baby i have been here before

[boomvox]

Who: Jae & Ilde.
What: Jae returns from confronting Hilmi, and has to deal with some things he didn't expect to.
Where: His apartment in Creekside.
When: Immediately following this log.
Notes: THE PARADE OF EMOTIONAL HORRORS CONTINUES.
Warnings: Discussions of rape, suicide, death, Apocalypse-verse flavored tragedy, torture, mental health issues (post-traumatic stress). LOTS OF SADNESS.

For a while, he's fine.

For a while, he isn't himself.

Indulging in this much magic is like no drug Jae's ever been on, and the adrenaline is tailored - precise, clean, detached. He hasn't accomplished what he set out to do, but he's taught someone a lesson (just like the deserved to be-), and they deeply fucking needed it. Now he knows what that thing is; he's felt its power and its magic and he can find out how to stop it. That's just how it's going to be.

Jae makes it all the way to Megan's neighborhood before his head finally comes back down to earth.

He stops short, not quite on her street yet - he looks down at his hands. There's blood on them, smeared awkwardly and mostly dried, and he's suddenly cognizant of the tightness on his face and the too-sharp stiff feeling of air hitting split skin on his face. Oh god. Oh god oh god-

What the fuck is he doing? Walking to Megan's house like he's done some great thing, where did Hilmi even go? What has he done - marching through the district, blood-covered, bruised, head held high and gaze frosted over, like some good little soldier, his school teachers would be so proud -

His school teachers. In Osaka, in the programs. He remembers it. He knows they'd be proud because he remembers this, too, every second ticking by of that magic that feels like black alien grease in his head and in his throat, that he's never, never used before - before -

He didn't remember it last time. Last time, at the facility. He used the same magic, tonight, that he used then.

And he remembers everything.

Jae throws up in a public trash can. Someone passing by takes pity on him and helps get him shuffled into a cab - one of the enchanted ones, and the little driver, delicate and glowing just faintly, asks him if he's all right and calls him sweetheart and he can't say anything besides hollowly telling her his address; he doesn't want to talk to her, even look at her, because no one should be taking pity on him or being kind to him, not after he did that. His head swims, he pays her - too much, and he ignores her to flee into his building, staggering up the stairs (doors slamming in his wake, he doesn't hear it at all) instead of waiting for the lift. His hands shake unlocking his apartment door, he locks it behind him, and it's not until he's in the bathroom doorway, staring in at the bright white tile, eyes shot, face bruised, split, bleeding, keys still in one hand, that he remembers someone else is supposed to be there.

Comments

[boomvox]

"Does she know Erik?"

Jae isn't sure a guy she doesn't know should go show up at her door, demanding her current status - hell, any guy, maybe he should... do something. Doesn't Hasibe know her? They're co-workers, right? (Fuck, does Megan even still have her job?)

[rhinemaid]

"I don't know-- I don't know her, really, I copied her eyes once--"

Ilde has no idea where she works, who she knows, what would be the appropriate response right now; the only part of this that she knows anything about is Hilmi and she doesn't know enough to offer anything useful. It's frustrating.

[boomvox]

Weakly, Jae thinks maybe he doesn't want to know what copied her eyes meant, and then he thinks that if he's thinking that, surely he's feeling better - and then he just feels hollow again. Maybe not.

"I don't think a guy she doesn't know should go."

So he'll go in the morning. He's in no state, right now. And he doesn't have anything to help her with, anyway. (Because Hilmi didn't. Because Hilmi is a fucking waste.) Maybe by then, somebody will call Ilde back.

[rhinemaid]

"Okay." Erik can go find Hilmi, then, maybe. They still might need him, though Ilde thinks she'd prefer it if they didn't. At least she doesn't have to see him, either way. Megan doesn't have to see him, that's important. More important.

"Okay," she repeats, nudging her cheek against his shoulder.

[boomvox]

Jae closes his eyes. She's comforting; there's something about her that makes the static in his head (that feels like a color, that smells like midnight) ease a little. Maybe it isn't her, maybe it's just being with someone else.

He wonders if he'll go to prison if he's killed Hilmi.

In the dark behind his closed eyes, for a moment he feels like he's not in his body anymore - like he's laying down, held down, in the dark-

Jae doesn't startle, but he opens his eyes again.

Sleeping is going to suck, tonight.

[rhinemaid]

"I'll stay," she decides, quietly, and it doesn't seem abrupt; one moment flows neatly and smoothly into the next and Ilde is staying because it feels like where she should be at the moment and she follows instinct like it's all there is, sometimes. Right now.

[boomvox]

He says, "Okay", and it sounds like Thank you, and for a long time, he doesn't move.

When his arm starts to ache from the position he's in, Jae finally sits up - his neck hurts, from being curled over, but he doesn't pay it any mind, it just blends in with everything else. His shirt's half soaked by now, and he slowly pulls himself to his feet. In his bedroom (which is attached to the bathroom; there's three doors in the master bathroom, one that leads into it from the main room, one that leads into where the toilet and shower are, and one that goes into the bedroom. It's a little crazy-), he pulls off his shirt lets it drop to the floor, and pulls on another one, long-sleeved and soft-knit, and doesn't bother changing anything else or even drying properly first.

He re-appears in the bathroom, standing by the doorway again, holding a black hooded sweater. It's the really soft one.

[rhinemaid]

Ilde pulls herself up out of the bath when he returns, picking up a towel and stepping down the dais with the very deliberate steps of somebody who needs badly to be in control and isn't, maybe, her glamours resettling on her skin as the water drips off it. (He's probably seen her tattoo before, in London; high hemlines and high heels, she's still that person, sharper and darker.)

"I should've got actual clothes," she observes, but she takes the sweater and it's not like it won't cover most of her, given how much smaller she is than he is. "I think I gave someone a turn."

[boomvox]

For all his other tendencies, you'd think Jae might turn red at a girl he's fully platonic with getting naked out of his own bath tub, but Ilde's body isn't the first he's seen; if he looks at anything, it's how she does her glamour. (She's much better at it than he is.)

"They must have been a prude." Lightly, just barely. There are odder things in Baedal than nudity. "I have.. I mean, whatever else you'd like to put on."

That one's just really comfortable, and he didn't want to assume she'd really want to, you know, wear his knickers. (Some of them are cute, though.)

[rhinemaid]

"This is okay," she says, finding her hands in the cuffs and smiling up at him, small and nearly tremulous. "This is-- fine, clothes are just..." A vague gesture. Habitual, obligatory, or play. Sometimes all at once, but right now it's just nice to have something soft to tuck herself up with.

"It's fine."

[boomvox]

To Jae, clothes are rather important (like her deliberate steps, he's got - the only things he has, putting himself together this way), but he's either in too open of a mood or too exhausted of one to do anything besides passively understand her implication. Clothes in the water must be a pain in the ass, anyway.

"You're welcome to whatever," he says, and it doesn't sound like a brush-off, it sounds like he's telling her she's got carte blance in his apartment (which she does). But his eyes are rimmed in red, worn out and frayed down to the bone, so that's the last she's going to get out of him for now. The bed in his bedroom is kingsized on an antique white frame, white sheets; he lays down, still fully clothed, on the far side of it (so Ilde's near the door if she decides to sit down).

He'll be out pretty quick. (Troubled, fraught, but out.)

[rhinemaid]

The importance of clothing is something that Ilde is just used to experiencing differently than people around her, but Jae probably would understand why she's so choosy and impractical; if she has to do this, then she has to do it her way and make it hers, uncompromised. It's like the glamours, and making sure that what people see is what she chooses for them to see. What they know is what she chooses to tell them--

--which Jae does understand, she already knows that, so she's both genuinely touched by Jae's offer and has every intention of taking him up on it at least as far as looking around. Because, from their admittedly short acquaintance, she's comfortable taking him at his word.

But she has to call Erik, eventually, and after she's decided that no, she's fine in the sweater, she pulls the door to behind her (not closed, not all the way) and curls into the corner of the chaise to get a hold of him. She doesn't have much to say - if anything - but it's one more task to tick off her list before she runs out.

After that, maybe she'll just sleep, too.