Gratuitous Baccano fanfic
1st Baccano! fanfiction. Just one bushwhacking idea, and I have to go to all this trouble...but I felt like completing something for once.
Title: Boy meets Girl
Words: 2000+
Rating: PG
Genre: Humour (be afraid)
Summary: The secret superhero origins of Isaac and Maria, as narrated by Firo.
Mr Isaac and Miss Maria do have many mysterious qualities. Are they idiots, incredibly wise, or both? Are they even actually lovers? You can bet I never asked-having to give Ennis the babies talk was quite painful enough.
How they first met seemed an easier question. Mine and Ennis’ last holiday took us Upstate, around the lower Catskills and Shawangunk ridge. To us city kids, a blur of crossroads, shacks, rocky inclines and silence. It was a clearing in a mid-sized forest, close and dark as fog all round, where we found the cabin. There was a vegetable patch full of weeds, a stick to tie up an animal and a heap of almanacs and paperbacks rotting away inside.
Apparently Mrs Dian had homeschooled young Isaac after an argument with the local teacher over her new hairpins. They still remembered in the nearest village how she’d bought, borrowed or stolen every book she could, until she passed away, G. R. H.S., from a cough or a chill, no one remembered which. Mr Dian fell down a gully a few months later, and any other brothers in the family died of some other complaint about then.
Young Isaac stayed in the cabin in the woods, with a few sickly animals and his mountain of books, occasionally trekking to the village to barter for food. He spoke to no one beyond that, save for occasional mumbling about the Romance of Three Kingdoms, the detective who vanished down the waterfall, or Death the shatterer of worlds. There were traces of civilisation he could’ve latched onto, but he stayed in the woods as if he simply never thought of it. Or never felt inclined to.
So matters stood, until a certain well-bred but debt-ridden New York family attempted to secretly and hastily remove themselves to Canada. We found the remains of a car near a river a couple of miles from the Dian’s cabin. Beyond this point, a chronicler must happily resort to imagination. Shall we say…
* * *
The girl’s eyes flicked open, flinging what little they saw at her brain without division. She screamed loud enough to drown out the torrential rain besiging the shelter of a branch and a blanket; and the boy with the prominent chin and stiff brown hair screamed back.
“…Time out! Time out!….The bears!”
“BEARS!?” The girl was shocked enough to fall silent. She blinked expressively at the boy, who blinked back, and swallowed softly, as if contemplating the most important task of his life.
“…You mustn’t ever take them by surprise. So at least if a bear comes along, he’ll hear where we are, and won’t eat us.”
Silence. Then continued screams.
“Ohh, it’s cold! And my bottom’s wet! Ohh…”
“You can keep your elbows dry by eating carrots! Didn’t anyone come from Oz down the lightning with you?”
“Only Father and Sister.” The girl shivered and feebly rubbed her hands. The boy copied the action, as a child might who had spoken with people for years, but in all that time never met a single one.
“So, where are they?”
“Umm…somewhere. Where’s Oz?”
“In a book. You can read it as well; it’s just back in the house!”
“Is it far?” Listening over the explosions of thunder, the boy could barely hear the voice.
“No not at all! But don’t get too wet, it could be dangerous!” The boy set off at a sprint, then ran back and set off again with the girl on his back.
“Ooo. That’s a cow, isn’t it?”
A week after the storm, the girl was out of bed (There was one bed; the boy had let the girl share it, despite getting sneezed on in the night), in no further danger of expiry, and once more confronting life with spirit and vigour.
“Yeah.” Expressive blinking, “They have ten stomachs, you know? I think for the different kinds of grass.”
“You know such a lot! From all those books?”
“I don’t read them so much…” Something in her dizziness was inexhaustible. The boy couldn’t look at those eyes that flashed with life without needing to speak. “You must know about loads of other things. Like the Imperial Statement Building, or the Iffy tower, or Manchu Picchu…or wherever it was you lived.”
“Umm, I lived in New York. I did all the dusting and sweeping in our house, so I never got to see the Iffy tower.”
“Wicked steparents? Like Cinderella, King Arthur, Pip-from-Great-Expectations, like that?”
“Um, yes?”
“Couldn’t…you maybe talk a bit more?”
“Father always shouted at me when I talked out loud. It was just the same at school when I talked out loud in lessons.”
“Even a wicked school…hey, you went to school? With blackboards, rugby, apple-pie-beds and motherhood, all that?”
“Mmm! We did lots of counting, and threw lots of chalk. And we always played a game where everyone rolled pennies down a slope and I had to keep catching them.”
The boy shot up, and starting pacing with his hands in his pockets. The girl watched him, as he fell to chopping wood with no great excess of technique.
“Um, children have got to have parents right? The government says so? Do you know how we could find Father and Sister?”
“Well…actually I don’t. And actually, we’re not going to. I mean are you sorry that they’re not here?”
“Well, a bit…”
“Ooo! They treat you so badly, lose you in a storm, and make you feel sorry as well! You should get your revenge by not bothering to find them, without a doubt! Anyway, they’ve all gone off rather than camping out in the forest or doing anything to find you again-”
“But, they might just have stayed in the village and asked around?”
A brief pause was followed by the boy shooting off through the trees, returning about two hours later with news that no strangers or strange news had reached the village in the last fortnight.
“-Anyway, it can’t possibly be wrong to have no parents. I’ve lived here on my own since years ago!” The girl looked about as if the absence of a thriving multitude had only just registered as a meaningful fact, and began to wail loudly. “Hey, stop that. Please.”
“That’s so sad!”
The world was not sad, it was happy. It hurt the boy inside that he couldn’t remember why.
“No, no…after all, no one can remember if ma died from a cough or a chill, so you couldn’t possibly say for certain she’s dead! It’s not as if I’m alone either! This is America, there are people everywhere!” The girl choked out a laugh. “Ooo, what is it, what is it?”
“That’s right. People.” The girl from the city had met the boy from an isolated cabin, and realised it that moment.
The girl didn’t cry again for months. Both children ate, slept in the only bed, wore the same messes of undistinguished cast-offs. The girl listened with the same eyes, and it would’ve killed the boy to take away his voice. He felt the unnamed something that he was, different from birds or trees or rocks because the girl’s bright thoughtless voice touched him and not them. He told the girl everything, or some interpretation of it, and she treasured and pondered all, after a fashion.
Eventually, the cow died, not having given milk for weeks. The girl cried her eyes out, and the boy found that it hurt him less if he cried as well. By sunset, both of them sat outside the cabin, watching the weaving flies.
“Hey, what should we do?” The boy scratched his head, as she did, so synchronously it could no longer be seen who was copying who, “Shouldn’t we bury her?”
“No, no. You can’t believe everything you read in books.”
“Hey. Are we going to die sometime?”
“Possibly, possibly…if we have kids. Yes, if we didn’t have kids they’d be no one to see that we were dead! And if there were two children living here and eating and sleeping, it’d like we weren’t dead anyway…well, I suppose.”
“Mmm. And they’d be children who run around and goo-goo and wet their beds….and we…hey, what do we do?”
“Yes, yes…well the first thing is who we are. You have to do these things properly after all.” After a few seconds, they both looked down at the shapeless rags they wore, and detected no clue, “Let’s see, we’ve never managed to trap anything, a library would have to be bigger…”
“We fish, don’t we?”
“But lots of people fish. This probably isn’t even a farm now…” The girl sniffed, having momentarily forgotten about the cow. The boy screwed his face up with effort. He had to be somebody, because he had to do something, but everything needed things that were somewhere else…suddenly he leapt to his feet.
“Who do you want to be?”
“Somebody pretty! Who has fun! And never has to clean out cowpoo.”
Two hours later, the boy had returned to the cabin. With a flourish from some unseen well of natural theatre, he held out a fairly wretched print dress the girl could’ve used as a sleeping bag. She blinked slowly, and asked what was it for?
“This is yours. Whoever you meet and wherever you go, it will prevent you being mistaken for anyone else at all! By wearing different clothes you can be somebody else-in this case, you! It’s…a print dress!” A few birds were woken up by the force of the conclusion.
The girl removed her ragged pants and shirt without preamble, and dived into the dress. She rose, twirled, hopped up and down in speechless joy, and suddenly began doing something to the boys face with her lips.
“Hey…” Stop music. Pause birds in flight. “What are you doing?”
“Um…I don’t know.” Further pause.
“Well…there’s so many things for us to find out!”
“So much we don’t know!” The boy and girl hopped around in each other’s arms, cheering as if the Civil War had just ended.
“Where did you get it? Where, where?”
“Just lying on a fence someplace around the village-”
The girl shot off, and returned one hour and forty five minutes later, clutching a waistcoat and pinstriped trousers, almost fainting from lack of breath, and one step ahead of a fuming man with a shotgun.
“They. Were just. Lying there.” The boy was pacing savagely, trying to talk out the opposite side of his mouth to the bruise. “How can this be allowed? Isn’t there any law-”
“Hey, but we stole them from him.” The girl, returned to her former cast-offs, wiped her eyes.
“How can he say that-?”
“Because he owned them? The clothes were in front of his house, and he bought them with money?”
“How can somebody own a thing-?”
“Like we own a cabin, a vegetable patch and a dead cow?” The boy dropped onto his haunches, and gave every outwards sign of deep reflection. Thinking had never troubled him in the past; in fact he had scarcely given it a thought. But there was an energy inside him, and something that needed to do and say things somewhere far away…it was coming.
“THAT’S IT!”
“That’s what?”
“I know what we going to and who we’re going to be. If the principle of ownership works that, anyone who breaks it can be none other than THIEVES! That’s what we’ll be!” He stood in front of the cabin in the forest, grinning at the world.
“But aren’t thieves bad people who steal things?”
“…not in the least. Anger, envy, unnecessary spending on luxuries, making helpless children unhappy, all of it comes from owning things. But that is a poor second reason.” The boy nipped into the cabin, and hopped out with a stack of books. “Arsene Lupin. Raffles, the Artful Dodger, Robin Hood! All loved by everybody. All spectacular people. All heroes. All thieves. And that is what we are!”
“Horray! We’re spectacular, we’re people! I’m Maria, I’m a spectacular thief-”
“And I’m the spectacular thief Isaac-”
Another world-stop minute. Isaac and Maria spend it considering each other’s names for the first time. Neither of them have heard anything before so wonderful.
“Now we’ve decided that, let’s go somewhere to steal something! There’s a funny smell round here anyway….Isn’t a theatre coming to the village next week, Maria?”
“Yes, Isaac! We can steal all the costumes, we can be-”
“-Kings, or queens, or clowns-”
“We can steal anything we want to be!” Isaac still didn’t know what making out was, but in common with any actions he commits, it could only be comprehensively described as possessing a hell of a lot of oomph.
* * *
Ennis sat on the cabin steps, and looked from the ancient bones of the cow, to the lattice of endless blue sky between the silhouetted trees.
“This country is beautiful. But too harsh…how could people as lively as Isaac and Maria have grown up here? Somewhere people take a long walk and die of exposure in a gully-somewhere so empty and changeless.”
“Well, the only thing that changes about Mr Isaac and Miss Maria are their clothes. And the conditions you were born in don’t really do much to make you who you are.” From across the clearing, I felt her heart quicken. I reached up to take a fruit from an untouched tree (okay, I made that bit up, sue me for criminal symbolism.) and smiled.
“It’s something inside you. With all people, every single time.”