Re: Log, the B&B: Jack & Newt P
He wasn't sure exactly what it was he expected behind the door. Jack's memory of Newt was patchwork scraps, small creatures cupped in freckled palms, copper curls, the muted look on his brother's small face when the aggro between mother and father got particularly loud. But at least Jack knew Newt, a little. Did it count, if you'd known someone when they were growing thinly and determinedly like something at the bottom of the precious garden, did that translate? He didn't hold out much hope that the older-him hadn't trashed this one, too. Deliberately, he hadn't read back to Newt. His name showed up, frequently and then less frequently, a tailing off that should have been impossible in a small town, shouldn't it? Except apparently, he was bound and determined for misery. What had Dahlia said, an ongoing desire to throw himself into traffic? Charming.
It wasn't after all, that Jack actually wanted a reminder that he took after dear old dad. As far as life-shaping experiences went, it wasn't something you precisely wanted to mimic but the show was apparently rolling along on the road and inevitability had tightened the set of Jack's jaw and the shit-show of a day so far had given him a faint, defiant air of 'don't care' written all over him from top to toe, a thin carapace over what was self-evidently not all that much happiness. Jack, after all, wasn't fifteen years on and cautious about anything.
Oh, he'd heard about the prison. But Jack vaguely thought his own little mishap didn't qualify, when he thought about it at all. He wasn't dangerous, after all, he was just young. Probably more danger older, actually. But he didn't worry about it, he didn't think about being seized off in the middle of the night, worrying was dull and consuming and it meant fretting.
He leaned against the frame of the wall as his brother did whatever it was he was doing behind the door. Getting rid of incriminating evidence? Jack couldn't imagine Newt watched porn, or if he did, being embarrassed by it. He waited, and he patted his pockets for his cigarettes, and idled with his head back against the wall and he probably looked nothing like his older self, save for the clay they'd both been moulded from. Jack's face held the opposite fragments of his mother to those Newt had, but it was rather more evident in the softened lines of youth. His hair was longer, reddish-blond and he wore a scarf, in a grayish pattern looped around his neck and a leather jacket shrugged over a white shirt and jeans. It was self-evidently more fashion than his older self had managed at all and at the same time required so little effort that he thought his older self had done it all deliberately.
He rolled on his shoulder into the doorframe the minute he heard the scrape of the handle, and he looked at his brother with a mixture of fascination and trepidation worn mingled openly on the softened planes of his young face. Newt looked startlingly like their mother, was his first thought. The delicacy had gone, the way Newt resembled a determined weed, absolutely set on growing, had gone. He was taller, and somehow sharper, and yet after all of that, he looked like someone Jack could know.
He smiled, not out of relief of course, because he wasn't actually relieved because he'd never been worried. "Hello, Newt."
He didn't actually need to stare at his brother, Newt wasn't about to throw a tantrum or tell him he needed to be something old already, Newt was probably the least likely person to find comfort in his growing up to be an addict at all. And besides, Newt didn't much like being stared at anyway, from Jack's recollection. He looked past into the room, which was rather like the one Jack had a key to himself.
"I thought there'd be more things in it. Animals, bits of forest. There's a whole woods here, not just the bottom of a garden. Do you have tea? Can I have some?"