Loki (hamrammr) wrote in spinningcompass, @ 2012-11-29 20:54:00 |
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Mitchell was leisurely scrolling down the page. He wasn’t reading anything. It was just something to do. The pub was completely empty. Not a soul wanted a drink which was surprising by the mass of people that had arrived. Just like the train. It had started with a small group where basically everyone knew each other and now there were so many faces he had never seen before. He pushed the laptop away and got himself a beer. He could call Annie or George or try to get the TV running. There were no channels but if he managed to connect it with a DVD player, he could watch all the movies he wanted. His eyes glanced at the DVD set box that he had hidden under the bar. The Walking Dead. He had stumbled over it in a shop. No, actually, he had searched for it. Still, he hadn’t counted on finding it. But here it was now. A show about Sophia’s life. What the fuck should he do? He decided for the most obvious. He opened the bottle and pushed the box deeper underneath the bar. He could still worry about it tomorrow. The fucking thing wouldn’t run away after all. --- Erol was used to a lot of things, but his sister coming back from the dead had rattled him even more than ending up far, far outside of his comfort zone, which in regular situations, was fickle at best anyway.. Regardless of the many religions his family had come to embrace, reincarnation or even resurrection wasn’t one of the things he got hung up on. Dead was dead and he found a strange sense of comfort in that. Frankly, life should just be as simple as that; death, no life hereafter and most definitely, no surprises. But he’d known that, from the very moment his younger sister threatened to squeeze him to death, that it wasn’t a trick. And he’d even managed a frown when she called out that damn old nickname he hated, before ordering her to take a shower at last. Barking out orders.Military strategies. Battlefields. That was when he was in his element. This? Ah well. Maybe if he pretended that the last twenty years or so hadn’t happened, then maybe it would have been exciting - just as the old city had been. Except this time, he wouldn’t let anyone get caught. Leaving Kaya in the shower, he quietly shut the door behind him and went out into a city a little similar. But just a little. Aside from the animals roaming an urban jungle, It was morbidly quiet and empty. But the similarities ended there. Even as he walked the streets, unsure of where he was going, he kept an eye out for possible escape exits into tunnels - tunnels that this city should surely have. And if Samir was even half the soldier he claimed to be, he had done the same. Just in case. But when the darkness was pushed away by light coming from a pub, he got curious And when he stepped closer, he let out a scoff at a familiar figure standing behind a bar. Okay. He knew his cousin liked to drink - who the fuck drank scorpion infused vodka anyway? - but tending to a bar? Right. “Sam? The fuck you doing here?” ---- Mitchell watched the stranger with mild interest. Just another one of the newbies, he guessed. Well, the newbie meant work and so the vampire straightened his back and pushed himself into a standing position. Before he could even ask for the other man’s order, the stranger decided to make himself just one tad more interesting. Interesting and crazy. Two things that often went hand in hand. “Not sure who you are talking to but is there something you want to order. For you and your imaginary friend,” Mitchell asked. His words were coated with amusement. --- His eyebrow rose as the man spoke - which was nothing like the eclectic dialects one could hear in the New York underground and last of all, nothing like that of his cousin’s. It was what - Irish? “But.” No, no. Erol pinched the bridge of his nose and drew in a deep breath before looking around the pub. Didn’t seem like a set up. Didn’t seem like a surprise party either. Besides, his birthday was months away still. “Samir.” Fine. He could play along, if that was what his cousin wanted him to do. “Beer. No, wait. I need something stronger. How about that vodka you like,” Erol decided as he sat down on a stool. He’d had enough of his man calling him chicken just because he’d refused to drink it - just once, but it was enough. “With the scorpion poison.” ---- Samir. Right. This - explained a lot. Mitchell’s eyebrows rose at the exotic choice of drink. “So... my dear great-great-great”- he decided to skip the last few ‘greats’ (it was getting ridiculous) - “grandson likes to drink scorpion poison? Interesting taste.” He turned around, got hold of the vodka and a glass and pushed them into the stranger’s direction. “There you go. I’m freshly out of scorpions. Sorry.” His voice was far from saying ‘sorry’. “So I take it that you are from his time and world,” he said and crossed his arms in front of his chest. --- It wasn’t the first time that he’d felt completely out of his depth, or even fragile, but he couldn’t help feeling like it right now. No matter how much he hated being in charge of a couple of million souls, walking away from it all had never been a real option. It wasn’t an option he’d willingly take - and now, now he was here, far removed from the people he was supposed to protect. Restlessness aside, he was somehow staring at a cousin who had lost his mind. Something that he should have seen coming maybe, but he wasn’t known for his perception when it came to those things. Everyone was damaged down in the Underground, some more than others. But after a tentative sip and feeling the familiar burn down his throat, he looked up once more with a quizzical look in his eyes as the other man’s words finally hit home. Grandson? He wasn’t lying - he could tell. There was a groan as he reached for his drink again, and swallowed the rest of it in one go. Come on. Couldn’t he have a break? Just once? Was that really too much asked for? But the fact that the man looked like another certain man he’d come to trust unconditionally, helped him to say more than he normally would. “He’s, uh. My cousin?” There was a wry smile as he pushed the glass closer to Mitchell again and pointed at the bottle. He needed more liquor to deal with this shit. Regaining one lost familiar member was one thing, but to look up at someone and actually see yourself - parts of yourself - in someone else’s face, that was something else entirely. --- “Jesus,” Mitchell mumbled. He had only wanted to know more about Samir’s world - do a bit of smalltalk. He had not intended to find another relative. “Are you related to Samir’s father or mother?” It was worth checking. It was a 50:50 chance. “You can help yourself. It’s not like I’m going to charge you for anything,” Mitchell waved off the stranger’s gesture. That’s why he had given him the whole bottle at once. Now, he began to reach for a glass for himself. Beer might not be enough. He pulled himself a drink, then Samir’s cousin. Jesus, did he have a whole army of great-grandchildren out there? He gulped down half of the glass. The liquid burned down his throat and left a tickling sensation in his guts. And if they existed, he had to have a child out there. --- And Erol hadn’t expected to pay for anything, so that worked out well in the end. Very well. “Through his mother. Her name was Adhara.” He reflected only briefly on the fact that he had to use the past tense a little too much in his life, but it was a habit that was hard to break. And now, suddenly, he could mostly stop referring to his own sister in the past tense, which was still mind boggling, so he had a greedy sip before he bothered to speak again. “You really our ancestor?” If so, what the hell was this place anyway? An island where present, future and the past had a chance to play catch up every once in a while? --- “Mother’s side, hmm? Yeah, I guess in that case I am or might be,” Mitchell answered in a half-mumble. He still wasn’t sure if he actually was. It was all… fucking complicated. Everything was always fucking complicated. Was it even possible for them to be his family? But in the end, he was comfortable with the idea. It was madness. But madness was this life and this was as good as madness could get. Family was a gift not everyone was blessed with. He had always tried to push the thought away. You needed to find the right woman. It didn’t work with just everyone and now that he was undead, it had been out of the question. Why should you ponder something that could never be? It wasn’t worth the pain. But now, this was real - or at least could be real. And he didn’t mind. --- “Why couldn’t you just take after me?” Erol wondered out loud as he reached for the bottle and topped off Mitchell’s glass before filling his own up again. Now, Samir had his own fair share of ‘fangirls’ back home, but damn it to all hell if he didn’t have eyes for any of them - which made him wonder what the case was with this guy. Was he at least involved with someone? He’d find out somehow, if only through nothing else but time. --- Mitchell chuckled softly. “You do realise that it works the other way around?” he teased. “He took after me.” He let another round of vodka burn down his throat. It spread through his stomach and tickled in his toes. Slowly, he relaxed. Weird was still everything this conversation was. --- “So you have strong genes.” Erol shrugged before lifting his glass up again. The stories his grandmother had told had to have been true - the ones of the Irish soldier in occupied France- but he’d never really been for the romance part of it all. That had been deserved for the girls in the family - namely Jasmine and Kaya. They knew the words, but his mind had filled it in with the kind of things a boy thought of - which was full of epic battle scenes and heroics only superheroes were capable of. But hey, it had been a nice story. You know. Except the man in the stories … he had a face now, didn’t he? “John Mitchell. My grandmother used to talk about you.” --- “Did she?” Samir hadn’t known his name. But Erol seemed to have listened better. Now, he had heard his name. This seemed to be it for real. Holy shit! “What did she say?” If his story had survived for this long, he must have made one hell of an impression. He vaguely remembered Jeanne. It was nearly a lifetime ago now. They had seen each other during the month he had been stationed at her village and another two weeks when he had returned later. But they had both known that it was only on time. They had barely even understood each other. His French had been rough and her English more than interesting. Or maybe it had just been the impact that he had left. Had it been a son or a daughter? Maybe Erol knew the answers. He hoped he did. --- He’d had more time to listen those stories than Samir ever had - with how hyperactive his cousin been back then, unable to sit still, it didn’t surprise him - and far more time to learn about his heritage. Memories of family trees popped up, all with three common denominators; the ever mysterious John Mitchell who had died in the First World War, and the less mysterious ancestors by names of Connor Marcus and Charlie McIntyre. And they’d intertwined, gotten more complicated until you needed a whole lot of time and patience to make sense of them. “That you were an Irish soldier, fighting in the north of France during the first World War and that you met a woman name Jeanne. I always imagined her as a redhead, but ...” Erol made a small face and to top it off, shrugged. It wasn’t a secret that he had a thing for redheads,but that was another story. “And that Jeanne and a couple of other villagers gathered their food and went out to feed the soldiers who were starving. And that it wasn’t enough, nowhere near enough, but it was meant as a thank you, even if their village was destroyed.” “You caught her eye. And the rest is ... I’m not even sure it was meant for kid’s ears.” A small eye roll and then a drink before he continued. “You were stationed there for a month and then you had to leave and eventually, you came back for another two weeks, but that was before she started showing. And when you died, she got a daughter named Marie-Hélène and married someone else from the village. She daughter eventually a Belgian named Jozef Boone and got three kids, one of them named John. What can I say, we’re interested in our pasts.” --- Mitchell smiled and chuckled softy as he suggested that Jeanne had been a redhead. Brown weavy hair and a cute smile. Not red. But he was too fascinated to correct him. This could have been his life. A life someone else had eventually lived. An unwelcome jealousy gripped his heart and held it tight. He tried to shake it off, but the intruder stayed. “Wow. Holy shit,” Mitchell summoned up Erol’s explanation. So he had a daughter. A tiny little girl like Eve. “Do you know more about her? What did she do? When did she die? Did she grow old?” He doubted she had studied. Her mother hadn’t been rich and in the 1930s WWII had knocked on the door. Had she survived it? --- “She uh, they saved up and moved to the United States, right before the second world war started. Her kids were born in the United States and she worked as a … a seamstress, I think. Yeah.” Erol nodded as it was all coming back to him. Maybe Kaya could give the man more details, but that was what he knew. “She died an old woman, by the way. You know, at home, I have all these documents and pictures of her and her descendants.” But he wasn’t exactly home anymore, was he? “My sister looks like her, a bit. If you were curious.” He wasn’t really ready to deal with that just yet, but there it was - the elephant in the room, or at least, his room. “She’s here. I left her in the shower.” ---” Mitchell didn’t know whether it was the tension of the topic or the inappropriateness of that comment but he broke out laughing. He threw his head back and laughed whole-heartedly. “You left her in the shower?” He still chuckled. It relieved the tension and suddenly the jealousy was gone. His daughter had grown old and lived a good life and here he stood in front of what remained of her. “Wow, can you send her over here at some point?” This was getting more and more like his own army. How much of them were out there? --- Okay, he didn’t get that bit - the laughing. He wasn’t really a genius when it came to the nuances of human emotion. “What? She was covered in dirt, so I ordered her to take a shower.” But okay, the man wanted to see Kaya, so he called her and again, ordered her to come over - stat. Because he was so used to doing it, it didn’t cross his mind that ordering people, especially family, wasn’t really a proper thing to do. “She’ll be right over.” --- Mitchell watched the stranger whose name he still did not know. He chuckled softly as the other barked an order. “You do realise that she’s your sister and nor your private?” he asked, still clearly amused. Absent-mindedly he scratched the stumble on his chin. If George would have spoken to him like that, he would have been faced with a dose of sarcasm. --- “Technically, she’s both.” And that was all the explanation the other man deserved so far. He might be a dead ringer for his cousin, but that didn’t mean that he’d allow the other man to read him like an open book. Or anyone else, for that matter. He reached for the bottle and refilled his glass, but that didn’t change anything. She’d died. Her name was on the memorial wall, Erol had made sure of that. And he was pretty certain that Samir had taken it a notch further and had pasted her image on one of the walls. He hadn’t had much time to grieve back then. “Do you have any fruity drinks? She likes them,” he finally asked him. --- Fruits. Yeah, they were blessed with a serious absence of those. “Yeah, we have a really rubbish fruit supplier. Freshly out of them, mate. But I hope we can harvest our own trees soon. Anything else she likes?” Somehow, he wanted to make her feel comfortable. Weird if he kept in mind that she was a stranger as well. --- “Soda? We don’t get much of that either.” After that however, he shook a cigarette out of a pack that had come with him and offered one to the other man. “Milk,” he suggested after putting one between his lips. “Or you could ask her.” But it felt like that the conversation had come to a standstill, so he took it a step further. “She died three years ago. I … don’t really remember what she likes. You know, parties. I remember that.” --- Soda, milk – all of that was doable. Sherlock had a cow. A purple one. Something you shouldn’t think too hard about. “Must be weird,” he commented lamely. He remembered the emotional wreck Annie had been when they had met for the first time on the train. Distracted, by his new task, he bowed down and got Soda and milk out of the fridge that was stored under the bar. --- “Very.” Not the most subtle of creatures, he heard Kaya coming long before she even got there and subsequently braced himself for impact. After finding himself trapped in his sister’s arms and sniffing in the smell of orange blossoms, he groaned and tried to free himself. “Let go.” “Do I get milk? Real milk? I saw a cow. It’s a purple one, I told you purple cows existed,” she rattled off as she gave him one more squeeze before letting go. “So, what is the hurry, Almighty Commander?” There was a half assed salute that had Erol cringing before she dropped down on a bar stool. Couldn’t wait to share your …” She peered closer at the bottle. “Vodka?” Oh, he could hear her disapproval coming from miles away. Erol scoffed at her and quickly pushed his glass to his chest, to keep it safe from her scorn.“I got a right to drink, woman. Now, meet John Mitchell. Right there.” --- Mitchell watched the siblings bickering with mild amusement and chuckled softly. Milk was poured into a glass and he pushed it towards Kaya. What a bundle of energy she was! "There, real mild. From an existing purple cow," the vampire said with a smile. |