Jones, Damari Jones

[Damari]

Damari threw herself through the café, a whirl of cashmere and linen, her hair was in disarray and her clothes as perfect as usual flapped around a body that moved with an anger filled stalk. Her expression was thunderous.

Ava and Kemp exchanged a slow glance and as one they lowered their heads, making themselves look busy in a café that was far from it.

Agitation beat off her in near palpable waves, her brow furrowed as she paced by her chaise. This city drove her nuts, she was nuts because of this city. Flinging a hand through her already tousled hair she kept up the movement, back and forth, and back again, rinse and repeat.

It was like her past wanted her to know that it was still there haunting her. Jones, fucking Jones. Always Jones, come around again until she felt like she rode a roller coaster of trying to ignore the family she just couldn’t escape from.

She could almost hear the teasing laugh of her brother, the dead one. The one her and Lucius had killed so many years ago. Its cold echo reaching past the years to infect her brain and drive her absolutely batshit.

The little thing had to die. She didn’t care if the little thing knew why it died. She cared even less if the little thing was innocent. What does this city care of innocence anyway. What does innocence mean but a means to create a plaything of it until it was innocent no longer. Until the toy broke and was discarded for another to take its place.

The little thing didn’t know why it died and she would never in a million lifetimes take the time to do enlighten it.

But dammit her past, her damnable past haunted her more now than ever.

Stopping her agitated movement she let her head droop, looking first at Ava, through a curtain of her own hair who studiously ignored her and Kemp who didn’t but wore an expression so deadpan it was devoid of reciprocal emotion.

“Find my husband please. And tell me him I have need of him.”

It didn’t really matter to her what that little thing was, or will be. That it bore a name that could cause this much disruption to her emotional state meant it had to die. And it had to be obliterated. There was no other course of action that Damari would accept.

There was a line between her reality now and the one she had buried beneath mounds of her own denial and the wretched ignorant creature would pay the price of a name that Damari claimed as her own.

Testing the name on her lips she spoke the words she hadn’t spoken in so long. The acknowledgement was hard for her and the steel composure she wore like a second skin.

“Damari Jones.”

Smiling a bitter tinged smile she raked the hair off her face and stood straighter, peeling off the tension as much as she could with the movement.

She didn’t give herself the nickname she had been known as but that too echoed through her mind. To call herself one again, she would have to acknowledge the weight of the past that also encompassed the whole.

“Damari Jones.”

Still hearing Mitchell’s voice in her head she frowned, her stare vacant and seeing into a past she’d tried to hard to forget, his voice snide. You’re royally fucked in the head, you know that Dem’s. Royally

Acknowledging that statement (albeit ghostly one) as the truth it was, she let her eyes focus on the here and now, noting with satisfaction that Ava had left the café on the errand she had sent her on.

The irony wasn’t lost on Damari. How could it. That irony being that she realised she cared for the name she pretended wasn’t her own. She cared A LOT.

And something was going to die for her caring. How ironic.

Seems Damari was full of the emotion this night.


(The post is neither open or closed. It is what it is and Damari is in a public space. If you want to fit something in – your choice.)

[Damari]

Four days later.

It’s amazing what an emotional outburst will do to ones sense of calm. Damari knew she wasn’t the most balanced female in the world. She rarely attempted to fool herself into believing herself a calm person. It wasn’t in her nature to be that hypocritical and for the most part she rather liked the sense of empowerment her little tantrums gave her.

She sat in her café, legs up and crossed on her chaise, magazine open to the new fantastical shoe offering, her hair neatly coiled in a lose chignon. Her demeanour one of calm and serenity as she slowly flicked over pages.

Someone had to be known for something and she knew, oddly, that her infamy could be laid solely at the door of her hubris driven impatience and lack of empathy for anything wholly unconnected to her or as this case was, completely connected to her…..


Pride.

Did she really think killing it was a good idea?

Of course she did. Did she feel any remorse for the act? No, of course she didn’t. It was a negligible entity with no connection to her whatsoever and her emotional investment in the act reached only as far as her personal interest in seeing it dead.

But it felt good.

Dammit it felt good.

She had forgotten what it felt like to feel the slip of unlife dribble through her fingers and it was intoxicating. A drug she’d almost forgotten the thrill of. Biting her lip Damari played with the edges of a magazine she wasn’t really reading. Four days after the killing and she could still feel the adrenaline rush of death as she chased it through the dark night. There was no fight from the target, shadowed lack of movement meant the death Damari dealt was hard won with scroll after scroll after scroll of monotonous repetition that slowly leached blood from the poser.

But that too was intoxicating. Watching slowly as unlife poured in stop motion movements from her target’s body, scroll, blood, scroll and yet more blood.

No wonder other vampires went blood crazy. No wonder so many of who she knew thirsted for this feeling again and again, making unwise choices just for the chance to draw this sort of emotion.

When the time came to pull the Garlic Spray from her pack her cheeks had been aglow with high emotion. The pink stained skin across her sharp cheekbones an outward sign of her enjoyment. Her hair had been in unnoticed disarray, flying about those cheeks in abandon, as if the wind that whipped the brown strands played a frantic accompaniment to what she had wrought that night.

And then death. Sweet death. Death of her own kind laid at her feet in all it’s inanimate glory. Death face, slack and ugly at her feet, the perfect end to her imperfect reaction.

Dammit it felt good. Death. Sweet Death. Her Death. It’s Death.

Slowly closing the magazine she held, she dropped it into her lap and smiled into a middle distance of nowhere, seeing nothing but four nights ago when she had killed something she knew she needed to kill.

Ava watched Damari, her glances quick but encompassing. She noted Damari’s distraction with a worried frown. She also noted the small half smile that played across the lips of her boss. And that look terrified her. She stayed close to Kemp, choosing to clear tables away from the back corner and the female filled chaise, sliding her assessing looks towards Damari but not getting any closer.

Death did that. Fear walketh in the path of death, slow exonerable fascination, hideous filled distraction.