JackEv - Not Yet
Summary: Jack visits Langwidere’s room and discovers more than he expected to. Spoilers for 1x07.
(I got inspired by a meta from the other day and had to get it all down).
It was the grandest room he’d ever seen. Jack’s eyes cast upward in amazement at the height of the ceiling above their heads. He’d never known a room could be so tall. But the opulence didn’t end there. Gilded mirrors, an impressive chandelier, and every possible edge, curve and piece of furniture covered in gold. It proved a stunning contrast to the tall urns filled to the brim with crimson red roses. They were the colour of blood, he thought, and couldn’t remember ever seeing a flower that looked more somber.
They paled in comparison to Langwidere, who took a careful seat at the edge of her bed. In all his life he’d never seen someone look so thoroughly alone. The cold white and gold starkness of the room only seemed to drive the point further home. He felt stuck as he stood there watching the tears drip from beneath her mask, his body half turned towards her and the door. He wanted to do something for her, anything to ease her pain. The necessity of it pulled at him with stubborn insistence, but he remembered all too well what happened last time he tried to help. His words never seemed to come out of his mouth the way he wanted them to. As he stood there searching for the right ones to somehow make her father’s murder seem less horrible than it really was, they seemed to evaporate the moment they formed on his tongue. Not wanting to hurt her more, he slowly turned to the door.
She stopped him with a soft plea, “No, please, stay?”
It was the first time she’d ever actually asked him to do anything. Normally she told him what she wanted, stubbornly persistent in her expectation that he would simply go along. He saw none of that cool bravado now. She sat there broken and sad, on a bed that was hers but didn’t feel like her own, in a room that only days earlier had belonged to her father. His death had left an obvious, gaping hole in her world and there was nothing with which she could fill it.
She guarded her emotions so effortlessly in front of the guards. Nothing ever seemed to reach her, break through that unflinching composure. Until this very moment that was how he’d seen her as well - cold, unfeeling, and too blunt to be considered kind. But here she was offering him a glimpse behind the carefully constructed mask she showed the rest of the world. He wondered if anyone apart from her father had seen her like this before, so completely vulnerable and human. His words to her in Oz slid unwelcome into his thoughts – “You’re the worst human being I’ve ever met.” He regretted them now, more deeply than he cared to admit. He’d met far worse humans in this world than Langwidere.
He moved slowly, deliberately, and sat as close as he dared next to her. His mechanical heart did a strange thing then, its cogs and wheels turning in an accelerated rhythm. The naked emotion was there in her eyes, too blatant to be ignored. She was hurting and unsure of herself, desperate to forge a new connection to replace the one she’d lost. But when her fingers slid behind her mask, determined to remove it so he could see her as she truly was, his hand rose up to stop her.
It felt wrong somehow, as though he would be taking advantage if he allowed her to assuage his curiosity now. But it went deeper than that. He’d had a lot of time to think in the Screaming Forest and while some of those hours were reserved for angrily cursing Langwidere for leaving him there in the first place, the others were consumed with a more productive sort of navel gazing. He resented Tip for getting him into this mess to begin with, for pushing him off that balcony. But when he thought harder on it he was able to admit that he’d had his own role to play in all of it. He still didn’t understand what had possessed him to try and kiss Tip, but every part of him knew that it was wrong. He owed Tip an apology, a sincere one, but may never have the chance to again.
And he resented Langwidere, too. For treating him as her play thing, for teasing him and acting as though he wasn’t entitled to any feelings of his own. But he hadn’t made it easy on her either. He’d been too wrapped up in his own pain and self-pity to see that she was hurting too. His well-intentioned words of comfort rang hollow when he thought back on them. “I’m sorry for your loss?” “I’m sorry he died?” It was all the consoling words you were supposed to say when someone has died, but none of them were what she’d needed to hear.
He’d been too focused on satisfying his own relentless desire to fix what was broken to realize his mistake. It was while standing frozen amongst the dark, twisted trees of the forest that he’d come to accept his inability to fix all things. Courteous platitudes weren’t going to bring Langwidere’s father back from the dead or miraculously allow her to come to terms with his passing. His words felt silly now. Silence would have been better. Or a listening ear. Or the comforting clasping of his hand around hers. There were a lot of things he should have done differently and would if he could go back to that moment. Time travel was not yet possible, but she was offering him a chance to redeem himself now.
“When we’re friends I’ll show you.”
That was the promise she’d made to him at the festival. Looking into her wide, glistening eyes he felt guilt creep in to slow his mechanical heart. He hadn’t behaved very much like a friend to her. And he certainly hadn’t earned the right to know her most closely guarded secret. She offered it to him now not because he was truly her friend, but because she was terrified of being alone. Someday, when he’d proven himself a friend to her, she would show him but that day was not today.
“Wait…You don’t have to do that,” he told her sincerely, and her hands slowly fell away from the edge of her mask. Her eyes darted back and forth between his, uncertainty clouding their depths.
“I do see you,” he assured her.
They were the truest words he’d spoken to her yet. He saw her now more clearly than he ever had before. For all her faults, she was not so different than he was. Both of them lost, both of them alone and freakish in the eyes of the world. She wore her masks to hide some small piece of herself from the world’s judgmental glare, while he wore his mechanical armour like a bitter shield to protect his heart from all its heartache. They were both frauds in their own way, finding themselves in desperate need of a place to belong.
The first time they’d kissed she’d initiated it, a show of gratitude for his bravery in defending her against a gang of thugs. This time it was he who kissed her, his mouth soft and tentative against hers. He offered comfort and intimacy, a tangible connection to remind her that even in her grief she was not alone. But perhaps even more than that, he offered gratitude. She saw far more worth in him than he saw in himself and it spurned within him a desire to do better, do more.
In time, when it was earned, he would be worthy of being called her “friend”. But not today, not yet.