Away From Here- Chapter 24.
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Chapter 24.
A New End from a Broken Beginning.
They say that the city never changes. Who ‘they’ were- he never really got around to asking, he didn’t think it really mattered.
But, he supposes, it doesn’t really matter when you get down to it, because they are right; the city never changes. No matter how long he could have been away, when he returned, the city still would have been as it always was; a slab of concrete and chrome, set against the backdrop of the edge of a country.
The city hasn’t changed a bit in five years. Solar cars still hum down the streets, silent and speedy, a hundred different people on their way to a hundred different things to do... Well, surprisingly little. Office blocks hum with the movement of the oppressed, monkey-suited Agency workers around every corner, creating an almost symphonic buzz throughout the streets. And, of course, tucked in between the blocks are the little shops, the keepers who refuse to give up in traditional ways of shopping, jewellers and butchers, intersected with restaurants and cafés.
He walks past them, taking in the sights of what he used to call home. He wanders past the high class shopping streets, along the pedestrian shopping centre, filled with expensive restaurants and classy bars, all the way to the south side of the city, into the streets filled with drug shops and ammunitions stores tucked behind old bookshops and backwater antiques.
It could almost feel like coming home.
Almost.
The man that walks these streets is not the same one that left five years ago; his hair is bleached almost white by the sun and his skin is a patched brown, areas crossed with sunburn on sunburn, some places not tanned at all by the oppressive sunshine he’s experienced over the past few years.
Those places are few.
His eyes are older too; that crystal blue hardened slightly, made into something crisper, stronger than before, devoid of the innocence it once possessed. His limbs are stronger, harder and more solid than before, his chest broader and his thighs harder.
This man is not the boy who left.
Therefore, it can never quite be a homecoming, more the visiting of a memory, almost forgotten, but never quite shaken.
Ankora’s has changed its opening times, he notes, as he pushes the door open, the small bell sounding his arrival. He can’t remember if that was there before or not, doesn’t think it really matters.
The café is as it ever was; one more thing that never changes. The walls are still paneled with wood and burgundy paint, the bar across the edge is still as fastidiously clean as it was the day he left it, gleaming under the slightly dimmed lights. The back wall is still framed with bottles of copper and gold and the coffee machine still hums quietly from the corner.
The people have yet to change as well. They still linger on the stools, hunched over their cups, as disreputable as ever, like smoke, clinging against the chairs and stools, an encroaching presence that time seems unable to wash away.
This... this feels a little more like coming home.
The bell startles the silence- and a young woman looks up from where she’d been cleaning a set of blue shaded glasses with an old yellow cloth. Bright green eyes lined with fluttering black lashes look up at him.
“Welcome to-“
She cuts off, her eyes widening, but he can’t reply. If nothing else has changed in the city, Annie Ankora has. She’s grown in all dimensions; dumping the punk look she’d adopted in her youth, the ripped leggings and low cut tops getting replaced by bright red v-necks and skinny blue jeans. Her hair is longer than it was before, curling loosley in red ringlets below her shoulders.
She doesn’t look like the girl that Liam remembers; the girl who tried to be a rebel, but loved her father too do anything more than wear too high-heels. She looks older, wiser, but no more cynical of the world. It surprises Liam more than it has any right to.
She straightens up, looking in almost wonderment at him. “L-Liam?” She stumbles slightly, like the word is unfamiliar. Her voice is soft, almost a whisper.
“Hey, Annie,” he replies, and his voice sounds hoarse even to his own ears, like he hasn’t used it to speak civilly for a very long time. Like he’s only ever used it to shout orders down a barley working vid at people who weren’t really listening.
It’s closer to the truth that he thinks he’s ready to admit.
But it doesn’t matter anyway, because suddenly all he can see is a blur of red and then Annie is pushing herself into his arms, slamming into him without warning, almost toppling him over with the force.
“It’s really you?” she says it almost like it’s a question, burrowed so far into the crook of his shoulder that he almost misses her soft words. She wraps her arms around his waist, holding on tightly.
Liam tentatively wraps an arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, Annie... It’s me all right.”
Her grips tightens almost imperceptibly. “We thought we’d never see you again,” she mumbles against him, and Liam isn’t sure what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all.
It’s a few minutes before Annie loosens her grip on him, leaning back slightly so she can look him. He returns her gaze. “We didn’t know if you were coming back, Liam, we were so worried,” she tells him, softly.
Liam makes a sound that’s almost laughter. “Oh, you know me, Annie, I always come back,” he reminds her, with another small almost-smile that feels fake.
She returns it and almost tentatively, she brushes a hand down his face, knuckles touching softly against the hard line of his jaw. “You grew up,” she tells him, softly, her eyes almost sad.
Liam wants to smile for real that time, but it doesn’t come out, so he just looks down at her. “So have you,” he tells her in reply.
For a moment neither of them move, but their silence is broken without warning by the sound of glass chinking against wood as a patron slams a glass particularly hard onto the bar. Annie coughs, whipping her hand away, blushing slightly as she buries both her hands in her pockets. She smiles up at him but doesn’t meet his eyes. “Well, come on. Sit down! Tell me what happened to you!” she requests, leading him over to the bar.
He settles on a raggedy bar stool. Annie grabs two glasses and fills them both to the brim with frothy white liquid and passes one over to him. He gives her a grateful look as he grabs it, draining half the glass in one swallow.
Annie chuckles lightly as she jumps up onto the edge of the bar. “You look like you needed that.”
Liam looks up at her and almost smiles. “You have no idea.”
And she really, really doesn’t.
She gives him a bright smile, like nothing is wrong and leans back, her hand resting on the bar to support her.
“Frederic will kill you for that,” Liam notes, nodding to her hand.
Something flitters, minute and unreadable across her face for a moment. She smiles at him again, her eyes tinged with something that Liam can’t read. “He might,” she tells him, absently. She shakes it off after a moment, giving him a bright look. “Also: don’t change the subject! I want to know what happened! Last I heard you were going to work for some Agency... which one was it.. the...”
“The Central Agency for Western Security and Protection,” Liam answers, his expression blank, reeling off the name like it’s second nature.
“That’s it! We tried to contact you, but there was nothing!” Annie finishes off. She looks at him, her gaze concerned. “That was five years ago, Liam. What happened?” she asks, her tone becoming more serous.
Liam breathes a long breath he didn’t know he was holding on to. He places his hands on the bar and looks up at her. He supposes he was going to have to explain this to someone; it might as well be Annie first.
“They wanted me to do a job for them. They’d seen I’d refused a job for The Central Agency for Spatial Development and they wanted to know why.”
Annie tenses slightly, they don’t mention why that is. “What did you tell them?”
“That I didn’t want to leave Earth,” he says it so matter-of-factly, and, even though it’s true, it doesn’t change the flicker in his heart, like an old war wound, something he can’t deny, an old ache, purely in his mind, but still there. “Not for anything.” He fiddles with the empty glass. “So I took their job. I needed the money.”
He doesn’t mention that he wanted to get out of the city. That he couldn’t go anywhere without being reminded of her face, without seeing her initials scrawled into every piece of chrome, that he couldn’t even open his eyes without feeling something aching painfully in the pit of his stomach.
He doesn’t mention it, but he’s pretty sure Annie knows anyway.
“What did they want you to do?” Annie asks after a moment, apprehension in her tone.
“They wanted me to go to the East. They needed an operative, and I had the right skills.”
Annie doesn’t restrain her gasp, although she does rein back the hands that threaten to flutter up to cover her mouth. “A-and you let went?!”
Liam shrugs. “I needed the money,” he reiterates.
Annie still looks horrified, her hands twisting in her lap. “W-what did they want you to do?” she questions, carefully.
Liam makes a dismissive gesture. “It was a project. The details are classified,” he tells her, simply.
“So, how did you get back? What happened?” she asks, her nervous fingers twisting around her glass because of course it’s a little known fact amongst people that if you somewhere like that you never come back.
Liam used to believe that too.
Things change.
“I came back because it was success,” he tells her, easily. “They’ve shipped me back here and given me a desk job... For the moment anyway.”
Anne breaths out, and the sound is long and harsh in the empty silence of the café. “God, Liam...” she breathes. “I can’t imagine.”
Blood spattered walls, the screaming bite of a tazer to the back of his neck.
“It’s just...”
Shouted orders, shoving hands, groping into the silence for something they can’t find. Mashing his fingers against a PDA with the palm of his hand scrabbling for answers he knows he can’t find here.
Liam smiles at her, benign yet silencing. “It’s all right Annie.” He laughs a little. “You shouldn’t be imagining things like that anyway.”
“Things like what, Liam?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “Things like that,” is all he replies.
Annie isn’t sure how long they spend there, sat together, chatting about things that don’t really matter, inane little things like who comes in here every day, if Annie still hangs out with the same old friends she adored so much in college, about all the stuff that neither of them really care about, but they don’t know what else to say.
She can’t decide whether it’s nice to hear his voice again, to see his face, or whether it’s just completely and utterly infuriating.
So they go on; she can feel an hour or so tick by her, closing time rapidly approaches, earlier than it used to be. She’s got work to catch up on after all, and she wonders, quietly to herself and no one else, how long it’s going to take before Liam noticed the one thing wrong with this picture.
Liam was always bright; she’s surprised it’s taken him this long.
It finally comes around as one of the regulars leaves the shop, off on a drug binge Annie’s mind suggests as the most likely destination, but she pushes it away. Liam watches her leave, turning back look at Annie, confusion clear in his eyes.
Here it comes.
“Annie?” he questions and Annie pretends to be incredibly interested in her nails.
“Mmm?”
“Frederic usually says goodbye to her.”
His voice is so clear, so crisp and tight, nothing like Liam she knew before, it makes her feel a little ill.
She still doesn’t look up at him, although the hand drops back into her lap. “He does?”
“Yes. He does.”
Annie doesn’t reply, and there’s silence for a moment before Liam speaks, his voice concerned. “Annie... where is Frederic?”
The question still catches her a little off guard, even though she expected it, she closes her eyes and breathes out through her nose.
“Cancerous tumour on his left lung; turned up about six months after you stopped contacting us,” she tells him, straightforward and simple, not meeting his eyes.
“..You mean?”
“He died a year later, the doctor’s only gave him six months.” She looks up at him now, but not in the eyes. She doesn’t want to see pity. “But you know Dad; he was always a fighter.”
“Annie... I’m sorry,” Liam offers, as though that helps.
Annie chuckles slightly, finally meeting his eyes. “It’s okay, it’s... well, it’s been a while. I’m okay,” She smiles at him. “He left me Ankora’s, you know. We wouldn't have had it any other way, but he didn’t want me to give up uni either.” She laughs. “Even after he died he was still piling up the work.”
“So, you still want to become a doctor?” Liam asks and Annie is oddly surprised that he remembers that bit of information.
“Hell yeah!” she replies, with a big smile, one he returns, if only weakly.
There’s a pause between them, and something twists in Annie’s gut. She could ask him, right now, she could do it, it would be easy. Things have changed, they’ve both changed, maybe they could make it work this time around, she could remember the fear in the back of her throat when she couldn’t get into contact with him, the idea that he could die and he’d never know.
She notices that his glass is empty, his hand rests around it, she swallows hard and shakes her head just a little, she supposes it’s better now than never.
She reaches forward and rests her fingers around his, touching the glass through the spaces.
“Can I get you another?” she asks, carefully, and he looks up at her, something in his eyes she can’t read, a flittering wave of things she can’t decide on, things that maybe he, himself, doesn’t even know.
Finally he replies. “All right.”
Annie smiles and releases his hand, going to get him a new glass.
Epilogue>>
Chapter 24.
A New End from a Broken Beginning.
They say that the city never changes. Who ‘they’ were- he never really got around to asking, he didn’t think it really mattered.
But, he supposes, it doesn’t really matter when you get down to it, because they are right; the city never changes. No matter how long he could have been away, when he returned, the city still would have been as it always was; a slab of concrete and chrome, set against the backdrop of the edge of a country.
The city hasn’t changed a bit in five years. Solar cars still hum down the streets, silent and speedy, a hundred different people on their way to a hundred different things to do... Well, surprisingly little. Office blocks hum with the movement of the oppressed, monkey-suited Agency workers around every corner, creating an almost symphonic buzz throughout the streets. And, of course, tucked in between the blocks are the little shops, the keepers who refuse to give up in traditional ways of shopping, jewellers and butchers, intersected with restaurants and cafés.
He walks past them, taking in the sights of what he used to call home. He wanders past the high class shopping streets, along the pedestrian shopping centre, filled with expensive restaurants and classy bars, all the way to the south side of the city, into the streets filled with drug shops and ammunitions stores tucked behind old bookshops and backwater antiques.
It could almost feel like coming home.
Almost.
The man that walks these streets is not the same one that left five years ago; his hair is bleached almost white by the sun and his skin is a patched brown, areas crossed with sunburn on sunburn, some places not tanned at all by the oppressive sunshine he’s experienced over the past few years.
Those places are few.
His eyes are older too; that crystal blue hardened slightly, made into something crisper, stronger than before, devoid of the innocence it once possessed. His limbs are stronger, harder and more solid than before, his chest broader and his thighs harder.
This man is not the boy who left.
Therefore, it can never quite be a homecoming, more the visiting of a memory, almost forgotten, but never quite shaken.
Ankora’s has changed its opening times, he notes, as he pushes the door open, the small bell sounding his arrival. He can’t remember if that was there before or not, doesn’t think it really matters.
The café is as it ever was; one more thing that never changes. The walls are still paneled with wood and burgundy paint, the bar across the edge is still as fastidiously clean as it was the day he left it, gleaming under the slightly dimmed lights. The back wall is still framed with bottles of copper and gold and the coffee machine still hums quietly from the corner.
The people have yet to change as well. They still linger on the stools, hunched over their cups, as disreputable as ever, like smoke, clinging against the chairs and stools, an encroaching presence that time seems unable to wash away.
This... this feels a little more like coming home.
The bell startles the silence- and a young woman looks up from where she’d been cleaning a set of blue shaded glasses with an old yellow cloth. Bright green eyes lined with fluttering black lashes look up at him.
“Welcome to-“
She cuts off, her eyes widening, but he can’t reply. If nothing else has changed in the city, Annie Ankora has. She’s grown in all dimensions; dumping the punk look she’d adopted in her youth, the ripped leggings and low cut tops getting replaced by bright red v-necks and skinny blue jeans. Her hair is longer than it was before, curling loosley in red ringlets below her shoulders.
She doesn’t look like the girl that Liam remembers; the girl who tried to be a rebel, but loved her father too do anything more than wear too high-heels. She looks older, wiser, but no more cynical of the world. It surprises Liam more than it has any right to.
She straightens up, looking in almost wonderment at him. “L-Liam?” She stumbles slightly, like the word is unfamiliar. Her voice is soft, almost a whisper.
“Hey, Annie,” he replies, and his voice sounds hoarse even to his own ears, like he hasn’t used it to speak civilly for a very long time. Like he’s only ever used it to shout orders down a barley working vid at people who weren’t really listening.
It’s closer to the truth that he thinks he’s ready to admit.
But it doesn’t matter anyway, because suddenly all he can see is a blur of red and then Annie is pushing herself into his arms, slamming into him without warning, almost toppling him over with the force.
“It’s really you?” she says it almost like it’s a question, burrowed so far into the crook of his shoulder that he almost misses her soft words. She wraps her arms around his waist, holding on tightly.
Liam tentatively wraps an arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, Annie... It’s me all right.”
Her grips tightens almost imperceptibly. “We thought we’d never see you again,” she mumbles against him, and Liam isn’t sure what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all.
It’s a few minutes before Annie loosens her grip on him, leaning back slightly so she can look him. He returns her gaze. “We didn’t know if you were coming back, Liam, we were so worried,” she tells him, softly.
Liam makes a sound that’s almost laughter. “Oh, you know me, Annie, I always come back,” he reminds her, with another small almost-smile that feels fake.
She returns it and almost tentatively, she brushes a hand down his face, knuckles touching softly against the hard line of his jaw. “You grew up,” she tells him, softly, her eyes almost sad.
Liam wants to smile for real that time, but it doesn’t come out, so he just looks down at her. “So have you,” he tells her in reply.
For a moment neither of them move, but their silence is broken without warning by the sound of glass chinking against wood as a patron slams a glass particularly hard onto the bar. Annie coughs, whipping her hand away, blushing slightly as she buries both her hands in her pockets. She smiles up at him but doesn’t meet his eyes. “Well, come on. Sit down! Tell me what happened to you!” she requests, leading him over to the bar.
He settles on a raggedy bar stool. Annie grabs two glasses and fills them both to the brim with frothy white liquid and passes one over to him. He gives her a grateful look as he grabs it, draining half the glass in one swallow.
Annie chuckles lightly as she jumps up onto the edge of the bar. “You look like you needed that.”
Liam looks up at her and almost smiles. “You have no idea.”
And she really, really doesn’t.
She gives him a bright smile, like nothing is wrong and leans back, her hand resting on the bar to support her.
“Frederic will kill you for that,” Liam notes, nodding to her hand.
Something flitters, minute and unreadable across her face for a moment. She smiles at him again, her eyes tinged with something that Liam can’t read. “He might,” she tells him, absently. She shakes it off after a moment, giving him a bright look. “Also: don’t change the subject! I want to know what happened! Last I heard you were going to work for some Agency... which one was it.. the...”
“The Central Agency for Western Security and Protection,” Liam answers, his expression blank, reeling off the name like it’s second nature.
“That’s it! We tried to contact you, but there was nothing!” Annie finishes off. She looks at him, her gaze concerned. “That was five years ago, Liam. What happened?” she asks, her tone becoming more serous.
Liam breathes a long breath he didn’t know he was holding on to. He places his hands on the bar and looks up at her. He supposes he was going to have to explain this to someone; it might as well be Annie first.
“They wanted me to do a job for them. They’d seen I’d refused a job for The Central Agency for Spatial Development and they wanted to know why.”
Annie tenses slightly, they don’t mention why that is. “What did you tell them?”
“That I didn’t want to leave Earth,” he says it so matter-of-factly, and, even though it’s true, it doesn’t change the flicker in his heart, like an old war wound, something he can’t deny, an old ache, purely in his mind, but still there. “Not for anything.” He fiddles with the empty glass. “So I took their job. I needed the money.”
He doesn’t mention that he wanted to get out of the city. That he couldn’t go anywhere without being reminded of her face, without seeing her initials scrawled into every piece of chrome, that he couldn’t even open his eyes without feeling something aching painfully in the pit of his stomach.
He doesn’t mention it, but he’s pretty sure Annie knows anyway.
“What did they want you to do?” Annie asks after a moment, apprehension in her tone.
“They wanted me to go to the East. They needed an operative, and I had the right skills.”
Annie doesn’t restrain her gasp, although she does rein back the hands that threaten to flutter up to cover her mouth. “A-and you let went?!”
Liam shrugs. “I needed the money,” he reiterates.
Annie still looks horrified, her hands twisting in her lap. “W-what did they want you to do?” she questions, carefully.
Liam makes a dismissive gesture. “It was a project. The details are classified,” he tells her, simply.
“So, how did you get back? What happened?” she asks, her nervous fingers twisting around her glass because of course it’s a little known fact amongst people that if you somewhere like that you never come back.
Liam used to believe that too.
Things change.
“I came back because it was success,” he tells her, easily. “They’ve shipped me back here and given me a desk job... For the moment anyway.”
Anne breaths out, and the sound is long and harsh in the empty silence of the café. “God, Liam...” she breathes. “I can’t imagine.”
Blood spattered walls, the screaming bite of a tazer to the back of his neck.
“It’s just...”
Shouted orders, shoving hands, groping into the silence for something they can’t find. Mashing his fingers against a PDA with the palm of his hand scrabbling for answers he knows he can’t find here.
Liam smiles at her, benign yet silencing. “It’s all right Annie.” He laughs a little. “You shouldn’t be imagining things like that anyway.”
“Things like what, Liam?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “Things like that,” is all he replies.
Annie isn’t sure how long they spend there, sat together, chatting about things that don’t really matter, inane little things like who comes in here every day, if Annie still hangs out with the same old friends she adored so much in college, about all the stuff that neither of them really care about, but they don’t know what else to say.
She can’t decide whether it’s nice to hear his voice again, to see his face, or whether it’s just completely and utterly infuriating.
So they go on; she can feel an hour or so tick by her, closing time rapidly approaches, earlier than it used to be. She’s got work to catch up on after all, and she wonders, quietly to herself and no one else, how long it’s going to take before Liam noticed the one thing wrong with this picture.
Liam was always bright; she’s surprised it’s taken him this long.
It finally comes around as one of the regulars leaves the shop, off on a drug binge Annie’s mind suggests as the most likely destination, but she pushes it away. Liam watches her leave, turning back look at Annie, confusion clear in his eyes.
Here it comes.
“Annie?” he questions and Annie pretends to be incredibly interested in her nails.
“Mmm?”
“Frederic usually says goodbye to her.”
His voice is so clear, so crisp and tight, nothing like Liam she knew before, it makes her feel a little ill.
She still doesn’t look up at him, although the hand drops back into her lap. “He does?”
“Yes. He does.”
Annie doesn’t reply, and there’s silence for a moment before Liam speaks, his voice concerned. “Annie... where is Frederic?”
The question still catches her a little off guard, even though she expected it, she closes her eyes and breathes out through her nose.
“Cancerous tumour on his left lung; turned up about six months after you stopped contacting us,” she tells him, straightforward and simple, not meeting his eyes.
“..You mean?”
“He died a year later, the doctor’s only gave him six months.” She looks up at him now, but not in the eyes. She doesn’t want to see pity. “But you know Dad; he was always a fighter.”
“Annie... I’m sorry,” Liam offers, as though that helps.
Annie chuckles slightly, finally meeting his eyes. “It’s okay, it’s... well, it’s been a while. I’m okay,” She smiles at him. “He left me Ankora’s, you know. We wouldn't have had it any other way, but he didn’t want me to give up uni either.” She laughs. “Even after he died he was still piling up the work.”
“So, you still want to become a doctor?” Liam asks and Annie is oddly surprised that he remembers that bit of information.
“Hell yeah!” she replies, with a big smile, one he returns, if only weakly.
There’s a pause between them, and something twists in Annie’s gut. She could ask him, right now, she could do it, it would be easy. Things have changed, they’ve both changed, maybe they could make it work this time around, she could remember the fear in the back of her throat when she couldn’t get into contact with him, the idea that he could die and he’d never know.
She notices that his glass is empty, his hand rests around it, she swallows hard and shakes her head just a little, she supposes it’s better now than never.
She reaches forward and rests her fingers around his, touching the glass through the spaces.
“Can I get you another?” she asks, carefully, and he looks up at her, something in his eyes she can’t read, a flittering wave of things she can’t decide on, things that maybe he, himself, doesn’t even know.
Finally he replies. “All right.”
Annie smiles and releases his hand, going to get him a new glass.
Epilogue>>