Who: Stella and Aiden What: Stella goes looking for comics someplace small. Where: Arcadia Unbound When: Recently Warnings/Rating: None
Consider a man told he’s possessed without realizing it by other people, also possessed, in a strange hotel in front of a door leading to another world. That was Aiden, days after the actual happenstance, still somewhat reeling from the revelation (alcohol had done nothing to either help or hinder him). The morning after he’d wanted to assume it was all just a godawful dream, but the key was still sitting on top of the little notebook, which had other people’s recollections writing themselves inside it. They all remembered going. So he had to accept that it had actually happened.
But that didn’t stop him from being irritable about it, or from mentally yelling at himself to try and get whoever or whatever was in there to identify itself. There was never any significant reply - just a few sharp words on occasion, or a sense of calming that made him even angrier. Whoever it was refused to fess up, and he had no idea why. If it was the Phantom, he would have known - the name Raoul would have crippled him with anger, wouldn’t it? And he sure as hell would have known if it was Christine or Meg or any other female character, because if he’d been sharing his mind with a woman, he would know. They were alien enough to him in real life that something this close would have been obvious.
He was left to argue with himself and grumble and stare at the notebook at night. During the day, the store had to be run, and it was just his luck that people seemed to find this week a good one for browsing without buying. It was enough to drive a man insane, provided he was already halfway there.
Aiden flipped the closed sign around to ‘Open’, what with lunch being finished and nobody standing outside the door anxiously waiting, and made his way to the middle of the store to try and numb his brain with some tedious reshelving. Every day he had to reorganize little parts of the store as books came and went. If he wanted to keep them in alphabetical order, anyway. It would have been easier to work haphazardly, tossing books on whatever shelf was nearest, but the very idea made his soul cringe.
Stella was having a rough day. She and Clark had a talk after her trip into the hotel, because she had been making plans to never go anywhere near the hotel every again after the snowstorm that (she thought) had tried to kill her when she opened the door. Clark knew very well what was there beyond the swirl of snow, and he didn’t want Stella afraid or determined never to go back. So they had a talk, and Stella had quite a bit to drink a few minutes into it, but she hadn’t been able to convince herself that it had all been a bad dream in the morning after hangover, thanks to his annoyingly polite good morning. He was such a nice guy that Stella was completely convinced that he actually wouldn’t look when she was in the shower or when she was regretting the last half of the vodka over the toilet bowl. It was infuriating just a little more than it was scary, and that got her through.
She still had the hangover, though, and it followed her out into the day as she pursued more information about the freakin’ alien in her head. She brought Krypto with her, who was getting a little friendlier despite all the growling and snarling, or so Stella liked to believe. She didn’t want to go to a chain store where no one would be able to help her, but she didn’t want to go to a comic book store where she’d stand out like a sore thumb, either. On her shiny new iPhone, she Googled ‘small book stores’ and came up with a proper name of ‘independent book store’ and then the phone obligingly walked her around a few blocks and into the dusty shop.
“Hello!” she shouted, cheerfully, into the abandoned stacks. Krypto barked.
The sound of the bell jingling over the door had Aiden’s irritation first, but it was fleeting compared to the amount that piled on when a cheerful voice all but yelled into the place, obviously trying to attract his attention. And then it leaped when he heard a dog bark, inside the store. The idea that his visitor might be blind and that was her service dog was the third or fourth idea to come to mind as he ventured out of the aisles of boxes and reappeared around the corner, fixing the young woman and her dog with a glare.
“The dog stays out,” he snapped, “and I don’t care if he’s well-trained or not, there’s a post to tie him up at right in front.” He was normally a little less sharp, but he didn’t normally have the last vestiges of his own sanity currently up for debate. The store’s previous owners had been fond of animals of all types, but after a few mishaps in the years before Aiden had gotten there, even their patience had been pushed to the limits. For however much they loved dogs, they weren’t going to put up with the damn things relieving themselves on the shelves.
Stella, looking like a piece of overly bright sunshine with her red hair, freckles, and loose clothing, was taken aback at the crazy employee’s objection to her dog. Her chin stuck out and she pouted at him, her natural reaction to criticism of any kind. “Her,” she corrected, haughtily, reaching down to pat the dun-colored mutt on the head proprietorially. (Krypto eeled to one side to avoid the affection and aborted her growl at Aiden to growl at Stella.)
Stella took her hand back, though not from fear, and sighed, crestfallen expression suddenly softening her features. The pair turned around and went back out the door. The one-sided conversation in which Stella told the dog that obviously “book people” were grouchy and she didn’t want to be in the dumb old store anyway was clearly audible through the door. The dog barked.
Stella pushed through a moment later, deliberately giving the bell an extra jingle, and presented herself a few feet down the first aisle. The chaos was intimidating. “Do you have comics?” She asked, staring out at the shelves blankly.
Aiden sneered at the conversation that went on outside the door, but didn’t object. If someone felt the need to lie to their dog about why it couldn’t go into the store, then that was their choice, and their complete delusion. He shoved a box back into line from where he’d been yanking it apart earlier and waited for the overly-cheerful woman’s return. What would she be looking for, he wondered. Romance novels? There was an unfortunate number of them, mostly in the boxes. People threw the damn things out every day. They were almost a dime a dozen.
Comics, though … if it had been up to him, there wouldn’t be any comics in the store, but Aiden had realized early on in his initial employment that comics people tended to have a lot of money to spend. For however strange, intense, and extremely unpleasant they were, they didn’t usually bother him and were happy to prowl among the little section set aside in the hope that there would be a carelessly abandoned copy of something rare, its value unrealized by the person who’d priced it. There generally wasn’t, but you never knew.
“I have some,” he said, watching the woman a little carefully. “But you’d probably be better off going to an actual comic book store.” He paused while the financial part of him screamed at the idiocy of telling a customer to buy things somewhere else. “Still, you could have a look. Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
“Yes,” Stella said, certainly, now starting to wander toward Aiden as if he was some foreign monument of which she had to snap a quick picture and then leave behind just as quickly. The shelves she was passing didn’t have anything like the logo on her key, and she wanted an explanation for the snowstorm beyond her door as well as a good idea of what she was getting into for the future. “I need all the stuff you’ve got on Superman. I don’t want to go to a comic book store, they’re too complicated and I get turned around. Superman on Mars, Superman versus The Bug Man, or whoever, and I just want to know about where he comes from and the basics.”
She came to a stop right in front of him, hardly intimidated by his less-than-approving expression, sure of herself and her mission in her low heels, 7 jeans and off-shoulder bulky sweater. The freckles made her look younger than she was, and from the look of it they speckled her whole body, a visible dusting over the one bare shoulder as well as over her nose and cheeks. She was stylish without appearing to try very hard, and she looked as if she’d fit better in the half-calf soy macchiato chain stores, not here.
He almost would have put her down as a hipster were it not for the lack of unnecessary glasses (unlike his, which were necessary) and a jauntily-angled scarf. And the dog, because he didn’t know many hipsters who took dogs with them when they went perusing for unfashionable fashion. With a slight shrug, Aiden stepped aside and lead her down the mess of box aisles back around the corner, to the dim dead end where he stored things that weren’t quite books but still qualified as passable merchandise - comics, magazines, how-to books, and the like.
“Have a look,” he said, gesturing to the low-down section that housed the various graphic novels. “If there’s Superman in there, you’ll find it - just put it all back if you have to pull it out to see it.” There was a flicker of irritations past on his face. “I’ll check the list and see if there’s anything. I’m sure someone’s published a book or two about him that technically counts as literature.” He stepped aside to let her in closer and headed back to the register and his laptop, where all the books he had were neatly stored in a few small files.
Stella followed along, trailing a young Dior scent that smelled like a combination of rubbing alcohol, blackberries and creme brulee sugar. She stared at the shelves as they passed, hoping to see something she recognized, but she was no reader and books were as much decoration as anything. It had never bothered her before, but for some reason she would have liked to make an impression on the grumpy bookstore owner, even if it was just to see surprise on his face.
She stopped when he did, squinting through the dimness. “Where are the lights?” she asked, innocently, skirting around him and crouching down without a trace of modesty, knees to her shoulders. She pulled out a carton without looking up again. “Thanks,” she added, as he left, coughing as she waved dust aside.
“Off until it’s darker out,” he said wryly. Sure, it was dim, but there was enough sunlight coming around the corners and down the aisles to provide just enough to see by - at least, for him. And he assumed that if he could see, with his weakened eyes requiring a stronger glasses prescription than most stores had on hand, then anyone else would be just fine.
Aiden reached over the counter and pulled out his laptop. It was a quick search, less than a minute’s worth, but he took his time with it anyway to see if there were other books rather than comics on the subject of Superman. There was a collection of mediocre comics scattered in the section the woman was looking through, and a how-to-draw book with the hero as the subject, but other than that, he didn’t have much. Which suited him, but he wondered if those would be enough for the woman to be willing to spend money. She had said anything, hadn’t she?
Stella was more willing to complain than she was to be bothered by the high shelves and the low lighting, and she forgot all about it as she pulled the box out and went through what was there. Not much was the answer. Dismayed, Stella pulled at anything with the big S on it, but none of the covers made any sense, and they all referred to obscure events and characters that hadn’t been mentioned in any of the others. By the time Aiden looked up from his laptop, Stella was sitting on the floor surrounded by scattered comics, trying to puzzle out one in her left hand while fiddling with the ruby-gold key to her hotel door that hung from a gold chain on her neck. “None of this is very useful,” she called down the aisle, not hiding her disappointment.
“Yes, well, this is a used book store, not a comics emporium,” Aiden said, a little irritably, as he closed his laptop and grimaced at the mess she’d made on the floor. Did nobody understand how piles worked? There were examples everywhere around her. “I thought he was sort of a standard American hero, anyway. Mysterious alien landed on Earth, raised by hicks, wound up saving the planet a few times … ” He waved a hand and was about to continue when he saw something gold glint in her hand. It was something around her neck, and as he came a little closer, it looked a lot like a key.
Which was strange. Why would someone who knew barely anything about Superman have a key on a necklace with his symbol on it?
“I thought you weren’t much of a fan?” Aiden asked suspiciously, watching her key and trying to ignore the fact that his own was still upstairs, closed between the pages of the notebook.
“I’m not. But I’m currently going crazy, and he says his parents are not hicks,” Stella said, matter-of-factly. “He’s actually really insulted, which is new,” she added, slumping back against the shelf across from the comics and knocking a couple books ajar with one shoulder as she did so. Oblivious she flipped through one of the comics, dropping the key to let it glint on her collarbone. It was obvious that she didn’t care one jot if the bookstore owner thought she was crazy or eccentric. The time for impressing him was gone.
In the comic she was reading, a very antique-looking and strange Superman was fighting a dinosaur escaped from the past. Stella made a face. “This isn’t right.” She poked a finger at the yellow block of Superman’s chest. “He doesn’t look like the movie posters I saw a few years ago.”
“He - what?” Suddenly Aiden was besieged with memories of the night he’d gone into that hotel, when the writer - Liam, that was his name - kept mentioning a he, only for it to turn out to apparently be Raoul. He still wasn’t sure if he believed any of them, but things were so strange, so surreal and unexpected these days, that it almost seemed easier to accept the fact that they were all suddenly saddled with fictional characters as split personalities than keep denying that he alone was the sane man among them all. His key had fit into that lock, hadn’t it? “Sorry, you’re talking for Superman, here?”
Momentarily, he was distracted from his surprise and unease by the woman knocking a number of his books to the floor. Aiden glared at the new mess before shaking his head and turning the glare back on her.
“Yes, well, time changes perceptions. Those are old, the movies are new, and CG makes things so much easier to elaborate. That’s a key, isn’t it?” His glare fixed momentarily on the red and gold resting on her collarbone. It certainly did have the right shape, and now a prickling feeling on the back of his neck left him wondering just how much he was going to regret this conversation.
Stella had followed his gaze down to the floor at the books next to her hip in a disorganized pile, and then she caught a look at Aiden’s face. When he turned the glare back she was smiling a little girl’s smile, pleased at having gotten to him even in the most immature way. (She’d given up on the good impression right?) She let him think what he wanted about her being crazy about Clark’s voice, still smiling, and looked back down at the page she was holding open.
“Yes, it’s a key. It’s his key, and I’m trying to learn more about him because the first time I opened the door, it was like Antarctica without penguins. Do you have any idea why that is?” She flipped through that book and tossed it aside to pick up another.
His key. No doubt, then. Unless she was just fucking with him, which she very well may have been, Aiden suddenly believed that he was dealing with yet another person who was a victim of that goddamned hotel and whatever was running it.
“Unbelievable,” he breathed. “How many of us are there? I think he lives in the Arctic. Who the hell is going to look for him there, and all.” She had to put up with Superman? The supreme good guy, master of American superiority? If that was his burden, he would have gone insane. How fortunate that he still didn’t know who was hiding in his skull. “You’re cleaning that mess up, by the way. You’ve got a door in that hotel, don’t you.”
Stella lowered her comic book. She rolled back on her hip and got upright in an awkward splay of limbs. She was alert and bright-eyed now, keen attention on him, much more than her fashionable attire and expensive perfume now. “You have a key too. That’s great. You hear the voice or not? People seem like they do both, just depends on the person.” Stella reached out to hook her first three fingers in Aiden’s shirt, pulling, if he allowed it, to see if he was wearing his key on a necklace like hers, which she seemed to think was a natural way to carry it around. “He lives in the Arctic??”
Aiden was pulled forward slightly when the woman pulled at his shirt, but her tug revealed nothing but bare collarbones under the collar of the t-shirt. He glowered and yanked his shirt back.
“Don’t do that,” he snapped. “I don’t hear a voice, or at least not consistently. I don’t know who it is. All I know is that I’m stuck with a door I don’t like the look of and … well, just the fact that none of this should be real and all.” He’d almost admitted an unusual ability to aim and shoot exactly where it would do the most damage without being fatal, which wasn’t exactly something he wanted people to know he could do. “Yes, Superman lives in the Arctic, the cold doesn’t bother him and he has some giant collection of crystals up there. I don’t know the details, I only ever saw one of the old movies.”
Self-consciously, Aiden rubbed his neck, pulling back from where the woman was. She was making a mess and trying to see what was under his shirt. At some point, he wondered if a harassment claim could be filed, but it was a brief thought, quickly dismissed as ‘completely stupid’.
Stella twitched her fingers in the bare air between them as he yanked away, not at all put off by his reaction. On the contrary her little smile seemed unnecessarily smug. “Really? What does your door look like?” Stella gave up on the comics and bent over to start putting them back in their box higgledy-piggeldy. As she tossed them the short distance through the air, she added, “And what does the voice sound like?” Stella seemed to think that anything involving the hotels were her business. Clark was a reporter, and he wasn’t complaining, though chances were that he was the more likely of the two to think of harassment charges.
“Not like that,” Aiden hissed, but knew he’d be reorganizing the box again later just out of the burning compulsion to keep things in their proper order. He sighed and stepped back to let her do whatever it was she wanted to do. “It’s big and fancy and I really don’t want to think about where it goes. I don’t hear much of a voice, so I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know who I’m dealing with, and honestly? I don’t want to know.” She wasn’t going to buy anything, was she? He wasn’t sure if this encounter had been a positive enough thing (linking him up with someone who absolutely didn’t share a door with him) to make up for the possible lost revenue. Though it wasn’t as if this never happened. “I can’t say I’m jealous that you’re saddled with Superman.”
“You? A big fancy door?” Stella laughed at him, harmless true, but still not necessarily kind. Once the comics were all back in the big cardboard box, Stella bent at the knees with the poise of someone who hauled crates of beer around and tried to hoist the thing up. “I’m going to take these,” she informed him, and without pause continued, “...Yeah, it kind of sucks. He’s pretty serious about protecting people and it’s not like the whole world doesn’t know you bring some green rocks from the Emerald City and he’s more dead than bugs in a zapper.” Stella rolled her eyes upward with a long-suffering sigh, her curiosity at Aiden’s door mostly abated in favor of her own problems, which was not a new thing with her.
He was momentarily caught off-guard as she stood up, holding the entire box, and declared her intent to purchase all of them. But Aiden was quick to recover, and stepped back, turning to head for the register.
“Fortunately for you, I guess, this planet doesn’t have any of that, so he’s safe enough here.” Once she’d set down the box on the counter, he started going through them, marking down the title and the price in one of his many notebooks to keep track of what was leaving. “And I doubt you’d inherit his otherworldly weaknesses, anyway. He doesn’t try to talk you into playing the big hero when you see a mugging or something on the street, does he?” Which couldn’t exactly be said happened to him, either, but the urge to see that justice was done was bad enough. “That’ll be $10.25.”
Stella parked the box on the desk and gave him a blank look. “Really? That’s it? Man, Clark, you’re not worth much.” Stella glanced over her shoulder to make sure the dog was still sitting outside in the sunshine, and then she dug into the purse she had over her shoulder. To Aiden, she said, “No. Well. I mean... he pays more attention to stuff than I do. Better with people. The alien, is, I mean, I bet you can’t believe that.” She smiled at him. It was obvious she didn’t mean talking; Stella was perfectly capable of having a decent conversation with someone. She meant something else, something deeper. An empathy she didn’t naturally possess. She didn’t have a name for it. She held out a twenty dollar bill to him.
“He is supposed to be a naturally friendly sort of person,” Aiden said wryly, taking the money and unlocking the cashbox to give the woman proper change. “Unlike most of the world, he legitimately gives a shit, though I’m sure he thinks that’s a good thing.” A few bills and a few coins, and then Aiden handed over the change and reached under the counter for one of the multitudes of plastic bags he accidentally hoarded and then gave to people if they bought too many books to carry. “You want a bag for some of these?”
Stuffing the change into her purse, Stella shook her head. She didn’t have a comment on Clark’s naturally friendly Kansas personality, except that she could almost see how it was different from her socialite smile raising in New York. Sure, maybe she’d be a nicer person if she grew up with Mom and Pop Kent, but she hadn’t, had she? Neither had Evan. So that was that. Stella put out her lower lip (Clinique Black Honey, which came out to a nice ripe cherry juice red on her, thank you very much) and turned glassy eyes on Aiden. First he wouldn’t let her bring the dog in, now this. “Can’t I have the box?”
Sheer stubborn spite fought with common sense and sanity for a moment, and the latter won. It was true that he did sort of need most of the boxes to hold the book overflow, or the stuff he just didn’t feel like shelving for one reason or another. It was also equally true that he got boxes pretty frequently, whether in the mail or picked out of dumpsters behind the multitudes of liquor stores nearby. There was no point in telling her she couldn’t have it when there were at least three more upstairs he wasn’t actually using.
“Sure, if you want. I assumed a bag would be easier, but … ” Aiden shrugged. Personally, he couldn’t imagine trying to walk a dog and carry a box full of old comics, but that was her prerogative. “It’s not like it’s raining or anything.” As if it ever did.
Stella, at least, came away feeling as if she won something, a hardly rational emotion that accompanied her efforts at hoisting her box (too many for a bag, she assured herself). She stopped in the struggle with the box poised on the edge of the counter and gave him a quizzical look. “I’m Stella, by the way. If you’re on the journal things. The more people that know I’m me, the better. If it turns out I get stuck in the hotel snowstorm or eaten by Krypton.” She gave him a flippant little smile that didn’t entirely conceal her general anxiety about the situation and then leveraged the box up with one hip.
It was almost funny to watch her manhandle the box, but all Aiden did was raise his eyebrows at her struggle. Stella, was it? She seemed fairly accepting of the idea that one of America’s greatest fictional superheroes was currently lodging in her head, but when things were this ridiculous and he was on the same page himself, maybe it was just a coping mechanism. Maybe internally she was freaking out.
“I’m Aiden,” he said, after a moment. “And if you do get caught in the snowstorm, god only knows if we’ll be able to get you out. It’s the arctic.” He gave a slight shrug and shut his sales notebook. “Nobody in this state even owns a shovel.”
Oh, Stella was freaking out. She adopted a dog, she signed up for a six-month rent, she didn’t quite her job the last time her boss yelled at her, and she nagged at her brother about his drinking. She stayed home at night and looked at a book that filled up with letters from strangers, and sometimes she looked in the mirror and tried to find the face of the person that belonged to the second voice in her head.
Stella was absolutely, unquestionably, freaking out. But Aiden used the word “we” and she gave him such a smile of gratitude that it made all the pouting and the irritating demands nearly worth it. “You never know. Thanks for the comics. Bye.” And out she went, hauling her box and then (after a lot of maneuvering, barking, and shouting), the dog too.