Work Text:
Doomed Enterprises
Doomed enterprises bind people together perhaps more strongly than the successful unions of plans made, plans followed, plans totaled in success.
“Hey,” Nicole Demara spoke as she leaned on that railing, evening hour, Lumina Square of Mankind’s last city. “A fifty percent win-loss ration isn’t, like, too bad, right?”
“I don’t know if it’s fifty percent at this point.”
“Oh but it doesn’t matter to you, my dear dear Wise.” The young woman had put her back to the salted sea of New Eridu’s bay, the lick of her attitude that landed her in jail momentarily that day brought up and out again at that orange hour where the day was done and yet not so quite finished that New Eridu lived and breathed in warmth, irreplaceable.
“I do think it does, Nicole.” He sighed as he leaned forward in opposition to Nicole Demara on that railing, looking out to those waters where commerce and transportation that even a single city warranted in a sprawl that had gone there from before the White Ocean to the Barrier Plains and the mountains above them that blew down that coastal air that had gifted New Eridu its smell that had remained constant in that year, as it had at its founding at the end of History. Where those two had been where the city had found its footing, where Mankind stared into the Hollow voids and said this far, no more, and remained not as shadows of yesterdays empires but a new civilization unto themselves of people able to live lives so divided, and yet so full.
“And why is that?” She said so petulantly, but not so much to be known as hostile. Not to him. Not to a young man who had been coming into his namesake.
“Because there’s a reason why the Cunning Hares are in the red in our ledger.” In profile, he slightly turned his face to her, those same heraldic winds brushing gray hair, inherited from a father he had hardly remembered or thought of. She puffed her cheeks, sitting on the rail completely now in balance that betrayed her outward appearance: that somewhere within her had been a woman of some martial talent. She was the Agent after all, and he the Proxy. “This is going on it too, I hope you know that.”
She pouted, scoffing, leaning back to look out to that same sight which he found himself staring out at. Somewhere on the other side of the bridge Sixth Street and his sister were waiting, hopefully with some leftovers cooked up. Those leftovers would have to last a long time based on the Denny situation in his pocket after today.
“Hey!” She drew out to him. “You must’ve thought that this was a good plan too, you know. You went along with it after all!” Her voice had been loud and pitched so that whenever she had been in a room all listened, not out of some commanding factor but it screamed for attention, and Nicole had always been someone who drew attention for one reason or another, and she, opportunist as she was, never wasted the avenue.
Even now she spoke and passerbys on the street glanced over, and when she caught their eye she winked back, ushering them down the street, keeping their ears incurious and keeping them unbothered to speak of the day that landed her in the slammer temporarily.
“Always too good to be true with you, Nicole.” Wise sighed, joining her to sit with his back to the waters. Out there the SS This Side of Paradise had been docking with the Orleans Dockyard and Belabog had some of its workers covering shifts of dock staff that had been out on strike. The echoes of shipping containers being picked up and dropped like the slow heartbeat of a distant being of the world. His voice had been no more louder than those heartbeats at time, coolly and breathy and airy that it threatened to be taken by the breeze around him, but she had long known the sound of his voice since she had been a teenager.
“Not always.” She chuckled. “Sometimes I am just that good.”
She leaned back, like that of a gymnast, her own self nearly falling out of her own shirt but the young man had reached out a hand to bring his hand to her back and right her again.
“Sometimes.” He parroted in some sort of agreement. His hand remained until she had been solidly still and he removed it not a second too long. “How’d they treat you in there?”
“Oh pfft.” She flapped a hand at him, her multicolored nails gleaming against the amber light above like stars. She heard the concern in his voice, stoic and measured as it was. “I was finneee.” She bobbed her head. “People in there know who I am. Heck! Some of them were even from my block.”
“I’m glad.” He said, none of the earnestness behind an implied worry hidden. He had called the other Hares that he had gotten their boss out of the joint, and would be picking her up in some time, but nothing immediate.
Wise had looked up at that amber honey sky and saw in it the whispers of a world beyond, that this sky had presided as king across distances that he would never know try as he might to imagine them. New Eridu had been all his life; or, at least, the life he lived now. The fire and brimstone of Hell were not as they seemed, for the otherworld of torment and pain had looked very much like where he had come from, forced out, with only his sister with him. He was born of Hell, he and Belle, and in those near twenty years of life he had little of peers for both the nature of his work and the nature of himself.
Nearly peerless that is.
“We had it, you know. All those data chips.” Nicole had been chipper as usual, speaking to that same sky as he looked up at it. “I’m willing to bet that Pub Sec are gonna do an auction of them at the end of the month like they usually do, and I’m sure we can buy them up for cheap and resell-“
“We?”
“Yeah, we Wise!” Nicole had reached out, grabbing a shoulder of his in some amiable gesture of bracing. “They won’t let me of all people bid, I bet, but you-!”
“Nicole. Have you ever considered cutting your losses for once?” He looked at her, into her eyes that he had known since they were both gangling teens, making their way in a world that had been faster then them, but they were quickly catching up to by age, by force, by the life they lived. “I’m telling you this as a professional opinion.”
“And lose out on the chance for double or nothing? As if.” She leaned in. As she dressed, and she had been very much aware of how she had, he saw near everything of her but that long in there was little of her he hadn’t seen. “And I wouldn’t let my favorite Proxy miss out, would I?”
It was Wise’s turn to scoff, staring her in the eye, drifting to the mole upon her face that had been in New Eridu mythology a mark of an beauty’s angel, just below her left I.
“You do from time to time.” He reminded her.
“And when I make such a grave,” she hung on the word in some fake suffering, “mistake you’re always there for me, aren’t you?”
She leaned back confidently, arms crossed, but Wise didn’t shy away.
He never did with her.
Both of them had been orphaned children; different circumstances, and neither knowing entirely of the other’s origins, but orphaned children all the same in a city in perpetual movement that could pay little heed to those that had no one to care for. Random Play was not built in a day, or paid for on good will, and Nicole Demara did not end up owing that many Dennies to the great Proxy Phaethon without having paid out her fair share before. They had been in each other’s peripheral, on street corners and at the communal schools where charities ran the bare system needed for the lost children of that super metropolis to be accounted for. Always in perpetual orbit until final collision. So goes the story of the twins that would become Phaethon, and the chief of the Cunning Hairs.
In a word: they had been childhood friends, for what counted as a childhood in that city beyond the end of History.
They knew each other from Adam.
He breathed, something fond, something annoyed, but something knowing of himself.
“Just, next time you want to try and collect a finders fee on a missing batch of public goods, try to make it look like you’re not trying to steal it, Nicole. Okay?”
“We were just unlucky, Wise, is all. Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?”
“You know what I mean. I don’t know how Belle deals with you being so like that all the time.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh that makes me sad.”
Near them, the scramble of an intersection paused for traffic rang out in the whistle of a Public Security officer, and all at once he walked out through that vast black, concrete sea and with his hands extended the six way intersection nearly as large as a baseball field had been conducted to his accord. At the sidewalks the great masses of Eridu waited, and then walked when he lowered his hands and beckoned them all to that migratory formation from work to home or restaurant or bar; a day in the life of the last city on Earth across painted lines of the street’s organization. Helpfully a Bangboo had held the hands of small children in a line across in a tightened unity, making sure none had been lost.
Wise and Nicole had stared at this scramble as it had been happening, a repeat of a maneuver that happened a thousand times a day, a hundred times an hour, across all intersections like this in that quarter to every distinct and ward, as constant as the sun and the moon and the clouds above.
“Me and Belle like to joke that you’re some freak of nature; someone pulled you out of one of your tapes where you’re like, the protagonist’s older brother who always says what they need to at just the right time.”
“You think I’m a freak?”
“Sometimes.” She teased again. “Sometimes I think you spend more time as Eous than you do as Wise.”
“Yeah, no thanks to you.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“Never could be to you unless you’re underwater with us.”
“But…. Aren’t I?”
Wise had looked over to her and smiled sweetly, the same smile he had given every irate customer on their way out the door. She knew that look as she knew him: without question, without distinction.
“I’m serious though. We should wait for that auction so we can finish up this contract. Get something out of it.”
He didn’t know when the switch had been flipped for Nicole, to always be so business oriented that her reputation on the Inter-Knot had been exactly that. But he hadn’t liked it, hated it even, perhaps. Because it had been one thing to be hard working, industrious, but it had been another thing to put it down for profit and profit alone as it felt like with her sometimes, even if he knew better.
“I’ve already lost enough. This took up my upfront fees and then some, Nicole.” He near silently growled.
“Don’t worry, you know I’m good for it. Always am.” She shrugged and let still the silence between them, that city sound that had pervaded all their lives, forever. They called it as they grew up Alley Lullabies; and that each different song had signaled the sleep or the start of one’s day. The garbage collectors and their trucks, the mail men and their carts, the police and the politicians with their parades, all held different sound over the city that echoed and reverberated through steel and stone and concrete and eventually reverberating in the blood and bone of two of its children; a generation of the lost that had to find themselves.
He considered this stated fact: that this woman had always been “good for it”. At times she hadn’t, he knew and been victim of. He knew in that first year owning a lease of a mixed use building in a popular, yet at the time understated development of New Eridu, where the landlord would not let one bill go on past for the rent, where the two children, he and his sister, with no prior record or history had to prove that they were good for their own money in a concept business so antique it brought all to doubt. Weeks where the money came hours before due, where all the best laid plans of financial wrought fell over by what could not be predicted like, at the time, a certain newfound agency coming up short after even their own part had been done. This man had known hunger and want, and he had known it sometimes because of this woman who never let the world seemed to bother her, even at other’s expense.
She read it on his face, the doubt. The long-time knowing of what this man’s airs had been foretold this change to her as that smile faded. She looked at him, the curve of his jaw, the unassuming features of a man that had been far more handsome than she ever liked to think about, messy hair, so full, so light that it danced in that breeze.
The last week between them had been their usual affair; she being one of the few allowed in the staff room at Random Play not by exception but just because she had made it so, slamming open the door and walking right in. Belle had never enjoyed it, but she too lived a childhood with her. This time, as often times when she did, she came bearing a commission, and often times with her, one of less reputable sort:
A data chip manufacturer had been using one of the Hollows as a dumping ground for its less than adequate chips, however those chips in themselves still had value for as much as they did not pass the standards of the various companies that manufacturer OEM’d for, they were still perfectly functional, and thus, had value.
Dumping in Hollows had been a long controversial act, nearly as illegal as actual Hollow raiding, but in that cost cutting scheme Nicole had seen her money, or, at least, money to be, given the guidance from a certain two twins.
Belle had always deferred commissions from Nicole to Wise, for as much affection as Belle had had for the go-getter, even her social battery could be drained by. Wise’s social blunting helpful here, at least.
A sound plan, and no more particularly illegal than what they were usually doing, and perhaps with a lighter side of preliminary searching the hackers known as Phaethon set off with the Cunning Hares out into the designated Hollow to find what had been left behind, but times had been changing in New Eridu, slowly, bit by bit, coalescing with the revival of NEPS, of a town building up for something far beyond any could say. You could feel it in the air, the electricity, the tension that something had been about to be born anew.
The defense for Nicole when a judicial task force had come up around her around the chips, entirely coincidental, was that she had been simply doing her civic duty to keep New Eridu, no matter how lost, clean. A slap on the hand and a fine to be paid, of which Wise had paid down.
Simple mistakes, bad luck, the same old stories of failed commissions that even as he, the legendary Phaethon, had faced again and again climbing the Inter-Knot.
He was not of Phaethon for nothing. He closed his eyes, long and considerate, blinding himself to the world in front of him or with him for a long while, letting himself instead feel it instead to center him.
She was about to speak up but she had found his face pleasing to look at as it had always been to her. A moment of peace she could at least afford him, for all that he had done with her, for her.
She was smarter than she let on, smarter than she appeared, and Nicole Demara had known this. She had a predilection to how she carried herself of course, but she was always strategic about it. The need for faces and masks and personas to be, client by client, work by work, and yet, with this man she had no play to abide by, no character to be. He had known her far too long for that.
“Nicole.” He said once, and something in her heart dropped. He said it far differently, far realer than he had usually. “I think I might have to come to a decision about how Phaethon and the Cunning Hares work together.”
It had been true on the other end as well. For as much as Wise had been that stoic young man, unshakable and used to the world they lived in and the people in it, Nicole had known him before that hardening of personality.
They had known each other nearly their entire lives at arm’s length, as confidants, as business partners, and, perhaps without saying, as friends by confirmation and confrontation.
This was why she had known something had been different in this address to her.
“I don’t think we should work together on things like this anymore.” He looked away when saying it, out toward the sun where it was flying out of the world, abandoning it to a darkness in a cycle that had gone on long before Man or Thiren and would long after, for as long as their would be skies, as long as their would be a universe to make it.
“Wh-“ She struggled to breath and speak at the same time, caught off guard. “What do you mean?”
“You come to us for a very particular type of work, Nicole. Sure, there are others who do the same, but your commissions are… They’re always a gamble, and I don’t think it’s sustainable, to me, or to you.” He gave her a soft, placating smile for it, at least attempted to, as if this had just been a conversation and not, as the words sounded, a break up of some sort. He had seen enough of such moments on the tapes at Random Play to know how they went, and for all the framing of this had been he tried to not make it land as so. This was a rational decision between the Cunning Hares and Phaethon, not Nicole Demara and Wise.
She seemed frozen hearing him, and Wise had been blinked himself a few times to verify that reality hadn’t glitched over, but when she moved she looked out at those waters and had been silent until she spoke again. “I’m going to ignore you said that.”
“Huh?”
“We were talking about how we were going to make back the money on this commission, right?”
“Uh, no, Nicole. I think I told you I don’t really want a part in that.”
“Don’t-!” She snapped a bit louder, the low howl of rushing air and the city behind them in its rush hid it and the snap of her clothing even as she held him by both shoulders. “Are you crazy Wise? We’re about to get the money we lost back and-!”
“Nicole.” He said once. He had grown into a young man and despite the fact that he hadn’t been the type to go into those Hollows, fighting Ethereals and Bandits, it hadn’t meant he had been totally weak. Video tapes did weigh enough, and he had been getting older for what good that it had done. His arms tightened, and she let go.
“After all this time?” Nicole looked up at him with a certain type of despondency, as if reality had arrived. He hated to see it on her face. He hated that it was because of him.
“I’ll have to talk about it with Belle, but…I don’t know Nicole. We can’t keep doing this forever.”
“Doing what?”
“When we lose together, we lose bad, and one day, something will come up, and we’re gonna need a check from you I don’t know if you can cash.”
“But I always pay you back! Always.” She stressed, and Wise shook his head.
“Do you think anyone else would let this slide?”
She wanted to say that there were other people who held debt by her, so no, not not technically, but it hadn’t helped her case, so she looked at him, lips parted, teeth grit together in seriousness so unlike her.
“Don’t- don’t look at me like that I’m not the bad guy here.”
“I didn’t say you were.” She responded. “But this isn’t the worst we’ve been. Why now? Really, why now?”
“Because things are changing. Because you’re building up the Cunning Hares, and because Phaethon is what it is now.”
Just very recently Phaethon had gotten that reputation of being that legendary proxy, no question, by a consecration of meme and reputation that had been the culmination of years of work. It meant that a huge stepping stone toward he and Belle’s goals had finally been achieved, and perhaps, their real mission had begun that would be, and had been, their life’s goal, and nothing could be risked for it.
And Nicole had cemented Gentle House into the Cunning Hares by her own skill and businessmanship. Not unearned at all. Not owed to a proxy in particular. She risked life and death more than Phaethon, Wise could admit, and he had been proud of her for it for what had been between them.
But that perpetual climb toward almost making it, toward building to a goal, would not last forever. Nothing ever did, and stakes and risks were different.
See how parents change when children are born. See how people change when money finds them.
See dreams realized, and how they reveal those taken within them.
Wise gathered himself up within his chest, within his heart, and he spoke to her as only he did when no one was looking. “I know you can make this money back, but you’re gonna have to do this without us.” He told her at last, with finality. He had been white knuckling the railing without realizing it. He hadn’t known why his lungs felt so tight.
For all the acumen of negotiation upon Nicole, for all that engine of a woman ready to grind people down to the dust for a better deal, she seemed very small then, very unsure, and she had replied with nothing as her eyes had been very deep. Wise couldn’t bare to look into them.
They both looked out of the bay, holding onto the railing to ground them, to anchor them in their turbulent thoughts, staring at the ships going by ferrying their cargo and how constant they had been, where one ship had been all ships, ones that needed to be to maintain a machine of that world and she a part of it. For Nicole, there were others like her out there, she knew, same role, perhaps same type of person even, but of all those trying to make their way in the world, she was the only one that had Phaethon.
She drifted near him, proximity a barrier gotten over a long time ago, on the market streets where out of the charity schools she and he would be working those hour shifts in between breaks; the only legitimate work that they could’ve gotten. Pamphlets and grills, shouting and crying, guides and what not. Thirteen years old and the need for the check was still needed, for all that the philanthropy of that city could give. They among a horde of young, wanting the same jobs, with only the voracity of work ethic to keep them. He was good with his hands, steady and able and understanding of machines, and she knew how to sell with everything about her, standing on her soapbox proclaiming what she had been charged with that day from whatever shop.
She reached out very slightly, touching upon his arms. He opened his eyes, the tenseness of his muscle noting some surprise, but not unwanted as he looked down upon her. He tilted his head in silent question. Money was not immaterial to him, the world’s water had been it and he had only very recently stopped drowning.
“Do you remember how we started, Wise?” She drew her hand away, looking up at him before talking then to the sea.
“Tons of ways I can answer that, Nicole.” He answered carefully, but in as much of a lighthearted way he could to draw them far away from what had just transpired.
First time they saw each other, first time they knew each other, first time they had called one’s attention and uttered their name, first time plans kept, plans given, successes and failures both.
“Our first… let’s say commission.”
“Founder’s Day. We ran the fireworks for-“
“No not that. Just me and you. You know, without Belle.” “There’s no commission I’d take without working with Belle, not even that far back, Nicole.”
“Even ones where she would be in danger too?” She leaned in to him in jest, but she remained, and neither had minded for the moment that it was. Not the first time, not the last of course, something that Nicole had more often than not done without Belle looking; a sister protective naturally of her brother for whatever reason such movements might elicit.
There was a hint of recognition in the man’s usually stoic gaze, but a nod of admittance. There had been no tenseness in his form, only letting her melt into him, that contacted warmth not lost on him as he hummed in his throat and spoke his answer.
“The edu-tablets?”
“The edu-tablets!” Nicole had affirmed, coming off of him and again sitting on that railing so that she saw him, eye-to-eye. “Do you remember how it went?”
“Of course.” He chuckled.
Behind them, Chop Junior’s cleavers had been making their meat massacre for a dinner rush, and his mouth had watered for it but he tamed himself, as he always had done.
Edu-tablets had been bottom of the barrel personal tablets that the charity school had been alloted by the New Eridu government; recycled personal electronics that had been reconfigured for education use only for children. For many in that system it had been the first personal electronic they had been alloted in their life; whereas kids nearly half their age had already been gifted smartphones at the age of five. Those that had come from Eridu, or rather, survivors of, had lost everything, and Wise and Belle had not been an exception to that for the most part.
He remembers it well enough, the scuff marks of previous owners held on the bezel, the hangups of software that always took one second more than it should’ve. The inadequacies of electronics, this electronic, had perhaps been what sent him down this path as hacker, as proxy. A slow machine, but one that still remained, both his own and Belle’s, somewhere in Random Play kept for sentimental value.
These devices had been locked by the IT department of the school, kept within a narrow band of usage: educational apps, restricting Inter-Knot access, the usual child-safe locks, and one which every student bemoaned and many tried to bypass. Many failed, generations of students coming and going, however at last there came a jailbreak.
“Do you remember how I had the eye to notice that you had a knack for hardware back then? Even before me and you even talked to each other?”
“Sure.”
“And that I had, when I worked for that one week with the school’s janitor, that I noticed all the tablets that other students tried to get jailbroken went to the hardware department and not the software?”
“Of course.” Wise placated her, the story slowly coming back to him.
“So, before we even became friends, I just knew that this plan would work, and so I came to you, my dear Wise.” He’s not sure how to react with him being called dear to Nicole, that part of affection he can tell if it was genuine or for show, but not whether or not it had been a different part earnest. “And what did you tell me?”
“I told you no.” He answers, almost a decade later. “I told you no,” he repeats. “Because if we got caught, it would’ve been the end for anyone involved.”
He remembers that night years ago, in the school and the dorm room allotted to both him and Belle on account of them being siblings. Belle had been out studying at the library, leaving Wise on his own to answer Nicole Demara having made her way into his building. She had entered his room in much the same way she entered the staff room at Random Play now, as if she had been always welcome, and with Wise not one to be particularly violent he had let her in and they talked.
They talked of the plan, where she would accrue interest through her usual means, currying crowds and favors and people interested in her for one reason or another, and then lead them to a particular idea: of jailbroken tablets for use for whatever one may want, and of course, Wise and Belle would be the one doing the jailbreaking.
He had wondered how then she had figured that they could even do it, and she had confided in him in a voice he had never heard from her before for all of her bombast and showmanship even at that age of theirs, that she knew them both to be capable of it, and of anything, given the right direction, and indeed, in this very instance, the sibling students had. There was a reason why, after all those years, the HDD was theirs and not some other Proxy’s. That chip in that head of his and Belle’s had grown along with them, a secret kept brought up from a lost world that granted them certain claims and certain skills to use in their path.
She spoke to him that night in tempting whispers not of a salacious kind as people often spoke of her and in that brief moment he wondered if anyone would’ve seen her enter his room and what may come of that, but he put it away and instead listened to what would come and what she was offering: half the profits for this service of jailbreaking.
“Think about it Wise!” She nearly pounced on him as he sat at his desk listening to her pitch back then after he had initially denied the idea out of precaution. “Think about how many boys here at least would love to get their hands on the Inter-Knot without that stupid safety filter!”
His mind hadn’t been there however. He knew what she was proposing had been great with a readily available customer base. His mind had been on the flipside:
“If we get caught, it’s game over.” He spoke back then, softly as he had always done, and even with his younger voice it came with a certain authority derived of confidence born of knowing. “This isn’t like getting into a slapfight at lunch, or being late to class, Nicole. This is interfering with government property.”
“And sneaking past the wall to go see Hollow Zero isn’t just as bad?” She poked a finger at him, the first time Nicole Demara had ever touched Wise, straight on his forehead.
He furrowed his eyebrows even as she kept a finger there, a threat in his eyes that had hardly fazed her. “How’d you know?”
She smiled, looking at her fingernails, manicured and cute, before flipping her hair, looking down on him. “I’ll tell you if you work with me on this… Spending all that money on guides has kept you and Belle looking thin, no?”
He leaned back, considering it all, considering what had been at hand and what could be offered back and what could be taken. Something a teenager with as much to think about as him could hardly be expected to burden with and yet he had been. He looked to the picture of he and Belle, school uniforms and all even younger than he had been then, and for as rough as existence had been now, at least it had been safe, at least it had been a path forward to them with no legitimate prior history and no adult in their life to guide them forward.
“Me and you.” He finally said after consideration. The money wouldn’t hurt, not at all.
“Oh?”
“Just me and you, keep Belle out of it. I don’t want her getting expelled for something like this.”
On that day the two of them had learned many things of each other at their formation, and when the dennies had started rolling in and free information returned to the student population, that had been a start of a relationship that existed until the now.
Her plans, when they worked, they worked. But when they failed, they failed hard.
Like today, years later.
Rent was due, the electrical bill higher because of a freak accident on the growing Sixth Street that required the backup generator to run longer than the two siblings had been usually comfortable, and the cost of food had been rising due to a lowered productivity in New Eridu’s hydroponics. Sure he knew that Nicole and her Hares would’ve paid them back at some point, but her word did not pay off a lease when it was due sooner than she could garner. More than that, this money had been not his alone. It had been Belle’s as well, compiled and shared without doubt and with total trust because. To use it even now had felt like an undue discretion, but in the end he had done it anyway, because for all that he had been, some of it had been due to Nicole.
“Did I not get you enough money to rent your first apartment off the school grounds?”
Wise had looked off to the walkway beneath them where couples, where children, strolled in the warmth of that dying day.
Years ago he and Nicole had done that very same walk, sometimes with Belle, sometimes not, and he would listen to her accomplishments and prizes for the week and he would also likewise, perhaps less boisterously, do so as well and together in their shared successes they would rise even higher. It had always felt natural with her.
“You did, yes, off of that… But you know how when you tried to repeat the same thing except for meal voucher tickets for kids who didn’t even go to school you got caught and all three of us were nearly expelled then and there.” Only because someone else, a child that had been not allowed in the school but fed because of their efforts where they were starving before, had taken the fall for them, had they not been caught.
“It was for a good cause.”
“I know, but you’re always digging deeper holes, and-“ He breathed tiredly. He had hardly broken like this. “I’m doing this to keep you from that, at the very least, Nicole. I’m trying to stop enabling you.”
“That’s not for you to decide, Wise!” She snapped again, and he had looked hurt for it, the pain on his face like lightning, even for as fast as he tried to hide it. She stepped closer to him. She didn’t know why but she had. He reached out and held her at her bicep and she had likewise touched upon his chest and when they had been allowed to do either of such to each other they did not know or cared to explain otherwise. Beneath her fingertips she felt his heart beating, something that when she had carried Eous in a Hollow she never could feel.
“Have I been unfair to you, Wise?” She had been quiet. Quieter than he had known her to be save for a party at the passing of New Years, where over the crowd of a block party she had leaned into his ears to say something of celebration and she did so hushedly, and he had done so back, and he thought of that moment often when he thought of Nicole Demara.
He shook his head. “Not on purpose, and even if you were, you do try to make it good. I know that of you.” Her worried face has alleviated a little. In orange light there was something soft to it that had been many times missing in the cool colors of their city. “But this is me being fair to the Cunning Hares, and to Phaethon.” That idea of combined effort between he and Belle, of which both of them had been responsible for as supplicants to that higher order. “I think it’s better off for us, at the very least financially, if you considered a different Proxy. I know you’re very capable even without me. I’ve seen you handle yourself… and besides, it’s not like every commission is something you do through us.”
“But the commissions I bring to you are the only ones I can trust you with!”
“I can recommend you others.”
“But I want it to be you, Wise.”
Year one of Phaethon, of Random Play, before Nicole had even established Gentle House, Nicole leads them into a Hollow upon the unlikely rumor that a computer lost within has a list of off-record Inter-Knot addresses that were rife with commissions caught by the Inter-Knot’s usual filter. A rumor born of a cop gone rogue and having left all his records behind in the development of that Hollow, and unlikely and fanciful and as it had manifested: real. From those commissions, the siblings know then now what a full refrigerator is like; the taste of butter, real butter, of simple luxuries and things taken for granted for their years as orphans alone in a threadbare system.
Year one of Gentle House, when Billy Kid had still been new to existing at all and Nicole had only gotten used to punching out Ethereals, she is poisoned for the first time by that pressure and corruption inherent to all those holes in the world, and when she calls out in a midnight day as she feels something twisting inside of her, without payment and without condition, a certain bangboo appears and leads her out and she arrives at Random Play immediately after escaping, before any treatment, despite all protest. She would have thanked the two Phaethon siblings, but she had been too weak to say, collapsing in that still being built store. Wise spends the next week caring for her on that couch in the back that remains to this day. She knows that couch well still.
“I want that success to be with you.” She says again. “You and Belle,” she quickly amends. She draws her hand away from his chest having forgotten it had been there and he steps back sensing the near impropriety of it. He looks over at where people had been passing and a wolf Thiren that had been long staring at them glances away as if he hadn’t been looking at the two and goes along his own business. “It doesn’t really feel right bringing my good fortunes to other people. The type of fortune that we work on, uniquely.” She looks on at the world and its progression. “I’ve got some things, favors to cash in, I can get you what I owe you and-.”
His jaw tightens up. She sees how tightly he shaves now; she wants to reach out with her hand and trace that jaw of his for all that it tells of him in thought and feeling. She very nearly does before he speaks again.
“That’s not the point, Nicole. I know you, you’ll end up owing us again, and I don’t want that. We’ll just keep doing this forever.”
She sucks in her lips and considers his words and when they sit in her mind a feeling progresses that she cannot hide. “…Doing this forever with you isn’t the worst thing.”
She’s never seen Wise blush before. Not even on those nights where she sees him and Belle out on the town in some sort of celebration of a mission well done or a milestone passed. Not when they share a bottle of hooch between them in a brown paper bag making sure to hide it from any NEPs, and where they find themselves among their customers not of the Hollow business but of their video store, and they talk and they talk of a shared passion so innocent of filmography and movie and they look so happy, so normal in that crazy world that she wonders if she has been truly a part of their life. He blushes on his paler face, multiplied by sundown light, as for what she had said had been so heartfelt that even he could not ignore connotation internally, externally, for all meaning or one meaning alone. An absolute truth held between them both revealed or perhaps reckoned with, after so many years, so many nameless nights and natural hours planning Hollow raids and how they would manifest outside in a realer world. Long after Belle had gone to bed, he would remain with her to smoothen out plans because nothing else had felt more real to him. All those nights made because of her, in every way, both at advent and execution. There were indeed commissions that would never have been given to them if had not been for Nicole, but, he reasoned, for reasoning was one of his strong points, they would have made it anyway.
Would they?
His face had been very warm and not for the sun, and he saw that same mirrored in Nicole’s face but she had always been rosy, excitable, not too unlike Belle but far more ditzy about it. There was something frantic and fragile and yet resolute despite despite despite in Nicole that he had always seen, always known. He had been drawn to it. Always. Professionally and perhaps otherwise. Unique to her, and only her.
He closed his eyes and he spoke to her. “Life isn’t like one of Random Play’s tapes, Nicole. I can’t keep rewinding when I know how it ends.”
She huffed. “But isn’t that the point of a videotape? To watch something again and again because it was worth it?”
“But we’re not tapes. Not me, not you. You’re too good for all the B-movies we stock anyway… Besides,” The words came out before he had even reckoned them. “I kinda miss the old days.”
Her eyes had widened out, her mouth left open barely, and he had looked at her lips and seen them closer than he had last remembered ever them, if ever. “Huh?”
He had to explain.
Somewhere down the street, a flower shop had delivered a surprise bouquet to a couple passing, framed as a random act of good will, but planned on one part of that pair, meant to brighten the day of the other and brighten they did in giggling and laughter and kisses.
“For a while, I think we’ve been more… business partners than friends… or just partners. That’s how I know we’re both getting serious about where we’re headed, even more so.”
More and more, they spoke about details of jobs as opposed to the frantic life shared of their coming up as it had been. Where the literal growing of their life was universal. But lives grow apart. A constant lesson in many coming of age movies, and these movies were often a reflection of life’s truths in some way, between maybe varied framing and execution.
“Is that really it?”
“No! I mean,” she had hardly seen him stammer before. “It’s a part of it. That’s what me, Wise, feels; it’s not like- it’s- okay look what I feel is different than what is right for Phaethon.” He had nearly forgotten to quiet down saying the name of it in public in his sputtering, and Nicole had taken some amusement for this tense discussion that had maybe not been more than ten minutes, but had felt of hours; longer than she had been in that holding cell even.
He was cute like this, Nicole thought.
“Oh do you miss me, Wise?” Her tone changed, a teasing voice from that past. “Have you missed having Nicky Demara around you all the time making your sister all worried about her brother? Is that it?” She stepped forward again and she had been nearly chest to chest, he breathed in and held his breath, a single drop of sweat forming at his forehead that he hadn’t been used to. “Do you want to take it to the next level then?”
“Nicole-“ He pressed with his voice, but she had none of it, her arms raising up draping across the back of his neck, she fully leaning on him.
“Tell me the truth. Is Wise getting jealous of Phaethon? Does Wise need something more than sure bets or money or-“ She stopped when he grabbed her waist. “Eh-?” No one had ever touched her like that, and people had tried. Her arms remained around him and in that light it seemed natural to those who might’ve seen them together. Above the belt of her waist he ran his thumb in such minute motions it had betrayed the enormity of her focus on it.
“Don’t even try, Nicole. I’m serious.”
“What do you think I’m trying?”
He couldn’t say out loud, but still they remained like that.
She licked her lips, sighing, but staying. “You know how I said both me and Belle think of you as a certain way?”
“Like that.” He parroted from earlier. She nodded, she leaned back, but still held onto him, pivoting them both so Wise had leaned on the railing and she remained within his grasp.
“I get it. I get why you’re doing this. It’s because you are, like, super responsible. I know you and Belle are together that one thing, but you’ve always been Belle’s anchor. You’re sturdy, you’re solid.” She made a point in her reach of him to shake, and with his shoulders he remained still as if to prove the point. “But there are times when you just let the world get away. Maybe I don’t want to leave how we are because I know you’d be left behind.”
His eye twitched. “That’s a bit unfair of you to think, isn’t it?”
“It’s a bit unfair of you to not give me a chance from here on out, having said this out loud, you know.”
“…Sure.” He didn’t know what else to say. “But it’s safe that way.”
“Safe isn’t gonna get you where you’re going. And I don’t even know what that is.” That goal between him and Belle, unspoken to the world since they made that plan as children who had lost everything, always there, always a light in a distant dark future. “Maybe if you told me it would-“
“No.” He cut her off, and it had been harsh, harsher than everything yet. “Me and Belle we’re… everything about Phaethon is supposed to lead somewhere and it’s not something I can tell you. Trust me on that.” He held her waist tighter to make the point, and she had nearly squeaked. But she could let him have that at the very least. It seemed deeply set inside of him.
“But still. Don’t tell me you don’t get what I’m saying, if you trust I get what you’re saying about me.”
He straightened his mouth. He wanted to look up to the sky again but she kept her hands tight at the back of his neck, her finger tips intermingling with the strands of his hair there in the slightest of strokes. It centered him, and he had resisted the urge to close his eyes and enjoy it. “I’m not saying what you’ve done would be what it is without me, or what I’ve done with the Hares would be entirely because of you; but… Isn’t anything about you, Wise, made up of me? Because I know a part of you is a part of me.”
He could hardly remember the last time Nicole had spoken like this. Where that character of her, and she did play one at times, play it up or assume its mask, for the world around her. But she had spoken true in small parts, and he had been thinking of where those prints of hers had been. She saw him thinking, the lock of her fingers coming undone and instead going down the sides of the front of his shirt, within that jacket he always wore. He was very warm.
“When I took on Anby, when I found Billy, everything I knew about what it meant to… be someone to rely on, it came from you. I had no one growing up, you know this. But I saw what it was like for Belle to have someone, and for you to have Belle. You were so good for each other and… well, when it came time for me to take care of people instead of just like, giving back to the community, I thought about you a lot.”
“Risk.” Wise said once, Nicole had felt beneath her pads again his heart beat. “You did let me know how to take risks, how to see it, how to see what was worth it… I admit I do take some pretty funny jobs, but… yeah, I guess maybe yours prepares me for it.”
For all that they were entangled now, he still had to ask. He held out his arms a bit wider, and he tilted his head one way at her in a questioning motion, and without word that question was asked and an answer given in her nod. He held her true, arms around her, bringing her in, his hands tracing the circular motions that had reminded him very much of a rewinding tape in the machines they used at the shop. She closed her eyes, head resting against his heart and she heard it constant and finely and in tune with the wind.
Old friends. That’s what they were despite, despite, despite.
“Tell me, exactly, why I’m saying what I’m saying Nicole.” He spoke lowly. His chest rumbling had been a vibrato that could never be found anywhere else in that world to Nicole and she didn’t want to leave it for fear of never knowing it again. “Tell me so I know you understand.”
“You want me to stop putting you in these situations. You want me to stop risking what you and Belle have built with what I do.”
She wanted to pull back, to look at him in the eye saying it, but he hadn’t let her go and she didn’t mind. She was very soft against him and he hadn’t minded at all. He hummed a pleased sound in his chest.
She deserved the same from him, so he spoke softly. “And you want me to not cut with you entirely, because you want to see us even better.” She nodded, rubbing her face into the fabric of his shirt. “I know despite all of your debts, it’s never because you’re… usually, spending it all on yourself. It’s not like that. I know it’s because you’re always giving back to where you were raised out of. I know what we do together is worth it, maybe not to us, but for people who need it.” He sighed, and she nearly cried for it. “I didn’t want to put it down to you like that today…”
“I know, Wise, I know… but,” she leaned back, finally looking up at her, her chin nearly touching his chest, and their faces very, very close. It had been then and there they realized perhaps what this had looked like, what this had felt like, and what they were feeling inclined toward each other to do. But yet still, they went on. Things still needed to be said, found and dredged up and presented only in these moments, and no other, where in that walking world where thousands passed them, that even they in their masses gave them solitude for their space to be alone and to work out what had been. They were flash images in the peripherals of those that day who would be forgotten or perhaps kept because they had struck an image together rightly, correctly, as if by nature alone that this was a right image: this man, this woman, holding each other on the edge of the world where beyond them the waters of that world rushed on, where in them schools of fish swam wild and the great souls of ancient myth born of the blue made reverse wise spectacle of a world beyond, and this scene as well. “I need you.”
He blinked down at her, he felt her breath upon his face, warm and wonderful and all his might he did not dip down closer to get more of it, and she too had been holding some restraint.
“I need you, too.”
Across the way hidden by crowd, another Demara looks on with Billy Kid, and as the two of them duck behind a trash can in the dark of an alleyway, seeing boss and manager together in a way they had never observed before, nearly vibrating, totally silent out of fear of drawing this scene away from wherever it’s headed, Anby Demara remembers that she needs to return a romance movie that reminds her very much of what is transpiring before her in that distance.
Wise whispered, and she tasted his words. “If I kissed you right now, what would it cost me, Nicole?”
A snap like lightning from her ears, down to her brain, her heart and core.
“Everything.” She whispered back in a giggle that Wise would impart to a forever memory, like the photos he kept in his book, which he intended one day to put on the wall of his room. “Nothing.” She said after a moment.
A price that he had known had been hers alone to give to him.
One that he would for his entire life had paid, would pay.
He returned a hand closer to him, and then up, cupping the side of her face where a beauty mark had found a home beneath her eye, and he stroked it wide with his thumb as a small smile painted over Nicole’s face. It was not one that had read like she had won. That inside that this was a trick to fully ingratiate Phaethon to her. Wise had known her heart and for all her business, that was not the darkness inside of it, if there had been any at all. Flawed as she was, so had been he.
He dipped down further, millimeter by millimeter, and she breathed in almost in surprise, but in the end with anticipation.
“Ah…” She closed her eyes, and she let what may be let itself.
She wanted it. Whatever it was. She needed it.
Their lips brushed against each other, pliant, and had it lasted a moment more they would’ve kissed fully, completely, given to each other. He was a man and she was a woman and there now had been a desperation at the tips of their minds that had been like a treasurers, deep in Hollow, waiting for that layer to be breached for all that danger within. Familiar to them, known by them. Easily taken. Her hands had been at both sides of his chest and she grasped him tight, and the hand on her waist, Wise had in that last moment squeezed the softness of her and she murdered a moan in her throat for her own decency.
But this far, and no further. It hadn’t even been a kiss, a lip lock, just that touch of lips, that grace; a motion of the could’ve been and maybe might’ve, different place, different time.
Known for his judgment, Wise had been true to himself as much as Nicole had always been, and he let go, and they had both parted almost panting and bothered and at the door of revelation of a different truth between them.
Nicole had been in tremors, and Wise’s teeth had been chattering, and in the minute that had come and passed without them speaking they needed to breath out of what had been denied, perhaps for the better, they both rationalized. He flattened his shirt and she had adjusted her shorts, and all had been made straight and narrow again.
“Ah- uh.” Wise shook his head as if it had been wet, and maybe it had been with some sweat, recomposing himself. “Just, okay- consider what I said. Really consider what I said. I don’t want to do this again with you, Nicole.” He tried to put back on his own mask, his own always knowing better self but it had been hard to do so, ghost warmth and affection and meaning of all rushing into them dispersing having lost that one definite outlet within each other.
“You’re gonna have to clarify what “this” is, Wise.” She giggled into her hands, adjusting her hair as if she had just gotten through something else turbulent.
“Telling you that you need to be more careful with us.”
“Mm. Okay.” She put her finger to her cheek, tapping it twice, glad that what else they had done or about to do was still on the table. She clacked her heels together and leaned toward him. “Yes sir.”
Being called sir had nearly put Wise into hysterics, but before he had, she laughed. She laughed true at the fluster of him, as rare as pure rain in New Eridu, and seeing, hearing that, it caught onto him.
“Jeez.” He caught a word out of his jubilant throat, she had thought twice about again re-embracing him and instead leaned on that railing besides, close enough. “What the hell kinda talk did we just have.” He spook loosely, but of any time it was warranted it had been here. “I wonder if that was how Eous feels when I control him.”
“It’s true though!” Nicole exploded her arms up and out at the day at the end of its rope, having last just long enough for them to be lit in that warm color, for whatever had just transpired between them. “I do need you.”
“You think it’s actually need?” Wise earnestly asked.
She laughed, shaking her head. “You know I have people who would pay me as much as we would’ve made on this commission just to say what I just did to you.”
“Are you actually asking for me to pay up then?”
“No!!!” She said in protest but half a laugh. “But I mean it… Don’t string a girl out like this!”
He had taken out his phone to see what time it had been for the first time since they left the police station, and he had been surprised. Anby and Billy had been supposed to meet them here and pick up Nicole five minutes ago. But it had been fine, just a little more time with her hadn’t been the worst thing.
For as warm as they both felt together now, it had been for a reason; that rubber band between what had kicked that whole thing off. He had to make sure, one last time, and he reached out and he held the small of her back as then night came over, and distantly the towers of New Eridu began to twinkle their own stars, lighting themselves in absence of the light above. “Nicole, just, I need you to remember that it’s different, nowadays. It’s not like when we were kids.”
She blew a raspberry into the air, rolling her head. “I get it, I get it. I promise. I’ll only come to you if I really need to. If I know it’s absolutely the best for us.”
He looked at her and her profile, and he knew that he had always been fond of it. He was pleased and satisfied then. “If that’s the case, please, come by any time… assuming you actually do pay me back for today.”
“Ugh,” she nearly shook his hand off, the back of her own tapping his own chest. “I will I will!”
Billy Kid, for all his programming as they walk toward the manager and his boss, wonders how strong his restraint limiters are actually when he considers asking Anby if people hashed out their problems more often than he had initially thought like how Wise and Nicole had done. But any answers to that belonged to the other side of android heaven as his metal footsteps alert the two to their approaching. Wise’s hand drops, darts back to his side, and a certain rigidness of command returns to Nicole as she turns to face the two other members of the Hares.
“Heyyyy Manager.” Billy waved at Wise. “Hey boss!”
“Where have you two been?” Nicole had fake pouted at them but they had hardly been affected.
“Hey Billy, Anby.” Wise had put his hand on his hip, acting as best as he could despite the residual pounding in his chest and the shaking nerves yet settled. Nicole hadn’t been any better, and Anby had been the stone of the four of them standing. Behind the Wise and Nicole, the city across the river alighted, the manmade stars beholden to their backs. The girl who had come from a different nowhere looked at the manager that had guided her through the void, and then the woman that had become a sister to her, beset behind them by the bright lights of men’s resilience and she thought how perfect they looked together, how seemingly they had been made together like the sun and the moon. She seemed to blankly look at them to take them all in, and when she spoke she spoke as she usually did: in relation to what she had known.
“Tomorrow will Come.”
“Huh?” Nicole hadn’t known what Wise had: the title of a coming of age movie stocked at Random Play.
“A movie where the two-protagonists, a boy who was born into wealth, and a girl, who has known nothing but poverty, find themselves stranded on an island together after a ship wreck. Staying alive together by scavenging and developing survival skills, they fall in love, but love is not strong enough to stop the boy from falling into despair of ever getting out of their predicament. The girl, reconciling him, tells him that “tomorrow will come”, and they are rescued soon after.”
“…Why are you saying this, Anby?” Wise was much familiar with the plot.
“Because I need to return this film to Random Play, and because I want to know how Nicole and you would do in such a situation.”
“Eh?”
“Okay that’s enough of that.” Nicole stepped away from Wise, joining her two other Hares and the three of them stood together as rightly they always did. They all looked back at Wise. “I’ll be around soon, Wise.” She winked. “To pay those debts, obviously.”
“Right…” He swallowed some air to center himself still for what he wouldn’t be able to until the next week. “And… maybe I’ll talk to Belle to see if we can’t throw into getting those chips back at auction.”
Nicole had beamed as brightly as those skyscraper stars, and there had been a pep to her step again as she had taken her hares and walked off after farewells were exchanged, Wise left at that railing a little while longer until he too, after staring out at the city that had arisen out of the end of the world, went on back to the metro to return home. In days to come he and Belle would work out what to do about Nicole’s data chips, and in several weeks, the Cunning Hares would take on a job that did call upon Phaethon; a safe at hazard, the future of New Eridu at stake. But in the weeks prior Nicole would come to Random Play not as a client of Phaethon, but as a friend of both siblings running it, and again long nights would be spent, but not in planning but rather in movie watching or hanging out like they had used to do. An apprehension of her arrival that heralded not a risky mission, but rather just her on her own.
“You seem different Nicole.”
“Do I, Belle?”
“Okay… well, maybe not different, but I feel like you came back from… somewhere.”
Wise had ruffled his sister’s hair at that observance by her. “I think we’ve just caught Nicole on a good day.”
“Hey-!” Nicole had protested, but it had been all in good jest.
Slowly, Nicole had paid off her debts, a renewed focus on the Hares finances made, and if in her extended staying at Random Play, she always left before Belle would notice how long she stayed after hours truly with Wise.
Doomed enterprises bind people together perhaps more strongly than the successful unions of plans made, plans followed, plans totaled in success. But perhaps closer than both had been love made over years, and years to come.