maintaining perspective
Break fic for azalee_calypso ! :D
I'm betting that Break spends a lot of time babbling to himself inside his own head. He seems like that kind of guy. But it is starting to annoy me that people canonically die on him all the time. What's that about? What, he's not tormented enough? Shall we stick needles in his one remaining eye, too? WHYYYYYY? This is like Hoshino and Kanda all over again.
Okay, it isn't that bad. And it doesn't even touch on CLAMP and Subaru. But still, man, authors are mean.
Pandora Hearts doesn't belong to me. You can tell, because I would have stopped picking on Break ages ago. :)
Spoilers through ch. 54. If it turns out that 55 jossed this whole thing, I am going to be sad.
Maintaining Perspective
Sharon’s ordered an absurd number of cakes today. Absurd. This is either an experiment on her part, or else some kind of obscure revenge. No normal person could possibly eat all that cake.
I’ve never laid claim to normality, not even back (so long ago and far away) when I reasonably might have. In any case, I have to eat them now that she’s ordered them. It’s by way of being a challenge. I do love a cake or twelve, I suppose.
Oh yes, the love of sweets supports the façade, but it’s also genuine. It has been ever since my jaunt to the Abyss. Lost an eye, gained a sweet tooth. White Alice’s little joke? Or maybe it’s a fundamental lack in me. A metaphorical attempt to replace what I don’t have. That smacks of something my harebrained subconscious might come up with.
Xerxes Break, after all, is a poor construct, patched together out of whatever was left of silly, dead Kevin. Held together with sugar and spit and the stubbornness of three remarkable women. And Reim, of course.
And Reim.
Poor Xerxes Break. He’s really starting to fall apart now.
“Break,” Sharon says, sure and strong. And however did she learn that? It must have been her mother and grandmother who taught her; it certainly wasn’t me. “Pay attention. If you’re still mooning around like this when Oz gets here, I won’t lay odds on your survival. You know he’s in a mood with you.”
Ha! A mood. Near-homicidal rage counts as a mood, certainly. “Yes, milady.”
“Stop that.”
“Of course, milady.”
She sighs and sits beside me, inappropriately close. She claims she does it so that I’ll know where she is, since I can’t see her. An excuse, perhaps. “I wish you wouldn’t play games at times like this.”
Dear girl, it is times like this when games are most absolutely necessary. “Hm.”
She leans her head against my shoulder, possessively and with emphasis. This shoulder, I am given to understand, is the property of Sharon Rainsworth. I assume that if anything untoward happens to the shoulder, the rest of me will be punished accordingly. “I wish you would cry, you stupid man.”
No. No, no. Silly Kevin cried, and look where that got him. “Am I a terrible disappointment, then?”
“Yes,” she replies with hurtful promptness. “But I suppose I shouldn’t expect any better. After all, we hired you without references.”
I lean down and brush a gentle kiss against the top of her head, still firmly planted on my shoulder, as thanks for not pressing me. I shouldn’t do that sort of thing. Maybe I do it because I shouldn’t. “A dangerous practice. Next I’ll be making off with the silver.”
“You make off with the silver all the time, Xerx.”
“I bring it back.”
“You horrible liar, you leave it everywhere. Everywhere. I found one of our fork patterns at Duke Barma’s table, did you know that?”
“Ah, but I imagine you’ll find Duke Barma’s patterns in your pantry, and so you see it all works out in the end.”
She giggles helplessly, precisely like the little girl she isn’t.
One of the servants-Mary-comes to the door and announces the arrival of Oz and entourage. Mary is very reliable, but she does have a small daughter out of wedlock she thinks we don’t know about, and that makes her troublingly blackmailable.
But not yet, apparently. There’s no shame at all in her body language, though it’s a pity I can’t see her expression. Ah, well. Sharon is perfectly capable of monitoring her people on her own by now. Close that eye, Xerxes Break. It’s all but worthless anyway.
Sharon straightens up and moves a socially acceptable distance away. Why she would bother for this motley crew, I can’t imagine. Practice?
I open my sorry eye as Oz walks in, and oh, he is in a mood. Oz has quite the presence when angry. He may one day grow to be a formidable man, in the unlikely event that he survives long enough. Tick tock, tick tock.
“Miss Sharon. Break,” he says, stern and authoritative. La, they grow so fast!
Alice immediately undercuts him, however, by diving for my cakes. We engage in battle. Little carnivore, what does she think she’s doing? As if I would sacrifice my cake to a philistine who would actually prefer raw meat. It’s blasphemy, and it will not be.
“Stingy clown!”
“Stingy? Certainly not! I just saw a rat in the corner-I invite you to go gnaw on that.”
“Really!?” And she’s off. In pursuit of theoretical rats.
The soothing indifference of black Alice. I should have been far more horrified when the chain I knocked out of Oz turned out to be this-they look so alike, she and her sister. But from the beginning, it was patently obvious that this Alice was something else again. The sisters have very little in common, in fact. If it weren’t for the face, no one would ever have made a connection. Which is more than can be said for Gilbert and his brother, alas.
And speak of the devil. Oh Gilbert, skulking around the room as usual. Looking tormented, I have no doubt. Fretting.
This was adorable when he was a tiny, obsessed child, but surely he must plan to grow up at some point? Or perhaps not. He may not know how. Just like his brother.
Stupid, stupid boys, for they know not themselves.
And stupid, stupid Oz, who knows himself far too well and lies to everyone about it. Yes…I can’t say I enjoy looking into another person’s eyes and seeing mirrors into my own soul. It’s more troubling when one considers that it’s taken me ahem-mumble-umpteen years to turn out this way, but Oz managed it in a mere fifteen. Creepy kid.
Well, I’m spared his eyes now. I can’t see them. This must be that much-vaunted silver lining.
“If anything like this happens again,” Oz says, trying admirably hard to stay calm, “please tell me before we’re actually in the middle of a fight to the death, Break.”
He’s indisputably in the right. “You’re right,” I admit. That’s where I should leave it, and so of course I don’t. “My deepest apologies, Master Oz. You must have been so wounded by my lack of trust.”
Sharon’s fan comes down briskly on the back of my hand. Point down. I wonder if she sharpens her fan. Does anyone sharpen a fan? Is that even structurally possible? It certainly feels like it’s possible.
Through the haze of pain, I notice that Oz is failing to respond; that he’s holding himself very carefully still. I can just picture the grim expression he must be wearing.
He’s not cute at all. What’s more, he’s far too young to be taking himself this seriously, and I am far too old to be taking him remotely seriously. In view of that, I squirm away from Sharon (yes, ow), nobly choose to sacrifice a cake for the cause, and smear whipped cream on Oz’s nose. Or anyway, I think it was his nose. It was in the middle of the blur that is his face; it ought to have been his nose.
“Break!” he yelps, and flails around a bit before Gilbert comes along to clean his face. Like a mother hen, if hens were in the habit of carrying handkerchiefs.
Oz, of all people, should know that a rewarding reaction only encourages the tormentor. For shame, Oz Vessarius. And I thought you were perceptive?
“If I’d understood what we were getting ourselves into, I would have told you,” I tell him. It may be a sort of apology for the cake. “I had incomplete information; I thought we could wing it.” I shrug and wipe whipped cream off of my hands and onto Gilbert’s cravat while he makes angry teakettle whistling noises. “My mistake!”
It isn’t my fault. Cravats are inherently ridiculous, and must be ruined as often as possible. It is a natural law. Gilbert’s cravats, by virtue of being five times more ridiculous than anyone else’s, must therefore be ruined five times as often. Perfectly logical.
“Break…” Oz scratches irritably at his head in a distinctly lower-class manner he probably picked up from black Alice. Where she acquired it is more of a mystery. “You could just tell us everything from the start, you know? Then we wouldn’t end up-”
“I thought the evening turned out quite well, all things considered.”
The weighty silence as everyone tries to work out whether I’ve forgotten that Reim is dead is bleakly amusing. After thirty endless seconds, I take pity on them. “Well, the city didn’t end up hurled into the Abyss by mad cult members. What’s a little death, misery, and burnt tapestry by comparison to that?”
“The fact that it could have been worse does not mean it went well,” Sharon puts in, accompanied by an ominous rattle of fine china. “Does it, Break?”
Oh my, we are in trouble now.
“No, milady.” I do a little humble groveling, which never fails to irritate her. “But in this case, more information wouldn’t have helped. Would it?”
She looks down at her table setting, and nervously, almost involuntarily, reorganizes all of her cutlery until it’s perfectly arranged, everything in its proper place, every piece an exact distance from the next. I haven’t seen her do that since she was tiny. Very worrying, Miss Sharon.
“It wouldn’t have helped,” she admits softly once her table rearranging is complete. And yet I don’t feel like a man who’s won an argument.
“Next time it might, though,” Oz cuts in. Oblivious? Trying to distract Sharon from her woes?
Trying to distract Sharon, of course. This is Oz, after all.
“Next time, Break,” he barrels on, “I mean it. Just tell us everything from the start. We can help, or anyway, we probably can’t make it worse.”
Is he demanding full disclosure? He is. Silly boy. Why on earth would I give honesty a try at this late date? Now that they’re about to lose me.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Master Oz,” I say. “I have every confidence in your ability to make anything worse.”
“If you meant that, you wouldn’t have tried to get me out of the Abyss in the first place.”
Not cute. At all.
The problem here is that children don’t organize their lives in terms of death. This is why I should never have surrounded myself with children. No matter how much they’ve been through (and God knows it’s been plenty), they’re still too young to plan everything around the assumption of inevitable loss.
It would be a poor idea to make them dependent on me now. Malicious, serving no purpose but to make my absence more painful. Reliable is the last thing they need me to be, whether they realize it or not.
“Tell you everything, hm?” I murmur. “Now, now. That would be contrary to my nature. Old dog, new tricks, so on and so forth.”
“You can learn new tricks,” Oz insists quietly, thoughtfully. “It’s about keeping up; you’re good at that. We’re on your side, so accept it. You have to accept things the way they are.”
Oh my. Life lessons from children. I must look something desperate.
Well, Oz’s life lessons, particularly when he has that eerie, echoey quality to his voice, are quite possibly Jack Vessarius’s life lessons, in truth. Yes, the man who murdered his best friend and let his city pitch headlong into the Abyss anyway. I’m sure I’m desperately interested in any advice he might have to offer. Afterward, perhaps I should go request a lecture on personal responsibility from Vincent Nightray.
“No, I really don’t,” I inform Oz. “If I like, I can prance around pretending I’m a giant chicken. And if you don’t stop pestering me with your nonsense, I will.”
“Um.” The Jack overtones have disappeared completely. Another victory for madness, thank you. “Break?”
I cluck at him and flap my arms. Emily clucks, too, for good measure. Sharon sighs loudly, and I edge away from her before she remembers that she’s still holding that fan weapon. At least she seems to have cheered up.
Xerxes Break, Reim would complain if he were here, you’re an embarrassment. But Reim is dead, which proves my unspoken point in detail. Oz would recognize that too, if he were paying proper attention.
If he were…
Now hang on. One of the more annoying things about Oz Vessarius is that he always pays far too much attention. It’ll make him old before his time. He will (should he live) have untimely and unattractive wrinkles, or at least, that is my fondest hope. So what are these impromptu lectures on trust and optimism? Knowing what he knows about me, would he honestly try to talk me into being, ah, forthcoming? Absolutely not. He might try to trick me into it, but just out and out asking, why, that’s not playing the game at all. Very suspicious.
I don’t like being used unless I know what I’m being used for.
I seize Oz’s face between my hands and pull us forehead to forehead. I can see him from here, for one thing. Then there is the added benefit that he panics amusingly whenever anyone but black Alice or Gilbert invades his space.
“Break! What are you doing to Oz!?”
“Stupid clown, let him go!”
And the staunch defenders of Oz’s virtue are highly entertaining, as well. But there’s method to my madness. (There always is, you know). I want a good look at Oz, because something about this chat is distinctly off. So what is it? What in the world is going on in the precocious mind of Oz Vessarius? Now there’s a question for the ages.
Oz does not panic, which is a source of great disappointment to me, I’m sure. Instead, his eyes dart briefly to his staunch defenders, and then back to me, though, turnabout indeed, he probably can’t see much from this distance. “Are you all right?” he breathes, so softly that I’m surely the only one who can hear him.
He is worrying about me. He is angry on my behalf. Because of Reim? From one former prisoner of the Abyss to another? Who knows. “Oz Vessarius,” I enunciate clearly and distinctly, “you are the most absurd person I have ever met in my long, long life. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” he replies, settling his hands over mine. Capturing me, the presumptuous brat. Who does he think I am? Gilbert? “Please answer the question.”
“Of course I’m not,” I tell him, and slither away. I’m good at that. “None of us are. Check the mirror.”
“Ah,” he says. “Are you going to be? Eventually?”
“Soon enough I’ll be dead, and then, I’m sure we can agree, it won’t matter.”
“But it will.”
I tap a finger against my lips and consider the problem before me. Young Master Oz. A possessed boy, loathed by his possibly evil father, beloved of two patently insane individuals with dangerous connections, and gradually being killed off by an illegal contract. To say nothing of white Alice and the Baskervilles and whatever it is they want from him.
And he’s worried about my wellbeing.
“Is this the only reason you came to visit today?”
Oz shrugs. I imagine he’s smiling his most winning smile. I always wanted to throw cake in his face back when I could see that smile. Near-blindness has more advantages than I would have suspected. Besides, I’ve already thrown cake in his face today. “There’s something very wrong with your brain,” I inform him in a fit of transcendent hypocrisy. “Now go away.”
I then walk straight out of the room because I can. Because I’m an old man, and entitled to act like one. Because I must uphold my reputation as a social disgrace even if Reim is no longer here to sigh at me about it.
Sharon, I note from my eavesdropper’s corner in the next room, wastes no time in hustling everyone out the door more quickly than is quite polite. It seems I have a staunch defender of my own. The children are taking this high-handed treatment variously: Gilbert is asking worried questions, black Alice is complaining that she never caught her rat, and Oz is laughing because Oz is bizarre.
“Thank you for worrying about him,” Sharon says softly just before they go. There is no verbal reply; I would’ve heard it if there had been. Due to the curious acoustics of the building, this particular corner of this particular room picks up small sounds from quite a few places, including the entryway.
The door closes. All the children have left at last.
All the children, indeed, because as I’ve been reminded lately-repeatedly, by absolutely everyone who knows us-Sharon isn’t a child anymore. Even Reim managed to throw in what turned out to be his last-minute two cents on the subject. If it weren’t for the saving grace of my own imminent death, I’d be starting to feel quite pressured.
Yes, she’s all grown up now. I know. I hear you. I understand.
Honestly, a noblewoman and a servant nearly old enough to be her grandfather. What is wrong with these modern people? Am I the only one left with a sense of propriety? It may be time to invest in smelling salts.
“You’re running off somewhere, aren’t you?” asks the lady herself, walking into the room with absolute assurance. Clearly she knew where I’d be. I daresay she knows all my hiding places by now, just as she knows that I always run away for a while after chats about my wellbeing. Why? Because it’s strangely horrible when people worry about me, and I require distraction afterward.
“I am,” I confess. I have a long list of chores, in any case. Snooping, making threats, thieving a little silverware from Rufus Barma.
“I’ll send Equus with you.”
Haha! And what that means is, I’ll be watching you, which ought to be alarming. Alas, overexposure to Rainsworth women brings on an addled mental state that causes one to be comforted by constant surveillance. They would never say, “I love you,” when they might instead say, “You’ll never escape.”
I find it charming. Worrying, isn’t it?
“Yes, milady,” I murmur, amused by the way she takes for granted that I won’t mind being followed. The way she doesn’t bother to ask where I’m going because she’ll know soon enough. “Any requests, since I’ll be out? Errands? Instructions?”
“Come home.”
I sweep a bow, dramatic but sincere. “I will, milady.”
“You’d better.”
“You’d only chase me down if I didn’t.”
“Yes, and don’t forget it.”
Forget it, no, never. I’m a good dog, after all, and always have been. I know who I belong to. The problem has never been my faithlessness; quite the opposite. I never left my masters behind. They’ve always left me.
“I’ll be waiting,” Sharon says fiercely, and I smile. By my side until my death does us part, hm?
I believe her. How odd.