lookforheaven (aucontraire_) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-05-29 03:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2018 [05] may, adelaide hawkins, ian terrell |
Who: Adelaide and Sarge
Where: The Capitol, and then outside the walls
What: Seeking comfort
When: The same night as these.
Since the moment in the flea market when she realized everything that her brother was holding onto, every resentment and doubt and hurt that stands piled up between them, Adelaide hasn't breathed easy.
He's always been stubborn, and he's always had a way of being able to take anything that was said about him, and twist it on its head and see it as a blight on his character. That comes from Mama, from all those years when she told him he was rotten, when she told him they were better off without him, when he internalized every rotten word into his enormous too-tender heart. Jims wants to be a good man, always has, but he's always been so, so much more ready to believe the opposite - and to believe that the people around him think the opposite.
But none of it has ever applied to Adelaide before, he's never questioned her love, her loyalty, or her devotion to him the way he's doing now, and it has completely and utterly rocked her world. If she thought that finding him had been the hard part, she was sorely, miserably mistaken.
It is winning him back that seems to be her challenge now, and before she can do that, can even begin that, Adelaide has to stop choking on the poisonous fact that he is doubting her at all. It sent her reeling the first day, and the texts tonight where Rodeo told her he can't talk about this yet? She is spinning again, tailspinning with frustration, with the unfairness of it, with the stubbornness, and in some ways the hypocrisy. He made the choices that landed him on death row, and at sixteen years old Adelaide had tried to figure out how to deal with the loss of her entire world as best she could. None of it means she doesn't love him, just like she would never, ever imply that his abandonment of her for the sake of his vengeance meant that he didn't love her. She's been mad about it, and hurt, but she would never go so far as to think it means he doesn't care. They are beyond that. There is plenty of hurt to go around, but to imply a lack of caring? Among them of all people?
Adelaide snarls under her breath, paces across the living space to her phone and stares at the last message again.
"Okay. I'm sorry. I love you."
He sent it nearly an hour ago, and she still hasn't been able to reply. Her heart clenches like a hard angry fist every time she thinks of it. Of course she loves him. She loves him more than anyone else, enough that she has been a wreck for days. But to say so right now tears at her stubborn, prideful heart. Not to say so right now is murder, too.
Finally she types, quickly, a short and bitter but nonetheless true answer that he will almost certainly misinterpret, and then Adelaide drags both of her hands into her hair. She's been pacing for the entirety of that hour, and all of this is so unlike her - even, unruffled, even in anger she usually runs cool rather than hot. This is not that.
Directly after the texts, a hundred strange and damaging ideas run through her head, none of them at all like her, none of them her usual brand of cool logical calculation. She thinks of ignoring his plea and demanding he talk to her. She thinks of smashing her phone so she can't. She thinks of up and driving to where he is alone, in the middle of the night, Thomas be damned. She thinks of messaging back the Very Open Minded elloboferoz fellow on the Freenet, taking her life and her security in hand and taking him up on a very damaging distraction. She thinks maybe she should bring Charlie with her to the Dog Park when she goes, show her brother just how much she has at stake and how she's still willing to do everything to be with them. A hundred insane ideas and as she thinks them she's been pacing. Thomas went to bed ages ago, Charlie is asleep in his crib, and Adelaide just plain can't get a grip.
She knows she can't stay here, knows she'll do something dumb or just plain burst with the frustration, and then it hits her.
She needs someone she trusts, completely. She needs someone who just knows, without being told - and not just because he was there, but because he gets it and always has. She needs someone who won't think she's insane if she tells him that she doesn't think she can breathe until her brother looks at her the way he's supposed to.
She texts Sarge, and just like clockwork or sunrise or Prembus, he doesn't disappoint.
Thirty minutes later Adelaide is walking briskly down the grand paths that lead away from the Capitol building. Her favorite machete is held tightly and at the ready in her hand, the sturdy leather case strapped at her side, though she knows that there are guards and roadblocks and it's very unlikely she'll see any shufflers until she is further out. She told Thomas that she couldn't sleep and was going for a walk so she wouldn't wake Charlie; she neglected to mention she was going outside. She listens carefully as she gets further away, for the moans of the dead, or for the much more welcome sounds of a bike.
Adelaide is just grateful to be moving, to be in action. She has rarely ever needed to be doing like she does right now.