Chapter Text
You have The Tough Guide to Fantasyland on your tablet, propped up on your lap with your feet in Jake's lap when you finally ask, "So what was the deal with the hostel back in Dublin?"
"Hm?" Jake hums, his eyes still on the TV.
There's a movie on, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Today is one of those wonderful days when Jake is in the mood for good movies. Not that he can tell the difference, apparently. Sometimes you think it'd because he was born so long ago and temporally transplanted into the modern era, and thus has no barometer for cinematic quality. Other times, you think Jake's just weird.
But the mix of Dianna Wynne Jones and Wes Anderson's vision of the hospitality industry has you thinking. Normally, you try not to interrupt Jake's movie watching in case he decides he missed too much and wants to rewatch. But... You don't mind rewatching this one, so: "The hostel. You hated that place. It's like a..." You look for the term, leafing through the mental catalog of Fae Shit you're building up. "Liminal space?"
"It's not, actually," Jake answers. "That's something else."
"Why not?"
Jake's nose wrinkles, but his eyes stay fixed on the movie. "It's difficult to explain. Liminality is... leaving one place and having not quite arrived in the next place. A point of transition and transformation and other such words."
"Okay. But isn't that fucking exactly what a hotel is?"
"No, there's... No motion in the ocean, there's nothing. It's..." Sighing loudly, Jake reaches out and actually pauses the film. Normally he just lets it run and rewatches. It's strange to have caught his attention so easily. You put your tablet to sleep and set it aside, meeting his diverted attention head on. "It's a bit like trying to describe color to the blind, I don't think I'll do a grand job of it."
"A hotel's a place between places, between being a visitor in a place and a resident of that place," you say, nudging him along.
"But it's like stasis, not like a robin's egg or a crystalis. And besides, there's worse things going on in that sort of place," he explains with a sour expression, like the very existence of hotels offends him. "It's almost... Inert. But actually it's the opposite."
"It's ert," you say, smirking.
"Don't be fresh with me, Strider," he says without heat. "But figure it's like a perversion of a good idea. Subways! Those are the best liminal spaces. Movement and inertia and all that lot, getting from one place to the next, being in motion even if you're sitting still."
"What about a place like a cruise ship, then. It's a hotel on the water, it's moving."
Jake glares at you, lips pressed together. "I... don't know. Why do you think I'm an expert?"
"Faerie."
"Mortal." He drums his fingers on the bone of your ankle, thinking. "Imagine that... There's a ritual or some hogswash you need to do, and it calls for-- for thyme."
"Time?"
"Thyme, with the y. It calls for thyme, and you can either use a freshly cut sprig from your garden box or a decade old ground up dash from your gran's McCormick bottle. Which do you pick?"
You lay your head back on the armrest and think. "Well, depends. Does my gran's love and experience and weird mothball smell lend to the ritual's power?"
"No."
"Fine, then the Real McCoy from the windowbox."
"Why?" Jake asks, like a fucking substitute teacher who's trying to drag you along to the right conclusion so they don't have to stay after the bell.
"Uh, purity of the ingredient? What, does all magic have to be done like that? If I make my draught of dreamless sleep in a crockpot because cast iron cauldrons are expensive, I'm a bad witch?"
"No, that's-- a crockpot is fine, that's a completely different discussion." He sighs again. "It's less about purity, more about contamination. Outside elements that skew the execution of the whole malarkey."
"Okay. So. Hotels."
"Hotels are places where people bring their worldly possessions and pack them up in borrowed rooms with the illusion of privacy and safety. It's where they sleep, but don't cook their meals. It's where they rest, but only in waiting. They're awful homes and yet are too confining to be a liminal space. It's not transition, but suspension. If you have a liminal experience in a hotel, it's despite the place being bloody awful for it, against adversity."
You nod. "And no threshold."
"And no threshold!" Jake crows. "They are so unsafe, I don't know how mortals stand them. It's the opposite of the fresh sprig of thyme, it's overloaded with meaning and people. If you bring anything to that space, you don't own it anymore, it's just a piece of the hotel detritus. You barely belong to you. It's so easy to lose yourself in those places. It's not liminal enough to say the item or the person belongs to the grand beast of the thing, and it's not someone's property enough for them to make a claim, it's but awful middle space between the middle space and the proper space, just a sidestep from either truth."
"You stole my fucking passport, didn't you?"
Jake yelps in surprise, taken completely off guard, knocked out of his fussy tirade. His eyes are wide and swing to truly focus on you for the first time today, lips parted. "Erm, um!"
"I fucking knew it," you say, snorting. "Things don't have owners in hostels. You swiped my passport when I was in the shower."
"How did you--!" Jake starts, then looks down at your feet, cheeks dark. "Oh, you absolute devil, did you set me off like that just to get me to admit it?"
"No. I really wanted to know what your deal with the hostel was. You making it pretty damn clear you stole my passport was just a bonus."
"Well." He's sullen, mumbling now. "That's sort of the point. Nothing there was yours exactly. It was all up for grabs. Including you, much to my dismay. And I just... needed more time."
"For a ritual?" You nudge him with your knee, gently.
"Haha, apparently!" He glances at you nervously through his lashes, then meets your eyes cautiously. "Time, not thyme. Are you upset?"
"No. But that was one hell of a trick, asshole. I think you owe me."
"Own you," Jake corrects, lifting an eyebrow and closing his hand around your ankle, thumb rubbing up and down the smooth skin there.
"You can owe me and own me at the same time. Ain't mutually exclusive."
He stares at you unblinkingly as he considers that. "Huh. You may have a point there, clementine. When'd you get so damned clever?"
"Always have been, ever since I sprang out of my father's forehead, fully formed." Then, you pause, thinking about it. "That's a joke. I'm not-- does Athena, like... exist?"
Jake shrugs, picking up the remote again. "Dunno. We can go to Greece sometime. Try to find out. That'd be a fun venture. But for now, may I?"
You nod and pick up your tablet again as Jake returns to his movie.
A moment later, he groans. "I don't remember what was happening. This one's too clever by half, just like you. I'm gonna start it over."
You smile to yourself, and say nothing, settling back into your book and the warm feeling of Jake's hands roaming your skin.