Thomas Cross/Gypsy Lullaby

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

We're eating corn dogs and drinking lemonade at a crooked picnic table outside the King's Row Swap Meet when I realize I'm about to make a terrible mistake.

"I'd have never pictured you here." She smiles at me, newly acquired bangling bracelets crashing up her wrist as she moves quickly to catch a drop of mustard with her tongue before she ends up wearing it.

"No?"

"No", she shakes her head, red hair slipping like silk over her shoulders. It's not natural. That color isn't in her gene pool. She dyes it because she likes it, because it looks fantastic. She catches me noticing, a quick little smile-flicker of her mind against mine. "You're too ... together. Too tidy for a Swap Meet."

"This lemonade stand looked pretty upscale to me when I was living in the alley two blocks over."

"Really?" Her perfectly shaped eyebrow rises.

"Heroin."

"Oh. I'm sorry ... I didn't - I'm sorry." And she is, too. She cares. She suffuses me with this warmth and comfort and a knowledge of her desire to protect me. I'm a virtual stranger. That doesn't matter.

I smile a genuine smile. One she'll feel. "It feels like a lifetime ago."

That's when I realize the kind of mistake I'm about to make. I told her we were going somewhere later, a surprise. I wanted to show her the best part of being who I am. I wanted to make up for the completely mad thing I'd said the night before, when we met. That meant taking her to a nursing home, or a hospice. Idiot. She's an empath. A physio-empath. A place like that could ...

"Just how empathic are you, really?"

"What do you mean?"

"Nursing homes, hospices ... how do you do in places like that?"

Her mood drops like a rock. It's the last thing I feel from her before mental shields that could have contained Chernobyl slam down. Corn dogs, lemonade and fun is over.

"I'm sorry." I kick myself mentally. "That was idiotic of me. I'm sorry. Let me make it up to you. Let me show you something beautiful." I get nothing. No smile, no flicker, not the slightest relaxing of her shields. She just puts her bags in the back of the jeep and climbs in.

I was screwed. She'd been so taken last night with one of my techniques, 'pathing a non-verbal non-visual sense memory. She was like a kid with a new toy. And she'd said she always envied the 'four color' heroes for their sense of purpose. I was just going to show her something that would delight her, but that meant I needed ... frankly, I needed someone who was dying. I couldn't take her to a hospice. I couldn't just 'do nothing'. Not after the mood crash for which I'd been unthinkingly responsible. Not if I wanted to see her again. I wanted to see her again. More than I'd have guessed. I'd never met anyone who understood my world. Now that I know what that feels like, I have to do this.

Ever since my vision of Scion's death I've stayed out of the winding maze of precognition if I could. This time there was no other way. I open myself up to the Source, let my mind take the twisting crimson path into the near future. I sort possibilities, probabilities, cascading realities. I need to isolate someone who is ready, near dying. You don't do what I can do to people with a full life in front of them. You just don't. I had to find the right someone.

Curving arcs of crimson probability guide me to a small blue house with white trim. The paint is weathered and faded but there are fresh red flowers in the window. I can feel him inside, alone, barely breathing, so bone weary. I know him now. She feels him too, and every moment is worse for her. Idiot. I'd forgotten how this terrified me in the beginning. How I'd spent months waking up in dread knowing that this feeling, this dying, was going to be my life for the rest of my life. It's why I wanted so badly to quit. I don't think I told anyone that. Not even Nicky.

I don't know how I'm going to get her in the house. You can't imagine what it's like for anyone with the slightest degree of empathy, being around the dying. You feel what they feel. The weight, the inevitability, the body that's supported them all of their lives betraying them. All of that, and there's nothing you can do. It's a hopeless cocktail of their pain and your impotence. My explanations started to sound like the delusional ramblings of a serial killer on a mission from 'god' even to me. I finally settle on 'please'. I ask with a heart full of empathy for her pain, a mental promise that there really is hope at the bottom of this Pandora's box. She's a brave woman.

We let ourselves in. Deadbolts don't stop telekinetics. The little house is perfect inside, almost storybook. Everywhere you looked pictures. Family, friends. Not a picture without a person, not a person without a smile. Upstairs the door is ajar. I look back at her. She unconsciously radiates 'don't touch me, don't get close'. Her face is pale and her expression grim, but she makes it up the stairs, through the door, to lean against it's frame as I approached -

"James Allen Reed the Third" I say, soft and low. "Jay Pepper." His dark skin is thin, like wrinkled tissue paper. His eyes had gone pale, they were done seeing. But an ivory smile split his face as he reached up with a trembling hand at the mention of his name. "That's me. Jay Pepper. Don't you forget it." I suffuse him with peace, calm. We're no threat. I don't need to. Jay Pepper is past being afraid of anything.

Without looking back at her I say simply 'follow me' and slip into his mind. I can't do this without thinking of Julie. She's the cautionary tale, the line between man and monster. The destruction I know I can cause. It took me three days to find the right memory to carve her up. Probably because I was trying to destroy her. When this is right, when I'm doing it right, I don't even have to look. There's no place else to go but -

Into the mud, the muck and the stench. I'm Jay Pepper now, and I'm already old, already most of life gone out of me. I'm picking my way carefully through thigh deep muddy water, my unsure legs stumble over what's below the surface. Broken concrete, broken glass, broken dreams. There are workmen and policemen, they tell me I can't be there, that I'll hurt myself. But I'm just one old man and there are so many problems, they don't have time to do more than tell me.

Even when I step higher, on the debris and rubble that rises out of the water, it's so hard to find my way. There are no street signs, no streets. The buildings all look the same now. Ruined teeth jutting out of mud gums. I see a corner, all that's left of what might be the place. I'll know if I can find it. I'm on my hands and knees now, crawling in the debris, looking in the dry places, feeling in the water. A glint of brass, the curve of a bell, if this is the place then she's here somewhere.

This is the place, my hands find familiar curves and I smile. I pull the ruin of a slide trombone from the mud. There's my girl. There are long minutes of care, of cleaning and blowing and moving and hoping. I'll know if she still has a voice. If she does at all, if anyone can find it, I'll find it.

I step out onto my corner, broken concrete above the mud and I play. Her voice isn't the same. It's weak, breathy, full of snags like silk replaced with burlap. But that's not what I hear. I'm still Jay Pepper, but Jay Pepper's not on a ruined New Orleans streetcorner any more.

He's back in a hundred hundred sessions. All night jams. Bourbon and smoke and jazz. Playing with Ray Charles, with a young Quincy Jones. Playing with the best musicians that no one ever heard of. Playing for sheer joy and the stubborn determination not to stop. The music has words. Not lyrics, lyrics are easy. You have to listen with your soul to hear these words. I will not go down. This music does not end. This city does not end. This is my song and I will not go down.

It's faith, it's hope, it's sheer southern stubborn. It's triumph. It's undeniable life out loud. I reach for the memory, pull harder, go deeper. I turn up the intensity, fall into the moment and make it louder, until the moment is everything, until it thunders, until it roars through me like a perfect storm. I pull and tear until the music screams through every fiber of my being. Every fiber of my universe. Screams to crescendo.

And then it's just ... gone. Still. Quiet. Dark.

I'm myself again. Sweating, breath labored, exhausted. "There", I manage. "That's it. That's what can be done. That's my purpose."

In front of me is a watercolor, Jay Pepper standing on a ruined New Orleans street corner, playing trombone, standing in another world, bridging the distance between bourbon and smoke and jazz and the devastation that surrounds him.

I put my paints and brushes away, I don't remember when I took them out. "Look at it, you can feel it. Waves of emotion rolling off the paper itself. Everything he felt in the defining moment of a life worth living. Not just people like you, and me. Anyone who looks at this will be able to feel it. If they ever have, if they ever could, they will. I will not go down. This song doesn't end. This city doesn't end. They'll feel it."

She doesn't answer, her shields are still up. If she feels anything I don't know what it is. But she steps forward and lays her hand on the back of my shoulder and all the fatigue melts away. Acid slips out of my muscles, breathing's easy again. I leave the unsigned watercolor where it sits, beside his bed. Jay Pepper lays there, humming the song he had been playing. He doesn't remember why anymore, but that doesn't stop the song.

I tell her that we should go, that his family will be home soon, that the hours he has left belong to them.

She doesn't say anything, she's closed to me. Not on the way out of the house, not in the jeep, not all of the long drive home. If she feels anything at all, she doesn't say anything.

You didn't do it for the girl.

I didn't do it for the girl. I left the watercolor for his family, they'll always have it, always have him, just like that.

You didn't do it for his family.

I didn't do it for his family.

You did it for the high.

There are pieces of life that shouldn't be lost. Dreams, ideas, moments that shouldn't pass out of the world with the lives that gave them birth. I'll build the Order because it needs to be built, because it's needed, because there's no one else. But that's not my destiny, that's not my purpose. I can reach into a life at its end and give the best part of it back to the living world. This is my purpose. This is what I was forged for. This is my high. I did it for the high.

My name is Thomas Cross, and this is my Gypsy Lullaby.