TITLE: Lex Talionis

SUMMARY: But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. Welcome to the Thieves Guild. Enjoy your stay.

RATING: T

WARNINGS: None

DISCLAIMER: They’re not my toys. Marvel’s just good enough not to yell at me for playing with them.

AUTHOR’S NOTES: For those unaware, pain perdu -- ‘lost bread’ -- is the Louisiana version of what you’ll probably know as French toast. There’s little to no difference in the recipe, but having grown up both in New Orleans and Tante Mattie’s kitchen, Remy would likely know it by its French name.

As well, it’s worth mentioning that Mattie referencing classic poetry and reading it to the Guild kids is directly inspired by and drawn from Green Amber’s one-shot “The Highwayman”.

Section Four: Killing Birds

Remy spends the night in the same room that he grew up in. It’s not a pleasant night, nor can he be certain that he even sleeps. All he knows is that he tosses, turns, and spends far too much time looking in to the dark that he swears is looking back. These are, after all, the four cream-coloured walls that formed his sanctuary as a child and his cage as an adolescent. This room and he are too well acquainted for him to be at any sort of ease here.

To pass the time he lays there in the dark, listening to the strange sounds a large building makes when there’s hardly anyone in it. He finally hears people making their way into and about the house at what’s probably three or four in the morning; he can be no more accurate than this guess since the alarm clock by his bed has been unplugged. The rest of the family, it would seem, has come home after a night’s profitable work.

He doesn’t go to say hello.

xXx

The next day dawns that special kind of winter-bright, the air stagnant and cool. The promise of clouds hangs in the empty sky alongside an almost oppressive significance that weighs down souls.

It’s a good day for a funeral.

Pity then that it will be wasted on a wake.

The sun has risen, though just barely, and Remy’s decision to reject last night’s dinner is making its ill-advised nature known by the painful rumble of his stomach. Despite everything, food is still a necessity. It’s this alone that draws him out of his room. He stalks along the hallway and down the main stairwell, making his way to the kitchen with the intent of getting something to eat and disappearing back in to his room before anyone else wakes up. It being early in the morning after a late night, no-one else will be awake. It’s all part of his plan to avoid as much human contact as possible.

The smell of cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla reaches him before he can even see the kitchen door, meaning his attempt to avoid people has been dashed. The disappointment lingers as he continues on his way anyhow. As he comes closer, he hears a slightly off-key singing barely rising above the sound of a sizzling pan. Both the sound and smell are familiar to the point of pain.

Tante Mattie doesn’t even look up from the pain perdu she’s tending to as he enters the kitchen.

“Mornin’ Remy.”

He knows his entry was soundless. He also knows better than to assume he can slip past Tante Mattie unnoticed. There’s no point to pretending at surprise.

“Morning.”

“Your breakfast is jus’ gonna be a minute, but there’s a cuppa coffee on the counter.”

He doesn’t question the woman, just picks up the waiting mug and takes a slow sip. It’s just how he likes it – strong, sweet, and just shy scalding.

Mattie flips the bread in the pan over, and her eyebrows take a hike for her forehead as she turns towards him.

“Sit down and stay a spell, why doncha? You look like you’ll up an’ run away if I so much as look at you funny.”

He gives her his best forced smile over the rim of his mug. It comes automatically, and however wrong it might be, this gives him a rather warped sense of accomplishment.

“I’m not going anywhere, Mattie.”

She finishes his thought for him as she fetches a plate and some syrup, placing the first right near the stove, and the second on the counter nearest Remy.

“Not ‘til all this is done, at any rate,” she sighs. “And Lord knows what that means anymore, or when it’s gonna be.”

There’s a question in there he’s being baited to ask – a what’s that supposed to mean, probably. He doesn’t say a word. Years in this house have taught him that no matter how closely held the secret, it will end up being revealed before the curtain falls. He just has to wait.

In the silence, Mattie checks the breakfast and deems it ready before serving it up.

“S’been a while,” she says, sliding the plate across the counter to a waiting knife and fork that’s a pace away from where Remy stands. He closes the distance and finds himself pondering the refusal of this food too, whatever his original intentions for coming here were. As good as it smells, and as good as he knows it will taste, accepting it somehow gets twisted in his head as being tantamount to accepting everything the family represents.

Perhaps the connection is not so strange; his memory is speckled with Sunday morning brunches after church, with everyone crammed in to the kitchen together trying to be heard over the din of cooking, chatter, and eating as this very smell filled the room.

Remy’s stomach rumbles again, and hunger proves louder than better judgment. He takes a seat and a couple absent bites of the breakfast.

It tastes as delicious as he remembers it being, which bothers him at the deepest sort of level. In even this small action he’s made yet another commitment, however tenuous, and knows that with each small concession like this he’s walling himself in.

“It has,” he finally replies.

“New York treatin’ you well?”

The words have the air of polite conversation, things said to keep the quiet at bay. Remy’s not so sure that this is the case. He can’t help but think that she’s searching for a certain answer.

“Well enough.”

If Tante Mattie is getting irritated with his moroseness, it doesn’t show. She sounds almost sad.

“New York ain’t your home, Remy. Never has been, never will be. Everyone seems t’know it but you.”

She sighs, wiping her hands on a dishcloth tucked in to her waistband. “Why’d you go back there?”

The real answer is that it’s not here, that the family isn’t there, and that New York is an easy place to get hidden and stay hidden. That’s what happened, after all. He got low and stayed that way for a long time, perhaps even in situations when he shouldn’t have. He doesn’t much feel like confessing this though. Besides, it’s easier to go on the defensive.

“You gonna tell me that I got swamp water in my veins, Mattie? I’ve heard it before. Don’t buy it any more now than I did then,” he retorts glibly, wondering if he ought not to have come to the kitchen in the first place. The look he receives in return from Mattie is pointed.

“This ain’t about what’s in your veins. It’s about what’s right.”

“Let me guess. That’s me sticking around here and being a good little Guild member, right?”

She is unimpressed by his cheek, or so the folding of her arms over her chest decrees. He gets the feeling that if he were any smaller, she’d have turned him over her knee by now.

“Don’t y’dare put words in my mouth, Remy. No-one, ‘specially not you, has earned that right.”

A sigh comes before she continues, voice softer now.

“Y’went North to escape, Remy. That was running away, not headin’ home.”

The astuteness of Mattie’s words isn’t surprising, but it’s still more than a little uncomfortable to have the fact of the matter laid bare like that. It’s beginning to bother him that everyone here seems to see the truth so clearly.

“Do you blame me?” he asks. It could very well be a real question, not just a rhetorical device. She looks at him, lips pursed.

“Y’had your reasons.”

It’s a complete sentence, but trails off as though there’s more that she’d like to say. Instead, there’s only quiet as Mattie takes the pan from the stove to the sink. She begins to wash it in what Remy’s pegging as an effort to let the subject die before it gets too close to the real issues, but as she stops mid-scrub it becomes clear that this conversation isn’t over yet. There’s a moment where she holds the pan suspended over the water before dropping it in and turning to catch Remy’s full attention.

“You know that Etienne wasn’t your fault.”

He sets his coffee mug down, the taste all of a sudden disgusting. He can’t even bring himself to tell her just how wrong she is, or how there’s more to it than even she knows. A white hot sensation he long ago learned to recognize as guilt seers through him like fire, and it takes a degree of control that he was only vaguely aware he possessed not to leave the room right then and there.

He’d been aware that this was going to come up, but all the knowledge in the world hadn’t prepared him for the actuality. His hands, now resting on his thighs, ball in to tight fists as he tries to ward off the power that name and everything that goes with it holds.

Tante Mattie continues, even more gently now, as though she sees the private war being waged before her.

“There was no way you, or anybody else f’that matter, could’ve seen that coming. Why d’you insist on carryin’ that albatross around your neck?”

Remy’s fists grow tighter, his fingernails digging in to his palms as childhood memories come flooding back again. Now though, they are of a nighttime ritual -- Tante Mattie would read to him and his cousins from a big book of poetry that smelt like must and age before tucking them all in to bed, insisting that they would appreciate it when they were older. Old lines return to mind, and they, like everything and everyone else here, cut too keenly.

And I had done an hellish thing, and it would work 'em woe…

The strength to reply is finally found. It is weak, and it is hardly more than a whisper, but it comes out.

“’Cause I shot the damn bird, Mattie. Or as good as.”

She doesn’t reply, and he claims this as a small victory. The disappointment in her face, on the other hand, is ignored. He refuses to let this get to him. He’s got enough to face on his own without Tante Mattie’s regret added to the mix. She regards him dolefully before going back to washing the pan.

“Eat up, Remy. No-one goes hungry. Not today.”

Remy looks to the half-eaten breakfast before him, realizing that at some point in this conversation, the sweet and familiar smell of the cinnamon had turned a nauseating saccharine.

“I’m full up.”

He knows that she knows he’s lying. He walks away regardless, the action futile. He’s already in far too deep. It’s been too late for an escape since he walked through the front door.

A Footnote: On Albatrossses. (Or, if you prefer: Remy’s guilt complex. Percy shows you it.)

Tante Mattie and Remy’s exchange about Albatrosses around necks, as well as the quote Remy remembers in this chapter, might be a little confusing to some of you. Allow me to clarify.

What’s being quoted and referenced in this chapter is the poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Coleridge. In this work, an albatross flies alongside the ship that the titular Mariner sails on. The Mariner ends up shooting the albatross, which leads to the ship’s journey being thrown in to chaos – the Albatross had brought them good winds, and in killing the bird, the Mariner is held responsible for leaving the ship stranded and motionless on the ocean. The crew of the ship then forces the Mariner to wear the slain bird tied around his neck as a token of penance.

As a result of this poem, the term has become an idiom. When you say that someone has an albatross around their neck, you mean that something is holding them back from success or that they’re shouldering a great amount of guilt. In Remy’s case, both meanings are appropriate.