision. "Tal vez." The words are soft, his voice rough-hewn from too many cigarettes and too many years. And his hands do, eventually, land on Isabella's shoulders. "Aunque no estoy convencido." Does she understand him? Does it matter? He seems to be musing half to himself, anyway.

After letting his hands rest there for a count of perhaps ten, simply feeling that tension coiled through her body and in want of a release, he gives her shoulders a squeeze. His voice, then, is suddenly quite close to her ear. Not touching, no, though she might feel the scratch of his beard at that soft spot where jaw meets throat. "Breathe more deeply. Decide what you want to aim for. Picture it; where your weapon is. Where your hand must be to find it. How hard to squeeze the trigger, the dropoff of the round after it exits the chamber. Y luego ser nada. Y luego ser nada." A beat, and then he releases her and steps away, like releasing his quarry to take flight.

She is only fluent in a few languages; Spanish isn't one of them, but she has traveled enough and has had to navigate foreign territories in the past. Latin languages were the easiest for her to comprehend the gist of. Perhaps it was for the best for the two of them that she isn't inebriated in any way, that she can turn that formidable mind to understanding him without liquor getting in the way of her comprehension. She would hate to lose his words.

And Isabella tries; the man gives her something to focus on, the warm squeeze - as if he could physically wring out everything that ails her through her shoulders, the closeness of his exhale when he murmurs his instructions. Lashes kiss her cheeks, feeling dormant nerve endings rage to life at that quiet application of heat, suddenly reminded that there were other ways to burn the pain away and perhaps if she did have that bottle of scotch, she would be asking him: To push her forward against the narrow stall, his hand fisted in her hair, the rest of him pressed up against her back, panting raggedly while she begged him to make it hurt and not to stop.

But in the end, she is who she is - a walking contradiction and choosy when it comes to deciding which set of impulses to act upon. Tonight, between fighting and fucking, she chooses the former. Instructions noted, she picks up the gun...

...and does even more poorly than she did the first time.

As the trail of smoke wafts from the end of the barrel, Isabella stares at her target disbelievingly. And then, she laughs.

How she manages to do it is a mystery too. Perhaps it was surprised out of her; fingers engage the safety, removing her shooting muffs and turning to look over at him. That sudden expulsion of mirth makes it in her eyes. "I'm definitely rethinking that scotch," she says, working her goggles off her face also, fingers lifting to roll her thumb on the bridge of her nose.

After a long pause, well after the last echoes of her brief laugh fade, her eyes lift to his face. "You wanted to talk to me about something," she says. "What can I do for you, Captain?"

If she were to ask him, he'd surely share his perspective on: Liquor consumption. Good idea or bad idea? Surprise, it's a trick question.

But she doesn't ask. And so that tension remains in her, and in him, and make it hurt and don't stop, and the precipice of brutality he always seems to teeter on is stepped away from when he puts some distance between his body and hers. He drinks her in while she lines up her shot, and maybe he's picking out the flaws and fallacies that lead her astray. Or maybe he's simply lost in wondering who this woman is. And why her grief is marked with that lonely ribbon around her wrist. And why people keep fucking dying in this shithole town.

"It might help," he's unafraid to say, with a chuckle that briefly transforms his face. And reminds her that once, he probably smiled all the time.

"I wanted to talk to you about your mother." His goggles are tugged loose so that they rest around his neck, and he meets her gaze squarely. Unflinching, yet not unyielding. "Would you tell me what you know?" He favours open-ended inquiries and letting his quarry flounder a little. Maybe, if for no other reason than he's an asshole.

Once.

As she was often fond of saying to Alexander, people change, and a blind man can sense that Captain Javier Ruiz de la Vega has been through the breach more than once. With her firearm lowered for now, and her equipment removed, Isabella takes a few steps away from the booth she occupies, towards the back of it where the man has decided to stand. Long fingers hook into the pockets of her jeans, her shoulder taking a careless lean against the wall. His broader, larger shadow easily engulfs her own, like gravitating towards the dark side of the moon, leaving a thin, illuminated line highlighting the curve of her cheek and the glint of the white gold chain on the left side of her throat.

I wanted to talk to you about your mother.

"I thought you would," she murmurs, though despite the words, there is some relief in her - palpable and real, that the man has not expressed any condolences when she is so desperately attempting to keep the dam from bursting.

Her knee bends, the ball of her foot resting on the floor, most of her weight on one side. Lashes lower, her eyes averted as she looks past his shoulder in a visible attempt to gather her thoughts. What makes her inscrutable, in the end, is not the lack of expression - her face tends to reflect so many things at once that it is often impossible to determine what she is thinking or feeling at any given time, or what remains the dominant emotion or instinct. There's simply too much.

"One of yours called me at four in the morning the night she was found," she tells him. "An Officer Bellomy. I was in the houseboat, sleeping. I went right away. I wanted to see her, when I arrived. I wanted to see the state she was left in, but my father wouldn't allow me. He wanted to protect me from it. He didn't want me to see what was done to her so...in the end, I think you know more about her state and her last moments in life than I do. I know, though, that she was found in the bathroom, with her throat cut."

One set of fingers leaves her pockets, toying with the moonstone pendant hanging close to her heart, feeling the bite of its setting's perpetual chill - like a knife cutting through flesh. It sharpens her focus, her thumb rolling over its multicolored surface.

"I lived in England for most of my twenties," she tells the man. "Pursuing my master's, and then my doctorate, but a couple of months ago I felt a tugging, like something was calling me back home. I tried to resist it, but a man I respect sent me back here for work, I couldn't refuse him. I returned the night of the big summer storm and strange things started from almost the moment I arrived. Something dead tried to kill me in the hospital while I was there filling my parents' prescriptions, and when I told Byron about it, when I said whatever it was felt very familiar to me, he told me that I should meet Alexander, because he was looking into the town's bloody history."

Something twists inside her at the remembrance; a brief flicker passes her eyes.

"I was always familiar with his reputation, but I never really met or exchanged any words with him until that night. He told me..." Her eyes shut. "He told me that throughout the town's history, members of the Baxter family have a disturbing pattern of dying well before their time. He suspected that something was killing them, and that he wanted to stop it. I became afraid for my mother's safety after that, so I told him that I wanted to be involved. I wanted..."

I wanted to save her.

I wanted not to fail again.

"...I wanted to prevent it."

Detective work, of course, is something normally well below the captain's paygrade; he has several officers under him tasked with just that. Never mind that he didn't bring with him today any notetaking supplies, nor a voice recorder. Off the record he'd told her. Meaning none of what they talk about would make its way into an official report. With all the people going and dying lately in Gray Harbour, the precinct's been frantically playing a game of whack-a-mole trying to get a handle on it all, and maintain some semblance of faith with the residents of this perpetually drizzly little town. It's a losing game, and the futility of it is in his eyes; the helplessness, at war with the darkness.

He's watching her profile as she speaks. Her cheek, limned in light from the hazy overheads. His shoulder is turned to the same wall she's propping up with her back, and while most of his ink is hidden at the moment by his clothing, the edges of something are visible at the neck of his tee shirt. Dark, looping script scrawled along his collarbone from left to right.

When she's finished, his dark gaze slides away. Focuses on the target at the end of her lane, and the placement of her rounds. It would be a slow death, painful and drawn out. "Entiendo," is what he says finally, brows furrowing a little. Futility.

"You should leave, Miss Reede. You should leave Gray Harbour, and never come back."

Off the record.

It was those three words that encouraged her, in the end, to come see him in the first place, other than the fact that he was a captain in the local police department. Gold-flecked eyes find him again when he deigns to speak - he has said little else, he didn't press anything, and she can't help but wonder why he wanted to know. Out of curiosity? Was he doing his job, keeping informed of the strange things that happen here?

Offering an ear, checking on one of the citizens under his care? He has to care, doesn't he? He wouldn't be in the profession he was in without some valiant sense of duty, no matter how stoic he was.

Isabella doesn't know, and it's not in her to assume, much less impose - unwilling to be so dependent on someone's life and breath that she loses all sense of self.

Those eyes that miss nothing find the swirls of ink lining the curvature of his collar, stark even against dusky skin and solid muscle and unyielding bones. Ultimately, Ruiz was an impossibly intimidating man; his quiet, subtle way only enhances the prevailing effect of a predator that is perpetually on the hunt. But there's something comforting there, also. Something familiar. She has spent most of her life trailing at the wake of those who have seen combat in one way or another, laden with equal parts fear and admiration both.

Her pupils shrink visibly at what he says. Her expression hardens, every fiber in her bolstered by her endless capacity for fiery defiance. Emerald irises grow almost incandescent under his shadow - mere hints of the nuclear corona of fury that has yet to truly take shape. But not at him - the frightening storm that is only continuing to build within her; it is doubtful that her slender body would be able to contain it, such an ill-fitting vessel in the end, too small to hold that relentless, inexhaustible spirit.

You should leave Gray Harbor.

"I will," she promises him, softly, fervently. It was all that she wanted to do ever since she was young.

"But not before I rip off a piece from the things that took from me."

His motivations are unclear, and the man himself is a walking contradiction. At once a thin and barely civilised shell around pure, unadulterated viciousness; and yet there is something in him that genuinely wants to help. To protect. To shepherd these lost souls like darkness calling to darkness; there is little light to be found in him. Even his shine is tenuous, a faint flicker like a match about to go out. The moment before it's tossed on top of a house soaked in gasoline.

Isabella, too, is a contradiction, and he seems both drawn to and repelled by it. To be pulled into her vortex, into that building storm in her green-gold eyes and unassuming frame, would not end well for either of them.

"Thank you for your time. Let me know if you would like some more pointers, some time." He jerks his chin toward the target at the end of her lane without quite taking his eyes off the younger woman still lurking in his shadow. "I would be happy to help." His tone is not quite warm, yet not unfriendly either. He is, perhaps, simply not a man for whom being personable comes easily.

Would it help, in the end, to tell him that she is probably one of the last people on Earth that needs protecting? Isabella has listened, she has learned - her father did not send her out into the world ill-equipped.

But, perhaps, in the cryptic ways of men with calcified exteriors but ultimately decent hearts, that could not be helped either.

His thanks, his offer, renders an overt gentling over her sunkissed expression - the calm, beauteous and placid eye within the perilous maelstrom she represents; perhaps it is more surprising to those that are just getting to know her that despite her bravado, bluster, and rebelliousness that she is capable of such, and all with the distressing effect of suiting her delicate features in the manner that all of her other tempestuous and bladed expressions do. A glimpse of the angel that the devil once was - perhaps an apt descriptor, when all things are said and done. After all, Satan himself was one before his Fall.

Thank you, he says. If you would like some points, some time.

I would be happy to help.

All words that inspire the smile that finally tugs up the corners of her mouth, as real and honest as the rest of the things she's told him, that she's managed to be able to show him. She cants her head in a manner that would remind anyone of her youth and vitality, wisps of dark chocolate hair hinted with bronze curling against the hollow of her cheek at the gesture.

"I think I told you before, Captain," she tells him quietly. "One wouldn't know that about you just by looking at you." His secret is safe with her.

She reaches out, and if he allows, her fingers will slide over the closest set of tattooed knuckles she finds. Freshly bitten from an unwarranted rejection, she is unconvinced that he wouldn't do the same, but that never really discourages her from trying unless he makes it perfectly clear that he doesn't want her imposition. Only if he permits it, the brush of surprisingly gentle digits over coarse skin and ridges of bone. She doesn't entangle her hand in his, doesn't squeeze; she only leaves him only with the ghostly traces of her warmth and the fleeting taste of her gratitude.

"Thank you." Simple words. "I will."

With that, she steps away from him, to move towards her case so she can pack up, and return pistol and ammunition to where it belongs.