Arthur a Bland (tan_thy_hide) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-03-30 22:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | arthur a bland, robin hood |
WHO Arthur a Bland and Robin Hood, open to Merry Men
WHEN Backdated to Tuesday 23 March, afternoon
WHERE The Sly Fox
WHAT He’s gonna need a little adjusting
WARNINGS TBA
He’d gone with them in the end. ‘Course he had, they were his mates. When your mates said they needed you, you stepped up, even if stepping up meant stepping out of your safe haven into a world that you still weren’t altogether sure wasn’t out to get you. It was only when the van had trundled down the wide main roads of Cheyenne, Wyoming – the first of several cities they would pass through on the long drive to New York, each of them busy and buzzing and conspicuously not in the throes of dystopia – that the truth of what the boys had been telling him began to penetrate. Y2K… the implosion of everything, the descent of chaos… hadn’t happened. A realisation of that magnitude could shatter a man. Arthur had spent twenty-one years in the forest (so Scarlet said, anyhow, though he reckoned Scarlet might have his timelines mixed up, cos two decades was crazy). He’d wrestled hunger and cold, sickness, injury, wild beasts; really, it was a bloody wonder he hadn’t died a dozen or more times (he was pretty sure he hadn’t died more than once… maybe twice?), most of it (all of it? surely not all of it) on his own. And he’d done it all off the back of a calamity that had never come to pass. It had shaken him, that. But he hadn’t shattered. Because what he’d realised, lying awake long into that night, drenched in the cold of an uncertainty he hadn’t felt for a very long time, was this: if he had believed that doomsaying, and believed it enough to go to ground, it had to be because somebody had wanted him to do so. (The very frustrating thing about Arthur’s paranoia – for everyone around him, at least – was that he’d come by it honestly. He’d had the man breathing down his neck for as long as he could remember. He and his mates had been chased across the country, then across the Atlantic, by the Sheriff of Nottingham. And when it wasn’t Prince John’s monarchy beating them down, it was the machinery of this new country’s government. He couldn’t count the number of folk he’d seen beaten bloody by cops. The number of activists who’d been followed, menaced, provoked, attacked, flat-out murdered by fucking FBI zealots. He couldn’t count the number of times it’d happened to him. How could it be paranoia, when there had always been someone out to get him?) He’d let that thought settle into his skin, finding it comforting. Of course there’d been a purpose to all this. He just didn’t know the who or the why of it yet. He would, though. With Robin and Johnny and all the others at his side? There was nothing they couldn’t crack. That had been almost a week ago now. Since then, Art had been given a new haircut (about fifty percent less shaggy than before), new clothes (soft and warm, in a way he’d forgotten clothing could be), new bedding (though he’d refused to relinquish Brian: that bloody grizzly had menaced him for a full month before he’d managed to best it, and its pelt had kept the winter cold at bay for years; Brian deserved better than to be stranded alone in the woods) and a new room whose walls were lush with comfortingly familiar greenery. Best of all, he’d been given a welcome home, and that was worth more than everything else combined. This latest gift, though. This one, he wasn’t so sure about. Cell phones, in Art’s memory, were plasticky, palm-sized things, with a keypad like an ordinary telephone’s and a tiny backlit screen that displayed numbers and words in blocky black pixels. The phones his friends used were all screen, little portable computers that responded at the tap of a finger. Computers that were also cameras and camcorders and tellies and satellite navigation and probably at least a dozen other things; Arthur had gotten a bit faint with horror at that point in Much’s explanation, and then Stoots had shot Much a death glare and pointedly changed the subject. Smart phones, they called them. Arthur didn’t like the idea of his phone having a mind of its own. But here it was, a phone all of his own, brand new and waiting for someone to crack the seal on its box. In retrospect, he’d probably been a tad ungrateful when Robin had handed it to him yesterday. He’d dropped the box on the bar as though expecting it to burn him, and loudly declared that there was no way in hell he was touching one of those cursed machines; what was Robin, crazy? Since then, the box had lain untouched on the bar. He knew, because he’d been checking on it every few hours. Just… you know, in case. Just to be safe. (And not at all because he was curious about what it looked like inside the box. Definitely not because he was wondering what it would be like to make the screen dance under his fingers, or if this phone’s camera could give people cartoon dog faces and flower crowns like Much’s phone could. Nothing to do with that.) He was staring at it again when a floorboard creaked behind him, causing him to spin around guiltily. |