jack's room, x-mansion
[The lights were off. Jack spoke hardly a word on the way back to the mansion. He had never been there before, but he didn't seem jarred by the unfamiliar building.
He followed where he was led, and hardly seemed to notice he was covered in blood until someone pointed out the shower. That penetrated enough to seem like a good idea, so he got under the spray still wearing what was left of the uniform they gave him, rinsing rust red down into the drain, eyes shut, not thinking about anything. He put on the clean clothes someone had left in his room when he was still wet from the shower, got into the bed, and slept.
When Max opened the door it was 24 hours later, the room was dark, and Jack wasn't in his bed. He was seated in the wide windowsill, cross-legged, looking out over the grounds. He was following every moving thing that crossed his line of sight with his eyes. It was startlingly easy to pick out animals as they darted between trees and skittered through the grass in the low light, or to spot individual leaves on the trees as they collided with each other in the wind. He could hear the sound of the other inhabitants of the manor bustling around downstairs. He'd heard Max well before she walked up, so he didn't flinch or start when she opened the door, just looked over his shoulder to see who opened the door, tension in the line of his curved body in the sill until he recognized her, tension that didn't entirely fade when he identified her.
There were four narrow, parallel holes in the wall beside the bed, caught in the light of the open doorway. They were at just the right height for a strike while still half-awake, half-dreaming.
He looked at her for a little while. She was different, but still somehow the same, and that was good.]
You still smell like smoke.
[Some of the damage and gravel had gone out of his voice from the day before, and the scoremarks on his back, just visible above the collar of his thin t-shirt, were even more faded. He looked the same as he had before, still the same Jack with the same unruly hair and hard-set mouth. But he looked past her, not at her, and then he turned his head back, looking outside again.]