[Fiction] Keys to the Kingdom (Completed)

[Machina]

"Yeah..." Gerad said pensively, visibly a little shaken, trying to fill awkwardly open space. He was about to offer her another shot, anyway, and so granted her request with a cautious distance. Things had gone decidedly unwell, clearly, and it became clear that whatever had just happened between Neil and Nova, it had, to confirm, been coming for a long, long time.

Gerad felt a silent pang of guilt over having any part of the matter, but he wasn't about to beat himself up over it, either. If Nova wanted whisky, whisky she'd have. To deny the woman at this point would be pretty cruel; after all, Gerad mused, it's the least we can ask to get so drunk we can't even see after chance hands you a solid KO. With a gesture and a flitter of eye contact, Gerad summoned another bottle from under the counter, brought by his employee, whose nerves compelled her to be spending as much time out of eyeshot of the corner booth as possible.

[Doctor Nova Madigan]

"So," Nova said, changing the subject, "when and where do we get started?" She drank from her glass, but avoided chugging the shot out of courtesy. "Is there anything brewing yet?"

May as well get to it, she thought.

[Machina]

"Well, this is phase one", Gerad uttered acquiescantly, trying to tiptoe the tightrope between avoiding the elephant in the room and being a callous, insensitive jerk. He was, after all, a callous, insensitive jerk, but he wasn't made of fucking stone, either. "We find the people, bring them together. This is the human end of resource assesment; we figure out who's on our team, which equals what resources we've got at our disposal. There's still more to do, there, apparently."

Gerad opened the new arrival, a plain bottle of Jack Daniels, and sloshed out two more shots with all the manual dexterity of a drunk, taking care to leave the bottle in grasping range of Nova's trembling hand. "In the meantime, Alex and I will get together and either start rebuilding, fine-tuning, or modding the Delphi - that's a good name, Al - interface, after which comes probably a week, two weeks of programming various search protocols. Probably two weeks after of tinkering with the logic engine, checking the outputs, shit like that. After that? Well, we wait to see what floats on down the stream and snags itself in our net, and we start dealing with it."

[Wargear]

"Three weeks, total." Alexandra's tongue clicked lightly against her teeth as her eyes went slightly distant, mental gears humming through the possible modifications she might need to make. "I've already got it networked into two other systems, so getting it to operate cooperatively with yours will just be engineering. No new theory to cover. Between us, we should have it up and running in a little under seventeen days unless Anna or Rachel need me for something unexpected." Her gaze snapped into focus again, her lips curving in the hint of a smile. "Unless you've suddenly redeveloped the need to sleep, Gerad. That might add a day or two."

[Machina]

"I fucking wish", Gerad spat. "After oh-three-hundred, all you get on the box is fucking infomercials, and all that's left to me then is to force an alcohol-induced coma. We'll have it done in three weeks."

He refilled his glass and poured another out for Nova, and laid the bottle back down. "We're still on the subject of who, if anyone, we want to talk to. Anyone want to throw anything out?"

[Doctor Nova Madigan]

"What about your friend from England," Nova asked Meghan, "Regina Newcastle, I mean?"

Meghan interrupted Nova casually, the way one interrupts a friend.

"Already mentioned her," Meghan said. "Sorry."

"No problem," Nova replied, nodding. "I'm drawing a blank right now. There's nobody I really trust enough to include in a venture like this one." Not to mention nobody I dislike enough, either she thought sourly.

"None of my other close nova compadres are made of the right stuff for this," Meghan contributed, looking to Wargear and Machina, "They're either not made of stern enough stuff, or are so far out there that they'd be useless-- unless you think it'd be wise to get someone like Timeslip involved, which I'm sure you obviously don't."

[Wargear]

"That would be inadvisable, I think." Alexandra's cool, precise words belied the glittering steel in her eyes. “Since the primary objective of our little venture seems to be pursuing efficient and beneficial outcomes for the largest populations, I doubt any of our Terat colleagues would be a wise choice. I think for the moment we would do well to restrain our recruiting to the four of us, with perhaps the addition of Dr. Newcastle as a consulting member. Your thoughts, Gerad?”

[Machina]

"Genie as consultant?" Gerad exhaled dragon-style, through his nostrils. "I'll talk to her. Though it's a toss-up, I guess, for who between Meggers and I would be better suited to that. I don't know. What kind of terms you two on?", Gerad directed to Meghan.

"And yeah, no Terats", he snorted. "For the same reason there are no social workers on the board at PETA. Opposing interests. And of course, there's conflicting loyalties to bear with, eventually. As much as the Teragen pays lip service to being some loose assemblage of old college buddies, they've got more organization than even their cronies know, to say nothing of the manipulation, the favor-doing reach-around games... Nah, fuck it. Too many headaches. And the only Terat I know with the brains and the ambition who could bring anything to the table is a sadistic, evil fuck. Forget it. If we find the exception to the rule, we'll cross that bridge when we reach it."

[Doctor Nova Madigan]

Meghan briefly considered her friendship with Regina Newcastle before replying. They'd not kept in close contact since their first meeting at Regina's home in Oxford, but what a meet-up that had been.

"We're on good terms, I think," Meghan said thoughtfully, nodding almost imperceptibly. "Close enough that she'd give me, and by extension us, a fair hearing."

[Machina]

"I'll leave it to you, then", he shrugged. "Any contact we've had has been all business."

Gerad downed a final shot and threw the glass onto the tabletop bottom-up. "Shame that's all we could come up with. Meh. Anyhow. I guess we've beat this dead horse enough for now. Unless any of you ladies have anything to add, I think we can bury this for the day, and I'll get to work. I imagine you've all..." He paused to collect himself, and silently regarded Nova, "well, we've all got a lot on our minds, and we all oughta take some time to hash it out. So, I'm good if you are. Glad to have you all on board."

[Wargear]

Alexandra's smile was ever so slightly mechanical, as though she were still remembering how to form the expression, but there was genuine satisfaction in her cool gray eyes as she reached over to shake Mithril's hand, then Nova's. "A pleasure to meet you both. I'll be looking forward to our future endeavors with interest."

Her eyes flicked across the table to Gerad, barely a fraction of a second worth of eye contact, but the message came through loud and clear. We, on the other hand, aren't quite done.

[Doctor Nova Madigan]

Mithril returned Alexandra's handshake, noting that the elegant nova's gloves enhanced the sensation of touch, instead of dulling it. To any onlookers, the handshake would have appeared businesslike, but Meghan felt an electric sensation shoot up her arm and spread throughout her body, like a wave rippling on a pond. A dozen cliched replies flitted across her mind, but she rejected them all.

"Good to meet you too," Meghan said with a thin smile. There was a curious disconnect in her expression. Her lips showed courtesy, but her eyes signalled a more personal kind of interest.

Nova clenched hands across the table with Alexandra, and locked eyes with her.

"Glad to meet you," Nova nodded once, precisely. "It should be an interesting time, to say the least."

Meghan pried her attention away from Alexandra to address Gerad.

"I'll be in touch with Regina presently," she said. By her tone, it was plain that she saw this as her first mission of sorts.

[Machina]

Gerad nodded briskly, standing up for the perfunctory hand-shaking and head-nodding before the more private meeting he'd been silently dreading having with Alex. The subject of the discussion was bound to conjure memories of the less-than-pleasant variety, something he worked very hard to avoid.

"Good", he told Meghan, "And good luck, huh?"

He reached out his creased mitt to Nova to shake, daring to look her in the eyes for the first time since she returned from dropping off Neil. "Take care of yourself", was all he could think to say.

[Doctor Nova Madigan]

"Will do," Nova replied, managing to keep her composure as she returned Gerad's handshake. Still, she felt the countdown clock ticking on a fierce crying jag. Nova looked across the table to Meghan who, for once in her life, was doing the exact right thing and paying close attention to Nova instead of some other nova.

Nova took Meghan's hand in her own, and then they were gone from the booth, without so much as standing up and walking out the door.

[Wargear]

A faint flicker of amusement crossed Alexandra's lips as their tablemates vanished without even the proverbial puff of smoke, and her faint English accent vanished behind an eerily effective imitation of a certain young Kansas girl from the silver screen. "'My! People come and go so quickly here!'" Her icy gray eyes examined the air where Nova had been sitting a moment longer, then dismissed the thought with a flick of her lashes. "She'll certainly be a useful member of our little cabal, assuming she doesn't have a mental breakdown in the process. Or give us one."

[Machina]

"She'll be okay", Gerad dismissed, and sat back down. "By the look of how that went down, it had been coming for a while. Cognitive dissonance will only get you so far; my guess is she's been preparing for this in some form or another for a while. B'sides", he reached out his mug to receive another steaming draught, "she's made of stern stuff, that one. She just needs time."

"Now", he settled back into the bench across Alex, sipping his coffee with deliberately detached regard. "I believe you had other business on the agenda. Let's hear it."

[Wargear]

For very nearly the first time in the years he'd known her, Gerad was forced to sit through a long pause while Alexandra picked up her shot glass and toyed with it slowly. Five seconds ticked by, ten, twenty, thirty, a full minute; practically an eternity by their mutual mental standards. When Alexandra finally spoke again, she did so without looking up from the glass twirling softly through her fingers. "It's personal. I know we're hardly friends, but I needed to ask someone and you're the best I could find." Her head lifted, eyes burning with a silent challenge as hard and cold as the metallic alloys she used in her armor. "If you take this opportunity to laugh or make a smart ass remark, I will kill you. Clear?"

[Machina]

He wasn’t in the mood for smart ass remarks, anyway. From the outset, Gerad knew the inevitable topic of discourse would be a mental mind field he’d had the good sense to cordon off years ago. His gaze was steady, an impatient frown sitting on his face like a bulldog’s grimace. He grunted quietly in affirmation and took a sip of coffee, the ceramic clink of the mug on formica breaking the stillness.

Gerad sniffed and gave a momentary fancy to the idea of crossing himself. “Alright”, he said. “Let’s have it.”

[Wargear]

Alexandra sat for a moment longer in the utter stillness he'd never seen anyone else quite match; it was as though every natural fidget or pulse of a normally functioning human body had been sheared away, leaving the ruthlessly precise function of the mind behind her steel eyes to proceed unimpeded. Sometimes she's less human than her damn machines. The thought came and went, and the silence lingered a double heartbeat longer before she finally spoke. "If you could compress everything you felt for someone into a single image and hand it to them, would you?"

She didn't bother with preliminaries, for once didn't insult his intelligence by filling in the context she knew he already knew. Didn't elaborate. Simply poured herself another glass of whiskey in silence and waited behind that icily still face for his answer.

[Machina]

“You’re asking the wrong question”, he grunted back. Two seconds ticked over, long enough for him to finish his mental leap from the spark of initial suspicion the question triggered, and a fuller understanding of the dramatis personae behind the question posed - a bit of pfil that to untrained ears sounded like a Desert Island question - was revealed to him. “You’re not asking what I would do. You don’t care what I would do, ‘cause you ain’t me. You want to know what I think you should do. And that ain’t a question I can answer, takin’ into account who all it involves.”

Angrily, he turned his head away, refilled his shot glass and slugged the liquor down, clutching the glass with the flat of his palm, like a weapon. “I never would. Never could. I don’t give nobody everything I’ve got so easy. There’s no mystery left. And b’sides”, his tone lowered, “there frankly just ain’t much to see, with me. I ain’t like you. The chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, angry greasemonkey everyone thinks I am? That’s who I am. I don’t have a duplicitous bone in my body. All I am, is just what you see. I don’t need a painting or a statue or a greeting card or whatever to do my talking for me.

“Why you came to me with this…” He shook his head gently, sighing through his nostrils. “I’ll never know. You know I ain’t gonna have anything reasonable to say on it. Every thought I think about her is so fucked-up by my feelings that there ain’t such a thing as an objective question in regards to her. I dunno, maybe you thought I’d be able to rise above, put it behind me.” He paused and lit another cigarette. “But I ain’t that good, Al. Trooper fucks her or you fuck her, it’s all the same to me. It ain’t even about spiting you; it’s about spiting me.” There was a long pause, a sigh, and a drag of smoke. He finished his thought with a grim finality, “I can’t stand to let myself think about her.”

[Wargear]

"There wasn't anyone else to ask, Gerad." The hint of agony under that silky voice rang like a struck glass. There wasn't anyone else who would have understood. No one else who has the first clue. She didn't say that, or any of the dozen other things she could have said. She didn't have to. The decade's worth of silent, half-shared pain quivered on the table between them like a living, grasping, hungry thing that no amount of work, alcohol or self-discipline had quite managed to cauterize.

She drained her whiskey glass slowly, balancing it delicately on her fingertips as she finished it, and the wet surface reflected her own eyes back at her in a dozen broken fragments. She hesitated a moment longer, set the glass down with graceful precision on the worn, scratched tabletop, and the corner of her mouth twitched slightly in what might have been the shadow of a smile. It wasn't quite an apology... but it was damn close. Closer than he'd ever expected to see out of her.

"There are days..." She trailed off, but he knew her well enough to fill in the rest. Sometimes I really think I ought to arrange for that lackwit punk to have a terminal training accident. She tossed the thought aside with a little flick of her gloved fingers, as if refusing to let herself linger on the temptation. "I'll get you sliced into the recon-sat flow I'm getting at Pretoria as soon as I get back."

[Machina]

“That’s it?”, Gerad arched an eyebrow, speaking accusatory incredulities with his entire body. “That was your big damn talk? And because I don’t have an answer for you – an answer you know damn well I couldn’t give you if you put a fucking gun to my head – you’re going to just fuck off back to the lab?” He heaved. “Look, I’m sorry I don’t have an answer for you. But you knew I wouldn’t have one, so either you built this up to waste my time – which I know you don’t do, because it means wasting your time – or you’re holding out. So fucking well say what you have to say. I got a thing against unresolved business. Loose ends make me nervous.”

[Wargear]

Alexandra's lips twitched in something that might have been a laugh if it hadn't died before getting close to birth, but her eyes flashed with a sudden bitter fury that illuminated her whole face like cold fire. "It may not have occurred to you, Gerad, but I didn't ask to talk to you so we could dredge up all the things we've done to each other or hurl all the things neither of us are fortunate enough to have with her in each other's faces. I found exactly what I said, a way to put it all on the table, and now I don't have a damned clue what to do with it and you were the only person I could think to ask. A million-to-one chance that you would have an answer was still the best game in town, so I took it, because who the hell else am I going to ask if Rachel would just run screaming if I showed her what she's been ignoring?" Her hands slammed down on the table, and every metal surface of the diner hummed with sudden vibrations. "Unresolved business, Gerad? Both our lives reek of nothing but unresolved business, and you bloody well know it, or do you really think you drink like a pig and spend your time verbally battering fools on a dozen Opnet forums because you've tied your life up in a neat little bow to flush down the nearest crapper?"

Her hands clenched slightly, the humming vibration of metal on metal cutting off abruptly, and her lips drew tight in something that a stranger might have mistaken for a smile. "'I think we are in rats' alley where the dead men lost their bones', Gerad, and she's the only fragment I've shored against my ruin, so what in Allah's name do you expect me to say?"

[Machina]

“For fuck’s sake, why’d you have to utter the goddamn ‘A’ word?” Gerad grimaced and rolled his eyes. “Why’s everything got to be such a fucking production to you? This is what never having been a proper soldier breeds in people like you, y’know; you gotta turn everything into some Byronic farce of emotional grand guignol. Shall we relocate this little meeting to a place better suited to posturing, brooding, and soliloquizing? Shit, I could leave, if you’re not feeling fucking embattled enough.” A flush rose in his cheeks, his eyes becoming alive with ice. He tried not to think about Alex, these days. Thinking about Alex meant thinking about Rachel, and he wanted to avoid that. Consequently, he never really knew how he felt about Alex at any given time, whether this was tough love or abuse. He knew he didn’t care, and the river of invective that flowed out of his mouth was as sharp as a diamond saw.

“I couldn’t give a good goddamn if you think my life is a hunk of shit. It ain’t perfect, but don’t sell yourself some fucking cautionary after-school special about how gee whiz, Gerad’s problem is just that he chooses to be unhappy, and golly, he certainly has made this bed he hates lying in so much, hasn’t he? You think I never tried to get her back? You think I didn’t keep this fucking deformity that got me pink-slipped from one of the only things I ever gave a damn about a secret for as long as possible? Yeah, I chose this. I choose it every day, right? Fuck. You. My problem is that Lady Luck has seen fit to shit on my head at every available opportunity, but I still do what’s right and I still slog my way through the shit every goddamn day to give it another try, and you oughta know that because you’re sitting here right now. There’s nothing tragic about my life, just unfortunate, and that’s never stopped me. I do the goddamn best I can with what I got, and who the fuck are you to quote that mincing little anti-Semite twat Eliot at me like it had some poignant meaning I was supposed to take away? I am angry because the world is a goddamn shithole, and I drink because I LIKE ALCOHOL.”

Gerad quieted his tirade, and realized that he was halfway off the bench seat, halfway across the table, and that he could be heard halfway across Long Island. He sat back down, his features hard and confident, and straightened his shoulders as he pulled another cigarette from the package. “I haven’t been drunk since I erupted.” His confession was smooth, calm, matter-of-fact. “Can’t anymore. I’ve tried. For a while, I tried every day, but like sleep, it just never seemed to happen. But it’s fun, having everyone think I’m a lush, that they’ve got this scalpel they can use to dissect me. Sorry, Al.” He snatched the bottle off the table and drank what remain, leaving the empty container on the table. “I’ve known how fucked-up you are for years, and back then, I was a goddamn wreck, myself. I’ve never been perfect. But I never felt sorry for myself, either. I got a problem, I do what I can to fix it. If I can’t, I put it out of my head, do something else. I don’t waste time on being depressed and I can’t even remember what self-doubt or anxiety feels like. Anger’s productive; depression ain’t worth shit.

“I’d love to have Rachel back, you know. Love her with all my goddamn heart. But even if she came running back to me, if she walked in here right now and demanded I punish her ass until sunup, I couldn’t do it. Ethically, we’re different animals completely, and I suspect that’s why she’s balling Trooper, now. All the macho bullshit of Gerad, none of those damn problems with thinking too much about ethics and the morality of what part you play in the world’s misery. I made peace with the fact that it ain’t happening again, but emotions are mean little fuckers like that, being irrational as they are. Not being with her makes me miserable, as much sense as it makes, and so I try not to think about it. But missing somebody and knowing you’re both better off without each other aren’t mutually exclusive concepts. You think I’m fucked-up? I made my peace with the matter. You, on the other hand, have been pining over the same fucking person for over a goddamn decade.

“Rachel’s a smart girl”, Gerad exhaled a jet of smoke. “But she’s stupid with people. I don’t know if she’s got you pegged or not, to be honest. You know she wouldn’t make a move, whether she reciprocated or not. That’s just Rachel. You know that, and you still haven’t said anything. You have nobody to blame but yourself for that. You want my advice? Fine. Do it. You know Rachel’s capacity for cognitive dissonance would allow her to easily get over some sloppy confession of love and treat you like she always has, if you’re wrong. The alternative is she coyly admits she’s always wanted a crack at you, too, and you both fuck off to establish a volcano lair on Lesvos or something. You’ll have lost slim-to-nil, and whatever ace you’ve got up your sleeve will hopefully overcome your utterly pathetic inability to convey anything that can’t be expressed in binary. The fact that you’re coming to me, of all fucking people, for advice on this, tells me you’re just looking for a way to weasel out of what’s probably your best shot. I ain’t letting you have that. Do it.”

[Wargear]

The first pulse of rage brought Alexandra to her feet, her eyes blazing with barely restrained fury, and for a fraction of a second the only thought in her head was to rip the table out of the floor with a thought and pound him into a bloody pulp with it. How dare this man, this man of all people, speak to me this way? Her gloved fingers tightened fractionally on the table, air crackling to ozone around her as her M-R node blazed with anger, but the pitiless precision of her own intellect caught up to her with an icy certainty that snuffed her anger like a candle in vacuum.

keisaku. The Elite who'd taught Alexandra aikido had once explained the term to her as originating from the long wooden stick which a teacher might use to awaken a student whose meditation had slipped over the line into sleep or something like it, and it was the only word she could think of to express the sharp, agonizing clarity of having Gerad, of all people, bring her up short with something her carefully honed mind informed her was entirely the truth. Oh, he might be lying to himself about his own situation, but that hardly mattered. “pining over the same fucking person for over a goddamn decade.” You have been, Alex, and you damn well know it. You just thought... oh, Allah, who knows what you thought. She bit her lip slightly against the acrid taste of disgust in her mouth. You can shrug off artillery fire, Alexandra, but you can't have a five minute conversation with a woman you love?

Alexandra closed her eyes, took in a slow unnecessary breath, then let it go again as she dropped back into her seat. Lifted her head. Looked him in the eye with a faint quirk of ironic humor on her lips. “You really are a bastard, Gerad.” Her voice was gentle, almost conversational. “Just at the moment, I'm not sure if I want to thank you or kill you.”

[Machina]

"Whatever", he shrugged and heaved before standing up with a machinelike lethargy and heavily-lidded eyes that wouldn't look at anything in particular. His anger had left him, drained out, and without it, all that remained in him was the grief, the futility, the acid memories. He threw a few bills on the counter. "Good luck.

"Close up early if you feel like it, doll", he muttered to the geriatric hash-slinger, who nodded silently, regarding him with equal parts fear and worry. "I'm headed to the titty bar", he heaved out half over his shoulder to nobody and anybody, and then he walked out and didn't look back.