Krissy had never really understood it when Jo explained it. Sure, she comprehended the words, could try to relate it in her own experiences in her life, but it just didn't compare. Nothing ever could.
Part of it was her age. Barely eighteen when she was dragged onto those islands years ago.
Now, it feels like a while different lifetime ago. And in a lot of ways, it was. She's not convinced time operates the same in every universe, and she's pretty sure some of them run much faster than Earth time back home. Like how a few years could be half a century in Hell.
She's been in a few others. In some ways, it seemed like they all tried to out-do the last one she was in. She wonders sometimes if that's the norm or she was just lucky.
Sometimes, her people came with her. They weren't always the right ones, but they showed up eventually. Others didn't, and she hasn't seen them, or any version right or wrong, in years now. She's hung up hope when it comes to friendships. Tries her damndest to keep her feelings out of it and assemble what is needed in every place she goes. Carries the tradition she was left with, because at least it gives her a focus and something to do and work towards when the multiverse decided to upend her life.
Again.
No matter how many times she does it, how many hellos and do you remember me's she goes through, it never really stops hurting. She never really gets used to it, even if she says she does, and that she is. Boasts about how this is all old hat now. Come 'round, newbies, she'll show you the ropes and regale you with horror stories and hilarious tales.
She gets why Jo was who she was now, in a whole new light. In ways wished she didn't.
Nothing prepares you for the multiverse.
Another city, in another world, with a generic name she hasn't been here long enough to bother learning yet. Looks mostly Earth-like, if run-down and just the sunny side of Apocalyptic, if the dilapidated buildings and broken down houses were anything to judge by.
Krissy is wandering mostly deserted streets to try and pick the place she'd label her own. And not her own, as it were. She may not be Jo, or even a Harvelle by blood, but she was by choice--both hers and Jo's. So when she found the right place, the right help and the right materials... that's what it would say: Harvelle's Roadhouse. The person running it didn't make it Harvelle's, the spirit in it did, and that's what she cared about.
She has a pistol with three rounds. It's all she was allotted when she showed up here, despite never being armed less than to the teeth everywhere she goes, at all times. Fuck you too, Multiverse.
She spots what was probably once a bar, because it always is a bar, and decides to scope it out. She slips the gun out of the waistband of her pants and peeks around the open door that hangs half off its hinges. Seems clear, so she steps carefully around debris and inside.
She's about to call out, see who's here, but she sees her. Small, lithe blonde across the room, back turned to Krissy. She looks like she could be anyone, but it's the tense stance of a hunter that only others of their kind will ever recognize.
Krissy hangs in the doorway where she is, pistol raised and at the ready, but she doesn't move. Doesn't speak. She's going to let this stranger go first.
It reminds her of Shatter, and that is probably the worst part.
Some people say it's the loss -- of time, of places, of people -- but it's not. It's the part where she gets up and she looks out the window and every single beat up, apocalyptic inch of it reminds her of Shatter. Right at the edges. The buildings are still nicer than it was, and there are no flash-BANG's but it's worse here. Just out of the corner of her eye, it almost looks right until it doesn't. She can feel the tense waiting for the sound, especially right when she wakes up.
The bed is empty, but she can't look at it, can't stop, can't belong to the memories. Not even if they are the only things she ever gets to keep. She gets dressed. She pulls back on that plethora of black, pants, tank top, bra, underwear, and she could replace it all now, scavenge stores or bleach it off one of the bodies, but she still hasn't. She will. She ... might.
Heavy black boots, and that beatup black leather jacket. Her father's dagger in the back of her pants. A gun beside it. Another in a boot. More knives tucked away. She braids her hair without looking at how long it's gotten, without thinking about it, or sheering it with a machete again. She never looks at the sheets. At the pillow. Not even once back at the bedroom when she leaves. It's empty and there's nothing in there for her but the roughest knife blade of sleep, worse here in the quiet than the entire ending of the mousetrap.
She goes down and she does the only thing she can. She looks at the room again. She hasn't been here long, but the bones of the building are good. It hasn't been blown down, or rained down, or burned down. It's got a brazen, bitchy refusal to be moved and maybe that's why Jo didn't leave the third time she came back. Began stockpiling the stripped weapons and the alcohol she could find. Just like in Hell. Just like in Shatter. Started trading information. And then a few words. And then a few more. Until she couldn't lie about what she was doing, even if she didn't look it in the eye.
It's a place. It's a ghost. It's the mark on her bones, and it'll bleed her dry again. Add to the black hole in her chest that bides, singular companion like checked baggage.
Jo starts with the windows. Curtain up and boards down. It's two-fold sometimes. That challenge that says, come fuck with me, see what you get until she's got blood and grass in her teeth, but it's still someone else's blood on her hands; and the invitation that says, safe; safe; no one's stopped me yet, no one's going to, you can stop a second here, you can breathe a moment. A tumbleweed rest stop. She could just tell herself that, and pretend that didn't make it even more like Shatter.
The sound of footsteps is something she can hear just before the door and then in, and when she turns she's not entirely surprised or worried about the gun.
Not even as every muscle tenses. Her hands open and she says, "You don't need that here." Unless she's one of them, and even then the gun wouldn't help long enough to matter.
There's the barest of not-quite-slips on her grip on the pistol in her hand as the other woman focuses her attention in Krissy's direction.
The open hands in, well, on anyone else it might be surrender, but not her. It's-- a gesture of good faith. It's safe. For now. Don't make a bad move and it'll all be fine. Just two people in the same run down shack. All good, right?
She blinks once, the most obvious of the evidence that she might be phased at all. "Jo?" she knows sometimes people just look similiar, maybe she's off, wrong somehow.
"Got it in one." Her voice maintains its same level. Her hands fold down, to settle on her hips, against the bottom of the leather jacket's line to her jeans. It's not as relaxed as it could be even as her weight shifts -- because it puts her fingers within inches of three different weapons. She doesn't look away from the woman, but she knows how many running steps she'd need to get behind the first thing she could dodge behind that would stop a bullet.
Still, there's something in the voice, in the raise of the question that is her name. Something that snaps at her heart, bloody ragged teeth it never ignores. Even though sometimes she does try her fucking damnest to do that. Still it's there. Still she doesn't miss it. The edge of surprise, desperation. That fathomless need that these types of worlds drive into people, especially in their first days, weeks, months, running between.
Jo's head tilts and she considers walking forward. "Paul or Robert send you?"
"Got it in one." It's her. It's so her. But is it her? Krissy isn't sure, and she's not ready to unleash a raindown of questions to figure it out yet. Not here, now, like this.
Slowly, carefully, she lowers the weapon. Doesn't put it away. But she's not quite as ready to put a bullet in the eyes of the person in front of her as she was seconds ago. "Don't know 'em." She shrugs one shoulder, casual as possible in the tension of the moment. "And I wasn't sent. Just found it-- same as you, I'd guess." There's an arch of her eyebrows to accompany those words. Really, Jo? A bar? Could you be any more predictable than she is?
The woman is starting to lower her gun, but while it should be letting Jo relax, there's an edge to that making her fingertips itch. It's outlining the barrel on one side of the small of her back, and the knife pommel right next to it. There are reasons, and then there are reasons.
"But you just happen to know my name." There's something half question-accusation in the words, and something that half isn't at all. In someone hopeful and light, it might be called whimsy. In the shadow of Jo's tone, there was uncertainty along with reticent recognition. That her name might be spreading. Or the name of this place. Or both in one. And she's not sure she likes that. Wants that. Is ready.
(When is she ever, ever, ever allowed to be ready?)
Something old aches. A creaking door on rusted hinges. Even in this deserted little space. Jo tipped her head toward the bar and the tables. "It's not much yet since I just started clearing all of this place out, but if you want to actually put away your gun, I can see about finding you something to drink?"
"It's much more than a 'happen to'," She assures her. Or, at least, confirms it for her; it might not be too comforting, as info-drops go. The problem was, Krissy isn't jure if she just has no clue who she is at all, or if it's too many years separated that makes recognition harder. She hasn't had her Jo since she disappeared from the islands, and she never dares hope any one she finds is her. Except she does, still. Even if she refuses to own it.
The offer--a drink in exchange for holstering her weapon--wasn't a bad trade, really. Krissy hardly has enough ammo to waste, so she nods her acceptance before putting it away, "Fair enough." She nods toward whatever she had been doing before she'd been interrupted. "How long've you been here?"
Jo gave it a second's lingering as she watched the woman holster her weapon, and stand there, confirming what she wasn't sure she wanted to know, and what she somehow always known would if she did. It's different, again. Not like the clean separations of the maps and logs. Kate's not here to sweep up the rest.
"Here-here?" Jo asks, waving one hand to gesture to the room. "Two weeks."
She turned, going back behind the rough-and-tumble bar that had seen better days, and would look better with some work. If Jo decided she was up for some work, or if that was anywhere near necessity at a point. Her name wasn't scratched, child-deep, into the back of this one. Small favors. ...and maybe she liked that it looked like it had seen hell and was still standing.
"All of it?" She tugged out a bottle, looking across the bar, with a shrug that made itself a blase she wasn't anywhere near to feeling yet. "A few months."
Jo didn't even know how to phrase it to herself. That was how long it had taken her to be willing to find a bed of more than convenience. That was how short a time she needed before she folded her last few years, like a map, and shoved it into a pocket with the solid, hilt thick thunk of driving a knife into someone's chest.
There's the slightest twitch of one corner of her mouth into something that's almost a smirk. Of course she's been here longer, isn't that the natural way of things?
Except maybe not. Depends on which Jo Harvelle is standing in front of her right now. She seems unphased enough by the idea of it that maybe she's seen an alternate universe or two, though, so at least there's that.
Then again, would any version of her ever seem phased by anything, at all? Krissy isn't sure. She never got the pleasure back home.
"I've been here maybe a week." Casual. Thumbs hooked in her belt loops at her hips as she makes her way over to the bar where Jo stood. Like she doesn't have a notebook somewhere in her pack with tickmarks counting days. She rocks back on the heel of her boots and tips her head toward the other woman, "And I guess since fair's fair an' all...and I know your name..." she looks up, eyes on her, waiting to catch any modicum of reaction when she says her own name. "the name's Krissy."
Jo doesn't freeze, but there's something almost too careful in the second after the woman gives her name. A flutter of something too real, too old, and not old enough. A certain laugh. A certain smirk. Merlin's prophesy, and his brown eyes. A letter. A talk. The weight of the world on too young shoulders.
A world that might be gone already. That she's had to count as gone, any gone, so she didn't go mad.
"Krissy." That repetition is just as careful as Jo stands back up with the bottle and sets it on the table, searching the face of the woman in front of her suddenly. As everything goes sliding, slotting. Even while the bottle, held by the neck, is still in slender fingers.
Her features flicker, eyes narrowing, except with something closer to a barely held spool of feeling she survives on not having, not allowing herself to, with a blink, and she can't stop it. "Krissy?"
She's too careful, too cautious, at the sound of her name. The repetition of it is too neutral. The whole moment is tense enough she feels like she's choking on it.
"What do you remember?" Krissy's own voice isn't as even as Jo's. She's not as skilled in that way as the other woman has always been. She's not sure if that's good or bad, but it's the truth either way.
The girl -- and she's not a girl, she's younger, but not young enough, not just started into gang-planking adulthood; not a girl, a woman -- her voice has cracks in that question and Jo's fingers leave the bottle. She doesn't answer, because it's far too much more important, too impossible to stop the question that comes out instead.
"It's you--" Don't hope, she tells herself, but. "--isn't it?" She's too late. She's always too late.
The kind of late that never really gets there. Not at a million years and a million miles of trying.
"Depends," She says, that same, irritatingly present waver still in her voice. "do you mean the me that you left a letter for?" A letter that Krissy was never sure she was really ready for, or could be ready for, ever, even if she'd been given twenty lifetimes to prepare for it. But certainly not when it was only dropped in her lap when the most solid part of the baby beginnings of her multiverse career suddenly up and disappeared on her.
Even as the question leaves her mouth, she's fairly certain she knows the answer, and simultaneously absolutely sure she doesn't want to hear it, not really.
Despite every time she ended up somewhere else, seeking out a small core handful of people, and refusing to hope that it was the right ones on the rare occasion when she did find them, Krissy never really knew what she'd do if she ever found Jo.
There's a swallow and a blink outside, but everything inside of Jo washes out. Here. And then gone. There's a momentary flash of too much. A girl with dark hair and bright eyes. The smallest fleck of a mole. With a crooked smirk. (That drags out the ghost of another smirk, and the echo of a biting English accent.) But that door slams, or slides, or vanishes, because there's no traction. And it's not night. And. And. She's. If. She's.
And Jo doesn't even put down the bottle. Doesn't even realize she's rounding the bar, before she is around it.
She's too old. Not old. But older. Taller. Her eyes are harder, and Jo's heart hurts to see it. Even as so much surges up toward her tongue. A million questions. And she doesn't even know what she was about to do, how far. How many faces has she made herself forget in the sun, yet is haunted by in the dark. She stops short of Krissy. A foot maybe from her. The bottle dangling by its neck from that hand still.
So much older. An adult. The multiverse is never a kind teacher. It's never fair.
(Merlin was right. Merlin was always right. About the letter. About Krissy. About Th--)
"I never wanted you to get it that way." It's all the wrong words. It's nothing in her chest, in suffocating tension that was cracking itself everywhere. Nothing on the half of her screaming it's not real, and nothing on the part of her begging to give in.
That's the only thing in her head, wired across her skin, at the reaction her question earns. And for a full minute, maybe two, that's all that exists at all. Not Jo, or the bar, or wherever they are in the multiverse or anything outside the not really safety of the walls around them. Just that visceral, resounding pulse of no and the feeling of an uneasy stomach at the thought.
It can't be. (But it is.) She knows it. (Even though she wishes she didn't.)
For a moment that feels too long to be natural, she's quiet and stock still, not sure how to react.
And then, she's a livewire, a sudden flurry of voice and motion.
"Fuck you!" Krissy shouts, not at all hesitating to close the remaining space between them, even daring to go as far as to shove at the older woman's shoulders. "Fuck you for giving me that letter and then disappearing. For leaving me." Doesn't matter that they both know she had no choice in it. These are words she's kept locked away for too long not to let go of. In hopes maybe the right person may be able to hear them one day, but never daring to unleash it even once on the wrong person. But she knows it's right. That's what makes it easy to forget everything and just be angry.
"You left... And it got bad. And then I left...and it got worse. And I was alone with nothing but a backpack and that letter." She scoffs, something the darker side of unamused and shakes her head. She turns and scoops up the bag that had fallen carelessly to the ground from her shoulder. She doesn't even have to dig or sift around, she knows exactly what she's looking for and where it is. The bag drops again, and Krissy rounds on Jo again, a worn, wrinkled envelope in her hand. "You know, this stupid fucking thing has made it through with me every. fucking. time...?" She shoves it at the blonde, like if she does, it can take away all the responsibility it had put on her for too long, too early.
Except it doesn't. It doesn't change anything. Her head, her shoulders, and her heart still carry that weight.
Jo's muscles tightened. Her heels pushed down hard. But she didn't dodge the push.
Her reflexes are still good. They don't get worse, and even if Krissy isn't the one person whose seriously beat her in that in the last few years -- at least until he they became human -- but that's not why either. She knows she deserves it. The sudden blistering sound. The solidness of that contact. The way she's almost certain it's not as much or as far as Krissy wants even. Maybe. Depending on who she is now.
On who Jo made her.
Which is the problem. Sin. Whatever the fuck you want to call it.
She's stiffens hard though at the produced letter, and it does nearly make her move back. Nearly. The shriveled, stained, wrinkled envelope that has seen so many better days, and looks nothing like the envelope in Jo's memory. That pristine white paper, with those long words she wrote, in that long ago window, as a long-ago other-person. She can't remember the exact words. It's been too long. Not even a parlay of them.
But she remembers the only thing all of them meant.
Only you.
Only you.
Only you.
"How bad?" Jo goes with the only thing she can. The only thing that can make it hurt worse. The one thing that dug in harder than the words thrown at her. Than the shove to her shoulder. That Krissy standing in front of her. An adult. Like Thorfinn. But with the years passed for both of them this time. "What--" It's hard to ask, hard to open the box she never wanted to discuss in the house in the mousetrap. Not even with them.
If there was one thing Jo knew how to do best it was survive.
If there was a second, it was how to hurt herself worse than anyone else could. Just like the multiverse. Giving Krissy the letter. Giving Jo that journal, and bracelet, and hat.
She forces the words out. Forces herself to it. Forces those wounds open. "What happened to them?"
"No," she's shaking her head before the word even finds a way to escape her mouth, sharp as knives. "you don't get to ask me that. I'll tell you what I think you need to know, when I think you need to know it, and not a second sooner. You don't get to make demands." And her words are spoken with such finality, it would almost seem to be the end of the conversation all together.
But it's not. It's too many years in the making for it to be so short.
"I think I was on the islands for a little over a year. Maybe year and a half. And then I was somewhere else. Two others, before here. Whatever this place is." There's a bitter sort of smirk on her face. "Weird, isn't it? The way every place seems to be worse than the last, somehow. Even when the conditions might be better, it's still worse." Worse because of what each new place represents. Of the loss of whatever came before it. Of the way she's never really lost what she's lost, because it clings to her heart and sticks to her skin like a parasite.
She deserves it, even when the word is more blow than any next shove could have been. Than a shot off the gun. Except. She hasn't. Until this place, she couldn't. But Krissy's words are still spilling out, and Ellen Harvelle didn't raise herself a daughter that plead pity and whined for sympathy, who handed out excuses like the meant a fucking damn whether they were real or not. And if she had, the multiverse would have burned it out so many stops ago. And it did. Burn out things you never even had.
Which is exactly what the words feel like. The censure that she doesn't deserve. Doesn't get to ask, to know. A dozen, and more, faces suddenly in her head. Brighter and more vibrant than she ever lets them surface to, for longer even in the pause of a thought than she lets her ghosts and demons free.
But then, even for the sharp denial, Krissy starts talking about it anyway, and something in Jo just keeps aching. She's so much taller, so much older, and suddenly in this second, young, so young. Like it was an outburst, but like the words can't be stopped.
And Jo knows that one, too. Too well. Doesn't want to see it on her face. Doesn't want to stop her from whatever she suddenly is saying. Needs to know. Need to know how each of them is, and the Roadhouse, and Krissy. Who is so close and so far.
Jo had to nod. A clipped, still thing, for all the stillness still clinging to her, for the anger that hadn't pricked even at the anger thrown at her. No. Not that. Betrayal. It is, isn't it? She left. Abandoned ship. Abandoned the house. Left her it and the letter she'd written because she had to, because she thought she'd have time, because Merlin said she'd ruin it all if she didn't, and she didn't have time, because she never had time.
Because Jo Harvelle bounced through this multiverse, she didn't stay. She wasn't allowed to stay. (Still.)
It's sheet glass thin, but Jo says it anyway, "This one is a lot like the one I came from before Medietas." There's the side tip of her head, but she knows it's just noise. "A lot less flash-Bang and multiverse movie monsters every five minutes, but--" This one ended on a shrug. An even so.
Especially because she knows her words may not entirely matter yet. Not with the way Krissy's eyes are shining. Not with what she did.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
{We've come a long way from where we began, and I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
Date: 2018-03-21 12:56 am (UTC)Krissy had never really understood it when Jo explained it. Sure, she comprehended the words, could try to relate it in her own experiences in her life, but it just didn't compare. Nothing ever could.
Part of it was her age. Barely eighteen when she was dragged onto those islands years ago.
Now, it feels like a while different lifetime ago. And in a lot of ways, it was. She's not convinced time operates the same in every universe, and she's pretty sure some of them run much faster than Earth time back home. Like how a few years could be half a century in Hell.
She's been in a few others. In some ways, it seemed like they all tried to out-do the last one she was in. She wonders sometimes if that's the norm or she was just lucky.
Sometimes, her people came with her. They weren't always the right ones, but they showed up eventually. Others didn't, and she hasn't seen them, or any version right or wrong, in years now. She's hung up hope when it comes to friendships. Tries her damndest to keep her feelings out of it and assemble what is needed in every place she goes. Carries the tradition she was left with, because at least it gives her a focus and something to do and work towards when the multiverse decided to upend her life.
Again.
No matter how many times she does it, how many hellos and do you remember me's she goes through, it never really stops hurting. She never really gets used to it, even if she says she does, and that she is. Boasts about how this is all old hat now. Come 'round, newbies, she'll show you the ropes and regale you with horror stories and hilarious tales.
She gets why Jo was who she was now, in a whole new light. In ways wished she didn't.
Nothing prepares you for the multiverse.
Another city, in another world, with a generic name she hasn't been here long enough to bother learning yet. Looks mostly Earth-like, if run-down and just the sunny side of Apocalyptic, if the dilapidated buildings and broken down houses were anything to judge by.
Krissy is wandering mostly deserted streets to try and pick the place she'd label her own. And not her own, as it were. She may not be Jo, or even a Harvelle by blood, but she was by choice--both hers and Jo's. So when she found the right place, the right help and the right materials... that's what it would say: Harvelle's Roadhouse. The person running it didn't make it Harvelle's, the spirit in it did, and that's what she cared about.
She has a pistol with three rounds. It's all she was allotted when she showed up here, despite never being armed less than to the teeth everywhere she goes, at all times. Fuck you too, Multiverse.
She spots what was probably once a bar, because it always is a bar, and decides to scope it out. She slips the gun out of the waistband of her pants and peeks around the open door that hangs half off its hinges. Seems clear, so she steps carefully around debris and inside.
She's about to call out, see who's here, but she sees her. Small, lithe blonde across the room, back turned to Krissy. She looks like she could be anyone, but it's the tense stance of a hunter that only others of their kind will ever recognize.
Krissy hangs in the doorway where she is, pistol raised and at the ready, but she doesn't move. Doesn't speak. She's going to let this stranger go first.
Nothing prepares you for the multiverse.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-21 01:24 am (UTC)It reminds her of Shatter, and that is probably the worst part.
Some people say it's the loss -- of time, of places, of people -- but it's not. It's the part where she gets up and she looks out the window and every single beat up, apocalyptic inch of it reminds her of Shatter. Right at the edges. The buildings are still nicer than it was, and there are no flash-BANG's but it's worse here. Just out of the corner of her eye, it almost looks right until it doesn't. She can feel the tense waiting for the sound, especially right when she wakes up.
The bed is empty, but she can't look at it, can't stop, can't belong to the memories. Not even if they are the only things she ever gets to keep. She gets dressed. She pulls back on that plethora of black, pants, tank top, bra, underwear, and she could replace it all now, scavenge stores or bleach it off one of the bodies, but she still hasn't. She will. She ... might.
Heavy black boots, and that beatup black leather jacket. Her father's dagger in the back of her pants. A gun beside it. Another in a boot. More knives tucked away. She braids her hair without looking at how long it's gotten, without thinking about it, or sheering it with a machete again. She never looks at the sheets. At the pillow. Not even once back at the bedroom when she leaves. It's empty and there's nothing in there for her but the roughest knife blade of sleep, worse here in the quiet than the entire ending of the mousetrap.
She goes down and she does the only thing she can. She looks at the room again. She hasn't been here long, but the bones of the building are good. It hasn't been blown down, or rained down, or burned down. It's got a brazen, bitchy refusal to be moved and maybe that's why Jo didn't leave the third time she came back. Began stockpiling the stripped weapons and the alcohol she could find. Just like in Hell. Just like in Shatter. Started trading information. And then a few words. And then a few more. Until she couldn't lie about what she was doing, even if she didn't look it in the eye.
It's a place. It's a ghost. It's the mark on her bones, and it'll bleed her dry again.
Add to the black hole in her chest that bides, singular companion like checked baggage.
Jo starts with the windows. Curtain up and boards down. It's two-fold sometimes. That challenge that says, come fuck with me, see what you get until she's got blood and grass in her teeth, but it's still someone else's blood on her hands; and the invitation that says, safe; safe; no one's stopped me yet, no one's going to, you can stop a second here, you can breathe a moment. A tumbleweed rest stop. She could just tell herself that, and pretend that didn't make it even more like Shatter.
The sound of footsteps is something she can hear just before the door and then in,
and when she turns she's not entirely surprised or worried about the gun.
Not even as every muscle tenses. Her hands open and she says, "You don't need that here."
Unless she's one of them, and even then the gun wouldn't help long enough to matter.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-21 02:03 am (UTC)The open hands in, well, on anyone else it might be surrender, but not her. It's-- a gesture of good faith. It's safe. For now. Don't make a bad move and it'll all be fine. Just two people in the same run down shack. All good, right?
She blinks once, the most obvious of the evidence that she might be phased at all. "Jo?" she knows sometimes people just look similiar, maybe she's off, wrong somehow.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-21 02:13 am (UTC)"Got it in one." Her voice maintains its same level. Her hands fold down, to settle on her hips, against the bottom of the leather jacket's line to her jeans. It's not as relaxed as it could be even as her weight shifts -- because it puts her fingers within inches of three different weapons. She doesn't look away from the woman, but she knows how many running steps she'd need to get behind the first thing she could dodge behind that would stop a bullet.
Still, there's something in the voice, in the raise of the question that is her name. Something that snaps at her heart, bloody ragged teeth it never ignores. Even though sometimes she does try her fucking damnest to do that. Still it's there. Still she doesn't miss it. The edge of surprise, desperation. That fathomless need that these types of worlds drive into people, especially in their first days, weeks, months, running between.
Jo's head tilts and she considers walking forward. "Paul or Robert send you?"
no subject
Date: 2018-03-21 02:18 am (UTC)It's her. It's so her. But is it her? Krissy isn't sure, and she's not ready to unleash a raindown of questions to figure it out yet. Not here, now, like this.
Slowly, carefully, she lowers the weapon. Doesn't put it away. But she's not quite as ready to put a bullet in the eyes of the person in front of her as she was seconds ago. "Don't know 'em." She shrugs one shoulder, casual as possible in the tension of the moment. "And I wasn't sent. Just found it-- same as you, I'd guess." There's an arch of her eyebrows to accompany those words. Really, Jo? A bar? Could you be any more predictable than she is?
no subject
Date: 2018-03-21 03:38 am (UTC)The woman is starting to lower her gun, but while it should be letting Jo relax, there's an edge to that making her fingertips itch. It's outlining the barrel on one side of the small of her back, and the knife pommel right next to it. There are reasons, and then there are reasons.
"But you just happen to know my name." There's something half question-accusation in the words, and something that half isn't at all. In someone hopeful and light, it might be called whimsy. In the shadow of Jo's tone, there was uncertainty along with reticent recognition. That her name might be spreading. Or the name of this place. Or both in one. And she's not sure she likes that. Wants that. Is ready.
(When is she ever, ever, ever allowed to be ready?)
Something old aches. A creaking door on rusted hinges. Even in this deserted little space. Jo tipped her head toward the bar and the tables. "It's not much yet since I just started clearing all of this place out, but if you want to actually put away your gun, I can see about finding you something to drink?"
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Date: 2018-03-21 04:16 am (UTC)The offer--a drink in exchange for holstering her weapon--wasn't a bad trade, really. Krissy hardly has enough ammo to waste, so she nods her acceptance before putting it away, "Fair enough." She nods toward whatever she had been doing before she'd been interrupted. "How long've you been here?"
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Date: 2018-03-21 04:29 am (UTC)Jo gave it a second's lingering as she watched the woman holster her weapon, and stand there, confirming what she wasn't sure she wanted to know, and what she somehow always known would if she did. It's different, again. Not like the clean separations of the maps and logs. Kate's not here to sweep up the rest.
"Here-here?" Jo asks, waving one hand to gesture to the room. "Two weeks."
She turned, going back behind the rough-and-tumble bar that had seen better days, and would look better with some work. If Jo decided she was up for some work, or if that was anywhere near necessity at a point. Her name wasn't scratched, child-deep, into the back of this one. Small favors. ...and maybe she liked that it looked like it had seen hell and was still standing.
"All of it?" She tugged out a bottle, looking across the bar, with a shrug that made itself a blase she wasn't anywhere near to feeling yet. "A few months."
Jo didn't even know how to phrase it to herself. That was how long it had taken her to be willing to find a bed of more than convenience. That was how short a time she needed before she folded her last few years, like a map, and shoved it into a pocket with the solid, hilt thick thunk of driving a knife into someone's chest.
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Date: 2018-03-22 02:41 am (UTC)Except maybe not. Depends on which Jo Harvelle is standing in front of her right now. She seems unphased enough by the idea of it that maybe she's seen an alternate universe or two, though, so at least there's that.
Then again, would any version of her ever seem phased by anything, at all? Krissy isn't sure. She never got the pleasure back home.
"I've been here maybe a week." Casual. Thumbs hooked in her belt loops at her hips as she makes her way over to the bar where Jo stood. Like she doesn't have a notebook somewhere in her pack with tickmarks counting days. She rocks back on the heel of her boots and tips her head toward the other woman, "And I guess since fair's fair an' all...and I know your name..." she looks up, eyes on her, waiting to catch any modicum of reaction when she says her own name. "the name's Krissy."
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Date: 2018-03-22 12:55 pm (UTC)Jo doesn't freeze, but there's something almost too careful in the second after the woman gives her name. A flutter of something too real, too old, and not old enough. A certain laugh. A certain smirk. Merlin's prophesy, and his brown eyes. A letter. A talk. The weight of the world on too young shoulders.
A world that might be gone already.
That she's had to count as gone, any gone, so she didn't go mad.
"Krissy." That repetition is just as careful as Jo stands back up with the bottle and sets it on the table, searching the face of the woman in front of her suddenly. As everything goes sliding, slotting. Even while the bottle, held by the neck, is still in slender fingers.
Her features flicker, eyes narrowing, except with something closer to a barely held spool of feeling she survives on not having, not allowing herself to, with a blink, and she can't stop it. "Krissy?"
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Date: 2018-04-04 12:36 am (UTC)"What do you remember?" Krissy's own voice isn't as even as Jo's. She's not as skilled in that way as the other woman has always been. She's not sure if that's good or bad, but it's the truth either way.
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Date: 2018-04-09 06:16 pm (UTC)The girl -- and she's not a girl, she's younger, but not young enough, not just started into gang-planking adulthood; not a girl, a woman -- her voice has cracks in that question and Jo's fingers leave the bottle. She doesn't answer, because it's far too much more important, too impossible to stop the question that comes out instead.
"It's you--" Don't hope, she tells herself, but. "--isn't it?"
She's too late. She's always too late.
The kind of late that never really gets there.
Not at a million years and a million miles of trying.
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Date: 2018-04-09 09:57 pm (UTC)"Depends," She says, that same, irritatingly present waver still in her voice. "do you mean the me that you left a letter for?" A letter that Krissy was never sure she was really ready for, or could be ready for, ever, even if she'd been given twenty lifetimes to prepare for it. But certainly not when it was only dropped in her lap when the most solid part of the baby beginnings of her multiverse career suddenly up and disappeared on her.
Even as the question leaves her mouth, she's fairly certain she knows the answer, and simultaneously absolutely sure she doesn't want to hear it, not really.
Despite every time she ended up somewhere else, seeking out a small core handful of people, and refusing to hope that it was the right ones on the rare occasion when she did find them, Krissy never really knew what she'd do if she ever found Jo.
The right Jo.
Her Jo.
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Date: 2018-06-25 03:08 am (UTC)Jo doesn't even put down the bottle.
There's a swallow and a blink outside, but everything inside of Jo washes out. Here. And then gone. There's a momentary flash of too much. A girl with dark hair and bright eyes. The smallest fleck of a mole. With a crooked smirk. (That drags out the ghost of another smirk, and the echo of a biting English accent.) But that door slams, or slides, or vanishes, because there's no traction. And it's not night. And. And. She's. If. She's.
And Jo doesn't even put down the bottle.
Doesn't even realize she's rounding the bar, before she is around it.
She's too old. Not old. But older. Taller. Her eyes are harder, and Jo's heart hurts to see it. Even as so much surges up toward her tongue. A million questions. And she doesn't even know what she was about to do, how far. How many faces has she made herself forget in the sun, yet is haunted by in the dark. She stops short of Krissy. A foot maybe from her. The bottle dangling by its neck from that hand still.
So much older. An adult. The multiverse is never a kind teacher. It's never fair.
(Merlin was right. Merlin was always right.
About the letter. About Krissy. About Th--)
"I never wanted you to get it that way." It's all the wrong words.
It's nothing in her chest, in suffocating tension that was cracking itself everywhere.
Nothing on the half of her screaming it's not real, and nothing on the part of her begging to give in.
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Date: 2018-06-25 06:30 am (UTC)No.
No.
That's the only thing in her head, wired across her skin, at the reaction her question earns. And for a full minute, maybe two, that's all that exists at all. Not Jo, or the bar, or wherever they are in the multiverse or anything outside the not really safety of the walls around them. Just that visceral, resounding pulse of no and the feeling of an uneasy stomach at the thought.
It can't be. (But it is.)
She knows it. (Even though she wishes she didn't.)
For a moment that feels too long to be natural, she's quiet and stock still, not sure how to react.
And then, she's a livewire, a sudden flurry of voice and motion.
"Fuck you!" Krissy shouts, not at all hesitating to close the remaining space between them, even daring to go as far as to shove at the older woman's shoulders. "Fuck you for giving me that letter and then disappearing. For leaving me." Doesn't matter that they both know she had no choice in it. These are words she's kept locked away for too long not to let go of. In hopes maybe the right person may be able to hear them one day, but never daring to unleash it even once on the wrong person. But she knows it's right. That's what makes it easy to forget everything and just be angry.
"You left... And it got bad. And then I left...and it got worse. And I was alone with nothing but a backpack and that letter." She scoffs, something the darker side of unamused and shakes her head. She turns and scoops up the bag that had fallen carelessly to the ground from her shoulder. She doesn't even have to dig or sift around, she knows exactly what she's looking for and where it is. The bag drops again, and Krissy rounds on Jo again, a worn, wrinkled envelope in her hand. "You know, this stupid fucking thing has made it through with me every. fucking. time... ?" She shoves it at the blonde, like if she does, it can take away all the responsibility it had put on her for too long, too early.
Except it doesn't.
It doesn't change anything.
Her head, her shoulders, and her heart still carry that weight.
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Date: 2018-06-25 10:52 pm (UTC)Jo's muscles tightened. Her heels pushed down hard.
But she didn't dodge the push.
Her reflexes are still good. They don't get worse, and even if Krissy isn't the one person whose seriously beat her in that in the last few years -- at least until
hethey became human -- but that's not why either. She knows she deserves it. The sudden blistering sound. The solidness of that contact. The way she's almost certain it's not as much or as far as Krissy wants even. Maybe. Depending on who she is now.On who Jo made her.
Which is the problem. Sin.
Whatever the fuck you want to call it.
She's stiffens hard though at the produced letter, and it does nearly make her move back. Nearly. The shriveled, stained, wrinkled envelope that has seen so many better days, and looks nothing like the envelope in Jo's memory. That pristine white paper, with those long words she wrote, in that long ago window, as a long-ago other-person. She can't remember the exact words. It's been too long. Not even a parlay of them.
But she remembers the only thing all of them meant.
Only you.
Only you.
Only you.
"How bad?" Jo goes with the only thing she can. The only thing that can make it hurt worse. The one thing that dug in harder than the words thrown at her. Than the shove to her shoulder. That Krissy standing in front of her. An adult. Like Thorfinn. But with the years passed for both of them this time. "What--" It's hard to ask, hard to open the box she never wanted to discuss in the house in the mousetrap. Not even with them.
If there was one thing Jo knew how to do best it was survive.
If there was a second, it was how to hurt herself worse than anyone else could.
Just like the multiverse. Giving Krissy the letter. Giving Jo that journal, and bracelet, and hat.
She forces the words out. Forces herself to it. Forces those wounds open. "What happened to them?"
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Date: 2018-07-03 07:31 pm (UTC)But it's not.
It's too many years in the making for it to be so short.
"I think I was on the islands for a little over a year. Maybe year and a half. And then I was somewhere else. Two others, before here. Whatever this place is." There's a bitter sort of smirk on her face. "Weird, isn't it? The way every place seems to be worse than the last, somehow. Even when the conditions might be better, it's still worse." Worse because of what each new place represents. Of the loss of whatever came before it. Of the way she's never really lost what she's lost, because it clings to her heart and sticks to her skin like a parasite.
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Date: 2018-10-13 03:59 am (UTC)She deserves it, even when the word is more blow than any next shove could have been. Than a shot off the gun. Except. She hasn't. Until this place, she couldn't. But Krissy's words are still spilling out, and Ellen Harvelle didn't raise herself a daughter that plead pity and whined for sympathy, who handed out excuses like the meant a fucking damn whether they were real or not. And if she had, the multiverse would have burned it out so many stops ago. And it did. Burn out things you never even had.
Which is exactly what the words feel like. The censure that she doesn't deserve. Doesn't get to ask, to know. A dozen, and more, faces suddenly in her head. Brighter and more vibrant than she ever lets them surface to, for longer even in the pause of a thought than she lets her ghosts and demons free.
But then, even for the sharp denial, Krissy starts talking about it anyway, and something in Jo just keeps aching.
She's so much taller, so much older, and suddenly in this second, young, so young.
Like it was an outburst, but like the words can't be stopped.
And Jo knows that one, too. Too well. Doesn't want to see it on her face.
Doesn't want to stop her from whatever she suddenly is saying. Needs to know.
Need to know how each of them is, and the Roadhouse, and Krissy. Who is so close and so far.
Jo had to nod. A clipped, still thing, for all the stillness still clinging to her, for the anger that hadn't pricked even at the anger thrown at her. No. Not that. Betrayal. It is, isn't it? She left. Abandoned ship. Abandoned the house. Left her it and the letter she'd written because she had to, because she thought she'd have time, because Merlin said she'd ruin it all if she didn't, and she didn't have time, because she never had time.
Because Jo Harvelle bounced through this multiverse, she didn't stay. She wasn't allowed to stay. (Still.)
It's sheet glass thin, but Jo says it anyway, "This one is a lot like the one I came from before Medietas." There's the side tip of her head, but she knows it's just noise. "A lot less flash-Bang and multiverse movie monsters every five minutes, but--" This one ended on a shrug. An even so.
Especially because she knows her words may not entirely matter yet.
Not with the way Krissy's eyes are shining. Not with what she did.
What she'd never had to face up to or down to.
Being right, and being wrong.
Waking up gone.