jotunvali02 · 2 years ago
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The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1982 PART 1
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teacup-crow · 3 years ago
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Maybe, Maybe, Maybe
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Fun bit of survivors’ guilt for @badthingshappenbingo, based pretty heavily off Don’t Poke the Bear and Variations on a Theme. Post-finale.
They take it in turns to keep watch for when he wakes up: Doug, Reneé, Isabel, first names still such a novelty. Just his luck, he opens his eyes to the impassive face of Captain Lovelace.
“Hi, dickbag. Sore head?”
“Unnnnhh…” he whines as if he’s lying under a ton of rocks rather than a cosy quilt on Renee’s living room floor. His face is a patchwork of bruising. “Aspirin?”
She takes pity, and passes him two and a glass of water. The sitting up takes longer than he thought it would.
“You look terrible. Lucky for you, Renee makes a mean chilli con carne. Never would have guessed she could cook.”
“No thanks, I should, should be going-”
“You need food in your system, that’s non-negotiable. First thing’s first, though, you’re having a shower, and you either go willingly or get dragged bodily, because you goddamn stink. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir,” he mumbles automatically, and he remembers the Colonel - Warren? Was it on a day he could call him Warren? - once saying something similar and his head pounds. ((“mr jacobi, of all the irresponsible, stupid shit i have seen from you this really takes the-“))
“Bathroom’s on the second floor, just past the master bedroom. Dominick put a pile of clean clothes in there before he left for work. And it’s Isabel, okay? Not sir. Not Captain. Never again.”
***
“Who did this to you?”
He grips his mug of sweet tea like it’s thousand dollar whiskey. He’s still ashen. “I did this to me.”
“You beat the shit out of yourself? Okay, yeah. Don’t buy that one.” Isabel repeats the question. “Who did this to you?”
“Just some guys I pissed off. I don’t know how many. I don’t know who. Happy now?”
The room goes silent. Isabel continues:
“And did you go provoking them deliberately?”
Not for the first time, Renee wonders whether they should have included Doug in this little intervention. He’s been through so much just like the rest of them, but he doesn’t know it, and he’s clearly freaking out at the situation.
“Why would he want something like that to happen? He looks terrible!”
“I don’t know, Doug,” Isabel says levelly. “Care to answer, Jacobi?”
He’s not on a first name basis, apparently.
“Not… I didn’t... no. No, no, no. I was too drunk and… picking fights, but suddenly there were too many of them, okay? But I got out. And if I want to drink then that’s my own problem, so thank you for the hospitality but-“
Renee cuts in there. “When you drink yourself into a stupor, get attacked by a gang in a back alley, and stumble into my doorway at 0300 hours after six months of radio silence, it becomes our problem.” Her look of pity makes his stomach churn even more than the chilli did. He breathes in, hold, out; in, hold, out; in-((alana’s breathing technique and why why why is she everywhere in everything why does he have to see her out of the corner of his eye when it’s been so long he can’t properly remember her face-))
“Fine. What do you want from me?”
“You are a good man and you saved every single one of our lives and we need to understand why you’re so intent on throwing yours away.”
Jacobi starts laughing then, guttural laughs that worsen the ache in his head and bones but he can’t seem to stop them. “...me? I’m a good man? Oh my God, Lieutenant, that’s hilarious. Give us another.”
“You need to take this seriously! This is a form of self harm! You could have died!” Isabel is pacing up and down. She and Renee do good cop, bad cop like it’s a professional sport.
“Boo fucking hoo. And the world would forever be worse off for my passing.”
Isabel stops, and turns back towards him with some heat in her gaze. “I have lost too many crew members who deserved to die far less than you do. Okay? Is that what you want to hear? Do you need me to reconfirm that you are a an asshole? Do you need to hear about how Fisher, and Hui, and Fourier, and Lambert were all far better people than you will ever, ever be? Or will you accept that you are good in there? That deep down you’re on the right-“
“We burned their letters.” He’s staring at the duvet he’s wrapped in, running his finger over the flowers on the pattern. “Okay? Still think I’m a good person?”
“...wait. What?” She laughs a little, in shock perhaps. “But you told me…”
“I told you what I needed to tell you to make you trust me. We burned your crew’s letters. Lambert’s… I remember those especially. His hands were shaking really hard when he wrote them, weren’t they.”
It’s not a question.
Isabel stops pacing, and Jacobi grins again but it doesn’t reach his bruised eyes when he looks up at her. “More than mine, even. You could tell he was sick. They didn’t make any sense. We laughed at them. The irony of a Communications Officer who can’t communicate. Are you listening to me? We read their letters and we burned them and we laughed about it-“
Renee loses her softness. “Jacobi, that is enough!”
Isabel has a hand on her chest as if something has hit her there. She counts to ten in her head, ((fisher’s technique to try and stop her fighting with sam, never worked but still stuck in her head, or this copy of her head, or whoever she is now-)) and leaves the room.
They hear her slamming drawers in the kitchen.
Doug glances at Jacobi and shakes his head, before hurrying after her.
“How could you,” Reneé says. “How could you.”
“I don’t know. Will you let me go and ruin my own life now?”
“Never,” she replies. “Because, God help me, you’re still a member of my crew.”
At that, his eyes prick with tears he can’t explain. He rolls over on the air bed, and closes them.
***
“Lovelace?” Jacobi finally makes himself walk into the kitchen, grimacing like each step is on hot sand. The words are monotone. “I’m so sorry. What I did and said is... inexcusable.”
“Nope. That’s too large a word for your vocabulary. Come back to me with an apology Renée didn’t script,” Isabel snaps, going back to scribbling in a sketchbook.
“Look, I’m not much good at this-“
“You’re telling me.”
“I’m… really used to people yelling at me and hitting me until they feel better. Or you can shoot me if you like!”
“Jesus. Well, I am not about to do that to ease your guilt. You look like you’d snap if one more person poked you. So apologise properly.”
“I’m sorry…”
“For?” Isabel prompts over the top of her book.
“I’m sorry for burning your crew’s letters.”
“You did what you were ordered to do. It is what it is. I’m not condoning it.”
There’s a moment of silence, and Jacobi realises she’s waiting for him to continue. “And… I’m sorry for bringing it up. That was… needlessly cruel. It sucked.”
“It really did,” she replies, putting the book down. “Tell you what: that sounded somewhat genuine, and Goddard brought out the shit in all of us. You look so pathetic, I’m going to forgive you. Not because you deserve it, but because I don’t bear grudges. Not anymore.”
She holds out a hand, and he shakes it. “Thank you.”
“Wow. That actually hurt for you to say.”
Jacobi nods. He sits down across from her at Renée’s huge darkwood table, and thinks about how she and Dominick must have bought this when they moved in together with plans to have people over for dinner every other night. Maybe even plans to have kids.
He wonders if Dominick ate at it alone while his wife was gone.
“So, you gone on that holiday yet?”
“No, actually. I’ve legally been dead for about seven years, so getting a passport is proving pretty tricky.”
“I can imagine.”
“Where have you been, anyway? We tried to get into contact with you. We drove down to your old apartment - got your address from the Goddard database - but it was cleaned out.”
Jacobi looks sheepish. “Yeah, well, I’d mostly been staying at Alana’s for the last few years or overnight at… yeah… so I’d not been a very good tenant and turns out they took ‘lost in space’ as the perfect opportunity to kick me out. So I’ve been sofa to sofa, on the streets a bit-”
“For heaven’s sake, Jacobi. We would have helped you, you stupid asshole! All you had to do was ask and you could have stayed here! Renee and Dominick would probably even let you have a cheese collection or whatever the fuck it was.”
“Guess the amount of drinks it takes for me to lose my pride is somewhere over eighteen?”
“How do you have a functioning liver?”
They sit in an almost comfortable silence for a few minutes, Isabel reopening her sketchbook.
“I never knew you drew.”
“You never knew me outside of a life-threatening situation.” Isabel sighs, twists the pencil between her fingers. “I don’t think I did. Before. The old ‘me’, I mean. But I was bored and I can’t get a job because of the ‘being dead’ issue, so I thought I should take up a hobby or something. Might be therapeutic. I’m not very good at it…”
“Can I see?”
“I, uh,” Isabel suddenly looks uncertain. “I drew her. Maxwell. I drew everyone, actually. Are you sure you want to look?”
“Yes.”
He leafs through the pages, at first simple doodles before branching into full portraits. Eiffel, upside down and smoking a cigarette. Hilbert, looking troubled at a shadow behind him he can’t quite see. Two ghostlike figures in lab coats staring out at the star, the man with a prophetic terror etched on his face - must be Isabel’s old crewmates. Mr Cutter smiles up at him with far too many sharp teeth in sharper lines where the pencil was pressed far too hard and he turns the page quickly. There’s Kepler, mid-whiskey speech and it almost stops his heart. He pauses. Maxwell.
In the picture, her eyes are shining as she stares at Hera’s console, fingers nothing more than a blur - the three-day stint she spent trying to get the AI online. Aside from the orange and blue of Wolf 359, elsewhere in the book Isabel has barely used colour, but here the room is bathed in a serene green light from the screens. Behind Maxwell, Jacobi sees himself, little more than a stocky, sketchy outline, waiting for her to finish.
He looks so proud of her.
He looks so… content.
After staring for a long moment, Jacobi closes the book and hands it back. “Thank you.”
“You can keep the pictures of them, if you like,” Isabel offers, but he doesn’t know whether he would like, so he says:
“Tell me about your crew.”
“What?”
“Your old crew. Tell me about them. Was Lambert the one staring at...?”
“No. No. No, that was Kuan Hui, our senior astrophysicist. He was whipsmart and funny and fearless, until the time Goddard Futuristics played around in his brain, stretched out his perception of time. He was completely alone in the dark for two weeks. His smile never really reached his eyes after that.”
Jacobi sips tea awkwardly, even though it’s cold.
“Something like that, it stays with you. At least he had Fourier, though.”
“That’s the woman behind him?”
“Junior physicist. Victoire Fourier had eyes like stars. Cleverest person I’ve ever met. She played six instruments, spoke four languages and she had the most gentle soul. She used to read to Hui when he got sick with Decima. Coughed up every organ in his body. I thought it would break her, but she was made of stern stuff. She vanished off the space station in the final days and I still don’t know what exactly happened to her-”
“I… do. If you want to know, I mean.”
Isabel shakes her head. Then pauses. Then shakes her head again. “I get the feeling whoever is to blame is long gone.”
Jacobi shrugs. “Who else?”
“Well, there was Mace Fisher. Fisher… Fisher died because of me, not Goddard Futuristics. Asteroid shower tore him from my hands. He had a boyfriend waiting at home. He was sensitive, sensible, grounding. A real older brother type. I- I didn’t deal particularly well with his death. Well, you know that much.”
((Pill popper!)) Jacobi gulps more cold tea.
“And Lambert?”
“Sam Lambert. Officer Samuel Lambert had a stick up his ass. He was whiny, and authoritarian, and he treasured his copy of Pryce and Carter more than Reneé and Kepler combined did. He drove me nearly insane, and I drove him likewise. The best second in command you could ask for. A damn good man. Sam got sick after Hui, so we knew what was coming. What it meant. He was brave, though. At first.”
((“C-Captain, please shoot me, please, it hurts, it hurts, Captain, please, I just want it to-”)
She falters.
“Lovelace?”
“Yup?”
“You know, it’s not even really about the Hephaestus. I keep… it’s insane, but I keep thinking about… I was an explosives guy for the Air Force. Before Goddard. A trigger failed and two men died. Andrews and Sullivan. I haven’t thought about them in years and suddenly-“
“They’re everywhere?”
There’s a sudden understanding between them.
“They’re everywhere. Them and Maxwell and Kepler. They’re in mirrors, in the back of my brain, around corners.”
“Flashes of them.”
“And if you just reach out far enough, maybe-“
“Maybe-“
“Maybe.”
((let’s go be monsters)), Jacobi’s brain echoes. He grits his teeth.
“Did it stop for you? When does it stop?” He finds himself asking. Isabel doesn’t answer.
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