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scifrey · 5 years

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The following first hand account was found amid the research papers of Rachel Belanger. The date on the entry marks it as Belanger and Munson's first official meeting, and matches CCTV footage transcripts of April 10th, 2032 taken in the Kingston Penitentiary, Domestic Terrorist Wing (Kingston, Ontario.)

[Image - grainy screencap of a brunette woman in her early 40s, dressed in jeans, a tee-shirt, and a zippered hoodie standing outside of a jail cell; inside a man, early 30s, in a bright orange prison jumpsuit is laying on his back on the lower mattress of an otherwise empty bunk bed.] Fig 1. Rachel Belanger as seen with Oliver Munson, a.k.a. The Futurist, a.k.a. The Professor, 10:47am April 10th 2032.

I want to put our first meeting in my own words. Tell my own story, before I work through this god-awful jumble of notes. I’m putting this at the top, a prologue of sorts, if a research paper can have a prologue. I just want it clear what I was thinking when I first spoke to him. I just want it on paper that the way this ended isn’t the way I thought it would when I started. I just need people to know that. Okay? This wasn’t supposed to be how this went. I didn’t mean for this to happen.

He was laying on his back on the bottom mattress, long fingers tapping out a metronome in the silence of his cell. One, two, three. Perfectly matching the tempo of the second hand on my wristwatch. I’d heard that he did this, and made a point of glancing at my watch as I walked down the corridor to see if it was true. They said it was an unconscious habit - counting everything, all the time, eyes skimming along floor tiles, and light fixtures,freckles. Alone in the perpetual twilight of his grey cell, he counted the seconds. Likely because there was nothing else to count.

“Yes?” he said when I’dd stopped right outside of his cell. At that moment, we were the only living things in that corridor. The guard had stayed on the other side of the door, leaving us the illusion of our privacy. I pointedly did not look up at the surveillance cameras.

Cut it out! I thought to my nerves. Fearing a man a trapped in a cage was a ridiculous waste of adrenaline. He couldn’t hurt me. He couldn’t even reach me, if I was smart and stayed far enough back from the bars. And I already had two degrees that said I was smart.

I was so stuck in my head, counting along with him, that I forgot he’d spoken. When he got impatient enough, he added: “And what is it that you’re wanting of me, Miss?”

His gaze was directed into the shadowed corner of his cell. He had already dismissed me with his body language without even bothering to look at me.

Insulting.

This was not how I wanted this to go.

I felt my hands tightened slightly over the tablet computer I was holding, and I took a deep, calming breath, forcing my fingers to unclench. I’d been prepared for this, too, I just had to remember that I had. The warden had mentioned that he had uncanny insight when she had been signing the permission forms, granting me clearance to speak with the man dangerous enough to have a whole corridor of the jail to himself.

“How could you tell I was female?” I challenged, if only to try to get him to turn his face to me. I didn’t like being ignored. Especially not by people like him. Alright, so I hadn’t said anything right away and I probably should have, but most people would at least afford me the courtesy of eye contact. “And how do you know I want something from you?”

“Your footfalls.”

“I’m not wearing heels,” I countered.

“But your stride - short legs, with that distinctive gait caused by a woman’s wider hips. Purposeful, so you’re comfortable in your position. Authority, or backed by some. Not heavy enough boots to be a guard, and no distinctive scent of gun oil. My lawyer used to wear only Manolo Blahnik, before she stopped visiting me, so you’re not her. Your shoes are cheap; they squeak slightly. If you were a politician on a tour, there’d be others with you, and your shoes would not squeak. Therefore, you are here for some personal reason. You want something of me, or else you wouldn’t be here at all, and it’s something likely to make you - or me - uncomfortable to discuss, or you wouldn’t be alone.” He sighed and shifted over onto one shoulder, dropping his hands to his side and turning his face to the wall. “I assure you, Miss; whatever it is, you cannot embarrass me any more than I already have been in my considerable lifetime. I am now quite without shame. So ask, and then do me the very great favour of going away.”

Jesus.

I felt like all the air had been drained from my lungs, like I had been the one who had just delivered that speech without a breath. I forced myself to inflate them, and resisted the urge to whistle, blinking under his steamroller pronouncements.

“Right. Wow. They told me you were a regular Sherlock.” It wasn’t flattery - more of an attempt to get him to open up more. Say something else. Look at me.

He didn’t look. He just snorted. “Ha. Except that I exist. The Great Detective was a character invented by an admittedly logical though inextraordinary man and is therefore as constrained by the imagination of his creator as I am by these bars. Doyle was a supremely analytical man, but he was no genius himself. The conundrums he fabricated and their equally fictional solutions are - heh - elementary.” He chuckled slightly at his own cleverness, but it was a sort of hollow, half-dead sound. Like he was laughing because he thought he should, and not because he wanted to. “So I say again: ask what it is that you wish to ask, and then go away.” He sneered, and I only knew he was sneering because of the way he added: “Please.”

Okay. So this was going to be a little more work than I had expected. But that’s alright. I was a psychologist, wasn’t I? Not the therapist kind, but I knew the human animal all the same. I could do this. I just needed him to look at me.

The need seized me in a way I didn’t expect. Didn’t know what to do with, except to give into it. But that wasn’t what he Did. He as one of Them, but the things he Did wouldn’t account for this feeling. It was all me.

So I gave into it. Challenged again. Pushed. “Right. Blunt. Just like the text books said.”

“Textbooks. Pah.” He made a snorting sound in the back of his throat, flopping his free hand as if waving away a bad smell. His shoulders curled tighter. The tips of his fingernails appeared around the curve of his upper arm, pulling furrows into his electric-orange sleeve.

For a pregnant moment, I just watched the shift of his hair - dark brown, thick, curling slightly at the ends - against the prison jumpsuit collar. The juxtaposition between the colours was stunning, distracting like a shifting pile of leaves on the lawn in autumn, oddly magnetic. Pretty.

“Your questions?” he prompted peevishly when I’d been staring too long again.

“Right,” I repeated, a verbal reboot, my brain finally chugging over from buffering to operational. “Er, I’m, ah, I’m writing my PhD thesis on Vigilantism, and I thought… that is, if you don’t mind… I have some, well, like you said, questions. A list.”

“And I may have some answers,” he rejoined, waving one pale hand through the weak light. “But why on Earth should I gift any of them to you, Miss…?”

I didn’t see any point in withholding my name from him. It wasn’t like he could do anything with it, not in solitary confinement, not with his sentence so long that I’d be long dead of old age before he ever saw the outside.

And besides, I was planning to publish the paper, so it’s also not as if he couldn’t get his hands on a copy later and read my name on the cover if he wanted to.

And lying was something you could read in a person’s body language. He’d read so much in just my walk; I would never get what I wanted if I lied to him about something as inconsequential as my real name. Especially since he would probably know exactly who I was if he’d just look at me.

“Rachel Belanger,” I answered.

He rocketed upright, the crown of his head ricocheting off of the steel support rods of the bunk above him. Startled by his sudden, vicious movement, I couldn’t help the little jump back. I was reminded unpleasantly of a cobra thought dead suddenly rearing up and striking. Only a cobra that - when he finally turned his face to mine - looked miffed and ever so slightly embarrassed, like it had also accidentally bitten its own flickering tongue.

“Ow, bloody… damn!” he said, rubbing the top of his head. One of his eyes was screwed shut, pain-summoned tears turning dark lashes into wet spikes in the outside corner. The other eye - so dark it was nearly black, shot through with yellowy mud-brown flecks - focused on me accusingly.

Like it was my fault he wailed his head off the frame, or something. It kind of was, I guess, because it was my name that surprised him. Maybe I should have had the warden introduce me like she’d offered, after all.

He rubbed his head a bit more, and then both of his eyes and his mouth dropped wide.

“Recognize me, do you?” I asked, feeling sardonic and peevish. It was the verbal equivalent of an eye roll, and it had taken me the better part of my teenage years to perfect it. But it was perfect. It would never have worked so well on my mother otherwise.

He said nothing, didn’t rise to the bait, I felt the wave of frustration crest. He was finally looking but he wasn’t… wasn’t what? The verbal eye roll had never failed before.

A furrow gathered between my eyebrows, the one that made me look exactly like a brunette version of my mother, I could feel it. “I was afraid you might see it. Look, I’m aware of your history with all that stuff, but honestly, I’m not here about that. This really is for my research.”

“Oh, Rachel,” he breathed, and stood slowly, eyes never leaving my face. Slowly, shuffling as if he was an old man, he approached the bars.

Well, he was an old man. Even if he didn’t look it. He was probably around a hundred years old, near as anyone in the system could figure, but he’d kept his personal history well shrouded. If he had indeed been a child when photography was young, there wasn’t any evidence. The first visual records Rachel was able to find were of him his late twenties, just before the outbreak of World War Two.

But he appeared to be in his his early thirties now, slight crow’s feet digging in and getting comfortable beside his eyes, frown lines bracketing a thin-lipped but mobile mouth. His hair was still dark and thick, if flat and ill cared-for. His voice rough with disuse, but still that rich, compelling tenor that had been described in hundreds of newsreels and newspaper interviews before.

He stopped right in front of me, forehead touching the bars just so, hands wrapped around the two directly between us. His posture was relaxed though. He didn’t grip the bars in white-knuckled fists or lean his head against the cell door as if yearning for freedom. He just accepted the steel’s silent offer of support and stood there, breathing. Existing.

Drinking in my face and exhaling wonder.

“Oh, it is you.” His focus dropped down to my lips, then back up to my eyes, quick and only partially involuntarily. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who found my conversation partner strangely magnetic. Or maybe he just recognized the shape of my lips, too. He waited to see what I’d do.

I took a decided step backward.

He burst into laughter, quick and dark. It echoed, slapping against their bare concrete and metal cocoon, ringing along the side of my head, ticking at myears.

“Now you fear me,” he said when he had calmed himself enough to speak.

“Shouldn’t I?” I asked. There was a tremor in my voice that I didn’t expect. I wasn’t scared of him, not really, but I was finally unnerved.

His behaviour was… odd. Yes, there was the counting, the deductions, but more that that he was… wrong in some way. He was strange. He moved like the weight of the years he’d lived were literally tugging on his spine, but looked like he should be in the prime of his life. He spoke like a gentleman, a remnant of the early part of the twentieth century, and yet he was as blunt as any person my own age. He was in a jail cell and couldn’t hurt her, and yet he behaved as if he held all the control.

“I don’t know,” he said, eyebrow arched. Challenging me back.

“You are The Professor,” I pointed out.

His shoulders immediately slumped and whatever amusement had been dancing in his gaze was extinguished. He looked so completely miserable for half a second that I actually regretted putting it the way I had.

“I don’t like that name,” he said. “Not at all.”

“Well, it’s not like you’ve got any other.” I refused to let him make me feel bad about it. It wasn’t my fault.

“Of course I do,” he said. He flicked a look up at me through his eyelashes, a startlingly coy and innocent gesture. It was almost little-boy in its blushing innocence. Had he done it on purpose? Was he was trying to play me? And if he was, to what end? “I had parents. A normal childhood. Of course I have a name.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Of course I’d never envisioned him as having parents. As a child, yes. But as part of someone’s family?

Never.

“Sure,” I said, because I felt like I had to respond somehow. “Of course.”

He raised those dark, dark eyes to me, lids narrowed, expression inscrutable. Was he studying me again? Weighing something? Finding me lacking somehow? Or was I in turn reading to much into it? Something flickered in those yellow flecks of his, and he straightened to his full height, squaring up.

“Olly.”

I couldn’t stop the involuntary gasp. I sucked in a breath, bottom lip fluttering against my teeth.

He told me, I thought, brain suddenly filled with hysterical warning lights. He told me. I didn’t dare say anything, stunned that he had chosen to confide this, his one last great secret, to me. Would he give me his family name, too?

No, he just remained silent, assessing my reaction, gaze darting over me face and cataloguing, calculating.

“Why would you tell me that?” I finally asked, unable to stand the harsh quiet. “Me of all people, knowing who my mother is? Was. Why me?”

“It seems…” He rolled a word around in his mouth, as if testing its ripeness before letting it escape: “Appropriate.”

My fingers tightened on my tablet and I forced myself to relax them. Again. Nerves this time? No, anticipation. Confusion, yes, but also…

This was exciting.

“Thank you, then. Olly,” I repeated softly. Then I jerked my chin at the door that was between us and the guard. “You know, I’ll have to tell them.”

“Of course you will,” he allowed. His stance relaxed a little, hands back on the bars. A carefully constructed artifice of pleading. I don’t know how I knew it was artifice, why I could see through it so easily. But I knew. “But can you hold onto it? Just until… until we’re done? Keep it just for yourself, for now?”

I hesitated. Making a promise to break a rule now, at the start of their relationship, meant that he might attempt to extract bigger promises later, to break bigger rules. On the other hand, the point of this was to build the relationship itself, and if a little white lying was what it took...

“Of course,” I said. “And Olly’s short for, what… Oliver?”

He raised his head again, searching for something, boreing. Whatever it is, he didn’t find it, and that seemed to disappoint him. He turned away, putting his back to me. It was either cowardice or a show of arrogance. He rested his slim shoulders against the bars between us, another faux show of contemptuous relaxation. But his hands on his elbows, crossing his arms over his stomach, the white knuckles? He was upset by something. Protecting himself. Closed off.

He shook his head slightly. I was momentarily enchanted by the play of his fine hair across his day-glo collar. “I’m certain your mother could have deciphered my legal name, should she have been bothered to try. It is not that great of a secret, no matter that I’ve destroyed my original government records.”

“But you never told the courts. The cops didn’t know. Your own lawyer.”

“You’ve done your research, brava,” he countered. He folded his hands at the small of his back, long fingers cupped in in my direction. I resisted the inane urge to reach through the bars and meet them halfway. His palms were calloused and scarred - half a century, maybe more, of laboratory work had left a map of nefarious deeds etched into his flesh. Acid and scalpels and gunpowder.

I cleared my throat instead, and took another little step back to separate myself from him more, if only mentally. Then I called herself ridiculous. Relationship, trust, they were what I was here for. “Why tell me?”

“I don’t know, Rachel. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always felt that intelligence ought to be rewarded. Perhaps it’s because you started it.” His voice was heavy with meaning that I couldn’t parse.

“You mean, coming in here alone?” I tried to clarify. “There’s a guard at the end of the hall. And the warden gave me an emergency buzzer.”

He chuckled again, nearly soundless. More of a puff of breath than a laugh. “We’ll call it that if you prefer, Rachel—” He lingered over my name, caressing the vowels, and I couldn’t suppress the way it made my spine shiver a bit. It wasn’t sexual attraction. It was… awareness. Of being the presence of something more than oneself. The coolness of the room had already made my skin pebble with goosebumps, but now they tightened. The hairs on my arms stood straight up and the nape of my neck prickled. “You said you had questions? A list?”

“Right. Right! Yes!” I said, and blinked a few times to force myself not to lose my focus. There was a purpose to all the banter.

“There’s a chair by the light switch.” He waved one hand to the left, indicating further down the hall where a metal folding chair leaned against the wall. It was covered with a visible layer of dust. He must not get many visitors, I realized. Even his lawyer had stopped coming, the one who wore the ludicrously expensive shoes; he had said so himself.

I dragged the chair over to his cell and settled down in front of him, unfolding the keyboard I’d rolled into my pocket. As I waited for it to synch up with tablet I’d perched on my knees, I studied the line of his back. He didn’t seem tense any more. Not even really miserable. He just looked… comfortable. Like my presence didn’t scare him, or annoy him, or confuse him at all.

Like he… liked me. God knows what he’d read off my face, and my clothes, and my posture to cause the sentiment.

It’s possible he did like me. I had no way of telling, short of asking him. And I’d rather save my questions for answers that I needed for my paper.

Dear god, I thought. Imagine, someone like The Professor - Olly - liking you.

“Ask away, my dear Rachel,” he said as soon as my tablet chimed its readiness.

“Right, well…” I cleared my throat and read my first question off the screen: “You’ve been charged with various crimes ranging from plotting acts of terrorism to first degree murder, but would you actually consider yourself a —?”

“No, no!” he interrupted, making me cringe back as his voice rang into the empty corners of the hallway, bouncing across the ceiling. His fists clenched by his side and they shook, digging white indents into his flesh. “Ask me your real question, Rachel. Ask me the one I can hear spinning through that grad student brain of yours. Stop being so damnably intellectual and follow your heart.”

I looked down at my screen, confused. “These are my real questions,” I protested.

“No. Those are the questions pre-approved by your ethics committee. But you didn’t decide to sit for Vigilantism to ask what I think about my past actions. You can read all that in my court transcripts and my Wikipedia entry. You’re not here for character analysis and motivation dissection. You want my story. You want to know why.”

He couldn’t have stoppered up the breath in my throat any more effectively if he had actually reached through the bars and wrapped his fingers around my neck.

“How…” I began, the word crumpling up behind my teeth, heart slamming against my ribs. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath and tried again. “How do you know that?”

He chuckled again and slid down the bars and plopped cross-legged into the dusty, cold cement floor in front of my feet. “I know more than you think, my dear Rachel. I always know more than anyone thinks I do. I know exactly what you want of me.”

I had no idea how to answer that. What to do? I asked myself, staring down at my - yes - pre-approved questions. Boring, useless questions. I had these answers already. I’d already culled them from the court transcripts and the records and the things they’d found in his lairs when he’d been arrested.

No one, least of all me, had actually expected him to talk to me. These were all things that they’d said I could ask because no one had thought I would get to ask anything.

I tapped my fingers along the side of the tablet casing, one tap per second, echoing the tick of my wristwatch as I thought this over. His own finger followed along, making the bars of his cell chime with the gentle percussion of his thumbnail.

Right.

Fuck the committee. This wasn’t an opportunity I was going to throw away that easily. Even if it cost me my PhD.

I had been handed and opportunity that no other researcher, journalist, lawyer, person had. Olly had chosen me. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t about to waste it.

“I have voice recording software on this thing,” I finally said. “Can I turn it on? And then we can… I don’t know. Start from the beginning?”

“Of course,” he wuffed. “Yes. Of course you would ask that. Okay, okay,” he agreed, descending into cryptic muttering for a moment before shaking out his shoulders and clearing his throat. “I think this is appropriate. If I was going to tell anyone, it ought to be you. It’s fitting. Very well then. Turn on your recorder, Rachel.”

So I did.

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