Rumor Hasn't

Repeat after me – repeat after me. Repeat after me. Repeat after me. Repeat after me –

Now stop repeating. It still sounds wrong.

***

"What have you done?" The child was distressed. Little hands went over his arm, lifting the sticky fluid, examining him.

She watched, arms wrapped around herself, shaking. What had he done ? Why had he done it? She had no answers for it. No answers for the way the child was pouring over him, crying out with growing despair at each new speck of stickiness. She watched his eyes as he watched the child. They were dark eyes, dark with fatigue, and perhaps some fear. Maybe even a tinge of shame. Why shame? she wondered. He had kept watch the whole night though. He\'d only been asked to take part of the watch. And he had stretched into the other hours, pulling something from within to stay awake. She had never had to fight to stay awake before; when the final bells of the evening rang, everyone went to sleep. Everyone. There were no exceptions to the rules.

To fight the commands of the bells was impossibly intriguing. She found herself wishing she had been the one holding the position of guard that past night. How strange might it have been to have been awake, looking across their world, knowing that all others were asleep. Well and truly asleep – anyone could visit anywhere if everyone but one was unaware. How many things were possible, then? To visit someone who was sleeping… Things would not all be left the way they were. Things could change while one slept. She shook her head. Imagining things…

What sort of fool imagined things such as these? Walking into another\'s place and moving things from black rooms to white rooms. Adding stains to the mantelpieces of white rooms, smearing flour on the black ones. She shivered. She was thinking too much. Too much thought was not good for the senses. If she could just let go –

"You shouldn\'t be doing that either!" the child cried. The sound of the child\'s voice broke her out of her twisting thoughts. She cast a curious glance towards the other two. The child had his arm mostly wrapped up. She stared, blinking madly for a time, just to be sure –

"What happened?"

"I took his shirt to stop the bleeding," the child snapped. "If you\'re not going to make yourself useful, then you can be the lookout for now. He\'s falling asleep on his feet – might as well give him some real rest for a time. Or are you too absorbed in thinking to allow him that small luxury?" The sneering voice jolted her slightly and she steadied herself, frowning.

”I can watch –"

"Good. Get to it."

She made to protest, but the child was absorbed in tending to him. She shook her head and settled herself. There was no pull of sleep, but she yawned anyway. Her body felt strangely tired, as though she\'d extended beyond her own limits. Strange, she mused, because she hadn\'t known there were limits. Not physical limits, anyway. The only limits she had ever come across were mental – what she could read, and what she could not. How long Intent could be ignored. How many she could go through before her skull felt ready to implode.

From the corner, she could hear the soft murmurings of the child, saying things to him. She listened in, feeling oddly as though she\'d been cast to the outside for some failure.

"Relax – won\'t hurt as much if you don\'t fight me."

A soft hiss in reply.

"You\'re still bleeding a bit… Careful – hold still for a moment; you don\'t want the edges of the tear to get into the wound or it\'ll get infected. There – mostly good. Feel better?"

More soft words, shunted back and forth between them whilst she was on the outskirts. Her eyes closed.



"Why were you sleeping?” The child\'s arms were crossed. The child was glaring at her. She shifted; her head hurt, as did her arms and her side.

"I wasn\'t –" she protested, but she knew it wasn\'t true. She had been sleeping. The sky was dark now. She must have been sleeping. When she\'d gone to watch, there had been light filtering through the sky still. Now, nothing, or almost nothing. The pale was fading into dark.

"You were!" the child yelled back. "You were sleeping, and you almost didn\'t wake up! What\'s wrong? Tell me!"

Was that fear in the child\'s eyes. She sat up, shaking her head for a moment. Small hands took hold of her shoulders and shook her.

"What\'s wrong?" the child demanded again.

"Nothing, nothing," she murmured.

"Lies!" the child screeched. "You\'re lying to me – why are you lying? I won\'t hurt you, I promise! You and I and he are in as much danger as anyone else; we have to work together. We can\'t abandon one another; we have to know what\'s going on. Please, talk to me, tell me. I need to hear it from you. I can guess all I want, but there are no truths in the guesses I make, only supposition."

"Tell us, please," he added in.

She looked up. She hadn\'t seen him come over.

"We were worried about you," he added. "We thought you\'d gone on already, and then we thought you might have stopped by accident."

Was it possible to stop by mistake? She thought it had to be intentional, but he looked like he knew what he was talking about, even if he\'d never tried to stop before.

"I\'m fine," she murmured, levering herself to her feet. "I\'m…fine."

"You\'re not!" the child protested, clinging onto her hand. "You\'re not fine, you\'re not okay, you\'re still hurting and you won\'t tell me why! That hurts me too – and it hurts him. Don’t you care about us? Or are you still Indigo?"

She stared at the child. "How –"

"It\'s written all over you," the child said softly, bitterly. "You might have tried to walk away from them, but they\'re still a part of you. He isn\'t one of them anymore; he left them the moment he left his home, but you\'re still clinging to that. There\'s nothing for you there anymore. Either accept that you\'re not Indigo anymore, or go back to them and make your amends. They won\'t forgive you, of course, but that\'s better than coming with us if you don\'t want a name of your own."

The child let go of her hand. "I\'m giving you a choice. They won\'t give you even that much. They\'ll just expect things of you; I thought you\'d know that by now."

Maybe inside she had known it, but that didn\'t make it easy to accept or understand.

"What should I do?" she asked quietly.

To her surprise, it wasn\'t the child that answered, but him. His arm went around her shoulders and he pulled her into a slightly rough hug, almost as though he were afraid to treat her like she was fragile, in case she became such by accident. "It\'s all right," he said, his voice hoarse. "We\'re in this together, after all, no matter what. Even if neither you nor I nor the child know anything. We\'re together in this. Always. I promise."

A promise. Was it possible to accept a promise made so lightly in the middle of dusk, when the sun had vanished and the last of light was fading away, leaving the slowly saturating hues in its wake? Was it possible not to trust that face, those eyes, which promised so much, all of it good. Even f there was pain, she read, they would stay by one another. The child made a noise then, drawing her attention away for a moment.

"Look at me," the child said quietly. "Look at what\'s happening." Little hands raised, and she leaned forward, looking. The arms stayed on her shoulders and he leaned forward as well to investigate. "What is it?" she asked, just as softly.

"I don\'t know," the child returned. The child was…for lack of a better word, glowing. There was a sheen to the air around the child, making it seem like the air itself was beginning to shimmer. "I don\'t know anything about what is happening, to me or to you. I can see you glow too… Both of you, but I can\'t see it on myself. I\'ve been like this for a while now, I think; the both of you have been getting brighter."

She turned to look down at herself; she couldn’t see anything. There was just..herself in her skin, as she looked down. But when she looked at him, she could see the very beginnings of a hazy glow. Not nearly as bright as the child, but there was a miniature sun beginning within that one. He was the perfect softness of glow, as if his soul were leaking through and the fire within was beginning to come out.

Come to me~

"What was that?" she asked, startled enough that she lost her balance and fell to her knees.

The child did not look surprised or even frightened. "The wizard," the child replied, voice soft and awe-filled. Reverent, even."It\'s the wizard. He\'s been calling to me for so long; I\'ve been waiting for him, you know. He said he\'d come get me when the time was right. I think now is the time. He said I\'d come to him with others. He never said now many others, but you two…I don\'t think there are any more in there who would come out for something as dangerous, hmn? Can you think of anyone who would go hunting for a name, after all?"

She could think of no one. He looked thoughtful, but in the end, he shook his head as well. No one. "None," she said aloud, though she guessed the child had known already. She just felt compelled to say something. To hear her own voice, as though it were a reminder of some physical plane of existence. It was safer to speak in words, not gestures. Words were not open to interpretation – taken at face value, what one said was what another got. Gestures, and body language, though were foreign concepts to be dealing with. A nod could be a jerk of the head could be a dismissal could be anything. It was in the eye of the beholder, and how one interpreted what was going on. It was not safe.

She declined to say as much, though.

"We\'d better be going," the child said. The child\'s eyes had closed briefly as the two of them watched the child. "Do you know where we\'re going?"

"I don\'t," she answered.

"We\'re going to the wizard," the child said, opening eyes that had been pressed shut. "We\'re going to see him, and then he\'ll tell us what we need to know. He\'ll give us names."

The words was like magic. Names. A name.

"maybe more than one, even," the child continued, voice building with enthusiasm and fire. "We\'ll have many names! So, so many. Maybe I\'ll have eight or ten! I\'ll be something extraordinary."

"I think I\'d like just one," he said, a small smile pulling at the corners of his lips. When his gaze met hers, that smile became a full one. "I\'d like something easy to remember, and something that isn\'t easily corruptible."

"I don\'t know what I want," she said when the two of them turned questioning eyes in her direction. "I want what anyone wants – I want to exist, but how are these names supposed to help me do that?"

There was no answer to that, she thought.

The child had one anyway. "names give you power," the child said firmly. "They are forbidden because of that. You have to reach out and take a name; make it yours. The wizard said he has whole rooms of names, just waiting for us. There\'s a name for each of us – for everyone, if they bothered to come one day. He\'s been keeping them. They used to think he was mad, these names, but he\'s started to convince them otherwise. It helps that he lets them out every other day, so they can flutter around together. It would be bad if he kept them all chained up all the time; they would never choose someone then, I think."

What was the child talking about? She was lost.

"He told me about it all, you know. He talks to me at night. That\'s when he\'s awake most of the time. He says that during the day, he\'s awake too, but he can\'t talk because of all the noise in the air. Everyone else is awake and thinking at each other. He can\'t make himself heard through the clamor. Mostly he talks in dreams, but sometimes if you listen really closely you can hear him screaming during dusk. He speaks really loudly then; it\'s when they come o visit him. He\'s hurting too, you know. He\'s been locked up with all these names and they have no idea what to do with him; he\'s no idea what to do with them either, really. So they just flutter and flutter and he watches them, and sometimes he\'ll get someone who is from the outside who wants a name, and he\'ll give him or her one. And then the names will be silent and sad for a while; they get attached to each other, you know, or so he tells me. It\'s possible that there are bully names, I guess, and then they wouldn\'t be sad about that name leaving. I wouldn\'t be unhappy if a bully left."

The child stopped talking and twirled, smiling. Then the child attached to him, clinging to his arm as she watched, shaking her head.

"It\'s nothing," he mouthed back at her, bending over partly before scooping up the child in his arms. The child shrieked in indignation and fought against the captivity, but there was nothing the child could do against him. He knew it, and she knew it, and she supposed too that the child knew it, because after a short time, the child just sat there, cradled in his arms and pouted.

Maybe it wasn\'t so bad, then, going with him and this child. She supposed that they couldn\'t be all that bad; maybe she would figure out sometime soon how to separate herself from Indigo. There had to be a way, after all. Feeling Indigo was beginning to hurt. If she hadn\'t shut off Intent, she supposed, she might have been called back already. Indigo was missing her. She wondered why. She wasn\'t that important, in the general scheme of things. Indigo stretched across many.