Re: [Second City: Cat & Jack]
The smell of spices and bodies blended together into a thick fug that could have been the souk in Morocco or its equivalent in Mumbai or god knows bloody where. It didn’t matter, it was a co-existence of people that was no longer allowed for in the city built over the graveyard of this one. Did half the Capital know that it wasn’t dead yet, in a mausoleum they’d forgotten? Probably not. He sat with the warmth trapped in under leather and the idle catch of scent in his nose and the interminable trudge to the Capital for plastic seats and recriminations felt far enough away to feel human for a while. It wasn’t a resurrection so much as excavation, but he didn’t feel much like examining the parting of dust from bones. He didn’t ask. The years had clearly rolled back, whether wound onto a bobbin for saving for later and they’d hit her all at once at some point or time was an elastic concept. The world had served up hell-dogs, anything was bloody possible. So he didn’t ask and he watched the play of people’s faces as they talked and ate and lived without self-consciousness here where magic lived cheek to cheek with deprivation.
“I don’t want to live forever,” he said entirely affably as he watched a man tend to another, far more elderly with all the tenderness of the mothers with their children. It was beautiful and brutal, age creating a reliance that had been absent for decades and was now a reversal. He thought sharply of the man who had died several thousand miles away and turned his head deliberately away from the picture to look at the girl curled around on herself and smiled. “Eternal health might give you the time to make fantasies come true but eternal life without reading the small print? No way.” Age was decay and he could still remember being young enough, stupid enough to want to go out early in a blaze instead of a snuff of smoke.
“I’m not arguing fantasies with you, you’ll red pen all of mine.” And talk of bargains as yet unfulfilled - Jack resisted the urge to shudder, the particulars of the cold-blooded murder of two bystanders still resided somewhere uncomfortable in the back of his head. Writing was a sidle-step closer to fulfillment. He heard her, of course. He caught the note between the lines, aging was apparently foreign concept to Cat. He looked at her now, as she looked to be in the throes of somewhat unholy pleasure and laughter was easy down here, it didn’t ooze through what felt like granite. “Give me a list of locations. Later.” An amendment, he didn’t feel much like digging through for notebook and looking through the lens at this place felt like it would break the surface-tension, he would be outsider cataloging experience instead of experiencing it and he could come back alone and do that without losing the sight of the place ticking first. It wasn’t agreement, she’d dictated one story to him in a blaze of anger that had ended with shreds of his own dignity.
He didn’t think he’d ever seen her face hold that much in it at once. There was the gaming den but that had been one mask held up like a masquerade and glimpses of behind it when she felt like it. Was it beautiful? Unbiased eye would see the refuse, the dirt, the clear hallmarks of poverty. He watched the little boy scrape the bottom of the bowl, and grinned at gravity levied over the lip of it from parental lap. “I didn’t know if I was meant to, or put it on the mantlepiece as proof I’d been here. You tell me.”