Lines of Blasphemy
Characters: ALEX & JAY
Date&Time: July 26/after Jay falls
Setting: medical wing? lmao idk
Summary: Alex hasn't slept in two days.
Rating: TEEN ANGST.
Status: Open to Jay
She looked so broken still, mending but broken, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. Not yet. He sat by the bed where he and Hank had eventually moved her to, holding onto her hand as if it might help somehow, and found himself overwhelmed with grief.
What if this was his fault? What if this was because of Amara, or Lorna...Jesus, if this was because of Lorna he was going to have words with the green-haired bitch. Because it surprised Alex how much her hurting hurt him. Jay already meant so much to him that it was almost scary.
Lying his head down on the bed beside her, he tried to keep his eyes open. He hadn’t slept since it had happened, and it was starting to show. Hank had argued with him, but Alex insisted on staying with her until she woke up at least.
Once Hank had finished her last stitch, the last bandage on her wings Jay couldn’t help but passing out once more. It all hurt so bad that she could barely see straight when she could see, and even though Hank kept insisting that the minor tugs and pulls was him administering local anesthetic Jay couldn’t tell the difference. It was almost one in the after noon when they finished (compared to their five am start time), and it was closer to seven at night now. Jay was not one for sleeping anyway, so when she first woke- for the first time she had every intention of holding onto that fact for as long as possible. Still sore, still weary it took her a few times to focus and even longer to figure out where she was, or what had even happened.
Alex was here. And here? Here was some sort of hospital wing or medical facility. Had she finally lost it? No- no she couldn’t have... she fell. Slowly, slowly it started to come back to her. The desire to go higher, Hank’s watch that told her how high she was. How cold the air was, how thin it was... the fall. Jay glanced down, and made a face at how she was still bruised all over. She must have hit the ground hard.
“Alex?” She mumbled, mouth still unclear of the words it was trying to say. “Am I alright?”
He was startled awake, lifting his head to look at her. He wasn't quite sure how to ask her what had happened, why she had fallen, so he settled on answering her question. "You're fine," he told her quietly. "You're just...you're healing, but you're fine." He reached up to brush some hair away from her face, his expression still worried.
"Hank fixed you up pretty good." He didn't mention the part where he'd held in her collarbone and ended up covered in her blood.
Jay smiled at his hand, the dopey, half-awake smile that most came to after a long and hard surgery. Only instead of medicine she was coming out of, it was the endorphins of the morning before. “Did you know the Earth is round?” It was a stupid fact, and one she had been harping on since she had fallen, but it was true.
Noticing his expression, her smile turned into a frown and Jay tried to sit up to correct his expression. Instead though, she was faced with the pain of the still-cracked ribs and after only a few inches she had to fall back down. “Ow”
He smiled, despite how out of it she still seemed. Alex sighed, squeezing her hand gently before finally asking, "Did you...what happened up there?" She'd had the wings long enough to know how to use them, right? So an accident like this had to be caused by something he wasn't aware of yet, or else...it hadn't been an accident.
And if that was the case, this was a lot more troubling than broken bones.
"I didn't see you fall," Alex explained. "Erik and Ben had found you already, so I didn't see what happened, but they weren't quite sure either..."
“I... don’t remember.” Jay admitted, looking away from Alex as she tried to remember. “I was going up. Trying to see how far I could go and...” She shook her head with a frown, looking back at Alex. “I must have passed out? Or fallen asleep or something.” It didn’t make sense. She could remember getting up that morning, getting dressed and going up. But after that? Anything above seeing the number 10,500” ? Was a blur. Pain, confusion- the red, red blood everywhere... that was it. Just the pain.
“I fell though, didn’t I? Otherwise, how else did I get here?” A pause, “How did I get here?”
"You must have flown high enough that you ran out of oxygen," he commented, half in awe half in fear. If she pushed herself like that, further into the atmosphere...well, death by air was Alex's personal fear. But at least this meant that she hadn't done it on purpose? "Jay, your mutation probably couldn't catch up with your ascension."
"Erik got you to Hank, and Hank put you back together," Alex explained. "We brought you here to rest. I...was afraid you wouldn't wake up. It's been a couple of days."
“That happens?” She hadn’t gotten that far in her studies yet, though to be fair- just about everyone had gotten further than Jay when it came to it. “I remember trying to go higher. Trying to... do something. Get so far as to...” She frowned and looked over her own body once more. “God this hurts. I’m sorry Alex. I must have scared you.”
She closed her eyes momentarily, doing a mental run down of her situation internally.Legs- sore. Arms? Worse. There was an after thought of burning in her upper chest, and where her ribs must be? Worse. Every breath felt as if someone was sitting on her, and she could not figure out why. “I must have been at... 10,500 feet last? I remember that.”
"Jesus fucking Christ," he commented, when she told him how high she'd been. "Look, just lay still," Alex insisted, placing a gentle hand on her stomach in case she tried to sit up again. "You broke pretty much everything. Hank had to reset your legs, and...it hurt." He'd never heard screaming like hers before, had never experienced being around someone in so much pain and unable to really help aside from holding her down. It was, unfortunately, unforgettable.
"But you're okay now," Alex insisted. "You're healing now. Everything is where it should be."
“I remember.” Jay admitted, frowning deeply. “Hank at least.” She looked down at his hand, reaching over to cover his with her own, she was sore, but it wasn’t impossible.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” She insisted. Later Jay would swear it was the pain, or just waking up, or confusion that caused her to admit this. At this time however? It was just his concern over how she was. “I was trying to be better.”
Right. Of course she remembered Hank helping her. Which was probably better anyway since he'd had to hold her down, make her endure the pain. Necessary pain, though, right?
Now he wasn't sure. Alex looked at her in silence before glancing down at their hands. "I was afraid that because of Amara you had decided...I don't know. I just wasn't sure."
“Amara?” Now she was confused. Both elbows went underneath her and Jay tried to push herself back up properly. “The Latin girl?”
What did she have to do with anything? “Alex, I was trying to train myself, be able to fight... not. What did Amara have to say? Is she okay?” Oh god. What if Jay had hurt her? What if she had been the one to... could there be more to her mutation? Could she have... “Is that why I’m all colored up?”
Oh Jesus, she hadn't known...
"No, Amara wasn't...you didn't hurt anyone," but yourself, "so stop worrying about that." Because he knew what that guilt felt like, but oh god he was feeling a guilt so much worse than that. "It's just that Amara and I...I thought you knew that we...are kind of together. Unofficially. It's complicated. But, I was afraid you had done this because you were mad at me."
They were kind of together. Together.
Immediately Jay’s hand pulled away from his, and her face turned to face the wall. Together. “I wouldn’t do something like this for you.” She mumbled, speaking low and away from him.
Together? Which probably meant that he and Amara... well. Didn’t Jay tell him to find someone else? Give her time? Clearly, obviously that was what he was doing. She just didn’t figure it would be so easy for him to do such. But if he and Amara were together, then why was he here?
“I was trying to be better. I was trying to... I’m not mad at you Alex.” She attempted to turn to her side on the bed, to face the wall. “But maybe you should go be with her.”
She was turning away from him, and that hurt more than he thought it would. Alex sighed, unsure of what to say for a moment. He didn’t reach for her hand again, giving her some space there, but he wanted to.
And Alex suddenly realized that she really hadn’t known. Not before now anyway.
“No matter what happens,” he told her quietly, “you’re my friend. You nearly died today,” forgetting of course that she couldn’t die, “there’s nowhere else I should be right now.”
“Because that would’ve been a tragedy.” Jay mumbled to herself. He found someone better, someone closer- someone who would- and could be what he wanted. Why shouldn’t he?
Finally, with both wings exposed and facing Alex, Jay did what she did best when laying down, curled up into a ball. Tucking both knees underneath her chin, she closed her eyes tight. Tight against the light, the noise- and tight against Alex being there.
It was a few minutes before Jay spoke again, bitter and quiet. “She is really pretty though.”
"So are you," he replied without hesitation. God he was all kinds of confused. He liked Amara, he could see what they had eventually becoming real, but then he'd thought that was what he and Lorna were...
"Should I go?" Alex asked Jay quietly, "Let you get some sleep?" Because he suddenly felt like his being there did more harm than good.
Jay laughed self-deprecatingly with a glance down her formerly broken form. This was not pretty. This was... pathetic. And stupid. She was stupid. Her wanting to go as high as she did was stupid. Alex was stupid and the mansion was stupid and Amara was beautiful and thinking she'd be anything besides the 'bird girl' was stupid.
Suddenly the word 'stupid' sounded less like a word in Jay's head, and more of just a sound.
Stupid.
"No." She turned her head to look at Alex over her shoulder. "Is she any good?"
Alex sighed, looking at her for a moment as he thought over how to reply to that question. He decided against answering it at all. Looking at her wings, he realized she was still very much injured.
Ever so carefully, he stood up so that he could lay down beside her on the bed, bringing one hand up to gently rest on the feathers of one of her wings--just to let her know he was there--before explaining in a whisper, "I've never been so scared in my entire life, because when I saw you I was afraid you...I wasn't sure what to think." It was amazing even to Alex how vulnerable and afraid he sounded explaining this to her.
“I thought I told you I can’t.” Even though she hated him right now. Hated him for making her feel like a fool, for putting herself out there... he was still there. Still the one who was keeping the cold at bay. She didn’t turn towards him, but neither did she pull away. Instead, all that Jay could bring herself to do was reach up to grab for the hand that was touching the always-sensitive, currently tender wings.
“I’ve tried before and it just doesn’t work. I can hurt.” Another laugh, “obviously but nothing comes of it. I’ll be back on my feet by tomorrow.”
"You told me, but still when I saw you laying there..."
She had...tried before? "Jay..." he whispered, but the question died at the end of his tongue. He knew why. He really didn't need to ask.
"After my parents were killed, I was put in an institution for a while," Alex explained quietly. "I kept talking about aliens, I don't even know, but while I was there...I considered it. I've never know the kind of heartbreak you did with Julia, but on some level I understand."
Jay nodded a bit, shutting her eyes once more. “If I didn’t come here, Mom was going to have to put me in a girl’s home. Or something like that. I kept...” She shook her head at the memory. Of the arguments with her mother- having to bribe Lizzie for a knife to cut up meat for everyone’s dinner. Losing even her tennis shoe laces. “The ladies from church kept talking to her. Telling her I was going to hell anyway, and that there was this school or home or some place that would ‘cure me.’ I was almost packed up when the Professor and Erik came to talk to her too.”
Once she found Alex’s hand, she squeezed it with a newfound tenacity- “I’m always cold.”
He couldn't imagine being in a situation like that, where the world said you were...diseased, instead of simply yourself. Even while in the psych ward they had treated him like he was going through something normal, something that could be helped, but what she was talking about was completely different. And to have her own family doubt her?
"Tell me how to help," he whispered, wanting to put his arms around her. The wings stopped him though, with her back turned like this, so he settled for squeezing her hand gently.
Date&Time: July 26/after Jay falls
Setting: medical wing? lmao idk
Summary: Alex hasn't slept in two days.
Rating: TEEN ANGST.
Status: Open to Jay
She looked so broken still, mending but broken, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave her. Not yet. He sat by the bed where he and Hank had eventually moved her to, holding onto her hand as if it might help somehow, and found himself overwhelmed with grief.
What if this was his fault? What if this was because of Amara, or Lorna...Jesus, if this was because of Lorna he was going to have words with the green-haired bitch. Because it surprised Alex how much her hurting hurt him. Jay already meant so much to him that it was almost scary.
Lying his head down on the bed beside her, he tried to keep his eyes open. He hadn’t slept since it had happened, and it was starting to show. Hank had argued with him, but Alex insisted on staying with her until she woke up at least.
Once Hank had finished her last stitch, the last bandage on her wings Jay couldn’t help but passing out once more. It all hurt so bad that she could barely see straight when she could see, and even though Hank kept insisting that the minor tugs and pulls was him administering local anesthetic Jay couldn’t tell the difference. It was almost one in the after noon when they finished (compared to their five am start time), and it was closer to seven at night now. Jay was not one for sleeping anyway, so when she first woke- for the first time she had every intention of holding onto that fact for as long as possible. Still sore, still weary it took her a few times to focus and even longer to figure out where she was, or what had even happened.
Alex was here. And here? Here was some sort of hospital wing or medical facility. Had she finally lost it? No- no she couldn’t have... she fell. Slowly, slowly it started to come back to her. The desire to go higher, Hank’s watch that told her how high she was. How cold the air was, how thin it was... the fall. Jay glanced down, and made a face at how she was still bruised all over. She must have hit the ground hard.
“Alex?” She mumbled, mouth still unclear of the words it was trying to say. “Am I alright?”
He was startled awake, lifting his head to look at her. He wasn't quite sure how to ask her what had happened, why she had fallen, so he settled on answering her question. "You're fine," he told her quietly. "You're just...you're healing, but you're fine." He reached up to brush some hair away from her face, his expression still worried.
"Hank fixed you up pretty good." He didn't mention the part where he'd held in her collarbone and ended up covered in her blood.
Jay smiled at his hand, the dopey, half-awake smile that most came to after a long and hard surgery. Only instead of medicine she was coming out of, it was the endorphins of the morning before. “Did you know the Earth is round?” It was a stupid fact, and one she had been harping on since she had fallen, but it was true.
Noticing his expression, her smile turned into a frown and Jay tried to sit up to correct his expression. Instead though, she was faced with the pain of the still-cracked ribs and after only a few inches she had to fall back down. “Ow”
He smiled, despite how out of it she still seemed. Alex sighed, squeezing her hand gently before finally asking, "Did you...what happened up there?" She'd had the wings long enough to know how to use them, right? So an accident like this had to be caused by something he wasn't aware of yet, or else...it hadn't been an accident.
And if that was the case, this was a lot more troubling than broken bones.
"I didn't see you fall," Alex explained. "Erik and Ben had found you already, so I didn't see what happened, but they weren't quite sure either..."
“I... don’t remember.” Jay admitted, looking away from Alex as she tried to remember. “I was going up. Trying to see how far I could go and...” She shook her head with a frown, looking back at Alex. “I must have passed out? Or fallen asleep or something.” It didn’t make sense. She could remember getting up that morning, getting dressed and going up. But after that? Anything above seeing the number 10,500” ? Was a blur. Pain, confusion- the red, red blood everywhere... that was it. Just the pain.
“I fell though, didn’t I? Otherwise, how else did I get here?” A pause, “How did I get here?”
"You must have flown high enough that you ran out of oxygen," he commented, half in awe half in fear. If she pushed herself like that, further into the atmosphere...well, death by air was Alex's personal fear. But at least this meant that she hadn't done it on purpose? "Jay, your mutation probably couldn't catch up with your ascension."
"Erik got you to Hank, and Hank put you back together," Alex explained. "We brought you here to rest. I...was afraid you wouldn't wake up. It's been a couple of days."
“That happens?” She hadn’t gotten that far in her studies yet, though to be fair- just about everyone had gotten further than Jay when it came to it. “I remember trying to go higher. Trying to... do something. Get so far as to...” She frowned and looked over her own body once more. “God this hurts. I’m sorry Alex. I must have scared you.”
She closed her eyes momentarily, doing a mental run down of her situation internally.Legs- sore. Arms? Worse. There was an after thought of burning in her upper chest, and where her ribs must be? Worse. Every breath felt as if someone was sitting on her, and she could not figure out why. “I must have been at... 10,500 feet last? I remember that.”
"Jesus fucking Christ," he commented, when she told him how high she'd been. "Look, just lay still," Alex insisted, placing a gentle hand on her stomach in case she tried to sit up again. "You broke pretty much everything. Hank had to reset your legs, and...it hurt." He'd never heard screaming like hers before, had never experienced being around someone in so much pain and unable to really help aside from holding her down. It was, unfortunately, unforgettable.
"But you're okay now," Alex insisted. "You're healing now. Everything is where it should be."
“I remember.” Jay admitted, frowning deeply. “Hank at least.” She looked down at his hand, reaching over to cover his with her own, she was sore, but it wasn’t impossible.
“I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” She insisted. Later Jay would swear it was the pain, or just waking up, or confusion that caused her to admit this. At this time however? It was just his concern over how she was. “I was trying to be better.”
Right. Of course she remembered Hank helping her. Which was probably better anyway since he'd had to hold her down, make her endure the pain. Necessary pain, though, right?
Now he wasn't sure. Alex looked at her in silence before glancing down at their hands. "I was afraid that because of Amara you had decided...I don't know. I just wasn't sure."
“Amara?” Now she was confused. Both elbows went underneath her and Jay tried to push herself back up properly. “The Latin girl?”
What did she have to do with anything? “Alex, I was trying to train myself, be able to fight... not. What did Amara have to say? Is she okay?” Oh god. What if Jay had hurt her? What if she had been the one to... could there be more to her mutation? Could she have... “Is that why I’m all colored up?”
Oh Jesus, she hadn't known...
"No, Amara wasn't...you didn't hurt anyone," but yourself, "so stop worrying about that." Because he knew what that guilt felt like, but oh god he was feeling a guilt so much worse than that. "It's just that Amara and I...I thought you knew that we...are kind of together. Unofficially. It's complicated. But, I was afraid you had done this because you were mad at me."
They were kind of together. Together.
Immediately Jay’s hand pulled away from his, and her face turned to face the wall. Together. “I wouldn’t do something like this for you.” She mumbled, speaking low and away from him.
Together? Which probably meant that he and Amara... well. Didn’t Jay tell him to find someone else? Give her time? Clearly, obviously that was what he was doing. She just didn’t figure it would be so easy for him to do such. But if he and Amara were together, then why was he here?
“I was trying to be better. I was trying to... I’m not mad at you Alex.” She attempted to turn to her side on the bed, to face the wall. “But maybe you should go be with her.”
She was turning away from him, and that hurt more than he thought it would. Alex sighed, unsure of what to say for a moment. He didn’t reach for her hand again, giving her some space there, but he wanted to.
And Alex suddenly realized that she really hadn’t known. Not before now anyway.
“No matter what happens,” he told her quietly, “you’re my friend. You nearly died today,” forgetting of course that she couldn’t die, “there’s nowhere else I should be right now.”
“Because that would’ve been a tragedy.” Jay mumbled to herself. He found someone better, someone closer- someone who would- and could be what he wanted. Why shouldn’t he?
Finally, with both wings exposed and facing Alex, Jay did what she did best when laying down, curled up into a ball. Tucking both knees underneath her chin, she closed her eyes tight. Tight against the light, the noise- and tight against Alex being there.
It was a few minutes before Jay spoke again, bitter and quiet. “She is really pretty though.”
"So are you," he replied without hesitation. God he was all kinds of confused. He liked Amara, he could see what they had eventually becoming real, but then he'd thought that was what he and Lorna were...
"Should I go?" Alex asked Jay quietly, "Let you get some sleep?" Because he suddenly felt like his being there did more harm than good.
Jay laughed self-deprecatingly with a glance down her formerly broken form. This was not pretty. This was... pathetic. And stupid. She was stupid. Her wanting to go as high as she did was stupid. Alex was stupid and the mansion was stupid and Amara was beautiful and thinking she'd be anything besides the 'bird girl' was stupid.
Suddenly the word 'stupid' sounded less like a word in Jay's head, and more of just a sound.
Stupid.
"No." She turned her head to look at Alex over her shoulder. "Is she any good?"
Alex sighed, looking at her for a moment as he thought over how to reply to that question. He decided against answering it at all. Looking at her wings, he realized she was still very much injured.
Ever so carefully, he stood up so that he could lay down beside her on the bed, bringing one hand up to gently rest on the feathers of one of her wings--just to let her know he was there--before explaining in a whisper, "I've never been so scared in my entire life, because when I saw you I was afraid you...I wasn't sure what to think." It was amazing even to Alex how vulnerable and afraid he sounded explaining this to her.
“I thought I told you I can’t.” Even though she hated him right now. Hated him for making her feel like a fool, for putting herself out there... he was still there. Still the one who was keeping the cold at bay. She didn’t turn towards him, but neither did she pull away. Instead, all that Jay could bring herself to do was reach up to grab for the hand that was touching the always-sensitive, currently tender wings.
“I’ve tried before and it just doesn’t work. I can hurt.” Another laugh, “obviously but nothing comes of it. I’ll be back on my feet by tomorrow.”
"You told me, but still when I saw you laying there..."
She had...tried before? "Jay..." he whispered, but the question died at the end of his tongue. He knew why. He really didn't need to ask.
"After my parents were killed, I was put in an institution for a while," Alex explained quietly. "I kept talking about aliens, I don't even know, but while I was there...I considered it. I've never know the kind of heartbreak you did with Julia, but on some level I understand."
Jay nodded a bit, shutting her eyes once more. “If I didn’t come here, Mom was going to have to put me in a girl’s home. Or something like that. I kept...” She shook her head at the memory. Of the arguments with her mother- having to bribe Lizzie for a knife to cut up meat for everyone’s dinner. Losing even her tennis shoe laces. “The ladies from church kept talking to her. Telling her I was going to hell anyway, and that there was this school or home or some place that would ‘cure me.’ I was almost packed up when the Professor and Erik came to talk to her too.”
Once she found Alex’s hand, she squeezed it with a newfound tenacity- “I’m always cold.”
He couldn't imagine being in a situation like that, where the world said you were...diseased, instead of simply yourself. Even while in the psych ward they had treated him like he was going through something normal, something that could be helped, but what she was talking about was completely different. And to have her own family doubt her?
"Tell me how to help," he whispered, wanting to put his arms around her. The wings stopped him though, with her back turned like this, so he settled for squeezing her hand gently.