damnfinecup | (no subject)

Entry tags:

in-game,
jill

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Dale made sure he and Jill stopped by the kitchen for coffee before setting out on their way for their long-planned outing in the falling snow. It was more for his own sake, and the sake of the weather, than for Jill's, but it was always the gentlemanly thing to do to offer refreshment to one's partner for the day.

"Can I get you anything?" he asked her, his scarf hanging loosely around his neck, only to be tied the moment before they went outside. "These aren't really travel mugs, but they'll do in a pinch."

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"I won," Jill said smugly, although she'd only really won because she'd ended up destroying Radek's shelter by falling on it. "You better not throw any at me," she warned a moment later, raising her eyebrows as she looked over at Dale.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Dale assured her, raising his un-coffee-laden hand in a gesture of innocence. "Clearly it's already been done. I prefer originality."

"So you don't favour the 'punch the girl in the arm and run away' trick?" Jill teased, her mouth turning up into a smile. All in all, she didn't mind that trick. Which probably said something about her.

"I don't find that one's worked very well for me since middle school," said Dale, with a regretful shake of his head. "It's a bit of a shame; things were much simpler back then."

"I don't remember things ever being simple," Jill told him with a quiet laugh, thinking back to the way things had been. Had it really ever been simple?

"Everything before puberty was simpler," said Dale. "We hadn't learned to play ridiculously complicated games yet, when it came to the opposite sex."

"For a lot of my life, I think I would have welcomed the games," Jill said honestly. "It would have been better, somehow, than burying myself in my work and coming up to find I was thirty-five and as alone as I'd been when I was fifteen."

"They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," said Dale thoughtfully. "If you'd played all those games as a teenager, and never devoted yourself to your field of study, you might be standing here with me today regretting that you'd never made anything of your life."

Jill laughed quietly at that, because in the end, she hadn't made much of her life anyway. She was on an island with no way of continuing her work on diabetes and no way to rebuild her name after the hep C disaster. "Well, it all amounts to the same now, doesn't it?" she asked.

"Well, I suppose that's a matter of perspective," said Dale. "All of our experiences in life add up to make us who we are. Would you have given up any of that history?"

"Some of it, yes," she said. Maybe that was sad or a testament to some of the things she'd done wrong, but it was the truth.

"Even if it means you might be a completely different person now?" Dale asked her. "It's difficult to predict the cascading effect each small change might have."

"Maybe I wouldn't be here, maybe there would have been no bomb, maybe there would have been no David." Oddly enough, the only thing from that last that sounded appealing was the lack of a bomb.

"Maybe you'd be in prison, maybe you'd be an astronaut, maybe you'd be a mother of three," said Dale.

Jill laughed at that, looking amused. "Maybe I'd be all three. In prison, in space with three kids waiting for me on the outside." Prison in space wasn't so unbelievable anymore.

"Kind of makes being stuck on a sometimes-tropical island a lot more appealing, doesn't it?" said Dale, grinning at her again.

"Besides the lack of work I haven't complained about the island yet," she shot back with a smile. The island really wasn't the problem.

"That's very true," Dale had to admit, leading her around the turnoff from the main path to the waterfall. "And I think you'll find, if you're determined and flexible enough, there's work to be had."

"I saw the note on the bulletin board about starting a resistance against the research on the people who look alike here," Jill said, her smile slightly strained at that.

Dale just smiled and shook his head. "Well, I imagine some of them might've been a little surprised that a public announcement was the first they heard of it," he said. "I have a friend -- well, a few of them, really -- who are among the clones in question."

"The announcement was to see if he'd be able to find help with the research," Jill pointed out. "There would be no point in Dr. Beckett advertising the study if he had no other researchers to help him."

"The announcement was public nonetheless," said Dale. "I would imagine finding out from a bulletin board that such a thing was in the works might've been unsettling."

"Unsettling, yes," Jill agreed. "Reason for a resistance? No, not quite."

"Well," said Dale, smiling a little, "I think the resistance is probably not going to catch on, despite the fetching goggles."

"Should I be sorry that I missed the goggles?" Jill asked, her eyebrows raised slightly at that. She'd only seen the bulletin and had no idea who Newbie was.