Eames (plagiaristic) wrote in repose, @ 2018-10-01 20:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, f eames, janus allen |
Janus & Eames: the crossroads
Who: Janus & Eames
When: Middle of the recent madness (backdated)
Warnings: Nada
The crossroads were not the first in a series. There were a number of paths and roads that criss-crossed each other as the town became more dense farther to the east. Yet here, this particular set of roads that the demon had described, the two paths were deeply defined into the ground, paved with black tar so shiny it seemed that the trucks had been by just last week. It was not full dark, just the afternoon fading out into a vague coolness that wasn't nearly autumn enough for anyone's taste.
Old apple trees leftover from the northern orchards almost reached this exact set of corners, the fullness of ninety degrees on each corner just large enough to boast one tree. They were somewhat haggard, those old trees, and there was no fruit on any of the skinny limbs, but they had some leaves to get on with. Their white fingers extended up toward the sky, clawing away from sparse grass.
On first approach, the place seemed deserted. Very far off there was a white noise echo from the highway. Here, there was only room for one car to go in any direction, and there was one stop sign with a few pockmarks to watch them go, if they ever did. The horizons went pretty far, and thanks to an illusion of the land's slope, there were no houses or buildings in sight.
Eames hadn’t slept in days, if you used the strictest definition of the word which was to conk out and wake, passaged through waves of sleep until you were refreshed or at least a little less tired than you began. It wasn’t the clinic, it was the crack, but Eames didn’t know that. The crack was a chink and when Repose was a flood, it rushed into every crevice opened to it and washed away what was there. Eames was hallucinating, darling and it wasn’t because he’d anything interesting in his own head he’d scraped together. No, it was the charge of the bloody Light Brigade as those with nightmares, hallucinations, rampaged through the only shut-eye he had, until he was like a rubber-band stretched thin.
He had no sane intention of bargaining. Janus was Janus and Janus was what Janus happened to be and the two stood proximate but with a crack between them as important as the one in Eames’ mental capability. It had been Janus fixed in a nightmare, to Eames’ own mind and not the demon. Eames knew to gamble when he was of complete mind, instead of half-cut and his memories were not a pot to sweeten. But he lacked orders and the clinic was closed down, the respite it might have provided in a roundabout way, closed off.
He approached the cross-roads on foot. Behind a wheel, he fancied he’d see things that weren’t there, and not see things that were, and he passed wreckages on the road out of town to the ‘roads that proved the point rather, darling. His head was full of buzz and the fingerprints of someone else’s screaming and Eames looked tired and as impeccable as one could be on no sleep. He wore a beautiful, Italian-cotton shirt in peacock blue over worn jeans that looked like they had returned change from a $100 bill and handmade shoes that had certainly not, and he had no idea if the trees were the trees or figments of his imagination. He looked dog-tired and faintly sick, and the abandonment of the place left the hairs on the back of his neck standing to attention.
“Janus,” Eames spoke into the silence, his throat hoarse and the word sliced off.
The demon appeared in a place where previously there had been nothing but dust. He was dressed to match Eames' splendor, though his mirror was a more sober equivalent, the fashion negligent in the gathering evening. The two men were an unlikely pair out in the middle of Repose nowhere, facing each other two feet apart, the gentle breeze through the apple branches overhead ruffling the feather in Janus' hat brim. He squinted through smokey glasses up at Eames, who had some inches on him in this particular form.
"You look like shit, man," he said. He said man and not sweetie, and grinned at Eames like he'd just told an inside joke.
At least it was quiet here. The unnatural sound that pervaded the town came from the north, and Janus' empty crossroads were beyond its reach. The lonely spot was a place from which the right moon and the right ingredients could call forth an emissary of hell. You could not call it busy. "You want to sit down?" Janus cast an arm back and to his right, where there was a patch of sparse grass under the apple tree with the most trunk.
The sound was part of the problem: Eames could feel it, attuned to it the way he looked for shadows in corners and sat with his back to the wall where he could look out at the room. But it wasn’t the only problem, it was the reach of all those freshly-driven-mad through his mental back chamber and the fact that the sound couldn’t reach and it felt still, as if one couldn’t drive a coach and horses full of insanity through it in a split-second Eames didn’t dislike. But it didn’t wrap the problem up with ribbons.
He curled the corner of his mouth and lifted the edge of his eyebrow in a look that would have been amused derision if he’d been fighting fit. As it was, it looked like a rather sad mimicry, “My worst is everybody else’s best day of the week, darling,” but the throaty was hoarse, not intention. He observed the choice of the day, because he wasn’t dead and he noted the switch in tone, whether the ‘roads and the demon or the man in the hat.
“Sit, fall, stagger, I’ll be down.” Eames put a broad, flat hand against the trunk of the tree and it looked like he was easing, until he sat abruptly, back to the tree and his skull against its bark.
“Cosy.” Observed, eyes half-shut.
Janus put an arm behind Eames mid back (about as high as his arm went, really) as the larger man turned away, not quite touching, just in case he tipped backward. Once Eames collapsed and half-rolled over, Janus was very close nearby, peering into his face. "It's not much," he said, of the crossroads. "Literally." Janus put one hand against the apple tree over Eames' head and sat himself in the dusty grass, folding only one knee under him. The wind brought hints of smoke from beyond the low hills, the trees burning on the other side of town and not the demon under the branches.
"You know," the demon said, lighting a cigarette with his fingertip, "you can't go on like this forever. Your body is going to give out, or your mind first. Either way, even if you recover, you won't be as strong as you were before. Physics." Janus didn't know physics. It was just the kind of bullshit Atticus would say to convince people he knew what he was talking about. He took a drag and exhaled away and downwind from Eames.
"So what are you planning to do to get it to stop?" Janus wasn't even sure what the problem was, except that it probably had to do with Eames' susceptibility to other people's dreams. He could get into Eames head without much difficulty, even when the other man was awake and Janus was a formless mess. Not a good sign.
Eames had a vague idea of presence at his back; he’d spent far too much time aware of where his back was and everyone else was and the two things not aligning that he didn’t not-notice, even dog-tired. It wasn’t trust, trust was like pissing into the wind and pretending the blowback was rain; it was something less tangibly difficult to agree to part with. Whatever it was, Eames did it and when he’d sat, Janus’s self was nearby, close enough to observe without really observing at all. Heat, scent, the way the wind moved around the blockage of a body, Eames didn’t have to really open his eyes at all to know he was there.
Eames was familiar with bodily limits, darling. He had a vague idea of where his cut in, and while it was some way off anybody who didn’t have the brass balls to survive the forcible extension of their limits, he was running out of road. He cocked an eyebrow, and he dragged open an eye. “Physics, darling?” It sounded very unlikely. Physiology, perhaps.
“I don’t know what it is.” Which he didn’t. It wasn’t that he couldn’t stay sane if the town hadn’t had a screaming fit in his skull. People got in but years and years of overlapping training like scales on the back of a singularly robust animal had them evicted soon enough his subconscious noticed they were there. It noticed, it just didn’t snap back like a rubber-band. Eames didn’t know games with gods and mortals, he could have asked the clinic but the idea of subjecting himself to assessing, coldly objective blue light that would then find a way of monetizing his little problem - no thank you, darling.
“I don’t know, darling.” He reached for the cigarette in Janus’s fingers and put it to his own lips. It wasn’t a cigar, but it would do and it put taste and feel to the charred smell in the air. It was almost relaxing, if he hadn’t been half-dead.
Janus grinned unapologetically. "Physics. You know, one thing bouncing off another thing makes the other thing bounce…" He waved one hand, knuckles and ash leading, to illustrate the "&c." "That." Janus frowned when the cigarette was plucked away, and his immediate reaction was the same as it always had been: "That's bad for you. Mortals have limited time to waste on unhealthy shit like this." He took the cigarette back, rather rudely, and brought his knees up to make further theft more difficult. The demon proceeded to smoke and then exhale away again, perhaps rather smugly. There were limited benefits to being dead, and this might be one.
"If you don't know, then it's time to find out," Janus said grimly, propping an elbow on one knee. "You let it go too long as it is. It's not normal to be so wide open, you ask me." Not that anyone did. "Especially in a place like this. I can think of four kinds of people around here that can get in your head, not even counting me." Flicking the cigarette end. "Not that they're bad people, just an example."
Eames had worse habits than the cigarette. The cigars, you see. And the red meat, and the funny habit about running toward gunfire, rather than away. All in all, he found the idea of life and time being very precious, amusing from a man who wasn’t a man at all but demon. “I’m not bouncing at this precise moment,” he said, with now empty fingers and a bereft sort of twist of the mouth. He could smell the snatch of ordinary cigarette smoke on the air and then the smokier undercurrent of being sidled up alongside the demon.
“Who?” Eames inched upward, but the question was real and pragmatic. He looked as if he’d gone ten rounds with the town’s bad dreams, but the tension had crept back into the lines beside his mouth and his forehead. “Four kinds, who are they?” He looked at Janus’s cigarette end with regret, and no small amount of feeling.
“I’ve spent the better part of two decades dreaming, darling. I’ve an idea of how bad it could be.” He fingered the weight of his shirt pocket - shirt, not pants; Eames had transferred the weight to where he would feel it as pressure even when he hadn’t reached for it specifically. It was dangerous, leaving it where it could be seen, but no one else had touched it, no one else knew the measure of its weight. “I’ve got no intention of asking the bleeding clinic and they would have me in for tests, spit-spot if they had an inkling.”
He waved a hand, smiled beguilingly. “Couldn’t you knock me out for fifteen minutes? More than enough,” Eames promised.
Janus knew about the cigars. They smelled good, beguiling in their warm tobacco reassurance and traditional masculinity. Nothing like a tough traditional guy hissing out smoke under a low fedora to really get the motor running. Cancer, Janus corrected in his head, rather firmly. Mortals were very sensitive to all kinds of disasters, especially the slow sneaking ones. They always wanted refunds when they died early, too. Janus had died before he hit twenty, and had smoked for most of his second decade; time was precious.
"Old gods, immortals, angels and psychics," the demon reeled off, readily enough. All those kinds of people rang certain kinds of alarm bells when they started parading around town so obviously. "So ask someone else. Like mafia doctors; you gotta have someone."
The demon pretended not to notice Eames prodding at his chest pocket. "Nothing is free," the demon said, in a regretful tone, eyes gilded in faint smolder as he puffed. "I don't make the rules." He could break them, but that always had a cost too, and nobody liked those. "I could do a few hours for a secret. Has to be a bad one." A cool autumn wind ruffled the skeletal branches of the tree overhead.
Eames didn’t think about cancer. He didn’t think about old age, or getting decrepit. He didn’t think about dementia and Alzheimers, they were all terribly unattractive things to think about and Eames didn’t, if he spent any attention thinking about it, think he’d make it that long. The cigars smelled good and they were a vice you could dwell in, enjoying it until you’d concluded. Time was short, but that didn’t make smoking a cigar any less precious.
“Are all of them here?” The parade of people who could all have knocked a crack into his mind. Eames sounded lazy, not surprised. This was in large part down to the silence settling into his brain-pan and his posture of recline. He had his eyes half-shut already. “No one else, darling.” He yawned excessively. “Anyone I trust needs to stay clear. Anyone I don’t, I’m not telling them I’ve a hole in my bucket.”
He closed his eyes properly now. “Stickler. I keep my secrets. Just stay still and let me sleep.”
Janus, on the other hand, knew that cancer wasn't just a thing that happened to old people. It happened to everybody, usually the everybody that least expected it, and it made people desperate and very willing to deal. He was one of the few demons that didn't seek out people who had terminal illnesses, just like he didn't hang around warzones and mental hospitals. The people who dealt with Janus didn't have to deal with Janus, and that was the point.
"There's a few," Janus conceded, nodding through the smoke. "It's that kind of place. Lots of weird people, most of them with harmless weirdness. Like mine." He grinned innocently, and this was the kind of face that had innocent grins that didn't look innocent, but Puckish and amused.
Janus huffed in distaste of the rejection, resettling his fine-fettered feet in the gravel and grass. "Have it your way. Though I don't know how we're supposed to stay clear, since your head is literally all over town." The breeze blew a little warmer now, dusty with backroad air.
Eames didn’t, strictly speaking, think of Janus and his bargains in the same breath. Strictly speaking, Eames’s first encounter flavored those that followed: of survival, very deep down and with nightmare plucking at the strings that wove a mind together. Eames lacked the ability to predict what would come next, and he imagined the bargains were, in themselves, predictable affairs. Draw what you need to the surface, coax - people were eminently coaxable - and then seal the deal.
Eames had no intention of bargaining for a very simple reason and it had nothing to do with what he might lose in the tradeoff. He didn’t wish to exchange the Janus who was utterly unpredictable for one that had certain expectations and could be relied upon. It didn’t matter what the bargain was or it wasn’t. Eames had a distaste for giving pieces of himself away and forgetting them, besides.
“Harmless?” Eames cracked an eye open, smiled benevolently. “You’ve got teeth, darling. If the rest of them are as toothsome, hardly people to entrust a fragile mind to.” But he had an idea, that it was less safe than he’d thought it and he hadn’t thought it very safe at all. He frowned, eyes closed, and Janus’s knee knocked against his temple.
“I don’t know where to begin. The people who knew dreams I had before, they didn’t touch minds that had damage. Too easy to get trapped there.” He sounded off-hand, even if he paused briefly - very briefly - on the word ‘damage’.
Janus hadn't any idea how people in town managed to balance what he was with the person they liked. Nor was he the type to really think it through, he was just grateful they hadn't lashed out about it. A slippery sly type would conceal more of his dubious "profession" rather than bringing it up regularly--unless he was just that slippery sly.
It didn't entirely surprise Janus that Eames didn't want to deal, but he was visibly disappointed. Atticus refused to deal with Janus for just the same reason as Eames, not that Janus knew the fact, and certainly the demon was a posterchild for reasons to avoid his own addiction (not that he knew that either). Janus didn't take it personally, not exactly, and accepted Eames might choose to continue to suffer for his own reasons. Janus was all for the choice.
Janus showed said teeth very wide and very white. "Fine fine," he said. "You have a point there, about teeth. Repose is a place for teeth, though. As long as you don't shit where you sleep. That doesn't help anyone." Like whatever idiot set the forest on fire or killed all the lake animals. What was the fucking point of hiding in a place that had a world spotlight on it?
"They might not want to do the fixing, but they could talk to you about it. Advice, maybe." A cool hand smoothed Eames' hair flat from his forehead. A muted tapping sound said that Janus had got his phone out and was texting or posting with his free hand.
Eames didn’t apply motivations to people when he couldn’t predict which way they would run. He knew them better by their dreams, when they were pure subconsciousness. He knew Janus had made a point of reminding him of what Janus was. Why, he didn’t know. But Eames equally didn’t know why there’d been a brief interlude at the bus station. It didn’t bother him.
He had one eye cracked and there was enough emotion on Janus’s face to evince (or guess) at the reason. “You’d rather I wanted to,” Eames said, as if it were fact. “Darling, you’re a contradiction.” He laughed, and it was rough with lack of sleep. Teeth, and he tried to concentrate. Eames operated on instinct usually and on adrenaline, but he was coasting on the edge of both. “Shitting where you sleep is terribly messy,” he said on a yawn. “Unless you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not.”
The hand sliding across his forehead was unexpected, but soothing. Eames’s eyes shuttered, and his breathing was evening. “Advise away.” Another yawn, this one longer, and he wasn’t helping himself. “If I’m screaming,” he said matter-of-factly, “Wake me.” It was with every intention of succumbing to the brink on which he was sitting. He heard the peck of the keyboard, but thought very little of it. Eames was engaged with the lack of anyone storming through his head and was very close to sleep.
Everyone cross-analyzed Janus more than Janus did. Janus didn't have a clue why he did 90% of the things he did, and whenever anyone asked for explanations he had to put effort into a response. Certainly, it was part of the profession to be manipulative, but that didn't mean Janus had a grand plan. It was the difference between talking about your job and talking about your career. He wouldn't have made a deal at 18 if he was any good at foreseeing the future. Janus-in-dreams was as ephemeral and indecisive as Janus in real life, it was just people expected less of him in the former.
Janus, who was looking at his phone, lifted it slightly to look down and under his arm at Eames. "I'd rather you did, but if you want to do it the hard way, that's up to you, sweet pea." The demon rolled rock-gilded eyes at Eames' yawning comment, and didn't bother to reply. He went back to scrolling as Eames went back to dozing.
"I'm not an expert on mortal dreaming capabilities. As far as I knew coming into it, you weren't supposed to be able to do that. You need advice from the people who do what you do but without the corporate paycheck. Every system has those, even mine. That's all I was saying." He looked down again after this short lecture, but Eames was already asleep. Janus sighed.