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 Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 2:57 pm
the pen is mightier
Chel had no clue what the ******** Jack was talking about, but she could piece together that he was working relatively hard, so she did her best not to look confused or worried. She just listened to him, nodding her head lightly as he spoke.
"S'hard right," Chel said after a while, very softly, even tenderly. "You have a million things in yer head, but sayin' them just don't happen?"
Metal clasps come back and her arms are tied back down-
"Stay put for a sec- wait I guess you have to!" She laughed despite all things. Always jokes. "I think writing's gonna kill you, but I got somethin' you can do."
She left the infirmary with a smile for Jack, but as she walked to her dorm it quickly turned into unexpected annoyance. Why did he get to forget everything? Why did he have to make her wait even longer? This was so like Jack, leaving her with too many questions and finding his own special way to make things difficult. The added complexity was that it wasn't even her fault and she couldn't punch an injured man.
Well, she couldn't punch Jack in the first place.
She returned not more than 15 minutes later with newspaper and a plastic bag of very strange objects. "Still awake?"
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:33 pm
the pen is mightier
"Yeah." He feels better knowing she understands and his expression relaxes. Maybe it won't be so—but then she's getting up and he feels strangely anxious at the idea of being left alone again. What if it's an excuse to get away? (He temporarily forgets in his sudden shift in mood that she chose to stay for a reason.) "Www...wait, wait..." A million is an understatement, he has at least two million thoughts running amok in his head, he needs to get them out now. But the words are barely able to make it past his lips after she's gone.
Jack leans his head against the pillow, shuts his eyes, and blocks out everything except sound. Breath. Heartbeat. The steady and occasional beep from his IV drip machine. Her laugh is orange and colorful in comparison to the otherwise gray and white noise.
In spite of his new relationship with sleep, fifteen minutes isn't enough to let him drop below the surface of consciousness. Jack is in a daydreaming state when she returns, and he comes to with a yawn. Then he looks at her in a mixture of relief and annoyance, and it's a lot more of the former.
"Don't do that again," he says, brows knitting. "Please. Have to ask me first. Have t'get ready for it. It's different when it's empty n' when it's not, when it's sleeping to wake n' when's dream real." His gaze drifts down to what Chel holds in her hands and forgets his train of thought. When he looks back up at her, there's a question in his eyes.
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 3:42 pm
the pen is mightier
Chel is baffled by the Jack that asks her not to leave again. With the speech pattern, could it have possible he was being possessed-
Jack's infallible, she has to remember that.
"Oh ... s**t sorry dude." With hesitation, she pulled up a chair to the bedside, but one glance to her chest and she was fumbling around in the various cabinets. She knocked over a box of wooden sticks and said, "Uh oops. I can fix those, promise." Finally she found a roll of runic bandaids and she carefully pulled down her shirt wrapping it over the wound and under her arm, over the shoulder, across her chest. She was getting much better at bandaging herself and others, which probably wasn't a good thing due to the resaon why she was getting better.
Certainly Chel had no idea if slapping a runic bandage over an infected wound was even a good thing, but she figured it was at least protection enough for Jack. That was all that really mattered.
Then with continued hesitation, she said, "Figure you can at least help me wrap presents yeah?" Chel had never been good at it, but that was because she never had to wrap very many in her life. "I can tell you 'bout what I got everyone too. Sound good?"
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 4:14 pm
the pen is mightier
The extra noise hurt his head, but he endured it. As Chel bandaged herself, Jack gingerly pushed himself into an upright sitting position, trying to hide the small spasms of pain in his expression. He was in control of very little now, and even talking expended more energy than he thought should be allowed: the least he could do was pretend it didn't hurt as much as it did.
"You got better at it," he noted about her bandages with a little bittersweet smile. The area looked worse up close but he didn't know what to say in spite of those two million thoughts.
The offer made him blink, but Jack gave a slight nod since anything more might set off a migraine. Gift wrapping wasn't something he was good at either, much less with only one working hand, but he welcomed the opportunity to distract himself and say he'd helped her. Anything to start balancing the scales again.
"Wait. Before that, before I forget again...Thank you," he said quietly. "Thank you for staying." It sounded so small in comparison to the more nebulous concept in his head, but it was a noble beast that couldn't be bothered to be captured and brought to coherence, so this was all he had to give. "Thank you," he said more emphatically, silently pleading her to remember he couldn't say it all.
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 4:40 pm
the pen is mightier
"God yer gettin' all sappy and gross on me," she murmured, but there was a distinctly pleased smile on her face. More sincerely she added, "M'always gonna stay Jackles."
She pulled out three hilariously tacky shot glasses and a nice pair of winter gloves. "Guess who?" she asked him, stuffing the glasses with newspaper and folding the gloves in another one. Then she folded up one side and told him, "Hold this while I tape it."
Chel obviously hadn't expected Jack to wrap the present on his own. Just to hold it while she taped, or tape while she held it. Simple tasks that were possible with one hand.
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 5:04 pm
the pen is mightier
Mildly affronted at first, her follow up statement mollified him. "So far you're right," Jack agreed, remembering snapshots of his visions and the bobbing pink form in the fog. It was disconcerting to remember how much blood had been involved in both scenarios.
"Uh..." He frowned and blinked slow as he held the cup down for her. "Finn? Crowell? These're...really brown..."
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 5:18 pm
the pen is mightier
"Who knows~" Chel mused, not wanting to give the secret away. The presents were wrapped and Chel wrote the name on the paper in big black letters with a permanent marker, though she may have mispelled it (who really knew with Chel's handwriting). The present was promptly tossed back into the plastic bag, and she pulled out the next one.
A fluffy dress and the bowties she'd gotten in China. "Do you want to talk about any of it?" she prompted quietly.
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 5:39 pm
the pen is mightier
He got the distinct feeling she was teasing him and squinted. It was almost comical how Jack lit up when he saw the dress, though, like they were back in school and he had just figured out the answer to a difficult equation. "AK, right?" he guessed, gesturing at his neck. "She likes those...what're...oh, Peter Pan collars." Bow ties weren't exactly it, but they had been in a less populated area of China.
"I..." He frowned and tugged at his shirt, losing that boyish brightness at Chel's question. "...yeah. We need to. I said so, right?" He swore he had. Several things were just out of reach in his head, like knowing he had misplaced the puzzle pieces to complete the picture.
He squeezed his eyes closed, willed his headache away unsuccessfully, and opened them again with a breath. "Pick a piece," he said. "There's a lot've them, but we need—" Jack stopped, realized he could be funny here, and backtracked. "There's a lot've them, but like you said: not going anywhere," he corrected himself, then chuckled at this clearly good joke.
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 6:19 pm
the pen is mightier
Chel opened her mouth, but quickly shut it. The newspaper was folded and she put tape on it quietly- being a soft object there wasn't really any need for assistance.
It was very odd watching a sort of slow-motion Jack. She was beginning to see why he always had such a contemplative look on his face. "I didn't mean any heavy stuff," she said, but quickly amended, "Unless you wanted to- er, what I meant was if you wanted to talk about the mission, or the dragon or anything you might have seen ..." More quietly, she adventurously said, "Or me. S'whatever." But Chel could wait if necessary.
Always with the waiting.
"Just ... anything ... if you're up to it. Feels like it's been forever since then." She wrote "ABBY" across this package. That one was sort of obvious though, wasn't it?
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 6:44 pm
the pen is mightier
"Mm..." Jack was pleased to get it right, easy or not, but a thoughtful look soon took over again. In most ways the medication and constant pain clouded his mind, but in other ways they also cleared it: in the mist of two million thoughts he was forced to stop and consider them one by one, to pause and mull over and investigate what he had often looked over in his storm forward. He could only hold these thoughts for so long, sure, like water that eventually slipped between his fingers or dried up, but they left more of an impact on him individually than most of the waves did when completely sober. Rather than stand against the tide as he tried to do, Jack allowed himself to be part of the ebb and flow.
"You...Mm..." He frowned slightly, tried to find the correct words. "You're always giving the choice t'me. But my head's not on straight; never was. Too many," he made a face, "things. So this time, you pick, I follow. F'it's too heavy, I can swim," he added helpfully. "Go back to shore. Try again later." Pause. "...Damn. Should've saved it for when we're actually at the beach..."
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 7:42 pm
the pen is mightier
Chel was definitely debating calling in a nurse to check if he was possessed.
Giving her the option left her somewhat disheveled. She felt like she was the one that was knocked off the cliff, because she never led. Her wrapping of the next gift was stalled for a moment as she gripped the paper somewhat more tightly.
"I just ... I uh. I guess first I wanna make sure you're uh- okay?" She coughed and said, "Not the bruises and s**t, that heals, but I mean like ... anything you see that made you ... I dunno, Wren was sayin' how there was a lot of distortion ..."
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 8:45 pm
the pen is mightier
"Oh." He was drained, it was easy to watch him become evasive. "You know. Usual stuff," Jack replied with a little more of his old sass. "Dead people. Past memories don't wanna revisit. Minor series of existential crisis...es..Criseez?" He moved his mouth around the word with some uncertainty. "You're...in some."
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 8:46 pm
checking in
Maybe no eating people was a bad choice of words. Ian winced a little, shook his head, and kept pushing until finally Jack had laid back down. He still looked - and sounded - terrible, which was relatively concerning. Ian sat back down and dragged his chair a little closer to the bed.
"It's quiet here," he said gently. "No noise. Just me and a couple of techs on duty, and two others - a woman who was bitten on the neck and a man with a broken jaw who did the biting. So it's just quiet, no dinos, no dragons."
Ian stood up, disappeared from behind the curtain for a moment and then reappeared with a water bottle, which he presented to Jack.
"Here. Drink slowly."
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 8:49 pm
the pen is mightier
Chel continued wrapping and without missing a beat said, "So you had some sex dreams on the field? Kinky."
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Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 9:13 pm
the pen is mightier
The scowl was tired but characteristic. "Wasn't like that," he growled. "Unless you think I like ********' corpses."
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