Path of the Vampire forum

OOC: Backdated to November 6th

<Clover> He still hadn’t texted. He still hadn’t called. And she hadn’t put forth any effort to bridge the gap between them. If he wasn’t back in an hour, she’d vowed, then she would go and find him. If he wasn’t back in two hours, she’d sworn, then she would go and find him. He wasn’t back. Clover traded out her pajama shorts for a plain pair of black leggings and pulled her messy hair up into an equally messy bun. She wasn’t worried. She had a secret sort of determination that he would come home, that he would text her if he needed her. Hadn’t she already checked her phone seventeen times? Yes, and she’d kept count. Her lack of messages meant he was fine. Jesse was okay.

As she collected her phone and searched for the tome to Circle, she began to wonder if she should simply summon him. But he hadn’t called. How many times had she reminded herself of the fact? She wasn’t worried, except she was worried. She’d put off her panic and paranoia by latching onto a promise she wasn’t even sure he could keep, one she wasn’t even sure he wanted to keep. When she finally used her tome, she arrived in a place filled with silence. Her sock-clad feet made dull sounds against the wood floors, despite the fact that she wanted to preserve the quiet. It was her focus on the absence of sound that really ruined her. Her right foot connected with the floor, but she slipped. She managed to let out a harsh gasp before her butt connected with the hard floor. Blood. The floor was wet with blood. As she looked up from the blood that coated her palms, she saw Jesse, or what was left of Jesse.

The smell of the blood mixed with an earthy undertone made her stomach churn. She crawled toward him, the knees of her leggings stained with his blood, and placed her hands - no, she didn’t place her hands anywhere. She let her hands hover over his body. “Jesse,” she spoke clearly, trying to push aside the overwhelming need to vomit, “you have to open your eyes now. Just l-let me know you’re there, okay?” She gagged then. She turned her head away from him and buried her nose into the crook of her arm.


<Jesse Fforde> The dreams came and went. Drifting dreams that could have been consciousness but could have been just that – dreams. Nightmares. Visions. Like when someone wakes up to their alarm but turns it off and goes back to sleep, only to dream that they got out of bed and made their way to work. Those were the kind of dreams Jesse had – of going for a shower. Of patching himself up. Of hiding away somewhere – of trying, at least, to hide his wounds. Impossible, but anything is possible in a dream, isn’t it? Anything but lay there in the middle of the floor for anyone to stumble over, like some kind of display.

It was the last thing he wanted. He didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he had done a stupid thing. He didn’t want anyone to feel any guilt because they’d left a grown man to his own devices. So many people had told him to call them if he needed them. To call if he needed help. To call if he was about to do something stupid. But who the **** ever thinks of calling someone before they do something stupid? Especially if they think that someone was better off without them, anyway.

At one point he dreamed they were celebrating Christmas. He felt their movements through the floor and heard their laughter from a distance, but he wasn’t with them. He dreamed of Jormun, wrapped around his throat with her fangs stuck into his temple. He dreamed that he was falling. He was falling, and at any second he was going to hit the ground and shatter into a million pieces. He twisted in mid-air – he saw the ground rising up. When he landed he didn’t shatter, though. It was just a dull shove and his eyes flew open.

Clover was there. He wasn’t in bed. He wasn’t bandaged up. He wasn’t hiding his wounds. He wasn’t in the bathtub. He didn’t know whether he was still dreaming, until he opened his mouth to apologise. To immediately tell her it wasn’t her fault. But he coughed instead, fresh blood bubbling in his throat. He remembered, too late, that his voice was non-existent, voice-box ripped out, or damaged too much for use. His skin was pallid and grey. There was nearly no blood left to spill. He tried to move, to comfort her, but with what hand? It was gruesome. It was nightmarish. He had to close his eyes again. Squeeze them shut as he willed himself to try harder.


<Clover> She just couldn’t look at him. Every time her eyes wandered back to him, to his mess of a body, she felt as if she were being crushed; she felt as if all of his injuries were magnified and slammed in front of her over and over again. Once the gagging had stopped, she couldn’t avoid looking at him. There was no other reason for her to look away. Although his injuries were almost horrific in nature, she’d seen worse. Hadn’t she spent hour upon hour dissecting her victims? It was different when she knew the person. It was different when she hadn’t been the one to cause the damage.

The sound that alerted her to his consciousness wasn’t the sound that she craved. It wasn’t his voice. Clover stared down at him as he tried to talk. She finally let her eyes take in the rest of his body. He looked as if he’d been in a fight, but had he actually fought? Had he actually done anything to try and prevent the injuries? And what happened to his assailants? Would she ever know? The more she looked at him, the more she wanted to get up and walk away. She wanted to leave him to bleed out on the floor; she wanted to leave him for someone else to stumble across. Because he hadn’t called. Because he hadn’t tried. Because she had to look at him in such a state and he didn’t seem like he gave a damn. He didn’t care. That was it. He just didn’t care. He was giving up.

Clo shifted around to sit next to him, but she didn’t touch him. She rested her head in her hands and tried to think about anything but the blood that had soaked into her clothing and dried upon her hands. Something inside of her told her to cry. A familiar voice in the back of her mind asked her why she wasn’t sobbing her eyes out. She’d seen Jesse close his eyes, after all. She’d seen him slip into his own little moment.

“What the **** were you thinking? Why didn’t you call?” Clover didn’t know when she’d started screaming, but she knew when her voice cracked. Even though it hurt, even though the sound of her screaming made her even angrier, she pressed on. “Why didn’t you ******* call me? Why didn’t you call?” She shoved her hands against his side, trying to jar him enough to force him to look at her and listen to her. The multiple questions could have been condensed and simplified into a single question, but efficiency wasn’t on her mind.

“Look at yourself!” Clo sat up on her knees and gripped at his shirt. She tangled her fingers in the bloody fabric and held on as if she needed him as an anchor. “Jesse,” she stopped there because she’d felt the tears welling in her eyes, tears that trailed down her cheeks and cleared lines through the blood smudged on her face. She’d wanted to yell at him for being so incredibly reckless and so unbelievably thoughtless, but she couldn’t speak when she’d dissolved into quiet sobs. Her anger slowly faded to the background.


<Jesse Fforde> This was it. This was what he had feared. Whether he had stayed out in the wilderness or whether he had come home, the result was the same. He’d let someone down. He’d let Clover down. When his eyes closed he imagined himself again on the stops above ground, above where they lay now. He imagined that he’d stood up and, instead of walking out into the fog, he turned around and walked back inside. Instead of letting her end their conversation with just an ‘okay’, he should have sent her another selfie. He should have changed the subject. He should have called her, for the sound of her voice. Instead, he’d done something stupid.

And he couldn’t tell her that he had done something stupid, and that he was truly sorry that he hadn’t called. Because he had no voice to tell her. All he had was a slip-shod consciousness that threatened to take him out of service at any moment; a wary realisation that he wasn’t dreaming. He could hear Clover screaming. Opening his eyes, he could see her sobbing, and he wanted to sob with her. He wanted to desperately soothe her. A gargled breath of air escaped him when she shoved at him, his dim eyes turned to her.

This was not what he wanted. This was not the outcome he had been searching for. This only made things worse. And he was determined, then, to make it better. Somehow, to try to be stronger than he had been. To not give in to random whims. His nostrils flared as his good hand reached for Clover; as his fingers found her shoulder so that he could pull himself up. They’ll heal, these wounds. They aren’t the end of the world. Although he couldn’t think straight, he knew that he couldn’t stand to see Clover cry. He couldn’t stand that he had caused it.

She was angry. And then she was in despair. Both showed him without any kind of doubt that she cared beyond what he deserved and he wanted to cry for her. On her behalf. He didn’t drape himself over her, but he did try to push himself to his feet. He didn’t know what he was doing or where he was going. He didn’t know how to make her feel better, except to get up and take care of himself. To show her that he had slipped, but he was here and he wasn’t dead. And he was going to take care of himself, because he wanted to live. There was a sliver of something – even if he himself thought death might be more comfortable, he had to do this for Clover. He had to live, for her. It became his new mantra. For Clover.


<Clover> Eventually, he would get worse. Those were the thoughts that kept her crying. Eventually, he wouldn’t find any tie to bring him back. He would disappear in a way that was both familiar and unwelcoming--he would die somewhere away from his family and no one would ever really know the truth. Her miniature breakdown became tainted with the stench of dried blood. She just couldn’t take the smell anymore. Fresh blood. Old blood. Clover rubbed her palms against the sides of her thighs, but the blood wouldn’t come off; the red had found a home within the tiny crevices in her skin. Some part of her wondered if she’d ever wash the moment from her mind.

When he touched her, she flinched. It was an automatic reaction, just like a default setting ingrained into her muscles. But it took only a beat for her to reach out to him, to try and stamp her own anger and sadness down all over again. He'd reached out to her, she told herself. Not that long ago, Clo had no concern where she touched him or where she hit him, but her concern had crept into the equation. Even as the last of her tears mixed with the stains on her blue top, she tried helping him to his feet. She grabbed his left forearm and tugged; she wrapped an arm around him and tugged. Clo did everything she could to help. And she knew, as much as she'd wanted to abandon him, she wanted to stay.

As hard as it was for her to admit, she'd also had darker thoughts, thoughts she'd reserved for the worst of situations. Vulnerable people were her favorite kind of people. Vulnerable people ignited the desire to pounce. She'd considered hurting him even more. No one would have noticed. Those dark thoughts brought on the sweetest feeling and produced the most delightful images. But it was Jesse. She only had to remind herself. It wasn't a human; it wasn't just some meaningless vampire. It was Jesse. And so those horrible urges were eclipsed by other more appropriate impulses.

"Let me help you," Clo requested, her own voice raw. Her throat still burned from where she'd screamed at him. She had to turn her head away and cough a few times. She tried to clear some of the pain left behind from her shouts, from the repetition of questions and her lone exclamation. He couldn't even answer for himself. "I'll help you get cleaned up." Despite her disgust with him, despite the varying emotions his state evoked, she hadn't abandoned him. She'd stayed. She cared. Then again, hadn't she already told him that?


<Jesse Fforde> Why would he have expected that Clover wouldn’t help him? That he would stand on his own and she would stay there kneeling on the floor next to a pool of blood? Of course she was going to help him. The urge was there to push her away, to shake his head and indicate, somehow, that he would do it himself. He had got himself into this mess and it was his responsibility to fix it. As soon as he was standing upright, however, he swayed. Dark stars danced at the outer edges of his eyes and his knees almost buckled. There were times that he had felt this weak, but it was a sensation he had forgotten.

The emotions were there, running rampant in Jesse’s mind. The black thoughts that wouldn’t go away. That Clover was only helping out of obligation. And he hated to think that. He hated to think that he was a burden to her, but whose fault was that? Only his own. He should have let them finish the job, or he shouldn’t have walked out there to begin with. Now he had to suffer the consequences, and if his punishment was to feel like a ****, then so be it.

He nodded, his eyes closing momentarily as he tried to keep his own balance; as he tried to keep from letting his whole weight fall against Clover. He tried to pretend that he hadn’t done this on purpose; that there was no shame in accepting help. He imagined what it would be like to climb into a bed, clean, with clean sheets and the weight of a feather quilt covering him. That was his motivation. He assumed that they would go downstairs; when he looked toward the elevator, it felt as if it were a mile away. But his lips were set. And he was determined to stay awake. To be some kind of help to himself. Air rushed from his nostrils, but his whole body shuddered to keep from coughing. The airways were riddled with blood. He had to remind himself not to breathe.

One foot in front of the other – but he hoped, at least, that Clover would take the lead. He couldn’t make decisions when all he wanted to do was pass out.


<Clover> The elevator shone like a beacon. They had a short distance between them and its welcoming doors, but the distance doubled when factoring in their situation. She would have had to make sure the elevator’s movements didn’t bother him; she would have had to help him to the secret room. The numbers and responsibilities increased. With each passing second, she doubted the plan. The elevator no longer seemed like a temporary sanctuary.

“Let’s go to my apartment, okay?” The intonation suggested that he had some sort of choice, but he had no choice at all. With her arm around him, she steered him toward her apartment. She’d spent a few nights there, but that had been weeks ago. She’d only installed a security system and then she’d gone back to lingering in other places, like Larch. Her apartment wasn’t as lovely as it could have been, but she had the basics: She had furniture and linens and clothing. She had items that she’d needed.

What about first aid? What about his clothes? Clo gritted her teeth in an effort to silence her own thoughts, as if cutting off her own ability to speak had some influence on her mind. What about the mess Jesse had left behind? What about the smell? Oh, the smell. As if her thoughts had beckoned the stale smell of dried blood, she had to turn her head away from him.

“I’m sorry. It’s the blood,” she managed to explain, her words coming out in one run-on sentence. By the time they reached the door to her apartment, she felt as if she’d run a marathon. The door was unlocked; she had no need for keys. She guided him inside, which was more like a gentle nudge to the small of his back. There was a quiet click and then the lights came on. Her security camera had snapped a picture and sent the image directly to her phone, alerting her that someone had tripped the sensor.

“We’ll clean you up first. I don’t want you passing out in the bath, so we’ll...I guess we’ll see how it goes, okay?” Again, she had a subtle rise in her voice, a rise that suggested she’d left her words open for a response. She led him through the front area of her apartment to the bathroom. Since it was her own place, she’d turned the second bedroom into a bathroom.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse nodded. It was the only thing that he could do, even if it aggravated the wound at his neck. He’d forgotten about the apartments; he’d forgotten that one of them belonged to Clover. The rest remained unclaimed, as far as he was aware. One was for Marian, but he didn’t think it had even been touched. It was a miracle that Third Circle hadn’t suffered the same fate as Gresse’s; there was still time, but he didn’t want it to come to that. He clung to that tiny hope still beating somewhere within him, that one night this place would be thriving. If it were how he wanted it to be, Clover wouldn’t have been the first one to find him. He’d have landed and been inundated. But he knew if he tomed back there was a high chance that no one would be there.

Passing out in the bathtub sounded like a good idea, too. Jesse had done that, once. Often, he’d filled the bathtub and sunk below the surface of the water. The silence was a calming mechanism. It was meditative. He hadn’t tried it this time around, but maybe he would, a little more. Maybe it would help. It had helped last time.

His phone made the pocket of his jacket heavy. His journal was still tucked into the back of his pants. Things that Clover may or may not find as he shuffled with her into the bathroom. As soon as they were far enough inside he let go of Clover. He stumbled toward the toilet, falling heavily onto the close seat. He might have told her that he’d do his best not to pass out in the bathtub, but he didn’t try to speak. He kept blinking, holding his eyes open, forcing them to stay open. He reached for the corners of his jacket to pull it off, forgetting again about the missing hand. There was another gargle in place of a snort. It wasn’t really funny. But it was, at the same time.

After the moment had passed he gathered his wits and grabbed at one corner, doing his best to undress himself one-handed. Trying to help. Trying not to be entirely, utterly useless. He knew the blood bothered Clover. It bothered her just as it bothered him, and the sooner he could get cleaned up, the sooner she’d stop turning away from him as if he were a piece of meat swarming with maggots.


<Clover> He looked drowsy. She should have gone forward immediately and helped him, but she watched him first. She watched the way he stumbled and fell onto the closed lid of the toilet. And even though she knew he had trouble removing his clothing, she made no more to help him.

They’d left a trail of blood behind them, a trail of prints made by her socks and his shoes, one dotted with droplets and painted with thin ribbons. The grey stone floor looked like the beginnings of a painting. No one wanted that painting; at least, she didn’t want that painting. Frustrated, she bent down to rip the blood-soaked socks from her feet. The white and teal stripes had turned shades of red and brown, like the beginnings of rust. Clo clenched her fists around the fabric and then threw them to the side. Of course the socks collided with the only real decoration she had in her bathroom--her socks had tangled them atop her small potted plant.

Clover turned her back to Jesse and leaned down to turn the knobs on the bathtub. She didn’t have anything remotely masculine to add to the tepid water, so she didn’t add anything. No bubbles. No bath salts. While the water collected in the tub, Clo turned back toward Jesse. He’d made a sound that had her wrinkling her nose, mostly from some sick fascination. Had he been trying to speak again? When she went toward him, she kneeled down in front of him and helped him out of his shoes. She didn’t say anything as she continued helping. In the back of her mind, she wondered if he’d ever help her do the same.

“I wanted you with me. I needed you and you weren’t there. I didn’t call you or text you, and I should have. None of this would have happened if I had just reached out. I missed you,” she sighed, listening to the steady sound of the temporary waterfall. “I wanted you. I want you. I don’t want you to just...to just go. You’re working really hard at leaving me, aren’t you?”

Her tone had some humor to it, because she didn’t know what else to add to the conversation. She could have been bitter. She could have chastised him. She’d found his cell phone and eased the journal away from him. Every item went to the side.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse could tell that Clover was unhappy. That she was even angry. It looked like she was angry. Or fed up. She turned around to help him and Jesse could do nothing but let her; too slow to push her away, and unable to speak to tell her any different. Jesse was no longer snorting. No longer laughing at his self-inflicted misfortune. He stared at Clover as she spoke. The words settled and he couldn’t argue against them. Something clicked; something…

Want. Need. They were words that were applied in reverse. They were words that he had spoken to Clover on so many occasions. But had she ever said them out loud to him? Maybe she had. Maybe she had and he had not listened. He had not heard. Or he had not believed her. The way she said it now, though… it filled him with regret. They now made a beeline for where his heart should be, and they weighed it down. Drowned it. He’d come back because he was terrified of failing Clover but now he realised it was too late. As soon as he stepped out into that fog he had failed her.

When he was mostly undressed he laid his good hand on her shoulder. He squeezed, wanting her to look up at him. His eyes were rimmed red and gleaming, tears that he refused to let fall. He pointed to the door, and made a very large effort to stand on his own two feet without aid. He wouldn’t try to climb into the bathtub until she was gone. If she left him alone, that was. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and hug her, but he was covered in blood. He wanted to reassure her, to tell her that he wouldn’t do it again. Maybe it was a good thing that he couldn’t. But in that moment, he would have meant it. For her.

He would try. He would try as hard as he could to be there. To be strong. To stay where he should stay and not wonder of. To not do anything stupid, ever again.


<Clover> She had every intention of staying with him. The moment she’d offered her help, she’d drawn a path and created a journey. Leaving him alone was absolutely out of the question. For all she knew, he would start crying and thinking of more creative ways to kill himself. No, leaving him alone meant letting the worst thoughts into his head. She knew. She’d been alone. And look at where that had gotten her. She still remembered the bitter feelings evoked by her melancholy thoughts. Loneliness fed the most destructive monsters.

When she felt his hand on her shoulder, she didn’t look up at him. Maybe it was the guilt. Maybe it was the fear. Maybe every emotion she’d ever felt had caught fire. She felt exhausted, as if she’d been extinguished. Clover couldn’t avoid him forever. Her body betrayed her and her eyes rose to meet his. By that point, he’d motioned to the door. He’d motioned for her to leave, the one thing she didn’t want to do. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay. Hadn’t he heard that she’d missed him, or that she’d wanted him? She still missed him. She still wanted him.

“No.” Her voice was light and showed her own determination, despite the fact that she sounded like a petulant child. How dare he think she would go. Of course she wasn’t leaving. It was her bathroom. It was her apartment. She could have gone on for hours, but her thoughts came to a screeching halt. Her eyes had fallen to the bathroom floor and the line of red that led to the door and out into her apartment. She had to clean up the mess.

“I have to go,” she panicked, scrambling over to the cabinet beneath the bathroom sink. “Please don’t hurt yourself. Please just clean up. I’ll be back.” She grabbed towel after towel, disregarding the color and the size. When she stood up, she turned on the faucet and soaked the towels in water. The cleaners were in the kitchen, right? She had cleaners? She didn’t know. “I have to clean up the blood. They can’t see the blood.” She disappeared from the bathroom, leaving a trail of water behind her. Had she even been talking to him? Had she simply been talking to herself, reassuring herself?

Outside of the bathroom, she stooped down and ran several of the towels over the blood, circling the wet linen around the smudges of red. She had to crawl her way over to her front door, stopping several times to spend more energy on the more stubborn spots. Every piece of evidence had to be removed.


<Jesse Fforde> No, she said. No, she wasn’t going to leave. She had understood that’s what he had asked, but she wouldn’t. He couldn’t make her. He didn’t have the strength. He’d just have to keep doing what he was doing, as best he could… but then she was gone, all of a sudden; Jesse just stood there while she collected and soaked the towels. In a rush to get rid of evidence, as if they had murdered someone and the cops were going to be here at any moment. Jesse was far too dizzy, far too out of it to understand her motives. He was far too focused on trying to remain upright and standing, so that when she was gone he could, in the silence, try his best to continue.

<Jesse Fforde> The door remained open as he pushed the boxer-briefs from his hips. The fell to the floor, still heavy with water – it was easier to get them off. He shuffled over to wall to use it as support as he stepped, one foot before the other, in the hot water. It took some time to lower himself, but he managed, in the end. The water immediately turned pink. He was okay from the neck down. There were no wounds on his legs or his chest. Nothing on his torso at all. But the blood from his neck had gushed, soaking his clothes and now caked to his skin.

Slowly, he reached for a loofah. Slowly, he let it soak. He felt as if he were a robot, and blood still seeped from his neck. It rolled over his skin and dispersed in the water, a cloud of crimson smoke. First, he did his best to get all the flakey blood from his chest, and his shoulders. When it came time to soak his neck and head, however, he was out of his league. He couldn’t see. He didn’t know what his head looked like, the way that creature had… bit him, as if trying to swallow his head whole. He could still see fine. But his cheek felt swollen and fractures. His skull felt like it had cracked, and only now did he realise how much of a headache he had.

With no other solution, Jesse slipped further down into the water. The tub was full enough now, and he at least managed to turn the faucets off so that Clover’s bathroom wouldn’t flood. Only then did he sink below the surface; blood rose up around him, thickening the water. He had wits enough to leave his good hand out – he didn’t want Clover to think he’d slit his wrists or anything. Maybe if he soaked himself for a while, it would be just as good as using a sponge…


<Clover> The wet towels worked beautifully on the hardwood floors, but the water did nothing for the smell. Some of the blood had already soaked into the wood; she could see the subtle signs in the variations in color and texture. No matter how hard she scrubbed, she couldn’t get rid of all of the evidence. She told herself that they would smell the blood, that they would notice the darker streaks and tiny splotches on the wood. She told herself that they would eventually trace the smell, if not the darker markings on the wood, directly to her doorstep. Her mind told her to cover the scent with her own blood, to mask the marks on the floor with her own blood. But those thoughts were insane, at best.

When she finished scrubbing up the trail of bloody footsteps and the accompanying medley of blood artwork, she sat down next to the pile of filthy towels and just admired the clean streaks on the floor. Her beige towels were stained red, pink, grey, and black. She’d picked up more than blood during her cleaning spree. With all of her scrubbing, she’d rubbed her knuckles raw. She might have bled her disgusting black blood in different places along her journey, but she didn’t have the energy left to go back and start all over again. Jesse’s blood was gone. As long as no one tried looking for him, they were fine. And in a few days, he would be fine. He had to be fine. No one would know that anything happened at all.

Clo lingered in the middle of Limbo. Jesse had asked her to leave, most likely to give him privacy, and she’d said no. She hadn’t wanted to leave him. In fact, she knew she had to get back to him. She wanted to get back to him. She pushed herself up from the floor and slowly gathered her towels, one at a time. There were bath towels, hand towels, repurposed dish towels--she had all sorts of towels that were dirty and ripped, ruined beyond repair. She knew she’d probably burn them. She’d burn her clothes. If she had anything to say about it, the night never happened.

Holding the towels to herself, she walked across the damp floor to her apartment. She sidestepped wet patches on her own hardwood floor and dumped the towels into the kitchen wastebasket. Up until that point, she hadn’t used the trash bin at all. Jesse’s accident had given her apartment a rare chance at life. The place finally had a real purpose. Clo walked past the bathroom to grab some clean clothes from her bedroom. She had nothing for him, but she would let him relax in a towel or a bathrobe until she ran to get him clothes. Just the thought had her rubbing her hands over her face, smearing dirt and blood over her pale cheeks and down her jawline.

After she’d gathered her shorts and a sweatshirt, she went back to the bathroom. She didn’t bother knocking. She didn’t bother announcing her presence. Clo dumped her clothes on the side of the sink and turned the faucet on. She scrubbed at her bare arms and then she splashed several handfuls of water on her face. She groped for a hand towel and patted her face dry.

“I cleaned up the blood. Do you want any help?”


<Jesse Fforde> He remembered the silence that he found beneath the water. If he had a heart, it would have gone from a violent rhythm to a calm one, the longer he spent in the dark pink water. The thought crossed his mind that he should drain the water and start over, but he only managed the slightest twitch. Water dripped from his fingertips to the tiles beside the tub. He closed his eyes… he started to slip. But he remembered the vow he had made to himself - the request that Clover had made. Do not pass out, Jesse Fforde.

He focused on what little sound he could hear; to the way the tub vibrated below him. The floors were made of wood, and though the lair was sturdy and secure he could still feel the footsteps. Could still hear them. It was subtle. It was barely there. But he was a vampire with heightened senses, and it was easy enough to do.

When they grew louder, and when he heard the faucet within the same room, he pushed at the back of his tub with his foot, his head soon rising above the surface; rising with enough time to hear Clover’s question. He was barely awake, but he nodded. Yes, he needed help. It shouldn’t be here and now that he was asking for it. It should have been hours ago, when he was sitting on the footsteps. He should have picked up his phone and called her. He should have said: Clover, I’m thinking of doing something really stupid. Rather than assume they’d be better off without him, he should have expressed his fears. Talked to her about them.

Instead, he was here in the bathtub and he couldn’t talk at all.

He lifted his good fingers to his head, to where his hair was matted, part of his scalp savaged. The area was tender and soft; he grimaced, before he brought his fingers to his neck. He didn’t touch the wound. Just the edges of it, his hand shaking as he did so. And finally he lifted the severed stump from the water. All three still seeping blood. He would not ruin her sheets with his blood. They needed to be bandaged, and covered, until they healed.

As he gripped the edge of the tub, his knuckles were white. As he slowly lifted himself from the water, his face contorted with the effort. He held his hand out to Clover. The good hand. He needed her help to get out of the tub. To get dry.


<Clover> Clover remembered the moments when she could hardly stand looking at him, let alone being near him. They were brief, but their effects were lasting. Silence had been the response to her question; she shouldn’t have expected any more. Raising her head, her hands still gripping the front edge of the sink, she stared straight at the bathroom mirror. Not seeing her reflection in the mirror had always bothered her. If it weren’t a sort of custom to have a mirror in the bathroom, she would have replaced the object with a painting. She would have replaced the mirror with anything else. At that moment, when she sought the comfort of her reflection, she saw nothing. Gone were her dark eyes. Gone was her dark hair. Gone were the dark circles that had plagued her eyes, battle scars from long nights spent partying and screaming; gone were the curves of her lips and the smattering of freckles along the bridge of her nose and cheeks. Without her reflection to soothe her, she felt colder. She felt lost. Tired.

The sloshing of the water became a second response to her question. When she heard the noise, she turned away from the mirror and pressed her lower back against the sink. She watched Jesse slowly rise from the water, knowing well that she should have moved forward to help him. But he needed to do it on his own. He needed to prove to himself, and to her, that he was capable of doing that much. He outstretched his hand and she moved toward him. That was the final response, the one that mattered the most.

As an afterthought, she went back toward the bathroom sink and began rooting around in the cabinet portion. She pulled out a fluffy bath towel, slung it over her forearm, and nudged the cabinet doors closed. When she went back to Jesse, she helped him to get his footing and helped him take the steps needed to get out of the bathtub. One towel really wasn’t enough, but she tried. She patted at his face and then patted at his hair, careful to avoid the nasty injury on his scalp. She did everything to stop the steady stream of water that always fell from a freshly bathed person. She had never been the one to dry someone else off, so it seemed rather awkward, or at least foreign. When she’d given up drying him off, she stood off to his side and circled the towel around his waist, securing it by tucking in one edge.

But she moved onto the tub next. She leaned over and thrust a hand through the red-tinged water to reach the plug. The tub made a little noise and then the water began its slow descent down the drain. There was an ugly red line around the inside of her tub.

“I can go get you some clothes,” she offered, though it came out more like a statement. No, she had basically declared that she was more than capable of getting his clothes, and she would be doing such. “You can sit on the bed. On the sofa. On the floor. I don’t have bandages. I don’t have a first-aid kit. I can probably find some new clothes I can shred. I can do that. ****. I’ll get clothes. I’ll make bandages. I’ll get it all, okay? Just, just relax.”

She still hadn’t left though. She looked as if she were waiting for someone to tell her to relax, or at least for someone to shove her and tell her to move. She didn’t know **** about first aid. Well, she knew to apply pressure. Did that even apply to head wounds? What the **** was she supposed to do when a vampire had a head wound? She hadn’t done **** with her own fractured skull. It hadn’t been that big of a deal. Clover could actually see the wound though. Clover could see the separation in the skin. How was she supposed to put him back together until his body finally healed? Was she supposed to use tape? Doctors used tape, didn’t they? Butterfly bandages! Did she even have tape? No, she didn’t have tape. Stitches! No, she didn’t have a needle or thread or any type of appropriate substitute. Glue? No. Why didn’t she have a first-aid kit? Perhaps she could cauterize. She knew more about that than stitching and gluing and taping. Were his wounds the type to warrant cauterization? She wasn’t a doctor.

She felt like crying all over again. She didn’t really know how to help him. She didn’t have the experience necessary to help him. She knew how to hold him. Hadn’t she only just mastered that step? “H-How do I stop the bleeding? I know you’ll heal. How do we stop it now? Do you...do I really just bandage and let the blood keep going until it decides that it’s tired of running out of your open wounds?” Her voice was shaky, wavering at the beginning and ends of her sentences. That was when she knew she wanted to cry. When her voice quivered in the way that her confidence quivered, she knew she wanted to break down.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse had reached for the towel himself; it would have been awkward to dry himself with one hand, but he had faith that he could do it. Sufficiently, anyway. He didn’t have to be perfectly dry, did he? Instead, however, Clover did it for him. It was different. Grey had dried him off plenty of times in the past, just as he had dried her off. The amount of times he and Grey had tended to each other’s wounds, it had become almost second nature.

And now here Clover was, looking like she wanted to have a panic attack because she didn’t know what to do next. Jesse laughed, even though it didn’t work. The laughter came in huffs of breath from his nostrils, his eyes closed as he finally caved, his knees bending so that he could sit on the lid of the toilet again. He wouldn’t go to the couch or to the bed until the wounds had been covered. He’d bled enough in her apartment.

If he’d had a voice - or an implement to write with - he’d have told Clover there were bandages and a first aid kit in the bathroom on Cerberus. A whole cupboard not full of toiletries or fluffy bubble bath liquid, but full of clean cloths and disinfectant, of spare bandages and tape of all shapes and sizes. Yes, vampires healed, but they needed the bandages even if only for a few hours just to keep the blood off everything they chose to touch. For comfort’s sake.

But all Jesse could do was nod. A bandage. To keep the blood from dripping. To soak it up. To keep everything else clean. He couldn’t tell her that the blood flow would slow as the blood clotted, like usual; as the sinews and the nerves and finally the skin started to stitch itself back together.

If he didn’t feel like he would pass out from the effort, he’d go get the necessary tools himself. As it was, he had to slowly blink, to lean against whatever surface was beside him. He felt drunk; he couldn’t focus properly. He did, however, have the energy to reach out and take Clover’s hand; to squeeze it in a reassuring way. It didn’t matter how she bandaged the wounds; it wouldn’t help or hinder them. It was for comfort only. The touch, he hoped, would boost her confidence somehow. He was okay, just as much as he wasn’t okay. The room spun, and the thought crossed his mind that he could be dreaming. That he could be dead already, and he was just imagining all of this even as his spirit already dwelled within the shadow realm.

And if he wasn’t dreaming, he really just wanted to crawl into bed. He really just wanted to be swallowed by the softness of pillows and comforters, with the added comfort of the weight of Clover’s body beside him. But he needed the bandages, first. He needed Clover to be calm. It was going to be okay.

Of course he didn’t have the voice to tell her that if she didn’t hurry up, he’d just pass out on the floor of the bathroom, comforters be damned.


<Clover> Nothing he said could have offered her the comfort she craved. His hand closed around hers, but she didn’t squeeze back. He wasn’t looking any better. That much was obvious. Clo slipped her hand from his and paused, struggling to find something else to say; in the end, she just held up both hands to gesture for him to wait, as if he had any other choice. She turned and rushed back out of the bathroom. She didn’t care how much noise she made as she stormed into her kitchen and began ripping open the cabinets and drawers. Even though she’d gone through a checklist of every first-aid item in her apartment--she’d already established that she had none--she had to be sure. When all of the doors to the cabinets remained open, and every drawer remained out, she stood in the center of the kitchen and went down the next step in her checklist. Clothing. Yes, she’d needed to find him clothing.

Clover took one last look at the bathroom and then darted out the front door of her apartment. No one lingered on the floor, so she had a straight path to the elevator. No one had to ask her questions. No one had to give her odd looks. What did he want to wear? Did it matter what he wanted to wear? Not when he was passed out. Not when he’d slipped from his seat, cracked his head against the corner of the sink, and landed in a puddle of his own blood and brain matter. By the time the elevator doors closed, locking her in the smaller interior, Clo had already imagined seventeen different scenarios, all of which involved going back and finding Jesse in pieces. He’d squeezed her hand to calm her down. Taking a deep breath, Clo had to remind herself that he’d tried to provide her comfort in the only way he could. He’d communicated nonverbally. He’d offered her some sort of comfort.

The elevator doors weren’t even fully open, but she turned sideways and slid her body between the parting doors. She had a mantra going, one tied to the steady movement of her legs. Clo had to keep going, or she’d lose all of her thoughts. She put no effort into disguising her heavy footfalls, and when she got to the secret room, she shoved her way inside. She made a mess of the place as she tore through the room in search of clothing. Shirt. Shirt. Shirt. Where were the pants? Where were his ******* pants? When her right hand finally closed around one leg of a pair of track pants, she snatched them. She’d left a mess of clothing in her wake.

Clo stood in front of the elevator and pressed the button on the panel. She listened to the steady click and groan coming from the concealed area, but the doors remained closed. The elevator wasn’t moving fast enough for her, not when her mind kept racing along. Had he hit his head yet? Had he skipped right to the point where he passed out in a puddle of his own brain matter? Her hand was poised to pressed the button again, but a thought occurred to her. Clo turned and looked in the direction of the bathroom. The click and groan of the elevator suddenly became the backdrop to her thoughts, where it had once dominated the forefront of her mind.

She looked back at the doors of the elevator and asked them for just enough time to scour one last area of the building. As if an object understood her looks or her silent requests, she patted the closed doors and darted off once more. Clover tore through the bathroom in the way that she’d torn through the bedroom. She scattered tape. She ruined bandages. She opened bottles of disinfectant when there were bottles already open. Clo gathered far too many items, items without a real purpose, and she carried her treasures back to her apartment as if she were hoarding them. Some of the bandages became stepping stones, the beginning of a trail that started halfway into her apartment and ended in the bathroom. She dumped everything on the floor and separated the items into two piles. She had a pile comprised of his clothing, just a shirt and his track pants, and then she had a misshapen pile built of bottles of disinfectant, rolls of tape, and both boxes and rolls of bandages. None of the items belonged on the floor, but the floor held it all. Her nerves couldn’t destroy the order of things if the items were already scattered over the floor.

“You don’t need the shirt. I don’t know why I grabbed the shirt,” she muttered to herself. Clo picked the clothing up and tossed the shirt off into the corner of the bathroom. She put the pants atop the cabinet, right next to her own change of clothes.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse had never seen Clover so flustered. It might have been amusing to watch if he weren’t in his current state; if he weren’t doubting his own actions and inwardly berating himself for his stupidity. Before she was flustered, Clover had been angry, and rightly so. Why had he come back here? He could have lied all on his own; he could have crawled into some small space where they wouldn’t think to look, and he could have stayed there in his own filth until he had healed.

Which would be worse? Which would have made her angrier?

He would have let his head fall into his hands, if he’d had two hands. As it was he had to struggle to keep himself upright. His feet were planted flat on the ground, his elbows resting on his knees. To begin with, anyway. He heard Clover rattling around outside before silence descended upon the apartment. Sometimes, silence was unbearable loud. It was ominously so now, after the fluster that was Clover, and the wildlife before her.

After a while, he leaned back against the back of the toilet. He wanted something to rest his head on, but the wall was too far away, and if he stretched his neck too far in the wrong direction, he could feel the healing sinews begin to tear. The last thing he wanted was to bleed some more. The bath would have been for nothing.

In the silence of the bathroom he remembered the roar of the wilderness. He remembered the way the leaves had cracked and rustled, the way the wind seemed to be speaking to him. Or was it just the fae, whispering to each other? Spreading the word of fresh vampire blood. He drifted; he wanted to sleep so badly. He saw that last Fae, coming at him for a second time - just as Clover came back and slammed everything down on the bathroom floor.

Jesse jerked awake again, barely avoiding the vicious maw of the creature that wanted to devour him. His head throbbed from where the teeth had ripped into his skull. He eyes the pants dubiously, doubting he needed those, either. He was more than happy to sleep naked. Rather than reach for the cloth, he instead leaned over to reach for a bandage, which he tossed at Clover. Somehow, he thought she would have to be talked through this. Or gestured, as the case may have to be.

After tossing the bandage at Clover, he picked up one of the non-adhesive pads; he ripped open the plastic with his teeth, before placing the pad over his severed wrist. He held said wrist out to Clover, and nodded to the bandage with his head. All she had to do was wrap it around; there ought to be a few hooks, somewhere, to keep the bandage in place once she was done.


<Clover> He really looked like ****. She had no other way of describing his appearance. He still looked so messy, as if someone had started disassembling him. And he looked so tired. Clover couldn’t get over how tired he looked. With every passing second, he looked one step closer to death. He was liable to become a walking embodiment of death. All of her observations were done while she struggled with the bandage, which insisted on coming undone and tangling around her fingers. Jersey was the health professional, not Clover. Clo could do many things, but she wasn’t a nurse.

Once she’d untangled the strip of cloth, she moved toward him and began to lightly brush his hair out of the way. She had to see where the injury began to judge where to place the bandage. It must have hurt. Clo knew how much it bothered her to have someone poke and prod at her wounds; at least, those things had bothered her when she still had a solid heartbeat. Perhaps Jesse enjoyed the attention. He could have enjoyed the way she placed her fingertips against his head and traced the exterior of the wound.

When she finally located the highest point of the injury, she began there. She placed one end of the bandage there and began wrapping the fabric, counterclockwise, around Jesse’s head. There were a few passes, and she moved the bandage up or down to properly cover the open wound. Before she’d even finished wrapping, Clo saw the signs of seepage. She didn’t know why she expected the wound to close. Their kind healed, but they healed at different rates, and they healed in different ways. It was Jesse, she told herself, as if that excused him from any limitations.

Clover reached the end of the fabric, but she hadn’t collected any clips. Had she brought any clips? If she were able to eat human food, she would have felt the lurch and the urge to vomit. She would have lost control all over again. As it was, with her stomach free of chemically processed food, Clo just growled. She held the end of the bandage there and reached toward the rest of the supplies. Her fingers groped at the floor. The rolls of tape and bottles of disinfectant scattered across the floor in all directions. When she managed to snag the clips she needed and she secured the bandage around his head, Clover eyed the gnarled remains of Jesse’s hand.

Logic told her that she should have taken greater care with the head injury, but he seemed as coherent as ever--well, he likely would have been coherent, if his throat hadn’t been ripped out. Oh yes, she remembered his throat. She rebandaged Jesse’s wrist, having found his work inadequate. She used gauze, medical tape, and more clips. For his throat, she used more gauze. Clover tried everything to keep the wound covered, because she desperately needed him to talk to her again. She needed his vocal cords to cooperate.

The bathroom didn’t have the most welcoming decorations. The floor, the walls, and the ceiling lacked any real designs. But Clo considered staying there; she considered shoving the rest of the supplies aside and curling up on the floor. Instead, she did the responsible thing. Clo swept the remaining items off to the side, but she swept them aside to clear a path to the door. She helped Jesse up. She led him out of the bathroom and over to the bedroom. Clover became a nurse again, showing her abilities as she showed such unadulterated concern. With her arms around him, she hesitated on letting him go. When she helped him into bed, she should have tucked him in and left to change her bloody clothes, but she didn’t. She crawled into bed with him. The blood on her clothing created smudges on her blue sheets, deep smudges that she’d never be able to remove. Her mind focused on the most inconsequential things.

“I’ll take care of everything else,” she sighed, curling up next to him. Where someone else might have been concerned with hurting him, she didn’t care. She didn’t care if she hurt him by holding onto him so tightly. Perhaps it was her anger. Perhaps it was pure exhaustion. Clover could have said so many other things, but opening her mouth, using her voice, used too much energy. And Jesse likely didn’t have the energy left to listen. They were both exhausted. They were both messes, in their own ways. Clo didn’t know whether he fell asleep first or she fell asleep first, but they slept. The hours passed.

OOC: Backdated to November 13th

<Jesse> Jesse heard Clover come home. Or, maybe he felt it, somewhere in his skin; the vibration of the door, of the footsteps. The snake, formerly Jesse Fforde, was dozing, but now half-awake as it waited. But the footsteps didn't seem to go any further than the front door. Still, he waited. How long? Long enough for the scent of blood to drift down the hallway and through the open bedroom door. There was no doubt that it was Clover's blood. He knew what Clover's blood tasted like, even if its consistency wasn't the same.

The adder slipped from the bed and out into the hallway. It slithered toward the figure on the floor, tongue flickering. He could not see so well as a snake, but he could feel everything. He could smell everything. And the closer he got, the stronger the scent; the scent that he could taste with his flickering tongue. Not just of blood, but of burnt flesh. Gunpowder. Ink and paper. But blood. So much blood. He knew he couldn't stay like this, in the scales that he had grown so comfortable with. But he knew he had to be able to look at her. Properly. He had to be able to see the extent of the damage.

Jesse went back to the bedroom. Back to where he knew he had some clothes, something, anyway. It hurt, going back to normal. Changing in and out of his animal form was a painful process; he didn't do it very often to get used to it, or for it to become any easier. He managed to do so this time with barely a gasp, however, as he pulled on a pair of track pants. Within seconds he was back out at the door. He was on his knees beside Clover, eyes grazing every limb, every surface of burnt skin.

“What the **** did you do?”

<Clover> Clover was so focused on her journal that she hadn't paid any attention to the apartment around her. When she'd originally entered into the apartment, she'd listened for Jesse. She'd waited for some sign that he was there. He wasn't in the apartment, she'd guessed. Just as he'd said, she hadn't found him. Exhausted, she'd simply leaned against the front door and slid down the surface, allowing the wood to scrape against her sensitive skin, taking more of her skin and blood. She'd stared at the floor as if it were the most interesting thing in the world, or maybe she'd stared right through it, just beyond it. With each word she wrote, the pain lessened, until it became a steady throb, one that would have fit nicely with the tune of a heartbeat. Thump thump. Thump thump.

She hadn't been able to continue writing though. Her hand eventually cramped, her fingers clenching the pen so tightly that she had to pry it out. And that's when she stopped. She gave up. Again. She still didn't know where to go. Clover closed her eyes and leaned her head back so that it rested against the front door. With her attention shifted away from her writing, she heard the other sounds in her apartment. Someone else was in her apartment. Clo's eyes shot open and she pivoted to grasp at the door knob. Even with both hands, she couldn't manage to get the door to open. She had to move her whole body to allow herself room, but it hurt. She ******* hurt. She couldn't use her jumbled senses, so she waited. One hand pressed on the butt of her gun, she stared at the entrance to her bedroom.

Clover groaned the moment she saw Jesse. Her hands went to her face, but it jarred her shoulder. She just went back to her former position. Legs stretched out in front of herself, arms at her side, she just waited for him to get to her and scold her. “It was a ******* accident” she began, letting out a shaky sigh, “well, most of it was an accident. The bullet holes are accidents. I-I don't know what happened, honestly. I got angry. I went for a walk. I was fine. Now.” She turned away from him to curl into herself, but her posture was awkward. She didn't manage to move much at all. “Don't even ******* look at me. I don't want you looking at me. I don't want you seeing me like this!” She was overreacting, but she didn't think so. She wanted to lash out at him and blame him for everything. Her voice was hoarse and it cracked on her. She was ******* disgusting. That's what she was. She just needed more bullet wounds to help. Or maybe she needed more burns. Then she'd be okay. She'd be beautiful all over again. Even more so.

<Jesse> Clover could have lashed out at him and blamed him for everything, and Jesse would have accepted it. As he looked at her now, he wondered if this was some kind of punishment; slowly the pieces fell together and he imagined that their roles had been reversed. This was what he did when people walked away. And this was what Clover must feel like, when she's the one who has to find him, bloody and broken. Anger and sorrow all twisted together in one gnarled ball that got stuck in his throat. Although she told him not to touch, not to look, he ignored her entirely. The lashings of her anger were nothing. They did nothing. He ignored them, even as his fingers touched her skin. Gently. They would be cold against the burnt flesh, but at least he could do something to restore the blood that she had lost.

An accident, she said. And Jesse wanted to scoff. An accident? He believed that as much as he believed himself when he told others that the fae were an accident. Maybe she wasn't lying, but Jesse was angry. And he wasn't thinking about himself, for once. He couldn't, daren't think that this was his fault. As much as he would accept it, it wasn't something he could dwell on right now. He couldn't dwell on the fact that he should have told her to come home. Instead, he growled.

“It works two ways, Clover," he said, even as he stood. He shouted at her as he walked away, headed for the bathroom, where he shoved the plug into the drain and roughly turned the taps on. But he didn't finish his sentence; he was a snake. He wasn't checking his phone. She could have texted or called to tell him she needed him, just as he was expected to do with her, but would he have noticed? Instead, he assumed Clover was fine, that she would be fine, and that she would always be his anchor. But he was wrong. Clover had her issues, too. Was he blind? Was he so caught up in himself that he couldn't see?

When he came back out, he was gentler in his demeanour. Even when he swore, his voice was soft. “I'm going to look at you all the **** I want. I'm going to show you how to tend to someone's wounds,” he said, crouching down again to either help her up, or to carry her without her blessing.

<Clover> It was different. It was a change. Hadn't she expressed her distaste for change? When he walked away, she wanted to yell at him that it was all he ever did. All he knew how to do was walk away. He left. He left people. He left places. He was leaving. Again. Clover snatched the pen from its place at the floor and hurled it after his retreating form. The pen missed by a mile, but it made her feel better. She'd let go of some of her anger and released some of the tension. Good riddance. **** him. She picked up her journal and closed the notebook, taking care to keep all the pages together. When she'd successfully fixed the journal, she reeled back and threw it after Jesse too. The notebook hit the wall with a quick crack and then fell to the floor in a flurry of noise. Clo had nothing left to throw except for her shoes, so those followed. She balled her socks up in them, pulled back, and released. They fell short of their mark and skipped across the floor like stones.

When he came back, she seemed almost surprised. He was so wonderful with walking away, so why did he bother to turn around and come back? Clo glared at him the entire way, watching him as if he were prey skirting just outside of her territory. “I don't need you to tend to my wounds, Jesse. I really don't. And I don't need Kaelyn texting me to apologize. Do you want to know what I need?” She paused so that she could struggle to her feet, refusing the possibility of help until she felt the growing shadow of desperation. When she was finally to her feet, she planted them on the floor. Pride. She felt a great deal of pride. “I need to be left alone.” She looked as if the words pained her, because they did pain her. Because she didn't mean it. She meant the opposite. She didn't want him walking away from her again. Was she that much of a **** up that he decided she wasn't even worth sticking around? He'd walked away. He'd told her he might not be home when she came back. If she came back. Clo took slow steps toward the bathroom, all the while telling herself it was her choice to clean herself up.

“Jesse, why did you tell me you might not be here? Was that because you were thinking about leaving? Because of what I did? And why the **** do we have a snake? I don't...I don't want a snake here. I want bats. I wanted to tell you that I want bats. I want to keep them here. Somehow. I want spiders. I want you to forgive me for being such a fuckup. I want you to stop walking away. I don't want this.” She'd slumped into a seat on the edge of the bathtub and doubled over, putting a painful amount of pressure on the bullet wounds on her stomach. “I just wanted to experience the sunrise. That's all,” she continued rambling, “that's all. I didn't mean to get in a shootout with cops. I was trying to get away from the sun. It was running or dying, and here I am. I just wanted the pain.”

<Jesse> The sound of things being thrown hadn't rattled Jesse. He didn't know why Clover was still so angry; he didn't know why she'd got herself so hurt. If it had been an accident then so be it, but he didn't believe her. When she told him she needed to be alone he recoiled, inwardly. Who knew what he would have done if she hadn't kept talking? Maybe he would have left her alone. Maybe he wouldn't have. Maybe he would have forced his company on her whether she wanted it or not, because it was what he wanted others to do. It's what he had wanted Grey to do when he'd told her not to come. He'd wanted her to come anyway. To tell him to get fucked. It's what he intended to do now, with Clover. She wanted to be alone? Bad luck.

He followed her through to the bathroom, stepping over the thrown obstacles as he did so. Bats, spiders, snakes, it was all irrelevant, given the situation. He didn't want to tell her he was the snake. They hadn't got another one. He was a coward who'd escaped into another skin in order to avoid chaos. And now he regretted it. Now he wished he had summoned Clover home instead.

“I didn't tell you I wasn't going to be here. I told you I hadn't gone anywhere, but that you might not find me,” he said. He hadn't wanted her to worry. He wanted to let her know that he hadn't left the lair. That he hadn't gone to do something stupid, even though, in the grand scheme of things, he had. It just wasn't him who got hurt as a consequence.

He wanted to pull her into his arms and rock with her. He wanted to tell her everything was going to be okay. “You were angry and Kaelyn was upset and I just wanted to stay happy. I didn't know how to make you both feel better at the same time so I walked away. I assumed you'd figure it out, between you. I didn't think I was the one keeping you both there. I didn't leave. I was just in the other room. I didn't think that you would leave,” he said, crouching down in front of Clover, his hands on her knees. The tub continued to fill beside them, the water slowly rising.

“I understand,” he finally said, the words hushed and slow. ‘The need for pain. I didn't think we'd reach this point so soon,” he said. They had been happy. Less than twenty-four hours ago they'd both been telling each other how happy they were. And now it was gone, like it had never existed. “I'm sorry for walking away.”

<Clover> Perhaps the eye of the storm never really existed at all. Her thoughts revolved around that simple idea. Perhaps they had been hallucinating, or she had been hallucinating. Clo did all she could to keep the worst words to herself. He didn't need to hear them. He didn't need her lashing out at him. He'd walked away to keep himself happy, because she'd made him unhappy. She looked down at his hands and she wasn't sure if she wanted him to hold her or if she wanted him to stop touching her altogether. “Why would I stay? She went after you. I wasn't going to stand there. I went somewhere I thought I was wanted,” she spoke calmly, every word enunciated. Thinking back, Clo couldn't even say that Jersey wanted her. She'd taken up space and wasted time. Jersey was too good for her own good, as unbelievable as it sounded.

“I thought you'd reach out sooner. You wanted me to come home, but I wanted you to come after me. I wanted you to show me that you cared and you didn't. I thought you'd left. I spent my time thinking you'd just,” she stopped and licked at her chapped lips, “that you'd left.” Admitting her thoughts made her throat feel dry. As outlandish as her thoughts had been, she had to repeat them. She thought he'd left her because he couldn't handle her anger. And in return, she wanted to make her exterior match her interior. Just as painful. Just as ugly. She couldn't burn her anger away. She couldn't burn herself away. It wasn't her intention to die, and yet she'd almost lost control of the situation. Still, the anger remained. She'd accomplished next to nothing. “I'm sorry I lost my temper. I'm sorry I made you feel so bad. That I'm making you feel that way right now. I didn't think you were here or I wouldn't have come home yet. I didn't want you to know.”

The tub had enough water that she could have gotten inside and let the water continue its slow climb toward the edge, but she didn't move. She didn't want to take her clothes off. She didn't feel comfortable. Her eyes moved toward the faucet and then dipped down toward the water within the tub. She wanted him to turn around. And yet she didn't. Because it would have been taking so many steps backward. The shirt came off first, followed by her bra. Her movements were slow, painfully so, and she hissed every couple of seconds. But she managed. She was fine. When she shied away from Jesse, she only did so to struggle out of her shorts. Skin. Blood. Curse words. She covered herself as if he'd never seen her naked, and began a slow descent into the water. The water which burnt almost as much as the sunlight. The water which felt like acid slowly eating at the remaining flesh.

<Jesse> Jesse didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to respond. The simple fact that he'd asked where she'd gone, shouldn't that have been enough? He wanted to know where she was because he wanted to know whether it was acceptable to bring her home. Because he wanted her at home. He always wanted her at home. The layers were being peeled from his eyes and Jesse began to understand so much. The tables were still turned. Is this what Clover felt like? When he constantly did and said things to imply that he didn't believe she wanted him around? Even now as she undressed without his help, as she covered herself as she lowered herself into the water. They might have been side by side but the distance between them was only growing.

It made him sick. It made him want to throw up. It made him want to throw things and scream until his lungs burst. The one thing he wanted to do was help her; he wanted to make sure the bullets were all out, he wanted to pick up the sponge and help to clean her, even though there was no blood clinging to her skin. He wanted to go and get the bandages and come back, to wrap up her wounds. He wanted her to be comfortable, just as he'd wanted to be comfortable.

But he felt like a plague. He felt like a thorn, unwelcome and annoying. He wanted to swear at her. He'd asked her where she was and she hadn't told him. How the **** could he go after her? But what did it matter? He hadn't tried hard enough. Velveteen's accusations were still barbs underneath his skin. He made messes and he wasn't man enough to clean them up. And now it was too late. He was stuck between coming and going. His resolve was failing. Where he had previously thought she was telling him to go when she wanted him to stay, now he thought otherwise. She didn't want him there. But he wouldn't walk away again. He stood with his back to her, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

“I can go. If you want me to,” is what he wanted to say, but the words got stuck in his throat. Instead, he turned around. He found the sponge, though he didn't do anything with it yet. “**** it. It doesn't matter now, does it? I was here, waiting for you. I'm here now. If you want me to go, tell me to go. But I don't want to go anywhere. Did you get the bullets out or not?” he asked, his voice and actions forceful even though his eyes remained uncertain.

<Clover> Those six words imprinted themselves on her mind. He didn't want to go anywhere. Clo knew that she was pushing him away, but she didn't know how to pull him back anymore. Voicing her insecurities and showing her insecurities had only aided in forcing them apart. What was she supposed to do? She started by answering his question. Clo dipped her head and leaned forward so that he could see her bare back and the two holes left behind by the bullets. The cops had shot her in the stomach, but the bullets tore right through her gut, ripping a line through her insides. The other gunshots were different. She couldn't tell if the bullets had passed through her shoulder or not. And her leg? The bullets that embedded themselves in her leg hurt the worst of all. Her leg had bled more than any of the other injuries combined. She could never forget the black blood that ran down her leg and pooled underneath her.

“I don't know about the others. I have four. No, five.” She had to think about the bullets that actually hit her, not the ones that had missed her. Quite a few bullets had missed her. Even though being in the water caused her pain, even though leaning forward caused her pain, she didn't want to move. She lost herself in her poor posture. Clo brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. Burn against burn. Bullet wound to bullet wound. She felt that she had to offer him something to stay; no, she felt as if she owed him something for staying. “I went to see the snake enclosure at Veil. I told you to be decent. That's what I announced before I opened the door. But I didn't wait. I don't know why I didn't wait. It doesn't make sense,” she spoke, a hint of amusement in her tone. “I told you that and you said...you said, ‘You'd be seeing two snakes instead of one.' I remember seeing your naked torso and flailing, and I do mean that. I tried shielding my eyes by waving my arms around like a complete fool. I think I yelled, ‘I didn't see your junk!’” Clover laughed, but her laughter jarred her wounds, so she had to quiet herself.

“This--what we have--is real. It's white-hot.” She didn't know if he remembered those words, but she did. She remembered odd little things, sometimes meaningful and sometimes not. As she spoke, she didn't look at him. She looked straight ahead at the wall. “That's what I said to you at Veil,” she offered, finally turning her head toward him. “That's the summary of what I wanted to finished saying to you the other night. You don't have to remember every detail. I remember. I guess I wanted to finish telling you because you're doing this for me.” Her feet slid along the bottom of the tub until she had her legs stretched out once more. She didn't know where to go with her words. There were plenty of possibilities, but she couldn't decide. There were other times, other interactions. She didn't ******* care about the bullets or about the burns.

“Will you get in with me?”

<Jesse> Jesse's laughter was as fleeting as Clover's. At first he was confused, he had no idea what she was talking about. When had she gone to veil? Which snake enclosure? And then he remembered. It had been one of those moments where he'd done it on purpose, he thought. At least, it sounded like something he would do. Knowing it was something that Clover didn't want to see, he'd have been naked on purpose. But he hadn't been naked. Not entirely. Which had made her reaction even more amusing. Whatever smile had come with Jesse's fleeting laughter faltered; when Clover continued, his memory failed. White-hot? He tried to recall when he'd heard her say those words last, and he couldn't.

He wanted her to keep going. What she had said so far seemed to him like half thoughts. They seemed like something that made sense to her, and though the story made sense to him, though the words matched up and formed understandable sentences, he didn't get the meaning behind them. He didn't understand the emotion that Clover was trying to convey. He couldn't understand much beyond the relief that she hadn't asked him to go, and he wasn't forcing himself to stay against her will. Over the course of her story his lips had parted. Only now did he realise he was gazing at her, dumbfounded, knowing that he should move. He should find some tweezers to dig the bullets out.

But he was numb. He didn't need tweezers. He just nodded and stood, slipping the track pants from his hips before stepping into the tub. Whatever blood still seeped from Clover's wounds tainted the water in a strange way; like ink that soon dispersed as it rose to the surface. He stepped in behind Clover, sinking down so that she could lean up against his chest. He still held the sponge in his hand, he used it now, if only to try to slowly examine the shoulder wounds. To see if the bullets were still inside. She said she wanted the pain, but he didn't know whether he wanted to test it. There might not be a choice.

“I don't remember,” he admitted, finally. Maybe if she continued the story, maybe if she explained the meaning of it to him, it might distract her. There were no exit wounds, at least in her shoulder, he didn't know about her leg. There were bullets that would need to be removed. “Remind me? What were we talking about?” he asked. He was probably oblivious, then. Maybe he'd have more sense, now.

<Clover> Some part of her scoffed at the idea that he would actually want to join her in the tub. She was injured and the water mixed with wisps of black blood. No, her blood didn't mix. Her blood had other properties that even disgusted her, at times. So when he climbed into the tub and sat down behind her, Clover wasted no time. She dismissed the urge to hunch forward, to disappear into herself as if she were a morning glory met with the dark; she leaned back into his chest and rested her hands on either side of the tub.

“It was around Christmas. I'd given you Jormungand and I wanted to see where you'd put her,” she explained, her voice slow and delicate. She felt as if she were groping around her thoughts, trying to collect the fragments of memories and tape them all back together again. “We were happy. You were so ******* annoying. You had that smile you used to wear all of the time...cocky and playful. I was grinning. I didn't want to visit the apartment you shared, but I thought we were getting along better, so I pushed myself. It was 702, right? The apartment number?”

The apartment number had no relevance to her story, but she had to know. Was that right? Were her memories correct? Was it absolutely pathetic that she remembered an instance that happened almost a year ago? Clover tightened her grip on the sides of the tub and closed her eyes. The image of the enclosure came to mind. The green of the snake. No, her memories were correct.

“I,” she hesitated, “walked into the apartment because you told me to let myself in. I'm almost positive. The whole point was to see the snake, but nothing's ever that boring, is it?” Clover hissed at the jarring to her shoulder and the smile on her face quickly turned to a frown. “We talked about cyclicality. I told you that you needed to communicate with your progeny in the way that we were communicating. I said it was hard enough being the childe that hadn't bonded with her ‘amazingly sweet, thoughtful, funny, glorious sire.’” She shouldn't have, but she laughed again. She laughed through the pain; her laughter mixed with the pain. “You thought I was mocking you. The whole time, you thought I was being sarcastic. You never asked the right questions. You spent that time studying my words instead of studying my actions. What am I saying to you right now?”

Clover finally opened her eyes, letting the memory of the apartment fade into the back of her mind. They hadn't had anything else memorable about the visit, not really. The important parts never involved the spoken word.

<Jesse> The black blood made it hard to see. It obscured the wound in such a way that he couldn't see beyond it, but there was no difference, was there? Red blood would do the exact same thing. But the red blood would ooze, would dribble away. The black blood turned to wisps of smoke, as if it were a magic trick, trying to hide the truth. The sponge was dropped and Jesse's fingers gently prodded around the area. This might be easier if she were laying down. Maybe he should wait, wait until they were out of the tub and he could tend to her properly on the couch. Or in the bed. Her blood wasn't going to soil the sheets so much, was it? Maybe he didn't have to bandage the wounds at all, unless Clover wanted the comfort of them.

The prodding stopped as he nodded; she'd feel the affirmative answer against her temple, his stubble picking up stray strands of her hair. Yes, the room number was 702. Is 702. Was. He still had belongings in that apartment. Things that he should collect. But how long had it been since he'd been there? Was that where Grey stayed? Did she know he wouldn't come back, that he wouldn't follow her, that he had made a mess of her and abandoned her to the world? For a single second, he was angry. Hadn't he always told her that? That he was no good for her? In the beginning, hadn't he told her to leave? Surely.

And now here he was with Clover. And she was a mess, too. She was telling him about that night in the apartment, about that smile that he used to wear. Past tense. A smile that he no longer wore, one that he couldn't even remember, really. Who was that man? Was that really him? Had he really been that way?

And now she had asked him a question, and he felt like it was a trap. He went over and over her words. Was she accusing him? She had told him he needed to communicate, but he hadn't followed through? Was she telling him that she was being serious and hiding it with her sarcasm? That she had cared, back then, and he had been too blind to see it? Or was she talking about something else entirely, a meaning that he missed because he was doing it again? Not communicating. Being blind. “I don't want to get the answer wrong. Can't you just tell me? Straight? What are you trying to say?” he said. He assumed it would make her angry; he wrapped an arm around her torso, mindful of her wounds, hugging her there, holding her there, as if he feared she might disappear.

<Clover> He didn't even want to try, and it bothered her more than if he had simply spun fanciful lies. Between the poking and prodding at her injuries and his loss of interest in her words, Clover wanted to simultaneously scream at him and slap him. Of course there wasn't a right answer! Of course there wasn't a wrong answer! He held onto her as if she were going to pull away and storm out. Honestly, the thought had crossed her mind. She always had a quiet voice telling her to leave, to escape, but that voice had been overshadowed by the opportunity to shove the truth down his throat. “I'm exactly where I want to be, for one,” she replied, her expression and her voice bland. That part seemed obvious enough. Anyone could have assumed she'd found some sort of peace or stability within his arms.

“When you're sarcastic, you always have a reason for your sarcasm. Sometimes you're hiding something different. Sometimes you're hiding in plain sight.” The words stopped there, but she didn't think she could rest her case. Clo dug deeper into herself, prying open more memories and deciphering old conversations. But she couldn't bring herself to say anything more than that. She stopped herself in the way that the words had stopped. He couldn't handle it. She couldn't handle not knowing how he would react. She'd never tell him.

“I was hiding in plain sight,” she sighed. Had she just blurted that out? Clover resisted the urge to reach up and brush her fingertips over her lips. That had been her voice. That had been her sigh. Her level of annoyance spiked, dragging her mood down deeper into the darkest pits. “Can you just rip the bullets out? Or rip my arm off? Anything. Quickly.” Clo slumped against him and groaned. She had to grit her teeth to keep from yelling or cursing. Her arm her. Her back her. She hurt everywhere. She hurt in places that she didn't think possible. “I ******* liked you the entire time. That's why I didn't like touching you. Other people? I didn't care. You? You were different. Can you please just rip my tongue out? I keep ******* talking.”

Clo couldn't drown herself, but oh how she wanted to try. She didn't have enough room to fully submerge herself and never come up again. She didn't have the rope necessary to hang herself or to snap her neck. Yes, she actually sat there and contemplated more ways of hurting herself, more ways to keep herself from blurting out every little detail about herself and her thought processes. But there were more words. She had so much more to say. On and on. Endlessly. That was a cycle.

“You said I loved you from the beginning and that I wanted to **** you, but I found out I couldn't, so I was ‘cold and distant.' I guess you weren't that far off? You're a cheeky ********.”

<Jesse> Only now, lately, did Jesse realise it had always been a farce. His sarcasm and his cockiness. He accused people of loving him, of wanting to **** him, of wanting to see him naked because who wouldn't? At the time, he hadn't believed it; he'd liked to push people's buttons. That's all it was, he told himself. He had been proud of his confidence, of the way he was so easily able to brush away their laughter or their anger or their disgust. But all along it had been a mask. A way to hide how he really felt by saying things that were completely opposite. He told himself he didn't care what people thought but all along their laughter and their anger and their disgust had built, stored away for later use. The confidence he had was of a man walking on hot coals; he pretended like they didn't burn his feet, but he instead relished the pain.

He should have been angry with her, he could have been hurt. But instead he smiled. She was angry. She was telling him to rip off her arm. To tear out her tongue, but the implication was there. The words hadn't been uttered but for once he read what she was trying to say when she was trying to say nothing at all. They had both been hiding; he behind a veneer of false confidence and she behind lies. She'd always been good at lying. He'd pushed for negative responses as a form of self-flagellation, and Clover had provided the perfect ammo. How was he ever supposed to see through that?

He wanted to laugh because he had never thought he was right. The joke was just that. A joke. He thought it was a joke. It was a joke that anyone could love him. Entirely possible that they may have wanted a ****, but that was human nature, wasn't it? It was everyone's nature to want to feel pleasure every once in a while. Love and ******* had never mixed with him before, not really. He'd assumed Clover's distance and her coldness were due to some deep-seated hatred. More so later, than in the very beginning. That was the answer he was searching for, when he'd joked with her. He knew that now.

No, he had not known at the time that she was serious. She played along because she was as sick of the seriousness as he was. Now, he knew differently. Love, she had said, but he was glad she hadn't said it directly. Because although his first instinct was to smile, now he just wanted to cry. He was so fucked up. Everything was fucked up. There was always that obligation to return the sentiment but he was so pessimistic about love. Did he believe in it anymore? Or was it just a fantasy?

He could have teased her, but he didn't. Instead, he did as he was told. He held Clover against him, all of a sudden; his grip tightened, palm flattened against her chest not to be a perv but to hold her in place, his own chest a brick wall. His fingers swiftly, hastily pushed and dug beneath her skin, ripping out the offending bullets before they were healed inside. He'd have to deal with her leg later. But, at least for now, the shoulder was free of metal. The bullets clinked on the tiles as he tossed them aside, but he continued to hold on to Clover.

“Why? How could you possibly like me that way, for so long? I **** everything up! I'm no good for anyone!” he said. Maybe he was trying to persuade her that it was a bad idea. That she should turn back. Even though it hurt him to do so, it hurt him to banish the brief glimmer of happiness he had just experienced.

<Clover> The silence that followed her words hurt more than anything she’d gone through in the last forty-eight hours. Had she just implied that she loved him? Well, she had said it before, hadn’t she? Yes, and she’d gotten the same type of reaction. Disbelief. Athena had found her exclamation to be displeasing, just as Jesse had found her implication to be displeasing. Of course, she thought to herself. Of course it was ridiculous to just throw his own words back onto him and expect him to simply accept them as truth.

Not only did he not feel the same way, he didn’t have the decency to even acknowledge that she’d spoken at all. She’d gone too far and she couldn’t lie her way out of it. She didn’t know how to take everything back. She didn’t think he’d allow her to take her words back.

As his hand moved to rest against her chest, she couldn’t muster any type of reaction. Perhaps she’d left her body. Perhaps she’d mastered some new ability, some type of astral projection or another out-of-body experience. She felt the pressure against her open wound and her eyes widened. Her mouth opened for a gasp, a sharp intake of air that left her lungs screaming, screaming in the way that she screamed. And she did scream.

She struggled against him, but she couldn’t move. She cut her screams off with a string of colorful curse words. Each sentence began with a chorus of “****” and a subtle slide into a “damn.” But at least she wasn’t telling him that she loved him. At least the tears that filled her eyes weren’t because of the silence she’d received.

Even after the bullets were pried from her skin, Clover continued her cursing. Her words slipped into a decrescendo, with accents laced into the beginnings of her words. She couldn’t get enough oxygen into her lungs, but she didn’t want him to stop holding her. Even though she’d fucked up with her wording and revealed something she’d never planned on revealing, she didn’t want him to punish her by going away. She didn’t want the silence anymore. Clover had experienced more than enough silence. The silence and the darkness had devoured her, body and soul, and she never wanted to give them another opportunity to destroy something else.

Clo had anticipated harsh words, but the words weren’t directed at her. Her chest still rising and falling at an elevated rate, she wanted to turned her anger onto him. How dare he think he wasn’t good enough. How dare he think he fucks everything up. She had been the one to waltz out into the sun. She had been the one to forgo summoning him. Why wasn’t he being the strong one? Why wasn’t he the one telling her that he cared? Because he wasn’t in the state, or in the position, to have the strength. Because he didn’t care.

“Shut up,” she ground out, clenching and unclenching her fists. “You’re good for everyone. You’re good for me. Look what you’re doing right now. Do you honestly think I deserve better? No one’s better for me than you. I,” she hesitated, stumbling over her words. Don’t say it, she found her thoughts whispering. Don’t say it, Clover. “I saw something in you. I see something in you right now. Even when you don’t, when you can’t. You can be sweet. You can be thoughtful. You can be funny. You can be what people need.”

Vague. She was being vague. Had anyone else noticed that she liked to shift the focus of her sentences onto other people? They. People. The family. Us. We. She meant to say ‘me.’ She meant to say ‘I.’ Her fangs dug into her lower lip and she felt the familiar rumble, the familiar urge to flee. Because it was all too much to bear. He thought he wasn’t good enough and she wouldn’t say what she wanted to say.

“I,” she tried once more. “I think you’re amazing. You aren’t as bad as you like to think you are. Your shortcomings can be my strengths. My shortcomings can be your strengths.”

The limitations of her words had never been more obvious. Was she going to say what she’d already admitted to Athena, what had already been made obvious to Jersey, to Kaelyn, and to Victor? “I,” Clover hesitated. The words wouldn’t come out. She thought she’d scare him. She thought it was too soon. She thought it was utterly ridiculous and disgusting.

The word felt like filth and tasted like the beginnings of regret. Had she ever really said it and meant it? “I really,” she continued. “I mean,” she practically begged him. Her wounds started throbbing, beating in time with the way her chest rose and fell. “I might.” she began once more. Desperation had crept into her bones and ate away at her certainty, but it was a lie; her desperation had taken root only because of his negative reaction.

“I don’t give a **** what you say. I love you, you ******* idiot. Now go ahead and run away. I said it. I meant it.” Clover closed her eyes and waited for him to leave. To laugh at her. To adopt a patronizing tone. Because she’d said words he didn’t like and she’d said words he didn’t want to hear. Because she wasn’t what he really wanted or really needed. Because they needed more time to establish that sort of bond. Clover didn’t know what else to say to him to salvage whatever they had, so she just covered her face with her hands. Maybe she should have lied or omitted her words. Was it really too late?

<Jesse> Jesse could feel it coming. With each word that she uttered, each complimentary sentence, he felt the tension within him rising. Just as she begged herself not to say it, he begged her too. Feel it, but don’t say it. Don’t put that pressure on him. And when the words finally bloomed from her mouth, even as she seemed to struggle against his hold, he groaned. But he didn’t let her go. Even as his forehead rested against her shoulder, even as he tightened his hold – wrapping both arms around her now, rather than just the one – he wanted to curse her. He wanted to hate her for laying this on him right now. She was afraid he was going to leave, but he was afraid of the opposite.

He wanted to tell her no. He wanted to ask her why, yet again. He wanted to accuse her of bad timing. Why couldn’t she wait? But he didn’t. He held his tongue and he deliberated over his response. He agonized. What could he possibly say that wouldn’t hurt her? That wouldn’t make her angry? How could he make her believe him? How could he possibly ask her to be patient? Eventually, he lifted his head. He closed his eyes as he spoke, after he had licked his lips and steeled himself against her inevitable response.

“Listen to me. Please just listen,” he said. He wanted the words to sink in. He wanted her to be reasonable. “You say that no one is better for you than me. I feel the same way,” he started. “You have been the best thing for me for… months. You kissed me on that roller coaster and I tried to stop thinking about it but it kept coming back to me. I started … comparing you to Grey. I…” he hadn’t even admitted this to himself, but he was admitting it now. He had told Micah that he had cheated on Grey. In terms of sex, technically he hadn’t. Grey had walked away before that. But Jesse had felt like he was cheating before that, even though nothing had ever happened.

“…I felt like I was cheating on her because I was spending more time with you. But … you did for me what she didn’t. You realised what I needed when she didn’t know where to start. I didn’t have to tell you, you just knew,” he said, quietly. He had noticed. “You did it because you cared and I took, selfishly. I took your time even though I knew you probably hated it. Hated it because I would go home to her afterwards,” he took a breath that he didn’t need. This was the difficult part. His arms curled that little bit tighter.

“I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want you to go anywhere. I don’t want to go… anywhere, because I am right where I want to be,” he said, echoing her previous words. “I want to be with you. But you are all I have left. I need you, and if you walk away I don’t… “ he clenched his teeth and shook his head. “Please just be patient with me. Give me time. Give me time to prove that I want you more than I need you,” he said. And then he waited for the fallout.

<Clover> There were so many things left unsaid, but they had been condensed into three words and shoved down his throat. Never had something been as painful as when she’d told him that she loved him. And instead of relief, she felt a type of emptiness that spread throughout her body. She couldn’t control him. She couldn’t really protect herself from what he had to say. The longer he took to reply, the colder she felt. As naked as she was, she felt even more exposed. He saw everything about her and he couldn’t accept it; he couldn’t accept her words.

His hold tightened around her. Two arms curled around her midsection. Clover felt as if he were bracing himself for a fight. She knew then that his words weren’t the ones that she’d wanted to hear. His words weren’t the ones that she’d needed to hear. Of course not. She’d picked a terrible time. She’d picked a terrible approach. He wasn’t ready. Clo had to wonder if she were really ready. He made her doubt in a way that had her reconsidering her whole body, her whole life. Maybe it wasn’t him that wasn’t good enough. Maybe it was her.

He requested that she listen, but she didn’t want to hear what he had to say. She’d already deciphered his message before he had the opportunity to align his words and structure his sentences. They were incapable of loving one another. He had far too much baggage. She lacked any baggage at all. He had too much to handle, too much to juggle. She tripped him up and made it all more difficult for him. Perhaps she should have stayed in the sun. Perhaps she should have sought refuge in the shadow realm. She should have just embraced the shadows until she was well enough to return.

But his words were unexpected, to say the least. He’d said nice things to her, as if he were slowly stroking and disarming her mind. He hadn’t rejected her, in so many words. He had yet to get to the point she’d replayed over and over in his mind. She waited. She embraced the assumption and cradled it to her chest. They were just too fucked up to be happy and she was better off giving up and letting go.

I’m sorry, Clover, he would say. I just can’t return your feelings, Clover, he’d whisper. I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m not ready for this right now, he’d admit, his voice filled with something dangerously close to regret. Clo wanted him to let her go, to stop trying to say nice things to her, to stop trying to admit things to her.

Jesse was still several steps behind. He was stuck on the first square in the game, while she had already made it around half of the board. She’d already claimed the prize while he had yet to move. And so the proverbial game, whatever it was that they shared, left her waiting and wanting. Nothing had changed at all. No, something had changed. He knew. He was aware. And he did nothing. He had no desire to do anything.

Clover dismissed the idea of fleeing. The thought of moving away from him, collecting her clothes, and leaving the bathroom exhausted her. The mere thought of expelling that much energy had her craving her bed. At the same time that she wanted him near her, she wanted him to go away. She never wanted to see him again. She never wanted to hear his voice again. Because he confused her. He challenged her. Clover didn’t know how to feel about the fact that he’d asked for her patience or that he’d admitted she was all he had left. What if she weren’t all he had left? What if he had more? What if he had someone else?

Paranoia. Jealousy. Anger. Hurt. She read between his lines and grasped at words that he hadn’t actually said, that he probably never thought. He’d asked her to listen and she’d failed. Or perhaps she’d listened too much and assumed too much. She understood so little. “I knew it was a stupid thing to say, and I’m sorry. I’m not going anywhere. It’s okay,” she admitted, confused on whether or not she actually meant what she was saying.

The words had left her mouth before she even had time to scan them, to reconsider and look at them for inconsistencies. “It did hurt that you went home to someone else, but I didn’t expect you to...I didn’t expect that to change. Not really. I thought that if I gave you some sort of happiness, you’d survive? I’m not sure. I was selfish. I’m still selfish. I was being selfish by saying what I said. I didn’t think. This is shitty timing. I know it. I just didn’t think. It’s okay.”

Okay. Fine. The two words rolled off her tongue like default responses. Were things okay? She wasn’t sure. He hadn’t left. He hadn’t claimed he wanted to leave. Quite the opposite. He’d said he wanted to be there with her. He’d said he needed her, as they’d already explained to one another. He’d asked for time. He’d asked for patience. Clover kept repeating his words, those specific words, over and over again. There were words clawing up the back of her throat and over her tongue. The words took refuge behind her fangs. The words took refuge behind her lips.

“I’d rather we forgot I said anything at all and just sit here, please. Whenever you feel like making a total fool of yourself, I’ll be here and we can start this all over again.” She felt like a fool. That was the point. That was the truth. It wasn’t okay. He hadn’t said or done anything unreasonable. It was Clover. Clover made the mistake. Clover took things too hard. Clover had been the one to expect something so very unreasonable from someone that hadn’t fully recovered from a long-term relationship, from someone that hadn’t recovered from his addiction.

He had the weight of the world on his shoulders and she’d been selfish enough to add more weight. “I didn’t mean to add something else for you to worry about, Jesse. I don’t want to do that. That’s why I want to forget. That’s all. I don’t want you thinking about this. I’ll be here. I’ll still be here. It really doesn't matter one way or the other, okay? I just...I'm glad you didn't run away, really. Ugh, that would have been terrible,” she laughed, the sound quiet, as if reserved for the smallest space around them.

<Jesse> Even though she said she wasn’t going anywhere, Jesse still didn’t let go. With his face buried against Clover’s neck, he breathed in the scent of her. It was still so new. But new in a good way. New in a refreshing way. He’d repeated her words – he was exactly where he wanted to be. And he meant them. For right now, he was where he wanted to be. Every now and again he might compare the women – it was a sleep kick. It was a natural reaction. It was to be expected, moving so suddenly from one to the other. But he didn’t find Clover lacking in any way. Different, but not lacking. In this scenario, Jesse felt as if he were lacking. The words that he wanted would not come. But he had asked what needed to be asked. Patience.

What did he want her to wait for? What if he got to the end of this sentence and he was empty of any kind of affection? He shook his head; words that were not spoken out loud, but he disagreed with himself by shaking his head against Clover’s neck. No. He knew that he had more than a little affection for Clover. His mind tripped over her words and instead of shaking his head, he nodded.

“You gave me happiness when I had none. I owe my survival to you. Even now. Still, I owe…” he sucked in another breath, and nodded again, slowly. He knew what he needed to say. What he wanted to say. Maybe it wouldn’t be enough, but it would be something.

“I’m not going to forget about it. I’m going to treasure it,” he said, his voice not much more than a purr. A whisper that didn’t lack strength. He was certain of this. He laughed with Clover. He wondered whether her laughter was real. His was. He pressed a kiss to the corner of her jaw, to the lobe of her ear. He wanted her to turn around so that he could kiss her lips. If his grip loosened it was only to rearrange his arms; he wasn’t holding her now in a desperation that she wouldn’t run away, but instead with tenderness. A loving embrace, even if he had not said the words; still avoiding the bullet wounds, his fingers dipped down, tracing over the lines of the dagger that disappeared into her skin.

“If you’re selfish, I’m selfish too. Haven’t we already established this?” he asked. “It doesn’t give me something to worry about. Not … entirely. It gives me something to come home for,” he said. “It gives me a reason to stay…” he added. He did not feel as if he had made a fool of himself. How could it? But he tried not to be too happy. He tried not to focus on the fact that her admission made him happier than it worried him. Because although he had admitted to selfishness, he would try not to act on it.

<Clover> His last words made her incredibly uncomfortable, and she couldn’t lie to herself and pretend as if she didn’t know the reason for the reaction. He’d said something sweet. He’d said something wonderful. The niceties were foreign, and while they should have been welcomed, she found herself pushing them away.

Figuratively, she shrunk away from him. She’d asked him to forget she’d said anything, but he’d replied. He’d replied in a roundabout way, a way that let her know that he did care--yes, he cared--but he wasn’t to the point where he could say the words she’d wanted to hear. In fact, who knew if he even understood the words. Perhaps he was like her, a cynic. Perhaps he found something incredibly disgusting about the mere thought of trusting someone else so completely.

She hadn’t responded to his words. Her mind had gone on another tangent, one that took her back to the words she’d shared with Kaelyn. Clover had been the one to talk to Kaelyn about feelings. What an awkward conversation they’d shared. And from that point, Clo thought back to other landmark moments, to times when she’d been overwhelmed. To times when she’d missed Jersey more than she ever thought possible. To times when she’d wanted nothing more than to tell her friends how much they meant. To times when she should have taken the risk and said what it was that she wanted, or needed, to say.

Yes, Jesse still had his arms around her, but she had gone somewhere else. What she’d just admitted to him, what she’d just thought, had blended with other situations and became a backdrop for her mind. Embarrassment really had no place in the equation. Regret. Guilt. Shame. Disappointment. How many other things had she felt? Joy. She’d felt joy. She’d felt the overwhelming rush of accomplishment. Power. Clover had won the internal battle; she’d overcome the hesitation that had found a home within her body. She felt all of those emotions, and more, whenever she said something so meaningful.

“I think I’ve met my quota on feelings, Jesse.”

She placed a hand over his and guided it down further, down between her thighs. Her tattoos needed less of his attention and his affection. She didn’t want him focusing on her skin when she had such burns and bulletholes. Clo closed her eyes and focused on something beyond her own discomfort. Things weren’t so awful. Things weren’t so wretched. They had no other reason for being there. She had no other reason for lingering in the bath. She’d never needed someone tending to her before.

“If you want to show me about first aid, you can,” Clo spoke, “but I’d rather have you **** me.” Hard. That word had been implied. She wanted something to pull her from her thoughts. She wanted to, as awful as it sounded, **** the feelings away. And she hoped he would oblige.

<Jesse> Words always fell short. There were so many things in this world that could not be described. So many feelings or thoughts that could elaborated properly. Words were just objects slung together haphazardly into sentences. Those sentences could drastically change meaning depending on focus; depending on word placement. Jesse was not an expert with words. He wasn’t a poet or a lyricist; he wasn’t a literary author, and he had no acclaim. For Jesse, trying to string together the perfect sentence would be like an untrained artist trying to take a tattoo machine to someone else’s skin. It was unprofessional. It could be detrimental.

So he followed Clover’s cue; he didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. She told him what she wanted and he would give it to her, though not so crudely as she had asked for it. Where Clover might have reached her quota, where she might be seeking distraction by pleasure, Jesse had reached no such quota. The feelings Clover inspired in him were a reprieve from the feelings he was subject to every other minute of every other night. Feelings of worthlessness, of loneliness. The need for death hung over him like an ill-equipped umbrella. Like some sick joke.

With Clover, however, he would seek to distract himself but in an entirely different way. Or maybe it wasn’t so different, after all. It was a way to channel his energies; to focus and practice good rather than bad. He would start in the bathtub, just as she had instigated with her fingers over his. And he would end in the bedroom. He would do as was requested; but he would do so with a particular kind of care. At some point, he’d have made sure the bullets came out of Clover’s leg. He would indulge in a different kind of first aid. At least, until the sun came up.

He would resist sleep when Clover was dead to the world. He would apply the bandages then, when she had no say in the matter. And only afterwards would he climb into the bed beside her, to sleep without care.

OOC: Backdated to November 21st

<Clover> Pacing. Clover couldn’t stop pacing. Nervous. Anxious. Angry. Furious. It took all of her control not to cross the street, throw open the door to Vic’s house, and destroy everything in sight. The more time she had to think about his words, the more she wanted to kick and scream. He hadn’t said anything they didn’t already know; in fact, he’d wasted time repeating himself multiple times in the same conversation. Vic was tired. Vic was angry. Vic didn’t want to be bothered. He didn’t want her to bother him. He’d only shown up so that she wouldn’t hunt him down, so that he wouldn’t have to deal with her incessant text messages.

Her gifts were piled in the backyard, mixed with random drawings and pieces of mail. She’d added anything that reminded her of the past. No more Victor. No more Kenlie. No more Nik. Clover grabbed at the sides of her head and stooped down next to the pile of garbage. She tried focusing in on the individual items, but she saw kindling. She saw target practice. “Irreparable. Asshole. Selfish, irresponsible, inconsiderate, useless piece of ****,” she muttered.

Her voice grew until she eventually let out a frustrated scream. It was too easy to lose control, and she knew what happened when she lost her temper. As if on cue, the sands in her garden began to shift, vibrating as if the earth were humming. Black wisps danced among the individual grains and seeped from between the freshly made channels. “******* great!” Clo reached into the pile of discarded gifts and miscellaneous items to grab at the handle of a knife. She threw the steel blade at the sand as if it would stop the rumbling.

<Jesse> Jesse was summoned into a part of Clover’s house he wasn’t sure he had seen before. A little courtyard, complete with sand and grass. When she’d told him she was summoning him, he’d been in his own garden back at Third Circle. The majority of his time gardening, he’d had Jormun twined around his body; she was a living, flickering thunder suit, almost as if the snake helped to keep Jesse in one piece. To keep him from spooking and flying out the door to god knows where and to do god knows what.

He hadn’t had a response to his last message to Clover until she told him Victor didn’t want to be bothered. Either that meant she’d had a long-winded discussion with him via text, or she’d met him somewhere. That didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t alone, which was fine, Jesse supposed. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear about it. He was channelling zen in his garden, pretending to be some all-wise Chinese master. Maybe he should have done that here, at Clover’s. There was a rake, here. Maybe he could learn the art of meditation.

He stood there with his hands behind his back, watching Clover pace and immediately barraged by her anxious fury. The ground rumbled, and he spared a glance through the door to the house. Had she wrecked it again, so soon after she’d fixed it all up? Jesse wasn’t sure he wanted more fuel added to the fire raging in the pits of his soul, but he wasn’t going to turn away. Instead, two long strides brought him behind Clover, where he wrapped his arms tight around her in a bid to keep her still.

“Use your words, Clo. Sentences. What happened?”

<Clover> Someone was touching her. Every instinct urged her to lash out and injure the one closest to her, but she had enough sense to avoid any sort of reaction. She didn’t move, not to hurt him and not to relax against him. The knife she’d thrown seemed like it wanted her back again. If inanimate objects had the ability to summon her, the knife would have already summoned her. Her lack of concentration--the whole situation, actually--made her feel as if she were underwater. Victor had walked out on all of them plenty of times, but he’d always come back. He was a selfish ********; selfish bastards got lonely too.

“He,” she just stopped there and gritted her teeth. Had she really forgotten everything he’d said to her? Her anger overshadowed everything. “We talked about you. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to talk about the fae. He said the fact that you lied to him hurt him. That doesn’t even matter. It was one lie. He’s a selfish piece of ****!” She snapped her mouth shut and concentrated on not losing control. She’d practiced. Everything was going to be okay. It only took a little concentration, a little concentration that turned out to require a great deal of effort.

Sentences. He’d asked for sentences. “He said the only reason he agreed to talk to me was because I wouldn’t stop texting him. He said I’d show up on his doorstep and he didn’t want that. He wanted to be left alone. I annoyed him and he showed up to pacify me and inform me that I was bothering him.”

The sand had ceased its movement and the ground had ended its steady cadence. Clo still didn’t relax. The anger was still there, bubbling beneath the surface. Why wasn’t Jesse furious? Why didn’t he have some ability to know what had transpired? She should have let Jesse talk to Victor, or she should have forced Victor into a group meeting. “He said it’s irreparable, whatever he means by that. He’s tired of dealing with us.”

<Jesse> Jesse didn’t have room for fury anymore. Although his temper would remain a constant, it was inspired only in the moment, and only with the person it was aimed at. If Jesse had been there, maybe there’d have been no controlling his temper. Or maybe he’d have accepted the weight of every accusation, would have believed them. Would have given in. Right now, he couldn’t be angry. Couldn’t, because what Clover told him were things that he already knew.

He didn’t focus on what she’d said about Victor in regards to himself; the lie about the fae. If Victor was so upset, if he wanted to fix things, he could come and talk to Jesse himself. Or maybe, when Clover was calm and Jesse was by himself again, he would text Victor himself. Maybe he’d meet with his progeny for masochistic reasons. Maybe he wanted to hear every accusation that Victor had, just to feel the cut of the knife. Maybe that was all Victor wanted. To be told that he was right. A decision was made, somewhere in the back of Jesse’s mind. But he didn’t Clover.

Instead, he focused on Clover. He focused on her own hurt. On the reasons why she was making the ground shake; why she’d piled every sentimental piece of Victor to be destroyed in the middle of her yard. He wanted to agree with everything. He wanted to tell her to do it. He wanted to step back and help her destroy the relationship she had garnered with her ‘sibling’, for lack of a better word. But something stopped him.

“Sometimes people say what they don’t mean. If anything is irreparable, it’s because he refuses to allow it to be repaired. How can anything be repaired if he won’t talk about it?” Jesse said. “Give him time. Maybe he’ll come around. Maybe he’ll realise what he’s lost. That he’s pushing away everyone who cares…” he said. It sounded so ******* familiar.

<Clover> “He’s refusing to be the bigger person. I’ve told him what he’s doing is giving up. I don’t know what else to do. It was always my little piece of family, and now that I’ve found something more, he just...I guess it’s gone and I can’t let go.” Clover stopped and covered her face with her hands. There was a long moment of silence, one in which she lost herself and found herself. The pattern repeated over and over again until she thought she’d fallen victim to Ouroboros, until she thought she’d taken the snake’s place. She rubbed her hands over her face and let her fingers slip down over her cheeks until they fell. Her arms went back to her side. “I don’t want him to throw us away. I don’t want him to throw this family away.”

Her anger had transformed into a mixture of rage and exhaustion. Why was she being such a problem for Jesse? Why was Victor being such a problem for Jesse? And yet, if she hadn’t reached out, what would that have done? Made things worse? Made things utterly irreparable?

“He can’t pick and choose when he wants to be here. That’s not how family works. He’s here or he’s not. When this is over, when things have calmed down, he can’t waltz in here and expect forgiveness when he’s done nothing. And he’s done nothing,” she fumed, thinking of the very scene. “I’m glad you weren’t there. I’m glad you didn’t talk to him and he didn’t talk to you. He’s being a little ****. He’s blaming you for everything and he’s not accepting any responsibility. I told him it’s a two-way street. It is. He’s being selfish.” Hadn’t she already said that? Hadn’t she already thought that?

She’d wanted to tell Victor to stay away from Jesse, but she’d chosen to bite her tongue. She’d wanted to threaten Victor, to tell him not to bother Jesse or she’d make sure that he, Victor, got enough bullets to last him an eternity. Clover hadn’t communicated everything; she’d promised to remain calm and control her temper. And she had. She’d bitten her tongue right off, figuratively speaking. Victor had walked away, and Clover had let him. She had made sure that he experienced her walking away, just to prove that he’d drawn the last straw. He deserved nothing more. She was supposed to give zero fucks, and so she went a little mad and decided to sever all ties and remove every memory of him, of them, of the bar. She’d decided to replace them with jade and cotton and metal.

<Jesse> This felt like something they had talked about before. Whether it was with Clover or whether it was with Victor himself. The same lacerations opened up, over and over again, only to heal over as scars. There had been high hopes for this family. The hope that he could and would gather around him those who could be loyal – not just to him, but to each other. It was a kind of loyalty he had seen elsewhere for people who did not deserve it. At least, that was his current opinion. Except those he wanted to care about were exactly the same as those he’d cared about in the past. They walked away when things got too tough, or when they had given up.

Victor had given up, and in Jesse’s current state of mind he assumed he deserved it. He had no idea why Clover was still around. If she were not so devoted to Jesse and his well-being, would she be suffering like she was now? She should have gone to Victor. She should have stayed with him. She could be angry with Jesse but he’d have allowed it to be in such a way that it wouldn’t hurt. Right? Was that possible?

“He will. He’ll come back and he’ll think that he’ll be forgiven but he won’t be. We can welcoming. We can be amiable. But I can’t ever trust him. That’s what he’s lost, and it’s his own fault. Maybe he’ll learn. Maybe he’ll change. Maybe I’m clinging to the last shred of optimism I have,” he said. He loosened his grip on Clover. She did not seem entirely relaxed, but at least the ground was no longer shaking. At least she was still.

He didn’t say what he wanted to. He didn’t say that maybe everything should be blamed on him – on Jesse. It was his fault. Every last scrap of turmoil was his fault. If he hadn’t walked into the fog. If he hadn’t tomed home. If he had taken the responsibility of his own actions and broadcasted them to the world; if he hadn’t lied. If he accepted that he was pathetic, and worthless. If he took all that on his shoulders – if he quit being so proud, and so stubborn –

“You do what you feel you have to do but you think about it first, and make sure it’s not something you’re going to regret…” he said, turning Clover around to face him – or if she would not be turned, moving to stand in front of her so he could look her directly in the eye.

<Clover> Was he trying to talk her out of it because he cared about her, or was he trying to talk her out of it because he thought she still clung to Victor in the way that he, Jesse, still clung to optimism? Did he think she’d regret her actions because she’d go back? Clover wasn’t sure what was happening, but something was happening. Whenever she couldn’t read the situation, she felt helpless. She felt as if the space around her were made of a thicker substance, one that she couldn’t move through, one that she couldn’t break through. Did Jesse realize that she felt confused?

“Don’t let me go,” Clo mumbled, reaching out with both hands to slide her fingers down Jesse’s forearms and along his palms. She took his hands in hers and squeezed. She touched him because she had to touch him, because she needed something to hold onto. Her anger had bled into something else, something that required she touch him. “He deserves this. I walked away from him before he had the opportunity to walk away. I didn’t look back. He’s wrong. He’s not trying. He’s the one doing this. He doesn’t deserve us. Not now. And if he should come back, if he should prove that he does want us,” she trailed off and then continued, her voice firm, “then that’s that.”

Optimism. She had to scrape through layers of pessimism and thick curtains made of depression. She had to be the strong one. It hurt her. It hurt her in the way the sun had hurt her those nights ago. But she had Jersey. She had Athena. She had Renee. They encouraged her. She was where she wanted to be and she clung so desperately to nights spent cleaning up messes that should have never occurred, messes created by selfish, lonely men that were too blinded by pride to forgive and forget. Men that she wanted nothing to do with. Men that she wanted never to acknowledge again.

“We’ll fix this, okay? We’ll build this up again. It’s him. You’re here and he’s not trying. I don’t care what he said. And I’m not a bother. I’m not an annoyance. I’m not selfish for wanting to be happy. He should be happy for me. This is his fault,” she repeated again, her words altered and yet communicating the same message. She didn’t know whether she meant to convince Jesse or whether she meant to convince herself, but she needed the words. Victor didn’t deserve them. Victor had ruined things. She’d tried. She’d reached out. She’d been kind and attentive and considerate.

And he’d transformed the conversation into a demonstration of his own struggles. Poor Victor. He hadn’t asked about her. He hadn’t checked in on her. The moment he’d realized she cared about Jesse, the concern stopped, replaced by bitter urges and even sharper words. And she retaliated accordingly. “If you talk to him and he hurts your feelings, I’m killing him. I don’t care what you feel about this. If he hurts you, I’m hurting him.” Her expression hardened and conveyed the seriousness of her words. She’d said what she’d thought during her previous conversation and what she’d thought on another occasion. “I’m serious,” she reassured.

<Jesse> Jesse had come to the realisation lately that Clover was fragile. Where once upon a time he had assumed she was stronger than the rest of them put together, he realised it was for show. The smallest things could send her to pieces – as well as the big things. And all of them accumulate and build to this. This had nothing to do with Jesse. Not entirely. It had to do with Clover, caring about someone and doing what she could to help that person, and getting nothing in return. Instead, that person turned his back because she had made a choice that he considered wrong.

Yes, it hurt. It hurt that Victor would think that Jesse was a choice. A wrong one. Jesse wasn’t who he once was. Jesse was failing, receding, becoming something less. It was temporary. Could be temporary, with the right kind of support. No, Jesse would not call it help. He didn’t like calling it help. Support was better. Support was what Clover was giving him now; a particular kind of loyalty that could have something to do with her feelings for him. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. But Victor had made so many promises, and he’d broken them. Maybe he’d broken promises that he’d made to Clover, too.

Jesse wanted to take Clover’s face between his palms, but she was too busy squeezing them. His fingers curled around hers, and he wanted to laugh. It was too late. She didn’t want Victor to hurt him? It was too late. He’d done that numerous times over, but Jesse wasn’t going to say it. He wanted to think that he was invincible, and that he could not be hurt. The last thing he was going to do was tell Clover that’s exactly what he was going to challenge Victor to do. He wasn’t going to argue with her, either. He wasn’t going to take away her optimism.

“I’m here. I don’t question your seriousness. I maintain that I should go and shoot him in the dick just for… this,” he said. Although it didn’t seem like Victor had, in any way, tried to convince Clover that he was the better choice, it didn’t matter. He had reduced Clover to this anxious, furious, fragile creature. And for that, he should be punished.

<Clover> The threat remained, standing stronger than she stood, looming over the both of them and clouding the air around them. In a way, Jesse had accepted her response. Clover took comfort in the fact that he wouldn’t fight against her. She stood there and imagined the reaction that the others would have, or at least she tried to imagine their reactions. Her mind had moved onto better things, more important things. The mission remained. She still had to destroy what she’d once deemed her most precious items. And even after they were gone, she knew the memories would remain. Sharp, pungent, bitter memories.

Clover didn’t know what else to say to Jesse. He hadn’t reacted the way she’d expected. If she were honest with herself, he hadn’t reacted the way that she’d hoped. Luckily, she’d left such honesty at the doorstep to her home, somewhere between the entryway and the doorway to the yard. She hadn’t destroyed the interior of her home, but she’d wanted to. She’d wanted to take chunks of her walls and drag the plaster out into the yard to join the rest of her items.

She’d wanted to take the computer and the television. The mattress would have eventually joined the possession party, the heap of trash that she meant to break into the smallest pieces possible. Instead of destroying her home, she’d plucked the gifts from their strategical places and went into the yard. She’d escaped the temptation by avoiding the interior of the home. And she’d summoned Jesse. And what was it that the man did?

He’d done his best to placate her. He’d held her. He seemed tired, as if joining in on her ranting and her raging was all too impossible. He lacked the spark that she’d anticipated, that she’d craved. It hurt. It disappointed her. She’d expected him to be just as angry, to be just as pessimistic; she’d expected him to encourage her retaliation with all of his heart. Instead, he’d held her. He’d spewed words of optimism. He’d left her wanting. She could have told him, but she knew how the truth tasted; she knew how the truth felt as it slammed into her chest.

Clover held onto his hands until she felt as if she'd gathered all the comfort they contained, and then she turned back to her belongings. The knife had been thrown aside, but she had no ability to destroy the blade, not without the aid of the hottest flames. The Batman lighter tucked into the front left pocket of her jeans lacked the heat necessary to melt the blade, or at least to soften the blade enough for her to shape into something unrecognizable.

Clo grabbed a book first, The Complete Excuses Handbook, and ripped it in half, the pages torn perpendicular to the spine. With the book in halves, Clo ripped the pages once more. She ripped the book into smaller and smaller pieces until the paperback book looked like a literary fruit salad, its chunks ugly and uneven.

“This was from Kenlie. I have an excuse for everything. I don’t need a book to help me. She thought it was funny though. We laughed.” Clover dropped the pieces onto the ground and collected a beautiful necklace that she’d tossed into the grass. The silver came to a point at the end, decorated with circular gemstones and crowned with silver flowers.

She’d never worn the piece. Jewelry wasn’t really her thing. Clo held the necklace out to Jesse, a silent offering. “This was from Nik. Right after he told me I was ruining his chances at getting into the motorcycle club. I think I told you and you took his side,” Clo looked at him with a blank expression, though the memory didn’t bother her anymore. “It looks like it’ll snap, if you apply the right pressure. Do you want to?”

<Jesse> It surprised Jesse too, in the end. If he stopped to think about it. Where was his anger? He should have been furious at Victor for reducing Clover to this. Just as Clover had said she would hurt Victor if Victor hurt Jesse, it was something that should have been reciprocated. But all the fight had left him. All of a sudden – or had it happened gradually, over the past couple of weeks? – he was tired. Where for months he had been restless, pacing, running away to some place outdoors, out of the city, out in the open, now all he wanted to do was curl up in bed and sleep. Not even in bed. He wanted to find somewhere in the garden, dig himself a hole, and sleep in the Earth.

What would happen if he did that? Would the earth grow around him? Would the seeds come to life? Would a tree stand where had chosen to bury himself? It was poetic, in a way. But why bother trying if he didn’t really care about the outcome?

As soon as Clover’s hands left them, Jesse shoved his own hands into the pockets of his track pants. There was dirt in them, which his fingernails collected, which the balls of his fingers played with, rolling the grit between his skin. He wouldn’t join in. This was Clover’s past. These were her memories she wanted to destroy, and Jesse felt it was not his place to destroy them for her. He’d help her light the fire, though. He’d be there to support her, whatever she chose to do.

Even though it hurt. It hurt to watch her tear through the things that mattered; the things that connected her to Victor. To Kenny. How was this something that could be fixed? She was letting go of a part of her family. Of his family. A part of Fforde. Not just letting go, she was blowing it up. Setting it on fire. Destroying whatever was left. Would there be anything to salvage? Or would it be better, in the end, to start fresh? A clean slate?

He should have been angry. But he was bereaved – he watched on, like a man watching a coffin being lowered into the ground.

<Clover> No. He hadn’t said the word, but she’d gathered his response from his stance. No. Clover shouldn’t have been angry with him. She shouldn’t have fallen into the trap of misplaced anger. But she looked at him with a quiet fury that ebbed and flowed. The expectation had been that he would help, that he would welcome the offer and aid her in cleansing her life.

Silence never had the opportunity to punctuate the moment. Clover closed her hands around the necklace and ripped it apart. The joining links snapped with a distinct ting, the sound of precious metal connecting with precious metal. The fire couldn’t destroy the silver or the gemstones, but the fire stood for something more; the fire promised a freedom that only the warm lick of flames offered. Once she’d torn all the links and severed the ties that kept the necklace in one piece, she tossed the different parts onto the grass and turned her attention, and her anger, back onto Jesse.

They were two very different people. There were excuses and justifications, but did they really matter? In the bigger picture, did their circumstances overwhelm them and overshadow them? Were they buried beneath layers of dust? There were so many questions running through her mind, questions that fed the fury that flowed through her body.

Clo told herself to keep her mouth shut. She told herself that things would get better. Normally, the optimism became the waves that cleansed the doubts from her mind, but Victor’s words crept through the fog and attached themselves to her every thought. Maybe Victor was right. Maybe she was deluding herself. Clover and Jesse were two people who were too weak to continue leading independent lives and too weak to continue leading dependent lives.

He will never be the same.

Can I put up with this forever?

Can I accept this?

I want more.

Victor’s words had penetrated and poisoned her mind. The thoughts circled around, over and over again. The doubts and fallacies bled into a vicious cycle that threatened to destroy the fragile relationship that she and Jesse had built. He wasn’t angry; therefore, he didn’t care. He wasn’t angry; therefore, he wasn’t the same. He wasn’t angry; therefore, he wasn’t the person she wanted. Her sound arguments had transformed into a steady rhythm, like a marching band built to escort them to a sudden, inconceivable end.

Clover produced the Batman lighter from her pocket and flipped open the top. She held the flame to the expired coupon, a coupon that had promised her one small tattoo from Masterpiece Tattoo. She and Kenny had never gone together. They’d had time to visit the shop, but the two women had wasted days and weeks. When the flames devoured most of the thick paper, Clo dropped the burning remnants onto the ground and stomped her shoe on the smoking remains.

“Am I the same person? And don’t tell me that people change. I mean,” she sighed, “am I unrecognizable?” Clover flipped the top of her lighter closed and looked over at him. “Am I delusional? Am I fooling myself?” Was Victor right? Was Jesse capable of answering those questions? Clover wanted to say no.

<Jesse> Jesse could see that Clover was angry. He could see that she expected something of him – though he wasn’t exactly sure what. Maybe he knew, but he didn’t want to admit to it. He didn’t want to fuel this. He didn’t want to help break this family apart. Normally, if someone turned their anger on him, Jesse would respond in kind. Some kind of chemical reaction would tell him to straighten his shoulders, to narrow his eyes and challenge them. My anger is better than yours.

<Jesse> When Clover turned her fury on him, however, he did nothing. His shoulders remained slumped, and there were black circles forming under his eyes. Eyes that were normally bright with mischief or passion were dull. They searched Clover’s stare, almost begging for forgiveness, but the words didn’t pass his mouth. He watched as the flame came to life – only when that flame flickered and burned was there some semblance of need in his eyes; a need to see it grow, to see it consume everything.

Clover stomped the flames out, however. They were ground into ash into the grass, and only the lingering scent remained; an acrid, black scent that tantalized Jesse’s senses, but not enough. Not enough to have him reaching for the lighter to finish the job. Whatever fire had been living in his chest, it had dwindled, and now there were only coals.

The questions were asked, and there was a flicker of a smile on Jesse’s lips. He shook his head. “You’re a mystery wrapped in an enigma, Clover,” he said, quietly. “At least, you were. I don’t have the authority to answer that question. I can’t tell you whether you’ve changed when I’ve only really just discovered who you are. Truly,” he said. There was a lot to take in, when it came to Clover. The journal… she had written so much, and it was hard to keep it all straight. Had she changed?

A frown furrowed Jesse’s brow, his fingers now fists in his pockets. “Delusional about what?”

<Clover> Clover had wanted to coax something from him. Words. Actions. Moments. Something. Anything. And he gave her nothing. She gave him nothing. So why the hell were they even trying? Nothing she said or did helped him. Her presence upset him. She’d invited him into her home to deal with her anger and her disgust, to put up with the fire that tempted him.

“You’re not getting any better. I know that. I like to pretend that you are though. I like to pretend that you’ll,” she sighed. Even though she knew how much he disliked her unfinished sentences, she stopped speaking. She didn’t care. Her unfinished words had turned into endless possibilities. Her mind had left her with a blank, so she had left him with the same. She had to censor herself with him, just like the others had to censor themselves with him. Even though she and Jesse had an agreement on honesty, omission became a bigger part of their relationship.

The light that filtered through the curtains and windows reflected off the cartoon figure on her lighter. Her home sent her a reminder that she had yet to burn the rest of her presents. The paper and fabric would have made a delightful little fire, one that would have been quick to start and quick to die. And Jesse would have enjoyed every minute. Clover turned her lighter around in her hand and then tucked it back into her left front pocket. She didn’t need the fire anymore. She didn’t need the fire, because Jesse didn’t need the fire.

Lie.

No one had to whisper the word, not when the word had been ingrained in her mind. When things got rough, Clover lied. Lying felt better than telling the truth. Looking over at Jesse, Clover felt the overwhelming urge to fall back into old habits. She felt the need to lie to him, rather than omit words. Instead, she shied away from the subject of her own delusions and focused on her other point. She focused on digging into his mind to see if they had reached the same conclusion. She operated by looking him over from head to toe, as if taking in his body language would answer all of her questions.

“What if you don’t get better? What if we don’t get better? What if,” she stopped, but she cut herself off with a frustrated growl. She turned her anger back onto her pile of gifts. She kicked at the chunks of her book and sent them tumbling across the grass. “We aren’t the same. I’m not the same. You’re not the same. And what if this is all we are? What if Victor’s right and I’m just fooling myself? I’m not optimistic enough. I’m not positive enough. I’m not strong enough. I’m falling apart. And I don’t want you to fall apart. I want to help you. I want to fix you. I want to support you. I can’t do any of that right now. I can’t do that when I can’t even accept the fact that you’re getting worse. I can’t win this. I can’t do anything. I don’t like this feeling. I’m helpless. I hate it. This isn’t me. I don’t even know who I am anymore.” Her words came out in a flurry, tumbling out of her mouth in the way that the pages tumbled across the lawn.

“I’m waiting for the moment when you can’t force yourself to try anymore. And then what? I’m angry with Vic because he isn’t helping. I can’t do this on my own. I want someone to help me. And I’ve always gone to you. You helped me. And now where do I go, Jesse? You can’t ******* answer the question. I can’t ******* answer the question.”

<Jesse> The words cascaded over Jesse like rocks dislodged from a cliff face. There was nothing he could do to stop them, and nowhere to move to get out of the way. He had to accept that unfinished sentence; the vague allusion to disillusionment that was never expanded upon. That was what he knew of Clover. That was something she did well – unfinished thoughts, or thoughts started that she realised she didn’t want to voice, after all. Jesse’s fingers remained tight fists in his pockets, the nails digging into the flesh of his palms.

If she’d meant to censor herself, she hadn’t gone far enough. As she shared her concerns, Jesse felt himself pulled under. The rocks had slammed into him and thrown him into the ocean and now he was drowning beneath the waves. There had always been the assumption that, like all addicts, he would get through it. He would go cold turkey. He would suffer withdrawals. But whatever addiction plagued him would soon leave him. His body and soul would be cleansed of it. It was the assumption that he had clung to, but what if it was wrong?

Now, Clover saw a reaction. Bright blues widened, bleached with fear. He hadn’t stopped to think about it. He hadn’t even considered that it might not work. That he wouldn’t ever get better. That the only cure would be to sire someone, and that would only ever be the case.

The pile of gifts that Clover kicked may as well have been the last tower of hope that Jesse had. It went scattering across the lawn and Jesse felt the stone drop in his gut; his eyes lowered to the grass and the world spun around him. Whatever reply he had got stuck in his throat, his Adam’s Apple dancing in his throat, as if he were physically trying to dislodge whatever was stuck in his throat. It took him a few seconds to realise what it was. It was panic. It showed in the wetness that now rimmed his eyes, in the way he fought hard to blink it away. To not give in. To try, oh so very ******* hard, to be strong for Clover.

He shook his head. Finally the words came out, harsh and forced. “I don’t have the answers. I assumed it would get better. That sooner or later I’d regain…. Something. Addicts get over the things they’re addicted to all the time, don’t they? But now you… you… I might be wrong. It might all be for nothing,” he said. He didn’t want to be weak. But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help the way he dropped down, sitting on the grass because he had nowhere else to sit. The ground was good enough to support his suddenly numb body. He looked up at Clover, his eyes still wide, his hand over his mouth muffling his words. “I’m so sorry.”

<Clover> The moment his eyes widened, Clover knew. She knew she’d said the wrong thing. Her words had cut into him, leaving deeper chasms than she could ever have imagined. All of her doubts had been transferred onto him; all of her worries had been magnified. Any of her remaining rage her transformed into regret and desperation. She didn’t know what to say to clear the air. Her mouth opened and closed several times, but only the beginnings of words came out. Her voice cracked in the way that she cracked, something weaker and incomparable to Jesse’s reaction. He’d crumbled, right in front of her, while she’d remained. Her body never gave out. Her legs never betrayed her.

The fears that had hollowed out her chest and spread throughout her body had found a new home in Jesse’s body. Though she lacked the ability to see beneath his flesh to the cartilage and tendons, through layers of tissue and bone, she saw the fear as it crept along connective tissue. Had her words wounded him as Victor’s words had wounded him? Was she no better than the others?

You don’t deserve him, Clover.

The thought stabbed her right in the heart. Clo took slow, uneven steps to the edge of her zen garden and fell to a seated position on the raised edge. They were even, or as close to even as possible. She blamed herself for everything. She blamed herself for the beginning of the journey; she blamed herself for every unhelpful word or sentence she’d ever spoken to him. She blamed herself for his reaction and his lack of answers and his apology. He covered his mouth, but she doubled over. Palms pressed against she shins, she just shook her head back and forth, from left to right.

“Don’t apologize, Jesse. I’m the one who’s sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean to say those things.” Clover finally found her voice, but it was weak, downright pathetic. She’d managed to stop shaking her head, but she still hugged her legs. She couldn’t bring herself to hug him. “I’m sorry. It’s not all for nothing, okay? It matters. Please don’t hold onto what I said. Please.” Her voice cracked near the end, broken apart by the shuddering intake of air. She had her own fear and insecurities. “You’ll pull through this, and you’ll be better for it. I’m sorry.”

You don’t deserve him, Clover.

Clover moved her hands to her face to try and block out the thoughts, but she couldn’t clear them from her mind. She didn’t deserve him. She didn’t love him, not if she couldn’t care about him unconditionally. She was awful to him.

“I’m sorry.”

<Jesse> Jesse crawled forward. He couldn’t stand the distance. The distance was too much. If Fforde had been the ship that was keeping him afloat, the ship had sunk and Clover was the lifeboat. Hadn’t he thought that before? There was Kaelyn, too – Rhett, intermittently – but mainly it was Clover. If he was drowning in the waves, he was now swimming toward her, clinging to her as if she was the only one who’d help him to survive the storm. It was unfair on her. But what does a lifeboat do? They don’t have to be proactive. They just need to be there. They just need to exist.

On his knees in front of her, Jesse reached for Clover’s hands. His own palms were smudged with his own blood, where the nails had dug in. Now, he gripped her hands. Maybe a little too tight. Not tight enough to break the bones, but close enough.

“Listen to me. You don’t have to do anything. If I’m only getting worse, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Just be here, okay? Just don’t leave me. You are the reason I came back last time. You’re the reason I’m alive. I need a reason to live,” he said. He wanted to lay his head down in her lap. He wanted to beg her, but beg her for what? She was his lifeboat but he could see her drifting. Or was it just the rocks that he could see up ahead, that the waves were going to throw them both onto?

He refrained from laying his head in her lap. That would be going too far. That would be crumbling too much. Why did he always have to do this in front of her? Why couldn’t he do it when she wasn’t around? They were right. He was weak, and he was pathetic. He had no strength left. The masks were fading.

“Things have changed. Irrevocably. You told me you loved me and that’s what I’m going to hold onto, okay? Why does change have to be bad? This can be good, Clover. Please just don’t give up on me. You don’t have to do anything else,” he repeated. He had to slam that point home. He didn’t believe her, obviously. When she touted her optimistic words, when she told him it was all going to be okay. He didn’t believe that she believed it. He was still stuck on what she had said previously.

“I’ve got nowhere else to go, either. You’re it. We’re it, for each other. We’re just going to have to ******* fall apart together,” he said. Who knew? Maybe it could be beautiful.

<Clover> Had her words and her thoughts carried her down a road that led to departure? Yes, her ramblings had acted as an introduction to some sort of end, but that had never been her intention. She’d told him that she loved him, and she meant it. She still meant it. So why were her sentences acting like a noose tightening around her neck? Why were the consonants and vowels like blades? Everything she said tore him apart; everything she didn’t say tore her apart. Maybe they were just meant to fall apart. And maybe they were meant to do it together.

Clover took in the scent of blood in the air. She closed her eyes and allowed the smell to travel up her nostrils and down into her lungs. His blood soothed her, where it had once set her on edge. Why he bled made no difference. The air wasn’t saturated with the smell, so it wasn’t a serious injury. She had no reason to dwell on the why, when she had such a wonderful opportunity to lose herself to his scent.

Jesse’s words prodded at open wounds. She wanted to argue that she had to do more, that she had to be more, but she didn’t have the strength left. Both of them were exhausted, or so she surmised. All of her things would be there when the sun rose, and all of her problems would be there when the sun set. When she finally noticed the absence of his voice, she opened her eyes.

“Okay,” she replied. Any number of his words could have earned such a reply, and Clover made no attempts to clarify. She focused on the pressure applied to her hands. He held them with something she identified as desperation; he held her hands as if she were going to leave him there, or as if she were going to float away. “I’m not leaving you. I’m not giving up on you.”

When she managed to slip her hands from his grasp, she leaned in and wrapped both arms around him. Clo held onto him in the way that he’d held onto her hands. She hugged him as if her hug were the only thing keeping them there. Hugs and kisses and hurried touches became such important additions to her life. With a small sigh, she took in the faint scent of his blood. “It looks like we’re falling apart together then.”

<Jesse> It wasn’t anything that Clover had said, specifically, that had Jesse assuming she would leave him. Maybe it was the defeat in her words; it sounded like she was giving up. Just like everyone else. SO many people had given up on him. So many people who’d meant something to him, who he had cared about, and they’d all given up and walked away. It was reasonable that he should assume that it was his fate? He was the one that everyone left behind.

Jesse was reluctant to let go of her hands. Even though she had told him she wasn’t going anywhere, he still didn’t want to let her go. There wasn’t much in this world that Jesse Fforde was afraid of, and if he was afraid the last thing he ever did was admit to it. But he didn’t have to say anything, now. No words had admit anything. It was clear in his actions. It was clear in the way he sagged into Clover’s embrace, the way he buried his face against her neck, as if by doing so he might be able to hide himself from the world.

Something had happened, and it felt profound. For a good few minutes he was still and silent; he breathed only to breathe in Clover’s scent, to feel his chest rise and fall against her own. To reassure himself that she was there, and that he wasn’t alone. His fingers clutched at her shirt, between her shoulders and at her waist.

Their conversation replayed itself in his mind. He’d consumed the heaviness; he knew something had happened, and that it was profound. He hung on to that, storing it away to observe properly at a later date. For now, he laughed. It was a hollow laugh, almost manic. There was a snort in there somewhere. “… maybe he was right. I’m a selfish **** who wants the world to revolve around him. You were having your own meltdown but here you are…” he didn’t finish the thought. It was obvious. There she was, comforting him when she had her own problems. Her own woes. And he was only making things worse.

<Clover> There were reassuring words lodged in her throat and stored on the tip of her tongue, but she took time to consider her reply. She had to take time to consider her reply. Her meltdown had been a meaningful release, another representation of her walking away and giving up on a relationship she’d maintained for almost a year. And yet she’d put all of her willpower and her concentration on the man in her arms. She’d shifted all of her focus to him.

Clover had yet to decide whether Jesse demanded her attention, or whether she willingly gave her attention. The answer made no difference, because the end result remained the same. She gave. Clo had no problem giving, when it came to certain people, the ones she deemed worthy. His words made it clear that he’d deemed himself unworthy, and she didn’t think she had the strength to continue arguing with him over it, not with the heavy feeling in her chest. Clo pressed her lips to his jawline. The kiss was soft, light, and lingering, and she repeated it again.

“His words are never going to go away. We’ll both think about them for a long time. When we’re struggling, we’re going to doubt ourselves. You’re going to think about them and they’re going to eat at you,” Clo whispered, the level of her voice reflecting her own inability to draw out her confidence. “I’ll always choose you. I’ll choose your problems. I’ll find some way to be there for you, even if I’m panicking. Even if I don’t know what to do. Even if it’s killing me. That’s not your fault. You aren’t making me do anything I don’t want to do, anything I wouldn’t do on my own.”

There was the answer she’d been looking for. Her own word vomit had the answer pouring from her lips. The seeds of doubt would blossom and die, an endless cycle brought on by outside words and actions. Her certainty, her wavering determination, came and went, just like the seasons. Unable to gather more words, she pressed another kiss to his jaw. Had she said the right thing in the wrong way? Had her words added another dimension of guilt to his growing pile? She’d told him she loved him all over again, but she’d told him in a way that never included the four letters.

“You’re my perpetual ray of sunshine,” she said, recalling the instance when he’d said that about himself. My. Mine.

<Jesse> A ray of sunshine couldn’t always be a good thing, Jesse wanted to say. But he didn’t. He remembered saying those words – a joke, he thought. A sarcastic reaction to one of those ludicrous questions about his wellbeing, wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember, entirely, but it sounded like something he would say in jest. Now, they couldn’t be further from the truth.

There was a lick of guilt as she said it – even if it’s killing me. But he couldn’t fault her on it; she’d sandwiched those words in optimism, had spoken them in such a way as if they were not important. The fact that he could kill her, because she cared so much. It was refreshing, even if it was morbid. Thinking about it, he had to laugh. They were a morbid pair. At least for now, anyway. Had there ever been a time when the two of them were happy together? Or had they both always been falling apart, one or the other? Maybe the fair. That had been one time they’d both been happy. At least for a little while.

His breathing came to a standstill, as did his laughter. A sigh hissed from his nose as he nodded, lifting his head so that he could press a kiss to Clover’s temple. She had helped. The moment had passed; the darkness wasn’t quite as dark. He didn’t tell her that he felt the same. That he would choose her; that he would, as far as he was able, help her with her problems. Instead, he would show her when the moment arose. He glanced behind him at the objects strewn across the lawn.

“Are we starting a fire or not?” he asked. Or was she over it? Was her passion for the wreckage of these gifts sated or washed away, or could he still turn the night back around to where it had started? He wouldn’t tell her that her own words would stick, just as much as Victor’s did. That there was now a new fear in his chest that he would have to deal with. That would be unkind. Instead, he suggested fire.

<Clover> He had no idea that she’d moved past the point of destruction so that she could take him into her arms. The quiet fury had been overwhelmed by the need to provide some semblance of comfort. Presented with another opportunity to lose some of her most precious objects in a blaze, she nodded. The plan had been to spend more time with Jesse and return on her own, to finish all of her plans in solitude, but he’d asked her a question that proved he hadn’t forgotten her reasons for being there; he hadn’t forgotten that she’d wanted to set it all on fire.

“Yeah, we’re still starting a fire.” As much as she wanted to tell him otherwise, she couldn’t. The way he’d phrased his question made it seem as if answering in the alternative--simply saying no--would have been a great disappointment. She wondered if he needed the fire like she needed the destruction. “Let me grab something,” she added.

Clover moved away from Jesse, though she seemed reluctant to do so. Her arms always felt heavier after hugs. Holding someone just reminded her that she lacked yet another purpose. Her free hands groped at the outside pockets of her jeans. When her palm traced the rectangular outline of her lighter, she checked off one part on the list.

Without saying anything else, she turned and walked back into the interior of her home. She fumbled around for a few minutes, even though she knew exactly what she needed; she knew exactly where she’d left the item in question. Clo came back with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, the same type she’d used the last time she felt she had to sever ties with some of her belongings.

There was a cleared area in her yard, one where she’d kept her yoga mat, so she nudged some of the papers toward the rectangular patch of dirt. When she’d nudged the nearby items toward the open area, she grabbed some of the items she’d scattered around the yard. Clo wanted to offer Jesse the lighter, but she knew better. Letting him watch was being generous. Letting him within ten kilometers was being generous.

Clover grabbed the cosy-like gag gift that Victor had given her. It was a stupid piece of ****, really. Her thoughts circled around those words and made peace with those words. She dribbled the alcohol over the cotton blend, soaking the green fabric, and then she took out her lighter and set fire to it. A single blue flame erupted from the top of the green fabric. The blue faded into a light orange, but the orange faded in and out. In and out. The material had yet to turn black, not with the accelerant burning first.

<Jesse> We’re starting a fire, she had said. And yet all her actions following the statement said I’m starting a fire and you’re just going to watch. It both infuriated Jesse – as if he were being treated like some ill-behaved child – and amused him. He didn’t believe that Clover would purposefully treat him like a child, and he knew himself deep down that he couldn’t and shouldn’t be trusted handling fire. Even though he had a lighter of his own, always pushed into one pocket or another.

It didn’t really matter in the end, anyway. Jesse was content to watch. It didn’t matter what frame of mind he was in, he still would have watched. This was Clover’s little bonfire. This was her time to vent. These were her woes that she wished to reduce to ashes. This was her prerogative.

When she came back from out of the house, Jesse watched her every move. When she nudged the items to that patch of dirt, he moved from his perch near the sandpit – where she had left him – and shuffled closer to where the fire would be set. He sat there in the grass, with his arms wrapped loosely around parted knees, one hand grasping the wrist of the other. There was a flicker of a smile as bright blues watched the fuel being lit. There he sat, an ode to good behaviour.

“The book,” he said, and then cleared his throat as the words barely made it past his dry throat. “The book is the best kindling. If you want to get it started properly – is there anything wood?” he asked. Built the wooden things into a neat little stack, and stick the paper kindling underneath – maybe a bit of fuel to get the flames to climb. He’d done this a few times before. Just a few. But even as he spoke, he was almost mesmerized by the colours of the flames that began to eat at the cosy. His fingers curled a little tighter around his wrist – he had to tell himself that he couldn’t grab the flame. He couldn’t hold it, stroke it, or hug it. It had to keep its distance.

OOC: Backdated to November 30th

<Jesse Fforde> Jesse didn’t know what was real and what was a dream. For a few hours he felt almost lucid – almost calm, though exhausted. He could have sworn that he had seen Victor, sleeping on a couch; that he had heard he and Kaelyn talking. If people came and went he was not fully aware – though he knew when he was alone. When he was alone, it was as if a blanket had been ripped from him, and he was out in the middle of a field in winter. When he was alone, it felt like the walls were going to collapse in on him, or as if he were underwater, doing deeper, and the pressure was going to crush him.

It was as if his body were regressing. He felt like he couldn’t breathe because he had forgotten that he didn’t have to. But he tried anyway, sucking the air in and out of his lungs in painful symphony, unaware that he sometimes moaned in his sleep. But his sleep was deceptive. When did he actually sleep? Every time he closed his eyes he was plagued with random images, random thoughts. Every single member of his family played a role in his dreams; each and every single one of them wore expressions of disgust and spewed venomous vitriol.

He dreamed that he was dead already. He dreamed that he was in the wilderness, and that the Fae were killing him – but they did it lovingly, as if they were embracing him in the process. He dreamed that he was on fire. He dreamed of gunshots and elevators. He dreamed of people he didn’t recognise. But it was okay. It was all perfectly okay when he wasn’t alone. There was a soothing balm, when he wasn’t alone.

He dreamed of Clover. He dreamed that she paced, that she stayed only to leave again. He dreamed that she was a moth, circling the light of a dying fire, beating her wings against it before drifting off to find a fire that was hotter and brighter. He dreamed that she wasn’t there. But he wanted her there. He dreamed that he had her in his arms, that he held her tight and didn’t let go. Even if it killed her, he couldn’t let go.


<Clover> Trees. There were so many trees that she’d lost count, and Clover spent such a great deal of time counting. She’d seen Victor and Kaelyn. She acted as if she were surprised to see them there, at the family home, at the scene of the crime. And it was a crime. Clover had already decided that it was a crime. It was a crime that Jesse had descended to such depths. It was a crime that they all had to watch the remaining parts plucked from his mind and his body. While Victor and Kaelyn stayed, Clover drifted. She drifted to the trees and took comfort under their bare branches or their snow-covered pine needles.

She always went home. That’s what mattered. Wasn’t it? She always returned to Jesse. She had nowhere else to go. She sought refuge in his wandering mind. He didn’t have the strength to push her way; he didn’t have the strength to judge her, or to aggravate her own insecurities. The embrace of the outdoors, the cold embrace of the air, of the trees, of the ground, never matched Jesse’s fevered embrace. Even if he didn’t know. And Clover doubted he knew. She doubted that it made any difference whether she came or went. She doubted if she mattered to anyone. She was nothing more than skin and bones, easily replaced and so easily forgotten. After all, she’d turned to the trees for comfort. If it weren’t for the mad noises of her wraith, she might have let the bullets take the last of her breath away.

The physical pain replaced the emotional pain, and she loved the feeling. She needed the feeling. She could handle bullets better than words. Her black blood clung to her flesh, and then it left her. Her blood left her in the same way that her family had left her. And Kaelyn had the nerve to use that word. Family. The trees were more of a family. The trees were all she deserved. In the middle of her self-hatred, she felt the familiar tug, the sensation that spread from her chest and down to her extremities. Someone was summoning her. Someone actually wanted her.

She never expected it to be Jesse, but it was Jesse. With his arms wrapped around a pillow, he looked as if he were just as desperate. He needed the trees to comfort him, to shield him. He needed the outdoors, just as she needed the outdoors. He needed roots. Clo sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed a cool hand to his forehead. “I shot someone today,” she mumbled, brushing her fingers through his hair. “My childe, actually. You’d like him. You’d like both of them. They’d like you. You’d be better for them. I don’t know how you do it, or how you did it. I guess you don’t need to do it anymore. I’m not a new vampire.”


<Jesse Fforde> It was so easy. The way she was so suddenly there. Jesse sighed in his sleep as soon as she landed; another deep breath that he didn’t need as her cold skin cooled his feverish forehead. Who’d have thought, that vampires could get fevers? But he dreamed that it wasn’t him at all. In one dream, Mandy had crawled down his throat and was now nestled somewhere inside of his dead organs; the slimy yellow and black Salamander heating Jesse up from the inside out, as if he needed it, somehow.

Jesse didn’t know that he had summoned Clover. At her touch his eyes blinked open; in that moment he knew that she was there. That she was real and that she was with him, but later he would forget. He would wonder whether she really was. He wouldn’t know how long ago it was, or how long she had stayed. Her words would change from meaningful conversation to accusations. There’d be no love in her features, just hatred. Expecting that, he wouldn’t have summoned her if he knew what he was doing. He’d have thought her absence was predictable – because everyone left in the end, didn’t they?

But she wasn’t absent. Not for too long, anyway. Just in that moment, she wasn’t there. And he wanted her there. Her, more than anyone else. He licked at his dry lips as he tried to focus; he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to understand. There was something about vampires. New vampires. Something about being shot. Gunfire and elevators. He tried to sit up, glancing toward the elevator as if it had just happened – all sense of time had been lost. As if he could still hear the echo of it in his ears; and he had to go and investigate. He tried to swing his legs to roll off the mattress and had to use Clover for support.

Deep down he knew things were happening. A small voice told him he needed to get up. He needed to be there. But on the surface, he was confused. He ended up leaning against Clover, suddenly distracted. “So cold…” he said in a noiseless gasp. He was talking about Clover, not himself. It could have been misconstrued. He took a deep breath – he could smell the fresh air on her. Something that he yearned for.


<Clover> Clover wrapped an arm around him and pulled him close, savoring the sudden warmth his body offered. For the time being, she wanted something other than the cold. “I’m sorry,” Clo replied, soothing him by squeezing him. Her apology lacked the enthusiasm necessary for it to sound sincere. Her short sentence seemed as lifeless as her cold flesh. She wanted to hold him, and so she held him. She didn’t care what he wanted. She didn’t care what he needed.

The low hum of her wraith felt like a blanket wrapping around her shoulders. Steady. Refreshing. Junebug, a feral and irritating reminder of her inability to master her summoning powers, offered her the comfort and consistency that she needed, and she hoped that the noise didn’t bother Jesse. She hoped that he found something as easily pleasurable about the noise.

“You shouldn’t be moving so much. Just rest.” The tone was just as cold as her skin. She’d had trouble mustering compassion, something she’d noticed only hours before. The detachment had found an attachment in the way she clung to the tattered remains of relationships. Or was her relationship with Jesse a tattered relationship at all. Clover looked at him. She studied his face and the way that he leaned against her. Maybe we’re fine, she thought. Maybe he’s realized that I have nothing left to offer him but the cold, she countered.

Her wraith’s noises faded, the only sign that the spirit had gone. To her, at least. She didn’t know how wraiths worked. She’d assumed he could manifest himself, but he’d chosen not to, simply to toy with her mind. Without the noise, Clover felt vulnerable. She felt as if she were alone, even with Jesse so close to her. And while she wanted to talk to him, to tell him how much she’d been suffering, she chose not to form the words. She chose to hide her half-healed injuries and pretend as if nothing were amiss. Because she had the trees, and the trees weren’t busy with their own problems. “You’ll be better soon. People are taking care of you,” she breathed, careful not to include herself.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse was sick of resting. Even when a person needed rest, it didn’t mean they wanted it. He wanted to breathe the winter air. He wanted to go for a run. He wanted the interminable fog to clear from his brain and he wanted to be his old self again. He wanted this endless illness to end, and he felt a surge and pull. The desire to leave and find the nearest human and force them into this life. To sire, to make everything right again. Except it wouldn’t be right. This depression would be lurking on the edges of his sanity. And he wanted it to go away.

Blinking again at movement nearby, Jesse focused. There was someone else in the room. Someone clicking. What was that? Although he’d relaxed against Clover he now tensed, his dull eyes following the movements of the grotesque looking shadow. It didn’t look friendly. It looked… but was he still dreaming? The shadows played large roles in his dreams, too. The wraiths and the spirits in the shadow realm, where he assumed he would soon rest. Rest – that’s what he thought of when Clover told him to rest. Death would be the ultimate rest. His heart keened for the release – it was a peculiar kind of strength keeping him here.

“… am I still dreaming?” he asked, his fingers curling into the flesh of Clover’s upper arm. They said that you should pinch yourself, and if it hurts, you’re dreaming. But Jesse wasn’t pinching himself. He was pinching Clover.

“…who’s is it?” he asked, suddenly on edge. He was looking for his phone. Looking over his shoulder toward the door that led to the stairs. Were they going to come? An army of people who used to care, but who now think he should die, because that would be better for everyone. And the wraith was just the beginning. It was the scout. It thought it couldn’t be seen, but Jesse could see it.

It felt like a dream. Clover’s voice was monotone. There was no emotion in it. Her presence was an obligation, not a care. He wanted to be imagining it. He wanted it to be a dream. A nightmare. An unreality. Because if she didn’t care, then he would do as she said. He would rest.


<Clover> Clover didn’t care that he’d pinched her flesh. She’d only just realized how much she relished the physical pain. He could have stabbed her and she would have taken joy in the tear in her flesh, in the sudden appearance and disappearance of her blood. She could have taken joy in the hideous scar left behind. Clover cared about his words. Clover cared about the questions. Her wraith had physical features. Junebug had a physical form that she had been unable to see. The wraith deemed her unworthy, and she was unworthy. She deserved absolutely nothing. Often enough, she received absolutely nothing.

“He belongs to me, I guess. I don’t think he really belongs to anyone though. He doesn’t listen. He does what he wants. But he stays with me,” Clo replied. She didn’t know when she’d come to appreciate the irritating noises produced by her wraith, the wraith that spoke no words at all.

Jesse had asked another question, one that hung in the air. He’d asked if it were a dream and Clover wanted to say yes. Clo wanted to walk away and go back to the little niche she’d built for herself. But it wasn’t a dream. The cold served as a reminder. How far had Jesse fallen that he couldn’t tell the difference between a dream and reality? She wanted to ask him, but the question seemed too harsh.

“It’s not a dream,” she added, the response like an afterthought. No, it wasn’t a dream. Being there with him made her feel as if she were in a dream. She hated being there. She hated being there because of Kaelyn and Victor. As much as she cared about Jesse, she detested Kaelyn and Victor. Or maybe she didn’t detest them. She didn’t want to be near them. She wanted to pretend that they didn’t exist. With them there, she wanted to be elsewhere. “I’m here. You’re awake. We’re just talking about my childer. I’m here.” She repeated the words because she felt that they were important. She repeated them for herself.


<Jesse Fforde> As soon as he was assured that the wraith didn’t belong to his enemies, Jesse relaxed. His head was spinning from trying to find the source of his anxiety, so instead he focused on Clover. He leaned back just enough to watch her face. To see the movements of her lips, and this time, to actually hear her. This was not a dream. She was there. She was real. Jesse wanted to kiss her. He wanted so much, but when he licked his lips again, he realised how cracked they were. How rancid his breath must be. Victor had tried to boost his blood but it wasn’t enough, and the levels were slowly dropping again. He felt half dead. He felt like one of those zombies, shuffling around in the Quarantine Zone. Was that his fate? Could that happen?

No, don’t think about that. Clover. What had she just said? His head canted to the side, gaze pulled from her lips to find her eyes. He reached up to run his fingers from her temple to her jaw; to caress her features as he gazed upon them, his brain taking half a minute to compute.

“Your childer?” he repeated, and then cleared his throat. He tried for a little more strength in his voice; he tried to push past the dryness of his throat, the way it felt like sandpaper when he talked. It could almost be pleasant, if he didn’t want to shove his whole fist into his mouth in order to try to scratch it. Or tear the whole thing out. His memory groped into the past.

“Crimson?” he asked. Had he ever met Crimson? He didn’t think so. Crimson hadn’t ever really come around, and Jesse hadn’t pushed the matter with Clover. They’d had the one discussion. Or was it two? But they hadn’t talked about him recently. Had he finally become part of the family? His brow furrowed. They had been talking about her childer? Had they? Was his memory that bad, or had she been talking to him while he slept? She had been saying something when he woke up… what was that? He shook his head. “… did something happen?”

<Clover> The words had rained over him, but he’d missed the message. He’d heard bits and pieces, and he’d tried to construct something new. She understood how it worked. The finished product left them both wanting. He craved answers to all the wrong questions; she’d never really expected him to grasp any of what she’d said. Clover focused on the fact that he moved away, that he’d withdrawn in any capacity, and she panicked. She craved him. She needed him. Her hold on him tightened. He looked so fragile. Something told her to break him into pieces and carry him with her always. Because she cared. Because she cared so much. He wasn’t a tree. He’d never be a tree. But he was coherent enough to please her. For however much time they had left, he was hers all over again.

“No, not Crimson,” she finally responded. How long had she been silent? Minutes. She’d spoken in appropriate time, replied as obligated; otherwise, she might have held him until the overwhelming urge to flee finally overpowered her and sent her running for the cold. “Their names are Okoro and Nona. I sired them a few nights ago. I’m trying to bond with them, but I’m not sure if it’s working. I want to. I want to be there, but,” she just stopped, unconcerned with the fact that she’d dropped off in the middle of such an important sentence.

She didn’t know if she was able. She didn’t know if she had the depth. Her wraith had returned again, growling like a rabid dog. When the growls subsided, she managed to sort out her thoughts. Was she capable of feeling? Yes, she reminded herself. How could she have forgotten that? Jealousy was an emotion. Paranoia was an emotion. She felt. Clover closed her eyes and let out a length sigh, repeated earlier actions that had cleared her head. It was the depression, she reminded herself. She had to remind herself that it would pass, like a cloud concealing the sun.

“I’m trying,” Clover finished. “I’m protective over them. They’re mine. I just don’t feel,” she paused, biting her lower lip, “I just don’t feel how I felt before. I don’t feel the intensity I felt when I formed a bond with Anton. I don’t want to be broken. I don’t want to lose them. I don’t want them to leave me. I don’t want Kaelyn or Rhett to take them. I want to be enough. And I’m not. Don’t tell me it’s not true. Don’t lie to me. If I were enough, Kaelyn wouldn’t have come to me about giving you blood. I wouldn’t have had to tell Kaelyn I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t help you. I can’t help you. I can’t help myself. I’m useless. And I’m useless with two childer that need my help, help that I can’t give them. Help that Kaelyn can. I’m not enough for anyone. I’m not enough for myself. I can’t even help myself.” She didn’t look at him when she spoke. The expression on her face wasn’t one of pain or of misery. She looked as if she’d accepted her words, as if she lived by them like a mantra. Clover lived by the logic hidden in every statement. She couldn’t cure her depression; therefore, she wasn’t capable of helping herself, and she wasn’t capable of helping anyone around her. It all made sense.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse stared. Again, it crossed his mind that he might be dreaming. Clover was telling him that she hadn’t sired just one new person, but two. Both in the same night. Where Jesse had copped so much flack because he’d sired two in two weeks, here Clover was, allowed to sire two in one night. But the bitterness was fleeting – that rage and that jealousy leeching into a kind of desperation. Was she really, actually here, and was she telling him the truth? Or was this just some elaborate hoax is mind was playing on him? A survival mechanism, playing with his beliefs so that he could make it through.

Jesse was jealous. He was jealous of Clover’s lips on other people’s skin. He was jealous of their blood, as it slid down her throat. His fingers curled again around the flesh of her arm, as if he might be able to feel that blood coursing through her veins. And he was jealous that they got to take Clover’s blood back. That she could give it. That she was allowed, while he was stuck down here, dying. At least, that’s what he thought was happening. Somewhere along the line he had accepted that he wouldn’t get better. That she’d been right.

But underneath the negativity was the spreading warmth. He wanted to be able to feel that bond; he wanted to tell her so many things, but he couldn’t breathe. He sucked in a breath to begin but it was like he’d swallowed a bug; he started to cough, and he had turn away. For a good five minutes he coughed – until finally he’d hacked up spittles of blood. Enough to coat his throat, but not enough to make much of a mess of his hand. Now that his throat was lubricated, he could try to form coherent sentences.

“Are they here?” he asked, doing his best not to swallow. Not to rid himself of the phlegm in the back of his throat.

“The bonds are a ******* lie,” he said. And there was that familiar bitterness. He’d felt them. They felt real. But how could they be real when they weren’t reciprocated? Couldn’t be. Not all of them. Only Clover. But was that even the bond of sire and childe? Or was it something different? But he knew what that felt like – the rage when someone else tried to do his job for him. “They are family…” he said. His thoughts were choppy, and his responses even more so. He groaned and leaned his head against Clover’s shoulder. He knew he wasn’t making sense.

“… a family should help each other,” he murmured. It’s all he wanted. A family that was there for each other. They were all circling around the new members, but they left him … no, he couldn’t think about that. He wanted to circle, too. But he pushed it all aside. Clover was breaking, and he felt everything that she felt, right now. She was pouring out her soul and he couldn’t help. He wanted to tell her so many things. He wanted to point out that her jealousy was a bond. It was something. That she should use that, that she should do it herself if she didn’t want others to, and then they would stay. They might stay. Maybe they wouldn’t. People don’t. It wasn’t a guarantee.

But he didn’t know how to form the words. Instead, he pulled her in. He held her as tight as he was able to. He pressed his face into her neck. Were any of them enough? Was any one person enough? For now, she was enough. But she had told him not to say it. So he held her instead, his feverish skin against her cold skin. He held her, because even if he never admitted it, that’s all he ever wanted, when he didn’t feel like he was enough.


<Clover> The coughing rattled her just as much as it had rattled him. The noise reminded her that he had so much more to worry about. He had been the one to summon her, whether he’d made the conscious decision or not. He’d needed her. And she’d opened her mouth and told him things he didn’t need to hear, things that no one needed to hear. She’d forgotten that her thoughts and fears were reserved for the pages of her journal. Her words weren’t meant for other ears.

As silent as they were, she couldn’t stand the noise. The sound of her thoughts was deafening. Her inner criticisms made meals of her confidence and excreted more fears and doubts. His last words filled the remaining spaces. She was too paranoid and possessive to let anyone near the ones she cared about. She was afraid they would leave her. They’d see what she’d already seen in herself. They’d leave her, just like Victor had left her. They’d poke and prod at her insecurities, just as Kaelyn had poked and prodded. They’d take all that she had to offer. They’d bask in the nothingness, and somehow, they’d take even more. They’d carve out her emotions and rip off her limbs, and then they’d leave her with the thoughts, the thoughts that tortured her and humiliated her.

Was she so desperate as to beg people to stay with her? In her own way, she’d already begged Jesse. She’d begged him by holding him. She’d begged him by putting up with Kaelyn and Victor. And her friends? She couldn’t explain them. She couldn’t explain anything. She couldn’t think straight. Without the noise of her wraith, she couldn’t hear. Without the cold touch of loneliness, she couldn’t feel.

Family.

The letters. The word. The definition. Family meant nothing. They only thought of the family when they were doing well. Family only mattered when it benefitted them. Their own patriarch needed them and they scattered. They slept. They worked. They ignored. They abused. Clover had to wonder if any of them were doing well. Were any of them strong enough, or stable enough, to help themselves? The answer to the question meant as much as the word. Family. Clover’s family changed, depending on the day, and she refused to take all of the blame for the shrinkage.

“You’re right,” Clo finally replied. The underlying message remained. Their family lacked the foundations necessary to actually succeed. Clo didn’t trust them. Clo didn’t want them near her childer. Clo didn’t want any of them near Jesse. That was her fault. That was another flaw, one which made her wonder how anyone could stand to be around her, even in the best of times. Then again, almost all of them had abandoned her. They’d given up on her. “We’ll just keep trying.”

She didn’t deserve a family. And if she didn’t deserve a family, then she didn’t want a family. Clo had a childish outlook about the world, one founded in her flawed upbringing and cemented with her many mistakes. Was it too late for her? Was it too late for all of them?

She mumbled, moving so that she could curl up next to him. She was tired, the type of tired brought on by endless wandering and violent fighting. She was giving up just a little more, in her own way. Her words were incoherent at best, and she had no intention of repeating them or raising her voice. The trees were suddenly too far away. Jesse was close. So close.

“Where do you want to go?” There was hope in the question, so much that she felt as if she were choking on it, suffocating on it. If they could go anywhere. If they could do anything. If things were different. She asked the question so she could drown out the thoughts, and so that she could hear the voice he struggled to share.


<Jesse Fforde> She said he was right and Jesse had no idea to which statement she referred. Was he right about family, and how its members ought to help each other? Or was he right about the fact that the bonds were a lie?

As Clover shifted, as they both lay down and she curled up against him, at first Jesse wanted to resist. The first question had been ignored. Were they here? A glance around the room assured him that there was no one else there, but the lingering wraith. There was no other family member in the room. The elevator doors were shut, closed. Had she told them about the stairs, not to use them? Did they have keys, or did he have to provide them? What about tomes? He had to make tomes. He had to get up…

... but as soon as he was on his back, he couldn’t move. Twisting sideways, he curled into Clover in much the same way she curled into him. A veritable yin and yang, limbs curled in limbs. Her body was solid, and it was still. It was far superior to a pillow. It was what Jesse had wanted, without realising he had summoned that want to him. He couldn’t get up. He didn’t need to get up. He needed to stay where he was, but he needed Clover with him. Another shiver wracked his body, but he didn’t fight it this time. He relaxed. A sigh hissed from his nose and fell from his lips as his eyes closed.

Keep trying, she said. What did she mean? He wanted clarification for her statement as much as he wanted clarification for what exactly he was right about. But she had asked a question and Jesse tried to breathe - to breathe enough so that he could answer her. Why was she asking? He couldn’t go anywhere. But she had only asked what he wanted. There was no guarantee that it would come to pass.

“I’ve never been to the beach,” he said, before he shivered again. He took his time to think about it; to gather the words.

“A real beach. Next to the ocean,” he said. He’d never been out of Harper Rock, except to go to Virginia to collect Grey. What had been the purpose of that? What was the outcome? More of the same thing. Nothing had changed. He had been selfish to want it to. The memory clung, and then it drifted. He tried to imagine the beach, bathed in moonlight.

“I think I want to go to the beach…” he said. It wasn’t unique. It was cliche. But it was an answer to the question.


<Clover> Stock images of beaches flooded her mind. Her eyes closed, Clover held onto the picturesque tide and the salty scent of ocean air. Before he’d even finished speaking, she felt as if she’d gone to the beach several times over. Her imagination carried her far away, outpacing her worries and lifting her from her unsolved problems and oppressive depression. And wherever her imagination took her, she took him. She couldn’t have gotten any closer; she couldn’t have curled into him anymore than she had already done.

Clo could have mentioned that she’d never been to the beach. The words were right there, just beyond her pursed lips, but she remained silent. She let his words linger, as if he had to be the last to speak. He had to be the last one to say something. Where she wanted to go made absolutely no difference. Nothing existed beyond Harper Rock. To her, they were isolated. The rest of Canada had been obliterated. The city limits became walls; they were confined to the roadways comprising the city and barred from traveling beyond the limits set by the wilderness. Somehow, Clo had resorted to a small-town outlook on the world. But not Jesse. She clung to the pathetic stock images of sunsets and crashing waves.

He didn’t know that he’d taken her to the beach. That, for the first time in over a year, she’d ventured into the sunlight, without the intense pain and the blood loss. In her state, in that moment, she wanted to be human again. She wanted to leave the city. She wanted to set aside fears of the sun and the fae. And death became permanent again, like a final voyage at the end of a long and meaningful life.

Jesse wanted to go to a real beach, a beach that blended so beautifully with the ocean waves, but the trip seemed wasted. They would have ventured out at night. They would have missed the sunrise and the sunset. They would have missed the noonday sun on their bare skin. Clover didn’t say those things to Jesse though. Those thoughts ate at her imaginary beach, darkening the edges of the dream location until she had nothing but the image of dark sand and the sliver of a moon.

“We’ll go to the beach,” she whispered. She didn’t trust herself to speak any louder, to put force behind her voice. Beaches were wasted on them. Half of the world had been lost. The moment he’d taken her life, he’d taken half of the world from her. And right then, she couldn’t help but pity the both of them. As the remaining image of the beach drifted away, she drifted to sleep.

OOC: Backdated to December 9th

<Jesse Fforde> Jesse was feeling only slightly better - the illness came and went like a damnable plague that wouldn't shift, and in his lucid moments Jesse caught up on what was going on online. At least the forum was a little busier - even Kenlie made an appearance, though he didn't comment upon it. He knew whatever he said would sound bitter, so he left off. Though, everything else he said sounded bitter, he realised, so he should call her out, anyway. He never got any messages. He never got any phone calls. The plants only kept him occupied for so long, before he started to descend - saying he felt 'better' when not ill was overreaching. Every time he let his thoughts drift, it was to find himself ruminating on how best to kill a vampire. To make matters worse, he had Mandy on his shoulder; maybe Jesse was imagining the amphibian's voice. Maybe Jesse was going insane. But Mandy encouraged him. Maybe Mandy thought he was being a friend, helping Jesse achieve what he wanted to achieve. This time, Mandy encouraged Jesse to try the flowers. To look his book of ingredients, discover which was the most poisonous, and feast. Jesse had a pile of them at his feet, his phone resting on his knee, his back up against the wall. The Scarlet Ammannias. One by one, he pushed one into his mouth. Delicious.


<Clover> Sire mode. That's what Clover called it whenever Jesse lectured, or whenever he provided a long-winded explanation, one that went above and beyond the question, or questions, asked. Whenever he went into sire mode, she rolled her eyes and did her very best to keep from strangling him. Yes, sire mode irritated her more than it should have; she should have been interested and attentive. She loved his voice, but there was something about sire-mode voice that grated her nerves. After she'd read his words, she'd considered replying, but she had nothing nice to say. She had sarcasm. She had rude comments.

Clover turned off her phone and dropped it onto the mattress. She lay there for a few minutes, just staring up at the ceiling. Some time ago, Kaelyn had joined her and fallen asleep, but Jesse had remained in the green room. His rant had her feeling restless. She debated on whether or not to disturb him, as if the decision were so difficult that she required a list or pros and cons. In the end, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, pulled her sweatshirt down further to cover her leggings, and slowly made her way to the green room.

"You always sound like an old man," she began, her voice cutting off. Clo froze, unsure of what to do. And then she felt the familiar itching beneath her skin. Irritation. "What the **** are you doing?"


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse chewed, and swallowed. Over and over again, he chewed, and swallowed. He stared at the wall opposite, contemplating the consequences. Would anything even happen? Poison doesn't normally work on vampires. But these flowers were used in rituals. They had magical properties. And Mandy was encouraging him, right? Mandy was fae. Mandy knew what he was talking about, right? The flowers tasted... like flowers. They didn't taste like food. There was something acidic in them. Acidic like his own tongue, sometimes. Acidic like his life. Clover's voice cut through his thoughts and he paused. And then swallowed. His tongue ran over his lips, his fingers subconsciously seeking out another flower. The second question he ignored. "An old man? Where?" he asked, eyes wide as he stared. He couldn't feel anything. If the flowers were going to poison him, they worked slowly. There was that familiar roiling in his gut - the one telling him to stop eating. That he was going to throw up. But he put another flower in his mouth anyway. He chewed, slowly. He waited for Clover to explain herself.


<Clover> "Nowhere." She didn't feel like talking to him anymore. She didn't even know where to begin. Her hands curled into fists and she looked away from him in disgust. Her mind preached patience, but her anger told her to lash out at him, to tell him to eat more and more of the plants. Whatever he wanted. He could do whatever he wanted. The fact was, Clover didn't know why he was eating plants. She only knew that he looked like a total loon. He couldn't eat. He'd said that he couldn't eat. And yet he was eating; he was eating when he shouldn't have been eating.

Clo wanted to tell him that he ruined everything about the room. Wherever he went, he left deep chasms. He'd seen her. He'd heard her. But he didn't stop eating. Clover moved toward one of the potted plants and admired the flowers, taking in the vibrant color and breathing in the scent. One minute, she was admiring the plant. The next, she'd lifted the pot and thrown it across the room, where it smashed against the wall, sending dirt in every direction. Just a little longer, her mind reasoned. Patience.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse lowered his hand to the flowers again, his fingers pressed around one of the petals. It was soft. Almost begging not to be eaten. Nowhere, she said. Jesse narrowed his eyes, watching her every movement; he swallowed again, his mouth dry, his jaw unused to chewing. It felt strange. Wrong. Jesse knew before she threw the pot that Clover was angry. There was something she wasn't saying. There was always something she wasn't saying. What must he look like to her? He didn't even hide what he was doing. Was he even ashamed anymore? Or did he just let the numbness take precedence? Shards of the pottery hit Jesse and he sighed. Normally Clover's anger sparked something in Jesse. Normally it was catching. But it did nothing, this time. He couldn't even ask her not to wreck the green room. What did it matter if she wrecked the green room? Jormun shifted, the vibrant green catching Jesse's attention. "Jormungandr would prefer you don't wreck her home," he said, flatly.


<Clover> "You said you couldn't eat, so what are you doing? Why are you eating plants? Why didn't you come back to bed? Why didn't you ask me to take a walk? Why didn't you do something to help yourself? Anything. And don't say it's because of withdrawals. I'm just," Clover stopped and slammed her fist down on a plant, flattening its bright green leaves and breaking the stem. "You're in here eating plants. What the hell, Jesse. What the hell." She'd hoped the pot hit him, but it didn't. Or maybe she didn't want to hit him. She couldn't tell. He didn't care that he'd angered her. He didn't care that he'd evoked such a reaction. And it felt like he'd just given up altogether.

As scary as it was, she began to regret everything. She'd walked right into a tangled web and thought she'd be able to help him, to save him from something she couldn't see and she could have never imagined. Clover sunk down into the dirt and stretched her legs out in front of her. There were no more tears. There were no more outbursts. Perhaps his apathy was contagious, or perhaps it was the exhaustion again. She hadn't had enough bullets. The fact was, she just wasn't enough. Every little action, every single word, circled back around to that lone fact. She had Jersey, sort of. But did she really have Jersey? Did she have anyone? She certainly didn't have Jesse. "I'll kill you. If you want to die. I'll kill you. Whatever you want."


<Jesse Fforde> There wasn't much that Jesse could say. There was nothing that he wanted to say. He wasn't going to tell her why he was eating plants because she already knew. He could tell, by her offer. As soon as she broke the plant's stem, all Jesse wanted to do was get up and walk over there and fix it. Just touch it, close his fingers around it, focus. Bring it back to life. Mend it. It was the one thing he was confident that he could mend. Silence pervaded the room after Clover's offer, as if Jesse were seriously considering it. The option was there. But the longer he thought about it, the more it upset him. It wasn't what she said, but what it meant. His gut twisted, and his passive expression twisted. Both at the same time, and not only because the flowers didn't agree with his dead organs. Was the poison working? Probably not. He'd probably succeeded only in making himself sick. "You may as well. If you've given up, then there's no ******* point," he said. The bare heel of his foot slammed into the flowers, grinding them into the earth. They had failed him. "I only succeed in pissing you off and bringing you down, so just ******* do it."


<Clover> How unfair. He'd reacted, but not in the way that she'd hoped. He'd expected her to soldier through, as if she were strong enough to support them both. Clover knew what it felt like to drown, and being there, being in their situation, felt a lot like drowning. What was she supposed to say to keep him going? What did she need to say or do to keep them afloat? "I don't know what to do anymore," she spoke. "I don't know what to do to make you happy, to help you through this. You say I just need to be here, but that's not working. You expect me to do everything and I'm weak and pathetic. I can't." Clover pulled her legs in toward herself and sat crossed-legged on the ground. She looked down at the dirt that stood out against her black leggings. "I'm sorry I've disappointed you. I just don't know what to do. Holding you doesn't help. Encouraging you doesn't help. I don't even know the last time you laughed. I'm failing you. So you have to see that I don't know what else to do. Hold you tighter? I leave to feed and get shot. I come home. I come right back to you. I was in the other room, Jesse. Do you want me to follow you everywhere? I can do that."

Her hands went to cover her face, where they remained until she chipped away at more words. "I just want you to be okay again. I want to be okay again. I don't want us to fake it anymore. I don't want to be treated like **** anymore. I'm tired of watching you being treated like ****. I don't want you to be so indifferent, so ******* apathetic that it hurts to watch. I don't want to feel like I'm alone when I'm with you. Because all you're thinking about is the newest, most exciting way to kill yourself. And leave me. And ******* leave me. You think you're the only one being abandoned? You aren't." She'd said everything that was on her mind; the words spilled out of her as if she were writing them across paper.

<Jesse Fforde> There came a time when a person gave up on themselves entirely. When people's accusations washed over them like water. No, they wash over - they sunk in, and Jesse absorbed them like a sponge. He nodded. He agreed. With most things. Some things... "I don't expect you to do everything. I realise that you are the only one who can. Kaelyn... she appraises me every day. Doesn't message me anymore, though. She does this out of obligation. I expect... I hoped that you'd have help, you know? But you don't. And it's too hard. It's too ******* hard. I don't want you to feel abandoned. I don't want you to abandon you. I've already done that though, haven't I? I don't want to treat you like ****. You deserve to be loved. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do. We're two of a kind. But I can't... I can't pretend anymore. I tried. I tried and I can't. I'm sorry."


<Clover> Was he listening? Did she even know what she said? Clover shook her head at him, dismissing his words. She didn't know what he ate. She didn't know what he expected to accomplish by making a meal of his plants. Slowly, she shifted and crawled toward him. Every bone in her body told her to keep going. They only had a little longer. Clo only had to hold things together a little longer. And then what? She felt like a broken record, one set on repeat until she finally came to a conclusion she felt as if she already knew, she already mastered. Where she might have wrapped her arms around him, she stopped. She felt as awkward as the first time they'd sat together, as if they'd moved backwards to the worst possible moment. What was she supposed to do? Clo moved to take a seat next to him and lingered, fussing over the bottom of her shirt, as if the smudges of dirt really made any difference. "Yeah, I don't help. Do you," she paused, "do you want me to go? I, uh, I don't...I don't really--I could?" It was like choking, the way she felt as she tried to form and communicate full thoughts and sentences. And the dirt wouldn't come out of her shirt. Why wouldn't the dirt come out of the fabric?


<Jesse Fforde> While he spoke, his hand had rested over his torso – underneath, he could feel the eaten plants; he wondered what would happen if he focused on them while they were in his gut. Could he make them grow in there? Could they flourish, until he had vines spurting from his every orifice? Could he become a living tree? But he was focused on Clover, instead; focused on the way she crawled toward him. Tried his best to decipher the words she said. He shook his head. “I didn’t say you didn’t help, Clo. I said you didn’t HAVE help. You should have help. And you don’t,” he said, his tone still flat. Words that might have caused him a lot of grief not too long ago, but now he just accepted it. Even when he typed them to post on the forum, there was no real feeling behind them.

“I don’t want you to go. But you might want to—“ he said. His words were cut off by the rising bile in his throat; he at least had the grace to turn away from Clover when the flowers came tumbling back out of his system. All blue and green and speckled with bits of blood, but not too much. Jesse hasn’t ingested any blood recently. He didn’t need to. The armlet was still secure against the skin of his upper arm, gleaming in the dim light. For a good minute he heaved, until every last leaf was cleared from his body, the vomit making patterns in the soil.

“…keep telling me,” he said. “Tell me how alone you feel. Tell me how I’m abandoning you. Make me feel as guilty as you possibly can because it’s the only thing left that’s working,” he said, rubbing the back of his hand under his nose, wiping spittle from his mouth. “…you don’t have to worry about me in here. The flowers aren’t going to hurt me.”


<Clover> There was an underlying urge to reassure him that everything was fine, to smile and tell him that she'd panicked, yet again, and allowed her own anxiety to lead her astray. His words stabbed at the urge, reminding her that she'd grown tired of the facade. As he turned away from her, she clenched her fists, fingers digging into the dirt, but the sound of the vomit traveling up his throat let her know that he hadn't needed the moment to gather his thoughts. He'd needed the moment to empty the contents of his stomach. Clover closed her eyes and tried to block out the sound of him trying to clear his stomach, but her senses focused on him. The smell assaulted her. The stench of the plant matter mixed with the damp smell of the earth. If she had a weak stomach, if she had the ability to vomit on cue, she might have been dry heaving, but she ceased her unnecessary breathing and waited.

He resumed speaking to her, as if he hadn't just vomited in front of her. Then again, they'd shared worse. Her skin had peeled off. His throat had been ripped out. She owed him something as equally disturbing as vomiting in front of her. "I want to try and reach you. If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes," she wanted to say to him. But she chose not to utter those words. Clover chose to pretend as if she weren't well aware of her tactics, as if they'd both discovered something new. "It's funny that guilt reaches you when nothing else does. When nothing is really as strong," she thought aloud. "I get it." Her words needed no further explanation. He needed no further explanation. They both understood a little something about guilt. She understood obligation, in the context of her childer and her friend. "I want to take you somewhere tomorrow." There was no hesitation and no shift in intonation. Her words came in the form of a statement instead of a question.


<Jesse Fforde> Only when he was sure that he wasn’t going to throw up all over Clover did Jesse straighten again. Idly, he shifted a mound of dirt with his already-dirty hands, coving the vomit as if it were offal that he was ashamed of. Something that he needed to be rid of. He wanted this to be over, but he was running out of fight. Would they ever know? Would any of them ever be aware of the lengths he had gone to, or how hard he had worked to try to make himself better? Stronger? Probably not. If he came out of this in one piece, things would remain as they had been. They would go back to the way they were. They’d tear him down for everything he did wrong but never be thankful for anything he did right. Current company excluded, of course.

He turned bright eyes on Clover, then. He didn’t put his arm around behind her or rest his head upon her shoulder. He had just vomited; he felt like a piece of ****. Why would she want him anywhere near her? There was something someone had said, once. They had asked if he would listen. Was it Kaelyn, who’d said it? She’d mentioned all the times they told him they cared, and she asked if he would ever believe them. But he had been told those words so many times in the past, and they had always been lies. It was so very ******* hard, no matter how much he wanted to believe it. But he tried, at least with Clover. He tried. But he still did not believe she’d want to cuddle up with him now, covered in dirt and pathetic as he was. A sigh huffed from his nose.

“I don’t have the enthusiasm to go anywhere. I’m tired. The thought of getting up and showering and getting dressed – it’s like running a marathon when I haven’t had any water to drink for a week. It’s… where? Where do you want to go?”


<Clover> "Then don't shower. Don't get dressed up. This isn't about what you look like. I'm not taking you to a five-star restaurant. I'm taking you to a refuge." She didn't need to observe his face to see his reaction to her words. Everything he'd said was true, but she'd gathered the strength to flee to her secret spots, to find the multiple points throughout the city, the places that allowed her some sort of comfort. "It's where I go when I panic. When I don't know what to do. When I'm bleeding. When I," she stopped and wrinkled her nose, as if the thought disgusted her, "when I miss you. When I miss things." Feelings. That particular feeling left a sour taste in her mouth, almost as if she were the one that had vomited.

The movement of her hand was slow, showing so much hesitation that she seemed as if she would pull back at any second. He hadn't reacted that well to her suggestion. No, it wasn't a suggestion. He hadn't reacted well to her statement. She reached for his hand to lace their fingers together. "If you're tired, I'll summon you. I want you to see it though. I want you to," she mumbled. She made it seem as if her sentence was complete, but she had more to add. She wanted him to see her. She wanted him to know her. She wanted him to share something else with her. Clo wanted to present yet another place to him and add yet another memory, regardless of whether the circumstances were the best or the worst.

"I'll take a shower with you. We'll take one now." The thought had her muscles aching, as if she'd already walked ten miles and she had nothing else to go on. But she volunteered herself.


<Jesse Fforde> Jesse felt pain when he looked at Clover; when he listened to her. Even if she wasn’t looking at him, he was looking at her, blue eyes dancing over every feature of her face, every furrowed line, every tremble or twitch. Not too long ago he had to prove to her that he knew that she was trying, and it struck him again, now, just how hard. How many places had she taken him? How much had she shown him of herself, and what had she gotten in return? Sure, she’d got to know Jesse. She’d seen things and she’d heard things that no one else had. They had their moments of pure honesty. But it was all negative. What had he done to try to lift her up? To make her feel better, rather than the other way around?

As their fingers laced together, he chewed on the inside of his lip. It might have been easy to sit there and tell her that if they sat there long enough, the sprinklers would come on and they wouldn’t have to move to shower. But it wouldn’t be the same. They weren’t plants. They weren’t vegetables, growing roots in the soil. He may as well have been, though, with the dirt forming a thin layer over his skin; it clung to his hair, too, from where Clover had thrown the pot. The bottoms of his feet were black. He at least needed to shower before he got back into bed.

He nodded, and forced himself to move. For Clover’s sake, rather than for his own. She was helping. She was here. She was doing something. As he stood he groaned, but he still had her hand in his, trying to tug her up with him. “Not a shower. A bath. A nice, long, hot bath. With lots of bubbles,” he said.