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axolotiels · 7 years

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Kick in the Head Ch.4

We get Doug’s perspective today and take a trip to a bazaar. Thanks to @actingwithportals for giving me a spellcheck!

Chell had been absolutely right: Doug did not like markets in the least, much less markets like Kaltag. They weren’t even all the way there; in fact, they had a few hundred feet to go. That did not stop the din of it from reaching his ears and ringing them from here to what used to be the state border.

The sun beat down on their backs from high in the sky, occasionally crossed by a cloud and having its harsh rays pushed away, but most of the time it was as bright and garish as it had always been. To the left of them was an overgrown forest, and to the right there was a mostly flat field with high grass and the occasional bush. Doug decided to walk closer to the field, even if it was in less shade than the left side of the dirt track; the grass of the field was only knee-high and could barely hide a decently sized rabbit, but the forest…

Doug was what you may call cautious, which means that he took every precaution to every problem that he could ever think up. Unless you are a supercomputer you may find this a difficult task, but Doug was not a supercomputer (Though he had worked on one, quite briefly) and he seemed to find more solutions to possible problems than one could find lawsuits at a bootleg movie company. It stands to reason that any number of dangerous animals were waiting in the forest, from mountain lions, bobcats, wasps, easily disturbed owls… He shuddered to think of it.

Chell normally wasn’t talkative unless she wanted something or he’d done something wrong, the latter happening more than the former, but it was still a rare occurrence. Nonetheless, Doug was still very nervous with Cube nowhere in sight. He knew she was fine back at the shed, but he didn’t like having nothing on his back, and he wasn’t allowed to carry the knapsack with all the trading goods in it. He settled for carrying two loaves of bread that he’d made earlier that morning before the sun came up.

They rounded a marking rock and made a turn toward the market, it’s noises getting louder as they grew closer. He grimaced and hoped that Chell didn’t notice said grimace through his beard, and cast a nervous glance to his left. She was focused on the marketplace with her eyes squinting against the glare of the sun, her backpack clinking with every step. She’d cut her hair short recently when she found that keeping short hair clean was much easier than keeping long hair untangled, and though in some spots the cuts were a bit uneven, Doug found that he liked it.

Almost on a dime, Chell cocked her eyes toward him in a silent dare, the rest of her face unmoving, and he looked away quickly. She was so frightening most of the time. Being a head taller than him and being able to elbow drop a weightlifter without so much as breaking a sweat didn’t help his case of ‘try not to be scared of her’. Another fact that did not help him be any less afraid was that he knew for a fact that, should she have the desire to, she could throw him a good few feet if he wasn’t fast enough to avoid it. Luckily, he had been fast enough to avoid it after the first time.

They finally got away from the stretchy fork of forest and into the more open field area where the market was situated. The high-pitched laughter of one of the usual sellers there could be heard, even some distance away. If Doug remembered correctly, she usually sold things like salvaged jewelry and carved bones, rocks, and wood. It was all useless but very pretty, especially some of the things she carved herself.

He tried to casually feel around in his pocket, ultimately looking like someone who had tried to pull a knife but had failed miserably, but Chell paid him no mind. He felt the hollow top half of a cat skull and grimaced again. It wasn’t as if it was dirty or even recently killed, he just disliked dead things.

Doug, unlike Chell, was not a person who was prone to hating. There were very few things in this world that he truly hated. For all of its atrocities and murder, he could think of at least one or two mildly redeeming things about Aperture before the collapse, but he’d bring about hell if he ever said such a thing out loud. The rest of Aperture he wished to see rot in a boiling pit that sort of looked like hell, but they were away from it now, so that was past them.

Admittedly, they were not as far away from Aperture as Doug would have liked. He knew the facility spiralled on down for miles, but not that it reached all the way out into the countryside like some sterile and deadly Willy Wonka factory that only mass-produced problems. They were about five or so miles from the wheat field, if he could remember correctly; either way, he remembered that it was not far enough. He didn’t wish to cause any more scuffles than necessary.

They’d gotten closer to the market so that they could see a little inside the tent’s open flaps. A short fellow with red hair and tan skin was walking back and forth between the two booths at the entrance with what seemed to be a much taller lady with pale hair watching him with her arms crossed. He trained his eyes toward the ground as they neared the tent and held the loaves of bread close to his chest.

“I’ll be around Booth C if you need me.” Chell said at him, not really expecting a response. She did not get one.

He’d only been to Kaltag market once, over a year ago. Now that he had a space that was at least half-his and was not trying to kill him, he didn’t like leaving it too often. Of course he’d go outside and tend the the clearing where Chell had planted her tiny wheat field when it needed it, or the slowly-growing vegetables, but he was much more at home in the shack. He had a tiny little workspace there with a few rusty tools, assorted bits of paper, and pretty rocks that he insisted upon keeping. There were only a few and none of them were gemstones, but he still liked them. The best ones were always found in the nearby river, either washed up or just regular rocks that were worn smooth by the flow. He didn’t like going to the stream alone, so he didn’t go often and only had a few rocks.

The stream was where he had found the cat skull as well, on one of the few outings that he’d been on by himself. He left it wedged between two rocks for a few weeks before finally gathering the nerve to pick it up and sell it. If he didn’t need to sell it, he might have buried it.

Suddenly, it was much easier to see when they finally entered the tent and the scathing rays of the sun were cut from view, excepting a few slim streams where it slipped between sheets in the tarps. The tiny red-haired man was speaking rather intensely in a heavy accent that he could not discern, and when Doug dared to spare him a quick once-over, he thought that the man might have attacked him if he looked any moment longer. The woman that seemed to almost be chaperoning the little man did him no-less disease, so he moved along.

Chell had parted ways with him as soon as she’d entered the tent, and was now indeed at booth c; it was a weapons dealer she looked to be haggling with.

Doug kept his head down as he walked past and toward booth d; this was not his destination, but something had caught his eye nonetheless. It was crammed full of shelves, and each of those shelves were crammed full of books, which were in their turn crammed full of something that he could actually read. Most of them he didn’t pay any mind to however, seeing as most of their titles were things like ‘30-Minute Dinners’ and ‘Mexican Food and You’, none of which particularly interested him for multiple reasons. He couldn’t make the recipes in them and thinking about food he didn’t have made him hungry, even if he was marginally well fed compared to two or so years ago.

The shopkeeper, a young bright-eyed girl with curly hair and dark skin, looked up at him from her tattered book and smiled. “Morning, Mister! What can I help you with?”

It took him a moment to find his tongue after glancing about the shelves and finding only recipes. “You wouldn’t happen to have any books that aren’t um…” He waved his hand in a fathoming motion, struggling to meet her gaze but feeling like it was the least he could do since he wouldn’t end up buying anything. “Cookbooks?”

She put her hands on her hips and looked around the lower shelves thoughtfully. “Uh… maybe. What were you looking for?”

“Not a cookbook.” He answered simply, and set about leafing through the myriad of them.

The shopkeeper crouched down behind a stack of cardboard boxes (Both of which were labeled ‘Southern Cooking for Northern Chefs’) and began rummaging, kicking up dust and the smell of old books. Doug squinted at a few titles and repositioned the bread that he was carrying, not wanting to put it down..

With a victorious ‘ah-hah!’, the book-keep brought out 4 moth-eaten hardbacked books. The front covers were mostly intact but discolored with time, some in better condition than others. Doug’s bushy gray-streaked eyebrows furrowed for a second.

“I hope you like horror.” The keeper tittered, pushing them in his direction.

He didn’t say it and hoped that his hair would hide the obvious non-verbal cues, but Doug did not like horror in the least. He’d lived through horror, he didn’t want to read about stuff that may or may not have existed doing who-knew-what to people. One of the few things in this world he found absolutely safety in was words, especially the ones he had written; quite a ridiculous concept, to find safety in simple words, but words told him what he wanted to hear and absolutely no more than that. At least, the ones that Doug wrote. He knew that nobody wrote what he wanted to hear but him, and the idea that his safe little words could morph into something that could fill him with terror was an abhorrent thought that he did not like spending time entertaining.

Still, he politely thumbed over the books and their beat up and often minimalistic covers. A book about a vampire, one about a dark tower consumed by roses, one about someone with an odd name, and… puzzled, he squinted at the book’s cover.

“Miss, I think you left one in.” He said softly, and took a step back. Some dust swirled in the air before his eyes in a streak of the sun as a gust of wind tugged viciously at the tent.

The shopkeep picked it up and looked at him, bewildered. “It isn’t a cookbook. You’ve never heard of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?”

Doug said nothing, and in his confusion, actually looked a bit angry.

“It’s a kid’s book. Silly but sweet.” The keep explained, and slid it back toward him. “I read it as a kid. I don’t think this is my old copy, though.”

He picked up the book and looked through the summary; he had indeed heard of the book but only through the grapevine. He was more familiar with the film that had come out in the 70s, though he’d seen it but one time and didn’t remember much about it. Everything that wasn’t happening to him at the moment was a dismal blur.

Her lowered his head in a violent jerk as both the man at booth c and Chell laughed rather loudly, interrupting the buzzy sounds of the bazaar. He wrinkled his nose and squinted his eyes, one of his many visual cues to indicate discomfort, and went back to studying the book. Oh you made her laugh. Diamond in the rough, aren’t you? He thought with no small trace of bitterness.

“You alright there, bud?” The book keeper asked, and before he could nod, he saw Chell’s heterochromic eyes peer over the divider curiously and squinted at the book in his hand. She returned to her business in booth c.

Doug looked at the scrawly illustrations by the author and found them quite charming. He started calculating things in his head and wondered whether or not he could afford the beat-up little thing after buying what he came to Kaltag for in the first place. He’d noticed, much to his dismay, that the shopkeeper was eying his bread and hiding it very badly.

He put the book down and tapped it several times, not looking back up but gesturing over to the lady who sold bones in booth h. “I-I’ll be right back.” And off he went.

The bone lady was mystical in the fact that she did not act like a real person. She was a portly old white woman, one of the elderly people that could be heard talking of times before the surface collapse about things like swing music and tax collectors. She sat at her booth with her hands laced together in her lap, appearing to be asleep. When Doug approached, however, quiet as a church mouse, she opened her eyes.

They were vivid gold that matched the almost gaudy earrings that she wore, as well as her four or five bracelets. Her hair was a mousy dull brown that hung over one of her metallic eyes, though he knew the metallic illusion was his imagination. She said nothing, watching him intently.

Doug looked down at her table nervously, surveying the goods that ranged from carved rock and wood to bones and gemstones. There were rat skulls, several chips of quartz and what appeared to be red jasper, but he was never well-versed in stones, and as he scanned it nervously with his hand on his chin, he was glad to find that he saw exactly what he was looking for.

“I was wondering if we could trade, miss.” He said, looking the shopkeep in the eye.

She raised her eyebrow and sat up in her chair, resting her elbows on the table which Doug now noticed was covered in black velvet. “What have you got?”

Doug held the bread out, looking for a place to set it, and settled on a chair nearby. It’s wrapping crackled as he set it down and he saw that the woman was a bit impressed but not quite enough to warrant major trade. He felt his hands begin to shake as he reached into his pocket and withdrew the top half of the cat skull, turning it away so he wouldn’t have to look into the hollow sockets where its eyes had once been.

He was a squeamish man who couldn’t handle the sight of blood; it made him ill to see any more than a shallow papercut or a pinprick. In fact, he didn’t like anything that made him think about death anywhere in his immediate vicinity. Even though the skull was clean and free of anything resembling flesh or tissue, he didn’t enjoy looking at it. This wasn’t for him, after all.

The shopkeep at least looked a bit more interested now. She took out a magnification eyepiece and the skull from Doug’s hand. Turning it in her palm several times, she threw a haphazard glance at the loaves of bread. “What do you want?”

Doug remembered, perhaps from some old business class, that the first person in a haggle to name a price always lost. He pretended to ponder greatly at the things he knew were pretty expensive, staring at the candy reds and greens of the actual gemstones that once would have been faceted into fine jewelry.

Somewhere else in the tent he could hear a radio that was much more clear of static than theirs piping out something about jingle-jangle-jingling spurs. He swallowed and focused on the beat; it wouldn’t really help all that much but it gave him something other than the transaction to pay attention to. “What can I get?”

The lady gave him an expression of suspicion, one that probably helped her in many of her transactions, but Doug was quite used to people looking as though they wanted to shove him to the ground, so he didn’t flinch. Doug was quite used to a lot of aggressive mannerisms, and as long as the mannerisms didn’t escalate into actual fighting, he could take them.

The shopkeep took out a piece of paper from behind the table and placed it flat over the section that he had been looking at with fake intent, and his eyes brightened a bit. “Whatever isn’t covered by the paper, hon.”

Doug knew exactly what he had been looking for, but nonetheless pretended to glance around the table some more for a few seconds. When he felt satisfied with his acting, he pointed a quivering hand at a rose quartz carving with two chunky thrown-in onyx eyes. Or at least, he thought it was onyx.

The shopkeep picked it up and squinted at it, almost like she hadn’t known it was on her table. “You don’t seem the type who’s looking for something like this.” She said nonchalantly, her gold jewelry shaking and sending little showers of light across the cubby.

He was about to answer when his voice dwindled away as another’s spoke from the booth across the way. “Alright Doug, time to go.”

He gulped audibly and raised a hand, hoping she would see it. Through his stringy black hair he looked from the shopkeeper to booth c and jerked his head, hoping that was all the explanation she needed. And it was.

With a sly wink, she wrapped the little carving in some dirty tissue paper and took the cat skull and both loaves of bread, waving him goodbye as he slinked up to the booth where Chell was standing. She had her arms crossed and was leaning against a stack of books, leaving Doug momentarily bewildered. She had been at the weapon booth, hadn’t she?

He was going to ask when she strode out towards the exit and the question left his tongue.

Doug did not do well with many things. From someone being angry at him, attempting to gas him out, jumping long distances, to judging when he put too much sugar in his tea. He had learned to deal with this fact about himself quite tolerably for the most part, but something he had not quite learned to deal with was yelling. Yelling was a foremost sign of aggression which was definitely something that he did not do well with. He hadn’t even met Cave Johnson, the founder and CEO of Aperture Science Innovators, but just hearing him project his voice through recordings made him wither at the sound.

Needless to say, when the man in the gun booth where Chell had been yelled out at him from across the tent, he flinched hard and crouched a bit, looking behind him with a horrified questioning expression on his face.

“Hey, buddy… aren’t you the guy she almost threw into a concrete wall?”

This gained the eye of everyone in the market, and if Doug could have vanished into thin air then he gladly would have. He felt the dozens of eyes now focused on the both of them and his head started pounding, his arms crossed and shaking.

Not only was being the center of attention not something Doug wanted, another was also to remember the rather unfortunate way that he and Chell had met above the surface. Remembering it in a panic was completely different from mulling over it on a regular day when he had too little to do, and he saw it in flashes. It was like watching choppy animation. She was charging toward him close to the ground, he’d barely gotten out of the way. His throat tightened, remembering being yanked back by the lab coat and then her eyes…. Whatever feeling filled them it was not a positive one, and they glittered against the dark color of her hair.

He felt a hand on the small of his back push him forward, and he hobbled on blindly out of the tent. Doug gritted his teeth and tried to breathe, I got what I came for. This was not a waste of time, this was not a waste of time, this was not a waste of time….

The harsh sun struck the top of his head and he squinted his eyes shut, opening and closing his hands while trying to regain feeling in them.

He couldn’t look up; he knew she’d be staring him down like a babysitter at a disobedient child. He found it hard to meet her gaze on a good day but he just couldn’t do it now. He shuffled along, just wanting to get back to the shack and perhaps pass out cold when he got there. Chell followed behind him, saying nothing, as she often did.

To become lost in one’s thoughts is a very scary thing, and when one has several mental illnesses all kicking your brain while it’s down, it becomes even scarier. Doug tried not to focus on what he was thinking and instead concentrate his attention on the sounds his shoes made when they hit the road, rather miserably at that.

Chell could be heard rustling around a bit, and she soon tapped his shoulder.

He looked up, hunched and glassy-eyed, to see that as they walked that she was holding out a book. It took him a moment to focus enough on it to see that it was, in fact, a book rather than some letter of dismissal. It was the book he’d been poking at in booth d; he’d honestly forgotten about the thing amongst all of the different signals his brain was giving him.

Doug took the book and stared at the cover as he walked, finding it hard to comprehend. He blinked several times, furrowing his brow and ignoring all the impulses that were telling him to walk faster or otherwise collapse.

“Thank you…” He managed to say, still sounding very confused.

He almost jumped out of his skin when he remembered the whole reason for his trip to the market and Chell flinched a bit defensively. Doug pawed the wrapped carving out of his pocket. He’d initially meant it as a long overdue peace offering but now he felt a bit obligated to give it to her now.

When he held it out, Chell mirrored his confusion from moments before. They reached the fork of the forest and once again she started walking closer to it. When she unwrapped the crinkling dirty paper, her eyes opened in surprise; in her hand was a carved statue of a raven, perhaps a crow, made out of rose quartz with beady black eyes. Once it would have cost a decent amount of money, so Doug counted himself lucky that two loaves of bread and a cat skull would net him such a thing.

He looked at her expectantly, waiting for a reaction. She held it up to eye level and looked at it closely, turning it over in her fingers.

For about perhaps the third time that day, Doug had a heart attack. This particular heart attack was forced upon him when the oh-so familiar and oh-so earsplitting caw of Chell’s pet struck him like a bucket of cold water. Aleu flapped her ink-black wings and cawed again from the underbrush of the forest before bolting out toward them and landing unceremoniously on Chell’s shoulder.

Doug eyed the bird warily, his book clutched close to him.

The raven leaned her neck out and she studied the rose-quartz doppleganger from every side she could manage, and once she was done with that she looked at her human’s companion with another startlingly loud call. Doug did not like this one bit.

Chell, on the other hand, must have thought that this was hilarious, because she snorted and looked at him from the corner of her eye. “She’s jealous. You brought me a better shiny.”

This was most likely not what was going on, but Doug still thought it could have gone worse. “So… you like it?” He asked shakily.

“Mhm.” Chell responded, and with Aleu swaying on her shoulder whilst giving Doug a dirty look, she continued down the road.

#portal #portal 2 #chell #doug rattmann #jinx writes #kick in the head

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