Who: Cherrie & Jack What: They have “the talk.”. Well, they have Cherrie’s version of “the talk.” Where: Hamartia 603 When: Thursday afternoon Warnings: None!
Cherrie had just run down to the store to get some essentials. She’d managed to clean out her entire apartment, dusting, vacuuming, and sweeping everything! She was running a little low on things like butter, eggs, and milk, all things she packed into the fridge after removing them from the brown paper bag. The elevator had been down again, so she was stuck taking the stairs all the way up. She was contemplating moving to a lower floor. The apartments were a little ridiculous in the way that the elevator would get stuck. She was just lucky she was in good health, although she was starting to attribute it to the lengthy climbs up to the sixth floor.
Pulling out a jar of peanut butter, she unscrewed the top and stuck her finger into it. Usually, she didn’t do that sort of thing, but she just really wanted to and it so she did. Opening her laptop, she pressed the little power button, leaving a message for Jack to come over whenever he was free. She was going to do it. She was gonna tell him, and she was going to do it now...or whenever it was that he was free enough to come over, and hopefully it was sooner rather than later. The last time she’d asked him to do so, it ended in her avoiding him and him not being around, which was convenient for the avoiding. It wasn’t right for her to carry around that secret for this long.
She was poking at keys with her pinky and sucking the peanut butter off her other finger as she scrolled around online and waited.
Jack hadn’t seen Cherrie in what felt like ages. She’d contacted him after the funeral, but then he’d had to take Winnie somewhere safe and everything had fallen to the back burner. When he’d returned the Masquerade had snuck up on him, and he’d spent a long week of nights on the street before that, trying to mend his feelings about putting Winnie in danger. Now Ruby had moved in, and the world seemed to have turned in a full circle again. He felt guilty for not telling Cherrie that something had come up, at least, but things in his world were mad. They’d been mad for over a year, but they’d really been building to a head lately.
It would be nice to do something normal after the meeting the night before with a group of teenagers who thought that they could save the world, now in part his responsibility. Something to take his mind off of it all - something good. He knocked on Cherrie’s door. He was dressed in clean, plain black clothes - a shirt with long sleeves, jeans. He was running mostly on the quickly fading stimulus of coffee, but he could sleep when he went back to the apartment.
Half the jar of peanut butter had been gone by the time he'd gotten there. She looked down at her hand and it was slathered between her fingers. She could not see him like that, it'd be embarrassing. Why did she even eat it with her hands anyway? She probably looked ridiculous. The thought of it made her frown. She couldn't present herself to Jack looking like she came right out of a preschool snack making session. She took a moment to wash her hands and check her clothes to make sure she hadn't just gotten some on herself randomly. Closing the peanut butter jar, she placed it back into the cupboard and hoped that if she offered to get Jack anything, it didn't involve the half eaten jar.
Wiping her hands over her jeans, she walked took a moment to check her clothes again, even her back side at this point just to make sure. Then she opened the door and looked up at him. "Hey," she said with a bright smile, completely oblivious to the smudge so inconveniently located just outside the corner of her mouth. "Come on in." Stepping aside, she pulled the door open so he could enter. She leaned her body against the edge was she waited for his entry.
When he saw the smudge on her face, he assumed it had come from sampling something while she was cooking, and something about that was distinctly endearing. “Hey” he said, walking in past her. He could definitely smell something, although it seemed a little more along the lines of peanut butter. He couldn’t help but smile, and he touched the side of his mouth. “You’ve got something just there,” he said. He didn’t want to embarrass her, but better to tell her than have her notice later.
“Oh,” she flushed a little red before trying to feel around on her face for the smudge. When she got it, she wiped it away. First, she did it with her hand, then went for a paper towel. “Thank you.” Usually in times like these, she would take a minute to try and put together the right words, but today was different. After wetting a towel and rubbing her cheek, she turned to look at him. “I can read your mind.” She held up her hands in an attempt to keep him from responding before going on. “I don’t do it on purpose. I just can’t shut it off, and when I touch you, I just get all these thoughts and images and feelings, except they’re not really feelings. I read your mind at your funeral. Wow, that sounds weird.” It did sound weird. “I am so sorry and I understand if you never want to talk to me again.” She bit her bottom lip.
Well, that came out of approximately nowhere. Jack was feeling normal so far today, but, then again, he hadn’t touched the stair railings, and the Hamartia had no elevator buttons to press. The sudden outpouring of honesty when he was only a few steps through the door did, admittedly, seem strange, but it sounded like something she’d been holding back for some time, perhaps trying to get up the courage to tell him.
He listened, and the worry he felt as she outlined this wasn’t for himself. It wasn’t even for Ruby - he knew that whatever Cherrie might have read off of him, she was a good woman, and she wasn’t likely to tell anyone or endanger either him or Ruby. No, the concern was something different entirely. There were aspects of himself that he didn’t expose to people that he met in his day to day life, and for good reason. They were jagged, and painful, and dark, and violent, when it came down to it. When he was with people during the day, he covered that, buried it deeply and tried his best to forget it was there. What he was wasn’t meant to be brought into the lives of decent people.
Once the surprise faded from his expression, it was clear he wasn’t exactly sure what to think. He was worried about what she might know, and maybe what she might think of him depending on what that was. “You don’t need to apologize,” he said. “It’s not something you have control over. We all have...” He tried to think of the right turn of phrase, and his lips pressed together into a line. “Our quirks, here, our strange turns of fate. I come back from the dead fresh as a daisy, and you read people’s minds. That must be disconcerting, with the amount of garbage most people are thinking about at any given moment.” He wanted to know what she’d read, but he didn’t know how to ask. He knew that there were a whole variety of things about him she might have picked up that would make her never want to speak to him again, so theoretically it couldn’t have been all bad, he supposed. Still, curiosity did tug at him, morbid as it was.
Cherrie hadn't expected him to be as accepting as he was. He seemed at accepting. He was accepting right? He was accepting that she was a telepath, but he did have a good point. He did come back from the dead after being shot in the head. She still had the mental image fresh in her mind thanks to Winnie. "You're okay now," she said absently following her own train of thought, and shook her head.
"It can get a little crazy sometimes, especially in crowded rooms, but I've been dealing with it for a long time now." Cherrie just wished she had a better handle on how to deal with it than she did. Isolating herself helped at times, but it wasn't something that was helpful when she was in a populated area. After moving to the city, that became more the norm for her. Sometimes she missed how quiet it was in her hometown.
"Everything clears out when I touch someone, though. I mean, when I touched you, I saw a lot of things. I wasn't expecting half of it, but you don't know what to expect when you touch someone. I knew you less than most, and I'm not even sure what to make of what I saw, not that I tried to, because it's not my business." It was times like this she missed Winnie. Her mind was so peaceful to invade, with her shiny thoughts. "Is your new roommate like your old one?"
“How long have you been here?” he asked, because the way she mentioned dealing with it for a long time made him wonder at whether she’d come over as an adult, as he had, or not.
She didn’t seem particularly disturbed by anything she’d seen, so it seemed safe to ask. “What did you see?” he asked. At the mention of his new roommate, he smiled a little, nodding. “In a way. I’ve known Ruby since before I came here. She used to live close to me, before I crossed over.” He had to practically wrench his thoughts away from everything that came with that statement - Helen, his guilt over leaving Ruby behind with only a note to explain where he had gone, everything that had made him leave. If Cherrie really could read thoughts, he couldn’t afford to linger on that too long.
"I moved in with my grandmother when I was eight," she answered without hesitation. She wasn't exactly sure why she was being so open with this man. She did enjoy his company, and believed that he was a good man. Despite his scars and the dark things she saw, she just knew he had to be good. He fell in with Sam and "Mike", and they were both good people. He took care of Winnie and now Ruby, and they were young. And he was a vigilante, attempting to help people. Helping people was good.
Those were the thoughts she had used to counterbalance the dark things she'd come across when she touched him. When he asked her, she turned away slightly, unsure of whether he wanted to hear what she'd seen. Usually she was better at schooling her reaction, but that had flown out the window for the most part. "You're really sad and angry." She lowered her gaze to the floor, before slowly turning to look over her shoulder. "I saw a lot of angry colors when you touched me that day. You were also very worried about me. It's why I trusted you. It's why I trust you." She remembered the thoughts that filtered in. He was genuinely concerned. You couldn't fake things like that if you didn't know. He didn't know.
"In the cemetery, I went a little deeper. I just...I wanted to make sure you weren't someone else. I wanted to make sure everyone was safe." It had been an abnormal situation. She couldn't focus enough on him to actually find his voice out of all the shocked thoughts flooding her at once.
He watched her face, watched her look down and then back at him. Sad and angry. She wasn’t off the mark, of course, and there was no way he could argue it - she knew what she said was true. “I worry a little too much,” he admitted, choosing not to respond to the other half of what she’d said.
“You did what you had to,” he said. “That was brave of you, Cherrie. If I’d been someone else, you likely would have been the only one able to tell for sure.” He knew she had to have been unsure what to think when he wandered up apparently none the worse for wear, and he couldn’t say he wouldn’t have done the same thing in her shoes.
"You're awfully accepting of all this, and I know you're making sense, but most people get upset over this sort of thing. They're always telling me to keep out, yelling at me about how I have no right, but you, you're telling me it's okay," she said with a soft smile. She understood that he probably didn't want her in there at all, but he knew what it was like to be a little different or in his case way different. He'd been dead. That had to make someone different, even among the freaks.
Even his thoughts hadn't been so much about him as they were about her and her condition. She hadn't been picking up on all of it, but she'd been a lot more focused in on him since he'd come in the room. He was still trying to protect her, from himself. Turning, she closed the distance between them and wrapped her arms around his waist in a hug. She placed her head against his chest, being careful not to touch his skin. "You don't have to worry about me, you know. I can take care of myself. Life isn't about being happy all the time. There's a lot of pain that goes along with it. You can share it with me if you want. I don't mind." Her voice had been very quiet. "You don't have to carry it all by yourself."
He could never say that being dead hadn’t affected him profoundly. Even after everything he had been through and everything he had seen, the crushing realization of what death meant, at least for him, was something he thought of every day, no matter how he tried to avoid it.
There was no peace at the end of the road for him, no quiet, and worst of all, the company he had hoped for even after the things he’d done was denied to him. He knew, too well, that he was a damned man, and yet he had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that she would be there in death, waiting for him. All he’d found there were nightmares and dreams, madness, punishment, a purgatory between things. Not knowing whether that was the only death he’d ever find gnawed at him.
Then she wrapped her arms around him. He couldn’t help but be a touch surprised, but she definitely seemed like she was in an honest mood. He wrapped his arms around her, loosely, looking down at the top of her head. This, in his arms, was a good woman, the sort who deserved an unmarked man who could give her things like stability and surety and safety, things he didn’t think he could guarantee to anyone the way he was now. He smiled faintly down at her. These were the sort of things he didn’t get, anymore, couldn’t have for risk of seeing them destroyed. “You are very kind,” he said. “But there are some things that I don’t think anyone needs to hear. Not because I don’t trust you or I don’t think you would fall apart, but because you don’t need to know they happen.” How long had it been since he’d had a warm-bodied woman in his arms instead of a phantom? Over a year, precisely that long. “I’ve done some things that are...they aren’t easy to explain. They were necessary, I know that they were, but they are the sort of things that exclude you forever from all the places where good people find themselves.” He took her by the chin, to tilt her head so he could look her in the eye. “You are one of those people, Cherrie.”
Cherrie was having a hard time listening to him. It shouldn't have upset her the way it did, the way he was trying to protect her from himself. Cherrie was not some delicate flower that needed protection. She may not have been all worldly, but she believed she had a good head on her shoulders. She knew how to deal with a lot of things, because all you needed was some common sense and a strong constitution. She had both.
When he tilted her head to look up at him, her eyes had hardened in their stubborn way. She could hear him quite clearly now that he'd touched her the way that he did. She could see that he meant every word and it put a fire in her gaze. She just looked up at him quietly, not speaking a word. Moving an arm from around his waist, she slid it around his neck. Rolling onto the tips of her toes, she pressed her lips against his. It wasn't a timid kiss like the last one she'd shared with someone. It was filled with with desire. She didn't think she'd ever wanted to kiss a man as badly as she did then.
In a way, she was defying him, telling him that he was wrong. True, she was a good person, but just because he may have done bad things, it didn't mean he wasn't good. He was a good person. He did deserve good things, even if he had done things that people thought irredeemable.
He did kiss her back for a moment. How could he not? She was beautiful and soft in his arms, and she’d kissed him. He was still human, after all, and even if his priorities had shifted and his world had turned during the last year, he was still a man.
It took a good amount of self-restraint to pull back from that kiss, but he did. “Cherrie...” He trailed off. He didn’t have words to explain what he wanted to say, and for once he found himself speechless. His thoughts were a tumble of conflicting emotions. He thought she deserved better, and he knew that being with him and knowing what he did was going to put her in danger. Winnie had proved that. At least Ruby didn’t know what he did, and might be protected in that way. There was also the distinct sensation that if she could see past the things he’d done, she didn’t know what they were, or she didn’t really understand them. And there were also echoes of guilt, deep set and ricocheting up from somewhere deep that would have been there for her in the kiss. There was a woman there, a woman with dark hair who he saw every time he went to sleep, and sometimes while he was awake, out of the corner of his eye. He was here, doing what he did, for her so much more than himself, and the fact that he didn’t know if he could fully devote himself to someone else, at least not yet, cemented the idea that Cherrie deserved better. His memories of Helen were tied up in vestiges of guilt, bundles of anger and betrayal and the sort of despair that would knock the breath from your lungs, and those emotions hadn’t burnt out or been dealt with the way they should have. So they remained there, chains of heavy, black iron. There was a lot of black down there, in Jack.
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to tell her without disappointing her, or hurting her, and he didn’t want either of those things for her, so he watched her instead, wondering how much she would just know without him saying.
He kissed her back. She knew he wanted to kiss her, by the way he had done it. The way he held her. This was right. At least, it was perfect physically. What she saw in the kiss made her heart wrench.
And then he broke it.
She could hear it, all of it as he looked down at her. She didn't even try to pretend she didn't know. Even if he didn't want to disappoint or hurt her, it was written all over her face. It did hurt, even if he wasn't rejecting her. He wasn't really, but she knew.
She pulled away. What else could she do? "I'm sorry," she said softly, rubbing the back of her neck and looking at the floor. "Please leave,” she said turning her back. She couldn't look at him right now. She wasn't sure what to do. She'd just made everything so bad between them. It had been too soon. She was starting to feel foolish and stupid, and she didn’t want him to be there to see her like that.
He didn’t think that she’d made everything terrible - he didn’t like her less, but he didn’t think that he had the feelings for her that she wished he did, didn’t know if he could feel that way about anyone again. Not now, at least. He didn’t say anything as he left, because he didn’t know what to say to mend her feelings, so instead he gave her a respectful nod and showed himself out, though he hesitated a little at the closing of the door, wishing he could leave her something comforting in parting.