Chapter Twenty-five – Glass Half Empty, Cup Half Full
Rammi sought Nagi out. Nagi was standing today, since everything else was still very painful, but his posture showed that internally he was curled in a foetal position, eyes squeezed shut against the cruelty of the world. Outwardly, his eyes were blank. Eerily so.
"Nagi?" Rammi asked nervously. "Is everything…"
Nagi didn't move. He just stood there, stiff as a board, arms loose by his sides, eyes open and staring. It had been snowing for a while. It had settled on Nagi, on his shoulders and hair and face, piling on his small nose and clinging to his eyelashes. Nagi hadn't blinked in a very long time.
"Nagi, thank you," Rammi said quietly. There wasn't much else to say. "I'll repay the favour."
Finally Nagi blinked. He seemed to come back to himself, as though he'd been on vacation and left his body behind, like underwear folded on the bed but accidentally left unpacked. He stared at Rammi. His body, having gone from deathlike stillness, now seemed to quiver with suppressed movement, as though any second now Nagi would explode.
"Tell me who," Rammi urged. "You killed for me, I'll kill for you." He didn't make the mistake of touching Nagi this time, but he moved a little close, hands spread in a gesture of good will.
"Don't know," Nagi said very quietly. He blinked again, causing a small avalanche of snowflakes to cascade off of his eyelashes. A tear followed them down his cheek. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
Rammi ground his teeth. No matter what his plans for Nagi, no one had the right to abuse him like this. There was a wide space around Nagi, and not just because people were afraid of him after yesterday's stunt. Every telempath in the area could feel him. Nagi was bottling things up. Nagi was a telekinetic. While the two frequently went together, it was never a happy combination.
Nagi positively thrummed with psychic energy. He was a dead zone emotionally. That's how they knew he was upset, because they couldn't feel it. That much power, that little emotion… rape. Rammi stared at the cold eyes, still welling up with tears, and fought the urge to wrap his arms around the child.
"It's going to be okay," the teen said awkwardly. "Nagi, everything's going to be okay. We'll get this guy and kill him. I'll protect you, Nagi. Shhh, it's going to be okay." Nagi stared at him, brows furrowing suddenly.
"Fuck off," Nagi said in perfect German. It rang out across the courtyard like a bell. Silence fell in the already quiet yard as scared faces turned to stare at them. They remembered yesterday.
"Nagi," Rammi sounded pained.
"It not going to be okay. It never was okay. It never will okay," Nagi said flatly, still in German. Rammi couldn't work out where he'd learnt it so suddenly. Turned out, Nagi could learn like a small child. He'd listened long enough, hard enough, and suddenly it seemed natural. Oh, it was a long way from perfect, and without real lessons it never would be, but everyone understood.
"No protect. You no can protect," Nagi spat.
The bell rang. The courtyard emptied as students trooped inside. Rammi's stomach twisted. One comforting lie might well have ruined everything. And just when he was starting to actually like the kid.
* * *
Schuldig was getting tired of being turned down. The rejection was getting to him. He was tired of trying to convince Brad that he had more personality, and use, than an inflatable sex doll. He not only had feelings, he had intelligence. Brad had told him so, several times. Well, once upon a time, when he was Bradley and cared.
It had been a while since they'd had sex. Schuldig kept watching for a hint that Brad was ready again, that he was perhaps desperate enough to consider taking the teen up on his offer. Schuldig had given up trying to actively seduce the older man. Brad just looked down his nose at Schuldig's non-too-subtle advances and made the German feel like a cheap, and ugly, whore.
"Brad?" Schuldig popped his head around the door to Brad's apartment with a small smile. He was really learning things now. It was still a struggle, but his writing was coming on in leaps and bounds and Brad was considering teaching him Japanese. Schuldig frowned. He hadn't seen Nagi in ages. The boy was avoiding everyone now, it seemed, and most of the student body was scared stiff of him. Schuldig hadn't had to ask why; the memory was still fresh in most of the minds he encountered.
"Penny for your thoughts?" Brad gave an amused smile as Schuldig realised he was glowering perplexedly at the kitchen cabinets.
"Nagi," Schuldig sighed.
"He seems to be doing quite well for himself. His language is still coming on in fits and starts, but some bright spark made the stereotypical connection between the Japanese and electronics and gave him a laptop. Brand new one as well, it's even got that Windows thing on it." Brad was used to the old command prompt machines, lines of code and abbreviations to execute commands with painstaking slowness. He wasn't sure if the graphical user interfaces this 'Bill Gates' had introduced were worth the memory they took up, but he knew they'd catch on in a big way. Big enough for him to have already bought shares in what was currently quite a small company.
"Well, good, but I think someone's still targeting him, and not just that Rammi kid." Schuldig stretched out across the table. "So, what are we doing today? Multiplication tables, long division, apostrophes, history?" He smiled disarmingly at Brad, but as the older man produced a sheet of blank paper and a collection of pencils it changed to a frown. "What are those? Why do I need so many pencils?" Schuldig stood up and leant over the table, trying to decipher the script on the pencil box.
"Art pencils, Schuldig."
"Art?" Schuldig picked up a pencil and studied it. "Why art?"
"You've been doing so well recently," Brad said with a smile, "I thought a little rewards was in order. No actual study today. I recalled that you have quite a talent for drawing, so I thought you might enjoy an opportunity to do so. The pencils are of various degrees of hardness, which means they will produce darker or lighter lines accordingly."
Schuldig sat down slowly, laying out the pencils on top of a piece of paper with a look of bemused amazement on his face. He tested each one and lined them up again from lightest to darkest. Brad left him experimenting with the implements while he read the morning paper.
An hour later, just as Brad was preparing to do the crossword, Schuldig gave a small cough. Brad glanced over the top of his paper to see what the teen wanted and caught sight of the picture. Slowly he lowered the paper and reached out enquiringly. Schuldig handed him the picture.
It was a pencil rending of Brad reading the paper, glasses perched at the end of his nose, hair still slightly tousled, coffee mug just in front of him. It was carefully shaded and textured. At the bottom of the page was a series of much more informal sketches of Brad reading the paper, which showed the coffee getting colder and the pages moving from right to left as Brad read further on. A clock in the background drove the idea of time passing still further home.
"You have a real talent," Brad murmured. "May I… may I keep this?"
Schuldig looked astounded, but very, very pleased. He nodded happily. Brad laid it carefully back down on the table and continued to study it, a smile growing on his lips.
"There's more to you than meets the eye," Brad admitted. "I'll bet there aren't many whores in Berlin who can draw like this."
Schuldig's smile vanished instantly. He stood fast enough to knock his chair over and snatched the drawing back. Slowly, deliberately, he shredded it in front of a protesting Brad's eyes. When the paper was a fine confetti Schuldig took the pencils, his new and most treasured gift, and broke them methodically.
"Stop!" Brad bellowed. "What do you think you're doing?"
Schuldig tossed the splinters and sawdust to the table, tears stinging his eyes. "I'm a whore, right? Nothing but a damn prostitute. I don't deserve pencils. I don't deserve paper. I'm an immoral little slut, aren't I? Aren't I?"
"You're an ungracious idiot!" Brad snapped. "What the fuck brought this little tantrum on?"
Schuldig was about to yell back when he caught sight of the broken pencils. His words caught in his throat. He sat down again, having forgetting his chair was on the floor and inadvertently joining it. A sob caught in his throat. He was an idiot. Brad was right. Cutting off his nose to spite his face… self-defeating… He'd wanted those pencils, dammit!
Brad crouched down next to him. "It's possible I cold have chosen my praise with a little more forethought," he admitted gently. Schuldig looked at him through blurred eyes, sniffing. "I forget, sometimes, that you can err towards the sensitive about your past." Schuldig gave a depreciating little laugh.
"You never change," he murmured. Brad wasn't entirely certain what to make of this sentence.
"I have more pencils, another set. Will you promise me you won't destroy these as well? They are expensive." Schuldig nodded, still hurt. Brad treated him like an irate child, hard to please and harder to console. Still, time spent with Brad was time spent with Brad, and hopefully he'd stop making those awful prostitute jokes now. There were two ways of looking at his situation, and Schuldig had always been determined that the glass was half full, and he had no compunctions about using someone else's glass to top it up from time to time.
