A Head's Up

Jack would never have admitted that she may have (or mave have not) been trembling. Jack wasn’t sure what had happened to her in the events of that night. So many months of silent struggle had passed without reducing her outwardly in the slightest, but tonight her reservations had slipped. Perhaps it was seeing someone else with unforgettable grief, or that that person was also someone who could so often double as the life of the party. Perhaps it was because she had come to admire Poe, as she rarely did with people. Or mayve it was just that odd notion that maybe she had found someone who might understand- but ever present was the idea that they still just wouldn’t.

Whatever it was, Jack was feeling odd and as Poe clambered to his feet, she realized she had no idea what to expect. In all honesty, Jack had sort of spouted out her little monologue before she could even begin to consider the aftermath, the harm or help, or even the cause. She had certainly not expected another embrace, but as it was offered, her only instinct was to readily accept it- again, something she would never have expected coming into this place.

His gentle criticism was unexpected too. He continued on and posed a question, to which Jack had a ready answer. “Because I instigated my problems,” she said, softly speaking against him, unwilling to move away in case she fell to pieces. “I am to blame. You aren’t, that wasn’t fair. I’d be so wrong to try to compare- I deserve what I got by taking a part in it.” Jack had not been angling for sympathy and it was with a twinge of hurt that she considered she might have evoked a feeling of obligatory sympathy in Poe. That had not been her intention.

He held her out to look at her and she allowed for a small smile as she was left with another question. “I think that was my version of exploding. Since explosions are my normal behaviour, I guess that was my own take on it.”

"Bullshit," Nemo proposed. He found it too difficult a thing to consider, that Jack had welcomed such suffering upon herself; that she'd had some conscious say in the matter. To accept such a reality would be similar to believing that Nemo had asked for the beatings that he had received; that he had simply chosen not to dial the phone number that would have served as his salvation, as apposed to having been paralyzed by his fear.

"You don't really believe all that, do you?" Nemo asked with a sense of determination, despite the weakness that was growing in his bones and had become evident by the manner in which he swayed on the spot. He was unbearably curious and the unfamiliar tugging sensation of sympathy had begun to agitate his inner organs. Thus, not in a tone that suited his words did he speak, but with lighthearted insistence, "Unless you signed your name on the line I won't believe it - and I want to see your signature. I won't believe you're as big and bad as you think you are unless you've got some proof." He shrugged his shoulders while the ghost of a smile, too faint to be real, brushed his lips.

Nemo swept from Jack's hand the bottle of alcohol that she'd acquired, for while very little remained, it would surely provide him with the momentary relief that he required. He gasped after draining the glass of its contents, and to the floor he threw the spent drink, "I'm tired. I haven't slept in days - and that hour I got before all this didn't count." He released Jack from his gentle grip and collapsed atop a near throw pillow. "You should make us a pot of coffee," Nemo concluded. "I still have about forty-some hours conscious until it's fatal, anyway," He added as an afterthought.

Nemo wouldn't be getting any sleep that evening.

Poe discounted it and she stared at him, trying to figure out why he was so adamant about defending her against situations and circumstances her knew nothing of. What did he know of her that could possibly convince him of her innocence? She stared up at Poe, this drunkard, this suicidal Seer, this stranger, this friend and questions arose. She knew why she enjoyed his friendship- she didn't have anyone else, and she liked the unconventional and the broken, and someone who could top her raucous behavior was someone she could be impressed with. But what could keep him at all interested in her?

He swayed slightly and her own hands briefly rose to his elbows to steady him, as though that could possibly derail him from these troubling thoughts he was expressing. Jack knew that circumstances had been against her, but she felt her fault in it as well. She watched her feet and responded, "I faulted out of ignorance, not intention. Still. I made the poltergeist and I failed to protect people. I consider that blame. But no-" she said, looking up. "I never agreed to any of it. You're right."

He took the drink from her and finished it, before saying he was tired. Jack wavered between taking his request for coffee and insisting he took to sleep. The latter presented a problem, though- if he asked her to leave, she had reason to fear for what he might do alone. She nodded and began looking for a coffee pot and went about the preparations of hurrying two mugs along.

She brought both mugs back to him, and handed him one before she sat down on a throw pillow of her own and said, "If you want to sleep, go ahead. I just don't really feel like going home. I can read, take a nap of my own, or rearrange everything- it all works for me." Her expression had yet to lighten, her heart was still doing weird convulsions from the release of secrets, and she still sounded solemn. But the briefest of glints in her eyes expressed that she was still able to crack a joke.

In the heat of battle (a battle of wits and the determination not to blink as they stared stubbornly at one another), it occurred to Nemo that McDonald would not be so easily convinced. He had been naive to assume that her view could be swayed with those mere words; that view which likely held together the protective walls that Jack had built around herself. Those which hid her from Nemo's view on most occasions and which he was forever peering through in an attempt to catch a glimpse of Jack in another form; she who smiled and laughed alongside him carelessly. And it was hypocritical of the lad to allow his aggravation towards Jack to flare briefly. Nemo had not yet been made a part of a like scenario in his lifetime; never before the present date had he found himself standing before someone, so utterly raw and emotionally exposed, all the while feeling the quite uncomfortable need to assist the other despite his own woes. He was a selfish man, after all - but he was not evil, and to look upon such a war worn being as Jack Dyllan with indifference would have made him so.

Or so he reassured himself when he was struck with the urge to vomit a second time.

"That wasn't what I was digging for, you know," Nemo called after Jack as she set to work, and further against his pillow he reclined. "The whole 'you're right' thing. I wasn't looking for an ego boost. At the risk of sounding completely perverted - which, I don't really mind, actually - you just... you don't feel evil. You know? No, I should probably add on to that..." He scratched roughly at his stubble peppered chin before proceeding. "People have these wave-type-things that they give off that I can read, as a Seer, when I make physical contact with them. And yours is obnoxious, overpowering and sometimes it nearly gives me a headache, but...

"Oh, fck it. I'm too tired for this. No more chick flick moments. You've put me through enough already today," Nemo abruptly concluded with a forced, yet humorous roll of his eyes.

He accepted with trembling fingers the mug that he had been offered, flattening the digits against the warm surface in an attempt to still them. The fear had not yet released him from its hold. "Rearrange what exactly? The pillows?" Nemo returned McDonald's favor of a joke in a similar manner. They looked shell-shocked, the pair of them, as though they had only just returned from the brink of death. "No, I can't sleep," He sighed, before admitting in a hush tone intended to be heard by his ears only, "Nightmares." He drank from his coffee. It was bitter and black and comforting. He closed his eyes, scrubbing his free, unsteady hand over his lids.

It was nice to be working on something. Jack was a do-er, a fixer, and it made her skin crawl to be doing something without doing something. Fighting Poe's beliefs about herself and her knowledge of herself had been an action without action, and it was scary. Jack was confident in her strength, her speed, her movement. She was not sure what she brought to the table in a battle of wits besides the refusal to lose. She did not think herself stupid, but she was afraid that if she stood still for too long, people would see through her. The scar on her head was almost completely hidden by her hair now, making it so no one seemed to know. If she stopped too long, people could see. And if she stayed under Poe's watchful gaze for too long, she was sure he would find something to be disappointed in.

But making the coffee was something that gave her purpose and use. He spoke to her and she responded, "I wasn't agreeing with you because you wanted me too. Do I seem like a people pleaser?" She looked over her shoulder with a little grin. Jack did not look the way people wanted her to, talk the way people wanted her to, and she definitely did not act the way people wished she would.

As the coffee warmed, she turned to watch him as he spoke. He told her she didn't feel evil, and that somehow he had felt her... waves? She shifted, trying not to look scared of the evidently intimate connection he as a Seer had connected to her. He began to describe hers and she tried not to drink in the proof that there was no evil, when he tired of the subject. She laughed, torn between a want to hear the full statement and relief to abandon the heavy subject, and settled with relief.

With the bringing of coffee, she brought more snide, teasing remarks from him. She raised an eyebrow. "You don't seem to realize that my rearranging includes Transfiguration. This tent would be full of piglets." She settled and drank the strong coffee. She was not typically a coffee person, preferring cola, but it was warm and reviving. He assured he couldn't sleep and she nodded. A small whisper from him caused her to look. If it was what she had thought he had said, she would have liked to reassure him he was not alone and she could be there. But she would hate to assume.

After a long moment of silence that wasn't necessarily uncomfortable, she said, "Well, I hate to make you work but you're up." She held out her wand hand and presented him with her palm. "What do you think? Am I going to die by dragon or by samurai?"

"No," Nemo replied as he leveled his eyes with The Savior's and he continued, "But you seem like the type of person who'd say what you needed to in order to shut me up, if it was what you wanted." He slipped a finger between his lips absentmindedly, tearing from its tip the stub of a nail that had begun to grow there in search of the stray marijuana that frequently existed beneath his cuticles. "But I've been wrong before." Nemo was well aware of the differences that existed between Jack and normalcy. She was one of his people; those who could not exist in the same dimension as the rest of the human population, despite and in spite of all expectations.

"Can we have turtles instead?" Nemo quietly asked of Jack with a halfhearted flop of his hand in her direction. "I don't really like piglets. Their noses creep me out. They're like ours, but without the tip. Like they were partially sawed off at birth, or something..." He mused aloud, for any lighthearted conversation was a blessing.

From Jack, Nemo received a knowing glance that he understood to be her response to his near-silent admission. Another mistake made on his part. He met her eyes with his own and offered her a nod that served as both confirmation and reassurance. I'll figure something out. A drug or a potion to get rid of them; to get some peace. I always do, eventually. Later, though. Later. I am so tired, Jack.

He did not speak up again until it was requested that he fulfill Jack's original purpose in visiting The Source. A demand to which he responded with a hesitant and guilty expression. "Well..." He began, before hiding in his mug. For he needn't search Jack's palm or a deck of tarot cards for his companion's future. Nay, he had already done a bit of snooping long before; a truth which Nemo was not entirely certain Jack would be able to accept without first pitching a fit.

Jack grinned a little at his guess, admitting her own flaws with some ride because they kept her alive for so long. "Ah, but I would never say something to shut someone up if it required me saying they were right. In my world, I am right more often than not. I prefer victory to silence." She knew it seemed like arrogant pride, but that very pride was what kept her from falling among the ranks of the unnoticed and the blatantly, repulsively normal and unknown.

He said he had been wrong before and, continuing with the vein of the joke she had introduced a bit before, she said, "I haven't." She had just turned off the coffee pot and she glanced over to smirk, an eyebrow raised to show she was pleased with how well that joke had gone.

He insisted on turtles and she shook her head. "No can do. Do you know how hard it is to catch a turtle? Not very. A piglet is a challenge. It took me three years of entering the pig-catching contest at my local carnival to ever catch one of those damn things." She adjusted herself on her pillow. "But yes. They are creatures sent to spur an appreciation of our own noses in the human race."

Again, she found herself speaking to Poe without speaking. His muttered comment had invoked some silence and their eyes met. Exhaustion filled his eyes and she nodded back, telling him she understood and not to worry, she would not press him. Continuing on, he seemed reluctant to read her palm. She re-stretched her hand and said, "I am the customer and I will receive service, Sir Poe."