[ open ] i just want a good night

[princessvegas]

Who: Julie Lawry
When: early July-ish
Where: Horizon, Cadens
What: resurrection. and also croissants.
Warnings: language, others marked

Comments

[itookashot]

Don't worry, it's just us.

[ Kaz has his own business to do, especially after the trauma of the most recent attack, and Jesper has always been good at giving people what they need, whether that's space or the lack of it. He gestures for her to come in and she'll see the apartment that she used to be in has changed to suit the people currently living there. Maps, weapons, fabric that he's working on all over the place, but overall it's clean and neat. Jesper used to be the housecleaner at the farm after his mother died, he is a very tidy person.

It's a credit to his desire to give people their space that he hasn't said anything to Julie so far. She looks like she's on her way to being a living corpse. She's lacking all the qualities that made her so alive to him, and he thinks it's time for an intervention of a kind. Nothing too strong, that's not his way, but something needs to be done. ]

So I'm going to talk for a second, and you're going to listen.

[ He gestures for her to take a seat if she'd like. She sure looks like she might need one. He crosses his arms over his chest, his guns hung up nearby since he hasn't put them on his hipbones yet.]

My mother was a special kind of person. She had a powerful presence. She was beautiful and funny and sharp, and I watched her die, which wasn't from something quick and kind, she wasted away from poison in her blood, it was slow and it was terrible. It was her choice, to take that poison from someone else and put it inside of her, and a part of me never forgave her for it.

[ A few years ago, Jesper couldn't even talk about his mother. It was too painful and he hadn't dealt with any of his feelings about it. That's changed. He comes closer to her, reaching to touch her hair if she'll let him.]

You, Julie Lawry, are a special kind of person. You are powerful and beautiful and funny and sharp, and I love you with all my heart, you are my family. I'm not watching you waste away, so you're going to talk to me and we're going to figure something out together.

[princessvegas]

[ For a moment, she is distracted as they enter the apartment. There's always something disconcerting about entering a place that feels familiar but then immediately proves not to be — the doorway still feels like her own, but when it opens, there's no burbling fountain of fish and water plants in the living room. No hay-scented aviary in the corner with bunnies perched on branches. No pretty knick-knacks shimmering on the windowsill.

She blinks and follows his gesture to sit on the sofa, still sort of looking around curiously. Jesper speaks and she does listen, her brows knit at first, then her whole face slowly growing sour. There is no one who knows death and suffering to the degree that Julie does, and she does not need a lecture about how she's handling her pain the wrong way.

Julie's poison was forced into her long before she ever met Jesper.

But the mask clicks back into place, her face quickly returning to a state of neutrality. If not for the particular topic at hand, she could just as easily plaster a wide smile on. She forces herself not to jerk away from his hand. ]

I'm fine, Jesper. [ Her voice is even, measured. ] I'm not sick. I'm not gonna die. I'm fine.

[ When she sets her small purse to one side, there is a clatter inside it, the sound of many pieces of metal clunking into each other. Tins, full of more croissants. She swipes a strand of hair behind her ear. ] Trust me, slow and terrible is better than fast and terrible. With slow, at least there's good days.

[itookashot]

Anyone with a set of eyes who is currently paying attention can see you're not fine.

[ Jesper doesn't like when Julie puts on any kind of masks with him. From the start he's always felt like they were two of a kind. She's been honest with him through the worst of times, and he's been the friend she could turn to and talk about just about anything. He has an ear for her, time for her. He's been busier in recent times due to his business and now having to turn it around entirely due to the economy, but his devotion to her doesn't end. ]

Why are you pretending with me? I get it with other people, but I'm not other people.

[ Jesper doesn't know if she's doing this with Nadine too, or the others that she's close to. Surely it's clear as day that something is going on with her, but he suspects they've either talked about it, or let it continue so as not to bother her going through whatever she is. He's just not willing to stand by and watch her wither away. She's not his mother but she is his family, and that's a line in the sand he won't be moving.

The problem is he doesn't know where it's coming from. The Singularity? She's always had a close relationship with it, maybe it's been messing with her. Coming back from godhood? It fucked up a lot of people, but not him, who frankly loved that future and is more than happy to continue down the path, as Kaz also agrees with. But she's not him, maybe it was a bad experience. Finding out the why has to be the next step. ]

Julie, come on, talk to me. What the hell is going on?

[princessvegas]

[ The mask is often not intentional; Julie has been masking for so long, for so many different people, in so many different ways, that she tends to wear them by default. To protect herself, to provide for herself. To do what she needs in order to survive.

Being this broken is not survival, and she knows it. So when she can't retreat, hide away like a fox in its den, then all she knows how to do is conceal the weakness.

Her posture is stiff, body coiled as if she is just waiting for his attention to drift long enough that she can bolt away, back to the silence of the hideaway she's sought refuge in (her own closet). Quiet, dark, alone. No one to see her cracks, no voices to try and filter over the horrible buzzing din between her ears.

No one to drive home the fact that she is apparently the only one who is hauling this weight around, as if they don't care that everything they had was stolen from them. Don't they understand that once it's stolen, there's no getting it back? There is only pain and suffering to be had... if there's anything to be had at all.

For a while, Julie had been able to relax in Abraxas. Now she can only wait on tenterhooks for this life to be yanked out from under her too. To be sent back into oblivion. ]

Nothing. [ The steel and distance in her gaze says different, but she keeps speaking. Her voice is so measured that it sounds almost like a recording. ] I'm fine. Everything's fine. Why wouldn't it be fine? Everyone's fine. Everything is fine. I don't have a reason to not be fine. Everything is fine.

[ Her back and shoulders ache from the tension she's holding. Internally, she winces because she always repeats herself when she's not okay, as if saying the opposite enough will make it come true.

She changes tactics abruptly, the only thing she can think to do. ] Do you want some croissants? Have some croissants.

[itookashot]

[ Jesper observes her closely and it's clear how closed off she is, how she want to run and avoid him and this conversation. And he's tried now to get her to talk, he's provided her with a safe space that he thinks has been communicated, but he can't force her mouth open and to move with what's on her mind. Every time she says fine it makes him cringe internally because it could not be less true, and he knows it, but Jesper can't fix what someone won't share with him.

So he sighs and takes a croissant. He thought maybe showing up to deliver them meant she was getting out and about, but it's clear she's locked down tight. Hopefully Nadine has better luck than he does. He'll probably check in with her after this. ]

Thanks for the croissants. People like them at the inn. I'm not forcing you to stay, Julie. If you change your mind about talking, I'm around.

[princessvegas]

[ There's a brief instant where her eyes flash hurt. It's not even a second, but the feeling hits hard — does everyone plan to simply disregard her existence unless she's willing to bare the deepest pits of her soul on demand? These are things she can't put into words even inside her own head; how could she possibly hope to make anyone else understand?

Maybe there's nothing left to be except the mask, she thinks. No one seems to like the Julie that's behind it. She's too broken, too fragile. Not strong enough to just pull herself up by her fucking bootstraps when she's dragged from paradise to go back to carrying all the weight she's been pretending she could handle.

People want the giggles and the smiles and the sparkles, the butterflies and bubblegum sweetness. Parties and fun and sex and drugs and glitter, that's all they care for. A cheerleader in the background for their own drama. Not someone with her own past, her own psyche shattered like glass. As long as she keeps the shards in a neat, hidden pile, then everything's hunky-dory, isn't it?

She doesn't know what to say. She feels unwelcome in a place she hadn't asked to be in the first place, in a conversation that she wasn't given much room to ease into. Julie is rarely at a loss for words, but she stands in silence, walking toward the door that still feels like her own. Her hand hovers at the knob, her voice quiet and her face not turned toward him. ]

You can't get it back, you know. What they take from you is always gone forever.

[itookashot]

[ Jesper feels like he's done his best. If she's not ready to talk he respects that, he tried to force her in this conversation and it was clearly the wrong approach. He'll learn from it and let her come when she's ready, not push the buttons that clearly triggered her. He expressed a very personal story about his mother and hopefully she'll understand what that all meant to him later. He did pull her up here and make her listen to him, which wasn't as kind as he thought it was. Respecting her space is the right thing.

Jesper's not always the best at serious stuff. He's the good time boy himself, laughing and pretending everything is always great. It means when things get serious, it's out of his comfort zone. They'll find their way back, he's confident of that. Their relationship has been rock solid for over two years.

She says something and he perks up. It's only a little but it's an attempt. ]

Who? The gods?

[princessvegas]

[ Her hand rests on the knob, her thumb running over the smooth brass. When she lived here, she'd used magic to turn the knobs into intricate, decorative pieces; when she left, she set them back as they'd been, so as not to cause any trouble for Mag (and also because Julie comes from a world where security deposits are a thing, so it's just habit).

There's an unstable quiver across her entire frame, but especially in her wrist and hand. The breath she takes is shaky, her ribs aching. In her head, she can barely hear Jesper over the noise she doesn't know how to seal back into its box. ]

All of 'em. [ The gods. God. The military. The government. The Abraxans. Flagg. ] They take everything from you, good or bad. And you can never have it back.

[ Her godhood. What makes her special. Her death. New Vegas. Eight billion lives. Everyone she ever knew or loved. It's all gone, never hers to keep.

She doesn't know why she keeps thinking things will be different next time. ]

You and everyone else think y'all can just reset and it'll be fine. But it won't.

[itookashot]

[ Jesper walks over to her and leans against the door frame next to her. Not in the way if she ends up turning the knob and leaving, but he's at least visible to her, a presence that she can look at if she wants. He wants her to have the freedom to decide what she wants to do here, while still knowing he's nearby. It's a fine line to walk, he knows that. ]

They haven't taken everything from us, Julie. Because you and me, we're still right here. If I end up the last Summoned, sitting in this empty inn, I'll be sad, but no one can take any of you away from me. Not from my heart.

[ The only thing that can take them away from him is sending him home, but that's out of his hands, and it seems like he won't even know it if he does. Jesper doesn't like that he won't know what's happened here, the people he's loved, but it also means he won't realize the loss at the same time. He doesn't linger too long on all the ways this is unfair or miserable because it's not in his nature. Life's hard but it's beautiful too, from his point of view. ]

There's plenty here that hasn't been taken. There are people who love you who are still here with you now. I don't reset, love, I adapt.

[princessvegas]

[ Julie can see Jesper in her peripheral vision, but she doesn't turn her head to look at him. She fears that, if she does, she won't be able to fight her instinct to put the front back up, or else to run and hide. It feels too vulnerable, too dangerous.

And she also fears that if she does meet his eye and manage to conquer the urge to shield herself, she will be putting a crack in a dam that is holding back a tidal wave of things she cannot afford to let loose. She thinks she'll drown if it breaks. ]

Jesper, you don't know what it is to be the last one. [ She doesn't say it with any vitriol — if anything, saying it seems to pain her, with her eyes squeezing tightly shut for a second. Her knuckles are white around the doorknob as she takes a shuddering breath. ] They take everything. Even when you die, they take that from you too, so you can never rest. You tell yourself it was 'cause you're special, 'cause it was meant to be, but then they snatch that from you too. First your life, then your death, then the only thing that ever made you feel...

[ Something crumbles. Her head falls forward, pressed to the door, and her eyes close again. Tears spill over the line of her lashes, down her cheeks. There's a moment where she struggles to breathe, her nose growing stuffy and choked when she tries to inhale.

Her voice comes out as nothing more than a quavering whisper. ] I was happy. I was happy there. I didn't... it was all gone, it didn't hurt anymore.

[itookashot]

I don't, you're right. I'm listening, I'm right here.

[ Jesper gently reaches out to put a hand on her back. He lets her talk but also doesn't want her to feel alone so some kind of contact feels the right thing to do. He's careful about it though, like he's afraid one wrong move will make her bolt. She's already at the door but he's got her here for now. He wants to hold her while she cries, it hurts him not to be able to fold her into his arms and make it all go away. Tears spring into his own eyes in empathy. Julie's been by his side since he first got here, he's been able to take care of her before. ]

I was happy too. Coming back to reality has been fucking terrible.

[ Maybe that's something that will help her, that he's unhappy too. That he acknowledges that coming back to humanity and all the stressful fucked up aspects of it has not been easy or wonderful or comfortable. Jesper's good at hiding it just as she usually is, behind his smiles and his laughter, but he was a god of love. All he felt was good and none of his foibles or struggles existed. No addiction, no trauma, no fear. ]

Please let me hug you, Julie. I'm not going to force you but all you have to do is turn to me and I'll take you into my arms and I won't make everything all better, I can't do that, but I can be your Jesper.

[princessvegas]

[ She flinches involuntarily when he touches her, although it's more because she has her eyes closed than because she's shying away. The knobs of her vertebrae jut sharply up into her skin, bracketed by the palpable lines of her shoulder blades; her frame shakes in time with her labored breaths. She doesn't jerk away after the initial start.

Julie can't bring herself to start elucidating on what being the last one left is really like. It's almost impossible to impart the desperation, the fear, the feeling of slowly losing your sanity while being all too aware that you're losing it. A little over a month — such a tiny fraction of her life, yet she's still trying to outrun the effects years later. The pain, the anger. Loneliness so deep that it still aches in her bones at this very moment.

She hadn't remembered any of it. Not the plague, not the bodies, not the isolation or the walk. Her parents no longer laid dead in their bed, swollen with mucus and rotting in the summer heat while she sobbed on the kitchen floor because they were too heavy for her to drag to the grave she'd dug in the yard. Flagg no longer lurked in shadows and mirrors and the corners of her eyes, forever threatening to steal her back again, to slither back into her head. She didn't wake with the burn of static and scent of ether on her skin.

There had only been Abraxas.

For a moment, her lips move like she has something to say, but nothing comes out except a panted squeak, obviously unintentionally. It's another long beat of struggled breathing before she can make her body move at all, and when she does, it's more of a drag of her head along the wall, until she has to turn with the curve of her own neck. She doesn't look up at him — she doesn't even open her eyes — and when she collapses face-first into Jesper's chest with a muffled sob, it's almost as if her body has simply given out on her, leaving her boneless. ]

[itookashot]

[ Jesper has heard from Nadine and Julie the realities of what they went through back home and how horrible it was, but that doesn't mean he can understand the details. His world was very alive. He had his struggles and dangers and fears, but there was nothing gruesome like what she's described. Ketterdam is filled with energy and packed full of people, he's never experienced loss to that extent.

He is ready and he catches her when she collapses onto him. Jesper is strong and she is a small woman at the end of the day, so he swoops her up into his arms without any trouble. He carries her back into the room and onto the living room couch where he sits and holds her closely to his chest. She can probably hear his heart beating with how tight he has her against him and he caresses fingers in her hair. ]

I love you, Julie. Just stay with me a little while, okay? You can cry or let me hold you, and I can't fix all of your pain, but I can give you someone to hold onto for a little while.

[princessvegas]

[ While Julie can't attest to how Nadine tells it, she personally has a habit of glossing over many of the worst elements of Captain Trips and the aftermath. It's partially to protect her own psyche from the trauma rearing its head, but she has also found that almost no one can really wrap their heads around her specific apocalypse. Nearly eight billion lives snuffed out in horrific suffering, all over within weeks. How the world went from light to dark almost instantaneously — all methods of contact were cut off, either willfully by the government or else practically due to the lack of people left to carry messages. The power went out in the early phases of the plague; all of the lights extinguished when the sun set, unimaginable darkness because she was the only one left to even try and light a fire.

It was the most stars she'd ever seen in the sky before.

There's no resistance when he lifts her, moves her, settles her. She does not have the energy or the willpower to do anything more than curl in on herself. Her body doesn't feel like her own, doesn't feel attached to her brain. Alien. She can barely even tell he's stroking her hair, feeling the movement more than the touch.

Julie has never been much of a crier. Crying is a tool more than anything to her. It manipulates people, helps her get what she wants. She occasionally is furious to the point of a tear, but she often blinks them away without issue. And even when she does cry, she specifically pushes herself to "cry pretty" — tears cutting smooth through her makeup, small sniffles, nothing louder than a gasp. Like a Hollywood starlet in a movie. She has practiced in a mirror before. When she does need to blubber, she does so in rooms spelled to be soundproof, doors not just locked but warded on to it. She doesn't wail in front of others.

She certainly does not bawl in front of them, howling and coughing. Only once in has she done so, in front of Geralt, and it was technically some sort of dream, so it's easy enough to rationalize away as not counting.

But now she weeps into Jesper's shirt, choking and gasping for air, face hot and wet. Her blood roars in her own ears, and the blob's bruit in her mind, deafening her. At a certain point, her cries become raspy from the dryness of her throat and mouth; her chest squeezes so tightly that she thinks she might die.

When she finally quiets, reduced to nothing but hiccups that feel sharp in her lungs, it is out of exhaustion. Her head feels floaty, light. Every muscle cramps and throbs and shudders. Her face is turned only enough to breathe, accompanied by deep sniffles. ]

If we can wrap on this, he'll just hold her as long as she needs!

[itookashot]

We'll get through this, love. We will.

[ Jesper holds her through her tears and pets her hair as soothingly as he can. Sometimes people just need a good cry. He's been there himself, for one reason or another, and he knows the value in letting it out rather than bottling it up. As an expert at bottling up emotions, he knows the value. She's gone through a lot but at least she knows she can come here and get it out of her system, he'll be that for her as long as she needs it.

The point is that she's not as alone as she fears, it isn't like it was back in her world. They might not be a perfect group of people, all with their own faults, but they do have each other, and that's how he looks at it. He'll hold her as long as it feels right and she can stay in the attic like she used to live in. Kaz isn't around and won't be for awhile. No one will interrupt them until she's ready. ]

I love you.[ He says again, hoping she believes him, and stays with her. ]