strangetrip | [EP] I am made of stars

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[EP] I am made of stars - OTA

It was night and everything smelled like the sea.

Snow White lay spread-eagle in middle of the parking lot, staring up at the stars. Her hair fanned around her head, inky black and, seeing as she hadn’t bothered to cut it since her arrival, growing almost absurdly long.

The sun had set over an hour ago and the sky was full into the black. The moon, not quite full but still nearly so, shone down silver and cool like a single huge, impassive eye. The sight of so much sky and so little horizon left her feeling dizzy, as though if she could forget the feeling of pavement under her back she might float upward and be lost in that eternity up there. It reminded her distantly of Mrs. H’s mirror and how it had caught the moon in its glass. But not enough to spoil the view. Not enough to make her afraid.

She’d had the nightmare again last night, the one where she was caught in the room full of fire. In the beginning it came every night. Then slowly but surely, it became less frequent. She hadn’t burned through the night in months. Logically, it would be months again before the fire, but she still couldn’t quite face going in, lying down, and closing her eyes.

She thought of Sansa and--because she had never asked--wondered if the stars in Westeros were different from the ones above her now. She wondered if that velvet black had a texture, and then if it was stupid to wonder that. She named all the constellations and stars she knew, some from her childhood observations, some from books she’d read in the library. Her gaze fixed for a time on Polaris.

She didn’t think anybody was around to hear her. “It’s so far away that no matter where we are, that’s still north.” It was a wild thought.

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Snow inhaled, and while a flash of Mrs. H's attempt to murder her went through her mind, she didn't let it ruin this. Exhaled. "I'm not gonna be the one to tell you to change that course. Most of 'em talk too much for my money." And there were just far too many excitable idiots for their small population.

Jag smiled a little, mostly thinking of Jake. "I don't mind that so much. You'd have fucking hated one of my old roommates."

"Only if he expected me to talk back," Snow answered with a shrug. "Or he was a fucking idiot." That tended to be the problem with the people who talked. They fell in love with the sound of their own voice or didn't actually pay any attention to who they were talking at.

"No, he was all right," Jag answered, his voice as fond as his look. He still thought Snow would have hated him, but it wasn't as if Jake was here. Fuck, he would lose his mind being stuck here. Jag couldn't imagine Jake existing somewhere without a proper nightlife, not when he made going to Blackpool for a couple of days sound like a dull and dreary nightmare.

And, well, it was Blackpool, but still.

Snow nodded. "So what's he like aside from yammering?"

"He's..." Fuck, it felt good to talk about him in the present tense. "Really warm, and lively, and... He'd drag me out clubbing when I didn't realise that was what I needed. He'd talk until I was ready to talk. But he could also be too much, sometimes." He shrugged. "He gave a shit, for real, and he didn't judge me."

He'd switched back to past tense without meaning to.

Snow noticed the slip, but she didn't say anything. That didn't seem like the kind of comment that would lead to anything good. "Sounds like he's all right."

"He's brilliant," Jag confirmed, then smiled a little. "It probably helped that our other roommate was the quiet type." Balance, or something.

Snow nodded. "I just had Bear. He was quiet, so we could go whole days barely saying anything. But he didn't get rattled by anything." Whereas she was--and sometimes still could be--jumpy and wary.

"Nothing?" Jag asked, instinctively. In his experience, everyone had something that rattled them, even if some of them had much fewer 'something's than others.

"Nothing he let me see, anyway," Snow said with a shrug. "A standing bear doesn't run."

Jag took another drag on his cigarette, letting a few seconds drip by, until he had to ask, "Are we talking actual bear, or...?" Hey, he'd met Trinket. Anything was possible.

Snow shook her head, not minding the question. She'd had an actual bear back in her father's house, and stranger things had happened.. "Man. Cheyenne. Henry Standing Bear. He took me in."

Right, Red man. If there was a better way to put it, Jag didn't know it; he was going with what Em had called her friend Dani. "Good of him," Jag said, but they weren't empty words. He knew the gratitude he owed Drina and Kennick, knew he wouldn't be half the man he was without them. It was a sobering notion, thinking of how much worse his life could've gone, how much worse of a human being he could've been.

Snow nodded and took another drag off her cigarette. She was quiet a long moment before she said, "It was. I was fucking awful." The first time she'd met him she'd almost punched him in the face. The only reason she hadn't was because she hadn't been able to land the hit. "He was more patient with me than I deserved."

Drina and Kennick had been like that, too. Paul. And Emma. Jag took another drag, then turned the cigarette between his fingers thoughtfully. "You reckon everyone's got people like that in their lives? Or we're just the lucky ones?"

"We're lucky," Snow said with the certainty of someone who'd spent the majority of her life with no one to care thing one about her, not really. "Or maybe other worlds just suck less than mine. I don't know."

Jag thought it over, then nodded. "I think we're lucky, yeah. I mean, either way, really." Even if her world particularly sucked. It made her even luckier. And him too, by extension.

"Ain't a word I thought I'd've used," Snow mused. Though even when her stepmother had been trying to kill her, what had it been but luck that had kept her from actually dying?

"Me neither, for a while," Jag stated, and shrugged. "But I was a bit of a wanker back then. Still am," he admitted, after a beat. "But a bit less of one, maybe."

"I dunno." Snow didn't smile, she so rarely did, but her eyes brightened. "You seem all right to me."

Jag smirked at her, then lay back on the ground, pillowing his free hand under his head. "Well, you've got the improved version."

Snow snorted, and for a while she was content to smoke in silence. It was only when her cigarette was gone and she'd stubbed it out on the ground that she asked quietly, "Ever have nightmares?"

Once his own cigarette was finished, Jag had set it down on the ground as he killed the cherry, then started playing with a lick of flame winding around his fingers, until her question made him look up at her. "Doesn't everybody?"

Not the same way; he didn't reckon his nightmares were ever as bad as Curnen's, given how fucking poignant they were when she was awake.

Snow nodded. Logically of course she knew that, but it was another thing entirely to actually talk about it. "I'm not even scared of mine anymore. Just exhausted whenever it comes up fucking again."

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