An Age of Prudence (Summer, Part Four) what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment’s surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed. - T.S. Eliot.
Conclusion
William looked down at Julian and rubbed her shoulders. “And how are you doing?” he asked, quietly so as not to disturb John. Her brother had come home from the hospital the day before, but was still weak enough that he was spending the majority of his time lying on the sofa and the rest of them were therefore deeply appreciative of the times he dropped off to sleep. William did not know the details of what a terrible patient John had been his whole life, but either he was deliberately quiet just because they were in a house with an ill person or he instinctively knew that waking John was not a good idea.
“I’m fine,” said Julian.
“Are you really?”
She made an effort to smile and pat his hand. “I’m fine, William,” she said more firmly. “I just knew Mom would feel better if she went back to work, and I knew she wouldn’t go back to work unless I said I’d stay with John.” She stood on tiptoe to give him a kiss. “Go on to your work party, and I promise I’ll make it up to you.”
He smiled roguishly and slipped an arm around her waist. “I’ll hold you to that,” he said in her ear, kissing her neck, and Julian giggled before slipping away.
“Behave,” she said, and waved him out.
Once the door closed, she turned back toward the sofa. “You can wake up now,” she said.
“I wasn’t asleep,” said John, his eyes still closed.
“I’m aware,” said Julian. “You don’t have to pretend you are when William’s here. He doesn’t know what you’ve done. I cleaned up your mess.” Figuratively and literally. It had fallen to her to do something about the couch. She had considered throwing the old one out and just buying them a new one even after she had gotten the old one clean, but had finally decided that was a bit too dramatic, at least for now. If no-one else would sit on it once John was well enough to vacate it, she’d consider it again. “I let Joanie go home before I went to William and I didn’t tell him anything about her.”
“Thank you,” said John.
Julian fussily rearranged his blankets until he made an irritated gesture, at which point she turned her attention to the coffee table. “You haven’t eaten many of these,” she said, pointing to the lemon-coconut cookies she had made earlier. For some reason John wasn’t supposed to have as much tea as usual – this, Julian suspected, was at least part of the reason for his fatigue and frequent complaints of headaches – but there had been nothing said about giving him cookies. “Are they not good?”
“They’re fine,” said John. “I like them.”
“Then eat them,” said Julian, proffering the plate.
“I don’t want any right now.”
Julian put the plate back down. The porcelain made a soft clinking sound as it touched the wood. Julian looked up sharply. “Why, John?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I just don’t want any right now.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Julian impatiently. She sat down in one of the chairs and stared at her brother. “Why did you tell Joanie about us?”
“I was ten, Julian,” said John. “Who knows why I did anything back then.”
Julian bit her lip and clenched her hands in her lap in sheer frustration. After a moment’s deliberation, she stopped doing both of those things. “That’s not good enough,” she said sharply.
“No?”
“No,” said Julian. “Not after – everything.” She stood up and walked toward the window before turning on her heel to face him, crossing her arms over her chest. “You endangered our whole family, you put me and Mom in an impossible position – “
“If I hadn’t got shot, you still wouldn’t even know it,” said John.
“And that makes it okay?” said Julian. “You broke one of the most important laws there is. You were old enough to know better and you did it anyway.” She frowned incredulously. “And you still don’t think you did anything wrong, do you?” she asked, more rhetorically than not. “You have the gall to look me in the face and call me and my fiancé a pair of selfish, classist – whatever you were calling us – to tell me I’m a bad person for having something, when you’ve had this, all these years – “
“It’s not the same thing,” snapped John, sitting up. He was flushed and supporting himself with one hand and Julian knew she should back down, make peace, calm him down so he would lie back down. He continued before she could do that, though. “And even if it was, whatever I’ve done, that has nothing to do with whether or not what you’re doing is right – “
“You’re really going to start preaching to me?” she said. “When you’re the one who lied to me, who cares more about her than you do about whether or not I go to jail, or if I lose my fiancé – when I did everything I’ve done for you!”
“What?” asked John sharply.
“That’s right,” said Julian. “When you were whispering with Paul about what an idiot I was, how I wasn’t bright enough to know up from down, I was meeting Bertram and going to parties and all of it so I could help this family, help you and Joe and all of us have an easier time in the world. That’s why it started. And yeah, maybe I do enjoy it now, and maybe I like things that a Puritanical, self-righteous hypocrite like you can’t, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about when I went and I’m damned if I’m going to be ashamed of it anymore.”
She expected John to react to that somehow – hopefully by agreeing that she was right and begging her pardon, but more likely by shouting at her. Instead, though, he just stared at her for a moment before leaning back into the couch, now propped upright on its back cushions instead of continuing to support himself. Again, she felt she should apologize, soothe him somehow, but she knew that if she gave a millimeter right now, he’d take the whole meter plus change.
“I didn’t just protect you for William’s sake,” she said, more calmly now. “I did it because I love him and this family, including you. But I won’t do it again, John. It’s your business now.”
* * * * * * * *
The sun was shining down bright and warm on the Umlands’ front garden, where John and Joanie sat in a pair of wood-look Adirondack chairs. Joanie found hers slightly less than comfortable – it, like most things, was built for someone taller than her – but it didn’t seem quite the moment to mention it.
Besides the chair being too big, it was all really quite comfortable. The temperature was just high enough for iced tea to seem better than hot (though John did look at his glass dubiously every time he picked it up, and occasionally grumbled that this was nothing but stained water) but not so high as to be uncomfortable, Mrs. Umland’s flower beds were in full, riotous bloom and attracting butterflies, and if Mrs. Umland, or some of their friends, had been around and they all had a book or article to discuss, Joanie might have found it a perfect afternoon. As it was, it was…not as bad as it could have been. John was not talking much, but between his grumbling over the tea and the casual way he had described the processes by which he’d been patched up and at least started to ramble about generalizability before he’d gotten tired and gone quiet, Joanie thought he was basically all right now. Joanie found herself avoiding eye contact with Joe and Mrs. Umland like the plague, it was awkward as hell with Joe now and she sensed Mrs. Umland was furious and hiding it, but they were in the house now and so she could not think about them too much.
“It was stupid, what you did,” said John suddenly.
“You’re welcome,” said Joanie.
“I mean it. It wasn’t a good decision. You should have left it alone. It worked out, but…Mom, Julian, you…you could have all gotten in trouble.”
Joanie considered a list of arguments. “Imagine our positions had been reversed,” she suggested.
There was a long pause. “That’s not a valid argument.”
“I love you, too,” said Joanie, and John laughed.
Almost all cars passed the house slowly – it was a residential street – so it took Joanie a moment to notice that one of them was slowing to a stop in front of the house. Her heart leapt alarmingly when she heard a horn blaring – for two seconds, she was in the back of Rafe’s car again, telling one of her friends she’d shoot him in the head if he didn’t keep trying to get Mrs. Umland’s attention – but she was distracted from past worries by present ones as she realized that she wasn’t just imagining Rafe’s car and its horn in front of the Umland house. Rafe rolled his passenger side window down, reached for something – probably to turn off his radio – and leaned toward them.
“Hey,” he called out. “You living, man?”
“No,” replied John. “I’m a zombie.”
There had been no way around the neighborhood knowing something had happened. John had missed meetings and work and church and a lot of other things that John simply didn’t miss over the past week and a half, and he had visibly lost weight and still wasn’t exactly steady on his feet. He had, everyone had heard, been ill. Joanie supposed this was technically true, as she had heard that he had ‘become feverish’ at one point; no-one had seemed to know why, which had made Joanie think again about how having the ability to cure the common cold didn’t really mean these people understood more than her own people did, at least about some things. Still, though, it was awkward when it came up, except just this once, when it made Joanie’s skin crawl to hear Rafe laugh at the joke. He clearly really did have no idea what had really happened to the three of them.
“Zombie, huh? Good thing we’re modern about this stuff, eh, Joanie?”
“Yeah,” said Joanie, smiling.
“Listen, I’ve got to get to work, but it’s good seeing you, man.”
“You, too,” said John flatly.
Tired mouthed Joanie, gesturing vaguely apologetically; Rafe nodded as though he understood. Joanie shivered again.
John watched as Rafe drove away. “Two weeks ago we were friends,” he observed.
He didn’t say anything else about it and Joanie couldn’t think of any good response, but Joanie was pretty sure he was still thinking about it. “Come on,” said Joanie. “Let’s – let’s just go somewhere.”
“Because that worked out so well the last time we did it.”
Joanie rolled her eyes. “This time I’m not on foot.”
John didn’t argue any further, but didn’t say anything as Joanie drove aimlessly around the neighborhood. Finally, she stopped at the park where they had played when they were kids, the place where this had all started.
“Talk to me,” she said.
“The weather’s nice today.” Joanie glared at him. “You didn’t specify a subject for conversation.”
“Screw you,” said Joanie.
“I wondered when you were going to stop being so nice,” said John. “Not that I mind. It was, uh, to tell you the truth, it was getting kind of weird.”
“You can’t hold something Rafe doesn’t even remember doing against him,” said Joanie. “Or – you shouldn’t, anyway,” she amended. “Or blame him for being kind of freaked out by what he saw.”
“So it’s acceptable for him to immediately jump to the conclusion I’m some kind of dangerous non-human, but not acceptable for me to be offended? I don’t follow.”
Joanie considered this. “Okay. So you both had emotional reactions. I thought one of your big things was that emotions shouldn’t be relevant to behavior.”
“You’re right,” said John, with an unsteady chuckle. “It is. I’ve always believed that. And I believed I was doing it right. And I believed I was right. And now…it’s…” John shook his head, evidently struggling for words, and then suddenly hit her dash. “Damn it!” he shouted, and then proceeded to begin beating the dash with both fists as though it were personally responsible for all his problems, cursing repetitively at the top of his lungs as he did so until his hand slipped and he fell back in the seat, apparently exhausted, sobbing. It took Joanie a moment to realize she was sobbing, too, and that she was doing so because she was terrified.
What are you? Rafe had asked, and Joanie had acted as though she didn’t assume the answer to that question. John wasn’t like them, and she had just pulled back because not quite two weeks ago, someone she had never once thought of as a threat to her in any way – someone who, for all his tendency toward scowling and grumbling, was really the fundamentally gentle, geeky dork who went on about birds all the time – had taken down two members of a street gang in roughly eight seconds with little more than a flick of the wrist and the fact he had done that scared her. She knew it wasn’t fair, especially not when him doing that had probably saved her life, but it was so just the same. It was one thing to know something about what John could do and another to see him throwing men across the street, another to see another one of her friends forget one of the worst nights of all their lives and know that could happen to her at any time. However she tried not to act on that feeling, however guilty she felt about having that feeling, the fact remained: John scared her now.
“It’s okay,” she gasped. Trembling, she screwed her courage to the sticking-place and made herself put out a hand and only momentarily waver before she put it over John’s, wrapping her hand around as much of his as it would cover. “It’s okay, it’s okay – “ she repeated as they sat there in tears, probably for different reasons, each clinging to the only other person who they thought grasped the least part of what each was going through.
* * * * * * * *
For the first two weeks after the day the world went away, John was virtually helpless. He had no wand, his having been damaged in the fight with the muggers, and he had also been in no real physical condition to use one even had he had one to use. He had been weak as a kitten when he got out of the hospital and it had taken some time to recover his strength – enough of it, anyway – as well as his wits. As soon as he was thinking clearly and getting around, though, he started thinking about a way out.
A lifetime ago, before midsummer had come around and uprooted them all again, John had floated the idea of visiting Clark at some point near the end of the summer, an idea his friend had responded to enthusiastically. It was the first week of August by the time he was well enough to go out, and so the first two things John did were buy himself a new wand and send an owl to Clark inquiring if a visit still sounded like a good idea. In the following week, he practiced with said new wand, cursing its unfamiliarity, re-teaching himself things he had known for years. At the end of the week, in August, he ate another silent meal (they had almost all been tense, silent meals since The Incident) with his parents and younger brother, then silently took up the dishes to wash them, as it was his night to do so. Before he went to bed, he went to his mother.
“I’m going to bed early tonight,” he said, quietly. They all spoke quietly when they spoke at all now. “I love you.”
He had worried the seemingly spontaneous declaration of love might make her suspicious, but he felt he had to make it. The next morning, he managed to rise before her and, taking advantage of Joe’s tendency toward heavier sleep in the grey hours before dawn, remove the trunk he had been gradually filling over the past few days from their room. In the living room he hesitated for one moment, looking around desperately at all the beloved, familiar old things – the family Bible on its stand, the chess table his granddad had built which sat in the alcove before the bay window, the bookshelves and family portraits and curio cabinet which held Mom’s collection of Alice in Wonderland-themed tea things – but recovered quickly and proceeded to put a letter explaining that he was going to America early on the kitchen table. Then he unlocked the front door without looking back again. Outside, he looked at his key for a moment, wondering if he should leave it behind, but finally he decided that was one length he couldn’t go to and put it in his pocket instead before walking to the curb and extending his wand arm to summon up the bus.
He didn’t, he thought, really expect Clark to put him up (or, for that matter, put up with him) for three weeks, but at least that would give him a place to start figuring out what to do next, somewhere with someone who wasn’t silently blaming him for tearing apart said someone’s whole life. At home, things were never going to get better until they all put some distance between themselves and it, and that was never going to happen, for him or any of them, as long as John was in the house. He had to go, even if it turned out that meant, in the long run, that he could never come back.
* * * * * * * *
Epilogue: What the Muggle Said
William was flipping mindlessly through the reports, only skimming them for relevant words before scrawling his signature on them, marking them as incidents reviewed to see if they needed the attention of a higher-up, and dropping them into the correct piles for his supervisor when he realized someone else was standing in the doorway of the airless little closet he pretended was an office. He looked up and saw Mitchell, one of his tiny number of almost-subordinates.
“Something on your mind, Mitch?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Mitchell, entering and sitting down in the room’s other chair without asking or receiving permission. One day, William thought, one day, he would have the right to be offended when people did that. “It’s that incident with your brother-in-law.”
William frowned. “It was a justified case,” he said. “It’s been closed.”
“I know, I know,” said Mitchell quickly. “It’s just…I can’t forget that thing the Muggle said.”
“Which one?” asked William. There had been four Muggles in the end, the one who John had forced to drive him and the three who had tried to kill him. One of them had had too much head trauma to say much and one had not had time before they were on him, but the other two had babbled a good deal before they were Obliviated.
“One of the…hm…criminally disposed ones,” said Mitchell. “He kept saying something about a girl – that there was a girl there.”
A girl. William sat back in his chair slowly. No-one had said anything to him about a girl. He had not interviewed the involved parties himself until after they were Obliviated because he had trusted that Julian had told him all of it. Was she the girl? There were four Muggles and a girl….
“Forget about it, Mitchell,” he advised his coworker. “It’s closed. We’ve got enough work to do without thinking about things that are already closed.”
OOC Formalities: John having discussed visiting Clark during term was discussed OOC in Chatzy. All the Eliot quotes/post titles are from The Waste Land, which you can read here if you want - I highly recommend it. Any questions/desire to yell at me/yell at one of the characters involved, just catch me in Chatzy. Thanks for reading!