Gensomaden Saiyuki Fan Fiction ❯ Suite on Rte. 86 ❯ Thread ( Chapter 9 )

Thread   While Jadan sleeps I close my eyes and look. The folds of earth are beyond black with deep, slow vibrations. The flitting lights of bats and insects whirl between the starry, upright trees like dust motes: tiny, musky balls of instincts tugged back and forth by the silvery strings between them, winking in and out in a pattern as old as the hills. I am rust-orange and smell of pomegranates and dirt, he is silver-smelling with hard outlines. His threads are faint; the brightest spin off into the atmosphere the way some of Shane and Bran's do. I can’t change the threads as easily as I can change other things. They’re not as fragile as they seem. This one, the one that connects him to me, never broke, though I pulled and pulled on it. I pulled it because I could and he needed me to and because at first there was nothing else to do. And then he was here, and I’d almost forgotten all this until just now.   Why I can do these things is a question that had bothered me for about two days before I’d decided it didn’t matter. Shane’s grumpy because that’s the way he is, and Jordan changes because that’s the way she is, and I can see threads because that’s the way I am.     “How were you born?” I had asked Jordan one night after we’d gotten Bran to tell us the story of how they found us again.   “I’m not really sure,” she’d said, “I just woke up one night in an alley, naked and hungry.”   “Have you ever met anyone else like you?”   “Only once, when I was too young to know better.”   Her dark expression warned me away from the subject, so I asked about the thing I'd been wanting to ask her instead, "How do you- when you-  How did you know what to do?"   She frowned for a moment. "I guess it's just how I am," she said, slowly, feeling out each word as she pronounced it, "Who I am. What I am."   Her strange eyes turned towards me, flicking my skin with exploratory energies. Her eyes had only just started doing that to me, the same thing she does to Bran or Shane when she gets hungry. It had been two days since she'd last changed.   "You're curious about it," she'd observed.   I shifted uncomfortably, felt for Shane's warmness, Jadan's smooth cold and Bran's citric prickle to make sure they were far away.   "Yeah," I'd admitted. "But- I don't want to if he doesn't.  But he does, but I don't want to make him. It's confusing. And lately he's been, you know. Strange. And. I want him back."   I looked sideways at her and after a moment she'd grinned.   "He's been looking at you," she said.   "He has?" I asked, too eagerly, making her laugh and ruffle my hair.   "Shane and Bran are going to be weird about it," I'd said to try and squash the weird fluttering in my chest.   "Shane's always weird," she chuckled.   "Can't you ever lay off him?" My mouth twisted in annoyance. "Bran's weirder."   "Is not."   "Is too!"   "Well, no one's as weird as you, you monkey."   "Hey! Ow! Ow! Cut it out!" I'd yelled as she suddenly dove for my boxers and yanked them up hard.   "Ha! That was for the pitch you put in my shoe last night," she’d crowed.   She won our brief scuffle by tickling me until I stopped fighting back, and then she’d coaxed all my questions out of me and answered them. I made her scratch pictures on the ground with a stick.     I search for the threads that feel like Shane and Jordan and Bran and touch them to make sure they’re OK. Then, I curl against Jadan, breathe his scent and think about the way things fit together until the night creatures disperse and the great, distant energy of the sun begins touching everything. I watch its heat pool in the rocks, a mild top note on their clean scent.   He stirs against me. His skin sliding across mine sparks a glitter of friction in my vision and a coil of heat in my groin. I press closer, watching him unfurl into wakefulness, then desire. When I say his real name all his energy keys to mine expectantly, waiting for orders I am not going to give him. (The one time I had, I had told him, "Don't look at me like that," and he hadn't looked at me again until I'd told him to.) I kiss him instead, rolling on top of him and plunging my tongue into his mouth, following it down and touching his silverness. He burns so good against me, all hot skin and cool power and we are twisted around each other in the purple rotting smell of leaves, my legs wrapped around him, hips moving desperately together. The way we fit ignites everything in flares of power and then he fists our cocks together and I cry out against his shoulder and then there’s his hands and his skin-taste and his little whimpering moans and an upward spiral of gold.    And then we are limp and sticky against each other and gasping into the narrow space between our mouths. He props himself on one elbow above me and smiles. His hair has come undone again and is stuck to his face. There’s a leaf clinging to the line of his deltoid. I grin back at him. He looks really good naked. My sight is back to normal, but the ground around us tingles with the power we just released. Any sensitive within a day's travel will have picked up on that, I realize. Maybe if I keep him here long enough, Shane will come and find us.   Of course, that thing we fought might find us first, the thing that had no threads.   He frowns at me with his eyebrows when my muscles go from sated relaxation to adrenaline tense. “We’d better get moving,” I say, but I don’t let go of his hand.     The river is cold, water charged with purpose and inevitability. Its energy connects to something vast and shifting and far away, plays against the stones beneath like a lover's nails down their back. They fear it, strain towards it, and I am touching Jadan all over again, half in his lap, fighting the current to press myself against him. He tastes like snowmelt and I can't help it.   This is taking too long. We're not far enough from the flare we made before and I can't help it with his urgency surging against my skin. I slide my fingers down the slick, new line of hair on his stomach and he makes a rusty, guttural sound and sucks my kiss desperately.     Luckily, no one finds us in the river or while we’re looking for our clothes, or in the hills beyond it and then we are climbing again. We hide in the shelter of the trees and criss-cross open patches at a run to confuse our trail. Our sense of being pursued intensifies the longer we run. Jadan wants to stop and pick a place to make a stand, but I’m not sure we can even hurt that thing, much less kill it. It occurs to me that heading back toward Shane might get the three of them killed, too, so I change direction.   The clouds lower as evening approaches, boiling down from the northwest and packing close around the mountains.  I switch my sight over as fog closes in, trying to keep my senses as open as possible.   It catches up to us in a long, gaping scar of high-tension wires which cringe and buzz overwhelmingly behind my eyes. I sense it right before it drops from the steel tower, landing a heavy punch where Jadan was just standing.   I see his thoughts change, clicking like polished clockwork as all emotion drains from his face. Things begin happening too fast for conscious direction. My body knows what to do without me thinking about it, and I dodge and land a blow to its side. Its flesh doesn’t have the give that those men’s had. Its lack of connection to anything is jarringly unnatural. The detached corner of my mind that is still looking informs me that it- she? feels more like Jadan than a human, that she’s half-empty and massing energy for something, that she’s focused left now.   I move to counter, to strike at her momentarily unprotected right, but Jadan is there between us, intensely cold purpose rising off him in waves. She drives him to one knee with a rain of kicks. I move to sideswipe her but he is there before me again. Under his ice armor, something despondent and tender is struggling to keep its rhythm.   He’s trying to protect me, maybe trying to protect himself. He thinks if I fight her I’ll lose it again and he’s tired and she’s too strong and he needs my help but he won’t take it. A vicious roundhouse sends him sprawling, and she is there crouched over him, arm raised to strike.   I’ll kill her.   I try to cling to that softness in him as my vision starts to go white. There is a rising scream that may be mine.   The heavy crack of Shane’s revolver and the familiar, searing spike of his fear/anger brings me back to myself. I am disoriented for the split second it takes her to get the upper hand, ground slamming hard against my shoulder blades, then Jadan is diving on her, then he is flying into me, knocking me back from my rising crouch and we are sprawled in a heap.   A hiss of pain and a wordless, feminine shriek of anger rings through the wispy fog. We struggle to our feet and find a woman fighting a mirror image of herself with shell-shocked desperation. Shane is half-crouched on the ground, clutching at his right shoulder, attempting to train his gun on the combatants anyway. I grab onto Jadan’s arm when he begins to move away from me, whisper his name to him.   Someone says, “What the fuck?” and Jordan and Bran are there, forming a barrier around Shane, who growls something at them through clenched teeth.   One of the women is loosing, badly. In my other sight she is not quite like Jordan or Bran and Shane but is all the parts that that thing is missing.    “Protect Shane,” I tell Jadan, then yank him back. “Don’t die.”   He nods, looking less like an automaton and more like he’s really, really scared.   “You’d better not either,” he whispers.   This is all happening too fast. The one who we fought before is all red killing lust and rage and has the other on the ground and I’m not going to get there soon enough.   There is no sound in the fog except a muffled splat and a wheezing gasp when the threadless one plunges her entire hand through the other’s chest.   I grab for them both, feel the woman’s white, tense aura beginning to thicken and fade. She’s dying, I realize, and they are the same and all I have to do is pull.   I touch their energies together and the cool, dim aura tries to suck all that redness into her failing body. I resist its flow through me, pull all of her together and force her where she needs to go.   She crumples forward onto the still corpse beneath her and I sag with relief. My brain feels fuzzy with lingering half-memories and feelings I know aren’t mine. I can’t move, though someone really should roll her off herself before she comes to.   Jordan shakes me lightly, calls my name before Jadan pushes her out of the way, pulling me in to his chest. I fist my hands in his shirt and exhale shakily.     I’m re-wrapping the deep gash on Shane’s shoulder when Tamar wakes up. We haven’t been able to stop the bleeding since Bran popped the joint back in place, though it’s slowed down a good deal.  I’m trying to help him but it’s hard for some reason. I want to lay down with Jadan somewhere far from these power lines and let the deep vibrations of the mountain lull me until I feel better.   Bran is helping her sit up when she looks up and sees Jordan. “You.”   The force of her punch sends Jordan flying, her dark hair arcing around her head.   Tamar looks down at her fist, then further down to her ripped and blood-smeared clothes.   “This isn’t-“ she says, then stares up at Bran blankly, “Bran?”   No one is really sure how to explain, but before we can say anything, her eyes widen and she tries to make for the woods with a feral snarl. Bran catches her arm and she flings him into a tower halfway across the clearing as if he weighs nothing. Shane intervenes before her shock wears off. He grabs her by the shoulder with his good hand, leans close and whispers a single word. She freezes, spine snapping ramrod straight. He talks to her quietly, seemingly impervious to her eerily vacant stare. I wonder how long it will take her to figure out what’s been done to her and if she’ll want to punch me for it.   Finally she slides bonelessly to the ground, dragging Shane down with a thump and a grunt of pain. Then she begins telling us how she found out her daughter is still alive.     By the time she’s done, we’re huddled together in a tired mass against the chill. The fog is very thick and darkness is coming on quickly. I have to lock my inner sense down as tightly as I can to damp the electric drone of the lines.   “What are we going to do?” Jadan asks. His body is slack with exhaustion against me, but his eyes are wide and his muscles are coiled into knots.   “I don’t care what you do,” Tamar says, hotly, flexing and unflexing her fingers like claws. “I’m going back there to get her.  Let them try to stop me now.”   “No,” Bran says, “Urzica wouldn’t have let you-"  We all glance involuntarily at the sheet-draped form barely visible in the gathering murk. He clears his throat lightly, carefully, and continues “He must have Named it. You’d just be putting yourself back into his control.”   “What do you think I should do?” she flares.   “We’ll all go,” Shane says. “Now shut up.”   Jordan gives him a look of approval when he’s not looking. Bran’s expression turns inward in the way that means he’s thinking. Jadan nestles closer against me and my fingers thread themselves through his hair. Eventually, they sleep despite the damp and their injuries and the grating hum of the power lines, and I watch the night, listlessly.