i wanna slay my demons, but i've got lots of them

[mightyfallen]

Who: Jack and Rachel
What: Talkin' about things
When: After hours
Where: Jack's office in Syriac Well
Warnings: Mild alcoholism

It wouldn't be fair to say Jack doesn't normally drink at work — he keeps a decanter in his office, and while that is ostensibly for guests, in truth it's as much for himself when he needs it, and that's been happening more than usual since the riots. (He tells himself it's for his nerves, as if nerves are all he's been dealing with lately, but he's been stalling the campaign announcement, he knows; he's almost ready to start something worthwhile, for once in his life, and he's stalling, and he doesn't want to think about why.) But he's good at this, he's had enough practice holding his liquor and keeping his composure that it's difficult to tell how much he's had at any given time, and even with his recent increase in consumption, he hasn't been drinking enough to compromise himself.

Not on the job, anyway. But it's getting late now, the lights dimming and most of his employees heading home for the evening with waves by his office door and distantly-called goodbyes. If he hadn't started before they'd left he'd have kept better track of who was still in the building, but he didn't, and so he's not really sure that the office is empty when he pours a second, and somewhere after the start of the third he wonders how the sunset looks from the far side of the building and decides it's a good idea to wander over and check.

The trash can in his path convinces him otherwise. A muffled thump sounds from somewhere out on the floor, followed by a curse and a distinct noise of dismay.

Comments

[gotbottle]

The minor catastrophe out on the floor is answered with a startled gasp from inside Rachel's office, the sound carrying out through her open door. She's usually much better at tracking who's come and gone, too, but she's distracted tonight.

She had her head down on her desk, arms folded up and over her head, and she was sobbing. Too many days in a row of pretending things are just fine, she feels just fine, except she really doesn't, and she finally cracked, alone in her office.

Or when she thought she was alone, anyway. But just as she heard Jack--and she knows it's Jack, knows the sound of his voice--she knows he had to have heard her, too. She scrubs at her face with her hands, sucking down a deep breath, frantically trying to cover up the fact that she'd been crying.

"Jack?" His name comes out way more shaky than she'd hoped, and she scowls at herself as she clears her throat. "Jack, are you okay?"

[mightyfallen]

"I'm excellent," he answers without raising his gaze to her yet, still scrambling to sweep the papers back into their now-slightly-dented container with his shoe before looking up. "Infinitely better than my– opponent."

Oh.

It doesn't take a fantastic amount of insight to realize why her eyes might be red, or what the sound had been a few moments before that he hadn't registered until now. He'd be more flustered about being caught, maybe even try to feign sobriety, but the state of her provokes an honest reaction from him before he can bother with all that. A grieved look passes behind his eyes. He glances down quickly, though, not wanting to make her feel more awkward.

Instead, he looks to the glass in his hand, then the bottle... then offers her the latter. "Here, you look like you need this more than I do." Problem solving with Jack Benjamin.

[gotbottle]

Jack's honest response startles an equally real one out of Rachel. She tries, she really does, to slide her usual mask of calm competence into place. She comes out of her office composed, chin up, faint and harmless smile on her lips, the picture of everything's just fine. But Jack goes off-script, actually sees what's happening and responds rather than what usually happens--playing along because they don't notice or don't want to get into it.

But he doesn't play along and she can't hold the pretense up all on her own. There's a long, silent moment and then her gaze drops, her next breath in a damp sniffle. "Maybe I do," she relents, crossing to him.

She takes the offered bottle, "Oh, I--" it's the good decanter from his office, Rachel, you don't just guzzle out of something like that, "--be right back," and she ducks back into her office. Her tea, now long cold, gets dumped into the plant by the window, and she tips some of the liquor into her mug as she comes back out.

"Thank you." There's another sniffle, a slight twisting of her mouth; she's not crying anymore but she's not actively trying to hide that she was, either.

[mightyfallen]

In the awkward moment while she's gone, he wavers about whether they should go back to her office, or if he should invite her to his, for privacy, and it's visible in his expression when he decides no, he's the boss of everything and he'll sit wherever he likes. (And besides, the volunteers' desks are less likely to be bugged, right?) So he flops into some poor soul's chair and nudges another out from its desk with his foot for her when she reappears. Come, sit with him.

To the thanks, he just shrugs. "You'd best keep it," he says of the decanter. Because otherwise he'll finish it, is the implication, which Jack of course breezes by as if that's completely normal, well-adjusted behavior. Right now, he's more worried about her. "Tell me you haven't been in here like this every night since."

Since what, he doesn't say; if he's guessing (projecting) correctly, he doesn't imagine he needs to.

[gotbottle]

She does keep the bottle, but only to set on the desk nearest the chair he offers her. If it's finished, they'll finish it together.

Rachel takes a long sip, rolling one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. "Not every night," she says, both gentle protest and reluctant confession. And since what remains unspoken because it's entirely understood. It's as if that afternoon at the Arena has become some kind of terrible watershed moment, the boundary marker between life then and the way things are now.

She fusses a bit with the rim of her mug, rubbing away the spot where her lip touched the ceramic. "Not all of them. I was mostly okay--"

Well. Faking it, anyway.

"--until a few nights ago, until I saw-- I found out-- Raylan, they shot him, he got shot at the Arena." She looks up. "I mean, like, he's okay, he's not, like, maimed forever or anything, but."

And maybe she's been coy about the tall man in the white hat who's come to pick her up at the office a few times, and maybe she hasn't really said much beyond he's my friend or I know a guy who could help us, but she was mostly coping until she found out he'd been hurt and she's been crying in her office. It's probably becoming obvious he's a bit more than a helpful friend.

"He was trying to get people out of there safely and the Militia shot at him."

[mightyfallen]

He nods. He could have guessed, about Raylan, although to be fair he makes a lot of guesses he doesn't end up being right about, but in this case he isn't terribly surprised. He could empathize, tell her that Raylan hadn't been the only one — he'd seen so many wounds, felt the arrow in his own arm (it's nearly healed now, and he hadn't explained it when it happened, but it had happened). But it seems so inadequate to just say he understands, as if those words are proof of anything.

"Before I came here, back in my city, there was a trial." Like it had nothing to do with him, he says that, as if he wasn't complicit or participant and didn't prosecute the so-called crime himself. But this is his story to tell and he'll tell it as suits his purposes. "For treason. A good, decent man so loyal he would've bared his neck to the guillotine on a whim from the king — and the king asked just that. He put this golden boy on trial before the world, and accused— no, convinced him that he was a traitor. That he'd 'stolen' the people's love from their sovereign. That he'd betrayed his king simply by existing, and for that terrible crime, he deserved to die."

"And I remember watching him confess— seeing him buy into all that bullshit when his idiot head was on the line, and thinking, How can this happen? How can anything this wrong just happen?"

A pause. He swirls his drink in his glass, then shrugs. "But it does. And it did." Then, in the Arena, and more times in more places than he can count. "And it probably will again."

[gotbottle]

"That's terrible." That story, the inevitability of what did happen and will happen again, this place. She doesn't have the experiences with it that Jack does, her miseries more personal and private, but she's seen enough in her time here and had it driven home at the Arena that terrible is what this place is apparently made of.

"It's always the good men, huh." Seems that way. "Decent, good people trying to change things or at least level the playing field. And then they cross the people in power and they get hurt, or they--"

Rachel grips her cup tighter, both her hands wrapping around it. "Or they die," she murmurs, raising it to her mouth and all but draining what's left in it in one go.

[mightyfallen]

"That one lived, somehow," he adds with a slight, understated fondness that slips through the feigned exasperation and emotional distance he'd been maintaining. (David was personal, too.) "He'll outlive me, like as not."

Context actually makes that less funny, but Jack smiles all the same, a thin, sharp smile that spreads and fades again.

"They don't always, though." Live, that is. The Arena, the deaths on that sand-covered floor, and one particular presence that won't be gracing his rooftop ever again isn't far from his mind. "But sometimes. Sometimes the good ones are just too stubborn to die. Sometimes they keep fighting."

He glances to her, there.

[gotbottle]

There's a very faint smile, a little nod of her head; she understands. Maybe that's the deeper meaning behind what's happened, maybe that's what she should carry away with her.

She does intend to fight. She always had, but there's a new urgency and sense of purpose to it now, there's someone whose death, she feels, needs to never wind up in vain.

"Maybe they keep fighting for the ones who can't. Who never could. Or can't anymore." She pauses, and then she turns toward Jack. "They killed my friend, Jack. The vigilante whose head they wanted, he-- I didn't know he was doing all that, he never told me. But I knew he was a good man." Her mouth twists a little with the effort not to cry all over again. "Whatever else he was, he was a good man, and I can't let his death be for nothing."

[mightyfallen]

He looks surprised for a split second, which is probably not the reaction she was expecting, when she says she knew Tom. And it makes sense, somehow, in that way that of course all the good people in his life would gravitate toward each other, like it's some kind of cosmic inevitability.

"No, I'm sure he wouldn't like that," he agrees, and implicit in that statement is the truth of it, that Jack would know what said vigilante would and wouldn't like because he knew that man, in some capacity or other. But he can't afford to linger on it, even with Rachel. (The information he'd been giving Tom hadn't been used for strictly legal purposes.) Instead, he leans forward, propping one elbow on his knee with glass in hand.

"What do you want to change?"

[gotbottle]

Mild surprise wouldn't have been out of place--the kind that says I had no idea you knew such a person or wow, that guy had friends or how horrible that you saw your friend die. But the surprise that registers on Jack's face speaks volumes, surprises her in turn. There's a deeper knowing there, she can guess at what it means. And his declaration only makes her certain.

She doesn't pry. She's under no illusion that Jack would tell her everything anyway, but knowing as she does now the nature of what Tom was doing she understands why whatever connection they had was a secret--and must remain so.

She takes her time answering, thinking things over. It feels like she wants to change everything, that there's so much that's so wrong with this place. Trying to figure out how to tell him in a way that encompasses it all is a challenge.

It hits her as she's tipping another measure of liquor into her mug. "I want people to feel safe, Jack." She sets the bottle back down on the desk, and she takes a sip, her gaze settling back on his face.

"When I got here I was so scared. Scared of being in a new place, scared I'd never get back to my own life. Scared of the power behind this place, that it could just take me and bring me here. Along the way I've been scared other times, too--like, scared a giant ant was gonna turn me into a zombie or scared a ghost was going to take my head off. But there was always a certain hope, right? Like, someday maybe I'd get home. If I got a job and a place to live and made friends, maybe this place wouldn't be so scary. If we killed all the giant ants or whatever maybe things would go back to normal."

She takes another drink, her gaze losing a little focus, drifting past Jack to the window behind him, the city beyond. "I almost think they did it on purpose, you know. Let all of us in this cohort settle in, build lives. Earn something to lose. And then they show us they can take it all away, permanently, on their whim. You can do all the right things, or you can do nothing at all, and they'll kill you to make a point. You can be a good person, and they'll kill you for not toeing the line. You can be trying to stand up for and protect other people, and they'll kill you for daring to question them." She trails off for a moment, sighing.

"I don't even know if I'm explaining this well," she admits with a slight spread of her hands, a faint gesture of surrender. "I feel like what happened at the Arena killed a little bit of hope. That's all we have, really. How can you ever feel safe without the hope that you'll survive this? It's bad enough you get here and you've lost everything. But if you can't even hope that you'll make it through, that if you build your life up all over again and do the right things and try to be a good person that you'll get to carry on--how will you ever be okay?"

Her eyes search his out again, meeting them. "I want people to feel safe all the time, Jack. Not just when they're blindly obeying out of fear, not just when they're hiding who they are and what they want. Not just when they have the right friends or live in the right neighborhood or when they give up."