(no subject)

[likepalegold]

The light grows brighter as Jay Gatsby turns away from this moment and begins to understand that this is a striking pivotal point and nothing will ever be the same again. The absent scattering of autumn leaves scratches along the stone paving, but even that is a world away. Sinking, he's sinking, and there may not be a way up for him. And yet, that too is a world away.

Jay Gatsby is a self-made man in control of his own destiny, but he stands on a spot of land he doesn't recognize, clutching his dripping chest to ease the hurt of a wound he didn't plan. His life, his whole life, had been the accumulation of riches achieved in the pursuit of a dream; a dream he's unwilling to abandon because his blooming flower gleams and glows as brightly as the summer they met. Distantly, he hears the shrill cry of the phone and he thinks ...

Daisy.

He thinks of Daisy the way he's thought of her for years. Every dollar, every fabric in his closet, every square inch of his floors accompany thoughts of Daisy Buchanan, but the phone's cry begins to dim down, growing quiet as the hush blankets him and brings with it a wave of uncertainty.

His fingers tap against his beating heart. He eases his hand away, but there's no wound. Numb, Gatsby stands there with the ghost of cool water haunting him and chilling his fingers and toes until they're blue and still, he thinks of Daisy. The blood had bloomed, but not like her. The water had claimed him, but delivered him to this new whirligig as though God above has insisted that his life is not over, that Jay Gatsby's destiny is not done. He is far from complete and yet he is without direction for the first time in his life.

His life, so often full up of rumors, now affords him possibilities the likes of which he has never dreamed. For a man so preoccupied with his past, it's now his future that calls his attention forward.

Comments

[incurablydishonest]

For nigh on a week, Jordan Baker had been drifting sleekly through the tall, paneled rooms of the Nexus hotel, watching guests and employees with cool detachment and burying her keen curiosity beneath wan disaffectedness. She felt an innate connection to the place, which reminded her of the Plaza, if the Plaza had been dipped up to its neck in all the scandalous, modern ideas no person of good breeding was supposed to acknowledge.

She thought she rather liked it and would stay, and dimly imagined snatching Daisy away from Tom so that she could do the same.

The gardens were effusive and green, ideal for a leisurely walk to accompany the cigarette Jordan was, surprisingly, not permitted to smoke inside. Slender, manicured fingers poised just at her mouth, cigarette smoldering into the gentle breeze, she paused at the edge of the lawn and took in the familiar figure wavering like a mirage atop the verdant carpet.

Dressed for swimming and wet, in the sun he looked dipped in gold, the spectre of Venus risen from an invisible sea. Jordan flicked ash into the neatly-trimmed hedges and stepped forward.

"Well, this is a surprise," she drawled, head tilted with polite curiosity but voice stitched up with tightly-controlled bitterness. "I've never met a ghost before."

[likepalegold]

"And here I've never been a ghost," Gatsby replies as if his life has been scripted for him and he's merely playing a role. Jordan Baker, that constant presence in Daisy's life and by extension, now his, standing there and regarding him as if some criminal eager to steal possessions or, perhaps worse, something dear to her. She's swanned in and out of his life, oscillating through the parties and remaining devotedly present at Daisy's side through the times when he was penniless and the times when he was poor of morals, but rich and warm. "Tell me, Miss Baker," he says, his gaze fixed upon a point in the distance as though it will bear him answers or, more dangerously, hope. "Where are we?"

[incurablydishonest]

"Oh, nobody knows that," Jordan quickly replied with a bob of her right shoulder, and lifted her chin to look at Gatsby down the curve of one downy cheek. "Not even you."

She swayed abruptly forward into a long stride that brushed past Gatsby, still dripping on the grass. Just when it seemed her attention to him was finished, she paused, grinding what was left of her cigarette under one heel, and tipped him a glance back over her sharp shoulder.

"You really shouldn't linger out here like that. You'll catch your death, and wouldn't that be ironic?"

Without waiting for his answer, she started again, long, confident steps and the expectation to be followed.

[likepalegold]

Her confidence has always astounded him. Gatsby's life has been built on determination, charm, and an abhorrently large sum of money, but confidence is something you need to live in this world and she wears it like Daisy wore those smiles, infused with warmth and the kind of beauty that took your breath away. Absently, his hand trails down from where it sits suspended at his heart and over the swimsuit, realizing, now, that he had never changed out of it. "Perhaps I'd like to see if I can be the first man to die twice in such quick succession," he remarks casually, as though he hasn't given a thought to living when clearly that isn't true at all.

"Out there," he says, pointing to that distance, "is hardly East Egg across the bay." There is no mansion gleaming in the green light, beckoning his dreams onwards just that inch more.

[incurablydishonest]

"How good of you to notice," was Jordan's reply, her voice slipping briefly in and out of the well of mild irritation she'd been reserving for anything Gatsby since that hot afternoon at the Plaza. It wasn't precisely fair, not when now confronted with the man himself, risen miraculously from the dead, but the annoyance was a comfort, a buffer for the more raw parts of her pride.

"Being in West Egg would require being on planet Earth, and as you'll discover, we're a long, long way from there," she continued a little less maliciously, and lead them into the cool shadow cast by the hotel's main building. "If I could tell you where we are, precisely, I promise I would, but I simply don't know. Nobody does. But the accommodations are pleasant enough even when you're not a ghost."

[likepalegold]

He's built the world up for himself in such a way that he's accommodated twists and turns with the elaborate spending of money to people for things and objects and services. People are all too happy to do whatever you ask when there's money involved, but he doesn't have a nickel on him and he doesn't have a telephone and he doesn't have the vaguest inkling of how he would even go back to the start (and doesn't it seem as though he's always going back). "There is a chill in the air, isn't there?" he replies conversationally, as though he's ignored every other word she's spoken. "It would be a grand idea to get inside and warm up, wouldn't it? Yes," he says, tapping his foot once on the earth beneath him. "Yes, I think that's the best idea for it."

[incurablydishonest]

"I suppose you would think so, yes," was Jordan's reply, haughty as a matter of course, her eye traveling a discerning route from his bare feet to damp crown. "I'm afraid there's a disappointing lack of available clothing options, but then again, just about anything would be more appropriate than that, wouldn't it?"

She bobbed her head at him over her shoulder, as if her own counsel were all she needed on the matter, and finished her confident traipse into the cool, gray building. In truth, the idea of Gatsby in a garish Hawaiian print was possibly more offensive to herself than to him. Myriad were Jordan's reasons for finding annoyance with the man, but to bring him so low would be outright crass.

[likepalegold]

His fingers are always moving, now, always tapping a steady rhythm against his damp chest as though there lies the faint belief that he's needed to beat his heart after that terrifying frozen moment in which it had stopped. It seems a lifetime ago that he had first taken Miss Baker aside, but then, it was. Jay Gatsby stands split between two lives; this one and the one before, and nothing to tie them together but the invariable moment of his death.

The water had cleansed him of a prior life, but Gatsby still wears all the sins of his past. "I'm sure we'll be able to persuade someone into some charity, Miss Baker," he says, his optimism sounding hollow to his own ears. He wonders what she must think of him, now, after everything. He wonders how uncharitable it is compared to the legions of rumors that had swirled around him like a tornado borne of bad tales. "How is it you came to be here?" he asks, fighting off a chill that struggles to take hold.

[incurablydishonest]

"I wish I knew," Jordan admitted, which wasn't true in the most precise sense. Certainly she would have liked to know, but the most critical aspects of the entire foray into Nexus life principally included ready availability of vodka martinis and clean linen sheets.

"One moment I was walking into the parlor, the next I was here." Pausing just inside the large front entry, she lifted a disinterested hand to indicate the grand, echoing space of the lobby. "I go home on a regular basis, but I don't suppose that will be an option for you," she added with an enigmatic tilt of her head that may have indicated sympathy, boredom, or anything in between the two.

[likepalegold]

"No, I suppose my options are limited," Gatsby replies with a thin smile that keeps a private joke behind the surface. For a man who's looked at his future as though a plane of never-ending, gleaming, golden possibilities stretching onwards and upwards, to be given a landscape with a definitive edge and end has done what a bullet couldn't do; give him hope only to take it away. "Tell me, would you, have you had any contact with any other familiar faces?" he asks, taking the first of several brisk steps to get the blood flowing through his limbs. "Meaning, of course, our mutual friend, Nick Carraway. I don't suppose you've seen him haunting these same grounds?"

And Daisy. He wants to know about Daisy, wants to ask about Daisy, but he can't bring himself to ask. If he asks, he risks discovering that she wants nothing to do with him, but he has bled for her, he has given up nearly everything and is ready to give up the rest in a single breath. How could she deny him after that? Surely her promises aren't as fragile as that cracked windshield on a car that will remain covered away, like a terrible dark secret.

[incurablydishonest]

The name was a barb, a sharp shot of pain that almost instantly settled into a bitter ache. The blue of Jordan's eyes grew icy cold.

"No," she replied, and pressed her mouth into a line as she turned and strode briskly inside without further comment. He'd want to know about Daisy—Of course he'd want to know about Daisy—but the entire affair had become a bore long before it had become deadly, and Jordan was well sick of it.

[likepalegold]

Their friendship remains brittle and convenient, then. Gatsby does wonder for the briefest of moments what Jordan must have thought of him after the incident, but the thought is fleeting and escapes as quickly as a coin spent poorly. It's no matter what she thinks of him so long as Daisy knows he did it for her, he did it all for her, and he'll still do everything in his power for...

Her. It seems routine, but new, because murder is a new chapter in the book and Gatsby is hardly sure what this means for him. He follows Jordan steadily, not quite matching her pace (content to amble despite the chill in his toes) and surveying the property as they enter it. "Trading palaces, I suppose," he murmurs, hand gripping for a cane that isn't there.

[incurablydishonest]

The sheer, horrible worst of this was the immovable feeling of obligation. Just this side of sympathy but not entirely without regret, it was a weighty pulse behind Jordan's eyes, like the preface to a headache that felt more oppressive than painful. Gatsby'd always been like this: Over polite, practiced charm; trying so hard to fit into a role he had no true understanding of. He was too pleasant to be moneyed, too courteous to aspire to the aristocracy. But of course, he had anyway, and Daisy had loved him despite the subterfuge, and Jordan hadn't many genuine friends but Daisy was one of the few.

She felt bad. Not for Gatsby, but herself, in being obligated without her consent. But the feeling was impossible to turn away from.

Sighing, she motioned him toward the stairs instead of the front desk, the originally intended destination.

"Come on, then," she said, the expression she turned back to him less harsh than the moment before, more softly confounded. "You can stay in my room while I fetch you something reasonable to wear."