He wakes to the thunder, not to his nightmares, as he is most used to. He wakes to a crack in the air like a war drum, and the howling of the wind, and the rain to his windows: he wakes to the gray world. Ah, that's right. They'd predicted a storm. It'd been unusually warm, recently. A cold front was coming, signaling the end of the sweltering summer that left his turtleneck and labcoat hanging on a hook in the closet Marie insisted he organize.
Yet, he didn't wake to her presence in his house. Not her humming, seemingly ever-present whenever he roused, or the smell of the coffee she usually brewed, or the sound of her banging into a table or a chair or something else because it was in her blind spot. He takes a look at the alarm clock on his desk, a relatively new edition after he broke the last one, and notes that it is 4 am.
Ungodly, really. Mother Nature was getting back at him for something. Just which of his misdeeds worth punishing with something so cruel, however, he couldn't place. He lost track of them after a little while.
Grumbling, he stood, yawning. Then perhaps she was asleep, his constant housemate. She'd been such a fixture in his life, it felt strange to have her gone, and her absence gaped in the room. He peered around, grabbing up his glasses from the side, and swiveled his head, trying to locate her soul.
When he realized she wasn't in the house, he got up to leave the room.
But there was no need for worry, and he knew that. She was outside but she was alone. She was outside but she wasn't standing upon the edge of the roof, overlooking the city with her one golden eye tender and pitying.
She was in his courtyard.
He made his way through his lab, wondering what Marie would be doing in such strong rain. Death City didn't often get it: most believed they were in a drought, and so it would be one of the first times she'd experience such a heavy storm after coming back from Oceania.
Staying, curiously, in Death City after coming back from Oceania. He'd have to talk to her about that one. Not that the lab wasn't open for her, welcoming, even, but just that he wanted to spare her the trouble of being by him. He was a haunt on the best of days, though, on the particularly good ones, he knew how to snark with the best of them.
On his way out, he absentmindedly patted at the side of his sleeping pants, a habit that he got into since he usually kept his cigarettes in a pocket around the same area. Ah, well. He'd have to go without a smoke for a little bit, then. It wasn't worth it, to go all the way back, when all he was going to do was see what she was doing outside.
When he opens his door, she is there, dancing in the downpour, glowing. It is dark, bleary, and she is almost blurred at the edges and soft from how she radiated. She turns to him, and he is immediately tempted to walk forward. Because this was Marie: the beacon, the lighthouse beckoning him home. Though, it doesn't make sense, because what he called shelter was behind him, around him, as he stood in the doorway.
A rivulet of water runs down her face and over her lips while she smiles at him. He notes how her usually well maintained hair was flat, close to her scalp, the strands all over her cheeks and caught on her mouth.
"You'll die of the flu," he informs her, dryly. Fitting, he supposes, because he's the one out of the rain and she is drenched to the bones. Her nightgown swirls around her, but it doesn't matter, much. No one came to Patchwork Labs: certainly not in the dead of night. No one would be there to see her trapeze, almost with a childlike glee, in the gray.
She is such juxtaposition to it all: her heat, her dance, her glow. Even drenched, she is all rose and gold, skin sunkissed. In the monochrome, she is a blip of color and she giggles.
"I feel like I haven't seen rain in forever," she tells him, voice raised to combat the wind, to reach him as he stood on the threshold.
He says nothing because he does not have to speak. There are no sick games to play, with her. Marie wears no masks, has no alternate faces: she does not ask pretense nor pretend from him.
Instead, she has started to twirl, her skirt billowing heavily around her as she spins, arms flying out for balance. Marie squeals in delight, her bare feet moving, her body circling. She is not graceful. She has never, could never have a liquid step. As her hair flies out around her, hitting her in the face, he notes how jagged her part-line looks, the zig-zag of it. And that's a contrast, too, because the yellow cotton of her pajamas sticks to her and she is all smooth edges and bunched fabric and roundness.
He opens his mouth to say something to stop her: that she looks ridiculous, which is true. Perhaps that it is stupid of her to be out, in the middle of the night, bumbling about. That her voice would wake the dead, woke him, and he'd like some sleep.
But he closes it immediately after the thoughts flit through. He is unused to watching curious things without killing them, but he can observe, for now. He is good at that. He blends into the space because it is his, first. She is the only inconsistency in the gray-scale. He, in contrast, is a sliver of silver and white, a quiltwork of a man.
In front of him, the hurricane that is her turns and turns and turns, dizzy without doubt, fingers stretched wide as though waiting for someone to fill the spaces between. Marie is a tropical storm of a woman, giddy, destructive. He has seen her demolish and leave nothing in her wake but rubble and ruin.
And yet, that is also not who she is. His hand comes to his phantom pocket once more, looking for a cigarette. He was unprepared to spend so long outside.
Her giggles surround him.
He wants to smoke. That is all there is to it. He wants to, and he will as soon as he can go retrieve his pack. So he steps forward, into the rain, and walks to the whirlwind that is her, and she keeps her head back, still spindling in the cool air. When he reaches for her, intent on getting them inside swiftly, he means to grab her wrist, but he finds her hand, instead.
Whether it is subconscious on his part or no, he doesn't care. It's wet. And he already feels his hair dripping, his glasses rendered near useless. For a single moment, Marie is motionless, but then she squeezes his massive hand in her miniscule one and, somehow, regains momentum, spinning him with her. They don't get far in her twirl, since he's much larger than her, and strong as she is, she doesn't force him if he will not whirl along.
As they make their way inside, she is still laughing, but there is an apology there, somewhere. For rousing him, for getting him, death forbid, outside, for something else: he doesn't know. Marie is a slippery slope. If he thinks too hard about her, he doesn't know where he'll end up.
All he knows is that he has The Pulverizer by the elbow, bringing her back inside. And after the door closes, shutting them away from the night, he thinks that in all the destruction she can and does bring, the eye of her storm was the safest place to be.
whoops my hand slipped and I wrote even more SteinMarie