preston rawlings . {viola} (theviola) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-04-06 11:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | lady of shallot, viola |
Who: Preston and Reina
What: Two coworkers go out for lunch. Not nearly as boring as it sounds; Creation issues come up, and much is left unsaid.
Where: A Mediterranean place near Sparke Ind. offices.
When: The day before the evening Rescue meets Arrow.
Warnings: Squeaky clean. Preston is a proper coworker. He's looking at you, Anton.
Getting out of the office for lunch was nice. She rarely did it, usually buried under paperwork that wasn’t worth Anton or Preston’s time. The delivery man for the nearby sub joint knew her by name, and knew which sandwiches she ordered on which day. First, she had simply gone down their menu since she didn’t know what would be best. Having worked out her seven favorites, she rotated between them by day. The stability was nice, but she liked breaking out of the norm from time to time. A lunch with a coworker was a fine way to do it.
Truthfully, she had never anticipated eating lunch with Preston. For the most part, she left him alone. He always seemed busy or frazzled, and unless he talked to her first, she thought it would be best to leave him to his own devices. He had plenty to deal with, and she didn’t need to add to his workload. When she could, she would take small cuts into it, quieting taking care of a loose end here or there, but she couldn’t do much. Most of what he did required an education beyond hers, which consisted solely of reading Wikipedia voraciously.
She waited for him just inside the entrance to the restaurant. A reservation had been made, for which she was grateful, but she had already told herself it was likely he wouldn’t show. Over the years, she had discovered keeping her expectations low meant they would always be met, and usually much more spectacularly that she had imagined. She quietly doubted people so they could always surprise her, and she found it worked out quite well. Few people managed to disappoint her these days.
If he had known that, Preston’s curiosity about what might attract Reina to Anton even after he’d acted his worst would likely be explained. For most women, Preston understood that the combination of intelligence, power, and charisma was an almost inevitable call, like the sirens of old, and his initial fears on Reina’s behalf (and, partly, Anton’s, from a legality angle) had been made with this in mind. However, Reina was smart, industrious, and undeniably pretty. More than that, she was emotionally cautious, and after getting to know her a little better, Preston was surprised that she would be in Anton’s (totally oblivious) thrall.
In the past several years, Preston had done an excellent job of convincing himself that he cared for Anton as a friend. The attraction was normal, unimportant, and Preston had trained himself to look away when Anton forgot what he was doing and started throwing laundry around mid-conversation. Reina’s little breakdown and his colossal mistake with Eli had made him doubt himself, however, and it was getting to the point where the denial was becoming obvious even to Preston himself.
Or perhaps he was just having a very bad day.
The tax men had been surprisingly restrained--they took one look at Preston’s haggard face, the expression of which did nothing to hide the flint he had underneath the innocuous blue eyes, and backed down with their problems. He probably would have worked through lunch if his calendar hadn’t reminded him to meet Reina, and as such he was a little late meeting her, coming down the sidewalk at a brisk pace, his jacket flapping over one arm. “Hello,” he said, smiling at her and hoping he did not look as bad as he felt. “Hopefully you’ll like the food here. They have excellent salads and good hummus plates.” Preston was one of those quiet vegetarians that snuck up on you when you weren’t paying attention and offered him rare steak.
His greeting took her by surprise. She had been looking the other way, staring into space and dreaming about nothing. Sometimes, when she was just thinking, she thought she could turn the sounds of the city into a bright symphony, full of energy. With wild arpeggios, the brass section chased the woodwinds. The strings came in on a quick crescendo, then dropped back for the brass instruments again. So when he said hello, she spun about quickly, her heart in her throat.
Her mild panic abated almost instantaneously. She let out a self-deprecating laugh, smiling back at him. “Sorry, I was distracted,” she said, ducking her head in apology. She followed him into the restaurant, curious. “I’ve actually never had humus,” she admitted, hoping that wasn’t a huge faux pas. Sometimes, it shocked people to learn what she had and hadn’t tried in her life, but she tried to take all those things in stride. If she acted nonchalant, most people didn’t react with quite as much surprise to learn that, no, she had never eaten a waffle cone.
“But I do enjoy a good salad. Was it hard to get away?” She didn’t want to keep him if he was truly busy, and so she readied a quick excuse, a poor one really, just in case.
Preston spent too long in the city. Industry was in his blood, and he made his bread from sheets of numbers rather than sweat. He didn’t hear the noise of the city, not really. He didn’t hear it the way sailors don’t hear the waves.
He watched her with a calm blue gaze. Eyedrops had done for the redness of the previous night, and even when frazzled there was a certain steely capability that Preston pulled around with him and hid somewhere under the nice suits and clean cotton. “It’s good; a kind of dip that’s not too sweet or too salty. They dust the shrimp with chili powder.” He wanted to reassure her that his attention was hers, a natural reaction after he discerned her initial unease. Preston spent his life soothing people.
“A little, it’s hard not to answer the phones or the emails when they don’t stop,” he admitted. “All the more reason I should take a break, they tell me.” He smiled at her, shallow though it was, and held the door.
The description of humus piqued her interest. It sounded like a very interesting combination of flavors, and the idea of shrimp dusted with chili powder sounded delicious. In theory. There were lots of things that sounded good that were actually gross, but she still enjoyed eating them.
Stepping into the restaurant, she flagged down the maître d’, to whom she had talked earlier, and he promptly sat them at a table near a window overlooking the street. Reina settled into her chair and accepted a menu. She opened it with wide eyes, not knowing where to look first. “It is more a reason to get away,” she said, peering over the top of her menu at him. With a smile, she hunted down the drinks list. She always felt awkward ordering Coke products when the restaurant offered Pepsi instead, and vice versa, and she had the awful habit of guessing wrong.
“If all you do is work, you never get the chance to do anything amazing. Like skydiving.” She looked over the top of her menu again. “I signed up for skydiving classes on Sunday.” Her nose wrinkled. “I think I might die doing it, but at least I’ll go out in an exciting way.”
Preston already knew what he wanted, so he was more occupied with conversation and drinks than the menu. He surreptitiously pushed the daily specials toward her, a little paper insert in the heavier folded menu, without saying anything about her wide eyes or indecision. Instead he let his eyesbrows go up. “Skydiving? You aren’t serious?” He smiled, already suspecting that she was.
Preston had been too busy working to pay much attention to living. He’d been around the globe with Sparke’s business, but he’d been too busy to do much sightseeing, and his life had certainly not been one where he looked for pleasure or thrill. Quite the opposite; Preston defined his success by that of those he cared about.
“I am,” she replied, setting aside the menu for the specials. She skimmed over them with interest, remaining indecisive, but figuring these would be the dishes to order. They wouldn’t always be available to try. “I’d like to try a little bit of everything in life. Experience as much as I can.” She showed him the specials and pointed to a dish with a name she couldn’t pronounce. “Do you know what this is? There’s no picture.”
She was one of those unfortunate people whose decisions for meals were influenced a great deal by the pictures available. Not necessarily terrible, it meant she often chose something with a picture in lieu of something without only because she had an idea what it would look like.
Preston turned his broad shoulders around the table to angle a better look at the menu. He blinked, then smiled. “Honestly, no, I don’t. Haven’t heard that one before. But if it’s on the menu and it’s here, it’s probably good. You can ask the waitress what’s in it; I do it all the time.” With this encouraging bit of advice, he sat back in his chair and thought about experiencing for the sake of it. It wasn’t something he did. “That’s brave of you,” he commented, after a moment of that. “Not the food, I mean the philosophy in general.”
Returning to the list of specials, she pondered her options. There were so many (because four choices was, clearly, the most overwhelming decision ever), though she really was interested in that one she couldn’t pronounce. Oh, and that second dish, with the picture. At least she had narrowed it to two, and she reviewed the options, weighing the pros and cons of each dish in her head as she ran her finger along the dish descriptions.
“You think so?” she asked, lifting her face to flash him a quick smile. “I suppose... I felt so cooped up for a long time,” she said, deliberately hedging and hoping he wouldn’t ask. People usually didn’t. The restrained by overprotective parents explanation did wonders, and it wasn’t far from the truth. “Most of my adventures were reading about other people’s adventures, and when I finally got out on my own, I realized I could have those adventures.” Shrugging lightly, Reina sat back, decision made. “I’m going to die eventually, now that I’m here, so I don’t see any reason to hold back. Sometimes, I think that if I were still in Musings, I would live more carefully, so I could live forever. But there’s a pulse to this world, a rhythm.” Lightly, she tapped her finger against the table in an easy, four beat pattern. “It’s constantly counting and gives everything an urgency Musings didn’t have. You could die here, at any minute, from any cause, not just murder or a freak accident. That makes me want to live more, right in the moment.”
She pressed her lips together and took a sip of water to hide her embarrassment. “Sorry, I can get a little...” And here she made looping gestures with her hands at the level of her eyes, as if to say I’m crazy, I know. “Carried away, I guess. What about you? Doing anything exciting with your life?” She leaned forward, fingers laced loosely over the menu, clearly interested in what he had to say.
“No. I’m very uninteresting. What you see is what there is. Just work, mostly. Anton keeps me busy.” He smiled, and there wasn’t any resentment in the comment. It wasn’t in Preston’s nature to pry about people’s private lives, or their families, or their childhoods. He didn’t want anyone asking about his, so it was only natural that he take the surface as truth and not dig deeper--at least, not farther than what was given to him. That didn’t keep him from making private conclusions, of course, and being an inherently private man, he did a lot of that. Still, this was a conversation about something that Preston knew very little about, and he found himself unable to press. “How recently did you come from there?” he asked, honestly curious and leaning into the table with it.
That seemed boring, being required to work and never doing much else. But he didn’t sound like it bothered him, so Reina figured he couldn’t hate it too much. Even she liked her job. She liked getting up early and going to a building with a desk that had her name on it. She liked seeing the same people day after day, a handful of new ones from time to time, and learning little bits about them. It was proof that she could still function, be a person in society too, and it was like having a small adventure every day. It didn’t mitigate her clawing need to jump out of a perfectly safe airplane, but she figured she couldn’t win them all.
His question surprised her, and her eyes widened as she thought over the answer. “About six months,” she said, and that response startled her a little. With a quiet laugh, she shook her head, an incredulous expression spreading across her face. “I’ve been here for six months. I can’t believe it’s been that long.” For a second, sheer joy replaced the expression of disbelief, but it was covered quickly by more mild surprise. “I came looking for my cousin. Then he moved.” Bastard. Her expression soured momentarily; she still hadn’t completely forgiven him. “What about you? You’ve been here a long time, I assume?”
Fascinated, Preston absently ordered a flower flavored tea and a hummus plate from the waitress when she came, and she was gone again without him doing more than absently looking up at her with a false smile. Focusing on Reina again he said, with deep curiosity, “So recently. What was it like?” He shook his head. “I never--well, I don’t remember it. I was very young when my parents left. They never spoke of it.” Past tense.
Reina barely noticed the waitress, focused as she was on her story and on Preston. She had a bad habit of shutting out the rest of the world when focused, often to her own detriment. There had been more than one occasion where she had finished a project at work only to find there were eight voice mails waiting for her.
“It was... nice.” She frowned slightly, and covered the expression with a sip of water. “Different. People don’t die there,” she continued, adopting his more circumspect way of referring to their world. “Not like they do here. Not everyone gets old and wrinkly. They reach an age, and which age is different per person, and they simply stop growing old. When I was young, I had a friend who stopped aging at five.” She winced at that. There was something lovely and romantic about immortality, but being a child for an eternity - or a broken, old crone - was some kind of cosmic horror she didn’t want to dwell on.
“When people did die, it was because of a murder or a freak accident,” she continued, her fingers tightening momentarily on her glass as she inadvertently conjured the memory of her father’s funeral. She dismissed the memory seconds later, unwilling to think about that for long, either. “Being here, where life actually matters and you don’t have forever, it’s nice. Good. It feels more real.” She gave him a warm smile. “I think you were lucky to grow up here.”
Preston sat back, the lines in his face easing as he turned his thoughts to the idea of such a place. He literally could not conceive. In his mind it looked like something out of The Wizard of Oz, with too-bright technicolor and the world crawling with people too busy being eternally beautiful or cruelty immortal to care about one another. He shook his head. “Five years old forever. That sounds terrible. But I suppose if you don’t have perspective...” He smiled at Reina as the flatbread and the vari-flavored hummus was delivered. Preston didn’t have much appetite these days, and sipped at his tea without haste. “Here must seem... faster?” he ventured, trying to picture it.
Abruptly, Preston realized that Eli had not moved to Chicago until they were in school. He thought at one point he mentioned that he came to stay with his relatives. Did that mean that he’d been in Humanity? For how long? Abruptly, Preston realized that Eli could be far older than he looked, and the thought temporarily pushed aside all others. “Are there a great many people from... from ages ago?” he asked, marveling.
The food momentarily claimed all of her attention. She took one of the pieces of flatbread and tore it into smaller pieces, dipping each piece in a different bowl of hummus to sample each flavor. “It’s more vital,” she replied around her bite-sized bits of bread. “More necessary. There, people let life happen. Here, people actually do life. They don’t just live, they move.”
His second question made her think. There were, of course, handfuls of people who had survived from the dawn of time, but she didn’t think they were too common. “No,” she said slowly, thinking it through as she took another bite of bread. “Not too many. The only one I can think of, really, is the Sadist.” She swallowed hard, blanching when she remembered an article she had read about him. “He vanished from there about five years ago. People said he was crazy. Absolutely crazy. He killed someone before he left. Eventually, the story came out that a guy had tried to rape a little girl at a party. But living so long... it’s hard. There’s a lot of people there who are vicious in ways people here won’t ever be. Maybe it’s the fact that we don’t die there, and we all get a little... crazy.”
With a heavy sigh, she took a sip of her water. Then, with a weak smile, she said, “I’m sorry I’m talking so much. I don’t mean to get up on a soapbox or anything.”
“Don’t be, I’ve never heard any of this before,” Preston reassured, automatically smiling for her benefit. He surprised himself by easily envisioning groups of people waiting for things to end rather than being proactive about action. If he thought there would always be time, he might never act at all. It wasn’t Preston’s nature to be volatile nor particularly impulsive. Such occasions were rare and uniformly ended up being mistakes.
“Do you think that explains the rise in unusual but vicious criminals lately? Or all the masks that keep showing up?” Preston didn’t understand any of the masks’ motivations. He didn’t know any of them that well, not even Arrow. Preston absently chewed a bit of flatbread.
“Hmm, maybe.” Her brows drew together. She hadn’t thought of it like that before, but there were a lot of posts on the apartment forums asking about “Creation crime.” “Most of us came from a world where violence was much more common. Suicide, too. Lots of people there killed themselves when living got too long,” she said, nibbling on another piece of flatbread. “The idea that you’re going to get old sooner, rather than later, that you’ve only got between eighty and ninety years most times, that makes people do things they usually might not. Some, I guess, express their more violent tendencies. Other people want to help. Of course, I might just be romanticizing it.”
“No,” Preston said, being rather of a romantic mind himself. “No, that makes sense.” Thinking of Eli, Preston pushed a fingertip through the circle of condensation left by the glass of tea on the dark wood of the table, saying, “A lot of them want to fix it. Like Creations here are... are ‘exotic species’ introduced into the ecosystem.” The phrase was obviously not Preston’s own and his smile grew unsteady. He glanced up for her opinion.
Reina watched his finger on the table, eyes drawn by the motion. She glanced up at him when he finished speaking, not immediately realizing he was waiting for her opinion. Without direct questions, it wasn’t always obvious to her when she was supposed to speak or if she was supposed to wait. People liked pausing in discussions, and she’d learned with HR that it was usually better to let them talk until they asked her something.
“But we are, aren’t we?” she asked, head tilted slightly to the side. “All of us come from another world, a world these people know nothing about. When we come here, we get powers, and those powers, for the most part make us superior. History consistently shows us that when two cultures meet, the more advanced or powerful one will always overwhelm the other. I think it’s amazing that humans haven’t found out about us on a whole, yet. Or maybe that’s the great deception: we’ve been among them since the beginning, and they have learned not to notice because noticing gets them killed.”
Preston stared at her, expression slack and sober. “That’s a damned depressing way of putting it.” He usually sounded so cultured, did Preston. He wore education like a suit and used big words like “insular” without realizing that not everybody carried around that kind of vocabulary. At the moment he sounded like the east, like Boston, and it only happened when he swore--which explained it. Preston didn’t swear, either. Not even at the tax team.
“Depressing but true,” she said, wincing internally. She hated putting people off, and that, she realized, was what she had done. And she had hoped Preston would like her after their lunch. Resigning herself to her fate as the waitress stopped by to take their orders, she pointed to the item on the menu she wanted. After getting Preston’s order, too, the waitress vanished. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get morbid,” she said after the waitress left. “Out of curiosity, how would you react to knowing all this if the roles were reversed? If you were a human, and not a Creation?”
Preston tapped wet fingers on the wood, splashing tiny droplets onto his napkin. He seemed distracted, still thinking about how old Eli could be. His eyes focused abruptly. Preston had nice blue eyes, but he so rarely looked at people in the face that it was hard to tell. “I am human,” he said, not really thinking. “I mean, my parents said--but I don’t remember. I am human.”
Well, that was true. Both Humanity’s humans and Musing’s humans were, she had to agree, human. With a nod, Reina conceded his point. “We are human, but we’re something a little more. We have to be. Plain old humans don’t have the abilities we have.” She paused, looking to one side with a pensive expression. She was almost certain that something dealing with this topic had gone up on the forums around the time the not-zombie monsters exploded across the city. “Wasn’t there a post on the forums? About Creation DNA compared to human DNA and that it was almost exactly the same except for one tiny, tiny detail? That says we’re human, but it also says we’re something else. Which isn’t necessarily bad, it just... is.”
That was a lame finish. A very, very lame finish.
“I’m not talking about nature, I’m talking about nurture,” Preston said, sounding just a little defensive as he had this argument once before--with Eli, naturally, who created all Preston’s arguments--and he fell into it like a rut in the road. “I grew up here. That little bit of DNA doesn’t matter to me. Creations are just like everyone else. My parents are no angels.”
Reina pressed her lips together, trying to arrange her thoughts in her head. She didn’t think it was going very well. She liked to be able to write her thoughts out, arrange them, and then hand in a concisely worded, well organized essay.
“Nurture is good,” she said slowly. “Nurture is a very large part of who we are.” With a quirk of her lips, she thought about how she could be considered the poster child for that, in a backwards sort of way. “It’s good that you consider yourself human. I would think most problems come around when Creations think they’re somehow better.” Panic momentarily seized her. Hadn’t she said something like that earlier? This, she thought, was why talking was confusing. “But history says anything that is different is destroyed. If it’s not the same, it’s probably dangerous. Humans react badly to what’s different from them. Even that little bit of DNA is going to matter to people who see psychics as criminals of thought.”
She paused again, collecting her thoughts as best she could. “I think, though, it’s people like you, like us, who see ourselves as part of human society who will make the case that we aren’t bad, should it come to that. We’re functioning members of society. We contribute. People like people who are useful.”
When Reina said ‘different’ it was not Creations that Preston thought of. He reached up and touched his hair at his temple, as if he could feel a headache coming. “Because that’s worked so well in the past? ‘I’m different but I’m normal too?’” Preston gave a short, bitter sound, like a soundless laugh. “Right.” He didn’t seem to hear the vinegar in his voice.
Her gaze followed the motion of his hand. “Deal with it when it happens,” she finally said with a little roll of her shoulders. “They’re not rounding us up and putting us in ghettos, and unless people start doing stupid, stupid things, they probably never will. Or we get more zombies.” She shivered, remembering how awful that had been. She had stayed in the office building, on her floor, unarmed and mostly alone. “I’m sorry, this is a pretty morbid topic of conversation.” She hesitated before asking, “Did you get your issues at home worked out?” She kept her tone studiously neutral, doing her best to convey that if he didn’t want to say anything, he didn’t have to.
It never ceased to amaze Preston how intent people were when they decided to stick their heads in the sand about things. Every once and again there would be a newspaper story about ‘research progressing’ or a few wild theories, but for the most part Seattle rebuilt and moved on, content with the brain disease story that seemed to be prevailing. Reina called attention to the topic and Preston blinked, intentionally taking some of the tenseness out of his shoulders and leaning back to take pressure off her. Most of the guards came up again a second later with the next question, but it was the thought that mattered. “Uh,” Preston said, looking away. The shrimp plates were coming, but they were too far away to stall answering. His eyes dropped down, awkward, and he tried to hide it with a pained smile that didn’t reach far enough. “...No, not really. At this point I’m trying not to aggravate the situation.”
Bad, bad topic of conversation to pick. She realized that when he tensed, and mentally beat herself for it, wondering if there was a way to segue from “familial relationships are a pain in the ass,” since she figured this was about family, to something safer. Like kittens. Everyone liked kittens. Well, no, that wasn’t true. Reina didn’t care for cats on a whole, and kittens were just tiny cats. Like babies. She didn’t care much for infants of any kind.
“I’m sorry,” she said, giving him a sympathetic smile. “Hopefully things will work out.” She leaned back as the waitress set their plates on the table, eyeing hers with no small amount of speculation. Different from the picture, but not in a bad way. Not necessarily. She tried a bite of it and found it utterly delightful. True, it wasn’t hard to please her with food, but still. “This is delicious,” Reina exclaimed. “I’m so glad you suggested this place to eat. I’ve never had Mediterranean food before, but this is amazing.”
As Reina backed away from the quicksand, Preston did too. He had no desire to spread his misery, being the kind of man that shies back from any consequence of his own pain in favor of that of others. In this case, he knew he was at fault, and he didn’t want to talk about his failings any more than she really wanted to hear them. He smiled, warm, at least, that she was pleased with the lunch, and turned the conversation gently to safer topics.