onlythebranch | (no subject)

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lisbeth

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Mad Sweeney has been quiet lately.

Quiet for a man like him is different than it is for most people, something that amounts to fewer fights and more nights spent at home -- or Spike's flat, as it were -- and more drinking. He's still a loud mouthed pain in the ass to anyone who cares to speak with him, that'll never fucking change, but he's not been found out and about as often in the past few weeks as he usually is.

There are memories troubling him lately. Not memories. Places where there should be memories. It's this that keeps him quiet and indoors.

But something tells him to go out tonight. Never one to ignore the signs, or rather, never one to ignore the signs he prefers, he listens to whatever sense is telling him to go and he goes. His denim jacket is yanked on over his shirts and he presses a cigarette between his lips as he steps through the front door of the apartment. When it's lit, he sets out, not entirely sure where his feet will take him, but assuming he'll know it when he gets there.

With his cigarette glowing in the deepening dusk, he sees Lisbeth's small, familiar frame, and realizes he's changed direction without consciously doing so. He heads for her, finishing his cigarette, then tilts his head and gives her a small, twisted grin.

"Lookin' for some company, darlin'?" he asks, hoping the answer is yes. This is where he was meant to go tonight. He's not sure how he knows it, only that he does. The same way he knows other things. Something else he pulls from the hoard.

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Since the day she'd ended up hauling Jamie back to her apartment, very much knowing that it was as much her own fears that made her do so as anything else, the desire to protect him from predatory forces, Lisbeth has been just a bit restless. Renovating and securing the warehouse with Sam has been a good distraction, but when work runs out, there's only her thoughts.

It's when she starts to sleep more fitfully, wakes up rubbing at her wrists and ankles, that she's aware she's got to deal with it. At least Martin fucking Vanger had the decency to get himself killed, but she can't account for Bjurman. It's not like Vanger couldn't appear, and it's not like there's an extraordinary chance that Bjurman could. It's not as if he couldn't be taken care of immediately.

She knows, when her boots hit the pavement that evening, that it's not about the actual possibility of being found. It's that the thoughts won't stay shoved in the corner anymore. The ice that keeps so many painful things contained within her is melting, and she has to figure out how to do something besides hold the pain.

Lisbeth considers ways in which she might deal with it tonight; starting a fight itches at her skin and she might as well keep Sam's name written on the back for her wrist for how often it keeps her from taking well-worn and destructive paths. But she's really thinking about it tonight, certain that something's going to happen.

When she sees Sweeney, her shoulders relax. She doesn't know how the fuck this works, but the sight of the friend she'd made during an actual bar fight settles the urge. "Hey," she says, and considers it for a moment before she says, "Yeah, actually. I could use some company."

"Good. 'Cause I'm fit t'go mad without someone to keep me on my leash," he answers with a flash of his teeth, an expression that's almost a smile, but borders just on the edge of a snarl. They're both a little fitful, he can feel it now, and maybe it's something in the air, but maybe it's just something in the two of them. He's been unable to place what it is that's got him so bloody twitchy, but maybe Lisbeth has a better idea of herself.

"You want a drink?"

He wants a drink. Right now he feels like he needs a drink and Mad Sweeney is well aware of his alcoholism, knows he uses booze to function, but these past few weeks he's begun to realize there's a damn good reason behind all his drinking. There are so many years he can't remember and he's not sure he wants to. A drink keeps that shit at bay.

"Any activities with leashes are to be left to the boyfriend," she informs him. "Don't know where we'd get enough chain for me to reach all the fuck the way up there to you anyway." The thing is, she's trying so fucking hard not to go get herself in the kind of shit that had led to her actual arrests.

Those had been mostly during her attempts to escape the foster homes.

Some sort of dizzying possible revelation exists in there, and Lisbeth has never been happier to be offered a drink. Yes, she's on board with repressing that, even if she's suddenly sure that it's something else she needs to bring out into the light.

"Fuck yes," she says. "I need many drinks. I've been thinking, and I've been having feelings, and I'm going to have to talk about something." How irritating.

"I'm hurt, darlin', that I'm not even your backup plan if things go sour with your first leashed man," he jokes with a crooked grin, though any rough flirtation he might engage in is entirely harmless at this point. A long time ago, he loved someone very much, and although he can't remember a damn thing about her, he remembers the moral code that goes with loving someone. With really loving them.

He's entirely devoted to Spike now. To lie to him, to deceive him in any way is unfathomable.

"I know a good place," he tells her. "Dark and quiet and the drinks are halfway decent without ripping out the lining from your pocket. And everyone'll leave us the fuck alone if you need t'talk. I'm shit at comfort, but I know when t'keep my bloody mouth shut."

That gets a rare laugh from Lisbeth, and there is an understanding between them, she thinks. "I never said that. You would do just fine, if I had a ladder." But there's a glimmer of affection for Sweeney in it, and the unspoken truth of feelings that she keeps carefully held in place for Sam-- or at least she pretends to do.

There's some irony in it too, that she's practicing one of the very things she needs to tell Sam, too.

"Sounds good. I wouldn't say I need comfort as much as I need to--" she looks pained, "talk. About it."

"You're spry, you'd make it up without a ladder," he answers, though it's mostly out of habit that he answers that bit at all. He's more focused on the rest of what she's said, a need to talk about it. It's not often Mad Sweeney would be someone's choice for something like that and not even because they would assume he's a shitty pick.

He's still a leprechaun. One of the Fair Folk. Words and secrets are powerful things and a man like him has been known to use them before, to twist them. It's what the Fair Folk do.

He has control of it, though, and he sure as fuck isn't going to abuse the trust Lisbeth has give him. Touching the tips of his fingers very gently to her shoulder blade, he guides her to the door of the bar he'd been talking about.

"Then you'll talk," he says. "And I'll shut the fuck up and listen."

"Yeah," she agrees, to all of it. She wouldn't fully understand the bit about the Fair Folk, not in that way; she treats every person as if they have this power, for she's found that far too many of them do. So she lets herself be led into the bar and to a quiet corner. She orders a drink, something with vodka that isn't awful, and she waits for said drink to arrive, along with his.

Picking up her glass, she takes a long swallow, sets it down.

"Back in Sweden, I am technically a ward of the state. I am considered anti-social and incompetent in dealing with daily life. My file is full of reports about how I might be some sort of psychopath." She takes another drink. "My father beat my mother when I was a child, and a few days after he put her into a coma, I set him on fire in his car."

He listens, like he'd said he would, sipping his drink while she talks, and trying to reconcile the woman she's describing with the one who sits across from him. She sure as fuck isn't incompetent in dealing with daily life, he's see first hand just how fucking smart and capable she is, and while he can't say she's not anti-social, he doesn't see that as such a bad thing.

He'd spent years in the trees, years in the woods surrounded by nothing but birds and animals. He'd gone mad in his isolation, but he thinks if anyone can understand the desire to be anti-social, it's him. People just aren't always worth the effort.

"So you take revenge on the prick who ruined your life and you're the psychopath," he says, then snorts in derision. "Ain't that fuckin' nice."

"Not many twelve years firebomb their fathers," Lisbeth says, and shrugs. "But either they didn't really get what an evil fuck he is, or they did, which presents its own fucking problems." She finishes her drink before she has to get any further with it. "So they kept me restrained and sedated for most of a couple years, then sent me out into the system. Don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't met a man named Palmgren. He appeared to give a shit, and became my guardian."

She falls silent.

"I was enough fucked up that I don't think he really thought he could get my status lifted. And then last year he had a stroke."

"Only the real fuckin' badass ones," Sweeney agrees, even though they've moved on in the conversation and he's got his gaze trained on Lisbeth as she continues to speak. He knows how much bloody injustice there is in this world, how much of it is perpetrated against women, and he knows he's far from a stain, but he's got a pretty goddamn solid moral code. It makes him furious to think of the childhood Lisbeth has lost because of some asshole with something to prove.

"So you found someone who gave a shit and then lost him," he says, his mouth twisting. "That's a fuckin' pisser."

This isn't what she wants to tell him, though, he can feel that. This is just the prologue and so he gestures for another round of drinks.

She waits for the drinks, ordering a third as well because she knows she's going to need it. She'd told the first story before, once in the hush of a bed to a man she'd thought she loved, and again in the quiet of a bed to a man she's come to know is the real thing. She'd told Sam more, but this is something she had planned to take to the grave.

Hers or Bjurman's, whichever came first.

She drains about half her second drink. "They didn't do anything like let me go. They gave me a new guardian. Nils fucking Bjurman. I knew right away it was bad. He was so smugly condescending. Told me he'd give me an allowance out of my own fucking bank account. Asked me about my sex life." She knows Sweeney's smart enough to realize where the story is headed with the inclusion of that detail; she takes another drink, letting it burn down her throat. "I ended up needing money. Thief on the train smashed my laptop. Bjurman made me blow him, and wrote a check while I gagged it up in the sink in his little private bathroom. I took the check. Made a plan."

Her eyes are distant.

Mad Sweeney knows dozens of ways to inflict pain. He's a king warrior, a product of blood and fighting, his earliest memory from his very long life the clashing of blades and the scent of blood mingling with dirt. Pain is a language for him, one built on poetry, and when Lisbeth tells him what this prick has done to her, he begins to dream up countless ways to physically destroy a man like that.

But as with Wednesday, this is not his war.

"How badly did you fuck him up, darlin'?" he asks in a thick voice. If asked, he'll say it's rage, and it is in part, but there's disgust, too. And pain. Knowing she's not the first woman it's happened to. Knowing she won't be the last. Knowing it happened right in his own bloody kingdom all and he hadn't done a thing to prevent it.

Lisbeth drains the last of her drink before she answer, because there's so many ways it had hurt her, can hurt her still if she's not careful. But that's why she's here, doing it. She can't let it stay inside like poison.

People care about her here.

"I miscalculated how sick he was," she finally say, quiet and a bit stilted. "I thought when I asked for more money, he'd just make me blow him again. I went to his place, I had a button camera on my bag. I placed it just right, just before--" She goes quiet, jaw clenching and un-clenching. "He had cuffs. He'd fucking done this before. He cuffed my wrists and ankles. He'd hit me. I woke up gagged and bound," she corrects herself. "He tore my clothes. He got on top of me. He said, I forgot to ask, do you like anal sex. I heard the condom. And then he raped me. Sodomized me. It was a long time. I bled very badly."

She drains half the third drink.

"Got the footage, at least."

By now Sweeney's breath is coming out in rough bursts through his nostrils, an attempt to control the nearly unwieldy anger that's bubbling inside of him. There are goosebumps on his arms, fury in his veins, and his fingers ache for battle, for a weapon, for the man's flesh under his nails as he tears him to shreds.

"I know this is your fight, lass, but if that man ever comes here, I'll make him hurt in ways he can't even fathom." In that moment, despite the alcohol on his breath, despite the curls of hair that have fallen out of his mohawk and over his forehead, he's every inch the warrior whose very name had caused men to tremble.

He sags a little then, forearms on the table, fingers wrapped around his drink. "You got the footage," he says. "Then what?"

The experience isn't that different than being sick, she finds, and bringing up all the awful sludge in the pit of her stomach. Saying it feels absolutely terrible, but then she's said it, the worst part, and her drink is cold against her fingers and she feels a little lighter. She's not quick enough to catch the genuine surprise on her face at Sweeney's rage, and she hopes he understands it's only that she's not sure what she was expecting at all.

"I might like to see that," she says. "He would deserve it, to feel small and at someone's whims." She observes him for a moment, and wonders. Leprechaun seems like a good mask, she thinks, and then supposes that beyond Sam, he's pretty much her best friend.

"I showed back up at his place," she continues, tossing back her drink. "Incapacitated him, made sure he woke up naked and bound and afraid. I made sure that he saw the video, that he knew that it could destroy him at a moment's notice. I made sure he knew what it felt like to have something shoved up inside him, and then I tattooed him, so that anyone would know to look at him without his shirt that he was a rapist pig." She glances back up at Sweeney. "And I made sure that he began the work of setting me free. Last I'd checked before coming here, he was following my rules, though perhaps not as enthusiastic in his reports about my newfound social abilities as I would have preferred."

The story she tells does a bit to soothe the fury inside of him. From this evening on, Sweeney will remember the man's name and there will always be a mark on his head, even if he doesn't know it. Moving through history and worlds, there's a god king coming for him and one day, with any luck, they'll find their way to one another. And Mad Sweeney is filled to the brim with luck.

But it helps, hearing what she's done. A smile even flickers at the corners of his mouth for a moment, all her words a reminder that she may not need him to save her, but she's still telling him above others. That means something. Secrets are powerful things.

"You tattooed him," he echoes, that smile still hovering at the corners of his mouth. "Christ, darlin', if my heart wasn't already elsewhere, I might be in love with you by now."

It would comfort Lisbeth more than she'd ever admit to know she's put a mark on the fucker metaphysically as well. She thinks she'd be happy to drag his ass straight into hell itself if she could design the torture.

Incredibly enough, Sweeney smiles at her, a little, the sort of smile that has been her own sketch of that expression until-- until here. Her own lips curve up slightly at the corners too. "I didn't do a very good job. He wouldn't hold very still. But it conveys the message." There's a moment when her smile deepens a little bit, and she's feeling lighter. "We're fucking star-crossed, then, since my heart--" She shakes her head, and smiles down at her empty glass. "I realized that I have to tell Sam about this, somehow, to feel right. It's not a secret I want to keep."

Her smile has faded when she looks up, but her features are surprisingly open. "I thought I'd try it with you," she says simply.

While it's true Sweeney doesn't know this Sam any more than what little Lisbeth has told him, he does know that any man or woman she considers worth her time, someone she's given her heart to, won't be the sort of person to let this kind of information change how they see her or how they feel.

"I'm a test run, am I?" he asks, but he clearly doesn't mind. If she trusts him enough for that, it's a pretty big fucking deal, something he's not sure many other people would ever say about him. He is who he is. Some people respond to that and others don't. It's what it is. And so now they're here.

"How's it feel?" he asks. "Havin' it out there with at least one person?"

"You have other secrets of mine," she says, shrugging artlessly. "They've been safe. I am safe with you. There are not a lot of people I can say that about." She mulls over his question as she rolls the glass between her fingers.

"It feels better to have said it. No one knows, back there. I had what I needed to prove it, but I would rather use it to get free. If I'd told the people above him, it would have meant I was further damaged. You can kill him, if you ever have the chance."

She's right about that, both that he's kept other secrets for her and that she's safe with him. The way that makes him feel is something he chooses not to examine any deeper, both loving and hating the warmth that unfurls in his chest at her words.

"I'll kill him." There's no if attached to his statement. No if he comes here or if I go there, just a promise that he'll do it when the time comes. Because it will.

"And you sure as fuck ain't damaged," he adds with a dismissive snort. "Fuck that fuckin' term."

She knows enough by now that she believes it; much as she'd initially disliked the expansion of the world to worlds and places beyond knowing or charting, things unseen and mysteries of heaven and earth-- it's comforting now. She will always believe her Sweden is filled with the sort of monsters she'd trade for the actual monsters here any day. But a reckoning will find at least one of them now.

"I might be a bit," she hazards. "Or fucked up. But nothing like what they'd try to make me believe. Checking up to make sure I was free was one of the first things I did here."

"You're a fucking weirdo," he says, knowing she'll take it as he means it, not as an insult, but as an observation that she doesn't look or behave like most other people. That's something he likes about her very much. "Ain't no one gonna argue that, but this world throws around terms like damaged to explain the human condition because they're too bloody scared of what people can really be."

He smiles then, somehow both here in this moment and very far away.

"Had you been one of my soldiers, you'd've been fuckin' revered for lighting that son of a bitch on fire," he says, the cadence of his voice gone soft and musical. "No one would've ever laid a hand on you that you didn't want. Your vengeance would have made you everything a warrior king needed in a fighter and the rest of you..." He comes back to the moment and looks at her, head tilted. "Your light. That'd've made you everything a king needed in his most trusted friend."

Lisbeth snorts, because it's fucking true, is what it is. "That, and if you believe them, if you buy into this idea that you're damaged, they have an easier time keeping you under their thumb." She might have said more, but there's something about his changing expression that catches her.

She listens, and she can't escape the growing warmth in her, the way her heart beats a little harder against her ribcage, strength of feeling she can honestly say only Sam has ever drawn from her. This is different, though, and the way he talks makes her feel like she's capable of those big words she'd said to Sam in the dark of a hollowed mirror maze. "Light," she repeats, and she's smiling at the table. "Not sure I've ever heard that before, about myself." She huffs out a little breath, not unlike the creature tattooed on her shoulder. "I like it. Are you telling me I'm recruited to your tribe?"

He doesn't have much of a tribe any longer, certainly doesn't have any army to his name these days, but there's something in the way she asks the question that makes him feel like it could be possible. That, or something very much like it.

"Think it might've been inevitable, lass," he answers. "And I'm a leprechaun, remember. All I fuckin' know is luck and light. You can trust me on that bit of information."

Looking at her, he knows why she doesn't think the word would've been used to describe her, but he remembers their first meeting, the tiny woman with electricity in her hands, and he doesn't know how he can be expected to see anything else.

"Well, if the fucking leprechaun says it, then I believe it," she says, but not even the way she ducks her face keeps the smile hidden. She feels better, she feels good. She'd expected to feel better for having said it, but the rest of the conversation-- she tries to imagine a world where someone would have recognized why she'd turned that car into a bonfire, or a world where she didn't have to worry about these men putting themselves over her.

"Thank you," she says eventually. "For all of it. It's never been like this for me. People I can talk to without feeling like I'm completely fucked."

"Make friends with a couple more immortals," he suggests with a grin. "You'll find we've seen too much shit to think much of anything is fucked."

He doesn't know Sam. He can't promise Lisbeth that he won't react like a complete fucking prick, but he's got a fairly good feeling that's not going to happen. Whoever he is, Lisbeth cares for him a great deal, probably even loves him, and with the shit she's just told him, he has to figure that doesn't always come easy. If she cares about him, if she loves him, he won't be a shit about this.

And if he is, Sweeney will crush his fucking head.

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