versusnurture | twenty-eight ♢ spam & video ( cw: tooth squick )

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twenty-eight ♢ spam & video ( cw: tooth squick )

spam } infirmary

[Before the pain hits, in that brief insensible moment after waking, she feels a stab of pride. She did it. She got him. She didn't win, but she fought back against the implacable, impossible, eternal enemy. She silenced him - if only for a moment, she silenced him.]

[It's after that that the pain hits, her head aching impossibly. She wants to die, laughs silently when she recognizes the irony. It feels as though she's cracking in half from her skull down.]

[But even the pain can't distract her from panic for long. While she was dead, it must have gotten worse. It creeps back up her throat before she knows it's there to push back down, her heart beating a hard tattoo in her chest as she sees-- hears-- smells red blood on her hands and the fur of the beast.]

[There is a man in the corner of the room. He breathes in and out. She can hear him speaking, one word only: "See." She can see his chest moving. She can smell blood on his teeth like he's breathing in her face.]

[She sits on her cot, staring at nothing, shivering helplessly, her throat as dry as the deadest desert.]

video

[It's later that the knives sprout. Thirty-two little monster teeth, each with a metal serrated edge, each curved just slightly, making their way into her mouth after pushing her old teeth bloody onto the pure white sheet.]

[They don't distract her as much as they should, though they cut her tongue up something wicked. She has questions - but she can't speak.]

[So in video she turns on a smile, her knife-teeth fitting together like perfect dentures, and holds up a small whiteboard.]

[It says, WHO ELSE CAN SEE HIM?]

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He was crazy.

[Like her. Like she is now. She has the decency, at least, to look away.]

[He rubs at his mouth again in thought, not so much in a nervous gesture but as something to do with his good hand. It's not that he doesn't believe people can be crazy; he just knows there's different kinds of crazy.]

He's not anymore. [He nods at her, a sharp tug up of the chin] How 'bout you?

Oh, [she says with a laugh, brushing at her cheek as though a spiderweb's fallen across it,] I'm always crazy. Certifiably. Less than I used to be, but still crazy.

[She considers saying boo, but dismisses it in the end as too much.]

[He would have found it amusing, if disconcerting. He looks her over, looks at the way she brushes at her cheek, files it away.]

Does that bother you?

Yes. No? I don't know. I'm so used to it that I can't really tell.

It bothers me that it'd bother other people. [And, finally:] Why are you asking?

[He purses his lips and adjusts his sling. He won't say that it doesn't bother him, but it's pretty clear it doesn't.]

Curiosity, mostly. You remind me of someone I used to know, a little.

Really?

[She sits up a little straighter in the bed, wincing and leaning forward to wrap her arms around her knees.]

Tell me who. [It's a little imperious, the way she speaks, the way she looks at him. Demanding.]

[He can deal with that. Likes it, even though he's never been good with it.]

Her name was Pearl. I met her in Chicago, summer of 1920. [He casts his eyes down a little- only a year ago, really. He hasn't talked about her since he left Chicago, and it feels like the memory is more distant than it ought to be.]

She was pretty, like you. Big eyes, long dark hair. She wanted to go to California, be an actress. [He rubs at his mouth again, his eyes darker, sadder than before.] You looked at Pearl and you just wanted to pick her up, protect her from the world. Small, fragile. Hurt.

I don't need protection.

[This quick, fierce, snapped; she sits forward on the bed and stares at him hard, daring him to say it again.]

I said, 'a little'. [This is mostly said in a flat, skeptical tone-- he disagrees, and it might be because of the way Pearl had died; but it probably has something to do with the fact that Abigail is lying in a hospital bed, telling him she's crazy.

Besides, eberyone needs protection. Even Jimmy himself.]

[If anything, this makes her fiercer. She folds her arms across her chest, pointedly looking away from him and across the infirmary. Her eyes focus on Cambridge's door, which she can see from her bed and which makes her feel secure in the face of this stranger who wants to stand between her and the world.]

Well, I don't have to like it. That I remind you of someone fragile. I'm stronger than I look.

[His mind keeps grasping at comparisons: Angela, for that stubborn look, for the way she's rejecting what he's saying. He's starkly reminded, all of a sudden, that he's known so few women in his life who he's had a connection with. His dead wife, his dead girlfriend, Nucky's wife, maybe-- dead, as well.

His mother.

He shakes his head minutely, tightens his hand on the railing once more.]

You're right. You don't have to like it. [he seems to consider something, then jerks his chin up in an inquisitive gesture] What'd you mean, that you're stronger?

I mean--

[She struggles for words. It's hard to explain, how she's always played weak when really she was strong, to seem small, to survive. Hard to tell this man who doesn't know her at all what it means to grow up with a man like her father, what it means to have to protect yourself from your own family.]

[Pressing her lips together until they're pale and white, she shakes her head.]

I mean I'm learning. That's what I mean.

[They’d be surprised at how much they have in common, should they ever come to talk about this. Jimmy had grown up torn between wanting to kill his father and needing his attention more than anything. Even when things had ended with Jimmy’s knife in the Commodore’s belly, all it had brought him was a dull sense of resolution.

He nods, satisfied with that answer.]

That’s good. Better, even. Pearl might have lived if she’d been more like you.

[This brings her a sense of resolution, too, of satisfaction. She is always someone who has strived not only for survival, but to be better than others. Blight had seen that, but he's gone now. Maybe Jimmy will see it in her too.]

[Not that she needs it nurtured at this point. She can nurture it all on her own.]

What happened to Pearl?

[He looks at her, steadily.]

Some Mick fuck slashed up her face to send a message, and then she shot herself.

[His voice is measured and calm, but it's obvious he's still angry about what had happened. Sometimes he wonders: what would have happened to Pearl if she'd lived? Would she have made it to Hollywood? Would she have become a starlet, like she'd wanted?

He likes to think so. It's nicer than thinking of her lying in a pool of her own blood while the other prostitutes screamed in the background. Jimmy doesn't mention that the message was intended for him, nor does he say that the gun Pearl had used had been his. It's a little more of himself than he cares to reveal right now.]

[It sounds like she was weak, to Abigail. She can't imagine being weak enough to kill herself, not anymore. There was a time - but she moved past it, she thinks; she's stronger now, she thinks.]

[She pulls the blanket down and exposes her throat, the scar on it, the empty space where her ear used to be.]

My dad did this to me. [Gesturing to the scar on her neck.] My other - somebody else, somebody I knew and trusted, did this to me. [Showing the space where her ear was.]

I don't want to kill myself. I want to wear my scars.

[She was, but that had been his attraction to her: a little bird that begged for just a little more of that sweet laudanum, who had needed him to take care of her. Someone he could be good for.

His hands are still curled around the foot of the bed, and he leans in to watch her scars. He doesn't seem unsettled, either by the physical scars or her words. But he's surprised that she'd tell him these things in such an open manner, when they've only just met. He admires that, distantly, though he won't understand until later.

He considers telling her his own stories- the scars on his face, from one father figure; the deep spear wound in his shoulder, from the other. His leg is riddled with ugly gashes that healed over wrong. But the thought of doing so makes him feel small and vulnerable, and he can't go through with it.]

How does it feel to remember what happened?

[She takes a moment to think about this. It feels like - reliving it all over again, she thinks, like darkness and fear and the taste of soil in the back of her throat. It feels like dying over and over and coming back to life until life barely means anything at all anymore. But it also means the ability to try again. It means people like Ben, and Kylar, and Elena, and it means she isn't beaten, not yet.]

[Slowly, she smiles. It's not a nice smile, not particularly, a little too wide and a little too cruel, but it contains hope, too. It's incongruous, a paradox, and it's all her.]

It feels like they're dead, and I'm still alive, and I'm going to win.

[He looks at his hands, the knuckles gone white minutes ago, then back up at her. He'd never blamed Nucky for what he'd done; he only blamed the both of them for letting it come to that. But he doesn't judge her, even if her smile twists something inside of him.]

Are you going to kill them, when you graduate?

[Cocking her head to one side, she gives him a serious look, feeling for once a little out of her depth. Usually she uses her story to frighten people. With Jimmy, for some reason, she really doesn't know where to start.]

My dad's already dead. The other man - his name is Hannibal Lecter. I don't know if he's dead or alive. If he's alive, I'll find a way to put him down. He doesn't get to beat me anymore.

[A pause; then,] I know once we graduate, we're not supposed to kill. But it would be a just killing, I think. If justice really exists.

[A man who's capable of cutting off a girl's ear, of beating her, god knows what else-- Jimmy doesn't have the whole picture, but that sounds like a killing as just as his own father's.

So he nods, satisfied. From one killer to another, it's approval.]

I wouldn't be the one to tell you not to do it. Some people don't deserve to live.

He killed a bunch of people here. Ate them.

[Her eyes are boring holes into Jimmy's face, gauging his response, waiting for something - disgust, maybe. She assumes that everyone will know the connection between him and her, will know her crimes and her cruelties, just by looking at her face.]

You can ask around. Almost everyone remembers him. He's very memorable.

[He doesn't see that connection, and he's not disgusted: he's shocked, though, very clearly so. Even in the trenches, when they'd sometimes been so hungry that they'd chew on their belts to distract themselves, even then they'd never considered that.

Someone doing that- his eyes flicker to Abigail's ear and he thinks, did he-- before rapidly discarding the thought. It's too much to think about. But he figures Abigail for a victim, not an accomplice, without even entertaining the thought that he might be wrong.]

I imagine he would be, yes.

[Her gaze is just level, now; some of the intensity leaves it. She's just looking, not staring, not trying to pull him apart.]

I hope you never have to meet him.

twenty-eight ♢ spam & video ( cw: tooth squick )

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cw: racist language, mention of suicide

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