A tiny first-season Jal drabble, because I just started watching Season Two and it inspires me. Scribbled at three in the morning, so I hope it's half decent. Dedicated to The Reviews Lounge, Too people, because it's actually technically named after a thread of theirs... Didn't really do it on purpose, it was sticking too well to the story ;P
She doesn't like people who flee, she says. People who go in the middle of the night, leaving a note and a few children behind. People who just turn around, and disappear.
(she thinks she knows better. She plays music, and stares people in the eye with generosity and arrogant straightforwardness.)
...she doesn't. Know better, that is. They are thin-skinned, elusive people, those Jalender loves – people who starve themselves into transparency, or fill their lives with noise and boys, people who escape. People who lie, and laugh everything off until it just becomes too much. People who'll run from the holes in their worlds, or whom she'll find, white and motionless, with that odd expression on their faces, in-between a smile and a frown, of triumph –
(and she screams, and tries to cling to them.)
Those people don't leave notes. They are noisier, clumsier – but like her, they think that their life is theirs, and no one else really has a say.
(except that they don't flee to make it better, somehow, somewhere – they feel free to screw up with it, instead.)
Jal thinks she's moved on. So her mother left, and still she lives, smiles, loves and plays music – plays well, so well. Jal has friends, crazy, selfish friends, who'd probably not even bother leaving a note before doing something really stupid.
(oddly enough, she loves them that way.)
In case it isn't perfectly clear, the friends Jal is thinking about in the third paragraph are: Cassie, Michelle, Chris (while he runs from his father's) and then Cassie once more, because I love Cassie.
