Ben Wolf (agoodman) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-04-17 01:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | captain america, thor |
Who: Benji S and Maren
What: Just talking
When: The Wednesday following this
Where: Madam Tussaud's
Rating: Tame, as Benji is a gentleman and Maren is a lady
The day was sunny and comfortably warm, summer not dragging Las Vegas into the pits of a nearly eternal swelter yet. But it was early hours still, and Maren knew that by noon the sun would be high in the sky and any illusion of breeze would have fled the desert. She liked Las Vegas, did Maren. It was like having an entire bookshelf of books, instead of merely having the one book. In the mornings, when the tourists hadn’t yet crowded the sidewalks, it was lazy sleep-slumber and quiet. In the middle of the day, it was raging heat, the kind that rose of the concrete and wound its way around legs and arms like demons determined to drag the tourists down into the bowels of hell. In the evenings, it was mystery and promises that were never fulfilled. She came up with stories for each time of day, for each tourist that passed her by as she waited outside the Venetian.
She had invited Benjamin on this outing for one reason alone - because he was a reader. She didn’t care that they shared a door, and she didn’t care if he was young or handsome or, even, kind. He read, and that meant he was worth a few pages in the chapter that was the day. And like a reader, one never read dust jackets, she had no idea what the chapter would bring; Maren liked that just fine.
Madam Tussauds was one of her favorite places in Las Vegas. Dark and cool, it wasn’t the celebrities that drew her. It was the historic figures, the stories behind them that were more rich and vibrant than their true lives could have possibly been. She came to the museum often enough that the employees knew her by name, and she waited outside in a thin, long day dress, white and suited for a Jane Austen movie, and flip flops. Her dark hair whipped around her face, and she had long since given up attempting to tuck it behind her ears. Instead, she watched everyone who approached, looking for a reader.
When he had been a boy, before they’d moved out of London, his mom had taken him and Justine to the Madame Tussaud’s there. He’d spent hours staring up at the faces, curious and horrified, especially when they’d gotten to see the room of decapitated “heads”. Now he couldn’t remember why they’d had the heads to begin with, but he suspected it had something to do with the Tower of London. Justine had loved the ladies that were dressed up in gowns.
The memory made him smile, bittersweet as it was now to miss her. One day he’d go back home. It wouldn’t be today, or tomorrow, or maybe even some time this year, but one day he’d see her again. With that promise in mind, he printed off the directions to the museum from the local library. He didn’t have a computer at home, hell, he didn’t even really have much of a home and he hadn’t wanted to ask Lizzy to use her computer. The library it was, and it worked out fine for him.
Armed with the directions, he started walking there after making sure he had enough time to make it there on foot. He could have taken a cab, or one of the buses, but both he and Thor preferred a certain amount of physical activity. Besides, it gave him a chance to take in the city when it still seemed to be sleeping. The tourists were out, but it wasn’t scalding hot yet, and the locals were still inside after having been up to all odd hours of the night.
Vegas first thing in the morning was a different creature than Vegas at night. There were still all the lights, but even they looked dim against the sun. Enjoying the warmth as it sank through his thin, white button down, he tucked his hands into his jeans for the last block. Rolling out his shoulders, Ben looked around to see if he could find Maren. While he didn’t look like a reader, she very much looked like a girl that would be at home in an English romance. “Maren?” He ventured.
Maren had done extensive reading about her source material - or, rather, about Steve’s source material - and she’d read up on his fellow fiction-mates as well. She watched Benjamin approach, trying to determine if he was as she expected. He was tall and handsome, and perhaps that was expected. She knew she looked nothing like the blond man she became when she crossed into New York, but he looked like he might be a superhero in another world. Acceptable, she decided, and she gave him a very small, antiquated curtsy. “Benjamin,” she replied, and the greeting was likely indicative of the fact that she was just a little strange.
She turned, and she motioned to the entrance. “Have you been?” she asked, not really expecting the answer to be affirmative. But she hadn’t expected him to launch into a discussion about the motivation of literary heroes on the journals either, and yet he had, and she was perfectly willing to be pleasantly surprised.
“Maren,” he replied, smiling, glad that he had been right even as he dipped into his own courteous bow to her. It came with a bittersweet pang -- Justine, when she was little, had been in love with the heroes of the stories. She’d forced him to dress up and play along as a knight, as Robin Hood, even as Arthur (but never Lancelot, as Guinevere was in love with Lancelot) and expected him to treat her as a lady. They were old, familiar steps and Benji offered his arm out to Maren. For him, it was no more strange than the conversation they’d had on the journals or the fact that they were not alone.
“Not to this one, no. I’ve been to the one in London, but I expect it to be a bit different.” As different as the two cities themselves were. “Have you?”
He won her over with that courteous bow, and she was a young girl for a moment, nothing of the hired hand to a criminal organization in the roses that warmed her cheeks. She took his arm, very practiced in the art of it, and she turned with him toward the entrance. Maren rarely met anyone willing to indulge her idiosyncrasies. When she was very young, she had tried to make her own brothers play knight to her lady, but they had no patience for her whims. It was one of the reasons she’d fallen so very hard for a young man in college, one who had humored her in this manner, even if it had turned out to have a very sad ending, that particular chapter of her life.
“Yes,” she admitted. “Often. I like the historic figures best,” she added, as they walked into the cool, slightly darkened entrance to the museum. The girl at the box motioned Maren in, and Maren smiled and pulled on the arm entwined with hers. “Will you tell me your story as we walk?” she asked, tipping her head up to look at him.
Ben wasn’t surprised to learn she liked the historic figures best, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d said literary figures either. Both seemed in line with the conversation they’d had, which had been a joy and a respite from Thor worrying about Asgard or New York and Ben’s own concerns about finding a job.
“I’m not sure it’s that interesting,” he started to say, but she had asked. A knight was honor bound to do what his lady requested. “I was born the eldest of five children. My mother stayed at home with us while my father worked, something in finances. We moved around a lot -- London, Geneva, Dubai, then back to London -- but I liked it. I liked traveling, still do.” He wet his lips as they stopped at the first set of figures. “My mother needed me to help take of my younger siblings, so I spent a lot of time being home schooled, with tutors to make sure my education wasn’t compromised.” It was a bare, sweet surface retelling of his life.
“My sister, Justine, she loved stories. I had to make sure I knew them in case she asked,” he added quietly.
Maren caught the past tense.
His sister loved stories, not loves, and she cocked her head to look at him, a curious little bird with a question she didn’t voice. Even still, his childhood sounded enchanted to her. Parents, siblings, traveling. There was no talk of needles, of death, of belts and fists, and she tried to imagine it, his life. She didn’t have enough to draw a good picture in her mind, and so she filled in the missing pieces with her own facts, her own imaginings. She pictured a loud family, settling into new houses, boxes set to be unpacked and a friendly tussle for the biggest round. She liked that image, and she kept it, turning her attention to the wax figures in front of them. “What kind of stories did she like best?” she finally asked.
The Justine that he remembered was from four years ago. As much as he wanted to pretend that his sister wasn’t any different, he knew that she could have changed in those years, perhaps even as much as he had. “When she was little, it was the fairy tales. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty.” He made his mother teach them to him so he could read them to her as bedtime stories.
“After that it was King Arthur, Robin Hood, knights and ladies. Then Shakespeare. She was getting into Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte the last time I saw her,” Ben added, his voice dipping on the last few words, becoming quieter. It had been his choice to leave, but that never stopped it from hurting every damn time he thought about his family and what he’d left behind. There was a reason that Maren reminded him of Justine. “She didn’t care much for sci-fi, but she seemed to be reading more high fantasy. Elves and dragons and what have you.”
Maren turned back a few pages, and she reevaluated her original assumption, that his sister was dead, in favor of his simply not having seen her in a long time. It was something about his voice, about the way he said the things she’d liked to read the last time he saw her. She turned her attention to the next set of figures, and she thought before she spoke. “I loved fairy tales when I was young, but only when I was young. Arthur and Robin Hood wore out their welcome once I realized those stories were just as much a fairy tale as a story about a girl with glass slippers. I fell in love with real books then, books that depicted life, but in its extremes, better or worse, never as it was.” She looked over at him. “You haven’t seen her in a very long time, your sister?”
Once he arrived in India, Ben had stopped counting the months since he last saw his family. It had been a frequent debate with Thor, who insisted that Benji’s family would understand and Ben, who didn’t want to put his family at risk, especially now given Thor’s brother. How could they possibly understand him running off to a place they would never visit, never see, and that by all accounts existed only in mythology? It was harder with him seeing the damage of being estranged from family and what it was doing to Thor, yet he couldn’t force himself to pick up the phone and call.
“Four years,” he finally said, quietly pensive before he abruptly changed the subject. “Even books that depict real life can only capture so much. They might tell you how green the grass is, what spring smells like, how it feels to walk barefoot through it, but until you feel those things yourself, you’re missing what words cannot describe. A good writer can do their best, can show you those things, but until you have your own memories and your own experiences to fill in the spaces, there’s something missing.”
“It’s better in the books,” Maren said solemnly, when he tried to explain that books could only capture so much. “I went on a gondola ride,” she explained of the rides inside the hotel that shared space with the wax museum. “I have read about them in books, all rich and the smells of Venice, romantic and claustrophobic, like there is nothing in the world but old and crumbling buildings and the lapping of water. In my mind, it was heaven. Here, this perfect version of Venice, it was nowhere as good as it was in my mind. Reality is never as good as what a girl dreams. The ball never comes with a prince, and homecomings are never a warm embrace that wipes away the past.” She gave him a shrug, an honest one. “I am sorry about your sister.”
It was, perhaps, the most honest statement she’d made all days, and she wandered through the remainder of the wax figures with little attention, not turning to him until the end, until the very end. “Do you think we’ll die? Over there, in that version of New York? Being heroes? Will we die?”
“But here isn’t Venice, it’s only a replica. Riding through a gondola here, its different by the simple fact that here you’re within a hotel, there are some things they could never replicate,” he pointed out, but her warning of a homecoming was a sharp one. What if his family didn’t want him back? Ben didn’t honestly believe that, but fear, once introduced, creeped like ivy into his thoughts.
“Reality isn’t like dreams.” Both he and Thor had had their dreams. Thor of glory, only to have learned the wisdom of war and Ben of home. It was a dream he still clung to. “Would you rather dream all day of the things you want, or actually have them?” It was a hard question, with harder answers if he’d had to answer it. There was always home, his family, but even Thor echoed those sentiments. Peace would be elusive, but they would continue to chase it.
Inhaling sharply, his grip tightened momentarily on her, not to the point of pain but only becoming firmer, as if he was grounding himself. “I think we all die eventually. Here or there. All we have is the time we’re given to make a difference,” Ben said quietly.
“Are you afraid to die?”
“Yes, I am afraid to die,” she said with unguarded candor. There was no point in lying about that, not in this book or any other. The end of things was not something she desired. Even the end of a book left her feeling bereft, the characters gone, dead. Even if she read the book again and again, it was never like the first time. It was a memory, rather than living. She didn’t want to die, and she wasn’t afraid to say as much. She sighed, and she looked at him, and then she backtracked to his comment about Venice. “The Venetian should have been better. It’s between a book and reality. It’s a perfect picture of a perfect expectation. It doesn’t matter how many times you dream things, the truth is never as shiny or pretty, never as exquisite.” She shook her head because, no, it wasn’t.
She gave him a curtsy, low and respectful, lower than the one at the outset, and she smiled. She was a broken doll in a picture perfect dress, shiny black locks and perfect red lips. She could have been Snow White standing there, waiting for him to hand her an apple, but she was too wise, too smart to eat it, even if he did hold out his hand. “Thank you for meeting me, Benjamin.”
She meant it, the thank you.
Whatever place they were left with: her books or his memories, Ben had the feeling they both hurt in ways that couldn’t really be described on any page. Books were for better times, an escape that provided enough realism for someone to feel close, with enough fantasy to make it magical. “Thank you, Maren,” he said quietly, returning her bow.
“And to answer you: the hero, even if he is afraid, does not stop. He does what must be done because that’s who he is.” Ben hadn’t forgotten her asking what the hero of the story wanted, nor would he forget that she afraid of dying.
“Until next time.”