A System of Messages by AdmirableMonster

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My Father's Ashes

mildly spoilery warnings at chapter notes end

“My father burned alive,” croons the traveler with the storyteller’s voice, the flickering firelight playing across the single dark braid falling down from underneath his broad-brimmed hat.  He has dark eyes that don’t quite look at you, and a smile that doesn’t reach them.  Not a cowboy, Hal thinks, for all he’s sitting down with them, for all he rode up as skillful as any cowboy Hal’s ever met.  But he already feels a loner, the way the Dúnedain aren’t, as if no one’s had his back in too long, as if he’s forgotten how to be around other folk.  He tells a good story, and Hal can’t stop looking at that too-red mouth with the scar that makes it look as if he’s sneering all the time.

He calls himself Lark.  It’s obviously a false name.

Aragorn shakes his head in sympathy and asks if they lost a house in the blaze that took Lark’s pa.  Lark’s eyes sparkle, too sharp, and he grins too wide, and that smile could cut glass.  Hal wants to kiss it off his mouth.

“You give me a bed, and I’ll tell you the story,” Lark says, eyes blazing.

“We’d give you a bed anyway,” Aragorn tells him, and Lark shrugs.

“I’d rather work for it.” He settles himself onto the log and produces an old banjo from somewhere underneath his voluminous poncho.  “To set the mood,” he explains, tuning it with a skill that only heightens his otherworldly appearance.

“My father,” he starts again, and the flickering chiaroscuro of the fire makes him seem wholly other, a fey spirit from another realm, “he burned alive from the inside.  Long time back, oh—say twenty years—he was a respected sheriff and a great maker of things.  Pretty clockwork pieces and gadgetry so real you’d think he’d seen the Center.  He hadn’t, though—not then.”

“I was so young then, me and my brothers—all seven of us.  We’d have done anything for him.  We’d have died for him.”  That smile is worse than any tears that Hal’s ever seen.  “Most of us did, in the end, I guess.”  His eyes catch Hal’s for just one moment, and Hal doesn’t know what he sees, but he flinches—just a tiny bit, and his mouth twists oddly before he looks away.

“I’d just turned eighteen.  My youngest brothers were thirteen.  Ma sure did keep having kids.  Our eldest brother—he was twenty then—I think his whole life was running after all the rest of us, seeing that we were all safe and cared for.  Well, Pa was the sheriff, like I said, so we were pretty well set-up, then.”

“Thing is, Pa’s mam, she vanished when he was just a boy.  She’d always been a scholar, and they said she went to look for the Center and didn’t come back, so he was mad about it.  All those dire warnings?  Fuck that, he’d say.  They just didn’t want anyone finding it.  Wanted to keep the knowledge for themselves.  Knowledge is power, remember, they said that too, the ancients.”

“So I was eighteen, with Pa treating me like—” His eyes go distant and sad.  “Don’t matter,” he murmurs.  “He never saw me, but he never saw any of us, so what’s it matter?  I was eighteen when the stranger came to town.  He called himself the Mighty One and wouldn’t give another name. He said he’d seen the Center, said he’d give Pa the maps if Pa would give him something in return.”

“Pa’d been working on these stones—not like his usual gadgets, not exactly.  They were meant to take the light of the sun and store it, so you’d have energy to spare for whatever you needed, whether it was cooking or staying warm or making some of the tools of the ancients work.  They were very beautiful, but I think he always saw them more than he saw us.  This Mighty One?  He wanted them, the moment he saw them.  We all knew it—so did Pa—but he needed to know where that Center was.  But he didn’t want to give up his stones—they could have saved a lot of lives in our town, and he did care about that, you know?”

The storyteller takes a long drink from his hip flask, and this time when he looks at Hal and finds that Hal is still looking back at him, there’s a queer vulnerability shimmering in his gaze behind a soft veil of tears.  Hal’s totally caught up in the story, can already feel the tragic weight of it beneath the teller’s rusty voice.

“What happened?” he asks, as if the two of them are alone together instead of across the fire and in the midst of a pretty big crowd of overly-nosy and friendly fellows.

“He made a wager.  Poker.  Him against the Mighty One, his sunlight stones against the location of the Center.  Pa never thought he could lose anything.”

“He lost,” Hal says, because it’s obvious, the way the story is going.

“He lost,” purrs Lark.  His banjo makes a soulful noise that Hal didn’t think a banjo could make.  “But he wouldn’t pay up.  He thought the Mighty One had cheated—and he might’ve, I don’t know.  But he wouldn’t pay up, went to ask for help from the big Sheriff down in Runner’s Haven.  Well, the Mighty One came and took them, and when our grandfather tried to stop him, he shot him.”

“Pa went a little crazy, I think, when he got home and found his dad dead and the seven of us hidden in the basement and the sunlight stones gone.  Mighty One had taken the railroad out across the Kazad desert, and Pa took us after him.  His half-brother too—well, anyway, his half-brother was mad about their dad, and Pa didn’t get on real well with him, but we thought for sure they’d make up then.  Only…Pa was really, really not okay.  Worse than we thought.”

“Twenty years ago, there was a railway running across the whole of the desert.”  He takes another swig from his hip flask.  “There ain’t anymore.”

The tension draws tight, like a noose around Hal’s throat.  He feels like he’s heard something about this.  Wasn’t there some great disaster?  Wasn’t there some kind of fire or—

“He laid explosives down along the whole track that night,” Lark says, quiet, hushed, so that everyone has to lean forward and strain to hear him (they’re all doing it though, leaning forward and straining—apart from his voice and the plink of the banjo there’s not a sound to be heard.). “Set ’em off so no one could follow us, not Uncle Nolvo, not our cousins—not Russo’s—my eldest brother’s—”  He halts and swallows and looks up at the night sky.  “That’s a love story for another night, I think,” he says, with a sweet smile that makes Hal want to cry, kind of.

“And in the cold morning light—he went off to the Center before any of us woke up.  And when he came back, he was burning.”

“Burning?” Hal echoes, because he can’t rid himself of the image of a man aflame and yet still walking, like the ancient ghosts in the stories his own Pa used to tell him, before he started forgetting.

“That’s what he said.”  Lark sighs and leans his head forward.  “He came into camp, and Russo and I went to him, and he said, ‘I’m burning, Dad, help me, they lit a fire in me.’  He was bruised all over, kind of, but it wasn’t like the kind of bruise patterns you see from a blow.  It was like little spots of dark purple flecked along him, like he really was burning and that was where the fire burned hottest.  He had a fever, too, threw up a couple times, and died raging.”

His hands are trembling, and he’s clutching them hard together, like he’s trying to hold onto something.  His voice falls silent, and he looks up at the stars from beneath that broad-brimmed hat.  It is a long, strained moment later that Aragorn breaks the silence.

“A fearful story for a firelit night, stranger, but I think you’ve earned that bed,” he says.  A quick glance sideways.  “I think Hal’s got a bedroll you can borrow.”

Oh, hell, he’s been spotted, hasn’t he?  Fuck Aragorn and how well he knows him.  Hal laughs ruefully, but he nods.  “You can come with me, if you want.”

The stranger rises, bird-like and graceful, and seems almost to dance over to him.  “Take me, then,” he says, his voice gone dark and smokey, and Hal is fucking hard in his too-tight leather pants, fuck, does he mean that like it sounds?

Lark’s not reaching for him, but he’s standing and waiting, and Hal swallows, too jerky, and nods.  “Yeah,” he says.  “Uh.  Yeah, come with me.”  Stars, he sounds an idiot.

They stroll together out of the firelight, into the quiet darkness of the starlit night.  “I need to tell you,” Lark says, sad and soft.  “I ain’t got the body I think you’re imagining, friend.”

Hal laughs, laughter too shaky, harsh in his throat like salt or sugar.  “Don’t care,” he says softly.  “I ain’t got much of a body at all.”

“I mean—” Lark’s heavy brows draw together.

“I really don’t care so much,” Hal tells him gently.  “And I, uh, I don’t need payment for the bedroll, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Well, then.”

Lark kisses him then, hands carding with trembling grace through Hal’s too-thin hair, the roughness of scar tissue catching on Hal’s scalp.  “Shit,” he mutters, but doesn’t pull away when Hal takes up his hands to look at.

They’re both scarred with the marks of old burns, the left one something like a circle, the right—

“That’s where I took my father’s star off his chest when he was dying,” Lark says, his mouth doing that thing where it jumps to the side.  “So you see, he was burning.”

“And the other?”

Lark shakes his head.  “Another story.”

“Another time, then.  Let me get you that bedroll.”

“Gets cold in the desert nights,” Lark insists, and Hal takes that for the invitation that it is.

Chapter End Notes

warning for rather disturbing descriptions of radiation poisoning

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