Strangetown, Here We Come: Free Will
Warnings: language, brief reference to religion, minor sexual innuendo (Really, that's all. I was surprised, too, considering the characters involved.)
Tank picked up his toaster pastry and snapped it in two, placing one half back down on his plate.
He liked to eat them that way, from the centre out towards the edge. He always had. They seemed to taste better that way to him for some reason, but he didn't know why. Moreover, he didn't really care.
"Are you going to eat that?"
Tank quickly smacked away the offending hand that had been reaching towards his reserved toaster pastry half.
"Do you live here now, or what?" he said, "because I don't remember asking you to move in."
Beau simply smiled back with that grin that was almost always plastered across his by now all too familiar face.
Tank picked up a votive holder from the table and turned it over in his hand like it was something he'd tracked in on his shoe. Beau had a way of making himself at home, even in someone else's house, and evidence of his handiwork was all around. He'd even started feeding a stray cat, so now Tank was stuck with it.
"Frances, call off your puppy, would you?" Tank called into the living room. "He's trying to eat my breakfast."
"You're on your own," Frances said, without missing a beat. "He's not house-trained."
"Hah hah, very funny," said Beau. "You two should form a comedy troupe."
Tank went back to eating his breakfast in silence, as he preferred it, knowing Beau would never take the hint and it wouldn't last. Beau played along for longer than Tank had expected him to, perusing a business magazine that he'd seemingly produced out of thin air.
"Hey, you know, they're bringing out this new line of modified Servos as a sort of sentient household appliance now. You should look into getting one of these new housekeeping extensions for Tits. Yeah, she could make us breakfast and clean the house and stuff."
"You obviously weren't here when she tried to cook the other day, were you?"
"No, I was," Beau said.
"Why am I not surprised?" Tank was beginning to think he never left.
Beau ignored this and went on. "Yeah, I was here. I didn't think it was half bad."
"You're fucking kidding me. The eggs still had shells on them."
So far, Sugar Tits had proven herself to be just about as useful to him as Tank had expected her to be, with her having more or less an exact duplicate of Ripp's personality. Perhaps just a little less useful.
"Beau will eat anything," Frances said, as he joined then.
Tank smirked, despite himself. "Yeah, I'll bet he will."
Beau smacked Tank in the shoulder. "Oh, be good."
"God, I'm spending way too much time with you. My mind is so tainted."
"Tainted...," Beau snerked.
Tank groaned. "Eghh, I need more coffee."
Beau turned his attention back to Frances. "How was your yoga thingie?"
"Practise," Frances corrected him. "Again, it was great once you stopped hovering around, giggling suggestively."
Beau snerked again and glanced over at Tank, who was already getting up for the kitchen, and using his own form of yoga-like concentration to avoid reacting. "Can you blame me?" Beau said, "Some of those poses are so..."
Frances sighed and shook his head. "You're hopeless."
After a minute or two, Frances began, "Do you ever think about free will vs. destiny? Like whether we actually have conscious control over our lives?"
"Ruminating again, dear?" Beau said. "I thought your therapist recommended yoga as a way to help you with that."
"It was something one of the other students was talking about after yoga class the other day. I mean, you know how I usually just shut out the conversation after someone gets into the idea of a higher power?"
"MmmHmmm. Sure do. God, Santa, and the Social Bunny. Heard it all before, Franny Poo."
"Well, I don't know, some of the things she was saying... it really does seem like some days there's this unseen hand guiding my actions. Religious nonsense aside, sometimes I do feel like I'm being propelled through someone else's story. Like tumbling dominoes, we all fall into place. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, sure," Beau said.
"I don't know. Other days, not so much. It's like it switches on and off." He turned to where Tank had returned with his coffee. "What do you think?"
"I don't."
"Fair enough."
"This yoga stuff's really getting under your skin, huh?" Beau said.
"Not really. It just got me thinking. You ever do that?"
"Think? Never."
"That's for damn sure," Tank added.
"Don't be a smartass," Frances said. "About free will and whether we have it or not."
"Sure I do. Sometimes."
"And?"
"Well, obviously I'm a big proponent of free will, otherwise I'd have accepted my fate to be poor forever and not have bothered to work to change that. I mean, yeah. I'm not exactly a card-carrying atheist like someone I know, but I think I have control over my own life, definitely."
"Yes, and I didn't have to follow the path my parents set out for me. I chose not to... right?"
"Yeah, that was all you," Beau beamed. "Your finest moment, I'd say."
"Still... sometimes it just seems like the cards are just being played a certain way. I don't know. Was that really a choice? Or did I just stumble on it? I almost felt like it was just happening to me and I was being pulled along whether I wanted to or not."
"Can't it be both?"
"How's that?"
"You know what I think? We do have the ability to direct our own lives, but sometimes there's an unseen hand..."
"...It's like it switches on and off, like you said. Or we're in control, puttering along, and then--wham! Something pulls us in another direction and we don't really know what compels us. And sometimes..."
"What?"
"Well, I don't know if I've ever told you this. It's weird. Yeah, and you're usually not that into unexplained otherworldly stuff."
"Like... ghosts?" Frances raised an eyebrow.
"Yeah, like that."
"Well, go ahead. Please. Don't let me stop you."
"Well, it was my Dad, right. He died when I was still a baby, so I didn't see this for myself or anything, but I heard my Mom talking about it to one of her friends once...
He drowned in our pool. Completely unexplained, and he was a good swimmer. He was happy, too, you know. No reason for... anyway, when Mom found him, she swears that the ladder wasn't there. She ran around looking for it and everything. Then she shook herself off and saw that it was. It had been there all along... or had it? Maybe it was shock, but do we really know?"
Frances wasn't sure what to say to that. He felt sorry for Beau's loss, but didn't know how to say that without it sounding too much like pity. And Beau rarely spoke about his father, so he didn't want to have that window of opportunity slam shut in his face. While Frances searched for the right words, Beau scanned his kind, blank expression and drew his own conclusions.
"You think I'm so out to lunch right now."
"No, I'm just... sorry."
"It's okay. I was a baby, right? I don't even remember him"
Frances would have to leave it at that, for now.
"But I looked into this pool and ladder thing," Beau went on, "and it seems that others have experienced the same thing. Yeah, it's like this... thing that seems to happen to some people. There's like forums for it online and stuff."
"Really?"
"Yeah, that's crazy, right? There's no way that could actually happen. You don't believe that... right?"
Frances threw his hands up. "Before I met Tank, I didn't believe in aliens, and you see how that worked out."
"Hey, I'm trying to eat here." Tank said.
"Now now. Be nice." Beau said.
After they'd gone back to their toaster pastries for several moments, Frances shrugged. "I don't know. That whole idea, that our lives are predetermined by some unseen force, it's a bit out there. The girl who brought it up was a real hippy type. I mean, her name was Blossom Moonbeam."
"Really?" Beau said, "That's awesome."
"That's nothing. You should have seen her. And her boyfriend was even better. His last name was Starchild."
"Wow."
"You'd have loved them."
"I'll bet."
It was at that moment that Tank decided that the gossip level had gotten far too high for his liking, so he quietly got up, collected the empty plates as he always did without even thinking about it, and left them to it.
Notes:
This takes place around the same time as the beginning of Chapter Twenty-Eight, which is a month or so after everyone graduates from college (well, not Beau and those kids, but those who were teens at game start). Frances is still living with Tank, while looking for a place to live in Sim City, where he works. As of this scene, Tank hasn't yet revealed his troubling secret to Frances, because then it might not have made sense for me not to reference that somewhere in this discussion. *ahem*
This might end up in a chapter one day, or it might stand alone. Either way, it is story-relevant.
Beau really doesn't live there, but as Tank said, he may as well. Funny how Tank moved in with Kendall back in the day partly to get away from them, because he felt sort of uncomfortable with them as a couple, only to have them move right back in on him after he moves back home. And it's sort of normal to him by this point. How quickly things change.
I've been writing for this story a lot lately. Bits and pieces for future chapters, and outlines of how I'm going to finish some of the images for the next chapter in a simplified manner. This short took much longer to put together than it used to for me, because I really have to do it in fits and starts, as I need some uninterrupted time at the computer to play the game and take the images and that's really hard to come by these days. Writing is a little easier, because I can keep my notebook handy while I do other things.
I'm really happy to share something of this story world again, and I hope you've enjoyed reading it. Thank you, as always, and I'd love to hear any reactions and feedback you may have. :)