Lamb laughed at him. Lamb laughed at him, and he was angry, because she laughed, but he chuckled and grinned back hesitantly. Hesitant because of his anger, suspicion, but smiling because Lamb smiled.
“...leased, but... y’know, I know that's ridiculous to say in this situation.” Seth’s bag thumped onto the chair, her lips twisted into a self-conscious grimace. “It’s like complaining about a heavy bag in front of a hobo.”
“You can’t help it,” Ian said, putting elbows on her shoulders, giving her a no-touching hug about the head to keep his cinnamon-roll sticky fingers away. In such incapacity, he turned the gesture into a face-smothering embrace, full of annoying fondness. “It’s heavy.”
She touched her hair. Lamb touched her hair. It was curly and black and not the soft waves of Ellen Stratton and he wanted to touch it so badly that it scared him. He had to amend his fantasy of reaching out to touch it into something gentler. He’d never given touching Ellen Stratton’s hair a single thought.
Seth frowned, as unthinking as her previous gesture had been overthought. It was a leaderish frown, and Ian reacted like a follower. He held at bay his fondness until she changed again, the vagaries of leadership as unpredictable as the direction of the wind.
Firmament hated him, almost as much as he hated Bosh.
Bosh was gone. Fir looked around the den as if needing to double check, but he was gone. His parents had purchased him a ticket, and as usual, he left at a different time than everyone else, first class. They had ordered him a car. He’d looked at it as if for the first time realizing how out of place it was for them to order him a car, rather than, Fir supposed, asking for a ride, or calling a taxi, or taking a shuttle, or, God forbid, navigating public transit.
He steeled himself, though, and got in, same grimness as the rest of them. Julie had been so disgusted she was visiting home she’d stayed silent for three days. Decon had confessed she’d almost told him to look after something for her, then rage at his incompetence to do so let her even greater rage at being asked to leave her labs for a few days cut her off before she got more than two words in. Firmament was impressed Decon had gotten two words.
Decon was sitting patiently on the couch opposite Firmament, occasionally smiling to himself and very slowly double checking his bags. He was taking a bus to the airport, but didn’t need to leave for another couple of hours.
Amos’ hands moved slowly. They were elegant, like a piano player’s hands would be; or, at least, that what Fir thought, having never met any piano players. He moved with the same delicacy when handling chemicals as when loading bullets as when picking up a cup, to drink. He smiled rarely. Fir focused on the smile, as a mutant memory of Amos’ hands doing all those things at once played under it.
“...at is it really, she’s got going up there? Like, beakers of stuff, fizzling?”
“You do actually have to go downstairs, love,” Ian said. “Your mother’s been waiting half an hour.” He took a bite of cinnamon roll, too obtuse to realize he shouldn’t because now is when he should kiss her, so she had to leave. Goodbye kisses were demanding.
She was Laura, only that wasn’t really her name, but the anglicized version she decided he could use. She was smiling and walking away while her scarf hit him in the face with enough irritating wooliness to erase her kiss from his cheek. Who does that who is an adult? he’d wanted to shout. Kiss me on the damn mouth, goddamnit. He hadn’t said anything, though, because it hurt, and when it hurt, he didn’t make noise. He didn’t even know how. The animal grunt actual physical pain brought out wouldn’t happen. She, he would read, got strung up in Prague. He wanted to vomit, in his memory, but knew that at the time, he’d only been angry at everything but her and upset that she was going and not allowed to say anything just as she wasn’t allowed to stay. The scarf was red.
The Red Reader punched him in the jaw. The Red Reader always did shit like that. The Red Reader was a cunt, and he punched her back, and his squad commander zapped him with a low-dosed cattle prod for hitting a girl while the Red Reader laughed. Then she punched the squad commander and got zapped herself.
He tried to feel the couch, open his eyes extra wide. He could smell the fire – they had a candle that smelled just like a real fireplace fire, only pathetic and sad and small, but what the hell else could they have? Decon noticed, and he looked at Decon, and Decon, while looking back, tried very hard to look as if everything was perfectly normal.
Maybe this was normal. Maybe this was. Maybe this was him, now. Maybe this was how he was. Maybe this was him, forever.
Seth poked him in the side of the head. He turned and looked up at her but his head felt very much like it was fighting him the whole way. What the hell else was his neck supposed to do but coordinate with what he thought it should be doing.
“Merry Christmas, Fir,” Seth said.
“There’s no Christmas in the army, Captain,” Fir replied.
Seth squinted a little. “Well, Merry Christmas, Mr. Scrooge, in keeping with the situation.”
Firmament wracked his brain. He kept seeing his teammate Graham’s chalkboard, filling with calculations and maps and diagrams and emptying, then filling again, sometimes several things written on the same spaces. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of sweater cuff and knew it was Graham’s though he didn’t know how. “Uh... Yippie-kai-yay, motherfucker?”
Seth jutted her chin and nodded. “Quality choice, nutball. See you in a few days everybody.”
She gave the room a wave, stopped to peck Ian on the cheek, and walked out as if storming into a courtroom to demand justice.
Sucking frosting off his fingers, Ian looked at Fir and Decon, then just at Fir, then left.
Firmament looked at Decon. The edges of his vision were blurry and he tried, again to focus. He was probably staring. Decon didn’t look as if anything unusual were going on and Fir got a little mad, but the delusions swallowed even that anger up, like the harder he fought them the worse it was. And it infuriated him, and he could tell he was infuriated, but it was all scarf-slaps and sweater cuffs in his brain like his own feelings didn’t even matter to himself. Decon looking at him, as if this were normal, wouldn’t even join the conversation of memories occupying ninety percent of his brainspace.
“You don’t know me,” he said. Oh, yes, he thought: there’s a clever trick to keep out of the looney bin. Respond to your own thoughts aloud. That’s good. Let’s keep doing that. And referring to ourself in the third person.
Decon’s eyes narrowed. “What is it?”
Firmament made his jaw clench, testing its readiness for words. All clear.
Lamb laughed and it fell apart.
Decon looked around. After a moment, he took a plastic bag out of his bag, and set a stick of deodorant on the table. He frowned at it. Standing, he cast about again, and found the candle. Pulling it off its table, he blew it out, spending extra time blowing on the wax to try to cool it as he sat down.
Firmament could observe all of this. The information hit his eyes. He could even speculate, to a certain extent, but not far. The rest of his mind was a shattering image of Lamb laughing, a thousand times, yanking down on his heart.
Gesturing at the deodorant, Decon said, “Move it,” between puffs at the candle.
Firmament was going to crush that thing. It would be destroyed. But he had nothing else, and Decon had put it down, so he felt for the strings.
Nothing felt like this. It was surprisingly taut, for such a little thing. He could caress the strands, like running a hand over thick, ridged wooden railing. Awareness of what it felt like sliced through his thoughts like a butter knife, a dull but effective rending. She laughed, and he yanked–
Well, carefully yanked? It was abrupt, the decision, but – without bragging, because what was the point of bragging about something nobody else had even the faintest knowledge of – even his abrupt decisions resulted in remarkably controlled movements. He knew how to do this.
It tumbled, because of course the strings were imbalanced, skidded on its flat face, rolled of the table edge and plunked against the couch cushion – but it survived. Sort of. The plastic was all cracked. The lid broke, not from hitting the couch or the floor, but because of the way Firmament had grabbed it. That was often the hard part; grabbing things right. No two were ever exactly the same. Not that he’d grabbed that much deodorant in his career.
His mouth worked. “Fucking Oslo,” he said. Yep. Helping. A round of applause for his damn mouth.
Decon cocked his head. “Norway?”
Firmament shook his. There was sound, now, he realized. All those other memories had been set to the tune of Lamb’s laughter, his anger, and now it shifted to a song he thought maybe Laura liked? It was hard to tell, but it was all red, like the scarf, and he felt... well, not longing, but its more direct cousin. Laura was a good lay. He couldn't tell if he missed that, or her, or if it mattered. He doubted it mattered to her.
Decon set down the candle. It was weightier, more dangerous. He touched it like an axe handle. Fuck this up, someone could get hurt.
He could catch it. They’d practiced that, a long time ago, at the base. Practical applications. Because there’s not always a street to drop on people. Also stop destroying infrastructure. It was stupid and risky to try it right now, but he could focus his whole mind on it to give it a go. It had been a long time, anyway, since he had tried. Maybe he would be better.
A voice whispered in his ear – not a memory voice, no, no he'd recognize the shit out of that. This was a new voice, a new voice that made him worry he was crazier than he thought he was, and he thought he was pretty crazy.
Lamb's voice. Whispering. Encouraging, but also withholding. Full of regret for wanting him to let go. Unable.
He wrapped his hand around the candle. Not actually the candle, of course, the strings, but they were it, for all intents and purposes except having anything to do with the shape or weight of it, itself. This was not a yanking gesture – it was more an inverse whip. He could only ever pull things, but it wasn't hauling in a rope – the line was unpredictable, unstable. He had to do it like a juggler, but one who tossed one object and caught another off the same throw. Changing something’s direction mid-air was difficult, but this was harder. His grasp was not permanent on an object in motion. Motion changed things. Motion fucked things up.
Motion made the damn candle slap into his palm like a fucking fastball.
Decon actually half-stood and cheered. He had never seen Firmament successfully catch something. He was sitting down, looking in wonder now.
Usually, Firmament was aware enough to know when he should dodge.
The whispers edged away like the sea. Nobody touched him here. This was his space, alone.
Now, several seconds later. Firmament set the damn candle down and said, “Ow.”
Then he sort of woke up – thank god he had set the candle down, because he should have dropped it – and he said, “Fucking Christ, ow.”
“What?” Decon asked.
Firmament hugged his hand to his chest, now fully occupied with the present moment, damnit, and said, “I think I broke my fucking hand.”
Decon cocked his head, then stood and walked to phone.
“No, fuck it, give me a second.” Fir didn't want to shake his hand. It probably was broken. He knew how that felt. He just wanted a minute to be upset about it.
“You broke your hand,” Wes said. Like a cat, Firmament had just gotten used to finding him unexpectedly present, though this cat was wearing a big red Christmas sweater and holding a mug of hot chocolate. Decon jumped a little.
“Does that interfere with your ability to feel?” Wes asked. As the house emptied, he got goddamn talkative. Friendly, almost. Then again, he and Firmament had been asylum-buddies for at least five years before this. Not that Fir remembered most of it.
“No,” Firmament said, then thought better of it. “Yes, but I don't know if it's more than would happen to anyone who broke their hand, you know?”
Wes nodded. He went back into the kitchen and came out with a fistful of marshmallows. Serious-faced, Decon waited to be allowed to call a medic.
“What is this, the orphan committee?” Ian had come back, the pull of pop-can cinnamon rolls too irresistible. “Who's chairman?”
“You have a father,” Fir grumbled.
“No papers,” Ian returned, sitting on the couch arm, hands newly blessed in frosting.
“So do I,” Wes said.
“Ew,” Fir said, because he was a helpful motherfucker.
“Voided by the courts,” Decon pointed out. “I have lots of a brothers.”
“In Christ,” Ian said, then looked chagrined at his own derogatory tone. Decon smiled at him.
“I'm chairman,” Fir said, “because you're all weird.” Six eyebrows went up. “And I'm oldest.”
“On a technicality,” Ian pointed out.
“Like you're qualified.” Fir snorted.
“Thumb war you for it,” Ian said.
Ugh, he hated Ian – even more because there wasn’t really anything to hate about him. Except the genocide. But who hadn’t been party to a little genocide now and then? (That wasn’t funny, but then, arguably Fir had done as many bad things as Ian anyway, without the g-word jokes. Hell, hadn’t his brain just taken him on a tour of dead?)
“No, you’ve got those freakish, long, Irish thumbs.”
“Now there’s one I haven’t heard,” Decon said, looking curiously at Ian.
“First of all, not Irish by heritage at all,” Ian said, holding up sticky fingers to tick off the points. “Second of all, who the fuck has ever said that prejudicial nonsense?”
“Never known an Irishman with short thumbs,” Fir said, leaning back to put an arm over his chair, wincing when he accidentally moved his hand too much.
“Oh–” Decon started, but Wes interrupted.
“I already called the nurse.”
And he had, in typical fashion, done so so quietly none of them had even noticed.
“Ah, fuck,” Firmament said, more about his hand than anything else. “Where are you even going, St. Francis?”
“Back to the home, to look after a different pack of orphans for a bit,” he said, smiling. He really did enjoy it – looking after people. Motherfucker.
“So you’ll be in town?” Wes asked.
“Yeah, and I can stop in if you need anything, or you could come out and we could meet up somewhere.”
The war criminal, traumatized ninja, and mentally unstable weapon of mass destruction all made more or less the same face (Wes’ was very understated).
“You’ll like it,” Decon said confidently, and now Fir was sure they were going to meet up to do something stupid and totally normal, like go to a coffee shop or visit the park.
But, his mind empty again, whatever hollows fed the echoes of memory through it temporarily turned dull and unresonant – at least he could be sure he would be here for it.