This is a place for the ongoing personal development of Karakuriya (formerly known as Aeon Quisling), and is a continuation of "Being and something else." This thread is closed in that I will likely be the only one to write in it, but I welcome investment from other writers and characters, and critiques are always appreciated. Rather than commenting here, please direct any praise, concerns, critiques, or questions over to the discussion thread, or PM me for further information.
Issue #12: Midnight Hour
An OOC i12 update: Student Information (off-thread) (Please note: this is currently incomplete.)
The slightly rough wool skipped beneath Violet's fingers as she pushed the brass buttons through their holes. It laid perfectly across her thin shoulders, hugged her ribs. She smoothed it appreciatively, noting the extra darting, hand-sewn, immaculately. The eerie feeling of being haunted by the melancholic shades of dead little girls returned; even fixed and whole now, she suspected it would always be that way.
Who had this "Aeon" been exactly? What social atrocity had she committed to leave her so friendless? Being quiet was one thing, but some of the glazed eyes she met in the hallways hinted that she hadn't been missed, or even registered as a member of the student body in the first place, let alone gone longer than expected. Like awoken from a horrific nightmare, Violet was longer lost down the rabbit hole of the Project Daedalus dogma, only now she felt as though she was still trapped on the wrong side of the mirror. Well, whoever or however the starved soul had been in her fight against deterioration, desperately grasping for control, at least she had been tidy.
That was all but ruined when Primavera's package arrived, the opening of which scattered an array of McQueen dresses and EGL accessories across the room. Violet vowed to never let her lace-obsessed sister pack for her again, but at least the girl had remembered her favorite jacket in oxblood leather which would dress down most of the other pretty things and too many shoes that were crammed into the steamer trunk. The FedEx envelope and its firm, rectangular payload absolved Prima entirely as Violet weighed it in a hand. "Aeon Quisling"'s numerous IOUs and coupons from hero work were nice, but it was particularly hard for anyone to disagree with a few thick stacks of unmarked, non-consecutive twenties. Too bad it would have to cover tuition as well.
She soon realized that Aeon wasn't just organized, she was obsessively fastidious--or at least that's how she left things. Almost every trinket the girl had ever collected was tagged or labeled in some way. A gold covered journal "from Nova, Christmas 2007" contained extra notes, exhaustively cataloging information that wouldn't fit on the little manila tags. This was her legacy? This was how she wanted to be remembered? Sentimentality, Violet understood. She sympathized with not trusting an unstable memory. But this morbid little autobiography--the insanity it patterned... It was grotesque.
Violet disgustedly tossed the journal in the general direction of the bookshelf as she hopped onto the bed and reached for her violin case. She cradled the instrument in her lap and plucked it idly, tuning it up and picking out a Wohlfahrt etude as she surveyed her corner of the dorm. It definitely felt better with all the books Prima sent and the stuffed closet and a few things strewn about rather than the tagged souvenirs that were now stashed in the steamer trunk and out of sight. For all the mementos Aeon had hoarded ,there were almost no newspaper clippings or diaries or photographs. A single frame sat on the desk and Violet paused her strumming to examine it. Prying up the back, she found it, surprisingly, unlabeled.
Young heroes in fresh colors lined up against a police barricade and collapsed buildings. She vaguely remembered their faces, though they were all a little different now. Hers the most. Bizarro-Violet was dressed in magenta and had a long wig nearly the color of her natural hair--or at least the color it had been the last time she'd had any. Her eyes were dull and wary, too round, her nose too European, her chin too cherubic. She looked like an abused porcelain doll with the bare skeleton of her arm exposed and her busted eye, but that wasn't the worst of it. Nothing about her thin smile or childish posture was convincing. No wonder she'd had nothing to her name but a box full of generic badges.
Violet carefully replaced the photo and took up her bow, but the inspiration left her, depressed by the prospect of having to pick up where this second-hand life had left off rather than getting to start anew. What would Molly do if she were here? What encouragement would Sydney have? What would her mother say? Coming up blank, Violet could already tell that the operation would likely exercise everything Dr. Ashe had ever taught her. But not to fret.
She affected a determined expression and played the entrance of Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major as if to announce her acceptance of the mission at hand. She would have to be as sweet and smooth and fresh and pure as new cream to rise above this mess. But that was precisely the sort of thing she had been created to do.
"When we fall in love / We're just falling / In love with ourselves / We're spiraling" -- Keane, "Spiraling"
He was just another fly stumbling into her web. She would pretend they were dancing. She would string him along. Even if he noticed, it was too late. Enmeshment.
She was confident that she needed only ask and Dominic would leave Ekaterina and make the leap for her. It would be fun, if only for the sake of taking him from someone else. But she'd rather he didn't; she wasn't interested ultimately. She'd reap the rewards from afar if she could. It was sort of fun now, if only to watch him squirm.
It was a distraction.
Despite her outward confidence, a smug neutral, Violet was terrified. She was in over her head. She had let him get too close too soon. She was out of ammo. And now she would have to paste the smile over the boredom and the disgust and it would be harder now--the fast car and hand-me-down dates were a small consolation for having to put up with the smarm that followed him and clung to everything he touched like a trail of mucus.
She had made the initial mistake of trying to recruit him. He had seemed to fit all the criteria: bold, witty, cultured, aware of art and style, and, most importantly, super-powered with nothing to live for. But it wasn't meant to be. These false positives happened more often than one would think, Molly had said, which was a comfort, but since Dominic and Violet were peers, now she was at the disadvantage of being unable to slip quietly into the night and a memory like her flighty elder sisters. Instead, she would have to keep him close, keep an eye on him, and keep her secrets.
By now he would see that there really was no grand mystery to the girl, just an obsession with dollhood and an honesty about it that seemed such an enigma if only for its deviancy. But too late for him, now that he was trapped--charmed, enamored, blinded--which was convenient.
Though she wouldn't be able to string him along forever.
She hadn't planned any of it. She'd only been playing, dancing for her own benefit, not his. She'd only batted her eyelashes to see if she could.
Molly had only warned her in passing about playing hard to get versus admitting to being hard to get, and now Violet saw how deep her naïveté really ran.
She was emotionally stunted--at least two years behind her peers, not taking into account the setbacks of trauma. Flip-flopping between impulsiveness and protective detachment, she was not in control of the situation. She was barely in control of herself: jealous, over-reactive, and completely owned by a single, arbitrary want.
And Dominic was onto her.
Last edited by Karakuriya on Mon Sep 14, 2009 12:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"When we fall in love / We're just falling / In love with ourselves / We're spiraling" -- Keane, "Spiraling"
Laminated and tucked carefully into a pouch on her belt, it made her invincible here in the land of bright red and yellow circus tents. She wove through the enamored throngs of thrill-seekers and the bare-breasted women in clown white, blending in, for now, waiting for one of them to turn...
A woman on a throne lounged with a golden scepter in her hand, surrounded by pillows and comfort. Golden wheat grew at her feet, trees rising in the background. Her crown was made of stars. She lay turned on her head.
Violet had played at tarot as a child. Indoctrinated with all the fairy tales and bedtime stories of witches and magic, they learned the cards and toyed at divination, trying to guess at who they would grow up to be, who they would marry, and what exotic luxuries their ever-abstract adult lives might hold. But it was just a girlish diversion, no more real or insightful than the fortune-telling beaks made from notebook paper or Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board or being the five-times-in-a-row winner of Pretty Pretty Princess.
"Hey... You're not--"
The young sword swallower's finger pointing was cut short as she was given something else to swallow. The crowd milled on around them, not realizing it wasn't part of the act.
It was just a game.
Then what was this sinking feeling that had overtaken her so suddenly? What had she been thinking about when she told Aura to stop shuffling and deal her fate in a word?
Aura had said a lot of words around the truth, maybe to make her feel better about something so bitter. Maybe to give a new-agey, feel-good spin on an old omen.
Sterility.
Emotional, physical, spiritual, who knew? If Aura knew, she wasn't telling. If Daedalus knew, they weren't telling. Which, which, which?
A crackling at her ear as a gout of flame barely missed her face, though not a few frayed ends of her hair. Applause from the onlookers. A maniacal giggle from the fire eater.
She held her upset stomach like she could assess the damage as one did a bruise. But the knot only wound itself tighter with a confirmation from Diego that disregarding one of Aura's omens was unwise at best. It wasn't what she had wanted to hear, and it showed.
It was probably also beginning to show that she had been spending an inordinate amount of time with the Spanish would-be noble. There was a friendship forming there beyond the mutual fascination, and she found herself liking him perhaps more than was safe. But what was safe when it was clear that the boy saw straight through to her soul and most closely guarded secret--and still he remained curious and full of wry smiles?
Beyond the heavy triangle of plasticized canvas, the inner sanctum of the tent was dark, save for the pinpoints of light in its patchwork shroud, and the stale air smelled of mud and sweat and straw. She let the flap fall behind her, let the painted circle ward her from the gasps and screams outside, let the darkness hold her close enough to hear its beating heart.
She had spoken frankly, for the first time, about her "family," their dogma, and how it was she came to be: this sterile soul. And in their conversations, she found herself longing for a more traditional family than her island of misfit toys. Maybe one day Daedalus would leave her to settle down with a family of her own... A townhouse in Pennsylvania filled with gingersnaps and piano music and no fear of destiny... A cottage in Avignon with a kitten and a library brimming with poetry and no fear of war...
Somewhere, softly, an organ. The irregular oom-pah-pah drifted out of the stifling dark, swirling somehow in the stillness of the air. A familiar Venetian tune.
Violet had to question the developing pattern. Throughout her training, the "Old World" and all its trappings had been put on such a high pedestal, she wondered if she might fall for the charms of any European boy with a quick tongue and a firm hand on the dance floor. She wondered why she found herself, time and again, sidling between some sought-after boy and the girl he had already chosen. Was she too selfish, too sociopathic to care?
The metallic clunk of heavy shutters thrown open cast a perfect circle of golden light onto the dusty floor. And into it stepped an ageless woman, her skin like fresh cream in the moonlight, her smile full of knowing patience, her eyes wild. Her motley gowns held every hue and shade of red, and pyrite beads clung to it like stars. A twin banners of green, depicting redwoods, hung at her back and her sun-kissed hair was woven with a halo of gold tinsel.
She lowered the hand-cranked instrument, though the music churned on around them, knitting them together in the darkness.
No, she could be jealous and secretive, but certainly not cold. Not sterile. Not since the Absinthe. Not with this seizing, electric equivalent of a knotted stomach. Not with the synthetic adrenaline that made her heart pound just the same.
The hyper-acuity when she noticed him step soundlessly into the room.
The smile made of his smiles.
She felt her feet carry her over the painted rope and into the sacred circle. The ring mistress' cracked makeup smile spread like a stain across her face.
Could it be that she was training, then? Honing her skill, mustering the courage to tackle the big game?
Violet lowered her visor over her eyes and drew her senses into the gray wire world, her cyberbrain painting the ring mistress' smile over the magic-drenched soul she now saw clearly. Here the music was tangible, surrounding them, the ethereal tendrils lapping at her skin, prying at her will. The carnival wanted her.
She felt old fears gnawing at the edge of her composure, her confidence, her ego. Aeon and all her "emotion" was no better than a dead limb, gangrenous and creeping ever further, tainting what was real and dangerous and beautiful. If she couldn't have her prize, the phantom would rather Violet be lonely and alone than settle for something wonderful.
The carnival, its mistress, her music was beautiful. But it was all wrong. It couldn't happen this way. One couldn't force someone to love.
Oh, everything had been so simple--so sterile--before he had shattered her dream world.
"When we fall in love / We're just falling / In love with ourselves / We're spiraling" -- Keane, "Spiraling"
She had been worn completely raw. Worn so brazen she might have just promised to go to the Snow Ball with that little wafer of eye candy from Bloodvine. She just couldn't bear the idea of putting on the face and the airs and all the effort for a boy who would wouldn't notice anyway.
She let them play at gem cutting, carefully shearing away at her pretty facade to discover an inner luminance, but Diego had found a deep-running fault (or had she deliberately shown him?), and a few skillful blows had crumbled the whole face--the whole game into a million shimmering shards.
Finally she had been shaved down to the tiny, bitterly jealous core that wished there really was a God. Because a truly benevolent Creator wouldn't dare fill the world with other people, not the vixens who could sleep with seven boys in so many days and not feel stained, the emotional black holes who swallowed any poetry that ventured too close, the seeming prefect pricks who all but begged for something better only to be too stupid to realize when it was handed to them on a silver platter. No, a watchful God would have left a lesson learned in all this. A merciful God would have struck her down by now.
Her life was, simply, a joke. Her fumbling raison d'être was anachronistic and unrealistic. Her methods were laughable. And at every turn, she failed it anyway. There was no allegory of Purgatory here, just visions of Hell.
That must be it. Hell. She'd perished in that car wreck and it had all been a dying dream as her soul floated toward the bowels of the afterlife. Every mote of good had been the poignant build-up to some black comedy. This was the punchline.
Who would believe any of that? Would Atwood? Would Conrads? Maybe he would think she was mad, too, like the rest of Daedalus. Or maybe Daedalus was all a figment, too: a transference of guilt, an engine for the inexplicable, inescapable pattern of wanting to reach past her grasp and being forced to saccrifice the limb. Maybe she should welcome the idea: the pain wasn't real, she was merely insane.
When Violet reached the counseling office, this time she took the first door, slightly ajar.
* * *
The girl sat in exactly the same posture she had in her first week; Dr. Conrads wouldn't forget it, careful and statuesque. Undoubtedly a lot had changed for the girl in two years, though a sense of being emotionally battered remained constant, whatever face it took. This one was more worrisome.
He and Valerie had spoken at length about Violet and her case, all that had befallen her--at least all that Valerie had gleaned. A measure of brain damage had rendered the seemingly otherwise hardy girl ill-equipped to weather a series of unfortunate events, resulting in a cascade of trauma. They had followed the girl's wide and scattered trail of breadcrumbs to negotiate a visitation with her parents who had fled the country, and, since they were responsible for Violet's cyborg state in the first place, held the best chance for helping her, unreliable though they were. And just as soon as the state declared the extended absence a case of kidnapping ten months ago, Michael Corde had turned up with Violet in tow, shaken, but otherwise as good as new. Valerie soon understood that this joyfully cynical, outspoken young woman was who "Aeon" had been struggling against her chemistry to be all along. Finally she was happy. It was the perfect ending to a tale of hardship.
That is, until Violet began to show signs of slowly unraveling again, though not on the surface. Valerie's drawings had always held at least allusions to fratricidal twins, and given what she had spoken of her "brother" and what they had been brought to do to each other, Valerie had not been surprised to see the theme. But over time the twin's face changed and then became indistinct. The figure grew armor. The scenes became more one-sided and disturbingly graphic. These images were seemingly incongruous with Violet's social and emotional situation. She did seem to have trouble making friends and combating rumors, and she often complained that her closest friends were all dating other girls and had no time for her; though, if Violet was jealous beyond this, it wasn't obvious in the murderous twins or in her manner. She seemed content to hold out for someone who could appreciate her wholly. However, Violet's grades began to plummet again as she missed more and more school to patrol or stay in bed. The Sisters reported secret crying fits and angry outbursts at other students. Valerie's picture of the girl's situation only grew all the more bleak. Eventually the lines on her sketchpad refused to take shape at all, degenerating into whole pages of an incomprehensible tangle of heavy scribbles like runes.
That was when Valerie had come to Conrads for help with Violet's case. Expressing a full emotional signature, unlike when she had first arrived, he could now be of some help.
Though, much to Dr. Conrads' dismay, what he felt from the girl (who, despite having a human brain, had always struck him as an unnervingly uncanny simulacrum) was identical to what Valerie had seen: a black static. Not deadened, not even bipolar, but everything at once, intense, and wound into a dense node of anxiety. To Conrads, the tension was palpable, the static filling the space near the girl, muffling as it deafened anything not itself, which, while itself a problem, also might be protecting anything beneath the noise. Also, a need: a grasping for succor just out of reach and never sating; though what she wanted, he had no way of knowing shy of just asking, overrun as she was.
Indeed, Violet sighed to herself daily; she was overrun by a swarm of passions, yet quite well aware of it and ashamed of having let herself get so far out of control...on purpose. She was supposed to be a living example of the beauty of the ever-tragic human condition--its agent, seeding her ideals in the hearts of those around her. But at this point it felt as though she was even failing to pull off tragedy. Nobody got it. Nobody saw or cared. Nobody was moved or changed.
She was a lost cause. People were idiots. The world was ugly and her with it. They deserved each other.
After an agonizingly long minute, Conrads spoke.
"What has you so upset you, Violet?"
The girl looked ready to crawl out of her very skin for the weight of it.
"I shouldn't be here."
He leaned into the arm of his chair. At least she was talking. It was a great measure better than the effort he had to make with other students, though maybe it was a sign that she was cracking.
"At school?" he ventured. "Are you homesick?"
Violet's features darkened, bitter at the willfully ignorant, broken, ugly world she was supposed to enlighten. The world she'd failed because it'd failed her. Either way, she was unnecessary.
"No. I shouldn't have to exist."
If there was a God, the world should have been beautiful all along.
"When we fall in love / We're just falling / In love with ourselves / We're spiraling" -- Keane, "Spiraling"
Violet carefully, oh, so carefully pulled her black socks up past her knees to that perfect zettai ryouiki height where wearing more clothing only drew the eye more distinctly to the slivers of skin that showed, like rice makeup on the back of a maiko's neck, suggesting peering through shy fingers. However, it wasn't the case that Violet particularly conscious of the effect today. Rather, the socks just...zettai--absolutely had to be even. In attempts to exact some iota of control on her crumbling emotional state, Violet was finally grasping at straws.
She could have--maybe should have cut down anyone who challenged her. She was not the cruel joke her job had become. How else could she prove that than to make them fear her and know without a doubt the magnitude of her seriousness and the gravity of her mission?
But that was Violet the doll. What about Violet the girl? The girl who was just as angry, just as alone. This failing mission could only sustain her for so long before burnout, nor could the mission go on without its agent. It was time to be selfish, she had decided as she smoothed every fly-away out of her flipped coiffure. Fuck the mission, whatever it was. She had helped undo Daedalus long ago, and it wasn't like that meant she had to inherit its millstone of a misguided dream out of guilt.
Violet felt remarkably calm. She had the beginnings of a plan. No matter how ridiculously ironic things got or how unhinged she became, she had a light to stumble toward. And if the light was really the lamp of an oncoming freight train, that was just as fine. How could things possibly get worse? Simple, atheistic mortality would be an easy out, although Violet feared her end would not come so consequence-free. That, alone, was reason enough to keep putting one foot before the other, to keep looking forward, to keep looking.
Molly had spoken (or gotten drunkenly long-winded) once about knights. Every lady needed a knight to appreciate her and every knight needed something to fight for. It was only a cliched notion because it was so true. Chivalry was chauvinistic, patriarchal bullshit, she'd said, but finding the one who challenged and sustained you was as real and true as anything.
Molly felt that she had become a knight herself and that the Tea Party was her lady. Primavera had a surprisingly stable arrangement with her editor at the Talos Island Tattler, a remarkably poetic soul with enough perverse creativity to keep them both busy. And Sydney, she said, for one misplaced reason or another, had found his lady in none other than Violet. "You should have seen him before you came to us," Molly had intoned. Of course, that didn't mean the engagement was mutual. Violet would have to find her own knight her own way.
* * *
That party had been swarming with girls in search of knights. Perhaps by being close to the beautiful people, it would rub off; and, they paid dearly for the off chance that they might bump into a kindred soul, like clumsy moths circling a bug lamp.
What ever happened to the girls who got too close to the light--fell into the brilliance of the mad sorceress queen?
Violet had toed at that bank and somehow survived. Now she felt compelled to play the part of Charon and pull the girls from the drowning pool. One way or another, they would find the shore.
A soft gurgle escaped the harlequin girl's lips, followed by a spurt of blood. Her doe eyes asked why.
Violet hushed her with a gentle finger and maneuvered the girl farther into the darkened hallway to prop her against a naked steel crate. The pain had shaken her somewhat from the psionic trance and she slumped like a liberated marionette against the corrugated metal. "Why? Why?" her decorative goldfish mouth burbled, though now for different reasons, her limbs sagging uselessly.
Violet knelt finally and pressed a "Zig zapper" into the girl's palm. At least she could make that choice herself now.
The waltzing rock guitars, violins, and crunchy synthetic tones of an unknown Chicago band gently filled the repurposed warehouse. Vanessa's parties never sacrificed intimate conversation for bone-quaking music, which was actually a pleasant change. It just meant Violet had to be quieter. Her knife's jacket of blood spattered to the floor as it withdrew, leaving her hand clean again. She was getting better. Molly might have been proud... No. She worked better alone, anyway. Better to be broken and bleeding with a choice than a marionette, right? Good riddance, right?
Violet moved back into the mingling bodies, glassy eyed, swaying, giggling. It might have been a fun party if she didn't have to be here. Some important person's daughter had gone missing. It was an all-too-familiar story.
A whisper like silk at the corner of her eye: long fingers snaked across her vision, clamping a warm hand over her mouth. Another arm crossed her waist, pulling her against the attacker's body. No guns, no knives immediately threatening, rather than cause a scene now, she let the man pull her backward past a swinging door.
Harsh fluorescents of a bathroom. A girl perched on the edge of a sink while her friend painted her mouth into a red heart shape. Neither saw the situation as out of the ordinary.
Violet's captor shushed her quietly and spun her to press her back to the chilly tile wall, his hand still pressed firmly to her mouth. She was met by an eerie, red-eyed stare beneath furrowed purple eyebrows, knitted together with--not aggression, but an intense concern.
Violet called out her surprise against the hand and was met by the quiet hiss again. His eyes asked if she would calmly stay put, and she nodded into his palm. Slowly, he moved his hand from her mouth, though it slid to her upper arm: insurance that she wouldn't just slip into the ether and get away. He was warm; he was human; he was real. But how? She had ended him. She had watched him burst into a million sparks, just like Lavender before him.
"Sydney...?" she breathed, like acknowledging the dream might banish it. "Your eyes... How are you alive?"
The young man smiled cryptically, his mouth twisting higher on one side than the other. She saw now that the side of his face had been overtaken by a faint, but oddly textured scar, the taut, plasticky flesh lapping at the corner of his mouth. Her hand went to it instinctively, fingertips tracing the grotesquely delicate swirls.
"They said I'd never do it," he hissed excitedly, a mad gleam in his eye. "I should thank you for taking that blind chance. I see now."
Violet searched his features, confused. What was he talking about? See what? If he had truly died...had he truly, finally seen the other side? "Are...are you saying that you transcended?" Like Molly and Primavera: without the Machine.
It was like he hadn't heard her. Sydney dug into the back pocket of his black hipster jeans and withdrew a slim, leather sleeve. He handed it to her like a fragile secret. "Look. Violet, this is it."
She flipped open the cover to reveal a panoramic photograph, though it took her a moment to realize just what the subject was: an elaborate city comprised of a maddening amalgamation of architecture. She saw Rococo, Art Nouveau, Heian, and--every style and every era from every corner of the globe, juxtaposed on winding streets, terraced high rises, catwalks, and parks. Within this slice, alone, a Gothic cathedral, a five-tiered pagoda, and an irregular glass monolith rose to scrape the--it wasn't sky, but a web of technology interwoven with thousands of varied frescoes.
Violet's breath caught in her throat as she tried to grasp the enormity and poignancy and majesty this one, aged photograph represented--what this could mean for her, for all of them. Sydney stood close, his hair tickling her cheek as he bent to peer at the photo in her hands.
"Icaria's brave new world. This is what we're for, Vi. To protect the Golden Jubilee."
The name resonated with her: something overheard in the still after-midnight, the knowing gleam in her mother's eye, the unspoken reason for all the research they'd stolen and artists they'd contracted and people they'd killed.
"How are we supposed to protect something we don't even know about?" Heaven knew she was already sick to death of secrets, but this was beyond ridiculous, even for a group like Project Daedalus.
"That's just it," Sydney murmured at her temple. "But it's real. I know it."
Violet honestly wanted to disbelieve. It was just too much to bear. Sydney was dead and Daedalus had failed to construct an army of custom super soldiers to defend a palatial underground utopia that couldn't conceivably exist. But the photograph still held her in its spell. In her nerves, her bones, her spider-work of silicon consciousness, she felt the dreams of hundreds of men and women ringing like silver bells.
"We have to find it."
Violet looked up into Sydney's earnest face for answers, for once, he didn't have.
"Don't you want to see it for yourself? Everything we're meant for?" It was clear that this had changed him. A new idealism had been sparked and spread like wildfire. It threatened to catch her, too.
"But how?" It was all she could manage with words.
Sydney raised a hand to hold her cheek and stroked his thumb across her skin. In his mind, it wasn't Violet he gazed upon: his surrogate lady, a shade of his lost love.
"Iris." He tasted the sacred words. "We find Iris."
"When we fall in love / We're just falling / In love with ourselves / We're spiraling" -- Keane, "Spiraling"
Violet dropped into one of the imitation leather, sling-back seats at her gate. Paris, connecting through Madrid, to some town she couldn't pronounce. CNBC hummed quietly on a flat-panel TV overhead. A row of passengers, most of them in suits, seemed to huddle around the news for warmth, their spirits rising and falling with the stocks. The aspect-ratio of the LCD mismatched the signal, made the anchors look shiny and bloated, very American.
Her eyes flicked to the corners of the ceiling, taking stock of the smoked Plexiglas bubbles, green "ready" LEDs shining dimly inside. Dampeners--probably some Malta tech with the serials filed off. At least she'd be safe here, from him.
In the main aisle of the terminal the stream of humanity parted itself, as if around a stone. Sydney's long strides carried him toward her faster than she would have liked. Violet stood, demure, more out of wariness than polite habit.
"Good morning, Violet. Glad you came." His layered, magenta hair was tied high on his head, already messy. It made him look thinner. There was a gauntness to him now.
"I'm surprised you'd meet me under these conditions." She could have meant the security or the crowd; she meant both.
The boy pushed up the unbuttoned sleeves of his dark, striped shirt and folded himself into the chair next to hers. "I hope I only have to explain this once: I don't hold a grudge about what happened last Spring." His lips were pulled wide with tension, but there was no contempt there. "You gave me something no one else would have."
Violet lowered herself back to her seat, frowning. "New eyeballs?"
Sydney laughed softly. He was only ten months older than her, but now it felt more like ten years. She suddenly wanted to touch him, feel at his ribs through his shirt, scold him, anything to make that austere look go away.
"You've got to admit, Vi. Even if we aren't always on the same team, we've always had a crazy sort of chemistry."
Classic hero-villain relationship, wonderful. A bony elbow draped over the seat back and into the vacant chair in the next row. His deliberate ease reminded her of Jack Skellington smoothed to 120 frames per second.
"You only want it to be true because I look like your dead girlfriend."
He slid a hand into her hair, massaging a few strands between his fingers, and she tried not to blanch at his sudden proximity. The ever-present sadness in his gaze seemed to calcify, fossilize in time-lapse.
"Appearances aside, you two are really nothing alike."
Violet gently extracted his hand, leery of falling into old patterns. The idea of Sydney harboring a fondness for her in something other than a proximal, substitutional, or familial context was novel, a little suspect. It muddled already murky waters. She didn't think she liked it.
Violet opened her mouth, but the boarding call came. Free of carry-ons, they lined up and presented boarding passes, passports, and S.E.R.A.P.H. bracelets. Sydney had extra clearance paperwork for the red flag on his name.
"Goddamn invasion of privacy."
Within the corrugated rubber tunnel Violet tossed a smirk over her shoulder. "Or are you just sore you're too small-time evil to have a private jet?"
"Bite me." He bared his teeth with a too-provocative grin.
She chuckled derisively, skipping ahead, and ducked onto the plane, cornering the aisle with a small twirl under the nose of the steward, but her eyes locked with Sydney's, her pout smug. "You wish."
That was going too far, she realized, as she retreated from the steward's flustered cough. Slinking up the aisle, she could feel Sydney's eyes burning into her back and seriously wondered if the sensation was not her imagination.
Their row was behind the wing, and Violet stepped beyond to let the conspicuous boy take the window seat. He stopped before her, too close--just a fraction of an inch within her personal space--considered her with oddly carmine eyes for a moment too long. Then he shrugged.
"My blood's as red as anyone else's." He slid into his seat, somehow graceful.
She liked the way he said, "blood," his accent never quite faded.
Her seat smelled of canned oxygen and soft, bump-mapped plastic from the early '90's. A faint trace of baby vomit. Stale bagels.
Throughout the ascent Violet fidgeted minutely, tossed her hair, tugged a knee sock into place, leaned on an arm rest, instigated a stare-down with a pale, wide-eyed boy in a Twilight T-shirt. Eventually she became aware that, from behind a casually affected "Sky Mall," Sydney had been watching her. He slowly lowered the thin catalog to his lap, his forehead puckered in concentration.
"My God, you're still a virgin, aren't you?" He rethought that. "Heterosexually."
"That's what you're thinking about?" She bristled, wrinkling her nose at him. "Not that it's any business of yours. What difference does it make?"
He held a dangerously pensive look, as if he was seriously considering bringing up the exact issue that the agreed-upon terms of this trip had specifically banned from the agenda: the events of the previous year, in particular the mystery hero; but (she had been holding her breath), he didn't, instead sliding the magazine back into its seat-back pocket.
"Maybe none. Maybe a lot. Iris wasn't." He looked out over the sea of clouds, like a blue bathtub full of cotton balls.
"Are you?" She didn't realize until after the words passed her lips that they could have stung him deeply.
He didn't turn from the double-paned window, watching moisture condense on the inside of the scratched safety plastic.
"Molly..." A thumb pressed down a wrinkle in the thigh of his jeans. "...Said I needed experience. To be convincing."
A prying eye appeared in the gap between the seats in front of them, flicking from boy to girl to boy, blinked with disapproval. For this trip Sydney had dyed a black streak into his hair, wore an earring, to look the part of a punk rather than face condemnation as a red-eyed lovechild of Science and hubris.
Violet hissed at the nuisance, her pout laced with menace. Her hair was a wig, her eyes were glass, her breasts vat-grown to specification, transplanted--all downgradable, but she wore them all with a condescending pride. She liked that she was what the emo kid across the aisle was trying so hard to be; she liked that seeing his fantasies in the flesh terrified more than excited him. She liked that perfection made people uncomfortable.
* * *
"Ah, the mysteries of the Uncanny Valley." His eyes only once flicked downward.
On the train now, the same, but the scents were different, older. The world, time still streaming past, the light fading, the Spanish countryside a stranger fading into the dark where it would pass, only inches away, unknown. Somehow it bothered her more than crossing the ocean on a metal tube, internal combustion, and the mercy of physics.
Sydney had leaned in under the pretense of peering at the shadows outside, his face close. "I wasn't being lurid, promise."
Violet sighed and retracted into her cardigan, somehow emotionally exhausted by her travel companion. "Of course. You never are."
"That's not true." His grin faded when he saw her drawn expression and, in pity, eased back in his seat. His face, like all his faces, was too perfect a picture of sympathy, but he eased an arm over her shoulders and didn't push for more. "What is it?"
She had worried the chads from her ticket unnaturally smooth between her fingertips. "I told you before. I don't want to play a game I can't win."
It was his turn to sigh, and it tore from his chest with an unexpected edge of anguish as he slouched into her, sliding down in the seat until his knees jammed against the industrial upholstery. "Oh, honey, then why the hell are we here?"
"Sleep, Sydney."
There was nothing left outside the gently rocking train but her dim reflection.
"When we fall in love / We're just falling / In love with ourselves / We're spiraling" -- Keane, "Spiraling"
