38.85 Fic: Comparing Notes
<Knock knock knock>
He stepped away from the Door. Opening it was easy, always. It was closing it again – or getting it as near as it would go – that took effort.
Rochelle looked around his head with open disdain. He guessed it was fair. If his thoughts had been disorganized before, last night had done little to change that.
He made a polite attempt to kick a few memories into another room – only for now. Absent the real thing, replaying the memory of the single most miraculously beautiful words he’d ever heard was a pleasure he was loath to give up.
Rochelle didn’t even seem to notice. She was looking warily at the gap in the door.
<Do you think it can hear us?>
He took a second to answer, as much from surprise as anything else. For all her lesser years, Rochelle had been quick to advise and chastise. He was pretty sure this was the first thing she’d asked him.
<I don’t think it matters,> he answered, careful, <I don’t think it understands conscious thought any more then it understands sound or language. But then->
A memory of rusty iron pushing his joints apart, screamingly hot, rough and grating against bone, nearly cracking his teeth with the effort of silence.
<- It doesn’t seem to care for belligerence,> he finished, focusing to disclose the text of the memory without the sensation.
Rochelle nodded, chewing her lip.
<Why?>
<Before. You said something about...> She paused, debating. Braced herself. <A way out.>
She reeled immediately, he put his real hands out to catch her on reflex but she steadied herself on the bar, waving him off.
<You good?>
<No, obviously! Obviously I’m not good. Would I be a hundred miles from home, waiting for another Imperative to blow my mind in half, missing my cat, sleeping in a skeevy inn, hanging out with a bunch of rat-catchers because the things in my head said I have to, if I was good?>
Her vitriol was fair. Stupid question. He waited until she caught her breath.
<You have a cat?>
<Sort of. He’s a mouser. Came with the house.>
He stomped down the incredulity of her having a house. ‘House’ implied some level of stability, groundedness, but not was not a synonym for ‘town,’ nor ‘community.’ Even if it was, it wasn’t so impossible. Her door still closed.
<What’s your cat’s name?>
<Yuri.>
<That’s Abenean, isn’t it?> He was a little proud of himself for inflecting a question on what he knew as a fact.
<Yeah. Means ‘farmer.’>
<Good name for a mouser.>
<He’s an idiot.>
He smiled.
She shrugged. <Do you have one?>
<No, there’s strays around the neighbourhood though. I have a dog. Well, used to.>
<It died?>
<Oh, no, not like that. I just mean she’s kind of a family pet and I don’t really live there anymore, so I don’t know that I get to call her my dog, you know?>
<What’s her name?>
<Rose.>
Rosie-posie, doce menina, Lady Rose of the Powerful Nose, Lil Rosebuddy. The diminutives followed before he could filter them.
Her smile was almost a smirk. <All pets have a legal name, and then ten real names,> she stated.
He could find no fault in this thesis.
<What are Yuri’s real names?>
<Yu-Yu, Furball, Idiot, Boneless Wonder, Bulbous Baby Boy. Carrots. He’s orange. And kind of fat.>
<You must be eager to get back to him.>
<Oh, he’ll be fine on his own. He’s a lazy asshole but he can focus when it comes to food. No shortage of mice this time of year, anyway. I just never been gone this long. I expected to be heading back by now.>
<Yeah, it’s weird it hasn’t sounded yet.>
They were silent for a moment. Exactly how much awareness the Thing(s) beyond the Door had of their movements on this side seemed inconsistent. So much as think about undoing its/their tether to this reality and screaming retribution rushed into every pore. Speak openly about hunting Wishes in pursuit of the same, and the only result was at most a mild headache that could as easily have come from skipping meals and grinding teeth.
The Imperative that sent her here was complete, or any move in the wrong direction would make itself obvious.
<The one that sent you here,> he started,
She looked up.
<-I know it’s not as if there’s specific verbiage to nitpick, at least not for me, but was it to find me for something, or just to find me?>
Rochelle frowned, introducing wrinkles into her freckled face.
<I had to find you. Make contact, not just observe or be seen. It was important – but it always is. You were necessary, or going to be. For what, I don’t know.>
He mulled it over. Made no attempt to hide his process. She’d said the Imperative needed both of them, but she didn’t know for what yet. An assumption? It was possible his participation in this particular objective was passive. If the conditions were already satisfied, if it just needed the two of them to meet, for some reason that they could only assume would later become apparent...
<I could go home.> Rochelle got there before he could verbalize it.
<It’s possible,> he admitted.
She frowned. Reluctance over the non-zero possibility the sirens would sound, demanding their cooperative capitulation?
<If you want to stick around, though, we’re here after a lead. Or, a possible one.>
<Wait, a lead on...>
<Yeah.>
Her real gaze strayed across the common room to where Cri and Saeldor were chatting at the open window, the firbolg’s pipe-smoke curling through it and into the street.
<They all know about it?> she was incredulous.
He shrugged, looking at the bar-top in reality didn’t help evade her stare in his head. <They kind of got me against a wall about it. Not literally.>
<Yeah I can tell. You’re still bad at sorting, but I got that much.> She, better at ‘sorting,’ was quiet in his head, contemplating.
<What did you tell them. Specifically.>
<Bits and pieces. They knew already I’m no sorcerer. We ran in to some cult devoted to, I don’t really know, some cousin of our mutual ‘friend.’ I owed them some explanation after what it put them through. They know I’ve got a connection in my head to something Bad. That that’s where my casting comes from, and that it’s also why I don’t sleep anymore->
Her eyebrows jumped
<-why I’m seeing and feeling things that aren’t real->
<All the time?>
<-yup. There’s been temporary stuff too, delusions, dissociation, panic, memory loss. Breaking the door ripped some big holes in storage. I’ve been trying to find a way to close it, board it over, something since then.>
<But if you hadn’t broken it-> Her real face was pale. Well, pale-er. He frowned.
<You can’t tell me it hasn’t taken anything from you.>
She hesitated, her real eyes slipped away, following the movements of her twisting hands.
<I get headaches.>
He waited.
<And... like you said, temporary stuff. When I’m not careful enough. Mostly whatever’s going on fades after a few hours, but...> She hesitated.
<I lost faces for like, a month once,> he supplied. <You may as well have asked me to identify someone by their fingernails. Never felt so lucky these weirdos all have such different voices.>
She was chewing her lip. <When you say you see things that aren’t real, are you talking about the ghosts?>
<It looks like spirits sometimes, but more often it’s viscera, shadow creatures, the Fog from the other side, that kind of thing.>
She nodded, <You don’t see the Ethereal then. I could show you, maybe. It’s useful, or used to be. I can’t... I guess I forgot how to turn it off?>
<The Ethereal.> he repeated, incredulous, <Like, Restless-Spirit-Land, the immaterial Echo?>
<The same. Like I said, it was useful. You can see through stuff if you stare hard enough, and spirits are usually stuck in their old routines, you can learn stuff watching them. But last summer...>
<You started to see it all the time.> He attempted to keep the sympathy from his voice – knew how it grated. Her wince indicated a lack of success.
<I thought it’d resolve itself but it didn’t. And now food doesn’t taste right. Or, well, it doesn’t taste at all. Started a couple weeks ago, hasn’t gone away yet.>
<Have you tried adding salt.>
She gave him a flat look. Not ready to joke about it then, noted.
<It’s not just ruining lunch, either. Makes brewing difficult. I have to like, actually measure shit. I’ve always eyeballed. What if I guess wrong and turn someone’s guts to mush or something?>
Confusion interrupted. <Wait, what are you brewing, exactly?>
<Potion,> she said, impatient, <Hamlin’s village witch, at your service. Anyway it’s kind of important I get that shit right or I’ll be out faster than you can say pitchforks-and-torches, and it’s hard to refine the recipes this far from the cauldron.>
He sat back in his real seat. It explained some stuff. The party spent enough time in the wilderness to have visited hamlets whose magical expert was a wise elder, self-taught sorcerer, or witch, too far removed from universities and libraries to support the academic or bibliographic hunger of a wizard.
The relationship between these shamans and their communities always felt tenuous; mutual necessity strung on threads of competence. A village witch could be as standoffish and rude as she liked, provided she remained the only one who could teach a new mother how to calm a bad case of colic, read the meaning in dreams, heal a blight, or lift a curse. But she was right, that trust was as unbalanced as it was fragile.
<So what’s this lead, anyway?> Her voice was brusque.
<It’s a weak one,> he admitted, <There’s some kind of concentration of chaos magic that’s fundamentally altered the state of a manor-house outside town. Used to be in the care of a wizard.>
<And chaos magic is an antidote because...?> Her expression was as incredulous as her tone. Fair enough; he’d hardly call the phenomena on the other side of the Door lawful.
<Because Wish is chaotic magic.>
She sobered, regarding him carefully.
<Arcane magic.>
<Debatable, but even if it’s true, there’s supposed to be artifacts that make it accessible. I did say it’s a weak lead; the odds we go in and find a scroll of Wish and a bunch of arcane horrors are low, but not zero. The odds we find some decent reading on chaotic magic that turns up some leads on an actual Wish are slightly better. Also it’s a paycheque. Either way, worth a look.>
<And if you find some bandits squatting, throwing up illusions to ward off the reeve? Or some kids playing pranks?>
<Then we oust them, I apologize for wasting people’s time, and we keep looking.>
<That sounds exhausting.>
He gave a conceding shrug, but couldn’t stop the smile.
<Some things are worth getting exhausted over.>
Movement on the stairs, a descending glow of sunset and sparkling twilight, drew his eye over her shoulder, and his heart stopped working right. It was too warm, burning with memory, tight from strain. He shooed Rochelle and her rolling eyes toward the Door with little resistance as the sunrise flooded him. But there lingered a weight on his chest.
In the clear light of day, rested, with time to consider...
“Morning,” he offered, probably not loud enough for the distance.
“Mn.”
Her pre-coffee eloquence made him smile against the pressure.
It felt like too long a sequence to have been hallucination; too much, too complete, too consistent, too removed from the horrors that usually slithered through the door to taunt his senses, but somehow that still felt just as likely as the alternative, if not more so.
After all, what crueller joke?
She was slowing her stride, coming to a stop in front of him. He hadn’t noticed himself swivelling to follow. Her face was determined, but not unkind. He hardly dared to breathe.
Her winds were cool as she leaned in, her kiss was swift on the corner of his mouth, her fingers warm against his cheek, brushing across his scarred stubble. Her gaze was steady and smiling as she regarded his wonderment from inches away.
“Still real.”
Eventually the jubilant chaos overwhelming the space where his words should have been might resolve into something expressible. But for the moment he only stared after her as she continued on her course for caffeine.
How did you know? How are you everything and exactly what I need? Obliterating my doubts with a touch and a word. Your love makes my head spin. Beautiful, powerful, kind and insightful and...
Real.
No more beautiful word in the Common tongue or any other.
He stepped away from the Door. Opening it was easy, always. It was closing it again – or getting it as near as it would go – that took effort.
Rochelle looked around his head with open disdain. He guessed it was fair. If his thoughts had been disorganized before, last night had done little to change that.
He made a polite attempt to kick a few memories into another room – only for now. Absent the real thing, replaying the memory of the single most miraculously beautiful words he’d ever heard was a pleasure he was loath to give up.
Rochelle didn’t even seem to notice. She was looking warily at the gap in the door.
<Do you think it can hear us?>
He took a second to answer, as much from surprise as anything else. For all her lesser years, Rochelle had been quick to advise and chastise. He was pretty sure this was the first thing she’d asked him.
<I don’t think it matters,> he answered, careful, <I don’t think it understands conscious thought any more then it understands sound or language. But then->
A memory of rusty iron pushing his joints apart, screamingly hot, rough and grating against bone, nearly cracking his teeth with the effort of silence.
<- It doesn’t seem to care for belligerence,> he finished, focusing to disclose the text of the memory without the sensation.
Rochelle nodded, chewing her lip.
<Why?>
<Before. You said something about...> She paused, debating. Braced herself. <A way out.>
She reeled immediately, he put his real hands out to catch her on reflex but she steadied herself on the bar, waving him off.
<You good?>
<No, obviously! Obviously I’m not good. Would I be a hundred miles from home, waiting for another Imperative to blow my mind in half, missing my cat, sleeping in a skeevy inn, hanging out with a bunch of rat-catchers because the things in my head said I have to, if I was good?>
Her vitriol was fair. Stupid question. He waited until she caught her breath.
<You have a cat?>
<Sort of. He’s a mouser. Came with the house.>
He stomped down the incredulity of her having a house. ‘House’ implied some level of stability, groundedness, but not was not a synonym for ‘town,’ nor ‘community.’ Even if it was, it wasn’t so impossible. Her door still closed.
<What’s your cat’s name?>
<Yuri.>
<That’s Abenean, isn’t it?> He was a little proud of himself for inflecting a question on what he knew as a fact.
<Yeah. Means ‘farmer.’>
<Good name for a mouser.>
<He’s an idiot.>
He smiled.
She shrugged. <Do you have one?>
<No, there’s strays around the neighbourhood though. I have a dog. Well, used to.>
<It died?>
<Oh, no, not like that. I just mean she’s kind of a family pet and I don’t really live there anymore, so I don’t know that I get to call her my dog, you know?>
<What’s her name?>
<Rose.>
Rosie-posie, doce menina, Lady Rose of the Powerful Nose, Lil Rosebuddy. The diminutives followed before he could filter them.
Her smile was almost a smirk. <All pets have a legal name, and then ten real names,> she stated.
He could find no fault in this thesis.
<What are Yuri’s real names?>
<Yu-Yu, Furball, Idiot, Boneless Wonder, Bulbous Baby Boy. Carrots. He’s orange. And kind of fat.>
<You must be eager to get back to him.>
<Oh, he’ll be fine on his own. He’s a lazy asshole but he can focus when it comes to food. No shortage of mice this time of year, anyway. I just never been gone this long. I expected to be heading back by now.>
<Yeah, it’s weird it hasn’t sounded yet.>
They were silent for a moment. Exactly how much awareness the Thing(s) beyond the Door had of their movements on this side seemed inconsistent. So much as think about undoing its/their tether to this reality and screaming retribution rushed into every pore. Speak openly about hunting Wishes in pursuit of the same, and the only result was at most a mild headache that could as easily have come from skipping meals and grinding teeth.
The Imperative that sent her here was complete, or any move in the wrong direction would make itself obvious.
<The one that sent you here,> he started,
She looked up.
<-I know it’s not as if there’s specific verbiage to nitpick, at least not for me, but was it to find me for something, or just to find me?>
Rochelle frowned, introducing wrinkles into her freckled face.
<I had to find you. Make contact, not just observe or be seen. It was important – but it always is. You were necessary, or going to be. For what, I don’t know.>
He mulled it over. Made no attempt to hide his process. She’d said the Imperative needed both of them, but she didn’t know for what yet. An assumption? It was possible his participation in this particular objective was passive. If the conditions were already satisfied, if it just needed the two of them to meet, for some reason that they could only assume would later become apparent...
<I could go home.> Rochelle got there before he could verbalize it.
<It’s possible,> he admitted.
She frowned. Reluctance over the non-zero possibility the sirens would sound, demanding their cooperative capitulation?
<If you want to stick around, though, we’re here after a lead. Or, a possible one.>
<Wait, a lead on...>
<Yeah.>
Her real gaze strayed across the common room to where Cri and Saeldor were chatting at the open window, the firbolg’s pipe-smoke curling through it and into the street.
<They all know about it?> she was incredulous.
He shrugged, looking at the bar-top in reality didn’t help evade her stare in his head. <They kind of got me against a wall about it. Not literally.>
<Yeah I can tell. You’re still bad at sorting, but I got that much.> She, better at ‘sorting,’ was quiet in his head, contemplating.
<What did you tell them. Specifically.>
<Bits and pieces. They knew already I’m no sorcerer. We ran in to some cult devoted to, I don’t really know, some cousin of our mutual ‘friend.’ I owed them some explanation after what it put them through. They know I’ve got a connection in my head to something Bad. That that’s where my casting comes from, and that it’s also why I don’t sleep anymore->
Her eyebrows jumped
<-why I’m seeing and feeling things that aren’t real->
<All the time?>
<-yup. There’s been temporary stuff too, delusions, dissociation, panic, memory loss. Breaking the door ripped some big holes in storage. I’ve been trying to find a way to close it, board it over, something since then.>
<But if you hadn’t broken it-> Her real face was pale. Well, pale-er. He frowned.
<You can’t tell me it hasn’t taken anything from you.>
She hesitated, her real eyes slipped away, following the movements of her twisting hands.
<I get headaches.>
He waited.
<And... like you said, temporary stuff. When I’m not careful enough. Mostly whatever’s going on fades after a few hours, but...> She hesitated.
<I lost faces for like, a month once,> he supplied. <You may as well have asked me to identify someone by their fingernails. Never felt so lucky these weirdos all have such different voices.>
She was chewing her lip. <When you say you see things that aren’t real, are you talking about the ghosts?>
<It looks like spirits sometimes, but more often it’s viscera, shadow creatures, the Fog from the other side, that kind of thing.>
She nodded, <You don’t see the Ethereal then. I could show you, maybe. It’s useful, or used to be. I can’t... I guess I forgot how to turn it off?>
<The Ethereal.> he repeated, incredulous, <Like, Restless-Spirit-Land, the immaterial Echo?>
<The same. Like I said, it was useful. You can see through stuff if you stare hard enough, and spirits are usually stuck in their old routines, you can learn stuff watching them. But last summer...>
<You started to see it all the time.> He attempted to keep the sympathy from his voice – knew how it grated. Her wince indicated a lack of success.
<I thought it’d resolve itself but it didn’t. And now food doesn’t taste right. Or, well, it doesn’t taste at all. Started a couple weeks ago, hasn’t gone away yet.>
<Have you tried adding salt.>
She gave him a flat look. Not ready to joke about it then, noted.
<It’s not just ruining lunch, either. Makes brewing difficult. I have to like, actually measure shit. I’ve always eyeballed. What if I guess wrong and turn someone’s guts to mush or something?>
Confusion interrupted. <Wait, what are you brewing, exactly?>
<Potion,> she said, impatient, <Hamlin’s village witch, at your service. Anyway it’s kind of important I get that shit right or I’ll be out faster than you can say pitchforks-and-torches, and it’s hard to refine the recipes this far from the cauldron.>
He sat back in his real seat. It explained some stuff. The party spent enough time in the wilderness to have visited hamlets whose magical expert was a wise elder, self-taught sorcerer, or witch, too far removed from universities and libraries to support the academic or bibliographic hunger of a wizard.
The relationship between these shamans and their communities always felt tenuous; mutual necessity strung on threads of competence. A village witch could be as standoffish and rude as she liked, provided she remained the only one who could teach a new mother how to calm a bad case of colic, read the meaning in dreams, heal a blight, or lift a curse. But she was right, that trust was as unbalanced as it was fragile.
<So what’s this lead, anyway?> Her voice was brusque.
<It’s a weak one,> he admitted, <There’s some kind of concentration of chaos magic that’s fundamentally altered the state of a manor-house outside town. Used to be in the care of a wizard.>
<And chaos magic is an antidote because...?> Her expression was as incredulous as her tone. Fair enough; he’d hardly call the phenomena on the other side of the Door lawful.
<Because Wish is chaotic magic.>
She sobered, regarding him carefully.
<Arcane magic.>
<Debatable, but even if it’s true, there’s supposed to be artifacts that make it accessible. I did say it’s a weak lead; the odds we go in and find a scroll of Wish and a bunch of arcane horrors are low, but not zero. The odds we find some decent reading on chaotic magic that turns up some leads on an actual Wish are slightly better. Also it’s a paycheque. Either way, worth a look.>
<And if you find some bandits squatting, throwing up illusions to ward off the reeve? Or some kids playing pranks?>
<Then we oust them, I apologize for wasting people’s time, and we keep looking.>
<That sounds exhausting.>
He gave a conceding shrug, but couldn’t stop the smile.
<Some things are worth getting exhausted over.>
Movement on the stairs, a descending glow of sunset and sparkling twilight, drew his eye over her shoulder, and his heart stopped working right. It was too warm, burning with memory, tight from strain. He shooed Rochelle and her rolling eyes toward the Door with little resistance as the sunrise flooded him. But there lingered a weight on his chest.
In the clear light of day, rested, with time to consider...
“Morning,” he offered, probably not loud enough for the distance.
“Mn.”
Her pre-coffee eloquence made him smile against the pressure.
It felt like too long a sequence to have been hallucination; too much, too complete, too consistent, too removed from the horrors that usually slithered through the door to taunt his senses, but somehow that still felt just as likely as the alternative, if not more so.
After all, what crueller joke?
She was slowing her stride, coming to a stop in front of him. He hadn’t noticed himself swivelling to follow. Her face was determined, but not unkind. He hardly dared to breathe.
Her winds were cool as she leaned in, her kiss was swift on the corner of his mouth, her fingers warm against his cheek, brushing across his scarred stubble. Her gaze was steady and smiling as she regarded his wonderment from inches away.
“Still real.”
Eventually the jubilant chaos overwhelming the space where his words should have been might resolve into something expressible. But for the moment he only stared after her as she continued on her course for caffeine.
How did you know? How are you everything and exactly what I need? Obliterating my doubts with a touch and a word. Your love makes my head spin. Beautiful, powerful, kind and insightful and...
Real.
No more beautiful word in the Common tongue or any other.