#scribbings

[the-pipes]

Maaan. Why do I get all the weird hitchhikers?

[journalofimprobablethings]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Summary:

Lucretia receives help getting the umbrastaff from an unexpected quarter--but that help does not come without a price.

Preview:

Angus McDonald notices things.

He has always been this way, as long as he can remember. Little details stand out to him, things that nobody else seems to notice or care about. And he's able to put those details together into pictures that seem, once they've come together, so obvious.

He's good at patterns, Angus is. Always has been.

What he's had to figure out is how to talk about them.

Angus learned from an early age that adults did not always like it when he pointed out the things he noticed. Sometimes, they got angry. Sometimes they brushed him off or ignored him completely. Sometimes they simply did not believe him.

No matter how many times it happens, or how used to it Angus thinks he has gotten, it always hurts a little when adults dismiss him just because he is small. He doesn't understand why it matters. His brain works just fine. But he has learned to take that hurt and set it aside, push it down into a corner of himself where he can deal with it later. And more importantly, he has learned that sometimes, he needs to come up to things sideways, to hint and suggest until he gets people to come to the same conclusion he has--but because they think they've come up with it themselves, they never question it.

It’s exhausting, but it gets results, and Angus is resigned to the necessity of it, at least for now.

And it's one of the reasons that he loves working at the Bureau of Balance so very much: since the Director recruited him, he hasn't had to do that once.

He actually feels useful here: a part of the team, rather than a child to be tolerated and humored. When Angus talks, the Director always listens to him. She doesn’t question him, or tell him he’s being silly, or brush him off. She listens and talks to him the same way she talks to all the other Seekers: like a person, like someone to be trusted. She has never once made Angus feel small.

No one other than his grandfather has ever made Angus feel this way, and he loves the Director wholeheartedly for it.

But as Angus spends more time at the Bureau, he begins to notice things.

He notices the way that Taako never seems to let the umbrastaff stray far from his reach, though he doesn't seem to do it consciously.

He notices the way the Director looks at the Reclaimers sometimes, with such sorrow and longing in her eyes that it hits Angus somewhere deep in the chest, reminds him of the way he felt the year his parents died, when all he could feel was the hole in the world where they used to be.

He notices the growing urgency in the way the Director talks about the relics, the way she stares at the sky at night sometimes when most of the base is asleep, like she's counting the stars.

He notices all these things, but he doesn't say anything, because he doesn't know what any of it means yet.

He's sure he'll get there in the end. He's good at patterns, after all. He files them away in his mind, building the patterns piece by piece, and he says nothing.

Then he has his magic lesson with Taako, and all the patterns he has been building in his head shift.

When the Director came into the dining hall that day and stopped dead at the sight of the letters on the wall, at first he thought she was just horrified at the violence of it, mystified as he and Taako was at what L-U-P might mean. But then she kept staring, and the way her face changed the longer she looked at those letters made him wonder if maybe there was more to it than just dismay at property damage.

By the time she left, stammering an answer to his question in a flustered way he'd never expect from her, Angus's mind was spinning with new questions.

He has always trusted the Director implicitly, believed everything she told them about the relics and the Bureau's mission. He is too young to remember anything about the Relic Wars, but from the stories the others at the Bureau have told him, they were just as awful as the Director says they were.

But he has seen the way that she looks at Taako and Merle and Magnus, and he has seen her growing anxiety over the search for the relics, and he saw, today, how shaken she was by the word that Taako's umbrella wrote on the wall.

And a sick, sinking pit starts to grow in his stomach as he wonders, for the first time, just how much the Director hasn't told them.

[the-pipes]

bleh month. Drew him as a manticore for fun.

[untaintedtea]

WIP of a thing I'm working on :0

[shisasan]

🜍 ⟡ ⟢  Spring 2014