It. (rasatabula) wrote in repose, @ 2017-11-10 18:13:00 |
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Entry tags: | *forum, *log, adrian march, cat dubrovna, dahlia haight, destiny sokol, jack penhaligon, newt penhaligon |
Public, Adrian M, Dahlia H, Destiny S, Cat C, [Newt P: in person]
[Public:time-fuzz, a couple days after the party]
A man spends a day or three at a party and comes back to find the ghosts have been through his drawers. Literal ones, not figurative ones.
[Adrian M]
Hello. Were you the good samaritan?
Dahlia H]
I think this is known as checking in. I'm not dead. Are you?
[Destiny S]
You disappeared impressively quickly. Was it the shenanigans, the undertones of compelling interpersonal relationships, or the drugs?
[Cat C]
I think I'm going to call you Rembrandt now, in memory.
Newt: in person
It wasn't the last straw. It wasn't even a straw, really. It was the fact that the ghosts had unearthed all the old-man-Jack clothes under the layers of carefully acquired and thrifted clothes that Jack actually wanted to wear coupled with the fact he was at least a year or so older given the face in the mirror and the memories flitting about in his head. Good joke, that. Go out, get blattered and remember more rather than less. It was weird, if you gave it any airtime, to wake up with a year compressed in the back of your head, a memory of girls and of assignments and shuffling a little further up the food chain of the local newspaper. London, he remembered London.
He remembered the girl at the party too, which was a little more weird, if you thought about it as a memory formed when dead. No thank you, Jack was capable of compressing things he didn't want to think about back into a suitcase at the very back of his head. But he was getting older. Whatever reversal, whatever old-man-Jack had in mind for his future, the time was ticking down and god he couldn't live like this, with a B and B room storing old things and a room held over full of fussy, old things and a permanent impermanence.
So the clear-out, of a few more things to take back to Dahlia's, presuming Dahlia was still there, became something else. He still had older-Jack's bank account, with dead-wife-money keeping it healthy (thanks, future-self, for all your terrible choices) and he dropped into the General Store and yanked half a dozen cards advertizing apartments off the board there to the scowling displeasure of the owner making money off leaving them up to gather dust. A call later and a visit and it was practically serendipity, if you believed in that.
But Newt was, in fact, meant to be at the B&B. And instead of just packing up the room and splitting, Jack wandered down the corridors, past old ladies who tried to pinch whatever was on offer, apart from his cheeks, he knocked on the door of his younger - now probably actually older, at this point in time? Wasn't that weird? - brother and waited.