Being Human: Requiem For a Jerk [Cutler]
Title: “Requiem For a Jerk”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG-13
Timeline: pre-series 4
Summary: Aside from planning to take over the world and missing Hal, Nick Cutler does… absolutely nothing. [Cutler/Rachel, Hal/Cutler]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC.
A/N: I don’t even know what it was supposed to be, let alone what it turned out to be. Typical warnings: weird, non-linear structure, no plot to speak of, could be classified as experimental character study. My Cutler muse came back to whine at me, obviously.
REQUIEM FOR A JERK
There are a few tiny stains of red sprayed over his cuff, and Rachel tells him:
“You’ve got blood on your shirt.”
Nick looks down, drawing imaginary lines to connect the dots. That’s Ursa Minor right there.
“I had a nosebleed earlier today,” he says apologetically. He doesn’t do his own laundry.
She clasps his hand between hers, brings it up to her mouth and kisses it. He resists the bizarre urge to thank her. She says he works too much. He knows he doesn’t work enough but he doesn’t tell her that.
--
Mirrors are a problem.
“You gave me a fright,” Rachel says, and laughs because it’s silly: who else would it be but him? Nick thinks it’s not funny at all. She has no idea.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to.” When he means to, his eyes turn black and his teeth grow sharp.
“It’s all right. I just didn’t see you.”
He is trying to choose a tie. Rachel likes blue; Hal prefers red. Nick glances at his wife sitting in front of her dressing table and hates her a little bit. How many times has he passed by that mirror since his transformation? She hasn’t noticed a damn thing.
Rachel smiles and asks:
“What would you like for dinner?”
He stares at her. It’s a simple question, should be a simple question but for all the veins, arteries, blood vessels inside her. She is beautiful.
“I’m, uh…” He struggles to speak with dry lips. “I’m eating out. Work-related.” He feels guilty.
“Again?” She looks disappointed. He cannot remember if he has made her any promises. “I barely see you.”
She steps closer; he steps back.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He picks red. She doesn’t notice or pretends not to.
--
Someday people are going to respect him. They are going to call him “sir”. Today is not the day.
Today is the day Griffin once again treats him like a tea boy.
He seeks out the fat, geeky scroll guy and asks him how much he knows about Griffin. He’s supposed to know everything about everyone; as odd as it may seem, that appears to be his job.
The guy (Regus, his name is, Cutler remembers) pulls off his ginormous headphones and looks at Cutler like he’s doing him a favour by talking to him.
“What?”
“How well do you know Griffin?” Cutler repeats. “You lot came down here with Mr Wyndham, didn’t you?”
What a short and resplendent leadership that was! Lots of talk about God, destiny and whatnot. Plenty of entitlement. Even Cutler felt sick.
“I don’t discuss my superiors,” Regus says tersely.
Cutler snorts and notes that in that case, there’s nothing Regus can discuss. It earns him a dirty look.
“How old is he anyway?”
Regus shrugs. “He’s an Old One. What do you think?”
Cutler thinks that there are Old Ones and there are Old Ones, and he’s dealt with both kinds, and he knows a hell of a lot more than Regus believes he does.
“Why are you interested anyway?” Regus asks. He’s not really concerned with an answer, seeing as he’s pushing the headphones up, indicating the conversation is over.
“I’m just curious,” Cutler mutters, “whether or not he’ll figure out there’s rat poison in his tea.”
Regus moves one headphone slightly. “What?”
“Nothing.”
--
Cutler is not much of a reader, never has been. Books were always the bricks for Hal to build his walls with.
There is a copy of Crime and Punishment on his coffee table. Long, bleak and Russian, a novel under a very appropriate title. He’s been reading it for almost two years now, a few paragraphs a day, taking intervals sometimes or switching to less ponderous stories. It’s not Hal’s book; Cutler burned the ones he’d left behind. It’s just a book, frustratingly cumbersome, and it reminds him of Hal, so he keeps reading, highlighting the quotes he thinks Hal might like. Might have liked. Probably did like.
The flat doesn’t really look lived-in. He spends most of his time running between work and the coven headquarters, so this place is… just some place where he comes to iron his shirts. With mixed results.
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better then to go right in someone else’s,” he reads. That there should be some kind of a lesson.
Cutler feels tired. There is blood in the fridge and he is too lazy to get up, and then there is a knock on the door.
It’s a girl.
“Hi,” she says, “I’m Adele. Like the pop star.” She giggles, and he almost says: seriously? “I was wondering if-.”
He slams the door in her face. It’s not that he’s not up for it. She’s clearly a new face; no one would even miss her.
He marches up to the fridge. He’s got things to think of, plans to make - and there’s no fucking blood in the fridge, is there? Great.
Cutler hates killing. He’d rather have someone else do it. He always gets blood on his shirt.
--
He rings Fergus later and says: “I killed my neighbour.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Do you know what time it is?”
Cutler glances at his watch. “Four in the morning. Why?”
“It’s you-don’t-make-a-mess-you-can’t-clean-up o’clock!” Fergus snaps.
“You’re a fucking copper,” Cutler hisses. “It’s your fucking job, so do it!”
They haven’t buried people together since the fifties. Fergus gives him an odd look but, fortunately, spares him all the stupid comments he could come up with.
“You don’t kill people in your bloody flat,” he grouses. “You don’t kill people in your bloody neighbourhood unless you want problems. You fuckers are getting too damn complacent. It’s my arse on the line.”
“Next thing I won’t be able to kill people in my bloody city,” Cutler says, mocking his tone.
Fergus looks at him over the open grave. “You will when it’s your bloody city.” Which is three hundred years after never is what he leaves unsaid, but it’s obvious.
--
He imagines Hal coming back sometimes, just so, out of the blue, not being dead and all. It’s only been, what, half a century?
“You think I owe you an answer,” Hal says.
“No. But it’d be nice to get one all the same.”
They are probably somewhere at Stoker’s (unless the vampires have acquired a fancier HQ by then). They are alone and Hal is actually paying attention to him.
“Ask away.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I wanted something different.”
“Did it work?” He knows it didn’t even before Hal gives him the look. “Why did you come back?”
“Because you halfwits can’t lead a revolution without me.”
Cutler laughs. “Is that what you think? I have personally put into practice some plans-.”
“It won’t work,” Hal interrupts impatiently. “You can’t ask for the world to be handed to you. If you ask for it, it’s borrowed. It’s not yours. You have to take it. To show that you have the guts to own it.”
“Shall we put that theory to the test?”
Then it’s Cutler’s mouth on Hal’s, and he’s amazed at his own insolence, but the wait was too long, far too long. He has taken everything Hal has ever thrown at him. He is prepared to take more.
But of course that is just his imagination. Reality is different: mindless toil and “where’s my fucking tea?”
--
Fifty-five years of solitude, and Cutler still can’t get used to it. Before that, there was Hal. Before Hal, Rachel. Before her, nothing really: college, the war, school, the usual string of high points of an average human life. Now there are cracks in the ceiling, an empty flat and the stale taste of blood clinging to the roof of his mouth.
One day, when he finally gets all the respect he deserves, when he wears the crown, all of that won’t mean anything anymore. He was Hal’s before; now he is nobody’s. He is all right with that. All of this is just a way station between points A and B.
Television tells him to choose life. Hal once told him he didn’t believe in choice.
“Is that why you never gave me any?”
Hal flashed him a sidelong glance, a small not-quite-smirk playing on his lips.
“Never heard you complaining.”
“No,” Cutler agreed. “You wouldn’t, would you?”
Of course Hal was there before the television. He made Nick choose something else.
--
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asks.
It’s a very nice dinner, the first one at home since forever, and he really wants to tell her it’s perfect. But food gets stuck in his throat, he isn’t sure he can keep it down at all.
“It’s rare,” he comments on the steak.
“Medium rare. The way you like it.”
There’s blood in it. There is even more blood in her. Rachel looks at him, uncomprehending; he considers telling her he is a drug addict, if only to elicit some kind of response.
She sighs and puts the fork down. It makes a loud, clanging noise as it hits the table.
“You know what? Enough of this. I don’t know how to please you. Why am I even trying?”
“Please me? What are you talking about?”
They are having a fight. Oh God, they are having an actual fight.
“You don’t talk to me, Nick,” she says and lets her arms hang lax alongside her body. Giving up before he’s even begun fighting back.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he says. “Everything’s fine.”
“Oh, right, everything’s perfect! You act strange, you don’t look me in the eye, you go in and out like a ghost, and those strange people from work that visit you at night-! I don’t know what to think.” Her voice acquires a hysterical edge. “Tell me what I am supposed to think, Nick!”
“Don’t shout at me, please,” he says quietly. And then: “I’ll go to bed if you don’t mind. I think the steak doesn’t agree with me.”
Three hours later, when he cannot sleep and she is there, kissing him like it’s their wedding night, he decides he can’t really blame her for that outburst. It’s his fault. He makes her feel lonely. But she makes him hungry, so they’re even.
--
Hal knows an awful lot of poetry by heart. He tosses it out in the most peculiar moments, for example providing a running commentary on the latest kill. When he is especially bored, he shoves a book into Cutler’s hands and makes him read aloud, decorating his body with vicious bitemarks in the meantime, snickering every time Cutler stumbles over the copious amounts of outdated words (seriously, did people actually speak like that?).
Half a century later that would go on Twitter with the hashtag #ThingsIHateAboutHalYorke.
No, not really.
Well, maybe.
Nick doesn’t own any poetry books but he looks up the stuff Hal used to make him read online sometimes, just to feel the phantom echo of Hal’s fangs piercing his skin and the teasing softness of Hal’s tongue smoothing over the bite.
He tries to catalogue the things he knows about Hal over and over again. Poetry. Long-winded novels. Fear of spiders. That story about the monastery. Arguably a gambling problem. Not a lot, not nearly enough. And it’s all pointless now that Hal’s been dead for decades.
Nick tilts his head back, resting it on the back of his swivel chair, eyes firmly fixed on the screen, on those old words, some as old as Hal. Every time he does that, a part of him hopes that Hal will somehow miraculously get washed out of his system. The sixties were the hardest. He couldn’t quite believe Hal was gone during the second half of the fifties, but it did hit him in the new decade. He might have turned into another pathetic pisshead if he hadn’t already had one addiction too many.
He palms himself through the trousers, grits his teeth to keep quiet. Hal always liked it quiet. In fact, Hal always liked to forbid Nick to make any noise and subsequently put him into the position where he was encouraged to make noise.
He unzips his fly and empties his head of thoughts. Just get on with it. He is tired and for once he is not in the mood to play games with himself. His hand moves up and down in a jerky rhythm, faster and faster. He is hungry; he can feel the hammering of blood in his human colleagues’ veins even from behind the closed door of his office. It kicks in sometimes, not even the actual thirst, more like a memory of what he felt when he was young, stupid and had Hal in his life.
Cutler is perfectly aware that he has a fuckload of issues. If piled up, it would stand higher than the bleeding Everest. His body tingles in the aftermath of release. He leans forth, rests his forehead against the edge of his desk and imagines himself elsewhere.
Nice. Rio. Bloody Bermudas. Fast cars, white sand beaches and an all-you-can-eat indigenous buffet.
One day.
Soon.
--
Four cups of coffee result solely in his getting stuck in the middle between wanting to sleep and not being able to. He catches a James Bond film on the telly and imagines himself playing the lead role. It’s his day-off, and he’s got absolutely no idea what to do.
If life had been a musical, he would have broken out into a tearful, self-pitying song.
His mobile phone buzzes. Good; sometimes they don’t even bother telling him they need a cover up until the murder case ends up on his desk.
“Hello?”
“Evening, dicksplash.” It’s Fergus. A beautiful addition to this otherwise dull day. “Haul your arse down here.” He sounds strangely serious underneath the usual vulgar brusqueness. “Wyndham’s dead.”
“What!?”
“You heard me.”
Cutler lowers the phone. If Fergus adds anything (which is doubtful), he doesn’t hear it. A slow smile creeps over his face. Edgar Wyndham was allegedly a thousand years old. Creepy as fuck (though not on Hal’s level). And now he’s dead. Something in the way Fergus said it implied it wasn’t vampire politics that got poor old Edgar dusted.
The Old Ones like to talk big, they do, but when it comes to the practical side of dominating the world, they… suck, to put it mildly. More than that, they are so wrapped up in their ego that they don’t see an inch before their noses. It gets them killed.
Not him though. He knows when to keep his head down and he knows when to act. Which means that his may be a weeping song now, but it won’t last long.
--
“Someday,” Nick says at breakfast, “people are going to respect me.”
He can go on about it for hours if Rachel doesn’t stop him. To her credit, she has the patience of an angel. Right now she simply chuckles and notes:
“Not if you’re late for work though.”
Nick blinks, glances at the watch and jumps up. “Bugger!”
He suspects that she secretly enjoys watching him run around like a twelve-year-old who is late for school. He adjusts his tie (almost chokes himself with it), throws on the coat, grabs his briefcase and dashes for the door, remembers something and turns back, kisses Rachel on the mouth, trying and failing not to get flour all over himself: she is baking. Rachel laughs and waves good luck at him. He darts out of the house like it’s on fire, but he can’t stop grinning.
Not bad for the last day of his life.
--
Things don’t really change after Wyndham’s death. Griffin takes over and he’s got the same keep-marching-on mindset as the rest of the Old Ones. More of them are coming; joy of joys.
Cutler doesn’t let it deter him. Making history is supposed to be a rather ungrateful job. At least he doesn’t have to go hungry.
He finishes off the bottle and tosses it into the bin, then turns to Regus who seems to have been standing there for a few minutes already.
“I’m sorry, are you talking?” Cutler asks.
“I said,” Regus reiterates, “you’ve got blood on your shirt.”
Cutler looks down. Just a few stains, but - shit. He sighs irritably. Looks closer. Cocks his head.
“Hey. That’s Ursa Minor right there. Wouldn’t you say?”
October 4-7, 2012
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: PG-13
Timeline: pre-series 4
Summary: Aside from planning to take over the world and missing Hal, Nick Cutler does… absolutely nothing. [Cutler/Rachel, Hal/Cutler]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC.
A/N: I don’t even know what it was supposed to be, let alone what it turned out to be. Typical warnings: weird, non-linear structure, no plot to speak of, could be classified as experimental character study. My Cutler muse came back to whine at me, obviously.
REQUIEM FOR A JERK
There are a few tiny stains of red sprayed over his cuff, and Rachel tells him:
“You’ve got blood on your shirt.”
Nick looks down, drawing imaginary lines to connect the dots. That’s Ursa Minor right there.
“I had a nosebleed earlier today,” he says apologetically. He doesn’t do his own laundry.
She clasps his hand between hers, brings it up to her mouth and kisses it. He resists the bizarre urge to thank her. She says he works too much. He knows he doesn’t work enough but he doesn’t tell her that.
--
Mirrors are a problem.
“You gave me a fright,” Rachel says, and laughs because it’s silly: who else would it be but him? Nick thinks it’s not funny at all. She has no idea.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to.” When he means to, his eyes turn black and his teeth grow sharp.
“It’s all right. I just didn’t see you.”
He is trying to choose a tie. Rachel likes blue; Hal prefers red. Nick glances at his wife sitting in front of her dressing table and hates her a little bit. How many times has he passed by that mirror since his transformation? She hasn’t noticed a damn thing.
Rachel smiles and asks:
“What would you like for dinner?”
He stares at her. It’s a simple question, should be a simple question but for all the veins, arteries, blood vessels inside her. She is beautiful.
“I’m, uh…” He struggles to speak with dry lips. “I’m eating out. Work-related.” He feels guilty.
“Again?” She looks disappointed. He cannot remember if he has made her any promises. “I barely see you.”
She steps closer; he steps back.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He picks red. She doesn’t notice or pretends not to.
--
Someday people are going to respect him. They are going to call him “sir”. Today is not the day.
Today is the day Griffin once again treats him like a tea boy.
He seeks out the fat, geeky scroll guy and asks him how much he knows about Griffin. He’s supposed to know everything about everyone; as odd as it may seem, that appears to be his job.
The guy (Regus, his name is, Cutler remembers) pulls off his ginormous headphones and looks at Cutler like he’s doing him a favour by talking to him.
“What?”
“How well do you know Griffin?” Cutler repeats. “You lot came down here with Mr Wyndham, didn’t you?”
What a short and resplendent leadership that was! Lots of talk about God, destiny and whatnot. Plenty of entitlement. Even Cutler felt sick.
“I don’t discuss my superiors,” Regus says tersely.
Cutler snorts and notes that in that case, there’s nothing Regus can discuss. It earns him a dirty look.
“How old is he anyway?”
Regus shrugs. “He’s an Old One. What do you think?”
Cutler thinks that there are Old Ones and there are Old Ones, and he’s dealt with both kinds, and he knows a hell of a lot more than Regus believes he does.
“Why are you interested anyway?” Regus asks. He’s not really concerned with an answer, seeing as he’s pushing the headphones up, indicating the conversation is over.
“I’m just curious,” Cutler mutters, “whether or not he’ll figure out there’s rat poison in his tea.”
Regus moves one headphone slightly. “What?”
“Nothing.”
--
Cutler is not much of a reader, never has been. Books were always the bricks for Hal to build his walls with.
There is a copy of Crime and Punishment on his coffee table. Long, bleak and Russian, a novel under a very appropriate title. He’s been reading it for almost two years now, a few paragraphs a day, taking intervals sometimes or switching to less ponderous stories. It’s not Hal’s book; Cutler burned the ones he’d left behind. It’s just a book, frustratingly cumbersome, and it reminds him of Hal, so he keeps reading, highlighting the quotes he thinks Hal might like. Might have liked. Probably did like.
The flat doesn’t really look lived-in. He spends most of his time running between work and the coven headquarters, so this place is… just some place where he comes to iron his shirts. With mixed results.
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better then to go right in someone else’s,” he reads. That there should be some kind of a lesson.
Cutler feels tired. There is blood in the fridge and he is too lazy to get up, and then there is a knock on the door.
It’s a girl.
“Hi,” she says, “I’m Adele. Like the pop star.” She giggles, and he almost says: seriously? “I was wondering if-.”
He slams the door in her face. It’s not that he’s not up for it. She’s clearly a new face; no one would even miss her.
He marches up to the fridge. He’s got things to think of, plans to make - and there’s no fucking blood in the fridge, is there? Great.
Cutler hates killing. He’d rather have someone else do it. He always gets blood on his shirt.
--
He rings Fergus later and says: “I killed my neighbour.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Do you know what time it is?”
Cutler glances at his watch. “Four in the morning. Why?”
“It’s you-don’t-make-a-mess-you-can’t-clean-up o’clock!” Fergus snaps.
“You’re a fucking copper,” Cutler hisses. “It’s your fucking job, so do it!”
They haven’t buried people together since the fifties. Fergus gives him an odd look but, fortunately, spares him all the stupid comments he could come up with.
“You don’t kill people in your bloody flat,” he grouses. “You don’t kill people in your bloody neighbourhood unless you want problems. You fuckers are getting too damn complacent. It’s my arse on the line.”
“Next thing I won’t be able to kill people in my bloody city,” Cutler says, mocking his tone.
Fergus looks at him over the open grave. “You will when it’s your bloody city.” Which is three hundred years after never is what he leaves unsaid, but it’s obvious.
--
He imagines Hal coming back sometimes, just so, out of the blue, not being dead and all. It’s only been, what, half a century?
“You think I owe you an answer,” Hal says.
“No. But it’d be nice to get one all the same.”
They are probably somewhere at Stoker’s (unless the vampires have acquired a fancier HQ by then). They are alone and Hal is actually paying attention to him.
“Ask away.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I wanted something different.”
“Did it work?” He knows it didn’t even before Hal gives him the look. “Why did you come back?”
“Because you halfwits can’t lead a revolution without me.”
Cutler laughs. “Is that what you think? I have personally put into practice some plans-.”
“It won’t work,” Hal interrupts impatiently. “You can’t ask for the world to be handed to you. If you ask for it, it’s borrowed. It’s not yours. You have to take it. To show that you have the guts to own it.”
“Shall we put that theory to the test?”
Then it’s Cutler’s mouth on Hal’s, and he’s amazed at his own insolence, but the wait was too long, far too long. He has taken everything Hal has ever thrown at him. He is prepared to take more.
But of course that is just his imagination. Reality is different: mindless toil and “where’s my fucking tea?”
--
Fifty-five years of solitude, and Cutler still can’t get used to it. Before that, there was Hal. Before Hal, Rachel. Before her, nothing really: college, the war, school, the usual string of high points of an average human life. Now there are cracks in the ceiling, an empty flat and the stale taste of blood clinging to the roof of his mouth.
One day, when he finally gets all the respect he deserves, when he wears the crown, all of that won’t mean anything anymore. He was Hal’s before; now he is nobody’s. He is all right with that. All of this is just a way station between points A and B.
Television tells him to choose life. Hal once told him he didn’t believe in choice.
“Is that why you never gave me any?”
Hal flashed him a sidelong glance, a small not-quite-smirk playing on his lips.
“Never heard you complaining.”
“No,” Cutler agreed. “You wouldn’t, would you?”
Of course Hal was there before the television. He made Nick choose something else.
--
“What’s wrong?” Rachel asks.
It’s a very nice dinner, the first one at home since forever, and he really wants to tell her it’s perfect. But food gets stuck in his throat, he isn’t sure he can keep it down at all.
“It’s rare,” he comments on the steak.
“Medium rare. The way you like it.”
There’s blood in it. There is even more blood in her. Rachel looks at him, uncomprehending; he considers telling her he is a drug addict, if only to elicit some kind of response.
She sighs and puts the fork down. It makes a loud, clanging noise as it hits the table.
“You know what? Enough of this. I don’t know how to please you. Why am I even trying?”
“Please me? What are you talking about?”
They are having a fight. Oh God, they are having an actual fight.
“You don’t talk to me, Nick,” she says and lets her arms hang lax alongside her body. Giving up before he’s even begun fighting back.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he says. “Everything’s fine.”
“Oh, right, everything’s perfect! You act strange, you don’t look me in the eye, you go in and out like a ghost, and those strange people from work that visit you at night-! I don’t know what to think.” Her voice acquires a hysterical edge. “Tell me what I am supposed to think, Nick!”
“Don’t shout at me, please,” he says quietly. And then: “I’ll go to bed if you don’t mind. I think the steak doesn’t agree with me.”
Three hours later, when he cannot sleep and she is there, kissing him like it’s their wedding night, he decides he can’t really blame her for that outburst. It’s his fault. He makes her feel lonely. But she makes him hungry, so they’re even.
--
Hal knows an awful lot of poetry by heart. He tosses it out in the most peculiar moments, for example providing a running commentary on the latest kill. When he is especially bored, he shoves a book into Cutler’s hands and makes him read aloud, decorating his body with vicious bitemarks in the meantime, snickering every time Cutler stumbles over the copious amounts of outdated words (seriously, did people actually speak like that?).
Half a century later that would go on Twitter with the hashtag #ThingsIHateAboutHalYorke.
No, not really.
Well, maybe.
Nick doesn’t own any poetry books but he looks up the stuff Hal used to make him read online sometimes, just to feel the phantom echo of Hal’s fangs piercing his skin and the teasing softness of Hal’s tongue smoothing over the bite.
He tries to catalogue the things he knows about Hal over and over again. Poetry. Long-winded novels. Fear of spiders. That story about the monastery. Arguably a gambling problem. Not a lot, not nearly enough. And it’s all pointless now that Hal’s been dead for decades.
Nick tilts his head back, resting it on the back of his swivel chair, eyes firmly fixed on the screen, on those old words, some as old as Hal. Every time he does that, a part of him hopes that Hal will somehow miraculously get washed out of his system. The sixties were the hardest. He couldn’t quite believe Hal was gone during the second half of the fifties, but it did hit him in the new decade. He might have turned into another pathetic pisshead if he hadn’t already had one addiction too many.
He palms himself through the trousers, grits his teeth to keep quiet. Hal always liked it quiet. In fact, Hal always liked to forbid Nick to make any noise and subsequently put him into the position where he was encouraged to make noise.
He unzips his fly and empties his head of thoughts. Just get on with it. He is tired and for once he is not in the mood to play games with himself. His hand moves up and down in a jerky rhythm, faster and faster. He is hungry; he can feel the hammering of blood in his human colleagues’ veins even from behind the closed door of his office. It kicks in sometimes, not even the actual thirst, more like a memory of what he felt when he was young, stupid and had Hal in his life.
Cutler is perfectly aware that he has a fuckload of issues. If piled up, it would stand higher than the bleeding Everest. His body tingles in the aftermath of release. He leans forth, rests his forehead against the edge of his desk and imagines himself elsewhere.
Nice. Rio. Bloody Bermudas. Fast cars, white sand beaches and an all-you-can-eat indigenous buffet.
One day.
Soon.
--
Four cups of coffee result solely in his getting stuck in the middle between wanting to sleep and not being able to. He catches a James Bond film on the telly and imagines himself playing the lead role. It’s his day-off, and he’s got absolutely no idea what to do.
If life had been a musical, he would have broken out into a tearful, self-pitying song.
His mobile phone buzzes. Good; sometimes they don’t even bother telling him they need a cover up until the murder case ends up on his desk.
“Hello?”
“Evening, dicksplash.” It’s Fergus. A beautiful addition to this otherwise dull day. “Haul your arse down here.” He sounds strangely serious underneath the usual vulgar brusqueness. “Wyndham’s dead.”
“What!?”
“You heard me.”
Cutler lowers the phone. If Fergus adds anything (which is doubtful), he doesn’t hear it. A slow smile creeps over his face. Edgar Wyndham was allegedly a thousand years old. Creepy as fuck (though not on Hal’s level). And now he’s dead. Something in the way Fergus said it implied it wasn’t vampire politics that got poor old Edgar dusted.
The Old Ones like to talk big, they do, but when it comes to the practical side of dominating the world, they… suck, to put it mildly. More than that, they are so wrapped up in their ego that they don’t see an inch before their noses. It gets them killed.
Not him though. He knows when to keep his head down and he knows when to act. Which means that his may be a weeping song now, but it won’t last long.
--
“Someday,” Nick says at breakfast, “people are going to respect me.”
He can go on about it for hours if Rachel doesn’t stop him. To her credit, she has the patience of an angel. Right now she simply chuckles and notes:
“Not if you’re late for work though.”
Nick blinks, glances at the watch and jumps up. “Bugger!”
He suspects that she secretly enjoys watching him run around like a twelve-year-old who is late for school. He adjusts his tie (almost chokes himself with it), throws on the coat, grabs his briefcase and dashes for the door, remembers something and turns back, kisses Rachel on the mouth, trying and failing not to get flour all over himself: she is baking. Rachel laughs and waves good luck at him. He darts out of the house like it’s on fire, but he can’t stop grinning.
Not bad for the last day of his life.
--
Things don’t really change after Wyndham’s death. Griffin takes over and he’s got the same keep-marching-on mindset as the rest of the Old Ones. More of them are coming; joy of joys.
Cutler doesn’t let it deter him. Making history is supposed to be a rather ungrateful job. At least he doesn’t have to go hungry.
He finishes off the bottle and tosses it into the bin, then turns to Regus who seems to have been standing there for a few minutes already.
“I’m sorry, are you talking?” Cutler asks.
“I said,” Regus reiterates, “you’ve got blood on your shirt.”
Cutler looks down. Just a few stains, but - shit. He sighs irritably. Looks closer. Cocks his head.
“Hey. That’s Ursa Minor right there. Wouldn’t you say?”
October 4-7, 2012