Re: [Second City: Cat & Jack]
There was a world between a desire to live and a desire to live forever, but arguing over the finer points of detail was something for a more staid location than this one. It was philosophy, except she had a cadence that rang so completely of truth Jack had no bloody idea what Cat had done with her life to warrant so much death, but she clearly had. He didn’t bother arguing semantics, he watched her laugh instead. He had thought her less pliant, impossible to shape but the light down here was distinctly different. It was shade and colored shadows and Cat herself wasn’t Cat herself. “Her,” he remarked, curious rather than commentary and he watched the little girl on the fringes of the group with the spindly look of the ill-fed. Did he think it beautiful? “This isn’t my world, the beauty I grew up in but I think I agree with you.” Yes, but it reminded him of India, a crushing kind of beauty that could be seen in different lights, like iridescence on oil. Beautiful but through perception.
“If it’s important later,” he shrugged as if it didn’t matter, her demand for charities given air-time and a story to coax money out of deep pockets. He could write it. It was bloody easy to conjure prose suitably sharp to prod those who could afford to listen to sob-stories, but it wasn’t important to Jack. The bottle, that was different. Above, it was bloody easy to find time to think something through to exhaustion, to carve it to pieces. Here it seemed like choice, in or bloody out. It was magic, wrestled from stalls and supposed happiness in a bottle. Thinking put him back in a chair, ringside at so many guilty people’s blood-letting. He drank it, swiftly and in one before he could think about it again and shouldered past a crowd settling in on the blankets like birds to keep up.
He couldn’t have told a stranger which way they went. The contents of the bottle was heat, but not the sharp score-line of whiskey or something like it, slow-bloom warmth that coiled rather than sank, quickening rather than softening blunt edges until they curled too. He blinked, hazily into what was sense-memory that became more bloody apparent the longer it lasted, past two men who practically bristled weaponry, and then they were within the cool dim of another world entirely. He knew the game without looking for longer than a minute. Poker, and he could feel that twist beneath the flutter of the bottle’s contents. Weapons on the table and whatever was in the center for the pot mattered more than cash. Sierra Leone, all over again and he glanced at cards and he leaned into the warmth of Cat’s outline in gloom, hand on shoulder and mouth at ear.
“What do they game for?” Nobody could bloody see what was written there, even a foolhardy writer. They were one of a motley of people watching, and he saw the flash of a smile bright as a blade across from them, from a man who deliberately wrapped a hand around the butt of a gun holstered at his belt.