So, here I was at Tommy’s, where three months ago I was a hot young soldier back from the wars with cash in my pocket and love on my mind. I was about as cool as I had been in my entire life. Which was now over. I was covered in Goblin King glamour, like David Bowie his own bad self stepped out of Labyrinth to make teenage girls inappropriate dreams come true, with MY MOM hanging on my arm and fangirling, while my father laughed his ass off across the table. I was going to eat like the unearthly abomination I was, because his smirking deserved the biggest financial hit I could give him, and because damnit it had been a stressful few days and it turns out running fast as a car burns a lot of calories. Who knew?
I caught the greeter giving me the long slow once over, pausing at the embarrassing, but flattering bulge that Bowie got away with in a movie rated for kids. I mean, goblins got it going on down there, not going to lie, and tights are, well, tight. This would be normally cool, but I have MOM clinging to my arm and squeeing with the greeter about how amazing I look, which has now forever ruined my chances at dignity or ever pursuing thoughts of romance with any woman who witnessed this moment. I smiled, and in a voice that was pure David Bowie, purred to her.
“Either I have the lead in a local theater companies’ production of Labyrinth, we started dress rehearsals today and mom just had to drag me out in costume, or I am the Goblin King here to grace you with my own dark majesty.” I felt the fairy magic of my elven changeling flow into my words, and I could see the perception of everyone who was pretending not to notice, along with everyone who was unabashedly staring at me start to shift. It didn’t touch mom and dad, because they were MINE, but everyone around that was not mine had their minds fogged just a little bit to accept the words I spoke, with the intentions I held, and would look inside their own minds for reasons to shore up that illusion. Fairy magic is flat ass scary that way. It isn’t Dr Strange flashy, but it is so subtle you could ride the Wild Hunt through Times Square hunting Unicorns and while everyone would see it, no one would find it at all odd, or worth talking about later or filming. I may not have that level of control yet, but what I could do was scary enough.
After posing for photos with half the waitresses, six of the guests, and one blushing Cantonese cook from the back, we got down to hard eating and discussion. Over a plate of Stoner Fries (think the love child of Quebec Poutine and pub nachos), we discussed my future options.
Dad started. “Look Jareth, I know I may have pointed you at the army since you were knee high to a grasshopper,” started dad, which was a funnier expression now that I was in fact greener than said grasshopper. “but you know I did communications for them for a lot of years, did security work to keep the most secure networks secure, which was tough using hardware that was amazing for the truly black ops groups, linked to main systems with were antiquated bargain basement garbage where the main army systems live. I saw a lot of things I never talk about. Look, they know you are dead, they declared you legally dead and have started the paperwork for paying your death benefit. If you were to show up again alive, they wouldn’t have to “disappear you”, you are already legally dead. If they made you disappear into some black program to see if they can figure out how to turn you into some new Super Soldier, you will never see the light of day again.”
I tried to lighten his mood. “It worked out okay for Captain America!” I joked, eating a fry.
His beer slammed down on the table and his voice got cold. This was the Dad of Consequences that faced me when my choices had been particularly stupid, That voice chilled me worse than some fairy fuckwad waving a sword at me.
“It didn’t work out so well for Weapon X. They had him for years, cutting him apart, making him into a better weapon, making him a better tool, then they tossed him at the Incredible Hulk to see if he would break. He calls himself Wolverine now, do you ever wonder why he never came back to Canada? Ever wonder HOW they kept him for all those years figuring out what kind of weapon he was, and if they could make more of him?” Dad’s eyes were giving me that flat thousand-yard stare again, suddenly, I thought about what he was saying. Sure, I had been overseas, I had been to war. I had got a look at how the game was played for real, the reality of how power got wielded, why and for who.
I looked at Dad and nodded, I had a problem though “Dad, I hear you, but I don’t have a choice. I swore an oath.”
My mother tapped her wedding ring on the table and swore. “Until death do us part. They told me my baby boy DIED in service. Your service number has already been reclassified, your records not sealed but closed. You are DEAD to them, and so is your oath. Unless you are stupid enough to swear it again, you don’t owe them a thing!” Her eyes were fierce, and she would have looked terrifying if she wasn’t waiving a piece of impaled chicken and lettuce from her Cobb’s salad to make her point.
That “cannot lie” thing, it makes sense now that I know I am a goblin, fairy has, well rules about that. Oaths are one of those rules, if I make one, I cannot break it. Not I feel deeply shamed and will never forgive myself or some sort of over the top emotional crap, I mean my body will not let me stop trying to fulfil that oath until I do or it kills me. Fairy are good at wordplay for a reason, being bad at it gets you dead pretty quickly. I felt for that welcoming line that had tied me to the Armed Forces since I swore my oath, that golden chain of belonging that made me know I was home at last, and it was gone.
Holy shit. Oaths have two sides, and one of them had already written me off. I wasn’t bound to them. Since I was dead in their eyes, even if they changed their mind, magic didn’t bind me to them. Now dad was right. Being legally dead but practically alive would be a bit too tempting for someone who wanted to see if taking me apart, tossing my green bits in a blender and injecting into a company or so of our best JTF2 Commando didn’t produce some cool new Captain America, (now made in Canada at off brand prices!). It wouldn’t work. I wasn’t a super soldier, I wasn’t a mutant. I wasn’t ever human, even if even I thought I was. I was ALWAYS the goblin half of a changeling pair. Now I just knew it, and had a lot of ghostly crap from my dead other half that somehow seemed to be flittering around in my head like a crowd of confused butterflies looking for a place to land. Of course, they could spend decades cutting me apart to figure that out, and Wolverine did not come out of that process sane. Let’s not call that plan B, lets call that plan FU.
I nodded to both mom and dad, as we decided step one of my new life was getting me out of the country before anyone who had I clue who I was figured out I was alive. Step 2 was figuring out what to do with my life. Damn but that was a hungry making thought. Time for the real meal and some thinking.
I ordered Tommy’s Ultimate burger challenge. A massive 3lb Burger topped with 3 fried eggs, 8 strips of bacon, and 4 slices of Canadian cheddar, all built on a Kaiser loaf. Served with a generous poutine
and a 20oz milkshake. It cost $60 dollars, but the joke was if you could eat it all in an hour it was free. I ordered the challenge, but asked them to top it off with a double helping of sauteed mushrooms.
“Are you sure honey, I mean, where are you going to put it all?” She was giving me a look that made me feel like I ought to be on the menu, even though my mom was sitting RIGHT HERE, like that wasn’t awkward at all. Still, I was a goblin of the world, a decorated veteran, and she had shot me down half a dozen times I tried to flirt with her before I was wearing David Bowie’s Goblin King glamour. I gave her his best smouldering glance and piled on more cheese than my burger would hold.
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“You precious morsel, you have no idea the kind of appetite beauty like yours can arouse. I fear the burger can only take the edge off what stirs in me now.” I could sense the fairy magic working on her, or maybe she was as much a fan girl as mom, because both of them sighed, and the stars in the waitress eyes made me think asking her what she was doing after her shift would be pushing dad’s lessons on consent in ways I wasn’t willing to. I cannot lie, this wasn’t a challenge. I ate a whole deer in a sitting, I could kill enough burgers for a football team in a single sitting and not have to adjust my belt.
She swooned off, I caught dad’s hard stare but mom punched him in the arm and just fangirled “Oh come on, that was SO COOL. My baby boy grew up to be a real goblin king. So proud!”
When the food came, I demonstrated my actual mouth’s abilities as I consumed the whole thing in half an hour, then used French fries from the poutine to push the surviving mushrooms to where I could spear them with a fork and murder the little saprophytic shits. Dad noticed my mushroom crusade and nodded. “So the mushroom thing is still an issue even with the…” He made a vague handwaving gesture with his BLT as if to encapsulate my goblinness.
I sighed, chewing on a cheese and grave drenched fry. “Hit a fairy ring at about 80 kph, then bounced like I hit the electric fence in Jurassic Park. No shit lightning bolt blasted me ten feet back and burned my uniform into my chest. If I grew any chest hair, I would have lost it. Those mushrooms fucking hate me, so I hate them back.”
We all nodded, as a family, this encapsulated half of our creed. We are good people, until you cross our people, then we are the last people you should have crossed. Dad asked, the big question.
“So Jareth, have you given any thoughts to what you are going to do when you get to the states? I mean any goals? We can help you figure out how to get there if you can figure out what you are aiming for.” Dad was maybe a little more like a freight train than a brilliant conversationalist, but it made him a good project manager, and the right person to keep me on track when my inner snark wanted to some shiny conflict so I could avoid actually dealing with something. I started to think out loud.
“I joined the army because I knew that I was too much wedded to violence as a means not to need a higher purpose to serve, if I wanted to be the man you raised me to be. I was just starting to get a handle on that in the army when this whole changeling thing got sprung on me. Now I have a whole lot more to learn about myself, I have no idea what I am capable of, and if I don’t get a handle on it, I might really end up becoming a monster. It isn’t enough to have this kind of power, you know that violence has always followed me like a shadow, it is going to find me no matter where I run. I have to be more than just ‘safe’, if I want to stay me.” I was letting the words flow, and feeling the weight of them, feeling the truth of them. I was willing to see where this went, not impose my thoughts on it, let the shape of the thing I was groping towards make itself known to me. I was a patient hunter after all.
Mom grabbed my arm so hard I almost spilled my milkshake. “A SUPERHERO! My baby is going to New York to become a super hero!!” She leaned in and gave me a big squishy hug on one arm. I had to raise my milkshake fast so she didn’t’ spill it. I looked over at dad for the voice of reason, but he was stroking his beard like he did when he was working on a project.
“Yes, that would work. You know Jareth, I uncovered a few fake ID’s over the years that US spooks have created in the system for future use. I can take one of the New York ones and totally tailor it to you. You just find what you want to look and sound like and I can have your whole biometric package back loaded through all the back doors they left so that you register as always being him. You know that the easiest way to look after financing yourself is to start hunting criminals. Anything you steal from them is money they can’t use to fund their own operations. To be fair, taking their money out of the system will hurt them more than taking the street thugs out. Turning it in to the government, honestly doesn’t always help.” Dad shrugged in a way that says as a father, he would love to tell me to obey the law, if only the law wasn’t largely made by the most successful of the corrupt.
I looked at him and sighed. “Not a lot happens on a pure cash basis, and if I try to live like that, I am going to show up on everyone’s radar. It isn’t like the old days. If you want to live in the light, your money has to have clean electronic footprints. Fairy gold doesn’t last the dawn you know.”
Mom smacked the back of my head firmly. Note to self, when mom knows you are superhuman, she will smack you harder.
“Jareth Bowie, I have been doing your laundry since they included cloth diapers. If you think I am done doing laundry for you now, you have no idea who your mother is.” My mother, the forensic accountant said, grinning happily.
I looked at her, and dad. My boring Computer Security specialist dad and my forensic accountant mom had just told me they are going to steal some spy’s back up identity to set me up as a super hero, and launder the money I steal from bad guys so I can still have a real life. I started to understand why the fairies picked which cradle to rob, and why that baby turned out to be such a deadly little bastard on the other side before he died. My parents are made of scary.
Dad was an honest man, so he helped me kill the last of the poutine, so he would have to pay for the Tommy’s Ultimate Burger Challenge. It really would be an amazing feat for a human to finish it, but honestly, mom and I both ordered Pudgie Boy mini donuts and chocolate dipping sauces afterwards. I had lots of room left. Dad dropped an unbelievable amount of money on the table, and I gave the sixty year old Cantonese cook a near heart attack when I kissed her cheek on the way out when she came with half the female wait staff to see me leave. This Goblin King glamour has got to be used sparingly. I have zero idea how to turn DOWN this fairy magic stuff, and my inner child, my goblin nature, and the ghost memories of my dead changeling partner all agree that the Goblin King from Labyrinth gets full spectrum fairy sparkle power. Reason has zero place in the transaction, and moderation is a waiting line for swooning girls. I need something I can wear on a daily basis.
I found something. Nick Condon was the ID that dad found. I googled the name. Turns out, it was an old James Cagney role. I watched the movie, it was good. Better, it was a character I could play. I drank it in. Blood on the Sun, a brash smartass Jimmy Cagney, that goblin grin. Even the build was right. Shorter stature, big square shoulders. Moved with the promise of violence but had the urbane air that tempted you to overlook the threat just under the surface. The glamour wrapped around it, and made it mine. Made it me. I was now Nick Condon. He had been a news reporter. There were no real investigative reporters anymore, not in the age of the streamers and corporate advertising packaged as news. I needed a different angle, and I had one.
Nick Conlon was insurance investigator. It was a great reason to be legally poking around anything that burned down, got robbed, blew up, or had undergone recent ownership changes. It wasn’t a cop, but wasn’t against walking in the front door of the cop shop to ask questions. It wasn’t criminal, but wasn’t really interested in crimes that had nothing to do with its employer’s direct interests. Be vague enough about the employer and you could swan through the shadows and the light with relative ease. Nobody would trust you, but nobody would shoot you on sight either. Not at first. What happened after you started to act in front of them was all on you.
So here I am, swimming the St Lawrence river at midnight, a dry bag floating behind me with clothes and well wrapped laptop. My shiny new, utterly fake, but as dad assured me, a real CIA fake ID is at least as real to US systems as a real US ID, and far less likely to have any watch flags on it. I had enough money wired into my new bank accounts (love you mom) to finance my first apartment while I start to look for crime. My death benefit turned vacation fund. I crossed the St Lawrence about as fast as a seal could, and fairy magic is actually pretty handy. It keeps you from noticing I am wet, even if it does jack shite about being wet or cold. I crawl out of the river, welcome to the USA.
I grab a hotel, order in, and book the next flight from Watertown to New York City. Tomorrow it begins. I will either become the first ever Goblin Superhero, or I will be a big surprise to some New York coroner who gets my dead green ass dropped onto his table.
Tomorrow, Goblin bites out of the Big Apple!