Sidestory:
Locked Inside My Head
by Angie
He was stuck. For the first time in his life, Jackson Reilly could not draw as he wished, could not control his long sensitive fingers and direct the stick of charcoal where he wanted it to go. Dully, he stared at the paper in front of him. Smudged, dark, torn from too much rubbing. It was merely the latest attempt; its fellows lay like dead leaves around the lanky brunette’s feet. Half-done, ruined sketches stared up at him with accusing eyes.
He kept drawing those same eyes over and over. The same face. Her face. Part of him wanted to give in to the compulsion, to just draw her properly. Then he could put the baby in her arms and put her love standing beside her. Part of him wanted to draw Theodore Parfett so badly that it tasted like copper in his mouth. He couldn’t, though. She never let him through the sickroom doors. He had never really seen the face of the man that his soul-sister, his more-than-sister, loved. And, sadly, that was the smallest perversion in the whole situation.
Situation. Jack roughly tore the half-finished drawing form his tablet, balled it up, and threw it across the apartment. Jace was not a situation. Her pain and her love, Parfett and their baby were not situations. Situation was a Tyche word. Cold, calculating. Jack shuddered and hunched over the table in front of him. He was getting stronger; he could feel him pushing at the edges of consciousness lately, prodding for weak spots. He was so cold, didn’t have a heart, didn’t have a conscience, Jack thought. His other self could be charming as a snake oil salesman. He knew it; he had watched from within his own head as Tyche wooed and won the likes of Hecate and Thalia.
Only Jace saw through him, it seemed. Only Jace. So much of his life had become "only Jace" lately. Was Jace eating? Was she sleeping? Was she having nightmares?
Eyes closed, Jack suddenly tugged his t-shirt over his head and dropped it to the floor. Sitting back in his chair, in the middle of his apartment, everything dimly lit and ghostly, his pale skin almost glowed. Thin, tired, strung-out. He had not been sleeping well because he knew she had been having nightmares; so had he. He had not been eating well; it was more important that she ate, for her and the baby growing within. His ribs were more prominent than when he had first moved to Roanoke. No matter how often Mrs. Kellen invited him to dinner, it was not enough. Thinner but tougher. Every line of his lanky frame had been converted into lean muscle. Eating was somewhere low on the list. Far below simply surviving. All of them surviving. He was just Jack. Not that important.
It was more important that no one else got hurt, too, that no one else would lie in the silently deadly hospital like Theodore Parfett. Jace’s love. The father of Jace’s baby. Oh, god, it kept coming back to her.
Jack’s hand wandered up, his scarred palm pressing against his scarred shoulder. He could feel her. Just off in the distance. He knew where she was. She was sitting, silent vigil, beside his bed, waiting for him to open his eyes and be hers again.
"Oh, Jace, darlin’..." He bit his tongue hard, sudden, painful. No, damn you, Tyche. You are not going to touch her. Dropping his head onto the table, Jack sighed. "Jace, he is yours, was yours, will be yours... And you’re his and this has to work out because you can’t keep going like this."
Because if you break, I break and I can’t protect you all the time and I can’t protect the others all the time and I can’t stop feeling Tyche...
In the silence of his apartment, sending a quick prayer out to a God he didn’t really believe in, Jackson Reilly broke down. For himself. For Jace. For Theodore. For Sophie and Wilma and Rhiannon and Perdix and... Please don’t let her feel this...