"Inventing the Future"

Author's Note: I haven't actually tried this trick myself. I only looked it up, so I couldn't say for sure whether or not it actually works.

"Chapter 47: Good Friends"

That evening, Julia hesitated on Jaming and Meredith's doorstep, a basket of freshly baked buttermilk biscuits in one hand and her other hand hovering near the doorbell. Even though they had extended an invitation to her, she still felt like she was intruding somehow. She almost turned and walked away once more, but out of the corner of her eye she saw a familiar figure watching her from the edge of the palm tree grove.

She wasn't sure if Parn was following her, or if they just happened to spot each other at the same time, but either way he was now standing between her and her house. As she shakily pressed the doorbell and kept him in her peripheral vision, he continued on his way. Was this an innocent coincidence, or was he stalking her now? She couldn't be sure, and when the door opened she let out the breath that she didn't even realize she had been holding.

Jaming peeked through the crack of the door before opening it completely, as was his habit. Seeing who it was, he opened it the rest of the way. "Ah, Julia. Will you be joining us this evening?"

"Yes, if that's all right..." Julia lowered her eyes, unsure. "I brought some biscuits."

"You didn't have to do that..." Jaming fought off the urge to smile as he stood aside to let her enter the house. "Please, come in. Meredith, look who's here!"

Julia and Meredith sat on the couch, discussing Julia's current situation while Jaming studied his notes at the dining room table and tried to tune out the conversation. A mug of hot, black coffee sat on the table beside him, from which he periodically took a slurping sip.

"I don't know what to do," Julia mumbled tearfully, accepting the tissue box Meredith handed her. "Once he's decided that he wants something, there's really no stopping him. And...well, he did paint that picture. Am I wrong to..."

Jaming's hand curled in a fist around his pen, and he turned towards the two women. "No, you're not."

Julia was startled by this, because he had been so quiet that she very nearly forgot he was there.

"You're a living, breathing person. He lost all claim to you the moment he used the gold paint and brought you out of that painting, and he lost his chance when he left you." he told her, angry on her behalf and a little upset because he himself could be very obsessive when it came to his inventions, and he didn't like the thought that he could be compared to Parn in any way. "You've decided that you don't want to be with him, and it is absolutely essential that he respects that."

"The trouble is, he isn't respecting it," Julia helped herself to another tissue. She sounded extremely congested now, because she had spent the past half hour or so in tears. Meredith put her arm around the troubled young woman. "And I wish I could say he's never acted like that before, but he has. It's just...this is a different situation."

Jaming sighed, disliking the sensation he felt in his chest. Over the years, he had grown quite accustomed to feeling sorry for himself, mostly because he'd had nobody to confide in, and there was no one else to do it. Sorrow for another was a totally different beast. "Well, he won't be able to bother you here."

"I can't stay in here forever," she pointed out.

"You may stay with us while he's in Veniccio," he said firmly, "and I imagine he won't be here for long, because he caused quite a ruckus earlier. We're not the only ones who will stick up for you, I'm sure, and things are sure to be uncomfortable for him."

The doorbell rang three times in a row, which Jaming had come to know as Pau's 'calling card'. As he rose to answer the door, his elbow hit the rim of his coffee cup. Right from the moment of contact, he knew exactly what was about to follow, and he was helpless to stop it. Even as the mug tilted over onto its side and spilled its contents in a dark sheet across the pages of his sketch book, seemingly in a series of slow-motion snapshots, Jaming made a desperate grab for it.

Meredith gasped as the mug fell to the floor with an almost musical shattering sound, and Julia turned to see what had happened.

"Oh, no!" Jaming stared down at what amounted to his life's work, obscured by a muddy stain that covered all but the section at the top left of the page that read 'Aero'. "Oh, no...Oh, nonononono..." he chanted under his breath as he tried to get himself to move, but the motion would have taken more energy than he had. All of his strength had fled with the toppling of a coffee cup.

Meredith and Julia rushed to the table to see what they could do to help, and Jaming simply stood rooted to the spot and stared. Coffee dripped noisily onto Jaming's chair. Meredith blotted at the book with a stack of paper napkins, and Julia rushed to the kitchen in search of a towel.

'It's over...Everything I've worked for all these years. My last chance to make up for everything. It was all in that sketchbook. And now it's gone. Every time I...' Jaming's internal monologue was completely flat, and its matter-of-fact tone evoked a dull ache that he knew was the precursor to a truly epic meltdown.

"Hey!" Pau could be heard calling from outside. "Is everything okay in there? I heard something break!"

Meredith looked over at Jaming, at his staring eyes, and she realized that it wasn't just the coffee up that had broken. "Jaming...maybe we can-"

Jaming actually put his hand over his heart, almost as if to verify that it was still there. Shaking his head, he backed away. This wound was deep, but he was beginning to feel it now, and he didn't want to have an audience when he finally lost his composure. "I...I'll be in the garage."

Julia watched as Jaming brushed past Pau, her own troubles forgotten for the moment. "Oh dear...Meredith, did the ink run very much?"

"No..." Meredith shook her head. "I think I got to it in time. It wasn't just ink, though. I can barely see what was written in pencil..."

Julia leaned over the pages to assess the damage for herself as Pau jogged over to them. Jaming, in something of a fugue state, had left the door open, so Pau just let himself in.

"Whoa..." the boy gaped at the sketchbook he had been told never to touch. "I don't think either one of you did that, because you're still alive..."

"Not funny, Pau," Meredith sighed, shutting the door that Pau had left standing open.

Julia carefully turned the page a few times, and saw that the coffee hadn't soaked through very much. The page that had received the worst of it was badly stained and soggy, but she could still see what had been drawn and written. "We might be able to save it."

"Really?" Meredith's eyes widened. "Are you sure?"

"Well..." Julia shyly looked down, "I'll need a tiny bit of bleach, some paper towels, and some luck. I've never done this before, but...it's a trick Parn used once or twice when he spilled coffee or tea on one of his books, and it worked when he did it. The stains didn't completely go away, and the pages wrinkled a bit when they dried, but they were readable again. It won't be perfect..."

"Let's try it," Meredith went to retrieve some bleach from the laundry room.

"Can I help?" asked Pau.

"I'll show you how," Julia nodded as Meredith came back with the bleach and the paper towels, along with a pair of gloves for Julia. "We'll finish twice as quickly. Also, we should open some windows because of the fumes. Meredith, speaking of which, I'm not sure if you breathing them in is safe for the little one."

Meredith wasn't sure, either. When she did the laundry, she only handled the stuff very briefly. "Better safe than sorry...I'll go make sure Jaming's..." She stopped right there, because she knew perfectly well that he was anything but okay, but she hoped he wasn't destroying his garage. "Thank you, Julia. Hopefully, this will work."

Pau cringed at a sound that the two humans couldn't hear. "It sounds like he threw something against the wall. Probably a wrench. You sure going in there is a good idea?"

"Frankly, no..." Meredith took her house key and locked the door behind her, mostly because of Parn.

Julia shook her head as she covered the top of the bleach jug with a thickly-folded paper towel and tipped it just long enough to get the paper damp without saturating it. "You should really be wearing gloves. Poor man, I hope he's all right..."

"Hang on, I have gloves back at my cave. Be right back!"

Meredith heard the clattering sounds long before she had closed the distance between herself and the garage, and when she reached the door she was able to hear Jaming using language that could make paint peel. The curtains were closed, and she was unable to see inside.

She knocked on the garage door, and this brought an instant halt to the swearing and the sounds of various objects being thrown about the room, but she received no answer. "Jaming, it's me. Can I come in?"

After several seconds of relative quiet, there was the sound of a chair being moved, and Jaming finally answered her. "Y-yes...watch your step."

When she entered the garage and shut the door behind her, she had to admit that this mess wasn't nearly as bad as the one that was made when his platform went haywire, but then again, most of that mess had been caused by the platform itself, and he had probably just been getting warmed up when she knocked. She found him sitting at his work table with his head in his hands.

"How could I be so stupid?" he growled, shaking his head without lifting it from his hands. "Stupid, stupid, stupid..."

"It was an accident, Jaming..." Meredith began to approach him, but halted when he brought his fist down on the metal table.

"An accident! My life's work...destroyed...all because of an accident!" He hit the table again, harder this time, then gritted his teeth and held his fist. "Ow...more evidence of my stupidity..."

"You're not stupid, and it was an accident. It could have happened to anyone," she sat down beside him. "And Julia's-"

"It didn't happen to 'anyone', Meredith, it happened to me! It...it..." Jaming grabbed a paperweight from the table, and he cocked back his arm to hurl it at a window.

Meredith reached out both hands in an unexpected burst of speed and closed her fingers around his fist. "Jaming, stop."

Startled that anyone would dare to touch him while he was venting, much less physically stop him from throwing something, he stared at her, his shoulders heaving as if he had just sprinted through a seven-minute mile. His eyes were wide and filled with pain, and when she spoke again they filled with tears.

"Just stop...Give me the paperweight. It'll be all right..."

"'All right'?" His grip on the paperweight loosened, and his face twisted as she put it back down on the table. "Nothing is all right! Nothing!" He folded his arms on the table and buried his face in them.

Meredith put her arm around him and rested her head against his. "Listen to me...Julia might be able to save it."

He drew in a shaky breath, but didn't raise his head. "How?"

"We could still see what was written, though the pencil marks were a little hard to make out. She's going to try bleaching the stain." She knew that he was already too worked up for anything to have an immediate effect, and she wasn't at all surprised when his only response to this was to shake his head. "I know you're upset. I know how important those notes are to you. And if Julia's trick works, you'll have them back again."

"If it works..." he mumbled.

"She told me she's seen it work before," Meredith rubbed his back, trying to sound encouraging. "You'll have to make a copy afterwards, I think. Maybe more than one, just to avoid this in the future."

Finally, Jaming wiped his eyes on his sleeve and raised his head. His eyes were bloodshot from crying, and anyone who didn't know the reason for his distress might have taken one look at him and assumed that someone close to him had passed away. "Do you really believe that it can work?"

"I think it's possible. Tell you what...why don't you take some time, calm down a little bit? I'll let you know if there's any progress."

Jaming nodded uncertainly, afraid to get his hopes up, and after Meredith had kissed him and gone back out again, he rubbed his face and gave a shuddering sigh before getting out of his chair and mechanically cleaning up his mess.

Pau frowned at the paper in front of him. "It's not all coming out..."

"No," Julia agreed, "removing all of the staining is impossible. Which is a good thing, because we want the writing underneath to remain. What we're trying to do is fade the stain enough to be able to read the notes again."

"Oh. Well, I can read it, but I can't understand it. For one thing, his handwriting is crap." The young Moon Person grinned as his comment made Julia giggle. "And all this science mumbo-jumbo reads like a foreign language!"

Meredith, who had arrived sometime before but was staying outside to avoid the fumes, called through the window, "He uses shorthand a lot, and he writes quickly when he's working on something. That's probably why. How's it going?"

"Very well," Julia called back. "In fact, we're nearly done. Is he all right?"

"Ehh...he's kind of upset at the moment. Angry at himself. Probably embarrassed. But he'll be okay, I think. Oh...actually, he just came out." Meredith's voice faded as she moved away from the window.

Julia smiled and said quietly to herself, "It seems my time with Parn wasn't completely wasted."

"Huh?" Pau looked confused.

"Never mind. There! I think that about does it," Julia gathered up the cleaning supplies and put them away, removing her gloves and looking up as Jaming stepped into the house. "You're just in time."

Jaming wrinkled his nose a little at the smell of bleach, and rubbed the back of his neck. "I...I must ask you to excuse my rudeness, Julia. Leaving the way I did when there was a guest in my house was most impolite, but I'm afraid it was necessary."

Pau rolled his eyes. "That's formal Jaming talk for 'I'm embarrassed for showing an emotion'. Jeez, Jaming, get the stick out of your-"

Julia surprised all of them by covering Pau's mouth with her hand, and she was startled when Jaming actually laughed at that.

"Ladies, I give you Pau, the resident ice-breaker! Meredith, it's safe to come inside. The windows are open, and you didn't handle the bleach directly."

Meredith came inside and set a fan in one of the windows, turning it so that it pointed outward, so that the fumes would be sucked outside more quickly. She nodded to Jaming, indicating that he should go and look at his sketchbook; it was clear that he was afraid of what he would see.

Julia could see it, too. "Come and look. It isn't perfect...but..."

Jaming swallowed hard and forced himself to look. And, after staring at the page for a solid thirty seconds, he was dangerously close to tears once more. The page was still stained, but he could clearly make out what he had written. Even the notes that were done in pencil. He hadn't lost his work after all! "I...I don't know what to say."

Pau folded his arm, smiling. "You're welcome."

"Thank you..."