...and then I trample on it with depressing mindfuckery, for that is what I do?
.
So, one of my springkink prompts bit hard and fast--and then refused to comply with what the original prompt asked for. I asked the prompter's permission, and she is cool with me writing the thing as, well, it wrote itself.
Title: Three Men Make a Tiger
Fandom: Digital Devil Saga (2)
Characters: ...so she asked for Bat and I gave her Bianfu. Doctor's Cast and other real world equivalents.
Rating: PG-ish-R for four-letter-words and intellectual disturbingness.
Spoilers: If you know who the Doctor's Cast is, you're fine.
Irony Cudgel Index: ow.
Note: Unlike with O'Brien and Sheffield, the characterizations and names of Chien, Krishnaswami, and Anders are not canon.
for qara_isuke, with apologies for deviations from the original prompt:
兩肉齊道行，頭上帶凸骨。 两肉齐道行，头上带凸骨。
相遇塊山下，欻起相搪突。 相遇块山下，欻起相搪突。
二敵不俱剛，一肉臥土窟 二敌不俱刚，一肉卧土窟。
非是力不如，盛氣不泄畢 非是力不如，盛气不泄毕。
Two butcher’s victims, of differing skill,
But each had sturdy bones upon his head,
Encountered each other on a mountain.
Both resolved to fight; each refused to fall.
The second was easily bested, the first triumphant,
And in the end the second was torn into meat to fill the grave.
It was not that the one was weak, or lesser.
Though they were both proud, one’s heart simply was not in it.
曹植
Cao Zhi
C.E. 191-232
Three Men Make a Tiger
digital devil saga (2)
Mithrigil Galtirglin
There’s a playground at the God Project. A literal one, too. Enclosed in a hexagon not-quite-biosphere meant to keep the bad out and the good in.
“Eggs rot from the inside,” Ms. Krishnaswami says. Her voice is always sad-Bianfu remembers something his grandmother used to say about how women with birthmarks near their eyes are destined to cry out of them. It seems true enough, he’s never seen Ms. Krishnaswami smile. If she, a teacher, can’t smile watching a bunch of children (test subjects, Bianfu reminds himself, they’re not really children, right?) swinging from a pristine jungle gym on a green lawn of sod, when outside this facility the world’s coming to an end…then yeah, she’s going to cry. Not now. When she sleeps at night.
She probably still gets more sleep at night than the twisted fucks here, experimenting on those kids.
Someone’s coming up behind them; Bianfu’s always been good at picking up on that (auspicious name, most of his family said, or at least the auspicious parts of a name that’s both bad and good luck), and gets a solid look at who. In a lab coat, black hair that’s longer and curlier than Bianfu’s, parted harshly. There’s a ring around her neck, a stain near her eyes. She definitely doesn’t sleep at night. Bianfu cocks his head, doesn’t speak before he’s spoken to.
“You must be Professor Krishnaswami.” The extended hand has a glove on it. “I’m Doctor Angel. Jenna.”
“Then call me Jinana,” Ms. Krishnaswami says, “Professor Krishnaswami has far too many syllables.” They shake hands like men, except that Ms. Krishnaswami’s bracelets jingle and shiver. “It’s good to finally meet you in person.”
Angel’s smile is a business smile. Bianfu’s not sure if how fake it is matters. “And this is your associate…?”
“-Chien Bianfu,” he says so Ms. Krishnaswami doesn’t have to. “Bruce. Or Bat. Either’s fine.”
“Bruce is fulfilling the field requirement for his teaching certification,” Ms. Krishnaswami explains, anyway. “He’s my shadow. If you’re concerned, he’s promised to dye his hair back once he finishes up the degree.”
“Actually, I think the purple suits me.” He’s gratified when she smirks back.
Angel huffs out a loud breath, softer than the laughing kids (experiments, damn it) down there on the playground but louder than the echoes that make it up here. “It’s none of my business, just be prepared to field their questions.”
“The kids?”
“Yes.” Angel does this nodding thing that implies they’re all about to start walking, then starts it on her own. There’s a spiraling stair that leads down to the lawn, the jungle gym, the fiction. Ms. Krishnaswami follows, and Bianfu follows that. “You’ve read what I’ve sent, of course, but all the other people who’ve come from the outside have found it hard to believe until they see it. Or hear it, perhaps more accurately.” The stairs are the kind without backs, only planks and rails. Angel’s wearing heels, Ms. Krishnaswami’s wearing heels, so it sounds like cannon fire a long way off.
“It’s not much of a surprise on paper, to tell the truth.” Ms. Krishnaswami’s bracelets scrape along the railing-she holds it delicately, green fingernails just brushing the metal. She’s all in green today-she tends to dress monochrome-tailored suit, silk shirt and scarf and peridots, not emeralds. It works for her. “There’s always been a correlation between intellectual genius and social immaturity. And the reverse is often true as well.”
“The candidates for the God Project are exceptional cases even beyond that, Professor Krishnaswami.” Oh, Bianfu caught that, seven syllables instead of three, polite in the past, passive-aggressive in the present. “You’ll forgive me for not disclosing this in the documents, but how old do they appear to you?”
They’re at the bottom of the stairwell before Bianfu is-he stays up so he can see over their heads (women and their heels. Heels). Five exceptionally frail kids, several different ethnicities, wide eyes and spindly arms like they’re out of some anime-something classic, pointy-chinned, and sickly, Akira comes to mind. Bianfu’s answer to Angel’s question is about to be ‘kindergarten, but that’s what you want us to think’-and then he notices the nurse and doctor standing beside the kids, like the doting surrogate parents they are-
“Argilla?”
“-Bat?” The doctor she’s chatting with looks up in a snap after she does. He’s-enough to hold Bianfu’s attention for a second, man those are dangerous eyes. But Argilla’s more important. Especially since she’s sidestepping the children and heading straight for him. “Bat! You son of a-how are you?”
“I’m all right,” he says, wriggling through the meager gap that Angel and Ms. Krishnaswami have left him, coming down to the floor. “Ha, the nurse look is good for you. Lose the dreadlocks, though.”
“Ha, ha.” She gets close enough to, and maybe her shoulders lurch forward like she’s going to, but she doesn’t hug him or shake his hand or anything. “Could say the same about you and the Manic Panic.”
“Special Effects.”
“Whatever.” Good, her smile hasn’t changed.
“You two know each other?” Angel asks, coming around.
“We graduated high school together, same year.”
“Yeah,” Bianfu follows, up, lowers his voice just enough to tease, “I’m the only guy she didn’t get with. -Ow,” he adds, because he half-expected the thwap on the head she just gave him. Her nails are longer. Her legs are longer. “Out of our close and personal friends, I mean.”
“Much better,” she chides, yanking on one of the purple streaks in his hair, then settling back on her heels. “But yeah, Doctor Angel, we go pretty far back.”
“A small world indeed,” Angel says. Her smile also hasn’t changed. Bianfu hasn’t decided whether that matters as much as how fake it still is.
He decides to stall by making a proper introduction. That should work. He steps aside. “Argilla, this is my advisor at UP, Jinana Krishnaswami. Ms. Krishnaswami, Argilla Anders,” who is not a double-A no matter what you say, as the joke goes, “childhood friend and subject of much boyhood fantasy.” As expected, she rolls her eyes.
Ms. Krishnaswami offers her hand, Argilla takes it. They don’t shake hands like men but it’s hard to describe how they do. “I’ll bet he’s giving you a lot of trouble,” Argilla says once Ms. Krishnaswami lets go.
“On the contrary, he must have grown up since you last saw him.”
“Nah, I’m still taller,” she says. Bianfu checks-no heels. She’s right. But she’s smiling. “Doctor Angel, they’re here to be introduced to the candidates, right?”
“Not just yet,” Angel says. “Tomorrow, probably, depending on how 14 fares in the EGG today. Just the tour and the personnel, until then.”
Argilla nods. She glances over her shoulder, at dangerous-eyes, who’s kneeling and pointing something out to a black-haired, black-eyed girl who’s smaller than the others. The little girl nods, runs off in that direction. The doctor uncoils, straightens himself out, brushes grass that leaves no stain off his knees, and smiles. Argilla smiles back.
Bianfu doesn’t.
Angel takes care of the introductions this time. “That,” she starts, and there’s evident derision in that, “is Doctor Sheffield. He oversees the mental health of the candidates. Now quickly, let’s get back into the facility before he talks your ear off.” Again with the fake smile.
Sheffield’s, though, isn’t fake, just smarmy. “Oh, Angel. If you’re going to taint their first impression of me, at least let them reciprocate.” He offers a hand that, again, Ms. Krishnaswami is the first to take. “But I believe I caught your name, though I think I’ll stick with ‘Jinana’, if that’s all right.”
“It is,” she says, with a seemingly genuine “thank you.”
Then he pulls back his hand and holds it out to Bianfu. “And since ‘Bat’ is probably something reserved for friends, with you, what should it be?”
If he can’t say Krishnaswami, then Bianfu’s out of the question. “Bruce,” he says, shaking a hand that’s colder than the handrail. “Bruce Chien.”
“That’s not so hard,” Sheffield says, lets Bianfu’s hand slide out of his and his own hangs, somewhere between surreptitiously wiping something away and not. “And in the interest of preserving syllables, you can call me Serph. With me, it has nothing to do with formality.”
-
They leave Sheffield where he is with relative ease, after that, a few more pleasantries that Bianfu tunes out for the sake of watching the children, experiments-children, he decides; if he starts thinking like Sheffield, whose asshattery is worth the extra syllable as far as Bianfu is concerned, he’ll kill himself. So he doesn’t.
“Come by for a cigarette later, if you can,” Argilla says before they go, and it seems like it’s under Angel’s nose, somehow. “We’ll meet here, I can show you how to get outside.”
“How’d you know I haven’t quit?”
“You still smell like it,” she says, winking. “Anyway, later. You can tell me everything when we’re off.”
He smiles. “I mean it, you know. About the nurse thing working for you.”
“Subject of boyhood fantasies,” she quotes, going back to the playground, “ha, ha.”
The black-haired girl that Sheffield had been attending to is watching him. He stops climbing the stairs so he can watch back. She has a cat in her lap, a largish, docile thing, with a silver ear and bells around its neck.
“Two,” he says aloud, not caring who he interrupts.
Angel and Ms. Krishnaswami are ahead of him on the stairs. “Oh?”
“To answer your question, Doctor Angel. How old do the children look. That girl’s no more than two years old, if you look her in the eyes.”
Yeah, her smile’s still fake. F, A, K, E.
-
Said tour winds up-winds down?-a good two hours later at least, and Bianfu’s head is spinning. The smell of the place. The temperature of the place. The sheer amount of information that can’t be put in a packet. A poem he memorized because his grandmother insisted comes flying back at him for no good reason at all, Southwards I am bound, but it takes me north; Supposing it blows to the east, it turns to the west. Ms. Krishnaswami remembers or empathizes or something like it, nods at him, lets him go, and he’s tempted to just get out of here. Seriously.
“They’re a bunch of sick fucks,” he says, aloud, leaning his fist into a wall, turning a corner.
“Yeah, but don’t use that wo-” the person he smacks face-first into says.
“-Fuck,” he says again, this time because his cheek is bleeding. He covers his face. “Fuck.”
The guy grabs his shoulders, pulls him along. “Let me get you cleaned up,” he says, to Bianfu obviously, and then, over his shoulder, “Can you take Sera back on your own?”
Someone with a voice not as low as this guy’s says yes, of course, but this guy’s already leading Bianfu along with a really strong hand and another one opening a door. “What’d I cut it on?” Bianfu manages once he’s leaning his back against something, squeaky leather, one of those long physician’s benches that’s neither a chair nor a chaise. He pulls his fingers away from his cheek, they’re sticky, looks through them at-another doctor, apparently.
“My ID badge,” the doctor says. The man’s tallish, gold hair and gold eyes that are narrowed and serious. The blood that Bianfu got on his lab coat is the same color as the shirt the doctor’s wearing underneath. “Well, the clip, actually.” He smears some rubbing alcohol onto cotton, knots his eyebrows. “Put your hands down and look up.”
Bianfu does, makes sure his hair is off his cheeks. This guy’s is almost as long, it turns out. He holds Bianfu by the chin, starts cleaning the cut. It stings, but Bianfu’s used to it. “So, what made you come to that conclusion?”
“Huh?”
“That we’re a bunch of sick fucks.”
Bianfu looks down. The doctor’s wearing a cross. “So it’s not enough that you’re sticking kids full of needles and trying to get them to talk the sun out of frying us all?” He chuckles to cover up that he’s wincing when the cotton scrapes too deep. “Well, how about that you’re hiring tutors to make sure they get an education before they hemorrhage to death?”
The doctor doesn’t bother concealing it when he winces. “Doesn’t that apply to the rest of the world, when you think about it? That we’re trying to learn as much as we can before God kills us all, and maybe that’ll save us?”
He pulls the cotton away, goes to pour alcohol on another one, grabs a real washcloth and runs it under the sink spout. Bianfu doesn’t say anything.
“-You’re up to date with tetanus?”
“What’s your name?”
“Heat.”
Bianfu laughs. It makes the blood start running out of the cut again.
The sound the doctor makes is somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Fine, Doctor O’Brien, it’s more professional.”
“No, Heat makes sense,” Bianfu says when the washcloth scratches over the cut, warm. After a second swipe, Heat steps back and puts the cloth into Bianfu’s hands, goes back to cleaning the cut itself. “Just counting syllables.”
“How many does your name have?”
“Which one?”
“Try me.”
“Chien Bianfu.”
Heat repeats it, gets the inflection correct.
Bianfu doesn’t bother hiding that he’s impressed. “So when I start quoting Cao Zhi in your general direction-”
“I was born in San Francisco,” Heat explains. “I don’t actually speak Chinese.”
“Neither do I,” Bianfu admits, “according to my grandparents. How deep is this cut?”
“I’m going to seal it.” He pulls over one of those paper-draped tables on wheels, starts outfitting it with gel and q-tips. “It shouldn’t scar too much. I’m sorry, we really have to get new clips for these badges.”
-
He’d been going the wrong way when he bumped into Heat, anyway. A lot the wrong way, it turns out. So Heat’s obliging, not quite leading him through the halls, “But I’m going to swing by and check on the patient I was with before I ran into you,” he says without asking if Bianfu minds.
Which he doesn’t, but he’d have appreciated being asked. Gifthorses, though, and the looking in the mouth thing. So they’re on their way, they’re outside her door. Number 19, it seems-the girl from before with the cat, which is perched on top of a row of medical cabinets that look out of place with how cushy the little room is. Bianfu hangs back, lets Heat go in and check on her, leans against the doorjamb. The tape over his cheek pulls at his skin, a little. It’s reddish brown there from the cleaner, from iodine.
“See?” Heat tells the little girl. “See, he’s all better now.” He glances over, urgently, like he’s trying to get her to do the same.
She doesn’t quite.
She’s staring at the blood on Heat’s lab coat. “Did you-did you hurt him?”
“No,” Heat says. “It was an accident. Like falling down stairs. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Bianfu smiles. “Yeah, it’s no big deal. I may be kinda small, but I can take it. Same as you, right?”
That makes the little girl look up and mostly at him. “I-I asked Nurse Argilla about you,” she mutters. “She said one of your names is Bat.”
“Yeah, that’s what the people I like call me.” He comes in, then, because it seems all right-Heat gets up from where he’s kneeling and nods, like he’s agreeing with that too.
Close up, she looks even weirder, and Akira’s still running through Bianfu’s head just looking at her. “Can I call you that?” she asks.
He grins, which pulls at the bandage and the gel a little. He hopes it doesn’t look too much like a grimace. It’ll be easier, he thinks, so he tells her, “Sure. Any friend of Argilla’s is a friend of mine, right?”
Her laugh is weak, enough that, behind him, Heat startles closer. “She told me what a bat looks like,” the little girl says. “You don’t look like one.”
“Thanks. But that’s not why people call me it. It’s what my real name means,” he explains. “Shunned by beasts, rejected by birds,” he quotes. That’s Cao Zhi twice today. He should call his parents later, that’ll amuse them. “I like it, though. It’s something people remember.”
-Her smile is even faker than Angel’s. Why does this all of a sudden make sense?
Whatever. He reaches down, ruffles her hair. Her skin’s colder than that Sheffield guy’s, or almost, and that’s hard. “I’m going to be your teacher, maybe. We’ll talk again then, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And don’t worry about my face.” Even though he thinks he did grimace, before, when he tried to smirk. “Just like you, remember? I can take whatever they give me.”
-
He stares out the passenger seat window. Even now, Portland’s home. He hates it. Not that it’s Portland, just that it’s home. Makes it difficult to stay away, even when there are places he’d rather be. The phrase “all my things are here” makes him sick.
“Three men make a tiger,” he says.
“Hm?” Ms. Krishnaswami is driving. The sunset blasts through her earrings and into his face. He explained the cut to her, to everyone who asked, ended up not getting the cigarette with Argilla but there’s always next time.
He repeats it. “Three men make a tiger. It’s a proverb. One man tells a lie, no one believes it. Two men tell the same lie, it’s still not enough. So it takes three men to make a tiger out of nothing. Kind of the opposite of the boy who cried wolf.”
“So you’re thinking of crying wolf too,” she sighs. The car pulls up to a light, slides to a calm and steady stop. “I talked to the Colonel again after you went off, this time without Jenna around. There’s an increasing amount of military involvement in the Project.” The light’s green. Her heel lifts off the gas. “It’s rather unsettling.”
“The thing is, there’s actually a fucking tiger in there.” Bianfu leans his head on the glass, looks at the streaks in his hair, never wants them to be black again.
“But we still need a third man,” Ms. Krishnaswami says, “to make the people see it.”
“They’re all too loyal, on the inside,” he sighs. Thinks of Heat-really grimaces-thinks of Argilla. Thinks of the kids themselves. “I don’t think I could betray the place either, if I was working for it.”
---
-
-
So, one of my springkink prompts bit hard and fast--and then refused to comply with what the original prompt asked for. I asked the prompter's permission, and she is cool with me writing the thing as, well, it wrote itself.
Title: Three Men Make a Tiger
Fandom: Digital Devil Saga (2)
Characters: ...so she asked for Bat and I gave her Bianfu. Doctor's Cast and other real world equivalents.
Rating: PG-ish-R for four-letter-words and intellectual disturbingness.
Spoilers: If you know who the Doctor's Cast is, you're fine.
Irony Cudgel Index: ow.
Note: Unlike with O'Brien and Sheffield, the characterizations and names of Chien, Krishnaswami, and Anders are not canon.
for qara_isuke, with apologies for deviations from the original prompt:
兩肉齊道行，頭上帶凸骨。 两肉齐道行，头上带凸骨。
相遇塊山下，欻起相搪突。 相遇块山下，欻起相搪突。
二敵不俱剛，一肉臥土窟 二敌不俱刚，一肉卧土窟。
非是力不如，盛氣不泄畢 非是力不如，盛气不泄毕。
Two butcher’s victims, of differing skill,
But each had sturdy bones upon his head,
Encountered each other on a mountain.
Both resolved to fight; each refused to fall.
The second was easily bested, the first triumphant,
And in the end the second was torn into meat to fill the grave.
It was not that the one was weak, or lesser.
Though they were both proud, one’s heart simply was not in it.
曹植
Cao Zhi
C.E. 191-232
Three Men Make a Tiger
digital devil saga (2)
Mithrigil Galtirglin
There’s a playground at the God Project. A literal one, too. Enclosed in a hexagon not-quite-biosphere meant to keep the bad out and the good in.
“Eggs rot from the inside,” Ms. Krishnaswami says. Her voice is always sad-Bianfu remembers something his grandmother used to say about how women with birthmarks near their eyes are destined to cry out of them. It seems true enough, he’s never seen Ms. Krishnaswami smile. If she, a teacher, can’t smile watching a bunch of children (test subjects, Bianfu reminds himself, they’re not really children, right?) swinging from a pristine jungle gym on a green lawn of sod, when outside this facility the world’s coming to an end…then yeah, she’s going to cry. Not now. When she sleeps at night.
She probably still gets more sleep at night than the twisted fucks here, experimenting on those kids.
Someone’s coming up behind them; Bianfu’s always been good at picking up on that (auspicious name, most of his family said, or at least the auspicious parts of a name that’s both bad and good luck), and gets a solid look at who. In a lab coat, black hair that’s longer and curlier than Bianfu’s, parted harshly. There’s a ring around her neck, a stain near her eyes. She definitely doesn’t sleep at night. Bianfu cocks his head, doesn’t speak before he’s spoken to.
“You must be Professor Krishnaswami.” The extended hand has a glove on it. “I’m Doctor Angel. Jenna.”
“Then call me Jinana,” Ms. Krishnaswami says, “Professor Krishnaswami has far too many syllables.” They shake hands like men, except that Ms. Krishnaswami’s bracelets jingle and shiver. “It’s good to finally meet you in person.”
Angel’s smile is a business smile. Bianfu’s not sure if how fake it is matters. “And this is your associate…?”
“-Chien Bianfu,” he says so Ms. Krishnaswami doesn’t have to. “Bruce. Or Bat. Either’s fine.”
“Bruce is fulfilling the field requirement for his teaching certification,” Ms. Krishnaswami explains, anyway. “He’s my shadow. If you’re concerned, he’s promised to dye his hair back once he finishes up the degree.”
“Actually, I think the purple suits me.” He’s gratified when she smirks back.
Angel huffs out a loud breath, softer than the laughing kids (experiments, damn it) down there on the playground but louder than the echoes that make it up here. “It’s none of my business, just be prepared to field their questions.”
“The kids?”
“Yes.” Angel does this nodding thing that implies they’re all about to start walking, then starts it on her own. There’s a spiraling stair that leads down to the lawn, the jungle gym, the fiction. Ms. Krishnaswami follows, and Bianfu follows that. “You’ve read what I’ve sent, of course, but all the other people who’ve come from the outside have found it hard to believe until they see it. Or hear it, perhaps more accurately.” The stairs are the kind without backs, only planks and rails. Angel’s wearing heels, Ms. Krishnaswami’s wearing heels, so it sounds like cannon fire a long way off.
“It’s not much of a surprise on paper, to tell the truth.” Ms. Krishnaswami’s bracelets scrape along the railing-she holds it delicately, green fingernails just brushing the metal. She’s all in green today-she tends to dress monochrome-tailored suit, silk shirt and scarf and peridots, not emeralds. It works for her. “There’s always been a correlation between intellectual genius and social immaturity. And the reverse is often true as well.”
“The candidates for the God Project are exceptional cases even beyond that, Professor Krishnaswami.” Oh, Bianfu caught that, seven syllables instead of three, polite in the past, passive-aggressive in the present. “You’ll forgive me for not disclosing this in the documents, but how old do they appear to you?”
They’re at the bottom of the stairwell before Bianfu is-he stays up so he can see over their heads (women and their heels. Heels). Five exceptionally frail kids, several different ethnicities, wide eyes and spindly arms like they’re out of some anime-something classic, pointy-chinned, and sickly, Akira comes to mind. Bianfu’s answer to Angel’s question is about to be ‘kindergarten, but that’s what you want us to think’-and then he notices the nurse and doctor standing beside the kids, like the doting surrogate parents they are-
“Argilla?”
“-Bat?” The doctor she’s chatting with looks up in a snap after she does. He’s-enough to hold Bianfu’s attention for a second, man those are dangerous eyes. But Argilla’s more important. Especially since she’s sidestepping the children and heading straight for him. “Bat! You son of a-how are you?”
“I’m all right,” he says, wriggling through the meager gap that Angel and Ms. Krishnaswami have left him, coming down to the floor. “Ha, the nurse look is good for you. Lose the dreadlocks, though.”
“Ha, ha.” She gets close enough to, and maybe her shoulders lurch forward like she’s going to, but she doesn’t hug him or shake his hand or anything. “Could say the same about you and the Manic Panic.”
“Special Effects.”
“Whatever.” Good, her smile hasn’t changed.
“You two know each other?” Angel asks, coming around.
“We graduated high school together, same year.”
“Yeah,” Bianfu follows, up, lowers his voice just enough to tease, “I’m the only guy she didn’t get with. -Ow,” he adds, because he half-expected the thwap on the head she just gave him. Her nails are longer. Her legs are longer. “Out of our close and personal friends, I mean.”
“Much better,” she chides, yanking on one of the purple streaks in his hair, then settling back on her heels. “But yeah, Doctor Angel, we go pretty far back.”
“A small world indeed,” Angel says. Her smile also hasn’t changed. Bianfu hasn’t decided whether that matters as much as how fake it still is.
He decides to stall by making a proper introduction. That should work. He steps aside. “Argilla, this is my advisor at UP, Jinana Krishnaswami. Ms. Krishnaswami, Argilla Anders,” who is not a double-A no matter what you say, as the joke goes, “childhood friend and subject of much boyhood fantasy.” As expected, she rolls her eyes.
Ms. Krishnaswami offers her hand, Argilla takes it. They don’t shake hands like men but it’s hard to describe how they do. “I’ll bet he’s giving you a lot of trouble,” Argilla says once Ms. Krishnaswami lets go.
“On the contrary, he must have grown up since you last saw him.”
“Nah, I’m still taller,” she says. Bianfu checks-no heels. She’s right. But she’s smiling. “Doctor Angel, they’re here to be introduced to the candidates, right?”
“Not just yet,” Angel says. “Tomorrow, probably, depending on how 14 fares in the EGG today. Just the tour and the personnel, until then.”
Argilla nods. She glances over her shoulder, at dangerous-eyes, who’s kneeling and pointing something out to a black-haired, black-eyed girl who’s smaller than the others. The little girl nods, runs off in that direction. The doctor uncoils, straightens himself out, brushes grass that leaves no stain off his knees, and smiles. Argilla smiles back.
Bianfu doesn’t.
Angel takes care of the introductions this time. “That,” she starts, and there’s evident derision in that, “is Doctor Sheffield. He oversees the mental health of the candidates. Now quickly, let’s get back into the facility before he talks your ear off.” Again with the fake smile.
Sheffield’s, though, isn’t fake, just smarmy. “Oh, Angel. If you’re going to taint their first impression of me, at least let them reciprocate.” He offers a hand that, again, Ms. Krishnaswami is the first to take. “But I believe I caught your name, though I think I’ll stick with ‘Jinana’, if that’s all right.”
“It is,” she says, with a seemingly genuine “thank you.”
Then he pulls back his hand and holds it out to Bianfu. “And since ‘Bat’ is probably something reserved for friends, with you, what should it be?”
If he can’t say Krishnaswami, then Bianfu’s out of the question. “Bruce,” he says, shaking a hand that’s colder than the handrail. “Bruce Chien.”
“That’s not so hard,” Sheffield says, lets Bianfu’s hand slide out of his and his own hangs, somewhere between surreptitiously wiping something away and not. “And in the interest of preserving syllables, you can call me Serph. With me, it has nothing to do with formality.”
-
They leave Sheffield where he is with relative ease, after that, a few more pleasantries that Bianfu tunes out for the sake of watching the children, experiments-children, he decides; if he starts thinking like Sheffield, whose asshattery is worth the extra syllable as far as Bianfu is concerned, he’ll kill himself. So he doesn’t.
“Come by for a cigarette later, if you can,” Argilla says before they go, and it seems like it’s under Angel’s nose, somehow. “We’ll meet here, I can show you how to get outside.”
“How’d you know I haven’t quit?”
“You still smell like it,” she says, winking. “Anyway, later. You can tell me everything when we’re off.”
He smiles. “I mean it, you know. About the nurse thing working for you.”
“Subject of boyhood fantasies,” she quotes, going back to the playground, “ha, ha.”
The black-haired girl that Sheffield had been attending to is watching him. He stops climbing the stairs so he can watch back. She has a cat in her lap, a largish, docile thing, with a silver ear and bells around its neck.
“Two,” he says aloud, not caring who he interrupts.
Angel and Ms. Krishnaswami are ahead of him on the stairs. “Oh?”
“To answer your question, Doctor Angel. How old do the children look. That girl’s no more than two years old, if you look her in the eyes.”
Yeah, her smile’s still fake. F, A, K, E.
-
Said tour winds up-winds down?-a good two hours later at least, and Bianfu’s head is spinning. The smell of the place. The temperature of the place. The sheer amount of information that can’t be put in a packet. A poem he memorized because his grandmother insisted comes flying back at him for no good reason at all, Southwards I am bound, but it takes me north; Supposing it blows to the east, it turns to the west. Ms. Krishnaswami remembers or empathizes or something like it, nods at him, lets him go, and he’s tempted to just get out of here. Seriously.
“They’re a bunch of sick fucks,” he says, aloud, leaning his fist into a wall, turning a corner.
“Yeah, but don’t use that wo-” the person he smacks face-first into says.
“-Fuck,” he says again, this time because his cheek is bleeding. He covers his face. “Fuck.”
The guy grabs his shoulders, pulls him along. “Let me get you cleaned up,” he says, to Bianfu obviously, and then, over his shoulder, “Can you take Sera back on your own?”
Someone with a voice not as low as this guy’s says yes, of course, but this guy’s already leading Bianfu along with a really strong hand and another one opening a door. “What’d I cut it on?” Bianfu manages once he’s leaning his back against something, squeaky leather, one of those long physician’s benches that’s neither a chair nor a chaise. He pulls his fingers away from his cheek, they’re sticky, looks through them at-another doctor, apparently.
“My ID badge,” the doctor says. The man’s tallish, gold hair and gold eyes that are narrowed and serious. The blood that Bianfu got on his lab coat is the same color as the shirt the doctor’s wearing underneath. “Well, the clip, actually.” He smears some rubbing alcohol onto cotton, knots his eyebrows. “Put your hands down and look up.”
Bianfu does, makes sure his hair is off his cheeks. This guy’s is almost as long, it turns out. He holds Bianfu by the chin, starts cleaning the cut. It stings, but Bianfu’s used to it. “So, what made you come to that conclusion?”
“Huh?”
“That we’re a bunch of sick fucks.”
Bianfu looks down. The doctor’s wearing a cross. “So it’s not enough that you’re sticking kids full of needles and trying to get them to talk the sun out of frying us all?” He chuckles to cover up that he’s wincing when the cotton scrapes too deep. “Well, how about that you’re hiring tutors to make sure they get an education before they hemorrhage to death?”
The doctor doesn’t bother concealing it when he winces. “Doesn’t that apply to the rest of the world, when you think about it? That we’re trying to learn as much as we can before God kills us all, and maybe that’ll save us?”
He pulls the cotton away, goes to pour alcohol on another one, grabs a real washcloth and runs it under the sink spout. Bianfu doesn’t say anything.
“-You’re up to date with tetanus?”
“What’s your name?”
“Heat.”
Bianfu laughs. It makes the blood start running out of the cut again.
The sound the doctor makes is somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Fine, Doctor O’Brien, it’s more professional.”
“No, Heat makes sense,” Bianfu says when the washcloth scratches over the cut, warm. After a second swipe, Heat steps back and puts the cloth into Bianfu’s hands, goes back to cleaning the cut itself. “Just counting syllables.”
“How many does your name have?”
“Which one?”
“Try me.”
“Chien Bianfu.”
Heat repeats it, gets the inflection correct.
Bianfu doesn’t bother hiding that he’s impressed. “So when I start quoting Cao Zhi in your general direction-”
“I was born in San Francisco,” Heat explains. “I don’t actually speak Chinese.”
“Neither do I,” Bianfu admits, “according to my grandparents. How deep is this cut?”
“I’m going to seal it.” He pulls over one of those paper-draped tables on wheels, starts outfitting it with gel and q-tips. “It shouldn’t scar too much. I’m sorry, we really have to get new clips for these badges.”
-
He’d been going the wrong way when he bumped into Heat, anyway. A lot the wrong way, it turns out. So Heat’s obliging, not quite leading him through the halls, “But I’m going to swing by and check on the patient I was with before I ran into you,” he says without asking if Bianfu minds.
Which he doesn’t, but he’d have appreciated being asked. Gifthorses, though, and the looking in the mouth thing. So they’re on their way, they’re outside her door. Number 19, it seems-the girl from before with the cat, which is perched on top of a row of medical cabinets that look out of place with how cushy the little room is. Bianfu hangs back, lets Heat go in and check on her, leans against the doorjamb. The tape over his cheek pulls at his skin, a little. It’s reddish brown there from the cleaner, from iodine.
“See?” Heat tells the little girl. “See, he’s all better now.” He glances over, urgently, like he’s trying to get her to do the same.
She doesn’t quite.
She’s staring at the blood on Heat’s lab coat. “Did you-did you hurt him?”
“No,” Heat says. “It was an accident. Like falling down stairs. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Bianfu smiles. “Yeah, it’s no big deal. I may be kinda small, but I can take it. Same as you, right?”
That makes the little girl look up and mostly at him. “I-I asked Nurse Argilla about you,” she mutters. “She said one of your names is Bat.”
“Yeah, that’s what the people I like call me.” He comes in, then, because it seems all right-Heat gets up from where he’s kneeling and nods, like he’s agreeing with that too.
Close up, she looks even weirder, and Akira’s still running through Bianfu’s head just looking at her. “Can I call you that?” she asks.
He grins, which pulls at the bandage and the gel a little. He hopes it doesn’t look too much like a grimace. It’ll be easier, he thinks, so he tells her, “Sure. Any friend of Argilla’s is a friend of mine, right?”
Her laugh is weak, enough that, behind him, Heat startles closer. “She told me what a bat looks like,” the little girl says. “You don’t look like one.”
“Thanks. But that’s not why people call me it. It’s what my real name means,” he explains. “Shunned by beasts, rejected by birds,” he quotes. That’s Cao Zhi twice today. He should call his parents later, that’ll amuse them. “I like it, though. It’s something people remember.”
-Her smile is even faker than Angel’s. Why does this all of a sudden make sense?
Whatever. He reaches down, ruffles her hair. Her skin’s colder than that Sheffield guy’s, or almost, and that’s hard. “I’m going to be your teacher, maybe. We’ll talk again then, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And don’t worry about my face.” Even though he thinks he did grimace, before, when he tried to smirk. “Just like you, remember? I can take whatever they give me.”
-
He stares out the passenger seat window. Even now, Portland’s home. He hates it. Not that it’s Portland, just that it’s home. Makes it difficult to stay away, even when there are places he’d rather be. The phrase “all my things are here” makes him sick.
“Three men make a tiger,” he says.
“Hm?” Ms. Krishnaswami is driving. The sunset blasts through her earrings and into his face. He explained the cut to her, to everyone who asked, ended up not getting the cigarette with Argilla but there’s always next time.
He repeats it. “Three men make a tiger. It’s a proverb. One man tells a lie, no one believes it. Two men tell the same lie, it’s still not enough. So it takes three men to make a tiger out of nothing. Kind of the opposite of the boy who cried wolf.”
“So you’re thinking of crying wolf too,” she sighs. The car pulls up to a light, slides to a calm and steady stop. “I talked to the Colonel again after you went off, this time without Jenna around. There’s an increasing amount of military involvement in the Project.” The light’s green. Her heel lifts off the gas. “It’s rather unsettling.”
“The thing is, there’s actually a fucking tiger in there.” Bianfu leans his head on the glass, looks at the streaks in his hair, never wants them to be black again.
“But we still need a third man,” Ms. Krishnaswami says, “to make the people see it.”
“They’re all too loyal, on the inside,” he sighs. Thinks of Heat-really grimaces-thinks of Argilla. Thinks of the kids themselves. “I don’t think I could betray the place either, if I was working for it.”
---
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