Re: [Quicklog: Jack/Dahlia]
[He well recalls the sound - christ, better the feeling of dry-heaving, the attempt to try to keep something down rather than allow the retch and bark of your throat to cough up something visceral. The wall is bloody, and Jack's gaze flinches to Dahlia's hand, cradled gingerly as if laving your tongue over the bleeding will do anything for the mangled knuckles. Yes, Jack remembers that too.
Her face holds the defiant blankness of the edge extremely close by and yet determined not to fall in and Jack sits quietly, with that infernal handkerchief extended, a white flag of something not quite surrender - perhaps sympathy? Her phone buzzes and he reacts, not least because there's steel-tensile tension running down the length of his spine and Jack is waiting, just bloody waiting for something to break over his head like sea-tides.
He blinks when she laughs, the ugly damp of near-tears and then she speaks and Jack's smile is brokered on the proviso that whatever has come in on her phone has belied the rift in the social contract that is the unending wave of someone else's pain that holds you tightly in its grip until it subsides.]
The idea is that you blow your nose, it's traditional but it's not obsolete. [But he's folding it up into his pocket once again, and he looks at her hand, eyebrows raised.] You're going to need ice. Up there? [He glances past her, it's tacit request for permission.]