Sometimes, people tell me random things and then stories happen. Like that time a friend told me to write a Doctor Who stapler monster. Stuff like that
( Read more... )
Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 1bendingsignpostJuly 25 2011, 03:01:47 UTC
“Do you enjoy doing that?” she asks him one day, cheek by his knee, watching him type. He’s not very comfortable, as far as pillows go, but neither of them have complained about it so far. “The translating, I mean.”
“I like the emails best,” he says. “The little fiddly bits where we hammer out the wording. Denotation versus connotation, emphasis, all that.”
Lying on her stomach, arms folded up against his thigh, she tries to read German and fails. He fires off that email, and then she tries to read Spanish and doesn’t fail quite so badly. She twists a bit, looks up at a pale face lit by computer light. His slight smile means he knows, but he doesn’t answer her gaze. Instead, he shifts his arm, puts his elbow over her eyes.
“Hey!”
“Rose, I’m trying to work.”
“So you like your job,” she says, rolling onto her back, sprawling with her head on his thigh. He’s hunched and crosslegged, straightening only once every so often.
“Love my job,” he says, frowning slightly. He leans forward, leans down, elbow adjusting around her head as he types. “That’s wrong,” he mutters.
She watches him at it and then she just closes her eyes, listening to the keyboard and the multitude of whispered words he can’t quite hold in.
“You’re going to be late for yours,” he prompts.
“I hate my job,” she says. “I know there are worse,” she adds hurriedly. “Much worse. But it’s just.... I don’t want that to be the rest of my life, y’know?”
Brown eyes flick down to her face.
“You do know,” she apologizes. “Sorry.” She turns her head, looks at the laptop. “You know it a lot better than I do, I’m just talking rubbish.”
He pets her hair, almost an absent touch. “Nothing wrong with wanting more,” he says.
“Tell that to my mum.”
“No thank you.”
They chuckle a little, but it’s weak.
He types on and says, “You could do anything, Rose.”
Anyone else and she’d laugh. Anyone else, she’d call mental. Except no one else has ever said that.
“The job in the shop’s the best I got,” she says.
“Why?”
She goes quiet. Shrugs, her shoulders up against his leg. “Dropped out of school,” she admits. “Go mental trying to go back in and finish.”
He types on.
“Even if I did, then what?”
“Well, what do you want?” he asks.
“What?”
“If you could do anything,” he says, “what would it be?”
She thinks about it.
Three minutes later, he reminds her, “Rose, your shift.”
“Right, yeah.”
She gets up, hugging him around the shoulders as she does.
“Bye.”
“See you.”
She locks him in and walks away, still wondering.
“If you could do anything, what would you do?” she asks Mickey.
“Anything like what?” he asks. “Ultimate vacation? Bucket list?”
“Job,” she says.
“A hacker,” he answers, not stopping to think. “Like in the movies, the man in the van, that’d be me.”
“No, seriously.”
“Seriously,” he insists. His grin is wide and excited. “It’d be so cool. Except that doesn’t work in the real world, so I guess I’d be the one catching hackers and stuff. Oh- oh! I’d test firewalls. Next best thing to professional videogame tester.”
She realizes she’s grinning along.
She realizes she’d never known any of that.
It perks her up a bit and she slips her hand into his as they walk. “How would you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Become a firewall tester.”
Mickey laughs. “Rose, that’s not actually going to happen.”
And she realizes she’d seen that coming a mile off.
“Yeah, but it’s fun to pretend,” she says. What she means is, it hurts not to.
Mickey laughs again, not meanly or anything. Like she’s done something cute and he likes her for it. She used to love that laugh. It's still nice, really. “I guess? Don’t really spend much time thinking about it.”
“So you like your job?”
He shrugs. “It’s all right.”
Over the next three weeks, Rose keeps track.
Mickey has two funny stories from work, one vaguely interesting anecdote, and about thirty complaints.
In that time, she comes home to find Freckles practically vibrating with the need to tell her something he absolutely believes is amazing every single dawn.
Re: Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 1wendymrJuly 25 2011, 03:19:30 UTC
I'm finding this a quite fascinating AU, and I have no idea where it's going. Keep it up! :)
I do have to say, though, that Rose (if you're following canon in this respect, anyway), is not a 'drop-out'. She left school with GCSEs. which is officially the school-leaving qualification, though kids can leave school in the April after their 16th birthday whether or not they've taken state exams. A-levels, generally taken at 18, are not mandatory - and in fact they're not even a suitable qualification for many young people. They're academically-oriented, designed mostly for people who intend to go to university.
Many kids leave school with GCSEs and at that point they get a job, or they go to further education college for vocational training (apprenticeships or other qualifications). Personally, I wish more young people in the UK would stay in full-time education of any type past sixteen, but the education system as it is allows for people to leave at 16 and do whatever they want. 'High school drop-out' is very much US terminology and a US concept.
While I'm here, I have vaguely worked out, through hearing it mentioned in commercials, what a 'bucket list' is, but it's not an expression I had ever heard in the UK, so I doubt Mickey would know it. The best equivalent I can think of is probably 'wish list'.
Re: Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 1bendingsignpostJuly 25 2011, 03:31:07 UTC
*headdesk* Evidently a year of study abroad was not enough to teach me that. I'm still crazy confused at the British educational system, which was not a fun feeling to have while in it.
Consider the wish list bit deleted and the above exchange edited to:
“The job in the shop’s the best I got,” she says.
“Why?”
She goes quiet. Shrugs, her shoulders up against his leg. “Not qualified for much else.”
Re: Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 1wendymrJuly 25 2011, 04:29:02 UTC
That works :)
And, believe me, the English (not British, as the Scottish system is entirely different again) education system does take some understanding. It took me years, after I moved to England to work in the university system to get my head around it!
Re: Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 2bendingsignpostJuly 25 2011, 04:07:45 UTC
“Thinking about maybe going back to school,” she tells Shareen one day.
Shareen blinks at her, but unlike Keesha, she doesn’t immediately start taking the piss out of the idea. “What for?”
Rose shrugs. “Just want to, I guess.”
Shareen thinks about that.
“Want to come with?” she asks.
Shareen thinks about that a great deal less. “Not really,” she admits. “But good luck.”
“...absolutely brilliant,” Freckles gushes. “I’ve been translating him from English into German and Russian and he’s just....” He makes a noise that Rose has never heard out of him before and immediately wants to hear again. “I want to be like that someday.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Everything he writes is so methodical,” he says. “He lays out the history and the social context, all that, and by the time he works back up to the present, you can see more than how it happened. You can see why. Everything that tipped the scales here or there. Some of it’s more or less fixed: that tornado was always going to happen, that drought couldn’t be stopped, the Turning, things like that. But some of it, the politics of the time, the policies, you can see it, you can actually see it where something picked up history and ran away with it.
“Mind you,” he adds, “it’s all very subjective and he’s well-known for being a bit of a liberal nut. But I like him.”
“Read it to me?” she asks, hopeful.
He does.
“What do you want to go and do that for?” Jackie demands.
“Mum.”
“I’m worried about you,” Jackie continues, sitting down at the table with her. “You’ve been off ever since I bought that one.” This is how Freckles is officially referred to in the Tyler household. Rose hates it. “Think it might be messing you up inside.”
She rolls her eyes.
“It’s not normal, the way you spend time with it.”
“I don’t want to have this fight again.” If it were at all feasible, she’d pick up the textbook from the table and make a wall out of it.
Jackie sits there, silent. Judgemental.
Rose sighs. “I’ll go see a doctor, okay? If there’s anything wrong, anything actually wrong, we can sell him back.”
She’s not sure how she would have faked the results, so it’s a lucky thing when she doesn’t have to.
“What about that programme?” she asks. It’s a nice day, a slow one that feels almost secret with Jackie out at Howard’s. They’re staying up past the long hours and into the short ones, watching crap telly and adverts. His shoulder is a much better pillow than his knee, bony though it is beneath her dad’s old t-shirt.
“Which one what?”
“That thing you’re saving up for.”
“Oh,” he says. He plays with her fingers a bit, like he thinks that’ll actually distract her.
It does, for a bit, but that’s not important.
“No really,” she says. “What is it? It’s not a game, you don’t need games.” He’s too smart for them.
He gives her a wary look, this sideways slanting look, and she moves her mouth away from his neck a bit. He smiles then and tugs her back. She giggles against his skin.
“Tell me?”
“It’s a secret,” he whispers.
“Even from me?”
“Who else do I talk to?” he asks. “Of course from you.”
“What about that professor friend of yours?” she asks. “Your mancrush.”
Re: Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 2.1bendingsignpostJuly 25 2011, 04:09:37 UTC
“He is not my mancrush,” he huffs, shoving her off, straight into more giggles.
“So gay,” she proclaims. “You want to have his brain babies.”
“Yes, Rose,” he says. “That’s the secret. I have brain babies.”
“I knew it.” She settles back against him. “Name one after me?”
“Of course.” His hand comes up, palm settling between her shoulder blades.
After a while, dozing off, waking up, watching one another sleeping and waking, she says, “I have a secret too.”
“Bet you’ve got dozens.”
“I’ll tell you this one.”
“Then it won’t be a secret,” he says.
“Will be if you don’t tell anyone.” A lie with him the fourth to know.
“I can’t keep anything from the father of my brain babies, Rose. That is a terrible foundation for a relationship. Think of the children.”
She pretends to. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll tell you anyway.”
“Mmhm?”
It takes her some time, takes her more than one try to say it. Jackie’s annoyed and Mickey laughed and not even Shareen has stood up for her. It’s not so stupid of an idea. It’s not so impossible of a thing.
“Promise you won’t laugh,” she tells him.
“I will never promise that,” he answers.
She rolls her eyes and he squeezes her hand.
“I’m studying for my A Levels,” she says.
He blinks at her.
He smiles like something, like some burst of light she can’t quite name, and she’s smiling back so hard she thinks she might cry.
“Oh, Rose,” he says. “That was my secret too!”
His secret is a bit more complicated than that. It involves a fabricated online identity, really vague details, and a rather crazy plan of revising for sociology, psychology and literature A Levels online. They're the ones he'd found the courses for. He hasn’t quite worked out how he’s going to sit for exams.
“Fake id?” he offers weakly.
“I think this is going to be a bit harder than a fake driver’s license,” she says. “There’s got to be records and all that. Schooling, your GCSEs. A birth certificate.”
“Um,” he says. “I was homeschooled?”
She sort of looks at him at that.
His gaze drops and he crumples. He doesn’t move, doesn’t twitch or fold or bend, but he crumples all the same, disappearing into himself until she catches his hand.
Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 3bendingsignpostAugust 6 2011, 04:23:54 UTC
“If you keep scratching, it’s going to fall out.”
He stops. Considers.
Keeps right on scratching the beard.
“Hair doesn’t work that way,” he tells her.
“Okay, just.... Be patient, yeah?”
A flash of white teeth through brown fuzz. “Oh, I know how to wait, Rose. Don’t you worry about me.”
“Wish October would get here already,” she says, says it yet again.
“Rose the uni student,” he muses. “You’ll be brilliant.”
“I’ll be a mess.”
He gives her a pointed look, then scratches at his beard.
She laughs. Reaching out, she scratches it for him, both hands along his cheeks and chin.
His fingers fall from his face, hold her elbow. Eyes happily shut, he hums.
“We’ll be messes together,” they say in unison, then laugh.
“But really,” Mickey says.
“No,” she says. “I’ll visit, all right?”
“What’s wrong with a school in London?” He’s accepted it’s happening, they’ve that much at least.
“What’s wrong with wanting to go somewhere else?” she asks.
“Yeah, but... Cardiff.”
“It’s a good business programme.”
“But, Rose. Cardiff.”
Yes. Cardiff. A nice train ride away, where nobody knows her.
“Change of pace,” she says and shrugs. “Look, are you going to support me on this or not?”
When she realizes she was hoping for the “or not”, she realizes she has a problem.
Lots of couples break up when one goes away to uni, right?
In the weeks that follow, she knows Mickey knows and she also knows they have one of those mad loops of knowing going on. It all means they’re very well informed but still not technically on the same page, and it’s driving her mental.
It’s just hard to bring up, difficult to start. She loves him, she really did, and now there’s the plan and she’s going away and she needs a clean break for this to work. Except she can’t say any of that.
She finagles it with her mum, works out the details for expenses. She has to live in a dorm, first year, but that’s not so bad. She’s applied for funding and scholarships and a great deal of things that Freckles worked out on his own. She’s pretty sure he applied for them on his own, too, because she doesn’t remember writing any of those scholarship essays. Might be an issue, that, later.
The real issue, when it comes down to it, is convincing her mother about the kennel fee. More specifically, the insurance.
“Look, we won’t say he’s a weird one,” she protests. “I just want to make sure that if anything happens to him, I don’t starve for the rest of the year. I’ve heard stories about the Flesh up in Wales, we all have.”
“Mm, yes, but....”
“Think of it this way, it’s still cheaper than selling him and me going back to frozen.”
“Be even cheaper without the insurance.”
“Mum.”
“Oh, all right.”
Perfect.
Moving day approaches and she packs everything up, all of his things and most of hers.
Edgy about it, he returns his clothing, storing it in the safety of her suitcase. With obvious reluctance, he puts back on the smock Jackie had bought him in. It’s ill-fitting and ridiculous. It’s absolutely horrible: he sticks out like a sore thumb. He looks like someone dressed up as Flesh for Halloween. They’re going to think he’s a joke, she’ll have to convince people, and then they’ll never forget his face, beard or no.
And then he shuffles, pulls in on himself, shoulders hunching, eyes flicking to the ground. Livestock once more.
Her stomach heaves and she rushes to him, shoves at his shoulders and catches his face. “Stop it. Stop it.”
He looks at her with confused eyes, brown and bright. “Stop what?”
“You’re not- You’re not that. You-”
“Not what?” he demands. “Not Flesh? Of course I’m Flesh, what did you think all the bloodletting was about?” He gestures at his own neck, the soft, marked skin.
“You’re not stupid,” she says. “You can’t stand there and go all small and-”
“Yes I can,” he interrupts. Says it firmly. “I can play the part as well as any. I have to.”
She knows that.
Takes a breath, lets it go.
Her convictions, her qualms: not so easily released.
“Just playing,” she says.
“Just playing,” he confirms.
They play a lot, the two of them. He plays a part, she plays a part. They play at this and that.
Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 4rallalonOctober 3 2011, 21:26:18 UTC
The first few days are chaos.
Getting Freckles sorted turns out to be the easiest of it. There are modules to sign up for and flatmates to meet and a campus to learn and a city to learn on top of the campus. If she didn't need to eat, she'd never see him.
That he hates the kennel is obvious. It's obvious because anyone with a brain or a heart or a soul should hate the kennel and every time Rose goes back there, she's hit by it all over again, the way no one notices.
At first, she thought it was the Flesh who were unnerving her. They're nothing like Freckles, nothing at all. The docile ones have their pens together and it's a common sight to see them slumped in piles. They lie around like stray cats but look like people: of course it's disturbing.
But then she starts paying attention.
The floors are hard. The air is cool. The Flesh are drained.
They're not foul and pathetic.
They're abused.
She begins to smuggle things in when she comes, little things at first, then larger things. For all Freckles is among his own kind, he clearly isn't. She's gained three pounds since uni began in the attempt to put him in a hazy state even vaguely like those of his penmates, but nothing's working. He's bored and can't sit still and it's worse than it ever was back in the flat. He's surrounded by Flesh and so terribly lonely.
Whenever she arrives, he stands. He stands and he comes to her, even if this involves shaking free of his sleeping penmates.
When she bites him, she takes her time about it and he talks all the while. He's light and clever, astonishing as always, and there's no sign of him going mad save for the fact that he must be. She couldn't stand this.
"Two more months," she reminds him every time. "Winter break." She's already looking into apartments.
"What are you getting me for Christmas?" he usually asks.
Or, a month away, "How's revision going?" or "Are my emails piling up?"
Or, a week away, in a tiny, controlled whisper: "Rose, they tried to drug me."
Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 5rallalonOctober 3 2011, 21:26:52 UTC
From the beginning, there has been the issue of group feeding.
From the beginning, there has been the issue of Lady Cassandra.
Cassandra is a bitch. Rose has thought long and hard about this and her conclusion is this. Cassandra is a bitch. Then, now, and always. Rich, spoiled, spent her two gap years traveling the world, and has a pair of Flesh in the same pen as Freckles. Chip and Dale are from the same batch and Cassandra likes to pretend she can tell them apart.
Cassandra also likes to feed with her friends. Once and only once, Rose tried to stick around for the social occasion. Not because she likes any of Cassandra's friends, or even knows them. They all look at Rose with "chav" written in their eyes. Even so, being social with other people is a reason to remain among the Flesh. It's the excuse she needs to sit with Freckles with her hand on his back, or combing her fingers through his hair or holding his hand with care so that no one else can see.
She remained the odd one out, which would have been fine if it hadn't made Freckles look odd as well. He's smarter than all of them combined and when Rose is with him, he lets it show on his face.
She still doesn't know what to think about that, that he wears his dignity best when she's there to see it. It scares her, the thought that someone else might catch a glimpse.
So the attempts at social feeding stop. If not for limiting her time with Freckles back to the beginning, she wouldn't regret the lack at all. Watching the other Flesh submit - some afraid, some oblivious, some fawning - it all turns her stomach.
"How did the world get like this?" she asks Freckles once while they're alone, as "alone" as they can be in his pen, surrounded by blank-faced Flesh. It's a week before the attempted drugging, two weeks before it's time to sink or swim.
"Is that rhetorical?"
"Nope."
"Check my emails," he tells her.
"Already done. You've had nothing new for-"
"No," he corrects. "The essays and articles I translated over the summer, those."
"From Professor Mancrush?"
Freckles rolls his eyes. "Professor Yana, Rose."
"I know," she says. "I'll read them."
"Will you?"
She nods.
He smiles. It's a sight she hasn't seen in ages.
She presses their foreheads together, running her fingertips through his beard. She can feel him smile wider.
"Everyone's looking," he warns, warm and chiding.
"Get used to it," she warns right back.
They grin into each other's faces, so very close and still so very far.
Re: Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 5mylittlepwnyOctober 4 2011, 00:27:13 UTC
There are...no words for how hard and fast my heart beat throughout all of this. Just.
The Kennels. God. God. And Rose, and group feeding, and Cassandra ugh and he is in there all alone THEY'RE GOING TO TRY AND DRUG THEM WHEN ARE THEY MOVING OUT WHEN OH GOD.
He smiles. It's a sight she hasn't seen in ages.
She presses their foreheads together, running her fingertips through his beard. She can feel him smile wider.
"Everyone's looking," he warns, warm and chiding.
"Get used to it," she warns right back.
They grin into each other's faces, so very close and still so very far.
And somehow, this was the worst. Because it's them, Freckles and Rose, and this moment should not be happening where it's happening, it should be happening on some hill looking over Cardiff at sunset.
Re: Evidently Deviltown, Arc2, Part 5rallalonOctober 4 2011, 02:08:20 UTC
And somehow, this was the worst. Because it's them, Freckles and Rose, and this moment should not be happening where it's happening, it should be happening on some hill looking over Cardiff at sunset.
Rather why this entire section had to be written in summary. Not as bad as the Ood pens, but still bad.
“I like the emails best,” he says. “The little fiddly bits where we hammer out the wording. Denotation versus connotation, emphasis, all that.”
Lying on her stomach, arms folded up against his thigh, she tries to read German and fails. He fires off that email, and then she tries to read Spanish and doesn’t fail quite so badly. She twists a bit, looks up at a pale face lit by computer light. His slight smile means he knows, but he doesn’t answer her gaze. Instead, he shifts his arm, puts his elbow over her eyes.
“Hey!”
“Rose, I’m trying to work.”
“So you like your job,” she says, rolling onto her back, sprawling with her head on his thigh. He’s hunched and crosslegged, straightening only once every so often.
“Love my job,” he says, frowning slightly. He leans forward, leans down, elbow adjusting around her head as he types. “That’s wrong,” he mutters.
She watches him at it and then she just closes her eyes, listening to the keyboard and the multitude of whispered words he can’t quite hold in.
“You’re going to be late for yours,” he prompts.
“I hate my job,” she says. “I know there are worse,” she adds hurriedly. “Much worse. But it’s just.... I don’t want that to be the rest of my life, y’know?”
Brown eyes flick down to her face.
“You do know,” she apologizes. “Sorry.” She turns her head, looks at the laptop. “You know it a lot better than I do, I’m just talking rubbish.”
He pets her hair, almost an absent touch. “Nothing wrong with wanting more,” he says.
“Tell that to my mum.”
“No thank you.”
They chuckle a little, but it’s weak.
He types on and says, “You could do anything, Rose.”
Anyone else and she’d laugh. Anyone else, she’d call mental. Except no one else has ever said that.
“The job in the shop’s the best I got,” she says.
“Why?”
She goes quiet. Shrugs, her shoulders up against his leg. “Dropped out of school,” she admits. “Go mental trying to go back in and finish.”
He types on.
“Even if I did, then what?”
“Well, what do you want?” he asks.
“What?”
“If you could do anything,” he says, “what would it be?”
She thinks about it.
Three minutes later, he reminds her, “Rose, your shift.”
“Right, yeah.”
She gets up, hugging him around the shoulders as she does.
“Bye.”
“See you.”
She locks him in and walks away, still wondering.
“If you could do anything, what would you do?” she asks Mickey.
“Anything like what?” he asks. “Ultimate vacation? Bucket list?”
“Job,” she says.
“A hacker,” he answers, not stopping to think. “Like in the movies, the man in the van, that’d be me.”
“No, seriously.”
“Seriously,” he insists. His grin is wide and excited. “It’d be so cool. Except that doesn’t work in the real world, so I guess I’d be the one catching hackers and stuff. Oh- oh! I’d test firewalls. Next best thing to professional videogame tester.”
She realizes she’s grinning along.
She realizes she’d never known any of that.
It perks her up a bit and she slips her hand into his as they walk. “How would you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Become a firewall tester.”
Mickey laughs. “Rose, that’s not actually going to happen.”
And she realizes she’d seen that coming a mile off.
“Yeah, but it’s fun to pretend,” she says. What she means is, it hurts not to.
Mickey laughs again, not meanly or anything. Like she’s done something cute and he likes her for it. She used to love that laugh. It's still nice, really. “I guess? Don’t really spend much time thinking about it.”
“So you like your job?”
He shrugs. “It’s all right.”
Over the next three weeks, Rose keeps track.
Mickey has two funny stories from work, one vaguely interesting anecdote, and about thirty complaints.
In that time, she comes home to find Freckles practically vibrating with the need to tell her something he absolutely believes is amazing every single dawn.
Reply
I do have to say, though, that Rose (if you're following canon in this respect, anyway), is not a 'drop-out'. She left school with GCSEs. which is officially the school-leaving qualification, though kids can leave school in the April after their 16th birthday whether or not they've taken state exams. A-levels, generally taken at 18, are not mandatory - and in fact they're not even a suitable qualification for many young people. They're academically-oriented, designed mostly for people who intend to go to university.
Many kids leave school with GCSEs and at that point they get a job, or they go to further education college for vocational training (apprenticeships or other qualifications). Personally, I wish more young people in the UK would stay in full-time education of any type past sixteen, but the education system as it is allows for people to leave at 16 and do whatever they want. 'High school drop-out' is very much US terminology and a US concept.
While I'm here, I have vaguely worked out, through hearing it mentioned in commercials, what a 'bucket list' is, but it's not an expression I had ever heard in the UK, so I doubt Mickey would know it. The best equivalent I can think of is probably 'wish list'.
Reply
Consider the wish list bit deleted and the above exchange edited to:
“The job in the shop’s the best I got,” she says.
“Why?”
She goes quiet. Shrugs, her shoulders up against his leg. “Not qualified for much else.”
He types on.
“Was there something you were getting at?”
“Well, what do you want?” he asks.
“What?”
Reply
And, believe me, the English (not British, as the Scottish system is entirely different again) education system does take some understanding. It took me years, after I moved to England to work in the university system to get my head around it!
Reply
Shareen blinks at her, but unlike Keesha, she doesn’t immediately start taking the piss out of the idea. “What for?”
Rose shrugs. “Just want to, I guess.”
Shareen thinks about that.
“Want to come with?” she asks.
Shareen thinks about that a great deal less. “Not really,” she admits. “But good luck.”
“...absolutely brilliant,” Freckles gushes. “I’ve been translating him from English into German and Russian and he’s just....” He makes a noise that Rose has never heard out of him before and immediately wants to hear again. “I want to be like that someday.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Everything he writes is so methodical,” he says. “He lays out the history and the social context, all that, and by the time he works back up to the present, you can see more than how it happened. You can see why. Everything that tipped the scales here or there. Some of it’s more or less fixed: that tornado was always going to happen, that drought couldn’t be stopped, the Turning, things like that. But some of it, the politics of the time, the policies, you can see it, you can actually see it where something picked up history and ran away with it.
“Mind you,” he adds, “it’s all very subjective and he’s well-known for being a bit of a liberal nut. But I like him.”
“Read it to me?” she asks, hopeful.
He does.
“What do you want to go and do that for?” Jackie demands.
“Mum.”
“I’m worried about you,” Jackie continues, sitting down at the table with her. “You’ve been off ever since I bought that one.” This is how Freckles is officially referred to in the Tyler household. Rose hates it. “Think it might be messing you up inside.”
She rolls her eyes.
“It’s not normal, the way you spend time with it.”
“I don’t want to have this fight again.” If it were at all feasible, she’d pick up the textbook from the table and make a wall out of it.
Jackie sits there, silent. Judgemental.
Rose sighs. “I’ll go see a doctor, okay? If there’s anything wrong, anything actually wrong, we can sell him back.”
She’s not sure how she would have faked the results, so it’s a lucky thing when she doesn’t have to.
“What about that programme?” she asks. It’s a nice day, a slow one that feels almost secret with Jackie out at Howard’s. They’re staying up past the long hours and into the short ones, watching crap telly and adverts. His shoulder is a much better pillow than his knee, bony though it is beneath her dad’s old t-shirt.
“Which one what?”
“That thing you’re saving up for.”
“Oh,” he says. He plays with her fingers a bit, like he thinks that’ll actually distract her.
It does, for a bit, but that’s not important.
“No really,” she says. “What is it? It’s not a game, you don’t need games.” He’s too smart for them.
He gives her a wary look, this sideways slanting look, and she moves her mouth away from his neck a bit. He smiles then and tugs her back. She giggles against his skin.
“Tell me?”
“It’s a secret,” he whispers.
“Even from me?”
“Who else do I talk to?” he asks. “Of course from you.”
“What about that professor friend of yours?” she asks. “Your mancrush.”
Reply
“So gay,” she proclaims. “You want to have his brain babies.”
“Yes, Rose,” he says. “That’s the secret. I have brain babies.”
“I knew it.” She settles back against him. “Name one after me?”
“Of course.” His hand comes up, palm settling between her shoulder blades.
After a while, dozing off, waking up, watching one another sleeping and waking, she says, “I have a secret too.”
“Bet you’ve got dozens.”
“I’ll tell you this one.”
“Then it won’t be a secret,” he says.
“Will be if you don’t tell anyone.” A lie with him the fourth to know.
“I can’t keep anything from the father of my brain babies, Rose. That is a terrible foundation for a relationship. Think of the children.”
She pretends to. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll tell you anyway.”
“Mmhm?”
It takes her some time, takes her more than one try to say it. Jackie’s annoyed and Mickey laughed and not even Shareen has stood up for her. It’s not so stupid of an idea. It’s not so impossible of a thing.
“Promise you won’t laugh,” she tells him.
“I will never promise that,” he answers.
She rolls her eyes and he squeezes her hand.
“I’m studying for my A Levels,” she says.
He blinks at her.
He smiles like something, like some burst of light she can’t quite name, and she’s smiling back so hard she thinks she might cry.
“Oh, Rose,” he says. “That was my secret too!”
His secret is a bit more complicated than that. It involves a fabricated online identity, really vague details, and a rather crazy plan of revising for sociology, psychology and literature A Levels online. They're the ones he'd found the courses for. He hasn’t quite worked out how he’s going to sit for exams.
“Fake id?” he offers weakly.
“I think this is going to be a bit harder than a fake driver’s license,” she says. “There’s got to be records and all that. Schooling, your GCSEs. A birth certificate.”
“Um,” he says. “I was homeschooled?”
She sort of looks at him at that.
His gaze drops and he crumples. He doesn’t move, doesn’t twitch or fold or bend, but he crumples all the same, disappearing into himself until she catches his hand.
“What do you want them for?” she asks.
“I want to be a doctor,” he says.
“Of what?”
“Of anything,” he says. “Of everything.”
She bites her lip. Asks, “What first?”
“Modern languages.”
They get to planning.
Reply
He stops. Considers.
Keeps right on scratching the beard.
“Hair doesn’t work that way,” he tells her.
“Okay, just.... Be patient, yeah?”
A flash of white teeth through brown fuzz. “Oh, I know how to wait, Rose. Don’t you worry about me.”
“Wish October would get here already,” she says, says it yet again.
“Rose the uni student,” he muses. “You’ll be brilliant.”
“I’ll be a mess.”
He gives her a pointed look, then scratches at his beard.
She laughs. Reaching out, she scratches it for him, both hands along his cheeks and chin.
His fingers fall from his face, hold her elbow. Eyes happily shut, he hums.
“We’ll be messes together,” they say in unison, then laugh.
“But really,” Mickey says.
“No,” she says. “I’ll visit, all right?”
“What’s wrong with a school in London?” He’s accepted it’s happening, they’ve that much at least.
“What’s wrong with wanting to go somewhere else?” she asks.
“Yeah, but... Cardiff.”
“It’s a good business programme.”
“But, Rose. Cardiff.”
Yes. Cardiff. A nice train ride away, where nobody knows her.
“Change of pace,” she says and shrugs. “Look, are you going to support me on this or not?”
When she realizes she was hoping for the “or not”, she realizes she has a problem.
Lots of couples break up when one goes away to uni, right?
In the weeks that follow, she knows Mickey knows and she also knows they have one of those mad loops of knowing going on. It all means they’re very well informed but still not technically on the same page, and it’s driving her mental.
It’s just hard to bring up, difficult to start. She loves him, she really did, and now there’s the plan and she’s going away and she needs a clean break for this to work. Except she can’t say any of that.
She finagles it with her mum, works out the details for expenses. She has to live in a dorm, first year, but that’s not so bad. She’s applied for funding and scholarships and a great deal of things that Freckles worked out on his own. She’s pretty sure he applied for them on his own, too, because she doesn’t remember writing any of those scholarship essays. Might be an issue, that, later.
The real issue, when it comes down to it, is convincing her mother about the kennel fee. More specifically, the insurance.
“Look, we won’t say he’s a weird one,” she protests. “I just want to make sure that if anything happens to him, I don’t starve for the rest of the year. I’ve heard stories about the Flesh up in Wales, we all have.”
“Mm, yes, but....”
“Think of it this way, it’s still cheaper than selling him and me going back to frozen.”
“Be even cheaper without the insurance.”
“Mum.”
“Oh, all right.”
Perfect.
Moving day approaches and she packs everything up, all of his things and most of hers.
Edgy about it, he returns his clothing, storing it in the safety of her suitcase. With obvious reluctance, he puts back on the smock Jackie had bought him in. It’s ill-fitting and ridiculous. It’s absolutely horrible: he sticks out like a sore thumb. He looks like someone dressed up as Flesh for Halloween. They’re going to think he’s a joke, she’ll have to convince people, and then they’ll never forget his face, beard or no.
And then he shuffles, pulls in on himself, shoulders hunching, eyes flicking to the ground. Livestock once more.
Her stomach heaves and she rushes to him, shoves at his shoulders and catches his face. “Stop it. Stop it.”
He looks at her with confused eyes, brown and bright. “Stop what?”
“You’re not- You’re not that. You-”
“Not what?” he demands. “Not Flesh? Of course I’m Flesh, what did you think all the bloodletting was about?” He gestures at his own neck, the soft, marked skin.
“You’re not stupid,” she says. “You can’t stand there and go all small and-”
“Yes I can,” he interrupts. Says it firmly. “I can play the part as well as any. I have to.”
She knows that.
Takes a breath, lets it go.
Her convictions, her qualms: not so easily released.
“Just playing,” she says.
“Just playing,” he confirms.
They play a lot, the two of them. He plays a part, she plays a part. They play at this and that.
Then it’s moving day, and it’s time for reality.
Reply
Reply
Getting Freckles sorted turns out to be the easiest of it. There are modules to sign up for and flatmates to meet and a campus to learn and a city to learn on top of the campus. If she didn't need to eat, she'd never see him.
That he hates the kennel is obvious. It's obvious because anyone with a brain or a heart or a soul should hate the kennel and every time Rose goes back there, she's hit by it all over again, the way no one notices.
At first, she thought it was the Flesh who were unnerving her. They're nothing like Freckles, nothing at all. The docile ones have their pens together and it's a common sight to see them slumped in piles. They lie around like stray cats but look like people: of course it's disturbing.
But then she starts paying attention.
The floors are hard. The air is cool. The Flesh are drained.
They're not foul and pathetic.
They're abused.
She begins to smuggle things in when she comes, little things at first, then larger things. For all Freckles is among his own kind, he clearly isn't. She's gained three pounds since uni began in the attempt to put him in a hazy state even vaguely like those of his penmates, but nothing's working. He's bored and can't sit still and it's worse than it ever was back in the flat. He's surrounded by Flesh and so terribly lonely.
Whenever she arrives, he stands. He stands and he comes to her, even if this involves shaking free of his sleeping penmates.
When she bites him, she takes her time about it and he talks all the while. He's light and clever, astonishing as always, and there's no sign of him going mad save for the fact that he must be. She couldn't stand this.
"Two more months," she reminds him every time. "Winter break." She's already looking into apartments.
"What are you getting me for Christmas?" he usually asks.
Or, a month away, "How's revision going?" or "Are my emails piling up?"
Or, a week away, in a tiny, controlled whisper: "Rose, they tried to drug me."
Reply
From the beginning, there has been the issue of Lady Cassandra.
Cassandra is a bitch. Rose has thought long and hard about this and her conclusion is this. Cassandra is a bitch. Then, now, and always. Rich, spoiled, spent her two gap years traveling the world, and has a pair of Flesh in the same pen as Freckles. Chip and Dale are from the same batch and Cassandra likes to pretend she can tell them apart.
Cassandra also likes to feed with her friends. Once and only once, Rose tried to stick around for the social occasion. Not because she likes any of Cassandra's friends, or even knows them. They all look at Rose with "chav" written in their eyes. Even so, being social with other people is a reason to remain among the Flesh. It's the excuse she needs to sit with Freckles with her hand on his back, or combing her fingers through his hair or holding his hand with care so that no one else can see.
She remained the odd one out, which would have been fine if it hadn't made Freckles look odd as well. He's smarter than all of them combined and when Rose is with him, he lets it show on his face.
She still doesn't know what to think about that, that he wears his dignity best when she's there to see it. It scares her, the thought that someone else might catch a glimpse.
So the attempts at social feeding stop. If not for limiting her time with Freckles back to the beginning, she wouldn't regret the lack at all. Watching the other Flesh submit - some afraid, some oblivious, some fawning - it all turns her stomach.
"How did the world get like this?" she asks Freckles once while they're alone, as "alone" as they can be in his pen, surrounded by blank-faced Flesh. It's a week before the attempted drugging, two weeks before it's time to sink or swim.
"Is that rhetorical?"
"Nope."
"Check my emails," he tells her.
"Already done. You've had nothing new for-"
"No," he corrects. "The essays and articles I translated over the summer, those."
"From Professor Mancrush?"
Freckles rolls his eyes. "Professor Yana, Rose."
"I know," she says. "I'll read them."
"Will you?"
She nods.
He smiles. It's a sight she hasn't seen in ages.
She presses their foreheads together, running her fingertips through his beard. She can feel him smile wider.
"Everyone's looking," he warns, warm and chiding.
"Get used to it," she warns right back.
They grin into each other's faces, so very close and still so very far.
Reply
The Kennels. God. God. And Rose, and group feeding, and Cassandra ugh and he is in there all alone THEY'RE GOING TO TRY AND DRUG THEM WHEN ARE THEY MOVING OUT WHEN OH GOD.
He smiles. It's a sight she hasn't seen in ages.
She presses their foreheads together, running her fingertips through his beard. She can feel him smile wider.
"Everyone's looking," he warns, warm and chiding.
"Get used to it," she warns right back.
They grin into each other's faces, so very close and still so very far.
And somehow, this was the worst. Because it's them, Freckles and Rose, and this moment should not be happening where it's happening, it should be happening on some hill looking over Cardiff at sunset.
Seriously. My heart is still clenching.
Reply
Rather why this entire section had to be written in summary. Not as bad as the Ood pens, but still bad.
Reply
basically.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment