There's just one thing….
A lot has changed after the bombing of Old Town. And not only the city is trying to hold on, recover and find a new normal...Johnny is as well.
Characters and settings are of course only borrowed from the excellent TV series. These are only a fan's thoughts about some of her favorite characters, no harm is intended and no profit is made from this work.
Chapter One
Coming back to Westerley, they find Old Town in shambles. Everything the bombers haven't destroyed is slowly being plucked apart by inhabitants trying to scrape together a living and scavengers using the chaos to take what isn't theirs.
But Pree refuses to let the Royale be a part of the destruction, determined that if he can pretty his girl up again the rest of Old Town will follow. And so they help him with the clean-up and the repairs when they are not chasing flimsy leads or knocking off low-level warrants around the Quad. John enjoys the work – fixing the wiring in the bar has the same calming effect tinkering with Lucy has. It gives his hands something to do and keeps his mind just occupied enough for him to not lose his shit completely.
And one day, Pawter comes back. She talks little about the time in the bunkers, but the tired look in her eyes and the slump of her shoulders tell the story for her. She goes back to work immediately, salvaging what's left of her practice. It's not much, so she spends most of her time trying to find supplies and helping people with the few meds she still has. John feels bad about taking the bit of joy she makes from her few paying customers, but she refuses to let them pay for the equipment and medicine they buy on Leith. They don't talk about the fact that 50 joy would never be enough to pay for the ten bottles of anesthetic they bring her from one of their visits to Bellus. She's Illenore Pawter Simms of Land Simms – and even though the ties to her family are more broken than ever, her upbringing still keeps her from accepting handouts.
The first time they kiss, it feels like it has been a long time coming. John isn't surprised when it happens – between exposed wires in the back of the bar – it had been building up for weeks. While Dutch is the rock that keeps him together on the job and on the hunt for D'Avin, Pawter is the one allowing him to give into his fears from time to time, sharing his worries and pain without hesitation so he can pull himself back together after without feeling like he is bursting at the seams. And while her hands are as calloused as his are from the rebuilding, her lips are soft and her arms ground him in a way only a lover can.
The sex is good too. He had been aware that his right hand wasn't a sufficient replacement for another person's body, but with everything that was going on around them, he couldn't get himself to find a sexter to relieve this particular kind of tension. Lying in his bed on Lucy with her feels good, comfortable. Fucking on the couch in her practice leaves him relaxed and even happy – for the short time it takes for the rest of his shitty life to come rushing back at least.
He's not in love with her, but he feels like he is heading that way and he is ok with that.
There's just one thing….
Sometimes, the faint taste of burnt coffee beans on her lips wakes up carefully suppressed memories of sneaking through dirty streets to meet shady people, of cleaning up vomit after helping his mother back into her bed, of worrying about how to get the money for her next fix. He doesn't hold it against her. He has seen too much to even judge her for it. Everyone has an addiction – drugs, sex, religion…everyone needs something to get them through the dark times. But this particular poison, he's not sure he can recover from again. They say you try Jakk once and you're hooked for life. Sometimes, he fears that Pawter will bring back an addiction he thought he quit when he walked away from his mother's grave.
Chapter Two
Pawter is not the only one to return from the bunkers. The streets slowly fill up again with people trying to rebuild their meager lives in a town that is now even worse off than it was before the bombing. The company comes back in, eventually, bringing order that feels more like oppression every day. The Scarbacks are also back, helping to heal the wounds carved into the homes and hearts of Old Town's inhabitants.
Since he is technically still a fugitive, Alvis mostly keeps to the tunnels and rarely comes to the Royale. But he shows up sometimes, even provides them with information on a few warrants they are working. When he comes back for the first time while they are there, he and Dutch nod to each other in the way of longtime friends with a reputation way too tough to allow for a hug. He talks to Pawter a lot as well, exchanging details about the situation above and below ground. John knows that Alvis helped her through some bad highs in the bunkers – there was no clean Jakk to speak off down there and even the dirty variety was rare. The Scarbacks provided her with enough to keep her going, but nowhere near the level she needs to stay calm and focused. Now that the company is back, that is probably the only thing that has gotten better.
Even though he has always had mixed feelings about the monk, John is glad Alvis made it out of his cell and through the bombing. He knows Dutch trusts him, has trusted him for a long time, and it would have been another loss that tasted like failure if something had happened to him. But when Alvis comes over to him on one of his visits and says "Have faith. The roots will carry him home" before once again vanishing into the tunnels, he still feels unsettled. He never thought much about the Trees, not like many others in the Quad do. To him, the Scarbacks mostly were another part of the Quad's scenery and the faith something beautiful but irrelevant to his day-to-day life. And even though he would never fault someone for seeking hope in religion, he never thought that a story about seeds, roots and trees could offer him anything.
But now he sometimes thinks he might have been wrong. "From all I hear, that's not something you get to decide." The words of the Rat King still resound in his ears on occasion, bringing back the strange feeling he experienced while giving the fake blessing to the King's sister. When he picked up the book Alvis had given D'Avin for him for the first time, it had been out of curiosity about a religion that managed to give hope to people who had been dealt the worst hand of all. But even though the stories were beautiful, he didn't get it until after the thing with the tunnel rats. When everything went to hell, when D'Avin went missing and Old Town almost became a second Sugar Point. That's when he found himself picking up the book again. That's when he realized that sometimes, the mere hope that there is something out there that connects all of them - that links him and D'Av even now - can get you through the day, can make you feel not entirely alone.
At first, he thought it was silly. He wasn't alone. He had Dutch and Lucy and Pree and Pawter. He felt like he was betraying his friends and family by looking for something else. Especially since he still had it better than most people on this crappy moon. But as the days without finding D'Avin turned into weeks and the leads got flimsier, there was only so much they could do to keep each other's hopes up. At some point, every encouragement had been said a thousand times, every promise started to sound empty. So you either found the strength to believe in finding him inside yourself or you gave up. John had never been a quitter.
He still only rarely reads in the book. But when he hears the monks say their prayers, he finds himself voicing the response with the rest of the believers. "And the roots grew." And he is ok with it.
There's just one thing…
He once accused Alvis of using faith to play politics and the monk responded that you can believe in more than one thing at once. John now sometimes wonders if a person can be more than one thing to you at once as well. All of his relationships are fairly simple, straightforward. Dutch is family, safety. Pree is the good friend who always has an open ear. Pawter is the pretty and kind girl he is falling in love with. And for a long while, Alvis had been the weird Scarback revolutionary who sometimes shared information. And even when that shifted to a grudging sort of camaraderie during and after the black rain, it was still uncomplicated. But when he sees Alvis now, he is not so sure it still is. He is not only a revolutionary disguised in monk's robes anymore or even a religious leader who had a hand in expanding John's religious horizon. When Alvis now says "Have faith" with his hand on his shoulder, John's not sure it is just the well-meant support of a friend. It feels like something different...something still undefined...something that's still evolving in a direction he can't predict. And he is not sure that he's ok with that.