#I verbally stim with the word beef a lot too

[almonddirge]

Sometimes it feels like there is no love in this world and then you eat a beeftaco

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Ok but what if Chris is with Jake at like,, a store or in public or something and they run into Joanne and Chris just,,,, doesn’t recognize her. At all. And then it kinda clicks —(that she’s a terrible person)— that something is wrong

CW: PTSD/flashback response, trauma recovery, negative stimming including head banging

Tagging: @burtlederp, @finder-of-rings, @endless-whump, @whumpfigure, @stxckfxck, @slaintetowhump, @astrobly, @newandfiguringitout, @doveotions

Icing-coated animal crackers. That iced coffee that comes in the big bottle with the red label - not the green one, it has to be the red one. It’s a good color of red and the iced coffee inside is sweet, just a little. They’re buy-one-get-one in the store and Jake throws six of them in the cart, why the fuck not. Those little cups of macaroni-and-cheese with the neon-colored orange sauce that comes out of a packet. Whole boxes of ramen packets, beef and something called ‘chili lime shrimp’. 

Milk, apple juice, coffee creamer (cinnamon sugar and egg nog, Jake never misses a chance for eggnog creamer when it shows up in November). Three whole frozen turkeys, they’re down to rock-bottom prices leading up to Thanksgiving and he can keep them frozen to use whenever they need a week’s worth of meat at once. Stuff for taco night, for pizza night, beer, bell peppers and cilantro, some anchovies for some kind of pasta thing Antoni insists on doing, sliced black olives... the list goes on and on and on.

Jake never minds. Grocery shopping is kind of... meditative, really. Chris bops alongside him, darting ahead to grab something he spotted and toss it in the cart, lingering back behind Jake to look at the label on a bottle of sparkling water, eyes carefully unfocused so he won’t try to read it, just enjoying the little painted image of grapes. 

The grocery store’s way out of the way for them, but Jake borrowed Nat’s truck today so he could take Chris to see a museum exhibit on the Spanish flu and its effect on lower-class and first-generation immigrant populations, a little bit of credit for one of his public health classes. Chris loved the museum the way that little kids love museums, all wide-eyed wonder and getting lost in exhibits until Jake had to all but drag him to the next one. 

They’d stayed in the museum for four hours - seen things, had lunch, gone back to see more - and Jake really, really needs to get the groceries before he comes home. Hence, kind of a hoity-toity grocery store outside their usual neighborhoods. The kind of place where they might actually raise an eyebrow at him if they knew why he bought three frozen turkeys, that it will save them next month when money’s at its tightest. 

Jake knows how to buy for poverty, and he doesn’t actually have to do that anymore, but the habit’s still there.

Chris has been such a constant blur of motion that Jake nearly runs into him with the almost-totally-full cart before he realizes that Chris is standing perfectly still staring over at the wine area.

It’s one of those stores, too - the wine is all shelved in custom-made stained wood to make it look like a small fancy wine store all its own, with a table where a man in a green apron is giving out samples of wine from a valley in Italy Jake doesn’t care about. There’s a woman sipping one of the samples and it’s her that Chris is staring at.

She has short dark brown hair cut into a stylish bob and she’s wearing a sweater that probably cost as much as one of Jake’s student loan payments, nice dark slacks. Looks like she’s come straight from work or something. There’s nothing special about her whatsoever, from Jake’s perspective.

“Chris?”

Chris jumps, spinning around, blinking at Jake. There’s a look around his eyes, like a panicking animal feeling a trap close around it, that makes Jake tense up immediately too. “Um, what?”

“... you okay, man? You look... spooked. Do you know her?”

Chris blinks and looks back at the woman. She chooses a bottle out of a little fake basket several are nestled into with cheese and fruit like it’s a fucking picnic at the fucking grocery store. As if she can feel the eyes on her, she looks up - and meets Chris’s gaze.

There’s a pause, where Jake could absolutely swear the woman knows who Chris is - and then she looks away with a blank expression like she hasn’t seen anything. It’s weirdly fake, though. Put on, like a trick. She turns and walks quickly in the other direction, shoulders slightly hunched. Jake stares after her as she sets the wine bottle down on a shelf and hurries right out the door.

“What the... fuck?”

“I think...” Chris winces, puts a hand up to his head, grinds his teeth against the headache Jake can see, the thunderclap of pain he gets as his reward for trying to locate a memory. “I th-think she, she, she... she she... worked... there...”

Jake’s knuckles go white on the shopping cart handle as he watches the dark-haired bob disappear out into the parking lot. The woman is nearly running. “The, um. The...”

“F-Facility.” Chris’s face is pale, unsettled. He hunches into himself and Jake feels the tension around him as Chris starts to fiddle with a bracelet he wears on his left wrist all the time now, pulling the nylon rope it’s made of, twisting the little metal bits in it, rubbing it in circles around his wrist. At the same time, he starts to rock, back and forth, just a little on his feet. “I think she-she worked there, I was... I was... tired...”

Jake looks slowly down at the cart full of food, closes his eyes. Shit. They’ve been in this store forever getting everything they’ll need for weeks. They’re not going to find such big turkeys at such a good price at the dinky stores closer to home. It’s all going to be such a mess and a waste and...

Chris’s face is pinched and pale, his eyes squinting through the pain that must be rocketing around inside his head. Jake takes a deep breath, lets it out. “She, she, she-she-she... I know-... I was really-... really tired, something... tired and, and, and... and... and and there were handlers and I kept asking-...”

Jake grabs the first person in a green apron with a nametag he sees and apologizes for the food waste, gives them back the cart, and takes Chris by an arm around his shoulders to help lead him out the door. Chris’s eyes are nearly screwed shut completely at the agony, fighting through it. He can’t see to walk and Jake has to hold him tightly, aware that they look more like some creepy dick and his teenage boyfriend than what they actually are. 

Makes him wonder what the lady who apparently works at WRU thought when she saw Chris with Jake.

By the time Jake gets him to the truck Chris is shaking all over, and Jake just stands with his back against the hot metal frame and pulls Chris to him, holding him while Chris rocks hard in his arms, twists fingers into his shirt, taps against him, makes strange low moaning sounds that seem nearly inhuman and also incredibly full of very human grief.

Jake gets him into the truck and waits, holding him, while he clings and cries and shakes and rocks and hits himself and rages against memories he isn’t allowed to have any longer.

Memories he cannot give words to. Thoughts he isn’t allowed to have. He can’t verbalize any of them, only sob. Jake doesn’t try to force him, just puts a hand behind his head to direct it into the crook of his neck, let Chris bury himself in darkness to protect against the way, in moments like this, he fears the light.

By the time Jake gets him calmed down, he can’t remember why he recognized the woman anymore. Can’t even describe her to Jake, only two hours after he’d seen her. He can’t remember anything about the grocery trip past the bread aisle, it’s been pushed under the surface where all the painful things go.

At some point, while they’re on the highway, Chris admits he can’t remember the grocery store at all now.

Jake gets Chris home and settled and goes out to get the groceries all over again from one of the local spots, and he can’t stop wondering if that woman shops at the fancy store regularly.

He can’t stop wondering if, having seen Chris there exactly once and with that look on her face when she did, she’ll avoid it from here on out just to ensure she never sees Chris again.