Watchmen fic: May You Live in Interesting Times
Title: May You Live in Interesting Times
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore.
Rating: G, gen.
Summary: Watchmen babies. Little snippets of childhood.
(X-posted to watchmenfic.)
1948
There's a small, grubby redheaded boy walking down St. Johns Place, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The boy is actually kind of comical looking, what with the bright orange hair and turned up nose, but there's something about him that stops people from laughing too much. Maybe it's because he speaks too slowly and holds people's gaze for slightly too long.
The boy's name is Walter.
Walter is pretty sure that they're all out to get him.
If he's not getting trouble from his classmates, then he's getting trouble from his teachers. He'd play hookey - no-one really seems to mind - but he's smart enough to realise that he needs to go to school in order to be clever, and he doesn't want to be stupid like the rest of them. They think he's stupid, but he's not, and he has to prove them wrong. (It doesn't help that he keeps having to change schools because he and his Mom change apartments a lot.) They can't pick on his grades, so they find other things to comment on. Like his clothes. It's not his fault that there's no hot water back home and Mom keeps saying she'll go to the laundromat but never does. He's learned to stop asking her.
Besides, even if he did have clean clothes, it probably wouldn't change much. It's not like he's the only kid who wears clothes that are dirty and don't fit right. At least Walter doesn't wear brown paper under his vest during winter, or puts old socks on his hands because he doesn't have gloves. That's what poor people do.
Some of the teachers are nice, but there aren't enough of them.
If he had to split them in to groups, he'd say that some of them are nice, some of them don't care, and some of them are assholes. (The ones that don't care are almost as bad as the assholes sometimes.)
"Assholes," he says out loud, very furtively. No-one seems to have heard him, and he gets a small kick out of that.
Then there are the teachers that try to be nice, but make things worse. In some ways, they're probably the worst of all, because Walter still has to be polite to them, even though he hates it. They talk to him like he's a moron - especially Mrs. Thompson, who calls him 'Wally'. This make Walter want to kick her stupid face in.
He's only 8 years old, but he knows that they're not being nice to him for his benefit.
People are such liars. Like when Mom says 'I won't hit you if you come over here,' but then she hits him anyway.
Things are going to be easier when he's an adult. Walter consoles himself with that thought.
===
1952
Adrian's parents give plenty of free reign; he's a sensible boy, and they trust him. He knows his way around New York quite well. Sometimes, he goes to one of the libraries; sometimes, he goes to the Nicholas Roerich museum, and sometimes, he goes down to Central Park and watches people play at the new Chess and Checkers house. Before the Chess and Checkers house was built, Adrian used to watch old men play as they sat outside of cafes. When he was younger, he used to ask them why they chose to move certain pieces, and he'd tell them what he would have moved instead, but he quickly learned that his input was not always appreciated. He still feels a bit silly about that.
Ironically, he avoids actually playing chess. It's a funny game: people who don't play it think that you have to be really smart to be good at chess, but this isn't strictly the case; you just have to be good at figuring out patterns and remembering them. Adrian doesn't want people to think that he's that smart. He's seen what happens to the smart kids. Smart kids have to take extra classes. Smart kids have to study to become doctors and scientists. Smart kids have to learn how to play the violin. Smart kids aren't allowed to spend lazy Sunday afternoons mooching around New York by themselves.
Smart kids don't seem to have many friends.
Adrian makes friends easily. His parents say that he's charismatic, and Adrian knows it's true. Charisma comes naturally to him; actually, it's often a case of making other people think that they're the charismatic ones, but doing it in a way so that they don't realise what's happening. It sounds simple, but it's not. He's already started to write a book on it, in secret. He'd like to be published, one day; probably non-fiction stuff, as he doesn't have much patience for fiction stories. Perhaps he's just not very imaginative. Adrian isn't without his moments of self-doubt.
Still, he's outgoing and confident, and he gets on well with others of his own age. He likes to play softball with a group of local boys. They like him, although he had to punch one of them in the nose for making fun of his accent and calling him a Nazi. (Which is stupid, because he hasn't even been to Germany, although everyone speaks German at home.) He didn't want to punch the boy on the nose, but it seemed like the most effective way of dealing with it. 'The working classes don't handle subtlety well,' says Adrian's father - and the words make him uncomfortable, even though he suspects that they're true. No-one has made fun of his accent or called him a Nazi since.
Right after punching the boy, Adrian helped him get back up again, and now they're good friends. The boy's name is Tommy Morales. They talk about movies and sports. They certainly don't talk about chess or Aristotle or the Hellenistic period. Adrian lies to Tommy about where he lives and what his parents do for a living; lying is surprisingly easy, although it's not something that Adrian likes to do. The truth usually comes out eventually, and Adrian knows that one day, he and Tommy probably won't be able to be friends any more, but Adrian suspects that he'll have got bored with Tommy by then anyway.
Sometimes Adrian finds people tiresome and predictable.
But Adrian still tries, he really tries, to get along with them. He likes people, and he always ends up feeling a little guilty whenever he thinks about how petty they can be. If everyone could fix their tiny problems then the big problems would be solved by themselves. It should be that easy.
There are a lot of homeless people in the park. It's sad. Adrian used to buy food for them, until he realised that buying them food wasn't the way to fix the problem. Now he doesn't tries not to do it any more. Instead, he reads newspapers, and tries to think of ways to shrink the poverty gap. People still ask him if he has any quarters, though, and Adrian still ends up buying them a hotdog sometimes. He's not sure why he does it. It's certainly not because he wants the approval and validation of others. New Yorkers seem to distrust altruism.
The city's cynicism is contagious, but Adrian refuses to be crushed by it. Being an idealist isn't such a bad thing, and Adrian is more intelligent than people give him credit for; 'idealist' isn't synonymous with 'moron,' and acrimony is the refuge of people who are too stupid to change their situation.
Adrian's father says that he is hopelessly naive, and one day, Adrian is going to prove him wrong.
===
1955
Daniel is allowed to go to the airshow as a reward for getting good grades. There's a massive queue to get in, so he's glad that he's there with Miss Rothman, his father's secretary. Miss Rothman is patient when faced with queues. Daniel's father isn't.
They wander around between displays, looking at the static aircraft, and Daniel tells Miss Rothman about engine types, designers, operational histories. She smokes her cigarettes and wordlessly nods along. Eventually, she buys them overpriced hotdogs from a stand; they furtively eat the hotdogs together and agree to tell no-one. Food tastes better when you're not supposed to be eating it.
Daniel decides that he likes Miss Rothman (even if she smells like smoke and wears too much makeup) although he feels guilty about it, because she's not his mother, and he has a nasty feeling that she isn't just his father's secretary. Still, she's a good listener, and she doesn't treat him like he's an idiot.
He even tells her that he wants to join the airforce some day, and she doesn't roll her eyes at him. It's a lie, though. He doesn't want to join the airforce. He doesn't really know what he wants to do, and sometimes he resents the way that his father expects him to plan ahead. Daniel supposes that he'd like to be a zoologist. Or a policeman. Or a writer. Or a paramedic. Or maybe, he could just move out to somewhere out in the country, and own lots of birds.
He's already picked out what species he's going to own and what he's going to call them. Not that he'd ever admit that to anyone, because it's just dumb.
Miss Rothman spreads out a blanket on the grass, as close to the flightline as they can get, and they sit and watch an air display. Daniel glances over to her now and then, and he's just at the age where he's starting to notice how pretty she is. However, he's quickly distracted by the roar of jets overhead, and he reflexively covers his ears; he'd like aircraft a lot better if they weren't so loud. Jets are the worst: they sound like they're tearing the sky apart. Daniel really prefers propeller-driven aircraft, although that might be because he was raised on a steady diet of patriotic war movies; movies about flying aces, knights of the air, gallant pilot officers locked in dogfights against nefarious nazis, that sort of thing. Modern warfare seems too complicated (and too raw, too close to home) to be romantic.
Above them, a F-86 Sabre screams through the air, sleek and otherworldly, and startlingly at odds with the chunky, muddy-colored Allied fighters of Daniel's childhood. It seems to promise the future; not a peaceful future, perhaps, but an interesting one.
===
1956
When Laurie grows up, she wants to be a veterinarian, although her Mom says that's silly, because do you know of any lady vets? Laurie tells her that you don't see many lady adventurers either, but her Mom just laughs and says that she ain't no lady.
She likes animals, and she'd like to have a dog, to keep her company. Maybe a German Shepherd, because Uncle Hollis has one. (Phantom II does not like to be petted, but he tolerates Laurie when she strokes him, and Uncle Hollis lets her feed him biscuits. Phantom takes them gently and then pads off to eat them under the safety of a table. He's getting old.) Laurie really misses Uncle Hollis, especially since her parents split up, but she hasn't seen him for a while, except on the TV. He's been in the news lately.
Mom doesn't let her watch the news, but Laurie is pretty good at being sneaky, and she can trick Mom in to thinking that she's watching cartoons when she's really hunting for news shows. Most of them are really boring (just a bunch of old men talking about stuff that she doesn't know or care about), but every now and then she'll glimpse a costumed figure sitting behind a desk, and she'll stop channel-hopping and pay attention. Uncle Hollis is pretty difficult to miss, although she only recognises the others from the photographs that her Mom keeps on the walls. Uncle Hollis isn't on the TV very often, but he's usually smiling for the cameras, despite the fact that everyone around him looks very serious. (He's the only one not wearing a suit.) He has a doofy kind of smile, like he's embarrassed to be there - it's not like the 'teeth and eyes' smiles that Mom makes whenever she's in front of a camera. (Which is less often these days.)
The other two guys in costumes never really smile. One of them looks kind of nervous, the other one (the guy with the wings) looks... even more nervous. They seem to be on the TV more than Uncle Hollis - especially the guy with the wings, he's on a lot more - and Laurie wonders if they're in trouble or something. Laurie can't ask her Mom about it, so she waits until she sees her maths tutor, Mrs. Iger, and asks her about it instead.
Mrs. Iger gives her a funny sort of look, and explains that the government are just making sure that the guys aren't communists. For Laurie, this creates more questions than it answers.
Laurie has enough to worry about in the fragile sphere of her own little world, like the way that her Mom has been extra grumpy lately, or whether or not she'll see her Dad again, even if he did yell at her a lot. There are already plenty of uncertainties in Laurie's life, and she doesn't need any more. Communists are the sort of stuff that belong to another world; an adult world, full of frowning men in suits and other dull, scary things. Maybe Laurie will fight communists when she's a bit bigger.
Laurie is only 4'2" tall (and she still feels small, even though her Mom tells her that she's a perfectly respectable height for a seven year old girl), but her karate teacher says that she's making excellent progress.
Maybe she can be the world's first lady crime-fighting veterinarian.
===
1938
The kitchen is quiet and almost unbearably stuffy. Jon can see out through the window that the autumn sun is low in the sky, although it's still warm outside.
The only other light is produced by the Anglepoise lamp that his father uses. It's too bright to look at, and Jon has to squint to see the watch components that have been laid out on a piece of felt on the kitchen table. The components look so neat and pretty; Jon is forbidden from picking them up, because nine year old boys have grubby hands and a habit of losing things - or so his father says, anyway. In actuality, Jon's hands are spotless, and he's much too quiet and gentle (and boring, according to his peers at school) to misplace or damage anything.
His father sits at the table, with his back to Jon. He's hunched over as he works, although every now and then he'll sit up straight, grimace, remove the loupe from his eye, and rub at his back. The loupe always leaves behind a little indentation in his cheek. Jon secretly covets the loupe, although it's yet another thing that he's not allowed to touch. (He has a recurring nightmare about picking the thing up and leaving a huge greasy thumbprint on the lens.)
Jon coughs.
His father flinches, muttering something unrepeatable, then looks over his shoulder to stare at him. "How long have you been standing there, boy?"
"Sorry," says Jon, because he's the sort of kid who apologises without thinking. "I was just looking."
"Well, don't be sneaking up on me like that again," says his father, and gestures to him. "Come here."
Jon takes a few steps forwards so that he can see better over his father's shoulder.
"You see this? It's a Cartier Tonneau, made in 1906 - one of the first ones they made. So it's older than you - and with any luck, it's going to be around after you're gone, too," his father says, although Jon's brain can't really process the concept of his eventual death. His father adds, of course, "Don't touch anything."
And of course, Jon keeps his hands clasped together behind his back. "It's pretty old," he says, skeptically. He doesn't like the idea of being outlived by something so small and breakable.
His father snorts. "I was born in 1902. Are you saying that I am pretty old, also?"
Jon thinks about it before answering. "Yes."
His father peers at him, then laughs and pats him on the shoulder. "Time is different when you are young. Wait until you are my age, then you will see what it's like."
Jon's brain finds that processing the concept of himself at his father's age is only slightly easier than processing the concept of his eventual death.
His father notices Jon's mildly horrirfied expression; he laughs more, before straightening his shoulders and rubbing at his eyes. "Ah - make yourself useful and open a window, why don't you. And stop looking at me like that. You make me feel ancient."
The latch of the kitchen window has been stuck fast with rust and paint, so Jon opts to just open the door of the fire escape, as they sometimes do on warm nights. Brooklyn is surprisingly quiet, apart from the distant wail of a fire truck, and Jon loiters outside for a minute or so, taking the peace for granted.
In seven years time, the pavement below will be speckled with watch pieces, and in ten years time, a small, grubby redheaded boy will walk past without looking up.
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Alan Moore.
Rating: G, gen.
Summary: Watchmen babies. Little snippets of childhood.
(X-posted to watchmenfic.)
1948
There's a small, grubby redheaded boy walking down St. Johns Place, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The boy is actually kind of comical looking, what with the bright orange hair and turned up nose, but there's something about him that stops people from laughing too much. Maybe it's because he speaks too slowly and holds people's gaze for slightly too long.
The boy's name is Walter.
Walter is pretty sure that they're all out to get him.
If he's not getting trouble from his classmates, then he's getting trouble from his teachers. He'd play hookey - no-one really seems to mind - but he's smart enough to realise that he needs to go to school in order to be clever, and he doesn't want to be stupid like the rest of them. They think he's stupid, but he's not, and he has to prove them wrong. (It doesn't help that he keeps having to change schools because he and his Mom change apartments a lot.) They can't pick on his grades, so they find other things to comment on. Like his clothes. It's not his fault that there's no hot water back home and Mom keeps saying she'll go to the laundromat but never does. He's learned to stop asking her.
Besides, even if he did have clean clothes, it probably wouldn't change much. It's not like he's the only kid who wears clothes that are dirty and don't fit right. At least Walter doesn't wear brown paper under his vest during winter, or puts old socks on his hands because he doesn't have gloves. That's what poor people do.
Some of the teachers are nice, but there aren't enough of them.
If he had to split them in to groups, he'd say that some of them are nice, some of them don't care, and some of them are assholes. (The ones that don't care are almost as bad as the assholes sometimes.)
"Assholes," he says out loud, very furtively. No-one seems to have heard him, and he gets a small kick out of that.
Then there are the teachers that try to be nice, but make things worse. In some ways, they're probably the worst of all, because Walter still has to be polite to them, even though he hates it. They talk to him like he's a moron - especially Mrs. Thompson, who calls him 'Wally'. This make Walter want to kick her stupid face in.
He's only 8 years old, but he knows that they're not being nice to him for his benefit.
People are such liars. Like when Mom says 'I won't hit you if you come over here,' but then she hits him anyway.
Things are going to be easier when he's an adult. Walter consoles himself with that thought.
===
1952
Adrian's parents give plenty of free reign; he's a sensible boy, and they trust him. He knows his way around New York quite well. Sometimes, he goes to one of the libraries; sometimes, he goes to the Nicholas Roerich museum, and sometimes, he goes down to Central Park and watches people play at the new Chess and Checkers house. Before the Chess and Checkers house was built, Adrian used to watch old men play as they sat outside of cafes. When he was younger, he used to ask them why they chose to move certain pieces, and he'd tell them what he would have moved instead, but he quickly learned that his input was not always appreciated. He still feels a bit silly about that.
Ironically, he avoids actually playing chess. It's a funny game: people who don't play it think that you have to be really smart to be good at chess, but this isn't strictly the case; you just have to be good at figuring out patterns and remembering them. Adrian doesn't want people to think that he's that smart. He's seen what happens to the smart kids. Smart kids have to take extra classes. Smart kids have to study to become doctors and scientists. Smart kids have to learn how to play the violin. Smart kids aren't allowed to spend lazy Sunday afternoons mooching around New York by themselves.
Smart kids don't seem to have many friends.
Adrian makes friends easily. His parents say that he's charismatic, and Adrian knows it's true. Charisma comes naturally to him; actually, it's often a case of making other people think that they're the charismatic ones, but doing it in a way so that they don't realise what's happening. It sounds simple, but it's not. He's already started to write a book on it, in secret. He'd like to be published, one day; probably non-fiction stuff, as he doesn't have much patience for fiction stories. Perhaps he's just not very imaginative. Adrian isn't without his moments of self-doubt.
Still, he's outgoing and confident, and he gets on well with others of his own age. He likes to play softball with a group of local boys. They like him, although he had to punch one of them in the nose for making fun of his accent and calling him a Nazi. (Which is stupid, because he hasn't even been to Germany, although everyone speaks German at home.) He didn't want to punch the boy on the nose, but it seemed like the most effective way of dealing with it. 'The working classes don't handle subtlety well,' says Adrian's father - and the words make him uncomfortable, even though he suspects that they're true. No-one has made fun of his accent or called him a Nazi since.
Right after punching the boy, Adrian helped him get back up again, and now they're good friends. The boy's name is Tommy Morales. They talk about movies and sports. They certainly don't talk about chess or Aristotle or the Hellenistic period. Adrian lies to Tommy about where he lives and what his parents do for a living; lying is surprisingly easy, although it's not something that Adrian likes to do. The truth usually comes out eventually, and Adrian knows that one day, he and Tommy probably won't be able to be friends any more, but Adrian suspects that he'll have got bored with Tommy by then anyway.
Sometimes Adrian finds people tiresome and predictable.
But Adrian still tries, he really tries, to get along with them. He likes people, and he always ends up feeling a little guilty whenever he thinks about how petty they can be. If everyone could fix their tiny problems then the big problems would be solved by themselves. It should be that easy.
There are a lot of homeless people in the park. It's sad. Adrian used to buy food for them, until he realised that buying them food wasn't the way to fix the problem. Now he doesn't tries not to do it any more. Instead, he reads newspapers, and tries to think of ways to shrink the poverty gap. People still ask him if he has any quarters, though, and Adrian still ends up buying them a hotdog sometimes. He's not sure why he does it. It's certainly not because he wants the approval and validation of others. New Yorkers seem to distrust altruism.
The city's cynicism is contagious, but Adrian refuses to be crushed by it. Being an idealist isn't such a bad thing, and Adrian is more intelligent than people give him credit for; 'idealist' isn't synonymous with 'moron,' and acrimony is the refuge of people who are too stupid to change their situation.
Adrian's father says that he is hopelessly naive, and one day, Adrian is going to prove him wrong.
===
1955
Daniel is allowed to go to the airshow as a reward for getting good grades. There's a massive queue to get in, so he's glad that he's there with Miss Rothman, his father's secretary. Miss Rothman is patient when faced with queues. Daniel's father isn't.
They wander around between displays, looking at the static aircraft, and Daniel tells Miss Rothman about engine types, designers, operational histories. She smokes her cigarettes and wordlessly nods along. Eventually, she buys them overpriced hotdogs from a stand; they furtively eat the hotdogs together and agree to tell no-one. Food tastes better when you're not supposed to be eating it.
Daniel decides that he likes Miss Rothman (even if she smells like smoke and wears too much makeup) although he feels guilty about it, because she's not his mother, and he has a nasty feeling that she isn't just his father's secretary. Still, she's a good listener, and she doesn't treat him like he's an idiot.
He even tells her that he wants to join the airforce some day, and she doesn't roll her eyes at him. It's a lie, though. He doesn't want to join the airforce. He doesn't really know what he wants to do, and sometimes he resents the way that his father expects him to plan ahead. Daniel supposes that he'd like to be a zoologist. Or a policeman. Or a writer. Or a paramedic. Or maybe, he could just move out to somewhere out in the country, and own lots of birds.
He's already picked out what species he's going to own and what he's going to call them. Not that he'd ever admit that to anyone, because it's just dumb.
Miss Rothman spreads out a blanket on the grass, as close to the flightline as they can get, and they sit and watch an air display. Daniel glances over to her now and then, and he's just at the age where he's starting to notice how pretty she is. However, he's quickly distracted by the roar of jets overhead, and he reflexively covers his ears; he'd like aircraft a lot better if they weren't so loud. Jets are the worst: they sound like they're tearing the sky apart. Daniel really prefers propeller-driven aircraft, although that might be because he was raised on a steady diet of patriotic war movies; movies about flying aces, knights of the air, gallant pilot officers locked in dogfights against nefarious nazis, that sort of thing. Modern warfare seems too complicated (and too raw, too close to home) to be romantic.
Above them, a F-86 Sabre screams through the air, sleek and otherworldly, and startlingly at odds with the chunky, muddy-colored Allied fighters of Daniel's childhood. It seems to promise the future; not a peaceful future, perhaps, but an interesting one.
===
1956
When Laurie grows up, she wants to be a veterinarian, although her Mom says that's silly, because do you know of any lady vets? Laurie tells her that you don't see many lady adventurers either, but her Mom just laughs and says that she ain't no lady.
She likes animals, and she'd like to have a dog, to keep her company. Maybe a German Shepherd, because Uncle Hollis has one. (Phantom II does not like to be petted, but he tolerates Laurie when she strokes him, and Uncle Hollis lets her feed him biscuits. Phantom takes them gently and then pads off to eat them under the safety of a table. He's getting old.) Laurie really misses Uncle Hollis, especially since her parents split up, but she hasn't seen him for a while, except on the TV. He's been in the news lately.
Mom doesn't let her watch the news, but Laurie is pretty good at being sneaky, and she can trick Mom in to thinking that she's watching cartoons when she's really hunting for news shows. Most of them are really boring (just a bunch of old men talking about stuff that she doesn't know or care about), but every now and then she'll glimpse a costumed figure sitting behind a desk, and she'll stop channel-hopping and pay attention. Uncle Hollis is pretty difficult to miss, although she only recognises the others from the photographs that her Mom keeps on the walls. Uncle Hollis isn't on the TV very often, but he's usually smiling for the cameras, despite the fact that everyone around him looks very serious. (He's the only one not wearing a suit.) He has a doofy kind of smile, like he's embarrassed to be there - it's not like the 'teeth and eyes' smiles that Mom makes whenever she's in front of a camera. (Which is less often these days.)
The other two guys in costumes never really smile. One of them looks kind of nervous, the other one (the guy with the wings) looks... even more nervous. They seem to be on the TV more than Uncle Hollis - especially the guy with the wings, he's on a lot more - and Laurie wonders if they're in trouble or something. Laurie can't ask her Mom about it, so she waits until she sees her maths tutor, Mrs. Iger, and asks her about it instead.
Mrs. Iger gives her a funny sort of look, and explains that the government are just making sure that the guys aren't communists. For Laurie, this creates more questions than it answers.
Laurie has enough to worry about in the fragile sphere of her own little world, like the way that her Mom has been extra grumpy lately, or whether or not she'll see her Dad again, even if he did yell at her a lot. There are already plenty of uncertainties in Laurie's life, and she doesn't need any more. Communists are the sort of stuff that belong to another world; an adult world, full of frowning men in suits and other dull, scary things. Maybe Laurie will fight communists when she's a bit bigger.
Laurie is only 4'2" tall (and she still feels small, even though her Mom tells her that she's a perfectly respectable height for a seven year old girl), but her karate teacher says that she's making excellent progress.
Maybe she can be the world's first lady crime-fighting veterinarian.
===
1938
The kitchen is quiet and almost unbearably stuffy. Jon can see out through the window that the autumn sun is low in the sky, although it's still warm outside.
The only other light is produced by the Anglepoise lamp that his father uses. It's too bright to look at, and Jon has to squint to see the watch components that have been laid out on a piece of felt on the kitchen table. The components look so neat and pretty; Jon is forbidden from picking them up, because nine year old boys have grubby hands and a habit of losing things - or so his father says, anyway. In actuality, Jon's hands are spotless, and he's much too quiet and gentle (and boring, according to his peers at school) to misplace or damage anything.
His father sits at the table, with his back to Jon. He's hunched over as he works, although every now and then he'll sit up straight, grimace, remove the loupe from his eye, and rub at his back. The loupe always leaves behind a little indentation in his cheek. Jon secretly covets the loupe, although it's yet another thing that he's not allowed to touch. (He has a recurring nightmare about picking the thing up and leaving a huge greasy thumbprint on the lens.)
Jon coughs.
His father flinches, muttering something unrepeatable, then looks over his shoulder to stare at him. "How long have you been standing there, boy?"
"Sorry," says Jon, because he's the sort of kid who apologises without thinking. "I was just looking."
"Well, don't be sneaking up on me like that again," says his father, and gestures to him. "Come here."
Jon takes a few steps forwards so that he can see better over his father's shoulder.
"You see this? It's a Cartier Tonneau, made in 1906 - one of the first ones they made. So it's older than you - and with any luck, it's going to be around after you're gone, too," his father says, although Jon's brain can't really process the concept of his eventual death. His father adds, of course, "Don't touch anything."
And of course, Jon keeps his hands clasped together behind his back. "It's pretty old," he says, skeptically. He doesn't like the idea of being outlived by something so small and breakable.
His father snorts. "I was born in 1902. Are you saying that I am pretty old, also?"
Jon thinks about it before answering. "Yes."
His father peers at him, then laughs and pats him on the shoulder. "Time is different when you are young. Wait until you are my age, then you will see what it's like."
Jon's brain finds that processing the concept of himself at his father's age is only slightly easier than processing the concept of his eventual death.
His father notices Jon's mildly horrirfied expression; he laughs more, before straightening his shoulders and rubbing at his eyes. "Ah - make yourself useful and open a window, why don't you. And stop looking at me like that. You make me feel ancient."
The latch of the kitchen window has been stuck fast with rust and paint, so Jon opts to just open the door of the fire escape, as they sometimes do on warm nights. Brooklyn is surprisingly quiet, apart from the distant wail of a fire truck, and Jon loiters outside for a minute or so, taking the peace for granted.
In seven years time, the pavement below will be speckled with watch pieces, and in ten years time, a small, grubby redheaded boy will walk past without looking up.