Jamie Young (
land_lover) wrote in
shatterverse2008-07-16 02:14 pm
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It starts the usual way: A flash, a bang, a person standing, disoriented, near a long stretch of deserted road.
But this man falls to his knees-
(thousands of voices; screaming, crying in his head; anger and despair and everything in between, and he can’t fight, can’t ignore, can’t resist them; stop, stop, Goddess why won’t it STOP)
-and clutches his head, letting loose an agonized shout of surprise.
Then it's over, and it's like it never was.
Jamie lowers his hands, noticing in a detached manner that short strands of blond hair come away in his fingers, and sits back on his haunches, blinking. The last thing he remembers is laughing at a joke -- a bad one, with three tavern wenches and a statue -- and climbing a ladder to get at the apples high in an Olau tree. His shirt still smells like the orchard: sun and fruit and green, growing things. Had he fallen? Is this a fevered hallucination brought on by his broken body and healing magic gone wrong? Grace never could get the hang of it. She’s probably given him an extra thumb.
No. All’s right with that.
Digging his fingers into the earth beside the road, he watches it sift back to the ground. It's chunky and rough, but not dry. Even so, it's clearly not the smooth, dark soil of Olau. Jamie sniffs his hand, frowns and pulls himself to his feet. The road crests a hill to the west. Maybe there's something on the other side to explain what's happened; maybe not. Nothing to do, he supposes, but to start walking.
He'll get back to the pain (voices) in his head later. When the mood strikes.
But this man falls to his knees-
(thousands of voices; screaming, crying in his head; anger and despair and everything in between, and he can’t fight, can’t ignore, can’t resist them; stop, stop, Goddess why won’t it STOP)
-and clutches his head, letting loose an agonized shout of surprise.
Then it's over, and it's like it never was.
Jamie lowers his hands, noticing in a detached manner that short strands of blond hair come away in his fingers, and sits back on his haunches, blinking. The last thing he remembers is laughing at a joke -- a bad one, with three tavern wenches and a statue -- and climbing a ladder to get at the apples high in an Olau tree. His shirt still smells like the orchard: sun and fruit and green, growing things. Had he fallen? Is this a fevered hallucination brought on by his broken body and healing magic gone wrong? Grace never could get the hang of it. She’s probably given him an extra thumb.
No. All’s right with that.
Digging his fingers into the earth beside the road, he watches it sift back to the ground. It's chunky and rough, but not dry. Even so, it's clearly not the smooth, dark soil of Olau. Jamie sniffs his hand, frowns and pulls himself to his feet. The road crests a hill to the west. Maybe there's something on the other side to explain what's happened; maybe not. Nothing to do, he supposes, but to start walking.
He'll get back to the pain (voices) in his head later. When the mood strikes.
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Behind the visor, blue eyes grow large as they regain focus and spot the solitary man ahead.
"What the f—"
She doesn't have time to wonder where the hell he came from. He's walking in the middle of the right lane. Her lane! Instinctively, she sounds the horn and swerves desperately to try and avoid him. Tires screech, bleeding long streaks of rubber onto the tarmac, and the bike and its rider skid across the road towards the opposite shoulder.
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He's devoting all of his thought power to the strange substance just barely crunching every time he brings his foot down, when a piercing noise interrupts and a blur of black moving faster than one of his mother's war horses goes barreling by on its side, sliding into a ditch.
An acrid odor wafts past his nostrils, making him frown as he sniffs.
There'd been a figure wrapped around something loud and powerful lost in all that black, he thinks. And a shout. Jamie crosses the road without looking in either direction and peers into the ditch. Man-made, most likely, as well as muddy, though a few tenacious weeds cling to the side. Nature always finds a way back in, if left to its own devices.
"Hello?" Jamie calls, crouching down to see under the dissipating smoke.
Ah. It's a female.
Make that a woman.
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A few paces into her rampage she tears off her helmet and hurls it into the grass, revealing a furious expression and a shock of golden blonde hair. Even in anger, her features are dangerously attractive, like a pretty-colored cocktail that contains lethal amounts of alcohol. You know it's going to knock you on your ass, but you drink it anyway, because it looks good and tastes even better.
"Are you fucking insane?" the woman yells. "Or just retarded?"
She walks right up to him, until their chests are actually touching, and sets the full force of her glare on him.
"I could have been killed, asshole!"
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Unfortunately for her, the glare doesn't intimidate him one bit. The smirk stays, just curving his full mouth, and eyes that are more green than blue today look down into hers from his higher vantage point.
Jamie leans in, watching. "But you weren't," he points out. His voice is clear and deep, a note of relaxed humor suggesting he finds the situation funny. "I'm glad." Beat. "Perhaps you can tell me what material makes up the road?"
Accusations of insanity are an old hat in his family, anyway.
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"Are you fucking kidding me?"
No longer completely blinded by fury, she actually absorbs the guy's face and his somewhat out-of-place rustic garb. And that's when it hits her.
"...Jamie? Jamie Young?"
Still staring, she takes a step backwards to get a better perspective.
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He remembers being dragged into the trees. Everything that happened after is a blur. What in Mithros' name had saved him?
Them?
And who undressed him?!
"Eleanor?" he tests his voice and finds it hoarse.
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"I'm here," she replies from close by, sounding reassuringly calm.
"Welcome back, AJ."
She's lounging next to him in a black t-shirt and functional boy-short style underwear, on top of the covers of a comfortable Queen sized bed. There's considerable bandaging around one thigh, and there are numerous band-aids patching her arms and legs. Several blotches of heavily-purpled skin and some nasty-looking abrasions complete the catalog of injuries about her person.
For what it's worth though, her head and face are unscathed, and she doesn't seem to be in any pain.
"That was some swoon," she continues, smirking now. "I know I'm hot, but... damn."
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"I did not swoon," he tells her emphatically. Then, regarding her injuries, he frowns. Gruffly: "Are you all right?"
He feels silly piled beneath the covers while she's on top, but if by some chance she wasn't the person who undressed him, he doesn't relish the thought of flashing his loincloth. Because Jamie knows about boxers; Adam had always had his made by a trustworthy seamstress (Eleni). Jamie had opted to stay native long ago.
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"I've been better. Nothing majorly wrong though. Just cuts and bruises and a hole in my leg. You beat me by a few broken bones."
She brings a lazy smile to bear on him.
"I'm guessing you don't feel too great."
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Pushing himself up enough to meet her eyes, he gives her a lopsided grin.
"Where are we? I doubt you could have had this many bandages in your motorbike."
Not without magic.
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Unsettling.
Of course, the way Eleanor's hands had been treating his person under the table hadn't helped with his ability to relax.
This is all alien to Jamie, and now he's standing outside on the pretense of helping Eleanor retrieve her belongings from her bike, but really he just wanted to breathe and have a quiet word.
"They're strange," he decides.
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She hadn't gleaned much from the conversation either, but she'd derived a lot of satisfaction out of the teasing and tormenting part. Especially when Jamie's knee had jerked up so hard that it banged the underside of the table. His excuse was impressively credible under the circumstances; he's an excellent bullshitter.
"At least we know what happened to this world now?"
That much Ethan had been fairly straight about.
Using the light of a paraffin lamp to see by, Eleanor starts to burden Jamie with various items from her panniers. There's a modest selection of clothes—nothing too racy—a large travel pouch containing toiletries and cosmetics, a box of .45 shells, a gun cleaning kit, a headlamp, and (somewhat at odds with the rest of the kit) a moth-eaten but ferocious-looking teddy bear.
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He's quiet right up until she hands him the stuffed, not entirely cuddly-looking bear.
"Huh," he says, biting back a grin, "you know you can hold on to me during the night if you get scared. No need to bring him."
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"What's that you say, Bear?"
She picks the toy up and holds its face close to her ear.
"Jamie's an ass-hole? Well, yeah. But he's kinda cute too. And his heart's in the right place. We're gonna keep him for now."
Rolling her eyes and smirking, she flips the bear over and tears open a hidden Velcro strip on his back. From amongst the stuffing she withdraws a few baggies that each contain a small amount of brownish vegetation.
"I wouldn't be dissing him if I were you. His insides are gonna have big barter value in this fucked up world." She shakes one of the baggies illustratively. "Hashish, or cannabis, more commonly known as marijuana. It's an illegal but popular recreational drug with no particularly harmful side-effects. When smoked or eaten it makes most users happy and relaxed."
After all these years Eleanor still has a soft spot for Bear, but who would ever suspect it when his purpose is primarily drug muling.
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"Happy and relaxed? Why ever would encouraging that be illegal," he smirks. "Why don't we suggest to Ethan that he try it?"
Happy and relaxed people are more talkative.
After carefully depositing his armful of stuff -- which he intends to carry in for her, later -- on a bench, Jamie gives Eleanor a meaningful look and swings himself around one of the poles holding the tin roof over the truck, the bike and some other large vehicle under a tarp. Along the wall of the house, he sees a large metal box, full of thin, impractical looking drawers, and decides to investigate. It's nothing but a glorified toolbox, but it's all shiny and new to Jamie. He rifles through wrenches and screwdrivers and some cylindrical toy he flips to the side, until one of the drawers jams. Looking around, he gives it a swift, surreptitious yank.
Plastic cards fly through the air and fall to litter the ground at their feet.
"Mithros," Jamie swears quietly, bending on one knee to gather them up.
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She's lying on her stomach with Jamie's arm draped across the small of her back. He still appears to be dead to the world, and somehow, Bear gravitated over to him again over the course of the night. Much to Eleanor's chagrin, the toy is now in the crook of his other elbow.
She petulantly yanks it back, not caring if the act wakes her bed-mate. It doesn't seem to though. Thus, once Bear has been safely removed to the nightstand, Eleanor cozies up to Jamie again and starts to bring him around in a far gentler way. Kisses are applied to his forehead and neck, while hands voyage caressingly over his arms and well-toned torso.
"AJ," she whispers. "EyyyJayyy..."
Gradually, her hands move in a more southerly direction.
"It's time for being awake."
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And so it's with some surprise that he comes fully awake with Eleanor almost under him and his hand covering her hip. Blinking slowly, he realizes it's her scent he's been chasing on the edges of awareness, and the act of rolling over to be nearer that actually jolted him out of his pleasurable fancy. He usually behaves with more finesse when there's a woman in his bed. Groping Eleanor like an animal enslaved by his instincts hadn't been part of his plan.
Not that he had a plan. Of course not. What a ridiculous notion.
It's disconcerting to imagine his own body having a laugh at his expense. Jamie shakes the last of the sleep-induced fog from his head and peers down at Eleanor.
"G'morning."
A slow, thoroughly satisfied smile crosses his face. Thwarted plans of suave seductions or not, this is a most agreeable way to awaken.
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She's already a little flushed, and she's definitely happy with the way things are progressing. Jamie's subconscious has been doing a very passable job of returning her affections. She doesn't mind primal in the slightest.
"How are you feeling today?"
From her perspective, he's feeling pretty damn good.
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"But we've only just met," he murmurs, tone thoroughly wicked.
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"Feels like we've know each other all our lives though," she counters.
There's some truth in that as far as she's concerned. And to be fair, their chemistry is undeniable. Without offering anything further, she turns her head and hungrily presses her lips onto his. He was lucky to get that much justification out of her really.
Meanwhile, her hands are trying in vain to loosen his loincloth. It's not as simple as it looks.
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They set out in a westerly direction along Highway 66, aiming for I-80. If that proves as impassable as I-29, Highway 6 runs approximately parallel to it just a mile further on. It's a solid plan, and everything is going swimmingly until Eleanor notes that they are getting worryingly low on gas about seventeen miles later.
Daylight is also fading by this point. So, to hopefully kill two birds with one stone, Eleanor detours them into the Louisville State Recreation Area. As she predicted, they find several abandoned RV's there. Gas siphoning resources and shelter, all in one. Having parked next to the newest-looking model, she removes her helmet and shakes out her hair in Hollywood-esque fashion.
"This should do."
The RV is sited near the shore of a glistening sandpit lake. The last rays of sun wallow on its placid surface, making for a quite picturesque vista. Purely coincidental, of course.
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"There should be birds," he comments lazily.
Birds and insects and small animals scrounging for their evening meal. The lack of them doesn't alarm him, just makes him a little sad at what's happened to this world.
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"Dunno what to tell you about that. Apocalyptic mass migration?"
A couple of Leatherman slices later, she emerges again with a long length of rubber tubing in her hand.
"When you're done with... whatever you're doing," she says, conversationally, "we could use your lock picking skills on the side door. Either that or you can just jimmy it with something. I doubt the lock's too sturdy."
One end of the tube is thrust into the RV's now uncapped gas tank. Dropping to her knees, Eleanor starts sucking hard on the other end.
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He doesn't know what she's doing, but it's downright suggestive.
He pulls his eyes away and focuses on the door, as it would be unforgivably rude not to honor her request. And to continue staring. He could pull out a lock pick. Restless and distracted, he decides instead to test the door, then smiles at its base lock and structure. It would be easy enough to apply enough force with his shoulder to break the lock, so that's just what he does, and feels irrationally better for it.
Inside, low levels of light go a long way toward hiding dust and shabbiness, and his occasionally fickle attention is immediately captured by an open pantry.
"I think I found some food," he announces, peering at a box of instant mashed potatoes.
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Eleanor spits out a mouthful of gas and removes the pipe from her mouth. Fuel starts glugging freely out of it.
After a few more splutters, she grins. "Excellent."
It's not clear whether she's replying to Jamie, remarking on the taste of the gasoline, or celebrating the success of her siphoning efforts. Regardless, the hose is stuffed into the bike's open gas tank and left to transfer for a while. She then drops the steps under the newly opened door, and hops up them to join Jamie, admiring his brawny handiwork on the way.
Her nose immediately wrinkles at the mustiness of the interior. There are no signs of ransacking though. It will definitely do.
"Oooh, Rice-A-Roni," she says. "And instant coffee. Score!"
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