James Hutchins (0roborus) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2020-12-31 14:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | fern o'grady, james hutchins |
So Much for Secrets
Who: Fern, James
What: Talking About Sam, Celeste, the Lady, Family Dynamics, and What It'll Take to Fix This (Witch Hunter Plot)
When: Late Afternoon
Where: Las Vegas
Ratings: Low
Once his medical team was assured that Sam Hutchins could breathe independently, he had been stepped down from ICU into a hospital room with less machinery and more quiet. The quiet, James found, was equally disorienting, especially in the presence of a man who had hummed, muttered, knocked about, and cursed during every waking hour of his life, while his son tucked multiple generations of musical devices into his ears to block it out. The television was on but muted, the remote stashed near Sam’s pillow. On screen, a couple was ripping the bathroom out of a house in Anaheim.
James sat at the window in a black thermal shirt and jeans, his boots crossed on the sill. A small, reclining chair bore his six-foot frame. He was silhouetted by the afternoon sun as it slipped lower in the sky. James marked a page in his book with a piece of paper, on which he’d drawn the symbols he took from Aaron’s arms and the notes he’d gotten from Izzy. There was a metal thermos on the floor. He reached down to grab it and took a sip of the drink he’d brought into the hospital with him. Right now it was plain coffee. It wasn’t always.
A few of Sam’s favorite charms were positioned around the room. James had asked Celeste to do the wards. Since the proverbial door slammed in his face at Sam’s house, he had kept his own magic out of the old man’s space and tried, for once, to just be his son.
Hospitals were something of a novelty for Fern. Her childhood hadn’t seen any medical intervention outside of the healers at the commune, and barring a single health check after she had been taken away from that life, she hadn’t visited one at all. Sure, there had been requisite doctor’s check-ups and vaccination appointments, but the doctors that her adoptive parents took her to had kept offices that felt more like hotels, with posh leather furniture and thick plush carpets in waiting areas that seemed more like lounges and exam rooms built for maximum comfort, walls holding expensive artist’s prints rather than medical charts or drug advertisements. The stark tiled floors and ever-present scent of antiseptic in the air as Fern made her way to the Hutchins man’s room was a curious thing for her to behold.
The machinery inside the room itself carried a point of interest as well: cords tethering the man in bed, gentle beeps and soft pings with each breath he took, an array of numbers in shining green digital displays that meant nothing at all to her but were apparently important enough to monitor closely. Though to James it seemed a great lessening from what he might have encountered in the ICU, for Fern, it was a matter of great interest.
Curious. Very curious.
She noted James by the window but her gaze remained trained on the man in the bed. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
James heard Fern’s soft entrance to the room before she spoke up and he observed her taking it all in, a tourist in the life of ordinary people— ordinary, at least, where financial matters were concerned. He lowered the thermos from his mouth, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed the black coffee. An unpredictability accompanied Fern on the few times he’d been in her presence. Right now, James wouldn’t have been surprised if she reached out, still wearing that placid expression, and snatched a cord.
“That’s a good question,” he answered. “According to the doctor, they have to run more tests, because they can't find any reason for him to be unresponsive. I don’t know how to break it to them that the thing that attacked him feeds on witches until there’s nothing left.” As the sunset reached an eye-piercing zenith, James leaned forward and pulled down on the metal chain of the shades, bathing the room in fluorescent light.
Fern settled herself gingerly into a chair, folding her hands in her lap, attention still trained on the man in the bed. Her expression was blank, even her curiosity hidden behind a mask of disinterest that had become second nature. She’d seen dead bodies before, but never someone seeming to hover between living and dead. Were the machines keeping him alive? Or was he still in there, fighting to take back control? Would it even be a life worth living, if he was able to come back? So many questions.
“What’s the point?” she said, then paused, realizing that her words sounded harsh even to her own ears. “I mean, why would someone do this?” she amended.
It was a loaded question. To most, her own foray into magic for magic’s sake would be viewed as a useless endeavor, if not an outright expression of madness and cruelty. But there had been purpose there, even if others could not see it. Power. Scholarship. There was so much to learn, and some things could only be gleaned from hands-on experience.
This just seemed… useless.
James stared at her and screwed the cap back on his thermos. He could have taken offense to it, but he let it roll off his back. He knew enough about Fern to understand that magic wasn’t just a means to an end to her, not like it was to Aaron Turner. He’d done some research into the twenty-two year old who died on his dad’s floor and what he learned about Aaron’s magic didn’t add up to much except sloppy work and a reckless power grab.
He lowered his legs, one after the other. The book slid in his lap. “This thing— I don’t know if you want to call it a demon or monster— it has an appetite. It has to build up a certain amount of power to stay in our realm. The last two times it made it to this side, witches sent it back, so it’s probably used us as a source before. The fact that Sam’s still alive… it’s just an accident.” James set the book on the end of his dad’s bed, where his feet made a peak beneath the covers.
“I don’t know why the guy summoned it. Maybe he just wanted to show the world he could. People have complicated reasons for using summoning spells, don’t they?” James looked at the small, white hands on Fern’s lap. He blinked at the memory of their palms pressed together, covered in blood and dirt. He rubbed his eyelids and looked at the machines: green lines, white font, a dizzying array of tubes and wires.
“So it’s not just some… creature… on a rampage,” Fern mused aloud. “Someone did this for a reason. And it takes someone knowing magic to send it back, but that’s what it needs to keep its foothold, so… any attempt to send it away could just as easily give it what it needs to stay.”
She glanced to James, watching him intently for a moment. He had looked better the last time she saw him: lively, interesting. Now he looked… tired. Careworn. Rough around the edges. It was interesting, in a way. Obviously, the sick man was family, and his injuries were a source of discomfort to James, though the way he spoke of him -- simply a first name, no endearment, no real sense of affection -- seemed to bely his state of unrest.
People could be so very strange.
“I’m sorry,” Fern said, and almost meant it. “For your… family? Being hurt. I wouldn’t have intruded here but I needed to talk to you. About Celeste?”
“You’re not intruding. Sam’s my dad,” he told her. James shifted his body forward in the blue chair, his legs taking up space in the cramped room that Fern didn’t seem to want. They knew very little about each other’s personal lives. Had he told Fern about the magic shop? James couldn’t recall. Maybe he let her think he was just a small-town mechanic who liked magic. He’d been cautious with what he told Fern because of Elfleda, which was odd because that same shared connection had been enough for them both when they trusted each other with an enormous secret.
James had never liked lying, but lately he’d slid into a relationship with its close relative: withholding. It kept the buzz of other people’s opinions out of his ears, but what good did it do anyone? It just created a bunch of useless silos, with everyone mulling over everyone else’s intentions. He brought his hands together in a loose grip. “Sam opened the magic shop that I run downtown. That’s where I met Celeste. I didn’t know you two were friends when we did the spell. What do you want to know?”
Fern nodded. “I met Celeste at the hotel. Motel. Where I used to stay,” she explained, unconsciously picking at her cuticles as she spoke. “She helped me. With the snack machine.” It seemed a lifetime ago; how long had it really been? Fern wasn’t sure anymore. The days sometimes seemed to run one into another. Without anything to make demands of her time -- no job to keep her busy, no classes to run to, no ridiculous social obligations set forth by her parents -- it was easy to lose track of the time.
How long since she came to Searchlight?
How long since her little housewarming with Celeste? The Echeveria was thriving, and had even spawned a few tightly curled little rosettes in its pot.
“I don’t… have friends. Many friends, I mean,” Fern went on, stumbling a little on her words. It could be hard to speak openly, to really mean the words that she was saying. Visits from the Lady always gave her a boost of confidence but they were few and far between, or so it could seem. Whatever was happening here, it seemed Fern would be facing it alone, with only the few feeble friendships she had struggled to maintain to guide her.
“I need to know if she knows? About everything,” she said, feeling only the slightest pinprick of pain as her fussing with her cuticles drew blood. “I need to know what I’m supposed to say. Or if I’m supposed to know you. Or… anything. Everything.”
“Celeste knows about the cemetery,” James said, casting his voice low. There was no telling who was lurking in the hallway, but there was more to it than that. James didn’t know how much his father, who looked unconscious, was actually hearing. He wouldn’t be surprised if something fell off the bedside table after this. “I told her the same night because one of the things we made hurt her.” James examined a callus on his palm.
The chair he was sitting in felt confining. James wanted to stand up and move, but he was aware he’d be looming over Fern. He looked around and decided even leaning on the window sill was a better alternative. He got up and took up residence with his back against the shade. “I told her I did the ritual with another witch, but I didn’t give her a name at first, and she didn’t ask. But a month or so later, she mentioned your name to me and I got nervous, because of your Lady. I didn’t want her near Celeste, so I told her that you were the one with me in the cemetery that night and that you follow Elfleda. I didn’t want to keep Celeste away from you, but I wanted her to know everything.”
James rested his palms on either side of himself on the window sill. “The thing about Celeste is that she accepts people for who they are. I think she’s only allergic to bullshit.”
His words struck a chord with Fern and she frowned, cocking her head to the side. “But why?” she asked, confused. “Why would you want to keep the Lady away?”
It was anathema to her, the mere idea of purposely pushing someone away from the Lady and all that She might offer. James didn’t seem to understand that earning the Lady’s favor had been the only good thing in Fern’s life for many long years. It didn’t make sense to her that he would keep someone he so clearly cared about away from Her blessings.
She shook her head. “I don’t understand that,” she admitted, casting her gaze down to her hands and noting for the first time that she had drawn blood. A thin line of it ran from the cuticle on her index finger and down to the tip of her nail, gathering there in a fat crimson bead but not yet falling. She lifted her finger to her mouth without thinking, clearing the blood away. “But I think I know better than to try and change your mind.”
An alarming thought suddenly occurred to Fern, and she glanced up to James with wide, uncertain eyes. “She isn’t mad, is she?” she asked, adding in a small, uncertain voice, “Celeste is my friend. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t want her to be mad at me.”
“No,” he said. “She’s not mad.” Anything else that needed explaining between Fern and Celeste, he’d leave to them.
James watched her suck the blood from her finger. It was a gesture many people did without thinking about it, and maybe it was only noteworthy to him now because of what blood could do in both their hands, or because of how much it contrasted with the pristine picture Fern presented, as long as you blurred your eyes. “I’m not trying to change your mind about Elfleda. I’m not in a place to be a hypocrite about who you worship, or what you use in your magic, or anything. What you don’t know is that she did something that scared my mother a long time ago and it changed her life, and that changed mine. I got in her way once and she offered to show me some things. I’m still working through what they mean.”
James had trouble deciding how much to say to Fern, how to keep it all in her language, and decided less was more. “Your Lady is complex. She doesn’t use the same... approach, I guess, with everyone else as she does with you. Celeste has a chance to figure out life without her family, and what kind of magic she wants to do, on her terms. That’s what I wanted to protect.”
“I wouldn’t want her to be mad at me,” Fern repeated, picking at her injured nail again without thinking. For a moment, she was far away from that hospital room, back in a place where friendship and affection came and went as arbitrarily as the breeze.
She thought about the girls she thought had been her friends in school, who would turn on her as quickly as the seasons changed, if they so desired.
She thought about the others in the Worship House, who had welcomed her with open arms only to despise her when they realized she was highly favored by their leader.
She thought about her adoptive parents, who had promised her the loving home she had never had, only to treat her like a street mutt they needed to shape into a show dog, with hoops to jump through and affection that had to be earned.
Fern swallowed, squeezed her eyes shut, and shook her head. She pasted on a small smile, and nodded. “I understand,” she agreed. It made sense, in its way; not everyone was prepared for all the Lady had to offer. Not everyone could truly understand.
She bit her lip. “Whatever’s happening here, what happened to your father… I want to help. To fix it, if we can? There’s more strength in numbers. You taught me that.”
James nodded. “Until the ritual we did, I hadn’t done magic with anyone in a long time.” He had mixed feelings about it; he was muddled when he made that decision, but it had cracked open a door for him that he wasn’t planning to shut. “We’ll figure something out, but whatever we do, I want you there. And Celeste. There’s another witch I know who wants to help. Her name’s Izzy. Maybe Gabe.” James retrieved the book from the foot of the bed and took out the paper with the summoning sigils and his notes on the creature. “This is what we found. It looks like it took a coven to send it back where it came from last time.”
Fern’s eyes went wide. “An entire coven?” she echoed.
That would mean working closely with others, a larger group than when she had set to work with James. The thought of it made her bristle, but she couldn’t take herself out of the equation, not when it meant that there was more she could learn and a magical community she could tap into outside of James himself. Maybe there were others like him, who would see beyond the arbitrarily drawn lines of right and wrong and know that true power waited for those who did.
“I don’t recognize this, but I want to help you. I… I was taken away from my real family. I don’t want that to happen to you,” she said, nodding to herself as she scanned the pages. There was danger in casting her lot with James and Celeste and these others he had mentioned, but it seemed a worthy endeavor. “What’s our first move?”
“Thank you.” James breathed out heavily. “We come up with a spell that can send this thing back where it came from without it getting its hands on us in the process. It would help if we could figure out its name. There are a few letters and numbers there in the symbolism, but we haven’t been able to pin it down. I wouldn’t hate it if we could find a way to strip it of everything it took on its way out. Celeste thinks it has a piece of Sam.” In other words, no small feats. James knew he’d be able to see it all more clearly if he could sleep for more than a two-hour stretch but that was pushing it. Drinking wasn't cutting it. He was halfway to calling up an old friend and asking for pills.
“Why would they write down anything about fighting the thing and not even say its name?” she asked with a sigh, then frowned. “Maybe it’s on purpose. Names can be important. Maybe that’s how it’s being controlled… knowing the name, speaking it aloud.”
The thought occurred to her that there might be someone who could offer some insight. She glanced to James with an arched eyebrow.
“I could ask. If She knows anything.”
He thumbed his eyebrow, knowing who Fern meant. “I don’t want to owe her anything,” he said, naming his hesitation about a thought he’d already had. “I’m not saying no. It’s just for me, it’s a last resort. And I don’t want anyone coming to collect a debt from Sam if we pull him out of this.” For the second time, Phanuel had dropped out of sight when he needed her. James tried not to do the thing he’d done before and draw comparisons between the two entities, which always ended up making Phanuel look slack in comparison to Elfleda. Hell, slack in comparison to himself.
Belatedly he remembered that Fern had poisoned his friend Phanuel. He remembered how Fern’s plants had coiled around his wrist as if they were following the sun. The thumbing of his eyebrow turned into a full-fledged scrubbing of his face.
Fern watched him quietly, noting the play of expressions on his face and what they might mean. There was a sense of protectiveness when he spoke about his father, and yet he used his given name rather than the honorific usually ascribed to his parent. He had been game to test their combined power when the Lady had sent Fern to greet him, but shied away from help She might offer in a far more desperate situation.
It was sending conflicting signals in Fern’s mind, a split she couldn’t parse.
“Maybe it is better not to involve Her, with people who wouldn’t understand,” she relented. She shifted her gaze to the man laying prone in the bed, another question coming to mind. “Why do you call him by his first name? Your father?”
She was prying, but she had no sense of doing it. Questions demanded answers once they occurred, so far as Fern could fathom, and asking them was the only cure.
James lowered his hands into a rough fist beneath his chin. He sat there, elbows poking into his thighs, his back aching from tension. “I grew up around Sam’s people. I don’t know if I’d call it a coven, it was looser than that. They got together in the desert, got high, did magic, meditated,” he said, rubbing his chin on his thumb. “They didn’t follow strict divisions between adults and children. When people talked to me about him, they called him Sam. Anyway, I did something when I was eighteen. It was magic he never would’ve touched. Dark. He had to help me out of it. When we got home, he said, ‘I guess you’re making your own path now.’ There was something about it. I dunno. After that, I wasn’t his boy and he wasn’t Dad. I was James and he was Sam.”
He leaned back, stretching his arms behind his head. “It doesn’t mean I don’t love him.”
The blurry path of his eyes carried his focus back to Fern. He remembered Celeste saying she had grown up similar to her, in some kind of commune. There were a lot of questions he had about that because he’d never pictured anyone who dressed, spoke, and behaved like Fern coming from that kind of background, which just exposed his ignorance on the subject. Maybe if she trusted him later he’d dig into it. Right now he knew he hadn’t earned that kind of information. For now he’d ask one thing. “Do you know what it’s like when someone doesn’t accept how you need to do things?”
Fern’s eyes lit up. The life that James described sounded familiar; it sounded like home. For just a moment there was a deep sense of yearning, for the fields, for Daisy’s gentle neglect and Dmitry’s calm guidance, even for the blood-soaked floors of the Worship House. She wondered if it was like that for James, if he ever longed for the life he’d had that sounded as though it were far and away from the daily trappings of a place like Searchlight or Vegas, but she erred on the side of caution and didn’t ask.
She couldn’t read people as well as most, but she could at the least recognize a raw nerve from time to time.
“My parents wanted a paper doll,” she said slowly, remembering her confusion in first encountering the white and gilt bedroom they had prepared for her, full of lace and pretty things that she didn’t understand. “Something small and pretty to dress up. Flat and boring and theirs to play with. They didn’t want to believe that I could be anything more than that.”
James’s face flinched. He schooled himself not to react to an image he had recoiled from. “That’s bad.” In comparison, Sam’s judgment felt warm. “I think I get it, though. Sam was so worried I’d turn out like my mom that he over-corrected into trying to make me like him. I scare him. But I’ve always thought doing darker magic for the right reasons was better than being neutral.”
He chewed on the inside of his lip, letting the last sentence settle in his mind, then finally said, “If she gives you a name, we’ll use it.”
Fern nodded and stood. She felt strongly jumbled inside, unsure of the thoughts collection in her mind: her friendship with Celeste, her devotion to the Lady, the power she could still feel in James, this creature, the others that James had mentioned… the man in the bed, dead to the world, all of it swirling around her mind with a hundred different disjointed memories she’d sooner forget. It was a flurry of question and emotion that was making her uncomfortable to the point that she winced.
“I’ll try and ask,” she agreed. With the Lady, nothing was certain and nothing could be taken for granted; that was Her way. “I’ll text Celeste if I learn anything. I hope… I hope we can help Sam.” In that much, she was being honest.
“Me, too.” James stood up because Fern did. One she left, he’d take a walk up and down the hall to get his circulation going, and maybe put in a call to his part-timer to see how things were going at the auto shop. “Oh. One more thing… Celeste knows about the plants at the angel’s trailer. You don’t have to hide that.” He stooped to pick up the thermos of rapidly cooling coffee and thought about getting a refill on that, too. “Thanks for coming by.”
He raised a hand in a tired wave goodbye and moved into position next to his dad, studying the numbers on the monitors, trying to make heads or tails of them for what felt like the thousandth time.
Fern had felt no shame in the act of putting the Lady’s pest in its place, but bristled at James’ words. She nodded, but said nothing, and headed out the door.
Secrecy only went so far in small towns, it seemed. Let the chips fall where they may.