multiversallogs | it's all right, ain't no God in my eye

Entry tags:

it's all right, ain't no God in my eye

Who: Wolfgang and Xas
What: Xas a roof is not a bed. Get a job.
Where: Chimer
When: Late Ged, before Samsdream, evening
Warnings: idk will update if needed

Among the other nasty surprises brought on by the siege, Wolfgang was rather put out to discover the Badside inn he had been staying in since his eviction from Bonetown had been partially blown up. The partial bit had, in fact, been the side he had been staying in. He'd lost all his things. It wasn't as disheartening as it should have been, but maybe he was just too exhausted from the last couple of weeks to have any spare emotion left over for this. He felt a tinge of frustration, that was all. He owned nothing that couldn't be replaced, anyway.

But that left him with a more pressing concern -- namely, where he was going to sleep. His friend Kahnde -- the one who kept trussing him up and dragging him around to parties thrown by Baedal's new money eccentrics, as well as the one who kept him in supply with the medications Wolfgang desperately needed -- offered him a place to stay and he couldn't turn him down. It makes him uncomfortable to stay there when he knows he's sort of leading the xenian man on -- but Kahnde also took the siege extremely poorly as several of his friends had died rather gruesome deaths. Wolfgang came out here partially as a babysitter. He's a bit worried about Kahnde doing something drastic.

The townhouse in the urban half of Chimer is a large property considering it's inhabited by only one person. The architecture is typical Baedalite weirdness, a mish-mash of various time periods, and the whole thing is painted an unfortunate shade of puce. It's got a flat roof upon which are mounted several solar panels for power, two balconies, and a superfluous amount of windows that at least offer a fantastic view of the beach.

He sleeps an awful lot, which means the hours he's awake tend to be ... odd. He sleeps very deeply these days, waking only if he's touched or if one of his dreams ends, and the latest one -- a very strange one that only further blurs the line between reality and fantasy for him -- lets him go just when everyone else is starting to go to bed. Well, fantastic. He's rubbing the sleep from his eyes when he hears it -- the distinct sound of something in the walls. No, not in them: on them. Something's climbing up the side of the house, towards the roof.

The fuck.

He freezes for a moment, then decides the last thing they need is a burglar or giant rat or something. Whatever it is, he can handle it, he's pretty sure, which is why he comes out on the balcony alone, his hair sticking out in every direction like he stuck his finger in a socket, as he looks up for the source of that sound.

It only occurs to him after he gets out there that whatever is out there could very well be a leftover monster. Oh. Well. Oops?

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Xas stands, too, and pulls the sweater back over his head, folds it and holds it out. "Meet me down there?" he says - he doesn't want to go inside, even if Wolfgang is comfortable inviting him. "I want to hear about it. Where you're from."

It's interesting, and easier than hearing about how they might all be trapped somewhere closed-in and limited, like flies under a glass.

Wolfgang accepts the sweater back and his mouth quirks upwards. "Okay." So it's off to the access door with him and through Kahnde's scary-ass attic again. He pauses in the guest bedroom to get properly dressed, throwing on an ill-fitting sweater and jeans and putting on some shoes. He's not happy with it but he's aware he is unreasonably fussy and if left to his own devices tends to spend three hours agonizing over shoes.

He does stop to brush his hair. You don't talk to angels looking a mess.

He pulls it back out of his face in a loose braid and is just tying off the ends when he emerges from the front door onto the street. If nothing else, he at least looks less like an electrocuted lion. Just a sleepy one.

Getting down didn't take any time at all - he jumped - but once he'd sat down next to the street to tie up his boots, Xas stayed there, peering at the first page of his book through the dark. It's in English, but it's either science-fiction or from another world (or both), and between the strange terminology and what he thinks are jokes about a popular culture he isn't familiar with, he hardly understands a word.

He's still on the ground when Wolfgang comes outside, but he's quick to swivel up onto his feet and tuck the book under his arm, thumb hooked through one of his suspenders. "Oh, I did wake you up," he says, though it's too late for him to feel sorry for it now, and wiggles his free fingers near his own hair to indicate what he means. "I thought maybe it was cultural."

Wolfgang stops up short and his hand immediately goes up to his hair as if maybe he didn't do a good enough job taming it. Even in the dim light, it's obvious that he's blushing. "Oh, no, I --" He sounds and looks flustered, which to be fair is not difficult to achieve with him and is closer to his natural state.

Then he stops himself and tries to school his expression into something cooler, which is a losing battle. This just in: Wolfgang is not cool. "You're teasing me."

He does make it really easy.

"Yes," Xas says. Manners keep him from laughing, but he's on the verge, grinning wider for a second before he starts walking - slowly, to make sure Wolfgang is still coming along, and in the direction he happened to be turned toward. Xas isn't aiming for anywhere in particular. He just wants to move, to shake off the feeling of being closed-in and stuck. "I had long hair for a while. I don't miss dealing with it."

Wolfgang does follow, hands at his side because he doesn't want to cover his left hand. Being about 90% leg, keeping pace with other people is awkward for him, but he manages. This part of Chimer is really nice -- and once they get out of this block, it's a lot less quiet. A few businesses are still open, some nocturnal residents just getting out and about, but it's not rambunctious in the way, say, Howl Barrow or Griss Twist are at this time of night. It's more family-oriented; he likes that. "It's a pain in the --" He stops. Changes what he was about to say. "Neck."

Honey.

"But I did it to myself, so..." True: it's this long anymore because people kept telling him how "handsome" he'd be if he just "looked normal". Spite, as it turns out, is a terrible reason to style one's hair. Back on the subject of where he's from and not how Baedal is basically a prison, though: "There's a lot I miss here. Books and music, mostly. I mean, there are books and music, obviously, just... the ones from home that they don't have here."

Neck. Okay. Xas wouldn't have noticed if not for the pause, but as it is he gives Wolfgang a sidelong look, more amused than anything, that shifts into reserved attentiveness as he goes on talking.

"Yeah," he says. He looks away to sidestep a passing pedestrian and slides both his hands into his pockets, book caught in the crook of his arm. "Anything in particular?"

He's been trying to find jazz - did find it, once, but it had unfamiliar instruments and an altogether different feel. Probably of a different time, maybe of a different planet. Anyway, it didn't do a thing for the homesickness; he just sat there missing his friend Millie, benzedrine, and Duke Ellington.

"Anything in Hebrew. Or Arabic. My English, um --" He flaps a hand dismissively. "It's okay but sometimes I don't get stuff." He sounds fine, but that's largely because the city helps; people who intend to be understood usually are, in Baedal. "AB Yehoshua, Amos Oz, Yoram Kaniuk, no one here's even heard of them. They have a lot of the classics here, it's the pop fiction and not-English stuff they don't... And of those sometimes they don't even have them in the original language, just translations, which. They vary in quality. I found a really horrible translation of Invitation To a Beheading a while back. Like someone ran it through Google Translate to, like, Chinese and then English.

"And music -- gosh, you'd be from before... like, the Beatles. The entire birth of rock." That's a bit of a headfuck, actually, most of the people he talks to are either from the future or from worlds so alien there's no common ground to begin with. "Even the popular stuff with that is hard to find here. Like, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Morrissey... and forget about anything lesser-known or, you know," he raises his hands and does some finger quotes, "foreign."

It is really weird to feel like a foreigner in Baedal. Everyone is foreign here, but...

He nods his head at the book. "What are you reading?"

"I haven't decided," Xas says without looking at it. "I think it's meant to be science fiction. And funny, maybe? But either it's very bad or it's over my head."

Or both. Both is a distinct possibility. He'd bought it off a bargain table, without considering why it might be there, because he liked the artwork on the dust jacket. In any case, he'll read it through.

"I know Arabic," he adds belatedly, then reconsiders and amends, "Or I - it was a long time ago." He hasn't forgotten it, but languages change (and are resurrected, apparently), and with that and dialectal differences and his antiquated vocabulary, it might not be any better for Wolfgang. He shakes his head. "You like rock music? Someone tried to explain it to me a few weeks ago. Made a lot of guitar sounds." He pulls a hand back out of his pocket to slide it down the neck of an imaginary instrument, much less enthusiastically than the other fellow had. "It wasn't persuasive."

"I would put money on it just being bad." If it's native, anyway. There are some talented writers in Baedal, but statistically speaking, the majority of them are awful.

"Do you?" he asks, switching -- he definitely speaks modern Arabic. And his accent is ridiculous because Wolfgang is ridiculous. "The problem with language here is that the city lets you be understood if you intend to be, which is great unless you're trying to learn something new. So you're trying to speak another language with someone and you're not actually sure if you're hearing what you're hearing or if the city is helpfully translating. I'm not even bothering right now," whereas he was before; the change is clear in his broader vocabulary, greater fluidity, and less verbal static, "I mean... I try to speak English because it's good practise but it's also kind of a pain."

Yes, English is a dumb difficult language, unlike Hebrew which is natural and intuitive, jeez.

Watching that air guitar gesture, his face contorts like he's trying not to smile. He ultimately fails at it and laughs. "Yeah, I... it's one of those things you need to experience rather than have explained. There's a couple venues that do live rock shows, but whether or not you see anyone good, um... well, depends on the night. The music's not bad here, just different. Sometimes they play some Earth stuff over the radio but most of it's easy listening cr -- stuff. I guess they're talking about changing that."

There's that pause again. It's okay to cuss in front of angels, Wolfgang.

"Yeah, English isn't what I would have chosen," Xas says agreeably, "if I were - ." If he were an unseen force plucking creatures out of space and time to populate a terrifying city. That's actually impossible to imagine. He supposes giving everyone a more melodic common tongue might not be a priority, though. At least Ragamoll is interesting - as is Wolfgang's accent and the shift in phrasing.

Xas listens with his head tilted. It took him a lot of long nights listening to Ivie Anderson at Apex for jazz to start making sense to him. He can give the music here the same amount of time and effort.

He's about to ask if there's anyone good in particular he should look out for, but this time the aborted curse is too much. It makes him laugh, a quick and quiet exhale. "I hope you're not watching your mouth because of me," he says. "God may care - " His God, Wolfgang's, one of the ones here; he isn't worrying about which he means, because he cares equally little about all of them, thanks. " - but I really don't."

Wolfgang nearly misses his step -- walking is a dangerous activity for him under ordinary circumstances, he's uncoordinated -- and his face colours faintly again. He ducks his head, suddenly fascinated by his shoes. His friend's shoes, actually, he barely looked at them before putting them on. Perhaps he will do so now. Yep, those are some shoes.

"It seems disrespectful," he mutters.

... which. Honey. Really.

"It's not, not to me," Xas says. He eyes him with equal measures of friendly interest and impatience. He doesn't let himself think of Sobran, the first night they met, saying forgive me, and something ridiculous about communion - or he can't help thinking about it, to be accurate, but he only holds it in his head for a second. Then adds, tone self-deprecating and effortfully light, "Would it help to tell you I'm from Hell?"

It's half true.

"Um..." He looks awfully sheepish. "Not really, because that doesn't mean much to me."

Wolfgang has a vague understanding that Christians believe in some kind of horrible flaming torture-pit that the souls of people who don't believe enough go to to suffer for all eternity, but the concept is pretty foreign and confusing to him, and has very little to do with what he's been taught about the nature of God.

... namely that He is not some kind of vengeful psychopath, because that's what that sounds like to him.

Anyway, result: he mostly knows about it from pop culture.

Xas looks surprised. Pleasantly so. The last person he told needed three years to speak to him again, and three more to forgive him; not having the conversation cut short is more than he would have bet on.

"That's probably - that's good," he says, a bit distant, collecting himself. Once he's managed, he grins. "Either way, I'm not very respectable. I'm an animal with a famous owner. And now I'm going to say fuck at least once before you go home." Wait. "Twice."

Wolfgang barely avoids covering his face in embarrassment. "I'm not --" sheltered? He's not actually sure what word he wants to use there. He is aware that he projects an image of being a lot more delicate than he is and that pearl clutching over a couple of swear words is not helping.

He throws his hands up helplessly. "This place is kind of a mindfuck." Then he looks at Xas sidelong like, so there, hah.

(He still feels vaguely guilty about it.)

"It is," Xas says, though he doesn't sound as unhappy about it as he might have a few minutes ago. Mostly he sounds satisfied. He could get used to this - to being able to be honest about himself - as long as it doesn't make people be careful with him.

Maybe that means he's a bit of a hypocrite for not asking about Wolfgang's brand, even though it catches his eye again. Oh well.

"So books, and music," he says instead. "What else?" He eyes Wolfgang's face, trying and failing to gauge his age, to guess whether he should be asking about school or about a job. He's never been good at that. "What did you do?"

"Umm..." Talking about himself feels weird. Things that sound interesting were usually pretty boring at the time. "A lot of the same as here. Bike courier, actually, just before, um, and bartending... poorly." He wrinkles his nose. "I moved a lot. Traveling." That sounds much nicer than 'running from the police,' as if it was just a decision he made one day.

"I lived in Izmir, before here -- in Turkey. Another coastal city, it's very much the same as Tel Aviv, in that... you know, they're both pretty secular and multicultural. It's a beautiful city, there's so much history there, and a lot of the ruins of the old city are really well-preserved." He talks with his hands when he speaks -- it's always been a habit of his but it's getting more pronounced lately. "But the politics there, um... they're a little volatile. Especially with language, that made it really hard."

"Nationalism?" Xas guesses, watching him as much as where he's stepping. He remembers watching his Burgundian friends evolve into Frenchmen, the sudden fervency of the Germans, people's increasing insistence on knowing where Xas from from. It's all easier to understand in hindsight. But he doesn't know if things kept on that way.

"The way to Hell is in Turkey," he adds, "at home. Near Tuz Gölü. But I haven't been back since - 1859, I think. And I never went to Izmir." He never went on foot at all, except the once. "Sounds like I should have."

"Mm-hmm. They call it Pan-Turkism. The government says their minority groups are Jews, Greeks and Armenians... and nothing else. Which is untrue... there are like, 9 million Kurds. Um, ethnic minorities in Turkey often aren't allowed to speak their own language, everyone is supposed to speak Turkish. That's a law, actually. It makes it hard to live there if you don't, but in the bigger cities it's not too bad of a problem, they're pretty multicultural, very used to tourists. I got by all right in Arabic until I learned a little Turkish. They thought I was a European tourist."

Wolfgang Einhorn. And he's pale, blonde and blue-eyed. His choice of pseudonym was deliberate.

"They want to assimilate all their ethnic groups so that there aren't any, just... one big Turkish nationality. And they'll do a lot of things to make it that way. In terms of language policing it's like the opposite of Israel -- they don't want to assimilate, they want to exclude, and fuck everyone else." He clears his throat. "Excuse me." That's less for his choice of language and more for blathering on about politics. He brushes his hair out of his face, looking a little sheepish. "So it's very different from when you were last there, yes. Lake Tuz, that's, what, Aksaray? I never made it out that far from Ankara. What's it like out there?"

"Beautiful. What I could see, anyway. I usually went straight in and out without talking to anyone."

Xas illustrates with a swooping hand, down and then right back up. He could never stay too close to the ground without risking being seen, and when he did land somewhere he rarely moved more than a few yards at a time across the ground. Most of his memories of the world are more like maps than postcards - and he was content with that, at the time, but there aren't enough human words for air currents and clouds for him to be able to explain why.

"Is that why you moved from Israel?" he asks, and on its heels, "Is it where it used to be, on the Mediterranean?"

"I..." His hesitation to answer that is pretty distinct -- it is very clear that there is something there he doesn't want to admit to, and he never knows what to say to people when they touch on it. It's easier for him to blow right past that, to talk about things that aren't personal. He wishes he had something to do with his hands.

He has to stop and think about what the region looked like before the 40's. "Mm. On the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, west of Jordan. It includes Jerusalem... or, well, most of it. Or all of it. Or half -- um, the Israeli government considers Jerusalem ours, the rest of the world... no. East Jerusalem is supposed to be the capital of the new Palestinian state, but um..." He spreads his hands in a helpless gesture, as in you see the problem there, yes.

Beneath the thin, practiced, and entirely artificial veneer of angelic patience, Xas's expression is scrutinizing. But he doesn't press. "I've moved a lot, too," he says, like that concludes it, like maybe they both just have wanderlust. It might be true.

As for the rest of it... He shakes his head, almost as impressed as he is exasperated. For being so frail and short-lived individually, he thinks, people are remarkably tenacious as a whole. "Someday everyone is going to have to find someplace else to fight over," he says. Xas avoids Jerusalem on principle - or did, when visiting it might have been practical.

"Yes, when the Americans have ensured that we've all thoroughly murdered each other so they can move in, take all the resources and stick a flag in it for Jesus." Wolfgang winces immediately after having said it and ducks his head. "Sorry, that was cynical."

He has a lot of feelings about America as an entity, although the individual Americans he's met -- largely here, he spoke to maybe a handful before Baedal and they mostly confused him, Jewish-American tourists with their weird entitlement complexes and neo-hippie backpackers in Beirut -- have been perfectly lovely people and not at all what he'd come to expect from television and Youtube comments.

Xas grins, charmed despite the subject matter, and turns a corner so they won't end up too far from where Wolfgang is staying. "I think cynicism is probably healthy." It doesn't come naturally to him, but he tries, with mixed effect.

"I was in America before I came here." Came. It's the easiest way to think about it. He'd been planning to leave, anyway - because Lucifer had found him, and because Con wanted him gone - even if that plan had only been born in the few minutes between when he resurfaced in the ocean and when he turned up here. "They didn't seem - " He stops, shrugs; even if no one he knew was very interested in foreign policy, there was segregation and prohibition and self-righteous religion. He kept out of it, but he doesn't want to say that it wasn't so bad. "I guess that would have been a long time ago," he says instead.

it's all right, ain't no God in my eye

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