tushanshu_logs | [Closed] Walk Away

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[Closed] Walk Away

Characters: Jack Frost, Oliver Queen / PART TWO: + Kyle Rayner / PART THREE: + Connor Hawke / PART FIVE: + Zatanna Zatara
Date: Following this showdown and Jack's horrible excuse. Exact length of time to be determined.
Location: One of Tu Vishan's abandoned villages (as outlined here) near the shell's edge, a few hours outside Keeliai and by the mountains.
Situation: Taking issue with Oliver's plan of action, Jack has brought him outside the city to see if he can't get his head on straight. Part Two & Three: After their return, there are still some things to answer for.
Warnings/Rating: Ollie's probably not happy, so associated warnings there.

Jack had been out to these areas several times since his arrival, so he flew straight and unerring across the barren landscape, stirring up heavy storm clouds in his wake, pregnant with snow that was only partially intentional, reacting to his emotions. When they finally touched down at the outskirts of a burned husk of a village, Jack dragged Oliver's unconscious form into the most complete building. It wasn't great, but it had four walls and most of a roof and that was good because Oliver was heavy and it didn't help that Jack couldn't stop replaying their conversation in his mind, over and over.

"What if someone starts coming after you the way you're going after these kedan?!"

"Then I kill them."

"Wrong answer."

So when the man awakes, he will find himself under a blanket but sans boots (and said footwear being nowhere to be seen) and Jack sitting in the windowsill, looking out at a thick curtain of falling snow and humming something of a song under his breath.

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Jack is unsurprised when he returns to an empty house with a new armful of stubbornly scavenged wood, sighing an exhale of frost as he set it down and glad that it had not been snuffed out yet. The wind rises at his command, whistling out through the decrepit buildings to bring back the anomaly and whisper to the spirit where Oliver was.

He lifted into the air following the Wind's directions and comes down again to settle, one foot tucked behind the other leg atop the wall.

"Please come back, Oliver. You're too far to get anywhere safe from here, especially dressed like that. I didn't bring you out here to hurt you. You just need a break."

He feels the wind pick up like a harbinger, prepares to bolt, but it's already too late. Oliver shies out from underneath the shelter of the wall, backing away, one of the knives in his palm - it's barely the length of his thumb, pointless against someone who can call snow and freeze the ground between them without any visible effort.

All he can think of is Slade putting a blade against his neck, his voice practically gentle. I can do this in a way you will not feel.

"Let me go." Useless words, and he knows that, and he hates how there's a trace of that stupid, desperate kid turning the command into a plea.

"And leave you alone?" Jack finishes the unspoken part of the demand. He kneels, lays the staff lengthwise across the top of the wall and hops down from the wall, now technically unarmed.

"I can't... and I think people have done that enough to you." The teen holds out a hand, palm up. It brings him within grabbing reach of Oliver and he knows it, but he doesn't hesitate.

"Come on. There's sandwiches."

He measures the seconds in snowfall, fury and fear overlapping into a familiar knot of helplessness. There's no choice here. He could run, but Jack would stop him. Every time he plays the scenario out in his mind it ends with Oliver back here, in the spirit's chosen shelter, maybe tied up next time, or half-frozen, or completely disarmed.

Oliver edges his way around to the corner of the building, toward the rest of the village, keeping his eyes on Jack. When he reaches the place where he has no choice but to break eye-contact if he wants to keep moving, he knows he's made the inevitable decision. Defeat stings - but he's alive and in better health than he would be if he bolted.

The fire is low when Oliver ducks back under the overhang of the shelter's roof. He builds it up gently, letting the heat scald his fingers back into feeling. With the ebb of confrontation comes exhaustion, and Oliver is sorely tempted to bundle himself into the blanket and sleep until Jack decides it's time for them to talk.

It doesn't take long for the small fire to begin warming the interior of the small room, and Jack climbs up to the rafters to make sure there's a good enough space for the smoke to escape. Once he's up there though, he stays, laying on his back balanced on the narrow wooden beam, reaching up to paint the broken wooden slats with delicate ice.

When he looks down again, Oliver appears to be asleep and Jack hopes it's real and not feigned, going back to his artistry on the ceiling like a cathedral painter. It's what he does to be at ease, to think, and without realizing it the song lingering earlier in his mind comes back.

"When the mistletoe was green midst the winter's snows, sunshine in thy face was seen kissing lips of rose, Aura Lea, Aura Lea..."

At first it is feigned. A chance to gather his thoughts and see if there's some way out of this he hasn't come up with. Then the space starts to warm up, and Jack starts singing, and between the blanket and the fire and the song numbing him like a lullabye, Oliver's thinking muddies until he's less conscious than daydreaming. After an hour or two (longer?) he loses the fight with consciousness and sleeps.

It's the first uninterrupted stint he's had since he got to the turtle, and the first time in longer than that he's woken up without the help of a nightmare. The shell's glow leaking through the floor of the dilapidated building gradually eases him back up from the dark.

The confusion of consciousness is familiar by now, and he waits it out, until the pieces fall into place and he knows where he is and when. It's a disappointment. Somehow he hoped he'd wake up at home, or in his hideout. Regardless he doesn't move - instead watching the fire that hasn't gone out, probably thanks to Jack, and the way the orange goes faint against Tu Vishan's shell.

Edited 2013-02-25 21:19 (UTC)

"Sorry," Jack's voice comes from above Oliver where he's rolled over on the rafter, chin propped up on one hand while the other arm hangs down like a lazing snow leopard. "You got the wrong Guardian to give you good dreams, but I hope you at least slept okay."

Oliver starts to lever himself upright and bites off a groan. The bruised feeling from before has settled into every part of him in contact with the ground, stiffening joints and making his muscles twinge in new and inventive ways. That's ignoring the number that cold does on old injuries. Pins and needles in one knee tell him, helpfully, that the snow won't be letting up any time soon.

He lets himself take the rest of sitting up slow. It's not like he has much of an audience.

Oliver eyes the boy in the rafters, reminded uncomfortably who the prey animal and who the hunter is in this scenario. He resettles the blanket around his shoulders. "I slept."

Which is more than he can say on any given day.

Jack frowns a little as he hears the aborted groan, watches the man move in obvious pain. "You should probably take those painkillers," he said. "And in the bag I put some leaves for tea, if you want something hot to drink them with."

Then a pause followed by the awkward admission, "I don't actually know if you like tea, but it'd still be better than taking them dry. And then I thought maybe... we could talk. If you're feeling better," he added hurriedly.

Edited 2013-02-25 23:50 (UTC)

What is it, he almost asks, in reference to the tea. What's in it would be the next question.

Does it matter is the most relevant one.

The tea leaves are accompanied by the tools necessary to prep them - it doesn't take Oliver long to get a small pot of snow melting next to the fire, and he eats a portion of one of the sandwiches Jack mentioned.

Talking doesn't come as quickly. He drinks the tea, takes the aspirin, and cocoons himself in the blanket, watching the rafters with a practiced blankness that hides suspicion. "What do you want?"

"To help," is the unthinking, unhesitating reply as the winter spirit climbs down from the rafters and crosses his legs, settling with his back against the wall to Oliver's left. Maybe it's an unconscious thing, but he takes the only wall that doesn't put him between Oliver and the door.

"Do you believe me when I say I'm not going to hurt you?"

It always ends like this this, regardless of the circumstances. A greater power threatening or breaking or destroying a lesser one once it steps out of line. Kyle with his ring, Jack and his avalanche. With people like Connor or Batman the gap can at least be overcome. There are steps he can take to make up the difference, to become the greater power in that scenario, even if it takes time and work and planning. There's no fighting winter. He doesn't even understand the Lanterns, how they could exist, let alone how they work.

And then there's this. The carrot and the stick. The whip and the sugar cube. Punished for bad behavior and then coaxed back into the fold, until the next time. That thought at least puts a little spine back into him. Makes him promise himself that whatever Jack is really after he's not going to get it.

Clipped, precise, and final: "No."

Jack smiles a bit, unfazed by the reply. "I know... you didn't trust me in the alley, either."

Which is something of a half-step backwards, the teen thinks. They hadn't exactly been confidants, but Jack had not sensed mistrust from the man before.

"But that's all right," he continues. "Trust is like belief, you can't force it. You'll just break it if you try. But at least you didn't lie this time, so I'm happy anyway."

Oliver lets the silence return at that, because there's no immediate response to it. He'd expected Jack to at least try convincing him of good intent. It's a break from the pattern, and in spite of everything it loosens one of the knots of tension holding him together.

"How long are you going to keep me here?"

"Until we figure out what's wrong and how to fix it," Jack answered, meeting his gaze squarely. "You've gotten worse since you've been here, Oliver. Something had you so angry you wanted to attack anything that got in your way."

Blue eyes sharpened. "Something that had you ready to kill, like you're supposed to be God or something."

Yet then his expression softened slightly and he continued, "So I had to get you out of the city, because I don't know exactly what happened. But I couldn't take the risk of anything happening because of you -- or to you, either."

He might as well have said forever.

Escape jumps back to the top of Oliver's list of priorities. There's no point in keeping himself in one piece if he's going to be stuck here. He's done that once. The brochure didn't cover what came with the vacation package.

For the first time it hits Oliver that Jack isn't human. He's not a kid with more power than common sense - he isn't human. Until we fix you is a perfectly reasonable answer, apparently, and Oliver doesn't doubt Jack's ability and willingness to keep to that indeterminate deadline.

"They'll miss you," he says. It's the first thing he can think of. He's not even sure who he means by they. "They'll come looking."

"They'll be missing you too," Jack says. "But helping you is more important right now. I'll have plenty to apologize for later, I know that much."

He'll apologize to Oliver later too, truthfully and from his heart, when he thinks the man won't assume it's a farce.

"Do you want to talk about something else for a while?" He'll let Oliver lead the conversation as much as he wants.

He's panicking.

This place has opened up Pandora's proverbial box when it comes to the negative feelings he's managed to compartmentalize. Some of them he's tangled with since getting back to Starling City - fear, helplessness, distrust. But panic is something that belongs to the island. Panic belongs to the roar of the ocean and to a torturer's knife.

Oliver presses back into his corner, sinking into the blanket and trying to remember how to breathe. "This isn't helping. Let me go."

He wants to.

Jack wants to believe that making Oliver better was just so easy as that, but the Pandora's box analogy is accurate and the winter teen has gotten himself more entangled in this than (he should have) he had the right to be. So he steels himself, shakes his head, keeps his voice soft.

"I know it feels like it's easier to be alone, Oliver. But I'm here and I'm not leaving." Putting the blame on Jack himself, rather than restating Oliver's inability to leave. He notes the quick and shallow breaths, the tight clench of his hands in the blanket's material.

"So please... tell me. Why are you afraid?"

Just like that, Jack hands Oliver the knife. It's easy. A one-word, one-syllable solution.

You.

It's a measure of how much he's changed that he hesitates. Forces himself to think through the choking nausea to consequence.

He doesn't deserve that. It's Diggle and Oliver practically unravels at the blessing of a familiar voice. Tell him.

Tell him what?

"I was a prisoner," he says, atonal. He has to close his eyes - the fire reminds him of torchlight on the cages. "I was trapped for a long time."

Jack's chest feels tight like something is sitting on it but he nods slowly, his expression solemn to tell Oliver he understands exactly the depth of what he's being told.

I didn't know.

It wasn't any excuse and even if it was, he wouldn't dare. He was not (he wanted to believe) so callous.

"I don't want you to be trapped. Out here," one pale hand indicated the small hut lit only by the firelight, then pointed at Oliver's chest.

"Or in there."

He almost laughs. Let someone in. Thea's unyielding advice. He's trying. He's tried. It's hard, and he can't remember if it's supposed to be.

God does he miss his family.

"Little late for the last part," he finally says, and it sounds close to normal. The adrenaline whiplash is exhausting. "How did you... get us here?"

"It isn't," Jack disagreed immediately. "It just takes practice to remember."

Because Oliver must have known how at one point, Jack knows, and thinks it's still there under all these masks and arrows and that awful green face paint. He knows it because there's a carefully patched hole in the sleeve of his hoodie and beneath that had been an equally gentle patch on his arm that Oliver hadn't owed anybody, certainly not someone he'd been able to see for all of thirty seconds.

But he'll let this conversation rest for the moment, because it takes its toll. He reaches instead for a few more sticks to lay gently across the fire, careful not to smother it. The flames gutter slightly at his nearness but there's enough heat in the pit to keep it from doing any harm.

"We flew," he answered and gets back to his feet, moving towards the window. "Well, I flew and you rode. But don't worry, that's how we'll get back too, once this snow stops. Neither of us are walking that far."

"It isn't that easy. It isn't as easy as... practicing and remembering."

Though he has practiced. Pushed himself into fragile admissions of the truth. It's started to feel less like he's giving something up. More like he's paying out, somehow - earning the patience of friends and family.

"It won't change what I do."

Except what he does is who knows how far from here in a city that these people have never heard of. Oliver touches the exposed shell where it comes up to a gap in the floor. "I scare people," he says, quietly. "When I have to I kill people."

"But it's the right place to start," the teen finishes.

Jack is quiet for several long moments, almost as though Oliver's admission had gone unheard... but it had been very much received and he has to think (actually stop and think this time, Jack!) before he replies because he doesn't want (can't afford) to screw this up, not this time, he can't make a mess of (everything) the situation when it's so important.

"You have scared people," he finally says, pointedly putting the emphasis on the action rather than the person. "But not for the reasons you think."

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