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shadowknightTitle: Jazz, Conversation and the Voices in Your Head
Rating: G
Universe: Home
Timeline: June 7th, 2006
Written: June 7th, 2006
Summary: Arnie gets traded to ShadowKnight.
On first, or indeed any glance, he was a wholly unremarkable creature. Just one of the many millions of people who called the greater New York City area home. Even sitting on his fire escape, playing the tenor saxophone, he just seemed like another New Yorker who woke up, went to work, came home and occasionally tried to relax.
His neighbors generally agreed that they didn't mind if he practiced out on the fire escape during the summer, so long as it wasn't at some unholy hour or very loud. Occasionally, in true jazz style, the old woman across the alley would start playing her banjo and an impromptu jam session would start between two relative strangers on two different fire escapes. Once they were even joined by a pianist, playing an electric keyboard two stories down.
Right now, however, in the sticky and heavy heat of a summer evening, he was playing by himself. He probably would have practiced indoors, but the old apartment became almost unbearable in the summer; he didn't have air conditioning, just a ceiling fan that didn't actually cool anything off, just pushed the hot air around lazily.
Despite the strange sort of artistry of the scene, however, it still wasn't actually remarkable. At best, anyone who would take a moment to look would think the guy on the third floor fire escape was just a regular guy, playing a sax. At worst, they would think he was a bit crazy.
In a way, neither and both would be true.
Arnold J. Rimmer was a regular guy in a lot of ways; he did indeed wake up in the morning, commute to Brooklyn Heights for work, stay there for far too many hours in the day, then commute back home. Sometimes he even managed to fit grocery shopping and laundry into his slightly work-obsessed schedule. He also knew every single jazz spot in the whole of New York City, and knew which places had an open jam night, though he'd only gotten the nerve up a handful of times to actually go and participate.
He worked six days a week, had Sundays off, and when business was abundant, he was lucky if he could crawl through his front door before flopping face first on the couch and passing out. A few times, he'd fallen asleep leaning on the door in the process of unlocking it.
Given that it was Sunday, though, and he had achieved all the items on his Daily Goal List, that left him some time to play the sax. He'd ironed all of his clothes (including t-shirts and the two pairs of jeans he owned), dusted the apartment, worked on organizing his giant file of pictures of telegraph poles, tidied up anything that had inadvertently fallen out of place during the work week, and had finished all of that off with a few sandwiches before picking up the sax.
He occasionally drove up to Westchester on his days off, though not this one; he'd finally got around to buying a car when rent rates skyrocketed in Cobble Hill, and he decided to move to Bay Ridge so that he wouldn't have to choose between eating and having a roof over his head. There was also another reason he'd moved down to Bay Ridge; maybe if he could put some distance between himself and work, he would actually pick up something like a social life.
It hadn't panned out quite as well as he had hoped, but it wasn't like time was an issue.
He had been playing the sax now for, relatively speaking, three million and some odd years -- in literal time, he'd been playing for ten and a half. In chronological time, he had been playing for negative five hundred and some odd years. Age wise, he'd started playing at the physical age of thirty-one, and was still playing at the physical age of thirty-one. His life, if it were to be measured strictly by his years in existence, spanned only forty-six years -- but in those forty-six years, he had been all over kingdom and creation, in various dimensions and time periods, before finally landing in this one.
The whole story spanned a short six-million and some odd years, and crossed the boundaries between life, death, reality, dimension and time, and was guaranteed to make anyone trying to puzzle it out end up in a mental ward. In fact, Arnie had the sole distinction of having a tale behind him more confusing and brain-breaking than the Summers family tree.
This particular era of his six million and some odd year story began not quite a decade before, when he found himself dropped without fanfare into a world of super-powered beings. At the time, he hadn't taken it all that well -- actually, he'd pretty much become a complete emotional wreck and spent quite some time that way before finally concluding that he'd just have to make the best of it.
Given the sheer number of times that his world had come crashing down around his ears, one would think he would have gotten good at dealing with it. Sometimes it came crashing down metaphorically; too often, literally. But he was a bit chagrined to find that it didn't get any easier... in fact, it just seemed to get harder.
He paused in his playing, absently tightening the screws on the mouthpiece of the sax a hair, and took a breather. It was oppressively hot. Well, not hot, but muggy. If he didn't like playing as much as he did, he would have gone inside to lay on his back under the woefully underpowered ceiling fan in the naive hope that it'd be cooler. But between work and responsibility, especially with the longer commute, his playtime had been cut too far already.
The people who had known him in his life (and occasionally death) wouldn't have originally thought him suited to jazz. He was too organized, too structured, and his musical inclinations went only so far as the Hammond Organ or the occasional questionable album. Jazz, by its very nature, was about improvisation and imagination and feeling. The heart of true Jazz couldn't be found on sheet music -- it had to come from somewhere intangible.
Originally, Arnie would have agreed with them; at least when he was only able to make the poor instrument squeak in shrill protest while trying to wrench a scale out of it. But his teacher had been both incredibly patient and incredibly stubborn, and hadn't let him quit until he could at least play a scale. From there, it was all down to practice.
He looked down at the sax he was holding. It wasn't the same one he'd learned to play on, but he had bought it new and the varnish on the keys was now worn off, and there was a small dent in the bell where he'd accidentally knocked it on the window sill a month ago while he was climbing out onto the fire escape. In a world that was still uncertain, even after nine years of being a part of it, it was one thing that he had to hold onto.
There was little doubt he would have allowed himself to get morose, though he'd gotten somewhat better at combatting that over the years, but the phone rang and completely ruined any notions he had about being melancholy.
Muttering a bit under his breath, he scrambled carefully back through the window, took the neck strap off, set the sax on the couch and grabbed the phone. "H'lo?"
"Someone call Ripley's! You're not at work!"
Arnie rolled his eyes to himself, and though the gesture was lost on the phone, the faint note of exasperated annoyance in his voice more than made up for it. "No, I'm not. It's my day off. Is this a business call, or..."
"Kind of a business call. You've been traded."
"Traded." The tone was flat. In fact, any flatter and it would be perfectly two-dimensional, defying the laws of nature. "Traded to whom?"
"ShadowKnight. See, since Kitty and the others vanished--"
"Scott, you already told me about this," Arnie interrupted, taking the phone with him to the kitchen to get himself some ice water. He felt like he was baking inside the apartment; another hour, give or take, and he'd be cooked through to a golden brown.
Few people would understand the conversation if they didn't know who was on the other end. In fact, the man on the other end was Scott Summers, Field Commander of the X-Men, one of the most powerful mutants in the world. Most people, when he called, tended to be a little reverent. At the very least, they were willing to hear what he had to say.
"Anyway, Lorna's coming back to the X-Men, at least as far as rosters go, and ShadowKnight's desperately shorthanded. Since you're still on our backup list, we're trading you to them."
Most people. Not all. "No."
Scott actually sounded a bit surprised. "Why not?"
Arnie took a moment to sip on his water before answering, "I'm not moving back to Westchester, I'm not joining any team full time, or even part time, and you know damn well that I don't want called unless everyone else is dead or incapacitated."
"It's just as backup! Look, they're down to three baseline human field ops. You scan as baseline human. Devon's been able to pass on most of the missions that have come in, but if something comes up where ShadowKnight has to go out, I want you to go with them."
"Okay," Arnie said, amiably.
"...really?"
"No. Look, I've never even been in the field. Why on Io do you think I'd be able to do this?"
"This from one of the only people in the world who can sneak up on and then evade Logan?"
It had been a very long time since Arnie had called the Xavier Estate home. Well, he never actually called it home; for that matter, he didn't actually call any place home in this world. Home was a beat up old mining ship, three million and some years into the future.
Despite only staying in Westchester for two years before moving into the City, however, he had managed to acquire quite a reputation. First, for being absolutely anal-retentive about things that most people wouldn't even think of... like hair length. And second, for being the most unlikely person in the history of any X-Team to blow the stealth training records in the Danger Room completely out of the water.
In fact, to this day his records stood. No one had managed to beat them. Not even Gambit, who was still rather burned over losing top billing. Arnie chalked the win up to hair length -- short-back-and-sides versus long-hippie-ponytail.
"Just because I happen to have some training doesn't mean I have any desire whatsoever to play hero."
"Think about it. All you have to do is..."
Arnie shook his head to himself, setting the phone down gently and sticking his head under the faucet of the kitchen sink before turning the cold water on. He figured that Scott's impassioned plea would go on long enough for him to cool himself off, so he could at least combat the oven-effect of the apartment for a few minutes.
Once he'd thoroughly soaked his head, he grabbed a clean dishtowel and wrapped it around his shoulders. Another sip of water, and the idle thought that he might order some delivery from somewhere, and he finally picked the phone back up.
There was a long pause, and Scott said, "You know, that's not exactly nice."
"Sorry, I thought you were going to go on about it longer," Arnie replied, smirking to himself. "The answer's still no. I have a job already, and I can't very well--"
It was Scott's turn to interrupt. "How long have you been working there?"
"Seven years, but--"
"And when's the last time you took anything more than two days off at a time?"
"I haven't, but--"
"I'm not asking for you to move back here. Just be willing to train some with the ShadowKnights, and if they do get a mission that they can't pass up for whatever reason, go with 'em."
This was getting frustrating. He didn't want to get dragged back into that world. It hadn't been terrible, but it was always uncertain. If there was one thing that Arnie disliked, it was uncertainty. God knew, he'd faced too much of it and this was as close to a stable life as he'd had in a long time. "Scott..."
"Their family's all broken up, Arn. They're basically alone."
"That's damn low," he snapped into the phone, before he had time to think about it. "How dare you pull--"
"You *know* what that feels like, and you can maybe help them survive it," Scott hurried on. "Will you at least think about it? Just think about it?"
"Smeg off," Arnie snarled, half-surprised by his own anger. He clicked the phone off and stalked back out to replace it on its cradle, not bothering to say goodbye or in any way be polite.
It was a low blow. He did know what it was like to lose people.
He'd been born the youngest of four; had three older brothers. He'd had parents, a slew of aunts and uncles, and cousins. Even had pets. But when he thought about his family, those people never even crossed his mind.
His family consisted of a Scouse spacebum who loved curry, a neurotic cleaning droid, a senile computer and a creature that evolved from the common housecat. They were irritating and drove him crazy, and he couldn't count the number of times he wanted to grab a polo mallet and beat them senseless; they were disrespectful towards everything he'd once held dear, merciless in their insults and...
...not a day went by, even so many years later, that he didn't miss them. As crazy and dysfunctional a group as they made, they were his family. The only one that he ever really belonged to. A group of absolute losers, doing the best they could to survive.
He never had the chance to tell them those things. But hindsight is twenty-twenty -- he could find some measure of comfort knowing that even if he never had a chance to say it, they had known anyway.
He probably still would give anything for that one opportunity, though.
Anger was replaced with a sort of weariness, as he put his sax away in its case then laid down on the rug, staring up at the ceiling fan. Not for the first time, he questioned the whole concept of destiny and fate; then again, when you're the sole survivor of a dead universe, forgotten by Time itself, it was hard not to feel a bit put upon.
Scott had informed him about some of the ShadowKnights vanishing not long after it had happened. It had bothered him; he was in the process of working out Kitty's wedding invitations, and she was his friend. He didn't know the rest of her team very well; had only interacted with them on occasion, but she had loved them and it was equally obvious that they had loved her. Still, there was nothing that he could do that everyone else wasn't already doing, so he just hoped and kept working on different designs for her when she and the others returned.
But now...
No. He was absolutely, positively not going to allow Scott to emotionally blackmail him into anything. He didn't like the whole 'hero' thing. He much preferred, in fact, to avoid danger at all costs. That was part of the reason why he had gotten so very good at the stealth thing -- if in doubt, sneak away from a fight. And if you do have to fight, do so only until you can get away from it. Bravado was vastly overrated.
He tried to get the idea out of his head, but it was persistent. "What could it hurt just to make yourself available?" the little voice asked.
"I'm a printer, not a covert ops agent," he replied, silently.
"You never did take yourself off of the X-Men's backup roster."
"I forgot!"
"C'mon, man," the voice persisted, and he could swear it was picking up a Scouse accent. "They wouldn't leave you in trouble if you needed 'em. It's not like they're askin' you to dress up in a tin-foil outfit, grow your hair out and drop your voice half an octave."
Despite himself, he was completely unable to suffocate a small smile at that.
"So, do it."
"Fine," he sighed, both out loud and mentally. He got to his feet, pulled Devon's business card out of his phone-side Rolodex and took a deep breath to steel himself.
And dialed.
Rating: G
Universe: Home
Timeline: June 7th, 2006
Written: June 7th, 2006
Summary: Arnie gets traded to ShadowKnight.
On first, or indeed any glance, he was a wholly unremarkable creature. Just one of the many millions of people who called the greater New York City area home. Even sitting on his fire escape, playing the tenor saxophone, he just seemed like another New Yorker who woke up, went to work, came home and occasionally tried to relax.
His neighbors generally agreed that they didn't mind if he practiced out on the fire escape during the summer, so long as it wasn't at some unholy hour or very loud. Occasionally, in true jazz style, the old woman across the alley would start playing her banjo and an impromptu jam session would start between two relative strangers on two different fire escapes. Once they were even joined by a pianist, playing an electric keyboard two stories down.
Right now, however, in the sticky and heavy heat of a summer evening, he was playing by himself. He probably would have practiced indoors, but the old apartment became almost unbearable in the summer; he didn't have air conditioning, just a ceiling fan that didn't actually cool anything off, just pushed the hot air around lazily.
Despite the strange sort of artistry of the scene, however, it still wasn't actually remarkable. At best, anyone who would take a moment to look would think the guy on the third floor fire escape was just a regular guy, playing a sax. At worst, they would think he was a bit crazy.
In a way, neither and both would be true.
Arnold J. Rimmer was a regular guy in a lot of ways; he did indeed wake up in the morning, commute to Brooklyn Heights for work, stay there for far too many hours in the day, then commute back home. Sometimes he even managed to fit grocery shopping and laundry into his slightly work-obsessed schedule. He also knew every single jazz spot in the whole of New York City, and knew which places had an open jam night, though he'd only gotten the nerve up a handful of times to actually go and participate.
He worked six days a week, had Sundays off, and when business was abundant, he was lucky if he could crawl through his front door before flopping face first on the couch and passing out. A few times, he'd fallen asleep leaning on the door in the process of unlocking it.
Given that it was Sunday, though, and he had achieved all the items on his Daily Goal List, that left him some time to play the sax. He'd ironed all of his clothes (including t-shirts and the two pairs of jeans he owned), dusted the apartment, worked on organizing his giant file of pictures of telegraph poles, tidied up anything that had inadvertently fallen out of place during the work week, and had finished all of that off with a few sandwiches before picking up the sax.
He occasionally drove up to Westchester on his days off, though not this one; he'd finally got around to buying a car when rent rates skyrocketed in Cobble Hill, and he decided to move to Bay Ridge so that he wouldn't have to choose between eating and having a roof over his head. There was also another reason he'd moved down to Bay Ridge; maybe if he could put some distance between himself and work, he would actually pick up something like a social life.
It hadn't panned out quite as well as he had hoped, but it wasn't like time was an issue.
He had been playing the sax now for, relatively speaking, three million and some odd years -- in literal time, he'd been playing for ten and a half. In chronological time, he had been playing for negative five hundred and some odd years. Age wise, he'd started playing at the physical age of thirty-one, and was still playing at the physical age of thirty-one. His life, if it were to be measured strictly by his years in existence, spanned only forty-six years -- but in those forty-six years, he had been all over kingdom and creation, in various dimensions and time periods, before finally landing in this one.
The whole story spanned a short six-million and some odd years, and crossed the boundaries between life, death, reality, dimension and time, and was guaranteed to make anyone trying to puzzle it out end up in a mental ward. In fact, Arnie had the sole distinction of having a tale behind him more confusing and brain-breaking than the Summers family tree.
This particular era of his six million and some odd year story began not quite a decade before, when he found himself dropped without fanfare into a world of super-powered beings. At the time, he hadn't taken it all that well -- actually, he'd pretty much become a complete emotional wreck and spent quite some time that way before finally concluding that he'd just have to make the best of it.
Given the sheer number of times that his world had come crashing down around his ears, one would think he would have gotten good at dealing with it. Sometimes it came crashing down metaphorically; too often, literally. But he was a bit chagrined to find that it didn't get any easier... in fact, it just seemed to get harder.
He paused in his playing, absently tightening the screws on the mouthpiece of the sax a hair, and took a breather. It was oppressively hot. Well, not hot, but muggy. If he didn't like playing as much as he did, he would have gone inside to lay on his back under the woefully underpowered ceiling fan in the naive hope that it'd be cooler. But between work and responsibility, especially with the longer commute, his playtime had been cut too far already.
The people who had known him in his life (and occasionally death) wouldn't have originally thought him suited to jazz. He was too organized, too structured, and his musical inclinations went only so far as the Hammond Organ or the occasional questionable album. Jazz, by its very nature, was about improvisation and imagination and feeling. The heart of true Jazz couldn't be found on sheet music -- it had to come from somewhere intangible.
Originally, Arnie would have agreed with them; at least when he was only able to make the poor instrument squeak in shrill protest while trying to wrench a scale out of it. But his teacher had been both incredibly patient and incredibly stubborn, and hadn't let him quit until he could at least play a scale. From there, it was all down to practice.
He looked down at the sax he was holding. It wasn't the same one he'd learned to play on, but he had bought it new and the varnish on the keys was now worn off, and there was a small dent in the bell where he'd accidentally knocked it on the window sill a month ago while he was climbing out onto the fire escape. In a world that was still uncertain, even after nine years of being a part of it, it was one thing that he had to hold onto.
There was little doubt he would have allowed himself to get morose, though he'd gotten somewhat better at combatting that over the years, but the phone rang and completely ruined any notions he had about being melancholy.
Muttering a bit under his breath, he scrambled carefully back through the window, took the neck strap off, set the sax on the couch and grabbed the phone. "H'lo?"
"Someone call Ripley's! You're not at work!"
Arnie rolled his eyes to himself, and though the gesture was lost on the phone, the faint note of exasperated annoyance in his voice more than made up for it. "No, I'm not. It's my day off. Is this a business call, or..."
"Kind of a business call. You've been traded."
"Traded." The tone was flat. In fact, any flatter and it would be perfectly two-dimensional, defying the laws of nature. "Traded to whom?"
"ShadowKnight. See, since Kitty and the others vanished--"
"Scott, you already told me about this," Arnie interrupted, taking the phone with him to the kitchen to get himself some ice water. He felt like he was baking inside the apartment; another hour, give or take, and he'd be cooked through to a golden brown.
Few people would understand the conversation if they didn't know who was on the other end. In fact, the man on the other end was Scott Summers, Field Commander of the X-Men, one of the most powerful mutants in the world. Most people, when he called, tended to be a little reverent. At the very least, they were willing to hear what he had to say.
"Anyway, Lorna's coming back to the X-Men, at least as far as rosters go, and ShadowKnight's desperately shorthanded. Since you're still on our backup list, we're trading you to them."
Most people. Not all. "No."
Scott actually sounded a bit surprised. "Why not?"
Arnie took a moment to sip on his water before answering, "I'm not moving back to Westchester, I'm not joining any team full time, or even part time, and you know damn well that I don't want called unless everyone else is dead or incapacitated."
"It's just as backup! Look, they're down to three baseline human field ops. You scan as baseline human. Devon's been able to pass on most of the missions that have come in, but if something comes up where ShadowKnight has to go out, I want you to go with them."
"Okay," Arnie said, amiably.
"...really?"
"No. Look, I've never even been in the field. Why on Io do you think I'd be able to do this?"
"This from one of the only people in the world who can sneak up on and then evade Logan?"
It had been a very long time since Arnie had called the Xavier Estate home. Well, he never actually called it home; for that matter, he didn't actually call any place home in this world. Home was a beat up old mining ship, three million and some years into the future.
Despite only staying in Westchester for two years before moving into the City, however, he had managed to acquire quite a reputation. First, for being absolutely anal-retentive about things that most people wouldn't even think of... like hair length. And second, for being the most unlikely person in the history of any X-Team to blow the stealth training records in the Danger Room completely out of the water.
In fact, to this day his records stood. No one had managed to beat them. Not even Gambit, who was still rather burned over losing top billing. Arnie chalked the win up to hair length -- short-back-and-sides versus long-hippie-ponytail.
"Just because I happen to have some training doesn't mean I have any desire whatsoever to play hero."
"Think about it. All you have to do is..."
Arnie shook his head to himself, setting the phone down gently and sticking his head under the faucet of the kitchen sink before turning the cold water on. He figured that Scott's impassioned plea would go on long enough for him to cool himself off, so he could at least combat the oven-effect of the apartment for a few minutes.
Once he'd thoroughly soaked his head, he grabbed a clean dishtowel and wrapped it around his shoulders. Another sip of water, and the idle thought that he might order some delivery from somewhere, and he finally picked the phone back up.
There was a long pause, and Scott said, "You know, that's not exactly nice."
"Sorry, I thought you were going to go on about it longer," Arnie replied, smirking to himself. "The answer's still no. I have a job already, and I can't very well--"
It was Scott's turn to interrupt. "How long have you been working there?"
"Seven years, but--"
"And when's the last time you took anything more than two days off at a time?"
"I haven't, but--"
"I'm not asking for you to move back here. Just be willing to train some with the ShadowKnights, and if they do get a mission that they can't pass up for whatever reason, go with 'em."
This was getting frustrating. He didn't want to get dragged back into that world. It hadn't been terrible, but it was always uncertain. If there was one thing that Arnie disliked, it was uncertainty. God knew, he'd faced too much of it and this was as close to a stable life as he'd had in a long time. "Scott..."
"Their family's all broken up, Arn. They're basically alone."
"That's damn low," he snapped into the phone, before he had time to think about it. "How dare you pull--"
"You *know* what that feels like, and you can maybe help them survive it," Scott hurried on. "Will you at least think about it? Just think about it?"
"Smeg off," Arnie snarled, half-surprised by his own anger. He clicked the phone off and stalked back out to replace it on its cradle, not bothering to say goodbye or in any way be polite.
It was a low blow. He did know what it was like to lose people.
He'd been born the youngest of four; had three older brothers. He'd had parents, a slew of aunts and uncles, and cousins. Even had pets. But when he thought about his family, those people never even crossed his mind.
His family consisted of a Scouse spacebum who loved curry, a neurotic cleaning droid, a senile computer and a creature that evolved from the common housecat. They were irritating and drove him crazy, and he couldn't count the number of times he wanted to grab a polo mallet and beat them senseless; they were disrespectful towards everything he'd once held dear, merciless in their insults and...
...not a day went by, even so many years later, that he didn't miss them. As crazy and dysfunctional a group as they made, they were his family. The only one that he ever really belonged to. A group of absolute losers, doing the best they could to survive.
He never had the chance to tell them those things. But hindsight is twenty-twenty -- he could find some measure of comfort knowing that even if he never had a chance to say it, they had known anyway.
He probably still would give anything for that one opportunity, though.
Anger was replaced with a sort of weariness, as he put his sax away in its case then laid down on the rug, staring up at the ceiling fan. Not for the first time, he questioned the whole concept of destiny and fate; then again, when you're the sole survivor of a dead universe, forgotten by Time itself, it was hard not to feel a bit put upon.
Scott had informed him about some of the ShadowKnights vanishing not long after it had happened. It had bothered him; he was in the process of working out Kitty's wedding invitations, and she was his friend. He didn't know the rest of her team very well; had only interacted with them on occasion, but she had loved them and it was equally obvious that they had loved her. Still, there was nothing that he could do that everyone else wasn't already doing, so he just hoped and kept working on different designs for her when she and the others returned.
But now...
No. He was absolutely, positively not going to allow Scott to emotionally blackmail him into anything. He didn't like the whole 'hero' thing. He much preferred, in fact, to avoid danger at all costs. That was part of the reason why he had gotten so very good at the stealth thing -- if in doubt, sneak away from a fight. And if you do have to fight, do so only until you can get away from it. Bravado was vastly overrated.
He tried to get the idea out of his head, but it was persistent. "What could it hurt just to make yourself available?" the little voice asked.
"I'm a printer, not a covert ops agent," he replied, silently.
"You never did take yourself off of the X-Men's backup roster."
"I forgot!"
"C'mon, man," the voice persisted, and he could swear it was picking up a Scouse accent. "They wouldn't leave you in trouble if you needed 'em. It's not like they're askin' you to dress up in a tin-foil outfit, grow your hair out and drop your voice half an octave."
Despite himself, he was completely unable to suffocate a small smile at that.
"So, do it."
"Fine," he sighed, both out loud and mentally. He got to his feet, pulled Devon's business card out of his phone-side Rolodex and took a deep breath to steel himself.
And dialed.
