ikissdhimbck | OOM: Room #100 -- For Tommy Gavin

It's the first deep sleep Tommy's had in a long time.

There may have been dreams -- possibly involving fire, or smoke, or blackness, or the faces of people no longer in his life -- nothing he hasn't seen before. But it all seemed farther away. Less vivid. Less haunting.

So he doesn't feel it when Kate wakes and gets out of bed. And he sleeps right through her bath (dammit!). He even sleeps through the arrival of breakfast.

The coffee, though.

That gets him.

He stirs.

The first thing he notices: an unfamiliar bed.

Sprawled on his belly with the sheets tangled around his waist and legs, he picks his head up, bewildered for a moment.

Did I drink? Was I drunk?

Squinting in the daylight, he rolls over and drags his fingers through his hair.

No hangover. It's just...early.

He manages to prop himself up on his elbows and has a bleary-eyed look around the room.

"Coffee," he croaks. "Awesome."

Kate peeks her head out of the bathroom door when she hears his voice.

"Good mornin'."

She smiles. She's pinning her hair up, dressed in her red silk robe. She doesn't linger at the door long, however.

"Help yourself t'breakfast. I'll be out in jus' a minute."

It takes a few seconds for him to respond.

"'Morning," he grunts out as he gradually starts to wake up.

Slowly rolling out of bed, he checks around him for his clothes. His underwear and jeans are on the floor, and he picks them up and pulls them on. His t-shirt, though, is nowhere to be seen.

Whatever. He'll look for it after his much-needed first cup of coffee.

Kate emerges a few minutes later, hair messily pinned in a Gibson Tuck. She looks vaguely nervous, so that you could almost hear her wondering:

What now?

"Hi."

She comes up beside him.

After a few gulps of coffee, he feels somewhat human again. Not enough to sense Kate's vague apprehension, but he turns to her and drops an almost automatic kiss to the top of her head, her hair still damp from her bath.

"Hey."

Another gulp of coffee.

"I'll just be a sec."

And he plods off into the bathroom.

His voice and manner are gruff, but that's just Tommy in the morning.

"All right."

None of the men in Kate's life have ever been morning people. She doesn't think much of it.

While he's off, she pours herself a fresh cup of coffee and finds the dish with the tea cakes.

He washes his face with icy cold water, gasping and shivering as his senses fully awaken and the previous night comes back to him in a flood. And at that, his lips twitch and a low chuckle to himself echoes off the porcelain sink. Combing his fingers through his hair, he regards his dripping reflection in the mirror for a moment before noticing a small red welt on the side of his throat.

Well. At least the guys at the firehouse will know he got some without having to ask.

After drying off his face, he emerges from the bathroom. He goes to the bed and shakes out the rumpled sheets in search of his t-shirt, eventually fishing it out from between the folds, before he approaches Kate at the table.

"How're you doin'?"

She sits with her legs tucked under her chair. Crossing them just isn't comfortable this morning.

"M'all right."

She eyes him from over the rim of her cup.

"I meant t'have that laundered for you before y'woke up. M'sorry."

"Ah, 's fine. No need."

He pulls the shirt on (it smells like her, too) and sits down at the table.

"Rough night, huh?" he then says, cracking a devilish smile up at her as he refills his cup of coffee.

She's completely nonchalant when she answers.

"It was all right."

The ho-hum is implied.

He sets down the pot of coffee with a soft thunk and levels her a Look.

"It was all right?" he scoffs with a short laugh.

"Well, it was wonderful until this obnoxious fella showed up at my door."

She spears a bite of jelly-filled pastry and brings it to her lips, making eye contact with him. That wicked spark is dancing in her eyes.

"An' he kept me up all night long."

"Is that so?" he says dryly, as he takes a sip of coffee. "You should've called me, I could've kicked him out for ya and showed you a much better time."

Her lips linger around her fork. She pulls it away, chewing slowly.

(And masking a grin.)

"Is that a promise?"

"Of course," he murmurs into his cup, meeting her eyes, before his gaze flicks down to her lips as she chews.

Suddenly overwhelmed with an appetite, he removes the lid from his plate and uncovers an omelet with a side of bacon, and immediately tucks in.

"So, what're you up to today?"

She pretends not to notice when his eyes sink to her mouth.

(But she almost always does — eyes on her mouth, on her chest, on her legs — and it always gives her a little thrill.)

"Mm, I'll probably check in on the stables at some point, but I might reserve this as a leisure day."

She cuts a biscuit in half, letting a pat of butter melt between the two halves.

"What about you?"

He crunches on some bacon.

"I'm just gonna go home, get a few more hours sleep before I have to go back to work again, since I'm pulling another double-shift. I'll have a couple days off after that, though, but I might hafta spend that time with my old man. Oh yeah, did I mention that yet? My dad moved in with me." He doesn't sound too thrilled as he shovels a forkful of eggs into his mouth.

"Really? That's wonderful."

So says the young woman who had the close relationship with her father. She doesn't notice his lackluster look until after the fact.

"That's not wonderful?"

A slight eyebrow twitch.

"Nah-uh. Not wonderful."

Cup of coffee in hand, he leans back in his chair. "You wanna know why it's not wonderful? Lemme tell you why. Take me on my worst day -- the boozing, the swearing, the carousing, basically all the seven deadly sins -- age that by eighty-two years, add incontinence, and that's what my dad's like. Don't get me wrong, I love the guy, and yeah, he was a war hero, yeah, he was a firefighter, but goddamn, he's a son of a bitch."

She eats quietly, eyebrow slowly, slowly arching. She takes in everything he says with the utmost solemnity, taking time to recall all seven sins, noting that his father was a firefighter as well.

"So what you're sayin' is — it's like bein' married to yourself?"

She stabs a bite of sausage, once more using her fork to mask her burgeoning smirk. Well, at least he's honest. And he knows what to expect in the next thirty or forty years.

She brushes his leg with her own.

"At two-and-eighty, I'd say he's earned the right t'be a bit of a sonnovabitch."

He brings his mug to his lips but pauses, his eyes narrowing at her over the rim.

"Mm. Low blow."

That's just his way of saying she got him there.

After taking a sip, he sets the cup down and continues work on his eggs. There's not that much room under that little table so his knee is inevitably going to nudge hers.

"It don't mean that I gotta put up with it."

She snickers.

"What's your alternative? We don't get t'choose when it comes t'family. Some of us get big families, an' some of us don't. Some women can have lots'a children, an' some can't have any. Two-and-eighty's a ripe age; it's unheard of. An' some people lose their daddies when they're young."

She was all right while she was saying it, but now that it's hanging in the air it gives her pause.

"Y'just gotta take care'a him the best y'know how. Um. So you're gonna spend your next few days on holiday with him? Anythin' special planned?"

He eats in silence for a while, because yeah, she's right again. As much as Tommy bitches and moans about his family, he wouldn't know what to do if they weren't around to bitch and moan about.

His eyes flick up at her at her last line. It weighs heavily with her, he can tell that much.

And he looks back down at his eggs again. He plucks up a strip of bacon and munches on it.

"I dunno," he sighs. "Hopefully he'll just wanna stay in so I don't gotta take him anywhere 'cause he can barely get around on his own as it is. Just turn on the sports channel on TV, set a couple of beers within reach, and boom, there goes 48 hours. At least on the weekends my kids can distract him. I mean, jeez, I have no idea what to do with him. Bad enough that his second wife died and left her millions to her thirty cats and his brother's in jail for murder--"

Tommy stops in mid-chew, realizing how that sounded.

"My uncle didn't kill my step-mom, by the way. My family's crazy but they ain't that kinda crazy."

Kate's fork is paused in midair, mouth ajar.

"I don't even know where t'begin."

So, in deference to Tommy and his family, she skirts around the crazy.

"You an' your daddy sound like y'have a lotta things in common. Is it really so hard figurin' out what t'do with him for a few days?"

He sighs again through his teeth with somewhat wry bemusement as he refills his cup.

"Yeah, well, lemme explain something. Me and my old man-- we don't exactly get along. I mean, sure, we do experience stretches of civility between him bein' a jackass to me and me bein' resentful towards him, but for the most part, the only things we ever exchange words on are baseball, war, and sometimes Ma. We don't-- we don't really talk. We just don't. We never did. Not even about firefighting. Okay, yeah, he used to tell the occasional anecdote or whatever, but frankly, it's like we've already said what we had to say and the only thing left to do is bitch at each other, especially now that we actually hafta live together, when before we had Ma or Uncle Teddy as a buffer. It would probably be a helluva lot easier if I was still drinking 'cause then at least we could drink together, but since I ain't, he'll just take every opportunity to call me a sissy for giving it up. But whatever. I'll try, y'know, of course I will, I'm the only one out of all my brothers and sisters who can take him in right now, and I'll do it 'cause, well-- he's my dad."

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