Variety Pack #2: Alternatives

All of the following excerpts consist of the same two characters, Alia and West. Some of their friends show up too. These all come from a selection of stories called Fragments, in which I used these characters to create 20 stories in different realities, time periods, and situations. It’s a little bit of fictional “If Only…”  that seems somehow appropriate for the last day of the year. Happy 2010.

—

When she failed to scoff or yell or turn away in disgust, he ventured to ask, “Are you new, then?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Yeah, sorry.” He glanced at the schedule crumpled in her hand. “Where you headed?”

She smoothed the paper out and squinted at it with blue eyes a few shades darker than his own. “Magickal Defense. I have no idea how people find anything in this place! I followed one boy’s directions, but I ended up in the wrong building. And then I got my foot caught in a trick stair.”

“Sounds like you’ve gotten the normal first-week runaround,” he said sympathetically. “It’ll get better, as long as you–” That sentence ended with, As long as you aren’t me, but that seemed a little much for her first day, so instead he continued, “Here, I’ve got that class too. It’s just up the hall. I’ll walk you.” Belatedly, he stuck out his hand to shake. “I’m West, by the way.”

There were a thousand things attached to that introduction. I’m a vampire, but I have a soul and a guilty conscience. I’m the school pariah, but that’s fine because I can’t stand anyone here. You’ll never talk to me again when you find out who I am in another ten minutes, so I don’t know why I’m bothering anyway.

She shook his hand firmly and smiled up at him. “Alia. Alia Pryce. Thank you for the help, West. You’re the first decent person I’ve met all day.”

It turned out later on that there were lots of things attached to her introduction too. Things like, I happen to have been raised by an organization specifically trained to kill vampires and Your cousin killed my mother and I was actually assigned to be your friend to kill you, but it’s turning out differently than I expected.

—

Later that night, Alia finds herself on the porch, tea in hand, watching Aya and Hope gamboling on the lawn. West joins her and they sit companionably in the fall air.

“Who would’ve thought it?” West says with a shake of his head. “She’s a great mom.”

Alia finishes off her tea and puts the mug aside. “You know, I thought she might be, if we ever lasted this long.”

He glances over thoughtfully. “Did you ever think we would?”

She considers that as she watches Aya tumble dramatically into the leaves, Hope dangling in her outstretched arms, both laughing at their twig-stuck hair. She feels West’s leg against hers, his presence comfortable and familiar, and thinks of all the things they need to do before they take over the Council on Monday. The air is cool, the sun setting, and she feels a warm weight in her chest at the rightness of it all.

“I hoped,” she answers him honestly. “On my braver days, I think I hoped for this exactly.”

—

Three and a half weeks after the world didn’t end and the Council mostly exploded, West started to admit to himself that maybe Alia was gone this time after all. As soon as he let the thought in the world grayed and he felt sick. He took several deep, slow breaths where he sat on his bed, and wondered what exactly he was supposed to do now.

The vampire stood up slowly and went to go find Micah. He could get through the funeral first—there would be time to melt down and run and kill something (anything) after Alia had a nice burial with her friends and family and—

“Micah!” he shouted to keep from losing it.

“Down here!” his friend called back from what sounded like outside.

West tramped down the steps, threw open the front door, and came face to face with Alia Pryce. They stared at each other for a moment. She was bruised and scraped, and wearing completely different clothes than the ones they’d been looking for her body in. Her hair was about three inches shorter, for no apparent reason he could see.

“I’m back,” she told him, with what he thought was less than the appropriate amount of apology in her voice. “Sorry about the delay.”

—

What he absolutely does not count on is the door being opened by an Alia Pryce that has never met him: a woman with Micah McCallister’s ring on her finger and his last name, and apparently his child about four months on the way if her rounded belly is any indication. “Do I know you?” she asks politely, and swipes loose hair back from her eyes with a hand half-coated in flour.

He stares at her blankly. “I’m, uh—I’m an old friend. From the…Council?”

Her eyes shutter unexpectedly. “Look, I don’t know how to make this any more clear to you people—we’re not interested in working for you, and we never will be.” She gives him a critical look-over, and it suddenly occurs to him that she seems a whole lot older than his version. “You’re a little young to be a Council delivery boy, aren’t you?”

Before he can answer, shouts start up behind him. West turns, tensed and ready to fight. He’s gobsmacked into submission as Micah McCallister comes up the walk, a little blonde girl running ahead and a matching boy cradled in his arms, sound asleep.

—

Two years after the apocalypse, they settle themselves on the Continent, where there’s less chance of seeing someone they know decayed and gray and trying to kill them. They avoid the safe places they created, live on their own. It’s not that they want to be together, per say. Alia’s simply forgotten how to be without him at all, and ensuring their mutual survival is an easy habit from better days that serves them now. Occasionally they speak of things and people gone before, but it hurts too much.

Three years after the apocalypse, they’re still alive, but they haven’t survived.

—

She gave the side of his head a stern look. “West.” There was a lot packed into that word. Her hand reached up of its own volition to brush a wet strand of hair away from his eyes. “You’re always welcome, wherever I am. You know that.”

“Thank you. It’s just…” she recognized the expression on his face that said he wished he hadn’t started. But to his credit he finished it, without looking her in the eye. “If I depend on you for everything, what happens when there’s only me left?”

She stared at him, a little gobsmacked. “For the record, I was talking about the summer. We were making life plans?”

West waved her off good-naturedly. “No, no, just had a freakout there. I’m done.” He settled back onto his elbows.

“Good.” She settled next to him, arm pressed against his. “Besides, your life expectancy is probably half mine, even if you are supposed to be immortal. You get into far more trouble.”

They stayed like that for countless more minutes. At some point he sat upright and leaned against the trunk of the tree, and she found her head pillowed on his leg. She had a tilted, monochromatic view of his face above her, surrounded by the dark dripping branches and the gray sky and the black stone of the School. She reached up to brush a disconcerting raindrop off his face where it trickled down his cheek like a tear.“It’d be enough,” she told him so quietly she half hoped it would blend in with the rain and be lost all together. He looked down at her curiously, so she shrugged and explained, “To know you’d remember me, after…well. It would be enough.”

Variety Pack #1: Action and Inaction

This is my first shot at posting a bunch of story snippets that don’t actually go together, except that they’re all centered around a similar theme. In this case I’ve chosen to focus on action and inaction: various moments when a character or characters are faced with a choice and must decide to do or not to do. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read any of the stories these go to, as this is more thematic, tonal exercise than anything else.

-

The house was empty now, of course. It had been for a long time. Some people, that hadn’t been in town back when it happened, thought that the place had always been empty of any kind of family or people or any life at all. Glancing at it now, it was certainly easy to think that way, if you didn’t know better. It was just a house, as long as you didn’t really look at it.

No one ever went inside the house, or into the yard out back. The townspeople weren’t all given to believing superstitious urban myth, but none of them were stupid. They lived right near the place, after all. They went by it when they couldn’t go around. They saw what happened every year.

During the spring, the huge old half-dead crab apple tree in the front yard covered the roof with thick white-pink blossoms that hid much of the squalor, and probably fell right through the gaping holes in the shingles, down into the abandoned rooms below.

Summer brought the faint stench of old wood decaying in the humid heat of long days; a few windows always got broken during this season by adventurous kids throwing rocks on dares. In the fall, huge piles of dead leaves drifted up against the stained once-blue walls and stayed there until they rotted into the soil. It was appropriate, in a depressing, maudlin kind of way that everyone in the neighborhood tried very hard not to notice.

*

By now, it should be obvious that Professor Dallancy never made his train. This is because he was distracted by a small crowd gathered to the side of the street, near the mouth of an alley between two shops. Curious, he thought. It should here be noted that Arthur Dallancy was not like other people–he was completely incapable of leaving curiosity unanswered. He went to see what was going on, and this is, of course, when he met the vampire Yuki, even if the undead in question was still unconscious in the snow.

“He’s dead!” the woman next to Arthur said hysterically.

“Yes,” he murmured, rather surprised. “Dead, but not finished yet, I think.”

A vampire in the middle of Plain London, on Christmas Eve. Dallancy reached out with a few particular sense towards the cold body and found–no. Impossible, and yet there it was, right where a human being’s was meant to be. A soul. The biggest question he had ever encountered. There was no recourse, really, not for a man so used to entering horribly complex situations without fear or hesitation.

With a string of long silent words and a deliberate, slow motion of his hand, the vampire’s body disappeared. The faint wisp of smoke left around the space, remnant of the transport spell, lingered briefly in the shape of a body before dispersing. Arthur cleared his throat and turned to the hysterical woman to ask, as calmly as he could possibly manage, “I’m sorry–what is everyone looking at?”

He stepped away into the street, already making the gestures of the spell again, identical to the one that had just sent the unexpected visitor away. When he disappared three steps later, leaving a vague halo of gray smoke in the air, no one notcied. Five minutes later, the people gathered by the ally were all well on their way to convincing themselves that they’d been seeing things.

It is amazing, really, what the plain human mind will let people like Arthur Dallancy get away with.

*

Ano saw him, of course. Her eyes went straight to his, and their gazes held there, practically solid in the air. Her Almarian eyes were green, no telling gold to show fear or rage or despair. She wasn’t afraid. Becken hated her for that—for being calm so easily when she was held at gun point and he was hiding there just twenty feet above her. When this place, his world would come crashing down without her in it. When he’d never even told her.

She must have seen something of it in his eyes, though, the split-second she hold it. Her face softened just a fraction. Her eyes dropped at the corners. She’d never said it out loud to him before, but he recognized the message now. I’m sorry.

And that-that was the absolute final straw because how could she possibly–

Becken didn’t move. Because he suddenly understood the message. Not I’m sorry I’m not doing anything. She meant, I’m sorry–there’s nothing you can do.

*

“It’s completely atypical of his historical pattern,” Annison murmured. “I’m beginning to think that he’s not just incognito; I think that except for the people on this beach, no one even knows he’s here. Can you imagine? One of the Greats hidden in the World, inactive all this time right under our very noses.”

Rose had given up on playing; she flopped back into the sand, arms spread above her. York winced at the thought of where all that dirt would end up later. Quentin sat beside her, the two in their own little universe that ignored the barrier between Plain and World that so separated them. Yes, he could begin to understand why Quentin never risked her. “Until now.” He hadn’t meant to say the words aloud.

“Until now,” Anni agreed. “This is something new. He’s changing, and Greats aren’t supposed to do that.”

York looked at the sunlight playing over her hair and the sand clinging to her toes and his chest ached a little. “We all change,” he said, despite himself. “Especially when we’re not supposed to.”