Jack was bloody blissfully unaware Eddie had packed up and shipped out. And yes, actually, he would have minded. Eddie was not a man he stopped by the arcade for often - too many young people who sloped and oozed out of the line of sight of anyone who gave the merest hint of an adult presence. But Eddie had stepped in on a number of occasions, provided a guide-book, a wry, slighting humor that was whenever it went to bloody ground, missed. Nor was he aware Helena had been broken into composite pieces, made up of trauma and languages she didn't know she knew, like boiling down to the bone.
No, Jack wasn't here because he had a family that had torn itself to flitters. Jack was here because he felt trapped. It was an easy enough deduction, if you came up for sobriety long enough, and the fact was Jack didn't much feel like deducing it, thank you. He wasn't bloody Holmes and it wasn't the hounds of anything, save the wilds of town gossip. It was the faintest suggestion that here was where he'd put roots, but without any sort of stretch of brick-work or trellis to climb them against and instead the wide maw of the world yawned and gave no hint of missing him terribly. Which was after all, the reason for the foul mood that had simmered even as he pretended it didn't.
It had begun with the loss of the trip overseas, if you really wanted to get into the grit. Jack didn't, but there it was. Getting shot had been a bloody inconvenience, but it hadn't really inconvenienced the editor, had it? So no, with the ashes of the newspaper (and his local reputation - not entirely stellar given a predisposition to throwing computers out of windows) faintly simmering and the class that had been postponed to the summer semester - some bloody use that did, did it? Jack felt like he had roots that were slowly drying out and every sense that the world was closing in like a fist.
So he had done precisely as he had before, the last time it had felt like the moment before the thunder, thick and hot and present. He'd gotten blotto, regularly enough to shut out what wasn't there and keep it from bothering him. But he wasn't dead and phantoms celebrating early summer was a sight that didn't take a plane-ride and an interested editor to get a ticket to see.
He wasn't old enough for the sixties and seventies. Fuck off. He hadn't seen this, he'd been born a year after the seventies died but christ, you didn't need to have lived through the decade to know what it looked like. Either this was immersive fucking theatre that they'd spunked money into, or it was another case of the weird and the wonderful truly gate-crashing Repose and its nearest and dearest.
It had been dead outside. A car-lot littered and wrecked, wrangled metal and the dull stillness of places that were sucked clean of sound. Now it was loud and it was alive and the story of it was a red thread that looped Jack loosely to the outside world, but god, there was a lot to enjoy about this place.
Jack wandered, with a blunt from a group riding the ferris wheel and with a flask in his pocket he had every intention of supplementing the oiled feeling of rolling through the world slightly drunk enough to rub the edges away.