He doesn't stop his fingers in her hair, twisting and carding through strands in a slow, steady rhythm, almost like it's what's grounding him in this moment. The reason behind it... it's hard-hitting and personal and something he never exactly worked through. Because how do you work through that kind of loss of power, of agency? You can't get over something like that.
"Did you know demons can possess vampires?" his voice is quiet and tight, and as much as he tried to push a bit of humor into his voice, he couldn't manage it. "One of them took me...wrecked every friendship I had, turned against my family...not to mention the destruction around the city."
Jo's first reaction is still a look of unguardedly confused suspicion. She is what has made her, and in both of those ways, it is why she nearly frowns, but it's also why if her brow knits, she doesn't say it's impossible. The last decade of her life has given her a lot space before being willing to say those words. A lot of things that shouldn't be possible have been as normal as everything else in that time.
Still, she's not expecting it, or anything like it, and he knows it. Fingers going quietly still over the symbol on his chest.
It's harder to imagine the idea of the rest, even in the if-then of the first. It's rude and the wrong place to make a joke about him not having friends. He's kept to himself here, and their accost of his existence by an exploded house, is the real reason they ended up under foot and under his skin to being with. Everyone else. Well. If she's honest, the joke and the truth of it makes them more alike, too, than she's willing to look at easily.
Jo had more than she came from to this place, too, and she hasn't made that same effort, again, either. Not in the same way. For all her barbs at his being as antisocially monstrous as actually a monster, it's not like she hasn't at least understood, on some level, too, why to not try, too.
"How long?" It's the first question of nearly a dozen questions, with more connected to each. How, even. Why. Who. What did it do, and was there ever a chance to change any of it, or did it do what demons did and take everything in its wake.
"Few weeks," he frowns, recalling thew whole ordeal. Not that he ever forgot, or ever could, the things done with his hands and said with his mouth were burned into his memory with such clarity, he knew it would never, ever fade. "maybe a month. Kind of blurred together."
He takes a moment before he says anything else, gathering the memories of it all so he could make any of this make sense of any kind. "Long before I ended up in Lawrence, Sam and Dean fucked up and let Lucifer out of some Cage he'd been trapped in. This... it was a lead up, Lucifer playing games, trying to cause issues in our ranks." He scoffs and shakes his head, "As if we didn't have enough in-fighting all of our own accord and needed his help." Too many heavy and strong personalities crammed into one space, it was impossible not to have clashes of personality and power alike.
"I wasn't the only one, there were probably six or eight others, maybe more...they were taken, too." He shakes his head. "Most of them were better people-- not killers, people who didn't have countless numbers of dead on their hands already. Genuine Team Good Guy sorts... it was probably worse for them, in some ways, I guess." Not that he'd have ever had the ability to admit as much, then. But it was still probably true more than it wasn't. "Lot of awful things happened back then."
His heart beats, slowly and steadily, under the palm of her hand as he speaks. The rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. These small things she can never entirely take for granted unless one or both of them has her distracted in another way. This same breath, same heartbeat, steady and constant this second, and for months now, that was not in existence during the time he's speaking of.
When he was just a vampire. Her mind almost supplies just a monster, but there are twists and turns there. There's a part-alien girl with long blonde hair and an angel with arrogant but protective tendencies, and a vampire, with a heart -- one that, she knows, oh she does, even if her expression changes none at all, watching him speak, and it would take more than much to pry from her mouth -- but one that existed somehow before this heartbeat, too.
The way she doesn't like to think about.
(The way she knows she wouldn't be here, in his arm, in his bed, any other way.)
It's horrific, the scene he's setting, but they live in horror. Here, and in the multiverse. It's not blase. It's not brush-away-able. But it's horrific, and it's what it is, and even more, as Jo's hand doesn't move from that placement over his heart, and the symbol etched into his skin between that heart and her hand, he's here now. He passed through it. Like those things she passed through to her, to this trap.
She wanders around the edge, knowing there's a time and place for sharp knives thrown at direct points, and sometimes for the leisure, carefulness of a morning in the sunshine, and the quiet of voices, talking about things they don't. But. Maybe are ... now. "Did you get it during it, or after?"
He doesn't mind the silence that stretches between them and wraps around the room like a barrier, invisible but existing all the same. He can take something almost like solace in it for however long it may last.
And there is a sort of comfort in it. With her here. Which is...not something he'd have thought, months ago, he could have ever thought in regards to Jo Harvelle. Especially not this one. She was nothing like the one in the version of Lawrence he'd known. She was so much harder and rougher around the edges. He liked this one.
"After..." He answers quietly, fingers tracing idle patterns into her skin. "Awhile...after. Because on its way out...it turned my emotions off and...it took awhile for them to contain me, still and...longer than that to get them back on. It's so easy to let yourself sink into that kind of apathy, once you taste it." He wonders if Lexi knows how much he really appreciated her getting him out of that. All the awful atrocities he's committed, he never tried to escape them that way.
This, right here, is where she should do it. It's the perfect opening. He even handed it to her, willingly. Maybe even honestly.
This. Right here. Where he's being honest. Is where she should do it. She should ask. Make him clarify. At least set it out there as a question, it would be at least stuck in his box, to answer or avoid. How bad was it. No. Not it. He. How bad was hethen. How long was it. How much destruction did he wreak during that time. How many people did he kill during it.
A half-dozen question marks. A weight in her chest -- maybe even her heart -- when all she does is shift a little, rubbing her cheek on his shoulder, due to the sensation of his fingers dragging over her bare skin. She thinks of a dozen responses in a second. Two. Maybe two dozen. She's been a bartender the universe over. It comes with fast reflexes in words. But. The thing is. They don't usually lie. At least not directly to each other.
Evade maybe, what they're not ready or will for.
Avoid what neither of them really ignores or wants to look at too closely.
But the blatant lies are usually soaked in arrogance and teasing, begging to be broken, or kissed hard into a wall. It's not even in the shouting when it happens. Not really. Not. Like this. There's a small heavy breath out her nose, eventually, as she looks at the back of her hand, lifting it under her gaze, to see the black mark. "How does that work? What happens when you turn your emotions off?"
Is it as bad as it sounds, worse that tornado of temper tantrum she found him in the first time, that it sounds ever bit like it is. (Like she knows it has to be.)
He knows how dangerous this dance with her is. He could very well be handing over the big, important parts of himself to someone who might feel the need to murder him in his sleep someday. Sure, they've come a long way since they first met, but... well. They are always who they are, at their cores, regardless of all of it. Anything's possible.
He's a bit shocked that was the question that she asked. He could think of a lot of them she must have considered. But... he'll answer it, because in whatever shade it really is, he trusts her. Maybe not wholly or completely, there's always that curious apprehension in the back of his mind, but it's enough. He trusts her enough for this.
"Normally... it's all heightened. Anger is automatically rage, sadness sinks you into the darkest depression, there's not really a middle road to what I feel." Which might explain a few of the earlier parts of how they met. Maybe. A bit. "But...that....switch, it takes all of it. You can't just lose part of it, you don't get to pick and choose... it takes the good right with the bad and it's nothing. It's this...heavy, empty apathy unlike anything I've ever felt. I could have killed my own sister and not felt a thing." And for a Mikaelson, it's always family above all, and even in what her limited knowledge of him may be, surely Jo's figured out that one.
"It's awful, and... I only ever did it before, when everything we were was still new and it seemed easier, at the time. Because, believe it or not, I did care once... about what that new life my wretched mother cast on us meant for other people. It was impossible to stop the hunger, so it seemed a better idea to stop caring about it. I never did it again after that. I never want to feel that kind of indifference again."
It's easy enough to shift the dominoes. Easy enough to envision the barer truth those words contain without quite touching on them. Base tactic truths, without body counts. But how easy to rack and rack, and rerack a body count, if you did not care, is the whisper underneath. About the world, about the people. About his family, as he pointed out.
About yourself, that too quiet, and not comforting voice in the back of her head added.
The one not from her head. Not her head. Her head knew better. But her feet. But these days. Her-
That's the ledge. That's the line. Her toes aren't at it. She'd know better than that. She knows what that feeling feels like. At the line, that is actually five miles past it. There's a different man, with a different face, who burned the knowledge of what every inch and every breath of that into her heart. It's a vine crawling through it all. Listening. Taking the time to listen. Putting the pieces together.
Pretending it's not just because she may need it one day. Her fingers shift, just barely, the faintest ripple of a tap.
Her pointer finger, middle finger, ring finger. Over the mark where her hand still rests. "And if this isn't what stopped that, or helped that. What did?"
What stopped a vampire with a demon inside it.
How was it the multiverse made monsters of even monsters (when it twinged slightly because the monster was the right word. But it wasn't, too)?
"There were attacks of all kinds in so many places... shootings, a chemical spill gone horribly awry, national monuments, a bomb in an orphanage..." It was the one that had stuck out the hardest, later, in the aftermath of everything, even though he hadn't been involved in the orphanage one.
He doesn't even know why he told her. That's not what she asked, but it's a shadow of before he got caught. Important to the story, maybe. "I'll never be able to make it to St. Louis without remembering the shooting at Union Station..." Not that St. Louis was high on his list of vacation spots or anything, or anything like reachable at all from here, but still.
He continues, his voice quiet, hesitant in the explanation of all this. He was a lot of things, murderer, manipulator, but this? Everything during those months? It wasn't him, and he'd hated every second of it. "My sister... tricked it, by making it think she had what it wanted. Was going to exchange that, and herself, for me. She exorcised it..." The words, final as they should sound, don't sound like the end to the story, though, even as he trails off, maybe losing himself to the moment in his memory.
His words start before the aim of her question, and the end before the aim of it, too, and if any of this were about the aim, it would stay there. There wouldn't be the lingering weight of wonder if his list is himself, or is Lawrence, that has never sounds like it was shipped shine much either.
But she knows sometimes telling a story, a story that isn't 'a story' because it's never less than deadly real, less than carved into your insides, doesn't have edges, or chapter blocks. It has oceans. It blurs, starting, ending, blending into other things even just to open the box. His voice is quiet, above the crown of her hair, quiet like you are when you go somewhere holy. Or somewhere damned.
It should be easy. To not hear it. To let it pass her by. A stone in a river of ice. She been through worse. She's done worse. Some people would rgue what's doing right now even is. Complicated, yes, but not complicit, and the people who don't understand how sex with a side of hate, and one of I-might-kill-you-you-might-try-to-kill-me-any-second-now really haven't lived, but not this.
This ache, that reminds her of piled bottles and guns and the silence of those rooms. That makes her wish the base was still hate. It might not be acceptance, but this feeling vined tight through her ribs, it's not hate either. It's something else, Jo knows that, before she shifts, as she does. Until her temple is more at the outside his shoulders and she can look up and see his face. Still listening. Still not looking away.
When did Jo Harvelle ever learn to look away, or walk away. Apparently, it wasn't going to be this round either.
And, God, how he wishes she wouldn't look at him. Like this isn't hard enough already, cutting that wound fresh open to make it all make sense, somehow, impossibly. Because she wants to understand how and why that ink exists on him.
"As it's last grand gesture, on the way out, it turned my emotions off... and it took awhile for them to get me back. Really back. But...after it was all said and done, I knew I couldn't ever let it happen again. So...I went to this bloke, this magic-user, who'd done this sort of thing more than enough by then to know what he was doing, to get a magically-applied tattoo." Since the normal methods wouldn't really work with his vampire healing. A traditional tattoo just wouldn't have lasted. "I s'pose, here, with all the power negation, it's just... delegated to just be ink on skin, though."
Which wasn't something he'd considered before now and he feels the growingly familiar too-quick pounding in his chest at the thought of that. The fear-response is, of course, futile and useless, because even if someone who could possess people was brought here, it would be something they'd lose once they came through the fountain. But that doesn't stop the possibility from still existing, somewhere, somehow. Because if their powers can be taken away, they could be given back, too.
She doesn't look away. Not even when he does react to it, and not when he takes pauses in it.
If he asked why, she couldn't say - wouldn't say, and whatever he assumes, she knows watching his lips move and the focus of his gaze move here and there, that for as much of it as he might get right in the guess, he'd get just as much wrong. But that has so much more to do with the person she hasn't wanted to be here. Refused to be here.
With the thing she knows second best in her blood, in her heart. She doesn't want to think of it that way. She can't stop herself. Even though she's locked away so tight since arriving.
Hunters didn't come to the Roadhouse, the first one but also any of them, just for a pint or a fifth of scotch. Nor to ply their lies. Or to shark a card table, or a pool game. Any bar had that. They came to be seen. Whether that was under a mountain of bravado, or to take over a dark corner, or a bar stool. The road was long. The road was dark. The road was cruel. It took jagged bites out of everything. Your life. Your people. Your mind. Your soul.
Your existence, that didn't exist, because you were a ghost passing through towns.
It wasn't to have someone thank you. Or warn you. Sometimes it was for help, but not always. Like a poker marker. I was here. I did this. I went through this. I chose it. I choose it still. Anyway.
Jo didn't love the feeling of unease in her stomach that cocooned the ache in her chest. Vampire, who was one of the first in wherever his first home was, taken over by a demon from her world, sacking a world like it but not anymore either. Taking Kol's free will like it was a thing that could still be taken. His mind (; a vampire's). His body (; a vampire's). His will (; a vampire's). Sympathy is impossible not to feel, even at uncomfortable, and she doesn't have to like it, but she doesn't fight any part of it either.
Or the urge that makes her lift her hand and place it against his cheek studying his face, those brown eyes she's seen in so many different ways now, and as much as she wishes any part of it was lie, it'd be easier if it was, but it's not. She's certain it's not. And she doesn't know if that fact it's a not a lie, the fact it happened, the fact that she's listening, or the fact they're laying here, in the morning light, having this conversation at all, is the root of that feeling in her center.
More squares she can't take back.
Her thumb brushed his cheek after another small circuit of his face, and she considered the second question, to the one still roaming at the edge of her mind too loudly. "How long before you came was all of that?"
He doesn't hear anything in the silence that encases the room. He knows her so much better now than he did when he first arrived, when they first met, but... Kol still can't read Jo Harvelle in her silences. Hers is a mind--and heart--locked far and away from anyone thinking they know how to predict them, or her, at all.
So, the only thing that he gets, really, is the movement as she reaches to touch his cheek, thumb sliding against smooth skin, still debating her words before she speaks yet. "Oh... um..." he frowns slightly, thinking about it, and so many things between it, and the point he was stolen to this village--the attack on the complex, the Apocalypse coming to a head, the ritual Crowley performed to shove Michael and Lucifer in the Cage and the ones, including his sister, who got trapped as collateral, the troubles Rebekah had on getting out of the Cage, Henrik, and so many countless, and widely impacting other things. It's hard, thinking about everything that happened in that space of time. It's blurrier than he remembers his memories being, and he can only assume it's being cut off from his vampiric abilities that causes it. So much happened in such a quick succession of time.
"I guess...something like eight months?" Long enough most might assume that, while perhaps it would never go away entirely, because nothing like that ever can, not really, that he'd put it behind him. He was, after all, not repulsed, not running, and still very much firmly entangled with his own demon; it must not be still this close to the surface, this raw. "Nine, maybe." Almost a year, but in what time did he ever have a chance to truly deal with it? Or even have the time to think about it, between appearances of red-headed Angels and vampiric-nephews and family dramas galore, when did he have the space to consider anything at all?
Jo didn't move, studying his face, as that face became introspective. The quirk of brows and tense of facial muscles toward that smile, as the mind behind it all whirled through who knows how many other things, and people, and details, and events, possibly light and possibly dark as the darkest fears -- and worst than fears, truths of exactly what she knows he is, his family is, his people -- searching for a number.
When it comes, Jo is surprised.
Hand still on his face, even though it makes her draw a slightly quicker breath in her nose. "Not even a year."
At not even a year from her worse no one this close knew either, had they. At not even a year, she was still thinking that everything could be just fine. He's not the same. He's not. Kol. A vampire. Thousands of years of embittered ups and downs she's only barely got the string to connect at all, over the references he drops here and there. But they are sometimes, too. That's the problem. Not even a year.
Not even long enough to pretend to look at it while pretending to not be looking away to survive it.
"Nope," he says simply, shaking his head, lips tugged together in a tight line. He reaches up to gently wrap his fingers around hers, pulling her hand away from his face.
He moves his hand, as if to thread their fingers together, but instead he slides his fingers carefully across the palm of her hand, tracing nonsense patterns into her skin. An echo of a different time, with a different woman.
A frown traces the edges of his features. "I miss it... Lawrence was, for all it's faults and fallacies, the first place that felt like home in...a really long time."
Jo let him pull it away, looking down at their hands, and skin, the rumpled excuse for blankets that always had two or three on any bed any of them ended up in. Okay, but basic. Good, with two. Best with three. Even if the bed could be a furnace at that point. Which was great in cold snap, but a bitch any other time. Because that's absolutely what she was really thinking about.
As Kol talked about home, and Jo strove really hard not to think about that word (home), that idea (the first place that felt like home...in a really long time). She let her cheek on his shoulder, looking down, be too good of a wall, between him waching her face, and her own mind and her memories. She left it to Thorfinn to talk about Medietas, and the Roadhouse. Answered questions when they were asked, joked along if she had to.
If she had to.
She chooses something else. "I had one once."
There's a faint nod into his shoulder. "Anti-possession tattoo."
His fingers never really stop their dance against her palm, her wrist and her fingers. He's just doing it for familiarity than anything else; like it's more a compulsion than an active choice now. But it doesn't steal his focus, or make him miss the way she's tilted her face down and away from him, so she doesn't have to see him as she says her next small handful of carefully chosen words.
"But you don't anymore." It's a statement more than a question. Even if she hadn't said it quite that way, he'd seen more than enough of her to know the answer to it. But he didn't know the answer to the next one. "What happened?"
Maybe this is part of that dance, same the reminders they might just wake up and have to kill each other the next morning, the next night, the first chance any of them get back who and what they really are, even as the cling with a biting, bleeding tenacity to the fact they still are those people and would take apart anyone else, bone by bone, for even implying they aren't.
(And, maybe, part of why Thorfinn says they wouldn't, even if it did happen.)
It's a dangerous thing. Hiding from one secret, by revealing another. Secret, or hell, or both.
She doesn't look up, watching his fingers against her skin. Looking at the movement of his hand as much as her own skin that they are touching. Her skin that doesn't hurt here. Doesn't heal here. Isn't screaming it's bloody murder because she's within forty or fifty feet of Kol, no less actually curved against him.
"It went away." That's too simple, and it'd be a sassy pop if her voice ever canted that way, or if she'd looked up at him, if she's pushed up and leaned over to rest on his chest and look at him teasingly tapped his breast bone or nose with her finger, and made it prim, like it was a game, a lark for early morning sunshine and something he had to earn at the edge of a flirting dare. But she didn't, doesn't, sees the option in her head and lets it wander by. Staring at his fingers and her hand. "The same as all my scars. And my pierced ears."
Funny how that last one clung like teeth sunk deep. She didn't even really like earrings, and yet it had stuck. Like a burr.
(It'll hurt, he said.
It's still better than being dead, she replied.
She thought he'd meant as it happened, She hadn't understood he meant forever.)
"And how did that happen?" His voice is still quiet and soft, like if he pushes beyond the edge of that steady stillness of all of this, it'll dissolve like sand between his fingers and the conversation will be over.
He wishes this wasn't all so... raw and real right now. He doesn't do this with people often, and it's always a harsh and sharp slice of discomfort between the ribs when it happens. Even when it's with people he trusts, in whatever varying degrees that word may exist with another person. But some conversations are necessary, no matter how hard they are to have.
The thing is she remembers it in clips and flashes.
Sometimes in her dreams. If you can call anything that horrific a dream. Sometimes clips and flashes more since the time she held her hand out and let Merlin take it, let Merlin step all the way into it. And later, she understood better, what she hadn't then; into her. Let him chance the fact it might have been him, or be him one day. Bash through the walls that she agreed to. Anything to stay alive. Anything to finish the mission. The one she couldn't even remember agreeing to. The one she never finished, because she'd been before that bastard, and suddenly
flash-BANG
And she was in the Shattered Universe without any warning, and almost without any recollection at first.
It's hard to pick words. It's been dormant so long. It's a pride, a shame, a tool, a loss.
But what it all really comes down to is -- "I made a deal."
He takes those words and holds them for a long, silent moment. They're bigger than they look, and he knows it, knows that deals are so much more involved than they ever sound like on the surface.
Deals were Crowley's thing. And, fuck he hates thinking of him. Of the hundreds of things that spiral out and down in waves and waterfalls on the heels of that thought. But once it starts, there's no stopping it. It trickles out and threatens to sink him before he can try to patch the hole it rips in the center of him.
"What kind of deal, exactly?" he can't help the curiosity of it. And almost as an afterthought, he adds, "with who?"
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Date: 2017-01-07 09:49 pm (UTC)"Did you know demons can possess vampires?" his voice is quiet and tight, and as much as he tried to push a bit of humor into his voice, he couldn't manage it. "One of them took me...wrecked every friendship I had, turned against my family...not to mention the destruction around the city."
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Date: 2017-05-26 03:11 pm (UTC)Still, she's not expecting it, or anything like it, and he knows it.
Fingers going quietly still over the symbol on his chest.
It's harder to imagine the idea of the rest, even in the if-then of the first. It's rude and the wrong place to make a joke about him not having friends. He's kept to himself here, and their accost of his existence by an exploded house, is the real reason they ended up under foot and under his skin to being with. Everyone else. Well. If she's honest, the joke and the truth of it makes them more alike, too, than she's willing to look at easily.
Jo had more than she came from to this place, too, and she hasn't made that same effort, again, either. Not in the same way. For all her barbs at his being as antisocially monstrous as actually a monster, it's not like she hasn't at least understood, on some level, too, why to not try, too.
"How long?" It's the first question of nearly a dozen questions, with more connected to each. How, even. Why. Who. What did it do, and was there ever a chance to change any of it, or did it do what demons did and take everything in its wake.
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Date: 2017-09-10 05:42 pm (UTC)He takes a moment before he says anything else, gathering the memories of it all so he could make any of this make sense of any kind. "Long before I ended up in Lawrence, Sam and Dean fucked up and let Lucifer out of some Cage he'd been trapped in. This... it was a lead up, Lucifer playing games, trying to cause issues in our ranks." He scoffs and shakes his head, "As if we didn't have enough in-fighting all of our own accord and needed his help." Too many heavy and strong personalities crammed into one space, it was impossible not to have clashes of personality and power alike.
"I wasn't the only one, there were probably six or eight others, maybe more...they were taken, too." He shakes his head. "Most of them were better people-- not killers, people who didn't have countless numbers of dead on their hands already. Genuine Team Good Guy sorts... it was probably worse for them, in some ways, I guess." Not that he'd have ever had the ability to admit as much, then. But it was still probably true more than it wasn't. "Lot of awful things happened back then."
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Date: 2018-06-25 11:32 pm (UTC)His heart beats, slowly and steadily, under the palm of her hand as he speaks. The rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. These small things she can never entirely take for granted unless one or both of them has her distracted in another way. This same breath, same heartbeat, steady and constant this second, and for months now, that was not in existence during the time he's speaking of.
When he was just a vampire. Her mind almost supplies just a monster, but there are twists and turns there. There's a part-alien girl with long blonde hair and an angel with arrogant but protective tendencies, and a vampire, with a heart -- one that, she knows, oh she does, even if her expression changes none at all, watching him speak, and it would take more than much to pry from her mouth -- but one that existed somehow before this heartbeat, too.
The way she doesn't like to think about.
(The way she knows she wouldn't be here, in his arm, in his bed, any other way.)
It's horrific, the scene he's setting, but they live in horror. Here, and in the multiverse. It's not blase. It's not brush-away-able. But it's horrific, and it's what it is, and even more, as Jo's hand doesn't move from that placement over his heart, and the symbol etched into his skin between that heart and her hand, he's here now. He passed through it. Like those things she passed through to her, to this trap.
She wanders around the edge, knowing there's a time and place for sharp knives thrown at direct points, and sometimes for the leisure, carefulness of a morning in the sunshine, and the quiet of voices, talking about things they don't. But. Maybe are ... now. "Did you get it during it, or after?"
no subject
Date: 2018-07-03 03:11 am (UTC)And there is a sort of comfort in it. With her here. Which is...not something he'd have thought, months ago, he could have ever thought in regards to Jo Harvelle. Especially not this one. She was nothing like the one in the version of Lawrence he'd known. She was so much harder and rougher around the edges. He liked this one.
"After..." He answers quietly, fingers tracing idle patterns into her skin. "Awhile...after. Because on its way out...it turned my emotions off and...it took awhile for them to contain me, still and...longer than that to get them back on. It's so easy to let yourself sink into that kind of apathy, once you taste it." He wonders if Lexi knows how much he really appreciated her getting him out of that. All the awful atrocities he's committed, he never tried to escape them that way.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-03 03:40 am (UTC)This, right here, is where she should do it. It's the perfect opening.
He even handed it to her, willingly. Maybe even honestly.
This. Right here. Where he's being honest. Is where she should do it. She should ask. Make him clarify. At least set it out there as a question, it would be at least stuck in his box, to answer or avoid. How bad was it. No. Not it. He. How bad was he then. How long was it. How much destruction did he wreak during that time. How many people did he kill during it.
A half-dozen question marks. A weight in her chest -- maybe even her heart -- when all she does is shift a little, rubbing her cheek on his shoulder, due to the sensation of his fingers dragging over her bare skin. She thinks of a dozen responses in a second. Two. Maybe two dozen. She's been a bartender the universe over. It comes with fast reflexes in words. But. The thing is. They don't usually lie. At least not directly to each other.
Evade maybe, what they're not ready or will for.
Avoid what neither of them really ignores or wants to look at too closely.
But the blatant lies are usually soaked in arrogance and teasing, begging to be broken, or kissed hard into a wall. It's not even in the shouting when it happens. Not really. Not. Like this. There's a small heavy breath out her nose, eventually, as she looks at the back of her hand, lifting it under her gaze, to see the black mark. "How does that work? What happens when you turn your emotions off?"
Is it as bad as it sounds, worse that tornado of temper tantrum she found him in the first time, that it sounds ever bit like it is. (Like she knows it has to be.)
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Date: 2018-07-03 04:12 am (UTC)He's a bit shocked that was the question that she asked. He could think of a lot of them she must have considered. But... he'll answer it, because in whatever shade it really is, he trusts her. Maybe not wholly or completely, there's always that curious apprehension in the back of his mind, but it's enough. He trusts her enough for this.
"Normally... it's all heightened. Anger is automatically rage, sadness sinks you into the darkest depression, there's not really a middle road to what I feel." Which might explain a few of the earlier parts of how they met. Maybe. A bit. "But...that....switch, it takes all of it. You can't just lose part of it, you don't get to pick and choose... it takes the good right with the bad and it's nothing. It's this...heavy, empty apathy unlike anything I've ever felt. I could have killed my own sister and not felt a thing." And for a Mikaelson, it's always family above all, and even in what her limited knowledge of him may be, surely Jo's figured out that one.
"It's awful, and... I only ever did it before, when everything we were was still new and it seemed easier, at the time. Because, believe it or not, I did care once... about what that new life my wretched mother cast on us meant for other people. It was impossible to stop the hunger, so it seemed a better idea to stop caring about it. I never did it again after that. I never want to feel that kind of indifference again."
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Date: 2018-07-04 06:46 pm (UTC)It's easy enough to shift the dominoes. Easy enough to envision the barer truth those words contain without quite touching on them. Base tactic truths, without body counts. But how easy to rack and rack, and rerack a body count, if you did not care, is the whisper underneath. About the world, about the people. About his family, as he pointed out.
About yourself, that too quiet, and not comforting voice in the back of her head added.
The one not from her head. Not her head. Her head knew better. But her feet. But these days. Her-
That's the ledge. That's the line. Her toes aren't at it. She'd know better than that. She knows what that feeling feels like. At the line, that is actually five miles past it. There's a different man, with a different face, who burned the knowledge of what every inch and every breath of that into her heart. It's a vine crawling through it all. Listening. Taking the time to listen. Putting the pieces together.
Pretending it's not just because she may need it one day.
Her fingers shift, just barely, the faintest ripple of a tap.
Her pointer finger, middle finger, ring finger. Over the mark where her hand still rests.
"And if this isn't what stopped that, or helped that. What did?"
What stopped a vampire with a demon inside it.
How was it the multiverse made monsters of even monsters
(when it twinged slightly because the monster was the right word. But it wasn't, too)?
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Date: 2018-07-05 12:14 am (UTC)"There were attacks of all kinds in so many places... shootings, a chemical spill gone horribly awry, national monuments, a bomb in an orphanage..." It was the one that had stuck out the hardest, later, in the aftermath of everything, even though he hadn't been involved in the orphanage one.
He doesn't even know why he told her. That's not what she asked, but it's a shadow of before he got caught. Important to the story, maybe. "I'll never be able to make it to St. Louis without remembering the shooting at Union Station..." Not that St. Louis was high on his list of vacation spots or anything, or anything like reachable at all from here, but still.
He continues, his voice quiet, hesitant in the explanation of all this. He was a lot of things, murderer, manipulator, but this? Everything during those months? It wasn't him, and he'd hated every second of it. "My sister... tricked it, by making it think she had what it wanted. Was going to exchange that, and herself, for me. She exorcised it..." The words, final as they should sound, don't sound like the end to the story, though, even as he trails off, maybe losing himself to the moment in his memory.
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Date: 2018-07-05 12:46 am (UTC)His words start before the aim of her question, and the end before the aim of it, too, and if any of this were about the aim, it would stay there. There wouldn't be the lingering weight of wonder if his list is himself, or is Lawrence, that has never sounds like it was shipped shine much either.
But she knows sometimes telling a story, a story that isn't 'a story' because it's never less than deadly real, less than carved into your insides, doesn't have edges, or chapter blocks. It has oceans. It blurs, starting, ending, blending into other things even just to open the box. His voice is quiet, above the crown of her hair, quiet like you are when you go somewhere holy. Or somewhere damned.
It should be easy. To not hear it. To let it pass her by. A stone in a river of ice. She been through worse. She's done worse. Some people would rgue what's doing right now even is. Complicated, yes, but not complicit, and the people who don't understand how sex with a side of hate, and one of I-might-kill-you-you-might-try-to-kill-me-any-second-now really haven't lived, but not this.
This ache, that reminds her of piled bottles and guns and the silence of those rooms. That makes her wish the base was still hate. It might not be acceptance, but this feeling vined tight through her ribs, it's not hate either. It's something else, Jo knows that, before she shifts, as she does. Until her temple is more at the outside his shoulders and she can look up and see his face. Still listening. Still not looking away.
When did Jo Harvelle ever learn to look away, or walk away. Apparently, it wasn't going to be this round either.
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Date: 2018-07-05 01:44 am (UTC)"As it's last grand gesture, on the way out, it turned my emotions off... and it took awhile for them to get me back. Really back. But...after it was all said and done, I knew I couldn't ever let it happen again. So...I went to this bloke, this magic-user, who'd done this sort of thing more than enough by then to know what he was doing, to get a magically-applied tattoo." Since the normal methods wouldn't really work with his vampire healing. A traditional tattoo just wouldn't have lasted. "I s'pose, here, with all the power negation, it's just... delegated to just be ink on skin, though."
Which wasn't something he'd considered before now and he feels the growingly familiar too-quick pounding in his chest at the thought of that. The fear-response is, of course, futile and useless, because even if someone who could possess people was brought here, it would be something they'd lose once they came through the fountain. But that doesn't stop the possibility from still existing, somewhere, somehow. Because if their powers can be taken away, they could be given back, too.
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Date: 2018-07-05 03:33 am (UTC)She doesn't look away. Not even when he does react to it, and not when he takes pauses in it.
If he asked why, she couldn't say - wouldn't say, and whatever he assumes, she knows watching his lips move and the focus of his gaze move here and there, that for as much of it as he might get right in the guess, he'd get just as much wrong. But that has so much more to do with the person she hasn't wanted to be here. Refused to be here.
With the thing she knows second best in her blood, in her heart.
She doesn't want to think of it that way. She can't stop herself.
Even though she's locked away so tight since arriving.
Hunters didn't come to the Roadhouse, the first one but also any of them, just for a pint or a fifth of scotch. Nor to ply their lies. Or to shark a card table, or a pool game. Any bar had that. They came to be seen. Whether that was under a mountain of bravado, or to take over a dark corner, or a bar stool. The road was long. The road was dark. The road was cruel. It took jagged bites out of everything. Your life. Your people. Your mind. Your soul.
Your existence, that didn't exist, because you were a ghost passing through towns.
It wasn't to have someone thank you. Or warn you. Sometimes it was for help, but not always.
Like a poker marker. I was here. I did this. I went through this. I chose it. I choose it still. Anyway.
Jo didn't love the feeling of unease in her stomach that cocooned the ache in her chest. Vampire, who was one of the first in wherever his first home was, taken over by a demon from her world, sacking a world like it but not anymore either. Taking Kol's free will like it was a thing that could still be taken. His mind (; a vampire's). His body (; a vampire's). His will (; a vampire's). Sympathy is impossible not to feel, even at uncomfortable, and she doesn't have to like it, but she doesn't fight any part of it either.
Or the urge that makes her lift her hand and place it against his cheek studying his face, those brown eyes she's seen in so many different ways now, and as much as she wishes any part of it was lie, it'd be easier if it was, but it's not. She's certain it's not. And she doesn't know if that fact it's a not a lie, the fact it happened, the fact that she's listening, or the fact they're laying here, in the morning light, having this conversation at all, is the root of that feeling in her center.
More squares she can't take back.
Her thumb brushed his cheek after another small circuit of his face, and she considered the second question,
to the one still roaming at the edge of her mind too loudly. "How long before you came was all of that?"
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Date: 2018-07-06 03:12 am (UTC)So, the only thing that he gets, really, is the movement as she reaches to touch his cheek, thumb sliding against smooth skin, still debating her words before she speaks yet. "Oh... um..." he frowns slightly, thinking about it, and so many things between it, and the point he was stolen to this village--the attack on the complex, the Apocalypse coming to a head, the ritual Crowley performed to shove Michael and Lucifer in the Cage and the ones, including his sister, who got trapped as collateral, the troubles Rebekah had on getting out of the Cage, Henrik, and so many countless, and widely impacting other things. It's hard, thinking about everything that happened in that space of time. It's blurrier than he remembers his memories being, and he can only assume it's being cut off from his vampiric abilities that causes it. So much happened in such a quick succession of time.
"I guess...something like eight months?" Long enough most might assume that, while perhaps it would never go away entirely, because nothing like that ever can, not really, that he'd put it behind him. He was, after all, not repulsed, not running, and still very much firmly entangled with his own demon; it must not be still this close to the surface, this raw. "Nine, maybe." Almost a year, but in what time did he ever have a chance to truly deal with it? Or even have the time to think about it, between appearances of red-headed Angels and vampiric-nephews and family dramas galore, when did he have the space to consider anything at all?
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Date: 2018-07-06 11:47 pm (UTC)Jo didn't move, studying his face, as that face became introspective. The quirk of brows and tense of facial muscles toward that smile, as the mind behind it all whirled through who knows how many other things, and people, and details, and events, possibly light and possibly dark as the darkest fears -- and worst than fears, truths of exactly what she knows he is, his family is, his people -- searching for a number.
When it comes, Jo is surprised.
Hand still on his face, even though it makes her draw a slightly quicker breath in her nose. "Not even a year."
At not even a year from her worse no one this close knew either, had they. At not even a year, she was still thinking that everything could be just fine. He's not the same. He's not. Kol. A vampire. Thousands of years of embittered ups and downs she's only barely got the string to connect at all, over the references he drops here and there. But they are sometimes, too. That's the problem. Not even a year.
Not even long enough to pretend to look at it while pretending to not be looking away to survive it.
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Date: 2018-07-12 04:06 am (UTC)He moves his hand, as if to thread their fingers together, but instead he slides his fingers carefully across the palm of her hand, tracing nonsense patterns into her skin. An echo of a different time, with a different woman.
A frown traces the edges of his features. "I miss it... Lawrence was, for all it's faults and fallacies, the first place that felt like home in...a really long time."
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Date: 2018-07-15 12:44 am (UTC)Jo let him pull it away, looking down at their hands, and skin, the rumpled excuse for blankets that always had two or three on any bed any of them ended up in. Okay, but basic. Good, with two. Best with three. Even if the bed could be a furnace at that point. Which was great in cold snap, but a bitch any other time. Because that's absolutely what she was really thinking about.
As Kol talked about home, and Jo strove really hard not to think about that word (home), that idea (the first place that felt like home...in a really long time). She let her cheek on his shoulder, looking down, be too good of a wall, between him waching her face, and her own mind and her memories. She left it to Thorfinn to talk about Medietas, and the Roadhouse. Answered questions when they were asked, joked along if she had to.
If she had to.
She chooses something else. "I had one once."
There's a faint nod into his shoulder. "Anti-possession tattoo."
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Date: 2018-07-31 03:50 am (UTC)"But you don't anymore." It's a statement more than a question. Even if she hadn't said it quite that way, he'd seen more than enough of her to know the answer to it. But he didn't know the answer to the next one. "What happened?"
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Date: 2018-10-13 04:13 am (UTC)He lets her. Maybe they let each other.
Maybe this is part of that dance, same the reminders they might just wake up and have to kill each other the next morning, the next night, the first chance any of them get back who and what they really are, even as the cling with a biting, bleeding tenacity to the fact they still are those people and would take apart anyone else, bone by bone, for even implying they aren't.
(And, maybe, part of why Thorfinn says they wouldn't, even if it did happen.)
It's a dangerous thing. Hiding from one secret, by revealing another. Secret, or hell, or both.
She doesn't look up, watching his fingers against her skin. Looking at the movement of his hand as much as her own skin that they are touching. Her skin that doesn't hurt here. Doesn't heal here. Isn't screaming it's bloody murder because she's within forty or fifty feet of Kol, no less actually curved against him.
"It went away." That's too simple, and it'd be a sassy pop if her voice ever canted that way, or if she'd looked up at him, if she's pushed up and leaned over to rest on his chest and look at him teasingly tapped his breast bone or nose with her finger, and made it prim, like it was a game, a lark for early morning sunshine and something he had to earn at the edge of a flirting dare. But she didn't, doesn't, sees the option in her head and lets it wander by. Staring at his fingers and her hand. "The same as all my scars. And my pierced ears."
Funny how that last one clung like teeth sunk deep. She didn't even really like earrings, and yet it had stuck. Like a burr.
It was still better than being dead.
And it was probably fucked up as hell to miss it.
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Date: 2019-02-10 01:20 am (UTC)He wishes this wasn't all so... raw and real right now. He doesn't do this with people often, and it's always a harsh and sharp slice of discomfort between the ribs when it happens. Even when it's with people he trusts, in whatever varying degrees that word may exist with another person. But some conversations are necessary, no matter how hard they are to have.
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Date: 2019-02-10 08:30 pm (UTC)The thing is she remembers it in clips and flashes.
Sometimes in her dreams. If you can call anything that horrific a dream. Sometimes clips and flashes more since the time she held her hand out and let Merlin take it, let Merlin step all the way into it. And later, she understood better, what she hadn't then; into her. Let him chance the fact it might have been him, or be him one day. Bash through the walls that she agreed to. Anything to stay alive. Anything to finish the mission. The one she couldn't even remember agreeing to. The one she never finished, because she'd been before that bastard, and suddenly
flash-BANG
And she was in the Shattered Universe without any warning, and almost without any recollection at first.
It's hard to pick words. It's been dormant so long. It's a pride, a shame, a tool, a loss.
But what it all really comes down to is -- "I made a deal."
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Date: 2021-11-10 12:36 am (UTC)Deals were Crowley's thing. And, fuck he hates thinking of him. Of the hundreds of things that spiral out and down in waves and waterfalls on the heels of that thought. But once it starts, there's no stopping it. It trickles out and threatens to sink him before he can try to patch the hole it rips in the center of him.
"What kind of deal, exactly?" he can't help the curiosity of it. And almost as an afterthought, he adds, "with who?"