(no subject)
They were filming White Collar today in what is more or less my neighbourhood. I assume it is the same White Collar that lots of people seem to like a lot. I have never seen it. They certainly had a lot of catering.
Anyway: someone (fahye, to correctly direct the blame) got me set off down another Sherlock rabbit hole with a quote from Kierkegaard about boredom. But strangely this story is not about that; it is about another thing. I suppose that means I still owe a story about boredom. That is for another day.
Title: Rate of Change
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: PG
Words: 2575
Characters: Sherlock/John, more or less
Disclaimer: I made up these things, but not these people.
Spoilers: None.
Summary: In which there are broken violins, horology, and some mention of ancient code-breaking. Also, far too much philosophizing, and a second person narrator.
A/N: I may have taken some liberties with the structure of violins and with the geography of Redbridge tube station. In the former case: the calamity I describe is what the conductors of my youth orchestra always threatened would happen if, as was the violinists' wont, we hung our very expensive instruments off the shelves of our music stands when we felt lazy. In the latter case: sadly, I do not live in London. Nothing else in the story can I excuse or explain.
As a child, you smash your violin. Smash, not break-- that would be too easy. M. de Troyes, your violin teacher, has shared with you some structural knowledge: there is a known spot at the base of a violin upon which one must never drop it, or else all the wood will split straight up the body. He has seen it done, the hideous wreckage, the noise, so he says, he will never, never will he forget it.
At this point you like the violin neither in the general nor the particular sense. You cannot tune it to your perfection. You spend hours twisting the pegs, tightening and loosening, struggling to match the pitch that rings inside your own small head. Furthermore, you cannot force it to play. Your hands splay against it, helpless. The sounds that you produce are hateful. You do not understand that this can change. All things in life seem set at this juncture, moulded into their shapes: you are small and will be small forever. You stammer. You sunburn easily. You will bear always the white scrape where Mycroft pushed you against a garden wall when you were two and ten months' age. The brass knights in the neighbouring church do not change, except to weather; the stained glass catches light in antique shades; and hobbyists bring up out of unplowed earth coins that are small and round and Roman. This is the world. It is fixed and enduring. You cannot imagine any change.
So: your relationship with the violin will not be improving. You resolve, consequently, to rid yourself of it. You clear a space in the music conservatory and climb on top of Mycroft's cello stool. You position the violin at such an angle as M. de Troyes has showed you. You calculate the impact, unclench your hand; the resulting crash is satisfying. The wood indeed splits. The strings go all a-jangle. It leads to a complete destruction. You would stomp on the wreckage, but that would spoil the clarity of the thing. Now, as it stands, it is clear: you can say, "It was an experiment." And it was; that is truthful; you wanted to see.
Afterwards, it is explained to you that life will get better. You will grow taller. Your stammer will diminish. Your scars will heal. Your skill will increase. "Idiot," Mycroft says. "You're not a stained glass window. You're a boy. It's different to being a statue or a machine."
Most of the time this difference is apparent. After all, you must eat: and eat, and eat, over and over, a tedious rote repetitive action, and sometimes, stupid with exhaustion, you fall asleep. This is all evidence that there is life happening inside you, invisibly, on levels that you cannot perceive.
All the same, Mycroft fails to understand. You are more like a stained glass window, in the peace of your own head; or rather, like a sequence: the Annunciation, or the stations of the Cross, spread out on separate panes. In sum, some narrative is present. But in each perfect scene the whole world hangs like clockwork paused for an instant: still, precise, complete.
***
There is a day in Baker Street when you fill the flat with clockwork. (John won't mind, you think; you always think this.) Surfaces become intricate. The inner parts of movements are miniature hoops, like ornaments that set the whole room gleaming. You have a magnifying glass and you work for a week, heaping them into piles that don't involve their provenances. It takes very fine motor control to fit them back into their places. One might almost call it artistry. But you don't believe in artistry, that rush and burst of sudden genius like a fine glass bubble blown under the skin. It is all just progress from one frame to another. Practice makes it go faster, so fast sometimes that it is hidden.
John claims that after this his watch is always losing seconds. He looks at you resentfully. "And," he says, "who gave you permission to dissect it in the first place? It was already working perfectly."
It's a cheap watch and the innards are tawdry. But he's right, of course; it was already working. You could tell its gears by their faint industrial colour. You just opened it up because you wanted to see. You laid it side by side with your own watch-- not the one you wear, but your father's Patek Philippe. The movements were impossible to mix up, and yet you did so. One wheel for another. It stopped both watches ticking. You put them back the way they were, and couldn't quantify your sorrow. For a moment you had envisioned that one cheap wheel forever embedded, cheerful, spinning.
John says, "Anyway, I don't know what on earth was the point of all that." He gestures to the line of timepieces, now closed all with their tiny worlds within them.
You shrug imperceptibly.
"Yeah, but surely you had a reason."
"Bored."
Your thoughts rest, fleeting, on the instant of dropping one solitary rotor into place. The exactness at the centre of you, so pleasing. Sometimes all the world narrows to one option or not, and that is the only thing; that single straight course that rings of rightness, that thin orderly filament, or else the flood of stochasticity. It is like living when you might be drowning. A heady thread of adrenaline.
"Couldn't you just get an ordinary hobby?" John asks. "Stamp collecting. Sudoku. I don't know, cleaning?"
You rest your hand on his wrist. On his wristwatch. You can feel it under your fingertips. The ticks don't catch. It is functioning. You fill your mind with the mechanism inside it. You can picture all the gears and wheels working. It is possible to predict how each one will behave; this simple picture, expanded to fit the universe, is seductive but incomplete. Other things interfere: a multiplicity of options. Then one must dredge up truth from down in the muddy water. It's dreadful. It's tiresome. It makes your bones ache.
You ask John, "Would you like me to do those things?"
He gets that faint crease, a look of confusion or disappointment. You sense that you have somehow gone astray. "I'm not ruling out the last one. And I wish you'd keep your hands off my stuff. But generally people do what makes them happy."
You take your hand off his wristwatch -- hands off stuff-- but realize in a moment or two that he didn't mean it that way. It's done, though: you moved too soon. You circle your fingers in a fist, expressing frustration. Other people do what makes them happy, you think.
You were sitting beside John on the sofa. Now you stand and roam about in aimless routes. Sometimes you are one still frame and you cannot see how to reach another. It is worlds away, that other stained-glass pane; it is the second part to your story, and the sun is shining straight through it, and you can see it from where you're frozen on the other side of the nave.
***
"I used to stammer," you say.
"Excuse me?"
"When I was a child. I used to stammer. Rather badly."
You and John are tied back-to-back in the scritchy darkness somewhere between Wanstead and Redbridge stations, awaiting the tremor of an oncoming train. The two of you are sat in the black grit that gets between tube tracks, held there by a long length of chain that runs from your wrists down to the rail lines. Now and then it brushes the dangerous part, and you jerk as your body hums with electricity.
"Why are you telling me this?" John asks.
"That's how people behave. Isn't it? They tell each other inconsequential things."
"Not in moments of extreme, mortal danger!"
"Nonsense. That's exactly when people tell each other things."
"No," John says. "No, it really isn't. You watch far too much TV."
Your hands are scrabbling behind you, quick and questing. You shut your eyes, though there are no distractions. You breathe fast through your mouth. You are focussing.
"Did you really, though?" John asks.
"Did I what?"
"Did you stammer."
"Yes," you say. "And I smashed a violin, and I killed a bird once. I didn't understand that it would stay that way."
John laughs: a soundless whistle that comes out between his teeth. "That's terrible," he says. "I don't know why I'm laughing at that."
But he keeps laughing, and after a moment you join in. The two of you are still laughing when you reach Redbridge, breathless and bedraggled, with blackened handcuffs dangling round your ankles and wrists. You haul yourself off of the tracks. You help John up. You sit on the platform, on a painted bench with John beside you, limp. Your hands hurt a lot. You can't think about it. You watch the train announcements scrolling-- little broken screens of light-- and feel illiterate.
John says, "I thought that we were done for that time."
"What a thing to imagine," you say.
The truth is that you cannot imagine. You are caught up in this instant. It is impossible to think that you might exit it in any way. Sometimes you are so flooded by the present that it floors you, and you feel like you cannot escape. There will not be another moment. There will just be this day, when you are sat there and the sodium lights are slightly nauseous, and you feel the cold hiss of the next train. You can tell where that train's going by the smell of the rain studding its metal doors, fresh from overground stations, cloud-scented, industrial, and strange.
The doors shift open. John says, "Right; are we going home, then?"
You shake your head. "Stay," you say. "Just for a minute."
Already there is so much change. A voice on the tannoy announces station closures. A flurry of human traffic sheds footprints of rain, watermarks against the marblescent tiling. Coats come and go, and trains, and you touch John's wrist and you can feel his tired heart beating. Every tap of blood against your fingertips new in his veins. You cannot tell what he is thinking. If you could stop the world and still move within it, you would figure out so many things. But you would never know the next number in this sequence: the next extraordinary thought to drift through John's brain. You focus on it; you apply complete attention. You want to wipe out the station so you can concentrate. You want to chart all of John's statements for years and years, and all the small expressive movements of his face, and at the end you will finally have enough data. You will click that last gold wheel into its clever place.
"I had a dog," John says.
"What?"
"Just, speaking of inconsequential things. When I was little I had a dog. It was called Field Marshal Viscount Allenby."
And it's so far, so far from what you expected, that you have to smile. And then John's laughing, little huffs of breath, again.
***
Sometimes when you are bored you do a bit of code-breaking. It's mechanical, a maze through which you run your mind to block out pain. When you were nineteen -- not a good year -- you almost cracked the Phaistos Disc. When you were twenty-one and locked in a room with Lestrade outside it, you deciphered Linear A. At night you listen to the Cold War ciphertexts that sometimes still sigh out over the radio waves, and in your mind you run the combinations. The result's not the point. It's all a game. You are lulled by the knowledge that there is a solution. It's out there, precise and Platonic. It has a physical shape.
John comes in late one night. It's dark. The radio's running. He listens for a moment. He says, "That's really quite creepy."
"Is it?" You shut your eyes. You're spread out on the sofa. A woman's voice reads out numbers at a flat pace, the syllables breaking unnaturally. "I suppose it is."
"It's a code, right? I can see why you like it."
"I don't like it. I find it... comforting."
"That's..." He shakes his head, sits down heavy in a chair. "Do you actually know what it means to like something?"
"You'll have to define your terms."
"Like. How'm I supposed to define 'like'? You just like something."
He looks frustrated, and you feel it is a delicate situation. You consider the layout of the field, charting the likely land mines beneath. "I find it rewarding to solve puzzles, of which this is one. My mind is wired for it. It's pleasing."
"Okay, but -- " He stops. He looks unhappy. "Surely even you can like something, without knowing why, without there being a reason."
"I always know why."
But you are lying. You shy away from that dark mechanism within you that spins and clicks and sets you liking. You must distrust any process that you cannot see. It's stage magic, apt to be took for the miraculous. If you were wise enough, you would perceive how it works. So you grind your teeth and it grates on you that you could feel so helpless. That you could be subject to the same flimflammery.
John lets it rest. He lets fall his head against the chair-back. He says, "All right, then, so what's it saying?"
"Pardon?"
"The coded message. What's it transmitting?"
"I've no idea."
A frown. "Let me get this straight. You're sitting in the dark, alone, listening to a message you can't understand."
"I don't need to understand it."
"Why not?"
You open your mouth to respond. No sound comes out. You blink. This is not the stammer of your childhood, the impatience of a mind trapped in a untrained body, but something new, of staggering importance. You feel the weight of it. You find you can't breathe. Something is shifting in your bones. Somewhere you have solved a mystery you weren't aware you were working out. The solution spreads fast, hot and bright throughout you. Your whole edifice, repatterning into some new structure; all the pieces of glass that make you up scattering. "Because," you say, "there is a plaintext. I don't have to work it out. I could do, but I don't have to. I know it's there. There exists a logic."
"Ah."
"John." You just want to keep saying his name. Like the numbers in the ciphertext, not quite the same once you knew they were a secret. "John."
"What?"
"When I was nine, I could identify every type of cloud formation. Also, I once solved Linear A."
"I don't know what that means," John says. He looks torn between fear and amusement. "Wait-- are we in extreme, mortal danger?"
You cross the room and place your hands very lightly against his face. He doesn't move, just frowns at you. "Always," you say.
Then you bend, and you can sense the world splitting into further iterations. You'll kiss him. He'll stay. He won't stay; he'll run; he'll be bewildered. You won't kiss him. You'll turn away. This is how it happens. Mysterious forces drag you forwards. It feels like freedom. You taste the new world on his lips. It tastes like light, and you are not afraid.
Anyway: someone (fahye, to correctly direct the blame) got me set off down another Sherlock rabbit hole with a quote from Kierkegaard about boredom. But strangely this story is not about that; it is about another thing. I suppose that means I still owe a story about boredom. That is for another day.
Title: Rate of Change
Fandom: Sherlock
Rating: PG
Words: 2575
Characters: Sherlock/John, more or less
Disclaimer: I made up these things, but not these people.
Spoilers: None.
Summary: In which there are broken violins, horology, and some mention of ancient code-breaking. Also, far too much philosophizing, and a second person narrator.
A/N: I may have taken some liberties with the structure of violins and with the geography of Redbridge tube station. In the former case: the calamity I describe is what the conductors of my youth orchestra always threatened would happen if, as was the violinists' wont, we hung our very expensive instruments off the shelves of our music stands when we felt lazy. In the latter case: sadly, I do not live in London. Nothing else in the story can I excuse or explain.
As a child, you smash your violin. Smash, not break-- that would be too easy. M. de Troyes, your violin teacher, has shared with you some structural knowledge: there is a known spot at the base of a violin upon which one must never drop it, or else all the wood will split straight up the body. He has seen it done, the hideous wreckage, the noise, so he says, he will never, never will he forget it.
At this point you like the violin neither in the general nor the particular sense. You cannot tune it to your perfection. You spend hours twisting the pegs, tightening and loosening, struggling to match the pitch that rings inside your own small head. Furthermore, you cannot force it to play. Your hands splay against it, helpless. The sounds that you produce are hateful. You do not understand that this can change. All things in life seem set at this juncture, moulded into their shapes: you are small and will be small forever. You stammer. You sunburn easily. You will bear always the white scrape where Mycroft pushed you against a garden wall when you were two and ten months' age. The brass knights in the neighbouring church do not change, except to weather; the stained glass catches light in antique shades; and hobbyists bring up out of unplowed earth coins that are small and round and Roman. This is the world. It is fixed and enduring. You cannot imagine any change.
So: your relationship with the violin will not be improving. You resolve, consequently, to rid yourself of it. You clear a space in the music conservatory and climb on top of Mycroft's cello stool. You position the violin at such an angle as M. de Troyes has showed you. You calculate the impact, unclench your hand; the resulting crash is satisfying. The wood indeed splits. The strings go all a-jangle. It leads to a complete destruction. You would stomp on the wreckage, but that would spoil the clarity of the thing. Now, as it stands, it is clear: you can say, "It was an experiment." And it was; that is truthful; you wanted to see.
Afterwards, it is explained to you that life will get better. You will grow taller. Your stammer will diminish. Your scars will heal. Your skill will increase. "Idiot," Mycroft says. "You're not a stained glass window. You're a boy. It's different to being a statue or a machine."
Most of the time this difference is apparent. After all, you must eat: and eat, and eat, over and over, a tedious rote repetitive action, and sometimes, stupid with exhaustion, you fall asleep. This is all evidence that there is life happening inside you, invisibly, on levels that you cannot perceive.
All the same, Mycroft fails to understand. You are more like a stained glass window, in the peace of your own head; or rather, like a sequence: the Annunciation, or the stations of the Cross, spread out on separate panes. In sum, some narrative is present. But in each perfect scene the whole world hangs like clockwork paused for an instant: still, precise, complete.
***
There is a day in Baker Street when you fill the flat with clockwork. (John won't mind, you think; you always think this.) Surfaces become intricate. The inner parts of movements are miniature hoops, like ornaments that set the whole room gleaming. You have a magnifying glass and you work for a week, heaping them into piles that don't involve their provenances. It takes very fine motor control to fit them back into their places. One might almost call it artistry. But you don't believe in artistry, that rush and burst of sudden genius like a fine glass bubble blown under the skin. It is all just progress from one frame to another. Practice makes it go faster, so fast sometimes that it is hidden.
John claims that after this his watch is always losing seconds. He looks at you resentfully. "And," he says, "who gave you permission to dissect it in the first place? It was already working perfectly."
It's a cheap watch and the innards are tawdry. But he's right, of course; it was already working. You could tell its gears by their faint industrial colour. You just opened it up because you wanted to see. You laid it side by side with your own watch-- not the one you wear, but your father's Patek Philippe. The movements were impossible to mix up, and yet you did so. One wheel for another. It stopped both watches ticking. You put them back the way they were, and couldn't quantify your sorrow. For a moment you had envisioned that one cheap wheel forever embedded, cheerful, spinning.
John says, "Anyway, I don't know what on earth was the point of all that." He gestures to the line of timepieces, now closed all with their tiny worlds within them.
You shrug imperceptibly.
"Yeah, but surely you had a reason."
"Bored."
Your thoughts rest, fleeting, on the instant of dropping one solitary rotor into place. The exactness at the centre of you, so pleasing. Sometimes all the world narrows to one option or not, and that is the only thing; that single straight course that rings of rightness, that thin orderly filament, or else the flood of stochasticity. It is like living when you might be drowning. A heady thread of adrenaline.
"Couldn't you just get an ordinary hobby?" John asks. "Stamp collecting. Sudoku. I don't know, cleaning?"
You rest your hand on his wrist. On his wristwatch. You can feel it under your fingertips. The ticks don't catch. It is functioning. You fill your mind with the mechanism inside it. You can picture all the gears and wheels working. It is possible to predict how each one will behave; this simple picture, expanded to fit the universe, is seductive but incomplete. Other things interfere: a multiplicity of options. Then one must dredge up truth from down in the muddy water. It's dreadful. It's tiresome. It makes your bones ache.
You ask John, "Would you like me to do those things?"
He gets that faint crease, a look of confusion or disappointment. You sense that you have somehow gone astray. "I'm not ruling out the last one. And I wish you'd keep your hands off my stuff. But generally people do what makes them happy."
You take your hand off his wristwatch -- hands off stuff-- but realize in a moment or two that he didn't mean it that way. It's done, though: you moved too soon. You circle your fingers in a fist, expressing frustration. Other people do what makes them happy, you think.
You were sitting beside John on the sofa. Now you stand and roam about in aimless routes. Sometimes you are one still frame and you cannot see how to reach another. It is worlds away, that other stained-glass pane; it is the second part to your story, and the sun is shining straight through it, and you can see it from where you're frozen on the other side of the nave.
***
"I used to stammer," you say.
"Excuse me?"
"When I was a child. I used to stammer. Rather badly."
You and John are tied back-to-back in the scritchy darkness somewhere between Wanstead and Redbridge stations, awaiting the tremor of an oncoming train. The two of you are sat in the black grit that gets between tube tracks, held there by a long length of chain that runs from your wrists down to the rail lines. Now and then it brushes the dangerous part, and you jerk as your body hums with electricity.
"Why are you telling me this?" John asks.
"That's how people behave. Isn't it? They tell each other inconsequential things."
"Not in moments of extreme, mortal danger!"
"Nonsense. That's exactly when people tell each other things."
"No," John says. "No, it really isn't. You watch far too much TV."
Your hands are scrabbling behind you, quick and questing. You shut your eyes, though there are no distractions. You breathe fast through your mouth. You are focussing.
"Did you really, though?" John asks.
"Did I what?"
"Did you stammer."
"Yes," you say. "And I smashed a violin, and I killed a bird once. I didn't understand that it would stay that way."
John laughs: a soundless whistle that comes out between his teeth. "That's terrible," he says. "I don't know why I'm laughing at that."
But he keeps laughing, and after a moment you join in. The two of you are still laughing when you reach Redbridge, breathless and bedraggled, with blackened handcuffs dangling round your ankles and wrists. You haul yourself off of the tracks. You help John up. You sit on the platform, on a painted bench with John beside you, limp. Your hands hurt a lot. You can't think about it. You watch the train announcements scrolling-- little broken screens of light-- and feel illiterate.
John says, "I thought that we were done for that time."
"What a thing to imagine," you say.
The truth is that you cannot imagine. You are caught up in this instant. It is impossible to think that you might exit it in any way. Sometimes you are so flooded by the present that it floors you, and you feel like you cannot escape. There will not be another moment. There will just be this day, when you are sat there and the sodium lights are slightly nauseous, and you feel the cold hiss of the next train. You can tell where that train's going by the smell of the rain studding its metal doors, fresh from overground stations, cloud-scented, industrial, and strange.
The doors shift open. John says, "Right; are we going home, then?"
You shake your head. "Stay," you say. "Just for a minute."
Already there is so much change. A voice on the tannoy announces station closures. A flurry of human traffic sheds footprints of rain, watermarks against the marblescent tiling. Coats come and go, and trains, and you touch John's wrist and you can feel his tired heart beating. Every tap of blood against your fingertips new in his veins. You cannot tell what he is thinking. If you could stop the world and still move within it, you would figure out so many things. But you would never know the next number in this sequence: the next extraordinary thought to drift through John's brain. You focus on it; you apply complete attention. You want to wipe out the station so you can concentrate. You want to chart all of John's statements for years and years, and all the small expressive movements of his face, and at the end you will finally have enough data. You will click that last gold wheel into its clever place.
"I had a dog," John says.
"What?"
"Just, speaking of inconsequential things. When I was little I had a dog. It was called Field Marshal Viscount Allenby."
And it's so far, so far from what you expected, that you have to smile. And then John's laughing, little huffs of breath, again.
***
Sometimes when you are bored you do a bit of code-breaking. It's mechanical, a maze through which you run your mind to block out pain. When you were nineteen -- not a good year -- you almost cracked the Phaistos Disc. When you were twenty-one and locked in a room with Lestrade outside it, you deciphered Linear A. At night you listen to the Cold War ciphertexts that sometimes still sigh out over the radio waves, and in your mind you run the combinations. The result's not the point. It's all a game. You are lulled by the knowledge that there is a solution. It's out there, precise and Platonic. It has a physical shape.
John comes in late one night. It's dark. The radio's running. He listens for a moment. He says, "That's really quite creepy."
"Is it?" You shut your eyes. You're spread out on the sofa. A woman's voice reads out numbers at a flat pace, the syllables breaking unnaturally. "I suppose it is."
"It's a code, right? I can see why you like it."
"I don't like it. I find it... comforting."
"That's..." He shakes his head, sits down heavy in a chair. "Do you actually know what it means to like something?"
"You'll have to define your terms."
"Like. How'm I supposed to define 'like'? You just like something."
He looks frustrated, and you feel it is a delicate situation. You consider the layout of the field, charting the likely land mines beneath. "I find it rewarding to solve puzzles, of which this is one. My mind is wired for it. It's pleasing."
"Okay, but -- " He stops. He looks unhappy. "Surely even you can like something, without knowing why, without there being a reason."
"I always know why."
But you are lying. You shy away from that dark mechanism within you that spins and clicks and sets you liking. You must distrust any process that you cannot see. It's stage magic, apt to be took for the miraculous. If you were wise enough, you would perceive how it works. So you grind your teeth and it grates on you that you could feel so helpless. That you could be subject to the same flimflammery.
John lets it rest. He lets fall his head against the chair-back. He says, "All right, then, so what's it saying?"
"Pardon?"
"The coded message. What's it transmitting?"
"I've no idea."
A frown. "Let me get this straight. You're sitting in the dark, alone, listening to a message you can't understand."
"I don't need to understand it."
"Why not?"
You open your mouth to respond. No sound comes out. You blink. This is not the stammer of your childhood, the impatience of a mind trapped in a untrained body, but something new, of staggering importance. You feel the weight of it. You find you can't breathe. Something is shifting in your bones. Somewhere you have solved a mystery you weren't aware you were working out. The solution spreads fast, hot and bright throughout you. Your whole edifice, repatterning into some new structure; all the pieces of glass that make you up scattering. "Because," you say, "there is a plaintext. I don't have to work it out. I could do, but I don't have to. I know it's there. There exists a logic."
"Ah."
"John." You just want to keep saying his name. Like the numbers in the ciphertext, not quite the same once you knew they were a secret. "John."
"What?"
"When I was nine, I could identify every type of cloud formation. Also, I once solved Linear A."
"I don't know what that means," John says. He looks torn between fear and amusement. "Wait-- are we in extreme, mortal danger?"
You cross the room and place your hands very lightly against his face. He doesn't move, just frowns at you. "Always," you say.
Then you bend, and you can sense the world splitting into further iterations. You'll kiss him. He'll stay. He won't stay; he'll run; he'll be bewildered. You won't kiss him. You'll turn away. This is how it happens. Mysterious forces drag you forwards. It feels like freedom. You taste the new world on his lips. It tastes like light, and you are not afraid.