2020-07-14 - there's not really a baby but if there was they would name it andre

Sometime last night, Elise got what was overall an innocuous text from Graham: running late, don't wait for me, love you ❤️ 🍆 🍑

It happens now and then. It's not like the guy punches a clock for a living, so. A few similar texts followed as the night waned, just quick things to the tune of he's fine, just taking care of some shit, will be home soon.

Now it's morning, sometime after people like Isabella leave for work and people like Alexander hang around at home and water the plants, and people like Graham finally pull up in the garage. It's just gonna take him a minute to get from the garage to the house; he needs to change into his emergency clothes - the ones he keeps in the trunk so he doesn't have to come home covered in blood - and get his shit together. It's that last piece, the getting of his shit so that it's together, that's really slowing him down, especially when he rolls the Beanie Baby up in the bloody clothes, tucking all of it under his arm like Elise is never gonna notice this at all, she never notices shit.

It certainly wasn't unusual, the text that he'd be late. She replied with a quick cleavage shot taken in the bathroom of the hospital, since she was on shift. There was some joke thrown in there about making sure she kept his dinner warm and then the few other texts went unanswered. That wasn't unusual either, since Elise did punch a clock for a living and tended to take night shifts since Graham's 'job' usually had him out late anyway, but it's always disappointing to come home to an empty house even if he did warn her ahead of time.

But now it was morning, and the garage door wakes her up - she was snoozing on the couch, Mews perched on her belly. It's probably the bleary eyes that don't have her picking up that something was wrong right off the bat when she pokes her head into the garage, about a half a minute after he's changed out of his clothes. "There you are," she flashes him a sleepy smile ... and then drops her gaze to the lump of shit he's got tucked under his arm. Brown eyes linger there for a tick, two ticks, before the frown starts to form. "Everything okay?"

Graham says, "Hi," in that way that uuuuusually means he just noticed Elise is looking like a fox right now so they should bang, plz, but it slips almost immediately after it falls out of him. 'Cause she's looking at the lump of shit, and he's torn between stuffing it behind his back and lying his ass off and - "Let's go inside." His eyes fill up pretty fast once he gets that out, all glassy and tragic when he he drops the bundle of shit on the closed trunk of the car that he loves so much that he would DO MURDER if someone else dropped a bundle of shit on it, all so he can make it to the door where Elise is, now empty-handed, and hang his arms around her heavily.

Apparently, he's only making it as far as the doorway of the garage before he starts crying like a five-year-old, getting Elise's shoulder all soggy with tears. At least he doesn't wipe his nose on her shirt?

It's true, Elise is looking like a fox right now - those yoga pants do wonders for her ass, and she's got the kind of hair that somehow doesn't look sloppy even after she's slept on the couch for a couple of hours, what a bitch. But before she has the chance to make any sort of invitation, his tone slips and she's barely got the time to take two steps into the garage before he's over here crying like a five year old in her shoulder. Seriously, what does Elise need a baby for ever? Graham's like three kids stuffed in a trench coat.

"G? Baby --" Her expression falls, brows coming together in a deep furrow as she shifts her arms around him, pulling him in. Mornings like these, she'd be overtly concerned with whether or not he brought home any bullet holes .. but this was different. He was different. She could count on one hand - hell, she didn't even need all five fingers - the number of times Graham's come home and burst into tears. So lucky him: this morning, for the first time ever, there are no questions or frantic worrying and fussing; there's just soothing fingers through his hair and down his back, letting him take whatever time he needs.

Graham needs a while to even be able to approach all this. He's not full of bullet-holes, so that's good! But it's bad enough that he holds onto Elise for a pretty long time, till he's cried it out in ways that the morning to this point just hasn't allowed - can't be all sobbing in front of the cops, or while breaking into Alexander's house, so it's all just pouring out of him onto Elise's shoulder. Eventually, when he's managed to rub his eyes with the heel of his hand, when he's okay leaning his head on her shoulder and taking a couple breaths that don't end in all new tears overflowing his eyes, he sniffs massively and stops trying to make Elise bear the majority of his weight. In the quiet, thick way of a person that's not sure how much of his voice is working right now, once he's shifted so he can burrow his nose into the top of her perfect fucking hair (what a bitch), "Andre got shot."

Does he need to say 'dead?' Cuz he'd rather not. Elise should figure that out with all those goddamn Alertness Dice you keep giving her.

There's no push for him to nut up and dry his tears - however long it takes, it takes, though eventually she stops stroking her fingers through his hair and along his back and just wraps her arms around him, bowing her head against his. In some ways, she was holding onto him to brace herself for what she knew was coming - she had no idea on the particulars, but she could figure out the weight of it all and knew it was heavy. Too heavy for him to hold alone, at least. And in spite of the life they've led the past year and some change, she wasn't yet used to him bringing bad news to her doorstep; it never gets any easier.

And this bad news, the words that he utters after he's taken his breaths and rubbed his eyes, was a staggering blow.

She didn't need all the alertness dice I keep giving her to fill in the blank spaces, to figure out the words unspoken. Her own eyes fill up quickly, the kind of hot tears that sting and burn at the edges, and she winces her eyes shut as a frustrated, angry sort of sound gets stuck in her throat. There are no words - because what was she going to say? That she was sorry? - she just squeezes her thin arms around him until she's threatening to pop him like a balloon.

Generally speaking, despite his promise not to try to white knight her, Graham tries to keep his shit from coming home with him. Like. Okay. Sometimes he gets hurt, and that's hard to hide, but he doesn't have a lot of angst about his career. So this is really taking a lot out of him, and then Elise starts crying and it pretty much just starts the whole process over. She's crying, he's crying. She squeezes him. He pulls back, like he's trying to pull her physically into his own person, like closeness will make it hurt less. Unfortunately, it won't, and the only thing to do is wait it out.

A few broken explanations come through during this fierce hugging they're doing, just the broad strokes - parking garage, Felix, four guys, and he leans back a little, finding her eyes with his, weary from the night and the crying and even the bad way he's breaking down the situation, but especially weary because the shots that got Andre "were meant for me, baby, three in the chest so I didn't take 'em in the face." His lip trembles dangerously.

They were a real mess in the moment, these two, though Elise's crying was really as much for Graham as it was for Andre. But really, if there was a single person in this world that didn't deserve to die? It was that big, cheerful dude. Like, even her parents deserved getting executed just a li'l bit. But Andre? He was precious. It makes it all the worse then when Graham mumbles the how, that the bullets were meant for him and Andre made sure to get in the way - and the cause of death doesn't pass by unacknowledged. For a brief moment, a tick in time, she's back there in the morgue where Andre got up from his slab, with the big hole in his chest and that bigger grin on his face, and she feels dizzy and sick and so she buries her face into Graham's very real, very undead chest to sob.

She does, at least, eventually get her shit together - probably faster than Graham, at least enough to pull them out of the garage and back into the house, because she needs to fuss over him to get her own shit straight. It was easy to throw herself into taking care of him, to get him down onto the sofa and blot his cheeks with a few dozen Kleenex that she keeps in a box on the end table, before she crawls into his lap and tries to reach for the load under his arm. "Gimmie. Are these your clothes? I'll.." Burn them, bury them. "What about the cops? If that asshole shows up on our doorstep again, I will shoot him with every single gun you have in this house."

wow now who's not reading poses

For people who READ POSES, the crap Graham put on his car got snagged at some point because - even grief-stricken - he can't just leave things on his car. That's auto-abuse, and he's a lot of things, but ABUSIVE isn't one of them.

So he gets put on the sofa and his face gets blotted with Kleenex, all sort of listlessly done. He understands his role in this part of their relationship: he needs Elise to take care of him, or else he will starve and die and have no clean clothes. The bundle gets relinquished with a limp nod, just sort of answering on auto-pilot - then suddenly lurching forward for the bundle of stuff, making with the grabby hands. "There's a - gimme." On the assumption that this is not an appropriate scene for slap-fighting, he manages to unroll the bundle enough to get the Beanie Baby out.

The lip trembling is back.

So God bless Elise for bringing up the cop that Graham hates like poison, redirecting the sudden desire to start sobbing again when he sits back with the bloody bear held in both hands. "He rolled up in the middle of it all. Fucking executed one of 'em." With a dull chuckle, "Maybe he'll do time for it." He'll sit here a minute, looking with glazed eyes at the stuffed bear and fantasizing about cops behind bars. It keeps the tears at bay.

Speaking of reading poses, the irony is real that the first paragraph suggests he's not abusive while the second one talks about SLAP FIGHTING.

Anyway, since apparently Graham's ONLY ROLE in this relationship is to be taken care of, Elise lets him enjoy it. But lets face it, she probably gets some sick pleasure out of being a caretaker else he'd have been kicked to the curb a year ago. There is no fight for the bundle of clothes that he's making grabby hands for, although she does FROWN STERNLY at him, like can't you just let me do my fucking job?! And then the beanie baby falls out, all pink-and-blue-and-blood-splattered, and another sob catches in Elise's throat.

The quiet utterance of 'oh my god' is probably not about Ruiz executing someone in the middle of a gunfight, but take it as you may. With shaking hands, she lifts to place them over top of Graham's own, her thumb stroking over the head of the beanie baby puppy and then down across Graham's knuckles. "Maybe someone'll execute him next," she says of Ruiz with a sniffle, looking up to fix shimmery brown eyes to his blue. "We'll.. find a place for this, yeah?" she keeps petting his hands, not daring to try and remove the baby from his grip. "Some place special, we'll put it some place special."

Graham never wins the slap-fights, so - if anything - Elise is clearly the abuser.

Anyway, he lifts crossed fingers to answer the possibility of someone executing Ruiz, saying with a decided lack of pluck, "I gotta tell the boss that that guy - you remember that guy, Alexander Clayton? He was there, but it was just his bad fucking luck. He says he was just walking by. But he says that he thinks it has something to do with some Mexican Canadian, and that guy's Mexican, right?" Another GOD BLESS ELISE, since her talking about the bear with her watery eyes gets him to shut the fuck up about Mexicans already, and he scoots his arms low around her waist again, hugging her fiercely, smooshing the bear in between them. "It's for the baby," he manages to get out, choking because oh god, that precious idiot. "He said hi, and this is for the - " Yes, yes; we all heard him the first time, so he's not going to actually repeat himself, just burrow his head into her and sniff massively.

Elise must be used to Graham being SUPER RACIST because his comments about Mexican Canadians don't even make her blink. Fuck, at least he's not talking about Chinese people again. "Alexander was there? Jesus fuck," she hangs her head, taking a few deep breaths, but it doesn't really help. "You have to tell Felix whatever you need to, so he doesn't get involved. He doesn't need to get involved, he doesn't.. deserve.. nobody deserves.." now HER lip is trembling. By now, Elise probably realizes that none of them are going to get what they deserve.

Especially not Andre.

Poor, precious idiot, who clearly has no idea how long human gestation should take and he said to say HI and that this was for the BABY, and Elise is blubbering all over again. Her hands on his own drag the beanie baby to get squished between them when she pulls him in for another clinging hug, as she lays her head against his and sniff-sniff-sniffles away. "He's gonna be right someday, you know," since Graham can't pull out to save his life, "So we'll just... It'll be for ..." there's a couple of gulping hiccups before she decides: "... Bubber will like it, I know he will. We'll just .. save it until he comes."

There's a quick head-shake about where she's going re: Alexander. "It's fine. I got that sorted out. I went to his place this morning and - " Brandished a firearm at him. " - he's fine. He's really fucking weird, though." Graham snaps his eyes to Elise's real quick, a moment when the weirdness of Mr. Clayton eclipses the heartbreak of dead Andre and dead Andre's Beanie Baby. "But he's fine." There's a particular stress on that fine - fine, not a dead-man-walking, not some guy that Graham now hates, just fine.

That doesn't mean he won't start to dissolve when Elise does, but he seems to be coming through the worst of it by now, and looks at her sadly rather than busting out with all new sobs, pressing a kiss to the middle of her forehead and nodding about all that stuff she's saying. "I mean, we kinda have to at this point, right? Like, 'yo little man, the only reason you exist is 'cause a giant took three slugs to the chest for your dad?'" Why is Elise willing to procreate with this person? Seriously.

"You went to his place this morning?" That's said a little touchy, like WTF Graham, brandish your weapons in the faces of crazy AFTER you come home to your girl. But it's over in an instant with a shake of her head. "It's fine," she probably means it. "If he's fine, it's fine." There's no comment about crazy. After all, they are sitting here in tears over a fucking beanie baby and talking about the baby that Elise SAW IN HER DREAMS.

She rubs her hand over her cheek to scrub the tears away as she bends her head into his kiss. Elise is really stupid, because he says all that about how they have to have a baby now and she's nodding away, like it makes all the sense in the world. "Yeah, we do. We kinda have to," she agrees somberly, managing something of a sad smile as she pet-pets the beanie baby's head. "Maybe we'll have to name him Andre. Bubber can be a nickname for Andre, right?" God damn, Elise, so dumb. "It'd be right though. To name him after the hero that saved his daddy's life." And there are going to be more tears, a lot more tears, but she kisses him hard on the lips before they start in earnest. "I love you so much, Graham."

It's the 'first off' tone, just without the 'first off' in front of it. "I didn't fuck him up or anything. I just asked what he was doing there." So it's fine, like he said. Also, fwiw, he meant that they kinda have to save this blood-stained toy for their future progeny, not that they need to cut the ribbon on the baby factory right this second. Not that he'd object but... anyway, it's just for the best that birth control is all Elise's department. Especially when he points out, right here in front of God and everyone, "I mean, if we have a kid named Andre?" Them specifically, the two people he points between, the really white guy and the half Thai/half Nazi German chick? "We're gonna have to give him a white-guy nickname, or we're just setting him up for failure."

She loves him so much. He slumps into her readily, breathing without the threat of tears behind it, letting the fact that he's loved so much take the sting out of the morning. "I know, baby. I love you, too, and more than that. I fucking appreciate you, yanno?" It's a heartfelt thing he's trying to communicate, but he's tired and overwrought, so the best he can do is just look at her with all that appreciation in his face: she hasn't kicked him out yet and someday they will make pretty mixed race babies together and she also hopes many of the same people die or get arrested that he hopes die or get arrested and she can cook good and she's hot.

"Okay, okay. I know, baby, I trust you did good," Elise says of Alexander in a soothing tone that suggests she'll only hit him if it turns out she's wrong. But Elise also knows that he isn't talking about him knocking the bottom out today; besides, Elise is like all birth controlled out since Graham can't control himself. At least he still has some humor left over - he gets a snort of a laugh out of her, but that's IT, okay? She rolls her eyes. "Andre can be a three-quarters-white-guy name, too," she points out.

But she loves him so much, and he fucking appreciates her. But does he appreciate fucking in the moment? Apparently not. At least she doesn't entirely expect to get him up. Sure, she kept his dinner warm, but he can eat it (her) later. The rest of the day is spent being sad sacks on the couch, and she gets him some real food when he whines, because she can cook good and she's hot and she loves him so much.