shadowtina (shadowtina) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2017-11-29 02:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | #september 2017, jen, jen x rostislav, rostislav |
Who: Jen and Rost
What: That darn hex bag
Where: From the cemetery to Joyland
When: Sunday 9/17
Status: Complete
Jen had not dared to bring the hex bag inside and since she couldn't go to Rost right away she had put it in a little box and hidden it outside. It was entirely possible that the bag was benign but she wasn't going to risk it and accidentally cursing the house she lived in. No way.
On Sunday she put on her raincoat and headed out to dig the box back up from the pile of rocks, relieved to find the bag still inside. She shoved both in her backpack and got on her bike, making her way to the cemetery. It was long past due to neutralize or make use of this bag and Rost was the only person she knew who would know what to do with it.
By the time she got near the cemetery she was in for a bit of a shock. The garden had been sealed off. There was crime scene tape and cop cars everywhere. She stopped at a safe distance, balancing on one foot, the other still one the pedal as she stared at the commotion. it was quite likely that her dad was there so she didn't dare go too close but her heart was pounding now. Had something happened to Rost? No one would have told her if something had, nobody knew they were friends and this reminded her how bad the downside of secret friendships could really be. What if he was dead? Something bad had obviously happened here and she was about to give in and go find Grady to ask what was going on when she spotted Rost standing by the fence with an umbrella. He might be a sad sight but for Jen it was the best thing she'd seen ever. He was far enough away from the cop cars that she didn't worry about joining him, getting back on her bike and closing that distance between them. "Jesus," she said as she slowed to a stop in front of him. "I thought you were dead or something. Are you okay?"
It had been a bad morning for Rost. Probably the worst one he’d had in years. He’d gotten drunk enough to sleep the night before, and hadn’t woken up until sometime after nine. The rain against the top of his trailer was soothing, and he was dead tired. But duty called, and Rost had to make his rounds even in the rain. He’d gotten up and gotten ready, and then opened the door to one of the more horrible things he’d ever witnessed. Mrs. Mercer’s body had been laying at the bottom of his steps, right in front of his trailer, her swollen body twisted at unnatural angles like she’d just been tossed there like a rag doll. Left out in the rain. For him.
He’d sat on those porch steps for a long time, hardly even feeling the water pounding against his head and shoulders, unable to do anything but stare numbly. He’d finally wept for her for a while, and the fact that he couldn’t cover her up without disturbing the crime scene, then gone back inside to call Grady directly to tell him what had happened. The next few hours had passed in an uncomfortable and awful blur as he told the police yet again that he hadn’t heard or seen anything. He was obviously emotional, so he hoped they believed him. It almost didn’t matter to Rost though, not today.
After a lot of phone calls, Grady had informed Rost that he was closing off the cemetery for now, and Rost had to vacate the premises. The only upside was they were going to put him up in the bed and breakfast for a while. Rost had packed a sheriff-approved single bag and his guitar, and walked out of the graveyard. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to fully leave yet though, hovering near the fence and watching the cops come and go in their rain slickers.
He wasn’t aware he was being approached until Jen spoke, and when she did Rost gave a little jolt. It took him a second to register who she was, then he blinked at her rapidly as the words processed. “Oh ... yes,” he answered, doing his best to dredge up a little smile. “Hello, Bug. Just some trouble in paradise.” He couldn’t very well tell a teenager that he’d woken up to a corpse at his door.
Jen looked over her shoulder, pushing the hood of her raincoat to her cheek to better see before turning back to Rost. "Looks like big trouble," she said with a little frown. He looked shaken and she'd never seen her dad with so many deputies in one place before. "Did someone die?" She could come up with theories on what had happened all day and never guess the right one because the cemetery was a weird place. Hopefully Rost would just tell her. She didn't think he should be standing here alone no matter what had happened so it had now become her civic duty to pester him for a bit.
Looking at Jen and her open curiosity put a lump in Rost’s throat. Not that it was difficult today, he kept getting sniffly off and on. He always did his best not to lie to her, though Rost sometimes padded the truth a bit. Since she was asking directly, he decided to leave out the details and just tell her. “A resident was stolen a couple of nights ago,” he said after a moment’s thought. “And then returned sometime last night. Not in her proper place, and not with proper respect.” It broke his heart all over the place, and he felt like he’d failed entirely at protecting the sanctity of this hallowed ground. He deserved to be banned from it for a while.
He looked so sad, Jen wanted to hug him but that would be weird and she wasn't all that great at hugging people anyway. She wrinkled her nose in sympathy and nodded. "You should get out of the rain," she told him. "I've got something to show you - ask you, really. Come get coffee with me?" Coffee would do him good, or hot cocoa - which was what she was planning on getting - anything warm somewhere nice, really.
Maybe it was pitiful that an invitation to coffee from a teenager made him want to cry again, but there it was. Rost was fond of Jen, she’d been visiting him for years now, and he’d watched her grow into someone very much worth knowing. She was right -- he should get out of the rain and get something warm in his stomach. Rost was fairly certain he hadn’t eaten anything yet that day. Everything was fuzzy and surreal. “All right,” he agreed solemnly. His bag and guitar case were at his feet, and Rost gathered them up, one on his shoulder and one in his free hand. He didn’t have access to a vehicle anymore -- that stayed at the cemetery -- so they would be walking to wherever Jen wanted to get coffee.
Jen got off her bike and after a few seconds she stopped again and offered him to put the bag on the rack. It didn't look that heavy but he was already carrying so much. It would take a while to walk down to Joyland from there but she didn't mind, even if it was raining. Rost had always been good to her and she was determined to buy him a coffee and cheer him up a little. "You can't go home?" she asked as they walked. "Where are you gonna go?"
Tired as he was, Rost let Jen and her bike assist with his bag. It wasn’t big, mostly just clothes and a couple of books and trinkets, but it was hard to carry everything and wield his umbrella too. He walked alongside her, trying to focus more on the moment and failing for the most part. “Not for a while,” he answered Jen’s question, glancing over. “I will be at the bed and breakfast.” He didn’t know how long the investigation would take, he just hoped the city would keep paying for a room for him somewhere. He didn’t want to be homeless, especially not in miserable weather like this.
"Not room seven," Jen warned him though he knew all about that. She couldn't be sure but she thought he might have been one of the people who had told her about that room at Juniper. "Just say no to that room." She would have to ask her dad for more details about what was going on at the cemetery, as much as he didn't like talking about cases she felt like she'd made a little progress with him after they met at the tunnel. Mostly she was curious about how long Rost would have to stay away. It didn't really seem fair, keeping a guy from his home and making him pay for a hotel. She of course didn't know how these things worked and assumed Rost was paying for his own room.
Rost gave a faint chuckle and nodded. He’d heard some stories about room seven at the bed and breakfast, and he believed every one of them. Most hotels in the world had those sorts of stories, he was pretty sure. Places where people were always coming and going always had stranger energy, they were more attractive to spirits and dark forces. Unfortunately, Juniper Bed and Breakfast only had seven other options for a room. Rost just hoped it wasn’t full up for the fall season. “Not room seven,” he confirmed, a little touched that she cared about his safety. “You will have to come visit me, it is probably the fanciest place I will ever live.” Plus, without a day of work to do at the graveyard ... what was he going to fill his time with? Anxiety threatened to drag his mind away, so Rost tried to focus on Jen instead. “How are you doing, Bug?”
"Better than you," Jen told him knowingly, giving him a sympathetic smile before shrugging one shoulder. "School is boring, my dad's job is really interesting but he won't tell me much about it because he still sees me as a little girl." It was hard to imagine she wouldn't get more information out of him if she was a boy, if Hunter had any interest in anything actually interesting he'd probably hear all about it, she was sure.
That wasn’t terribly surprising to Rost. If he was the sheriff, especially in a town like this one, he would want to shield his daughter from the realities of what all was going on too. Granted, Jen was a special girl with a keen mind and she seemed more mature than most girls her age. But a father was a father. “Do not be too hard on him,” he murmured. “Old habits are difficult to break. It is his job to protect you.” He didn’t know much about parenting, obviously, but he did know that.
"I'm so not hard on him," Jen replied with a shake of her head and a little roll of her eyes. "I think he needs more taking care of than I do but he'd never admit it." She looked up at Rost again, studying his profile. He still looked so forlorn and she had no clue how to help him, especially while they were still out there in the rain with no hot beverages in their bellies yet. "Is he nice to you? He's not giving you any trouble, is he?" She could easily see how her dad might think Rost was a troublemaker or something, he was hardly the type of guy cops loved or anything. Jen just happened to see through it. Rost was weird but he was the nice kind of weird and she'd seriously sulk at her dad if he was mean to him.
Rost had the vague feeling that a lot of daughters of single fathers felt that way about them. Maybe they were right. His eyebrow quirked at her concern over him, and he looked over at her with a tiny ghost of a smile. “No, no trouble,” he assured her. In spite of everything, it kind of warmed his heart that she cared. And not only that, sounded like she would give her dad an earful if he wasn’t being nice to Rost. “He has given respect and belief, and that is all I can ask for.” It was more than he got from a lot of other people in town, and Rost was grateful for it. Sheriff Barrett might privately think he was a total crackpot, but he didn’t act like it, and that was what mattered. He arched his brow higher at Jen. “Is he nice to you?”
Jen nodded and smiled at Rost again. She might not see her father very often because of his job but he had always been kind to her and she never once questioned that he loved her. "He's so stressed all the time, I don't think he wants me and and my brother here but I can take care of myself. I don't know about Hunter though." She grinned and for the rest of their walk she told him a few things about both her brother and her father and why she wasn't so sure either of them could take good care of themselves. By the time they arrived at Joyland she locked her bike and hurried inside, shivering a little as she shrugged off her jacket and hung it up. "Come on, I'll buy you a coffee and then you can let me pick your brain some, okay?" she said to Rost as she sat down, rubbing her arms through her cardigan.
It was nicely distracting to listen to Jen talk about her family. It made him feel kind of sadly nostalgic, as he missed his own big family. But that was an old wound, and it was a feeling he was used to dealing with. Today he preferred to focus on how cute it was that Jen was so protective of the men in her immediate family. Honestly, Rost didn’t doubt that she could take good care of them. She was such a fierce little flame. Rost peeled his own coat off and hung it on the back of the chair before he sat down. He had his bag and guitar case too, not wanting to leave them outside. It would be just his luck to lose them. “My brain is not at the best today,” he told her as he sat down as well and crossed his lanky arms on the table. “But I will try to be picked.”
Jen ducked down to where she'd put her backpack on the floor next to her chair, carefully opening it - it was so wet, ugh - and digging out the plastic bag that contained the metal box. She hadn't wanted to get her backpack all dirty and that damn thing had been outside.
"I hope this is a good thing then," she said quietly. "And not a bad thing. I don't want to pile on, but I do need your help." She carefully opened the box without removing it from the plastic bag and took the paper bag with the hex bag out before closing the box and shoving it back in the backpack. A bag within a bag within a box within a bag within a bag was perhaps a little excessive. Mostly it had been because of the rain but maybe a part of Jen had hoped that all those layers would keep some of the magic inside. It wasn't a rational thing but every little bit helped.
She put the paper bag on the table in front of her, staring solemnly at it before looking at Rost. "I found something and I need to know what it does."
Rost watched Jen unearth whatever it was with growing curiosity. A bag and a box and another bag with something she didn’t understand inside of it. Interesting. His eyebrow arched as she spoke again, and Rost reached for the paper bag in front of her. He wasn’t positive that he would be able to identify it, but he was pretty well versed in esoteric matters. More than a teenage girl, anyway. He pulled the bag closer to himself and opened up the top to peer down into it.
What was inside was a small black cloth bag, lumpy with something inside of it and tied up with leather string. Rost shook the paper bag a bit to get it to turn over, and he saw a symbol stitched on one side of the cloth. He gave a little grunt and closed the paper bag again. “I cannot say for sure what it does,” he told Jen evenly. “But is a hex bag. Made by a witch. Only they can know for sure.”
Jen had been braced for either bad news or good news, she really hadn't been expecting Rost not to know. "But you can ask someone, right?" she said with a quirk of a brow before leaning back as their waitress showed up to take their orders. Hot cocoa for Jen, black coffee for Rost and two slices of pie to make up for the shitty weather some. Jen leaned back onto the table when the waitress left, watching Rost curiously. "You know some witches." Maybe he deserved to know why it was so important so she lowered her voice even more and added, "We found it at the Cooperdale Tunnel. Maybe somebody cursed it."
“Cursed the tunnel? Perhaps,” Rost said. It wouldn’t surprise him to learn that many places around this town were cursed, if he was being honest. He knew it was a creepy place, and that someone had died there pretty horribly recently, but he didn’t know much about its history or what might be magically wrong with it. “Where did you find it at the tunnel?” Not that that detail would give him any real insight into what the bag meant, but he was curious himself.
"There was a hole in the wall," Jen told him. "Maybe twenty, twenty five feet into the tunnels. My dad found it, didn't think it was anything important since it's old and all. It looked like was kinda shittily sealed in the wall with like... Poor concrete work. It was all crumbling." She was trying not to be too excited about it but what if this was the cause for all the horrible things that happened there? Or somehow linked to it. Maybe destroying the bag would fix things somehow. It was naive to think that but it made her want to go looking for other hex bags around other strange crime scenes - just to check.
Rost nodded slowly as he stroked his moustache, gazing at the paper bag. He could ask around to the witches he knew -- it was even possible that one of them had put it there to try and ward off something in that place. Hex bags were only as good or as evil as the intent their creator put into them. He knew that wasn’t quite the answer Jen wanted, but it was the only one he had. “Someone did not want it to be found, at least,” he murmured. Rost gave Jen a faint smile. “Perhaps you have solved the problem.” He didn’t think so, it would probably take more than a hex bag to cause the kind of death that had just happened at the tunnel, but maybe it was a piece of it.
Jen wasn't gullible enough to think he actually believed that even if it would be amazing if that was the case. She was relieved to see their waitress bring them their order, cold and hungry as she was. "How do we get rid of it safely?" she asked once she was sipping her hot drink, warming her fingers against the cup. "Can you bring it to someone? Or do you know a way? I don't want to just leave it somewhere in case it's... You know. Bad."
Rost murmured his thanks to the waitress and pulled his coffee in close. It smelled heavenly, as did the pie. He dumped plenty of sugar into the mug and stirred it up before taking the first sip. Perfect. “I have many of these around the cemetery,” he told her nodding to the paper bag he’d pushed to one side once the plates had arrived. “But I know their intent. If I had to get rid of one, I would burn it. But since we do not know the intent of this one, I will ask a magical friend. Perhaps there will be some way for her to tell. If not, perhaps she can ... what is the word ... neutralize it. Take the teeth out.” Rost picked up his fork to dig into the pie, his stomach waking up now that there was food in front of him.
"Can you take it?" Jen asked. "Or do you want me to bring it somewhere?" It felt kind of mean to ask him to handle all of this now since he was already dealing with so much but Jen didn't feel comfortable keeping the bag or storing it somewhere where it might cause ill effects. If Rost wouldn't tell her who his magic friends were she'd need to rely on him to get this done and she trusted him implicitly.
Rost nodded. “I will take it,” he said, glancing at the bag again. He wasn’t naive enough to think his situation couldn’t get any worse -- it could always get worse -- but he wasn’t going to leave something potentially dangerous in the hands of a child he cared about. Jen might be savvy and mature for her age, but she was still very young, and she had a family to consider. An important family. “My best contact has been out of town. I will see if she can assist as soon as she returns.” He popped a bite of pie into his mouth and grunted his approval, feeling half-starved now, finally.
"You'll be careful, right?" Jen said. "I don't want to get you into trouble. I left it outside under a bunch of rocks, you know, in case it's a bad thing. The last thing you need is a curse or something." He was having a shitty day already and Jen was unable to do a damn thing to help with that. What was she going to do? Help him patrol the cemetery at night? Even if she wanted to there was no way she'd be able.
He chuckled a little at the mental image of Jen burying her multi-bagged treasure under some rocks. It wasn’t a terrible instinct -- the earth did have a grounding, containing effect -- but he would’ve put it in actual dirt, himself. “That was good thinking,” he told Jen, his smile coming a little easier now that he was warming up both inside and out. “I will be careful, I promise.” He suspected he was already cursed, but Rost wasn’t going to bring that up. Jen was sweet to be concerned about him. He arched a brow and pointed a fork at her. “As should you be. Leave magical artifacts where they are next time.”
Jen wrinkled her nose at that and shook her head. "If I had left it, some clueless sap might have taken it," she pointed out. "Maybe even my dad. I didn't wanna risk it." It was a good point but she could just picture her dad or one of the deputies sticking it in an evidence bag or tossing it away somewhere where it might do harm. At least she knew someone who could take care of it. At least she knew it could be dangerous. "If I find another one I'll cover it up and let you know about it, deal?" That was a compromise and maybe if she found another one it wouldn't be right in the middle of her dad's crime scene.
Rost was a little amused that Jen didn’t count herself as a ‘clueless sap.’ And maybe she wasn’t. She’d known enough to know the bag was something, and that was a good start. She’d also turned it over to him -- someone who was more experienced in these things -- so he supposed Jen had plenty of clues. “That sounds acceptable,” he said, flashing her a gold-toothed grin. Rost switched fork hands and offered his right one over the table for a shake of agreement. “You are a good and vigilant person, Bug. The town is lucky to have you full time now.”
Jen laughed a little at that, then nodded solemnly. "It is," she said before breaking into a grin again. "We're probably the only thing standing between this town and total mayhem." She raised her cup of cocoa in a toast to that and drank some more before putting it down to eat some more pie. In all the time she'd known Rost they'd never actually done this - sat down in a public space and eaten together. It was nice, like a nice angle to their friendship, and an affirmation that he wasn't ashamed to be seen with a 'dumb teenager' in public.
He wasn’t quite sure that the town wasn’t in the midst of total mayhem, but Rost didn’t say so. It may have just felt like it to him because it was hitting so close to him. His life was in upheaval, that was for sure, but when was that anything new? He lifted his own cup in a toast to her, then took another long drink. Rost preferred the privacy of his trailer and the cemetery when he spent time with young people, if only to avoid the suspicion that a grown single man hanging out with teenagers usually elicited, but this was a special exception. Not just for Jen -- he needed the company too. It was doing him good. Rost dug into his pie, feeling a bit more content with the world and the day to come.