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Fic: Red Book (1/?)
So I was browsing through old fic in search of something that might not be too horrible to put on my page at the AO3. (It's my shiny new toy--I need to play with it). I came across this weird little story I started in high school, replete with a billion cliches--it somehow managed to combine my love of rentboy fic and my love of high school AUs with my love of pretty boys with super special destinies. And space/time travel?
Anyway, I finished reading the draft of it I had from high school and though to myself "I would read this, if I saw it posted somewhere."
I sat down this morning to do some free-writing before work and I appear to have started rewriting that story. So now I have 3,200 words and sort-of kind-of an opening. Here it is. This is completely unbetaed (even I haven't read it through again). Please don't take this seriously. Just have fun with it?
It was raining. That was pretty much par for the course, these days.
It came down in sheets and left him standing here, back to the concrete wall of a donut shop at damn near two in the morning, hoping to land a trick when the bars closed and some unlucky bastard realized he was going home alone if he wasn't willing to pay for it. Rory hoped this unlucky bastard was at least somewhat sober, because he really hated hopping in a car when the driver was plastered.
The headaches had been getting worse, these past few months. He'd almost gone to the clinic, but couldn't quite scrape together the cash.
He was soaked through but refused to shiver on principle. Principle, or perhaps it was the sheer quantities of caffeine and nicotine he'd consumed while waiting for this horrid night to end. He'd already been out too late to make it into a shelter by the time the rain started coming down. He'd started with the Belltown bars with no success, then hopped the Metro down Aurora to what he'd hoped would be easier hunting grounds. Then the rain had started. And now... well, the only good thing he could say was that his shirt now really did hang like it was painted on, and not just like he was trying to make it look that way. The less said about his mascara, the better.
A car pulled up. It was a station wagon, a maroon Subaru--a chick car, but what the hell. The wipers flopped back and forth across the windshield in frantically erratic patterns, shoveling great gushing torrents of water to each side. He didn't care if it was a chick car.
He walked to the passenger's side and tapped on the glass in a manner he hoped was somewhere between seductive and disarming. If this was some soccer mom out looking for her highschooler who'd missed curfew... well, he'd fuck her, too, if she was interested, but there was no sense in scaring her off.
The window rolled down just enough for Rory to see blue eyes, thick glasses, and a five o'clock shadow. He tried the handle. It opened. He hopped in.
"You some kinda serial killer or something?" He asked. Not the best way to start a conversation, perhaps, but Rory was well past caring.
The driver said nothing. His suit didn't really belong in this part of town, and it put Rory on edge. In this part of town, the only suits were on frat boys come slumming, who paired their Levis with a second-hand blazer in some misguided attempt at dressing both up and down simultaneously. This man was no frat boy. His face looked hard and the gray at his temples said he was a little too old for this part of town. If he'd been wearing a pair of leather gloves, Rory would have been out of the car in a flash, rain or no.
"Fifty for a blow. Anything else, you're gonna need a room." Cash was all well and good, but Rory thought he'd rather guarantee a roof over his head tonight. Hell, he thought he might be willing to fuck just for that.
The driver looked at the trick in his car like someone staring down a problem they'd rather not have, not someone he was about to have sex with--but, hey, no leather gloves. "Two hundred for what's left of the night," the man said at last. "Plus the room."
Rory smiled. "Alright, baby." Still got it. "Lead the way."
The car turned back out onto the highway. "Anywhere you recommend?" The man asked, holding the wheel perfectly at ten and two like they taught you in Driver's Ed as cheap neon streaked by the rain-slicked windows.
"Someplace with room service?"
"Nice try, kid."
"Half a mile up the road." He said. He hated being called kid. "There's this place called The Three Bears. It's clean." And they wouldn't call the cops. Slip the manager a twenty and he'd even keep an ear out on the police scanners and give a ring if anything nasty was coming your way.
"Alright. Just tell me when."
The man didn't touch him. It was big car, with a gear shift and at least three cup holders crammed between the front two seats, but that was still unusual. Generally, his tricks liked to get their money's worth. He drummed his fingers on the dash, anxious, until the suit cast him a look which stilled his fingers. "When," Rory said.
The man pulled over and handed him cash, rolling out a wad of twenties where he knew Rory could see. It was honorable enough, making sure he knew he was good for it. Rory took the cash and went inside.
The heavy-set black man behind the counter raised his eyes as Rory entered. "You look like shit," he said.
"Nice to see you too, Ron." Rory flashed the cash in his fist; the trip from car to building had left it slightly damp, but still serviceable. "Brought you some business. Got a room?"
"For you? Always."
Rory smiled. Ron was a good man. "Your wife start putting out?" He asked while he waited for the receipt to print. He played, perfectly innocently, with the tip of a plastic flower taped to a pen in the mug on the counter, drawing it across his lips, drawing it down to the hollow of his collarbone.
Ron snored. "My wife hasn't put out since Emily was born and you damn well know it." He said. "And anyway, she never did any of that kinky shit you do."
Rory widened his eyes in mock surprise. The state of his mascara probably negated the effect.
Ron handed him the receipt. "You come 'round in the morning and maybe they'll be a room for tomorrow night too. My shift ends at eight."
"Sure thing, baby." Rory dropped the receipt in the waste bin by the door.
He dangled the room key in front of the Subaru, then walked slowly down the row to the room, letting his ass sway in his too-tight, too-worn jeans. The car was dark and still but he could feel the trick's eyes following him. He turned the key in the lock and heard the car door open.
The trick came in while Rory was fumbling for a light switch. He shut the door and bolted it behind him. The shades were already drawn. Rory found the switch. The ceiling lamp spat, flickered, and a sickly fluorescent glow bathed the room. It was an singularly unflattering light. He could flick the light in the bathroom, close the door halfway and call it mood lighting; it would hide is scars pretty well, too. "I'll just be a moment," he said, turning the light off again.
The man said nothing. He'd brought a bag down from the car and set it on the bed, feeling around for the zipper to open it.
Rory slipped into the bathroom and flicked the light on in there. He took a moment to piss--that much caffeine would run right through anybody--and stepped back into the main room. With the door half closed, the light was right: dim, close, and, if you squinted just right, possible to construe as something approaching sensual.
The man turned. There was a gun in his hands.
"Oh, fuck."
He'd seen guns on the street, seen what they could do. He'd been mugged once and felt the press of cool metal against his temple. This was nothing like that. This wasn't a 9mm some street punk carried in his waistband, this was like something from TV. This gun looked slender and dangerous and oh-so-lethal, graceful lines broken only by the screwed-on bulk of a silencer.
"Anything you want, man." The words came pouring out of his mouth. He held his hands out carefully, showing they were empty. "You can have it or you can walk away. It's all the same to me, man. Whatever you want. Please don't do this." His voice broke on that last, as the man stalked closer, coming around the side of the bed and trapping Rory against the corner.
"Your kind are scum." The man said, taking another step. It sounded like a speech he'd rehearsed, or something he'd said before. The gun was between Rory and the phone, between Rory and the door.
Please.
"Like rats, seeking the dark and dying places in the universe."
Please.
"This is not your world and the time has come for you to leave it."
Please.
He made some gibbering fearful sound and stretched his hands, trying frantically to keep the man at a distance. He tripped over the nightstand and fell back over the bed. His foot caught the man in the knee and sent him, staggering off balance, forward for a moment. Rory recovered faster and leaped for the hand with the gun, hoping his weight would drag it down. He'd seen that on TV once, he thought, and terror made him want to try something, no matter how stupid it was.
When his fingers closed around the man's wrist, the man froze. His eyes lost the furious, almost religious fervor and Rory thought, for just a moment, that he saw some of his own fear reflected back at him from those cornflower blue eyes.
Please.
Then the man died.
He fell so quickly, like a marionette with the strings cut, that for a moment Rory thought he'd shot himself in the tussle. But no, there had been no sound. The man fell forward, his weight carrying him down on top of Rory's slight, struggling frame. He screamed, finally, but no sound came out. He scrambled out from under the body, pushing it aside frantically. The man's flesh was cold and stiffening where it touched Rory's bare skin at arms, ankles, and midriff. It was as if he'd been dead for hours.
The headache started again, then, worse than it had ever been, and the whole world seemed to narrow down to that one room, that one bed, where a corpse lay cooling and Rory sat rocking with his head in his hands, tears of agony streaming down his face.
He clawed at the pain as if it were a living thing he could dig out of his flesh but the pain clawed back. It sent shivers of fire down his spine and he screamed for real this time. Sound and everything. No one came.
Dawn came rolling up over the hillside and cast a too-cheerful sliver of light onto the worn carpet under the curtain. The pain receded. The man was still dead. Rory sat cross-legged on the bed and stared at him.
After the sun had stretched a ways further across the carpet, there was a knock at the door. "Housekeeping." Rory said nothing. The woman opened the door and shut it again, screaming for the police. Rory said nothing.
They took him downtown, booked him, and left him sitting in a cell. Rory said nothing.
The police were, frankly, baffled. They weren't sure whether to bring him in as a suspect or a witness. There was a gun found on the scene, but his prints weren't on it. There were no marks on the body. A few signs of a struggle, but no blood. No one had seen the dead man enter the room--which in itself was not surprising--but the body had clearly been dead for quite some time. Longer than the prostitute had been in the room.
"You've got to talk to us, kid." The detective said. "Or this is going to start looking real bad."
"Don't call me kid." Rory said.
"Alright," the detective said, flipping up his chart. "Aurora."
He bit back a grimace. "Just Rory."
"Tell us what happened, Rory."
He stopped talking. What was he supposed to say? He'd touched him and the man had fallen over dead? They'd put him in the loony bin. But crazy still didn't explain the dead body. He felt a distant trace of the power which had surged through his hands then and wrapped curled them into fists at his side on the metal chair.
He kept silent and eventually they put him back in the cell. He was alone, thankfully--Wednesday nights weren't so popular for violent crimes, or even frat boy binge-drinking; he thought, also, that suspected murder might also be getting him some alone time. Whatever. He didn't care. He had to think his way out of this one, and right now it felt more like he had cotton between the ears than a brain.
The cell door opened. He turned to look and saw a figure in the doorway. The light was bad--a horrible blend of too-bright florescent and shadowy corners, and he couldn't pick out more than a chock of hair as bright-dyed and unruly as his own. Then the figure stepped fully in the light and Rory felt something tug deep down within him, like a puppy straining against the leash.
This man didn't look like a cop. He looked like a high school boy, actually. He was slim, slight and dark. But his eyes... he was a man, to judge by the eyes. Rory wondered if he had somewhat of that look himself, now.
"We're leaving." He said. Which was of course a perfectly natural thing for a stranger to say, a stranger who was most certainly not-a-cop, at midnight in the city lockup. "Here are your things." He tossed a slight bag Rory's way. In it was a spare pair of jeans, a couple thin shirts and, fuck, even his toothbrush.
"These are from my apartment."
"Yeah, let's go."
"You were in my apartment." There was an edge of hysteria in his voice, now, that even he could hear.
"Yeah, now let's go."
"Who the fuck are you?"
The man looked a him carefully. Those dark eyes were appraising. "I cannot answer that question to your satisfaction, at present. If you're asking why I'm here, I can say that I'm here to get you out of this place. If you're asking my name--well, I don't have one yet." He paused, as though debating what he could say that would be believed. "You have yet to name me."
That was some seriously fucked-up shit. Rory began to wonder leaving with this guy would really be better than facing murder charges. Something in the man's eyes said trust me but, as had just been proved, Rory's taste in men was shit. Still, what did he have to lose? If things went pear-shaped again, he could just kill the guy. All he had to do was touch him.
With that in mind, he made his decision. "Help me up," he said, lifting his hand to the intruder. "I think my leg fell asleep an hour ago. This mattress is shit."
A wry smile worked its way past those delicate lips. He knew exactly what Rory was asking. "Unsubtle," the stranger said. "But perhaps a good precaution. There are better uses for the touch." Except there was a capital in there, when he said it. The Touch. "Try this."
The touch of firm, dry skin against his palm cast him out. He couldn't have said where. There were strange smells in the breeze that ran over his face; the breeze itself seemed strange, too. He saw the sunset over mountains taller than he had imagined existed, purple and red, and traced the path of two moons over the horizon, chasing each other across the sky. The memory--that's what it was, he realized--started to fade after an instant, and Rory felt the stranger's hand start to slip from his own.
He gripped it harder and pulled, casting out on instinct, utilizing senses he hadn't even known he had. The memory jerked into focus again. He moved closer to it, somehow, till he could smell this alien world around him. And then he stepped too close and the image shattered before him and there was only a screaming, sucking darkness where the sunset had been. The hand he clutched in the here-and-now spasmed, but Rory held on.
He pushed his way through the darkness like a man walking uphill into a head wind and then, suddenly, the howling darkness was gone. He pushed forward; he wasn't sure he knew the way back.
There were voices up ahead.
"We return to this shape most frequently. It is easiest--a midpoint resting in the change. This form knows the plants and animals of this world better than any other. It sees things past the sight of other forms." The winds receded. The voice was like a single point of light piercing the darkness and it anchored him in this moment of experience. It was neither high nor low, he couldn't have said whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman and somehow he felt it didn't really matter.
"Why does the touch kill?" A child's high voice asked.
"It takes knowledge to kill. When you know a form with the touch, you learn its weaknesses also. You will learn this better than most, I believe. It is your heritage."
"I don't want to." The child confided.
The voice laughed. "This world will not give you a choice, little one. There are those who hate our kind."
The wind rose again. Its edge was sharper this time and tasted of rage. Rory was pushed back into himself and opened his eyes in the dim cell again. A dull headache lurked behind his eyes.
"That was extremely rude." The man's face before him betrayed no expression, but there was a tightening around the eyes that had not been there before.
"I'm sorry."
"No," the voice was tight with restraint. "You're not. But come. We had little enough time to begin with and now you've wasted most of that. I doubt we'll get out of here without casualties. Stay close to me, keep your head down, and drop when I say drop."
"And if I don't want to go with you?"
The other man sighed dramatically. "This is neither the time nor the place..." he muttered, dropping to kneel on the floor. "But I suppose I would find it no more pleasant at any other time."
Rory started to step back but the man grabbed his left hand and held it firmly between both of his own. It would have been easier to snap iron than break that grip. "I don't think--"
That's certainly true, came the whispered thought through the connection. Before Rory could voice an objection, the kneeling man spoke. Rory didn't recognize the words--he would have said, previously, that this harmonic was a sound impossible to stretch from a human throat--but they tugged at some part of him, some part he hadn't known was there.
"Theilen," he said, the word bubbling up seemingly of its own accord when the man finished.
Those too-dark eyes met his again and a wry smile stretched across the stranger's face. "That will work. Call me that for now." He said. "Now come."
"Okay." It was the only answer, really. It had always been the only answer.
Anyway, I finished reading the draft of it I had from high school and though to myself "I would read this, if I saw it posted somewhere."
I sat down this morning to do some free-writing before work and I appear to have started rewriting that story. So now I have 3,200 words and sort-of kind-of an opening. Here it is. This is completely unbetaed (even I haven't read it through again). Please don't take this seriously. Just have fun with it?
It was raining. That was pretty much par for the course, these days.
It came down in sheets and left him standing here, back to the concrete wall of a donut shop at damn near two in the morning, hoping to land a trick when the bars closed and some unlucky bastard realized he was going home alone if he wasn't willing to pay for it. Rory hoped this unlucky bastard was at least somewhat sober, because he really hated hopping in a car when the driver was plastered.
The headaches had been getting worse, these past few months. He'd almost gone to the clinic, but couldn't quite scrape together the cash.
He was soaked through but refused to shiver on principle. Principle, or perhaps it was the sheer quantities of caffeine and nicotine he'd consumed while waiting for this horrid night to end. He'd already been out too late to make it into a shelter by the time the rain started coming down. He'd started with the Belltown bars with no success, then hopped the Metro down Aurora to what he'd hoped would be easier hunting grounds. Then the rain had started. And now... well, the only good thing he could say was that his shirt now really did hang like it was painted on, and not just like he was trying to make it look that way. The less said about his mascara, the better.
A car pulled up. It was a station wagon, a maroon Subaru--a chick car, but what the hell. The wipers flopped back and forth across the windshield in frantically erratic patterns, shoveling great gushing torrents of water to each side. He didn't care if it was a chick car.
He walked to the passenger's side and tapped on the glass in a manner he hoped was somewhere between seductive and disarming. If this was some soccer mom out looking for her highschooler who'd missed curfew... well, he'd fuck her, too, if she was interested, but there was no sense in scaring her off.
The window rolled down just enough for Rory to see blue eyes, thick glasses, and a five o'clock shadow. He tried the handle. It opened. He hopped in.
"You some kinda serial killer or something?" He asked. Not the best way to start a conversation, perhaps, but Rory was well past caring.
The driver said nothing. His suit didn't really belong in this part of town, and it put Rory on edge. In this part of town, the only suits were on frat boys come slumming, who paired their Levis with a second-hand blazer in some misguided attempt at dressing both up and down simultaneously. This man was no frat boy. His face looked hard and the gray at his temples said he was a little too old for this part of town. If he'd been wearing a pair of leather gloves, Rory would have been out of the car in a flash, rain or no.
"Fifty for a blow. Anything else, you're gonna need a room." Cash was all well and good, but Rory thought he'd rather guarantee a roof over his head tonight. Hell, he thought he might be willing to fuck just for that.
The driver looked at the trick in his car like someone staring down a problem they'd rather not have, not someone he was about to have sex with--but, hey, no leather gloves. "Two hundred for what's left of the night," the man said at last. "Plus the room."
Rory smiled. "Alright, baby." Still got it. "Lead the way."
The car turned back out onto the highway. "Anywhere you recommend?" The man asked, holding the wheel perfectly at ten and two like they taught you in Driver's Ed as cheap neon streaked by the rain-slicked windows.
"Someplace with room service?"
"Nice try, kid."
"Half a mile up the road." He said. He hated being called kid. "There's this place called The Three Bears. It's clean." And they wouldn't call the cops. Slip the manager a twenty and he'd even keep an ear out on the police scanners and give a ring if anything nasty was coming your way.
"Alright. Just tell me when."
The man didn't touch him. It was big car, with a gear shift and at least three cup holders crammed between the front two seats, but that was still unusual. Generally, his tricks liked to get their money's worth. He drummed his fingers on the dash, anxious, until the suit cast him a look which stilled his fingers. "When," Rory said.
The man pulled over and handed him cash, rolling out a wad of twenties where he knew Rory could see. It was honorable enough, making sure he knew he was good for it. Rory took the cash and went inside.
The heavy-set black man behind the counter raised his eyes as Rory entered. "You look like shit," he said.
"Nice to see you too, Ron." Rory flashed the cash in his fist; the trip from car to building had left it slightly damp, but still serviceable. "Brought you some business. Got a room?"
"For you? Always."
Rory smiled. Ron was a good man. "Your wife start putting out?" He asked while he waited for the receipt to print. He played, perfectly innocently, with the tip of a plastic flower taped to a pen in the mug on the counter, drawing it across his lips, drawing it down to the hollow of his collarbone.
Ron snored. "My wife hasn't put out since Emily was born and you damn well know it." He said. "And anyway, she never did any of that kinky shit you do."
Rory widened his eyes in mock surprise. The state of his mascara probably negated the effect.
Ron handed him the receipt. "You come 'round in the morning and maybe they'll be a room for tomorrow night too. My shift ends at eight."
"Sure thing, baby." Rory dropped the receipt in the waste bin by the door.
He dangled the room key in front of the Subaru, then walked slowly down the row to the room, letting his ass sway in his too-tight, too-worn jeans. The car was dark and still but he could feel the trick's eyes following him. He turned the key in the lock and heard the car door open.
The trick came in while Rory was fumbling for a light switch. He shut the door and bolted it behind him. The shades were already drawn. Rory found the switch. The ceiling lamp spat, flickered, and a sickly fluorescent glow bathed the room. It was an singularly unflattering light. He could flick the light in the bathroom, close the door halfway and call it mood lighting; it would hide is scars pretty well, too. "I'll just be a moment," he said, turning the light off again.
The man said nothing. He'd brought a bag down from the car and set it on the bed, feeling around for the zipper to open it.
Rory slipped into the bathroom and flicked the light on in there. He took a moment to piss--that much caffeine would run right through anybody--and stepped back into the main room. With the door half closed, the light was right: dim, close, and, if you squinted just right, possible to construe as something approaching sensual.
The man turned. There was a gun in his hands.
"Oh, fuck."
He'd seen guns on the street, seen what they could do. He'd been mugged once and felt the press of cool metal against his temple. This was nothing like that. This wasn't a 9mm some street punk carried in his waistband, this was like something from TV. This gun looked slender and dangerous and oh-so-lethal, graceful lines broken only by the screwed-on bulk of a silencer.
"Anything you want, man." The words came pouring out of his mouth. He held his hands out carefully, showing they were empty. "You can have it or you can walk away. It's all the same to me, man. Whatever you want. Please don't do this." His voice broke on that last, as the man stalked closer, coming around the side of the bed and trapping Rory against the corner.
"Your kind are scum." The man said, taking another step. It sounded like a speech he'd rehearsed, or something he'd said before. The gun was between Rory and the phone, between Rory and the door.
Please.
"Like rats, seeking the dark and dying places in the universe."
Please.
"This is not your world and the time has come for you to leave it."
Please.
He made some gibbering fearful sound and stretched his hands, trying frantically to keep the man at a distance. He tripped over the nightstand and fell back over the bed. His foot caught the man in the knee and sent him, staggering off balance, forward for a moment. Rory recovered faster and leaped for the hand with the gun, hoping his weight would drag it down. He'd seen that on TV once, he thought, and terror made him want to try something, no matter how stupid it was.
When his fingers closed around the man's wrist, the man froze. His eyes lost the furious, almost religious fervor and Rory thought, for just a moment, that he saw some of his own fear reflected back at him from those cornflower blue eyes.
Please.
Then the man died.
He fell so quickly, like a marionette with the strings cut, that for a moment Rory thought he'd shot himself in the tussle. But no, there had been no sound. The man fell forward, his weight carrying him down on top of Rory's slight, struggling frame. He screamed, finally, but no sound came out. He scrambled out from under the body, pushing it aside frantically. The man's flesh was cold and stiffening where it touched Rory's bare skin at arms, ankles, and midriff. It was as if he'd been dead for hours.
The headache started again, then, worse than it had ever been, and the whole world seemed to narrow down to that one room, that one bed, where a corpse lay cooling and Rory sat rocking with his head in his hands, tears of agony streaming down his face.
He clawed at the pain as if it were a living thing he could dig out of his flesh but the pain clawed back. It sent shivers of fire down his spine and he screamed for real this time. Sound and everything. No one came.
Dawn came rolling up over the hillside and cast a too-cheerful sliver of light onto the worn carpet under the curtain. The pain receded. The man was still dead. Rory sat cross-legged on the bed and stared at him.
After the sun had stretched a ways further across the carpet, there was a knock at the door. "Housekeeping." Rory said nothing. The woman opened the door and shut it again, screaming for the police. Rory said nothing.
They took him downtown, booked him, and left him sitting in a cell. Rory said nothing.
The police were, frankly, baffled. They weren't sure whether to bring him in as a suspect or a witness. There was a gun found on the scene, but his prints weren't on it. There were no marks on the body. A few signs of a struggle, but no blood. No one had seen the dead man enter the room--which in itself was not surprising--but the body had clearly been dead for quite some time. Longer than the prostitute had been in the room.
"You've got to talk to us, kid." The detective said. "Or this is going to start looking real bad."
"Don't call me kid." Rory said.
"Alright," the detective said, flipping up his chart. "Aurora."
He bit back a grimace. "Just Rory."
"Tell us what happened, Rory."
He stopped talking. What was he supposed to say? He'd touched him and the man had fallen over dead? They'd put him in the loony bin. But crazy still didn't explain the dead body. He felt a distant trace of the power which had surged through his hands then and wrapped curled them into fists at his side on the metal chair.
He kept silent and eventually they put him back in the cell. He was alone, thankfully--Wednesday nights weren't so popular for violent crimes, or even frat boy binge-drinking; he thought, also, that suspected murder might also be getting him some alone time. Whatever. He didn't care. He had to think his way out of this one, and right now it felt more like he had cotton between the ears than a brain.
The cell door opened. He turned to look and saw a figure in the doorway. The light was bad--a horrible blend of too-bright florescent and shadowy corners, and he couldn't pick out more than a chock of hair as bright-dyed and unruly as his own. Then the figure stepped fully in the light and Rory felt something tug deep down within him, like a puppy straining against the leash.
This man didn't look like a cop. He looked like a high school boy, actually. He was slim, slight and dark. But his eyes... he was a man, to judge by the eyes. Rory wondered if he had somewhat of that look himself, now.
"We're leaving." He said. Which was of course a perfectly natural thing for a stranger to say, a stranger who was most certainly not-a-cop, at midnight in the city lockup. "Here are your things." He tossed a slight bag Rory's way. In it was a spare pair of jeans, a couple thin shirts and, fuck, even his toothbrush.
"These are from my apartment."
"Yeah, let's go."
"You were in my apartment." There was an edge of hysteria in his voice, now, that even he could hear.
"Yeah, now let's go."
"Who the fuck are you?"
The man looked a him carefully. Those dark eyes were appraising. "I cannot answer that question to your satisfaction, at present. If you're asking why I'm here, I can say that I'm here to get you out of this place. If you're asking my name--well, I don't have one yet." He paused, as though debating what he could say that would be believed. "You have yet to name me."
That was some seriously fucked-up shit. Rory began to wonder leaving with this guy would really be better than facing murder charges. Something in the man's eyes said trust me but, as had just been proved, Rory's taste in men was shit. Still, what did he have to lose? If things went pear-shaped again, he could just kill the guy. All he had to do was touch him.
With that in mind, he made his decision. "Help me up," he said, lifting his hand to the intruder. "I think my leg fell asleep an hour ago. This mattress is shit."
A wry smile worked its way past those delicate lips. He knew exactly what Rory was asking. "Unsubtle," the stranger said. "But perhaps a good precaution. There are better uses for the touch." Except there was a capital in there, when he said it. The Touch. "Try this."
The touch of firm, dry skin against his palm cast him out. He couldn't have said where. There were strange smells in the breeze that ran over his face; the breeze itself seemed strange, too. He saw the sunset over mountains taller than he had imagined existed, purple and red, and traced the path of two moons over the horizon, chasing each other across the sky. The memory--that's what it was, he realized--started to fade after an instant, and Rory felt the stranger's hand start to slip from his own.
He gripped it harder and pulled, casting out on instinct, utilizing senses he hadn't even known he had. The memory jerked into focus again. He moved closer to it, somehow, till he could smell this alien world around him. And then he stepped too close and the image shattered before him and there was only a screaming, sucking darkness where the sunset had been. The hand he clutched in the here-and-now spasmed, but Rory held on.
He pushed his way through the darkness like a man walking uphill into a head wind and then, suddenly, the howling darkness was gone. He pushed forward; he wasn't sure he knew the way back.
There were voices up ahead.
"We return to this shape most frequently. It is easiest--a midpoint resting in the change. This form knows the plants and animals of this world better than any other. It sees things past the sight of other forms." The winds receded. The voice was like a single point of light piercing the darkness and it anchored him in this moment of experience. It was neither high nor low, he couldn't have said whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman and somehow he felt it didn't really matter.
"Why does the touch kill?" A child's high voice asked.
"It takes knowledge to kill. When you know a form with the touch, you learn its weaknesses also. You will learn this better than most, I believe. It is your heritage."
"I don't want to." The child confided.
The voice laughed. "This world will not give you a choice, little one. There are those who hate our kind."
The wind rose again. Its edge was sharper this time and tasted of rage. Rory was pushed back into himself and opened his eyes in the dim cell again. A dull headache lurked behind his eyes.
"That was extremely rude." The man's face before him betrayed no expression, but there was a tightening around the eyes that had not been there before.
"I'm sorry."
"No," the voice was tight with restraint. "You're not. But come. We had little enough time to begin with and now you've wasted most of that. I doubt we'll get out of here without casualties. Stay close to me, keep your head down, and drop when I say drop."
"And if I don't want to go with you?"
The other man sighed dramatically. "This is neither the time nor the place..." he muttered, dropping to kneel on the floor. "But I suppose I would find it no more pleasant at any other time."
Rory started to step back but the man grabbed his left hand and held it firmly between both of his own. It would have been easier to snap iron than break that grip. "I don't think--"
That's certainly true, came the whispered thought through the connection. Before Rory could voice an objection, the kneeling man spoke. Rory didn't recognize the words--he would have said, previously, that this harmonic was a sound impossible to stretch from a human throat--but they tugged at some part of him, some part he hadn't known was there.
"Theilen," he said, the word bubbling up seemingly of its own accord when the man finished.
Those too-dark eyes met his again and a wry smile stretched across the stranger's face. "That will work. Call me that for now." He said. "Now come."
"Okay." It was the only answer, really. It had always been the only answer.