This chapter is dedicated to Mindy Morganna and Marie Poe for their reviews. Thank you!

U ɴ ƒ o ʀ ɢ ɪ v ᴇ ɴ

Chapter Three: Contrast

Three months.

That was how long it took for both David and Griffin to act.

For David, it was out of sheer unwillingness to hurt another Jumper, and an impressive inability to even find anyone else.

For Griffin, it was because it took him three months to recover .

In those three months, several things changed drastically for both of them, and not for the most part, it wasn't for the better.

\/\/\/

Griffin lay on his stomach, on his bed, rapidly outlining plans across a large butcher sheet of paper. His writing was large and child-like, straggling across the page. His face was a mask of two emotions, rage and, again, child-like ecstasy, terrifying in their dissimilarity and their intensity. Like his writing, the innocence only made the viciousness that much more apparent. He was a frightening contrast at that moment in time; the hatred of a feral teen clashing against a child's pure and unbreakable joy.

He gripped the pen as a child did, and turned the page over, continuing to write. The moment he began to wind up his plans and start to return to a state of what he considered normalcy, the vivid emotions faded from his face, replaced by the amused apathy which served as his default mask to hide anything and everything else. When he had finally finished, he dropped the pen as though it had burned him, and sat up straight. He stretched easily, then stood up and gazed around his new lair.

It was a cave, about seven meters by five. The roof was just low enough for him to reach if he stood on tiptoes and stretched his arms out. The floor was, thanks to him, completely covered in six inches of white sand, taken from the Sahara desert.

He might have been homesick when he'd done that. So what?

Scattered around the lair were the usual pieces of furniture he brought with him; a power generator, a coffee table, a plasma TV (with a PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 beside it), a couch that was incredibly comfortable, his bed (the same as before; three thick queen-sized mattresses piled up on top of each other), the safes, a couple of Persian rugs to spread on the sand, and several lamps.

There was also a globe of the world, dozens of DVDs of locations, briefcases full of CD discs with even more photographs, and a scrapbook comprised of his favourite haunts. The entrance into the lair had a flyscreen pounded over it, and a black curtain which could be moved to cover it at night to shield the light. He didn't think that any of the light make it through the thick, falling wall of water, or be seen. Nobody ever visited this waterfall; it was just another of the world's anonymous locations, left alone by almost everybody. Besides, the cave was what, halfway up the fall? Just another reason why it was less likely. But, the curtain was still there anyway. You could never be too careful.

Griffin had found the cave about a week before he'd met David in Rome. It was one of his many backups, but by far his favourite, hence his being there. To be honest, he didn't even know where it was exactly; he'd found it by Jumping to one point, then Jumping to the furthest location he could see from there. Rinse and repeat. Line-of-sight-Jumping.

Tilting his head to the side, the young man considered for a moment, idly running his hands over the globe. Where to go?

He'd almost completely recovered from his electrical incident. He hadn't managed to put all of the weight back on, but now he could pass as a casual anorexic rather than a prisoner of war who'd only just been released after three years. In the first week of his recovery, he'd eaten everything he could get his hands on, all the food in the lair and then all the takeaway he could "obtain". He'd healed amazingly fast, but then again, he always had. He was the freak of nature who could bounce back twice as hard when hit. That was the way he was. He definitely had all of his strength and energy back, to the point where he wondered if he was stronger than he had been when David had initially left him.

He was still grateful to Andrei, though, for saving his life. Sure, the Russian owed Griffin more than a few favours for … for that particular incident, but Griffin never really expected anyone to come through on debts owed. Even so, for a fifty year old Russian man to stand there patiently on a ladder for day after day and feed him and give him water – it was incredible. The same went for the electrician who had accompanied him on every trip, passing the supplies up the ladder. Every day for nineteen days. It had been them who had switched off the electricity as well, Griffin was sure of that. As for who made the wormhole for him to pass through, he was still hazy on that point.

That was one thing that he was never going to forgive David for; Griffin's already fragile mental state had been completely shattered by that tower. His memories had been splintered apart. Sure, he could remember everything to do with the Jumpers, the Paladins, and the War, but what about him? He couldn't remember his birthday, what town he'd been born in, what school he'd attended, and …

And his parent's faces.

Their voices, their personalities, their faces… They memories had completely faded, and no matter what he did, he couldn't bring them back. Before the electrical incident, Griffin had been able to remember them perfectly. Now they were masked in the same haze that hid the identity of the Jumper who had created the scar for him.

But their identity didn't matter. They were a friend, and that was all that mattered. He'd figured out one thing about them, though; they were a Saviour, part of a group that roamed the world, rescuing Jumpers. They were pacifists, more than anything, but they could still defend themselves if the occasion called for it. He'd been part of them, for a couple of weeks, before he decided that fighting was definitely more to his style than acting like a paramedic.

He'd been the lone wolf from there on in, and a hell of a lot happier for it.

Laughing quietly to himself, Griffin stretched easily and cracked his fingers, looking back at the globe. It displayed the times in each time-zone across the world at its base. He was itching to start Jumping again, get back out into the world, catch up with the others …

But he had everything he needed, right here. He could wait. He looked back at the sheet of butcher paper on his bed, now covered with his childish handwriting, and then back at the globe.

There was another clock, beside the aforementioned time-zones, with a silent red countdown that read:

11: 09: 31: 17

Eleven days, nine hours, thirty one minutes and seventeen seconds to go.

Oh, yes. Griffin softly laughed again.

He could wait.

\/\/\/

In an eerie parody of Griffin, David was lying on his bed and writing. Unlike the other, his handwriting was fluid and interconnected, a running style that had been painstakingly perfected in the many hours after high school ended when he wrote his journal. In the years that had passed, David had never kept another journal, but now he'd pulled one of his old ones out and started to write. It was calming. This is what the page read so far:

Dear Journal;
I haven't used you since I was fifteen. It feels weird to be confiding in a book. Paper. That's all you are. Paper. But you've held my secrets for a decade, so I may as well use you again. I'm in trouble. I don't know what to do. I'm a Jumper; I can teleport anywhere in the world just by thinking it. My first Jump happened when I was five, and my mother abandoned me. She was a Paladin, and Paladins hunt Jumpers and kill them. To quote another Jumper, "They're religious nut-jobs."
That Jumper, I left stranded, to die, in an electrical tower. His name was Griffin. He's English, but apart from that, I have no idea about any of his history. He's an enigma. I didn't come here to write about him. But maybe he's part of the problem. I met my mum, again, see, and she wants to declare a truce between Jumpers and Paladins and stop the "war". Stop the deaths. I think it's a good idea, but I don't know if I can trust her. I think I can. I hope I can. She wants a Jumper, though. A Jumper who knows other Jumpers. Someone they can trust. That someone might be Griffin. He's the only other Jumper I know, and I left him to die because of Millie. He was going to set off a bomb in her apartment and kill the Paladins there, even though it was going to kill her as well. If he'd done that, he would've killed both Millie and my mother, even though I didn't know she was there at the time. I could go on, but the basic end of the story is that I stole the bomb and left it on top of a Pyramid. The detonator is somewhere in Chechnya, with him.

How am I supposed to contact any Jumpers if he's dead? How am I supposed to get him to trust me again? He tried to kill Millie! I did the right thing by leaving him!

… Right?

Anyway, I'm gonna go look for him. I don't know what else I can do. I know where he used to live, maybe he's still there. As for how the hell I'm going to get him to trust me? I'm just going to wing it. Wish me luck.

– D. R.

\/\/\/

David put the pen down, placing it carefully next to his journal. Nobody would read it, he was confident of that. Nobody could break into his penthouse apartment, short of an explosive, and if that happened, he would know about it, no matter where he was in the world. He'd rigged a system that would trigger an alarm on his phone if anyone tried to break in. So, short of a Jumper miraculously being able to get into his penthouse, his journal was safe. Sighing slightly, he massaged his temples, sitting on his bed and –

– getting up off a bench in Paris, France. He glanced around once, stood up, and started to walk –

– down the middle of a street in London. Okay, so maybe he was procrastinating. What did that have to do with anything? Sighing, he rubbed the back of his neck, and turned –

– to view the unholy explosions that marked Chechnya. Fine. If his mother was truly convinced that this was the best course of action, and if was willing to believe her, then this was what he had to do. Sighing again, he saw the electrical tower where he'd abandoned Griffin.

It was empty.

Okay, so, what did I expect? David asked himself, trying to ignore the fact that his whole body had just gotten tenser. I knew he wouldn't be here. But I had to check, right? Where do I go now?

He looked around, took another step –

– and touched the hard rock floor, temporarily blinded as his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the lair. The lair that was just as empty as the tower. There wasn't anything left, not even a scrap of litter. The games, the videos, the suitcases, the TV, the bed, the cabinets, the wires, the papers, the rubbish… It was all gone. Everything within it was completely gone, with no sign that anyone had ever lived there. The walls were crumbling in, the roof had collapsed in one part, sand had created massive drifts on the floor. There weren't any footprints; not even a pattern of sand to indicate a Jumpscar had been formed.

"Great," David muttered out loud, and then checked his watch. 7:39pm, according to the time-zone that Millie was currently in. He was supposed to pick her up at 8, so they could start their old tradition. He shook his head, and vanished, reappearing in front of her mother's house. A heavy snow was falling, reminding him of the night when he'd left the snowglobe on the swing behind the house.

With a small shiver, he walked up and knocked on the door. Millie's mother opened it, a friendly smile gracing her face as she saw who it was.

"Come in, David!" she urged. "Oh, my, it's so cold, isn't it? You must be freezing out there!"

"Uh, thanks, Mrs Harris," he replied, returning the smile. "H–How are you?"

"Oh, very well, thank you." She went to the stairs, and called "Millie! David's here!"

"Give me a minute!" Millie called back, adding a moment later "Hey, David!"

"Hey!" he shouted, smile widening. Mrs Harris took him by the elbow and sat him down on the couch.

"So what are you to up to these days?" she asked. "Carrying out the Christmas tradition again?"

David laughed. "You know us too well."

"I remember that so well," she sighed in warm reminiscence. "Millie always used to get so excited about it."

"A month of Christmas movies," Millie said from the stairs, her nostalgic smile reflecting that of her mother's. "Going around and buying those chocolate calendars that let you count down how many days there were until Christmas. Singing in the street. Decorating people's homes for them." She laughed softly. "Those were some of the best Decembers I've ever had."

David blushed faintly, and both Millie and her mother giggled slightly. The former came and took David by the hand, kissing her mother on the cheek as she did. "Love you, Ma," she murmured quietly.

"Love you too," Mrs Harris murmured back. "Take care out there."

"I always do." Millie told her, and then pulled away from her to be with David. "I'll be back in a couple of days, okay?"

"Alright." Mrs Harris said. "So long as you're both back in time for Christmas lunch!"

"We will be," David promised. "We're coming here first, for Millie's presents, and then we're going to my mother's for mine." He grinned. "After that, it's carnival rides all night long!"

"Sounds delightful," Mrs Harris said. "Now, go on, scram. I'm sure you two kids have a lot better things to do then hang around with an old lady!"

Another round of fresh laughter broke out, and Millie and David walked to the door. With a final round of goodbyes, they departed, walking outside. As soon as they were out of view of the house, David jumped them to Europe.

"Just think," Millie said wonderingly. "Christmas is almost here."

"Yes, it is," David agreed, hugging her close to him. "Only eleven sleeps to go…"

Author's Note:

Doug Liman says in an interview that David is 25. The movie says that David is 23. At the time of filming, Hayden Christensen was 27. Don't you love consistency? Anyway, in this fic, I'm kind of left with a choice. See, Jamie Bell is five years younger than Hayden Christensen. Does that mean that he should be 20 (according to Liman), 18 (according to the movie), or 22 (real-life age in 2008)?

In any case, hope you liked this. Let me know what you think of the age issue and this chapter, please?

Take care, all.

- Req.