The Alphabet Soup Drabble Challenge, Letters J-R
Post two.
10. "Just Dance" by Lady GaGa: Runaways
so many women without a flaw
"I'm just gonna say this now, because I can't be the only one thinking this," Chase began, in the kind of nonchalant tone that immediately put Nico on alert. "But Victor, my man, does an android ... you know, function the same way a regular guy does? And does it mean your sperm are, like, superpowered or, like, little hunter-seeker robots or something with, like, sonar to make them better than all the other sperm? And while we're on the subject, how does that even work? I mean, did your dad, like, have your entire sexual life planned out when --"
Nico's hand snapped out in a universal "stop!" motion, cutting Chase short. "One more word out of your mouth that has anything to do with Victor or his sperm, whatever shape they might be in, and I will skewer you and serve you up with barbeque sauce," she threatened, making Victor's lips quirk in bemusement and Old Lace to snake her head around with a worried whine.
+++++
11. "Kashmir" by the London Philharmonic Orchestra: Twilight (Breaking Dawn)
When she woke, she instantly stretched herself taut, spine curving like the arch of a bow, weight support by her heels and neck, mouth open and gasping like a fish. Her arms flailed for purchase, and she was dimly aware of knocking things over, of things crashing to the floor with a terrific noise.
"Easy, easy," she heard, like the low murmur of flies, humming to each other on a windowsill. "She doesn't know where she is."
"She's probably still remembering the fire. Poor thing."
"I thought you said the morphine was supposed to help with that!"
"I lied. Well, Bella lied. She had the decency to tell me before I tried the same trick with this young one."
"Bella ... lied?"
"Don't look at me like that, Edward. It's the past now."
"I think you just have to suffer no matter what. Being a vampire can't be that easy, you know!"
"Emmett, shh! She's coming around!"
She tried to brush off their voices, but she found she could hear them all, as well as the murmur of a refrigerator, the buzz of the overhead light, every rustling tree branch outside the window, every creak in the house's tired old bones. She couldn't tune them out, she couldn't hear any of them fainter than the other. Just sound, present in her ears, and she recognized it all instantly.
She relaxed slowly, unfolding from her convoluted shape. She panted. Her throat was dry, and this seemed incredibly important somehow. Impossible to ignore. She clawed at it, rasping hard.
"Ri?" said someone, no longer whispering but talking to her, very clearly. "Ri, can you hear me? I know you're very thirsty, but you have to listen to me."
"Carlisle ..."
"Be careful, Carlisle, please. I can't stop a physical attack."
"It's okay. Jasper, if you please..."
A calm stole over her, and she shook herself, frustrated and trying to fight it. She'd been sleeping for so long. Sleeping and burning. She didn't want to feel calm. She wanted to move! She wanted to stretch! She wanted to bound and bite and she wanted to do something about her aching throat, her cheeks that felt as dry as sandpaper against her teeth!
"Ri, please, answer me if you can hear me. Your name is Ri Chen. Do you remember anything?"
"Carlisle, don't, she's going to --"
She felt it; the faintest vibration, there, close to her head! As if someone had tried to reach out to brush her hair. Immediately, her body responded, and within a fraction of a second, she was on the opposite wall, one hand clasped around a light fixture and the other limbs braced against the window frame and the wall. The light fixture bent with a protesting whine underneath her weight.
Life throbbed in her blood, and she felt it at the ends of her fingers and toes: a pulsing, limitless kind of energy. She bared her teeth, and felt them, there, against her bottom lip: her fangs. She snarled.
"Oh, dear," she heard. "I was fond of that lamp, too."
"It's replacable, Esme."
"Not for cheap, it isn't."
"Since when has money really been a concern for us?"
"Since people started being afraid of it."
"Oh, psh."
"Rosalie, you should start to pay attention to the rumors and the talk in town. It's getting harder and harder to ignore."
"Is now really the time to bring this up, you guys? We can talk about politics after we talk Ri off the ceiling, okay?"
At the sound of her name, she snarled again, a fierce, proud roar that reminded her of an animal. She'd never sound so intimidating before. Another wave of calm hit her, enough that she loosened her grip on the destroyed lamp slightly, so that she slid down the wall a few inches.
"Edward?"
"She's puzzling it together. Her mind's a mess. Give her a moment."
"Bella? How far away is Nessie?"
"She's with Jacob. Farther than the town. And there aren't any hikers out when I scouted this morning. Not that I don't think eight full grown vampires can subdue her if she starts on a hunt."
"Don't get cocky."
"Oh. Oh, I'm sorry, Jasper, I wasn't..."
"Are you sure everything went okay, Carlisle? Her eyes look off."
"They're always going to look like that. If the transformation didn't change them, then nothing will."
"Wow. A blind vampire? That's a first."
"We always do attract the weird ones, don't we?"
"Hey!"
"Hm. I wonder how that's going to affect her."
"She'll probably be incredibly lithe and graceful and she'll make a sexy supermodel and will always be someone to look up to for blind children all across the world. Er, well, bad choice of words, but you get the point I'm trying to make."
"Besides, after Bella, I don't think we're ever going to meet anyone less coordinated, much less a blind person."
"Oh, shut up, Emmett."
"It'll be fine. We just need to make sure we don't rearrange furniture for awhile."
"Thanks, Alice. Does this mean she'll stay with us?"
"It's one of her possibilities, but so are many other things. You can't make up your mind when you don't know what you're supposed to be deciding. Ri?" She tilted her head towards the voice. She'd already distinguished them, categorized them, and many of them had names. She just needed to remember who they were. "Ri, it's okay. No one's going to hurt you."
She licked her lips, and before she could stop it, it slipped out. "I'm thirsty," she whimpered, and gasped. That wasn't her voice! That couldn't be her voice. Oh, god, she couldn't even remember who she was, because that wasn't the voice of the person she understood to be her.
"It'll be strange having someone single around the house again."
"It'll be refreshing. It's okay, Ri. We'll take you hunting here soon. But first, you need to tell us -- do you remember anything about your previous life?"
And then it hit. All at once, a flood of memories, muddy and scarcely distinguishable, like she was looking at them through glass that had been blurred by the rain running down it. She remembered her childhood in snatches of impressions and sounds and familiar smells, like lasagna in the evenings, and the earth underneath her feet. She remembered her mother and her father's voices, remembered them telling her she'd been named after the French word for laughter. She remembered learning to read with her fingertips, remembered walking with a cane. She remembered the times she lived in.
Then she remembered the attack. It had been sudden, in the middle of the street with the summer sun beating down on the top of her head; an explosion like the sound of the earth being ripped apart. She'd flown into the air, struck something hard, and everything after that had gone black.
She remembered waking in a bed, not unlike she had just done, with everything burning. She'd cried and screamed and thrashed, and when she grew exhausted of that, she listened to the impatient words being spoken outside her door. Chemical warfare. Quarantine. Death more than just a probability for all infected. Death imminent.
And then she remembered the doctor, whose arms had pinned her down like cement blocks, kept her from hurting herself. She remembered the choice he offered.
"Doctor Cullen," she said aloud, her voice a question and a statement and a declaration, all in one.
She could feel eight identical, warm smiles as she slid the rest of the way down the wall.
"Yes. Welcome to our coven, Ri Chen. We have a very interesting story, one I hope to tell you someday."
+++++
12. "Last Train to Lhasa (remix)" by Banco de Gaia: a Firefly/Doctor Who/Pokemon Platinum crossover
"Serenity's going to have a baby," she tells him, swaying on by up the ramp and into the ship's belly.
Mal stares after her for a long moment, stylus between his teeth, fingers hovering over the electronic cargo checklist. A stray breeze from the valley below catches at the hem of her skirt, lifting it in a movement too similar to leaves blowing in the wind for Mal's comfort. He snatches the pen from his lips. "I don't think so, darlin'," he says, uselessly. "This is good ship. Faithful ship. She don't go skirtin' around behind my back. We're more loyal to each other than that. And she certainly don't go around making little Serenities. That's a big no." He looks at his ship. "Right?"
River tosses him a smile. "She thinks it's going to heal us. She loves us and we've been so good to her, she says, but she wants us to grow again."
The realization dawns on Mal so fast it's like being shot. He thinks Inara would have been proud of him. No, he corrects himself, she wouldn't have, never mind, because it shouldn't be the first thing that pops into his head. Nevertheless, he frowns at her, and asks, even as her brother comes up the ramp behind him at a slow and wary pace, "How far along are you, albatross?"
She thinks about it, head tilted like she's listening to a song from far away. "About fifteen minutes," she nods.
-
"Your mother has some pretty clever quotes, then, doesn't she?" Anita drew her legs up onto the rim of the fountain, wrapping her arms around her knees. "You're always referring to something she said. Like she's a book you always need to cite." A ghost flashes briefly over her face; books are a bit of a taboo subject these days.
"She was a little strange. Always saying things I didn't understand." She shrugs. "That's what mothers do, I suppose."
Anita smiles, leans her head on top of her knees. Wasn't that a universal truth. "What was her name?"
"River." River's lips twitch.
"What, she named you after herself?"
"No, no, no. The name she gave me was Ruth. I picked River on my own, many years later, when I emigrated out of that galaxy. Changed my name, like it was that easy to change my identity. Like it was going to create a new me. Ruth Tam. Ruth Serenity Tam became River Song who became River Song, professor of archaeology. That's what I picked."
Anita arches an eyebrow. "That's the best you could come up with?"
"Oi!" River protests, splashing her with water from the fountain. "Like you're any better, miss Anita Mann!"
Anita's hands fly up to cover her face as River tries to splash her again. "Hey, now, I didn't get a say in that! That's what my parents picked! Besides, I stopped complaining about it after I met a woman in uni named Anita Dick. My parents seem almost thoughtful in comparison!"
They keep laughing, long after the joke stops being funny, just because they can, just because it feels good to laugh, to hear the sound ringing in the clear, blue, artificial skies.
-
They crouch, low and still and quiet, behind the grating, where Mal and Zoe stashed illegal bankrolls and other undesirable things, like the Tam siblings and the girl who looked into the black.
Ruth presses herself harder into her mother's arms. Her heartbeat pounds against her ears, louder and faster, like it was trying to tell her something, rising to a shout, like people do when they're trying to communicate and can't and get frustrated. On the other side of the grate, she can hear the scuffle of boots. Army issue. Alliance.
Her uncle's arms tighten around both of them as the footsteps grow closer.
"Can't you hear it?" River whispers, her lips parted and her eyes wide, looking at some point beyond the both of them. Outside, Zoe's voice barks with anger and Jayne says something decidedly insulting and unpleasant (then again, he doesn't really come in any other flavor.) Click-click-click went the guns cocking. "Can't you hear it? It's coming."
She turns her head very slowly, looks right at them, and answers their unspoken question. "The sound of drums."
-
The clouds roll in from seemingly nowhere.
"My Manectric would have freaked," Proper Dave lifts one of the slats in her blinds, squinting up at the sky. "Packs of wild Poochyena would bay at the full moon like lunatics, but Manectric. No. They were better than that. They howl only when a thunderstorm was approaching. That's why they built the Weather Institute where they did. With all those Manectric around, the scientists barely had to do any work."
Catching the expression River gives him, he smiles sheepishly. "Sorry. They were my friends. Manectric are kind of like dogs with no noses. I think they're one of few Pokemon who ever escaped my planet: I saw a whole pack of them on Barcelona once, when I was in flight school."
"I know what Manectric are. I've been to your planet."
Proper Dave grins, surprised and delighted. "Really? When? What for?"
She waves this away, smiling and tucking a lot of her rioting hair behind her ear. "The Doctor took me, when we were younger. Said he had a craving for cookies. Lava Cookies, I think they were called. We missed the cookies; came a millennia too early, wound up creating a legend by accident. Have you ever heard of Diagla and Palkia?"
"The Lords of Time and Space, yeah," Proper Dave frowns, trying to see where she was going with this. Then his eyes go as wide as saucers. "Oh, my GOD. You're KIDDING. No way! That was YOU?"
"Yeah. Sorry 'bout that. Although I must admit, you Pokemon Trainer lot sure went bibbledy with the details after we left. Big blue box and the Doctor, and then me, the albatross -- and, er, well, Giratina, too, I suppose, but we don't really talk about him. Sure took a lot of artistic license, didn't you?"
She wanders into the kitchen to put on some tea, laughing at his expression the whole way.
-
"Come on! Come on, come on, come on! Don't tell me you're not curious?" The Doctor grins at her, a mad light to his eyes. She reaches out and pulls him out of the way of a man on a messenger bike, who sails on past them down the sidewalk, ringing his bell. "Even the smallest bit? Insiest bit? Hold on, no, wait, insiest isn't a word for another half-century. Forgot. Sorry."
River shoots a look at the building out of the corner of her eye. She'd seen buildings like them, on the old videos Wash had downloaded off the cortex -- the ones nobody had the heart to erase off Serenity's hard drive -- but seeing them in person was a whole other thing. The air smells different, too: acrid, like bad water.
"You can't not be curious," the Doctor insists, frustrated by her lack of enthusiasm. "Maybe a hundred thousand remaining relics of Earth That Was left in your time, and what do we find but the Alliance keeping tabs on the Tam family for two thousand years because Torchwood told them to? There's no way that isn't just begging to be investigated."
Without waiting for her to process this, he grabs her by the hand and half-drags her up the steps. He rings the doorbell.
River fidgets with the hem of her shirt.
The door opens, and River's eyes snap immediately to her face. It's ridiculous to try and find your own features in a face that has been rotting in a grave for two thousand years by the time you come to possess them, but she can imagine they share the same high, agile cheekbones, if nothing else. But then her attention cuts away: the Doctor has grown stiff and still beside her.
"Yes?" says Lucy Saxon, a little impatiently, bouncing the blue-eyed baby on her hip. "May I help you?"
It's three days later when, tucking a pillow underneath their heads, he tells her his real name: a falling sound, like stars burning out. She tilts her head so that her lips brush the shell of his ear, and whispers her own name back, the name her mother had whispered to her every night with a kiss: a thump and a beat, like the pounding of drums.
-
"Once upon a time," River begins, voice hushed.
"Oh, geez," says Other Dave, because it's the middle of the day and they're eating pasta and one of River's youngest's teddy bears is looking at him from the other end of the table and he doesn't like it one bit. Miss Evangelista leans her head in, looking genuinely interested.
"Once upon a time, Harold Saxon married Lucy Cole. Then Harold turned out to be an evil Time Lord called the Master. He tried to destroy Earth That Was, but it didn't work and he died, not knowing that his wife carried a half-human, half-Time Lord baby. Two thousand years passed, and the Alliance kept tabs on the descendents: an ordinary, high-class family with a stiff British upper lip who eventually come to be called the Tams. Their children are brilliant. Prodigies. One of them becomes a doctor. The other gets tortured by the government, goes woolly, and runs off and becomes a space pirate. She's a psychic: her brain's too big, her mind is filled with too many things, but the rest of her is too human to handle it. She's my mother," she finishes proudly.
Other Dave arches a sardonic, "yeah, and?" eyebrow, but Evangelista's eye pop. "You mean, you're a Time Lord? Lady?" she corrects herself, confused.
"Many, many, many, many times removed, yes," River spreads some more parmesan cheese on her pasta. She waves her fork around when she talks. "The stray gene that gave my mother her inhuman intelligence became magnified in me."
"Oh!" Evangelista's eyes grew wider. "Is that why you're so interested in space exploration?" She catches Other Dave's eye and giggles. "We all just thought it was because you were raised by pirates."
"Lady of Space and a Lord of Time, that's what we were," River says, fondly and a little wistfully, stabbing a noodle and using it to wipe marinara off the edge of her plate.
"Did you travel with him?" Other Dave wants to know. "The Doctor, I mean?"
"Not very long," River confesses, like they were talking about any other relationship. "It was fantastic while it lasted, and I trusted him implicitly, but I wasn't too fond of merely being a companion. Unpleasant cultural connotations with the word, if you know what I mean."
-
River kneels in front of the girl, her fingers finding the neck of the man she cradled in her arms. His pulse beats against her fingertips, and she gives Dawn a reassuring smile. "He'll live," she informs her with the calm, clear note of authority in her voice: one she adopted without even noticing. Nothing like being a time traveler to make you think you're a little bit more important than the average person.
But it's average people like Dawn who save the world every day. The girl glances down briefly at the unconscious Cyrus, who's half-propped up on her knee, limbs akimbo and face the color of ash. A Floatsel curls itself protectively around her back, crouched low to the chalky earth. It's cold at the top of the Spear Pillar, and the ends of Dawn's scarf kick in the breeze.
"He'll live," she repeats, in case she hadn't heard the first time around.
"Yeah," Dawn replies, her tone dry and unshaken. "The idiots usually do."
River grins.
"River!" the Doctor cries from further uphill. "River, you have to hurry! Jack's going to close the rift and we have to be gone before he does! Come on!"
A quick glance over her shoulder tells her that he's standing in the doorway of the TARDIS, brilliant silver spokes of light haloing his figure and shooting into the multi-colored sky. Looking at him, she can almost see how this image came to resemble Diagla. She still has no idea how they got Palkia out of her, though; pink perhaps for her femininity, sure, and the wings because she's an albatross, always has been, but last she checked, her face was not that gruesome.
"Giratina's going to close the rip," she translates for Dawn, pointing at the great fracture in the sky. "And everything's going to return to normal."
"But you'll be gone?"
River's heart throbs at the almost pitiful note in the girl's voice. "You'll still have our legends," she tries to reassure, and unable to help it, she leans forward and kisses Dawn's forehead. "Take care, meimei."
"Good-bye, Palkia," Dawn whispers back, and sits back and watches as River turns and sprints up the incline, half taking the hand the Doctor offered her and half being yanked off her feet in his haste to get her inside.
"Aren't we going to get Jack?" she asks as he races back towards the console, the TARDIS doors swinging shut behind them.
"He's coming to us," he replies brusquely. Mid-stride, he rounds on her. "Where on earth did they get a cross-dimensional temporal locator? That should have rightly ripped the very fabric of that world open! Fascinating world, though -- did you notice that their animals developed the art of instantaneous evolution? It's like an amoeba becomes a furry, warm puppy with big anime eyes in the blink of an eye. Amazing!"
River smiles fondly, jumping over the railing to him. She slides her hand in between his, earning her a quick, toothy smile. "So once we have Jack, where are we going, browncoat?"
+++++
13. "My TV and You" by VAST: Death Note
i was born to stare,
who stares back at me?
The bathroom door doesn't shut all the way because of the chain.
You're tired, says the mirror on the wall.
I am, Raito admits, and can't remember why.
***
When he wakes up, his hands are red as if covered in blood, and it takes him a moment to realize it's the lighting in the room and the play of shadows. He rubs the tips of his fingers together and wonders at how dry they are.
He looks past them, finds L crouched on the opposite couch, watching him with a bowl of Fruit Loops in his lap.
He turns his palm up, fingers out, to show him he still has his fingerprints. He hasn't lost his identity yet.
***
It's easier to breathe.
It takes awhile to learn, though.
***
Raito still shies away from L's touch without knowing why. It makes him curious, he knows, the same kind of burning, gnawing curiosity that he uses when he's going after Kira. It doesn't bode well, he thinks.
He dreams of nothing.
***
"Go to sleep, Ryuuzaki," he snaps, late one night or early one morning, when the air is brittle and his mouth is thick with cotton and he doesn't care what it says. Then, lest it sound like caring even in his half-awake state, he adds, "I can't sleep with your damn light on, and neither of us are any use if we're dog tired."
He can feel L's eyes on him. He stares at the back of the cushions, wide awake now.
He misses his mother. (But only for a moment.)
***
L acts like he has to cross-examine every breath the world takes, like he has to consider every possibility and take precautions like it's the only possibility that's going to come true, like he's watching a dozen and a half more screens than he has in front of him, like no one else should have the responsibility but him.
(He remembers a tennis game. He remembers the sunshine. He remembers L doing all the same calculations about air and wind and ball velocity he was. He remembers losing.)
It occurs to Raito that it must be an exhausting way to live.
***
L holds a sugar cube between his teeth. His tongue gives it a quarter turn, a half turn, a full turn. His eyes cut to Raito, catch him watching. The platter of cubes balanced on his knees tips sideways.
***
His fingers are nearly as broad as his entire head, long and spindly like the limbs of a salt-bent tree, and when they touch lightly upon Raito's face, it's as if he can feel them everywhere. Against his will, his hands tighten along the fabric at L's waist and drags him closer.
"Interesting," says L, his eyes big and black.
"Hm," replies Raito, the way people do with newspapers and curious things. L pulls their mouths together, and Raito responds like a punch -- because he'd been expecting a fight.
It's not so different, really.
***
In the made-up world, with four walls and no privacy and no air, this sandbox of L's and this maze of Kira's, there is no such thing as girls and boys and no need to prefer one over the other.
Here, there is just L and Misa, and, never mind the chain, he knows which one he would rather spend his time with.
***
He nods to show that he heard, following the pull of steel and iron at the end of L's chain into the hallway, away, forever away. Behind the silence of a door, it's easier to pretend. College students, maybe even friends; he curls his fingers into L's hair, pulls until L sighs into his mouth. He forgets what he was thinking about at the first touch of their tongues.
He can't shake the feeling he's been forgetting a lot lately.
***
His father chews at the widths of his nails when he thinks no one is watching. The glare of lights off his glasses tells Raito nothing, and he doesn't look long.
His curiosity is painful, sometimes, and his imagination even worse. What must it be like, he thinks, to investigate as if your own son is Kira? To look at dozens, hundreds of faces, many guilty, some innocent, some your friends, and know that they're dead, their families grieving in the worst possible way, because of your own flesh and blood? To remember his slouched back, his faraway eyes, the way he meandered up the stairs with an apple cupped in his palm, and realize all those times you thought he was just a studious boy, a regular teenager, he was actually going to commit murder -- the same baffling deaths you were going to lose hair over the next day.
What must it be like, he wonders, to know that every country wants your son's head? To know that history books will immortalize your name right up there with Hitler, with Genghis Khan, with all the great villains of the world, because of your son, Yagami Raito, of whom you were so proud, of whom you thought the world.
Raito turns away, lets his father keep chewing.
***
"Your hands are warm," murmurs L, with a leap of muscles up his abdomen at Raito's touch. He nibbles at the flesh of his neck, so lightly that he feels the goosepimples rise against his lips. "Means a cold heart."
***
"What convinced you in the end?" he asks, voice purposely casual, foot tapping at the desk like a metronome. The chain swings between them.
L's eyes make triangles at the screens. "Your dreams are untroubled," he says, like the others aren't right there, not needing reminders that the two of them are stuck with each other all the damn time.
Raito knows what he's trying to say.
He thinks they might be missing something big.
(That something tastes like apples.)
+++++
14. "No Man's Land" by Sufjan Stevens: The Time Travelers
the right hand takes what it can / ransacks with the mad man
for this land is not yours or mine to have
The only sound besides his own footsteps was the whistle of the winds through the blades of wild grass, through the limbs of the trees, making the eaves of Hawthorne Cottage groan in tolerant protest. This early in the morning, everything was painted in ochre, almost golden, as if it all became invaluable at the first touch of light.
Gideon paused at the bottom of the steps, turning his head back as if he had heard footsteps following him. The wind rustled his surroundings again, peaceful, unperturbed. The swaying branches almost sounded like people murmuring in a crowded room.
He closed his eyes. Then he opened them. And opened them again.
It was as easy and as shocking as suddenly submerging himself in a cold basin of water; he remembered how ill it had made Kate, right before the timequake, to see past, present, future, all that was and all that ever could be. To Gideon, it was as easy as turning the page of a book.
The scene in front of him exploded into light and brilliant clarity; he could see the ghosts of the parallel worlds, so close to theirs he felt as if he could reach out and touch them, as if there was nothing more substantial between him and them than a veil; they were cast into a hundred different colors, like he was looking at them through a prism. Their whispering increased tenfold; he could catch snatches of conversations, of laughter, angry rejoinders, all layering over themselves, a thousand different Hawthorne Cottages, all pressed together right next to each other like leaves in between the pages of a novel.
He could see this very same morning, done a hundred times over, and in them, he was rarely alone.
In several, Kate and Peter both smiled back at him, their bodies overlong and at home in eighteenth century clothes. In some, they looked forlorn and distant, hands pressed palm-to-palm as if remembering a pact, the familiar, worn expressions that Gideon saw the second time they came hurtling through time for him. In others, they looked happy; Kate's freckles stood out on her face and Peter's eyes were dancing, and he put an arm around her waist and murmured something that Gideon couldn't entirely make out, but he caught Sydney Byng's name and Kate shrieked with laughter.
In some, it was just Kate alone, standing with her arms wrapped around herself, the hem of her skirts trailing in the mud and the dew, looking translucent and ungrounded. In some, it was Peter, Joshua's features in his face even more evident in middle age, sitting in the morning sunlight with the manuscript of something in his hands.
Sometimes, there were other faces there, too: Dr. Piretti, whom Gideon had met in passing as he hurtled forward in time and she hurtled back, her eyes unclouded and bright, head craned back to watch a couple men install what looked like a metal rod to the roof of the cottage. Lord Luxom, as transparent as plastic, sitting miserably on the porch. Dr. Dyer, Molly bouncing around him. Peter's father, watching his son lead the cows to pasture with a fierce pride in his face. A thousand could-have-beens, people who had brushed past this century who could have stayed.
He saw the Tar Man, too, inked darkly onto the pages closest to his own. In some, he was dressed in his familiar, formidable overcoat and tricorn hat, and in others, he was the perfect picture of a twenty-first century aristocrat. Sometimes (and Gideon never understood why) he thought he saw Tom, standing beside the Tar Man almost as if he deserved to be there. Sometimes there was a girl, too, eyes pretty and dark.
The Tar Man held onto Tom and Anjali in a way that reminded Gideon a lot of the way he'd once held onto Kate and Peter.
Some of the worlds had a Hannah in them, standing in the doorway to the cottage, the sunlight catching the hints of blonde in her hair. In some worlds, Joshua came to stand beside her, a paintbrush tucked behind one ear, and in others, her smile was for him, Gideon, and him alone. In many of these worlds, a sleepy-eyed child buried his face in her skirts; his, sometimes, and sometimes not. He took a moment to marvel in their existence; lives he would never know, children who didn't exist in his world, who lived their lives so close to him and yet so completely out of his reach.
Surely a life, once lived, cannot be unlived? someone murmured, sounding both as if they were standing right next to him and as far away as Tyburn.
Gideon pushed, and felt the resisting pressure begin to build inside his skull, right behind his eyes, but then he saw it: the nothingness, the black, the blank slate of a universe wiped clean. Compared to that, the worlds where people swirled around him, whether they be familiar faces, or people he'd never known, whether there was a Hawthorne Cottage or if England had never existed, seemed miniscule and very few, a small tuft of grass in a field the size of London.
It hurt him, to look at the nothing where there should have been a world, but at the same time, it installed a renewed appreciation for his life, the same way he'd felt the night before he was supposed to be hanged at Tyburn. How easily everything could have been destroyed.
How lucky were they to even exist at all.
"I find I like you better when you're not smudging like an oil painting," came a cold, clear voice from behind him, droll in its light, adopted twenty-first century accent, but the tone was unmistakable. Come back to me, it said.
With as little difficulty as it had been to begin, Gideon pulled away, shutting his eyes against the possibilities of time with a sensation not dissimilar to feeling an ocean wave retreat from underneath his feet.
The Tar Man stood behind him, on the topmost step, hands in his jeans pockets. He watched him with his eyes guarded and his face set so that the scar stood out like a throbbing vein. It never failed to surprise him, to see the Tar Man holding his head up straight, but Gideon had seen the wonders of the twenty-first century firsthand and could not doubt them.
"You can do it too, can you not?" he wanted to know. "Probably easier than I can, since you time-traveled more."
The Tar Man shrugged and said dismissively, "I have nothing I want to see in the parallel worlds. I quite like what I have right in front of me."
Gideon smiled, and jumped up the steps to join his oldest brother.
+++++
15. "O Verona (Reprise)" from the Romeo + Juliet OST: Vampire Knight
She skips down the steps, dressed to go out, and Kaname grows antsy. She is still the queen of his chessboard; he cannot afford to lose her.
"Wife," he calls after her.
She tosses a glance over her shoulder, acknowledging. "You called me Yuuki before," she comments dryly. "Don't tell me you've devolved."
"Wife," he says again, this time a question.
"Big brother," she replies warmly, and again turns to leave.
He seizes her arm, yanks her back around. "Wife," he says, forcefully, because he needs to make the distinction clear for the human she still carries inside of her, the one that shies away from him like a skittish colt, thinking, barbaric.
She sighs. Relents. Lifts her hand to his cheek, obediently tilts her head back to be kissed. "Husband."
+++++
16. "Pony" by Erin McCarley: The Chronus Chronicles (The Shadow Thieves and The Siren Song)
you hold your head up to the sky
and say, what kind of blue are you?
She rolls onto her back, on her mattress, socks to her knees and hair wild. The pleats of her skirt fall, and the white of her thighs extend into --
"Don't tell," she murmurs, her knees falling sideways to make room and his jeans rustle against her polyester.
Don't worry, he wants to say, crooking his elbows and finding her mouth. We're good at keeping secrets.
***
Don't tell anybody, but Charlotte Mielswetski kisses with her teeth and when she says fuck, it's usually a command, not an expletive.
Zee's not going to admit it, but it's kind of hot.
She blushes like a volcano.
***
He's a nice boy. He's a British boy. He's the kind of kid anyone would want to bring home to their parents. See, Mom, see, Dad, I'm not a social leper. I have upstanding friends. I'm just not going to tell you this is the only one.
And Zee will smile and say hello and that's usually charm enough. (And he will never understand why British accents are such a turn on.)
But he's never going to tell you, and no one is ever going to find out, but Zee has almost destroyed the world, and it was Charlotte (yes, THAT Charlotte. The one who mouths off to authority and is never on time for math class. The one you DON'T bring home to Mom and Dad.) who saved his life, and, consequently, the world and everyone in it.
And how does Zee, the nice, British boy, repay her?
He pins her against the wall in the girl's bathroom in the middle of her gymnastics meet, and when he rips a seam, she mutters, careful, into the fabric of his shirt and he tells her he likes her out of the leotard better than in, and she says, well, you should have just said so, and shimmies right out, like a minnow, like a cat.
Her hair is scarlet and gold against his black skin. He thinks of the way it whips around when she somersaults on the balance beam, the way her whole body bends like a straw, and his mind flashes to the way she'd ragdolled between the Harpies, the way Philonecron looked at her like he wanted to break her, and his heart gives one great cry --
She wraps her freckled legs around his waist.
"Bril," he gasps.
"Oh, shut up," she returns. "Who are you kidding."
***
"English project!" Charlotte flashes her parents a smile, and as far as clever, on-the-spot lies go, it's not the best.
As she leads him up the stairs, he hears Mrs. Mielswetski say to Mr. Mielswetski, "They sure do have a lot of projects in Mr. Metos's class, don't they?"
"Do you think we should complain?" Mr. Mielswetski says back to Mrs. Mielswetski.
Charlotte and Zee have the decency to wait until they're safely locked in her room before they fall apart laughing.
It doesn't take long for their clothing to fall to her carpet. They're not worried about her parents walking in on them; even if they did, Charlotte and Zee have faced Immortals and the forces of Evil Themselves. And they know what other people would say. Oh, gross. You guys are cousins!
"Yeah, and?" Charlotte would say with an upturned nose and a flip of her hair. "What does that mean? Don't tell us we should go out and meet other people before we settle on each other, because then the implication is that we won't. And Zee's happy with me and I'm happy with Zee. We're two parts of a whole."
(There is, of course, the whole illegal aspect of it, but remember, Charlotte and Zee have broken the laws of immortal gods. Societal laws are laughable in comparison!)
Somewhere along the line, there's a girl named Maddy with a broken heart and a missing friendship bracelet, a girl named Samantha who's afraid of her own shadow, and a boy named Jason who's not a boy at all, and they're present in every kiss, every whisper of skin against skin, but Zee and Charlotte are good with living with consequences.
"Our cat is glaring at us," he whispers, and Mew flicks her tail in acknowledgement.
They might just be projecting, but the cat looks almost disappointed.
***
"We should live in London," she says, stretching her body against the long, vertical lines of his bedspread.
"I was thinking Los Angelos," he says, watching with darkening eyes. "Closer to the Underworld."
She looks at him drolly. "Unless you plan on hiring me full-time as your bodyguard, I don't think actively provoking the gods is going to be healthy for either of us."
"We'll have to find somewhere that accepts cats." -- this is said against her ribs, the underside of her breast. She smells like summer.
"Maybe Cairo, then," her fingers play against the plush of his lips, slip inside.
***
They are fifteen.
Just fifteen.
+++++
17. "Que Sera Sera" by Pink Martini: Bitter Virgin
when i grew up and fell in love / i asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
will there be rainbows / day after day?
The strap of her purse slid down her arm. She pushed it back, and climbed the last few stairs to her apartment. There was a strange noise in her ears, like static off a badly-tuned television, its hiss dulled and muted but still present. She felt like she'd just gotten back from a very loud rock concert with her ears still ringing.
Oh, God. Her little girl.
She had noticed everything. Hinako was fourteen; sullen and moody was the main mode of transportation for fourteen-year-olds, so she hadn't worried. She pretended it had nothing to do with an abortion; she read in a pamphlet at work that abortion hurts the mother just as much as it hurts the fetus, in a manner of speaking. She'd been prepared for that. Hinako withdrawing was to be expected. She'd made light of it, so her husband wouldn't grow suspicious.
Everything would go back to normal.
She had noticed nothing.
Ma'am, have you looked closely at your daughter? She is covered in bruises; Hinako, could you extend us your arm for us, please? Thank you. See, here, here, and here. The nurse in the lab also reported tears and abrasions around her genital area. Judging by this evidence, both old and fresh, I don't think your daughter consented. And I think the abuse is still going on.
What?
Ma'am ... Aikawa Hinako is still underage. Sexually abusing an underage girl is against the law. Her abuser would have to have continuous access to her. A neighbor who looks after her after school, or a teacher, perhaps, or a stepfather...
She unlocks the door and enters the home. The kitchen is dark; the only light came from the living room, pooling on the linoleum. The dishes are still in the sink from when Hinako collapsed, shirt puckering around her growing belly. Her second child. Her second unwanted child. Rape-baby.
The shoes are all lined up next to the door, neat and straight. She'd lectured Hinako only a few nights earlier about keeping them tidy; how ridiculous it seemed now, the pantomime of a regular life.
She was a horrible mother.
A horrible, horrible mother. The worst. They should lock her up too, for neglect. She'd lectured and yelled, told Hinako to comb her hair out straight, to tuck in her shirt, to do the dishes, to be responsible and to get good grades. How stupid. It was all so utterly stupid. When her daughter had needed her the most, she'd turned her back and pretended it was all part of the normal package.
Her daughter.
This couldn't happen. Not to her. This happened to other people's daughters.
Ma'am. Please. Whoever it is, they need to be punished for what they've done to her. Help us. Think.
Hinako. Hinako.
Mother. It's too late this time. It can't be aborted, can it?
No. Oh, Hinako...
Don't look like that, Mother. This one isn't your grandchild any more than the last one was. It's just a parasite.
A trusted neighbor, a teacher, or a stepfather....
A meat cleaver swung above the sink, its blade glinting. In the other room, she heard him chuckle appreciatively at something on the television.
Hinako! Tell me! Who did this horrible thing to you?
I told you already. You didn't listen. It was Nagashima-san.
She picked up the knife and gripped the handle tightly. Took a step towards the living room.
"Hey, honey?"
+++++
18. "Right Here, Right Now" by Fatboy Slim: original fiction
waking up to find your love's not real
She has been a wife for a week before he tells her she must learn Chinese.
The sulfur street lamps cast a subtle halo the color of buttermilk across their bedsheets. She rolls over to face him, soft cotton tangling between her bare legs. She can't see his eyes for shadows, but she heard him clearly, even over the soft hum of the fan on their bedside table.
She knows why he asked. It stings between her ribs like a stitch in her side; it doesn't lessen even when he leans over the space between their pillows, kissing her eyelids.
"You must learn," he murmurs soothingly. "It will save us an immense amount of embarrassment."
She puts her hands underneath her blonde hair, pressing them so hard into her ears she can hear nothing but the singing of her own blood like the pulse of waves. She shakes her head, over and over again, even when he stops telling her, even when he falls silent and watches her with unoppressive disappointment. Still she refuses, over and over until she forgets what it is she is saying.
-
She does not like the way the Chinese bark. Their voices are too high and their mouths always shape into long "o" sounds, like they're constantly being surprised. The family who live in the bakery -- the one who let them rent the attic room -- greet her every morning with those shocked noises and long syllables, and she just smiles politely.
It is no different on the street. Everyone in Chinatown knows who she is -- she is Zhu Feng's fishwife, brought from farther away than China, farther away than Europe. She has come, quite literally, from an island on one side of the world to an island on the other, in a completely different sea. When she walks down the street, everyone has to crane their necks back to say hello, for her legs are too long and her head too high in the sky. She is easy to spot, because her hair is the color of an orchid, so blonde it is white like sand, flowing over her shoulder blades in uneven strands like exclamation points.
Her name, too, is as foreign as the rest of her -- Anjill. The children have fun saying it, the adults stumble over it, but the rest of what follows is inevitably in Chinese, as if by having an address on River street, she automatically must know the language.
At first glance, Chinatown looks no different from the rest of the Honolulu business district. But once you look closer, you can see that the street signs are in two languages, that the corners of the buildings curl up into greens and reds like smoke from a pipe, that there are lanterns strung outside the windows and sweet buns on display in the cluttered windows. On Saturdays and Sundays, River and Beretenia become flooded with foot traffic for the weekend farmer's market.
Anjill visited a few of these, venturing out to buy fat star fruits and bunches of grapes, mop heads and heavy bags of rice. She also buys meat; moist, raw-smelling mutton and a dozen different kinds of fish, because meat she knows. Meat she's familiar with. The young women with pink-tinged gloves help her count out the unfamiliar green bills at the registers with impatience, because it is always hot here and the smell of warm meat in close confines is enough make anyone mad. They snap instructions at her in short, clipped English; they sound like they're cracking a whip at her, even though Anjill knows it's just her imagination.
"You must learn," Zhu whispers coaxingly in her ear, running his hand up her thigh, and she bites the insides of her lips to swallow her complaints. "It will be easier if you learn."
Anjill turns her head away from him. She closes her eyes, and for a moment, it is easy to imagine the snow. Easy to imagine the ice, condensing on the side of her water glasses, the icicles that hung from the gutters of her family home. It is easy to imagine how comfortable it was to sink into the afghans on the sofa early in the afternoon, lulled to sleep by the sound of the winter sea wind through their rafters.
Then the moment is shattered, and she is back in the hot little room above the bakery with a husband breathing hot gusts of air across her breast bone, with no company besides the bedside fan and the smell of catfish.
She holds onto the memory, though, tucking it someplace inside her heart, where it is always cold and there is always light.
-
The first thing she noticed was the feet.
There was a joke running amongst her brothers, that when the snow outside melted, water streaming in rivulets through their brown lawns, when the weather was warm enough that they could remove their coats, those were the rare days they met their feet.
"What in the world are these things?!" they would cry out in alarm, rolling onto their backs and madly shaking their legs, as if the sight of their own feet terrified them with how unknown they were. And they did look strange; lumpy, soft white things with pink fingers curling underneath. They looked even more strange when they ran outside to squelch through the mud; shrieking at the sensation of earth moving between their toes, laughing and laughing until they were sick of it, until it was time to go inside and put their thick woolen socks back on as the earth turned back to snow.
In Hawai'i, nobody wears socks. It alarmed her, at first, the sight of all the brown feet, calloused toes hanging off the edge of their flip-flops, the toenails dirty brown and blushing coral underneath.
It also bothers her, how nothing about her is different, and yet as if by switching countries of residency, she has changed completely. She wears different things on her feet; thus, she walks differently. She wears her hair up, to cool the back of her neck; thus, the shape of her own face in the mirror is foreign. She jumped four pant sizes without gaining a pound, which disgusts her enough that she refuses to shop in the department stores in Ala Moana for new, more lightweight things. She is always sweaty and miserable these days.
The fashions bother her with how new they are to her; the men walk around in shirts and shorts that look and feel slimy underneath her fingers like fish scales, and their knees poke out, rubbed pink and white from sand and surf. The girls wear clothing that reveals the kind of flesh that Anjill has seen nowhere but in her own shower.
She stares at their clothing and their faces, each as different as the tides. Never before has she been somewhere where she is the minority. Never before had she been somewhere with so many different shapes of faces, eyes, hands. The color of hair and the shape of bodies.
Yet.
Yet.
She sits in the lobby of the bank, the air chilly on the nape of her exposed neck and the strange alphabet swimming underneath her nose. She watches a woman in a paisley blue shirt run a mop over the scratched marble floor. She is old, with a face crinkled like the surface of an almond from the sun and the wind. She is darker than the women behind the counters. Anjill bet if she asks, her lineage goes back to the birth of the islands.
Yet some things never change.
-
Zhu Feng had once been to her as everybody is -- a stranger. When she met him, she had absolutely no idea where he would someday take her, not even the faintest ghost of a dream.
She'd been a waitress for her brother's restaurant, carrying platters of thick meat and boneless fish to tables that were often sticky with beer. She loved the cheer, the warmth, the ruddiness of the familiar faces, crusted with seasalt, all raising their glasses to her when she came around with the pitcher. She remembered her own language, the humming syllables of lullabies and greetings and songs, weaving around inside her head like the pattern of a beloved quilt.
Then came the day a man came into her restaurant, pressed in a clean blue suit with a hand-knit scarf around his neck. He unraveled the scarf to greet her, but the greeting was in English, a language she didn't know then. She smiled politely and shook her head, showed him to a table. She'd stared at his far-apart eyes and his high cheekbones, like the delicate curve of an earthenware pot, his slender body, his hair like the blue-black shade of midnight.
He was joined, shortly, by other men in similar outfits. Politicians and others like them, stopping for a casual dinner at a local eatery like good tourists. One of them had manageable Icelandic: he ordered for them, and when Anjill came back with the bill, he pointed to the dark man who'd been first to enter.
But he hadn't signed the receipt. He'd explained to her, later, that he hadn't known that that was what you were supposed to do; his cheeks always grew rosy whenever she brought it up.
She'd chased him down before he'd gotten two blocks, breath misting in front of her face, her heels slipping on the ice. He'd caught her elbow as she almost skidded into him, and somehow, through pantomime and a lot of awkward laughter, she'd managed to explain to him what he needed to do. She found out, later, that not only had he signed his name in sharp, clear Roman letters, he'd added his phone number.
She didn't call. She told her friends, and they laughed, but she didn't call.
He came back the next day.
And the day after that.
The following day, Anjill didn't have work, so instead, she went down to the little bookshop on the corner next to the post office, and she bought an Icelandic-to-English dictionary. When she saw his face the next morning, bobbing over the top of that knitted scarf, she smiled at him and greeted him with a very polite, "Hello, good day, how are you?" And his face lit up, color flushing up underneath the smoky burn of his skin, and the rest, they say, is history.
Anjill learned English slowly and painfully, for she was long beyond the years that made such things simpler; her mind and tongue had already settled into a comfortable pattern, and she had trouble with the new shapes and the way she had to twist her mouth and throat. He coaxed her, telling her in a roundabout way that it had been difficult for him too, but the English he knew was a businessman's English. He told her, after awhile, as they walked up the pier, fields of white and grey extending in every direction, his story of China.
He was born a small boy in a big city, a blurred face in a hundred million faces. He'd been no one interesting, done nothing interesting, until he'd left home for the first time. He planned to someday be the ambassador for some big company, to be their international representative, and to prove it, he smiled a warm, eager smile, the kind that made her want to smile back without knowing why.
He has charisma, her mother told her, later, with a sly smile, the smile of older women who know what will happen to the younger.
She, in turn, told him what little there was to tell about herself. In truth, there were many things to discuss, but most of them only had ways of expressing themselves in her own language, the inexpressible pieces of her that she only knew inside her own heart, pieces shaped like ice.
Still, when he offered to marry her, her white hair tangled in between his fingers, she said yes, just to see that smile.
-
She eats lunch in a little fruit shop down the street from the bakery where she now lives. The doors are always open here, so she can hear the gasps of the buses as they hunch down close to the curb on River street to spit out their passengers. She can hear the soft shushing of the rain on the corrugated rooftops, even as the sunlight came slanting through to the pavement in dappled patches.
For lunch, she'd bought a fruit cup and a small package of dumplings. She pops grapes into her mouth and watches the families all chatter to each other; mothers wiping the runny noses of their toddlers, fathers practicing counting games, teenagers tapping their sandaled feet to the little colored headphones in their ears.
She has trouble with the dumplings. Not because they are ill-made, and not because they are foreign; she knows what pho is, and this is very good pho, with the right amount of spice, carefully wrapped in the rice-wheat wonton. They have given her chopsticks.
Anjill never learned how to use chopsticks.
She struggles with them, crudely pinching them between her middle finger and her thumb, like she has watched others do, but she cannot get them to pinch and hold. Her food always slips sideways, landing with a greasy plop back with the rest of the dumplings. And she is too good-mannered to eat them with her fingers.
She keeps on fumbling, feeling the familiar frustration begin to knot up in her gut like a cold, hard walnut, tight in the pit of her stomach, when she notices that she is being watched.
She looks up through the thin veil of her hair to find a girl sitting at the table across from her, staring at her. Catching Anjill's eyes, she raises her eyebrows a fraction, and, with slow deliberate, lifts her chopsticks up away from her rice noodles. She arches her fingers up to show where they are positioned. She moves the top chopstick up and down, and then scooped a handful of noodles into her mouth.
Anjill tries to copy her, stealing glances out of the corner of her eye; the girl keeps her fingers high so they are easy to distinguish.
To her surprise, she finds herself holding one of the dumplings between her chopsticks. It wavers and trembles, but it is held solid. Smiling, she pops it into her mouth.
The girl smiles back. She is everything Anjill has come to expect from these islands; she is small, her hair spiralling down her back, the ends ratty from salt water and sweat. Her shirt falls off her smooth, caramel shoulders, and flip flops dangle from her feet. She is Asian; she bets Zhu could take one look at her and name her nationality without even trying, but Anjill finds that she cannot tell one Asian nationality from the next; they all look the same to her.
She picks up her lunch and goes to join her.
-
They walk through downtown Honolulu, through the business district, past the cemetary, around the wharfs and the Aloha tower, which chimes the time out at their retreating backs. Cars hunker in traffic beside them; tourists swirl around them in bursts of foreign languages and sun hats, in sunburns like half-cooked steaks.
Kim's voice is soft like a padded chair, like she isn't used to disturbing the air and likes it the way it is too much to be sharp. She talks about her childhood in Korea; how hard it was to move to Chinatown when she was twelve and have to learn two new languages. She manages, she says.
"The loneliness will always be there," she mumbles, stopping to pluck a flowering hibiscus from a bush. She pulls a bobby pin from somewhere and pins it into her hair, where it sits among all the black in a splash of fiery crimson like a blush. There are flowers everywhere in Hawai’i. "Nothing will make you ache like your longing for the syllables of your home language. The loneliness will be waiting for you in every sentence, every command, every joke that you will never understand. But it's bearable."
In return, Anjill tells her about Iceland. She talks about the rugged heart of the island, where the terrain is so impossible that American astronauts used it to practice moon landings. She paints a picture of the fertile valleys; how whenever she catches sight of the mauka, the bright green mountains of Hawai’i, out of the corner of her eye, she thinks for a heart-stopping moment that she is back home. She talks about the tongues of ice licking their way down to the shore. She talks of her small town by the ocean, where everyone will be a fisherman or a fisherman's wife; she remembers afternoons, swimming with her brothers in geothermal springs.
She tells her about her husband, the way he smiled her off her feet, about how the only thing they have in common is the mutual trouble they have with speaking English. They have no children, except for the sour, rotten nut of frustration rooted deep inside Anjill's belly.
He doesn't understand what it's like for her; he thinks her only trouble is the switch from small town to big city. He's a city kid moving to another city; he doesn't understand why she seeks desperately for a familiar face, familiar creatures, anything that will remind her of the other island on the other side of the world. The only thing he knows is that he wants her beside him, without knowing what that entails.
She misses Iceland, but she wants her home to feel like home.
They walk along the shore; the ocean whispers up against their feet. The smell of flowers is all around them.
Kim reaches out and takes her hand, the way friends do.
-
When she gets home, her husband is sitting at the baker's table, a newspaper opened to the economy section spread out in front of him. She walks over and slams a book down in the middle of it.
Zhu looks up at her, startled by the violence, and by the sudden fire in her eyes.
"I will learn Chinese if you learn Icelandic," she tells him in a tone that brooks no argument, and she feels the ice around her heart begin to crack.
+++++
10. "Just Dance" by Lady GaGa: Runaways
so many women without a flaw
"I'm just gonna say this now, because I can't be the only one thinking this," Chase began, in the kind of nonchalant tone that immediately put Nico on alert. "But Victor, my man, does an android ... you know, function the same way a regular guy does? And does it mean your sperm are, like, superpowered or, like, little hunter-seeker robots or something with, like, sonar to make them better than all the other sperm? And while we're on the subject, how does that even work? I mean, did your dad, like, have your entire sexual life planned out when --"
Nico's hand snapped out in a universal "stop!" motion, cutting Chase short. "One more word out of your mouth that has anything to do with Victor or his sperm, whatever shape they might be in, and I will skewer you and serve you up with barbeque sauce," she threatened, making Victor's lips quirk in bemusement and Old Lace to snake her head around with a worried whine.
+++++
11. "Kashmir" by the London Philharmonic Orchestra: Twilight (Breaking Dawn)
When she woke, she instantly stretched herself taut, spine curving like the arch of a bow, weight support by her heels and neck, mouth open and gasping like a fish. Her arms flailed for purchase, and she was dimly aware of knocking things over, of things crashing to the floor with a terrific noise.
"Easy, easy," she heard, like the low murmur of flies, humming to each other on a windowsill. "She doesn't know where she is."
"She's probably still remembering the fire. Poor thing."
"I thought you said the morphine was supposed to help with that!"
"I lied. Well, Bella lied. She had the decency to tell me before I tried the same trick with this young one."
"Bella ... lied?"
"Don't look at me like that, Edward. It's the past now."
"I think you just have to suffer no matter what. Being a vampire can't be that easy, you know!"
"Emmett, shh! She's coming around!"
She tried to brush off their voices, but she found she could hear them all, as well as the murmur of a refrigerator, the buzz of the overhead light, every rustling tree branch outside the window, every creak in the house's tired old bones. She couldn't tune them out, she couldn't hear any of them fainter than the other. Just sound, present in her ears, and she recognized it all instantly.
She relaxed slowly, unfolding from her convoluted shape. She panted. Her throat was dry, and this seemed incredibly important somehow. Impossible to ignore. She clawed at it, rasping hard.
"Ri?" said someone, no longer whispering but talking to her, very clearly. "Ri, can you hear me? I know you're very thirsty, but you have to listen to me."
"Carlisle ..."
"Be careful, Carlisle, please. I can't stop a physical attack."
"It's okay. Jasper, if you please..."
A calm stole over her, and she shook herself, frustrated and trying to fight it. She'd been sleeping for so long. Sleeping and burning. She didn't want to feel calm. She wanted to move! She wanted to stretch! She wanted to bound and bite and she wanted to do something about her aching throat, her cheeks that felt as dry as sandpaper against her teeth!
"Ri, please, answer me if you can hear me. Your name is Ri Chen. Do you remember anything?"
"Carlisle, don't, she's going to --"
She felt it; the faintest vibration, there, close to her head! As if someone had tried to reach out to brush her hair. Immediately, her body responded, and within a fraction of a second, she was on the opposite wall, one hand clasped around a light fixture and the other limbs braced against the window frame and the wall. The light fixture bent with a protesting whine underneath her weight.
Life throbbed in her blood, and she felt it at the ends of her fingers and toes: a pulsing, limitless kind of energy. She bared her teeth, and felt them, there, against her bottom lip: her fangs. She snarled.
"Oh, dear," she heard. "I was fond of that lamp, too."
"It's replacable, Esme."
"Not for cheap, it isn't."
"Since when has money really been a concern for us?"
"Since people started being afraid of it."
"Oh, psh."
"Rosalie, you should start to pay attention to the rumors and the talk in town. It's getting harder and harder to ignore."
"Is now really the time to bring this up, you guys? We can talk about politics after we talk Ri off the ceiling, okay?"
At the sound of her name, she snarled again, a fierce, proud roar that reminded her of an animal. She'd never sound so intimidating before. Another wave of calm hit her, enough that she loosened her grip on the destroyed lamp slightly, so that she slid down the wall a few inches.
"Edward?"
"She's puzzling it together. Her mind's a mess. Give her a moment."
"Bella? How far away is Nessie?"
"She's with Jacob. Farther than the town. And there aren't any hikers out when I scouted this morning. Not that I don't think eight full grown vampires can subdue her if she starts on a hunt."
"Don't get cocky."
"Oh. Oh, I'm sorry, Jasper, I wasn't..."
"Are you sure everything went okay, Carlisle? Her eyes look off."
"They're always going to look like that. If the transformation didn't change them, then nothing will."
"Wow. A blind vampire? That's a first."
"We always do attract the weird ones, don't we?"
"Hey!"
"Hm. I wonder how that's going to affect her."
"She'll probably be incredibly lithe and graceful and she'll make a sexy supermodel and will always be someone to look up to for blind children all across the world. Er, well, bad choice of words, but you get the point I'm trying to make."
"Besides, after Bella, I don't think we're ever going to meet anyone less coordinated, much less a blind person."
"Oh, shut up, Emmett."
"It'll be fine. We just need to make sure we don't rearrange furniture for awhile."
"Thanks, Alice. Does this mean she'll stay with us?"
"It's one of her possibilities, but so are many other things. You can't make up your mind when you don't know what you're supposed to be deciding. Ri?" She tilted her head towards the voice. She'd already distinguished them, categorized them, and many of them had names. She just needed to remember who they were. "Ri, it's okay. No one's going to hurt you."
She licked her lips, and before she could stop it, it slipped out. "I'm thirsty," she whimpered, and gasped. That wasn't her voice! That couldn't be her voice. Oh, god, she couldn't even remember who she was, because that wasn't the voice of the person she understood to be her.
"It'll be strange having someone single around the house again."
"It'll be refreshing. It's okay, Ri. We'll take you hunting here soon. But first, you need to tell us -- do you remember anything about your previous life?"
And then it hit. All at once, a flood of memories, muddy and scarcely distinguishable, like she was looking at them through glass that had been blurred by the rain running down it. She remembered her childhood in snatches of impressions and sounds and familiar smells, like lasagna in the evenings, and the earth underneath her feet. She remembered her mother and her father's voices, remembered them telling her she'd been named after the French word for laughter. She remembered learning to read with her fingertips, remembered walking with a cane. She remembered the times she lived in.
Then she remembered the attack. It had been sudden, in the middle of the street with the summer sun beating down on the top of her head; an explosion like the sound of the earth being ripped apart. She'd flown into the air, struck something hard, and everything after that had gone black.
She remembered waking in a bed, not unlike she had just done, with everything burning. She'd cried and screamed and thrashed, and when she grew exhausted of that, she listened to the impatient words being spoken outside her door. Chemical warfare. Quarantine. Death more than just a probability for all infected. Death imminent.
And then she remembered the doctor, whose arms had pinned her down like cement blocks, kept her from hurting herself. She remembered the choice he offered.
"Doctor Cullen," she said aloud, her voice a question and a statement and a declaration, all in one.
She could feel eight identical, warm smiles as she slid the rest of the way down the wall.
"Yes. Welcome to our coven, Ri Chen. We have a very interesting story, one I hope to tell you someday."
+++++
12. "Last Train to Lhasa (remix)" by Banco de Gaia: a Firefly/Doctor Who/Pokemon Platinum crossover
"Serenity's going to have a baby," she tells him, swaying on by up the ramp and into the ship's belly.
Mal stares after her for a long moment, stylus between his teeth, fingers hovering over the electronic cargo checklist. A stray breeze from the valley below catches at the hem of her skirt, lifting it in a movement too similar to leaves blowing in the wind for Mal's comfort. He snatches the pen from his lips. "I don't think so, darlin'," he says, uselessly. "This is good ship. Faithful ship. She don't go skirtin' around behind my back. We're more loyal to each other than that. And she certainly don't go around making little Serenities. That's a big no." He looks at his ship. "Right?"
River tosses him a smile. "She thinks it's going to heal us. She loves us and we've been so good to her, she says, but she wants us to grow again."
The realization dawns on Mal so fast it's like being shot. He thinks Inara would have been proud of him. No, he corrects himself, she wouldn't have, never mind, because it shouldn't be the first thing that pops into his head. Nevertheless, he frowns at her, and asks, even as her brother comes up the ramp behind him at a slow and wary pace, "How far along are you, albatross?"
She thinks about it, head tilted like she's listening to a song from far away. "About fifteen minutes," she nods.
-
"Your mother has some pretty clever quotes, then, doesn't she?" Anita drew her legs up onto the rim of the fountain, wrapping her arms around her knees. "You're always referring to something she said. Like she's a book you always need to cite." A ghost flashes briefly over her face; books are a bit of a taboo subject these days.
"She was a little strange. Always saying things I didn't understand." She shrugs. "That's what mothers do, I suppose."
Anita smiles, leans her head on top of her knees. Wasn't that a universal truth. "What was her name?"
"River." River's lips twitch.
"What, she named you after herself?"
"No, no, no. The name she gave me was Ruth. I picked River on my own, many years later, when I emigrated out of that galaxy. Changed my name, like it was that easy to change my identity. Like it was going to create a new me. Ruth Tam. Ruth Serenity Tam became River Song who became River Song, professor of archaeology. That's what I picked."
Anita arches an eyebrow. "That's the best you could come up with?"
"Oi!" River protests, splashing her with water from the fountain. "Like you're any better, miss Anita Mann!"
Anita's hands fly up to cover her face as River tries to splash her again. "Hey, now, I didn't get a say in that! That's what my parents picked! Besides, I stopped complaining about it after I met a woman in uni named Anita Dick. My parents seem almost thoughtful in comparison!"
They keep laughing, long after the joke stops being funny, just because they can, just because it feels good to laugh, to hear the sound ringing in the clear, blue, artificial skies.
-
They crouch, low and still and quiet, behind the grating, where Mal and Zoe stashed illegal bankrolls and other undesirable things, like the Tam siblings and the girl who looked into the black.
Ruth presses herself harder into her mother's arms. Her heartbeat pounds against her ears, louder and faster, like it was trying to tell her something, rising to a shout, like people do when they're trying to communicate and can't and get frustrated. On the other side of the grate, she can hear the scuffle of boots. Army issue. Alliance.
Her uncle's arms tighten around both of them as the footsteps grow closer.
"Can't you hear it?" River whispers, her lips parted and her eyes wide, looking at some point beyond the both of them. Outside, Zoe's voice barks with anger and Jayne says something decidedly insulting and unpleasant (then again, he doesn't really come in any other flavor.) Click-click-click went the guns cocking. "Can't you hear it? It's coming."
She turns her head very slowly, looks right at them, and answers their unspoken question. "The sound of drums."
-
The clouds roll in from seemingly nowhere.
"My Manectric would have freaked," Proper Dave lifts one of the slats in her blinds, squinting up at the sky. "Packs of wild Poochyena would bay at the full moon like lunatics, but Manectric. No. They were better than that. They howl only when a thunderstorm was approaching. That's why they built the Weather Institute where they did. With all those Manectric around, the scientists barely had to do any work."
Catching the expression River gives him, he smiles sheepishly. "Sorry. They were my friends. Manectric are kind of like dogs with no noses. I think they're one of few Pokemon who ever escaped my planet: I saw a whole pack of them on Barcelona once, when I was in flight school."
"I know what Manectric are. I've been to your planet."
Proper Dave grins, surprised and delighted. "Really? When? What for?"
She waves this away, smiling and tucking a lot of her rioting hair behind her ear. "The Doctor took me, when we were younger. Said he had a craving for cookies. Lava Cookies, I think they were called. We missed the cookies; came a millennia too early, wound up creating a legend by accident. Have you ever heard of Diagla and Palkia?"
"The Lords of Time and Space, yeah," Proper Dave frowns, trying to see where she was going with this. Then his eyes go as wide as saucers. "Oh, my GOD. You're KIDDING. No way! That was YOU?"
"Yeah. Sorry 'bout that. Although I must admit, you Pokemon Trainer lot sure went bibbledy with the details after we left. Big blue box and the Doctor, and then me, the albatross -- and, er, well, Giratina, too, I suppose, but we don't really talk about him. Sure took a lot of artistic license, didn't you?"
She wanders into the kitchen to put on some tea, laughing at his expression the whole way.
-
"Come on! Come on, come on, come on! Don't tell me you're not curious?" The Doctor grins at her, a mad light to his eyes. She reaches out and pulls him out of the way of a man on a messenger bike, who sails on past them down the sidewalk, ringing his bell. "Even the smallest bit? Insiest bit? Hold on, no, wait, insiest isn't a word for another half-century. Forgot. Sorry."
River shoots a look at the building out of the corner of her eye. She'd seen buildings like them, on the old videos Wash had downloaded off the cortex -- the ones nobody had the heart to erase off Serenity's hard drive -- but seeing them in person was a whole other thing. The air smells different, too: acrid, like bad water.
"You can't not be curious," the Doctor insists, frustrated by her lack of enthusiasm. "Maybe a hundred thousand remaining relics of Earth That Was left in your time, and what do we find but the Alliance keeping tabs on the Tam family for two thousand years because Torchwood told them to? There's no way that isn't just begging to be investigated."
Without waiting for her to process this, he grabs her by the hand and half-drags her up the steps. He rings the doorbell.
River fidgets with the hem of her shirt.
The door opens, and River's eyes snap immediately to her face. It's ridiculous to try and find your own features in a face that has been rotting in a grave for two thousand years by the time you come to possess them, but she can imagine they share the same high, agile cheekbones, if nothing else. But then her attention cuts away: the Doctor has grown stiff and still beside her.
"Yes?" says Lucy Saxon, a little impatiently, bouncing the blue-eyed baby on her hip. "May I help you?"
It's three days later when, tucking a pillow underneath their heads, he tells her his real name: a falling sound, like stars burning out. She tilts her head so that her lips brush the shell of his ear, and whispers her own name back, the name her mother had whispered to her every night with a kiss: a thump and a beat, like the pounding of drums.
-
"Once upon a time," River begins, voice hushed.
"Oh, geez," says Other Dave, because it's the middle of the day and they're eating pasta and one of River's youngest's teddy bears is looking at him from the other end of the table and he doesn't like it one bit. Miss Evangelista leans her head in, looking genuinely interested.
"Once upon a time, Harold Saxon married Lucy Cole. Then Harold turned out to be an evil Time Lord called the Master. He tried to destroy Earth That Was, but it didn't work and he died, not knowing that his wife carried a half-human, half-Time Lord baby. Two thousand years passed, and the Alliance kept tabs on the descendents: an ordinary, high-class family with a stiff British upper lip who eventually come to be called the Tams. Their children are brilliant. Prodigies. One of them becomes a doctor. The other gets tortured by the government, goes woolly, and runs off and becomes a space pirate. She's a psychic: her brain's too big, her mind is filled with too many things, but the rest of her is too human to handle it. She's my mother," she finishes proudly.
Other Dave arches a sardonic, "yeah, and?" eyebrow, but Evangelista's eye pop. "You mean, you're a Time Lord? Lady?" she corrects herself, confused.
"Many, many, many, many times removed, yes," River spreads some more parmesan cheese on her pasta. She waves her fork around when she talks. "The stray gene that gave my mother her inhuman intelligence became magnified in me."
"Oh!" Evangelista's eyes grew wider. "Is that why you're so interested in space exploration?" She catches Other Dave's eye and giggles. "We all just thought it was because you were raised by pirates."
"Lady of Space and a Lord of Time, that's what we were," River says, fondly and a little wistfully, stabbing a noodle and using it to wipe marinara off the edge of her plate.
"Did you travel with him?" Other Dave wants to know. "The Doctor, I mean?"
"Not very long," River confesses, like they were talking about any other relationship. "It was fantastic while it lasted, and I trusted him implicitly, but I wasn't too fond of merely being a companion. Unpleasant cultural connotations with the word, if you know what I mean."
-
River kneels in front of the girl, her fingers finding the neck of the man she cradled in her arms. His pulse beats against her fingertips, and she gives Dawn a reassuring smile. "He'll live," she informs her with the calm, clear note of authority in her voice: one she adopted without even noticing. Nothing like being a time traveler to make you think you're a little bit more important than the average person.
But it's average people like Dawn who save the world every day. The girl glances down briefly at the unconscious Cyrus, who's half-propped up on her knee, limbs akimbo and face the color of ash. A Floatsel curls itself protectively around her back, crouched low to the chalky earth. It's cold at the top of the Spear Pillar, and the ends of Dawn's scarf kick in the breeze.
"He'll live," she repeats, in case she hadn't heard the first time around.
"Yeah," Dawn replies, her tone dry and unshaken. "The idiots usually do."
River grins.
"River!" the Doctor cries from further uphill. "River, you have to hurry! Jack's going to close the rift and we have to be gone before he does! Come on!"
A quick glance over her shoulder tells her that he's standing in the doorway of the TARDIS, brilliant silver spokes of light haloing his figure and shooting into the multi-colored sky. Looking at him, she can almost see how this image came to resemble Diagla. She still has no idea how they got Palkia out of her, though; pink perhaps for her femininity, sure, and the wings because she's an albatross, always has been, but last she checked, her face was not that gruesome.
"Giratina's going to close the rip," she translates for Dawn, pointing at the great fracture in the sky. "And everything's going to return to normal."
"But you'll be gone?"
River's heart throbs at the almost pitiful note in the girl's voice. "You'll still have our legends," she tries to reassure, and unable to help it, she leans forward and kisses Dawn's forehead. "Take care, meimei."
"Good-bye, Palkia," Dawn whispers back, and sits back and watches as River turns and sprints up the incline, half taking the hand the Doctor offered her and half being yanked off her feet in his haste to get her inside.
"Aren't we going to get Jack?" she asks as he races back towards the console, the TARDIS doors swinging shut behind them.
"He's coming to us," he replies brusquely. Mid-stride, he rounds on her. "Where on earth did they get a cross-dimensional temporal locator? That should have rightly ripped the very fabric of that world open! Fascinating world, though -- did you notice that their animals developed the art of instantaneous evolution? It's like an amoeba becomes a furry, warm puppy with big anime eyes in the blink of an eye. Amazing!"
River smiles fondly, jumping over the railing to him. She slides her hand in between his, earning her a quick, toothy smile. "So once we have Jack, where are we going, browncoat?"
+++++
13. "My TV and You" by VAST: Death Note
i was born to stare,
who stares back at me?
The bathroom door doesn't shut all the way because of the chain.
You're tired, says the mirror on the wall.
I am, Raito admits, and can't remember why.
***
When he wakes up, his hands are red as if covered in blood, and it takes him a moment to realize it's the lighting in the room and the play of shadows. He rubs the tips of his fingers together and wonders at how dry they are.
He looks past them, finds L crouched on the opposite couch, watching him with a bowl of Fruit Loops in his lap.
He turns his palm up, fingers out, to show him he still has his fingerprints. He hasn't lost his identity yet.
***
It's easier to breathe.
It takes awhile to learn, though.
***
Raito still shies away from L's touch without knowing why. It makes him curious, he knows, the same kind of burning, gnawing curiosity that he uses when he's going after Kira. It doesn't bode well, he thinks.
He dreams of nothing.
***
"Go to sleep, Ryuuzaki," he snaps, late one night or early one morning, when the air is brittle and his mouth is thick with cotton and he doesn't care what it says. Then, lest it sound like caring even in his half-awake state, he adds, "I can't sleep with your damn light on, and neither of us are any use if we're dog tired."
He can feel L's eyes on him. He stares at the back of the cushions, wide awake now.
He misses his mother. (But only for a moment.)
***
L acts like he has to cross-examine every breath the world takes, like he has to consider every possibility and take precautions like it's the only possibility that's going to come true, like he's watching a dozen and a half more screens than he has in front of him, like no one else should have the responsibility but him.
(He remembers a tennis game. He remembers the sunshine. He remembers L doing all the same calculations about air and wind and ball velocity he was. He remembers losing.)
It occurs to Raito that it must be an exhausting way to live.
***
L holds a sugar cube between his teeth. His tongue gives it a quarter turn, a half turn, a full turn. His eyes cut to Raito, catch him watching. The platter of cubes balanced on his knees tips sideways.
***
His fingers are nearly as broad as his entire head, long and spindly like the limbs of a salt-bent tree, and when they touch lightly upon Raito's face, it's as if he can feel them everywhere. Against his will, his hands tighten along the fabric at L's waist and drags him closer.
"Interesting," says L, his eyes big and black.
"Hm," replies Raito, the way people do with newspapers and curious things. L pulls their mouths together, and Raito responds like a punch -- because he'd been expecting a fight.
It's not so different, really.
***
In the made-up world, with four walls and no privacy and no air, this sandbox of L's and this maze of Kira's, there is no such thing as girls and boys and no need to prefer one over the other.
Here, there is just L and Misa, and, never mind the chain, he knows which one he would rather spend his time with.
***
He nods to show that he heard, following the pull of steel and iron at the end of L's chain into the hallway, away, forever away. Behind the silence of a door, it's easier to pretend. College students, maybe even friends; he curls his fingers into L's hair, pulls until L sighs into his mouth. He forgets what he was thinking about at the first touch of their tongues.
He can't shake the feeling he's been forgetting a lot lately.
***
His father chews at the widths of his nails when he thinks no one is watching. The glare of lights off his glasses tells Raito nothing, and he doesn't look long.
His curiosity is painful, sometimes, and his imagination even worse. What must it be like, he thinks, to investigate as if your own son is Kira? To look at dozens, hundreds of faces, many guilty, some innocent, some your friends, and know that they're dead, their families grieving in the worst possible way, because of your own flesh and blood? To remember his slouched back, his faraway eyes, the way he meandered up the stairs with an apple cupped in his palm, and realize all those times you thought he was just a studious boy, a regular teenager, he was actually going to commit murder -- the same baffling deaths you were going to lose hair over the next day.
What must it be like, he wonders, to know that every country wants your son's head? To know that history books will immortalize your name right up there with Hitler, with Genghis Khan, with all the great villains of the world, because of your son, Yagami Raito, of whom you were so proud, of whom you thought the world.
Raito turns away, lets his father keep chewing.
***
"Your hands are warm," murmurs L, with a leap of muscles up his abdomen at Raito's touch. He nibbles at the flesh of his neck, so lightly that he feels the goosepimples rise against his lips. "Means a cold heart."
***
"What convinced you in the end?" he asks, voice purposely casual, foot tapping at the desk like a metronome. The chain swings between them.
L's eyes make triangles at the screens. "Your dreams are untroubled," he says, like the others aren't right there, not needing reminders that the two of them are stuck with each other all the damn time.
Raito knows what he's trying to say.
He thinks they might be missing something big.
(That something tastes like apples.)
+++++
14. "No Man's Land" by Sufjan Stevens: The Time Travelers
the right hand takes what it can / ransacks with the mad man
for this land is not yours or mine to have
The only sound besides his own footsteps was the whistle of the winds through the blades of wild grass, through the limbs of the trees, making the eaves of Hawthorne Cottage groan in tolerant protest. This early in the morning, everything was painted in ochre, almost golden, as if it all became invaluable at the first touch of light.
Gideon paused at the bottom of the steps, turning his head back as if he had heard footsteps following him. The wind rustled his surroundings again, peaceful, unperturbed. The swaying branches almost sounded like people murmuring in a crowded room.
He closed his eyes. Then he opened them. And opened them again.
It was as easy and as shocking as suddenly submerging himself in a cold basin of water; he remembered how ill it had made Kate, right before the timequake, to see past, present, future, all that was and all that ever could be. To Gideon, it was as easy as turning the page of a book.
The scene in front of him exploded into light and brilliant clarity; he could see the ghosts of the parallel worlds, so close to theirs he felt as if he could reach out and touch them, as if there was nothing more substantial between him and them than a veil; they were cast into a hundred different colors, like he was looking at them through a prism. Their whispering increased tenfold; he could catch snatches of conversations, of laughter, angry rejoinders, all layering over themselves, a thousand different Hawthorne Cottages, all pressed together right next to each other like leaves in between the pages of a novel.
He could see this very same morning, done a hundred times over, and in them, he was rarely alone.
In several, Kate and Peter both smiled back at him, their bodies overlong and at home in eighteenth century clothes. In some, they looked forlorn and distant, hands pressed palm-to-palm as if remembering a pact, the familiar, worn expressions that Gideon saw the second time they came hurtling through time for him. In others, they looked happy; Kate's freckles stood out on her face and Peter's eyes were dancing, and he put an arm around her waist and murmured something that Gideon couldn't entirely make out, but he caught Sydney Byng's name and Kate shrieked with laughter.
In some, it was just Kate alone, standing with her arms wrapped around herself, the hem of her skirts trailing in the mud and the dew, looking translucent and ungrounded. In some, it was Peter, Joshua's features in his face even more evident in middle age, sitting in the morning sunlight with the manuscript of something in his hands.
Sometimes, there were other faces there, too: Dr. Piretti, whom Gideon had met in passing as he hurtled forward in time and she hurtled back, her eyes unclouded and bright, head craned back to watch a couple men install what looked like a metal rod to the roof of the cottage. Lord Luxom, as transparent as plastic, sitting miserably on the porch. Dr. Dyer, Molly bouncing around him. Peter's father, watching his son lead the cows to pasture with a fierce pride in his face. A thousand could-have-beens, people who had brushed past this century who could have stayed.
He saw the Tar Man, too, inked darkly onto the pages closest to his own. In some, he was dressed in his familiar, formidable overcoat and tricorn hat, and in others, he was the perfect picture of a twenty-first century aristocrat. Sometimes (and Gideon never understood why) he thought he saw Tom, standing beside the Tar Man almost as if he deserved to be there. Sometimes there was a girl, too, eyes pretty and dark.
The Tar Man held onto Tom and Anjali in a way that reminded Gideon a lot of the way he'd once held onto Kate and Peter.
Some of the worlds had a Hannah in them, standing in the doorway to the cottage, the sunlight catching the hints of blonde in her hair. In some worlds, Joshua came to stand beside her, a paintbrush tucked behind one ear, and in others, her smile was for him, Gideon, and him alone. In many of these worlds, a sleepy-eyed child buried his face in her skirts; his, sometimes, and sometimes not. He took a moment to marvel in their existence; lives he would never know, children who didn't exist in his world, who lived their lives so close to him and yet so completely out of his reach.
Surely a life, once lived, cannot be unlived? someone murmured, sounding both as if they were standing right next to him and as far away as Tyburn.
Gideon pushed, and felt the resisting pressure begin to build inside his skull, right behind his eyes, but then he saw it: the nothingness, the black, the blank slate of a universe wiped clean. Compared to that, the worlds where people swirled around him, whether they be familiar faces, or people he'd never known, whether there was a Hawthorne Cottage or if England had never existed, seemed miniscule and very few, a small tuft of grass in a field the size of London.
It hurt him, to look at the nothing where there should have been a world, but at the same time, it installed a renewed appreciation for his life, the same way he'd felt the night before he was supposed to be hanged at Tyburn. How easily everything could have been destroyed.
How lucky were they to even exist at all.
"I find I like you better when you're not smudging like an oil painting," came a cold, clear voice from behind him, droll in its light, adopted twenty-first century accent, but the tone was unmistakable. Come back to me, it said.
With as little difficulty as it had been to begin, Gideon pulled away, shutting his eyes against the possibilities of time with a sensation not dissimilar to feeling an ocean wave retreat from underneath his feet.
The Tar Man stood behind him, on the topmost step, hands in his jeans pockets. He watched him with his eyes guarded and his face set so that the scar stood out like a throbbing vein. It never failed to surprise him, to see the Tar Man holding his head up straight, but Gideon had seen the wonders of the twenty-first century firsthand and could not doubt them.
"You can do it too, can you not?" he wanted to know. "Probably easier than I can, since you time-traveled more."
The Tar Man shrugged and said dismissively, "I have nothing I want to see in the parallel worlds. I quite like what I have right in front of me."
Gideon smiled, and jumped up the steps to join his oldest brother.
+++++
15. "O Verona (Reprise)" from the Romeo + Juliet OST: Vampire Knight
She skips down the steps, dressed to go out, and Kaname grows antsy. She is still the queen of his chessboard; he cannot afford to lose her.
"Wife," he calls after her.
She tosses a glance over her shoulder, acknowledging. "You called me Yuuki before," she comments dryly. "Don't tell me you've devolved."
"Wife," he says again, this time a question.
"Big brother," she replies warmly, and again turns to leave.
He seizes her arm, yanks her back around. "Wife," he says, forcefully, because he needs to make the distinction clear for the human she still carries inside of her, the one that shies away from him like a skittish colt, thinking, barbaric.
She sighs. Relents. Lifts her hand to his cheek, obediently tilts her head back to be kissed. "Husband."
+++++
16. "Pony" by Erin McCarley: The Chronus Chronicles (The Shadow Thieves and The Siren Song)
you hold your head up to the sky
and say, what kind of blue are you?
She rolls onto her back, on her mattress, socks to her knees and hair wild. The pleats of her skirt fall, and the white of her thighs extend into --
"Don't tell," she murmurs, her knees falling sideways to make room and his jeans rustle against her polyester.
Don't worry, he wants to say, crooking his elbows and finding her mouth. We're good at keeping secrets.
***
Don't tell anybody, but Charlotte Mielswetski kisses with her teeth and when she says fuck, it's usually a command, not an expletive.
Zee's not going to admit it, but it's kind of hot.
She blushes like a volcano.
***
He's a nice boy. He's a British boy. He's the kind of kid anyone would want to bring home to their parents. See, Mom, see, Dad, I'm not a social leper. I have upstanding friends. I'm just not going to tell you this is the only one.
And Zee will smile and say hello and that's usually charm enough. (And he will never understand why British accents are such a turn on.)
But he's never going to tell you, and no one is ever going to find out, but Zee has almost destroyed the world, and it was Charlotte (yes, THAT Charlotte. The one who mouths off to authority and is never on time for math class. The one you DON'T bring home to Mom and Dad.) who saved his life, and, consequently, the world and everyone in it.
And how does Zee, the nice, British boy, repay her?
He pins her against the wall in the girl's bathroom in the middle of her gymnastics meet, and when he rips a seam, she mutters, careful, into the fabric of his shirt and he tells her he likes her out of the leotard better than in, and she says, well, you should have just said so, and shimmies right out, like a minnow, like a cat.
Her hair is scarlet and gold against his black skin. He thinks of the way it whips around when she somersaults on the balance beam, the way her whole body bends like a straw, and his mind flashes to the way she'd ragdolled between the Harpies, the way Philonecron looked at her like he wanted to break her, and his heart gives one great cry --
She wraps her freckled legs around his waist.
"Bril," he gasps.
"Oh, shut up," she returns. "Who are you kidding."
***
"English project!" Charlotte flashes her parents a smile, and as far as clever, on-the-spot lies go, it's not the best.
As she leads him up the stairs, he hears Mrs. Mielswetski say to Mr. Mielswetski, "They sure do have a lot of projects in Mr. Metos's class, don't they?"
"Do you think we should complain?" Mr. Mielswetski says back to Mrs. Mielswetski.
Charlotte and Zee have the decency to wait until they're safely locked in her room before they fall apart laughing.
It doesn't take long for their clothing to fall to her carpet. They're not worried about her parents walking in on them; even if they did, Charlotte and Zee have faced Immortals and the forces of Evil Themselves. And they know what other people would say. Oh, gross. You guys are cousins!
"Yeah, and?" Charlotte would say with an upturned nose and a flip of her hair. "What does that mean? Don't tell us we should go out and meet other people before we settle on each other, because then the implication is that we won't. And Zee's happy with me and I'm happy with Zee. We're two parts of a whole."
(There is, of course, the whole illegal aspect of it, but remember, Charlotte and Zee have broken the laws of immortal gods. Societal laws are laughable in comparison!)
Somewhere along the line, there's a girl named Maddy with a broken heart and a missing friendship bracelet, a girl named Samantha who's afraid of her own shadow, and a boy named Jason who's not a boy at all, and they're present in every kiss, every whisper of skin against skin, but Zee and Charlotte are good with living with consequences.
"Our cat is glaring at us," he whispers, and Mew flicks her tail in acknowledgement.
They might just be projecting, but the cat looks almost disappointed.
***
"We should live in London," she says, stretching her body against the long, vertical lines of his bedspread.
"I was thinking Los Angelos," he says, watching with darkening eyes. "Closer to the Underworld."
She looks at him drolly. "Unless you plan on hiring me full-time as your bodyguard, I don't think actively provoking the gods is going to be healthy for either of us."
"We'll have to find somewhere that accepts cats." -- this is said against her ribs, the underside of her breast. She smells like summer.
"Maybe Cairo, then," her fingers play against the plush of his lips, slip inside.
***
They are fifteen.
Just fifteen.
+++++
17. "Que Sera Sera" by Pink Martini: Bitter Virgin
when i grew up and fell in love / i asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
will there be rainbows / day after day?
The strap of her purse slid down her arm. She pushed it back, and climbed the last few stairs to her apartment. There was a strange noise in her ears, like static off a badly-tuned television, its hiss dulled and muted but still present. She felt like she'd just gotten back from a very loud rock concert with her ears still ringing.
Oh, God. Her little girl.
She had noticed everything. Hinako was fourteen; sullen and moody was the main mode of transportation for fourteen-year-olds, so she hadn't worried. She pretended it had nothing to do with an abortion; she read in a pamphlet at work that abortion hurts the mother just as much as it hurts the fetus, in a manner of speaking. She'd been prepared for that. Hinako withdrawing was to be expected. She'd made light of it, so her husband wouldn't grow suspicious.
Everything would go back to normal.
She had noticed nothing.
Ma'am, have you looked closely at your daughter? She is covered in bruises; Hinako, could you extend us your arm for us, please? Thank you. See, here, here, and here. The nurse in the lab also reported tears and abrasions around her genital area. Judging by this evidence, both old and fresh, I don't think your daughter consented. And I think the abuse is still going on.
What?
Ma'am ... Aikawa Hinako is still underage. Sexually abusing an underage girl is against the law. Her abuser would have to have continuous access to her. A neighbor who looks after her after school, or a teacher, perhaps, or a stepfather...
She unlocks the door and enters the home. The kitchen is dark; the only light came from the living room, pooling on the linoleum. The dishes are still in the sink from when Hinako collapsed, shirt puckering around her growing belly. Her second child. Her second unwanted child. Rape-baby.
The shoes are all lined up next to the door, neat and straight. She'd lectured Hinako only a few nights earlier about keeping them tidy; how ridiculous it seemed now, the pantomime of a regular life.
She was a horrible mother.
A horrible, horrible mother. The worst. They should lock her up too, for neglect. She'd lectured and yelled, told Hinako to comb her hair out straight, to tuck in her shirt, to do the dishes, to be responsible and to get good grades. How stupid. It was all so utterly stupid. When her daughter had needed her the most, she'd turned her back and pretended it was all part of the normal package.
Her daughter.
This couldn't happen. Not to her. This happened to other people's daughters.
Ma'am. Please. Whoever it is, they need to be punished for what they've done to her. Help us. Think.
Hinako. Hinako.
Mother. It's too late this time. It can't be aborted, can it?
No. Oh, Hinako...
Don't look like that, Mother. This one isn't your grandchild any more than the last one was. It's just a parasite.
A trusted neighbor, a teacher, or a stepfather....
A meat cleaver swung above the sink, its blade glinting. In the other room, she heard him chuckle appreciatively at something on the television.
Hinako! Tell me! Who did this horrible thing to you?
I told you already. You didn't listen. It was Nagashima-san.
She picked up the knife and gripped the handle tightly. Took a step towards the living room.
"Hey, honey?"
+++++
18. "Right Here, Right Now" by Fatboy Slim: original fiction
waking up to find your love's not real
She has been a wife for a week before he tells her she must learn Chinese.
The sulfur street lamps cast a subtle halo the color of buttermilk across their bedsheets. She rolls over to face him, soft cotton tangling between her bare legs. She can't see his eyes for shadows, but she heard him clearly, even over the soft hum of the fan on their bedside table.
She knows why he asked. It stings between her ribs like a stitch in her side; it doesn't lessen even when he leans over the space between their pillows, kissing her eyelids.
"You must learn," he murmurs soothingly. "It will save us an immense amount of embarrassment."
She puts her hands underneath her blonde hair, pressing them so hard into her ears she can hear nothing but the singing of her own blood like the pulse of waves. She shakes her head, over and over again, even when he stops telling her, even when he falls silent and watches her with unoppressive disappointment. Still she refuses, over and over until she forgets what it is she is saying.
-
She does not like the way the Chinese bark. Their voices are too high and their mouths always shape into long "o" sounds, like they're constantly being surprised. The family who live in the bakery -- the one who let them rent the attic room -- greet her every morning with those shocked noises and long syllables, and she just smiles politely.
It is no different on the street. Everyone in Chinatown knows who she is -- she is Zhu Feng's fishwife, brought from farther away than China, farther away than Europe. She has come, quite literally, from an island on one side of the world to an island on the other, in a completely different sea. When she walks down the street, everyone has to crane their necks back to say hello, for her legs are too long and her head too high in the sky. She is easy to spot, because her hair is the color of an orchid, so blonde it is white like sand, flowing over her shoulder blades in uneven strands like exclamation points.
Her name, too, is as foreign as the rest of her -- Anjill. The children have fun saying it, the adults stumble over it, but the rest of what follows is inevitably in Chinese, as if by having an address on River street, she automatically must know the language.
At first glance, Chinatown looks no different from the rest of the Honolulu business district. But once you look closer, you can see that the street signs are in two languages, that the corners of the buildings curl up into greens and reds like smoke from a pipe, that there are lanterns strung outside the windows and sweet buns on display in the cluttered windows. On Saturdays and Sundays, River and Beretenia become flooded with foot traffic for the weekend farmer's market.
Anjill visited a few of these, venturing out to buy fat star fruits and bunches of grapes, mop heads and heavy bags of rice. She also buys meat; moist, raw-smelling mutton and a dozen different kinds of fish, because meat she knows. Meat she's familiar with. The young women with pink-tinged gloves help her count out the unfamiliar green bills at the registers with impatience, because it is always hot here and the smell of warm meat in close confines is enough make anyone mad. They snap instructions at her in short, clipped English; they sound like they're cracking a whip at her, even though Anjill knows it's just her imagination.
"You must learn," Zhu whispers coaxingly in her ear, running his hand up her thigh, and she bites the insides of her lips to swallow her complaints. "It will be easier if you learn."
Anjill turns her head away from him. She closes her eyes, and for a moment, it is easy to imagine the snow. Easy to imagine the ice, condensing on the side of her water glasses, the icicles that hung from the gutters of her family home. It is easy to imagine how comfortable it was to sink into the afghans on the sofa early in the afternoon, lulled to sleep by the sound of the winter sea wind through their rafters.
Then the moment is shattered, and she is back in the hot little room above the bakery with a husband breathing hot gusts of air across her breast bone, with no company besides the bedside fan and the smell of catfish.
She holds onto the memory, though, tucking it someplace inside her heart, where it is always cold and there is always light.
-
The first thing she noticed was the feet.
There was a joke running amongst her brothers, that when the snow outside melted, water streaming in rivulets through their brown lawns, when the weather was warm enough that they could remove their coats, those were the rare days they met their feet.
"What in the world are these things?!" they would cry out in alarm, rolling onto their backs and madly shaking their legs, as if the sight of their own feet terrified them with how unknown they were. And they did look strange; lumpy, soft white things with pink fingers curling underneath. They looked even more strange when they ran outside to squelch through the mud; shrieking at the sensation of earth moving between their toes, laughing and laughing until they were sick of it, until it was time to go inside and put their thick woolen socks back on as the earth turned back to snow.
In Hawai'i, nobody wears socks. It alarmed her, at first, the sight of all the brown feet, calloused toes hanging off the edge of their flip-flops, the toenails dirty brown and blushing coral underneath.
It also bothers her, how nothing about her is different, and yet as if by switching countries of residency, she has changed completely. She wears different things on her feet; thus, she walks differently. She wears her hair up, to cool the back of her neck; thus, the shape of her own face in the mirror is foreign. She jumped four pant sizes without gaining a pound, which disgusts her enough that she refuses to shop in the department stores in Ala Moana for new, more lightweight things. She is always sweaty and miserable these days.
The fashions bother her with how new they are to her; the men walk around in shirts and shorts that look and feel slimy underneath her fingers like fish scales, and their knees poke out, rubbed pink and white from sand and surf. The girls wear clothing that reveals the kind of flesh that Anjill has seen nowhere but in her own shower.
She stares at their clothing and their faces, each as different as the tides. Never before has she been somewhere where she is the minority. Never before had she been somewhere with so many different shapes of faces, eyes, hands. The color of hair and the shape of bodies.
Yet.
Yet.
She sits in the lobby of the bank, the air chilly on the nape of her exposed neck and the strange alphabet swimming underneath her nose. She watches a woman in a paisley blue shirt run a mop over the scratched marble floor. She is old, with a face crinkled like the surface of an almond from the sun and the wind. She is darker than the women behind the counters. Anjill bet if she asks, her lineage goes back to the birth of the islands.
Yet some things never change.
-
Zhu Feng had once been to her as everybody is -- a stranger. When she met him, she had absolutely no idea where he would someday take her, not even the faintest ghost of a dream.
She'd been a waitress for her brother's restaurant, carrying platters of thick meat and boneless fish to tables that were often sticky with beer. She loved the cheer, the warmth, the ruddiness of the familiar faces, crusted with seasalt, all raising their glasses to her when she came around with the pitcher. She remembered her own language, the humming syllables of lullabies and greetings and songs, weaving around inside her head like the pattern of a beloved quilt.
Then came the day a man came into her restaurant, pressed in a clean blue suit with a hand-knit scarf around his neck. He unraveled the scarf to greet her, but the greeting was in English, a language she didn't know then. She smiled politely and shook her head, showed him to a table. She'd stared at his far-apart eyes and his high cheekbones, like the delicate curve of an earthenware pot, his slender body, his hair like the blue-black shade of midnight.
He was joined, shortly, by other men in similar outfits. Politicians and others like them, stopping for a casual dinner at a local eatery like good tourists. One of them had manageable Icelandic: he ordered for them, and when Anjill came back with the bill, he pointed to the dark man who'd been first to enter.
But he hadn't signed the receipt. He'd explained to her, later, that he hadn't known that that was what you were supposed to do; his cheeks always grew rosy whenever she brought it up.
She'd chased him down before he'd gotten two blocks, breath misting in front of her face, her heels slipping on the ice. He'd caught her elbow as she almost skidded into him, and somehow, through pantomime and a lot of awkward laughter, she'd managed to explain to him what he needed to do. She found out, later, that not only had he signed his name in sharp, clear Roman letters, he'd added his phone number.
She didn't call. She told her friends, and they laughed, but she didn't call.
He came back the next day.
And the day after that.
The following day, Anjill didn't have work, so instead, she went down to the little bookshop on the corner next to the post office, and she bought an Icelandic-to-English dictionary. When she saw his face the next morning, bobbing over the top of that knitted scarf, she smiled at him and greeted him with a very polite, "Hello, good day, how are you?" And his face lit up, color flushing up underneath the smoky burn of his skin, and the rest, they say, is history.
Anjill learned English slowly and painfully, for she was long beyond the years that made such things simpler; her mind and tongue had already settled into a comfortable pattern, and she had trouble with the new shapes and the way she had to twist her mouth and throat. He coaxed her, telling her in a roundabout way that it had been difficult for him too, but the English he knew was a businessman's English. He told her, after awhile, as they walked up the pier, fields of white and grey extending in every direction, his story of China.
He was born a small boy in a big city, a blurred face in a hundred million faces. He'd been no one interesting, done nothing interesting, until he'd left home for the first time. He planned to someday be the ambassador for some big company, to be their international representative, and to prove it, he smiled a warm, eager smile, the kind that made her want to smile back without knowing why.
He has charisma, her mother told her, later, with a sly smile, the smile of older women who know what will happen to the younger.
She, in turn, told him what little there was to tell about herself. In truth, there were many things to discuss, but most of them only had ways of expressing themselves in her own language, the inexpressible pieces of her that she only knew inside her own heart, pieces shaped like ice.
Still, when he offered to marry her, her white hair tangled in between his fingers, she said yes, just to see that smile.
-
She eats lunch in a little fruit shop down the street from the bakery where she now lives. The doors are always open here, so she can hear the gasps of the buses as they hunch down close to the curb on River street to spit out their passengers. She can hear the soft shushing of the rain on the corrugated rooftops, even as the sunlight came slanting through to the pavement in dappled patches.
For lunch, she'd bought a fruit cup and a small package of dumplings. She pops grapes into her mouth and watches the families all chatter to each other; mothers wiping the runny noses of their toddlers, fathers practicing counting games, teenagers tapping their sandaled feet to the little colored headphones in their ears.
She has trouble with the dumplings. Not because they are ill-made, and not because they are foreign; she knows what pho is, and this is very good pho, with the right amount of spice, carefully wrapped in the rice-wheat wonton. They have given her chopsticks.
Anjill never learned how to use chopsticks.
She struggles with them, crudely pinching them between her middle finger and her thumb, like she has watched others do, but she cannot get them to pinch and hold. Her food always slips sideways, landing with a greasy plop back with the rest of the dumplings. And she is too good-mannered to eat them with her fingers.
She keeps on fumbling, feeling the familiar frustration begin to knot up in her gut like a cold, hard walnut, tight in the pit of her stomach, when she notices that she is being watched.
She looks up through the thin veil of her hair to find a girl sitting at the table across from her, staring at her. Catching Anjill's eyes, she raises her eyebrows a fraction, and, with slow deliberate, lifts her chopsticks up away from her rice noodles. She arches her fingers up to show where they are positioned. She moves the top chopstick up and down, and then scooped a handful of noodles into her mouth.
Anjill tries to copy her, stealing glances out of the corner of her eye; the girl keeps her fingers high so they are easy to distinguish.
To her surprise, she finds herself holding one of the dumplings between her chopsticks. It wavers and trembles, but it is held solid. Smiling, she pops it into her mouth.
The girl smiles back. She is everything Anjill has come to expect from these islands; she is small, her hair spiralling down her back, the ends ratty from salt water and sweat. Her shirt falls off her smooth, caramel shoulders, and flip flops dangle from her feet. She is Asian; she bets Zhu could take one look at her and name her nationality without even trying, but Anjill finds that she cannot tell one Asian nationality from the next; they all look the same to her.
She picks up her lunch and goes to join her.
-
They walk through downtown Honolulu, through the business district, past the cemetary, around the wharfs and the Aloha tower, which chimes the time out at their retreating backs. Cars hunker in traffic beside them; tourists swirl around them in bursts of foreign languages and sun hats, in sunburns like half-cooked steaks.
Kim's voice is soft like a padded chair, like she isn't used to disturbing the air and likes it the way it is too much to be sharp. She talks about her childhood in Korea; how hard it was to move to Chinatown when she was twelve and have to learn two new languages. She manages, she says.
"The loneliness will always be there," she mumbles, stopping to pluck a flowering hibiscus from a bush. She pulls a bobby pin from somewhere and pins it into her hair, where it sits among all the black in a splash of fiery crimson like a blush. There are flowers everywhere in Hawai’i. "Nothing will make you ache like your longing for the syllables of your home language. The loneliness will be waiting for you in every sentence, every command, every joke that you will never understand. But it's bearable."
In return, Anjill tells her about Iceland. She talks about the rugged heart of the island, where the terrain is so impossible that American astronauts used it to practice moon landings. She paints a picture of the fertile valleys; how whenever she catches sight of the mauka, the bright green mountains of Hawai’i, out of the corner of her eye, she thinks for a heart-stopping moment that she is back home. She talks about the tongues of ice licking their way down to the shore. She talks of her small town by the ocean, where everyone will be a fisherman or a fisherman's wife; she remembers afternoons, swimming with her brothers in geothermal springs.
She tells her about her husband, the way he smiled her off her feet, about how the only thing they have in common is the mutual trouble they have with speaking English. They have no children, except for the sour, rotten nut of frustration rooted deep inside Anjill's belly.
He doesn't understand what it's like for her; he thinks her only trouble is the switch from small town to big city. He's a city kid moving to another city; he doesn't understand why she seeks desperately for a familiar face, familiar creatures, anything that will remind her of the other island on the other side of the world. The only thing he knows is that he wants her beside him, without knowing what that entails.
She misses Iceland, but she wants her home to feel like home.
They walk along the shore; the ocean whispers up against their feet. The smell of flowers is all around them.
Kim reaches out and takes her hand, the way friends do.
-
When she gets home, her husband is sitting at the baker's table, a newspaper opened to the economy section spread out in front of him. She walks over and slams a book down in the middle of it.
Zhu looks up at her, startled by the violence, and by the sudden fire in her eyes.
"I will learn Chinese if you learn Icelandic," she tells him in a tone that brooks no argument, and she feels the ice around her heart begin to crack.
+++++