Author's Notes: Has anyone here seen A Scanner Darkly? I have and I loved it. It's like philosophy on crack.
4
I am not a nihilist, but I do believe that life is ultimately boring and therefore pointless no matter what you do about it. It hasn't stopped the billions of people from getting up in the morning and doing their stupid jobs to pay the rent, do the bills, fuck their wives and raise their children.
I hate children. I hate women. I have no job. I worship Hell's Angels. You can see where this is going.
Schuldig and Crawford think the same thing about normalcy and the normal folk. Schu thinks of them as farm animals or playthings he can throw away when he gets bored. Crawford hats the Angels, but happens to be an anarchist. He says the boy they'll bring in a year from now won't think anything at all. Schu says he's seen the boy too, but instead of not thinking, he is simply steeped in hatred. Schu already loves him like a son and tells me I should enjoy having a sibling again.
I think of Valerie, choke and lock him out of my room for the rest of the afternoon. He knows I'm angry with him, knows I don't think he's worth mentioning her, but he doesn't care. Crawford orders him to leave me alone and I seethe. I don't need some blind spawn of Satan to protect me. I don't want some sadistic freak defending me.
Schuldig can hear me. He's laughing at me through the door. God, I hate his laughter.
You're one of those sadistic freaks, my little crazie, his voice echoes in my head. I slam a fist on the door and shout at him to leave me alone…
One day you'll find this little extra voice very comforting. One day all this is going to change. Crawford says so.
He doesn't know everything. The future isn't definite.
Fate, he says, never changes. He found that out the hard way. He says that the means to an end might change, but the end itself does not.
I never thought of Crawford as a Calvinist…
Does everything to you come back to religion? Dumb fuck…
Your dumb fuck, actually.
Speaking of which…
/No. I'm going to sleep./
Schuldig whines only minimally about how horny he is, but I'm really in no mood. I'm still angry at him about my sister.
I crawl into bed, the cheap mattress sunken into the center, and yank the covers over my head. I fall into masochistically depressing dreams and wake up several times feeling slightly self-destructive. I finger the cool blade on my nightstand, the edge sliding easily through my skin. I make a cut on the inside of my left thigh to mark the number dream I had, then put the blade back and go to sleep again.
I have seven cuts on my leg when I wake up to Schuldig's pale face hovering so close to mine I can count the freckles around his eyes and over his long, straight nose. For once his lips aren't smiling, pulled into a tight, wide line.
He's frowning at me, pulling the covers down and wielding a cotton ball. I can smell the alcohol it's soaked in and scrunch my nose against it, wondering why I hadn't heard him pick the locks on my door. I growl at him to go away and look for my knife to make another mark, number eight. It's gone. Schuldig took it away.
"Arsehole," I seethe. He ignores it and cleaned the blood off my leg with the swab, curses about me ruining yet another set of sheets, tells me this is why I can't have a nicer bed, that I should be sleeping on cardboard or something if he had his way.
I'm still cursing him through his whole tirade and his relentless cleaning.
"This is why we can't let you have knives," he's saying at the same time he's thinking What are you, fucking suicidal!
So what if I am? What difference does one hell make from the other?
Schuldig pauses to smack me, so hard my head snaps around and I feel all my blood go to his handprint. I smile up at him as if to say, I told you so.
Fucking stupid.
I'm still smiling, my eyes mad-bright and I sit up to press my warm cheek into his neck, my face into his surprisingly soft green hair. The gesture is almost affectionate, but to be honest, I'm turned on with his hand so close to my crotch. He knows it and thus denies me the pleasure of rubbing against him, my hips thrusting pitifully at air even though he's trying to disinfect my self-inflicted wounds.
I lean back against the wall, my hands roaming over my body, down into my pants and I suck in a harsh breath, release it in a throaty groan. His eyes are on me now, the gold in blue alive with lust at my display, at the tent in my pants.
I crook a finger at him and that's all it takes. He's on me in a second and a half later.
And who says telepaths aren't easy to control?
The reason for Hell is to make whatever bliss we find seem blissful because after it we feel like shite.
Like now.
Now I feel like shite.
Emotionally, that is, spiritually. My soul loves wreaking havoc on my head, loves to make me think of church doctrine when I would rather not. I count how many sins I've committed, my fingers ticking them off as I half smother myself, face down in the pillow. Schuldig is having a post cordial cigarette and the smoke is seeping into the fabric of the sheets, into my hair, my skin.
I think about murder and try to count how many I've killed.
Clergymen…
My parents…
My sister…
Businessmen in their expensive cars and suits, cigars hanging out of their stinking mouths…
Ruth…almost.
I think about pre martial sex. Sex with my own gender.
I think about my desire to kill God, to make God cry and bleed and feel as wretched as I once felt.
I would continue, but Schuldig's thin fingers close mine into a tight fist. His other hand is still occupied by the cigarette, which he moves silently back and forth from his mouth. He sighs out the blue smoke before talking.
"Stop is, Far, it's annoying," he says, his voice smoke-harsh and a little German drawl. I turn my face out of the pillow and blink tiredly up at him. He looks back at me, but doesn't show any emotion.
He doesn't care, so long as I stop. He doesn't care, so long as I stop thinking.
Maybe not such a dumb fuck after all…
I snort, pull my hand out of his and roll away from him to sleep. He finishes his cigarette, stubs it out and spoons around my back; his hair tickling the back of my neck, his long nose pressed between my shoulder blades.
I am eighteen now. My birthday was last week. I am now old enough to buy cigarettes that I don't smoke and porn, which I never watch. I can sit at the bar in pubs and sign legal contracts for various things, such as a car or a house, or I could if I wasn't legally insane. It's a federal offence if someone opens and reads my mail without permission.
A week ago Schuldig handed me a cupcake with a lit candle stuck in the top. He sneered and said, "Happy Birthday. You can now legally buy a whore."
I'm old enough to buy lotto tickets and sign my own papers at the hospital for my lobotomy. I should be paying taxes.
He's still sour about his past. I don't blame him. Drug addicts and pushers have it rough, except in Amsterdam. Half of his druggie friends were whores. His childhood friend was raped while selling herself. She was so depressed after it that she killed herself a few days later. He joined Crawford not long after that.
I had Valerie. He had Christine.
After I ate my cupcake, Crawford emerged from behind his morning newspaper and coffee cup in all his morning splendor, which is mostly a tired, unwashed, unshaven face and dark, bloodshot eyes behind dingy glasses. He hadn't even bothered getting dressed, his robe open and his boxer-clad legs spread. His hair was tousled and his skin a little sallow. He certainly looked the part of the prophet…madder than I am.
It didn't make any difference to us, though, his day-old beard or his unbrushed teeth. To us he is always Oracle. We know he will always present mornings with this face, since he doesn't ever really sleep. It was normal.
"We're moving. Start getting packed."
Schuldig's head snapped up at him, glowering. Schuldig loved New York. I simply liked America because I didn't have a record. So long as we didn't go back to Britannia, I was fine with wherever Crawford dragged us.
"When? Where?" our German asks.
"Our flight leaves for Japan tomorrow afternoon. We're picking up our boy and a job."
Good. We needed a job. I was sick of cheap apartments and defending my supper from roaches the size of the sewer rats that were in turn the size of small cats. The cats ran from the roaches. I'd seen it. I was sick of a sagging bed and the cigarette butts in the carpet that Schuldig denied any and all blame we tried to set on him. I agreed immediately and packed.
The next day on the plane I was reading a dog-eared book of Jack Kerouac's poems and doing my very best to ignore Schuldig, who was whining something high pitched in the back of his throat and had his fingers latched in a death grip around my arm. He wasn't fond of flying commercially, but Crawford refused to let me give him a high dose of sedatives or let him drink anything with alcohol content.
"It's weird. It feels weird to hear all these people below me, like little ant voices…then the rest of them in the plane. At least three of them hate flying, or close places, or heights…Half of them want to blown chunks," he often said.
I am not one of those people. I don't care about death like those people. If the plane went down, we'd be going way too fast to even think of survival anyway. It was a good death, quick and virtually painless, I would assume. So long as I'm not locked in a stuffy bathroom, I'm set.
Schu's hand clutches tighter and he hisses directly into my ear, "Don't think like that or I swear I'll have a fucking panic attack right now."
"I don't doubt that," I reply wryly, "Have a drink. A beer, a wine, a vodka, I don't care so long as I get some blood flow back into my arm."
"What? The pins and needles thing not doing it for you?" he sneered. I simply reached up and smacked the call button. A stewardess came up to us, all smiles. Schu and I had the similar desire to rip her teeth out. I ordered the hardest liquor they had, double.
"What about Crawford?" Schu asks conspiratorially.
"Fuck Crawford."
"No thanks. I couldn't get around the stick he's got shoved up there."
I smile and he laughs and the stewardess comes back with the cup of watered down vodka. Thank the powers they had vodka. Schu could drink himself into a pleasant stupor with vodka, if given enough glasses. He downs it and orders another, still in the 'Fuck Crawford' mindset.
He's snoring, his head tipped back and his mouth wide open, before the stewardess even comes back with his fifth drink. I send it back and pry the man's hand off my arm, thankful for the silence I'll have for the rest of the trip.
He's going to have such a hangover.
Thirteen hours later, we land and Schuldig's head is pounding with hangover and the onslaught of three billion minds in one place. He's cursing with every breath he takes and can barely lift his luggage from the rack and stuff it into the car. Every five minutes he turns and glares at me.
Crawford's doing a spectacular job ignoring the both of us. He's setting up last minute moving stuff in quick English and Japanese on his cell phone, his briefcase clamped in one hand as he walks easily a foot and a half taller than everyone else here.
Christ…everyone here looks exactly the same! Men, women, children, elderly, it doesn't matter. They all have the same black hair and the same small eyes and the same round faces and smashed noses. They look as me like I'm the freak. At least in Ireland we could tell one another apart!
Then I see a flash of color and I focus on it as hard as I can. Over the heads of a thousand similar faces is a group of girls with brightly dyed hair and flashy clothes. One girl's hair is bright pink, another's deep blue. The blue girl is chatting on a tiny cell phone that is covered in stickers and the pink-haired girl's eyes are done up with bright green eye shadow. I can't help but stare at them, amazed that they could walk around looking so ridiculous. I can sense the distain of all the respectable gingerbread businessmen and women. I realize how very different they are to everyone else, how very artsy.
And now Schuldig is dragging me into the car, swearing at me and threatening me uselessly if I choose not to obey. I simply give him an elusive smile and slide in beside him.
"They're called Harajuku," Schuldig says, motioning to the colorful beings in the crowd, "Bunch of hot shot rich kids wasting their daddy's money…"
Crawford gives the driver directions and goes back to speaking into the cell phone. I press my forehead against the windowpane and gawk at the lights and neon and culture and adverts that flit by like dreams on display.
I've died and gone straight to heaven…I love this place. It's so busy. It's so surreal.
The car stops in front of a high-class building and we step out as the doorman pulls our luggage out of the trunk. I gawk at him until Schuldig pushes my mouth closed and shoves me at the door, still holding his head and glowering at me whenever he can. The doorman gives another uniformed man the luggage, which he loads onto a cart and rolls to the elevator.
The last flat we had was a third floor walk up in Brooklyn. We didn't have an elevator. This is a huge step up for us.
I look at Crawford. What kind of job had we landed to afford all this? He's passively looking at the doors of the elevator, his eyes deceptively tired.
The door opens again, a soft ding announcing our floor and Crawford pulls out a key to unlock the third door on the left, apartment 24C. He walks in first and does a look over for traps, and then we follow. Schuldig immediately raids the fridge for ice and wraps it in a towel, pressing it against his head with a sigh as he wanders around. The bellhop sets our luggage inside and Crawford tips him and closes the door, locks all the locks and deadbolt.
I claim my room and drop my bag on the bed. It's a comfortably small room, the single window large and bright, facing an intersection on the street. There is a single bookshelf beside the closet, opposing the double bed. Another door by the bed opens to a bathroom that I share with Schuldig's room. His room is wallpapered with small green flowers on a white background. He swears at the sight of it and demands permission to tear it down. Crawford refuses. He looks into my room and complains that I got the better room. My walls are painted with a burnt orange color and white trim. I'd rather have his, though, it's larger.
Crawford naturally gets the master bedroom and private bathroom, though I have a feeling Schuldig is going to be taking over the bathtub from time to time. I'm studying the lights in the rooms and trying to decide which need to be brighter or dimmed. The kitchen is well stocked with silverware and flatware and cooking things like pots, pans and spatulas. The extra bedroom has a black and white theme and the hall bathroom across from it is blue with lighthouse pictures. Our living area looks comfortable enough, with more bookshelves and a respectable television and VCR. The sofa I flop down on is soft and doesn't creak. The matching chair is good to curl up in and has a nice light by it for reading late at night.
All in all, I am both pleased with the apartment and suspicious of what Crawford has gotten us into. He isn't' the type to endanger the team for money, and I don't think he's changed, but it doesn't hurt anything to ask a few questions, after all. Surely he'll mention something over supper, so I wait until then to consider asking.
Our take out is still steaming in the paper boxes we eat out of, unwilling to wash dishes right away. Schuldig still mastering basic chopsticks. It's funny watching him try to get a mouthful of noodles close to his face and watch it splat back into the box. He doesn't know we have forks. Crawford and I eat in relative quiet, listening and becoming accustomed to the sound of the city around us, a little different that New York and London and Dublin and Paris…it's nice.
"Our new Employer is called 'Takatori'. He is a politician and a snake and really not worth Esset's or our time but for that fact that he has money. They are interested in the paychecks and I've been promised that our duty will be little more than body guarding and cleaning.
'Cleaning' means we make whoever itches Takatori the wrong way go very far away and never come back. I've never done body guarding before. Crawford and Schu assure me its brainless work and it'll bore me to death in seconds flat.
"I'll be bringing the boy in two days from now. He will be malnourished, so I want you to start coming up with something to feed him that'll get him healthy, Farfarello."
I nod. I start planning immediately.
"He will also lack control on his power, so Schuldig and I will be training him to the best of our ability until Esset comes and picks him up for proper training."
I freeze, my teeth clenched.
The boy is barely eight, I know. Esset training would kill him. It almost killed Schuldig and nearly drove Crawford insane. I would've been shot in the head had Crawford not insisted on my importance to his team.
"There's nothing we can do about his training, Farfarello," Crawford says before I can even open my mouth, "He's far too powerful to be left untrained."
"How powerful?" Schuldig asks.
"They won't be able to rank him."
"Scheiße."
"That isn't possible," I say, a little amazed myself. I didn't think it was possible. Only the Elders, whom I had never met, were unranked psychics. Could he be the future of Esset, the next Elder, if it came to that?
And what would happen to us if he did? Esset wasn't known for helping former teammates on the scale to the top. We were the kind of business that scrambled up as far as we could go, shoving all others behind us. I hoped this boy wouldn't be the same.
"You'll see," Crawford says, then gets out of his chair and drops his empty box into the trash, "In the mean time, get unpacked and let's get to work. We already have a job set up for us. We'll start on it in the morning. That's all for tonight, gentlemen."
Briefing concluded.
Schuldig and I look at one another.
What had Crawford gotten us into?
Fin Chapter 4
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Author's Notes: Is it just me or are these chapters getting longer? Yes, I used Bable Fish. I'm lazy like that.
eva84: Again, thank you for the review. Go tell your friends…