Re: [Second City: Cat & Jack]
What Jack thought of love didn’t really matter here. It was academic given the curling fronds of what had once been liquid under glass. But what he did think was that it was a form of exposure, the sloughing off of layers of onion skin until the green core could be found glistening within. Did he feel raw under the weight of a false sky and with love poured into a bottle and stoppered with a promise? It was a finger run along a spine full of nerve endings but Jack had always been better with raw a different way. Anger, anguish, that exposure was bloody easy, it could be closed over without difficulty. You could heal from what was ripped open but you couldn’t from what coaxed you open and kept you there. Love was terrifying: he loved Newt in the simple way of picking up the end of a loose thread and rolling it back onto the bobbin. But christ, the prospect of disappointing, of watching whatever made you, dim their eyes - Jack wasn’t brave. Cat before - and he drew a hazy distinction between them, the woman in front of him and the woman wild-haired and far more open than her younger self which he hadn’t appreciated before - was braver than he’d ever bloody been.
But the girl who smiled as if it didn’t matter enough to remark on. She slid past him like oil through rock, and left behind the table that balanced lives on the turn of cards. It wasn’t his game, even if he had seen enough of the hands of cards to know how to sit down and play at it. He turned his back because it was bloody satisfying to deliberately ignore the man with the gun as he followed the girl in and out of the crowds.
It was a journalist’s wet dream. The bubble of dialects like a melting pot, the glimpses of buildings staggered up to the ceiling beyond crumbled walls, the laughter darting at knee-level as a swathe of children ran in and out, it was the kind of place you flew to, to embed yourself. Community, and they’d forgotten how to do it above. Or rather: they’d forgotten in the peculiar pocket of isolation in which Jack existed. He looked at Cat’s back curiously, community was one reason to find beauty in the dust. Perhaps they hadn’t forgotten where she was.
The pulse-beat of music mingled with the one in his ears, and it wasn’t remotely organ skirls and pomposity behind medieval-era stone. He pushed through warm bodies decked out in bright embroidered colors, a squeeze of people in pursuit of one dressed in black and he stopped on the other side of the archway and just bloody looked. The faces that were filled with humor that it didn’t need a language to translate, at the figures on the stage, at the cadence of voices. It belonged. To the crumbled stone, to the city underneath a city, it was bound up in blood and community and there was a romance to it that would endure.
He toed off shoes, his feet bare beneath and he watched the wedding draw to conclusion. Wedding it was, but it didn’t make Jack think of white dresses and honeysuckle-soaked walls, it was far too bloody different. It was like glimpsing another country and he watched as the couple drew together after all that poetic declaration and fold themselves into one unbroken line.
“You can practically feel it.” Remark and he hadn’t taken his eyes off the stage as he stood hairsbreadth from her. “The crowd too.” The couple parted to a roar of approval and the music picked up, the crowd began to move like water toward food and wine and music. It was a way of celebration that wasn’t unique. It was linked to the human condition for all that Jack knew, but as the pressure of people swelled around him, he grinned at her, good humor practically infectious. He held out a hand as someone young and small pushed past his knees hard enough to sway as the couple were embraced by their people.
“Do you dance? Would you?” Christ knew what he looked like, spackled with dust, the leather jacket heavy and warm now instead of comfortable but he held out that hand regardless. A man in colors so bloody bright they clashed, warm red and scarlet and gold was at her shoulder and Jack looked over. “You’ve got options, apparently.”