khajidont | MoM IC Contact: TAKE TWO

[ Right? Well, maybe not, but maybe so. For Jaime, who doesn't run into the same cyclical destructive thoughts that Ruka does, it really might settle as quietly as this. Just because weeds like that grow in her heart is no reason for her to plant those seeds in his.

She leans against his shoulder, settling in. ]

He was on the Network, asking about you. Among other things. I answered the other things first.

[ Meaning: went through a good portion of a conversation before confirming that Jaime was still around, and, of course, snarked when he complained about it. Usual Ruka Behaviors. ]

He was asking about me?

[ Of course he was. Jaime's pleased that he did, but it makes sense, doesn't it? He and Jaime had been close. And now that the others have been ported out, Jaime may be the only person not from his world that Yusuke still knows. That's an uncomfortable thought, though not an unfamiliar one; he's known plenty who've been in the same boat, his girlfriend included. ]

Why'd you avoid telling him for a while? Did you know who he was, or...?

You keep pictures.

[ Not always out, not always in sight, but Jaime is a hoarder of sentiment. Unlike Ruka, who tries to bury her pains and her losses in dark places where no one can trespass, Jaime almost keeps vigils for it. Mementos on a desk; paintings in the hallway; photographs tucked into frames, into books, onto the bare spaces of the walls.

Her thumb runs along the back of his for idle comfort, wondering how to explain it. ]

I suppose... I wanted a closer look, at the kind of person he was, first. Make sure the face he wore actually belonged to him.

[ Jaime peers at her, curious. That's never something that occurs to him. But he's less suspicious by nature - has had fewer bad things happen to him too - and he's got the boon of Khaji, who would be able to tell him immediately whether or not his DNA was the same. ]

Yeah? You thought he was, like... a shapeshifter, or something? Or could be?

[ It's not an outlandish suspicion. Not with the lives that they lead. ]

Could be. Pretend to be your friend. Pretend to remember you. Sometimes it's because they don't want to hurt you. Sometimes it's because they do.

[ One of her shoulders shrugs a little, but she doesn't make any motion to moving away from where they are. ]

It happens.

Oh.

[ Nobody's done that to him before. Because it's a crazy thing to do, right? Short-sighted and cruel in all of the wrong ways. It would take a real piece of work to do that. ]

...who did that to you?

Mmm. Well, there was when a bunch of people got abducted, and replaced with shapeshifter lookalikes. They could copy memories and spoof their DNA, so they were really difficult to flush out. Eridan got switched, but that was before we started dating. The other Jaime did, too. I don't remember who else.

Aside from that... [ It's not flippancy, the way she tells these stories, but there's a near casualness to it that betrays the distance of time. Things that hurt a great deal when they happened, of course, but... ] ... there was a guy from my world. He was someone I would have met, later, but I didn't know him then. Told me that the time he was from, we'd known each other a few months, that we were dating. You know, like, grade-school dating. Turns out he was actually trying to kill me, back in NDC, thought it might stick in the City.

[ That really was a long time ago, wasn't it? She can't remember the last time she even thought about Luciano. There's other stories she could tell, too, but even as she tells these ones, there's one person that comes to the forefront of her memory — one case worse than anything else.

Her hand shifts in his, changing grip. Fidgeting. She speaks a little quieter. ]

... You, um. Probably don't wanna hear about the other one. It has a really bad ending.

[ Worse than attempted murder, apparently. ]

[ Shapeshifter lookalikes. Those aren't so surprising. That's Jaime's bread and butter, after all, these things that just seem to happen sometimes - nobody's fault but the shapeshifters'. And then you move on, because what else can you do? The other part is different - and met with a mild spike of alarm; he's not worried about it now, of course, but some asshole was trying to kill her when she was twelve? - and a little less in his wheelhouse.

And then... well. He doesn't move, his hand in hers, firm enough so that he's still there, loose enough to let her fidget or pull away if she has to. He frowns at her. Does she still think, after all this time, there's anything that he'd want her to keep from him because he doesn't want to hear it? He knows she has her secrets. Things she won't talk about, that haunt her in the night, just like Jaime. If she doesn't want to voice the things that happened in those long years, he understands. If they were to lay all of their experiences out on the table, they'd be there for days, weeks, months.

But not for his sake. ]

I wanna hear about anything you wanna tell me. Even if it didn't end well.

[ Especially if. ]

[ It's a story she's only had to tell a couple times. Had to, the details wrenched from her like pulling teeth, a protracted misery offered in recompense for a wrong she'd done, a mistake she'd made. It's not the kind of thing she offers, nothing she tells strangers, friends. What good can pity do her now?

... But... Jaime keeps parts of himself closed off, too. There are hurts of his she doesn't know — some she sees in flickers behind his eyes at unusual moments, reacting to unseen blows, and she's never known how to ask about those kinds of things. She wants to know him.

Maybe he wants to know her, too. ]

... He didn't do it out of malice. I think... he thought he was clever enough, he'd be able to pull it off. [ She's nearly the age he was, now; those years seemed so much wider, so much more impressive, when she was still a child. ] But, um... this guy, he ported in only a day or two after a different him ported out. We didn't have the auto-refresh on the Network, or anything like that, so... when he left, nobody realized it. The second guy, he arrived in a strange place, and found he already had a life in progress. He had a job. A house. A— ... Uh, commitments.

So he. Um. Picked it up, as if it'd been him the whole time. That kind of thing, the switching histories, it wasn't common at all back then yet. It's not like we knew how to look for it. Just, he seemed off. We chalked it up to stress, at first, but... just because you know somebody is supposed to be your friend, it doesn't mean you know how to treat them. Even if you can see what's happened before, if you don't know what the feelings are supposed to be, it's not going to be genuine.

... Maybe he thought, if he faked it long enough, the feelings would come later. But we were just obligations to be minded. Contracts to fulfill. Nothing more.

He just...?

[ That's a crazy thing to do. That's a crazy thing for anyone to do, and Jaime likes to think that he knows crazy - heck, he's done crazy. You do crazy things like go out against things you'll never win against, or try to forge a life in a place that will never be permanent, or delude yourself into thinking that you're fine when you just got a dump truck of trauma piled on your head, but this isn't any of those things. This is identity fraud. Only the identity who he stole was his own - but not his own.

For a moment, Jaime entertains the idea of a different version of him who swoops in, pretends like everything's the same, like he knows everyone and can maintain all of the same responsibilities. He feels very resentful towards that hypothetical version of him for a moment. It's more than crazy. It's stupid. It's crass. And... ]

That's cruel, [ Jaime says softly. ] Even if he didn't think that's what it was. That's cruel.

[ Not only to be forgotten, but to be picked up again as though she's a job at the grocery store, as though she's a thing, not a person, as though nothing that came before him had meant anything, had their own lives, their own feelings. ]

You deserved better. Everyone in his life did. You can't just...

[ He shakes his head. Squeezes her hand in his. It's awful, but it makes sense. The more he thinks about it, the more sense it makes, the more explains about her. ]

But I guess he did. How did you find out?

Empath, remember?

[ It's surreal. It's one of the awful things that happened to her, sure, but it's... there's a strangeness to feeling the way Jaime has that spike of anger, the resentment. The things that hurt her happened so long ago, and maybe she was never able to forgive those people, and maybe they'd never tried to make amends to her — and all the supports she'd been given were too transitory, too fragile. It had always wound up feeling, in the end, that there was no point to letting herself feel hurt; it wouldn't change anything. In the grand scheme of things, whatever happened to her wouldn't matter, because nobody would stick around long enough for anything like consequences.

You deserved better. Jaime's not the first person to have said it, but it remains a strange thing to hear. ]

... I mean, it was different. I couldn't tell what people were feeling just by being around them. I didn't have that sense, yet. It was just the touch-stuff. [ Like his recipe cards. Like the little carved rabbit he gave her. ] We were on a trip. In Egypt. It was a little, um, vacation we'd planned, a while before, for just the three of us. He'd been acting weird, of course, and wouldn't talk about it... it felt easier to corner him there. He was the kind of person that... wouldn't talk about things, even if you tried to bring it up, if he had any way to avoid it. So I had to... use my power, to prove it.

I made up some story about needing practice, and gave him some totems, and asked him about different things while he held them. Like, his sister, his job, his colleagues in the City. His spouse, his childhood friends. His son. ... His daughter.

[ ... ]

... He didn't realize what I was doing until it was done with. He knew about it, but he didn't really understand. He had all these details, but couldn't sort out which things were important, and which things weren't. We had a lot of arguments, after that, about things, but—[—leaning as they are together, he'll feel the way she tries to shrug her shoulder, as if to dismiss the subject—]—he ended up exPorting about a month later, anyway.

[ That sure sounds like Ruka, doesn't it? Even back then, even that young - she's bright, with or without her empathy. She's good at collecting data. At studying people, even if they don't know they're being studied, on getting the sum of them only to burst into their life having already known what they've been trying to keep secret. For Jaime, it had been terrifying, but it had also been a relief.

To be this man, covering up this terrible secret, wronging the people around him... there's no relief to be had there, is there? Just the knowledge that you messed up. You messed up so bad, and you made everyone else suffer because of it. Even a child. A child who was, by all accounts, far more clever than he was. If it wasn't so devastating, Jaime would be proud of her, in a way. She's brilliant. He's always admired that. But this isn't the direction her brilliance should have had to have been placed. On a family vacation. Something that should have been good, ruined again.

He never even had to answer for his mistakes. Not really. He just got to vanish. The coward's way out, even if he hadn't chosen it.

What an asshole. ]

What an asshole.

[ Oops. He hadn't meant to say that out loud. ]

Sorry. I know it was a complicated situation, I just -- it would have been painful enough, him coming back like that. To lead you on like that, it's just... [ He lets out a quiet exhale. ] And if he left that quickly, it's not like you could do anything else about it.

[ It would have been less cruel to have him just disappear, leaving her with at least happy memories. ]

His -- his spouse. Were they there for you?

Yeah. I mean, he tried, at least. But it was a mess; he was hurting, too, and he wasn't any good making decisions, when he felt like that. Sometimes it was like I was the only adult in the house.

[ It always seemed to feel that way, even as a child; she was only thirteen when Miles left for good. By the time she was fifteen, she was totally on her own. Always the youngest, but always the responsible one. ]

It felt like being stuck in someone else's soap opera. It was so stupid.

[ She says it more like gossip than the more personal pain of the rest — as stupid as it was, if it hurt her then, it's a wound that scabbed over well enough. ]

Do you wanna hear about it? It's not really much to do with the rest, but—

[ —but how often does she volunteer these kinds of things? ]

[ That's not the way it should be. Heck, he and Minato had been teenagers when they'd been taking care of Ken, and they'd tried so, so hard to make sure that he didn't feel burdened by their own disasters. He thinks that they did a pretty good job of it. So if they could pull it off, what's with these guys? Why take a kid in when you can't even do a half-decent job? Nobody deserves to have to take care of the people who were acting as their parents at that young an age. ]

Yeah. Yeah, of course I want to hear it, [ Jaime says, shifting towards her a little. ] I wanna hear about anything you wanna tell me.

[ That's a blanket statement more than anything else, but it's a true one. It's easy enough to tell that he's telling the truth, with the full force of his attention on her, wanting to learn more about all of those years that had been taken away from her along with that entire world. There are no physical keepsakes he can go through like Ruka can go through his pictures, no remnants of the people that were. Just her and her memories.

And now Jaime and his own, in a way. ]

[ It's nowhere near the first time he's said something like that, and so while it's not surprising to be told, it is... a comfort, and one she's not sure she'll ever get used to. At the very least, it'll never lose value. It's been a long, long time since there was anyone she could confide in like this, and longer still since it was someone who could listen, and hear what she was trying to say, instead of seeing only the things she'd done wrong, or the ways she should have reacted, or how she should have felt.

It seems like it should be such an easy thing to find — but it's rare for anything to come to her easily.

She answers first with a gentle squeeze of his hand, grateful. ]

I know... still, I want to make sure. I don't want to take you for granted. [ He deserves better than that. ] It's the same for you, too, you know. I want to know you, too.

[ She falls quiet then, trying to figure out where to start — but after a moment she frowns, realization setting in. ]

I'm gonna have to make a diagram. [ It's too complicated to follow otherwise. God. This is so stupid. She looks back to Jaime, apologetic. ] That's how dumb this gets. Hang on.

[ With that, she makes quick and careful work of disentangling from where they're seated on the couch — and hey, there's a knock at the door. Delivery time!!!!! Time for Ruka to scurry upstairs for some paper and to leave all the "try to get the delivery guy to leave before he realizes he's in an imPort neighborhood and starts asking for autographs and favors" work to Jaime. ]

I know. And you've never taken me for granted. This is just -- this is the way things should be, [ Jaime says warmly, giving her a kiss on the cheek, his facial hair scratching against her. It's true. All of it. It is the way it should be. It should be taken for granted in a way, because it should be expected. But she's also someone who's never made him feel like he was being taken for granted, as though someone would accept what he'd do, what he'd say without trying to see who was underneath it all. He wants to be that for her too. ] And you can ask me anything whenever, you know. It's just that stuff doesn't always pop into my head.

[ Which is why she won't hear anything of his past, the big, momentous events, but over dinner, she may well hear that he dreamed that he was digging a giant hole in the desert, and hey Ruka, isn't that weird?

From upstairs, Ruka will hear a muffled: ] Hey, man, we just wanna eat. I'll double your tip if you just, like... go.

[ By the time she gets back down, Jaime's seated on the couch again, cutlery and plates out and a bevy of food laid neatly out on the coffee table.

Jaime's already got a mouthful of pakora. ] Mmf, [ he says artfully, waving at her. ]

You didn't actually tip him double, did you?

[ She moves lightly down the stairs, footsteps almost silent as she pads her way to the couch. It's easy enough to get her spot back, setting book and pen on the arm rest beside her for the moment while she takes off her gloves, looking over their selection. Okay.... maybe she ordered them too much (she's not going to eat even a third of it, when it's all said and done), but the variety is nice, and whatever they don't finish tonight, Jaime'll get to later. And if he doesn't, it'll disappear some other way all the same.

The downside, of course, is there's not much that's neat enough for her to peck away at with one hand while she draws with the other — her coordination is good, but it's not that good. She debates a moment in silence, and with gloves put away, she retrieves the sketchbook, flipping to a blank page. ]

You're gonna wind up financing your own stalkers like that.

No.

[ Jaime sniffs. ]

He didn't know what I was gonna tip him in the first place, so how would he know whether or not it was double?

[ Okay, it was probably double of a bad tip, but Jaime's not going to say that out loud. He's a good tipper! He's got the funds! So nobody really needs to know that he probably tipped him a little too much, considering the grief. Whatever, it's fine. ]

Besides, if he tries to stalk us, I'll sic Khaji on his ass. He'll terrorize all of his electronics. It'll be great. Right, Khaj?

[ Khaji agrees a little too emphatically. ]

...if he's an actual stalker, [ he scolds him, sitting down and starting to shove spoons in the take-out containers. ]

You should eat some while it's still hot too.

[ She gives him a Look at his protest, but says nothing. She knows you, Jaime. She knows!!!! But she shifts, getting comfortable where she's leaning against his shoulder, sketching out her diagram. ]

In a minute. [ She always says that. Usually it's when he has to lure her away from something in order to go to bed (or to get her out of bed), but it's most meals too. She's only been staying with him for ~~(checks which thread this is)~~ two weeks, but it's a hard habit to break. She keeps a poor schedule. ] I don't wanna forget what we were talking about. Besides, it'll reheat fine, won't it? I thought that was the point of take-out.

I guess, but it's hot now, [ Jaime protests, though it's only a token protest; he doesn't appear to actually have much interest in dissuading her. He does, however, hold up a pakora. ]

At least have one.

[ He'll pop it in her mouth if she lets him, because of course he will. ]

[ She spares him another look, but it's a little more curious this time. There's offer in the way he says it and the way he holds it, and — oh, this is a little more intimate than she's used to. A lot more, now that she thinks about it. It seems like such a stupid, little thing to get flustered by, but her face feels hot for it, and she's sure her cheeks are getting redder by the moment.

Ruka might be the more experienced between them, regarding some aspects of relationships, but her history has gaps and blind spots aplenty. She's never had anyone try to feed her like this before. It feels like such a huge thing, now that she's realized it, meanwhile Jaime makes the offer like it's the most natural thing in the world.

How does he do it? How does he make love look so effortless? ]

[ Jaime wasn't expecting this to get a rise out of Ruka - aside from maybe a playful scowl as she batted him away or a fondness as she accepted it - but she surprises him every day still. Just like he still seems to surprise her. His heart swells with affection, deeply pleased that such a small gesture means that much to her. He's always tickled pink when he can see it on her face. She knows that by now.

His eyes crinkle at the corners for his smile as he pops it into her mouth. And once she's done chewing, he leans in to give her a little peck on the mouth. ]

Good?

Yes, [ she grumbles, all fond affection beneath that heavy layer of embarrassment. (They're in their twenties! They live together! She has seen him naked! Many, many times!! Why is this where she gets flustered?!) She's still blushing when he pulls back from this kiss.

Not sure what else to do, she shifts on the couch, her knees bumping against his, and she turns the sketchpad so he can see the diagram. It's a series of little caricature faces, most arced in a semi-circle, and one person at the middle. The center face is a tired man with thin features, crows-feet wrinkles at his eyes, with a little crescent moon over his head. From him emerge lines that connect to the other faces on the paper, with thinner lines between some of those secondary characters. As Ruka talks, her pen hovers over the lines, indicating each person in turn. ]

He was someone that came from one of those places that, like, fifty other people come from all at once, but they didn't always come from the same point in time. They had a leeway of a couple decades. That kind of thing is pretty rare, when there's only one history. Anyway. He got here when he was in his thirties, and he wound up getting with someone from a different world.

[ Her pen traces a line to a face on the left side of the page. It's an even-more-serious-looking man, thin eyes behind thinner glasses, mouth a simple straight line. And yet, even for the simplicity of it, it's a face Jaime might recognize from years gone by. One of those people who come through more than once, and never remember. ]

He was only in his twenties, but he acted a lot older. He was a lawyer. Things were always really dangerous back then, a lot more than they've ever been here, so he was always a little on edge. That's why he couldn't stand—

[ The pen moves down to the bottom of the page, where two heads are drawn side-by-side. They're clearly of the same person, years apart: one, a teenage boy, with shaggy dark hair and a sharp-bright smile, a faint dotted outline of dog ears emerging from the top of his head. The head beside it is of that same boy but much older, deep dark circles under his eyes and a much dimmer smile. The dog ears repeat. ]

—him. He was that guy's best friend from high school, but — he [ Dog-ears ] showed up from high school while he [ Moon-head ] was way past that. It seemed like they had a thing while they were in school, or like, almost had a thing, so it was really tense. After a while he ported out and came back older, which sucked for me, because I had a crush on him when he was closer to my age, but that sort of thing happened a lot too.

Anyway... it was during all this that he— [ Glasses ] —exPorted, and lost his heart, and then left for good, so— [ She presses her pen to the paper and with a couple quick strokes blacks out his face. ] —he's gone. A few months after that, these two— [ Moon and Dog ] —started dating, which was really weird for me, but it was also really weird because, back in their own history, the guy got married to this girl—

[ She traces a line from Moon to a face on the right side of the page — a woman with a short, jagged haircut and dark-shaded lips ]

—and they had a kid, too, back in their own world. But she was there at the same time as all this, so it must have really sucked to see her husband get married to someone else, and then rebound with— [ she indicates the line between this woman and dog-ears. ] —her cousin.

But then again, they all— [ she scribbles out the woman's face. ]

Ported— [ the man with the crescent moon. ]

out— [ the man with the dog ears. ]

[ The diagram is now just a series of scribbled black splotches — all except for one spot. Beneath the void where the glasses-wearing lawyer had been is a smaller, simpler drawing than all the others — a girl's face. She has the same horizontal slash for an unsmiling mouth, with two little eyes and two little pigtails sticking up, and out.

Like rabbit ears. ]

—so it didn't really matter, anyway.

Edited 2020-01-07 07:39 (UTC)

[ That's a lot.

For a second, Jaime doesn't even know how to respond. It seems -- unbelievable. Ridiculous. Far, far stranger than anything he's ever seen here, any supernatural event, even stranger than that pervy serial killer clown that got all up in his business for a few months back there. And the child assassins, which is to say, children that are assassins and not assassins that specialize in murdering children. It's even stranger than that prolonged thing about cannibalism that happened, back in the day.

No, this is a romantic entanglement of absolute telenovela proportions, with a child in the middle of it. On a telenovela, the kid would be there, oh, once every few episodes to pop up, say three lines, and then fade back into the distance until it was useful for her to be back in the picture again, for some stakes or exposition. That's not the way of life, though. The way of life means that when you have someone you're taking care of, you're taking care of them the whole time, no matter what personal junk you're going through, like dating someone your kid had a crush on who then got aged up and so you dated them despite having lost your previous partner, and being married back home. ]

That's jacked up, [ he murmurs, leaning in to look closer at the illustration, try to put it together in his head. It's much lonelier now, too, all those faces crossed out while only Ruka remains. He can understand that part, though. For a moment, he's lost for words, and then he blurts out the only think he can think to. ]

-- did they ever ask you how you felt about it?

[ She has to think about it. Her head leans to one side, glancing from one little grave to another. There were always a million other things going on, after all... most of the answers people wanted from her were things that didn't matter.

She taps the back of her pen the older Dog-Eared man. ]

Yeah. He wanted to know if I'd be okay with him trying. But, like... it's not like I could say I wasn't, right? How I really felt didn't matter. [ Her shoulder shrugs where she's leaning against him, but he won't feel any tension when it drops. These are old hurts. ] I mean... it's no fair asking other people to be miserable just because you're sad. If I said anything like that, they'd have... moped and danced around it for six months, and wait for me to change my mind, and it would have felt like my fault. Or, they'd have gone for it anyway, and would have tried to keep it from me. Things were hard enough already.

[ She explains it so plainly, so matter-of-fact. As though the things that mattered most were the practicalities, and how those decisions would cascade into consequence after consequence, like everything is a game of dominoes. She calculates them out for everyone else, but never for herself. How I really felt didn't matter — she hasn't changed at all.

But... to her, it feels now a little unfair for her to have said anything at all. None of them are around to defend themselves, and — though imPorts arriving here from before the City's destruction isn't impossible — the chance of any one of them showing up is well below one percent. There's no one left who knows them but Ruka, so... if all she tells are her uncharitable, childish frustrations, then that's all anyone will know them for. Not any of the good they'd done, or the care they'd given her, or just how much suffering each of them had endured on their own up to that point. ]

I wanted them to be happy. It was... just a stupid situation. That's all.

MoM IC Contact: TAKE TWO

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