Let's Get Down to Business
Straight from the airport to the office, Harry in his wake for once. Normally he leaves his head of security in England, but more and more business is being done on this side of the pond now (as Serptichore becomes more established in America), and for the next three foreseeable months Robin intends to be Stateside. Enough staff has been left in
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"Compensation?"
He flicks the bubble with a finger again, sending it back into a lazy drift towards the desk, and leans back in his chair.
"You are monetarily compensated for that; I can't think you want more money, given that it's just dollars. So very useful to our kind. And what else shall I pay you in, Rory?
"You are doing this to 'make it big', aren't you? To have more people listen to your music. Well. You're getting that. Fame and all that comes with it. The nights on stage, the crowd at your control. Oh yes, you're getting that."
Robin gestures for the bubble to come to him; it does, floating from where it lies on the desk to his hands. The Puck poises it again on one finger and then spins it, peering into the shimmering rotating depths as if at the future itself.
"And you are such a very virtuous boy that I'm not sure what else appeals to you. Sex? You have a girl, and you love her, which makes her of course more titillating than the combined attractions of all the sweet young flesh I could possibly find for you. Drugs? We've established that the chemical sort hold no temptation. Magic? You have enough of your own that the tricks I could impress crowned heads of state with are nothing extraordinarily special to you."
Robin's smiling, but it doesn't really reach his eyes. "What is it you want, Rory Stone?"
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"You've been extremely generous financially, Robin. I do appreciate that, and I'll have no problem accepting monetary compensation for those songs I'll write for Serptichore in the future. But for the ones I've already done--" He pauses for another sip of scotch, wishing briefly that he could find courage in a glass as so many can. Enough.
"I need answers," he says at last, meeting Robin's gleaming blue gaze once again. "A few honest answers to a few straightforward questions. Questions about me, not about you."
After some seconds of silence, Rory lowers his eyes to the liquid still in his glass, hoping to conceal just how unsettled he is by the question Robin asked him.
What is it you want, Rory Stone?
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The boy wants honesty from him. What a silly dangerous thing to ask for. To ask him for. Robin taps the bubble with one finger, tap tap tap, then pokes that finger through it and regards the skewered bubble with studied indifference.
"I doubt," he says lazily, "that I am such an expert on your person as you seem to think. What you mean to say is answers about the music, about what you feel when you're on stage; let us speak plainly, my dear dear boy. And, frankly, for you to try and say those questions therefore aren't about me is patently absurd. Your interest may be discreetly within the bounds of yourself, but nevertheless."
Robin is poking and prodding and stretching the bubble as he speaks, elongating its shape, pulling out a bit to form a nose, flicking his fingers at the top to create the semblance of hair, making a face out of the shimmery nothingness.
"You may ask your questions. You get three. That's a nice traditional number."
The bubble is starting to resemble Rory.
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He watches Robin shape the soap-encased pocket of air, watches his familiar features forming. If the display is meant to unnerve him, he's forced to acknowledge that it's working a little too well. If only his own interests were on the line here, he might say to hell with it and drop the whole line of inquiry, but in this matter several other people have linked their welfare to his. He needs information, for their sake if not for his.
"All right. Plainly then." His voice sounds low and rough, not entirely like his own; he clears his throat and went on, "What was I picking up on from the audience? Insofar as you could tell."
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He remembers-- the lights, the stage, the sounds. The feedback of the speakers as they warm up for the night, the resonance of the first chord, out over not just the stage, but out over the people. One hundred or one thousand, it both matters and doesn't matter. They are a sea of shadows in which the pinprick gleams of cigarette lighters or eyes-reflecting-stagelights gleam like stars. The true believers are there in the front, crowding the stage, their faces upturned like the devout to their gods. An apt metaphor.
And all of them his, his for the taking, his for the using, his to both rule and serve, because he owns them for the duration of the performance but ah yes, they own him too, by their existence they justify his own and perhaps the best term is not master or servant but lover--
The bubble starts to fall and Robin jerks his attention back to the now, to balancing it once more on his fingertips. "Belief. Worship. Admiration. Enjoyment. Pick an abstract noun, I've many more of them.
"...to put it in the sort of terms you'd see in a bad science-fantasy novel, you were picking up on the collective psychic energy of a group of human beings engaged in something they are genetically programmed to do, which is to say, be entertained and awed. And you register this because it is what you-- a part of you, the non-human part of you-- are in your turn genetically.... no... existentially programmed to do... hm..."
Robin speaks in tones of indifference, his eyes never leaving the shaping of the bubble-Rory's likeness.
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And existentially programmed. Robin makes it sound as if Rory's own will is as insubstantial and malleable a thing as the bubble he's still shaping. Does his fey nature really make him that -- that vulnerable to his audience?
Was Robin just as vulnerable, during his brief flirtation with stardom?
You know better than to ask that one, boyo.
Speaking of asking ... he sees Robin watching him through the bubble-replica with half-lidded eyes. The thinning of his lips reminds Rory both that he has two more questions and that the Puck hates having his time wasted by anyone but himself. Extremely eloquent lips, those, even when they're not shaping words.
Right then. After a deep, not-quite-calming breath, he continues. "I asked Tadhg to check me over after a gig. The first words out of his mouth when he saw me were Ruddy hells." Rory recalls the shocked look in his brother's eyes. "He told me that, given the effect even a small crowd had on my energy levels, he was worried about what a larger audience might do. Said I might ... lose track of myself, in everything they poured into me."
He finds his eyes fixing, not on Robin's eyes, but on the fingers now adding deft details to the bubble. "Do you believe he's justified in his concerns?"
There's a risk of getting just a one-word answer, he knows. But even that one word should be ... instructive.
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That's not an answer yet, and Robin sighs. Rory's terms dictated honesty. "I don't know," he says bluntly. "I don't know if his concerns are justified; I don't know if he even has the right concerns."
Robin purses his lips, considering his next words, then continues, "Those weren't how I would have phrased my concerns. And before you ask just what my concerns were for your third question, allow me to say that, yes, I am bound to answer you honestly and therefore I will-- but such a question will not endear you to me, Rory. Not at all."
Robin smiles thinly. "Isn't this honesty thing wonderful?"
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He wants to ask, to know. He doesn't want to ask or know a damned thing. He's stepped out onto the knife's edge in this conversation, feels it beneath him, forcing him to decide whether to topple off on one side or the other or continue on and risk being sliced open. Metaphorically, at least.
Though he's heard a fair number of stories of what happened to those who spectacularly failed to endear themselves to Robbie Fellowes, or Robin Goodfellow for that matter. Cleft in twain might well be the cleaner fate.
And beneath all these careful thoughts seethes a very incautious emotion indeed, anger at the thought that he looks well on his way to becoming another one of the Puck's multitude of toys ...
His eyes again find Robin's through the bubble. Angling his head slightly to one side, Rory asks his third question. "Do you have any plans in place to deal with these concerns of yours, or are you just planning to ... watch events unfold?"
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He remembers:
...he remembers standing on the empty stage, looking out at the empty seats of Madison Square Garden. Tier upon tier of them, rising and rising up into the darkness, out of sight. Surrounding the stage.
Twenty-thousand.
It's more than double-- more than quadruple-- any audience he's played to before. Tomorrow night the seats are going to be filled. Twenty-thousand. Twenty-thousand hearts, beating to the rhythm he will set.
He remembers the days before there were even twenty-thousand humans in all of Britain.
On the strength of belief of this small village or that woodlands town, or on the entertainment he'd provided to a faerie court of a few hundred, he'd survived millennia as a cunning and dangerous spirit, a force to be reckoned with, the Puck.
Robin Goodfellow stands on an empty stage the night before his American tour begins and comprehends that in twenty-four hours' time this is the spot where he will become a god...
In the now, Robin moves impatiently in one abrupt jerk, his fingers closing on his little bubble-likeness and popping it without any ceremony at all. Rory will not become a god, whatever else may happen. Too much human in him. Not enough to overpower his other side, no, but enough to interfere with it.
Up until now, Robin had considered that humanity a pure advantage for Rory-- something to ground him, as it were. Now he considers whether or not it may provide its own complications.
Well, well. It's going to be an interesting six years, isn't it?
He's moved to stand in front of the huge windows of his office, barely realizing it; Robin stares out at the city unseeing until his gaze focuses.
"I cannot make plans because I cannot predict exactly what will happen, Rory," he says, his voice sounding suddenly terribly weary, the voice of one buffeted by a whirlwind of maddening change. "In the last century, humanity has done-- has become-- has changed every rule and every--"
He breaks off. Twenty-thousand, in the 1970s. And so many more now...
Robin's tone returning to irritated crispness, he continues, "I intend to watch, though you don't have to infuse your words with quite so much bloody disdain for my watching. I have keen eyes, my boy, and, as should be obvious, a vested interest in your health. You are an investment-- logic dictates I profit when you are in one piece, now doesn't it? So no, I have no plans; that doesn't forestall me making them should I see a bloody need."
Robin tosses a glance over his shoulder at Rory. "Three questions. Three answers. Payment, I point out, for something you haven't yet signed over to me and can't until you get your bandmates' approval."
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And do you honestly believe the situation would be different if you were sitting in any other record executive's office right now?
The anger drains out of Rory with his next exhaled breath. He doesn't fool himself into thinking that Robin's assessment of a bloody need will necessarily tally with his own, but neither does he believe that Robin will leave him without any kind of support if the worst happens ... whatever that might be.
"Not disdain, Robin," he says, his voice low and weighted. "But concern, yes." Rory raises his eyes to take in the man standing before the window, outlined in a diffuse afternoon light that turns his hair to a halo and burnishes every point of his gracefully angular face. Strange that this glass-and-concrete setting should somehow make him look even more fey than usual, but it does.
His gaze drops to his now empty glass. "As for the band's approval ... it will be forthcoming." His voice takes on a shade of Robin's briefly weary tone. "They trust me, you see." And I'm trying to figure out if they're right to do so.
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When he turns back to Rory, however, he's once more smiling beatifically and warmly at the younger fey. "And we'll have a party to celebrate the signing! A splendid one. All the champagne you-- ah, my mistake-- your friends can drink, and naked starlets, and-- ah, no naked starlets? Well, to each their own. It'll be smashing. We will all have an excellent time."
Bright smile on cue. "Anything else, dear boy?"
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"No, nothing else." He stands, feeling as fatigued as if he'd just finished a strenuous performance. In a way, he has.
And one of Robin's parties ... well, that should be interesting. He'll ask Pippa, of course, though he's not entirely sure she'll agree to come. His believer girl is more than a little wary of Mr. Fellowes, which is likely just as well.
Summoning a smile of his own, he sets his glass on Robin's desk. "Thanks for the drink. I'll have the paperwork back to you no later than Friday." Angling his head, he regards the older fey with suddenly thoughtful eyes. "Is there anything else you need from me, other than the contract?"
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