Author's Note: I like to think that Penance would've actually had a promising career in theater. Even though he routinely has to 'act' in order to live— and so you could just argue he's gotten very good at it with age— who's to say he doesn't actually have a ton of natural talent? Helps to explain how he's still alive, anyway.
And if he could nail any theater role I suppose it would be 'Hamlet'. Unlike Whip and her choleric temperament, Black Hat and his perverse sanguinity, or Nicnevin and her controlled phlegmatism, Penance's personality leans toward a different humor...
.
.
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"In Every Lovely Summer's Day"
Green Bay, Wisconsin – 1945
His whisper barely echoed across the auditorium, and he hissed out those three words on drawn lips, like a spurt of steam venting from a pipe; the echo lingered just long enough before he looked up into the blistering limelight. The beam scalded his face; by now he was freely sweating and he felt sick, but Penance pressed on, spreading his hands as he spoke into the light.
"...from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will..."
He walked across the stage, hands balled in fists against his chest, head bowed.
"...and makes us rather bear those ills we have..."
The boy struck an open pose and pointed to the right while glaring out at the dark chasm holding his audience, his face anguished and words harshly punctuated.
"...than fly to others that we know not of?"
He held that pose for a time— seconds that seemed like hours— before letting his hand fall and bump, limp, at his hip. His desperate face turned to a cold smile and he chuckled derisively, shaking his head as he paced back in the opposite direction.
"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought..."
Soft feet moved at stage left; one of the girls in his class entered the limelight's cone, on cue. Penance pretended not to notice her, instead looking down at the floor with a thousand-yard smile.
"...and enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action."
Again he paused— and again the seconds felt like hours. Finally the boy looked up, as if startled, and he crossed over to his classmate, a sudden beaming grin on his face and deliberately-forced warmth in his voice.
"Soft you now, the fair Ophelia!"
He got to one knee, taking the girl's hand as if to kiss it. But he lingered, her knuckle a millimeter from his lips, and then he looked up at her with roguish eyes.
"Nymph...in thy orisons..."
He set his lips to her hand, kissing it deeply with screwed-shut eyes. He was slow to pull away, and when he finally did he looked up at the girl, his playful smirk now a forlorn frown and his voice again reduced to a steamy hiss.
"...be all my sins remember'd."
He held that position for a moment. As long as he thought proper, at least, then he looked back into the hot light, blinking. Only silence met his ears.
"Uh, is it something like that?" Penance got to his feet, breaking from the confident casualness of his stage presence and cocking a leg awkwardly, one hand gripping his opposite elbow.
Still, however, there was nothing but silence.
After several more seconds that seemed like hours the limelight finally thunked shut and he could see the theater seats.
The drama teacher sat second row center, clipboard in her lap. Her coke-bottle glasses made those beady little eyes appear gigantic on any given day, but now they were ballooned to the size of cup saucers. His classmates filling out the front row shared the woman's blank gape. One of their pencils rolled off its place on an armrest and clattered on the ground, and the noise was like a firecracker in the silent room. Someone had been coming, or going, from the back of the otherwise empty auditorium during his performance, and they stood watching him with that same slack jaw, their fingers still gripping the door handle.
The teacher eventually cleared her throat, nodding gently.
"It's, uh... something like that, Pentti, yes..."
X
X
X
The Wisconsin summer was in full-swing and temperatures outside consistently hit the high 70s. While almost anything above 40 was 'shorts weather' for the kids in Green Bay July was prime time for outdoor exercise, but on account of the heavy rains Penance's PE class was relegated to the stuffy little gym. It was one of the oldest buildings in the school and it showed; pound for pound there was likely more mold than wood in the place. But Penance had a certain affinity for old buildings and he didn't much mind the stuffy surroundings.
Nor did he particularly pay any mind to the class activities on the court. He sat up in the bleachers by himself, clad in the white shirt and green shorts of a boy's PE outfit, but not managing much in the way of heavy lifting, other than supporting a book on his bent knees. An uneaten red apple— the only remains of his lunch— rested on the splintery seat at his hip.
He wasn't alone for long. Feet tromped up the bleacher rows to meet him. Clara stood over him in that frumpy green cotton romper, her little blue satchel strung across one shoulder; she circled an impatient finger at the boy.
"Scooch," she ordered.
Penance, absorbed as he was in the book, was already repositioning himself before the girl could speak. He rotated to one side on the bleacher, bunching his legs up and exposing his back to her. Clara sat down in perfect symmetry, her back to his. They leaned against each other in silence, Penance finishing his page. As they each began to feel the distant toll of one another's heartbeats Penance refocused his attention, gently closing his book.
"Whatcha reading?" Clara asked.
The boy closed his eyes and drew a contented breath.
"It's called The Screwtape Letters."
"What's it about?"
Penance smirked.
"Devils 'n demons."
"Not a proper subject for kids, is it?"
"This guy doesn't write books for kids."
Clara turned her head in Penance's direction; he still faced forward, but he could see the fringes of her red hair moving on his periphery, like flames lapping at the corner of his eye.
"You know, if you put that kind of effort into drama class all the time then you'd actually get cast in decent parts."
Penance scoffed. He bumped the girl's cheek with the back of his head, teasingly warding her off.
"I just like that part of the play, that's all."
"You ever manage to see any of the original performances at the Globe? I did."
"Mmm." Penance shook his head. "You're dating yourself. I was born the year it came out, ya old crone."
Clara clucked her tongue with playful indignation; she reached back and flicked the boy's ear as punishment. The spark of her immortal touch lingered long after the flick, shuttling down the boy's jaw and disappearing through his skull.
It wasn't unpleasant.
"You hear anything from Neil?" Penance asked.
From the corner of his eye he saw a frown forming on Clara's face before she looked forward again. She nodded, jostling the back of his head.
"He thinks his unit's gonna head out to the Pacific any day now."
"Mmm." Penance stared at his shoes. "That's rough."
"Just when he was getting used to Austria. And not getting shot at on a regular basis. Mrs. Carver's not taking the news well, especially given how much Mr. Carver goes on about the fighting over there. It's not like Europe."
Penance nodded, jostling the girl's head.
"Iwo Jima was bad enough. Mr. Danson still hasn't unboxed any of Ryan's medals the Marines sent him. He got a whole caboodle for commandeering that tank, you know. They're just sitting on that ugly yellow table by the front door. I guess it's hard to... you know..."
Another small nod from the girl.
"I know," she whispered.
They sat still for a time, each of them tuned into the dull heartbeat of the other. Eventually Clara noticed Penance's apple and snatched it up. She took a large bite, grunting her words through packed cheeks.
"I'm commandeering your apple."
Penance arched his brow.
"Duly noted."
"Mmm," Clara swallowed the bite and quickly unzipped her satchel, rooting around for a moment until she found what she was looking for. She hefted a soda bottle over her shoulder; the glass brushed Penance's cheek.
"One of them 'lulu quenchers' of yours. Fair enough as a trade, right?"
Penance took the bottle, grinning when he saw the '7-Up' logo slapped on the front.
"More than fair."
Mr. Danson had recently put the kibosh on Penance's obsession with 'fancy, gussied-up sugar water' and he'd forbidden the boy from wasting any of his allowance on it. Penance was a kid of his word (at least when someone else's money was involved) and so he obeyed, but for some reason he could never quite get the idea of a sip of 7-Up out of his mind, and he was always eager to trade for it if he couldn't buy it. It was a persistent addiction but, as vices go, he didn't think it was too serious.
He figured there were worse things to be addicted to, after all.
"You ever kill anyone in a war, Penance?"
His fingers fumbled as he set the glass bottle down on the bleachers; this was an unexpected question.
"I... well, in the Game—"
"Not that," she interrupted.
One of their policies— one of the little 'rules' they established as a part of their truce— was that they not talk shop as much as it could be helped. This was more an unspoken tenet than anything concrete, but they both observed it. Penance always figured it was a way to keep the outside outside; if they were going to coexist together for a time in these fantasy personas— 'Pentti' and 'Elinore'— then they weren't going to waste their time hashing over the trials and tribulations of 'Penance' and 'Clara'. Sure, they could relate to each other far more than anyone else in the world, but that didn't mean they actually had to relate anything, explicitly, in order to share the time together.
Penance closed his eyes and refocused on Clara's heartbeat against his back. That was a case in point: the very act itself was almost sacred, and not a word need be said. For him to turn away from a fellow immortal— and to have her do the same—to press his vulnerable back to hers, well, that was a symbol of familiarity and trust he wouldn't have thought possible some years ago.
He smirked; Penance could theoretically round the bases with anyone and yet still never achieve the level of intimacy that this single, simple act entailed.
"Penance?"
The boy opened his eyes, remembering her question.
"Did I ever kill anyone in a war?"
The girl nodded.
"No," he shook his head. "At least I don't think so." He squinted. "I monkeyed on a ship once, and I had to help fire one of the cannons when the gunner got injured. I think the cannonball might've hit the enemy ship, but I couldn't tell for sure."
"How'd it feel, knowing you might've killed somebody?"
Penance rolled his eyes.
"You're getting kinda morbid—"
"You're the one quoting 'Hamlet'," Clara countered. "How'd it feel?"
The boy sighed, staring down at his uniform shorts.
"Never gave it much thought, really. Distant, I guess. Cold."
"So... not like the Game, then?"
Penance shook his head. The Game was not distant, and it was certainly not cold.
"Killing that's impersonal— unfocused..." Clara shrugged. "I guess that would be different."
More silence. Eventually a basketball skipped up off the court and entered the bleachers, bouncing near Penance's feet. He picked it up and looked down to the court; one of the beefier boys in their class— Billy Reynolds— started climbing up to retrieve it, but he stopped in his tracks when he saw Penance and Clara.
Billy was something of a bully, and Penance had known more than enough of them in his time. In retrospect Penance had made himself fair game in choosing a name that sounded so similar to 'panty', and that had been Billy's go-to taunt against him. Again, Penance had known more than enough 'Billies' in his time, and he was content to let the matter go.
Clara, however, was less inclined to do so.
Thus 'panty' had been Billy's go-to taunt against Penance, but even after Billy's jaw healed up and he could say the word properly again he declined to do so, nor did he dare tell anyone who it was that clocked him. He'd never admit to being bested by a girl, nor would he try to falsely implicate a 'shrimp' like Penance. He'd sooner blame his baby brother than do that.
Penance tossed him the ball, giving the boy a small nod. Billy reciprocated, meekly stepping back down onto the court and leaving them in peace.
Clara watched this over her shoulder.
"You'd have never gotten that from him without getting rough, you know: that quiet respect. I get to wondering whether you don't like to be taunted and teased, for some reason."
"Just by you," Penance smiled. "Maybe I should ask whether you've ever killed anyone on the playground—"
"That," she cocked her head back at the court, "was focused and personal. There was a reason for me to do that to him."
"There's reasons for the war, too, you know."
Clara scoffed and hugged her knees. She shook her head.
"Mortal reasons, maybe. Nothing that concerns us."
"Hate to break it to you but we're part of this world, too."
Clara didn't answer this statement for some time, but when she did her voice was decidedly cold.
"No, we're not, Penance. Not really. And you know it, too."
To this he had no response, so he didn't even try. Clara continued with her point.
"We're on the outside looking in, and as the years go by I see less and less of their world worth taking a gander at. These wars, for example— 'world wars'— they're not like anything I've ever seen. You and I can only 'live' our lives a year or two at a time, but mortals get their whole lifetime to do what they want. They've got forever, compared to us. And wasting it on this kind of slaughter?" She scoffed. "The Game pales in comparison."
Penance didn't respond. He knew where she was going with this. It was the same subject she'd been broaching for months now, at first testing the waters, then diving in headlong to get him to agree.
"There's always the road, though." She said. "Only constant thing we have, isn't it?"
Penance nodded.
After a long pause Clara chuckled, her voice laden with more than a little bitterness.
"So this is where I'll say 'why bother going it alone? Why not walk it together'?"
Penance said nothing.
"And then you'll say 'the road's tough to walk for one, more than doubly so for two'. And you'll be right, at least a little bit. But then I'll be right when I say that means we don't have to spend any more rainy days in summer, or in any other season, just surrounded by them..."
Again Clara turned her head, and again Penance saw fire on the fringes of his eyes as she whispered to him.
"...all alone with the crowd."
Penance turned his head to meet the girl's gaze, their ears pressed together. He gave her a sad little smile.
"And I wouldn't have to worry about bullies like Billy anymore, huh?"
Clara returned the smile.
"No, you wouldn't. But... I think you do like being taunted and teased, so..."
Penance faced forward, sighing.
"My road's more dangerous than you think, Clara. And this summer's been grand, so far. So are you. But..."
"...summer doesn't last forever," she finished.
"Even if we're both stuck in 'spring'." The boy playfully knocked his head against hers, but Clara wasn't feeling his conciliatory humor.
"Well, the rest of the world feels more like 'winter'." The girl sighed, setting her chin on a closed fist supported by her knee. "'Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate'..."
"What's that?" Penance asked.
"You call yourself a Shakespeare fan?"
"As I recall I said I liked one part of one play..."
Clara said nothing for quite some time, and when she finally did speak it was in a whisper. The dull thud of her heartbeat grew more prominent against his back, the tempo increasing.
"Do you feel them, Penance? Do you ever see them?"
The boy blinked at this.
"Uh, you gotta be more specific than 'them'—"
"The ones you've killed."
His hackles came to attention; Penance's heart soon joined Clara's at that accelerated pace. The girl spoke on.
"They say you can feel them sometimes in the quiet, if you listen carefully. My teacher even told me you can see 'em, when conditions are right, just like they were when they were alive. And I figure that makes sense; what they are— what they were— that's become a part of you, now, hasn't it? And it's part of you forever, right? A quickening's not just a burst of energy, and it's not just nerves blowing out in your body. It's... well, it's what they were— what they are— that ends up inside you, right?"
Penance drew a breath; he looked over his shoulder at the girl, his face grave.
"I guess it is," he said, "but I've never listened for 'em."
"Neither have I," the girl admitted. "I figure I don't have anyone worth 'feeling' out, in my being. Then I get to wondering: what would I do if I did? What could I do?" She looked over her shoulder at the boy. "What would you do?"
She was speaking on a sore subject and Penance declined to answer. Eventually she returned her gaze forward. The girl started turning Penance's apple over in her free hand. She brought it up and set her teeth against it to take another bite but then stopped short, pulling it away from her face.
"Want some?" She held it up over her shoulder.
Penance shook his head.
"I'm not hungry," he said.
Clara nodded, taking it back and staring at the bitten part.
"That's my problem," she said. "I always am..."
She set the apple down at her hip. Penance thought to comfort her on her concerns.
At least on what he thought her concerns were.
"Clara: you know this war will end, like every other war ever. You know they'll keep on having more wars, too, but those wars also end. There's really nothing new under the sun, even though it might look like it."
These were comforting words. They were to Penance, at least, because the war consumed much of his thoughts lately. Clara, on the other hand, had been using the topic of the war to make a point, and in his own preoccupied mind Penance had missed that point.
He would do so to both their grievous misfortunes.
Two weeks later the Hiroshima bomb fell, and Nagasaki three days after that. There was something about them that affected Penance in the most peculiar way. He could only call it 'incomprehensibility'. All the wonders and terrors he'd lived to see humans create— from underwater telegraph cables, to iron-clad ships, to powered flying machines, to modern machine guns— he could understand at least at a basic level. Even with the terrible things men made he could wrap his brain around two simple questions: the 'how' (generally) and the 'why'.
He could do neither with this new terror that shook the earth. All those other inventions only served to make Penance's world feel 'smaller'— an uncomfortable feeling, albeit one he was used to— but the birth of nuclear weapons did something quite different: it made the world feel fragile.
And that was a far less tolerable feeling.
Thus, in the dawning days of the post-war age he found himself more and more often down in his 'clubhouse' under the floorboards of Mr. Danson's house, more and more often with a small dram of cheap bourbon 'liberated' from the old man's liquor cabinet. He kept a running total, mind you, and he'd be sure to leave a roughly equal amount of his stashed-away allowance money after his inevitable departure.
After all, he was no thief.
Before those two bombs fell Penance had been nose-deep in CS Lewis's space stories, having already devoured Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. He was eagerly anticipating a third book due out later this year, but after the world's entrance into the nuclear age his interest in such stories waned. Put simply: the science facts ended up souring his taste for the science fiction.
His little streak of melancholy transferred into his relationship with Clara, and he unintentionally began to distance himself from her, too, bit by bit. It wasn't out of anger, although he started reacting to her suggestions to travel together with more hostility than polite rebuffs. For her part she could obviously sense his moodiness, and she never let things get too heated between them; she was always ready with a conciliatory 7-Up to make up for any of their more spirited rows.
Things were fine between them.
So he thought.
Penance looked back over his shoulder at the girl.
"You got a spare eraser on you? I think I need one for math."
Without hesitation the girl stuck out her leg and kicked backward along the bleacher, pushing her blue bag towards Penance.
"You'd forget your own head if it weren't attached to—"
"Yeah, let's stop being morbid, shall we?" Penance flashed an impish smirk to the girl as he took her bag in his lap.
"Whatever you say, 'sweet prince'—"
"That's 'little prince'." He held up a finger over his shoulder, wagging it at the girl as he unzipped her bag.
Inside were all the trappings befitting a young schoolgirl's bag: supplies for class and sundry vanity products. Also there, surprisingly, was a thin and intricately braided rope. Plastic toggles adorned each end, made to look like oversized purple gems. When properly wrapped around an outfit and left to dangle in symmetry from either side of one's body they were cute little fashion adornments befitting a pubescent girl.
And the push-knives concealed inside each of those plastic gems— both of them marinating in a special 'brew' of toxic chemicals— were quite befitting a battle-hardened immortal warrior.
Finding them here, in a bag she'd just handed off to Penance, was indeed a surprise. As far as he knew Clara generally kept them tied around her waist under her romper during PE, just like Penance found a place for his little knife even in his relatively skimpy PE uniform. He didn't expect her to keep them off her body.
And he certainly didn't expect her to so casually hand them off to him, of all people. There was being 'intimate' with an offered immortal back and then there was being 'suicidally foolish'. One had to draw the line somewhere, Penance figured.
Regardless, the boy was careful not to let his hand wander too close to those gaudy little toggles, even though Clara still faced forward and did not, it seemed, care in the least that she'd handed her only means of defense over to him. He focused on digging near the bottom of the bag, finding a spare eraser and retrieving it before casually pushing the bag back over to her.
It would be nearly five months later, when he had need of another item from her bag, that a few black flecks on his fingers would undo her. This had nothing to do with Clara's toggles or the knives within. It had to do with the leak of gunpowder from a faulty bullet, and the tell-tale indentations of stashed ammunition in the bag: dry runs for a certain 'event'.
It had to do with Penance discovering Clara's research and planning for a quick getaway from Wisconsin.
It had to do with the snub-nosed .38 that went missing from the Carver household without a trace.
It had to do with the fact that, as Penance figured it, all this time Clara was pretending to be Penance's friend, and even pretending to want to partner with him, but she had instead been planning his murder.
He didn't know why he did what he did next. Not at the time, and not for years to come. But for whatever reason he consciously disregarded every instinct in his body (and Galabeg screaming in his ear) and decided to confront the girl on this. Not to fight, necessarily, but just to talk.
What about? He didn't know.
He should've known there wasn't anything left to say.
And when he chose a certain alley Clara frequented on her way to school— a place with myriad branches to allow ample protection to dive from a bullet— it must have just been fate that Clara left for school early, and instead accidentally met him from the other end of a narrow and branchless corridor between long buildings. They each rounded their respective corners at exactly the same time, and although both got wide-eyed at the sight of each other it was immediately clear what was about to happen. Even as they both skidded to a halt, frozen like mannequins, there was a cold realization in both their faces.
She knew she was caught.
Penance knew he'd caught her.
And so one of them was about to die.
To this day Penance can't remember what happened first— whether he went for his knife while taking the first leaping step of a sprint or whether Clara plunged her hand into that powder blue satchel, going for the gun. In any event there was about 20 yards between them by the time she got the revolver out and aimed it at Penance. She got off four shots.
Turns out she was a good shot.
Really good.
Not great.
She was a whiz, however, at planning escape routes, and after co-opting her detailed plans Penance found himself at a malt shop just outside Chicago the very next day, huddled up in a booth and staring at the bottom of a soda bottle. Clara had enough cash stuffed inside her satchel for him to live on nothing but 7-Up for weeks, but he just had the one drink, then.
It didn't do much to improve his mood.
Within a few years it didn't do much for him at all, really.
Billie Holiday crooned from the jukebox of that malt shop, singing a sweet and sultry little tune. He remembered liking it very much. He didn't remember thinking about much else of consequence.
He remembered that he didn't want to think at all, really.
He never cried over his kills after that first one, and with Clara it was no different. But looking back on his numbness in that booth— a dry clarity in his head that verged on 'emptiness'— Penance figured that it was actually kind of more than crying, in a way. He didn't know if that made much sense. He did know, however, that it took a certain amount of energy to cry.
And he utterly lacked the energy for it at the time, even if he'd wanted to.
For now Clara zipped up her satchel and stretched her limbs to either side; he felt the bony blades in her back twisting about, digging against him.
It wasn't unpleasant.
The gym teacher finally had enough of their loafing up in the bleachers; he took a break from coordinating the kids on the court to snap his fingers and point up at the pair.
"Pen! Ellie! Keesters on the court. Now!"
The pair grudgingly got to their feet. Clara whispered into Penance's ear as the boy stretched his legs, preparing to descend the bleacher rows.
"I hear tell they're gonna do Romeo and Juliet for the fall play; bring your acting chops to that one and we might get to be the leads, you know."
Penance looked over at the girl, a wry smile on his face.
"That wouldn't work, I don't think."
"What? You don't wanna be able to smooch in front of the whole school?"
He tried, unsuccessfully, to hide the blush creeping over his cheeks.
"No. It's because Romeo and Juliet were both idiots."
Clara crossed her arms.
"And the other reason?"
Penance's grin spread.
"I don't trust you to stand over my 'dead body' with a sharp dagger in your hands!"
When the girl pouted Penance punctuated his taunt with a playful little flick of her ear; that immortal electricity shot up his finger, riding the tendons through his wrist and dying out at his funny bone.
Again, not unpleasant.
The gym teacher had to ruin the moment.
"Come on! Double-time, you lazy layabouts!"
They descended the bleachers and joined the others, awkwardly forcing themselves to be two people they weren't, hiding those hideous strengths of theirs and setting aside all the trappings and concerns of their immortalities.
But still, it was another summer day they could spend together, idyllic or not. And so it was a moment to be cherished nonetheless. Because Penance knew full well— and Clara certainly must have, too— that nothing lasts forever.
Not even a rainy summer day.
