Lease on Life
Jan. 1st, 2020 12:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shinonCharacters: Ned, Aubrey, Duck, Minerva, assorted background characters
Word count: ~4000
Warnings: Language
Notes: Yuletide treat for
You just hear the wind. And you just see the stars above you.
They're beautiful.
And then... they're gone.
And you get the sense that time has passed, although you don't know how much. You see Aubrey – your friend, Aubrey Little, who you lied to – and she's crying, and shaking you by the shoulders. But you are not inside that body anymore.
There's a pendant around her neck and it glows brighter than anything you've ever seen. It still catches your eye, just the way it did back then, at her house, before everything went wrong.
She's saying, “Ned – Ned, you bastard, not like this! This isn't what I meant!”
And you clear your throat, and you say: “Well, if you're that upset about it...”
“Am I being detained?” said the ghost of Edmund K. Chicane. “Can I be detained?” When he concentrated, he could make his hand phase through the table. He would never have to manually crack a safe again. He'd never have to rely on some phone app to bypass any stupid security system – although he never should have in the first place. If he'd died sooner, how much trouble would it have saved?
“Well, I dunno,” said Deputy Dewey. “I'm still figurin' this all out, same as you, but if you wanna play Ghost Cops and Ghost Robbers, you can try to leave 'n I can try to stop you.”
Ned sighed. “Thanks, Dewey, I'll pass.” It occurred to him that he was technically the victim here. “Technically, as the victim here -” No, that felt wrong. He'd died, sure. But that was turning out to have almost no consequences. Not for him, anyway. “Look, go easy on our dear mutual friend Ms. Wilson, would you? She didn't mean to kill or... en-ghostify anyone.”
“Well, shoot, Ned, that's nice of you, but I'm just a ghost deputy and I don't think I got much say in what happens to Pigeon. But I'll pass that along, see what Sheriff Owens says.” He paused, looking thoughtful. It was not a look you saw often on Deputy Dewey. “'Tween you and me, I think if you don't wanna hurt anybody, a good first step is not pointin' rifles at folks.”
“Dewey,” said Ned, with a second and larger sigh, “you're wiser than you know.”
He had been idly passing his hand through the table as he spoke – but now found it was stuck there, half in and half out of the pinewood tabletop. He couldn't pull it out. He stood up, for better leverage, and jerked his arm back. The whole table came with it.
“Say,” he said casually, “my esteemed comrade in – transitional existence. How do I get out of this thing?”
Dewey leaned down to look at the table, and Ned's wrist sticking out of it, and then rocked back on his heels, laughing. “Guess you're being detained!”
“Oh. Great.”
Ned supposed, technically, he didn't need to walk anymore. He could just drift ominously from place to place. He probably didn't even need to stick that close to the ground, which he could barely feel anyway, like he was wearing thick rubber soles and also both his feet were permanently asleep. Old habits died hard, though, and so, days later, he was walking into the Cryptonomica for the first time since his death, and he passed Aubrey and Duck and a giant alien woman walking out.
Ah, shit, he thought, How do I turn invisible again? He settled for making “you-didn't-see-me-here” gestures at Duck when their eyes met.
But Duck, with the best will in the world, couldn't trick a department-store mannequin.
“Why are you staring at the ground, Duck Newton?” the alien woman boomed. “I can assure you that your shoes are tied.”
“I, uh – buddy of mine started a – rock collection – asked me to look out for, um, interesting gravel, so I'm doing her a favor –”
“Really? Because I do not think your fascination with the local geology is genuine. You hastily averted your gaze from something in the parking lot.” She came to a stop, and looked where Duck had been looking seconds before. “Oh! Hello. You must be the deceased colleague Duck Newton has spoken to me about.”
“Nah,” said Duck, “that's a projection. From a projector. It's a hologram.”
“There are a number of reasons I find that unlikely. Come, Duck Newton, will you not greet your friend?”
Aubrey had come to a stop a few paces behind them. “Hi, Ned,” she said, quietly. “I got your note.”
Oh, shit. He'd forgotten he left letters. He tried not to remember what kind of embarrassing crap was in them. “Hi, Aubrey.”
“I've got some stuff to take care of right now, and... I think I need time to process all this, but we should probably talk. Later.”
You'd think that, being dead already, there would be no reason to retain the capacity for such acute dread. But there it was. “Um,” he said. “Yeah. Sure. Hey – how's Dani?”
Aubrey smiled, the way she always had when she thought about Dani, but this time there was an extra softness to it, almost a glow. “She's fine,” she said. “She's gonna be fine. Thank you.”
“Uh, yeah, don't sweat it. Tell her I said...” What the hell did you say, at times like this? “Tell her I said something weird.”
Aubrey raised her eyebrows. “That's what you're going with? I mean, I'm not saying it's not on brand, but -”
“Yep. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.”
“Well, okay. Where can I find you after this?”
“I dunno. The astral plane?”
“I mean, are you gonna be sticking around here?”
“Man, that question's got layers.” And he wasn't sure of the answers to any of them.
“Okay, forget it,” said Aubrey, with a flicker of frustration. “Janelle's waiting for me, but – don't think you've escaped or anything.”
No, that he hadn't was abundantly clear.
“You gave them the letters?”
Kirby was not cowed, which was disappointing. What was being a ghost for if you didn't scare anybody? “I didn't think you were coming back. And what was I supposed to do, hold onto stuff plainly addressed to somebody else?”
“Yes,” Ned snapped. He sank into a chair – and had to pay attention to avoid sinking any further through it, which was a real not-pain in the not-ass. “Well, I could still leave. Do we need blockade runners?” It'd be especially convenient to run the blockade in one direction only.
“Can you even drive?”
“Gee, Kirby, can I drive?” he shot back sarcastically, and then thought about it. Manipulating even one object at a time took work – would he end up having to pick between the steering wheel and the pedals? “I, uh,” he said, in a more subdued tone, “I should ask Moira. You know Moira? She's a ghost.”
“What do you think would be waiting for you if you got through, anyway? You're the ghost of a local TV personality.”
“Oh, have some faith. Nothing is strictly local in the age of the InterNed.” Kirby rolled his eyes. “Seriously. I have more pull than you think.”
“Uh-huh. Well, either way, welcome back, boss.” He surveyed their surroundings. “Not that there's much business left to be boss of.”
Ned followed his gaze around the inside of the Cryptonomica. It looked subtly different now – small and dingy and kind of grotesque. Not even grotesque in the fun, intentional way, but just... cheap. The overhead lights buzzed fitfully and there were dead bugs trapped behind the window screens. This always happened – if you stayed somewhere long enough, one day you would wake up and suddenly see it the way it really was, and wonder what the hell you'd been doing all that time. The cure was easy: just chuck your bags in the car and step on the gas.
He'd been in Kepler so long he'd started to think this place was different. He had wanted Kepler to be different. If he'd just gotten the hell out of Dodge instead of turning back to the archway, he'd have never had this moment, and for the rest of his life he'd have thought of this town as the home that got away.
He didn't want to deal with this now.
As it so happened, Aubrey's appointments with Janelle over the past couple months had all been geared at pulling Arlo Thacker out of cold storage. As it so happened, even a fully lucid Thacker still gave Ned the creeps.
“I'm just saying,” Ned was just saying, “in my capacity as a, uh, as a sort of Pine Guard emeritus, I don't think the Quell's actually our biggest problem here.” And Thacker, in between handfuls of existentially horrifying gorp, was just staring at him. The Cryptonomica had seemed like a fine place for strategy meetings at first, and of course Ned didn't begrudge the Sylvans the use of the van to get to and from the springs, but...
...Everything was starting to smell like pepperoni.
“Just to be clear,” said Aubrey, frowning, “the thing that's eating a planet and turning people feral... is not the problem?”
Ned scratched at his beard. “All right, put that way, it sounds pretty callous, but hear me out. The Quell's a threat to Sylvain, and it needs to be dealt with. But the abominations aren't coming from there.” He looked at Minerva. “Duck told us a little about your situation, with your planet and the other world. Something out there wants a repeat.”
Duck leaned forward across the table and said conspiratorially, “I told you guys it's aliens.”
“Uh,” said Ned. “Could be? I saw some stuff in that hotel and – I'm not sure what all of it meant. But the shapeshifter spoke to me, too, right before the end. So, all the information I was able to glean, you're welcome to it. See, I'm trying out this new policy. Complete transparency.” He laughed. He was the only one laughing.
“Forgive me if I misunderstand, spectral human thief,” said Minerva, blinking those huge alien eyes, “but you are translucent at most.”
Duck muttered, “It was a joke, Minerva. You don't have to acknowledge that.”
“Oh,” said Minerva. “Was it a good one?”
“No.”
“Now, hang on,” said Ned, “can we workshop that 'spectral thief' thing? That could be the start of something.”
“It was intended as a literal descriptor, not a springboard for japes. However, if you find this turn of phrase serendipitous, use it freely. Of greater concern is the intelligence you possess about the nature of our enemy. Please share.” And granted that Ned hadn't gotten the hang of reading Minerva's subtly inhuman facial expressions yet, but that right there was one you absolutely didn't fuck with.
He spread his hands. “Sure. It's what I came back for.” And who could say? Maybe that was true.
Thacker threw his walking stick through some guy's hand. Even if Ned hadn't already planned to stay on this side of the gate, and even if he wasn't sure anything could even hurt him at this point, that was another point in favor of giving the guy a wide berth.
“Dear friends,” he said, “esteemed companions, I think this is where we part ways.”
Aubrey said, “We don't have time for this, Ned.”
“We have access to this whole facility now, right?”
“Right,” she said, dubious.
“So why don't we have the people who can actually put a dent in the Quell go fight it?” And why not let Mama get rescued by people she'd actually want to see? But that wasn't the point. “I have a small but dedicated fanbase full of total computer geeks. What if I grab all the data I can from here, about the gateway and how it works...” He waved at a bank of computers. “And see what they make of it? If we can use that to hunt down whoever made it -”
“So we're hacking the FBI,” said Duck. “So we're leaking FBI shit to a bunch of B-movie nerds.”
“It's got legs, right?” said Ned.
Aubrey brightened. “Actually, I kinda love it.”
“Love it,” said Duck, deadpan.
Thacker said, “Glad that's settled. Can we get a move on?”
Ned wasn't much of a hacker himself, but with a little bit of cold reading and the simple fact of being a big spooky ghost, he was able to intimidate one of the technicians into decrypting some files. As he watched her work, he was composing the forum post:
Dear friends, this may well be the last request I ever make of you. But it represents a chance to change the fate of our world, and to avenge our fallen brother GregorMortis.
He waffled some on whether to mention his own death. How would he describe himself in those terms? Your temporarily slain eccentric uncle-type? Better not.
Other friends of mine are going into battle now, and I don't know if they'll come back alive -
Well, no, by the time he was out of here and got to write this, he'd know, one way or the other. That would change the whole tenor of the post. God forbid.
Aubrey, I hope you know what you're doing.
Sylvain was alive again, and when he and Mama and Dani and Agent Stern went through the portal, Ned had brought printouts.
“It's aliens!” said Duck, pumping his fist. “The Internet agrees with me! And when has the Internet ever been wrong?”
“I dunno,” said Aubrey, “Yelp has let me down pretty hard a couple times.”
Duck stared at her with an air of, I'm not sure if you missed the sarcasm or if you're also doing a bit, but either way I'm disgusted with you. She just grinned.
“I myself am an alien relative to this planet, Duck Newton. Is extraterrestrial involvement really cause for surprise?”
“Don't be a buzzkill, Minerva.”
When Minerva opened the portal within the portal, Ned almost didn't go along. He'd done all he reasonably could, and it was hard to imagine fighting alongside Aubrey and Duck after everything he'd told them. Aubrey in particular was some kind of awakened demiurge now and her eyes were searing orange, which made her pretty hard to look in the face, in the literal as well as the psychological sense.
Then he imagined Kirby saying, “You run a museum of the weird and you're passing on this?”
So when everyone had finished their preparations and the time came to leave, Ned just – showed up. Acted like he belonged there, exactly the way you were supposed to bluff people if they caught you in the middle of a job. And it worked here, too. Nobody even questioned him.
And there they all were – Aubrey, Duck, Thacker, Minerva, Vincent, Mama, Ned – in the world between the worlds, waiting for some kind of digital hivemind of dead aliens to pass judgment on Earth and Sylvain, and... this was all a bit much, wasn't it?
Letters flared into being over the terminal dome. QUERY: SHOULD PAIRING 14198, EARTH-SYLVAIN, BE GRANTED CLEMENCY?
They waited.
13.11% AFFIRM.
“You're kidding me,” said Ned. Transport pods began to slam down all around the room, locking them in. Aubrey and Duck engaged in a quick whisper conference he was too far away to hear. The others assumed battle stances. Four-armed beings started swarming up out of the core. “You're kidding me,” said Ned, louder.
“Something you wanna share, Ned?” said Mama.
“Hey, you!” he shouted toward the Deliberative Operational Mind. “You don't understand the genre conventions you're playing with. Or legal procedure, now I'm thinking about it. We have to try to talk this out first. When negotiations fail, then you can rush us and my friends here will kick all your asses. But don't you want to avoid that? Or are we abandoning that pretense already?”
The light beings paused in their advance. But on the perimeter of the room, the organic printers were still running. There wouldn't be much time.
“You call yourselves nonviolent,” he said. “All these eons you've prided yourselves on keeping your hands clean. But it takes more than that to secure peace. You don't have to be the guy with the gun or the sentient planet with crazy fire powers to really, really hurt someone.” He spread his hands. “Look, I get it. I do. You're scared, and you don't think there's anyone in the universe you can trust. And you think maybe if they just... ran into an accident before they could hurt you, everything would be fine. But you can't make Minerva wipe out a planet and call yourselves the good guys.” He took a step toward them. “I can't put this woman's innocent family in the crossfire” - he waved back toward Aubrey, but didn't dare look - “and say I'm the good guy. So from one ghost to a thousand others: this is bullshit and you need to stop. Stop lying to yourselves, stop killing people, stop – stop trying to hang onto this moral high ground. If you wanna start redeeming yourselves, stop all of this, and send us home.”
There were several seconds of resounding silence, even the printers going still.
“That's it,” said Ned, trying to sound flippant. “That's my part in this supernatural courtroom drama. Big rousing speech in our defense. You know.”
QUERY: CAN THE INTRUDERS OR ANY SUBSET THEREOF BE PERMITTED TO LEAVE?
14.79% AFFIRM.
The printers whirred into life again. The four-armed beings resumed their advance.
“Welp,” said Mama, and snatched up a length of metal pipe.
The dust settled.
Well, the dust was in the process of settling, and the doors to Earth and Sylvain stood open before them.
“I could stay here,” Ned said, pacing around the chamber. “Imagine if I could broadcast from this place. Coming to you live from somewhere outside Euclidean geometry, it's Hyperspace Ghost East to West.”
“Don't fuckin' bother if you can't get Zorak on there, bud,” said Duck. “Don't do that to my high school memories.”
Aubrey was off in the corner, glowing a little, apparently talking to Dani. Everyone else had made their decision. Ned's was basically a no-brainer, too – he could maybe pick up a few ghost lessons from more experienced Sylvans, but he was still more human than not. He'd just be a tourist in Sylvain. Anyway, Sylvain had at least as much reason to be angry at him as Aubrey did. That night he and Boyd had put the both of them in an unthinkable position. There was a direct line between that robbery and unleashing the Quell.
But what was left on Earth? He'd burned a lot of bridges in Kepler, and outside Kepler, being a ghost might prove a serious social impediment. Sure, there were a number of handy features if he'd meant to return to a life of crime (an afterlife of crime?), but – he didn't.
“Boo,” said Aubrey, no longer glowing. He started. She had apparently snuck up on him while he was lost in thought. “The tables have turned. I always wanted to spook a ghost.” She nodded toward the doors. “Are we ready to go?”
“You and Dani get everything sorted out?”
“Yup. Backpacking through Sylvain, righting wrongs and doing magic 'n shit. Think Thacker can suggest a good route?”
“That does kind of seem like his thing, yeah.”
“Cool. So. Ned.” She put her fingertips together. “We never got to have that talk.”
Abruptly Duck said “Okay, catch ya later,” and grabbed Minerva's hand and vanished through the Earth door.
Ned flicked his gaze uneasily back toward Aubrey. “Well, uh. Busy couple of months.”
“No shit.”
“And you said you needed to process, or something.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You... done processing?”
“No, not really. But I know for sure there are two things I want to say right now.” She drew in a breath, shutting her eyes. “The first is thank you.”
Ned said nothing.
“The second is, you should go back to Kepler. The town needs the Cryptonomica, and the Cryptonomica needs you.”
He heard himself blurt out, “Kind of a dump, though, isn't it?”
Aubrey frowned up at him. “Okay, look, here's what I think. When you know a person really well – or a place – or a person who also is a place – there's this point where you suddenly see everything, and you're like, 'whoa, there's a lot of super ugly and awkward stuff here! Don't like that!'”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Been there.”
“But when you really care about something, you stick it out. You try to have faith that, hey, maybe you didn't see everything, and if you stick it out through the weird bad parts it'll be worth it. Things will be good again on the other side.” She looked down, rubbing self-consciously at her arms. “Sometimes you're wrong. Sometimes there isn't anything better after the shitty part, and you get burned. But... I think it's a gamble worth taking.”
“Aubrey,” he said, at length, because there was nothing else he could say, “it's been an honor.”
A digitized voice piped up from behind them: “Yo, dudes, isn't this kind of much? You still have an archway and shit. You can, like, visit.”
“Wait,” said Aubrey, turning to the spherical computer console. Billy waved. “Were we not supposed to have an archway?”
Billy moved his hands. “Oh, yeah,” said the voice, moments later. “My people were totally gonna mess that thing up. But I guess Minerva got a heads-up from somewhere and did sword things to the portal before we could. I dunno. Still works, though. Ha ha.”
“Well, shit!” said Aubrey. “Guess I'm off to Sylvain, then. I have a lot of work to do.” She nodded at Ned. “You do, too.”
“Maybe so,” said Ned, thoughtful. “It may be I can still influence worldly affairs from...” Ominous pause. “...The other side.”
Aubrey half-laughed. “Ned, it's called 'Earth.' Get it right.”
“Oh, sorry. We've been over this, haven't we?”
She walked toward her door. He drifted toward his.
She said, “I'll be in touch. But not, like, soon.”
“Nah, I get that.”
“I have a whole planet to explore, and a lot of rebuilding to do, and I should probably start by learning how to build stuff?” She stared down at her hands. “Unless I can just summon stuff out of the ether?”
“Hey, yeah, no obligation. Look me up afterward if you want to, and if you don't, don't.” She was the aggrieved party, after all. And that grievance wasn't the kind to wash away easily. “I defer completely to you.” She nodded once, and smiled at him, like she was willing to wait out the weird bad parts, and someday, be friends again. And once again, it was hard to look her in the eye. “Anyway – you and Dani take good care of each other.”
“We will. I'll tell her you said hey?”
“Please.”
“See you around, then.” She turned again and waved toward the console. “Later, Billy!”
“Pizza,” said the flat voice from the ceiling. “Just kidding, I can say more words now. Bye, Aubrey.”
And she ducked through the doorway, and in a flash, she was gone.
Ned stood staring at Earth – at Kepler. Finally he drew himself up. “Billy, I'm going back.”
“Good call. You're a cool guy, but I dunno about having roommates. I already have a lot of messes to clean up.”
“I commend you, Billy. You're facing the consequences of your misdeeds with considerable fortitude.” He hesitated before the door a moment longer. “I'll...” he said, but didn't know how much he could promise. “Let's both do our best.”
“Coming to you from the world's preeminent museum of the macabre, the Cryptonomica in Kepler, West Virginia – it's a brand-new season of the never more aptly named Saturday Night Dead! Friends, I may barely show up on film anymore, but I have the privilege to remain your host and spiritual conductor, Ned 'the Phantom Thief' Chicane, and I can't wait to share what I've got in store for you tonight...”
