This one is of when Julian was waiting for Jenny in the More Games shop.
…
Update 2013: good set-up. at least now i know i have always been a stellar conversationalist. so fetch.
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"Welcome, beauty. banish fear
you are queen and mistress here
speak your wishes, speak your will
swift obedience meet them still."
- Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont (Beauty and the Beast)
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Patta-pat. Patta-pat. patta-patpatta-patpatta-patpattapatpat-
Spasming, the pale hand smacked against the countertop as though it were disobedient pet. Stiff and still below him, Julian glared icily down at his trite fist as if daring it to oppose him for the twelfth time in as many minutes. Obviously it wasn't of his own volition, to ever be caught in so pointless and humanly inane an act as this – finger-drumming. If the perpetrator was not attached to his person the incessant digits would have been removed. But attached to him they were, and it was perhaps this fact alone that prevented their ability to be described as in any way 'nervous.'
Tch.
More air than human, Julian slipped from his perch. Instead of chancing a look at the neon eccentricity that was the store's clock, he watched the faint wisps of dust curl up from under his thick boots and rise idly upward, glittering in quiet defiance of physics to settle upon the ceiling where it set to shifting as smoky silt above the strobe lights. Even while absolutely ignoring the stupid human invention, he couldn't begin to shut out the constant, mocking chip of the tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, itisn'ttime, tock, haha, tock, ticking.
He'd barely felt his annoyance spike before the room was flooded with brutal acid house blaring.
Ahh.
It was not at all funny, the Shadow Man reflected as he set once more about adjusting his game boards to very precise angles of disorder, that eternities could pass him by in what felt like a hummingbird's wingbeat – and here he thought wistfully of the 13th century, the most part of which he had spent sleeping worlds for himself in a Persian palace catacomb and only gotten up to mentally annihilate the occasional ambitious lordling that hoped to win boon from the djinn cursing the royal treasury. That had been a quaint break – and then…
And then there was this One Day.
Because it was the Day.
Today.
The day he was finally, finally, after all those days and hours and breaths and almost-touches, going to claim her. Her. Locks like sunshine on new gold and eyes of evergreen forests. Beached smooth skin over that white-hot ember glow and a spirit like the Summer. Jenny.
Images of her trickled into his thoughts wholly, as was her way, without his consent. They flitted through his head as a sort of slideshow at a speed anyone else would merely see as a full motion picture of a girl's life – but Julian gave every candid scene the attention of which it was deserving, every prism facet of colour his pouring attention, and all other distractions (and wasn't everything, in the face of his Jenny?) were scattered away like pests before a torch flare. He could almost feel it, as he always had, the way his own mind, cold and sharp and pitch as it was, warmed as the precious pictures brushed at the hard spines and melted them softer. On any other day, this could have tempted a little smile.
Julian checked a hateful, furtive glance at the time.
Aaaannnyy second now.
A sharp clatter to his left made Julian jolt, but when the following growl rumbling from all the dark places at once was met with a hiss that gave the impression of a rushing gas pipe in an explosives factory, it shifted to an irked scowl. Eyes flicking to the source of the commotion, Julian shook his head almost wearily before issuing a sharp whistle though his teeth. Lurker paused bashfully mid-snarl like a cut engine, dropping the tail of the Creeper from her jaws while the snake himself unwound his coiled length of muscle from the wolf and slithered, sulkily, to what could be misconstrued as a safe distance.
Julian examined the mess. Miniature gemstone game pieces lay scattered on the floor like fallen soldiers, the labyrinthine details crafted by a loving and long-dead master of the old art irretrievably lost to tooth marks and cracks. A thick sheet of 24 karat dark gold lay tiredly in the plaster dust, gouges and dents forever obscuring the intricacies of the hieroglyph guides drawn into it. The set was a survivor attesting to a thousand years of play, and simultaneously just two owners past new (one of which was a long forgotten pharaoh, and the other, of course, was Julian). A legacy which had, unfortunately, ultimately lead to a half hour with his pets, drawn inextricably as they were to destroying the most expensive things in whichever vicinity they so happened to find themselves. He'd taught them well.
Despite this, he looked back to the Creeper and the Lurker with a gaze he knew promised creative punishment. In unison, they shot each other blameful glares before averting their unnaturally intelligent eyes to the floor. The wolf's ears were flat against her shaggy head and the snake was lying ruler-straight on the floor and rather wishing he could flatten to paper.
"Get out of my sight," hissed Julian in a convincing show of grit-teeth rage that his long-time companions saw through, but wisely humoured anyway, dissipating into chastened shadows almost before the words were finished. Maybe they'd gone off to break something else priceless and precious. Like a small child. Or whatever.
Julian didn't care. Julian was looking once more at a clock, and he was starting to grin.
Showtime.
With an absent finger-snap the ruined game board clicked out of existence and into some far off universal deadspace, a faint pop of air hastening to fill the emptiness its last mark on the Earth before its existence was forgotten at last.
Moments later the handle on the shop's paint chipped door jerked down and swung in, silent in a way deeply at odds with the rusted hinges. A creature of habit, Julian swiftly found himself coiled in the darkest corners of the room. He barely felt his meticulously prepared body dissolve itself, though it was usually a good feeling – much like a too-tight bandage being released. His form settled in time to see Jenny stumble in almost gracelessly, her familiar heartbeat irregular and her chest heaving in a way that disquieted him. He resolved to root out the reason later, and preferably make it cry.
For now, looking at her, Julian had the notion that she was in exactness an angel that had – well, not precisely fallen, so much as wander vaguely downwards and come flitting into his little corner of Hell. Julian watched his seraph as she spun, casting good light over that which had just been in the business of dullness and dark. Even the dust motes in the air seemed to be reacting to it, curling in the air around her like an excitable kaleidoscope vying for a sliver of her attention as she looked about at the strangeness all around.
Julian felt his ever-unprepared chest oriented stall that came every time he saw her, chased by the twisted pleasure-pain of being so close – soclose –and still, still unable to reach out. To touch.
Sudden giddiness. Heady and bubbling, it would have knocked him down, had he legs at the time.
Because he could do it.
Today. Today was the Day.
Swallowing an unidentifiable vibration of feeling, Julian stepped out of the shade and into his electrified bones.
Slowly, slowly, a breath for each step, Julian closed the distance between himself and Jenny. He moved until he was standing so close that he could blow in her ear and send the threads of sun dancing, could smell the jasmine of her shampoo and the honey of her. A few silky strands almost brushed his face, making his eyelids flicker, when she tilted her head. Julian followed her look, chin almost on her shoulder, and he quirked his lips and closed his eyes and breathed her.
And shall we begin, my dear?
Crafting one of the many smirks that came so easily to this face, and in three, two, now-
"Can I help you?" Nailed it.
Hair flying like a sheet, Jenny whirled. Her rose petal lips opened soundlessly but for the slight part of flesh from flesh that sent a shiver down his spine. Her green eyes met his with a force that crushed away his breath and left him utterly stilled. Far from the sweeping entrances and shared witticisms Julian had imagined extensively through the years leading up to this Day, he found himself reasonless and – lost to her.
He thought he'd known what to expect, would have been some semblance of used to her by now, but – the way she was looking at him.
By the Nine, but She was looking at him.
And he could not give thie game away, he thought, and gave himself a mental shake (and, when that didn't work, gave the mental equivalent of dropping a rather enraged anvil atop himself), not before the Games had even begun.
Julian turned away and closed his eyes hard, seeking his professionalism behind the lids. One last deep breath lost under the music, Julian flipped it off the accursed noise manually. While had been half-decent for distraction, now he couldn't afford anything of the like. This was important – this was Jenny. Here.
As in, actually.
As i- Oh – fuck, oh fuck ohfuckfuckingcalmfu–
While a considerable segment of him was having what may have been what the humans called a panic attack, the rest of Julian leaned against the nearest supportive surface. He aimed for nonchalant, so that is damn well what he got, thank you. "Can I help you?" he repeated.
Come and play with me, Jenny, another branch of him was humming, soothing. Come play.
Jenny blinked a few times before lowering her gaze. Ashamed? Off-put? On more familiar ground now, Julian's curiosity won over and a quick glance into her mind showed him her motive. It made his lips skim back from his teeth, but this was damnably common grounds, too.
'–think i'd never seen a guy before god on tom's birthday too–'
Tom.
Useless, idiotic, undeserving little Tommy with his insipid little swine eyes and his generic little life slugging on ahead. He also, by some ungodly backhand of a fluke, happened to be Jenny's boyfriend. Soon, very soon, to be ex. The Shadow Man had the calming little mental picture of the boy's prone body indeed with cartoonish Xs sliced across his eye sockets, and it was this that cooled his mask back to its place in time for Jenny's risen head. Her eyes were opaque dyed glass and her jaw was set.
His defiant Jenny, she was. When she spoke, her voice held the steadiest note of a wind chime. "I want to buy a game," Julian quietly catalogued as First Words Spoken to Him. "For a party – for my boyfriend."
Of course you do, thought Julian, affectionate, Who do you think whispered the idea to you in the first place? He liked to think he did a very good job of not reacting. "Be my guest," he said smoothly, straightening. "Anything in particular?"
"Well…"
"How about Senet, the Egyptian game of the dead?" It helped to talk directly to her, he was finding, or he'd forget himself and start to stare again. Creature of habit. "Or the I-ching? Or maybe you'd like to cast the runes?" He picked up the deceptively modest looking leather cup from one of the shelves, shaking it. It contained carved human knuckle bones, but she didn't need to know that.
"No," said Jenny, just adorably uncomfortable. "Nothing like that."
"Well, there's always the ancient Tibetan game of goats and tigers." He held out an arm to the block of bronze sheen of the set, and wished for someone to appreciate his giddy irony. "The fierce tigers, see, stalk the innocent little goats, and the innocent little goats try to run from the tigers. For two players."
Was he pushing it? He didn't care.
Hello, Jenny.
"I– no," she deadpanned, indeed suspicious. Clever, clever Jenny. "I was just looking for- just a game that a lot of people can play at once. Like Pictionary or Outburst." (How he managed not to roll his eyes was a mystery, although it made him queerly close to piteous for her. My poor girl, he thought. Doesn't know how to play any real Games. I'll teach you, lovely darling, just you wait.) "But since you don't seem to have anything like that in store-"
"I see. That kind of game."
With a suddenness that opened a predatory place in his mind, Jenny turned for the door with an abrupt, "Thank you."
Time to set the trap.
"Mystery." She stopped. "Danger." He made his voice low, made it only truly fit for sharing secrets under the shield home bedsheets. "Seduction. Fear. Secrets reviled. Desired unveiled." He rolled the last word around his tongue before releasing it: "Temptation."
Jenny was tensing. "What are you talking about?"
"The game, of course," he replied, adding a perfectly placed blink of the innocent. "That's what you want, isn't it? Something…" He sieved the words from one of the thoughts she'd had earlier that same day, accidentally. "Very special."
"I think that I'd better-"
"We do have something like that in stock." At your convenience and most fated coincidence, mademoiselle.
Julian was there and back swiftly, perfectly aware that her expression was close kin to the one worn directly before an artful escape from one of the many worthless boys that breathed her air too closely and, another happy coincidence, tented to end the night bloodied red or screaming blue or more often than not, Julian could cheerfully report, both. His return was largely a swagger. "I think that this is what you've been looking for?"
She gave the plain looking box a once over, looked back at him, and was generally incredulous. "You've got to be joking."
Wordless, Julian held the box. Partly because nothing more needed to be said on his part, and partly because he was, again, lost to the novelty of watching this angle of her. Alert and close. Aware.
"Could I see it?"
Regrettably, those green eyes were clouding slightly as a side-effect. "Well… I don't know. " Still, she was stronger than this illusion – but Julian hadn't been called a master of strings for no reason. "On second thought, I'm not sure I can sell it to you after all."
"Why not?"
Got you.
"Because it really is special. Un-mundane." -unlike your boyfriend- "I can't let it go to just anybody, or for just any reason. Maybe if you explained what it was for…"
He knew, of course. But he'd also been doing all the talking. He wanted her to talk now. He wanted to hear more, always more, of that clear charmed voice he could listen to – and would listen to, if this played out as it ought – forever.
"It's for a party tonight," she said, "for my boyfriend, Tom. He's seventeen today. Tomorrow night we'll have the big party- you know, with everybody invited. But tonight it's just our group. Our crowd."
Unhappy words, to him, but Julian loved this. How long had he wanted it, this attention? How long had he wished for her to spin words meant for him, and him alone, to hear?
Too long.
Julian felt his head loll blissfully to one side, still so pleased when her eyes noticed his movement, but displeased that she'd stopped her talk. He pressed on with forced casualness. "So?"
"So I need something for us to do," she went on, mercifully. Nine, he was a lost cause. "You can't just get seven people in a room, throw Doritos at them, and expect them to have a good time. I've screwed up massively by not getting organized until now- no food, no decorations. And Tom-" Ah. Even her voice couldn't make that name pleasant.
"And Tom," he put conscious effort into not spitting, "will care?" Petty, ungrateful bastard that he was, he just might. How absurd.
"I don't know- he might be disappointed. He deserves better, you see."-Julian only bit back the incredulous growl when it hit his teeth-"He's– He's– well, he's incredibly handsome, and by the end of this year he'll have lettered in three sports-"
"I get it," he managed.
"No, you don't." No. I really don't. "He's not like that at all. Tom is wonderful. He's just so wonderful that sometimes it takes a little keeping up with him. And we've been together forever-" I know. "-and I love him-" Don't. "-and I have since second grade. Okay?" She stepped forwards, towards a Shadow Man wound up and close to screaming with black envy and ready to break and cross a lot of yellow tape lines. Stop. It. "He is absolutely the best boyfriend in the world, and anybody who says he isn't-"
How he could have snapped. He could have- could have–
What? He couldn't have hurt her, or even frightened her, not really. And there were his reflexes vetoed. What could he have done?
And he knew.
He was a syllable away from hitching her to a wall, pressing in, and kissing her very, very hard.
Instead, Julian held out the box and said, stupidly, desperately, detachedly, "You can hold it if you want."
"Okay." Jenny reached for it, and the moment her fingers came in contact, the moment her forest green eyes widened slightly, Julian, eyes closed when she wasn't watching, could have sworn he did hear something snap after all. It was the closing of a trap.
Jenny was tracing unknowable patterns over the dully gleaming box in his hands. His eyes were still shut, but Julian could feel the fine motions almost well enough to picture those curious, smooth fingers curling over his skin– eyes opened. She had to go.
Now. Or he may not let her.
"We're closing. You gonna buy it?"
After a moment of deliberation, she raised those eyes again. "How much?"
He moved to the cash register, realised he'd forgotten to put it there and had to materialise one mid-step. He breathed a random number and sought distance, distance, distance.
Jenny handed over the money quickly and Julian almost snatched it, avoiding contact, pushing it among a few stray farthings without considering to check it the amount.
He looked up at her, and, gods help him, this was still a thrill, to find her returning it. He looked down. "Enjoy," he said.
I know I'm going to.
But that would be later. He had last minute things to plan, a chaotic mind to settle, and, hopefully, enough of her to keep him sated until then.
You should check your watch, he thought, and pushed it towards her.
Jenny sucked in a breath. "Thank you; I have to go. Uh – see you later."
And she left.
With her back turned, Julian felt a coil unwind in him that had been tightening torturously, though to what ends he couldn't say, for every moment her eyes had been looking at and through him at the same time (rather than the alternative which was, of course, merely the through). His eyes nearly rolled back into his head as his face relaxed back into itself, and a reply that wasn't meant to be heard hitched on his sigh: "At nine."
To his surprise, Jenny glanced back – Julian hastened to smother his hunger under his layers of indifference as he had been for the last few minutes (had it only been minutes? Could he possibly be that unfamiliar to her?). From the looks of her, he was wholly unsuccessful, and couldn't bring himself to care overmuch. Severing contact before it could begin, he reached out a too-quick hand to flip the blasting techno briefly back to its status of eardrum-bursting novocaine.
He didn't hear the door click after her. But he felt Jenny's spike of fear like a sickly shock, and was oil-slick spilled into the street's shadow in a fractured heartbeat after it.
Jenny was grasping at a door knob that had never really existed. Two human males were advancing on her.
Oh, Julian thought, uninterested and murderously livid as only a Shadow Man can be, is that all.
With practiced ease, he slipped into the dimlit little minds like a scaling insect and triggered some neurotransmitters into highly respectable frenzies of suffocating terror. The one on the left had a crippling fear of drowning, the other, spiders.
Oh, if shadows could smile.
In microseconds, the wall was a roaring pressurised tsunami and heaving mound of scuttling black legs and mandibles, respectively, with the long-lasting fright of the experience all compressed into one neat little click of a synapse.
They ran.
A few quiet beats later, a somewhat dazed Jenny left for home, and the shadows followed.
It was a beautiful Day.
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because i just realised that Julian is the Number One Fanboy in the history of ever.
like actually that's it. that's the book.
-Feb. 2013