Scene III: To Introduce (Mabovna)
#3 of Chamber Music
As always - open to requests, bonus points (that don't mean anything) if you get the nickname before the characters do. This time, though, the explanation won't happen until next chapter! I know all of you are just on the edge of your seats waiting to see what the challenge is this time, so let's go!
t3h p05t, 4 j00
_Beasts in their major freedom
Slumber in peace tonight. The gull on his ledge
Dreams in the guts of himself the moon-plucked waves below,
And the sunfish leans on a stone, slept
By the lyric water,
In which the spotless feet
Of deer make dulcet splashes, and to which
The ripped mouse, safe in the owl's talon, cries
Concordance. Here there is no such harm
And no such darkness_
from "Beasts," by Richard Wilbur
In his room, back at home, Jeck tore at his hair and crouched on the ground in the fetal position, whimpering in fear. He shook his head. "No. No. There has to be another way."
Why should there be another way? You're strong enough to do this.
"Isn't there some... trial? Something I could do to test it?"
Are you willing to cut your heart out twice?
He rolled onto his side. The pain of destroying a human being... Especially that one!
Besides, you don't have time. You have this one opportunity, and if you fail to take it, you will hate yourself forever.
"I know, but..." He grinned with a mad kind of irony. "Who shall I tell them has sent me? I AM!" he answered before the other could. "I am enough. I am the messenger. I can break a skull and sew it back together."
You can do this. You have to do this for him. For all of us.
"No. For all of them. I cannot reap the rewards of this, for I will lie broken."
... is that such a certainty?
"Nothing is achieved without sacrifice. The world cannot be mended without excluding its mentor. The Illuminati are dead, and the Masons were hated, and the Templars before them. Muhammed, Malcolm X, Jesus Christ were all killed. Men trying to preserve and to change, to seek and to destroy. I am... the last remains of their legacy, with no following to support me."
You really are an egotistical human being, aren't you?
"I guess this argument is over, then."
I suppose it is.
_As the selfsame moon observes
Where, warped in window-glass, it sponsors now
The werewolf's painful change. Turning his head away
On the sweaty bolster, he tries to remember
The mood of manhood,_
from "Beasts," by Richard Wilbur
Once in the café, Faeram took a moment to absorb the atmosphere. This was a habit of his - to observe extensively those around him before contacting them. It was a good place, to begin with. Of course, there was a pervasive smell of coffee grinds permeating the room like steam in a sauna and this particular day was full of good cheer. Impressionist art and fractals and photographs were framed on the wood panel walls and a canopy of hippy shrouds gave it an almost Indian feel despite the clearly American customers. It was a small place, of course, so the cashiers were, if not always friendly, certainly companionable and definitely aware that their pay was almost directly related to customer service and appeal.
In a corner at a short table, in polished wooden chairs, sat a couple a year younger than Fae, laughing at one another's jokes about their families. The boy saw him first, inadvertantly directing his girlfriend's gaze. His glance was longer than a passing one, and hers longer than that. He quickly learned why as he continued to surreptitiously watch them. The guy was a bit of a bad boy, a tiger with his hair in a bleached, buzz-cut stripe between his ears, whereas her Persian ancestry was evident in how she elegantly held herself and the way she watched him, always searching for change, meant that she was more interested in fixing his life than holding on to the relationship. A year older, and Fae would have been tempted to meet that calculating glance, the one that wondered if he was a legitimate fixer-upper, rather than this poser she was with who was just in a passing phase.
Fae smiled a little to himself, unconsciously rubbing the prick on the inside of his elbow that meant he had already given himself a good day. He could feel the drugs playing with his consciousness, fiddling with different emotions and senses. It was fun, to live in this dream world, and he had taken enough and long enough ago that by the time Jeck and Guin arrived, he'd already be sober again. The smell of coffee synesthetically drifted into his sense of sight and brightened his vision in patches, depending on where his nose told him the strongest smell was. The glance from the girl had meant an incoherent voice whispering silkily in his ear while that from the boy was a muted butterfly knife flicking open. The constant sound of conversation pulsed vibrant hues of color across his field of vision and his world in general was diffracted. He could taste the coffee as well as smell it and if he hadn't spent so long experimenting in his basement, he would not have retained the balance or motivation to walk to the bar, sit down, and order a hot mocha, taking his hood off and smiling a little at the cashier who took his order. She watched him for longer than the younger girl and seemed legitimately surprised when he handed her a reasonable dollar amount to pay, then managed to get his change in his wallet without fumbling it.
"Courtney?" he asked her after looking at her nametag, and watched the word slip out of his mouth and into her ear as he felt the coffee beans that were being used for his order fill his hands, even though they were still empty. She looked back with her eyebrows raised. She was a wolf, so this was a fairly significant act.
"Yeah?" There was a wart on her left cheek and her face was already aging. She smoked.
"Twenty years from now, we won't know one another. You will have lung cancer and I will not. Do you know why that is?"
She stopped what she was doing while the other girl glanced at them every few seconds and kept making the drink she had been asked to. It felt like a private room had suddenly sprung up around the two of them, shutting out other sensory input. Like her co-employee, she looked to be about twenty. Hands on her hips, the first said, "No, I don't." There was poison in her voice, which held behind it the barest hint of a scratch. "Have you got some wisdom for me while you're on your little trip?"
He looked down at the bar with a grin and then met her eyes. "It's because when I smoke or shoot up or drop or whatever, I do it in moderation and I care about what is happening to my body and my brain. When you do, however, you do it to fill a need. You do it recklessly. You think of cigarettes as a necessary expense, and you have trained yourself to enjoy them. You cough too much, your breath smells, and your teeth are yellow, so you feel worse about yourself, so you smoke to get the neurochemical high that other people get from other hobbies and lasting relationships."
She stared at him for a while, obviously so surprised that she didn't know how to react to being hurt. "Well, at least I'm not a fucking stoner," she shot, but he was quick and deadly with his words, more so than a barrista like her could be from just catering to mostly harmless high schoolers.
"I don't kill anyone but myself, Courtney," he said, with a fire that he was sad to note was dispelling his high. "You spew carcinogens and toxins like a powerplant everywhere you walk, spreading cancer and emphasema like a living coal mine." His eyes had a penetrating light in them that only his victims ever saw. "If you have children, it will be infanticide. If you go home, patricide or matricide. If you have siblings, fratricide or sororicide. As long as you smoke, everywhere you walk, you are a murderer." The grin was gone. "Let me make this clear. I don't care if you kill yourself. In fact, not many people do." Her lip was trembling under his gaze as he spoke, but she couldn't look away, as though something had locked her eyes and ears open. "I care that whenever you light your cigarette, you expose every human being within a twenty foot radius to chemicals that have been used for assassinations and warfare and clog their lungs with gaseous shit. The next time you want to smoke, if you want to retain worth as a human being and be respected and die happy, either put the cig down or pick up a joke book and swallow a handful of sleeping pills." Wide-eyed, the other worker very slowly slid his styrofoam cup of coffee to him. After holding Courtney's gaze for another second, he broke away and smiled warmly at the other girl. "Thank you," he said, and took a sip. "Mmm. I should come here more often."
Too late, he noticed the second girl looking behind him. "Make sure you invite me, would you?" he heard, and dropped his head down on the table with a groan while Courtney was gently moved away from the cash register, still in shock, so her partner could take Jeck's order. "Strawberry smoothie, please," he said, paid, and sat down next to Fae, who wouldn't look at him. He nudged the squirrel with an elbow. "Come on, man, it's just me."
"I know," he mumbled, his voice muffled. He should have seen the other girl - was her name Brittney? - looking. How stupid did he have to be? He shouldn't have gone off like that while he was still in flight, at least not without letting his intermingling senses warn him of the human boy's approach. "You're early," he said with a sigh, finally looking up.
"You're even earlier." It was seven forty-five. Jeck had lied to his parents so he could make sure to show up and catch Fae while he was still buzzed, like he was sure the intellectual other boy would have timed it. He had gotten more than he had anticipated and had listened to the last half of the speech with laughter bubbling in his mouth while he forced a stoic countenance on himself. Wearing a dark jacket that was one size too big for him, he fit in nicely beside Fae.
"Am I that predictable?"
"Actually, I just thought I'd catch you high." Brittney, who had had the kindness to let Courtney take the rest of the shift off, handed Jeck his smoothie, but then leaned her head in.
"Hey, squirrel. Umm..."
He blinked and looked at the shifting white tigress. "Hm?"
"Ah... should I, like... tell her not to kill herself?"
He started to give her a sardonic look from under his eyebrows, then softened his features. Jeck watched him. "Do you think she'll kill herself?"
"Well... I don't think so, but you can't ever really know someone, you know?" She bit her lip in indecision. She clearly thought he had some authority on the matter after how he had dealt with her friend.
Fae lay a paw on the one she had braced herself on the counter with. She looked at it with a quick start that jolted her senses, kind of like punching a malfunctioning juke box. "Anything you do for her will remind her that there is someone who cares. It's the most you can do. And whatever you do, don't let her get you angry at her. She'll probably just be confused for a while." He let her go, then, and she backed away unsteadily.
"Thanks... yeah. Thanks. Umm... lemme know if there's another customer?"
The two of them nodded, and she disappeared with another thanks to call her friend. Fae and Jeck sipped their beverages for a minute or two in silence while they waited for Guin. "She really believed you," Jeck noted after a while. "Brittney, I mean."
Fae snorted at his coffee. "I let too much of it show, tonight. You know, before you came in, I was thinking of just leaving so I wouldn't have to deal with those two the rest of the night." His voice was mostly calm, if a little self-deprecating, but Jeck could tell how angry he really was at himself.
Jeck had been thinking during those two minutes. He had been there before and seen what marks Courtney could leave with her prickly attitude and scathing voice, and to see her stripped bare like that was, for him, a pleasure. It was especially special to get to watch Fae do it, because every time he was with Fae, he felt he saw a little more of the squirrel's personality. Today, he learned that Fae was capable of the most concealable form of murder ever known, but had too much... was it humanity? Was it heart? Was it respect and sympathy or pity for the bleak aspect of any given human life? Whatever it was, Jeck was glad that the squirrel had it.
"I'm glad you didn't. It's hard to keep up a façade when your mortar sucks."
Fae chuckled. "Only you would know what that word actually means."
Guin joined them some minutes later, as did Brittney, who seemed self-assured. Fae exchanged no words with her, but she sent him a grateful glance before the three of them moved off to a table to facilitate a three-pronged discussion.
Guin had brought all the materials he needed and Jeck had brought what he could, anticipating that Fae would try to keep up his succorless appearance by "forgetting" his own stuff, but he had apparently realized how much the other two knew. Out of his faded, torn backpack came mechanical pencils, a nice graphing calculator, a book in perfect condition, and a notebook of work paper. The fox's jaw dropped and he blinked every time Fae went for something else that appeared to be in pristine condition, but the human just shook his head. Unlike Guin, Jeck knew that the double purpose of the clean book was to make it seem like he never used it while he kept it in excellent condition.
Once everything was set up, Jeck asked, "So what exactly is so perplexing that niether one of you get it, even though by all rights you should both be in my class?"
"It's these goddammed proofs," Fae answered without hesitation. "The book's all up like, 'You just divide by the identity of fuck' and so I'm all, 'Well no shit, smartass, now that you've shown it to me.' And Jeck, you probably did these in your head, right?"
Jeck leaned back laughed into his hand at the other boy's... eloquence. "Except that I had to write it all out for the tests, yeah, mostly. I mean, you get up to problem sixty or so in the homework and they start getting stupid hard."
"Fuck damn you, Jeck," he sighed with a grin.
Guin opted to look in from the outside for the time being as the three of them started working through problems. Ocasionally, even Jeck had trouble with one, and it would take all three of them to work at it with an equal chance among them of coming up with the solution. Even then, though, with movements and intonations so subtle that Guin hardly even noticed until afterwards, when he was trying to examine the strange, bitter, foreign feeling that had developed in the pit of his stomach through the forty minutes it took them, Jeck seemed like he was sliding off the fox like oil, just barely ignoring him, just barely making him feel isolated. It probably wasn't intentional, he reasoned, proud of himself that he had caught himself before hyping the situation into something it wasn't. He needed to hang around fewer girls. Girls, always making something out of nothing.
It wasn't just that Jeck seemed distant, though. It was the fact that with Fae showing his true face, the face that was undeniably brilliant, Guin wanted to get to know him better. Sure, they talked, and more than half of the time was spent talking about movies or people or whatever else so they all got a chance to socialize like normal people, but with that... well, not opposition, but the way Fae and Jeck connected more readily because of their honed intellectual talents than Guin possibly could because he had not trained his mind like they had, the fox wanted to be a part of it. He had never been on the outside of a social connection before, and it bothered him that he could be there now if he hadn't squandered his brain for lack of motivation.
He could change, he decided after that night, when they had split up and Guin had gotten his last appraising look from the human boy. He would change, because he knew he could be smarter than he was acting. But... if he started doing well, he'd eventually get moved out of the class with Fae.
Wait, where did that come from?
Lying in his bed again, he halted his thoughts in their tracks. He had honestly considered, if only for an instant, downgrading himself so that he could see the squirrel more. That was unacceptable. Even if he moved up, he could see the squirrel still. Come on, Jeck hung out with him enough that they were good friends, even if Guin had never heard Jeck use any of the words that had started flying out of his mouth a few moments after meeting the squirrel. They weren't as crass as the rodent himself ahd used, but coming from someone who had never cursed for fear of the implications, it was a tremendous step from one set of people to another. Seeing Fae, though. Why did he care? They could be friends, and that was all that mattered, right?
Jeck had more important things to worry about that night than social interactions. At one point during the night, Fae had referred to Courtney as Mabovna's middle ground. What the hell, Fae? Why are you such an asshole? He was grinning as he fell asleep thinking about it.