Fic: A Far and Sere Elysium 1/? (Saiyuki, 5, 8)
Title: A Far and Sere Elysium
Rating: PG
Word count: 2400
Summary: A soldier and a dock worker walk into a bar...
Notes: Originally started for![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
springkink, and first version posted here, though the plot and characters ran away with me completely, leaving the kink far behind, together with most of my sanity. Yes, there's more. Yes, I'm working on it. No, don't expect it to come on any kind of regular schedule (sorry).
Bay 32 West X430-B had four gas-exchange valve locks, two electrical interchanges, six fluid pumps, and a cute structural vulnerability in its outer piping. I'd gone over the blueprints. I was pretty sure I'd know where to aim in an emergency.
It was called Mars Bar. It was that kind of place.
It was packed now, since the day shift at the docks had just finished, and the din of all those voices in that small, reflective space made me remember why I didn't go drinking with my squadron. The bartender, a busy, no-nonsense woman working methodically through the mob at the bar, handed two pitchers of Ares Ale to a knot of dockworkers still wearing their fatigues, then nodded at me. I smiled, which didn't seem to make the slightest impression on her, and asked for a half-liter of Garcia's.
I took my beer down to the far end of the bar, which was sticky with a well-seasoned lacquer of beer and grit. I leaned my elbows on it anyway, and took a sip. The screen above my seat was showing the soccer broadcast from Luna, Serenissima against Arsenal. I nursed my beer along slowly, and watched as people squeezed up to the bar and away. I was looking for three people: Jeff Mulcahey, Annelise Morot, or Arvind Krishnamurti. I'd been careful to find photographs of them in dim light, at different angles. I didn't see any one of them.
The brain starts to play tricks on you in times like that. You start to imagine that you recognize everyone, or anyone, or that you need to look closer. I reminded myself to drink slowly.
Luna Serenissima blew one penalty kick, then another. I was down to the last third of my glass by the time I decided that my strategy was flawed. No matter what else they might or might not be mixed up in, Mulcahey, Morot, and Krishnamurti were not the kind of people who would be fighting the crowd for their drinks.
Time for a bathroom break. The walk at least let me check out more of the bar than I could see from the bar stool. I pissed into the cycler, staring absently at the unpainted synthstone wall in front of me, and thought.
The graffiti was frankly disappointing. The only bright spot was a very clever and very rude drawing of a worm miner, and there were no references to drugs or smuggling at all. AM makes Titan take a trip, I scribbled helpfully, to see whether that might get the ball rolling, and washed my hands.
On the trip back to the bar, I spotted Jeff Mulcahey in the middle of a crowded booth, his shaved head and snub nose unmistakable. There was a large bottle of fairylace standing half-empty on his table, and most of the people in his booth were playing a game that looked like lunar whist. Mulcahey, though, was sitting back and aloof, one arm stretched out along the back of the booth, the yellow lamplight slanting across one of his shoulders and half of his face. He gazed out toward the bar, blank and indifferent, and I hated him then, freely and gladly, and with anticipation.
I waited my turn at the bar again, got another half-liter of Garcia's, and wandered back casually toward Mulcahey's booth.
I never got there. I was threading my way past a clot of people when someone grabbed my arm.
Drink in the face, kick to the stomach, gun between the eyes.
I said politely, "Excuse me."
A man, not one who'd turned up in my computer searches: dark hair, wavy and down to his shoulders, broad mouth, dark eyes. He leaned in, so close that I smelled skin and dust and fuel, and said, "Hey. You looking for Mulcahey?" His voice was deep and rough, with the scruff that came from days spent breathing dock grit. He was big, too, broad-shouldered and taller than me.
So Mulcahey had sentries. I wasn't surprised. I said, "Mulcahey? Is he one of the guys over there playing cards?"
He gave me the deeply unconvinced look which that remark deserved. "Yeah," he said. "You didn't know? Maybe I'm doing you a favor."
"Oh. Sorry. Is he important? I didn't know. I was just hoping they might deal me into the game."
"Right, because you're absolutely mad about lunar whist."
I was enjoying myself. I said happily, "Well, I think bridge is much more interesting, really, but no one up here seems to play."
"Huh." His mouth worked for a moment. He looked off into the distance, thrusting one hand into his hair, and when he looked back at me his gaze was curiously intent. "Right," he said. "You want to play cards. I've got a deck. I'll play you."
That was not in the script.
"What?"
"You heard me," he said. "Let's play."
Insist on whist, brush past him and so on to Mulcahey's table? It would be rather blatant. I didn't see a graceful way to refuse. Or perhaps that was an excuse; the way he was looking at me was not in the script, either. I said, slowly, "I would be delighted."
He found an unoccupied booth in a far corner of the bar which was surprisingly secluded, and, almost certainly not by accident, about as far away from Mulcahey's table as it was possible to get. He pulled a deck of cards out of his shirt pocket, tapped the cards on the table, and shuffled, slowly, with deliberation.
"What are we playing?" I asked.
"Poker." He kept shuffling. I leaned out to make sure I could still see Mulcahey, and could tail him if he left. I still hadn't spotted Morot or Krishnamurti.
I sat back and found my opponent staring at me, direct and unsettling. He flushed when I caught him, and looked at the wall. "So?" he demanded. "You want to cut?"
"Sure." I cleared my throat. "What are the stakes?"
He said, with a jerk of his chin, "Around here, minimum bid's 50."
I smiled, and dug into my pockets for ante. I could feel my pistol settled securely in my waistband, and that reassured me.
He started dealing, with easy, absent fluidity. "My name's David, by the way."
"Jason," I said. "Jason Yu."
A lie, of course. He was probably lying too.
He was a good player. I lost two good hands before I figured out that he understood how to bluff. Afterward, I settled down to enjoy the flow of the game. My stack of coins fluctuated nearly as swiftly as Phobos; that was a part of the game, too, the phase where you felt out the measure of your opponent. Mulcahey didn't seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere, and I confess that now I was curious about this person who called himself David, who accosted strangers in bars and demanded that they play poker instead of talking to possible smugglers.
Who kept staring at me, in between hands, like I was a question and answer all at once.
"Call," he said.
I laid down four jacks. "I think this one is mine."
His smile twisted in a way that was more friendly than not. "Hah. You're not too bad at this."
"I like card games," I said. "I'm pretty good at them, too." I meant: you cannot keep me away from Mulcahey.
"Yeah," he said. "I can see that."
He lost the next hand, badly.
I smiled apologetically, scraping in the cards. He shook his head and gazed out over the bar. His face was set and distant. The game, I thought, might be drawing to a close. I shuffled, and as I did I looked over for a glimpse of Mulcahey's party, still at their table. They had all the air of being settled in for the evening, but you couldn't trust that. Someone like Mulcahey could look down at any moment and decide they were done here, and in two minutes the whole group would be gone.
"Robin!" my opponent called, flagging down a server.
She came by, short, dark, and mine-scarred, and gave him a real, if hurried, smile. "Hey there. What can I get you?"
He grinned at her, broad and blazing and wild around the edges. "Robin, doll, gimme some fairylace to drown my sorrows. I'm getting slaughtered here."
She hesitated for a moment too long before she said, "Right. Coming up."
Evidently there was something abnormal about the fairylace at this bar.
"Make that two," I said promptly. To my disappointment, she merely noted down the order, one hundred percent professional, and disappeared into the crowd.
Surely the owners of Mars Bar could not be so brazen as to sell illegal biologicals openly in the bar? Not unless the corruption in security went far deeper than I had imagined.
"You going to deal those?" Call-me-David said snappishly, so I smiled apologetically -- I seemed to be doing a lot of that -- and laid out the next hand.
But the fairylace, when it came, was only fairylace, the usual acrid citric edge numbing the tongue, and a breath or two later warmth and laxity blooming up the brainstem, unwinding the back of the skull.
My host had downed his in a single shot. He set his glass down with a dull thunk, grinned at me toothily, and picked up his cards.
He lost again, not well, shoving money into the pot pro forma and folding the second time I raised. I swallowed down disappointment -- waste of time or not, there was nothing less enjoyable than playing against an opponent laced to the gills -- and collected the pot. Mulcahey was still there.
As I stacked my coins my host smiled at me, a floating thing, with no edges. His eyes were black in the dim light, blown open and unprotected to the universe. He collected the cards, straightened them carefully, almost lovingly, and dealt again. He picked up his hand, swayed, and smiled, and then to my vast surprise waltzed away with a hand that cost me more than a quarter of my take. Then, as if determined to prove it was not just luck, he won both of the next rounds for good measure.
I raised my eyebrows, considered my cards, and anted in.
But instead of putting his own chips in, he tossed his cards down, face-up. They skidded toward me, a pair of eights and a queen: a good hand with the eight showing in the common cards, much better than my pair of twos. He had no reason to throw those cards in, not unless he had decided the game was over. Now that it was finally ending, I found that I was sorry; it was a silly whim in the circumstances, but still I wished I had bluffed better in the last hand, something to have kept him interested in the game.
He flicked one of his eights toward me. "You've found something at work which is bothering you." He was lounging back, shoulders wide and too ostentatiously casual, and I knew then that he was saying only a part of what he knew. For the first time I stopped thinking about Mulcahey.
He pushed his other eight forward a deliberate centimeter. "Eight of hearts. You came here to sort it out. Queen of spades," he said; "Titania. You're looking for something from Titan." He touched the eight of diamonds in the common cards. "Something new." His gaze met mine then, his huge dark eyes fixed on mine like he could see all of Titan through me, and my lungs constricted. I found I could not look away.
He looked back down at the cards, then, and away from the amazing pressure of his eyes I found my brain running again. I thought, with quick, cold clarity, of the pistol concealed in my waistband, and the angle I would need to take him out with the gun still concealed below the table. I didn't think he was armed.
He moved on to the king of spades, his long fingers trailing over its upraised sword, its single eye. "King of spades. This is personal." His fingers stopped on the jack of diamonds, the last card I'd dealt before he'd stopped the game. "You're not on duty. Soldier boy." He swallowed, frowning at the table, or I thought he did; his head was bowed, and it was hard to tell.
"You tell fortunes?" I said, into the sudden silence, aiming for amusement, just a little hint of mockery, something to defuse. I was afraid it came out uneasy. Or fascinated.
"Fortunes. Yeah." He regarded me for a long moment across the table, tapped his fingers on the cards, brisk and irregular. His jaw tightened, then, and he leaned forward, his face sharpening.
I don't know why I didn't fire. I should have. Every reflex trained into me told me I needed to. Or, since the laser might constitute excessive force for a civilian locale, I should have jumped back, kicked the table over, at the very least called for a server. I did none of these things. I sat perfectly mute while he reached across the table, his rolled cuff trailing through the damp circles my glass had left on the plastene, and drew one of the cards from my hand.
"Nine of spades," he said, and dropped it on the table. "You've put yourself in danger, and you don't even know it."
I had dealt.
I stared at the nine, just an ordinary playing card, crisp, unmarked, and unbelievable. He had named it before he'd turned it around, before he'd seen anything more than the pattern on its back.
"Two of diamonds," he said, and plucked the card from my fingers. "Change, and strange bedfellows."
Twice. I was positive the cards were not tagged.
"Wait," I started, "how --"
"Two of hearts," he said. I looked down at my last card, at the two red spots in opposition to each other, point to point, and slowly laid it down.
"You need help," he said. "You can't do this alone."
The cards lay scattered across the table, their recombinant sets of pairs and potentials transformed into something sideways and strange. I stared at them helplessly. "Should I applaud?" I murmured.
"It's a good party trick, huh?" He leant forward on his elbows, in toward me, intent, and his hair swung forward with him.
"My name really is David," he said. "Let's go outside."
Rating: PG
Word count: 2400
Summary: A soldier and a dock worker walk into a bar...
Notes: Originally started for
springkink, and first version posted here, though the plot and characters ran away with me completely, leaving the kink far behind, together with most of my sanity. Yes, there's more. Yes, I'm working on it. No, don't expect it to come on any kind of regular schedule (sorry).Bay 32 West X430-B had four gas-exchange valve locks, two electrical interchanges, six fluid pumps, and a cute structural vulnerability in its outer piping. I'd gone over the blueprints. I was pretty sure I'd know where to aim in an emergency.
It was called Mars Bar. It was that kind of place.
It was packed now, since the day shift at the docks had just finished, and the din of all those voices in that small, reflective space made me remember why I didn't go drinking with my squadron. The bartender, a busy, no-nonsense woman working methodically through the mob at the bar, handed two pitchers of Ares Ale to a knot of dockworkers still wearing their fatigues, then nodded at me. I smiled, which didn't seem to make the slightest impression on her, and asked for a half-liter of Garcia's.
I took my beer down to the far end of the bar, which was sticky with a well-seasoned lacquer of beer and grit. I leaned my elbows on it anyway, and took a sip. The screen above my seat was showing the soccer broadcast from Luna, Serenissima against Arsenal. I nursed my beer along slowly, and watched as people squeezed up to the bar and away. I was looking for three people: Jeff Mulcahey, Annelise Morot, or Arvind Krishnamurti. I'd been careful to find photographs of them in dim light, at different angles. I didn't see any one of them.
The brain starts to play tricks on you in times like that. You start to imagine that you recognize everyone, or anyone, or that you need to look closer. I reminded myself to drink slowly.
Luna Serenissima blew one penalty kick, then another. I was down to the last third of my glass by the time I decided that my strategy was flawed. No matter what else they might or might not be mixed up in, Mulcahey, Morot, and Krishnamurti were not the kind of people who would be fighting the crowd for their drinks.
Time for a bathroom break. The walk at least let me check out more of the bar than I could see from the bar stool. I pissed into the cycler, staring absently at the unpainted synthstone wall in front of me, and thought.
The graffiti was frankly disappointing. The only bright spot was a very clever and very rude drawing of a worm miner, and there were no references to drugs or smuggling at all. AM makes Titan take a trip, I scribbled helpfully, to see whether that might get the ball rolling, and washed my hands.
On the trip back to the bar, I spotted Jeff Mulcahey in the middle of a crowded booth, his shaved head and snub nose unmistakable. There was a large bottle of fairylace standing half-empty on his table, and most of the people in his booth were playing a game that looked like lunar whist. Mulcahey, though, was sitting back and aloof, one arm stretched out along the back of the booth, the yellow lamplight slanting across one of his shoulders and half of his face. He gazed out toward the bar, blank and indifferent, and I hated him then, freely and gladly, and with anticipation.
I waited my turn at the bar again, got another half-liter of Garcia's, and wandered back casually toward Mulcahey's booth.
I never got there. I was threading my way past a clot of people when someone grabbed my arm.
Drink in the face, kick to the stomach, gun between the eyes.
I said politely, "Excuse me."
A man, not one who'd turned up in my computer searches: dark hair, wavy and down to his shoulders, broad mouth, dark eyes. He leaned in, so close that I smelled skin and dust and fuel, and said, "Hey. You looking for Mulcahey?" His voice was deep and rough, with the scruff that came from days spent breathing dock grit. He was big, too, broad-shouldered and taller than me.
So Mulcahey had sentries. I wasn't surprised. I said, "Mulcahey? Is he one of the guys over there playing cards?"
He gave me the deeply unconvinced look which that remark deserved. "Yeah," he said. "You didn't know? Maybe I'm doing you a favor."
"Oh. Sorry. Is he important? I didn't know. I was just hoping they might deal me into the game."
"Right, because you're absolutely mad about lunar whist."
I was enjoying myself. I said happily, "Well, I think bridge is much more interesting, really, but no one up here seems to play."
"Huh." His mouth worked for a moment. He looked off into the distance, thrusting one hand into his hair, and when he looked back at me his gaze was curiously intent. "Right," he said. "You want to play cards. I've got a deck. I'll play you."
That was not in the script.
"What?"
"You heard me," he said. "Let's play."
Insist on whist, brush past him and so on to Mulcahey's table? It would be rather blatant. I didn't see a graceful way to refuse. Or perhaps that was an excuse; the way he was looking at me was not in the script, either. I said, slowly, "I would be delighted."
He found an unoccupied booth in a far corner of the bar which was surprisingly secluded, and, almost certainly not by accident, about as far away from Mulcahey's table as it was possible to get. He pulled a deck of cards out of his shirt pocket, tapped the cards on the table, and shuffled, slowly, with deliberation.
"What are we playing?" I asked.
"Poker." He kept shuffling. I leaned out to make sure I could still see Mulcahey, and could tail him if he left. I still hadn't spotted Morot or Krishnamurti.
I sat back and found my opponent staring at me, direct and unsettling. He flushed when I caught him, and looked at the wall. "So?" he demanded. "You want to cut?"
"Sure." I cleared my throat. "What are the stakes?"
He said, with a jerk of his chin, "Around here, minimum bid's 50."
I smiled, and dug into my pockets for ante. I could feel my pistol settled securely in my waistband, and that reassured me.
He started dealing, with easy, absent fluidity. "My name's David, by the way."
"Jason," I said. "Jason Yu."
A lie, of course. He was probably lying too.
He was a good player. I lost two good hands before I figured out that he understood how to bluff. Afterward, I settled down to enjoy the flow of the game. My stack of coins fluctuated nearly as swiftly as Phobos; that was a part of the game, too, the phase where you felt out the measure of your opponent. Mulcahey didn't seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere, and I confess that now I was curious about this person who called himself David, who accosted strangers in bars and demanded that they play poker instead of talking to possible smugglers.
Who kept staring at me, in between hands, like I was a question and answer all at once.
"Call," he said.
I laid down four jacks. "I think this one is mine."
His smile twisted in a way that was more friendly than not. "Hah. You're not too bad at this."
"I like card games," I said. "I'm pretty good at them, too." I meant: you cannot keep me away from Mulcahey.
"Yeah," he said. "I can see that."
He lost the next hand, badly.
I smiled apologetically, scraping in the cards. He shook his head and gazed out over the bar. His face was set and distant. The game, I thought, might be drawing to a close. I shuffled, and as I did I looked over for a glimpse of Mulcahey's party, still at their table. They had all the air of being settled in for the evening, but you couldn't trust that. Someone like Mulcahey could look down at any moment and decide they were done here, and in two minutes the whole group would be gone.
"Robin!" my opponent called, flagging down a server.
She came by, short, dark, and mine-scarred, and gave him a real, if hurried, smile. "Hey there. What can I get you?"
He grinned at her, broad and blazing and wild around the edges. "Robin, doll, gimme some fairylace to drown my sorrows. I'm getting slaughtered here."
She hesitated for a moment too long before she said, "Right. Coming up."
Evidently there was something abnormal about the fairylace at this bar.
"Make that two," I said promptly. To my disappointment, she merely noted down the order, one hundred percent professional, and disappeared into the crowd.
Surely the owners of Mars Bar could not be so brazen as to sell illegal biologicals openly in the bar? Not unless the corruption in security went far deeper than I had imagined.
"You going to deal those?" Call-me-David said snappishly, so I smiled apologetically -- I seemed to be doing a lot of that -- and laid out the next hand.
But the fairylace, when it came, was only fairylace, the usual acrid citric edge numbing the tongue, and a breath or two later warmth and laxity blooming up the brainstem, unwinding the back of the skull.
My host had downed his in a single shot. He set his glass down with a dull thunk, grinned at me toothily, and picked up his cards.
He lost again, not well, shoving money into the pot pro forma and folding the second time I raised. I swallowed down disappointment -- waste of time or not, there was nothing less enjoyable than playing against an opponent laced to the gills -- and collected the pot. Mulcahey was still there.
As I stacked my coins my host smiled at me, a floating thing, with no edges. His eyes were black in the dim light, blown open and unprotected to the universe. He collected the cards, straightened them carefully, almost lovingly, and dealt again. He picked up his hand, swayed, and smiled, and then to my vast surprise waltzed away with a hand that cost me more than a quarter of my take. Then, as if determined to prove it was not just luck, he won both of the next rounds for good measure.
I raised my eyebrows, considered my cards, and anted in.
But instead of putting his own chips in, he tossed his cards down, face-up. They skidded toward me, a pair of eights and a queen: a good hand with the eight showing in the common cards, much better than my pair of twos. He had no reason to throw those cards in, not unless he had decided the game was over. Now that it was finally ending, I found that I was sorry; it was a silly whim in the circumstances, but still I wished I had bluffed better in the last hand, something to have kept him interested in the game.
He flicked one of his eights toward me. "You've found something at work which is bothering you." He was lounging back, shoulders wide and too ostentatiously casual, and I knew then that he was saying only a part of what he knew. For the first time I stopped thinking about Mulcahey.
He pushed his other eight forward a deliberate centimeter. "Eight of hearts. You came here to sort it out. Queen of spades," he said; "Titania. You're looking for something from Titan." He touched the eight of diamonds in the common cards. "Something new." His gaze met mine then, his huge dark eyes fixed on mine like he could see all of Titan through me, and my lungs constricted. I found I could not look away.
He looked back down at the cards, then, and away from the amazing pressure of his eyes I found my brain running again. I thought, with quick, cold clarity, of the pistol concealed in my waistband, and the angle I would need to take him out with the gun still concealed below the table. I didn't think he was armed.
He moved on to the king of spades, his long fingers trailing over its upraised sword, its single eye. "King of spades. This is personal." His fingers stopped on the jack of diamonds, the last card I'd dealt before he'd stopped the game. "You're not on duty. Soldier boy." He swallowed, frowning at the table, or I thought he did; his head was bowed, and it was hard to tell.
"You tell fortunes?" I said, into the sudden silence, aiming for amusement, just a little hint of mockery, something to defuse. I was afraid it came out uneasy. Or fascinated.
"Fortunes. Yeah." He regarded me for a long moment across the table, tapped his fingers on the cards, brisk and irregular. His jaw tightened, then, and he leaned forward, his face sharpening.
I don't know why I didn't fire. I should have. Every reflex trained into me told me I needed to. Or, since the laser might constitute excessive force for a civilian locale, I should have jumped back, kicked the table over, at the very least called for a server. I did none of these things. I sat perfectly mute while he reached across the table, his rolled cuff trailing through the damp circles my glass had left on the plastene, and drew one of the cards from my hand.
"Nine of spades," he said, and dropped it on the table. "You've put yourself in danger, and you don't even know it."
I had dealt.
I stared at the nine, just an ordinary playing card, crisp, unmarked, and unbelievable. He had named it before he'd turned it around, before he'd seen anything more than the pattern on its back.
"Two of diamonds," he said, and plucked the card from my fingers. "Change, and strange bedfellows."
Twice. I was positive the cards were not tagged.
"Wait," I started, "how --"
"Two of hearts," he said. I looked down at my last card, at the two red spots in opposition to each other, point to point, and slowly laid it down.
"You need help," he said. "You can't do this alone."
The cards lay scattered across the table, their recombinant sets of pairs and potentials transformed into something sideways and strange. I stared at them helplessly. "Should I applaud?" I murmured.
"It's a good party trick, huh?" He leant forward on his elbows, in toward me, intent, and his hair swung forward with him.
"My name really is David," he said. "Let's go outside."