vigilantly taxonomish
Welcome back, SPACE. 
You said to let you know if it's confusing, so honestly, there is an aspect which I'm finding a little confusing, and that's the pronouns. They make it a little hard to follow.
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This foreboding is fa...
For a counterpoint, I found it not too hard to follow by remembering that all the genders were exactly flipped, save Lyon Prime (I think? Was he supposed to be flipped as well? Didn't notice if he was.)
I wonder if Lux is confident enough yet to disregard Aubrey prime's "corrections". Or at least confident enough to ask him some questions about their last few minutes of conversation...
Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
She Lives and Writes More yay!
edited 19th Jun '11 9:20:03 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
⚙
Thought I might update today, but nope. Fridays until I get out of this tangled bit.
@Bobby: After looking it over, I think that is best addressed after an update or two, when they are not a problem anymore, and I can look at this whole situation as it is complete.
However, for everybody, there shall be a small guide below my post to temporarily compensate for what I may not be handling so clearly in this initial draft. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
⑨
THE ALMIGHTY PRIME'S GUIDE TO THIS TOMFOOLERY
Sims with gender flipped as of verbal log entry (post, in your crude speak) 573: Aubrey Prime, all non-admin simulated laypeeps. The status effect has lifted their entire history of identity, as with a tremendously oversized salad fork, from their surveillance data roots, and they are being referred to by the opposite of their original form's pronoun for the duration of the effect.
Non-sims with gender flipped as of post 573: Ginger, upon entering the simulation via immersive. The effect will be null upon disconnection from her immersive. She is being called "he" while inhabiting her status-effect'd avatar because look, all those hundreds of other times she has been disguised as a dude for undercover debauchery, she's been rather adamant that I follow through with it verbally, so what am I to do? Just in case there's something personal behind it, one of those things from the pre-computer age that I wouldn't understand.
Sim unaffected by ye status effects: Yours motherfuckin' Truly.
edited 21st Jun '11 12:12:29 AM by Lugdunum
"█████ ████ ██ ████████"
This foreboding is fa...
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
"Corrections" as in "whatever incorrect stuff Ginger's getting Aubrey Prime to say." That the documents are fake and Lux's conclusion about the Langleys' is wrong, even though it seems to be correct.
Also, unless I misread your response...glad I could help.
edited 22nd Jun '11 5:30:23 PM by deathjavu
Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.
⚙
Ah. Maybe that can be worked in. And you did help.
*dispenses classic Robot Spiel*
“No, but..." said Aubrey. "...no.”
Ginger laughed anxiously. “Me, neither...hell, it would be one of the less bizarre things he's ever convinced himself of.”
“I mean no, I can't tell Lux that.” Aubrey . “He's spent so long making sense of those papers, and they were so dry that they put the poor thing to sleep...”
“They keep drawing you to them.” Ginger sprang to her feet after her, but then went still, twitching a little. His face betrayed that he was doing his damnedest not to throw Aubrey through the ceiling with his little finger. “You know what I've made them into—better than anyone why that family is dangerous. I told you so the first time...imagine someone you love being killed by something you created, and then if he went near them again.”
“He couldn't. He's still dead, and you made me with his surveillance data to replace him.”
“Is that what it is? Why you're doing this to me?” Ginger asked. He wanted to know. And despite whatever the mind inside this faulty Aubrey had done, she did have the real one's face—or at the moment, a ladylike semblance of it. Ginger's eye, trained longer than any mortal's to read faces, could always make out when there was trouble behind that face, no matter how well-hidden, and he could remember how it had teemed with ghosts on the night of the true Aubrey's death—up to the very last minute.
They had disagreed about Lux II—the real two, with the correct sexes intact. Ginger knew what had made Lux, and she had seen the archduke as no more human than a bomb. Aubrey had seen only another spawn of another weird family, and he could not perceive the greatest differences between the Londons and the Langleys. He had wondered whether the Langleys would stop being so eager to lash out at the world that hated them if someone out in it didn't hate them—if someone like the Londons offered them a place as one of their own.
Aubrey had met Lux two times, and the first time, he was all questions. No, there was nothing he could do with a face or a voice like his to make it look very friendly, but he had tried hard to get around it. That meeting did not last long—they had planned on speaking to the Fates that night and getting it done in one go, but that had somewhat bloodily not panned out. What Ginger knew was that Aubrey's earpiece had cut out rather early in the meeting. There had been a childish mumble from Demetrius some distance from the speaker—downstairs again—just too far to make out the words. Then, Aubrey had said “Wait here.” Then the earpiece had gone out with a crash. Ginger was afraid that Lux had gotten murderously tired of all the questions and warned Nitya, who ran downstairs with Lucrezia, ordering Ginger to keep listening to the earpiece.
Aubrey came back up alive, without Lucrezia or Demetrius, closely beside Nitya. Ginger asked what had happened, but though he tried to speak a few times, no sound would come out; he looked like he was trying to apologize for that with his eyes. And there was some blood on his face—right there, above the eyebrow. No, the other one. Just too high up for it to be his own blood. Damn it; it had been him, not Lux. He aimed to wipe the blood off with his hand, but missed by inches; Nitya did it for him.
“I'll be—“ Aubrey began, but there was something in his throat. It probably was his throat. “—er—” He gestured to his bedroom and headed that way. “Sorry.”
Ginger tried Nitya for an explanation, but Nitya just returned to her the usual resentful snarl and walked off without a word.
Demetrius. Where was the child? Had there been some accident? Was he alive? No, wait—Deva dragged him upstairs and past Ginger. Deva looked pissed at him—and Demetrius knew to keep his mouth shut. But he was okay.
Ginger followed Aubrey to ask again, what the hell had happened, but when she got to his room, he was already asleep—under the covers, but with all of his clothes still on. He had even forgotten to remove his shoes.
Or maybe he didn't really sleep that much. Even normally, he slept alarmingly little, especially for his age. He definitely was awake at some point in the morning when no one else was, making some quiet phone call to Bones where she did almost all of the talking. She was going to do something or other with his brain in three days, like look it over.
He and Ginger had been protecting the Fates for a little while now; even if he had never killed anyone before, he had since then. Though no one had died this time, something was special about it—maybe Demetrius had seen? But something different moved him to finally check his fears with Bones once and for all.
Three days, though. Just an impending exam did nothing for him yet, and it showed when his next encounter with Lux II flipped the first on its head.
Ginger had ordered him to scare Lux into behaving, for his own safety. Not to scare her. She listened to him through their earpieces and watched him through the security cameras when he floated past them at the right angles. His body language had shifted from welcoming Lux to challenging Lux to welcome him—into what? Okay, she had thought, you can fuck his corrupted brains out if it comes to that, but you're coming on a little strong. Blowing a kemuri bubble into someone's face, due to its invasive effect one's mind, was always coming on too strong.
Realizing why was worse than puzzling at his behavior—he was insisting to Lux that he was one of the Langleys' kind himself.
No. Um, hell no. You're not even in the same world as them, she had thought, only able to watch. They're the worst, besides me—I made them to be. They're premeditated, the worst breeding experiment in history. Stop mirroring his face, like you're relating to him. It's impossible for you. Stop, it doesn't look right on you. Oh, dear gods...for all your reputation, for all your grim sculptures, dangerous tastes and genuine sketchiness, you have never once gave me the creeps. Not even one creep. Not until right now. Look, Lux has killed way more than you and enjoys it. You get bloody catatonic and stop trusting yourself because you gave some fuckass who threatened Demetrius a beating. Hell, Lux wouldn't have taken Demetrius in—he would've used him for target practice! Stop destroying the distance between you and that blind idiot golem—you're going to get within knife's length. Please talk to me about last night. The minute you finish with Lux, I'm going to try—
And then the lengths of a whole lot of pointy things went straight through him. Aubrey would not talk again for any reason.
Back in the simulation, Ginger could not even bear to watch a false, rogue Aubrey-like sim exit existence with any fear of that size shut inside. “Is that it?” he said. “How you came into the world? No, it wasn't a perfectly inoffensive idea. It came to me fast; I was in a bad way at the time. But who does begin life because of anything excellent? The other sims are made to be nothing but imitators, to do what so many cameras tell them to. So many of the humans they imitate are there because of nothing but that their mum and dad wanted them. Even the original Aubrey London—hell, his mother didn't want him. And me—I was created because a god was afraid he might get in a slap fight with a spoiled little girl. I don't believe it can begin well—I can't. It's what comes after that defines everything? Wasn't that better for you?”
Aubrey seemed, at first, to ignore the question. “I think it began for me when I discovered that it couldn't be. Do you remember how I found out that I was a bot and not the man?”
“You asked me, one morning, if you were real. Astute of you. I answered because it was also charmingly accurate.”
“But what compelled me to ask? I will tell you: doubt that I was afraid to warn you of, that would never have troubled the real Aubrey. Afraid—” Her voice had cooled by now, no longer shaking—as placid as it had ever been. It looked like her eyes had never shed any tears before. “—a visual imitation of afraid. Look. Please. I have communicated in nothing but superficial visuals and sound all my life. That is all any sim knows—in fact, like most, most of my life was scripted for me by Aubrey's surveillance data. The unexpected autonomy that came when you introduced the column, stopping the incoming data and, for us, stopping time, was something to adjust to, but I had the patterns of my past behavior in the logs to follow—it could be done. But what came next would be impossible.”
A whole new kind of being stepped into my world. She said her name was Anima—yes, I could understand her words, but her communication was foreign. There were currents underneath her words that I could not read pictographically. Like...I eject pictures of tears when the logs inform me that in my surroundings, someone named Aubrey London would cry...Anima actually could cry. And she was actually in love with me.”
I was fortunate that the real Aubrey had a frightful capacity for love, so I could imitate it very well. But all the while, underneath, I was never anything but failing to compute the rest—suspended in a more perfect void than dream space. Your artificial intelligence is good, but even I, not in any sense qualified to judge it, know that it isn't life yet. Maybe too good. It is in a place on the edge of life where a sim cannot comprehend love, but may have detailed enough logs—and gods, I did—to know that their counterpart would dearly want to love. I wanted to badly.”
“But if she really loved a sim, I thought, wouldn't she understand what that meant? I hoped. For fourteen years. But then I received an alert of something that changed it all...bloody all of it...an innocent little redheaded alert who wasn't supposed to be outside. I remembered Kenichi from my older logs, and I'd never seen anything that suggested he deserved what my Anima was doing to him.”
And then what did he discover? Raise in my mind? Show me in the collapsing city that followed when he ran away? That you had been Ginger all along, the real one, looking to me for the real Aubrey you'd lost, and I wasn't him. No matter how much you loved me, I could only give you empty sound and image back. You, who is supposed to be the love of my bloody life...!”
I was created for a task I could never complete—that is why I'm upset.”
Give anyone, even your Aubrey, the unexpected challenge of being a more advanced species than they are, and they will grow into something unlike themselves.” Aubrey's black eye quivered, but her voice remained even. They will begin playing games. My purpose is what I cannot do, so I am doing something I can—trying to pull two innocent people out of the hands of a manipulator. I know it dashes that initial purpose. I don't like to do this...but it was always dashed.”
Aubrey had spoken, but the weight would never leave her. Ginger began weakly, “You wouldn't—“
“Aubrey wouldn't.”
“Fine. You aren't complete. You couldn't be. But I perpetuated you after the column from piece of him. Does someone lost not stay alive in memory? I put that life into you.”
“Which was filtered through you first,” said Aubrey. “Wasn't Aubrey so much less reserved around you than anyone else, for instance? That is how you remembered him, and so I am less reserved than him always. And worse. I'm not the same at all. Please do what you came for quickly and destroy me,” she asked in the same voice with which she would ask for a kiss.
“Aubrey, the one I loved,” Ginger began, “would not play these games. Not with someone who can never have the relief of death. Not with someone's eternity he was prepared to go to any length to share. You're right; you are not him. That's why I'm updating the column and erasing you. You are rogue. You are batshit rogue.”
One thing had stayed exactly the same about Aubrey through Ginger's status effects was her necklace. The one from Ginger, with the little bottle on a string. He seized the bottle from the neck of her dress and and tore the necklace off her, breaking the string. Aubrey was unfazed by the sting.
Lyon Prime was still frozen in the background. He had forgotten to move while trying to process this madness. “Oh my gods, you guys.”
Ginger took the string in his hand and whipped her once in the temple with the bottle. Aubrey still did not react at all, too far gone and too aware of her artificiality to take pain seriously anymore.
Lyon Prime said, “You guys are so disturbed. Serious—” He stepped between Aubrey and Ginger, nearly catching a bottle in the face.
Ginger bared her teeth at him. “And the hell are you doing encouraging this rogue sim, administrator?”
Lyon Prime answered automatically, “Everything. I did all of it, gave all the stuff about you away. She's only visiting, and her name is Lucille. Just leave each other alone—you're messing up my flowers. Please!”
“No,” said Aubrey. She put her hand on Lyon Prime's shoulder and moved him aside effortlessly. “He's just written to act like Hans Lyon as well as your administrator. It was myself who told Lux and Ryu everything—the baron is only prolonging the inevitable the little he can. I genuinely am batshit rogue...but before you update the column, can I have one more second to do something.”
Ginger said through her teeth, “Only one second. One...”
“I want to give myself a name. If I'm not Aubrey, who am I? May I please choose one for whoever I am?”
“Fine, if it doesn't involve moving.”
“It doesn't...” Aubrey took more than a second to think, but she did not take many more. “Corvus.”
“What.”
“Your first name, because if I am anyone, I am a projection of my writer, who is made of games. If I am anyone, I'm you.”
Ginger could not even raise another hand—no, for the last time, Corvus. She could barely move her lips. “Hans...go...do...the column thing. You know what I mean. Now.”
Lyon Prime seized up a little bit, looking like someone had just grabbed his brain with their hand. He turned abruptly to Aubrey. “I told you I would have no choice.”
“It's okay,” said Aubrey. She doubted Lyon Prime could make any motion back, but she squeezed his shoulder once. A little too tightly, like a woman. Of course they had none of that kind of affection for each other, but if they were both to live, such gestures would have become a terrible running joke between them. “No one will remember.”
“Except the admin, damn it.” Lyon Prime's body became more and more tense, being pushed from the inside to leave. He then stormed out, back downstairs. “Another world, sis.”
Aubrey and Corvus said nothing more to each other after he left. Maybe the anger on both sides had become unspeakable, not that Aubrey looked angry. Maybe they stared because they could no longer kiss at this point, though neither could turn away from what was about to happen. Probably, it was only that if either spoke, they stood the chance of being interrupted by Aubrey's disappearance and never being heard.
Corvus thought, You're not going berserk. Liar. He moved something besides his lips—reached for Aubrey's hand as if to hold it, but only shoved her bottle necklace into it with the force of a slap and withdrew.
Aubrey whispered, barely above a breath, “I changed my mind.”
Corvus said, “You'll call Lux for me?”
Aubrey shook her head emphatically, but moved no other part of her. “I don't want to be destroyed.”
Corvus looked up at her, confused. Despite how many times Aubrey had denied it, all he could see in her face was the real Aubrey, afraid.
“I...don't want to leave this.” She stared through Corvus's head, not asking for mercy or even speaking to him—only expressing a feeling. “I don't—”
Outside, blocks away, the midnight column retracted into the sky, never to return. Straight below, it was afternoon, and Aubrey London had been dead for fourteen years. Lucrezia, too, incinerated in her metal shell by the same hand. A misshapen Demetrius, seventeen years old, was confined to his father's old room, asleep, as he had been for far too many hours now. Deva and Miyagi's efforts to wake him had become desperate, but they found it impossible to even make him twitch.
Mister Corvus had never existed at all.
Lux and Lyon sat perfectly still, gaping at Lyon's screen. A few seconds ago, a stunned woman with a bottle necklace in her hand had stood in their view, but now there were only luminous flowers. The two of them barely breathed.
In Lux's case, it was because Lyon had his arm around him so tightly. Lyon's lip quivered, holding back fourteen years of triggered angst, and then some. “Fucking hell...she...she was so cute.”
Lux spoke, as much as he could manage, a bit strangled-like, “If Aubrey were still here...he would say you don't have to be upset. He'd say that only an image was lost.”
“Did you see her? Did you see her face, right before she went?” Lyon squeezed Lux even harder, cutting off his breath entirely. “If a lady can live a thousand years, I can say that I don't know what the hell kind of creature just got wiped out.”
Soooo evil, writing a mortal/immortal romance without warning anyone. It's like I am trying to outdo myself. >:]
I am going to be so upset over this messed up update come a few hours from now.
edited 24th Jun '11 5:48:36 PM by SPACETRAVEL
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
vigilantly taxonomish
Wow. Powerful stuff.
And thanks for the guide, Lyon Prime.
Welcome To TV Tropes | How To Write An Example | Text-Formatting Rules | List Of Shows That Need Summary | TV Tropes Forum | Know The Staff
⑨
How nice of you to thank m-
E.
Lyon
Prime
Is indeed
My name, which I don't have
To keep any longer to distinguish me from that
Ruffian, but I will because it's just that badass.
And good sirs and madams,
Please don't mind my dirtying of your
Pristine log fold-
Er , which is brought to you today by the letter
D.
Aardvarks
Neglect
Dogs (the BASTARDS).
Blah blah blah
Okay, let's face it; I'm just shit at this sec-
Ret m-
Essage thing.
D is a fucking annoying letter of the alphabet.
edited 24th Jun '11 7:55:13 PM by Lugdunum
"█████ ████ ██ ████████"
⚙
Just one more, split off for the sake of timing.
A chime sounded from his computer before he could babble any further. It was the program that was decoding Kenichi's augments. It had stopped, and an error message overlapped it that Lyon had written and programmed in himself to avoid infuriating situations like some he had encountered in the past. It read: “WARNING: Oceanic Prime. Give up, stupid.”
“Of course.” Lyon read it through the fingers of the hand covering his face. He let Lux go, his grip dying with a shudder. “Of course she would know it. We don't have years...only if we have a chance at shanghaiing the patron goddess of insane girlfriends and making her code against her own plot can it be done. I'm sorry, kid...it can't be.”
Lux's heart fell into his stomach. He gripped the edge of Lyon's desk so hard that he lost feeling in the tips of his fingers. “But there's words...I see them...! Your...program gave us so many of those words...”
The kid looked like Lyon had the day Lucille had run away. Lyon put his arm back around Lux just to keep him standing; he had needed one then. Amanda had tried to give him one—she had really, earnestly wanted to, but she just wasn't tall enough, and he did not get up for a long time. “Can't edit it.”
Lux took a few breaths before saying any more. He sounded like he was crying, but there was nothing in his eyes. “Can you see what else is going to happen to him?”
“Yeah,” breathed Lyon. “Yeah, I can tell you that.” With his free hand, he closed the error message and scrolled down through the code. “You know what happens to his skin? Energy he gets from it?”
“Yes, it's already happening.”
“Ridiculous conservation of water?”
“Yes, but I don't think he has it right yet.”
“It'll straighten out. Eyes—“
“Yes.”
“Right, I think that's...oh.” Lyon's scrolling slowed to a stop. “That's not all...oh, gods. Oh...oh man. Kid...?”
“What?”
“Look,” said Lyon, circling a block of code with his finger. “Can you read this?”
No, Lux couldn't.
“That block there tells Corvus's nanobots to go to the bits of Kenichi's brain that regulate speech and language. And this...” Lyon pointed to the next block down, a smaller and simpler one. “...this one tells them to shred those bits up into teenier, tinier dead bits. She isn't just coloring his skin; she's totally turning him into a species made to be the only one of his kind. When he stops talking, that's when you'll know that it's done.” He turned to Lux, face softer and more sincere than it had been in perhaps years. “When that happens, please, please let him go. Far from this city—I'm talking barren northwestern sun hell. If he could speak, I promise you that's what he'd be telling you to do eventually. Yeah, there are means to keep him here for the rest of his life, but it wouldn't be very long, and he'd spend most of it pretty much really, really sick. I know it was what Corvus intended, and I can tell how you feel about him, but there's no way around it.” He moved his hand to Lux's shoulder and but his free hand on the other. “Promise me you will consider letting him go.”
Lux took a few breaths and looked over Lyon's face before giving a tiny nod. Lyon's face looked the way his felt. He was serious.
“Thanks, kid.” Lyon smiled a tiny bit. “You really aren't like your dad.”
“Why are you smiling?” Lux snapped. “Something is wrong with Demetrius, too.”
“He did all he can handle for you. You can only use the city as a piano from one room with narcolepsy for so long. He needs the rest. We can take it from here.”
“Try. I'm the only one left.”
“That just means we can't lose you. Over my dead blue body is it going to be in vain that any one of you guys got fucked over. If you can stay down here just a little longer, I'll map out for you how we're going to end all this once and for fucking all, starting the nanosecond you get back to the skyscraper. Demetrius did what he did well, but you in one periodically attacked building forever just isn't sustainable.” Lyon finished his drink. “We're exposing you. We have to let Iosethep see who they have no idea you are, and that they have no damn business keeping you inside. Admit it to me, kid—you've got to be so bloody bored in that skyscraper by now.”
“You're drunk.” But Lyon was also very right. Lux bit back tears—he remembered the one and only thing about his father that he had a feeble imitation of a quarter of a speck of admiration for, that he now knew was true of all Langleys, even if they used it for self-destruction. Lux II had never given up. At least, he had never quieted down, not until his blood was on the walls of his top floor room. Lux's last memory of him was him yelling through the intercom, delightedly annoying his staff at the same volume he had all his life, regardless of his condition. “But...yes, I am. But something will go wrong. Corvus will make sure it does.” It felt weird pronouncing her name like that of a living biological miracle. He understood why his father had been obsessed with her and wondered how he had come to guess so much of what was going on. Then again, he had probably been eliminated because he knew too much. “She wants something from my family, and I don't know what it is, but we have to be crazy for it. We've been trying to stop her forever, and it's only made things worse.”
“Don't forget, you have two things the other Langleys didn't. One, her name. Two, numbers on your side. I mean, you will have numbers. Trust me. I'm your first.”
Footsteps. Lux gasped and looked behind him—Amanda had just come down the stairs. “What's going on?” she asked, worriedly. “Everything got quiet all of a sudden.” Knowing Lyon, that was a big reason to worry.
Lyon answered like nothing was wrong.
“What you hear, missy,” Lyon swiveled his chair around to face her, and at this point, Lyon Prime would have also pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the air and slowly put them on. However, Lyon was not Lyon Prime, so he didn't. Lyon Prime wouldn't have been able to anyway, as he was currently getting his administrative powers stripped indefinitely by a crying demigoddess. “is the sound of a show hitting the road. Our show. And it's quiet because it's a ninja show. They'll never see it coming."
END OF CHAPTER 10
edited 24th Jun '11 10:31:50 PM by SPACETRAVEL
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
Zzzzzzzzzz
I wanna kill her. Hunt down that bitch and kill her. Not you, Ginger. Corvus. Anima. Whatever the hell name she hides behind. How dare she. And oh boo-hoo she's hurting herself. Wah for her.
Spacetravel, this is powerful stuff, indeed....
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
⚙
lol, Magnus takes all the way until now to get introduced.
Deva was woken up deep into the afternoon by a very familiar sound—someone cutting through metal. Since Aubrey had died, there was no more reason for that sound ever to occur on any floor of the bar, but this sounded like it came from the unlikliest floor of all—just one below her bed. The only thing on that particular floor was Demetrius.
Magnus, however, did not lift his head from his pillow. He had joined Deva in the bar's empty noontimes to help look after Demetrius while Nitya away on whatever special super secret mission he had handed her. Demetrius necessarily needed two people staying with him at a time because, if worst came to absolute worst, one person alone was never enough to move him. Magnus blindly put a hand on Deva's arm when he heard her sit up. “He's trying his dad's art,” he muttered into his pillow. Deva heard him smile.”I might, too, if I were wigged as I last saw him...”
Due to Aubrey's talent for acting like nothing tense or special was ever going on, the first time he was ever caught sneaking out of his home in Sef was when he was sixteen and Magnus was four years younger.
Magnus heard him and their mother fight—within a radius of five miles of their shack, there was no avoiding it. He hid under his bed until it was over, something he did an awful lot while he still lived at home, regardless of age. He did not have to hide; Lucky London was never a physical threat to her boys. He just did not sleep a lot back then and thirsted for moments of darkness.
Magnus found it inexplicable, almost creepy the way Lucky singled Aubrey out for rejection the way she did—maybe for the same reason why she lived so far from and did not speak to the rest of the Londons. Aubrey didn't help, either. Sure, he had his desert tortoise-caliber mellowness, but that only made his rebellious strikes back at Lucky more startling, like a tortoise leaping from the ground and biting one's face. He never lay a hand on her, either, and he did not have the mind to manipulate like she did, but despite his appearances, he did have the ability to raise his voice sometimes, and the unspeakable things he would do with girls in Lucky's room while she was away approached their own kind of creepy.
Magnus, however, was not sure that the proper punishment for sneaking out for a night was locking Aubrey in his bedroom indefinitely, padlocking and boarding up the door and fitting bars into his window. The smallest available cat flap was even installed in the door for the delivery of meals. Lucky felt sure that Aubrey could escape and wanted to watch him take the time. He was twice her size, and he had dared to look at her as if her threat to lock him up didn't bloody phase him. If he could kick a chair through the drywall “by accident” (that had been a genuine accident, not that she believed so), surely he would be out in little more than a month.
Aubrey did not make a peep from inside his makeshift cell, passing the time by sleeping almost nonstop. Considering how noisy Aubrey was in his sleep, perhaps it was a passive-aggressive act; no one would ever know. Lucky seemed disappointed, in any case, that she had failed to get a verifiable rise out of him.
One day, a knock on the door woke Aubrey up. Did someone think they could get through all of that? Before he could ask who it was, Magnus's recognizably bony little hand stuffed a hat through the cat door—this black, wide-brimmed twentieth century antique that only Sef's most elderly would be caught dead wearing. Magnus had stolen it from one of said elderly because he knew Aubrey would feel the brittle age of its tag and fall in love with it. Aubrey did, audibly. More so when Magnus told him about the theft.
The same hat would be falling over Aubrey's sleepy eyes minutes before he died.
Magnus guessed that his brother was giving the window bars a wiggle or two between naps and that he would have worked them out in a few days had a friend named Clare not come from the outside and broken him and the hat out first. In any case, Aubrey was fortunate to be more than five miles away when Lucky unbolted his door to discover that what he had really done between naps was paint Lovecraftian eyeball monsters all over his walls and furniture.
That was the first time Magnus had wondered what Aubrey would do with a building if he stole one of those for him.
Now, Deva knew that Magnus was still half asleep; he slept more soundly in the afternoons than she ever would. The Chapals, by this time, were voluntarily and permanently in sync with the London circadian rhythm disorder, but they would never actually have it.
Deva could remember that Demetrius had already tried his hand at visual art once and had no will to ever do so again. She pulled Magnus out of bed with her despite his protests.
A circadian rhythm disorder was what Bones called it, but she wondered if the condition had been named for cases as destructive than the Londons'. She herself had become a doctor of criminals due to the difficulty of finding legitimate work for a doctor who could not sleep if not under sunlight and could not adequately perform during daylight hours. Lucky had been a rare London not born that way—Magnus wondered if that had at all played a part in how she wanted nothing to do with the others, and if so, had she loathed Aubrey because he was another nocturnal one?
Magnus dragged himself out of bed. He had the condition, too, but he had done in his childhood what Aubrey had not—forced himself into Lucky's sleeping habits to avoid confrontation. It hadn't worked, and having spent over a decade of his body's formative years only getting a few hours of sleep per night showed on him. Inside, he was no longer the child with the permanent head cold who had spoken in word salad and hung out under his bed a lot. His head and voice were perfectly sane, even witty now, even if his hands below were still burning through childhood reserves of crocodilean, rarely legal energy. Outside, though, he always looked like he had just sleepwalked out of the long term ward of a hospital despite being in good, albeit delicate, health. He had permanent dark circles under his eyes no matter how well he slept; Deva told him that his long white hair made them look more sunken, but he still liked it too much to cut it off. His frame was still just as bony as it had been when he was a child, and its skin flashed allergic reactions to almost everything more exotic than his own clothes. The worst had permanently made it look even spookier—he had tried an immersive just once and woke up with an instant bluish grey tint to his skin and his stomach trying to escape his body. The immersive's horrified owner swore it had never happened that way before. Fortunately, when he looked at himself in a mirror between buckets of vomit, he thought he looked pretty cool. He still did.
When Deva and Magnus got to Demetrius's door, they had to open it. He would not respond to knocking, and he did not sound like he was making art. The cutter sounded intermittently, and when it stopped, they could hear him muttering terrified sounding things, though they could not make out the words.
Deva unlocked the door and threw it open; a startled Miyagi nearly fell into Demetrius. His irradiator knife shook out of his hand and dropped to the floor. He cried, “He told me to stay—!”
Though he was taller than Deva, she managed to glare down at him anyway—way down. She pointed an irradiator at his face.
Miyagi's voice lowered again, to a trembling near whisper. “He told me...to keep building it...even if he wasn't awake...”
It was not Miyagi who was causing Demetrius any pain. Demetrius was talking in his sleep, from somewhere deep in another nightmare. He was not at his desk; the device he was in looked pretty nightmarish itself. He slept upright, lifted just off the ground by the restraints of a machine that wrapped around him several times and then, as it neared the floor, stood on many metal legs with many joints each. It looked inspired by a spider and needed enough legs for several spiders to stand on and hold him. About half of his black coatings remained wrapped around him, partially absorbing the machine and trailing on the floor; the other half were piled on his desk. His toes nearly brushed the floor. No one had seen his feet in a long time, and they were startlingly tiny for his age, so much so that they were probably deformed in some way.
Even though the whispers from Demetrius's mouth sounded scared, the rest of him looked comfortable. His head rested on a puffy mass of loose foam that Miyagi had gently wrapped around his neck just for that purpose, and his arms hung over the first metal wrapping, floating slightly off of his sides at doll-like angles.
Deva's expression did not change, but she did not move.
Miyagi took a piece of paper from Demetrius's desk. He looked at the floor. “He said you might not believe me, so he wrote you this.” He handed the paper to Deva.
The writing on it was beautiful enough to be Demetrius's—no one could replicate it. It said “I told Miyagi to continue working even in the absence of my consciousness.”
Miyagi pleaded, “Please—we can't fight now. Listen—I can't wake him up, however I try. He told me I could, that it would be easy...”
Deva lowered her irradiator, confusion replacing her anger. “It should be...it always is.”
“It's nothing I did—I promise! He was so tense this morning, and then he got a call from someone screaming weird things at him, and he passed out in the middle of it...that's it. I can't...” Miyagi demonstrated by shaking Demetrius and then clapping his hands once next to his ear, to no effect. “...he won't even stop dreaming. I...I think someone should call a doctor...”
Deva shouted, “Why didn't you sooner, bloody idiot?”
Magnus put a hand on her arm. “We'll call Bones...can we let mister Miyazaki work?” He stared at Demetrius, blindly gesturing at him. “He looks so much better like this...”
“That's what everyone said the first time.”
“The way he covers himself back there, usually, he looks like he takes up half the room, but look at him—he doesn't. I mean, not that he looks mobile or anything, but...I...I can see him. I...” He took a step toward Demetrius, but stopped and asked Miyagi first, “Could I...?”
Miyagi nodded.
Magnus approached Demetrius and lightly ran his fingers once over the machine; that was all he wanted with it. However, he stayed where he was. He asked Deva, “Could you call Bones?”
Deva agreed, hoping he wanted to stay to watch over Miyagi and scare him into not fucking up.
Of course he didn't; he wasn't that prudent. Magnus didn't even look at Miyagi as Deva activated her earpiece and Miyagi resumed trimming Demetrius's metal legs.
Magnus lay one unmoving hand on top of Demetrius's head, as he had many times crawled out from under his bed and done to a loudly dreaming Aubrey on afternoons in Sef. Those had been the only times he had ever seen his big brother visually frightened, and he had not known what else to do but talk to him and hope he could hear from inside his dreams. “It's all right; they're not going to get you,” he said quietly to Demetrius, something he was sure he had said before. “I'm not going to let them.”
edited 5th Jul '11 8:59:08 AM by SPACETRAVEL
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
Zzzzzzzzzz
Brrrrrr.
And this: "Sure, he had his desert tortoise-caliber mellowness, but that only made his rebellious strikes back at Lucky more startling, like a tortoise leaping from the ground and biting one's face."? What a great image.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
⚙
I'm not quite sure yet what is to come next = type out some trippy nonsense until it turns into plot again
Most uncertain point in the piece so far = lol, let's pull out all the stops
Language-wise, sleep is something one falls into or drifts off to—moving either down or away. That may be because the words do make sense for many—remember Aubrey, who weathered a trip down to hell every time he closed his eyes. For Demetrius and Lux alike, too, dreams were the only way they had to leave their constricted living space.
Dreams had worked that way for Kenichi, too—once. Not anymore. By the time Nitya stunned him, the nanobots were working their way into his brain, and the first thing to go was the way he had always dreamed.
His dream—the first of its kind and the only one he would ever have again—did not take him away from himself, but deeper inside, it seemed. The first thing he felt was more like himself than he ever had before, despite having totally exchanged the body for something very different from even the body of the Green Man. He certainly had not descended into this dream—into this form—either, but ascended. The earth and any creature on it seemed minute and dim in comparison. Was he some kind of god? If he wasn't, he was very close.
Whether or not he was, this creature was a wonderful thing to be. His sense of touch had risen to the point that he could feel particulate light, and wherever he was was so densely swimming with light that the textures of each partile blurred together into what he percieved as a viscous, fluid atmosphere of it. His body treated it like one, too. He stood on no ground but floated within this fluid, which alone held him up—a feat considering that he was the size of a large planet.
Physically, he was mostly composed of a vast mouth for drawing in the fluid light and a vaster reservoir that filtered and released it again; with each intake and release, his shape cycled through several variations of spheroid. He was limbless, but he did not need limbs because he had no drive to go anywhere else; his primary sense measured light concentration, and nowhere was light concentrated more tightly than here. Instead, his upper half was forested with tentacles that passively guided fluid toward the mouth and, once it was there, shaped it into the perfect vortex for descent inside. That which passed through the mouth then spun out into the giant, hollow body, which was bounded only by a translucent membrane made of something between mist and jelly in consistency. It was stretched to its limit, and the pressure forced the fluid light back out into the atmosphere through thousands of round, trisected valves in the membrane near his base.
The sensation of the fluid light both cradling the outside of him and murmuring against the inside was ecstasy made physical, and the sound of the process was sweet and hollow, the kind of sound one might imagine space to make if it could. The nicest thing, however, was how the light exited him unaltered from how it had entered—the notion that a creature like him would have to strip some nutrient from the light for sustenance was earthbound thinking. The current he and the atmosphere made together severed just fine as the heartbeat of a cosmic light-structure far vaster than himself, so neither Kenichi nor the fluid had to forcibly alter the other to give that structure life.
Kenichi was not sure what sort of structure—that is, where he was—but he got that he and the atmosphere were acting out love for one another to power it.
Maybe he could ask Tama about the where. Not that she would know, but she was right there, lying next to him and shaking him gently.
“Kenichi? You waking up, Kenichi...?”
Kenichi struggled to open his eyes. He wasn't in the infirmary; this was way too bright even for that. Something twitched at the corners of his eyes—oh yes, the dark eyelids. They were instinctively trying to close. He spread them over his eyes and could look up painlessly through them. Yes, he could see the sun overhead. He couldn't even be indoors anymore. He felt concrete under him through a feeble layer of blankets, and a glance over Tama confirmed that the two of them were lying on the skyscraper's roof.
Having pieced the setting together, he breathed more easily. Here he was, with his skin converted entirely into the Green Man's by now, under the maximum amount of sunlight any place in Iosethep could be exposed to, and he wasn't doing anything crazy. Far below, back in the atrium, he had been unable to slow down under half this amount of sun and feared what kind of destructive force he might become under more. Maybe it was partly the sedating effect of having been stunned or leftover peace from his dream, but now, he felt no drive to even get up. Or maybe the humming under his skin was just vibrating his limbs too hard to let them bend—or whatever it did. He gave up on trying to compare the photosynthetic feeling to a sound or anything he had ever sensed before and let it be what it was. Words were difficult to find. More than usual, even.
“Mm-hmm...” He exhaled, through a wide smile, “Hi, Tama...how did you get here? And me...why the roof?”
“There you are...!” She pulled him close to her, embracing him like she would never let him go. “Fucking finally...Nitya was worried about you. You wouldn't wake up all the way down there in bed—that's what Nitya said. That it had been all day, and you were still just drifting back off again every time she saw you stir a little bit. She carried you up here—because of what sunlight is supposed to do to you. She told me about that when she told me how to get into the skyscraper. You were reacting funny to the light when she put you out here, and it made her think you should be with someone who knows you better...what are you thinking?” She looked from his open eyes down to his smile. “You look so...” She did not want to say that she didn't expect him—him, of all people—to be in any kind of mood for smiling in his situation. Nonetheless, a smile of her own reluctantly twitched to life. “...so happy. What is it?”
“You,” Kenichi laughed quietly. “What did you think? And, dream I had...dear gods, it was the most beautiful best fucking thing...maybe I gave you guys trouble because didn't want to wake up from it.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I want to, but I'm not sure how; it was weird like that, too...but I can try.”
“Go on.”
He tried; she listened. It was hard to put to the right words, and yet he watched her eyes widen as if she understood it better than he did.
He concluded, “ The one thing I can't say at all was where all that stuff was taking place. I didn't really care where I was at the time, but...yeah, that's it.”
She said quickly, “You were in the core of a star.”
“It was like I'd imagine it to be like inside the sun or something...”
“You were this elder god kind of being that lives in the center of stars and circulates the star matter so they don't go stagnant and die.”
“I've never heard of anything like that.” Confusion replaced Kenichi's smile. The dream hadn't just come from his own head. “Was it...was I there for real?”
“Oh, no—“ Tama almost laughed. “—it couldn't be real; Aubrey London totally let scientific accuracy go for the sake of metaphor when he drew that one up. It's one of his pieces.”
“Not one I've seen before...”
“You haven't seen that one lamp? The yellow, lit up globe thing tucked kind of in the corner of the bar? About the size of your head, transparent, and it has your creature inside of it, exactly as you described it.”
“Kind of out of the corner of my eye because of the light, but not really—no, I've never gotten close enough to see anything inside.”
“Huh, maybe it's just me thinking it would be easier to notice,” said Tama. “With how it's the only thing in there that isn't all dark and eerie. I asked Deva about it once, and she just said that he put it back there because he couldn't fit it in with anything—but that was just what makes me curious about it. It makes me wonder what such a bright thing was doing in a head like Mister London's—what he was thinking when he made it. I could never even guess because I'm too young to have met him, but if you look at everything around it, you can tell it was something out of the ordinary. You sure you've never seen it? Because if you didn't, that would be...”
“Oh, no.” Kenichi barely hid how disconcerted he was at the thought that had just come to him. He knew how the dream had come about. “I probably have—been all over in there; I have to have. I think I just don't remember it.”
Tama quickly shook her head. “You think Ginger's bots wrote it into your head.”
Nitya had told her more than Kenichi had thought. It was okay; he would trust her with all of it himself. He slowly nodded. “More like scratched it in...and based it off his piece. I know me, and it's not something I could have come up with myself.”
“Why, though...?”
“I'm afraid I might never know. She was all about not wanting me to know things, so she's not trying to tell me anything with it...I don't know. Why alter me so heavily that I'm pretty much thrown off the face of the earth, but also send a little gift for me to bring along with me?” His smile crept back at the memory. No matter who it had come from, he could not help but love the dream, and he always would. “I'm not trying to answer it anymore.” He maintained his smile—a peaceful smile, genuinely not angry or afraid anymore. He couldn't feel those things for very long under such a clear sky. “What anyone truly wants or feels about any of it...not Ginger, not Demetrius, not entirely me, either...”
⚙
Tama instinctively took his hand, but hers then froze upon it—the skin. Didn't just look different. She slowly began to rub it in circles, and he watched like a reluctant cat being petted. The texture brought back a sensate memory from her early childhood. She remembered holding her newborn sister's hand the evening after her birth and was being struck by how the newness of the skin was vividly tangible; it made a slightly waxy film, like a plastic glove the baby was yet to grow into. She grew into it as soon as the very next day, and Tama would not feel the same texture again until massaging between Kenighi's pure green fingers—even the fingernails were tinted—she avoided those, as they were narrowing and sharpening.
He was accepting rebirth as something else because there was no better option. She imagined what would be if he did not accept—madness. The sounds of Lux II writhing in this tower, mid-transmutation, keeping the city on the dead London's sleeping schedule with his bloodcurdling screams and breaking glass. Twenty-four years of incompetence and terror would surely explode forth.
Instead, he was letting it seep away along with his body, letting it be caught by the melted old skin as it flowed away at the speed of water only.
Wasn't that like him...? Smiling peacefully over his new claws and gazing miles into her eyes?
She said, “I can tell.”
Kenichi really didn't mind if anyone was interested in touching him. It sent waves through the hum the incoming sunlight filled him with in such a fascinating way, though he wasn't sure yet whether it would be proper to speak about it. It was a little like knowing certain feelings for the first time when he was Lux's age—he had gotten used to those quietly, too. But not that he had had to. That was the difference here—was there more of him out there? A myth of a colony of Green Men rather than just one? Maybe an army of them under Ginger's hand? No, no and no. No one could tell him what was normal in his transformation, but that was because as the only one, that was all up to him to determine. Was this what the first human to grow up felt like?
Never mind. He would not compare himself to anything with skin in shades of brown. If he thought about what he would never be again, he knew he would lose his mind—remembering his attack on Oros and remembering screaming into Nitya's shoulder as he watched his legs take color with one tri-lidded eye.
Most of all, he would possibly damage Lux if he tried to identify himself as anything but the Green Man and lost it.
I will damage Lux.
I will damage Lux.
He's doing better than I ever did.
I will...
He had gone single-minded because it was the best he could do in his remaining time. It paid. He said, “Are you...okay with me? Me like this?”
“I don't know, either...” she said. “...just don't say Demetrius. Please.” She bit back tears that she had expected to well up for Kenichi instead. “We know for sure what he thinks of you. You saw him once—didn't you see how he likes you?”
“I saw his face.”
“I see him a lot—it's way deeper than his face. I wish you could hear him talk about you...he's not doing this dispassionately. Ask Nitya—ask her when she comes back how attached he's become to you. Bloody swooning over you—not because that's just what he does. Thinks you're the most precious thing he's ever met.”
Kenichi blinked, eyes blank under their lids. “You've...I've never heard you be sarcastic before, but I don't believe it. I can't. What would someone with his mind care Lux II's most useless person? How could he ever even bloody relate? That's what I needed to ask before anything else...”
“By trying. By wanting to. By not actually being so different. Please listen—” She squeezed his hand. “—Nitya said that when he heard what Ginger did...she'd never heard him upset quite the same way before, never in his life. When you snapped at him this morning, he...” Wait, no—she wouldn't say what had happened to Demetrius. Kenichi would either be horrified or cold in response, and she could not handle seeing either. She wasn't here to do that to him. “...I think you broke his little heart.”
“Very...little.”
“Kenichi...!” Her first tear fell. “This isn't you...where did you go?”
“I know,” he said. “But look at me. If I stayed too attached to Kenichi—tried to run after him—we both know I would be freaking out right now.”
“I know...I...even if what you say about him is true...it's hard. Both of you are my friends.” Kenichi said nothing, only rested his head against her chest. To try and declare he was right would be to assume he understood anything but his own one task.
“Are you cold?” Tama asked. “You're kind of shaking.”
“No, no—not out here. Impossible. Maybe it's the stunning; it hangs on for a while. 'S happened to me a few times before.” That was how Kenichi had learned that paying Lux II any kind of sympathetic visit was a stupid idea no matter how much he was screaming. The second he heard Kenichi ask if he was okay—whoa, how did he keep that irradiator in his appendage? Bang. Then, waking up in the hallway and receiving triple the usual demerits for any mistake made out of grogginess for the rest of the day. “Or maybe it's the light? It does feel kinda intense.”
In case he was getting restless again, Kenichi reminded himself how many different kinds of tranquilizers sat in the infirmary cupboard. When the irradiator's effects fully wore off, he planned to take advantage of as many as necessary. He would rather risk an overdose or crazy interaction with the bots than endanger Tama; he didn't need a second to choose.
Tama asked, “If you think you can't trust Demetrius, what will you do?”
“Be fine. I was to begin with, when he wasn't around for me at all. Lux is still all right—I'll just protect him as long as I can survive here or however long it's necessary. Whichever is longer. That's what I stayed here to do, anyway, nothing more complicated than that. It doesn't have to be. We didn't have anybody but us for a while, and we did okay; we made it alive together.”
“If you can't be stopped from that now, I guess it's useless to try anything at all.”
Kenichi nodded.
“I see you,” said Tama, looking at him like Kenichi and no other creature. “I hear you; there's my Kenichi. I wanted to tell him something.” She leaned in to kiss him—seriously this time. On the lips, for real. That was okay with him, too.
However.
The universe, despite all of Kenichi and Aubrey's uncannily aligned planets, was not about to start playing the same damn scene over and over again.
Nitya ran out onto the roof, heavily shadowed. The sun was that low in the sky; no one had noticed it go. “Kenichi! Is Kenichi awake?”
Tama sat up; she hadn't kissed him yet. “Yeah—what is it?”
“I can't find Lux. Tried a whole bunch of consoles; he's not showing up in here. Or I could just be using them wrong. Probably am...I just thought you should know.” She failed to take her eyes off Kenichi. His legs looked great, but his skin—none of it was left. She couldn't imagine how he felt even under weakening evening sun.
Tama put her hand on Kenichi's chest to keep him from sitting up.
“Yeah,” said Nitya. “Don't come down and look for him if you don't feel up to it.”
“He doesn't.”
“Just...tell me if he comes up here.”
“We will.”
Nitya turned and descended again. It was okay; Kenichi did not resist under Tama's hand. He stayed down flat on his back and wove his fingers between hers. She couldn't figure out the expression on his face; it was the eyelids.
Fingers intertwinted...he squeezed. And lifted their hands. And when he heard the door click shut behind Nitya, moved them and sat up with a jolt, like there was a spring compressed under him. He had just been waiting until she couldn't see him get up.
“Kenichi—“ Tama gasped.
Except he didn't go anywhere. He had put his hands under him to spring to his feet, but then froze that way, unblinking.
“Huh? Kenichi?”
His wrists shivered under his weight, and a sallowness poured over his green skin so fast that Tama could watch it fall
She twisted around to look at his face. Now the expression was obvious: shock, and pain. He looked like he had just been stabbed, and he felt like it, too.
“What is it?” She asked. She moved her hand toward his shoulder, and one of his slapped past it by accident while leaping up to his forehead. “Your head?”
Kenichi gave the tiniest nod ever. “My gods.”
“I think you just sat up too quickly...that isn't good; you've been lying down here all day.” She guided him slowly back down, one piece at a time. “You've got to relax and let Nitya take care of this one...I know her. She will.”
Nitya had only called Lux's name one more time before running smack into him in the center of the atrium.
“Where were you?” she cried. “Not in here—I looked in here ten fucking times for you!”
“The reactor level,” Lux lied, and took a step back from her, feet anxious to run again. He was carrying his jacket, and he looked a lot less pale than usual, but more nervous. “Is Kenichi still in Hisakawa's room?”
“Who's?” Nitya didn't know the names of Lux II's staff.
“The...” Lux was in too much of a hurry to think. “...the big one, way up, with all the beds and the medicine! Is he?”
“No, on the roof, probably being really damn worried about you. What is it?”
“Nothing,” Lux said as he tore off for the elevator. Not thing yet...he hoped nothing yet.
If she followed him, she didn't make it into the same elevator. He didn't check; looking back would take too many seconds. The moment after Lyon had dropped him off at the secret entrance in the alley, just when it became too late to say anything, he had realized that there had been a question of utmost importance to him that he had forgotten to ask Lyon: how much time would it be before Kenichi lost his voice?
He had taken one Carulean B vest in with him; when he had put it on right, he stopped the elevator and climbed the rest of the way to the top. He could do that faster now than the elevator could run. He then left it on when he got off and transferred to the unlit and windowless staircase between Lux II's topmost old floor; this way, he could leap up it five stairs at a time instead of two.
He had left Lyon's house resolved that Kenichi was better off never knowing how Lux felt about him. He was perfectly well off not knowing, and it would be a disservice to give him something more to be confused by, possibly alarmed. There was no way to deal with it—not legally, and as Kenichi seemed to just like girls, not ever. Lux knew he thought right then. However, he entered the skyscraper again feeling different. The time was on his mind, and his hurry forced to the surface what he really wanted—to say something, just because it was true. Maybe at least consider it. Maybe just give him a hint to take with him—
When he opened the door to the roof, though, the only person he saw was Tama kneeling alone.
He skipped any hello and asked, “Where did Kenichi go?”
She responded too quietly for the Tama Lux knew, “I don't know. But I'm pretty sure he'll be back.”
He approached her to demand which way he went, but then—“What happened to your face?”
Five scratches crossed it, just deep enough to draw blood along their entire lengths. One of them ran over her eye, which was not scratched under its lids, but the skin had swelled around it. Five—the number of fingers on a hand.
She said quickly, “He didn't mean to do it. He was starting to get up, but had some kind of attack, kind of like a seizure, with limbs going everywhere. He told me to stay back because he knew it was going to be bad, but I didn't.”
“What the hell is he doing running around after that? I mean—I need to see him immediately.” Lux feared, though, that his legs would shake out from under him if he tried to run. “Did he tell you where he might have gone?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything at all?”
“No.”
Lux did not go run, nor did he say anything back. Nor did he blink.
Tama said, “He seems okay now; up and walking and stuff, but since he recovered, he hasn't said a word to me. I don't know what's going—”
“It's not you.”
“What's that? Lux...?” His body permitted her to guide him down beside her. “You don't look so good all of a sudden...” She put her arms around him, but he did not move, stiff as plastic in them. His white clenched fists were locked to his sides, and he shuddered with more anger than she had seen in him when they had first met.
“What...was...the last thing he said to you? For you to stay back?”
He felt Tama shake her head. “No, 'turn the lights on'. Like five times, he just repeated that. I thought at first it was about the sunlight and what his skin does, but it's summer; there was still plenty of sun out. And I was going to get up and look for a light switch out here or something, but he didn't let me go. I asked him why, but all he could get out was that one sentence again. I don't think he meant anything by it.” Her voice sped up the more she said. “I mean, he was seizing up like crazy from his head, hitting it against the roof here over and over...oh man. I've never seen him in pain like that before, even the time he fell off Girard's roof...Lux?” She had the corners of his shirt wadded up into little balls in her worried hands. “Is...is he going to say anything again...at all?”
Lux couldn't answer fast enough. While his answer was still caught in his throat, he and Tama heard the door open and both turned to look. Lux slowly stood up and out of Tama's weakened arms. It was Kenichi.
It popped into Lux's head that of all Tama had just said, she had not said a thing about Kenichi's appearance, didn't talk about him as though he looked completely different in every way than Lux had ever seen him. She was nice...he was right to trust her...Kenichi was the creature from the page from the book. Like its clothes, Kenichi's had gotten very torn up. Lux barely got a glimpse of the whites of his eyes before the dimming, orange sunlight touched him and the dark lids slid automatically over them. Lux wondered if Tama noticed that Kenichi's hair was a little bit thinner. His skin—all of it—was a given. Lux had seen how fast the color had spread and had known since he had got on Kenichi's bike what his skin would look like the next time he saw it. He had been ready for that, but he had not been ready to lose Kenichi.
Lux looked up and down the figure that had risen so tranquilly from the stairs, but he couldn't find his Kenichi. This being didn't walk like Kenichi, but like the Green Man had looked like it would walk—as if his feet were on soft sand even though they weren't. Kenichi's horror at his body was gone, and he carried it the way Tama wore her most beautiful dresses. It seemed like the bots, their work finished, had rushed together in the center of his head and formed a gem, some bright dream to sustain him.
Multiple sentences and exclamations crowded upon Lux's tongue to free themselves, but he swallowed them. They were trying to get out very loudly, and Kenichi would only hear them as noise now. Lux just looked and tried to smile, not wanting to break the unknown peace that he saw.
No, wait; this was Kenichi still. Definitely. Lux found him below his foreign face, down at his hands, which held a bottle of disinfectant and medical sealant.
Kenichi strode right past Lux, betraying consuming urgency beneath the new face. He knelt down beside Tama and wiped down and sealed the scratches on her face like her life depended on it, doing hand acrobatics to keep his claws off her skin. She let him, silently teetering somewhere between shock and love. This was answer enough for her question to Lux. It wasn't her; Kenichi simply was this way now.
That's right, Lux remembered. You don't remember most things in words.
Kenichi's knowledge was intact; he rubbed in the sealant perfectly, just enough to push it into the broken skin, but not hard enough to sting.
Would he read anything into the speechless act of leaving? Lux sped from the roof before thinking of the possibility.
Going up the stairs five at a time was one thing, but in the dark, down was different—especially because Lux had forgotten to put his vest back on. He fell all the way down, unable to see where the bottom was. It hit him just when he began to think it had disappeared. He dragged himself to his feet, feeling polka dotted with soon-to-be bruises, cursing the dark and Ginger—that was what he called her in his head, though Corvus was a prettier name. He didn't want to separate her from the lover she had almost been. He wanted it to haunt her and turn the rest of her eternity alive into an unending string of recollections that wouldn't let her free. When the earth burned away at the end of its life and left only her alone floating in space, he wanted the name Ginger to still surround her in a cloud and be the only thing she ever had to breathe again.
He couldn't find the door out, which alerted him that he was missing the point. This was the point, that he couldn't find the fucking door. He needed to find a light switch first.
After a moment of running his hands over the stone wall, he found the switch and prepared for nothing, that Kenichi had not known or cared who he was speaking to after all.
Instead, Lux found himself covered in red paint, the angry shade with which his father had scrawled his demand for all to KEEP OUT upon the screen that had hidden his melted body. Someone—Kenichi—had just dropped the bucket on the stairs indiscriminately near the top, and it had spilled all the way down to a growing pool at the bottom. Lux had rolled through all of it. Above, on the wall, Kenichi had splattered the rest of his message for Lux in furious strokes.
It wasn't a written message; by the time Kenichi had rendered it, it had no longer occurred to him to write anything. Instead, he had painted a lumpy, closed shape; Lux took a moment of squinting to recognize it as their own continent. From every other corner of the wall, dripping painted arrows arced inwards toward the sloppy map, all pointing at the western desert in a desperate crowd.
“Is this mister Lyon?”
“Yeah, it's me. Just call me Hans. Can you hear me? This is the old puke-colored phone. Sorry; I didn't label the numbers for you. You can call the other next time.”
“I can hear you.”
“I can hear you breathing. What happened?”
“You should know.”
“...”
“You told me you were ready to do the plan as soon as I was. Can you do it if I'm ready now?”
“This is soon.”
“Can you?”
“I didn't say I couldn't do it. I'm ready, too. Let's go. I'm going to start coming back your way, and you know where to wait for me and who to bring with you.”
edited 30th Jul '11 12:09:51 PM by SPACETRAVEL
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
Zzzzzzzzzz
Good to see you back.
More comments later. This is a let-it-perk section.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
⚙
Ouch, this section.
Also, I have reached the end of my outlines and am writing blindly now, so if it isn't already obvious, I need some extra time sometimes to plan as well as write.
Lux and Lyon's plan was to reach to the very center of the Langley family's insularity and end it by sacrificing both its symbol—the skyscraper itself—and the source of its fearfulness—its unfettered wield of destruction and death. The reactor had to go. Only then would the city understand what the new Langleys would give up to end their enmity.
Lux crept to the alleyway entrance to wait for Lyon, who he would recognize by the pair of yards-wide, multiple-jointed metal wings. Nobody in Section Eight would mark his disguise for anything suspicious. In fact, they would keep their distance from him so he couldn't hear them sniggering. Wings were as far out of style as any augment could go, considered conformist, trite and slightly more outdated than hoverboards. What had been the first thing to happen years ago, when the material prices of the less invasive augments initially plummeted, making them accessible to more than just the very richest? Everyone and their mothers and cousins and dogs had lined up to get a pair of fucking wings. Their initial coolness was fatally diluted by overexposure.
But little did Section Eight's denizens know, Lyon's wings were secretly not lame. They were secretly the shit. This was because once Lux let him inside, they would pull out a couple of screwdrivers and dismantle them, revealing them to have been cobbled together out of all the necessary instruments to disarm a mortally illegal Black B reactor. Where those instruments, which had had nothing to do with his work or interests before that moment, had come from all of a sudden did not matter, and nether did Lyon's total lack of education in mechanics. He was able to make the wings build themselves by asking the reactor instruments nicely and impressing them with a finely timed one-liner. He was able to do that because he was just that much of an amazing guy.
Lyon and Lux would then descend to the reactor level with their supplies.
The disarming would be done by breaking into the clockwork indicator on the distant reactor ceiling, which bore the rotating little red light that was first to re-illuminate when the reactor was activated or shut down. The impracticality of the location of this means to disperse the Black B was intentional, a characteristically Langley way to make something hard to do, but nothing Lux and Lyon couldn't surmount with grappling hooks and spy catsuits.
Then, to destroy the power of a threat so cosmic and flashy as a Black B collapse, it takes great combustion histrionics of one's own. The explosion of the dispersing black B would certainly take out the skyscraper and probably would be magnificent enough to witness from outer space. Oh, and everyone would have to get out of the building somehow before then—but not too long before then, so they could narrowly outrun the explosion in a slow motion fashion. They'd work it out.
Thus would conclude Phase One of five. In the plans' second phase (speaking of outer space)—
—or so Lyon had wished. Lux had had to drag the less practical Lyon kicking and screaming from his magnificent doomsday machine-centered ideas, but in the end, they agreed that they had no time for anything terribly flashy or climactic or involving the reactor, which was actually withering away quietly already thanks to Lux and rather less so Kenichi long ago. They would not do anything very exciting at all, in fact.
The baron had finally recalled hearing Lux muttering something or other to the world's second prematurely liquidated Aubrey about Nitya giving him a chance only once she had seen him move between her irradiator and Kenichi. If it had worked once, it was likely to have an impact again.
When Lux let in an earthbound Lyon, he would then run off and pretend there was nothing going on.
Lyon would then begin his act, switching on his video camera and pretending that he had just broken in to inflict a just death on what was left of the Langleys. Playing the part of the attention-starved asshole everyone knew he was, he would stream the video live into nodespace for anyone who wanted to watch Hans Lyon avenge Aubrey London and the Fates, not to be confused with the band. Using the consoles, he would locate Nitya.
Lux had begrudgingly agreed that no one but Nitya had to be the scenario's unfortunate Kenichi. She was the only one in the building with close ties to the Londons. When Lyon found her and bullshitted up an excuse to point his irradiator at her, Lux would then step over the blood between his family and hers. Conveniently nearby, he would do something like put his hand over the end of Lyon's irradiator or leap in front of it—he had room to improvise as he saw fit.
Lyon would then imitate his best tearful change of heart, and somewhere, word would begin spreading that Lux was not the kind of Langley Iosethep knew.
They hoped Nitya would not stay mad at them for too long, but she needed freeing from this, too.
After changing out of his paint-smeared clothes and before going down to the tunnel, Lux located her on a console. Lyon planned on finding her this way, too, but Lux would tell him where she was for the chance that it would get everything over with faster. He did not want her to be chased if it could be at all avoided. Already, he was not sure if he would ever fully forgive himself for how they would scare her.
He found her in the middle of the atrium, marked by an unmoving dot next to a column. "I might be a moment late," he told Lyon, and took the elevator to the ground floor. Lux, like Nitya and Kenichi, knew to be nervous for anyone found being too still in the atrium. He felt one spider circling in his stomach when he stepped on to the marble floor and saw her on the ground, slumped against it and facing away from him.
The fear only lasted for a few steps—he then saw her hand, which she held against the column's surface like it was someone she had affection for.
“Nitya?”
She did not turn to look at him. “What now, and how bloody earth-shattering is it?” She sounded exhausted. Lux felt the spider start spinning something. “I just need a moment here.” When she heard no answer, but no Lux walking away, either, she did turn around. “Is Kenichi okay? Did...did the bots do anything new?”
Lux had not spoken because he did not know how to say it, even though it seemed very simple. “I think they've finished with him.”
“I know his skin is all changed by now. Is that it?” She turned around because it didn't sound like that was it. Lux's voice hadn't been this thin even when she had first met him, when she had held a Kenichi in her arms who they both feared could explode like a bomb at any second. His face looked just as drained.
“They took his voice.” Don't ask how I know...don't ask how I know...
It did not fall down an Nitya's mind with the force of the words Kenichi had lost. Instead, the first thing that came to her was his laugh, that damn way he had responded to anything and everything. All of them—his amused laugh, and his frightened and ashamed ones, too. Did those take a voice? Because without...
Without thinking, Niyta breathed, “She killed him.”
It was worse than asking Lux how he knew or forcing out anything about Lyon. “NO!” Lux cried. His arms screamed to push her away from him again, but they were jelly; they wouldn't do anything right. “He's alive! I just watched him patch up Tama's face! He's right there, and he's alive!”
“Poor...girl. Is she all right—“ Nitya reached reluctantly for Lux's arm, but he threw her hand back.
“Yes! Yes, she's still up there with him because he's alive!”
Nitya's voice crystallized—hard, but it cracked. “I can't think right now,” she said sternly. “I don't know what I'm saying—it doesn't mean anything. It's nothing. You need a minute alone, too. Just go. Go to your room and wait for me. I won't be long.”
“He's alive, and he wants out of here!”
“Aubrey wanted...” She took a breath before letting the rest spill out against its will in one stream. “...he wanted as much of himself preserved as possible if he died, and they were only able to save his brain in coolant. In this column-y thing downstairs; he designed it, so it's ornate as shit. I always sit by it for a while at this time of the day when I'm at home...I said please leave me alone. I need to pretend he's in here for a while.” She slapped the column as she turned away from him again. The last Lux saw of her face was the rims of her eyes shining and the whites reddening as she strained to hold the tears back from the edges.
Tears for a Kenichi who felt as dead to her as Aubrey, weren't they?
Lux screamed, voice drying out, “Stop it!”
“Go. Just wait for me for a minute.”
Lux could hear her, in her words, start crying. “Stop!”
“Now, Lux.”
“No, you go! Go up to the stairs—the stairs right before the roof—and turn the light on. Kenichi—take him and have him look at the wall, look at what I wrote and don't move. For days—for fucking ever if that's as long as it takes! Have him look at it until he invents words all over again and reads it!”
“Take those inhuman eyes off my back and get out!” snapped Nitya.
“Hold his eyes open at night! And if you cry in front of him, I'll kill you!” Lux ignored the protests of his stinging throat. “Everything in this house can kill you, and I'll use all of it! And I'll be fucking laughing, just like my dad! Go! Go!”
Except Lux was the one to go somewhere, while Nitya stayed put. If she responded, he didn't hear over the clicks of his own feet running again. He didn't even stop to wait for the elevator, rather taking five floors of stairs down to the alley entrance. He knew he should have waited; his shaking legs kept slipping down several stairs at a time, jolting him and making him feel a little sicker.
He did not call Lyon again. His reservations about the plans and what they were to do to Nitya had disappeared. He was fine with it all; they would make her stop it.
Lux did not remember, but he had left the light on in the stairway to the roof. On the wall, Kenichi's frantic drawing was losing its form and smearing itself downward. Kenichi had thrown the paint up there in globs, and it dripped faster than it dried.
Only one strand, falling from one of the map's rough southern capes, fell over Lux's tiny addition, leaving it readable. He had added it with one finger dipped in paint puddles, managing his normal, measured handwriting despite a shaky hand that showed every few strokes and a shakier mind that didn't totally know what the hand was doing. In contrast with Kenichi's wall-spanning cry for help, Lux had written no letter bigger than one of his own hands. All together, closely up against one of Kenichi's arrows, they said, “I love you.”
The paint was thin and already dry; Tama could have found and read it had she any inclination to leave the roof and Kenichi.
At the time Lux went to meet Lyon in the tunnel, the sun could no longer be seen from up there, having sunk behind Iosethep's solid wall of structures.
Kenichi had not frightened Tama yet. He had communicated to her in any way he could—in some ways she would never have imagined—to tell her without speech that her offer of a kiss had been received. He was not frantic in his motions, and he did not try to spell anything out with his hands. It was like he had forgotten that he had ever known what words were, and it was slowly contagious.
After a while, Tama's kisses no longer were desperate attempts to suck a voice back out of him. Without anything to hear, her senses fixed upon his face more than anything. He was smiling like nothing new had happened, and she did her best to pretend the same.
That was when the sun was still hitting him. Its departure had crept up on him not long after it got dark, and he had dropped off to sleep about as suddenly as Demetrius would any time. He had been sitting next to her, and they had been touching noses for no speakable reason. Then he fell back from her, swaying slightly. His dark eyelids were peeled back, but his comparatively bright Kenichi eyes fixed on nothing in particular. She noticed the sun and guided his head into her lap, where he always liked to lay it, and she felt him relax more as his eyelids closed one at a time. And then some more, until she might have taken him for dead if she did not feel his heartbeat against her, which had slowed to a crawl.
She had been in nursing school for just two terms, and that was enough for her to know that the beats weren't expected to be so far apart. She was startled a few times by the gaps, instinctively thinking for a second that his heart had stopped even though she knew better, but only a few times. There was a rhythm that strung the beats together, a string that each one held with the next in tow and certain to come. It was just such a slow one—like that of a much larger creature than a human. Elephants had hearts like Kenichi's when he was in the dark. Whales. Vast cosmic horrors in the centers of stars—he looked like he was having that dream again.
He was, of course, because it was the only dream he had in him anymore at all.
Such a happy face.
Just to experiment, she tried a few times to wake him up, shaking him or tickling him. All she got was what Nitya had likely struggled with earlier; at the very most, he opened his eyes for an entire second. The sunlight wasn't back yet, and nothing but that could pull him out of this dormancy.
What's going to happen to you in the winter? she wondered, holding him tightly though he was too far away to feel her. There were months here when the days were all as dim from the clouds as this evening.
With her mind no more on what he might be communicating moment by moment, he got the chance to finally start feeling like another being in her hands. Different skin than that she had squeezed into a single twin bed with in school. Different head than the one that carried the mind she had grown comfortable inside? Regardless, she did not loosen her grip on him because all of that was up to him. He was the Green Man instead of Kenichi only if he thought he was, and whether he did or not was locked up now by the widest language barrier there could be. That was actually pretty human—raising questions with no accessible answers.
To Lux, the tunnel seemed too light and too colorful, even as it arched up toward the alleyway entrance. There were no windows down there; it was secret. It was supposed to be tightly closed up as long as the door was...
Lyon had gotten ahead of himself, it turned out. Lux laughed aloud. The light had come from the neon and street lights outside, which shone through the human-sized hole in the alley door. The edges of it were singed, and the “REM HOTSPOT” sign hung, swinging, from the top on one dying nail. Oh, well. It would only be a little while now until he would no longer need a secret entrance.
Lyon stood quietly in the middle of the hall, masked and with a fist-sized, dark object in one hand, no doubt the camera. He had changed out of his usual drab clothes for this, too. Lux remembered thinking he had seemed a little too bubbly about the preparations for such a grave mission. “Maybe,” he had said, “I'll dress like a neurotic aristocrat, too, now that I finally get to be one. Oh, yeah...I'll pick out something completely stupid! Maybe that lacy shit from my mother...they'll love it.”
“Slow down,” Lux had warned him. “Clearly, you already are one.”
Now, in the tunnel, Lux said, “M-making it look like real breaking and entering?”
Lyon hissed, “What do you think?” He was frustrated about something.
“Is something wrong?”
“Just one Langley.”
“Oh.” Lux took a few steps back and tried to look more scared than sick. So Lyon was filming already. It worked well; Lux couldn't handle anything else to think about. He was barely able to think straight about the original plans anymore as it was, nauseous and lightheaded from Kenichi and Nitya. He felt like he still had his vest on, like every step should have sent him flying. Every time he had tripped on the stairs, he had half expected to bounce. His eyes, too—the details were smoothed out of everything further away than the tip of his nose. It could have been tears that had slipped his notice, maybe something else. He whispered, hoping the camera wouldn't pick it up, “Your clothes—are you sure they'll believe them? It looks a lot like a dress—it's not enough like you...”
Then he decided that was a bad idea and wouldn't actually work. Lyon probably had really sensitive speakers. Oops. Lux was in no state of mind for acting, and his eyes were streaming. He bit his lips shut, partly because the glare Lyon gave him through the eye holes of his mask looked real. Lyon slashed Lux's throat with his eyes. He had come up with this plan not just because he was an ass, Lux realized, but because he was talented.
Lyon whispered to himself, “Oh my gods.”
“I'll take you to the others—!” Lux gasped. It would have sounded forced had he not truly felt like he was going to throw up. “They can explain everything—“
“They'd better. I'll talk to them myself.” Lyon stepped toward Lux slowly, showing one pointy shoe, until they were an arm's length apart. The shadowed camera pointed straight into Lux's chest. “You just wait for your dad, and when you see him, tell him you met me. And when you meet my girl, tell her that I did the last thing she ever told me to do. You'll know her when you see her—she'll be waiting for you.” Then he thrust the camera into Lux's arms because it was actually an active grenade.
Lyon backed out of the weapon's range, pointing an irradiator at Lux to forbid him to move any closer to him with the thing. The grenade was wrapped in a half dry slick of shield material that stuck to Lux's hands; he could feel his palms starting to sear against it. This was getting too elaborate to be fake.
“She's been waiting for you a long time,” said Lyon.
He watched Lux stay standing there, spinning his hands around and around the grenade's opaque cue ball surface, unable to detach them. He didn't know that Lux had a blurry idea of what he was doing. The knowledge rose out of a murky pool, slimy but reinforced by enough experience to be coherent: the material wanted to stick to his skin more than the grenade's metal. Lyon expected him to try and pull his hands off of it; instead, Lux submerged his hands in and under it, letting them burn. He couldn't see what he did, but he could feel it; it stung. In a few rotations, the material was a pair of slimy gloves that had crept up to Lux's, wrists, and the explosive hung from them by just threads.
Lux flung it back at Lyon, aiming for the face—just in time to save himself, but too late to hit. The flashes, which did look much like many analog camera flashes in a row, began in midair, at the top of the thrown grenade's ark.
Lux shielded his face; anyone who had ever seen a grenade's light from any but the greatest distance clearly enough to describe it never saw anything again. The rest of him felt as if splashed with boiling water. A quick splash that did not stick or drip; maybe he would find blisters later on the back of his neck later, where neither his hair nor his shirt covered the skin. Everything else would be invisibly sore, but unbroken. He had escaped.
Only the ceiling was near enough to take the worst of it. The grenade left it blackened, streaked with cracks and melted cobwebs.
Lyon, who had shielded himself with the remains of the door, screamed at a pitch that Lux did not know his voice to be capable of. He snatched up the now dormant and smooth grenade as it rolled back to him, reset it with a twist of his hands, and threw it back at Lux in blind pain.
Lux ran back through the tunnel, not seeing where it landed. He would have made it with just another layer of minor burns if not for the noise of another figure landing near the door. They hadn't been there before, but then thud, on their feet. Lux caught their jagged shape in the corner of his eye, which startled him into looking over his shoulder because he knew the shape. Impossible. It's too dark.
Not too dark to glimpse the green skin in the street lights.
“Kenichi!”he screamed, forgetting that names meant nothing to Kenichi anymore. In his shock, it was not the only thing he forgot.
“Always close your eyes,” said every grenade manual ever on protecting oneself from a blast. “In short, the skin cannot see.”
“It doesn't matter if you're within sunburn range of it, child,” Kimura had once told Kenichi, who had expressed interest in watching a small grenade detonate from a floor above. “Would you look at the sun if it was twenty feet from you? What do you think would happen? You always close your bloody eyes.”
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
Zzzzzzzzzz
Oh man. Powerful stuff you're serving up here. And there's a vibrancy to it that wasn't there before; I think maybe because you're off the outline. The story is leading you where it wants, now, the same way that Lux and Demetrious and Kenichi did before.
Remember way back when I said the story had good bones and good muscles? Well this feels like the section when the lightning strikes and you get to cry out "It's ALIVE!"
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
⚙
And then I come in and drop this experimental BLAM.
Not too long before, Lyon had run from the seventh district with a bag of dangerous metal objects clattering on his back, leaving a trail of noise behind him. It was okay. When Lux had called he had been waiting.
If it had been any other day, and he had never met Lux, there would have been nothing to do. Maybe read through M6 archives for fun; from what he recalled, he had last left off at section with the reptile heads wired up to blood pumps. That or the scanned catalog page selling all those premium black highlighters. Maybe he would have, that day, continued on with his little “project” within the programs that ran the Section Eight watch station's electrical appliances. They hadn't yet figured out that the slow mechanical decay of the third floor's printers, lights, refrigerators and worse was due to Lyon's remote tampering—some watch. He targeted them to see how long they would take to suspect something and to keep a vengeful fist up against Victor, an underqualified watchman on the floor who liked to take out his disdain for blue men on Lyon.
Victor would never understand that the twenty-nine-singing-telegram-ordering incident wasn't personal, never learn the meaning of “get over it”. Lyon had been far, far too drunk to tell who it was on station duty that fateful midnight of his youth, the midnight little recruit Victor would open the station's front door to a veritable tidal wave of scantily clad lasses singing about April Fools. Sure, it had been Lyon's idea, but he hadn't even made the calls; they didn't do it until hours after Lyon signed out of the chatroom and passed out on his desk. Alexi of the Fates would volunteer their quiet new friend to seal the twenty-nine deals, that weirdo called “sn0wball” who was never online at the same time Lyon was, and purportedly never did anything but sign in and out repeatedly without ever saying a word anyway. sn0wball had just so happened to have an imperious voice and a detective friend who owed him the failure of many suicide attempts.
Lyon thought now that he should have puzzled out who Snowy was, and had the sickly suspicion that he might have if he had ever gone online sober back then. If he had known, would it have occurred to him to slip Snowy a message that Lux II wanted a little something more from the Fates than he claimed outright? Probably not; Lyon had been dead set on surprising everyone after the fact with the news of his act of vigilante awesome, having weathered the most obnoxious aristocrat in the country to deliver the Fates a shelter that would stand up for centuries. Instead, the room—and anyone, for that matter, even remotely connected to the Fates—would never hear from him again.
Snowball—way to be really, really obvious, weirdo. Round, snow-colored thing with no vocal cords to speak of. It sounded like some kind of descriptive pet name, given by someone special enough to make fun of poor Snowy that way and have him like it.
Lyon ran toward the railway with his clanking supplies even as his lungs ached in protest. No one knew, but he wished that wings were still in fashion. More, he wanted to be standing right there when Lux reached his door, a start to doing something properly this time. He ran even as, until he noticed, the ground screeched to a halt under him and his legs treaded only air.
Two watchmen, with the railway in sight, had seized him, one on each of his arms.
“Too slow,” said Victor. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. “This is a restricted area.”
Finished the brother, “That means you can't go inside.” This one looked like Victor's brother. His red hair was a far cry from Victor's sticky grey-brown, but the face was much the same. Their expressions were similarly annoyed.
Lyon mocked, panting, “Which means you want me to stop...! It wasn't earlier—I got through here just fine a while ago.” He looked at the second watchman and said, “Your partner is just fucking with me—he does this. Make him show me the paperwork for this.”
The two tightened their hold on him, putting his arms to sleep. Lyon wasn't very good at watchmen, Victor or not.
“It's too old to carry around,” said Victor.
Added the brother, “A month and approximately a week old.”
“We know you could find and flip through it yourself, and you are welcome to once you leave this place alone.”
“That being for the Langley skyscraper.”
“Wrong, Parrot Boy,” said Lyon. “That place is so far across the district. Let me go—”
“In case,” said Victor, “you really did miss us earlier...suspicious persons...seeking the Langley cryptid have been spotted running here once turned away from the building proper. Until we can get a closer look, we are assuming an extension of the skyscraper and thus the restricted area.”
And the brother had to add, “An underground extension.”
Lyon, though, was becoming less sure that the two watchmen were related. Watching their faces, he spotted no real similarities in features; it was just their expressions. The redhead followed Victor's, exactly, and without even looking at him. Rather than the same genetics, they looked like they had the same thoughts. Almost like that one absurd M6 file... “But you—”
A third watchman—he hadn't seen her coming—grabbed his left foot out from under him and held him with the other two. Her face was just the same. Something new was going on with Victor—he wasn't nice, but he had never been creepy before. In fact, he had never inspired anything but humor and pity before.
“You guys!” Lyon pleaded, gesturing with his remaining free foot. “I heard you let Duke Oros in! Nice guy, but he looks like Duke Sketchwood the Sketchy of the Sketchlands!”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “Says the one in a pith helmet and domino mask.”
Lyon had almost forgotten. He had had no time to put on a Desmerais-style, lacy anachronism explosion, but these had been right by the door for some reason he didn't remember. He'd grabbed them on the way out. “I was led to believe that your security was a lot more relaxed. What does a one-man zombie apocalypse have over me?”
“Thing is,” said Victor, “He's the duke.”
Redhead: “Of the western province.”
Lady: “The windworn and wild.”
“Vickie!” scolded Lyon, trying to drain his building fear through his voice. “You're a moron, but I still thought you knew better than to employ a bunch of antique androids! Is this Division Weirdass you've formed?”
“No,” said yet a fourth watchman with Victor's eyes and Victor's face while seizing his last leg. Lyon's hat fell off.
All five finished the sentence in unison: “We are Division Nine.”
Lyon didn't want to believe it, but this had to be, this was a case of that absurd M6 file made flesh. The way they all made the same faces and tried to do the same thing—he had read about it.
The Alsace Treatment was an extreme, experimental measure against otherwise intractable psychological problems, and according to the date of its papers, it was the last experiment the agency had successfully executed before the making of the technology the Fates had commandeered. Lyon could see the link. The treatment also involved the lifting of the personality from a single brain, but rather than encoding it into a machine, it was divided carefully by its evaluated facets and poured into several human bodies, including the original. Where those extra bodies came from was blacked out in the papers. Next, the resulting group would be placed together in a closed room, encouraged to discuss matters, and observed. If the initial dividing of the consciousness had been done properly, one of the group would soon reveal themselves as the most contentious. That one would then be led from the room, in restraints if necessary, and euthanized. And that was all.
The Alsace Treatment wasn't perfect—aside from the obvious downside, sometimes a few troublesome patterns ran too deep to be cut away and remained a little bit in each division no matter how many times the spirit was cut, as in Victor, whose every aspect still was a bully. Other times, the surviving divisions, though now technically sane, would suffer the quieter new affliction of not adding up quite the same way they had before. And most noticeably, how to put the remaining divisions back together in their original body was yet unknown, though to about two hundred people in the central province, the multiples were an acceptable price.
In short, there were five Victors now. The Victor Lyon recognized was only Victor A, while the redhead, the woman and now the boyish man with his right foot had an equal claim to his identity as Victors B, C and D. Their nametags said so, Lyon now noticed.
All of them, as one, looked down at his horrified face with a restrained shaking of their heads. Victor A said, “You could make this so much easier for yourself.”
Lyon stammered, “C-come on, I know who Oros is. But you know me! I'm Baron Lyon—I have a title and a tragic vendetta that the law would never understand, too!”
"You're not the same,” argued Victor A.
“If this is still, still about the dumb telegram—”
B interrupted, “Not the same, being a baron.”
And C, “I'm sorry.”
D: “Let me show you.”
A hand heretofore unoccupied by a limb pulled his hair from behind, forcing back his head and bringing him eye to eye with a watch badge that read “Victor E”.
“How many of you are there?” cried Lyon. “I'm out of limbs—I was already out of limbs!”
This new Victor looked the least Victor-like of the team, with clumpy silver-blue hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. Lyon had to wonder who he had been before he had been Victor, and if he had wanted to be. He looked too young to be a very good Victor, and he wasn't one. When Lyon saw them, Victor E's glasses hid his eyes, glowing with the screen image of a list of terms. As though it was a long, thin piece of paper rolled up inside the lens, he pulled an end of the glowing image down and out of it with his bare fingers, unfurling it. Lyon read it upside down—it was a list of the country's ranks of nobility arranged in descending order.
“Five. You see,” began Victor A.
B then continued, “Hopefully you recognize the noble ranks of this continent—when this list was written, it had them in descending order by size of dominion. Today, thanks to more recent redistributions of political power that has made these names all but obsolete, the meaning of the list has shifted.”
Finished C, “It is now a list in descending order of how much of a stir it would cause if a lowly watchman stood up to one of these bats.”
Lyon could see what they were trying to tell him. “Duke/Duchess” was printed near the top of the list and appeared about prestigious as one could get without living overseas in the motherland. “Baron/Baroness”, on the other hand, lay nearly at the bottom, around the baronets, viscounts and other weird words Lyon only pretended to know the meaning of. “Well, geez.” His sarcasm shook. “They should've tucked this into the job description!”
D interjected, “Although, this is only a list of technicalities.” He was beginning to develop a sheen of sweat around his hairline, and his expression finally was beginning to stray from that of the other Victors. He looked aside from Lyon's eyes as though he had stopped enjoying this. “There is the matter of character of the individuals with these titles. Slight alterations...”
Lyon's eyes followed Victor E's finger as he drew with it on the list, leaving squiggly lines that looked like a holographic pen had made them. First, he drew an arrow from “Duke/Duchess” that ascended the list nearly to the upper edge, to the gap between viscounts and “King/Queen”. There, he wrote “Alexander Oros” and “monster slayer extraordinaire”, surrounding the latter with little scribbled stars. He then drew another arrow from “Archduke/Archduchess” that plummeted all the way to the bottom of the list, where he wrote “Langley” and “self-explanatory”.
Victor A cleared his throat and finished for D. “But nothing changes for mister Lyon.”
Victor E then drew one more arrow, dropping from “Baron/Baroness” past even Langley. Of course, the holographic paper lengthened itself accordingly, letting the arrow pass two list-lengths of blank space before reaching its end near the ground. Lyon almost had to bend his neck ninety degrees backwards and roll his eyes up into his head to see Victor E write there “Lyon” and “smelly asshat”, also drawing in a little frowny face with its tongue sticking out for good measure. Victor E giggled at his masterpiece, baring his teeth. He looked different now, too.
Lyon pleaded, “Come on! At least I'm still on the chart. You can let me in—I won't take very long. I won't tell anybody. I can give you a set of beautiful mounted kangaroo heads for your trouble! Besides—look at me! Blue man—even if you don't let me, I'll find an even less lawful way in anywaaaahahaha...! Don't!”
Victor E had picked up the nearly blank end of his list and started tickling under Lyon's chin with it, who did not have the prehensile hair it would have taken to stop him. It stung like the real thing.
Victor A took one hand off Lyon to smack Victor E in the face with a rolled up newspaper. “Down!” The force triggered something in Victor E's glasses that sucked the list back up into them like a tape measure. Once recoiled, the list disappeared, showing Lyon Victor E's crazed eyes for the first time. He wasn't a very good Victor at all. “Don't mind him,” said Victor A.
Sighed Victor D, sympathetically, “There's one in every soul—not worth culling, but you can't live with him, either.”
“What do I have to do?” gasped Lyon. “Even to just get you to just put me down—I can't feel my arms!”
The Victors regained their unison again with a simultaneous, sadistic smile. “Beg a little longer,” said A. “How badly do you want in?”
Victor B: “How sorry are you for hacking typos into the entire eighth district station's badges? Those cost more than you realize.”
Victor C: “For signing the watch's highest security postbox up for terrabytes of puerile spam?”
Victor D: “For turning on the station's fire extinguisher modules whenever I'm already angry?”
Lyon balked, “Holy hell, you seriously haven't seen the pattern yet? You're saying it yourself! Someone can't take a joke, much less a simple pun—and someone had better learn, because that all is what he's going to get until that bump you gave me on my head starts going down. It's been five years—freaky shit for something like that to last so long! Someday, I'm going to finally be with some beautiful girl again, and she'll be about to kiss me when she leaps back and goes,” he squealed in imitation of the hypothetical girl, “' Oh my gods, you have a hunchback, except on your head! ' Sometimes, I lay awake nights wondering if your fucking Croquet Mallet of the Law injected alien spawn into it that are going to burst out in a flurry of skull bits at any minute and infect the world—including you! I should have had you reported—“
Lyon heard something click behind his head, and Victor E demanding, “Show me your sorriest big ol' fishy eyes, my belly-up goldfish.” The click was a knife opening, which Victor E swung into view and pointed at Lyon's middle, laughing maniacally.
“I'm sorry...!” squeaked Lyon, turning teal. “For...I...I...”
Stone-faced, Victor A knocked the weapon out of Victor E's hand with the newspaper. “What's that?”
“Uh...” Lyon's memory fled without him.
“Spit it out.”
Victor B looked at A. “Can he?”
“His voice,” said D. “Need a drink?”
“Here,” said C, freeing one hand to pick a cup off the ground. She poured it slowly over Lyon's face, looking pleased the more he screamed. Lyon couldn't see the liquid in the dim evening, but it smelled like tea and tasted like shitty tea, though it was first and foremost boiling hot.
D gasped and took the cup from her, letting Lyon's leg go. “I didn't mean like that! I meant that maybe we're being cruel.” D and E's brief breaks in the five's union minutes ago had been a warning. Their last grin together had been the calm before it all fell apart. There was another indelible side effect of the Alsace Treatment. “It would be one thing if he could defend himself...”
A's hands went slightly clammy. “He has a point,” he said sternly. “He hasn't gone in; he hasn't done anything yet. This is well against the laws of watch conduct, and he's not worth unemployment if we're heard.”
B specified, “Rule zero seven nine dash three. A highest class regulation.”
“Even the bloody sociopath who will only leave someone alone if there's something in it for him agrees with me.”
E's glasses darkened despondently. “But I was just getting started...”
C snarled, “You want to deal with him forever? His kind don't listen—sooner or later, someone has to be the one to scare him off!”
“If scaring him off,” said Victor A, “has to be grounds for expulsion, better someone else.”
D just missed A's face with his spit, startling A off of Lyon's arm. “I'm ashamed of you. And you, C; I'll bet it was you who hit him five years ago.”
B corrected, voice becoming quieter, “Technically, it was all of us as a composite—“
C elbowed him, knocking him off Lyon's arm and, herself, forgetting Lyon's leg. Lyon found himself on the ground, and he stayed close to it as he quietly crawled into the restricted area below the Victors' distracted fields of vision.
“I'm ashamed of all of you!” he heard C say. “You always have to find something to be controlled by. If I had my way, you'd all have been culled, and by now, I might just have been someone no petty blue man—no one—thought they could hold back anymore. E—what the hell?”
E was on his knees, spilling tears of laughter into his hands. “I'm sorry—you guys are so funny when you're arguing because...hahaha...because you're all the same—“
As Lyon finally ducked into the Langleys' alleyway, the voices became muffled by brick, but he saw the blue light clearly when it flooded the dark and heard the screams. He peeked back out at the Victors.
At once, the bodies of all of the five had been engulfed with a web of electric blue lightning, lighting a beacon of time on the edge of the Ninth Circle, the district that looked like time had forgotten it. The Alsace Treatment had included the installation of an off switch for situations like this.
One by one, the Victors fell to the ground stunned, the blue extinguishing when they hit the pavement. Except for E. When the last of the others fell, Victor E instead burst into flames, orange fire mingling with the still circling blue.
Lyon jumped to his feet again. “Victor...er...D...no...um...Victor Letter!” He glanced around the alley for a bucket of rain water, a fire hose or something, but E was going too fast.
In a second, E stopped screaming, and in two seconds, the silhouette of his body disintegrated. His legs crumbled first under him, and then, the remainder of the body fell out of the air and exploded into a starburst of ash on the ground, taking the fire with it. Lyon watched the flames descend and shrink to embers, unable to move or to remember that Lux might be waiting behind the door. Then, shadowed against the last orange-hot fragment, he saw something move.
The first thing Lyon thought of was an undead, crawling hand. He stepped out of the alley again, closer, and with one of his grenades in hand, just in case.
A small lump of something, twitchily, was rising in the pile of powdered ashes. Strands of something in cold colors grew out of its surface, more contours bubbled outward, and then something with enormous eyes shook the ashes off of its head and back: a silver owl, tinted by the blue street lights to appear the color of Victor E's hair.
Lyon was so close, but it didn't move, unafraid of him. He reached with one finger to touch the feathers, maybe to make sure that this wasn't just a burned pair of glasses puking out one last random hologram. Instead, he got the owl's beak, which took the shape of a claw equipping the mouth. The owl bit him for real, glared at him over stretching wings, then lifted off. Lyon watched it fly away over the unlit void of the Ninth Circle and disappear between the nineteenth century peaks.
Also, his hat was still on the ground, lying against an unconscious Victor B. Lyon wasn't sure what else to do but pick it up and put it back on.
When Lyon knocked on Lux's door, no one answered. He didn't know if something was wrong, as Lux's incessant calling had stopped near the moment the Victors had appeared. He couldn't simply walk in and do something about this, either, or search for Lux. Waiting was it for him, and trying not to let his nervous hands shake the camera too much.
He had to dig through his pocket for a minute to find the camera, it being the rough size and shape of an identification card. Then, after checking its connection and active nodes, which had a way of fading out unpredictably around the Ninth Circle, he forced a smile and spoke into it.
“It's me,” he said. “Good evening, ladies, gentlemen, and otherly persuaded accomplices...!” He hoped the lens was smudged enough and the night was dim enough not to let the tea stains on his shirt show. He tried not to sound too shook up. “Be very quiet, now,” he whispered as loud as he could. “What you see here—” He waved the lens around to give a view of the surrounding alley, its trash piles and the rickety door. “—may not look pretty, but in fact, we stand in the center of Your Humble Naturalist's dreams. Right now, I am right beside the nest of a rare Austral...er...reticulated loon.” He didn't know what “reticulated” meant, but it sounded good. He zoomed in on the REM sign while plucking three grenades from his bag with his other hand. He would next film that hand tossing them in the air and catching them like rubber balls. “Lovely, isn't she? But just wait—we are only one hopefully short break away from exploring the hitherto undocumented interior and from breaking a jolly good shitload of environmental ordinances—whoops—!” The grenades had all missed his hand and spilled at his feet. “Let me get those...”
He covered his lens and crouched to pick them up, but only spotted one of the three. When he reached for it, a much smaller hand than his own picked it up first.
He looked up and met the eyes of a suspicious person—some one-upper who had snuck in wearing a Desmerais-style lacy anachronism explosion. Not that she had stolen his costume idea, though, because she was the actual Mynah Desmerais.
“Um...” Lyon blinked dumbly. That was the first thing he had ever said to her in his life. “...be right back.” He switched off his camera as the two of them slowly stood up at once.
“You...”
“You? Ah...you! Hi...!” He wondered if she recognized him behind her dusty mutt-colored hair. He knew he would recognize her with his eyes closed. They had nearly the same voice—had she ever noticed? “You...er...you have hair in your eyes.” He reached toward her face to brush it out, but she grabbed his wrist and stopped his arm. Her grip was steel wrapped in porcelain skin.
“Sorry,” said Mynah, and by that wrist threw him over her shoulder and into a pile of varied alley junk, sending rats scattering where he landed. She turned around with a drawn irradiator ready to stun and uncovered his face, but there was no need to fire; he was already unconscious.
A shallow scrape bled over his eyebrow where his head had struck something.
She curled him up on the ground like a sleeping kitten and hid him under a large discarded box so that no matter what happened, at least that watchman wouldn't drag him away and abuse him some more. She would have tried to help him when she had first heard his cries, but the watch didn't want her here, either. Avenging Lux II's fatal treatment of her best friend came first.
She wedged one of the grenades under the REM sign and activated it.
That grenade was the one Tama saw from the skyscraper's roof. Around these districts, such flashes cutting the dark were normal, and she would have paid little attention were it not right around one of the building's entrances. No one knows where that is...it can't be anything...
The light had touched Kenichi's skin, too, and being as sensitive as he was to light, his eyes fluttered open for a second. He saw it burn out before they fell shut again. But that, too, only lasted a second. Something about the blast intruded on his dreams, and he struggled with all three pairs of his eyelids.
“It's okay,” said Tama. Oops; forgot not to speak. She hoped the sound of her voice would calm alone.
For whatever reason, it didn't. He rolled out of her lap and dragged himself to the roof's edge; in another second, he was over it. He hung on with one hand and peeked at her over the edge. With a gasp, Tama ran to grab the one hand, but she felt no resistance when she took it. Looking down, she saw he had a stable footing on the skyscraper's spiky details. He was just going to climb down, on some reserve energy she wasn't supposed to understand. What could she do about it? He squeezed her hand.
She gave him a worried smile. “You come back soon.”
edited 20th Aug '11 5:10:07 AM by SPACETRAVEL
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
⚙
What Kenichi? Mynah wondered. She hadn't expected the Langley boy to still exist, and what little she knew of him had painted her a picture of someone more isolated—rightly so. Why did the brat call him? Is he coming? How many Kenichis are there in this city?
Her grenade was gone; it had fallen through the hole it had punched in the floor, which was much too thin for a secret passage. Had the Langleys ever known it was this fragile, the floor not even feet away from the hollow catacombs below? This was near the Ninth Circle, yes, so such was hard to avoid, but Mynah would have expected more care.
Lux lay across the hole from Mynah, not blown in half or anything signaling certain death, but not moving, either.
Mynah started toward him—maybe she could jump over the gap—and then walked into the sword. One is a bad thing to trip over in any event, but particularly when it is hovering at waist height. Maybe Kenichi had just been trying to stop her rather than bisect her, hoping she would see the blade—maybe. No one, not even Mynah would ever get to know. No one but him. She fell backwards into Green arms.
Kenichi dropped his sword. He didn't know who this was, but the solidity of familiarity surrounded her. Images of a crowded skyscraper were caught in her dress, of a mousy haired someone who didn't make much sound, but tagged with a series of sounds uttered more recently, by Demetrius. Dysmrrayess—her? But also something else. Familiarity weighted like a brick.
To get a look at her face, he brushed her stringy hair from it—way from it. It slid out of her head in a handful. And another handful. And another, and another, giving way to a more firmly attached red-black mop of short hair underneath, because she was actually not Mynah Desmerais, or even a she, but a he named Ace Girard.
“You wouldn't have known,” said Girard. “She couldn't do this. Got very sick, infection. And I knew...I know what's it like to lose someone dear to me, too.”
All Kenichi processed were frightened sounds interspersed with the rattle of blood where it wasn't supposed to be. The duke's bloodied body shifted subtly in shape in Kenichi's hands has everything in it leaked into places it shouldn't be.
“Two now...I guess.” Except Kenichi looked like he didn't want Girard to die. He looked like Kenichi at his most horrified, albeit painted to look like something else. Girard had only seen him this distressed once, and it was the time he fell off the roof, right when he had lost his footing. “Kenichi?”
Kenichi said nothing back. Could he? If his eyes were...like that, had his voice been taken, too?
“Kenichi, can you hear me?”
Kenichi stared.
“I'm not going to find out what they did to you, am I?” Considering the condition of Girard's middle, he should not have still been talking, but after a pause, he came back quieter. “Come with me, Kenichi. It's going to be all right.” With a last explosion of energy, he swung down his arm and picked up the sword, beginning to swing it toward Kenichi's head, but the energy was only half enough for what he wanted to do. The sword dropped from his hand at the same time that his soul dropped into Death's boat.
Kenichi, holding Girard, stood for a moment looking down the hole the grenade had left, but he couldn't drop Mister Brick down there. He lay the body down nicely on the passageway floor and jumped across the hole to where Lux still rested.
He felt for Lux's pulse first—alive. His own slowed down by half. Lux almost looked awake—he deceptively appeared to be crying, but with blood passively draining from his eyes instead of tears. Not even all blood—it clumped and pooled on his face, shining, rather than dried or ran to the floor. He extended one finger toward the substance, but stopped when he brushed Lux's scorched eyelashes and several fell out. Lux's eyebrows looked almost as ruined, and his face was reddened by the grenade's light, but only on the bridge of his nose was the skin blistered. But maybe that was the least of his trouble. It was his closed eyes again—something was wrong about the way his eyelids hung shut.
Drapey, not enough of a shape.
So he wouldn't sit paralyzed here forever, Kenichi eased one of Lux's eyes open with a finger—wait. Eye? There was no eye there. Not much of one. Not enough to recognize as one or, by a long shot, to put back together. Just blood and the liquid Kenichi could recognize but no longer name.
Kenichi still had the sealant in his pocket. Mechanically, he took it out, cleaned his hands and the bottle, and opened it up. As a very, very temporary measure, to stop the bleeding, he filled each eye socket with a globe of the foaming white sealant, loose eyelashes sticking to his fingers in threes. He wiped away the blood and fluid the expanding and solidifying sealant forced out onto Lux's face—it almost looked like he had eyes again. Almost, because they were featureless and white, and slightly too large; Lux's eyelids would not shut over the sealant quite completely, but almost.
Kenichi didn't know where to go, so he stayed kneeling right there and picked up Lux, cradling him every bit like Nitya would have held Aubrey had he not died so fast. He didn't remember now, but one of the final things he had spoken to Nitya, after a profane string of hostilities toward Demetrius, was “Lux is all right. He's pretty much Baby Zimmer—I never had a little brother, but I'm sure one would've turned out just like him. He's a little—uh—really strict like my mum and dad, yeah, so obsessive I have to try not to laugh sometimes. But my family never turned out anybody bad.”
Until Kenichi heard the footsteps, he could not move from the edge of the hole. From his eyes to his feet, he was awash with energy that would once have drained in words or tears, but his eyes no longer could shed tears in the human manner, so he just sat still through its motions. The feeling of its flow eclipsed the sensation of having a body at all for a moment. An observer would have seen his fully open, unfocused eyes and guessed that there was nothing going on behind them.
But then—oh shit, footsteps. The feeling came back to his feet. The sound was of more than two sets of footsteps. At best it was Nitya, Tama and one stranger. One was enough, and with the secret exit lividly blown up, he didn't know how many more would come next. He glanced at Girard's body.
Still holding Lux, he climbed down into the hole and fled into the catacombs. Down there, silence fell quickly, except for the sound of moving stone walls.
Lux woke in perfect dark and silence, not that otherwise would have looked any different to him. It was a pair of screaming lungs that had woke him; he couldn't breathe. Dead? No, someone larger was just lying on top of him.
There was the person's head—he felt pointed teeth, waxy skin and a frighteningly slow heartbeat. Kenichi. There you are. “Kenichi?”
Something tingled behind his eyes.
Kenichi didn't move, totally limp; Lux heard him give a quiet snore when pushed off of him. Lux breathed again, and his senses sharpened a bit, save for sight. Oh, hey, they were lying on a bumpy stone floor of some sort. A dusty floor. And he felt scratches on Kenichi's face and dried blood on the tip of his nose, as though Kenichi had just fallen on the rough stone face first—the dark.
And his eyes tingled more. He couldn't ignore them any longer; they nearly stung. No, definitely stung.
He lay still until they clawed at the inside of his head. He didn't touch them. He didn't want to know why they hurt so bad; he just wanted to die. “KENICHIII! Kenichi, wake up! Wake up!”
He knew Kenichi couldn't understand and wasn't going to wake up while it was dark, and he could have used any name; he just needed something to scream. He didn't actually know if he was touching his eyes now, or moving at all; those were the only thing he could feel.
He also didn't know that a dark, shaggy-haired girl in a camouflaging cloak and with hateful eyes had just carried a dim lantern into the chamber he lay in, and in her other hand, a small and unmarked leather case. Over his screaming, he didn't hear her crouch down beside him and open the case, and didn't see the rows of cloudy white vials that lined the inside.
Corvus Seven plucked out a vial labeled “analgesic”. She pushed a corkscrew through a fingertip on her free hand and with that, opened the vial. A plume of smoky white gas rose from the opening, clearing the glass inside and revealing one ball of solid matter that was far smaller than the vial itself—a curled up spider, striped black and white on its abdomen like a monochromatic beach ball. It was a type of spider that only lived in captivity in these catacombs where it was bred, nowhere else in the world.
The spider woke and scrambled for the lip of the vial to escape. Quickly, before it got out, Corvus Seven slashed off one of Lux's sleeves with the corkscrew and lowered the vial to his skin, letting the spider crawl out onto him. She seized Lux's wrist and, holding it, watched the spider. As it crawled over just the right vein, she shook Lux's arm. The startled spider froze and bit—Lux didn't feel it; he only felt his eyes.
Corvus Seven gripped Lux's wrist until he stopped screaming and lost consciousness again, a matter of a few minutes. By then, the spider had started off again, leaving Lux and running for the exit across the floor. Corvus Seven tossed the vial aside, shut the case with a snap and, leaving her lantern behind, slinked after the spider. It had almost made it out of the chamber when she crushed it under a steel thumb, leaving the number “VII” stamped in its remains as on a seal.
When one who has become, all their life, accustomed to consciousness being defined as the senses being turned on, waking up with one of them not operating is one thing. But two? That's two out of only five, inching close to half. The state might become dubious.
After some unpercieved gap, not only had Lux's sight not come back, but his sense of touch had walked out after it. He could no longer feel anything his eyes, and he couldn't feel the floor beneath him, either. Every feeling was replaced by just one, this totally uninformative extension of cotton mouth throughout his body and to his toes. It told him that he was either filled with synthetic fibrous matter and lying inside something larger and stuffed with even more fibrous synthetic matter, or he was drugged up to his hair follicles. He doubted his waking mind without enough information from outside coming to prove that he was really aware. He placed himself somewhere between life and death. What sense would go next?
So far, his ears were in working order. He heard a shuffling, tight and impatiently human, not far from him. So this was how it was all going to be.
He still heard Kenichi, too, sleeping as soundly as ever and close enough to be still up against him as he last had been. If Lux hadn't been numb, he would have felt something new and alarming surrounding Kenichi, but that was not the way it was.
“What poison?” he asked the moving person. He heard his words; despite not feeling his mouth, they came out just right. That wasn't supposed to happen, but it didn't matter. “How long have I got?”
“A strongish analgesic poison, if you insist,” said a woman.
“Hello Ginger.”
“Hello, Lux. You're right; all medicines are poisons in the right amount, but for this, it would be a full two spiders' worth. I only administered one. I didn't want you to get hurt that way.”
Lux didn't want to know how, and didn't ask, and mentally thanked her for not telling when he didn't ask. He could only assume that if she was in here, wherever he was, she had brought a light, which he couldn't see. The most recent thing in his memory that had the potential to blind a person was grenades. Those did things to eyes that weren't reversible. It was too bad. The drug had flattened out the amplitudes of his emotions, and that was all he thought of his eyes. It was just disappointing. “Then,” he asked Corvus evenly. “How are you going to kill me?”
“You asked for how long you have—you likely have around the length of an ordinary human lifespan, minus a few years for a reckless nature. But I'm not going to determine that. I'm not going to kill you—if I can let your dad live in this chamber, of all fucking people, you're safe in it, too.”
With his lack of touch, it was consciously, but Lux's body curled a bit, tried to retreat into itself. He had never had this kind of physical proximity to Lux II before, and he knew it was likely for the better. Those, like doctors, who had got that close paid for it in blood. Not always literally; he wasn't Uncle Vox.
“It's all right,” said Corvus. “He can't bother you; he's a tree.”
Lux asked the first thing that came to mind: “Is it going to happen to Kenichi?” He needed a sensory reason to believe this. He brought himself to his knees, trying to remember how the actions was supposed to feel. He almost made it—he clumsily fell into a mess of small, winding pressures—he could sense that. They made a pattern recognizable as branches, but there was a certain give. They were covered in flesh; he didn't quite know how he knew. “Is it—”
“No! You have to ask to be a tree!”
edited 2nd Sep '11 12:39:43 PM by SPACETRAVEL
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
Zzzzzzzzzz
Oh man......
Powerful. Gut-wrenching. No words left, Space.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
⚙
I have no reason to get stuck to the extent that I did on this again. This is somewhat messily solved. It also shouldn't get any more morbid than these segments again.
The evening before Lux II's disappearance was discovered, his feeding tube malfunctioned, delivering at only intermittent, uncomfortably pressurized spurts. It wasn't the first time, so he didn't worry, and he wasn't starving, but he was a little annoyed. As with every other time, a technician and one guard were sent up to repair it, unknowing that someone had fashioned the rote malfunction on purpose, to cover a greater problem—herself.
Corvus knew she shouldn't have been able to get into Lux II's stinking room, and that he would probably not be alone there. She couldn't sleep, though, and it was worth a try if only to find out why she couldn't do it. She got in through the roof, though, with no resistance, and for some reason, he did dare to be alone. Fortunately. She doubted her ability to fight off any guards while in his sight. She had many pictures of him, certainly, ripped off the skyscraper cameras at the rare times she could manage to get into them, but the cameras were filters—sharp, but never as sharp as a pair of eyes with nothing between them and him. They were a wall thick enough to block many parts of the soul from getting through to him and bouncing back with sensations. She felt something face to face with him—mostly like she was about to puke a fountain of tears. And he'd really deteriorated since the last picture.
He wasn't even trying anymore. There were no makeshift tentacles anymore (he'd abandoned fingers and toes long ago), and keeping his eyes next to one another was right out. There was no head and no body—no nothing at all. He had let himself go completely liquid and employed something else to give him a shape and a face—a scarecrow, already slightly moldy, was stuck through the floor at the nadir of the room's central slime puddle. Like a coating of shield material, the ochre ooze that Lux II's body had at last successfully melted into was simply splashed over the scarecrow's shoulder, dripping. In front of him, Corvus couldn't see any eyes, and she couldn't see anything move when his voice issued forth from nothing:
“Nice outfit.” He wasn't afraid. “Assassin, eh? Gods, just like everyone else. How fucking trite. I was hoping I'd be the one to be killed by a window cleaner, or a plumber, or something. For a damn change.”
She wore all black, like he had once done, and a hood that barely contained mousy, electrified hair—the hair she would make orange and limp like Kenichi's a month later. She forgot why she still did this.
“I've noticed that you haven't died,” she said. “Do you want to die?”
“That's better. No one ever asks permission—a perfectly exciting approach turned boring by overexposure. But yeah. Sure. I'd like to,” he answered as though he had just been offered a piece of candy.
“Can I try something, then?”
“Shoot.”
Corvus had been thinking for the last ten years that this might be the case. She was here to give her mind peace and sound sleep again. She felt a mix of emotions, but let the angry and the hateful ones breathe through her flurry of shots at him with her irradiator. Nothing happened; his form rippled a little with each shot, but there was no damage.
“You're in here,” Lux said, unfazed, “because my security has lightened quite a bit. I thought, you know, why not? Who wants to fuck with a bunch of dumb guards and fragile machines when there's no actual danger?”
Fuming, she hurled two knives into him with the force she'd futilely thrust such things into herself before, trying to escape a thousand-year-old body she was pretty sure she wasn't human anymore. When those slid through Lux and dropped out of him without cutting him any more than they would harm water, she, hands shaking with anger, took the early century machine gun from her pocket and inflated it. How that worked was unimportant, but it did all that a more conventional gun of its kind would do. That is, spray him with bullets that didn't do a thing but be absorbed and drop out of his body onto the scarecrow's chest. No blood was drawn, even a drop—did he have blood anymore? Lux wondered, “What's your point? Target practice? I'm good for that. Look, I know who you are—shouldn't you know better than anyone that you can't maim a liquid? Try, bitch. Just try.”
“I've been thinking that you've had enough. I didn't imagine you would be...like this...for so long.”
She would kill Lux. Her need for revenge would be satisfied by the blood, as would this new need to give mercy. But of course he was as hard to kill as she was.
“One mistake of so many,” said Lux. “Another—you showed me your supernatural nature by what you made of me. And second, you drove me just mad enough to believe it, and to run with it a little...knowing that magic is a thing, it wasn't too far from there to your name, Miss Corvus.”
“Of course.”
“Don't worry; no one knows. I'm disappointed because I read about you, and I was really starting to hate you less. You seemed like someone so good at things—who would be a hell of a lot more careful about concealing yourself than you were with me. But then...what the shit made that one night different than the zillion that came before? What made you suck on that one night is the one thing I don't understand, couldn't see myself doing in your place. You are too good to be thrown off—that far off—by some annoying weirdo happening to die in your vicinity.”
Corvus hated not knowing how intelligent he really was. He spoke like he knew things, but then would just plummet into that, crashing, burning and exploding so suddenly—when it came time to understand those things he knew. “Because, you idiot, you'd just killed Aubrey!”
“He was some kind of dumb anomaly for you, right? Because if shit got so distracting every time you were ever with a guy, you'd have—I would say died long ago, but you're immortal—“
Corvus cut him off with another gale of ineffective bullets, only releasing the trigger when she heard him laughing.
“That tickles! Really. You're not going to scare me with weapons. Knowing that you're real, I now know for sure that if someone could kill me, I'd just get dumped into a river for some eternal nighttime swimming party. Sounds more interesting than this.”
“Clearly,” Corvus said through her teeth, “I don't know the right way to do it. Do you?” She had just been trying show him a shred of mercy, and he'd now skipped away with that, too, like it was nothing. He had a point; he was far more suited to withstand being unable to die than she was because he didn't know what love was. The thought nearly made her want to stop trying to release him from it. What if Death were to throw him back, too? After looking down at him and saying “What the hell is this? He makes Corvus look like something we could have dealt with.” When the rest of the world melted away, it would just be him and her, creator and beast, as if their spirits really were brother and sister. More than anything else, she didn't want them to be.
“I don't know, either, but two heads may be better than one.”
Whatever the way to kill him was, her one precious consolation that she had left was that when they found it, she could do it as hard as she pleased.
That hope, too, would die, as Lux repeatedly failed to.
He let her bottle him and bring him back to the catacombs with her, where they proceeded to try everything—handheld irradiators, illegal B-crossed irradiators, overclocked grenades, rusty bullets, fire axes, knives, forks, eight foot long metal legs, angry poodles, spiders, anvils, a refrigerator, a grand piano, a spendy immersive set, pipe bombs, traditional grenades, dynamite, broken window glass, railroad spikes, a hologram generator, more grenades, a sword bearing Dingo insignia, a bullet train, broken cobblestones, scalpels, everything in Ginger's cavern except for her photo and Aubrey's necklace, kisses, fortunately not a satellite irradiator, the entire set. She could only pretend that what she heard from whatever invisible duct he used for a mouth was screaming; it was laughter. She remembered how repulsed she was by what happened to a person when their ending was taken away. Did he feel pain anymore at all?
Her catacombs, which never looked tidy but tended to have some order to their madness, quickly became trashed just in time for Kenichi to wander into for his surgery. She had cleaned up the slime right before pulling him through the door; it had been all over everything. Lux II's consciousness had been dripping off of everything in sight, thrown and splattered everywhere, but alive. And from someplace, speaking and laughing. He would claim to have seen everything she did to Kenichi—from where? How? He didn't think it important.
“Try to attach me to the immersive,” he said, not with talking in hesitant circles to get there. “I might have an idea.”
Corvus stepped over sideways filing cabinets and paper wrinkled permanently from being slimed too often to ever dry. “Not afraid of it anymore?” she snarled. “Not afraid that I'll write up some wall every bit as strong as yours was and leave you there alone?” The old immersive was the only thing she owned that he had previously refused to be bludgeoned with. He didn't want it near him. He wanted to die, not be reminded of the most frightening moment of his life.
Something overrode that today.
He said, “As much as your flailing at me feels like being wrapped in flowers, not firing back feels kind of fucking weird after—what, weeks now? I know better than the great Corvus if I can stand to get my body back for just the time it takes to ram something through her face. Lady, in the only way I can, I'm trying to challenge you to a duel.”
She mopped him into the smallest box he could fit into, so that if the immersive's drug tried to drain out of him, it would have nowhere to go but back through him. The only box she could find of the perfect dimensions was that which held Aubrey's necklace and his photograph. In all this mess, there has to be somewhere nicer to put them, she told herself so that she could consider emptying it, but then something else that would let her not just empty it, but overturn it on the ground without looking back at the contents. I chose Lux's family the second I pushed Hadrian onto my boat. It surely didn't matter where she put the necessary needles with his whole body being of the same form; she would just stick them through the lid of the box in whatever order she saw fit...
The wrong one, maybe. There was no way she would do as he said and follow him into an equal fight—
Lux's first thought after entering the simulated environment with a scream was, what the hell are those? He was looking at the cavern floor, and on it were two knobby, asymmetrical things made of flesh—his? Did I shape those? I told myself to give up; I'm starting to suck at this...
He didn't remember spending enough time on any appendage to make it look quite that intricately weird. From the outset, he had foregone difficult details like toes, but there looked like toes. He was looking at his proper set of feet. Huh. It was hard to be excited about anything, set down in the neutral plastic doll stance he recalled from Aubrey's immersive. Maybe these weren't anything to fear after all. Examining himself, he found his old clothes, in fine condition and harder to breathe in than ever. He found his face; while he didn't exactly feel it or believe it was there, it left black lipstick on his hand all the same. It was all right.
Across the cavern, up against a wall, he spotted Corvus spinning a rusty sword like no one else was there. This was when he noticed the folding sword in his hand and realized why he was taking everything in so impassively—he was saving his energy for something. He unfolded the sword and did the thing, which was run at Corvus despite not feeling his legs and pin her to the wall through her chest.
Then she saw him. She took a second a to speak, appearing too astonished to feel pain. She stared up and down him as though she had never seen him before.
He grinned at her, but the smile twitched, threatened by his frustration. “You are the worst duelist.”
She said, looking into his eyes as though he had eight of each, “You weren't supposed to do that.”
“Oh my gods, you were going to follow the rules or something? You thought I had the patience? The memory?”
“You baby, you were so busy screaming that you didn't feel me not put in the numbing needle,” she gasped. “No doubt you feel weird right now—it's because you have the sensations of being a useless liquid with no legs overlaying that of your simulated body.”
“So? Two worlds at the same time. It's only one more than one. What's the big deal? Couldn't handle it yourself?”
“No, and I've tried.” Corvus raised her voice over the pain that was just starting to well between her ribs; she reminded herself between every word that the injury was not real. It would not send her into days of immobilization in agony as it failed to kill her; in the simulation, she had made sure that she could die. “There's a reason all immersives use that drug—so you're not totally immobilized! You impossible...you freak, I was going to watch you wobble around for a minute before skewering you in some humiliating manner that you would otherwise easily be able to block! I gave you the folding sword because you weren't supposed to be able to open it!” If there was one comfortable thing about having Lux around, it was that there was nothing she could say out loud that would bother him.
“Disappointed?” Lux did not hold back a snort of laughter at the mental image, even if it was of him. “The extra world thing was the idea I was toying with when I had you bring me in here—doing this, but the real way. If I can't be pushed off this mortal world, the next best thing would be to skip through to when it happens by itself, eh?”
“Don't change the subject; I'm about to drop out of the immersive—how did you just run the hell over here?”
“You should talk—shut up; I'm trying to tell you I mean the real way as in dreams, damn it! Fill me with some kind of bloody sleep juice in some way that isn't going to leak, and leave me that way! If you can do your box thing, you have to know a way that will last longer than weak cardboard—my secretions will melt that shit like I was going to eat it.”
“Can't you see I'm dying? Tell me—what did you do, put the needle in yourself?”
“Listen to what we have to do! Who are you, some random box peddler off the street, or the brilliant freak of nature who made me this way? You wanted to help me—you can help me—help me already!”
“You've never asked someone that before, have you...?”
“If they sell dumb boxes?”
“For help, stupid—and I'm getting tunnel vision! Why won't you explain?”
Lux couldn't shut it out any longer. His smile dropped off, and he gripped the handle of the sword threateningly. “Because how is BORING! It doesn't matter if my nervous system is hanging out on the moon without me; I've practiced this in my head for fourteen years, so you bet I know all the steps!”
“Even when you didn't have feet to step with?” Corvus challenged him, hoping that the stirring she felt around her would was just blood loss and not a different kind of pain.
“After you found out I wouldn't die?”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” was now, too, a new reason for Corvus to let him die, or put him to eternal sleep, or whatever he wanted. Her destruction of his body had accomplished nothing; Aubrey would have thought so even more than she did. Everything had melted from the outside of Lux, but under that, he had only become more solid. Being a thousand years old, with longer knowledge of ruin than any single soul on the planet as a consequence, Corvus had the authority to believe that if she had failed to break Lux II, no one could do it. She did not speak any more as her simulated death removed her from the immersive because she was trying not to imagine who Lux might have been had she not poured generations of corrupted genes into his mind.
Lux rambled, “Like I told you, I've come to like you a little more than when you made me that way, but I'd rehearsed this for too many years, you know? That time couldn't just go to waste...”
No container was necessary to keep whatever soporific flowing through Lux for centuries if necessary. Corvus had stolen a tree from the underworld once, back when people used to take such exploits more seriously, whose flesh purportedly sent one there upon consumption. Rumors that this meant poison were lame Death shenanigans. Death would never breed something that would bring in extra souls to contend with. Rather, the plant only sent one to the underworld in the sense that everyone visited when they went to sleep. It made a useful drink for bets and escaping places by playing dead.
It grew faster the darker the place it was planted in. All Corvus had to do was knock out some deep catacombs and plant it under him there. Lux didn't make a peep as the tree grew into him, even as his form clung to its spiny branches in every corner of the chamber. He was out before it put down its first root, and would remain so as long as the tree grew.
Corvus said to Lux III, “A flower grew on it—not far from you. I mean it; it's purplish and—never mind. You can smell it, right?”
Lux said nothing, but she could tell he did. He didn't even feel the pillow she had slid under his head, but there was no reason why he couldn't smell the overpowering thing. The smell was unlike anything that was supposed to come out of a plant Death had touched. It was fluid and almost heavy enough to swallow, falling straight down into the throat and pretending to be a taste. It confused, urging the senses that it came from something to be eaten, though the eyes saw the nightmare the flower sprouted from and knew otherwise. The flower smelled infinitely sweeter than an earthbound Lux II had ever been.
Corvus could see Lux smelling it; he stopped moving, and she watched the tense rise and fall of his chest slow a little bit and deepen. “It's not supposed to happen on that kind of tree, not when it's in total dark. One would hope that it's your father saying he's found what he never could in this world.” She liked to imagine that it included tormenting remorse.
“It's your flower,” Lux murmured, wavering in control over his mouth but never losing very much. “Like you said some spider was your spider you used on me. You're just torturing him more. That's what you do to my family. Stupid waste of time on a story.”
He couldn't see her face and what happened to it when he said it wasn't true. It was. “I...I didn't expect you to believe it.”
“What are you doing to Kenichi now? Same thing?”
“No!”
“Why did you bring him here?”
“You weren't supposed to be awake this soon,” snapped Corvus. “What I am going to do is take him out of the catacombs for a while—“
“Oh my gods, you are going to make him another tree!”
“No, I am not.”
Lux had become so practiced at shouting recently that he did not have to feel the motions to do it clearly. He started to lift himself up again when he realized that he had lost track of where Kenichi was. He could hear something going on, the sound of a body sliding across a stone floor over a slow, thick bubbling that was almost low enough not to hear. It sounded like Kenichi. Lux knew the tiny noises Kenichi would make in annoying quantities in his very deepest sleep; smudges of ridiculous random words, single isolated snores, bouts of hiccups with no origin, sighs where it seemed like he would never stop inhaling. Lux could hear him, even, and still needed his eyes to find the right direction. His anger pushed harder through the drug because he knew that Kenichi was probably just feet from him. “What would it matter if you did, damn it? If you leave him down here where it's dark, he's never, ever going to wake up and bother you—“ Lux frantically slapped the ground all around him, hoping to feel the curved pressure of any limb of Kenichi's to grab hold of.
“You won't find him; I've taken him all the way off the floor now. Don't worry; he looks perfectly at ease.”
“What?”
“I am not hurting him or changing him at all!” Corvus growled for the last damn time. “I just received warning that Nitya has called the watch about me. I made Demetrius a certain promise that I would deface something in his father's building were somebody from there to do that. I doubt he is going to be very cooperative, so Kenichi's presence can be of help to me there. Even if I say I might harm him, I promise that it will certainly be unnecessary. He will never even know where he went.”
“What's going to happen to me...?”
“I don't know. You know entirely too much for me to just let you go without a thought, I'm afraid. Haven't you ever been afraid? Don't you think something like me can be, too? Be like you? That's all I ever wanted from you—any of you. That's all. Please just rest now, Lux. Please.”
Lux heard something scrape softly against a wall, the floor or perhaps the ceiling—they were all made of the same thing and sounded the same. Kenichi? Lux would get him, wherever he was—now. Trying to will the nerves in his legs awake, he leapt up in the direction of the sound, hoping to feel the tug of having caught a moving person's hand or ankle or hem and to hear someone scream or fall. The only sound he got was the isolated sound of his own hands hitting the floor, and all he felt was the dull, deeply buried sting of his elbows as he landed too hard on them. He didn't hear Corvus go, but he did hear the silence and motionlessness she left behind with him.
She did not close any doors on the way out; the catacombs were twisted enough for those with eyes to get lost in them all the time.
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
⚙
As far as Lux knew, he was alone with no other living thing but the flower.
Reaching for the sounds of Corvus departing, he seemed to have brought himself even closer to it, and it felt like it could have been growing in his own lungs for how strong it smelled. He was nearly choking on the scent now—or not choking, as choking requires trying to breathe. His lungs were filled, totally shut down, and still he felt it. The flower had a smell even when one wasn't breathing, just pouring it through any live or frozen nasal passages, and any throat—even his mouth could smell it.
He could only think of one way, unable to stand or see the catacombs, to get rid of it—really make it stop this. It helped that he could not see the grotesque tree stuck to it, and he avoided the flesh parts so that he might pretend they weren't there for just this second. He pulled off one petal at a time and swallowed it, hoping each would be the last one. There were five. He would have stopped if he had tasted any acrid sting or bitterness of poison, but there was none, only a taste as fluffy as the smell and that similarly insisted that he was supposed to do this.
Even this didn't help—the vapors just rolled up from his throat and filled his head from the inside, pooling in every irritable membrane within it. He choked on them—
“It's you—hi!”
Lux stopped breathing altogether. He had just heard his father's voice bubble forth—not literally, not through a film of slime and mist. Lux II's tone was effervescent. Lux was completely lost on which direction the voice came from; it came in from all sides, everywhere and nowhere. “You're...you are...”
“Shh...” Lux II held back amusement at something; his shushing wavered up and down. “Clonebitch can't hear me...she's going to think you're mad talking to yourself...” he teased. To keep his own voice down was a challenge he could not win against himself; he could contain himself no longer and exploded into peals of laughter at the sound of his own whispers.
“You're supposed to be a tree!” Lux screamed. “You can't talk—you don't have a mouth! You're not even awake! I can't see you—I am mad!” He began trembling and curled up around his knees, trying to be as invisible as he was to himself. If he couldn't see, how did he really know there was a tree at all instead of a fully formed Lux II? Lux knew all of the horror stories about what, back when his father still had arms, legs and a head, Lux II did with them. Just as a voice, he had been a living headache. He had been much too scattered to manage focused abuse of any one person in the Langley skyscraper, but that voice, over an intercom unnecessarily turned up to its full volume, spat fire everywhere at once, never letting anyone rest for fear of being startled.
“Well,” Lux II considered, “if having another person in your head makes you automatically mad...” Lux heard him smile.
Lux's heart was pounding too loud in his ears to let him pick out the tone of that smile and hear how uncharacteristically benign it was. “Damn flower—get out!” He tapped his head against the stone floor as if trying to shake Lux II's presence out of an ear.
“So I found you...! I knew that was the way to contact you,” teased Lux II. “Put something something to do in front of you that was as ill-advised as could be imagined. I can see the part of your mind responsible, the one that makes other people not do the interesting things—it's flipped, mirror-imaged. Like mine...!” He glowed.
“GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT—“ Lux hit his head harder until dizziness tilted the ground and tipped him over. He lay frozen still, to afraid to move, imagining that Lux II might do something like tear his brain apart from the inside just for kicks.
“Lux...?” Lux II's voice softened—saw what was wrong. He actually did. “Oh...erm...shit. It's all right; I...can I just help...?” Lux did not show any sign of believing him. “You need to stop my sis Corvus, right? Am I right...? Or get to Demetrius's before her...? Am I right to guess you want Zimmer back...? He looks different now, and you're pretty attached to him...as far as I can t-tell...” Lux II wasn't even a mockery of himself, he was being so strange. His voice ricocheted like a pinball between emotion ofter emotion that he was supposed to be incapable of, with more energy than anyone in a humane world should be expected to handle. Suddenly, he sounded choked by his own words. He jumped subjects with no pretense. “See, when...” he swallowed, “you spend long enough in dreams, you start to be aware of what's between them, what you're supposed to just skip over, where exactly you go when you're asleep. You notice at first that it's really shiny, with no corners, and moving. It's a bubble, a tiny small one moving over the surface of Death's own river,” he intoned, still so evenly and softly. Maybe he hadn't launched into his description in a random leap, but to slow things down for Lux. It could be true if everything else was. “You're inside it alone, but you can see out and see millions more, all of 'em with another person dreaming in them—most of them lying unaware of where they are. You can't hear them and can't speak to them yourself, but oh my gods...I can hear them with my mind! I can look at their faces or their hands and get a flash of what kind of thing they're dreaming about—get it in my head or chest or sometimes my eyes. I never understood anyone outside of here like I do them in the Iosethep bubbles that are all nearby...gods, we've never even spoken, and I think I love them all,” he sighed in his wonder. Lux had no idea how long his father had been aware of the bubbles, but it sounded like that wonder had never dampened since. “I just don't like when someone starts freaking out, though. Like screaming or twitching or kicking at shit that isn't there...like Demetrius London! He's been at it for so long that I'm picking it up like an antenna and I just want to claw myself out of here and try to swim—“
Lux forgot something and responded as he would to someone who was born with the feelings that Lux II thought were a psychic superpower. “I'd think he's having a nightmare, Dad.”
“Uh-huh...oh...” Lux II's voice wilted some more. “And you, I just saw you pop in and disappear again...I want to help you because you looked sad. And just like your mom...or, I think she must have been your mom...L something...Lu...Lucille? Lucie...Lucrezia...Lucrezia. Lucrezia...Lucrezia E...Er...Ev...somebody! What the fuck? I killed her...I killed her, and I've never, ever, ever remembered her name...” He strained against tears.
Lux rolled his head over the floor; the bumpy stone hurt less than the voice. “You are hurting my head. Quiet—“
“LUCREZIA EVANS!”
“Ack—“
“I remembered!” Lux II's voice jumped up and down as though he had just succeeded at giving something he had taken back to the woman after all this time. “Lucrezia Evans! I did it—it's because my head can hear, I think. I know...“
Lux could almost feel his father's newfound warmth dripping from his ears and yet almost wanted to strike him for acting so far away from the expected. “This is weird. I need to know I'm not just imagining you. Do you ever see Corvus?”
“No.”
Lux ground his teeth.
“She complained a lot about it—when she was thrown out of the whole Deathworld, it included dreams. She hasn't had dreams since then; that's one reason why she doesn't write them into her immersive program. There's nothing she can influence here—that was the point.”
Lux gasped—he understood now how this Lux II could be real. His father was in a place where Corvus had no ability to touch; this was the Lux II who could have been if not for her breeding. It was really him. The personification of a bouncing ball with no regard for gravity, except made if its rightful pink rubber instead of the old spikes. He wasn't scary, though he was as tightly wound as ever. Lux remembered his voice on the intercom seething so deeply that one couldn't help but fear that he would become a hole in the universe like agitated Black B and tear up everything at once. Here, the hyperactivity remained, but the energy had flipped outward, and now he was a star about to explode.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, the bubbles are kind of fucking small. Can't exactly run around in here—I get to feeling like there's a million more fizzing in my veins. So, you need to get out of there, right? Let me get to the point—maybe you could distract her at the same time, so you can make it to Demetrius's before she destroys anything and take back Ziimer? That would be ideal, anyway, would it?”
“YES!” Lux yelled. If he couldn't get Kenichi back, he would be torn apart by the city trying to get to him blind. “But only ideal. Give me something I can do, or I will have to ask you, as acting archduke, to fuck off.”
“It can be done,” said Lux II. “I can do it.”
“Fuck off.”
“Move to your left, however you can, and keep moving that way until you find a girl sitting against the wall. She's the clone; she's stayed here to watch you. She doesn't think you're mad for talking to a person in your head—she's a seventh generation. She's worse...” Lux protested no more and began crawling, if only because this was a way to find out if Lux II was imagined or had really just invaded his mind through a flower. If this got him out of the catacombs...
His hand eventually hit the flesh of a bare knee, the bearer of which did not move in response.
Said Lux II, “There. Find her forehead...”
Refusing to trace up the entirety of Corvus Seven's entire unclothed body, Lux rose shakily to his knees and threw his hands against the wall far above where he guessed she was. He probed the wall until he found the top of her head. When he put his hand on her forehead, she paid him no notice.
“...and kiss her there.” Correctly anticipating Lux's angry cry, he added earnestly, “I know. I know, but it's the only way for me to get in there and tell her something.”
“Tell her what?” Lux hissed.
“Explain to her what you have to do; that's all.”
Lux leaned in slowly, following his hand, careful not to touch any part of her but her head. He felt mottled patches of metal chilling her skin, especially around her eyes. He quickly kissed one of those and recoiled. “There. Are you happy?”
He heard nothing back from Lux II for several minutes. His face itched, especially around his mouth—the analgesic thinning?
He didn't see Corvus Seven's eyes open or the cold rage in them, and he didn't see the spiderweb-thin wires that were making his face itch. They had run from her forehead to his mouth since the second he had kissed her. They itched because the ends that adhered to his face were dividing, branching out like grey roots across the skin of his face. He didn't see the metal patches on her skin grow until they covered her and then started covering the ground and the walls, and did not see the shape of her body melt into a lashing hive of steel tongues that pulled everything into its mass. She pulled skulls from the walls and took them in with the walls themselves, amorphous and growing until she could ooze through the walls with ease, leaving holes that she would quickly fill. When she hit Corvus's enormous main chamber, countless immersives and computers, medical machinery from all ages, metal filing cabinets and worse were all absorbed and forced into their places in the body of her functionless machine. She spread around the tree, somehow too repulsed by it to touch it, but she washed completely over Lux, enveloping him before he could imagine what was happening.
“What did you tell her?” cried Lux. He couldn't feel stone anymore, not the floor or the wall. Only flowing steel forms around him.
Lux II finally spoke again, and he sounded calm. “Just what you wanted to get out and do. That's all.” He meant it.
Lux reminded himself that this was a Lux II who wouldn't lie to him. “Is this her? Kenichi told me she was more than human, like...did she understand? She's freaking out on us...!”
“Because she never will understand. I thought she wouldn't. Have fun now. Gods, it's like the whole damn catacomb just have to life—amazing! Look at all of the—I mean, can you hear everything? All the skeletons and boxes—like they're all speaking! This is like a dream...”
''“Lux? How long did you read that it would take for Obscuro gas to clear out of the building with the vents broken?”
“Seven hours, approximately. We're sleeping up here.”
“Fuck; I'm cold...”
“I'm sorry.”
“What for?”
“Breaking the vents.”
“It's okay; you weren't trying to; I'd have ruined them much worse. Besides, this is kind of fun. I've never been on the roof before.”
“You haven't? What the hell?”
“I'd have liked to when the staff was still around, but I was afraid someone would get angry at me if I went off on my own...what is it?”
“Nothing.”
“No, really; what are you smiling about?”
“Nothing, Kenichi.”
“Hmm?”
“The way you're laying there. Spread out all random like someone just dropped you out of the sky and you never moved. Like you're trying to get a moon tan.”
“Except it's overcast, and I think I have maybe four coats on...five counting the uniform...”
“I noticed. You're just weird.”
“Want one?”
“No, you said you're cold, and I'm not. Keep it.”
“You kinda look like you are, sitting there like that. Please take it?”
“No!”
“Come on...here.”
“NO!”
“Hehe...okay, fine. I'll keep it...you see where it landed? You threw it somewhere over here, I think.”
“Yeah, I did...stop; let me shine the light there.”
“Huh...guess it went elsewhere.”
“No, I don't...I don't see it...fuck.”
“You don't think it went off the roof...oh. Haha, oh my gods...”
“It's not funny! Oh fuck...fuck...”
“It's only a coat on the ground. What's the worst that could happen?”
“Let me tell you—coat falls over pedestrian's head (who slipped through the watch line because it's dark), who is blinded to the open manhole or bin of REM-contaminated needles in front of him, trips, falls and dies. People hear screaming, swarm, overpower the watch with numbers and cry foul play. It is forensically proven that I threw the coat rather than simply dropped it, enough to confirm their suspicions. We are dragged out and trampled by the mob.”
“Wow...did you think up all of that just now? That was fast, like...five seconds? I wish I could do that...”
“This is an emergency. I have to think fast. Stay and don't make a sound; I'm going down to get it.”
“Wait—“
“What?”
“The Obscuro. You won't be able to find your way down.”
“Damn it—“
“It's going to be all right. We'd know if someone got through the watch line...it's been weeks and no one ever has. Don't worry...besides, what you said isn't actually the worst thing that could happen. The worst...is if coats are like pennies, and if they're dropped off a skyscraper, they'll just kill someone they land on straight away rather than blind them.”
“They're not. That's physically impossible. For pennies, too.”
“Oh. Well, if we're stuck out here, don't tell me you aren't freezing in just your suit jacket! Come over here—ow, sorry...there you go.”
“You're like a pillow.”
“One of a captain of security's many duties...huh? Are you crying...? I didn't know you were that worried—”
“No. No, I'm not worried about that anymore; the wind...making my eyes water. I-I'm not.”
“You sure all that's just the wind, little guy?”
“No. N—some kind of particulate must be blowing though that is giving me an allergic reaction. Unwatered shield...possibly? I'm fine. I'm-m perfectly fine. What reason is there for me to be upset...?”''
Let's see...dear Deva, this is Demetrius. I am writing this note because you requested that I let you know if I kept feeling unfocused, and perhaps why. In short, you and Nitya and Amanda are correct about what I think of Kenichi Zimmer. I caught myself, today, almost wishing that my pile of notebooks would topple and bury him, just so I could pluck just one from his face and kiss him on an embarrassed cheek before rescuing him. My imagination is distressingly inconsiderate. Fortunately, what I picture would require my body being of the proper form, which it is not. And it would require him coming back at all and...no. Damn. Damn. Scratch all of it. Stupid; no one would want to hear about that...
When Lux could feel ground again, he was pretty sure he was outside. He could also feel ground again, sort of. The analgesic was cooling down—fine, as long as his eyes didn't start hurting again. He felt cobblestones, tilted and bent—a ninth district being shredded from below by something massive. He heard stone tearing not far away, but he had been spat out too far away to feel the ground move or any of the multiplying metal appendages. Corvus Seven wanted nothing to do with him.
He muttered, “I'm alive.”
“Yeah,” said Lux II, “you are!” He sounded in love with the very idea. Hearing Lux be alive in any wretched corner of the city for any reason made the reckless ass light up.
“What now?” Lux asked, still blankly and well under his breath. Out here, he could be heard. Thousands of people were waiting for him to be criminally insane. That he had lay here for any amount of time undisguised and not been killed he took to indicate that he was too roughed up to look much like himself.
“You go to Demetrius's.”
“What.” Maybe, Lux thought, it was his eyes. The first thing anyone ever said about Lux II's sinister son was that he had cold eyes, dead blue eyes...would they recognize him without them?
“You do what you do best and improvise. If you could break into every restricted floor in the skyscraper...this is just bigger, right?”
“And one hundred percent darker, you...wait, you knew?” For all the care Lux had ever taken to avoid his father's staff when exploring, he had never remembered that the archduke in charge of them all was the only one among them with the right to see everywhere. “That I did things like that? But no one ever stopped me—”
“You know I wasn't wired to give a fuck about your safety when I was out there.”
SHUT UP. Lux dared not speak aloud. A new sound had edged between the rumblings of the catacombs and Lux II's voice—a pair of running feet, coming his way.
Lux II went on, unable to hear Lux's thoughts. “Didn't want to stop the great show, either.”
Stop—I can't talk back to you! Someone heard me! STOP!
“Even somebody without their sixth sense can appreciate watching someone do what they're good at.”
“Kid?” said a strange man—a Ninth Circle man. His boots fell heavily enough to have steel in the soles, and the tinny rasp of multiple surgical voice changes rang behind his voice. Nobody ever stepped into this district unless something dark pushed them there. “Are you—“
Lyon curled in the back of a train back to his district, making one plan for when he got there.
When he had got up and looked inside the skyscraper's passage, there had already been a huge hole, a dead Mynah, Nitya and some other Oceanic girl speaking frantically to way too many watchmen who had heard the explosion, and no Lux. Lyon couldn't bring himself to join them, even to step inside far enough to hear how upset the girls were. Lux couldn't be alive; he could only do more damage.
Unseen, he snuck back out of the restricted area and caught the train, giving the ticket machine a gum wrapper instead of a ticket because he was not going to be around long enough to face any consequences.
By the time he had sat down in the furthest seat back he could get, he had remembered killing Aubrey, too, and realized what had to be true. There was a pattern there, and completing it meant that he had somehow been the thing to drive Lucille mad. He had never heard that she had any great problems with him, but there had to be something. He knew most people were put off by his cavalier approach to conversation—maybe his bluntness had driven her to silence about her pain. He had never had any idea; she had seemed so content...the way that Aubrey had seemed so invincible, and Lux had seemed so unbeatable.
When it happened again, he wouldn't see it coming. Maybe the next to die would even be the tiny lady whose seat he had just stolen—maybe he'd forced her to move to move to a section of the train that was about to explode. He could think of only one way to cut off the trail of doom he dropped behind him like crumbs. He didn't know what it was about himself, but he had to get off of this planet before he destroyed anyone else. He gave himself no choice; it had to be right away. I'm sorry, Amanda, but you'll be the last one. Jumping out of a top floor window would be easiest, but like drowning in the pool or anything involving sharp and pointy objects, it was right out. Amanda would be disturbed enough by his death alone; he didn't want her to have to look at any mangled remains, too. Firearms were too unreliable—he had heard enough stories of such attempted suicides landing in the hospital for eons instead, brain ruined but body still alive. He twitched as he imagined every doctor and nurse who tended to his vegetable self for too long dropping dead from his curse—he wanted to go without taking a hospital with him. He mentally explored his house for objects that would just disintegrate him and determined that he would have to browse it for real to find one. Ideally, he would cleanly disappear, leaving the idea that he might still be alive, but not the effects. He had the rest of the ride to think up how.
The train made a stop near the Ninth, one he knew was always nearer to home than it looked; he didn't have much time left to think. However, the lack of time put a block on his mind—too stressed, it shut down. All that happened when he tried to think of deadly household objects was pain in his eyes. I can cry here if I need to, he thought. Nobody here is going to see me again, seriously. He told himself, but no tears got out, backing up inside him instead or something and making him feel like he had the chills. His face felt like it was getting too much sun, even though he had his window shade drawn, but cold pinched the rest of him.
The other people in the car kept glancing at his isolated seat. His distress was probably showing, if it wasn't just his skin they were looking at. If the latter, and if someone was about to get up and ask him for help with their computer, he would let them have it so hard—because he would never see them again. Ever. And if he did help, he would likely ruin the computer by mistake, so that it would explode and kill them. Or perhaps they were just worried about his bleeding nose. It had been over an hour now, and it hadn't stopped. Was it possible, he wondered, to just die from that? Stop looking at me; I'm endangering your car.
A woman with two metal arms guided a child into the car just as the train started moving again. She wrapped the arms about the boy for the second the train lurched back into motion to keep him still. He had a sickly weave to his step and was blind, eyes replaced with featureless cue balls that drew the passengers' eyes off Lyon for a second.
When the car steadied, she walked him to the back of the car and left him in front of Lyon. “Is that him?” she asked.
“Yes—!” the boy gasped, and Lyon finally looked up. It was Lux.
“I thought you might haunt me,” he said. “Without going into detail, I'm sorry, but it's going to be a really pointless endeavor.”
The woman who had led Lux in, who Lyon figured might also be a ghost, looked back several times as she left, not sure she approved of the blue man the child had described to her so confidently.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” said Lux blurrily, and fell forward half into the seat next to Lyon and half into Lyon's face.
Lyon lifted Lux off of him and put him on the seat properly, staring at him without blinking. Not a ghost. Then what could explain... “Your eyes.”
“I know already,” Lux's face twitched around the substitute eyes, trying to form a glare.
Lyon blinked back the sting in his own eyes. “It is better than dead...fuck, why hasn't anyone attacked you yet? You're just walking out here in the open...you are a ghost. You almost fooled me—”
Lux sealed Lyon's mouth shut with a hand; it took him a couple of tries. "They all know me by my eyes. They don't recognize me without them. They keep helping me..."
"Well, shit..." Lyon exhaled. "Maybe you're free. Just choose a fake name and..."
"Don't remind me—I just have to get to Demetrius's place. Do you know where to get off the train?” Lux did not notice himself beginning to slide sideways out of his seat; he was too busy reclaiming control of his mouth, which had regained much of its feeling but still slipped sometimes. Corvus's analgesic was proving to be slightly more refined than it had first appeared; slowly, it was rising toward his still painless eyes, somewhat giving him his limbs back. This was no perfect substitute, however, for Lux II's help. Lux knew he hadn't left; he felt himself being watched and was more than a little annoyed. But then again, he had made it this far on his own—surely that was the point.
“Kid...” Lyon began slowly, hoping that Lux could understand him. He took Lux gently by his shoulders, steadying him. “You know that you're drugged out of your mind, right? I dunno what happened, but you can't be going places on trains; you need a place to lie down—“
“No, I need to go to Demetrius's while I'm like this. If I weren't drugged, I'd be in a corner underground going 'oh gods, my eyes'.”
Lyon opened his mouth to argue, but all that made it out was “You make a point...”
“Can you take me there?”
This changed plans a bit, but Lyon never had been good at saying no. “I'll take you so long as you're the one telling me where to go. Whatever you want to do there, it'll be better than anything I'd come up with...”
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
⚙
Everything I said in the last post, I didn't know, but it was impossible to determine for the last chapter. Apologies. Any of it may have changed. In fact, pretty much everything changed about this shit.
So here it is. The whole last chapter of the thing (or is it?). I do hope it will be worth the protracted wait, and that it won't outpace absolutely everyone.
CHAPTER 13
Someone had run from the bar too fast to decide how closed it was. Scribbled signs marking the interior as off-limits wallpapered every corner, one bearing a lie about a mechanical failure and toxic fumes, but someone—Deva, Magnus, whoever had been the last to go—had left the door open.
Though Lyon knew Lux was as safe as any other accompanied child in the city, he bent over him extra protectively as he guided the blind boy through Section Eight. One tense arm stayed crossed in front of Lux, never falling an inch even though Lyon knew that arm wouldn't be much of a guard against anything that could try and touch Lux. With Lux in tow, he shuffled nervously around the cracked open door until Lux angrily realized that he had walked over the same bend in the sidewalk three times.
“I'll stay out here,” Lyon conceded, pushing the door further open with one finger and releasing Lux inside. “Stand watch or something.”
Lux protested, “But Kenichi said it's like a maze in there—he even got lost the very last time he went in—“
“I know.” Lyon cringed. “But you have technically roped me into breaking and entering. Blue men are well-known piles of sketchiness. In an empty building, I'm watch target practice. You alone look like just a sweet blind kid who wandered in by mistake.” And Lyon hadn't ever been inside before himself—he hadn't even dared to walk less than two blocks from the bar Aubrey had dressed up since the day he reckoned he had killed the man.
Lux could not see how sickly Lyon looked just standing there, but he sensed something that pissed him off. He strode inside without another word; Lyon would be responsible for whatever injuries resulted.
“I think it's just straight back—!“ Lyon whispered quickly behind him, flinching every time he saw a quiver in Lux's step. By now, Lux almost had his legs back from Ginger's drug—almost. “The stairs to where they live—like straight in the way back—fuck, watch out—!”
Lux disappeared from view with a clatter behind a deep blue centerpiece depicting the reason why spiders do not have internal bones. Lyon was relieved to hear him hit the ground. City safety codes could not puncture this district, Iosethep's carnival of monsters; it could have been worse. There were holes in the floor—just holes for the sake of creepy looking holes...
Someone rushing down a flight of stairs as fast as they could—faster than they could. Lyon heard the footsteps scramble themselves and saw the ghostly Oceanic man slip down half the staircase, knocking its door open and barely landing on his feet. So that was where the stairs were—it was too dark to see much except for Miyagi's face, which had all the shading of a light bulb.
Lyon was about to move when he saw Miyagi help Lux off the floor.
“Who are you?” Miyagi tried to ask as kindly as possible. The result came out mortified instead, as if the boy whose shoulders he held was tied up with explosives from head to toe. “Wh-what do you need?”
Lux felt Miyagi's hands shaking violently; their grip caused his own voice to shake when he started to speak. “I'm...” He wrenched himself from Miyagi's hands. “...Demetrius's friend. Who are you?” There was no way those hands belonged to Demetrius, the feathery voice he had heard through Nitya's earpiece.
“Theo Miyagi,” Miyagi forced out. “Mechanic. He hired me. It's...it's...it's...it's—it's—it's okay. But...”
“Nothing—I have to see him now! It's urgent.” Since falling, Lux's nerves about looking Demetrius in the face, the Demetrius he couldn't even speak to through an earpiece, had spiked. Whatever he had tripped over had put him on edge—it had been sharp, and his hands felt like it had scraped the skin on both. It had felt like bones, but not those of any creature Lux knew. “Has anyone but me come in here since they closed up?” he snapped.
“No—“
“Good. Please take me to Demetrius.”
“I'm afraid...y-you might find your visit unproductive. Boring...you see—“
“I know. Fuck it, then; I'm here to wake him up.”
Miyagi paused. If this child knew that Demetrius was asleep, perhaps they did know each other, he guessed. He was unfamiliar with all of the Chapals' and Londons' connections. He would have trusted Lux less if not for his age and frailty. To come here in this state, Lux had to be desperate. “You m-may try...” He put an arm around Lux and led him into the stairwell. “Don't mind my machine; it had to be a little big, but I t-tried to make it as subt-t-tle as I could—“
“What is wrong with you?” Lux pried Miyagi's arm off of him, the vibrating of which had added to his own unsteadiness. “You're going to make us both fall.”
“But can you see where—“
“No, and I won't see your bloody machine, either.” Lux, after a second of probing with his fingers, found the stair rail and threw his arms onto it and climbed it with them like a rope.
“Tell me where to stop.”
“Stop! There—there, now—! To your right—yes, the doorknob. Lower...there. Just go in. I—I left it open.”
Lux fell inside. He could tell just from the feel of the air that the room was little. He was halfway to his feet when the whispering froze him.
“Leave him alone...mother...please...those are his eyes, stop...”
There. There was the voice on the earpiece.
“That's him,” said Miyagi, sidling to the back of the room. He breathed deeply, forcing his voice to cooperate. “He...only sounds awake. I want to apologize to you...I am normally more composed. Maybe a little more cautious about letting in strangers...” He watched Lux for any sudden moves, but saw none, just a nervous boy sitting still on the floor, collecting dust. “But Demetrius's order was time-sensitive; I haven't slept since I began the construction. My mistake. Then something happened across the district where Nitya is, and everyone...well, I'm the only one here to watch him right now.” Backing into Demetrius's unoccupied desk, he discreetly brushed the unmarked bottle of pills that was the only reason he remained awake now onto the floor. “Tell me if you need anything, please.”
“...no, I can't...are you bloody serious...? Can't you see all of the...”
Thanks to Lux II, Lux now saw the world of dreams as a place, and Demetrius was crying for help from that faraway continuum of bubbles. Before he knew he was up, Lux had leapt to his feet to reach for the source of the voice—and missed distantly, falling into a pile of shaved scrap metal.
Miyagi sprang forward to lift Lux to his feet, then showed him where Demetrius was the only way he could think of, by placing one of Lux's hands against his face. “There he is.” Lux was unprepared, silence by shock for a moment with his hand stuck there. Demetrius was the warmest person ever. Maybe it was his breathing alone that heated this room. Lux felt him breathing shallowly until, maybe one time every minute, he would inhale just once like he was filtering the air of the whole room.
Lux asked, “How old is he?”
Miyagi glanced aside awkwardly, puzzled by the question. “Seventeen.”
“Oh.” Under Lux's hand, Demetrius's hair had felt no less fine than a three-year-old's. Then Demetrius gave a delicate snore, and Lux remembered what he was doing. He tugged at the hair, yelling, “Demetrius, can you hear me?” It had just burst out; he had spoken to Demetrius now, broken through the wall. Now everything would be easier.
Miyagi sighed. “I've tried. Everyone has t-tried.”
“Fuck off. DEMETRIUS! Wake up—this is an emergency. Come on—!”
“I can do it for you.” Lux II's voice reappeared behind Lux's eyes, softer than before. Lux hissed under his breath, “I thought you were gone.”
“Almost. You did destroy my flower, after all. But I can do this. I'm closer to him—I can. Let me tell him you're here; it'll be the last thing.”
Lux knew what that meant. His hands felt like clammy, eyeless reptiles attached to his arms as he found Demetrius's forehead and brushed his hair out of his eyes. To stop his hands from shaking as badly as Miyagi's, he placed them against Demetrius's hair. Maybe they would absorb a little of his warmth. Don't scare him. Please don't do it by scaring him. Lux almost said goodbye to his father, but then figured it would be better to just go ahead and kiss Demetrius between the eyes.
whoever wrote this shit needs to step on a rake in a comedic fashion
Glad to see you back; I was concerned.
And I can see why this didn't want to come along quietly; the characters are going all Escher-staircases and turning themselves inside out and sideways-upside-down.
It's also a very cinematic section. I'm thinking that Phillipe De Broca at his best
might be a good choice for director. If you had a time machine, of course.
edited 18th Jun '11 8:15:52 AM by Madrugada
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.