Shapeshifter - 10. A day in court

**Noom**

I’d never had troubles with waking up in time. Most of my life, the problem had been falling asleep at all, though of course I slept at some point. It just never felt restful or easy to sleep.

When I opened my eyes to find a softly snoring, pliant body wrapped around me, I was disappointed for a second. Then I squashed the feeling, like I had done all my life. I had awoken with sunrise, like every day, and now, I had hours to kill before anything of interest would happen. Of course, having sex with someone I thought I loved wouldn’t fix me magically over night, but a small part of my wretched mind still had held hope. Stupid, stupid mind.

I was angry for a heartbeat, and the anger translated into the urge to shove Kelaste off the couch, because, how dare he sleep when I couldn’t, but I squashed that down too. Being cruel to him hadn’t fixed anything in me as of yet, and to top that off, he wasn’t fazed by it, at all. Infuriating, that was what he was.

I carefully peeled those sleep-slack arms off of me and crawled out from under him. He didn’t wake up, but his stomach growled softly as he curled up against the back rest to conquer the warm spot I had left. God, he’s cute.

I twitched at my own thoughts and whirled around until I couldn’t see him anymore. What the hell? Cute? Really? How had that happened? A vertebrae in my neck cracked, reminding me how tense I was being ever since that lanky boy had entered my life. This couldn’t be healthy. No way was a body meant to stay wired up all day long, but still, still…

With a huff, I drudged into the bathroom, scraping at the flaky, sticky remnants of the wildly unreasonable sex we’d had last night. I just had to get myself cleaned up, change my bandages, take him to the court house to find out who was trying to murder the fuck out of him, and then run like hell, the moment he was safe. The sooner I could get rid of him, the better I’d be. I did still want to get rid of him, right?

On my way to the bathroom, I headed to the window to have another look at the spot that stranger had lurked around at yesterday. Of course, at this time in the morning nobody should be standing around down there, with the pub closed and most shops just opening. On the other hand, a professional would know that and find another spot to watch us, so seeing no one actually didn’t help my nerves at all. Having a room on the second floor did have a calming effect on me, though. I was a light sleeper, and the stairs creaked with no ‘blind spots’, as I called them. I had tried that the night before, and I was confident enough that nobody could sneak up those stairs without me hearing it. My scrap seemed to have even better hearing than me, but he had no experience with danger, so I didn’t want to rely on him with things like that. The only weak spot in our temporary home was its layout. I’d have to scan the rooms thoroughly each time we came back, or set up a booby trap. I did not want to waste energy on booby traps right now.

As I covered myself in generic hotel body soap, my mind kept torturing me with pictures of him. Those freaky eyes, that mop of hair, his tall, lanky back, the way his spine showed through the tendons and muscles at his back in the throes of passion, the musky smell of his sweat, but worse than the words my head used to describe him was the boner all that thinking-too-hard gave me. Usually, I would just have tugged myself into a happy morning, but since I didn’t want to react to Kelaste that way, I couldn’t really give attention to my cock without becoming a hypocrite.

The shampoo was no improvement to the body soap, but it did the job well enough. I didn’t like the scent and I was short a bottle of hair spray and a comb to fix my hair the way I usually wore it, but at least I was clean— something that couldn’t be said for my clothes. I so didn’t want to get back into them, but they were all I had until we bought something new. At least I had my own clothes, which was more than I could say for Kelaste. He couldn’t go into the court house wearing nothing but sweat pants and an over-sized sweatshirt, they wouldn’t take him seriously looking like that.

Again, I twitched, then bumped my head against the bathroom wall three times.

What the hell was I thinking! This was so not me, nothing like me, more like an episode of ‘Twilight Zone’ meets ‘Twilight’! Had that little twerp put some kind of spell on me? Or had he sprayed some occult cat-pheromones into my face, like a B-movie version of Batman’s villain Poison Ivy?

When someone knocked on the bathroom door, I almost broke the shower stall door because I jumped so hard, only to shudder when I heard his voice.

“Noom?”

“What!” I barked, satisfied with my annoyed tone of voice. Yeah, that was more like it. If I could just keep it up--

“I need to go to the bathroom, and I’d like to take a shower, too. How much longer do you need?”

I closed my eyes. He sounded so apologetic and sleepy, it ramped up my anger like nitrous oxide sprayed into a race car. The urge to hit him, to hurt him, was there again, but it burned out just as quickly as it had come and it left me bereft and shaky. Another vertebrae in my back cracked, realigning itself with its buddies and reminding me how tense Kelaste was making me.

“Put on some coffee, I’ll be done by the time you come back,” I finally huffed, turning off the water. ‘Vaguely annoyed and grumpy’ was the best I could do, but it would have to suffice. When his footsteps faded into the kitchenette, I felt myself relax a bit, and I used the break in tension to dry myself off and find a way to wrap that tiny towel around my hips. It was too short to stay there by itself, but if I held it with one hand, I’d be fine. I honestly had no idea why I still tried to hide my crotch from him, but it made me feel more confident, and that was enough of a reason for now.

I opened the bathroom door, holding my dirty clothes in one hand and the towel around my waist with the other, just as Kel raised his hand to knock again. His nose twitched as he scented the air, and whatever he was smelling beneath the generic body products blew out his pupils until his eyes looked almost black. It gave me a small feeling of triumph to see him so gob-smacked.

“What?” I asked, again happy with the slightly annoyed tone in my voice. Or at least that was what I heard, because whatever Kel heard in that one word made him turn red and stammer.

“No-nothing at a-all,” he blubbered, and his eyes wandered over my naked, damp chest only to flutter back up to my face, which he then kept staring at religiously. “I-, t-the coffee is, I mean, uh,” he went on, grasping at the air with both hands, then gesturing at everything and nothing.

I grinned, showing my teeth like a shark at breakfast. At least, I wasn’t the only one not really coping well with the situation, and it was enough of a moral updraft for me to get a grip on myself. As long as I could stay in control, I’d be fine.

“Go take a shower, you smell like a bordello,” I snarked and shoved him into the bathroom, more than happy to have him out of sight. I normally didn’t have such a fine sense of smell, but I’d be damned if I didn’t smell my own cum on him as he passed me. My palm tingled where it had touched his sleep-warm skin.

God help me, I was so, so fucked.

~*~

We had coffee and a few awkward moments as I watched Kel scarf down everything edible the small kitchen offered. At least, we managed to stay civil with each other. That bugged me more than the amounts of food that fit into that small body of his. I didn’t do civil, not ever, except with him when trying not to have sex.

It was eight o’clock by now, and I watched him fiddle around with the dishes, all but swimming in his over-sized clothes. The garments billowed around his body in a most curious fashion, so that I got peeks and glimpses of his tight ass and his small hips, but nothing more than that. It reminded me of the stories about pornography in the Victorian era, where a naked ankle was said to have been enough to drive men crazy.

I felt crazed right now.

As we had brought no hair brush— amongst other missing amenities— his black hair was tangled and disheveled, but it still caught the light and shone with blue highlights. I remembered how he had looked in his designer jacket, his just as expensive pants that had looked painted on they had been so tight, the carefully styled hair, and how I had thought he was gorgeous then. I hadn’t been wrong, but not right all the way. Kel looked good because of who he was and how he moved, not what he wore, exhibit A for that fact standing in front of me.

“We need to get going,” I said absentmindedly, more to snap myself out of it than to hurry him up. “Mike won’t wait, and we need to get some new clothes. We can’t go into a court house looking like hobos.”

A plate clattered out of Kel’s hands, and he threw a wide-eyed look over his shoulder. His face said plainly that his thoughts had drifted off and he’d forgotten I was still here. Out of breath and blushing, he replied, “yeah, yeah, sure,” then turned back to the dishes and piled them up next to the sink to dry. A domestic one, that boy. Another evil prank by the universe, if you asked me; I was more of a hunter-gatherer-kind of guy, but I liked a well-run home to come back to, and here stood my perfect other half, looking scrumptious and taking care of things.

My fingers started to prickle and I tapped them against my thigh to ease the feeling as I turned towards the door. Not being alone with Kel for long periods of time sounded more prudent by the minute.

Kel finally turned and gave me a once-over with those iridescent eyes of his. He blushed slightly, a pale-pink hue that almost vanished against his usual skin color, but I saw it.

“Shame. Just when I fell in love with the way yours smell,” he stated, blushed harder and hurried towards the front door.

I gulped and balled my hands into fists. We so had to get going, or I would do something that’d definitely make us miss the deadline.

~*~

We didn’t have to go far to find stores, but I spent the whole way listening, looking, and trying not to grind my teeth at Kel’s carelessness. He took off as soon as we hit the street, pouncing from shop front to shop front and commenting on everything he liked, or disliked. I would have liked to go slow, to keep an eye out for suspicious persons or anyone following us, but trying to stop or slow him would have alerted other people just as much as yelling at him to wait up. The only chance I had was to take his hand into mine and then slow down, trying to ignore how we must look from the outside. I should have worried more about how Kel would take it, though.

The way he stared down at our hands, then snapped his gaze up to my face and grinned like an idiot, made me turn a red somewhere between ketchup and aubergine, trying to look anywhere else but at him. Of course he had to take the gesture in the wrong way, damn it! But now that I was committed to it, I didn’t try to get him to let go until we were inside a store. At last, my streak of bad luck ended with a thrift store front popping up next to us like a TARDIS in disguise. I did, however, shake him off as soon as the door fell shut and shoved him towards the rows of clothing hangers.

“Go, find something mediocre.”

I’d have to find something to wear, too, but first, I’d make sure we hadn’t been seen or followed. When I looked outside through the display windows, the hairs on my neck prickled for a short moment, and I had a feeling of being watched somehow, but I couldn’t find anyone or anything suspicious. I especially kept an eye out for the sucker who had watched our windows yesterday, though I already knew that if he had been there to watch us last night, he was too experienced to show up looking anything like that today.

Kel, having no care in the world for safety, was already rummaging through rows and rows of second hand clothes. Or third hand, judging by the sad look some of the items had to them.

Kel had never seen a second hand store from the inside, I soon realized. His exclamations over every piece of designer clothing soon grew tiresome, but he kept going anyway. I already knew I wouldn’t touch anything that had been expensive at one point. Rich people had given that stuff away, and not for the best reasons. It was easy to be charitable if your ex-wife had peed on your Armani suit as a ways of revenge. Or when a box of rat poison had exploded in your walk-in-closet, spewing poisonous clouds over your two-thousand-dollar jackets.

I, on the other hand, was a seasoned veteran with these kinds of shops. My whole wardrobe could boast a provenance, having gone through enough hands to count as antiquities. I liked that, and the smell of moth balls and chemical detergent. A good thrift store had an aroma of failed lives. It smelled like home.

As I went through a few stacks of clothes nobody but me had looked at for months, if not years, I lost sight of Kel. I didn’t worry, though; I could hear him squeak and groan and hum almost constantly. I found some great faded red jeans, a pair of camo pants with almost all of its buttons intact, three white tank tops, two black sleeveless button-up shirts, and the most awesomely colored hoodie ever invented, striped with fat rows of screaming orange and dark brown. I couldn’t understand how anyone could throw something so awesome out, I really couldn’t. So it had a bleach stain, so what? It looked fucked, and I loved it.

Everything fit, as I already had known it would. Kel, on the other hand, took his sweet time, running in and out of the changing room with heaps of stuff. The only thing the rags on his arms had in common was the color: all black. Deep black, faded black, the true black only polyester kept over thousands of washings, and all of them horribly boring.

“When I said ‘mediocre’, I didn’t mean depressing,” I remarked as he trotted by. He just grinned unabashedly, and carried on. My face tingled with the need to sneer.

Instead, I went back to the jackets and sweaters section and did what I did best. A few hard choices later, I had in my hands the solution to Kel’s horrible taste, and it was dark violet. The zip-up hoodie even had a few decorative black and grey patches right where they looked best. Another few moments of searching, I had a matching set of almost black, purple boots in my hands. It was the cheap sort, with steel plates to cover the toes safely, but scratched and with a few cracks in the leather here and there. They would do, at least for a time. Enough time to get this mess sorted out, I hoped.

This time around, when I came back to the cashier’s table, Kel was already there, hands on a small heap of darkness, waiting for me. I threw the hoodie and boots onto his heap, nodded once, and proceeded to haggle with the old man behind the registry.

The prices were higher here than they were at my usual haunts, but we still made a bargain. As I paid, Kel picked up the violet abominations, examining them with a puzzled expression on his face. I thought he might argue, but after a few twists and turns, and a sniff at the cloth, he simply shrugged and put them back on his pile.

“We’ll just be another moment, to get changed, then we’re out of your hair,” I told the old man. He shrugged, counting the bills I had presented him with, then pointed back at the changing rooms.

“Knock yourselves out.”

So we did.

With another twenty minutes to reach the court archives, we stepped back out onto the street, laden with plastic bags full of wardrobe-y goodness. Kel carried both bags, his own and mine, as I tried to find the best place to put my gun. Some of my mercenary friends swore by holsters, but I had never bothered trying one. Too impractical and bulgy, you see. A Beretta is a heavy, angry gun all by itself, but stick it in a leather sheath, and it morphs into a deadly fanny pack, impossible to disguise with generic clothing.

I finally found a good place and angle at the small of my back, where the gun would be hidden beneath my hoodie without digging into my flesh, and sped up my pace.

We had us a brisk walk over to the other end of Cat’s Cradle Peninsula, arriving at the court archives with only a minute to spare. Mike’s face told the story of how close we had cut it, but he didn’t remark on it. Phobias are a funny thing. There’s no good way to handle a fear like Mike felt for cats, and his muddled mind seemed to have no problems whatsoever with translating his phobia onto Kel, furry or not furry. So Mike kept a good distance from Kel, who for his part tried not to let on how very aware he was of things. I, being my hard-headed best, just walked between them, slightly more angled towards my scrap, and tried to look serious and trustworthy.

Of course, the court archives had a metal detector as a separator between the entrance and the back rooms, but they also had lockers set to one side, available to everyone wanting to stash stuff. Kel put our bags in one, I put my gun in another one, camouflaged by Mike’s Viking bulk. Kel’s eyes followed the gun with a strange expression, almost as if he was afraid it might come to life and jump him if he didn’t keep an eye on it.

My lips moved before I could think about it. “I won’t shoot you, okay?” they promised, following an urge I couldn’t describe. Then the urge disappeared, just as quickly as it had come, leaving me wide-eyed and stammering amidst the ruins of my reputation.

“I mean, you know, it won’t bite,” I added, puffing my cheeks as I blushed with adrenaline. I made myself shut up after that, made myself ignore his surprised face, and turned around briskly. I’m a jabbering idiot.

Turning just brought me face-to-face with Mike’s manic grin— well not really face-to-face, since Mike was standing a good half dozen feet back. But still, he grinned wide enough to make me want to smash his face in. Wipe that expression off his damn visage. Whatever I was feeling must have shown on my face, because he toned down his amusement, coughed softly, and started walking towards the metal detector queue. Wise man, that Mike.

I followed him after a quick look back, and Kel trailed behind me like a lazy house cat waiting for its bowls to be filled. He was grinning, too, but it had a pleased note to it. I wanted to hit him too, but for a whole different set of reasons. Mostly because him grinning made me want to grin, too, and that was unacceptable. Nobody should be able to influence me. I had sworn never to be manipulated by any other person, ever again.

My personal hell walked behind me, and there was nothing I could do.

~*~

The archives were rather underwhelming. I had imagined cloak-and-dagger stuff when Mike had told me we’d have to look through case files, but the reality was much more boring. There was a big room with a high ceiling, dozens of tables spread across the main floor, and a few clerk’s ‘offices’-- meaning, there were boring people behind cheap, boring tables, typing away on uniform personal computers.

Oh, and all the other tables had computers, too. There actually was a double swing-door leading back to paper archives where a person could do cloak-and-dagger stuff, but our case was too fresh to have ever been stored there. We got to play with a PACER station.

Kel took it on himself to get an account and browse through the files, but a few of them were still closed to the public, marked “ongoing”, and therefore out of our reach. Mike had already told us as much, but we had to keep up appearances for the clerks if we wanted to do this right. Meaning, we had to build a plausible case of ‘sorry, sir, but since this case is about me, I’d really like to read what it’s all about’.

I had troubles sitting still and holding my tongue as they proceeded to fill Kel’s newly acquired search history with enough stuff to prove that he had really, really tried before bothering the clerks. It took ages, eons, a millennia, or at least enough time to have me dozing when Kel finally got up to go visit one of the supervisors.

Mike and I stayed where we were--him because he was a fucking seven feet tall Viking; me because my job showed and looking like a hardened criminal wouldn’t go well with Kel’s pleading. He did seem to do well enough, although his face showed increasing versions of distress and shame as he gestured and whispered with the old lady manning the desk. The way his face scrunched up made me tense up and grip the arm rests of my chair with white-knuckled hands. Had anyone asked, I probably would have said it was irritation, but nobody did, so I could be honest with myself. I didn’t like those expressions on his face, just like I hadn’t liked him smiling before, although for different reasons.

“Christ, why are flings so hard on a person,” I muttered through gritted teeth as the wizened lady clerk sighed and started typing away on her computer. At least, Kel looked to be getting somewhere.

Mike snorted. “Yeah, fling, that’s what this is, sure,” he drawled, smirking lazily. “You’re just in it for the money, right?”

I tried not to frown, because I’m not stupid. I heard what he wanted me to hear, and I knew what I tried not to. Not a fling. Oh boy, so not a fling. I did like money, though.

There was no good answer to his remark, so I kept my mouth shut and just watched.

The lady clerk had scooted back to make room for Kel and his second chair, so he had obviously succeeded in trying to look at the rest of the files. Problem was, Mike couldn’t just saunter over and join them to have his own look-see, and both of us didn’t really trust Kel’s drug-addled little brain to remember everything.

“Next time, we find a way to smuggle in bugs and an ear plug,” Mike grumbled, having realized the impasse, too.

“He’ll get what we need,” I replied, trying to sound bored, because I didn’t feel confident enough to fake ‘sincere’. Kel probably would get us enough information to continue our own hunt, but it would cost precious time. Time was something I didn’t want to fuck with, not with a free-fire-sign on Kel’s head.

There was a moment when Kel looked at us with a puzzled, unhappy expression on his face, but for most of the next hour, Mike and I just sat there, playing Solitaire on the PC and clicking through the government website connected to the archives.

I almost jumped up when Kel finally fell into a chair next to us.

“So?” Mike prompted, forgetting— at least for the moment— how little he liked cats, or Kel. I’d have bet money he would scoot back, but he didn’t. Long stretches of waiting can do that to a person.

“I’m confused,” Kel stated, nodding sagely to his own words. He didn’t meet my eyes, or Mike’s, fiddling around with the zipper of his fabulous violet hoodie. “It seems I have a quite substantial trust fund in my name, and, what did they call it, shares? I own some of them. Well, more than half of them, actually, of my father’s business. And I’m supposed to get access to all of it at my twenty-first birthday.”

There was so little emotion in his words, I did a double-take, just to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. Kel had just given us so much information, in so little words, it was hard to make my mind digest them quickly enough. When I did, though, it all seemed quite clear.

“And your father has control over your stuff until your birthday?” I asked in a hushed voice.

Kel nodded numbly. “That’s what those case files say. I read the court transcript.”

I didn’t know what to say. It was a first for me. My parents had been fucked-up drunks, not violent or anything, just not quite here in the head anymore, so I didn’t really understand family bonds, but the thought of having someone who was supposed to love you, try to kill you? It had to hurt.

Mike didn’t have the same qualms. “So, your father is behind the assassination attempt?”

“I don’t know,” Kel whispered. His head sagged, his shoulders rolled forward, and he carefully, slowly, rested his elbows on his thighs. “There were things I don’t really understand. Something about my mother’s relatives in France. If I die, they have some kind of set time period to lay claim on my money, but that’s where it gets fuzzy. My father tried to get that clause to be stricken from the pre-nup, something about them having had no contact with me or my mother for more than twenty years. The judge agreed, but only if the French relatives signed a written statement, confirming they don’t want anything to do with me.”

Kel looked up, and his eyes glittered in the light. It wasn’t tears, but emotion, some deep, dark, strong emotion setting his irises on fire. “That’s when he decided to withdraw his motion.”

Mike’s seat creaked as he leaned back. I, for my part, kept as still as I could. I would have lit a cigarette, had we been outside or something, but in here I’d probably get kicked out or arrested. Sitting still was the next best thing I had to offer. That, and blunt truth.

“Your dad didn’t want your French blood relatives to find out you existed.” It made sense to me. If they didn’t know they had a nephew or cousin or something, they didn’t have any reason to contact ol’ Teddy after his wife’s death. And Kel would have known about their existence, even if they just didn’t care about him. “Fucked up, if you ask me.”

Kel looked at me sluggishly, his eyes darting over my face, then to my eyes. He held my gaze, looking at me and through me at the same time.

“Noom,” he said haltingly, his lips quivering, again not with tears, but with something deeper, something more hidden, “I think my dad wants to kill me. And he has four more days to do it.”

I blinked at him. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

A shiver ran through him, my Kel, and he sighed.

“My birthday is on this Friday. The thirteenth of December. I’ll be twenty-one.”