#Damas will soon learn that Jak as a teenager hates the same foods he hated in his fetal stage

[radioactivepeasant]

Snippets Wednesday Part 1: Blackmail au

Previously, on the "Jak and Mar are separate people for one time loop" au:

Krew handed Jak over to Wastelanders in exchange for an exorbitant price. It is revealed that he'd been blackmailing Damas, saying he had an abandoned Heir of Mar and would give him to Praxis if Damas didn't pay up. Jak learns that when Praxis took over, Damas had a pregnant lover who had been believed lost...until a DNA test revealed that Jak was the child she had successfully hidden (with an interloper Samos from a collapsed timeline, unfortunately). Jak is struggling to cope with this.

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Apparently people didn't travel the desert continent at night unless they had a death wish. The gang of Wastelanders that had snatched Jak and Daxter from Haven were all bedded down in the outer courtyard of the temple, taking advantage of the balmy sea air. Jak had been allowed to take a bedroll right back into the alcove behind the statue again. It made him feel safer, knowing he couldn't be dragged out.

Damas stopped at the mouth of the cloister and crouched slightly. He jolted back for a second, then blinked.

"Ah." He leaned back on his heels. "Eyeshine. Just like Mar, then."

"Not so funny when you're the one seeing glowing eyes in the dark, is it?" Sig snorted, thumping Damas between the shoulders as he passed.

"I thought you were exaggerating!" Damas grumbled.

“Nope! Gremlin toddler, staring at me from the end of the bed in the middle of the night.” Sig called back. They could joke about this now. They knew he was okay now.

“Well you shouldn’t have given him milk before bed,” Damas retorted, “That’s why he was up in the first place!”

He turned back to the alcove and shoved a small, wrapped package in.

"I...know what it is to go hungry," he said apologetically, "All Wastelanders do. No one will judge you for keeping rations to hand between meals. No one will take them from you."

He stood again and brushed off his tunic. "To- tomorrow, we're going back to my city. We'll...we'll find somewhere for you to sleep. Then we'll decide what to do about Mar. If you need-"

He cut himself off, looking unsure.

"Er...Sig and I will be over. Over there."

Silence blanketed the chamber for a moment, then on Jak’s chest, Daxter propped himself up on his elbows.

"Well, he seems nice," he teased. "He's no Osmo, but a guy could do worse for their old man."

"Shut up, Dax."

"So...Sig, though. Do you think they're like, platonic? Or...y'know...smmmmoooching right now?"

"We agreed that you would never speak that word in my presence."

"Whaaat? Smooching?"

"Shut up shut up! I will throw you out of this alcove, Daxter."

"Fine fine. So do you think you'll have two dads or is Sig more of an uncle-"

"Omigods stop talking."

Jak shoved Daxter off his chest.

_________________________________________

Jak had gotten very good at feigning sleep. It kept the guards from noticing you in prison, and it was a good way to eavesdrop on Kor and Samos. And when Mar was curled up under his arm, it occasionally softened even people like Torn enough for them to avoid "waking" them.

Jak lay in the alcove and measured his breaths to mimic the easy cadence of slumber. He strained his ears, listening as closely as he could to Sig and Damas whispering nearby.

"You said the baby died during the coup. Heck, Damas, we've been doing a memorial for years! If Jak is Baby Heart, how did he survive?”

Sig sounded shaken. Almost choked up.

There was a soft metallic sound as Damas must have shifted his weight.

"He has my eyes, my complexion, but those cheekbones, and his build...I swear he's the spitting image of Damaris when we were kids. Damaris was smart, she- she must’ve hidden him."

"All this time..."

"I know."

There was a wet, labored breath, another clearing of the throat.

"He's within his rights to hate me. Sig, I- I could have saved him! He was there! My- my own baby was still there, and I never knew-!"

A quieter sound, cloth and skin and armor. Comforting whispers just on the edge of Jak's hearing.

"Hey, hey. Don't do this, Daym. You know it ain't your fault. Praxis told you he killed Damaris, right? You had no reason to think he was bluffing, not after what happened to the rest of your unit!"

Jak didn't want to hear any more. He rolled over and pressed his hands over his ears.

At some point he must have fallen asleep, because eventually he became aware of the smell of coffee brewing. Crawling on his elbows to the mouth of the alcove, Jak squinted out with bleary eyes and found Damas pouring a mug with a blank, foggy stare. Survival instinct took over, and Jak eased into a stealthy crouch, preparing to snatch the cup.

"If you want some, you could just ask, you know," Damas yawned. He didn't even turn around.

"Haven's full of soft nobles. In the Wastes, you don't try to steal a man's coffee if you want to keep all your fingers."

“Hm.” Jak didn’t bother answering.

Speech was overrated, especially before coffee.

Despite his warnings about not stealing Wastelander coffee, it only took a few seconds of silent staring to wear Damas down. He sighed, and handed the cup to Jak.

"Well this bodes ill for matters of rule enforcement," Damas muttered.

But what was he supposed to do? For fifteen years, three months, and twelve days, he'd mourned Damaris and "Baby Heart", the child he'd never even gotten to hold. Fifteen years he'd tortured himself imagining what Baby Heart would have been like. A mischievous daughter climbing everything she wasn't supposed to. A curious son always tinkering. A child neither son nor daughter, trailing along behind him full of questions. Faced with the real, live, Baby Heart -- Jak -- how could he deny him something as small as a cup of coffee? It was, by far, the least of what the boy was owed.

"So. Jak." Damas dug around in his pack, hoping he might’ve stowed a second cup. He knew better than to filch Sig’s.

"Where did that name come from?"

Damaris had always been fond of flowery and frankly pretentious names. The boy was lucky to have escaped them.

Jak shrugged. "Me. I picked it. Don't know what my name was supposed to be."

Damas winced at the expectant glint in Jak’s eye.

"I don't either," he apologized. "You were...you weren't much more than a heartbeat on a scanner when I ruled Haven. The last time I saw you, you were a lumpy little bean-shaped fetus who flipped upside down every time your mother ate something you didn't like. We hadn't even picked a name yet -- although I remember talking Damaris out of "Jupiter" early on."

The boy wrinkled his nose. "Wow. No. I knew a Jupiter, back home. Guy's probably metal-meat now. He was...hang on, what was that word Daxter used- Melodramatic. Really melodramatic."

Damas smiled -- barely a twitch of the lips. "Well. Damaris was too, sometimes."

Jak settled from a crouch to sitting cross-legged at the mouth of the alcove. "So uh...who is Damaris? Or was, I guess. Who was she? I mean like, to you."

Ah.

"That's...a difficult question to answer," Damas admitted. “She was a nobleman’s daughter from the House of Rho -- descendants of the Yellow Sage. We were supposed to be betrothed, but we couldn’t stand the thought of having to be married to each other.”

He cracked a smile. “She was still one of my closest friends, though. Chaos in the form of a scrawny, racing-obsessed girl. My mother used to say the two of us shared a brain cell and only one of us could use it at a time. Harsh, but not wholly undeserved, considering the trouble we used to cause.”

“Oh. So she was your Daxter.”

Damas wasn’t entirely certain what that meant in context.

“I…suppose…?”

That was too much thinking for this early in the morning.

Jak finally came out of the alcove when he'd finished the coffee. He leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets and studied his alleged parent. After an undisturbed rest and calmer heads, he was more curious than suspicious of the man.

"Are you guys gonna go crazy again and drag me back in here if I go outside?" he asked. He wasn't even sure he was being sarcastic.

Damas shrugged and poured his own cup of coffee. "Not if we know where you're going. I don't recommend going far from the beach without a waterskin, but if you want to take the footpath down the spire, I won't stop you."

Jak nodded once or twice. "Good," he muttered.

He'd never taken well to being told where he could or couldn't go.

"Tell Dax I just went to get some air."

It was another ten minutes before the human-in-a-rivercat's-body dragged himself inch by inch down to the cookplate. He groaned like a ghoul, arms out in front of him.

Damas sighed in resignation, and handed over the coffee pot.

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