Summary: Many of the people of Jericho carry scars.
Couples: Jake/Heather, Dale/Bonnie Note: Sequel to, if less upbeat than, Stardust. Note, I changed a few names, Eve became Eva, and Clairie became Caroline. The hidden ship from my last story was Dale/Bonnie, so I owe most of you lollipops. The last new episode helped me to fill in a few openings in this idea, and the end filled me with such a hot boiling rage, I had to write something Jake/Heather to get all of the gross Jake/Emily out of my system. Also I need to watch the scene with Bonnie and Stanley again, I have to find out what the sign for "screwing" is. Also, I'm giving everyone a ton of kids, because the birth control would almost certainly dry up quickly.
Jake Green finds the box of pictures when clearing out the back shed looking for the extra axe. Most of the remnants of the old ways were stored out here with other non essentials. Pausing to look through them, he is amazed. He turns and sees Eva coming toward him with an armload of firewood.
"What are you looking at?" She asked trying to see over his shoulder. He handed her the picture. Her eyes went Wide.
"Mom?", she asked quizzically.
He nodded.
"She looks different without her scar".
He almost laughed, Eva was a very perceptive and mature ten year old, though he supposed in this world she would have to be. She had so few friends, because the epidemics had taken so many of the children from before the bombs, and infertility had halted births for several years, yet she never seemed to mind. It was just the way things were.
Heather had recieved the scar about six months after the bombs. They had been having trouble with some of the teenagers who had gotten angry and restless, who had formed a group and had been robbing and raping and assaulting people over a good portion of town. Most of the town had tried to subdue them, and one of them had broken a glass coke bottle across Heather's face, when she tried to cuff him to a pole.
The scar stretched from right under her hairline in a diagonal, over her left eyelid which had been puffy for a time, down her cheek. She hadn't even cried, even when the blood had gotten in her eyes, and the scar had never faded.
He had up until this point regarded Heather as what he knew of her, a sweet, slightly awkward, somewhat naive woman. Her reaction to her injury allowed him to see, what he had not before. SHe was, with the possible exception of his mother, the toughest woman he had ever met.
Most other women would have been crippled with pain. She had simply wiped the blood off of her face, and kept moving. She had been one of the last treated when it was all over, April calling her foolhardy, saying it could have gotten badly infected. She had simply nodded, not even wincing from the stitches.
That was the moment he knew, there was so much in her that he would never find in Emily. In the fifteen years he had known her, and the thirteen they had been married, he had never once seen her cry out in pain. The only time he had seen her with tears rolling down her cheeks was when someone died. She had cried when Bonnie's first child was stillborn and later when Stanley died of blood cancer, but that day she had ot so much as shed a tear, and she had not even gotten misty eyed when giving birth.
He observed Eva out of the corner of his eye. She was every bit her mother. Her thick dark hair and her cool green eyes. While she had his darker complexion, her square face was unmistakable.
She said "Dad don't we need to go get dinner, the Turner's are going to be here soon.
He nodded and grabbed his .22. They would need to feed everyone tonight, and some more firewood, which was getting harder to come by for winter.
Bonnie Richmond stood back to watch as her family loaded up the carts with the dried hay and corn stalks, which push come to shove could be a firewood substitute. Gas having become nonexistent except for the little bit saved for tractors, everyone who needed to travel either walked, rode horses or rode bikes, in this case with large wagons strapped to the back.
Winters in Jericho were not only cold and lonely, but also hard. Families on the edge of town or on farms huddled into the larger houses with other families, surviving on a little meat, and canned summer fruit, and tried to wait it out.
She was just glad that neither of her two boys objected. While they were used to sharing a bed with their sister, they would in a few years be sensitive to the idea of sleeping with three girls not related to them. But at six and seven they were just thankful for the extra warmth.
Caroline, the ever responsible one, was helping Dale with the last of the stalks while Jack and Benny ran about playing with an old balloon one of them had found. Her red hair was in stark contrast, but her soft face was so much like her fathers it was amazing. Dale, the one person she knew who had never left her. Stanley had left her twice, first to screw the IRS woman. She had at the time been so angry she had done some pretty stupid things, like many kids, but she had been unable to deny it when she got pregnant. Dale had stood by her side when she felt she couldn't go home, making SKylar give her a room to stay in. Her birth had been difficult and painful, a large scar the permanent reminder her of the cesarean they had to do to try the baby that had been unsuccessful.
She really hadn't been surprised. She had been the seventh stillbirth since the bomb, and April Green's had been the third miscarriage. No healthy children were born until almost six years after the bombs, and Caroline had only been the second. She had made a silent apology and left Skylar and Dale to move back to the farm, silently forgiving Stanley and while she was sure they would never get along, she had tried to at least be civil to Mimi.
But she had never forgiven him for the second time.
The miscarriages and stillbirths had been a clue, but they hadn't realized how the radiation had affected them all under the surface. Stanley thought he could hide the nosebleeds from her. But he couldn't hide the coughing blood, or the bruises. Or the fights he and Mimi had when she was out of lipreading range.
He had died at home in his own bed. She had been inconsolable that day. Dale had come over and tried to comfort her, but he had been too shocked when he discovered that she didn't even appear to know what was wrong with him.
"I don't understand, why would he keep something like that from you?"
She had looked at at him, and started to sob. He held her close, his chin on the top of her head, trying his best but never being able to truly understand.
Nothing is scarier to a young deaf child than the dark. Cutting off their main knowledge senor was sure to cause tears and tantrums in mere seconds. But as she grew older Bonnie began to associate other things with the dark. Without being able to overhear gossip the way everyone else did, she often felt the last to know anything, and as such often the butt of the other kids jokes.
Stanley, had without realizing it, scarred her more deeply than he could ever imagine. And in his death he could not explain himself.
Dale hadn't left that night. Mimi left in a few days to move in with one of the rich families who had opened their homes as inns to the refugees or homeless, or just lonely. Dale had not. He went into town on foot during the day to manage the store, but he always came back every night without fail, to eat dinner with her, help her with the evening chores, and sleep on the couch.
They had always been sort-of friends, what with the outsider camaraderie. But she had never before realized what he meant to her. He had never learned much sign, but she taught him a bit, because although she could speak fine, she enjoyed communicating in her own language.
One day she had been showing him the signs for different foods, and paused. She looked him straight in the eye, and took each of his hands, curled them into fists and crossed them over his chest. He looked at her, and seemed to understand without her having to speak. She had leaned and put her hand on his cheek as his lips met hers gently.
The scar on her heart that Stanley had left had finally begun to heal.
two fists crossed at the chest is the sign for "love". "I love you" is just a handshape, and describing it makes it sound a lot like the devil-horns salute.