Nothing terribly long, but it is Jandy. The first portion is continuing off my last drabble challenge, with Jandy and Gage Continuing Escapee Adventures, and then I found that I had originally written that locker room scene with Jandy and Dechlan in a notepad. So I typed that up and am throwing it in here as a bonus.
The train hummed and thrummed around Jandy in a way that was not as soothing as having Dechlan’s activities running in the back of her head, but it was getting there. Anything besides the dead silence that had been making it difficult to concentrate during her waking hours.
Again, almost without meaning to or even thinking about it, she searched for him, seeking relief from the echoing quiet that made a near-physical ache rise in her chest.
It wasn’t as bad as when she’d lost Jane—she doubted anything would ever be as bad as that. Dechlan was still alive; their connection was unharmed, intact, just weakened by distance.
Lost in her thoughts, Jandy wasn’t prepared when a bump on the tracks below them made the car jolt and that motion caused her to slide on her make-shift cot enough for the pain to flare across her upper abdomen.
A quiet gasp escaped her before she could help it. Gritting her teeth as an afterthought, Jandy tried to breathe slow and even, lying still, her mobile hand fisted, in an attempt to keep from irritating any other portion of her injured anatomy. Not an easy thing to do, to say the least.
Jandy was just quelling the urge to give in and voice a handful of choice words—a habit Dechlan had made a point of breaking her of and the only reason she underwent the effort to not—when Gage spoke.
“You okay?” He sounded both weary and wary, neither of which were too surprising.
She took a moment to get herself together before speaking, reminded of how little she actually knew about either of the Daxtons in those moments. “Yeah. I would just give a lot for a bottle of some hard alcohol right about now. Or, you know, morphine or something.”
There was a snort of humor off to her right, out of sight. Granted, most everything was out of sight as her position on her back only put the four sides of the train car and the roof within eyesight.
Needing a distraction, Jandy gripped the crate under her with her useable hand and used that hold to elevate herself. Gage, sitting with his back to a near identical crate on the ground, watched her progress with a cautious gaze, but didn’t offer to aid her. Yet. Jandy was grateful. She would have to learn to deal with this new, unfamiliar pain and the sooner, the better for both of them.
Once she was upright, nails digging into the wood beneath her, she forced out “What’s the plan then, chief?”, desperate for something else to think about besides the way her injuries seemed to be set on fire, her head pounded, and everything else ached like she’d been thrown from a bull.
The man glanced at the expensive silver watch on his wrist, the long sleeves of his dress shirt from their op the prior night rolled up past his elbows. “We’re going to get off at the next stop, which should be a fair-sized hub. We need to figure out how far we’ve come, get a new set of clothes, and see if there’s anything we can do to make movement easier for you. We’ve got a long ways to go yet.”
The promptness of his reply told her that he’d already been working out the different steps they needed to take in order to continue further for some time.
His reminder of their clothing state caused Jandy to hazard a glance down at her own evening wear. Former evening wear. Now she wanted to be out of the torn, blood-stained, and uncomfortable dress as soon as possible. If she hadn’t been so familiar with Gage, the state of her disattire in his presence would have made her edgy. But she was at least comfortable having him around and she wouldn’t have put it past Dechlan to read the male Daxton his right when it came to her. Or, his lack thereof.
Four months linked mentally to Dechlan had allowed her the chance to realize just how much protecting those he cared for was a part of who he was.
Burying the ache that rose from the loss of her counterpart’s presence, Jandelyn moved to sit on the floor, favoring her side, diagonal from Gage, and let her head lean back on the crate. They would have a few more hours of travel in this unorthodox transport and then she would get to relearn how to walk with cracked—or broken, it was hard to tell—ribs.
//
Jandy sat on the floor of the small thrift shop in Stoney Run, a decent-sized city with a larger train depot then anything much else, Gage had informed her, trying to recoup her energy. The not-so-stealthy walk from the far end of the train tracks had been a long, grueling excursion, even with Gage’s help.
Now he rifled through the racks of clothes with a focus reminiscent of Dechlan while she worked to not curl into a ball of pain. The proprieter was already eyeing them with the look of someone comfortable calling the cops on suspicious patrons. And boy, did they fit that ticket, between the visible bruises, the tangible injuries, and their attention-drawing clothing. Gage’s jacket was around her shoulders, shielding her immobilized shoulder and arm but doing nothing for the raw scrapes and deep purple marks on her legs.
Pushing her loose hair, with only the remnants of its curl, out of her eyes, Jandy considered weighing in on what Gage was taking off the rack, but knew that whatever he got would be functional. Not pretty, but Jandy was done with dressy for a very long time. Not to mention, the fewer eyes they drew, the better for everyone.
Gage snapped his fingers, drawing her out of her thoughts with a jerk. “Hey. You should look at the jeans. I want to be out of here in ten minutes. Need a hand?”
Arching a brow at him, Jandy got herself up using her good hand planted on the ground and making sure not to stretch out her damaged side. Coming to her feet brought her into the stream of burning daylight that was coming through the filthy front windows and illuminated the water-stained walls. Squinting against the light, the female turned to find the women’s pants.
“Check for small sweatpants over there,” Jandy commented to her companion as she started rifling, looking for anything close to her size that wouldn’t be a pain to wear.
She heard Gage pause in his own search, then resume a few beats later. “Copy. Look at the shoes, too.”
Just what she needed—a reminder of her scraped and dirty feet, the cost of losing those admittedly-stupid heels sometime before they’d gotten on the train, while she’d been unconscious. Letting a silent sigh escape her and with her bad arm braced along her battered ribcage, Jandy settled into her seaerch, trying to keep from imagining that Decklan was nearby.
//
The sky had clouded over by the time they had found clothes, gotten changed, and straggled back to the rail depot. Gage left her out beside the building’s wall, the hood of her ratty sweatshirt pulled up to cast the bruises on her face in shadow. He wore a ball cap that would perform the same function along with a dark gray jacket that complimented her blue sweatshirt and faded denim jacket that was a couple sizes too large in order to accommodate both her bound arm and the sweatshirt that kept it from sight.
Rain started to spit from the dark clouds overhead, staining the sidewalk and splattering on her pants. Jandy let her head fall back, protected under the roof’s awning. Everything was happening more quickly than she was almost able to keep up with.
It’d been twenty-four hours since she’d stood in the bathroom back at base, feeling like she’d be ill to her stomach with nerves. Since then, she’d been a prize on Gage’s arm, had the snot beaten out of her, escaped from the organization that had killed her sister, and was now on the run with a man she knew hardly anything about. Without the man that she wanted most at her side right now.
The only thing about Blogger is that I have to take my documents from Microsoft Word, transfer them to a Notepad, so that the format isn't totally screwy on here. Thus, it doesn't transfer over my italics, and I have to go back through and put them in and it's just a pain in general. Just to be random.
Onto the retake! Just as a mild warning, this one could be seen as a bit more mature than the last one.
Jandy was fairly sure that the ill-tempered European woman who’d put a day’s worth of time into her appearance would have an aneurysm—or at least a fit—if she threw up right now.
Trembling hands gripped the edge of the locker room sink. Slow breath in, even longer out. Get it under control.
Dechlan was detectable on the fringes of her thoughts, but he felt distracted and Jandy was fine with that because she couldn’t have handled his reaction at that moment. Anymore emotion than was already roiling in her and she really would be ill.
The brown of her eyes had been covered with a pair of contact lenses that were an eye-drawing azure and it was that gaze that stared back at her in the mirror.
The hard part was that Jandy knew what this was. She hadn’t been given any information on this job, but her appearance was telling.
When she and Jane had been living in Akita, she’d juggled two full time jobs and a part time when she had the energy to spare. One of those jobs had been as a serving girl in a high-class night club—a position she’d procured by not being one of the women her age addicted to drugs—that would get crazy around two in the morning on a regular basis.
Right now, her attire and make-up could have rivaled that of any of the women who had walked into that club on the arm of a man who man a point of showing how deep his pockets were.
The dark outlining to her eyes, the high pair of platform heels, the short hem and plunging back of the dress that matched her eyes. All of it had a purpose. Draw attention, intimidate lesser men, intoxicate those who thought they had a chance.
Jandy shifted to stand up straight, ignoring her churning stomach and stepping into her shoes, all too aware of how their height had been chosen to further augment the image she’d been created to fill.
Previously dark eyes flickered to the door, closed for the moment, then back to the mirror. Jandy wished she could say she had no idea how to be the type of woman who could fulfill this role, this… appearance. But she couldn’t, because this was who her mother had been, who her friends had been. This was the type of person she’d worked around for three years, day in and day out, and who she had learned to be when the moment called for it as a result.
Jandy knew how to walk like those women, talk like them, smile like them. Seduce like them. That’d been the world she’d struggled to keep both herself and her sister afloat in, when everyone else had been content to drown.
In the back of her mind, she felt Dechlan’s focus shift to her, but knew she wasn’t ready to face his thoughts—not yet. Her ability to keep him out was far, far less impressive than his, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know how to drown him out for the precious few minutes that she needed.
Finding a memory of a pounding beat, deafening lyrics, and the thump of her own heart, Jandy ran her hand through her loose hair. It, too, had undergone hours of treatment and the tousled look her short, brown locks now bore could easily have been hours of work or a happy accident, depending on the eye of the observer.
She practiced smiling, the blood red lipstick on her lips stretching to accommodate the expression. It looked real because she’d had to learn to hide the exhaustion, the stress, the hopelessness that had weighed heavily on her shoulders as she worked to support her family of two. All for naught, as it turned out.
Her smile took on a sardonic edge just as there was a light rap at the door that echoed through the locker room. Then Jandy realized that Dechlan was very there in her head, despite her thoughts drowning him out, and that he was waiting for her to let him in—literally and figuratively.
And there we go. Scribbles! And now I need to go work on science and my parents and I are watching The Island with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson. She's been kicking butt for a lot of years.
Thoughts, comments, and critiques are welcome, as always. Thanks for reading!
Ad astra per aspera.
To the stars, through difficulties.
