disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: to my nugget, who should DEFINITELY PLAY THIS GAME.
notes: so i def played goetia and honestly i need to stop playing video games with ghosts bc they gives me ideas and like i have enough of those ok
notes2: "so about that there local sporting event—" comes to you directly from my oldest friend. wow, jer.
title: just salt in the wound
summary: Alex, stumbling through the time-stream. — Alex/Jonas.
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As for me, I'm—
[—rewind; i'm getting tired, okay. can we stop for a while? alex? are you listening?]
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"Hey, let's take a picture!" says Ren. "It'll be like a—a before and after thing!"
Alex rolls her weight from foot to foot at the stern of the boat, eyes fixed on where the mainland's already receded into the gloom. The familiarity of the sentence bites the back of her eyes, before and after, as if there's even really such a thing. Time is a circle, and one of these days, she thinks she might fight it. Might see if she can't convince Ren and Jonas to stay, just to see. She'd thought that maybe this time—
But no.
There's been nothing.
Really, nothing. Not a peep out of the Kanaloa's crew, not a whisper, not a single flicker of anything out of the ordinary. No static, no laughter, no nothing.
Frankly, the silence is giving Alex the creeps. The lack of interference is a whole different kind of wrong; when she pulls out her radio to spin the dial, all she gets is empty frequencies. Searching for the eerie fifties jingles she's caught herself humming when she's not paying attention but not finding them is wrong. Waiting for the drip of rain and not hearing it is wrong. Even shrieking children's laughter, the blank-out of white noise, anything would be better than this awful, wrong silence. Because it is wrong, it's the most wrong, and it oozes across her skin, creepy-crawly slime. It leaves her shuddering, breaking out in gooseflesh and rubbing at her arms, nails biting into her skin so hard she bleeds.
Alex isn't a masochist. She doesn't enjoy the way it leaves her trying so hard not to shake herself to pieces. She turns the collar of Michael's jacket up against the cold.
(God, she doesn't even know what she's trying to prove.)
Ren's babbling, yanking her closer in the dusky blue evening, soft swirl of mist around her fingers. He never remembers. She thinks of him with seaweed tight around his throat like a noose, and lets him reel her in.
"Here we go again," Alex murmurs as she smiles for the camera, but it really feels like a grimace. The words are more for herself than for either of the boys, but something—happens. The world shifts; that's the only way she can describe, a seasick tilt that doesn't belong to a stable universe. The whole thing throws her off-balance.
She keeps the grin on her face via sheer willpower and the hard grit of her molars.
"Cheese!" Ren hollers, and the flash goes off.
The picture is like this:
Alex, teal-haired with her lips pressed tightly together. Ren, grinning with all his teeth on display. Jonas, staring at Alex.
(Later, this will be the moment that Alex will pinpoint as the minute things started to really change. The pictures are static. They're always the same. But not this time, and it says something, but she doesn't know what.)
"Aw, guys, c'mon, this is terrible—"
The ferry's horn bellows around them, cuts through the night and cuts Ren's tirade right off. It's not right to be thankful for it, but who cares what's right anymore. Alex shrugs one shoulder at him like a crow, a sheepish kind of lopsided.
"We'll get a better one later," she says, even though she knows it's a lie. There won't be another photo of just the three of them. Not tonight, anyway. "But hey, look, we're here."
"Right," Ren says, nodding, less enthused than he should be. "Later."
The dock is solid under her feet as they disembark, old wood warped out weathered silver from sun and sea. Don't think about it, Alex tells herself, and tries to ignore the weird push-pull prickle of déjà vu. God, don't think about it.
But Alex can feel eyes on the back of her neck, and she knows what comes next.
"Hey, Ren, can I talk to Alex for like, two quick seconds—?"
"It's okay, Jonas," Alex says, swallowing around a sudden lump in her throat. The funny thing is that no matter how many times she does this, it never really gets old. Yeah, it's not so scary anymore, and there's nothing surprising, but that doesn't mean—it's like muscle memory, okay? She can't just stop, even when she wants to. Especially when she wants to. That's not the way this works. "I think I know what you're gonna say. It's—yeah, it's cool. Don't worry about it, I've got your back."
Jonas blinks at her, goes still all over, and they just kind of… look at each other.
The moment hangs in the air like curdled milk, shatter-shard, and Alex wonders if maybe the ghosts got it right after all. There's something to be said for caring about someone so much that it burns. There's something to be said for caring about someone the way Michael cares about Clarissa. There's something to be said for caring about someone the way Maggie cared about Anna.
Alex thinks: yeah, love's nice.
"Oh-kay," says Ren, gaze flickering back and forth between them. "So about that there local sporting event—"
"No, Als," Jonas tells her, very, very slowly. "I really don't think you do. Seriously, I just need a couple minutes. We'll be right behind you, dude, I swear."
"I—are you—uh, okay, just—not too long, okay?"
Jonas grins. "No problem. We'll be right up."
It doesn't sound like a lie, but that's probably not a good thing.
"Als?" Alex asks, watching as Ren wanders up the hill. He's even worse than she is at trying to keep her cool; he keeps squinting back at them over his shoulder because he's the most terrible Orpheus in the history of forever, and it's way easier to concentrate on that than on Jonas on the pier with his hands stuffed into his pockets. There's only so deep she can dig her own grave before she hits rock bottom, and the ground is ringing solid beneath her feet. "Nicknames already? That was fast."
"Yeah," Jonas says. "Als. You don't have a brother, right?"
"Not really," Alex says, because she can't say not right now and she also can't say well there's you, right, because both those things are great big ugly lies, and if there's one thing Alex hates, it's lying to Jonas. "Not anymore."
"But you did," he says.
"Yeah," Alex says, thinking of the way her brother laughed just yesterday. The loss doesn't hurt the way it's supposed to. If there's anything that she's learned from all of this, it's that if you stare into the abyss, it stares back, and whatever you learn from it isn't worth what it takes in payment. The ghosts, the void, whatever you want to call it—they're sick, have taken and taken and taken, in blood and flesh and bone, but it's always worth it because she's pretty sick, too. "I did."
"His name was Michael, and I'm going to be living in his bedroom," Jonas' jaw clenches a little
"How do you know that," Alex says, very steadily. It's not a question.
"I don't know," Jonas says. "When we were on the ferry, something—I just knew. I dunno how."
"Okay," Alex says. "You are going to pull your cigarettes out, and we are both going to have one, and I'm going to cough up a lung and you aren't, and once we're finished, we're going to go find Ren and try not to be super weird, okay? Because, you know what, tonight's going to be weird enough and there's only so much weird I can handle in one night, alright? Clear? Good."
"How did you know I have smokes on me?" he asks, after a long minute.
"I just know, okay," she says, can't think of a lie fast enough to cover her tracks. Jesus, she used to be good at this.
"What, the same way I just knew?"
"Yeah, maybe! You always have cigarettes on you!"
"You can't know that, Alex. We haven't met before," Jonas snaps.
"Yeah, well," she says. We haven't met this time, she doesn't. Her hands curl into fists, because nothing is fun and this isn't going to get her out the way it's supposed to. Jonas is staring at her with eyes like chips of flint, hard-edged and too bright in the greyed-out shadow of the streetlamp flickering down the street. God, she hates it when he looks like that. It makes her think of the ghosts, and the way they'd used him, you know how we know, because we can be here for this long and his soul is quiet as an empty church.
Some things stick. Some things always stick.
"What do you want me to say, Jonas," Alex says. "Do you have a cigarette or not?"
Wordless, Jonas pulls out the pack he keeps in the inner pocket of his jacket. The lighter is a bright little spark in the night, lighting up the cup of Alex's palms golden-orange as she inhales. In the purple-dim of the late evening, she catches him watching her like something wild.
Alex exhales smoke, and doesn't cough at all.
Jonas watches her with steady eyes, watches until the cigarette in her fingers is ashed down to nothing. He doesn't light his own, just toys with the lighter, clear green plastic and the soundless slosh of flammable fluid beneath his hands. He shifts; it's the slow roll of a body unused to something, old muscles waking up. Awareness. Awareness.
"What do you remember, Als?" he asks, finally, so quiet.
Alex chokes, coughs until her eyes water. The smoke hisses around her, acrid with gaseous cancer. It's too early for this conversation. It's too late for this conversation, too. Shit, she is in so much trouble.
"Excuse me?" she manages around the burn in her throat.
"You heard me," Jonas says, and his voice is very level. He's staring at the smoke between her fingers. "I can't be the only one. I'm not crazy, I know I'm not. So what do you remember?"
The moment hangs between them for a very long time, suspended in the silence.
"Jesus, you have terrible timing," Alex says. "You couldn't have waited until later, Jonas? Really?"
"Answer the question, Als," he tells her.
So. Much. Trouble.
"Everything," she says and she doesn't let herself crumble because if she crumbles, so does everything else. Alex doesn't know how much of the reset relies on her keeping track of her feelings. Probably not too much, but the ghosts are still too quiet. She waits for the whispers, continues only when they don't creep into the crooks and cavities of her brain. "You?"
"Caves, and light," Jonas says, rolling the words around in his mouth. "Being pissed at Ren for—something, and lemme tell you, wanting to deck someone for no reason isn't a feeling I'm cool with. There was a really ugly chair. And you, when you smile."
"Caves," she murmurs. "Yeah, there are caves."
There is a lot more than caves on Edwards Island.
"We don't have to go down there," Jonas says. Alex doesn't ask whether or not he remembers what those caves lead to, because he has to. There's no other reason to bring it up, and their little spelunking adventure is pretty well burned into her brain for the rest of time. When she doesn't say anything in reply Jonas touches her, cuffs and elbows and the soft crease of her collar. She knows that he doesn't know where to put his hands. This closeness is like breathing a great lungful of air after being underwater too long, teetering on the edge of tumbling into real pain. God, she's such an addict. "We could just… not."
"You don't have to. But I do."
"Why?" asks Jonas.
"Because I can't let Michael stay dead. He's my brother. I can't—I just can't, okay. I can't," Alex says in a wretched whisper, and it's awful and shitty and she can't believe that this is the first time she's facing this, but of course it is: there's way too much emotion involved here for her to face it any other way. Edwards Islands is so many things, memories and bonfires and the actual, literal afterimages of people who used to be alive. But it also makes her honest. It makes them all honest; Ren wants Nona more loudly, Clarissa is crueler than she has to be because loss makes her mean, and Alex can't leave Michael dead even if it means she doesn't get to keep anyone else.
And Jonas is always going to be the only one who understands that because if it was his mom, he'd do the same.
Maybe that's why they fit: they're the same kind of selfish.
(Alex looks at her hands, and wishes that she was a better person. Be better, she tells herself, be smarter, be softer, be normal. Be normal, be normal, be normal.)
And then Jonas does something she doesn't expect.
He laughs.
Alex looks up at him, peeking out through the dark fan of her lashes to blink owlishly at him. She doesn't know what she expected, but it sure as hell wasn't laughter. It definitely wasn't the crinkle of his eyes, that weird little line through his forehead that she's teased him about before because it shows up any time they watch a scientifically-inaccurate movie because Jonas is actually a giant fucking nerd. It wasn't that—it wasn't any of this.
"Oh my god, shut up," she grouses when he doesn't say anything, just keeps laughing. "It's pathetic, not funny."
"It's not pathetic," Jonas says when he finally gets control of himself.
"Um, yeah, it kinda is," she tells him. There are tears sloshing behind her eyes, but there are always tears sloshing behind her eyes. Too on edge, maybe. There wasn't enough time before the reset, and adrenaline only lasts so long before real hysteria sets in. Alex is running on the dregs of herself, and she doesn't know much longer she can do it for.
"It isn't," he says, voice gone gentle. The sky is a sigh, and the air is numb. One of these resets, it's going to be too much.
(As though it's ever anything but too much.)
"Yeah, okay," she says.
"Seriously, Alex."
"Seriously, Jonas," she parrots.
Jonas looks at her for another long moment. "You okay?"
"I guess," Alex says, even though she really isn't. Okay isn't something Alex really knows how to be, anymore. She knows anger, and fear, and fury. She knows apathy. She knows exhaustion.
But okay? No, not okay.
"C'mon," Jonas says. He grins out of the corner of his mouth, and Alex hates, hates, hates him. She hates that he remembers, maybe, or doesn't, or whatever this is. She hates that he gets it. She hates that he's rolling with it. It's not fair that he can just—do this. Like it's nothing. Like it's everything. God. God. "Ren's waiting."
He turns to start heading up Main Street. The cut of his shoulders is weirdly lonely, and there's one, unfair minute where Alex wonders what it would be like to just go fuck it and let the ghosts win. Maybe it's time. Maybe they all could just… rest, for a while. Maggie and Anna and Michael—maybe they should let the dead rest in peace. Maybe Alex should let the dead rest in peace.
Alex thinks, speak now or forever hold your peace.
But he's right. Ren's waiting.
And Alex was never very good at leaving things alone.
She follows him, radio held tight in her fist like a weapon ready to go to war.
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tbc.
