Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Mom, is that boy crying?”

“I think there’s only one way to find out, sweetie.”

Jameson felt fingers tinier than his prodding at his shoulders. A girl stood in front of him, holding one of her tiny hands over the blue ribbon belt-thingy of her skirt.

“Yes?” he asked her.

“Why are you crying?” she asked.

Jameson flicked his tongue out to catch a salty tear. “I’m not,” he lied.

The girl crouched down so that their heads were almost even. “I just saw you and… you looked sad.” The girl shrugged.

“No. I was just… a little bit upset,” Jameson said like the two were oh so different.

“Oh, my mother asks if you want a sandwich.” She gestured to a lady sitting on the grass, a few feet away from them. She was putting what looked like peanut butter over bread. The lady looked up waved at them with a smile.

Jameson knew that it wasn’t right to take food from strangers. Nash had told him all about it. Bad guys and dirty rooms and broken lives. But he hadn’t eaten anything since before he was going to the tree house and was intercepted by the old man. His stomach grumbled more loudly than would be considered normal. He felt embarrassment creeping up his cheeks. “Yes.” 

After all, a sandwich wouldn’t hurt. He’d once drunk a glass of that horribly bitter clear golden liquid he found on his mother’s- ‘Skye’s’ as she was so fond of reminding him- dressing table. It felt like he was weightless. Like he was slipping away from himself. Until everything went dark.

Surely this couldn’t be that bad.

“There you go, sweetheart,” Sandwich lady said, her words really soft.

Jameson would never admit it, but he liked the softness of her words, like melting cotton candy over his tongue, he liked the way she called him sweetheart. All his mother called him was ‘a pain in the ass’. And her sandwiched weren’t half bad.

The woman nudged the girl’s back, nodding towards Jameson.

“I’m Avery,” the girl murmured shyly.

“Jameson,” he managed through a mouthful of sandwich.

Something seemed to light up Avery’s face. “I can spell my full name. It’s very long.” Her eyes widened. “Can you do that?”

“I also have a long name,” Jameson said, wiping his still swollen knuckles over his mouth. He seemed to realize something then. The other kids at school were never friendly to him like this.

He tried to narrow his eyes in an imitation of Grayson. “My grandfather has loads of money. So don’t even think about kidnapping me.”

Jameson had meant it in the way that his grandfather had lots of money and would set free very dangerous lawyers (which was all Alisa talked about becoming) after her.

Little did he realise the incentive in his words.

Sandwich lady chuckled. Not in the evil, cruel stepmothers in cartoon way, but more open and sincere. “Wouldn’t even think about it,” she assured him.

Good. Jameson found himself smiling.

An unexpected shove to his shoulder caused him to stumble back a few steps.

It came from Avery.

“My mother is not a kidnapper,” she said angrily, right into his face. Her mother pulled her back with a hand on her arm. “You shouldn’t say mean things like that,” she gritted out, struggling against her mother’s hold.

Jameson felt bad. The Sandwich Lady pasted a wry, I’m-sorry smile, but he could see that she was hurt underneath. “I'm sorry,” he said, looking at her shoes. The words felt weird in his mouth. You didn’t tell anyone you were sorry. It was admitting something gone wrong. A weakness.

The smile on the woman’s face made them feel less weird. She loosened her hold on Avery.

“See,” she told the girl. “It’s your turn now.”

Avery turned to him with a frustrated puff, her eyes still pinched. “Sorry,” she said smarmily. Jameson could see the two little fingers crossed at her back.

He let it slip, his attention falling to the clean line of shadow that divided the actual pale pink colour of her skirt from where the sunlight falling made it look almost white.

“Your dress is very pretty,” he said truthfully. Making an observation.

Her pale skin did nothing to hide the faint flush on her cheeks. It looked like she didn’t go out in the sun a lot. “Oh,” she breath out, “thanks. You are-” a pause “-beautiful too.”

Jameson didn’t like being called beautiful. It didn’t sound nearly motherly coming out of her mouth. He would have much preferred something more boy-ly. But the way Sandwich Lady beamed at her told him this was a gesture her daughter didn’t often make.

“Can I touch your ribbon,” he asked, gesturing to the bow on her hip.

“No.”

“Okay.”

Chapter Text

The bell rings as Jameson steps into the hole in the wall diner. His shoes leave dirt prints on the recently cleaned linoleum floor. The whole place reeks of phenyl. Jameson has half a mind to turn on his heels and head out, but there’s some comfort in the unfamiliarity of grimy brown walls. He can wallow here for however long, without anyone none the wiser.

He takes a seat by the large frosted window; it pokes him in places that assure him it was made with the distinct purpose of his discomfort. His knees bump under the low table top and the chilly breeze coming through the cracks in the glass, offering little comfort from the overwhelming smell of phenyl, makes him shiver.

“What can I get you?”

There’s a waitress across the table, her pen already poised over a small notepad. She’s wearing an apron over faded jeans and a t-shirt. Jameson looks at the threadbare elbows and knees and wonders how she isn’t feeling cold.

But then his gaze snaps to her face and something weird happens.

His jaw goes slack and his eyes wide and his knees buckle under the table and he thinks: just how drunk is he right now?

Surely a bottle of the cheap booze (more water than alcohol, really) wouldn’t have him seeing things.

Cause it can’t be, right?

It can’t be that Avery Grambs is standing in front of him, staring down her nose, like she used to in those intimidation tactics that only made him smile wider.

But it’s the same freckled face; same eyes, dark with a tinge of something that was too many things at once; the same hair, although a few shades lighter.

“Stop staring,” she says grimly, but with an air of annoyance, like this is something she faces every day. Her other hand is bunched at the hem of her apron, fists turning white. Jameson’s jaw draws shut like a trap when he realises he was staring at her name tag. And by extension, her chest. She mutters something about being ready to take his order when he was and turns away from him.

“Wait-” Jameson stammers after her, “sorr-” He stands up, his knees knocking painfully hard against the table, lifting it momentarily. His leg that was twisted around the flimsy chair almost makes him fall face first on her feet. With great care, he extricates himself from the stupid chair and skid-walks the few steps to the girl, her back toward him.

He thinks better of tapping her shoulder. “Um… Excuse me?” I think you're my friend who up and dusted from my life four years ago, or you have an uncanny resemblance to her. I wasn’t meaning to make you feel uncomfortable, or stalking you. At all…  Please don’t have me thrown out.

The girl turns with a grimace; her shoulders curled inward defensively.

His very first instinct is to scratch his head. “H- Hi, I think I might know you,” he says slowly, his mind running double pace to find the most comfortable approach. But things aren’t really salvageable when you’re drunk, hiding from your brother and had spent an inappropriate amount of time staring at a waitress’ chest. “I’m Jameson, and…” The small shift in her expression further jumbles all the thoughts in his head. He gives up all pretence of having any idea what is happening and blurts out the name he associates with his best friend. “Avery?”

The last of the sun rays cast lengthened shadows over the park. The few children daring to brave the chilly evening wind are hollering by the frosty pond at the edge of the park. Despite being able to see his breath, Jameson feels warmer out here than in the diner. Avery sits quietly beside him with her hands in her lap.

Jameson can’t help but feel the stark difference between the chilly stone bench and the warm grass that afternoon so long ago; the silence in the park compared to the chittering buzz when Avery had pushed him into the ground.

Oh, that and… What really does one talk about after so long?

At the start, when she’d just left, Jameson would think about this all the time. This moment when they would meet. An expanse of sparse grass, two friends running to the middle, euphoric. Embracing in the warmth of the sinking sun and the body next to each of them. Then he’d have thrown his arm around her shoulder and asked Avery: Hey, do you remember that? The time we did that? That time we broke that? The time I won that?

But then when days passed and there was no sign of Avery or Hannah returning, no slowmo-midfield reunion, those thoughts came less often, slipping into the back of his mind, until they stopped entirely. Those memories replaced by newer, not necessarily pleasant ones. All that remained was a face and the way it caught the light; something slight, bony limbs with a mess of dark hair and huge brown eyes.

Now he only wants to know one thing. “What happened Avery?” Why did you leave Avery?

She splays her palms over her lap. “Would you believe me if I said that I don’t know?”

No, he wouldn’t. “I don’t know. It just- Everything happened so-”

“Abruptly,” Avery suggests hoarsely.

“Yeah,” Jameson agrees. “I just wonder what went wrong.” He has difficulty pushing the rest above his throat. “It felt like you both abandoned me.”

Avery’s eyes momentarily lock with his before resuming their study of her bitten nails. She doesn’t say anything. To be fair, it wasn’t a question, but still.

Jameson feels she isn’t exactly happy to see him. He’s barely managed to get two words out of her in the half hour they kept avoiding glances. He’d have brought some food if he’d known it was going to be like this; have something to do with his hands rather than wanting to close them over hers.  

“Like everything we had disappeared so suddenly, and I didn’t have anyone to go to about it?”

“Hm.”

Jameson huffed, lost in memory. “It also sucked that the old man couldn’t care less.”

“I’m sorry,” Avery concedes when she finds he has nothing more to say, sitting primly tight lipped, politely indicating: Stop whining. Can’t you just get over it already?

Fine. He can be tight lipped too. He huffs up his breath and leans back against the bench, wincing when his bad shoulder crushes against cold stone. He should’ve worn a coat, he thinks distantly. His sweater’s just not cutting it. A feeling of someone’s absence settles over him. Of a wrinkled smile and gentle reproach acting as mediator when they weren’t talking. “Speaking of which,” Jameson says, reluctance forgotten, “how’s Hannah?”

Through her top (how’s she not feeling cold?) her shoulders tense up. “She’s alright.” Avery says, her voice easy. Too easy.

But if there’s something that made him return to that park- cautiously hopeful that he would see the blue ribboned girl who’d pushed him, it was her openness, her face’s inability to show anything other than what was in her mind. It’d felt strangely reassuring, living in a house where lies were as abundant as secret passages; told through sparkling smiles that he hated.  

Well, he doesn’t hate them that bad now. After all, he does it too.

Either way, he knows Avery’s lying now.

“Avery?”

He takes one of her hands in his to disrupt her progressively furious nail picking. It’s startlingly cold. She lightly tries to shrug Jameson off but he holds on. “Avery, what’s the matter?” he asks gently.

After a long moment sitting like that, she lifts her face.

A sense of inexplicable joy blooms within him when she meets his gaze. It not like that empty nod she’d given him when he asked if they could talk or that silent way she’d regarded him through the corner of her eye.

There’s some swirling in her eyes, painfully reminiscent of how animated her gaze was; A small patch of paint peeling away to give him a peek into someone familiar; like someone’s messing with that dusty, taped off part in his heart where Avery used to live; a paralysed part coming to life.

It feels like home.

“You're staring again,” she reminds him.

“No-” He stutters, slightly afraid, “I mean sorry.” He grasps her hand tighter instinctively, taking a deep breath. “So, how’s Hannah?”

“Sick,” Avery says, blank in a way that strains her jaw.

Jameson swallows. Something is ringing in his head, but it sounds distant, muffled. Keeping his voice gentle instead of bombarding questions takes more effort. “Avery, what happened?”

Avery squeezes his hand so hard it almost hurts. There’s a crack in her voice when she speaks. “She’s not going to make it, Jameson”