itinere | Open | Well, isn't this just fine and dandy.

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{criminal minds: derek morgan

Open | Well, isn't this just fine and dandy.

Suffice to say that this new locale that Venus is forced to call home has not been entirely kind to her. Firstly, she was taken from her lover and from Charming and unceremoniously dropped in this place. Then she met a most stunningly handsome man who turned out to be just a little nuts short of a full toolbox, very nearly overwhelming her with his ardor only to entirely vanish as if nothing had ever occurred.

It's enough to make a girl's head spin.

Then add insult to the injury of the whole drama that is her current position, she has the most hellacious headcold, making everything seem muzzy and fuddled.

Really, as she sneezes for the fiftieth time into her handkerchief, she falls to sit on a bench because a girl just needs a break. After all, it's hard to give oral pleasure when one can't breathe through one's nose.

So, there is a very striking brunette in a very short skirt sitting on a bench, sneezing and blowing her nose to beat the band. Oh, the trauma.

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Why did he have to touch her like that? Say things like that? Smile like that? Because a smile made it easy to dismiss what he's saying. It makes it easier for her to take him less seriously.

Because if she takes him seriously, she might just lose herself. And if Venus loses herself in someone who - their time aside - seems to so clearly have his life together, then well, that cannot end well, can it? And perhaps she's just as eager to be loved too - is that so wrong to be loved?

"What is it that you mean when you say 'get to know you,' mmm?" she asks, waggling a finger at him, her face - and her heart - somewhere between hope and humor and wanting to chastise the foolish boy. "Explain those words to me, please."

Derek did have his life together. But that wasn't always the case. He had fought so damn hard to get to where he was now, to be better, to be stronger, to be in control when for so long he had been so out of control. The truth was, Derek could get exhausted by the maintenance that his hard fought and earned and carefully cultivated image required.

"I mean..." A corner of his lips almost pulls into another smile at that waggling finger of hers. But he doesn't quite get there. "I mean I'm a person. You're a person. Layers. There's more than sex to a person. To you and me. I wanna know who you are, Venus. I wanna get to know you beyond the superficial. And I know that's gonna take time."

He looks away again, adjusting his sunglasses and then leaning forward away from the corner of the bench. He rests his elbows on his knees. "And I also understand that you might not wanna get to know me. And that's okay. I get it. Somethin' in this place made me crazy for awhile. And I'm... complicated sometimes. When it comes to dating."

Dating.

Venus had to smile, shaking her head. "Honey," she says, again, not cruelly, but with a gentle kind of incredulity. "You know, don't you, that I'm not someone a boy dates."

Oh, but since she was a high-schooler going by Vincent with an overwhelming and cruel mother, how she had wanted just that very thing.

The exoticness of the ordinary. It takes Venus back, making her just want with a kind of ache that seeps into one's bones.

"Do you really ... Derek ... " she has to clear her throat. "Do you really want to date ... me?"

The way she initially responds to him, he's pretty sure that she's telling him that no she does not want to date him. He had never in his life felt so inept in interacting with a woman. Usually it was all too easy to turn on the charm, put on his show of tough, charming guy and get a good time out of it. Right now, he was flailing in a way he never had before.

And he couldn't help the way the residue of love left in his heart made his chest ache when he felt rejection from her.

He looked down at the sidewalk beneath his feet. Maybe he needed to tone it back even more. Maybe he was still coming on to strong even though it felt like he wasn't doing enough. Anything to keep her from saying a flat out no to him.

"How about coffee?" Was that better? He looks over to her through the shade of his sunglasses. "One step at a time. Coffee sounds good, doesn't it? You and me? Conversation and caffeine?"

Well, she's give him one thing: he's determined. And really, there's no reason not to go. She never felt endangered by him.

"Throw in a scone," she finally says, a smile on her lips that doesn't quite make it to her eyes - she's waiting for the other shoe to drop, the one with a stiletto heel that has an obscenity that starts with an F on it and ends in "you."

"And you've got a deal."

"You got it, pretty girl." Relief flooded him. Derek exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. She could have said no. He'd given her an out. And he realized she had given him an out too. Neither of them had taken it. That had to say something, didn't it?

He stood up an held out a hand to her that she could take or not. He wouldn't be offended if she didn't. It might sting a little but that's okay. He could handle sting if she was willing to still hang out with him. Coffee was just coffee. No label on it like date or anything else that could make either of them uncomfortable. Hopefully he was on the right track now.

Her heels arere high enough that she did appreciate the help and takes his hand to get to her feet, letting go after that. Just as she's about to wriggle her skirt down her hips, she sneezes again, handkerchief over her mouth; she staggers a little with the force of it.

Lord. This cold just isn't going away. It's just a cold, she thinks, not relating it to that strange message they'd all gotten.

"Excuse me," she murmurs, wiping her nose again. "Perhaps I'll have tea."

She takes his hand and he's glad for about as long as it takes for her to let go again. No, he can be happy with what he got. But then she sneezes again and staggers and he reaches out to put a hand at the small of her back while they start walking.

"Wait what's this goin' on up in here?" He waves a finger around the nose area. "You sick?" He too remembers that strange message from some woman named Brig.

"It's just a cold," she says, waving her non-handkerchief'd hand. "Allergies, perhaps." It isn't something that concerns her. It just makes her head feel muddled.

"Are you having second thoughts of taking me to coffee, Derek? Because I have a bit of a cold? Trust me," she says as she starts to talk. "It takes more than a cold to take me down."

For a few moments he looks at her in concern, a nitch in his brows that's barely visible above the line of his sunglasses. He has this sinking feeling that her allergies and his headache have something to do with whatever is happening in the city right now. That worries him, of course, having just come off of the affect of something else that had been the city's doing.

"Nah. Just..." He shakes his head. "Maybe you should go home and lay down. I could bring you some chicken noodle soup, orange juice, stuff to get you feelin' better."

This is Venus turning to give him a look over her shoulder.

That sounds ... wonderful, really. Marvelous. She's so worn out by this blasted cold that there's a moment when tears nearly come to her eyes at the offer. She was on her way home when she'd paused at this bench for a respite. " ... I'll be fine, I'm sure."

"Look. I know you'll eventually be fine. But let me do somethin' to help you feel better now." Derek says, stopping on the sidewalk with a hand at her elbow to let her know he had stopped walking so that he could talk to her.

"I know where you live. You go home, get comfortable, lay down. I'll be there in twenty minutes or so with a care package. Easy." He lays out the plan for her. He isn't so insistent that he sounds like he's giving her an order, he's just giving her an alternative plan.

"You realize that's what stranger-danger denizens say," Venus teases, clearly meaning no harm by it, tired, though and worn down. "'I know where you live.'"

She sneezes again - a blast of four in a row and it's clear that she cannot argue with his point that she needs to lie down. "... all right." Squeezing Derek's arm, she says, "thank you, Derek." And she starts the slow walk toward her home.

He smirks at her teasing. And he's glad that it's clear that she's teasing him because that was too close to what he had been the last few weeks. Stranger danger. When she finally concedes after another bout of sneezing, he's relieved. She really should be lying down. He nods and watches her walk off with some of that sway and swag he had mentioned earlier.

Finally, he goes off to get a few things. It takes just a little bit longer than the twenty minutes he said it would. It's just over half an hour later when he knocks on her door and then twists the knob to let himself inside.

"Hey it's me, gorgeous." He calls out to let her know she didn't have a stranger in her apartment. Then he locks the door. "Don't get up. I'll find my way around." He goes straight to the kitchen with his bags.

Venus has stripped off her heels (such blessed relief) and her dress, replacing it with a robe. She's pulled her hair up off her neck and has made a nest for herself on her sofa. She still feels quite terrible actually and is too fatigued and sick to object to being called gorgeous, because she is far from in this moment in time.

Her little apartment is nothing special, but it doesn't need to be. "In here," she says of her living room, her voice sounding stifled and sniffly.

In the kitchen, Derek finds a mug and puts it, filled with water, into the microwave. While that's heating, he finds a bowl and empties a can of chicken noodle soup into the bowl. "They were out of chicken noodles so I went with chicken and stars. Pretty much the same thing anyway. Tastes the same."

The microwave beeped and he swapped out the mug for the bowl. With the mug out, he drops a tea bag of chamomile tea in it. His mom had always found that one soothing, at least. "Got some OJ in the fridge for you. Vitamin C."

And then he finally appears in the living room with a steaming mug he sets on the coffee table, a box of kleenex with aloe in it for her nose which he also sets on the coffee table, a box of sinus medicine and THIS stuffed lion. He holds the doll out with a grin and wiggles it back and forth. "For you. Too good to pass up."

"Oh, look at that thing," Venus all but coos, making grabby hands for the lion. And he's soft, too! She turns on her side on the couch, snuggling the stuffed animal close. "Thank you."

Just as another sneeze comes, she snatches up one of those soft tissues and covers her mouth.

The aloe really does make the sneeze a much more pleasant experience, all things considered. She slumps back into the couch. "I haven't had chicken and stars for ages." She can't smell it, but she has a sense-memory of the soup.

Lions. Derek didn't necessarily collect them, but he identified with them. Hence, the lion tattoo on one of his shoulders. And he had no problem buying their paraphernalia for other people. Maybe when she saw it she would think of him. And maybe it would be a good thought when and if she did.

He gets to his knees by the couch and starts to peel open the box of medicine. They always make these things so hard to get into. But he also wanted her to see him opening it, having to rip through the box and peel the paper away from the plastic side. That way, there would be no question that he was doing anything unwanted to her. "Decongestant... stuff. It should help."

The microwave beeps and he settles the pills on the table by the tea before getting back up to go into the kitchen. "Anything else you can think of that you might need?" He calls over his shoulder.

Taking up the pills to look at dosage information and the like, Venus says, "I don't suppose you were found a new nose or something of the like," she replies. "Mine seems to have fallen out of warranty and stopped working."

She does, though, take two pills and washes them down with tea. When Derek comes back with the soup, she gives a small, crooked smile. "You're being very kind."

Derek carefully carries the bowl of soup and a spoon back into the living room. "Hey, it's nice to be taken care of sometimes, I know that." And as if it were an afterthought to the original statement once he realizes that it could be taken as an entirely different thing in regard to himself, he adds. "Especially when you're sick."

He has the bowl on a folded dish towel when he hands it to her so she doesn't burn herself. Then he kneels next to the couch again so she can take up all the room she needs to on the couch. "I grew up with all women so... I've got an idea of what's good for takin' care of them when they're sick." Or, all the time.

"I'm glad you aren't scared of me." He says, the words slipping out. She had let him into her space, after all. He was thankful for that.

"Well, now I have a bowl of hot soup I can throw at you if you try anything untoward," she tells him. Suddenly the couch is indeed quite full: herself, her lion, soup and tissues as well as her quilt.

"All women, mmm?" settling back, Venus starts to eat her soup, watching him. "Tell me about your family, Derek. About you being a little boy among women."

He gives her a small grin at her comment about the possibility of his being untoward. He has to take that as teasing and not as if she thinks he actually might. As it was, he had been waiting to see if he needed to leave now that he'd gotten her all settled, whether through his own decision, as he was thinking through it, or hers, if she wanted him to go. But when she asks him to tell her something about himself, he figures he gets to stay for a bit. His legs shift to the side and he settles on the floor by the couch, one elbow up on the couch with her.

"Grew up in Chicago... on the wrong side of the tracks. Lower income housing. Gangs and violence. Lots of crime. I was the baby of three kids. Two older sisters, Sarah and Desi." He misses them so much. "My mama was a seamstress. Dad was a cop. But he was killed when I was just barely ten." He pauses, shaking his head. "Ironically, he was off duty. At a seven-eleven where I was with him. Begging him for candy we couldn't afford but he took me in to buy anyway. Guy came in to rob the place. My dad ended up dead."

For a moment, he seems to get lost in that memory, the darkness of it, seeing his dad, superman himself, in a pool of his own blood. Then he snaps out of it. "So I was the man of the house after that. With two older sisters and my mom. It could've been worse. They're amazing women. Strong. My mom picked up two more jobs so she could take care of us. My sisters and me were home alone a lot. But there was a lot of love." Sounds like a good enough life. But there was a lot that was not right for Derek.

"I would," Venus hazards, "imagine that your mother and your sisters is so very proud of you now, Derek." She smiles, her cheek resting on the lion's head; she's listened to every word, despite her fatigue and stuffed head. "I'm so sorry about your father. That must have been horrible." After all, the loss of a parent, no matter the circumstances, has lingering effects on one's psyche.

It was hard. Sometimes Derek had nightmares about his father's death. Sometimes he obsessed over it, trying to think of what he could have done as his father laid there bleeding out to save his life. 'Hide Derek. Go over there and hide.' His father had said. And Derek had stayed hidden, even when the man had opened fire in the store, even when his dad had fallen to the floor full of bullets. And Derek, at ten years old, felt so responsible for that and for his mom and sisters.

"They are. I don't get to see 'em as often as I like." Derek did not like going home to Chicago for any number of reasons. And some very specific reasons. His mom said she understood, she would sometimes come to see him. But not often enough. It was a hurdle he couldn't get over.

"When I was home, we used to play together. My GI-Joe's and their Barbies. Somehow my GI-Joe's would end up their boyfriends..." Because his sisters had him wrapped around their little finger and he couldn't tell them no. GI-Joe's don't have time to date, they're too busy saving the world. He couldn't say that. So instead, they dated all the Barbies.

"Until I got mixed up in one of the gang's on the street." He says. "You know how it is... kid without his dad, lookin' for... someone to fill that hole. I messed up for awhile."

The smile Venus gives him then is knowing and nonjudgmental between sips of soup and tea. "Some of my very best friends are members of one of the most notorious and violent motorcycle gangs in all of California. I can say with great certainty that not all members of gangs are bad men. But tell me," she adds, setting aside the bowl for the moment, "you don't still play with GI Joes, do you?"

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