Gem: Rae & Kratos Who: Rae and Kratos What: Handy stuff! Where: Gem When: After this. Warnings/Rating: Safe.
Gem was an empty space. It wouldn’t be for long, Rae had plans. It was ridiculously self-indulgent for a small town that undoubtedly didn’t have enough commerce from the Capital funnelling through for a shopping experience to make the plans worthwhile commercially. But she didn’t feel like self-denial. And she could hire someone young and ridiculously eager to build a website and ship jewels in sleek packaging. The last website had been shuttered: it was too much of a beacon. Here, she could start from a blank page and the storefront was a page freshly prepared.
The workshop consumed much of the floor-plate. It was out back, and not so much sealed off as shuttered. Back there it was a mess of concrete and tools and a heavy wooden workbench that she had installed on the way over. Rae didn’t have patience to wait once she had decided to make anything and having her toys arranged for her before she arrived made perfect sense. But the store-front itself was freshly painted. It reeked faintly of the gun-metal blue paint on the walls and the floorboards were freshly sanded down and varnished dark. The thin light slicing through the glass of the door’s window was soaked by the colors rather than reflected, which gave the impression of being in a closed, secret space. Which was after all, entirely what Rae intended.
The door was open. The floor was stacked with cut-birch, and there was a pencil sketch taped to the back wall. The hand was heavy, lead pencil over a thick paper and it was precise rather than impressionistic. It gave a view of the intended interior, and there were a couple of glassed boxes for the cabinets that would be built around, carefully pushed into the corner.
Rae’s own home was stacked above the eaves but she was deliberately still asleep.
Pre-dawn light was a good time to work, train, fight or move. No matter the season, before sunrise the ground was cool and the air as wet as it could be, and there was just enough light to see without adding more heat. Here too there was blessed silence, as the people most prone to unnecessary talk--politicians, administrators, shopkeepers--were asleep at that time, leaving laborers and soldiers, people like Kratos… the ones that got things done, and had little time for frivolity.
Kratos came to the shop and moved around the outside without hesitation. There were many places that he was not allowed to be, but a man so large and with such experience had little respect for physical boundaries. People here were obsessed with fences, borders, possessions, he knew, but there was no one in sight to watch him arrive. He brought tools with him, a number of them in a large shapeless leather bag he could strap to his back. Faye had made it, and the embroidery was black on treated leather, subtle but made for strength as well as functional beauty. It had her axe in it, and since the blade was literally larger than his head, he left it where it was in favor of the other tools that were left here.
Chatty as this merchant's world was, it had its benefits. The tools were far more advanced, motorized saws and blades, excellent chisels, hatchets, astonishingly strong glue, transparent glass that almost never broke. He was pleased enough with the workbench and tools as he found them, and turned his attention to the designs as the first rays of the sun broke through the trees in the distance. Kratos was no artist, but he had outlived two wives; the first had been a dab hand with cloth, while the second had been a craftswoman of wood, metal and stone. He knew how to make a shelf, thanks very much. And a number of other things.
He could appreciate the saw, but it was a hungry, dangerous thing, and he preferred blades. This wasn't that big of a job. He used a hatchet and a dovetail saw, not Faye's axe, as the latter was better as a weapon and for cutting down things thicker than men. He started measuring out the wood first, translating any numbers he saw and working with his own stub of pencil. He didn't use a ruler, but lengths with his chisel, and by the time dawn was in full sway he was tapping a chisel down into the birch and sanding the edges, making tok tok tok noises into the warming morning.
A combination of the dawn and the noise woke Rae. The light entered the room above the Gem through wide, unscreened windows and the sunlight licked warm along hardwood floors. She slept as she did most things: exactly as she pleased, with a satisfaction in doing it precisely as she would. Waking so early was ordinarily unnecessary, but the day held promise, the kind for which she had appetite and Rae had nothing to deny it for. She began with coffee as she did every morning, the process convoluted and complicated and necessarily slow, which made it indulgence. The smell rolled down the wooden steps to the workshop below, and beyond that to the Gem itself. Rae followed, slowly.
One might imagine a sensualist enjoyed sleeping rolled in satin or silk, would appear a scantily-clad vision and entirely deliberately. Instead, Rae wore cotton, loose through the knee and ankle and a robe belted over the top of the shirt in a soft silk, with a vague suggestion of chinoiserie. The coffee mug was in her hand and she came because she had a precise plan for the Gem and no idea at all about the man who grunted on the phone.
She didn’t bring a second cup. She didn’t do anything to make inroads into the room. She stopped in the doorframe between the shop and the real heart of the place, the workshop and blew gently on the surface of her coffee, black.
Kratos didn't look up when she entered the room, or when it filled with the scent of coffee. He was not enticed by the scent, nor was he repulsed, but it did smell very bitter to someone raised on watered wine as a standard beverage. Kratos did have with him a large plastic container that sloshed with water, a cleaned out milk jug with a blue cap visible next to his leather bag behind him, but no other visible food or drink. He finished the plank he was working on, adding it to the hand-shaped pile that met her measurements off to the side nearest the door. Then he stood up.
Rae did not wear scanty silk, and Kratos still had his shirt on, but otherwise he was a pretty picture of the carpenter at work. He had been in this world for years now and from off-hand comments he had learned there was some joke about toolbelts, and he felt fortunate to feel they were unnecessary outside of battle. Here he wore the sturdy jean workmen favored (though he felt even the loose cut he favored to be unnecessarily restrictive), and white under plaid. The plaid had grown warm, and was piled next to his bag. He had brown bandages, the kind used to brace ankles, wrapped around his forearms from wrist to just before the elbow. The rest was unnaturally gray skin over large muscle and a blood red mark over eye that also seemed to slash over his left shoulder.
He took her in with the chisel still in his left hand. Her face resembled one he knew well enough that he made no move after standing, just watched her in the doorway, eyes narrowing. He spoke a word in Faye's language, a Scandinavian precursor that sounded like Norwegian and Icelandic. It was not hostile, and he spoke it like a greeting, a title and also the bare hint of a question. It translated to: "Witch...?"
Rae hadn’t dominated the space of the Gem as yet. The paint on the walls was right, and the intent was there but the Gem didn’t feel enough hers yet to put this workman ill at ease. And he was, at first blush, the sort of man who would be ill at ease with a space designed for the feminine. Not the saccharine expectation of what femininity ought to be but its truth. As yet, she looked at him in denim and white and thought uncharitably about the likelihood of the smell building over the hours ahead.
He didn’t strike memory. Rae didn’t remember. Deliberately. She didn’t remember lives lived and she didn’t remember barren landscape, the determination of men and women who lived in the salt-rimned places and believed. She looked at him, very large and imposing and clearly he’d been in some sort of state (the marks, which she studied with a flat certainty she was entitled to do so) and he didn’t pluck one single string. The Scandinavian - call it what it was, Norse did. It was visible: it ran down her spine like ice. Rae’s eyes cooled, her hold on her coffee became somewhat more imperial.
“I have no idea what you mean.”
Kratos had learned quickly that this world was very different from his, but the similarities he was discovering were starting to throw him for a loop. Repose in particular seemed to hold a number of gaping pits that he stepped into regularly, where people and things would be very like without being themselves at all. Given all the grunting, his size and lack of manners, people generally thought Kratos was a lumbering idiot, but when she did not reply in kind, he caught it fast and corrected course with speed. He pointed the chisel at her, at her cup. “Coffee, I was meaning.” That is not what he had said, and they both knew it. He didn’t even want coffee, but it was a convenient scapegoat. The accent was very thick and covered all manner of ills. Kratos was aware that most people understood him perhaps 40% of the time.
There was a short pause in which he might have turned back to his work, but he wouldn’t give her his back. He stopped looking at her so intently, having determined what he wished already and made his decision regarding what he had seen. Stepping back and around so she was still in his sight—with a strange, warlike grace given the tools in his hands—he crouched again by the boards, measuring them with her eyes. “They are the size you wished,” he commented. It was not a question.
He pointed his chisel at some of the birch branches he had leveled, forks and tridents with flat tops to support the shelves with strangely organic grace for which he now understood her preference. “These are also?” This one was a question.
Rae did not acknowledge that she understood the phrase. She didn’t dream of acknowledging she understood the phrase. To indicate, to incline, to suggest she had any idea where the roots were buried for a tongue that was lost, or should be by now, was to suggest there was any sort of chain-link between Rae and she, but no, she didn’t think any man who had Norse on the flat of his tongue was an idiot. The cool regard acquired edge: Rae thought threat.
And the way he moved, the way he shifted within the space made her feel as though she’d done better at creating a cradle, a cocoon than she had previously. As if she were the threat. This didn’t warm Rae so much as find a specific place inside her that was satisfaction. She didn’t move. She stood still, without the lazy slouch of first-thing-in-the-morning and she observed over the rim of her coffee cup, and sipped. But when he spoke about the boards, she moved. Rae was sharp and precise in her motion forward. She inspected the boards, near at his shoulder and she nodded.
“They are.” And then the next - because of course she inspected both, and her smile was cool but present. “As are they.” He’d taken taste from the surroundings. Which was perhaps, somewhat unusual from a craftsman who grunted on the telephone, but Rae did not think him an idiot.
Kratos looked at Rae with his own cool regard, heavy-lidded and ready. To him, Rae was also a threat, and like her, he wasn't actually worried about it. They saw each other from across a bare distance, acknowledged the potential destruction mirrored in both, and then moved on. He did not rise from his crouch when she came to inspect the work he had done so far, which was to shape them and then position them against the wall where he anticipated they would go. When she circled behind him he still did not move, nor did he wait for a knife in the back. He had made his decisions as well, and if she chose to fight him, then one of them would die, and until then, he made shelves.
At her affirmative he used one massive hand to brush aside sandpaper he'd been using on the stout trident-shaped branches he'd be using to support the shelves, and started measuring. He did it with his eyes, the flat line of the chisel, and occasionally a board. He marked with the heavy lead pencil she had used for her own drawing, making small crosses where the supports would go, pacing around the edge of the room. He was a giant, and had a care for the ceiling. In her last dwelling, there had been arched supports, as if one of their boats had been upended. He remembered the shelves, too, and black iron.
"The cases that are clear," he said, pointing at the glass in the corner. "Where do these go in your house?" His voice was at a low, impossibly low register, like gravel grinding, yet he sounded sedate. Bored.
Rae had particular taste. It was organic, largely. It was imperfect almost inevitably but it was quietly elegant in an unshowy way. It was also obliquely feminine but utterly un-performative. Rae preserved performative femininity like a blade tucked into a back pocket. She didn’t know - why would she? She didn’t remember - that the taste strummed memory like a chord. She didn’t know she’d carried it with her and if she had, she might have dropped it completely. Searched about for something complicated or completely clean. She didn’t and so it maintained. Which was practical: her style of design followed her taste and she didn’t begin to know how to build a following for a form she didn’t naturally incline toward
She wasn’t going to stab him. Oh, she had a knife. Fastened and out of the way as was her custom. You never knew when a knife would be handy and he had grunted on the telephone. Fighting was reserved for when you could no longer maneuver and Rae rather thought she had a lot of space for maneuvers still. He was exceptionally large, and he had hands like plates, but he didn’t grunt now.
She sipped her coffee. Took the minute and considered. “In the middle of the floor. With enough space for people to cluster or circulate. A couple in the window. None at the back, no one likes to be in the back.” She held the coffee cup balanced on her palm, her other hand curled around its handle lightly, as if merely keeping it steady.
“It’s not a house. It’s a store.” Mild correction and highly American. He wouldn’t have made it into her home.
Kratos thought he knew her taste. He remembered the tree, the hardened wood shaped into vines, the strings of animal skulls, the twists of leather. These things he associated with witchcraft and the ultimate femininity of nature. It made sense to him that whatever incarnation he spoke to here, in this chemical merchant's place, she would prefer what was natural in appearance, if not reality. And yet she didn't strike him as a ghost or a pale imitation. She seemed real, and certain of herself. He acknowledged her potential as an adversary. This was a high compliment from a Spartan, who led lives of total violence.
He looked at her wall. Kratos had accepted this person he must be, and even preferred it. Yet the wall held no potential for him. It was no canvas, he no artist. He must do this thing to get money, and money was what the boy needed to survive. His expression was blank. "A store," he repeated. Shades of language. He accepted the correction.
A flat hand that was harder than old leather indicated a spot in the center. "Here." Then another. "Here." He looked at her wood, and then her face. Dark eyes almost invisible in the hairy beard and brows glinted. "You would like unfinished edges, and sanded…" he flattened his hand and wiped the air to indicate the surface of a shelf, the word for which he obviously did not know, if there was one.
He bent, and lifted a stack of boards. There were perhaps six of them. He showed no exertion. He took one off the top--it was perhaps half the length of her entire body--and held it out against the wall with the stack under it, balanced on his left hand. "What do you sell?" He adjusted the shelf up and down to indicate that it might hold, say, a tall thing, or a short thing.
It would have been terribly nice if she’d known he thought her capable of bloody violence. She was: she had, and it was an impression Rae rarely minded leaving, even if she looked as cool and collected as one could not half an hour after waking. The workman - because she didn’t have a name and she hadn’t asked for it - looked perfectly capable of taking a head off with his hands if she’d thought it. There was something in his motion that carried the underlying impression of rather more grace than anyone that sizeable rightfully owned and Rae didn’t think of it as pleasant. It suggested a greased locomotion was possible, rather than a shamble and she placed that in the same column as she did the fact he was clearly not an idiot.
Despite the grunting.
The wall was a wall. It was freshly painted and barren. It was a canvas or it would be, but it wasn’t made for his projection. It would be a backdrop, and Rae could begin to see, now that she looked at the shelves, how she might parcel it out. He didn’t speak English naturally, that much was clear. Nor was it the Norse.
“Yes,” she said simply. There was no reason to expand on it, he had divined how she wanted it put, and there was no need to tell him how clever he was. Her taste was extractable from the dictation of the shelves. And all right. He was considerably strong, for a grunter. Rae raised one eyebrow. It was a tiny movement, but it was apparent.
She turned on her heel. She didn’t excuse herself, she didn’t need to. She pushed past the lip of the store into the back, and retrieved something on the nearest surface. For expediency, she slid it onto the bare space beneath her cotton and silk cuffs, and when she returned, she held it out. Rae did not turn up her palm, which might have been an invitation. This was not, she held her arm at parallel to her body, and her palm turned in toward her. The cuff was visible.
“That.” She returned to her coffee.
Kratos looked down at the shiny thing. It had no value as armor and he saw the beauty but did not appreciate it the way she or her customers would. Through the years Kratos had worn a number of gauntlets, many of them enchanted to do more than simply fend off a blow or support the wrist. This would qualify as a “bauble.” He was unimpressed, but understood its purpose was not for him. It adorned her white arm well. It might fit on three of his fingers. Maybe. He nodded at it and looked again at the wood, adjusting height again, a little lower.
There was so much metal in this world that they could make such things for farmers and merchants rather than gods and royalty. “If you have many, and wish them here, there will be room.” He put all the boards down again with control, and picked up the tools again. The shaped branches were nailed into the wall, unhesitatingly. He went down the wall with each level, setting the boards atop without securing them first to be sure they were level. He neither sang nor hummed as he worked, and he worked fast. He wanted it done.
He was on the second one when a bizarre sound broke the silence. Default iPhone text chime. Bing! He paused, as it came from his heavy bag on the floor not far away. Bing! It repeated. Kratos turned. Perhaps one of those toolbelts would be handy. His hands were full of nails. He put them down on the way back to the leather bag, and he dug in for the phone, which he brought out, moving aside Faye’s massive axe in its long confines. He did not bother to hide any of this if she noticed around her cup. The phone had one of those thick rugged cases on it, yet his hand dwarfed it. He inspected its surface to divine the message with a deep line in his brow.
It wasn’t a bauble. A bauble was inexpensive, it lacked substance. The cuff wrapped around Rae’s wrist, incongruous with the cotton pyjamas was worth a small fortune - or it would be once Gem’s doors were open. But she didn’t expect the workman to register anything more than the appropriateness or otherwise of whatever measurements currently resided in his skull. She looked at him baldly and wondered whether he even had someone who would long for pretty jewellery.
“Rings, pendants in the cases. Necklaces, and perhaps bought in stock, on the shelves.” It was confirmation under the clamor of the hammer and the nails and Rae watched her walls go up without batting an eyelash. He had absolutely no bedside manner, but she wasn’t sure she minded terribly. He was efficient, and she had every intention of shutting the door once the tasks she didn’t want to conceive of managing by herself, were complete.
Rae’s cool rippled when an axe emerged from the confines of his bag. Her assessment was rapidly reviewed, and she put the coffee down and without an iota of it appearing on the surface, calculated the balance of options available to her if the workman began using it. The chime of the phone had carved a route into his forehead, and she was thinking of the axe when she said, “Problem?”
Far from waving the thing around, Kratos pushed the axe into the folds of the bag, along with the rest of his belongings, as he returned the phone to it. In his mind the tool was something she had seen many times before, and in his age such things were not necessarily things that threatened, but rather mandatory items of life. The long bag was the only nod to the merchant's world he now occupied.
After making that neutral rumbling noise that met all facets of life, he gave her the unsmiling look he gave everyone. "My son wishes to return here sooner this week," he said, sounding displeased at the idea.
He rose again from his one knee and went back toward the wall where she would display her shiny baubles, stopping only halfway there when he noticed she had put the coffee cup down and was standing still as if to face an ocean wave. The heavy brows made a slight caterpillar crawl upward.
He didn’t begin swinging. It wasn’t that the axe made him any more or any less dangerous. It did not, the Norse did enough to unsettle Rae. It was the very fact of his occupation of what she had already begun to distinguish as her space. One with a door she could lock on destiny she didn’t wish to follow up. But whatever it was she had been thinking (and there were a fair few things simmering beneath the cool exterior: Rae thought rapidly, with the adrenal silver sharpness of the animal that knew the nature of traps very well.
But he spoke into the space that had chasmed out from that axe and from the Norse and Rae - who looked anything but trapped - looked at him as the new information joined the morass. A son. It sounded particularly mundane for a very large man who she doubted had much in the way of romance - perhaps that didn’t matter to whoever it had been. Children could be incidental as well as intentional, she knew that as well as anyone.
“Where is he?” She resumed her lax posture, as effortlessly as if she hadn’t been caught in that split-second uncertainty.
This was a potentially disastrous question, as invasive as it came. The two of them confronted each other in the center of her empty room, in the echo of the AC as it hummed, amongst the smell of birch scraps. He looked into her face as she looked back at him, not at all convinced by her relaxed posture. It was obvious, from the length of time that continued after her question, that he was considering whether or not to answer, not whether he should lie--but whether to answer at all. It was easy to imagine, and quite true, that Kratos would protect any progeny of his with absolutely lethal and permanent force.
Then, after a moment, he said, "At school. He is there twelve from fourteen days." The boy could not stay with him at all times, and if the witch wished to find him, he probably could, simply by watching him. He would warn the boy of her presence next they spoke, and it would be good for him to wary of such things.
Rae had a sense for when the jaws of a trap were about to snap shut. She kept herself clear on the basis of that sense and she didn’t flinch when the long, hard look the workman gave her suggested those teeth. It was uneasy, his silence or it was deliberately intended to be. Rae waited. People talked if you waited, they loathed the yawned space that could mean anything at all unless you rushed to fill it. He didn’t seem much like the type to mind silence but she didn’t have to wait long.
She didn’t know he weighed the practicality of saying something with the inevitability of a warning: Rae was no threat to the boy whoever and wherever he was, she would have laughed if he’d voiced it, gilted amusement for the ridiculous. She kept her threats in abeyance, reserved for those who came far too close to her periphery when she least wanted them there.
“What’s his name?” She could, however, tell it unsettled him. Good. She blew once more lightly on the surface of her (cool) coffee and drank.
His face betrayed some surprise. This was saying something, as he had a granite slab of a face, and not just because of its sickly grayish color. "Atreus," he said, looking at her face again with a peculiar searching squint. The person she was should know this name, and he felt no uncertainty betraying it. Yet it seemed she did not know, would not know, and it disoriented him. He frowned, not at her, but in general, and made that rolling boulder sound in the back of his throat.
He moved away then, and began to finish her shelves with his functional knowledge, producing not works of art but functional pieces that would not fall. He knocked on the drywall, unimpressed with its construction, requiring extra support and other ridiculous methods to support solid wood shelving. "Weak," he said.
Rae had forgotten more than she remembered. Deliberately, obviously. Information had value and control was built on the back of knowing limits and forgetting was a choice you invoked if you wished not to be bound down by knowing. She gave no particular indication that she either observed his unsettlement (she did) nor that the name rang familiarity somewhere very far off, banked down like the ashy-dull glow of embers. She didn’t know why. Rae had forgotten and she didn’t choose to investigate the remnant, the ghost of someone else’s memory.
“Atreus,” she considered it: and looked at him. “Greek, isn’t it? What’s yours?” Which had its own, full and lazy sense of danger. What was a Greek doing with the shape of Norse on the flat of his tongue? Even one as large and ugly as this one?
She watched him roam. “I didn’t commission the building,” she said dryly, into her coffee cup. “I cannot be at fault for the decision-making of the walls.”
Kratos perceived that the conversation was one that she wished to have, in the way she wished to have it. He was not crafty, though he knew others could be, and he was only naturally suspicious in… certain situations. This was not one. "Kratos," he said, answering her question. It was Greek, extremely Greek, like his accent, though the sickly neutral tones of his skin were far from the natural ones of those white beaches.
"All these are weak," he said, commenting on the buildings. He shrugged a massive shoulder. "Easy to put together. Easy to take apart." He worked on her shelves for the next hour, looking at her to confirm position when each was secured, and then he sat down on the floor to work on the cabinets, sanding the edges and fitting the hinges on.
Rae was often suspicious. It went naturally with an expectation there were people who very much wished to tidy her into a given slot and no intention whatsoever of being tidied. It was not a particularly burning state, nor did it leave her unsettled. It was simply a way of admiring the irony in the world. Kratos. She didn’t know it. Not without digging past certain well-constructed obstructions and she had no intention of that, either. He knew her. Enough to put Norse on the flat of his tongue and wasn’t that a conundrum? A Greek, with Norse. Rae was well-read. There was nothing at all to do at Vale that wasn’t improving, and reading had been very improving indeed. The distinction between the old Norsemen and the old Greeks was a chasm but she wasn’t nearly ignorant enough to suppose there wasn’t some truth there to be nudged out.
She let him work. She left and she circled back, the impatient interest in seeing the task completed and done and when at last she returned - dressed this time, impeccable and no doubt expensive denim, underneath a loose white shirt that was particularly mannish - to find him beginning on the cabinets, Rae began to allow the idea that Gem would be hers very shortly.
She put an envelope, well-filled down on the nearest, newly-made shelf.
“You’ve done well enough. Leave the door on the latch when you leave.” That was enough. She’d Norse and Greek to mull over and she would do it behind the forbidding division of the workshop from the main room.