(A/N: I kind of dreaded writing this chapter, because romance isn't generally something I write very often, and when I do, it's an undercurrent to something more action-y or horror-y. I hope I did this well enough. Did I do good?)
When the worst or most frightening of situations arises, the mind has been reputed to do some pretty strange things. Virginia had been forced to kill quite a lot of time while waiting for it to be her turn to go inside and see Jet. She had truthfully wanted to go and be the first one to see him and check up on him, to see if he was alright. As Jet's significant other, she felt she deserved that right. But it eventually dawned on her with a surprising stillness, as she first watched Gallows walk into the medicine house on his own, that there was also something deep within her mind that didn't want to see Jet sick or crippled ever again, and even not see Jet at all. She couldn't bear to see him accepting that sort of fate. Virginia was glad to be last.
She ran some errands and took Jenny home in her free time, the younger girl admitting to feeling exhausted. The trip to Serenitatis had been a little hard on both of them. It was not over yet. When she returned to the medicine house again, freshened up and with a brown paper parcel under one arm, Clive was outside and leaning against the wall of the building, something small and indistinct in his mouth. He had been looking up at the sky, but when he noticed Virginia he very quickly concealed whatever it was he had been sucking on. He looked to be embarrassed, like a child caught in the act of doing something discreet. Sheepishly, he spoke. "Oh, there you are. It is your turn now. He wishes to see you."
This both pleased and terrified her. She smiled nervously, keeping a firm hold on the item within her hands. Clive had noticed it as well, but had kept his inquiry to himself. If Virginia was to have anything, it would be for Jet. "…I don't know what I should say to him." She admitted hesitantly. "What should I say?"
Clive shrugged half-heartedly. "Say whatever it is that comes into your mind. Jet has not become mentally retarded, he is the same as he always was. If it worries you, forget that he had any problems in the first place. The last thing that he would want is excess sympathy." He put his hand warmly on Virginia's shoulder, looking at her in a fatherly way. "It will be alright, leader. Don't be afraid." Obligingly, he toed the front door open, which had been left unlocked, an act of lax courtesy for the girl.
Gallows and Clive had had the courage to step inside. She had to prove that she could do the very same thing. If not, then what right did she have over her title as the team leader? This evening would not just test her heart, but her mettle as a drifter as well. She had to be strong. "Thank you, Clive." She replied. As she stepped inside, the door closed shut. She could hear Clive walking away now, fulfilled of any duty that he currently had. He was probably going to join Gallows at the local pub. That was how most men coped with their problems and feelings, by washing it away in a tide of beer and ale. It was sad, in a way.
"Hey Virginia!"
Suddenly hearing Jet's voice, loud and strong in such a quiet environment caused Virginia to jump unexpectedly. The inside of the medicine house was dim, and growing ever dimmer as the evening grew on. The small shaft of light that came in through the ceiling was only a shadow of its former self. The only real source of light now was the warm hearth, burning in the center of the room. Jet was sitting on his bed. When Virginia reacted to his call, he stood up to greet her.
It was only standing in the barest sense of the word. He had fished a walking stave out from under his bed after Clive had left, using it as a complete support in lieu of his legs. One of his doctors had left it there, just in case he had really needed it. He couldn't walk, but with this, he could stand. Both his hands were wrapped firmly around the wooden length, holding onto it like it was a buoy in a raging ocean. His legs were lax and lifeless beneath the rest of his body, all the strain and tension existing in his arms and shoulder muscles. Jet looked proud, as if in his act against standing he was flipping off all the gods at once.
Virginia panicked, dropping the parcel she had been carrying and racing up over to him. "Are you crazy! You'll hurt yourself!" She snapped, prizing Jet's hands away from the stave in startled anger. The boy squawked in surprise as his support vanished and his legs buckled underneath him, grabbing at anything that would help him to stand up. He tried to lean back so that he would fall on the bed, but his foot accidentally hooked with the back of Virginia's ankle and drew him forwards in the struggle, ending up on the floor anyway, but cracking the back of his head on the edge of the bed.
He moaned in pain, bringing a hand up to rub at the wounded spot. The stave had clattered to the floor beside him, forsaken. Virginia crouched onto her knees herself and inspected Jet carefully. He was sprawled comically, like a child who had fallen off his pony for the very first time. "Sorry…" She murmured self-consciously, realizing that she had started their final meeting in an excessively stupid way. "I didn't mean to…"
Jet glared at her accusingly, then offered her a small, lopsided smirk. "You're right." He grunted, pulling his hand away from the soon-to-be-forming bump on his head. "I just hurt myself. What the hell is wrong with you? Do me a favor and lend me a hand, alright?" He reached out and grabbed her hand, relying on her strength to pull him up again. He was almost surprised at how easily Virginia managed it. Even if she was only a woman, she was a strong woman, nevertheless. Probably why Jet tolerated her so much.
"What the hell is wrong with me? Jet, what the hell is wrong with you? You're not supposed to get out of bed, remember? If you know you can't walk then what's the point of trying?" Virginia quipped, already exasperated and reminded of just how much Jet annoyed her to death. She pushed him into a sitting position onto the bed. As an afterthought, she picked up Jet's walking stave and leant it against the wall, only a little longer than an arm's reach away. He wouldn't be able to grab it there.
"I wasn't trying to walk." Jet argued with a defiant attitude. "I was just tryin' to stand up. Is there some kind of law against that now? You expect me to starve to death or piss my pants whenever I need to get up and get food or go outside or somethin'? Fuck that."
"That's what the doctors are for." Sighed Virginia, reaching up to touch where Jet had been hurt. He winced with pain, but it didn't seem to be too bad. There was no blood, so it would probably be fine in a little while.
"So you say," Jet said in a soft tone, "But I hate doctors. I'm a drifter, I can do things my own way. But if I told them what I really think of 'em, they'd take my painkillers away. I need them…" A faintly hurt look came into his eyes. "…'Real bad nowadays. I never knew just how many parts of your body can hurt until recently. I guess I really am turning into a complaining old man."
Virginia sat down next to Jet and then put her arms around him. He was now staring at the floor, but he also seemed to be accepting of the gesture. He didn't pull away. "You're a moron, Jet." She murmured. "But I missed yelling at you. I wondered if I would ever get to do it again. When you were carried out of the tunnels yesterday you looked like a corpse. I thought that when you would wake up again, you would be blind and deaf and completely empty, like a vegetable forever. I thought I would lose you even before you had truly gone."
"If that were to ever happen, I'd want anybody with an ARM nearby to shoot me in the head. It'd give Filgaia a little extra space to breathe." Jet smiled, unconsciously putting an arm around Virginia. "Don't you have enough faith in me to know that I'd make sure there'd be a next time, even if it was just for one more day? I can hold on just long enough until you're willing to let me go, I think. By the way," Jet added obstinately, "I never for a moment missed you bitching at me."
"But you did miss me?"
Jet looked at her strangely, like he had been asked the dumbest question in all the world. At the same time, it felt like the hardest question in all the world as well. How was he to answer a question like that and still keep his reputation as a hardened outlaw with no feelings? But that was not true, he did have a great many feelings, they were just very deeply buried away. This was probably his last chance to talk to Virginia, honestly. What more could he lose now?
"Uh… of course I missed you." Jet admitted gruffly, taking a great interest in the socks on his feet. Staring at them would be easier than staring at Virginia's face. "In the tunnels you were all I could basically think about. That you take being leader too seriously sometimes, that you're an annoying bitch whenever you wanna be, stuff like that. But… but when I really, honestly thought that I was dying, I thought about how much I l-" He paused. That word stuck in his throat angrily, like coagulating blood upon a shirt. Jet blinked once, confused at himself.
I can't say it. There's no way in hell that I can say it. It's not me, it's not something I can do.
He knew that Gallows would make Chieftain and Clive would have another eight or nine kids before Jet would be able to admit that he loved anybody. He knew very clearly that he did, but there was a thin, translucent barrier in his mind and heart that prevented him from saying it out loud. There was always the off chance that he would say it tenderly and honestly to Virginia one day, and have her laugh at him and turn away. That would be a hurt more than he could bear. He'd rather not get into that situation at all, even if it left him lonely. If Virginia really knew him as much as he thought she did, she wouldn't have to hear the words to know that they were there.
Shaken by just how closely he had gotten to saying the L-word, Jet anxiously changed the subject. "If my memory isn't as fucked up as I think it is, it's been six months, hasn't it?" He asked the girl beside him, thinking back to the recent past. Their relationship had been started by an ignoble truth that existed in the world, and by some strange kind of coincidence that was something neither himself nor Virginia could explain, it had attained some sort of purity, some sort of real meaning to it.
Virginia's lips stretched into an amused smile, one that was close to laughter, reflecting on that time. "You mean the night you were too nervous to go to the cathouse?" She giggled into his shoulder.
"I was not nervous! Not at all!" He argued indignantly.
Jet was what he was, a man, and even drifters got lonely as they traveled across the face of the wastelands. He had saved up a neat little pile of money by the time they had stopped on over at the immoral town of Little Twister, a debaucherous town of drugs, gambling and sex. Jet had avoided the first, dabbled in the second and desired the third. But he had not quite trusted the cleanliness of the women in that town, and so had gone to Virginia for advice. That 'advice' had turned out to be something much more. Each drifter had a price for their services, Jet knew that, but he had far more faith in Virginia than a sprawled drugged-up Twister whore, lying in a puddle of jizz in some hotel, in the red light area of town.
Virginia's price had been mortifyingly high. He later learned that it had probably been a test to him, to see if he would consent to wasting so much gella on her, when there were much cheaper options. Perhaps he had stuck with her just to prove his point, but as time went by he began to feel a deeper attachment to her, as something more than just a casual screw. He didn't really know if Virginia felt the same way as well, until the day came that she stopped asking him for money. He had gruffly pointed this out one evening, after everybody had gone to bed, and she had shut him up with a kiss, one that had said; 'You're mine now Jet, I've decided it. If you don't like this, tell me right now so I can slap you in the face. I don't know how it happened, but I have fallen for you.'
He could not have answered her even if he had wanted to. His mouth had been quite occupied with something else. The fact that he sort of liked the way Virginia was thinking made it a moot point anyway. This young woman knew him, understood him in a way that nobody else had been able to do, and although it went against the values he had learnt to keep in life, he wanted to stay with her too. Jet wasn't quite sure if he had really loved Virginia in the beginning of their little pledge, but unbeknownst to him, the words Jenny had spoken at Serenitatis rung absolutely true. Like a seedling, love grew. It grew strong and rooted itself deep into his heart, until he was aware of nothing else.
"Time flies, doesn't it?" Jet said gently, thinking on the past. "It's only when there's hardly any left that you realize how fast it goes, or how little the Guardians decide to give you. If I had known there was only six months left, I would've come to you much sooner. Listen… why on Filgaia did you pick me?" He finally said, asking him a question that had taken him half a year to say.
Resting her head on his shoulder, Virginia looked at a particularly pretty tapestry on the wall, her expression serious. She wasn't sure herself. "I don't know." She said after a moment. "I guess in the beginning I was amused and curious about you, and I didn't mind making a few gella along the way. That's what drifters do, after all. Everybody needs somebody, Jet. We're only human. Clive has Catherine and Gallows has that red-haired girl back in Claiborne, I think her name was Becky or something. I guess I decided that I needed somebody as well, and that somebody turned out to be you. We were both lonely."
"Yeah." Jet agreed. "We were." And with the advent of Jet's demise, Virginia was going to be lonely again. How long would it take her to find somebody else? He didn't know. Not too long, he hoped, but not too short either. Jet got very close to swallowing his next few words, but just gave in and said them instead. "I was happy." He stated calmly, but then backtracked again. "That is to say, I am happy. I drifted for eleven years, I got a nice little stash of gella saved up, some tolerable friends, an' you too." He pulled Virginia away from his body and looked at her in the face, evenly, kindly. "That's what people want, isn't it? I know it's what I want."
"Memories." Virginia answered softly, taking his hand. "That's what we all want. Good memories of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Memories of our homes, of our friends and of happy memories of the past. Memories of everything that we love. It's those kind of memories that make us complete." She gave his hand a gentle squeeze, knowing very well about Jet's lack of memory. "I know it has only been a very short time for you upon this planet, but I like to think that quality of life depends on how precious our few memories are, regardless of how many there can be."
"You helped me to make a lot of them." Jet replied with a careful look at his very dear friend. "You and Gallows and Clive and a lot of other people as well. I l-… that is to say, I feel as if I should thank the whole bunch of you."
This was a very different Jet to the one that Virginia was used to. He was far more talkative and open with his thoughts and feelings. When one was dying, she guessed there really wasn't much point to hiding things anymore. Still, she could sense that Jet was keeping something held back. Maybe he thought that if he became totally vulnerable to her, spread out to her critical inspection, she would be too disgusted with his inner self to love him anymore. It was a silly fear, but that didn't make it a false fear either. She wanted him to trust her. "I love you, Jet." She finally said, speaking deeply from her heart.
He leant forward and kissed her softly. The bump he had gotten on the back of his head was easily forgotten. "I know." He said as he pulled away. "Don't you worry, I know. Thanks, Ginny." He offered her a reassuring smile, then his eyes flicked to the floor of the medicine house, the parcel that Virginia had brought with her left lying on the ground. She had dropped it when Jet had startled her. He would have gotten up and fetched it himself, had he the ability to walk. "What's that?" He asked, gesturing towards it.
She jumped a little as the package was mentioned to her, the memory of it leaping back into her mind. She had forgotten all about it. The drifter leader smiled coyly, standing up to go and grab it. "Oh, that! I got you some stuff you might like." She explained, picking it up from the floor. It seemed to be relatively light in her arms, so what could it possibly be?
Virginia placed the small parcel upon Jet's lap expectantly, smiling a little smile. Jet put his hand down on the brown paper and wondered how he was going to remove the thin coarse string bound around it without a pair of scissors. It looked like it had been tied up very tightly. Jet looked at Virginia, pressing down a little with his fingertips, as if to guess from touch alone what it was. "What is it?" He asked, seeking an answer.
"Open it and see."
Jet was a little confused by this, but was also slightly curious himself. What on Filgaia kind of present could you give to a dying man? "Okay…" He mumbled, hooking one thin digit beneath a loop of tight string and slowly sliding it towards the corner of the parcel, where he was easily be able to lever it off. The string pinched off the flow of blood to the end of his fingertip, but after only a moment the loop came free and he could rip the rest of the cord away. The paper wrapping was fresh and folded neatly onto itself, so when Jet straightened it up again, the present opened up neatly, like a blooming flower.
There was fabric underneath the paper, feeling softer and cleaner than usual, but still familiar. Beneath the brown was a flash of white and red. His scarf. Jet lifted out a ragged fold of anger-red scarf and held it in his hands. He felt an odd, overwhelming sensation of wet sickness wash over him like a tidal wave, as if the grim reaper himself had swept into the room invisibly and had stamped a great big red X straight onto his forehead. Jet found himself at a loss for words, looking beneath his scarf to find his dark shirt, his tan coat, all of his clothes and his ammunition belt safely tucked away. It was all here. This was his life.
"Look," Virginia said blithely, sliding her hand into the parcel and rifling through the clothes, "They weren't lost after all. One of the Baskars said they saved your clothes right before they torched the larvae pool. I had them washed and dried for you. Honestly Jet, when was the last time you had that outfit cleaned? It must have been ages ago."
"It's kind of hard to get laundry done when you're on the run from the law." Jet retorted softly, detached from his smart alec and ready words. He held one strip to his face and pressed it against his cheek. It felt softer than he had ever remembered it before. Alien. "… I've always used this thing to hide my face. I've had a bounty on my head ever since that day years and years ago when I put on this scarf and robbed my first bank. Thinking back on it now, I can remember just how young and stupid I was. I couldn't have been more than three years old."
"We've all done stupid things in the past and we're always going to regret them. But if we didn't do those stupid things in the first place we wouldn't know any better and we'd never learn how to improve." Virginia said, happy that he had appreciated her gift. It wasn't much, but it was something.
Jet reached into the bottom of the parcel and pulled something out of the pile of clean clothes. He held it in one hand and looked at it solemnly. "This is…" He began, but then found he could not finish. He lowered his hand into his lap, taking the object with it. Jet thought he had lost Jenny's bracelet in the tunnels when he had fainted, but he must have been sadly mistaken, for there it was, red beads, hawk feathers and all. If Jet's scarf represented his past, then this bracelet surely represented his present, and between those two, there was no room for his future. It was the gift from people who shouldn't have been caring about him, but did anyway.
"Virginia…" Jet whispered, tearing up. "Nobody else is going to come in here, right?"
"It's just us." Virginia replied softly.
"…Okay." He said with a small touch of relief, then he bowed his head slightly and started to cry. He knew for a very long time that he was going to be reduced to this eventually, but he had put it off as much as he could. There was no stopping the degradation of the soul. Jet wasn't even very sure what it was he was crying about, but it felt like the crushing weight of the last four weeks of uncertainty had come tumbling down on top of him, and all he could do was weep for the wound that Filgaia had inflicted upon his body. There were just too many reasons left for him to count, yet Jet knew that he needed to cry.
This was not something Virginia was expecting to see. Concerned, she put her arms around him again, but was denied that when Jet tried to tear himself away. He didn't want her to touch him, not when he was like this. He could not retreat very far from her, but he tried anyway. "Go away…" He said at last, his voice thick with tears, gritted between his teeth, making it sound like a half-growl. "Don't look at me. Please…"
Virginia had always been determined to have things her own way. Shaking her head and uttering one short simple "No.", she reached out for him again. She didn't allow Jet to squirm away. He was completely unable to overpower her, though his attempts were only half-hearted and weak. She hugged him strongly, hearing him curse her name angrily. Counting the moments that passed by, Virginia felt all the fight eventually go out of Jet's body, then he trembled when he realised that there was nothing he could do to make her go away. A short, stunted sob slipped from his throat.
He found himself clinging to her willingly instead, crying into her shoulder. Minutes passed. It felt like a separate part of himself was watching his performance with disgust. It filled him with sickened revulsion. "I… don't get it…" He confessed heavily. "I dunno why I'm cryin'… but I can't stop it. 'Feels like I'm broken all over…"
"I'm sorry, honey." Virginia murmured, holding him close. "I didn't know the clothes would make you sad. I thought you'd be happy. Forgive me, please?" He didn't answer her, so there was no way she could acknowledge a reply. Unperturbed, she clucked her tongue in her mouth and pulled Jet away, holding him at an arm's length. There were trails of tears like glistening smears upon both of his cheeks. He looked down shamefully, wiping at his eyes. "Maybe you should lie down, now."
Jet nodded, accepting Virginia's aid as she helped him to get back under the covers. The girl put Jet's clothes on the table beside the bed, but before she had done that, the sick boy had slipped the wooden Baskar bracelet back onto his wrist. He couldn't bear wearing his drifting clothes now, but the bracelet was a different matter. It had been a gift from somebody who cared. He sniffed slightly, trying to force the telltale signs of his crying fit away. Jet hated this bed now, hated the way in which it become a prison for him. If it had not been for the friends who had visited him, he would not have known what to do. As composure slipped back into Jet's form, his mind cleared. "You just forget that ever happened." He said, in a mildly threatening tone.
"I don't know why that would matter, but okay." Virginia replied, sitting on the edge of Jet's bed and looking at him. It sounded like Jet was having trouble controlling the proper volume in his tone, but as their conversation drifted onwards, the faint notion that Jet had any kind of impaired hearing dwindled away. She smiled at him reassuringly. "I don't know a thing."
He still rubbed a little at his eyes, as if the tears staining them stung like weak poison upon his skin. Under the coverlets, he looked like a sleepy child. "Did you know that I made Gallows and Clive do somethin' for me, even though they didn't want to?" He asked, conversationally. "I asked Gallows to be the one to bury me when the time came, an' I asked Clive to write down whatever he wants on the grave, my epit-something-or-other. They'll do it, I know they will. It'll haunt them if they don't." This statement almost seemed to give him morbid pleasure. Jet smirked. "And you know what? I'm going to ask you to do something too. Two things, actually, because I like you so much. You feel honored?"
The girl looked over him levelly, like she was sizing up a dangerous foe. "In a way." She confessed, wondering what Jet would want her to do. If Jet was paralyzed below the waist, there were certain things that existed that were now out of the question. She bit her lip. Those day for Jet were over as well. "What do you want me to do?"
Unexpectedly, Jet blushed. "Uh… It's kind of a stupid request, now that I think about it…"
This piqued her interest. "What is it? You can tell me. When have I ever blabbed something personal about you before?"
That was a point. She had a clean record when it came to keeping secrets. Jet leant his head back against the comfortable pillow and sighed. "You're gonna laugh at me, but what the hell do I have to lose now? You see, ever since a long time ago I had this little fantasy, something I thought I'd never experience but I liked the idea anyway. It's stupid, but…" He blurted out his wish. "I've always wanted somebody to tell me a story while I was going to sleep. Like a mother." Jet was going beet red now. "Yeah, its stupid…"
She just couldn't help herself, Virginia wound up laughing just as Jet had predicted, holding a hand to her mouth to calm herself down. It was just so funny, that a feared and tough drifter like Jet would have such an innocent, an incredibly sweet last request. It was overwhelmingly endearing. Jet shot her a reproachful look and tilted his head away from her, fiercely embarrassed. He coughed slightly. "I knew you would laugh…" He muttered, humiliated.
"No, no!" Virginia exclaimed, mortified at what she had done. Jet had just told her the deepest wish in his heart and she had laughed at him for it! She thought he had only been joking! The drifter leader blushed herself. "I'm sorry Jet, it's not a stupid idea. I think it's a lovely one." She scooted over, a little closer to him. "What kind of story would you like to hear? I know lots."
He was regarding her intensely, trying to read if there was any kind of lie on her face. Virginia's sentiments were honest ones, so the inspection came up totally clean. Jet relaxed finally, smiling like a little boy who had gotten his way. "You know a lot, 'cause you have a lot of memories. Memories from travelling across Filgaia. I have them too, but everything… all this wasting away has made them faint and blurry in my mind. I want to remember the memories again. Ginny, can you tell me about your memories of Filgaia?"
"Our memories of Filgaia." She corrected gently. "Which one in particular do you want to hear?"
He gave her a bit of a tired, cheeky smile. "Yeah. Our memories. All of them. Tell me them all. Please."
She did.
xxx
"Well Jet, it was a dark and stormy night…"
xxx
She told him the tale of the Ark Scepters and the meeting of the four different drifters, of the run for making cash and the treacheries of the bumbling Cascade Gang. She told him of the cunning Maya Schroedinger and her loyal team of minions, of the three evil Prophets and the misguided Council of Seven. She laughed as she recalled Jet and Florina at the Secret Garden, and she cried as she spoke of the passing of her father at Mimir's Well. Jet listened carefully to all these stories and smiled under the coverlets. There were so many memories from just this one girl, but these memories did not just solely belong to her, they were Jet's memories as well, and the memories of all of his friends.
Memories were life, snapshots of their soul. With these, Jet finally felt that he had pieced together and earned himself a soul, something definite and precious to call his own. He felt that he owed it to all of his friends, and especially Virginia, who was here and speaking to him soft words, sweet words. Gods, he felt like he could get caught up in those words and be swept away forever. Her tone was more comforting than anything else.
Sometimes Virginia made a mistake in her storytelling and Jet spoke out to correct it, usually the names and dates of places and things. He had said before that his memories were blurry, but there must have been some sharp points, scattered here and there. The evening wore on, soon it became night. Hardly making a break in her words, the drifter leader alternated between keeping the burning hearth down to a bundle of pleasant embers and sitting beside Jet's bedridden form. At times when her mind wandered too much, she found herself gently stroking Jet's pale silver hair, the youth not complaining about the touch. He leant into it, subdued but alert.
Half-heartedly, Virginia wondered if Gallows and Clive had left the inn yet. She didn't know. She didn't particularly want to know, it felt like the universe had shrunken down dramatically, encompassing only this one room. As the night wore on, Virginia noticed that Jet's rare, clear corrections to her stories were becoming more and more incorrect, unfocused. He inisisted things like Beatrice had only had pale light blue hair, or that Clive was really five years older than what he said he was. When she talked about their mediums, Jet admitted that he no longer remembered what they were. What was a medium? What did it do? Magic? That's stupid, magic doesn't exist.
He was probably getting tired, but he still wanted to listen. He stopped making interjections as the moon rose over the colony of Baskar, just watching her with interested lavender eyes. As everything swelled to its nearing end, he finally opened his mouth and spoke.
"-the light shot from her hand, and before any of us could act, Lamium darted out before her and shielded us with his life. The expression on his face, of all things, it looked happy, completed and fulfilled. He had done his duty to the world, or what he believed to be so. He had protected us, so that we could-"
"…I'm gonna fall asleep." He said softly, apologetically. "Gotta sleep soon, before the painkillers wear off. I don't wanna be awake when they wear off. Sorry…"
Virginia halted her tale. "Do you remember the ending?"
Jet shook his head. "There isn't an ending. Not just yet. I don't think there will be one for a very long time. I reckon the Maxwell Gang is gonna be around for years to come. Isn't that right?"
"I really hope so." Virginia intoned, from her position at Jet's side. A thought came to her head. "Jet? You said that you had another task for me, that there was two. Before you go to sleep, can you tell me what the other task was?" Or had that been something false, cooked up from Jet's steadily fading cohesion, as the drugs were removed from his system?
"You remembered." Jet said, touched. "I hope you don't laugh at this one, like you laughed at the other one. Thanks for telling me a story, by the way. I'm gonna sleep better now, I just know it. Maybe I'll dream of the past." He pulled his hand up from under the blankets and placed it softly upon the crook of Virginia's elbow. He tugged on the purplish-pink fabric softly. "The other thing is… if you don't have anything else to do tonight, I was wondering if you could stay here with me, until tomorrow morning. That's all. There's a spare bed over there if you want it. I don't think you'd want to sleep here in my deathbed."
"I heard that it was bad luck. But I don't believe in superstition." She smiled, nodding once. "Even if you had asked me to get out, I probably would have stayed anyway. I don't want you to be in the dark, all alone. Not now. Not like this." Her hands reaching up to her head, she started to unbraid her hair. It began to come loose in chestnut waves.
Jet sat up, feeling a sense of warm affection for the girl. What else could it be but love? A love that had grown in defiled soil and bloomed into a pure, small white flower. If only he had had more time. He hugged her from behind, pressing his face into back of her neck. Her hair smelt like the world of far away, of horses, gunpowder and sand, with an undercurrent of the scent of the wind. Nothing was more beautiful than she. "…Ginny?" He asked, uncertain.
"Yeah?" She answered as she unlaced her boots.
"I… I really do… you know… I, uh…"
"What is it?" Virginia pressed, serenely.
Why was it so hard?
"…Nothing. Forget it, it's nothing."
Bullshit.