Davrin Week Day Three: Whatever It Takes
oh baby it's 12:08 AM and I still need to shower, but we did it Joe!
@datvcompanionweeks this was a little tougher to work in for me prompt wise but I MADE IT WORK.
Please enjoy my multirook modern AU now featuring Ella Laidir because she and Davrin are big best friend vibes.
Rage Ball (3,161 Words)
“I expect significant compensation for coming up with so many similarly sized glass bottles on such short notice.”
A contraption of Davrin’s own creation–simply a long plank of wood with several bottle neck-sized holes–sits propped between two metal poles at the edge of the modestly sized yard that came with the abandoned property he purchased at an auction just after he’d finished college. The lot itself, though, has long since been abandoned. With a lot of elbow grease and many nights sleeping on a shitty mattress on the floor of what was basically an oversized garden shed with no heat or running water, his little home is plenty for him. It’s comfortable. A single bedroom. One bathroom. Living room. Kitchenette. It’s enough for him. Even with an added presence, he can’t complain.
In fact, the house feels a little empty when he’s by himself.
He smacks an old baseball glove against his thigh as he watches an assortment of wine bottles and liquor bottles alike be placed into their designated slots. “Can’t believe you aren’t in liver failure yet,” he quips, sliding his hand into the glove. “What are you? Like, sixty at this point? I guess you’re really in your twilight years at this point.”
Popping up from behind the metal beam, an old friend glares back at him with a hair tie between her teeth as she attempts to wrangle her mass of curly red hair into some semblance of a ponytail. “Fuck off,” she grunts before ducking underneath the row of bottles. “I’m barely closer to death than you, Mister Saving Kittens from Burning Buildings.” Her arms drop but somehow the hair defies gravity in a mess on top of her head. He scoffs. “Oh no, you don’t get to laugh.” She points at one of the bottles, a square bottomed one with white labeling. “That was a nice farmer’s market gin with pea flower in it. Put me out seventy bucks.” The finger she’s using to point to the bottle comes back to jab right in his direction. “I finished that for you, bud. Just remember that.”
Ella was a teaching assistant in an anthropology class he took on a whim spring of his freshman year: Blood and Valor in the Viking World. Sitting in a classroom mostly filled with nineteen year old boys certainly felt fitting given the reasoning he had taken the class himself. The professor herself, he can hardly remember given how often Ella was thrown out in front of them. By the time the fall semester came, the professor had moved onto bigger and better things, but when he ran into the TA in the library surrounded by piles of books and half written sheets of paper, he was thrilled to tell her he was taking another anthro course. She was impressed, though upon hearing which one that was (Anthropology of Pirate and Piracy) a little less so.
At the time, she was working through the second year of a master’s degree. They often found each other in the library at similar times. So much so, they ended up occupying a single table. Eventually, she came to use him as a soundboard when she could. Talking out all the arguments she was developing. The bits and pieces of her thesis that were coming together slowly but surely. In return, she acted as a guide that his advisors failed to be, so he wouldn’t have to change majors… again. Environmental Science (with a minor in anthropology, thank you). She was encouraging and funny and real. He missed home despite choosing to go to school farther away than his parents would have liked. It was nice to have some familiar touchstone there with him… also to have an emergency contact that wasn’t his mother who was hours away.
“And how about all that free labor I put into your place when you bought it?” His brows are raised for an argument he expects from her. “Hmm? Nothing? That’s what I thought.”
She snatches up two bottles from the grass behind him, jostling her keys before potting the cap off of both of them and shoving one at him. “You know, I think I’m gonna start hiding kittens in all the coziest corners of homes for you to find,” she grumbles while picking up a glove of her own. “See how well you can duck and roll now that you’re all healed up.”
The glare he throws at her is playful. Not truly cross or hurt by the joke that’s clearly in poor taste. “I get it,” he tosses back at her. “You just want my liver.”
“An organ donor, are you?”
“Since I turned eighteen.”
“I’ll drink to that.” She taps the butt of her bottle against his. “L’chaim.”
“Sláinte,” he responds, though it comes out sounding more like salon chair than it should.
As he tips the bottle back, she slaps it back down. “Ah, ah, ah, not too much now,” she chides. “Does me no good if that liver isn’t pristine, young man.”
“Fuck you.”
Her nose pinches. “Not my type.” She takes one long swig from her bottle before placing it gently in the grass. “You’re a little too well adjusted for my taste.”
Snorting, he hands her his bottle to place beside hers. “You do like a project,” he agrees. “How’s it going with the coffee guy?”
She shrugs while grabbing a baseball off of the ground. “Really could just bounce a quarter off his ass,” she sighs, a little more dreamily than he’s used to hearing her. “But he’s always gone and disappeared by the time I leave.” She passes the ball between her glove and her bare hand. “I was a little worried I’d hallucinated him until I saw Harding talking to him one evening when I passed after they’d closed.”
“That can happen with advanced age, though.”
“Also mental illness. I’m really batting a thousand there.” The ball pauses in her open hand, rolling around the pads of her fingers. “But we’re not here to talk about me, are we? I’ve already gotten bumped to twice weekly therapy, so I’m pretty sure I’ve hit the Eleanora Laidir trauma hour quota for the week.”
He rests a hand on her shoulder. “That’s rough, buddy,” he sighs. “Too bad I’m too well adjusted to understand your struggle.”
“Oh, ha ha, look at me. My name’s Davrin. I’ve got a rocking bod and a smoking hot girlfriend and own my own home. I spend all my days in the woods and on my off time I volunteer to put out fires and save kittens.” The baseball lands in his glove with a hard slap. “All you need is a… fucking… golden retriever to top it all off.” Eyes rake up and down his form. If it had been anyone else scrutinizing him in such a way, he might have squirmed a bit, but Ella clicks her tongue to account for the lack of a literal lightbulb turning on above her head. “Or a big cat. Like one of those ones that’s basically a medium sized dog… did I tell you about the cat who keeps showing up at my doorstep? Big fluffy black thing. A little standoffish, but he likes tuna and–”
“Ella!” Fingers snap in front of her eyes, earning a startled blink. “Focus!”
Shaking her head, she huffs out a heavy exhale. “Yes, right,” she replies. “First to break four bottles wins it. Now, go.” He rears back with the ball in his hand before sending it whizzing right past the farmer’s market gin bottle. “What’s got you summoning me for rage ball?”
It’s a stupid game really. One they used to play in a lot that had long since been abandoned for cars at the college. Mostly, the largely gravel area sat vacant, so they would set up layers of dollar store garbage bags beneath the very hunk of wood in front of them now and just wail tennis balls at it until all of the bottles were broken. It was a good way to clear a mind. Effective stress relief. It didn’t hurt anyone, and many an underage drinker was thankful to get rid of their evidence for such an admirable cause.
The grass is still warm from the sun that’s setting over the horizon. Davrin can feel it below the thinning soles of sneakers that could probably stand to be replaced. He ducks underneath the bottles to retrieve the ball at the fenceline. “I don’t know,” he answers. A truth technically. Using the pad of his thumb, he rubs against a smudge on the ball. “The last month has been weird.”
His throw is easily caught by her. A long forgotten softball scholarship occasionally comes out to play. “Sure, you got hurt,” she reasons. “Things take time to get back to normal.”
“I’ve given it time. Plenty.” Frustration is already bubbling to the surface. He’s only thrown one fucking pitch that missed the bottle. The ball lands back in his glove. His brows furrow, eyes flicking from the ball to his friend, who gives a nod in the direction of the ball. “It’s been over a month, and she’s not here, Ella.”
This time, he whips the ball at the gin bottle again, eviscerating whatever swirling white pattern decorated the glass. “She was at first, but… I don’t know. It’s weird.” He would normally be throwing out some sort of celebration at hitting a target, but he doesn’t want to. There’s nothing in him that wants to cheer for shattered glass when he could be comfortably on a couch watching some re-run of some trashy show on TNT with Silvia. “I don’t even know what happened.”
A second ball is hidden in the grass he should really get around to mowing. “Alright, and you discussed the emergency contact thing?” she asks as she lifts the second projectile.
“It wouldn’t have been a problem if my first emergency contact answered the phone.”
Her glove stabs into the center of his chest. “You know full well I was plastered after eating pie on the anniversary of my mother’s death, jackass.” This is less of a joke. A conversation they’ve already had at length. Words mixed with guilt and grief all at once. “And you also realize I can’t be your emergency contact forever, right?”
That change is something he’s all too aware of. “Just… let me know next time.” A statement made quietly in the dark as two bodies curled into each other as best they could on his bed before whatever pain medication he was given put him into the deepest sleep of his life. “I know that!” He watches the second ball fly by in a stream of yellow and hit right into a bottle of Tito’s. A quiet ‘hell yeah!’ comes from beside him before Ella marches off to retrieve both balls. “I know. I don’t even know what I was thinking when filling out the form when it came around.” His emergency contacts had only been updated two weeks prior to the incident, and he put some girl he’d only known a month on there.
“You’re in love.” The way she so plainly states it as fact has him reeling. Rolling his eyes. Perching his hands on his hips. Turning on his heel so he doesn’t have to face her. “And that’s okay. People in love do… silly things, Davrin.”
And that’s what they were… are. Silvia hasn’t completely disappeared from the face of the planet. She’s still around. They’ve still talked, but it’s different. Before, she had been spending most of her nights there with him. It was comfortable. Something they both slid into easier than either one expected. A routine. Domesticity at its finest. Even directly after, she was there. Days would be spent at work but checking in on him frequently. He doesn’t know what happened. Now, it’s mostly text messages. Sometimes a phone call, and she is always distracted. Maybe he had done a stupid silly thing. Overstepped a boundary. Let his heart get carried away.
“The thing is,” Davrin starts as he turns back to Ella, barely catching a short throw in his glove. “She was here right after.” He woke up next to Silvia the day after the fire. She had fallen asleep with her cheek in her palm, propped up by her elbow on her pillow. Like she had been watching him. Making sure he was okay. That he was really there. “She was trying to do all sorts of things for me.”
“Did you let her?”
At first, he did. It was like being nursed back to health as a sick kid. Lots of soup and vegging out in front of the TV. A lot of doing nothing. And Silvia, for all the trying she did, was not a good nurse. She’s a terrible cook, first off. Kept burning everything and getting food stuck in the coils of his stove. And she kept asking if he needed anything. What she could do for him. What would be helpful. No matter how much he told her it was okay. That he was fine. That she didn’t need to do that. Insisting that she was doing too much.
Oh.
“No, I didn’t,” he admits. The next ball grazes a dark green wine bottle, but doesn’t crack it. “She didn’t need to do anything for me.”
Ella stands staring up at him, hands on her hips this time around. “Did you consider she might have wanted to help you?” This isn’t how the game is supposed to work. He’s supposed to work out his issues with broken bottles. Not be psychoanalyzed. “Sometimes people do things not because their obligated to, but because they want to.”
“She wasn’t very good at it either.”
An arm comes down hard against his stomach with a thunk and a gentle throbbing pain that quickly dissipates in his side. “Asshole!” she snaps. “You absolute fucking moron, a pretty girl wants to help you after you get hurt, and you tell her she doesn’t have to because she’s not very good at it? What’s the matter with you? You didn’t tell her that, did you?”
“No!” He did mention the food on the stove. Only because it made the whole house smell like something was burning. He also might have told her numerous times that he could handle himself. That he was fine. That she didn’t have to baby him. “No… I… are you going to throw that ball or what?”
“Does she even know you love her?”
Of course she does. He’s said it before… once. Down at the lake. They haven’t mentioned it since. “Yes, of course she does.” Does she? He isn’t sure anymore.
“Well, that’s the first positive I’ve heard.” The ball in Ella’s hand drops into the grass. She bends down to scoop up her beer once more. “I know I’m not really qualified to give any sort of relationship advice given my last partner tried to dismantle my life’s work so I could move across the country to be some live-in girlfriend.” She explains this as if he hadn’t been beside her to witness all of that mess. “But you’ve got to apologize.”
He does. “Why should I apologize?” he challenges even though he knows exactly why.
“Because you’re a dense moron clearly!” He doesn’t get to witness Ella get frazzled very often. She’s collected for the most part. A little eccentric in her way. Much in the same vein that one might view a quirky grade school art teacher. A little kooky. A little zany. But even all the same. Her cheeks are red. Fingers are white in her grip around the neck of her bottle. “Do you even want this to work out?”
What a stupid question. “You know the answer to that. Don’t be an asshole.” He wants nothing more than for this relationship to be it. No more casual flings. No more first dates. No more dipping his toes in a pond he’s not interested in to begin with. He wants her. Silvie. That snarky little complicated mess. He whips a ball at what he thinks might have been a fancy bottle of tequila that shatters on impact.
“Then what are you going to do about it?”
In order to break anything else, one of them has to retrieve the balls he’s thrown, but they’re both firmly planted in place. Sometimes, he forgets that this is both a wonderful and terrible thing about his friend. She’s truly someone he can always talk something out with. They’ll get to the bottom of whatever the problem is no matter what. On the flip side of that coin, she can read him like a book. It doesn’t matter what his issue might be. She will more often than not call him out on it.
“I don’t know, Ella.” Defeat weighs on Davrin’s shoulders. He has been so dense. So blind to the fact that he was the issue. That he caused the wedge in something that had been otherwise so good. He needs to apologize, but why would Silvia even accept that at this point? His love doesn’t feel adequate enough to bring her back. “I could apologize? But it feels a little late for that.”
Ella drains the last dregs of beer from her bottle. “It’s a start, though,” she reminds him, squatting to grab his bottle so she can hand it to him. “If you really want it, you do whatever it takes.”
Whatever it takes?
“And if that isn’t enough?”
She takes a deep breath in, and he takes a long swig of lightly carbonated liquid into his mouth. “I don’t know,” she sighs with a shake of her head. “I don’t really know. I’m not really the person to ask because that kind of thing doesn’t usually find me.”
Is this that kind of thing? He doesn’t know much about commitment to relationships like this, but he does know about taking the jump. About taking risks. About making his own path. What he also knows is that he was so relieved to see Silvia at the hospital that night. To listen to her blabber at him the entire way home with her fingers laced with his. He knows he loves waking up next to her. That seeing her name pop up on his phone brightens his whole day.
He knows that the moment he laid eyes on her in that bar he was done for.
A heavy breath pushes out through his nose. “Whatever it takes?” he repeats.
Silence passes for a beat between them. The peepers that have been popping up in the woods over the last week croon in the waning light of the evening. Ella taps his bottle with her glove. “Drink up,” she commands. “I’ll find a different liver because I think we’re in for a long night, big guy.”
