itinere | Open : Well, isn't this a relief?

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Open : Well, isn't this a relief?

There had been more than a few moments when Venus had threatened to lose hope. She is strong: she knows that. She showed that. It's just that things were so very grim for a while there: no power, food that was difficult to come by, things that chewed other things, all of it could get a lady down.

But, now that things are looking better, well, so is Venus. Now that the sky is back (and as strange as that is and things are just ... better. Showers are so very nice, and so is being able to cook. Between helping Derek to get the fitness center back into order and getting her apartment back into order (though she misses having a reason to sleep with Derek every night), Venus is busy. But when she has a bag of homemade food (chicken and potato salad), she ventures toward the garage where she knows Adam works. She wants to see him! She's missed him! She's worried. So, she hopes he's there. She hopes he's all right.

She hopes they've all come out the other side of all this insanity all right.

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"I did, yes," she says, turning to reach for the bag, drawing out what she brought: fried chicken and potato salad (though it's not the best potato salad, what with her not being able to find as many eggs as she needed) and some brownies (that, you see, is where the eggs went). She also has a thermos of tea. "Eat up, sweetheart, this is all for you." And his friends if he wants, but Adam is welcome to have it all. She pries open the lid to the chicken and the smell wafts out, then the potato salad and the brownies. She rummages back in the bag for a fork and a paper plate, too, though she won't tell if he eats right out of the containers.

All this food is for him? Adam looks from it up to her with the eyes of a person who is surprised and unaccustomed to being cared for or thought of at all by any adults. It's always been him by himself. Venus thought about him even when he wasn't around her. She had to to have made all of this for him. Right? It's a strange feeling, being thought of, existing outside of himself.

The scent reaches him and his stomach growls involuntarily. He licks his lips and tilts his head. "Will you eat with me?"

If she says no, he will feel like an inconvenience and a kind of spectacle. Venus knows that sensation. So she says, of course, "I hoped you would ask." She will break one of the brownies in two and just have that, eating it in small nibbles. If asked, she'll say that she's watching her figure, which she is, of course, but that's not why: she wants him to have more. "I hope you like it. This is the food that I like when I feel just that bit not myself. Comfort food, they call it, and that's just about right, I think.

The rouse works because when she takes a part of a brownie, Adam is picking up some chicken and taking a bite. It's delicious. But he's also a barely eighteen year old boy and as slim as he is, he can still put a good amount of food away when he's presented with it so readily as Venus has done. And since it's homemade, he doesn't even think to ask how much he owes her for it.

It's only when he's reaching for another piece of chicken that he realizes that he should say something and speaks again. "It's really good. Thank you."

Adam shakes his head. "I haven't had fried chicken or brownies in a really long time. And I've ever had potato salad." He looks at the latter somewhat skeptically before having more chicken.

"Well, if you decide you don't like it, I'll remember not to bring it," she tells him, smiling, so very happy she can at least do this for him. "But perhaps, just give it a try? It's got bacon in it, and we all know everything's better with bacon, don't we?"

She is nibbling at her brownie bit, making it last as long as she can, so that he can eat as much of what she brought as he wants to. "I like cooking; it helps make me to feel useful when ... well, when I suppose I don't always."

Freaks have their novelty, after all, don't they? But uses?

Adam is and will continue to gladly eat the food. He was hungry. He can admit that. But it's also good. Venus, he thinks, is a good cook. Adam has never had much that wasn't out of a can or frozen. Even with that, there was never much food in the house. There was always beer though.

He pauses a bit when she says she doesn't always feel useful. Adam has felt that way many times. It makes him sad to think that Venus felt the same way.

"You're useful... even if you don't always realize it." He says as he picks up the container of potato salad and pokes at it with a fork. "I mean, I know... it sucks to feel like a waste of space." Speaking from experience, of course. "But you're not."

"Well, then, that makes two of us," Venus says, keeping her hand resting lightly on his shoulder. "And I know of at least one person who will agree with me on that count, I imagine."

And no, right now, she doesn't feel like a waste at all. She feels valuable and useful. It's a good feeling.

When Adam takes a bite then, she watches his expression. What does he think?

Adam instinctively shakes his head when she says that both of them aren't a waste of space. But then he pauses and shrugs. He's starting to see that the things his dad have always said might not be so. Ronan has been a huge part of that. Gansey, Noah, Persephone and Venus have helped as well. Blue, well, he's still stinging from her harsh rejection awhile back no matter how much time it's been. In the land of self esteem, it didn't help.

"Ronan's... I'm not sure his opinion counts." Because Ronan sees Adam in a way that no one ever has, as far as Adam knows. He sees past all the dirt and grime and poverty and general broken pieces to a place in Adam that Adam didn't know existed. He doesn't care that Adam is hard to be friends with.

He takes the bite of potato salad and rolls it around in his mouth a bit before brows lift and he nods. "I like it." He'll start shoveling more in because he likes it so much.

Good. Venus smiles, indulging herself and him too, letting him eat his fill and more. "Of course his opinion counts," she tells him. "Just as Derek's opinion counts for me as well. Just because they might be a bit ... well, biased ... doesn't mean that they don't count, sweetheart."

"I would hope that you would say that my opinion counts, too. Even though I am admittedly very biased. Because I think you're just lovely."

Well, when she says it that way, that Derek's opinion counts for her as well and that her opinion counts, he can't really argue. Venus's opinion does matter. So does Derek's. And so, he supposes, does Ronan's. All those good things that Ronan and Venus think about him are true from their perspective.

It's so strange to be thought of as lovely or attractive or anything good.

"I like it here better than home." He admits. Because here there is no court case, no Robert Parrish to contend with. But, there's a flip-side to that too. "But there are a lot of unfinished things back home." Robert Parrish, his mom, Aglionby, Gansey's supposed death (which he will prevent), Glendower. "I don't like unfinished things."

"We all left things behind, sweetheart," she tells him. Unlike Adam, though, Venus doesn't really miss anything or need to get back to anything, aside from Alexander. Otherwise, this place is a home for her as well as any place.

"If those things need to be done," she tells him, reaching out to touch his arm, "then it will be there when you get to it. But ... well, I think you should make the most of your life here. Take it by both hands so that you can wring all the happiness from it that you can."

In this moment, Adam kind of wishes Venus were in Henrietta. He wishes he had known her there. He wishes he could know her there when and if they go back. Going back home means losing Venus and her friendship and her confidence and support. That thought makes him sad and his brow furrows. He dips his head and pokes the potato salad with the fork again.

"I wish you could go back with me. Or that you lived in Henrietta." He's only so open about it because his mind is really fucked up right now. His mind is fractured, like the ley lines in Itinere.

"My parents are... they're a soap opera... like the really bad kind." He looks up at Venus. She's sitting on his right. He wonders if she knows about his left ear. "Did you know I'm deaf in my left ear? My dad..." He stops. Venus knows about his dad. "It's weird cause I remember hearing out of it not so long ago, so sometimes I almost feel like I can. But I can't. So Ronan always tries to be on my right side. That's nice of him, right?"

"Your Ronan is a good one," she says almost automatically, processing all that he's said, and so glad that he feels he can tell her that, "fucked-up" mind and all that.

Her hand moves despite herself, practically, once again cupping his cheek. "I wish I could too. Me and Derek. It would be so much better than you coming to Charming. Charming isn't like its name at all. So, I would go to Henrietta."

Teasing aside, she sobers. "I am so sorry about your trials, sweetheart. Your father and my mother would have gotten along quite famously, I think. And they both deserve to rot in hell."

Her voice is quiet and firm. She believes that with all her heart. "My mother is already saving him a place, in fact."

Adam can't and won't argue that Ronan is a good catch. The truth is that Adam has always idolized him in every way even before he knew Ronan Lynch. Now, yes, he sees all those imperfections up close, and that's only served to make Adam admire him even more. Ronan's imperfections make him a little more attainable.

Now, why he's with Adam, Adam will probably never know.

"Did she beat you up?" It's such a forward question. But the way Adam asks it is so tentative and genuinely curious. It's a horrific thing but it's said so casually because of the dilution that happens when having experienced something similar.

Ah, if only. Venus's smile doesn't reach her eyes; it is small and tremulous and terribly sad. She tucks hair back behind her ear, ducking her head for a moment. However, she doesn't shy away from answering Adam. He deserves that.

"When she found out that ... well, that I am not the most normal of people, she used that against me. I became the foundation for her very lucrative video pornography business. I was young- I was so very young."

She will go into more detail if she needs to, but she may not need to.

She didn't need to go into more detail. And Adam figured that if she had stopped there then there was a reason for that, so he wouldn't push her to say more than she was comfortable with. He got the gist of it anyway so he nods slowly and shoves more potato salad into his mouth.

"I don't really like most people." He admits after a moment. People are judgmental and cruel. Grown ups and kids alike. His parents. His teachers who knew something was going on and did nothing. Kids at Aglionby who knew he was so poor. Adam never felt good enough for any of these people. He wanted not to care. It just made him try harder to be better.

He shrugs. "It probably evens out. Most people don't care all that much for me either." Adam pauses, setting the food aside. "Your mom deserves what she got."

Venus has wanted to like most people. And she has wanted most people to like her. The lot of the outsider, perhaps.

To what Adam says, though, she keeps smiling, albeit even more darkly before it fades away all together. "She does. She got shot point blank." Venus taps her chest. Right there, by Jackson.

Looking over to Adam, she asks, "and your father?"

It might make them both despicable people to subscribe to the 'she deserves what she gets' line of thinking. But Adam has never claimed not to be a despicable person, quite the opposite, actually. He knows fully well the darkness that resides in his own mind and heart and will never claim that it isn't there.

The difference here is that Adam has a sort of stockholm syndrome when it comes to his parents. He thinks he deserves what his parents did to him. He wishes they would love him. He wishes he were whatever they wanted him to be.

It's hard to reconcile those feelings with what he says next. "The night he hit me so hard he took the hearing from this ear, Ronan was there. Ronan beat the crap out of my dad. The cops showed up and my dad played the victim. I had to make a choice. I pressed charges so that the cops would let Ronan go."

He shrugs, looking over to Venus. What does she think of him choosing Ronan over his dad? "We went to court. He might be going to jail." Might. That much hasn't been decided yet.

Surely, Adam will notice that Venus's expression in no way turns judgemental about his choices. Her eyes do darken when he talks of his father causing permanent damage. In her mind, then, Adam of course made the right choice. How they both ended up here will remain a mystery, but it seems Ronan has, since the start, proved himself to be a good person.

Venus likes that about him.

"I hope he goes to jail," she says quietly. "I hope at least in that way, he pays for what he did to you. You did not deserve to be treated that way, sweetheart, not by a long shot. You deserve good things. Only good things."

"Sometimes I hope he does too." Adam says, a roundabout admission to his confusion on the matter. On one hand he knows his dad belongs in jail, or maybe Adam should have just moved out a long time ago. On the other hand his mother will be alone now. He probably did stuff to piss his dad off, legitimately. Sometimes that line is blurred.

He shrugs. "I kind of like it here cause I don't have to deal with it." As long as Robert Parrish doesn't show up here, then Itinere is far better than Henrietta could ever be. "But he's still, I can still hear him, you know?"

Adam isn't sure he deserves good things. People keep saying he does. But he isn't sure. He's done some horrible things. His mind is so dark sometimes. He's not always a good person. Maybe he's gotten exactly what he deserves. But he doesn't argue it aloud. He really wants Venus to like him. Talking himself down doesn't seem very smart. And even if Adam isn't always good, he is pretty smart.

What could he have possibly done to warrant being beaten?! Nothing.

Venus could spend all her days here trying to remind him of that. It's now one of her goals.

"If he does show up here for some reason," she says, quietly and tentatively, "something can be done like was done for me. But that is something that cannot be undone." She has a hunch, after all, that Ronan could deal with this, too. But sometimes it takes someone outside the situation too, like Jackson was.

She will not pressure him about this. There is nothing more personal. But the offer is out there and ideally, he will not take offense to being made such an offer.

After what Ronan and he had done to Greenmantle, Adam takes no offense to the offer. How could he? He's dark on the inside and now Ronan knows how dark. Venus probably knows too. He does look over to her for a long moment before he quickly averts his gaze as he always ends up doing first.

Right now Adam is selfishly wishing for Venus not to go away as people tend to do here. If this place runs on some kind of wish magic, then he's keeping her here through sheer force of will. How terrible of him.

"Do you wanna see what I'm making Ronan?" He asks her.

Really, were Adam to tell Venus that he wills her to stay, she would be quite flattered and very touched. She has no intention of leaving as she has nothing waiting for her of note back in Charming and here, she has Derek and Adam - people who legitimately care about her: a kind of family, really, in a place that, despite recent events, is and can be quite nice.

"I would like to see that," she says, making sure the food is in a state that it can be moved and saved for Adam to eat more of later.

Adam pushes up off the couch and moves across the expansive space. There's a dirty tarp covering something in the corner. Adam carefully peels it away so as not to mess anything up. Underneath, a nearly completed motorcycle is there. There's nothing shiny or new about it, which is very much an Adam thing.

He looks back to Venus and shoves his hands in his pockets. "He likes to drive really fast and... this barely weighs anything so it'll go really fast."

Edited 2016-03-19 15:14 (UTC)

"Oh, my," she says, coming closer. While she may not be an expert on motorcycles, some of her time with SAMCRO has to have rubbed off or been transferred by osmosis. She reaches out carefully, respectfully, to touch, tracing along the seat. "This looks like it will go very face and I'm sure you'll do what you can to make it safe," she says, gaze flicking back to Adam. To control what can be controlled.

They both know, after all, that they can only control so much, but what they can should be controlled, if at all possible.

Open : Well, isn't this a relief?

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