onlythebranch | (no subject)

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.