ph_logs | [OPEN] So what's on your mind?

[OPEN] So what's on your mind?

Who: Jack La Hire and You
What: Settling into yet another new home
When: Early November
Warning(s): In headers as needed

1. There's a piece of me that knows his name [The Oak and Iron]
There is a new face in town. Perhaps you might recognize him from your time in the Black Stag Casino. Perhaps you just have an eye for newcomers. Either way, here he is, sitting at a table alone with a meal he's barely touched, watching everything going on around him with the haunted eyes of a prisoner.

2. Every once in a while, he'll show his face [Out and About Town]
It has been decades since Jack has been allowed outside. While he's not literally kissing the grass in gratitude, he is lying on his ground, under a tree, staring up at the branches blankly with not a moment's care for how dirty his clothes (his casino dealer uniform) might be getting. Or for the fact that it is starting to rain.

3. And when he does I'll have something to say [Aces Wildcard]
[Find me on Discord or PM to plot.]

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George is on his way home when he spots Jack lying on the ground, and while he looks uninjured and it's probably none of his business what the man does with a newfound ability to go outside, George still stops beside him to ask

"Excuse me, are you alright?"

“I am not injured or ill.” A precise answer, but an honest one. “You aren’t like the rest. You…something. There is something about you.”

Wyrd, but he doesn’t have the word.

"Something familiar?" George asks, sitting beside Jack. He's going to hate himself later for the work it takes to get the dirt out of his suit, but this is important. There isn't a Freehold here, no-one else he can call on to help that will understand in quite the same way.

“I would not use that word, exactly. Something…that resonates with me, though. A recognition.” Jack frowns, thinking. “You were not a servant of The Golden Wheel, were you? A gambler or other attendant?”

"I was not, no. I served The Master of The House. It wore a different face and took its pleasures differently, but it was cut from the same cloth." George taps his leg idly, barely even notices that he's doing it "That recognition you feel is called the Wyrd, the magic of our Keepers and the consolation prize for surviving."

Edited 2024-11-16 03:44 (UTC)

“Surviving. That makes it sound like everything is past tense.” In multiple senses of the term it’s very not, yet, for Jack.

"It's not."

That was probably blunter than George meant it to be, but it is the truth.

"It never really ends, and I'm sorry to say it may be more difficult for you, when everyone can see you as you are." There's a moment where George thinks to question Jack's missing Mask, but he dismisses it. Perhaps it just comes down to a difference of worlds, and the Contract that created it just hasn't been struck here.

“Many of them saw me at the Black Stag casino already. They know what I was shaped to be. What I am.” That part isn’t significant on the list of things that bother him about the situation at hand.

"That's true. Explaining the sudden change may have come with its own problems."

George is still wishing there was someone better suited to this to call on.

"Do you have any ideas of what you want to do with yourself now that you're out of there?"

"No." Blunt in his turn.

George bites back a huff of laughter, it's not malicious, just recognition.

"I didn't either, at first. It took me a long time to find who I was when I didn't have a master to serve or servants below me to... look after, any more."

"I was told I am to attempt to live a good life here. Whatever that may mean, in this or any world. From talking to people, the assumption most people have been making is that it involves me petting their farm animals."

This time George does laugh, "I've never quite understood the fascination with animals. A lot of people swear by them as companionship and recovery in one, but it never really worked for me."

Until he got his fish anyway, but he's not admitting that the backbone of his mental health is currently the goldfish he won by accident at a fair to a near stranger.

George frowns slightly, sticking on the particularity of Jack's phrasing, it's adding to the curious lack of Mask in a way that unsettles him.

"Who was it that told you that? To attempt to live a good life, I mean."

Jack gives a very slow head-shake. "I am certain I couldn't tell you."

He is being careful, but in a way that's hopefully going to avoid the wrong type of prying.

George watches Jack for a long moment, trying to decide if that answer has a deeper meaning or if he's just forgotten who in the shuffle.

"If you could, would you want to?"

Edited 2024-11-16 05:54 (UTC)

"It seems unlikely that would help anything." Jack shrugs slightly. His hands twitch as if he's seeking something to do with them, defensively.

"If you tell me to back off, I will." Because he feels that needs to be said, before he continues "Does that mean you need help?"

"I hardly know what I need. 'To live a good life.' To endure everyone projecting what they think that means on my current existence. To know what I should be doing with my time."

He sounds, quite honestly, exhausted. Stretched tight. He hasn't been able to really relax yet. Even lying on the ground in the rain is not yet helping.

"It sounds to me like you need a break, and to be left alone." George stops, as if realising what he's just said, and smiles a little self-deprecatingly,
"I'm not helping, am I?"

“You are not hurting, either.” Jack shrugs slightly. “Everyone means so very well. I feel like not listening and letting them help is letting them down. It is not as though I have better to be doing for myself.”

"This place is full of people willing to care if you let them, more so than anywhere else I've been, I think. That doesn't mean you have to let them though, it matters more what you want and are comfortable with, than the notion that you'll be 'letting them down' if you don't. But it may take some time to know what you want, that's a skill that must be learnt and practised, and not enough people realise that."

“…how?” His chest feels tight as he asks that question, as if the weight of something truly important is pressing down on it.

"By starting with small things where the stakes aren't very high."

George pauses for a long while, ordering his thoughts before he tries to explain more thoroughly.

"I used to practise at the library, I'd spend time walking around the shelves looking at books until one caught my eye, and I'd stop and I'd ask myself why. Had it caught my eye because it looked interesting? Did I want a closer look at it? Or was it simply out of place, and had caught my attention because I'd spent so long forced to maintain the strictest standards?

"Whatever answer I gave myself, I'd act on that. Sometimes I was right, more often I was wrong, and more often still I couldn't answer at all. Ask yourself what you want, and give yourself the space to be wrong, to change your mind, and eventually you'll start to find what's right for you."

Jack thinks about that quietly.

"The town has a library. I could do that."

It feels like meaningful advice, useful beyond 'hug a chicken'. Not that Co and Sam don't help at all, but they're a little like a bandaid on a bullet wound.

"You could," George agrees, careful not to put any weight of expectation on it. Whether Jack chooses to or not should be entirely his decision and not another thing he's been told he has to "And I hope it helps, if you do."

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lahire - 2024-11-20 04:47 (UTC) - Expand

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