Taffer Notes: Short chapter this month. Nicole's and John's authors are busy with life. Buuut as I was getting ready to post this I realized how close I am to the end of book 2 and this is exciting!
5 Minutes
All she has is the dark. It's ever-present, follows her. She tries to push away from it. To run from it. But there's never anything but. It's tiresome, it is, and there's frustration next to the fear. A hint of anger. She wants to scream at it at the top of her lungs to leave her be.
It whispers back. Tells her it'll do just that if only she'll let go.
Back when— in her first life, her life life —Nicole had had a reasonable morning routine. Granted, she'd had one for everything. Not much of a choice when any sort of deviation liked to pop the lid off her anxiety. Which she preferred bottled, thank you. So it'd always been the same. Wake. Fumble for phone. Turn off alarm. Roll over again and let the second one hit and then finally get up. Shower. Dress. Brush teeth, etc and so on, then walk Thor, feed him, and finally go to work.
Every bloody morning. She'd got to hate it, eventually.
Now she missed it fiercely.
Nicole would trade this in a heartbeat for just one more normal morning hour. This being her lying flat on her back staring blankly at an equally blank ceiling while her chest felt too tight to fit all the bits it carried.
Her arm flailed up. Oh. Right. No watch. No phone clutched in her hand either. She didn't know how long she'd been wide awake, tucked into darkness lifted only by a faint sliver of silver light pooling in from a crack in the curtains. Curtains she kept stubbornly closed. She did remember though that falling asleep had been a battle, too, and that most of the late night she'd spent asking Ghost about goblins and whatnot.
Those really didn't look anything like the goblins she knew from books and movies. Then again, now she knew what Vex looked like and she was, to be perfectly honest, quite... vexed.
Groaning, Nicole tossed and turned and kicked at the blankets before finally asking the empty air: "What time is it?"
"Five-O-six," Ghost supplied readily. "AM." He appeared between her and the ceiling a second later, all made of electric clicks and whirrs and a cheerfully slanted eye-light-thing. "And I'm happy to say I didn't lie yesterday when I told Shephard we weren't going to be busy."
Nicole stuck the tip of her tongue out at him.
"Hoooow about I ping him?" he offered in turn.
"How about you don't. It's not his fault I had another of those Children of the Corn dreams. Sans children. And I guess literal corn." She made a face. There hadn't been a wolf either, which'd been good, just a whole lot of running with cold phantom cuts tracking along her arm.
Ghost ticked sideways. "Children of the…?"
Nicole waved her hand at him and pulled her blanket over her head. "Never mind. Go transmat some dust off the shelves while I feel sorry for myself under here."
He paced. Then he paced some more. He could have paced ruts into the ground by now. And he didn't know how many times he'd stopped to pretend he was very interested in all the objects around him that he knew far too well: the model spaceships and sparrows, the poster of an ancient musician – the Man in Black – on the wall…
John rubbed at his stubbled chin and scratched at his jaw and paced some more.
"Will you stop?" Darrow halfway snapped from where he floated nearby. "You're making me nervous."
With a scoff, John muttered, "You're one to talk about pacing."
"I don't pace. I float. I have that advantage. Well… arguably an advantage— anyway, technically, you're wrong about that, too. Just like how you're wrong about how, if you went to Nicole's right now, you wouldn't be bothering her or waking her up."
"It's five-freaking-AM, Darrow," John snapped back. "I know you love your naptimes, but we sleep a little longer than that." He folded his arms. "Although I'm pretty sure you'd sleep seventy percent of the time if you were given the option."
"I've never calculated the percentage of time I spend recharging, and I work very hard, thank you, with many battery-drained nights trying to keep you alive. Go to her place and knock on the door. You're a daredevil about literally everything else, why's this such an exception?"
"I'd go to her place at five AM," John reiterated, "if I was an ass."
"Wonderful; I'll pack my bags."
"Ha ha. I'm not busting in on her this early, Darrow. She doesn't strike me as the get up at 5 AM type."
"I don't think she was military, or is military, or whatever, no, but…"
"She's asleep. She's a normal person. A hell of a lot more normal than I could ever pretend to be—"
"Oh, please, Shephard, I've seen you try to sleep long enough to know she's at least as restless as you are."
John folded his arms tighter, shoving his fingers under his armpits. He ducked his head a little and sulked.
"Oh, look, I'm getting a call," Darrow half chimed, half deadpanned so dryly it made John want to reach for some water. "Yes, Ghost. What?"
"You don't have to talk out loud," John said with a sigh, rubbing his forehead.
"Yes, I know I don't, I do this for your benefit. Here, Ghost, let me put you on speaker so Shephard can grasp precisely how correct I've been for the past fifteen minutes."
"What? Your Guardian is up, too?" Ghost's tinny voice asked over whatever other speakers were hidden on Darrow's shell.
John resumed pacing.
"Yes, he's busily wearing pathways into the floor. And you already mentioned your Guardian is also awake. We should take our nervous puppies out to the park for a doggy date before they both drive themselves crazy," Darrow said with an overdose of false saccharine.
"What?" Ghost said at length, sounding baffled.
Darrow rolled his eye. "I'll have my Guardian visit your Guardian. We'll be there in… five minutes."
"Great!"
"Yes, bye, thank you."
Silence. Darrow hovered there oozing all kinds of smugness, and John stopped pacing enough to stare at him.
"Don't," John said, lifting a finger, "say a word."
"I'm glad I don't have to," Darrow replied, sounding endlessly amused. "Now let's—"
"Yeah yeah."
And John snatched him right out of the air.
It'd been more than five minutes. Thankfully. Because there'd been clothes to put on and teeth to brush — and wait, did that mean he lived only five minutes from here?
Knock.
Knock. Knock.
"Ghost," Nicole whisper-hissed while sorting out her shirt. Desperately so — she'd probably put it on backwards. "I've never even held a gun before. Why'd I say yes? Why?"
"Technically," Ghost said while he hung in front of her, "you're not the one who did. That was me. You said—" He paused and tried on her accent. "—Okay." He wiggled his shell. "Now will you stop fidgeting with that? It's fine."
"Nothing is fine." Exasperated (and feeling a bit like she was back in wee-babby-Nicole school about to step out in front of the class and present her summer project about why spiders were amazing and everyone ought to stop squishing them), Nicole balled her hands into firsts and stalked up to the door. Though before she'd grabbed for the handle, she whirled around and jabbed a sharp finger at Ghost. He recoiled and intoned an electronic huff. "I'm hereby declaring you blamed for anything that goes wrong today. Anything. I stub my toe, it's your fault. I shoot my toe, it's your fault. Heaven forbid, I shoot John, it's your fault."
Ghost mimicked a bow, his eye downcast. "I'll make that sacrifice gladly."
"Oh I hate you. Did you know that?"
"You know, a week ago I would have totally believed you still. Now? You're lying."
She sighed and pulled the door open.
Anyway. About those five minutes? The reason why it'd taken longer than that was the second thing she noticed. First, she discovered how John wore all black (again), how Darrow hung perfectly parallel to his right shoulder, and how somewhere between the door coming open and now, didn't forgot how to say Hi. There was also the realisation that John had some stubble on his chin. Since it was early in the morning, did that mean he wasn't the shaving kind, or that he'd not had time to because of those aforementioned five minutes her brain kept lamely looping back around to?
Then, finally, said looping mind broke out of its circle, limped forward, and caught on why he'd been delayed. The culprit was a pot. A small one— wrap one hand around it and you're good —made of red clay and filled with dark dirt. John was holding it out to her with that one hand it fit into so nicely.
"Morning," he said. Quietly, too. A soft-spoken sort of greeting fitting the we-aren't-anywhere-near-respectable-morning-hours mood. Didn't want to wake the neighbours.
Nicole's brain locked up. Next to her, Ghost leaned his entirety forward. He flicked a scan over the pot.
Which was all well and good, but Nicole simply stared some more, before, finally, a tiny voice kicked around inside her skull and hush-screamed manners! at her. She squirmed. "What— is that?"
Oh dear lord.
"I mean— I mean good morning. It's early. I'm sorry."
Nicely done… Was she blushing? Oh god, she was blushing. This was a disaster already.
Ghost piped up first. "That's a—"
—and promptly got hushed by John raising a finger.
"Ah-ah. It's a surprise," he said, smiling ever so slightly in a way that might have meant he didn't mind how absolutely pants she was at human interaction. "What did you say? No cut flowers since they wilt." He looked her dead in the eye, before adding, "And stuff."
Yep. That'd been exactly what she'd said. Also had his eyes just twinkled? No way, Eyes didn't twinkle. Not around her, anyway.
"This one hasn't even gotten started yet so I'm hoping it won't wilt any time soon." He gave the pot a minuscule sideways wiggle. A very inviting wiggle.
Nicole steeled herself, slipped her tongue between her teeth to have a bite down on it, and carefully plucked the pot from his hands. It was surprisingly heavy (because the dirt was wet) and oddly warm (where his hands had wrapped around the clay). She held it dumbly for a while, not sure how one could possibly and reasonably proceed from here on.
"Ta," she said at some point or the other, hoping she hadn't just stood here for ages, and turned around to carry the pot back inside. She put it on the kitchen table. Twisted it around a little. And then stopped by the curtains hiding the City and the Traveler and pulled them open all the way.
The little thing'd need light, after all.