Ride Home

There are days when you don’t want to wake up. I’d had them before, but this one…

            …this one felt special. Particularly horrific.

            I resisted opening my eyes for what felt like a long time, but I could take stock of the situation pretty well. Based on the weight in my bed, Lee was still there. I knew she snored, so I could tell that she was now awake. And she wasn’t moving, which probably meant she was thinking.

            None of this boded well.

            Ugh.

            My head hurt.

            I opened my eyes and looked to my left, and of course Lee was lying on her side, concealed by my blanket to the neck, and looking back at me with an expression I can’t even begin to try to decipher.

            “So that just happened,” she said mildly, as though picking up a conversation.

            “Yup.”

            “Yeah.” We pointedly avoided looking at each other. Dimly, I noted I was wearing my left sock. Something to keep in mind? Or a terrible attempt at self-distraction?

            “It was-“

            “Yeah, I, um. Yeah.”

            She grinned at me. “It was really nice, Tyler. Relax.”

            Something about the way she said it put me at ease. “I can’t help but feel kind of weird.”

            “You?” She chuckled. “I haven’t gotten laid in… I don’t even remember. Since college, maybe. I needed that.”

            “That seems impossible,” I said, incredulous, and she grinned again.

            “You’ve seen how much spare time I have. And you’d be surprised how many guys are freaked out by…” she waved her brand. “No, that was… nice.”

            I didn’t really know what to say, so I smiled. “Well, I had a great night, too.”

            I leaned over and kissed her lightly, then leaned back. She had an odd smile on her face.

            “What is it?”

            She shrugged, covers bouncing. “Hard to say. I don’t… look, don’t be offended, because I really enjoyed myself last night, but… we’re not really like that, are we?”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Like, snuggly. Couply.”

            “Gotcha. Yeah, I sort of agree.”

            She rolled onto her back, stretching. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re… I can see it happening. Soon, even.” She gave me a small smile. “Just not quite yet.”

            “Not sure about me?” I joked, because I knew exactly what she meant.

            “You and I both have a lot of s**t to straighten out with ourselves. You know?”

            I thought about it. The plain truth was, I didn’t know what my life was going to look like a week from now. Or if I’d be alive, at this rate. She had a point.

            And then there was the matter of her threatening to leave Conclave. “Should this not have happened, you think?”

            She shook her head. “Honestly, I think it helped. I feel a little more human, if that makes any sense. Centered.”

            “Any other feelings?”

            “Sticky,” she laughed, and we almost kissed again. We wound up with our faces close together, simply enjoying the closeness and company. I felt more relaxed than I had in months. Years? I sighed and she blinked.

            “I guess I don’t know what this is. But it’s cool.”

            “I think so, too.”

            “Think it’d be cool again some time?” I wheedled, only half kidding. She bit her lip, then rolled her eyes, apparently at herself.

            “If you promised not to let it go to your head,” she said, a laugh in her voice, “It could be pretty cool right about now.”

            “Yeah?”

            “I’m thinking so.”

            “Cool.”

            “Very cool,” she murmured, and we both grinned as we closed the little distance of my bed.

            I wondered what day it was. Somewhere along the line, I’d forgotten.

            *

            Much later on, Lee asked if she could use my shower, and I sat around relaxing for once. It was one of the first really cold days of the year, to the point where I put on my shoes to walk around rather than place bare feet on the cold floor, and as I considered what to do with next week’s outrageous paycheck, I realized it was probably time to get a new place.

            I’d grown up not far from here, but I couldn’t convince myself that there was any nostalgia. My family life was a miserable story in itself, and I hadn’t enjoyed school other than cutting class and getting high. Then, when you considered that Beck lived a few blocks away, that I could now pretty reliably teleport to wherever I wanted, and that I was way out of the economic class of my current surroundings, there was really no reason to stick around at all.

            “Christ, it’s cold in this apartment,” Lee said, coming out of my room in a pair of my sweatpants and a long sleeved shirt.

            “I was just thinking about that.”

            She laughed. “I was going to walk of shame it, but I think I’d freeze to death if I put those shorts back on. Mind giving me a ride?”

            “Of course, where?”

            “My place,” she said, pointing directly up. “Forgot my Text, and I left my gear in my room too. No way home.”

            I blinked. “What would you have done if you were alone?”

            “Hadn’t really thought about it,” she shrugged, dropping into my recliner while I tidied up the kitchen. “I was in sort of a bad way last night, you may have noticed.”

            “Yeah.”

            “I guess I was thinking that it’d be okay if I never went back. I mean, that’s where I live, all my clothes and stuff are at the Nexus, so of course it was a silly thought.” She sort of stared at nothing. “Still. I’m starting to think I might need some time away from it all. Conclave, and fighting, and Reading.”

            I glanced at her brand, tracing silver lines disappearing into her sleeve. Would time erase what had happened to her? The things she’d had to do, the slow growth of steel into her skin?

            My own hand suddenly itched, and I hoped against hope that it was just my imagination.

            “But on the other hand,” she reasoned, “The only reason Conclave is getting to me this way is that I’m intentionally seeking out bullshit. It’s not like we’re the Justice League, you know? I’m not being ordered to go after criminals. Mostly.” Her face fell at the memory of yesterday.

            I shrugged. “So maybe if you just took it easy, did the normal Conclave thing for awhile, things would be better? Went to a couple parties, lazed around on the beach?”

            “Couldn’t hurt,” she agreed, grinning. “Maybe I do need a vacation.”

            “I’ve always wanted to go to Disney World,” I suggested, wiping up the countertop. Finally, no trace of Beck’s evil breakfast remained. “Especially with a little spending money.”

            Lee laughed. “You’re such a little kid. I feel like a pedophile.”

            “Hey, I like what I like.”

            ”It’s actually not a bad idea. But I was thinking more along the lines of a beach town. Relaxation. No bullshit, and none of these prissy kids bothering me.” She sighed. “I can feel myself getting antsy just thinking about it, you know? Like I’ll be trying to sip a margarita on a pier somewhere and all I’ll be able to think about is finding bad guys and righting wrongs.”

            “With great power…” I quoted, and she nodded.

            “I feel like I can do something, so any minute I waste doing anything else is like… some kind of betrayal, or something. Like I owe it to the world to be on the clock.”

            I dried my hands and sat on a bar stool, shaking my head. “It’s okay to have some time to yourself. Even if you’re a superhero. I mean, Superman has to get drunk and f**k once in awhile, right? Of course they don’t put it in the comics, but…”

            “Mmm. No point saving Lois over and over if he’s not getting any play, right?” she rolled her eyes. “This isn’t some weird story about heroes, this is real life.”

            We both paused, suddenly uncomfortable without knowing why. The moment passed briefly.

            I shivered, then said “Well, you should look into doing something for yourself. You deserve it.”

            “I wouldn’t mind some company, of course,” she said, chuckling. “Feel like getting away from it all?”

            “Do I ever. F**k.”

            “What?”

            “I really need to talk to Buck,” I said, feeling guilty. “I think I skipped work completely a couple times. I haven’t even thought about it.” She laughed out loud, and I frowned. “What day is it?”

            “Saturday morning,” Lee replied. “Don’t think you have work today. As if it matters.”

            “All right, I’ll talk to him on Monday.” 

            “Sounds good.”

            “Ready to go?” I asked, standing and looking around for my sweater, where my Text was concealed. “Also, uh, how do I get us to the Nexus?”

            “Oh, it’s easy,” she said, as though I should know already. “The warp Glyph defaults to bringing you home, but if you want to go somewhere else, you just Read it with that destination in mind. The Glyph does all the work.”

            “Seriously?”

            “That one’s pretty versatile, yeah.”

            I found my Text and opened it to the correct page, while Lee stood and came close to me. “Is this too weird?” she asked, putting her arms around me, and I grinned.

            “Not weird at all. Yayin aayatana,” I pronounced, as always a little surprised that I hadn’t remembered such a simple phrase, and pictured Lee’s blue room in my mind.

            *

            The shifting insanity of in-between seemed a little more manageable, with someone to hold on to. Some sense of my human form was maintained by touching her, and we came to rest with perfect smoothness, standing and unwavering in the center of her room.

            “Wow,” she breathed, looking around. “That was really… easy.”

            “I noticed. Guess traveling together is the way to go.”

            She let go of me with what seemed like reluctance, and I thought about our odd relationship. For the time being, it was comfortable, and that was enough. Still, when you’ve come out and admitted that you have feelings for a person, to whatever degree, it’s hard to go back to acting like everything’s the same.

            It seemed only natural to maybe take her hand while we walked, or lean in to kiss her when she smiled at me. Little touches that only meant ‘I like you and I want you to know it’, but carried such amazing significance, depending on who you asked. For the sake of comfort, however, we mostly refrained.

            “So…” I began, not sure what I was doing now. Lee laughed.

            “So what’s on the agenda for today?”

            “Pretty much.” I admitted. Having some structure in my life was surprisingly addicting. “Don’t really know what to do with myself all day.”

            “Welcome to my life,” she said jokingly, approaching her wardrobe. “Did you spill my bullets?”

            “Oh. Yeah, sorry about that.”

            “It’s all right,” she laughed, “but it also reminds me; you need your own toys to play with. We should do some shopping.”

            My eyes flickered over her assortment of trinkets and supernatural gadgets. “That sounds good to me.”

            *

            My experience of the Nexus Mall up to this point had been of restaurants and people in funny costumes. Now that I was paying closer attention, however, I realized that the five floors of businesses and shops were an absolute smorgasbord of the weird, magical, and amazingly useful.

            Lee and I stood in front of a directory, where I stared for what must have been five minutes, trying to figure out what to do first. There were shops that sold what they called potions, various substances with effects from the mundane to the absolutely ridiculous. There were dealers in trinkets, like Lee’s necklace that’d make people forget you.

            And most interesting to me where the Thaumaturgists, whose specialty was a careful blending of the mystical and the technological, which was where Lee had procured her shield bracer, an item that’d fascinated me from the moment I saw it.

            “Let’s check out one of those,” I said, pointing to that section of the map. Lee looked around and nodded.

            “Good idea. I’ve been thinking about trying a few new things, myself.” She led us to a shop I’d noticed before, an oddly tucked-away little place with a sign that read “Fence’s Thaumaturgery”.

            The door chimed when we entered the long shop, a spotlessly clean workshop that resembled nothing so much as the woodworking room in my old high school. Rather than wooden work tables, however, there were stainless steel surfaces that brought to mind a modern kitchen, and the air smelled strongly of cordite.

            Twisted bits of metal and plastic, glittering shards of crystal, and substances I couldn’t identify lined the shelves above the tables, mixed in with tools I recognized and tools whose purpose I could only guess at.

            “This is really cool,” I said to nobody in particular, and I was surprised when something answered.

            “Glad you like it,” a voice said from around my knees, and I leaped back from what appeared to be a stuffed animal with reflective black eyes and pit-bull fangs.

            “Whoa!” I fumbled for my Text, struggled with the snap on the cover, and gave up when I realized both Lee and the two-foot creature were laughing at me. “Okay, what is this?”

            “This is a demon, for lack of a better term,” Lee said, still chuckling. “Fence keeps a few around as assistants.” The thing on the floor nodded its unnaturally large head.

            “A demon? Like, from hell?”

            Lee shook her head. “It’s just the best word for what they are. They’re a sort of constructed magic, not all that different conceptually from the Glyphs, actually. Only instead of words on a page, they manifest as… this.” She lifted the thing onto a work bench, tickling it under the arms and giggling as it squirmed and squealed.

            “They’re really kind of cute.”

            “If you say so,” I said, wary of approaching the creature. “So… how intelligent are you?” I asked it. “Like, if you’re just constructed magic, what can you do?”

            “Simple tasks, mostly. Fetching things, holding things in place, cleaning, customer service. Unskilled labor.” The being on the table seemed satisfied with its lot in life. If it could be called life. “Plus, we can see,” it said, which seemed like an odd qualification to me.

            A door in the back of the shop opened and a very tall man walked in, and my first thought was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Closer to six feet than seven, and wearing sunglasses that concealed his eyes completely, his skin was so jet black it almost looked blue, only enhanced by the khakis and pale green Hawaiian-style shirt he was wearing.

            “Heya Fence,” Lee said cheerfully, and the tall man smiled without looking at her.

            “That must be Leah Weon,” he grinned, and I realized he must have been blind. The demon’s last comment suddenly made sense. “And who’s this boy, staring at me so?”

            “He’s my friend, Tyler,” Lee explained, as I hastened to look away from the monolithic man. The demon looked at me and grinned.

            “Friend, huh?” Fence chuckled, a deep and pleasant sound. “You ought to know better than to lie to me, lady Weon, but I’ll let it go and save you the need to blush.”

            “Um. Right,” Lee stammered, actually appearing flustered for once, and I could see why. Her tough act and aggressive body language had no effect on this man. He listened and heard what was there. “Anyway, Tyler’s a new Reader and we want to outfit him. What’ve you got for us?”

            “How’s the bracer working out for you?” Fence asked, striding confidently around a table and running his hand along a shelf, where I now saw Braille dots in the place of labels every few inches. He seemed to be searching for something.

            “Great,” she said enthusiastically. “I wish there was a way to dial it down so I wouldn’t have to be so careful with it all the time, though.”

            “I’m actually working on that, lately. Might be able to key the response into the user’s willpower, so it’d only block what you want to block and only throw what you want to throw. Running into some problems, though. It keeps causing all kinds of mayhem.”

            “What sort of mayhem?” I asked, fascinated.

            “Well, the new model pays attention to your will. So it only lights up when you want to do something with it. The problem is, it doesn’t differentiate between what you consider doing and what you actually intend to do.”

            He took a complex-looking version of the shield bracer from the shelf and snapped it onto his left arm. “So if it even occurs to me to, say, unleash a kinetic burst at the nearest demon-“

            CRACK!

            The multiple gems set into the plate flared with golden light and the creature on the table was obliterated, scattered into wriggling motes of light like a cloud of red fireflies. As I watched, however, the dots began gathering, and before long the demon had nearly reassembled itself.

            I grinned at Fence, who had already removed the bracer and carefully replaced it. “As you can see, it’d need a much better sense of commitment to be safe to use. Getting there, though.”

            Lee nodded, and Fence pointed at me. “So,” he said, “What does our new friend with the very perfect lips need from Fence today?”

            Lee blushed furiously, and I made up my mind to learn how to listen like Fence. “I was thinking basic defensive stuff, something that doesn’t need a lot of precise control to use. No offense, Trick, but you’re still sort of green.”

            “None taken, that sounds great.”

            The statuesque man smirked at our exchange, and I wondered what he was getting out of it. He ran a hand along a shelf, then crossed the room and checked that one. “Ah, here we go. I think you’ll like this.”

            He brought me an item that looked like one of those stress balls, except it appeared to be made of hundreds of tiny metal spheres, held together by some magnetism or other force. It was a little larger than a ping-pong ball.

            “Go ahead and squeeze that,” he said, gently pulling Lee away from my side. I looked at them, shrugged, and squished the ball in my fist.

            There was a sound like a parachute opening, a sort of whump, and a perfect sphere of… something, rushed out of the ball and formed a twisting, semitransparent globe around me. I felt like a hamster.

            Fence’s basso voice was muffled, but I distinctly heard him anyway. “That’ll stop most anything, although it can’t hold up forever. I’ve keyed it specifically for bullets, so you can block those most all day. Big spells or anything with a whole lot of mass will wear it out much faster.”

            “How do I turn it off?”

            “Hm?”

            “How do I turn it off,” I yelled, realizing I must be muffled too.

            “Let the ball relax.”

            I opened my hand, and as the metal spheres resumed their previous shape, the force field was sucked back into it. “That’s really neat,” I said honestly. “Would have been awesome to have yesterday.”

            “Got into a spot of trouble, hm?”

            “Got into a few interesting spots yesterday,” I chuckled, and Lee shot me a dirty look.

            “You’ve got a mouth on you, you know.” The big man laughed. “Takes all kinds. Well, feel free to look around, and let me know if you have any questions. Maybe the next time you get in a spot, you’ll know what you’re doing, hmm?”

*

Reviews

[Ness]

Haha I like tricks remark about getting into a few interesting spots, reminds me of a joke you would make. And I loled at " becks evil breakfast " haha. But this was angood chapter, I like how you did the morning after. You got the awkwardness in but it also wasn't too awkward and I like that she didn't just run off while he was sleeping. I also like that they're not just, bam relationship. It was very realistic, well done.