2019-09-24 - Fight Club

---

It's late, after midnight, and August is lying in bed next to Eleanor, not quite ready to sleep. He can tell he's getting sick. It's not on him just yet, but he knows this feeling. The lethargy, the way everything is too much or too little, the tinnitus hitting more frequently. He's got sometihng coming on.

Also he's been thinking about Itzhak, and the exorcism. How he hasn't replied to a single call or text. August limited himself to two of each, spaced a couple of hours apart, and now, here it is, pushing two AM, and still nothing. He knows about needing alone-time, but he also knows about that not always being the best idea after a highly stressful event.

He shuts his eyes, centers himself, and reaches out. Something about doing it feels odd, like his Gift is achy in some way. He waits, patiently, to reach Itzhak. It takes a while; the river runs, the wind winds, and still he's seeking. Where have you wandered off too, he wonders.

---

Up the I-5, through first Olympia, then Tacoma, then into Seattle; that's where Itzhak's gone, into the glitter of the city. Gone, for a certainty, to look for trouble to get himself in.

And, funny, he's almost disappointed. Seattle, even now, is a far cry from Manhattan. But August tipped him off in a conversation weeks ago, and wouldn't you know it, the Off Ramp (now El Corazon) really is right on the off ramp.

It's coming up on two in the morning. Itzhak's head rings with noise and music and anger just below the boiling point. He's more than a little drunk, and he's focused on a guy in a leather jacket bearing the Iron Cross. This guy's been a shithead all night, and Itzhak is juuuuust about to teach him some manners.

---

It takes a while for August to find him. The impending illness complicates things, as it makes his mind wander a bit. Oh, Olympia, is that little Crab Shack still there? Tacoma, what's at the glass museum right now... But find Itzhak he does, the sense of the mind connecting is jarring. Not the least because August is a little off balance, and Itzhak is ready to boil over, which August is in no way prepared for. The link itself seems odd too: distorted and twitchy, the emotions and senses it's feeding back and forth not coming through quite right. The wind's volume stutters, the river seems to go silent and then roar.

<<What on earth are you doing,>> August wonders, because despite how obvious it is, he's having trouble actually grasping what's going on via this tentative, uncertain link formed at a vastly greater distance than he's ever tried.

---

Smeared colors represent people around Itzhak. Everything he hears is clear, too clear, painfully clear like too-cold air. The pain is driving him not-so-slowly to rage, and he welcomes it. He wants to lose his temper. He's well on his way to doing so. It's like standing on the deck of a ship tossed in a storm and about to sink.

"None a ya fucking business!" he snaps, head whipping around to glare over his shoulder. Nobody's there. "...Roen?"

---

August winces and makes a sound, looks askance at Eleanor to make sure he hasn't woke her up. The feelings coming off of Itzhak feel different than it seems like they should. Maybe he should start on some Theraflu.

<<Did you at least take someone with you on this adventure?>> His mind voice is gravely, not at all like it typically sounds. <<Tell me Kelly's there with you. Or...someone.>> Not Ignacio. No, not him, not right now. Are those bystanders, or is Itzhak trying to wade into an entire gang?

<<I'm so old, don't do this to me.>> Does he mean 'make me drive to Seattle to bail you out' or 'watch you beat the crap out of some people and hate yourself later'? Probably both.

---

Itzhak snorts, turning back around to hunch over his beer. <<Kelly. Please. I can do my own fighting.>> Also, he's kind of hurt and betrayed by that thought from August. How dare August suggest Itzhak can't handle instigating a brawl with neo-Nazis all on his own? Joey Lee Kelly might be a semi-pro boxer and actively coaching him, but fuck that guy! Fuck him, fuck his entire clan, fuck Monaghan, fuck EVERY. THING. UNDER. THE. SUN.

The guy in the Iron Cross jacket has been hassling girls and getting too rough in the pit, but he hasn't been bounced. Maybe he has a little glimmer of his own. Itzhak's been watching him, and the guy's been watching him, and they've been doing something that in another context might be called flirting. Eyeing each other across the raucous room. Maneuvering. Silently promising each other 'soon'. Now the guy is heading outside, drunk and wired.

<<You don't wanna watch, hang up.>> Itzhak abandons his beer, weaves through the crowd towards the exit.

---

August knows this particular type of emotional rollercoaster all too well. He also knows there's no point to trying to talk Itzhak out of it, and anyways, he lacks the energy just now.

<<If something happens to you, I'm sending Alenxader to fetch you, and going to suggest he bring de la Vega.>> There, that'll teach him! Or piss him off more, but whatever. No one said a desire to burn the world didn't come with consequences, like your friend weaponizing a mutual friend.

He does drift back and away, letting the connection fade to just a suggestion, the thinnest thread so he can tell if Itzhak's in real trouble. If August feels Itzhak getting injured, he's going to throw up. He just is. But he can wait, until Itzhak's got some of this out of his system.

---

Itzhak shoves the connection away with a snarl. Not all the way. He lets August maintain that thread, and if he's thinking about it more as punishing August rather than allowing him to care for him, well, what really matters is that he doesn't sever the line.

Things from his end become a little wild. Adrenaline spikes and muscles working and pain flashing bright and hot. The taste of blood. Real fear, mixed with overwhelming berserker glee. It's all rather like listening to a fight happening next to a phone left off the hook, however. Tinny, easy to ignore.

After a few minutes, the crux of the fight is over, and Itzhak's limping swiftly away, cursing and laughing to himself.

---

August weathers all of this with a fraction of his usual patience, and he wonders what that means. None of this is new for him, it's exactly the sort of behavior he's always known was possible. Yet it hurts more, just now, and it's harder for him to not want to shove back.

And yet, that won't help, will only prove the point Itzhak is currently trying to make to himself. (That he deserves this sort of thing.) He lays back, tells himself his head's not spinning.

Eventually August notices the cursing and laughing. Well, that means Itzhak's not dead, and not unconscious. No need to ping Alexander and send him to Seattle like a bat out of hell.

<<Feel better?>> He doesn't ask it with the kind of wry amusement he might normally. Something in him feels too tired, too worn down for that.

---

<<You know what Roen-->> Itzhak's kythe hiccups as a lifted pickup roars to life somewhere behind him. Then he's running. Then he's climbing, flinging himself against a gate and scrabbling over the top. Then he's running again, lungs burning, a sharp pain in his side. His shirt is stuck there, wetly. He stumbles, cursing, and someone else curses him--he's racing through someone's tent site--and he's fleeing as fast as his long legs will go.

He doesn't stop until he's crammed himself into some cranny on the waterfront.

---

August waits, tense and rigid in the bed next to Eleanor. But it doesn't come; no cut off of the connection, no indication Itzhak's been severely hurt. August allows himself to breathe.

<<You okay?>> A husky murmur, as if August himself needs to remain quiet. It's a little frustrating, knowing he can't do much of anything from here, and a part of him is tying itself into knots because in the--

August shuts the door on that memory. No. Not right now.

---

Itzhak's breathing is harsh and terrifically loud in his own ears. <<Fine.>> He sends even as he's feeling around on his side, even as he's listening with furious concentration for running footsteps. Nothing, though. Only the sigh of the ocean.

His fingertips come away bloody, and there's a slit in his shirt, but it's a surface wound. <<Had a knife,>> Itzhak provides, unnecessarily. <<Bent it for him.>>

He sags back, shaking, teeth bared.

---

A small injury. The kind that August can generally handle of late. (Unlike earlier, with Ruiz...no, not that either. Don't see it.) Less so right now, but maybe it's because he's sick. Or maybe it was just the usual way one got over this sort of thing: two steps forward, one step back.

<<Good. Now he can't use it on one of those girls he was bothering.>> He's quiet a bit, and for a time the link between them is almost like its usual self. The distortion minimizes, the river rambles, the dead volcano sits in the distance. <<You did good today. Locked up that shithead in your case.>> The real thing August would prefer to congratulate Itzhak for.

---

Itzhak, sweating, panting, shakes his head in reflexive denial.

<<S'what they needed me for I guess. My old prison trick. Used to hide contraband, evidence. Had no idea it was...>> he winces, breath catching. <<...it was kind of a thing.>>

His mental violin is scrapey and uneven, first too loud then too soft, like he's having trouble controlling the intonation. <<One of the 'Three', how about that, huh.>> Bitter amusement makes his strings shrill.

---

<<One of the Three,>> August echoes. <<Guess it must be. Can't say I'm surprised, you're basically altering spatial properties when you do that.>> He winces at the odd sound coming from Itzhak, but welcomes it none the less. It's still him, after all; jangled and struggling or artful and ringing. He knows what these moments are like, has lived through a few too many himself.

<<I suspect Ignacio's been blowing up your DMs, prepare yourself.>> A ripple of amusement makes the river's sound fuzz and distort. <<Once he figures out how to do this, you're pretty fucked you know. He'd have watched that fight and mocked your form.>> The amusement turns thoughtful. <<Maybe I should use that to incentivize him...>>

---

<<He better fuckin' not or I'll push his loud gimpy ass over.>> Itzhak's tone lacks his usual humor. He's angry. Furious, really, with everyone and everything. Himself most of all. Regrets are seething around in the depths of his mind, which just pisses him off more.

He digs out his phone anyway, trying not to smear blood on it. <<Yyyyep look at that. Asshole.>>

But he fires a text back anyway before stuffing his phone back in his pocket.

---

<<He'll be able to taze you, you know. That shit can hurt like a motherfucker, too.>> Of course, Itzhak can just stop him. But he might not know that, and August doesn't feel like clueing him in just now.

<<Not sure I've seen you this angry before.>> It's an observational comment, like he's talking about a new shirt Itzhak happens to be wearing. <<Did the Ghoul say something to you before you guys locked him up?>>

---

<<No!>> Itzhak snaps, lying. <<I just--I need a new case and I'm gonna need a new fiddle and--and you didn't know me that long, you ain't seen nothin' yet.>>

He should break up with Isolde. (The thought bubbles suddenly to the surface like a blorp of tar.) He should quit not-dating Bex. He should stop pretending he can be a decent boyfriend or a good friend or even a good guy and he should get the hell away from them and August and everyone he accidentally made friends with in this fucking town despite his best efforts.

August watched him physically punish himself. Now he gets to see him emotionally punish himself, too.

---

<<You're right--I don't.>> August accepts the censure with equanimity. <<And those are definitely some things to wrestle with. I'd be pretty mad too. I was, for a long time, about stuff like that.>> Personal things, he means. Things he'd placed value in that had been taken from him when he'd already lost so much. <<Still, now's a bad time to decide things. Decisions later.>> More silence. The odd distortion is like wheezing, a thin film slowly building up.

August thinks back to what Itzhak's just indicated. 'I'm gonna need a new fiddle.' He knows what that means; that August isn't the only one sacrificing a friend to Billy the Ghoul. <<Maybe we could make you a new one. A fiddle, I mean. I know it'll be a lot harder than the bow,>> he remembers that fondly even with all the missteps, which make him smile to recall even now, <<but that's okay. It's a good way to learn.>> Their Gifts. The Song.

---

Itzhak drags himself from under the picnic table he'd used to hide. Every single muscle in him screams as he does, a metal-on-metal screech like worn-through brake pads. <<Oy gevalt. I really am getting too old for this shit.>> He slumps on the bench and pulls out his cigarettes. The token August gave him earlier comes out with them; the aspen leaf with the pink ipe bead and the feather. He sets it on the table, studies it while he lights up.

He's grateful for the gift, of both the beautiful little bit of art and August's own strength. He's too angry to say it in so many words, too full of self-loathing. But he lets the feeling seep under all that, a slow trickle of a spring.

<<Make me a fiddle?>> he sends back, eyebrows popping up. Ever the technician, of course he's intrigued. The intrigue itself is a relief from the anger, something cool to set on a fevered brow. <<I dunno we could make it sound any good.>>

---

August smiles at the fleeting sight of the token. He's still deciding on what to give Eleanor. No antlers, of course, but a leaf, maybe a carved bit of wood. It'll come to him in time. <<You were too old at thirty, really. I remember a scrap or two at thirty-one. Soaked in a hottub for a goddamn week after that. It's like you turn twenty-eight and your body throws in the towel. Just plain rude.>>

Relief trickles through him as Itzhak's mind turns away from the anger for a moment. <<Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly we'd fuck it up plenty. Not like Stradivarius popped out of his mom a master luthier though, right? Who knows. We won't, if we don't give it a shot.>> Anyways, who's August kidding, he's dying to try and get things to reshape themselves. A frivolous use of the Gift? Given what they'd just gone through, maybe they were owed some. <<We'd need a bunch of kinds of wood, too.>>

---

Itzhak snorts, reluctantly amused, letting August amuse him. Allowing as to how he's listening. <<No kidding, right? Shameful. Youth, wasted on the young.>>

He's still thinking, unable to help it, about how he should break up with his girls, stop acting like he's anything better than a good fuck. The thought chases itself around in a well-worn groove, its own demented little merry-go-round, louder now that he's cooling down. But August did something for him he can't do for himself. He gave him permission not to make any decisions. These thoughts torment him, but hell, he just has to put up with them for a while, maybe. Maybe he doesn't have to go out and promptly ruin the rest of his sorry life.

(He thinks of Isolde, her eyes shining up at him, lit by the setting sun. He thinks of Bex, standing waist-deep in a rocky little pool in the forest. They want you to come back, yutz.)

Thinking about violins and wood is a welcome distraction, something to do while he waits for the merry-go-round to wear itself out. <<Maple, ebony, maybe mahogany and spruce and stuff like that.>> He only knows most of these woods as things that make up a violin, so it's not trees that pop into his mind's eye, but slabs of seasoning wood in a lutherie. <<They say it's the wood Stradivarius used that made his instruments so special. Wood that just don't grow no more.>>

---

Of course, now August is thinking about what he'd be doing with his 25 year old body in the here and now. Particularly since he's feeling so run down. But he also looked markedly different then; leaner, generically good looking in the way society likes, black-haired, hazel eyed. So maybe not. Maybe just 25 year old vitality. Maybe not the aches, but the scars can stay. There. That's the ticket. <<It sure is.>>

The merry-go-round squeaks on. <<No decisions.>> It's a gentle reiteration, reminder rather than admonishment. Once that merry-go-round stops, Itzhak can think about if it represents anything worth doing. (It doesn't, but that won't be obvious until it's no longer spinning and making it's harassing noise of 'you're worthless and deserve nothing of value'.) Itzhak might be down in a hole, and August might have jumped in with him, but the reason he did that was he's been in it before and is aware of the various methods for getting out.

So for now, violins and wood which no longer exists. <<I can believe that. We see that up here. The old longhouses, we've found wood in them from a kind of tree we've never been able to locate in the wild. Descriptions in tribal histories that don't match any extant species. Probably when white people showed up, between the native tribes already using them and colonists clear cutting like idiots, it was too much.>> He imagines it; some type of yellow cypress or Washington red cedar, a little different than the ones they know today. Huge forests of them, beloved by the tribes and revered for all they offered. Then barren hillsides, eroding as white people set up saw mills and stripped them. For the same uses, but at a much more pronounced rate.

<<I wonder if that's something we can change.>> Could they find a way to bring back extinct species of plants? Animals seemed impossible, but plants...

---

Itzhak shivers hard in the ocean chill, eyes drifting closed. He had a vision, a Dream, that he now shares with August. The old sawmill running backwards, knitting planks of wood into trees.

And someone was there with him. De la Vega, marveling at Itzhak's power, at his Dreaming mind. The bloody knot of contention and desire between them throbs like a heart.

<<Maybe.>> Itzhak sucks down the last of the cigarette, tosses it to the concrete and crushes it under the toe of his boot. <<Anything's possible.>>

In Yiddish, this means 'not on your life'. Itzhak means it like that. He also means it literally, because how can he not? He rode on the back of a unicorn. De le Vega thanked him for his Dream. Anything really is possible. Such contradictions Itzhak is learning to embrace.

He stands up from the picnic bench, wincing, rolls his left shoulder. <<Watch this.>>

Itzhak taps out a beat on his jean-clad thigh, one-two. One-two-three-four.

"Your love is like a tidal wave, spinning over my head
Drownin' me in your promises better left unsaid
You're the right kind of sinner to release my inner fantasy
The invincible winner, and you know that you were born to be..."

Vrrrrrrrmmmm. The throaty growl of his Vette rises through the silent streets. She's coming to him, commanded by his Song. Itzhak grins lopsided to hear her, and as he sings, she slinks around a corner. Her lights are off, and she prowls towards him like a living thing.

"You're a heartbreaker
Dream maker, a love taker
Don't you mess around with me, no no no..."

---

August is, perhaps oddly, unsurprised to see that between Itzhak and de la Vega. He's been harboring his suspicions, isn't shocked to find them confirmed. Maybe, if anything, he's relieved, that Itzhak's willing to let him see it. He makes no comment on that, though. Not right now.

A soft sigh for that vision, wistful and sad but with some hope. Destruction undone. Things wronged put to rights. Healing what they can. It won't be everything, yet even a little bit is enough for August, because a little bit spreads, and spreads, and spreads. No one of them can fix the world. Just what's in reach.

August's laugh is a ripple through the trees and the river, unmistakeably happy despite the exhaustion and oncoming illness. <<That's amazing,>> he says, watching the Corvette approach. He might not be a car person, but even he can appreciate her, especially summoned as she has been. <<Careful or I'll make you drive me to and from work.>> God, what a thought. Just get in the car, and it takes you there.

Oh, he's tired, and his joints are twinging in a way they shouldn't. Not a good sign. <<When are you coming home?>>

Not back. Home.

---

Itzhak limps to his car. She opens the door for him, like a lady. He's caught by the question, though. Pausing before getting in, one hand on the roof, he squints out over the ocean, into the night wind.

He's pretty sure August used the word 'home' deliberately, because that's the kind of thing August does. And damn him, it works. A little spark of guilt and homesickness flares to life in his breast. Homesick for Manhattan, homesick for not Elm Street, but the people in Gray Harbor he's learned to love. Itzhak sighs and gets in.

<<Tomorrow night. That make ya happy, you crabby old queen?>>

He's holding the aspen leaf-feather-antler token, and as he drops into the bucket seat, he gets an idea. A moment of messing with it later, he's got it hung from his rear view mirror. Heartbreaker can wear it as her jewelry.

---

It does, of course. The distortion in the link eases a touch, the weight which is August's own struggle with Gohl's infection shifts, becomes a little easier to bear.

But because he's himself, what he thinks is, <<It's a start.>> A pause, in which there's the distinct impression he's in pain. <<There's some kind of horrible flu going around. Careful who you kiss. Half the town's got it.>>

A soft sigh that makes the mental landscape ripple when he sees where the token winds up. <<Stay safe.>>

And then he's gone, falling asleep because he can't hold back. He's just too tired.

---

In not quite thirty hours, Itzhak will completely disregard this advice by kissing an obviously-sick Isolde, on the floor of her house, just after the two of them are dumped out of the Veil.

Sensing August's presence drop off, he sighs, leans his forehead against the steering wheel. Here's what will really compel him back; knowing his friends and lovers are sick, in danger, struggling with the aftermath of Gohl's exorcism. His urge to stand guard over them like some kind of low-rent Jewish Batman will only let him stay away so long.

"Yeah," he mutters, beneath the grumble of the idling engine. "You too, old man."