"Here?" he asks, his eyes opening and eyebrows lifting high. "In your bedroom? In the dark? With nobody else around?"
He has two options, here. Either he can get defensive and fight back, or he can close his eyes pointedly and try to sleep. Instead, he sighs quietly and lifts a hand to wipe at his face, scrubbing at the scruffy beard that's cropped up along his chin now that he doesn't have a razor.
"My life has been a complete shit show since I was nine years old, Cougs," he says finally, his voice practically flat as he obeys Cougar's orders and doesn't use his given name. He's not going to go into his sob story childhood, though, Cougar knows all he needs to about that and Jake really doesn't feel like opening old wounds just to win a stupid argument. "Don't try and tell me I'm oblivious, okay, I know. There's a difference between being a realist and being a pessimist."
Well, apparently he went for option one after all.
He'd been planning on leaving it at that, but the words just bubble out of him like a fountain now that he's opened his mouth, and he finds himself continuing. "And now we're stuck here in this godforsaken fucking town, and I don't know why. I don't know where we even are, I don't know how to get out, I have no fucking clue what to do to help us in any real way because all of my skills are dependent on technology that apparently hasn't even been invented yet, I have no way to contact my family to make sure they're okay or let them know I'm not dead again..."
He'd sent his sister a heavily encoded email when they were in Bolivia, to let her know he was still alive. He knew he shouldn't have, that he was just asking for trouble, but he had to tell her he was okay. It had made their exile easier to bear, to know that his family knew he wasn't a traitor and a murderer. But here...
"I am painfully aware of the realities of our situation, okay. Is it so wrong that I'm trying to find a silver lining so I don't lose my fucking mind trapped here without even a cell phone or a goddamn radio? If I let myself wallow in the name of being a realist, there'd be nobody to look after you, or Veronica, or half the other scared kids in this town who don't know what the hell they're doing either. I'm not an idiot. I'm just trying to stay sane."
Gritting his teeth to stop any more words from spilling out, he pointedly rolls over so his back is turned to Cougar, and hugs the edge of the bed himself. He would just get up and storm back to his own room, but his glasses are on the other side of the bed, on Cougar's bedside table, and stumbling around and banging his shins into the corner of things would really undercut his righteous fury.
no subject
He has two options, here. Either he can get defensive and fight back, or he can close his eyes pointedly and try to sleep. Instead, he sighs quietly and lifts a hand to wipe at his face, scrubbing at the scruffy beard that's cropped up along his chin now that he doesn't have a razor.
"My life has been a complete shit show since I was nine years old, Cougs," he says finally, his voice practically flat as he obeys Cougar's orders and doesn't use his given name. He's not going to go into his sob story childhood, though, Cougar knows all he needs to about that and Jake really doesn't feel like opening old wounds just to win a stupid argument. "Don't try and tell me I'm oblivious, okay, I know. There's a difference between being a realist and being a pessimist."
Well, apparently he went for option one after all.
He'd been planning on leaving it at that, but the words just bubble out of him like a fountain now that he's opened his mouth, and he finds himself continuing. "And now we're stuck here in this godforsaken fucking town, and I don't know why. I don't know where we even are, I don't know how to get out, I have no fucking clue what to do to help us in any real way because all of my skills are dependent on technology that apparently hasn't even been invented yet, I have no way to contact my family to make sure they're okay or let them know I'm not dead again..."
He'd sent his sister a heavily encoded email when they were in Bolivia, to let her know he was still alive. He knew he shouldn't have, that he was just asking for trouble, but he had to tell her he was okay. It had made their exile easier to bear, to know that his family knew he wasn't a traitor and a murderer. But here...
"I am painfully aware of the realities of our situation, okay. Is it so wrong that I'm trying to find a silver lining so I don't lose my fucking mind trapped here without even a cell phone or a goddamn radio? If I let myself wallow in the name of being a realist, there'd be nobody to look after you, or Veronica, or half the other scared kids in this town who don't know what the hell they're doing either. I'm not an idiot. I'm just trying to stay sane."
Gritting his teeth to stop any more words from spilling out, he pointedly rolls over so his back is turned to Cougar, and hugs the edge of the bed himself. He would just get up and storm back to his own room, but his glasses are on the other side of the bed, on Cougar's bedside table, and stumbling around and banging his shins into the corner of things would really undercut his righteous fury.