Warnings:
Mary Sue introduction story.
Already read all terms and conditions, but I'm not a native speaker and this is a translation from a fanfiction I wrote a couple of years ago.
If something sounds off, please tell me... Kindly :)
Jake had a vision.
The decision was taken then: he would quit his job the very next day.
He himself could not oppose for sure the divine call.
"Let the good times roll" sounded far and outdated on his old record player, as well the plate was already a little bent by too much use. Meanwhile, Jake seemed to have put an end to his tedious romance-like speech, Elwood didn't even managed a chance to counter it yet, but he had definitely decided who would take the bed and who the chair that night.
Elwood shrugged in his jacket, while his eyelids grew heavy with sleep and fatigue of the day just passed, one longer than the any other, a day that he was waiting for years: the day when Jake was finally released from prison.
"When you get on stage, say something!" - Jake's voice broke the silence, and, with renewed insistence, he suddenly emerged again from his slumber.
"Mh ..." - answered Elwood, without even looking back at him.
"Anything that crosses your mind is gonna be fine..." - Jake stretched his shoulders confidently and raised briefly his brim, pulled down over the black glasses.
"Mh ... Nah ..." - continued Elwood, not really paying attention to his words.
"It is impossible, with all the stuff you read all the time... You have nothing to say?" - He urged him.
"What do ya say, I can sing Rubber Biscuit? Just like the old times? "- he asked in response, without showing the slightest interest.
"Nah, it's chop stuff! The audience expects it! Something that makes sense ... Something that is always on everyone's lips, the same reason of music..."- the words of Jake should have fired its insistent vitality, the same that was found again that day, it was a dictated desire, that went way above a mere human will...
Elwood looked up toward the ceiling, the paint stood out, broken in large flakes, showing the various colors and layers underneath, in which his hotel room was painted in previous years, among them was a shade of dark red and babyblue, someone had the brightest idea of replacing baby blue paint to bordeaux, perhaps to hide dirt... Or blood stains encrusted on the wall. A train passed, shaking the forgotten toast on the stove now extinct. It was not him the one who had seen the light, that had the idea of putting the band back together. He slowly opened his eyes and looked at Jake, animated by emotions that he did not succeed to describe, but Elwood did not answer.
"Why are we in this world?" - asked Jake back to that silence, forcing him in the conversation he obviously did not want to carry on.
"Eh?" - replied Elwood distractedly.
"Why am I here? Why are you here? "- asked Jake again.
His voice echoed through the narrow walls, but instead of a response from Elwood, Jake met only silence and some background noise, someone outside, on the road, was commenting excitedly about the entrance to the Hotel, reduced to rubble just sometime before. He did not care and his brother's silence did not surprise him at all.
Elwood wrapped his arms again, even though it was only the end of summer, a cold gust caught him with a shiver behind his back. In that brief breath of cold air, the events of a December of so many years ago emerged to his memory. Certainly could not remember the night he was born into the world, the policeman who found him or a young Sister Mary holding him in her arms while he slept, the blanket in which he was wrapped, nor the icy morning or the frost on newsagent's Cassette, but it was a story he loved to hear in the gentle words of Curtis and those of the Penguin, the same way they listened in silence the story of Artesia and the birth of Jake.
Stories that, as a child, he had so often claimed were repeated to him; stories that, in a way, he had lived himself the moment when, in a childhood memory that now seemed a little more than a dream, another bundle, wrapped in a pink blanket, had walked doors in the arms of the Penguin.
Finally, the tired voice of Elwood came in a trickle of nasal words, tired, mechanical and defensive.
"No-I do not know ... To save St. Helen? Not-I do not think at this moment I want to carry on a trail-on-words about existential phil-... "- but Jake did not let him finish.
"Sleep, hunger, death and love ... It does not matter who you are, what you are and what your fate will be, these are the things that make us all the same... No one can resist. Not even you!"- Jake tone dozed off again, returning apparently drunk and tired, about to fall asleep. It was the truth: everyone, at least once in life, had felt those feelings, Elwood himself. The thrill of the danger of being caught at the wheel of a car when he could still not even get to the clutch pedal, the mad desire to tell Jake about his adventures, a smile hidden in the shadows of fence, two bright blue eyes and his first kiss, the music, the scar of a heart broken by distant words, a "no" said at the wrong time, to a dry and sad, painful, goodbye.
Elwood sighed.
"You say I should ... Write her?" - Said in a low voice, perhaps giving more weight to the words that he had not yet pronounced.
Jake burst out a half-laugh, even he did not know what had happened that night a few years back, when his brother joined him and the Band behind the wheel of yet another stolen car. Jake had only noticed his tears, dried briefly, masking his sadness behind dark glasses, but it would not take much more to him understand: Elwood knew he could not hide anything from Jake.
Probably, after not having seen her around in a long while, Jake maybe had suspected something already. Still, before that time, he had never asked anything on the matter.
"I should write her... About..." - the silent brother tried to scan timidly words that could hardly pronounce.
Although dark glasses masked the impatient expression, Jake rolled his eyes and sighed deeply.
"What happened that night?" - He asked fast, as the question had been extracted by force and it's matter was virtually inevitable.
"W-what?" - Stammered Elwood, bitterly.
"I don't have to remind you that. You would have brought her with you, we should have left all together, everyone knew, but that night you joined us alone. What really happened that night, five years ago? What happened to Irene?" - as Jake asked, his gaze left the intimidated face of his brother, his mouth set in an expression mixed between pain and remorse; and so alighted unsteady on the brick wall attached to the edge of the bed, between a poster of Playboy and one of Aretha Franklin, looking as if through the photos of the women that Elwood kept pasted in his room, one was still missing.
"Don't know, I don't wanna know"- he paused briefly -"She studies at the University now, she has a respectable life..." - explained Elwood, lowering his head, perhaps to the floor or the inside pocket of his jacket.
"Respectable ..." - Jake repeated in a twitch.
-A car?! You've been inside seven months to steal a car? A Cadillac! - In their tired silence, that phrase resurfaced clear in the memories of Elwood. He remembered hearing her voice vivid and sharp, exactly as if she was there and he just heard it.
"In the meantime there have been others, many others... Of Cadillacs!" - Muttered in attempt to ward off that sound from his memories, the inquisitive look of a girl who felt betrayed.
"Yeah, right ..." - shoot Jake absentmindedly.
"You don't trust me? I bet one hundred dollars that I'll have a date with another girl in less than two weeks ... "- Elwood defended himself quickly, soon betrayed by his own cracked voice.
Jake said nothing, reached for the Playboy centerpiece, where a tanned blonde, scantily clad definitely showed all of the qualities of which she was provided without the need to talk. Too many times, when it comes to girls, their interests had tended to be the same and, almost always, Jake was entertained by both girls at the end of the evening, while his brother was lost who knows where, drunk, singing his "mojo" ... The last time they had even found him handcuffed to an elevator handrail. Not that the two had never argued about some particular girl or his brother was always left alone, but in a now distant time, before that damn tour that brought them where they were now, his heart beat in unison with the one the right person for him. For a while, perhaps, he had almost envied the way they grew up together part of their lives. One thing that he, between a reformatory and another, barely could remember.
Jake checked with suspicion the roughly pasted edges of the poster and then lift the back slightly turning his stare away from Elwood who, distracted, was turning between his fingers an old picture of themselves as teenagers. He returned with his face on the poster, then back at him and the picture that his brother had pulled so gently from the pocket his jacket. In fact it did not show anything that special, it was a simple snap of them together, about ten years before, or maybe some more, in black and white. Jake thought quickly: were not the years since that time, even less the subject, that made that photo so special to him, but who snapped it. Sure of his actions, Jake turned to the poster again and lifted safely one of the corners.
The magazine center piece, in fact, covered another image: a full-length photo of a girl in front of a blue satin drape, dressed in an elegant, old-fashioned dress and slightly too big for her. It was one of those pictures that usually are shoot to couples during prom nights. However, in this one, the girl had no escort. Elwood put again the photo he had his hands back in his pocket jacket, along with a strategic piece of bread and some other trinkets that he carried with it.
Jake lowered the corner of the poster and lay down again, pretending not to have seen that hidden picture.
"As you wish, but that is not what makes the difference, it is not yet find another girl if she is the reason of your blues ..." - he said slowly.
Elwood nodded in silence: he could not hide anything from Jake.
He let a few moments, before start talking.
"How did you do, with Kay?" - He asked, almost with the claim that the safe words of his brother would comfort him.
"As everyone else does, Elwood. Life goes on, initially surviving, eventually you'll get over it. The blues you have inside will not disappear, no one will take you away her memory, but one day, someone else can get up the space she left going away ... "- Jake let out a very long sigh and a kind of nasal grunt: in the same way as he had awakened from his slumber, he got back to sleep.
Once past the corridors of the Palace Hotel, Elwood had the feeling someone was watching them. Not that he cared that much over it, it had already happened several times in the very last days, at least since Jake was out of prison, Mercier and Fiscus were standing at their heels for over a week, a strange car was following them everywhere and the police could not wait to put them up against the wall.
Coincidentally, he noticed how Curtis seemed to be looking towards the audience with enthusiasm and smile to someone, someone probably familiar to him too, but he could not really focus between all those police officers, just briefly wondered who that was.
He didn't mind but a few seconds, the pace was frenetic, the Band was finally together like the old days, Jake dancing like he had never done before, it was only a brief moment, a pause for breath and put together two words to the public, as Jake would often ask him to do, as he had asked no more than a week earlier, before returning to running, playing, dancing, before returning to music and the Blumo.
... And when you find that special somebody...
Jake had a vision. The other was not all good, maybe ok, but this one was just plain bad, even worse. Stood still, for once, eyes wide open in the darkness of his cellblock.
It was so bad, he could not tell anyone, not even Elwood. He could hear how he was still asleep, so quiet he did not probably notice. Jake shrug off those thoughts quickly, at least he tried to, and rolled over the bottom half of his jail bunk bed.