Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 4

For what felt like the thousandth time that night, she activated the screen on her phone briefly to scan it for activity before swearing under her breath and turning it off again.

Of course there were no notifications. Why would there be?

Well, that wasn't strictly true.

There were notifications, a lot of them, but none of them were the ones that she had been waiting for. Waiting for 73 hours and counting now, if one were to be keeping count. But keeping a vigil like that would be agonizing and useless and a complete waste of emotional energy. So she certainly wasn't going to do that.

She activated the phone screen again and looked at the glowing panel that was bereft of anything except for the time. 73.06 hours now. But she wasn't counting, of course.

She stared silently at the clock widget as it slowly but resolutely ticked away the seconds as they passed, trying to find a sense of comfort in the knowledge that time was still indeed passing despite her sense of it being completely frozen. But the comfort that knowledge would usually bring, and indeed had offered her some scant solace when #IAmJake was in full force, was utterly absent now.

Sighing, she passed a slender thumb over the screen to activate the phone proper, and stared at the text message interface that was still open and waiting. Open and waiting and blank, save for the jumbled mess of words that she had written and sent over an hour ago. She had stopped writing when the tears had come, forcing herself to stop pressing send on her increasingly scattered thoughts, processing only after the fact that the last few messages that she had sent him were grammatical nightmares.

She ruminated on them for a while, reading and re-reading what she had written, wondering how they would come across to Jake, if he ever did read them. His exacting use of punctuation was something of a trademark - the man always seemed to have time for periods at the end of his sentences, even when he was deep underground in a mine with a psychopath and FBI agents thirsty for an arrest. She wondered if he would pick up on her spelling mistakes. Or, as Dan had so often insinuated - or well, made bluntly clear, to be more precise - maybe the 'emotionless hacker freak' wouldn't even notice.

Jake has emotions, she had retorted, when Dan had sent that in the group chat. Never one to miss a sparring chance, Dan had instantly replied.

Yeah I bet

She had not responded to Dan's one liner, but it had sat with her for a long time. It was sitting with her now, in fact, and it was a memory that invoked a bizarre mix of emotions that had come to perfectly exemplify the strange, uncertain, and utterly hypnotic relationship that existed between her and said emotionless hacker freak.

She knew that Dan had been not so subtly implying that Jake had feelings for her, and it had sent an altogether too pleasant tingling feeling through her body when she had read it. It had felt like proof, however indirectly, that maybe she wasn't misreading the vibes that Jake had been putting out - others had caught them too. But the more she thought about the concept of Jake and emotions, the less certain she became of them.

Logically, she knew that Jake had emotions. Of course he did. He had admitted to having a great many of them during the course of their time together. But more than just that, he had admitted to a very specific one in their last text exchange. It was one that she had been feeling for herself for a good amount of time prior, one that she had wondered if, but would barely let herself begin to hope, he shared. So when his message arrived on her screen 73.19 hours ago, her joy had been bordering on the edge of ecstasy as the three words sank into her soul and engraved themselves there for perpetuity.

But 73.19 hours was a long time.

Long enough for the inevitable postmortem to creep up on her and start dissecting her memories and feelings, slicing each one apart with a brutal and surgical precision as she relentlessly searched for the disease, the rot that she was terrified of finding at the core.