Parallel Lines
Disclaimer: I own nothing; I'm just playing with the characters!
Summary: Tru muses on how she doesn't really hate Jack, on all the things they have in common and how terrified she is of the inevitable end to this charade.
She hates it.
How he can understand her better than anyone. Better than Harrison, better than Davis, better than Luke ever did or Jenson ever will.
It feels like betrayal. Betrayal of everything she stands for, believes in, but she can't deny it.
Davis and Harrison know about her, they can help and god knows they try to understand, but they can't know. They can't understand how it feels to have the same conversation over, and over, how isolated she feels always one step ahead of everyone else, alone even when she's surrounded by people. Unable to explain how she knows things they never told her. Always on her guard trying not to let anything slip.
Perversely she never has to be on her guard around Jack. Yes, he's the enemy…but he already knows everything, probably more than she herself knows actually, he has been doing this longer than her. It pisses her off how she can be completely open with him, yet so shut down with Jenson that she knows he resents it.
Most of all she hates how she doesn't really hate him at all, though you'd never hear her say it. Deep down she knows that she doesn't, because how can you hate your other half, the other side of yourself? If she hated him she'd hate herself…but it's more than that…and that is what she can never admit, that the one person in the world she should hate, is the one person she could truly love.
Opposite sides or not it would be laughably easy to let him in, which is why she can't. She can't weaken in front of him, can't give him that hope she knows he's looking for. She knows he needs her. He's alone too and though they'd both deny it there is something infinitely liberating about seeing him on a rewind day, a secret only they two know. Jenson's noticed the lingering looks, she can tell, but he can't ask and she won't tell. She can't explain it, not even to herself.
They two have nothing in common…and everything in common. A secret so terrible the world can never know, could never understand, at once the only thing linking them…and only one of many.
He won't talk about his past, not to her, not to anyone she thinks, but the few glimpses she's got of it lead her to believe that perhaps they're not so different, under different conditions their roles could so easily have been switched. She can see where he's coming from and yet she can't really understand it. In many ways their pasts mirror each other's, the difference being…she was never left alone...and he was…
Can she really blame him for who he is, what he does? She'd like to say yes, and mean it with everything she has, but she can't. Because he believes in what he's doing just as much as she believes in what she's doing. He's got his reasons to see death as release, to see that fate as right, as inescapable, his sister she thinks, death was the end of excruciating pain for her. But just like him she has her reasons to see death as a trap, a way to take loved ones from you before their time, she sees fate as cruel, just as he sees it as kind. She's got her reasons too, death took her mother from her, and for her it wasn't a release, fate stole a mother from her children, children who needed her, who still need her, what is right or fair about that?
He can't understand her point of view, just as she can't understand his. Their experiences have shaped them, neither one can really imagine what the other feels. Reflections, parallel lines, each can see the other but they don't overlap. Exactly opposite, yet ...exactly the same.
She sometimes wonders which one of them is right, and sometimes, though it pains her to admit it, she knows that he is. Some things are meant to be, she can deny it, and she can fight it, god knows she does, but sometimes he is meant to win. She's never going to tell him that, though knowing him as well as she does he probably already knows, no doubt he will take great pleasure in forcing the confession out of her. He's just like that, another thing about him she should hate but doesn't, how arrogant he is, how he has to rub it in her face when he's right.
She wishes she could explain to Harrison, to anyone what she feels. As though to get it off her chest will protect her from the inevitable, from the cliff she grows ever closer to with each passing day. As if that cliff will suddenly disappear if someone else other than her knows that it is there, but even though she knows that this would probably work, if only because she knows they could never bare to look her in the eye afterwards, the words just won't come. She just can't force those soul saving words through her lips because deep down she knows that this is only for the two of them. If she wants to talk it will have to be with him, though that might just destroy them both.
Salvation or destruction. With Jack and her either would be equally likely. Who can say? Not her, she has no idea what would happen if either of them made that move, crossed that line. It's what paralyses her, stops her from acting when everything inside her screams that she should. She blocks out those voices, tries to reason with herself, follow her head, not whatever else is speaking, but sooner or later she knows that is a battle she is going to loose and part of her is not even sorry that this is the case.
She knows that it'll happen eventually, the joining of life and death. One night or forever she isn't sure which will happen but she knows that one will. Something inside her knows that this wouldn't be the first time it's happened. He is still the only one who could ever truly understand her and that is never going to change. One day one of them is going to cross that line, rules be damned, and once that happens there will be no going back. Sooner or later one of them is going to act on this unspoken attraction, it's just a matter of time…
Just putting up some old stories I recently ran into while cleaning my hard drive, figured I might as well post them as not. So what do ya think? Good, bad, indifferent? It'd be great if you'd tell me!
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