1The Catalyst
Daniel surveys the situation. Monique is crying, crying, Monique never cries if she can help it. She hasn't cried since grade school, and Daniel would know. Blaise is standing shocked off to the side; he's in the dark, he doesn't understand the situation, but he came with Daniel anyway, now didn't he? He had to; he brought them here. Didn't even know what he was getting himself into. Before Daniel stands a bleak white building, lights blazing in the spark of the evening (catalyst indeed, thinks Daniel with a grimace), and somewhere in that building is the reason Daniel's standing at the epicenter of the array of corpses and blood and gears, still clutching the lead pipe, his knuckles going white under his tight grip. Two days, nineteen hours and (Daniel glances at his watch)… twenty-seven minutes ago, this isn't how he assumed he'd be spending his Friday.
"Let's get this done with," Daniel growls, low and deep and angry. He grabs Monique by the arm, because she's still crying and won't come unless he drags her, and he beckons for Blaise to follow, and with a snarl and a glare he kicks in the front door.
...
Two days, nineteen hours and twenty-seven minutes ago:
"Don't you think it's depressing when a soda drink loses its fizz? It's like it's lost the will to live."
They are eating lunch on the school roof, and Blaise McKnight is going off on another of his philosophical tirades. Standing up with his bottle of soda, brand-new and unopened, he turns to face the only kids left on campus that still tolerate and attempt to comprehend the tangible strangeness Blaise isn't aware he is constantly exuding.
Blaise's caramel-blond hair blows lightly in the wind, and the sun peers uncharacteristically through a vague gap in the clouds, reflecting off his blue-gray eyes. The girls at the school speculate that he could be handsome if he would only get his nose out of his math book and stop coding long enough for them to give him a complete makeover.
"To that end," Blaise continues, "There are other comparisons you can make too. For example," he says, sounding altogether like a scientific demonstrator, and with a morbid grin on his face he begins violently shaking the soda bottle. "See," he explains airily, easily, without any inhibitions or shyness, "think of shaking this bottle like pushing a person's limits. Bothering, exploiting, teasing, hurting them… getting too close for comfort, slowly, slowly breaking them until they just can't take it anymore and-" suddenly he puts down the bottle, leans as far back from it as he can, and pops off the lid. Sticky sweet once-carbonated liquid sprays up in a radioactive fountain of something likely cherry-flavored, splattering back down to earth once the velocity runs out.
"-they explode," Blaise finishes tartly, smile gone and slate-blue eyes gone cold. The three boys who have just born witness to this display of mad-scientist-esque behavior glance discreetly back and forth between Blaise and each other, beginning to realize why it's only his third day at school and already nobody else wants to each lunch with Blaise.
At his introduction in homeroom on Monday, when the teacher had explained in a monotone that he'd been forced to transfer schools because of his parents' jobs, Blaise had seemed affable enough. Shy, slightly spacey, but he had a likeable look to him. Most of the class had assumed the shy bit because for the first three classes, he hadn't said a single word to anyone, and assumed the spacey bit because he'd spent those classes staring vaguely out the window.
And then math class had rolled around and Blaise had promptly shown up everyone, the teacher included, by solving the bonus problem on the geometry pop quiz using some fancy calculus thing that apparently actually worked, and then he'd been transferred up three levels the next day. He attempted to explain to one girl who asked how he'd done the problem, and she'd walked away even more confused than before. Nobody could exactly approach him to talk because he spent every break other than lunch on his computer doing… well, doing something involving a lot of code that nobody could decipher.
He also tends, as he just has to the three remaining people in the school who are attempting to understand him, not to talk to people but at them.
"Oh," he mumbles vaguely, glancing at the empty, tipped over bottle on the bench before him. "Now I've gone and wasted a perfectly good soda."
...
Unlike Blaise, news of whom has yet to completely filter through the senior class, Daniel Black likes to pretend he is normal. People enjoy Daniel's presence; he's amiable, charismatic and clever, and the girls (as well as most of the gay boys) think he's attractive; dark swirling hair and startlingly green eyes and tall, fit physique, with a good fashion sense to boot. It's only too bad he seems to be married to the job, and that job is the theatre. Yes, he can dress up in all manner of Victorian or Shakespearian costumes and still look hot. Yes, he can quote Romeo and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice at you all day, but he's completely clueless as to the fact that half the student body wants his student body.
Or maybe Daniel just pretends not to notice. Daniel, being an actor, is very good at pretending. For example, right now he is pretending he has a slight interest in football. In actuality, Daniel can't stand sports. He abhors physical education. He generally abhors physical exertion in general. And yet somehow he remains fit and lithe and graceful. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he eats a small box of grocery store sushi for lunch every day, no more, no less. All that tofu and soy might have protein, but it doesn't pack the pounds.
Daniel's doctor tells him he's too thin and he needs to eat more meat. Daniel complains loudly that he's a "fucking vegetarian" and he'll do what he wants.
Nobody at school has ever heard Daniel swear, because at school Daniel is amiable and sweet and stands atop the world of cool like he invented the stuff. Away from all the crowding masses of infidels and ingrates and imbeciles, Daniel is a sour, cynical jerk who terrifies most adults and forces the others to assume he probably has a gun or a knife. In fact, he has both. They are on his person right now. He has managed to sneak them by the guards stationed outside the entrance to the school.
Daniel smiles inwardly and praises his decision to try out acting in eighth grade; it has served him well and probably will continue to in the future. Life isn't fun if you aren't a manipulative bastard every once in a while. The only difference between Daniel and the other manipulative bastards of the world is that generally, they flaunt it. Daniel gallivants through life under the pretense of charisma and charm, earning the ever-strong trust of his peers, juniors and on a good day even his elders, and then one day expects to use them all for his own selfish devices if need be. That's how he is.
Before she left for college three years ago, his sister used to tell him he was warped on the inside, that when he was being conceived, the wrong sperm had gotten to the egg, a gnarled, nasty, rude little bastard of a sperm.
To this day this still makes him smirk.
Daniel leaves after lunch and decides he isn't in the mood for history class and so he makes his way up to the roof. He enjoys it up on the roof, because any time other than lunch it's quiet and nobody else goes up there, because technically it isn't allowed.
It is for this reason that Daniel is incredibly confused to find someone else up on the roof. It is a medium-height boy who is probably a grade or two below him. His blond hair is tousled in his face and his clothes are slightly big on him. He has a computer open on his lap and a bottle of cherry soda in his hand and he is staring blankly up at the clouds.
Daniel steps out of the door, letting the wind catch his specifically-combed dark hair, and he strides forward to the center of the roof and calls out to the other boy.
"Hey, class is starting, dude." The boy shows no inclination that he's listening. Daniel raises an eyebrow and a vague memory of something like a rumor comes to mind, a rumor of a boy in the sophomore class who was smart enough for multivariable calculus and aloof as all hell with no social affluence whatsoever. Odd. Strange. Words he'd heard in passing from the kids at the lunch table, and he hadn't paid attention because he hadn't really cared.
"Yo, get off the roof and go to class," Daniel calls. The rumor boy tilts his head and turns slowly to make eye contact with Daniel. Pale blue-gray meets mint-leaf green and Daniel isn't sure what to make of this all of a sudden, because somehow, rumor boy seems vacant, almost vapid, and yet simultaneously like he's standing ten levels above all of humanity and is completely unaware of it.
Daniel considers himself very aware of the fact that this boy appears to be on the same separate wavelength as he himself is, a sine wave in comparison to the y equals zero line that is society; diving and floating and swirling around the line and every now and then crossing over with normal and seeming like, for a fleeting moment, part of everyday societal life… and then all of a sudden something slips, something strikes everyone as strange, and all of a sudden the feeling's gone.
Daniel tends to hold his place around normal fairly well without winging out of control and showing off his strangeness, his sadism, the fact that he lives to lie. It is very, very clear to him that rumor boy is entirely unaware he has already alienated himself by not pretending to conform.
Rumor boy holds eye contact with Daniel for a long, nearly painful time, and then he holds up the half-full bottle of cherry soda and says vaguely, "Want a sip?"
Daniel is entirely blown away by his nonchalance and lets a real, completely unsolicited smile slip onto his face. He strides purposefully across the roof and sits down up against the wall next to rumor boy with a nod, and takes the soda from his hand. It's probably been open for a while, but when Daniel tastes it, it hasn't lost any of its fizz yet, which is just the way he likes it. Life is always better with a little bubble to it, he believes.
"You're that weird sophomore, aren't you?" Daniel asks entirely unreservedly. If he's open about things, usually the person he's speaking with will be too. It gets him answers much more easily than skirting around things.
"Am I weird?" he replies, looking emptily up at Daniel. Daniel nods. "I'm Blaise McKnight," rumor boy says offhandedly, taking back the bottle of soda as Daniel hands it to him.
"Daniel Black," he supplies, and leans over to see what Blaise's doing on his computer. "Is that code? What're you making?"
Blaise blinks slowly and turns to face Daniel, and unreadable look in his eyes. He does the creepy thing where he keeps eye contact with Daniel for a very long time and no matter how hard he tries, Daniel can't look away. And then he turns silently back to the computer.
"It's a game," Blaise replies. "I'm programming a game."
"What kind?"
"I'm not sure yet. I'm still creating the world it takes place in."
"Oh."
Daniel watches him type for a moment before realizing he can't comprehend a single thing being input into the computer. At this point he turns to watch Blaise himself, completely absorbed in his work. He saves his progress, closes the screen of his computer, and places it on the ground next to himself before staring back up at the clouds.
"Daniel," Blaise says suddenly. Daniel raises an eyebrow. "What's a catalyst?"
"Catalyst…" Daniel thinks, because he's pretty sure the word 'catalyst' has popped up in a line he's memorized for some show or another a few years ago, and he remembers looking it up. "A catalyst is something that creates change. The thing that makes things start to happen," he defines, crossing his arms and trying to see what Blaise is finding so interesting up there in the clouds. "Why d'you ask?"
"My parents said it the day we moved. I hadn't gotten around to looking it up."
"Oh."
For some reason, Daniel stays. He doesn't leave campus and he doesn't make Blaise leave the roof and leave him be. They spend fifth period staring at the sky, silently searching out shapes in the clouds, and Daniel finds himself imagining a world of possibilities that he could create, if only he had the means to do so.
...
Monique gets home late from lacrosse practice and pulls off her jersey with a flourish, letting it drop on the back of a chair as she strides purposefully through her small apartment. It's been years since her father's worked inside the country, so he's not home, and it's been years since her brother went to Vegas with his girlfriend and never came back, so he's not there either, and her divorced mother lives across town with the man she remarried six months ago. She doesn't have custody, and so Monique lives alone and revels in it. She doesn't need to close the door when she changes. She doesn't need to turn down the volume on her music. Just so long as her dad keeps paying the bills and tuition and sending her envelopes of food money, she's entirely content with the world.
It's just before eight and just getting dark when her cell phone rings, vibrating angrily against the tiles of the kitchen counter. Monique stops working on her English essay, because she's not getting anything productive done anyway, and glances at the caller ID.
It's Daniel.
Daniel, in Monique's opinion, is a self-righteous bastard. She can see right through his devious little tricks, and most of the time he pisses her off. She's been in his class since sixth grade, and ever since he pulled her hair on the playground and she knocked him into the concrete and gave him a bloody nose, they've been best friends.
"What do you want, failface?" she asks by means of a greeting.
Daniel laughs on the other end of the line. "I took a walk after school and started wandering around, and I guess I ended up in gang territory 'cause I got in a fight," he rambles. "So I sorta twisted my ankle and I don't really wanna walk all the way home. Wanna drive over and come get me?"
Monique sighs, because this is a very Daniel thing to do. It happens in cut-and-paste circumstances at least once a month. Daniel's in Monique's car nearly as much as Monique herself is.
"Where are you?" she concedes, making her way to her room and pulling on a button-up shirt. She tends to walk around in just a bra after lacrosse because she's sweaty and it's hot and she just feels comfortable doing so.
"I'm chilling out under the streetlight near the corner of Ninth and Division," he informs her, and she makes a noncommittal "hn" noise and hangs up the phone, grabs her keys off the counter and yanks on her boots and gets in the car.
She pulls up at the corner of Ninth and Division and Daniel gets into the passenger seat of her beat-up, indestructible green station wagon and she waits patiently while he concedes to buckle his seatbelt. Daniel immediately turns off her music when she starts the car back up, because for some unknown reason he can't stand her German Death Metal that she loves so much.
"What the hell did you do this time?" she asks, taking note of the dried blood on Daniel's left hand. He always punches with his left, because he's right handed and that's the hand he holds a pencil in when he writes. She's noticed that about him, even if he hasn't. Daniel, despite his tendency to be a fantastic bastard, loves telling stories more than anything, and lives for the chance to put them down in words. Usually, however, he settles for sweet-talking them to people as a method of coercion and businesslike seduction and manipulation, because Daniel is only secure when he knows everyone is willing to wear their hearts on their sleeves for him.
"I was bored and thinking about things, so I was wandering around and not paying attention and these dickwads jumped me near the park, thinking I had cash or some shit. So I gave 'em a few really good reasons why they shouldn't try it again." Daniel's explanations never leave much to be desired, because the way he tells stories like this, people always decide in the end that they really don't want to know after all.
"Are those reasons permanent?" Monique questions, adjusting the car mirror at the stoplight.
"I called an ambulance for 'em," Daniel admits. "They'll be walking tomorrow, but they won't be happy 'bout it."
"You're an ass."
"Yet you still drive me around the city like you're my chauffeur."
Monique wants to glare at him, but she at least tries to be a good driver and so she keeps her eyes on the road instead.
"I met the rumor boy today," he says, striking up a conversation. "You know, the new sophomore kid that got switched into multivariable calc."
"Oh?" Monique feigns interest.
"Yeah. His name's Blaise. You don't hear that one too often, huh?" He pauses for a second, and Monique feels no need to reply. Daniel takes this as an invitation to ramble. "Kid's a total weirdo. Does all this freaky code stuff and totally doesn't realize he's a social train wreck. Hey," he asks, "A catalyst is a thing that makes things change, right?"
"Yeah, that's basically the definition. Something or someone that causes change to occur. Unless you're talking about it in a science class sense, in which case I think it has something to do with enzymes-"
"Momo!" Daniel shouts, and Monique flicks her eyes back to the road just in time to see a figure in what looks like a white hospital gown darting out in front of the car and she slams on the brakes and shuts her eyes because she knows she's just barely too late and there's a horrid thud sound as the car comes to a complete and abrupt stop. In the beam of the headlights, the figure in the hospital gown is visible, lying about ten feet away from the car.
Monique and Daniel look briefly at each other and then she yanks the keys out of the car and they jump out of their respective seats and hurry over to the person that Monique can't believe she just hit. The sun is just barely set, and the blue glow of twilight is just enough for them to see by. The figure in the hospital gown has messy black hair that looks more Spanish black that Asian black, but the skin is deathly pale, like that of a nerd who stays inside all the time in the dark, the only light that ever graces their skin being the blue glow of the screen they play video games on.
The first question out of Monique's mouth is not "is this kid okay". It is: "Is this kid a dude or a chick?"
"I don't know," Daniel admits. "Can't tell."
"Check then," she insists, gesturing for him to lift up the poor kid's hospital gown.
"No, you," Daniel suggests. Monique fixes him with a glare that could freeze liquid nitrogen, and he blushes and obliges. "Dude," he confirms awkwardly.
Monique nods and takes the boy's pulse. His skin is cold under her fingers, but his heart is beating, if not beating slightly… well, slightly mechanically. He's just unconscious. She holds a hand over his mouth and feels him breathing. Upon closer inspection, he doesn't appear to have sustained any major injuries despite being hit by her car, but there are lacerations all up and down his arms and legs that probably extend underneath his hospital gown too, and those look like they've been there for at least an hour. There's a lot of blood. Daniel refuses to check, however, so she doesn't know how far up they go. She doubts these injuries came from the car crash, because they don't look like damage cement has done; rather, they appear to have been cut into the boy's skin with a knife.
"He's got on a hospital dress," Daniel notes, "But no wristband."
Monique looks, and he's right; no hospital wristband bearing the boy's name, age and whatever other important information the nurses would need.
"Pick him up and get in the car," Monique instructs. Daniel gapes at her. "Do it," she insists. "We're gonna take him back to my place, and when he wakes up we'll get a number and call his parents, okay?"
Daniel nods awkwardly and does his best to scoop the boy into his arms. Monique assumes the boy is probably about fifteen or sixteen, but he's skinny to an anorexic extent and not very fit, so she's not surprised that Daniel can lift him easily. She opens the door to the back seat for Daniel, and he piles in and lays the black-haired boy down on the seat. Daniel rests the boy's head on his lap and buckles a seatbelt across the kid's waist and gives Monique a thumbs-up. They drive back to the apartment in silence.
Monique lets them in and Daniel carries the boy over to the couch where he sets him down carefully yet unceremoniously, and then crosses the room and jumps up to sit on Monique's kitchen counter. He takes an apple out of the basket of fruits that Monique keeps around simply because she enjoys fruit with breakfast, and bites into it thoughtfully.
From beneath the sink, Monique produces the first aid kit that she usually uses on Daniel after he gets in fights, and she sits down on the couch next to the boy and begins wrapping cotton and gauze around the lacerations on the boy's arms and legs. Daniel watches skeptically from his position on the counter, and Monique glares at him, trying to convey a message of get your ass over here and help me so it takes less time, but it doesn't work. All Daniel does is smirk.
And then, "Daniel," Monique calls, "get over here and take a look at this."
Daniel raises an eyebrow and takes another bite of apple. Monique tries to glare, but it doesn't have her usual bite behind it because she's effectively creeped out. Daniel senses this, clearly, and hops off the counter to come see what she wants him to.
Embedded in the boy's left arm, visible under his skin and spattered with his own blood, is a shiny bronze plate. It's unclear to Monique how it could've been set into his arm, because there are no stitches; it looks cleanly grafted in, like his muscle's grown around it. Monique suppresses her gag reflex. Daniel fails to do so and has to look away.
"What the fuck is that?" He coughs to cover up for the fact that he's gagging. "Seriously."
"I don't know," Monique replies, trying to calm herself. "I'm just gonna wrap his wounds and hope it's supposed to be there." And she does exactly this. When the gash in the boy's arm and the metal plate inside it are covered by cotton and gauze, Daniel allows himself to look. The two of them stare awkwardly at the boy for a moment, and then at each other.
"This is just a weird situation, Momo," Daniel says finally, more placid than normal. "Just weird."
"I hit a random kid in a hospital dress with my car in the middle of the night, and he turns out to be injured and have a metal plate in his arm, and now he's crashed out on my couch," Monique deadpans. "This defines weird."
They are silent for a brief moment, and then the boy's eyes flicker and he sits up, startled. Daniel and Monique gape at each other and then fix their eyes on the boy, who is glancing around in desperate and somehow-silent confusion. He notices Monique and Daniel and his eyes widen for a fraction of a second, and then he shakes his head rapidly and his hair falls in his face, blocking his left eye from view. He doesn't manage to block it fast enough, however, and Monique catches another glimpse of bronze as he shuts his eye.
The boy stares at Monique with his one visible, ink-black eye. Monique blinks. The boy turns to Daniel, who's equally as confused as Monique is.
"Um, hi," Monique tries, waving at the boy. He stares vacantly back at her, unmoving. "I'm Monique. You can call me Momo. This is Daniel. What's your name?" she says, gesturing at Daniel. The boy says nothing, and so Monique tries French. "Euh, Bonjour?"
Nothing.
"Hola." Nothing. "Konnichiwa. Ciao. Nihao. Guten tag? Christ, does this kid understand any language? Aloha!" The boy continues to stare blankly at Monique.
"Lemme try," Daniel says, grinning. "How do you say 'hi' in Esperanto?"
"If you don't know how to say it, don't try, stupid," Monique complains, whacking Daniel in the face with a pillow. The boy smiles faintly, just barely noticeably, but Monique notices.
"What's your name?" she tries again. The boy makes a vaguely sad face and continues to say nothing. He makes an odd motion with his hands that reminds Monique of what she does when she's looking for an answer; hands flailing slightly from side to side as if trying to dissuade someone silently from something. And then the boy shrugs.
"What's he mean by that?" Monique asks Daniel.
Daniel thinks briefly, comedically stroking a beard that he doesn't have, and says, "Well, maybe he doesn't have a name."
They both look at the boy, who nods almost imperceptibly.
"You really don't have a name?" Daniel asks incredulously. The boy blinks at him. "Can I name you then?"
"Hell if I let you name him, Daniel!" Monique interrupts. "You'll end up calling him something really weird, like Deathcrush or something." Daniel pouts and then leans over to rest his elbows on the edge of the sofa next to the nameless boy.
"Raven," he says decidedly. "Can I call you Raven? Since your hair's black." Monique coughs, and it sounds suspiciously like pretentions author bitch.
The boy blinks and nods, and as such he becomes Raven. Daniel smiles and Monique nods awkwardly and says, "Daniel, go home. You can walk from here. Raven'll stay here tonight and we'll figure out what to do with him in the morning."
"What?" Daniel complains, "Why can't I stay over? Your dad's not home, like, ever-"
"Daniel, go home," Monique insists, "Because if you stay, you'll be up talking at me all night and I won't get any sleep. Get out."
Daniel pouts and Monique shows him to the door. Raven watches him leave with an unsure look in his one visible eye.
"I can get you some clothes if you want," Monique says. "If my brother left 'em here, he doesn't want 'em anymore. Also you can take a shower and I'll get my brother's room disinfected for you." She kicks open the door to her brother's room and pulls out some clothes and a towel out of the cabinet in the hall, and hands all of this to Raven. "Go take a shower," she insists. "Or at least get changed."
Raven nods slowly and closes the bathroom door behind himself. Monique hears a faint click as it locks on the other side.
Monique stands in the hallway with a hand on her hip and a bit of a headache coming on and wonders what the hell she's gotten into.
...
Blaise and Daniel aren't entirely surprised to see each other on the roof first thing the next morning, mostly because Blaise isn't really surprised by anything and Daniel has a suspicion the sophomore boy'll be up there. However, Blaise isn't expecting to see two other people with Daniel, one of them a girl and one a young boy. The girl is tall and buxom and failing not to flaunt it, and has her short hair yanked into a pin-straight blond ponytail. The other boy is short with chin-length messy black hair that falls in his face and covers his left eye. He's dressed in all dark colors; baggy pants and sleeves that cover his hands because they're too long and black boots that probably aren't his.
Daniel approaches and Blaise looks up from his coding, analyzing Daniel's expression. Blaise always tries, tries hard to tell what people are thinking, but he simply can't seem to see it in their eyes like everyone else seems to.
"Hey, how long are you going to be up here?" Daniel asks. Blaise pretends to think to himself, even though he already knows the answer.
"Every class but math," he admits. "That one's all that matters to me."
Daniel raises an eyebrow but doesn't question it. "Can I ask you a favor?" He stuffs his hands in his pockets, and looks away, which Blaise has come to recognize as a universal sign of uncomfortable shyness. In the background, the girl is fussing over the short, dark boy, who is shrinking down physically in an attempt to become invisible psychologically.
Blaise stares at Daniel until he can tell that the senior boy is becoming physically uncomfortable under his gaze and finally spits out his favor: "This kid Raven needs somewhere to hang out while we're in class. Momo'll come pick him up when you go to math, but can he just chill up here with you the rest of the day?"
Blaise glances over at the dark boy, who must be Raven. He is still trying to make himself invisible, but because he's dressed in all black against an all-white rooftop, it isn't working at all.
"Sure," Blaise says.
Daniel nods and smiles and leans in to whisper in Blaise's ear. "Um, he doesn't really talk… like, at all. I don't really know why. But, well, he doesn't. So…"
"I won't mind," Blaise insists, and Daniel thanks him and leaves with the girl, who must be Momo, and the boy named Raven stays behind, standing awkwardly in the middle of the roof. Blaise peers over the top of his computer screen at him for a moment and then gets back to work. If he wants to create an entire world, he can't pause for insignificances like that.
At some point, Raven appears by his side. Blaise is only vaguely aware of this, until Raven leans over far enough that he's obscuring the screen. "Pardon," Blaise says, nudging at Raven's shoulder. He pulls away like he's been burned. "Sorry," he mumbles. "But I couldn't see the screen."
Raven points at the screen and makes a face. Blaise feels like this face is a question, but he's not sure, so he attempts to guess what Raven wants and answers with, "It's code. I'm making a game." Raven blinks. "A video game. You use the keys and move a little person around in the virtual world and control them to win."
At the words 'control them,' Raven twitches visibly and pouts. Blaise has memorized pouting; it means that person is sad.
"You don't like the idea of controlling someone?" he asks. Raven shakes his head. "I suppose if you're thinking about it like it's a real person, then that's disturbing," he admits, standing up to go on a philosophical tirade. "Being able to move a real person around with a remote control, force them to talk to people or lash out and attack with the press of a button… no wonder video games don't have artificial intelligence yet; none of the characters would stand for being manipulated like that. If you were a character in a game I was playing, I could make you go wherever I want and do whatever I want. I could send you into battle and refuse to press the attack button and let you die-"
Blaise stops when he sees the look on Raven's face. He's memorized this one too, because it's hard not to remember; Raven is crying. He's very upset.
Blaise has never been particularly good with apologies when it comes to accidental things like this. It isn't his fault Raven was upset by something he said, because how was Blaise to know that something he hadn't said yet would affect someone he'd just met in the future? It held no logic to him. Yet clearly Raven was upset, and Blaise wasn't comfortable with people being upset around him, and so he saves his progress on his coding and sits back down next to Raven and takes his hand, because that's the only thing he knows how to do in this case.
...
Daniel follows Monique to her car after school because he's curious about Raven. Instead of sitting in the front seat like he usually insists upon doing, he piles into the back with the mysterious little boy and helps him with the seat belt, because Raven doesn't seem to know how it works.
"You're a weird one, aint'cha, kid?" Daniel mumbles to himself as he clicks the seatbelt into place around Raven's waist. Raven stares up at him with one blank black eye and blinks slowly. "Do you ever talk at all?" he wonders aloud.
Raven's eye narrows sadly and he pouts. His lips part as if he's about to start speaking, but no words come out.
"Daniel…" Monique warns from the front seat.
"You're allowed, you know," Daniel says, ignoring her. "You're allowed to talk." Seeing Raven's startled expression, Daniel continued. "You can talk whenever you want, about whatever you want to talk about. It's not like there's a rule against it or anything."
The car pulls up outside Monique's apartment and they get out. Raven keeps eye contact with Daniel for a very long time, blinking slowly and regarding him with a pensive, melancholy face.
And then, soft as snowflakes and barely audible over the clicking of Monique turning the key in the lock on her door, Daniel hears: "Really?"
Daniel's eyes are wide as he spins on his heels to catch Raven's eye, and Raven assumes by the look of shock on Daniel's face that it really wasn't okay and now he's in trouble. Dawning realization that punishment is about to be exacted is an expression Daniel knows well, because he wears it frequently and makes anyone who fights him wear it just as often.
And then he smiles, as gently as he can. Monique, behind him, is shouting for him to come inside already because it's cold and she doesn't want to heat the whole neighborhood, so Daniel reaches out and takes Raven's bandaged hand in his own and leads the enigma of a boy inside.
Monique makes an isn't-that-cute face when Daniel enters the kitchen, still dragging Raven by the hand. Daniel gives her the finger. Raven laughs, which startles Monique, and Daniel feels like revenge has been exacted indeed and in a sudden rush of uncharacteristic, inexplicable sympathy, he pulls both Raven and Monique into a careful, caring hug.
He has no idea why.
...
The sun's already set when Blaise realizes it's after school hours and he should be getting home before his parents call him in for dinner and wonder why he's not showing up. He saves his data and closes his computer, slipping it carefully into his backpack as he stands up.
As he opens the door to the stairs that will take him down from the roof, he realizes on the other side of the tinted windowpane set into the door is the silhouette of a person. Blaise opens the door anyway and finds himself staring into a pair of eye sockets that no longer contain eyes. Where eyes should be, there are glass domes protecting a series of gears and bronze and metal like the insides of a pocket watch. The gears turn and click faintly in the silence as Blaise stands at the top of the stairs, staring into what should be eyes, and despite Blaise and his desperate inability to feel emotion, something about this really, really disturbs him.
Blaise doesn't feel, but something about this person with the clockwork eyes is intrinsically wrong.
The clockwork-eyed person (Blaise has no idea what the person even looks like; he's mesmerized, sickly mesmerized by the eyes…) stays there for a moment, a moment too long, and then he turns on his heels and walks mechanically down the stairs.
Blaise, not one to be left in the dark about anything, follows the clockwork man (now that he's not transfixed with the disturbing eyes, he notices it's a man with scraggly brown hair and a wrinkled suit), follows all the way down the stairs and out the back door of the school. He follows the man down the sidewalk and around the corner, through a back alley of somewhere and twisting down the corridors and causeways of downtown until
-until he entered a building that Blaise found himself grinding to a halt before. Tall, stark, white and austere, with lights in almost all the windows (none on the top floor, Blaise notes absentmindedly).
He's stopped short because he's almost positive this building is where his parents work. He's almost sure this dull, inauspicious building is the one his parents have rented out for their medical biotechnology company. Blaise saw it the day they visited the city, looking for a house to move into. He'd seen it four days ago when his father had driven him by on the way home from school.
Blaise stares at the building for a long, long time. The clockwork-eyed man doesn't come out of the building. The last rays of sun disappear behind the skyline and Blaise shoulders his bag and leaves to go back home.
He wonders to himself what's going on in that building, what kind of 'medical biotechnology' his parents are working on, what on earth they could possibly be doing to warrant their work being labeled a catalyst.
...
Raven has dinner with Daniel and Monique. He doesn't say much; he's still getting used to the idea that he's permitted to speak. Still getting used to the fact that he has a voice and that he's allowed to use it. Daniel asks him question after question after question, and Raven does his best to answer them.
Monique asks one question, and Raven refuses to answer it: where did all those injuries of yours come from?
Raven isn't entirely sure he knows the right way to answer.
He watches over both their shoulders as Monique corrals Daniel into actually doing his homework ("Tomorrow's Friday; there's only one more day left in the week and then you can goof off all you want!"), watches the math flow out of their pencils and the words appear on the screen and at some point, some point he realizes he'd really like to stay here.
Daniel and Monique speak easily to each other, and Raven finds himself utterly amazed by their freedom. He has no words for what he's feeling, because he was never given words aside from what he's heard in passing from the people around him, telling him not to speak. It's a bubbling, warm feeling, like soda that's been left out in the sun and then shaken up until it bursts, and Raven feels like he's bursting with the feeling.
"Daniel," he says softly, and Daniel looks up from his notebook with a curious lilt in his eyes and an unreadable half-smile on his face. "Have to tell something to you two." Monique stops finding the area underneath a sine wave and starts paying attention. Raven takes a deep breath. "Don't want to scare you," he says softly.
"Raven, not much scares me," Daniel admits, his smile falling a little bit.
"Not scare," Raven shakes his head. "Bother? No. Disturb?"
"What is it?" Monique asks gently. "You can tell us anything."
Raven is quiet for a moment while he looks for the words. Some of them bubble about in his head for a bit but there's no softening adjectives, no cushioning phrases to attach them together with to make the statement less blunt, and so he takes a deep breath and pushes his hair out of his face to reveal the one eye he's been keeping covered.
Beneath a thin dome of clear glass where Raven's other eye should be is a network of gears and coils and metal bits, ticking and turning rhythmically inside his head.
No matter how hard he tries, Raven can't ignore the ticking. He can't escape it.
His one actual eye flickers back and forth between Daniel and Monique's, trying to read their expressions. Monique is biting her lip. Daniel is unreadable.
And then Daniel leans forward off the edge of the sofa, to where Raven is sitting on the floor in front of him. He pulls Raven up off the floor by his arms and onto the sofa between the two of them. Raven kneels awkwardly there for a moment, Daniel's arms braced on his, and then he's bent forward slightly and Daniel's resting his head on Raven's chest.
He feels Daniel's breath catch and knows that despite having his ear pressed to Raven's body, despite listening, Daniel's not hearing a heartbeat. What he's hearing is tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick as the gears inside Raven's body turn.
Raven doesn't know when he starts crying silently, but he realizes he must've at some point when Daniel pulls away and wipes a tear off his cheek.
"What are you?" he asks gently, as gently as one can possibly question another's humanity.
"Experiment 5-6-5," Raven says blankly, reciting his number. "The first successful living clockwork soldier."
He waits for the words first successful and living and the number 565 to sink in before Daniel and Monique realize what that entails.
Five hundred and sixty-four people before Raven didn't make it through the operation. Raven is the first. Raven is also the first to have escaped. They were trying to make him immortal. He explains this in hushed, shaking tones to the pair of them. Monique takes his hand and strokes his hair gently, comfortingly. Daniel sits in stoic silence with one hand still on Raven's upper arm, the other lightly on his waist, eyes cast downwards as he takes it all in.
And then Raven is being lifted up and shifted and suddenly he's pressed up against Daniel's body, sprawled awkwardly in the older boy's lap. He adjusts himself to sit more comfortably, his head resting on Daniel's chest and his hands tangling themselves in the fabric of his shirt. Daniel rests his chin on the top of Raven's head.
"You're being unusually sympathetic," Monique says softly to Daniel. "For you, I mean."
He can feel the vague vibrations when Daniel replies quietly, "I live my life by manipulating the world into spilling its secrets and wearing their hearts on their sleeves. I've never seen someone wearing a heart this broken." He pauses, his arms tightening around Raven's body and holding him close. "So it's not sympathy, Momo. It's empathy. Come here," he insists, leaning forward and grabbing her by the sleeve of her shirt and pulling her closer. She shifts sideways on the sofa until she's up next to Daniel and rests her head on his shoulder and one of her arms on Raven's legs.
Raven shuts his eyes and listens to Daniel's heartbeat and wishes he still had one of his own. The three of them fall asleep on the sofa together, homework forgotten.
...
The end of the next day is a hectic disaster. Monique is caught up in a hurricane of shouting when Daniel takes her up to the roof and they find Blaise and Raven are missing and the rooftop looks like someone's taken a dinosaur-sized cheese grater to it. There are scratches and gashes dragged into the cement, and Monique tries very hard to convince herself that the splatter on the pavement is cherry soda and not blood. It can't be blood. Blood on people doesn't bother her, somehow, but blood splattered where a person is not implies death to Monique. Like shooting, and the blood splatters it leaves on the wall behind the victim. Like slashing, and the splatters on the pavement as the force and velocity drag the blade through the air, crimson dripping off it as it moves.
She has to look away eventually.
"Where the fuck are they?" Daniel growls angrily. Monique hasn't seen him this mad in a very long time. She thinks hard about it, and she's pretty sure the last time he was this upset over something was back in eighth grade when some boys had used her to lure him out for a fight. He'd been absolutely apoplectic, and he'd broken one of the boys' legs. (Monique had knocked the other two boys unconscious herself with a brick by the time Daniel got there, otherwise he'd have done them in too.)
It's at that moment that Blaise appears in the doorway of the roof, looking exhausted. His hair's a mess and his laptop case hangs heavily off his shoulder, one hand gripping tightly onto the strap of it and the other bracing him on the doorway.
"They took him," Blaise gasps as Daniel heaves him mercilessly up by the front of his shirt. "They took Raven away."
"Who's they?" Daniel barks. Monique starts drawing more parallels between this incident and the one in eighth grade. Daniel shouting and interrogating and damn near torturing until he finds out where Monique had gone. "Who are they and where did they take him?"
Blaise coughs a bit and pulls a bottle of cherry soda. He takes a swig of it and coughs some more when Daniel shakes him and insists that Blaise answer him immediately.
"Clockwork people," Blaise gasps. "They were clockwork people!"
Monique and Daniel look at each other.
"What do you mean clockwork people?" Daniel asks harshly.
Blaise is silent for a moment and then he says, cautiously, "People – no, bodies. Corpses. With all the insides taken out and replaced with gears. Like an automaton. You look into their eyes and all you see is the little pieces moving and you can hear them ticking."
"How d'you know they're corpses?" Monique asks carefully.
"Raven stabbed one," Blaise explained. "With my drafting compass." He pulls out a device that Monique recognizes from geometry as the weird little previously-nameless doohickey used to draw perfect circles. "He stabbed it right through the heart. It didn't die. And there wasn't any blood. So I figured since it didn't die, it was already dead."
Monique averts her eyes from the splatter on the pavement. They keep flickering back there anyway.
"Where did they take him and why?" Daniel growls, halfway hoisting Blaise into the air by the front of his oversized shirt. Blaise cringes.
"I followed them… took him… took him to my parents' office," he explains, half-confused and half-upset.
"What kind of job do your parents do?" Daniel questions.
"They work in biotechnology. Medical biotech," he says. "I don't know specifics."
Monique has to sit down at this point because she feels very, very sick. In her mind, it's like fragments of a broken stained-glass window have just re-coalesced into the image they once were before being shattered, and the image is hideous and horrible and disturbing beyond all reason.
Raven. Hospital gown but no bracelet. Metal under his skin. Clockwork eye. Experiments. Only successful living attempt. Clockwork zombies. Medical biotechnology.
Monique swears she can feel her blood run cold as she realizes what must be going on. Corpses filled with clockwork didn't just burst unbidden from the ground like geysers; the bodies had to come from somewhere.
"Blaise," she chokes out, trying not to let her gag reflex get to her, "have you moved around a lot? Has your family moved a lot?"
"Yes," he admits. "Why?"
The bodies had to come from somewhere. Steal them from recent graves, dig them up and take them away when nobody will miss them. Take a bunch, remove what's inside, and fill it with gears. Then go somewhere else, where the dead people's old friends and family aren't, so nobody recognizes the clockwork zombies if they ever get released. Besides, someone's bound to notice the grave robbing eventually, and if they got arrested for that, their facility would be searched and zombies are hard to hide.
They moved again, moved here, and Raven broke out. And now they'd taken him back. Blaise's family had taken Raven back, they'd been the ones to make him into a human experiment-
Monique throws up a little in her throat when she realizes what must've been done to Raven to make him a clockwork person like the zombies Blaise explained. She thinks of what Daniel told her, about how he didn't have a heartbeat and how all he could hear inside Raven's chest was a tick-tick-tick like he was listening to a pocket watch.
Raven had no heart. He probably didn't have most of his organs any more. He'd been torn apart and rebuilt in bronze and gears and-
Monique throws up on the paved tiles of the roof, because the thought of it and the empathetic reaction her body's experiencing are too much.
She relays this hideous revelation to Daniel in a fervent whisper. He blanches, the flushed anger in his face receding to allow in abject horror and disgust, and suddenly he's not next to her anymore and there's a soft shout and she looks up and Blaise is being pushed up against the wall, two feet in the air, held there by Daniel who's shouting.
"Take us there. Take us there now!"
...
It's almost like they knew someone would come, because when Monique stops her car in front of the hospital-white building, there's a small militia milling around inside the fence that separates it from the street. The fading sunlight casts a bloody glow over everything and reflects oddly off the eyes of the masses inside the fence, and Daniel assumes these are the zombies; their eyes must be like Raven's one unnatural one.
Monique parks and Daniel jumps out of the car before she's event turned it off. He glances around and notices a lead pipe near the alley. He picks it up in case they need to break a window to get in, and then leads Monique and Blaise, who's been dragged along for human-GPS purposes, up to the gate. The clockwork zombies all turn to face them as one synchronized entity, eerie glass-domed eyes glinting red-orange in the sunset.
"Hey, you lot!" Daniel shouts, humorless and dry, "Get outta the way!"
The zombies step forward. Monique steps back, Blaise presses himself up against the chain-link fence, holding his laptop case up in front of himself.
Daniel steps forward, tightens his grip on the pipe, and meets the army in the middle.
There are screams. Daniel knows some of them are his, because he always yells when he fights, yells curses and hate-laced death threats at his opponents, and sometimes they're in good humor but tonight they're not. He knows Monique's screaming, and he can make out what she's saying, saying something along the lines of "Daniel, stop, Daniel! Please, Daniel! Daniel, STOP!" and he doesn't listen. Doesn't care that she's never actually witnessed one of his fights. Doesn't care if he's scaring her. She knows who he is. She's known for years that he's not a nice person. A lead pipe to the skull of a body that's already dead shouldn't be what reminds her of the fact. Splattered gore from superfluous velocity and impact shouldn't be what reminds her of that.
And then, as rapidly and fluidly as the sound started, it's dead silent.
Daniel surveys the situation. Monique is crying, crying, Monique never cries if she can help it. She hasn't cried since grade school, and Daniel would know. Blaise is standing shocked off to the side; he's in the dark, he doesn't understand the situation, but he came with Daniel anyway, now didn't he? He had to; he brought them here. Didn't even know what he was getting himself into.
Before Daniel stands the bleak white building, lights blazing in the spark of the evening (catalyst indeed, thinks Daniel with a grimace. Changed his life? Ha, if Raven's the catalyst, then he threw Daniel's life in the blender and set it on high), and somewhere in that building is Raven, the reason Daniel's standing at the epicenter of the array of corpses and blood and gears, still clutching the lead pipe, his knuckles going white under his tight grip.
He's not gonna let them take him back. He's not gonna let Raven be subjected to inhuman experiments like that any more. Two days, nineteen hours and (Daniel glances at his watch)… twenty-seven minutes ago, this isn't how he assumed he'd be spending his Friday.
"Let's get this done with," Daniel growls, low and deep and angry. He grabs Monique by the arm, because she's still crying and won't come unless he drags her, and he beckons for Blaise to follow, and with a snarl and a glare he kicks in the front door.
It doesn't budge, and out of the corner of his eye he notices the code box. A key card or a pass code needs to be swiped or submitted. Daniel turns to Blaise and commands, "Hack it."
"What?" Blaise blinks startledly. Daniel isn't sure if he's startled by the question, or by the fact that Daniel doesn't seem to care that he's just committed several murders in front of his new acquaintance and his best friend.
"I said hack it, computer boy. I saw all that code of yours; I know you're smart. And this is your parent's building, so fucking hack into it."
Blaise shivers under Daniel's piercing stare and pulls out his laptop and a cord. He pries the code box open with a house key and connects a cord from some jack inside of it to his laptop, and proceeds to run a program through it. Daniel watches a series of numbers go by on the computer and figures Blaise is testing all of the possible permutations of numbers at a high speed.
There's an electronic beep, and the light on the box flashes green. The door clicks unlocked and Blaise shuts his computer screen and opens the door for them, leading them unsurely inside.
The receptionist is startled by the three of them, takes conspicuous notice of the lead pipe and the blood on Daniel's clothes (Daniel's too angry right now to worry about the fact that Blaise had said earlier that the zombies didn't bleed, too angry to realize that the blood splattered on him means he may or may not have killed a living person. He at least has injured them irreparably). The receptionist reaches immediately for the telephone, which Daniel knocks aside easily with the lead pipe, as if it's a pool cue and the phone is the shiny white ball.
"Get out," he suggests, but it's hardly a real suggestion. She stands up from her swivel chair and edges around the desk before running out through a back door. Daniel vaults over the desk and pulls out her chair. "Blaise," he says, "Hack us into the system. Get up a map. Find out where they're keeping Raven."
As if resigned to his fate as Daniel's tech support for the mission, Blaise circles around to the other side of the desk and sits down uncomfortably in the chair before setting to work. Monique leans up against a wall, across the room from Daniel. She doesn't look at him. Daniel wonders if he's broken her heart somehow.
While Blaise hacks into the system, Daniel makes his way slowly across the room to her. She looks pointedly away from him, rubbing her eyes to wipe away tears that will just be replaced in seconds anyway.
"I'm sorry if I scared you or something, Monique," he whispers, using her full name to emphasize the gravity of the moment. "Or if I did something wrong."
"Did something wrong!" she gasps exasperatedly. "Daniel, do you have any idea what you just did?" she looks up at him, the six-inch height difference between them becoming apparent for the first time. "Or were you too lost in your anger and adrenaline?"
"Lost," Daniel admits.
"There were only about fifteen zombies," she says slowly. "And you took them out fast. One whack to the head each and they went down like dominoes, one after another. And I don't care about them; they're already dead. What I care about is the ten security guards that came out as soon as the fight started and went at you with nightsticks." She bit her lip and continued. "About half that blood's yours," she whispered. "And the other half is theirs. Daniel, I'm pretty sure you killed some of them."
He's silent for a moment and takes this in. Finally he says, "Do you want honesty and cruelty or lies and sympathy?"
"You make everyone else be honest. Do it yourself," she spits.
"I don't care if I killed them," he admits. Monique gasps and tries to hide it. "If they're working here, they're involved. They have to know what they've been doing. Their morals are looser than mine, and they're involved in what happened to Raven. They deserved what they got."
"You really are a bastard," she mutters under her breath. "But I guess I must be too, because if you put it that way… god, it's morbid and god, it's disgusting of me, because if you put it that way I feel more like sympathizing with you, and you're a fucking murderer now, Daniel!"
"Not if I don't get caught," he shrugs. "We can burn the bodies on the way out. I intend to blow this place up."
"What?"
"I'll evacuate everyone first, I mean," he continues. "I'll pull the fire alarm and everyone'll get out, and then you and me and Blaise and Raven can make a run for it, and I'll steal some chemicals –it's a science lab, they've gotta have chemicals – and I paid good attention in Chem, I know what I can mix to make something that'll blow up. Like a Molotov cocktail but better."
And with that, with the stunned look on Monique's face the only consolation he has, Daniel whips out his cell phone and dials the number of one of the other theatre kids.
"Hey, Rex," he says, not waiting for an answer. "If my parents call looking for me, tell them I crashed at your place 'cos we were running lines."
"Sure, man," Rex agrees. "Why?"
"I got into a fight and need to lie low," Daniel lies easily. All lies come easily to Daniel. He wraps up the conversation and dials another number. "Hey, Aya," he says.
"Daniel?" Aya replies. "Need something?"
"If anyone asks where I was this weekend, tell 'em I was at Rex's dad's place. Forgot to tell people where I'd be if they needed to reach me, and my cell phone's about to die."
"Sure thing," Aya agrees, and Daniel wraps that one up too. He calls five more people from three different social groups, tells them all he's at Rex's house, and then turns off his phone and yanks out the battery.
"Now there's a false lead. Anyone comes trying to figure out where I was Friday night, there's a trail a mile wide with my name blazing on it."
"You're a manipulative freak," Monique spits venomously at him.
"Got in!" Blaise calls, and the pair of them jogs over to the desk. Blaise points to a spot on the map that he's managed to bring up on the screen. "That room there is where the operations go on," he explains. "And right across the hall from it is where test subjects are kept. Raven ought to be up there. It's on the third floor."
"Great!" Daniel beams, but the smile doesn't reach his eyes. "Hey," he says softly, "go home, okay? Go home. You're gonna want to be there when your parents come running back, because otherwise they might think you helped get us in here. So get out. You'll get in trouble otherwise."
Blaise's eyes widen; he hasn't even though of that. But he's thankful to Daniel for realizing it, and so he shakes his hand (his palms are sweating, Daniel notes; he's terrified) and runs out the door, making Daniel promise to call when it's over with.
Daniel memorizes the location of the rooms, and leads Monique up two flights of stairs. He kicks open the first door to one of the test subject holding rooms. There's a young girl in a hospital gown sitting on the edge of an uncomfortable-looking bed. Both her eyes are normal, but red from crying.
"Get out," Daniel commands. "Run for your life. Get out of here. Go on!" he barks, gesturing at the door. Her eyes widen and she obliges, stumbling down the hallway. "Stairs are that way," he calls over her shoulder, pointing the other way.
He does this at every room, freeing them all. None of them have been experimented on just yet.
The room at the end of the hall is full of corpses lying on tables, and Daniel slams the door so hard it rattles in its frame.
The operation room is the only one he hasn't checked yet, because he was hoping to whatever god or gods there might be that Raven isn't in there. Yet he hasn't found the boy yet, and that's the only place left to look, and so he stops outside the door and pulls the fire alarm.
Everything in the building unlocks. The cieiling sprinklers fire up, and the door bursts open. Daniel pulls Monique behind it as a horde of lab coats explodes from the room and scrambles for the stairs, obviously used to emergency protocol like this.
Raven doesn't exit, and Daniel immediately yanks the door all the way open and storms into the room.
Strapped to the operation table in the center of the room is Raven, fully conscious and unclothed from the top down. Metal plating adorns his chest, and one panel is popped open, revealing clicking gears where his heart should be, bronze grafted onto muscle and flesh. There are tears in his eyes. Daniel suppresses his gag reflex and closes the panel, locating a screwdriver and fastening it back down. He snaps the restraints around Raven's arms and legs and lifts the smaller boy easily into his arms, carrying him like a child and pressing their bodies close, feeling Raven's cold skin against his own, which is burning from the energy he's been exerting through all the shouting and the dying adrenaline from the fight.
He sits Raven down on a counter and yanks open cabinets, pulling out whatever the hell he can and reading the labels. He places a handful of bottles on the edge of the counter and then grabs a beaker. He uncaps all the bottles and indiscriminately pours them all into the beaker together. The mix of chemicals starts to bubble dangerously and Daniel knocks it over on purpose. Whatever he's mixed is clearly very acidic, because it sets fire to the plastic counter immediately.
Daniel lifts Raven back into his arms in case the boy 's too weak to run on his own, and then he beckons for Monique to follow him. They sprint down the stairs, Daniel taking them three at a time for the sake of speed and Monique jumping down them, using the railing for leverage. Daniel has long since ditched the lead pipe because he doesn't need it any more.
They burst out of the building and scramble across the street to Monique's station wagon. Monique jams the key in the ignition and manages zero to forty in about three seconds. She's never made the car accelerate that fast before. She's never had a reason. Daniel buckles himself into the passenger seat, still cradling Raven protectively in his arms.
Two blocks away, once Monique is driving normally and Raven's curled up in the back seat with his own seatbelt on, Daniel hears the pained wail of fire trucks and ambulances.
The electric wailing is soon drowned out by a fiery WHOOOSH; Daniel rolls down the window and stares back at the building, gone up in a burning explosion. By the time the fire department gets there, all the corpses will be charred beyond recognition. The lead pipe will have the bloodstains burnt off it. The only thing suspicious about the whole ordeal will be the gears inside the charcoal bodies of the zombies Daniel's left in their front yard. With any luck, it'll be enough to incriminate Blaise's parents and their sick fuck of a company. Blaise might even take Monique's advice and use the moving and the grave robbing in his court testimony against them, if he's made to argue against them.
Monique pulls up in front of her apartment and insists that Daniel stay the night, because he's already promised he can't go home. She makes him call Rex and tell him where he really is, and then makes him take a shower to wash the blood off his skin. She puts his clothes through the wash and gives him something her brother left behind to wear.
When he gets out of the shower, his hair still dripping and his mind still reeling as the events of the evening sink in, he finds Monique leaning up against the refrigerator with a smile on her face, and Raven sitting on the counter with a cup of tea.
"Momo," he says, as gently as he can, "Can we keep him?"
"He's not a pet, Daniel," she chastises, flicking him on the forehead.
"Can he stay?" Daniel asks.
"Can I stay?" Raven echoes, latching onto Daniel's arm. Daniel leans into him and wraps his arms around Raven's waist protectively.
"Besides," Daniel adds, "he's got nowhere else to go."
"And I like it here," Raven mumbles melancholically. "Daniel and Momo are nice. It's warm here. Can I stay?"
"Please," the boys chorus, drawing the word out to at least three syllables. Monique sighs and ruffles Daniel's damp hair, smiling exhaustedly and resigned to whatever may be.
"Fine," she says. "But Daniel's going to be paying his living expenses."
"What? Seriously, Momo?"
Monique just laughs and hands Daniel a cup of tea of his own. It's vaguely cherry flavored, and he wonders where the hell she got it.
He crashes on her brother's bed last night. He's been gone long enough that the room doesn't smell like anything more than a room. He has a feeling he'll be staying there more often than not, and so he takes the liberty of removing the Pro Wrestling posters from the walls and stuffs them in the closet along with the sports magazines stacked on the shelf.
But it isn't his room; the only other empty one in the house is still in occasional use by Monique's father, and so while Daniel's here, he shares Raven's room, curled up easily on the twin bed with the smaller boy tangled in his arms.
Monique smiles at them as she closes the door, gives Daniel a knowing wink, and lets them drift away.
...
Blaise's parents lose custody when they're sent to prison for "unethical scientific advancements" and "multiple incidences of desecrating graves", and so Blaise is sent to live with his mother's rather appalled sister and her family in Canada. His goodbye isn't tearful, because he only lived there for a week or so after all. Daniel sees him off at the airport.
"You really like that cherry soda, don't you?" he notes as he walks Blaise to his gate. Blaise glances down at the reddish bottle in his hand, and then back up at Daniel.
"Suppose so," he admits. "It's not necessarily that I like the soda, per se. I like where it makes me think."
"Oh?"
"It's like the life of someone you love," Blaise explains, stopping dead in the middle of the terminal. Daniel pauses to watch him. "You get it and it's unopened and you don't know what it's like inside, and then when it's first opened up, it's bubbly and loud and has texture to it. And you drink it in, and find out what it's like, and you get to like it, and after a while it quiets down and it's less bubbly. Less energetic. And it calms down, but you still like the flavor. And after a while, it's all gone, but you still remember it," he finishes. "Like a person you really love."
"Tell me how," Daniel insists, even though he could probably figure it out on his own.
"You meet them," he explains, "and you talk a lot and learn a lot and hear and say a lot. And you take that all in and you like what you hear. And then once you've gotten to know each other, it's not awkward to sit and be quiet together and just not talk, and you still like them a lot. And everyone dies eventually, right… it's sad, but it's true… but you still remember them when they're gone."
The voice over the terminal loudspeaker announces that Blaise's flight is boarding, so he gives Daniel a quick goodbye and starts off down the hall. He stops about six feet away, spins around, and says, "Here!"
He tosses Daniel the unopened bottle of cherry soda.
"You should smile more," he suggests as he turns to go.
"I smile plenty," Daniel insists.
"I meant real smiles," Blaise calls over his shoulder, and with his laptop case slung easily over his shoulder he skips down the hallway of the terminal and disappears into the crowd.
Daniel stands there, alone, with the bottle of cherry soda, and he thinks.
He thinks Blaise is a bit pretentious, honestly, but that's nothing he can change.
He thinks he's probably been a real asshole to a lot of people who just haven't noticed the lying smile on his face when he says sweet things to them. He wonders if Blaise could read the undercurrents of what he was really thinking beneath his cordial act, or if it was mostly the screaming interrogation as to Raven's location that clued him in to who Daniel really was.
This makes him think of Raven, and with a quirky half-smile (but a real one nonetheless), he turns and winds his way back out of the airport.
As he waits on the curb for Monique to drive by and pick him up, he takes a sip of the cherry soda. It bubbles, and he can feel and hear it fizzing on his tongue. It's sweet, almost too sweet, but Daniel likes sweet things and so he's okay with it. He likes the taste of it.
He downs the whole bottle.
My god. What a plotbunny.
Shortest story I've ever written, right there. I kid you not. Shortest. Eighteen freakin' pages.
I'm so in love with it though. I loved the characters to death while I was working on it.
Feedback much appreciated.
-Forte