[ OPEN ]

[heisenbitch]

Who: Jesse & OPEN
Where: Jesse's pharmacy & around town
When: May catch-all
What: Digging trackers out of his thigh, covering cameras, picking up chicks, doing art with kids, and getting bored out of his mind while festering in Orwellian paranoia. This town sucks.
Warnings: Nothing major of note so far! Will edit if this changes.

► BLUE SKY PHARMACY - open

[ Jesse kind of looks a joke, in his baggy dark jeans and his skull t-shirt, his close shaven head, and a white lab coat his boss makes him wear in the pharmacy. The coat is too big on him around the shoulders and the arms, and the cuffs hang halfway over his hands. There are dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep, he's pale, the wounds on his face from when he'd woken up in hospital all busted up now fading scars.

With no choice but to keep busy, lest he start losing his mind from paranoia at being all too aware of the goddamn cameras, or losing his mind to boredom, Jesse resumes his jobs around the store: unpacking boxes of cold and flu pills, unpacking brightly coloured packs of period pads onto shelves, restocking boxes of condoms on shelves, signing off on paperwork his boss has left for him to fill out, wiping down shelves with begrudging tiredness… and occasionally slipping out the back door into the alleyway for a smoke whenever his boss ducks out for a coffee or to run an errand. Other times, he's got nothing to do, and he stands around the store looking bored as hell, or wanders around drumming his hands on his thighs or finger drumming on surfaces or doing stupid, restless things like doing wheelies in the wheelchair that people can hire from the store.

The bell over the door rings again as another customer steps into the store. Jesse might be found doing any of the above tasks. ]

► AFTER SCHOOL PROGRAMME @ PINES ACADEMY - open

[ It's one thing to feel like a prisoner in some bizarre fucking Twilight Zone pantomime. It's another thing entirely that kids are trapped in this shit. But Jesse tries not to focus on that. In fact, if there's one thing Jesse enjoys the hell out of, it's hanging out with the kids every Wednesday and Friday afternoons, from 5.30 through to 7. He'll take them out into the grounds of the school for skateboarding some weeks, takes them to the woodwork room to show them how to build things other weeks, will set up art supplies in the art room other times.

This week, it's art. He hasn't set up all the art supplies yet, though. Instead, Jesse is standing on one of the tables that he's dragged over to the corner of the room, and he's stretched up on his tiptoes with an art smock that he's trying to reach high enough to hang over the camera. ]

► OUT AT NIGHT - open

[ Jesse never really cooks for himself. Microwavable meals and frozen pizzas are about the scope of Jesse's culinary skills. That would mean eating alone, though, in his huge, empty house, surrounded by silence and loneliness while his mind races at a hundred miles an hour. So, most nights, instead of going home from work or from the after school programme at Wayward Pines Academy, he heads into town. He almost always has an agenda to pick up a chick at the bar at some point, someone to take home with him for the night. If he's drunk and desperate enough, it doesn't even have to be a chick. Whatever he can get to fill the hollowed out deadness inside him and kill the endless churning restlessness bottled up inside him.

Some nights, he eats at It's Raining Hen, picking away at fries that he doesn't really feel like eating while slurping on a soda. Sometimes he grabs a meal at Tequila Mockingbird while sitting by the window, and almost always winds up slouched at the bar with a few drinks. Sometimes, he doesn't feel like eating at all and so skips eating altogether to head straight for Weaver's, where the guy who owns the bar is a total jackass but Jesse's chances of picking up someone for the night are higher. ]

► DIGGING TRACKERS OUT OF HIS LEG - open

[ The tracker embedded in his leg that Jesse had mistaken for just a weird lump until Laura's announcement to the town the other day feels like a cancer growing inside him. It makes his skin crawl, knowing his every move isn't just being watched but tracked.

And so, in a fit of frustration, morbid curiosity, downright irked in anger, he chugged down half a bottle of booze and took out a surgical blade he'd lifted stealthily from the pharmacy. He grunted in pain as he'd dug the thing out of his thigh, and he'd held up the bloodied, small thing with creeping horror to inspect it. Scrambling off the couch to his feet with an off-kilter sway, he spat in slurred fury, "Eat me, you fucks!" at a camera in the corner of his living room with his jeans down around his ankles, blood running down his inner thigh, and the tracker held up at the camera while flipping the bird with his other hand.

It's the next day now. He's a washed out wreck. And he's limping slightly. The limp is noticeable when he's working in the pharmacy, it's noticeable when he's at the after school programme at the high school that afternoon, and it's noticeable as he slouches into Weaver's that night and grimaces in pain while sliding onto the stool.

And, boy, is he in a cold, withdrawn mood. Not because his leg hurts, but because Laura had been right about the trackers being replaced: when he'd passed out drunk on the couch, he woke up the next morning with a hangover and a new tracker under his skin. ]