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radioactivepeasant · 11 months ago

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Free Day Thursday:

"Responsible Adults", the sequel: Jak tries to do a regular Jak Stunt and is shocked that it doesn't go over well

(Roughly a week after this one ends. Long post warning, as most of these are lol)

Night terrors were not an uncommon experience for Jak. They may not have been his nightly companions anymore, but when he did have them, they were intense. He woke up in a corner of his room, wedged beneath the sink. There was a vague sense that he was taking cover from something, or someone.

Blessedly, he remembered no details of the nightmare. But the terror still sent his guts quivering the way they had in the prison. Huddled under the cot both for warmth and silently praying the boots wouldn't stop at his door. That he wouldn't end up Tyber's new punching bag when he got bored of the old man in the cell above Jak's.

Tyber is dead. Errol is dead. Praxis is dead. I watched them die.

Jak repeated the words like a mantra until he could move his limbs again. He crawled out from beneath the sink, but the lingering fear made his room feel claustrophobic. Smaller than it really was.

At least he hadn't woken Daxter this time.

Jak put on his boots, but didn't bother getting fully dressed. He didn't even know what time it was. Why bother if the doctor and the king guy were just going to nag him about being sleep-deprived anyway?

It must have been early morning, before dawn; the moon had vanished and people were outside doing repair work on houses and fog-catchers.

Early morning was the best time to get any outdoor work done in Spargus. A small girl led a flock of caprids out of the stables and towards one of the other districts to graze on the cactus there, and a gang of trainees only a little older than Jak were taking advantage of the temperature to do an endurance run around the city.

Personally, Jak didn't see the good of such things. You learned to be fast enough or smart enough to escape your enemies, or you didn't. He'd learned through life and death experience, not a footrace with no winners.

"Easy with the straps there!" A stocky man backed into Jak, calling up to a team of three people.

"Ope-! Scuse me there, pipsqueak." The Wastelander stepped to the side as if Jak was barely worth noticing.

"Howland, that thing ain't cinched tight enough!"

They seemed to be trying to remove a corroded beam from the supports of one of the multi dwelling houses. It was already leaning at a precarious angle, as big around as a grown man. If that beam came down the wrong way, it would take a lot of the adobe structure -- and probably a lot of people -- with it.

"It's fine, Daru!" Howland complained, "I just cinched it!"

"Well cinch it again! That sucker’s leanin'!"

Jak frowned, but let his curiosity wash away the dregs of the night terrors.

"What's wrong with it?"

The unofficial foreman tugged at a bushy red mustache and shook his head. "Don't rightly know yet. Could just be age. Sand storms and salt air will do a number on this kind of metal after a while."

Jak wondered if that had anything to do with Sandover using wood and stone almost exclusively. He was about to ask why it had been anchored to a mud wall when there was a loud metallic clang. The last bracket holding the beam snapped under the weight, and the straps weren't enough to hold it.

Jak didn't remember moving. But then he was there, with the beam on his shoulders and the foreman on the ground, having narrowly avoided being crushed to death. Cold metal dug into his hands, pressed down against his head, and Jak knew that by rights he should've been dead.

There was a thrill of revulsion in his chest when he reluctantly acknowledged that the only reason he was standing right now was that the dark eco experiments had lengthened his muscle strands to twice the size of a normal hu'men's. It wasn't just in his dark form. That element of...unnatural...was just with him. Every moment.

"Frith! Oh my- HOWLAND! GET DOWN HERE!" Daru roared, "YOU COULDA KILLED SOMEBODY!"

"I got it," Jak said through gritted teeth. "Is there a place to put this thing down?"

"Not yet," Howland admitted as he shimmied down a ladder.

"We were going to cut it into pieces once it was secure, transport it that way to be recycled."

Jak craned his neck, but the motion jarred the beam. Hastily, he adjusted his grip.

"What's- What's around me?"

"Too much," said Daru grimly. "Just- Hold on, kid."

He winced at the boy's flat stare.

"Er...no pun intended. We're gonna, gonna get you out from under there, I promise!"

"Get it cut up first," Jak grunted, "And you won't have to worry about getting me out."

"And what if your hands get sweaty, huh?" Daru demanded, "Fat chance, little man! We're going to find something to hold this up!"

The other two men hurried down from the roof with saws in hand.

Oh gods. Handsaws. This was going to take a while.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Honestly, Damas should have been expecting trouble when he didn't start his day with a free heart attack after seeing eyeshine in the kitchen. The kid was diametrically opposed to the concept of sleep, so he wouldn't have been in bed. If he was off his routine -- and by now Damas had learned to dread something interrupting the kid's self-imposed routine -- then there was probably going to be trouble later.

When he refilled the fuel in the Beacon, fed the birds, and actually had a cup of coffee uninterrupted, he was suspicious.

When the sun rose and there were no echoes of truncated curses in the halls from guards running into Jak, he started to wonder if the kid had decided to work outside. Unusual, but as long as he didn't do anything that would make Dr. Petros yell at them both, more power to him.

But when the talking ottsel showed up in the throne room about an hour after dawn, frantically demanding to know where Jak was, Damas was concerned.

Those two were attached at the hip! Jak wouldn't have gone to look for work without Daxter.

There was a small crowd forming by the time Damas stepped outside. People were shouting encouragements, or conflicting advice about pulleys and snatchblocks. Had something fallen? Damas hadn't heard any impacts. As he began to pick his way through the crowd, the shouts took on new meaning.

"He's slipping! Somebody get under there!"

"How many more hands do you want? There's ten people holding the beam up!"

"Why won't he just let go?!"

"Standing this long, maybe his arms locked up-?"

A beam? People holding a beam-?

An accident. There'd been an accident and night watch hadn't caught it.

Thoughts of crushed citizens and mangled houses circled Damas’s imagination as he pushed through the rest of the crowd, close enough to hear the rasp of handsaws and the buzz of a lone angle grinder.

"Get the cart back in!" Someone yelled, "Next piece is almost off!"

From the looks of things, a crew of four had reduced a two-story high support beam by a third.

Ten Wastelanders were beneath the colossal pole, hands and shoulders braced against the metal as it shrieked and groaned. If even one of them slipped-!

Damas threw down his staff without thinking to join them, racing to catch the end beginning to slide.

"What happened?" he demanded, straining with the others to keep it from crushing the houses and themselves.

"Tie straps broke!" a man three people down called back, "If it weren't for the kid, it woulda come down right through the roofs of a couple houses!"

Kid?

Oh gods don't tell me...

Jak was standing in the very center of the line. His arms trembled, and sweat poured down his face. He didn't seem to hear anything happening around him, too focused on keeping his grip. He was beginning to pale.

"What's he doing here?!"

"Dunno!" A woman to the left answered. "He was already there when me and the girls showed up, but that was two hours ago."

"Hours?!"

Jak had been out here for hours, trapped, and Damas had been none the wiser?

"Why hasn't anyone gotten him out yet?!"

"We tried! The poor kid froze up!"

Damas gritted his teeth and pushed away images of the kid standing alone under that crushing weight for hours until help had woken up.

"Get a truck and winch out of the pit!" He ordered, "Forget damage to the streets, we'll fix it later! I want this thing taken care of now."

It took a full twenty minutes to get the Dozer through the narrow streets of the tower district. By that time, those who had been holding the beam first had cycled out for fresh arms to allow for water and eco. All except Jak. He'd accepted some water that someone poured into his mouth earlier, but still seemed to be unable to let go. He was at the fulcrum point, he insisted, and he wasn't going to let it tip. (Not that he thought he'd actually be able to move at this point.)

Fifteen people attached pulleys and cables to the beam from above, careful not to dislodge the hands of those below. When the cables had all been hooked to the Dozer's winch, the weight began, at last, to lessen.

There was a ragged cheer from the assembled Wastelanders as the end of the beam tipped up and the rescuers eased the other end to the ground. There would be extensive damage to infrastructure to deal with. But nobody had died, and there were no major injuries, and Damas would count that as a victory. Shaking out aching arms, he hurried to the center of the line, where someone was physically holding Jak upright. Damas took hold of the boy's stiff arms carefully.

"It's gone," he said, easing the limbs down, "It's gone, let go, Jak. Come on, you're done."

The kid made a sound, a soft rasping whine that might’ve been words. Then he collapsed.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

When the world drifted back into focus, Jak didn't know where he was. The smell of eco lingered around him, confusing the other scents that could have identified his location. He couldn't move his arms. Why couldn't he move his arms?!

It took a massive effort just to pry his eyelids up. Jak’s breath caught harshly between his teeth as he forced himself onto his side.

Well, that explained the lack of mobility in his arms. He ached like he'd been fighting beyond his limits again. The injection sites would be agitated again, he knew without looking. The pain radiated from his shoulders to his fingertips, skin, muscle, and bone.

The room was a blur. Brown and yellow slowly settled into more colors, ending in something either white or pale blue in front of his nose. The longer he stared at it, the more detail he could see. Pills of thread, clinging to loosely woven fabric. The texture and shape of the warp and weft shifted as he tried to move his hand.

He hissed in pain.

"Well that's what happens when you try to make a career as a load-bearing wall."

Jak tensed. Not alone. Not with Daxter.

Biting down on the pain, he dug his fingers into the pallet beneath him and forced himself upright.

This wasn't the hospital -- small blessings -- but it wasn't his room either. There was a low wooden bedframe on a wall a few feet away, on the other side of some kind of half partition full of plants.

"Where...?"

"Well you're about to think of it as prison," Damas answered from the opposite direction.

He was sitting at a table, hunched over a cup of coffee. The empty pot beside him was a story of its own.

"By the way, you're grounded."

"What?!" Jak sputtered. He started to get up, but fell back onto the pallet with a grunt of pain.

"Like rot!"

Damas glanced back over his shoulder. "Take it up with the doctor. He put you on bedrest, not me. Better yet, blame your own self! You could've let go at any time once the rest of the district turned up to help!"

"The whole...district?"

Jak blinked.

"I don't...remember that..."

Damas sighed and peered into into his mug.

"You've been sleeping most of the day, I'm not surprised. Even with the eco you'll probably be sore for a while."

"How -- ow! -- long was I out there?"

Jak cringed at the look in Damas’s eyes when the man turned around fully.

"Four. Hours. Four hours! Why didn't you let go when others arrived?!"

Was this a trick question? It had to be a trick question.

"Be...cause...I'm not supposed to let other people get hurt?" Jak answered with slow confusion.

Damas stared in complete silence for several seconds. Then,

"You're insane. My foster-son is insane. That's insane! In what world is "throw the youngest under the pillar" a rational solution?!"

"Uh. Haven?" Jak muttered peevishly. He tried to sit up again. "Look, just. Tell me which way my room is and I'll get out of your hair."

Damas pushed his chair back with a scraping sound.

"Mn. No. What part of "bed rest" didn't you hear?"

In brusque motions, he knelt and pulled the blanket back over Jak.

"You are not to do anything even mildly strenuous, or Petros will strangle me. And since I apparently can't trust you not to willingly walk into harm's way unsupervised, you get to camp out in here, and I get to work from home for the next few days to make sure you don't go try to lift a car or something!"

Jak was appalled. "You can't do that!"

Dry as dust, Damas retorted, "First of all, I'm king. Secondly, I'm your legal guardian. Yes I can."

Jak groaned in frustration.

"Where's Daxter?"

"Not grounded."

"Oh come on!"

#jak: but i did this kind of thing in haven all the time!#damas is developing new gray hairs every time the kid says something about haven #fic prompts #writing prompts #jak and daxter #dadmas #king damas #free day Thursday #snippets #this universe of stressed dad damas i generally file under the title “Relearning Childhood”#because Jak is one of only 50 minors in the entire city and they're a lot more strict about age-appropriate chores than Haven #Daxter will absolutely rub it in Jak’s face that he's not grounded. because he is Mad at Jak for pulling a stunt like this without him #oh just wait Damas. It gets so much worse.

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