There was something about the past few months that made the Twa Corbies, late at night, make sense all of a sudden. During the day it was tacky; beginning at around ten and magnifying exponentially each subsequent hour it got weird, and then surreal, and then absurd, and then it was something like home.

Kristopher sat on that bar stool as though she were born there, dressed in tight jeans and a loose teeshirt, hair a little tangly and looking gently windswept, sucking on a screwdriver and, although the place was far from empty, the two or three seats immediately to her right and left were. It wasn't the absent expression or the dark, blank eyes- it was the smell of the girl, a genetic signature off of which she could probably, like successful Vikings, eat out for the rest of her life. Moira's girl didn't have to put up with much, except from Moira.

The Weird Factor in Andrei’s life has gone down recently. It’s still there, waiting—but he has mostly been able to get on with his studies; mostly been able to settle into gentle, boring routine. He has unmagical friends, or if they’re magical they don’t say anything about it. He attends class, writes papers, channel-surfs, and hangs out with people who don’t know anything about Death capital-D.

Kristopher probably doesn’t fit into this category.

He’s here anyway, dressed in a long-sleeve shirt in spite of that whole ‘summertime’ thing; jeans, also. He slouches in, a tall and skinny S-curve of a guy. There’s something funny about his eyes, but it’s not as obvious as his hair—a thin mouse-brown with a streak of white on the left side, like he’d been in a car accident as a child and it had grown in trauma-pale. It’s a little to irregular to be a trendy dye-job; a little too white.

“Kits.”

He’s one of those people who think that saying a person’s name is basically the same as ‘hello’. He slides into the seat next to her, rubbing his arms with his thin father’s fingers.

“Fucking no smoking law, huh?” No smoking in buildings anywhere, even bars; it’s a recent Ontario law and not one that Andrei is very pleased with. Amiably, though, he considers this an appropriate opening conversational gambit. Look, we have similar interests!

Kristopher smiles. Sometimes Andrei behaves so normally it makes Tam look weird (as opposed to, I don't know, Irish). She appreciates it, even if it breaks every time he comes near her.

"Hey. Yeah, seriously. May as well never leave my own fucking porch." Kits puts her chin in her hand, looking sidelong at the guy who could probably be her brother or something, if things were really much more fucked up. Or possibly not really that much more fucked up than they already are.

"You've been holding up," she adds observantly.

“Enh,” he says dismissively, and runs a hand back through his hair (over the white streak on his left side; subconscious/habitual). He hasn’t been holding up; he’s been running in a rut of normalcy. It’s somewhere between comforting and frustrating.

He catches Kits’ look and offers her a lopsided smile in return. He would probably be annoyed if anyone told him how much the expression is reminiscent of his father’s. It’s more self-conscious, not as leeringly confident, but the familial resemblance is there.

“How’ve you been?” He’d add that he’s been busy—that he hasn’t gotten a chance to call her or send her an e-mail. He doesn’t. Blathering on excessively isn’t his style, and besides—he doesn’t feel the need. Not with Kristopher.

He does feel the need for a cigarette, though. Goddamn law.

Well- if you want to get out of a rut of normalcy, hanging out with Kristopher is a good method, if harrowing at times.

She grimaces, wrinkling her nose and showing little sharp teeth. "Ridiculous. You know. The usual. Looking for a job that doesn't involve prostituting myself for The Corporation." Giving room and board to an Irish kid here looking for his sister; fending off the increasingly bizarre house; feeding cats. The usual.

“Yeah, I hear The Corporation has gonorrhea.” He makes an attempt to catch the bartender’s eye. It’s not completely successful, so he drops a couple blue bills on the counter and waits for her to notice them.

Deprived of his usual hand activities—shoved up against a wall with them stuffed in his pocket or hunched over with them caressing a cigarette—he taps the bar idly. The last knuckles of his first and second fingers on his left hand are yellowish and well-used.

“You could try Communism; word is it uses a condom.”

"Hah." Kristopher shakes her head slightly, wearing a half-smile. "Yeah, something, anyway." And pauses.

The small talk thing was a little ridiculous- firstly, because they don't really need to, secondly because Andrei is keeping up some semblance of normal, and Kristopher isn't, and normal things Andrei might say might not make sense to Kristopher, and abnormal things Kristopher might say will just remind Andrei of irritating things.

"We should do a cook-out or something now the weather's warm." A normal thing to say. That works. Also there was the small thing of introducing him to Tam, which might or might not be necessary.

Andrei smiles and glances back over his shoulder at the bartender. He’s a little hurt he didn’t get more of a laugh; The Corporation has gonorrhea? Come on.

He returns his gaze to her as she mentions a cookout and nods.

“Yeah. We could probably both use a little fucking sun, anyhow. Heh.”

Pause.

“So.” He hadn’t come into this feeling awkward, but that feeling has been descending on him slowly for the last couple of minutes. The cloth of it is weighting on him heavily.

“Why’d you call?”

Kristopher shrugs. "You're the only person I know who gets it. At all. Got a kid staying with me while he finds his sister, but he doesn't know a lot." Read: even less than do Kristopher and Andrei, who don't know a lot either.

"And I think my mom's been visiting or something, but it's hard to tell. You know she's supposed to be dead?" she adds suddenly, looking at Andrei. So much for normal. "Did I tell you? It was on TV and everything, big pane of glass fell out of a building. But I haven't had to-" -deal with any of the things she ought to have to deal with, with a recently dead parent. Wills and funerals and stuff. She shrugs again.

Andrei stops tapping his fingers. The mention of—stuff—makes him uncomfortable, though there’ a twinkling and comforting light of superiority in it. Yeah. He and Kits—they know a bit more than does the average joe.

Also, her mom is dead. Or—something.

“No, I didn’t hear.”

Haha, now we both have a Death in the family. He stills the urge to quip inappropriately.

“Man, Kits, that fucking sucks. Is she really--? I mean? I thought she was, you know, different?”

"Yeah, she is. I don't-" Kristopher awkwardly stirs the ice in the bottom of her glass with a stirring straw. "I don't think so. Not that anything else makes sense either, but it doesn't make sense..."

She thinks of telling him about the look the woman in the television gave her, and the thing shorting out, but thinking of it only makes her shudder. Talk about nightmare material.

"And I'm starting to remember things from the- the dream. I don't think she's dead."

“Jesus.”

Andrei lets out a breath, and what he says next shows that he really has matured in the year or two he’s spent at university. He’s found out who his father is, he’s accepted that he has powers, and he’s been introduced to a world where he isn’t the only one. He’s grown up, just a little bit.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

No one said he was good at being not-entirely-self-absorbed.

Even Kristopher kind of understands that the offer is out of character for him, but isn't surprised, either. So she talks about it- and it's okay to talk about, because it was only a dream. Even though it wasn't.

"There was- there is a sort of registry there," in the dream world, "people who have houses there. People do, apparently, so I found our house there. I mean it's not the one I live in but it felt like it sometimes, and it was big and empty and dusty and I found some letters and things in drawers-" Kits pauses, thinking. "I don't know. I wish I knew where that house really is, I don't know if that stuff was real."

“Dreams aren’t usually really real,” he says, and then shuts up. Good job, Andrei, way to put her down when she’s opening up to him.

He inserts a laugh and continues, “…but what do I know. Yeah. That’s weird. Is that the dream I, uh--?”

Helped you out with?

This is making him uncomfortable, but it’s Kristopher.

The odd look Kristopher gives him isn't odd because he's putting her down while she's opening up to him; it's odd because he's the son of the God of Death and Dreams, which, y'know, whatever.

"Yeah. I think I dreamed I killed you at the beginning of it," she adds. She's not sure she remembers. She's not sure he'll remember. "Uh, sorry about that, by the way."

Kristopher figures it's okay to have this discussion in public because the night crowd is still filtering in, and now it's not just her keeping the seats around them clear; Andrei is surely contributing to that. There's like a three foot radius of empty space around them.

Yeah, Andrei’s an idiot. He’s only just starting to catch on to this fact.

He rolls his shoulders, looking at her glass full of icecubes instead of directly at her. On the plus side, he’s smiling—sort of.

“Yeah, kinda.” He doesn’t remember it clearly; it’s a dream. He remembers the impressions of it, though—how it felt or what he felt in response.

“It’s cool. I don’t kill easy, anyhow—asleep or awake.”

Looking back at her, he offers a grin.

Incidentally, he’d be really irritated if he consciously clued into the space thing.

Yeah, Kristopher wasn't really paying attention to the space thing either.

She does, however, look mildly relieved. That had been a pretty brutal dream segment in a very, very long series of brutal dream segments. She's not going to mention that he kills very easily in dreams, and even spills red blood and, you know, viscera, and all that human stuff. She stops thinking about it.

"Yeah, I know."

This is depressing! Man, and Andrei had sort of been getting on with life, and growing up, and school and stuff.

He taps his fingers on the bar and then looks down at the bartender, who is still serving other people.

“Fuck this, Kits, let’s go outside.” He jerks his thumb at the door and lifts his brows inquisitively (also a gesture his father makes).

Outside means smoking, and also not sitting in silence. It seems like a good idea.

"Yeah," she agrees instantly, looking more relieved, and slides off the barstool, leaving a dollar or two and some odd change as a tip (she'd been served quickly and well, unlike Andrei) and sidles through weirdos to get outside.


It's warmer out here, and although the streets aren't empty, in fact full of people trying to get to other places, it's actually quieter.

Quieter bar, perhaps, the odd, distant yell of a drunk. As soon as they leave the building Andrei is reaching for his cigarettes, even though there’s a broad “no smoking” area painted around the entrance. It’s the same pocket he’d fumbled his two fives back into, unwilling to forget them on the counter for service never provided.

The air is heavy and thick, even at night. Southern Ontario around the Great Lakes is like that: shitty and humid, like an armpit.

Andrei’s complaining is, nonetheless, out of proportion.

“God, you need an air conditioned bubble in this fucking weather. Summer, hunh.”

Kristopher laughs and almost tells him not to say that so loudly 'because he'll hear you,' but she doesn't think he'll actually get the joke.

Instead she digs a crumpled pack out of her pocket and says, "I bet you could do that."

Andrei snorts. This is one of those expressions that he’s suited to; there’s something sarcastic about his long, sharp nose.

“I’m getting a general BA, not a masters of science and engineering. Sorry, you’ll have to turn elsewhere for your inventive needs.”

He flips out a lighter and offers it to her first. This is a definite sign of maturity.

“Besides, I bet there’d be no smoking in the damn thing. Indoors, isn’t it?”

Kristopher gives him a blank look, wears it while lighting her cigarette. "No, like your- never mind." Right: He hasn't met his dad, and isn't going to catch references to the whole radiating-cold thing. In retrospect, this makes sense.

It doesn’t matter whether Andrei interprets that as “your” or “you’re”—either way, he gets a pricking suspicion she’s referring to his unusual heritage.

But it’s Kristopher, and so mature responses (or at least not completely immature responses) are a bit easier.

“Like my--?” he leads, and it seems like he might not completely freak out at discussing so delicate a subject. He asks it while holding out his hand for the lighter.

Kristopher frowns slightly, passing the lighter back.

"Your dad," she says, after a pause. "Makes everything around him cold." She doesn't sound apologetic or embarrassed to have brought it up, only giving him a strange, skeptical expression. "You probably could, too."

You probably could, too.

The idea hits him as curiously intriguing—that there might be more to his heritage than he’d been aware; that he might actually be able to control things, refine things, channel things. His tiny talent for illusion is almost completely useless, but what if there were more? What if he could actually kick the glitches out of his system and—

He frowns. It’s not a usual rejecting frown, though; it’s a thoughtful expression. He has to admit,

“I’d have no idea how to go about trying.”

Kristopher relaxes and shrugs her narrow shoulders, sighing smoke. "I had wings. For like a month."

She makes a weird face, nose wrinkling and mouth twisting up. "I wouldn't even know where to begin, to get them back. Not that they were, you know, helpful. At all."

Wings, on Andrei's internal scale from "totally human" to "tentacle monster freaky", are a lot weirder than his not-dying trick. He seems kind of weirded out; his uneven eyes widen.

"What, like," he hooks his arms out behind him as if to mimic the spread of angel wings a-la-church, "for real wings? Could you fly?"

His cigarette is lit, because he'd got it lit as soon as she'd handed back his lighter. Its smoke curls heavily around them, not dissipating in the humid night air.

"Yeah. No, they were small."

It isn't that she sounds bored with the idea- only tired of it, or from it. "They just weighed a lot and knocked things over for me. I-" summoned your father to help me get rid of them and then spent several months in a coma. She isn't going to say it, so she shrugs instead. "It sounds cooler than it was."

“Huh.” Cigarette.

He exhales, automatically, drawing the thing away from his lips because he mostly talks with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth to people about whom he does not give one shit.

“I don’t think I’ve ever grown extra, you know,” he wants to say appendages but doesn’t remember the word, “limbs.”

Not that he remembers, anyhow. He gestures vaguely with the hand holding the cigarette; his left.

“Man, we need like—like a magical check up. Like a witch doctor or something to give us an MRI* but for all this shit.”


*(He's been watching House M.D.)

"Man, if it existed I don't know if I'd want it." Kristopher is thinking about letters and things in a desk in a house that may or may not exist. And she can think of a few people to ask for such a checkup, but it's an awful thing to talk about.

"Fuck. I'm kind of sorry I brought any of it up. How's school?"