Eᴠᴇʀʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴋᴇᴇᴘs ᴍᴇ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ ɪs ғᴀʟʟɪɴɢ ᴀᴘᴀʀᴛ

[stations]

Who: Jack Townsend & Others
When: Month of October
Where: Thorne, Horizon, Borrel
What: A monthly catch-all
Warnings: references to child abuse & neglect, ptsd, general trauma flashbacks

I ɢᴏᴛ ᴛʜɪs ᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ I ᴄᴏɴsɪᴅᴇʀ ᴍʏ ᴏɴʟʏ ᴀʀᴛ

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[stations]

( It wasn't supposed to go like this.

They're in a shitty little town a couple of hours from Greensburg, Louisiana. It's sometime in late August, 1997. It's humid, sticky-wet, the kind that makes your shirt cling to your back. Just after seven in the evening, and the sun has started to set. They're in a trailer park; in one trailer in particular, rundown, at the very edge of the lot. It feels like rot, and dread, and fear.

This wasn't the memory they were supposed to be pulling out.

There's a six year old boy standing in the room with River. Dark hair, bright green eyes — one of them is bruised, but they still shine with alertness, with an uncomfortable intensity as his attention locks onto her. There's something off about this kid. It's not just the cast on his left arm, or the fact that he's too skinny, or the fact that he's been staring silently for too many seconds. Something feels off about him on a deeper, more internal level. Maybe it's creepy, or unsettling, or maybe it isn't. Whatever's wrong with him, it's impossible, and it clings to his mind, to his cells, to his bones — even the broken ones.

They shouldn't be here; she shouldn't be here.

He can't think clearly. In this moment, he's what you might call lost in the sauce. He's six, and the memory is real, and he can hear the slamming of a truck door outside. The sound of a glass bottle slamming into the side of the trailer and shattering into pieces makes him flinch, and his free hand shoots out urgently to grab hers. Beyond the loose front door, a man is slurring his words and cursing loudly enough to hear through the walls. )

We have to go. I'll take you to the safe place.

forward dated to event times ☆

[thoughts]

[ it wasn't supposed to go like this.

the spell is new, one of those so-called "gifts" from the singularity that river only recently discovered. the two of them have delved into each other's minds before - or rather, they dreamt of doing so for hundreds of years in a lifetime that never was. it's strange and confusing, to feel like she knows jack, to feel echoes of a love she had for those that were like family to her once.

in reality, they haven't spent as much time together - but she knows him. she knows about his past. she knew what she was getting into when she asked if he might like to try this spell with her, and she remembers the explosive ways their magic collided in the non-existent past.

but it wasn't supposed to be like this. it was just supposed to be a flash, a brief glimpse into a moment from his life. river's magic isn't strong enough to recreate the entire memory and it certainly isn't meant to pull them into it. so when she looks around to find the messy interior of a tin can filled with despair, when the person before her is suddenly another jack that she does and does not know -

river's heart leaps into her throat as she begins to panic. glass shatters and she screams in surprise, wide-eyed and frantic as her head snaps to the door and the looming threat beyond it. jack's tiny little hand is what draws her back to him, this young boy covered in gruesome injuries and bright green eyes that reflect her own fear. ]

It's safe?

[ her voice sounds doubtful - there's nowhere that could be called safe for the boy in front of her - but she hears keys jingling and grips his hand tightly, a promise to follow and a refusal to let go. ]

Chūzǒu! Go!

👉😎👉

[stations]

( It's like dreaming of somebody, he thinks, the way they know each other. Meeting someone once, and then having dreams about the impression of them, watching fact meld with fiction to create a story that isn't. It leaves a lingering feeling of familiarity, of experience earned even though it wasn't. He knows about the idea of her, and she knows about the idea of him, and maybe they did the equivalent of reading each other's biographies on Wikipedia in a detailed but detached sense, or something.

To tell you the truth, he has a hard enough time navigating normal interpersonal relationships and understanding the dynamics at play. Figuring things out with her, with Cassian, with Yennefer, with people who mattered in a place that doesn't matter at all? That's so far out of his depth, it's almost comical.

Five-years-ago-Jack would have ignored it entirely, shut down, allowed himself to feel nothing in particular about it all, and then he would've shoved the loss into the Try And Forget portion of his mind with all those other Try And Forget memories he represses. But hey, look at all this character growth, look at all these attachments he's willingly letting himself explore and form.

And besides, he liked River before the universe played make-believe with their lives for a few centuries, so... Whatever. They'll figure it out. At least, that was the plan.

Shit went, how do you say, fucking awry.

Here's the thing: he knows on a deep level that there's supposed to be a girl. That there's a weird, impossible, not-quite-baseline-human girl that he's supposed to care about a lot, and that he's supposed to protect. That's a thing that is built into him so concretely, so foundational, even getting lost in a dream like this is not enough to make him forget it. That girl is not actually River, but right now, it is.

He pulls her by the hand, tugging her through narrow hallways that stretch disproportionately too long and too tall, expanded by a childish mind and the surrealism of dream logic. They're dingy, and orange, and they lean in claustrophobically over the pair as Jack guides through them, toward the half-open door of a bedroom. A bookshelf in the corner, a twin bed against the wall, a desk under the window — all of this is ignored in favor of the closet door that he pulls open. It's cramped, tiny, but just large enough to fit the two of them.

Clearly, his definition of safe is a little loose. )

[thoughts]

[ the hallways twist and turn as they run for what seems like an impossible amount of time for how small the trailer should be in logical proportions. it must be a dream - but they don't know it's a dream and it feels real. river can feel it vibrate in her chest when the angry bear that entered the trailer bellows jack's name, a nasty, snarling 'where the fuck are you, you little shit?' that makes her clutch the boy's hand a little tighter.

as they crawl into the tiny closet, river buries her free hand in her hair and clenches her eyes shut, trying to think past the rage and agony that heats the air and floods her mind.

what do they do? what's happening right now? is she really here? can that man see her? can he touch her? everything feels real. what's going to happen if he finds them? or when he finds them in this so-called "safe" place.

she doesn't know. she doesn't know what to do. she can't make herself be not afraid, that function was carved out of her along with any ability to block out the volatile emotions that swirl within this trailer. but there's the boy in front of her, battered and frail and off the way that jack is off, the way that strangeness clung to sabine and made the two of them so easy for river to be around, the only people that could ever truly understand the madness in her mind.

river knows jack. jack knows her in a way that no one else really can. he thinks he has to protect her but right now, he's just a kid and she knows that she needs to protect him too. trembling with fear and anxiety, she finally looks back up to him and squeezes his hand imploringly. ]

We have to go. Can't stay here, it's not - [ safe ] - not, it's n-no good. There has to be a way out.

[ she's never been in a trailer like this before but she's hoping beyond hope that the door covered in glass and beer isn't the only way into or out of the building. ]

[stations]

( Oh, no. Oh, no, oh no. This isn't good. She's scared — he understands, he's scared, too. He didn't want to come here at all, but he really doesn't want her to be here. He doesn't want her to see, but more importantly, he doesn't want Miller to get to her. He'll hurt her, because he hurts everyone all the time.

The stress winds him tighter, a childlike urgency gripping at his heart and his throat. It's the desperate need to solve a problem, but the absolute inability to conceptualize a real solution to it — something that will, unfortunately, become a recurring theme throughout his life. It gets easier — or at least he learns to disassociate enough not to feel the overwhelming anxiety of it after a certain point in his life.

But not yet, not now, and his small hand tightens around River's, squeezing back. )

I don't have anywhere else to go. I live here.

( It's a whisper, an apology. He could try to take her to his mom's, but mom locks the door and doesn't let him inside. Miller could find them much easier there. )

[thoughts]

[ this entire situation feels like a boiling pot of water or a kettle that's been left steaming for far longer than river has been here. there's smoke in the house and the fire is a living, breathing beast whose footsteps seem to echo as he comes stomping down the hall. she doesn't know anything about miller but she knows without knowing that he'll burn them both once he finds them.

yet here's jack, just a child covered in burn marks and scars, carrying some kind of misplaced guilt for them being here in the first place. her chest aches and she shakes her head. she doesn't know how to fix this either; the only thing she can think to do is pull him into a tight hug as she cries. ]

Not forever. You won't live here forever. We can go anywhere - anywhere is better. We'll go together -

[ but before she can spew any other platitudes that feel entirely useless, the sound of the bedroom door being kicked open makes her scream and clutch jack even closer, both out of terror and a fierce need to shield him from the oncoming flames. ]

[stations]

( This, too, is familiar. The impossible, special girl who winds her arms around him (he hasn't been touched very often in his life, at least not in a way that feels very good; even when he's older, gestures like this will continue to disarm him) and she says we can go anywhere, we'll go together. When he's out of hope, when he's desolate, when he's started to resign himself to living and dying every moment of his remaining days in a shithole, in Hell, in pain, losing himself — she whispers we can leave together, and for the first time in his life, he does not feel alone.

River is not Sabine. Sabine is not River. Their differences are vast and stark, but their few key similarities feel. They feel, on another level that he can't articulate. Indescribable, complicated, like... math on a wavelength humans weren't built to perceive, let alone understand, which is for some reason exactly the wavelength Jack has always been slightly tuned into.

In that moment, the sameness feels right, but the differences are just enough to keep things feeling real, and present, and clear.

Okay he means to say, okay, I'll go with you, if you promise you'll never leave me.

But he doesn't have time to actually say it. Miller is there like a hurricane, like a force of nature, and he doesn't even hesitate to backhand River across the face so hard it ought to be enough to send her sprawling.

And Jack's left standing there, momentarily stunned by the sight of it, slowly beginning to fill with a rage so powerful it will very soon circle right back around to calm again in all the worst ways.

The next thing he thinks, with a detached and slowly disassociating kind of confidence a child should not be capable of, is:

I'm going to kill him.

He's so consumed with the ringing truth of that statement, he doesn't even react when Miller seizes him with a bruising grip on his broken arm, forceful enough to leave him balancing on his toes. )

[thoughts]

[ he may never get a chance to say it aloud but river hears it all the same, tuned into the same strange wavelength that lets them hear things they shouldn't, see things that are and aren't; that makes it hard to grasp the world they live in when it looks so different from everyone else's.

river doesn't have a basis of comparison for what it feels like, to not be so alone in her world of monsters and nightmares that stalk her in the daylight. there's sabine and there's jack, impossible people that she only met by virtue of an impossible dream, here in this nexus of the multiverse where their paths have crossed by chance and chance alone.

jack thinks 'promise you'll never leave me' and a growing part of river doesn't want to, wants to stay in abraxas forever with these connections that are so important to her because she doesn't want to be alone anymore -

but then a large hand grabs her by the shoulder and separates them by force, and river can't help crying out when the knuckles of his other hand crack across her cheekbone. she falls back and away, leaving enough space for miller to move in and grab jack, yanking him out of the closet while shouting words that sound like an unintelligible warble above her head.

jack doesn't scream or otherwise react to being manhandled by his broken arm, and something about that is hauntingly familiar too, in the way they'd put them in a trance and beat them into submission so that they'd become perfect little soldiers that won't yield to something as insignificant as pain.

river feels that fight or die response come to life and doesn't let more than a few seconds of this pass before she leaps onto miller's back and grabs him in a firm chokehold. it startles him enough to release jack in favor of trying to tear her arms away from his throat, but she's stronger than her thin frame might suggest and she refuses to budge. his face is already turning an alarming shade of red when he tries a different tact, moving backward to slam river into the nearest wall.

she gasps in surprise, loosening her grip just enough for him to take in a big breath, but she still refuses to let go, intent on choking the fight out of him if not to put an end to his violent rampage altogether. ]

[stations]

( There are two variations on the way violence manifests in Jack. The first, the most common, the normal version is what he calls Hyper-Defense Mode. This is Jack in a crisis, while still very much grounded within himself. This is the version of Jack that can snatch up a baseball bat, swallow a panic attack, and act on behalf of others while trying not to lose his entire shit.

That's not the version Jack goes into now.

The second is... worse. The second is one his mind fully withheld from him for over twenty years; the second is a version that represses memories and then rewrites them, so that he doesn't have to live with the things he does at these times. Maybe River can feel it — the way Jack switches off, and something else takes over. Disassociated, detached, mechanical. No emotion, no empathy, no personality. He blacks out, and becomes an instrument of violence.

If the first version is a baseball bat, the second is a box cutter. That's what he sees now, branded with his Arcana sign, jutting out of Miller's coat pocket. Easy to snatch up without his even noticing.

Jack's eyes are empty as he flicks the blade out and extends it beyond all practical limits for its intended purpose. They are flat as he drives the blade into the center of his father's chest. There is no flicker in the green of them as he drags the blade upward, hot blood cascading over his fingers, spraying himself in the face, impasive to the howling of Miller as he loosens his hold on River. Nary a single scrap of emotion as his howling turns to gurgling, which gets quieter and quieter even as Jack continues to drive the blade up his sternum.

The lights are on, but nobody is home. )