Who: Wren and Penn What: A walk home Where: On the way to Hamartia When: Immediately after the masquerade Warnings: None
The air outside Centro was cool and clean, and Wren was thankful of the change. She hadn’t been expecting anything from the evening, not really. Maybe a new client, maybe the pleasure of seeing Quinn finally having a good time, maybe a nice glass of champagne and a dance or two. But she hadn’t had any great expectations, and so she wasn’t disappointed or upset with the night. She didn’t have a good grasp on the fact that anything strange had happened. She didn’t recognize anyone, but that could be chalked up to not knowing anyone present, and she didn’t really feel very many inhibitions to begin with.
She looked over at the man walking beside her, the man with old eyes, and she made a thoughtful sound. “Over a thousand?” she asked, her bare feet cold on the concrete, but not uncomfortably so with the movement of walking.
“Stopped counting. I thought women didn’t like talking about age,” Penn said, hands in his pockets and elbows out as she walked beside him. He wasn’t taking advantage of the contact, quite the opposite, and if she hadn’t had her arm through his they could have very well just been walking in the same direction at the same pace. Penn didn’t notice anything different about his behavior at the party either, but Penn didn’t have very many inhibitions it was true.
“I’m turning twenty,” she told him. “I’m not old enough yet to worry about that,” she told him, though her eyes seemed much older and the calmness in her speech spoke to a maturity that was emotional and not physical. He wasn’t interested in her, and she registered that and acted accordingly, as she always did. It was a companionable silence for a block or so, and then she looked at him once more. “Are you tired of it? Is that why you came here?”
“Told you I came for the beer,” he said, easily, deliberately misinterpreting the question. Penn didn’t look all that intelligent, since he was prone to scowling and squinting, and when he misinterpreted things enough people tended to leave them be. He glanced at her sideways, obviously thinking that she was too young to be wearing what she was wearing a party like that, and he had no doubt that she’d probably had more than what was good for her too. “Hmph.”
She gave him a smile that was impressed at the evasive tactic, but that said she didn’t buy it for a minute. “Why you came to humanity,” she clarified, though she was sure he didn’t need it. He was too old to need clarification on most things, she imagined.
“They got beer here too.”
She laughed, a young, young sound. “I’m going to assume the answer is yes. You were tired,” she said, adding a moment later, “and they had beer.”
“You go on and assume anything you like.” He had a distinctly American accent, without embracing a particular region, and he sounded like everywhere and nowhere all at once. “Since you know the difference, you must have come over too then, huh?”
“When I was five,” she said, and that statement was enough to make it obvious that the decision had not been her own, unlike his, which meant something in and of itself.
Even younger than he guessed. “When you were alive five years or when you were still looking five?” he asked, shrewdly.
She gave him a look that said she knew she’d guessed right about his intelligence, but she left it at that. “I’ve been alive nineteen years,” she told him. “It will be twenty next month.”
“Mmhuh.” It was a funny kind of grunting affirmative, and characteristic of Penn and only Penn. “With your family?”
“With my mother,” she said, because it was different than family, different than something inherently plural. “You don’t have any family,” she added with a soft sort of care.
“No,” he said, stoutly, with the years to take that kind of a sting out. “Bit late to try it.” He gave her a sideways look for getting that out of him.
She met his sideways look with an open one of her own. “I’m not going to tell you it’s never too late, because I don’t know what it’s like to be you. But I hope it’s not to late.”
“Be a funny thing meeting the woman that would want to try it.” Barked laugh, of true amusement, not bitterness.
“I hope you aren’t underestimating us,” she said, a smile in her voice and in the question.
“Would have had to had my head up my ass a long time to do something like that,” Penn said, smirking.
She hugged his arm against her side, and she laughed at both the crassness of his phrasing at the words themselves. “Some men do, I find.”
“I bet you do,” he said, in amused agreement.
“What do you do over here?” she asked, after a few more blocks of quiet. “In addition to drinking free beer?”
“Teach some. Self-defense. Bouncer at a bar if I can’t make rent. Nothing exciting.” He looked at her, waiting for her reply in kind.
“I provide companionship for men,” she said, without any embarrassment at the words. “How long have you been here? If you were in Musings a very long time?”
“Mmhuh. Thought it might have been something like that.” It didn’t make one iota of difference to him, you could tell. He didn’t hold her at any more distance, and none of his words changed tone. “Few years,” he said, shrugging a little with his other shoulder, “Don’t count.”
“Do I look the part?” she asked, and it was a question she was obviously interested in. The kind of work she wanted, it didn’t come to girls who looked like they did what she did. She was starting to believe he did count, but he just didn’t admit as much, and she hugged his arm reassuringly, in an obvious movement of understanding and support.
“You asking me if what you’re wearing looks right? ‘Cuz I don’t pay attention to that shit.” Little shrug. He did that a lot. “If you’re asking me if you have the face for it, there ain’t no face for it. Women all look different, and men too.”
“That doesn’t help so much,” she said truthfully, but it didn’t take the smile from her lips. “I like nights like this, when it’s starting to get cold and you’re so tired you can barely think to keep words from slipping past your lips like breathing.” She looked back up at him. “You don’t think there are types?”
Penn looked around. The night felt to him like just about any night, but so did all the others. “I just told you there aren’t types. People all over the world do that kinda thing and there’s nothing about them that’s all the same. Why, you think you were born for it or something?” He gave her a keen look.
“No,” she said truthfully. “I don’t really. I think it’s all circumstance and choices and fate. Like you ending up here, tonight, on my arm. It happened because it was supposed to happen. Does that cancel out free will?” she asked thoughtfully. She liked to talk, and she liked to talk about deeper things, things beyond dresses and boyfriends and movies. She had a feeling he wouldn’t mind that.
“Nothing is supposed to happen just cuz it’s supposed to happen. Sometimes things just do. There’s no destiny, there’s no plan. Things just happen because of people being people.” Penn didn’t care about boyfriends, dresses, movies, or anything significant to this decade. As long as she wasn’t trying to wrest his opinion of her hairstyle from him, she could talk at him all she liked.
“There’s an order in nature, and there are cycles in life. Why wouldn’t our lives be the same?” she asked.
"Those cycles are just people being people over and over in different generations."
“And human nature?” she asked. “What of that?”
He raised his eyebrows, pausing at the corner and looking back the way they came and then forward, the way they were going. Habit and a general awareness of what was around him. "You say that like it changes anything."
“I say it like I want to know what someone who has lived much longer than I thinks,” she corrected, and she looked back and forth the way he did.
"Human nature is human nature, and that's why there are cycles, because it doesn't change much."
She mulled that over, turned it over in her mind before responding, taking her time with it. “As much as we do not want to admit it at times, we’re animals. Smart animals, and that smartness makes us cruel, and that is human nature. Fate, I like to think, keeps all that in check. We’re still here,” she said, motioning to the night around them. “And if it was just us with our cruelty and our greed, we would have ended everything by now. Something has to rein it in.”
"We could just be winding up to it." It was a grim forecast, but he had seen Hiroshima. One couldn't help but be grim after that. He remembered that horror, the endless one, and he turned away. "We're almost there."
“Something will turn it back around,” she said, the soft sort of certainty of the young in her voice. “Fate, or nature, or cycles. Whatever you call it, something will.”
"I hope you're right." He started walking again.
“Is that why you don’t have a family?” she asked, and she moved when he did. She looked down at his shoes and his socks, and then back up at his face. “Can I have your sandals?” she asked plainly.
He stopped and looked down at her bare toes. “Feet bothering you?” He glanced up at her face once, gave a little sigh that said very plainly, The young will be the death of me, and extracted his arm from hers. “It’s only two more blocks.” Turning slightly to face her he held out one arm. “I’ll carry you.” He didn’t just sweep her up, or do any number of things he knew to get her into her arms, because while that’s romantic it’s also called assault when it’s unwanted and Penn was very aware of that kind of thing--not the legal aspect, the personal one. He taught self-defense, after all. He didn’t get in other people’s space without their permission (unless he was pissed).
The sigh, long-suffering as it was, didn’t bother her. She stepped on one of his toes. “It’s easier to just give me your sandals,” she said. She liked this blunt man. He felt like old and comfortable things, and she didn’t have to try around him or worry what was in his head.
He rolled his eyes up into his head. “Women.” Stepping back (he wasn’t going to haul her off without her permission), he clamped a toe on the back of one sandal and worked his way out of it, then he kicked it over to her and shook off the second. Penn had flat, worn feet, and he had enough callous on them to walk over coals and not notice. “Gonna be big for you,” he said, amused.
They were big, but she pressed her toes as far into them as she could, and she shuffled when she walked to keep them in place. He looked like a man who didn’t care about walking a few blocks on bare feet, and her own feet were admittedly numb from the cold night sidewalk. “A man would let himself be carried?” she asked.
He laughed. “A man wouldn’t admit his feet were cold.”
“That makes a man very silly,” she said, nodding at Hamartia coming into view, the sun beginning to rise behind the tired looking building. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Even in its stark poverty and graffiti.”
He looked at her like she was crazy. “It’s a heap.”
“Everything has a beautiful side, Penn,” she said, still looking at the building in the distance as they walked. “Even this place.”
“If you say so.” He wasn’t going to argue about perceptions and beauty with her. He’d read enough philosophy to know that that argument had no end.
She was quiet the rest of the way. She didn’t need to argue or convince him that she was right. They would both see it how they saw it, and she knew she tended to always see the good in people and things. It was just her way, and she was extremely self aware. She stopped in front of the building, and she stepped out of his sandals.
He looked down. “You’re going to want to keep those on in this building.”
“I can sidestep the needles,” she said plainly, because there was no point in pretending they lived the Aubade.
“Don’t,” he said, flatly. “When am I going to wear those things again anyway?” He dusted off his pleated tunic with no trace of the ridiculous and grinned.
“What’s your last name?” she asked, because that was the only way to get in touch with anyone, and she stepped back into the sandals without arguing about his feet and the needles.
“Johnson,” he said, not as if it was really his name, but just as if it was... a title. ‘Mister.’ ‘Teacher.’ Johnson. He walked into the lobby with her and stood at the foot of the stair, waiting.
She gave him a hug, stepping into his space without asking before entering. “Thank you for walking me,” she said, and she kissed his cheek before stepping back and heading for the stairs.