Who: Kenna and Eli What: Drinking the best looking wine and arguing about morality, like you do. Where: Bathos 703 When: A few days ago. Warnings: None
Kenna arrived at Eli’s apartment with a six pack of Heineken and a bottle of red wine she had bought because the irony of the label grabbed her and the illustration looked interesting, and because she had a hunch she could at least get a good brow raise out of Eli by telling him she’d picked the wine because she liked the pictures.
She was wearing a black coat that hit around her ankles, her fair weather army jacket resting on the back of a chair in her apartment for the time being. The bottom edge of the coat was wet, no avoiding that in winter in Seattle, but it was good wool and warm and buttoned with silver colored clasps, and one of the only items of clothing in her wardrobe she hadn’t picked out from the racks at a thrift store somewhere. If she’d learned anything going to high school in Wisconsin, it was that there was never any excuse not to have a coat that cost enough money to cut the cold, even if the clothes under it were double generation hand-me-downs.
The beer and wine were still in the bag of the liquor store she’d bought them in, and when the door opened, she lifted it slightly. “Libations,” she said, with a tiny crook of a smile and her usual deadpan.
Admittedly, Eli was more coffee and tea than wine and beer, but he had worked enough with Kenna in the past that he knew she liked her drinks on tap, and he was willing to accommodate her.
The apartment was wide open and spacious, the previous residence having knocked out all the walls between living room, dining room and kitchen, and the door to the one room beyond was closed when she arrived. He held out a hand for the paper bags and bottles within them, and he nodded to a hook beside the door. “That coat stays clear of my carpets,” he told her, but the smile on his lips was inviting. Eli liked talking to people, despite his tendency toward sarcasm, and he enjoyed having company.
He turned, leaving her to work with those buttons, but talking as he moved toward the kitchen. “I expect to be entirely astounded by your choice in alcohol, Kenna,” he told her, setting the bags on the counter.
She pulled the coat off, undoing the buttons and hanging it up on the hook indicated. She might find his insistence on cleanliness a little silly, but she’d been raised to be a good guest in the houses of others, and it took a great deal more than that to ruffle her, particularly when she knew it was barely meant at all.
“It’s nice,” she said simply, looking around. “Not what I expected.” She paused. “Not that I expected a heap or anything, but your shop is a little more...you know, closed.” Cluttered seemed to be the wrong word, because she genuinely liked the place. She’d never stayed in Seattle long, but she’d stopped in on multiple occasions, and it was still one of her favorites among those she had visited around the country, numbering somewhere in the hundreds by now.
“Oh, I can guarantee you’ll be astounded.” She walked around the kitchen table, reached into the bag, and pulled out the beer. “I know it’s your favorite,” she said. “Unfortunately, they don’t make coffee flavored beer yet, or I would be buying it by the caseload.” Then she pulled out the bottle of wine, turning it to face him. “Carnival Barker flavor,” she said, indicating the name with a long, calloused finger tapped next to the letters on the label. “It got a 3.5 on some wine website,” she offered, to soften the blow.
“Different spaces have different intentions,” he told her, as if space itself attempted to do one thing or another, as if homes and coffee shops had a life beyond what was given them by whoever furnished them and painted their walls. “The shop is about conversations, bringing people together. Wide open spaces, they make people find their own corners and remain there, alone with their electronics and their drinks.” He said this as he pulled the wine bottle toward him, examining the label. His clothing was casual, but pristine, in a black shirt and jeans that were expensive and tailored. “You chose this for the label and no other reason, Kenna. No use in pretending otherwise,” he said, as he pulled out a wine screw and uncorked the bottle. “Goblets are above the counter.”
Kenna managed to look a little out of place no matter where she was - nothing intentional, but something in her demeanor and her clothing that drew the eye. Her jeans were dark denim and her top a dark green sweater with holes in the weave wide enough to show the blank tank top underneath. “Goblets,” she murmured, vaguely amused by the drama of the word, and pried the cabinet open, pulling down two glasses. “You see right through me.” She figured she might as well try the wine before she went for the beer. “Does that mean you expect visitors here to find their own corners?”
“It means it’s harder to find a corner when there are only two people present,” he told her, pouring the wine with the confidence of a man who was used to the task. “And we’re not strangers, so we hardly need the clutter to force us to interact.” He took one of the goblets, and he lifted it to her in a toast before swirling the liquid and smelling it. “It could be worse,” he admitted, a smile on his lips, and then he took a sip. “Tell me what you’d do with my space, if I allowed it, Kenna.”
She raised her glass in toast back to his comment on the wine’s quality, then took a sip herself. It wasn’t half bad, really, even if wine wasn’t generally her cup of tea. She expected that tea was Eli’s cup of tea, but he was such a good sport about drinking that she almost wanted to tell him to put down the wine and let her put the kettle on. “That you say like I’ve got plans for it,” she said. “I’m not here to renovate. Like I said - it looks nice, just not what I would have expected out of you. More...antiques, more old things. Chunks of buildings, if you could find space for them.”
“Good. I enjoy being a surprise,” he admitted, motioning toward the couch with his wine goblet, and then following his own recommendation and sitting down. His body language was open, slightly turned toward where he expected her to sit, and he took another sip as he waited for her to join him. “After all this time, why settle here, Kenna?” he asked. He had his own reasons for choosing Seattle, of course, and none of them were actually his, but that wasn’t the case with the woman across from him. She was free in a way he was not, and he knew that and lauded her for it without even a hint of jealousy.
She kicked off her boots, sliding one off with a toe to a heel and then did the same with the other, making sure to keep them well off the carpet. Then she sat down, legs curled underneath her, balancing the wine glass neatly in her fingers before taking another sip. “Felt like it was about time,” she said. She thought about not going on. She often found it hard to talk about herself, having inherited something of a male propensity for talk that darted around and never really got to the whole feelings thing. She’d managed to go a whole year without speaking, and while she was more verbose now than she was then, some habits were hard to kick. But she was in the company of someone she considered a friend - and she did consider Eli that, as well as a colleague - so she went on, lips pressing together unconsciously.
“I’ve been avoiding this town for a long time, believe it or not. Never wanted to settle down here. I screwed up here once, and I let that keep me away even though this is where I ought to be. If anything is going to go down we might need to look into, it’s going to be here.” A large proportion of the cases that turned out to be both legitimate and truly difficult turned up somewhere in Washington state, and while there were still plenty scattered around the rest of the country, it was sort of hard not to justify picking it for a base of operations. “Things have gotten too crazy the past couple years,” she said. “Had to set down stakes sometime, figured I might as well kill two birds with one stone. What about you?” She’d never asked him why he settled in Seattle, though she’d seen him arguing about it with people on the boards until the end of time, as he was wont to do.
“Rich relatives control the futures of their poor relations,” he told her, and it was true enough. He never would have chosen Seattle, never would have chosen the shop. He would have taken his camera abroad and visited the haunts of his childhood, had the choice been his to make. “My aunt and uncle felt I needed to embrace my roots.” He said the word roots with thick derision. “They don’t understand my insistence that I’m human, and I live a human life.” That was it, in a nutshell.
He took another sip of his wine, and he examined her over the goblet. He’d been immediately intrigued upon meeting her, immediately impressed with what she’d managed to build and accomplish. He didn’t always agree with EIT or its methods, but he thought what they did was important enough to be a member, despite the occasional disagreements. He could go into buildings, and he could see what had happened there, and it helped when things were reported. He could have worked with any number of organizations, but hers protected people from Creations, and for a man that liked humans better than Creations, it was a perfect fit.
“You’ll have cabin fever within a month,” he told her, giving her a knowing grin over the rim of the goblet. “You’ll be itching to move on and be free. Four walls are a cage to you, Kenna. They always have been. You’re not like those of us who long for late mornings and nothing to do but nap on the couch on a Sunday.”
She didn't say it, but all she could think about was that being human or not wasn't really the point. They were all people - but they were undoubtedly Creations, and there were things that came with that, most of them more curses than blessings. Even if her own childhood had gone another way, there was no denying that the work she did highlighted it starkly - they weren't the same as humans. She understood it, though, wanting to be human, wanting to be normal, and she grew quiet as she listened. She didn't like humans over Creations, really, because they were just people in the end, though humans lacked the power to destroy quite so many lives, even with the atom bomb at their disposal.
She smiled even as she drank the wine, setting the goblet down. "Your faith in me is astounding," she said, a deflecting laugh at the edges of it, and she got up to grab a beer from the counter. "What makes you think I'm going to miss the motel room bedsprings and their elegant cum-stained curtains, or the Creations masquerading as pastors touched by god in Georgia, or that senator in Missouri? I could do with some localized freaks for once in my life instead of trotting out to them every time someone calls my name." She searched in his drawer for a bottle opener, found one after some rummaging, and used it on the bottle.
There was no way she could put it into words, why he was right, why in any other circumstance she would have already left town. Always running from something. "Besides, I've got a feeling Seattle's going to be fun."
“I think we need to have a chat about your definition of fun,” Eli said, giving her a look. Honestly, fun? “This city, Kenna, it is the farthest thing from fun. Have you not read about the things happening here? It’s a menace. Creations are a menace.” He sighed, and be brought the goblet to his lips again, watching her as she rummaged. “Of course, that’s why it makes it perfect for you, and dreadful for the rest of us. I can only imagine the number of places in these buildings that have memories as old as bones.” His apartment had, thankfully, yielded nothing more than dust motes and the occasional memory of a child chasing a puppy, for which Eli was extremely grateful. He was not, however, so foolish to think that would always be the case.
She honestly hadn’t meant it to be taken that seriously, and she tipped the bottle back. “Some of them,” she said, nonplussed, walking back over to the chair and setting the half-drunk goblet of wine off to the side. “Perfect’s an exaggeration. You seem to think my job satisfaction depends on how screwed up things are. I didn’t mean it that literally, Eli.” He should be used to her sarcasm by now, and she eyed him. “Something eating you?”
“I’m new to this little network of disaster,” he admitted, setting his own goblet aside. “I’ve been living in bliss ignorance at the shop until now. Days without inhibitions are foreign to me, and I knew nothing of bodies being dumped here and there. All these atrocities centered around the three Creation buildings in the cities, doesn’t it make you wonder, Kenna? About us, as a peoples? Or are we meant to think it’s simply magnified because the spread of the buildings is fewer? That humans commit these same atrocities on their kind and it’s simply part of living?” He shook his head. “It will take some getting used to, this place,” he said, motioning to the apartment itself. “And my rich relations, you’ll note, are not actually required to live here. They’re in Boston, a world away, where people use names instead of aliases involving bats and black globs of ink.”
“I think you’d be an idiot if you thought you weren’t going to get more trouble with more of us in one place,” she said. “At the same time though, it’s not like Creations aren’t making trouble everywhere else, too. There’s just more of us here, so you get more madness. You get less human crime in the places in the world where there are fewer humans - and there are a lot less of us than there are of them. Makes sense that it’s crazier here, where so many have settled down.” She shook her head. “We’re just people, Eli. People do stupid shit, it’s just more visible and destructive when they’ve got power. We’re not born any better or any worse than humans. We’re just a different stripe with better tools to make mayhem with.” She punctuated that happy thought by going for the bottle again.
“That doesn’t sound like a woman in your business, Kenna, if you’ll forgive me saying so.” He leaned back, arm draped along the back of the couch casually. “And you’ll know by now that forgiving me for saying things is a requirement of friendship.” He watched her go for the bottle again, and then his attention returned entirely to her face. “Are you running from something, I wonder, here, in this place?” he mused, thoughtful, almost as if he wasn’t aware that he was posing the question aloud.
She paused a moment, bottle halfway to her mouth. “I live to screw with your expectations,” she said.
She took a long drink from the bottle, resting it on the arm of the chair she was perched in, quiet for a long moment. “What do you think?”
“I think I know better than to attempt to answer that question,” he said honestly, because it was the truth. He had already made his observation, couched in a question, and he would leave it there. “Tell me what you’re proposing to do with my space,” he said reaching for his goblet again and swirling the remaining liquid before finishing it in one swallow.
“Have a real office, for once, not just where ever I can find that has free internet,” she said, glad to get beyond the running away question. “Nothing complicated, but a place we can tell clients to come. The nice thing about being in one place is that they can come to us for once. We can get everything in one location - my books, our files, whatever.” She smiled a little, involuntarily. “I have a dream of it being organized and more convenient but we all know it’ll be a trash heap in a month. Regardless, it’s better than being scattered.”
He considered her words, and he considered what it would mean. He had worked with Kenna for years now, but it had always been something that happened somewhere else. He had never considered listing what he did for her as a true job. He told no one he worked for EIT, when they asked what he did, even before the coffee shop when he was a penniless academic with no desire to do anything but traverse the country and find abandoned homes and lives to examine. No, he’d never considered it a true job, but this would make it one. It would mean that their headquarters would be on his property, with all the responsibilities that came with it.
Eli’s interest in EIT had been born of Kenna’s penchant to go into buildings humans considered haunted. His ability, to walk into a space and see what had happened there, proved useful to the woman, and he’d signed on because she assured him they would be hunting down Creations that caused trouble. They did that, yes, but they did not follow standard, law-abiding practices. Lethal force was sometimes required, and Eli had come to terms with that years before. But it was a large risk to take, bringing that all inside a property that was in his name.
He ran a finger along the rim of the empty goblet, thinking, and unconcerned that he was sitting there silently as he did so. He looked up at her, finally, and he nodded. “Telling clients to come there, it’s a hefty risk, Kenna, for all of us. With what we do, a static location, it’s hardly safe if others know about it. You can have the rest, but meets should still take place off-sight.” He didn’t mention price, because he had no intention of charging her for the location. If he was in, he was in. And this, he suspected, was being in.
She’d thought of renting the space from him for a number of reasons - it belonged to someone she trusted and not an impersonal office building where someone might pay off a security guard, it was close, it was convenient, it wasn’t too big. She was barely going to be able to afford this as it was, but she did intend to pay him for it - the question of using the space rent free never even crossed her mind. Watching him think so long about it made her doubt, though, and she watched him a little more closely. “That’s fine, but are you sure you’re comfortable with this?” Suddenly she felt strange, like maybe she should never have asked, like she’d taken things a step too far without meaning to. “I can rent a space somewhere else if the risk’s too high.” Admittedly, she hadn’t put as much thought into the risk as she should have. Usually she was terribly practical, but she’d come up with the idea of it while moving in and been struck by how good it sounded to have a real office. He was right, though, it was potentially dangerous, and it made her feel silly. She’d jumped ahead of herself to the conclusion without thinking the options through first, and she never did that.
“Kenna,” he said. “Don’t be a fool.” He stood, going to refill his goblet. “I’ve been collecting a regular check from you for years. I’m not about to turn you down, especially not if it means we can meet somewhere that isn’t the closest diner. What we do isn’t precisely legal, though, you must admit.” He took a sip of his newly poured wine, and he made his way back to her, sitting on the arm of the couch this time. “I don’t think I’d look very good in prison orange.” He quirked his brow and gave her an entertained sweep of his gaze. “It might work for you, though. But I recommend a rental costume. It would work perfectly for Drake, if he’s in the area.” There was humor in that last comment, as well.
“I do admit that.” Behind closed doors anyway. She finished the beer off, trying to shake the weird feeling from before. “He’d look good in a jumpsuit, it’s true,” she said. “Orange isn’t really my color either, but I think he could pull it off.” She leaned against the back of the chair, watching him walk back. “I think he might be coming into town to stay too, sometime soon. You never can tell with him, but he seemed serious enough about it.”
“Are we sure this isn’t a sign of the apocalypse?” he asked, “The two of you settling down in places with permanent mailing addresses?” He put his wine on the side table, and he crossed his arms and looked at her. “I’ve made you uneasy,” he said, recognizing the body language that went along with said uneasiness (he was accustomed to seeing it in people). “The top floor master bedroom at the coffee shop is yours to do with as you please, meeting of clients included,” he said. “I’ll even have a plaque made up for the door.”
She laughed when he suggested the apocalypse was coming. “Yeah. I’ve always got the horsemen at my heels, just waiting for me to sign a lease.”
When he crossed his arms and grew serious, she still smiled. “I’m not uneasy,” she said. “I was just feeling like an idiot for not thinking through all the angles. I really do appreciate you doing this. We won’t meet clients at the office, and we will move in in the next couple weeks, and I will be paying you.” She held a hand up. “No arguments.”
“No arguments. You can add it to my paycheck, if you insist,” he said, and he raised his glass in a silent toast. “To new beginnings, Kenna?”
She raised her empty bottle. “To new beginnings. And outrunning the horsemen.”