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31_days2005-09-13 11:47 pm
of-carabas.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2005-09-13 11:47 pm
[September 13] [Near Dark] A Thousand Miles (9/26)
Title: A Thousand Miles (9/26)
Day/Theme: September 13th/Go west
Series: Near Dark
Characters: Diamondback, Jesse, Severen
Rating: PG
Jesse had once told Diamondback that when you know you'll live forever, maturing doesn't have much to do with the passing of years. Instead it has to do with the way the world around you changes, and how it forces you to adapt.
In those years, Diamondback had the strangest feeling of being part of a pack, an equal - and yet at the same time, she felt very, very young next to Jesse and Severen. Oh, she'd learned how to get along quickly enough, how to hunt, how to find cover, how to take care of the body so as to leave behind a missing person report instead of a murder; she carried her own weight, and the boys treated her accordingly. But in other ways, she felt like she could never catch up to them. Sitting in hotel rooms just before dawn, sometimes Jesse and Severen would talk of friends, neighbors, brothers lost to a war she'd only heard about from her grandfather and from history books. If it had lasted a few more years, Severen might have fought against Jesse in that war; this didn't seem to bother either one of them, but it bothered her. She followed Bonnie and Clyde in the papers and joked with the others about what it'd be like to turn those two - but Jesse and Severen had told the same jokes decades earlier about Billy the Kid.
The time before the turn of the century might as well be another world to her, but it was the world they'd grown up in. And she could never share that.
In the middle of one of those early morning stories, Jesse looked up at her. And some of this must have shown on her face, because the next night they changed course, moving away from their southerly route along the east coast and heading west, out to the Mississippi and, eventually, to a graveyard, and a memorial, and a field that Jesse remembered filled with men and gunfire and blood. He paid his respects to the memory of people who'd been dead before she'd even been born. But then he talked to her, and he pointed out this tree or that ditch, and he told her about all those people he'd known there, the people he'd cared about. And standing there in that place, listening to his voice, she felt like maybe even though she hadn't been around for those years, she could still share the echo of them that was left behind. And maybe the years in between didn't matter so much.
Day/Theme: September 13th/Go west
Series: Near Dark
Characters: Diamondback, Jesse, Severen
Rating: PG
Jesse had once told Diamondback that when you know you'll live forever, maturing doesn't have much to do with the passing of years. Instead it has to do with the way the world around you changes, and how it forces you to adapt.
In those years, Diamondback had the strangest feeling of being part of a pack, an equal - and yet at the same time, she felt very, very young next to Jesse and Severen. Oh, she'd learned how to get along quickly enough, how to hunt, how to find cover, how to take care of the body so as to leave behind a missing person report instead of a murder; she carried her own weight, and the boys treated her accordingly. But in other ways, she felt like she could never catch up to them. Sitting in hotel rooms just before dawn, sometimes Jesse and Severen would talk of friends, neighbors, brothers lost to a war she'd only heard about from her grandfather and from history books. If it had lasted a few more years, Severen might have fought against Jesse in that war; this didn't seem to bother either one of them, but it bothered her. She followed Bonnie and Clyde in the papers and joked with the others about what it'd be like to turn those two - but Jesse and Severen had told the same jokes decades earlier about Billy the Kid.
The time before the turn of the century might as well be another world to her, but it was the world they'd grown up in. And she could never share that.
In the middle of one of those early morning stories, Jesse looked up at her. And some of this must have shown on her face, because the next night they changed course, moving away from their southerly route along the east coast and heading west, out to the Mississippi and, eventually, to a graveyard, and a memorial, and a field that Jesse remembered filled with men and gunfire and blood. He paid his respects to the memory of people who'd been dead before she'd even been born. But then he talked to her, and he pointed out this tree or that ditch, and he told her about all those people he'd known there, the people he'd cared about. And standing there in that place, listening to his voice, she felt like maybe even though she hadn't been around for those years, she could still share the echo of them that was left behind. And maybe the years in between didn't matter so much.