As I’m spinning my wheels deciding what to do now that The Audacity Gambit has finished its run, please enjoy a short story from the same world, some years later. This was originally published on Patreon: July 23, 2021.
Ian did his best to have no regrets. For example, he’d decided not to go to college or trade school, something all the other Court kids had done. Even Michael had gone and gotten a nice, two-year business school degree and Hannah was spending her gap year deciding which university to attend. With the assets their parents had set aside before fucking off into the Sidhe they’d had their pick of schools, so everyone figured they might as well take advantage of the opportunity. For Ian though, the idea of faking his way through another two-to-four or more years of school sounded like a hell selected just for him.
And he didn’t regret it. Not really, once he picked up the emotion and looked at it objectively.
He was also between jobs, but that was a clear-cut case of being twenty and knowing he didn’t have to work if he didn’t want to. Sure, there were jobs out there that seemed fun, or useful but in a small town like this, the odds of having a manager who wasn’t a living political cartoon ran slim. The supermarket job doing night stocking had been really enjoyable, actually, and he’d entertained small daydreams of play-acting at normalcy. Then, the girl who’d been the king bully of his grade was promoted to shift lead and that had been that. At least she hadn’t gone into nursing.
It’s not like he didn’t work, or educate himself. Having a totally open schedule allowed him to do things like run errands for the old folks who spent their day parked in front of the café next to the supermarket. He’d made friends with them over his cigarette breaks. Since they weren’t allowed to smoke in front of the shop anymore, the gang of grey hairs would post up on milk crates with the grocery store employees around the side of the building. They all owned old houses that needed work of one kind or another and loved teaching Ian the things he would have learned in shop class if his school hadn’t cut the program his freshman year.
If you were willing to live outside of the regular nine-to-five you also opened up your day to things like evening lectures streaming straight from the UK. Ian also had gotten to know everyone who worked in the library, the folks who lived at the park, and the workers who did things like repaint street markers in the middle of the night. He’d joke to his sister that he was getting his degree from the school of street smarts and Hannah would roll her eyes so hard he could hear them over the phone.
“You don’t have to justify it.” Hannah was, he often thought, an annoying combination of observant, nosy, and smart.
And he wasn’t justifying it. Not really, but it felt like a knee-jerk reaction to the world’s expectations in general.
It was absolutely easier, overall, to pretend his main interests were video games and like, animal facts—especially if he was trying to fill the conversational space in a date. It was more interesting listening to other people talk anyway. For however much talking got done.
He understood why Michael and Emily, especially Emily, kept jobs and schedules. Michael needed structure as a balance to the freedoms he allowed himself. Emily had a good boss, liked the simplicity of her work, and absolutely would have had a breakdown if she didn’t have the predictable unpredictability of a coffee shop job.
For all that he tried to live without regrets, part of Ian’s brain felt itchy and searching. He knew he was in a holding pattern and fine with it on an intellectual level but even so, it bothered him. He’d tried to talk to the hare about it, laying half-in, half-out of the arbour with his feet kicking out in the mundane world and his elbows resting on a cushion in a stone hallway at the Institute. The hare was, as always, less than helpful.
“From what I’ve observed, the most exciting things in a life happen by accident and are often not the desired outcome of a choice.” The hare had brought a small blanket with him and had set up a sort of tea picnic on the floor next to Ian. The scones were annoyingly just out of his reach.
“So, something that sucks at the time but you can look back on as an adventure?” Ian rolled onto his back, staring up at the plastered ceiling. “Like what happened with Emily, or the time this guy I know got blackout drunk, ended up on a plane and came to in Illinois?”
The hare sipped his tea carefully. “I’d say that Emily would probably not classify what happened as an ‘adventure,’ and it’s probable that your friend does not look back fondly on his incident either.”
“No,” Ian agreed. “He thought it was pretty fucked.”
The hare ran a claw through his whiskers, thinking. “You could, possibly, control the random outcomes of an impulsive choice, with enough planning—although that then brings into question how impulsive the choice truly is.”
Ian felt a bug land on his leg, out in the courtyard of the Royal Oak Court trailer park, and hoped it wasn’t the biting kind. He lay quietly a while, listening to the hare pour more tea and eat the last of the scones.
“You could though,” he spoke suddenly and could hear the clatter of the hare’s cup on its saucer. “You could plan and set things up, and then just wait. Like, let yourself forget about most of it, and just wait for the first domino to fall and set it all off.”
“That you could. But it’s still possible it would all still be, as you said, ‘pretty fucked,’”
Flopping back over on his stomach Ian looked at the hare. “Do not let Emily hear you swear, she will instantly blame me.”
Packing everything into a children’s wagon that one of the Court kids had given him during a spring cleaning, the hare shrugged his narrow shoulders. “And she would be correct, Ian. But I’m certain she’d forgive you as that’s both your nature and hers.”
Ian smiled. “It sure fucking is.”
This post is part of The Audacity Gambit – Serialised. Learn more about when the book was first published here, see the archive and overall content warnings here, and find more of my writing here. I’m over on both Comradery and Patreon, if you feel like supporting my creative endeavours. If you’d like to subscribe to this story, here’s a handy email box for you: