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The start of chapter two, in which Eames appears. Yay Eames! Sally Cunningham, the other notable character in this part, is halfway between an OC and a vanishingly minor canon character -- she is physically based on the blonde woman Eames forges on the second level, but her personality is entirely my creation.
Also, I should probably mention at some point that Peter Lebrun is, of course, Peter Browning. In the same vein, Fisher is Maurice Fischer, and yes, there is a reason I keep misspelling his name. :-) But anyway, on with the story. (1,775 words)
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Weregild, part 9
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Sally Cunningham leaned across the plastic table at the twenty-four hour McDonalds, giving Eames a calculated glimpse down her low-cut green blouse, and whispered, "Your coat is vibrating."
Eames grinned at her, sliding a hand into his pocket to pull out the little machine. "Thank you, I had somehow failed to notice, what with all the excitement."
Sally raised one penciled eyebrow and sat back upright. "Oh? Do tell."
"You know how it is: any time I see your glorious face and hear your entrancing voice, I altogether lose track of reality." He unlocked the phone and opened the message. Unknown number, one word: spanner.
Arthur was in trouble.
"Bloody telemarketers," Eames grumbled, deleting the message. "I don't want any upgrades."
Sally dipped a French fry -- really, what Americans did to innocent potatoes didn't deserve to be called chips -- into her little paper cup of ketchup and bit it in half. "You're a funny sort of technophobe," she said. "If it blows things up, you can't get enough, but if it's for talking to people? Heavens, no! Back, foul demons of silicon and wire!" She stuffed the remains of the fry into her mouth and held up her two index fingers in the shape of a rough cross.
"Computers take all the interest out of human relationships," Eames said, stealing one of Sally's fries. "It's no fun if you can't at least hear a person's actual voice, let alone see and smell their body. For example, if I couldn't see your face and the set of your shoulders right now, how would I know you're wondering whether you can get away with slapping me as a joke?"
"You wouldn't," Sally conceded, "but that's mostly because I wouldn't be wondering it, since you wouldn't be sitting in front of me stealing my fries. I already bought your dinner. Have a heart and leave mine to me."
"Since you ask so nicely," Eames said. "Listen, I'm going to go wash up while you finish eating -- maybe walk around the lot, get a bit of fresh air before we go back underground. Meet me in the car in fifteen?"
"Yeah, sure," Sally said. "Give me the keys."
Eames tossed her the keys to their rental car, slung his battered brown coat over his shoulder, and headed toward the washroom. He stole one more fry as he went, easily dodging Sally's halfhearted punch.
Two minutes later, he was outside at the edge of the McDonalds parking lot, where it bordered a strip of scrubland at the edge of a back road. There were no cars parked here in the arse end of the night, he couldn't hear anything beyond the normal rustling of night breezes and tiny prey animals, and he was fairly sure neither Lebrun nor Fisher cared enough to send a spy to watch him and Sally eat artery clogging grease. This was as close to privacy as he was going to get.
Eames opened his phone and started to dial Arthur's number.
Then he paused. Just because he was in a position to talk now didn't mean Arthur was. He probably ought to show a bit of consideration and text instead, setting a time for Arthur to call.
Eames scowled down at the little silvery phone and tapped out a single word reply: noon. That would take care of the vampires, and if Sally or Robert happened to be awake, it would be easy enough to redirect their attention to each other, letting him slip away clean. Lebrun's other hangers-on might be trickier -- for one thing, Eames didn't know who half of them were -- but he wasn't a thief and con-man for nothing.
He wasn't the one who kept tripping over new complications.
"When this is all over, Arthur, I am going to point and laugh for days," Eames murmured as he deleted the record of his text and flipped the phone shut. "I've been dancing with Fisher for almost a year. You only have Dom Cobb to wrangle, and you can't even manage that half the time."
If he was being honest, he might admit that it was harder to maneuver a person you were trying not to hurt or lie to, but Eames tried not to let honesty get in the way of his own amusement.
He kicked idly at the loose gravel where the asphalt met the grass, then turned and headed back to the oasis of light around the McDonalds.
Sally was waiting in the driver's seat of their rented car, something that looked like the mutant offspring of a sedan and a sport utility vehicle, painted a horrible burnt orange.
"You know, about the only thing that could possibly make this vehicle less awful would be lime green racing stripes," Eames remarked as he buckled himself into the shotgun seat. "That would be so over the top it might come back around to tasteful."
Sally favored him with her coldest unimpressed stare. "This is why I pick our clothes," she said. "You do all right with style and fit, but you have no color sense whatsoever."
"Too true, love. You've hit upon my deepest secret. I'm colorblind, completely and utterly. It's shocking how well I've overcome that handicap in my work as a painter," Eames said lightly.
This time, he couldn't evade Sally's punch. He caught her hand as it withdrew, though, and squeezed her fingers gently to make a point. Werefoxes didn't have enough numbers to bother with elaborate dominance hierarchies like wolves or some of the great cats, but if push came to shove, Eames outranked Sally. He was stronger, and he'd been a lycanthrope much longer. It was best that they both remembered that.
"Dick," Sally grumbled, shaking her fingers out with excessive melodrama. "We've looked in on Lebrun's businesses, we've eaten, we've done laundry. Anything else on the list tonight?"
On his list, certainly, which was his own stupid fault for getting over his head in New York five years ago and consequently owing Arthur his life. On Sally's list? No, she was well out of his mess.
"Not to speak of," Eames said, tilting his seat back and stretching his legs and toes. "Tell you what, though -- I seem to recall passing a Dunkin' Donuts on our way to dinner. Let's grab something sweet for Robert on our way back, yeah? I'll foot the bill; you'll get the credit."
Sally's wide-set eyes softened and her smile was small and warm. "You're the best sometimes, you know?"
"Go on, flatter me more," Eames said, and let Sally swat the air in his general direction.
They bickered amiably as they drove around unfamiliar streets in search of the elusive Dunkin' Donuts, as they debated whether to buy extra donuts to save for breakfast, and as they headed back to Hunter's Point.
The old shipyard and much of the surrounding area had been surreptitiously purchased by vampires over the past decades. Once Addison vs. Clark had made the undead legal, Peter Lebrun had openly declared the neighborhood to be the vampire district of San Francisco, and poured much of his hoarded money into renovating and revitalizing the area. It wasn't as lurid or famous as the vampire districts of New York, St. Louis, Savannah, or New Orleans, but it was a close fifth, easily beating out Chicago (whose Master of the City preferred to fly under the radar). The small sister district across the bay in Oakland was also under Lebrun's control these days, wrested out of Mallorie Deschain's hands with fatal finality.
Lebrun kept his daytime resting place in the basement of a large brick building that seemed to be a perfectly ordinary four storey apartment complex. In point of fact, the majority of the outward facing "rooms" were nothing but closet-sized decoys. The real rooms were in the windowless interior, and filled with vampires beholden to Lebrun. The higher they were in his favor, the lower their rooms.
Fisher, of course, was staying in the cellar itself. He had been Lebrun's lord and commander when they were both human knights fighting for William the Conqueror, and neither had ever terminated that master-to-vassal relationship, despite the Pacific ocean that now sundered their respective territories.
As part of Fisher's entourage, Eames and Sally had also been offered beds in one of the luxurious underground rooms. Sally had accepted, the better to be close to Robert, Lebrun's human servant. Eames had declined. Both Fisher and Lebrun were old and strong enough to rise before sunset, and he preferred a bit of distance so they didn't barge in on him unexpectedly. He'd commandeered one of the closet rooms on the top floor, laid out a bedroll, and pried open the window for a bit of air that didn't smell of blood and graveyards.
Lebrun hadn't been amused at the minor property damage or the implied insult to his hospitality, but Eames had Fisher's favor right now -- the bloodthirsty old bastard thought Eames was clever -- and so there was nothing Lebrun could do but grin and bear it.
With that comforting thought in mind, Eames nodded to the wererat manning the checkpoint between the parking lot and Lebrun's lair and said, "Excellent job, man. Glad you've learned to recognize me and the lovely lady and aren't getting in our way anymore. Carry on then, old chap," in his most absurdly posh accent, so plummy and overdone it made his teeth ache.
Beside him, Sally rolled her eyes and pulled a plain donut -- with a handle; who thought of things like that? -- from the carryout bag. "Sorry about him. Have a donut," she said, and shoved it into the hapless wererat's hand.
"You're incorrigible," she muttered to Eames as he unlocked the door, and the inner door, and the door to the basement stairwell. "He was a rat, right?"
"So he was. You're getting better at recognizing trace scents," Eames said, waving her past to walk in front of him. "You go bestow sugary delight upon our favorite human servant, I'll give the boss the rundown on Lebrun's people and property, and we'll reconvene in the common room around... half past one, shall we say?" Which would give him plenty of time to talk to Arthur and perhaps even start working on contingency plans, should they prove necessary.
"Sounds like a plan," Sally agreed.
They reached the bottom of the stairs. She turned right, heading toward Lebrun's suite where Robert would be waiting in case his master needed his presence. Eames turned left, tucking away all thoughts of Arthur and his plans, until all that remained was Fisher's newest lieutenant and occasional hors d'oeuvre.
He had a report to make.
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End Part Nine
continue to part 10
back to part 8
read the final version on AO3 (Trust me, you want to read the final version. The journal version is the equivalent of a beta draft, with all the errors that implies.)
---------------------------------------------
So that's Eames in this world. If anyone is willing to Brit-pick for me, I will be eternally grateful! I am not going to change my spelling, because it makes no sense to have two thirds of a story in American spelling and one third in British, but I would like to at least try for non-jarring word choices and phrasing.
Now I am off to bed because I have to be at work at 9am Wednesday morning, for semiannual inventory day. I have to help count every item in the store by hand. And then, when my brain is thoroughly turned to porridge, I have to snap back into the rhythm of a regular working day until 6pm -- I don't even get to go home early like my coworkers! I am so not looking forward to that.
Also, I should probably mention at some point that Peter Lebrun is, of course, Peter Browning. In the same vein, Fisher is Maurice Fischer, and yes, there is a reason I keep misspelling his name. :-) But anyway, on with the story. (1,775 words)
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Weregild, part 9
---------------------------------------------
Sally Cunningham leaned across the plastic table at the twenty-four hour McDonalds, giving Eames a calculated glimpse down her low-cut green blouse, and whispered, "Your coat is vibrating."
Eames grinned at her, sliding a hand into his pocket to pull out the little machine. "Thank you, I had somehow failed to notice, what with all the excitement."
Sally raised one penciled eyebrow and sat back upright. "Oh? Do tell."
"You know how it is: any time I see your glorious face and hear your entrancing voice, I altogether lose track of reality." He unlocked the phone and opened the message. Unknown number, one word: spanner.
Arthur was in trouble.
"Bloody telemarketers," Eames grumbled, deleting the message. "I don't want any upgrades."
Sally dipped a French fry -- really, what Americans did to innocent potatoes didn't deserve to be called chips -- into her little paper cup of ketchup and bit it in half. "You're a funny sort of technophobe," she said. "If it blows things up, you can't get enough, but if it's for talking to people? Heavens, no! Back, foul demons of silicon and wire!" She stuffed the remains of the fry into her mouth and held up her two index fingers in the shape of a rough cross.
"Computers take all the interest out of human relationships," Eames said, stealing one of Sally's fries. "It's no fun if you can't at least hear a person's actual voice, let alone see and smell their body. For example, if I couldn't see your face and the set of your shoulders right now, how would I know you're wondering whether you can get away with slapping me as a joke?"
"You wouldn't," Sally conceded, "but that's mostly because I wouldn't be wondering it, since you wouldn't be sitting in front of me stealing my fries. I already bought your dinner. Have a heart and leave mine to me."
"Since you ask so nicely," Eames said. "Listen, I'm going to go wash up while you finish eating -- maybe walk around the lot, get a bit of fresh air before we go back underground. Meet me in the car in fifteen?"
"Yeah, sure," Sally said. "Give me the keys."
Eames tossed her the keys to their rental car, slung his battered brown coat over his shoulder, and headed toward the washroom. He stole one more fry as he went, easily dodging Sally's halfhearted punch.
Two minutes later, he was outside at the edge of the McDonalds parking lot, where it bordered a strip of scrubland at the edge of a back road. There were no cars parked here in the arse end of the night, he couldn't hear anything beyond the normal rustling of night breezes and tiny prey animals, and he was fairly sure neither Lebrun nor Fisher cared enough to send a spy to watch him and Sally eat artery clogging grease. This was as close to privacy as he was going to get.
Eames opened his phone and started to dial Arthur's number.
Then he paused. Just because he was in a position to talk now didn't mean Arthur was. He probably ought to show a bit of consideration and text instead, setting a time for Arthur to call.
Eames scowled down at the little silvery phone and tapped out a single word reply: noon. That would take care of the vampires, and if Sally or Robert happened to be awake, it would be easy enough to redirect their attention to each other, letting him slip away clean. Lebrun's other hangers-on might be trickier -- for one thing, Eames didn't know who half of them were -- but he wasn't a thief and con-man for nothing.
He wasn't the one who kept tripping over new complications.
"When this is all over, Arthur, I am going to point and laugh for days," Eames murmured as he deleted the record of his text and flipped the phone shut. "I've been dancing with Fisher for almost a year. You only have Dom Cobb to wrangle, and you can't even manage that half the time."
If he was being honest, he might admit that it was harder to maneuver a person you were trying not to hurt or lie to, but Eames tried not to let honesty get in the way of his own amusement.
He kicked idly at the loose gravel where the asphalt met the grass, then turned and headed back to the oasis of light around the McDonalds.
Sally was waiting in the driver's seat of their rented car, something that looked like the mutant offspring of a sedan and a sport utility vehicle, painted a horrible burnt orange.
"You know, about the only thing that could possibly make this vehicle less awful would be lime green racing stripes," Eames remarked as he buckled himself into the shotgun seat. "That would be so over the top it might come back around to tasteful."
Sally favored him with her coldest unimpressed stare. "This is why I pick our clothes," she said. "You do all right with style and fit, but you have no color sense whatsoever."
"Too true, love. You've hit upon my deepest secret. I'm colorblind, completely and utterly. It's shocking how well I've overcome that handicap in my work as a painter," Eames said lightly.
This time, he couldn't evade Sally's punch. He caught her hand as it withdrew, though, and squeezed her fingers gently to make a point. Werefoxes didn't have enough numbers to bother with elaborate dominance hierarchies like wolves or some of the great cats, but if push came to shove, Eames outranked Sally. He was stronger, and he'd been a lycanthrope much longer. It was best that they both remembered that.
"Dick," Sally grumbled, shaking her fingers out with excessive melodrama. "We've looked in on Lebrun's businesses, we've eaten, we've done laundry. Anything else on the list tonight?"
On his list, certainly, which was his own stupid fault for getting over his head in New York five years ago and consequently owing Arthur his life. On Sally's list? No, she was well out of his mess.
"Not to speak of," Eames said, tilting his seat back and stretching his legs and toes. "Tell you what, though -- I seem to recall passing a Dunkin' Donuts on our way to dinner. Let's grab something sweet for Robert on our way back, yeah? I'll foot the bill; you'll get the credit."
Sally's wide-set eyes softened and her smile was small and warm. "You're the best sometimes, you know?"
"Go on, flatter me more," Eames said, and let Sally swat the air in his general direction.
They bickered amiably as they drove around unfamiliar streets in search of the elusive Dunkin' Donuts, as they debated whether to buy extra donuts to save for breakfast, and as they headed back to Hunter's Point.
The old shipyard and much of the surrounding area had been surreptitiously purchased by vampires over the past decades. Once Addison vs. Clark had made the undead legal, Peter Lebrun had openly declared the neighborhood to be the vampire district of San Francisco, and poured much of his hoarded money into renovating and revitalizing the area. It wasn't as lurid or famous as the vampire districts of New York, St. Louis, Savannah, or New Orleans, but it was a close fifth, easily beating out Chicago (whose Master of the City preferred to fly under the radar). The small sister district across the bay in Oakland was also under Lebrun's control these days, wrested out of Mallorie Deschain's hands with fatal finality.
Lebrun kept his daytime resting place in the basement of a large brick building that seemed to be a perfectly ordinary four storey apartment complex. In point of fact, the majority of the outward facing "rooms" were nothing but closet-sized decoys. The real rooms were in the windowless interior, and filled with vampires beholden to Lebrun. The higher they were in his favor, the lower their rooms.
Fisher, of course, was staying in the cellar itself. He had been Lebrun's lord and commander when they were both human knights fighting for William the Conqueror, and neither had ever terminated that master-to-vassal relationship, despite the Pacific ocean that now sundered their respective territories.
As part of Fisher's entourage, Eames and Sally had also been offered beds in one of the luxurious underground rooms. Sally had accepted, the better to be close to Robert, Lebrun's human servant. Eames had declined. Both Fisher and Lebrun were old and strong enough to rise before sunset, and he preferred a bit of distance so they didn't barge in on him unexpectedly. He'd commandeered one of the closet rooms on the top floor, laid out a bedroll, and pried open the window for a bit of air that didn't smell of blood and graveyards.
Lebrun hadn't been amused at the minor property damage or the implied insult to his hospitality, but Eames had Fisher's favor right now -- the bloodthirsty old bastard thought Eames was clever -- and so there was nothing Lebrun could do but grin and bear it.
With that comforting thought in mind, Eames nodded to the wererat manning the checkpoint between the parking lot and Lebrun's lair and said, "Excellent job, man. Glad you've learned to recognize me and the lovely lady and aren't getting in our way anymore. Carry on then, old chap," in his most absurdly posh accent, so plummy and overdone it made his teeth ache.
Beside him, Sally rolled her eyes and pulled a plain donut -- with a handle; who thought of things like that? -- from the carryout bag. "Sorry about him. Have a donut," she said, and shoved it into the hapless wererat's hand.
"You're incorrigible," she muttered to Eames as he unlocked the door, and the inner door, and the door to the basement stairwell. "He was a rat, right?"
"So he was. You're getting better at recognizing trace scents," Eames said, waving her past to walk in front of him. "You go bestow sugary delight upon our favorite human servant, I'll give the boss the rundown on Lebrun's people and property, and we'll reconvene in the common room around... half past one, shall we say?" Which would give him plenty of time to talk to Arthur and perhaps even start working on contingency plans, should they prove necessary.
"Sounds like a plan," Sally agreed.
They reached the bottom of the stairs. She turned right, heading toward Lebrun's suite where Robert would be waiting in case his master needed his presence. Eames turned left, tucking away all thoughts of Arthur and his plans, until all that remained was Fisher's newest lieutenant and occasional hors d'oeuvre.
He had a report to make.
---------------------------------------------
End Part Nine
continue to part 10
back to part 8
read the final version on AO3 (Trust me, you want to read the final version. The journal version is the equivalent of a beta draft, with all the errors that implies.)
---------------------------------------------
So that's Eames in this world. If anyone is willing to Brit-pick for me, I will be eternally grateful! I am not going to change my spelling, because it makes no sense to have two thirds of a story in American spelling and one third in British, but I would like to at least try for non-jarring word choices and phrasing.
Now I am off to bed because I have to be at work at 9am Wednesday morning, for semiannual inventory day. I have to help count every item in the store by hand. And then, when my brain is thoroughly turned to porridge, I have to snap back into the rhythm of a regular working day until 6pm -- I don't even get to go home early like my coworkers! I am so not looking forward to that.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-07 03:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-07 04:14 am (UTC)Anitaverse lycanthropes don't get automatic magic powers beyond the shift itself. Although, now that I say that, I realize I should mention that the stronger ones can have the ability to exercise some control over the animals into which they shift, to control or force a shift in less dominant/strong lycanthropes of their own type, to share power among members of their clan through blood or touch, or sometimes to heal through the medium of touch or sex. But still, those powers usually related directly to the body; they don't take associated animal legends into account. So if Eames can work minor illusions -- which he might; that is a neat idea! -- it would be because he studied magic at some point, not just because he's a fox.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-07 04:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-06 06:12 am (UTC)Also, this sentence:
If he was being honest, he might admit that it was harder to maneuver a person you were trying not to hurt or lie to, but Eames tried not to let honesty get in the way of his own amusement.
It's fun and it does a great job at capturing Eames.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-06 11:22 pm (UTC)There will always be little bits of world-building. I can't help it -- they creep in around the edges even if I'm trying to write nothing but plot. *wry*
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-06 03:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-06 11:24 pm (UTC)