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It is evening on January 17th, 2005, and Jazz Fenton is tired. Or rather, she’s exhausted because tired is just a perpetual state of being now and this is a weariness beyond that. This is the kind of exhaustion that comes in the night-time when you’ve let down your guard, when you’ve let weary bones rest.
The snow is falling in little twirling ribbons, sugar-fragile and windows cold enough to let them cling. The table is cold too, seeping away the warmth of her hot chocolate. Danny’s not in bed like he promised. It’s damn near midnight on a Monday night, but that doesn’t mean much anyway anymore. In the basement (in the lab), a saw is howling as it bites through metal. She doesn’t know what they’re making now but she’s too tired to care right now. They’ll find out anyway whenever they finish, whenever they emerge with some new device that will almost inevitably lash out against Danny or much less often, her. Jazz should go ask what it is.
She can’t drag herself from the chair, can’t drag herself to let go of the cup she holds like a lifeline. It is growing cold but warm yet, warm for a little while, cinnamon, allspice, chocolate, milk.
Jazz doesn’t think she’s depressed. She would know after all (except her books warn her that it is hard to recognize mental illness in yourself, that denial is as powerful a drug as any other, that difficult experiences in childhood greatly increase the risk of developing unhealthy coping skills and mental health challenges). But Jazz isn’t depressed because she cannot be. She is the eldest. She is the one who keeps everything together, the one who smiles, the one who is put together and bright and sweet and maybe a little (a lot) bossy but knows just about anything if you ask. Anything she doesn’t know, she’ll find for you by the end of the day.
Except her little brother died and she thinks a little piece of her died with him for all he came back , even if it is only halfway. Except Danny died and there’s a lot Jazz doesn’t know anymore, answers she cannot find in any of her books. Except her baby brother died and there is nothing Jazz can do to protect him anymore when he’s so dead set on protecting the entire world at damn near any personal expense.
Jazz watches the snow fall and there is a devil in her pocket that begs her to go to sleep. She’s got a college tour tomorrow, was planning to spring Danny from school and take him with as a treat. They’ve got a planetarium on campus, a nice astronomy program and stellar physics department. It’s five to midnight now, watch hands ticking around her wrist in a steady, endless beat. If she wants to make it two states over by ten tomorrow, she had to be in bed three hours ago.
She cannot drag herself from her spot, though, and Danny isn’t in bed, and her parents are in the lab, and Jazz is really, truly, deeply tired. Her legs have gone asleep, toes past tingling into numb aching. Her hot chocolate is nearly cold now. The snow has neatly piled up to the first panel of the window and if she placed her hand to it, an impression would be left behind on glass, frosted. Her watch has somehow skipped past midnight all the way to nearly one and Danny is still not home. The saw has gone quiet but her parents haven’t emerged. There's a bone floating in ectoplasm on the counter. There's always bones around these days, pigs and frogs and birds, arriving in little chemical-filled pails with the flesh to cling to them and waiting to go under the knife. Jazz is always a little terrified these days that the jump from pig to ghost isn't very far at all. She knows Danny dreams of it, some nights. They both watch the jars, watch the bones float, and don't speak their shared fear, not if they want to stay sane. Not if they want to stay here. Far more pressing is that t here’s barely any groceries in the fridge so Jazz will have to borrow her mother’s wallet when they get back from the tour. When she gets back from the tour, more likely.
She’ll probably still pick them up Nasty Burger even if Danny is too tired to come with. She knows Danny doesn’t eat nearly enough anymore. Jazz shifts a half-asleep hand from the side of her cold cup and presses it against one half of her face and after a while peels the other and repeats it. She cradles her face like that for a while, elbows boring into the cold metal. She falls asleep at some point too like that, hours skidding by like seconds until her watch alarm shrieks.
Danny still isn’t home, she finds as she begins searching the house. Her parents are shouting in the basement, excitement or anger or disappointment, she doesn’t know. She has half an hour until she needs to leave and he isn’t picking up his phone at all.
Tucker is the one who finally picks up when she starts calling. He sends her a picture of an exhausted, pale Danny asleep on his floor in a sleeping bag, explains that he crawled through the window at half past four in the morning and crashed there, that he is okay except he thinks that Danny might have broken his ribs again but his lungs sound okay and Danny swore up and down that Frostbite gave him a clean bill of health, besides the whole bones thing. He asks her to call Danny in for the day. He promises to keep her updated and to make Danny call her when he wakes up.
She says thank you.