Notes: I didn't intend to write another EQ fic after "J'adoube", which makes this something of a pleasant surprise as far as I'm concerned. I hope you'll agree. Incidentally, you don't need to read "J'adoube" before you read this. Several characters are my own invention.
Pentimento refers to the changes an artist makes to their plans during the process of painting. It's from the Italian for "to repent".
--- Henri Matisse
What I want is an art of equilibrium, of purity and tranquility,
free from unsettling or disturbing subjects...
---
The building isn't far from Preston's own home, and they're similar: bland concrete towers in classic Tetragrammaton architecture, tall and gray and menacing in their soullessness. It's near the center of the city so the streets outside are broad swaths of asphalt teeming with pedestrians, with shouts and songs and laughter. But inside the only noise is the mutter of uniformed figures.
John Preston is here because death is. A man argued with his girlfriend and shot her, and when the police arrived he grabbed his own kid to use as a hostage, and when it became obvious to all that he wasn't going to passively go into justice, Preston was called.
It took one bullet.
Now the little girl is an orphan and Preston is left with a new death on his conscience. He hates these calls but, he thinks, they're better than cleaning up after suicides. Or cleaning out sense offenders.
The police don't need him anymore so he leaves the girl to the orphanage workers, leaves the building, leaves his driver, leaves the other work he needs to do today - leaves everything but the guilt - and goes for a walk.
Librian streets these days are different creatures than they were a year ago, let alone two. No mindless trudging of worker bees in gray, black, beige; everyone, it appears, has colors. Preston in his stiffly black Cleric's coat sticks out almost painfully, a raw dark gash, and he's granted a wide berth out of fear and respect and hatred. He doesn't mind. He wants the air and the movement, not any attempts at conversation.
He thinks about how sick you have to be to put a gun to your daughter's head. He tries, distasteful as it is, and can't imagine doing that, ever, to Lisa. He'd kill anyone who attempts it. He gets angry just thinking about it - angry at the phantom gunman, angry at the man today, angry at himself for being so uncompromisingly excellent in his chosen profession.
John Preston is quite likely the finest Grammaton Cleric ever produced, and he knows, now that he's awake and alive and feeling, that while he has to continue being a perfect killer, he really doesn't like it.
A shift in the pattern of movement ahead draws his attention back to the world. There's a small motionless crowd, an eddy in the flow of traffic, all tilting their heads back and watching something on the wall of the nearest building.
Simple human curiosity prompts him to join them, to see what they're seeing. That, too, is simple: someone is painting.
Graffiti has devoured the dour concrete walls of Libria, sublime and stupid and savage, multicolored, multilayered. Give the people paint and freedom, it seems, and they'll use it. This artist, however, is more sophisticated than average. It's a woman in a gray worker's jumpsuit, albeit one liberally spattered with her medium, and she's painting a huge rendition of a work that Preston recognizes as banned and burned long ago.
Peachy-orange people with dark brown hair dance in a ring - dance on green fields with a blue sky behind. The colors are bright enough to border on garish. Preston thinks all of the nude figures are women but it's hard to tell; some of the shapes are that primitive.
He stands with the other citizens to watch the small magic of brushstrokes transforming paint into a painting. The crowd, uneasy with Tetragrammaton legacies, slowly drifts away from his blighting presence. He notices but doesn't mind that either.
The artist eventually climbs down from her stepladder, puts down her brush and pushes her own dark hair back, and says without looking behind her, "What do you think?"
Preston checks; he's the only stationary observer, although passersby give curious stares. He thinks it looks like something a child would draw. He says, "It's... colorful."
"EC-10," she says with mischief in her voice, then glances around. Surprise flashes over her face when she sees him and he expects fear, or embarrassment, but instead she laughs at herself. "But you know that already, Cleric."
He nods at the painting. "I've seen that before."
"Matisse. The Dance." She rakes her hair back again and leaves a stripe of green paint like an exclamation point on her forehead. "He was a founding member of Fauvism - the intense, unmixed colors and lack of details are a signature of that."
Preston prefers music to art, personally, and he certainly doesn't know enough to appreciate Fauvism. He makes a noncommittal noise and she resumes painting. She goes over a few areas, fixing things he can't see, then signs one bottom corner in black. H. Abelard for H. Matisse.
H. Abelard starts packing away her supplies. Preston thinks he should probably help her clean up - that seems like an empathetic thing to do - but he looks at his watch and realizes he can't delay his life any more.
"It's good," he tells her. He means it, more or less. It still seems childish to him, but it's vibrant and cheerful and she's obviously pleased with it, and what the hell. He shoves his hands into his pockets and moves off, back toward the building where his driver waits.
"Thank you, Cleric," Abelard calls after him. He looks back, sees the painted dancers dwarfing their creator, and thinks the whole street, this one corner of Libria, is brighter for her efforts.
He wishes he could feel the same about his.
---
The dog is the first one to notice he's home tonight, but Preston isn't surprised about that. It jumps on him and barks and covers his hand with slobbering dog kisses until he kneels to pet it, and then it covers his face with drool instead.
He laughs, and that feels good, but not nearly as much as hearing his daughter's feet race down the hall.
"John!" Lisa cries, joyful, flinging herself at him in her plain gray nightgown. He catches her up and gives her a quick, hard hug. Wonders again: how could anyone put a gun to a little girl's head?
"How was your day?" he asks her, and gets a long, detailed response that follows him as he moves from room to room, greeting Robbie, discarding his coat, his jacket, and the bodyguard who's been keeping watch on his children while he watched the city.
She pauses for breath and Robbie says calmly into the gap, "We're ready for bed. Your dinner is on the kitchen table."
"Thanks," Preston tells his son, who still mostly acts like an adult. Preston carries his children's dreams; but Robbie, he suspects, is carrying everyone's, and always will.
Preston eats his given meal, not because he's hungry but because he needs the energy. He gives some of it to the dog, who enjoys it more. Lisa sits beside him and chatters on, swinging her bare feet beneath the table. The happy talk streams over and around him, and he lets it, taking comfort and a little pride, too, in her freedom of expression.
Robbie practices a new kata in the other room.
Lisa eventually finishes her story in a jaw-popping yawn. Her father walks with her down the hall, sees her into bed, kisses her goodnight, leaves the door open a crack.
Back in the kitchen. Preston clears the table and lays out his two primary weapons preparatory to cleaning them. Robbie comes in and sits in the same chair his sister recently vacated, but where Lisa talked, Robbie merely watches.
Preston isn't bothered by the silence. He and his son have much in common - perhaps too much, but Robbie's future is unwritten and, now, open to a dizzying array of choices.
He carefully removes the magazines and checks the chambers, making certain there are no bullets inside before he goes on.
"You fired it today," Robbie says. Not a question.
Preston has started with the one he used to kill the hostage-taker. "Yes," he says.
"Was it a criminal?"
It was a man whose soul was sick and rotting. "Yes."
Robbie puts a hand on the other weapon, then pulls it back, suddenly hesitant. Preston nods and watches his son check the gun again for any remaining rounds before picking it up. That bit of common sense meets Preston's approval: if you have to use the things every day, if you have to live with them as an extension of your body, you damn well better have a care for safety.
Preston cleans and Robbie turns the handgun over, trying to fit his fingers around the grip.
"It was bad," Robbie says after a minute.
Preston finishes cleaning the first gun and reassembles it. He holsters it again, thinks about his daughter sleeping down the hall. Thinks about the little girl who'll be sleeping among strangers tonight and every night for the rest of her life.
Thinks that, under Father and Prozium, it would never have happened.
"Yes," he says. He takes the weapon from his son. "But it could have been worse."
---
John Preston waits a week and then he can't. He gets the police report, reads it front to back, goes and gets other files to read everything he can about the three people involved: the murdered mother, the executed father, the orphaned daughter.
Her name is Nina and she's four. Tiny, as he remembered. A scrap of baby-fine blonde hair and brown eyes. The report from the orphanage notes that Nina loves to sing and play with dolls.
He thinks about his Lisa again, about madness, about guilt and murder, about loss and repentance.
Preston closes the file folders, stacks them neatly on his desk. Says to the empty air, heavy and quiet, "There's no way to fix this."
No reply.
Today, also, there is a small mountain - a large city - of work waiting for him. Instead he drives himself to the orphanage, parks the car along the curb with all the old authority of the Tetragrammaton, and walks in like a man who knows where he's going and what he's doing - which is almost funny, because it's so transparent a lie.
The orphanage used to be a factory of some kind and it still shows in the cavernous interior spaces. Concrete walls, strips of fluorescent lights hanging lonely overhead. Flimsy partitions have been set up everywhere to make a refugee-camp labyrinth.
It would be depressing except those bleak walls echo with the squeals and shouts and songs of children: audio sunshine.
The street entrance has a guarded desk where Preston stops perforce. He gives his name and asks to see Nina Oglivy, age four.
The woman behind the desk looks at him, both dubious and nervous, but goes off into the labyrinth nonetheless. The armed guard shuffles his feet and tries not to notice Preston's black coat. Preston looks around out of habit, checking his sight lines and potential exits.
Somewhere in the building, a door slams and a child roars with laughter.
The receptionist returns with two people in her wake. Preston recognizes both: the orphanage director, Bakker, and, more unexpectedly, the street artist who signs paintings for Matisse. Abelard, Preston remembers. Today her worker's suit is clean gray, and, as if to compensate for the lack of splatter, she's tied her hair back with a spring-green scarf.
"Thank you, Ms. Abelard," Bakker is saying. "I'll get back to you."
Abelard smiles and thanks Bakker in return. She gives Preston a curious glance as she leaves. He's also curious - about the oversize book she's carrying - but is not as interested in showing it.
"Cleric Preston," Bakker says, respectfully and impersonally regretful, "I know you're a busy man. I won't waste your time. Given the child's, uh, circumstances, we cannot allow you to see her. I'm very sorry, sir, but it's policy..."
It's no such thing. No one ever comes to visit the child whose father they've killed.
But Preston lets the lie slide past him. "That's fine." He reaches into his greatcoat's inner pocket and pulls out a doll, one Lisa never liked. But it's fine. Cloth and colorful, with a tangle of yarn hair. Flowers on its little dress.
"Would you give this to her. Please," he says, passing it to Bakker, who takes it gingerly, like it might explode. "You don't have to tell her who it's from."
Bakker looks uneasy but also a little relieved that the bogeyman and messiah of Libria is not going to force his way in. He agrees, Preston nods, and the business is concluded.
Preston walks out into the day feeling no better.
Before he can get back into his car, a sudden loud thud and curse pulls his attention down the sidewalk: Abelard has dropped her too-large book and papers are spilling everywhere. White scatters against the cold gray cityscape. There are people already stopping, gathering the papers up, but Preston goes to help anyway.
He plucks a paper out of the air just as it blows away. Hands it to her.
"Thanks," she says, shoveling papers into a rough stack. The other pedestrians who've come to her aid make themselves scarce. "Ah, I can't believe I did that - Get the book?"
He picks it up. It's fallen open to a picture of a black figure falling, he thinks, against a blue sky, with yellow starbursts all around it. The caption says Icarus. He shuts the book. The front cover has The Works of Henri Matisse stamped on it in faded letters, and it's obvious that this isn't the first mishap the book has suffered. The spine is faintly blackened by old fire.
"Why were you at the orphanage?" he asks, like he's investigating a crime.
She stands and takes the book from him. "Trying to convince Mr. Bakker he needs a sixteen-foot-wide copy of Lagoon. It's one of Matisse's later works," she adds. "Paper cutouts, very abstract. Just colors and shapes, really. But soothing - he was a big believer in making art restful. I thought the kids would like it."
Matisse's paintings all look like children's art anyway, so they probably will. Preston doesn't say it. Instead he gives an impassive nod.
She smiles, crookedly. "It really is a new world, isn't it. Two years ago - two years ago I would be dead, talking art with a Grammaton Cleric. Palace of Justice, right? Then - whoosh."
Preston has nothing to say to that, either, so he doesn't. It's all right, because Abelard is running on her own momentum now.
"I should say, Cleric Preston," she starts, then fumbles her book - almost drops it again - and laughs at herself. "I should say I'm a danger to myself. Anyway, I want to thank you. For - what you did. Everyone should be thanking you, including some people in there, I think."
"I killed a man in front of his daughter." The words fall heavy, deliberate stones, and he expects them to kill the conversation as well.
But she looks at him thoughtfully and asks, "Did he deserve it?"
"No one deserves it," he says, and as he does he acknowledges once more that this is truly the crux of his problem. Preston takes lives he has no right to take and bears the cost on his soul. And in his heart.
"I think you're wrong," Abelard says, no longer a cheery artist but a battered Underground survivor. "Father deserved it. The Tetragrammaton deserved it. The world is a better place without that pack of liars. Even if we do have orphanages now, and little girls without fathers. So thank you, again."
The orphanage door bangs open before he can respond, and the receptionist bustles out, breathless. "Oh! Oh, good. Here, Cleric. This is for you." She hands over a piece of paper and scurries back inside like the fresh air might be infectious.
Preston turns the paper over in his hands and examines it carefully. A child has painted a big red heart and underneath, signed in purple. NINA.
He looks at the lopsided heart and the clumsy word and feels a weight lift away from his chest. He feels like Matisse's Icarus, falling fast and free.
There are a lot of things that Preston regrets, a lot of things he wishes were different or that he could do again differently, and that will probably never change - but little Nina Oglivy is no longer one of them.
The paper is carefully folded into quarters and tucked inside his coat pocket.
There's a moment of awkward silence. Then, "I should be going," Abelard says. "It's a long walk to my studio."
"I can give you a ride," Preston says, on impulse, out of nowhere. He doesn't know why.
She smiles, bright and sunny and alive. Like dancers and lagoons and big red hearts. The green scarf flutters out behind her. "Thanks, Cleric. I'd appreciate it."
He puts out his hand to make a proper introduction. "John."
"Hannah." She shakes his hand. Hannah Abelard's grip is strong and warm and certain.
And John Preston finds himself smiling.