dog_eat_dog | OPEN POST

Well, he has to hand it to Tess: she's stoked his curiosity in spite of himself about what's behind cupboard three, with the way she builds up the grand unveiling of what their dinner is going to be. And lo' and behold, she reveals... Heh, meals ready-to-eat. Refilled glass brought back to his mouth, Joel snorts around the rim before taking a sip as Tess approaches with their meal 'prizes'. Jackpot indeed. A questionable jackpot at that, being there's never any knowing what the hell is in any of those MRE tins until they're opened. Sometimes it's actually kind of decent, relative to their usual staple options. Sometimes not.

Trust Tess to turn their dwindling food supply into a joke, though. A grim yet still kind of dryly amusing joke. It's really not funny, just like their whole life in this autocratic quarantined shithole isn't funny, but Tess always has a way of somehow lightening the mood with her observational sarcasm and off-the-cuff remarks. Pisses him off at times, sometimes a lot, when she's being flippant about things that Joel doesn't want to be flippant about. Other times, though, like right now... well, somebody has to take the burden of their shitty lives and turn it into a joke sometimes, because god knows Joel can't.

Truth is, Tess has carried a lot of that burden for the both of them over all the years they've survived together. If Joel actually allowed himself to think deeply about that, really think deeply, he'd realise just how much Tess is the whole reason his existence all these 20 years on hasn't swallowed itself up in complete darkness. Pity Joel isn't one to examine himself too deeply.

He watches Tess peel back the tin to reveal... turkey? Okay, that is actually a win, even if that win comes in a shitty dented can. At least that's one little win today. One is better than none. Sure felt like none when he'd first came through their front door clouded with the demoralising heaviness of the whole exhausting day.

"Classy," he states, all dry humour to both the tinned turkey and to Tess' claim that she slaved her day away for their meal. "Almost beats dinner at Bill an' Frank's."

Ah, he better throw some clothes on, he supposes as he tips the remainder of his drink down his throat. The glass strikes a decisive thud on the table when he sets it down, and he leans a sudden step forward to Tess to drop a kiss of quick affection to her cheek. Unspoken display of gratitude for dinner, or unspoken apology for coming home in such a foul mood? Impossible to say.

The kiss is a surprise, and it's over before she can translate that surprise into pleasure –– the delightful scruff of his beard on her skin, the warmth of his whiskey breath. It leaves her with a vague smile in the aftermath, her gaze fixed on him.

She's long accustomed to getting by on the bare minimum, shitty rations and an apartment with peeling walls and meticulously inventoried bullets. It's enough, and that quick kiss feels like just enough, too. It may not be an apology or a thank you, but she doesn't have to wring it from him –– it's what he gives, and she'll take any affection he gives her readily.

But she knows where the lines are, over a decade in. She knows where she needs to play it cool.

"I always thought rabbit's too fucking gamy anyway," she says, playful. "This is where it's at, Texas, this is real luxury."

Tess' understated affection gazed at him soothes like a reassuring and caressing hand. Joel tends to close himself off from initiating outward displays of sweetness; it's Tess who initiates their candid moments, mostly. Tess, who seems, somehow, to be able to read him like a book when he's stuck too deep inside his own head; Tess who comes at him with the nurturing back rubs, the mollifying hand-holding when his hackles are up, the forcefully gentle clutch of his face in her hands when she wants him to listen closely to her. Joel selfishly takes what Tess offers and often doesn't think to return her needs.

When they fight, though, or when they come too close to tipping over an ugly edge of wounding, vicious words... A cheek kiss, a reach for her hand with beseeching apology in the subtle lace of his fingers within hers, a longing look for Tess to reassure him that they're good tends to spill out of him. Anything to melt her familiar nearness back to him, safe and sound. And then she usually gives him looks like this.

Joel snorts softly to her remark about luxury, returning her understated gaze of affection with an unsmiling but still soft, understated one of his own. Then, turning a retreating step towards their shabby little excuse for a bedroom, he answers a mildly joking as he strips off his towel and tosses it aside, "Heh, turkey-in-a-can for two. Yeah, real romantic. S'pose I'd better get my best suit on."

He returns her look and no matter how cool her expression is, there's something in her eyes that betrays her, soft and tender and needed. It's almost a relief when he turns away; she could get cocky, feeding off anything resembling affection, taking care of him the way he needs to be cared for, his comfort metamorphosing into comfort for her, too.

Having someone to look after other than herself is the best survival tactic she knows, and it plays out between them every day, month after month and year after year. No matter how much he pisses her off sometimes, no matter how many times she lobs some pithy line at him before storming out, no matter how many times she grits her teeth when his voice rises, she is fine, better than fine, when the dust settles and he's still there, still giving her that look.

She's done this for so long that she thinks she could do it for another ten, twenty years without batting an eye. However long they have.

"Black tie," she agrees, casting a lingering glance through the doorway as he drops the towel. She easily settles into a smile as she sets about heating up dinner, a glamorous affair in which the contents of the can are dumped into a pan on the stove. She scrapes out every last bit dutifully, nothing going to waste. She adds: "What show are you taking me to after, huh?"

They're dinged up, creaky dresser Joel restored several years ago, crammed in the corner of their drab bedroom, squeaks on its brackets as Joel jiggles the drawer open. At the same time, he throws a quick dubious glance at Tess out in the kitchen scraping their dinner out into a saucepan.

"Show?" he echoes. Followed by an equally dubious snort to himself under his breath. A show. Like a musical? Or some classy stage thing that's way out of Joel's scope of what he deemed 'entertaining' back in the day? Yeah, right.

He digs through his sloppily folded clothes. A scraggy blue t-shirt, faded and washed out with time, is pulled out first, followed by a pair of even scraggier grey sweatpants. He shoves the squeaky drawer shut and tugs the pants on first and reemerges from the bedroom with shirt in hand.

"A movie, not a show," he corrects her. "Somethin' like..." He threads one arm into his shirt, followed by the other, and then pauses in thought, thumbs hooked into the collar of his shirt ready to be tugged over his head. "I dunno. Con Air. Or Face/Off. Somethin' like that." Because that's the kind of high-brow, brainless entertainment that enthralled Joel back in the day.

Over his head his shirt goes and he yanks it down over his bare chest, adding in a little dismissive mutter that borders on mocking, "Pfft, 'a show'."

Edited 2023-02-07 01:00 (UTC)

Tess pads around the kitchen, getting plates and two forks –– two forks from the same set, no less! –– while the food heats up, the congealed fat and water snapping and bubbling long before the chunks of turkey heat through. She rolls her eyes to herself when her back is to him, but it's with a vague smile. Even if there was a show to go to, he would gripe the whole way through. Typical. But she won't take Con Air.

She gestures towards him with their cracked wooden spatula.

"If you ever make me watch a Nick Cage movie, I am making you sit through Save the Last Dance or something."

Not that they've had a working TV for the last couple years, but if they somehow did, they've got an old DVD player in the closet. Tess thinks about the cold nights through the earlier winters of this apartment, sometimes, when they'd while away the season with the TV set up at the foot of the bed and every blanket they owned piled up on top of them. What else was there to do?

There's a long winter ahead of them. The turkey continues to fry.

Dressed now, Joel returns to the table and reaches for the whiskey. "Save The Last what now?"

Is that a film? Must be, if Tess is mentioning it in context with Nicholas Cage. What would Joel know about dance films. Aside from, say, Flashdance, way back when he was a teenager, which he definitely didn't watch for the plot. In any case, Save The Last... whatever it was Tess just said, sounds bad.

A wildly trivial and stupid issue next to their almost-fight earlier, but oscillating from stewing tension erupting between them to casually threatening each other with bad films and acting like nothing happened, is how he and Tess are. It's how it's been for years. Doing awful shit in order to get by and then carrying on like it's all just business as usual, is how they've always worked. They fuck people over, they take what's theirs without mercy, they kill, and then they come home and make dinner, talk shit and fuck. And sometimes make love, too. Sometimes.

And then the next shitty day rolls around and they do it all again without questioning themselves, because survival is cruel, ruthless and unsparing, and so are he and Tess. That's just how it has to be. He and Tess carry each other through it all and that's all that matters.

Bottle uncapped, Joel sloshes a helping into his glass, then Tess'. He returns the bottle to the table and gathers both glasses in his hands. He sidles towards Tess.

"I'm already bored to tears just hearin' the name," he retorts. Then he goes on to argue, stopping alongside Tess at their cramped kitchen counter to set her drink down in front of her, "Con Air is a masterpiece, I'll have you know. But I guess you wouldn't get it, bein' a woman and all."

Is Joel being a deliberately goading dick or actually casually sexist? Again, like his little kiss to Tess' cheek earlier that didn't clearly define his true intentions, it's impossible to say. Perhaps it's a little of both.

Edited 2023-02-07 05:16 (UTC)

Tess bets goading —— not that he’s immune to that ol’ Texas brand of paternalism, but this many years in, it slides off her like nothing. She’s the one pretending at being a homemaker, anyway, they each have their parts.

If it left this shitty little apartment, she’d have words, but here she laughs dismissively, leaning a hip against the counter.

“A masterpiece of what, over-acting?” she drawls, picking up her glass and raising it to his in a silent cheers. “Isn’t it just Die Hard on a plane? Come on, Tex.”

She knocks back half of her drink.

She will fight with him over movies any day, without hesitation, but it is more fun drunk.

"Die Hard on a plane? Seriously?" Joel challenges, likewise leaning a hip against the counter and fixing Tess with an oppugning look as she tosses her drink back. The smell of their dinner wafts to him, igniting hunger that's been knotted up like gritty tiredness in his gut most of the afternoon. The smell awakens a slight further shift in his mood, from grim surliness towards relief that he's home. Home with Tess.

He, too, takes a swig of his drink. This would be, what — his third finger of whiskey now? Fourth? He wasn't keeping count when he was slugging them back. Whatever. The booze's warming, dulling effects is beginning to soften the jagged, brittle edges of his shit-kicking day.

"Now you've crossed a line," Joel declares, glass lowered with a (playfully) threatening finger outstretched and pointed at Tess. "You asked me what show I'm takin' you to, and this is how you respond: With blasphemy."

She has to stir the food before it burns, and she does that, barely taking her eyes off him for more than a glance.

"But you are taking me to a show?" she asks, with a little quirk of her eyebrows and a broad grin.

He's going to be plastered before long, and Tess will take her time catching up, at least until dinner's done. When the stove is off, so are the last vestiges of responsibility before caving into pure hedonism. She imagines them drinking everything they could sell, stumbling into bed too drunk to fuck, and spending all that time grinding on each other anyway. Whatever. They've earned it. They can always make more deals. Let this day die.

She dumps the turkey onto the plates.

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