(no subject)
Another BE ficathon fill.
Never see heaven or home. Owen, Richard, Gillian.
He'd lied to Thompson, when he was asked what brought him to the States. Not that it matters, of course: the boss doesn't give a damn about the cause except for the ways it can line his pockets. Owen wonders what it is inside the man that makes him so hungry, so grasping; but he can see desperation in the Thompson's eyes, even if it's just the memory of it. How odd it is, the way that Americans think you can dress a boy's poverty up in a man's flash clothes and no one will be the wiser.
It wasn't the bloodshed he'd sickened of, but the politics. Cutting a throat or setting a bomb feels like a real act, however small. Makes him feel like a real thing in the world. He has a talent for destruction, after all. He is not educated and he knows that most people don't fancy him particularly sharp (men see him as a gun and women as a cock, which is the same thing at the end of the day); but when he's got those wires twisting between his fingers and the smell of gunpowder in his nose, the whole world seems to fall away.
He loved Ireland dearly. He still does. But he is not entirely sure the feeling is mutual.
---
It's not Margaret that makes him lose interest in Katy, not really. He's hopeful but not daft, and when Mrs. Schroeder becomes Mrs. Thompson (with him as a witness, no less, and he would call her cruel for it if he believed she thought of him at all) it's a nail in that coffin. He doesn't have time for Katy because he doesn't have time for her, is all, not with the boss trying to take over the world like he is.
He doesn't take her for a threat, not as he would a man--but then, he doesn't quite understand this town, not yet.
And so one day Lillian meets him at the back door, and he can hear shouting inside. "Katy told Mr. Thompson," she whispers, and Owen doesn't need to be told what. Not with the accusatory voices rising and falling in the next room. Thompson wouldn't kill him, that much he knows. You could bed his wife right before his eyes and he wouldn't kill you, because he's not that type of man--a cold fish who feels nothing but crisp dollar bills and thick envelopes. But he could make Owen's life very difficult. And so a telegram lets them back home know his current situation is--untenable.
He gets a letter in return, its message careful and coded but clear. It's for the best. The man's greed has become a liability. There are other ways to get guns. Owen, as always, is to sit tight and await further instruction.
That puts Owen in one hell of a position, here in the big man's town. Allied with no one, loyal to nothing--that's not a place he's comfortable. And so after a week of starting at shadows he decides to seek out Thompson's enemies for protection.
Anyone gunning for Nucky Thompson isn't going to show it, not with the man reascending so quickly. But Owen watches and listens until the players start to reveal themselves. And that's how he finds himself a second time in that garish mansion, being stared down by half a dozen stuffed wildcats and his predecessor's comely young mother.
"It's no longer in my best interest to work for Mr. Thompson," he explains. "I was curious as to whether my skills could be of use elsewhere."
"What skills are those?"
He hesitates, wondering if he should use the coded response he gave Thompson--making people stop--but she seems too sharp around the edges for that sort of nonsense. "Frightening people, ma'am. Killing them, when I have to."
She doesn't blink, just flicks the tip of her cigarette into a crystal ashtray. "I already have someone for that."
"Your soldier boy?"
"Mr. Harrow, yes." She leans back against the sofa cushion and studies him, with a smile he's seen on so many women's lips before. "You're going to have to do better than that, dear."
He remembers his first time in this house: that absurd tableau, Darmody and the mother and the two old men. Like aristocrats sitting for a portrait, and the knew that blue-eyed boy would be swallowed up alive. But winter is coming and there's naught much else but lint in his pockets, so he takes the bait. "Perhaps I could offer my services in other ways."
He doesn't even fancy her much. But a job's a job, and it's the same old dance as always.
--
He finds himself oddly comfortable among the blacks and Jews, the Italians and Poles that keep the whiskey flowing like water in Atlantic City. The Irish here--descendants of the ones that escaped the Famine--like the idea of the war back home: a glorious battle, the brave underdog, though three generations off the boat they grind the immigrant and the colored man beneath their heels. But Owen is the wrong kind of Irish, and they want nothing to do with him, with his thick accent and cheap suit and scuffed shoes and skill for mayhem. He's an embarrassment.
He supposes it's the same for Harrow, in a way. Americans like the idea of the war hero well enough; they'd like him better in the ground, though, not distressing their sight and reminding them how pointless the whole venture was. Owen has to speak to get those looks of disgust, but they're the same looks, in the end: they do not belong here in this glittering paradise, and they're ruining everyone's fun even as they're providing the lubrication for it.
They gather allies slowly. There's a connection in Chicago still willing, for Darmody's sake, to at least grant them a hearing--a plump fellow who calls them "Frankenstein and the mick" but is happy to send a favor their way, for a price. There's them in New York, the dark one who grins when Gillian is mentioned, with a glint in his eye that Owen can read all too easily. He doesn't care enough to be jealous, not here in this swank office with the New York lads' boss eyeing him with a lifted eyebrow and knowing half-smile that make Owen want to wet his trousers.
There are those in Atlantic City still loyal to Thompson, but the two of them start making their way to changing a few minds. Owen's smile gets him in the door, but no further without actual violence; there's no menace to him, which is sometimes a blessing in this line of work and sometimes a curse. But Harrow is a walking threat, with his stone-and-tin face, his patience-on-a-monument stance, his voice like a shotgun report. He's the only thing that could kept such a one as Darmody alive that long.
He suspects Harrow doesn't think much of him. Resents his smile, his easiness of speech, his way with women. Hates him, even, for the alliance he had with Thompson last summer. But he tolerates him. They are two of a kind: tools, weapons, bodies for the slaughter. Their skills have kept them alive but do not make them special. And they will not be remembered when they are cut down.
---
"Sleater."
Owen looks up in surprise. Harrow has never used his name; he had begun to wonder if he even knew it. (The New Yorkers he calls vaguely "the little one" and "the other one"; Capone doesn't even warrant a descriptor, although Richard grinds his jaw harder than usual when the man is mentioned. The only people he's heard him call by name are the mother and the son, and once, when referencing a seascape that hangs in his room, the dead wife. Owen suspects that other people--those who are not Darmody or Darmody's--are not quite real to him.)
"Yes?"
"You were there. When he--"
Harrow trails off. But Owen has seen many a good man cut down, and he hears the question that isn't asked. "He was cocky," he answers. "Still as a statue, throwing taunts like a boy in the schoolyard. He went to it as a soldier should." He's silent for a moment, remembers how the rain ran in rivulets off the brim of Darmody's hat, past the narrowed eyes, the sneering mouth. "I've never seen a man die so brave."
It's hard to tell, but he thinks Harrow smiles.
---
Eventually it seems pointless to keep paying the weekly rent on his bedsit. He shares a giant mahogany bed with Gillian, in a giant mahogany room with picture-windows and velvet curtains that cost more than everything he's ever owned. He is not sure, but he suspects this room was once the old man's. There's a smell of tobacco and camphor still.
Harrow's room is a poky little chamber (Owen suspects it for a storage-room) tucked away in the furthest corner of the house. "He doesn't like to be near the parlor," Gillian says off-handedly--as if nothing of any particular import happened there, even though there's still a bloodstain on the floor by the sofa and another along the wall. Harrow doesn't take meals with them; but on nights when Owen can't sleep because the sky is the wrong color or the sea the wrong scent and he can't seem to find a cup of tea that tastes right, he paces along the hallways and can hear the marksman puttering around in the kitchen. Every Friday evening he retreats to his room to clean his guns, every blessed one of them, and there's no point trying to converse with him when he's doing that.
They get along well enough. On the long drives to New York or Canada he talks--yammers on really--and Harrow listens, or at least pretends to. His tales of his time with the óglaigh seem to spark the other man's interest, for Owen's was a service without uniforms or marching. It's those experiences they hold in common that they never speak of.
Sometimes when he's in the car with Richard, he can feel a third with them, a mad ghost with full lips and dark blond hair falling in his eyes. He doesn't speak, just watches, and Owen feels he has been gifted with a sacred trust: this brittle, broken, deadly creature.
Sometimes there is another ghost, if the living can be said to have shades. When he lies with Gillian, entwined in long pale limbs and fiery locks, he glances past her, just over her shoulder, and sees another sitting in the corner. Always in his vision her hair is as he remembers it, soft chestnut curls tumbling like eiderdown; and her hollow eyes pass judgment.
He always looks away.
--
A successful shipment, then another. Their product in four speaks about town, then six, then ten. They've got Whitlock working from one end and Luciano from the other, and the noose is tightening around Thompson slowly, so slowly he cannot yet feel it. No one takes her for a threat, not yet. But she's got her grandson's estate and a blood-grudge; she's well-connected and fearless as the Mórrígan, and she's young still. And she will live to see Nucky Thompson ground into the dust.
A new pair of shoes appear by the bed for him, a swank silk tie. He has champagne for the first time: glass in hand, she wraps her arms around him from behind, giggling like a girl as she pours it down his throat. On Sunday mornings she leaves the child with Richard and the two of them drive to the shore, and if the sun shines too brightly on the waves, it's still nice enough.
He can feel her working at his edges, somehow--tweaking him, slowly and carefully. Not into Jimmy, not exactly--he's too low-rent for that--but into the kind of man who could have helped put Jimmy on the throne. He wonders if she'll still be at it in ten years, when Tommy becomes a man. He wonders if he'll still be here, too, endlessly shaped beneath her fingers.
"I'm so proud of you," she says to him, as they lie together in bed. Her voice comes from some strange place halfway between mother and lover and he wonders, not for the first time or the last, just how far things went between those two.
But it's rather apt, after all: Jimmy used to do his job, in more ways than one. And so he beds Gillian and plots against Thompson and keeps watch over Richard, feeling as if he's only holding this life in trust because someday Darmody will appear at the door, hair still dripping wet, sardonic half-smile on his lips, and reclaim everything he left behind.
Because sooner or later, Owen will outlast his usefulness.
Never see heaven or home. Owen, Richard, Gillian.
He'd lied to Thompson, when he was asked what brought him to the States. Not that it matters, of course: the boss doesn't give a damn about the cause except for the ways it can line his pockets. Owen wonders what it is inside the man that makes him so hungry, so grasping; but he can see desperation in the Thompson's eyes, even if it's just the memory of it. How odd it is, the way that Americans think you can dress a boy's poverty up in a man's flash clothes and no one will be the wiser.
It wasn't the bloodshed he'd sickened of, but the politics. Cutting a throat or setting a bomb feels like a real act, however small. Makes him feel like a real thing in the world. He has a talent for destruction, after all. He is not educated and he knows that most people don't fancy him particularly sharp (men see him as a gun and women as a cock, which is the same thing at the end of the day); but when he's got those wires twisting between his fingers and the smell of gunpowder in his nose, the whole world seems to fall away.
He loved Ireland dearly. He still does. But he is not entirely sure the feeling is mutual.
---
It's not Margaret that makes him lose interest in Katy, not really. He's hopeful but not daft, and when Mrs. Schroeder becomes Mrs. Thompson (with him as a witness, no less, and he would call her cruel for it if he believed she thought of him at all) it's a nail in that coffin. He doesn't have time for Katy because he doesn't have time for her, is all, not with the boss trying to take over the world like he is.
He doesn't take her for a threat, not as he would a man--but then, he doesn't quite understand this town, not yet.
And so one day Lillian meets him at the back door, and he can hear shouting inside. "Katy told Mr. Thompson," she whispers, and Owen doesn't need to be told what. Not with the accusatory voices rising and falling in the next room. Thompson wouldn't kill him, that much he knows. You could bed his wife right before his eyes and he wouldn't kill you, because he's not that type of man--a cold fish who feels nothing but crisp dollar bills and thick envelopes. But he could make Owen's life very difficult. And so a telegram lets them back home know his current situation is--untenable.
He gets a letter in return, its message careful and coded but clear. It's for the best. The man's greed has become a liability. There are other ways to get guns. Owen, as always, is to sit tight and await further instruction.
That puts Owen in one hell of a position, here in the big man's town. Allied with no one, loyal to nothing--that's not a place he's comfortable. And so after a week of starting at shadows he decides to seek out Thompson's enemies for protection.
Anyone gunning for Nucky Thompson isn't going to show it, not with the man reascending so quickly. But Owen watches and listens until the players start to reveal themselves. And that's how he finds himself a second time in that garish mansion, being stared down by half a dozen stuffed wildcats and his predecessor's comely young mother.
"It's no longer in my best interest to work for Mr. Thompson," he explains. "I was curious as to whether my skills could be of use elsewhere."
"What skills are those?"
He hesitates, wondering if he should use the coded response he gave Thompson--making people stop--but she seems too sharp around the edges for that sort of nonsense. "Frightening people, ma'am. Killing them, when I have to."
She doesn't blink, just flicks the tip of her cigarette into a crystal ashtray. "I already have someone for that."
"Your soldier boy?"
"Mr. Harrow, yes." She leans back against the sofa cushion and studies him, with a smile he's seen on so many women's lips before. "You're going to have to do better than that, dear."
He remembers his first time in this house: that absurd tableau, Darmody and the mother and the two old men. Like aristocrats sitting for a portrait, and the knew that blue-eyed boy would be swallowed up alive. But winter is coming and there's naught much else but lint in his pockets, so he takes the bait. "Perhaps I could offer my services in other ways."
He doesn't even fancy her much. But a job's a job, and it's the same old dance as always.
--
He finds himself oddly comfortable among the blacks and Jews, the Italians and Poles that keep the whiskey flowing like water in Atlantic City. The Irish here--descendants of the ones that escaped the Famine--like the idea of the war back home: a glorious battle, the brave underdog, though three generations off the boat they grind the immigrant and the colored man beneath their heels. But Owen is the wrong kind of Irish, and they want nothing to do with him, with his thick accent and cheap suit and scuffed shoes and skill for mayhem. He's an embarrassment.
He supposes it's the same for Harrow, in a way. Americans like the idea of the war hero well enough; they'd like him better in the ground, though, not distressing their sight and reminding them how pointless the whole venture was. Owen has to speak to get those looks of disgust, but they're the same looks, in the end: they do not belong here in this glittering paradise, and they're ruining everyone's fun even as they're providing the lubrication for it.
They gather allies slowly. There's a connection in Chicago still willing, for Darmody's sake, to at least grant them a hearing--a plump fellow who calls them "Frankenstein and the mick" but is happy to send a favor their way, for a price. There's them in New York, the dark one who grins when Gillian is mentioned, with a glint in his eye that Owen can read all too easily. He doesn't care enough to be jealous, not here in this swank office with the New York lads' boss eyeing him with a lifted eyebrow and knowing half-smile that make Owen want to wet his trousers.
There are those in Atlantic City still loyal to Thompson, but the two of them start making their way to changing a few minds. Owen's smile gets him in the door, but no further without actual violence; there's no menace to him, which is sometimes a blessing in this line of work and sometimes a curse. But Harrow is a walking threat, with his stone-and-tin face, his patience-on-a-monument stance, his voice like a shotgun report. He's the only thing that could kept such a one as Darmody alive that long.
He suspects Harrow doesn't think much of him. Resents his smile, his easiness of speech, his way with women. Hates him, even, for the alliance he had with Thompson last summer. But he tolerates him. They are two of a kind: tools, weapons, bodies for the slaughter. Their skills have kept them alive but do not make them special. And they will not be remembered when they are cut down.
---
"Sleater."
Owen looks up in surprise. Harrow has never used his name; he had begun to wonder if he even knew it. (The New Yorkers he calls vaguely "the little one" and "the other one"; Capone doesn't even warrant a descriptor, although Richard grinds his jaw harder than usual when the man is mentioned. The only people he's heard him call by name are the mother and the son, and once, when referencing a seascape that hangs in his room, the dead wife. Owen suspects that other people--those who are not Darmody or Darmody's--are not quite real to him.)
"Yes?"
"You were there. When he--"
Harrow trails off. But Owen has seen many a good man cut down, and he hears the question that isn't asked. "He was cocky," he answers. "Still as a statue, throwing taunts like a boy in the schoolyard. He went to it as a soldier should." He's silent for a moment, remembers how the rain ran in rivulets off the brim of Darmody's hat, past the narrowed eyes, the sneering mouth. "I've never seen a man die so brave."
It's hard to tell, but he thinks Harrow smiles.
---
Eventually it seems pointless to keep paying the weekly rent on his bedsit. He shares a giant mahogany bed with Gillian, in a giant mahogany room with picture-windows and velvet curtains that cost more than everything he's ever owned. He is not sure, but he suspects this room was once the old man's. There's a smell of tobacco and camphor still.
Harrow's room is a poky little chamber (Owen suspects it for a storage-room) tucked away in the furthest corner of the house. "He doesn't like to be near the parlor," Gillian says off-handedly--as if nothing of any particular import happened there, even though there's still a bloodstain on the floor by the sofa and another along the wall. Harrow doesn't take meals with them; but on nights when Owen can't sleep because the sky is the wrong color or the sea the wrong scent and he can't seem to find a cup of tea that tastes right, he paces along the hallways and can hear the marksman puttering around in the kitchen. Every Friday evening he retreats to his room to clean his guns, every blessed one of them, and there's no point trying to converse with him when he's doing that.
They get along well enough. On the long drives to New York or Canada he talks--yammers on really--and Harrow listens, or at least pretends to. His tales of his time with the óglaigh seem to spark the other man's interest, for Owen's was a service without uniforms or marching. It's those experiences they hold in common that they never speak of.
Sometimes when he's in the car with Richard, he can feel a third with them, a mad ghost with full lips and dark blond hair falling in his eyes. He doesn't speak, just watches, and Owen feels he has been gifted with a sacred trust: this brittle, broken, deadly creature.
Sometimes there is another ghost, if the living can be said to have shades. When he lies with Gillian, entwined in long pale limbs and fiery locks, he glances past her, just over her shoulder, and sees another sitting in the corner. Always in his vision her hair is as he remembers it, soft chestnut curls tumbling like eiderdown; and her hollow eyes pass judgment.
He always looks away.
--
A successful shipment, then another. Their product in four speaks about town, then six, then ten. They've got Whitlock working from one end and Luciano from the other, and the noose is tightening around Thompson slowly, so slowly he cannot yet feel it. No one takes her for a threat, not yet. But she's got her grandson's estate and a blood-grudge; she's well-connected and fearless as the Mórrígan, and she's young still. And she will live to see Nucky Thompson ground into the dust.
A new pair of shoes appear by the bed for him, a swank silk tie. He has champagne for the first time: glass in hand, she wraps her arms around him from behind, giggling like a girl as she pours it down his throat. On Sunday mornings she leaves the child with Richard and the two of them drive to the shore, and if the sun shines too brightly on the waves, it's still nice enough.
He can feel her working at his edges, somehow--tweaking him, slowly and carefully. Not into Jimmy, not exactly--he's too low-rent for that--but into the kind of man who could have helped put Jimmy on the throne. He wonders if she'll still be at it in ten years, when Tommy becomes a man. He wonders if he'll still be here, too, endlessly shaped beneath her fingers.
"I'm so proud of you," she says to him, as they lie together in bed. Her voice comes from some strange place halfway between mother and lover and he wonders, not for the first time or the last, just how far things went between those two.
But it's rather apt, after all: Jimmy used to do his job, in more ways than one. And so he beds Gillian and plots against Thompson and keeps watch over Richard, feeling as if he's only holding this life in trust because someday Darmody will appear at the door, hair still dripping wet, sardonic half-smile on his lips, and reclaim everything he left behind.
Because sooner or later, Owen will outlast his usefulness.