Zadkiel Thrush (lifeibreathe) wrote in we_float, @ 2010-05-16 23:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | backstory, gabriel wilder, zadkiel thrush |
Your hair. It's blue.
Who: Zadkiel Thrush and Gabe Wilder
When: Early March, 2096
Where: A street near the clinic where Zadkiel works.
What: Zadkiel runs into Gabe. Literally.
Status: Closed, Complete
Gabe lit another cigarette, watching as its glow blinked, then dimmed, lost in the neon lights of First Avenue.
His grandfather had said to him when he first started smoking, "Watch it, Gabe. Those things'll kill you." It had been a reference that he hadn't understood. No one died from cigarette smoke. But now, as the ashes drifted down, wet and grey on the tips of sneakers soaked with rain, he thought he understood. It wasn't the cigarettes that killed. It was the things that drove you to put one to your mouth in the first place.
In this case, it was Julie. Then again, it was always Julie.
He inhaled again, watching people walk in and out of the clinic doors a couple streets down. It was recognizable mainly because it was one of the few places that wasn't lit. He liked that about it. It seemed quiet, even though it wasn't. Safe, even though it definitely wasn't that either.
He stomped the cigarette down, then stuck the butt in his pocket. Another thing learned from his grandfather. Don't litter. Old sayings. The man had been full of them.
Zadkiel stepped out of the clinic and sighed. It was raining. It was always raining. After several weeks... months... he was losing track of time, but maybe that was a good thing... he ought to be used to it. It wasn't as if it didn't rain in Oregon. When he'd actually looked up the statistics, the average rainfall at home was actually more than it was here. Somehow, though, it was more depressing in the city. All of the gray buildings and artificial light...
But those were all useless thoughts. He ought to be thinking about what he was going to eat, because the groceries he'd bought at the beginning of the week were nearly gone, even though he hadn't eaten most of it. It was a danger of keeping anything in the refrigerator. Everything was assumed to be communal, and nothing was safe. It wasn't any different from home, except that he hardly even knew these people, and they never gave anything back, or even apologized when what he'd planned to cook for dinner was gone.
He flipped up the collar of his jacket to try to keep the chill drizzle off the back of his neck. He needed something warmer, or at least more waterproof. He was tired of being damp. He was just tired in general, after... eight hours? No, he'd gotten stuck when his relief hadn't showed up (he didn't think she'd last long) so it was closer to nine or ten. Did it matter? Shaking his head as if it might clear it, he stepped onto the sidewalk and started to walk, his eyes on his feet, his hands shoved deep in his pockets as he thoughts spun out.
He was jerked back to reality abruptly when he ran into someone. Literally. His head snapped up and his eyes went wide. "Oh. Sorry."
“Uh,” was about all Gabe managed after he felt the thud against his chest. It wasn’t often that anyone failed to notice him... even when he wanted them to. He took a slow step back, careful about it as if he expected to hit someone by not looking. “It’s okay. Really.”
Zadkiel blinked up at him, startled by his height and blue hair in about equal measure. He tried, and failed, not to stare. "I should have been looking where I was going," he said. "It's just... been a long day?" It came out as a question when it shouldn't have. He still wasn't used to talking to strangers, even though technically it's what he did all day. But at work he had a purpose and out here he had no idea what anyone expected of him. Should he just keep walking? He supposed most people would, but he hesitated. It seemed rude.
The stare shrank Gabe slightly and he found himself rubbing at the base of his palm as he squinted and looked into the distance, not sure of what, exactly, the other man was staring at.
"No.. uh... it was kind of cool, actually. Being run into." He said, then glanced back. "Fuck. I mean, it doesn't happen a lot, you know?" His knuckle rubbed against his nose for a minute as he watched Zadkiel's face. "Uh. Do I have something on my face?"
"Is it naturally like that?" he blurted out, and then instantly turned crimson. "I'm sorry. That's rude." He oughtn't ask about things like that. People might not like to talk about it, or they might ask questions of their own. He suddenly felt completely see-through. His hands bunched in his pockets, pulling his trousers out in the front slightly.
"My face?" Gabe blinked. "Uh. Yeah, actually. I think."
Zadkiel bit his lip, scuffed the toe of his sneaker against the pavement. What was it his mother had always said to him? 'Think ere you speak, for words, once spoken, are no more your own'? Something like that. He couldn't take it back, and was it worse to just leave the question misunderstood. "Your hair," he said after a longer than it ought to have been pause. "It's blue."
"Oh. Right." Now his knuckle was rubbing his head. "I dyed it. Um. Still dye it. It's... I work at Seretech and I got bored. Started mixing colors with the drink packets you get in the cafeteria and-" He gestured. "Blue. Pretty fucking cool, I guess. Better than brown."
The words were followed by a shrug, then a pause as he looked at the stranger's clearly undyed hair. The pause grew until he stuck out his hand and said, "I'm Gabe."
It sounded awkward spoken out loud like that. He wasn't used to introducing himself until someone else asked. He was pretty sure, however, that this man wasn't going to.
"Zadkiel." He took the offered hand and shook it, then let his hand hand at his side, resisting his normal inclination to shove it back in his pocket. "You dye your hair with drink packets?" From the way the other man, Gabe, said it, he assumed he was supposed to know what Seretech was. Being clueless was pretty much par for the course for him, though, and he thought he was getting pretty good at hiding it.
"Yeah." He could sense that there was something wrong here but Gabe didn't know what it was. "Zadkiel. That's an angel, isn't it?" He tried to remember which one but of all the things his family had impressed upon him, angels weren't high on the list. It sounded enough like his own full name to be familiar.
For a moment, he almost asked Zadkiel if he needed help but realized just quickly enough that he probably looked just as lost himself.
Confusion turned quickly to surprise. "Yes, it is." Most people he'd met had no idea what the origin of his name was; they just thought it was 'weird' and didn't hesitate to tell him so, and promptly make up something else to call him. At work he was mostly Z, thanks to Kira. "Not quite as well known as some of the others... Gabriel." One corner of his mouth quirked up just slightly.
"Yeah. No one ever calls me that, though. Not since..." He shrugged again. "Sean... My father's not real religious." Gabe's head glanced up at the sky, waiting for the drizzle to stop or to turn into a downpour. Neither happened. "Why Zadkiel?"
He blinked again. No one here had ever asked, and everyone at home already knew. He glanced up, trying to figure out what Gabe was looking at, but saw nothing. "I was born early," he said. "My mother thought the name might protect me. Summon me a guardian angel. Zadkiel was the angel that kept Abraham from killing Isaac when the Lord told him to." One shoulder lifted and fell. "I lived, so maybe there was something to it."
And that was more than anyone in Seattle knew about him, he realized. It made him a little sad.
"I never fucking liked that story. That Abraham just... that he's so willing to kill his kid. I dunno." He shrugged. It was the kind of God he'd have to learn to love someday. But he didn't say that out loud. He wasn't that kind of person... he hadn't given in that far to anything.
Gabe felt unsure of what to say to this stranger. He seemed half out of this time, almost as if he'd called him from some distant past, rather than future. "Do you want... um, do you need... can I, like, get you a cup of coffee or something?" It seemed more polite than offering him a map or a newspaper with today's date on it.
Zadkiel tried not to wince at Gabe's profanity. "I was actually just trying to figure out what I was going to do about dinner," he said. "Are you hungry?" He knew of a few places around the clinic, but he suspected a number of them contributed to the number of people who came in with gastrointestinal (he'd just learned that one, and that GI was shorthand for it) upsets, so he wasn't sure he wanted to take his chances. "I don't much like the story either," he admitted. "But the angel did the right thing, even if God didn't, so I don't mind my name."
"Yeah, a bit. You don't want to eat here though. Like, half the time they put dog in and call it chicken. Or worse. Come on." Gabe hooked his thumb to point towards the next street. "So... uh, can I ask you something?"
Of course he could. He just had, hadn't he? But perhaps his parents hadn't been sticklers about the difference between 'can' and 'may'. He wasn't sure he wanted to let him ask anything, though, since he seemed to actually know how to ask questions that required true answers. "All right," he said finally. He shoved his hands back into his pockets, his shoulders curling inwards with the gesture.
"Are you..." Gabe paused, feeling strangely rude for asking. "Amish or something?"
Zadkiel hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath until it came out in a rush like he'd been punched in the gut. It wasn't the worst thing the other man could have asked, but it was close. They never talked about where they came from with outsiders.
But wasn't he an outsider now too? He'd left, and he couldn't go back. He couldn't count himself as a member of the community anymore, and he had become a 'Them' to his family, in the Us versus Them dichotomy. So who did he owe loyalty to? But a word to the wrong person and he might put his family in danger, and some of them at least were still on his side.
Seconds stretched as he tried to figure out how to answer the question. He finally settled on, "Not exactly."
Not exactly meant "Don't talk about it" in Gabe's book. He'd grown up too long with people who avoided questions they didn't want to answer. There didn't seem to be any reason to push someone he
barely knew and so Gabe just shrugged, then added, "It doesn't matter, yeah? I just..."
Thought maybe you were a time traveling ace or something? Dude. He really needed to stop daydreaming. It was getting ridiculous.
Zadkiel shrugged back. "I know. I don't exactly fit in." He tried to, but he suspected he wasn't as successful as he'd like to be. "Where I grew up was very... traditional. And tried to keep out a lot of outside influences." It was safe enough to say that much.
"It's not a bad thing, you know? The more I try not to fit in, the more sometimes... I think I do." He pointed to his hair. "It's like... um. Nothing shocks anybody anymore."
"It shocked me," Zadkiel pointed out. "But... why would you not want to fit in?"
"Why would you want to?" he countered.
He actually stopped dead, not moving for a second while he tried to comprehend this baffling question, before forcing himself to start moving again. "To not call attention to yourself. To not set yourself apart. 'Your beauty should not come from outward adornment. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.'"
"I don't..." Gabe hesitated, but continued, "I don't think people care about that anymore." He cared but how true was that of anyone else that he knew? "If you call attention to yourself, then at least you get someone to react."
And he fell silent again, so quiet that all he could hear was a moment was Zadkiel's breath, followed by footstep and the buzz of a sign overhead, the neon flickering light down on both their faces. His shoulders straightened a little, as if he was trying to look his height, then slumped back down. Amongst the rest of the crowd, Gabe faded in despite his tallness and the blue of his hair, worn clothes and slow feet marking him as just another shadow in a street full of them.
Zadkiel watched him out of the corner of his eye as they walked. "Don't they?" Perhaps they didn't. Perhaps that's why the community tried to keep women and children away from the outside world, and why they didn't let outside media in. He'd been told that outsiders were Godless, but this was the first true confirmation he'd had. "Why do you need them to react to you?"
"I... don't, I guess." He went quiet again, not sure of why he wanted them to react at all. It was a few more moments of walking before he continued. "Nobody really needs- uh, no. That's not right." Gabe
shook his head, thinking out loud. "People need other people. To listen, um, or even just to notice they're alive. Dude, otherwise, why stay in society, you know? Why not just go... um, live on the
mountain?"
"Of course people need other people," Zadkiel said, glad that at least they had that much in common. "Family. Community. It would be a very rare person who didn't want that. I'm just not sure I understand how that translates to wanting to call attention to yourself from complete strangers. Unless you don't have anyone else." Which was close enough to the truth for him that it made his throat ache.
"I... dunno." Gabe inhaled slowly. "What does that mean? To have somebody? Just... just because you've got people in your life... it doesn't mean they're listening."
"No. I suppose it doesn't." Zadkiel had a hard time speaking around the lump in his throat. "And even if they listen, it doesn't mean they comprehend. People hear what they want to. What they're comfortable hearing and knowing." He pressed his lips together. "But we all can hope to find a few people, at least, who can see us for who we are, exactly as we are, and still..." He frowned. "Love us, I suppose."
"Or else you can settle. Make someone else happy. I mean, dude, it's not like people get that. Most people." His voice was calm. "Like, if you can be that for someone else, um... maybe that's the best you get."
"Maybe it is," he acknowledged. It was all he could ever hope for, after all. Except not even. "Where were you thinking of going to eat?"
"Fuck, I don't even know." The other man admitted. "Um, I cook. That's what I do at Seretech... they still, like, use real food and they want it cooked by real people." He held up his hands, wiggling the fingers. "Well, for their executives. Everybody else gets packaged shit. But they don't mind if I eat there."
He glanced at Zadkiel. "You got any ideas?"
"I usually eat at home," he said. "I don't know many places to eat out. It seems like most people are content to just eat things from bags and boxes and packages. I don't quite understand it; it all sort of tastes like chemicals to me."
"Yeah." Gabe replied. "When we lived outside Aurora, sometimes we used to grow food. I miss that. I dunno where I'd do it here, though." He looked a little wistful. "What'd you eat... back where you came from?"
If Zadkiel said something like "pterodactyl stew," Gabe thought, he'd have him. Even though he knew it was a completely ridiculous thought, a grin too wide for the question spread across his face.
The shorter man cocked his head, unsure what was so amusing about the subject. "Just ordinary food. We grew our own vegetables, kept our own livestock, so everything was fresh. We did have to get the bulk of our grain from outside, though." The words slipped out easily, and he realized only afterward that it might be saying too much, or inviting more questions that wouldn't be so easily answered.
"Outside?" Gabe halted.
Devil take me. He'd managed to flub it. "We were... isolated."
"Um...." The taller man muttered. "You, uh, don't talk about it, do you?"
"No one else has asked." A truth he was mostly grateful for, but at the same time, it kept him apart from everyone else, not fitting in anywhere, in between two worlds where neither felt as if it was truly his own. Then again, it seemed like most of the people he'd met since coming to Seatte, most of the people outside, didn't much care about anyone else.
"Well... I mean, do you want to talk about it?" Gabe wasn't much for words. He'd already spoken more to Zadkiel than he ever needed to with anyone else and he wasn't quite sure how to explain that he didn't want to push. Not without actually spelling it out.
He turned it over in his mind. Did he? Should he? Were the answers to the two questions the same? There didn't seem to be any harm in this man, and he was just a cook. He wasn't likely to bring any kind of authorities down on his home, his family... No, not his home. It kept coming back to that, and the question of loyalty to a place that showed him none, with only a few exceptions. He didn't know anything about this stranger, and he was making assumptions about the goodness of him, or at least the fact that he seemed innocuous.
"I don't know," Zadkiel said finally.
"Maybe we should talk about something else then." Gabe shoved his hands in his pockets, glancing up into the sky. "Um... looks like it's gonna rain. Yep." That was followed by a laugh, half at himself for resorting to the weather.
"It always looks like it's going to rain," Zadkiel pointed out, smiling a little. "I suspect the weather is a less interesting topic here than anywhere else."
"You never went to Utah, did you?" Gabe grinned. "At least they've got volcanoes." He stopped in front of a small cafe with a tattered sign reading "Dingo Baby," blinked, then kept on walking.
"No. I've only ever been in Oregon and here." He frowned slightly. "What was wrong with that place?" His stomach was starting to growl quite loudly.
"I think they serve uhh... never mind." Gabe jabbed a finger one block up. Oregon? He was trying to think of what was in Oregon that could explain Zadkiel. After deciding Oregon alone could explain Zadkiel, he added, "Do you like dog? That place two blocks down has the freshest stuff in town."
Zadkiel shuddered expressively. "How about chicken? Does anywhere in this God-forsaken place serve chicken?" He didn't use the term lightly. "Otherwise, I might just decide to head home and see if any of my groceries are left." Except now he was so turned around he didn't have any clue which way home even was.
"Pretty sure they'll sell you something that tastes like chicken?" Gabe offered.
He sighed. "Never mind." He would have to ignore his stomach. Figuring out which direction home lay in was more important. Stupid of him to follow this man blindly into neighborhoods he didn't know. They'd mostly gone in a straight line, at least, so he ought to be able to find his way back. He turned to look behind him, frowning.
Gabe wasn't as stupid as he sometimes seemed. He sighed and turned.
"Come on, I can get you back there." His feet led Zadkiel down the strip of sidewalk, ignoring the roar of a car as it passed. He wasn't sure how to read the sigh - then again, he so rarely tried to make friends. Normally, people just grabbed him and pulled him into the circle to fill some sort of a space. He wasn't sure how, or if, he should do the same.
Once they were back at the intersection where he had originally run into Gabe, Zadkiel stopped. "I can find my way from here," he said. "Thank you."
"Yeah. Um. Sure." He wasn't sure what had just happened, exactly. "Hey... uh, it was nice meeting you." He meant it, strangely, and it showed in the friendly grin that followed.
"You as well," Zadkiel replied, but there was no answering smile. "Perhaps we'll meet again." He wasn't sure if he wanted to or not. The conversation, the almost connection that he held himself back from, that they both did, he thought, made him feel lonelier than before.