In Which A Resolution Is Reached
“You’ve had a lot on your mind,” Amaranth said. “Don’t worry about this one thing… you might have forgotten the turning of the year, but how could I? The cycle of the seasons is a huge part of who I am. Even a relatively recent mortal calendar means a lot to me.”
“It’s not like I had huge plans,” Glory said. “There was no way of knowing exactly when we’d make it home, or what kind of shape we’d be in… but I thought that no matter what, we’d need something in the way of refreshment and maybe distraction, and since it was a holiday anyway… we might as well have a low-key affair to mark it. What are our supplies like? I’m guessing pretty low after the storm… what do you think the odds are that a pizza delivery would get through?”
“I might know a place I could get a pizza in walking distance,” I said. I didn’t think the black door concealed a pizza oven, but people came to it from all sorts of places. I bet enough coins would convince someone more conveniently situated to pop out and pick up something for me.
Okay… maybe that would be going a bit far, but I liked having a problem I actually could maybe solve with a little ingenuity and a creative application of available resources.
“Mack, I know that everything is technically walking distance if you try hard enough and believe in yourself,” Steff said, “but are you remembering what you’d be walking through?”
“Glory, honey… I don’t want to be rude to a queen in her castle, but I told you not to worry about it,” Amaranth said. “You put Mack in charge of making sure things were taking care of, and she put us in charge…”
“Technically, Mack put me in charge,” Steff said. “I mean, yay, team effort, couldn’t have done it alone and would have gone bugfuck crazy with boredom if I’d tried… but I’m the one who was given the responsibility.”
“And you did a good job, sweetie,” Amaranth said. ” Like I said, I couldn’t personally do a lot for the defense effort…”
“You did all that was required,” Glory said.
“We were lucky that more wasn’t,” Amaranth said. “But even if things had been rougher, I never doubted we’d make it through things okay, and I never doubted that you’d make it back… and as I’ve said, I really couldn’t help knowing that the new year was coming. So, I’ve been ready. There is nothing left for you to do but relax.”
“I… feel a little weird about that, given that in theory I’ve been doing nothing but relaxing since we left,” Glory said.
“How’s that been working out in practice, the last twenty-four hours or so?” I asked.
“That’s a fair point,” Glory said. “You know, if you don’t mind… I think I’d like to be alone for a few hours. Doing nothing, thinking nothing… maybe collapsing and falling asleep, but definitely being in charge of nothing.” She looked at me. “Nothing personal, Mackenzie… I just need some ‘me’ time.”
Amaranth put her arm around my shoulder.
“I don’t think that will be a problem,” she said. “Just don’t sleep through the countdown… I mean, unless you want to. Taking care of yourself is important, but it would be a shame to miss it accidentally.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Glory said. “I made very definite plans for the new year some time ago… though I have a feeling I may have to stand in line.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a first time for everything,” Steff said. “Off you go.”
Glory’s idea seemed to be popular with the other elves, and not just because it was hers… most of the rest of the court had already dispersed to their corners of the house, mostly alone. It was just the three of us pretty quickly.
I could understand the impulse… it was hitting me that I hadn’t had any real time to myself for most of a week. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen Amaranth or Steff in that long, either. It felt like it would be rude to disappear. More than that, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. What I really wanted was a way to do both things at once… I supposed that just sort of hanging out quietly without any pressing demands would be the closest thing to that.
“I’m glad to see you guys and all, but I really hope you don’t mind if we just sort of chill for a bit?” I said. “It’s been a long day.”
“Mack, hon, it’s been a long fucking week here,” Steff said. “I don’t plan on doing anything more strenuous than falling over, and if someone can convince the couch to meet me halfway on that it’ll be a big help. You’re cute and all, but if you think I’m going to jump your bones just because I haven’t seen you in a few days…”
“Okay, okay, point made,” I said. “Amaranth?”
“Well, it’s been hectic enough that I’m a little… what you might call ‘undernourished’,” she said. “But nothing that can’t wait until you’re feeling up to it. It will be more satisfying then. Anyway, I’m sure Ian’s going to be in need of some serious release when he gets in, and that should be more than enough to make up for the wait.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“I just told you it’s okay, baby. Your needs are real, including the need for rest and… if you want it… privacy.”
“I know,” I said. “I just wish there was a way I could accommodate your needs at the same time as mine.”
“You do a lot of that anyway,” she said. “When you can… and when you can’t, it’s okay. That’s what a relationship is. It’s not like I can be there for you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”
“I’ve never needed you to, though,” I said.
“And I don’t need you to do any more for me than you do,” she said. She gave me a kiss on the forehead. “It’s seriously fine. I’ve missed you, baby, but I’ve missed the closeness as much as the sex… well, in a different way, maybe.”
“On the subject of needs… politely re-voicing my need to find a couch and fall into it,” Steff said.
“Oh, sorry!” Amaranth said. “Do you think you can make it up a flight of stairs? I feel like the second floor lounge is likely to give us more privacy.”
“Yes… and yeah, it’s empty,” Steff said.
“So what exactly did you have planned for New Year’s?” I asked Amaranth on the way up the stairs.
“I wouldn’t say I have a plan… I just tucked a few things away before we sort of hunkered down here,” Amaranth said.
Being built as a dormitory, every floor in Oberrad House had its own lounge. They were all more or less built to the same cookie-cutter plan, but that didn’t mean the more transitory furnishings had to be the same. Now that the renovations were largely complete, the decor of Oberrad House heavily featured large potted plants and a lot of plush seats made for leaning back and lying down: recliners, chaise longues, and elaborate sectional couches.
It was a good place to collapse. Elven femmes didn’t seem to believe in sitting upright any more than human furniture and architecture forced them to. They preferred furniture they could drape themselves over.
“What a year,” Steff said, after we’d settled in a bit. “You can apply that either to the past few days, or the actual year. Seriously, I can’t wait until 223 is dead and buried so I can dig up its corpse, animate it, make it drive a stake through its heart and bury itself again.”
“…I didn’t think stakes through the hearts worked on zombies,” I said.
“No, they’re one of the few things with hearts… usually… that won’t die if you jam a stake through it,” Steff said. “Which is why it would be able to bury itself again. But, honestly Mack, you’re way too literal about metaphors and you always have been.”
“I realized you were speaking metaphorically from the moment you mentioned the corpse of a year,” I said. “My problem is the internal logic of the metaphor… just because something isn’t literally true doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be internally consistent.”
“The shoving a stake through its heart is a metaphor,” Steff said.
“Well, yeah, a year doesn’t have a heart.”
“No, I mean, within the metaphor where the year is a person who has died and left a corpse, the stake is a metaphor,” Steff said. “It is a meta-metaphor.”
“I think at this point you’re just using ‘metaphor’ to mean ‘I don’t have to say things that make sense on a literal level’,” I said.
“If we were talking about an actual person who wasn’t a vampire but just sort of hung on and never left, you’d accept that I could talk about wanting to shove a stake through their heart and it would be a metaphor for that, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Okay,” Steff said. “In the metaphor, that’s what the Year of our Imperium 223 is.”
“Except in your metaphor, the year is actually dead, or will be,” I said.
“There may be more than two layers of metaphor here… I don’t know, I’m too burned in the brain to figure it all out,” Steff said. “Fuck this year, okay? Fuck it in its soon-to-be-dead, undead, and/or living ass, literally and metaphorically.”
“But you couldn’t do it literally…”
“You know, it’s amazing how much I managed to miss you,” Steff said.
“I missed you, too,” I said.
“You’re quiet, Amy,” Steff said.
“I’m just enjoying this,” she said.
“What?” Steff and I both said.
“This. Right here, she said. “The two of you. It’s not just that you’ve been gone, baby… it’s that you’ve been busy. We’ve all been busy. School, life, sex… everything. We’re all being pulled in different directions, so many directions each. We see each other at breakfast, usually lunch, sometimes dinner… we spend some nights together… but it’s all so… I don’t know…”
“Perfunctory?” I said.
“Obligatory?” Steff said.
“I don’t want to say that,” Amaranth said. “But… it does get that way sometimes.”
“I think when you’re getting pulled all over the place, sometimes you have to make the effort… even if it feels like an effort,” I said. “I mean, it beats the alternative, right?”
“If the only alternative is not seeing each other,” Amaranth said. “But I feel like we can do better. I feel like we should do better.”
“That sounds like a resolution,” Steff said.
“I don’t usually do resolutions,” I said. “But… I’ll join you there. I’ve been thinking a lot about what the future might hold, and I haven’t come up with any answers for the long term. I think in the short and medium term, though, I can say… the future’s going to hold whatever I put into it. Whatever we put into it.”
“And possibly a sneak attack by asshole middlings or some sort of snow death beast,” Steff said.
“That falls under the heading of ‘things I can’t control’,” I said. “I can only deal with that kind of problem as it arises. The problem of… well, let’s not call it a problem. The subject of relationships? Friendships? Those we can control. Those we can do something about.”
“I’d drink to that, if it didn’t mean getting up,” Steff said.
“Hold onto that thought,” Amaranth said. “I don’t know much about the long-term future, either, but in the short term, I predict a lot of toasting.”
Author’s Note:
As you may recall, back in December I was raising money to help keep Tales of MU going through the next year. I raised a bit over $300, which was not nothing but also not quite enough to let me enter 2015 brimming with confidence and on solid financial ground.
Not wholly related to that but also not completely unrelated, I have been going through a period of self-doubt and depression that I’m just starting to get a handle on. It’s affected every aspect of my life, including work. The lack of confidence has really affected my ability to deliver the podcasts that started so promisingly, though I’m working on the next one for delivery tomorrow. “Feature creep” has also been a problem, as there’s a lot to talk about, though that’s admittedly a better problem to have than crippling self-doubt…
I digress. Anyway, there’s a vicious cycle to these things. Fear of failure makes it impossible to put one’s best self forward, which leads to the very failures that were feared. Though I didn’t say as much, I’ve come very close to giving up at a few points over the past few months. Talking frankly about this stuff is making it a bit easier.
I’m not out of the woods yet, but I’m back in a fighting mood at least, which is where I tend to do my best work. I couldn’t have made it this far without your support. I can’t make it further without it. It’s not on any one person to keep MU going except me, though it’s up to all of us collectively to make it possible. If you want to keep reading, if you want to see where the next story-calendar year takes Mackenzie and company, now is the time to pitch in.
There’s no crisis right now, just the cold reality that it takes time to do what I do, and it takes money to live a life while doing it. I’ve been riding on thin margins for a long time now. That’s why I’ve been branching out more lately, exploring publishing in other venues, trying out other stories… I still love what I’m doing here, but it might be that I’ve taken this ride as far as it can go. Or maybe I just need to take it further than I am.
Like Mackenzie, I have some hard decisions to make about my future, and like Mackenzie, I’m not at all sure what it holds for me.
I do know what my past has held, and I am deeply appreciative for it.
Thank you all for reading.
<3 AE
