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 Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 12:19 am
"Good!" she snorted, feeling the same sort of confusion; it was hard to tell where hers began and Jack's ended. Months of silent language were traded for a single mind, while also being two separate minds.
She watched him carefully, trying to gauge a reaction but also keeping her own in check. "I gotta ******** you up somehow, Mr. God." She tugged on one strand of his hair, pulling his jaw towards her for a proper kiss. It was strange, feeling Jack's tight sense of affection. Much less messy than her sloppy fountain, but still powerfully controlled and smartly applied nonetheless. It was addicting, almost, getting to love herself so fully for even a whisper of a moment. It kept her clinging to the kiss and turning it into an embrace she held for a second too long and missed dearly when it was gone.
"Well now that we used my ancient a** magical powers for our own lovey-wuvy purposes," she murmured, trying to brush past the fact that yes, she had been doing that to show Jack her affections, "How's about you show me all your embarrassin' secrets?" She made grabby motions with her hand, threateningly so.
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Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 10:08 pm
Another heartbeat, a live wire that seemed to run through his system instantaneously. They weren't physically there, but they might as well have been from how warm she felt. Her hair felt real enough as he pressed his nose to it, but then he had thorough enough memories that reliving them wasn't an issue. Jack considered not letting her get away when she broke it just to continue their little high, but too much of a good thing would ruin it quickly. Now he had a memory comprised of other memories to look back on, he noted.
"Mr. God?" he echoed with some amusement. "Where did that come from?"
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Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 10:17 pm
"Like Zeus and them," she explained, moving on quickly. "You think I'm gonna let the chance to dig around in your big brain go to waste? C'mon there's gotta be some good s**t in there." All clearly a joke, emphasized by the way she reached over to his head and pretended to pry it open, only messing up his hair in the process. Maybe a small part of her had actually hoped for something spontaneous, but it seemed to share it required a great deal of focus.
She fell back into the position they'd been sitting before, her frame still lightly pulsing with laughter. After a moment or two of enjoying the high, she perked up and looked at him somewhat more alert than before. "Hey- what if that's what we get tattooed, y'know? Like two brains or something."
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Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 10:11 am
He still quirked an eyebrow at the response before tossing his head back, only partially fixing his hair in the process. "Meh," Jack commented. "Better than most ideas, but it doesn't feel right."
After a pause, he turned his head to Chel and asked, "What do you want to see specifically? Ask me a question or give me some parameters."
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Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 10:19 am
"Mm. Then you come up with a better idea!" she whined, nosing her way into his side. "You're the smart one c'mon."
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Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 2:40 pm
"Mmmf." He tried to look put off, even when it was clear in this headspace that the motion always pleased him. "How about a cross since you worship me so much?" Jack suggested dryly, and then more seriously, "Actually, don't. No martyrs allowed."
He tilted his head back and gazed up, half expecting stars above them. "I don't know. My last tattoo idea was a drunk impulse, remember?"
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Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 4:21 pm
"I'd have t'get a little pumpkin or somethin' for worshipping you," she said with a laugh. "Pumpkin king, get it?"
She put a hand on her chin. "Hearts then? Like really gross real ones that are like on ********' fire." Then she thought that maybe body organs weren't something Jack would want to see. "Maybe heartbeat stuff?"
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Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 8:48 pm
His mouth tugged to the side in his usual half smile since, well, she wasn't wrong.
"Hmm." Dropping his gaze back down to her, Jack touched elbows with Chel and manipulated her arm so that they were touching down to the wrists at least. "Like..." With his other hand, he drew a rough equivalent of a regular heartbeat as interpreted by a monitor, first across his arm and then across hers. "...this? Or," he took her arm and lifted it, tracing lightly over the veins in her wrist as he made a full circle about, mimicking almost the many times she'd trace his, "all the way around?"
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Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 9:55 pm
"The first one," she said quietly, her approval rolling off of her like waves. "Hot rod flames?"
She took the hand tracing hers and said, "Show me somethin' from before Deus? Yer family or basketball or Stormy or ... I dunno. Anything."
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Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 10:57 pm
"And a little hula girl dancing on the dash."
He settled amidst the waves, closed his eyes, and considered. Every moment was marked with a slight movement even as he sat still, as if there was still an actual heartbeat pumping. Only when he had settled on something did his fingers more pro-actively curl around hers, unsure if the anchor helped connectivity here but aware at least one element might unsettle her.
Darkness snuck upon them like smoke. There was a sensation like they were being propelled forward despite sitting still, like the world's most realistic IMAX theater. A light flicked on in his hand, illuminating undecided forms shaped only as generic obstacles; his memory wasn't so sharp over minor details anymore. (And she knows innately that this vision fits best with the little boy they had brought back from the mission: the perspective is skewed, the breathing lighter, the weight on her back a possibly familiar sensation of a child's backpack.) There were no distinct thoughts but a general sense of purpose: they have to be here. And threaded in that single goal is a mixture of trepidation and excitement, the shared thrill of exploration of the unknown and the instinctive fear of the unknown itself.
Jack's memory split as he remembered not one locale but many across years. Most were still dark, abandoned places, but in one moment they're in a forest not unlike the one they had been in before, and then in the next it's all concrete and stained with spray paint, and in some there are other people (sometimes a girl she could recognize as Stormy with longer, curlier hair) while others are solitary ventures. Several even involved scampering from police. All of the snippets, however, shared the common theme of the dauntless search for answers behind the living shadows. He wasn't crazy, he wasn't crazy, he wasn't. It was a bittersweet series of memories: on the one hand, Jack had a sense of purpose and took to the journey with his characteristic seriousness; on the other hand, it had mostly proved fruitless and at best answers that began with maybe.
He stopped sharing and pressed his lips together ruefully for a moment. "It's a little too easy to let your mind wander. But. Well. There was that."
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Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 12:22 am
After his vision had finished, Chel said nothing for a moment. It might have seemed like apprehension, but the artifact would sort her as mentally exhausted after essentially witnessing a lifetime of moments. She kept her hand in his grip, but needed a moment to process all that she'd seen, felt, lived.
Each snippet was such a small whisper of what she knew was a much grander picture. The freedom and exhilaration of the chase, the sureness of his fate- it was hard to believe someone so untamed was shaking inside of Jack's concrete frame. Seeing Stormy was tumultuous and nearly broke the connection; their contempt mixed with their affectations (it stemmed from Jack, but to say it was solely his in the memory was erroneous. Chel felt it too now). It was incredible to experience so much of Jack, but exhausting to experience it all at once. It was like being introduced to a familiar stranger.
Despite every reassurance he could utter, Chel still felt even now that there were too many parts of him she couldn't know or understand, not ever (and the very selfish part of her was angry- mine mine mine). His violence with Peyton was one aspect certainly, but so too was his childhood, his family. Even in living through his reckless abandonment, even in watching him snub his family and living freely, Chel couldn't say she felt like she was closer to Jack.
It was probably because there was such a large gap between the Jack in the past and the Jack of now. Her Jack was steadfast, he was the logical one, the one that sometimes let loose but always remained restrained somehow. Not without his sentimentality, but never with such a rush of freedom and naive hope as his past self. The distance between the two Jacks made her blood run cold because it filled her mind with the ever present what if?
Jack would then feel an immense rush of questions, confusing, anxiety as she sorted through it. Was she allowed to have seen that? What made him change- did she play a part in any of it? Did he want to be who he was or was he satisfied now? At what point did the diaspora end? Did she even have the capacity to love both Jacks (that's a stupid question- she would encompass the world if he asked her to).
She settled for gripping his arm tighter, her fingers clenched like a shackle. Her Jack was slipping away and bleeding into who he once was, the two people intermixing. She'd force them together. She loved both. She loved the complexities. She loved him.
"Yeah. There was that." She sheepishly looked at her boots, unsure how much of her awe he was retaining. "I didn't know." Chel had always been s**t with words, always using the wrong phrases at the wrong time, but her fingers and her feelings had more than enough to say to cover the blunder.
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Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 8:22 am
The initial rush of confusion instinctively had him pull back in fear of rejection, a firework in rewind where the little explosion of sound and color was sucked back into a blander compact form again. Even as the awe eventually won over the anxiety he remained defensive, not just out of some unsourced fear of being pushed away but in fear of giving too much at once. Jack had always been a private person; as such, he didn't know how to control the manner he expressed himself. And with this being such a raw and unrefined method...
"No-one did," he said a little breathlessly, as if he had been actually running. Some of Chel's worry seeped in through the cracks. Had even a glimpse of Lina been too much? He hadn't meant to remember her, she had simply appeared, bid by the unconscious simply recollecting she had been on some of his adventures or simply because Chel had brought her name up before he started sharing. "I'm...sorry if that was too much at once." He was as locked back up as the grip on his arm was.
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Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 10:01 am
"No ... no hon," she said with a small sigh of a laugh. "F'anything I want more." Always more.
She tried to think how to explain it to him. "S'just like f'you found out I had a twin sister or somethin' this whole time." Sort of, but not really. "Y'haven't changed at all, but there's all sorts of questions that start comin' up, y'know? Like this whole other part I never knew." A part that Stormy did know. Now she had a reason to be jealous of Stormy.
She ran a hand through her hair, unsure if she was getting her point across. "But I want to don't get me wrong." Mine mine mine. She smile and poked at his side, trying to relieve the tension she hated.
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Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 10:20 am
He nodded in understanding and relaxed a little. He couldn't completely let the tension go just because it was in his nature to retain some. To always remain just a little bit guarded without thinking. "In a different session, then," Jack said with a small if tight smile. "I think we've done enough for now. We'll probably will wake up with some awful headaches or something." Who knew how time worked either while they were in this space...
"The question now is how do we get out?"
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Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 12:39 pm
"Who knows," she said with a shrug. "Maybe this is life's way of tellin' us to chill for a bit."
She moved to rest her chin on his shoulder, looking a little silly because he was so much taller, but contented like a cat. "Maybe it's all part of my plan. Yer trapped with me forever Jackles."
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