return of the son of the bride of the 4k day (also the rest of the boy made of thought)
Author: C
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 1,064
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: A Box For The Boy Made Of Thought (1/3)
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes.
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #6: disillusionment.
Characters: Carla (who is far too jaded for all of this), Daisy (who should keep a better eye out), Matt (who is over here).
Toppings / Extras / Other: Malt: Prompts From a Hat [6: disillusionment // Carla, Katerina, {random Fate}, Daisy, Matt: the nightmare room].
Notes: Lozenge is a funny word. Also, as I pre-code this on June 17, I just realized that Forsaken is a decent song for these main three -- no, each of them at different points --, so I'll send you into the first big turning point with that on your mind! (Uh, assuming you're familiar with the song Forsaken. ...It's pretty?) In other news, I wonder if I've managed to hide at all the fact that most of ifupdown's plot exists because of these PFaH prompts. Somehow I doubt it. *lampshade*
In the back of my head there's a box. Inside that box is absolute nothingness, nonexistence, painful and clear and horrifying.
Daisy puts me in this box as easily as some kid might put away an unwanted toy, and my body flickers away like a thought.
Very much like a thought, in fact.
- - -
Carla catches a shriek in her throat; it comes out as a sort of panicked squeak, instead. “What the hell did you do to him?” she asks, voice shrill. (I have to say, in any other context I'd be pleased I made such an impression.)
“Put him away for safekeeping,” Daisy says like it's no great thing, and laughs. I think it's a horrible laugh, but I've never liked her sense of humor.
“Right.” Carla's still nervous but the panic's ebbing rapidly; her time with Daisy when the latter was called Zei had, among other things, made her unable to hold on to fear for long, and it shows. Soon the adrenaline will be just another memory; she must be incredibly unflappable on rollercoasters.
“I am going to give you your explanation, you know,” Daisy comments, and sits on the floor, staring glassily up at the ceiling. “Just... didn't want him to hear it...” Her face contorts briefly as pain stabs her three times between the eyebrows and is gone. “And, to be honest, I don't know where to start.”
“At the beginning?” Carla suggests, straight-faced through witchcraft or some miracle.
“Don't be stupid,” she snaps, idly tracing a pattern on the very slightly dusty linoleum floor. “I don't want this to take longer than it absolutely has to.”
- - -
Admittedly, though she doesn't start at the beginning - how could she? - or even at her own beginning, the heavily abridged story Daisy tells does start at a beginning.
Then again, most stories do.
- - -
“I was the daughter of a god called the Faceless Man,” Daisy says, making shapes with her hands in the air that repeat over and over again, matching the cadence of her voice (such as it is). “Also of a human woman of little importance to you now but who named me Katerina. Kat. This was, I guess, upwards of a hundred years ago--” the pattern of her fingers fumbles for a millisecond, something only she can see, and goes on “--which makes me the youngest demigod alive or dead, for what it's worth.
“At the age of twenty-seven I killed my half-brother Darren, with whom I had a pretty old - I mean, relatively speaking - grudge for the fact that he'd repeatedly tried to get me killed as well as having forced me to leave the closest to a home I had.” Over her still-moving hands she glances up at Carla and goes on defensively, “Also he threw a bomb at me.”
Carla says nothing, and after an uncomfortable silence Daisy rediscovers her train of thought.
“Shortly after that I became Fate. The how and the why aren't particularly important either, and even if they were, I'd still not tell you. At the time a … man's not the right word … named Zane was in charge, occupying the post we called - they call - First. The Second who followed him shortly before I left was bizarre - is, I should say, he's there now, if by the grace of my father saying his name doesn't alert him somehow - and by some fluke of personality charismatic enough that this took me a long time to notice. His name's Iall.”
Her hands whirl so quickly they're a blur.
“I know he was still Second when I... Look. What I did was treason--” she speaks as if defending herself not to, as before, what she believes Carla is thinking, but against some shadowy and official-looking crowd of accusers “--and it was wrong, and it was pointless. I started changing the future in tiny ways that struck my fancy as it passed into the present.” She grins briefly, single row of sharpened teeth as sharklike as she can ever manage. “It was an amazing feeling, too, I'll give you that.
“Thing is, the lightest punishment for that sort of thing - the sentence I ended up with - is torture, having your past stripped out of history, and exile into the mortal world.
“So here I am,” she finishes abruptly and somehow slightly weak, the motion of her fingertips listless and slow once more, the ending sharp because it isn't really. Not yet.
“How long ago was this?” asks Carla. Amazement doesn't really stick to her mind for too long either, and if it did this time she's certainly not going to let Daisy see that.
“I don't know,” Daisy confesses. “I think I've been here around twenty-five years. It gets fuzzy.”
Carla nods. “And this Iall guy, he--”
“Shows up in my dreams.” Daisy's voice is clear and without emotion as her hands speed up again, wrists just barely clicking as they turn. “Sometimes to remind me. Sometimes to talk at me, for the lack of anyone else.” A pause, as her fingers begin to blur again. “Sometimes to hurt me.” Pause. “Most of the time to try to get me to go back to them. Him.”
“Why?” Carla inquires, her head buzzing slightly, her voice calm.
“Because he says the gods are dying--” Daisy's voice is dreamy and childlike, now “--and he'd need such as me to kill them so the world does not end, slowly, with them. Maybe it is already.”
One more pause, as Carla stares.
“At least, that's what he says.” Her hands stop.
- - -
Awkwardly, Carla says, “Your voice is pretty rough. Do you want water, or I don't know, a lozenge or something?”
“No.” Daisy's rasping quite a bit, that's true. “I'm fine.”
“Good,” Carla replies. “Only I don't have any lozenges anyway and I wouldn't have given you water if you'd asked.”
- - -
And I know all of this because, if you think about it in the right way, I never left at all.
Author: C
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 3,074
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: A Sort Of Friend For The Boy Made Of Thought
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes. 4k day ftw (again)!
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #24: neglect.
Characters: Valencia (who is convenient), Daisy (who has an alternate character interpretation), Matt (who is confused); mention also of Zane (who is dead) and Iall (who is... Iall)
Toppings / Extras / Other: Malt: Prompts From a Hat [24: neglect // {random Fate}, Matt: the train goes nowhere but it goes there fast].
Notes: Now With: What Vali (And Kala) Look/s Like To Other People (okay, depends which people is which. But she and Daisy would have a great mutual creepout circuit going.) And now you can go back and reread 3/3 and maybe it'll make sense! Well, as much sense as my posts ever make :3
“That's really not very nice of her, is it?” a voice says. I'm too tired (and I hurt, but I can keep telling myself it's for unimportant reasons; this is, after all, my not-a-dream) to really answer, or even look up; the voice is somewhere around a foot and a half up from what I think is my right shoulder.
Or maybe it's not. I don't exactly have any visual cues to help me. Inside the not-a-box where I am (hence why this is not-a-dream; the hyphens make it special) it's completely dark, and I can't bring myself to look over my shoulder and into more darkness at the (female, I think) voice's point of origin. Apparent point of origin, that should be; all of this is really originating in my head.
Or in Daisy's head.
I mean, probably it is.
As I think these frantically backpedaling thoughts I don't notice that the blackness isn't black anymore until it's well on the way to substance and color. Looking around my awareness of what it's trying to turn into lets it (maybe, that is; to my way of thinking) do so, and suddenly I've been sitting on a white stone bench in the middle of a somewhat bizarre park all along.
By “somewhat bizarre” I mean it looks like what you'd get if you gave a kid with severe synathesia who had only read vague descriptions of gardens - or, for that matter, of plants and animals - to make you one. The colors seemed to have tastes in the back of my throat, vague ones, and there was a buzz in my ears no matter what I looked at. I could also mean, though, “containing a young woman in a white dress who sort of vaulted over the back of this bench and against all odds landed neatly and sitting down”. Because, you see, she just did, so both meanings though frankly esoteric are quite accurate.
My mysterious voice, this is, I assume. I turn towards her casually (after all, this is not a dream but it's mine, so I should get to enjoy for once understanding a situation). “What are you supposed to be, my subconscious?”
“Do you have one?” she asks politely. Her irises are off-white circles without pupils and she smiles uncertainly but doesn't blink. After a slight pause: “Would it be a girl?”
“Search me,” I say, grinning just slightly. “Daisy's subconscious?”
“Who's--” she starts, then cuts off like she knows already. Well, she'd better know already if she's in my head; turning up in the middle without directions or any idea of the persons involved is rude, and Daisy is definitely a main character. (I think of saying this, in the few seconds before she goes back to talking.) She goes on as if she has a bad taste in her mouth and a burned tongue to boot, “Her? Merciful... no. Very much no. What's with the fixation on subconscious... es?”
“I'm dreaming, aren't I?” I reply, figuring this should be answer enough.
It's a good question.
I don't feel like explaining the whole not-a-dream thing to her. Doing so, it looks like, might involve figuring out why - just for one thing - this feels so familiar when I've never been here before.
After all, I don't even dream.
“No,” she tells me, grinning. Her teeth are fluoride-white and too even; normal people don't have thirty-two identical teeth. I point this out and she shuts her mouth immediately but her lips are still smiling and it still doesn't reach her eyes.
Her answer, at any rate, to this is another question: “Why thirty-two?” Then she looks, all of a sudden, extremely defensive, and when she speaks she sounds the part: “Anyway I always get something slightly wrong. Or a lot of things slightly wrong. Teeth aren't so bad, are they?” She frowns, looks down at her hands quickly, then glares at me. “They aren't, right? The rest is okay? Tell me the rest is okay!”
I lean backward as far as I can. It's only when angry that she actually looks like Daisy very much at all, that I can see why she reminded me of her, and Daisy for one is actually frightening, but I don't think I've ever liked fights and right now they could be sisters. Best to calm her down. “Yeah,” I say quickly, “You're fine, you look really human.”
This seems to be what she wants to hear, thankfully enough. “Good. Thank you.”
Of course, I'm lying. There's nothing else like her teeth that I can put my figurative finger on - except, maybe, those eyes, and in that case the finger had better be figurative - but she's got that weird slight wrongness and sense of dead plasticity. It's one of those things that's impossible to understand if you haven't seen it, I think, and if you've never seen the actual real thing you'd never know the difference.
But I've got a vague idea that's something one can't help if you have it. (I'm very good at just knowing things when I'm not-exactly-dreaming, it seems. Maybe I should ask Daisy to force me into this more often.)
I realize I've been staring at her - actually staring past her left shoulder, but there you go - for a while and look away into the weird greenery.
Most of it is just that - something like, I don't know, a fairly normal park a couple years ago that has been left to its own devices for too long - but too bright. It almost hurts my eyes to even glance at, and so it takes me a while to realize that a fern here and a vine there - I'd swear there's no pattern to it - is moving, and not in the same direction. There's no wind.
“Sorry about that,” she says distantly, and doesn't sound sorry at all. Not that I particularly mind; there's something about this place, bizarre and too bright or not, that feels weirdly good.
I think I can't place the feeling, and then I do. It's the lack of a certainty that I tend to carry around like a lead weight: it's not being sure that I can and might be killed at any moment.
Huh.
“Normally,” she goes on, knees drawn up to her chin and eyes fixed on a bright though at least not green thing, maybe a dragonfly, almost too far away to see, “I'd just get this over with. But I kind of don't want to go back, not with things... er, the way they are at the moment, and I had a feeling you wouldn't either anytime soon, so... so I came here.”
“Where's here?” I ask after a pause to try to sort out what she just said. It shouldn't have felt hard to understand, but it did. Things are slower here, I think, and it sets my teeth on edge.
“Not slower timewise,” she replies so fast I'm not sure if I said it out loud after all. (I didn't, but it takes me a second to realize this.) “Time goes faster here than the real world. It's so you don't lose as much, all told, when you come back. It doesn't feel fast though, I guess.”
“No,” I say, and think of going on, you read my mind? but repeat my original question instead. “So, where's here?”
She finally looks away from that all but invisible flying thing. I can't say I welcome the attention. “I thought there might be something wrong with you, you'd stopped asking questions. Not even a 'who are you'. Guess it works on you the way it does on me, this place.” Then, just as I'm getting fed up at more or less last with the constant pausing and the tangents: “We're in a place I keep in my head. I've actually never brought someone else here before, so congratulations I guess.”
That gives me easily half a dozen new questions, which I ignore for the time being; she herself suggested a better one. “Okay,” I go on cautiously. “Next question: Who are you?” What are you avoiding? I want to add, but that seems kind of personal.
Her response is immediate: “My name's not Vali, but it's safe to call me that. I'm here because Iall won't let me alone lately.”
It takes me a frustrating second to place the name, but when I do it comes up easily and with a series of associations, borrowed ones, that are somewhat horrifying. I stay with the least threatening one, one I don't even recognize, Daisy half-crying with rage and speaking far too calmly, one sleeve pushed up to show a fine network of pink-white scars: What, you mean the one who brought me there and convicted me and tortured me and--?
I do mean him, it seems.
(Could that be what's happening in the real world, maybe, while I'm here in some bizarrely volatile young woman's head?)
It's hard to explain the way these associations work for me. I can borrow things Daisy knows, sometimes, but they come with the way she feels about him; the way she feels about this Iall is a wash of acid and the mad scrambling urge to kill something. Not a particularly pleasant sensation, and the furious acidic panic transfers to me whether I want it or not.
(Though, considering that this anger snaps me out of the sleepiness that comes with this strange place, I can't say I'm exactly complaining.)
“Who are you,” I repeat, “and how do you know Iall?”
She looks at me tiredly. “Oh, right,” she says, and her voice is sour. “You're hers.”
“Yes,” I reply without being sure what I'm agreeing to, but the acid retreats and offers a singing surety that this is the answer I want. Obviously the shadow of Daisy in my head approves. “I'm hers.”
“Then I've got some explaining to do.” Vali draws her knees up to her chest again and rocks back and forth as if trying to figure out how to begin.
- - -
When she does begin, what she starts with is: “Please don't go insane or hit me or anything until I've finished talking, all right?” and doesn't go on until I nod cautiously.
“I'm a Fate,” she says, suddenly very concerned indeed with twirling her off-white hair around one finger and not looking anywhere near me. “To be specific, I'm the Rain Lady's daughter. I'm only maybe a hundred and fifty years older than the one you call Daisy, I've lost parts of it though. And - do you know what Untainted means?”
I honestly can't answer that. I know I should the way I knew I should know who Iall is, but this time there's not even the vaguest of impressions coming to my rescue. “Guess I don't.”
She sighs heavily. “They're the ones whose lives have been stripped out of the actual fate of the world. They don't exist to mortals anymore at all. We don't exist to mortals anymore, I should say. I was supposed to be one of them. It got botched.”
“Botched how?” I ask automatically, and then, since I don't want her to read my mind and answer that, “And who's Iall, really? Everything I know is really, really vague.”
“Oh, well, they got me out of the world but it hurt and messed me up pretty bad,” Vali says cheerfully. “I've still got the Taint - that's, y'know, a personality and the ability to go against ourselves and everything - and how, but I'm useful even if I can't touch raw fate like an Untainted is supposed to be.”
“I'm torn between asking 'useful how' or demanding an answer to my second question.” Hopefully my voice sounds as dry-in-a-good-way as it did in my head; for some reason I do care about what impression I make on her.
“Both'll come up, don't worry,” she replies, sounding like the dark tone she's got going is something she's not even aware of. “I'm useful in that I can see the future, and I am not-Untainted the way Iall is or Zane was. So now I can explain who they are.”
- - -
Only she doesn't; it's pretty obvious that she's having a lot of trouble figuring out how to put this. It makes it easier to think that when she says so. Confirmation is a lovely thing.
Iall, she starts to say uncertainly, is er, is um, is - this reminds me of something, her stuttering does. It suits her better, I have to say. Eventually she goes on and the real explanation is so short I wonder why it took her so long to get to it.
The way she ended up saying it could go somewhat like this:
She's a Fate; Iall's in charge of them; Zane was before him; both are, as Daisy would probably summarize it, nasty bastards indeed. To be in charge of the Fates you have to have been what she called the First among the Untainted (and then shivered like she didn't even know she was doing it). The Untainted, she went on, kicking her feet against the bench she'd come up with, were demigods who'd been taken out of history, which took away their personalities and meant they could touch the, um...
Then she couldn't figure out how to go on and she waved her hands awkwardly to try to illustrate it. “There's threads and they make up the word - world, I mean. Word works too, they can work as books but that's not pure and this is and oh by my parents it's amazing--”
Threads. Right. I'm sure it's far more impressive if you've actually seen it, actually important if you've had the white-colorless light of it seared into your eyes - I can almost see it, though I don't want to, so that's why the almost I guess.
The image in my head is extremely familiar. Considering what I am I shouldn't be surprised.
She swore by her parents because at least one of them was a god. She didn't mention which, though, which I suppose is her right. All of the Fates were half-god. Demigod, such things were called (things, she specified cheerfully, because they really weren't human, not better or worse - a bit more efficient, maybe, they lasted longer, but different - or even animal, and certainly not plant, or did she look like a fern or something? I somehow doubt she'd make a very good fern).
It took a while to dawn on me, vague and kind of silvery, that this meant Daisy was one of them. As commentary went all I could manage was a rather weak interesting. (It was, though.)
When she hit that point she stopped and went back to kicking the bench. Eventually she went on.
Something had gone wrong, for once through no fault of her own (she actually said that, as well), when they'd tried to turn her Untainted, something like - pause, and not a pause I liked - ninety years ago. Around, she contributed helpfully, when “that thing you call Daisy” (this time the word thing actually had some vitriol in) was between being born and being ten years old. It made her more different from the others than, say, Zane and Iall, who were just Untainted not-exactly-people who could remember who they used to be. Vali, she said, as they called her most of them time now, could see the future. Sort of. The present, sometimes.
Oh, and if she touched a line of fate it caught on fire.
- - -
“Your thing,” she says cheerfully, “your girl I guess, it's not like that specifies personhood, just, um, gender, or are you her boy, really? Anyway, that Daisy, she was...” She folds her legs up again and puts her chin on her knees until she finds the right words. “A thrice-damned monster!”
I've listened to her for - what? An hour? An hour - maybe an hour - here, that is, with the slightly blurred plants waving gently (one of them snapped a fly out of the air) - less in the real world, if she's telling the truth. At any rate I'm getting somewhat impatient.
It's just as well that she goes on. “See, she started tinkering, I don't even know why, I mean why would you do something like that-” The desperation in her voice is slightly worse than the self-absorbed panic that came up when she was begging me to tell her she was managing humanity decently. “She started changing things in with fate itself, I mean the big bits, the braids, not just the threads, and Iall had to set her out but-”
“But what?” I ask, slightly hoarse for no reason I can tell, wondering vaguely if this is the question that will get me some real answers as far as why Daisy is the way she is goes.
“He's sort of obsessed with her,” she confesses. “It's very weird. I mean, you're supposed to only give the exiles so many chances, but he visits and he visits and he says it's to make sure she remembers but I think he wants her back.”
“Okay.” I rub my temples with one hand, head spinning slightly. “Now, why are you telling me this?”
“Because,” she says, eyes bright. “If he wants your Daisy, it's for a reason. And I'm sick of his reasons. And,” she adds, “From what I've seen I rather like you. I--” a glance to one side at something only she can see “--have to go soon, so pick your next question really carefully, it'll be your last, okay?”
“What am I?”
The answer is close to what I suspected.
- - -
“My real name was Valencia,” is the very last thing Valencia tells me.
I wake up.
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 1,064
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: A Box For The Boy Made Of Thought (1/3)
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes.
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #6: disillusionment.
Characters: Carla (who is far too jaded for all of this), Daisy (who should keep a better eye out), Matt (who is over here).
Toppings / Extras / Other: Malt: Prompts From a Hat [6: disillusionment // Carla, Katerina, {random Fate}, Daisy, Matt: the nightmare room].
Notes: Lozenge is a funny word. Also, as I pre-code this on June 17, I just realized that Forsaken is a decent song for these main three -- no, each of them at different points --, so I'll send you into the first big turning point with that on your mind! (Uh, assuming you're familiar with the song Forsaken. ...It's pretty?) In other news, I wonder if I've managed to hide at all the fact that most of ifupdown's plot exists because of these PFaH prompts. Somehow I doubt it. *lampshade*
In the back of my head there's a box. Inside that box is absolute nothingness, nonexistence, painful and clear and horrifying.
Daisy puts me in this box as easily as some kid might put away an unwanted toy, and my body flickers away like a thought.
Very much like a thought, in fact.
- - -
Carla catches a shriek in her throat; it comes out as a sort of panicked squeak, instead. “What the hell did you do to him?” she asks, voice shrill. (I have to say, in any other context I'd be pleased I made such an impression.)
“Put him away for safekeeping,” Daisy says like it's no great thing, and laughs. I think it's a horrible laugh, but I've never liked her sense of humor.
“Right.” Carla's still nervous but the panic's ebbing rapidly; her time with Daisy when the latter was called Zei had, among other things, made her unable to hold on to fear for long, and it shows. Soon the adrenaline will be just another memory; she must be incredibly unflappable on rollercoasters.
“I am going to give you your explanation, you know,” Daisy comments, and sits on the floor, staring glassily up at the ceiling. “Just... didn't want him to hear it...” Her face contorts briefly as pain stabs her three times between the eyebrows and is gone. “And, to be honest, I don't know where to start.”
“At the beginning?” Carla suggests, straight-faced through witchcraft or some miracle.
“Don't be stupid,” she snaps, idly tracing a pattern on the very slightly dusty linoleum floor. “I don't want this to take longer than it absolutely has to.”
- - -
Admittedly, though she doesn't start at the beginning - how could she? - or even at her own beginning, the heavily abridged story Daisy tells does start at a beginning.
Then again, most stories do.
- - -
“I was the daughter of a god called the Faceless Man,” Daisy says, making shapes with her hands in the air that repeat over and over again, matching the cadence of her voice (such as it is). “Also of a human woman of little importance to you now but who named me Katerina. Kat. This was, I guess, upwards of a hundred years ago--” the pattern of her fingers fumbles for a millisecond, something only she can see, and goes on “--which makes me the youngest demigod alive or dead, for what it's worth.
“At the age of twenty-seven I killed my half-brother Darren, with whom I had a pretty old - I mean, relatively speaking - grudge for the fact that he'd repeatedly tried to get me killed as well as having forced me to leave the closest to a home I had.” Over her still-moving hands she glances up at Carla and goes on defensively, “Also he threw a bomb at me.”
Carla says nothing, and after an uncomfortable silence Daisy rediscovers her train of thought.
“Shortly after that I became Fate. The how and the why aren't particularly important either, and even if they were, I'd still not tell you. At the time a … man's not the right word … named Zane was in charge, occupying the post we called - they call - First. The Second who followed him shortly before I left was bizarre - is, I should say, he's there now, if by the grace of my father saying his name doesn't alert him somehow - and by some fluke of personality charismatic enough that this took me a long time to notice. His name's Iall.”
Her hands whirl so quickly they're a blur.
“I know he was still Second when I... Look. What I did was treason--” she speaks as if defending herself not to, as before, what she believes Carla is thinking, but against some shadowy and official-looking crowd of accusers “--and it was wrong, and it was pointless. I started changing the future in tiny ways that struck my fancy as it passed into the present.” She grins briefly, single row of sharpened teeth as sharklike as she can ever manage. “It was an amazing feeling, too, I'll give you that.
“Thing is, the lightest punishment for that sort of thing - the sentence I ended up with - is torture, having your past stripped out of history, and exile into the mortal world.
“So here I am,” she finishes abruptly and somehow slightly weak, the motion of her fingertips listless and slow once more, the ending sharp because it isn't really. Not yet.
“How long ago was this?” asks Carla. Amazement doesn't really stick to her mind for too long either, and if it did this time she's certainly not going to let Daisy see that.
“I don't know,” Daisy confesses. “I think I've been here around twenty-five years. It gets fuzzy.”
Carla nods. “And this Iall guy, he--”
“Shows up in my dreams.” Daisy's voice is clear and without emotion as her hands speed up again, wrists just barely clicking as they turn. “Sometimes to remind me. Sometimes to talk at me, for the lack of anyone else.” A pause, as her fingers begin to blur again. “Sometimes to hurt me.” Pause. “Most of the time to try to get me to go back to them. Him.”
“Why?” Carla inquires, her head buzzing slightly, her voice calm.
“Because he says the gods are dying--” Daisy's voice is dreamy and childlike, now “--and he'd need such as me to kill them so the world does not end, slowly, with them. Maybe it is already.”
One more pause, as Carla stares.
“At least, that's what he says.” Her hands stop.
- - -
Awkwardly, Carla says, “Your voice is pretty rough. Do you want water, or I don't know, a lozenge or something?”
“No.” Daisy's rasping quite a bit, that's true. “I'm fine.”
“Good,” Carla replies. “Only I don't have any lozenges anyway and I wouldn't have given you water if you'd asked.”
- - -
And I know all of this because, if you think about it in the right way, I never left at all.
Author: C
Rating: PG13
Wordcount: 3,074
Story / World: ifupdown ( index)
Title: A Sort Of Friend For The Boy Made Of Thought
Counts for the Summer Challenge? Yes. 4k day ftw (again)!
Prompts: Dark Chocolate #24: neglect.
Characters: Valencia (who is convenient), Daisy (who has an alternate character interpretation), Matt (who is confused); mention also of Zane (who is dead) and Iall (who is... Iall)
Toppings / Extras / Other: Malt: Prompts From a Hat [24: neglect // {random Fate}, Matt: the train goes nowhere but it goes there fast].
Notes: Now With: What Vali (And Kala) Look/s Like To Other People (okay, depends which people is which. But she and Daisy would have a great mutual creepout circuit going.) And now you can go back and reread 3/3 and maybe it'll make sense! Well, as much sense as my posts ever make :3
“That's really not very nice of her, is it?” a voice says. I'm too tired (and I hurt, but I can keep telling myself it's for unimportant reasons; this is, after all, my not-a-dream) to really answer, or even look up; the voice is somewhere around a foot and a half up from what I think is my right shoulder.
Or maybe it's not. I don't exactly have any visual cues to help me. Inside the not-a-box where I am (hence why this is not-a-dream; the hyphens make it special) it's completely dark, and I can't bring myself to look over my shoulder and into more darkness at the (female, I think) voice's point of origin. Apparent point of origin, that should be; all of this is really originating in my head.
Or in Daisy's head.
I mean, probably it is.
As I think these frantically backpedaling thoughts I don't notice that the blackness isn't black anymore until it's well on the way to substance and color. Looking around my awareness of what it's trying to turn into lets it (maybe, that is; to my way of thinking) do so, and suddenly I've been sitting on a white stone bench in the middle of a somewhat bizarre park all along.
By “somewhat bizarre” I mean it looks like what you'd get if you gave a kid with severe synathesia who had only read vague descriptions of gardens - or, for that matter, of plants and animals - to make you one. The colors seemed to have tastes in the back of my throat, vague ones, and there was a buzz in my ears no matter what I looked at. I could also mean, though, “containing a young woman in a white dress who sort of vaulted over the back of this bench and against all odds landed neatly and sitting down”. Because, you see, she just did, so both meanings though frankly esoteric are quite accurate.
My mysterious voice, this is, I assume. I turn towards her casually (after all, this is not a dream but it's mine, so I should get to enjoy for once understanding a situation). “What are you supposed to be, my subconscious?”
“Do you have one?” she asks politely. Her irises are off-white circles without pupils and she smiles uncertainly but doesn't blink. After a slight pause: “Would it be a girl?”
“Search me,” I say, grinning just slightly. “Daisy's subconscious?”
“Who's--” she starts, then cuts off like she knows already. Well, she'd better know already if she's in my head; turning up in the middle without directions or any idea of the persons involved is rude, and Daisy is definitely a main character. (I think of saying this, in the few seconds before she goes back to talking.) She goes on as if she has a bad taste in her mouth and a burned tongue to boot, “Her? Merciful... no. Very much no. What's with the fixation on subconscious... es?”
“I'm dreaming, aren't I?” I reply, figuring this should be answer enough.
It's a good question.
I don't feel like explaining the whole not-a-dream thing to her. Doing so, it looks like, might involve figuring out why - just for one thing - this feels so familiar when I've never been here before.
After all, I don't even dream.
“No,” she tells me, grinning. Her teeth are fluoride-white and too even; normal people don't have thirty-two identical teeth. I point this out and she shuts her mouth immediately but her lips are still smiling and it still doesn't reach her eyes.
Her answer, at any rate, to this is another question: “Why thirty-two?” Then she looks, all of a sudden, extremely defensive, and when she speaks she sounds the part: “Anyway I always get something slightly wrong. Or a lot of things slightly wrong. Teeth aren't so bad, are they?” She frowns, looks down at her hands quickly, then glares at me. “They aren't, right? The rest is okay? Tell me the rest is okay!”
I lean backward as far as I can. It's only when angry that she actually looks like Daisy very much at all, that I can see why she reminded me of her, and Daisy for one is actually frightening, but I don't think I've ever liked fights and right now they could be sisters. Best to calm her down. “Yeah,” I say quickly, “You're fine, you look really human.”
This seems to be what she wants to hear, thankfully enough. “Good. Thank you.”
Of course, I'm lying. There's nothing else like her teeth that I can put my figurative finger on - except, maybe, those eyes, and in that case the finger had better be figurative - but she's got that weird slight wrongness and sense of dead plasticity. It's one of those things that's impossible to understand if you haven't seen it, I think, and if you've never seen the actual real thing you'd never know the difference.
But I've got a vague idea that's something one can't help if you have it. (I'm very good at just knowing things when I'm not-exactly-dreaming, it seems. Maybe I should ask Daisy to force me into this more often.)
I realize I've been staring at her - actually staring past her left shoulder, but there you go - for a while and look away into the weird greenery.
Most of it is just that - something like, I don't know, a fairly normal park a couple years ago that has been left to its own devices for too long - but too bright. It almost hurts my eyes to even glance at, and so it takes me a while to realize that a fern here and a vine there - I'd swear there's no pattern to it - is moving, and not in the same direction. There's no wind.
“Sorry about that,” she says distantly, and doesn't sound sorry at all. Not that I particularly mind; there's something about this place, bizarre and too bright or not, that feels weirdly good.
I think I can't place the feeling, and then I do. It's the lack of a certainty that I tend to carry around like a lead weight: it's not being sure that I can and might be killed at any moment.
Huh.
“Normally,” she goes on, knees drawn up to her chin and eyes fixed on a bright though at least not green thing, maybe a dragonfly, almost too far away to see, “I'd just get this over with. But I kind of don't want to go back, not with things... er, the way they are at the moment, and I had a feeling you wouldn't either anytime soon, so... so I came here.”
“Where's here?” I ask after a pause to try to sort out what she just said. It shouldn't have felt hard to understand, but it did. Things are slower here, I think, and it sets my teeth on edge.
“Not slower timewise,” she replies so fast I'm not sure if I said it out loud after all. (I didn't, but it takes me a second to realize this.) “Time goes faster here than the real world. It's so you don't lose as much, all told, when you come back. It doesn't feel fast though, I guess.”
“No,” I say, and think of going on, you read my mind? but repeat my original question instead. “So, where's here?”
She finally looks away from that all but invisible flying thing. I can't say I welcome the attention. “I thought there might be something wrong with you, you'd stopped asking questions. Not even a 'who are you'. Guess it works on you the way it does on me, this place.” Then, just as I'm getting fed up at more or less last with the constant pausing and the tangents: “We're in a place I keep in my head. I've actually never brought someone else here before, so congratulations I guess.”
That gives me easily half a dozen new questions, which I ignore for the time being; she herself suggested a better one. “Okay,” I go on cautiously. “Next question: Who are you?” What are you avoiding? I want to add, but that seems kind of personal.
Her response is immediate: “My name's not Vali, but it's safe to call me that. I'm here because Iall won't let me alone lately.”
It takes me a frustrating second to place the name, but when I do it comes up easily and with a series of associations, borrowed ones, that are somewhat horrifying. I stay with the least threatening one, one I don't even recognize, Daisy half-crying with rage and speaking far too calmly, one sleeve pushed up to show a fine network of pink-white scars: What, you mean the one who brought me there and convicted me and tortured me and--?
I do mean him, it seems.
(Could that be what's happening in the real world, maybe, while I'm here in some bizarrely volatile young woman's head?)
It's hard to explain the way these associations work for me. I can borrow things Daisy knows, sometimes, but they come with the way she feels about him; the way she feels about this Iall is a wash of acid and the mad scrambling urge to kill something. Not a particularly pleasant sensation, and the furious acidic panic transfers to me whether I want it or not.
(Though, considering that this anger snaps me out of the sleepiness that comes with this strange place, I can't say I'm exactly complaining.)
“Who are you,” I repeat, “and how do you know Iall?”
She looks at me tiredly. “Oh, right,” she says, and her voice is sour. “You're hers.”
“Yes,” I reply without being sure what I'm agreeing to, but the acid retreats and offers a singing surety that this is the answer I want. Obviously the shadow of Daisy in my head approves. “I'm hers.”
“Then I've got some explaining to do.” Vali draws her knees up to her chest again and rocks back and forth as if trying to figure out how to begin.
- - -
When she does begin, what she starts with is: “Please don't go insane or hit me or anything until I've finished talking, all right?” and doesn't go on until I nod cautiously.
“I'm a Fate,” she says, suddenly very concerned indeed with twirling her off-white hair around one finger and not looking anywhere near me. “To be specific, I'm the Rain Lady's daughter. I'm only maybe a hundred and fifty years older than the one you call Daisy, I've lost parts of it though. And - do you know what Untainted means?”
I honestly can't answer that. I know I should the way I knew I should know who Iall is, but this time there's not even the vaguest of impressions coming to my rescue. “Guess I don't.”
She sighs heavily. “They're the ones whose lives have been stripped out of the actual fate of the world. They don't exist to mortals anymore at all. We don't exist to mortals anymore, I should say. I was supposed to be one of them. It got botched.”
“Botched how?” I ask automatically, and then, since I don't want her to read my mind and answer that, “And who's Iall, really? Everything I know is really, really vague.”
“Oh, well, they got me out of the world but it hurt and messed me up pretty bad,” Vali says cheerfully. “I've still got the Taint - that's, y'know, a personality and the ability to go against ourselves and everything - and how, but I'm useful even if I can't touch raw fate like an Untainted is supposed to be.”
“I'm torn between asking 'useful how' or demanding an answer to my second question.” Hopefully my voice sounds as dry-in-a-good-way as it did in my head; for some reason I do care about what impression I make on her.
“Both'll come up, don't worry,” she replies, sounding like the dark tone she's got going is something she's not even aware of. “I'm useful in that I can see the future, and I am not-Untainted the way Iall is or Zane was. So now I can explain who they are.”
- - -
Only she doesn't; it's pretty obvious that she's having a lot of trouble figuring out how to put this. It makes it easier to think that when she says so. Confirmation is a lovely thing.
Iall, she starts to say uncertainly, is er, is um, is - this reminds me of something, her stuttering does. It suits her better, I have to say. Eventually she goes on and the real explanation is so short I wonder why it took her so long to get to it.
The way she ended up saying it could go somewhat like this:
She's a Fate; Iall's in charge of them; Zane was before him; both are, as Daisy would probably summarize it, nasty bastards indeed. To be in charge of the Fates you have to have been what she called the First among the Untainted (and then shivered like she didn't even know she was doing it). The Untainted, she went on, kicking her feet against the bench she'd come up with, were demigods who'd been taken out of history, which took away their personalities and meant they could touch the, um...
Then she couldn't figure out how to go on and she waved her hands awkwardly to try to illustrate it. “There's threads and they make up the word - world, I mean. Word works too, they can work as books but that's not pure and this is and oh by my parents it's amazing--”
Threads. Right. I'm sure it's far more impressive if you've actually seen it, actually important if you've had the white-colorless light of it seared into your eyes - I can almost see it, though I don't want to, so that's why the almost I guess.
The image in my head is extremely familiar. Considering what I am I shouldn't be surprised.
She swore by her parents because at least one of them was a god. She didn't mention which, though, which I suppose is her right. All of the Fates were half-god. Demigod, such things were called (things, she specified cheerfully, because they really weren't human, not better or worse - a bit more efficient, maybe, they lasted longer, but different - or even animal, and certainly not plant, or did she look like a fern or something? I somehow doubt she'd make a very good fern).
It took a while to dawn on me, vague and kind of silvery, that this meant Daisy was one of them. As commentary went all I could manage was a rather weak interesting. (It was, though.)
When she hit that point she stopped and went back to kicking the bench. Eventually she went on.
Something had gone wrong, for once through no fault of her own (she actually said that, as well), when they'd tried to turn her Untainted, something like - pause, and not a pause I liked - ninety years ago. Around, she contributed helpfully, when “that thing you call Daisy” (this time the word thing actually had some vitriol in) was between being born and being ten years old. It made her more different from the others than, say, Zane and Iall, who were just Untainted not-exactly-people who could remember who they used to be. Vali, she said, as they called her most of them time now, could see the future. Sort of. The present, sometimes.
Oh, and if she touched a line of fate it caught on fire.
- - -
“Your thing,” she says cheerfully, “your girl I guess, it's not like that specifies personhood, just, um, gender, or are you her boy, really? Anyway, that Daisy, she was...” She folds her legs up again and puts her chin on her knees until she finds the right words. “A thrice-damned monster!”
I've listened to her for - what? An hour? An hour - maybe an hour - here, that is, with the slightly blurred plants waving gently (one of them snapped a fly out of the air) - less in the real world, if she's telling the truth. At any rate I'm getting somewhat impatient.
It's just as well that she goes on. “See, she started tinkering, I don't even know why, I mean why would you do something like that-” The desperation in her voice is slightly worse than the self-absorbed panic that came up when she was begging me to tell her she was managing humanity decently. “She started changing things in with fate itself, I mean the big bits, the braids, not just the threads, and Iall had to set her out but-”
“But what?” I ask, slightly hoarse for no reason I can tell, wondering vaguely if this is the question that will get me some real answers as far as why Daisy is the way she is goes.
“He's sort of obsessed with her,” she confesses. “It's very weird. I mean, you're supposed to only give the exiles so many chances, but he visits and he visits and he says it's to make sure she remembers but I think he wants her back.”
“Okay.” I rub my temples with one hand, head spinning slightly. “Now, why are you telling me this?”
“Because,” she says, eyes bright. “If he wants your Daisy, it's for a reason. And I'm sick of his reasons. And,” she adds, “From what I've seen I rather like you. I--” a glance to one side at something only she can see “--have to go soon, so pick your next question really carefully, it'll be your last, okay?”
“What am I?”
The answer is close to what I suspected.
- - -
“My real name was Valencia,” is the very last thing Valencia tells me.
I wake up.