Jamie & open: kitchen
Jamie's heroes were genre-specific. No surprise to anyone, ever. He wasn't feeling Superman or Batman, or comic-book genre anything and there was no Steve Jobs polo either, he liked his phone but not like, THAT much. Sergei Polunin and Baryshnikov both felt a little like, too much for a houseparty in February even if he felt like dragging tights out of a box somewhere - it was his sister's place, he wasn't going to wear a dance-belt to go drink mixers and listen to tunes. Yeah, nah, Jamie turned up as Gene Kelly - pre showers. He had the tie and the suit, and the hat and the umbrella, and it was thrift-store basic, the kind where the shoulders didn't hit Jamie's exact, and he hadn't knotted a tie since the last time he'd been to a benefit and it was kinda hasty and sloppy. The shirt was pale blue, which probably didn't go, but it was the one without gnarly pit-stains in the thrift store, and Jamie didn't like, run to expensive on clothes he had nowhere to wear. He didn't feel like he needed the little label, Gene Kelly was kinda like Madonna, he didn't need a name-tag to get the reference point and he wandered into twinkle-lights and warm, soft atmosphere that felt exactly like the combination of Audrey and Hannah must have felt.
He felt weirdly anticipatory. The kind that sat at the back of your neck and waited there, stroked fingers down along the column of your throat. It wasn't the kind he associated with Seven, with Uber-rides and text-messages that got filthier the closer the pin, but the kind where Jamie felt vaguely anxious, low-key constant. Because he got the stuff in the mirror. Like, six weeks? Had crossed a fucking threshold and Jamie had gotten into the habit of sloppy dressing when he'd switched out the bar as his main gig for the rec center, but even sloppy dressing in January hadn't hidden the knobs of his wrists, or that his ribs fanned when he breathed.
Since January, he'd been like, doing better. But better was slow fucking progress, and his family weren't slow, they were swift and bright and sharp as birds - Mars, when she was home, had a magpie's ability to fucking glean. The suit kinda felt like thrift-store armor, even if his face had started to fill back in, and he looked briefly around for Seven, because the guy had agreed to show separate, without like, even talking about it much. Family, Jamie wanted to keep whole, like one of those fuzzy candles, warm and glowing and not threatening to blow out. And Seven? Yeah, Jamie wanted to keep that EXACTLY as it was, the squeeze of warm knowing that somewhere in the knot of people the guy was there, without getting way stuck on what exactly, that was.
So he milled. He wanted a glass of water, and he slid into the kitchen, past some drifting past the green brownie thing and reached into a cupboard to help himself. Jamie hooked his umbrella on the edge of the counter while he did it.