Title: Eating Angel Cake

Author: livlovesyou

Email: freshklouds@hotmail.com

Rating: R [language warning. those offended: read with your eyes closed]

Classifications: Angst, Sam/Jack Jack/Other.

Archive: SJD, yes. Keep Me A Secret.

Disclaimer: Don't sue me. I never claimed to own them.

Summary: "this is not about taste"

Not an epic.

Eating Angel Cake

He tastes the oblivious every now and again. Sometimes it comes in boxes holding pizzas, delivered to other people's doors, or from the light between the curtains of the house across the street. He knows you can buy it in bottles, share with friends and order a takeaway when you're too tired to fight the microwave. It plays his tongue and constricts his throat. There's something about unbearable sweetness and a choking misused familiarity. They clash with ease.

He files away the unaware in a grey cabinet at the back of his mind, beneath the file named "needed". It belongs to metallic and electric, coupled with everything he cannot have, and then this is not about taste available in all shades of normality.

Rewind twenty years and he'd be taking comfort in driving forever, to places he'd never wanted to be, ordering coffee he'd never wanted to drink. Now it's about anonymity purchased with a one-way ticket to anywhere, nowhere and all the places in between.

So he likes this. He likes it more than a whole lot of things. He forgets selectively and sometimes it's enough to pretend that he isn't sleeping with Carter, and that sometimes he feels something and then sometimes, sometimes he's dead.

Then it's not about him not needing her. And then sometimes, sometimes he's dead. All over again.

----

He stands by the long wardrobe in the corner of the room. If he stares hard enough he'll see through wood and then he'll see the suitcase pressed up against the backing of the cupboard and then maybe he'll look right through to Narnia and back because he's not going mad.

He wants to believe he can slip away and never be found. He can be the guy they don't notice when they cross the road. He could drive in circles for hours, double back and follow a route to a place he doesn't want to be. Leave his car; take a plane down south to a place with a nice name, then go to the town next door.

He is free and a thousand other pretty clichés come all included.

----

Then he became Ed Remnick.

Ed Remnick has a wife and a kid and no one asks questions about his past. His wife talks too much but that's what drew him to her. She was so easy, tasting of apple pie and something too young. And if he doesn't think, he likes this, so he tries not to, but there are times when the rain hits the ground so hard he can't stop himself.

The kid isn't his. Janie's known a lot of people; so she's not so young, and they were all just passing through. She pours your coffee and fries up grits like she's been yours forever. It's so easy; he'll watch her lips as words tumble over, and then he'll kiss her goodbye like he was hers forever too. And then he's just passing through and she knows it.

------

He plays with the behaviour of the oblivious like it was never something he couldn't have. And then he got a phone call and a man at their front door and he had to give back his borrowed time, because it had never really been his.

But he was oblivious. If oblivious was falling out of love with a woman you used to fuck, and if oblivious was not being so your life depended on the way you love, he was all for it. Because sometimes he loved her, then sometimes, sometimes he was dead.

-fin-

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