Re: The Enfant Terrible/The Jaded
It was probably for the good that Emil didn't get a load of Kelly's trail of thought because he would have put up dumb protest at the first mention of reiki. Woo-woo healers were rich people substitute for needing attention. Medicine, Emil believed, was medicine. It was a combination of chemical reactions that had cause and effect. They could be measured - they were measured. Medicine was a centuries long evolution of basic observation of practical impact, and it wasn't unrelated that the only people Emil had come across who ever talked about reiki with earnestness were rich, middle-aged white people who also thought you could boil a flower down to an essence and that it did anything to you beyond the placebo effect.
For poor people, getting hold of actual medicine was hard enough. But the valium would do it. He came to a halt in the corridor in order to figure out how to get around Party City hanging out of the interior of a compartment. The hallways weren't that wide, and Emil wasn't that narrow. Most people didn't grab Emil. It wasn't a thing. The height, maybe. The hair. For whatever reason, people didn't get grabby. He flinched. It ran up his spine like an electric flicker, and he was pulled into a compartment that smelled like a college dorm room. Sweat. Cigarette smoke. Less try hard, more like a bunch of people avoiding thinking about what it meant that people had disappeared off the train, no notice. Emil didn't avoid. He didn't evade.
He didn't need to hold onto the guy's hand. He was getting towed, no matter what. He didn't drag his feet, he let the guy mow through people and came to a stop eventually when the guy stopped tugging, hemmed in by people shimmying determinedly in a bedroom compartment. The significant number of people who managed to simultaneously be inside, and also be dancing was a pretty big feat.
"And you are?" Emil said. It was lower-register. Dry.