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 Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 12:39 am
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 12:58 am
He rolled his eyes slightly and felt his head throb gently. Guess the pain pills weren't enough. "I'll get a new pair just for you to take off before we screw," he promised Chel.
"You want sappy, though? I can one up you there too." Face twitching with little spasms of pain, Jack scooted himself closer until they were just a short stretch from dumping noses. "You are," he told her as he looked her in the eye, "the best partner I could ever ask for, in and out of missions." It was a joke, and it also wasn't.
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 7:36 am
Chel's eyes lowered on his fourth word. She was too straightforward a person to pick up the joke in his voice. That was too much for her, he was crossing some sort of invisible threshold she had. Her I'm not, from the airport earlier came back, but she took strength in the hand gripped around his.
She closed to gap to touch his forehead and quietly said, "I just hope I'm enough to make you happy." Because that was all her goal ever was for any person she encountered, but especially so for Jack.
It was hard for her to sit there and acknowledge that Jack Hawthorn was saying these things to her. He had been so many things to her, so many different flavors of abrasive that to hear him murmur these things would take time to process. I love you was still ringing in her head in his voice from earlier and it was exhausting her just to process that.
"God it sounds so gay when I say it that way."
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 12:48 pm
"S'not gay." Hard to process, yeah, something he'd need time to get used to with their initial admissions out of the way, but not stupid, which he knew was the real word Chel was using. "Dangerous, I guess, but we both like that." It had the potential to be either a burst of flames that faded fast or the longest bonfire.
He wondered if that feeling would change, though. If letting her in and having her seeing the parts that she'd only caught glimpses of before (in any mention of Peyton, in the story at the China campfire, in the nooks and crannies of his words when they skirted dark topics) would change Chel's mind. Or if it would just make her disappointed but stay anyway.
"You ran the gauntlet, Chel. 'Enough' doesn't really cover that," he said quietly. "You've shown me who you are, and I'm lucky I got you before someone else did. I can hope what I show you is enough to make you happy too."
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:10 pm
"Stoooop," she moaned, dragging herself to lean over his frame, palms pressed into the mattress on either side of his head. She was beginning to realize why Finn hated this particular form of torture. Her pink hair trailed along either side of her face, barely tickling the edge of her hands.
She gave him a hard look and said, "I got it. I got it and if y'keep goin' I'm gonna ******** you now and yer gonna lose yer arm." Chel always had a rough way of talking, but the scrape dragged against Jack in a pleasant way, in her own romance.
She fell back on the pillows, groaning softly as her cuts compressed; the numb from the bathtub water was beginning to fade and she was starting to feel it. The reddish color on her face, however, wasn't. She rotated until her back was facing Jack, but she'd curled herself around his free arm and pressed her cheek into it, somehow needing to convey the heat he brought to it. "Go to sleep, Romeo."
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:22 pm
With a lopsided smile of triumph in spite of her threat, he dropped the sap and closed his eyes. "Fine. Just promise me nobody ever hears about how mushy I can get," Jack said. "I have a reputation to uphold." He'd already done enough today to warrant some vomiting later.
Taking a deep breath, he stretched his legs out with a wince and exhaled slowly; every wound seemed to pulse in tandem. He wondered if either of them would really get to sleep tonight. "Night," he muttered as he folded his hand against her. "Don't bleed out."
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:34 pm
"There's no way I could tell everyone without pukin' part way through," she said. Both of them kept dragging the conversation out, inch by inch. Maybe that was because they knew, or at least Chel knew, that on the other side of sunset there was a prison island with a stonier Jack waiting for her. She only hoped Jack could remember how soft he'd been, even for one night.
She tucked the hand under her chin and returned, "I'll try not to."
---
Although the morning started out evenly and slowly (adjusting to being awake was the hard part, especially with the tender muscles, but hunter healing was a marvelous thing) it quickly picked up. They had the room until 11 after all.
The room was a mess and Chel had to admit, she was rather proud. Books had been knocked off the shelves, certainly the one potted plant on the coffee table had never stood a chance as it was now smashed on the ground with the dirt spilling out. Pillows had been upturned and the blanket was nowhere to be found (it was shoved in one of her bags somewhere probably). The tiny tea kettle had been poured out and she had stuffed that in a bag too. A chair had been overturned at some point. All of the nice smelling soaps and amenities were also wrapped in a flannel, tucked under her arm.
She hadn't been kidding.
"Wish we could stay long enough to see their ********' faces," she said, heaving her bags over her good shoulder and offering a hand to carry one of Jack's. "Even better when they try to trace the cards an' find they don't lead to nothin'."
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:47 pm
It was only when they had finished packing that Jack actually took inventory of the room itself rather than its parts. He found himself strangely proud of the mess, even though his arm still hurt like a b***h afterwards. Worth it.
"I bet they've seen worse," he said with a snicker as he passed just a souvenir bag over. His backpack was slung on awkwardly, but his shoulder wasn't hurt; he could technically carry as much as she could there. "High end ******** are messed up. Too bad we can't sneak a pillow out, I like these. Not the design but the quality."
His glasses still hung a little oddly. He kept having to fix them and it was starting to grow irritating.
"Got everything you needed, Catwoman?"
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:52 pm
"I'll buy you nicer ones," she told him, taking the bag and wrapping the hands around her wrist. Chel was pleased to be a pack mule.
She gave him a quizzical look at the nickname. "Catwoman?"
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 2:57 pm
"You ransacked the room," he explained, and then continued with a smirk, "Sometimes when I get it just right, you make this purring noise. And apparently I'm Batman, so." He made a tada gesture. "Catwoman."
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 3:03 pm
"That is a thing I do," she admitted with a "not bad" sort of expression and a hand on her chin. "Catwoman it is."
She began to walk towards the doorway and continued to talk even as they walked down the hall. "Just don't start sportin' spandex." Not because it was tacky or because she was embarrassed, no, because, "Stuff chafes."
The door closed behind them and Chel felt a hint of finality. "Next time I pick where we go," she jested, as though Jack had a choice in the matter. "I'm thinkin' disneyland or some other place with a shitton of people and kids." There was a sarcastic, s**t-eating grin on her face. "You wanna call for the portal or should I?"
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 3:12 pm
Jack made a disgusted noise, first at spandex and again at Disneyland. "You b***h," he accused with a nudge of his elbow, their bags bumping against another. "I got it."
Double checking that the halls were empty, he lifted the pendant around his neck and muttered Deus ex Machina. A portal yawned open before them. "Ready to dive again?"
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 3:22 pm
"Fo sho." She was already walking through the portal, fingers interlocked with his.
Also, she'd forgotten Dawson's gyros.
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 3:34 pm
"Time of day; six fourty-three a.m.," a hunter called to a second tech who was scribbling the data down. "Vitals are normal." Chel raised an eyebrow at that one. Why were her vitals important? Had the techs been simultaneously experiment-
The metal was loud as it cracked open along blueish glowing lines. The tech had waved a runic device over the metal and it was done (after all, any sort of locking mechanism could easily be undone by any number of death lockpickers).
She could see her wrist. It was a pale, weak looking thing, a distinctly different color than the rest of her skin, but it was hers and it was free. She stayed stonefaced for a moment, but then she immediately stood up and did a dance, shoving her wrists in the techs' faces and saying, "Suck my d**k."
After struggling through the proper paperwork, she kicked a chair over and promptly left as the techs started a chorus of hisses (<******** suns).
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Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2015 3:56 pm
There wasn't as much paperwork as there could have been.
On the other side of the door and leaning against the wall, with one hand holding a mug of coffee and the other limply grasping a pair of sunglasses, Jack waited, stoic other than a snort when he heard something crash from within; he took that as a good sign. When she emerged, he straightened up, glanced at her newly freed wrist, and smiled in just the way solely Chel managed to bring out of him. The mission was his proof of competence, but it was a victory for them both.
Sunglasses were offered so they'd match. Let's greet the day with style.
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