Chapter #7The Boy from Before Everything, Part 1 by: Seuzz   You're all ready to head out the door as Marta, but a change is quick to make, for your emergency kit is just a few feet away. You quickly pull off your clothes and stash them in the bag, and pull out Levis and a white t-shirt and sneakers instead. Your body stretches into a tall, lean and masculine shape as you slip into the comfortable travel clothes. You slide a comb through short brown hair.
"Oh. Hey man," Frank's disappointed voice comes from behind you. "What happened to Marta? I thought she'd be going with me."
You flip through the case of spare IDs until you find Nick Martin's cards. "Handle them yourself," you say. "I'm running up to see Kali."
"Sure. But Marta's always a selling point with these people."
"We should start putting ads in the gay press," you retort. "See how you like it for a change."
His chuckle is a surprise, until you hear his follow up. "I'd like to see Billy out in the brush," he grins. "Those short-shorts?"
You just give him a look. "And would you love me if it was Billy in your bed?"
He shrugs. "We both make compromises to make this work."
"Sure. And your compromise is that you don't ask me to be anyone but Marta. I'll be back in a few days," you say, and give him a manly clap to the shoulder. "If you have to string the new clients along, Marta'll reel 'em in when I get back."
* * * * *
Though a plane would be much quicker, you catch a train from London Kings Cross station, for you want time to think. Your morning meditation clarified the nature of what happened last night, but the fact of it hasn't settled solidly around you. Indeed, you have rather a bifurcated sense of reality, as though looking at the world through two sets of eyes. There is really no question of who the dominant personality is, of course. The figure who rose from dinner and turned to find another figure gazing fearfully back from a darkened hallway had ten years of life and something like a lifetime of experience beyond the terrified youngster. You might as well feel influenced by the six-year-old self you sometimes feel within you. Still, the teenaged Will Prescott brought a very strong impression with him, as you sometimes get when the sharp odor of grilled cheese sandwiches or the sight of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the television suddenly casts you back to long-past days when you would sit, rapt in front of the TV, in your foot-jammies in the old house in Saratoga Falls.
As you settle back on the train, you close your eyes and try to think back to where the "split" between his reality and yours must have occurred. In both universes you bought the Libra Personae in a used book store, and in neither universe did you want much to do with it after you'd gotten a closer look at it. You smile grimly over that, for you know now that it was probably going to get you no matter what you did. So it proved in that other reality, you see. You gave it to some classmates--Stars, but you've not thought of Justin Roth or his friends in ages--but still wound up playing with that damned book, with calamitous results. The sudden and recent merger with that "other you" brings back vividly people and situations you'd put away so long ago: the stink of Westside High, the pettiness of its students, the weary resignation of its teachers. People you've not thought of in forever: Caleb Johansson and Keith Tilley and James Lamont and Carson Ioeger. Your own family. You twinge hard at that, from two directions: the horrible fate that overwhelmed them in that other place, and your secret abandonment of them in this one. You glimpsed them, actually, only a few months ago, on a trip to Saratoga Falls, though it was only at a distance, and of course you didn't speak to them. It would have been impossible.
And it amuses you, in a bleak way, to "remember" yourself fighting alongside Gordon Black and Aubrey Blackwell, of all people, against a common foe: There could be no surer sign of how desperate things were than that they should have been your allies. In this reality, of course, Blackwell had been your first, erstwhile instructor in the world of magic, until you'd met Frank and Joe and switched allegiances, and gone off to study with Kali and join the Stellae. It's a been a crowded history since then ... | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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