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Author Topic: The Lessons of History [open...ish]  (Read 848 times)

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Anonymous

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The Lessons of History [open...ish]
« on: March 10, 2009, 02:22:05 pm »
---nine years ago, ATC, Stage Two Candidates' History Lesson---


"... and I think that's enough said about that."

Hasdrubal's hand came down on the desk.  He had pronounced the word 'said' with a lower-caste drawl, sliding and slurping into a wet twang.  Ssay-yed.  

"You!"  He spun and pointed to Ben, a shaggy-haired kid sitting in the back of the classroom, chewing on a hangnail.  He jolted backwards; a red mark appeared on one cheek.  "Pay.  Some.  Fucking.  Attention."  He turned aside.

"When I was in the warrr," Hasdrubal went on, rolling his 'r's, rubbing his palms together.  Callouses hissed on callouses.  "Had a runin with some friendly fiyah."  He tapped the scar that cut across the bridge of his nose and splattered across his cheek and neck, to disappear into the collar of his uniform.  "Hot metal just comes pouring down, that'll teach me to keep an open seat on the old Dragon.  Pilot Lukacsz, that old bastahd, fella who does it, he's an all right guy, but what happened?  He coulda fallen to one side.  Or to the other side.  And I could have gotten out of the way.  But I was lookin' straight ahead, see, because that is where the enemy had chosen to place himself, and Gods-damned if I didn't miss my shot anyway.  Someone else took the motherfucker down, believe you me, he went down."  He chuckled and shook his head, rocking back and forth on his heels.  It was one of Hasdrubal's weirdly misplaced anecdotes, of which he was so fond.  It seemed modest, but that threw you for a loop, didn't it?  Besides, he gave a slightly different explanation for his scarring every time.  "He went down.  Ain't no ego in it."  

Hasdrubal continued without transition.

"We have covered"  Cuh-vuhed "the Edanith premigratory period.  All you need to know, lads and lassies, is the motherfuckers turned tail and ran.  And that is because the Aedolian policy is.  Goddamn.  Precise.

"What do I mean by precise?" A grin glinted out at the Stage Two Candidate glass from amidst the shadowy rivulets and pits of scarring.  "What... do... I... mean."  He knotted his hands behind his back.  There was a shifting of shoulder muscle, of paunch, a sense of some ponderous boulder about to rock off its perch.  He took a step forward.  Then another.  It was supposed to be pacing, but, as always, seemed markedly too conscious of itself.  It was--it was--the performance of pacing.  

"You."  He spun artfully on one heel, his great bulk rocking back and then forward, to land silently but still with the feeling of immense, poised weight.  

Had this been grade school Liv might have said Hasdrubal had eyes in the back of his head, but as it was, he'd felt the wriggling tendrils of his mind before he heard the remonstration.  Hasdrubal knew what he was thinking.  He always knew what you were thinking.  Liv felt ill and horribly angry.  His head buzzed from exhaustion.  

"Yeah?"  Carefully, deliberately, he let his foot fall from the seat of his chair, where he'd drawn it up in a one-kneed huddle, to the floor.  He froze.  He had been thinking (though after a year of classes he knew better than to say it) that Hasdrubal's lies were too stupid to be believed, and his performance apparent.  Unfortunately...

"There's no need to speak, Candidate.  Come up."  Hasdrubal's eyes were bright, twinkling somewhere between good cheer and expectation.  An invisible hand jerked at the front of Liv's shirt, and he got to his feet, then stumbled around desks to stand beside the Pilot's desk, head down, hair over his face.  He stuck his hands in his pockets and tried to hide.  When Hasdrubal's palm came down on the back of his neck, thumb moving over his nape, he knew what everyone was thinking.  But he hadn't done anything, Hasdrubal had just stopped him in the halls a few times and--  A snicker chased itself to the back of the room and flickered out.  

Hasdrubal was fond of Object Lessons.  

He removed his hand and left Liv standing there while he began to pace once more.

"What Sulo was about to say is this," he said, voice gone soft and honey-thick.  "That we had no right to do what we want with Earth.  That we had no right to disrespect the culture of a group of slaveholders.  Think about that one.  What it's like.  To cripple your most powerful population."  He popped his p's.  His grin began to broaden.  "War is not the answer, thinks young, foolish Sulo.  And maybe he's right."

He stopped in front of Liv and tipped his chin up.  "Maybe."  A breath sputtered out over the final vowel.  His fingers tightened around Liv's jaw.  He held his chin up and looked out at the classroom.  "It's true that pain doesn't teach a lasting lesson.  This one is still fucking pathetic."  He let go and Liv came down against the edge of the desk, sucking in air.

That was enough.  Hasdrubal was doing it again.  He was spinning his web--his magic--something, the air had gone all soft and heavy and soporific.  Liv felt anger flaring up in his chest.  His palms were getting very hot.  How dare that fat motherfucking Pilot take the thoughts out of his head and twist them like that.  He was right.  War's not the answer, no, fucking bullshit little stories aren't the answer, you goddamn game-playing--he ripped free of whatever it was Hasdrubal was doing to keep him from being able to talk.

"Fuck you," he said.  "Fuck you, it's not all about power.  Come on, you all believe in this bullshit?  The whole--Aedolis is better than everyone, so we can just do whatever the fuck we want, even to our own--"  

For just a second he thought the Pilot was going to hit him, or knock him out, or strangle him again, but Hasdrubal only took a step back, clasped his hands, and looked out at the class, face still caught in a tarry half-smile.  

"Looks like we got ourselves a regyoolar allegory."  Slowly, he crossed over to the cabinet at the back of the room and took out two things.  Item one: a pair of electric clippers.  Item two: an unidentifiable iron object with an oddly whorled end and a long handle.  "For example.  I think I'd like to make this one mine."  He nodded at Liv, and invisible hands shoved him into a chair.  Liv looked up, teeth caught in a grimace, but he already had the leaden feeling that it was too late.  "You can say I'm Aedolis in this analogywhosamathing, or, why not, that there is mightily hubrist-stick."  He shook his head and tutted.  "Never mind, then.  Look at it however you like.  Now here's the problem we've got here, and I'm only going to say this one fuckin' time."

His benign smile juxtaposed the clang of his language.  "Powah.  Think ye upon the name.  Sulo.  Head down."  Something lifted all of Liv's hair off his nape and twisted it viciously.  "Think ye," Hasdrubal said, "upon the name.  Aedolis and Edanith.  Freedom and slavery.  Victory and pain.  None of you have any fucking idea what I'm talking about, which is.  The.  Point."  

He turned the clippers in one hand and leaned over.  "I like you, Sulo, I think I'll make you my little Candee-date.  But how do I do that when you're so big and bad?"  Liv could feel his smirk crawling down the back of his shirt-collar.  Big he wasn't--sixteen, 5'4'', 110.  Bad--no.  He was a failure.  He was, he knew--weak.  That was the point.  "He likes his hair, doesn't he?  Yes he do."  The clippers came on, buzzing.  Another nervous laugh lapped the class.  Liv had gotten much teasing for his effeminate preening, but he'd thought it was cute, or thought--  "I don't like one of mine having something of his own.  The idea is to keep the having here.  Keep the wanting here.  You.  Do not.  Deserve it."  His glare swept the room.  "He.  Does not.  Deserve it.  It's a nothing to me.  It is non-essential.  Trim it."  There were little squiggles of fear darting down stomachs now.  Liv could feel it.  Not for him; he knew all too clearly that no one cared about him, not even Callas, with that straight fringe of hair that flopped so perfectly over one eye.  She, like everyone else, knew it was pathetic to waste time on something as easily squashed as Liv.

He had to close his fists very tightly to keep from spilling flame onto the floor.  He hated object lessons.  He hated to be the unreasoning victim.  He hated to be played for what he was in Hasdrubal's game and he hated that it made sense and he hated that he was his and he hated the way his hand ran down the back of his neck, over his spine, inside his shirt.  And he hated, hated, hated, that Hasdrubal could feel his hate, knew his hate, and used his hate; and that whatever Liv did he was always playing the game on the losing side.

The clippers buzzed a path over his head.  He felt a sudden loosening at his scalp, as if of a  wig lifting.  He'd colored his hair a brilliant aqua.  When it came off he saw the brown root, like the living part of some dead plant, and then he shut his eyes again.  

"Now then," Hasdrubal said.  Suddenly he was kneeling beside Liv, one hand cupping his chin. His breath smelled of burnt cork and sour yeast, and he was grinning.  "We're learning a lesson today about the mechanics of victory, ain't we?"  He hefted the long metal object, gripped it like a club, and Liv made out the squiggle on its end:  CH.  What did that stand for?  "My name."  Hasdrubal regarded it, and Liv, with something like affection.  "My imprimaturrrr, if you will."  

"Now, Sulo," he said softly, "I want you to take all of that little ol' angah and I want you to focus it down on this.  I can help you."  His teeth glistened gray-white.  Inside Liv's head something clamped down.  

Liv didn't know what this was but he knew it wasn't good.

"F-f-f-"  He'd lost the ability to retaliate in anything but a weaker shadow of Hasdrubal's words.  "Screw off."  Wasn't he supposed to do this?  Supposed to express his will.  But he was doing something wrong.  Something wrong.  Wasn't playing the right game.  Wasn't playing his own--

Hasdrubal reached down, picked up one of Liv's hands, and very deliberately snapped his pinkie backwards.  There was a tree-and-gristle crack.  He'd half-expected it.  It still took a moment for the pain to arrive in his brain and when it did he went limp, fuzzy, still angry.  It hurt.  But he'd said something about pain.  Something about pain.  And there was that clamp in his head. What was this supposed to fucking mean, supposed to mean that pain wasn't--couldn't--if he just had his pain he could still feel superior, he couldn't--it wasn't a matter of--but he didn't want--ugh it fucking hurt.  Pain wasn't victory.  That was it.  But Hasdrubal had told him that, and there he was, still smiling, leather and ivory and Liv's damp, hoarse breath.  His palm, beneath the stinging, horrible, jaw-clenching pain, flared up with the familiar pyrokinetic itch, stronger than usual.  Hasdrubal controlled that too, or coaxed it down the right--what was he--

Liv couldn't think, that was what pain did.  It made you play the game by someone else's rules.

"Sulo," Hasdrubal said, conversationally, turning to the class.  Liv tried to catch Callas's eye and could not.  Hasdrubal sank a tendril into the damp place of hopefulness and twisted it awry.  "Sulo here is exhibiting what we like to call losing behavyah."  He twisted viciously at Liv's hand and Liv saw spots, gasped, whimpered, felt his legs curling up.  

"Heat it up, Sulo.  Fire has to burn somebody."  

There was laughter.  Why was there laughter?

Oh.  I get it.  By the time his brain had caught up Liv could already feel the gaping place of horror in his stomach, which had reacted faster than his brain.  No no no no no I want out I want home I want to go home I want but that was weak, he was weak, he had to do something else, there was nothing else, maybe that was the point, maybe the lesson was that there was nothing else he could do.

"No," he said.

Hasdrubal took his ring finger.  Exerted pressure.  More pressure.  Something popped.  "Don't be silly, lovey."  He sounded like a pirate.  He sounded cool.  

Because that was what it was.  There was only silly and cool.  There wasn't good and bad somewhere.  There was only Liv, squirming like an insect, trapped because he had trapped himself, because he was weak and there was no way out, and he belonged to Hasdrubal.  

"This is not real resistance," Hasdrubal announced to the class, lazily, nonchalantly, fingers now strung over LIv's wrist as though here were taking his pulse.  "This is the silent agreement to conquest.  This is the language of the conquered, the language of slavery to the self and all sorts of shit you lovely twosies can't possibly ken, eh?  Now then, Sulo.  It'll be over so quickly.  Of course it'll hurt, but that hardly matters, don't it?  You can deal with that, can't you?  Pain is temporary.  Weakness'll last ya, but at least you'll see things from the side of the strong, eh?  The truth.  Sulo.  Hurts."

He grinned.  "Fact I'd say that's the main point of the truth and most of what makes it true--that it hurts."  The pressure on Liv's hand increased.  Something cracked.  He tasted vomit in the back of his throat and then he could no longer control it.

Flame heated the painful surface of his palm.  He hissed.  It moved.  Hasdrubal backed up lazily and held the brand to it.  That was what it was.  It was a brand.  Something terrible was happening but Liv had no idea what and he felt sick from pain.  Once it was turned on the fire wouldn't stop.  He never could get it to stop.  It fluttered just above his palm, scorched his skin, and the metal turned, by degrees, to flaking gray and then to orange and then to red.  Heat beat at his face.  He shut his eyes.  Hasdrubal had something inside him in his grip and he couldn't

and the flame dwindled and winked out.

"Now," Hasdrubal said, his voice still modulated to teatime conversation and not classroom.  Liv felt the brand move near his face, but he could not move in turn.  Something had definitively been shut down.  His body shuddered and stilled.  "Now, I think, names and claims, how's about it."

One hand came up to Liv's jaw again and held it steady.  He wanted to bite down, but he couldn't.  

He felt heat near his head and the skin on his scalp twinged and tried to crawl away

and then

it was

only pain.

It burnt down through skin

to bone

to brain

and it stayed there.

He choked on a scream and it was nothing and it was only pain and it was everything and it was one moment, flash, one, flash, Hasdrubal leering in his head, and another flash

again

burning pain and then it was over, and it was only the smell of his own burned skin, something like barbeque meat, sickly, and another smell

He'd pissed himself.  He had not even enough time to be ashamed, but, loosed from Hasdrubal's control, fell bonelessly from the chair onto the floor.  Hasdrubal stood over him.  Through the sticky haze of pain and the taste of metal and shock and nothing and dust, Liv heard, fuzzily, what he said.  The slow coils of his mind unwrapped.

"Thus," said Hasdrubal, looking down at Liv with amusement, "endeth the lesson."







------nine years ago, ATC------

Hasdrubal had been right.

Pain didn't last.  He missed it.  Liv had gotten out of the infirmary after a quick patch job, fingers splinted, the brand on his scalp daubed with ointment that prickled unpleasantly and smelt of something unnatural and green.  He sat down in front of his terminal, willing the dull ache in his broken fingers to stop.

It was mostly that they felt wrong.

Of course, it all felt wrong.  He shouldn't focus on something as petty as pain.  It was another escape, wasn't it?  Hadn't that been the lesson?  But he didn't want Hasdrubal's lessons.  But maybe that was the point.  He was too tired to think about it any longer.  He wished Callas had said something to him; one word.  Of course he wouldn't've said a thing to her, in her place.  Would he?  Maybe.  Maybe.  He'd begun to feel more and more that it wasn't worth it.  

"Oy--Pisser."

Lovely, a new nickname.  His roommate.  Dail.  "Make sure you take a shower before bed, eh, Livos?"  Put a hand on his shoulder with some disdain.

"Shut the fuck up."  He stood abruptly, shoving in his chair.  "Don't touch me."  

Dail backed away, hands raised, shaking his head.  "Gods, calm down.  Cripes, you're a complete--"

Someone knocked on the door.  Liv could feel who it was.  "Gatten, get yer ass out here."  Dail backed up and Liv still there, thrumming, sparks of pain racing through his scalp and through his fingers.  The door opened.  Hasdrubal stuck his head in, that one drooping eyebrow held forward, as always; as always, all too easy to read.  "Git."  Dail shot Liv a wordless, mocking look, and shot out the door ahead of the telekinetic pulse Liv knew Hasdrubal would send after him.  The door shut.  Liv's Adam's Apple went up and down.

"My new Candee-date."  Hasdrubal studied him, corners of his lips crimped into the tiniest possible elfin smile.  He took a few steps forward and picked up Liv's hand, studied it dispassionately.  "Decent job.  They do know their patch-work.  Now, then, Candidate, I came by because I'd heard you were getting depressed."  The perennial twinkle in his eyes was tinged with nothing like sympathy.  Perhaps contempt.  "Sit."  He sat Liv down on the bed and stared him down.

"LIsten.  You're one lucky motherfucker.  I don't pick just anyone for a Candidate.  Golly--you're spe-shul."  He laughed.  "You're lucky because you've got something I want.  Some kind of fucking brain in there, not that you've used it for anything.  Pretty face."  His face twitched into an ostentatious leer.

Pretty face.  No one else thought so.  They'd looked at him like--but no.  That was the point.  That was something Hasdrubal had put in his head.  Or in their heads.  Something. His new mentor's hand came around, with surprising delicacy, and touched the open burn wounds on Liv's scalp, then slid down, over his cheek, to his chin.  Always with the same lecherous old-man look, and something faintly amused behind it, as though he knew how filthy, ugly, and scarred he was, how patently absurd the spectacle was--and didn't care.  Didn't care about anyone.  No, it was more than that: he knew precisely what the spectacle did, and, while his desire might be real, the performance was the point.  It took place on a plane that wasn't pain and pleasure, but--  "That's a kind of power you've got over me, Sulo."  Still the faint smile.  If Liv had thought of it on his own, the revelation would have helped him somehow, given him something.  Because Hasdrubal said it it meant, simply, that they were still playing his game.

He sat down, abruptly, beside him, and nodded, a brief, sharp movement.  "Take off your clothes."



When it was over, Hasdrubal lounged, breathing hard, against the railing of his bed, belly moving up and down like a bellows.  Liv could see the map the scarring made of his skin.  He willed his stare into opacity.  At last Hasdrubal heaved himself up, with a faked grunt of exertion.  That was part of the spectacle, too, part of the hideousness and sordidness, which was the point: humiliation.  Of course Hasdrubal could move like the lightest gymnast when he felt like it.  Now he felt like humiliating Liv with his age and his ugliness.  And Dail knew, too.  Obviously.  He shut his eyes and buried his face in his pillow.  He was beginning to understand how this worked.

A hand landed on his back and dragged him upright.  He half-sat, face twitching with discomfort.

"Don't feel fucking sorry for yourself.  You're fucking lucky."  One rough thumb came down at the corner of his mouth and tilted his head back.  Hasdrubal stood in front of him, belt looped through his pants.  Liv shut his eyes against afterimages of humiliation.  "You just don't get it."  He laughed, shaking his head, and turned away to put on his shirt, slide on his boots.   "Powah!"  

Liv bit down on his arm again and stared downward.  He couldn't become pathetic.  He wouldn't cry, he wouldn't beg for Hasdrubal to leave him alone.  How was he lucky?  What was he missing?  At the same time he thought

couldn't help thinking

He thought what Hasdrubal said made sense.

"You're angry, ain't you?  Ah well, laddie, it is what it is."

The door swung shut on the twinkle of Hasdrubal's wink.

And it was what it was.
« Last Edit: August 28, 2009, 05:57:33 am by Anonymous »

Anonymous

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Re: The Lessons of History [open...ish]
« Reply #1 on: March 10, 2009, 09:13:55 pm »
---eighteen months later, 4 a.m., Candidate Callas Abelard's room---


Liv blinked up through the damp half-darkness.  He felt the hot puff of her breath on his face.  Her hair tickled his forehead, and her eyes glittered at him upside-down.  She leaned forward, knees set on either side of his head, hands impressing the mattress to either side of him, and ducked to whisper in his ear.  "That was not very impressive, Livos."

He helplessly inhaled the smell of her hair.  "Sorry."

"I'm not that surprised."

"Hey."

"Now, now."  Callas drew back, curled her body into a quick, neat arch, then wriggled down next to him.  "We'll have lessons.  Female anatomy..."

"I'm quite good at blowjobs, actually."

"Thanks for that."

"Sorry.  Hey, listen, I--"  He stopped with his hand cupped, hovering over her cheek.  

"No, no."  She sighed, her tongue twisted around the air so it came out as an admonition, and squirmed closer to him, lacing their hands.  She held her other hand up to the dimly buzzing ceiling light, which threw little darting birds of shadow back at the wall.  "This is the part where you say oh you were fantastic, and I wanted you the first minute I set eyes on you.  And so on."  She wiggled her fingers.  Her face was remote, set in a faint half-smile that lapped only fitfully at her eyes.  

"What I thought was actually."  He reached over and flicked at a damp lock of her hair.  "That I was jealous of your hair."

"Wrong, Livos."

"Well, what did you--"

"Wrong!"

Liv breathed out the imitation of a laugh.  

"Well, that's what you kept saying.  'Wrong.'"  She wrinkled up her face in a musing approximation of Liv's pinched expression of disgust, then let it go.  It wasn't mean-spirited.  "'Wrong.'  And you'd--"  She put up a hand and twisted her wrist, limply.  "'That's just ludicrously stupid.'  These idiots.  Some of us could actually hear what you were thinking, idjit."

They lay there breathing for a few minutes, wondering at the shadow-shapes that slid across the wall.  He could hear the unsyncopated thump of their hearts, and the rocking boat motion of her ribcage against his.  In an hour or so he'd have to get back to his room.

"Because you're brilliant."

"Wrong, but thank you."  She put her lips to his shoulder.

"Beautiful."  

"Honesty check: were you thinking of my face just then?"

"There is no right answer to that--"

"I'll go in and see.  You know I can."

He knew she could.

"Because you knew what it was like,"  he said.  

"Ever thought about how you're going to make it," Callas said, shutting her eyes.

"Because I'm cute."  He put one palm between his bare scalp and the mattress.  

"Wrong again," she said.  

She did that--Callas.  She had the illimitable ability to keep her own balance in any conversation, to exert a kind of gravitational pull toward her point of view.  Or maybe that was just his utter rootlessness.  

"How you're going to make it," she said, sitting up.  He leaned on one elbow and blinked at the curve of her back, the dark shape of her breasts against the general gloomy blue.  He couldn't believe it was out of modesty--or maybe for the sake of his--but she'd wanted the lights out.  "How you are going to make it, Liv."  She reached over and touched the tip of his nose with one finger.  

He caught it.  "Because I know what you were doing.  You think I'm--"

She looked away, pulled her finger out of his grasp, and cradled it in her other hand.  

"Your shields are supposed to go down when you're having sex."

"Well, fuck, Cas."

"They do--when you're angry, or."  She wasn't looking at him.  "Well, they used to."

"Yeah."  The word sat on his tongue like a flat strip of metal.  "They used to.  That's why he did it."

"Liv, please.  What has he told you about Project Nexus?"

"No."

"I can do this with or without your permission."

"Cas I am not--"  His teeth were clenched and he was breathing through them, hard.  His hand shot out--he grabbed her by one wrist.  "You are an idiot--"

"Do you know what he does, Livos?  Really.  Do you think Liv's going to get through this?  Do you think you.  You.  Liv.  Are going to--"

"I'm not going to let you in."  His face was suddenly very close to hers, her wrists caught in his fists, his thumbs against the bones and skin and pulse.  "Whose fucking side are you on.  If this is because Rilke told you--if this is because of his fucking argument with Haz--"

Her mouth opened.  Her cheeks had gone hollow.  "He's going to destroy you.  Just tell me--"

"He is not a traitor."

"Just tell me.  Please.  Please tell me."

"Fuck you.  Fuck you, Cas.  You have no idea."

"Whose side are you on, Liv?"

He threw her wrists aside, raked his hands through his hair, and shut his eyes tightly.  When he opened them, the air glistened with vibrating specks of static.  He fumbled for his boxers, which had tangled in a coil of elastic around his left ankle, pulled them up, and stood.  He dressed himself quickly and grimly.

"I'm on my side, thanks."

"Listen to me, I'm not doing this because of fucking Rilke.  Okay?  Calm down.  I'm doing this because of this, look at you, because of you."

His telepathic communication, always hard to sustain, fragmented; she'd sent a writhing tendril of emotion toward the edges of his shields.  Liv drew back.  "Don't you.  Fuck.  Don't you dare.  If you ask more about this even Rilke won't be able to protect you."  He viciously twisted shut the last button on his shirt.

"You don't know, do you."

"Shut up."

"You really don't know.  He hasn't even told you.  He's just using you, Liv.  He's using you, and you're letting him, and you don't even know what for."

"I'm not on his side."

The door slid shut behind him.
« Last Edit: May 04, 2009, 04:28:25 pm by Anonymous »

Anonymous

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Re: The Lessons of History [open...ish]
« Reply #2 on: April 12, 2009, 08:30:22 pm »
---the next day---

"Fee-ah," said Hasdrubal.  He tucked his hands behind his back and leaned forward, chin resting on his chest.  "Fee-ah!"  Fear.  

Liv stood in the middle of classroom 107.  The chairs had been pushed back.   He stood surrounded by a dirty expanse of speckled plastic flooring the color and texture of old bone.  He blinked back fine-grained exhaustion and swayed side to side, palms open and prickling.  He waited.  Training in psychic aversion was neither routine nor facile.  It wasn't a popular technique, but as Hasdrubal said, you and I, luv, know better than to play the game without changing the rules.

"You are a cowahd," Haz said, and took a step.  His voice moved in time with his feet, pausing when he did.  It lent his words a hypnotic, irresistible rhythm.  "Everything you do, you do out of fearrrrr."  Now he chose to roll his Rs (and for Hasdrubal everything was always a choice).  The change in pronunciation marked the word's essential importance.

However you slice it, boyo, and however it's said.

"For the cowahd it is a close and crrrramped world.  The boundaries are drawn for you and they will only keep closing.  There are so many ways of looking at it.  Cowardice and bravery?  Bravery is an invention for and by the fuckin' juhcks who want to believe in ignorance!  Bravery is for children.  Bravery is only the othah side.  Of.  The mothafucking chip.  Oh no.  Theah is something else that we can use."

And then his mind was all over Liv's, everywhere, sticky and creeping, as relentless as a swarm or a kind of bubbling, expanding mold.  

Aversion, Liv had found over the past months, was less a matter of strength and more a matter of flexibility.  He let his mind slip and bobble beneath detection.  Hasdrubal seethed upward from below, and it was--the point was--to overwhelm.  

Fear.  Only fear.

Because there was no differential in the human mind.  However thinly-sliced its subdivisions.  However

Cas Cas Cas her hair her body her


His pulse rate jumped.  Hasdrubal had hit the surface of memory and broken it with a splash.  He plunged into deeper, colder, bubbling waters and twisted the paradigm

"Whatever we may    wish     to         be, what we are is a mask," Hasdrubal said, delicately.  His mental movements hurt.   His words came through in fits and starts and flurried across the surface of Liv's  
 
The way she'd looked at him and that sick hanging sense of nothing there

the sudden stomach-dropping lurch of abandonment, when he'd felt her mind twining around his, and when he'd tried to read her, had come up against a slick, cold wall

that he had wanted to say

couldn't say it, and it had all, all, all

the longing, which
was weakness, which was, was it, had turned into

"You don't trust pretty things."  Hasdrubal prowled the circumference of the room.  Despite the distance, Liv could make out tiny things about him, the tracery of lines around his eyes, the flickering twitch of one eyelid.  Hasdrubal was not beautiful.  He was unbeautiful.  And at the same time you could not stop looking at him.  Liv couldn't.  He projected a larger and more vibrant image of himself, and the salt-sweat of his skin, the spattered network of his scarring--were all grotesques holy because they were hideous, and not beautiful but sublime

and more dangerous, and more compelling, than beauty, because the projection was made of desire, and fed by desire, and it was desire, encrusted over ages, thickly deposited, sickly calcified.  Desire for desire, desire to be desired, desire to be

"Very good."  Hasdrubal had circled behind him, but Liv felt the upward twitch of his mouth, into a breathy grin.  "Bodies!  Bodies, minds, and all the little clustahs of memory and feeling: these things are all masks.  Take away one layer"

that gap of doubt of agony of No One

Liv fought his way free with nothing but the sticky tentacles of Everything had already wound around


"--and the next appearsss," Hasdrubal said, voice softer now, less stentorian, "and that's a shell, too.  Take away that, and you'll find another.  And at some point, you're going to find there are no more masks--"

blue-green, but he hadn't gotten in

Liv kept his mind shifting, it hurt, but he kept it

because pain was an anchor to the self.  It had reality.  Pain, and fear, and anger.  Nothing as sophisticated as love, nor even hate, and the fact was, in the substratum of all mental activity, there was the requirement of merely one thing

whether his thoughts or Haz's thoughts or no one's thoughts

Liv kept the boundaries shifting, and


"--no more masks--" he said, coming up behind Liv.

"--but there's nothing else, either.  There's no ghost in the machine.  The big secret is there's nothing there.

"So what's left when the masks are gone?

"We are all sharks.  When we stop moving, we die."

kept going because that was all of it.  One thing.  There was nothing to read because there was nothing written

there was only movement.  Liv's abilities were not unitary they were in fragments they were nothing and that was why

Hasdrubal circled, and the water was dark, the currents slowed, he was at the heart of

the skin of Cas's thigh, the blue light, the anger and a flash, a slice, a flitting picture of her eye, stretched in shock, these things were memories, Liv let them go

Projec t N e


Hasdrubal's withdrawal came abruptly, plunging him into still cold waters.  He gathered his mental shields, though their stasis was a poor substitute for the avoidance training they'd been absorbed in.

"What the fuck, Sulo," Haz growled, coming up behind him.  He rested both forearms on Liv's shoulders and leaned in.  "How'd you hear about that, darlin'?"  

Liv could feel his unease, a background buzz obscuring the usual solidity of his mental presence.  He swallowed.

"Well," Hasdrubal said at last, taking him by the jaw and turning his head so he looked up at him.  By now the gesture had become familiar.  "Well, well.  Not the time for jokes, Sully.  You know what you're doing?  It's called aversion, but that's not the case.  Aversion, inversion"  He grinned.  "Call it whatever you like.  The fact is, what you are doing is rewriting your own brain.  Rewiring, rerouting, wiping clean.  Usually we don't notice, as anything once remembered will never be remembered in the same way again.  But some of us go that way and never come back, because we know..."  

He shook his head, fingers sliding over Liv's jaw and down his neck.  He tapped thoughtfully at the hollow between his collarbones.  

"That little girl is an object lesson.  No, I don't care whom you fuck, youngster.  I am only concerned, because such incursions into PIlots' private files is--whatever her motive, and whatever his--well, it smells like treason to me."  He cut off the sentence with a downswipe of lip.  To listen to Hasdrubal speak was to inhabit him.

"You're avoiding the question," Liv said, staring straight ahead.  

He should've expected it by now.  Hasdrubal didn't have to bother with outward violence; he was adept at manipulating the nervous system directly.  But he thought (and Liv believed him) that the spectacle of violence and the pose of dominance held more power than inner pain.  Pain could only weaken.  Spectacle conquered.  

"You don't talk to a superior like that" and a flash of capital-letter PAIN and he was on the floor.  His mouth tasted like blood, probably because he had blood in it.  Simulacra.  How fucking useful.  He spat red on speckles.  He'd only bitten his tongue at the force.  Hasdrubal set one foot on his chest and leaned on it until his sternum creaked.

"You want to know?"  He shook his head and leaned more heavily on his foot.  "All right, Sulo.  I'll tell you just this once, darlin', just because I care about you."  Because of this, look at you, because of you.  The pressure went away and then Hasdrubal's face came down close to his.  Liv sucked blood between his teeth.  "It's about putting an engine in the shark."  His face sharpened into a frown.  "If you spit that at me, luv" (sudden hasty and entirely clear image of destruction).  Liv knew.  He put one finger to Liv's lips.  

"Engine in the shark," he said. "Ain't we dreamers."
« Last Edit: April 26, 2009, 07:08:46 pm by Anonymous »

Anonymous

  • Guest
Re: The Lessons of History [open...ish]
« Reply #3 on: September 03, 2009, 04:06:19 am »
---Seven and a half years ago---

It was what it was.

The worst part was when he was not allowed to brush his teeth.  He sucked on his shame like sour candy after a dentist's visit.  Numb-mouthed.  Shaky.  With anger and cotton in his cheeks.  Shame and disgust were puerile and stupid and, nonetheless, Liv couldn't shake them.

He learned that the thing he ought to hate about himself was Shame Itself, not Fear Itself.  

Hasdrubal insisted that it was Fear Itself, perhaps on a deeper primeval shark-level. Where sightless things swam and big fish ate small fish, and small fish ate incandescent worms that writhed around just asking for it, really.  Some accident of evolution that meant their DNA did not care about the individual.  Like plants or insects.  All evolution was accidental.  You are not really alive, Liv-oh my lad, until you realize that life is not about anything but

Liv hated it when he left parables undone.  Fucking stupid.

He figured something else out, but it was unhelpful.

The thing he figured out was as follows:

Whatever he did when trying to fight back against Hasdrubal, it was wrong.  And Hasdrubal felt the same twisted, frustrated pleasure (or pain) in his being wrong that Liv felt when people were wrong.  He felt viciously toward people who didn't get it.  There was something so clear and pure about frustration at people who were wrong, like water or alcohol; a liquid that washed away sticky second thoughts.  They just didn't get it, they deserved to get pounded, and then deserved it again for taking it, or for realizing they deserved it in the first place.

Trying to sort out the infinite regression of weakness and shame gave him a fucking headache.  So did psychic training.

Liv had decided that Hasdrubal had probably picked him because of that, because of how he had reacted to people who were wrong.  He had called a lot of people idiots in his head.  He had flattened them out and then wanted to stomp on them.  He had muttered snide things in the back of the class, and felt vicious and uncomfortable.  Insecure in his judgment, as though it were a bad haircut.  One that left his neck hot.  He realized eventually that he was the wrong one, the totally deluded one, and also lonely, because his judgments all turned out to be judgments of himself.  

... well, other people could be fucking idiots, too.  

Liv was nearly eighteen years old.

He had mastered several training simulations and remained in the top ten percent in his classes, though he did better in mathematics and the special coding module he'd qualified for than he did in biology or psychology.  He didn't like things that required context.  He tended, he realized, to trap himself in systems and could unravel them very well from the inside, but he couldn't find his way out again.  He could break codes, but writing them demanded a lot of effort.  

He had grown two inches and gained fifteen pounds in the past two years.  He had done fairly well at hand-to-hand combat, had discovered he had really shit lungs for endurance training... had found a lower-stage Candidate he'd sparred with once for fun, pulling his punches.  Judgmental little fucker.  With freckles and great hair.  Loki.  Liv secretly, grudgingly liked him.  He was also exceedingly jealous of him.

Hasdrubal sometimes showed remarkable kindness, which left Liv wondering if his occasional brutality came merely out of disappointment.  He could understand disappointment.  At present Liv was on a speaking ban.  No talking except during classes, when asked by instructors.  This was to get him to communicate better psychically, but he still couldn't do that well.

He'd been allowed home to visit his mother (accompanied by one of the Pilots, of course) and she had fed him cake and given him a pair of stylish sneakers.  And six pairs of matching gray socks with red seams.

He had no friends.  

A message popped up on his terminal screen once he had settled in to do this homework.  Marked 'Read At Once.'


----------------------------


Hasdrubal was asleep when Liv, allowed into the Citadel on his request, reached the medical wing.  He was breathing hard and weirdly conscious that he was making more noise than he should.  Hasdrubal would be pissed, he might do that thing with his throat again, Liv hated that.

But no, he didn't have to worry at present, because early that morning Haz had had a heart attack.  Almost died, but had managed to resuscitate himself telekinetically while his Dragon fetched the medics.  Vascular disease, obviously they all knew about it.  A lower-caste ailment, said the small bigoted part of his brain.  Hasdrubal had been Lower-Caste.  He always forgot that.  He remembered it when he went up to the nurse and telephatically asked permission to grab a seat.  He found a blue plastine chair out in the hall and dragged in next to his mentor's bed.

Hasdrubal usually looked buoyant despite his weight, but now he looked weighed down by his own body, like a punctured inflatable raft of flesh.  There was a fresh, healing incision on his chest, nearly lost amidst the jumble of burn scars that already corded his skin; they had put in a defibrillator.  Hasdrubal had his arms crossed beneath it.  Liv could see the outline of the device under the purple of surgical bruises.  

Ha.  Liv thought it looked sort of Dragonish.  He really was like a Dragon, Hasdrubal.  That would piss him off.  He liked to rant about how very important it was to be human.

No, he didn't look like a Dragon.  He looked fragile.  Human.  Liv found himself wavering between the desire to shove a pillow over his face, go see, fuck you, see, you're fucking weak too, or hit him--or kiss him, something not sexual but... obviously what Haz called his Daddy issues.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Liv rubbed at his eyes and breathed out, sickened by the medicinal smell of the air and overwhelmed by Hasdrubal's appearance.

When he looked up, he saw that Haz's eyes had opened, blinking slits beaded with stickines.  They shone green at Liv.  His eyes were so green.  Like glass or grass.  Liv thought it a frightening and unpleasant color, as eye colors went.

"Su-lo," he said, making two clipped words of it.  His voice sounded more gravelly than usual, bumping over little pebbles of pain, but his eyes caught and held Liv's.  "Weh-heh-hell."  He cleared his throat, a pitifully soft sound, wincing at itself, and pushed himself upright against his pillow.  "I ain't no Dragon, boyo," he added quietly, and Liv was struck by the utter lack of malice and by the fact that for the first time he realized--the Lower-Caste accent wasn't an affectation.  It was how he'd probably grown up speaking. It made him seem more and more vulnerable.  Liv's stomach tightened uncomfortably.

"Ain't... no..."  Hasdrubal coughed and cleared his throat again, then reached waveringly for the cup of water by his bed.  He finished it in a gulp and put his head back, eyes shut again, the empty cup flung sideways, rolling around its base in a half-circle and spilling tiny drops across the tabletop.  "... Dragon."  He was looking at Liv again.  "You have too many fuckin' feelings, Sulo.  Delicate ssssensibilitiessss ."  He hissed it between weakly parted teeth.  

Liv twisted his hands together and opened his own mouth, an echo, as almost always, of his mentor's movement.  He shut it when he realized what he was doing, then, angrily, spoke anyway.  What the fuck could Haz do to him now?  "Oh.  Fuck you," he said, crisply and deliberately.  

"Fuck me, that's right."  Hasdrubal leaned back, smiling.  "Ah yeah.  I am the measure of all things, isn't that right.  'Man is the measure of all things.  And all things, Sulo darlin', are the measure of man."  He thumped at the lump in his chest.  Liv winced; Has didn't.  He suddenly looked much stronger.  "Painkillers, lovey, I can't feel a Gods-damned thing.  All fuckin' things, I tell ya, it's the only way to live."  He'd moved himself up so he was sitting more or less upright, his head higher than Liv's, his chest moving up and down a little with the exertion.  Liv was quite aware of the little bones that ran between the slackened skin of his pectorals.  He looked old.

That was the one thing.  He'd sometimes thought.  That Haz was afraid of dying, how could you not be afraid of dying.  Well.  He'd shown Liv often enough that there were things nearly as bad as death, but certainly it was only for Liv that that was the case.  Hasdrubal was good at life.  

"Feah," Haz said.  "You and your fuckin' weaknesses, Sulo, you got so many the only way I've gotten you to cope is by puttin' one against the othah.  You gotta realize, boyo."  He sounded kind.  This was so wrong.  Liv twisted his fingers together.  Hasdrubal's face had softened, not into a pained expression but something else, and he was looking at Liv.  One hand shot out and grabbed Liv by the wrist before he could move, pinching between the tendons.  Getting his attention.  His grip was just as strong as ever.  

"The reason I do what I do--"  Pulling him closer.  "'Cause you were wonderin' about deathbed, uh, regrets or somethin'--"

"I didn't think you needed a reason," Liv said, as he never would have if Haz hadn't been... whatever he was.  "I thought it was all about pleasure."

Hasdrubal's fingers tightened to excruciation, but Liv had learned to ignore little things like that and just let the side of his mouth pull taut, absorbing the discomfort.  They had come close together, Haz leaning over the side of his bed and Liv sitting forward in his chair.  

"Listen to me, Livos," he said, but his voice was light and his face had taken back some color, "You and your stupid mindfucking shit.  About everything--everything's shame, everything's self-fuckin'-hate.  Pain.  Fucking.  Eating.  Breathing, for fuck's sake.  All that weakness, you gotta go through it and burn it out.  It's your own godsdamn weaknesses, boyo, and I am sorry but you're only batterin' yourself against yourself.  Fuckin'--jerk-off!"  He pulled Liv's hand up and down in a parody.  "And you... fucking... like it!"  He let go at last and withdrew, laughing to himself and shaking his head, going to refill the cup he'd let slide away on the side table.  He took a long, long drink and put it down again, and his hands weren't shaking.  

"I am glad you came to visit me, Sulo," he said at last.  "But don't waste your time feelin' sorry for me.  I am a Dragon, Sulo, after all."  His grin was wide.   "I am a Dragon and enough of a human bein' to be one."

He paused.  "Now then..."

It was only after Liv left, and, back in his room, leaned over the sink and watched the foam of toothpaste circle the drain, that.  That he realize Haz had needed him.  And maybe hadn't had anyone else.
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