#super-flowered

[kathsadventuresinwonderland]

Charlie

[kathsadventuresinwonderland]

Jeremy

[kathsadventuresinwonderland]

Super-Flowered

Part 42

Union was staying in a large block of university dorms. They were clean, which was good, small, which was inconsequential, and shared, which Jeremy wasn’t looking forward to. Tommy always shared with Tonio, which meant he would be stuck with Charlie, and everyone Charlie brought with, from friends, to lovers, to fans he just wanted to show off to because he got a kick out of seeing their awed faces when he took an interest. Jeremy didn’t actually believe he cared about them, just that all if them, from friends, to lovers, to fans, were equally infatuated by his glorious personage.

Did it make Charlie a bad person? No, of course not, he was just excited by the attention of the last few months. Did it make Charlie an annoying person? God, yes, so annoying. Did the infinite energy that allowed Charlie to toy with people so easily without getting bored of them mean he also had the energy to start unpacking the second they arrived? Yes. And did this mean that Jeremy would be unable to finish the Ben-centric brooding he had started in the carriage through Roren, because Charlie wouldn’t shut up? Unfortunately, yes.

Charlie had opened his suitcase and turned it upside down on his bed. (When he entered the room there had been a whoop of delight as he realised there wasn’t a top bunk for Jeremy to stick him in.) He spun, on his good leg, using the stick to push himself round, as he send coloured lights around the room, dotting the once-white walls, with a soft fairy-like glow, like the lights on a Christmas tree, spiraling around the room.

Jeremy reached up and flicked one of the lights. “Hey, no. Do I flick ya throa’ every time I hear ya sing? No. So leave mah ligh’s alone, yeah?”

“Ya know it don’ go ou’ when I flick i’, righ’?” Jeremy asked, flicking the floating purple light again. The lights at the top of the room were red, fading down the rainbow, until they stopped about two feet above Jeremy’s be, where he was lying stretched out, his feet kicked up, and his hands behind his head. Charlie flipped him the bird. Suddenly a very bright light appeared in front of Jeremy’s eyes, blinding him. “Fuck off, asshole.”

[kathsadventuresinwonderland]

Super-Flowered

Part 48

Jeremy’s lungs burned, struggling against the cold air. He could feel himself losing a little more control with every step he took, but he kept running anyway, sure that whoever was in that apartment hadn’t followed him, but not willing to take that risk. Every corner he took and alley he flew down sent him crashing into the wall of a different building, until his arms were bruised and his shirt was ripped and dirty.

The rain was no longer battering his face until he couldn’t see, and the Dohn bridge was visible now. It had a reputation for being loud, because it was entirely made if copper and most of the time the messengers tried to avoid Coen, so they didn’t get deafened as the crossed it. The bridge lay flat across the Dohn, as though  someone had had an old sheet of metal and nothing to do with it, so they threw it in the river and it got stuck.

In truth, there had been a slightly batty architect, back when the Big City was just starting its industrial revolution, who had been commissioned to join Coen to Scurs, by the Janurs, so that the royal family could bring there parades onto the little rock. He had lost his eyesight to old age and every pair of glasses he had ever owned to clumsy hands and living on an island city (it was said that his glasses were still washing up on the shores of the Nossa beaches) and he had been unable to see a way to join the scraggy rocks that cut Coen off at the end of a street, and the sharp rocks jutting up from the road stop the world from walking straight into the Dohn, to the sandy beaches that led from Scurs, as the stacked buildings dissolved into the sea, so the architect stood on the rocks, looking out over the Dohn, squinting at Scurs. Unable to see the beach, or even the buildings that blocked the horizon, he waved his hand and produced a large slab of copper. It melted over Coen’s rocks and extended out towards Scurs, with the architect standing on the end, still squinting into the distance.

Perhaps the Janurs had planned to visit Coen, or perhaps they had heard about the architect crossing the Dohn and imagined it to be somewhat more noble than an old git in greying jumper and a hunch formed from getting to that age when you can’t walk without leaning, standing on what appeared to be a shiny piece of  wood extending over the Dohn. Either way, the Janurs arrived, and liked the bridge so much that they decided it was perfect, if in need of a few minor adjustments. The made the architect form several copper posts up from the bridge, and up until a few days beforehand, those posts had been used to hand the Janurs banners, like tapestries, either side of the bridge. In the current light, however, Jeremy could see the remnants of the burt fabric hanging loose from its fixtures.

[kathsadventuresinwonderland]

Super-Flowered

Part 33

The next day, Ben was up early. He’d was used to Darina’s time zone, so it nearly killed him (even Margaery would call me a drama queen if she heard that, which is a lot coming for someone with those skirts) but he was used to not having shutters in Darina, where the glass was electrochromatic, turning opaque at night and clear in the day. It blocked out the stars overhead and the gentle firefly dots of the lights below, but became crystal clear just in time for the sunrise each day. The view from his room in Darina was certainly better than this one.

Ben had lived in an one of the many buildings owned by Seltan, the company funding the programme that had sent him, Dmitri and all the other med students who worked with them on their course. Like every other building in Darina, it was tall, skyscraper-esque, but, unlike the Big City’s piles of building upon building, as though it had run out of space and just decided to build on top of itself,  Darina, or more precisely Féna, but most of Darina’s cities were the same, was made of individual buildings, all made of the same glass, all set to white, with different colour sections on each building. The one Ben had lived, though completely clear from the inside, had the odd splash of hot pink.

There were balconies on each building with tiny gardens on each and some had six hundred meter gardens up one wall with colourful flowers growing up them. One of those gardens was on the building opposite Ben’s and, without the Big City city-smells, Ben could smell the flowers every time he opened the window. They smelt like freedom and ambition (or birds of paradise and hollyhock, but that wasn’t the point) and turned the city into a new world of hope, despite the first few nights when Ben would slide open the window and leave it like that, so he could smell the flowers all night, and woke up covered in birds of paradise with one very long stemmed blue iris growing out of the end of his nose. You don’t realise how annoying hope is until you literally have to pull it up by the roots. This must be why villains are always so cranky.

Quietly, Ben got up, knowing his family would still be asleep: they got up early, but this was ridiculous. His mother had seemed reluctant to accept the Darinian food, so he started gently frying the small pastry circles ready for her, so she would have to try them. He wanted them to get used to eating good food, ready for when he was a Healer and could buy them whatever they wanted.

[kathsadventuresinwonderland]

Super-Flowered

Part 44

“Fuck off, asshole.” They were the only words Jeremy had heard Charlie say, but he was enthralled. The kid was incredible. Not that Jeremy thought of him as a kid. In fact, Jeremy was a couple of years (he didn’t really know how old he was, but Charlie said he was probably a couple of years younger than him) younger than him, but Charlie seemed so much more than that. They met in the days after the revolution, with so many new kids on the street after anyone who worked for the royals, in one of their mansions, or with their carriages, even some children of ambassadors and lords survived, but they didn’t remain that way for long if they went blabbing about it, so for all anyone could possibly know, they were dead. Either way, there was a sudden influx of street rats, and the Asylum was swamped by kids of all ages, begging to be let in. Most of them learned how to survive, by and by, but some, like Jeremy, flourished in the new world.

Jeremy remembered nothing. Some of the others said they remembered nothing, wailing and crying for hours if it got them a penny, but Jeremy had wandered down to the Asylum and started taking messages without a word. One morning he had gone down at sunrise, with the rest of the kids at the Asylum, to find a small, but very heavy package for a Miss Eliza Tompkins, on Coen. The note scribbled on the top said that there was a bag of coins for taking it to her. Normally, one of the older boys would have taken the package; it smelt like blood money and cargo they didn’t want to damage. But Jeremy was the first one down, and he didn’t want one of the older boys to snag a goldmine that could feed Jeremy for a week. It had been raining heavily that night and was still going in the morning, so Jeremy clutched the package under his shirt and ran, bent over to protect it from the rain, until he had crossed over the Dohn bridge, and had to stop to check the address.

[kathsadventuresinwonderland]

Super-Flowered

Part 21

Ben had sucked in his disappointment at not seeing Jeremy, feeling it bubble in his stomach, twisting and folding in resentment, which came crawling up his throat, until he had enough control to swallow it, and he felt his skin itching, as something began blossoming under his shirt. Petunia. When he took off his shirt that night it made sense. Walking around with his resentment pressing against his undershirt all evening made the pain of pulling the crushed flowers out by their roots sharpen icily under his skin. He had allowed the roots to grow too much and pulling the out bit.

Jake always said that had there been a revolution, Ben and Lewis would never have had to go to the Asylum. Lewis said that he would have gone anyway, insisted it, but they all knew he wouldn’t. He would never have had to. It didn’t matter, or so Jake said, but Ben found he couldn’t look him in the eye when he agreed and Lewis didn’t know why he felt a blurred shadow of confusion brush over him, when he saw Eleanor glance at Ben when jake said it. He never mentioned it, he couldn’t have explained it. How do you ask someone why they had an odd look after that one thing someone else said? It might not have been anything to do with Jake, it might have been a silent admonishment of the way Ben had been staring at his shoes the entire conversation, but Lewis didn’t think so, and he know what to ask.

Ben had never been good at carrying messages, not that he could really be bad at it, but he was a little too tall, a little too hunched over, not quite loud enough. He never seemed to be able to make himself seen well enough to give anyone the message he had for them, or to be picked to take a message from the Asylum. Never dreaming that someone might want to help because Lewis was a child, Lewis always thought that was why Jeremy had come to their aid that day: pity. Sophie and Sarah had told him later that Jeremy helped out all the youngsters. Apparently, that was just what the older boys did.

[kathsadventuresinwonderland]

Super-Flowered

The lounge area on the Victorious was louder than Ben would have liked. It had an annoying echo, despite the once blue carpet, that was less a single voice and more like being on the inside of a bass drum a few seconds after it had been thwacked, when the beat had become a steady rumble that reverberated around the inside of the room, not loud enough to be the cause of any pain, or even irritation to anyone who wasn’t Ben, but was just loud enough to distract him from the laptop in front of him.

A song was playing in the background – because just what this disaster of a relaxation area needs is more background noise – too low for Ben to hear what was playing unless he focused on it, which he was desperately trying not to do, but a small child had just started wailing and Ben's finger repeatedly hitting the back button (not that there was anything to delete) didn’t have the desired ability to drown the little brat out, so he chose the lesser of two utterly horrendous evils. It wasn’t a nice song. He was glad when it ended.

And then he wasn’t, because a familiar chord was softly introducing a familiar voice. Perhaps he was imagining it, but a sort of quiet seemed to spread through the lounge. It wasn’t silence, but the couple who had been chatting and laughing in front of him fell into an easy stillness and the teenager a couple of tables over (who could only be described by the distinct feeling Ben got that a grandmother would say she looked like trouble, even though she’d probably never even had a detention in her life) who was tapping the toe of one boot and humming along to something Ben had no interest in hearing, playing in her headphones, slipped said headphones down around her neck and leant back to listen, no longer humming.

It would have been the perfect time for Ben to get some writing done, if it hadn’t been for the damn familiarity of the song. He slammed his laptop shut and grabbed his bag, catching the side of the table as he did, spilling the last cold dregs of coffee over the hand he reached out to catch the falling paper cup with.