I really owe Will for this one
He felt silly, and even the dim lighting broken by candles and glowing sticks of fragrant incense didn't thwart that feeling. It didn't help that he was seated across from Phoenix Wright's excitable sidekick; somehow the fact that she was quiet and calm made things worse. Surreal, but not the mysterious kind. It was the kind of surreal that came right before a plot twist the audience knew about for five episodes was revealed to one poor sap of a character.
Will sighed. He'd been an actor for too long. He could practically see the guy with his finger on the laugh track button waiting for the moment when Miss Fey either shrugged and said she was kidding or launched into some horrible 'trance' and spouted generic nonsense that could apply to any ghost.
He suppressed the urge to reach up and rub his eyes. She wouldn't do that to him. She was far too nice, and he knew that.
The trial had left its mark on him.
Growing up rough, his sister's bad breakup, years of struggling before Global Studios... nothing had touched him. So many times someone had taken advantage of his nature, and he knew he trusted too easily and was far too naïve, but he could never make himself cynical. He got himself pessimistic, but he could never make himself doubt a person's good intentions even if they didn't have any.
Thanks, Jack, he thought with a fair touch of the bitterness that still felt so foreign, I've finally learned how not to trust people.
He quieted a self depreciating sigh and turned his eyes back towards Miss Fey. She was still in the same position, her legs folded neatly under her and her hands folded in her lap, her back strait and her chin slightly lowered. Her eyes were closed as they were before, but as Will looked closer he could see that her eyelids were twitching a little. Like a flutter but less movement. Before they started she told him that this stage might take some time as she had to search for an unfamiliar soul.
Soul.
Jack.
He heard of the little settlement of psychics from one of the new assistants on the Pink Princess set (he really wished they were all like Penny). She raved about the accurate card reading she got from one of their trainees visiting the city for practice and how she couldn't even believe how incredible the full fledged mediums must be. Then she spent some time complaining about the size of her paycheck and how she wouldn't be able to afford the big time psychics in this lifetime.
Will's paycheck was bigger than hers.
He spent the whole train ride with his face pressed against the glass and regretting his decision to go to Kurain and drag Jack's spirit back from the afterlife. He was amazed at the new depth of regret when he saw the sweet if loud girl he knew from the trial standing there telling him she would be the one to do the channeling. He almost turned tail and ran but she turned on that special brand of warm charm that reminded him so much of his sister before the breakup. He couldn't leave after she smiled at him like that.
So she led him to the small windowless room and sat him down on the comfortable floor cushions before lighting everything and settling in herself. In her lap, her hands rested on the carefully folded piece of embroidered cloth that was once Jack Hammer's trademark bandana. The rest of the man's meager possessions were in two cardboard boxes in the bottom of Will's closet. There was no one else to claim what was left of Jack's life, and in the detached fog that surrounded him in the days after the trail he took the boxes home. Something about remembering him since no one else was going to... and then reality finally sunk back in and he just left them because he couldn't bring himself to think about it. About Jack, the trial, the betrayal...
Suddenly Miss Fey's head lifted, though her eyes remained closed. Her fingers brushed over the embroidered patterns on the bandana, aimlessly at first but soon she was tracing the lines of the stitches. The expression on her face was one of reaching for something just out of her grasp. And there was... something. It's not as though she was glowing or the temperature suddenly changed or anything theatrical like that, but there was something that made it feel like she wasn't quite there. Like she was halfway out the door even though she was sitting right in front of him.
Will allowed himself a little belief.
Her face was turned to the rafters for perhaps a minute. Then she slowly lowered her head, her lips moving ever so slightly as if she was almost talking to herself. Her bangs obscured her face. After another few minutes she stopped tracing patterns on the bandana and gripped it tightly. Her shoulders drew in, as if she was shivering, and then with a long sigh she relaxed.
There was something.
It was... it was as though her shoulders got a little broader, her arms not quite as slim as they were, the hands griping the bandana less elegantly feminine. Those hands unclenched and were held palm up as Miss Fey presumably looked at them; her bangs were still obscuring her eyes. And her bangs... it was subtle, but they weren't a straight line anymore. They were swept to the sides just a little more than before, a little more ragged.
She stopped looking at her hands and gently lifted the bandana from her lap. Her thumb brushed over its surface and her chin tilted up enough for Will to see the sad, nostalgic smile that graced her lips.
It didn't make sense.
Will stared as she bowed her head again and seemed to notice how she was sitting. She shifted so she was cross-legged, tugging self consciously on the gray slacks she donned before she began. The way she sat spoke nothing of an excitable young girl, or even the collected medium. Her hands found their way to her knees. Unladylike, unlike her. She was slouching. She was sitting like a man.
Will stared as she lifted her head and he saw the same apologetic grin that Jack had given him when the Evil Magistrate missed a mark but the Steel Samurai was the one getting yelled at. That was when Jack started talking to him. When they started becoming friends.
"It... it worked?"
Miss Fey looked up and to the side and scratched her cheek the way he would when he was embarrassed. When she spoke, she didn't sound the same... it was her voice, but the tone and the words... "I guess it did?"
On the train he reasoned that if it did work, he'd be so shocked that he'd be unable to speak. He was wrong.
It finally caught up to Will. The anger and resentment that had been brewing beneath the surface ever since the truth had been revealed came rushing to the surface. His sense left him and he slammed his hands down on the floor hard enough to make the candles wobble dangerously.
"I guess it..." his sense tried to take hold of his tongue and failed, "Jack, you framed me. You tried to take everything away from me." His volume climbed to Steel-Samurai-public-appearance levels. "Why?"
She blinked and leaned back a little, obviously surprised that Will was raising his voice. He was surprised that he was raising his voice, but he just couldn't stop himself. The floodgates were open and he was just along for the ride.
And it just kept coming. "Jack, you were my friend! We went out to lunch and we laughed about things and we shared confusion over everything Sal ever said, we... we..." he faltered, "... we... damnit, Jack! Was it all a lie? Every time you smiled at me, every time you... we..." but it was Miss Fey, cute excitable Maya, and he couldn't tell her, couldn't say it. Even though it wasn't her.
"Will, I..." he couldn't look at her, "I never..."
It wasn't.
Will's eyes snapped back to Maya's, all the wrong color but the way she was looking at him was right, and that shouldn't have been enough but in that moment it was. And it took that burning core of anger and froze it, not cooling it, but transforming it into an impenetrable wall of cold and calculating rage. When he opened his mouth he didn't yell; the low whisper was much, much worse.
"Were you planning this when you had sex with me?"
She wasn't surprised. Any lingering doubts he had that this really was Jack were swept away.
Jack met Will's icy gaze and immediately looked away, running his hands over the bandana still in his lap. Traced the patterns without looking, each color in turn, taking slow, forcibly even breaths. Will waited.
"You know what?" at last Jack spoke, "The way you were before... in a world that Dee controlled, the way you were was the one thing that made me feel there might be something good left. And now..." his shoulders tensed and he slumped with palpable shame, "God, what have I done to you?"
"You framed me."
Jack flinched as if he'd been stabbed, partially from the words but mostly because of the emotionless tone.
"What have I done..." he buried his face in one hand while the other held his bandana as if it was a lifeline, "I never... God, Will, I never wanted to hurt you!"
The cold rage still building was starting to scare Will, but he couldn't stop it.
"You did."
The hand fell away and tired eyes met the icy gaze again. This time Jack didn't look away. Still clutching his bandana he unfolded his legs and crawled forward, reaching out to touch Will's face with his free hand. Will leaned back; he wasn't about to let Jack near him.
"Will, please..." he reached out again.
Will turned away.
There was a pause and then the frustrated growl that was a commonplace during the really hard fight scenes back on the Steel Samurai set, and suddenly Will found himself with a lapful of angry Jack. Fingers threaded through his unruly hair and gripped painfully hard, using that hold to forcibly turn Will's head around. Will's hand automatically came up to disengage Jack's but he was already leaning in with a different growl, distinct in intent to someone who heard it so many times in the dark of the night, in the haze of alcohol...
Jack froze a bare centimeter from his lips. With a sigh that he could taste Jack shifted and buried his face in scruffy beard.
"This isn't," his voice was muffled but the awkwardness was clear, "this isn't me."
Will was suddenly acutely aware of the body straddling his hips and pressed against his chest. Whatever magic was at work made it more Jack, but that didn't change the fact that it was Miss Fey. The cold rage slipped away and was replaced by the hot flush of deep embarrassment. Will tried to gently disengage her but Jack held on tight, and the only way to get him off was to hurt her.
"Will," there was that voice still muffled by his neck, "I wasn't trying to frame you. I wasn't trying to kill Dee... I just wanted her to leave me alone. I was going to try... I don't know." Jack's arms tightened around Will's shoulders. "Everything I hadn't said before, anything that might work... the only reason she held it over me was because Manuel was her lover... and it was a god damn accident, I wasn't trying..." a small, humorless laugh, "damn fence. Ruined everything twice..."
Will heard him. He wanted to believe him. The part of him that didn't die at the trial needed to believe him.
"Mr. Wright said-"
"Smart man. I would have thought the same thing, but it wasn't..."
Will swallowed around the growing lump in his throat. "You drugged me...?"
"I..." the arms tightened again, and again there was guilt radiating off of Jack, "I'm sorry. But Dee said it had to be private, and if I was myself then the security lady..."
Can't trust him can't trust him, were the words running through Will's mind, can't trust -- God it all fits -- no, it can't, just can't... no...
He crumbled.
Jack's desperate embrace was returned and they both sagged with relief. Will clung to him and cried, cried for the first time since the night after the trial when he clung to his pillow and a bottle of Jack Daniels and sobbed. That burning anger and frozen rage bled away, replaced by the most depressing relief that he'd ever known because the body he held didn't belong to Jack.
"It wouldn't... we never would have worked anyway," Jack mumbled into Will's hair after a long, aching breath. The first time Jack kissed his cheek, the first time Jack showed him a real kiss, hot sticky nights with a hand on his hip and those little moans Jack would make... Will remembered it all in that moment.
"Jack-"
"No," that humorless, hopeless laugh, "we work... worked on a children's show, we're both men... hell, Will, I'm fifteen years older than you." A long, shuddering breath. "Don't get me wrong... what we had... it gave me hope again. And I could never resist when... but it couldn't have worked."
Jack pulled away and smiled a humorless smile while he gently caressed Will's cheek.
"You deserve so much better than my bitterness anyway. And you'll find that person and it will be... it'll be what you should have..."
Jack buried his nose in that perpetually tangled hair again.
"Will... I have to go."
Will crushed Jack against him, afraid to let go. Not after he learned that Jack didn't frame him, that he was wrong about his friend, his lover.
"I'm sorry," he choked out between the sobs that he couldn't stop.
There was the curve of smiling lips against his neck.
"Don't bother setting the record straight... you're the only one I wanted to know. And live, or I'll haunt you."
Another humorless laugh, this time from Will's end.
A few seconds later, the strange masculine quality melted away and it was unmistakably Maya Fey who he held in his arms. He was so distressed he couldn't even muster the embarrassment at the fact that she was still straddling his lap. His arms fell away as Miss Fey leaned back, blinked a few times, and looked at him with confusion. Her eyes widened when she saw the tears on his face.
Without a word she slid off of his lap onto the floor beside him, nearly catching herself on fire in the process. After blowing out the candles and tucking her legs beneath herself once more, she gently but firmly pulled Will into her arms. It reminded him of how his sister would comfort her little brother after a bad dream... he clung to her and drank up her silent comfort. She never said a word, never once asked him what happened while she was out of control of her body. Once he'd spent his tears she simply stood and excused herself to take off the unfamiliar slacks, returning with a piece of cake and a cup of soothing tea.
He ate in silence, the sugar helping take the edge off the complete emotional drain. It wasn't a happy ending... he wasn't even sure if it was better than what he had before. It just was. Depressing, devastating...
The cake was good.
Will sighed. He'd been an actor for too long. He could practically see the guy with his finger on the laugh track button waiting for the moment when Miss Fey either shrugged and said she was kidding or launched into some horrible 'trance' and spouted generic nonsense that could apply to any ghost.
He suppressed the urge to reach up and rub his eyes. She wouldn't do that to him. She was far too nice, and he knew that.
The trial had left its mark on him.
Growing up rough, his sister's bad breakup, years of struggling before Global Studios... nothing had touched him. So many times someone had taken advantage of his nature, and he knew he trusted too easily and was far too naïve, but he could never make himself cynical. He got himself pessimistic, but he could never make himself doubt a person's good intentions even if they didn't have any.
Thanks, Jack, he thought with a fair touch of the bitterness that still felt so foreign, I've finally learned how not to trust people.
He quieted a self depreciating sigh and turned his eyes back towards Miss Fey. She was still in the same position, her legs folded neatly under her and her hands folded in her lap, her back strait and her chin slightly lowered. Her eyes were closed as they were before, but as Will looked closer he could see that her eyelids were twitching a little. Like a flutter but less movement. Before they started she told him that this stage might take some time as she had to search for an unfamiliar soul.
Soul.
Jack.
He heard of the little settlement of psychics from one of the new assistants on the Pink Princess set (he really wished they were all like Penny). She raved about the accurate card reading she got from one of their trainees visiting the city for practice and how she couldn't even believe how incredible the full fledged mediums must be. Then she spent some time complaining about the size of her paycheck and how she wouldn't be able to afford the big time psychics in this lifetime.
Will's paycheck was bigger than hers.
He spent the whole train ride with his face pressed against the glass and regretting his decision to go to Kurain and drag Jack's spirit back from the afterlife. He was amazed at the new depth of regret when he saw the sweet if loud girl he knew from the trial standing there telling him she would be the one to do the channeling. He almost turned tail and ran but she turned on that special brand of warm charm that reminded him so much of his sister before the breakup. He couldn't leave after she smiled at him like that.
So she led him to the small windowless room and sat him down on the comfortable floor cushions before lighting everything and settling in herself. In her lap, her hands rested on the carefully folded piece of embroidered cloth that was once Jack Hammer's trademark bandana. The rest of the man's meager possessions were in two cardboard boxes in the bottom of Will's closet. There was no one else to claim what was left of Jack's life, and in the detached fog that surrounded him in the days after the trail he took the boxes home. Something about remembering him since no one else was going to... and then reality finally sunk back in and he just left them because he couldn't bring himself to think about it. About Jack, the trial, the betrayal...
Suddenly Miss Fey's head lifted, though her eyes remained closed. Her fingers brushed over the embroidered patterns on the bandana, aimlessly at first but soon she was tracing the lines of the stitches. The expression on her face was one of reaching for something just out of her grasp. And there was... something. It's not as though she was glowing or the temperature suddenly changed or anything theatrical like that, but there was something that made it feel like she wasn't quite there. Like she was halfway out the door even though she was sitting right in front of him.
Will allowed himself a little belief.
Her face was turned to the rafters for perhaps a minute. Then she slowly lowered her head, her lips moving ever so slightly as if she was almost talking to herself. Her bangs obscured her face. After another few minutes she stopped tracing patterns on the bandana and gripped it tightly. Her shoulders drew in, as if she was shivering, and then with a long sigh she relaxed.
There was something.
It was... it was as though her shoulders got a little broader, her arms not quite as slim as they were, the hands griping the bandana less elegantly feminine. Those hands unclenched and were held palm up as Miss Fey presumably looked at them; her bangs were still obscuring her eyes. And her bangs... it was subtle, but they weren't a straight line anymore. They were swept to the sides just a little more than before, a little more ragged.
She stopped looking at her hands and gently lifted the bandana from her lap. Her thumb brushed over its surface and her chin tilted up enough for Will to see the sad, nostalgic smile that graced her lips.
It didn't make sense.
Will stared as she bowed her head again and seemed to notice how she was sitting. She shifted so she was cross-legged, tugging self consciously on the gray slacks she donned before she began. The way she sat spoke nothing of an excitable young girl, or even the collected medium. Her hands found their way to her knees. Unladylike, unlike her. She was slouching. She was sitting like a man.
Will stared as she lifted her head and he saw the same apologetic grin that Jack had given him when the Evil Magistrate missed a mark but the Steel Samurai was the one getting yelled at. That was when Jack started talking to him. When they started becoming friends.
"It... it worked?"
Miss Fey looked up and to the side and scratched her cheek the way he would when he was embarrassed. When she spoke, she didn't sound the same... it was her voice, but the tone and the words... "I guess it did?"
On the train he reasoned that if it did work, he'd be so shocked that he'd be unable to speak. He was wrong.
It finally caught up to Will. The anger and resentment that had been brewing beneath the surface ever since the truth had been revealed came rushing to the surface. His sense left him and he slammed his hands down on the floor hard enough to make the candles wobble dangerously.
"I guess it..." his sense tried to take hold of his tongue and failed, "Jack, you framed me. You tried to take everything away from me." His volume climbed to Steel-Samurai-public-appearance levels. "Why?"
She blinked and leaned back a little, obviously surprised that Will was raising his voice. He was surprised that he was raising his voice, but he just couldn't stop himself. The floodgates were open and he was just along for the ride.
And it just kept coming. "Jack, you were my friend! We went out to lunch and we laughed about things and we shared confusion over everything Sal ever said, we... we..." he faltered, "... we... damnit, Jack! Was it all a lie? Every time you smiled at me, every time you... we..." but it was Miss Fey, cute excitable Maya, and he couldn't tell her, couldn't say it. Even though it wasn't her.
"Will, I..." he couldn't look at her, "I never..."
It wasn't.
Will's eyes snapped back to Maya's, all the wrong color but the way she was looking at him was right, and that shouldn't have been enough but in that moment it was. And it took that burning core of anger and froze it, not cooling it, but transforming it into an impenetrable wall of cold and calculating rage. When he opened his mouth he didn't yell; the low whisper was much, much worse.
"Were you planning this when you had sex with me?"
She wasn't surprised. Any lingering doubts he had that this really was Jack were swept away.
Jack met Will's icy gaze and immediately looked away, running his hands over the bandana still in his lap. Traced the patterns without looking, each color in turn, taking slow, forcibly even breaths. Will waited.
"You know what?" at last Jack spoke, "The way you were before... in a world that Dee controlled, the way you were was the one thing that made me feel there might be something good left. And now..." his shoulders tensed and he slumped with palpable shame, "God, what have I done to you?"
"You framed me."
Jack flinched as if he'd been stabbed, partially from the words but mostly because of the emotionless tone.
"What have I done..." he buried his face in one hand while the other held his bandana as if it was a lifeline, "I never... God, Will, I never wanted to hurt you!"
The cold rage still building was starting to scare Will, but he couldn't stop it.
"You did."
The hand fell away and tired eyes met the icy gaze again. This time Jack didn't look away. Still clutching his bandana he unfolded his legs and crawled forward, reaching out to touch Will's face with his free hand. Will leaned back; he wasn't about to let Jack near him.
"Will, please..." he reached out again.
Will turned away.
There was a pause and then the frustrated growl that was a commonplace during the really hard fight scenes back on the Steel Samurai set, and suddenly Will found himself with a lapful of angry Jack. Fingers threaded through his unruly hair and gripped painfully hard, using that hold to forcibly turn Will's head around. Will's hand automatically came up to disengage Jack's but he was already leaning in with a different growl, distinct in intent to someone who heard it so many times in the dark of the night, in the haze of alcohol...
Jack froze a bare centimeter from his lips. With a sigh that he could taste Jack shifted and buried his face in scruffy beard.
"This isn't," his voice was muffled but the awkwardness was clear, "this isn't me."
Will was suddenly acutely aware of the body straddling his hips and pressed against his chest. Whatever magic was at work made it more Jack, but that didn't change the fact that it was Miss Fey. The cold rage slipped away and was replaced by the hot flush of deep embarrassment. Will tried to gently disengage her but Jack held on tight, and the only way to get him off was to hurt her.
"Will," there was that voice still muffled by his neck, "I wasn't trying to frame you. I wasn't trying to kill Dee... I just wanted her to leave me alone. I was going to try... I don't know." Jack's arms tightened around Will's shoulders. "Everything I hadn't said before, anything that might work... the only reason she held it over me was because Manuel was her lover... and it was a god damn accident, I wasn't trying..." a small, humorless laugh, "damn fence. Ruined everything twice..."
Will heard him. He wanted to believe him. The part of him that didn't die at the trial needed to believe him.
"Mr. Wright said-"
"Smart man. I would have thought the same thing, but it wasn't..."
Will swallowed around the growing lump in his throat. "You drugged me...?"
"I..." the arms tightened again, and again there was guilt radiating off of Jack, "I'm sorry. But Dee said it had to be private, and if I was myself then the security lady..."
Can't trust him can't trust him, were the words running through Will's mind, can't trust -- God it all fits -- no, it can't, just can't... no...
He crumbled.
Jack's desperate embrace was returned and they both sagged with relief. Will clung to him and cried, cried for the first time since the night after the trial when he clung to his pillow and a bottle of Jack Daniels and sobbed. That burning anger and frozen rage bled away, replaced by the most depressing relief that he'd ever known because the body he held didn't belong to Jack.
"It wouldn't... we never would have worked anyway," Jack mumbled into Will's hair after a long, aching breath. The first time Jack kissed his cheek, the first time Jack showed him a real kiss, hot sticky nights with a hand on his hip and those little moans Jack would make... Will remembered it all in that moment.
"Jack-"
"No," that humorless, hopeless laugh, "we work... worked on a children's show, we're both men... hell, Will, I'm fifteen years older than you." A long, shuddering breath. "Don't get me wrong... what we had... it gave me hope again. And I could never resist when... but it couldn't have worked."
Jack pulled away and smiled a humorless smile while he gently caressed Will's cheek.
"You deserve so much better than my bitterness anyway. And you'll find that person and it will be... it'll be what you should have..."
Jack buried his nose in that perpetually tangled hair again.
"Will... I have to go."
Will crushed Jack against him, afraid to let go. Not after he learned that Jack didn't frame him, that he was wrong about his friend, his lover.
"I'm sorry," he choked out between the sobs that he couldn't stop.
There was the curve of smiling lips against his neck.
"Don't bother setting the record straight... you're the only one I wanted to know. And live, or I'll haunt you."
Another humorless laugh, this time from Will's end.
A few seconds later, the strange masculine quality melted away and it was unmistakably Maya Fey who he held in his arms. He was so distressed he couldn't even muster the embarrassment at the fact that she was still straddling his lap. His arms fell away as Miss Fey leaned back, blinked a few times, and looked at him with confusion. Her eyes widened when she saw the tears on his face.
Without a word she slid off of his lap onto the floor beside him, nearly catching herself on fire in the process. After blowing out the candles and tucking her legs beneath herself once more, she gently but firmly pulled Will into her arms. It reminded him of how his sister would comfort her little brother after a bad dream... he clung to her and drank up her silent comfort. She never said a word, never once asked him what happened while she was out of control of her body. Once he'd spent his tears she simply stood and excused herself to take off the unfamiliar slacks, returning with a piece of cake and a cup of soothing tea.
He ate in silence, the sugar helping take the edge off the complete emotional drain. It wasn't a happy ending... he wasn't even sure if it was better than what he had before. It just was. Depressing, devastating...
The cake was good.