Author's note: I've got dicey knowledge of this series at best so I took a couple liberties. The most prominent is that Jack doesn't have any power here.
Prologue
Mood Music: Somewhere in between Lifehouse
It is not a detail many notice. Tru has recently made a habit of chasing away visitors before they can ask.
There is only one clock in her apartment.
Davis, of course, was the first one to comment- in that noncommittal way he had of broaching any subject sensitive to her calling (he calls it her calling because he appreciates the pun on her name. Sometimes she hates that about him).
The clock is digital and keeps the date.
She lives by herself (this sounds less grown up every time she says it) and isn't sure if reliving days is making her older. But she feels so damned tired.
When Davis asked for the time, she went to a closet and took out a pile of clocks, the batteries pulled out and time frozen.
He thanked her.
It's in this way that she can explain herself completely to him without explaining anything at all.
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Davis used to love the morgue (the dead never made demands on the living). All that was left was for him to concentrate on his breathing.
This was before.
He died that day in the car accident. Not in the metaphor he always employed to describe the loss of his wife but he, himself, had died. Even if that was a reality that was never realized, sometimes he thinks he can still feel it. That meant something right?
He died.
For a long time after, he wished he had stayed that way.
Trapped between the wheel and the windshield, body awkward and eyes fixed on her blond little head, not wanting to outlive her by even a second. Please… Knowing that this was years ago.
He had thought this was survivor's guilt.
That was before.
He stopped having nightmares when she took the job here. He tried to leave once, but they came back.
He stayed. A penance.
And he was waiting for something. He didn't know what. But like the bodies here-
He was waiting for someone to help him.
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He never talks about his father but secretly, Harrison admires him. He left a full house in the middle and started over, still managing to get a straight flush with a completely different hand.
Richard Davies is a gambler at heart and Harrison is only sorry that he has only the balls for card games and dog tracks. He pours his money into this hoping that he has some sort of inherited grace.
Harrison knows all of the gods of luck.
He doesn't pray to any of them.
But where his father can roll a three and still come out with a new wife, Harrison has trouble keeping track of the variables and ahead of the fallout.
He doesn't let himself win. Even when he begs Tru for lotto numbers he doesn't really want them. Winning lies in how well you can manipulate and he isn't like his father.
He is not his father.
He hasn't known family since his mother died and it is so much easier to just give up and let Tru keep his head above water. To test her to her limit and know that yes, here is one person who will love him no matter what.
He lets her pretend that she is keeping all of them together. Goes along with it because he knows that Meredith isn't quite what she appears to be and that their parents used to fight about things that are only now making sense because naive thoughtless Tru was dumb enough to tell him her calling.
And now everything was coming together.
Everything was falling apart.
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Meredith, despite her misgivings, was her father's daughter. Her mother may have shown her her first Jane Austen, dressed her in pinafore and gaiety but it was her father that gave her her pride, her Victorian sensibilities.
Her damn sense of duty.
Tru and Harrison were entirely her mother's doing. And although Harrison had no real power (a lacking on the Y chromosome that kept him from inheriting the nausea of too much living) his absolute devotion to Tru kept him out of her counsel. Tru also had the fortune of working near the dead.
Meredith had no such luck.
She toed the corpse, not looking up as she pocketed the coke (her job hazard, her spoils of war).
On the east side of town, it was easy to find death.
On the east side of town, it was easy to ignore the pleading of another hooker (brief animation bringing life to a lipstick smeared face that hides a face too young or too old. She knows her face to have the same look).
On the other side, it was easy to loose yourself.
Meredith clutched at the pocket of her coat as the day rewound.
Again.
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