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 Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 4:19 am
Hematite sat on the steps outside the Barren Pines auditorium, lazily cleaning off his butcher knife with a piece of torn cloth that couldn't possibly have belonged to him any more than the blood it mopped up. That was the nice thing about knives, and humans - you didn't have to be particularly good at using a knife, and humans didn't blast you in the face with any of that magical explosion s**t. Oh, and to top it off, it was a school day. No classes? ******** yeah. So, aside from not being able to persuade Nealite to call off her engagement, he was rather enjoying the past few days.
The zombies hadn't turned out to be particularly efficient on their own, so Hematite had to direct them very carefully and specifically if he wanted them to actually do what they were supposed to. And if there was one thing better than spending all day taking out his aggressions on Barren Pines survivors, it was being able to kick back and take a long smoke break while some youma did it for him. He was down to a quarter of the pack he'd swiped off of Nealite, and had already smoked more cigarettes this week than he normally managed in the space of two or three months. One of these well-deserved cigarettes was half-hanging out of his mouth at that moment, well on its way to ashes.
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Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 5:34 am
The youma were running wild over the campus; for all intents and purposes, the project had gone off successfully. They were much smarter than the average youma, though that wasn't saying a hell of a lot as there were moth traps smarter than Mr. Crumpets. It had gone well. They all had the pleasure of a job well done. And then, interrupting that warm, summery glow in the middle of winter, the General-King suddenly popped into existence like swine flu.
"You should get that ******** thing out your mouth," he said, but in a massive display of hypocrisy held his hand out for a cigarette anyway -- possibly Ursula didn't let him smoke up the house. It would have been vindicating had that been the case. The General-King stood there, arm outstretched, demanding, until for serenity's sake Hematite shuffled one out and passed it on to him -- Charonite had a light, when did he not have a light, and he leant back against the pillar of the stairs and watched the campus.
From far away there was a bloodcurdling scream. Pleasant.
The General-King lit up. He looked exhausted. He looked tired as hell. However, the only one who would have cared about this was Nealite, as you could not accuse Hematite of wanting to know or bitterly caring to know about how the leader of the Dark Kingdom was doing. He at least wasn't pressing the issue about the cigarette.
He exhaled a breath, sucking in the smoke greedily and blowing it out in fine white curls.
And then he said, roughly --
"Are you gay?"
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Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 6:33 am
The sudden arrival of Charonite had Hematite practically dropping his makeshift weapon in surprise. No amount of care and vigilance ever prepared him for ******** teleportation. Son of a b***h, what the hell was he doing here!? The bloody blade was set down on a concrete stair off to the side. After having lost, quickly and rather badly, to the General-King in their most recent fistfight, Hematite had once again lapsed into simply wanting to avoid the source of his problems. Same ones as ever, only now on top of the disrespect and the threats and demands, he was planning to marry Nealite. ******** hypocrite. 'Girls are nothing but trouble'.
Hematite did almost take the cigarette out of his mouth (since it was preferable to having it shoved up his nose, like he'd been previously threatened), but the hand stopped halfway as he got to his feet. The General-King's hand was out. Did he want the cigarette? Did he want a cigarette? The expression on the General-King's face was as unreadable as ever, to Hematite's annoyance. The teen's hand moved away from his own smoke and down to his jacket pocket, where the box was stowed, and slowly, regretfully, plucked one out and dropped it in the outstretched hand as though he were dropping a $100 bill into a paper shredder. Cigarettes were terribly hard to come by when Hematite had no money. But he wasn't going to say anything, because like every complaint he had for the General-King, voicing it was asking for it. At least he still had the rest of the pack and the half a cigarette he was in the middle of. Lucky day.
Charonite was treated to a wordless, sullen glare from the lieutenant. Hematite went at his own cigarette as well, anything to keep himself from breaking the silence. It turned out to be unnecessary, because the General-King came at him with the last question he had ever expected to be asked by a non-Hillworth student. What!? Had all of Hematite's failed attempts to chase skirt (while successfully gaining minor injuries) been forgotten? Was getting caught making out with a girl sending the wrong message about his interest in women? Had Obsidian been using that godawful nickname somewhere Charonite could hear it?
"I didn't ban myself from making out with my girlfriend, sir," Hematite stated pointedly, passive-aggressive as ever, though he looked extremely flustered by the question. "But if you'd like to drop it, given how it's such a hassle for those of us involved with women, I'd be more than happy to show you just how straight I am with her."
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Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 1:43 am
"Look, I was just ******** saying that if you were gay, I wouldn't..." Normal people would have said 'mind', or 'judge', or even 'care', but the General-King finished up with: "... talk about it. Wouldn't be the first. We all wondered about goddamned Zo -- never mind."
He seemed aggrieved, a little distracted. "Good," he said curtly. For Charonite, this was practically dancing around with ants in his pants and wringing his hands; he didn't even seem particularly furious today, just frustrated. He was taking the aggression out on the cigarette, still looking out over the eerily silent (intermittently) Barren Pines campus.
"Well."
Pregnant pause.
"Ursula."
Oh.
"Women are no ******** different than men," said the General-King. "It's a matter of biology. No difference otherwise, anyone saying so is a ******** liar. I never was prejudiced against them, I opened the goddamned Negaverse to them. General-King Kunzite would have let Tanzanite through -- and then kicked her off a cliff for being ******** psycho, but that's Tanzanite for you. So."
He blew out smoke again. "What the ******** do they want."
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Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 9:23 pm
"Well I'm not," Hematite snapped. Why the hell was his goddamn masculinity being called into question here? He didn't even know who the hell Charonite was referring to. Probably must have known them however vaguely before he'd completely lost 16 years of his life. More 'family friends' or something, who knew? He was just annoyed that the General-King seemed so amiable about dropping these references as though he expected him to get them, when the subject of Hematite's own past and family were off-limits. Oh, he could ask again, but he'd tried that recently and it hadn't ended well.
He went at the cigarette for a while, looking annoyed at first by the mention of Ursula. ********, Charonite wanted to talk about the ******** engagement, huh? But as the man kept talking, the tune was changing. This wasn't another one of Nealite's attempts to justify her marriage. This was... this was an opportunity. The General-King was here, asking him about women? Hah!
"Women," Hematite began with emphasis, watching the General-King carefully as he spoke, "want to be useful."
The trick to lying that Hematite had come across in his year of evading trouble was never to lie outright. Telling the truth was absolutely not the point, but if he wanted to sell someone on his words, he had to make sure there was just enough believability that the falsified information slipped past anyone's defenses. Hematite knew Nealite well enough for this. But would the General-King buy it? Hematite couldn't help but get his hopes up; after all, which one of them had teleported all the way over to the other just to counter-steal cigarettes and ask awkward questions? One hint: Hematite couldn't teleport.
"I don't want to name names, but I know of at least one woman who was too eager to do the jobs you gave her. I think you had to order her to take two weeks off?" A knowing smile, however forced. The lieutenant took a few nonchalant steps closer to the General-King, though he made sure to stay out of range of any chance blow-ups should he make the wrong move. Sure, Nealite followed Charonite's orders dutifully, but that was because she had that ridiculous infatuation with him. Even that patience and 'understanding' had to have a breaking point, especially when placed into the supposedly inexperienced hands of the General-King. Just look where that tolerance had got her - about to be married to that a*****e, and sharing her body with a ghost queen or something. That was just not right. And obviously no one else was going to do a damn thing about this very important problem. "Women want to take orders, especially from us men. There may not be a big biological difference, but there's a huge psychological one."
To punctuate the remark, Hematite tapped his forehead with one finger. "That's what you didn't think about, sir. They think differently. You just have to be more... aggressive? You'll get what you want out of women that way."
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Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 10:04 pm
The General-King looked at Khaldun with so much skepticism that it covered him like a second skin, a greasy one. He stared, tapping the cigarette as a terse piece of punctuation. His eyebrows had gone up right into his dreadlocked hairline, and he said: "What the <********> are you talking about?"
Apparently it wasn't striking a chord into Hematite's Dear Leader. Charonite was now looking at him as though he were speaking pure crazy b***h along the lines of 'grapefruit monkey dishwasher', mouth now in a sour line. "You -- ********, do you know Beryl at all? You think women like taking orders? Some of them -- god, Ursula? Likes taking orders? She used to b***h if I complained about my ******** coffee. Queen Beryl liked taking orders from goddamn nobody."
He was looking disquieted, though, as though he didn't want to believe but was considering it anyway. Khaldun's fishing line was being bobbed a little. "You've got to be shitting me. What about your little girlfriend? Audrey?"
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 3:06 am
Not good, not good, not good. So maybe Hematite had exaggerated. A lot. Selectively. But he'd been banking on Charonite having been serious about his limited interaction with women the last time they met on the Barren Pines campus. Apparently not; he really shouldn't have been surprised he'd been lied to. Charonite never joked, but he hadn't been joking that time, just applying the ridiculous double-standard as always without any hint he could even sense the wild contradiction. And to what end? The day Hematite wanted to be more like the General-King was the same day he'd pick up a henshin pen and a short ******** mini-skirt, and go hug some trees. Both required hell to be frozen over.
He took another drag or two from the cigarette while he tried to think. Oh well, if he wanted to salvage this, he'd have to work quickly. "I'm just telling you what you wanted to know, sir."
But Hematite looked just as confused right back at the General-King, caught off-guard. He didn't know Beryl, and in some wordless sense really didn't want to. That whole incident struck him as off, uncomfortable, backwards, and that inability to make sense of it bothered him. Why Charonite had stood up for him against this Queen Beryl, just as the General-King had been threatening to kill him anyway, Hematite still had no ******** clue. Everything was supposed to have a pattern, but those he'd spent the longest trying to understand were suddenly unpredictable. "Beryl? I thought we were talking about 'women', you know, lipstick and high heels and PMS, but strictly the non-ghostly variety. Women. Like Ursula. Not... uh..." The lietenant sifted around for the appropriate honorific, trying to defuse the situation. It wasn't often (ever, really) that he had to use one for a queen. He still sounded about as serious about his commitment to the term as he did when he addressed Charonite with 'sir.' It came out flat as paper. "Her highness."
"And I don't know where you heard Ursula complaining about making your coffee, sir. I mean, every time I've had to wait in the office she'd never shut up about the latest thing you ordered her to do." Lies. She fawned over the General-King himself, to Hematite's eternal disgust, but it wasn't because of the obstacles Charonite put in her way so much as despite them. "I'm just saying, all women want it. Don't tell me you're really surprised by this."
"Audrey? Girl lives for this. Does what I want, and shuts up when I want, too. She'll do anything I tell her to - and you might have noticed she's all over me." Hematite was more than a little smug about this fact. He'd been relentless with girls before, but since he'd actually managed to kind of sort of land a girlfriend, he'd become absolutely arrogant on the subject. It wasn't an improvement.
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 6:29 am
Charonite automatically cuffed Hematite on the ear. It was so automatic, so deeply-seated, so kneejerk a movement -- "Stop being goddamn nauseating," he said. "That's disgusting. Ugh. You disgust me. Goddamnit. I have no idea why anyone would be all over you at all."
Really, the one time Ursula had dared to complain it had sounded more affectionate than anything else. In hindsight, it was probably teasing. Very borderline teasing. Very subtle teasing. Subtle teasing might as well have been invisible to him back then, with Ursula. He'd just remembered the complaint.
"Sounds like you're kissing a goddamned robot."
The entire conversation was now a little... sickening. The implications in 'anything I tell her to' made him both irritated and vaguely horrified at the same time. It was the kind of conversation you wanted to lock up in a box and float out to sea. Why the hell had he asked Hematite. "If you want a partner, go for someone who you ******** respect, go for someone who won't do... what you... tell. Them."
Charonite ground to a halt.
Reason: he was paternally ********, he was paternally lecturing.
"All right," he said after a moment, turning back to his cigarette. "How about you and I just forget we ever had this conversation. Let's forget it ever goddamn happened. How do you feel about that."
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 7:31 am
"Hey!" Hematite had wandered within range of that one, unfortunately, but he skipped back a few steps to cup his ear delicately with his free hand while he glared. He was feeling unusually sensitive about getting hit anywhere near his face by the General-King since he still sported the signs of bruises. Charonite had come all the way here and asked him all these stupid questions just to disagree with it all!? Hematite was getting sick of being degraded. It wasn't worth it; he could find more direct ways to try and get a wedge between this a*****e and Nealite. He wasn't holding his tongue so well lately. It was the fact Charonite was dating Nealite - the fact tipped the scales of his defensiveness just a little too much. "Well, right ******** back at you. Ursula's like a decade younger than you! How about that?"
"Better than not kissing anyone, sir." The truth was that Hematite had no real grasp on 'normal' or 'socially acceptable' outside of what he gleaned from others. And Charonite had, up until extremely recently, dumped him in Hillworth, which was about as far away from normal on the spectrum as a school could manage to get. Charonite had also recruited him into a military organization right off the bat, one where killing was an everyday activity and the General-King, Obsidian, and Nealite were who he'd attuned his makeshift moral compass to. So this was normal - for him. What Charonite was telling him now absolutely wasn't. It conflicted with all the information on 'love' he'd ever grasped. It also sounded out of touch with reality to him, like the talk about the Negaverse having a queen had. Hematite narrowed his eyes slightly. Respect? Wasn't he the one who was supposed to command respect in a relationship? That's what he'd always seen, and it worked for everyone else. The ******** was all this bullshit all of a sudden?
A question was sharply aimed at Charonite, as Hematite ignored the offer to quit while he was ahead. "Why?"
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Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2009 7:39 am
It was more bizarre that this was the first that Charonite had ever bothered to talk to him about love, since all other conversations about love had ended the sentence in: "... the Negaverse." The Negaverse was meant to be your wife, girlfriend, best friend and dog. That had never deviated. Until now.
"Because this conversation's making me want to ******** throw up," said the General-King. "And because she's not a decade younger than me. She's thirteen years my goddamn junior and I know that better than you do."
He seemed tired. This was the only reason why another cuff around the ear did not eventuate. "It was ridiculous thinking I wanted to talk about this with you," he said. "Stop slouching. And stop goddamn smoking, Khaldun."
Then he blinked out of existence.
This was just unfair now.
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