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ninety6tears[See Master Post]
Gaila might have held on until I fell over if I hadn't complained, "Ow ow ow," making her pull back with an apologetic frown as I felt vaguely below my ribs. I made as if to distract her from that by moving to pick up my suitcase just as Chris was pulling out, and she eagerly offered to get it for me, wiping under her eyes and doing a little cursing exhale.
"Everyone's freaking out in the kitchen or something," Gaila grunted as we got up to the porch. "Do you even know you're early?"
The old-fashioned screen door kicked open again and Ken was yelling behind him, "He's here!" I could see right through to the narrow foyer and the kitchen beyond, somebody moving over the stove. I exchanged grins with Ken and he was also clapping his arms around me for a short time, muttering a simple "Hey, you."
After that it was a flurry of Toni yelling something inside excitedly and Gaila and Ken resuming some previous exchange—"I just did it, okay, no whining," Ken was saying—until we were all migrated into the kitchen and Toni was stopping between an aloof series of movements to squeeze one of my arms and tip up to give me a firm kiss on the cheek.
Everyone seemed to become a spectator when I became aware of Danek on the other end of the kitchen. He was leaning against the sink with his arms crossed, looking me up and down, and I could feel the others looking between us as I smiled weakly.
I said, "Hey."
One side of his mouth crooked up. "How are you feeling?" I had always really liked that voice, the way it was deep and sort of young at once; from Danek there was a different rhythm to it, but the pitch-perfect likeness, hearing it in person rather than on the recordings, felt electric.
"I'm just fine."
"Will," Toni finally interrupted, "what do you want for dinner? We'll do anything you want."
"Oh..." I put on an indifferent pout. "Whatever's around is fine."
I shrugged, but Gaila and Toni exchanged these suspicious looks, lips all pursed.
"He's looking very teriyaki to me," Gaila considered, and then Toni was giving me a playful deciphering look.
"Yeah," she agreed.
"Coming right up," Gaila said, clapping her hand over my opening mouth, as across the room Danek started getting things out of cabinets as if he was anxious to have something to do with his hands. Gaila pivoted me around her and Ken, urging, "Now go sit down, babe. You look seriously beat."
Dinner in the living room was pretty decent teriyaki chicken with some dessert Gaila had already made that was apparently also a favorite of Will's, along with an old samurai movie clanging on the screen. No one asked me so much as how bad the hospital food was, and I was a little intrigued by how they were handling it, though I knew it was still early. Chris and I had both known their interview behaviors could hardly be very telling; they'd all been tactful to some degree in that environment even if Danek had been far and away the most difficult to analyze.
Because of the detachment, anyway, I was able to keep things quiet that first night. If anyone thought I seemed more distracted than was normal or made sense to them, they hid it gracefully. I did ask Gaila a couple questions about our shared class; Danek was sitting next to her at the time, and I thought he seemed to have a look of relieved recognition that I would start asking about that already. From Gaila's vague answer about how she'd had to borrow some notes from someone else and would send them along to me, I made a note to ask Chris what everyone's attendance had been like only just recently. From the records I'd seen, it wasn't like Gaila to skip class often.
If what I was perceiving as a façade was in fact that, they all smoothly carried it to their rooms when they dismissed themselves to bed later. The goodnights were very casual; in Ken's case it was nothing more than a kind of teasing nudge to my leg as he passed by to go upstairs, and Toni and Gaila followed later with yawns and lazy waves after Gaila hugged me once more, absorbed in some talk they were having about giving rides tomorrow. Danek was rearranging something in the kitchen and I decided to retreat to Will's bedroom but leave the door ajar. I was looking busy hanging up some clothes when I heard a brief couple knocks; it was Danek, already changed into a pair of basic pajamas.
"I wanted to ask you alone," he said with a tiredly amused expression, "because the others won't have you going back to class tomorrow and I also think you should have the time to relax...but I have a meeting scheduled with Professor Nichols and he said that if you wanted to accompany me to make up for the one you missed...I figured you wouldn't like to stay in all of the day."
He was comfortably leaning his shoulder into the door frame and I'd stopped up closer to the door, thoughtfully running my hair off my face. "Oh, definitely not. Yeah, I'll come. I was even looking over my thesis notes last night at the hospital, so, sure."
It might have been iffy to mention anything about the recovery; my only assignment for the first several days or so was to not fuck up until Chris was completely satisfied I was in, so I shouldn't have been pushing on any tense topics. But it was useful that from Danek's reaction he didn't necessarily want to evade the subject, even if he'd had yet to address it directly, and still didn't then. "Good. We're scheduled for six in the evening, so don't be on a walk."
I nodded, smiling. "I'll be here."
My starting to turn away then was mostly fishing for what Danek would do; I got it when he simply said, "Will..."
I pivoted back into the doorway and Danek had hardly moved. He was looking at me with a half-smile and a new and gentle gravity in his eyes. After a hesitance, he gave a motion that could have been a shrug. "Welcome home."
Of course I had addressed the issue of touch telepathy with Chris at some point, but when I brought it up he refused to be concerned about it. Danek doesn't seem to get feely all that much, but if he does, and you can't get some serious method acting on, the one important thing is to not panic. If you're uncomfortable or you're confused, let him blame it on the trauma, let him make up his own explanation, and know that if he seems suspicious you can use that too. As long as you don't totally freak out on him, you'll be fine.
At a different time, a hug might have sent my heart running a bit faster, but it happened in a fluid motion where it was actually hard to place who had initiated it. Danek's arms wrapped around mine and it was a brotherly pull, close in the comfortable lean of weight and his chin finding a bed on my shoulder. I returned that same loose squeeze, one hand going assuringly for his upper back. I didn't have to remind myself he couldn't sense what I was thinking rather than just feeling, because I wasn't really thinking much at all.
It was over after a pretty short time, and then Danek, looking like he'd settled into a more solid relief, backed up and said, "Goodnight, Will."
"'night."
Once I was alone I pulled the suitcase from where it had been set by the door and tossed it onto the bed, trying to will the humming of the house into that sensical line between voices and phantom noises. Perhaps still having enough stage fright that I'd prefer no one else to come knocking, I took my time with unzipping and unpacking so that the rustling wouldn't make much noise.
Behind the compartment in the case lid that only held a few pairs of underwear, there was an additional hidden zipper. I opened it and slid out my second firearm, my usual larger phaser. Looking around the room, I settled on the far underside of Will's desk, ripped off a length of tape from the roll I had in my bag and attached it under the desktop.
For a second I stayed under there on my back, idly listening to the murmurs I'd discerned from upstairs. I picked up a vague whisper of two people talking—I thought maybe it was Gaila and Ken—and it reached me as grave and hushed, until one of them coughed into a giggle. After that the voices were more staggered, and by the time I'd gotten into sweatpants and a t-shirt, they'd dissolved.
I flicked off the light and slipped under Will's covers and got into his bed and I lay there for a long time, listening anxiously as if I was waiting for the house to start snoring, like I didn't want it to catch me asleep. But there was another presence to it, the pleasant scent still emanating from the kitchen close to the bedrooms, perfect warmth of the comforter clouding and settling in around my body. When I did sleep, I slept better than I had in a very long time.
In the morning I picked up that most of the residents rose early; I figured Will had an excuse to oversleep a bit so it didn't concern me that when I made myself appear in the kitchen Danek and Gaila were already pinching bagles out of the toaster, responding to some anxious calls from Toni who was having a hard time finding one of her PADDs. She appeared at the threshold of the kitchen with her jacket on and gave me a little smile; I interrupted what she might have been about to say: "The brown one? I saw it next to the comm screen."
"Oh, oh," she exited again, her rushed flurry making Danek mumble something to himself I didn't pick up on. I was at the refrigerator and jumped a little when Gaila playfully dug her hands into my shoulders, giving a massaging squeeze.
"We got that tea you like. Finish up all the leftovers if you want." I touched her wrist in a gesture of appreciation as she wrapped her arms around my ribs, rocking me exaggeratedly back and forth for only a couple seconds and then getting gone.
Gaila was on her way to her part-time job at the coffee shop a few blocks away; Toni and Danek had a class at the same time, and were late, judging from how Toni entered the kitchen and asked, "Why aren't you in the car?"
"Why aren't you?" Danek returned, giving me a look over what he'd been reading while waiting for her. I just smiled and said some generic goodbye to them, and sat down at the kitchen table to blow on a cup of coffee I'd just prepared. I idly read a few lines of the news off Ken's PADD he'd abandoned before leaving much earlier, waiting till I heard the click of the front door, the dull tapping of the car doors closing even farther away. I was on my feet as soon as the engine started.
Back in Will's room I pulled the suitcase out again from under the bed, and got out the bug kit I had stowed in the shaving bag.
The implements are usually these black button-shaped devices and were made to be unremarkable-looking, something you could easily assume was supposed to be part of a piece of furniture. Chris had decided to forgo bugging the living room area, perhaps assuming nothing much candid that I would miss happened over movies and study sessions. The only room he wanted to monitor was the loft.
The house had three floors, consisting of a tiny basement I looked and discovered had been plastered with shelves after shelves of old books that were probably worth a fortune; then the main floor with the kitchen connected to the small living room and the crammed hallways starting under the stairs and leading to Will and Danek's rooms; and an upstairs loft that the other three all shared.
The disproportionate rooming situation seemed a little odd, but the loft turned out to feel like a place where I could hypothetically easily bear living with two other people. One area with a bunk bed was sequestered away from someone else's space with a short decorative screen, but I thought the layout could have been done differently if its habitants were all that conscious about privacy. A pair of sneakers that looked to be Gaila's size had been fastened onto the feet of a big stuffed panda for somebody's laugh. There was a board above the computer space that held a lot of memorabilia, brochures and ticket stubs.
Nothing in the room looked like something I couldn't be convinced had been bought in the last year. There were photos sitting around, but none of them showed anything beyond the typical college life or even anything explicitly from outside of New Dublin. I had an automatic habit of looking for history and biography when I entered somebody's space, even when it was personal rather than professional curiosity. What may not have been noted at all by someone else felt like a white-walled and slightly cold lack of something that should have been essential.
I quickly decided to bug the computer space, activating the chip so that it lit up in one blink of confirmation and then placing it where it might pass for some extension of the central comm system hooked up to the computer screen. I made a face about it, having never done a job where we tapped anybody's place like this, but I had to make my peace with it, telling myself at least that in all likelihood no one was going to be bringing home a date to this room. Terran law enforcement is more limited when it comes to these kinds of things, which I tend to forget about until my mom makes disapproving comments about the long leashes we're kept on, "Not that you're not one of the good eggs, honey." She rather transparently hates a lot of our policies, along with the cigarettes, the kill-only guns, the messy currency, and just about everything else about New Dublin.
Once I was back downstairs I was tempted to scope out Danek's room, but instead I checked out the back yard. The group lived somewhere that was almost unreasonably far from their university, at the fringes where even though the places still looked nice, you were uncomfortably close to a very bad part of town.
Brynock Place was a somewhat upper middle class villa where the homes formed a horseshoe around a medium-sized park. It was a great park, heavily wooded as if in imitation of ND's innermost forest areas, but farther in it was also somewhere you'd be nervous to come across somebody else at one in the morning. The homes that were way off lining the other side of the park were a much louder type of living entirely. It would make a lot of people nervous; I couldn't help but admire anyone with apparent indifference about it.
I took a walk many paces in before I pulled out Will's comm and called Chris.
"How's life at the dollhouse?" he asked when he answered after only one alert.
"Just fine," I said. "Pretty little place. Everyone's gone, I bugged the upstairs, I don't know if anyone's tuned on yet..."
"I was just there and told Boyd you might be doing that soon. Well done."
"Have you listened to last night?"
"Danek hugged you, didn't he?"
"Yeah." I laughed. "I kept it cool, it's fine."
"I'm more concerned that you mentioned—"
"I know. He wasn't that sensitive about that, but I'll keep it toned down."
"Alright. And you never know, he might be the one to bring it up. After a point, not being curious is way weirder than nothing."
I made a hum noise. "Depends."
"Well, we'll save it for your one-week report. Go make the house look lived-in."
"Take it easy."
"Later."
I really didn't have anything to do for the rest of my alone time besides put some further study on Will's notes. Compared to some of the other cumbersome things I've had to do for undercover it was not all that boring, when it wasn't a pain in the ass trying to decipher his scribbles. Will and I didn't really have the same writing, but if I hadn't given up on cursive when everyone told me it looked like a bunch of nothing, it's hard to say if there wouldn't have been a kinship. Where he bothered to translate himself into typed notes, a step he'd seemed to take when he had his thoughts in a less preliminary stage, a lot of his ideas felt tragically unsalvageable.
A couple hours after lunch Gaila came in from her shift, doing nothing much more than groaning an expression of her exhaustion into my shoulder when she sat down next to me. "Hey," I said, tipping my head in on hers for a second and catching the scent of her shampoo. She eventually got out of her respite, complaining vaguely about how much she needed to do that night, and I offered to help her with some of the Civil Wars dates.
"No, no." She was getting up. "You have all this catching up to worry about, don't worry about me."
"Well, fine," I said, lazily mock-huffy.
"You should be worrying about nothing but you. Unless you're asking me to help you study," she said, smiling. "Which you're not. I can see why you're starting to think about being a teacher."
We hadn't come across that; I'd gave no real thought at all to Will having those kinds of aspirations for his life. Before I could start wondering about it I said, "The problem is I'd have so little patience for the mediocre students. It's more fun with you."
"They'd put you with the best, I'm sure."
"And there's less to teach the best. I'd want the second best," I said wryly.
"Only the second best for Professor Kenley," she said with a dry little giggle, squinting as she reached to un-snag one of her curls from a long earring. "By the way, your cover's blown. We know about your super-secret Nichols meeting. He mentioned it to Toni in the hallway while she was on lunch, so you don't need to tip-toe away with Danek later. It's not like we're all trying to babysit you, anyway."
I wondered if somebody on the other side of the mic had blinked at the cover idiom. "Who says it's a secret?" I said with playful coyness.
"Nichols, apparently. 'Danek said not to mention this to you, but...' He just wanted to ask us how you're doing and it slipped that he's expecting to see you today." She shook her head and abruptly commented, "Jeez, he is a silly big thing sometimes."
"Danek? Or Nichols?" I got up to get something to eat. She just gave me a light whack on the arm.
"You two and your little arbitrary secrets, that's all," she said. "I'll be surprised if I ever find out you've been keeping something from us that actually means much of anything."
"Explain to me what direction you're taking from the lit angle?"
"Well, the subject of that research is trying to go with the assumption that virtually all of the literature that was written pre-first contact on Earth was completely socially irrelevant following contact with alien life..."
"Okay." Professor Nichols sat back in his office chair, cracking a slow smile. "No, I thought you were...Explain more about that?"
"Basically, there were two somewhat distinct genres, between science fiction and fantasy, before Terrans knew they weren't alone in the universe. And the entire amount of responsibility in writing about extraterrestrials very abruptly changed. If you look at pretty much all of the pre-contact sci-fi that deals with aliens, at the most what you get is simply an allegory for domestic oppression. It's never really something that effectively treats alien races as a variant of humanity in their own right rather than as an accessory to humans as the defining example of ideal sentience."
"So, you're almost arguing that it's sort of...pre-appropriating?" Nichols looked like he was kind of enjoying how confused he was. I'd forgotten what it was like to put that look on an instructor's face.
"Even when the fiction is about aliens, it's still about Terrans; when it's about how terrible Terrans are to aliens, it's still about Terrans," I said with a nod. "Following first contact, there should have immediately been a distinction that lumped in sci-fi that still treated extraterrestrials as fiction with the rest of fantasy, or at least as a subdivision of science fiction, but the distinction isn't really made, and as a result we have this whole mess of literature that gets put into historical relevance without much of any knowledge of how ignorant it is...especially considering that authors were appropriating the very first limited information they got about Vulcan and were just making stuff up about it in books which were getting published as fiction but still having kind of a problematic influence..."
He motioned for me to go on. Next to me Danek tapped my elbow and I managed to realize he wanted a swig out of my water bottle, almost straying from my train of thought.
"I'm comparing it to the current intellectual treatment of artificial intelligence, and also transhumanism to some degree. Sorry, here," I mumbled to Danek, finally managing to hand the bottle over from the other side of my chair. "Um, just proposing that there's a lot of imaginative theories which are possibly underestimated in the assumption that they'll never come to fruition...So in essence I'm suggesting that history may or may not repeat itself in that sense of how fiction follows history, because the problems with it the first time around were never treated with as much respect as they could have been."
"Good." Nichols nodded. "Good. Uh, there was this one series of novels that I've heard was written before first contact, but was still being written afterwards, it's by somebody named...Rubaya?..."
"The Animon Chronicles," I said. "I've read them all."
"See, I'm not even worried about you. That does make this something like the third time you've changed your focus just by a bit..."
Danek said, "You should be used to Will doing that by now," his voice softy humored, and Nichols laughed.
"Yeah, I know. And yours, Danek...I was looking over what you sent me last night, and it all looks good. You've really kept up with the topic extremely well, and, hell, I can answer any questions you've got, but overall I've got no concerns. Great work."
"Thank you, professor." Danek's eyes shifted to look over his notes a second time, a bloom of warmth to his eyes as he bit his lip once; it had become obvious throughout the meeting that Danek greatly admired Nichols, and it was pretty damn endearing. He'd made about half a dozen little unneeded adjustments to his scarf since we'd sat down.
I was observing everything Danek did as closely as I'd paid attention to him in Will's recordings; it was harder when I had to only glance and pretend it was all second nature, but I'd gotten so comparatively little to go on with him and it felt like I was still studying. When we finished up the meeting I figured we'd go and wait for Ken to get out of his evening class, and sure enough he went automatically in the direction of the central courtyard where he idled and then leaned his hands into a decorative stone banister that lined around a little garden in front of an administration building. I put my bag down and leaned so that I was half-sitting against it.
There was low student traffic, but I felt like one of the people we passed gave me a double take. Danek had started talking then, asking me a couple things about my paper; I got the impression that it was basically small talk. I couldn't shake off this idea I had that he was skirting around getting into anything deep, like the time just wasn't right. Just then, while we were waiting for Ken, I got the tiniest hint about that, but it made no sense to me.
We had briefly fallen into a silence when some kids started kicking a ball around in the grassy expanse and it gave our eyes something to trace after for a couple unconscious moments; then I felt Danek's eyes looking at me askance, and met them expectantly.
He asked, "Are you alright?"
The air felt a bit heavier as I looked down at my shoes, giving a not-completely-there nervous grin. I looked back over at him. "Sure."
Danek turned away so that we were facing the same direction, forming that different kind of union that happens when you share the viewed horizon rather than the simpler joint of direct glances; I felt like I could feel him telling himself to relax.
"I really am," I added quietly, then shrugged. "This whole thing just feels really crazy."
He seemed to take the breath to say something but then take quite a while to say it. "I didn't look at the chip."
I could envision Chris somewhere on the other edge of this, cocking a slow brow and sitting forward; I was blanking completely but only got in a hint of a look before Danek practically interrupted.
"It would have been foolish if I had, but I thought you might have been worrying about it."
"No," I said with casual confidence. "Not really."
The corners of his lips twitched up.
A cheery few notes were whistled from off to the right, and Ken was walking up with his boots dragging a little tiredly on the pavement. "Let's call it boys' night for dinner, guys, I am so damn hungry."
I suggested, "Jillian's?" It was close by and somebody in the interviews had mentioned it was a frequent spot. They both agreed and we were there within minutes. The waiter obviously recognized me as soon as we sat down.
"Hey, hey, hey, hey." The server, whose name was Jek judging by a holler from behind the front counter, was a mixed Orion who had long hair in a ponytail, extremely handsome features, and a name tag that had JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH painstakingly written on it. "William's back."
"'lo," I said mildly.
"Hey, what do they call them? Beverages?" Ken suggested with a teasing gesture of shooing him away.
He returned with everyone's preferred drinks without having to ask, then leaned down in my direction. "They said you had like amnesia or something."
"Jek," Danek said, warningly.
"It's okay," I said with a wave toward Danek and Ken. "I don't remember what happened and I'm more or less glad I don't, but anyway I don't really want to talk about it."
"Sure, sorry. I'm just glad to see you're alright." He walked off, pausing to throw over his shoulder, "I missed your tips."
The rest of dinner went without much incident; Ken and I got into a friendly debate about Bajoran politics once Danek got into his bag to start some reading. Ken stole bites of my bacon as if to break even when I made a good point, considering what else to say as if it was something like a chess match.
Ken and Danek seemed different, somehow, outside of the house. More polite in some ways but ruder in others, as if there was something almost fake in how they interacted with people who weren't each other, and only in a way you'd have to be on the inside to notice. I was beginning to sense that among the whole house: that comfortable lack of care, the taking for granted of something between them I couldn't yet define. People who are simply roommates are never quite like that.
Gaila might have held on until I fell over if I hadn't complained, "Ow ow ow," making her pull back with an apologetic frown as I felt vaguely below my ribs. I made as if to distract her from that by moving to pick up my suitcase just as Chris was pulling out, and she eagerly offered to get it for me, wiping under her eyes and doing a little cursing exhale.
"Everyone's freaking out in the kitchen or something," Gaila grunted as we got up to the porch. "Do you even know you're early?"
The old-fashioned screen door kicked open again and Ken was yelling behind him, "He's here!" I could see right through to the narrow foyer and the kitchen beyond, somebody moving over the stove. I exchanged grins with Ken and he was also clapping his arms around me for a short time, muttering a simple "Hey, you."
After that it was a flurry of Toni yelling something inside excitedly and Gaila and Ken resuming some previous exchange—"I just did it, okay, no whining," Ken was saying—until we were all migrated into the kitchen and Toni was stopping between an aloof series of movements to squeeze one of my arms and tip up to give me a firm kiss on the cheek.
Everyone seemed to become a spectator when I became aware of Danek on the other end of the kitchen. He was leaning against the sink with his arms crossed, looking me up and down, and I could feel the others looking between us as I smiled weakly.
I said, "Hey."
One side of his mouth crooked up. "How are you feeling?" I had always really liked that voice, the way it was deep and sort of young at once; from Danek there was a different rhythm to it, but the pitch-perfect likeness, hearing it in person rather than on the recordings, felt electric.
"I'm just fine."
"Will," Toni finally interrupted, "what do you want for dinner? We'll do anything you want."
"Oh..." I put on an indifferent pout. "Whatever's around is fine."
I shrugged, but Gaila and Toni exchanged these suspicious looks, lips all pursed.
"He's looking very teriyaki to me," Gaila considered, and then Toni was giving me a playful deciphering look.
"Yeah," she agreed.
"Coming right up," Gaila said, clapping her hand over my opening mouth, as across the room Danek started getting things out of cabinets as if he was anxious to have something to do with his hands. Gaila pivoted me around her and Ken, urging, "Now go sit down, babe. You look seriously beat."
Dinner in the living room was pretty decent teriyaki chicken with some dessert Gaila had already made that was apparently also a favorite of Will's, along with an old samurai movie clanging on the screen. No one asked me so much as how bad the hospital food was, and I was a little intrigued by how they were handling it, though I knew it was still early. Chris and I had both known their interview behaviors could hardly be very telling; they'd all been tactful to some degree in that environment even if Danek had been far and away the most difficult to analyze.
Because of the detachment, anyway, I was able to keep things quiet that first night. If anyone thought I seemed more distracted than was normal or made sense to them, they hid it gracefully. I did ask Gaila a couple questions about our shared class; Danek was sitting next to her at the time, and I thought he seemed to have a look of relieved recognition that I would start asking about that already. From Gaila's vague answer about how she'd had to borrow some notes from someone else and would send them along to me, I made a note to ask Chris what everyone's attendance had been like only just recently. From the records I'd seen, it wasn't like Gaila to skip class often.
If what I was perceiving as a façade was in fact that, they all smoothly carried it to their rooms when they dismissed themselves to bed later. The goodnights were very casual; in Ken's case it was nothing more than a kind of teasing nudge to my leg as he passed by to go upstairs, and Toni and Gaila followed later with yawns and lazy waves after Gaila hugged me once more, absorbed in some talk they were having about giving rides tomorrow. Danek was rearranging something in the kitchen and I decided to retreat to Will's bedroom but leave the door ajar. I was looking busy hanging up some clothes when I heard a brief couple knocks; it was Danek, already changed into a pair of basic pajamas.
"I wanted to ask you alone," he said with a tiredly amused expression, "because the others won't have you going back to class tomorrow and I also think you should have the time to relax...but I have a meeting scheduled with Professor Nichols and he said that if you wanted to accompany me to make up for the one you missed...I figured you wouldn't like to stay in all of the day."
He was comfortably leaning his shoulder into the door frame and I'd stopped up closer to the door, thoughtfully running my hair off my face. "Oh, definitely not. Yeah, I'll come. I was even looking over my thesis notes last night at the hospital, so, sure."
It might have been iffy to mention anything about the recovery; my only assignment for the first several days or so was to not fuck up until Chris was completely satisfied I was in, so I shouldn't have been pushing on any tense topics. But it was useful that from Danek's reaction he didn't necessarily want to evade the subject, even if he'd had yet to address it directly, and still didn't then. "Good. We're scheduled for six in the evening, so don't be on a walk."
I nodded, smiling. "I'll be here."
My starting to turn away then was mostly fishing for what Danek would do; I got it when he simply said, "Will..."
I pivoted back into the doorway and Danek had hardly moved. He was looking at me with a half-smile and a new and gentle gravity in his eyes. After a hesitance, he gave a motion that could have been a shrug. "Welcome home."
Of course I had addressed the issue of touch telepathy with Chris at some point, but when I brought it up he refused to be concerned about it. Danek doesn't seem to get feely all that much, but if he does, and you can't get some serious method acting on, the one important thing is to not panic. If you're uncomfortable or you're confused, let him blame it on the trauma, let him make up his own explanation, and know that if he seems suspicious you can use that too. As long as you don't totally freak out on him, you'll be fine.
At a different time, a hug might have sent my heart running a bit faster, but it happened in a fluid motion where it was actually hard to place who had initiated it. Danek's arms wrapped around mine and it was a brotherly pull, close in the comfortable lean of weight and his chin finding a bed on my shoulder. I returned that same loose squeeze, one hand going assuringly for his upper back. I didn't have to remind myself he couldn't sense what I was thinking rather than just feeling, because I wasn't really thinking much at all.
It was over after a pretty short time, and then Danek, looking like he'd settled into a more solid relief, backed up and said, "Goodnight, Will."
"'night."
Once I was alone I pulled the suitcase from where it had been set by the door and tossed it onto the bed, trying to will the humming of the house into that sensical line between voices and phantom noises. Perhaps still having enough stage fright that I'd prefer no one else to come knocking, I took my time with unzipping and unpacking so that the rustling wouldn't make much noise.
Behind the compartment in the case lid that only held a few pairs of underwear, there was an additional hidden zipper. I opened it and slid out my second firearm, my usual larger phaser. Looking around the room, I settled on the far underside of Will's desk, ripped off a length of tape from the roll I had in my bag and attached it under the desktop.
For a second I stayed under there on my back, idly listening to the murmurs I'd discerned from upstairs. I picked up a vague whisper of two people talking—I thought maybe it was Gaila and Ken—and it reached me as grave and hushed, until one of them coughed into a giggle. After that the voices were more staggered, and by the time I'd gotten into sweatpants and a t-shirt, they'd dissolved.
I flicked off the light and slipped under Will's covers and got into his bed and I lay there for a long time, listening anxiously as if I was waiting for the house to start snoring, like I didn't want it to catch me asleep. But there was another presence to it, the pleasant scent still emanating from the kitchen close to the bedrooms, perfect warmth of the comforter clouding and settling in around my body. When I did sleep, I slept better than I had in a very long time.
In the morning I picked up that most of the residents rose early; I figured Will had an excuse to oversleep a bit so it didn't concern me that when I made myself appear in the kitchen Danek and Gaila were already pinching bagles out of the toaster, responding to some anxious calls from Toni who was having a hard time finding one of her PADDs. She appeared at the threshold of the kitchen with her jacket on and gave me a little smile; I interrupted what she might have been about to say: "The brown one? I saw it next to the comm screen."
"Oh, oh," she exited again, her rushed flurry making Danek mumble something to himself I didn't pick up on. I was at the refrigerator and jumped a little when Gaila playfully dug her hands into my shoulders, giving a massaging squeeze.
"We got that tea you like. Finish up all the leftovers if you want." I touched her wrist in a gesture of appreciation as she wrapped her arms around my ribs, rocking me exaggeratedly back and forth for only a couple seconds and then getting gone.
Gaila was on her way to her part-time job at the coffee shop a few blocks away; Toni and Danek had a class at the same time, and were late, judging from how Toni entered the kitchen and asked, "Why aren't you in the car?"
"Why aren't you?" Danek returned, giving me a look over what he'd been reading while waiting for her. I just smiled and said some generic goodbye to them, and sat down at the kitchen table to blow on a cup of coffee I'd just prepared. I idly read a few lines of the news off Ken's PADD he'd abandoned before leaving much earlier, waiting till I heard the click of the front door, the dull tapping of the car doors closing even farther away. I was on my feet as soon as the engine started.
Back in Will's room I pulled the suitcase out again from under the bed, and got out the bug kit I had stowed in the shaving bag.
The implements are usually these black button-shaped devices and were made to be unremarkable-looking, something you could easily assume was supposed to be part of a piece of furniture. Chris had decided to forgo bugging the living room area, perhaps assuming nothing much candid that I would miss happened over movies and study sessions. The only room he wanted to monitor was the loft.
The house had three floors, consisting of a tiny basement I looked and discovered had been plastered with shelves after shelves of old books that were probably worth a fortune; then the main floor with the kitchen connected to the small living room and the crammed hallways starting under the stairs and leading to Will and Danek's rooms; and an upstairs loft that the other three all shared.
The disproportionate rooming situation seemed a little odd, but the loft turned out to feel like a place where I could hypothetically easily bear living with two other people. One area with a bunk bed was sequestered away from someone else's space with a short decorative screen, but I thought the layout could have been done differently if its habitants were all that conscious about privacy. A pair of sneakers that looked to be Gaila's size had been fastened onto the feet of a big stuffed panda for somebody's laugh. There was a board above the computer space that held a lot of memorabilia, brochures and ticket stubs.
Nothing in the room looked like something I couldn't be convinced had been bought in the last year. There were photos sitting around, but none of them showed anything beyond the typical college life or even anything explicitly from outside of New Dublin. I had an automatic habit of looking for history and biography when I entered somebody's space, even when it was personal rather than professional curiosity. What may not have been noted at all by someone else felt like a white-walled and slightly cold lack of something that should have been essential.
I quickly decided to bug the computer space, activating the chip so that it lit up in one blink of confirmation and then placing it where it might pass for some extension of the central comm system hooked up to the computer screen. I made a face about it, having never done a job where we tapped anybody's place like this, but I had to make my peace with it, telling myself at least that in all likelihood no one was going to be bringing home a date to this room. Terran law enforcement is more limited when it comes to these kinds of things, which I tend to forget about until my mom makes disapproving comments about the long leashes we're kept on, "Not that you're not one of the good eggs, honey." She rather transparently hates a lot of our policies, along with the cigarettes, the kill-only guns, the messy currency, and just about everything else about New Dublin.
Once I was back downstairs I was tempted to scope out Danek's room, but instead I checked out the back yard. The group lived somewhere that was almost unreasonably far from their university, at the fringes where even though the places still looked nice, you were uncomfortably close to a very bad part of town.
Brynock Place was a somewhat upper middle class villa where the homes formed a horseshoe around a medium-sized park. It was a great park, heavily wooded as if in imitation of ND's innermost forest areas, but farther in it was also somewhere you'd be nervous to come across somebody else at one in the morning. The homes that were way off lining the other side of the park were a much louder type of living entirely. It would make a lot of people nervous; I couldn't help but admire anyone with apparent indifference about it.
I took a walk many paces in before I pulled out Will's comm and called Chris.
"How's life at the dollhouse?" he asked when he answered after only one alert.
"Just fine," I said. "Pretty little place. Everyone's gone, I bugged the upstairs, I don't know if anyone's tuned on yet..."
"I was just there and told Boyd you might be doing that soon. Well done."
"Have you listened to last night?"
"Danek hugged you, didn't he?"
"Yeah." I laughed. "I kept it cool, it's fine."
"I'm more concerned that you mentioned—"
"I know. He wasn't that sensitive about that, but I'll keep it toned down."
"Alright. And you never know, he might be the one to bring it up. After a point, not being curious is way weirder than nothing."
I made a hum noise. "Depends."
"Well, we'll save it for your one-week report. Go make the house look lived-in."
"Take it easy."
"Later."
I really didn't have anything to do for the rest of my alone time besides put some further study on Will's notes. Compared to some of the other cumbersome things I've had to do for undercover it was not all that boring, when it wasn't a pain in the ass trying to decipher his scribbles. Will and I didn't really have the same writing, but if I hadn't given up on cursive when everyone told me it looked like a bunch of nothing, it's hard to say if there wouldn't have been a kinship. Where he bothered to translate himself into typed notes, a step he'd seemed to take when he had his thoughts in a less preliminary stage, a lot of his ideas felt tragically unsalvageable.
A couple hours after lunch Gaila came in from her shift, doing nothing much more than groaning an expression of her exhaustion into my shoulder when she sat down next to me. "Hey," I said, tipping my head in on hers for a second and catching the scent of her shampoo. She eventually got out of her respite, complaining vaguely about how much she needed to do that night, and I offered to help her with some of the Civil Wars dates.
"No, no." She was getting up. "You have all this catching up to worry about, don't worry about me."
"Well, fine," I said, lazily mock-huffy.
"You should be worrying about nothing but you. Unless you're asking me to help you study," she said, smiling. "Which you're not. I can see why you're starting to think about being a teacher."
We hadn't come across that; I'd gave no real thought at all to Will having those kinds of aspirations for his life. Before I could start wondering about it I said, "The problem is I'd have so little patience for the mediocre students. It's more fun with you."
"They'd put you with the best, I'm sure."
"And there's less to teach the best. I'd want the second best," I said wryly.
"Only the second best for Professor Kenley," she said with a dry little giggle, squinting as she reached to un-snag one of her curls from a long earring. "By the way, your cover's blown. We know about your super-secret Nichols meeting. He mentioned it to Toni in the hallway while she was on lunch, so you don't need to tip-toe away with Danek later. It's not like we're all trying to babysit you, anyway."
I wondered if somebody on the other side of the mic had blinked at the cover idiom. "Who says it's a secret?" I said with playful coyness.
"Nichols, apparently. 'Danek said not to mention this to you, but...' He just wanted to ask us how you're doing and it slipped that he's expecting to see you today." She shook her head and abruptly commented, "Jeez, he is a silly big thing sometimes."
"Danek? Or Nichols?" I got up to get something to eat. She just gave me a light whack on the arm.
"You two and your little arbitrary secrets, that's all," she said. "I'll be surprised if I ever find out you've been keeping something from us that actually means much of anything."
"Explain to me what direction you're taking from the lit angle?"
"Well, the subject of that research is trying to go with the assumption that virtually all of the literature that was written pre-first contact on Earth was completely socially irrelevant following contact with alien life..."
"Okay." Professor Nichols sat back in his office chair, cracking a slow smile. "No, I thought you were...Explain more about that?"
"Basically, there were two somewhat distinct genres, between science fiction and fantasy, before Terrans knew they weren't alone in the universe. And the entire amount of responsibility in writing about extraterrestrials very abruptly changed. If you look at pretty much all of the pre-contact sci-fi that deals with aliens, at the most what you get is simply an allegory for domestic oppression. It's never really something that effectively treats alien races as a variant of humanity in their own right rather than as an accessory to humans as the defining example of ideal sentience."
"So, you're almost arguing that it's sort of...pre-appropriating?" Nichols looked like he was kind of enjoying how confused he was. I'd forgotten what it was like to put that look on an instructor's face.
"Even when the fiction is about aliens, it's still about Terrans; when it's about how terrible Terrans are to aliens, it's still about Terrans," I said with a nod. "Following first contact, there should have immediately been a distinction that lumped in sci-fi that still treated extraterrestrials as fiction with the rest of fantasy, or at least as a subdivision of science fiction, but the distinction isn't really made, and as a result we have this whole mess of literature that gets put into historical relevance without much of any knowledge of how ignorant it is...especially considering that authors were appropriating the very first limited information they got about Vulcan and were just making stuff up about it in books which were getting published as fiction but still having kind of a problematic influence..."
He motioned for me to go on. Next to me Danek tapped my elbow and I managed to realize he wanted a swig out of my water bottle, almost straying from my train of thought.
"I'm comparing it to the current intellectual treatment of artificial intelligence, and also transhumanism to some degree. Sorry, here," I mumbled to Danek, finally managing to hand the bottle over from the other side of my chair. "Um, just proposing that there's a lot of imaginative theories which are possibly underestimated in the assumption that they'll never come to fruition...So in essence I'm suggesting that history may or may not repeat itself in that sense of how fiction follows history, because the problems with it the first time around were never treated with as much respect as they could have been."
"Good." Nichols nodded. "Good. Uh, there was this one series of novels that I've heard was written before first contact, but was still being written afterwards, it's by somebody named...Rubaya?..."
"The Animon Chronicles," I said. "I've read them all."
"See, I'm not even worried about you. That does make this something like the third time you've changed your focus just by a bit..."
Danek said, "You should be used to Will doing that by now," his voice softy humored, and Nichols laughed.
"Yeah, I know. And yours, Danek...I was looking over what you sent me last night, and it all looks good. You've really kept up with the topic extremely well, and, hell, I can answer any questions you've got, but overall I've got no concerns. Great work."
"Thank you, professor." Danek's eyes shifted to look over his notes a second time, a bloom of warmth to his eyes as he bit his lip once; it had become obvious throughout the meeting that Danek greatly admired Nichols, and it was pretty damn endearing. He'd made about half a dozen little unneeded adjustments to his scarf since we'd sat down.
I was observing everything Danek did as closely as I'd paid attention to him in Will's recordings; it was harder when I had to only glance and pretend it was all second nature, but I'd gotten so comparatively little to go on with him and it felt like I was still studying. When we finished up the meeting I figured we'd go and wait for Ken to get out of his evening class, and sure enough he went automatically in the direction of the central courtyard where he idled and then leaned his hands into a decorative stone banister that lined around a little garden in front of an administration building. I put my bag down and leaned so that I was half-sitting against it.
There was low student traffic, but I felt like one of the people we passed gave me a double take. Danek had started talking then, asking me a couple things about my paper; I got the impression that it was basically small talk. I couldn't shake off this idea I had that he was skirting around getting into anything deep, like the time just wasn't right. Just then, while we were waiting for Ken, I got the tiniest hint about that, but it made no sense to me.
We had briefly fallen into a silence when some kids started kicking a ball around in the grassy expanse and it gave our eyes something to trace after for a couple unconscious moments; then I felt Danek's eyes looking at me askance, and met them expectantly.
He asked, "Are you alright?"
The air felt a bit heavier as I looked down at my shoes, giving a not-completely-there nervous grin. I looked back over at him. "Sure."
Danek turned away so that we were facing the same direction, forming that different kind of union that happens when you share the viewed horizon rather than the simpler joint of direct glances; I felt like I could feel him telling himself to relax.
"I really am," I added quietly, then shrugged. "This whole thing just feels really crazy."
He seemed to take the breath to say something but then take quite a while to say it. "I didn't look at the chip."
I could envision Chris somewhere on the other edge of this, cocking a slow brow and sitting forward; I was blanking completely but only got in a hint of a look before Danek practically interrupted.
"It would have been foolish if I had, but I thought you might have been worrying about it."
"No," I said with casual confidence. "Not really."
The corners of his lips twitched up.
A cheery few notes were whistled from off to the right, and Ken was walking up with his boots dragging a little tiredly on the pavement. "Let's call it boys' night for dinner, guys, I am so damn hungry."
I suggested, "Jillian's?" It was close by and somebody in the interviews had mentioned it was a frequent spot. They both agreed and we were there within minutes. The waiter obviously recognized me as soon as we sat down.
"Hey, hey, hey, hey." The server, whose name was Jek judging by a holler from behind the front counter, was a mixed Orion who had long hair in a ponytail, extremely handsome features, and a name tag that had JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH painstakingly written on it. "William's back."
"'lo," I said mildly.
"Hey, what do they call them? Beverages?" Ken suggested with a teasing gesture of shooing him away.
He returned with everyone's preferred drinks without having to ask, then leaned down in my direction. "They said you had like amnesia or something."
"Jek," Danek said, warningly.
"It's okay," I said with a wave toward Danek and Ken. "I don't remember what happened and I'm more or less glad I don't, but anyway I don't really want to talk about it."
"Sure, sorry. I'm just glad to see you're alright." He walked off, pausing to throw over his shoulder, "I missed your tips."
The rest of dinner went without much incident; Ken and I got into a friendly debate about Bajoran politics once Danek got into his bag to start some reading. Ken stole bites of my bacon as if to break even when I made a good point, considering what else to say as if it was something like a chess match.
Ken and Danek seemed different, somehow, outside of the house. More polite in some ways but ruder in others, as if there was something almost fake in how they interacted with people who weren't each other, and only in a way you'd have to be on the inside to notice. I was beginning to sense that among the whole house: that comfortable lack of care, the taking for granted of something between them I couldn't yet define. People who are simply roommates are never quite like that.
