Slight Return (continued)
III: Quicksilver Songs
“I *know* what they think, but I also know what I think. And for my money, the, um - yeah, hosts, thanks - probably don’t even know anything’s up.
“You remember what happened last time they just trusted the Plan. Well, the one they knew about, anyway. They won't be doing that again any time soon, I don’t think.”
The car had been quite an attention-grabber during the leg of the trip he’d needed it for. Most people just assumed the steering wheel was on the wrong side. Everybody knew it was old, and the few who realized it was British had also seemed to appreciate the restoration job.
But as far as he could tell, not one of them had noticed on the occasions, such as now, when he wasn’t actively driving the car.
“Huh? Oh, I think I’m about halfway there. No idea how long the actual job will take, but I don’t think whoever came up with this mess does either. So, it evens out.
“I have no idea. If they *did* set a time limit, chances are they changed their mind. You know, only one time and that’s Too Late. Or maybe you don’t know, though you should have noticed that by now.
“For my money, they’re getting antsy. Nothing truly important on that scale has happened for... six weeks now, I think. They want action. Possibly even another go at the Big-
“We’d both prefer if they never spoke of it again, but seriously, what’s the likelihood of that? I believe you’re the one who said your people want it to go down.
“Knew you’d see my side of things eventually.
“Oh? You do that, then. Call you later.” Assuming control of the car as he ended the connection, he started poking around in the glove box for a cassette. He finally came up with Bach.
o/~ Any way the wind blows, d- o/~
Never mind that idea. The glove box was evidently up to its old tricks again. He’d have to take his chances with the radio.
o/~ -ly matter to me... o/~
Obviously he wasn’t meant to win tonight. Adjusting his sunglasses, he drove on through the night and just listened to whatever came on, even the commercials.
Commercials had to be one of his better inventions.
><>
“You had two trays of food - if the stuff can be *called* that - at lunch,” Daria pointed out. “What makes you think you’ll be interested in pizza by the time school’s out?”
“Trust me. I’ll be hungry by then. The stuff they serve isn’t very filling.” Jane had to lean into her locker in pursuit of the textbook she was after. “’Sides, you didn’t eat anything.”
“Watching you eat more or less destroyed my appetite. Mystery meat almost makes Dad’s kitchen sink stew look good.”
“I notice you didn’t say taste.”
“Have never tried the former, and still am not out of excuses to avoid eating the latter. You’re not stuck in there, are you?”
“No...” To prove the point, Jane got her head and shoulders out of her locker, but kept both hands on her history textbook. “Think my book is, though.”
Daria raised an eyebrow and started pulling what were primarily art history books off the trapped text: “Escher... Monet... Picasso... how many of these things do you need here, anyway?... Matisse... Durer...”
“I think I can get it now.”
“Good. My arms are full.” As they started putting the art books back in Jane’s locker, Daria continued, “Anyway. I think you said something about Trent between mouthfuls?”
“Oh yeah. He’s acting weird again. Besides the regular sleeping schedule thing. He was going around yesterday like he was planning something, and the only thing I could get out of him was ‘come and see’... whatever *that* means.”
_Come and see... I’ve read that somewhere..._ But Daria didn’t have any more mental leads on the matter.
<><
A pair of heavy boots clunked down the basement stairs at Casa Lane. The owner of said boots, Jesse Moreno, stopped on the last one and looked at the lanky figure perched atop an amplifier.
“Hey, man, you okay?”
Trent Lane looked up. “More or less. Don’t feel like I got enough sleep.”
“You get too much sleep, I thought.”
“I don’t know. If I ever wanted to keep track, I slept through it.”
Jesse snickered briefly, then move on to a more serious topic. “McGrundy’s gonna get on your case, man. We’ve missed at least five gigs. How’ll we get house band if we don’t go play?”
“Do you see a point in performing when we haven’t even *started* a practice without skipping straight to the pizza break lately?”
“Point.” A pause for thought, then: “Hey, speaking of pizza, I think I’m gonna go get some. If I see Nick and Max, I’ll tell them to be over tomorrow, okay?”
“Works for me.”
“Cool.” Jesse clunked back up the stairs, and Trent stayed downstairs thinking for a few minutes. Then he stood up and headed out himself. _Yes... let’s get some pizza. Or, better yet, let’s not and say we did._
><>
He parked the Bentley in a reserved space, but that was all right because it was reserved for him. Look for yourself: Reserved for Anthony J. Crowley, 24 hours, all events.
The inside of the school looked to be relatively devoid of life - presumably the students had been let out for the day. Those few who remained were on their way out. A pair of shirts, or possibly jackets - one red and one green - caught his attention, and he decided to see if they could help.
“Excuse me.”
The one in green stopped first. “Only if you have a good one,” she shot back after turning to face him.
The other girl turned around and just looked at him for a few moments, finally saying, “Wait a minute, you’re not with those immigration officials, are you? As much as I’d like a free class period for a few days, I don’t think Mr. DeMartino could handle being arrested again.”
Crowley blinked, though either of the girls would have been hard-pressed to spot any movement behind his sunglasses. “What?”
“I think that counts as a no, Jane,” the first girl said. “In that case, what do you want?”
“I’m looking for a girl,” he replied, using his best lead on who he was meant to find. “Red hair, about so tall, probably about your age.”
“Quinn?” the two girls chorused. After a short side conversation, the one in green said, “I don’t know why you’re looking for my sister, but you won’t find her here. She left as soon as school let out. Probably a big sale at the mall.” She hesitated a moment before continuing. “You’re welcome to come to Pizza King with us, if you want.”
“*Now* who’s inviting someone they hardly know out?” the other one - Jane - questioned, in half-jesting, half-accusatory tones.
“Can it, Jane. If we must have that conversation, let’s do so later. Weren’t you the one who wanted pizza after school?”
“Well, yeah, but... oh, never mind. Let’s just go.” She turned to leave, then remember they possibly had a guest. “You coming?”
Crowley thought it over, then shrugged. “Why not?”
He followed the girls out of the building, then nearly walked into Jane when she caught sight of the Bentley. “Nice,” her friend commented, clearly impressed but staying subtle about it.
“Oh, come on, Daria, that’s several steps over ‘nice.’ That... that is one hellacious car.”
“One does one’s best,” Crowley replied, smirking.
<><
“I could have told you the cassettes wouldn’t do you any good. Next time just disregard all the labels.”
“Oh, it’s all right, I figured it out,” Jane replied. “...Wait a minute. Did you just say all of them are like that?”
“Every single one of ‘em. You expect it to play ‘Here, There, and Everywhere,’ and it gives you ‘Now I’m Here’ instead.”
Daria considered that. “Is it possible for a car to have a sadistic sense of humor?”
“Only on truly bad TV sitcoms,” Jane shot back.
“Shut up and order the pizza, Lane.”
The three of them decided on extra cheese and pepperoni, and Crowley offered to stake out a table. Once he had left to do so, Jane commented, “I hope he’s not going after your sister. He’s cute.”
“I hope so too, but mainly because he seems to have better taste than that. I really don’t think it’d be worth your effort.”
“Just because you stole my boyfriend-”
“This has nothing to do with Tom,” Daria explained, “and besides, you said you were over that. I’ve just got the impression that he’s... taken, more or less.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t think he’s cute.”
“If you start sounding any more like Quinn, I *will* hit you.”
“Nice to know you’re looking out for me, amiga.”
One of the workers approached the counter with a boxed pizza and three soda cups. “We’re out of plates,” he said by way of explanation.
They took the box and (filled) soda cups over to the booth their guest had picked out. “Do you ever take those sunglasses off?” Jane wondered.
“Only under duress.” That hadn’t really helped to satisfy her curiosity, but she wasn’t really interested in asking questions. She was interested in eating, now that the opportunity to have real food presented itself.
IV: Come and See
They had just finished off their second pizza when Jesse and Trent walked in.
“Oh, hey, guys,” Jane said. “So you finally decided to leave the house, eh, Trent?” Both guys acknowledged her and Daria’s presence before heading for the counter.
“Large pizza, extra pepperoni,” Jesse said. Someone came up from the the kitchen and talked briefly with the cashier, who then replied, “Sorry, dude, but we just ran out of dough.”
“Oh. Bummer. Burgers?”
“You go ahead,” Trent responded, seeming a little distracted. “I’m waiting for some people.” Daria and Jane looked at each other when they heard that.
“I’d ask if you knew who he was waiting for,” Daria mused, “but you apparently don’t know either.”
“Nick and Max, maybe, except the Spiral hasn’t had a full practice in weeks...”
“Curiouser and curiouser.” She went back to pondering the “come and see” thing Jane had mentioned earlier. She knew she’d read it somewhere - possibly the Bible?
A string of very loud cursing from the kitchen area of the store, directed at the freshly broken dishwasher, snapped her out of her thoughts once again. She hadn’t seen the third J walk in, but the muddy tracks across the floor gave away his presence - to hear Quinn tell it, he’d been very mud-happy as of late. The tracks led, of all places, to the booth Trent had claimed about five minutes previously.
“What kind of meeting of the brains is *that?*” Jane boggled.
For his own part, Crowley was watching the booth intently. That was two of them. He half-wondered what was holding the third up. Chances were she wanted out of there as badly as he did, if for polar-opposite reasons.
They barely heard the bell above the door jingle under the further uproar from the kitchens:
“What the hell is this?”
“I don’t know, everything’s broken. And we’re out of pizza dough.”
“So why haven’t you started fixing it?!”
Meanwhile, the red-headed girl who had just walked in took one look at the booth in the corner and said, “Finally! Where have you been, anyway?” Sidestepping and following the mud all at once, she sat down next to the blond and glared expectantly at the lanky dark-haired guy.
><>
_Oh shit, *now* what do I do?_ After giving the situation a few moments’ thought, Crowley finally said, “Look, girls, I hadn’t exactly expected this to be a ‘come and see’ sort of event, but if you want to stick around-”
Pop.
Jamie White was left to wonder who bleach-washed his favorite shirt, how he got so much mud on his shoes, and who the sleepy-looking guy across the table was. One table back, a young man with faded blond hair and dull grey eyes had just turned up. He was easily ignored, at least for the moment.
Over the combined chaos of three separate arguments in the kitchen and the last gasping strains of the broken dishwasher, Daria thought she could pick out “Who Are You” from the radio.
“Well,” Jane said, “we hadn’t expected to come and see how Pizza King holds up under stress...”
Another subdued pop, with much the same effect: Trent Lane felt extremely tired, and somewhat curious as to why he was sharing a booth with Daria’s sister. Someone else had turned up at the booth behind them. This someone had a trim black beard and looked for all the world like some kind of businessman.
“Call it a side benefit,” Daria shot back, before turning her attention to Crowley. “Anyway, that’s my sister over there, and her brother, and one of my sister’s friends.” There was the slightest hint of a smirk in her eyes. “We just wanted to come and see what’s up with some people we care about.”
Pop the third: Quinn Morgendorffer looked at the mud on Jamie’s sneakers, and the little bit that had snuck onto her shoes in the process, and at the camouflage tank top she was wearing, and at Daria’s weird friend’s brother who could never remember her name. She opened her mouth to say something, not necessarily sensible, and failed to even get a squeak out.
Scarlett closed her eyes in relief. “Tell me, how did I manage to survive nearly two months with that girl?” she mused quietly.
“I’ll let you know when I’ve figured that out,” White responded in kind.
“Why are you here, then?” Sable asked, addressing Crowley. “Have we been recalled or something?”
“No. You’re on your own again. And I kind of doubt you need to ask why *I* got the honors...”
“Oh, so Below finally got tired of waiting, did they?” It had never been Scarlett’s style to beat around the bush - she much preferred just shoving the damn sword straight through the small animal hiding inside it. “They should try it like *this* sometime.”
As the three of them left, Crowley realized Daria and Jane were staring at him, and sighed.
“Congratulations, girls. You managed to do... about half of what I was sent here to get done. Not that I’m exactly happy about having to do any of it in the first place...”
“Who were those guys, anyway?” Jane wondered. “And while we're at it, who are *you?*”
<><
It was a lot to absorb for a five-minute car ride. Jane thought of several more questions based solely on the answer to the first one, and at least one of them was a subject Daria never wanted to talk about again. She figured on saving them until her friend was out of the car, and did so.
“Okay,” she started as she moved to the Bentley’s front seat. “Supernatural occurrences... aren’t exactly uncommon in Lawndale, but I still don’t get it. I mean, I’ve got the Four Horsemen-”
“Bikers,” Crowley corrected.
“Whatever. What I’m not seeing here is, why Lawndale? That’s part of what I’m not seeing, anyway.”
“I think it either came up as a good short-term idea, or as being very, very funny. Couldn’t tell you for certain.”
Jane thought about that for a while before asking her next question. “Still, couldn’t they have left on their own? I can’t figure out why you got dragged into it.”
“They probably would have found a way out eventually, yes, but... if you must know, I think I got dragged into it because I ruined their fun the first time.”
“What?”
“It’s a long story. Suffice to say the world nearly ended in August, and the only thing stopping it was the fact that nothing went according to plan. Well, not the plan everyone knew about.”
“Sounds like bureaucracy at its finest. Except for the end-of-the-world part.”
Crowley smiled slightly. “Two of them, actually. And don’t think I didn’t have help. I suppose you’d call it more of a ‘like-minded opposite number’ thing.” A pause for thought, then: “Wait a minute. You said something about supernatural occurrences earlier?”
“Yeah.”
“What did *that* mean?”
“Exactly that, weird stuff. There was a huge mess involving holidays a while back, and the whole town sang through a hurricane not long after. Daria doesn’t want to hear about one of them for the rest of her life and won’t tell me which that is, since that would mean discussing it. But I think, though there’s absolutely no chance of getting her to admit it, that this particular mess gave her a few good story ideas.”
“Glad to be of service.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you are. You mind if I try the music again?”
“If you want. But I’m warning you, the tapes are going to work out the same way they did last time.”
Jane considered. “I’d tell you not to be such a pessimist, but it is your car. Besides, I use that line enough on Daria.” With that, she opened the glove box and pulled out a tape at random.
“Funny, I thought you were *both* pessimists.”
“Well, if you ask her she’ll give you the dark cloud to match every silver lining. Sometimes she’s a little too good at it.” Before starting the tape, she treated it to a glare which suggested it had better play whatever had been recorded on it.
And it did. But that was the problem. She popped it out before much more than the opening strains of “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” played, and decided to read the tape’s label after all.
“Oh, bloody hell,” she said upon being informed it really was a Best of Queen cassette, and started laughing.
><>
“You never answered my question,” she finally said.
“Could be because I never got a chance... what was it again?”
“Where *were* you that whole time?”
“Apparently, that guy doesn’t go shopping very often. Or, for that matter, have much motivation to leave the house at all. Took me far too much effort just getting him on a regular sleeping schedule.”
“Narcoleptic?” She’d heard of the condition before, and vaguely remembered trying to cope with a particularly sleepy baron in France, back even before the arms-delivery business. That had worked out only marginally better than dealing with those fashion heads.
“No, just incredibly slothful.” The slim smile crept onto his face. “I did at least get a few people to notice something was up. All in all, though, it was pretty uneventful.”
“Too bad you didn’t get out sooner; you should’ve seen the job White pulled on that football stadium.” A pause for thought, then: “See, I don’t get how you can stand that much quiet. It gets on my nerves after a while.”
“Maybe it’s something to do with you always being surrounded by chaos.”
“Eh. Could be. So... now what’re you going to do?”
“I have a business to get back to. You know that.”
“You mean you’re sure it’s still going?”
“Just because I’ve been gone for six weeks doesn’t mean the demand for the product went down. You were in a school cafeteria, weren’t you? Those places are some of my top clients.”
“Oh. Point taken. I guess I should see if my job with the pulp magazine is still... you know, mine. If not, I know where I can get a truck and lots of weapons, and that’ll hold me over until I think of something new. The Middle East needs some action anyway.”
“Looks like we’re once again headed our separate ways. I’ll see you when I see you, I suppose.”
“Seconded.”
Of *course* they were splitting up again. Given the nature of their respective jobs, and the fact that they crossed paths less and less under normal circumstances these days, was it really possible for it to end any other way?
...Well, yes. It was. And she never wanted it to end like that again.
<><
Stacy glanced away from the mirror, in Quinn’s direction. “So, you’re sure it’s over now?”
“I think so. I hope so. Really, I don’t know.” Quinn had gone back to her usual pink shirt and jeans, and had informed Sandi that morning that it was her plan to burn those tank tops. “I tried to get Daria to explain it, but she hates talking about that stuff.”
“Her friend might know.”
“Yeah, she might. I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks.”
For her own part, Stacy was extremely relieved to see the relative dip in the club’s stress level. Over the last month or so things had gotten particularly bad - Quinn had been extremely aggressive in their style debates. It was almost like she’d been trying to pick fights. Whatever the problem had been, it seemed to be gone this morning, even though Sandi and Quinn were still harping at each other. That was what they *always* did.
“No, it’s probably not over,” Quinn mused. “Sandi’s definitely not going to let me off easily about those clothes, whether I actually burn them or not. Besides...” She left off in the middle of the sentence.
“Besides what?”
“I’m getting kind of sick of the Fashion Club anyway. I mean, if the point of different styles of clothes is to express yourself, and Sandi just wants to pin everybody to her definition of good taste, is there really a reason to stay in?” _And then there’s that whole tutor business,_ she added to herself.
“I see your point,” Stacy reflected after a few moments. “I’m not sure I agree with all of it, but I see your point.”
“That’s all right. You can think for yourself.” She glanced at her watch, then said, “I have to go grab my stuff. See you later.”
“Later!”
When Quinn opened her locker, she noticed an envelope sitting on top of her pile of books. She pulled out the things she needed for her first couple of classes before she opened it. Inside were a bracelet of some kind and a note:
So maybe I didn’t give you enough credit. You’ve got a brain, and you’re even using it - sort of. Can’t say the same for a couple of your friends. Chances are, you’d be better off without them. Oh, and for the record, I think red looks much better on you than pink. But I’m probably biased. -Scarlett
Quinn had no idea who Scarlett was meant to be, but whoever she was, she definitely had a good eye for jewelry. The bracelet mostly consisted of blood-red beads, and there were a few that had the same sheen as oil in a puddle of rainwater. She was about to put it on when the bell sounded, so she just carried it to homeroom.
It turned out the be an anklet anyway, so it was just as well.
Random Ending Notes:
*The soundtrack: “Narcissisima” - Don McLean, “Bohemian Rhapsody” - Queen, “Who Are You” - the Who, and “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” - Queen. Songs mentioned in passing: “Here, There, and Everywhere” - the Beatles and “Now I’m Here” - Queen (yet again!).
*I've done what I can to explain the basic conepts of both involved crossed-over things to confused fans of the other legions. If you'd like to look into it further: You've either got a book to buy (worth all the hunting it could take) or a TV series to look into. You probably don't want to go for watching Daria on Noggin/The N/whatever, as they cut up the episodes for strange reasons. I believe a series DVD is due out in 2003 sometime, but can't guarantee.
*The whole “come and see” business is indeed from the Bible. Revelations. Look for the Four Horsemen (since, after all, that’s what they are in the Bible...).
*Section titles... well... I sort of made the first one up. Suggestions will be accepted if you’ve got anything better. Second stolen from a Patricia Wrede book (I think it’s Calling On Dragons), and the third is a GO reference. Agnes Nutter, more specifically.
*I’d thought a crossover between these two things would be a good idea shortly after reading the book, but couldn’t see how - it even took me a while after I figured out the character comparisons for the Horsepersons. This is my third piece with the Horsepersons, the first one I’ve managed to get Crowley in, and my first *crossover* crossover. ‘Twas lots of fun to write. Thank you to the beta readers, and I won’t tell you what’s coming next because, to be quite honest, I really don’t know.