victoryorvalhalla: (Default)
[personal profile] victoryorvalhalla
Ice Age - How to Destroy Angels


It was a split second, the loss of a footing with the added stength of a shove by two supernatural powerhouses. Thorfinn had pulled back to hit someone else and ended up losing his footing falling against one of the two women. Shoved out of the way before either could really pay mind to the small blonde he never regained his balance. These were not the type of shoes he was used to fighting in. Instinct called for him to grab his knife stab something to regain his footing but it was just to fast to much for his small frame.

A loud bang barely registered over the sound of the brawl. One of the nearby booths had cut his fall short in the worst way, the bang was his forehead hitting the edge of the booth. There was nothing he could do or think, it was instantaneous. It was to much for his neck, a clean break. He was gone before his body hit the ground at an awkward angle, his father's blade slid from his hands, sliding under the booth as the small body laid there. With only four minutes until it would vanish.


-----

Four hours didn't really register for him. No bright light, no heavenly voices, no Valkyries. Nothing like the boastful stories passed around camp fires.

He was back home, laying in a pile of hay, listening to the man raiding outside of the barn. It was strange but oddly welcomed after so much strangeness in his dreams.

'where did the little bastard go?'
'same place he always goes when the jobs done.'

It was Bjorn's voice, that same quiet command to leave him alone and let him sleep. Which meant in about twenty minutes he'd wake up to screams. But something wasn't right. He couldn't put his finger on it.

Wait no. They were all dead. He remembered it all suddenly. his blood running cold as he started to push himself up in time to see a wicked grin.

'Figured it out did you, boy?' No it couldn't be, not him. 'Time to get up, good things don't come to lazy layabouts.' Thorfinn could only stare in horror at the man making his way to him. 'THORFINN! IT'S TIME TO GET TO WORK!' His voice bellowed.


Thorfinn's eye's shot open with a strangled gasp.

Electric lights were almost to bright for his eyes as he flinched form them, closing his eyes to stop the sharp pain. Reality sinking back into him. He wasn't in Mercia, or England. He was on Mundus. He was still in that strange world that had taken him... Askeladd was still dead, Bjorn was still dead.... everyone was dead and yet here he laid flinching away from the bright lights in the ceiling.

It was about then that he started to feel sick to his stomach, and the realization dawned, he wasn't alone.

Date: 2016-11-27 05:46 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (She Gets Lost)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
She doesn't think about how she ended up here -- in his room. And she does. Both the steps her feet took, and the one she took in the past. So much not thinking. So much action. Reaction. So much inaction she could have taken, but never did. The choices she made. They made. Without she thinks, actually deciding them. With weighing the true risks. Selfish. Willfully blind.

She doesn't think about how she ended up here -- her head pillowed on her arms, cross on the side of his bed. This little sparse room, with touches of him everywhere, and Sylvi curled up in her lap, finally asleep, finally the reason Jo closed her eyes, even if she couldn't sleep. She had to know before she could sleep, before she could do anything again.

It didn't matter if everyone else on the island had. It mattered if he did. Would.

If she was going to cry, she might do it, now, finally. But she doesn't.
She just lays there, feeling the ache spider cracks widening in her.


Time passes too fast, too slow, before suddenly the bed moves, weight that wasn't there only a second ago, shifting and Jo has to look up. Almost a hiss for someone interrupting her in here, daring to touch the bed, after she told Merlin and Gabriel both no. That they couldn't be here. With her. Except not in those words. A single no that brooked no other question, no argument, while she ignored both their expressions. She was selfish. She'd been selfish. She was going go on being fucking selfish tonight, this morning, whatever.

Which is a piss poor thought to have left in her teeth, when she spring from the floor, upsetting Sylvi into a sharp yelp and nearly tumbling Thorfinn right back down on his bed, when she pulls him in close. Hard against her.

Date: 2016-11-28 12:12 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Default)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim




He's solid. Seriously solid. Crashing into him is like slamming a wall, because it has no control, no grace, and not planning stop at any specific place. It jolts through her bones with a reliving repercussion of more pain than just the physical pain that is always low-grade stinging her skin, and she doesn't know if it's greater or lesser than the explosion that rocks the inside of her body.

Like her ribs might have actually exploded for a second there. Because he is. He's solid. Alive.

Rusty, raw, confused voice in her ears. The question that starts out Norse, and turns into English halfway through as her device vibrates slowly to life in her pocket, never needed for that before. But she doesn't care. She doesn't care if he's confused yet. She can't breathe, and her head is a clash of too many things. And he's solid, and he's alive, and his voice is right. He came back, and Jo shakes her chin against his shoulder. Hard. Harder than maybe makes sense, because hard is the only thing this is, will be.

It'll be worse. Letting it in, it'll be worse. Later. So much worse. But she doesn't care.

She's selfish, remember. Selfish, and selfish, and selfish. She doesn't care.
For right now, and right now is all she ever has, she has him back.


"Shut up. We're hugging right now."

Date: 2016-11-30 01:22 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (I'll wait for the day when)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
As the first slam of the shock, like a punch, wears back, it's replaced with an anger and kind of fierceness everyone around here knows to stay on their toes and away from. Even the wizard and the archangel. It throbs almost violently through all of her as Jo pulls back suddenly and her hands find his shoulders, maybe just as hard as her chin had been and it's a miracle she doesn't hit upside of the head, and only shakes his shoulders. Hard.

It's hard to put it all together, and she doesn't want to, but she hasn't been able to get Merlin's words out of her head.
The futility of trying to ignore him when he's usually right. Capable of being very flawed and socially graceless, but right.

The futility of trying to ignore when he's usually right, when being right, if all of them weren't, would be like stabbing herself too deep.

It goes into her grip, and the words that fall out, so much more like daggers, than anything like the hushed order from a second ago. Like the truth has to be punishment, if this was answer before she even got there, and if she's alone, alone, alone in this, again. Like she has been since coming her. Since Anna, and then Dean arrived. And she had been for too many minutes of too many hours tonight.

"I've had exactly two people in my immediate family. Two." This is emphasized with a shake. "And one of them is very dead." For so long. "And one of them is very gone." She only nearly doesn't say mostly dead. She lives by the skin of her teeth against the hope that every person isn't right and her mother isn't dead, even if she is gone, has been, for so long, might be forever.

"I've never had siblings." Hunters. Family. So many uncles and aunts. But no siblings. No friends her age even, until she managed to reach near to the age of her aunt's and uncles, and they became friends and partners instead. Not. Not -- "Not a sister. Not a brother." She won't let herself hesitate on that word, even when her heart founders in her. With a real kind of fear she never feels anymore. Maybe never before this way.

"But I swear to God--" It's gritted and sharp, and shaken in "--if you do that, again, I will bring you back, myself, to kill you, myself."

Date: 2016-12-02 04:23 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Irrate)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
She lays the truth of Merlin's slander on him, the likes of which she never had, or ever can take back, and he makes it through one word, before a horror the multiverse had somehow graced her from ever experiences suddenly exploded onto her. Literally. Vomit coating her shirt, and her legs.

"Fucking shit! Thorfinn," is sworn, as it's making her jump back, stumbling, trying to unfold her legs, and nearly slamming into a wolf pup also unexpecting her her start and jump, but nothing like fastest enough to beat gravity or an effect of the death that Merlin had never had and she'd never had cause to guess at.
Edited Date: 2016-12-02 04:23 am (UTC)

Date: 2016-12-02 12:44 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Scene Maker)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
The scent -- almost taste -- of bile is strong in her throat, up her nose, but the urge to vomit because of it is a reaction long lost in that palce. Where she was covered in blood and any number of things exploded from a body as par for the course in her weeks changed and racing forward under the red-black sky. It still doesn't change the race of shock, the newest reason for the flare of anger, or how both are better, easier, than a minute.

"Yeah, whatever. Like that's been helping anyone around here tonight." Is hard while she looking between the collapsed miserable pile of body on the bed, blonde hair everywhere, and her own now ruined clothes and spattered body. The floor around her. The stench only getting stronger for longer seconds of existing. "I need-" To get out of this. Clean herself. The floor. Him. Thorfinn, collapsed. Miserable. Face looking no better. Like he might just do it again.

"I'll be right back." Jo gives on shuddering or pausing or flinching. Her fingers gathering mess into her shirt, getting slick and acidic in her hands, for the most of it she can have in her shirt and not falling even more heartily on the floor around her when she stands. Her stomach is turning, but she shoves it down. Back. Gritted teeth and bones. "I'll get you something. Try not to do that again before I get back."

She makes it to the door, still marshaling her own body's reactions, and the spur of disgusted-annoyance before she looks back.
"Don't die, again, before then either." It's a sharp thing, with no note of the thing in her face, that uncertainty to walk away.
Like if she looks away this will all be the first of the worst dreams and he won't actually be there on that bed.


Just before she does. Slip from the door, the room. A roll of eyes and her stomach, needing a shirt and a bucket at least.

Date: 2016-12-03 03:18 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (No Damsel)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
She knows she's dripping onto he carpet crossing the hallway, through her shirt and off it, and everything on her splattered. It's fast movements, because she needs to get back, but she needs to get out of this shirt. It's hard to pull something like that off and manage to not get it anywhere else. It's revolting and she's sure it slimes her neck and a portion of her hair, before she's balling it up and dropped it in a trashcan.

Reaching for anything nearby to wipe at her pants, and boots that she doesn't pull off, her arms, as well, before dropping that one with the first, and finding another shirt to pull over her head. Not caring she doesn't match in the slightest, or that the rest of her clothes are still beset (with blood, and pie cream, and now vomit). She grabs a hair tie, while headed back out of the room, tying it up, messy and hight, as she gets into the kitchen doorway with fast looks around.

She ends up with a large silver bowl, and two of the hand towels hanging from near the fridge, before she's dashing back. Hoping the best for the carpet, there not being another mess since she left, and, if she was being honest, the catch in her chest to release choking her tight returning because of his being gone so long already, even in so few hours. But he's still there. A solidity that still catches her, now, and again, a second time, like being punched in the face, lungs, stomach at once.

Even as she notes the differences. He's half dressed, under his blanket now, slender scarred shoulders and miserable expression. The blanket is up there, and Sylvi, and the shirts are over there. Jo strove to keep her voice something flatly neutral as the crossed the small space between the door and bed. "Well, at least we know you aren't entirely bedridden. I suppose, that's some kind of plus."

"This is for you." Jo set the bowl on the edge of the bed, towels still in hand, as she sat back down on the ground beside the bed with a hard sigh. "Try to aim. I know boys have a horrible time of it, but still." Jo started working at the mess on the floor, that was framed around where she'd been sitting when he suddenly lost it all. "It's the least you could do now."

Date: 2016-12-03 04:47 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (One Look Before Leaving)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
Jo didn't look at him, and didn't really get through even half of the half-an-eye roll at the explanation.

It was fine. She was fine. She'd like more warning before having someone spray fountain her. But she was fine, and he would be, supposedly. He almost deserved this, except she couldn't get herself to feel any true emotion in her that believed that when she thought it. It was just a stab at the dark that dissipated fast like it was a drop of ink in water instead.

Her back stiffened a little at his words, and she shook her head. Not wanting to leave, again, quite yet and not able with the task under her hand, wiping up vomit from the floor on the towels, and not entirely wanting to be bereft of his voice. Even if she'd never taken any stock in it before now. "I can't. I'd really rather not need to replace your carpet, too."

Date: 2016-12-03 05:43 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (cause I can't decide)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
She can't help listening. There's rage, but it's banked, and it's false. She knows that, too. Like a mask she can cloak herself in, it covers everything beneath it. A gaping crack that she cannot see to the bottom and does not want to. It will only serve to do worse to the future. Like all of this. And, still, she can't help listening. About his mother, and his sister, the past he rarely talked of, for whatever reason he felt compelled to tell her now.

Except whatever isn't right, but she can't look at that, or him, or Merlin. Even if she knows she should.

She should tell him a lot of things. Maybe starting with the one where he picked wrong.
Where things do not go well with those who pick her. Because she shouldn't be.
Picked. The last one lay deep in the ocean, before burned to ashes.

Her head washed her this way and that, like the roll of the ocean under the boat she never stepped on, and the scent of once-upon-a-different-universe ocean salt on the rim of the hat she refused to clean. Or let anyone touch. Or had ever even explained to anyone. Nor spoken Jack's name once here yet. It did her no good to dwell, and she'd thought only Gabriel could rouse him to her thoughts.

But, this, too.


This, too.


Jo cringed a little as he threw up again, the blanket shuddering as he tried to hide, making her feel even less like she should be there, forcing him to handle more in his space than there had to be. She folded the worst into the middle of the towels, as she pushed up, "You should rest some more, Thorfinn. It looks like you're going to need it."

Date: 2016-12-05 03:19 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: HPAU. Order of the Jobberknoll. (Once There Was a Time)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
Fresh and acidic, it pulls at her guts, absently, like a hand fondling a cord, but nothing comes. Like a bucket on a dry wellspring. Jo stood watching him, as he set the bowl on on to the bed table, wondering less about his words and more about emptying it, or just waiting, coming back and emptying it in a little while, in case he still wasn't anywhere truly near done.

But, also, about the likelihood of it getting knocked over on the floor, or tipped on the bed in a too frantic rush.

"It's still early," Jo shook. "Not yet dawn even. It's only been four or five hours since--" You died, she doesn't say. She could make herself. She could, but she doesn't want to cut herself on it yet. It's already repeating over and over in her head. Suddenly blurring the boy in this bed with the boy on the floor, head lolled at it's incorrect angle. "I'll find Freya and get your phone back."

She turned for the door, the thing she could make herself do, if not the first yet. (Even when her mind reminded her, she never spoke of Merlin's dying and coming back either. Not to anyone who hadn't been in that room when it happened, ie Balthazar, or on the steps when he came back, ie, Amy. And not ever since.) Jo pressed her hands too hard on the towels, making when give wetly between them, and she grimaced. "Sleep for a little, and I'll bring it up to you."

Date: 2016-12-09 12:56 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Intruiged)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
Those first two words shouldn't contract in her chest, but they do, and for a second she's there, again. The wrong side of the room. The middle of a fight still. Doing the thing she swore she wouldn't. Using Gabriel for everything he'd offered to the bar -- to her, her so much more than it, as Merlin's voice reminded her over and over, she'd slipped too far inside of him, his interest of, control over -- staring at that fallen body.

Not giving a damn what burned, broke, or was used for that second.

If you were you'd be sleeping now, Jo wants to grouse, but it's not quite annoyance.

She hasn't heard enough of his voice yet. Blood and vomit, and long nights, and even whatever this is, this his illness, and this what this change happening between them, or happened long before and unknown by her, doesn't change that. And she isn't sure she can look at it head on quite yet. Not and him.

"Worry about it later, Thorfinn," Jo said, generally enough, as she opened the door. "Tomorrow, since you still have one now."

[ Wandering In and Out ]

Date: 2016-12-03 03:33 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (You Can But Can't See Me)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
The thing is...she doesn't. Jo doesn't work.
Almost at all after the bar is cleaned up to manageable.


She trades between the main floor and Thorfinn's room while he sleeps, wretches, groans, and curls up in a ball, sweating like he's trying to figure out how to rain from his own pores. She and Merlin exchange glances when they pass, not talking about what they said earlier, and he doesn't comment on if he knows what Jo said to Thorfinn either. Her and her worst timing. That was all that all of this was.

Always the wrong time, always the wrong place. With blood on her hands, and then vomit on her clothes.

She was clean. Most of the bar was a shattered semblance of remembering itself.



Syvli whines, and Jo usually stops to scratch her head, while they both watch him sleep, but Sylvi doesn't leave him now, even though mostly she's curled on the floor beside the bed or the foot of it, not near him anymore, and Jo was remiss to note that sometimes she almost missed the constant contact and pushiness of her now that it wasn't there, and she felt adrift, lost somewhere between the real world of things she was supposed to do and the grey that had set in around it all.

But she kept herself busy. There were messes up here and down there, and she could find things.



Reasons to keep coming back, while he slept on in this sick state she hadn't expected.
Edited Date: 2016-12-03 03:35 am (UTC)

Date: 2016-12-03 05:54 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (but don't bother)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
It's too familiar. This grip. By the wrong person, too, months ago. One, who'd, also, mistaken her for family. Someone loved. grieved. She looked at his fingers wrapped on her hand and her wrist. Not the best grip to hold, but not the worst either. Not that she would have bet he had most of his strength to vie with currently anyway.

But it's the name, too. The ghost that she isn't certain she isn't for him.

And if she's bad at being herself? She's murder on being anyone else at all.

Jo settled on the slight edge of the bed, using her other hand to check his forehead. Clammy skin, and mostly closed eyes. He sounded like a child, like the child she'd been chiding herself on calling him when he was dead, and so she tried to be gentle. Even if it took a breath, given it was not the thing she was often, when not dealing with Jacob. "You need to sleep. I can get you another blanket if you need one."

She'd strip every bed if he needed it, but that would be overkill. Even she knew that.

Date: 2016-12-03 03:03 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Later On Lookin' Off)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
She shouldn't. A second time, when this time she couldn't actually hide behind the excuse that there was nothing else to do. Krissy had been sobbing and pleading with her not go, but even she hadn't specifically asked this much. The girl had just ended up in her arms, hugging her, unable to let go, or let her go. From the space, the room, or the delusion.

Even that was almost too much to consider with Merlin's newest judgment laying on top of it now. Krissy was.

He wasn't him, though, in a very alike way and she should put him off, but when had she ever lived by what she should actually do. It'd been a long, long morning, and her bar still bore all the signs of it, even if she bore not a one, from any of this again. No tracer of a tattoo to the like of what had happened except from that place is the palest sigils. She was tired. So damn tired. And too much hurt. In a way she couldn't explain, that had nothing to do with pain, and,

maybe too much to do with a kind of wounding she couldn't come back from, and still wasn't running from. Not exactly.

She shook his hand on her, lightly, with a simple--"Move over." -- as she turned, not pulling back the blankets or divesting her boots.

Date: 2016-12-05 03:38 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Hard or Soft)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
She made no move to get under his blankets, or to even consider shifting her new clean clothes, or to apologize for the fact her hair was likely still half wet. That if anything, her skin was probably chilled more than warm, given it. Laying down on the edge and looking at him,w watching her, with those eyes. Dark and distant, deep inside themselves, half-forgotten, of more remembered-of-the-forgotten, than self.

Continuing to speak of things so casually and with so much concern. Apologizing, with such an ease, that did not come normally. To her as someone else, or maybe. Maybe, because to that someone else he would have. In another world, a lost life. His actual family. The ones who never even knew he was dead for those hours, and whom she didn't know if were frozen where he left him, or missing him, and not knowing of the few hours of the worst.

"Yeah, well," Jo said, reaching out, after a labored second of deliberation, and brushed back his hair from his eyes and his cheek. Fingers gentle against the illness and blanket piled warmed skin. "We can't all be perfect." Even if Jo would settle for anything, anything at all, right now, so long as it was still this. Warm under her fingertips, voice rusty and sleepy in her ears. Alive, alive, alive.

Date: 2016-12-09 01:07 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (She Gets Lost)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
He can't focus, and maybe that makes it better. That it isn't her he's seeing, her that he's talking to, apologizing to.

But at the same time, that tears and cuts at something else in her. That it isn't seeing her, talking to her, wanting her here. Things she has no answer for, and things she doesn't think would have mattered as much twelve and twenty-four hours ago, but now hit her with a confused sharp sort of pain, amorphous and edgeless.

All the same and more when he curls up against her. Fever warm skin and warm breath against her shoulder, and she's glad, absently, that she showered, and that no one expected her to be downstairs, even when they did. She'd done cleaning, and she'd keep going back. They knew that. Which made it confusing why her throat dried too fast on the contact and the edges of her eyes burned, even when she blinked dried eyed and untempted, unmoved, by the strange urge for tears now.

So many hours later. Late. Too late. Not when he died. Not while he was dead. Not when he came back to life.
Now. When it was pointless and stupid and there were too many feelings and too many questions.



Jo breathed slowly, timing her own breaths to his, as she reached up to run her fingers through his hair lightly, studying the wall behind him, that the bed lay against. Tired as sin, and uncertain in a way she wasn't sure she'd ever been. What it meant, how she could fail this, too, given he had already died on her watch, and somehow somehow this one she got back, this chance she got a second time, if like a slap, still in her hands all the same.

Date: 2016-12-12 01:08 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Asleep or just in bed)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
If she's a coward to find this easier, in the wake the of the harder, she'll take that today. So few things ever are or were when they came knocking to deck down her doors. He sleeps with the heaviness of a child, curled into her, arm sprawled over her, in a manner no one has in the better part of a year. All the jokes about her headboard aside, she knows what she misses most from The Apocalypse in this same manner has nothing to do with sex, and that the sex doesn't touch it at all. These things she's broken herself most of. All over again.

For long seconds he reminds her, too small and too broad shouldered, even small, of Rachel. The blonde hair and the bright eyes. They are nothing alike, her ice-eyed model tag-along, and her viking boy one. Nicknames even in the silence of her mind and this room, as though, even the sanctity of that space cannot handle the true names and faces on them. She knows the first. She does. Even if she's only said Rachel's name twice, and she rarely thinks of her head on save with Amy now.

Jo watched him sleep, labored and heavy breaths against her shoulder, quiet in the still room.

Too many words, too many questions, too many nameless things too big to contain, and on top of too much else.

In the end, if Jo Harvelle would be the last thing to admit such a simple thing, even in the face of everyone around her who knew it, from child to Archangel, she is only human, and there is only so much one heart, one mind, and one world can take. Especially when it's calmed down from the explosions to stay on point and ever ready for. She falls asleep, somewhere between one breath in and the next out, one slow blink from exhaustedly, but unwaveringly, watching his fevered face, and the next second just darkness.

Date: 2016-12-03 03:46 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Well.....)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
Jo had actually been expecting Merlin when she opened the door, given how audibly she could hear voices. Or what she'd thought was voices, given she opened the door to Thorfinn's room -- after pondering interrupting or not interrupting, and how she was fine, he was alive, she didn't have to keep coming back, and he was busy besides already -- to an empty room, with him turned to the wall.

"Thorfinn?" It was a light question. Not enough to wake him, if he was sleeping.


But the room was empty, and there had been voices.
Edited Date: 2016-12-03 04:19 am (UTC)

Date: 2016-12-03 05:06 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Daddy's Girl 2)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
His expression was familiar by now. That glassy-eyed uncertainty that might have meant he was hardly conscious from sickened sleep, or might have meant he was questioning whether she was real, again. She was hoping it would pass, but it hadn't improved in the slightest yet, which did concern her some. "Yeah. 'Course."

Jo crossed the room, picking up a cup that was on the bed table closest to him and finding it empty. "I'll be right back." She almost turned, but she glanced back. "Ice, too? Or just water?"

Date: 2016-12-05 03:51 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Intruiged)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
Jo's not gone that long, before returning with the glass refilled with ice water and a bowl of soup. It had taken her longer earlier, but Amy, who was a mom of the utmost, and someone needed to be today, while Jo balanced this and the downstairs disaster area, had left a pot simmering with soup all day, so it could be ready at any needed notice.

"You still awake under there?" She asked, as she was depositing one and then the other on his bed table.

Date: 2016-12-09 01:15 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (<lj site="insanejournal.com" user="graph)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
She set everything down, considering his flushed and sweating face, even if he looked marginally better than the first hours. It was a sour and sick thing to say or even think the joke, he looked like death. Common words enough and common taunt, and Jo was nothing if not made of her own sass, but instead of turning it on him, she turns it on herself.

"In one piece, and with nothing to show for it." Jo shrugged, without a hand movement toward her body, face, knuckles. There's the normal crook of a common enough expression for every bar and every day. "If anything I'm doing better than anyone else around here, and even those who are giving the whole place a wide berth after last night, in the hospital and the jail cells and sick beds."

It's a lot of details for a question she actually doesn't answer. He doesn't want that answer and she doesn't want to give it. It's not what he's asking anyway, and she knows it, but the question he asked only has one answer. It's only ever had one answer. The answer that keeps her moving forward no matter how bad, or horrifying, or terrible anything out here throws at her.

There is no other answer to those four words. She lost the right to them a very long time ago, at her own hands.




And dissembling from the truth, and that too deep truth, has always been just this side of far too easy for her.

Date: 2016-12-12 01:27 pm (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (cause I can't decide)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
If he notices now, most of a day later, he's not the first person to notice or the first person to ask. Comment on it. Jo shook her head, taking a spot on the side of his bed, about a third of the way from the end, at his first words. She hasn't said much to most all day. It's normal. She blows it off. She's busy. The Bar. Thorfinn.

"No, nothing like that. Gods had nothing to do with this." Jo looked down at her own, healed and unscabbed, unbruised, as would be normal after a fight like that, hands briefly. "Only myself and someone from very long ago."

There's a strange consternation, almost reluctant, not by choice but by habit. She never spoke of that place but once in The Apocalypse. Even when they all knew about it. "It's helpful, but it's not a blessing." And something she's admitted to no person ever, though she knows Merlin must know now. Merlin with her soul, her memories, the knowledge of whatever this was in his mind. "And I pay the price for it every minute of every day."

In the low pain that seared like a soft burn across all of her skin even now. A hum she could almost ignore.
The soft, steady heated lick of fire. The scratch like fiberglass rubbed at ever rawed and ready skin.

"See." It's an odd offering. But Jo Harvelle has so little to offer in these universes, that is hers.

She scooted up, pulling the collar of her thin longsleeve shirt over her tanktop aside to show her shoulder and clavicle close and clear. Marks that are her sins and triumph in one. Violent and brutal, pride and shame. There on her skin, the faintest of nearly skin-colored sigils everywhere, all over her skin. Making it easier to see where they continued even beyond there, across the whole of the skin above her chest. They didn't move right now, but they weren't doing anything that she knew of right now.

If she pretend sfor her own sake this doesn't feel stupidly dangerous and too much. Things she's never been willing. Like a wager placed on a betting table, or on wildly unbalancing and balancing scales, she speaks without moving her shirt back. Giving him leave, but distracting her nerves. "Yeah. There are several of them. People who are ill, people in the jail. Beat up. A number who showed to help with cleanup regardless."

Date: 2016-12-19 03:58 am (UTC)
tobeclosetohim: (Bar Girl - At Work)
From: [personal profile] tobeclosetohim
It's a single word, and a slight touch, and it shouldn't hit so deeply, but it does. While Jo stares in the middle of them at nothing and tries not to go to perfect, rock still, on one hand, or to shiver on the other. It's nothing something she's put on a platter. Not for any of the men or women she's pulled into her bed, since she rolled out of hell.

She damned Jack for his lack of asking, when she never offered, and she covered it up more than not. She nodded, barely, just a tip back and forth, once, even as she sat back to straight up, pulling her shirt back right. "No tattoos or piercing either." She found herself annoyed as all get out about it for the first few years. Now it just was. "I had all three before." Scars, tattoos, and piercings. "None of them stay now."

It would be pointless to point out she never asked for that part. Not exactly. She asked to survive, and she hadn't cared about the consequences or the required details of the need at the time. A gift. A desperation. A gratitude. For something she couldn't even remember entirely. Just that it was important. It had been so important. She'd done something. Or he had.

Jo can't help but snort a little at the last part though. "You'll be fine. You aren't the reason any of them are where they are."
At least not any more than she was, or anyone else in the bar was. Or the 4/5ths of them were not part of why Thorfinn died.

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Thorfinn "Karlsefni" Thorsson

November 2016

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