I'm good at shooting people, cracking wise, and pretending to know how to fight.

Reds and blues and yellows drifted across the cab windows, filtering in and out of Jack’s vision like splotches of paint on an empty canvas. It had been weeks since the show, longer still since he and Dane had figured out their poodoo in this latest round of jam-your-trauma-edges together.

And life, well, life had a way of fading in and out of focus. One minute everything was acute, a crisis. Then, for days, it blended together in a soup of gigs, odd jobs, recording studios, prep for community Christmas parties and Sunday morning coffees on a ratty sofa and light-hearted arguments about whether to cut vegetables.

Then, before you knew it, you were here: in the back of a cab, speeding back to your crappy apartment in the middle of the night, your partner sprawled in the back seat with you with his eyes set hazily on the pavement and your eardrums muffled by the loud bass of a party you'd already left.

“I don’t know why I’m so exhausted,” Jack said, watching red drift into blue; the back of his head tickled with the sensation of a thousand lives whizzing past, hidden behind old brownstones. New York’s blood pressure was up, he thought distantly. ( A moment in liminal space. )

[[ establishy. nfb due to distance ]]

The last couple of days had been... weird. A tension in the air, that wasn't really Jack's to break, but that no one else wanted to break either. So he was glad when they finished their last show and piled up into the van. Relieved.

Many hours later, having been forcibly talked out of the driver's seat yet again, he found himself in the back seat. Still tense. Not sleeping.

Everyone else was silent. There was rain ticking against the windows of Trent's van. And he reached for his phone, and turned it on to the new Yellow Eyes album. Let himself get lost for a while, then.

( It had stopped raining by the time they pulled into the Waffle House parking lot. )

[[ nfb, nfi, unless you're dying to call him at 3 AM ]]

Jack was antsy. He had been since breakfast. Nothing had helped. Not Trent dragging him on a 'manly man-date' to the racecar track, not Jill's advice to stick his head under the tap, and now, not taking a walk around the block of their hotel with Dane.

His eyes just kept skittering across the road, ( like he was looking for danger. )

Fucking touring. Fucking music. Life was a lot easier when all he needed to do was save people from evil space wizards. At least that had an easily-definable goal to hit. This? He looked up at the Indianapolis skyline as Dane took the right towards their hotel, and rubbed his half-gloved hands together to ward off the cold.

This was terrifying.

[[ open for phone calls etc ]]

It was a nice, chill, not-too-cold and not-too-rainy New York fall day. A good time to be indoors, on a very rare gig- and festival-free Saturday, listen to some music, drink some cocoa, enjoy being alive.

Or to be hanging upside down off the back of the couch, staring at an artsy black-and-white picture of yourself standing on a Chinatown street corner with the words INTERVIEW WITH THE BOXER printed on it in large letters in the corner.

"I really don't know how this happened," Jack muttered, as the blood out of his extremities and into his head.

"They noticed us at Metal Fest last month, called you, came over, interviewed you, then made you stand outside looking serious for two hours while a guy took pictures," Dane called from the kitchen, where he was desperately trying to unwrap a frozen pizza.

"Ha, ha." He squinted at it, at the answer below the opening question - why they'd called the album 'Boxer'. "'I realized, I’m a boxer. I’m the guy who gets knocked down and gets back up. But I’m also the guy who has trouble sharing my feelings - I almost said fee-fees -, who’d rather hit back than open up.'," he read aloud. "Did I actually say that? Space. I sound like one of those internet kids. But pretentious."

"You also told them that you got knocked in the head a lot," Dane offered, "So I feel like you've covered most of your bases."

"And I told them I meditate," Jack muttered. "They're going to think I'm alt metal Enya or something."

"I did appreciate all the nice things you said about me," Dane said brightly. "I'm definitely bundling that mag up and sending it to Lana later, so you can't get out of it."

And just like that, Jack immediately rolled up the magazine and tucked it into his jacket. Yes, upside down. "Absolutely not!"

The plastic around the pizza finally came loose. "It's hilarious you think that's the only copy of Grindstone I got this morning," Dane said brightly. "I already put hers in the mail."

"I hate you!" Jack bellowed.

"You said you were graaaaaatefuuuuuul for me," Dane sing-songed, and popped the pizza into the oven.

"With partners like you, who needs enemies," Jack groused, and pushed himself upright. He stared back at the magazine again. 'Glazed Windows'. It’s complicated to talk about this stuff, right? About being in that place where you can’t go on, but you also know that you can’t stop. Of knowing you can’t fix the former, so you wind up hoping that everyone else around you will finally stop keeping you from stopping. Grappling with that. That’s all I can say about that song.

"I talk too much," he said, quieter. He could feel Dane smiling from the kitchen, but he didn't look up.

[[ open for phone calls, texts, or visits from she who lives near here now ]]

The past week had been... something. Jack was still working it all out in his head, the talk with Anakin, the talk with Rey. It wasn't even - just - the substance of it that kept bouncing around his head.

It was his own tone.

The sofa cushions sagged abruptly under someone else's weight. "I'm happy to let you brood, if you want," Dane said. "But Persistence of Time stopped spinning fifteen minutes ago, so I thought I'd check in."

( Jack eyed the record player like it was personally at fault. )

[[ nfb, nfi et al ]]

Another day, another show, this time upstate. Dane and Trent had gone on ahead earlier that morning to get to their rental. But a bunch of Jill's gear was still locked up at practice, never mind some of Dane's amps, and so it fell to the drummer and the singer to roll all of their stuff out onto the street while they waited for their ride to show up.

"I swear if short range portals weren't so expensive, I would never drive anywhere again a day in my life," Jack groused, as he attempted to peer over the edge of the kick drum, just to make sure he wasn't about to bowl someone over.

"Oh please," Jill said, as hauled two of her toms over her shoulder. "You're too much of a control freak. You're going to grab the wheel in that car as soon as it gets here and we'll have to wrench it back out of your hands when we get there."

"I could give that up for short range portals." Jack squatted down to set the kick drum down by the side of the road. He stretched up, tilting his head sideways in a desperate attempt to dispell the crick in his neck. "Maybe with some kind of speeder that actually goes up the stairs, so we don't keep having to do this."

( And then we'll get a unicorn... )

[[ nfb, nfi. ]]

People'd be less impressed by the thrantas if they knew how karking stupid they were. Yeah, Jack had flown one once or twice as a kid; it was hard to grow up on this planet without it. But he viscerally remembered the stupid look in the thing's eyes, the way it would get distracted.

And his dad, grumbling about the wasted money the day after. Sitting in a chair at the medcenter, waiting for the kolto patches to be removed from Jaq's arms.

It'd been a long day out here. There wasn't much left of the town he'd grown up in. It'd been relentlessly renovated, older buildings removed and replaced with new, prettier ornate synthstone. If he had to take a guess, he assumed the people he'd grown up with had been priced out of the neighborhood.

Sorry, 'moved to more suitable housing'. It was Alderaan, after all.

And then they'd headed out, towards the mountains, a little more like the hiking trips they took back on Earth. But the mountains were taller and more majestic, and every once in a while, a thranta herd would come out from behind a snowy peak, and fly past the sun, and the sunlight would reflect on its wings, and Jack-- well, Jack wanted to grab a pebble and throw it out there with the Force. See if he could nail one.

( But he wasn't the only one there, and he knew it was an immature reflex. )

[[ nfb due to distance, can be open for comms/phone calls/messages ]]

"Wow," said Jack, as he stared up at the sign 'Some Hot Hipster Brewpub With a Really Dumb Name' that hung off the side of the building. "Irony and hipster, all at once? I feel like I just got sandblasted in the face by the Pacific Northwest."

Hi, Summer.

[[ for her ]]

Another weekend, another series of shows. Or, at least, there would be. For now, Dane had dragged Jack down to some hidden-away coffee place that probably turned into a bar at night, with the local alternative station playing just-slightly-too-loud in the background and a barista who absolutely did not want to do latte art.

Which was fine. Jack didn't drink lattes.

“I don’t know why he’s still getting to me," he muttered. “I thought I'd been therapized out of this."

( What did he say again, exactly? )

[[ nfb due to distance, can be open to phone calls/texts ]]