om_main | Shinobi & Felix (backdated April 30)

Shinobi and Felix spend a day at the Club... except it isn't day, it isn't the club, and even time passing is suspect. Felix crafts a dream to show Shinobi the real extent of his powers, and to cover topics too important to speak out loud: the other members of the Black Court, the nature of Felix's true intentions, and the masks that both of them are wearing.

It was another lazy afternoon of lounging at the Club, and for no reason substantially more sinister than the pleasure of it. Shinobi was in his favorite chair, a massive throne of soft gold and silky gems, ermine-lined cape spreading out around him like the wings of a glorious phoenix. With his legs crossed idly in front of him, he watched the other members gavotte merrily below the lofty dais where he and his favorite guest had been ensconced. He raised a hand, and the dancers shifted immediately into a slow sarabande, their jollity transformed to sober gravity in an instant.

"Now is this living?" he sighed. "Or is this living?"

Felix relaxed back as well, his now quite long legs crossed before him as he snuggled into the warm, furred, protective large lion that was his current seat. For such a large beast, it was quite tame, and napped on its forepaws as Felix idly stroked its mane. His Club attire was resplendent in royal purple, with a lace cravat at his throat like a champagne fountain of elegant silk. Rings of ten different gemstones sparkled on each finger, which he admired from time to time.

"I don't know, it seems a bit like Heaven," Felix laughed, teasing Shinobi more easily than usual.

It wasn't afternoon at all, nor were they at the Club. Not really. In reality, it was the dead of night, and both Shinobi and Felix were tucked in their beds. This Club, Shinobi's phoenix-throne, Felix's lion, and the serving butler who bore a striking resemblance to High King Peter from the Narnia films were all a product of Felix's dream manipulation, built especially for Shinobi. It was time, after all, that Felix show what he could do, really do, with the power that Shinobi had recruited for his Inner Circle. The older teenager might realize it in a bit, or he might not remember until he woke up, that he had agreed to walk in Felix's dreams.

"But that has strange implications for you and I, lording over it all."

Shinobi laughed gaily, concealing his face below his eyes with an ornate azure paper fan. His attire, too, had dissolved, between one glance and the next, into something distinctly more Eastern: a flowing sapphire kimono in seven shimmering layers. The throne had disappeared entirely, in favor of a low black table upon which rested a steaming cup of sake. Even the dancers had transformed, and now circled in a stately, precise Bon-Odori in honor of the two teens in robes of lavender and grey. "It is easier to imagine our ruling over a far warmer locale, isn't it? I've certainly never knowingly associated with anyone the least bit saintly in my life. Not if I could help it."

He lifted the sake to his mouth and downed the drink in one quick, effortless motion. "Sinners make for far more pleasurable company, in my experience. Especially the imaginative ones. There's nothing duller than vice without creativity. Unless it's virtue without creativity, I suppose."

Felix had a drink of something he couldn't fully identify, but he could describe flawlessly: it was in a slender martini glass, it was blue, and tendrils of dry-ice-steam curled along the rim. When he sipped from it, and then spoke, that same trailing steam tickled along the edges of his lips like a dragon's smoke. "Virtuous and dull is insufferable. Wicked and dull is crass. I can't bear either of them."

As quickly as Shinobi changed the dreamscape, Felix adapted, shifting his own details while holding the environment around them steady, so it didn't get out of control. Dreams could shift so unpredictably, and this was such a delight.

Tilting his head back and snuggling comfortably with his lion, Felix looked up above them. A gnarly-branched tree had begun to grow, spreading its boughs with a distant cracking sound, stretching twigs and unfurling leaves in a canopy above their heads. When the small pink cherry blossoms appeared and bloomed, tiny lights of a dozen different colors hung suspended within the petals. Creating the fabulous and unearthly was ever so much more fun than making something real.

Despite the alterations to the setting, Shinobi remained convinced that they were still inside the Hellfire Club, despite the sheer impossibility of any such landscape ever being possible within its confines. "Hai, hai," he said, switching seamlessly to Japanese but confident Felix would understand him--that's what the subtitles were for! "Obviously, you should have nothing but the best henceforth. Even your saints will be of the finest possible quality. After all, there is no joy quite like temptation without certainty. That moment of submission is so unspeakably sweet ..."

Shaw's immediate environment shifted again; now he sprawled atop a small mountain of soft cushions, gowned and turbaned like a Turkish sultan, with a jeweled dagger at his belt and his fingers heavy with dazzling gems. Beside him, shirtless harem guards waved fans made from iridescent peacock feathers, and the dance below had become a display of exotic sensuality in diaphanous silks and soft, curling slippers. He raised the stem of the hookah to his mouth, inhaled, and breathed a long, slow spiral of thin gray smoke into the air between him and Felix, which soon adopted the stylized equine look of the knight from a standard chess set.

"Of course, you're in a unique position to circumvent that sort of thing. I'd advise you to take the opportunity to bend another to your way of thinking the old-fashioned way at least once. Borrow a page from Damon's book."

Felix wondered, privately, if Shinobi's regular dreams were so rapidly-shifting. Felix knew exactly how much of this adventure his power was facilitating, but a good deal of it came straight from Shinobi's own desires, run rampant. The change in topic from the carefree toward the decidedly more adult shifted Felix's certainties, tremoring the air. He caught control back quickly enough, and when he gave Shinobi a reproving look, he was wearing a pair of silky harem pants and an embroidered vest that left his arms bare. It was defiance, in a way. Proving that he could behave just as grown-up as the Black King.

The smoke-knight dissolved and reformed into the chess king as soon as Felix had the thought, but when Damon's name was mentioned, Felix forgot all about it. "Why would I want to be anything like Damon? Enough people at school despise him that he left. I've convinced everyone that I'm not only harmless, but need taking care of," he stated frankly, looking Shinobi in the eyes. A good deal more frank, in fact, than the ethereal shyness or effervescent innocence that Felix typically showed the world.

He knew what he was doing with the students at school, and he had no qualms about his little manipulations.

"Now now, my dove," Shinobi chided, his body visibly shrinking and contracting suddenly for no obvious reason; otherwise the scene remained unchanged. In a few moments a seven-year-old version of the half-Japanese mutant was looking up at Felix, in a uniform school blazer and short pants. He tucked his now significantly shorter legs up under himself and said, "There is no one so repulsive you cannot learn something from them, I find--it's pretty much the only lesson my father ever taught me."

The mini-Shinobi brought a highball glass of some mercifully-unidentifiable drink to his mouth, taking the whimsical novelty straw between his lips and blowing bubbles into the liquid. On some level, he knew that Felix's admission had been shocking, but dream-logic insulated him even further than normal from such a reaction. He simply mulled the information over, filed it away as interesting, and moved on. "And he's always been terribly sweet to me." A gross exaggeration on his part, but still. Principle demanded he stand up for his ex-roommate. One had to give in to it every once in a while, just to keep things interesting.

This time, Felix refused to shift to meet Shinobi's change in characterization. He would not even pretend to reveal himself as a child; even in a world completely controlled by his mind, Felix could not conceptualize himself other than he had been at the age which Shinobi presented himself. An undernourished, frightened, hollow-eyed victim was not the person Felix wanted Shinobi to see.

Instead, Felix changed more slowly, morphing into something else -- someone else, as he'd said, that he would be someday. Tall, beautiful, at ease with himself, with a sharpness to his eyes and his features, calm and in control. Felix's future face was a work in progress, still, and the hardest thing for him to hold manifested in the dream. With Shinobi's tendency toward caprice, he would likely not have to maintain it for long. He reached out, plucked the subtitles from the air with a little puff of smoke, and dropped a few pretty words into his martini glass, where they bubbled contentedly.

"Until he wants something from you," the older-Felix said, turning up his palm where appeared a round snowglobe, and a wintry scene miniaturized inside it. A bridge, a river, a large house, and two tiny figures indistinguishable at such a distance. "All I learned from Damon was that I was right to hide the worse things I can do. It hasn't bought him much that I can see."

"I admit, mutual self-interest is the glue that holds the most enduring relationships together," said Shinobi, hopping to the edge of the dais and kicking his feet over the side as he watched the colorfully-dressed girls and boys dance below them. He propped his chin in his hands and turned his face toward the handsome--yet somehow inchoate--older version of Felix. "I've never given him a reason to compel anything of me; you've probably noticed by now, but I'm very accommodating of my friends. And I'm not sure I have anything he particularly wants. Nothing I wouldn't give without hesitation."

The smile on mini-Shinobi's face was utterly ill-suited to his childish face. "And the same is true for you, of course," he went on, slipping into French this time. "It's wiser, certainly, to let others take care of you for now--you've not yet quite grown into your teeth. But there's nothing wrong with inspiring a bit of fear. It makes one's kindnesses seem all the kinder. And it's gratifying to know that those who might wish you ill will think twice about crossing you."

Felix, as fair in his older dream-form as his physical self, but far more critical, frowned faintly as he turned the glass snowglobe back and forth in his hands. This was his secret, for him to guard and for him to wield, the one thing he knew that he could hold against Damon if ever he had need for it. He had tucked it away in this little bauble, in his world of dreams, so he'd never forget. This was what the tiny Shinobi version was talking about: a very, very small step down a path much more complicated than he had walked so far.

"They should be afraid," Felix answered, finally, after letting the subtitles break apart into tiny butterflies and flutter away, to settle in the branches of the electric tree. "If they knew about me, they'd treat me like they treat Damon, and that boy Anders. People will forgive you anything if they think you're innocent. Or you've been hurt. Look at Benjamin. Or Vance. They'll let you almost literally get away with murder if you did it because you were hurt."

"Up to a point," Shinobi agreed, still in his child-body. "As long as they can convince themselves you didn't know any better. Eventually, though, we all have to grow up--whether we like it or not." And suddenly, he was in his usual dark-blue Hellfire Club regalia, but sized for his teenage self, the sleeves hanging down long past the tips of his fingers and breeches pooled loosely around his hips. "Won't it be better to be respected for what you might do, but withhold, than cared for because of what you've endured?"

The walls of the Club had never been quite visible, save as a distant sort of haze. And now, in that vague, misty perimeter, scenes obviously gleaned from Shinobi's past began to play out. Scenes that rather prominently featured a burly man dressed in the manner Shinobi tended to prefer when making an appearance at the Club. Mutton-chop sideburns framed a severe, angular face, cold blue eyes glowering out from beneath bushy black brows. Blows from fists and boots, thick-fingered hands at his throat, wrenching an arm, a leg, violent shoves and throws and booming disapproval. "Children need forgiveness," he said pointedly. "Rulers rule. I wouldn't have invited you to this party if I thought you were just a damsel in distress. Or even just a useful pawn."

That moment was the closest Felix had yet come to losing control of the dream. He was on his feet, his lion-throne forgotten, his adult self abandoned. The boy was a child again, or he was his waking self, or he was younger: his own features in flux as Felix struggled against a deeply violent instinctive reaction to Shinboi's tableaux.

They were part of Shinobi's dream, his memories, and Felix couldn't catch hold of them in an emotional state of turmoil. Instead of turning them into something else, as he'd done with every new detail up until then, Felix denied them. New walls slammed up through the ground with deafening sound, shutting out the cinematic visions of abuse and pain.

Fearful, angry, the walls Felix threw in his own defense were meant to resemble the walls of the Club, with creamy neutral colors, alabaster wainscoting, rich mahogany wood. But Felix struggled with them, visibly, their fine facades fading against an underlying layer of cheap wood paneling from decades gone by, neglected, faded, cracked. Whenever he was afraid, his dreams retreated there, to a dark and hazy room lurking in a corner of his memories that Felix could not allow Shinobi to see.

Yes, he was afraid. Angry, too. Not at Shinobi. Maybe not at anything at all. Only fumbling with his control over an ever-present, ever-concealed well of terror and fury that lived within him. Shinobi had glimpsed it, once, when Felix had objected to the bruise on his face care of that man in the other boy's memories. Now it simmered like a black hole in Felix's eyes. "Children grow up." The words were Felix's voice, but he'd forgotten to move his lips to say them. "That's what this is about. Isn't it."

Shinobi nodded. "Sooner or later. Eventually. I suppose the only question of any significance is whether you embrace the transformation or have it thrust upon you, instead." He was talking to Felix, but absently, his gaze fixed on the not-quite-right walls that now surrounded them, slowly aging back to his waking size. "It looks so plain now," he mused. "So boring." Even painful was better than that. Anything was better than boring. Anything at all.

Felix had never had much self-control when it came to strong emotions. He never knew what to do with them, when all his life he'd been made to swallow those feelings until he choked. They'd never managed to die, not for all his trying. As he had no other outlet for the pent-up tangle of sticky black feeling that had bubbled to his surface, Felix unleashed it on the scene about which Shinobi was complaining.

The walls came alive, teeming with rushing indeterminate shapes, made of warm auburn fur and tips of black. Dark delicate paws and bright eyes glimpsed through the fur that rippled like wind through grass, unrolling, unfurling, until the walls around them were made of nothing but foxes, darting and dashing, both two- and three-dimensional at the same time in complete defiance of physics or reality.

Lounges and thrones grew up out of the ground, thick vines with leaves of crimson, honey, emerald and sapphire like the leaves that decorated Felix's hands and fingers in the waking world. Living gemstones, sparkling with wealth but warm and alive to the touch. "You didn't ask me to be your Knight because you think I'm a child," Felix said, accusatory, like needles. "Did you?"

Laughing delightedly, Shinobi swung his legs over the arm of his verdant throne and clapped his hands, watching the foxes loll and play where the walls had once been. Felix's question, however, caught him somewhat off-guard, and when he looked in the other boy's direction again, his face was concealed behind the same white and scarlet kitsune mask he had worn at Halloween, though the rest of his attire remained unchanged. "What a strange question," he said, looping an arm around the back of his living, blooming chair. "Have I ever treated you like a child? Condescended to you or tried to shield you from influences I considered unwholesome? Do you think I view you more like a project or a dependent than a fascinating friend? Or at the very least a friendly acquaintance."

Shifting the dream so constantly, at whim and without true purpose other than to entertain, grew as tiring as being so very angry and confused could be. Felix's energy flagged, and the vines grew more slowly, the foxes slowed to an inquisitive trot. The gemstone leaves curled around Felix loosely, protectively, letting him sink into their supportive grasp.

"I don't know what you think of me," he confessed, pushing the words out and away; he couldn't be sure he wanted to know. "If I'm a dress-up doll or your charity good deed for the year. Or if you just want to rub the Club's nose in the fact that you can bring in a nobody from nowhere, and none of them know it, and none of them can argue with you about it."

One of the leaves burst into a blossom of jade chrysanthemum-shaped flowers in an abstract pattern around Felix's shoulders. More of the flowers bloomed in trails down Felix's seat and out across the floor. He seemed unaware of them. "The Knight moves unlike any other piece on the board. It has a noble title, but it's sneaky. I think you asked me because you're smart, even when you pretend like you aren't, and you think I can make moves that your other pieces can't."

"All true!" said Shinobi, lounging deeper into his chair as the atmosphere of the dream grew more languid, more sluggish. "Except for that part about charity," he added, waving that notion aside. "Charity isn't really a thing I do." To him, the idea implied either the catastrophically flawed principle that all people had some inherent right to equal treatment and equal access to the best life had to offer, or that he was under some sort of obligation by virtue of his stature to shower the less fortunate with generosity. Shinobi Shaw's approach to life was far more self-centered; as far as he was concerned, his wealth existed to indulge the people he liked and torment the ones that annoyed him. To the rest, he owed nothing but tolerant indifference.

"Yes, I do enjoy flaunting the privileges of my position more than a little, and yes, you are quite possibly one of the only people I've ever known that may be even sneakier than I am," the fox-mask's grin widened, "but that's not all." He touched a finger to the fox's muzzle, just below its pointed nose and painted whiskers. "This last part is a secret, though, so I'll ask you to keep it in the strictest confidence."

Shinobi stretched, arching his back over one arm of the throne and extending his legs into the air against the other. "I think I trust you, Felix. Not implicitly. Never implicitly, never without qualification, but far more than I do Lydia or Manuel or even Damon. Your aspirations, as I've seen them, mesh best with my ambitions. I need someone in my Court I can rely on not to cast me to the wolves as soon as it's most expedient to do so."

Felix let the gemstone vines hold him up, his limbs melting over their strangely comfortable support. His dream-self had settled again on his sixteen-year-old appearance, with all the long lanky height he had gained in the last months of proper sleep, nutrition and health care. The mask that he held in his slim fingers was fluffy and white, and when he lifted it to rest on the bridge of his nose, it was the face of an innocent little lamb. At long last, Felix smiled a tiny bit, a pink curve of deceptive sweetness glimpsed beneath the mask.

He didn't need to say anything. The conjured mask said it for him, not out loud, but in the certain silent language of dreams: whatever Felix was hiding, he'd learned to conceal it behind a veil of harmlessness, even helplessness. A lamb had no place among the wolves, but what creature could be better suited to lure them?