Written in response to this prompt: "Don't you ever do that again! You scared the shit out of me!" Come find me on tumblr under Redlance!
It isn't a decision that Dani makes with any measure of ease. She thinks long and hard, and heavily for weeks. Jamie notices, Jamie always notices, but whenever she asks about Dani's solemn mood, Dani tries to brush it off.
She doesn't like lying to Jamie. Hates it, in fact, but she tells herself it isn't really lying. It's just bending the truth until it forms a circle and loops back around on itself. Playing at avoidance.
When she finally makes up her mind, it takes her a few weeks more before she can convince herself to act. Because Jamie is warmth and safety, Jamie is love, and Dani had spent so long being cold and scared. Resigned to the idea that Eddie was the only love she'd ever experience.
But then Eddie was gone and everything that happened at Bly happened, and now she's in Vermont. She's in Vermont and Jamie is with her, stayed with her, refused, in fact, to run away. She tells Dani that she loves her without words, not quite ready, and Dani, feeling so much and wanting, really, so little, lets her. Lets Jamie show her what it's like to be loved by someone who has your whole heart.
She just wants Jamie. Just wants to live out her life with the woman she loves and be happy. That's it.
She doesn't want to have to take things one day at a time. To constantly be in fear of having their lives upended at any given moment. It's not fair. She doesn't want Jamie to have to live like this. She deserves better, deserves to have a life, not to be a supporting role in someone else's.
And Dani loves her so, so much.
Jamie sleeps like the dead, but always manages to somehow be up with the sun, and so it's easy for Dani to unwind herself from around the slumbering woman. Though, it's hell, letting her go.
Dani stands at the foot of their bed and watches Jamie sleep for an indeterminable amount of time. Watches the rise and fall of her chest and commits her face to memory for the millionth time. For the last time.
She doesn't let herself cry until she's in the kitchen, the bag she'd travelled to Bly with at her feet, packed with the bare essentials and hidden in the back of their closet until tonight. She doesn't let herself cry until she's standing in the kitchen of the apartment she shares with Jamie, one that sits above the florist shop that's theirs, in the dark, knuckles turning white where her fingers grip the sink.
She props a note, written carefully and stained with tears, labelled 'Jamie' against a vase that sits on the kitchen counter beside her heart. Then, with shaking hands, Dani lifts her backpack up onto her shoulders and takes one final look around the only place she's ever really felt at home.
Home really can be a person, Dani thinks.
The front door doesn't make a sound when she opens it and she forces herself not to look back as she closes it behind her.
Jamie sleeps like the dead, this much is true. But here's the rub; she only sleeps like that when Dani's next to her.
As a kid, she'd never slept well. She was always waking up, probably because she was always afraid, always waiting for something bad, and that followed her right into her twenties. While she was locked up, she found she slept better after going hard in the garden for a few hours, but even then she didn't sleep through the night.
That first night with Dani, after the moonflowers, Jamie fell into a dreamless sleep and didn't blink even one eyelid until the sun was already rising high in the sky the next morning. She'd lain there, a little stunned, and pondered the hows and whys of it. Concluding that, despite wearing one another out the night before, it was the American that made the difference, not the activities.
Something in Jamie's body just knew it needed to be near Dani's. Probably for a long time. Maybe for forever. And god, that should have terrified her, but it didn't.
It just made her smile.
And so, without Dani, when an unrecognisable sound reaches for her through the fog of sleep, it's able to grab and shake her awake.
Bleary eyes are greeted by darkness and silence and Jamie immediately knows something is wrong because she can't hear Dani softly snoring beside her.
"Dani?" Her voice is rough, croaky, and she clears her throat before calling out again. "Dani?" Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, Jamie tosses the covers back and swings her legs over the side of the bed.
The rain outside has let the cold run into the flat and Jamie's bare legs break out in goosebumps where the air hits below her shorts.
Everything's so quiet. And dark.
Dread creeps in like the chill from beyond the building as she checks the bathroom and makes her way into the kitchen.
The dark, empty kitchen, that remains empty even after she's turned the light on.
Dani isn't there.
Jamie's heart is pounding, blood ringing in her ears and panic spikes through her veins.
Everything's wrong.
And then she sees it, leaning against a vase on the counter top, brandishing her name in Dani's neat, teacher-esque script.
"No," Jamie says to no one, unaware she's speaking at all as her feet move her forward. "No, no, no." She snatches up the note in shaking hands and almost rips it in half as she unfolds it. There are tears shining in her eyes before she reads the first word and by the time she's reached the last they're tracking down her cheeks in a neverending flood of heartbreak and fear. "Fuck," she whispers the word into the quiet of the room, harsh and biting. "Fuck."
Here's the thing about Jamie, though; she doesn't let things die. She's brought plants back from the brink of death through sheer stubbornness and will power, she's sure, and she's good at it.
Good at not letting things expire before their time.
She spends exactly seven seconds breathing heavily against the deafening lack of Dani that scrapes across the inside of her brain like nails on a chalkboard. For exactly seven seconds, Jamie allows herself to feel terrified and hopeless.
For exactly seven seconds, Jamie's entire world is ending.
Then she closes her eyes, wipes her fingers across her cheeks, and lets out a wet, humourless laugh as her arms fall to her sides.
"Nah," she rasps, bare feet taking her to the closet in the hallway. "Not sick of you yet, Poppins." Then she's pulling on Dani's long purple coat, shoving her feet into the oldest pair of Doc's she owns - the ratty black ones with the broken laces - and she flies out of the flat without even locking the door. Isn't sure it even closes behind her. Doesn't care.
She is singularly focused on the fact that there's a bus station close by, about a ten minute walk from the shop, one that runs around the clock but has buses departing at odd hours.
She cuts through the shop rather than going out the back and the second her feet hit pavement, she's running. She tries to pull the outrageously fluffy hood up to fend off some of the rain, but it won't stay up and Jamie doesn't care.
She splashes through puddles, spraying water all the way up her legs and letting it into her boots.
She doesn't stop.
She fleetingly wishes she'd buttoned the coat up before running out into the rain, because the wind is blowing it open as she runs and there's a damp chill against her chest now.
She doesn't slow.
Her lungs are burning, muscles screaming, her hair is sticking to her face as the rain runs down it and blurs her vision.
She doesn't care.
She just needs to keep going a little longer, a little further.
When the lights of the station finally come into view she almost cries out in relief. Or maybe she does. Doesn't matter; her body finds strength from somewhere, enough to keep her going. Past the buses not currently in service and around the back of the building. She slows to check the stands, each one providing a short seating area that has a roof and barrier in front of it to keep the elements out.
Her eyes flit frantically from one to the other and her legs almost give out when she spots a shadow sitting slumped on a bench at the end.
It's Dani. She knows it's Dani.
And only then does she stop. Only then does she give herself a moment to catch her breath, bending forward with a hand on her knee, and clutch at the stitch in her side through soaked fabric. Only once she has Dani in her line of sight and can keep her there.
She walks forward in sodden shoes and shorts so stuck to her skin they might be a permanent fixture, and tries to push her curls out of her eyes so that she can keep Dani in focus.
Dani, who doesn't seem to hear Jamie's approach at all. Who looks lost in thought and also just… lost. Who clutches her red backpack to her chest like it's a lifeline and sniffles loudly.
And Jamie wants to be angry. Feels it, bubbling low in the pit of her stomach. She wants to scream and shout, and basically just kick off right there in the middle of the bus station as the rain pours down around her.
But she also doesn't. Because it's obvious that Dani is already very upset. Morose remorse hangs about her, a defeatedness that Jamie's never seen before.
And Jamie knows she needs to be the strong one now, but that doesn't mean she's giving Dani a free pass. She's upset too and she wants Dani to know it.
"You don't get to do that." Jamie raises her voice over the sound of rain pelting pavement and Dani's head snaps up, swings towards where Jamie is standing beneath a street light.
Her face is the very picture of shock for all of three seconds before her expression crumbles. Jamie can see that Dani's eyes are red from six feet away, the colour becoming bolder as she nears the bus stand. Dani looks like a frightened animal, desperate and scared.
"What are you doing? You're soaking wet!" There's a panicked kind of concern lacing Dani's words and Jamie almost laughs, bewildered.
"What am I doing?" Jamie's breathless from her sprint and suddenly aware of the pain stretching along the muscles of her thighs. She stops just outside the shelter, staring hard at Dani with watery eyes. "I'm not the one trying to leg it in the middle of the night, in the middle of a god damn monsoon!"
"Jamie-"
"You don't get to decide what's best for me and then just-" her voice catches, once, "Without even-" twice, and she tries valiantly to hold everything together, but her whole upper body shudders under the sob that escapes. Bursts free like a wild deer. And Dani looks like Jamie's just slipped a knife between her ribs.
"I'm sorry," Dani whispers, sounding raspy and hollow, and shamefully hanging her head. She won't look at Jamie now, though it's clear from the way her hands are gripping her arms where they're crossed around her bag that Dani is forcing herself to stay where she is. Holding herself in place.
"Where are you even going?"
"I don't know. Just… away."
"Away from me, yeah?"
"No." "It's not… it's not like that. I don't want to leave."
"Right, then don't. It's that simple, Dani. It really is." Jamie's voice is shaking. Dani is gently crying.
"It isn't fair that you have to live like this. Being..."
"What?" It's meant to be rhetorical but she sees Dani open her mouth to answer and cuts her off. "Being happy?" What Dani had planned to say dies a swift death and Jamie watches the words fall away. Finally, Jamie enters the shelter and leans against the glass across from Dani, a foot or so away. "Having the bloody time of my life owning my own shop? Going on an insane, amazing adventure through a country I've never been to with someone I-" she stops herself before she can say it. She feels it, wants to tell Dani, but knows this still isn't the right time, though it has cemented the fact. She's in love with Dani. And she'll tell her. Soon. But not now, not tonight. Tonight is about something else. "Someone I never thought I'd find?"
Dani is looking at her with such sadness, such heartache, tear tracks catching the light. There's a conflicted longing to her gaze and it reminds Jamie of those early days at Bly, when Dani would look at her for a beat too long. She'd been so brave then and Jamie knows that, in her way, she's being brave again now. She's just going in the wrong direction and Jamie will be damned if she doesn't get her turned around.
"You keep looking at this thing like everything is your decision to make on your own," she says after a pregnant pause, a slight sense of frustration to her tone. "It isn't. You're not alone in this and I'm sorry if you've felt like you are."
"You didn't do anything," Dani rushes to assure her, mouth tight, frown in place. She wipes her eyes. "I mean, you-you did everything."
"And I chose to do that." Jamie doesn't really know how to say what she means, so she just lets her heart take the wheel for a while. "D'you remember the moonflowers?" she asks and Dani, sounding small, whispers that of course she does. "Takes effort. Everything takes effort, Dani. And in the end, it's either worth it or it isn't. You?" She inclines her head towards Dani and then gestures between them. "This? There's never been anything I've wanted to put this much effort into and if that means chasing you down through the rain at three in the morning, then I'll do that every night for as long as my legs will let me. And then I'll wheel myself after you." A slice of levity, an almost smile from Dani; Jamie swallows. "This," she taps two fingers to her chest, right overtop of where her heart sits, "might have picked you." She slides over to stand right in front of Dani and sinks down until she's crouching in the cramped space. Their knees touch and Jamie reaches out with wet hands that tremble with the cold and something else. She works her fingers under Dani's and pries her hands from her arms, holding them tight in her own. She makes sure her eyes stay fixed on Dani's as she speaks. Doesn't even blink, doesn't want there to be any doubt about the truth of what she's going to say next. "But I chose you. And if I'd known what I know now before the moonflowers, I still would've chosen you. I'd choose you every time."
She sees it, the crack in Dani's resolve, the moment it appears; a small crease between her eyebrows that splits her down the middle and opens her back up to Jamie. She's crying then, stuttering through more apologies than Jamie can count and clinging hard to Jamie's hands like they're her only lifeline.
She isn't sure how long she stays there, knees bent, thumbs rubbing over Dani's knuckles as she tries to sooth her, but she'd stay there for the rest of the night if she needed to. If Dani needed her to.
Dani does calm, though. Enough that her crying stops and Jamie feels it'll be okay if she stands. So, she does, stopping on the way up to kiss Dani with every ounce of certainty she can muster, leaving her breathless as she drops her forehead against Jamie's chest. Feeling her own panic begin to settle, Jamie wraps her arms around Dani's head, enveloping her.
"Don't you ever do that again." She tries to sound stern but the tremor from earlier returns to her voice and Dani lets out a small whimper of a sound as she presses into Jamie. Soggy clothes and all. "You scared the shit out of me."
"I'm sorry." Dani sounds so meek, so fragile.
"No more sorries." Jamie drops a kiss to the top of her head. "Let's go home."