Jack pressed the button to begin recording, and shouted his intro. "TOP O' THE MORNIN' TO YA LADDIES, MY NAME IS JACKSEPTICEYE-"
I had heard it before, but I still flinched briefly.
"-and her name is Snow." he said in a normal voice. I cocked an eyebrow at him. He either didn't notice, or didn't feel the need to acknowledge it.
"Today, we're going to learn more about each other, since we only met the other day. Earlier, I tweeted out and asked you guys for questions, and you gave the most random shit ever." Jack said, laughing. "And I love it."
Jack explained that he would read off the questions, then we would both answer it. I nodded, and he read the first couple of questions.
"Ok, first ones are super generic. Eye color, hair color, favorite color, birth stone, and zodiac sign." Jack said, then looked up at me. "Blue, brown, blue, amythest, and Aquarius." he said, counting off each thing on his fingers.
"Ok...hazel, my hair is brown, blonde, and strawberry blonde(among other colours...),I like all colors, ruby, and Cancer." I rattled off, blowing the strand of hair I had almost suffocated because of earlier out of my face.
"Favorite videogame?" Jack read. "Shadow of the Colossus."
I thought for a minute, there were so many that I loved.
"Presentable Liberty, Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, or The Beginner's Guide."
Jack raised an eyebrow at my answer. "Oh, so you like crying and questioning your sanity. Good to know...."
I stuck my tongue out at him. He returned the gesture before moving to the next question. "Favorite Avenger?" Jack said, his voice gaining interest as the questions got less generic and boring. "Hawkeye, I guess. Or Thor."
"Iron man. Dude's got a sense of humor." I replied, shrugging.
"Fair enough. Do you have any scars from surgery or any accident in the past? Ok, now the questions are just weeeeird..." Jack chuckled. "I don't have any super deep scars or anything, no. What about you?"
The question surprised me. In my mind, I saw my forearms, covered in bloody scars from years ago.
I knew the truth, and I swallowed it, lying through my teeth. I laughed. "That's the most specific question ever! Um, no, I don't have any scars from breaking my face on anything."
Jack didn't seem convinced. He would interrogate me on it later, I could see it in his eyes, but he said nothing.
"Ok, next question," he said, his voice empty of suspicion. He was a better liar than me, obviously.
"Pro-life, or Pro-choice?" He read, glancing at the camera, probably to check that it was still recording.
"Pro-life!" we both said in unison.
"If you had to choose between two superpowers, being able to teleport or being able to fly, which would you choose?"
"Probably....being able to fly. I want wings!" I decided, flapping my arms up and down. Jack shook his head vigorously. "Nope, nope, nope. I would teleport, because fuck flying." he said quickly.
I scoffed at him, but couldn't help grinning.
"Super strength, super smarts, or super speed?"
"Super smarts." I said without pause.
"Why? I already have super strength anyways. I mean, just look at these PLUS-ONE BICEPS!" He shouted, flexing his mildly above average bicep. I blew a raspberry, and he glared at me.
"You are a child, you know that?" he asked.
"You're one to talk. But I'm a cute child. That's the difference between us." I responded.
Jack feigned hurt, grasping at his heart and scrunching up his face, fake sobbing and slumping into a ball.
After a second of that, he popped back up and continued on to the next question, as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.
"What's the weirdest dream you've ever had?" Jack thought for a moment. "I guess whenever I have dreams that I actually die in. Like, dreams where you usually wake up right before you hit the ground, I've just died in."
"Jeez." I said. "I had a dream when I was four that knights impaled boots, the little monkey guy from Dora, through the stomach and ate his intestines like soup."
Jack looked at me with a mixture of disgust, reverence, and fear. "You were four!?"
"Yeah..." I said, sighing and chuckling at myself. "I was a fucked up little kid."
"Ok, last one, because now I'm scared of your answers a small bit," Jack said, scrolling through questions on Twitter, presumably.
"Here's one: if you had to shoot yourself to save the person sitting the closest to you where you are, would you do it?" his voice faltered as he reached the end of the sentence. He looked up at me, studying me.
"Sure." I said plainly.
Jack peered at me with strange eyes. "Why?"
I shrugged. "Why not? I've got no one else to save, can't save myself, so why not save the one person who hasn't turned out to be a huge prick?"
"What do you mean you don't have anyone else to-?"
"Can we move on, please?" I asked, though it was more of a command than a request. We locked eyes, and I silently dared him to press harder.
He must've given up on prying, for now at least, because he broke his gaze and continued on to the final question.
"Ok, last question: how much force is needed to insert-ok, skip." Jack said, gagging and scrolling down. I smiled slightly, my mood improving again. I wanted this to be a redo on my life, not a replay. If I had to relive that again, I would go insane.
"Ok, ACTUAL last question!" Jack announced in exasperation. "Sunrise or sunset?"
That was probably the hardest question of them all, all things considered.
"Sunset, I suppose."
"Agreed."
Jack sighed, and turned to his camera once more, and shouted his outro with impressive enthusiasm. Afterwards, he clicked the button for the camera to stop rolling.
"I'm cutting the two questions before the end out of the video, if you don't mind." Jack said. He sounded different than the man who had shouted goodbye to the millions of people who were waiting for the uploaded content impatiently. His voice was lower. More somber, maybe. He knew I was hiding something.
"Well, that was fun.." I said awkwardly, not quite knowing what else to say.
"Yeah, it sure was." Jack replied, no emotion in his tone. He avoided my eyes, fiddling with his camcorder and computer.
I looked out the slightly open window. It was dark. It looked like it could be twilight. Rain poured from the sky in what seemed like buckets and buckets of large droplets.
"It's raining." I observed.
"And you're a horrible liar. Are we just stating the obvious now?" Jack said.
I brought my knees together and sat back on my ankles, so that I didn't slump. "Don't try to make me tell you. It's none of your business." I said.
"It's my business as your friend to help you if you're cutting yourself open!" he snapped at me.
"You need to chill out." I said. I was trying to keep my tone calm and level, but it was getting harder and harder to keep emotions pent up in my throat, trying desperately to burst and spill out.
"Roll up your sleeve." he demanded, still refusing to meet my gaze.
I sighed in anger and frustration, and rolled up my left and right sleeves so that they exposed all of both my shoulders. One was disgusting, one was beautiful to me.
My left shoulder bore scar upon ugly scar from the knife I had kept stashed in that little backpack from when I was an eight year old orphan.
Jack finally steadied his hands and let his eyes wander to the exposed skin. I watched his crystal blue eyes darken with worry when he fully processed the scars.
"These scars are anywhere from 9 to 4 years old. They were my source of relief and release." I said. "I was stupid, I didn't know there was any other way to..." the words caught in my throat as a lump formed in its place. Tears stung my eyes, and threatened to spill over onto my cheeks.
Jack was silent as I spoke, my voice wavering and cracking. "I'm an orphan...my father was a drunkard, my mom was the sweetest, nicest woman. She felt more like a best friend than a mother. She was so strong for me, when I cried, and whenever I would ask her what was wrong, she would just say that she was sad, because I wasn't smiling." I said quietly. The first tear fell onto my jeans, as memories came flooding back, full force.
"But I saw her bruises. The welts and the red marks on her face and wrists from him. She hid them as best she could, so that she wouldn't worry me. She tried to make it seem like Daddy was just having a bad day. She tried so hard to shield me, but it didn't work." I struggled to find the strength in my voice to speak any longer. More tears.
"One day, my mom came home and woke me up on the night of my birthday. She packed a backpack full of water and food and a little knife, in case I ran into 'bad guys'. My father came home that night, and Mom told me I needed to go. I ran out into the woods by our house, so that I could still see the house, but my parents wouldn't see me. I thought I was safe, and then..." I faltered. There were large darker spots on my pants from tears.
"Two gunshots. When I went back one last time after that, I saw my mother shot through the stomach, and stabbed many times so that I...I hardly recognized her, and my father had then shot himself in the brain. I was lost little Snow Black. I didn't have a place to myself until 2 years ago, but I still didn't have a home." I finished.
I didn't feel as...heavy, anymore. It felt good to get that off my chest, to at least tell someone the whole story. I just felt drained. My heart ached from the freshly reopened wounds (mentally speaking, of course), and I felt like I was going to collapse any second.
As if on cue, I felt myself starting to lean towards the floor, but didn't have the physical or mental energy to put my hands out in front of me to stop my fall.
But I didn't need to.
I felt something warm against my halted body. They wrapped their arms around me tightly as I leaned my head into their shoulder and sobbed quietly.
"I'm not leaving you, you understand me?" Jack whispered in my ear. "Your parents may have left you here all alone, but I won't."
I trembled slightly from my sobs as they got quieter and quieter, until I stopped. My eyes were closed.
Jack loosened his grip on me as he felt my breathing steady. He glanced out the window at the rain, coming down in heavy sheets now.
"You've cried too many times today, Snow." he muttered to himself, though he knew I couldn't hear him.
He stood up carefully, trying not to wake me, as he carried me bridal style to his bedroom and laid me down on his bed.
Jack blew a piece of hair out of his face as he made his way back to the slightly ajar door. Once he had left his bedroom, he closed the door quietly, and collapsed face-first on the couch. The video was set to upload tomorrow at the normal time, and everything was running smoothly.
Except for her, he thought. And me.
"Oh well. We're people. Humans, not machines." he thought out loud.
For the first time in quite a while, I slept happily.
(Hey! Woah, things got a little.....serious and depressing towards the end there, but whatever. There's gotta be highs and lows, I guess. Oh well, that's what you get when the author is finishing this at 1:30 in the morning and it's raining as hard as it is in this chapter outside. Aaaanyways, I hope you guys all have a BEYOOTIFUL DAY with all your BEYOOTIFUL faces! I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I will see you guys in the next one. Buh-bye! 👋🏻)