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 Posted: Sun Sep 29, 2013 1:39 am
Deus was too large with the full rank hunters gone. It was an anthill missing its quality soldiers while larger creatures threatened it stomp it out. Strangely it didn’t make Stormy feel small: if anything, now she felt the magnifying glass upon her, enhancing every movement she made because now they mattered more. The sun was out, but there was no fire burning her just yet—no she was sitting idle upon her bed, wrapped up in her gilded paged edition of Children’s and Household Tales by the Grimm Brothers, safe inside and still sweating. It was easy to fall back into books and forget people existed; definitely easier with everyone else busy: Gale on an important mission, Nevada probably off somewhere lounging (they hadn't had much contact after the first insanity titan came up), too caught up in her own nerves to try and reach out to someone else without using her phone.
Nerves. That’s what it was that made her think and tremble long after the battle was done. Without Thane, she had been falling more and more into social pitfalls lately: more like a tense songbird, feeling something watching and warbling onward all the same until something made her squawk and unceremoniously leap into the air for a new perch. Higher and higher up the tree until she felt safe—up into the world of the written word. All she had to do was calm down, talk it out with her partner, and then the problem would be fixed.
Now if the dracolich would stop giving her the cold shoulder . . . Stormy hadn’t heard very much from Thane at all since her embarrassing slip up in the spar against her best friend, but she knew this had been a long time coming. Deserved even, if his subtle noises were read right. But she never knew how empty her head felt without that solid presence of his curled spines, or how dim it was without the cold lantern light of his phylactery; her sense of self was already loose and changeable by even the slightest word, and she sorely missed that grounding nature Thane provided. Even the waspish insults were preferable to the desolate silence.
But she was supposed to be strong now. She was the hunter, well on her way towards being full rank; therefore, she was in control. He couldn’t stop her from wielding him, or tell her what to do and when, or bring her down just because she couldn’t meet his expectations; in fact, when she was launched they had done such a spectacular job that even Thane couldn’t help a remark (“Decent”). So Stormy stuck it out the stubborn way and let him do as he wanted, because in the end he would crack and come back to her once he understood that weakness was not a sin—that nobody could be as perfect as he wished, as much as she wanted to be for him. And she would happily welcome him back with open arms once he did, because a hunter wasn’t really a whole without their partner.
Upon realizing she’d read the same line three times without comprehension, Stormy sat up and shook off her thoughts. Revisiting them wouldn’t make her calm down. They’d do just the opposite and make her more and more worried. So with a deep breath she settled into the middle of “The Six Swans”, one of her favorite stories of the compilation (scribbles and scribbles of comments on the delicate pages). That was when she heard the knocks.
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Posted: Sun Sep 29, 2013 2:45 am
He had memorized what he was going to do, naturally. Preparation, preparation, preparation. Then a contingency plan, then a backup for the contingency, then an alternative for the contingency. Planning and scrutinizing every possible angle so that he would not be caught off guard again. His staring on the battlefield had not only been unprofessional, but it was a lapse of his good judgment failing in favor of emotion. That wasn’t acceptable here.
But Jack had stared because he couldn’t help himself. Even if it had just been the back of her head, it was still hers. Even if it had only been for a few seconds before he was left staring in the empty spot she had been, that moment in time had existed. She defied his logic just as she always had, and she didn’t even know it yet.
“It’s open!”
A little higher than average, airy, round at the edges, a vaguely musical cadence. Almost expectant in tone. A wild thought crossed his mind that she knew he was there already, but that was doubtful; Finn would have mentioned it to really drive that revelation he gave home. He knew Nevada lived in the room and had expected her to greet it, or her roommate, not . . .
He faltered. Jack, a man who prided himself in his own agency and will, who gave glazed smiles and doled out insults with mechanical precision and shrugged off retorts like rainwater, who emotionally circumvented the temporary deaths of his fellow hunters and laughed when his own safety wasn’t guaranteed, fell upon a rare moment of true hesitation at the sound of her voice. Two words from her goddamn mouth after almost three years threw him off like it was nothing.
(( This is a bit of a tender topic, I understand? It’s natural to feel— ))
Shut the hell up. He was in no mood for Owain’s sorry attempts at comforting him, hated that this monster was privy to his private moment and his every waking moment otherwise and that there was nothing he could do about it. The giant had no business in this encounter, and Jack made sure he made his point with great emphasis. This was what being sentimental offered: a ******** tree hugger trying to coddle him over one stupid little girl.
Just get this over with; only a few steps had to be eliminated, and it was better without a middle man anyway. Back straight. Chin up. Shoulders relaxed. Countenance neutral; adjust to avoid looking closed off. Hair, bangs swept back. Coat crisp. Turn the knob promptly, find the minimal angle to open (around 115°). Two steps in, left then right. Position body accordingly depending on the number of occupants.
Only one was there today. When green eyes met green eyes, an electric current went through his system and he briefly forgot his steps.
“Lina . . . ?”
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Posted: Sun Sep 29, 2013 10:36 pm
It was impossibly wrong.
Some of the details were right—the height, the clothes, the voice, the eyes. But the hair was wrong, and that should have been enough to deny his existence here: an ill-made translation that had to be God’s copier spitting out a frighteningly similar (but certainly not the same) individual. Tall, green eyes, pale skin, the subtle indolence of a cat, yes, but green hair meant by absolute natural law that it had to be someone else. It had to be. It wasn’t his style to go so far (she had coaxed him, coerced in the beginning, but only partially). So someone else, then: maybe a relative a Lucky’s (right hair, right eyes, in Life judging by his coat), or at least someone else’s old connection. It wasn’t fair to simply dump him back in her life like it was nothing.
There he was anyway, forcing himself in when he wanted something, as he always had.
Three words and they had a dialogue going. Stormy was still on the bed, and he was still just inside the threshold, and she stared. Their modest room now became insufferably small and suffocating, and she swore the world tilted just the slightest bit. Everything was off the axis. A dream! Hah, this had to be a dream, or a nightmare. It wasn’t the first time he had visited her vivid nightly visions, and after the Tear incident he had been showing up more and more lately. Had Fate conspired to bring him now, or had she not been diligent enough? Had she not made every attempt to skip his name, avoid the topic, pretend it never happened? But if he was a devil then he followed the same rules: even if you did not say his name, even if you wiped your mind and never thought about him, there was still sin. Still imperfections in the world. Still a smudge on the soul you couldn’t quite get rid of.
“My God, it’s actually you, isn’t it.”
It wasn’t fair.
They stayed at an impasse, Stormy too afraid to move, him perfectly happy to remain still, looming over her like a living statue. At length her hand twitched and broke the spell, closing the book with a snap too loud in her ears. She watched him mouth her old name like she had stolen his voice away, wondering what it was he saw in her now. What had her expression frozen into? Did her mouth betray a tremble? Did her eyes dim, did her pupils narrow? Had her brows lifted? She didn’t know because she felt such a disconnect from reality—what was the point? This wasn’t real. This wasn’t real, she kept telling herself, because it was too convenient. Kick up the dust of her memories before Deus and suddenly he was back, like black magic? She didn’t buy it. The relationship had not been what it said on the package and she had wanted her money back.
Two steps into her room (her room) and he was far too close. He seemed to sense this as he hadn’t tried to move forward, but it was soon coming. Soon he would be on her again like before, and what could she do? There was nobody there to stop him. Nothing could, really, if he put his mind to it.
After all, she had tried dying and relocating to a remote island, and he still had found her.
“Say something.” He had an odd look on that she couldn’t decipher—was that actual emotion, or the mechanical calculations to copy it? The silence stretched and he swallowed. “Please.”
That was unnatural.
Stormy continued to keep her lips pressed together, physically beginning to feel her neck hurt from how stiff she kept it. Maybe this was just the old game again: who had the power? She had no obligation to answer, and it was obvious that the longer she refused his demand, the more he squirmed. It wasn’t evident in obvious pleading; no, with him it was the little things. A shift of the foot. Remembering to blink. A small tic near his left eye that developed from impatience. At least those hadn’t changed either.
Setting the book aside, she straightened her legs and got to her feet with barely a rustle of the bed, never once turning her head away from him (if she did, he would make sudden movements surely). Even when standing there was a disparate height difference, but at least now she wasn’t so defenseless. He did, however, block the only way out, and that made her nervous; and he probably knew it, too, and remembered that the more nervous she was, the more likely she would hit her limit and crack.
But she could do this. She didn’t need Thane’s scornful presence to keep her cool. All she had to do was keep telling herself she was strong, and she would be fine.
(If she kept telling herself it didn’t happen, then it never existed)
“Stormy,” she said, tilting her head up to view him directly. “It’s Stormy here.”
He could drag in her old self, but she wouldn’t falter. She knew who she was here.
Didn’t she?
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Posted: Wed Oct 02, 2013 11:24 pm
She was wearing the Catholic Guilt look. Still thought him some sort of devil. The more things changed, the more things stayed the same, he supposed. Lina—Stormy—was obviously less happy about this reunion than he was.
(Was that the right word? Was he “happy”? His compartmentalized emotions had decided to pull out all the drawers at once in this unexpected turn of events. )
Stormy. Stormy. He couldn’t help but make a face when he gave a flat, “What.” She stared up at him unflinchingly, which Jack gave her some credit for; apparently Lina had decided to try and grow a pair of balls here, like the other women he had encountered. The difference, however, was that he was certain she couldn’t uphold it. They were more like balloons: one sharp p***k was all it took to deflate them. The question was, did he want to? Or did he want . . .
“Is that a thing here? Codenames? Because I met your friend Nevada,” (Jack noticed her grow more pallid) “and I’m aware she has a twin named Alaska, and I could have sworn I read an older report about someone named Killzone.” His mouth twisted into a half-smile. “So. What’s my nickname, Lina?”
He had forgotten what it was like to watch the mental gears turn in her expression: to see her flip between coming up with an appropriate answer, changing the topic, or not speaking at all. Catching her off guard was a blessing—the girl was normally so guarded that had she known he would come, this meeting would have been impossible. Silence and silence and more silence from beyond the wall. So maybe it was for the best that he had come across her like this, though Jack was loathe to be anything less than 100% prepared, 100% in control. Nevertheless, he had always been good at recovering quickly whereas she was one to get stuck in her own thoughts; and maybe that would give him the advantage he needed to come out of this conversation with what he wanted.
(But that pained look was starting to make him forget exactly what that was.)
“I have an idea: How about Major Screw Up?” His half-smile gained an edge. “That’s all I’ve been since you’ve died.”
She flinched. Good. He took the opportunity to step closer.
“Do you know what happened when you left? What they told me? They said that you died, Lina.” His mouth was still in that mockery of a smile, the chuckle that left him a sour sound. “You know what was the first thing I thought? I thought, ‘Holy ******** s**t, she actually did it this time. This b***h actually meant it. Just—’” And he made his hand a gun, stuck it to his temple, and made a soft pwooh sound. It wasn’t strictly true, however: Jack had been more of the theory of overdosing on something at first, maybe a mixture of pills and alcohol from her Dad’s cabinet. He was very aware Lina couldn’t handle gunshots, let alone hold one herself. Violence wasn’t in her nature.
But it was very worth it to see her start to quiver anyway.
“They wouldn’t let us see you. Not me, not your family,” he continued darkly, his smile persisting. “Closed casket funeral; said the body was too mangled for public viewing. The wailing stuck with me for weeks.” He could still hear it now, but it was not from her family. “Your sister sang that one song—s**t, what was it? She was wearing a really nice jacket, I remember, had vine designs etched everywhere. The tyke, he looked too old in his suit next to your dad, but I remember they all had flowers somewhere on them. Everything smelled like fresh cut ******** flowers, or vanilla if you got close to the casket.” His face lit up inappropriately and he snapped. “‘The Last Rose of Summer’, there we go! That’s what she sang. That’s what killed it . . . It was like being at your mother’s funeral all over again, only worse.”
She was really starting to shake now. Those green eyes were luminous with impending tears. Jack didn’t flatter himself as a story teller, but he remembered one important thing about Lina: her imagination was particularly vivid. Right about now she was sitting in the pews with her grieving family.
“Your dad—I remember how your dad looked when your mom died. He looked like someone had gutted him from the inside out, like those science projects we used to do in high school. Cut at the sternum, peel away, remove the organs one by one. Sterile—it smelled awful in the church,” he remarked offhandedly. “Flowers and chemicals and vanilla. Fresh and pungent and sweet. Not even a ******** corpse around to justify me wanting to puke.” His own stomach turned uncomfortably; he noticed his chest was growing tight.
Could she imagine him there too, he wondered, in his svelte black coat and his stiff mother like cardboard at his side? Did she even remember what he used to look like anymore? Or had she embraced this new life so wholeheartedly that she ******** forgot him?
“Imagine the dissected man. Then imagine it worse. Not your organs but your God damn soul cut out. When you died, the rest of them died too. I died.” Jack didn’t know when he had approached several more steps, only that he remembered to blink and there he was. She shrank under him, her back against the wall, her hands clenched, her eyes wide and luminous. His smile formed a sneer. “Imagine me, not having had contact with you for weeks, finding out you decided killing yourself was a better idea than sucking it up. Thinking it was my fault you went that far, wondering if I could have tried harder to get past those God damn barriers you put ********, what about your family, Lina? Did you think about how it’d affect them? How they’d fall apart and fragment and suffer after losing both a mother and a daughter? How I'd get along afterwards, with all those damn issues unresolved because you took the easy route?
“Did you think at all about the consequences, you stupid b***h?" he hissed. “Or did you just not care because it meant more escapism from the real world you're so afraid of?”
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Posted: Sun Oct 13, 2013 2:04 am
She shook on the outside, but on the inside she was still and cold as a desert’s night, and almost as desolate of life. Weapons could slice and beat and break her shield, but words would always wound Stormy more: the shape of their letters could cut her open; the very sound of their consonants and vowels and strung together syllables like cannons and guns blasting her to pieces; the intent, the tone, the body language behind them like an invisible army she couldn’t hope to stop. He spoke and it was a full out war that washed over her, a raging rant of how his life had fallen apart since her apparent death, a play by play, a deconstruction brick by brick—his words kept coming and she couldn’t hold onto even one analogy to compartmentalize it all. It was burning hatred and despair that drowned and the bare boned trees of the winter cold and brittle and the emptiness of space that made everything else insignificant and the crushing guilt that came long after the fact, after lying awake at night to replay it over and over.
She realized suddenly that her tears had spilled over. Her fists clenched at her sides with uncertainty as she viewed Jack’s tear-stained face through her own blurred eyes. In spite of the spite emanating from him, in spite of feeling like she should explode from how much she felt at the moment, nothing could cut a path more clear for her than the sight of someone crying: it brought out the need to ease that pain, no matter what the cost, no matter who the person. It was what had made her hug strangers as a child and what made her work so hard to make someone happy: to impress Candace, to watch out for Nevada, to spend time with Gale in hopes of his memory returning . . . And now here he was tugging at those heartstrings. Was that also a trick? His sniffles sounded real enough.
Stormy couldn’t tell if it was just her tear-stained vision, or if she actually saw something glisten in those eyes that watched her now. But try as she might, she couldn’t find her anger at being accused of causing everything that had happened to him since she came to the island, not one shred of the ability to be indignant at this rare and illogical argument. And at first she was confused, until she dug a little deeper and realized, on an unconscious level, that she really and truly did feel responsible. That she deserved it. And after hearing how far Jack had fallen, from uptight a*****e to the loser next door, how could she think otherwise? Here was a man who had realized too late how much he had emotionally depended on her, who had thought she had killed herself because of him, who indeed had taken the offer from the recruiter to get away from her old life before it suffocated her, who before even all of that had tried in the worst ways to mend or tear the relationships—now it seemed she had several years’ worth of pent up grievances to account for.
And her tears continued because in that one broken moment she came to believe that life was very, very fair: it had allowed her a chance to breathe and grow when she had deserved none. And now like the Devil it had come to collect by forcing her to acknowledge him once more. To remind her that to validate her existence on the island, she had to fight for humanity every single day like it was her last, to be their soldier when they were defenseless. And she hadn’t done that. On missions she fell apart and cracked, had nightmares, failed at defending herself and others, and she pretended a smile could wipe all of that away. She’d run away to a new life, but she wasn’t doing anything with it; just collecting friends and hiding behind them, throwing herself into their lives so that she could stop bothering with her own.
Gale, Nevada, Miss Candace: they all called her strong at some point, but she wasn’t. The only thing strong about her was her imagination, and that only begot her the means to escape away when things became too hard to handle; much like she wanted to now. Not even Thane, her own soul-bound partner, wanted to deal with her right now. It was a painful reminder of where she and Jack had began, she noted with a bittersweet twist of her mouth: where she thought herself unworthy of even those close to her.
They stood mirrored, fists at their sides, faces stained and tensed, one looking up and one looking away. She could almost make out the way Jack’s jaw shifted as he swallowed.
“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly, her trembling beginning to lessen. Three words out of three thousand emotions.
“You’re so sorry.” He made them sound so childish and useless.
They were. Nothing could make up for what he went through. That was what killed her: that there was a wrong she couldn’t fix.
“What do you want me to do?”
He wiped at his nose and sniffled again, scanning her wall for what felt like an age before he turned to her. “I want you to give me a second chance,” he said, and he lingered on the final syllable like he hadn’t quite planned out that response.
“What do you mean . . . ?” A split second before he answered it hit her.
“I mean a second chance at us.”
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