Fic: The Rules of Endogamy [The Social Network/His Dark Materials]
Title: The Rules of Endogamy (Or, Four Times Somebody's Daemon Surprised Erica Albright)
Fandom: The Social Network/His Dark Materials
Characters/Pairings: Erica, ensemble (pre-Mark/Erica, implied Mark/Eduardo)
Summary: Erica Albright goes to state university. She has four brothers and a green-eyed daemon named Oswald, and it's very hard to get under her skin.
Word Count: 9,300
Notes: Maybe if she stopped being so awesome and inspiring me, I'd stop dedicating things to lovestories. As is, this is entirely her doing.
[read @ AO3]
If you are unfamiliar with the His Dark Materials world, then I've always found this primer to be particularly sufficient at explaining :DD
one | eduardo saverin
If all good stories begin with a time, a place, a person, and a fairly poetic but not overly flowery description of the weather, then ours is this: her name is Erica Albright, she's boarding a bus while in the background traffic goes howling by on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and the weather is shit.
The aisle of the bus is slick with grey slush and grit from where people have been tracking it up and down all day, and it's crowded enough that the overhead PA has taken to reminding them to please keep their bags and their daemons securely in their laps to expedite those still trying to get on, and would those with oversized daemons please move to the back of the bus, or to kindly step off and wait for the MetroPlus, which is specially designed for their needs.
Erica gets an aisle seat next to a big woman with a loudly-patterned purse, which is so large it seems ludicrous, and also a little detrimental to finding anything useful, like car keys or a phone. Erica swings her backpack into her lap as she sits down and Oswald springs on top of it, daintily shaking the wet off his paws and leaving damp footprints on the canvas fabric.
The woman shifts minutely to show that she's aware of Erica's presence and would make room for her if there was more to be made, but doesn't look away from the window. At this point, Erica is not so far removed from high school that it doesn't feel weird to be outside at one in the afternoon, and, as she always does, she wonders at the habits of bus-riders: given a choice, people will always sit close to the door, or where there are no people at all, but what about when it starts to fill? The politics of riding the bus make for a fascinating science: why, in the few seconds she had upon boarding and upon realizing she would have to sit next to someone, had she decided to sit next to the woman? Was it because the woman seemed the least threatening of all the choices? Was it because she liked the look of the woman's daemon -- an exotic-looking creature balanced easily on the back of her seat, with bright red fur, thick tail, and a blunt snout, that she vaguely recognizes as a tree kangaroo -- and thought it would brighten her ride some to sit next to them?
The bus lurches into life, doors swinging shut, and Oswald finishes cleaning the dirt from in between the pads of his paws, leaning against her breastbone and interrupting her inner monologue. "And why," he says, keeping his voice private between the two of them, "are there people standing where there are two seats open at the front of the bus?"
Erica looks. Sure enough, up behind the driver, where the seats are reserved for the handicapped and expectant mothers, there are two seats open on either side of a gruff-looking man.
He smelled like a frat house on the morning after, Erica realizes belatedly, the sense memory of it pungent even though she can't smell it back here.
"He looks like he's got serious problems," Oswald comments quietly, tone milky with pity.
He's a broad-set man in a wide, thick coat with elbows that have been worn to white and an orange ski-cap that doesn't look like it's come off in days. His face is unshaven, salt-and-pepper stubble covering the squat, oddly-shunted spread of his jaw, and there are deep gouges of sagging flesh under his eyes, like someone had taken their thumbs to the putty of his skin and slipped. He doesn't seem to be aware that people are avoiding the sour stench of misery that's sitting heavy on him; his gaze is fixed at some point near the floor, hard and unwavering and enormously tired.
That is, until the dog daemon that's sitting across the aisle abruptly stands up, her head tilted curiously, and tentatively crosses the space between them.
Erica's not the only one paying attention now; the woman next to her drops her hand to her lap, straightening up a little to get a better look. A couple people in front of her are openly watching as well.
She's wearing her headphones, but her Shuffle brings up something soft and instrumental, and she can't reach her pocket to adjust the volume or skip songs without elbowing her neighbor, so she can hear it just fine when the daemon's human -- a slender kid Erica's age with a thick head of hair -- hisses, "Gwen," between his teeth, like a command. The collie ignores him, focused firmly forwards.
Some of the onlookers quickly avert their eyes; a grown man who can't control his daemon, even when he speaks out loud, is about as embarrassing to watch as a child throwing a tantrum, or walking by a stranger whose fly is undone.
Erica grew up with four brothers -- it takes a lot to get her well and truly ashamed, so, intrigued, she studies the pair of them. The boy's sitting directly across from the wino, neither handicapped nor expectant, but soft around the edges of his eyes, like he'd be the type who would give up his seat to the disabled, elderly, or pregnant without a fuss. He's wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit, and Erica's never been part of the New England aristocracy and therefore can't recognize value on sight, but she'd hazard a guess that it didn't just come off the rack from Macy's. At the same time, there's a well-worn, raggedy backpack parked on top of his feet. He's got the same slim face his daemon does, same wide attentive eyes and glossy dark hair.
No, no, no, that's a good sign, goes her eldest brother's voice in her head. He chin-stroked his way through three years of a philosophy major at BU before dropping out to do ... whatever it is he does, and to work barista at the Borders by the public library. You want to trust the people who look like their daemons.
Why? Erica had wanted to know. Her brother's daemon was a scaly, orange-and-black gila monster, and she didn't think they resembled each other much at all. (Well, in looks, anyway. They were both lazy slackers with dirty mouths, otherwise.)
Well, think about it, he had replied. Daemons are supposed to be your utter compliment, the other half of your soul, right? So it's a good sign of the inner self mirrors the outer self in looks as well as mannerisms -- it means that that person has nothing to hide. There's no deep, dark contrast that you can't see.
"Gwen, Gwendolyn," Suit tries again, the tips of his ears gone a dull red, but the border collie just lowers herself to her belly and crawls the last couple of inches, half-disappearing under the seats in order to get at the stranger's daemon. There, she doesn't hesitate before she pushes her muzzle forward, licking at the skunk's cheek, friendly and comforting.
The wino jerks, startled into physically coming back down to earth, and stares right across the aisle at Suit, whose face is flaming but who looks back at him and smiles steadily. Gwen nuzzles reassuringly at the skunk daemon until she, too, seems to come back to herself, fluffing her fur up and blinking around, like the bus is the last place she expected to find herself.
The man straightens his shoulders, abruptly looking less like a broken man -- he looks like he might have been all right once, the same way the guys from Fight Club weren't hard on the eyes before they took one too many hits. The skunk puts a paw on the top of Gwen's nose, an obvious thank-you gesture, and Gwen scoots backward to return to the other side of the bus, sliding a little over her own paws when they round a corner.
The overhead PA announces their next stop and Gwen puts her chin on Suit's knee, sighing out through her nose. Erica can hear it, that's how quiet the rest of the bus is.
The man seems to reach a decision, because he abruptly pulls his wallet out of the inside pocket of his woebegone coat and -- Erica's eyes widen -- fishes a $20 out of it, folding it and holding it out to Suit, who immediately holds up his hands in refusal.
The man laughs at that, nice and only a little raspy, and when he speaks, his accent is roundly foreign, "No, boy, take it," he says. "That's the nicest thing anyone's done for me in ages."
"I couldn't --" Suit goes, and Erica has to admit, privately and maybe with a little judgmental callousness, that he doesn't look like he needs the money.
The man seems to realize this, too, because he just laughs again, brandishing the bill. "Oh, go on," he says, with a grin that unsmudges the pockets underneath his eyes. "Take it and buy something nice for that lad of yours, the one I always see you tagging after all lovesick-like."
Suit, if possible, goes even redder, and Gwen pricks her ears forward, amused. It does the trick, though -- whether it was because he's given in or just because he doesn't want anything more said about who he may or may not be be lovesick for, Suit reaches forward and takes the $20. He tucks it into the front pocket of his suit and shares a shy smile with his daemon.
"And here I was, thinking he was a homeless man," Erica says to Oswald, keeping her voice down. She watches the man lean back, looking out the windows like he hasn't in awhile. His skunk daemon clambers up into his lap, and he fondly strokes the long line of her back.
"People can be down on their luck for reasons other than money," her daemon replies, sounding sage.
She crosses her arms over him, tugging him in to rest her chin on top of his thin shoulder blades, smiling to herself. He obliges by rubbing his jaw against hers. Up at the front, Suit's head is still down, embarrassed, but the border collie noses at his hand demandingly until he starts petting her.
The politics of riding the bus makes for a fascinating science, she thinks again, hooking her ankles together under her seat and settling in, feeling Oswald purring against her sternum. It might just be her, but some of the world's kindest people take the bus.
two | christina lee
Erica had gone to an all-girls Catholic high school, where she rolled the waist of her skirt and pulled her itchy, polyester sweater down to cover it, and she wore ankle socks that were only just visible above the tops of her sneakers -- she and everybody else skirted around the rules without ever quite wanting enough to break them. While there, Erica learned too much of what was wrong with the world and not enough of what was right, and came out feeling like she'd give anything not to care anymore.
University's easier, she finds -- empathy and charity, for the most part, seem to be a voluntary practice hawked in the commons, not an issue of mandatory attendance. She goes to dinner with her roommate and a couple people she met at orientation, where they complain about teachers and what stupid shit the Harvard kids got up to and discuss dumb Internet memes and who's going to Providence over the three-day weekend to do allegedly illegal activities with the students at Brown (Erica is pretty sure half of it is made up, but it's Brown. You can't really rule anything out.) It's probably the most comfortable Erica's felt inside her own skin since her daemon settled.
Her roommate is from California somewhere; she's pretty chill, if prone to getting excitable over inter-dorm gossip, and gets the wickedest care packages from her aunt in Santa Monica. Her daemon is a sleek, grey fox with a crazy smile, whom Oswald likes to slink circles around, just to show off.
"Foxes like to think they're so agile and clever," he sniffs, standing on the edge of Erica's headboard, his tail serenely swishing back and forth. "But they're so bulky compared to me. It's an overrated form to take."
"Oswald," she scolds.
Tuesday afternoons are all her roommate asks for, since it's the only day of the week her boyfriend has off from marching band, so on Tuesdays, Erica packs up a couple textbooks and hops on one of the shuttles whose sole purpose is ferrying kids between the Boston schools and Harvard.
Technically, there's nothing wrong with the library at BU, but as Erica's goal is to waste as much time as possible before going back to her dorm, she likes the trip: Oswald curls around her shoulders and watches unblinkingly as other cars pass them on the bridge, leaving Erica to watch the other kids on the shuttle. They're usually all sports teams with powerful daemons and the occasional engineering student with their headphones in, and a lot of them take the time to power-nap. They sometimes miss their stops. It's entertaining.
She likes the library, too. It's the quietest place she's ever been. God bless anal-retentive Harvard students, she guesses; they're the ones that actually adhere to the "quiet, please!" signs and get lip-pressingly entitled and bitchy when other people don't, so Erica can get a study carousel and queue up her iPod and power through several chapters of political science like it's a trashy novel.
It's one of these Tuesdays, and she's sitting at the end of a table in the new wing (not that she doesn't like the essence of power and history in the main Harvard library, but the new wing has power outlets,) when Oswald makes a sudden spitting noise and disappears under her chair, and somebody comes to a halt right in front of her.
Startled, Erica hits pause on her iPod and looks up, tugging one earbud from her ear.
"Erica?" says the girl on the other side of the table, plainly for the second time, her eyes enormously wide in a pantomime of surprise and --
"Christina!" she blurts, half-standing even as Christina leans over, and they meet part-way over the table for something that's more an awkward bumping of shoulders and patting hands than it is a hug.
"Hey, wow, I haven't seen you since we graduated, your hair's gotten so long!" Christina says, without attempting to really make it sound like a cohesive sentence, grabbing the ends of Erica's hair and holding it out for inspection.
You haven't changed much at all, grabby hands, Erica thinks, a little on the dry side; Christina's hair is perfect, shining, like she actually had the time to shower and style it this morning, instead of rolling right out of bed and hoping that the clean clothes in her closet vaguely match one another, like Erica does. She's wearing too much make-up, and she hasn't really lost the parochial school look: she's traded in the plaid uniform for a pleated black skirt and a blouse that's so far on the shear side it wouldn't have been allowed through the school doors.
"Ha, thanks," goes Erica, tugging her hair out of Christina's grip and tucking it behind her ear. She has absolutely no reason at all to dislike Christina just for being handsy: they'd pretty much run in complete opposite circles in high school. "I forgot -- do you go to Harvard?"
Even as it comes out her mouth, she knows the answer. Their high school made it very hard to forget who'd gotten into the Ivy League schools and who did not.
"Yes!" Christina bobs her head, earrings catching the light, and then gestures at one of the other tables. "We're here for a group presentation for our food science class. It's one of those core requirement things you just have to grit your teeth and get through, it's complete shit," she elaborates at Erica's look. Her group consists of two other people: a dark Indian girl with a thick plait of hair and basketball shorts, who is wearing what Erica thinks is a beautiful green hair clip until it folds its wings and she realizes it's a moon moth daemon; and the other is a boy whose only distinctive feature is his massive head of curly hair, which does nothing to hide his very large forehead and heavy, serious brows, which gives him the look of one perpetually glaring. She can't see his daemon at all.
"And you?" Christina goes, her eyebrows raised. "I didn't realize you were in Massachusetts, too. You're going to ..." she trails off, plainly having no idea.
"To Boston University," Erica finishes for her politely. "They offered me a scholarship, and my brother went there, so it's not like I knew nobody in the city."
"Oh, well, that's good!" says Christina equably. It doesn't seem to occur to her to ask why Erica's in the Harvard library, but fortunately, she's saved from having to come up with a different topic of conversation, because her daemon leaps up onto the tabletop, settling onto his haunches and fixing Erica with a disinterested, assessing look. He's a monkey about Oswald's size, with black-speckled fur and an enormous white mustache that comes halfway down his chest. He does a very good impression of wrinkling his nose at her, like she's the kind of gum you find on the underside of desks, and then clambers the rest of the way up Christina's shoulder so he could cup a paw around her ear and whisper something to her.
Erica frowns, because that's not right.
"Didn't he used to be a gyrfalcon?" she points at the monkey, perplexed. High school wasn't that long ago, and she's almost positive she remembers when Christina's daemon stopped changing: he used to perch on top of bookshelves in classrooms, the backs of chairs in the study lounge, and he circled the rafters during gym and pep rallies, always with that fierce-eyed, unblinking, hunting look, like he was just waiting to catch someone doing something wrong.
Christina's smile curves up slowly this time, like she's enjoying a joke. "She," she corrects, watching Erica carefully, and even before Erica's mind can jump to the first conclusion, she hears her second eldest brother's voice in her head, leaping in to interrupt, don't be stupid. The gender of a daemon has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on sexuality. Sure, there's a trend towards preferring same-sex relationships among same-sex human-daemon pairs, but the only thing it states definitively is an immense strength of character. And he would know; his daemon was male, and Erica hadn't even realized there was anything abnormal about it until she went to middle school.
When her expression doesn't change, Christina continues more easily. "Yeah, that was a phase we went through, but it took Nollen a long time to find something she liked, so we settled later than most."
"What is she?" she asks, nodding again to Christina's daemon.
"An emperor tamarin," she answers proudly, curling Nollen's tail around the end of her finger.
The monkey strokes the ends of her mustache, eyeballing Erica from under the curtain of Christina's hair and then offering her a grin; a nasty one, revealing sharp canines as long as pencil stubs. Erica wants to exchange a look with Oswald and see what he thinks of this, because the daemons of most girls settle between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Anything later than that is a cause for concern. Waiting until eighteen before settling down permanently is what her psychology textbook likes to call "a warning sign." But down on the carpet, Oswald has his back to her, idly washing his whiskers and watching students moving on the staircase in that "I can't be bothered with you right now" way that cats have. He couldn't be more deliberate if he tried.
"Well!" says Christina with finality, gesturing over her shoulder. "I should probably go figure out what bullshit we're going to say for our presentation. It was good seeing you!"
They lean in for another stiff hug. "Yeah, you too!"
Christina turns on her heel and returns to her group table, letting Erica sit back down, putting her stray earbud back in and running her fingers over the touchpad to wake her laptop up. She doesn't thumb at the play button on her iPod, though, because she hears the guy in Christina's group ask her flatly, "was she important?", and it makes her freeze.
It's an odd question to ask. It wasn't, "did you know that girl?", because that would have been stupid and obvious even if it is the conversational gambit of choice, and it wasn't, "who was that?" It was "was she important?", like Erica can be quantified by her usefulness. She tightens her grip around the casing of her Nano and feels rather than sees Oswald's head swivel around.
She assumes Christina looks over her shoulder to check and see if Erica heard (she's not going to look up from her laptop screen to find out,) and she obviously takes comfort in the sight of her with her headphones in, because Erica watches in her peripheral as Christina tosses her hair over one shoulder and sits down, saying dismissively, "What, her?" A snort of derision. "Not really, no. I mean, did you look at her? She goes to BU, and she has a housecat for a daemon. I mean, please, with the exception of, like, a slug, I don't think you can have a more boring daemon than a domesticated animal."
Erica's face flames.
Christina might follow this up with a laugh, high and sparkling, but she can't tell: there's a roaring in her ears. She ducks her head so they're all completely blocked from view, her fingers absently hovering over her computer keys. Her cheeks burn, and she feels the sudden hot prickling in her nose, the one that warns of impending tears. It's one of those horrible things she can't control, like the kneejerk way she tears up during the sinking montage in Titanic, or when her brothers mercilessly go on about her big forehead.
Oswald springs up onto the table, stepping directly onto her laptop and lying down. It pins her hands against the keys, and the Google searchbar she has up erupts into long strings of "jjjjjjjjjjkkkkssiiiiiiiiiiiii," which she ignores. Her daemon looks at her levelly.
She drags in a breath. It sounds shallow and shaky, even to her own ears. "It's kind of hard to take notes on my reading when you're sitting on my keyboard, you silly creature."
"It's rather warm right here, actually," Oswald comments lazily. "But I promise to move if you promise to forget everything she just said."
She flexes her fingers under his belly. She sighs, "You know, I think it must be hard for her, being that smart and that beautiful, especially with all this competition," she jerks her chin around to include the general Harvard area. "And I mean, I know it doesn't excuse her from being ... from being --"
"A shit-flinger like her monkey?" Oswald supplies helpfully.
"I was trying to think of the politically correct term for it." She drags a hand out from under him in order to rub her forehead with the heel of her hand. It's hot to the touch. She's probably still bright red. "People can't be that bitchy in real life, Oswald, they can't."
He stands up, rubbing his cheek against her forearm. "Come on," he says softly. "Let's go home. Evanna can deal if we interrupt her and her boyfriend."
"Yeah, okay," Erica agrees readily. She shuts her laptop lid and puts it into her backpack with her textbook. Oswald takes the opportunity to spring up onto her shoulders, evenly balancing himself around the curve of her neck. When she walks past their table, Christina flashes her a toothy smile and a twiddle of her fingers that might be a wave, like everything's all fine and dandy. The girl with the moth daemon doesn't look up, but the guy watches her and Oswald go, expressionless. There's something black in his ear that might be a hearing aid, but she doesn't bother to look twice and find out. She walks down the stairs and out the door, her eyes bright and damp-feeling.
three | cameron winklevoss
She stops going to the Harvard library after that. She wonders if this is maybe a wimpy decision to make, but Oswald doesn't argue with her when she tells him.
Now on the Tuesdays she gets sexiled, she crashes at her friend's dorm instead, where she gets very good at blast-studying her way through marathons of what the box said was Karaoke Revolution but in actuality is more like adventures in scale-sliding caterwauling, and reruns of Charmed on the WB.
The next time she's at Harvard is for an end-of-the-semester extra credit opportunity for her psychology class: she gets an e-mail from the department head regarding a keynote speaker who's going to talk about people-profiling on the Internet, and Erica doesn't necessarily need the extra credit, but it's not like going and listening to a speech is an especially difficult assignment.
She has no idea how formal it is, but it's Massachusetts and it's Harvard, so she pulls her nicest dress out of her closet, where it smells kind of like laundry detergent but mostly like Axe. She thinks about asking Evanna about it and then decides she'd rather not know. She manages to find respectable earrings and entreats Oswald to at least wash his whiskers or something, which he does with great show. On the way out the door, she just tugs on her usual Rocket Dogs, because while it's Harvard, it's still college.
When she gets there, there are all kinds of people up and mingling around inside the conference room, talking and laughing while their daemons weave around each other, equal parts affectionate, respectful, or standoffish, depending on the type of conversation being held.
"See anyone we know?" she asks Oswald, half-heartedly looking around for a cluster of classmates or something she could hover with awkwardly for awhile. Finding no one, she retreats to one of the rows in the back, which is empty except for a pair of very large, very well-dressed twins with identical daemons. She sits with her notebook and clutch purse in her lap and finds herself watching them, entertained: people come by frequently to speak to them, giving them the appearance of broad-shouldered Whack-a-Moles, always popping up and down to shake hands with the kind of men and women who say stately things like, "Am I to ascertain that your father will be joining us this evening?"
At one point, a puff adder daemon comes sliding in between the chair legs, its jaw unhinged around an enormous orange. Erica can't tell who it belongs to, but the twins act like this is all par for the course, like snakes carrying fruit is perfectly normal.
"Oh, man, how does he always know when we're about to keel over from hunger?" goes Twin #1, reaching down to let the adder gingerly deposit the orange into his palm. He salutes it as it goes winding away.
"Because he's our best friend?" replies Twin #2 dryly, reaching out to snag the orange and digging his thumbs into it.
There's nothing more pungent than the smell of an orange being peeled. Twin #2 looks up and Erica is too slow to look away before he catches her eye. He holds up a slice. "Would you like one?"
"Actually, yes," says Erica, who is missing her regularly scheduled dinner with roommate and company in order to get extra credit. She scoots down the row of chairs, and Twin #2 meets her half-way, extending the slice of orange towards her. She takes it and thanks him, and Oswald helpfully licks the citrus juice off her fingertips with his sandpaper tongue.
"I'm Cameron," offers the twin. "And that's Tyler," he gestures vaguely over his shoulder at his brother; his daemon easily ducks out of the way of his hand to avoid getting hit. She's a ferret-looking creature with big, glittering eyes and a way of holding herself that's purely regal, and now that she's up close, Erica can tell she's got the thickest, most luxurious coat of ebony fur. She almost blends in with the color of Cameron's suit.
"Erica," she introduces herself.
"Do you --" Cameron starts, slow smile curving the corner of his mouth, but he gets cut off by a sudden commotion several rows in front. They turn their heads. His daemon pushes herself upright, one paw on his ear for balance, peering over his head to see what's going on.
Amidst a knot of students, there's a boy with too much hair, cargo shorts, and a sweatshirt for a high school robotics club standing on a chair. He's familiar in a way Erica can't place: maybe he's in her class? The students around him -- a group of guys who all look alike, laughing raucously -- swat at the air like they're trying to shoo something away. Someone's Jack Russell terrier daemon joins in, snapping and snorting like there's some piece of paper it's trying to buffet around. A flash of light catches on something very, very small and black, as a skua daemon swoops in to bat it back to the terrier with a flip of its wing -- they're torturing what looks like a fly.
"Oh, hey, look," comments Tyler to Cameron, deadpan. "Someone's picking on the freshman again. Surprise, surprise."
Erica glances sideways at them, then up front again. The boy on the chair clenches his fists. His expression is unflappable, but the livid red color to his cheeks gives him away. "Leave her alone!" he snarls, his voice carrying. The skua makes another move like a tennis swing, and he flinches, full-body. "Stop it, you're hurting her!"
A horrible idea occurs to Erica, dropping in her stomach so suddenly that Oswald yowls, instantly echoing her distress. She twists around to face the twins. "Is that his daemon?"
"What, the fly?" Cameron says, and snorts. "Yeah. Can you believe it?"
A fly daemon -- well, under any other circumstances, Erica might be tempted to laugh, but there's nothing funny about this. "What's he ever done to them?" she demands, jerking her chin at the small crowd that's doing the bullying.
"Well," offers Tyler drolly, as his weasel of a daemon bares her teeth in a snicker. "For one, he's an obnoxious little prick. He's in our business class this semester, and he's got the biggest entitlement issues we've ever seen, and we go to Harvard. What's his name, Cam?"
"Zuckerberg something-or-another. It's a miracle no one's swatted him before now. For a computer nerd, he's impossible to squash."
She narrows her eyes. "And that gives you the right to pick on his daemon?" On the seat next to her, Oswald crouches down, hissing.
In unison, both twins quirk eyebrows at her, and then exchange a look.
"I think she's oh-so-subtly implying that we should go up there and stop them," Cameron remarks, his tone light.
Tyler shrugs. "Why not?" he goes, gliding to his feet. "I'm behind on random acts of kindness this week."
"You're always behind on random acts of kindness," Cameron answers, to the soft, spitting jeers of their two daemons. They leap from their perches, hitting the carpet and scampering up the aisle, disappearing under the chairs. Where they had seemed so little against the twins' shoulders, they suddenly look a lot bigger, pouncing into the middle of the group. Too big to be ferrets or weasels. One of them gets the Jack Russell pinned under her paws, hissing and snarling, and the other one takes a swipe at the skua, coming away with a couple feathers and a pained yelp from the bird's human.
"Problem?" goes Cameron mildly as he stops at the end of their row, Tyler flanking him. It's amazing how quickly the boys scatter, muttering mutinously; one of them holds the skua close to his chest and glares fiercely at the twins, like he hadn't just been doing the exact same thing to the fly daemon.
Jew-fro kid takes advantage of the preoccupation, snagging his daemon out of the air and cupping her in between his palms, resentment fierce in the duck of his brows. He nods curtly to Cameron and Tyler and disappears into another row.
"Nicely done, gentlemen," Erica says on their return, in her best pompous imitation of the adults who'd greeted them earlier.
They curtsy mockingly, and then, looking towards the entrance of the conference room, Tyler elbows his brother. "Look, there's our dear old dad, schmoozing away with our speaker this evening. I guess that means we can get this show on the road. Shall we?"
He sets off without waiting, cutting through the crowd towards the man who'd just walked in, dwarfed beside an enormous black spectacled bear.
"Cameron," Erica says, and he stops, turning his head, his eyebrows lifted curiously. She runs her fingertips over the notches in Oswald's spine for a moment, and then asks, "Your daemons ... they're different species, aren't they?"
He smiles for real this time, not his smarmy, talking-to-strangers smile, but an honest one. "You're right," he says, facing her fully. He reaches up, letting his daemon's sinewy body slide down to twine around his hands. She bares her teeth at Erica again, friendlier this time. "Not many people notice that."
"Tyler's -- her ears are a little more rounded than yours', and her fur's darker."
"That's because she's a sable. It's a type of marten. Whereas mine," he smiles down at his daemon, stroking under her chin with the tip of his finger. "She's a mink. Which my father wasn't all that thrilled about. We're the type of family where the men are expected to have big daemons --"
"I can see that," comments Erica, who is craning her neck in order to talk to him.
"-- oh, haha. But bigger daemons just aren't feasible in modern times. Besides, me and my brother are water creatures anyway. My dad gets that now."
Hours later, after the speech, the Powerpoint, and the discussion, the scent of citrus has faded from Erica's hands and her stomach is gnawing at her in pain and she never wants to hear about identity theft ever again. She walks out of the room, saying to Oswald, "this had better be worth a shit-ton of extra credit points."
She pauses outside the doors, pressing back up against the wall so she's out of people's way, and checks her phone for the time. As she does, someone brushes by her, close enough that it makes Oswald back up onto her feet to avoid being stepped on, and Erica's eyes snap up, insulted.
It's Zuckerberg, the freshman they'd been picking on before the speech.
"Hey!" she goes, flinging her hand out and catching his elbow, more the soft fabric of his sweatshirt than actual arm. He swings on her, startled, and she lets go quickly. "Hey, is your daemon all right?" At his perfectly blank look, she fumbles, "I saw -- I mean, I saw them ... um, messing with her. Earlier. I wanted to know if she's okay."
"We're fine," he goes, his tone brusque. He has a big forehead and low eyebrows, which gives him a caveman-esque stare -- an impression his monosyllabic reply isn't really helping -- and he levels it on her until she feels her cheeks warm up, because basically, she'd just admitted to seeing someone getting bullied and not doing anything about it.
"Well, okay then, that's --" she starts.
"No, don't," he cuts her off, rather impatiently. "I didn't mean to imply we aren't grateful. You were the one who got the bouncer-wannabes to come over and flex their muscles some. We saw it."
She stares. "How?" she goes, dumbfounded. She'd been sitting in the back.
This earns her a smile; a slim, self-satisfied curve of Zuckerberg's mouth. He turns his head, lifting up his palms as if in supplication, and only then does Erica notice the little black shape sitting on the outside curve of his ear like a cartilage piercing. It's the fly daemon, easily lost amongst his messy hair. With an easy buzz of her wings, she lights off his ear and settles into the grooves of Zuckerberg's hand.
"This is Marjane," he introduces her, holding her out. His tongue blurs on her name, so that it sounds like a "sh" sound: Mar-shawn. Erica wants to be like, you mean, like the girl from Persepolis? "Look at her."
Erica does. Black and bristly, Marjane is the size of her fingernail, or a very small SD card, like the kind they put into phones. A booger would probably be more conspicuous-looking than she is. But it's her eyes, Erica realizes, that get you: they're huge compared to the rest of her body, multi-faceted like a hundred miniature computer screens all looking in different directions at once. With eyes like that, Marjane is probably able to see a full 360 degrees.
"We see everything," Zuckerberg says simply.
"That's ... that's different."
"Inconsequential, is probably what you're looking for. It's a good word. We hear that one a lot." He lets his hands drop, and Marjane zips into the air, disappearing faster than Erica can follow her. "After all, flies are meant for swatting. They're not meant to be people's souls." It smacks very strongly of bitterness, and Erica shifts her weight a little bit, uncomfortable. Zuckerberg's gaze sharpens, catching it (or maybe Marjane did? Oh, that's an eerie thought.) "You misunderstand me. It's not an upsetting thing. I'd rather have a fly than anything people these days are considering the 'economic choice'."
She thinks of what Cameron had said, about how he and his twin came from a big-souled family, but their daemons had chosen smaller shapes because the world doesn't really cater to big-daemon people. The world is a shrinking global village, she can hear her third oldest brother saying; he's the one closest enough in age to her to be her Irish twin, which means they've had to be very close out of necessity, but they gladly went to opposite ends of the country for college.
"Why do you think so many urbanites have domesticated dog daemons?" Zuckerberg continues. "You see them everywhere, the bigger cities especially. The more complacent people get as a society, the more sociologically obedient they become. Oh, a 9-5 desk job and a 401k, look at the cool tricks I can do, do I get a treat? People are afraid of being big, or doing something on a much grander scale, so they just fall in line. Or worse," his eyes narrow. "They keep a misguided loyalty to their fathers, and let it shape their very soul."
"That's not true," Erica says immediately, thinking of Gwen, the border collie daemon on the bus, who is ...
Who is walking right towards them, actually.
Erica double-takes, actually physically recoiling in her surprise, as that is truly the last thing she expected to see, but fortunately, nobody notices. Gwen sweeps a circle around Zuckerberg, her plumy tail wagging, coming close but never close enough to touch, as familiarly as if she does it a lot. And then -- yes, that's the same boy she saw on the bus, the one with the three-piece suit and the hair so thick it looks like it'd be impervious to a lawn mower, walking out of the conference room.
He stops dead at the sight of Zuckerberg standing right outside the door. "Were you waiting for me?" he goes in such unadulterated tones of surprise that Erica hides a smile behind her hand. It's the same tone one would use at an impending sign of the apocalypse.
Zuckerberg shoots her a look out of the corner of her eye that she correctly interprets to mean that no, he wasn't intentionally waiting for Suit and would be long gone if Erica hadn't waylaid him. She comes to his rescue, clearing her throat a little and stepping forward, which dislodges Oswald from the top of her foot and drags Suit's attention to her.
He double-takes, too, but in a deliberately comical way. "Oh my god," he says. "A specimen of the female persuasion? Willingly talking to Mark?" He lowers his voice, leaning in conspiratorially. "You do realize that that is Mark Zuckerberg, right? I'd understand if you wanted to take this opportunity to run for the hills. Are you sure you're feeling all right?" He reaches out, pressing the backs of his knuckles to her forehead.
"You're being very rude right now," Zuckerberg -- Mark? -- deadpans.
Suit snatches his hand back, pressing it to his chest. "I humbly apologize from the bottom of my heart," he says instantly and very solemnly. Gwen edges into Oswald's space, smiling and her ears perked forward, saying something lowly. Oswald tilts his head up to sniff back in that "I guess I can deign to give you my attention" way that cats have, but nicer, because Oswald likes Gwen as much as Erica does. "I am so very sleep-deprived. I didn't intend to come up to you and touch your forehead inappropriately. That was inappropriate. Did I say that?"
Erica can't help it. She laughs, because she doesn't think she's met anyone as sincere as Suit and his daemon. It earns her a wide smile, and Suit spins on his heel, demanding of Mark, "Are we fooding?"
Mark looks pained. "That's not a word. And actually, I was going to go back to the dorm and --"
Gwen stops mid-conversation with Oswald, her tail stiffening and her head dropping down, fixing Mark with the kind of intense, unblinking, don't-bullshit-me collie stare that has his words dying in his throat. Suit seizes the distraction, snatching Mark's hands between his imploringly.
"Come on, Mark," he says, swinging Mark's arms like a child playing ring around the rosie. "Food. Doesn't food sound wonderful? Yummy, delicious, edible things that you can put in your mouth and chew that do not come from Dustin's dubious mini-fridge? Food. Come on, let's go food. Fooood."
It's kind of amazing how the idea strikes Erica out of nowhere, because she doesn't think people are actually this perceptive outside of books, but there's something about the way Suit's leaning into Mark's space, about the vulnerable line of his mouth that responds the second Mark smiles tolerantly, about the way Marjane is sitting on top of Gwen's nose like it's nothing, that has Erica thinking, Oh. This is what they meant. This is what the stranger on the bus was talking about when he said "lovestruck." She hides another smile behind her hand, because "panting after" is not an inappropriate comparison to draw at this moment, either.
Suit must get some kind of acquiescence from Mark, because he punches the air. "Dinner!" he announces triumphantly. "Let's go!" Gwen waves her tail at Oswald, and then she and Suit are off down the hallway. Suit walks backward for a second in order to wave to Erica and say, "It was nice to meet you, possibly mentally-afflicted girl!"
"Oh shut up!" goes Mark.
As he rounds the corner at the end of the hall, Erica turns to Mark and goes, "I'm sorry, what part of sociologically complacent domesticated dog daemon does he fall into?"
"Shut up," Mark says again, without any bite whatsoever. He shoves his hands into his pockets and sets off after his friend. Erica watches him go, and she's glad she does, because at the end of the hall, he stops and turns around. He waves at her, his arm held stiff and close to his body like he's not sure of its welcome.
Erica smiles and waves back.
four | mark zuckerberg
In all honesty, Erica's not expecting to ever see the boy and his fly daemon again. After all, as has been pointed out to her, she doesn't go to Harvard, and it's not like she actually uses her MySpace to do more than post pictures from events where she was the only one who had a camera, and even then mostly at her friends' behest. Stalking people on the Internet is not her forte.
So she goes home, she tells her roommate because it was the only remarkable thing that happened in the entire conference ("a fly? Poor bastard,") and she includes it in an e-mail to her youngest brother, who's still in high school and regularly mentions how pressured he and his daemon feel to pick something that will impress all his friends ("it shouldn't be a matter of peer pressure," she writes, "because there's at least one stupid person who's going to try and make you feel miserable about her choice.") And then she forgets about it.
It's a little over a week later, the Friday before finals week, and Erica's sitting at the counter in the cafe area of the Borders on Bolyston, waiting for her oldest brother to get off work so they hang out. Oswald sprawls out on the counter in front of her, eyes peacefully closed and ear flicking lazily every now and then, as Erica tries to read a book she snagged off the New Releases shelf without cracking its spine. It's supposed to be a New York Times Bestseller and therefore obviously Very Good, but Erica is mostly concerned with putting off studying for as long as possible.
Someone clears their throat at her elbow, and Erica knows instinctively, the way people do sometimes, that it's directed at her. She looks up.
"Hello," goes Mark Zuckerberg, without any inflection in his voice at all.
"Hey!" she goes brightly, using her foot to push out the stool next to her, inviting him to have a seat, which he does, perching himself on the very edge so that his feet don't have to leave the ground. His hair partially obscures the view, but when he angles his head a little, she spots the tiny shape of Marjane, sitting in the shell of his ear and nervously rubbing her front two legs together.
He doesn't say anything more, so Erica watches him, bemused. He doesn't seem to have brought anything with him, not even a backpack, so she's assuming he's not here to study -- and at any rate, she's pretty sure Harvard's final week is staggered away from the rest of the other schools', so that the ERs aren't flooded with a whole bunch of students attempting suicide at once. As far as she can tell, the only reason he's here is to sit next to her and look as awkward as possible. He restlessly begins to drum his fingertips against the countertop.
"Are you --" she starts, and wonders how to finish it. -- here to meet someone? Here to buy books? "What's up?" is what she finds rolling off her tongue, and feels herself immediately flush. Oswald lifts his head to look at her, deeply unimpressed.
Mark doesn't seem perturbed. He offers a half-smile, mostly aimed at the back of his hand. "Your, ah, your roommate and your brother might have collaborated. They seem to be under the impression that you need more friends."
Erica's spine straightens as if someone had stuck a stake in it. "Those --" and she glares at the door to the employee backroom, like her brother might feel the heat of it and spontaneously catch fire.
"I posted instructions on how to break through BU's privacy firewall on my LiveJournal back in September, and I linked to a number of proxies to use in case that didn't work. Your roommate -- Evanna, right? -- thought it was necessary to friend me for that. So, that's how we know each other." He picks at the dead skin on his lower lip, flicks it away. "In case you were wondering."
Oswald gets to his feet, shaking himself off like someone had spritzed water at him. "Foxes," he goes lowly to Erica, his ears flattened. "They think they're so clever."
Erica settles back onto her stool some. "I was wondering why my brother told me to show up early," she comments mildly, and smiles sideways at Mark. "I'm sorry they schemed and dragged you into it."
He shrugs, a jerky roll of his shoulders. "I don't mind," he says, even quieter. "In fact, talking to you was probably the first conversation I've had with a girl where I didn't want to immediately leave the country afterwards." At her look, half-startled, half-amused, he gives her that sort-of smile again and explains, "Not a lot of practice. I went to an all-boys high school."
"Hey, me too!" she says, feeling the warmth of it reach her face. "Well, all-girls, obviously. You know what I mean."
This actually makes Mark grin, full on with teeth, and they share a companionable, knowing nod, the kind that's instantly recognizable to others as, hey, would you look at that, we attended parochial high school and survived it intact, alive, and whole-heartedly dedicated to atheism!
"Right," says Mark, after the pause goes on for a little bit. He hops to his feet, shuffling a little bit. "I should probably -- yeah," he gestures over his shoulder vaguely.
"Yeah, no, go ahead," Erica laughs, and waves a hand at the employee door. "I'll tell my brother his nefarious plan worked."
"Cool," Mark goes, and with an awkward twitch of his hand that might be a wave, he leaves.
Amused, Erica just shakes her head a little bit and returns to her borrowed book, flipping it back open to the page she'd bookmarked with her finger. In her peripheral vision, she sees Mark's curly head reach the rack of magazines and come to an abrupt halt. He hesitates, shifting forward onto the balls of his feet, and then, faster than she knows what to do with, he's right back at her side.
"She was wrong, you know," he goes, voice flat and brows settled low.
"Um," says Erica, blinking at him. Marjane buzzes around their heads, lost easily against the bold colors of the cafe. "I'm sorry, what?"
He purses his lips impatiently. "Christina," he says. "She was wrong about your daemon. He's not an ordinary housecat."
Erica stares at him for a beat longer, and then her mind whirs into place, like she's snapping a crooked piece into a jigsaw puzzle. She startles badly. He'd been there. Mark had been there, at the library, at the table where Christina had sat down and tossed her shining hair and sneered that Erica and Oswald were nothing. He'd been the one who asked, "was she important?" That's why he looked so familiar at the conference: it wasn't because he was in her psychology class, it was because he'd watched her leave the library, her feelings stung and tears in her eyes.
Heat flushes through her, and Erica knows she's going red, redder than she's ever been, because she wants nothing more than to forget that ever happened. They can probably see her forehead from satellite from this point.
"No," says Mark, almost angrily, when she says nothing. "Don't do that. She was wrong. He's a mau, an Egyptian mau, named as such because they were regarded as a metaphorical construct of divinity -- or at the very least a direct liaison -- for ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia. They were considered sacred. They might be a domesticated breed, but that's not ordinary. Am I right?"
The direct question prompts Erica into responding. "Yes," she goes, reaching out to trail her fingers along Oswald's spine, the soft grey spotted fur. He flicks his tail at her reassuringly. "How --"
"You have the same eyes," Mark says, quieter. "It's a distinctive color. You both --" he gestures. "You both have it. That's how I knew she was full of shit." She lifts her eyebrows questioningly, and he shrugs. "It's something Wardo says a lot. The people who physically resemble their daemons are the most trustworthy, because what's on the inside reflects what's on the outside."
"Wardo..." Erica echoes, and feels something else click. "Your guyfriend from the conference with the big eyes? Has a border collie daemon named Gwen?"
Mark's eyebrows disappear into his hair momentarily. "How do you know her --"
"They did something nice for a complete stranger on a bus once."
His face clears. "Yeah, they do that." He sits back down on the stool, tucking his feet up on one of the rungs. He props his arm up on the counter so that Marjane can land on his fist, dancing over his knuckles. There's something about his expression -- calm, smoothed out, almost affectionate -- that makes Erica think people are just as full of shit about Mark as Christina was about Oswald. He likes his best friend and he likes his daemon: that's more than enough to be getting on with.
"So does that make your inner self a microchip?" she asks, because why bring it up if he wasn't going to invite the comparison in return? Mark and Marjane look nothing alike, not even remotely, so what does that say about his trustworthiness?
"That's what I've heard," Mark comments with a grin, as Marjane skirts along the edge of his fingernail, before flipping over to walk upside-down along the pad of his fingertip, unconcerned. "Well, nobody has ever considered flies to be a symbol of divinity, but we are -- oh, how did Big, Tall, and Ferrety put it? -- rather difficult to squash."
And of course he'd overheard Cameron's remark. Why is she even surprised? She focuses instead on the first part of the sentence, and blinks, sitting up straight. "Mark," she says slowly, feeling a smile begin at the corners of her mouth. "Albeit in a roundabout way, did you just imply that I'm a goddess?"
Thing is, she meant it as a joke.
But a voice answers immediately. "Yes!"
Mark's eyes double in size, just as shocked by this as she is. The voice wasn't his -- too feminine, too lively -- and it takes Erica the space of a long heartbeat to realize that it was Marjane. It was Marjane, speaking directly to her. Daemons almost never speak to a human not their own: Erica can count the number of times someone else's daemon has spoken to her and still have fingers left over, and that's including her family.
She watches, dumbstruck, as the little fly lights off of Mark's fingers, weaving aimlessly in the air for a moment, just because she can. Mark doesn't seem to know how to react, either. His face is dull red, and his eyes flick between studying his own palms and the billboard behind the counter, which offers cappuccinos with shots of peppermint and gingerbread hot chocolate in curly-que writing.
Marjane skates over the spine of Erica's book and settles, abruptly and without warning, on the very tip of Oswald's ear, where the fur is the softest. Oswald lids his eyes, an unconcerned purr starting low in his chest. Erica feels the warmth of the contact all the way to the pit of her stomach and the ends of her toes.
Mark moves, ducking his head in a sharp movement, and Erica reacts instinctively, reaching out with her hands as if she's catching a falling object. Her fingers snag along his jaw, tilting it up so she can press a kiss to his cheek, the both of them laughing and unable to help it. His skin is warm.
-
fin
(Helpful Google Image reference for those who are curious: Oswald, an Egyptian mau; a tree kangaroo; Gwendolyn, a border collie; an Indian moon moth, which are crazy pretty; Nollen, an emperor tamarin; a sable marten; a mink; a spectacled bear; Marjane, a housefly, in case, you know, you actually want to look at close-ups of flies.)
Fandom: The Social Network/His Dark Materials
Characters/Pairings: Erica, ensemble (pre-Mark/Erica, implied Mark/Eduardo)
Summary: Erica Albright goes to state university. She has four brothers and a green-eyed daemon named Oswald, and it's very hard to get under her skin.
Word Count: 9,300
Notes: Maybe if she stopped being so awesome and inspiring me, I'd stop dedicating things to lovestories. As is, this is entirely her doing.
[read @ AO3]
If you are unfamiliar with the His Dark Materials world, then I've always found this primer to be particularly sufficient at explaining :DD
one | eduardo saverin
If all good stories begin with a time, a place, a person, and a fairly poetic but not overly flowery description of the weather, then ours is this: her name is Erica Albright, she's boarding a bus while in the background traffic goes howling by on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and the weather is shit.
The aisle of the bus is slick with grey slush and grit from where people have been tracking it up and down all day, and it's crowded enough that the overhead PA has taken to reminding them to please keep their bags and their daemons securely in their laps to expedite those still trying to get on, and would those with oversized daemons please move to the back of the bus, or to kindly step off and wait for the MetroPlus, which is specially designed for their needs.
Erica gets an aisle seat next to a big woman with a loudly-patterned purse, which is so large it seems ludicrous, and also a little detrimental to finding anything useful, like car keys or a phone. Erica swings her backpack into her lap as she sits down and Oswald springs on top of it, daintily shaking the wet off his paws and leaving damp footprints on the canvas fabric.
The woman shifts minutely to show that she's aware of Erica's presence and would make room for her if there was more to be made, but doesn't look away from the window. At this point, Erica is not so far removed from high school that it doesn't feel weird to be outside at one in the afternoon, and, as she always does, she wonders at the habits of bus-riders: given a choice, people will always sit close to the door, or where there are no people at all, but what about when it starts to fill? The politics of riding the bus make for a fascinating science: why, in the few seconds she had upon boarding and upon realizing she would have to sit next to someone, had she decided to sit next to the woman? Was it because the woman seemed the least threatening of all the choices? Was it because she liked the look of the woman's daemon -- an exotic-looking creature balanced easily on the back of her seat, with bright red fur, thick tail, and a blunt snout, that she vaguely recognizes as a tree kangaroo -- and thought it would brighten her ride some to sit next to them?
The bus lurches into life, doors swinging shut, and Oswald finishes cleaning the dirt from in between the pads of his paws, leaning against her breastbone and interrupting her inner monologue. "And why," he says, keeping his voice private between the two of them, "are there people standing where there are two seats open at the front of the bus?"
Erica looks. Sure enough, up behind the driver, where the seats are reserved for the handicapped and expectant mothers, there are two seats open on either side of a gruff-looking man.
He smelled like a frat house on the morning after, Erica realizes belatedly, the sense memory of it pungent even though she can't smell it back here.
"He looks like he's got serious problems," Oswald comments quietly, tone milky with pity.
He's a broad-set man in a wide, thick coat with elbows that have been worn to white and an orange ski-cap that doesn't look like it's come off in days. His face is unshaven, salt-and-pepper stubble covering the squat, oddly-shunted spread of his jaw, and there are deep gouges of sagging flesh under his eyes, like someone had taken their thumbs to the putty of his skin and slipped. He doesn't seem to be aware that people are avoiding the sour stench of misery that's sitting heavy on him; his gaze is fixed at some point near the floor, hard and unwavering and enormously tired.
That is, until the dog daemon that's sitting across the aisle abruptly stands up, her head tilted curiously, and tentatively crosses the space between them.
Erica's not the only one paying attention now; the woman next to her drops her hand to her lap, straightening up a little to get a better look. A couple people in front of her are openly watching as well.
She's wearing her headphones, but her Shuffle brings up something soft and instrumental, and she can't reach her pocket to adjust the volume or skip songs without elbowing her neighbor, so she can hear it just fine when the daemon's human -- a slender kid Erica's age with a thick head of hair -- hisses, "Gwen," between his teeth, like a command. The collie ignores him, focused firmly forwards.
Some of the onlookers quickly avert their eyes; a grown man who can't control his daemon, even when he speaks out loud, is about as embarrassing to watch as a child throwing a tantrum, or walking by a stranger whose fly is undone.
Erica grew up with four brothers -- it takes a lot to get her well and truly ashamed, so, intrigued, she studies the pair of them. The boy's sitting directly across from the wino, neither handicapped nor expectant, but soft around the edges of his eyes, like he'd be the type who would give up his seat to the disabled, elderly, or pregnant without a fuss. He's wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit, and Erica's never been part of the New England aristocracy and therefore can't recognize value on sight, but she'd hazard a guess that it didn't just come off the rack from Macy's. At the same time, there's a well-worn, raggedy backpack parked on top of his feet. He's got the same slim face his daemon does, same wide attentive eyes and glossy dark hair.
No, no, no, that's a good sign, goes her eldest brother's voice in her head. He chin-stroked his way through three years of a philosophy major at BU before dropping out to do ... whatever it is he does, and to work barista at the Borders by the public library. You want to trust the people who look like their daemons.
Why? Erica had wanted to know. Her brother's daemon was a scaly, orange-and-black gila monster, and she didn't think they resembled each other much at all. (Well, in looks, anyway. They were both lazy slackers with dirty mouths, otherwise.)
Well, think about it, he had replied. Daemons are supposed to be your utter compliment, the other half of your soul, right? So it's a good sign of the inner self mirrors the outer self in looks as well as mannerisms -- it means that that person has nothing to hide. There's no deep, dark contrast that you can't see.
"Gwen, Gwendolyn," Suit tries again, the tips of his ears gone a dull red, but the border collie just lowers herself to her belly and crawls the last couple of inches, half-disappearing under the seats in order to get at the stranger's daemon. There, she doesn't hesitate before she pushes her muzzle forward, licking at the skunk's cheek, friendly and comforting.
The wino jerks, startled into physically coming back down to earth, and stares right across the aisle at Suit, whose face is flaming but who looks back at him and smiles steadily. Gwen nuzzles reassuringly at the skunk daemon until she, too, seems to come back to herself, fluffing her fur up and blinking around, like the bus is the last place she expected to find herself.
The man straightens his shoulders, abruptly looking less like a broken man -- he looks like he might have been all right once, the same way the guys from Fight Club weren't hard on the eyes before they took one too many hits. The skunk puts a paw on the top of Gwen's nose, an obvious thank-you gesture, and Gwen scoots backward to return to the other side of the bus, sliding a little over her own paws when they round a corner.
The overhead PA announces their next stop and Gwen puts her chin on Suit's knee, sighing out through her nose. Erica can hear it, that's how quiet the rest of the bus is.
The man seems to reach a decision, because he abruptly pulls his wallet out of the inside pocket of his woebegone coat and -- Erica's eyes widen -- fishes a $20 out of it, folding it and holding it out to Suit, who immediately holds up his hands in refusal.
The man laughs at that, nice and only a little raspy, and when he speaks, his accent is roundly foreign, "No, boy, take it," he says. "That's the nicest thing anyone's done for me in ages."
"I couldn't --" Suit goes, and Erica has to admit, privately and maybe with a little judgmental callousness, that he doesn't look like he needs the money.
The man seems to realize this, too, because he just laughs again, brandishing the bill. "Oh, go on," he says, with a grin that unsmudges the pockets underneath his eyes. "Take it and buy something nice for that lad of yours, the one I always see you tagging after all lovesick-like."
Suit, if possible, goes even redder, and Gwen pricks her ears forward, amused. It does the trick, though -- whether it was because he's given in or just because he doesn't want anything more said about who he may or may not be be lovesick for, Suit reaches forward and takes the $20. He tucks it into the front pocket of his suit and shares a shy smile with his daemon.
"And here I was, thinking he was a homeless man," Erica says to Oswald, keeping her voice down. She watches the man lean back, looking out the windows like he hasn't in awhile. His skunk daemon clambers up into his lap, and he fondly strokes the long line of her back.
"People can be down on their luck for reasons other than money," her daemon replies, sounding sage.
She crosses her arms over him, tugging him in to rest her chin on top of his thin shoulder blades, smiling to herself. He obliges by rubbing his jaw against hers. Up at the front, Suit's head is still down, embarrassed, but the border collie noses at his hand demandingly until he starts petting her.
The politics of riding the bus makes for a fascinating science, she thinks again, hooking her ankles together under her seat and settling in, feeling Oswald purring against her sternum. It might just be her, but some of the world's kindest people take the bus.
two | christina lee
Erica had gone to an all-girls Catholic high school, where she rolled the waist of her skirt and pulled her itchy, polyester sweater down to cover it, and she wore ankle socks that were only just visible above the tops of her sneakers -- she and everybody else skirted around the rules without ever quite wanting enough to break them. While there, Erica learned too much of what was wrong with the world and not enough of what was right, and came out feeling like she'd give anything not to care anymore.
University's easier, she finds -- empathy and charity, for the most part, seem to be a voluntary practice hawked in the commons, not an issue of mandatory attendance. She goes to dinner with her roommate and a couple people she met at orientation, where they complain about teachers and what stupid shit the Harvard kids got up to and discuss dumb Internet memes and who's going to Providence over the three-day weekend to do allegedly illegal activities with the students at Brown (Erica is pretty sure half of it is made up, but it's Brown. You can't really rule anything out.) It's probably the most comfortable Erica's felt inside her own skin since her daemon settled.
Her roommate is from California somewhere; she's pretty chill, if prone to getting excitable over inter-dorm gossip, and gets the wickedest care packages from her aunt in Santa Monica. Her daemon is a sleek, grey fox with a crazy smile, whom Oswald likes to slink circles around, just to show off.
"Foxes like to think they're so agile and clever," he sniffs, standing on the edge of Erica's headboard, his tail serenely swishing back and forth. "But they're so bulky compared to me. It's an overrated form to take."
"Oswald," she scolds.
Tuesday afternoons are all her roommate asks for, since it's the only day of the week her boyfriend has off from marching band, so on Tuesdays, Erica packs up a couple textbooks and hops on one of the shuttles whose sole purpose is ferrying kids between the Boston schools and Harvard.
Technically, there's nothing wrong with the library at BU, but as Erica's goal is to waste as much time as possible before going back to her dorm, she likes the trip: Oswald curls around her shoulders and watches unblinkingly as other cars pass them on the bridge, leaving Erica to watch the other kids on the shuttle. They're usually all sports teams with powerful daemons and the occasional engineering student with their headphones in, and a lot of them take the time to power-nap. They sometimes miss their stops. It's entertaining.
She likes the library, too. It's the quietest place she's ever been. God bless anal-retentive Harvard students, she guesses; they're the ones that actually adhere to the "quiet, please!" signs and get lip-pressingly entitled and bitchy when other people don't, so Erica can get a study carousel and queue up her iPod and power through several chapters of political science like it's a trashy novel.
It's one of these Tuesdays, and she's sitting at the end of a table in the new wing (not that she doesn't like the essence of power and history in the main Harvard library, but the new wing has power outlets,) when Oswald makes a sudden spitting noise and disappears under her chair, and somebody comes to a halt right in front of her.
Startled, Erica hits pause on her iPod and looks up, tugging one earbud from her ear.
"Erica?" says the girl on the other side of the table, plainly for the second time, her eyes enormously wide in a pantomime of surprise and --
"Christina!" she blurts, half-standing even as Christina leans over, and they meet part-way over the table for something that's more an awkward bumping of shoulders and patting hands than it is a hug.
"Hey, wow, I haven't seen you since we graduated, your hair's gotten so long!" Christina says, without attempting to really make it sound like a cohesive sentence, grabbing the ends of Erica's hair and holding it out for inspection.
You haven't changed much at all, grabby hands, Erica thinks, a little on the dry side; Christina's hair is perfect, shining, like she actually had the time to shower and style it this morning, instead of rolling right out of bed and hoping that the clean clothes in her closet vaguely match one another, like Erica does. She's wearing too much make-up, and she hasn't really lost the parochial school look: she's traded in the plaid uniform for a pleated black skirt and a blouse that's so far on the shear side it wouldn't have been allowed through the school doors.
"Ha, thanks," goes Erica, tugging her hair out of Christina's grip and tucking it behind her ear. She has absolutely no reason at all to dislike Christina just for being handsy: they'd pretty much run in complete opposite circles in high school. "I forgot -- do you go to Harvard?"
Even as it comes out her mouth, she knows the answer. Their high school made it very hard to forget who'd gotten into the Ivy League schools and who did not.
"Yes!" Christina bobs her head, earrings catching the light, and then gestures at one of the other tables. "We're here for a group presentation for our food science class. It's one of those core requirement things you just have to grit your teeth and get through, it's complete shit," she elaborates at Erica's look. Her group consists of two other people: a dark Indian girl with a thick plait of hair and basketball shorts, who is wearing what Erica thinks is a beautiful green hair clip until it folds its wings and she realizes it's a moon moth daemon; and the other is a boy whose only distinctive feature is his massive head of curly hair, which does nothing to hide his very large forehead and heavy, serious brows, which gives him the look of one perpetually glaring. She can't see his daemon at all.
"And you?" Christina goes, her eyebrows raised. "I didn't realize you were in Massachusetts, too. You're going to ..." she trails off, plainly having no idea.
"To Boston University," Erica finishes for her politely. "They offered me a scholarship, and my brother went there, so it's not like I knew nobody in the city."
"Oh, well, that's good!" says Christina equably. It doesn't seem to occur to her to ask why Erica's in the Harvard library, but fortunately, she's saved from having to come up with a different topic of conversation, because her daemon leaps up onto the tabletop, settling onto his haunches and fixing Erica with a disinterested, assessing look. He's a monkey about Oswald's size, with black-speckled fur and an enormous white mustache that comes halfway down his chest. He does a very good impression of wrinkling his nose at her, like she's the kind of gum you find on the underside of desks, and then clambers the rest of the way up Christina's shoulder so he could cup a paw around her ear and whisper something to her.
Erica frowns, because that's not right.
"Didn't he used to be a gyrfalcon?" she points at the monkey, perplexed. High school wasn't that long ago, and she's almost positive she remembers when Christina's daemon stopped changing: he used to perch on top of bookshelves in classrooms, the backs of chairs in the study lounge, and he circled the rafters during gym and pep rallies, always with that fierce-eyed, unblinking, hunting look, like he was just waiting to catch someone doing something wrong.
Christina's smile curves up slowly this time, like she's enjoying a joke. "She," she corrects, watching Erica carefully, and even before Erica's mind can jump to the first conclusion, she hears her second eldest brother's voice in her head, leaping in to interrupt, don't be stupid. The gender of a daemon has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on sexuality. Sure, there's a trend towards preferring same-sex relationships among same-sex human-daemon pairs, but the only thing it states definitively is an immense strength of character. And he would know; his daemon was male, and Erica hadn't even realized there was anything abnormal about it until she went to middle school.
When her expression doesn't change, Christina continues more easily. "Yeah, that was a phase we went through, but it took Nollen a long time to find something she liked, so we settled later than most."
"What is she?" she asks, nodding again to Christina's daemon.
"An emperor tamarin," she answers proudly, curling Nollen's tail around the end of her finger.
The monkey strokes the ends of her mustache, eyeballing Erica from under the curtain of Christina's hair and then offering her a grin; a nasty one, revealing sharp canines as long as pencil stubs. Erica wants to exchange a look with Oswald and see what he thinks of this, because the daemons of most girls settle between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Anything later than that is a cause for concern. Waiting until eighteen before settling down permanently is what her psychology textbook likes to call "a warning sign." But down on the carpet, Oswald has his back to her, idly washing his whiskers and watching students moving on the staircase in that "I can't be bothered with you right now" way that cats have. He couldn't be more deliberate if he tried.
"Well!" says Christina with finality, gesturing over her shoulder. "I should probably go figure out what bullshit we're going to say for our presentation. It was good seeing you!"
They lean in for another stiff hug. "Yeah, you too!"
Christina turns on her heel and returns to her group table, letting Erica sit back down, putting her stray earbud back in and running her fingers over the touchpad to wake her laptop up. She doesn't thumb at the play button on her iPod, though, because she hears the guy in Christina's group ask her flatly, "was she important?", and it makes her freeze.
It's an odd question to ask. It wasn't, "did you know that girl?", because that would have been stupid and obvious even if it is the conversational gambit of choice, and it wasn't, "who was that?" It was "was she important?", like Erica can be quantified by her usefulness. She tightens her grip around the casing of her Nano and feels rather than sees Oswald's head swivel around.
She assumes Christina looks over her shoulder to check and see if Erica heard (she's not going to look up from her laptop screen to find out,) and she obviously takes comfort in the sight of her with her headphones in, because Erica watches in her peripheral as Christina tosses her hair over one shoulder and sits down, saying dismissively, "What, her?" A snort of derision. "Not really, no. I mean, did you look at her? She goes to BU, and she has a housecat for a daemon. I mean, please, with the exception of, like, a slug, I don't think you can have a more boring daemon than a domesticated animal."
Erica's face flames.
Christina might follow this up with a laugh, high and sparkling, but she can't tell: there's a roaring in her ears. She ducks her head so they're all completely blocked from view, her fingers absently hovering over her computer keys. Her cheeks burn, and she feels the sudden hot prickling in her nose, the one that warns of impending tears. It's one of those horrible things she can't control, like the kneejerk way she tears up during the sinking montage in Titanic, or when her brothers mercilessly go on about her big forehead.
Oswald springs up onto the table, stepping directly onto her laptop and lying down. It pins her hands against the keys, and the Google searchbar she has up erupts into long strings of "jjjjjjjjjjkkkkssiiiiiiiiiiiii," which she ignores. Her daemon looks at her levelly.
She drags in a breath. It sounds shallow and shaky, even to her own ears. "It's kind of hard to take notes on my reading when you're sitting on my keyboard, you silly creature."
"It's rather warm right here, actually," Oswald comments lazily. "But I promise to move if you promise to forget everything she just said."
She flexes her fingers under his belly. She sighs, "You know, I think it must be hard for her, being that smart and that beautiful, especially with all this competition," she jerks her chin around to include the general Harvard area. "And I mean, I know it doesn't excuse her from being ... from being --"
"A shit-flinger like her monkey?" Oswald supplies helpfully.
"I was trying to think of the politically correct term for it." She drags a hand out from under him in order to rub her forehead with the heel of her hand. It's hot to the touch. She's probably still bright red. "People can't be that bitchy in real life, Oswald, they can't."
He stands up, rubbing his cheek against her forearm. "Come on," he says softly. "Let's go home. Evanna can deal if we interrupt her and her boyfriend."
"Yeah, okay," Erica agrees readily. She shuts her laptop lid and puts it into her backpack with her textbook. Oswald takes the opportunity to spring up onto her shoulders, evenly balancing himself around the curve of her neck. When she walks past their table, Christina flashes her a toothy smile and a twiddle of her fingers that might be a wave, like everything's all fine and dandy. The girl with the moth daemon doesn't look up, but the guy watches her and Oswald go, expressionless. There's something black in his ear that might be a hearing aid, but she doesn't bother to look twice and find out. She walks down the stairs and out the door, her eyes bright and damp-feeling.
three | cameron winklevoss
She stops going to the Harvard library after that. She wonders if this is maybe a wimpy decision to make, but Oswald doesn't argue with her when she tells him.
Now on the Tuesdays she gets sexiled, she crashes at her friend's dorm instead, where she gets very good at blast-studying her way through marathons of what the box said was Karaoke Revolution but in actuality is more like adventures in scale-sliding caterwauling, and reruns of Charmed on the WB.
The next time she's at Harvard is for an end-of-the-semester extra credit opportunity for her psychology class: she gets an e-mail from the department head regarding a keynote speaker who's going to talk about people-profiling on the Internet, and Erica doesn't necessarily need the extra credit, but it's not like going and listening to a speech is an especially difficult assignment.
She has no idea how formal it is, but it's Massachusetts and it's Harvard, so she pulls her nicest dress out of her closet, where it smells kind of like laundry detergent but mostly like Axe. She thinks about asking Evanna about it and then decides she'd rather not know. She manages to find respectable earrings and entreats Oswald to at least wash his whiskers or something, which he does with great show. On the way out the door, she just tugs on her usual Rocket Dogs, because while it's Harvard, it's still college.
When she gets there, there are all kinds of people up and mingling around inside the conference room, talking and laughing while their daemons weave around each other, equal parts affectionate, respectful, or standoffish, depending on the type of conversation being held.
"See anyone we know?" she asks Oswald, half-heartedly looking around for a cluster of classmates or something she could hover with awkwardly for awhile. Finding no one, she retreats to one of the rows in the back, which is empty except for a pair of very large, very well-dressed twins with identical daemons. She sits with her notebook and clutch purse in her lap and finds herself watching them, entertained: people come by frequently to speak to them, giving them the appearance of broad-shouldered Whack-a-Moles, always popping up and down to shake hands with the kind of men and women who say stately things like, "Am I to ascertain that your father will be joining us this evening?"
At one point, a puff adder daemon comes sliding in between the chair legs, its jaw unhinged around an enormous orange. Erica can't tell who it belongs to, but the twins act like this is all par for the course, like snakes carrying fruit is perfectly normal.
"Oh, man, how does he always know when we're about to keel over from hunger?" goes Twin #1, reaching down to let the adder gingerly deposit the orange into his palm. He salutes it as it goes winding away.
"Because he's our best friend?" replies Twin #2 dryly, reaching out to snag the orange and digging his thumbs into it.
There's nothing more pungent than the smell of an orange being peeled. Twin #2 looks up and Erica is too slow to look away before he catches her eye. He holds up a slice. "Would you like one?"
"Actually, yes," says Erica, who is missing her regularly scheduled dinner with roommate and company in order to get extra credit. She scoots down the row of chairs, and Twin #2 meets her half-way, extending the slice of orange towards her. She takes it and thanks him, and Oswald helpfully licks the citrus juice off her fingertips with his sandpaper tongue.
"I'm Cameron," offers the twin. "And that's Tyler," he gestures vaguely over his shoulder at his brother; his daemon easily ducks out of the way of his hand to avoid getting hit. She's a ferret-looking creature with big, glittering eyes and a way of holding herself that's purely regal, and now that she's up close, Erica can tell she's got the thickest, most luxurious coat of ebony fur. She almost blends in with the color of Cameron's suit.
"Erica," she introduces herself.
"Do you --" Cameron starts, slow smile curving the corner of his mouth, but he gets cut off by a sudden commotion several rows in front. They turn their heads. His daemon pushes herself upright, one paw on his ear for balance, peering over his head to see what's going on.
Amidst a knot of students, there's a boy with too much hair, cargo shorts, and a sweatshirt for a high school robotics club standing on a chair. He's familiar in a way Erica can't place: maybe he's in her class? The students around him -- a group of guys who all look alike, laughing raucously -- swat at the air like they're trying to shoo something away. Someone's Jack Russell terrier daemon joins in, snapping and snorting like there's some piece of paper it's trying to buffet around. A flash of light catches on something very, very small and black, as a skua daemon swoops in to bat it back to the terrier with a flip of its wing -- they're torturing what looks like a fly.
"Oh, hey, look," comments Tyler to Cameron, deadpan. "Someone's picking on the freshman again. Surprise, surprise."
Erica glances sideways at them, then up front again. The boy on the chair clenches his fists. His expression is unflappable, but the livid red color to his cheeks gives him away. "Leave her alone!" he snarls, his voice carrying. The skua makes another move like a tennis swing, and he flinches, full-body. "Stop it, you're hurting her!"
A horrible idea occurs to Erica, dropping in her stomach so suddenly that Oswald yowls, instantly echoing her distress. She twists around to face the twins. "Is that his daemon?"
"What, the fly?" Cameron says, and snorts. "Yeah. Can you believe it?"
A fly daemon -- well, under any other circumstances, Erica might be tempted to laugh, but there's nothing funny about this. "What's he ever done to them?" she demands, jerking her chin at the small crowd that's doing the bullying.
"Well," offers Tyler drolly, as his weasel of a daemon bares her teeth in a snicker. "For one, he's an obnoxious little prick. He's in our business class this semester, and he's got the biggest entitlement issues we've ever seen, and we go to Harvard. What's his name, Cam?"
"Zuckerberg something-or-another. It's a miracle no one's swatted him before now. For a computer nerd, he's impossible to squash."
She narrows her eyes. "And that gives you the right to pick on his daemon?" On the seat next to her, Oswald crouches down, hissing.
In unison, both twins quirk eyebrows at her, and then exchange a look.
"I think she's oh-so-subtly implying that we should go up there and stop them," Cameron remarks, his tone light.
Tyler shrugs. "Why not?" he goes, gliding to his feet. "I'm behind on random acts of kindness this week."
"You're always behind on random acts of kindness," Cameron answers, to the soft, spitting jeers of their two daemons. They leap from their perches, hitting the carpet and scampering up the aisle, disappearing under the chairs. Where they had seemed so little against the twins' shoulders, they suddenly look a lot bigger, pouncing into the middle of the group. Too big to be ferrets or weasels. One of them gets the Jack Russell pinned under her paws, hissing and snarling, and the other one takes a swipe at the skua, coming away with a couple feathers and a pained yelp from the bird's human.
"Problem?" goes Cameron mildly as he stops at the end of their row, Tyler flanking him. It's amazing how quickly the boys scatter, muttering mutinously; one of them holds the skua close to his chest and glares fiercely at the twins, like he hadn't just been doing the exact same thing to the fly daemon.
Jew-fro kid takes advantage of the preoccupation, snagging his daemon out of the air and cupping her in between his palms, resentment fierce in the duck of his brows. He nods curtly to Cameron and Tyler and disappears into another row.
"Nicely done, gentlemen," Erica says on their return, in her best pompous imitation of the adults who'd greeted them earlier.
They curtsy mockingly, and then, looking towards the entrance of the conference room, Tyler elbows his brother. "Look, there's our dear old dad, schmoozing away with our speaker this evening. I guess that means we can get this show on the road. Shall we?"
He sets off without waiting, cutting through the crowd towards the man who'd just walked in, dwarfed beside an enormous black spectacled bear.
"Cameron," Erica says, and he stops, turning his head, his eyebrows lifted curiously. She runs her fingertips over the notches in Oswald's spine for a moment, and then asks, "Your daemons ... they're different species, aren't they?"
He smiles for real this time, not his smarmy, talking-to-strangers smile, but an honest one. "You're right," he says, facing her fully. He reaches up, letting his daemon's sinewy body slide down to twine around his hands. She bares her teeth at Erica again, friendlier this time. "Not many people notice that."
"Tyler's -- her ears are a little more rounded than yours', and her fur's darker."
"That's because she's a sable. It's a type of marten. Whereas mine," he smiles down at his daemon, stroking under her chin with the tip of his finger. "She's a mink. Which my father wasn't all that thrilled about. We're the type of family where the men are expected to have big daemons --"
"I can see that," comments Erica, who is craning her neck in order to talk to him.
"-- oh, haha. But bigger daemons just aren't feasible in modern times. Besides, me and my brother are water creatures anyway. My dad gets that now."
Hours later, after the speech, the Powerpoint, and the discussion, the scent of citrus has faded from Erica's hands and her stomach is gnawing at her in pain and she never wants to hear about identity theft ever again. She walks out of the room, saying to Oswald, "this had better be worth a shit-ton of extra credit points."
She pauses outside the doors, pressing back up against the wall so she's out of people's way, and checks her phone for the time. As she does, someone brushes by her, close enough that it makes Oswald back up onto her feet to avoid being stepped on, and Erica's eyes snap up, insulted.
It's Zuckerberg, the freshman they'd been picking on before the speech.
"Hey!" she goes, flinging her hand out and catching his elbow, more the soft fabric of his sweatshirt than actual arm. He swings on her, startled, and she lets go quickly. "Hey, is your daemon all right?" At his perfectly blank look, she fumbles, "I saw -- I mean, I saw them ... um, messing with her. Earlier. I wanted to know if she's okay."
"We're fine," he goes, his tone brusque. He has a big forehead and low eyebrows, which gives him a caveman-esque stare -- an impression his monosyllabic reply isn't really helping -- and he levels it on her until she feels her cheeks warm up, because basically, she'd just admitted to seeing someone getting bullied and not doing anything about it.
"Well, okay then, that's --" she starts.
"No, don't," he cuts her off, rather impatiently. "I didn't mean to imply we aren't grateful. You were the one who got the bouncer-wannabes to come over and flex their muscles some. We saw it."
She stares. "How?" she goes, dumbfounded. She'd been sitting in the back.
This earns her a smile; a slim, self-satisfied curve of Zuckerberg's mouth. He turns his head, lifting up his palms as if in supplication, and only then does Erica notice the little black shape sitting on the outside curve of his ear like a cartilage piercing. It's the fly daemon, easily lost amongst his messy hair. With an easy buzz of her wings, she lights off his ear and settles into the grooves of Zuckerberg's hand.
"This is Marjane," he introduces her, holding her out. His tongue blurs on her name, so that it sounds like a "sh" sound: Mar-shawn. Erica wants to be like, you mean, like the girl from Persepolis? "Look at her."
Erica does. Black and bristly, Marjane is the size of her fingernail, or a very small SD card, like the kind they put into phones. A booger would probably be more conspicuous-looking than she is. But it's her eyes, Erica realizes, that get you: they're huge compared to the rest of her body, multi-faceted like a hundred miniature computer screens all looking in different directions at once. With eyes like that, Marjane is probably able to see a full 360 degrees.
"We see everything," Zuckerberg says simply.
"That's ... that's different."
"Inconsequential, is probably what you're looking for. It's a good word. We hear that one a lot." He lets his hands drop, and Marjane zips into the air, disappearing faster than Erica can follow her. "After all, flies are meant for swatting. They're not meant to be people's souls." It smacks very strongly of bitterness, and Erica shifts her weight a little bit, uncomfortable. Zuckerberg's gaze sharpens, catching it (or maybe Marjane did? Oh, that's an eerie thought.) "You misunderstand me. It's not an upsetting thing. I'd rather have a fly than anything people these days are considering the 'economic choice'."
She thinks of what Cameron had said, about how he and his twin came from a big-souled family, but their daemons had chosen smaller shapes because the world doesn't really cater to big-daemon people. The world is a shrinking global village, she can hear her third oldest brother saying; he's the one closest enough in age to her to be her Irish twin, which means they've had to be very close out of necessity, but they gladly went to opposite ends of the country for college.
"Why do you think so many urbanites have domesticated dog daemons?" Zuckerberg continues. "You see them everywhere, the bigger cities especially. The more complacent people get as a society, the more sociologically obedient they become. Oh, a 9-5 desk job and a 401k, look at the cool tricks I can do, do I get a treat? People are afraid of being big, or doing something on a much grander scale, so they just fall in line. Or worse," his eyes narrow. "They keep a misguided loyalty to their fathers, and let it shape their very soul."
"That's not true," Erica says immediately, thinking of Gwen, the border collie daemon on the bus, who is ...
Who is walking right towards them, actually.
Erica double-takes, actually physically recoiling in her surprise, as that is truly the last thing she expected to see, but fortunately, nobody notices. Gwen sweeps a circle around Zuckerberg, her plumy tail wagging, coming close but never close enough to touch, as familiarly as if she does it a lot. And then -- yes, that's the same boy she saw on the bus, the one with the three-piece suit and the hair so thick it looks like it'd be impervious to a lawn mower, walking out of the conference room.
He stops dead at the sight of Zuckerberg standing right outside the door. "Were you waiting for me?" he goes in such unadulterated tones of surprise that Erica hides a smile behind her hand. It's the same tone one would use at an impending sign of the apocalypse.
Zuckerberg shoots her a look out of the corner of her eye that she correctly interprets to mean that no, he wasn't intentionally waiting for Suit and would be long gone if Erica hadn't waylaid him. She comes to his rescue, clearing her throat a little and stepping forward, which dislodges Oswald from the top of her foot and drags Suit's attention to her.
He double-takes, too, but in a deliberately comical way. "Oh my god," he says. "A specimen of the female persuasion? Willingly talking to Mark?" He lowers his voice, leaning in conspiratorially. "You do realize that that is Mark Zuckerberg, right? I'd understand if you wanted to take this opportunity to run for the hills. Are you sure you're feeling all right?" He reaches out, pressing the backs of his knuckles to her forehead.
"You're being very rude right now," Zuckerberg -- Mark? -- deadpans.
Suit snatches his hand back, pressing it to his chest. "I humbly apologize from the bottom of my heart," he says instantly and very solemnly. Gwen edges into Oswald's space, smiling and her ears perked forward, saying something lowly. Oswald tilts his head up to sniff back in that "I guess I can deign to give you my attention" way that cats have, but nicer, because Oswald likes Gwen as much as Erica does. "I am so very sleep-deprived. I didn't intend to come up to you and touch your forehead inappropriately. That was inappropriate. Did I say that?"
Erica can't help it. She laughs, because she doesn't think she's met anyone as sincere as Suit and his daemon. It earns her a wide smile, and Suit spins on his heel, demanding of Mark, "Are we fooding?"
Mark looks pained. "That's not a word. And actually, I was going to go back to the dorm and --"
Gwen stops mid-conversation with Oswald, her tail stiffening and her head dropping down, fixing Mark with the kind of intense, unblinking, don't-bullshit-me collie stare that has his words dying in his throat. Suit seizes the distraction, snatching Mark's hands between his imploringly.
"Come on, Mark," he says, swinging Mark's arms like a child playing ring around the rosie. "Food. Doesn't food sound wonderful? Yummy, delicious, edible things that you can put in your mouth and chew that do not come from Dustin's dubious mini-fridge? Food. Come on, let's go food. Fooood."
It's kind of amazing how the idea strikes Erica out of nowhere, because she doesn't think people are actually this perceptive outside of books, but there's something about the way Suit's leaning into Mark's space, about the vulnerable line of his mouth that responds the second Mark smiles tolerantly, about the way Marjane is sitting on top of Gwen's nose like it's nothing, that has Erica thinking, Oh. This is what they meant. This is what the stranger on the bus was talking about when he said "lovestruck." She hides another smile behind her hand, because "panting after" is not an inappropriate comparison to draw at this moment, either.
Suit must get some kind of acquiescence from Mark, because he punches the air. "Dinner!" he announces triumphantly. "Let's go!" Gwen waves her tail at Oswald, and then she and Suit are off down the hallway. Suit walks backward for a second in order to wave to Erica and say, "It was nice to meet you, possibly mentally-afflicted girl!"
"Oh shut up!" goes Mark.
As he rounds the corner at the end of the hall, Erica turns to Mark and goes, "I'm sorry, what part of sociologically complacent domesticated dog daemon does he fall into?"
"Shut up," Mark says again, without any bite whatsoever. He shoves his hands into his pockets and sets off after his friend. Erica watches him go, and she's glad she does, because at the end of the hall, he stops and turns around. He waves at her, his arm held stiff and close to his body like he's not sure of its welcome.
Erica smiles and waves back.
four | mark zuckerberg
In all honesty, Erica's not expecting to ever see the boy and his fly daemon again. After all, as has been pointed out to her, she doesn't go to Harvard, and it's not like she actually uses her MySpace to do more than post pictures from events where she was the only one who had a camera, and even then mostly at her friends' behest. Stalking people on the Internet is not her forte.
So she goes home, she tells her roommate because it was the only remarkable thing that happened in the entire conference ("a fly? Poor bastard,") and she includes it in an e-mail to her youngest brother, who's still in high school and regularly mentions how pressured he and his daemon feel to pick something that will impress all his friends ("it shouldn't be a matter of peer pressure," she writes, "because there's at least one stupid person who's going to try and make you feel miserable about her choice.") And then she forgets about it.
It's a little over a week later, the Friday before finals week, and Erica's sitting at the counter in the cafe area of the Borders on Bolyston, waiting for her oldest brother to get off work so they hang out. Oswald sprawls out on the counter in front of her, eyes peacefully closed and ear flicking lazily every now and then, as Erica tries to read a book she snagged off the New Releases shelf without cracking its spine. It's supposed to be a New York Times Bestseller and therefore obviously Very Good, but Erica is mostly concerned with putting off studying for as long as possible.
Someone clears their throat at her elbow, and Erica knows instinctively, the way people do sometimes, that it's directed at her. She looks up.
"Hello," goes Mark Zuckerberg, without any inflection in his voice at all.
"Hey!" she goes brightly, using her foot to push out the stool next to her, inviting him to have a seat, which he does, perching himself on the very edge so that his feet don't have to leave the ground. His hair partially obscures the view, but when he angles his head a little, she spots the tiny shape of Marjane, sitting in the shell of his ear and nervously rubbing her front two legs together.
He doesn't say anything more, so Erica watches him, bemused. He doesn't seem to have brought anything with him, not even a backpack, so she's assuming he's not here to study -- and at any rate, she's pretty sure Harvard's final week is staggered away from the rest of the other schools', so that the ERs aren't flooded with a whole bunch of students attempting suicide at once. As far as she can tell, the only reason he's here is to sit next to her and look as awkward as possible. He restlessly begins to drum his fingertips against the countertop.
"Are you --" she starts, and wonders how to finish it. -- here to meet someone? Here to buy books? "What's up?" is what she finds rolling off her tongue, and feels herself immediately flush. Oswald lifts his head to look at her, deeply unimpressed.
Mark doesn't seem perturbed. He offers a half-smile, mostly aimed at the back of his hand. "Your, ah, your roommate and your brother might have collaborated. They seem to be under the impression that you need more friends."
Erica's spine straightens as if someone had stuck a stake in it. "Those --" and she glares at the door to the employee backroom, like her brother might feel the heat of it and spontaneously catch fire.
"I posted instructions on how to break through BU's privacy firewall on my LiveJournal back in September, and I linked to a number of proxies to use in case that didn't work. Your roommate -- Evanna, right? -- thought it was necessary to friend me for that. So, that's how we know each other." He picks at the dead skin on his lower lip, flicks it away. "In case you were wondering."
Oswald gets to his feet, shaking himself off like someone had spritzed water at him. "Foxes," he goes lowly to Erica, his ears flattened. "They think they're so clever."
Erica settles back onto her stool some. "I was wondering why my brother told me to show up early," she comments mildly, and smiles sideways at Mark. "I'm sorry they schemed and dragged you into it."
He shrugs, a jerky roll of his shoulders. "I don't mind," he says, even quieter. "In fact, talking to you was probably the first conversation I've had with a girl where I didn't want to immediately leave the country afterwards." At her look, half-startled, half-amused, he gives her that sort-of smile again and explains, "Not a lot of practice. I went to an all-boys high school."
"Hey, me too!" she says, feeling the warmth of it reach her face. "Well, all-girls, obviously. You know what I mean."
This actually makes Mark grin, full on with teeth, and they share a companionable, knowing nod, the kind that's instantly recognizable to others as, hey, would you look at that, we attended parochial high school and survived it intact, alive, and whole-heartedly dedicated to atheism!
"Right," says Mark, after the pause goes on for a little bit. He hops to his feet, shuffling a little bit. "I should probably -- yeah," he gestures over his shoulder vaguely.
"Yeah, no, go ahead," Erica laughs, and waves a hand at the employee door. "I'll tell my brother his nefarious plan worked."
"Cool," Mark goes, and with an awkward twitch of his hand that might be a wave, he leaves.
Amused, Erica just shakes her head a little bit and returns to her borrowed book, flipping it back open to the page she'd bookmarked with her finger. In her peripheral vision, she sees Mark's curly head reach the rack of magazines and come to an abrupt halt. He hesitates, shifting forward onto the balls of his feet, and then, faster than she knows what to do with, he's right back at her side.
"She was wrong, you know," he goes, voice flat and brows settled low.
"Um," says Erica, blinking at him. Marjane buzzes around their heads, lost easily against the bold colors of the cafe. "I'm sorry, what?"
He purses his lips impatiently. "Christina," he says. "She was wrong about your daemon. He's not an ordinary housecat."
Erica stares at him for a beat longer, and then her mind whirs into place, like she's snapping a crooked piece into a jigsaw puzzle. She startles badly. He'd been there. Mark had been there, at the library, at the table where Christina had sat down and tossed her shining hair and sneered that Erica and Oswald were nothing. He'd been the one who asked, "was she important?" That's why he looked so familiar at the conference: it wasn't because he was in her psychology class, it was because he'd watched her leave the library, her feelings stung and tears in her eyes.
Heat flushes through her, and Erica knows she's going red, redder than she's ever been, because she wants nothing more than to forget that ever happened. They can probably see her forehead from satellite from this point.
"No," says Mark, almost angrily, when she says nothing. "Don't do that. She was wrong. He's a mau, an Egyptian mau, named as such because they were regarded as a metaphorical construct of divinity -- or at the very least a direct liaison -- for ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia. They were considered sacred. They might be a domesticated breed, but that's not ordinary. Am I right?"
The direct question prompts Erica into responding. "Yes," she goes, reaching out to trail her fingers along Oswald's spine, the soft grey spotted fur. He flicks his tail at her reassuringly. "How --"
"You have the same eyes," Mark says, quieter. "It's a distinctive color. You both --" he gestures. "You both have it. That's how I knew she was full of shit." She lifts her eyebrows questioningly, and he shrugs. "It's something Wardo says a lot. The people who physically resemble their daemons are the most trustworthy, because what's on the inside reflects what's on the outside."
"Wardo..." Erica echoes, and feels something else click. "Your guyfriend from the conference with the big eyes? Has a border collie daemon named Gwen?"
Mark's eyebrows disappear into his hair momentarily. "How do you know her --"
"They did something nice for a complete stranger on a bus once."
His face clears. "Yeah, they do that." He sits back down on the stool, tucking his feet up on one of the rungs. He props his arm up on the counter so that Marjane can land on his fist, dancing over his knuckles. There's something about his expression -- calm, smoothed out, almost affectionate -- that makes Erica think people are just as full of shit about Mark as Christina was about Oswald. He likes his best friend and he likes his daemon: that's more than enough to be getting on with.
"So does that make your inner self a microchip?" she asks, because why bring it up if he wasn't going to invite the comparison in return? Mark and Marjane look nothing alike, not even remotely, so what does that say about his trustworthiness?
"That's what I've heard," Mark comments with a grin, as Marjane skirts along the edge of his fingernail, before flipping over to walk upside-down along the pad of his fingertip, unconcerned. "Well, nobody has ever considered flies to be a symbol of divinity, but we are -- oh, how did Big, Tall, and Ferrety put it? -- rather difficult to squash."
And of course he'd overheard Cameron's remark. Why is she even surprised? She focuses instead on the first part of the sentence, and blinks, sitting up straight. "Mark," she says slowly, feeling a smile begin at the corners of her mouth. "Albeit in a roundabout way, did you just imply that I'm a goddess?"
Thing is, she meant it as a joke.
But a voice answers immediately. "Yes!"
Mark's eyes double in size, just as shocked by this as she is. The voice wasn't his -- too feminine, too lively -- and it takes Erica the space of a long heartbeat to realize that it was Marjane. It was Marjane, speaking directly to her. Daemons almost never speak to a human not their own: Erica can count the number of times someone else's daemon has spoken to her and still have fingers left over, and that's including her family.
She watches, dumbstruck, as the little fly lights off of Mark's fingers, weaving aimlessly in the air for a moment, just because she can. Mark doesn't seem to know how to react, either. His face is dull red, and his eyes flick between studying his own palms and the billboard behind the counter, which offers cappuccinos with shots of peppermint and gingerbread hot chocolate in curly-que writing.
Marjane skates over the spine of Erica's book and settles, abruptly and without warning, on the very tip of Oswald's ear, where the fur is the softest. Oswald lids his eyes, an unconcerned purr starting low in his chest. Erica feels the warmth of the contact all the way to the pit of her stomach and the ends of her toes.
Mark moves, ducking his head in a sharp movement, and Erica reacts instinctively, reaching out with her hands as if she's catching a falling object. Her fingers snag along his jaw, tilting it up so she can press a kiss to his cheek, the both of them laughing and unable to help it. His skin is warm.
-
fin
(Helpful Google Image reference for those who are curious: Oswald, an Egyptian mau; a tree kangaroo; Gwendolyn, a border collie; an Indian moon moth, which are crazy pretty; Nollen, an emperor tamarin; a sable marten; a mink; a spectacled bear; Marjane, a housefly, in case, you know, you actually want to look at close-ups of flies.)
