Revik wouldn’t tolerate it, for one.
Jon felt his nerves ratchet up a few more notches, right before Balidor’s voice rose in his earpiece, seeming to echo inside Jon’s very skull.
“Ready for immersion?” the Adhipan leader said.
“Yes,” Revik answered.
“We’ll use the past jump hits, to try and speed things up with––”
“Yes,” Revik cut in.
Jon felt Revik’s impatience. It sharpened in the brief silence after he cut Balidor off.
Jon didn’t have long to think about that, either.
Everything around him––the feel of the worn leather chair, his sore ankle where he’d twisted it in mulei the day before, the soft bleeps of nearby machines, traces of Wreg’s anger and hurt still circulating through his light, the rustling of clothing and murmurs of the techs and other sounds that Jon didn’t even know he could hear until they disappeared––abruptly cut out.
Jon fell.
...HE’S NEVER BEEN on a jump with Revik before.
That doesn’t occur to him until now, either.
The darkness moves so quickly, he can’t orient himself at first, can’t make sense of where he is. He knows, of course––knew before they started, really––that Revik wouldn’t move through the stages of the Barrier jump with the usual 1-2-3 used by Jon’s trainers as part of the standard protocol. Even so, he finds himself utterly lost in the span of seconds after he first notices the room fade. He can’t pull apart the resonances buffeting his light; he knows only that they come from Revik, that he feels familiarity in them, and familiarity from the other seers who have collected them...but those resonances are fleeting, impossible to pin down.
He feels something familiar in what is coming, too...something...
Gods...Allie. He feels Allie.
The pain that rises in Jon is unbearable. He tries to pull it back, to shove it into some recess of his heart before Revik can feel it...
...but by then he’s moving so fast, lost inside the wave of light, buffeted by more feelings of her, of Cass, of a strange flavor of his childhood, almost like a scent cloying in his aleimi, something so a part of him he rarely sees it as a separate thing. Memories rush forward, things Jon hasn’t felt in years, things he forgot about, not all of them good or particularly nostalgia-inducing, but so damned familiar and shockingly immediate...in that achingly clear-cut way emotions and feelings arise and get stuck in one’s mind and light in childhood.
He remembers Mom drunk on the couch, helping Allie carry her. Allie hollow-eyed, blank, still drunk herself after they went out to drink on Dad’s grave.
Younger than that, he remembers making cookies with their parents.
Christmas with Cass showing up at their door, crying, Mom giving her a glass cat with her name on it and the beaming smile on Cass’s face.
He remembers Allie fighting at school, that pack of assholes who would harass her, who wouldn’t leave her alone, led by Mickey, that prick who seemed to be obsessed with her, pretty much from the second he laid eyes on her. Mickey...jesus. What happened to that guy? He’d been like four years older than her.
Four years and they all made fun of him because he shaved.
He disappeared at one point, didn’t he?
Before Jon can puzzle through this, before he can sort his way through images of Allie crawling on the carpet at age three and their mother wearing her uniform for the post office as she washes dishes and sings in a kitchen bright with a happiness he only dimly remembers, that still hurts and comforts him somewhere, in the softest, most vulnerable part of his heart, when their father was still healthy and still working as an engineer for Intirdan Corp., coming up behind their mom to grab her and make her shriek in delight...
Jon finds himself standing on sand.
Wet sand.
He is confused at first, unsure how he got there.
The sand doesn’t leave when he blinks. It squishes softly between his toes.
It shines a glowing white under Jon’s bare feet, finer than any sand he’s ever felt.
Jon turns his gaze up, his eyes that aren’t really eyes, not in here...and a few hundred yards, or maybe only a few dozen yards, or maybe only twenty or so feet...a massive rock configuration sits buried in that fine, white sand, its sides steep and marbled green and red and black. Waves break at the rock’s base...waves from a glittering, gold-plated ocean...and it looks like someone dropped that giant piece of jagged earth, trees and birds and all, into the shallows near the shore, and left it there.
Jon blinks up at the forest sitting atop that rough, wild-looking hill.
He sees eagles soaring and circling above, more colorful birds, tropical and incongruous with the jagged appearance of the cliffs and their gold and green textures that remind him of the north Pacific coast back home. Sea birds nest there, too. Cormorants with their shimmering green-tinted black feathers, puffins with colorful beaks, seagulls of such a blinding white that Jon finds them difficult to look at...
The sky above arcs a perfect, cobalt blue.
Dotting that azure dome float clouds so white and high they don’t look real, despite the swirls of blue and gold that lighten and darken their crevices.
The whole landscape looks like a breathing, living painting.
Jon has never seen anything so beautiful, so completely filled with life. Everything has presence. Not only the birds and dolphins he can see and feel...the latter jumping and playing in the surf of those gold-tinted waves, those same waves bleeding sunlight and teeming with fish of all sizes and shapes...but every grain of sand, every feather in every wing, every drop of water and curling wave and breath of wind exudes life. Every waving green leaf, every branch, every stone, every mist of white-foamed spray...
...it lives.
It all lives. Moreover, each exudes its own peculiar jumble of living frequency. Complicated, dense, meaningful...totally unique to itself.
It is immediate. Immediate...
Jon can’t articulate this part to himself, but he feels it. Feeling swells his chest, and he is lost here, in the power of this place. He can’t make sense of how he reacts to it, but it feels like every part of him bursts into tiny, white-hot flames, shifting his vibration to some higher level he can’t comprehend, a sound only dolphins can hear. White light fills him, a feeling of stillness so profound he barely knows himself in it.
Even as he feels like he’s starting to adjust, to fully relax into being in this place, to letting in the myriad of densities and light...
The scenery changes again.
Detail floods his consciousness.
Any one thing Jon focuses on grows so detailed to him that he becomes lost in it.
The veins in leaves shock his awareness, showing tiny cilia and drops of water, insects with so much presence he feels a flush of guilt for every ant he’s ever stamped on, every mosquito he’s ever squashed in thoughtless irritation, every fly he’s swatted with a shoe or piece of cloth. He sees the deep black eyes of birds. The depth he feels there pulls on him, beckons him to seek its source...but he only gets lost in those depths, lost in something he can’t understand, in a mind or minds that move so differently from his own that Jon can only puzzle at them.
He feels their own puzzlement reflected back, their attempts to understand him.
Jon tries to remind himself why he is here.
He forces a wider perspective, a tenser focus on his surroundings.
Staring back at the horizon, he again notices the curling, perfect waves as they make beautifully precise, green-glass tubes before they crash into clean, white foam. Jon is lost again in the beauty, in the perfection of what he sees. He loses himself there willingly at first; feeling overwhelms him as he stares into the crystal blue-green waters beneath the golden slant of sunlight that coats the ocean’s surface.
The sun is white. Young and white, eclipsed with a ring of rose fire.
Then he sees her.
She stands, waist
-deep in the water, a single form, looking strangely small in the immensity of blue-green ocean and high azure sky. Like a shadow, her reflection darts behind her as the water shifts and moves in gentle swells. When Jon continues to stare, that same reflection resembles an oddly-shaped fish teasing at her legs and back.
She is alone.
For the barest of seconds, he envies her.
This place...this beauty feels like hers. It belongs to her somehow.
It is a part of her.
Dark hair coils and unfurls gently and languorously in the breeze, hanging down her back in a thick curtain. Strongly contrasting the color of her hair, a filmy, green-gold dress, low-cut in back, hangs off her small form, seemingly with nothing worn under it. The dress floats around her like the single petal of a golden lily, moving gently in the passing swells without leaving her narrow waist.
Before Jon can make sense of her, before he can let her in or let his mind categorize anything about her, he sees another form plowing through the waves. The other form is taller, walks with long strides, seemingly oblivious to the crash of water as it pulls him to and fro, teasingly impeding his attempts to reach her. Jon watches that dark-haired form without moving, watches as the tide pulls him sideways as he walks inexorably towards that lone woman looking out to sea. He walks without hesitation, with an impatience Jon can feel, moving towards her in a straight, unswerving line...
It is Revik.
Jon knows this, even before he knows.
Revik doesn’t look at anything but her. He doesn’t look at his feet as he walks, at the water, at the sky, at the rock and its small forest sticking out of the sand. He doesn’t look at the birds, or the dolphins that weave through the waves, circling him in concentric rings.
Already, Jon can feel the other man’s grief.
Grief mixes with a relief so palpable that the relief is somehow worse...the feeling Jon glimpses there closes his throat, cutting into his skin like sunlight bent through glass. Revik appears to be walking towards her, from what Jon can see with his Barrier eyes...but everything about him, everything Jon can feel on Revik or see in him, makes it clear that he is running.
He is running towards her...he is running towards his wife.
Jon understands now. He understands too well.
He shouldn’t be here.
He thinks it, even as Revik reaches her, as his long arms encircle her from behind, holding her tightly, but gently, as if she were porcelain or glass instead of skin and bone. He pulls her against his now-wet clothes, and Jon looks away, with whatever part of himself that watches this. Even so, he almost feels it when Revik leans down to kiss her neck and bare shoulder.
Pain expands out of the other man, a dark, dense cloud, discordant in this perfect land of water, sun and light. It is intense enough that it buckles Jon’s Barrier-created knees.
He might have fallen to the sand. He might have fallen, then and there...
...but Revik pulls on him.
Demands him.
For Jon, there is no dramatic walk through Barrier ocean waves to greet her.
Jon is simply there.
He blinks, and then he is somewhere else. He stands next to the two of them, waist-deep in crystal blue water. His Barrier body adjusts to the change––or really, his mind does, even before Jon can think about his own mind consciously. His subconscious supplies him with appropriate dress, too, the same blue and white flowered swim trunks he bought in Hawaii in his mid-twenties, when he’d gone there with his then-boyfriend Brett, and Allie, who’d brought Jaden, paying for her slacker musician boyfriend out of her own meager tip money from the crappy diner where she worked.
Feeling a strange guilt at the memory now, Jon looks up to see Revik staring at him with clear, colorless eyes, reproduced almost exactly in the Barrier as they are in the physical world, but for the added light that make his irises glow strangely.
They reflect Barrier sunlight, even as they narrow down at him.
What can you feel? Revik asks.
It is less a question than another demand.
Revik doesn’t let go of his wife as he asks it. He seems unable to let go of her, unable to stop touching her, caressing her hair back from her face, holding her belly and hip with his other hand, even as he pulls on Jon almost angrily––even as he seems to resent Jon’s presence here in the first place. Jon feels all of these things, and wishes he could be elsewhere, too.
Goddamn it, Jon... Revik snaps.
He jerks roughly at Jon’s light, and Jon winces in pain, closing somewhat.
He looks reluctantly at Allie’s face.
Immediately, pain slams his own light. It mixes with Revik’s enough that he has to fight to disentangle it, to pull them apart once more. He feels anger on Revik, too, impatience, a desire to be alone with her, to kick Jon out of his space.
Gods, grief.
So much grief...
I’ll fucking kill you if you don’t help me with this, Revik says, gripping her tighter. Jon can hear the fear in his words now, a near panic, a longing so twisted that it’s ceased to be hope, but feels closer to some kind of prayer. Jon, please...she’s never been this close. Forget about me. Look at her. Please, gods, look at her, and tell me what you feel...
At the end of this speech, the longest Jon has heard from his brother-in-law since Cass did what she did, the grief and fear are winning out over his anger. Revik is begging him, Jon realizes. He is begging for Jon’s help, and something in the reality of that simple fact pulls Jon’s own light and mind sharply into focus.
Jon steps towards her. This time, he doesn’t avert his gaze.
Allie...? he sends to her, tentative.
His Barrier fingers reach up, and although Revik flinches, his light exuding threats, exuding protectiveness, Jon touches her face, which looks so much like Allie’s face in the physical that it takes his breath. Only the eyes are different. A brilliant, jade green, they are as clear as glass, but there is a vacancy there that Jon doesn’t recognize. It occurs to him how full of life she is, how completely there and present she has always been, and again he has to fight to keep back his own emotions, his own feelings about the woman in front of him.
Allie, he sends, softer. Where are you, Allie? Can you hear me?
She looks at him.
Her dark head turns, and she looks straight at him, that vacancy even more unnerving as she looks through him to the waves and the endless horizon through Jon’s Barrier form. She looks at him, and for a bare instant, Jon imagines that she might see him...that perhaps she recognizes his voice. A rush of feeling hits him as he thinks it, feeling that morphs into anger, perhaps because he doesn’t know what else to do with it.
Al! he shouts at her. Goddamn it, Al! What the fuck are you doing?
He feels Revik tense, gripping her protectively.
That time, Jon barely notices, because something in her stirs.
Something in her is seeing him briefly, like a flicker of spark from a flint struck on rock. Jon imagines he sees a flash of anger there. Anger and what has to be grief, a kind of fuck you, Jon that he almost recognizes. It turns Jon’s own anger into joy briefly...then abruptly back into rage, a kind of helpless fury. All of the feeling he has been suppressing for days and weeks, for months now, ever since they found Allie in their mother’s bed at that run-down purple Victorian on Fell Street, everything he’s said and done, the way Wreg’s looked at him, the way no one will blame him to his face about what happened while he knows how they must feel behind his back.
The way Revik looks at him. The way Revik looks like he wants to kill him sometimes, even though he won’t blame him directly either...
All of these things, the anger and guilt and self-hate surge in Jon’s chest like hot flames, blinding him to everything but those blank, green eyes, staring at him.
So that’s it? he says. You’re just done now, is that it, Al?
Those green, eerily vacant eyes don’t blink.
Things hurt too m
uch for you to come back, so you’ll just stay here? Jon says. Hang out until the rest of us are dead? His anger sharpens, coming from so far inside him he barely knows what he is saying. This is it, isn’t it? Your happy place. What Revik told me about in the tank...where you go when the going gets rough. The ‘golden ocean’...isn’t that what Revik calls it? Must be nice to be able to just check out...
It’s not her fault, Revik says.
It comes out closer to a snarl, even as his fingers curl protectively around her shoulder.
Jon ignores him, staring only at Allie’s face. Goddamn it, Al, he says. I will fucking hunt you down and kick your ass, if you leave us like this...
Jon... Revik warns, gripping her tighter.
What about your daughter? Jon snaps. If you don’t give a fuck about Revik and me...what about her? Do you really want Feigran and Cass raising your kid?
Allie’s face doesn’t move.
Jon sees nothing in her, nothing.
Reaching over, he slaps her across the face. Hard.
Fuck! Revik says. Jon! I’ll fucking kill you...
Revik stops, mid-sentence, staring down at where she grips Jon’s wrist in her small fingers. Jon’s hit is a Barrier slap...not a real hand, not a real face...but her grip on him is strong. He can’t withdraw his arm from it. The not-Allie stares up at him, and the fury he sees in her, the hatred that shines there briefly, sings through his blood like music.
Fuck you! he screams. Fuck you, Allie!
Jon, Revik warns, his voice holding more pain that time. Jon, stop. Please––
Jon doesn’t care.
You want to blame me? he says. Jerking his hand free, he grips her by the shoulders, shaking her, trying to hurt her, to reach her, even where Revik holds her firmly against his chest. You want to blame Cass? Revik? Me? So do it! Just come back here and do it! Stop hiding here in la-la land, and just do what you came here to do...
Jon isn’t finished. He wants to yell at her some more, to scream into her face, call her a coward...hit her until she answers. Before he can, her arm reaches back. She moves so fast he barely tracks the motion, can’t make sense of what she’s doing...
Allie's War Season Four Page 8
