January 2013
"And you promise me that this is actually a thing people do to food?" Jane sent an eyebrow as high as it could go, fixing an inquisitive, perhaps slightly accusatory stare upon Daria.
"Boiling leftover chicken bones?" Daria dipped her wooden spoon into the simmering mixture and gave it a gentle stir. "You have my word. Where did you think broth came from?"
"Cans," said Jane. "Boxes, if you're fancy."
Daria had tuned her shiny new Encom phone to a retro station, and Orbital's "Halcyon" was bubbling up through the kitchen's speaker system. She took a deep whiff of the steam over the stock pot, rising up on her sock-toes to do so.
"Soup tomorrow?" Jane asked, hopefully.
"Soup tomorrow. And I'm going to turn some of that ten-kilo chocolate brick into mousse."
"But what about squirrel?"
"Oh Lord," Daria deadpanned. "The Internet has rotted my best friend's brain."
"A Womantime Original Movie of the Week!" Jane took a frosted molasses cookie from the pile that Daria had made earlier that afternoon. "Hey, that reminds me. I found this fanfic where someone is rewriting Buffy one episode at a time, to be as feminist as they remember it being."
"Huh. See, that's the thing I admire the most about fanfiction. When it follows through on a premise, it can really follow through. Sherlock and John adopt a clone baby: two hundred thousand words! A gritty reboot of Dave where 9/11 happens during Kevin Kline's presidency: one hundred fifty thousand words and counting!"
"You seem to know your way around."
"You should see my bookmark list sometime."
"Truhhff," said Jane. She swallowed the bite of cookie and tried again. "Trust," she said, "is the foundation of any solid friendship."
"Why, Finch, I didn't know you collected statues."
"Yeah, Glasses here has gone full Charlie Kane."
"Mr. Reese, Detective. I called you to this penthouse suite tonight because it has come to my attention that we need more ... assistance with our work. Now, the exact words of the spell were that the curse would be broken when the gargoyles were raised above the clouds, so---"
Jane Lane lifted her fork and scrutinized the syrup-drenched fragment of pancake upon it. "You're telling me this is vegan? But it looks so ... real."
"My cubicle-mate at my last job gave me the recipe," Daria explained. "She said she lost the ability to digest milk, and without cheese, most of the fun of meat was gone."
"Huh. That makes a disturbing amount of sense." Jane stuffed the forkful of pancake into her mouth and began to process the experience contemplatively. "Mm-hmmm!" She swallowed. "And I guess it's automatically healthy, right?"
"Exactly. Just like my deep-fried quinoa fritters."
Midway through her syrupy stack, Jane paused to lean back and pat her stomach. "I've got to hand it to you, Dariatron: You make me want to say breakfast of champions about something that isn't booze."
"Got to keep you from kicking me to the curb somehow."
"Man, and I never have pancakes. Never awake enough to make them for myself, so I only ever get them when I'm out on a brunch of shame."
" 'Shame'?"
"Yes, it's one of our Earth emotions."
"I kind of figured you'd ... I mean, you haven't gone out on a date since I've been here."
"Taking a break for a while," Jane said. "Gotta recover after my last experience. Boy wouldn't shut up about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality."
Daria smiled her little Mona Lisa smile. "I've got an AO3 bookmark you should see. Remember that night in college when we stayed up to binge Evangelion?"
* * *
The Commander said, "My son imagines himself the hero of his own story."
Fuyutsuki replied, "Most do."
"He believes that he knows that I know that he knows that I know his plan. Well," and the Commander allowed himself a smile behind his gloved hands, "let him."
* * *
The escalator hummed as it carried them further into the NERV geofront. Rei asked, in her typical soft voice, "Do you not trust your father?"
Shinji said, "He doesn't say anything interesting. He doesn't respect me. Adults never do. Why should I listen to them when I could be playing my Richard Feynman audiobook instead?"
Rei said, "Feynman admired his father."
He inserted his earbuds, turned up the volume on his S-DAT and said nothing.
* * *
"Baka!" shouted Asuka. She raised her right hand and slapped Shinji full in the face. He stumbled back, tripped over his box of Warhammer miniatures and landed with a thump that made three of the thin walls of Misato's apartment vibrate.
From beyond the fourth, they heard laughter.
* * *
Misato sighed and pulled her jacket more tightly around herself. If the world still had seasons, this night in Tokyo-3 would have been unseasonably cold. Ritsuko stood beside her, leaning against the rail of the scenic overlook. Misato said, "Some days I just don't know how to reach that boy."
"Shock therapy," Ritsuko suggested. "Tell him Feynman was quantifiably wrong about the double-slit experiment being the only mystery of quantum mechanics."
"Maybe... maybe he needs a male example in his life. Someone to look up to."
Ritsuko suggested, keeping her face straight, "Kaji?"
"Bite your tongue."
* * *
"Get out," Shinji hissed. "Go back and tell my father that I've seen through his tricks."
Kaworu stood.
At the door, he turned to face Shinji again. "Remember: I will understand, and I will forgive you, always."
And then Kaworu was gone.
* * *
The corridors on the way to Central Dogma stank of LCL. Shinji passed military uniforms, labcoats and the jumpsuits of NERV technicians, all sodden with the organic liquid, seemingly abandoned in piles on the floor.
Just outside the door to the primary control center, Shinji heard a voice from within. He recognized it as Maya Ibuki, the quiet and efficient computer specialist, shrieking with a degree of delight he had never imagined. "Senpai! Senpai!"
And then Central Dogma was silent.
"Hello?" He was not sure his ID card would open the door.
"You don't need to go anywhere."
He spun about. "Rei? Where did you come from?"
"I appeared to her," Rei explained, "as what she desired most. I have appeared to them all."
A second Rei now stood beside the first. "This was to ease the process and make their transition a joyful one."
A third Rei spoke, and he turned to face her. She said, "You want as strongly as any of them, but you reject that about yourself."
The door slid open, and a fourth Rei emerged. "We regret that we must resort to force of numbers, but this is the simplest approach."
"Instrumentality is at hand, Ikari Shinji."
"We welcome you, Ikari Shinji."
"We understand you, Ikari Shinji."
He put up his hands and began to scream, but the screaming did not last for very long.
The cornbread batter hit the oil in the cast-iron skillet and began to spread, sizzling on its way.
Daria darted back to the microwave and pulled out the ramekin with the defrosted bits of chopped green garlic, then scurried to the counter and sprinkled the garlic slivers over the batter, which was now ringed by bubbling oil and just barely browning at the edges of the pan. She slid on a pair of oven mitts and lifted the skillet. Juxtaposed with her petite frame, it seemed not quite comically large.
Jane slipped past her and opened the oven door. As Daria was depositing the skillet into the preheated interior, Jane carried on what she had started saying a minute before. "It's about finding things in the source material you didn't even know were there, sometimes. Right? Click 'sort by kudos', skim past the straight-up porn—"
"To find the bi-up porn." Daria closed the oven door, removed her mitts and punched fifteen minutes into the stove timer.
"If it's a slow Saturday night, sure. Like this one I found a couple weeks ago, a Voyager fic that shipped Paris and Torres, then split them up to get him together with Harry Kim and her with Seven of Nine. But the main thing was that Seven was there from the very beginning. The Caretaker captures a Borg sphere, everything plays out differently, Janeway has a good reason to blow up the Array, she kills Neelix in the process, it's all good, you know? I had always thought Seven was just, you know, fan service—"
"37-double-D of Nine. The real Borg spheres. Et cetera."
"But she was actually an opportunity to have a character with an arc. And that's something the show really needed. Plus, with Neelix dead, Kes gets to develop, and Harry takes on the part of 'morale officer', which suits him since he's a kind of genial hapless doof and it's a good role for him to grow into. Chakotay becomes the guy who knows wilderness and survival stuff, which becomes a window into his character because he'd always had a messy relationship with everything his father said was their 'heritage', and now he has to 'best of both worlds' that and Starfleet."
"Sounds good," Daria said. "I'll have to check it out."
"It hasn't updated in, like, a year, though."
"Well, isn't that just a genre convention?"
"The same author had a one-shot about Tasha Yar dying in Next Generation. You remember when we binged that from Wind's VHS collection, what was that, the summer after tenth grade?"
"Do I remember the first season of TNG? Yes, much as I wish I didn't."
"Well," Jane said, "this story made me remember that the one where Tasha dies was the first sign that the show could actually become really good. I guess I forgot how I had noticed that the music is strong and atmospheric, the character bit with Tasha and Worf is a good opening, Troi actually has a purpose — holy shit, right? If anything, her one-on-one scenes with the bad guy were like, wow, they wasted the character, and the actor too."
"Armus," Daria thought aloud. "Why do I remember his name was Armus? But he's a very TOS villain: allegorical pure extruded evil on a soundstage dressed with rocks. But, if you give Sir Patrick a script where he has to be scornful to a sentient oil slick, Sir Patrick is going to act the hell out of it." She paused to reflect. "Now that you make me think about it again — Tasha's memorial service was a better scene than TNG had deserved up to that point. 'Hailing frequencies closed, sir' is the kind of closing line that makes the fictional world feel lived-in."
Daria switched on the oven light and checked the progress of the cornbread. Pensively, she went on, "I wonder how many brain cells I've devoted to remembering fanfiction. There was this one story I read over Thanksgiving break in college. I wonder if I could find it again. It was a sequel to H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. The idea was that the Martian invasion failed because of deliberate sabotage. The war strategists insist upon total commitment, sending all their troops and cylinders in a massive onslaught. This won't actually kill proportionally more humans than a small force would, because once the cities fall there simply won't be many opportunities for engagement. The point is to leave nothing in reserve after the invasion fails — and they make sure it does, because the guy in charge of the preventive measures against Earth microbes does a shitty job on purpose."
"Dang, yeah, let's look for that. After food."
* * *
"We, the scientists of Mars, watched our civilization consume itself and the world that nourished us. It was not the grinding desiccation of our planet that made us regard yours with envy, for we had survived that crisis with our domes and our canals. Our envy was born of our entitlement, of forgetting what had made our domes and canals possible.
"A few of us warned against this. Not enough, and not even all our scientists, for intellect alone is no protection against self-righteousness. When the hunger for conquest spread through our people, we had no time. We knew that words of compassion would be ignored. Our only choice was to give fire to the cruelty, to become the technicians of empire. We said what the colonizers thirsted to hear, so that the conquest would overextend itself, and only one world would die, instead of two.
"The dead allow us no forgiveness. We pray only that you learn what we could not."
"Smells typically delicious," Jane said, shucking off her heavy work boots.
"Just whatever we had on hand," Daria told her, a little apologetically. She pulled the second foil-covered baking dish out of the oven, set it on the stove surface and pushed the oven door closed. Björk's "Isobel" was playing from her laptop. "I'm calling it 'air-quotes Hawaiian tofu'. And yes, you have to say the air quotes."
"As in, if you ordered 'Hawaiian tofu' at a restaurant, you'd expect to get something like this?"
"It's got pineapple chunks and diced red and green peppers, with soy sauce and agave and a glug of mirin. The other one is broccoli with lemon and garlic." The rice cooker chirped out a rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. "And I used the last of the brown rice — I'll get more at the store tomorrow."
"Wait until after I'm done with work, and I'll go with you." Jane stepped toward the cabinet with the plates and reached out a hand, and then let it fall to her side. "Christ, we're domesticated."
* * *
Jane set her bowl down on the coffee table. "Let's go stargazing," she said. "I mean, sometime when it's not, you know—" She waved a hand at the window, beyond which a light but definite sleet was falling.
"Where can we do that?"
"I've heard of some places, out west or up north along the coast a ways. Can I—" Jane stood and pointed at Daria's laptop in lieu of assembling words. Daria signaled her permission with a tilt of her head and a wiggle of her fingers.
Jane was walking back from the kitchen when, stopped cold by an open browser tab, she asked, "A coffee shop AU of John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness?"
* * *
"Yes, Mr. Cane. I know it's not turning out how you expected.
"I know about the tunnel of undying flesh. I know about the whispers and the screaming. I know about 'the horrible, slimy things, trying to get back in', and how they've used your words to give shape to our bad chemistry and catalyze the reaction that will make the walls of reality weak.
"But the thing about reshaping reality with words? Your words aren't the only ones.
"And the thing about building up all that fear, all that chaos? Is that people will seek refuge.
"This isn't Paradise, Mr. Cane. But we do a mean dark roast. And the scones? To die for.
"Sorry. Couldn't resist.
"(John! Linda! Grab a seat, I'll be right with you.)
"Do you know why people enjoy this little café so much? It's not just the scones, it's the atmosphere.
"You see, management has empowered the staff to eject entitled customers."
Bonfire Night tumbled out of the wind between worlds, landing hard on his left leg and stumbling back and forth over the asphalt. "Time to raise the roof," he belted, "my ink-and-paint-stained wretches!"
Daria and Jane watched him silently for a moment.
Then Jane asked, "He can only come in if we invite him, right?"
"Hey now," Daria said, "we should have sympathy for the less fortunate."
Bonfire Night pulled a bottle out of a pocket inside his jacket that should have been too small to contain it. "Aw, bollockettes. Nobody on my plane of reality wanted to do shots either. And this is the good stuff — straight out of the subconscious of a film student doing a thesis on noir."
Jane and Daria shared a look.
"Fine," Daria sighed. "But any talk about the beauty of streetlights in the rain, and you're out."
"Out like flout," he promised, making the Boy Scout salute.
* * *
His head was in the fridge. "Oi," he said, "what's this? A visual aid for brains?"
"That," Daria told him, "is the leftover macaroni with cashew cheese that I made for my girlfriend yesterday."
"By the fog and the filthy air," he said. "It's just my luck that the only refrigerator I can raid is stocked by vegan lesbians."
Jane shot back, "That's uncalled for. By, like, twenty-five percent." She began counting on her fingers in a complicated manner. "Add three-half points for bisexuality, subtract half of a third because her GF still eats egg —"
Daria splashed bourbon into a glass and topped it up with Ultra Cola.
Bonfire Night spooned a noodly pile onto a plate and slid it into the microwave. "Let's put on some tunes, right, then?"
Jane said, walking back to the living room, "Way ahead of you." She pulled the wireless keyboard for the media computer out from its hiding place, under a cushion in the papasan chair. A few taps later, and the room speakers were active. The track was flagrantly electronic, but with odd syncopations and missed rhythms around the main driving pulse that hinted at life.
"Really, now?" Daria asked.
"It was on random!" Jane replied.
Bonfire Night looked from one to the other, quizzically.
"Locrian Fuck Jams," Daria told him, "by DJ Qiana and Trent Lane." And she took a drink.
* * *
Some time later, Bonfire Night was saying, "I was there from the beginning, you know. Before the bastard came back from the dead, the girls were all like, he escaped from Moriarty at the Falls and now he's just hiding. I remember all the tea-gown chatter. Holmes is alive, Holmes came back because he loves Watson, Holmes is secretly a woman... Nothing new under the goddamn Sun."
Daria felt an unaccustomed warmth deep in her belly. "He who is not shocked and amazed by AO3 has not searched the right keywords." And, because Jane was giving her a definite I double-dog dare you look, she opened a browser tab on the projector and started typing in the address bar. It autocompleted after arch.
* * *
Bonfire Night hit the down arrow with increasing disbelief. "Irene Adler plays Sherlock in a kinetoscope?!"
Daria pushed her bedroom door closed with her shoulder. Her hands were full, one with a glass bottle of ginger beer and the other with a red-and-gold bag of snacks labeled in Mandarin. She set both items on her desk, where her laptop was waiting, and then she pulled the bag open, leaned over and inhaled deeply of dried chili peppers and peanuts.
"Just half an hour," she said. "Just let me have thirty minutes to stuff my face and read something silly before the next piece of the sky comes crashing down. That's all I ask."
She pulled on her headphones and flipped through her playlists, settling on "The Real Folk Blues".
—Yeah. Gimme a fic from ten, fifteen years ago. Something old, about a show that went off in a different direction since, to tap that vibe of unrealized possibility.
She typed in a search for only '90s kids remember, saw nothing that interested her, tried a few variations, began clicking tags...
"Wait, there's fic of the original Sick, Sad World? How?"
ALIEN LOVE GODDESSES, CAUGHT IN FLAGRANTE DE-LICK-TO
"Eep!" Daria slammed down the laptop screen. The impact tipped over the open snack bag, and spicy fragments spilled across her desk.
Daria leaned back in her chair, stared at the underside of her loft bed, and tried to think of nothing at all.