ID: Black, neon green and neon pink digital drawing of Scary Marlowe, a grinning teenage girl with pale skin and dark hair with pink streaks. She is wearing boots, baggy pants, a band shirt that says shit garden, and fishnet gloves. With her left hand she shows a “rock on” symbol, and with the other she summons flames.
David Wymack watches Jean Moreau ride the long escalator down to baggage claim and arrivals. Jean doesn’t look back, and David doesn’t take his eyes off him until he disappears from sight. He still doesn’t move, not for several seconds even then. It’s too hard to unstick his feet from the floor; they’ve been glued there with bone deep weariness.
He manages it, though, just like he always does; turns on heel to head back into the throng of the airport, makes good on his plan to lose his melancholy in overpriced Johnny Walker. His flight home is not for several hours - he’d left wiggle room in case of delays. Always a back up plan, and then another. But they’d landed at LAX right on schedule, and David reckons that means at least a $200 bar tab before he’s airborne again.
It ends up just shy, at $198 with tip, and he’s one of the last on the plane, easily ignoring the grumblings of the couple who have to get up and let him to his window seat.
He likes the view, from a plane. Likes looking at the earth from this high up; a view that makes the weight of the world seem small for a pocket of time. From up here one can imagine that mafias and psychopaths and rapists and deadbeat parents are monsters of fiction.
It’s beautiful, from up here.
Sometimes David thinks that it can be beautiful from down there, with two feet on the ground, but today is not one of those times. He thinks about burn marks and blue eyes, he thinks about blood and rackets, he thinks about patches of raw scalp and scars and broken bones. He tries to close his eyes, but he sees Seth on the back of his eyelids, and others too, names he can’t bear to think right now.
Instead, he flags down the flight attendant about it, ordering two small bottles, and then again, and then again, until the attendant finally rolls his eyes and hands him ten at once. David toasts the clouds with a heavy heart and doesn’t try to sleep.
There’s a changeover at Dulles, and then a short hop to Upstate Regional, and David is decidedly on the far left of sober when the plane lands on his home turf. He’d driven them there, just him and Jean, not quite 24 hours ago, leaving his truck in the short term parking.
It’s dusk out, now, the sun pushing pale orange and lavender across the sky when David walks steadily out of the terminal, digging his keys out of his pocket with his head down. He pulls up short, though, something finally putting a hitch in his step, when he arrives to find Abby sitting on his tailgate with her legs hanging down and her hands wrapped around the edge.
David’s raw heart aches, to look at her. It’s like staring into the sun. “How are you here?” he says, gruff, voice rusty with disuse and airplane. He looks around reflexively for her car.
“Betsy,” Abby says, hopping down, holding out her hands for him. Which wasn't what he was asking. Which he knows she knows.
“I can’t,” he says. Not here, he means. Abby doesn’t fight him, just nods and drops one hand, keeping the other out for David to place the keys in.
She drives them to her home in silence. She doesn’t ask, and David doesn’t protest. She’s too good for him. Doesn’t mean he’s going to turn this down, when the hope of it right now is the only thing keeping him stitched together.
“Come on, old man,” she says when they’ve parked. There’s no other cars besides Abby’s, and David lets out a sigh that turns into a groan as he crawls down from the passenger side of his own truck. He’s not that old, damnit, but he played hard on the court and off it in his younger years and that shit takes a toll on a body, particularly after back to back trans-continental flights.
Abby shoves him towards the master bathroom once they’re inside, and David’s throat does something complicated to see a clean pair of his own sweats folded up on top of the closed toilet seat. He obediently showers off the travel and the whiskey, and while being clean and wrapped in soft clothes doesn’t manage to put an actual dent in the weight on his shoulders, he does feel steadier.
He finds Abby perched at the far end of her couch, some serial drama reruns on the television and a robust sandwich sliced in half on the coffee table.
“Thank you,” he says, and lowers himself beside her with a sigh. She’s left a bottle on the table too, half full of a good single malt, even though he knows she disapproves of this tactic. He leaves it, eats half the sandwich, and doesn’t resist when Abby winds a free hand in his hair and tugs.
“How are you?” she asks him again, once David is sprawled long on the couch, his head resting comfortably on her soft thighs.
Abby cards her fingers over and over through his hair and David finally lets his eyes fall closed. He watches the back of Jean’s head, his stance rigid, as he rides that escalator down and out of sight over and over and over again.
“Been better,” he says. Abby’s gentle touch doesn’t falter, and she doesn’t push, and David slowly falls asleep in her lap.
it’s kind of wonderful to watch Jeremy handle Jean’s trauma because the foxes are so used to each other being fucked up and problematic that when blood spills out of Neil’s locker and he says that he doesn’t want to talk about it they go okay fucked up but sure. Jeremy is so insistent with Jean’s issues and thinks that he just needs to talk about it and pushes and pushes and just begs him to tell him what’s going on. Because that’s the world of trauma he’s used to. He’s used to a problem shared is a problem halfed and being a shoulder to cry on that when Jean says “I’m traumatised” he thinks, “talking about it will make you feel better.”
He handles Jeans trauma with this messy heavy hand and he means so well but his version of trauma, his perspective on trauma is so far removed from the trauma the foxes or the ravens are used to. Every single minute detail Jean reveals is shocking and insane and fucked up and he’s barely scraping the surface. How do you tell someone who thinks you can talk through your problems that you’re afraid of water because you were waterboarded, or that you are so used to your body being used that it’s no longer that Jean feels as if he deserves his abuse, it’s no longer that he thinks his punishments were normal. They are facts. They are core unmoving beliefs so ingrained in him they are set into his skin like the tattoo on his cheek. They’re going nowhere. Jeremy will never understand that, and every thing Jean tells him disturbs him more than the last. He’s so empathetic and compassionate - I think if Jean told him the truth, it would destroy him. It would destroy his spirit, his belief in others, his faith in kindness. It would make him angry. It would make it impossible not to annihilate the Ravens for what they did in the dirtiest, meanest way possible.
Capybaras were impressive from start to finish tonight and I'm so sad that all french ccs are gone now, probably not gonna watch the final day bc today was already a hell of a rollercoaster
Maybe it's cheesy but I actually really enjoy everyone just hanging out in Etoiles' cave, fighting, talking and joking together. Idk, this feels nice (the cave has never seen such life before too lmao)
thinking about how trump loved to play with explosives, and max died at the metaphorical hands of one. do you think, tinkering away in the middle of the night, he heard his son in the hum of machinery? the clinking of tools? staring down at the chemical stains on his gloves, eerily reminded of how soot used to cover his son's?
Etoiles chooses to be kind. He chooses who he trusts carefully, he keeps his cards close to his chest. I mean, he hid the fact that he had the sword and he's still hiding the fact that he has the shield back.
He chooses to be kind, and he chose to extend that kindness to the codes. Despite the fact that the codes have attacked his children. He chooses to extend that kindness to the codes, because it's not their choice. Because they are misunderstood, because they are alone.
And doesn't that sound so familiar? Misunderstood and alone. It took some of the islanders so long to come around to Etoiles simply because he's powerful. He's powerful and despite the fact that all he's ever done is protect people, they're afraid of him.
He chooses to be kind, today he saved that code. He called it his brother. He stood still in a building where his position was compromised, where he knew people were coming for him, and he waited for the code to finish writing. He waited to hear what it had to say.
He doesn't understand them fully, but no one understands him either. Why should he hate something that, in reality, is very similar to himself?
izzy806
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
gummygunk
snowghoul
stormborns
