There's not a word yet...[open]

[cassie_of_troy]

Who: Cassandra, Bret, Cris, and anyone else!!
What: Still alive, baby?
When: Tuesday evening
Where: Some random bork place in Jhelbor

Comments

[posinglikeaswan]

Jemaine was angry. And when he was angry he walked.

Dancing was more a Bret thing, anyway.

Hell, it wasn't so much that he was angry anymore -- he was hurt. In a very short amount of time he'd fallen through a tree and into an alternate universe to be handed over to another man as a pet by a fifteen year old girl who somehow managed to try and kill him twice. And that, that had only been the first hour. He'd then found out that he'd been living with an imposter for just under a year in New York, which quite frankly still baffled him, and alternate universe Bret was coming with the worldwalkers to rescue him and Ianto who had seemed a little unstable on their first meeting but had gradually become less crazy and more lucid. And then everything came apart, a whirlwind of chaos and destruction. For hours all he could see and smell and hear was red. There had been so much blood on his and everyone's hands and Ianto -- Elimyr had snapped Ianto like a sprig, twisted him around her lithe fingers and fractured his mind completely. And

[cassie_of_troy]

Instinct took hold of Cassandra and she hissed, whirling around and pulling back from the man. Her fingers curled into claws and her pupils dialated in her already enormous eyes. For a second, she remained on the balls of her feet, ready to run away or charge at whatever had assaulted her. In the next second though, she saw him trying to stabilize himself and decided he had probably bumped into her by accident.

Cassandra's posture relaxed and she dropped her arms to her sides. She hadn't seen him before. He was a curious looking man. Not exactly handsome, although not ugly either. Awkwardly shaped. And perhaps slightly disoriented. A worldwalker? There were some that she didn't yet know. It was possible.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

[posinglikeaswan]

Jemaine rearranged his glasses and fell back a step. She didn't look pleased at all. In fact she looked the opposite of pleased, she looked very displeased. Well it wasn't as if he ran into her on purpose. He wrapped his arms around his chest protectively and squared his shoulders.

She was pretty, though. Kind of old looking. Yeah, that'd go down well -- hi, I'm Jemaine, you look very old. What's that? Go fuck myself? Well that's not very nice. But she didn't look old in the sense that she was ageing, rather that she had an ageless, classical appearance. Sort of elegant and regal. She also looked as if she could rip his eyes out with her nails. He shrunk back at the thought.

"Jemaine," he swallowed and gestured at himself lamely. "And you?"

[cassie_of_troy]

She blinked in surprise. This was Jemaine? Bret's Jemaine? That was...interesting. Quickly, she gave him a second look. Still awkwardly shaped, she decided. And she wasn't quite certain what to make of the visor he was wearing in front of his eyes. She had seen similar ones before in Rowan, but that didn't mean she understood the purpose.

Now that she thought about it, his accent was similar to Bret's accent.

"Cassandra," she said after a moment. "Bret's friend."

[posinglikeaswan]

Jemaine shifted uncomfortably under her scrutiny.

Oh, Cassandra.

"Yeah, I spoke to you--" he trailed off and frowned, tightening his arms. "Nnyeah, I remember. You uh, you said something that sounded very much like you were insinuating that I was gay. Which I'm not. Gay. With Bret. Who is my best friend and very much not my boyfriend."

You sound like an idiot. He looked down at his hands and scrunched his face a little. "Umnn. Were you in the battle?"

[cassie_of_troy]

"Yes," she answered absently. "Standing sentry over the wounded. Not the heat of the battle, but still part of it." Part enough to see things she never wanted to see.

She was silent, watching him. She felt she ought to say more, but she could't come up with much. Digging through her memory, she thought of their interactions so far. Insinuating that he was gay? "Very few of the people here are gay, I would say. There tends to be an overall sense of gloom in Rowan. Give or take a few demon victories here and there." She paused a moment. Boyfriend. Oh. "Or...is that a term for someone who is homosexual?" she asked.

[posinglikeaswan]

He watched her for a moment, stiff and rattled, before returning his gaze to his hands. "I'm sorry."

Wait, what? Sense of gloom in Rowan? Demon victories? Homos- oh, right, yeah, that's what he mean. "Yes, homosexual. You insinuated Bret and I were together, mnn, as a couple. Dating. And we're not. Because I like women." He swallowed again, his voice scratching and tired and still healing from Ianto's attack; the bruising had faded, however, now only a soft shade of plum and yellow.

At speak he could talk again, even with difficulty.

[cassie_of_troy]

"I see," Cassandra said, putting that fact away in the back of her mind. Gay meant homosexual. And Jemaine was not homosexual. He liked women. Or felt the need to express his prowess as such. Either way, it didn't matter much. She wouldn't bring it up again.

"Bret told me about your escape from the bubble. I see you took a few knocks along the way." She gestured to his bruises, staining his skin like a leper's, really.

[posinglikeaswan]

Jemaine smiled a little in spite of himself, feeling distinctly smug at how easy it was to convince her -- not that he was lying -- before falling solemn once again, his thumb brushing absently against a split in his lip.

"Yeah," he mumbled, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "Yeah. Probably shouldn't have put myself, mnn, it was my own fault." Usually by this stage he'd brag about how brave he was, about how he hadn't felt a thing, about how he'd risked his life for everyone and singlehandedly saved Bret from a giant squid or something. Instead he just stood, awkward, thinking on his abandonment, on how alone he was and had been, on how if he bit against his lip any harder he'd probably break skin. Oh, right. He loosened his jaw and hunched, hands wringing together.

"Could've been worse."

[cassie_of_troy]

"True," Cassandra agreed. His wounds were nothing compared to some of the things she had seen. Dangling limbs still waggled in front of her eyes as she tried to sleep. To say nothing of the mortal wounds she had seen. Unconsciously, her hand drifted over her belly, right beneath her ribcage, where Othryoneus had been run through.

"The worldwalkers were remarkably lucky." The image of Bret's pained face flashed before her eyes and she shivered. "Bret's friend, as far as I can tell, got the worst of the physical wounds from the battle."

[posinglikeaswan]

Jemaine looked stricken. He ran a hand over his face once, twice, three times before bringing the other up to join it. He didn't even know Bret had a friend who'd been injured. He didn't seem to know a lot of things these days.

"I didn't even," he rubbed at his face, voice distorted and fraught. "I-- he," fuck. He shook his head and lowered his hands, inhaling deeply. "I didn't know Bret had a friend who was hurt."

[cassie_of_troy]

Oh dear. Either he was possessive or guilt-striken. Or both, she supposed. Both were quite possible. Nothing was ever all one thing or all another in this world or any other. Curiously, she tilted her head to the other side, examining Jemaine. He was a strange fellow. But she had thought the same about Bret at first.

Clearing her throat, she explained quietly. "Bret's friend Cherry was wounded in the battle. Blow to the back of her head. The two of them had a...unique relationship." That was a diplomatic word, especially since Cassandra was not privy to all of the details.

"He wants to visit her later. Maybe you should go with him. Might do him good to have someone by his side. Give him some strength."

[posinglikeaswan]

Jemaine was only half listening, caught between isochronous guilt and anger and for a moment, though his eyes were fixed, he'd quite visibly lost himself in thought; he wanted to be there for Bret -- as much as he could without it being weird -- but there was an unspoken tension between them, something that had changed, something that hadn't been addressed. Outwardly everything about Bret was the same, from his cowardice to his naivety to his easy excitement, but Jemaine felt as if he didn't know his friend at all. He'd gone from being Bret's only real friend, his best friend where every day consisted of living in each other's pockets, band practice and comforting each other after a particularly sour date -- though admittedly Jemaine did more of the comforting -- to being just another friend in a crowd, a crowd who had helped build and support Bret throughout his entire stay in Rowan

[cassie_of_troy]

Cassandra's black eyes took to examining Jemaine again. Was he tearing up? She went over what she had said to him, searching for a possible explanation for this turn of events. She had spoken of Bret's friend Cherry. And earlier wondered if Jemaine was possessive. What could go hand in hand with that better than jealousy? Goodness, that girl had caused a lot of strife by being close to Bret.

"I've heard a lot about New York," she said slowly. "As I understand it, it's very different from here. The adjustment must be difficult." It was the closest she could get to talking about Bret without actually talking about Bret. "How are you managing?"

[posinglikeaswan]

"A little," he riposted with a small, shallow laugh. "There weren't as many attempts on my life and the children weren't as evil. And I was never trapped in a bubble back in New York, I don't even think things like that existed. And Bret--," he frowned and waved his hand from side to side.

"I never watched, I never-- no one died. I never had to see that. I--," he didn't want to talk about this, not now. And he wasn't choking up because that wasn't masculine at all.

"Do you like it here?" He asked quietly, not quite meeting her gaze.

[cassie_of_troy]

She gave him a mirthless laugh. "No one likes it here," Cassandra told him, her voice a bit more condescending than it should have been.

Quickly, she caught her error and amended it. "It isn't a good place," she said. "And I would never try to convince you otherwise. It's a decidedly bad place with bad problems and bad people."

And she paused a moment because she still hadn't really answered his question. "It's better than where I came from," she finally admitted. "Not a better world, but better for me. I had problems with the people I left behind, the few that were still actually alive."

Cassandra shrugged. "Who knows? There still might be a chance for us all to find some peace and happiness here. But it won't be easy. Nothing worth doing is ever easy."