The Councilor and the Glass

[Treadwell]

Safe.

"Well, hmm hmm. Flowers."

Flowers are good. Tubbius, facet of the Glutton and lord of harvest and growth, a great-bellied man from the waist up and roots stretching deep and wide from there down, loves and appreciates flowers, being a most peculiar one himself, of a sort.

"Good, good, yes. You can come in, Catch, hmm hmm."

He lifts hand from gut to fumble to adjust his glasses on his shnozz, pushing them closer to his bulgy, blinky eyes.

You are safe, Aloisius. No blade, no weapon.

"I reckon--"

My jaw, my hand, my stomach!

"I reckon we can talk."

[catch]

Talk, speak flowers. Yes. Yes, he had flowers, and - with an arm that shakes - the addled man thrusts his bouquet towards the mass. It was entirely unintentional, and Catch would be horrified were he to know that the Flowers that had sung the loudest, the prettiest, begging to be plucked, had spoken to his subconscious. The dazzling Catherine Wheel, the Jasmine-like Wintersweet, soft Water Hemlock, sweet Oliander, trumpet-like copse laurels, and poisonous, poisonous, every one. Whatever wickedness worked in his mind, it thought so privately that Catch could not even hear it that the Glutton would eat the pretty, deadly things, would eat and eat and die, in shakes and in pain.

Talk, speak, but Catch could not. His one attempt came out in a frightened, animal moan, and he dare not try again, embarrassment flushing his cheeks as he stares down at his ragged-nailed toes.

[Treadwell]

On an instinctive level, Treadwell recognizes the plants for what they are; when it comes to flora of all kinds, Tubbius knows. He gives a grunt, an "Mmph mmph!" and a nod, though, and takes them in his good hand, studying them briefly before awkwardly stretching just perhaps a little too much to set them on a stand by the bed.

At Catch's moan, he gives a slight frown.

"Catch."

The frown slips toward only a trace of a frown, something closer to a half-smile.

"Catch, it's all right, mmph mmph. Just. . . pray don't worry about it, hmm?"

Poor Catch, unable to speak well for fear and inner agony; poor Treadwell, unable to speak well for half a jaw swollen and sore from a thunderous stomp of a foot that might as well have been a hoof.

[Rance]

Catch had been struck with silence; there was an exchange of flowers, and as the addled man's hand thrust closer to Treadwell's own, she tightened her grip around her friend's fingers with both encouragement and wordless constraint. If she'd known anything about the dark secrets of those flowers, she might have paused the offering, but her smile was a crest of pride and her words soft and explanatory in those places where Catch could summon none.

"A matter between us," she confirmed, her hand all for Catch, but her eyes wholly for the stitched Councilor. "No words or -- or condemnations beyond this room. Yes? What happened in those woods, near that cavern, should be stories of lost children and altruism. Nothing more.

"No knives," she said. "No mistakes. No conflicts. May I ask you for your word in this, Councilor, if you've mine that -- that I will do what I must to prevent hostilities and misunderstandings like this again?

"Catch," said the seamstress, reaching up toward him with gloved fingers to touch his brick-heavy chin. "Will you promise Messa Treadwell, on account of -- of your Good Citizenry and your honor as Junior Constable, to uphold this pact of peace?" The words were formal, an amalgam of precise language she'd extracted from her recent readings.

The room of convalescence had become, in essence, a miniature forum of mediation. She was the dirty-skirted adjudicator, a young woman who inadvertently smeared her fingers through the muddy footprints of beings so much greater and more destructive than she would ever be.

[catch]

He does nothing as Gloria speaks, as she pours out her words, scrubbing the hard palm of his hand against his soured, ruined pants. His eyes are nothing; his mind is nothing. It all goes through him, floating colors of words that he cannot read, his great, ruined head bowed against the flesh-thick of Treadwell. He is cowed. He is repentant - he must be - so quiet, so docile in Gloria's hand. He has been too frightened to allow his spirit to flare -

Yet, it does.

When she says his name, his head moves a fraction within the cage of her fingers, his ear flicking lewdly under the confines of his cap. Junior Constable. Junior Constable. That is what he was. Junior Constable, Good Citizen, the Broken Dagger's Brightener, a chopper of wood. And before him was a wickedness, an awfulness, a beast that Ser Glenn preached must be burned, must be buried, must be hidden away.

Catch stiffens under Gloria's hand, and his head twitches, a single, baleful, sullen eye regarding her, narrowed from under a fringe of near-white curls.

"No," he says, his One Word, a Word that must never be said. It is his only word left to him, and his tongue holds it with all the strength of a spoilt toddler.

"No."

[Treadwell]

No?

Treadwell stiffens in his bed, no word having been given to Gloria yet in response as Catch has interrupted with his sharp, sudden reply.

"No, Catch?" he asks, puzzled, fearful as eyes flit around, looking for anything that Catch might be able to grab and use against him in the hospital room.

Then there is the brief, sudden clarity of revelation: Catch could just as easily leap upon Treadwell's great stomach and rip anew with his bare hands into the seams so freshly sewn up, if he so chose.

Thus does Aloisius begin to pale. . . and to sweat where he lies.

[Rance]

No.

A word she did not want to hear.

Her grip instinctively tightened around his hand, and her gloved fist shot out to close around his large knuckles. A reassurance. A restraint. Her stomach start to turn and grow heavy, and her breath quickened.

No.

"You remember what I said, Mister Catch--"

So long ago, months ago, another veritable lifetime ago, she had told him of Cherny and the arrow; she had watched as that ever-noble, ever-misdirected beast inside of the mountainous man was suddenly hers to contend with, not because he meant to turn that side of himself upon her like a sharp blade, but because he hurt. She tried to remember what it was like--

"--about the glass words."

--to look into the Black Smoke and be frightened.

But if only she realized that was only a facet of the creature inside him, a miniscule sliver, a sprinkling of spice from a barrel of it...

"Apologize, Catch," she said. "Please. As you -- you said you would. Do not go back on your word to me. Do not devalue that."

Do this as you want to, her brain chattered, and we will both be hanged.

[catch]

He would not make a promise he could not keep. The Glutton quivered in it's hammock of flesh and gore, great and yellow grease dribbling, staining sticky the floor under his mass.

For a moment, Catch can grasp that the Fat Man is afraid. For a moment, he remembers -

He wanted the Numbers, he wanted the Words. He wanted Power, Power that a lifetime of service to the Gods had not granted him. He delved ever deeper into Power, the Promise and Redness of Power, until Power was all he could see, all that spewed from his lips, all that shackled his fat, thick hands, hands that Caressed, that Pleasured, that Hurt, that drove Power into his skin so that he screamed and screamed and a young boy called Guericke watched and laughed and laughed

No. Catch could not promise, because he would have to break his promise. It would make him a liar. It would make him a Bad Citizen. But there is something he could do, and he blinks, a slow, shuddering blink mirrored by the quiver of his chest.

"I'm sorry," he says. And he means it. He does mean it. He is very, very sorry for the Fat Man - because they, together, have matched each-other, torment for torment, through ages and ages of time. "I'm very Sorry."

[Treadwell]

"Sorry?"

He's sorry. This is good, isn't it?

"Thank you, Catch. . . but, hmm hmm. . . ."

Treadwell's hands slip shakily to his belly--both of them, even the one splinted up and supported painfully--there to rest amid the sutured flab.

"No more of this?" He asks, pressing his hands into his roly poly gut. "I didn't do anything to those children, Catch." A sloooow shake of his head, side to side.

"I don't eat children. They're--"

How best to put this in the simplest terms? The Glutton has children of his own; Marta and Porcus are both mothers to their own unique forms of life; Tubbius oversees growth and harvests.

"Children. . . all kinds, mmph. Very, very sacred. Holy. To me."

[Rance]

He was a Good Citizen. He was her friend. He was her family.

In her guts twisted a few knots of regret; she despised speaking of the glass words at all, sickened herself with what ease she could wield even their idea against the platinum-haired man. Those words were the

years back before she'd her clothes and her naked skin burned and hardened in the eye of the Glass Sun. She was young, and the other young seamworkers teased her for her wide hips and underdeveloped breasts, chattering, "They might never find enough fabric to make you a dress when you pass the Odos," and "You'll be as flat as the Glass Sands, Glour'eya; did the Nameless put your breasts in your thighs?"

So when Mother Sempstress put the whip of braided twigs in her hand and said, "You place scars on the spines of any rat'vak that denies its task here in our house," she did. She made them bleed and turned their backskin to wet rivers, dug canyons that ran so deep she could see the muscles quiver as they cried, gashes pursing like little pink lips gasping for forgiveness--

But yet she held Catch's hand, squeezed, clenched it in her fist, and when he spoke his apologies, the black oil in her tooth subsided in its thunderous cadence. She glanced up at him. He was a pillar and she was a tiny hill; he could have bent her in two, snapped her bones into splinters, ignored her. But by virtue of his obedience -- she wrestled cooperation out of him by the very nature of her origin, that she was Jernoan, and always would be to Catch -- he withheld. He abstained.

"Mister Treadwell," she said, a regular young rhetor, a maker of what she thought was peace, even if its edges were burnt like blackened parchment. "It was a matter of -- of frayed threads. I only heard through men in town what horrible things occurred in that -- that place.

"You meant to do well; Mister Catch, too, meant it. If it had not been for him, we might not have our Cherny. If not for both of you--" she punctuated it with commonality, relativity, "there would be more--"

children, eleven children--

"--dead.

"Catch," said the girl who fancied herself a makeshift diplomat, despite the stains of black sweat under her chin, "we should give the Councilman his rest."

[catch]

Those eyes have already seen what they had seen, had already twisted such visions in his mind - the Fiddler, the Glutton, and Catch between, between, his hard hands tight on Cherny's and Tsoss' shoulders. The Fiddler had devoured; the Glutton had devoured. Catch did not mistake them for one being, but the Glutton had exploded, had thrashed, had eaten.

How many of those eleven had gone down the Glutton's throat?

The Fat Man asks him a question, and Catch does not want to listen. He wants to be away, he wants to run, run until the good loam is beneath his feet, and his lungs and nostrils are cleared of gore and too-sweet honey, and that strange, acrid smell of bitters and herbs that marked the Rememberdarium, that aroused such terror in him. It was easy to pretend he did not hear, to avoid answering a question in a way that would cause Glass Words. A way that would distress Miss Gloria. His discovery of Treadwell's fear was nothing grand for him. It was a bitterness in his throat, blood-grit on his tongue. He hated him, and hate and fear warred in his broken mind, his chin thrust, his teeth ground and clenched.

"D-d-does th-that mean we may go," he asks Gloria, for her words were beyond his mind, for the moment.

[Treadwell]

Treadwell nods a time or two; his hand and belly and jaw all ache, the belly and hand the most, and he would rather be free of Catch. "Go on, Catch," he grunts. "No more knives. No more stabbings." With that, Aloisius slumps a little into his covers and pillows and bed, wheezing as he settles and starting to close his eyes.

[Rance]

"No more knives," she said. "No more stabbings."

Had she a knife, she might have been able to saw through the hard oak of the tension between them with its serrated edge. There might have yet been wood-dust left on the floor of the Rememdium come morning. But in the absence of it, there was only a bloody strip of once-skirt, which she snared up in her two fingers and stuffed shamefully into her satchel.

Tonight, if by approximation, she had threatened the life of a Councilor for the sake of her friend.

Tonight, she had lied as a Jerno was not meant to do, and the guilt of it turned to rusty iron in her guts.

"Councilor," she said, a stiff valediction, while she took Catch by both hand and belt-loop, trying to turn him and his eyes away from Treadwell. She could not be rid of the room quick enough, with all its phantom blood splattered on the floorboards -- she still knew the patterns, as if someone had overturned a wide-brimmed candle, thought she felt the red mess still squelching beneath her clogs. And it was both apology and sadness in her eyes as she looked finally, fully, upon her platinum-haired friend, with the sweat of fear on his skin and the moisture of urine on his brightly-colored pants.

Her hand was always his. Even when she realized, at times such as this, what her most well-wishing words could do to him.

"Come with me, Mister Catch," the seamstress said, leaning into him. "Morning comes quickly."

[Treadwell]

[Edited out to move to another thread. Continue! ]

[catch]

They make their statements, and Catch continues his sullen silence, his agreement assumed by that silence, though his thoughts were on the wet of his skin, the shameful cold clamming to his legs. That the Fat Man says it means nothing. That Gloria says it heightens it's worth, and he hated that it did. It meant he must pay attention, it meant he must make some remark, and his slack features twitch from the effort, grotesque, a corpse - but could he ever be mistaken for a corpse? - come to life.

"No more knives," he says, his voice hardly a whisper. "No more stabbings." There were ways. Other ways. There was the axe. There was... other. Ways. A little whisper in his mind, and for a moment, Catch goes completely, utterly still - as if he had died - his face transformed by some realization, some thought that is grasped by both hands, delighted.

"No more," he says, when he speaks, and his throat is suddenly a hum, his face relaxed, his fingers no longer stiff, wooden boards in Gloria's grasp. His bearded chin jerks to his chest, and he would allow himself to be led out, and he skips - he very near skips - out the door, and the only reason he doesn't is for apparent concern for Councilor Treadwell's health. His well-being. So he shuffles, instead, and he waits until the door is firmly shut.

"Miss Gloria," he says, his tongue still thick with the Glutton's blood, his fleshy web clawing at the boards, discordance that still rang in his ears. He squeezes her hand, so she would know.

"Miss Gloria, he is a terrible thing, and he m-m-must be stopped." There is the iron of a Junior Constable in his eyes.