Who: dead time What: Reveal Warnings/Rating: Language.
He didn't put much stock in the parties the hotel threw for itself and press ganged people into attending. He'd been to a few of them now, and he'd gotten used to how they ran a while back. Was it a holiday? Well, the night would likely be spent in some imaginary far-off place where he got to be somebody else's dream of who he was, a random interpretation forced on him and then squeezed over top, his thoughts deflected at every turn from figuring out the why, or remembering, while the fog was on, what came before.
He had been things, at past hotel shindigs, that seemed to spin out some weird sub-section of his past or personality. Just a little, of course, not too much. This time it was just a variation on a theme, harmony to the melody. On the boat he'd been the dead kid, killed twice, preserved for some people the way he'd been when he was 17-years old. He was that now. But he didn't look twice dead, and he didn't look 17.
He had killed people since he'd been dead, and the more they tried to exorcise him the more he had killed. He didn't know what the point of the reflection had been - it wasn't as if he didn't know these things, didn't carry the knowledge of how much his living dead presence intruded on the old memories of the person he'd been.
The dead girl, she'd been a new thing. The things he'd felt for her, someone he barely knew, were a little bare, embarrassingly vulnerable, flayed open by the lack of inhibitions his journal trumpeted on its front page. Yeah, yeah. Didn't everybody want someone they could relate to, though? Someone who knew the same tragedies, had left the same kind of people behind?
He'd had the opportunity to come back to those people, the ones who mourned the boy he never really was, and teach them about who he was now. They learned, some of them. There were still vestiges of those old expectations all mixed up with the reputation he'd built after coming back like an blood-angry spirit. But he was a little older, now and a tiny bit wiser.
Prison had brought many of those feelings back, feelings he didn't bother telling anyone about. Nobody wanted to hear how hard it was to not fuck up. He just had to do it, even when thrown into a situation that dictated survival by death. No one had asked if he'd killed anyone back there since he got out, and he knew why. They expected, and they didn't really want to look him in the eyes and ask. Nobody wanted to know.
It was a little of that old shine come back to haunt him, a will to wipe at their eyes and be blind because he used to be someone else. But nobody really ever goes back to how things were, and he might change, but he would never be the same. It was all so fucking morbid and maudlin that it made him sick, but what the hell else was there for him to do but chew on it? Trapped in bed with a useless leg, rolling toward the sun coming in the window, he knew better than to pretend it was all a bad dream.
Jason didn't put much stock in what the hotel thought of him, though. It, or anyone else.