Written for a friend and to finally make good on a promise to write more Gren. Hope it's decent.
Holly is a lot of things. A troll, a Fable, a sister, a daughter. A friend. A woman who can play a decent game of darts and drink a decent amount of booze. She can read any sign no matter how fast the cab they're in is going and she's got a steady hand to paint nails with. She can reach any shelf in her bar regardless of height and she can knock grown men on their asses without even thinking about transforming.
Holly is a lot of things, but she's not an idiot.
She's left Gren alone most of the night. Most of the last few nights, too. She knows when the grumpy swamp man wants to be left alone, which is often. She likes it usually. She likes the hum of the Midas Gold sign, washing the glasses and watching reruns of soap operas on an old TV. Sure, she needs customers some nights to make enough to get by, but she always does just that. Gets by. That's the most a disenfranchised Fable can hope for these days.
When it hits that point in the night where no one drops by she approaches him. He turns his head, five fingers gripping the edges of his shot glass. Anyone else would look at that mug and think 'mean.' Holly knows better. Not mean, just defensive. Not nasty, but tired.
"What's going on?" she says, her drawl especially pronounced after several hours of silence. "What the hell is your problem the past few days- no, don't answer that unless you're actually planning on telling me the truth."
"The fuck," is his immediate response, a precursor to meaningful words more than anything else. "I haven't said a fucking thing to you, what's the fucking deal?"
"You're a mess," she says. "I mean, you always are, but look at you."
"You're the mess!" is his hot reply. He can go zero to sixty faster than anyone she knows. "Fuck if I know, ain't a guy allowed to be in a shit mood around here?"
"Yeah," she says. "But not for a week straight, not without putting the bartender in a shittier mood."
"What, so you're not going to get me drunk? I can go to other bars, you know."
"You can't rack up this kind of tab at other bars."
"Is that what you want, Holly? Fuckin' money? Well, look, I don't got it right now, but I will, I always fuckin' pay off my tab, you kn-"
"It's not about the money," she says quietly, reaching out to grasp the shoulder with an empty sleeve attached. "It's about you needing the tab in the first place. You never let it get this bad. Gren, what the fuck is going on lately?"
Gren sighs, a low angry noise that the man manages to make all his own. She can see him considering his options in the bottom of his empty glass, whether to tell or to say something so mean spirited she'll leave him be for another night or two. He's predictable, right down to the reaction she knew he'd have if she told him that.
She decides to put him out of his misery. "You lost your job, didn't you?"
His mouth falls open dramatically. She reaches over and shuts it for him. A series of expressions that range from betrayed to confused cross his face until he settles on defeated. "How did you know?"
"You're a barfly, Grendel," she says. "But you don't usually spend this much time here. You shouldn't drink this much, even for you. It's fucking depressing to watch."
"Maybe you shouldn't run a bar if you don't want to watch people get drunk," he snaps.
"Maybe you should watch your mouth if you don't want to get hit," she replies.
"You'd really hit a cripple?" he says with a grimace that contorts his whole face, twists his whole body in a sad hunched way that she wouldn't be able to describe to anyone else, only that it makes her chest ache. That's the moment she knows things are fucked.
"Go home, Gren," she says. "Sober up and then we'll talk. You're a fucking mess."
"Oh, who the fuck cares if I'm a mess," he says, dragging the shot glass across the table so tightly the wood scraped. "I'm always a fucking mess. I've been a mess since I stepped onto this shithole the mundies call America. I've been a mess since my ass dropped into this world, thinking, well fuck, this weird warm hellhole has got to be at least a little better than getting my dick chopped off by the Adversary. You know what, Holly? You know fucking what?"
"What?" she asks despite herself, arms crossed, because Gren's rhetorical questions are always so old but so desperate.
"I was fucking wrong! I should have let the Adversary chew on my balls as long as he liked. Better than this shit. Better than sitting around and letting the mundy world ask for more and more, for money for their booze and their swanky apartments and their uptight little noses that always find a way to turn the fuck up at me! Not to mention our own people standing there high horse and charging out the ass for the Glamours we need just to stop ourselves from being shipped off to their woodland penitentiary!" His voice cracks at the end. Maybe it's the big word.
"Gren," she says. "You don't have enough money for a Glamour, do you?"
"Not just that," he says, his head now turned away from her so that his slicked back hair hides most of his face. "It's not just that I can't even get Greenleaf to give me the time of day without cold hard cash. It's…I'm fucking broke. Completely. Holly, I…fuck. Fuck."
She reaches over and turns his face towards her. He flinches at the speed with which she does it, his neck cracking. He doesn't meet her gaze. He never seems to anymore.
She sits on the stool next to him, scooting it towards him and wincing at the scrape against aged floorboards. "The fuck is going on, Grendel? Shit, if you can't talk to me, who can you talk to?"
"What if I said no one?" He says this nasty shit sometimes. It isn't going to make her leave him alone, not right now.
"You ain't going to say no one," she says, with a heavy feeling of certainty of the words coming out of her mouth.
He hesitates, a moment in time where she genuinely wonders if he's going to bottle it all back up and disappear into the night to go kick trash cans over and break windows. "I didn't just lose my job," he says. "I got evicted."
She sucks a breath through her front teeth and has no idea what to say. "Shit, Gren," comes after a long pause, when words will finally come to her. "I'm so fucking sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry about. You didn't go up to them and force them to do it," he grunts. Now the blush is coming as he realizes what he's admitted to. "I'll find a new place soon enough, if I can ever get Snow to fucking listen for once. They're supposed to make sure we have housing."
"Housing we can pay for," she says, too surprised to be angry at the fucks in the Business Office for once.
He snarls. "What's the point of them if all they can do is point us to a shithole where we can live?"
"They can trick the manager into not needing to see a- fuck, why am I defending their shit? I don't know, Gren. Maybe they don't really give a shit about us after all, even after all Snow did with me."
"I could have told you that," says Gren. "If they cared, Bigby might have gotten in the teeniest bit of trouble for all the damage he did to your bar."
"I don't care about my bar," is her reply. "I care about how he got no shit for the damage he did to you."
Even for Fables arms aren't exactly a dime a dozen. Holly was the one who stitched him up that night. She remembers the crying, the screams of pain. She almost forgot during that terrible week, when Lily was lost to her forever. She hasn't forgotten now.
"You should care about your bar," he grumbles. "What would you do without it?"
"What would I do without you?" she retorts, the tone biting but the words anything but.
He pauses. He wants to say something pointlessly cruel, something he knows isn't true. He might be mean and angry and not know when to shut up, but he's there for her to the point of never being there for himself. Even he can't deny that- or he can, but not successfully. She has a million examples she can pull from going back hundreds of years, when her mother won that poker game and the quiet guy at the bar looked around and said, "About fucking time we got some new management."
Now he says nothing. She squeezes his shoulder. "You're getting the couch upstairs tonight, okay?"
"If you really wanna put me up I can sleep on th-"
"The cot? The place I put every drunk who passes out on my bar? Fuck that. The couch is more comfortable."
He grouses about it, but she doesn't care. He'd complain about every good and bad thing to ever happen to him, given the chance. He's turned complaining into an art form.
"Upstairs with you," she says. He's only slightly off-kilter in his step, making her wonder how high his alcohol tolerance is these days. That's another problem with being centuries old and living in a world designed for the mortal. Who knew how things affected you in the long run?
They leave the building and go up the rickety metal staircase in the back. It's inconvenient to need to go outside but hardly the worst thing to ever happen to her. Gren grumbles about the weather while she unlocks the door to her apartment.
It's not amazing, but she's seen where Gren lived. She ushers him in and locks the door behind her, flipping on the light.
Her apartment isn't much, but compared to Gren's messy little hole it's an afghan covered paradise. She isn't sure what it is about afghans, except that she likes the way they feel and that they can cover up holes in unfortunately ugly and old sofas, and she's gone through plenty of those.
He doesn't make fun of the photos on the walls like usual, maybe because the last time he did she snapped at him for not appreciating art and maybe because he's a kicked dog who's more interested in licking his wounds. She supposes she's always wondered if being a veterinarian is a good job.
"I hate afghans," were the first words out of his mouth.
"I don't care," she said. "I like them."
"They itch," he whined.
"So?" she says. "There are a lot worse problems to have than an itchy blanket. Now take a shower, you reek like booze worse than me, and I run a bar. I'll make you something to eat while you do."
Again, her fridge isn't much, but at least there's enough in it to piece together a decent enough meal of spaghetti and mashed potatoes. She knows the same isn't true of Gren's fridge, not unless she personally buys the groceries herself. She sometimes wonders if the two of them were meant for this world. She knows the answer without wondering, but she also reminds herself that some of the mundies weren't either.
She almost puts it all in the same bowl until she remembers the cooking channel she likes to watch and that mundies never do that. They have some pathological need to separate all their food. She will give them that it tastes better that way.
The food is ready by the time Gren reappears in the same clothes, his hair too slick against his head. She suddenly realizes that when it dries, there won't be any pomade in it. Maybe she can use the chance to convince him he looks better without it; she hasn't seen his natural hair in ages, but damn, it has to be better than watching his hair freeze in the winter.
"The fuck is that smell?" he asks.
"Dinner," she says. "Solid food served with a glass of water, not alcohol. I know the thought is completely new to you, but I think you can give it a chance."
He pauses and shoots a grin at her. "You're being real mean to this poor helpless homeless man."
She shakes her head. "Grendel, if a day comes that you're helpless, you can throw all my afghans out."
"You might wanna pile 'em near the door soon," he says, pointing towards the front of the apartment helpfully. "Fuckin' take a good look at me, Holly. I'm a mess."
"We've covered that base," she says. She walks over to the table where she's set his dinner and pulls the chair out, listening to another set of legs scrape against a wooden floor. "Eat."
"You don't think I'm helpless? I think Bigby fucking Wolf got pretty damn close when he tore my arm off."
"Look, Gren," she replies, arms crossed in a position that's become all too familiar. "You couldn't be helpless if you tried."
"Jack calls me all bark, no bite."
"Jack's a dumbass and you know it," she says. "Now eat."
He sits in front of the food. It's a step. He pulls his chair in, somehow managing to do the whole business without making it hurt their eardrums. Grendel, the man who hates noise, would have a trick for that. She wonders if she could get him to teach it to her.
"I don't feel like I have a bite anymore." The words come out soft, tired. Sad. It hurts to hear.
"You turn into a giant monster," she says, sitting into the seat across from him. "Or you turn into a human, depending on the way you look at it."
"I don't really know anymore," says Gren. He starts shoveling the food into his mouth, and it's a couple minutes before either of them talk again.
"It doesn't matter," he adds when his mouth isn't so full of potatoes and pasta he can't speak. "I'll be back to the beast everyone learns about in schools soon enough. Then Bigby'll find out and get a kick out of dragging me to the Farm."
"He's not going to do that," she says. "I'll cover your Glamour, Gren, as long as you promise me you'll start looking for a job. And before you say a fucking thing, I know that's easier said than done. I know."
"A guy does fuckin' heavy lifting for two hundred years and suddenly can't lift a box, you know?" says Gren, his tone returned to that snarl with a bit of whine in it. "You toss boxes into ships and trucks and trains and then your goddamn Sheriff rips off your arm and you can't fucking do shit."
"You've got other skills, Gren," she says. "Use them."
"What, you want me to get a job getting pissed and losing all my money in a power game? Doesn't sound real promising."
She points at him with an accusatory finger. "You've got a shit poker face, yeah, but you're not completely hopeless at gambling. Try the casino. See if they're hiring."
He wrinkles his nose but doesn't protest. She figures that's the best she'll get out of him.
She dumps the empty dish in the sink and they stand there for a few seconds. She considers turning the TV on, but then she remembers the time. It's too late for either of them to be awake, and that's saying something. If they stay up much longer the sun will remind them of the time itself.
"Grab your favorite afghan," she says, hustling him towards the couch. "It's time for bed."
"The fuck are you, my mother?"
"No," she replies sharply. "Go to bed, Grendel."
"That was not convincing evidence that you're not my fucking mother. That sounded exactly like something a mother would say."
"Go to fucking bed, asshole."
"Now you do sound just like my mother."
She lets out a laugh despite herself, pushing. "Try to sleep, okay? Things are going to get better. They can't fucking get much worse, after all."
He snorts and kicks off his shoes, a clear admission of defeat. "Whatever, I'll go to bed. I ain't gonna let you pay for my Glamour, though. That's just fucking not gonna happen."
"Sure," she says. He's wrong. She'll stuff a Flamour tube down his throat if she has to.
She kicks her shoes off before flopping down into her own bed, not bothering to shut the door before passing out. Her last thought before she falls asleep is that she needs to take a cab over to Gren's old place and pick up what's left of his things. There's no way he remembered to do that.
The hours pass peacefully enough, and in the morning she wakes up mid-snore to find the light in the kitchen on. It's around noon, guessing by the light gushing in through her thin drapes. Not a surprise, they went to bed late. The light on in the kitchen though? That is unusual, to say the least.
When she walks into her kitchen she has to suppress a big smile. Gren is cooking. There's flour on his face, which is all the funnier because he's cooking what appears to be a big omelet, or maybe two of them. It's hard to tell in the mess he's made of her counters and her stove. She doesn't mind. It's easy to clean up a mess; it isn't so easy to fix up your best friend.
"Aw, fuck," are the first words out of his mouth when he spots her. "You weren't supposed to be awake yet."
"What's all this?" she says. She doesn't bother to gesture to any of it. It speaks for itself. "I didn't know I had eggs."
"You didn't," says Gren. "I went out and bought some."
With what money, she wants to ask. She doesn't, but Gren can see the question in her eyes and says, "I had a little cash."
The last of his money, used to buy eggs for an omelet he doesn't know how to cook. All to thank her. It's enough to make a troll want to cry.
"I'm almost done," he says, a pleading note in his tone, like he thinks she's going to grab the utensils out of his hand and force him back to bed or something.
"I'll wait," is her reply, and she goes out to the living room and sits on one of the afghans now much more haphazardly covering the sofa. She can see some of the discolored arm of the old couch but doesn't bother to cover it. Gren doesn't care.
A few minutes later Gren comes out with a plate in his hand and one balancing precariously in the crook of his arm. She resists the urge to help him as the food threatens to spill onto the floor, breathing a sigh of relief as the plates clatter onto her coffee table.
They aren't pretty omelets, but when she sinks her fork into it and brings it to her mouth she finds that the messy exterior hides a damn good breakfast. "Shit," she says. "Gren, where did you learn to cook like this?"
He shrugs, hiding a smile beneath a clump of egg. "All I did was follow the recipe in one of those books of yours. Wasn't me, just some lady named Betty something. Go send her a fancy thank you letter if you're so into it."
She rolls her eyes. "Learn to take a compliment."
It's quiet while they eat, maybe, just maybe, quiet enough that Gren doesn't hear the sounds of the city invade her afghan laden home. She can hope. After all, he's probably going to be here for a while. She's going to get him back on his feet no matter what it takes.
"Gren," she says, opening her mouth to use her voice for that letter, except not to Betty Crocker.
"Don't do it," he says, staring at something just past her shoulder. "This was…fuck. This was to say that to you. For everything."
"You don't have to."
"I know," he says. "But I did it anyway. Look…"
"You don't have to say anything. You never do."
Gren moves from his seat at the other end of the sofa slightly closer to her. Before long his head is on her shoulder. He's trembling, like the Glamour can't contain all that beast inside of him…or maybe he's trembling for the same reasons mundies do. She read somewhere they do it because they're cold. She saw somewhere that they do it because they're sad.
"It's going to be okay."
She means it, and he knows she does, because Holly isn't going to wait around for the business office this time. She's a Fable, and he's her best friend, and anyone who tries to stop her from getting what she wants is going to pay. Grendel's been through enough. She's been through enough.
The trembling turns to tears. It's going to end, she decides, because she can't go on much longer if it doesn't.