Re: Gotham: Jake & Clem
[First thing he noticed right off was the way the light worked in this room. Light and the way it smelled, both real different from the corridor in the mean-looking hotel and the place in Marvel that had been a stopping place, stead of some place people set down long. He didn't mean to notice it first, toeing into the line of the door but Jake noticed things before he noticed people and maybe that was backwards but things were right out in front of you.
There was music, the slow and soft and sad kind that pulled some string inside that had come loose someplace between the truck and driving with eyes gritted over with no sleep and the hostel with the thick layer of grime and he pressed his tongue up against the tip of his lower teeth squeezing away all that undoing.
His aunt Clem, she hadn't explained out zombies calm as if it meant nothing and she hadn't left him alone years on years. Clem missed his momma as much as he missed her himself, and when he'd been small enough to get away with crying some, Clem hadn't said a thing but hugged him tight. He'd been real small to start, small enough to think all that blond and the smile made her an angel out of a story, and then he'd gotten old enough to know she was family, which was better.
He looked for blond now and he hadn't seen his momma in years, but as he approached the back of the couch, all that dark hair made him think of the crumpled photo folded precious in his wallet, and when Jake rounded, the backpack dropping to the floor with a heavy clunk, he didn't know for one whole minute into the next whether she was the woman sitting on a porch in a house he hadn't seen in years or his own aunt Clem.
And then he smiled, the curl of it real hesitant and he sank down onto the couch beside her.]