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MoM IC Contact: TAKE TWO
Jaime's cell phone is more or less plugged riiiight into his brain, so he tends to pick up like 99% of the time! If not, however...
"Hey, Jaime here! Leave a message, and I'll get back to you ASAP."
[If you want to find his previous inbox - it hit captcha! - please go HERE.]
"Hey, Jaime here! Leave a message, and I'll get back to you ASAP."
[If you want to find his previous inbox - it hit captcha! - please go HERE.]
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[ 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.
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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?
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[ 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? ]
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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. ]
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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. ]
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[ 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. ]
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[ 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.
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[ 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.
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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.no subject
At least have one.
[ He'll pop it in her mouth if she lets him, because of course he will. ]
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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? ]
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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[ If it had been him and Minato, and them entering a relationship - as odd as that feels to even think about - had any chance of hurting Ken, they wouldn't have done it. Simple as that. They wouldn't have been miserable about it either. They knew what was more important. Looking at Ruka now, even just imagining her, young and hurt and vulnerable, makes him wonder how anyone could possibly look at her and not feel the same. ]
They matter. [ They mattered then, too, even if nobody seemed to think that way, even if Ruka herself doesn't seem to think that way. ]
You were all in a crappy position, [ he does admit, though, relenting. ] This place has those in spades. Especially when all anyone ever seems to want is to have someone else.
[ He frowns down at the paper, all of those scribbled out faces, that single image of Ruka left behind. He takes the sketchbook, grabs a pen and doodles a face beside her, a crude little grin on the head's face, floppy hair, and beetle horns sticking out behind him.
At least Ruka's got someone now. ]
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She doesn't squirm out of his arms, or make any strange expressions for it, but it does leave her silent for a moment too long, distracted until she feels his hand moving over hers, taking her pen— ]
Hey, what—
[ —and drawing something new on the paper. Though it's tempting to fight him for control of the pen, she's held back by her curiosity, her brow furrowed as she looks back up at his face. What's he playing at? It's a quick drawing, so she doesn't have to wait long, but when she sees the paper... ]
... You?
[ It's a rough drawing, but there's no room for mistaking it. Who else would Jaime put there? And there's a dozen cruel little rejections that bubble at the edge of her thoughts — that he wasn't there for that, that he couldn't be (after all, that world had its own Jaime Reyes, someone dear to her for very different reasons, and if this one had been there instead, it wouldn't have been this, not then), that all the caring and the wishing now doesn't change how it went. But... those aren't the things she wants to say. They're not even things she wants to feel. They're all just residual poisons, little habitual sabotages all stirred up rather than let her be made vulnerable by sweet affection.
Besides. He's not trying to change the things that were, anyway. When Ruka looks up from the face on the paper to the one he's wearing, she sees the real message there. He's here now. Things like that won't happen here, because... it's hard to say she matters, but she matters to Jaime, who's leagues better at the whole emotional intelligence thing than most people. Or, she thinks, he just... sees how fragile she is, and knows how to be gentle enough with her.
God. Wasn't she trying to support him this time?
Without a word she leans over, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth — a lingering, sentimental thing. ]
How'd you get to be so sweet, huh?
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What can I say? [ He says, an easy, natural thing. ] I've got a gift.
[ His eyes flick down to the page. ]
I couldn't have been there for all that. Not... me, anyway. But I'm here now.
[ He's not planning on going anywhere. He probably won't, at the end of the day. ]
That stuff's always gonna matter to me. So that's one.
[ One person to care, even when Ruka herself doesn't.
It's a start. It's better than none, anyway. ]
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He's here now. She matters to him now. That's what's important, isn't it? They can't change how things went, and there's nothing from back then that she would want to give up. Not even the ones that hurt still. ]
Your feelings matter to me, too. And... not because I can feel them. You know that, right? The things that happen to you, that are important to you... they matter to me. I...
[ ... She shouldn't. Not yet. There's... still too many ways he could doubt, and she's not ready to face them. She doesn't have enough strength to lay them all to rest.
She lets her hand twist, her fingers wrapping around his wrist like a bracelet cuff. Her exhale is slow; she didn't realize she was holding it. ] ... ... I'm here, too.
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He always wants to know more about her. More about who she was, what she's been through. Maybe it's so that he knows what he has to be now. ]
I know, [ he says, voice low, fond. And he does. Even when he has his doubts about some of the strength of his feelings, just how swept up he finds himself, Ruka cares. She did even before they started dating. It's part of what drew him to her in the first place. The book she had given him, new years, calling him, watching others without them knowing just how much she was trying to help them, save them from themselves... ]
...you've showed me.