Fanfic - Johannes Cabal - Parts 9 and 10
Part IX - In which Abigail has her First Day of School but She Learns More at Home
Part X - Abigail Goes to the Movies
Part IX - In which Abigail has her First Day of School but She Learns More at Home
Abigail was given a present at the end of her first day of Reception. Abigail was still slightly confused by the concept of “school,” and was just wondering when it would end when the bell rang and the teacher herded Abigail and her classmates out the door. Outside, she saw that a crowd of parents gathered around the fence --- her classmates recognized friendly faces right away, sprinting and shrieking to meet with mothers or fathers.
Abigail searched the crowd until she found a face she recognized, then ran towards him, ponytail of tow-colored curls slapping against her neck as she sprinted.
“Grandpa!” She howled and barreled into Frank Barrow’s legs.
“Good afternoon, sweetheart,” he said with a wide grin and kneeled down to her height.
“You’re here,” she said, surprised delight evident in her voice. She’d been hoping to see her mother…or her father, but she liked her grandfather, too.
“Very observant,” he replied. “So, how did you enjoy your first day?”
“It’s okay. Some of the other kids are really irritating.”
The accurate application of the word made Frank give the child a double-take. “Who taught you a word like that?”
Abigail almost replied ‘my dad’, but her mother had drilled her on the importance of never mentioning her father around her grandpa...or anyone, for that matter. “Grandpa,” she said, insistently, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I read books.”
Frank paused for a moment and studied Abigail. He saw her mother in her when she got like that, like he wasn’t taking her seriously enough. But when he searched her face for her absent, Mirkarvian father, he couldn’t quite discern the familiar from the alien. “Sure you do, young missy.”
“You were a detective, grandpa. You shouldn’t have forgotten that.”
“’Course not,” he grinned, and they started walking away from the school. “Do you want sweet tea and scones?”
She beamed and tugged lightly on his sleeve. “Always!”
They walked down one of the busy main streets of Penslow. It was a town where everyone knew everyone’s name, and anyone trying to go anywhere got a warm reception from people on the sidewalk. Abigail had a certain shyness to her. After she warmed up to someone, she could converse like someone years older, but there was always a moment where she glanced downwards to hide her eyes from a stranger or someone she wasn’t comfortable with --- usually because they were too loud or expected her to respond with too much, too quickly. He’d catch himself thinking of how outgoing her mother was and question where she’d gotten that shyness from.
Frank Barrow imagined himself slapping an exact copy of his face. He’d promised a long time ago that he wouldn’t dwell on it. Still, his mind did wander sometimes.
“Abigail?” he questioned after they were sitting down in the little café at the end of the street, tea on the way and scones in front of them. She liked blueberry most. It was the only one she could ever be guaranteed to finish. “I got you something.”
She looked up at her name, blue-grey eyes wide, excited, and curious.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a book, handing it to her.
She excitedly leafed through it. It was about, of all things, dinosaurs. Each scaly beast was brightly rendered in colorful sketches. Details, outlines, and facts were arrayed in paragraphs along with each species. She squirrelled in place, consumed with a state of giddiness and immediate interest unique to childhood. “Thank you so much.”
“I’m glad you like it,” and he was. She smiled, and it reminded him of how much joy Leonie had always brought him. When she smiled, nothing else mattered.
~~~
That weekend, her father visited.
He was like no other man she knew. He always wore suits and long jackets. He dressed in all black, the only sign of white the button-up shirt he always wore under his jacket (occasionally, he’d wear a splash of color in the form of the red cravat her mother had gotten him for Christmas one year…or the bright, multi-colored one Abigail selected when she was four. The latter only appeared very, very rarely).
When he stepped through the door, she ran over to him, and he stiffly drew her into a hug. “How was your first day of school?” He asked as he rose to his feet, looming over her.
“It was good,” she replied in German. “Why do boys act like tiny dogs and why do girls giggle all the time?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” he replied in the same language. “My answer would have something to do with the inherent inferiority of other people’s parenting skills or, in the case of the inevitable brat who sticks a pencil into every orifice for comedic value, eugenics --- but I don’t think your mother would approve of that response, so I’m going to tell you to ask her.”
She smiled wryly. She didn’t always understand it, and she wasn’t always quite sure she agreed, but there was something that amused her about the way he dissected and criticized the world. “I like math. I’m frustrated with reading, though. I already know how to read.”
This got his attention, and the blue-tinged glasses he always wore were smoothly removed and placed into his jacket pocket. “What?”
“We’re doing our ABCs. I can read. I can even read words, not just letters all on their own.” In two languages, no less.
“Mention it to your mother, I’m sure there’s something that can be done about it.” The tone in his voice implied that there had better be something that could be done about it.
Once the hat, glasses, and jacket came off and the Gladstone back was deposited by the door, he began to look much friendlier. Well, he was her father; he was always friendly to her. While they sometimes made her mother uneasy, she was used to his long periods of silence or his occasionally clipped, biting speech. It was rarely directed at her, since she’d figured out early what was likely to pull at his nerves. Unlike most children, Abigail had never wanted her parents to marry just for that reason. She loved them both, but she loved them for different reasons that, even at five years, she knew collided.
She liked to think they had been just slightly different people in another life and that the awkwardness that hung between them didn’t exist. That was the closest she ever came to wishing her parents would marry.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “Grandpa bought me a book on dinosaurs.”
Her father raised one pale eyebrow. “Did he now?”
“Yes, it’s got all these pictures. And did you know that Tyrannosaurs Rex was a carnivore? Oh, and raptors hunted in packs like wolves.”
A small smile found its way onto his face. “Yes, I knew all of that. From personal experience no less. I could even tell you more, like how important vocal communication is for velociraptor hunting technique.” His face took a slight scowl at the last part of the sentence.
At her confused stare, he indicated the couch, where they sat down and she knew a story was coming. She always liked her father’s stories.
“I was in Peru, high in the mountains when I crossed over into another dimension, one of many just like it tucked into secret and forgotten places in our own. I was looking for a mythical garden for a mythical tree that would give life eternal and cure any wound. Both turned out to be a myth. There was another dimension and there were plants in it, but the word ‘jungle’ is probably far more apt a description for the wild, primordial vegetation that covered the deep, cavernous tomb on the other side. It was once a playground for the Incan gods, but like most gods they grew bored with it and left it to its own devices. The tree was entirely fictitious and I want to slap whatever harebrained Spaniard first made note of it to make his discovery sound more important --- the vast quantities of gold mentioned were also a damn lie. Instead, I found there creatures banished from our version of Earth millennia ago, preserved forever in a bubble ecosystem that would be what they needed to thrive. They tried to eat me…”
Abigail listened in rapt attention to every word, every detail.
Part X - Abigail Goes to the Movies
Abigail liked to think that her dad was a spy.
As the school year came and with it all the family events and teacher conferences and celebrations, for the first time she wasn’t entirely happy relaying the lie that her father was a Mirkarvian graduate student from the university. That was also the year she learned what exactly that implied. She keyed in to the apologetic looks teachers and other parents gave her mother, but it was only really confirmed when a small, petulant boy in her year had used the words “dead as a doornail” at recess one day. She realized that most educated Mirkarvians had been involved in the uprising of ’82 (the year before she’d been born) and most of them had either died or been shipped off to prison camps.
At first, she didn’t quite understand why her real father’s identity was such a secret, why it was such a big deal whether anybody knew he still visited them, why he never interacted with the other parents or came to parent-teacher conferences or made anything for the bake sale. It hurt, a little, to want to share him with her friends and not be able to because the father they knew her to have was supposed to be some martyred revolutionary in a land she’d never even seen a picture of.
Towards the end of the year, however, the class had gone out to the movies to celebrate a year of hard work --- a field trip to the silver screen. It was a movie about espionage, cunning, and heroism. A suave, brave lead in a suit foiling every villainous scheme, drawing some gadget from a compartment on his shoe or a book and creating a way out when the situation seemed impossible.
Abigail realized. Her father was a spy.
It was why he couldn’t live with them, why he came and went with no indication that he’d ever been there at all. ‘Johannes Cabal’ was probably his only real name in a long list of aliases and fallacies. He may have even loved Leonie Barrow at one time, but the call of his job drew him away from a normal life. He was out doing good things, brave things, for a cause higher than his own safety or happiness. Her mother was always worried for him because people wanted him dead, clearly. She thought of all his wonderful stories from far flung places, and suddenly realized with full certainty that they were all real --- stories about cities rising from the water, vampires too noble for their own good, and a man who tricked the Devil.
Then the villain of the movie showed up. A tall, handsome German in a long, dark jacket, stern and pale.
There was something about the villain’s intensity, his cold, calculating gaze on the screen that made her wander that, if her father was a spy, he was on the side of all things malevolent and evil. He was, after all, a man with a foreign accent in a long black coat.
No. That was silly thought and she squashed it immediately like a disruptive bug buzzing around in her mind. Her father had to be at Her Majesty’s Service, through and through, anything else did not even warrant consideration. She planned never to mention it to him, but she left the movie theatre with her class in the pure, powerful illusion of being a cog in a network dedicated to truth, justice, and the British Empire. She no longer cared when he wasn’t there, because she knew he was off doing great incredible things and maybe someday, he’d teach her how to do them, too.
Part X - Abigail Goes to the Movies
Part IX - In which Abigail has her First Day of School but She Learns More at Home
Abigail was given a present at the end of her first day of Reception. Abigail was still slightly confused by the concept of “school,” and was just wondering when it would end when the bell rang and the teacher herded Abigail and her classmates out the door. Outside, she saw that a crowd of parents gathered around the fence --- her classmates recognized friendly faces right away, sprinting and shrieking to meet with mothers or fathers.
Abigail searched the crowd until she found a face she recognized, then ran towards him, ponytail of tow-colored curls slapping against her neck as she sprinted.
“Grandpa!” She howled and barreled into Frank Barrow’s legs.
“Good afternoon, sweetheart,” he said with a wide grin and kneeled down to her height.
“You’re here,” she said, surprised delight evident in her voice. She’d been hoping to see her mother…or her father, but she liked her grandfather, too.
“Very observant,” he replied. “So, how did you enjoy your first day?”
“It’s okay. Some of the other kids are really irritating.”
The accurate application of the word made Frank give the child a double-take. “Who taught you a word like that?”
Abigail almost replied ‘my dad’, but her mother had drilled her on the importance of never mentioning her father around her grandpa...or anyone, for that matter. “Grandpa,” she said, insistently, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I read books.”
Frank paused for a moment and studied Abigail. He saw her mother in her when she got like that, like he wasn’t taking her seriously enough. But when he searched her face for her absent, Mirkarvian father, he couldn’t quite discern the familiar from the alien. “Sure you do, young missy.”
“You were a detective, grandpa. You shouldn’t have forgotten that.”
“’Course not,” he grinned, and they started walking away from the school. “Do you want sweet tea and scones?”
She beamed and tugged lightly on his sleeve. “Always!”
They walked down one of the busy main streets of Penslow. It was a town where everyone knew everyone’s name, and anyone trying to go anywhere got a warm reception from people on the sidewalk. Abigail had a certain shyness to her. After she warmed up to someone, she could converse like someone years older, but there was always a moment where she glanced downwards to hide her eyes from a stranger or someone she wasn’t comfortable with --- usually because they were too loud or expected her to respond with too much, too quickly. He’d catch himself thinking of how outgoing her mother was and question where she’d gotten that shyness from.
Frank Barrow imagined himself slapping an exact copy of his face. He’d promised a long time ago that he wouldn’t dwell on it. Still, his mind did wander sometimes.
“Abigail?” he questioned after they were sitting down in the little café at the end of the street, tea on the way and scones in front of them. She liked blueberry most. It was the only one she could ever be guaranteed to finish. “I got you something.”
She looked up at her name, blue-grey eyes wide, excited, and curious.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a book, handing it to her.
She excitedly leafed through it. It was about, of all things, dinosaurs. Each scaly beast was brightly rendered in colorful sketches. Details, outlines, and facts were arrayed in paragraphs along with each species. She squirrelled in place, consumed with a state of giddiness and immediate interest unique to childhood. “Thank you so much.”
“I’m glad you like it,” and he was. She smiled, and it reminded him of how much joy Leonie had always brought him. When she smiled, nothing else mattered.
~~~
That weekend, her father visited.
He was like no other man she knew. He always wore suits and long jackets. He dressed in all black, the only sign of white the button-up shirt he always wore under his jacket (occasionally, he’d wear a splash of color in the form of the red cravat her mother had gotten him for Christmas one year…or the bright, multi-colored one Abigail selected when she was four. The latter only appeared very, very rarely).
When he stepped through the door, she ran over to him, and he stiffly drew her into a hug. “How was your first day of school?” He asked as he rose to his feet, looming over her.
“It was good,” she replied in German. “Why do boys act like tiny dogs and why do girls giggle all the time?”
“I couldn’t tell you,” he replied in the same language. “My answer would have something to do with the inherent inferiority of other people’s parenting skills or, in the case of the inevitable brat who sticks a pencil into every orifice for comedic value, eugenics --- but I don’t think your mother would approve of that response, so I’m going to tell you to ask her.”
She smiled wryly. She didn’t always understand it, and she wasn’t always quite sure she agreed, but there was something that amused her about the way he dissected and criticized the world. “I like math. I’m frustrated with reading, though. I already know how to read.”
This got his attention, and the blue-tinged glasses he always wore were smoothly removed and placed into his jacket pocket. “What?”
“We’re doing our ABCs. I can read. I can even read words, not just letters all on their own.” In two languages, no less.
“Mention it to your mother, I’m sure there’s something that can be done about it.” The tone in his voice implied that there had better be something that could be done about it.
Once the hat, glasses, and jacket came off and the Gladstone back was deposited by the door, he began to look much friendlier. Well, he was her father; he was always friendly to her. While they sometimes made her mother uneasy, she was used to his long periods of silence or his occasionally clipped, biting speech. It was rarely directed at her, since she’d figured out early what was likely to pull at his nerves. Unlike most children, Abigail had never wanted her parents to marry just for that reason. She loved them both, but she loved them for different reasons that, even at five years, she knew collided.
She liked to think they had been just slightly different people in another life and that the awkwardness that hung between them didn’t exist. That was the closest she ever came to wishing her parents would marry.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, “Grandpa bought me a book on dinosaurs.”
Her father raised one pale eyebrow. “Did he now?”
“Yes, it’s got all these pictures. And did you know that Tyrannosaurs Rex was a carnivore? Oh, and raptors hunted in packs like wolves.”
A small smile found its way onto his face. “Yes, I knew all of that. From personal experience no less. I could even tell you more, like how important vocal communication is for velociraptor hunting technique.” His face took a slight scowl at the last part of the sentence.
At her confused stare, he indicated the couch, where they sat down and she knew a story was coming. She always liked her father’s stories.
“I was in Peru, high in the mountains when I crossed over into another dimension, one of many just like it tucked into secret and forgotten places in our own. I was looking for a mythical garden for a mythical tree that would give life eternal and cure any wound. Both turned out to be a myth. There was another dimension and there were plants in it, but the word ‘jungle’ is probably far more apt a description for the wild, primordial vegetation that covered the deep, cavernous tomb on the other side. It was once a playground for the Incan gods, but like most gods they grew bored with it and left it to its own devices. The tree was entirely fictitious and I want to slap whatever harebrained Spaniard first made note of it to make his discovery sound more important --- the vast quantities of gold mentioned were also a damn lie. Instead, I found there creatures banished from our version of Earth millennia ago, preserved forever in a bubble ecosystem that would be what they needed to thrive. They tried to eat me…”
Abigail listened in rapt attention to every word, every detail.
Part X - Abigail Goes to the Movies
Abigail liked to think that her dad was a spy.
As the school year came and with it all the family events and teacher conferences and celebrations, for the first time she wasn’t entirely happy relaying the lie that her father was a Mirkarvian graduate student from the university. That was also the year she learned what exactly that implied. She keyed in to the apologetic looks teachers and other parents gave her mother, but it was only really confirmed when a small, petulant boy in her year had used the words “dead as a doornail” at recess one day. She realized that most educated Mirkarvians had been involved in the uprising of ’82 (the year before she’d been born) and most of them had either died or been shipped off to prison camps.
At first, she didn’t quite understand why her real father’s identity was such a secret, why it was such a big deal whether anybody knew he still visited them, why he never interacted with the other parents or came to parent-teacher conferences or made anything for the bake sale. It hurt, a little, to want to share him with her friends and not be able to because the father they knew her to have was supposed to be some martyred revolutionary in a land she’d never even seen a picture of.
Towards the end of the year, however, the class had gone out to the movies to celebrate a year of hard work --- a field trip to the silver screen. It was a movie about espionage, cunning, and heroism. A suave, brave lead in a suit foiling every villainous scheme, drawing some gadget from a compartment on his shoe or a book and creating a way out when the situation seemed impossible.
Abigail realized. Her father was a spy.
It was why he couldn’t live with them, why he came and went with no indication that he’d ever been there at all. ‘Johannes Cabal’ was probably his only real name in a long list of aliases and fallacies. He may have even loved Leonie Barrow at one time, but the call of his job drew him away from a normal life. He was out doing good things, brave things, for a cause higher than his own safety or happiness. Her mother was always worried for him because people wanted him dead, clearly. She thought of all his wonderful stories from far flung places, and suddenly realized with full certainty that they were all real --- stories about cities rising from the water, vampires too noble for their own good, and a man who tricked the Devil.
Then the villain of the movie showed up. A tall, handsome German in a long, dark jacket, stern and pale.
There was something about the villain’s intensity, his cold, calculating gaze on the screen that made her wander that, if her father was a spy, he was on the side of all things malevolent and evil. He was, after all, a man with a foreign accent in a long black coat.
No. That was silly thought and she squashed it immediately like a disruptive bug buzzing around in her mind. Her father had to be at Her Majesty’s Service, through and through, anything else did not even warrant consideration. She planned never to mention it to him, but she left the movie theatre with her class in the pure, powerful illusion of being a cog in a network dedicated to truth, justice, and the British Empire. She no longer cared when he wasn’t there, because she knew he was off doing great incredible things and maybe someday, he’d teach her how to do them, too.