Adam opened the door and held it as the boy entered.
Lorcan sniffed lightly at the musty space and screwed up his face, "It's smelling a bit like arse in here."
Adam retrieved a can of vanilla scented air freshener from the toilet and sprayed a little toward the ceiling.
"Oh, now that's much better. Now it's smelling like vanilla scented arse," Lorcan quipped in his trademark cheeky fifteen year old Irish style.
"Sorry, it's been closed up for a while. We probably should have cleaned up the mess from the wet scuba gear." Adam indicated a large mouldy patch on the floor.
"Why would you be having wet diving gear in a London flat?"
"Long story, but we had to... teleport out of trouble, and this is where we came out."
Adam checked the stairs leading down to the caff below. He didn't want to run into his boss, his former boss, he'd had to cut out on his job and lay low a while. Sometimes avoiding things is easier.
Lorcan's curiosity was picking its way through a pile of Adam and Duke's belongings on the bed and floor.
"How did you live in a mess like this?" coming from a teenage boy, that was a statement with weight.
"This isn't how we left things, well apart from the sea weed on the floor. It looks like someone's turned this place over. They wouldn't have found much," Adam wandered over to the caff's upstairs storeroom that formed the other half of the space, "we never left anything that identified us here, except Duke's computer."
"Amazing," the Australian called out from the space above the stairs, amongst boxes of tinned goods, "they seem to have missed it. Come help me take it all back to the folly."
Lorcan picked up a cracked clock-radio, examined it briefly but put it back. He found his way around to where Adam was waiting holding an old cathode ray tube monitor.
'Can you get the box, keyboard and so on?' Adam thought at Lorcan.
Lorcan shivered, "I'm still not okay with telepathy," he said as he picked up the rest of the computer.
"Okay, but if you don't practise, you wont learn. Is it that it's too invasive?" Adam asked, "You know we don't read minds, just broadcast."
"Yeah, I know," Lorcan considered his answer, "It's just too... too yellow."
Duke balanced on the tattered arm of an old sofa in a dark corner of the stone folly. Staring up into the soft glow of the beacon that Adam had fixed to the ceiling, thinking of his father and his home in Vermont. His reverie was broken by two bodies suddenly coming into existence.
"...What do you mean by yellow?" Adam asked.
"Hey! My computer!" Duke jumped from his perch to claim his property, "I never thought I'd see this again."
"They didn't leave much undisturbed. But I think they missed this in the corner," Adam offered.
Duke took the box and cables from Lorcan and went to work assembling the machine on the sofa, leaving Adam holding the monitor.
"Do you think we can go back to London? Or do we have to stay in the ass end of Cork forever?" Duke asked.
"Oi!" Lorcan couldn't let the slur against his home go completely unchallenged, even though he knew Duke was only teasing him.
"I don't think we can go back to our lives in London, they'd be keeping an eye out for us there. And anything that links us to Lorcan is trouble he doesn't need."
"Jesus, you two don't need too abandon your lives just for me," Lorcan pleaded.
Duke relieved Adam of the old monitor, "Don't worry kid, what we had I wouldn't class as a life. We have one big problem here though," he said holding up the square UK three pin power plug, "we don't have any power."
An Australian, an American and an Irishman walked into a pub - no really.
Lorcan waved hello to his mother pulling a pint behind the bar as they headed upstairs to Lorcan's room with the components of Duke's computer.
"You lived above a restaurant, I live above a pub, are all Tomorrow People in the hospitality trade?" Lorcan joked as he cleared a space on his desk, "There, you can find a power point behind the desk."
Lorcan sat on his bed next to Adam, "Teleporting's orange."
"What?" Adam responded.
"Teleporting's orange, telekinesis is blue, they're okay. Orange is a bit hard to take, but yellow hurts, and the beacon up close, that's white hot." the boy said.
"I don't follow, mate."
"It's what I see, or feel when I do these things. Don't you see the colours?" Lorcan looked worried. He thought all this was normal. Or at least normal for the kind of freakshow he'd become since he'd met Adam and Duke.
Adam thought at the pillow at the head of the bed, it levitated a few feet up into the air.
"Blue," Lorcan said firmly, as if it were self evident.
"So you see blue?" Adam asked again.
Lorcan nodded and looked despondent, "You don't see it do you? I thought for a while that it was part of being a Tomorrow Person. I've seen them all my life, the colours, the doctors say it's mild schizophrenia. Nothing to worry about, I just see more than is there.
"But when you two showed up and all that happened, with the hospital, those soldiers, I thought maybe I'm normal after all. Some kind of messed up normal, just not alone.
"Blue's okay, orange is fine, they're just there, but yellow, yellow's a problem. When my dad died, yellow came and wouldn't go away for a long time. It would flicker across the room and hurt. And after the car hit me, yellow came back and stabbed into me. The nurse would give me morphine and everything would be red, warm and okay. But I knew yellow was waiting outside the morphine, I knew it was there.
"You're red Adam, and you too Duke. When I was dreaming in the coma I could feel you, red a while away, but there. Red and yellow make orange, and orange is okay.
"Am I making any sense? Please tell me I'm making sense, 'cos if you don't get it, no one will."
Lorcan's eyes were swelling with emotion, begging for understanding. Begging for acceptance.
"I.. I think I know what you're saying," Adam tried to lie, but his half heartedness betrayed him.
Lorcan withdrew slightly, and placed his head in his hands, despondent.
"I do," Duke started softly, "I get it. Sometimes you see what you feel. It's nothing to worry about, like the doctor said. It's not something that cripples you, is it? You just get a bit extra. It's not stopping you learning telepathy, it's just that telepathy is hard at first. Adam's been doing it so long he's forgotten what it was like at first. Before you learn to filter out all the crap that people throw at you. It's not just a voice in your head, like in the movies. There's all the emotion behind it, all the imagery that goes with thought. It's a lot to handle."
Adam sat back, he wasn't used to seeing Duke meat out all the empathy and understanding - that was his job. But he'd failed where Duke had made the connection with Lorcan. Maybe he was getting old, he thought to himself.
"Adam, you're not that old," said Lorcan through a cheeky smile, "Red and yellow make orange and orange is okay."
FIN