[Jarod] I'll go with you, Jarod said.
And so the two of them broke away from the frisbee group and started toward the lagoon. Gale, with his shorter legs, kept a brisk pace across the grass, reaching up to wipe a damp lock of dark hair off of his forehead. He had on a black t-shirt and a pair of rather expensive-looking jeans - not at all unlike the clothes that occupied space in Jarod's own closet, which might lead one to assume that Jarod had either bought these clothes for him, or that he'd managed to find an apprentice with very similar taste. (To an extent, they were both true - though Gale's taste in clothes was a lot more eclectic than Jarod's.) A couple of Violet's friends - as well as Maia, at one point - had commented on the fact that the fit of these jeans made the kid's ass look rather appealing. To which, of course, Jarod had just smirked.
The Disciple's own pace was more relaxed and agile as he fell in slightly behind his apprentice. When they reached the shaded spot under the tree where Ashley was resting with Finnick and Zane, Gale paused and hung back, letting Jarod approach her first. There was evident curiosity on the boy's face though. You could tell he probably wanted to ask a few questions, but common sense dictated that Jarod probably wanted to talk to Ashley in private, so he kept his thoughts to himself for now.
"Planning to make off with my daughter's dog, are you?" This from Jarod, as he made his way around the tree and lowered himself down slowly next to Ashley in the grass. Finnick yawned sleepily and blinked his dark eyes at Jarod, then climbed down from Ashley's arms and padded over to sniff his hand. Jarod massaged one of the puppy's ears with gentle affection, then picked him up and handed him up to Gale. "Can you keep him away from the main group for awhile?"
"I'll take a walk with him."
"Thanks." Jarod nodded, and Gale turned and walked toward the bridge, carrying the still-sleepy puppy in his arms.
Jarod stared out at the water. After a long moment, he said, "I guess this isn't exactly how you imagined your day going."
[Ashley] As Gale and Jarod reach her place by the lagoon, Ashley's eyes open and flick up toward them. The reaction is a touch delayed - they're approaching from her bad side. She's a bit more alert than she might be normally though, sitting alone here, and when Zane's ears perk sharply and he raises his head, that causes Ashley's attention to twist in their direction as well.
She eyes Gale for a second or two. What curiosity is there has taken refuge behind a veil of - not quite hostility, but something not entirely friendly, either. There are things to be curious about. Clearly if Jarod agreed to take the kid on as an apprentice, officially, there's something interesting about him at the very least. Or perhaps it's nothing after all; perhaps Emily and Ashley wore Jarod down to the point where he's now willing and able to do such things. Perhaps that's all it is.
Wait, this is Jarod. Who is she kidding.
"I stole Luka from Kage's niece," she says lightly, even as she moves her arms to allow Finnick to hop out of them. "I figured why not make it a hobby."
Gale steps forward to claim Finnick then and Ashley looks up at him as he offers to take the puppy away. To leave Ashley and Jarod here with only Zane, who is dozing in a patch of sun, his muzzle partially hidden in the growing grass.
When Jarod falls quiet and looks out at the lake, Ashley's head tips back against the bark of the tree and turns to regard him, the profile of him. There have been other days when she studied it like that, but it was a different time, and so after a few moments her head turns, too, to look back out at the lake. "I wasn't expecting to see you," she says, after only a moment's pause. "I thought..."
And here a pause, and there's a bit of an ache in her chest but not too much of one to speak, and she says, "You didn't call. Or want to keep in contact or...anything." A beat. "Who's the kid?"
[Jarod] Jarod turned his head and looked at her for a long moment, studying her face the same way that she'd studied his a moment ago. He had some sweat at the edges of his hair and on the back of his neck, though less so than Gale. He hadn't pushed himself nearly as much. But there was a bit of color on his skin, where the sun had kissed his face and arms. Not much. Just the faint hue of what would become a light tan later. Sitting back against the trunk of the tree, he let out a soft breath that might have been a sigh.
"You're the one who left, Ashley. I didn't think you'd want to hear from me. If you wanted to talk, you have my number." His tone was too gentle to sound accusatory. More... matter-of-fact. This is the situation as he saw it.
Ashley asked about Gale, and he glanced in the boy's direction, watching him walk away.
"Gale," he said, simply. "He sortof Woke Up in my back yard. Guess he's mine now."
[Ashley] There's something naked about all of this, for all that they're both guarding their words. There always seems to be, between them; there are times when they both conceal their vulnerability in such a way that it still can't help but shine through - though perhaps that's only to people who know them very, very well (and who can really be said to, of these two, after all?)
She could've called, he says, and there's a moment where Ashley bites the inside of her cheek because that is entirely true. "I didn't think you would want to talk to me," she says, with a laugh, not too much different from the one she gave Dana much earlier in the afternoon. She could say more: she could unleash a gale upon him, batter him with her words, rip him raw, because Words are the most powerful things that exist. The only truth, even if they are only words.
Then she shakes her head and says, "This is stupid. I missed you. I meant to come back, I just didn't..." Didn't want to promise, perhaps.
Her eyes flick again toward Gale when Jarod says that he's his, that he feels responsibility because the kid Awakened in his backyard. "You picked up another apprentice awfully fast."
[Jarod] "Another?" he corrected her with a raised eyebrow, though there was some tired humor in the expression. "You were never my Apprentice, Ashley. Calling you that would be an insult. We helped each other. That's all." Perhaps she meant Emily as well, but Jarod wasn't inclined to broach that subject, so he didn't. "It wasn't something I'd planned on. I'm sure you know that. But he's here, and he needed someone, and he... wore me down, I guess."
Jarod and Ashley had very different ideas about words. To him, they were not Truth. Quite the opposite, usually. Words could be beautiful or ugly, useful tools or achingly poignant art. They could tell stories and weave elaborate costumes. Jarod loved words. But he did not believe that their power lay in making things real. What was real... that was something else. Something beyond words.
Ashley said she missed him. He hadn't responded, at first. There was a glance out to the water, another briefly to where his daughter stood talking to Dana. Then he looked back at Ashley again. "It's alright, you know. You don't have to explain." Another long pause. "But I missed you too."
[Ashley] There's a glance toward Gale, a questioning thing. Perhaps she's trying to decipher Jarod's words, to read between the lines and see if there's anything there at all. It's always hard to tell, with Jarod, and therein lies the source of any trouble they've ever had: for Ashley, things must be spelled out. She doesn't have enough skill with understanding other people to understand all the things he doesn't say. "Good for him, I guess, if persistence wins the day," she says dryly.
Jarod tells her she doesn't need to explain herself. Perhaps she doesn't; perhaps she wasn't really trying. She lets the words hang in the air for a while as though hoping it will allow them to dissipate. As though she either doesn't know what she wants to say or knows too well and can't, as though anything else that could be said would be deliberately sidestepping all of those things.
All she asks, in the end, is "How long are you in Boston?"
[Jarod] Good for him, I guess, if persistence wins the day.
Well, not only persistence. But Ashley likely knew that, and he wasn't here to talk about Gale.
She held back the things she wasn't comfortable saying out loud, or maybe she just didn't think there was any point. He didn't seem to be wrestling with the same demons that she was. That might not have been very comforting to Ashley, seeing him in a state of calm acceptance. Knowing that he was going about his life exactly as he always did; exactly as he always had. She'd already made a few bitter comments to Dana to that effect. But she was being pleasant enough with him now. Not friendly, exactly. But he hadn't expected her to be.
Ashley asked him how long he was going to be in Boston, and Jarod picked a small twig out of the grass and ran the shape of it through his fingers, absently. The young bark was smooth, with a couple of rough bumps where tiny wounds had healed over.
"We're flying back after Violet's wedding. Sunday morning." And then, after a long pause, he dropped the twig and looked at Ashley, allowing a small smile to appear. "Would you like to do something while I'm here? I'm sure I can leave 'Lana with Dana for a day."
[Ashley] Ashley nods once, slowly, at his invitation. There's a kind of friend that you see once or twice a year, whenever they're in town, and keeping company is like staring across an ever-widening rift into which both parties dump everything they don't say. It's the kind of company people keep out of affection for the people they both used to be rather than because they know or understand each other now.
There's also a kind of friend that you slip into a familiar rhythm with no matter how infrequently you see each other, who you get to know and like again with each meeting. It'd be impossible to say which sort they'd end up being but neither Ashley nor Jarod is likely to have a lot of patience for the former.
"We can do that," she says. There's a small smile that appears there on her face too, though it's touched with a wistfulness that's for more than just him. "I'm going to be moving soon to start my PhD, so it's probably better to catch me while I'm in Boston."
[Jarod] "I think that's the first genuinely good news I've heard in awhile." Jarod smiled, and for all that he could be so good at affecting false expressions, this one seemed to come from an honest place. It took a moment before he looked up, but when he did he caught Ashley's eyes and the smile remained for a moment longer. "I'm glad you're going back."
There was a long pause before he continued, as if he was thinking about something (or remembering something) that he wasn't vocalizing. After awhile he tossed away the twig he'd been rolling between his fingers.
"Where are you off to?"
[Ashley] His smile seems to come from an honest place, but that's not altogether unexpected - not to Ashley, at least. For as rocky as their friendship was at the beginning it's been rather rare for him to feign emotion with her. More often he was likely to offer a sharp word or to get up and walk away before he would resort to anything artificial.
Not that she would really know the difference.
"San Francisco, for now," she tells him. "Berkeley. I figured I'd go after a PhD in English and poetry." There's a wry smirk playing at the corner of her mouth. "If I'm going to get a useless humanities degree it might as well be in something I enjoy. I'll probably just be working for the Order anyway."
Who she's apparently still on good terms with. There are factions of the Order who do appreciate a diverse viewpoint, after all - people who don't stick hard to the party line. Ashley would have found those, if anyone did. She watches him for a moment longer, then leans over and, after a moment of hesitation, kisses his cheek. It's little more than a light brush, that contact. "I'll visit."
[Jarod] This was true, of course. Jarod was seldom artificial with the people he cared about. (Detached, maybe, but everyone had their survival mechanisms.) One could make the argument that this wasn't always to their benefit, especially when his honestly came in the form of sharp words and temperamental moods, as it so often had for Ashley.
Well... no one said he was an easy friend to have. And likely no one who'd been afforded the privilege ever would. Whether or not his friendship was actually worth the trouble was still up for debate.
Ashley was moving to San Francisco. Jarod's expression took on an amused smirk for a moment as he tried to picture how Ashley might get along in the Berkeley Sociology Department, but then she told him that she was switching degrees and the look of amusement dropped into something more thoughtful. "Or maybe you'll become a famous writer and tell the Order to go fuck themselves," he added, as an alternate vision of the future.
Then she leaned in and kissed him lightly on the cheek. It was a scant moment of contact, but he turned his head into it and looked at her. A shadow of... something flickered across his eyes. But that was all. (And if for a moment it felt as though he meant to do something else, that impulse never materialized.) Instead he broke his eyes away and glanced over his shoulder at Ilana, who was now resting quietly by herself underneath a distant tree. When he turned back to Ashley, he nodded. But there was no verbal response to her claim. Perhaps she would visit (he might even like it if she did.) Perhaps not.
"I'll call you after breakfast tomorrow. You can show me around." He touched her shoulder gently as he got to his feet. "I think I'm going to see about slipping away early. Ilana looks tired, and Lauren's probably about a glass of wine away from ripping into me about something." He knew his step-mother's patterns well, and it was better if Ilana didn't have to witness that.
When the two of them had said their (temporary) goodbyes, he left to go and round up his daughter. And, after talking a moment with Dana (who stayed behind) and waiting for Gale to catch up with the puppy, the group of them made a quiet departure. Some of the others noticed, but his family simply watched them go without comment. Perhaps they were used to this from him. Perhaps it was enough that he'd been there at all.
