self_composed | i believe i can fly

"But an awesome one," he says happily.

"A pleasant one, but we've got plans to make," Bella says briskly. She unpokes the thought, but keeps up the cursory scan for communication-facilitation purposes. "About your dad."

Ooh, watch the love and joy drain out of him.

Literally, watch that happen, because it does.

"Yeah," he sighs. "Okay. ...You know, hell, I'm almost tempted to tell your dad now that I know he doesn't suck? Would that work, you think?"

"That's... a maybe," Bella admits, deflating somewhat now that she has nothing to actively bask in. "My dad can make an arrest, press charges, get it to trial - and maybe yours can bribe the jury or the judge. Or get a ridiculously good lawyer and get actually not-convicted. The evidence boils down to you turning up at a hospital in November with injuries. Would Theo say where he picked you up from? What would your mom do - she can't be compelled to testify against her husband, but would she? Does Hilary know anything?"

"Hilary knows squat," he says, rubbing his face. "No fucking idea which way Mom would swing, but I wouldn't bet on her coming down in my corner. I could always piss Dad off some more and go to the hospital again." (There's no particular positivity or negativity attached to that idea; it's just an option.) "Harder to pull off now that I heal, but not totally impossible."

Other ideas, other ideas... "I could show off all my old scars, I guess." Wryly, "Didja know Dad used to smoke?"

When he remarked on the difference between liquid nitrogen and cigarette burns, he was speaking from experience. Experience that left permanent marks on his back.

"Some of 'em ain't from him, though." A knife in a New York alley, twice, once under his jaw and the other biting deep into his hip—he's still proud of calling that bluff, of knowing that a knife to his throat means nothing to him, even if it helped shit-all in the end.

"You could wish away the scars if you wanted," Bella points out quietly. "Later - if we need them for evidence - but you can."

And: "What about Theo?"

Edited 2012-09-24 00:31 (UTC)

Alice smiles. "I like my scars," he says, closing his eyes for a moment and experiencing the truth of that statement. Even the ones where he doesn't like what they remind him of—and that is most of them—are his, part of him, a physical record of the experience of his life. He likes himself, and he likes the totality of that experience even when he doesn't like the individual pieces that make it up.

The scars can stay.

"Anyway, Theo," he says, and considers what he knows of Theo. Damn little, really. "If he can possibly get away with keeping quiet, he'll do it, but if they drag him in there and sit him down and put him under oath, he'll probably admit he picked me up at home. Pretty sure he knows more than that, but he pretends he doesn't."

"I'm trying to think if there's a good way to counter either the bribery possibility or the slick defense lawyer possibility," muses Bella. "I don't think you get to pick your own prosecuting lawyer in a criminal trial, though I could be wrong. And if we bribe or coerce or appear in the dreams of or impersonate the judge or jury or defense lawyer then I don't think we ought to bother with the trial approach at all - we have plenty of extralegal options, no need to dress that up like a procedural if that's the plan."

"We could use magic to catch him bribing somebody, if he does," Alice suggests. "And then figure out a way to nail him for it. If we can. Okay, but what are the" (he likes her phrase, it's cute) "extralegal options?"

Besides wishing the fucker off a cliff. Which is the thing they're trying to avoid here. It would be kind of viscerally satisfying, but it wouldn't really be that much better than any other option that took Alice out of his dad's power for good.

"Well, where do you want to go, besides away? You can live anywhere. Wish yourself all the things you need and want. You don't need his financial support, his stupidly huge house, his permission. You could just pick up and go - like I suggested before, but now with added self-defense capabilities. Where would you go?"

"...I wanna be where you are," he says. Was that not obvious? He thought it was pretty fucking obvious. "I mean, if I didn't, I'd just... go." He makes an expansive gesture with both hands, thinks about hitchhiking and open roads with big cities at the ends and whether he'd rather try hooking again or maybe strip or maybe just wish himself diamonds and sell them. "But I do. So I kind of wanna keep the stupidly huge house at least until you go somewhere else."

"Alice?" says Bella, amused. "We can both fly. If you don't mean you want to move in with me and Charlie - and I think that might be a bit much for Charlie - then 'where I am' can be a pretty big radius. Build an underground lair. Live in a floating invisible castle in the clouds. Make the inside of a tree bigger than the outside. Set up housekeeping in the temporally bizarre hill. Get a house in Port Angeles and show up to art class on alternate Tuesdays. If you're attached to the house in particular, we have to figure out how to pry your dad out of it, and that's gonna be more complicated."

"I don't," he says slowly, working it out for himself as he goes, "want to be—here, and him also here. I want him to be where I'm not. And I do kinda wanna keep going to Art," and maybe gym and Home Ec, "and if I skipped out on him he'd already throw a pretty big shitfit, and if I skipped out on him and kept going to class he'd throw a way bigger one and it'd probably get all over everything and you don't like collateral damage and I don't like it when it happens to people I like." (Bella, Ms. Finch, Hilary.) "I mean, if we try something else and it doesn't work, underground lair all the way. Or whatever."

"What kind of shitfit? Absent any plausible deniability, even rich people get convicted," Bella says.

"Got a teacher fired once because I had a crush on him," Alice recalls: he doesn't know details, but he knows he was about fifteen and his father was very happy that Junior was actually going to class for once until he found out why. And then that teacher was no longer employed at that school. Broke his fifteen-year-old heart, and also cured him of his nascent interest in algebra.

"It would be useful to know how he did that. Absent that information we'll just have to be conservative, I suppose. Hmm." Think, think. "What's your patience level here? I wonder if we could just make him psychically allergic to you to the point where he moves away without realizing why."

"...Psychically allergic?" he asks warily; no meaning he can think up for the phrase leads anywhere good in his head. It's not like his father currently likes him or gains any enjoyment from his existence. Making his father like him even less just doesn't seem like a good plan.

"Not a matter of making him like you less. Just a matter of him being more comfortable the farther away from you he happens to be - subtly. Certainly it would get sharply worse if he considered something as drastic as interacting with you in any way."

"No," Alice says firmly. "No. No."

Because in his experience, the more his father hates being around him at any given time, the more likely his father is to take it out on the most convenient of targets. And no amount of hating being around him reached thus far has made him actually stop.

"Okay." Bella doesn't think he actually understood the idea, but there's more where that came from anyway. "New angle. What is it that he does that takes him away on lengthy trips? Turn that up to eleven, he has to move, you happen to not be interested in moving, reason-to-move is still turned up to eleven so he goes."

"He's not gonna let go of me," says Alice. "Like, fuck, I am literally the worst son he could possibly have had, I could not get any less like his ideal offspring unless I openly wore dresses" (which he's into) "and did drugs" (which he isn't particularly), "and he hangs onto me tooth and claw because I'm his flesh and blood" (the phrase echoes in his head in his father's voice) "and it's his responsibility" (that word does the same) "to deal with me. Even though he obviously can't. Unless we do some serious brainwishing, in which case fuck it, might as well drop him off a cliff, he is gonna keep being a pain in my ass until he is in jail or thinks I'm dead."

"The mechanism by which he would attempt to not-let-go matters," Bella says. "If he attempts it by defending himself in a court of law against abuse charges we have limited ability to substantiate, that's one thing. If he attempts it by kidnapping you and taking you across state lines, that's another."

"Okay," says Alice. "I don't actually—wait, yeah, I do know why he keeps fucking off. He's just visiting his old buddies in New York. Probably not something we can wish up more urgency for. I don't know what he'd do," he says, shrugging. "I know he only breaks the law when he thinks he can get away with it. He's been pretty good so far about knowing when that is. But I don't, like, have a list of all the subtly vicious things a really rich guy can do when he's pissed off."

"Right." Bella's massaging her own forehead with thumb and forefinger. "Right. Okay. Maybe we should tell Charlie and go from there. He's got a reasonable shot at understanding that he can't necessarily forge ahead blind without getting you hurt - he probably at least knows the judges around here and can get us a clear picture of which of them are corrupt asses - and the last time anyone tried to bribe Charlie personally he arrested him on the spot and that's a matter of public record. We can fuck with relevant attorneys - I don't think I want to brainwash them, but I have fewer qualms about their notes disappearing and their neighborhood dogs suddenly being very agitated every night at two in the morning."

"...I love you," says Alice, hugging himself and beaming. "You're good at plans."

(Which he isn't. He's not even sure what he is good at in that area, although once in a while he thinks of something she doesn't, which is nice.)

This might actually work. They might actually get Delaney Hammond Sr. to go the fuck away.

Yeah, he loves her really a lot.

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