Title: Julie M Gormly
Author: Kevin POston (Fojiao2)Alternate Dimension New Orleans, Louisiana, Tuesday, 11:25 am, May 27, 2003
"Cruel! That's what you are! Mean as a cottonmouth!" Nina's sharp tones cut through the darkened house.
"You're no bed of roses yourself," Connor responded bitterly. "Christ! God damn, where'd you learn to be such a HARPY? They give you lessons in some Alabama finishing school?"
"Don't you take the Lord's name in vain, not around me!" she warned.
"CHILDREN," came Angel's deep, commanding voice, quieting them both. The old, old vampire sat in a rocking chair, his human grandchild curled into a sleeping ball on his chest, where he cradled it with the utmost tenderness. "If either of you wake this child, I'll give you a scar of some sort. So if you have to continue arguing, can you do it another room?" He motioned with his head toward the bedroom. He had no problem at all sentencing the two teenagers to a bedroom, for although he held the evidence of their former passion in his arms, he knew that now they'd sooner cut themselves into small pieces than touch each other.
Nina stuck out a pouty lip. "No, I don't have any more to say," she said.
Connor leaned toward her, leering. "Well, I do! You give up?" He stepped into the bedroom, looking over his shoulder until his face couldn't be seen.
Balling her fists, the young woman stormed into the room after him. "Why do you gotta be like this?!"
"It's the only way to be," he said. "In case you hadn't noticed, we've been sucked into another dimension. We have to be on our guards at all times."
"So that makes you be mean to me?"
He smirked at her. "No. That's just for fun."
"Ohhh!" Nina stomped her foot in frustration and threw herself onto one of the twin beds in the room. "You're a monster! You're nothin' like the Connor I first met!"
Connor wasn't looking so happy anymore. "That's where you're wrong," he said. "I've been like this for a while now. Had everyone I loved and cared for walk out on me. So I finally got the message, the thing they'd been trying to teach me since I was Dev's age: that I can't count on anyone except myself. And that just because they're older and more powerful doesn't mean they have the answers." He crossed his strong arms, staring furiously at the floor. "Nobody has all the answers in this world. Nobody and nothing."
Nina looked up at the now-silent young man. She really was more compassionate than either he or his father could think of being... because she hadn't made the mistakes they had. Well, there was ONE mistake that she and Connor shared - which is probably why she reached out to him by saying, "Why don't you ever go any where with Dev and me? Why don't you go to church with me?"
"Church!" he snorted, rolling his eyes.
"It isn't right. You didn't even see your own son baptized," she said, her voice holding an edge of teariness.
Connor spun around, finger raised righteously. "What you call CHURCHES are just tombs, girl, tombs for some dead invisible man in the sky! There's nothing up there but the Powers That Be, and they spend most of their time laughing at us and baiting us like fish on the end of a line!"
Nina looked completely shocked at this outburst. "You can't talk about God like that," she told him.
"'Cain't,'" he mocked her accent. "Goddamn, you are so COUNTRY! I'm from L! A!, do you understand? I party with the rich kids in the richest city on this continent. At least I used to, before I got - " He looked around helplessly at the moldy ceiling above him. "Trapped! I'm trapped in this crumbling, antebellum Southern eyesore of a city that's sliding into the Gulf! We shift friggin' dimensions and I'm still stuck here!"
Nina crossed her arms defiantly. "You like New Orleans. You told me you did. Now you hate it? And you say I'm whiney. You never stop whining 'bout your own problems."
"Oh, what would you know? I'm sure your fine Alabama education prepared you for everything, eh?"
The young girl swallowed a deep knot of pain, and her voice - if her Daddy could have heard it - would have driven that proud Papa into a rage against the boy who brought her so down. "I've had to take on a lot in the last year; I think even you'd agree with that. I didn't grow up around vampires and demons like you. But I've been adjusting, and doin' all right with it. As if havin' a child wasn't adjustment enough! So I say, if you wanna leave so bad, maybe you should just leave."
Connor laughed bitterly. "Ohhh, if only I could. But I have nowhere to go. At least with the family I'm getting to fight the good fight." He shook his head. "Of course, that gets harder for me to define every day. I'm just another soldier in Spike's army. Don't think he'd miss me all that much." The young man sat down heavily across from Nina. He looked at her without bitterness for the first time in a long time. "Why'd you ever sleep with me?" he asked.
"What?!"
"I mean, a girl with your looks and... that bust. Little place in Alabama. The boys must've been trying to knock on your door since you were just a kid."
Nina's face now had a grim look. "Since eighth grade. If Daddy Jean hadn't taught me a few tricks in fighting, I might a' been one o' those victims you spend your time protecting."
"So why give it up for me? What's so special about me that you wanted to go all the way?"
"You're kidding, right?"
"No, I want to know."
Nina put her hands up as if sweeping back the curtain of memory. "I was all by myself in this city," she said. "First time I'd ever been away from home. And then you come out of nowhere. It was like you were... Superman. You never had any problem protecting me; wasn't a challenge you couldn't knock down. You had a house for me, and money, and - and you gave me your attention. Something you ain't had time to give me in a long while," she said, her voice turning bitter. Then she closed her eyes, seeing the boy she'd known then, making herself the girl she'd been at that time, and her voice was now light and hopeful. "You were a hero and you had power, so much power that it spilled out of you, carelessly. Everything you touched seemed to absorb it. You showed me a world that I could take command of. When we'd go through the zoo, or you'd drive me around town and take me to all these fancy restaurants... it was like you owned the city. You didn't know what fear was. Is it any wonder that I wanted that... IN me, as a part of me? I'd never met anyone who could make me feel so safe, not even Daddy Jean. You were there for me, and I wanted to give you all of myself that I could." She opened her eyes, expecting to see his usual sneer, but Connor was humbled and made silent by her words. His face was so open, his eyes so filled with emotion, that she felt she might get an honest answer out of him. So she asked, "Why did you want to sleep with me?"
Ah, there was the patented Uncle Spike smirk, just as she expected. "Now you're the one who's kidding, right?" Connor asked.
"No. I really want to know. The real reason. Was it just 'cause I'm pretty and LET you?"
The smart-ass answer was on the tip of his tongue, a barb ready to be delivered. But he was still resonating with the power of her answer to him, with the strength of her words; so instead he decided to be honest. He didn't hesitate to look into her eyes as he spoke. "You were so innocent. Okay, not innocent like a baby, and you sure knew how to work it once I got your pants off. But... your soul. It was so innocent, so quick to trust. You weren't untouched by life, but you weren't messed up by the baser parts of it. You were always looking to the sky instead of seeing how everything was covered in slime. And your faith! You had faith in the silliest, stupidest... the most endearing things I'd ever seen. You weren't doing it to be popular, to follow a crowd or anything. You really believed, with all your heart and soul. And you had no idea what it was like to live in a place where that's rare, where that's something to be cherished and taken care of because it's like a single flower blooming in the middle of Hell." He paused to take a shaky breath. "It was something purer than I'd seen in a long time. It's hard for me to even remember when I was that innocent. Maybe when I was seven and attacked a demon with a bottle of dishwashing soap, 'cause I had to make it 'clean’." He chuckled at the memory of little Connor, a person he didn't know anymore. "So, like you said: is it any wonder that I'd want to be part of that? I wasn't just looking for good lay. I was trying to find something sweet and pure that wasn't a part of the world of darkness that I saw every day."
The two teenagers then sat quietly, staring at each other, the potentials of both their lives hanging between them. For this moment, without words, they could exist as they did in their dreams, without a past or a future or anything beyond the NOW. They could take from each other and not think about consequences. Neither of them rose to approach the other... but it was a very near thing.
Then, from the other room, came little Dev's cry of need, his tiny soul needing the presence of his mother. And suddenly everything was consequences. Suddenly the past was all there was and the future was a frightening spectre leaning over their shoulders. Suddenly every mistake they'd made was open and bleeding once more, and their grasping hearts shut down, and their faces became masks once more.
Nina stood. "I - I gotta get Dev, calm him down," she said, already moving toward the door.
Connor lay back on the bed. "Yeah, you do that. It's what you're best at, isn't it?"
Nina stopped cold in the doorway, looking at his reclining figure. "Cruel," she said, the word snapped off, and then went to take her child from Angel's loving embrace.
Connor could only nod at her assessment. But there was nothing to do about it. So he put his hands behind his head and looked for the Mendelbrot Set in the cracks on the ceiling. It was going to be a long wait for the sun to go down once more.