angermanaging | IC contact (TuShanshu)

Yeah. This place changes the rules... the ones we thought couldn't be changed.

[ Jack remembers that conversation too and it's something that's been in the back of his mind, lurking just below the surface. Especially given how suddenly people disappeared, here one moment and gone the next and it was an uncomfortable knot in his stomach. The spirit thought, maybe that's why I told him, just now... because there was the a fear (not unfounded) of the risk that he'd never get the chance.

He thinks, he should be uncomfortable about having things guessed about him but the awkwardness doesn't come. So he nodded finally, affirming Bruce's observation. He had been alone for a very long time, in more ways than one. Alone in being unseen, alone in having no guidance, alone in having no one he could rely on except himself. ]

[He's not surprised to have his guess confirmed. It makes sense. The pieces that he knows of Jack's life fit together that way; and Bruce might not know much about spirits, but he does know that part of the definition is immortality. By nature they tend toward the incorporeal, the abstract and the unreal. It's easy for him to imagine it as lonely, with his own experience drifting in and out of other's lives, as unseen as he could be. And for Jack it would be so many more years, when Bruce already felt like the nine he'd been on the run were so long they were erasing the ones that had come before it.

He knows, too, what it's like to lose a chance. He'd known it before he got here, and had it confirmed since with disappearances. Bruce doesn't begrudge him the impulse not to leave things unstated, when you never knew and couldn't trust that sudden external events wouldn't sweep them away from you. But Betty, and those here, had begun to make him believe that period of loss might always be eventually ended.

Lighter and almost wry,] Always seems like just when you give up is when someone comes along to prove you wrong.

[ The change in tone and words prompt a similar reaction from Jack, the heaviness in his gaze lightening once again. ]

You'd almost think they were doing it on purpose, huh? Ought to give those people a piece of my mind.

[ He withdraws his hands from the pocket of his sweater, takes his staff from where it was leaning innocuously against the wall, layering a fresh crackle of frost across the old wood. ]

I should get going.

[Bruce sets his cup aside and straightens up to say goodbye. He's still not sure he'd really helped any, but Jack had said that it made a difference, so he'll believe him. After a certain point, there's only so much you can do for someone else, in any case.

The window's still open from where he'd come in, and Bruce reflexively walks over to it to see him out.] Don't be a stranger, [he says, half-joking, half-serious.]

[ Jack hops up, rests one leg bent beneath him on the sill and nods. ]

I won't.

IC contact (TuShanshu)

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