lisapizza replied to your post “WILL YOU EVER WRITE MY NOVEL??????”
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HERE. JUST SO YOU KNOW I’M STILL DOING IT.
. . .
“Why don’t you butt out?” he said. “I’m an adult. It doesn’t matter what I do with that man or any other.”
“You’re twenty-five,” she said.
He threw his arms out in frustration and hit the shelf with his knuckles. That hurt. “You’re twenty-five!”
“This isn’t about me! I’m not the one falling for my co-worker. Jesus, Angel, I--”
“Xiv,” he said quietly.
She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Xiv. I haven’t seen your eyes follow someone through a room like that since Sidney and the aftermath of that was messy, and that’s the polite way to say it.”
“Oh, Sidney. Of course.” He brought his fist to his mouth to tongue at the scrape there as he spoke. “Remind me. The person or the city?”
She frowned harder. “You’ve never been to Australia.”
“You don’t know where I’ve been. You only know I haven’t been home in four years.”
“First of all, I do, because heirs to biomedical fortunes don’t just get to go traipsing off on their own without someone keeping tabs on them, and you’re lucky dad let that someone be me. Second of all, stop deflecting. You have not successfully lied to me once in our entire lives.”
He scoffed. “This isn’t the same as Sidney.”
“Sure,” she said. “It’s different. How is it different?”
“Because Sidney was…” he sighed and tilted his head back, stared up at the crown moulding above them. “They were beautiful, and they were in love with me.”
He closed his eyes, thought about Sid in the ocean at night, bright smile tinged blue by the bioluminescent algae around them, the sound of their laughter breaking over the sound of water lapping against their skin and whispering over the sand further up the shore.
He had been here for almost a year and had never once heard Peleon laugh. Was it even possible to fall in love with someone who didn’t laugh?
“And?” Chedeline said. “Peleon is beautiful and--”
“And he hates me.” Xiv said, rushing to cut her off before she said the words he knew he wouldn’t come back from.
He was already sweating, wondering how she knew. Could she smell the kiss on him somehow? Had Peleon done something when he wasn’t looking? Did Peleon only do things when he wasn’t looking?
Either way, Peleon was upstairs falling apart. He was grieving and he was desperate and Xiv was not going to be the one to put him back together. He couldn’t be. He didn’t know how, didn’t know what Peleon’d been like before all of this happened, before he came to Wagner to begin with. What if he fucked it up? Peleon’s person was too much to lay in Xiv’s hands. He was good with colors and brushes and bad with people and their fears.
“He doesn’t hate you,” she said. “Not anymore than he hates anyone else, anway.”
“He definitely hates most people,” Xiv said.
When Xiv looked at her again her arms were still crossed but there was a quirk to the corner of her mouth. “I can relate,” she said. “What have most people ever done for him anyway?”
“What have I ever done for him?”
She tilted her head and looked him over thoughtfully. “More than you know, I’d bet. For one thing, when you look at him, you’re looking at him.”
“Who else should I be looking at?”
“Do you remember what you said to me when Sid left?”
Xiv did remember, in spite of spending the last five years trying to forget. Sidney had loved him, but the him they had loved had not been the him he was trying to be. Those two people, the person Sidney wanted and the person Xiv wanted to be, they weren’t the same, and Xiv couldn’t be both of them, not even for the sake of what they’d had.
“I said I couldn’t trade my future happiness for things being easy now.”
She studied him a moment, then reached out and placed her hands on his shoulders. “You don’t ask enough questions,” she said. “You’re always like this. You fall in love with the idea of a person and you don’t spend enough time fact checking it.”
“Why should I? You’re just going to come along and do it for me anyway.”
“You should ask him who he is,” she said. “Because it’s the polite thing to do. And if you’re not going to, you should at least do a general search for him on the internet, because I have and I can tell you, there’s a lot there.”
“How do you--”
“He’s famous, you idiot. I knew who he was the minute I saw him.”
She pulled him close and hugged him. He hugged her back, held on to her tight, afraid that if he didn’t she would slip away with Wagner and all the rest of it. He’d been working so hard to establish himself here and here it all was, vanishing.
“We’ll get Wagner back,” she said. “Don’t worry about that right now. Worry about you.”
“I’ll worry about both,” he said, which was a half truth. He would worry about Wagner until Wagner was returned to them, and then, maybe, he’d get on with worrying about himself. Maybe. There was always something new to worry about if you knew where to look.
lisapizza replied to your post “People have things I made on their walls like they’re real art and I’m...”
clutter my dash with xiv and peleon :p
Okay! Here, have a distraught ginger cyborg arguing with another cyborg over who’s gonna get all up in the robot. (It’s not what it sounds like.)
. . .
Chedeline placed a hand lightly on Xiv's arm. "You can't blame me for not wanting to go back in there guns blazing. I know Ankh is important to you, but it's a machine. It had to have known that eventually it would be turned off."
"Turned off?" Xiv asked. His own voice sounded far away and the words hardly made sense. "Of course he knew. He knew it like you and I know that one day we'll be turned off."
"He," she said, accepting this as evenly and easily as she accepted everything. "Dying isn't the same thing as being shut off."
Xiv took one deep breath after another, trying to tether himself to the moment. "How is it not?"
"Because he can come back," Romm said, suddenly interested in the conversation. She closed the panel on her calf and slid the disembodied limb off her lap onto the table to rest next to her thigh. "All we need is to find his brain, wherever they're keeping it. Then we can put him back in his body and turn him back on!"
Xiv looked from Romm to Chedeline.
"No," Chedeline said, before he even had a chance to ask. "I already told you I’m not going and you shouldn't go either. Xiv, you're going to die for real. We can't bring you back."
Xiv pulled his arm out from under her hand and turned on the sofa so he was facing Romm. "So we find his brain, put it back in his body, and just let him walk out with us?"
Romm shook her head. "It would take too long to reboot a lifetime of consciousness to get to what matters. No, someone will have to walk his body out while someone else goes to another part of the compound to find his brain."
"And use him as his own distraction?" Xiv's heart thumped heavy in his chest. It sounded plausible when Romm said it in her matter of fact tone.
"Right. We'll just need to break off a small functional part of one of our spirits to put in him."
There was a shuffling sound and then Peleon appeared in the doorway of the library, sleight and pale against the large dark hallway behind him. He leaned against the frame. "I'll do it."
Peleon looked like a man in mourning. His eyes were distant, pupils blown huge and black so that they swallowed the usually bright irises, and his lids were red around the edges. His ginger hair was curling at the tips and tangling away from his head like a lopsided crown over the jagged red gash across his temple. He was wearing the white undershirt and black trousers he'd been wearing when he was shot and there was still blood spattered across his clothing and neck. The peacocks in his half sleeve faring leaned against each other, uncharacteristically somber, and flickered in and out of focus.
He was a man in mourning, Xiv realized. He'd been so thrown off by Peleon's vicious outburst after the failed rescue attempt that he’d written him off as being willfully difficult and not taken any of the other facts into account. Not even after Romm had told him about the damaged neural receptor.
Peleon had been willfully difficult in the time that Xiv had known him, but that wasn't what this was. This was a man who had spent almost half his life digitally self-medicating, who trusted the steadiness of being numb over the incalculable deviance of emotion, who had built a life for himself with a creature who cared for him. And now, for the first time in ten years, he was feeling all of it, and with the rest came this loss too: Ankh was gone.
Xiv felt like the Peleon leaning against the door frame had been swapped out for one he'd built just then in his mind. Probably neither was wholly the truth.
"No," Romm said. "I will. I'm constantly caching myself. It won't be any trouble to divert one piece. Besides, we'll need you for brute force."
Peleon looked up from the carpet, though his eyes didn't quite seem to meet Romm. He tightened his jaw. "I don't want-- You're not-- I can't let a strange person into Ankh's body. He wouldn’t trust you. I don't trust you. How do I know you won't just walk off with the face of the most valuable artist in the country?"
"Faces are easy to come by," Romm said. "Talent is not." She spread her hands to indicate her intentions were just as empty as the air between them.
"I want it to be me."
"You don't have a copy," Xiv said.
"Getting one would take hours." Chedeline stood and put one curled finger to her chin. "We need to hit them before they have time to recoup. If I know Martine he's already working to get all the pieces of Ankh shipped off."
"Shut up," Peleon said. His voice cracked. "You don't belong here. You don’t know anything about who Ankh is or what he wants. And you," he pivoted so he could jab his finger angrily in Xiv's direction. "You should know better than to think he would want all these outsiders involved. He trusted you."
The 'I trusted you' was left implied. Xiv felt it just as surely as if it had been said.
"And I trust them," Xiv said.
Romm stared at Peleon, her irises whirring and spinning the way his did when he was working on a difficult problem. "Suicidal," she said.
The word was heavy. It seemed to suck all of the air out of the room.
"Fuck you," Peleon said. "It's my body. I'll do what I want with it."
"Yes," Romm said. "You've made that abundantly clear with your mix and match upgrades. Your hodge podge being. Stamp collector." The s stained the rest of the phrase, Romm hit it so hard in accusation. "Figure out what you want and then come back to tell me how valuable a body is or isn't."
Peleon shifted away from the door and stood unsteadily on his own. "Fuck you," he said again, but the fury had gone out of it. "You're just as handy with a gun as I am and you know things about them that we don't."
"Things I'm going to teach you," Romm said.
"We'll get him back." Xiv believed this like he believed the sun would rise in the morning. It was impossible to imagine the emptiness of a life without either.
Aaaaaah, I’m just so happy I could write today, now that I have my city and my brain space back from my parents. I’m so happy about this stupid book and these stupid characters and Xiv being stupidly the bi-est. I’m happy I have a project that can fully embrace both my battle cries of ‘MOAR INK ALWAYS’ and ‘MOAR BIS ALWAYS.’
She’s still beautiful. The cascade of her black hair, the regalness of her posture even as she’s reclined against the window sill with her arms crossed, the assured set of her thin shoulders and plump lips, the way her hazel eyes study every person, searching them for weakness or valor and responding immediately to what she finds, the way she knows how to spin any situation into gold. These are all things he had loved about her. Still loves about her, he thinks, though not in the same way.
When he goes looking in his heart for the same fervor he used to have for her beauty, he doesn’t find it. Some other feeling has taken up residence in his chest. Some other want has gently moved his desire for Chedeline aside and replaced her where she always should have been: admired, beloved, respected, but not coveted.
“So you’ll do nothing about Martine?” he asks.
“For the time being. But I’ll also do nothing with him. His actions are unbecoming of a Delice suitor and I think mother will agree.”
“Casting him over will only make him more unpredictable. If he’s not working for your favour then you’ve truly lost him as an associate.”
“Yes, I quite think that will be more than enough rope for him to hang himself with. In time.”
She glances at the red clock hanging against the black silk on the wall and Xiv follows her gaze. It’s showing almost midnight. She should have returned to her rooms at the hotel hours ago and there’s probably word being sent to both of their parents right this moment about her delinquency. Elsewhere too, there will be guards sharpening their knives tonight and preparing for a completely different fight.
“You know, I’m truly sorry,” she says.
“What for?”
“That I don’t love you the way you want me to. Our union would have strengthened both businesses.”
“I don’t give a damn about my father’s business.”
Chedeline purses her lips, amused. “I know. He knows. I think he wanted me to make you interested, but I’m glad I was unable to change you. I like you better like this. You look like you’re actually alive here, not just existing because you have nothing better to do.”
“I…” here he stumbles, because how does he tell her just how alive he feels without pissing on everything she holds dear? How does he tell her that he would have become anything she wanted if she had just shown him the sort of affection he desired then? If he hadn’t always been the younger brother she never wanted, but tolerated anyway? How does he tell her that he just now realized that he’s glad she never did? “Am,” he finishes, anticlimactic.
She nods, seeming to understand anyway. She always had been too canny for his own good. “Have you told him yet?”
Xiv knows where this is going, but he feels a sudden and immature impulse to make her work for it. “Told who what”
“The pale, angry one. We didn’t exchange names before the bullets started flying I’m afraid.”
“Peleon?”
“Ah,” she gives a small nod. “Yes, him. Have you told him that you want him, or are you just going to pine for several years and then run off across another sea on another adventure?”
“That’s not fair,” he says. “You never wanted me to tell you.”
“I never did. I knew without you telling me, but I think he might need to hear it.”
