He’d secured a comfy spot, crossed his legs, and parked his drink (which he was totally unashamed to admit was probably more pump flavoring and whipped cream than actual caffeinated bean juice, but whatever, it was freaking delicious and he didn’t have to worry about anyone whining about him being hopped up on sugar to worry about for now…
Well, except whoever was watching his tweet feed for a running commentary as he made up stories with rapid thumb taps about the people around him. At least until he saw a head of bright red hair bounce through the door, and the phone dropped from suddenly numb fingers into his lap, because he was pretty sure he’d just seen a ghost.
It certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing that had happened recently. Well…probably in the top five… but…
It looked just like her. It couldn’t be her but it looked. Just. Like her.
He fumbled around for his phone and sat up straighter, blinking in confusion and trying to decide if he should call someone. But what the hell did you say? Hey, come over here I think I just saw a dead girl walk into the coffee shop with me?
---
Mercy was, in a word, exhausted. She had gotten into the coffee shop line because she desperately needed coffee. Not tea, coffee. Granted, by the time she was done with her order the coffee flavor was mostly drowned out by chocolate, caramel, and cream, but it did the job. When she got her cup she walked over to one of the chairs by the window, a hand absently brushing a stray bit of red hair over her ears.
She’d gone to the window for a few reasons. One, it let her look outside and focus on her whole reason for coming here, which was to study a bit and give Arthur a bit of work space to work on their project. And two… It let her try and figure out who was staring at her.
Ever since she’d walked in she’d felt eyes on her, and it was creeping her out. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing up, so she was doing her best to use the window like a mirror to look behind her and see if she could catch anyone staring. She spotted a few culprits, but none that were obvious. She sighed, huffed and shook herself a little, bringing the hoodie she’d bought the other day at the thrift store, too large, somewhat worn, but WARM, black affair and zipped it up a bit.
“I’m just being paranoid…” She muttered to herself, before pulling out her school books to try and focus.
---
OK this was making him crazy. He kept trying to check again and see if her face had changed, or at least become less familiar, but it stubbornly continued to be Mary’s face. And it made it worse that she was not the age she should have been if she lived. Younger than that. It made it feel more like he was looking at a ghost, and he was struggling to make up his mind.
He took an angry gulp of coffee trying to sort it out, and gave himself a mental kick in the shorts. He had to do something about this. She already looked uncomfortable not in the fun, annoyed way.
He put the coffee back down to try and keep claim on his spot, figuring he’d be able to go back and get it and go -after- he was done making an idiot of himself, and walked toward her, trying to get it straight what the hell he was going to say.
“Uh… Hey.” He called, walking toward her and tucking his phone in his pocket. “OK this is going to sound like a bad pick up line but you look… -exactly-... like someone I used to know.”
He hoped his expression read more to his actual confusion and distress than a creepy round of shitty flirting. “But you literally can’t be Mary Haynes.”
Or if she was he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do.
----
She had been about to write the whole “being watched” thing to paranoia and her albeit slow recovery from the “vampire sickness” when an older man, she’d put him at roughly college age, but it was hard to tell between the long hair and… the words hit her like a truck and her hackles immediately rose. She could feel the words, I have a boyfriend, rising to her lips. It was a lie, of course, one that Mercy would feel guilty of even if she hoped it would become true sooner or later. It was usually an effective deterrent for the types of creeps that took a look at her more mature physic and weren’t put off by her youthful face.
But before she could could bring down her haughty, scathing, retort to the presumption that she would even deign to acknowledge this…
The rest of his words stopped her cold, and her eyes widened in… shock? Fear? It was hard to tell, but one thing was sure.
He had her attention.
“How… Do you know my Aunt?” She said with a low, surprisingly angry hiss. “Were you one of the monsters that gave her the drugs and left her to die?”
It appeared she had formulated a bit of an opinion on her Aunt's death.
---
He went from guiltily warily to angry and defensive on the spot, nose crinkling. But in spite of abrupt and colorful temptation, headbutting an attractive young woman, apparently Mary’s -niece-, just wasn’t his style, and he wasn’t even sure where it came from, outside an urge to defend himself and Lucas from that rage. Lucas would have just taken it, bless the man for a meat-wall, but Michael Kidder… not so much.
“Oh hey, look at you, Little miss DARE Program, you gonna slap me across the knuckles with a shitty ruler?” He snapped, reflexively. “******** no.” Good Lord, definitely not Mary. He had trouble picturing Mary needing to pull this kind of judgy-pants wedgie out of her a**. At least, evidently, he was sane.
s**t though, not a good foot to start off on. He held up a hand, pinched the bridge of his nose with the other and took in a deep breath. “Let me try that again. No. I wasn’t even there that night.”
Thank god or he imagined he’d have somehow been dragged by the ear to juvie or whatever other trouble he could have been fired into. Bad enough what had happened to Lucas over some goddamn weed. Not that he could have done much for her if he had been there. He’d never had that kind of power. It would have been like the court jester trying to lead a revolution. “I’m Michael Kidder. I knew her in school, and I’m not the kid of idiot who’d have done something like that to one of the only people who didn’t want to slam my head repeatedly in a locker door.” Which didn’t tell him anything about what she had, or hadn’t been TOLD about him, but he supposed he might find out.
---
The glare she leveled at Kidder could have punched holes through titanium. Her feet found their way to the floor, and she found herself looking up at the man, and in another time and place that would have been imposing…
But Mercy had faced down monsters three times his size. She’d been cut, bitten, clawed, and worse.
She feared no man. Least of all some jackanape that thought he could saunter over and drop her aunt’s name like he KNEW her. How dare he dredge up an event she had not known of until Lucas had come back into her lives. That made her even more angry, not at her Uncle - for him all she had was sympathy - but the fact this man would dredge up the painful past so offhandedly made her sick.
Her finger poked him in the chest hard, her voice rising in both volume and pitch. She could already tell she was making a scene, but she didn’t care.
“How dare you!” She hissed, finger stabbing again. She glared up at him, even as he started to backpedal. As he spoke, arms crossed across her chest in a way that would probably stop Kidder cold. Had it not been for the baleful glare she cast his way, she would have been Mary’s perfect doppelganger. The small ticks were there, the puffing of her cheeks in obvious frustration. The tight hugging of herself as she felt obviously uncomfortable.
She was still glowering at him, but she had simmered the roaring flames of anger to embers.
“Sorry,” she finally said, bowing her head and scrubbing at her eyes with her hands in a vain attempt to stem the tide of angry tears that were going to come regardless. “Aunt Mary is a bit of a sore spot for me, I never really met her… I only learned about her when Uncle Lucas came back… I’m sorry, Mr. Kidder-” she gave a small, if curtsey. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It has been a very rough month.”
---
Oh god. This was just. So. … so… if it were a horror movie she’d probably be lining him up to rip her own face off and then drag him to hell or something, but it wasn’t. She was just a kid, she wasn’t Mary, no matter how much she had the face, the mannerisms, the fury.
Further oh my god though.
“OK just…” He flinched, holding up his hands as though warding off something unpleasant. “Just Kidder. Everyone just calls me Kidder. Or something ruder but that’s not what we’re going for here.”
Rough month. God, it had been. A rough couple months, and he didn’t imagine Sam-I-am would have made it remotely easy to reabsorb Lucas into the family tree, and was probably still desperately trying to saw off that branch as aggressively as possible. He was -not- ready to take on his father's title though. He hoped to god he’d never be that awkwardly stuffy. Being ‘Michael’ at home was odd enough, when he’d felt divorced from that part of his name since forever.
“Mary’s a sore spot for everyone.” Except maybe the people who’d actually killed her. The ones who should have been sent to rot and hadn’t. “But man you are like seeing a ghost.” He hesitated to bring up Lucas, even to mention her uncles continued pain, not sure how that relationship stood, and pretty sure he couldn’t spackle a patch onto it in five minutes.
-----
“Uncle Lucas said we looked alike, but I wouldn’t know,” Mercy said with a sigh. “Daddy pretty much erased the event from family history, so all I have is second hand accounts.” This statement was followed up by another puff of cheeks, before she finally climbed back into her chair.
She looked at the empty seat beside her. “You can sit if you’d like,” she said, trying to be a bit more… polite in her tone.
“I’m sorry, about before, really…” Mercy said, plucking a bright purple pen from her to tap lightly against the doodled cover of her notebook. “I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions like that…”
---
Kidder looked down at himself, and really -looked- for the first time in… well he’d actually started to get comfortable in his own skin again, if only because he was too busy worrying about everything else, but man, he didn’t blame her for thinking the worst of what he imagined looked like a mangy woodstock scarecrow.
“Yeah no I can’t blame you, it’s been… it’s been crazy.” He couldn’t even get into it, the kind of crazy he’d been involved in… well…
“Well Lucas and I have better hand accounts, but I don’t imagine I’m any more in favor than Lucas. Especially after…” He caught himself short of accusing Sam Hanes of an a straight up frame up, which it had been, but the kid didn’t need to be caught up in her dad’s bullshit. “...Yeah I’ll tell you what I can about being friends with your Aunt if you want, but maybe better off if I don’t get into the stuff between your dad and your uncle. Opinions I’ve got but they won’t help you put the pieces together.”
Maybe when she’d gotten what she needed to know she’d also be prepared for some casual joking around.
“I’ll… get my coffee.” He noted vaguely, gesturing toward it and moving to get it, and no small part wondering if he’d gotten in over his head.
---
There was a long moment of silence before Mercy nodded. “I would like that,” she said. “Like I said, I never knew Aunt Mary, so anything to help fill in the pieces would be appreciated.” Not to mention her father wanted her to stay out of this whole ordeal, but that just convinced her how important it was to know about all of it. From all angles.
Her father was not perfect. She was keenly aware of this fact. He was overprotective of his only daughter, but Mercy was getting the sneaking suspicion that her close likeness to her deceased Aunt was fueling some of that. She would not however, not allow anyone to speak poorly of him, with cause or no, he was her father, and for all his faults she loved him.
“I think that is… wise,” she said to Kidder in reply to staying out of things between her father and uncle. The Fact that Kidder used her uncle’s name casually, made her think that her knew him in more than passing, but she decided to withhold inquires to her uncle’s well being for now.
She had been too busy as of late to spend any solid volunteer hours at the BookWyrm, though, soon she would be old enough to part time, but she doubted Jessie really needed the extra hands if her uncle was helping out.
She waited for Kidder to return, her pen slowly tapping against the notepad, wondering if this was really a good idea.
---
He thought about texting Lucas as he retrieved his coffee, even started to reach for his phone, then decided to take it easy. Hard as it hit him, personally, he had no idea how hard seeing her would hit Lucas, if they hadn’t seen each other already, but damn he was going to have to find out.
He took another sip as he went back, mostly because he was feeling a bit dry, and realized it was pure nerves. It was just so… uncomfortable. His brain kept trying to tell him they’d gotten her back, but he knew they hadn’t. Not really, it didn’t work that way. Not…. not normally. (This last with an uncomfortable recollection of Lucas unconscious in the alley way.) And man he wanted a smoke, but couldn’t in here. Coffee would have to do in the meantime.
“OK so.” He forced a smile, which he didn’t even try and make look less forced, because there was a lot of obvious dancing around sore points here. It was like tangoing around open nerves. “Oh god I don’t even know where to start, so… uh. I dunno. Ask me something.”
---
“What was she like? Before the drugs, I mean,” Mercy asked, turning her head to look at Kidder as he sat. She did not return his obviously forced smile. There was no point in pretending this wasn’t awkward. The sooner Kidder accepted that the more inclined she’d believe he was a decent person.
But that was beside the point.
The pen had stopped tapping against the notebook as she watched him. “You can spare me the details of her death, Uncle Lucas already told me.”
---
Well that answered that question, they had crossed paths.
“Good to know. He didn’t mention it… or you.” He was going to have to kick Lucas in the butt for that one. … Where the hell were those pics of him in the fairy wings. He should share those. “Uh. Well she had a lot of your mannerisms. She did the...poofy cheeks thing too. It was a stitch.” He gestured vaguely, over-emphasizing the gesture with his hands for comedic effect. “Lucas and I are buddies but we wouldn’t have even met if she hadn’t been there. She was like the glue that stuck everyone together.” He fished for ways to describe it, the details that got nebulous with time.
“And you know she was -smart-. Well I thought she was anyway. Like this stupid a** time I decided it was a good idea to harass the jocks because they kept grabbing the girls and yelling… so there's me, in… this… horrible goth phase, so, even shittier looking than after those stupid a** bats at the Halloween fest. So I’m -that- guy and we’re all tired of these idiots but I’m the one who figures on returning the favor and I run up while they’re talking to her and one of her friends and I -grab- this dude’s butt and yell… I don’t remember what but it was pretty crude and awful and just -run like hell- while he figures out what the hell just happened in front of a full hallway of kids. She helped pry me out of a goddamn trashcan afterward and she was doing that whole mad face thing and telling me off for being stupid and then she just kinda starts cracking up and she’s trying to help unstick me from being stuffed in a can and trying to stop laughing and it was... “ He waved his hands. “Her. Like she’d punch you in the arm for being a jackass and then laugh at the funny bits. You could have a serious talk about class work or world issues and then talk about where to hide some rotten eggs in the yard of that nasty a** old lady who tips all the waiters with those godawful fake bills with the “come to Jeebus” talk. She was cool.”
---
Why would Uncle Lucas need to tell this man about her? It sounded like they were close? He definitely sounded close to Aunt Mary, and so she listened intently to his description of Mary.
“She must have been a very special friend,” Mercy said, tone implying that the relationship might have been more than that. “I am not nearly as… cool… as she was though.”
She wouldn’t have done half of what he described, or at least, she would have been too afraid of getting in trouble.
---
“Not my girlfriend, if you’re wondering.” He picked up on that tone. “She was a little older than me, it never even crossed my mind to ask.” Though thinking about that made him think about what Lucas had said. The missed cues. Definitely no such clues here even if he’d wanted them to be there, but god this kid made him miss her like a missing limb. “She was.” He admitted. “Special I mean. The kind of person who makes you feel like your particular brand of weird maybe isn’t as impossibly broken as you worry it might be.”
Which came more uncomfortably close than he wanted to to admitting that he spent a lot of time, especially back then, and when Lucas had been gone, figuring he was too ‘broken’ to be around other people. Avoided trying to make closer friends, stuck to his studies and trying to help out at the vets office with as much sarcasm locked behind his teeth as he could manage without all but literally exploding. “You seem like a good kid though, looking like her isn’t your measuring stick. I mean hell. I look like Ichabod Crane and my life ambition does not stop at being chased by a headless Hessian with a thing for gourds.” He flashed a wicked grin at this, but he hoped she got the point. She might hear it again and again ‘you look like her’, but god he hoped no one made her feel like she should be her.
---
Not an old boyfriend then, good. If that had been the case, Mercy would have found the first opportunity to excuse herself, and then make herself scarce. She’d of powered up and climbed out the bathroom window if need be. But no, just a friend, good.
At his statement though, that Mary had made him feel like his weird wasn’t broken, Mercy shook her head, eyes taking on a dull, almost empty look as she spoke.
“Everyone is broken in some way, Mr. Kidder. This world is cruel, cold, and very unkind. We have to fight for our moments of happiness, but even then, there are those that would rather see us suffer.” Her voice was, almost bitter.
“Some, like my Uncle, are more broken than others,” She added, looking up at kidder with eyes that did not belong to a fifteen year old girl. They were almost hollow, looking past him as if he wasn’t even there. “Some can’t show they are broken at all.” That statement was made with a small smile, before Mercy shook her head.
“Of course, I am a ‘good kid,’ Mr. Kidder. I am a lady.” Her eyes met him again, seemingly normal for all the emptiness they had contained moments before. “Or at least I strive to be.”
---
He wanted to laugh at the ‘I am a lady’ bit. Or throw a dramatic bow, because it was funny. It should be funny. It should be hilarious in this day and age, that antiquated gentility, but it wasn’t half as funny with that hint of something hollowed out behind her eyes, that maybe called at something hollowed out in himself, though maybe shallower. She’d seen some s**t, and for all he knew she was wearing that lady status like porcelain armor made of teacups and the bones of extended pinky fingers. Quaint but horrible at the same time.
s**t he wanted a cigarette, and he caught himself with one hand raised, two fingers up like he actually had a cigarette to puff in it. He was smoking too much lately. He didn’t care. He did care but also didn’t.
“More all the time.” He agreed, though he frowned a little at Mister Kidder again. “I can’t even tell anymore if this city was this messed up when I was your age or if we just had our heads deeper in our own quicksand. Now it’s full on freakin’ X-files out there.”
Souls. The lady with pockets said, and ripped him out of existence.
“My father keeps bitching about the cops not being able to take care of things but man, I’d be shocked if they could.”
----
There was a painful pause, long and very pregnant. Mercy’s eyes looked down at her notebook, almost as if Kidder’s last statement had hit home in a painful place.
“They can’t,” She said softly. “I am sure you have heard of Senshi, Mr. Kidder? The Negaverse? Both tout themselves as helpful, but very few know the truth.”
This was incredibly risky - and she knew it. He could be the enemy and she would never know. He knew her face, her Uncle. It was entirely possible he could use these as leverage.
“There is a war going on in this city, Mr. Kidder. It is for the fate of every person in this city. There are some who would call the Senshi evil, and they are wrong… Sometimes evil greets you with a smile and an open hand…”
She was looking out the window as she spoke, not wanting to see Kidder stare at her like she had three heads.
---
...Well. He’d throw out a line and he’d just, he suspected, hooked a Megalodon. “Unless the senshi were the ones who nearly killed Lucas the other night by ripping a freaking sims plumbob out of him and put me in a week long coma well before that….” But he suspected that no, that had to be the Negaverse. Smile and an Open hand. “Wave a taser at someone that can do that and see where it gets you.” He growled, and sipped coffee because everything about it made him feel cold again. “He got lucky, his apparently mental almost-date didn’t seem to know what she was doing and dropped it when I freaked out in her general direction. It certainly wasn’t the gun show over here….”
He threw that out, decided to see where she was going with it, because she clearly had something to say and he kind of thought he wanted to hear it. Lucas didn’t know what had happened to him, but her? She kinda felt like she knew something.
“Good thing he did too, who else am I going to bother into wearing giant sparkly fairy wings and taking pictures. Granted I think he should just put it up on an online dating site, he’d have to beat off actually sane, non Smoking-Man-Agent types with a stick, the jerk.” He snorted, in an way that clearly indicated he didn’t think Lucas was a jerk. And added, because the conversation was dark and uncomfortable and he wanted to break its surface tension. “I’ve got copies on the phone. There was a flower crown.”
---
There was a moment that Mercy’s body tensed so hard the pen in her hand began to shake. This was followed by the soft sound of plastic cracking and a pained hiss as Mercy dropped the now cracked pen onto her notebook. The fact that the Negaverse had attacked her uncle, and the fact that Kidder had been there and prevented it, made her take a new look at the man.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “It would have been taken and hoarded away into their stronghold. Uncle Lucas would have died. You saved his life and I owe you a debt I doubt I can repay. But if you ever need help… You can call on me and I will do what I can.”
The empty eyes were back. She remembered that awful place, curled and sobbing around a pail of starseeds. Waiting for the horde of youma to crash down on them. The fire, the screams, the smell of blood, the bodies…
She didn’t even realize she was crying until the tears hit her chin.
Shaky hands rubbed her eyes as she let out a small, weak, laugh. “Sorry… you shouldn’t of had to see that,” her voice murmured as she tried to force a smile. “I would love to see those photos, actually. Uncle Lucas didn’t strike me the Fairy type… He’s more of a knight or a dragon to me…”
---
Kidder looked about as shocked by the tears as if someone had actually turned a taser on him, though he realized he supposed maybe he shouldn’t. Not with that empty sadness, though at least she laughed, however weakly, and he hastily pulled out the phone and thumbed in the codes, thumbing through to find the appropriate pictures.
“Thats sort of the point though. It wouldn’t be half as much fun if it was what people -expected-.” He pointed out, and handed her the phone. Worst she could do was flip back into pictures of Bodi, or eye his contact list, short as it was.
“I mean I’d -like- to know a bit more about all this plumbob yonking bullshit and… stuff… but let’s settle for dropping the Mister. My dad is Mister Kidder and I am not ready to satisfy years of griping to cut my hair, ditch the beard and get a business major.”
He’d send the place down in metaphorical flames in a week and probably laugh the whole time, then go back to his birds.
----
She did laugh a bit at the photos, small things, but earnest. They were also tiny reminders of laughs Kidder had heard ages ago. Mercy was ever the ghost of Mary, and it was unlikely that would ever change. She shook her head, watching Kidder for a moment.
“Kidder it is then,” she said softly with a nod. “To be honest, the less you know the better. I’ve seen their base. It was a nightmare.”
She still had nightmares. Waking up in cold sweats and silent screams.
“Fighting them as a normal person is impossible… They will just kill you. If they don’t their pet monsters will.”
---
Normal people. Ha. Oh that felt increasingly funny. But this was going to be a pain in the a**, trying to get information he was pretty sure he needed, and he floundered, hands making expressive acrobatics as he tried to figure out how to ask the question. And then thought of something.
“I just… I mean ok but…” He stood up, retrieved a coffee-stirrer and a napkin, and came back, using coffee from his cup to draw a circle with a cross in the center. “But what’s -this-.” He asked. He remembered it on the pin, and it was the only actual -symbol- he could think of. It felt like a symbol. It might have been the magical equivalent of ‘Killroy was here’ for all he knew. “What’s…” What was the term? “What’s -Nether Wallop-”.
Don’t tell him about the base, fine. He wasn’t planning to pull a Katz anyway. Don’t explain the plumbobs, great. Stick to sims jokes and hope they stayed where they were. But he had to at least know what happened in the bar alley.
---
There was another long stretch of silence as Mercy looked down at the symbol and listened to Kidder speak. She had not met many knights, but had met enough of them to at least have some vague idea of their naming convention. A hand grabbed napkins, quickly wiping the symbol out of existence, before grabbing another to scribble on with the cracked purple pen.
She handed it over to Kidder with a look that was equal parts sympathy and understanding.
Not here, too risky to talk more about this in public. They are everywhere and could be listening. Meet me at the park near Crystal Academy, the one with the fountain, at around 8 and I will explain more.
With that she nodded her head and began to pack up her things. “Thank you, Kidder, for watching out for my uncle. But we should both be going…” Her voice was a small implied warning.
“Until, next time,” she said with a bow of her head as notebook and pen were shoved into bag.
---
“Oh ******** my life….” Kidder growled, half under his breath, and raked his fingers through his hair. He kind of figured it would somehow be tied up in all this, but he’d been holding out, he realized for some kind of ‘oh that's nothing it’ll go away’.
“Great. Just.. great. I’ll see you around…” He was too flustered to even come up with a parting nickname, at least not until it would be awkward to tack it on. Adding on a random “Ms Manners” would just sound stupid and wasn’t exactly him at his best either.
Oh god and he couldn’t tell Lucas. Lucas would turn spontaneously white haired with worry for his niece.
When the hell had his life turned into an damn X-file exactly?
He waited while she left, glancing around as subtly as he could to see if it looked like anyone was following her, then chugged as much of his coffee as he could stand and tossed the rest on the way out. The park near Crystal huh? Great. Juuuuust great.
Torvil
