InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "To Cross the Road?"

Audrey Jensen (fknaudrey) wrote in somerealityrpg,
@ 2019-07-30 00:16:00

Entry tags:

active: five hargreeves

WHO: Audrey Jensen, Five Hargreeves
WHEN: Some nebulous time between 7/20 and 7/30, approx 2 AM.
WHERE: Abandoned subway station.
WHAT: Discussions of dubious events.
WARNING: References to past sexual assault, self-harm, and murder; copious drinking. More will be added if necessary.

They were halfway through the 6 PM showing of Midsommer when she texted Five to let him know that she'd stopped by the liquor store on her way to work and, if he was feeling like a story, to let her know where to meet. It wasn't so much that she'd finally worked up the nerve, but that she'd had the thirty bucks burning a hole in her pocket and they happened to have her brand of bourbon there when she stopped in to have a look around. She took it for fate, providence, serendipity, some bullshit like that. She bought the bottle, sent the text, and an hour later she had a location. It seemed appropriate. She sat through Crawl at 9:30, programmed the Google Maps on her phone, and peered briefly into the lobby to make sure there weren't any kids messing around before going back to the man-eating alligators, letting the cheesy creature feature take her mind off the cold weight slowly sliding down on her shoulders. It shouldn't have felt so heavy, and yet it did.

By the time she'd gotten all of the chattering teenagers out of the theater and cleaned the sticky amalgamation of candy and soda off the floor, it was that ungodly time where time wasn't really real anymore. That also felt right. She was getting used to cabs and subway lines the same way she'd been used to trollies and busses back home. The same general idea, just a different map to follow. The fact that it was right about that time when all the bars were emptying out didn't really bother her. It was just noise, just bodies, and she'd always carried herself with a certain air of "fuck off". Anyone who tried something had to anticipate that she was going to bite back. She stuffed her vest down in her bag with the bottle of Four Roses Single Barrel and a pair of shatterproof glasses and headed straight for the subway station, her fingers wrapped the taser in the front pocket of her bag. One could never be too careful, after all. Even if it was fake New York, it was still New York.

It took a while, and it really was the end of the line. She was practically the last person on the train when the car emptied out and the last few tired (and some heavily inebriated) passengers made their way upstairs and into the night again. But Audrey went on, along the gently curving walkway and fluorescent lights, the graffiti, and occasional rat; her boots hollow and empty on the subway tile. Weird passageways jutted out from the walkway, some of them lit and some of the cast in total darkness, but Audrey kept glancing down at her phone, a little green dot slowly moving closer and closer to a little blue dot until the two finally intersected and she glanced around, walked ten feet further, and took an abrupt right into a closed-off stairway. Five was already there, waiting, and Audrey released her grip on the taser for the first time since stepping out of the theater to reach into her bag and pull out the bottle of bourbon with a smile instead.

"Nearly top shelf," she said. "Single barrel. Kentucky. Did you already do a surveillance sweep?"

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jumps
2019-08-02 03:49 am UTC (link)

A soft, almost smile tugged at the corners of his lips as Audrey spoke, as he saw that she had understood him. When was the last time anyone had understood him about anything? Had anyone? For a moment, he thought Klaus might have, but then he'd let himself get distracted by a briefcase and the impending doom of his entire world. Other than that, however, he could not name a single person who ignited that strange spark of pure recognition in him. She'd understood his quote and, now, his anecdote, something he thought no one outside of his family would get without explanation (and he wasn't so convinced everyone inside his family would get it, either). For one moment, he wondered if this was what it was like to not be so alone in the world.

Sitting still, he listened as she spoke, eyebrows furrowing. He already had an idea of where the story was going based on their previous conversation, but that didn't mean he enjoyed actually hearing aloud about Audrey's girlfriend. Or about how she'd been used as a means to control her.

Looking down at his glass, Five quietly spoke. "I tried to save the world, and no one understood. One life to save billions... But someone I cared about was used against me to save that one life." He set his glass down and made short work of refilling it, letting himself briefly get lost in that simple act. The weight of the bourbon bottle, the soft splashing of the liquid, the right amount of pressure to recork the bottle. He didn't want to think about Dolores, and he especially didn't want to think about the ultimatum Luther had given him. And he certainly didn't want to think about how there was a very real possibility that that one life would have been the wrong life to prevent the apocalypse, that it wouldn't have made a difference at all.

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fknaudrey
2019-08-05 11:02 am UTC (link)

She liked that smile. It was small, subtle, but it was there and it made her feel safe and understood. At that moment, she needed that. Everything felt so raw and vulnerable, exposed, like an entire layer of skin had been peeled off and left the very air around her stinging the nerves underneath. But one simple smile was enough to settle some of that. If she was going to mix metaphors - and, hell, why not, her emotions were always such a mess that it felt like a thousand different things at once anyway - that feeling of fear and anticipation was like the waves of dread the came at the edge of some high up place; the l'appel du vide. And that same rush came in a smaller way in the darkness at the bottom of a staircase when you thought there was one step only to discover there wasn't one. A swift rush of dread and then safety. She had expected the height and she had found security. She'd found Five there to catch her.

"Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges," she murmured softly, not really expecting him to place one line from a nearly five-hundred line poem, but she'd always loved Swinburne and Notre-Dame de Sans Merci was one that was especially dear to her in all its dark sensual imagery. It was her own way of acknowledging Dolores without actually saying it out loud, in case she was a subject that Five wasn't ready to talk about yet.

Audrey unwound herself slightly, moving her feet down a step from where she'd been tucked tight into herself, braced against the emotional onslaught she'd been preparing for, the one that never came. She rolled her shoulders and stretched out a cord of tension in the left side of her lower back, then picked up her glass again. "There's no sense in thinking about the things I could have or should have done differently," she said, pausing to take a drink, letting the alcohol chase away some of the lingering numbness in her limbs. It soothed that cold that had born down on the back of her neck and wrapped around her chest. "I've torn myself up over it already, all the mistake I made, and it doesn't make one bit of difference. It happened the way it happened. If I could go back and undo it, maybe I would. Maybe I'd undo all of it. And maybe it would have happened anyhow - with or without me sparking the fire. I can't say."

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jumps
2019-08-06 04:41 am UTC (link)

Instantly his eyes went from the bottle in his hand to Audrey, the muscles of his face twitching slightly -- surprise and curiosity, interest and wonder. And, again, that strange spark of recognition, of being seen, truly seen. It was almost petrifying, to have someone he barely knew cause such frisson in his stomach and down his spine. Who are you, he wanted to ask. How do you know me? he wanted to whisper, to search for answer he didn't think could possibly exist.

"Dolores," he breathed, barely a whisper. Was it the comic books she had mentioned? Had Dolores been in those? Or was it something else? Who are you? he wondered again, his face open, a strange vulnerable feeling in his chest, as he looked at her for the answer that he knew he wouldn't find so easily.

As she spoke again, Five watched her, his drink forgotten, the bottle of bourbon in his hand ignored. Who was this person, he wondered as he listened, who could have such an entirely different experience than he, yet also share so many similarities to his own? He could change the past, but he'd tried, when he'd been willing to do whatever it took to see his family again, to save his family, it hadn't been enough. And he had no idea if his second attempt would work. He had no idea if, in the end, all the effort in the world would matter. And, for a brief moment, it was almost okay. Almost.

"It's like The Time Machine. Not the book. The movie from 2002," he said quietly, finally setting the bottle down. "He goes back in time to save his fiancée, and, in the end, he can't." He looked at his glass on the step, at the liquid inside, debating on picking it up. "It isn't comforting, but maybe some things find a way to still happen." Suddenly he didn't want to pick that glass up. "But it's just a story," he added, looking back up at her. "In the end, it's about what you do after the bad thing happens that matters more. And that shapes you just as much as the catalyst. Sometimes more."

Was he explaining it right, he wondered. It made sense in his head, but so many things made sense when he didn't have to explain it. And it was so difficult -- so very difficult -- to admit that he had tried to change the past and failed, that, in the end, some things happened. Part of him still believed that, maybe, just maybe, he could change it, that if he wasn't the only one to know about the future then maybe that would change it, but he would never know now.

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fknaudrey
2019-08-11 07:03 pm UTC (link)

She tilted her head slightly, a look of surprise and amused curiosity mingling on her face. She really had not expected him to recognize the quote and yet the look on his face and the soft whisper than followed it said that he obviously had. It was sort of amazing, really. She felt that cool excitement bloom up in his chest and her cheeks warmed as a smile slipped onto her features. "Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs," she murmured, her French accent decidedly more Creole than Parisian. But there was still that curl to the soft consonants, the thing that spoke of a degree of fluency.

"Sometimes in the middle of surviving we either forget to or just don't have the chance to live," she said. "Maybe this place is the after, the second chance, though? I'm not a natural optimist, but I can't help but think of it that way." After all, New York was supposed to be her second chance. It would be nice if she could exist in a place where the last two years didn't constantly haunt her. Every house, every building, every face, was a reminder of what had happened. But this place was different. Brooke was here, but Brooke shared her feeling of wanting to run from it as far as they could. Leave Lakewood behind. She wasn't sure what she would do if Noah or Emma showed up. She missed them, yes, but it still hurt and she still needed a little more time to find herself. And then there was the sinking, terrifying thought of Kieran or Piper returning from the dead and somehow showing up here...

She banished that line of thinking with another quick swig of bourbon and sighed. "There are a lot of people here looking for a way to get back where they came from because things are happening there, big things, important things, but I wouldn't mind staying. I've met good people here. There are things I want to get back to, too, but I have to think that there's some version of me back there handling that as well as I would handle anything."

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jumps
2019-08-17 08:42 pm UTC (link)

A second chance. Was that what this place offered? A place to start over, a place to live without the same worries he had at home? No looming threat of an apocalypse or near soul crushing loneliness. No desperate need to save his family, to see his family again and just be around them even if he'd long since lost the ability to know how to do that. Because most of them were here. They'd been here when he'd been hijacked during his attempt to save them. He still didn't know what had happened to Allison and Luther, if they were safe somewhere in another time in his own reality, or if they would show up here but later. But Vanya and Klaus and Diego were there, and, maybe, just maybe, he had a second chance with them. If they let him.

And, if he let himself, maybe he would have a second chance at a decent life. Maybe not a happy life, but something filled with anything but how stay alive from one moment to the next.

"I don't think," he began, picking up his glass, "that there's much of anything for me to go back to." And if there was, he thought as he took a sip, he suspected it would contain a lot of the same things as before; the Handler and the Temps Commission hunting him -- hunting his family -- the threat of an apocalypse, and the struggle to stay alive just a little bit longer. It was exhausting, and Five was tired -- so damn tired. He didn't think he could ever rest properly, but that didn't stop exhaustion from pulling at his mind, from wanting some kind of respite from having to be on high alert.

Idly, he rolled his glass between both hands, watching the liquid inside slosh about. "I wouldn't mind staying, either," he said after a moment, glancing up at her. "I don't know about doppelgängers, but if I have one..." His brow furrowed slightly, his lips pressed together for a second. The possibility of having another version of himself back home was strange and presented its own mystery, though his brain didn't want to dwell too much on it just yet. Thankfully. It was too full to handle one more thing right then. He shook his head slightly. "I don't know. "Maybe he's handling things like yours is. Maybe he's handling it better than I could." Or maybe, if he had a double, that double was dead. A depressing thought, but he couldn't help it from formulating.

"Regardless," he raised his glass toward her, "to second chances and new friends." Presumptuous, perhaps, to call her a friend, but what else did you call someone who saw you so clearly when no one else did? He quickly drained his glass before he could think too much about that.

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