Family Ties

I was filled with a ballooning dread as Eris shooed me out of the car and I ascended the stairs to Mark’s third-floor apartment in Holland Park. I fished the spare key out of his lockbox – he had used the same combination for everything since he was seventeen – and opened the door. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting…

… but it wasn’t the far-more-familiar-than-it-really-ought-to-be sight of my cousin’s pale, bony, naked arse draped over one arm of his sofa.

Wincing, and wishing desperately for eye bleach, I closed the door behind me and cleared my throat. Mark squealed and jumped up – fortunately a predictable reaction, so I was able to pre-emptively close my eyes as he frantically searched for something with which to cover himself.

‘Caledonia!’ he exclaimed. ‘I… erm… that is to say, did we have plans, or…’

‘It’s a surprise visit, Mark,’ I said. ‘Very much a surprise.’   

As he stammered something about going to find some clothes, I realized that it had been a very long time since something like this had happened. In the old days – oh god, 2012 was “the old days” now – I would often check in on Mark (at the urging of his mother) and find him sleeping off the aftermath of a bender – which led with uncomfortable frequency to him passing out naked somewhere in his apartment. Sometimes I would find a similarly hung-over woman, and it was with a kind of morbid curiosity that I cast my eyes around the flat looking for signs of one.

But even though I had popped by from time to time while Dan and I had been visiting the Academy outside York and some business or another had brought me to London… I actually couldn’t remember the last time I had found Mark in such a state. Nowadays when I visited in the morning, if he hadn’t already left for work, he had been drinking a cup of tea and reading the Financial Times. I don’t think we had had an encounter like this since… well, since he had joined the Order of the Oncoming Storm.

I heard the sound of the tap running, and splashes – Mark was clearly trying to wake up. I scrutinized the couch, attempting to discern the probability that my cousin’s genitals had touched different parts of it to avoid the risk of sitting on those spots, before opting instead to just pull up one of the dining-table chairs. He emerged about five minutes later.

‘So Eris sent me,’ I said. Mark looked surprised. ‘They said you… might need checking in on.’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ he muttered.

‘What did they do to you?’ I asked.

He looked oddly pensive, taking a breath before replying. ‘They showed me who I was.’

‘… damn, I mean I always figured they were a good lay, but obviously I never tested that…’

‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘it wasn’t anything like that.’ I cocked an eyebrow and gestured for him to say more. He closed his eyes for a second before reopening them. ‘They brought me to the Grotto.’

Well. Wasn’t expecting that.

I momentarily wondered whether Eris had taken Mark into the Sex or the Violence wing – the former seemed more likely, considering. But I was rather surprised to learn that the answer was “neither.” Apparently they had stayed in the center room, and Eris had given him some sort of experimental drug which sent him on a vision; though what he saw, he didn’t tell me.

‘And so I realized that I was never going to beat Loki or Amelia or Mia or… whatever combination of personas show up until I’d reconciled my own Persona with my Shadow.’

‘When did you get into Jung?’ I asked, impressed.

‘Three days ago,’ he said. ‘And… I tell you, cousin, it’s been a fuck of a three days.’

‘Looks like it,’ I said with a smirk.

He waved his hand. ‘I don’t just mean the drinking – though, God knows that’s been part of it. No, I mean that I’ve been doing a lot of thinking with the drinking. Thinking about what I need to do, who I need to be, if I’m going to achieve my goal.’

‘And that goal is…?’

He looked at me as if I’d just declared two plus two to be five. ‘Stopping the Institute from bringing about that future,’ he said, slowly and deliberately. ‘Making what changes we can now to bring the Amoralists down before… whatever bloody change happened to make that magical apocalypse possible. That was why I was all-in on the Order… or at least it’s how I justified it to myself.’

Well, that’s new. ‘Justified it to yourself?’

He leant back. ‘Really truly, it was just about getting Father to accept me again. He didn’t speak to me for years after The Incident, not until he needed me. And even then, it wasn’t until I took up with Urquhart and got into politics that he began speaking to me properly.’

Well, that’s VERY new.

I couldn’t think of what to say; this was a level of candor I’d never seen from Mark. He continued. ‘So at any rate, I found myself thinking: well, if what I want is to stop the Institute’s future, what exactly can I do? I mean, the Order achieved most of its goals; Elisha’s still locked up somewhere, we deposed Ryan Sunset… but, well, you saw the same future I did, it just took a different form with different leaders. The Order’s approach…’ He frowned. ‘Is it “isn’t going to work” or “didn’t work”, since we went to the future, but in our past?’

‘I have not had enough coffee to parse that one,’ I said.

‘You’ve been living in America too long, cousin,’ he said with a grin. ‘You used to drink tea like a proper British lady.’

‘Says the man who orders a Manhattan every time he goes to a bar!’

He chuckled. ‘Touché. Well, at any rate… it’s fortuitous you’re here, even if it would have been preferable for you to announce your plans to visit…’

The mental image of a pair of pale ivory buttocks flashed unwelcomed into my mind. ‘For both of us,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

‘Eris and I touched upon the point of preventing the future,’ he said, ‘and they observed that… well, of anyone on this world, you’re probably the best suited to it. You’ve seen the future, and you managed to stymy both Order and Institute eight years ago. So I suppose I should ask: how can I help?’

I was taken aback. Not least because…

… because I had given almost no thought to how to stop the dark future.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like I’d done absolutely nothing. My plan, such as it was, had been to try and bring Angelica around early, turn her off the path to Amorality. But our encounter at WrestleFest had apparently not had the desired effect, as her future-self, transported back to the past, was now wreaking havoc in HVW. So too was J.Rish; though precisely how that worked was unclear, since present-Rish was dead. I couldn’t reach out to him if I tried, much as I might want to.

But for the most part, the plans to save the future had been… well, shelved.

Which felt really fucking shitty.

And now, with Mark looking at me so earnestly, awaiting my advice, I felt like a truly terrible person.

I briefly thought about spinning some tale about how all that I was doing in CWF would serve the cause; defeating Ripper could only be good, and Angelica’s fixation against me probably meant that my victory wouldn’t be a happy thing for the Amoralists. But no; Mark deserved better than that bullshit.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. To my surprise, he looked crestfallen, and with a pang I realized that he had interpreted my words to mean that I had no use for him. ‘I mean… I have no idea how to stop the future. Other than countering the Amoralists’ plans… and I have no idea what those are. Save that they seem to involve CWF, or maybe HVW now, and…’ I didn’t have a followup to that.

‘And so you’re lining up to take down the Ripper,’ he said, nodding.

‘I…’ I hadn’t even thought about it, but… well, one of the things we had learned in the future was that legends had power.

If I could do this, if I could take down the Ripper and claim CWF’s top prize… if I could then hold onto it at Last Call…

… I would be inscribed in history as CWF’s final champion.

A legend.

CWF had been central to the Amoralists’ plans in the future. Perhaps if the one standing tall at the end of it all was the woman who stood alone against Institute and Order…

… maybe it might make a difference.

But it wouldn’t be enough. I knew that. First of all I had to get it done against Ripper, and even if I did I would have to weather whatever was next.  And there might yet be something else I could do…

We had been silent for a few minutes. I spoke. ‘So, you never did tell me – did you actually leave the Order?’

He nodded. ‘Urquhart was… more graceful than I thought. Spencer was furious, but I think part of him was happy to be shot of me. And my father… well, he hasn’t spoken to me in three days.’

‘How’re you feeling on that?’

He leant back. ‘I mean… look, if his love were conditional on my obedience, then was it really love?’

… that’s REALLY new. I just looked at him, thoroughly taken aback. ‘But… you always said family…’

‘Family is everything to me,’ he said. ‘But… well…’

‘Family is… complicated,’ I said in a low tone. A thought was occurring, one that I might not have dared contemplate had Mark not shown such insight.

… damn, Eris, what DID you do to him?

We talked a while longer, before he requested that he be allowed to sleep off the rest of his hangover. I obliged him, and as I stepped out of his flat, I took a deep breath and texted Eris, asking them to track down a point of contact. Their only response was “Are you sure?” – by itself unusual, since their usual texting style involved a lot more emojis and profanity. I replied in the affirmative, and they sent the info as I was getting into my cab. With a deeper breath, I crafted another message and sent it to the number Eris had procured.

My next stop was an autograph session. Interacting with the fans was a nice distraction from the mounting anxiety I felt, but my heart wasn’t in it as much as it should have been; to mix a metaphor, it was too busy being stuck in my throat.

Midway through the session, I felt my phone vibrate; ever the professional, I didn’t check it until we were done. But the very second we were, I whipped out my phone and read the response.

‘The Aubrey Arms. 7pm.’

And then, as I was reading it, a follow-up.

‘Can’t wait to see what THIS is about.’

I took a deep breath.

Hope you know what you’re doing, Cali, I thought to myself.

What I can, I thought back.

I arrived at the Aubrey Arms tavern, an upscale place in Mayfair, around 6:45, and ordered a glass of sherry – somehow I got the feeling that this wasn’t the sort of place to make Lemon Drops. I was fidgeting, with nerves that had nothing to do with my fight against the Ripper.

And as I was looking at my phone to check that I had the right place, I heard a voice behind me.

‘Well, now, this is a surprise; I thought this might be some sort of a prank… or perhaps an ambush.’

I turned to face the speaker. ‘Evening, Jezebel.’

My half-sister, dressed in a custom-fitted grey suit, smirked. ‘Cali.’ She sat beside me and snapped her fingers at the bartender, who abandoned the cocktail he had been working on and hurried to get her a glass of scotch. ‘My sheer morbid curiosity,’ she said, ‘will last the length of this beverage. So this is the point where you tell me why the fuck you wanted to meet with me. As I recall, the last time we met didn’t go so well.’

‘An impulse, I suppose,’ I said, taking a sizable sip of my sherry. She matched my motion, never once breaking eye contact. ‘I’m sure you saw CWF’s broadcasts from 2326?’

She smirked. ‘Not every day you see your own neck get snapped.’

‘I suppose I thought… well, given that, that you might…’

‘What?’ she said, a massive grin breaking out on her face. ‘Want to prevent the future where I live three hundred years, most of it as a literal queen? When all I have to do to prevent my death is make sure I kill Urquhart before he merges with the Tormented Soul? Oh, sister, you really don’t know me.’

‘But I want to,’ I said. That shook her. Her grin turned into a frown. ‘Look… I mean, you’re my sister, and I don’t even know your real name.’

‘It’s Jezebel,’ she spat.

I shook my head. ‘Not always. That was the name the Institute gave to you, and it was the function the Order wanted you to play. You can’t always have been Amoral.’

‘Oh, what would you fucking know about it?’ she snarled. ‘You, who grew up a stupid girl playing with dolls and going to dance classes and gossiping about boys? I have always been Amoral, you idiot, it’s all I was ever meant to be, and I fucking like it.’

Her scotch was half gone at this point. ‘What my – our father did to you was unacceptable. What your mother did was unacceptable.’

‘My mother molded me into the instrument that would take down the Institute,’ she spat. ‘To infiltrate them, to rise in their ranks, to be positioned to strike… but then you came along. You couldn’t let your fucking piece of man-meat go, and you ruined it. Because of you, there was no Starchild for me to marry, no role for me, no use for me…’ Her nose twitched. ‘You made me useless in the eyes of my own fucking mother, you reprehensible bitch.’

I felt a pang. ‘I… I am so sorry that that happened to you.’

‘Save it,’ she snarled. She slammed back the rest of her scotch. ‘This was a mistake. I don’t know why I thought it would be amusing.’ She rose and stepped away from the bar. ‘I may have intended to betray the Institute,’ she said, ‘but they accepted me… the fools. Amorality is all I have. And it suits me just fine.’

She shoved her chair in and turned to go. I called after her. ‘We’re family, Jezebel.’

She stopped in her tracks, and slowly turned around. She laughed. ‘I was wrong. This was amusing.’

I continued. ‘Look, blood isn’t everything, but it’s something. For better or worse, we’re sisters. And Amorality doesn’t have to be all you have. Just… think about it.’

‘I won’t,’ she said with a smirk, and swept out.

I turned back to my drink, swirling the last of it. ‘Family is complicated,’ I said, as I finished the last of it.