Title: Bones (And a Name)
Author: Lexie Jayne
Pairing/Characters: Jondy/Zack, Zane, Tinga.
Word Count: 3 553
Rating: M
Genre: Romance, Drama, Angst
Summary: Jondy. Zack. Emotional damage and how everything happened.
Disclaimer: Property of James Cameron. Lyrical quotes from Nina Gordon's Bones and a Name
Spoilers: Season 1.
Notes: is back never really left Written as part of an exercise in my creative writing class – we were given a picture and a quote. I was given a picture of a girl eating cherries and the quote 'love is all you need' from Moulin Rouge. Then I heard Nina Gordon's Bones and Name and spent the last three months working on this extraordinarily slowly.
There are more notes attached to the version I'm posting at my writing livejournal – community 'lexiewrites', if anyone is interested. Also written for the fanfic100 prompt 'not enough'.
I hope you enjoy it D Updates on chapter fics are next on my to do list.
All the horses and all the men, couldn't bring her back again. We tried so hard; we couldn't save her day.
She liked eating maraschino cherries with a spoon; she wore a light blue-grey ribbon wrapped around her head like a headband, keeping her light brown hair off of her face, and had words tattooed along her back, where her shirt met her jeans, and three blue stars tattooed on her hip. She wore brown leather cuffs on both wrists, and had a watch on a necklace that was made of red plastic and shaped like a star.
She liked needles and sticky pink lipgloss and he didn't know who this strange girl was; not his sister.
We smile at each other 'cause we know we know each other.
He finds her at night, late. There's a party going on and she's wearing a blue and white dress with her boots, and she's got a cigarette in one hand, a bright green drink in the other. Her eyes don't stay on one spot, one person, very long, but her face is full of laughter.
He wonders what she's taken, and when she swears it's nothing, he knows she's lying. She knows she's telling the truth.
They spend their night sprawled out on the lawn of some high school's football field, blowing smoke rings into the night sky. She affects a Southern accent to seduce him; she smelt beautiful, her perfume like an invisible pink mist that settled on her skin, something that smelt like old fashioned movies and of glamour.
Her underwear is secondhand and mismatched – purple and green, with tiny stars printed on them. Her eyes are more grey than blue now that she's growing up.
She was seventeen and he was old enough to know better.
I always thought we could be friends.
The very first time he recovered her – the second, after Tinga – she was sitting on the steps of New York City walk up, in a dress that hung below her knees, her hair brushing her cheeks. She was sitting with another child, and they were blowing bubbles with bits of twisted wire, watching them sparkle as they floated upwards and popped.
She was ten, and she knew him on sight, her thin arms around his neck as he said her name, a bruise around one eye.
"Jondy."
He touched the grey and black of the bruise and she offered him a brave smile, her eyes still frightened.
"I didn't think they'd beat us out here," she whispers, so that the other child – a girl with curling red hair and the biggest green eyes – that nurses a broken arm cannot hear them. It's like she's telling a secret – the worse kept one, because America has worse things to worry about now there's no economy, no money or work or food or sanctuary, than little girls being slapped again and again for mouthing off.
He buys both Jondy and the child an ice cream from the store on the corner and leaves them. A few bruises… she liked to mouth off in the dorms too, and he'd smacked her and her acid tongue around a few times, too. She was clean and fed and safe for now.
He came back the next day to find her alone, wearing a hat made of floral fabric, holding a book in her lap.
"Zack." Her voice is soft and pleading. "He kicked her until she stopped moving."
She has matching bruises now, and two broken fingers he splints with popsicle sticks before they leave.
All the millions and billions of stars that shine into her eyes are barely bright enough to light her way.
She gets tattoos when she's fifteen, with a fake I.D. and an impressive attitude problem. She gets one for every dead body she's seen. Three stars on her hip – one for Jack, one for Eva and one for the child in New York City, whose skin purpled when the man kicked her head – it sounded like someone stomping on a melon.
Then she gets words on her back for herself; a prayer, a eulogy or a promise, she cannot tell.
She was a good soldier, a hard girl with an easy smile. Nothing was beneath her, that anything and everything was just another challenge. Why have a stolen million dollar body if you aren't planning on desecrate it in the first place? People steal things to make them theirs, to take power away from the owner, to turn them into their own sacred items.
Religion was too insubstantial for her, so instead of prayers and piety, it was every life experience she could pack into the two years he left her alone that turned her from stolen property into her own personal artifact.
It was spending her last twenty dollars on a thrift store wedding dress dyed dark grey, and a glass bottle of soft drink. It was sleeping on a park bench for two days, all wax white skin and tangled hair. It was finding the wrong sort of people and doing the wrong sort of things for all sorts of powders and liquids and pills that made her blood buzz and her mind twist.
It was no worse than any of the others. They all did it, he complained later, when she spelled out her time in the big city. She was always such a drama queen. The others had the sense to save their money and buy food instead of mourning dresses.
Though, Tawny had gone through a stage with a pair of deep, chardonnay red leather pants and a black mesh shirt that even Zack found amusing. Tawny would later blame the drugs, and mock Jondy's mourning dress.
It wasn't really that funny, but hindsight is 20/20 and it was the closest they got to family anecdotes, so they let Zack have it.
So she covered herself with sorrow and shame; and smoke and mirrors and fame.
They meet dawn on the football field, and he looks at her, her dress crumpled next to her, her hands resting on her stomach, her eyes closed. She isn't sleeping.
"Coming?"
She opens her eyes and smiles her greeting, tugging her dress on and carrying her boots in the other hand. She presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth and they walk back to her tiny basement apartment, discussing everything and nothing.
They eat left over food, hers covered in some kind of soy sauce and eaten with pink painted chopsticks, as she paints her toenails bright purple and hums unfamiliar songs. She paints her nails deep red and waves her hands madly around when she's finished. He takes her hand when the polish is dry, and examines the deep colour.
"It's called duplicity," Jondy says, admiring her hands. "Because it's so close to the other shades, but not quite."
He likes the purple better, and he spends the day tapping away at her laptop, while she sits cross legged on the floor, cleaning her weapons and watching military dramas on her old television.
They leave the apartment early in the evening, and head to a bar that is filled with smoke and the stench of cheap alcohol and urine. She drinks shots and smokes and he spends the hours sliding the buttons of her shirt open, drinking cheap liquor and trying to think straight.
They end up sitting on the side of the road at a park, alternately groping each other and eating greasy pizza from a box. Neither was surprised that dawn found them tumbling into her bed together, half naked, with a mostly empty bottle of tequila on the nightstand and barely a single coherent thought between them.
Fake love, angry love, bad love, and sad love.
He yells when Tinga tells him she's getting married. Her face is lit up with happiness and he wants to slap it away. She already has a son, the white dress is god-damned pointless. But she promises, swears, it will be her, her groom, her son, the groom's parents and two siblings, and him. She asks him to bring one of the others, and he shoots her a dark glare and she shuts up.
"I just want to be happy, Zack."
So does he, but he's trying to protect her, himself, them all, so the closet he gets is an alcohol sodden night with a pseudo-sister who has ghosts in her eyes.
He conveniently forgets Jondy was stone cold sober the first time and his parting words to his oldest sister are ones of frustration, anger and regret.
He's even more uncomfortable when he decides to drag along whoever is closet because in all honesty, he believes after this stunt, Tinga will be dead and gone by the end of the year, and then he finds out the closest is Jondy.
Her smile lights up the room when he asks her – no, when he tells her – and she kisses him hard on the mouth and dances around the room. "She's getting married! I never thought we could get married."
"We can't."
"But Tinga…" she looks at him hard, harder than he expects, and he feels like she's reading him like a book and he doesn't like it. "Oh."
"This is Tinga's decision and Tinga's risk."
"Why are you letting her do it?"
He's not letting her, damnit. She's doing it, whether he drags her to the moon or to Texas. He knows she'll march back to Charlie and marry him, and that she can make her family disappear just as well as Zack can.
This is happening because he still has his pride, and as they get older, he's losing his control over them. Willful, with a destructive streak a mile long, those are his siblings. Nothing many years of extensive psychotherapy and some shock treatments couldn't remedy, but there is no one adequately trained in America that could deal with the bundle of neuroses and violence his siblings have become.
And because he likes seeing happiness on the face of someone who was dragged back from the darkest place technology and progress had ever conceived; he doesn't want to have to explain the closest he's had to happiness like Tinga's was a tequila soaked night during which he couldn't remember to worry or tense up.
"What am I going to wear?" Jondy squeals, and if he knew her better, he would have seen the understanding in her eyes at his silence; the fierce affection she had for him. He's taking her at little more than face value, and she knows they're both too good for that.
And now sometimes I think I see her and I can almost hear her cry.
The wedding was a mere thirteen people, including the celebrant, in a small room of a café that Charlie's sister worked for. The ceremony was short, and heartfelt, and Zack had to squash the feelings of contentment for his sister. She would be dead at her feet, her family's – and Charlie's – blood on her hands for this.
"Lighten up," came a sweet voice, and his eyes met hers, as she handed him a glass. "Have a drink and try not to scowl too much."
"What is this?" He asked as she took a sip of her drink.
"Margaritas," she smiles sweetly. "Me and tequila, we've had some good times."
"I remember," he says dryly and watches two pink spots appear on her cheeks. She looks more like the teenage girl she is today, in a thrift store pink dress and silver heels, her hair fixed with a cream coloured ribbon.
Tinga materializes beside Jondy, glowing in her silky white dress. Tinga hands Jondy's drink to Zack before wrapping her arms around her tightly.
"I can't believe he brought you!" Tinga gasps, as she examines her almost-grown sister. "You're so beautiful, Jondy."
Jondy laughs out loud, and shakes her head. "You're the bride, I'm meant to be complimenting you!"
"You look so different," Tinga continues, ignoring Jondy's statement. "I wouldn't have picked you on the street."
"That's the point," Zack half grunted, handing Jondy back her drink.
"And you, in a suit, and starting on the hard drinks at four in the afternoon," Tinga teased. "I wouldn't have picked you as a margarita drinker, Zack."
With a completely straight face, he looked at Tinga. "Me and Jondy, we've had some good times with tequila."
Tinga whipped around to face her little sister, who was choking on her own drink, her face prettily pink with embarrassment.
"I'm going to go and cuddle my new nephew," Jondy managed, backing away from the stunned Tinga and the smirking Zack.
As she put her half finished drink on a table and moved towards Case's playpen, she caught the beginning of the conversation.
"If you hadn't told me, Zack, I would've thought she was Max."
"Me, too."
Her smile felt strained as she scooped up the baby, her baby sister's name feeling like a weight, like a bad omen to hang over her head. It rattles around her head as she hurls Case into her arms, and silently wonders why hearing her best sister's name makes her sad and worried.
He was predictable, cliche, and cruel to you
He leaves her for awhile in San Francisco, which she likes. She's beautiful and dramatic, and fits in well. She becomes a bartender, weaving stories from thin air for some and listening to the problems of others for hours, money damp and crumpled as it is slid across the bar to her. Bright smiles and dancing eyes, and no one really notices that she slips out the back, to the payphone, dialing a number, leaving a quick message and hanging up, before dialing another number, hanging up as soon as it begins to ring, just enough so no one can hit 'redial' and catch her out. Every single break, it's more than just routine. It's cold, grey, sick fear.
She spends daylight hours in her apartment, reading anything she can get her hands on, her leg tapping on the mock-wood floors, as she waits for a phone call, for a familiar blonde man to break into her apartment. She keeps a bottle of tequila under her sink, and no matter how many times she washes her work clothes in the bath tub, the smell of spilt liquor clings to the fabric.
It's weeks before he comes to find her, his eyes distant and his manner withdrawn. He meets her at the bar, and rebuffs all her attempts to recapture whatever they had before he left her in San Francisco. After work, he takes her and buys her a coffee, and as she sips the bitter brew, she wonders what happened to nights seeped in Mexican spirits and sex, and wonders if black coffee and the harsh light of dawn is Zack's way of getting as far away from those nights as he possibly can.
When they get back to her apartment, she slips into the shower, scrubbing off dirt, grime, cigarette smoke and her smudged make up. She tugs on her most comfortable clothes – soft black pants and a thin white top that hangs off her frame, her tanned shoulders bare. Her hair is scraped off her face, piled on top of her head with a white plastic heart-shaped clip, the flesh at the back of her neck pink and raw from having her barcode removed.
He makes her a cup of tea and hands her an unopened jar of maraschino cherries and a spoon. She grins at him, and sits at her sticky kitchen table, her prize in her hands.
"You didn't return my calls."
"I didn't return anyone's calls."
"Ah."
She fills in the silence by opening the jar of cherries and spooning one into her mouth. Yes, she's hurt, but Zack's never been able to read her emotions in her eyes, so she says nothing, and stirs the spoon in the jar.
"I found Max." His eyes bore into her head. "She's alive. She's beautiful."
She tries to remember the last time he called her beautiful and can't recall even one.
"Did you sleep with her?" Her voice is perfectly ordinary, interested but not sarcastic or hurt. She holds a cherry by the stem and looks at him, as if this is a normal conversation.
"No." He sounds incredulous, like she's asked a stupid question. "Of course not, Jondy."
"You slept with me." Three times and counting. Or not, she supposes now.
"That didn't mean anything…" he realizes what he's said and something flickers in his eyes, but she doesn't take the care to read his emotions right that second.
She drops the cherry back into the jar, the treat now irrevocably soured, and squints at him. "I'm not sure what I should say, apart from the obvious."
"The obvious." He's tense, and she kind of wishes he'd beg for his forgiveness, that she would over look his careless words. Unless it's something that he's been burning to make clear since the beginning.
"You're in love with Max."
"I can't be in love with Max."
"The same way you can't be in love with me."
"I don't want to be in love with you!" He snapped and slammed his fist on the table, unsettling the jar of cherries and the tea. Both shatter as they hit the floor, china and glass tinkling on the lino. Her pants and shirt are splashed with maraschino liquor and tea, as she stands up.
"Pass me a paper towel," she said flatly, she picks the shards of glass and china, and mops the stain up with the handful of towels Zack hands her. Her foot catches on a missed shard of tea cup, and ignores the drip of blood on the lino, carrying the broken glass and stained towels into the kitchen. He stands by the table, his hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket. She wishes he felt awkward, just being there.
She dumps everything in the bin and then disappears into her room for clean pants and a clean blouse. She doesn't meet his eyes, like she's embarrassed for herself, for being so easy – emotionally, more so than physically.
"It's okay," she said, holding up her hands in a sign of peace, more reassuring herself than him. "Are you going to crash on the couch?"
He nods and they share pizza and soda in what could almost be an amicable silence.
Later, when he's snoring on the couch, and she's tucked in her bed, staring at the water marks on the ceiling, she lets the cold, clammy feeling of humiliation take over. She doesn't cry but she can't sleep either.
He said my sweet, you will never be sad again
She hears the news of his death – and Max's – from Zane, who heard it from Syl and Krit. She lights a cigarette and offers a wobbly smile.
"At least they died together," she offers, blowing perfect smoke rings into the sky.
"He really loved her," Zane added, as they both stared up at the sky.
"He really did." She stubs out the cigarette. "I wonder how we're going to die."
"On top of a big pile of money, with many beautiful women?"
She laughs, and her eyes are dry. "You have lots of beautiful women."
"But no money, my sister."
"Duh. You had to pay the women with something, dumb ass."
He grins at her and she rests her head on his shoulder.
"You want to talk about it?"
"Not yet. Maybe later."
"Do I have to pay you?"
She laughs, bitter but no less sweet. "No one has to pay me, Zane."
They sleep on the couch together, and she wakes up before dawn, the white-light spilling into her lounge room. She gets up, walks around the apartment, picking up empty coffee cups and beer bottles, hiding her face behind a curtain of hair.
She won't believe Zack is dead until she sees his cold, still body before her. She can't let herself believe it.
Zane finds her standing in the kitchen, washing up, and he sends her to have a shower. She comes out looking fragile, her lips chapped and bitten, draped in clothes. She sits at the table, peeling the label off the tequila bottle in the middle of the table. She once thought about putting flowers in it, but she's never got around to it.
Zane makes her breakfast – eggs and toast that isn't burnt. As she eats, he throws up every bottle of alcohol in the apartment, even the bottles that might have once held alcohol.
Her cutlery clacks against the plate, and he sits beside her, turning so he's facing her, their knees touching. She pushes her plate away, and swivels to face Zane, biting her lip, and resting her hands on his knees, both leaning forward so that their foreheads touch, Zane's hands fisting in her hair.
She rocks a little, tightening her grip on the fabric of his jeans.
"He's dead.
"He is."
"Really."
"You'll live."
"I'll live." She cracks a smile then and they both sit up, and she kisses Zane's cheek, and he wraps his arms around her.
Don't you try to tell me that love is all we need.