In Which Mackenzie Is Obliviously Perceptive
There was a nagging feeling in the back of my head that I’d let myself get sidetracked away from something important, but I also felt like I’d said what was on my mind so I pushed it away and let Ian lead us back inside.
It was easy to cede control to Ian. His need to take the lead was practically reaching out and twining around me. I didn’t mind following along behind him… something about the night was making me feel very small and very vulnerable and being outside away from the crowd was only making it worse. I felt like we were as much fleeing from the cold and strangeness in the air as heading towards the warmth and familiarity we could find with each other, indoors.
Also, it was a nice feeling to be wrapped up in his need and his love, like being bundled up in his coat… like the way my hand was gripped in his.
He stopped us in front of the group where Pala and Two were. It had both split and grown in the time we were outside. Shiel was off having her own conversation, and Honey and Hazel had disappeared, but some of Two’s classmates who had been at our party.
“Hey,” he said. “We’re going to go upstairs for a bit, but we’ll come back down if people are still hanging out. Otherwise, I guess… well, I think we’re going to be inside for the night.”
I noticed that he was very specifically looking at Pala as he said this, like he was updating her about our whereabouts. I didn’t know exactly what the parameters of her bodyguard gig were… I would have assumed she was off-duty once I was back at the dorm.
“Have you eaten dinner?” Two asked.
“What?” Ian said. “Uh, no, I guess not… maybe we could order something in?”
He’d clearly not thought that far ahead. Neither had I, but I didn’t need to eat food, I just liked it. And I was supposed to, to try to make me feel more connected with my human side. I felt plenty connected at the moment, but I could always be more so. What could be better for that or more appropriate than pizza? It seemed like such a prototypical college food, and so… communal, too. One persons says something like “Anybody else feel like pizza?” and everybody throws in a few coins and before you know it everybody’s eating out of a box.
“Pizza sounds good,” Ian continued, his voice growing in confidence. “We’ll put an order together later, if anybody else wants to get in on it. Are you going to be around, Pala?”
“I think so,” she said. “I was hoping to spend the night in the dorm, overnight. To see what it would be like, living on campus.”
“Mack, I need your permission for her to stay with us,” Two said. “Which I think you should give me because it’s not fair if…”
“Yeah, Two, it’s fine,” I said. “As long as she doesn’t mind sleeping on the floor.”
“Is there something very different about your floor?” she asked, and I realized that she was lying on the floor, as it seemed like she had been half the time I saw her. I supposed being comfortable without furniture made it easier to move between differently sized cultures.
“No, it’s just a floor,” I said.
“That is what I like about floors,” Pala said. “They are always floors, or very nearly so.”
“Well, anyway, if you can’t stick around, let Two know so she can tell us,” Ian said to Pala.
“Okie dokie,” she said. “Anything else?”
Maybe she was off-duty, but it seemed like Ian liked the thought of her working for him. He wasn’t being rude or pushy or anything, just acting less like a client and more like a boss… or a commanding officer. In fact, it wasn’t even really anything in how he was acting… it was more how he carried himself, what he projected.
In that instant I thought I had an inkling of understanding about the… rapport… he seemed to be cultivating with Callahan. Perhaps he was looking for a leadership position in the arena.
Coach’s assistant? Captain? I didn’t know how the program was organized… there were team events but I wasn’t sure that the roster of gladiators constituted a “team” or that it had or needed a captain… but he wouldn’t be satisfied with just being another fighter. I felt certain that he’d want to work his way up more than just the competition ladder.
Especially since he would never be the strongest gladiator, or the best fighter… he had some natural talent and he was focused, but there were people in the program who had been fighting competitively their whole lives. Given that he’d signed up in part to overcome feelings of inadequacy and lack of control…
I felt a flush of embarrassment, like I’d somehow pried too deeply with what was basically idle speculation. The weird thing was I wasn’t even paying attention to what he was saying… it was more in how he said it, it seemed.
I tried to ignore him and focused on what was happening around us instead.
I’d always sort of blocked out anyone around me that I wasn’t actually talking to or actively paying attention to… it had been an emotional survival technique in high school, I supposed. If people weren’t talking about me then it didn’t do to get all excited or interested about whatever they had to say, and if they were talking about me… well, it had been better to just ignore it.
Safer, emotionally and physically.
I’d mostly got over my extreme aversion to the attention of others… which had come from the same place… but I was still keeping my head down and my eyes and ears metaphorically closed most of the time. Now, with my growing sense of connection… of belonging… opening up seemed like the easiest, most natural thing to do.
Off to the side, Shiel and Jeanie were still talking… mostly about their game, but interspersed with little excited outbursts about some meeting they were planning on going to. It seemed like they were trying to be nonchalant about that, though, because neither one really acknowledged the other’s outbursts and they just sort of wove the game conversation around it.
Farther away than that, it was all an indistinct babble of voices, sounds unconnected to faces and too mixed up for me to find any meaning on them. I didn’t want to seem like I was eavesdropping… even if that kind of was exactly what I was doing… so I just closed my eyes and focused on trying to pick out distinct voices.
All around us, people were talking about everything: homework, sex, love… it surprised me how open people were being, talking about the things they’d done, the things they wanted to do, the things they wanted to do them to and with… there was a guy somewhere behind me talking about how he wanted to take a girl, hold her down, and “fuck her in the ass till she can’t walk straight, until she bleeds, until she fucking breaks”.
It was shocking, but what was more shocking was there was a girl over towards the corner wondering aloud if she’d ever find a guy who was aggressive enough to just take her, brutally and savagely and with no regard for her feelings. They both sounded so lonely… he sounded desperate in every sense of the word, and she sounded almost despairing.
I wondered what would happen if one of them overheard the other, or if they met. I wondered if they would be compatible, if they would be able to “click” beyond having somewhat similar fantasies/desires… or if that would be enough..
I shouldn’t have been surprised that people around me had those kinds of desires, or that they talked about them. It wasn’t like my own circle was particularly sexually inhibited… and after all, we were all college students, a phrase that could be used in place of either “kids” or “adults” for most uses.
We’re just kids. We’re all adults here.
That dichotomy seemed to be weighing on more minds than my own. I could hear several people talking with surprising frankness about how out of place they felt.
One girl was sure that she'd somehow missed out on something, that turning eighteen and graduating high school should have changed something, but she just felt like a kid at a long sleepover. That was an interesting way of putting it.
A guy was talking about how he had no idea how to do laundry… he did it, but he had a nagging feeling that he was doing it wrong.
He sounded embarrassed, but he was admitting it, so maybe he was making some progress. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who felt an extra sense of connection… maybe a lot of people’s barriers were coming down in the wake of everything that had happened.
It was probably a good thing for people to get all of this out in the open. If more people realized how many of their fellow students felt inadequately prepared for adulthood… or had “extreme” sexual desires and fantasies, or whatever… it could only be a good thing.
Going away to live in a tiny pseudo-apartment with minimal supervision for five months at a time or so was probably better preparation for adulthood than just diving in to the deep end of the responsibility pool, but there wasn’t much in the typical high school existence to prepare you for it… it seemed like feeling utterly overwhelmed and totally unprepared for being on one’s own was a fairly common subject, too. I heard a girl complaining about it to no one in particular and felt bad for her… then realized she was also talking about seeing her parents on the weekend.
Most of the people around me had way more of a safety net than I did. I had my grandmother, but going back to her would be giving up on everything… if she was a net to catch me if I fell, she was the kind of net made out of pointy metal bits set in a pit twenty feet below the floor.
I couldn’t say I’d done a great job of coping with the “on my own” aspect of college… I hadn’t really dealt with it at all. I’d been busy with other things, some of which probably spoke reflected better on my coping skills than other ones did… but nevertheless, I was here and I was getting by and that was something. I wasn’t going to get a visit from my mother on the weekend. I wasn’t going home to a comfortable room full of beloved possessions in a familiar house full of people I cared about for the holidays. But I was managing. Without any parental support at all… at least, without any parental support that appeared outside of recurring nightmares…I was managing, and I was doing kind of okay.
I didn’t exactly feel proud over that, and I didn’t exactly feel relieved, but I felt something that was a bit like both of those things. I felt the urge to take that information and store it away for later, for the day when I was feeling overwhelmed and incapable of coping.
The other thing that surprised me was how much homework some people seemed to have. I’d lucked out there, I supposed, with two labs on my schedule for subjects I had enough of an aptitude for that I didn’t have to do much work outside of class. That wouldn’t last once I got into the higher level enchantment classes… it was a very complex and hands-on subject.
Elsewhere in the nexus a girl was verbally beating herself up for not having had the guts to go into Harlowe with her friends on Sunday and wondering aloud if anybody say anything if she just wandered into the dorm. I realized I hadn’t really heard both sides of any conversations since I started listening, but I chalked that up to the fact that I was focusing on picking up individual voices. She was pretty clearly talking to herself.
How good was my hearing that I could pick this out? I knew my sense of smell could be pretty strong when I focused on it, which I didn’t tend to do consciously. I also had better than average night vision, for a human. It didn’t seem impossible that I could also have unusually keen hearing, if I could just learn to access it. Like by closing my eyes and focusing on voices around me.
The weird thing was that even as I was trying to focus on specific voices, I seemed to be picking up a really strong sense of the general atmosphere. People were worried and angry, on the edge… but they were also hopeful and relieved, and excited. You could hear it in their voices, almost feel it in the air.
It was kind of heady and exhilarating to just open up and take it all in… and more than a little bit overwhelming. I felt almost like I was floating in a sea of sounds and voices and feelings, and all these things… these snippets, these facts… were just floating towards me. Taking them in was as easy as opening up my mouth and breathing. I was getting some things without even picking out specific words, like the fact that Oru thought that Shiel was trying to lure human boys with her war games.
I was starting to feel a little bit sketchy about the whole thing. Hearing a public conversation was one thing, but listening to people voicing their feelings was almost like being privy to private thoughts. This was something I’d have to experiment with more at some point… it really wasn’t a good idea to have so little idea of my actual capabilities. I really didn’t know what I was capable of, for better or for worse.
For all that my grandmother had never let me forget about my demon half, she’d never wanted me to do anything to acknowledge it. I couldn’t really blame her for that… judging by the other half-demons I’d met, I had to agree that there was reason to be concerned.
But the one full-blooded demon I’d encountered hadn’t been all bestial, for all his faults. And it wasn’t like seeing in a dimly-lit room or bounding across the hillside had increased my craving for blood. Neither had straining my ears to pick out voices in the crowd… though it didn’t really feel like I was even straining that hard.
In any case enough was enough. I’d test my ears out some other time… maybe talk to Steff, see if she could explain what it was like for her to hear things in a crowd. She’d been experiencing the world with semi-elven hearing for her whole life. It seemed likely that she’d be able to give me some help with attuning myself to particular things while blocking others out.
I opened my eyes and tried to focus on blocking out the sound of the crowd. The weird thing was that all of a sudden the hallway seemed to get louder. The nexus was all tile floors and brick walls and metal roof, and there were a good three or four dozen hanging around in it, at least.
Ian gave a tug on my hand, and I realized he’d turned and was starting to leave. He gave me a look when he realized I wasn’t moving with him.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I guess it must have looked like… I mean, I guess I spaced out again.”
“What?” he said.
“I just mean my mind was elsewhere,” I said. “Or everywhere.”
“Whatever,” he said. “I was just telling Pala to let Two know if she changed her mind about staying.”
“You spent that long?” I asked.
“What long?” he said. “I mean, I told her just that. In so many words.” He shook his head. “I guess you really were spaced out, huh?”
“You caught me,” I said, feeling like I’d missed something… though that was kind of the point of spacing out.
“Whatever,” he said. “Let’s get upstairs.”