Re: [Jack & Clem: family reunion]
Jack had only a dim memory of Clementine's wedding and what there was, was like newspaper steeped in whiskey, thin and soggy and torn through in places. He remembered his cousin glowing: the expensive, polished and primped kind of glow rather than the sort of bare-faced joy that he remembered from his own. He had largely ignored the man married to Clementine, because it was about as much as he could do to hold down the wedding repast and he had been noisily and messily ill into a rosebush shortly after the first dance.
He stared at her now. Jack had very blue eyes, once. They had been knife-bright and glittered when he was particularly interested in someone or something but the alcohol had washed much of the color out of him until he was pale and bloodshot and his pupils were pinpricks. "You were arguing," he repeated blankly. Jack had inhabited a world where when you argued, you threw things. Or you smashed things. Or you shouted loudly enough that the neighbors banged the ceilings or the walls - and then you fucked or laughed your way out of the argument.
None of his experience of arguments ended up with either of them pitching out of a window. "But what did he say that was so rude and nasty," he said now, because it stood to reason that this might shed a small pool of light on where to even begin. Clem clearly didn't want to pry an answer out of the man, but appeared to expect to have him do it.
This was why he'd moved somewhere small and desolate, where no one knew his name. "Did you actually speak or one of those," he waved a hand at the ancient computer on the desk, "Things?" Forums, Jack considered, were not conversation. You could lie with relative ease, which made him much more comfortable.