Our Home and Native Land

Talia suddenly hid her phone when she heard Cassie's voice. It was like she had been caught doing something she wasn't. She wasn't entirely sure why she did that. "Wh-what's up?" she asked as she slowly got off the bed. The redhead slipped out of the bedroom and into the hallway with Cassie. At first, she wasn't sure what Cassie was gesturing towards. It was a small desk, yes. And neat. But it was just a desk. She assume there was something far more sentimental about it to Cassie. So she smiled and nodded.

The poster, though, sent another wave of thoughts through Talia's mind. Taylor. All the way here in Canada. And she even had that signature look to her. The kind of "Don't mess with me" cool that so many fans adored. Talia had always suspected the two friends had known each other for awhile. The poster made her realize that it was more than that. "Well I guess that explains why he's so bitter with me...he still hasn't forgiven me for that time waaaay back when with Taylor." She tried to make a joke about the actual situation but it kinda set hard in her head. Cassie seemed hopeful but...she hadn't seen how Taylor reacted when Talia refused to acknowledge her apology. The icon roughed her up only feet outside her own apartment. She wasn't sure just how much Taylor still resented her.

"Does umm...does Jacob ever dream of wrestling too?" Even though she knew the whole family had fighting experience, she wasn't sure if any of them did the kind of stuff Cassie did. She assumed not. They seemed too nice.

"No..." That wasn't it. Well, maybe that was part of it. Cassie had never spoken to Jacob specifically about when Talia ruined Taylor's match against Chigusa, but the full grown elephant in the room remained the conflict between Talia and herself.

She shook her head. "No, he's never been even a little interested in it. He wasn't even a fan until he found Taylor. And he met Akashi, too, and he really liked her. I think he's more interested in girls than he is in wrestling, but not like you think," she assured Talia. "Not like... Mamouru."

And now that she'd ruined her own mood with a single word, she wanted to change the subject. She stood in congested silence, at a complete loss for how to move the conversation to something else. Lucky for her, Jacob arrived.

"Snoopin' around, huh?" He said as he walked past the girls and into his room.

Cassie brightened considerably. "I was just showing Talia your collection of Taylor Parker action figures."

Jacob looked at her and blinked. "They make those?"

Cassie nodded. "I'm gonna take a little nap," she said, and walked back to her room, leaving Jacob to stare blankly at Talia.

He began to turn his attention to something else, anything other than Talia, to show her that she could leave, but he couldn't quite let her go. "Um..." He said, rubbing his hand against his short clipped hair. "Hey, can I... do you have a minute?"

Talia felt rather awful when Cassie shifted the conversation to Mamouru. She never intended that to happen. She wasn't even sure if it was her fault at all. But it certainly felt like it was. At least Mamouru really did seem like a bad person. After everything she had recently learned about Cassie, she was happy that Mamouru and her were no longer a thing. She deserved better.

The redhead inadvertently straightened up in surprise when Jacob walked in. She suddenly felt very uncomfortable and out of place. And then it got a lot worse when Cassie casually left the two alone. She awkwardly stared at a spot on the ground near where Jacob was standing. That was probably her queue to leave so she started to walk out. "Huh?" she asked and turned around before reaching the doorway. She was somehow even more nervous. All she could think about was how Jacob probably hated her for everything that had happened. He was the only one who refused to associate or talk to her in anyway. "I'm sorry," slipped out before he even had a chance to say something.

"Yeah."

He sat in his chair and idly arranged the pens in a cup on one side of the desk. There was so much to talk about and yet so little to be said, and he wasn't sure where to start. He had to say something. There were things he needed to hear from Talia's mouth.

"I don't think you know Cassie very well," he began, and then paused again with a tense expression like he was in physical pain. "And you don't know how much we all... She's my little sister. She's kind of everyone's little sister. I know everyone else is all crazy about this idea of you being here and everything, but if people here knew who you are and what you did..."

He looked Talia directly in the eye, but stayed seated. He felt like if he got up, he'd be too threatening, and something might happen. When he thought about this conversation before, he didn't imagine that he'd sound this angry. "If you tried to order a soup and sandwich from the diner up the road, they'd throw right back on the sidewalk. And that's just people who know Cassie. I'm her brother, her older brother. What am I supposed to do, eh?"

He scowled. It just wasn't fair, to him or to Talia.

The redhead never once met eye contact with Jacob as he spoke. It was the dreaded lecture she had been expecting from everyone she met since coming here. Even though it was coming from the least threatening member of the family apart from Cassie, it instantly made Talia's heart sink. Everyone...literally everyone had been incredibly kind to her in Canada. She had come expecting to be yelled at and interrogated. But that never happened. And Talia had come to terms with the fact that maybe she only ever had to worry about upsetting herself from then on.

But Jacob brought her back to reality. This fantasy world that Cassie pulled Talia into wouldn't last forever. Despite their best intentions, eventually Talia would have to return to a place where consequences were upheld. A place where normal people like Taylor...and Johnny...and Clyde and Shauna...and pretty much everyone else she had ever met in Japan would hold her accountable for her actions. She dreaded having to return. She dreaded facing those people she had crossed during her conflict with Cassie.

And she knew they'd all be like Jacob.

Talia crossed her arms and looked down at her feet like a child who had just been yelled at by her parents. She imagined an apology would be meaningless to him. He obviously cared about Cassie. And his discomfort probably stemmed from his distrust of her. She wanted to make things right. But maybe the only thing that could be right would be if she left her life for good. But as always, she assumed Jacob would yell at her for trying to do that too. Everyone always did. "Do you want me to leave?" she whispered in the smallest of voices with her gaze still stuck on her shoelaces.

"I thought you'd leave eventually," Jacob said. "I didn't think you were moving in. I do wish you never came, but that would be if you never attacked my sister in the first place."

He sighed. He wasn't even sure what he was trying to say or what they could realistically have to talk about, but the weight of all the things left unsaid was unbearable. There had to be some way they could reach some sort of an understanding, at least so they could be civil until she left.

"I'm not very good at being angry. I'm not like that. And I'm not sure what you can really say that would make up for what you did, so... here we are. Stuck. So how do we get unstuck?" He asked, sounding less like he was lecturing her and more like he was asking for her help.

The bashful redhead kept staring at her feet. She wasn't sure how to get unstuck either. It felt like an impossible task. If she could have done so, she would have broken off her crusade long before anything bad had happened. So all she did was sigh. Talia finally looked up at Jacob with the same hopeless face she gave Taylor way back when. Then she turned and walked out of the room. That was the only thing she could have done.

She walked to the bedroom and pulled the shoebox out from under it. She checked to make sure the contents were still intact and sought out another Elliot. "Rachel?" She asked as she poked her head around the corner of the laundry room. "Could I ask you for a favor?"

Jacob sighed so heavily that he bonked his forehead flat on his desk. That girl was a trainwreck. He hoped that Cassie knew what she was doing, but he also thought that they would probably never be fully rid of Talia Wilson.


Rachel hummed to herself while she pulled things one at a time out of the washing machine. Some went straight into the dryer, some went onto hangers, and a small pile of loose change grew steadily on top of the machine. Her hair was up in a bun, but even that was artfully arranged in an ornate pattern that would be beyond the scope of most housewives capabilities. She took great pleasure in things that grew and her children and the peaceful lives they had found at home, but in all things she loved to artistically arrange things to be beautiful.

She looked up when Talia entered and smiled warmly. "Hi," she said. "I hope so, what is it?"

Talia looked at the folded laundry and back to Rachel. "Do you have any wrapping paper? And some scissors...and tape." She stepped into the laundry room with the shoebox in hand. "I picked something up for Cassie. I thought I'd try to wrap in while she's taking a nap."

"Oh," Rachel touched Talia's arm. "How sweet. I certainly do, right this way."

She led Talia out to a kind of sunroom that was more like a short hallway joining the entrance of the house to the livingroom, bypassing the usual route through the dining room. The door was usually kept closed to prevent muddy feet from dirtying another room of the house. The outside wall was covered in large windows, and there were plants hung from the ceiling and in pots on small tables and stands all across them. The opposite wall had a large storage cabinet, and Rachel began to root through it.

"I don't know if I have any shiny, storebought wrapping paper, but lucky you I'm pretty crafty in my old age..." She said as she pulled out a long roll of brown Kraft paper. "And I've got all kinds of twine and ribbons and things you can use to make it pretty... oh." She paused what she was doing and turned to look at Talia.

"Would you like to see a picture of me when I was your age?"

She pulled down a small photo album and flipped it open. She showed Talia an old picture of a petite, flame-haired woman, a young Rachel, standing at the apron of what was unmistakably a wrestling ring. Her glamorous red hair cascaded in waves over her shoulders to the small of her back. She wore a pristine white leotard, gold bands around her upper arms, a gold necklace, and gold boots with white lace trim around the tops. The resemblance to Cassie was unmistakable, but instead of her daughter's unstoppable sweetness, she wore a confidence that was very self aware, pure with a hint of trouble.

"Nick was born within a year of this photo. I don't really look back and wish I could be doing that again, but oh, to be twenty three again!" She sighed, and handed Talia the roll of paper. "Do you want to do this yourself, or would you like help?"