Absit Omen RPG
Role-Play Boards => London => Muggle London => Topic started by: Nemo on August 22, 2019, 01:29:29 PM
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20 Jan 2012 @ 10pm
Friday night
Tower Bridge, London
"No, not the walkway," Nemo wiggled her finger in the air as if to erase the elevated pedestrian bridge that spanned the two towers. "On the roof. See the the crenelations between there? There's space to stand."[1]
Nemo and Virgil Carstairs stood on the pavement at the entrance to the grand London monument, Nemo pointing up and up and up to the nearest tower. The little battlements running along the edge of the tower's roof looked tiny from below, but really they were nearly as tall as the seventeen-year-old Nemo.
Last fall, she'd spent a few days trying to figure out how to Apparate up there. She hadn't known what the space looked like, and it was such a precise landing it would be a tricky move. But she'd done it on her birthday last November,[2] and it had meant more than a pretty view. It had been a place no one had ever been, or so it felt. But she'd had company join her in the form of a curious and strange old vampire who she'd see again. And tonight, she'd been restless as she'd been for weeks, so invited Virgil along.
"Here, we can Side-Along." She shrugged her accordion up onto her back more securely and held out her hand.
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There was just about enough room for them to stand up there, he thought as he squinted up at the tower. It looked impressive even against the cloudy sky, and Virgil felt a rush of affection for this city all of a sudden. His city. He was a London boy but sometimes it took an outsider's perspective to remind him of the beauty. Built on the back of a great and awful empire.
"Here, we can Side-Along," his friend offered.
Anticipating the cold and winds above, Virgil zipped up his bomber jacket (https://urstyle.com/styles/2246565) before reaching out to take her hand. With a familiar pop! they suddenly found themselves high above the rooftops and eye-to-eye with a sparkling urban skyline. It truly was cold.
"You come up here all on your own, wanderer?" Virgil laughed a breathless laugh, feeling the tension in his head dissolving now that they had escaped the Friday night crowds below. "What a view. To think muggles made it," he smiled down at her and leaned against the battlement to steady himself. "They stood up here, no brooms or spells to stop a fall."
Were they afraid? Virgil looked down, his heart fluttering at the thought of a fall. They must have been.
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When they appeared at the top of the tower, Nemo felt a rush of adrenaline and gasped in the cold air and bracing wind. She was as much startled by the cold as she was grateful she'd nailed the jump and didn't splinch them. She ought to have probably been more cautious but she'd just gone for it. Life slowed down when you hesitated and part of her wanted the next time Virgil saw her to seem brave and put together. Not traumatized by a vampire, not reckless, not barfing in his bathroom.
She'd stopped wanting to please people when she was, like, twelve, so this was a strange feeling.
Nemo was happy to hear Virgil's exhilaration.
"Yea, on my own," she answered. "It makes me feel completely myself, like all the chaos falls away. Not in it, above it, alone with my own soul. Feels like I left my body down there."
She looked over the battlement in the empty spot where they'd stood. She imagined their figures, which disappeared like smoke when a cyclist rode through.
"It is really amazing," she agreed. "Muggles have patience. Sometimes feel magic folk are always in a rush."
Nemo shrugged off her accordion case, wishing her violin was fixed.[1] She'd played up here last time. The wind stole any reverberation.
"Only been up here once before, actually," she said and laid back against the steep roof. Her whole field of vision was filled with the sky.
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"Feels like I left my body down there."
He smiled a little, knowing exactly what she meant. Virgil actually had left his body; almost exactly one month ago[1] now, sending his mind and soul through the archway in the Death Chamber. This didn't feel like that, though. Up here he felt vividly alive and awake to the corporeal world. The minds of London buzzed across the city, indistinct.
"Only once?" he lowered himself to sit, legs dangling off the edge, and slung his backpack around. "I'm honoured you brought me this time then." Nemo was something else.
Virgil unzipped the bag and took out a silver thermos. He took off the cap, which doubled as a cup, and poured black coffee in. "It's peaceful up here. Much better than being underground in the Ministry all day..." the wizard offered the cup to her. "Coffee?"
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Nemo made a pleased little hum in response to Virgil's saying it was an honor she brought him up. Perhaps it was, but he was now in a very strange club. It was difficult not to think of this place without thinking of the vampire and what happened to him. Complicated. But she didn't want trauma to take this place from her. She needed it to be cleansed with friendship and good feelings. Same with seeing Virgil again.
"Coffee! Dude, you're awesome." Nemo sat up a little to take the cup. There was an advantage in acquiring a tolerance to black coffee, that is, more opportunities for coffee and the connections that came with it.
Lazarus and the vampires were on her mind, like a letter you didn't want to open or a song stuck in your head or a mistake you didn't want to admit. She fell quiet for a moment and tucked her hair behind her ear to take a sip.
"Can I tell you something? Maybe it'll be question." She didn't want to tear off a scab, wake up something that maybe Virgil had put away. Without a conscious decision, she opened the windows of her mind a crack. Something inside wanted someone to see her worry, without her having to say anything.
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He swung his legs, alternately glancing at the view below and then back up at his friend. Nemo was interesting to be around. She was, he knew, the kind of person lots of teenagers their age wanted to be. Unattached, wandering, taking risks. Cute as a button. But they never wanted the other aspects of her life - the ones she never talked about.
"Can I tell you something? Maybe it'll be question."
Virgil thought that she was very brave. He let her thoughts shine across, running a light and invisible hand through them. Her mind was full of all sorts of things; at its forefront, however, was the something that Nemo wanted to say without actually saying.
"You're worried about the vampires," he wrapped his long fingers around the thermos, warming them. "About Lazarus. What's the matter? Why are they worrying you?" Virgil looked up at her searchingly.
His neck prickled above the collar of his jacket and he felt the pin pricks that he sometimes forgot to hide these days. Terrence Hooker's bite marks. Yes, that worried him too, in a distant way. Hooker wasn't going to come after him. Virgil was sure that the vampire was done with them after the deal they had made over cards.
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Nemo's expression softened away from the tense wince. The way he'd put it - she presumed it was more than a guess - made her fell silly and young.
"Yeah. But not really worried. It's not like I think I'm going to turn a corner and one of them'll be there and attack me. I just don't understand why I did what I did. And am I going to do it again, something dangerous? Hurt somebody else?"
She'd gotten them both into such serious trouble. And with Grimshaw's and Kurby Bagnold, she felt like she was constantly holding back doing it again. Even coming here with only a passport, leaving the US. It could have been so bad and she'd left a mess behind her.
Nemo shivvered her shoulders, trying to clear her head. Rattle up the brain and settle the stones. Feeling things, overrated.
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His heart did a nervous little jump at Nemo's wince and he blushed, sheepish. That was clumsily done. Yavin would have said it was clumsily done. Not that Yavin was right about everything. Fuck Yavin. At least tonight, fuck him. Virgil reached out to pat the spot next to him, silently asking for Nemo to join him in sitting down between the battlements.
"Why do any of us do dangerous things?" he answered her questions with his own, shrugging. "Sometimes... I don't know know, Nemo. It's like something inside of us really hurts, and we just want to keep pushing. Pushing limits, pushing ourselves. Finding the wall."
Virgil lifted the thermos to drink his coffee, barely tasting the mellow bitterness of it. "You don't want to hurt anybody. I don't either," he looked out across London again and felt himself smiling. Look at that city. And how many people could really look at it, the way he could right now?
"Do you want to see something beautiful?" he asked Nemo without looking away. "It might cheer you up."
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Virgil's suggestion made sense somewhere inside, and Nemo touched gently on her memories of growing up and feeling out of place. She was bluster and blithe confidence and taking her life in her own hands, but things still hurt. She still hadn't written back to her mother. Maybe Virgil was right.
She didn't say anything in response, just slid down the roof to sit next to the older boy. Her smile was genuine.
"Bring it on, dude," Nemo replied pulling her knees up. When she'd first met Virgil, he'd been hard to read. He'd seemed like everything was always this sleepy, happy right-in-the-world. Unaffected. But as she got to know him, she learned to notice the changes in his affect. Something was bothering him, but first, something beautiful.
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He sensed the calm inside of her, finding Nemo's center. "Bring it on, dude."
Virgil smiled brightly at the witch - that's the Nemo he knew and adored. She was always ready for something new. Even if it was dangerous or silly. He put down his thermos and fussily reached for her hand, taking it into both of his. "Close your eyes. You have to listen, too." And then he closed his own, which felt just a touch risky when they were sat this high up.
In the darkness behind his eyelids, all was quiet and stagnant at first. He wanted to show her something special: something he didn't show to most people. Nemo was different from most people. Frowning, he opened his consciousness to the skyline of London city: just a crack at first. A rush of noise spilled into him, like crowds and crowds of people all talking at once.
"Every mind is like a star." Virgil announced grandly, voice getting lost in the wind. Hundreds - and then thousands - of pinpricks of light appeared in his mind's eye, in Nemo's. "And every star has a song."
The tumult of sound rose higher, so high that the thinking voices became abruptly thin. Like a flute, or the sharp glide of a violin string, each overlapping the other. A maddening cacophony. Virgil squeezed his friend's hand tightly. The stars receded until there were only a few dozen around them.
Stars beneath them (Friday night throngs) and a scattering above them (a muggle aeroplane). The noise was sweeter, musical. He released her hand after a moment, opening his eyes and closing his mind again. Tightly. "There." Virgil smiled, calmer than before.
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Nemo shut her eyes and let Virgil take her hand - glad that he did because it felt somehow that the only reason the tower stood so solidly below them was because they expected it to be there. Virgil's hands the tether, Nemo waited for the beauty.
She was not disappointed. Other than the light touches she'd suspected before, all of Nemo's thoughts and nightmares had always been her own. This was like the planetarium multiplied by Fantasia in a sea of orchestras tuning; it took her breath away. She couldn't see or hear just one of the star-minds so she let it all come; Virgil's voice was a dependable anchor. The loudness and fullness receded leaving a much nearer scope of a couple hundred brilliant little songs - so many but really very few compared to the thousands and thousands that filled the air just a moment before.
And too quickly it was over. She'd have to accept it would be glance.
Nemo let her eyes open, the London night coming back brighter and louder than it had seemed before. She tucked her hair behind her ears and folded her legs. What was she to do with all of that?
"That was beautiful," she said. She reached for the coffee and spun the cap. "Where did you even come from, star boy?"
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"Where did you even come from, star boy?"
He laughed, leaning in to bump shoulders with her and point out one of the few actual stars in the London sky. "Second star to the right and straight on till morning, Wendy Darling." The young boy who never grew up - never grown up enough for anyone in this world anyway. Not for Yavin, or Cepheus, or even for Nemo. He'd been useless to her at Hooker's pub in Camden. Just another neck for the vampires to bite and another person for her to worry about.
"Thanks for letting me show off." Virgil smiled at his favourite wanderer as he looked back at the skyline. "It's too much. But it's so beautiful, I can't hate it. Maybe that's just life."
As often as he fell into melancholy episodes, as often as he walked right into danger.... he couldn't help looking for beauty everywhere. "You're not alone, you know," his gaze trailed along the rooftops cut out against the sky, each one different in age and aesthetic. "When it comes to doing dangerous things. If you ever feel like that again, I'm here. I'll come."
That's what friends were for, wasn't it?
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Nemo appreciated the friendly bump and it reminded her of how they'd comforted each other that night, nothing self-conscious, but something needed she'd never had. She'd heard that before, that she was not alone, but it never really felt believable. She was always on the move, she supported herself, a solo artist, always doing exactly what she felt. Everyone around her had a different life from hers and she trust anyone would let her truly be that way without judgement. Maybe Virgil, but something still made her hesitate.
But what he said next! She turned to him nearly square, and stared at him wide-eyed. "Don't you dare!" she laughed. "Don't tempt me, man! Like, everyone is telling me to sit down, calm down, stay away, don't do anything stupid."
Nemo scoffed in confused and rubbed her face in her hands, unhappy with the surge of emotion that brought up. She came up for air, still smiling, still aghast.
"I don't know that you get what you said. It's all I think about. I'm trying to not, make friends, I'm going to play for Stardust, I got a real job, and Kurby and Abby. Ffffuu..."
She groaned and laid back. "C'mon dude."
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"I'm trying to not.... play for Stardust.... real job.... Kurby and Abby. Ffffuu.."
He laughed, more surprised than amused, twisting slightly to look down at Nemo as she fell back on the battlement floor. "Sorry!" he poked her tummy and reached for the thermos, careful not to spill it. "We're two halfwits stuck up the same tree, I'm not certain how much help I'll be talking you down."
Every time he recovered from doing something reckless, he told himself he would never do it again. But then he did, because life was boring if he didn't. Salazar forbid he play it safe: what was the point of playing it safe if he could help other people by not? Virgil had helped Abby, didn't he? And followed Nemo to Hooker's, or else she would have been all alone. Helped Fauna with scrying. Helped Yavin with work.
Something tingled at the back of his head and he bit his lip, suppressing the sensation. He had to help Nemo now in a way that wasn't reckless.
"How about this?" he poured her another cup of coffee, wrinkle in his brow. "Next time you want to dance with the reaper or whatever, owl me. We can try to stop each other."
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Nemo squeaked and pulled her knees up when Virgil poked her tummy. She giggled and gave him a gentle kick back. They really were a couple of ninnies who both went running full tilt at the nearest entrancing intriguing shiny objects, be it vampire covens or screaming tailor shops or whatever spooky secrets occupied star-mind Virgil.
"Fine, but the vice-versa, too. No slinking off towards self-destruction without me."
Right now, it was Grimshaw's that called to her. Every once in awhile she thought she heard that crying voice, in that way that you could sometimes hear your name being called but no one was there. It wasn't obvious why she was staying away, other than, perhaps, some loyalty to the strange Kurby Bagnold, werewolf hunter if he could be called only that anymore.
She sat up and took the coffee. Sitting still up in the tower was chilling, although their little nook provided some shelter. From insider her pocket, her phone buzzed.
"One sec.."
Nemo flipped it open, and the little blue screen lit up her face. She rapidly clicked out a message, then snapped the phone shut.
"Trying to situate a new crash," she explained, unperturbed. Her sublet was coming back from summer abroad. Finding someplace new (and nearly free) required a lot of sniffing and texting around, but her network was widening slowly but surely. Phone put away, Nemo turned her full attention back to Virgil and their starry night.
"How are your people?" Virgil had a lot of them. Family, friends, co-workers, lovers. To Nemo he seemed to fit in anywhere he went.
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Partners in self-destruction. He liked the sound of that, and bowed his golden head in acquiescence. Unless it was Mysteries related, why not ring up Nemo the next time he felt like toeing a line? They could handle themselves, together. They survived the vampires.
Virgil waited patiently as she tapped away on her phone, always on the move. She was a runaway. That much he could tell without evening have to lift the rug to examined the dirt underneath - but he didn't pry, assuming this was their mutual understanding. Nemo wouldn't poke about his sensitive business and he wouldn't poke about hers. Nobody crossed an ocean because they were leaving behind something good and safe, anyway. Not if they barely had a life waiting for them here. Often, she made him realise how reassuring it was to have a home.
"How are your people?"
He reached behind his ear to pluck a cigarette that had miraculously survived the trip up. "Not bad," Virgil shrugged. "I got into an argument with Yavin though. I mean, not really an argument, he was being an arse. He does that sometimes."
That made it sound so simple, and hearing himself say so was a relief. The young wizard lit the cigarette and took a long drag, lips going numb in the cold wind.
"I miss my family," the confession came out as a sigh, and he rubbed his tired eyes with the heel of his palm. "I miss being a kid. Do you know what I mean? Back at Hogwarts, I was trying so hard to grow up because I thought I was so fucking clever. And now I'm here, it's like I'm being pulled apart. I miss Edgar and Angela[1] and Adelaide." Virgil pulled a face and passed the fag over to Nemo. "Even miss my stupid little brother."
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Aw, sweet boy. He missed his family. Nemo had rolled her eyes at Yavin who wore his red flags like he wore his bright sweaters; he'd saved them and kept the questions away, but now she'd met him twice, she meant to avoid him. And each time Virgil mentioned him, Nemo's urge to protect him ticked up one notch. Not high enough yet to say anything, but she didn't like that anyone would be an ass to gentle Virgil.
Nemo listened and discovered she hadn't realized how big Virgil's family was. She'd met his parents and thought she remembered he had a sibling, but. She lifted her eyebrows. "You don't see them anymore?"
She took the cigarette - nasty habit, but it warmed her up and sharing a smoke was a friendship ritual for back stoops on drizzly nights.
"I miss it, too, yea. Being a kid,," she said. "I might have made it hard, though. I tried to be weird for the sake of it being weird. Try to be cool to impress older people. I dunno."
Nemo winced and handed the cigarette back, becoming self-aware. Almost everyone she knew here was older than her, except for Dido who Nemo could never pin down. "Guess somethings don't change."
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"You don't see them anymore?"
"My parents, loads." Virgil looked away from the skyline - Maida Vale, where he grew up, it wasn't a part of the glimmering skyscrapers and piss-scented streets. "Cecil's at school and Laidie..." he trailed off and shook his head as if though a fly were buzzing around it. Adelaide. "I don't know." What was he going to say about Adelaide? Something itched at the back of his head, something that made him want to reach into his brain and give it a good, long scratch. Virgil scratched the back of his neck instead.
Oh, of course - of course he knew why he didn't see her anymore. But it was alright. Nemo was speaking again and he didn't have to talk about it. She wasn't going to needle him for answers.
He reached for the cigarette, smiling softly at the little witch. "You're pretty cool without trying." Virgil breathed out a cloud of smoke and watched it dissipate into the night, white wisps carried away by winds. "And hey, pretty weird without trying too," his sleepy mouth stretched into a grin and he leaned down to bump heads.
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"Why thanks, kid," Nemo said and put her boots up on the crenelations and ashed the cigarette as if it was a big cigar. It was reassuring, she supposed, that Virgil found her cool and weird.
"Saw something on the internet," she said and puffed the smoke slowly. "What was it... If we want to be loved we must submit to the..." her stomach pulsed in a silent laugh, "...to the mortifying ordeal of being known."[1]
"S'like, this leap, you know. To let someone in. I used to hate seeing my name, like, in the school paper or the orchestra program. Or if a teacher said it. I was always trying to decide between the two: attention or anonymity. Because once they know you, it's like. They've got you. They can see you."
She held her hand up to the sky. "I can't decide."
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He listened, passing the cigarette to and fro. London was distant but audible below them - sounds of brusque car horns and middle eastern music blaring from bike trishaws. Drunken yells. Nemo's voice in his ear, carrying with it an accent and cadence of a history about which he knew nothing. Her familiarity with muggle worlds and muggle words. She had lived a life before this one and she carried it around with her.
The mortifying ordeal of being known. A phrase so accurate it stung his insides just to hear it.
"They've got you. They can see you...I can't decide."
"To be somebody or to be nobody." Virgil reiterated, glancing down at the cigarette in his hand while she looked up at her own against the night sky. "Can we ever actually be seen by someone else? I feel like I could spend years in your head and I still wouldn't actually know you, Neems. Not truly."
Their true selves, that had to be unobservable. The one excruciating secret every single being kept: to be alone in one's understanding of oneself, because how other people saw you said more about them than about you. Virgil shook some ash off the cigarette, watching the embers crumble and drift off. "But I think I know what you mean," he glanced back at her, wry.
"Sometimes I feel stingy about who I share myself with," his mouth pushed out into a thoughtful pout. "As in, do I want this person to know me like that? Do I trust them with this part of myself?"
Will they use it to hurt me?
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Nobody. No one. Nemo. They'd walked right into it, like a clearing in a wood.
Virgil took the concept to outer space, up with his deafening stars. Nemo watched him go. Was he cosmic, Virgil? She decided this bridge tower was as much his as hers. He fit up here. Nemo budged closer to Virgil so they were shoulder to shoulder. The cigarette did as much as the black coffee as an illusion of warmth.
"Yea, you know what I mean," Nemo confirmed. She moved her fingers in a wave and then gently closed them as if she'd caught a lightning bug. She wondered if there were lightning bugs in Britain.
Nemo shook her head and brought her hand down to folded in with her other arm. "No, you have to be stingy. Even if they don't really know you, sometimes a little thing is enough to put you in a box. Feels cliche to talk about labels, but yeah. Little tags on everything."
She thought for a minute, all this talk about knowing inner selves, stars as minds, living in her mind. She'd never thought about it much, hadn't been too put off when she'd found out, but if anyone had opportunity to find out, it was Virgil Carstairs.
Nemo turned to look at him. "Do you think people don't trust you? Because of what you can do?"
Maybe this was one of Yavin Morgenthau's red flags. How he looked at people how he talked about Virgil - how much did he know, and what was he going to do about it?
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He wondered what other labels had been applied to Nemo. People were complex but they still placed each other into boxes, making little assumptions as they go about their day. To do otherwise might drive a person mad... all the same, he wished they gave more thought to it or at least to the notion they might be wrong about those assumptions. Virgil accepted that he made these mistakes. His guesses were educated because he could look into minds but that didn't make them right, nor accurate.
"Do you think people don't trust you? Because of what you can do?"
Blonde eyebrows climbed up, caught off guard by her question. The question of his life, even. He paused to nurse the cigarette and took his time with it. Other legilimens had this secret doubt too, when their ability is made public knowledge.
"I know for a fact Nick doesn't trust[1] me." Virgil stared into space, thoughts sprawled in every direction as he spoke. "And other people probably, but I don't think it's because of what I can do. It's because of what I've already done, what I continue to do. Can't blame them."
His track record wasn't exactly great. He eavesdropped on a regular basis, it came naturally to him though he did refrain just as frequently as not. Virgil liked to think he knew better than to use other people's thoughts against them, now. The level of manipulation he could exercise was substantial. Tedious amount of effort, though.
"If you don't want me looking, I won't," he turned to Nemo, one hand on his chest and the cigarette hand raised as if to take an oath. "I don't all the time anyway, promise. It's just normal sometimes. Like a sixth sense."
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Nemo listened to Virgil seriously, watched his emotions play over his face. He felt ashamed, but was he penitent? Nemo felt such a need for privacy and to let others be that the urge to spy felt offensive a temptation that she'd not forgive herself for. Of course, she had her own vices. So sharp was the knife she used to cut people out of her heart, sometimes without even a word of warning.
She picked at her nails. She didn't want to tell him not to look; tell him to shut off what he said was part of him or ask him to darken that sky he showed her. But to have him in her head when she didn't know he'd been there, it made her wonder what he'd moved around. He swore and oath, but it felt like he was teasing.
"I guess it depends what you've seen already," she said, forward. "Why -"
Nemo bit back a question she didn't want to ask because she didn't want to hurt him. Why he hadn't cheated at blackjack. But maybe they'd already answered that, both of them on this tree branch tempting fate like plucking fruit.
"What do you think you're going to find up there?"
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Her hesitation told him more than a direct yes or no could have. Virgil took a deep and final drag from his cigarette - perhaps he needed to have this conversation with more people. Or perhaps he shouldn't have told anyone at all, life was easier when nobody knew before. He breathed out a lovely little cloud before stubbing the fag on the ledge of the battlement.
"What do you think you're going to find up there?"
"I don't know. I don't... I don't go looking for things, it's only surface stuff." Virgil turned slightly to lean against the wall and bring his legs up so to hug his knees, facing Nemo. A little shove could send him plummeting. "Just, imagine if everyone around you was always talking. Always. Since you were a child. Sometimes they're talking about trivial things - you know, groceries or calling their uncle Isiah or whatever."
He reached for the coffee and drank more of the coffee to wash down the taste of tobacco. Virgil looked at his own fingers wrapped around the thermos, uncomfortable with making eye contact when he talked about his Legilimency.
"And sometimes people talk about really fucked up things. You get used to it because your baseline for what is normal is constantly changing," he drank again, then used the back of his hand to wipe his mouth before glancing at Nemo. "Then someone finds out, hey, you can hear them talking to themselves. They worry."
The wizard shrugged, making an effete gesture as if to wave away this imaginary concern. "It's white noise. I'm not really listening unless I need clarity for a conversation. I would go proper mad if I listened the way they think I listen."
Who's to say he hadn't already gone mad?
"I haven't gone spelunking in your head." Virgil clarified gently. "Fishing in a shallow stream, maybe, to catch whatever we're talking about at any given time."
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Something about what Virgil was saying didn't line up. He didn't normally talk this much, and this was the first time they'd ever talked at length about anything like this. She thought back to the night she'd been first banished from Camden Town Hookers and he'd been a pal and they'd read palms.[1] He'd been deft, but then, divination was his training. What she wanted, she realized, was to be able to trust him. She'd always loved Abby Ried, but she and Abby had found a line when Nemo had asked her to help with the Grimshaw's phenomenon.[2] They'd made up, but it felt like a door had closed and her world was smaller.
Virgil was at the same time reassuring her that he didn't pay attention but that there'd been times he'd done things he wasn't proud of. Nemo relaxed her face realizing she looked pained, and busied herself with her hat and her hair again. People were complicated, and they ought to be, but it left her feeling isolated.
Things had been simpler when she and Virgil were just two blonde waifish idiots.
"Like."
She hedged.
"I just want you to be you, man. I don't want you to act weird around me, protecting me or whatever."
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"I just want you to be you, man."
Virgil dropped his head back against the battlement, laughing. He could hear the hint of hysteria in his voice and it sobered him. His smiled softened, his lucid blue gaze settled on Nemo as if he were looking at her from very faraway. "Do I look like I have any idea what it means to be me? Does anybody?" What did that even mean? It was something you would see on a billboard in the underground, waiting for a train to come rumbling into the congested tunnel.
Live your authentic life! Buy Schwarzkopf hair dye!
The wizard rubbed his face with both hands. What was he doing, talking to Nemo about this? She didn't understand, she had her own problems. Like telling a shark you have knee problems.
"I look out for my friends, that isn't acting weird is it?" he dropped his hands and sighed heatedly. "Friends look out for each other, but I've never... I trust you to tell me if you actually need my proper help."
Virgil glanced to his right, catching the breeze against his face. His nose was red and his eyes watered in the cold. "If you think I am acting weird, just say so. I won't mind," he looked back at Nemo. "I like to think that we can be honest about that."
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"Aw...!" Nemo's face fell at Virgil's reaction. She hadn't meant to do that. "Nooo...." she whined with a little chuckle, but let him carry on. Now they were both feeling super self-conscious and ordinary and angsty and that wasn't them. They were meant to be divine and poetic and above the folderol. Maybe that was a fantasy and they were both as mundane as everyone else. That was an icky thought to step in.
He did, though! He did seem like a boy who knew who he was, who existed as a concise form, a nebula with edges. She sat back and pursed her lips seeing his exasperation with her. They weren't on the same wave length, just a few inches to the left of each other and what she felt was static. She let the discomfort ride. Discomfort could be instructive in its abrasion, in its tendency to peel back dead layers.
"No, right. I get that. We can. That's not what I meant," she said gently.
"I mean, when it comes to your -- 'gift' sounds insipid and I hate it and I'm sorry -- what you do, what you said comes naturally, the mind-reading and all those stars. Just do it. I don't care."
Nemo shrugged and furrowed her brow, feeling very convicted in that. Why should her friend have stifle himself? Of course, she wasn't giving him permission to just go strolling in whenever he felt like it, and Nemo hoped he understood that. She nudged his foot with hers.
"You don't have to keep your hands over your ears around me. S'all I'm saying. That's the most honest we can be, right?"
She lifted her eyebrows at Virgil who looked like he might cry. She crossed her arms feeling like she shouldn't touch him again.
-
"You don't have to keep your hands over your ears around me. S'all I'm saying."
He looked at her rather seriously for a moment, unaccustomed to being given permission. Virgil was mored used to asking forgiveness. It meant a lot - and not just to him, he could see that it was a big deal for Nemo even if she was trying to be really cool about it. She wanted him to be comfortable, wanted them to be comfortable around each other. Not many could or would say the same. Sometimes it felt like he was born to throw people off-kilter.
"Okay." Virgil nodded, crossing his arms over his knees and hiding his face in them. "Okay, thank you..." he mumbled as he pulled himself together, uncertain of when he had started falling apart in the first place. What was wrong with him? Even being at home with his parents hadn't solved it; Edgar and Angela would always be there to help but they weren't the right people for it. All they could do was hold him. And he didn't want to be held, not now.
When the young wizard looked up again, chin on the tops of his bony knees, he nudged his foot back at hers and smiled gently. "Sorry. It's been a difficult couple of... difficult few months. It's nice being up here with you, away from the rest of it all."
-
Nemo was good at sitting in quiet, good at existing in the exposed and awkward. It was disarming though, seeing a boy feeling something. Growing up, the boys had derided feelings and passion, laughing when they managed to push a girl to shouting. Here now, she chose her people better. Here, now, she hardly knew anyone younger than twenty. She didn't know how to comfort V, or even if she should, so she let it be until he was ready.
And soon, he seemed to be. He looked young like this, like maybe they were in a make-shift fort in the woods. But they weren't - they were on a tall tower in the middle of one of Europe's business cities, high in the air and no one knew where they were. As far as she knew, it was only her, Virgil and Lazarus who'd been out here.
"Yea, it's pretty wild," she agreed. She tried to decide whether to ask him more but then decided he'd tell her if he wanted. That's what they were agreeing on. Instead, she moved onto her knees and pulled over her always-bulky bag. She rooted around - obviously bigger on the inside - and soon pulled out her tarnished accordion. Nemo got settled again, sitting up on the edge of the roof, propping her foot up on the battlement.
She began to quietly play, just something gentle in her favorite key; she barely moved the bellows. The night sky sucked up the noise.
"Can't remember if I told you," she said, unable to keep her mind away from the edge. "But this is were I met that vampire. Lazarus."
Nemo didn't seem upset about saying so. It had been intriguing. And the contrast to how he was then to when he'd played apart in their tragedy made her mind swirl.
-
Something in him calmed at the sight of Nemo's accordian and he thought: there is always music. The world could be ending but were will always be music and they must never forget it. Before he was even born, lullabies sang to a swollen belly, there was melody and rhythm. And long after he died - Merlin knew when - there will be voices, a funeral hymn.
"Can't remember if I told you...But this is were I met that vampire. Lazarus."
Virgil turned his head and looked right at her. His chest thrummed anxiously, calmed again. Lazarus, who rose from the dead. Was that actually his name or a poetic joke? The vampire who had saved Nemo by telling Hooker to bite him instead, and stick her with a needle or whatever it was. He still couldn't tell if that night had been a blessing or a curse.
"Lazarus, Lazarus, fanged and pale," he half-sang in a falsetto voice as he hugged his knees tighter. "Looking out for mortals, hearty and hale..." Virgil trailed off, humming along to the accordion for a second. Perhaps a blessing. Nobody had forced them to go to Camden and without Nemo's friend something even worse might have happened. He could have been turned or she could have been drained or...
Or whatever Terry Hooker did to people in the back room of his pub. "Tell me about meeting him," Virgil finally asked.
-
A smile sneaked onto Nemo's face. It was good to be around people who were comfortable in their creating. A little song about the grey immortal, they were making together. Comforted she also was that her bringing it up hadn't pushed Virgil away. All Lazarus had ever done was try to help her - not so much for Virgil. She wondered how many time it would take talking about it for her to forget. Maybe it just needed to be amputated into a song to live on its own, immortal itself out of their heads.
"It was my birthday," Nemo said with a patient laugh for her younger self. Deciding to mess around a little, she began to speak just so, just along in a rhythm. She wasn't as quick with couplets tonight, but it didn't matter.
"Birthdays still matter to a witch seventeen," she said, thinking. "She claimed her cloud but there she was found by a vampire curious and wandering. Guess my name, the vampire said, so thus she named him Strange." Nemo laughed a little again.
"Nobody sent him - " She'd thought it had been Hooker, "Nobody met him. He knew she'd run away."
"And ... From her he wanted only one favor, wanted to try something new."
Her fingers stopped on the keys. "He said to the witch, what could I do, what could I do for you?"
Nemo lifted her shoulders, still as surprised now as she was then. Turning a dream into a verse, it was nice; Nemo no longer apologized for self-indulgence, for aesthetic, for being young.
-
Nemo painted a picture with her words.
He could see it in his mind's eye, little lost witch gone wandering in dangerous places on her birthday. Birthdays could do that to you. He hadn't really thought much of turning nineteen but this year he would be turning twenty - and even though he knew it wasn't going to flick a switch, somewhere, inside of him, he felt like it would mark the leaving behind of certain childish things. At least he hoped as much.
"So he wanted to help?" Virgil spoke into the silence as Nemo's accordion fell into silence. "The helpful vampire. It sounds like something Edgar would write." A musical about a vampire who went around trying to do good things but never quite got it right, in the way Genies did not always grant you exactly what you wish for.
He rested his chin on his knees, watching Nemo thoughtfully. "What favour did you ask from him?"
-
It was good to have friends who appreciated flights of sweetness and prose. Virgil could be counted on for that. When he mentioned Edgar she first thought of Poe, for the context, and showed her skepticism with a wrinkled forehead. But no - she remembered quickly that Edgar was his father, who'd come to collect him, who owned Stardust, and who conjured elaborate spectacle.
She chuckled. "Yeah, dude wanted to help. It was like he'd never done it before. Like it was his first time ever thinking about somebody else and thought this was how you did it."
Nemo shook her head and began to quietly play the chords from the Pentral song. "But you remember this one, right? From Abby Reid and the Pentral. There's not a lick I know about vampires, other than they're old, I think. So I asked him if he knew the song."
She switched the tune into 3/4 time and it sounded a little more like a carnival song.
"He did. Called Pentrals 'banters'."
-
He hadn't expected conversation to veer into pentral territory. That made Virgil sit a little straighter, awake to the memories of Limbo. Nemo had asked the vampire about the song to do with pentrals and the vampire knew the tune...
"Called Pentrals 'banters'."
"Banters?" he repeated, laughing a little at the name. "I guess they must have gone by a different name where or when he's from." It would be obtuse of them not to assume pentrals manifested differently in other cultures or in other eras. Lazarus was old, from Merlin knew exactly where, and he'd probably seen a fair bit of the world. Maybe that's what Mysteries should have first done when the pentrals started appearing.
Quizzing vampires and anyone else who had been around in the last few hundred years. Not that the Ministry had an especially good relationship with such beings....
"I'm glad you befriended him, even if he did tell Hooker to bite me." Virgil smiled dryly at Nemo. "I hope he continues trying to help people. I guess nobody's too old to try and change themselves."
Or too young.
-
Nemo paused in her playing.
Her friend? The prospect hadn't crossed her mind. The swaying, mumbling vampire both intrigued and unnerved her, his movement and lack of breath made her suspect a jumpscare at any moment. His brand of helping came from a different angle. Virgil seemed to accepting of her connection to Lazarus even though he'd thrown Virgil to the wolves. A knot came to her stomach; she wasn't ready to forget any of that yet and not ready to see Lazarus or any vampire again.
Nemo had come to the same conclusion as Virgil about the vampire's word for Pentrals. Lazarus had helped with that, at least.
"Not sure about 'friend'," she said. "But the other part, that's a nice hat to put on the night."
Nemo adjusted against the roof and pulled her coat around her closer. The air was getting colder, but Nemo felt warmer somehow as if she and Virgil's moment had created a pocket of coziness. Or it could just be their foggy breath. Or the onset of hypothermia, the blood retreating from the surface of the skin - to escape the cold or the talk of vampires. She shrugged the accordion strap on a little better and started again but with a change of key. One of those solemn major keys that was good for war poets.
"I'm going to stay a bit and play. Not ready to come down yet."
Fin