Post by David Atkins on Mar 24, 2006 5:00:19 GMT -5
The house was quiet and dark when Travis arrived at home. Heidi must have gone on to bed, he thought with mild concern. Was she okay? Perhaps she had a headache or simply wasn’t feeling well. In either case, she was due some undue special attention. He would happily leap at any opportunity to ‘annoy’ her as much as she had ‘annoyed’ him with all of her smothering concern ever since he’d been released from the hospital several months ago. Back before that, before his coma and the gunshot that’d put him there, and before his and Heidi’s ‘break-up’ that thankfully hadn’t survived those tumultuous times, it wouldn’t have occurred to him to wonder what was wrong if he’d arrived home to an empty house. Though she hadn’t taken a job since he’d gone into the hospital, she was a successful, high-in-demand model and an aspiring actress. It wasn’t uncommon at all for her to be gone to this or that photo shoot, an audition or to some fancy dinner party where she could meet people and forge connections that would help pave the way for her career. It was, in fact, her busy schedule that had kept her from becoming involved with his wrestling career when he’d first returned to the LOC. She had made it clear to him that, while she absolutely supported what he was doing, she had had higher goals than becoming just another piece of eye candy in that particular business. He had respected that, and loved her all the more for it.
The first thing Travis noticed upon entering the house was the light of their television that was spilling through the doorway from their living room. Fear touched him; it was wrong, out of place. Heidi had never, in all the years they’d been married, failed to shut off the TV in the living room before going to bed. She had never fallen asleep watching it in the living room either, not without him beside her. A hundred thoughts rushed through his head; Klowd had escaped and was on the loose, Jon Roth’s interest in him was a little odd, what if he had misjudged Anthony Coffman when he’d helped the kid beat the attempted-murder wrap? Was it something, somebody, else entirely? Maintaining his cool, without even a pause to reveal his fearful suspicions, Travis went through the motions of normalcy. He hung up his jacket, he kicked off his shoes, and he walked down the hall toward the bathroom without even glancing into the living room as he passed.
He opened the bathroom door and flipped the light switch, deliberately allowing the yellow light to spill out and down the dark hallway for a moment before closing the door again. But he did not go inside. Instead, he took a few quick steps backwards and placed his back against a door that was directly across the hall. Like every door in his home, it was set in a three foot recess, giving him a comfortable buffer of space between any given room and the door leading to the next. Every door also opened in either direction. Travis smiled. He had, himself, designed the entire house. It appeared simple, though strange in it’s layout, but in truth it was an easily defensible fortress-maze in which he alone would be in his element. As Angel had once put it, with a grin no less vicious than Travis’ own, Heaven help the man that took the fight to him there.
Ten, possibly fifteen minutes passed by Travis’ reckoning as he strained his ears to hear voices, movement, anything that would tell him something about whom he was up against. There was nothing, save the distant and indistinct murmur of the television. Dammit! He had been hoping that he was dealing with somebody inexperienced that would make stupid mistakes; somebody that would come down the hallway looking for him rather than waiting for him to spring their trap. Nothing is ever easy, he mouthed silently to himself, and eased forward to peek around the corner and confirm to himself that the hallway was empty. It was. He moved back and through the door by which he had been hiding, disappearing into the shadows of an unlit closet. He did not turn on the light. To do so would have been to give away his location to prying eyes. He didn’t need it, besides; he knew exactly where he was, what he was going to do, and what he was looking for. Dropping quietly to his knees, Travis reached up and under the bottom shelf on the right-hand side. He pulled free a pistol that had been taped to it’s underside. From the opposite side he pulled a cylindrical object, a silencer, which he quickly attached to the barrel of his gun. When it came to the safety of his home, of his wife and himself, Travis did not fuck around. Rising, he climbed the shelves, shelves that had been reinforced to be capable of bearing his weight and more. Near the top, he reached up with his free hand and nudged aside a panel that was only barely visible even with the light on. Up he went, through the opening, and closed it behind himself.
Travis crouched, unable to stand up straight, as he moved in the space between the first and second floors of his home. It was only four feet high, but that bothered him not at all. This space existed for the express purpose of allowing him to move about his house unseen and, if he was careful, unheard. There was a way down into almost every room via a hidden panel much like the one through which he had just come, and there was a way up via a trap door into every room on the second floor. However, for each of the rooms on the ground floor that guests might frequent, such as the living room, hallway, dining room, and bathroom, Travis had placed four specially designed light fixtures. They were huge and they were almost gaudy, so that they might draw one’s eye and be subsequently dismissed as an eccentricity of a man with more money than taste. Above each of them was a gap, to small to be suspicious but large enough to serve it’s purpose. Through these gaps, Travis could survey the entire room and, if need be, cover it with a weapon such as the one he had in his hand.
Moving swiftly and silently, with a confidence born of a familiarity with his surroundings, Travis approached the fixture in the corner of the living room nearest him and eased himself down next to it. He shifted his gaze from one end of the room to the other and back again. There was nothing. He grinned. Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, they were almost certainly directly beneath him, on the couch. Otherwise, they had left the room. He was fairly certain, without even taking the time to consider the two options, that it was the former rather than the latter. Moving again, as quickly and as silently as before, he slipped across to the fixture directly opposite the one he was at and peered down at the couch. What he saw there made his breath catch in his throat.
There was Heidi, alone, sitting on the couch with her legs folded up and underneath herself. She wore only a t-shirt and a pair of panties and an expression so serious, so intense, that her eyes bored into and directly through the obviously forgotten television set in front of her. She probably didn’t even know for sure what was playing. In front of her, sitting on the coffee table, was a small stack of papers. She looked... like she had only once before, he realized. A feeling of trepidation began eating away at his innards. There was only one other time in all of their time together that he had ever found her sitting up late, in the dark, looking like she looked just then. It was a nasty memory, one he would have preferred to have forgotten. He had walked into the room and she had looked up at him, without even a flicker to suggest a change in expression, and had said, ‘We need to talk.’ The very next night, she’d asked him for a divorce. He glared hard at the papers in front of her, and squinted, trying to make out what they were without success.
Travis withdrew the gun, withdrew himself from his hiding place, and climbed back down into the closet where he returned the gun and it’s silencer to their respective hiding places. What was wrong with her? He exited the closet, stepped across the hall to turn off the bathroom light. Were they in trouble again? He placed his forehead against the closed door, breathing deeply. What was going through her mind? He needed desperately to now. But more important still was what was going through his own; anger, fear, and every variation thereof and in between. He had to calm himself down, he had to get his act together and under control. If he went in there and confronted whatever this thing was in his current state, if he allowed his temper to get away from him like it had the last time... well, he already knew what lay down that road. The end of everything. Raising a shaking hand, he made a fist that was no steadier, and placed, rather than pounded, it against the wall next to his head. He was so, terribly afraid right then. He couldn’t lose her again.
When finally he had his emotion under control, or a least as close to under control as he could possibly bring them this night, Travis took a long, deep breath. Everything would be okay, he promised himself. Everything. He steeled himself and walked down the hall toward the living room, barely managing not to hesitate before he walked through the doorway. Heidi was sitting exactly as she had been before, having not moved an inch. She was still staring off in the general direction of the television set without really seeing it. She still looked troubled. But then she became aware of him; she snapped her eyes toward him, jerking as if surprised, and stared for a moment before giving him a tired smile that filled him with relief. He smiled back, realizing that he had been just imagining things after all. She was fine, they were fine, and everything was fine.
Then she spoke.
“Travis, we need to talk,” she said, and his heart skipped a beat.
“What about?” Travis heard himself asking. The words, and the friendly tone in which he spoke them, sounded hollow to his own ears. As empty as the smile he kept pasted on his face rather than allowing it to whither. This was not good at all. He had to try, try, try his damnedest to keep his cool, to remain calm, to stay rational... he had to do that and whatever the fuck else it would take to convince her that their marriage was still a good idea. He couldn’t lose her again.
Unfolding her legs so that she could sit forward, Heidi reached out and picked up the papers on the coffee table. She didn’t know that he had already seen them from his secret crawl-space overhead; so engrossed she’d been, contemplating whatever was going on, that she hadn’t even heard him come in the front door. She held the papers out for him to take. Travis just stood there; he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do this. He froze, like a deer in the headlights, only his eyes were locked on the papers in her hand as if it was a viper she was offering him.
“Oh! Don’t worry,” Heidi said quickly, understanding dawning on her. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She berated herself silently, realizing for the first time what this whole situation must look like to him. “It’s about a job, not... it’s a job.”
Relief, visible relief, flooded through him and Travis relaxed. It made her heart ache to see just how worried he had been. She hadn’t meant to scare him. All of their problems, all of the fighting and the bitterness, were ancient history to her. Heidi knew, and she knew with absolute certainty, that she would never, ever leave him again. Never. Her heart belonged to him and that was that. She wished that he knew, that he could understand and accept that, but how could he? After all, Travis didn’t give up and walk out on her. She had bailed on him. How could she blame him for being afraid? With a crushing certainty, she realized that she couldn’t take the job. Not now, maybe not ever. Not until she had won back his trust.
“What kind of job?” Travis asked, taking the papers from her hand as he finally found his voice.
“A movie,” Heidi said softly, hiding her sadness away. It was a movie that might have made her in the movie business. “I auditioned for it months ago, before you were shot, but I never heard back from them. Now they have a new director. I guess he reviewed my tape, or something.”
Travis whistled through his front teeth. “Sounds big,” he said as he leafed through the papers, skimming the text. “You gonna go for it?”
“I... no.” She faltered, the shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Travis asked, lowering the papers as he shifted his eyes to her.
“I don’t want to.” Heidi shrugged, putting up a disinterested front. “It’d just be a big hassle, you know? I’d have to go overseas...”
Shaking his head, he tossed the papers back down on the coffee table. “If that’s the best you can do, then maybe it’s for the best.”
“What?!?” She exclaimed, sitting forward in indignation. Why was he being such an ass? How dare he? Then Heidi was lost, caught somewhere between royally pissed off and wanting to cry. Then, all of a sudden, Travis’ big hand was on her chin. Gently, he turned her face up toward him again and kissed her. It was the kind of kiss that made her think that they weren’t going to get any more talking done for a while. She kissed him back, matching his hunger with her own, letting the hurt and anger from a moment before pass and fade out of existence. Then, unexpectedly, Travis stopped.
“Don‘t try to convince me of how much you don‘t want it,” he murmured with his face still against hers. “Just do me a favor and go for it, okay?”
Her breathing quickened and he felt her fingers tugging at his belt.
“The MOVIE, dammit!”
“Yeah.” Heidi growled at him, “Shut up.”
The first thing Travis noticed upon entering the house was the light of their television that was spilling through the doorway from their living room. Fear touched him; it was wrong, out of place. Heidi had never, in all the years they’d been married, failed to shut off the TV in the living room before going to bed. She had never fallen asleep watching it in the living room either, not without him beside her. A hundred thoughts rushed through his head; Klowd had escaped and was on the loose, Jon Roth’s interest in him was a little odd, what if he had misjudged Anthony Coffman when he’d helped the kid beat the attempted-murder wrap? Was it something, somebody, else entirely? Maintaining his cool, without even a pause to reveal his fearful suspicions, Travis went through the motions of normalcy. He hung up his jacket, he kicked off his shoes, and he walked down the hall toward the bathroom without even glancing into the living room as he passed.
He opened the bathroom door and flipped the light switch, deliberately allowing the yellow light to spill out and down the dark hallway for a moment before closing the door again. But he did not go inside. Instead, he took a few quick steps backwards and placed his back against a door that was directly across the hall. Like every door in his home, it was set in a three foot recess, giving him a comfortable buffer of space between any given room and the door leading to the next. Every door also opened in either direction. Travis smiled. He had, himself, designed the entire house. It appeared simple, though strange in it’s layout, but in truth it was an easily defensible fortress-maze in which he alone would be in his element. As Angel had once put it, with a grin no less vicious than Travis’ own, Heaven help the man that took the fight to him there.
Ten, possibly fifteen minutes passed by Travis’ reckoning as he strained his ears to hear voices, movement, anything that would tell him something about whom he was up against. There was nothing, save the distant and indistinct murmur of the television. Dammit! He had been hoping that he was dealing with somebody inexperienced that would make stupid mistakes; somebody that would come down the hallway looking for him rather than waiting for him to spring their trap. Nothing is ever easy, he mouthed silently to himself, and eased forward to peek around the corner and confirm to himself that the hallway was empty. It was. He moved back and through the door by which he had been hiding, disappearing into the shadows of an unlit closet. He did not turn on the light. To do so would have been to give away his location to prying eyes. He didn’t need it, besides; he knew exactly where he was, what he was going to do, and what he was looking for. Dropping quietly to his knees, Travis reached up and under the bottom shelf on the right-hand side. He pulled free a pistol that had been taped to it’s underside. From the opposite side he pulled a cylindrical object, a silencer, which he quickly attached to the barrel of his gun. When it came to the safety of his home, of his wife and himself, Travis did not fuck around. Rising, he climbed the shelves, shelves that had been reinforced to be capable of bearing his weight and more. Near the top, he reached up with his free hand and nudged aside a panel that was only barely visible even with the light on. Up he went, through the opening, and closed it behind himself.
Travis crouched, unable to stand up straight, as he moved in the space between the first and second floors of his home. It was only four feet high, but that bothered him not at all. This space existed for the express purpose of allowing him to move about his house unseen and, if he was careful, unheard. There was a way down into almost every room via a hidden panel much like the one through which he had just come, and there was a way up via a trap door into every room on the second floor. However, for each of the rooms on the ground floor that guests might frequent, such as the living room, hallway, dining room, and bathroom, Travis had placed four specially designed light fixtures. They were huge and they were almost gaudy, so that they might draw one’s eye and be subsequently dismissed as an eccentricity of a man with more money than taste. Above each of them was a gap, to small to be suspicious but large enough to serve it’s purpose. Through these gaps, Travis could survey the entire room and, if need be, cover it with a weapon such as the one he had in his hand.
Moving swiftly and silently, with a confidence born of a familiarity with his surroundings, Travis approached the fixture in the corner of the living room nearest him and eased himself down next to it. He shifted his gaze from one end of the room to the other and back again. There was nothing. He grinned. Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, they were almost certainly directly beneath him, on the couch. Otherwise, they had left the room. He was fairly certain, without even taking the time to consider the two options, that it was the former rather than the latter. Moving again, as quickly and as silently as before, he slipped across to the fixture directly opposite the one he was at and peered down at the couch. What he saw there made his breath catch in his throat.
There was Heidi, alone, sitting on the couch with her legs folded up and underneath herself. She wore only a t-shirt and a pair of panties and an expression so serious, so intense, that her eyes bored into and directly through the obviously forgotten television set in front of her. She probably didn’t even know for sure what was playing. In front of her, sitting on the coffee table, was a small stack of papers. She looked... like she had only once before, he realized. A feeling of trepidation began eating away at his innards. There was only one other time in all of their time together that he had ever found her sitting up late, in the dark, looking like she looked just then. It was a nasty memory, one he would have preferred to have forgotten. He had walked into the room and she had looked up at him, without even a flicker to suggest a change in expression, and had said, ‘We need to talk.’ The very next night, she’d asked him for a divorce. He glared hard at the papers in front of her, and squinted, trying to make out what they were without success.
Travis withdrew the gun, withdrew himself from his hiding place, and climbed back down into the closet where he returned the gun and it’s silencer to their respective hiding places. What was wrong with her? He exited the closet, stepped across the hall to turn off the bathroom light. Were they in trouble again? He placed his forehead against the closed door, breathing deeply. What was going through her mind? He needed desperately to now. But more important still was what was going through his own; anger, fear, and every variation thereof and in between. He had to calm himself down, he had to get his act together and under control. If he went in there and confronted whatever this thing was in his current state, if he allowed his temper to get away from him like it had the last time... well, he already knew what lay down that road. The end of everything. Raising a shaking hand, he made a fist that was no steadier, and placed, rather than pounded, it against the wall next to his head. He was so, terribly afraid right then. He couldn’t lose her again.
When finally he had his emotion under control, or a least as close to under control as he could possibly bring them this night, Travis took a long, deep breath. Everything would be okay, he promised himself. Everything. He steeled himself and walked down the hall toward the living room, barely managing not to hesitate before he walked through the doorway. Heidi was sitting exactly as she had been before, having not moved an inch. She was still staring off in the general direction of the television set without really seeing it. She still looked troubled. But then she became aware of him; she snapped her eyes toward him, jerking as if surprised, and stared for a moment before giving him a tired smile that filled him with relief. He smiled back, realizing that he had been just imagining things after all. She was fine, they were fine, and everything was fine.
Then she spoke.
“Travis, we need to talk,” she said, and his heart skipped a beat.
“What about?” Travis heard himself asking. The words, and the friendly tone in which he spoke them, sounded hollow to his own ears. As empty as the smile he kept pasted on his face rather than allowing it to whither. This was not good at all. He had to try, try, try his damnedest to keep his cool, to remain calm, to stay rational... he had to do that and whatever the fuck else it would take to convince her that their marriage was still a good idea. He couldn’t lose her again.
Unfolding her legs so that she could sit forward, Heidi reached out and picked up the papers on the coffee table. She didn’t know that he had already seen them from his secret crawl-space overhead; so engrossed she’d been, contemplating whatever was going on, that she hadn’t even heard him come in the front door. She held the papers out for him to take. Travis just stood there; he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do this. He froze, like a deer in the headlights, only his eyes were locked on the papers in her hand as if it was a viper she was offering him.
“Oh! Don’t worry,” Heidi said quickly, understanding dawning on her. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She berated herself silently, realizing for the first time what this whole situation must look like to him. “It’s about a job, not... it’s a job.”
Relief, visible relief, flooded through him and Travis relaxed. It made her heart ache to see just how worried he had been. She hadn’t meant to scare him. All of their problems, all of the fighting and the bitterness, were ancient history to her. Heidi knew, and she knew with absolute certainty, that she would never, ever leave him again. Never. Her heart belonged to him and that was that. She wished that he knew, that he could understand and accept that, but how could he? After all, Travis didn’t give up and walk out on her. She had bailed on him. How could she blame him for being afraid? With a crushing certainty, she realized that she couldn’t take the job. Not now, maybe not ever. Not until she had won back his trust.
“What kind of job?” Travis asked, taking the papers from her hand as he finally found his voice.
“A movie,” Heidi said softly, hiding her sadness away. It was a movie that might have made her in the movie business. “I auditioned for it months ago, before you were shot, but I never heard back from them. Now they have a new director. I guess he reviewed my tape, or something.”
Travis whistled through his front teeth. “Sounds big,” he said as he leafed through the papers, skimming the text. “You gonna go for it?”
“I... no.” She faltered, the shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Travis asked, lowering the papers as he shifted his eyes to her.
“I don’t want to.” Heidi shrugged, putting up a disinterested front. “It’d just be a big hassle, you know? I’d have to go overseas...”
Shaking his head, he tossed the papers back down on the coffee table. “If that’s the best you can do, then maybe it’s for the best.”
“What?!?” She exclaimed, sitting forward in indignation. Why was he being such an ass? How dare he? Then Heidi was lost, caught somewhere between royally pissed off and wanting to cry. Then, all of a sudden, Travis’ big hand was on her chin. Gently, he turned her face up toward him again and kissed her. It was the kind of kiss that made her think that they weren’t going to get any more talking done for a while. She kissed him back, matching his hunger with her own, letting the hurt and anger from a moment before pass and fade out of existence. Then, unexpectedly, Travis stopped.
“Don‘t try to convince me of how much you don‘t want it,” he murmured with his face still against hers. “Just do me a favor and go for it, okay?”
Her breathing quickened and he felt her fingers tugging at his belt.
“The MOVIE, dammit!”
“Yeah.” Heidi growled at him, “Shut up.”