The Depths

[Near]

Jude pronounces "fight" in italics, and Near isn't sure he's bothered to frame anything using that word, fight. It's somehow too small and too dramatic at the same time, connected to both memories of high school parking lot brawls and the Hollywood moment when the main character grits his teeth and realizes that he can't keep running from [blank] forever. No, in his own head, he prefers to skirt around the action part and skip to the result: get rid of them. Gone. Dead or whatever, vanished into a void. Simple as can be.

In Jude's absence, maintaining that one-two-three pipedream simplicity has been as easy, easy, easy. Now he finally has to muck it all up and is discovering that he kind of hates the way it feels, but the alternative is to shrug and forget about it. Near has never been world champion of letting shit go. At least not the big shit.

"Why is that insane?" He's still probing for his real answer, the actual information that might dissuade him, rather than a kneejerk emotional lashout. But he can't help himself, tacks on a pointed, "What else are you doing?" (Convincing a few people. Nothing.)

[Jude]

Jude assumes that Near wants him to do the fighting, because of course Near would. Near is not cutting the figure of an action hero, and unless he does something even crazier like get out a gun, he probably figured Jude both can and would engage in some Harry Potter-style fight to the death. (Jude had been warded away from such fantasy fluff in his combination home schooling/boarding schooling, but hotel cable television has provided him this chunk of pop culture.) Near is thinking of the high school parking lot, and Jude is thinking of wizard robes.

"Well, first of all, I'm not sure I can be killed." He pulls out the biggest gun first, hoping to put Near off from the start. "And I'm not interested in finding out either," he adds hastily, before Near can propose some kind of elementary school science experiment. What Jude does involves taking the energy of life force and using it to bypass the laws of physics. So far he's demonstrated it consciously, by his own influence, but Jude isn't sure he's all conductor. He is certainly a conduit of things, things that exist a knife's edge away from them but are unseen and unfelt by anyone except him.

"Second of all I haven't ever fought anyone." Juliet was the fighter — brawler, Near would say, the one inclined to punch any schoolyard snot who cracked a test tube baby joke. She was only that for a few short years, a brief, violent adolescence. Near must think that Jude shares his sister's interests and capabilities. It's true, for some of them. But in a wizard battle Jude would likely panic. His path of least resistance plan here is exactly his speed.

[Near]

Doesn't know if he can be killed.

Of course he doesn't. Christ, what an absolute beast of a problem to be burdened with, uncertain mortality. Poor sweet Jude. Lucky for him, his good friend Near is right here to help him get to the bottom of the mystery ...

He heaves a sigh that's actually not as dramatic as it could be and leans back, stressing the plastic of his chair as he stargazes toward the ceiling (textured offwhite stucco, forever collecting cobwebs) for a few seconds, then runs a hand through his hair and straightens back up.

"I'm not trying to kill you." If only.

"Look, do you want to do something about this or don't you? Want to let them keep chasing you? Or ending the world? Or whatever the fuck they're doing. I don't know these people. Do you know the only possible way to mess them is up is for you to personally wade in and start throwing punches? Imagine, just the sake of conversation, you can have anything you want."

[Jude]

Uncertain mortality is a beast of a problem, thank you very much. Being not human, not quite, on an unprecedented level, is actually alienating and burdensome, much more so than being a sulky only child with an inheritance. Jude doesn't think these things consciously, but he feels a natural, childish opposition to unspoken scorn. "Good," Jude says waspishly. "I'm glad we can agree to that much." Good to know that his mortality won't be put to the test before he's stuffed into a wizard robe.

Imagine you can have anything you want.

Jude looks suddenly taken aback, as if Near has proposed something unspeakably vulgar. He has lived his whole life near-sighted, with blinders on, and the concepts of 'distance' and 'peripheral vision' bring on a wave of agoraphobic doom. Imagine you can have anything you want. That would involve wanting things clearly, beyond short-term impulses and idle musings. Jude does a lot of musing, not so much wanting.

"That's a lot of questions." He backs the conversation up into safer territory: first principles arguments and hair-splitting. Jude was born to end the world, and now, he doesn't want to end it. That is the entirety of his self-concept, and no one, even in the year he's been out, has really pushed back on it. Doesn't it just figure that Near, consummately annoying man, would be the first?

[Near]

It isn't "a lot of questions." It's a single question, director's cut: approached from a couple of different starting points, viewed from a couple of different angles, one story all the same.

That's the nub of Near's problem, really. He's been grasping this one question for too long; hasn't put it down long enough to stretch his fingers. Now his hand is cramped up around it and he can't let go. Or he would have already. He would have dropped the whole thing ages ago. As if he enjoys sitting here interrogating Jude. As if listening to Jude refusing to provide a single piece of useful information doesn't make him want to throw his empty glass at the kid's inexplicably surprised face. As if he doesn't have better things he could be doing.

"Pick one of them," he says flatly. "Start from there." (Toddler, toddler, toddler ... maybe if he holds Jude's hand they'll both make it across the street ...)

[Jude]

Near must absolutely enjoy it. Jude thinks Near is having the time of his life. Jude thinks this even though Near radiates a near-constant state of displeasure, or discomfort, or irritated confusion. He cannot imagine that anyone would behave this way for so long without deriving satisfaction or fulfillment or joy. Jude doesn't think he's the most likeable person in the world, but he's not hostile, he doesn't look half bad, and he doesn't want to hurt anyone. People usually try to get along with him. If they were children, Near would push Jude off the slide and the swings.

"Why don't we get dinner?" he says, exasperated as well as backed into a corner. "We can -- go somewhere. Or order in. Let's start with that." Jude is stalling for time, because he has been asked to turn in a homework assignment he didn't know was due. Imagine you can have anything you want.

"I just -- I just think." He warms up to the prospect of thinking in fits and starts. "That the most important part -- is not getting caught. Because there's -- one of me. And more of them." There, that's a practical assessment of the situation. Jude's shoulders droop as he relaxes slightly more. "I mean -- I understand if you want to fight them -- but you don't seem..." He gestures with an upturned palm, from the top of Jude's head to his feet. "...ready to fight either."

Maybe food will solve their problem. Cheap Chinese food. Drinking did not solve their problem last time, and driving didn't either. Maybe food. Doesn't eating with someone make them like you?

[Near]

Jude's inability to spin up an answer to a single largely hypothetical question is baffling. It is frustrating. There is something wrong with him -- a lack of imagination, a lack of nerve, god knows -- but Near was already well aware there is something wrong with Jude and has, spitting in the face of good sense, caused this meeting to precipitate despite that, so if he's frustrated with anyone, it should be himself.

Knowing this does nothing to keep the aggravation from building in him, bit by bit, a little more with each of Jude's hems and haws and speaks and pauses until, by the time he has reached the end of something like a noncommittal but full thought, it has expanded beyond Near's capacity to support it. As it *pops* into something floppy and disappointed, he rises up from his chair with an old man's sigh.

Dinner.

Poor, poor Guthrie, who has been lured into the belief that his boyfriend is normal.

Normal on the scale that West Coasters measure it by, anyway.

Near has been known to ask himself, usually very early in the morning before the sun comes up, if Guthrie is a person he will be happy to be with at the end of the world. Because it is still supposed to be ending, isn't it? And that's one of the questions someone with inside knowledge of the impending apocalypse should ask himself: who do you want to be with when it happens: anyone, no one, Guthrie? And if someone cornered him and forced him to answer, he would waffle for fifteen minutes like Jude just had until coming to some noncommittal conclusion.

"Fine," he says. "I had plans, but that's fine. I'll order dinner. If you answer one thing: do you think you can keep the world from ending without dealing with them?" Saving the world, Jude's original, vague raison d'etre, which Near had guessed ran in conjunction with, if not quite parallel, to his own.

[Jude]

There are a variety of things wrong with Jude, and yes, one of them is his inability to answer this question. But he is not so unique in this regard. Many people don't know what they truly want. They are full to the brim with what they're supposed to want, what they've been told to want, and those are the answers they parrot on command. Jude was like that too -- knowing what he was supposed to want until he didn't, and now one nebulous want has been replaced by another barely more concrete.

What do you want? Jude thinks accusingly. If it's so easy to know? This apartment does not seem to be filled with want. Two noncommittal people, angry that they cannot lean on the strong internal definitions of the other. Near makes Jude feel like he's dissolving, melting into formlessness. He certainly felt like a more decisive person before he went to the mall today.

"I mean, if tomorrow would be better--" Oh, that's even better, a whole additional day to think about the question instead of a few hours. Then he perks up with a question he can answer. "Yes. They can't end the world without me." Jude plants his elbows on his knees and leans forward. "It takes both of us -- me and my sister." And some very expensive machinery that's been decades in the making.

If the world was ending, would Near rather be with Jude or no one?

[Near]

There it is again. If the first full-body deflation hadn't already come and gone, this would do the job. And if the last one failed to flatten him completely, this finishes what it started.

"You're telling me if you just ... avoid them. Forever. Then everything goes on like normal." As normal as it can go on, if it ever was normal.

Near has been banking on an assumption that these people will, eventually, accomplish whatever it is they're trying to with or without Jude. That maybe it will take twice as long, but it will still pan out at some point. That Jude's desire to prevent the world from ending prematurely will require some semblance of action to achieve. That his and Near's desires for action run parallel despite their different ends. But, twist! Apparently Jude has the option to save the universe via eternal inaction. Isn't that lucky for him.

"So when you showed up at the Reaches, you were hoping Courtland would, what, buy you a plane ticket?"

[Jude]

If Near has been digging for gold, all this time, to no avail, he finally hits on it, in his last, deflated question. Were you hoping Courtland would buy you a plane ticket?

At the mention of Near's father, Jude's expression shifts. Instead of looking human and confused and young, the meat of his face alive and malleable, it changes, solidifying into something solid and more handsome and aloof. Jude lowers his eyelids and his eyelashes seem to get a little longer, as he tilts his chin down and speaks to Near as if Near could not possibly understand the depths of his question.

"Courtland would have had a plan," he says, the choppy nervousness of his voice now smoothed to glass. "He had something in mind. I just don't know what. And apparently he didn't tell you." A little sadness flickers in Jude's eyes at this, but it's sadness for himself, not for Near. Jude really did like Courtland -- as much as one could be attached to a warm stranger from one's youth (which is a great deal, as such specters are glow within from idealism and uncorrupted potential.)

Jude has balanced the risk of potential solutions against their rewards, and risk is mitigated by trust. He trusted Courtland, enough that if Courtland had told him to go running into the fire, Jude could have been persuaded. He is what he is born to be -- a weapon, and weapons are not very good at thinking for themselves. Jude is the sword in the stone, and he does not like Near's attitude, and so he'd rather run and hide indefinitely than find himself wielded by so shaky a hand.