jin character piece #17

[bipolyjack]

 that season finale tho. we're playing a fun game here called how many times can we end a scene with jin passed out cold.

Dragging themself, and a sobbing Marian, out of the water and up onto the beach is maybe the hardest thing Jin has ever done, and they’ve done some wildly difficult shit in the past couple of months.

Somebody in the early class left a lab mouse sitting out after dissection in Jin’s first-year bio practicum one time. Stiff in its little styrofoam tray, guts pinned open, skin shrunk tight against its skeleton. (Ben was Jin's lab partner that day. He'd turned his face aside at the sight of it, leaving Jin to tip the little tray into the trash.) Jin’s body feels like that - hollowed out, a stick-frame of loosely lashed bones. They didn't realize just how extensively Pygmalion had been smoothing their movements, helping them lift and push and pull and walk and sit and stand and lie down. Now their own muscles are small and flaccid, weak with disuse, and when the nanobots flood out of their body and they fall, with a series of stop-motion jerks, to their knees in the ocean with Marian in their arms, it’s only very distantly from shock and mostly because their legs just won’t hold them up any fucking more. They keep one trembling arm locked around Marian and claw their way through the shallows with the other, sea-froth and stirred-up sand sloshing into their mouth. They’re half-conscious and half-drowned and bleeding from a half-dozen scrapes and grazes they don't remember getting and doing their fucking best to keep Marian’s head above water, which seems like some kind of fucked up metaphor for like, this whole thing honestly. The palm of their right hand is stinging with the salt, trailing threads of blood. They don't remember why - ah, Ursa's taser robot. Crushed in their fist. They didn’t even register the lacerations at the time, and now Pygmalion isn't around to heal them.

The inside of their head feels hollowed out too. There's only one quiet thought rattling around in there, tiny but persistent, like a beach pebble in the toe of a shoe: Now me and Marian are the same.

Jin’s limbs completely give up halfway out of the surf. They collapse on their side, still holding Marian close, fingers cramped into a fist around a handful of Marian’s shirt. Marian’s back heaves with sobs, wracking and awful, like their body is coming apart.

Seawater hisses up the beach, funneling sand out from under them. Jin feels the receding wave tug at the loose hem of their shorts and remembers being five years old on vacation with their parents in Monterey, lying on the cool hard-packed sand at the tide line, letting the waves make a little island out of their body.

Where the evening breeze touches their sodden clothes, cold sets in. “Soul,” they say, and the effort of pushing that sound out of their mouth makes them drop their head to the wet sand in exhaustion. Their neck feels like a toothpick, too spindly to hold up the weight of their skull. 

Luckily, a few moments later, Soul does appear overhead, wearing a look of concern, along with Swansong, who reaches for Marian, saying, “Jin, let me -”

With the absolute dregs of their strength, Jin pulls Marian a little more firmly against them and croaks, “No.”

It's Airic who carries them both back to the manor, cradling them against each other in his big bony arms because Jin still won't let go. Marian has fallen quiet by the time Airic deposits them gently in the infirmary, just a low hitching breath every so often. Jin clings to consciousness and to Marian with the same grim determination, freezing on the infirmary exam table but unable to shiver, soaked and gritty with sand, shoes full of water. Marian's eyes are closed, salt drying in their lashes.

There's water in Jin's ears. Everything sounds garbled and distant; the hum of medical equipment, the infirmary doors opening and shutting, the voices and footsteps. Someone pries Jin's hand free of Marian's shirt, finger by stiff cold finger, and they try to open their mouth and protest, or shake their head, or something, but in the end all they manage to do is pass out.