James jerked to his feet and snatched the backpack. It landed hard on his spine, the straps twisted on his green shoulders. He grappled them flat. Rancor stoked the untamable forge within, and its power guided his charge all the way to the auditorium.

His body thrust into the push bars, bursting the twin doors open. Harry jumped and spun around, gasping and clutching his chest. A panel spring boarded off the wall, echoing like a gong in the empty assembly hall. It shuddered violently post-collision, and both doors slowly exhaled closed as James took a few steps in.

"Holy shit, James!" Harry panted, still pressing his hand over his panicked heart. "Fuck! If anything's gonna give me a heart attack around here, it's probably gonna be—"

"Why did you lie to me?"

Abruptly halted, genuine bafflement indented a wrinkled frown on Harry's forehead. "What? Lie to you? I don't—"

"You lied to me. It's not 2019. It's 2016."

A slight turn and unsure tilt of his head had the patriarch staring at James out of the corners of his eyes. "Nnnooo," he slowly replied, somewhat patronizing. "It's 2019. Trust me on that, James."

"It's 2016, or it's 2018," James repeated doggedly, another step closer. The aggression in his body language did not go unnoticed by the veteran. Harry flinched; James bristled. "I did the math. You've been saying Heather's seventeen. Nineteen ninety-nine plus seventeen is twenty sixteen. You're three years off."

Silence thickly overcast the vast room while James waited. Harry lowered his head in troubled thought to do the math himself. His face scrunched and the barest whisper of 'what?' preceded a shake of his head. "No.. wait. No, it's 2019," Harry confirmed, raising a finger. "It's definitely 2019, I know thatfor certain."

"Heather can't be seventeen then, Harry," refuted the conduit. "She has to be twenty."

The rest of Harry's fingers flared the universal sign that demonstrated an even more bewildered What? when he went through one more estimating round. "That's.. no, wait, something's wrong."

"No shit?"

"James, I'm not lying to you," Harry curtly replied, finally looking him straight in the eye. "Heather is seventeen and it's 2019. I'm forty-eight. I don—"

"Then how does that work?"

"Do you think I fucking know?!" He spread out his arms, a spark of his own impatience leaping into the fray. "James. Listen to me. It is twenty. Nine. Teen. Heather, my daughter, is seventeen. Okay? And I just turned forty-eight in February. Out of the things I don't remember, I sure as hell remember that."

They glowered at one another, trying to find a rebuttal or an explanation. The best Harry could do in his defense was to keep talking. "I seriously don't know what to tell you, James. I know what I know. But now that I think about it, no, it doesn't make any fucking sense. I'm just as lost as you are, here. Okay?"

James exploded. "NO! It's not okay! Harry, you are missing three fucking years! Everything you've said, or claimed , doesn't add up at ALL! You've got to be lying about something! And I don't fucking know how you're doing it! You are the shittiest fucking liar I've ever met!"

Harry sarcastically threw up his arms. "Tell me something I don't know! I've been a really shitty fucking liar my whole life, James, I thought you'd caught on! Remember? I couldn't lie to a baby, cuz it'd never believe me!"

"Oh, my fucking—" His hands strangled his hair again. Harry looked on despairingly.

"James, c'mon, don't— don't do that."

The resident snapped up his head. "Do what? "

"Pull your hair like that, c'mon, don't do that." James eyeballed him incredulously.

"What's it to you? Why— and why do you think you can tell me what—"

"You're hurting yourself."

".. yeah? What's your fucking point?"

"I just.. it's.. it's self-harm, man," Harry said with an empathic wince. "I hate seeing you do it. It's bad."

That was the final straw. James lost all his stronghold's barriers and screamed so hard he staggered to hold his balance. "SHUT THE FUCK UP, HARRY! HOLY SHIT, JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!"he roared, his pent-up acrimony infesting the entire school. "I am so SICK and TIRED of your goddamn therapy shit!Just shut the fuck upfor twofucking minutes. TWO. FUCKING minutes. I don't give one flying fuckabout whatever the hell you think I should do or not do! I'm really, really going to lose my shit on this and I swear to godthat I'm this fucking close to shooting you in the back of the head about it. God dammit, Mason!"

There it was again, that same crushed look that he got from back in the hotel. James thrust his fists down to his sides. "What?"

A shocked and wounded man shook his head. Snarling softly, the younger of the two shot his arms to the sides expectantly. "What is it? You've got that fucking look on your face. What's the problem?"

"Nothing," Harry lied. James, of course, remained unconvinced.

"It doesn't look like 'nothing', Harry. Stop lying already. You're shit at it and you've done enough lying today. You had that same look on your face when we got up in each other's ass at the hotel. So what. Is. The fucking. Problem."

Harry struggled to answer, taking his eyes to the side. "It's just.. I find it disrespectful," he explained, passively lifting his shoulders. "Being called by my last name brings back some kinda shitty memories. Not that you'd know that." He centered his gaze on James. "That's all."

"Why?" James coldly demanded. "I'm not gonna stand around and wonder what offends you, Harry. Get it out now. You've heard mine, so let's hear yours."

Harry twisted his mouth, directing his head and eyes to the stage. It looked so deserted. "Listen, I know it'll sound stupid."

"Probably."

He winced. That sure set the tone. This was gonna be a fun tale to tell.

"So it was my first job, right out of high school. It was at a small mom and pop hardware store. There were a couple other people there aside from me, maybe in their twenties and thirties, so I was the only young, new guy. Everybody else had been there for years.

"The owner was a mean old fuck. He hated life, he hated you, he hated everyone else in the world. Elmer. Heh, fuck," Harry chuckled, passing his hand over his hair. "Can you even imagine meeting a guy whose name is Elmer? I dunno about you, but that sure says a thing or two about how old this guy was. Or the type to go hunting in wabbit season."

"Get to the point."

He sighed, leaning back on the table again. The construction paper crinkled under his weight. "So this guy was a piece of work. Nobody liked him. It was like he was constantly on a warpath. He was probably compensating for something, or had some shit happen to him, like he was in the war, or whatever, and he had to blame somebody for it. So naturally it became our fault, and he took it out on us.

"I don't know why he hired me; he seemed to hate me from the start. Maybe it was because I was new, but he called me by my last name; everybody else was called by their first. I tried to talk to the others about it - figured it was some kind of hazing process - but they just shrugged and said oh, he's like that. They were probably jaded by that point. I think they expected me to jump ship after a couple weeks, so why bother getting to know, or talk to me? Which, in hindsight, is fair; but at the time, and many years later, it still feels kinda cruel.

"Every time he 'talked' to me, and I use that word very liberally," Harry added, quotation marks and all, "it was all, 'Mason'. Mason this, Mason that.. and he said it so.." He licked and bit his lip, pausing to struggle for the right word. ".. reprehensibly? It might as well been a 'fuck you' or a devil's curse. He ran me into the ground, gave me all the worst jobs he could think of, kept me late..

"But he paid well. Everyone knew it, but nobody was brave enough to apply. They didn't want to deal with his shit. But I needed this job. I fucking needed it," Harry stressed, hiking his shoulders to his ears. "We'd just gotten an apartment. We were getting married soon. Jodi was in school, and I wanted to support her, support us, and if that meant being Elmer's personal punching clown, then so be it."

James prudently watched Harry itch and knead his fingers into his eye. Maybe he didn't know what forty-eight was supposed to look like on a man, but Harry now looked like he was bordering on sixty. Two seconds of reflection were dedicated to how it was weird that he could age before his eyes, then he threw the thought over the fence.

"Okay."

His tone said 'go on' and 'I'm losing my patience'. Unfortunately for both, Harry didn't know how to be anything but long-winded. Harry found the floor again. "He started to slander me, started a rumor that, for some ungodly fucking reason, people listened to. So on top of my ass being handed to me every day, now I have people whispering behind my back. Even all the other guys at work were fucking smirking.

"And they all knew he was full of shit! But hey, why not. I was a young, dumb, overeager high school kid, just graduated and trying to get my foot in the door anywhere to make a living, so let's have a little fun. Show him how the world works."

Harry took his eyes to the ceiling and expelled another rib-deflating breath. "Yeah. Bullying. I know it's pathetic," he projected, sneering at the rafters. "But, man.. Elmer cut right to the bone. He was scooping out the marrow and spreading it on his morning toast. Jodi started hearing about the rumors, naturally," the author expounded, glancing at James. "Oh, she loved them. Heh. As though her schooling wasn't stressful enough, she had all this shit to worry about, too. .. yeah," he wryly laughed. "Yeah. It was that bad.

"And all the while, I was 'Mason'. That's it. No other name. .. okay, that's a lie," Harry muttered, and directed his stare to the hardwood. "He had a bunch of other names for me. It was great. Y'know, come to think of it? He had an impressive vocabulary. Heh, I'd believe it if he knew just as many words in Italian, or French, or fuck, even Portuguese.

"Gotta hand it to him: he was so vulgar that he could make George Carlin blush." The veteran inclined his head, ruefully peering sidelong at his companion. "I know this probably sounds like nothing. I was bullied; so what. But for a long time after," he said, his gaze drifting away, "I was ashamed of my last name. All I could hear was how ugly it sounded. It got to the point where I was begging Jodi to let me take hers.

"It's humiliating. It sounds childish, even long after, years later, every time I think about it. Heh, I think you're the first person I've actually told," Harry chuckled. "Never brought it up in therapy because there wasn't a reason to. I wasn't reminded of it. So.. hearing it, from you.. coming from a, uh.. frustrated place.. it sends me back."

Exaggerating his lofting brows and tuck of his lips, Harry added a dismissive shrug along with it. "Guess that shit's still there; who woulda thunk it."

".. so, basically..?"

"Basically, I see it as disrespectful, and I hate it. And, look," he tacked on, "I'm not trying to make this whole thing about me, but since you asked, I'm answering. Just to get that out there, make it clear. .. heh," he shook his head, "been doing a fucking lot of talkin' about myself today. Would you believe it if I said I'm getting tired of hearing my own voice?"

James switched his study from one of Harry's eyes to the other. For a good five or so minutes there, he totally forgot that Harry didn't understand what a 'short summary' was. He got, as he should've known, a piece of Harry history that he didn't ask for. (Except he did, like Harry said; just didn't want in that oversharing way.) Harry said he's 'getting tired of hearing his own voice' and he had a bosom buddy to support him on that through thick and thin. But, like a persistent, vulpine earworm replaying only the chorus of a song so hated over and over and over a thousand times more, they'd never escape a chatterbox's unstoppable stream of consciousness.

So fuck them both, then.

But in that time, James had calmed down. If it was a manipulation tactic for distracting and rehoming the missile, then damn if it didn't work. Furrowing his brow, he attested, "But you've called me 'Sunderland' all the time. So.. what's that mean? If you see it as disrespectful, are you trying to disrespect me?"

Harry grimaced. "No, no, that's not what I'm trying to say," he backpedaled. "It's different - that's a different story."

"Okay.. how?"

"It's— it's different," Harry repeated, as though that explained everything. "I know how it looks, pot versus kettle, but—"

"But when you say it, it's okay."

The patriarch held up his finger to stop him. "Just wait. It's one thing to say it to be a dick, or pretend you have some sort of authority over someone. You ever have a P.E. teacher like that?" He watched James search for an instance of it, then bob a shoulder. Harry went on. "At any rate, you've got someone calling you by your last name like that, versus someone calling you by your last name in good humor."

Tilting his head this way and that, James was personally getting bored of the subject, engaging in the bare minimum to appease. Harry took it as philosophizing, so he illustrated further. "Me fuckin' around and going, 'hey, Sunderland'!" Harry exemplified - which immediately drew the aforementioned's attention - "'C'mere', or 'hi-ho we go, Sunderland'; that's more familiar. Or, I could be a dick, and be like, 'Hey, Sunderland, get a fucking move on'. 'Seriously, Sunderland, you can be such a fucking idiot'." Harry's index finger smartly tapped the air once, ending his expert analysis. "See? There's a difference.

"Unfortunately, it just so happens that, in my case, the dick version of it hits harder."

Author watched resident. James squinted at Harry. Before he could get a word out, his ward had one last clinch.

"I also wanna point out that you never use it with me on the regular; you've only done it twice, and both times, you were really raging mad."

James flashed defensiveness. Refuting that would be counterproductive, and he wasn't interested in stirring the pot. However scowling, he took it on the chin, eyeballed the patriarch, and muttered, ".. yeah."

"So, in essence, you meant to be disrespectful, huh?"

".. yeah."

Harry simply outspread his arms; tadaaa. "See, Sunderland - you're a dick, and you know it."

Wrinkling his nose at Harry's wink and unpolished click from inside his cheek and heard through his half-grin, James shoved his hands into his pockets, and glowered. The author's own hands dropped with a clap on his thighs and crunch from the banner. "But, let's be fair, here: you could have a problem with it too, and just haven't told me. Which would be really out of character for you," he softly chuckled. "You usually tell me what's up. But it's a two way street. If you actually hate it, I'll stop."

James found the whole ordeal annoying. He wanted to move along; and he wanted more answers. The quickest way to achieve it was to entertain the older man. James shot his glance elsewhere, thinking. Harry waited as he always did - patiently - and questioned him with his eyes when James made his decision. "I don't care."

"Okay then. The fun continues." Scanning the area, he frowned a little, then twisted both ways, taking glimpses of the table behind himself. He found his treasure, and, holding the pipe aloft as Arthur did Excalibur, looked up at its hook, and gave it a hearty wiggle-wobble. "We should continue, too."

His gaze tracked James as the conduit returned to the head table and took up his gun. James stared expectantly back at him. Harry pushed off the table, shouldered the bludgeon, and tilted his head at the far opposite doors. "We'll talk about the rest of this later. C'mon. The play's over. We've got a different show to catch."