Life is rarely what you expect it to be, for who would ever dream of having messy relationships and lonely nights? Everyone is looking for that perfect world, for that future where happiness and prosperity win triumphant over sorrow and loss.
We can blame Hollywood for some of that, for most movies (and the related tie-in books and various other media) focus heavily on that “and they lived happily ever after.”
Especially when it’s far too convenient to overlook the fact that said happiness is often best found with a healthy distance between some people…and an even healthier distance between certain others.
We forget the lessons taught by the Brothers Grimm.
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The trouble with having a friend that runs a bar is that you tend to patronize that bar exclusively. When you find yourself at a point where you want to get mindlessly and stupidly drunk, it’s not as easy to do it when the reason you want to get that way is mixing the drinks for you. It’s even worse when it’s your ex-girlfriend, largely because if she suspects that you’re out to get drunk, she’ll start watering the drinks and you end up pissed off before you get pissed drunk.
I didn’t want to get arrested for assaulting an upstanding member of society, so I decided the best way to go about getting absolutely plastered was to find a new bar. Normally, this isn’t a problem. Just pick a bar, walk in and start to order. ‘Normally’ doesn’t also happen to come along at eight in the morning on a muggy Wednesday in May.
Fortunately for me, I’d learned this gem of wisdom early enough being Suzu’s flatmate, and I always had a bottle or two of my favorite poison around. In my case, it was a single barrel vintage brandy. I didn’t get the good stuff out just to get drunk, but I didn’t drink swill, either. I shot a quick text off to Caroline, my PA at Ravenswing that I wasn’t going to be coming in, and then grabbed a bottle of brandy and a glass.
I put my cellphone in my pocket as it began to ring, but I ignored it, instead heading around past my stairs, and heading down the hall to the living room. I knew who was calling me, and he could damned well wait. I’d done the job; the rest was simply pick-up work. It wasn’t as if I needed the money, after all.
Now let me clarify a few things. Suzu and I weren’t a ‘thing.’ I called her a girlfriend, but it isn’t with the normal connotation. We may have entertained the idea once or twice, even tried to let things take a natural course. What we discovered was that she bites; and that was a really bad idea for both of us. The best way I can describe it is that we’re as close as lovers… without the benefits of sex. Doesn’t mean I don’t think those thoughts sometimes, and well she knows it.
Still, it didn’t make life any easier to walk through the townhouse, seeing the little signs of her presence completely gone. It wasn’t as if she had been a collector, or a woman of many knickknacks. She’d been content to leave her impression in a room, a lace thing she called a doily under a glass vase, and a small handful of little smooth river rocks collected on the mantle over the fireplace. Rocks, vase, and even the well-dratted little doily were gone.
Strange, how easy it is to measure life by what you’ve lost.
I’d been toying with writing my memoirs, even had a few stories of my past scratched out in my abysmal handwriting, but really, an autobiography? I’m an assassin; I’d have to sell it as pure fiction, or nearly every Government on the planet would be fighting for my extradition, and rightly so. No, I thought it wiser to keep the vast majority of my life unknown to the general populace, and with men like John Kelly on my ass… I’m sure you can understand.
I walked into the kitchen and set the brandy down on the counter, opening the refrigerator to see if there was anything safe to eat cold. While I can use a computer, I cannot for the life of me use a microwave or any other electrical cooking appliance. Gas stoves are something that I require if I am to even attempt to cook for myself, which is a dicey proposition at best.
Generally speaking in today’s world, a meal is something that one shoves into a microwave and pushes a few buttons to heat. In my world, a meal is one of three things: cold, burned, or take-out. Suzu has called my refrigerator the epitome in bachelordom, a daily record of my miserable eating habits. I say its science experiments for the betterment of human society. She thinks that what grows in my refrigerator could possibly be used as an effective biotoxin.
Maybe she has the right idea, all things considered, as I recall one cooking attempt in which I had the brilliant idea that I could make an old Irish style pot of stew. So I got the biggest stockpot I owned out, and proceeded to fill it with things from my take-out containers. If it still smelled good, I dumped it in and added some water. Right, I can see your expression; I know what you’re thinking. I thought it myself about thirty minutes after it started to get hot. I might be vegetarian, but eggplant lasagna and vegetable chow mein do not make a good stew. It smelled so vile, I had to open all the windows and escape the house.
Another attempt at cooking brought the Charleston Fire Department to my aid, even though I had suppressed the flames by my magic. It was the talk of the neighborhood, and I was man enough to own up to the fact that it was my abysmal attempt at cooking myself some food that caused the problem. Mellie Adams, the lovely young lady two doors down brought me dinner for a month after. I was understandably sorry when she moved away.
Continuing the self-humiliation, I tried to boil eggs once… I heated the water to boiling, and then added the eggs. That’s how one did pasta, so it stood to reason that boiling eggs went much the same. Unfortunately, adding cold eggs to hot water is an… explosive experience. No, please don’t try it yourself; scraping egg off of the kitchen ceiling is absolutely no fun. Suzu moved in shortly after that, and she’d been doing the cooking since.
So as you can see, I don’t often cook for myself. It’s far safer to my environment and the health of the rest of those who live near me. What I don’t generally share is that I actually am rather capable of creating a multiple course meal. I just need to do it outside on the open flame of a campfire or a grill, but that takes too much work. And I’d have to buy a grill.
Now that Suzu was gone, however? It was back to cereal and meal replacement bars. I didn’t want to burn the place down; it was on a local Register of Old Houses, and I didn’t want the Hysterical Society breathing down my neck too.
My cellphone kept ringing, a jarringly irritating sound, and I fished the thing out of my pocket, glancing at the caller ID before I hit the green button and answered. “Shestin, go.” So it isn’t the cheeriest of greetings, but when it’s Ravenswing on the other end, I don’t have to be cheerful. After all, I know what he wants.
“I take it that this is an unannounced day off.” The man on the other end of the call had a somewhat nasal quality in an odd European drawl, with the second to the last word stressed and the final word elongated into a statement and not a question. If I closed my eyes and tilted my head slightly, I could see Alan Rickman standing there glaring at me with his stringy black hair hanging over a perpetual scowl.
“Actually, someone stole my car. I had to go down to Lockwood to file my report.” I picked up my drink and walked back into the living room; spotting a few more things that were ‘missing’ and I took a swig of the drink and turned my attention back to the phone call. “So, yeah. Call it an unannounced morning off. I mean, it’s not as if you won’t know where I am for later. I imagine you’ll want the usual meeting.”
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There was silence for a moment, and I could tell that my reply wasn’t entirely what he was expecting. I could almost envision the gears spinning as he considered, and then his dry voice crept through the phone’s speaker. “Nine. The usual place. If you aren’t there, it will be the worse for you.”
The trouble with cell phones is that the call can disconnect and there is no dial tone to tell you that the call has ended. A sufficiently sophisticated Bluetooth headset will beep at you, but I didn’t have one of those. My last one ended up falling off my ear when I bent over and they don’t do the backstroke well.
Right. So. I was expected to be at the office by nine o’clock that evening. Usually doable, except for that pesky lack of car issue. See, the head office for Ravenswing Corporation was situated in a small industrial area of North Charleston, off of a road bizarrely named after a local river and a chemical that was found nearby. Don't ask me; I just worked there. The two-story building with attached warehouse hadn't been worthy of Valen Ravenswing's use, so he'd bought out the adjacent property, leveled the lot of it, and had a five-story building built, with a secondary two-story lab facility parked behind it and a warehouse behind that. At my insistence, and only after several months of arguments, he'd put in a parking garage, and local offices rented out the upper floors as needed. The rentals brought in enough to offset the cost of maintaining the parking garage, and in the end, I won that round.
I’d like to mention that I had also wanted an access road to the airport since the office was within walking distance to the loop road... but it was US Government property and there were no chances of that. I had a good go at it, though, poring over maps to try to find a route over civilian ground, but there wasn't much for it. It was simply easier to take the interstate around. But that’s neither here nor there, because I’m down at Tradd and Legare. I almost called Ravenswing back to tell him to meet me at my place… but I really didn’t want to invite him in to my home. I’d have to call a cab and rent a car to deal with the aftermath and the meeting as best I could.
The Grandfather clock in the hallway announced the time, and my eyes strayed habitually to my phone. Don’t misjudge me; I have faith in today’s technology, but I tend to believe more in the old fashioned analog clockwork over digital chicanery. Batteries die, cell phones lose signal, but clockwork just keeps ticking. Ah-ha, see? Two minutes off. I blame the phone.
Being that it was only a hair past eight-thirty in the morning, I had time to take a shower and go about renting a car before having to worry about more mundane issues such as food. You may have noticed that I’ve not mentioned sleep. That’s because I don’t unless I absolutely have to. It isn’t unheard of for me to run between seventy-two to eighty-four hours without so much as a nap. Right now, I’m about close to thirty, which means I’m still good for a bit longer before I have to succumb to the nightmares. The longer I push past exhaustion, the harder it is for the nightmares to reach me, so I’ve been pushing that out towards the eighty hour mark more often than not lately.
No, it’s not healthy, and I don’t suggest it for the average human. Then again, I’m fair bit far from average.
Average people generally don’t have grossly disturbing nightmares every time they sleep. I’m fair certain it ties back to the fact that my soul is bound to a Demon Lord. Whatever is detrimental to me gains him power, so I try to deny him what I can. I daresay that he got quite the kick of a jolt when I got shot, but not enough of one to truly make him happy. No, he’ll get his thrill tonight in our meeting… when he beats the literal bloody hell out of me.
Please. Don’t look at me like that. Next I’ll have to confess to actually enjoying it sometimes.
By nine thirty, I’d showered, scraped a razor across my face just because I could, and called for a cab as I dressed. Black silk shirt, lightweight charcoal wool pants… I’d not suffer too terribly with the weather being in the mid-eighties, but I wasn’t planning to spend all day outside. I would be outside only as long as it took to inspect the rental, and then it would be back to the comforts of modern living.
Why the wool? Well, given my line of work and the nature of my magic, I prefer to wear things that don’t easily take to fire. Cotton was out of the question, as was polyester, given that anything flammable didn't last long in my world. I’d entertained silk pants once or twice, but they were difficult to maintain and I had enough issues with my appearance as it was.
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘Black Irish,’ and it applies in full to me. Dark hair, pale skin… blue eyes… I have a big hang-up over how I look. Flat-footed, I stand one hundred and seventy-five centimeters, and I weigh a little over nine stone. Ah… call it five nine, one twenty seven. I’m not skinny enough to be considered unhealthy, but I’m not too far from it. On a day I’ve had to expend a lot of magic, I can lose a good bit of weight in a short amount of time if I don’t eat, and when I do forget… it takes time to gain that weight back.
On top of being a skinny little shit, I don’t look much older than twenty. My hair tends to be a perpetual black mop atop my head, and when it hangs in my eyes, I’m more mistaken for a teenager. I try to keep it in one of those Asian styles with a few spikes here and there, just because that’s about all it will do. Sometimes it ends up longer, and then I have this feeling that everyone is staring at me thinking I’m a girl.
The only thing about myself I really like is my eyes. They’re one of those blues that runs bright and intense, the color a cross between the darker blue topaz and a sapphire. Suzu calls it cerulean, but she’s always been given to fancier words than I am. Anyway, add all that up and you’ve got a fair good idea of me. The only bad part of it all is that I get carded for everything, and when you’re over a hundred, it raises some eyebrows.
The taxi’s horn drew me away from my contemplations, and after a quick chat with the driver, we headed up to Meeting, and within twenty minutes I was looking at the list of available cars on the rental lot.
Now, I’ll be honest: a Pontiac G5 isn’t my first choice in sports car, but it was enough for the rental agency, so I had to endure. Of course I drive a standard, and as I growled my way through the gears, I considered taking the thing back for an automatic... which was near on sacrilege in my book. The clutch felt as if it was filled with glue, and don’t get me started on shifting the thing. Oh, what I wouldn’t have given for a Porsche.
I had an entire day to kill before my meeting, and the last place I wanted to be was the townhouse. Without Suzu's presence, it wasn't anything approximating a home, and I knew that the only thing I would do on my own would involve alcohol and destructive tendencies. I turned down towards the crosstown, and pulled into the visitor parking at the Medical University. I'd funded some grants on a private project, and there was one patient/doctor combination in particular that I felt like checking in with.
James Everton worked in pediatrics, though his primary field had been cardiology. He’d become somewhat of an expert on leukemia, given that his daughter Mary had been diagnosed when she was two. He’d thrown himself into the specialized role of single father and primary doctor, attending classes and seminars whenever he could, trying to learn how to best care for his little girl. Five years on, if it existed, he knew about it. But it still wasn’t enough.
I’d made Everton’s acquaintance at a fundraiser, and though I was already heavily funding cancer research, his impassioned speech had intrigued me. I invited him to dinner; he countered with a request to have it at the hospital. Curious, I’d agreed, and that impromptu Italian dinner prompted many a night at the bedside of a seven year old girl who called me ‘Uncle.’
You think you’re strong in the face of adversity? Little Mary Everton broke my heart and showed me up as the weakest man on the planet, and she’d do the same to you.
Before I got to the hospital complex, I stopped off at a local gift shop and picked up a few gifts; a new blanket and a big white stuffed rabbit. If it was a good day, she might appreciate the rabbit. If it was a bad… well, a warm blanket never came amiss, and the rabbit could make an appearance later.
It wasn’t a good day. The treatments had made her sicker than usual, and I stood in the doorway, clutching blanket and rabbit and hating myself for being unable to do anything to help. James didn’t even notice as I moved away from the room and placed the gifts on the nursing station counter. The nurse gave me a sad and understanding smile, and I echoed it for a moment before moving away and walking through the hallways back out of the hospital. I could heal myself, could call my phoenixfire and rebuild my own body… but I could do nothing for that precious seven year old girl who hadn’t done a damn thing wrong in her life.
I’d long given up my faith in God, turned away from my Irish Catholic upbringing and my once-fervent desire to be a priest. But I leaned against that rented car in the parking lot and prayed to whatever might have been listening to heal that child, or grant me my ability long enough to allow me to do it myself. Doctors and nurses walked around the car, voices lowered as they talked, understanding the despair that I stood in. Around this facility, they saw it all the time.
A voice caught my ears, and I lifted my head, but whoever it was had entered the hospital and was away from my sight. It had sounded like my brother’s voice, but it was more than likely just my imagination. The mind plays tricks on you when you’re upset, and this was no different.
I got into the car and checked the clock. It was nearly eleven. I decided I’d get some food and then go on up to the office and get some work done before Ravenswing decided to start what he called a meeting. Meeting, beating… close enough, I supposed. I didn’t like either, either, if you really want to play on words.