Title: Adhbhar Breithneachaidh (Food for Thought)
If it makes you feel any better, it feels like busywork to Evan, too.
-Chapter 2-
Breakfast is awkward. They eat standing by the counter, Sam not even bothering to ask how Evan prefers his toast, buttering a piece for him and handing it to him without looking in his direction. Evan rocks back and forth on his feet, torn between annoyance and relief, and grabs his toast without a word.
"So why did you go to all the trouble to get in here?" Sam asks bluntly, turning to stare directly at Evan's face. "I can't imagine what you were doing out so late. Early? Ah, hell, who am I to talk." he says, stuffing his face with food.
"Home was too far away."
"Couldn't call anybody?"
"Didn't wanna get in trouble."
Sam whistles lowly. "I know that feeling." He continues to stare, then nods to himself, throwing the bread and butter in the fridge. "Alright then."
He wanders off, apparently considering a single piece of buttered toast sufficient food for the morning. He doesn't even offer Evan a drink.
Sam disappears behind a stack of crap, and for a while all Evan can hear is the sound of someone shifting metal pieces around. Deciding it's safe to snoop, he walks around a stack of old speakers and radios, admiring the exposed wires and various bits he didn't understand. Evan stands on his toes to grab a circular radio off the pile, being as careful as humanly possible. He panics slightly when the pile starts to lean, but a gentle push settles it back into place. Evan turns the radio over and over in his hands as he heads back to the couch, flopping onto his back. The radio reminds him a bit of a Rubix cube. It has a variety of twistable sections of varyingly colored cubes. The sections only move in two directions, however-left and right, as the speaker portion doesn't split into smaller pieces. Evan lets the sound of shuffling and metal wash over him as he mindlessly twists the slats around.
He should leave. If no one has noticed the fact he's gone yet, someone will, eventually. And once they do, they'll try to find him. And if they find him, they'll want to know why he left in the first place. And if they ask where he went...
He'll make something up. No one takes anything he says seriously, anyway. If anyone asks, then he just wanted an excuse to get out of his room and went for a walk. Late at night. Everyone does stupid stuff when they're kids, right? It's completely believable.
He got lost. It's true enough.
Something crashes and Evan jumps, reflexively perching on the back of the couch. He makes eye contact with Sam, who looks angry. But Sam just deflates. "Listen, kid, we got up a little late. If you take a shower now, we can go out for lunch, alright?"
Evan thinks. He nods, then realizes "But my clothes are dirty. And I don't have shoes."
Sam looks at nothing for a moment. "I'll deal with it. Just go shower."
Evan slowly slides down the couch and quickly walks toward the door. He briefly considers stripping in the bedroom, but decides he might as well try to clean his clothes off in the shower. A wise decision, seeing as Sam pops his head through the door. "Forgot to mention! Towels are kept underneath the bed. Soap's in the shower already. I don't use shampoo or anything, sorry." He says, looking moderately embarrassed about it. Something in his face makes Evan giggle, and Sam relaxes a little. "Take your time-uh. Well. What's your name?"
Evan freezes, don't trust strangers bouncing around his brain. "I'm." Evan says intelligently, "I'm Evan."
"Evan." Sam repeats, more trying the name out than confirming it. "I'll remember that. Now! Shower!" Sam looks at his disheveled, somewhat muddy bed pointedly. "Before you ruin anything else."
Evan dodges into the bathroom, embarrassed.
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Evan makes some headway with the "cleaning his clothes" idea, but ultimately, soap, his hands, and a relatively weak stream of water could not remove the mud stains from his clothes. He thinks he did a better job with his skin.
Of course, he hadn't quite thought out the logistics of getting his clothes wet; after last night, he wasn't looking forward to having to wear wet clothes again. He sits on the cold tile of the bathroom and wills his clothes to dry, but when that doesn't work, decides to ask Sam if he happens to have a hair dryer in his piles of junk. There's probably one in there somewhere. It might even work.
He peeks out of the bathroom door, debating whether to yell or to string water everywhere, when he notices the bed has been stripped of its sheets. He opens the door further, realizing that there's clothes sitting on the bed. And new shoes.
Well, "new" was probably being generous. They were likely taken from some sort of secondhand shop, considering how fast they showed up, but they were clean enough. The shoes didn't have any holes in them and looking at the soles, Evan didn't notice anything wrong with them. He quickly dries and gets dressed, not daring to question having something dry to wear.
He find Sam hunched over a desk, comparing two pieces of paper with great intensity. Evan clears his throat and Sam jumps, quickly twisting around to look at him.
"I see it all fits." He ventures.
Evan shrugs. "Better than some things I've got." Sam seems to get a bit lost in thought at that, but Evan pulls him back. "So, where're we goin'?"
"Not sure yet." Sam admits, "I have a couple things I need to drop off first. I guess we'll eat wherever we end up."
Sam digs under his desk and pulls out a backpack, shoving a few things on his desk into it. The stuff is obviously made from the assorted junk, but Evan doesn't recognize anything. Sam slings the bag around and loops it around his arms in a practiced motion, already heading towards the door. "C'mon, Evan! Let's get going."
Hurrying to grab his Rubix Radio, he follows without a word.
Though he did laugh when Sam managed to hurt himself trying to move the bed away from the door.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
"I have a couple things I need to drop off first" turns out to take much longer than the wording implied. And a lot more walking.
Apparently, Sam dislikes being enclosed in small spaces with large numbers of people, so the bus was out. (Nothing good has ever come from a person riding the bus!) Seeing as Sam lived in an old shed, Evan figured he didn't have a ton of money. So a cab was out. Meaning walking was how they would manage. Sam, at least, had ran this circuit enough times to have optimized the route. So he said.
Evan didn't want to know what the first few trips had been like.
The trip itself was unimaginably boring. It was a repetitive cycle of walking, walking, walking, walking, circling, knocking, and maybe handing off an item if someone actually opened the door. Sam gave Evan the very important (and boring) task of striking out locations on a notepad if they actually saw somebody. More often than not, however, no one showed up at the door, and more than once the wrong person showed up at the door. When that happened, Sam would promise to come back another time. To Evan, it seemed needlessly inefficient. Couldn't Sam invest in a phone to call and see if these people were there?
"Alright kiddo, there's only one more stop left." Sam says cheerfully. Evan groaned.
"Are you sure." Evan says dryly, voice barely betraying his frustration. When they stop at a corner, he peers into a nearby window. "It's... 3:48. We gon' have lunch or what?"
Sam was not impressed or affected by Evan's tone. "We had breakfast at 11. You're not going to starve just yet."
"We didn't get up that late! 'Sides, a toast ain't breakfast! 'S a snack!"
Sam just hums at him and walks across the street.
The last leg of the trip ends up being the longest, and the one that takes them the furthest out of the bad part of town. They end up in that strange world between the normal world and the dangerous one, where normal people apartments transition to rat-infested holes.
For once, Sam walks up to the front door to a building. The small building in question is dark purple, and all of the windows are blacked out with dark curtains. The building is covered with all sorts of deep blue symbols and patterns, outlined with such a rich color that it is almost invisible to the eye without tilting the light in a specific way against the paint. Sam doesn't even knock, just walks into the building like he's been there 1000 times before. Evan scrambles after him.
The inside of the building is more or less like the outside in tone: the floors consist of intricate tile mosaic, the walls covered in a dark velvety material from ceiling to floor, the lights turned down low. The air was musty and mothball-y. The wood portions of the furniture had intricate symbols carved into them, and much of it also had metal gilding. Sam speaks quietly to a blonde woman sitting at a comically small desk, who nods at him and disappears behind another maroon, heavy curtain.
"Where are we?" Evan whispers.
"A fortune telling house." Sam murmurs back. Evan makes a face and Sam smiles at him gently. "Don't worry, it's all complete horseshit. People are quick to take anything they don't understand and believe it to be mystical or supernatural. Smart people-like the people here-take advantage of peoples' stupidity to make money. I was asked to create a hologram projector for them. People believe what they see, not what makes sense."
"How's a hologram supposed to make people believe a fortune?"
"The truly stupid will believe anything in front of their face, no matter how silly it is." Sam says seriously.
A soft rustle of fabric catches their attention. A woman with pink hair tied into a pinned up braid emerges, and she's not as old as Evan expected, what with the mothball smell everywhere. She looked to be in her early 20s. She looks down at Evan and then narrows her eyes at Sam impatiently.
"I'm not paying you to stand here. I'm paying you to set this up for me." She quickly twists around, apparently done with pleasantries, marching back behind her curtain. The blonde woman from earlier lets out a deep breath and sits gingerly in her chair. Sam rolls his eyes and gives Evan a wait here gesture, eyes pleading with him to be patient just a little while longer.
Evan rocks on his feet, not sure what to do by himself. The blonde woman has gently started back in on whatever paperwork she was filling out, obviously not interested in talking to him. He decides to wander through the doorway with the pinned open curtains, reasoning that if it's open it's okay.
The rest of the rooms look like something in a cheap movie set. While different rooms contained unique furniture, nothing deviated from the dark, gloomy, mystical feel. Every room was tiny, made smaller by the massive amounts of furniture, fabric, and trinkets cluttering the space. Evan starts making his way back to the entrance, but as he pulls aside one of the curtains he finds a finely dressed man.
The man is somewhat older and dressed in a dark suit, complete with cane. He even wears a top hat. Evan stares at him wide-eyed before hastily backing out of the doorway to let him through.
"My my." the man says, "No need to be so shy, boy."
The man nods at Evan politely, then walks toward a chest of drawers. He opens the second drawer and reaches his hand in, pulling out a couple palm sized bags with long drawstrings. He pushes the drawer closed without a sound. Tucking the bags into an inner breast pocket, he strides confidently back towards the door, but stops suddenly at the frame, head tilted in slight thought. The man's eyes lock onto Evan. He then twists off the top of his cane, pulling a thin chain out of the stem and reassembling his cane in an oily motion. The man hold out the chain expectantly.
"Now now." the man says, "Take it before I change my mind. You need all the help you can get, my boy."
Evan bristles, offended and embarrassed in equal amounts. After an intense staredown in which the finely dressed man's eyebrow very nearly arches off his face, Evan relents and takes the chain. The man straightens and turns on his heel, walking out the door as if he had never acknowledged Evan at all.
The chain is similar to much of the decor, in that the chain has an engraved pattern across every link. Evan takes off his shoe and wraps the chain around his ankle, deciding to keep it. When he stands back up, he can't help but wonder if his eyes have finally adjusted to the darkness.
He feels a little bad, seeing Sam waiting for him back at the entrance. The blonde woman apparently hadn't seen fit to grace Sam with conversation, either. He feels a bit less bad when Sam grins at him.
"Guess who just got paid? This guy." Sam jabs a thumb at himself happily. "Guess who gets something to eat now?"
"This guy?" Evan says hopefully, copying Sam's thumb action. It makes Sam laugh a little.
"And I know exactly where to go."
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Evan was less pleased to realize that getting food required more walking.
He was never going to walk again. Evan swore it.
Surprisingly, they continued their way into the less sorry part of town. It made some kind of sense; the better restaurants would be in a better part of town, wouldn't they? The problem with this is that with the better part of town comes more people, and more people means that Evan has to stick slightly closer to Sam than he strictly wants to. They eventually make their way to a small, hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop with outside dining.
Of course, now that they have nothing to distract themselves from each other, the silence is awkward and quiet. Evan trails his fingertips across the soft tablecloth.
"So..." Sam starts, "Have you always lived in town?"
"...yeah. Yeah, I have. Where are you from?"
"I'm from Missouri." When Evan gives him a blank stare he amends, "It's part of the United States."
"Why'd you come here? Don't tourists usually stick to huge cities and landmarks?"
"I'm not a tourist, I'm an electrician. And an inventor, on the side. The inventor part tends to be the more lucrative job, actually."
"Why not just invent stuff all the time? And what's lucrative mean?"
"Lucrative means it brings in a lot of money. At least comparatively." Sam says with a shrug. "And the kind of inventions I create are not... consistently requested. A person'll need one thing or a whole list of things, and I can make them for the right price fairly quick, but there'll sometimes be months before anybody gets ahold of me. Then everybody will be asking for shit at once. So I have to do something when business lulls."
"What kind of stuff do you invent?"
"Anything asked of me, really. No one's asked me to make anything I haven't been able to turn out. Of course," he says with a tilt of his head, "the best projects are the ones I do for myself."
"Like what?" Evan asks, curious as to what Sam could make out of garbage. He's seen the sort of things Sam creates, of course, but he's never seen any of them in action.
Sam thinks for a moment, then digs in his backpack, pulling out a thin metal box and drops some change on the table. He sifts through the coin pile for a moment before holding up a coin.
"This is the dullest coin I have on hand at the moment," he says, "and the top half of this box slides open with a push of a thumb." He drops the coin into the open slot and snaps it shut, holding the box up vertically so that Evan could see the back of it. "You can put in more than one but I haven't worked out all the kinks in doing multiples, yet. Once you put something in it, you drag your finger down this blue line and you're done." Sam holds out the box closer to Evan and slides it open. Inside, the dull coin has been polished to perfection. Evan hesitantly pinches the coin between his fingers, careful not to touch the faces, and holds it up into the light."
"Wow." He says, turning the coin this way and that. "How'd you do that?"
"Hard light scubbing." Sam says simply. "Only works on metallic materials."
Sam hands Evan the coin box and let's him shine a few coins, but the novelty wears off fast.
"I don't really get the point of this, though." Evan says, handing Sam the box and placing his newly shined coins back into the coin pile. Sam shoves both things in his pocket. "I mean, a coin's a coin. Why bother? S'not like people won't take a normal one."
"It's always good to be prepared. Besides, there's no reason not to look neat."
Evan's mind boggles at how having shiny coins is supposed to make a person prepared for anything, but opts not to comment on it. It's probably not smart to antagonize the guy who's buying you food.
Before the silence can become oppressive again the waitress backs out the door with their food. She stares non-subtly at Evan, eyes flickering from Evan's face to the food. When she hovers slightly too long after dropping things off, Sam turns to face her politely. Before he can say anything she pipes up quickly with "Is there anything else I can do for you two?"
"No." Sam says politely, but firmly. "This is perfect, thank you."
The woman wrings her hands, eyes flickering from Sam to Evan and back again before her shoulders slump a little and she excuses herself. Evan only remembers to breathe out once she's no longer visible through the windows. When he turns back to look at Sam, Sam's chin is resting on the back of his hands, eyes locked onto Evan gently. The moment passes quickly, however, as Sam picks up his sandwich and starts eating like everything is normal.
Evan follows Sam's example.
"We're going t' have to address this eventually." Sam murmurs after swallowing his food.
"...I know." Evan says back. He just doesn't want to.
