[ 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. ]
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.
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. ]
[ 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.
You shouldn't have had to. Say anything, I mean. To feel like your feelings mattered.
[ 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.
[ It is not a strange thing for Jaime to say. Your feelings mattered. They matter. It's not a strange thing for anyone to say, even about Ruka, but it's still strange to hear. It is uncomfortable to hear. It shouldn't be, and she knows it shouldn't be, but... her heart is strange, and weak, and it hurts sometimes just to have it at all.
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. ]
[ Jaime laughs, pleased - he's always easily pleased - as he lets her look at the crude little drawing he'd made. His nose wrinkles when he smiles. It didn't always do that. It seems like that's something he's picked up from her, too happy to see her smile to keep from mimicking the gesture unknowingly, and now he does it all on his own. His hand grasps at her wrist lightly, thumb on her pressure point. ]
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.
[ There's comfort and warmth in that gentle little touch, his hand at her wrist; he'll feel the little jump when her heart skips a beat, as ever too sensitive even to these little points of intimacy. It's distracting, and sweet, and as always makes it a little bit harder for her thoughts to focus on running counter to what he's saying. Someone else with that much power over her heart would be dangerous, and in a way he still is, but it's always these soft affirmations that he tries the hardest to make take root.
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.
[ He smiles at her. Today's been... challenging. He knows the future will be even more challenging, when the things that have been given to him are taken away again. They always are. But for now, she's here, and so is he. And they'll be together for the forseeable future. The Porter likes them, after all. In a way, this helped more than anything else, listening to her talk about her past, slow and steady, having her trust him with that, learning about some of her past hurts as he cradles his own.
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... ]
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2020-01-06 12:41 am (UTC)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? ]
no subject
Date: 2020-01-07 04:50 am (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2020-01-07 07:39 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-12 08:32 am (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2020-01-12 09:08 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 12:19 am (UTC)[ 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. ]
no subject
Date: 2020-01-20 06:48 am (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2020-01-22 09:57 am (UTC)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. ]
no subject
Date: 2020-01-25 07:34 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 02:49 am (UTC)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.