entrancelogs | Open} It comes to say it’s hard now

Entry tags:

Open} It comes to say it’s hard now

Who: Barbie, Julia, Open to you
Where: 8th floor, in the tunnels, around outside
When: During July
Rating:
Summary: Preparing once more and ignoring the slot that had been in his head
The Story:

The Eighth FloorAnyone coming by might find Barbie moving from one room to another. One is the one that he is sleeping in, Julia's room where he is living. The other is the room he's taken over, that one would find his name on. No one is living actually in that room though.

Instead he's used the closets to outfit it with shelves and bookcases, totes and boxes. All of them were things that he wished they'd had in Chester's Mill to help them get through how bad things that had happened to them. He wouldn't let it happen here in Wonderland as well.

So he spends a part of each day working on stocking up on things he imagines they might need depending on how things go. The room has lanterns and canned food, bottled water and even scuba tanks. The Army had taught him to always think about how bad things could get. Chester's Mill had shown him just how bad it could be. He isn't prepared to let that happen to him and Julia in Wonderland.

The Tunnels

Several times throughout the month, Barbie can be found beneath the mansion, going through the tunnels. He wears a mining helmet with a light, steel toed boots, and climbing gear strapped to the backpack he is carrying.

Not that he expects to find a pit in the tunnels, but he can't help but to check things out and be sure.

Outside the Mansion

Throughout the month Barbie can be found around the mansion making sure he stays in shape. Running on the beach. Swimming in the lake. From time to time he also wills one of the rooms into a half court basketball court where he can be found shooting hoops and playing against "imaginary" players unless someone else chooses to join him.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

For a moment the tension wanes. Not because of anything more than her. The way those tousled curls were caught by the breeze, the brightness of her eyes.

Her words though take away the start of a smile though, giving her a nod. "You're still the Monarch. Even if this place doesn't recognize that," he says, believing that. He had given his life for that. Even if he hadn't died for it.

"I'm sorry if I've put too much on you about this," he says, reaching out and lightly touching her cheek, brushing back a strand of hair. "I'll keep it all in check," he adds, used to doing that in the Army and more than capable of doing it here as well. "Sorry for that."

Julia sighs at the touch of his hand, her eyes fluttering shut for a moment as she tries to recenter herself. Maybe if she'd had the chance to really figure out what being the Monarch meant at home, she would feel a little better. Instead, she had been blindly making decisions while Barbie blindly supported her, all the way to his death.

Almost to his death. The Dome had protected him in the end, hadn't it? It helped to remember that.

"It's not that, it's just that I wish I had any answers for you," she admits. "I wish I did at home, too. I just feel like all we've done since we met is struggle to survive and now I keep finding myself wondering if we're ever going to get out of this."

"You're not going to like my answer but..." He pauses, knowing his words can make things tense again. "If we don't, we don't. Nothing is guaranteed in life, Julia. Not here. Not in the Dome. Not without it. If it was, life wouldn't have gone ways that ended with us both in Chester's Mill now would it?"

He'd still be with his unit. She would still be in Chicago.

"I'm used to hunting down answers, but I don't expect you to always have them. Maybe it's just that I'm used to following orders," he says with a lopsided grin.

She answers his grin with a half-smile of her own and a small roll of her eyes. "And Joe seriously thought you were the Monarch. So off-base."

It was unlikely that Julia will ever admit to Barbie how much she internally panicked when she found herself drawn to the egg. It took a split second for the realization to kick in even after Joe pointed it out and a second longer for the heavy feeling of doom to lay down over her heart.

That feeling of doom still hadn't gone away, even here.

"I know nothing is guaranteed. I learned that the hard way, with what happened in Chicago..." She winces slightly. "I'm so sorry you had to learn about that from Junior. I didn't think that little shit would sell me out."

"Yeah well, trained soldier that kind of saved people the moment he met them versus the reporter chick he'd seen around," Barbie teases, grinning wider. "I mean, not a hard choice for him there."

Which was cruel, and playful at the same time. Though for a teenage boy, probably close to home.

"Yeah well, Junior is seriously a product of his upbringing," Barbie points out, though it gets him to thinking. About the things he's been through... and what he might go through. "It wasn't easy getting it from him and not you, but maybe I get that sometimes it's hard to talk about the truth. Harder with someone that you care about. I... I definitely know how that is."

He sighs, knowing he should say it and get it over with, but how would that help either of them? If he goes back and the car crushes him, what changes? They can't stop it, after all.

"If by 'reporter chick' you mean highly trained journalist," she teases back in mock offense. She frowns at the thought of Junior, though, especially with how things were left, with Junior turning on all of him and back to his psychopath of a father. "Junior is a product of Big Jim Rennie," she says, not exactly to correct him, but she does feel like there's some kind of difference. Big Jim hadn't just raised that kid, he created him, and Julia has a feeling the result of that is going to become much more apparent the longer the Dome is in place.

Junior is less on an issue right now, though, as is James Rennie Senior. The more important thing at the moment is the look on Barbie's face that Julia misinterprets as disappointment... Perhaps even doubt. Two of the last things she needs from Barbie right now.

"No, don't dance around it," she says, deciding that owning up to it is better than brushing it aside. "You have every right to be upset with me. I was the one who said there would be no more secrets between us and then I didn't tell you why I was even in Chester's Mill to begin with. I only told Junior because he's a messed up kid and I thought not feeling entirely alone would make him less of a shithead. That turned out great for me."

Next time, she'd be wiser in who she offered collateral to, not that it mattered much in the end. Secrets always came out in situations like this.

Julia sighs and shifts slightly, rubbing the back of her neck with the palm of her hand. "It's not a long story. I was covering a local election, and a source sent me documents showing that one of the candidates was corrupt. I knew there was something wrong, that the documents might be forged, but I didn't do my due diligence. I ran the story anyway, and obviously the truth came right on its heels." She averts her eyes from him, embarrassed. She wasn't when she told Junior, but Junior was just a kid. At the end of the day, she was far more concerned with what Barbie thought of her than just about anyone else. "After the paper fired me, Peter talked me into moving back to Chester's Mill with him. He thought it would be a fresh start for me, for both of us."

He hadn't exactly been wrong, after all.

She meets his eyes again, bright and resilient as always, but this time, laced with just a little fear. "I'm a lot of things, Barbie, but I'm not a liar. I'm not."

"Well of course. What else would reporter chick mean?" He asks, one hand going to his chest, staring at her with wide, "innocent" eyes. "And that's what I mean about product of his upbringing. He was left in the hands of Big Jim. I figure he's actually turned out much better than he could have been given that. But unless they show up here, for now our life is our own. Without them."

Which is another bonus to this place. That list of PROs to Wonderland was just growing longer and longer every day.

"Trusting Junior will always be a bad choice, and we know that now." He may be one of them because of the Dome choosing him, but he would always be the one that Barbie side eyed the Hell out of as well.

So he listens, glad to hear the details from her, about what she's been through and done. "And I should be angry." And maybe if they were still in Chester's Mill he would be. Except they're here, and he's done some secret keeping of his own and can understand what leads a person to hide the truth. "I'm going to ask something, and only because I want to hear why. Why did you run it if you felt something was off?"

He suspects numerous reasons, and all of them he is likely to use to justify why she did what she had. Part of it coming from loving her, and a huge part coming from knowing he is the man that can't throw stones. Not after what the Jackrabbits had done, not after his omissions when he arrived in Wonderland.

She suspected he was going to ask, but she that didn't mean she had an answer prepared. In a way, she'd been trying to answer the question herself since it happened. The first few months she'd spent in Chester's Mill, she's distracted herself by hating everything about the town that she possibly could, even as the place slowly began to grow on her. All she had was the Independent which stayed afloat largely thanks to the efforts of their savings account - which her husband had, of course, been gambling away. Before long, her little newspaper and their little lives wouldn't have been enough to keep them afloat under the weight of their own stupid choices.

And even after all that, she still wasn't entirely sure why.

"I wish I had an answer that didn't sound complete asinine," she admits, glancing at him sheepishly. "You know that character in movies, the journalist who gets so absorbed in chasing the story that they lose their integrity? I'd been doing this for, God, almost ten years, and I had barely made a name for myself. I thought this story could be my big break and I sold my soul for a byline."

She lets out a slow breath and breaks her gaze from Barbie's to stare out at the water. "It was an impulse decision that bit me in the ass, and I deserved everything that happened afterward."

This isn't their world, it isn't the place where she did these things, but Barbie needed to know. Not to know the kind of person Julia is - he believes he knows that no matter what she says - but to know more of her as a person. Who she is, and who the woman he loves is.

So while he knows he could stop, not ask anymore questions, he has one more.

"You don't have to answer this, and I won't judge you if you don't. It won't change that I love you, okay?" Because more than anything else, he needs her to know that. She matters, and he wants her to know that the past is still that. The past.

"Did you believe they were corrupt?" Because running a story that was fishing but could expose the truth was a cause he could believe in, even if she had gone about it the wrong ways.

Somehow, this entire conversation feels almost as bad as the night she confronted him about Peter. That was in their house, though, trapped under the Dome, and bogged down with her understanding that Peter was dead and that Barbie had killed him. The fact that she fell in love with the man who murdered her husband doesn't ever fade from the back of her mind, so much so that she hasn't even confided in Claire about it yet. She worries an awful lot about the kind of person she is in the wake of all that.

And yet, she worries even more about the kind of person Barbie thinks she is for this.

"I..."

She considers lying to him, for a fleeting moment. It could be better that way. Her integrity won't be in question, he won't doubt her. What she says here doesn't matter back home, anyway, and the most important thing to her isn't even the fact that he loves her, or that he looks out for her or, that he makes her feel safe.

It is the fact that he has faith in her. He believes in her. Thinking about losing that faith makes her feel sick deep inside.

But she also told him she isn't a liar and somehow, right now, that matters more.

"No, I didn't," she admits. "It wasn't a case of me doing the wrong thing for the right reason."

She isn't the only one worrying, because Barbie remembers often what he has done. Directly and to Julia, not even counting the rest of the things in his life where he is definitely not a good man. No matter his motives and his desire to be a good man. He knows he isn't always.

But with Julia he will try and do the best he can to make her life better, with all that he can do. Which he knows means being honest, just as much as Julia is being honest with him.

"I see." And he wishes that he did. Except in the part where he kept secret... because of doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

Shifting, leaning away from her for a moment, he digs into his pocket, getting out his wallet. A moment later he holds out his coin to her, the one he had used at the Dome.

"Remember when I talked about my unit being infamous? Why they listened to me?"

Julia had braced for anything... Anything but that, maybe. She had expected some kind of reaction, whether it be anger or admonishment, but simply having Barbie shift to the side before pulling out his unit's coin and passing it to her was not at the top of her list.

She pauses before she leans into him and takes it out of his hand, flipping it over in her fingers before her gaze rises to meet his.

"Yeah, back when they were going to launch the missile?" She barely remembered much of that day - it had a been a blur between visitor's day, the evacuation, the riot, and the rain, not to mention what she and Dodee had found following Joe and Norrie around. Barbie's mysterious history had managed to be the least interesting thing about it all.

Still, she has the sinking feeling that whatever he's about to admit goes a little past running forged documents in a newspaper.

He knows it seems so far off course, but he needs her to know this. He needs her to know that mistakes are made, all the way around. Much as he's confused that Julia, as the woman he sees her as, would have done this but can he truly take the moral high ground, all things considered.

He nods then, remember that day acutely, because of this. Of using his past to get what they needed.

"The reason we're called the Lucky Thirteen is because we survived an insurgent attack and then rescued the remaining member of another unit who was taken hostage and saved her life. It's why the soldier was willing to tell me about what he knew outside the dome. Except..."

He sighs, looking out over the lake. "My unit was the one that opened fire on theirs. We thought they were insurgents. We... killed all of the unit but one, and then saved her from the life threatening danger we put her into," he says, speaking softly, almost distantly. "But the only survivor had no idea where the shots came from, and we swore as a unit never to talk about it since what would the truth do? Destroy us all and not bring anyone else back from the dead? So we just kept our mouths shut."

"Jesus, Barbie."

It's out of her mouth before she can stop it, before she can give herself enough time for the forethought of what a hypocrite she might sound like. Granted, she didn't kill anybody, but she nearly destroyed a person's life for her own gain. She wasn't a soldier, though, or an enforcer. The only damage a journalist could do, after all, was destroy someone's life with a lie.

"I can't imagine your unit is the only one who ever did anything like that," she admits, although it does chafe a little to think of how Barbie had been lauded for what happened while her own life had collapsed to ruins. Her lie made her a washed up reporter that couldn't be trusted, while his made him a hero. And yet, there they are, both burdened for the rest of their lives with a similar kind of shame.

"Oh, God, we're a fucked up pair, aren't we?" she says impulsively, as the weight of everything comes down on her. All the things they've done, and all the things they may have to do to survive whatever is coming.

Edited 2018-07-28 00:38 (UTC)

He winces, not that he didn't expect that. Not in the least. He knows how bad it is, the horror that he caused. More than that, Barbie knows he deserves it and more for what he was part of. The rest of his unit may be at piece with what they've done, but he never will be.

"We may not be the only unit, but I wasn't part of those other commands. It's why... Why I left my dad's after my mother died, and why I ended up working for Maxine. I thought... wasn't thinking. I won't pretend otherwise."

He can't lie to Julia, not about what he's done. Not now that he's come clean to her.

"So what you did was a bad choice, and I'm sorry it ruined your career, but if you wanted to be condemned for it, I'm not the man to do it," he admits. "Never was."

Smiling then as he leans over, nuzzling her cheek. "Maybe that's why the universe brought us together."

"So we could mutually feel sorry for ourselves for our unforgivable life choices?"

Her eyes flutter shut at the feel of skin against hers, but she knows what he really means.

Maybe the universe brought them together because, even if they couldn't forgive themselves, they at least understood enough to forgive each other.

"I've loved you from the moment we met," she reminds him, lifting her head away so she can turn to look at him and cup his cheek with her hand. "Nothing can change that." Julia leans forward to kiss him gently on the mouth.

"Or help one another get through our unforgivable life choices," he notes in a low voice, leaning in close to her. "Because that's one thing you've given me. More than I've ever known. A way to find forgiveness in myself."

And he's been working on it, as hard as he can. Because hating himself for what he'd done was never going to help him with helping those in Chester's Mill.

"And nothing will. Not for either of us. Do you want to know the very moment I knew that whatever happened in that Dome, I wasn't going to give you up?"

She manages to smile at him warmly, just like his words seem to warm her insides. No one has ever talked to her like Barbie does, or made her feel as loved or as safe as he does. It's not even that she feels like he protects her, although that is part of it. But he also makes her feel like she could do anything, like he's her own personal cheerleader. Their relationship may have only been beginning at home, but Wonderland has only reinforced all of the feelings she had for him over the last few months.

"I have no idea. When?"

He grins then, remembering the moment. "When I told you that you weren't going to get those soldiers attention and you could walk naked in front of them and nothing would change... and you said you already had," he says, chuckling.

"I knew then you were the woman I wanted to try and have a life with, because of the woman you were. Are."

"I did? Oh my God."

She laughs, shaking her head and glancing away from him. "God, Barbie, I barely ever remember that. That whole morning was a whirlwind."

The Dome had only come down the night before. She clearly remembers the frustration and the fear, and how they both ran around town looking for answers in the short time before things really went to hell. She's not surprised that she did it, or that she had to gall to say that to him either; what is surprising to her is that his moment of truly knowing what she could mean to him was a moment so mundane she'd forgotten it.

In a way, that made it even better.

"Most guys would not have reacted that way," she admits. "I guess you got to know me faster than most people do."

"You did. Now, I was not there so I don't know if you really did it or not, but the truth? It is the kind of woman you are, and I believe you would do it. Because you're that determined and strong, and I have faith in you to do what you must. That's why I knew," he says, smiling at her.

Leaning in, kissing the tip of her nose. "You're an amazing, strong, determined woman and I knew then that whatever the Dome did, I would be on your side."

She shuts her eyes as his lips brush her nose, her cheeks flushing pink at the affectionate movement. She loves when he does that.

When she opens her eyes again she stares at him, her mouth curved into a smile, although it fades after a moment. She feels the same - all she needs is him, and she knows that they can take on anything together, be it Wonderland or the Dome or anything in between.

Still.

"Do you think the Dome will ever break?"

Certainly things were tense in speaking of those things. They weren't there, and there was more to have here than the Dome. Except, one day, they would be returned to all of that.

"Yes. I have to believe that eventually it will break. Something will have to happen and break it and we'll be able to go on about our lives." He arches a brow, leaning back a bit. "Do you believe it will?"

"I guess I have to believe it too. Mostly because I hate the idea of living the rest of my life under that thing. Do you have any idea how much I missed showers?"

Her mouth curves into a smile again and she bumps her shoulder against his.

"You have no idea how much it means to me that you don't hold what happened in Chicago against me. A lot of people would." She winces slightly, thinking about the camera next to her and her new role here in Wonderland. "I'm going to have to tell my new boss. If she finds out because of an event or if, God forbid, Junior shows up and airs our dirty laundry, she'll kick me off the team."

Of course, talks about the Dome and if they will survive it means that confession time isn't over with. Not with what he still has to tell her.

And when she goes on about Georgia finding out, he sighs, taking a breath.

"Okay so... confessions are a thing, right? Because I may have one more thing to tell you. I wasn't sure... because I don't know for sure, but you deserve to know. It's about when I came here, back in Chester's Mill."

Open} It comes to say it’s hard now

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