"Letters"
by Acey
Disclaimer: If I owned DBZ, why is this on a site for fanfiction? *thinks* Maybe it's because I don't own DBZ, eh?
Author's Note: Since I am likely going to veg out on "The Twilight Zone" marathon (something I do every July and New Year's... I always miss a few of the episodes, anyway) Wednesday (in the U.S.), I'll warn you that tommorow probably won't have an update. Rest assured that I am very much alive.
The shoutouts (maybe I'm posting chapters a little too quickly):
Kelly Neptunus: Thanks for all your reviews and encouragement to continue. My updates would not be nearly as fast without it.
Teenager-Videl: Glad you like it!
And now, chapter eight. I really hope you enjoy it.
She woke up the next morning at seven o'clock, prompt, determined. The cook had just put breakfast on the table when the woman strode into the kitchen, visibly tired, but otherwise her normal, slightly irritable morning self.
"Good morning, Miss. Did you sleep well?"
"No, but there's nothing you can do about it now, so don't worry about it. Let's see..."
The woman searched the pantry, forgetting again that that was the job her cook should be doing.
"Do we have any hot chocolate left, Cook?" she asked from halfway inside it. The pantry was so narrow it was hard to enter, another of the many mundane reasons the cook did not immediately remind her mistress that it was her duty to find the things inside it-- too much work, and plus the cook was not slender enough to get into it comfortably.
"No, Miss. You drank it all before you left."
"That's right," she said, "and you don't like the stuff, so you didn't buy any more. Well, see if there's orange juice."
The cook sighed as she obediently stuck her head into the refrigerator door.
"Yes, Miss." **********************************************************************
Breakfast was pleasant enough to the cook's untrained eye. Her mistress went to get the paper while the beignets were frying, and ran back in a mad rush to see if she could finish the daily crossword before they were done. She was a bit disappointed when she found that in her hurry to finish, she had missed one by a letter the second after the cook had removed the pastries from the deep fryer.
"My brain doesn't work as well as it used to, Cook."
"Your brain works faster than most folks' do in a year, Miss," the cook said in a rare display of true respect.
The woman laughed harshly.
"Only because they don't bother using them for more than they have to. Most people are so lazy that they only do the minimum in life. Therefore, they get the minimum out of life. Sad, isn't it?"
"I suppose, Miss. I never thought about it like that."
No, of course the cook wouldn't. The cook was an ordinary, sensible woman, able but not exemplary, content with her life the way it was. It was people like the cook who unconsciously kept society the way it was for so long, with their unchanging ways and customs, only to be thrust aside first when revolution, any revolution, would eventually come.
"Any good news in the paper, Miss?"
The woman looked at her cook sideways. The cook didn't noticed the rimmed purple shadow underneath the mistresses' forest colored eyes, and if she had, would have likely attributed it to the lack of sleep the night before, never probing further to see the reason for the insomnia. The poor cook was like that, eternally nonjudgemental, forever silent about whatever she saw-- if, indeed she saw anything-- below the surface. That was what made her Cook.
"No, not unless you count that Capsule Corporation has invented some new, handier version of the capsule, or what-have-you." She set down her orange juice and sighed. "Doctor Briefs must be getting old. He's four or five years younger than me. At any rate, he should be retiring and handing over the reins of the company to his darlingly brilliant daughter soon."
The cook nodded, absently wondering what had been causing her mistresses' obvious dislike for the Capsule Corporation's industry for so long. But only for a moment or two-- the cook had been wondering that for years, and so it would be out of her mind now if it weren't for the occasional bitter remark like the one she had just given.
"I think I'll stay in the lab today, Cook," she said after she had polished off the last French doughnut and folded the newspaper. "Heaven only knows how much fungus lies there in the wake of my recent absence."
The cook ignored the sarcastic melodrama and watched her employer leave the kitchen. 'Geniuses.' **********************************************************************
She did not go to the lab. Instead she went straight back into her bedroom, dug out the unopened stack of his letters, and tore each one open randomly, unceremoniously, dumping the contents in a pile as she called the cook from downstairs to not come in, that she'd found the remnants of an old chemistry experiment in there, a plausible enough excuse, considering.
She counted the envelopes she'd just ripped apart at the edge. Three. Three more letters, two handwritten pages a letter, six pages. Elementary math, to be sure, but still. Smoothing out the papers, leaving them neatly on an embroidered pillow, she set them aside and went back to the pile that she had already read the night before, reading them one more time in a futile attempt to understand what the man was hinting at. A sentence caught her eye:
"'Why not improve on nature's work, instead of going against it?'"
The woman stared at the sentence, half-expecting a lightning bolt straight from mythology to shoot her down with inspiration, with at least a milligram of comprehension. None came.
She tried again, finding another sentence, another letter:
"'You can only go so far with messes of microchips and metal before you realize how pathetic that truly is in comparison to the organic-- but genetics, of course, was your field, not mine, and I'm not terribly efficient at it.'"
'Well,' she thought, 'of course he knew that genetics was always my field. The only thing that kept him from being valedictorian himself was a low A in genetics. If it had been a few points higher, we would've tied. He had the second-highest genetics score in the class as it was.'
Comparison to the organic... that sounded like a poorly-done sci-fi flick. Why, if she didn't know better, she'd've...
"'A few adjustments... some minor operations...'"
What the--
She knew. She knew. Adjustments, operations, genetics, microchips. The woman could have slapped herself for not figuring it out sooner, for stupidly skimming through the letters until something interested her, when every answer-- every answer-- stared her straight in the face.
"You counted on this, didn't you, Gero," she said quietly, controlling her voice so it didn't alarm the cook, looking at the letters as Moses probably looked at the statue of Baal-- with anger, hatred, as though she was trying to burn them-- burn Gero, too-- with nothing but her eyes. "You counted on this. You knew me so well, knew how I would react in every situation. You knew that I don't really read letters. You knew that I speed through them. I told you how I read through the Western Capital College acceptance letter three times before I realized that it was an acceptance letter. I told you."
She bent her head low. For a second something passed across her face, a look of an eighteen-year-old college student whose only interest were things in microscopes that linked together in odd patterns to make you who you were, predispose you to disease, and so on, the look of a hopeful, ambitious girl who'd finally found someone to pin those childish hopes upon.
Then the moment passed and she was the aging lone scientist again.
"Gero, I told you too much."
Disclaimer: If I owned DBZ, why is this on a site for fanfiction? *thinks* Maybe it's because I don't own DBZ, eh?
Author's Note: Since I am likely going to veg out on "The Twilight Zone" marathon (something I do every July and New Year's... I always miss a few of the episodes, anyway) Wednesday (in the U.S.), I'll warn you that tommorow probably won't have an update. Rest assured that I am very much alive.
The shoutouts (maybe I'm posting chapters a little too quickly):
Kelly Neptunus: Thanks for all your reviews and encouragement to continue. My updates would not be nearly as fast without it.
Teenager-Videl: Glad you like it!
And now, chapter eight. I really hope you enjoy it.
She woke up the next morning at seven o'clock, prompt, determined. The cook had just put breakfast on the table when the woman strode into the kitchen, visibly tired, but otherwise her normal, slightly irritable morning self.
"Good morning, Miss. Did you sleep well?"
"No, but there's nothing you can do about it now, so don't worry about it. Let's see..."
The woman searched the pantry, forgetting again that that was the job her cook should be doing.
"Do we have any hot chocolate left, Cook?" she asked from halfway inside it. The pantry was so narrow it was hard to enter, another of the many mundane reasons the cook did not immediately remind her mistress that it was her duty to find the things inside it-- too much work, and plus the cook was not slender enough to get into it comfortably.
"No, Miss. You drank it all before you left."
"That's right," she said, "and you don't like the stuff, so you didn't buy any more. Well, see if there's orange juice."
The cook sighed as she obediently stuck her head into the refrigerator door.
"Yes, Miss." **********************************************************************
Breakfast was pleasant enough to the cook's untrained eye. Her mistress went to get the paper while the beignets were frying, and ran back in a mad rush to see if she could finish the daily crossword before they were done. She was a bit disappointed when she found that in her hurry to finish, she had missed one by a letter the second after the cook had removed the pastries from the deep fryer.
"My brain doesn't work as well as it used to, Cook."
"Your brain works faster than most folks' do in a year, Miss," the cook said in a rare display of true respect.
The woman laughed harshly.
"Only because they don't bother using them for more than they have to. Most people are so lazy that they only do the minimum in life. Therefore, they get the minimum out of life. Sad, isn't it?"
"I suppose, Miss. I never thought about it like that."
No, of course the cook wouldn't. The cook was an ordinary, sensible woman, able but not exemplary, content with her life the way it was. It was people like the cook who unconsciously kept society the way it was for so long, with their unchanging ways and customs, only to be thrust aside first when revolution, any revolution, would eventually come.
"Any good news in the paper, Miss?"
The woman looked at her cook sideways. The cook didn't noticed the rimmed purple shadow underneath the mistresses' forest colored eyes, and if she had, would have likely attributed it to the lack of sleep the night before, never probing further to see the reason for the insomnia. The poor cook was like that, eternally nonjudgemental, forever silent about whatever she saw-- if, indeed she saw anything-- below the surface. That was what made her Cook.
"No, not unless you count that Capsule Corporation has invented some new, handier version of the capsule, or what-have-you." She set down her orange juice and sighed. "Doctor Briefs must be getting old. He's four or five years younger than me. At any rate, he should be retiring and handing over the reins of the company to his darlingly brilliant daughter soon."
The cook nodded, absently wondering what had been causing her mistresses' obvious dislike for the Capsule Corporation's industry for so long. But only for a moment or two-- the cook had been wondering that for years, and so it would be out of her mind now if it weren't for the occasional bitter remark like the one she had just given.
"I think I'll stay in the lab today, Cook," she said after she had polished off the last French doughnut and folded the newspaper. "Heaven only knows how much fungus lies there in the wake of my recent absence."
The cook ignored the sarcastic melodrama and watched her employer leave the kitchen. 'Geniuses.' **********************************************************************
She did not go to the lab. Instead she went straight back into her bedroom, dug out the unopened stack of his letters, and tore each one open randomly, unceremoniously, dumping the contents in a pile as she called the cook from downstairs to not come in, that she'd found the remnants of an old chemistry experiment in there, a plausible enough excuse, considering.
She counted the envelopes she'd just ripped apart at the edge. Three. Three more letters, two handwritten pages a letter, six pages. Elementary math, to be sure, but still. Smoothing out the papers, leaving them neatly on an embroidered pillow, she set them aside and went back to the pile that she had already read the night before, reading them one more time in a futile attempt to understand what the man was hinting at. A sentence caught her eye:
"'Why not improve on nature's work, instead of going against it?'"
The woman stared at the sentence, half-expecting a lightning bolt straight from mythology to shoot her down with inspiration, with at least a milligram of comprehension. None came.
She tried again, finding another sentence, another letter:
"'You can only go so far with messes of microchips and metal before you realize how pathetic that truly is in comparison to the organic-- but genetics, of course, was your field, not mine, and I'm not terribly efficient at it.'"
'Well,' she thought, 'of course he knew that genetics was always my field. The only thing that kept him from being valedictorian himself was a low A in genetics. If it had been a few points higher, we would've tied. He had the second-highest genetics score in the class as it was.'
Comparison to the organic... that sounded like a poorly-done sci-fi flick. Why, if she didn't know better, she'd've...
"'A few adjustments... some minor operations...'"
What the--
She knew. She knew. Adjustments, operations, genetics, microchips. The woman could have slapped herself for not figuring it out sooner, for stupidly skimming through the letters until something interested her, when every answer-- every answer-- stared her straight in the face.
"You counted on this, didn't you, Gero," she said quietly, controlling her voice so it didn't alarm the cook, looking at the letters as Moses probably looked at the statue of Baal-- with anger, hatred, as though she was trying to burn them-- burn Gero, too-- with nothing but her eyes. "You counted on this. You knew me so well, knew how I would react in every situation. You knew that I don't really read letters. You knew that I speed through them. I told you how I read through the Western Capital College acceptance letter three times before I realized that it was an acceptance letter. I told you."
She bent her head low. For a second something passed across her face, a look of an eighteen-year-old college student whose only interest were things in microscopes that linked together in odd patterns to make you who you were, predispose you to disease, and so on, the look of a hopeful, ambitious girl who'd finally found someone to pin those childish hopes upon.
Then the moment passed and she was the aging lone scientist again.
"Gero, I told you too much."