Backlash II

[Jarod Nightingale] "It's nothing serious," came the obvious reply, when directly questioned about the stiffness he held in his torso. The way he moved with just slightly less grace than usual. And from the casual tone in his voice and the lack of emotion in his eyes, one would imagine that he was telling the truth. Really, it was not serious.

(But yes, he was hurt. And he admitted it rather than lie, because it was Emily.)

"Remember what happened that time, on the beach?" The headache. The nose bleed. "This is the same." No one else seemed to be within earshot. He'd already checked, but an inner sense of paranoia caused him to look again, and to lower his voice before continuing. "Alice... would have died. Maybe even at a hospital. She was pretty far-gone. So they called me, and I helped her. There's always a price to pay for those things." He wasn't speaking in specifics, but by now Emily knew enough that she would understand what it was he was telling her. Hopefully, in any case.

He said he'd helped her. But what he'd really done was nothing short of a miracle, in the eyes of some. Jarod didn't believe in miracles. He believed in himself. And in the power of life to heal and adapt, to be all at once fragile and strong. Alice's body had wanted to live. And so, it had been made whole again.

Jarod glanced up the stairs that led to the bedroom Emily shared with her roommate. Then, he nodded. "Better than standing in entrance-ways. And you won't need to worry about me corrupting you with my wicked ways, since I'm fairly useless for anything interesting at the moment." There was a little wry humor in that comment. That fact, in itself, was some indication that being here was easing some of the tension he'd been feeling.

[Emily Littleton] She regarded him thoughtfully, fitting the bits and pieces she knew together in unsettling ways but not yet sharing those insights. Emily chewed on the inside corner of her lip a little as she listened, as she thought, and as she worried, retroactively, about something she could not change.

"Still..." she said, somewhat cautiously (cautioningly). "You should tell that good for nothing apprentice of yours to take better care of you," her nose wrinkled a bit and the set of her mouth was almost wry enough to be joking. Anyone over hearing them might think that Emily was none-too-fond of this understudy of his.

And with that, she set to moving up the stairs. Emily looked back over her shoulder enough to make sure he was following (no, she wasn't concerned that he couldn't handle the steps). Her room was neater than before, probably because the vaccuum had made forcible ingress into Marissa's side of the room (likely Emily's doing). Her fouton was already unfolded into a bed, but she had folded the blankets up again before going downstairs to meet him. Her laptop sat open on the small bookshelf at the foot of her bed, open to an email program of some variety. Beside it sat a pair of notebooks: one open to a page of intimidating physics homework; the other closed and underneath the first, its bright red cover and the corner of a Cubs logo just peeking out at one corner.

[Jarod Nightingale] That... actually made him laugh. It was an honest thing, in its spontaneity, and that was rare for him. It was good that he laughed, too, despite the flash of pain it caused his tender ribs, because it meant that the icy veneer he'd been holding in place was starting to melt. Still, it did hurt, and he cut the laugh off a bit more quickly than he otherwise would, putting a hand up to touch his chest reflexively, as if somehow that would ease the wound.

"You don't need to take care of me. I don't recall that being a part of the job description." And he didn't need taking care of, of course. He hadn't needed that for a long, long time. Wouldn't have gotten it, even if he had.

He followed Emily up the steps, taking them a little slower than usual, but not to a noticeable degree. When the two of them entered her room, he moved to sit down on her futon. That made the pain a little more obvious, when he had to flex the muscles in his core, and it made him stop breathing for a moment. But he nonetheless refused to hold himself as if he were some poor, wounded creature. (Really, this was hardly the worst injury he'd ever gotten.) Letting go of his breath, he sighed and leaned back a little to rest his weight on his hands. That made it hurt less. And it looked casual.

[Emily Littleton] He can look casual all he wants, but she is not buying it. Not tonight. Emily does not even pretend that she is being fooled by his pretending. And whether he needs to be taken care of or not is not what is at question here. It is whether she should, as someone who cares for him (perhaps more deeply than she's letting on).

It's possible that he would remember why she is so patently unfooled, remember seeing the scars in her pattern left by fractures along her own ribs. They had healed long before he'd met her, but the memory of that sort of pain did not completely take its leave from one's mind. He didn't have to carry himself like a wounded bird to bring back a keen awareness of it in her mind.

"I have some vicodin, from when I got those stitches. Do you want it?" she offered. Emily hadn't taken any pain medication (willingly), and she didn't expect he would take her up on the offer either. But she still tried. "Or dinner? I brought home leftovers: mapo dofu, steamed fish, and some bok choy. I can heat something up for you, if you'd like."

She knelt beside him, but didn't cross into his space. The more Jarod assured her he was fine, the more Emily seemed to fuss. She was, after all, his good for nothing apprentice (for lack of a better term). Emily smoothed her hands down her thighs, fidgetting in a less obvious fashion.

There were so many things he'd told her that just passed by, unnamed and unremarked upon, but this was the sort of thing she could do something about. Something nominal, but still measurable. This was unlikely to cause either of them great emotional distress if she tried, in some small way, to demonstrate her concern and affection. If all else failed, Emily would at least have tried to be there for him, to show some semblence of reciprocity. That had to count for something.

[Jarod Nightingale] "Emily, I am fine. I don't need medication, and I don't need food. Just try not to punch me in the ribs for awhile. Besides, I came over here to check in on you, remember? And don't think I didn't notice how you changed the subject back there. I'm an expert at that sort of thing. I know a subject change when I see one." He smiled ruefully, though, because her attention wasn't entirely undesired, even if he did offer protest.

"And speaking of willful distraction," because he'd tried to do that himself downstairs, to absolutely no avail. "You, my dear, are absolutely terrible at flirting." There was a note of warmth to his playful admonishment. It was not meant to insult so much as tease, but then, saying things like that to people in any form tended to make them irritated. (But this... this was a good thing. A few minutes ago he had been near-silent. Cold. His guard had been up. Now he was relaxing. Teasing. A step in the right direction, for all that they had both had such serious, unpleasant things to deal with that weekend.)

[Emily Littleton] She pressed her lips together, drawing them into a thin, pale line for a moment and then squeezed her eyes shut in annoyance. Perhaps at what he'd said to her, or perhaps at some other nuance of her evening that was as of yet unnamed and unnoticed.

"Bother," Emily said, softly, and much more to herself than to him. It was a little annoyed sound, and paired with her annoyed expression, it was quite difficult to miss that something had irritated her. At least in passing. Because she sighed a little, and it did pass. Emily did not admonish him for ... for any of it.

"I am fine, too," she said, when he tried to turn this back to being about her. Two could play this game, and they were both quite good at it in their own ways. So that was that. He clearly didn't have to worry about her, either. Unless, of course, they had differing definitions of "fine."

"You are ... insufferable upon occassion," she added, in response to his chiding remark about her inept flirtations. She hadn't been trying to flirt with him, after all. Though that was, quite possibly, the problem.

[Jarod Nightingale] Jarod was the kind of person who turned flirting into an art form, if such a thing were possible. In the right set of circumstances (which he seemed to find himself in frequently), he could spend an entire evening doing just that. Words could taunt and tease and flick just the right sorts of buttons, without ever having to so much as touch someone. And he played it like it was a game to be won or lost, because for him... it was. And it was a game that Emily never really seemed to want to play, but then, perhaps Emily wasn't terribly fond of games in general.

On impulse, Jarod shifted his weight forward a little and reached out with one hand, to run the backs of knuckles down the side of her upper arm, affectionately. "I know," he said quietly. Because many people had told him this. Then his mouth curled into a partial smile. "Anyway, it's not like I don't still find you infinitely intriguing." Despite the aforementioned lack of flirtation. "So I suppose it doesn't matter if you humor me or not."

More seriously, now. "And you aren't any more fine than I am. But if you'd rather not talk about it... we don't have to."

[Emily Littleton] There were many things that Emily wasn't any good at. Apparently flirting was one of them, and Nick had suggested another (the endgame to those flirtations) not too long ago. That he found her intriguing despite herself was of some confusion to Emily, and in this unguarded place it was easy to see how the confusion (just shy of hurt) rode her features for a wary moment. And so it was with some wariness that she watched as his hand reached out to touch her, affectionately.

It was not the time, tonight, to revisit any of that, though. Not the time to ask him about another's insinuation. It would never be the time to wallow in the insecurities that Nick had brought forward.

"You keep saying that," she observed, a little sadly. Perhaps just seriously. It was difficult to tell. Emily's eyes found his, held his for a moment. They were clouded and muddied with too much to sort out in that moment's time, save to acknowledge that she was deeply perturbed, thoughtful. "And then we don't talk about it. There's already been so much that we don't talk about, it just goes by in footnotes and ... I..."

Emily shrugged a bit, uneasily. "I don't know what to make of that. If it's all the same, I'd rather not dump every last detail of my bad days on you, not like that guy did at dinner tonight to me. But... there will be times when it is important to talk to one another, maybe not tonight. Maybe not about this. You can't always leave it at if you'd rather not... I won't always have the presence of mind to know what's best, or what's right, or even what I want. You likely will not either. Not always."

No, she wasn't fine. Emily wasn't sure she was supposed to be fine. Not after this Winter. But she wasn't really upset, either. Her words flowed into each other without hurrying one another along. They were shaped with the same oddity, same foreignness, that her tongue always held. She was thoughtful tonight, and those thoughts were not limited to the madman on the mile, or the greater implications of paradox and magic. They were far reaching thoughts, tangled up in thoughts of what she wanted and who she was becoming and how to get from where she was to where she would some day be.

They were tangled up in him, too, and those were the hardest thoughts for her to voice. She'd called herself his apprentice in her worrying over him. She'd used that word like a shield, to separate herself somehow, from the vulnerability of caring for him. She'd used it to distract him, if only momentarily, from caring for her.

Some day one of them was going to have to push the other. Emily hoped it wouldn't break them.

[Jarod Nightingale] [pause!]