Re: [Second City: Cat & Jack]
"So this isn't what did that." Jack shook the little bottle enough that the rosy color lapped the sides as he parsed her sentence for what it actually was in there, forty dollars of it or not. But he wasn't looking at it, a curio from a market that would apparently hold a promise of more than colored water because the small-scale spectacle in front of him demanded paying attention. He looked at her and he thought she expected it, scarlet mouth, chiming metal and draped black. She didn't stand out from the others, not the way he did in leather and denim and too bloody clean despite the dust coating his shins. Cat fitted too cleanly into place here, christ knew if she would fit so neatly with the decade or so on her bones. She stood out all the same, and he hadn't for one bloody second thought it was the daughter in front of him.
"Eternal youth. My youth was far less assured than yours apparently was. Is?" And he wasn't going to ask why she was the way she was, youth curled on blanket, he wouldn't get an answer so why bother? Nor did the answer feel particularly necessary, with the sweat from belting through the market still drying on the back of his neck. Jack got his wallet back, and he opened it, the bottle transferred to the pocket of his jacket as he rifled through his own wallet's contents, cards and bills and a handful of photographs shoved behind the plastic in the back. She had taken cash but nothing else, and he looked from the contents of the wallet to the curl of her smile, his own amusement coating him like dust. It was better than pickpockets in India, who would take everything.
"I can think of better fantasies to fulfil for the right price than living forever." He shoved the wallet into the pocket with the bottle and he could feel the corners of his mouth curl as Cat pitched an itinerary that included funding her own spree. Given the state of that gaming hell, she could have probably bought and sold the market in its entirety several times over, but he didn't think she cared. That wasn't the point, so far as he could see and he glanced in the direction of the food stand and the thick smell of cumin and cardamon that hit the back of his throat and smelled sharply like a version of home had, once.
He put his back to Cat and the blanket and demands and he lined up at the food stall that wasn't busy enough to be this close to the action. It had been once, or it looked like it and he lingered minutes after she'd put bowls in his hands, the curls of steam heavily fragrant and sharp enough to catch at the soft space at the back of the throat. He asked after the baby, and she pressed a hand to the curve of her belly but there was a presence in the shadows of the nearest stall. Vaguely menacing, for a pitch nearby, the man who looked between the stall owner and Jack himself. And he asked that question. When Jack returned with pottery bowl in each hand, he was several bills lighter than two bowls of curried meat and rice went for and he'd seen her disappear behind the stall to secure the money as he loitered deliberately in the way of the gentleman who was monitoring her custom.
He put a bowl into Cat's hands that was hot enough to sear, and Jack picked his path to a spot on the blanket, evading the exploration of a small boy who was all dirt anyway, and sat himself. "Bon appetit. If you need mellow, you're shit out of luck." A grin, and he inhaled what had been familiar and was now strange again but that little boy was watching them both, now from the tether of his hand to the hand of a father who had plucked him back. He had liquid eyes and a sharp face and correction, he had eyes for the bowl rather than either of them. Smart boy, far more interesting prospect than a stranger and bells and black over there. It wasn't bills, which he imagined would go down like a lead balloon on the blanket, but when the boy's straining passed a second, he handed over the bowl which small boy accepted with the gravity of an old man. He wasn't bloody hungry anyway, it was familiar enough set of scents that he didn't need to be.