Okay, I was out of town for a couple days with no wifi, so I had plenty of time to work on this, and I'm quite proud of it, thank you very much. Um, let's see...I don't really have much to say, which is kind of a rarity for me, lol. Uh...so yeah, I own nothing, enjoy the chapter, and please remember to review, because it motivates the authoress. :)
It was only as she got out of the shower that things really began to take their toll on Shilo. She didn't know how long she spent sitting on the floor up against the wall wrapped in a towel while her wig sat in the sink a few feet away and soaked, time having lost all meaning to her as soon as it all began to come crashing down on her. She didn't know how she had lasted this long. All she knew was that at some point after sinking to the floor, she heard Graverobber's voice calling to her from the other side of the bathroom door, but it sounded strange and far off, as if from a great distance, or through water. Maybe both. Either way, she could hardly make out the words. He'd said something about...more? Was that what he'd said? More what? Okay, wait, she may have been out of it, but Shilo knew, she knew that door had been closed just a second ago, just like she knew that she'd been alone in the bathroom until then.
Wait, what?
She felt something. Hands. Strong ones, calloused and warm and firm, and not, she faintly registered, completely unfamiliar. They were on either side of her face, cupping her cheeks and turning her head to the right. She squeezed her eyes shut and gulped in a lungful of air, then blinked until the face hovering in front of her came into focus. She knew that face, she could feel it in her gut, but she didn't know from where, or who it was, only that the blue eyes gazing into her own brown ones were impossible not to recognize, even though she couldn't come up with the name of the person they belonged to. She studied the person's face intently, and only after staring at those unmistakable eyes for several long moments did her brain manage to re-create the makeup that Graverobber had evidently removed at some point during the time she'd spent holed up in Bathroom Land. His lips were moving, so he had to be saying something, but Shilo had no idea what, because there was no sound coming from his mouth. Not any that she could hear.
Her vision blurred suddenly, and then she felt something hot and wet spilling down her cheeks. Whatever was happening, it wasn't entirely unlike what she experienced just before passing out when she missed her medicine, but at the same time, this was something completely new and different and...terrifying. And she had no idea what it was, or what would happen to her as a result of it, or how long it would last, or anything. "I can't breathe," she choked out. Graverobber nodded as if she was only telling him something he already knew, and then, the next thing she knew, he had lifted her off the bathroom floor and was carrying her out into the hallway, still wrapped in the towel, leaving her wig in the bathroom sink.
He took her into a dark room where all she could see was a network of thin cracks that spiderwebbed all over the ceiling, most of them emerging from the larger cracks that she managed to lock eyes on every so often. Then the room filled with light—Is that a lamp? It...It has to be, it's too dim to be anything else and there's no ceiling lights in here.—and her view of things suddenly shifted so that his shoulder was in the bottom edge of her vision while directly in front of her and several feet away was a bare plaster wall and a door standing wide open. In the same amount of time it took her to absorb all of this, her view had shifted again, back to the ceiling with its cracks and occasional waterstains.
His voice came to her sounding muffled, like someone had forced her head into a sack and was holding her underwater and all at the same time there were cotton balls or wax plugs or something shoved into her ears and she was hearing him through the combination of all three. She could barely understand the words and couldn't fathom what he might possibly be saying to her, but his voice seemed to have risen suddenly in volume. Or maybe that was just her mind playing even more tricks on her. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she faintly registered that she was on a bed, which probably explained the shifts in her field of vision; it had been when he was setting her down on the mattress.
Then they were back, those hands on her face. His hands, she supposed. She couldn't catch her breath. It felt like there wasn't enough oxygen in the room, and while logic demanded she breathe as sparingly as possibly to preserve what there was, her instincts and the panicked feeling that was eating away at her from the inside out both made her want nothing more than to gulp in as much as she possibly could at once so she wouldn't feel so suffocated. His face was there again, hovering in the air above her, his hands still on either side of her face, his long hair falling over his shoulders, and maybe it was her half-delusional state of mind, maybe it was just the light or the angle, maybe it was two out of three, maybe it was all of the above, but she could have sworn that past the dyed streaks of color, for just a brief instant, she caught a glimpse of what looked like highlights, natural highlights of a warm golden-brown mixed in with his...ash brown? Was that what shade of brown his hair was? God, nothing made any sense anymore...
Is this what Alice felt like? But...if I'm Alice, then...is Graverobber the Mad Hatter?...Or...Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe Alice is me and the Hatter is Graverobber. Or would that be that I'm the Hatter and Alice is Graverobber?...W-Wait...I don't...What...? Why does he wear makeup, I wonder? Why would anyone wanna cover themselves up like that when they're so handsome?
What was that? What was that weird feeling in her ears, why did it feel like something was pressing that outer fold of skin into her eardrums, what was doing that? Wait, how...It was gone already, how could it be gone so fast? And why was Graverobber so close to her? His face was suddenly mere inches from hers, and she could feel the heat of his breath, the heat and oil of his skin, the grease in his hair, the odd stench of damp earth from the graveyards, of leather and sweat, and something strangely metallic that she knew she'd been overwhelmed with and had her nostrils assaulted by at some point or another in the very recent past, but she couldn't figure out when or where that had happened, and was therefore unable to figure out what the scent was.
Then the strange feeling in her ears had vanished, Graverobber had backed up a bit so that he wasn't quite so close anymore, and he was staring down at her with a creased brow and his lips moving. After a few seconds or so, sound began to issue forth from those lips, and then the sound gradually became broken and fractured syllables, which then began to separate into slurred-together words until finally, she could understand what he was saying and hear each word the way it was meant to sound.
"—shock, I need you to look at me and relax, just stay calm, alright, I need to go get something from another room, I'm just going down the hall, I'll be right back, alright, stay here." So saying, he turned and hurried the less-than-ten-foot distance down the hall from the guest bedroom and his own room, and just as he'd expected, she began crying out for him frantically almost as soon as he left the room, begging him through her sobs to come back, pleading with him not to abandon her, screaming about how she was scared to die and wasn't ready to yet and please, for God's sake, don't just leave her alone there to die all by herself. He grabbed what he needed quickly, then ran back to the guest room, getting to her just as she started hyperventilating.
The towel had, in the midst of her panic, slipped off almost entirely, leaving most of her small, pale, slender little body exposed.
Graverobber glanced down at the t-shirt and sweatpants clutched in his hand, having gotten them for this exact reason. Now, how exactly am I gonna help her get these on without looking at anything I'm not supposed to look at...? Finally, he went and sat down on the bed, keeping his gaze towards the ceiling. "Arms up, kid," he said, and after a moment, he could see her hands in the lower edge of his vision hovering in the air. He slipped the shirt onto her, and then somehow managed just by feel alone to get the pants onto her legs, despite the fact that she wasn't exactly keeping them very still at the moment. Once he'd gotten her covered up, he threw the towel onto the ground and got onto his knees beside Shilo on the mattress, having to fight a bit before he succeeded in pinning down her flailing limbs.
"No, don't!" she screamed, and he froze. "Don't, please, don't!"
"Calm down, kid," he said in a low voice, "I'm not gonna hurt you."
"Help! Daddy!"
"Daddy's gone."
"No, I want my daddy!"
"Kid. Daddy's gone, okay?"
"No! Get him back, I want him back!"
"I know you do, but he's not coming back. I'm what's available."
She let out a loud sob. It was followed by another, and then another, until they were wracking her entire frame and she was having trouble breathing past them. He laid down on his side next to her and gathered her up in his arms, holding her against himself and letting her cry. After a while, her sobs began to grow softer and less frequent. "Why are you being so nice to me?" she asked quietly, her voice muffled by the fabric of his shirt. Graverobber's gaze flickered down to her for a brief instant, then moved back up as he sighed. "Because," he said, "you're a good kid. You don't deserve to be left on the streets just because you don't have anywhere you can go or anybody to look out for you."
For a moment, they were both silent. Then, he felt her hand work its way up between their bodies and stop at her breastbone, and he wondered what she was doing. She gasped and abruptly jerked into a sitting position, practically yanking herself out of his arms in the process. "My mom's necklace," she said. When she looked at him, he could see that her eyes were still bloodshot from crying, but she seemed to have cried herself out for the moment, because they also looked rather dry. He sat up, pushing some hair out of his eyes and running his fingers through it. "What was that?" he asked.
"My mom's necklace," she repeated, "where is it?"
"I dunno," he said, "it's probably still in the bathroom with your wig. Stay here, I'll go look."
"Can you get my wig out of the sink, too? It's real hair, so you can dry it off with a towel."
Graverobber didn't respond, only nodded as he got up and went back to the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall. He had to look around a bit, but he finally managed to locate the necklace hanging by its chain from the knob on the inner side of the door, and then he took the wig out of the sink and drained the water, which was stained pink from the blood that had washed out. After drying it off as best he could with a towel, he took both the wig and the necklace back down the hall, only to find Shilo standing in the bedroom examining the contents of the closet, which he supposed was partly his fault since the doors on it hadn't been closed.
He cleared his throat to get her attention, and she turned. "Thanks," she said. She took them from him, slipping the necklace on over her head and then putting the wig on and adjusting it slightly. "Whose clothes are those?" she asked, pointing at the closet. "They don't really look like they'd be yours. I mean, no offense, but you don't exactly seem like the flannel kind of guy."
"Yeah, they're not mine, they're my brother's," he said as he went and shut the closet doors. "He stays with me sometimes, and this is his room when he does. Guy can't hold a job or an apartment for more than a couple months at a time, so he stays with me while he's between places. Just keeps some of his clothes here to make it more...convenient."
"What's your brother like?"
"Crazy and stupid."
"Didn't you also say you have a sister?"
"Yeah."
"What's she like?"
"Gone."
"Gone?"
"Dropped off the face of the earth after my mom's funeral, haven't seen or heard from her since, doubt we ever will again. It was seven whole years ago. I'm not sure if she's even still alive. And before you ask, my parents were...One was a drunk, the other tried too hard. My childhood wasn't fun, kid, I don't like to talk about it that much."
For a moment, they just stood there in silence, Shilo feeling slightly awkward. Finally, Graverobber jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "You hungry?" he asked. "I've got leftover Chinese from last night in the fridge, we can heat some up and put on a movie or something. I've got a ton of stuff from before the NOS epidemics hit and the world got shot to all hell. You ever heard of a guy named Tim Burton?"
Shilo looked up at him, a grin on her face. "Are you kidding me, Beetlejuice is only like my favorite movie ever!"
Graverobber held up his hand, and Shilo high-fived him. "I got that one," he said. "Chinese and Beetlejuice. I can make that happen. Follow."
So she followed him downstairs and through a small living room and into an even smaller kitchen. "What's in those two doors we walked past?" Shilo asked, watching as Graverobber opened the fridge and looked around.
"Huh? Oh. The one at the bottom of the stairs is just a closet, the other one's the front door," he said, and then emerged from behind the fridge door holding two cartons that had clearly come from a Chinese restaurant. "Orange chicken," he said, "or chow mein?"
"What's chow mein?"
"Type of noodles."
"Oh. Then...I guess chow mein."
Graverobber nodded, then set the cartons down on the counter. Shilo sat down at the small table and watched as he dumped the noodles into a bowl and the chicken onto a plate, then stuck the bowl in the microwave. "So," she said while they waited for it to beep, "if you won't tell me your name...can I guess?"
He laughed. "You can try!" he said. "There's a billion names in the world, kid, we'll both be dead by the time you get it! But hey, to quote my brother, whatever floats your goat."
"Okay, so you already told me that it doesn't start with an N, right?"
"That is correct. And just so you know, you're guessing twice."
"I beg your pardon?"
"You wanna know my first name, right?"
"Right..."
"I don't go by my first name."
"You don't?"
"No."
"Then what do you go by?"
"My middle name."
"Why?"
He shrugged as he brought the food over to the table and put the bowl of noodles in front of her, then sat down with the chicken. "I don't like my first name very much," he said simply.
"Okay, so...I'll guess your first name, then your middle name?"
"Whatever you want, kid."
Shilo thought for several moments, chewing her chow mein thoughtfully.
"Zachary," she said.
"Wrong."
"Darren."
"Nope."
"Christian."
"Uh-huh."
"Cody."
"Try again."
"Michael."
"No."
"Jacob."
He shook his head.
"Uh...Gavin."
"Kid, just give up."
"No! You know my—"
He cut her off with a tilted head and raised eyebrows as if to say, Really?
"Kid," he said, "everyone in the city knows your name now. It's not much of an accomplishment, believe me."
"God, I hate you so much right now, you know that?"
"You seem to be feeling better. That's good."
"You...energize me in some weird way I can't describe."
"How're the noodles?"
"Good. What are these things mixed in with them?"
"Onions. They put 'em in to give the noodles more flavor."
"Seriously, though, what's your brother like?"
Graverobber sighed, letting his head droop for a moment to add drama. Then he looked up at her with a look on his face that was a mixture of amusement and what looked like tiredness, laughing lightly as he shook his head. "I can't tell you," he said, "just like I can't tell you my name. It could put him in danger, and that's not a chance I'm going to take. I can't, kid, I just...can't."
"Who exactly do you think I'm going to go and tell this stuff to, anyway?" Shilo asked. "You're like the only person in the city that I even know, who am I going to repeat anything to? You said before that you're the only kid without an N name in your family, so his name starts with N, right?"
"Yeah, it does."
"Is he named Nick?"
"Nicholas, but we call him Nick. How'd you figure that out so fast?"
"It's just the first guy name I thought of that starts with an N, that's all."
For several moments, they just sat there staring each other down across the table until finally, Graverobber sighed.
"Alright," he said, "you wanna know about my big brother Nicky? Listen up, I'll tell you about Nicky. Nicholas is the most ADHD person I've ever met in my life, and because of it, he has trouble keeping a job held down, so he's always bouncing around between employment and between living places. When he doesn't have a place to stay, he either crashes with me or with our godsister. Technically speaking, I shouldn't even be calling him my brother because he's not, he's my half-brother. My dad and one of his girlfriends he had before he met my mom got wasted at a party one time, and Nick is the result. He was raised by his mom and my sister, mom, and I knew nothing about him until one day, when I'm about, eh...I guess I would've had to be around six or seven at the time...He shows up out of the blue on our doorstep asking if his dad was there, and we were so confused, and then all of a sudden, Dad comes in asking what's going on, he sees Nick, and pulls him inside. Nobody knew what the hell was happening. All we knew was that there was some weird kid yelling, 'Dad!' at my dad, who is suddenly acting all guilty and nervous and shit. So after we've cleared things up about who this kid is, we find out from him that apparently, his mom had gotten killed in a mugging, so he decided he was gonna go looking for his dad. Nick was ten at the time this happened, by the way, my sister was nine. So anyway, my mom ended up legally adopting Nick as her own, and Nick, who had previously used his mom's last name, started hyphenating that with Dad's, and over time, he ended up cutting out his mom's name altogether, and now he just uses Dad's name, same as me. And that, Shilo, is the story of my brother Nick."
He got up and disappeared, then came back a few minutes later with something in his hand, which he passed over to Shilo. "That's us when we were teenagers," he said. "I'm on the left, Nick's on the right, and those two girls with us are my sister and our godsister. My sister's the one with the deadpan bitch look on her face. That was taken when I was sixteen."
"He looks so much like you," she said.
"Yeah. We don't look quite as similar now that we're older. His hair stayed about the same color, mine got lighter, our jaws kind of went different directions with their shape...It's funny. He has long hair in that picture and mine was only to my shoulders. Now it's the other way around. He ended up looking more like Dad than I did, though I'm the one that ended up with the blue eyes. Nick got his eyes from his mom, I think. I never met her. Heard she was a nice lady, though."
"Dad always said that I looked just like my mom."
"You never met your mom, did you?"
"No, she died when I was born."
"That sucks, I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Can't miss her when I never knew her."
Graverobber shrugged in a "yeah-I-guess-that's-true" kind of way. "So what about you?" he asked.
"What about me?" she replied.
"What's your life been like, locked away like Rapunzel for seventeen years?"
She cast her gaze down, giving a faint smile as she shrugged slightly. "Not that interesting," she said. However, now that she'd managed to get something out of him, Graverobber was determined to get something out of her in return. So he leaned forward across the table, putting a hand under chin and lifting her head so she was looking at him. They stayed that way for a bit, just watching each other, a small grin on Shilo's face, until she finally couldn't help but let out a small giggle. Moving his hand out from under her chin, she shrugged again.
"I have a bug collection," she said. "I'm...I guess you could say 'culturally educated.' I know all these TV shows and movies and books and songs and stuff from before the NOS epidemics. I grew up pretty much idolizing Blind Mag, and I found out just hours before the Opera that she was apparently my mom's best friend and my godmother, but my dad told her I died with my mom for some reason. Anyway...I...I don't know what else there is that I can tell you, really, I mean..." She trailed off into another shrug. Graverobber sat there gazing at her for a moment, then got up suddenly, left again, and then came back, this time with two pads of paper and two pens. When he sat back down, he gave one of each to Shilo and kept the other set for himself.
"I have an idea," he said. "What if we each make a list of facts about ourselves? Just random pieces of trivia, whatever we can think of. But here's the catch—only some of them will be true. The rest will either be lies or partial truths. Think of it sort of like a game, if you will. So we'll make these lists, then trade 'em, and whenever the hell we feel like it, we can whip these things out, read something off of them, and the other one has to say if it's true or not. If it is, then the one who read off will have to tell something off of their list that's true. If it's a lie, the other person has to say something that is true, and if it's only a partial truth, they have to tell the full truth, and if there's a story behind it, they have to tell the story. How's that? This way, we get to know each other without either of us constantly pestering the other about certain stuff, plus maybe have a little fun in the process."
"Alright," Shilo said, "sure. Let's do it. How long does the list have to be?"
"However long you want, just put as much on there as you can come up with. If it ends up being more than one page, that's fine, I've got a stapler around here somewhere."
So for the next half hour or so, the two of them just sat there at the kitchen table, writing down their lists. By the time they finished, they both had two pages, each with writing on the back of it as well as the front. "Okay," Graverobber said once everything was stapled and they'd traded, "I'll let you do the honors. Pick anything you want off of there and I'll tell you if it's true or not."
"Okay, um...You're ambidextrous?"
"True."
"What? No you're not, shut up."
"I am so, you want me to prove it to you?"
"Yes."
"Fine, watch this."
He grabbed his pad of paper and pen again, holding the latter in his right hand, which, Shilo remembered, was the same one he'd been using while making his list. She watched as he wrote out the words Amber Sweet is the Queen Bitch. Then, switching the pen over to his left hand, he wrote the exact same thing directly underneath it, then dropped the pen on the table and leaned back in his chair as Shilo grabbed the pad of paper and examined both lines. "Holy shit, they're identical," she said after a minute.
"Told you," Graverobber said, shrugging casually. "Yeah," he added, "I can do just about everything equally when it comes to my hands. I mean, I prefer my right over my left because that's the one I used when I was learning to write as a kid, so it's a tiny bit stronger, but if and when I ever need to, I can use my left hand just as easily. Okay, that one was true, so now you have to tell me one of the true ones from your list."
"I'm named after my mom."
"Are you really?"
"Yeah, my middle name, Marni."
"Shilo Marni Wallace...That's pretty."
"Thanks. Hey, I think maybe after we read these and stuff, we should cross them off so we don't accidentally read the same ones again."
"You know what, that's probably a good idea. Yeah, let's do that. Nice thinkin' there, kid."
"Okay, uh...The girl who taught you how to be a graverobber has purple hair?"
"That one's a partial truth, her hair is actually pink. And no, it's not dyed, it was surgery. My turn. You have a—You do not have a black widow spider in your collection, quit bullshitting."
"Okay, okay, fine, you caught me, that one's a lie! But I do have a crescent comb-foot, and those are a member of the same family as black widows, which is the Theridiidae family. It's the family that all Lactrodectus spiders belong to, Lactrodectus being the widow spiders. Um...you've got a thing for roaches, really?"
"That one might be more true than anything else on that list, yes. I don't know jack shit about spiders, but you come to me with a question about cockroaches, and I will take it as an opportunity to yap your ear off about the little guys, I find them absolutely fascinating and I have no idea why, I just do. So when I was a kid, I started cramming my head full of all these roach factoids and trivia and stuff. Like, for example, you know how they say that the roaches will inherit the earth if we get stupid enough to kill ourselves off in a nuclear war? The lethal dose of radiation for a roach is like six to fifteen times higher than that of a human, but compared to, say, a fruit fly, they're actually not that radiation resistant. The reason they can survive so much radiation is because of the way their cell cycle works. Apparently, cells are most vulnerable to radiation while they're dividing, and for humans, that's like twenty-four-seven, but not with roaches. Roach cells only divide once each time they molt, and for a juvenile, that's maybe once a week at the most. So since it's pretty much impossible for every roach on earth to be molting at the exact same time, a lot of them would be totally unaffected by a sudden burst of radioactivity, but the lingering fallout would still be bad for them."
"How do they survive without a head?"
"Oh, that's easy. It's because the spiracles that the tracheae attach to don't include the head. You know, one time, they did this experiment where they submerged some roaches underwater for like an hour, and when they took 'em out, the roaches were able to recover. They're pretty cool, I mean, they can survive on nothing but the glue on the back of a postage stamp and stay active for like a month without food. And the eggs, you know how they hatch? It's a result of the combined pressure of hatchlings all gulping air at the same time. Some people think there are albino roaches, but that's not true. See, for a few hours or so after they hatch, the nymphs are white until their bodies harden and darken. People see the nymphs, and they think it's an albino roach, which leads to the belief spreading, but it's total bullshit, trust me. Okay, so now we got that out of the way, you have to tell me one of your true things."
"One of my wigs is Zydrate blue."
"What I wouldn't give to see you wear that! Okay, um...your favorite book is The Outsiders, is that one true?"
"It's one of my favorite books, but not my absolute favorite. My absolute favorite is a little known book that was published in 2010 called Revolution by a woman named Jennifer Donnelly. It's historical fiction, and it's really cool because it's actually told from the point of view of a girl living in 2010, and she finds the diary of this girl that lived during the French Revolution, and so it sort of switches back and forth between them as she's reading the diary, and then one day, boom, Andi, the girl from 2010, is suddenly in Alex's time period to finish what Alex started. It's really good, it's got some great quotes and stuff in it, and my favorite one is probably the one that's the very last thing in the book. It says, 'It goes on, this world, stupid and brutal. But I do not. I do not.' And then that's it, that's the end of the book. And, like, Andi's brother Truman was killed by some crazy guy like two years before the book takes place, and she suffers from like insane depression, and she even thinks about suicide several times, and she actually tries to get up to the top of the Eiffel Tower at one point so she can...you know...Anyway, she doesn't manage to do it, thankfully, the elevator was like full or something, and it was the last one going up that day, so...You know...now that I think about it...there's this one quote that kind of reminds me a little bit of you. I think it fits what I've seen of you so far. It's from Alex's diary."
"What is it?"
"Well, to understand part of it, you have to hear another quote from the diary first, which is, 'They call me a woman now, and mad. Bonaparte...laughingly says that I, being a lunatic, will simply walk into the Seine one night and drown myself like mad Ophelia. How convenient.' But the quote that reminds me of you is, 'I will not stop. For mad I may be, but I will never be convenient.'"
"That sounds about right to me," Graverobber said, leaning back in his chair and putting his hands behind his head. "I'm totally nuts, my whole family is, each in our own messed up way."
"Amade."
"What?"
"Amade. It's a name."
"Oh, Christ, are we back on that again? No, my name is not Amade!"
"Dante."
"No."
"Mitchell."
"No."
"Dillon."
"No."
"Joseph."
"No."
"Jasper."
"No."
"Garrett."
"No."
"Emmett."
"No."
"James."
"No."
"Tyler."
"No, but now you're on the right track."
"How so?"
"With the T."
"Trevor."
"No."
"Timothy."
"No."
"Thomas."
"No."
"Travis."
"No."
"Tristan."
"No."
"Trace."
"Trace?"
"It can be a name! I read a book once with a character named Trace!"
"No."
"Tony."
"That's a nickname for Anthony, it's not an actual T name by itself."
"It can be sometimes."
"Either way, no. And neither of them is Anthony, either."
"Tracy."
"That's a girl's name!"
"It can be a guy's name, too!"
"Well, it sure as hell ain't my name!"
"Those are all the T names I can think of, if it's not any of them, what is it?!"
"You're not thinking dorky enough."
"Dorky enough?"
"You heard me."
"You're calling your own name dorky?"
"I told you I didn't like my first name, didn't I?"
"Give me a hint. Please. I'm begging you."
"First name. Double letters in there somewhere."
"Tanner."
"No, but there is an R and an N in there."
Shilo sighed heavily, then grabbed her pen and pad of paper. "What are you doing?" Graverobber asked. When she was done writing, she turned it around for him to see. The only thing she'd put on the page was a capital T. "Here's what I know about your first name so far," she said. "Let's make a compromise. How about you tell me all the letters in your name in whatever order you want, and I'll write them down at the top of the page, then try to unscramble them and figure it out, and for your middle name, just tell me the first letter, and I'll guess all the names I can think of that start with it, okay? Does that work for you?"
"Fine. But I'm not telling you how many of each letter there is, if there's more than one of it, I'll say 'at least one,' but you have to figure out how many."
"Alright, deal. Start spilling."
"At least one R, and at least one E. A. C. N. And that's it."
"Okay, let's see...Well, it could spell out Trance with multiple Rs and Es, but I'm assuming your parents didn't name you Trance."
"You would be correct in that assumption."
"Alright, then let's see what else we can come up with here..."
Graverobber sat back casually and observed while Shilo thought for the next several moments, her brow furrowed up in thought. He couldn't help but notice how she got this little crease right between her eyes when she was like that, and he thought it was cute. He was broken out of his thoughts by the sound of her voice suddenly. He blinked and looked at her. "I'm sorry, what?" he asked.
"Terrance," she said. "Once you add an extra R and E, it spells out Terrance."
"And lo, our heroine finds success!"
"Your name is Terrance? Really? It...doesn't really..."
"I know, I know, that's part of why I choose not to go by it. Now, we made a deal, and I believe part of that was for me to give you the first letter of my middle name. It's A."
"I already know it's not Anthony...Andrew?"
"No, but ironically enough, that was my dad's name."
"Antonio."
"No."
"Abraham."
"No."
"Aidan."
"No."
"Adrian."
"No."
"Austin."
"No."
"Adam."
"No."
"Alan."
"Which spelling?"
"Um, I dunno, why? Oh my God, that's it, isn't it?!"
"I dunno, it depends on how you're spelling it!"
"A-L-A-N!"
He made a buzzer sound. "Wrong!"
"A-L-L-A-N!"
"God dammit!"
"Ha, I figured it out!"
"You got lucky, kid!"
"I still figured it out!"
"Fine, you got me! I'm named after my grandfather, he was named after Edgar Allan Poe, my great-grandmother was really into pre-NOS literature, especially the classics. Poe was one of her favorites, so my grandfather was named after him, and my great-uncle was named Dante. God dammit, why are you so smart?! Okay, Little Miss Genius over there, then tell me what's gonna happen to you when your body starts to register the lack of meds!"
"That's easy. I'll have one of my episodes."
For the second time within the last five minutes, he made a buzzer sound, giving her two thumbs down. "Wrong! Daddy had you on drugs, sweetheart, and drugs mean withdrawals!"
"Whatever, quit making shit up!" she countered. He didn't reply, his face growing serious as he looked at her from across the table. After a moment of staring at him, her smile began to fade. "Oh my God, you're serious, aren't you?" she said. He didn't even nod. He didn't have to. His expression alone was enough. "How soon?" she demanded, and he shrugged.
"Depends on what he was giving you," he said. "Whatever it was, though, your body's been getting a regular intake of it for seventeen years, and now that intake has stopped. Your body hasn't registered that fact yet, but it will sooner or later. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. Once your body figures out it's not getting that intake anymore, it'll have to adjust to the change, just like with an addict who's trying to get clean. You stick a needle in your arm and shoot meth into your veins for however many years in a row and then suddenly stop because you're trying to quit, your system's gotta readjust to functioning without that stuff as a contributing factor in what you do and how you do it, right? Same thing with crack, weed, Zydrate, or whatever else, even, in some cases, prescription drugs. And that includes whatever your dad was putting into your blood. So as much as I hate to say it, Shilo, yes. You are going to be experiencing withdrawals starting at some point probably within the next couple weeks or so."
There was silence for a few minutes or so as she let all of this sink in. "So...what exactly do they involve, how long do they last?"
"Well, they usually last a few hours, at least, and part of it depends on the drug. When they start also depends on the drug, usually no less than about twelve hours after taking the final dose, I think. And I've heard of...aftershocks, so to speak, happening up to three weeks after taking that last dose, but again, I think it depends on the drug. As for what they involve, that's something else that depends on the drug. Typically it's things like fever, shaking, sweating, nausea and vomiting, headaches that often get bad enough to qualify as migraines, and sometimes hallucinations, seizures, or both. Like I said though, a lot of it depends on the drug that was being taken. And I'm assuming you don't have any idea what he was giving you, am I right?"
She shook her head, and he sighed. "Well," he said, "then I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens when the time comes, won't we?"
"How do you know so much about this stuff? It almost sounds like you're speaking from personal experience or something."
"To some degree, I am. I mean, I myself have never gone through withdrawals, but you have to remember, I live on the streets part-time, and it was full-time when I was younger. I've seen more than my fair share of shit. My godsister likes to say that I'm old for my age in a lot of ways. And I guess she's right, at least to some extent. Not only that, but my dad had a bottle addiction. Took him until I was about nine, but he finally decided to quit because he wanted to be around to see us grow up. He went through alcohol withdrawals. I didn't even know there was such a thing until it happened to him. Freaked me out when it started happening, so I got online to see if I could find out what it was exactly that was happening, and I ended up learning about the drug version of it, too." He laughed without humor. "It didn't work," he said. "My dad quitting, I mean. By that point, it was too late, the damage was done. He died of liver failure when I was twelve, and a year later, my mom's epilepsy popped up and she hit her head on something during the seizure. In the end, it was the internal bleeding caused by the blunt force head trauma that did her in. I've been on my own except for Nick and my godsister ever since."
"What about your sister?"
"Like I said earlier, she disappeared after Mom's funeral. Probably left the island and went to the mainland. That'd be my guess. I always liked my godsister better, anyway. Natalie was always such a megabitch, but Jem...Jem's the opposite. I mean, she's a black belt in a bunch of different martial arts, so she can totally kick a person's ass if she has to, and she won't hesitate to do it if she feels like she has no other choice, but she'd prefer to avoid it when she can. She's...She's the glue that's held the family together ever since my parents and godparents died. Works her ass off doing the graveyard shift—please excuse the pun—at some obscure bar or something where someone grabs her ass every time she turns around. Works minimum wage and lives in a crappy little apartment near the harbor. She just...deserves so much better than what she's got going for her right now, you know? She deserves to be an actress like she wants to be, not a minimum wage waitress. She's so talented, and she's absolutely in love with Shakespeare. She'd make the best damn Juliet this world has ever seen."
For several moments, they were both silent. Then, Graverobber—Terrance. Allan. Whichever he wanted her to call him now that she knew his name—stood up and took her empty bowl, putting it on top of his empty plate, then dropping them in the sink and grabbing the photo of himself, his siblings, and their godsister off the table where Shilo had set it down after looking at it earlier. "Come on, kid," he said, "let's go watch that movie, shall we?"
Okay, so...the book Shilo talks about is actually a real book that I have, I've read it like three times, it's fantastic, uh...the reason for all the roach stuff is because I have a headcanon that, like Zdunich, Graves has a thing for the little mo'fos (I can so easily picture him in Zdunich's Cockroach Hall of Fame t-shirt), um...I seriously did go online and look shit up about roaches and drug withdrawals to help write this...what else?...The thing at the beginning that Shilo went through was supposed to be like she went into shock once the adrenaline finally wore off, and it resulted in a major panic attack. I did NOT have to look anything up for that, because I have had more than my fair share of panic attacks throughout my seventeen years of life, including ones far more severe than the one Shilo had in this chapter. So all of that was written through personal experience, most of the things that happened to her are things that I've experienced during my own panic attacks. So, yeah.
And those of you who want to, don't worry, you'll get to meet both Jem and Nick sooner or later, I just haven't figured out when they'll make their entrance(s) yet. :)
OH! That reminds me! Young Graverobber in the picture! I run a Grilo ask/RP blog on tumblr, and when I need to have pictures of Young!Graverobber for whatever reason on that blog, the FC I use is Gus Drake, so if you want to know what Graves looked like in the picture he showed to Shilo, go look up Gus Drake. And Nick in the picture is Jackson Rado, and Jem, the godsister, is Tamara Lazic. I'll tell you who my FCs for Grown Up Nick and Jem are once we get to the chapter(s) where they're introduced.
Anyway, yeah, that's about it for now, so...hope you're enjoying this so far, and please review, be sure to tell me what you like about it, what you don't like, all that good stuff so I know what I'm doing right and what I need to improve on. :)
