"Inventing the Future"

Author's Note: I thought it might be fun to explore their backgrounds and flesh out their pasts a little bit, and this is the result. Nothing exciting, but it was fun to write out their rapport! Also, I didn't intend for things to get this sad, but the characters had other ideas.

"Chapter 12: Origin Points"

"Ah, thank you," Jaming said over his shoulder as Meredith dropped a newspaper on the floor next to him. "Been to the post office, have you?"

"Uh-huh."

Jaming didn't doubt for a second that Meredith had gotten a pretty good laugh at his expense as soon as he had shut the door after her, but he was relieved that she hadn't made so much as a veiled reference to it since then, and within a week he had forgotten all about it. Mostly.

It had become their custom to meet in his garage on days when she wasn't working at her stall on one of the shop boats, and the two of them would catch up on current events, an activity that was usually accompanied by a snack of some sort. As Jaming used a tattered old cloth to wipe grease from his hands, he did a double-take at the headline. "What the deuce is a 'Finny Frenzy'?"

"Oh, that..." Meredith sat down next to him on the floor and looked at the back of the envelope she carried. "Claire told me about that weeks ago. It's a fish race. One of her father's pet projects. She seemed fairly excited about it, and I can understand why, but I don't see the point of racing fish. It sounds an awful lot like trying to herd cats!"

"That can actually be done," replied Jaming, grinning a trifle wickedly, "as long as you have a fish to use as bait. Then they'll follow you anywhere."

Meredith rolled her eyes, sliding her thumb underneath the flap of her envelope to open it. "Something tells me you haven't had your morning coffee."

"No, and I need it," he got up to wash his hands at his small utility sink.

"Don't tell me. You worked through the night again." It wasn't a question, but she didn't follow it up with a lecture. She didn't like to see him push himself to exhaustion, but it was really his choice to make, and he didn't seem to do it very often.

"Very well; I won't tell you."

She shook her head, and as she read through her letter her smile slowly faded.

Jaming turned on his coffee pot, and frowned as he noticed this. "Is everything all right?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah...Just a letter from home. My mother is thinking about coming here to visit..."

Jaming ambled back over and sat down beside her, spreading the newspaper out in front of them so that they could both read it. "Is that a bad thing?"

Meredith didn't answer right away, and she didn't notice as he leaned over to peek at the letter until he asked her a follow-up question.

"And who is this 'Cricket' person?"

Holding the letter to her chest to hide the text, Meredith leaned away and pretended to glare at him. "Back off, nosey parker," Then, smiling a tad ruefully, she explained, "It's...well, it's my nickname."

Giving her a smile that so few others ever got to see, Jaming asked mischievously, "Is she the only one who gets to call you that? Because that's just priceless."

She swatted him with the letter before putting it away, but she was still smiling. "That depends. Can I call you 'Jam-Jam'?"

"No," he said flatly, and after a beat of silence they burst out laughing.

"Well, whatever...as long as you don't call me 'Cricket' in public, I guess I don't mind. But no, her coming here isn't a bad thing per se. We just...don't always get along."

"Mm..." Jaming looked down at the paper, skimming through the uninteresting articles. He hoped the coffee would be ready soon, because he was in that slightly goofy, slightly thoughtful mood of the sleep-deprived.

"What about you?" Meredith asked, and at first he couldn't fathom what she was asking him.

"What about me?"

"Well...you've never mentioned your parents. I'm curious. What are they like?"

Jaming's expression didn't change, other than to turn 'inward' somehow, and he pointed out, "Before today, you haven't mentioned your mother either. Or, indeed, any of your family."

"Yes, I guess that's true."

Jaming turned the page, absentmindedly forgetting to ask her if she was done reading yet, and said evenly, "My parents have passed away."

Meredith's face fell. Open mouth, insert foot! "Oh, I'm sorry...I didn't know."

But he waved off her apology with a gentle shake of his head. "How could you know if I didn't tell you? I don't think about it much. It was a long time ago. But I think...they would have liked you very much."

Meredith was more perceptive than that and she put her arm around him for a moment, softly rubbing his shoulder. He might not think about it much, but that didn't mean that he didn't miss them. In response, he turned his head towards her and lightly nudged his nose against her cheek in a sort of modified kiss, since the conventional type was something he would never be able to do.

"It's all right, Meredith, really. Do you know something?"

"Hm?"

"No one has ever asked me about them before,"

Jaming realized that he could no longer hear brewing sounds from the coffee pot, and a glance told him that it was ready. "How about this; I'll get us some coffee and clear a space on the table, and if you give me a minute, I'll figure out how to begin."

"Jaming, you don't have to talk about them if you don't want to."

"Actually...I welcome the opportunity." And he did. His parents had been his strongest (and, indeed, his only) supporters when he was a boy, and up until now he'd had no one to share the good memories with. He only hoped that none of these memories would cause him to become emotional, because he truly hated crying. That sort of thing accomplished nothing other than an increase in nasal mucus and a decrease in dignity. And that was to say nothing of his male pride! Still, it wasn't as if she hadn't seen him do it before.

While he was getting their space ready, Meredith opened her pack and withdrew their snack, which was simple enough. Buttermilk biscuits, a small container of butter, and another small container of honey. She assumed that he had worked through breakfast, and she was correct. He didn't even begin speaking until he had polished off his first biscuit, and she didn't press him to hurry.

Finally, Jaming washed the biscuit down with some coffee and began to talk. "Let's see, now...Well, first of all, as you might have guessed, I don't physically resemble either of my parents. The theory was advanced by several doctors that both of them carried the recessive gene for an unknown genetic mutation, resulting in..."

He paused, realizing that he had lapsed into technical jargon, but when she nodded and he saw that her eyes weren't glazing over as he feared they might, he went on, "Well, blue skin. Blue hair isn't completely unheard of. There was...a Sage by the name of Crest who had blue hair." A shadow crossed his face, and he looked down for a moment. "Anyway...they tried to shield me from the world, of course. My father was a schoolteacher. I inherited my physical build from him. They enrolled me in the school where my father worked, in the hopes that his close proximity would make things easier on me."

Meredith winced. "I think I see where this is going..."

Jaming nodded wryly, stirring his coffee. "You probably do...It opened the door for accusations of preferential treatment. Children aren't convincing liars, but when many of them tell the same story, people tend to believe them. Complaints were made, and my father faced an inquiry. When he refused to make a formal apology to the parents who complained to the school board, he was discharged from his position."

"But that's ridiculous!"

A little startled by the anger in her voice, Jaming blinked then nodded once. "Ridiculous and unfortunate, but that's what happened. My mother, who worked as a mechanic, didn't make enough to support all of us, and my father's pride would not allow it. So, after trying to find employment elsewhere and failing to do so, my father announced that we were moving. And it became a pattern until, finally, they decided that I would be homeschooled."

Jaming wondered if he was really giving Meredith what she had asked for, or if he was talking too much about himself. When he voiced this concern, she shook her head no.

"Talking about how the three of you are connected isn't the same as just talking about yourself. That's so sad, though..."

That statement came dangerously close to sounding like pity, and Jaming was quick to offer up a denial. "Actually, being taken out of public school was the best thing that ever happened to me. I never had my shoes stolen after that, or came home with a bloody nose, or...well, you get the idea, I'm sure. I got my zeal for learning from my father. And, while I was being homeschooled, I was around my mother more than ever before. It was through her that I learned to love technology. Do you know what my first invention was?"

"Uh-uh."

"Well," he fidgeted in his seat a bit, warming up to the subject. "she would complain about having to put down either her coffee or her breakfast muffin to turn the page of her newspaper, and Father finally got sick of hearing about it, so he said, 'Well, why don't you just go into your garage and cobble together a machine that'll do it for you?'." Jaming lowered his voice slightly and added a bit of a gravelly quality to it in what was a surprisingly accurate imitation of his father's voice, though Meredith couldn't possibly know just how accurate it was.

Meredith giggled, and pointed out, "Well, now I know who you got your sass from!"

Jaming wagged a finger at her. "Preposition..." he sing-songed, then burst out laughing when she grabbed his finger.

"Oh, hush!" She was laughing too, and it took them several minutes to settle down because they kept setting each other off.

"Actually," he continued, "I believe I got it from both of them. But anyway, she threw her paper at him, and I went off into the garage to see if I could do it. Make a page turner, that is. And I did! She was so pleased with it..."

Inside his head, Jaming could see all of this play out as clear and plain as if it had just happened that morning. The smell of oil that constantly lingered in his garage was nearly identical to the smell that permeated his mother's old workshop. The tempting aroma of biscuits and honey were almost the same as the remembered smell of that breakfast so long ago when an eight-year-old Jaming had presented his mother with a gift she cherished to the end of her days. The memories were so powerful, so real, that he could almost swear his mother was standing right behind him at that very moment. He could almost smell her perfume. He came quite close to throwing a look over his shoulder just to make sure!

'When was the last time I'd smelled my mother's perfume? What was it even called? It began with an 'L', didn't it? Damn...I can't remember! But the scent...I'll never forget it.'

Meredith grew worried as Jaming stared straight ahead, clearly seeing something that wasn't there, and the old grief that hovered just out of reach behind his eyes was almost palpable at that moment. She touched his back, and her voice was almost a whisper as she asked him, "Jaming? Are you okay?"

Seeming to come up for air, he drew in a deep breath and nodded, giving a small, reassuring smile. "Oh, yes. I just haven't thought about that in years. I'd all but forgotten the way they would trade comments back and forth. It was almost a kind of gentle warfare between them, but they never went too far with it. Sometimes the memories are so clear that I almost forget I can't just call them up and...and..."

His voice broke, and he quickly turned his head away in embarrassment. "Damn...I'm sorry, Meredith...I told myself I wouldn't do this..."

She made a small noise of sympathy and put her arm around him. "You don't have to apologize, Jaming...I understand perfectly. There's not a day goes by that I don't miss my father."

He turned towards her again, looking surprised through his tears, but then he remembered; Meredith had only mentioned her mother in connection to the letter. It hadn't occurred to him that her father might not be in the picture anymore! "Oh, Meredith...how long ago?"

Meredith reached up and cupped his face between her hands, wiping his tears away, but it was a futile action as more replaced them. She smiled sadly, her cheeks damp with the evidence of her own grief. "Forever...Almost a year now."

"I know what you mean," he mirrored her gesture, tenderly wiping her cheeks with his fingertips before drawing her close and giving her the hug they both needed. "I'm so very sorry."

"Hey!" Pau's voice from the doorway caused them to jump. "What's with all the boo-hooing in here?"

Jaming was embarrassed, but he was also indignant. They had both barely even been sniffling. 'Boo-hooing' indeed! He squinted over Meredith's shoulder before whispering in her ear, "Somebody needs to put a bell on him, or something."