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Summary: James ties to make the most of his vacation; Jinx discovers more than she bargained for.
Date: August 18, 2010
Log Title: Something Noteworthy
Rating: PG.
Upper New England
it's been a day and a half since James and Jinx arrived at the cabin the hyena had rented for himself in a bid to get some breathing room. He hasn't voiced much in the way of complaints to his uninvited companion. Actually he's said little if anything other that that he'd take the couch, she could have the bed. Otherwise, he's been giving her plenty of space at this middle-of-nowhere retreat. With no neighbors for miles and the Canadian boarder practically in sight, the pair hasn’t seen another soul since before they arrived. And after making himself scarce, Jinx has probably seen even less of the gnoll. Tonight, however, he sits on the couch; a fire lit in the fireplaces a short distance away, occasionally ripping pages out of a small stack of notebooks he brought with before crumpling them up and throwing a wad or two into the fire.
Jinx has popcorn! She has found an old battered pot that she filled with enough oil to shimmer over the bottom, then threw in a couple handfulls of popcorn. No bowl was available, so she has folded it into a big towel that she co-opted from someplace else. "I'm gonna drop it!" she laughs, carrying the unsteady bundle towards the hyena. "James… you have to eat some of this…" she eases over to the couch, and folds her knee under herself to sit down in the corner. Eyeing the fire she glances between it and the hyena. "It's gonna be roasting in here. Are you cold?"
James watches the girl skirt around with a 'what did I get myself into' kinda look in his eyes. "Yeah…I'm fine…just deleting some old history." He tosses the rest of the notebook he was working on into the fire, leaves the other 10+, and moves over to sit near the girl. Shutting the light off on the way—the room now illuminated by dancing flames—the hyena takes a seat on floor, and then a lay, looking somewhat subdued. "I never noticed the heat. But, I guess I'm built for extremes. Want me to open a window?"
She notices the notebooks. It would be hard not to, with him pointedly destroying them. "What's in the notebooks?" she asks, taking a handful of popcorn and stuffing it into her mouth. Determined to hear his story with little distractions (or ways of evasion), she shakes her head. "I'm fine at the moment. If I get hot I will take care of it. You said 'old history'?"
James lays his head on his arm, looking one of the furnished cabin's walls, "This is going to surprise you greatly. But I've been to a psychologist." There's no reason to hide the fact, or lie. The skunk will smell the dishonesty and he's of the mind to share at the moment. "Actually, it's one of the reason my parents are kinda poor. They had to take out a mortgage to pay for it." He shrugs, "Nightmares and stupid things like that. So, I was asked to start keeping dream journals. That's about 8 years worth."
Her head slowly turns to the pile of notebooks, and her eyes widen. "That is a lot of dreams. You have them all the time?" she asks, between bites of popcorn, chewing thoughtfully. Her tail is curled around her legs, covering her feet in a plume of long hair. "That's real hard. Did the psychologist help at all?"
"Made me the person I am today," James says with a half smile, "But I think all that it really did was cause my parents to go into debt and gave me a habit of writing down my dreams." Waving a foot around, probably meant to be at the couch, he adds, "Three of those are from February alone. Back after I was possessed by demons."
She is very curious, and the curiosity plays across her scent. She licks her lips and reaches up to wipe the butter from her lips with the back of her wrist. "Do you ever share them with anyone?" she asks cautiously. "I can't imagine what dreams post-possession might be like. I bet they are pretty hellacious." She frowns, considering all the ways that it could go, and imaginging none of them as good.
He answers the first question flatly, “No.” The look that crosses his face would make some wonder if James had just turned a little pale under all that fur, "Ehhh…..I dunno." He tries to play it low, "They're probably dreams like anyone else has, you know?" He pulls an arm over his face as if trying to block out the rest of the world as he attempts what might be seen as a subject change, "You get any of that future flashback stuff some of the kids were taking about?"
Tenacious to a fault, the subject seems a bit too personal for her to press to hard.. plus James has bigger teeth. "If you want to talk about them, I am always interested in weird shit dreams," she smiles. "I sorta saw death… like the white light and all that. Since then I am curious what else is out there, you know? Must be a whole 'nother universe that we can't see." At the subject change, it inspires her to cough and turn her head, her fur bristling in a bit of a blush. "Yeah.. I think I did."
With the confirmation from Jinx, James goes preternaturally still. The type of stillness that bring bad things with it. His scent changes, to one of extreme concern, flight even. "Yeah…?" he asks, his mouth sounded all too dry, "What did you see?" For the hyena, it's all but faded. He remembers little, if any at all. But it was too dream like not to write down like he has been everything else, and it's all in one of those books, in his own handwriting, reminding him of its presence like Poe's tell-tale heart.
"I think…. that we were something? Like… together," her voice lowers an octave as she treads on the uncomfortable path of this conversation. She shifts, some of the popcorn tumbling from her lap. "I saw… well, you came for me, somehow," she wrinkles her nose, reaching up to scratch behind her ear before shrugging. "It was all so fuzzy, but you never know, right? Might have been real."
There's a long pause where nothing is said, just the occasional crackling of the logs James used to keep the fire going, "So you saw the same thing I did, then." It's a disappointed sound. One that speaks volumes to the right set of ears. He never wanted to be connected to anyone like that. That he was so sure his longer path he'd picked up from Logan was a great idea, and that he'd only be eventually responsible for himself. Something marriage is totally counterproductive to. "What do you think of that?"
She doesn't quite know what to do about the long silence. It's an awkward thing to talk about, after all. She smirks at the disappointment in his voice, though she is sorta surprised that he has the same vision. Unlike a true dream, this was shared. "I dunno. It made sense and all that. It did not feel all weird and uncomfortable," she pauses. "Did… yours?"
James shrugs, "It…isn't something I want to talk about." He rolls over onto his other side, the great beast that he is trying to shut her out by showing his back. A proverbial 'walking out on the conversation.' "I decided to burn all the notebooks. Seems kinda silly to focus on things that didn't happen and things that may not. You know? I mean…just knowing the future changes it or something. Right?"
"That's what I hear. So that what Connor said to us all wasn't real because it was a future that was different from our own. I think the future is what we make it," she considers, leaning back into the cushions of the couch. Normally, she would touch to comfort, but is aware of his feelings on the matter of touch. "I think you should keep them." She nods to the pile of notebooks.
James shrugs, "I have a lot of thing I'd rather stop remembering I was part of. And some of those things happened long before I found out I was a mutant." He pushes himself off the floor in a slow, weight-of-the-world looking manner, "I need a drink. And a walk." Pulling himself off the floor he ambles to the fridge, pulls out a can of No Fear, and grabs the pile of notebooks before heading to the door, "I'll be back in a bit. It's…" He sighs, "It's not you. I just need some of that air I came up here for." Truth of the matter is he knows she knows about the future. And therefore she probably knows that he also knows the history of this specific cabin. And someday, their cabin. One that just got too small for a 7'tall beast. But, it all the noise and fur, the distracted beast made one mistake. On the table near the couch sits one of the books, allowing anyone who happens to find it a glimpse into his thoughts.
She is generally a good person, but left an opening and she will exploit it. When he has gone from the cabin, she will take the notebook, and spend a few minutes skimming the entries. Fair play, she reasons, since he found her website a while ago. Turning the pages, she keeps an ear trained to the door in order to replace it on the table before he returns, as if nothing happened at all.
The unique thing about being a feral is that there really are no secrets. Your scent gives away all. And the ones permeating this most recent notebook are the ones felt while writing several stories and dreams inside: sadness, joy and more. It's an olfactory telling of everything James has put on page within the last 2 months. And while his writing leaves a lot to be desired, one of the final pages sums up several written about the future: “I can't ignore what I saw and know I felt. But how do you tell someone you don't even know that you love them?"
