Re: Jack + Cat: the Mean-Eyed Cat
He'd thought she was in Russia. Gone in a blizzard of snow and post-Soviet architecture and sub-zero cold enough to drop your balls from between your legs. Out the bloody country, serenading her own ghosts. Jack's smile sharpened on flint and his cigarette between his fingers dropped ash into snowy drift at his feet. He wasn't wearing an overcoat, hauling furniture out the fucking window was warm, and he'd left it draped over the now-empty desk in the office and snow had scattered damp over the shoulders of navy wool, hauled up at the sleeves.
And if he had bloody timing, she wasn't Newt. Newt whose bloody fault it wasn't that he made him want to climb inside his own skin and scrape it off until it burned. Newt whose unhappy articulation was pauses of static and then the quiet click and Jack divorced his brother with difficulty from the quiet storms of arguments past and dragged self back to the present, cigarette burning down to stub between his fingers and the soft gray of ash joining snow. No, Cat raked for blood and the savage flare of unbanked moil caught like oil-soaked rag.
The bar was shut, clearly closed for the night but precipice and cliff-edge and Jack lingered long enough to drag the cigarette down to root and drop it to gray snuff in the snow and laughed, dry and brief. "Practically neighborly of you." The smile wasn't pretty. He stepped past her into the gloom of silent bar, "Take another gun out?" He didn't prowl, and he didn't inspect the mess by the side of the pool table. Deliberately, he dragged a stool out from the side of the bar, a scrape of legs over floor.
"You've got too much tat in here to bother throwing it out the window."