Symphonium
#8 of Chamber Music
Here it is, the full post of Chamber Music, slightly edited from the original series to "perfect" the symbols and motifs and technique in general. This is one of the only stories I have legitimately finished and I feel that it properly conveys the message I want it to. It is particularly violent and particularly coarse in its language, but there's nothing X-rated. Everything that needs credit is either obviously not me (like a GameBoy) or is credited in the story somewhere. I hope you all enjoy it and if you have any questions about it of any kind, feel free to ask.
Faeram, Guinnevon, Christopher "Razor," and Kindelford are all © ScarbriDe.
t3h p05t, 4 j00.
When two human or anthro beings first come into contact with one another on this speck of space dust we have presumptuously made synonymous with the material that makes it, even such an insignificant moment as this chance meeting among heptillions that may have occurred in the past eternity, if it is between two particularly well-suited individuals, warrants a capture by the universe as a snapshot of human interaction. Well-suited, of course, does not necessarily mean that they got along swimmingly at first glance, or even that they got along swimmingly at all. When General Lee and General Grant first met, such a memory was most likely engraved in the structure of the universe and put alongside all the others: the lovers, the archnemeses, the parents and children, the business partners, and the murderer and his victim. Any pair is potentially worthy of this snapshot. Only a very few ever truly deserve it.
Guinnevon Leary and Faeram Marshall were two such lucky individuals. The first was a fox so alluring, so unquestionably graceful, so perfectly curved, that at times he appeared to be some nymph, some naiad, some sylph drawn from her thermals and updrafts and gales into the body of a young man, whose emerald eyes were always partially hidden behind a veil of thick, black eyelashes, shining as though captured from a dragon's lair and set for a pharoah on his faraway throne out of a face as smooth and playful as a fawn's. The red luster of his fur shone brilliantly in any light it could find, even when tucked away inside the black jeans and tee shirts his mother hated that he wore. A golden earring, set with amethyst, adorned his right ear, dangling from the perky feature like a sleighbell, glimmering like the rest of him. It mysteriously seemed to match his lucious hair, hanging down to his shoulder blades and tinted a deep, majestic blue like the depths of the ocean. His tail, thick and three feet long, followed him like the tail of a comet, its fiery red painting his past as surely as some god or perhaps even God had painted his future. His slight frame bounced, weaved, and floated as he walked, defying the biophysics that made most youths his post-pubescent age prone to trip over themselves and flail with lanky arms and gangly legs until someone was injured. His muscles were small and taut, leaving room for interpretation of his strength and drawing women and men to him in droves. He was the picture of high school glory, but despite constant reminders and definite awareness, he would not directly acknowledge it. Regardless of his defiant mode of appearance, a well-honed upbringing had left him honorable, well-mannered, and to the regret of dozens, chaste.
The second individual had not necessarily been cheated out of glory, as it would seem someone must have been to afford Guinnevon's luxurious physique, but nor had the dice in his genetic match-making been handled by such a high-roller. This squirrel had been born with a coarser type of fur and less note-worthy features. His ears were slightly rounded and less imposing than the sharper variety many admired. His white chest fur and granite overlay did not reflect the sun, moon, and stars as did Guinnevon's and to those who knew him, seemed almost to drain the light from where he stood. His shoulders were uncharacteristically broad and his other muscles well-defined for a rodent. A black tattoo from some foreign land or another adorned his left pectoral. No one really knew if he was a virgin or not, and few cared. He was taller than the average male that age, standing at five feet, ten inches, but he didn't stand out. His tail was nothing extraordinary and his eyes were often bloodshot, his gaze hooded like Guinnevon's, but from fatigue, as the lines ringing his inky eyes showed all too well. He was known to partake of alcohol, hash, and LSD liberally. A darkness radiated from his person as though under a new moon only could he truly shine.
_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,_
"Wake up, Fae," the squirrel heard sometime during his third period class. "I don't know how you did it, but you passed again. Well done." Fae rolled his eyes up from under his arms at the old panthress handing over his paper. Mrs. Buckshire was a kind woman, but had harsh edges to her that sometimes made her mood difficult to read. Her fur was silver in patches and she wore her head hair in arget curls over thin spectacles.
"Thanks, Mrs. Buckshire," he mumbled, looking at the sharp handwriting where it spelled out "78 / C" on his math paper. Glancing quickly around to take in the faces of those nearby, most of whom were shunting his gaze, he flipped quickly through the test, glancing at the red marks scouring it.
She walked off and flicked her tail. "Come see me after class. We need to talk."
He moaned and pulled his hood back over his head, quickly asleep again. He didn't wake up until the bell. Meanwhile, the elderly cat moved on through the room, congratulating, cajoling, and coddling until she reached Guinnevon. "Guin, I think you can do better than that."
The fox casually slid the paper from her grasp. "But Mrs. Buckshire, it's an eighty-seven. Isn't that good enough?"
She froze him with a stare he received only ever from her. She was one of the few teachers at the school not swayed by his charm. "‘Good enough,' Mr. Leary, is never good enough." She paused for a moment, considering his innocent, seemingly hurt eyes. "You will also see me after class." He looked back at the paper as she let his gaze drop before quickly slipping it into his backpack. His eyes wandered over to the squirrel to whom she had spoken. From the back, only the gray hoody and lazily curling tail were visible. Guin's eyes narrowed in interest.
He made a point not to condemn others based on first impressions, given his unflagging beauty, but this seemed like a special case. He heard how the others talked about that one. He was dirty, crass, and ill-mannered. How he had stayed in school was a mystery. They had always been in the same level classes, but never spoken, never even met one another, each hardly aware of the other's presence. Thinking back then, though, Guinnevon realized exactly how many classes they had shared. Fae had been a presence in his life from seventh grade until this, his junior year of high school, and he had not even noticed.
The papers all returned, Buckshire took her place before the white board for lecturing in advanced pre-calculus, which meant an unceasing, ever-growing base of trigonometric identities. She herself did not understand how Faeram had gotten into her class for the first few weeks. As winter exams approached, though, she had taken the time to examine all of his past grades, which was easy because she was one of the few teachers who trusted her students little enough when they claimed she had made a grading mistake that she kept a photocopy of every test on file. Given his apparent motivation, he should have been in basic geometry or some other lower-level class. However, he sat there, hovering on the edge of failing as though predetermined to never fall behind or push ahead.
Guin was the less interesting case, obviously. He was a pretty-boy who didn't have a place in the world yet. He knew he was gorgeous, he knew he would have no trouble finding a mate when the time came, and if his clothes were any indication, his parents could send him to his college of choice, assuming he was accepted. So he didn't try. He let his natural intelligence, moderately limited though it was, guide his path through school and always had. It wasn't the first time the lady had seen someone like this, and she was certain it would not be the last.
She wondered if the two she had pointed out could help one another. Niether appeared to have any motivation to excel, although she was certain that at least Guin could, if he so chose. She wasn't so sure about Faeram, and that was part of this experiment. He might â€" if she was right, of course â€" have greater potential than any student she had yet encountered. She had intentionally failed to contact his parents, although she knew other teachers had, because she knew it would do no good. A child like that would not change because his parents, whoever they were, asked him to.
He needed a reason. Whether or not Guin would provide that reason was uncertain. She had dealt with children with drug problems before, and nothing really seemed to work particularly well with them. Pairing them with successful individuals made them more down-trodden, putting them in groups of their own kind provided an exponential decrease in productivity, and their general response to those less than they in state or situation was the typical "at least I'm not that bad" line of thinking. So maybe choosing this pairing would have some magical effect or another, even though it wasn't so much a pairing as an association. Anyway, she was no psychoanalyst and didn't know anyone who was so, hey, why not try to do something unusual? And Faeram... if she was right, Faeram was worth a little confusion on Guin's part.
After class, Guin packed intentionally slowly so he wouldn't be seen waiting to address her. As soon as everyone else had left, he slowly made his way to her desk, passing Faeram with an almost caustic glance. "Faeram!" barked Mrs. Buckshire. He awoke blearily, looked around, and stood up with his backpack slung over one shoulder.
Niether student could see, but behind the mask of calm she displayed for them, her mouth had gone dry. It had taken a long time to verify or believe what she was seeing in Faeram's work and past class schedules, which she had managed to drag out of the principal only barely. She pulled out the stack of photocopies she had made, shuffled them, and rapped them on the desk, then took off her spectacles and turned a practiced, weary gaze to the two of them.
"You both understand why I'm keeping you?"
Fae didn't respond, but Guin nodded quickly, brushing back his hair. "I know, I could do better. But ma'am, I'll be late to class..."
"I'll write you both late passes. I don't have a fourth period, so I can keep you as long as I like. Guin, I'll start with you." She fixed him with the same gaze from before. "I know you're doing decently well in my class, Guin. You pass easily and you seem to understand the material, and I'm proud of that and many students would be envious of that ability." He smiled politely and she returned the expression with the same reasoning behind it. "I know, though, that you don't try." His face fell pitifully, but she would have none of it. "I'm an old woman, and I can see when a student is not reaching his full potential, and you are just not doing it. B's are enough to get you by, but when you could be acing every test I hand you, it simply doesn't cut it for me. There's not much I can threaten you with, but I've always been known for my creativity, and believe me when I tell you that I can find a way to punish you for doing ‘good enough.' I want you to pick up the pace, so you can have a job and a life to go with your hair." He flushed at that last cut, and she kept him still with her wry gaze before dropping it.
"Can I go, then, ma'am?" he asked humbly, his tail twitching uncertainly. She couldn't really punish him, could she? He had a clean slate with his parents, and his older sister had never been brilliant, so they didn't push him to excel, either. There was nothing she could do to him... but he didn't dare question her authority to her face.
"No. I made Fae stand there while I talked to you, so you will have to hear what I have to say to him. Now, Fae," she began, turning to him. He didn't respond at first, his eyes hidden under his hood. Even the crowfeet around her eyes hardened as she said it again. "Faeram," she commanded.
He jerked his head up quickly and took off the hoody, revealing tired, blood-shot eyes. By all rights, he looked like he should have had a smoking cigarette in one hand, but he had always avoided the "death-sticks." He looked back at her in earnest. "Sorry, ma'am. I guess I... zoned out there."
She harrumphed at him suspiciously while glancing back at her notes on him. "Well, you did just get up, so I guess I can't blame you."
"Sorry, ma'am," he apologized again. She raised a questioning eyebrow while she was checking the papers. He was polite. She had never noticed that.
"It took me a long time to figure you out, Fae," she murmured, pulling out a particular essay from an earlier English class, "but maybe I can make my explanation shorter by showing you this. Do you recognize this essay?"
He glanced at it briefly and a spark of recognition ignited alongside... something else. "Yes, ma'am." The writing was barely intelligible, but the grade on the paper was a solid "C-plus."
"Read me the first sentence."
He read it, word for word. "‘In his book The Scarlet Letter, author Nathaniel Hawthorne makes an... exem... exempulry allegory between some characters using a... a plechura of symbols and their meanings.'" He finished, and the something that had sparked with the recognition had been kindled.
"You know how to pronounce those words, Fae, and you spelled them right, there," she said gently, watching him. He didn't meet her gaze. "Exemplary. Plethora. Later on, you use the word ‘catechism' in its appropriate context, and yet you consistently misused and misspelled words like ‘their' and ‘blurry.' I know Mrs. Angelthorpe, and she is far too far gone to have caught something like this." That was his ninth grade English teacher. "She saw your apparent failure to appraise the symbols you talked about and the fact that you only wrote a single page of what could have been three pages of material and handed you that C-plus. I see that you're hiding something."
A cold flame of fear was burning slowly in his black eyes. Guin was looking curiously at the paper in the squirrel's hand. Fae scratched his head nervously. "I don't see what you mean."
"Let me try to clarify it." She folded her hands with her elbows on her desk and affixed him to his spot with her piercing eyes. "I majored in statistics in college and received a physical doctorate in algorithms. The reason I'm here now is that I once made a mistake for the CIA." Both students were rooted where they stood, jaws slightly agape as they gawked at her. She ignored the attention and cut off Guin's attempted sycophancy. "Once they're done with you, you get pension checks and are told to carry on as though nothing had ever happened. I noticed a pattern in your papers, Fae, and I don't like, or I don't know, what I see. You've been lying, Faeram."
The length of her explanation had given him time to quench that fire. "Why would I lie so I could do worse?" he asked with a smirk.
"I'm not sure, Fae, and that's what I'd like to know. Your mistakes are not the common mistakes other kids make. They look stupid, but they're not. The vast majority, if not all, comparing the questions you got right, however well-disguised, to the missed ones, seem to indicate that you would have had the right answer if you had wanted to."
His confidence was back with him, and he refused to back down. "Not to offend you, ma'am, but that doesn't make sense to me. I do well enough to get by, and that's all I need, really. I mean, come on. I'm not exactly gonna be President or the CEO of anything."
"Not if you don't get some motivation behind you, you aren't," she chastized. "You could do a lot better if you would quit pretending to be less than you are. I believe in you, Mr. Marshall, even if you don't want me to." She knew there had to be some motivation already there, for him to continue to learn anything at all. If only she could inflame it somehow, she was convinced he could light up the world with what he knew.
Buckshire finally stopped looking at him and pulled out a sticky note pad to write them late passes. "Where are the two of you headed?" she asked perfunctorily, glancing at the clock for a time.
"I'm going to Mr. Muller's room," Guin answered quickly.
"Same here," Fae mumbled. They looked at one another, and that was the moment they met. The glance came and went and was gone, but to those attuned to the workings of the universe, a pulse swept through time and froze that image, those green, delicate irises looking directly into the inky depths of Fae's red-rimmed eyes, the two of them angled symmetrically across the front of the panthress's desk while she bent over it, blind to what had happened, and Fae's glint of recognition were caught forever, stored in a place few will ever find and from which none return, once enraptured by the power held there.
Walking out of her classroom and down the empty hallways, Guin felt uncomfortable for one of very few times in his life. This squirrel just seemed to... ooze nothingness. His shadow was blacker than other people's, his visage darker and more enigmatic, his entire being seeming wrapped in occult secrecy. In short, he was creepy. He kept his eyes to the ground and made no move to acknowledge Guin's presence. He smelled a little, like cheap wine and smoke, and it offended Guin's nose. His shoulders were hunched and his coat was wrapped tightly around him as though he were always cold. He was scary, and it made Guin feel awkward.
"So... is there really something you're hiding?" he tossed into the silence. "Mrs. Buckshire sounded pretty convinced."
There was no response for a few seconds. As soon as Guin opened his mouth to repeat the question, though, he got an answer. "People can be pretty convinced of a lotta things, Starfox." His voice was low and pugnacious, as if he just wanted to create tension.
Guin grinned nervously, confused. "Starfox?"
"Your name. Makes me think of Starfox."
"My name's Guinnevon. What does that have to do with anything?"
He shrugged nonchalantly, smugly. "It's your name." They had reached the door to the next classroom. Fae gave a strangely playful glance over his shoulder as he trudged in, his note somehow wrinkled and smudged after the short walk when he handed it over. "You tell me."
Guin just looked at him, unsure of the glance and unsure of his words. They felt... prophetic. But how could a nickname as useless as that be in any way prophetic? He shook his head and took his seat, no smile on his usually cheerful or bemused face. Whoever Fae was, he decided, Guin was having nothing to do with him.
Later that night, Guin was still thinking of the squirrel. Starfox. Why? It was a stupid nickname. Guin hadn't ever even gotten into that series. He liked the newer stuff: "Halo" and "Gears of War" and all that. What even gave Fae the right to give him a name different from the one he already went by, anyway? He liked Guin. It was quick, simple, and easy to remember. Starfox, as the vulpine boy had learned from a friend, was complicated.
Fae was strange. Guin could not get over that simple observation. He also found himself, in every class after Buckshire's, watching the squirrel and trying to see if that aura, dark without being sinister, was really there. It was something about him that, juxtaposed with his playful quip and his politeness, clashed and by its very nature was magnetically repulsive, like roadkill and brain surgery.
He thought back to a conversation he had had later that day with a human he knew by the name of Kindelford Gates, who very reasonably went by his middle name: Jeck. This particular human was interesting in his own right. He had grown up a middle child in a middle class family and had been largely ignored for much of his life because of it. As an early victim of the Western European reverse-racism movement, he received little attention from the government and as a white male stuck between an adopted younger daughter lynx and a prodigal older son, he received little attention from his parents besides obligatory we're-sorry-you're-not-as-special-as-our-other-children disguised as something genuine. He was average-looking, with mild acne on a lightly tanned face, smoothly-curving features, soft, gray eyes and impossibly straight, mahogany hair. His body shape was just on the masculine side of effeminate, with supple lines from under his arms to his gently rounded hips and muscular legs. His shoulders were somewhat weak, but they were offset by a strong chin and stronger gaze, well-tempered over the years to transform what may be at first perceived as a dismissably placid face into an unbreakable chain of command. He was somewhere between Guin's height and Fae's, meaning that the fact he was captain of the academic team and a leader in most any group he joined or was put into attested to his powerful voice and attention-drawing gaze.
"Hey, Guin," Jeck had called in his friendly baritone at lunch. The fox looked up and waved, at first about to let it go at that. However, thinking back on how much Jeck generally knew about people and, indeed, the world in general, he decided to invite the other boy to sit with him. As usual, he was in tight quarters what with the tremendous number and variety of girls who invited themselves over, but instead of playing their heartstrings today, he ignored them almost entirely, save for a few dashing smiles and a wink or two. And an ass-grab for Lolita, his current favorite.
Sarabi, Jeck's lioness girlfriend (despite the social taboo on inter-species couples), followed with her dazzling smile matching her glittering earrings. Some people said that Jeck had just gone for her for the Lion King reference, and while that was secretly part of it, she was also academically brilliant and, when she decided to get out from behind her glasses and let her platinum hair out of its cooped-up bun, was absolutely stunning. She rarely did, though, and her African accent was hard for some to get by, as was her introspective nature. How Jeck had penetrated her shell was anyone's guess. Guin parted the masses that rushed to destroy any chance she had of getting a seat and magically, one appeared for her. The crowd visibly thinned.
Jeck grinned triumphantly as he came over. "Ah, I thought I could get you to do that if I pitched it right. Sara, are you sure you don't want to sit with your friends? We're probably gonna talk about icky guy stuff."
She leaned over to him and whispered in his ear, "I may be shy, but I love watching the faces of these girls when they see that I get to hang out with him and they don't. I can deal with ‘icky guy stuff' for a day." He chuckled airily, and she giggled.
"Jeck, manipulating people. Why must you always use me like this?" Guin asked with a smile over his soda. They had been friends for a few years, ever since Jeck had brutally shoved Guin through a basic level required science class they had suffered through.
The boy just smiled. "So why were you and Faeram late for class together?" Sara began daintily eating her pizza, a food most people are completely unable to eat without some degree of messiness. After staring in wonder at her for a few moments, Guin answered.
"Mrs. Buckshire decided we weren't doing well enough in her class, even though we're both passing." Their voices were lost in the tremendous, sadly-ornamented cafeteria, so secrecy was a surety, if it was ever an issue.
"Skimping on effort again?" Jeck joked.
Guin rolled his eyes. "I just don't see why it's so important. It's not that I haven't thought about it, or that I don't know how capable I am or anything." His tenor, usually up-beat or seductive tone was somewhat downcast. "I just don't feel the urge to do better than I have to." Sara shot him a look that he missed. She was the current number two in their class.
"Eh. Can't say I agree with your thinking, but Mrs. Buckshire doesn't really have a right to pull just the two of you out. I mean, Fae's my friend and all, but the kid is a pothead, no matter how smart he is. And there are plenty of other students who aren't making As, so what's her problem?"
Guin paused, his eyes hard. In the angle of Jeck's eyes while he talked, he thought he had seen a ghost of that... ugly, seeping, sickening blackness about Fae's person. "Wait, say that again."
"I mean, she must have just been choosing random people to lecture..."
"No, no. The part about Fae being smart. I never met him before today, really, but he's never seemed like anything special." Must have been his imagination.
Jeck averted his eyes in hesitant concession, not really wanting to condemn anyone he considered a friend as "stupid." "I suppose he doesn't exactly stick out. But he's a smart one, somewhere down deep. You know, he once told me why LSD was such a great drug? He laid it out in, like, perfect chemical detail. I double-checked on the internet."
Guin rolled his eyes and took another gulp of soda before chowing down on his sandwich. "He's just weird. You know, when Mrs. Buckshire was telling him how unmotivated he was, she took out this old English essay he had and pointed out all these words. He was using all this ‘SAT-word' crap two years ago, but spelled easy stuff wrong to make himself sound stupid. I'll bet he's under-cover for something."
Jeck stuck him with a grinning stare. "Guin. He's a pothead. You can fake a lot, but you can't fake what he does. That kid is a stoner." Sara was still quiet, now sipping from a soda can as though it were a tea cup. Jeck was awkwardly trying to mimic her grace with food while at the same time staying a man. Luckily, only Sara could tell that that was the reason he kept straightening his shoulders and then leaning his elbows back on the table.
"He called me ‘Starfox.' What do you think he means by that?"
"Pot. Head. It doesn't mean anything. He probably saw your hair or your tail or something and it reminded him of a comet." Jeck leaned in for a bite of food, but then stopped. "Well, wait a minute."
Guin did wait. He was used to this behavior from the human, who enjoyed word games more than most. Jeck would initially totally dismiss an idea, but then had a habit of running it through his massively capable brain a few times and seeing how it could work.
"Your whole name's Guinnevon, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well, if you take the ‘guin' off, you get ‘evon.' I knew a girl once named Avon, and people called her Nova for fun."
Sara looked up. "She choreographed for the colorguard. Oh, she was a genius. Wasn't her sister's name Galaxy, or something?"
"Yeah, that one. Well, if you flip around your name and keep the pronunciation, you get ‘nova,' which would have to do with space, and you're a fox. So, Starfox. Huh. That's pretty good," he mused, sitting up again.
Guin thought about it, surprised that the name actually made sense. "I guess so," he agreed. He always felt like he was in the company of giants, with these two. They were both science-minded academics who enjoyed language to its fullest extent. Jeck was a bit too playful to advance far into the top echelon of the class, but Sara was bound and determined to graduate valedictorian.
Conversation moved on to more normal things â€" video games, movies, homework hassles (of which Guin had none), the like. The rest of the day, Guin's eyes kept landing on Fae, over and over again. In a way, the two of them were similar: capable, but entirely unmotivated. At some point that day, Jeck had suggested that the old panthress, who had taught him a year ago, might have been doing some... what had he called it? "Socio-therapeutic matchmaking," trying to make the two excel by playing them off one another's unique situations. Guin wondered if he might be right, and then wondered if Buckshire might be right. Maybe, somehow, if the two of them got to know one another or at the very least studied together, it would spark something. As things stood, he was happy to let them keep standing. Somewhere in the back of his mind, though, the combined threats of ending up like Fae, Buckshire's brutally honest words, and Jeck's omnipresent, progressive mentality were beginning to add up. Maybe he was lagging behind unnecessarily. He kept thinking about it until he reached his bed that night. It was strange, to for once in his life be this unsure about his future.
Karen Buckshire knew there was even more to Fae than she had first imagined, given his reaction to her discovery. When she got home that evening, she immediately started going over the papers anew. At first, there was nothing she could discern, even concentrating just on the math examinations. The problems missed seemed too random, too arbitrarily chosen to mean anything. Eventually, though, she saw: the eraser marks didn't always make sense. There were places where whole sequences of numbers had been crossed out before an answer was reached. Even those sequences didn't fit into algorithms she knew, though, so she concentrated on the questions with those marks, trying to fit it into some sort of cipher. He was smart, but he was young, so she started with a standard substitution cipher, i.e., A = 1, B = 2, etc. The first problem that he missed in the eleventh grade, he was off by ten, translating to J. Nothing useful. The next was 488. Wrapping around, it became T. The next was 27, so A. Made no sense, but he was smart. There might be further substitution down the line.
Her first day with the new idea in mind was spent this way, tracking down missed problems and recording the numbers by which the problem had been missed, whether by a decimal in which the decimal had to be ignored, or some other mechanism. Two days later, she had a garbled mess of letters and felt like she hadn't advanced in the least. This puzzle was consuming her, she knew, and let it go for the next few days, to let it digest. She would get it eventually, and she was old enough to know that as quick as her mind was, she had plenty of time to figure this out. This young person would not escape her, no matter how hard he tried.
Jeck also had an interesting initial reaction to Fae. The Gates family had always lived well, though not hugely extravagantly, and so had mostly associated with their own class â€" white, pseudo-generous types with small mansions and no servants save a professional slave here and there. Jeck's family had no slaves of course, being far too magnanimous to consider causing such a demeaning station to be created in their own family, and had instead done the opposite by taking in Claire, his adoptive sister, when she was an infant. That had been his first close exposure to the anthro species, who, though respected as a sentient people, only mixed in public high schools, cubicle cities, and factory floors.
Despite his general isolation from the rest of the world, Jeck was a voracious reader, quickly exhausting his father's library of fantasy and science fiction in middle school and avidly seeking out other forms of escape from what he was quickly realizing was a self-entrapping society, closed in by its feeble brains and cowardly tendencies. He remembered well one of his father's arguments with his older brother, who was dating an Asian girl. The girl had invited Geoffritch to China with her and been staunchly refused by both parents. His father argued that the he would get himself killed by "those yellow Chinks" because "they don't understand civilized society." Geoff had stalked off in a rage and ended up breaking up with the girl because they wouldn't be able to keep up communications with one another.
This fictional exposure to such a wide universe abraded Jeck's patience with his parents exceptionally swiftly until friction with them, at least from his end, was like a joint without cartilage. They didn't seem to notice, but he mentally ground his teeth during every interaction with them, feeling damned by their atrocious ignorance and hidebound stasis. He, aware the other hand, excelled in school and sports alike, determined to break free somehow and knowing that a university education was the way to do it, especially one he paid for without their help.
When he hit high school, even as sociophobic as a life in books had made him, he did his best to associate with a variety of people, seeking out primarily humans and furs of his level of intellect or higher. Finding these in short supply, he down-graded and expanded his tiny social circles little by little until finally, he met Fae.
Fae instantly intrigued Jeck as a person. The human boy was no blinded idiot to miss Fae's potential. The first time they talked was in a ninth grade social studies project. The two had been put in a group of four together because the social studies classes weren't segregated by demonstrated ability. By the time the two had had their third conversation independent of the other human boy and sociophilic vixen, Jeck knew that he was associating with someone special. Fae retained tremendous quantities of information, demonstrated by the spark of understanding he always had to quench whenever Jeck brought up a new point.
"Well, when the French started copying the Industrial Revolution..." Other areas of history.
"If Madame Defarge hadn't gotten that guy..." Bringing in A Tale of Two Cities.
"The French all up like ‘paper or plastic?'." Juvenile humor, low-quality though it was.
Fae got everything he was talking about, even though after the first few, he stopped responding when Jeck spoke. Eventually, Jeck called him out, cornering him in a small alcove near the art room in the school after lunch. "I know something you know, Fae," he said quietly, leaning against the wall beside the squirrel without looking at him and happily adopting a half-lidded, mysterious smirk.
The art hall was an interesting place to be. Amateur art with scattered masterpieces adorned the walls like tapestries in the thin space. On any given day, a breath-taking portrait of a raccoon could be found next to "expressionist" art and a collage of uselessness. It was the close spaces that were most interesting. A prevailing theme in the legible artwork was confinement, bombs in cages, volcanoes under sheets of ice, and bleeding children in classrooms. Some of it was downright disturbing, and Jeck had always known that it was because the arts were confined to this tiny, forgotten realm of the building, with its chipped paint and faded signs. This place was dying.
The two who met there, though, flourished in the expressive atmosphere, their blackness having finally found a home. From the walls poured forth depressed air, mingling with their swimming oil of irony, the ferrous stink suffering with the inanimate emotion effusing from the paper. Only here could any discernment be made between what they were and what the artists had tried to communicate. There was an elegance to their pitch, making it more of a jet next to the lightless midnight of a new moon. Here, these two could shine. Just... it was infrequent that light was found to complement them.
"And I know a lot of things you think you know," the squirrel answered without skipping a beat. They were alone. "You're right about a lot of them."
Jeck just smiled, sepulchral toxins leaking from his lips. "Works for me. So, I'd like to get a good grade on this project without having to do all the work. Only you and I have any clue what's going on, though. So, I'll leave you out of the class presentation of it if you'll put the powerpoint together. I can give you my notes, and I'll do the quiz."
"You're pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?" he said, putting a joint in his mouth. "What if I screw you over? I'm not reliable, I can tell you that much."
"I'm not much for society, but I know that I can put together an A powerpoint in about an hour if you don't get one back to me before the night before this is due, so I'm willing to try to pass it off on you. I'm a lazy person; it's why I pay attention in class."
A genuine laugh left the rodent's mouth at that. "Good point. Want a hit?" he asked in all seriousness, proferring the lit paper good-naturedly.
Jeck turned him down. "Nah. I've never been one for drugs. I don't understand them enough yet."
"Dude, do you know how LSD works? I looked it up a while ago, it's pretty cool."
"No, I don't." Jeck was interested, though. He liked learning things. "How?"
"It mimics, like, three different inhibitors in your brain, so the feedback inhibition process stops working. Dopamine, epinephrin, and norepinephrin hit up their receptors in the synapse and are all like, ‘epic fail.' It's why it screws up your brain so bad."
"So you fly with Lucy and Mary Jane? Even when you know what they do to you?"
He chuckled again. "I fly because I know what they do to me. If I understand it, I can control it." He sucked on the joint too hard and choked, glancing up at the smoke detector a few yards away. "So, you sure?" He offered the blunt again.
"Yeah, I've got a class. Don't count me out for later, though."
"Don't count me out either, Lief. And keep me under wraps, if you would."
Jeck pushed himself away, but turned to the other boy at the name. "Sure thing. But Leif? Leif Ericson?"
Faeram just smiled again. "Son of Eric, son of Thorvald, son of Asvald, son of Ulf. You'll figure it out."
The human furrowed his brow and joked, "You jerk. Now I'll be thinking about that all day. I'll see you later."
"See ya."
They parted ways, but as usual, Jeck didn't give up the word-play. Leif Ericson was a Viking, a race of people known for... raping, pillaging, plundering, discovering Greenland, populating Norway with blond women, and burning villages. They wore horned helmets and could enter a berserker rage on command, making a single man able to kill a dozen, kind of like... someone on LSD. Impervious to pain that would cripple normal men.
Kindelford Jeck Gates. Kindel. Kindling. Fire. So, Fireford. Fjord, a feature in Norway. Ford. A ford can cross a river, because it's a raft, like a boat. Viking burials involved putting the body on a boat and burning it as it sailed out to sea.
Kindelford becomes Leif.
He was brilliant.
_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_
The social studies project got a nearly perfect score, and only Jeck noticed how many consecutive minor assignments Faeram came close to failing to balance out that major plus. Jeck had not known, though, how long or with what seriousness Fae had been doing this until Guin mentioned the meeting with Buckshire. Throughout the past few years, he had kept intermittent contact with the squirrel, always observing Fae's placement in varying classes. It was always between bad and good, just like his marks in those classes.
At some point, Fae directly double-checked that Jeck was not spreading word of his hidden talent, and Jeck made his promise, but the boy made a decision when he heard about the paper Fae had written. It had clearly been some sort of cry for help, rather than an honest mistake. Fae was too smart to have let himself be found out that easily. Mrs. Buckshire had taught Jeck during his ninth grade year of English class and Jeck, as a shy, star student, had been a favorite of hers despite the difference in species. He decided to go ask her a favor after school the next day.
Unfortunately, she wasn't there because she didn't have a class at the end of the day, so he checked the day after during lunch. As the class emptied out, he stepped in, sucking air nervously. He had always had trouble stepping out of line. Simply approaching Fae had been a tremendous effort for him, though he had managed to hide it, as sure as he was. It was a result of the arguing and its uselessness, imprinting upon him a strong unwillingness to cause any sort of chaos. So when he first approached her desk, his lips were dry and his face was somewhat pale.
"Mrs. Buckshire?"
"Hm?" She looked up from her papers. Wearing a gaudy necklace and matching, garnet, dangling earrings above a jet shirt and ox-blood skirt, she cut an imposing figure without even trying. But when she smiled at him, the grandmother in her came out and he felt a rush of warmth. "Oh, Jeck! How are you?"
As he returned the smile, some of his fear dissipated. It was that fear that endeared him to woman after woman, and much as he knew it, he hated that he couldn't seem to quell it on his own. "I'm getting along," he answered with valiant nonchalance.
"Mrs. Davinsk hasn't convinced you to be an English major, has she?"
He laughed lightly at the recurring joke. "No, definitely not. I feel more comfortable around numbers."
"That's good," she smiled indulgently. He had struggled through the Polish human's class, but the strain on him hadn't shown except when she tore his first paper to pieces with her pen. All of the BS he had always gotten by on in middle school didn't work with that woman and it was why she and Buckshire were such good friends. "So now that I know it's not an emergency, what brings you here?"
"I have an odd request, Mrs. Buckshire."
"Do you, indeed?" She was intrigued as they went through the motions of the royal court, pretending overwraught civility. He felt comfortable that way, able to adopt his submissive pose without fear of retribution.
"I do. I was talking to Guin Leary the other day, and he said that he overheard you say something interesting to Faeram Marshall."
She raised her eyebrows. What did Jeck have to do with those two jokers? "He said he overheard, did he?"
"Well... not quite."
She gave the boy a look. What was he up to? The only classes he could possibly share with either one of them were social studies and arts. "Well, what did you want to ask?"
He looked down nervously. "Guin said that you said Fae is a lot smarter than he seems, and I've known that about Fae for a year or two now."
Buckshire blinked at him, suddenly concerned. "And you haven't said anything?" As abruptly as that, the atmosphere in the room changed. Now, they were discussing something clandestine. "Close the door, please."
He shrugged as he complied and turned back, but he felt the change as surely as she must have. "Fae tells me he knows what he's doing and he's never slacked, so I trust him. Guin said there was a..."
"Never slacked? Jeck, he slacks on purpose. That's what I was saying. That boy is probably as smart as you are, but he won't show it."
The boy caught the momentum and ran with it. "See, I think he's smarter than I am. By a lot. Guin talked about a paper you went over with Fae, from a year or two ago." His voice gained confidence and a little of his practiced command slipped accidentally into it, but he also spoke more quietly. "I don't think Fae would make mistakes as blatant as the ones in the paper."
She shook her head quickly. "What I told Guin was that he had made small mistakes."
"I know, I'm sorry. I'm bad at communicating sometimes." He shook his head, clearing his mind. "He shouldn't have made it that obvious that he was being intentionally... less talented. I know him."
"You're sure?" She stopped him as he opened his mouth again, putting a hand up. "I believe you, Jeck. What I saw in those papers is not something I can just ignore."
He nodded with a swallow. "I... was wondering if I could borrow that English essay you talked to him about, to see if I could find something else in it. I've always been pretty good at word games."
She didn't hesitate. "You know this is unethical, right, Jeck?" she said, sifting through papers.
"Yes, ma'am."
"And I know you know this, but this cannot leave this room, is that clear?"
"Yes, ma'am." She was totally serious, and so was he.
Her wrinkled paws found the right paper along with a few others and held them out to him. He took them tentatively. "Take a few. I want to help that boy. I just don't understand why someone that smart would take the path he's chosen. Now, as long as you're here..." She searched for a few more seconds and found another sheet of paper, this one covered in numbers that were clearly her handwriting. Jeck would know it anywhere. "One thing I've learned is that especially at puzzles, two minds are better than one. Do you see any sort of pattern in these numbers?"
He moved around beside her so he could see better and started, barely audible, to read over the numbers. "Twenty-one... nine thousand and eight... four hundred forty-eight... Well, for those three, the digits add to three, seventeen, and twenty. I don't see how that works, though. I guess..." She looked at him, suddenly excited by something he said but unwilling to interrupt his train of thought. "Maybe they stand for letters, but that would be C, um... Q, and T. I dunno."
"That's it, Jeck, that's the missing link," she whispered in a fervor. "I looked at it a different way; I tried to wrap every number around to the alphabet. Most of it made sense, but if you take just the ones that wrap to the same number and the digits add up, maybe it makes more sense!"
Jeck looked at her with new respect. "So... four hundred forty-eight wraps to twenty, too? He's been encoding his wrong answers... I'll bet he did the same thing with the English paper."
She nodded gleefully. "Oh, thank you! If you find anything in that essay, you let me know, and even if you don't, I'll keep the others with me if you want to borrow them!" She sobered quickly and shot him a warning glance. "Keep them safe, though."
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, this'll be interesting." He grinned joyfully as he tucked the essay away.
"Oh, I hope it's more than that," she called after him as he rushed to lunch. The old teacher sighed and regretfully turned back to grading papers that, at the moment, were more important than the stack she had acquired detailing this squirrel's journey through the education system. She was ecstatic that Jeck had come to talk about it; especially Jeck. If any of the students had the brains to figure this one out, it was him. Sure, put the boy in a social context and he lost all confidence, but she used to enjoy watching him take her tests. He would look at a word problem, write the basic information, then write absolutely nothing for a full minute or more if that was what it took. Ten seconds later, he had finished the problem and moved on. Given infinite time, he could solve anything. Well, as long as his incessant daydreaming didn't get in his way. She smiled nostalgically into the tests as she slashed through a number with her pen. He was the only student besides Sarabi she had ever let go through an entire class period without looking up from his book.
The next day, a Friday, Mrs. Buckshire announced that there would be a quiz on the following Monday, and that it would be an excellent buffer before the test that would be coming up in the two weeks after that. Guin glanced at Fae, who was keeping his bleary eyes at the very least pointed in the woman's direction. Should he honestly ask the boy if he wanted to meet up and study? Surely it would end in failure.
He decided against it. It would make much more sense to just ask Jeck, if he wanted help. Jeck was a generous person, professing to hate people but at the same time infinitely willing to teach when given the opportunity. It was just... why should he? It was the same argument he had gone through with himself a dozen times before. His parents were rich. He was beautiful. He knew enough to get by, and high school didn't matter, anyway. College was what mattered, in the end, and even that didn't seem to have much to do with how much money one made.
All the same, he decided it couldn't hurt, just to see if he really was capable. All through that science course, as though bound by some invisible chain, Guin had found himself unable to escape Jeck's encouraging influence. They sat next to one another, and after Guin struck up a conversation about Final Fantasy, Jeck started paying attention to how the fox did in class, occasionally giving him strange looks, as though measuring him. Guin quickly learned exactly how vast the stores of knowledge and the mental capacity hidden inside Jeck's skull were.
After every test Jeck would look over at Guin's paper and see what he had missed, forcing himself to do so. And after the third or fourth time he said, "Oh, come on Guin, we talked about that one," the fox gave in. For example: "Of course the Mariana Trench supports life. You'll do better on the next one." Guin finally responded with, "All right, all right. Maybe before the next one, could you come over and we could study a little?" Jeck had given him another one of those looks and complemented it with a grin. "Sure. No problem."
Guin flicked his earring uncertainly. Would Jeck think the fox was just using him? Surely not. They were better friends than that, and besides, as joking as he had been at the lunch table, Jeck did use Guin fairly extensively for getting hastily-written papers in before school was out if he had forgotten one was due, or for repelling one of the shy, awkward girls who followed him around despite his obvious interest in Sarabi. He made his decision.
"Jeck, this may surprise you, but I need help."
The human looked down at the blunt in his hands and wished he had the nerve to smoke it. He was all too aware of the effects the chemicals and ash would have on his body, though. "What kind of help? I know you're in trouble with Mrs. Buckshire, but there isn't anything she can do to you."
Fae took a long pull on his cannabis. He was the only stoner Jeck had ever heard of who didn't cough when he smoked. Most of the time, anyway. He just breathed out the oddly-scented smoke as though it had come through a hookah. "I haven't been paying attention."
"How has that ever hurt you?" The corner of Jeck's mouth tugged up in a smile. "You and I are the kings of bullshit. You could take a test on anything and keep making C's." He glanced around. They were out by the janitors' entrance to the school. Fae had only had to make eye contact and start walking that way to get Jeck to meet him there.
"Hah! True enough. It's more than making the grade, though, man. You know me. I don't think I've made a legitimate C in my life. Everything I do is bullshit."
Jeck smiled a private smile that it was okay for Fae to see, because he couldn't possibly know what it meant. Not so, Fae. It just looks like it. "So what, you want to meet up, or is it something easy?"
"There's a coffee shop out by the strip mall a lot of people go to to write papers and jazz. Let's hit that up around eight or so tomorrow."
"Works for me." The human's hair swung low over his eyes as he watched the joint burn in his fingers. "Man, why'd you even light this for me? I'm wasting your money." He handed it back. The smoke was making his eyes itch and he felt a little light-headed.
The squirrel pinched the lit end and rubbed, putting it out before slipping it in a pocket with a sigh. "I thought I could get you high off the smoke. Damn, I'm hungry. You got any munchies?"
Jeck threw him a snack bar. "Jackass."
"Pussy." They grinned and walked in opposite directions.
That was usually as far as conversations with Fae went, and it was what Jeck liked about the boy. He felt... relaxed around Fae. He could curse without hurting his reputation, he could hold a home-rolled sample of the evil weed, and he was in the company of one of the brightest people he knew. It had taken some time to get accustomed to speaking with him, but once he realized how free he was, of everything, it had become an unremittingly positive aspect of his life. Sure, the constant drugs were a problem for his conscience, but he never partook. He only watched as Faeram kept himself buzzed and happy but in control and tried not to think about the state of the rodent's lungs.
"Jeck," the boy heard a voice say quietly on his way to the parking lot. He looked up quickly, nervously, and saw Guin not two feet away. The fox was uncharacteristically anxious. "I... think I've decided to do well on this next quiz in Buckshire's class. Would you mind... helping me study for it? I could do it on my own, but I know I won't if I'm alone." He toyed with his earring.
Jeck looked him in the eyes with the barest hint of incredulity and then averted his own in thought. Suddenly, it was as though a dam had been broken in his life, and it took him a few seconds to comprehend it. This was a chance for something tremendous. He knew he was to be an arbiter, somehow, to the world. Growing up the way he did, being born under the signs he had been, being associated with the people he knew, he felt he was being gently guided by a sort of make-your-own destiny. He had thought of too much, learned too much philosophy, understood too much ideology, to be meant to spit, sick, cry, and die like the rest of his race. He looked back at Guin, at the fingers twiddling with the jewelry. "Well of course. That's awesome."
Guin looked at him oddly. "Have you been..." He sniffed the other boy's shirt, putting his face uncomfortably close to Jeck's. "You've been smoking marijauna."
"Or hanging out with Fae," he returned with a grin.
The fox shrugged and rolled his eyes. "Or hanging out with Fae. Sorry."
"No biggie. Yeah, I can help out. Did you have a time you were thinking of? I'm mostly free this weekend."
"Sometime tomorrow or Sunday." His beautiful eyes were incredibly hopeful.
Jeck wished he had something to play with in his hands. He had nervous fingers. To put the two of them together, or not to? He couldn't possibly refuse Guin, that was for certain. Jeck's mind had been opened to the beauty of all things without regard to classification because of a series of movies and TV shows and books â€" "Ergo Proxy," "Fight Club," "The Boondocks," etc. So he felt privileged whenever in Guin's fantastic company.
"Umm, lemme think when would be best." His priority was not hanging out with Guin, though. His priority was whether or not to put the two of them in close proximity with one another. Buckshire had thought it was a good idea, but old people had a tendency to not see things as clearly as they believed and people in general tended to act without thinking. He made his own decision.
"Actually, Guin, Fae asked me to help with the same quiz, tomorrow." Something, some sphere of protection, some circle of prayer, shattered as he said those words. Pathways once closed off were open. Deaths and births, marriages and divorces, vaccines and biological warfare, everything had suddenly become a possibility. Jeck wanted to gasp for air. He felt like he was drowning, choking on a vacuum, breathing helium as everything around him exploded. Instead, he studied the fox's face, fighting the sweat that threatened to break out on his own. "Would it bother you if we all just met up at Gorlo's Coffee at around eight tomorrow?"
The vulpine features were absolutely frozen as thoughts made their way through his head. He hadn't noticed what Jeck had felt. "Yeah, sure." His eyes were wide and he nodded quickly. Jeck checked his pupils. They were dilated. Guin was either lying or scared.
"You sure?" he asked, even though he knew the answer.
"Yeah. I mean, Buckshire put us together, so why not just do this? I thought he was a super-genius, though."
"No one has perfect knowledge."
"Except you," Guin joked.
"Heh. Except me, right."
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," he hissed acidly, "if I'm back to calling myself names."
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,_
Once in the café, Faeram took a moment to absorb the atmosphere. This was a habit of his â€" 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 artists whose lives hung on the wall had to pray someone was impressed enough by their black-framed souls to purchase the work and the cashiers were, if not always friendly, certainly companionable and definitely aware that their pay was almost directly proportional 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 room, 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 â€" was her name Brittney? â€" 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 Latino girl. "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 hand 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 some.
"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, ignoring Guin's poorly-hid glances of suspicion. "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 had 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?
It had been successful, Jeck thought to himself. The first step had been taken, and out of the chaos unleashed during his first decision, the broken circle protecting them all in this blissfully ignorant oasis among the barren heat of fallen ideals had realigned itself into a pathway, a channel through which could flow the water and hydrate deserts, so long as the flow, now unprotected, did not waft away in the scorching light of ignorance. Guin had been snapped out of trances more than once that night, had given more than one despondant sigh, had paid attention with more than one taught pair of lips. It was good.
Jeck had more important things to worry about that night than social interactions, though. 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.
The following Monday, Mrs. Buckshire handed out her papers with a glitter of hope behind her spectacles. Fae was awake, which was a plus, and Guin had been shooting the boy furtive, wondering glances while class began, distracted from the usual conversations he had with all of those around him. The fox was trying hard to cover up how anxious he was about the coming quiz, but the fact that he had scratch paper on his desk for the first time all year belied exactly how much it meant to him.
She took the quizzes up after half an hour and graded them in the next ten minutes while the class did some busywork. She was done quickly, as eager as she was for the class period to end. She had e-mailed Jeck about her findings and was wondering if he had gotten any further with the English essay. He was to meet her before his lunch period and they would discuss what they had decoded. She was sure she had a good idea of something, but it wasn't complete. Maybe he could fill in the blanks.
Suddenly, she got to Faeram's quiz and started going through it. She hadn't expected this. She had thought that with the right encouragement, he would break out of this strange shell he had placed around himself, but instead, nothing had changed at all. With a sigh, she put a C-minus on his paper and moved on. What would she have to do to get anything through to him? It was nearing winter break, and she wanted to see him excel on the midterm exam. Guin's paper, though, did bring a pleased smile to her lips. A perfect score.
"Excellent job, Guinnevon. Keep it up for the next test."
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you." His ears went red at her words and he shoved the paper in his backpack as his cohorts around him started asking him wide-eyed questions.
"Fae, you barely passed. Again." She looked at him coldly.
He, however, met her gaze with a warm, playful glint in his eyes. "Ma'am, you should know by now that I never ‘barely pass.'" He blanched as her look hardened. "Not to be offensive, ma'am," he said, flustered, and shoved the paper in his backpack. Right then, Buckshire noticed her mistake and hid a regretful gasp behind a self-righteous sniff. By grading the papers in class, she hadn't photocopied them. She had lost... how many letters would he have included in one paper? Four, five? Enough to cripple her efforts. Ashamed of herself, after all her years of service, she finished handing out quizzes, dismissed class, and went to her desk. Stupid, stupid mistake.
Guin caught up with Fae as they walked to the next class. "Hey, Fae. How'd you do? I aced it!" he whispered excitedly, trying hard to ignore the strange looks he was getting from those around them.
Fae shot him a sideways glance. "Why do you care? I passed. It's good enough for me." The squirrel hefted his backpack higher on one shoulder as a means of blocking off the fox and continued on while Guin was left, confused, in the hallway.
"Guinny, you shouldn't talk to him," said Hailey, a small vixen with breasts that would give her back problems one day, more makeup than a geisha, and a butt that followed her like a bunny's tail. "Why were you trying to, anyway?" Her voice was pitched to a sycophantic whine. Another girl pushed between them, a lioness whose red-rimmed eyes were the only lie to her otherwise pristine appearance. "Yeah, don't worry about him. Some people are just lost, you know?" Her voice was lower, more womanly and robust, and was there to show how much she knew about the world.
He shook his head and turned to look at them, pushing a smile on his face. "Yeah. He just â€" I don't know, I guess I don't understand him, is all. You two want to walk me to class?" He grinned coyly at them and they blushed, each taking an arm, and they hung off him like ornaments until he reached the door to his next room, extricated his arms, and blew them each a kiss, a flawless charmer. These days, girls were less brainless, especially where he went to school, but the same ditzy quality leeched their humanity from them as they tried to mimic the moronic twits who landed jocks at other schools. So even though the vixen was taking AP Chemistry and the lioness was treasurer of the National Honor Society chapter at that school, each exhibited some level of insouciant idiocy that for the first time in his life, Guin looked at with a sort of repulsion. Why cheat yourself out of the quality of person you could be, when you were as smart as those two? It made no sense.
Jeck watched Fae come into class first, his eyes narrow as the taller boy took a seat in the back of the classroom. The squirrel was troubled by something that came from within, that much was certain by the empty gaze that brushed across his desk before he folded his arms on it and stared up at the front of the room. Jeck's heart took his stomach hostage and started beating it mercilessly. To destroy a human being...
Next came Guin, escorted by two of the loveliest girls to give up proper glamour for glitz and gilded eyes. The kisses he blew them were genuine falsities and he maintained his grin as he walked in. Jeck raised his eyebrows in question and the smile just broadened. The three of them, unknowingly, had formed a triangle in the beginning of the year when they chose seats that allowed absolutely no interaction. Fae and Jeck had done it as a necessity to preserve their respective images. Guin just wanted to stay away from Fae. To be fair, Fae did have an odor about him from the cheap wine he bought. It was understandable.
The human wasn't quite sure of what to make of the combination of Guin's belated entrance and Fae's disconcerted one. Was there a connection? In a relationship like the one that had begun Saturday night, everything could mean anything and anything could mean nothing and nothing could mean something and something could mean everything. A vicious cycle, that.
He opted to delay further analysis until he could get the two of them together again and take it from there. That was his next task, after his meeting with Buckshire, then. That, and to figure out the stupid nickname that he still hadn't solved.
After class, he spoke with Guin for a few moments, fully appreciating the other boy's enthusiasm and the confusion that ran rampant around them while they talked about the fox actually doing well academically. Most of it turned quickly into drippy compliments that made Jeck turn away with a mumbled "I think I just became diabetic" to meet the teacher.
He walked in and immediately closed the door. She didn't look at him, instead staring at her computer screen and clicking intensely. "Hold on, Jeck. I'm playing TextTwist."
He laughed lightly and went around behind the desk. "Really? I love that game." He stared as she clicked the letters into different words over and over again, her mind much quicker than he would have ever imagined while taking her class. He furrowed his brow. "What's a ‘nee'? I thought that was Monty Python nonsense." The fact that they were working together like they were made him much more comfortable, even though he still ocassionally straightened his own spine and made sure his butt was tucked under him instead of sticking out like some idiot. Projects always negated his shyness, but only to a degree.
She still refused to avert her eyes. "It's pronounced like ‘neigh.' It indicates a woman's maiden name. Like Katherine née Black, or some such. French origin."
His eyes lost focus. "I hate Fae."
She raised her eyebrows with a smirk. "Hate is a strong word."
"He does these word games, where he gives someone a nickname that has some sort of weird relationship with their real name, and this time he called some girl named Courtney ‘Mabovna's middle ground.' I hadn't been able to figure it out until you told me that."
"That boy," she sighed, shaking her head. "I wish he would stop doing all those drugs and drinking. Did you know he did that?" She finished the game and looked at him. "You should tell him to stop. It seems like you're the only person who's at all close to him." He thought she was watching the impulse her words birthed travel down his spine and swallowed. Close to him. "I've called his parents, and they're both just... distant. I think they've given up on the boy, Jeck, and it makes me so mad!" Her volume didn't rise, but the intensity of her voice made her anger apparent.
Jeck nodded understandingly. He was running the nickname through his head while he listened. Courtney was really COURT-nee, so nothing followed the ‘née' indicator, and Mab was Queen Mab from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet," appearing as the goddess of dreams, which in another Shakespeare play â€" "Hamlet" â€" is mentioned as something "perchance to happen" in death, which may be nothingness. ‘Ovna' is the Russian indicator for "daughter of," so daughter of Mab, which would be ‘née something-to-do-with-dreams,' so that part was solved. And then the ‘middle ground' would be the court, or courtyard, either of which is a middle ground, one between the queen and her people and one between the land and the castle.
That one was far more complicated and thinly-stretched than the others. He must have been troubled when he came up with it. Which would have been... while they were talking after he chastised Courtney Saturday night.
"So, Jeck, let's see what you have first. Is there anything you could find in the essays?"
He blinked and shook his head, sweeping his hair across his face with a hand. "Huh? Oh, yeah, I found some patterns, but I don't know which ones to pursue." He put down his backpack and rifled through it, searching for the right documents. "Here we go." He perused a paper in his own writing. "See, he's done a number of different things to prove he knows what he's about, but I don't know that they mean any more than that. One paper, something on To Kill A Mockingbird, he bolded a bunch of letters so they fit into a Caesarean square, but I've tried a couple substitutions and haven't been able to figure out what it says. There's another one where he does the same thing with a different square and a bunch of spelling errors."
"Hold on," she said, putting a paw on the paper where he had copied the first square he spoke of. "Look at these letters. They're all Ds, Ps, Os, Qs, and Gs. Some Es, too. All the letters he used have holes in them. Looks like you even copied down a capital A here."
"It's not even a cipher," Jeck said with an intellectual frown. "It's a clue. In the book, Boo Radley would hide things in the knot of a tree trunk. I think he must have left ghost marks or something inside the letters. I'll have to check that out next time, if it's not too faded."
"See this, too," she said, pointing at where Jeck had put the dates of two of the papers. "He wrote the Mockingbird one first. It's just a hint to look for the Caesarean square in the next essay."
"Christ," he swore with a smile. "We should just send these to the CIA and see if they'll hire him. I hate to ask what you have."
She laughed once, grimly. "Hm. Very little, I'm afraid. He was less... pervasive with the math papers." She got out her own notes. "Like we discussed on Friday, this is a collection of letters that seem like they have a reasonable frequency, but not in a Caesarean square. I've converted it just using what the letters are likely to be, but it may be incomplete, so any substitutions are going to be totally random and probably misguided."
"These are all from this year?"
She nodded. "I haven't had time to compare to the papers I have from his seventh grade, but I'm hoping they'll give me a clue. In hindsight, I shouldn't have started with this year. Oh, I've gotten old," she sighed in mild bitterness.
"Nah, there was no way to tell how far he was willing to go with this."
She smiled up at him and started putting things away and preparing to her next class. "You're sweet. Go eat, and try to rub something off on him. Lord knows, he needs it. And thank you again, so much, Jeck. Come back on Friday and let me know what you've found. Be good."
"No problem. You to- I mean, I'll see you Friday!" he corrected, blushing as he packed up quickly and slipped out the door.
The old panthress just shook her head with a motherly smile. One day, he wouldn't be awkward. That day just seemed a long, long way off.
_But lies at last, as always,
Letting it happen, the fierce fur soft to his face,
Hearing with sharper ears the wind's exciting minors,
The leaves' panic, and the degradation
Of the heavy streams._
How cliché is this? Fae wondered to himself as he stared down the row of people facing him. Like I'm some sort of stereotypical druggie and they're some sort of stereotypical crime ring.
"Guys, I can assure you there's a better way to settle this." It was night in the city and he was wandering back from getting a forty from a reliable "friend" of his, a sloth who sold as close to pristine liquor as you could get where he was, at least when you were under age. Fae was probably overconfident, but he wasn't stupid enough to buy anything low-quality. Even the hash he had gotten off the fellows aiming two nines, three blackjacks, and a set of knuckles at him was good stuff. They just seemed to be confused by their own payment plan at the moment.
They were in an abandoned basement Fae used as a cut-through to avoid the streets above. Yellow lamps hung from the ceiling and sandbags lay piled around, haplessly scattered as though the previous occupants had used them for pillowfights, or something. Other than the odd crate or rotting carboard box and a four-legged rat or some bug, it was empty, cold, and gray. It smelled lke death.
"You owe us some Franklins, Fae."
His eyes narrowed and he kept the hand that wasn't holding his bottle of drink in his pocket. A cool wind blew through his ears where most people would have cultivated head hair. He kind of wished he had at that moment. It could be flowing all down his back and give him a pretty intimidating look. As it was, his torn clothes weren't much insurance against anything the six people in front of him had to offer.
A tiger, a wolf, a rat, and three humans comprised the entirety of the gang. He didn't know how they produced the pot, why, where, or in what volume. It was something customers didn't get to know, and these guys were good. Otherwise, they'd have been off the streets. So instead of finding their source, Fae had tracked down information about all six of them; things they had probably forgotten by now. Fae was good at this kind of thing.
"As I recall, I pay you every Friday that I get hash on Saturday. Has that changed without my knowledge?" In school, he looked to everyone else like these six now looked to him. Out here, though, his shoulders were straight, his voice was crisp, and his senses were on high alert.
The wolf was the leader, unsurprisingly. An aura of evil, not unlike that which Fae seemed to carry, oozed out of his tar-black body and white eyes, altered by some genetic defect or another, sparked and flashed beneath mock-bored lids. Two humans had guns and another a blackjack, while the leader held knuckles and his furred friends had the other two blackjacks. The rat was casually swinging his while he sucked on a cigarette and tucked his coat tighter around him every thirty seconds or so. The tiger was the one speaking, as representative muscle.
"Plans change. We need the money now, rodent." Fae raised his eyebrows and looked at the rat, whose eyes went cold for the barest of seconds before he went back to pretending he wasn't there.
"And what if I don't have the money?"
"We take it in flesh, chump."
"Six on one?"
"We saw what you did to Josef."
"That was the idea, after he tried to knife me. And you cisor shitheads think you can fuck with me? Tell me this: is Josef out of the hospital yet?" Two of the humans, a black brute and a white guy who looked like he'd been in flight so long he'd broken his landing gear, seemed confused at the calling of "cisor." True, inter-species relations had nearly grown seamlessly together with some well-placed political bandages. The fact that cisors had lynched molars, raped their women, and in extreme cases, eaten their children in the days before the Industrial Revolution and up until World War II had not been forgotten by society, though. Humans were often not "in the know" because they had been a continent away, for the most part, while the infighting was still so prevalent. The extreme black-white racism in Europe had gone mostly unnoticed by anthros while humans and furs tried to integrate, though, so at least there was an analog to the ignorance.
The tiger, whose name was Jace, looked back to the wolf, whose name was Razor, to check. Razor shook his head. "No, he's not."
"And he won't be for a fucking long time. Remember that. I don't have the money today," he said, meeting the wolf's eyes. He didn't look at the rat, but he knew that Vice had been looking for an out recently and besides â€" there had been venom in the tiger's calling of "rodent." "I can give you a downpayment, but it's not much."
"We need it all," Jace growled. All six of them shifted aggressively.
"Put the guns down, people." He raised his bottle. "Can't we just share this and forget about it? I promise I'll have the dough... when you said I should have it." He started measuring them. Humans were naturally better shots with guns because they didn't have muzzles blocking their points of view. It would have been interesting that it was the black ones who held them, except that the white guy was so far gone that he probably had too much of a chance of killing them all if he got his hands on one. Well, actually...
"Na-ah, Fae."
The squirrel whirled suddenly on Tee, the bigger African European. "Tee, shoot yourself," he ordered.
"What?" He was taken aback and lowered the weapon in confusion. Vice didn't waste a second. With no warning, he sped the rotation of his blackjack and smashed the human's fingers, drawing attention to that part of the room before dashing to the nearest exit. The gun went flying, and Fae dove for it, coming up from a roll to point it at the other gunman.
"Fuck, you guys!" shouted the wolf, his ferocity spiking like scorpion's tail. "How fucking stupid are you, Vice?" He ripped the tiger's blackjack out of his paws and threw it like a bolas at the fleeing rat. The gravel-filled sock hit him squarely in the back of the head, knocking him out. Razor started walking over to the rat, and Fae knew what would happen next if he didn't do something. As quickly as he could, he looked again at the situation. The remaining gunman was pointing at his head. How quick did Fae think he was?
Fast enough. He shot and ducked his head sideways and down in the same instant and heard the opposing boy's bullet impact the wall behind him as he screamed and held his bleeding stomach, dropping the weapon. The white guy, who was closest, eyed it curiously.
"God, Razor, you know, I have no idea how to make sure you don't get your hands on the rest of these bullets." Fae tried to keep his voice whimsical and dangerous. Tee was sweating profusely and had his hands up, palms out, muttering about not shooting him. The tiger hadn't moved, instead just watching Fae and licking his lips disturbingly.
"You won't shoot me, Fae. I'm too much of a project for you," the canid sneered. "Your little urban experiment." He was quick, and moved before Fae could react, opening the mouse's jaws against the floor like an expert and placing a foot on the back of Vice's head.
The squirrel's grip did not waver. "Don't do it, Razor. I'll kill everyone in here if I have to, and you know I won't feel bad about it." His teeth were clenched as he held the gun trained on the other gunman. He was afraid of what would happen if he took the time to change his aim. He wasn't the best in the world, and anything he did needed to count. He knew Razor. Razor was fearless. There was no way Razor was that cold, though... was there?
"I know, Fae. But you'll feel bad about this. I mean, come on, Wolfbane. Why do you think I named him Vice?" With that, he raised his booted foot and stomped down with the weight of his entire body. There was a sickening crunch, and Vice was no more.
"You fucking bastard!" Fae screamed, and shot five more times into the nameless black boy's gut. He couldn't change his aim. He wanted to, but his arm would not swing to the wolf. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. He was, however, not one to not keep his word. He changed his aim and opened Tee's throat, then handed the white guy the gun, sprinted past Jace, and closed and locked the door behind him before leaping up the stairs leading down to it. As he chased the wolf, he heard Jace screaming for mercy and pounding on the door. Three more shots echoed through the streets after him. Pop. Pop. Pop.
"I'm still using you, you God-damned lupine bitch! Don't you ever forget it!" he shouted into the scarcely-populated streets. Razor was gone, though, and there was nothing to be done about it. He ran and he ran, but he knew it was pointless against the wolf's naturally superior senses. In this city, Fae's keen sense of smell was useless to track him. The wolf was gone, and Vice was dead.
It wasn't that Fae knew Vice at all. They had spoken briefly during exchanges for the evil weed and gotten along because Vice seemed to feel somewhat protected, having another molar there in the midst of everyone else. Even that, though, was just an occasional something, nothing special. It was that Fae knew Vice had wanted out. He had felt threatened and wanted to start something with his life that didn't have him always in danger of cops and gangs. He wanted to go somewhere. And now he was dead.
Snarling like the animal he had just chased off, Fae made his way back to the basement. Upon opening the door, he found a pair of feline legs limp behind it. The face at the other end of the body was hardly recognizable, because it appeared the white guy had picked up the other gun, too, and gotten happy to have it. Fae pulled a spray can of ammonia out of his backpack and went to work after seeing the white guy's limp body a few feet away. No DNA evidence here. He collected the guns, too, to bury later. No fingerprints, either.
It took a while to get everything straight, but when he was done, he knelt reverently over Vice's mutilated head, wishing he could make the rat look at all presentable. Having done the rituals to cover all of their asses in stony silence, he slowly started weeping, his quiet gasps and choking cries echoing in the useless chamber, and silently prayed to anyone who would listen.
No, it wasn't that the rat was anything special to Fae. But Fae was not one who made friends easily. Except for Jeck and a fellow stoner or two, he was alone at school. In the city, he couldn't afford to make friends because he had learned in a similar fight three years ago that friends would either turn their backs or be used against you, and let themselves be used.
The rat wasn't special. Fae had watched him for a long time. He wasn't especially smart. He had no charm, no way with words. He was a good shot and a decent fighter, sure, but where does that get a man? He knew enough to partake of his own product only in limited quantities. His parents were decent people and he seemed to respect them. The school he went to was a dirty place. His siblings were, for the most part, filthy vermin who didn't care much for their brother.
There was nothing to set him apart from anyone else, but Fae knew he was lying to himself. Vice was the only person who had been a genuine friend, however far the distance they both tried to make between them was, who had wanted something better for himself. Fae knew. They hadn't talked about it, but they hadn't had to, even if they had had the chance when they saw one another. The way Vice let Fae see him looking nervously at Razor and Jace. The way he joked about "getting a broad" with an odd look in his eyes that meant this joke held more truth than most.
The only one. The only one left in the city. Stuttering through his tears, Fae repeated the words of the only prayer he had bothered to learn, an Irish one he had seen scrawled on a bathroom stall somewhere. "Do not stand on my grave and weep. I am not there; I do not sleep. I am the thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you waken in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of gentle birds in circling flight. I am the soft star that shines at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die." He poured some of the liquor on the back of Vice's head, his tears nearly run dry, and took a swallow for himself before capping the bottle and standing. He put away the bottle of ammonia and hefted his backpack, then thought better of it. Here, when money meant so much and when information had saved his life more than once, it was stupid to leave behind things like wallets.
He searched each body carefully, moving his fingers delicately so his fur wouldn't brush off and implicate him during an investigation. His tail was especially vulnerable, so he tucked it up under his coat, probably too late, but the chances there would be a serious investigation were slim. He had just used the ammonia as ritual. Anyway, he found little, except that Jace was carrying an eight ball of cocaine. That would explain why they needed the money. Razor wouldn't have allowed one of his own be in debt, but he'd certainly let them die. He let the coke lie. It wasn't a good idea to have too many drugs around when he was emotional.
Beyond that, the money was pitifully scarce and the wallets gave him the identification he needed and the identification the cops wouldn't get. He stood again, sniffing once and pretending it was from the cold, then grabbed his possessions and glanced once more at Vice's body. It was time to go home.
Jeck went home that day already lost in thought. During his computer science class, he had started examining the suspicious letters in the To Kill A Mockingbird essay, and had not liked what he found. They weren't even a cipher. In the order they were found, they simply said, "TREHE IS NNHTIOG HREE IORNGE THE SRIQRUEL." It was very clearly an attempt at subliminal messaging. It's fairly well-known that the human brain generally only cares about the first and last letters of a word as long as all the others are there. So the message read, "THERE IS NOTHING HERE IGNORE THE SQUIRREL." One period had been drawn as a circle with a dot in it to total the characters to thirty-six, a perfect square. There was no readily apparent hidden meaning; he just wanted the teacher's eyes to pass over it and her brain to take it in without question, so he would remain completely under the radar. It hadn't worked on Jeck for two reasons. First, subliminal messages are a sketchy business anyway and are not guaranteed to work. Second, the letters were so faded that Jeck's eyes hurt from scrutinizing the sloppy handwriting for as long as he had to â€" they certainly wouldn't be picked up by his subconscious.
That wasn't important, though. With Fae's brainpower, he would have realized that there was no way to test the effectiveness of the tactic with that particular message. If he were testing it, he would have said something like, "YOU LIKE PEPSI BETTER THAN COCA-COLA." Assuming, that is, that the teacher in fact did not like Pepsi better than Coca-Cola. But instead he had tried something that would return positive, whether false or real. It meant he was getting tired, two years ago. Or pubescent. That tended to subjugate one's senses and emotions fairly chaotically.
The Caesarean square didn't resolve into anything, either. It really was just a hint. So they weren't dealing with a mastermind. Just someone willing to use his brainpower for something that might, one day, come to something more. And that was what mattered to Jeck, especially as he passed into his house that day.
His brother was arguing with his mother. Again. She was crying while she cursed at him, and his voice and words went through Jeck's ears like a salted cheese grater. His sister was in her room, as evidenced by the sound-damping bass pulses issuing from that direction of the house. Jeck's stomach bit at him and he felt his face draw taught as he passed the combatants in deathly silence. He didn't care what it was about. He just didn't care anymore.
They could be normal people when they wanted to be. They could laugh, and joke, and talk, and make conversation. But both of them had this venom to them, boiling under the surface all the time, and it was like they produced it, a little bit every day, and then it would spew out in this nasty detonation of screams and emotion, niether one caring in the least who was around to hear them.
That was what hurt. His mother would apologize after this, to him and to his sister. But it wouldn't stop her from doing it again, so really, what did the apology mean? His brother would pretend nothing was wrong, that nothing had happened. And his mother would be on edge for the next twenty-four hours, making every interaction in the house silent and awkward, and Jeck spent enough of his life being awkward that he wasn't sure how much of it he could take from within his own house.
His father thought himself a big man, thought he knew how to control things. His father would try to reason with the two of them until Geoffrey said something that was "too offensive," and then shoot his mouth off at the younger man until the latter slammed the door behind him and disappeared, leaving his parents battered and confused, everyone thinking they had been right the whole time.
There was a solution, Jeck knew. Peace. Peace was a good solution. Buddhism taught harmony in all things, and it was why Jeck felt like a foreigner in his Christian household. These arguing hypocrites clung tight to their religion when its holy scriptures said it was right to stone an adulterer with only three men as witnesses and no evidence, said that no one but the priests may touch the Ark of the Covenant even to keep it from falling and that those who do must die, said that Christ was a perfect human being when eighteen years of his life was omitted from the texts. And the first two were ignored now along with the rest of the Old Testament, because of some flimsy argument that ended up sounding like, "Well, they didn't really mean it," even though other Old Testament law like the forbidding of homosexual conduct is upheld.
It was so simple to Jeck. Just... don't get angry. Make an effort to understand other human beings. It was why he found himself equally attracted to both genders, both species, and the vast majority of races â€" because he made an effort to understand the perception of beauty from different cultures, and he didn't understand why that was so difficult to do. Yes, blacks were generally stupid and poor and seemed to perpetuate the stereotype while at the same time raging against it. Yes, furs tended to screw at the drop of a hat during mating season. Yes, in general, Brits had front teeth like beavers (which the beavers all thought was perfectly fine). But in everything, there is an aspect of humor and an aspect of beauty, and if all people would accept that, the world would be a better place.
The boy trudged up the stairs to his room with these thoughts in his brain, his face stretched thin from his frustration, opened the door to his room, tossed his backpack on the bed, and swung his fist into the floor with a contained grunt. The resulting sound echoed through the house, shaking walls through three floors and five thousand square feet, and on any quiet day would have brought people running to see what had happened, what was wrong. Today, with the music and the shouting, no one cared.
"Rough day?"
You have no idea, the one answered, before Jeck had time to stumble backwards from his crouching position. He landed on his butt, listening to a familiar chuckle. "Fae, how the hell did you get in here?"
The stoner squirrel was standing over him and smiling with his hands in his pockets, but as soon as Jeck had recovered from his shock, he realized how hollow the chuckle had been. It sounded dead. The fur's face was grim, though an ugly half-smile complemented the flat shine in his eyes. "Your family fights more than mine does."
The sounds of the argument carried up a flight of stairs and through a closed door. Jeck rolled his eyes and heaved himself to his feet, still looking at Fae's face. Something was different. "My family fights more than any given African ‘nationality.' Did you climb through my window, or something?"
Fae shrugged. "Eh, turns out squirrel claws are good for something even on us furs."
The other boy chuckled half-heartedly. If anyone had been privy to what was going on in that room, it would have seemed as though the sum total of human negativity was seeping from their bodies and leaking out under the door. In times like these, it was difficult to tell if this meant it was escaping their over-stressed brains, or if the blackness just hung in a haze around them, niether fleeing nor being sucked in. "My mom'll kill me if you scratched up our house."
"Hah!" he laughed, and it was finally a real laugh. "You can just ask your brother to distract her and I'll get out in time."
"Don't remind me. Those two piss me off." Yeah, ‘cause that's some real Buddhist language for you. "Don't give me that shit," he mumbled, then realized he had said it out loud and jerked in his place. Fae had cocked an eyebrow at him and actually seemed ready to fire it. Niether one of them was pleased with the world, it seemed. "Sorry, I... just thinking out loud."
"About shit?"
"Not as uncommon as you might think." He dropped into his desk chair and the laptop in front of it, then opened the computer and started going mindlessly through the motions of checking e-mails and the like. "So what's up with you? Something wrong at the house?" Fae sat down on the bed with an honestly depressed sigh, and Jeck suddenly realized what was different. He swung his swivel chair around to face the rodent. "You're sober. And you've showered without hitting something between your house and mine."
Fae didn't respond facially. "You have a pretty good set of senses on you, for a human."
Jeck was suddenly concerned. His own cares were swept away in a practiced, mental motion. It was clear that Fae's problems were greater than his own. "What's wrong?"
The squirrel took a moment to answer. "Are you religious at all?"
"I prefer to call myself spiritual." He decided it would be better to let Fae tell him this one than to drag it out of him.
"What do you think happens when we die?"
The human blinked a few times in surprise, then waited a while to make sure his response was properly composed. It was something he had considered for years, but he hadn't managed to come up with a convincing answer. Obviously, there was no way to test it, no experiment to run that would yield results. All he could tell was that organs ceased functioning, for the most part, and the phenomenon considered "consciousness" was presumed to fail, through analysis of brain waves. Lungs and heart stopped functioning, but could sometimes be harvested, as could other organs. Only the brain really seemed to be useless after death.
"I think... that we might hit up a Heaven. There's no proof for it, though, and that's why I've had to... you know, come up with my own kind of theory."
"Uh-huh," Fae acknowledged.
"I think we have to... make our own afterlife. I mean, think about this. We have hugely powerful brains. We two in particular, yeah, but every human and anthro being just has a tremendous brain, capable of ridiculous, ridiculous things. And... everything you do is a choice, right? Like whether to, I don't know, start a shouting match, or laugh, or study for a test, or get offended, or..."
"Or shoot somebody."
Jeck's heart leapt into his throat and he shot Fae a glance that the other boy ignored. "...or shoot somebody. So maybe... maybe we choose whether or not to have an afterlife. Some people, I think, just... don't want one. They don't want the responsibility, and it sucks, but I think for them, consciousness has to end there, when their bodies stop. And then some people hold on to a religion for their whole lives, or for part of them, and make the decision to leave an afterlife up to some... nameless... thing... that no one has ever had proof of. I know you didn't want this much of an explanation, sorry..." he trailed off with a self-conscious grin.
But Fae wouldn't have it. "Yes I did. I want to know what you think happens when we die. Keep going. What happens to the rest of us, those of us who have the desire to stay alive, but can't trust what they can't prove?" It was as clearly as Fae had ever spoken to Jeck. His voice was crisp and confidant. His manner was controlled. But he also seemed so... troubled.
Jeck cleared his throat. "Well... the rest of us, I don't know what necessarily happens. Maybe we have these ‘soul' things that religions seem to like so much. Maybe we just... don't die. It just doesn't happen. I don't know if anyone's ever thought this way before, because obviously, not everyone writes their thoughts down. I guess there are some people who might slip into a communal consciousness or some oversoul, like Hinduism or some breeds of Christianity, or dogmatic Buddhism or whatever. But me... I don't know what will happen to me. I just know that I want, more than anything else, to keep living... forever. I can't stand the thought of ceasing... to be." He stopped, wondering if Fae would respond. He was afraid of what he would say. "Why? What happened?"
There was silence greater than the shouting beneath them or the music above them. "I..." Fae started, but didn't finish. Jeck almost wanted to touch him, hug him, do something, anything, to make him feel better. "I killed someone. I killed a lot of people. And I watched a good person get murdered by... some fucking twit I should have killed..."
Jeck just stared at him. It hadn't really occurred to him that Fae had to obtain these drugs somehow, and that it wasn't exactly a secure business. "S-seriously? You killed people?"
"Yes. Yes, I killed them. I... shot one in the stomach, four or five times... and one in the neck... and then I gave some crack-head the gun and left, and let him kill himself and another guy..." He was breathing harshly, but he wasn't crying. Jeck was at a loss. Fae kept talking. "And one of them got away, after he killed someone I knew... and I couldn't kill that one. I tried to. I wanted to. I could have." He growled, a strange noise from his throat. "It would have been so easy, but I didn't kill him because I've known him since we were, like, ten, and I keep thinking I can make him change..." He shuddered with the effort to draw air in and out of his lungs.
"Christ, Fae..." Jeck breathed.
"And he curb-stomped Vice! You don't know Vice, he's.. he's a rat, he was in the guy's gang, and I got him killed because he thought he could get out in time..." He clenched his teeth and rocked slowly back and forth on the bed. "Fuck!" he yelled. "Fuck, I already fucking cried over a fucking stupid dead rat once today! Fuck and fuck and shit and God damn it all to Hell and back!" He punched one hand into the other hard enough that the sound would have been audible on other days. A tiny river was making its way down his cheek and another was forming on the other side. "He shouldn't have died! He wanted out! He was worth more than any of them!"
Jeck licked his dry lips as he watched his friend cry. What was he supposed to do? He was too much in his shell to do anything. Two nautili pass one another in the ocean, and see only a ripple in the water.
"We only feel ripples," he mumbled under his breath, but was still paralyzed where he sat. But he had to do something. He cleared his throat again and fought the cotton in his mouth. "Fae, I- I know you. I think I do, anyway. And I know how smart you are. So I know that..."
"Jeck, please don't tell me it's not my fault," he begged through his slowing tears. "It is. I've looked at it from every angle, and today, I put bullets through five people's heads. It's my fault." He laughed bitterly. It was a strangled noise. "I even told them... that I wouldn't feel bad about it."
"You wouldn't have killed someone without a reason," Jeck said firmly, correcting the squirrel. "You're too rational for that. I know there was someone else at the start of this."
"I was the one who bought the fucking pot. They thought I owed them money, ‘cuz I'm a fucking pothead because I think I have control over myself..." he had retreated back to hoarse breaths and gasps, no longer able to produce tears.
"See?" Jeck said with as much intensity and vivacity as he could muster. "They thought. They were mistaken, though, right?"
The squirrel nodded and shook his head in a strange concession. "Effectively, yeah. Do you have Kleenex, or something?"
Jeck handed him a box. "So you didn't start it. Do you even own a gun? You don't, I know, ‘cuz you didn't have a license in your wallet. I mean, I guess you could have stolen one."
Fae looked at him suspiciously while he blew his nose. "When did you look in my wallet?"
Jeck looked down sheepishly, smiling secretively. The diversion tactic had worked. "You were a little bit more than buzzed one day, so I asked for it."
"God, I hope that's the only time that's happened. No, I don't have a gun. Why?"
Jeck picked up where he had left off, trying to maintain his energy, hoping it would somehow osmose into his friend. "So if you shot someone, you had to have taken their gun. You were being threatened, and you defended yourself."
Fae didn't respond at all for a few moments, rolling the reasoning around in his head. "Strictly... yes, that's true. I was defending my word, anyway. I had said that I would kill all of them if... the guy, you know, killed Vice. And he did, so I guess, theoretically, I was defending myself. Are you honestly going to say that it was still legitimate?"
The human fixed him with a stare. The well-honed command of leadership had taken hold of the situation, and he knew it. "I already told you, you're incredibly smart. You would have known whether the people you killed would be worth anything alive, and chance dictates that they probably weren't even if you didn't know."
"You are the coldest bastard I know." He shrugged, sniffed, and reconsidered. "Second-coldest. Maybe third."
"I know," Jeck said with a grin that hid the sharp pain in his gut. You have no idea how frigid I can be. "But it works, doesn't it? I know you've thought this through. You just feel responsible for... is his name Vice? You feel responsible for his death and that guilt is bleeding over into everything else you did. And you can't bring him back, and it will probably haunt you forever, but his memory is what matters now, and you'll keep that alive. You can pray that you will see him again, as himself."
"So I should... what? Ignore the other four?" His voice was whole now, if not entirely sure of itself.
Jeck shrugged slowly. "Well... that's what it comes down to, yeah. Except for legal implications. I don't need to be looking out for cops, do I?"
"I'm... well, it's not the first time I've killed someone or seen someone die. It just... hasn't hurt this badly in a long time." He sniffed once and blinked a few times. "Ever, really. And no, no cops. I covered it up."
"I'm sorry it happened, Fae," Jeck said quietly. He was touched, immensely, that Fae had felt safe coming to him with this. Their gazes locked, and Fae smiled appreciatively.
"Thanks, man." This is who you will destroy. "Thanks for... I dunno. Not kicking me out for breaking into your house, or calling the cops." He will feel your hand crushing his heart. He stood up, and Jeck met him there, screaming silently at the voice to be quiet.
"It's no problem. I'd only kick you out if you started smoking something. I don't want those stains." He will know, in the end, that it is you. Part of him will die. Fae laughed. Jeck felt sick to his stomach, but it didn't show. "What was with the question about the afterlife, anyway?"
You will tear him apart. "Well... I only know one prayer, and it's kind of Celtic and doesn't really hold for someone still being... conscious, I guess. Real. I just... wanted a second opinion. Vice is a good person. He doesn't deserve to be broken up. I dunno, unless he wanted it that way."
"Well, it's kind of cool to think of people that way. They're always around, if they're everywhere." He shrugged. "It could be comforting." He will want to die.
"I suppose." Fae also shrugged. "Anyway."
"Anyway." They stood there awkwardly until, mock-playfully, Jeck opened his arms wide. "Hug?"
Fae grinned gratefully and rolled his eyes. "Why not?" They embraced quickly, strongly, warmly, and broke apart as swiftly. "Thank you."
"No problem." The squirrel climbed slowly out of the window, and Jeck watched until he couldn't see him anymore. He sniffed the air. Fae had come clean so he wouldn't leave a smell to get Jeck in trouble.
You will sacrifice him like a dove.
Jeck was immediately enraged again and threw himself to the ground to slam his fist into the floor, then instantly regretted it.
"Jeck?" he heard from elsewhere in the house.
He breathed heavily. "I'm fine," he yelled with no trace of anger. "Just stubbed my toe, is all." Somewhere deep within him, he hoped he was weeping, because his own mind was not allowing him to let saltwater touch his cheeks for any reason but the sweat of fury.
"'sup, Guin?" Jeck called cheerfully as he maneuvered his way into a seat across from the other boy. It was lunch time again, so he had to pick his way through a small crowd, but luckily, it was easier on the opposite side of the table from the center of interest, especially because Sarabi had opted to hang out with her friends, instead. Guin's face was somewhat downcast. Something had gone out of him recently, Jeck had noticed. It was the end of the week again, and there had been few developments in Fae's case. Now that the human knew the squirrel was not perfect at what he did and could allow emotion to occasionally alter what he was trying to communicate, he was constantly double-checking himself. Also, he had been plagued by yet another nickname. Mrs. Buckshire had suddenly become "Mrs. Grim."
"Eh, not much." The fox tapped at his earring, which seemed to have lost some of its luster in the past few days because of the dim light of winter's onset. Something was troubling him.
Jeck grinned. "Aww, you sound depressed. Is something wrong?" He took a bite of his sandwich.
"Not really, no. I guess it's just... Everything I've done for the past week or so, I've aced without a problem. I get it all, and I feel so dumb for wasting so much time. It feels good to do this well. I'm just wondering if I've screwed myself over for later."
His friend laughed lightly. "I told you you could do it. Nah, you'll be fine. I mean, probably won't make valedictorian or anything with the level of competition, here. But dude, isn't your dad a stockbroker for, like, massive, massive companies?"
"Eh, he's a financial advisor for GE, yeah."
Jeck whistled. "So you won't exactly be strapped for cash getting into college, and as long as you write good essays and all that and get nice SAT scores, you can go anywhere. Don't worry about it."
"I s'pose you're right..." he acknowledged, his eyes unfocused. Jeck knew that look, especially after the fox shot him a quick, wondering glance. It wasn't a communicative one; it was a considerative one. There was something else bothering him, and he didn't like it, and he didn't know who to talk to.
"Psh, of course I'm right. I'm always right."
That got the fox to smile. Mirthlessly, but smile all the same. Jeck couldn't help but laugh, inwardly. The kid may have recently realized he was a capable anthro being, academically, but he still sat like he always had, eternally posing. His head was held carefully in a hand while one elbow rested on the table, his blue hair was flowing down to one side while his ears hung casually back, the one weighed down by the earring. His tight, white, designer tee shirt wasn't entirely opaque and showed his creamy chest fur to anyone who was looking, and his tail swished langouriously back and forth behind him when it wasn't in the hands or paws of some admirer. He was, without a doubt, the best-looking kid in his class of handsome. Or beautiful; he did always have a bit of androgeny surrounding him with his slender body and smooth face that was only accentuated by the hair.
Jeck had always found himself somewhat attracted to the boy, despite his definite and unyielding infatuation with Sarabi. It was as much because of Guin's personality as anything else. Guin was an opportunity for Jeck. He was someone with potential that until recently had been locked deeply within him, but he was also a very fragile personality. His ego was like a glass ornament â€" blown to tremendous breadth in the heat of adulation, but as was shown by this onset of depression, susceptible to even the smallest chinks. Cracks were spreading across his frame, and if something didn't fix it, he'd fall apart. Again, Jeck's heart and stomach went to war and a thin sheen of sweat broke out all over his body.
GUILTY.
He shook his head quickly and went back to eating, only to hear Guin saying his name. "Jeck? Now you look depressed. What's up?"
Unlike his friends, though, Jeck was not one to open up until absolutely cornered. He couldn't afford to. There was too much riding on this. He could feel the universe swirling around him, mixing like a witch's cauldron and boiling different ingredients in and out with all its toil and trouble. Sin spiked at his soul, innocence, sweet and unbroken, slid across his tongue, desire scraped his skin like battery acid. He knew all too well that he was more than likely creating all of these strange, spiritual sensations, but with the reality of what he was doing, he could not ignore them. "Huh? Oh, just zoned out for a second."
"Sure, Jeck." The fox had recovered from his own despondency in the face of his friend's. It was one of the more ironic aspects of human nature. Schadenfreude. The ability to always find pleasure in another person's pain, despite the magnetic attraction to society. Jeck knew it more intimately than most.
Again, the conversation turned to normal things, but this time, it was strained. Guin still had something on his mind, and for some reason, Jeck could not get his guilt to leave him. He still didn't fully understand what he was doing, but it hurt him deeply, as though one of the seven deadly sins itself had its bony grip around his chest and wouldn't let him breathe, wouldn't let his heart stop racing as though he were being strangled. Things were wrong, and all Jeck could think of was a line from a song.
"And don't you know, the darkest hour is always, always just before the dawn. And it appears to be a long time before the dawn." ((Crosby, Stills, and Nash))
_Appears to be along.
Appears to be along. Oh, it's coming._
Shut up, shut up, get out of my head, you'll break it all down!
"Hey, Jeck, are you done eating? I wanted to ask you something somewhere... you know, where people can't hear me being a pansy."
Jeck looked up again, hiding his rage and his confusion and his pain as though he had an actual mask stored somewhere. He was an expert, and he knew it. "Yeah, sure. Hold on a sec." He realized that during the lunch hour, he had actually managed to finish his meal, despite his inner turmoil.
As he got up, he suddenly noticed Guin's earring. "Dude, did this thing get tarnished?"
"Oh, yeah. I've got to polish it, soon."
They started walking out the door. "It won't get infected or anything?"
"It shouldn't. At least, that's what the guy who pierced it told me."
"Cool." They walked on in silence, each lost in his own separate world, until Jeck found himself in the same hallway in which he had originally "met" Fae. As usual, there was no one there. No one could hear them, no one could see them in the hall of bleeding naught. They both dropped their backpacks, assuming they might be there for a while, each for his individual reason.
Guin was getting increasingly nervous. He glanced once around the corner while Jeck followed his movements with a wary eye. What was he about? Jeck would have bet good money on this having to do with Fae. He was confident that he had done things just perfectly to instill the proper doubt and perplexity irrevocably in the fox's mind.
Then, Guin looked him once in the eyes, his own filled with anguish and anxious nerves, latched his hands onto the human's shoulders, and kissed him.
Jeck's eyes shot open wide in shock and his heart pulsed hard against his chest. He let the fox do it, assuming it would end with just that, but then Guin stayed there. Just like he had when Fae visited some nights previous, he didn't make any movement, completely unsure of what action to take. He felt Guin's tongue on his lips and parted them slowly, the hair on the back of his neck standing as his friend's soft hands began lightly massaging his shoulders and he could feel the tenderness with which this was happening.
Slowly, his eyes regained their normal size and closed and he started to give back, sucking gently on the tongue, sweat breaking out again as he worried about what would happen if they were caught, what if Sarabi found out, what if, what it, what if...
This is nice... a sibilant hiss snaked through his brain.
At that, he knew he wouldn't let go, just to spite the other. Just to spite it, just to make this his own, he slowly, cautiously lowered his pale, slender hands to Guin's slim waist and held him there, pushing their chests and their waists together, hearts beating swiftly and heavily against their breasts, as they shared something new to them both, foreign, alien, and for both, far more than they had anticipated.
Eventually, though, it had to end, and Jeck pulled his head away, searching the fox's eyes carefully, looking for any sign of from where that had come. Guin did the same thing, but he was the first one to speak.
"I thought... I thought you were dating Sarabi. You shouldn't have... kept going..." He pulled softly from the embrace.
"I just..." Jeck began, looking away and dropping his hands, already beginning his act. It wasn't really much of an effort to trip over his words, though. "I mean, I guess I didn't know what to do, I mean, I haven't done it before, I mean..."
"What, exactly, do you mean?" Guin asked with a small smile.
Jeck blushed and looked at the ceiling. "I mean... I just... figured high school's probably a good time to experiment, right? And you seemed like you needed it, or wanted it, so I wasn't going to take it away from you, what with how you were acting, and all." He checked his watch, to fill time. "Why did you do that?"
"Well... I didn't think it would last that long, I just... I'm confused. And... I guess I wanted to thank you, for showing me what I could be." He withdrew into himself after that, something he had probably never done before. "I think I'm in love with Fae, and I shouldn't be, because, you know, my family's Christian, and boys like girls anyway, right? And he's a stoner and a drinker and all, but after seeing him and what he could be, I... I don't know..."
It worked. At that moment, something locked into place, like a car on the end of a train. "...with Fae?" Jeck asked. There wasn't an ounce of hurt in him. Not from the lack of real meaning in the kiss, anyway. This was what he had been expecting. The fact that the kiss had been nothing but a thanks, in all honesty, caused him no emotional pain. "So why kiss me?" he laughed quietly. It was clearer now than ever that Guin was shorter, was smaller, was easier to manipulate than he was. That was what hurt. It hurt that he had broken Guin open, made him able to grow into something great, and now... he was using it. The kiss, the tender hands, the caring lips, the innocent eyes? Just a good memory.
Guin shifted his feet nervously. "... you should understand, you're a science person. Just a trial run, is all. See if it's really what I'm into." He suddenly collected himself, very quickly, and met Jeck's eyes. "So... the reason I brought you here was... I wanted to ask if you knew why Fae would be ignoring me. And oh, God, I do not want to turn into one of those girls who are always all over me, with their ‘oh-my-gawd, why won't he talk to me?' whining and all. Just... why would he ignore me, after we've met each other? I know who he is."
Inwardly, Jeck rolled his eyes. He had been doing a lot inwardly, recently, he realized. More than most. He proceeded to explain Fae's peculiar disposition and possible motivation, but as he did so, he put a spin on it that made him want to spit up and swallow cyanide. He made it sound as though Fae were someone who needed help, who had to have someone pull him out of where he was, and that it was too late for Jeck to do that. The human had already squandered his chances, and besides, he was too withdrawn to try anything that personal, despite the kiss. At the same time, though, he made Fae seem nigh unapproachable, determined to remain where he was and with no intention of rising up.
By the end of it, Guin was looking at the floor and clearly doing some scheming of his own. They said their good-byes as though nothing had happened and headed to their classes, but thoughts were still swimming in Jeck's mind. He had to be careful, now, more careful than before. Fae was brilliant, and he was an observer, and had been for longer than Jeck. This was a dangerous game to play. If his timing was off, if his words were pitched wrong, everything would fall apart. And from what he had seen that day, it was easier than he had first perceived for everything to fall apart.
He touched his lips once in memory. At least he had gotten one honest, positive experience out of it all.
Sometimes he wondered why he was so cold, why so rational. Why was he doing this, anyway? He was feeling all of these tremendous impacts, like meteors striking down on the spiritual plane of the world, but in all honesty, what was going on? A few little emotional threads being pulled here and there, and for some reason that was supposed to warrant these star-strikes that kept wetting his skin and drying his mouth?
The voice filled in an answer with a fervor it had not shown in years. Ripples. Ripples are all we ever feel, all we ever are. One creature moves in this ocean, and everything feels the ripples. Like a submerged butterfly, trying to flap as it drowns, causing tsunamis when it was once blamed for hurricanes and monsoons. Chaos theory. "A Sound of Thunder." A single impact changes the course of the universe. A single human doing the work of gods, by just twitching his fingers. You. Are. One. May you save the many. An ethereal hand touched his shoulder, flooding him with a sudden, confident calm.
Ah, yes. That was why.
_Meantime, at high windows
Far from thicket and pad-fall, suitors of excellence
Sigh and turn from their work to construe again the painful
Beauty of heaven, the lucid moon
And the risen hunter,_
"I can cause... anything, really." Fae blinked groggily, his vision clearing slowly. Who was talking? "How else would I know to be here, now? You cleaned up the evidence perfectly. No one should know. There's no reason for you to come back." Very gradually, shapes formed and he was able to make out a figure in front of him. He tried moving his arms and legs. No good. "Even the cops won't find out until someone goes looking for the kids, and who knows how long that could take?"
Suddenly, everything became clear. Fae stared at Razor, his jaw open. How had this happened? The wolf was pointing a gun at him, while Fae was bound naked, beaten, and humiliated in a chair. He should have been prepared. He was always prepared. He always knew what was best and when. It was how he survived, living the way he did. Why was he here, now?
Razor laughed, and it was a cruel sound, but the voice was strange in the cold, hollow room. It didn't sound like Razor. Fae shifted his bare feet on the hard cement. "You're so naïve! Growing up with me, playing with me, living with me. I know you, Fae. I know everything about you, and I know it better than you." The light in his eyes was a deadly sort of playful. "You wanted to cure me, somehow. You thought you could make me better, make me... normal, I think you would say. But it didn't work, did it? I killed Vice. In fact, I knew I would kill him three years ago when I saw how badly it hurt you to have those people ripped away from you. I had been waiting for a reason to kill him. Although... I hadn't anticipated you killing the rest of them." He giggled.
"Are you finished monologing?" Fae asked, and gagged at the sound of his voice. It was his, to be sure, but it was sloppy and slurred, and he suddenly noticed the state of his face. Bruised, slashed, torn, his tongue nearly bisected, teeth missing, blood spraying with every word. And Razor just laughed again.
"Blf blu-bleah, fl-bleah? What, Fae? Has your one tool left you? Sure, you can think like this, but you can't do anything, can't manipulate anyone." He rested the gun on his chin in a parody of deep thought. "Speaking of which... have you been watching that Jeck kid? Damn me to fuck if he won't get you killed."
Concentrating as hard as he could, Fae managed to bring out the word, "How?"
Razor doubled over in laughter, the wicked scar across his face disgustingly evident. It went from the left corner of his mouth, across the bridge of his nose, to above his right eyebrow, the product of a drunken father. His favorite line, after the Batman movies, was, "Do you know how I got this scar?" When he smiled, it moved like a snake, slithering up his face and around desperately, trying to escape the madness that was there, deep within. The madness Fae couldn't cure, because it wasn't madness. It was the same sanity as the Joker's. Untouchable in its surety.
"Ah-hah! He speaks! The belligerent bastard speaks!" He straightened. No one else was in the room, but he threw his arms out as to a crowd. "How will the human boy kill you, you ask me? Just think about it." He bobbed his eyebrows with a sly grin. "Ready for it? Huh? Here we go! He won't do it! That pussy couldn't pull a trigger on a child-murdering rapist! He's worse than you are, with all his ‘destruction of potential' bullshit. He'll get that other kid, the one he's playing with, to do it."
"He'sth... noth..."
"He's noth? What's ‘noth,' Fae? I'm not familiar with that one. You know he's playing with that fairy-fuck of a fox. You've watched him do it. I know you have. Oh, but how would I know? I'm just some street-whelp everyone gave up on. I'm that pathetic little wolfling you need to save!" He growled deep in his throat, suddenly angry. "We could have fucking stayed friends, you know that? But no! Your only wrong move in the history of you put me where I am! So you know what? You got to make one mistake, and I've shaped my entire life around what you did wrong because of your experiments, your social brain-fucking."
Fae had heard all of this before, so he just glared at the wolf. "I... know..." he spluttered. Everything the wolf had said was true. They had both been born brilliant. It had taken no extra cultivating, no external influence; nothing. Raised in poor families in a destitute part of town, the two of them had met when they both ran from their homes to the same deserted street corner. Clashing in the ugly, cowardly lights, they had struggled briefly, two adolescents trying to vent some of their anger for their impoverished predicaments, when all of a sudden they started talking while they fought and each realized how gifted the other was.
<<<
On that night, they resolved to combine their intellect and solve their respective problems. Back then, five or so years ago, Razor had gone by his birth name, Christopher. Fae's brothers and sisters were being horribly mistreated by the squirrel's step-mother, after his biological mother had died from lung cancer. Without a single tear of sorrow or pang of regret, those two boys put together a scheme that ended with the step-mother not only out of town, but murdered and buried before the rest of the family could even react to her disappearance. His father remarried a few years later to the mother he had now.
The plan to fix Razor's father's drunkenness did not go as smoothly. At first, they tried opening his beers and wine bottles, pouring out the brew into the gutters, watering them down, and replacing the corks and caps with hardly a noticeable scratch. This did nothing but make his father buy more, because he wasn't getting the buzz he needed. The next plan was to simply take half of the booze away every time his father bought any, to see if they could "thirst him out," as they called it, just by making it increasingly difficult to buy the beer. It wasn't until that only resulted in the father changing the locks that Fae made his final suggestion.
_"You don't want him dead, right?" the squirrel asked as they sat on top of a randomly chosen hotel.
Chris nodded, his thin-haired tail motionless behind him despite the wind. "Right."
"Have you ever talked to him about it?"
"N- no. I couldn't do that. He'd just hurt me."
"But when he's sober, he's such a good guy. Just catch him then."
"...I don't know. He's so angry, usually, and I think... I think what we've been doing has made him a little crazy. Maybe we should wait, and just see if he'll stop if we keep doing this."_
Fae shook his head. "No. I've known a lot of alcoholics. They don't just stop."
"I should just call the cops..."
"And have him arrested? What would that do to your mother?"
"I know! I know, and I don't want to hurt her, but I think it would be better than just... waiting until he hurts someone. Really bad."
"It will hurt your brother, if you don't do something." Chris's mother was pregnant with his only sibling. "You can't let him grow up with that."
"I know, Fae!" he snapped. "I've thought about this, too, you know." They sat in silence for a while. "I'm sorry." The squirrel just nodded and looked down into the city lights. Why had they been born like this? Other people in these situations just let life go on, made the same mistakes, died the same deaths. But they two... they were more than that. They were worth a lot to the world, and had started here. Smart people were supposed to come from smart families. Why were they in this hell?
The wolf shook his head quickly, trying to clear it. "Assume I did talk to him. What would I say? ‘Don't drink'? ‘I think you're a fool'? ‘Me and this other eleven-year-old each have double your IQ and think we know how to live your life for you'?"
Faeram laughed at that. Chris laughed with him. "Hmm, maybe not. I dunno. I've never really done a whole lot of talking, myself. Maybe... just try to show him who it hurts, when he's drunk. See if you can get him to tell you why he gets drunk in the first place. If you can break him all the way down, maybe you can help him build himself up again."
A slow, thoughtful nod. "Makes sense. It's still the crazy part I'm worried about. He's been... well, the other day he bought a gun, to take care of ‘those robbers.'"
"Heh."
"He hasn't been sleeping much, except when he passes out. I just..." He sighed, tiredly. "I'll give it a try. And if it doesn't work... I guess we'll just try again. I dunno. Maybe we should kill him." His eyes were looking at nothing.
"Your mother," Fae said softly.
"I know," Chris whispered.
The following day...
"BOY, YOU THINK YOU CAN LIVE MY FUCKING LIFE? YOU THINK YOU KNOW BETTER? You don't, you fucking shit-brained excuse for a son! And if your twat mother gets in my FUCKING WAY, I swear to God I will carve her face off!"
As it turned out, Chris's mother did get in his way, shortly after Chris had obediently sat still, shaking and trying not to look at the gun in his father's hand while the old, wild-eyed wolf took a straight razor in the other and carved the line that now adorned his face. The father didn't carve her face off, though. No, he put a bullet through it instead, instantly killing her and the child within her. "I keep my promises," he said. After that, he disappeared and turned up two days later, drowned in a gutter. The doctors said he had a blood alcohol level of oh-point-seven. They weren't sure how he had managed to imbibe so much beer and wine before he had passed out.
Chris remembered that he hadn't watered down his father's alcohol stores that night.
For two days following, Fae tried to comfort him. The cut didn't heal right, because it was jagged from Chris's shaking while it happened. They hid in the basement beneath the corner they had first met, eating scarcely. Fae stayed with him for all of those forty-eight hours, fighting for him, doing everything he could, letting him weep, letting him rage, letting him beat his fists bloody against the ground. He watched and listened and held him and laughed when he could.
Then, when it was over, Chris made his final statement, ending with the last friendly thing he said to Faeram.
_"I think I'll call myself Razor. You know. Because Chris, it's like ‘crisp,' like a razor. And for the obvious reason."
"Chri- Razor, you need to go find someone to take care of you. I want you to live with me, but my dad couldn't afford it."
A sudden anger spiked in the boy like a wasp's stinger. "Stop scheming, Fae! You suck at it, and you don't want me! You want this at your house? I'm disgusting! Every part of me. My life, my family, my house, and now my God-damned face."
Fae looked at him, hard. "What part of me looks like that matters to me? We. Are. Incredible. You know that. If something I'm doing is somehow conveying the message that I don't want to help you, tell me so that I can carve it off for you. Damn it, Razor, if I thought killing my little brother would help, I would do it!" he whispered fiercely. "You are worth more than running away and making nothing of yourself!"_
Razor just met his eyes with a sad look. "It isn't that, Fae. I know you would, and it means a lot to me that you would murder children to make my life better. Really." They shared a hopeful grin and a sad laugh. "But it's that logic that just ruined my life. It's your logic." A strange look came into his eyes, twisting into the grin in an evil way. "In fact, with my logic, I could _decide to realize that it's really not your fault."
Fae's face shattered. "What?"
"On the other hand, though... I know that you just see this as a single mistake, don't you?"
"Well... I have to. I'm sorry, I am, I made a mistake. You were right, we probably should have waited, maybe he'd have killed himself, maybe..."
"Well, then I'll just have that one mistake, Fae. One thing for each of us. One flaw. You, you made a mistake, and me? Well, I watched my father kill my mother and now I live with the guilt of having caused her death, his death, and my unborn brother's death. So I guess I'm psychologically damaged, aren't I? It's just one thing, isn't it?"_
"Razor, don't do this. We could... we could do anything! We're incredible! You can't throw that away!"
"I'm not!" the wolf snarled. "I'm still using it. I'll use it however I have to. I'll pin everything bad in my life on you, I'll hate you, I'll destroy you and everything you are."
"Don't... hurt my family."
"You think I'd kill your family? And listen to you! You've already accepted it! You can tell, can't you? You can tell I'm not kidding, you know you can't talk me out of it. You wouldn't care if I killed your family, and that's a fact. What you care about is me, and that's what's going to hurt you for the rest of your life, because you know me. I will never die!"
Black eyes in a gray face pleaded desperately with white eyes in a black face. "Razor... please. We're more than this. We could change the world."
"No." He stood up to leave, and Fae stood up with him, still looking at him, searching the tear-filled eyes for something that might indicate he could be changed. Nothing was there. "I love you, Fae. Like a brother. I would kill for you. I did it once, and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again."
"You're... already starting. Don't do this to me." His eyes were beginning to fill, as well.
The wolf shook his head. "No, I'm not. That was the truth. That's the last. This is the end, Wolfbane, and this is the beginning."
He walked away, then, with Fae's lip trembling, holding back a flood of tears that never fell. Child services came to collect the pup from the police station and found him missing. The squirrel turned his back, as well, and dedicated the rest of his life to protecting his family by ignoring them. Whenever a sibling did well in school, he stayed painfully neutral, because he knew Razor was watching. Whenever his father got a promotion or a raise, he failed to respond, because he knew Razor was watching.
He started doing drugs the day he learned Razor was running a crime ring and twisted himself through the city's underground until he was buying from the wolf, so he could watch him. He sabatoged himself at school so he wouldn't be drawn into the upper circles, so he could watch Razor. Every time he saw the wolf, he was altering conversations, spinning tales, doing anything he could to show Razor how much the wolf was to him, but the boy was doing the same to him, to hurt him. Vice was just a casualty caught in the cross-fire. He had developed his own motivation without any outside help, and by doing that had unwittingly offered himself up as a toy for both of the warriors to play with. Razor probably hadn't even wanted to kill him.
And the nicknames. Every single one harder to understand than the last. It was a self-imposed punishment, a constant reminder of the very first one he had heard, and knives struck his heart whenever he made one because of it. He had destroyed someone, despite how clear Razor's decision had been, and he spent every day trying to resurrect what had been lost.
>>>
The voice that wasn't Razor's came through to him again. "So how are you, Fae, how're you doing? Now you know that Jeck's trying to kill you by breaking that little fox snot's brain. I'm surprised he hasn't gone on a shooting spree yet, with how weak kids are these days. It's like us two and that Jeck kid are the only people who are harder to break than petrified clam shells." We only feel the ripples. Razor hadn't been around to hear Jeck say that. What was going on? "God, I don't think us three could be broken. It's too fucking bad that one of us is determined to stay fractured, isn't it? And that one of has that little stain on his fingers from the acid he cracked me with. And that the last one's an elitist murderer. If only all three of us were perfect, we could probably mend the world."
Fae listened, but was enraged. He couldn't believe what Razor was telling him, but even now, he was reexamining the human. He shook his head painfully, refusing to accept it. "Ssho... why?"
The wolf looked down and sighed, almost seeming ashamed. "Sho isn't a word either, Fae," he mumbled. He was despondant for a while, but perked up unnaturally quickly. Such was their way. "Why did I break your face? Why did I strip you naked and strap you down? Why did I lure you here again? Why am I saying all this in a voice that isn't mine? Close your eyes, Wolfbane."
The choking bark of a squirrel hurled its way out of Fae's throat at that. His own, personal nickname. But he did as he was told. Razor wasn't stupid.
"Who am I, Fae?"
Fae's eyes shot open immediately. He could suddenly talk. None of it had been real. "Jeck! You want me dead? How dare you, you fucker, you God-damned traitor to your own God-damned class, how dare you scheme against me!" He screamed and howled and ripped free of his bonds, even knowing it was a dream, suffering the gunshots through his chest so he could beat the wolf speaking with Jeck's voice, beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him until he wasn't recognizable, until he
woke up sweating and yelling and thrashing at his bedding. Jeck. Jeck was playing him. Fae should have known not to trust someone as heartless in how they operated as that. Why Jeck wanted him dead was a mystery; Razor hadn't told him that. Razor, back from his hell to tell him in a dream that he was in danger. I would kill for you.
Well, murder was not an option. Not here. No, something far more deadly was in order for that bastard of a human being. It would be glorious. It would be rich.
Seething in his bed, Fae went over every interaction with the boy from a new perspective. He saw where it was leading. He saw why Guin was the natural target. He could see it all, as though a dark haze had lifted from his eyes. True, Fae could put an end to this plotting with hardly an effort, but he didn't want to. If Jeck was prepared to use his tools to this end, to eliminate all others with his power, then he deserved death. More than death.
Fae spent the night picking out threads from his past with the boy and weaving them into a pattern that in the end would obliterate his opposition and leave him not only dying, but regretful of his whole life, empty, and hopeless.
Jeck had never been to Fae's house before. Walking the chilled streets, he considered, reconsidered, and redirected his feet a thousand times. In his pocket, he held the end result of the last weeks of study. It was two days before exam week began, so a Saturday evening. Jeck's parents believed he had gone to a friend's house to study, and in a way, he had, even if in reality, all of his study was complete. Through what he had found, he knew Fae intimately, more than the squirrel had probably ever believed possible and so tonight, a death sentence was being written.
It seemed appropriate â€" the last nickname had been morbid, more so than anything previous. Mrs. Buckshire, pronounced with a German accent, became Buchschere, or, translated, "book-shears." Cutting books. Cutting tomes. Cutting tombs. Reaping tombs. Reaping death. The Grim Reaper. Mrs. Grim. Everything was caught in this downhill slide, and the only question now was who would meet Mrs. Grim's grinning husband.
The hunting, the searching, and the analyzing had all ended the afternoon before, during Jeck's final meeting with Mrs. Buckshire. Through the days, Jeck had pulled out countless messages from the English papers, but they all pointed to the math tests. "Pythagorus knows me." "Euclid draws my spirit." "Descartes's philosophy is where mine lives." Time after time, Caesarean square after Morse analog, substitution after cipher, those math papers were where they led. At least, the ones that weren't just experiments or clues to the next indication.
Mrs. Buckshire had been distressed on that final day. She had everything she had managed to weed out, and the result was still bogus. "J T B O Z P O F M J T U F O J O H." Eighteen letters, so not a square. Seemingly random frequencies. Knowing the end was near, she was stressing herself far more than her old age should have allowed for, and it made her forget one of the original methods of encoding. Jeck saw it.
"Take one step back," he murmured. Fae had stayed one step back from glory, one step back from everything he could be. That was the key to this final message. Move every letter back one in the alphabet, and the message was plain as day. "I S A N Y O N E L I S T E N I N G." "Is anyone listening?" It was the same for both years of papers, at least as far as Buckshire had managed to get her hands on. He had been searching for someone who could hear him for years, ever since middle school.
Jeck knew then that Fae was stronger than he was, and smarter. He had been working at this level of intellect for far longer and with far greater purpose, even if it was just to get noticed. The two analysts just stared at the message once Buckshire wrote it out. "You need to tell him," Buckshire said, her mouth dry. "You know him best. Let him know that someone is listening. Someone cares about him. If he was getting tired of this repetition two years ago, think how close he is to the edge now. You go tell him; here's his address. Thank you so much, Jeck. You're a saint." She made sure he was looking at her. "You will do great things one day, with your heart and with your mind. If Fae is with you... nothing will ever be a barrier to you."
He whispered a thanks to her and left for the final time after returning the original papers. He had not been aware that it was possible for every part of his body and soul to hurt at the same time. There he was, then, walking with the stance of a warrior and the mindset of an eleven-year-old boy.
Guin had not approached him again, but he had been making attempts to get to know Fae, all of which had failed. The squirrel slid away from him, brushed him off, sometimes even swatted him back, but the strangeness and the uncertainty in his eyes kept Guin coming no matter how he was pushed away. It was pathetic to watch, for those who knew how to, and Jeck could see Guin's mentality, as he continued to excel and Fae to remain static, begin to fail and fall apart. He was growing desperate and he had never before in his life felt desperate. Fae's dark aura had slid onto Guin, but unlike the squirrel, it had infected the fox's mood and bearing insidiously, like a toxin slipped in his drink every day, slowly building until the explosive, fatal end.
And Fae's reaction was dangerous. His eyes were always on the other two. Jeck knew by now that Fae knew, and he had had to alter his tactics to adjust for that development. How the squirrel had found out was not hard to surmise. Guin was too transparent â€" he had spent no time in the real world of manipulation, thinking he knew what he was doing after the way he tossed around the succubi who circled about him day after day. His expressions, his eyes, and the very state of his body all reflected his degredation. His earring had darkened with the tarnish daily, and when he flicked it, he winced. Like a corpse in wet ground, he was breaking down.
Abruptly, Jeck found himself slammed bodily into a wall of a back alley, spun until the street was out of sight, and holding his breath agains the razor blade on his throat, praying his beating heart wouldn't push open his skin. A voice hissed in his ear, "What do you think you're doing?"
"I am a murderer, and I come to lay the dead to rest," he responded without thinking, the poetic words harsh to his ears. He could see the short, black fur of a wolf on the hand that held the weapon and could feel it on the one trapping his arm. He didn't dare move. He knew that were he in the wolf's position, he would not hesitate to draw blood. Kill? Probably not. But Jeck knew well the cost of being scarred.
"I know who you are, Kindleford Jeck Gates. You're trying to kill my brother. You want to kill Faeram Nathaniel Marshall."
The arms slammed him into the opposite wall and a snarling face showed itself as he turned to find the knife on his throat again. An ugly scar wound its way across the wolf's features and between eyes as white as ivory, as white as a graveyard. "You would put out the brightest light this generation has failed to see."
Even the one was confused. How could he know? Impossible! Kill him! Kill him, he will ruin you! "Who are you?" he asked, throwing a growl into his voice.
"My name is Razor, and I will break you in half if you keep going the direction you were headed. I will skin you alive and wear your flesh for clothes. I will eat your heart out while it is still beating and you will shriek like all the banshees of Hell, but no one will save you. Either you will murder me, or you will get no further while you are still alive." With a swiftness that sent Jeck's eyes wide, he felt the weight of the blade leave his throat and the wood of the handle press into his palm. His fingers closed instinctively around it.
Razor backed away, the snarl still there, but his hands and arms open and inviting. "I know you, Leif, son of Eric, son of Thorvald, son of Asvald, son of Ulf." He was just showing off knowledge. Showing Jeck who he was. "You would make way for hordes of tyrants just to discover a new world. You would walk on the backs of giants and call yourself Prometheus. Do you know how I know? Because I know. I talk to your fox friend, and that sad little fucker has quite a mouth on him, if he has the right guy to talk to. You know. An ‘angel' his feeble little psyche can pretend is there so he has a reason to fall in love with another man." And suddenly, sexuality and religion were just extra tools. Such was their way.
Jeck's breathing was hard and fast. He couldn't understand. Kill him! Kill him now! "No, no, I won't kill you! I'm not a real murderer. I don't want to put Fae out, I want to uncover him. He's been suffocating for six years, and I want to bring him out!" He even had the paperwork to prove it.
"DON'T LIE to me!" the wolf raged. "You would betray the light of the world! You would chain the real Prometheus to a rock and feed eagles his organs!" So much knowledge, so much insight! Jeck's head was reeling. Who was this?
"Why would I do that?" the human gasped desperately. "What sense does that make? He's more than I am!"
"And you want to cut him down so that you will be visible! I know that that's it. I know it is, because I know your kind! Filthy, white, human bastards in your mansions and your villas, you want to paint the world white and rich!"
Jeck's eyes narrowed quickly in anger and he straightened himself with a violent twitch. "Racism? Racism at this level of being? Don't be so filthy; I know you better from the ten seconds here. What do you think you're doing, traitor? You're one of us!"
The wolf just grinned, a half-mad, half-sorrowing light in his eyes. "You'll be the one who lives this through, but I won't let Fae die if he feels like there's any hope left at all, and you need some practice killing. You're a murdering bastard, and I'm a suicidal bastard, and he's the only one of us all who deserves to live, even in this world full of unthinking bastards, so if you're going to kill him, by God, I'm going to fix any part of you that is still inadequate, and I will make him hate himself and die lonely."
He grabbed the hand that held the razor and guided it forcefully against his throat, but Jeck pulled back. "No! You can't die! There's too much of you! I don't want him dead, I want him to live! Don't you get that? We're eternal!"
"None of it matters! This is the beginning, and this is the end!" Razor screamed, and twisted himself and Jeck's wrist, slashing the human's hand across his throat, opening it in a spray of blood that he turned so it couldn't stain the human, couldn't provide a reason to keep him from going to Fae's home.
Jeck cried out and backed away, dropping the bloody tool into the quickly-spreading pool of crimson ripples. He didn't understand. Why couldn't Razor have lived? Why was he dying? It wasn't supposed to be this way! Jeck had gained and lost another nautilus in the space of a minute. Ripples, ripples blustering currents. Why?
But he knew the value of knowing your enemy, dead or alive. Careful to avoid the still-spreading blood, he extracted the other boy's wallet and checked the driver's license. Christopher Tajex Fowler. Jeck could not seem to tear his eyes from the depth of the miasma that swallowed that name. It was disgusting, it was pungent, and it was horribly, horribly familiar, like looking into a frosted mirror. This was a darkness he knew well, one he had seen in too many of the people he knew. Breathing with a feral rage, he tried to take a moment to collect himself. Just breathe. You have time. Don't worry. But he couldn't, he knew.
_Making such dreams for men
As told will break their hearts as always, bringing
Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,
Navies fed to the fish in the dark
Unbridled waters._
"Beasts," by Richard Wilbur
He swept furiously out of the alleyway, leaving the soaked body behind, on the verge of baring his teeth. So stupid. Why were people stupid? Why did Guin have to talk? Was Razor dead because of racism? Was he dead because of insanity? Was he dead just for vengeance? None of them good reasons. None of them.
He was clenching his lips shut and seething until he reached the door to Fae's house and knocked. Then, he composed himself, smoothed his low-lying hair, and greeted the smiling mother squirrel with a cheery grin and a wave. End game was nigh.
Deep in thought, Fae frowned at the ceiling, twirling a joint in his fingers while the soft sound of techno played from his computer. The synesthetic experiences washed through him as always, but he was ignoring them. Everything was ready, and had been for weeks. Jeck hadn't made his move, though. He hadn't tipped Guin over the edge, like he should have. The squirrel shifted against the couch, watching the purple haze over him sift lazily through the air. Maybe he was wrong.
Then again, he couldn't be wrong. He had analyzed everything, and he knew that only once in his life had he ever been wrong, at least about something like this. Jeck was preparing that fox for a psychological meltdown the likes of which could take innocent lives in its murderous wake. It was up to the two of them who knew what was happening to control the blast area, and each of them would try to channel it at the other.
He went over everything again. Guin's reasoning would be simple. He had been used from the start, and his mad, confusion-driven anger would fire, naturally, at Fae, who was the simplest target, once he was pushed over the edge. Jeck would do everything in his power, as Fae's "friend," to convince Guin, as indirectly as possible, that this original assumption was correct. Fae would just have to be more convincing. Jeck would tell Guin to shoot him instead of the squirrel, having done something earlier to convince Fae that it was in fact Fae who should take the bullet. He laughed bitterly to himself. Guin with a gun, in the first place. God, he'd probably miss the first few times and end up killing someone who didn't deserve it. There was really no good way to control that explosion.
Fae would, of course, fail to come in on cue, leaving the trembling gun still pointed at the human. Desperate, Jeck would say something that would accuse Fae, probably irrefutably, knowing the kid. The aim would shift, but Fae held the trump card. Fae knew who had started all of this. He knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Guin would have to recognize that he had been pushed and prodded by his human "friend" from the beginning of this whole, twisted game. That would be the end of it. Once Jeck had been shot, the only thing to do was clean up the psychological mess.
The only thing that troubled Fae was Jeck's motivation. Yeah, Jeck was an elitist prick. He was arrogant, his conversation centered generally around himself, he rarely seemed to listen to other people's problems, Sarabi appeared to basically be an ornament, and the grin of achievement he flashed with every person he aided, the grin that had been especially prevalent when Guin aced that very first quiz, was an undeniable mark of selfishness.
It was just... Fae had said that Jeck was the coldest bastard he knew, and corrected himself. At the time, he had considered both Razor and himself to be probably more cold-hearted than the human's words. But even so, as an elitist, Jeck should find strength and comfort in numbers. He should seek out those who understood him. In that light, even Sarabi's presence by his side made sense. The girl was an academic genius. If Jeck couldn't cultivate a desire and a will for change in her, no one could.
But... there was no other reason for Jeck to be pulling Guin's strings the way he was. It made no sense unless Jeck wanted Faeram dead, whether for security or for the glory of achievement. And so Fae had to kill him.
The squirrel's ears perked up at the sound of someone knocking on the door and his mother's warm-hearted answer. Well. Step-mother's. The voice that responded to her made Fae grin to himself. A series of mental jumps sparked their way through his brain. "So this is it, then, is it?" He took a long pull at his joint with a slow, confident smile. Bring your worst, Jeck. I'm holding all the aces, whether you're the dealer or not.
"Fae?" he heard.
He spun around and sat up, bringing the blunt to his lips and schooling his face to pleased surprise. "Jeck? What are you doing here?"
Jeck stood in his room's doorframe, his pale, dark-clothed figure silhouetted by the light from the hallway and black in the dim light of the stoner's room. The boy's granite eyes were devoid of emotion. Fae grew cautious, but nothing could prepare him for what came. "I'm listening, Fae."
Fae's joint slipped from between his fingers and smoldered on the carpet while his mouth hung open in shock. The music, the haze, the air â€" everything left him. His entire world fell apart.
Jeck watched his friend's reaction carefully. For a full minute, Fae didn't move, just blinking as he stared. He had wondered if this might happen. Slowly, carefully, he took a step inside and closed the door behind him. There was a stillness in the room that was not easily described. It was like... like Emily Dickenson's stillness. She sat behind the walls of her house for her entire life, watching people die, and published a pittance of seven poems before she, too, succumbed to the old reaper's icy hand. Later investigation revealed more than a thousand works largely regarded as the greatest of their time. It was that kind of stillness, the motionlessness of someone who has hidden something for so long that once it is discovered, they no longer remember how they had planned to respond.
Of course, Jeck no longer knew how he was to respond, after meeting Razor. Even walking there, even standing there, his plans were shifting back and forth between one ultimate finale and another. Razor had shown him that it was nigh impossible for two of their kind to truly understand one another and help one another and as a result, he was tossed back into his original quandary, suffering indecision the likes of which either meant Fae's terrible death or the squirrel's devastating life.
"Fae?" he queried. The stillness persisted. The human moved forward and took up the dying roach, then took a seat in a soft, mouldering chair across from the couch. Colors didn't seem to matter too much. The smoke in the room made it all a peripheral thing.
"I have waited... five... six... too many years to hear someone say that," Fae whispered. His fingers had remained at his mouth. All of a sudden, he flicked his eyes over to the friend-who-was-not-a-friend, who was in fact a challenge nearly equivalent to the one who had dragged his life down for six years, ever since he had made his first mistake. "So, it's all out in the open then, is it? Who we are? What we do?"
Jeck nodded, slowly, his gaze unfocused. "This late in the game, I figured it was only courteous. Between players, I mean."
"Why do you play, Leif?" His eyes were hard, searching, enigmatic.
The human shifted his feet, not meeting those lancing pupils. "I want to build a new world, of new people and new philosophies. I'm tired of where we live, and I'm only seventeen years old. Can you imagine... living the way we live and hitting a mid-life crisis? It's suicide not to play, Fae. It's all we can do for ourselves." The focus of his words was still himself. He lapsed into contemplative silence, his chin held in his hands. "Why do you play?"
"I play... I play because before you, the only person I knew who could play was playing for the wrong reasons, and I wanted a teammate. Still want a teammate, it's just... It seems less and less likely every day."
Inwardly, always inwardly, Jeck winced. Fae couldn't know, then, that the only reason he played was dead. That was too cruel, despite his intentions. Razor wanted Fae to die with nothing, but Jeck would not let that happen.
"So when is the final phase coming?" Fae continued. "That one's your call, and I've been waiting for it. Before Christmas? I sure as hell hope so. I'd hate to play during winter break; that's just unsportsmanlike." He grinned softly, and Jeck matched it.
"It'll be before Christmas, that's for sure. It had better be, anyway. If our delivery boy's not up to snuff, I'll just scrap the whole thing and start over in the spring."
"Maybe you should get him ‘up to snuff,' you know? Could speed things up. I've got some, if you want to borrow it."
The glint in Fae's eyes and the smell of the smoke throughout the room got Jeck to laugh, to honestly laugh. He relaxed in his chair, grinning. "I can't believe we're even talking about this. I mean, here we are, trying to get one another killed, and instead of fretting about it, we're getting high on smoke."
Fae laughed back at him. "You know I can't get high. I'm too ‘in control' of all this shit." He rolled his eyes. "You just think I'll give you my wallet again."
"Dude, what would I do with your wallet? You probably don't have anything ‘squirreled away' in there, anyway." Jeck smiled slowly, then convulsed with sudden, quick laughter. "Squirreled away."
"You racist. It's not our fault our analogs are nut-brained idiots."
"Nut-brained." He cackled.
"Quit monkeying around, simian!" Fae shouted through a grin.
"Monkeying around!" Jeck repeated with a loud laugh. "You're doing it on purpose!"
Fae started giggling, his eyes closed tight against his mirth. It felt good, to let the drugs finally actually invade, for once. "You whities and all your ‘oh, we're God's children, ‘cause Jesus was white, meh-meh-meh.'" He made a face and stuck his tongue out.
"Man, everybody know Jesus'z black!"
"Bull! Jesus was a beaver. He was a carpenter!"
"A beaver in Israel! Don't even!"
"What, you think he was a camel or some shit? Jesus Christ all, ‘look at me fasting for forty days' with a hump on his back?"
"'Cause Jesus not gnawing himself off the cross makes so much more sense! All chewing up the Spear of Lonnn... whatever it was, ‘Arr, gimme that spear, mmm, looks like a chimichanga! I'll give ya a holey spear, ya Roman twits!'"
Fae was howling and almost fell off the sofa. "Jesus was... a-heh! Jesus was a Mexican pirate beaver?"
They fell about the place, laughing and giggling like hyenas, holding their sides and shaking and doubling over until both of them had hit the floor, tears of mirth streaming down their faces. "Ah-hah! Oh, that hurts, God-dammit!" Fae managed to choke out. They were facing one another, apparently stoned out of their minds, and laughing fit to wake the dead, still.
"Fae... Fae, what the hell is this crap? I didn't... ohhh... didn't think it could work that fast."
Fae nodded and tried to still himself. It was largely unsuccessful, and he curled up in a giggling ball, his tail wrapping him head to toe. "It's â€" it's â€" I only get the best stuff, man. Only the best. This shit'll have horses trippin', man. And I don't mean the bipeds." He covered his face with his hands playfully, laughing into them uncontrollably.
"Where you hidin', dude?" Jeck asked with a grin, grabbing his friend's tail and pushing it off his face, looking him in the red-veined, drug-lit eyes that peeked from between his fingers.
"Peekaboo!" Fae laughed, then abruptly sobered as his ears twitched.
"What?" Jeck asked, fighting to come down from the high. Fae would have heard better than him, and as he listened, he knew that the phone call he had made earlier that day was coming to fruition.
"Just... just thought I heard something." His face broke into smiles once or twice more. "Dammit, I lost it."
"Maybe I can bring it back," Jeck whispered, and suddenly grabbed Fae's cheeks, pulled himself in, and kissed him.
It was nothing like Guin. Nothing at all. Guin had been thanking him and simultaneously doing something for himself. He had been kind and grateful and had meant everything he did. With Fae, it lasted for less than a second and was the most hate-filled thing he had ever done. In the instant their lips touched, the blackness embodied in Fae condensed into a bullet so solid, so real, that he felt like it would come bursting through him and kill them both then and there.
The fact that the kiss didn't last meant nothing, though. Jeck held him there, faces pressed together, and yanked the unprepared boy's body towards him, pressing his against it and rolling on top of him while Fae's claws dug into him with their famous grip and nearly poked holes in his sides, struggling to toss the smaller boy off him. Jeck's hands were strong, though, and held his mouth closed so he couldn't speak, could do nothing at all.
And then the blackness broke into Fae's eyes, and an evil grin split his face. "Have it your way," he whispered, and latched his hands on the human's back, pushing them inextricably together. He relaxed the evasive jerking of his head and instead thrust forward and sucked the air from Jeck's lungs with the force of his kiss of death, not even opening his eyes as he heard the unmistakable footfalls of a fox draw near, the turn of the knob, the creak of the door, the gasp of horror, the slamming of the portal, and the rapid retreat of those same footfalls. This was the final cue, the final suspension in their twisted symphony.
Even then, their actions didn't end. They only grew less warlike as each began thinking about what it all meant. No longer tense and fighting, Jeck relaxed his muscles and fell smoothly onto his friend's chest before, in mutual silence, they drew away and went back to their seats.
The door opened again, admitting Mrs. Marshall. The sullen faces she saw as she glanced back and forth were more than convincing enough for her. "Well, God, no wonder he left like that! Fae, one of your friends comes over and you're in here smokin' like a chimney! Honest to God, I don't know what to do with you!" She flung glares at both of them.
Another voice, muted by the walls, cut in over hers. It was that of Fae's little sister. "Mom! Gerie being mean!"
Tapping her foot angrily once or twice, the woman stormed out of the room to answer her step-daughter's call, slamming the door behind her. Without a word, Fae took off his shirt, lay down expectantly, and waited as Jeck, equally silently, likewise made himself bare, made his way over, and crawled on top of him. They breathed shallowly, smoke filling their eyes and lungs, dreams filling their minds, and bent forward and kissed again, meaning it this time. The oozing blackness was gone. Jeck tenderly rubbed the taller boy's shoulders, squirming softly against his bare, vanilla chest. Fae held the back of his frend's head, kissing and pulling away and diving in again, loving him as Jeck loved him back, eyes closed, motions free and calm and wild and racing, with nothing between their bodies in the dim light of the misty, rippling room.
A song came on, one that shouldn't have been there. Both of them heard, and listened, but niether stopped. "Dancing," by Elisa.
_Time is gonna take my mind
and carry it far away where I can fly
The depth of life will dim my temptation to live for you
If I were to be alone, silence would rock my tears,
'cause it's all about love and I know better,
How life is a waving feather
So I put my arms around you, around you
And I know that I'll be leaving soon
My eyes are on you, they're on you
And you see that I can't stop shaking
No, I won't step back, but I'll look down to hide from your eyes,
'cause what I feel is so sweet and I'm scared that even my own breath
Oh, could burst it if it were a bubble
And I'd better dream if I have to struggle
So I put my arms around you, around you
And I hope that I will do no wrong
My eyes are on you, they're on you
And I hope that you won't hurt me
I'm dancing in the room as if I was in the woods with you
No need for anything but music,
Music's the reason why I know
Time still exists
Time still exists
Time still exists
Time still exists
So I put my arms around you around you
And I hope that I will do no wrong
My eyes are on you they're on you
And I hope that you won't hurt me
So I put my arms around you around you
And I hope that I will do no wrong
My eyes are on you they're on you
And I hope that you won't hurt me._
They lay like that for minutes, breathing and shifting, moving lovingly, caressing one another. Jeck ran his hands down Fae's silver, muscular sides and Fae brushed along the boy's supple shoulders and creamy back and his slim chest, and they loved eachother, kissing noses, cheeks, eyes, lips... It was deep and complete, and they rippled against one another, feeling more, and knew eachother. The blackness that had held them for so long was dissolved for those moments in time and somewhere, the image of them, meeting in a way that none had before, was taken and stored in the universe, a record of their touching, two nautili...
To anyone else, this meeting would have come almost as though from nowhere. It was true that they had been friends for several years, but never before had any romantic attraction to one another. Here, though, now that they could afford to recognize the power of each to move the world, now that everything was out in the open, they were inextricably drawn to one another and there was no better way to express themselves. Not in the universe.
Eventually, Jeck crossed his arms behind the squirrel's lithely powerful back and lay his head on his chest with a contented sigh, feeling the other boy's breathing, hearing, despite everything, the pure rush of living air through his lungs.
"Why are you playing, Leif?" Fae ran his hand through the human's hair, his fingers fiddling softly with the silky strands. "Why can't we play together? Why..." He swallowed a lump in his throat. "Why do you want me dead?"
"That's where you're wrong," Jeck murmured, and shivered as he felt the squirrel's long tail land gently on his back. "I don't want you dead. I want you alive. I want you... so alive..." he breathed, holding Fae closer, closer.
"But look at what you've done to me. I can't know if you're still playing me, at this stage. I can't tell when you're telling me the truth and when you're lying to me."
"I know. It'll be over soon. But I'll tell you this." He held himself up and looked deeply, into Fae's eyes. "Know that I'm telling you the truth. I swear to me and I swear to you and I swear to the future that these next words are real." He waited for the squirrel to nod, and then went on. "When it's over, you will know everything. Whichever one of us is dying, whichever one of us has to clean up after that poor guy we've been playing with, you will know everything."
Fae searched his eyes and could find nothing in their silver depths to make him doubt. "I believe you."
"I'm glad." He lay back down, but Fae lifted his chin with a finger and a curious look and brushed at his face, giving a perplexed sniff. "What?" Jeck asked.
"Just... an eyelash. Reminded me of something, is all." Fae flicked his fingers, and one of Razor's hairs fell to the ground.
"Oh," the other boy said, and fell slowly back down, pulling himself into his friend. "Even being who we are... can we just do this, for a while?"
Fae blew air through his hair with a snort. "Of course. What kind of friend would I be?"
They smiled and held one another close while the music and the haze and the drugs and the love washed through them, giving both of them a surreal calm while they fought off thoughts of the week to come. In those minutes, in that hour, into that night, the reaper was still a long way off, and his ripples were muted by something more powerful than his scythe could hope to carve.
Thoughts, before the end.
What if I'm wrong? I don't want to die.
Pulse-beat and rhythm-wind. Comatose petals falling, dying and detonating like meteors. Ethereality. I put my arms around you.
Everything I've worked for, breaking them...
Like a butterfly, gyrating as it drowns, still dancing, bringing tsunamis. Impervious to pain that would cripple normal men. Like LSD.
What if they die? It could all fall apart. I only have this one chance.
Palpitate pressure paralyzes, proliferates such dreams for men and beasts in their freedom, ripped mice in my talons...
I... might not be as eternal as I think I am.
Try to remember the mood of manhood. Sinking and shattering cities, Atlantis is weeping as earthquakes break her down, because a nautilus only feels ripples. I hope that you won't hurt me.
What if we had been born normal? What if it were all okay?
Such dreams for men... I'll be leaving soon... spin me through this razor-wind and give me a sail to navigate a purple haze.
We... are... incredible... You know me, I can't die. I'll never die. We're better than this, we can't just run away and be nothing! We're worth more. Time still exists. The darkest hour is just before the dawn. Don't let this go to waste. Ripples causing tidal waves and building oases in intellectual deserts, nautili in deserts making ripples in barren sands, all we feel are ripples...
"Man, I don't know how people get away with school shootings. What with cell phones and all, you'd think the police would have to get there before anything could happen."
"People all texting, ‘plz help! He has a gun, lol! Liek, 911!'"
Jeck laughed aloud at Stephen's comment and surreptitiously shifted his gaze a foot forward to where Guin was nervously twitching through the crowd at the door ahead of them. There was no way this chance would go to waste because of some twit with a cell phone.
"All right, class, here are your papers. I'm Mrs. Buckshire, your proctor for this exam, because Mr. Muller is still in the hospital from the heart attack and we don't want to stress him overly much."
Jeck caught the accusing glance Fae shot him and smirked down at his desk. That had been harder to organize, last week, but it turned out that a man that age could be given a heart attack and survive if the call was placed from his own home.
"Call the hospital, Mr. Muller. You're entering cardiac arrest and will die if you don't act quickly. Here's your phone." Jeck had waited with him, face hidden in a black scarf, until the ambulence came, then bid him farewell like any gentleman would.
Twenty minutes passed. Jeck knew he could kill Fae, if he wanted. It was necessary, by this point. If he and Razor had been cohorts, too much madness was possible if that one was left alive. He has to do it soon. Shifting eyes and shifting winds, breath rippling through the air, come on, Guin. Don't disappoint now. Now, of all times, sweating at your desk with that pencil, you're not even writing anything. Stop checking your backpack, it's still there. Panting ripples through sound, saliva drips on the paper, is this a heat flash, or what? I even told you what to do. Do it. Come on. Come on, you God-damned pansy, shoot someone!
"Jeck?"
It was the only voice Jeck was not prepared to hear. A small, metal, open-ended cylinder was pressed up against the back of his head. It took him half a second to understand. He dropped his pencil, slapped his hands on his legs with a disappointed sigh, and smirked while a collective gasp rose up from the class. "I would have expected a wider birth from your circumnavigating, you traitorous fucker," he said quietly, but loudly enough that the class could hear.
"Every one of you will put your cell phones against the wall or I will blow his brains across this entire fucking room!!" Fae's powerful voice bellowed through the classroom. There was a moment's hesitation before Fae changed aim and shot point-blank through Jeck's shoulder. The silencer made it sound like a toy gun.
Jeck grimaced and groaned loudly through his teeth as the bullet tore through his flesh, but he didn't scream, and he didn't cry. He had been ready for far worse than that if this went wrong, so bone shard ripping him from the inside of his shoulder was really not about to get him going. Instead, he looked up at Fae's expression. The squirrel spared him an instant's smiling, sad eyes, black eyes conveying so much more than nothing, communicating an apology more complex than a nation's to its people. Panicked yells and shrieks echoed through the room, but they threw their phones against the walls as though they were burned by them. Jeck watched Fae's eyes as they blinked. He was counting impacts to make sure everyone complied.
A click resounded through the breathing that made it all stop at once. Mrs. Buckshire's voice cut through the solid sound-death. "Put the gun down, Fae." As ex-CIA, she had a silenced pistol trained on him. It didn't waver. "I've killed children like you before."
Niether did his as he slammed an iron grip around Jeck's neck with one hand and aimed the gun back at her. "All respect to you, ma'am, but I murdered my step-mother when I was eleven and I have dodged bullets and I can guarantee you that if I don't kill you, I can take out five of these kids in the time my body takes to stop twitching."
Jeck spoke up, though strangled. He hadn't tried to fight, knowing it was a waste of energy, calculating what he could do to turn this around. "Don't doubt him, Mrs. Buckshire. I know him. Please." He looked at her imploringly and tried to tell her how sorry he was that it was ending this way, how serious he was about his friend's abilities â€" everything. Would it be enough?
She didn't lower the gun immediately, keeping it pointed straight at her student. In her bright red dress and old spectacles, the gun looked entirely out of place in her arms, but it was so steady that in a strange way, it worked. After a moment, though, she let it drop to the ground and sat back at her desk, arms folded as she glared at Faeram. "I expected better of you, Fae."
"This isn't about you, ma'am. Please be quiet." She started to open her mouth again, but Jeck shook his head to discourage her, and she stopped, trusting him. Fae moved the gun to Guin, still not letting go of Jeck, who was concentrating on getting air through his tightened airway. The fox looked at him with a desperation seen usually in rabbits chased by hounds. "Get up, Guin. Now, look at Jeck and tell him that you didn't bring a gun with you."
The fox stood, his hands up, shaking like a leaf. Jeck just stared at him darkly, his eyes shrunk to half their usual size. "I... I-I didn't bring a gun," he whispered.
"LIAR!" Fae yelled, and shot through Jeck's knee. Jeck sucked air through the windpipe that Fae subtly opened up for him. Jeck knew, then. Fae had as little certainty about how this would end as any of them did. He was attached to Jeck. Just as Jeck wanted, he was irrevocably bound to the human, and he was confused. It just didn't show. Or was Fae still playing him?
Stephen, a blond-haired human with a football-player's body, stood up. "Jeck, you knew this was going to happen, didn't you? What the fuck, dude?" Fae immediately switched direction and put a bullet through the kid's desk.
"Sit down," he ordered, and Stephen did as commanded, afraid for his life. Everyone was now looking at Jeck. He smiled again, and then laughed at their looks of disgust.
"Take me to the front of the class, Fae. I want to give them a little lesson. Some face-time before you blow my brains out. You God-damned mother-fucking twit of shit-headed cock-sucker. And Mrs. Buckshire, if you would please take Fae's seat. I imagine mine is bloody."
Fae let him go and slammed the barrel of the gun against the side of his head. "Let's go, then." His voice was hard, cold, and quivering with rage. They walked slowly to the front of the room, separated only by a row of desks, connected only by the cold steel of the gun. Jeck was hopping on his good leg and leaking blood onto the floor, but did his best to keep his pain to a grimace. Mrs. Buckshire complied with a steely gaze.
Once there, they turned and faced the class, Fae's expression still as cold as Antarctic snows, Jeck still grinning and apparently about to burst into laughter at any minute. Everyone watching thought he was mad. Which, in a way, he really was. Most people are in the moments before death. Fae picked up the gun to which Jeck had led him. Mrs. Buckshire's. The squirrel pointed it at the students in general. Jeck spoke, gray eyes sparkling merrily. "Okay, class. Today, we have a lesson in logic. Let's examine the case." His face was pale and his voice was a little weak, but other than that, he clasped his hands in front of him and bowed and moved like a professor. On cocaine.
"I'll start with the small things. First up, we have the bullet wound to my shoulder. This is a classic example of a failure of logical thinking. You see, when Fae pulled a gun out and told you all to throw away your cell phones, you hesitated. I don't know why, because I got rid of mine pretty quickly. When someone delivers an ultimatum, you should listen to them, evaluate the circumstances, and then act in a way most suitable to the situation. Such as: throwing away your fucking cell phones instead of sitting there like shit-tards and watching him blow a hole through me." He always had felt more comfortable cursing around Fae.
"Second, we have the bullet through my knee. This one's harder to see, but if Guin had examined all the material, he would have been able to avoid it. Fae told him, basically, to lie. However, Guin should know by now that Fae is not a fan of lying. He is, in fact, a fan of blunt and uncaring truth. Case in point: he was so blunt to a girl once that she almost committed suicide. I don't know how many of you know Courtney who works at the coffee shop, but it was her friend's quick thinking and LOGIC that saved her life a few weeks ago. That's why Fae thinks I should die, rather than him, but we'll get to that later. So when Guin lied to him, even under duress of his life, he should have known that that kind of stupidity is the kind of thing that gets holes blown through people's knees.
"Third is the first actually entertaining case. Mrs. Buckshire, who is very cool, as she just demonstrated," he bowed towards her, "and I'm not shitting you, that was awesome â€" she recognized truth when she saw it, both in my words and in Fae's. She knew that Fae was willing to not only kill her, but control his flailing muscles as he died to murder several of you. So she put her gun down when he asked her. This is an example of logic put to good use, and we should congratulate her. So when this is over, you fucking congratulate her.
"Finally, the fourth case, and this one may take a while to explain, so I'll shorten it so that my oxygen supply does not get too fully depleted and you all end up with a poor explanation. That would be terribly rude of both of us." He looked to his captor, and Fae nodded. He spread his arms wide and smiled beatifically. "See? We're both reasonable people. Reasonably, I decided that one of us probably needed to die if the other ever planned on accomplishing anything in this world, because the reason both of us exert is, unfortunately, hindered each by our own little flaws. Fae caught on remarkably quickly to my plan to use Guinnevon's little hidden homosexuality and said fox's own flowering concept of his own potential, combined with a bit of evil, social scheming from my side, to drive the fox entirely insane and get him to come to class with a gun, then shoot Fae's brains out because my own logical and emotional arguments would cause him to place the blame on Fae instead of me for his horribly muddled little mind." People looked at Guin in surprise, and he shrank into himself a little, crossing his arms over one another as he huddled down.
"There are three major flaws to the logic of this. The first comes from Guin. First, Guin believed that he could actually change things for the better by bringing a gun to school and killing one or both of his friends, and probably Mrs. Buckshire. In fact, Mrs. Buckshire is only here because I gave Mr. Muller a heart attack because I thought if I could disrupt Guin's concentration by placing it on her, first, then it would give me a better chance of getting him to switch aim to Fae. Well, Guin, look at this. It didn't help so much after all, did it? Do your best to salvage this when I'm dead, all right?
"The second flaw comes from me. I underestimated Fae. I thought that when I was talking to him about this two nights ago, I had convinced him that we would let Guin do all the faulty reasoning. We knew this was coming, both of us, and we were prepared to battle it out and see what in all hell would happen, because wouldn't you know it, I'm the only one, or so I think, who really knows what's happening. And don't worry: Fae thinks he is, too. I didn't think that Fae would pickpocket Guin's gun before class and take his own initiative to kill me before I could kill him. My mistake." He bowed accession and folded his hands before him, formal and resolute to the end.
"And lastly, there is Fae's flaw." Fae glanced at him quickly, then shifted his gaze, which had deadpanned, to the class again and froze in place at what he saw. "All of us do things wrong, see? Fae made the mistake of letting me come up to the front of the class and monologue. Now, while he's been zoning out because his mind got used to that from being a stoner, Guin has pulled out the extra gun he brought, because as a passive, rich-bred guy, he wasn't sure that one would really do the trick. And now, as you can see, it has all been made ready, and Guin really will be the one to decide all this. Either both of us die, or just me. See, class? Everyone makes mistakes. If all of us had been thinking clearly, none of us would be where we are now." He bowed deeply while the gun followed his head, then looked up from under his eyebrows with a vile glare. "So don't make mistakes. People die from mistakes, and you're about to witness that."
Fae turned his gaze to him without even blinking while Guin's hands shook with the weapon he was holding and Jeck put his hands in his pockets nonchalantly. The squirrel didn't dare turn his extra one on the fox, not with him in that state of mind. "Did you really know he'd have another one beforehand?" he asked quietly.
Jeck slowly shook his head. "Made that one up on the spot." He raised his voice and addressed the perplexed, semi-hysterical class again. "Now, before dear Guinnevon here does something abnormally stupid, which would still not entirely be his fault because I targeted him specifically because I knew how little he had been trained in these particular arts, can anyone tell me what any one of the three of us could do that would most help the situation?" His eyes darkened and became penetrating as he challenged the students before him. "And this isn't ass-tard ‘new wave' education, so there are wrong answers. And no, we didn't plan this, and yes, at least one of us will be dead before this is over. This is not a game. Not by your standards, anyway."
One girl immediately said, "Both of them could put their guns down! This is stupid!" Her eyes were red with tears.
Jeck glared at her angrily and exhaled furiously, like a bull. Red was staining his shirt and pants. "Fae, I'm going to move around behind Mrs. Buckshire's desk."
The squirrel cordially accompanied him back. Once there, Jeck slammed his fists onto the desk and shouted, "WRONG!" Buckshire's eyes flew to his hands. Had he dropped something? He ignored the piercing pain in his shoulder and the blood that flew out of it with the motion. "Are you stupid? Do you not have a brain? Did someone hurt you when you were little? Is that why you gave one of the stupidest answers you possibly could? When I say, ‘any one of the three of us,' I don't mean, ‘all of us.' Those are two different statements, and unless you have a hearing impairment, don't â€" fucking â€" give me â€" fucking â€" stupid answers! Christ, I wish I had a gun so I could shoot your finger off so you could never, ever forget what stupidity does to people! Does anyone have a reasonable answer, or should we just unfreeze this whole retarded tableau and let Guin figure out which one of us to shoot? There is more than one right answer! You can't all be wrong. I hope." With a disgusted sneer, he turned from the girl, who was now crying, and surveyed the class again. Tears were tracking down Guin's face and he had clenched his teeth at the psychological battering Jeck was giving him. "And Mrs. Buckshire, I'm only calling on you if you're the last one in here."
There was silence. Everyone's eyes were wide that were not closed, everyone's breath was quick that was not the slow and even breathing of unconsciousness, and everyone's mouths were hushed that were not sobbing into the dead air. Jeck slapped the table. "In ten seconds, I will do something that will force Guin to shoot one of us, whether you pathetic fuckers have learned your lesson or not!" He suddenly forced a calm on himself and breathed evenly while he spoke. He apologized: "I'm sorry. I don't usually curse this much. I'm stressed right now, and I'm trying to use my language to express that, and I shouldn't. I apologize. But I'm down to five seconds. Five. Anyone? Four."
"Someone answer him!" Fae shouted. All eyes shifted to him. "It's not that hard!"
"Two." Back to Jeck.
"Kindelford Gates, don't be stupid!" Mrs. Buckshire yelled. To her.
"One." To him.
A hand shot up. Immediately, Jeck's eyes shot to it. "Yes, Fiera? And don't tell me you just did that to stop the count-down, because I swear to God-"
"Fae could put his guns down," the girl spat out in a rush. She breathed in and out quickly, chokingly. It was one of Guin's hangers-on. The ones from before weren't in this exam, but she was... tenth, Jeck seemed to remember, in the class.
"Surprisingly good! That is one of the several correct answers, and one of the better ones. Could you tell the class why it's a good answer?"
"It's... it's math," she said quietly, to herself, looking down at the desk. "If... if Guin shoots Fae, Fae will convulse and shoot Jeck and... and someone else, and they'll all be dead. If Guin shoots Jeck, then only Jeck will die. If Fae puts his guns down, only one person can die. From... from that instance, anyway."
Jeck's face lit up like a jack o' lantern. He was exuberant. "Yes! Yes, wonderful! You're not stupid! Congratulations! All of you should listen to her! What a good idea!" In his excitement, he moved his head out of Fae's line of fire before the squirrel could react and slammed his arm into the squirrel's, dislodging the one gun. Guin took advantage of the distraction, as Fae swung his other around to Jeck, and shot twice. One hit Fae's arm and the other grazed his neck, causing him to start bleeding profusely, rivers tracking down his side in seconds. It happened so quickly that few in the classroom could remember the order of events afterwards. Jeck was perfect.
"It was me?" Fae whispered, staring at nothing. "No..."
Jeck was like a bear separated from its mate, like a lion from its cubs, like a doberman from its master. Something animal, something feral, came out of his features and swung the entire front of the room into ethereal darkness like that of the new moon. "You idiot!" he erupted, and violently snatched Fae's other gun from him before throwing him to the ground. "How stupid do you have to be? How stupid can one person be?" He locked the gun on the center of Guin's chest. "I told you the answer, and you ignored it! Kill me now, Guin, or I swear to God, I will take out you, Fae, me, and everyone else in this class!" Anyone looking at him was looking into the very eyes of Hell. Most of the students shrank from him, frightened beyond what fear they had ever witnessed before. "KILL ME, GUINNEVON LEARY!"
Guin shot. Pop. He didn't miss that time, or the next. Pop.
Two holes appeared in Jeck's chest. He looked down at them, still holding the gun, while Fae looked up at him from the floor. Jeck grinned madly. "This is the beginning, and this is the end," he whispered to no one in particular, then raised his voice. It was as though he didn't have four bullets in him. "That didn't do it, Guin. I feel fine. Shoot me again, I ain't dead yet! Shoot me!" There were screams from everywhere, including the teacher. Fae was watching coldly.
"I won't save you, Jeck," he murmured during the next two shots. Pop, pop. From those words, Fae knew that Razor was dead and that Jeck must have met him and killed him if the human was still alive and knew the words to say them. Crimson had soaked the whole of Jeck's chest, but he kept grinning and hopped out from behind the desk, gun still levelled. Only ripples. He was only feeling ripples. The one was silent.
"I'll kill you, Guin," he choked, knowing his eyes were losing their fire, and threw gasoline on them, burning everything with the ripples of his flame. "I'll murder you right now." Pop, pop, pop. Click. Jeck dropped his gun with a bloody laugh. "Clip's empty." The human fell to the ground, bereft of the strength that had held him for so long.
Fae immediately got up, stepped over to him, and knelt down by his ear, tears refusing to course down his rage-drenched face. "I win, Jeck. I didn't save you."
Jeck laughed again in a choke that spat globules of crimson life splattering onto the tile floor. "No you don't, you stupid fucker," he breathed out, finally calm. "Don't you get it? When I said I'd explain everything, I didn't think I'd have to actually do it. Dumbass." He breathed harshly, trying to suck in enough air to say what was necessary. Guin was frozen in his seat.
Fae's face screwed into one of confusion. He didn't usually have to do that. "What?"
"I just committed suicide," he said, loud enough for other class members to hear. "Faeram Marshall is not to blame! Guinnevon Leary is not to blame! I am the culprit!" His words slurred together from the blood foaming at his lips, but the class could hear them clearly, whether they chose to listen or not.
"No, no you didn't," Fae said quickly. "No you didn't. I just altered events. I just put things so that when you thought you had me killed, I wouldn't save you, and you'd die instead of me. That's how it went down, right? Are we telling the truth now, Leif? Come on." He held the human's head up, even with his wounded arm, and looked in his eyes. "Come on, Jeck."
Jeck smiled and shook his head. "No. From the beginning, this was the plan. I took those bullets so they wouldn't hit you. Because we need to break out of our little flaws, Fae. We're each one step from actually accomplishing something..." he choked on his own blood, and Fae held him up so he could cough it out, red painting his white, blanching skin with rubies. "But you're better at it than I am. You just let your guard down, is all. So I'm setting you free. You're free, Fae." His eyes hardened one last time and he clutched at Fae's collar. "Break this fucking world in half, Fae."
The squirrel watched the light in his friend's eyes fade again, and he knew it was all the truth. "No. No, Jeck! Come on, Jeck, you can still pull through! There's got to be some... some other way." He could feel the ripple of Jeck's unsteady heartbeat as the muscle pushed the ruby water of life out of the holes in its system. "You could have just told me, we could have done this together!"
"No. As long as we're in stasis, we don't... ripple. We don't do anything. We just... die." His voice dropped until it was barely audible. "But Fae! Tell Sarabi I really love her. Tell her she should- should stay with you. Lie to her if you have to to get her to work with you. She can be one of us, too. And tell Guin to... put the gun down..." He fell back with a sigh. Gaze and heartbeat and lungs were dead, lifeless. He didn't hear the final screams, and he didn't hear the final shot.
Guin swallowed a bullet from Buckshire's gun, but he wasn't thinking very hard. All he wanted was the bullet to sever his spinal cord, effectively decapitating him. He didn't think the bullet would fire through him when Buckshire tackled him and lodge in Fiera's frontal lobe, instantly killing her as it knocked him into a coma. And as she had predicted, because Fae didn't put his gun down, three people died in that room that day. It just happened differently than they all expected.
And that was how it fell apart. While Fae tried desperately to keep everything calm, to control the situation so everything could go on like it should have, to spray the ammonia he had in his bag so there couldn't be easy evidence, someone got to a cell phone. Guin shouldn't have died. Fiera shouldn't have died. The cops were called. Special forces took "control" of the situation, ushering the weeping, hysterical kids out of the classroom, evacuating the school. Parents were called, exams were rescheduled. Jeck shouldn't have died. Fuck you, Jeck. Fuck and fuck and shit and damn me to Hell and back. Fae was thrown to the ground and arrested while Buckshire looked on with tear-filled eyes. The parents, relatives, and friends of the deceased wept for hours on end, to be followed with decades of sorrow for the loss. And no one gave an accurate story.
Except one.
"Faeram Marshall is charged with the shooting deaths of three children in a massacre... no comment from the accused..."
"...at the school shooting when Faeram Marshall, a known user of LSD, heroin, and marijauna, attacked a classroom..."
"...unresolved gay relatonship..."
"...no video surveillance tapes are available..."
"No one has a ready answer for why the targets were chosen... students' stories range from double-murder-suicide to unintentional homicide... no one can make sense of this terrible tradgedy."
"Karin Buckshire, former CIA agent and math teacher at the high school, though she was the only adult present, has refused to comment until she testifies on Marshall's court date..."
"Some schools are thinking of putting video surveillance in their classrooms..."
"I would like the court to recognize that I am of sound mind and body," Karin Buckshire proclaimed from the witness stand. It was several weeks after the murders. Faeram Marshall was handcuffed, his tail was chained to his orange jumpsuit, and his eyes were brighter than she had ever seen them as he held his narrow gaze up at her. He did not appear to have suffered at all from withdrawal syndromes.
"The court has already testified to that, madam," the judge said patiently.
"I know, your Honor," she said with a voice strong and clear. "What I am about to tell you is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which I have sworn by my God and to this courtroom to tell. Most of you will not believe it, because most of you, at this point in your lives, have lost faith in the youth of this generation, as all adults have always lost faith in their own children." Through her glasses, her eyes were stern, but when she removed them, the red corners, ugly and newly wrinkled from days of weeping, could be clearly seen. "I will tell you why this boy is not guilty. I will tell you that he is not responsible for a single death, and why he has refused to speak a word to any of you since that day."
"Ma'am, you are aware that he is not on trial for murder? He is on trial for inciting a riot with deadly consequences."
She fixed him with a teacher's glare before he could blink, and he backed down. "On that day, your Honor, two people attempted suicide, both by their own volition, one succeeded, and one unfortunate girl, through no fault of this young man before me, lost her life."
This time, the prosecution addressed her angrily. "You are aware that fingerprints and DNA evidence of all three were found on the guns, and that every student witness has testified that Faeram Marshall was the first to fire one? Leary was clearly influenced by-"
"Do not lead me, Mr. Jeffers. I am perfectly capable of telling the truth without you." He received the same treatment as the judge, who motioned him to take his seat. Fae let loose a tiny smile that Karin did not catch. From then, she proceeded to tell her story, from the day she brought Guin and Fae to her desk after class, providing every piece of information she had managed to gather. She spoke only facts, telling in exact detail what had occurred on the day of the deaths. When she was done, she also brought a tape recorder out of her purse.
"Jeck Gates left this on my desk before he died. It is a recording of every word that was spoken that day, and will show you undeniably that he intentionally assumes all responsibility for all offenses."
"Ma'am, that is new evidence, we can't..."
A crackled voice cut through the courtroom as she held the machine up to the microphone. "My name is Kindelford Jeck Gates, son of Danielle and Harvard Gates, brother of Geoffrey and River Gates, boyfriend of Sarabi Chism. On December 16, 2010, I will cause the death, hopefully, of Kindelford Jeck gates, son of Danielle and Harvard Gates, etc., that is, me. This is not the most obvious suicide you have ever heard of, but what follows is a recording of the day I died."
The first voices were muffled and chaotic, as though from a crowd. Then Mrs. Buckshire's voice came out clear as the sound died down: "All right, class, here are your papers..." It went on from there, and on, and on, and no one in the courtroom spoke a word until the last understandable words were spoken: "No. As long as we're in stasis, we don't... ripple. We don't do anything. We just... die." Then, a gunshot, followed by screams. It clicked off, out of tape.
"Now," Karin said, drying her eyes with a handkerchief, "is that something that a boy who had been murdered would do?"
Obviously, the courtroom detonated in sound and fury as both sides began arguing with one another. Karin and Faeram were led out and the judge declared a recess until the evidence could be verified as reliable. But, though they were on opposite sides of the room and facing away from one another, Fae and Karin shared a small, bitter, grim smile. Jeck had taken care of Fae and Guin, in the end. No one would be able to dispute the tape after it was analyzed. Fae would be free. He would be absolved. What follows is the speech he gave, when finally released.
"This is what happens when you don't think about what you're doing," he said, his voice scratched, but commanding to the crowd before him. "Jeck knew. He knew what it was like to live in a world where people actually listened and actually cared about one another, but instead, he lived here. Here, where people are so wrapped up in themselves that they don't take time to think and end up killing someone else because of it." He took a moment to breathe, and looked at the masses with nothing on his face. "This is not Guin's fault, any more than it is anyone else's in this world. Jeck could have chosen any of you and you would have shot him in the end." His voice picked up strength as he went. "It's what he does, it's what he's good at. He can see all of your little flaws that you all overlook and he can grind cigarettes in them until you hurt so badly that you just want to kill something! He made Guin kill him so that all of us could see that actions have consequences. That is all he wanted to say, because so few people seem to get it. It's not a difficult concept." He was breathing quickly, clearly fighting back an emotion that would be inappropriate for the podium, the barked, "Is there anyone here who still fails to understand that, who has embraced their mental density so tightly that they refuse to grasp the meaning of his sacrifice? Because if there is, speak now! I will not have his death go to waste!" he snarled against the rest of them, and no one challenged him. "There is a moral and intellectual deficit in the workings of the world today, and he wants you all to see it and fix it!"
As long as we're in stasis, we don't ripple. We don't do anything. We just die.
May there be an epilogue.
_pulse
ripple
pulse
ripple
shake
pulse
ripple
pulse
pulse
pulse
pulse
pulse "Can you hear me?"
tap ripple break "Come on, wake up."
It's too cold. Why is it so cold? Just to oppose Hell?
light
kind of.
Standing up. Black face. Snake scar. White eyes. Scarf? A smile. "Wake up, Leif."_
"How did you find me?" The voice was gone. The deed was done.
"I can cause... anything. Thanks for the scarf, by the way. I don't know when my throat'll heal, though, so I think I'll keep this for a while."
"We have to get out of here. Most people die when they think they're supposed to."
Grin. "I brought two shovels. Let's get this done, and I'll fix those bullet holes up nice and proper. You look fucked up to hell and back."
Jeck started filling in his grave and could still hear the words Fae had spoken over it ome days ago. They made him smile, even as tears, fresh from the moisture of the earth above the grave, fell where he had lain.
_"Do not stand on my grave and weep.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am the thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you waken in the morning's hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
of gentle birds in circling flight.
I am the soft star that shines at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry-
I am not there. I did not die."_
This is the end, and this is the beginning.