Wordsworth – Chapter 4

Lisa's apartment is as soothing as ever.

It may be the dredges of the memories from the time I spent here while she was still piecing me back together, or it may be just another perk of being a Thinker who can apply her power to interior design, but the warm tone of the eggshell white walls, the beech flooring, the thoroughly cushioned wooden sofa and chairs… They all are home in a way that a place with piles of dirty dishes and forgotten beer cans has stopped being.

Seeing her opening the door in her gray, fuzzy pajamas and slippers, her eyes bleary with interrupted sleep, just adds to the impression.

I should feel guilty, bashful about intruding.

I don't.

I feel…

Welcomed.

"Are you going to stand there all night? Some of us still have human metabolisms, you know?"

"At the rate you ingest both coffee and painkillers, I don't think that's as true as you think."

"Smartass. You're lucky I'm still not up to a hundred percent verbal sparring."

"Oh, they say one should capitalize on good fortune wherever it's found, don't they?"

"Tay, if you start misusing your power to throw trite quotes at me, I'll make sure you are officially designated as Fortune Cookie."

I laugh.

Then I hug her.

It's a deliberate decision, something that takes me effort to do, but the other me, the one lost in stories, reclaimed this. She had lost a lot of memories, but along them, she lost many reasons to be afraid, to not want to touch others, to avoid a hug, a pat on the back… I have regained those reasons, but that doesn't mean I have to lose what a simpler me had.

Not anymore.

Lisa stiffens for a moment, which tells me she's surprised by this, that she'd expected me to pull back, to retreat rather than push forward. She had expected the current me not to hug her anymore.

I am not at all ashamed to say that surprising the Thinker seven adds a thrill of pleasure to the warm embrace. Really, I can't wait to rub it in her face.

"You couldn't let me have this nice moment without adding it to your arsenal, could you?" She grumbles as she reads my mind, her fingers digging on the words that make up my dress, a particular passage from The Little Mermaid flowing beneath her touch.

"You would do the same if you were in my place," I murmur, my head buried in her blonde hair.

"Which is how I know it's not a good thing to do."

"Self-hatred doesn't befit you."

"Self-awareness, though, seems to be part of the package."

I lean back and look at her reproachfully. I don't know how much of that's a joke, nor how much is something that she only allows herself to say through jokes. It's just… I don't think it's funny.

"Tay, you really don't need to make a big thing out of this," she says, dejected, her shoulders slumping over my arms still circling her.

"I'm pretty sure I'm contractually obligated to make sure the girl who rescued my soul doesn't get stuck in Hades or something. It's how these things work."

"Nope, the way things work, I'll nag you incessantly until you get fed up with me, turn around to look me in the eye, and then that dooms me to forever remain as a shade."

"Orpheus was a chump."

"And Eurydice an amateur. Seriously, I could've had him turning around in the first ten minutes [tops.]"

I hug her once again, tighter than before.

"Have I told you how much I missed being able to make these jokes?" I ask her while I rest my chin on her shoulder.

"What? You mean, overly pretentious, full of literary references, and actually not that funny jokes?"

"Yes."

"Ah. You've come to the right place, then."

We laugh in each other's arms until one of the other doors in the landing starts opening, and we panickily rush into her apartment.

***

I sit on her sofa, and Lisa is prompt to sit with her back against her armrest and her feet on my lap.

Then she wiggles her eyebrows.

…

And now she wiggles her toes.

"Fine," I grumble.

As careful as I always am, I grab her right foot, my thumbs on her sole, the other fingers on top of it, and I begin to trace slow, firm circles on her.

Then she moans, and it certainly feels different from all the other times I've done this before.

"You are… quite vocal," I try to comment nonchalantly.

"That's what [she] said."

"… That doesn't work. At all."

"Give me a break; you've woken me up in the middle of the night. At least wait till tomorrow to demand my A game."

I hum noncommittally, and I reach the spot below the ball of her foot that's right between the big toe and the others. It's sensitive, and too much pressure makes it painful, so I slow down and—

… That's a long moan.

With a hint of purring.

Is she doing this [on purpose?]

"Tay, I swear to God, it's like this is your actual superpower…" she murmurs, her eyes closed, an arm draped across her face.

"I got a lot of practice. Care to explain why, by the way?"

The arm slides up just a bit, brushing her hair out of the way as her eyes open with languid, deliberate grace.

The slit of green is more eye-catching than I remember.

"Touching another person has demonstrable therapeutical effects—and being touch-starved has been proven to be awful in far too many ways."

"Am I supposed to believe that you taught me how to massage your feet for my own good?"

"Oh, no, not at all. I could've just hugged you or slept in the same bed—"

"Which you did."

"Which I did. The massage was just icing on the cake. Also, I don't trust karma's one-day-delivery policy, so I try to expedite things whenever I can."

"Obviously. That must be the reason you've given yourself up to the police so many times."

"Hey, if the police hadn't been replaced by a pseudo-fascist organization obsessed with brainwashing the public and having different laws applied to the very subset of people I belong to…"

"Laws that [benefit you."]

"It's the principle of the thing, Tay. You can't expect me to submit to those enforcing laws so fundamentally contrary to the very principles this nation was founded upon."

I look at her, my eyebrows having climbed so high they may need some oxygen and a couple of sherpas.

She smiles that smug thing at me that she always held back when I was too afraid of pretty girls for reasons I had yet to understand.

"Do you remember when you taught me how to massage someone without being too rough?" I ask with as much innocence as I am able to fake.

"… Yes?"

"And how to be firm so that the massage doesn't turn ticklish?"

"Tay, don't you dare—"

I dare.

In short order, I have a writhing, kicking, laughing blonde on my lap. It's about as fun as it sounds, except that kicks don't do much to me since I basically turned into compressed wood pulp, so, extra fun.

"L-let go! You! Jerk!" Lisa manages to demand in-between bouts of laughter.

"Sorry, it appears your package of karma has been as promptly delivered as could be managed, dear customer. You'll have to endure it for a while."

"Not! Karma! You! Jerk!"

"I've had a great teacher."

It seems that's the last provocation Lisa needs to go on the (actually effective) counterattack, because she lunges forward and starts tickling my armpits.

Touch is a weird thing for me. Some things are not the same, and they no longer affect me how they used to do. Cold is a non-issue, and so is heat, so long as it doesn't reach a point that would've also been dangerous to humans.

Touch? Human touch?

That's still as much of an annoyance as anyone who's been four years old and tangled with schoolyard friends knows to be.

Thankfully.

So Lisa and I roll around on her sofa, each one trying to get the other out of breath (which, as I don't need to breathe and I don't feel like reminding her, seems to be tilted in my favor), each one laughing harder than we have in months if not years, until we finally fall off the abused, white cushions to the thankfully not that painful wooden floor.

I fall below her, my body cushioning her, and for just a moment, I'm caught off guard as I stare into the grinning face of the pretty girl above me, the tip of her nose almost touching mine, her green eyes twinkling with as much merry as I've ever seen in them.

And then the merry turns to mischief, and, of course, she starts tickling me yet again.

"Hey! Truce! Truce!"

"I see no Leviathan in here," she answers in a sing-song that I'm not in the mood to appreciate. Not with the way my sides are aching at the moment.

Brute ratings aren't all they're cracked up to be.

"Lisa! Stop!"

"Oh? I guess we just found out how to neutralize your power. Beware, do-gooder, for thou shall fall prey to the might of tickles!"

All right, that one's funny.

Still a jerk, though.

Also… Not quite true, seeing how quickly I can speak when I need to—

"Now one day it happened that the princess's golden ball did not fall into her hands, that she held up high, but instead it fell to the ground and rolled right into the water. The princess followed it with her eyes, but the ball disappeared, and the well was so deep that she could not see its bottom."

And there's no well, and certainly no Frog Prince waiting for a kiss, but the spoiled princess was already here, so adding a rolling ball that just so happens to slide beneath her bare foot as I shift my weight…

Lisa squawks as she trips on the golden ball that's actually black, and I catch her as she falls, her body beneath mine, the tip of my nose almost touching hers.

My smile broadens, hers disappears, and I spend quite a while non-verbally explaining the notion of karma to her

***

"You are awful," she says, as melodramatic as ever.

"I've had a great teacher."

"… I'm not sure this is something I want to actually know, but did you ever watch Star Wars?"

"The old ones. Why?"

"No, it's nothing… apprentice."

"… I'm pretty sure you just cast yourself as the Emperor."

"Yup."

"And that would make me Darth Vader."

"Anakin, actually, but same difference."

"I'm also pretty sure Darth Vader never gave the Emperor a foot rub," I say with a bit of dryness to my tone as I keep doing the very thing that started this whole incident. Because, apparently, Lisa keeps a very detailed account of her karmic balance, and the last ten minutes shoot it straight past the 'deserves a reward' line.

"He was always wearing a bathrobe. Pretty sure he pampered himself quite a bit."

"With that skin?"

"Imagine if he hadn't."

I chuckle, abandoning the conversation for a moment as I trace between the tendons that go from the top of her toes to her ankles, and she purrs.

"Actually…" she starts, and I dread what comes next.

No good ever comes from something that begins with 'actually.'

"Have you, you know, tried it? With Star Wars novels?" she finishes.

On the one hand, she isn't mansplaining anything to me (don't ask me how she does it: she manages); on the other… Power mechanics discussion. My favorite subject.

"I have."

"And…?"

I press the knuckles of my middle and pointer finger beneath the bridge of her left foot, seeing her toes curl as I do.

"And… I can absorb them. I remember them after I do; that part works just fine."

"But you can't give me a sweet lightsaber."

"Why would you ever lick a lightsaber?"

"… First: dad jokes are beneath you. Second: because I would get an awful amount of money off lonely people with very specific fetishes."

"I'm never getting into the internet ever again."

"You are a wiser woman than I am."

We settle into a bit of a comfortable silence for a while, and my hands go from her feet to her calves, the muscle taut beneath my touch, not because of fitness, but because of that tension she always tries to hide.

"You know, it may be a mental block," she says, and her tone lets me know she's already feeling the late hour, even as the adrenalin from our impromptu tickle-fight starts to fade.

"It may," I agree with words that are more punctuation to her monologue than anything else.

"Think about it: so far, everything you can manifest has something to do with what you read before getting your powers, but it's not always something you actually read. Just… Connections. I'm pretty sure you can use the whole English literary corpus, aside from any fairy tales tangentially related."

"That seems to be the case."

"But… But what's actually the mechanism behind it? Does your power access your emotions? Do they shape what comes out? It benefits from an audience, so it may use that as a way to better determine the adequate manifestation…"

"Lisa, you're about to drift off."

She pauses, blinking slowly up at me as her calves soften with each press of my fingers.

"So am I."

She keeps looking at me, something in her eyes that I can't quite decipher, not even after so long having her as my only anchor, the only solid thing in a world that kept fading in and out of old, yellowed pages with crumbling margins that smell of long afternoons cuddled up in front of the fireplace, that sound like crinkling—

"Tay, can you tell me a story?"

The fugue recedes for a moment, and I look at green eyes lidded with pleasant drowsiness.

"A story?" I finally ask without ever straying from her eyes.

"One of yours. Please. I don't want any that may remind me of—you know, I just want to hear your voice. Is that weird?"

I keep looking at her, lying on her sofa, her legs over mine.

"No. No, I don't think it's weird."

"Good," she smiles. And then she claps.

And the lights turn off.

"… You are far too dramatic for your own good," I tell her.

"I like to think it's just the right amount of drama. You know, to make the comedy more incisive."

"Who's the storyteller here?"

"You are! So… Can you start?"

There's too much darkness to make out her expression, but the tone… It's childlike, in that way that so few of us manage to not turn into a mockery after a certain age. It has wonder, and expectations, and…

And I smile down at the pretty girl, relieved that she can't see me.

"Once upon a time…"

"Oh, those are the best ones!"

"I agree. So, once upon a time, there was a little girl. The girl didn't think she was that little, but everybody told her she was, and so she started believing it.

"She would ask to read books, hard books, and they would tell her: 'These aren't books for a little girl such as you, try again when you grow up.' And the girl would harrumph and puff up her chest, but go away to look for other things to do while she grew up.

"She would ask to help her mother, but the mother would look at her kindly and tell her: 'Thank you, sweetheart, but you are still so small, so young, and you don't have to do hard things until you grow up.' And the girl would try not to look sad, because she had only wanted to help, and didn't think one could ever be too young to do that. But it was what her mother told her, and so, she went away to look for something else to do while she grew up.

"There came a day when her father arrived home. He was alone, and sad, and the little girl wanted to help. She should have been able to do it, because this wasn't anything like her mother's work; she only had to let her father be sad until he felt better. But when she tried, her father said: 'Thank you, kiddo, but you can't understand. You are too young, too small, and even if you feel sad, it's not the same.' And so he went to feel sad by himself, and the little girl wished she had already grown up.

"Time passed, but no matter how much, she always heard the same things. She was too little, too small, and some even said that she would always be, that no matter how much she grew up, she could never be the girl who took care of things, who helped her father.

"The girl believed those things. She had nobody to tell her otherwise.

"And there came a day when it seemed those words would be true, would always be true, because a cruel fairy made it so the girl lost as many years of her life as times people had told her she was too small. And with that curse, the girl felt that she was no more than a toddler, speaking only from time to time, her mind always lost in a childish fairy tale.

"And, as much as her mind was lost, so was the girl. Far from home, because she couldn't read the signs or remember her house, the girl wandered, always feeling too small, always fearing those who were so big, so much more than she had ever been able to be.

"And she had reason to fear, because, as small as the girl now was, she found places where no little girls should go to. Places with cruel people who didn't care if the girl was a grown-up. Places where nobody told her she was too small, because the wolf didn't care about how young Little Red was.

"Places as dangerous as the woods in the middle of the night, places where people who couldn't live in the light had gone to.

"Places where the girl knew she would never grow up.

"And there the girl met a fox.

"Foxes are tricky things, and most of the time, they are as dangerous as wolves, but they are clever and see a world other than what others see, and sometimes this means they are very much unlike wolves.

"Because a wolf sees food and eats you, but a fox… A fox sees a lot of things. And sometimes it isn't hungry.

"So, the fox approached the girl and asked: 'What are [you] doing here? Don't you know this place isn't safe?'

"And the girl, after a while, because it had been quite long since she last spoke and was out of practice, said: 'I don't know. The fairy cursed me, and now I only know things little girls know.'

"The fox laughed at first, thinking there was a joke in those words, something she wasn't quite understanding, but then she looked at the girl's eyes and saw she wasn't lying. That what she had told her was the truth.

"And it was a good thing the fox wasn't hungry that day, because she smiled at the girl and told her: 'It's not what you know, it's what you learn.'

"So she took her away from the dangerous place, to another place that might have been dangerous at other times, and the fox decided, for reasons only foxes understand, to care for the girl.

"Until one day, the curse was lifted, because that's what happens to curses, and the girl remembered all the years she had lost. The fox was happy, satisfied, because she had managed to help the girl and defeat the fairy, which was something to celebrate for as long as the fairy didn't know she had been defeated. But… Foxes know a lot of things. But not all of them.

"And so the fox didn't know that, before the curse, the girl had been told many times that she was little, small, unimportant. Weak.

"But the girl did. The girl remembered each and every time."

I pause. The words are still flowing beneath my mind, still aching to be left out. The tale is incomplete, and something in me will be viscerally unsatisfied if I let it die out without a proper ending.

I close my eyes, open my mouth, and let it finish.

"But she also remembered the fox.

"Because the fox had never told her she was too small. She had cared for her, helped her, been patient as she learned and relearned. The fox had watched her grow long before the curse was lifted.

"The fox understood many things about the girl. She had helped put her back together, after all.

"What the fox didn't understand… what the girl didn't want the fox to understand, was that the fox was the first one to not tell the girl how small she was. That the fox had always expected her to be big, smart, strong.

"That the fox hadn't broken a curse.

"But two.

"And that no matter how many fairies ever came after her, the girl would never, ever, forget the fox that let her grow up."

My voice drifts off, the feeling of the story flowing through me fading away like the sound of the words.

I open my eyes, used to the twilight darkness of Lisa's living room.

She's sleeping.

Her face is so peaceful, so relaxed, that it's hard to believe this is the same whirlwind of activity and unrelenting words that always greets me in the morning. This is a Lisa very few ever have the chance to see.

So I let my hands rest on top of her bare calves, no longer massaging but still feeling her smooth skin, her soothing heat.

And I open my mouth one last time just as the thread of the tale frays into another myriad images put to ever insufficient words.

"Because that's what always breaks curses in stories. Even if the fox didn't know, even if the girl didn't understand, even if it was one-sided.

"It was true love.

"It doesn't happen every day."

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This work is a repost of one of my first commissions, and one that I'm both grateful for and proud of. It can be found on QQ, SV, and AO3, and, of course, on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true), where the latest chapter will show up a week before it comes out for everyone else. It is currently 33 chapters and 94k words long and approaching its final arc at a good pace, so I hope you'll look forward to learning about Wordsworth's ending.

As I don't have access to Webnovel's "premium" features, the original italics in the text will be conveyed through the use of square brackets. I'm sorry about the inconvenience.

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