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 Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2010 12:03 am
The teacher had slipped Khaldun a note in the middle of English, some cryptic summons during the lunch hour. Office notes at Hillworth were color-coded for panic, not unlike an emergency alert system. The manila-colored ones were the best ones; the worst one could mean was a brief chat with the principal, culminating in a slap-on-the-wrist detention, but more often than not they simply meant a trip to the school counselor or health office. Manila was Hillworth's collective favorite color. Second after manila, and for some the real favorite, were the orange slips. An orange slip called a student into the office where Mrs. Killingworth, formerly Ms. Johnson, worked. But it was the green slips that struck fear into the hearts of students. It was the green slips that meant trouble. Green ones used to just mean the P.E. department, but in the hands of notorious troublemakers, they were synonymous with the phrase 'now you ******** up.'
Needless to say, Khaldun's note was neither manila nor orange.
The note was also in several crumpled, torn-up,and lighter-torched pieces in his pocket by the time he stopped in front of Coach Killingworth's office. It was two minutes to noon. He'd already learned not to try and show up late or skip out - he'd have no mercy to beg for if he did that. Already he was uneasy about the thought of having to explain himself to Killingworth, whose vocabulary was strictly devoid of 'fun'. It wasn't clear why Killingworth wanted him here, and now (well, maybe it had been, but he'd angrily burnt a sizable hole in that part of the note before he'd had a chance to look it over). Khaldun could only venture a guess that someone must've ratted him out to cut time off their sentence. There were too many recent infractions to guess which one he was about to get yelled at and disciplined for. Smoking out behind the gymnasium might have been a bad idea in retrospect. Stapling shut the math gradebook thirty times when the teacher left the room certainly had not gone unseen. And that Alexander kid whose shirt Khaldun had ruined with a leaky pen (really, it had taken like three or four), well, Khaldun would see him in hell.
His fate all but sealed, Khaldun screwed his face up into a stoic expression and knocked weakly on the door. Once, twice, and lock seemed to click itself open from the inside while his fist hung in the air before knock number three. Uh-oh...
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Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2010 11:47 pm
The door opened. Gunn Killingworth stared down at Khaldun Cilentani with his sunglasses scraped up high over his purple dreadlocks, staring down at him impassively as though he'd been left in a rush basket with a FEED ME note right outside his stoop. Weary resignation. He said, "Get in here," and watched as the younger boy shuffled inside.
The General-King closed the door. There was a lot that he might have called Khaldun in for, either for Khaldun purposes or Hematite purposes. There was the mission they'd organised that was going to be enacted on Friday night, if Uranophane didn't plug him from behind in the middle of it. Maybe it was the smokes. Could've been Jesse Alvarez, but ratting out cig-smokers wasn't really Jesse's style.
Could've been anything. So it was baffling as hell when all Charonite did was sit down at his chair, crack open the window, and gesture to the coffeepot taking up residence on a stack of folders: "Get me a cup," he said, "Ursula's on her lunchbreak. She thinks half an hour means forty-five ******** minutes -- anyway, get yourself one too, if you're inclined."
Uh, what.
"I heard about the stapling."
Okay.
"I don't even give a ******** s**t," said his guardian. "That's the stupidest ******** thing I've ever heard. I don't even know how you goddamn did it. If I can't work out how you did it, I'm not going to ride your a** about it -- no milk, all right."
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Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2010 1:13 am
Khaldun couldn't help but grin a little triumphantly from where he stood near the other side of the desk. It was a clear admission of guilt without having to say a word. So he'd been caught, yeah, but it sounded like he was off the hook for this one. Miracles did happen! He made a mental note to try the stapling trick out in P.E. class sometime when Jesse or Elzo had Killingworth's undivided attention. Then he went back with a mental eraser and scuffed it out hastily from his thoughts. Too soon. Maybe on graduation day - after all, he was sure he'd be out of this hellhole school by then, and it'd be one less place to be bossed around by his... 'parents'.
"A magician never reveals his secrets," he quipped, clapping his hands together and folding them. His expression had gone slightly distant when Killingworth mentioned Ursula, but otherwise he appeared to be as he usually was - which was to say, barely kept in check. The teenager spotted the styrofoam cups out of the corner of his eyes and pulled two from the stack, not about to question the oddity of the request, or the offer. Ursula never let him have coffee on her watch, for some reason. And it was too expensive to buy it. Not so glamorous as smoking, and hardly illegal enough to bother with, but Khaldun wasn't picky about forbidden fruit.
"C'mon. The look on the teacher's face was priceless. Even you had to think it was a little funny, right? Huh?" ... Maybe not. He sloshed some coffee haphazardly into both cups, set the pot down again, and pushed the fuller one across the desk, between the folder mesas and trailing a streak of coffee dripping behind it. Killingworth's ward was definitely not born with the blood of secretaries or baristas. Hovering uncertainly next to the empty plastic chair across the desk, Khaldun's eyes kept darting toward the closed door. He was off the hook, right? He could go?
"So, uh. Is this about Friday? Because I mean, I wouldn't say no to putting it off for another week or two or ten or something. For the new kids. Not for me, no sir." How many times had he tried to stall for time on his missions? A hundred? Two hundred? It never worked, but that was no reason not to try. One hand rested loosely on the back of the plastic chair, hoping he'd get to push it away instead of sit in it. He was already simultaneously running his mouth off and damage controlling in real time, reading the expressions that crossed the General-King's face to guesstimate how close he was to verbally stepping on a mine. "Not to say I've got any issue with getting a team of girls, sir, it's just that these girls are Manice, Manice's girlfriend, and the Hillworth princess. Ghost Hunter's the only one who's remotely useful in a fight, and she's out sick. But hey, hey, whoah, consider the mission accomplished, I'm just- for next time- something to consider I guess, unless you... don't... want to. But that's cool. It's cool. It's all totally under control."
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Posted: Thu Apr 22, 2010 2:19 am
Charonite's expression had become more and more withering as time had gone by. First one eyebrow cocked up, and then to emphasise the extreme wither the other had followed suit. His hands wrapped around the coffee cup and he raised it to his mouth, but none of the withering did cease. "Close your mouth," said the General-King. "Something will fly into it one of these days, and then I'll have to face the fact that it's more useful as a ******** nest than anything else."
It was fairly light for his guardian. Even bordering a joke, albeit an incredibly lame one. The withering gaze just turned into a mutter as another swallow of the coffee went down, and another, as Khaldun did not get told to leave or stay. As long as he'd known the General-King he'd loved coffee. He loved coffee as though he had never known coffee before, had only been exposed to it in the last few years of his life and was amazed at its existence. That and cigarettes. Actually, anything stimulant that wasn't a hallucinogenic. He was too dignified to drink anything green that advertised itself as Mountain Dew, but had the soda had a little more gravitas the General-King might have been doing the Dew all day long.
"Sit."
Khaldun had to sit.
"You have no goddamned respect for anyone else in your team, Cilentani," the General-King said. "How do you expect to lead them when you're this juvenile? Are you surprised Uranophane's out for your blood. Are you."
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Posted: Thu Apr 22, 2010 10:49 pm
Well, there went the hope that he was going to be let off with a warning. Khaldun sank into the chair uneasily. It wasn't built to be sat in. Someone, somewhere, in Sweden or China, had made possible an uncanny valley for furniture. It looked a chair, it sat where a chair ought to. But the plastic furniture never seemed to be meant for actual use, except perhaps for helping with interrogation. Then again, maybe that was why Killingworth had one or two of them on the other side of his desk.
Khaldun shifted uncomfortably under the General-King's gaze. He'd never stopped to notice all the creases in his uniform vest. And wow, the plaid pants were so plaid. And for some reason the fact that Killingworth was just sitting there drinking coffee and putting him through an impassive maturity guilt trip was somehow, inexplicably worse than being yelled at and cussed out and fought with. Things had been different since Khaldun had ended up in the hospital, comatose and bleeding to death. Charonite was no less demanding of Khaldun still, maybe even more demanding than before, but the crude and heavy-handed approach had practically stopped somewhere between the hospitalization and the promotion to captain. The teenager didn't understand. But he was nervous. Things were simpler when Charonite made it easy for Khaldun to hate him. When he hated someone, he didn't care what they thought about him and what he did. But he'd always been indebted nonetheless, whether or not he hated his guardian. And it was because of that guilt that he dodged his responsibilities. He wanted to try and control his situation and self-image, keep things the same as they always were, safe and predictable. If only Charonite knew how much Khaldun feared failure, defeat, weakness, and truly being unable to pay off his debts through the Negaverse. The way it was now, he never put his all into most things, and tried to appear largely apathetic and uninterested. What if he tried his best, but his best wasn't good enough? Better to deceive everyone into thinking this was his best. Set the bar low. The teen may have played himself up as an eternal failure already, but in his own little world he'd never have to know his own limitations, and he'd never have to see how far he really was from all the expectations of him.
"They're supposed to respect me," he lamented, though it was halfhearted at best. That strange feeling of a pit in his stomach had started up in full force, and he hated it. Dark eyes flicked up to meet the General-King's briefly, but darted back to his scuffed-up loafers soon enough. It was obvious from Khaldun's body language and expression that he already knew it was the wrong answer to give, but it was the only answer he could think of. It was impossible to grasp what the General-King was trying to get at, so all Khaldun could take away from it was that he was ******** things up and hadn't even realized it. He wanted to lead by fear, and intimidation, and respect would be earned by show of force. How could anyone lead out of respect alone? Where the hell was it going to come from, if not threatening them every time they stepped out of line, and following through just to keep it fresh in their minds? "That's what ranks are for. I'm their captain, not their counselor."
And then, as if to combat his own tongue, he grabbed his own cup of coffee and tried to casually down a mouthful. He hadn't doctored it with milk or sugar, but he quickly realized the importance of doing so. Coffee was awful. Khaldun spat it back into his cup as subtly as he could, which was not nearly subtle enough, even as he tried to lower the cup out of view, held in his hands just above his lap. Apparently, even when it came to Ursula's coffee-making, everyone was a critic.
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Posted: Fri May 07, 2010 7:49 pm
After all this time, he had realised some things about his General-King. He was a stickler for duty; he was more stodgy than a villain had any right to be, ever; he still had no idea what Ursula really saw in him; and it was hard for his answers to be right. But where a lecture usually started with they're supposed to respect ME all Gunn Killingworth said was, "You're supposed to earn that respect. Start listening, Cilentani."
His arms were crossed over his desk, and his line of sight meandered away from Khaldun and over to the wall. The coffee was drunk as though it were ambrosia and not the godawful burnt liquid that only he could stomach -- maybe that was why Ursula married him, the key to her hand had always been in waiting for th eman who could stomach her coffee -- and worse, made Khaldun wait as he slowly drained the cup.
"It's Ursula."
His eyes were deadly serious.
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