Stephie Marsh (slinkster_ghoul) wrote in darker_london, @ 2018-04-08 23:19:00 |
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Entry tags: | josie rhydderch, stephie marsh, thomas littleton |
The morning after (Stephie, Josie, open to Thomas)
Stephie woke up with a start, gulping in air, from a vivid dream that it had all been a trick. Amaris wasn’t in hospital and they weren’t safe from her and she was laughing, delighted, that they’d all been so stupid as to fall for it. Stephie had to force herself to remember details of the flight, remember exactly what room 23 looked like, but it still took a few long, long moments before she could start to believe it. She lay back down, pulled the blankets around her, stared at the ceiling and doubted herself, doubted her memory, doubted their luck.
Don’t do this, Stephie told herself. Amaris is in hospital. That’s real. That happened. Don’t get sucked into doubt because it’ll spiral out of control and you’ll end up where Tasha was a few months ago. This is real, Amaris is really in hospital. You flew her there. You saw it. It’s real.
She shifted, strategically, next to Thomas and he reached out, more than half asleep, and draped his arm across her, settling back in with his face against her hair and a sleepy murmur. Stephie closed her eyes again, leaning her head against his. This is real, she thought. Not the nightmare version of reality. This version.
Stephie really, really understood why Thomas had needed to see Amaris locked up with his own eyes, and it made her cautiously worried because if she was having trouble completely believing it then maybe he was too.
With her head resting against his and his arm around her, she let herself doze off again, feeling safe in this version of reality, feeling right, feeling loved.
Some time later, not long enough to get back to sleep completely but long enough to have been half-dreaming about Thomas, a change in the light woke her up again. Her phone was on silent, but it was sitting there on the bedside table, lighting up around Josie’s name. Stephie grabbed it, and one of Thomas’s shirts, and slunk out into the hall. It was pretty late in the morning, but she and Thomas had been up very late even after they'd got back from the hospital. The kids were all still over at Spectre and Abby’s. “Hey,” she said quietly, pulling on the shirt. “You made it.”
There was quiet on the other end of the line as Josie tried to read Stephie through the phone and through her morphine haze. “Yeah,” she said, eventually. “So did you.”
“Hah,” said Stephie, unable to stop herself grinning a little, still high on the success of getting Amaris to hospital without incident – well, without much of one. She still felt a little sick just from speaking to her, and there was still Brian… but Stephie was still buoyant enough to grin down the phone.
Well, for a moment. Till she remembered Josie was nearly the reason she couldn’t fly at all. “Good for us,” Stephie said, with a little less buoyancy. “What’s your plan, Josie?”
“Staying here,” Josie murmured with her eyes closed, voice as heavy as her body was feeling. “Gotta.”
“Good,” Stephie said, trying to untangle her feelings about being attacked by Josie from her concern for Josie’s wellbeing. “Deirdre said you got shot.”
Josie snorted, which hurt. “Yeah. One of Miles’s family. Offering me a job. Turned it down.”
For a moment, Stephie was grimly speechless. “Shit,” she said, dropping down into an armchair.
“Jinx got me to hospital,” Josie said, the words coming out in a rush. “Please don’t hate him.”
Stephie didn’t say anything that time, not even shit.
“Please,” Josie said again, and Stephie had to wonder when, exactly, the last time was she’d heard Josie say please, not just one but twice, but so pleadingly. And it was awful, because it was making great unidentified chasms open up inside Stephie. “Don’t hate Jinx. Hate me all you want, but please don’t hate him.”
“Hey,” Stephie cut her off, her voice sharp.
She wasn’t comfortable hating anybody right now.
Well, Amaris. But even threatening Amaris had made her feel gross. Fuck. Stephie tried to push it out of her mind. She didn’t hate Josie and she didn’t hate Jinx, she knew that much.
If only it was that simple. “What if we don’t talk about this right now?” she said, raking a hand through her sex-tangled hair. She felt barely awake enough to deal with this.
“So you repress it and end up imploding on him?” Josie asked, which felt mean, but was a fair point.
Stephie didn’t take it as a fair point. She huffed in frustration. “I’m not going to implode,” she insisted, and then because she couldn’t help herself: “Josie, why didn’t you just tell me?”
She wouldn’t have imploded, right? Sure, maybe at the beginning, when she was still trying to use Miles to drown everything out. But in the last few months she and Jinx had been getting better and yeah there was still an ache she felt around him but not an… implodey one.
“Just?” Josie asked, and yeah okay, maybe she had a point and maybe Stephie could admit it was never going to be a case of ‘just’ telling her anything. So maybe she didn’t know how she might have reacted if Josie had told her earlier and she didn’t know how she would have reacted if Jinx had told her himself either and there was just so much going on inside Stephie right this minute that she didn’t know. And then Josie said, “Because you two are so in love it makes you both really stupid about each other.”
“What?” said Stephie, as everything in her head got real quiet. “No I’m not.”
“God,” Josie groaned. Words were so hard. Emotions were so hard. “I don’t know what you want to call it. You’re in Stephie with him. And if I’d told you you would have gone all Stephie on him and because he’s so in Jinx with you it would have fucked up everything.”
Stephie was shaking her head, just couldn’t stop shaking her head. “I don’t… want to talk about this.”
“Just promise me you won’t hate him,” this was all Josie needed to get across, and she was going to keep saying it till Stephie promised.
Why do you get to make demands of me Stephie wanted to snap. You attacked me! Josie should be begging Stephie for forgiveness, not begging her to forgive Jinx.
There was something big in the tone of Josie’s voice though. “You… guys are a thing again, aren’t you?” Stephie asked, and when Josie didn’t deny it Stephie very firmly put the phone down on the arm of the chair and shot up and did a frustrated stomping circle of incredulous disbelief around the coffee table. “Seriously?” she demanded once she’d picked the phone back up.
Josie was way too worn out for sarcasm. “Yeah.”
“Since that night? Was that when it started? Or had you been sneaking round even before then?”
“Since that night.”
“You know he fucked Deirdre the night before, right?” Stephie said, her brain catching up with her mouth a second too late. She’d wanted to lash out and say something that would hurt and figured using something that had hurt her might hurt Josie too.
And it had hurt, seeing Jinx with Deirdre. It had hurt in a complicated and inexplicable way that she’d never had a chance to deal with because the next night Jinx had kissed her, and Stephie hadn’t let herself think about the kiss that had come before he grabbed her because that ached too. They’d talked about grief and they’d talked about Snap and he’d kissed her and told her he wanted her and Stephie remembered just how goddamned much she wished it had been true.
But she hadn’t let herself think about any of that stuff. Till now, apparently, because Josie was right about her repressing till she popped. “Sorry,” Stephie said. “Shouldn’t’ve said that.”
“Please,” Josie said again, ignoring the comment about Deirdre and Jinx because it really did only matter to Stephie. Because the only thing that mattered to Josie right now was desperately grabbing for one little bit of damage control. And if Stephie hadn’t answered the phone… or had answered the phone screaming at her, then Josie would have had to put her energy toward damage control with Stephie but she hadn’t, she’d answered the phone with relief that Josie had made it. She’d answered the phone and asked Josie about how she was.
And yeah of course it was all more than Josie deserved and she’d let the guilt attack her later but right now all she wanted to do was try to keep the worst of Stephie’s anger and hurt away from Jinx because he’d saved her, he’d saved her and he didn’t need the world to be any harder. So she said please. She was going to keep on saying please.
“I don’t hate Jinx,” Stephie said finally. “And I don’t hate you either.”
“Okay,” Josie said, and closed her eyes in relief. Her whole body felt swampy with it, heavy and misty and relieved. She could have dealt with Stephie hating her. Stephie probably should hate her. But Jinx didn’t have to deal with any more hate in his life so... okay. So... good. So... “I’m going to sleep now.”
“Yeah, you should,” said Stephie, who needed a break from this conversation anyway. She should probably say something like she’d come in and see her soon, or repeat that she was glad she’d made it into hospital… but she didn’t, because everything was a bit much.
She stayed in the armchair for a few more minutes after Josie hung up, flipping her phone from end to end on the arm of the chair.
Nope, she thought. Nope nope nope, she was not going to work this out right now. It was the day after Amaris had been locked up for good and the thought still bought a relieved grin to Stephie’s face. Amaris was locked up, Josie was getting help and Jinx… she’d work him out later. Not now. Now she was going to flick the kettle on for morning coffee then go back upstairs and crawl back into bed with Thomas, who bought another smile to her face when she thought about him. A smile that reached all the way into her chest. A smile that deepened when she pushed open his bedroom door and saw him again. God, she really was never going to get over how gorgeous he was.