The Other Side of the City--Chapter 40

For the next several days after their battle, the Phoenix played nursemaid to her three children.  All had sustained injuries, all had worked harder than she, all had been in more danger than she.  She had to make it up to them.  She had to make it up to them that she hadn’t done a better job protecting them.  She had to make it up to them that she hadn’t had them train harder, to be better prepared.  She had to make it up to them that she had allowed them to participate in this crazy escapade in the first place.  She gave instructions to the unhurt Grey Cats who urged her to come to the cargo bay, and usually added, “Well if someone would have learned how to do this, you wouldn’t have this problem, would you?”

It left the three of her kids time to sleep.  Sleep brought on various nightmares that none of them wanted to discuss. When they weren’t sleeping, it left them time to think.

Medusa who was feeling the best of the three, would move slowly around the warehouse, like she did in the winter.  She made three tours of the floor before coming to her mother in the living room and asking, “How did Crevan get you to come out to the battle?”

“He told me you were about to fight the ninjas that have been plaguing New York.  I couldn’t very well let you do that alone, now could I?”

“He didn’t tell you how we decided to fight?” Arcos asked, straightening himself up on the couch and wincing as he did so.

“No,” Phoenix drawled.

“They were going in without a plan,” Medusa explained.  “So we left.”

“Crevan came after us,” Aries said, “and told us Chategris wanted to hear our strategy.  We told Crevan to go get you.”

“Crevan neglected to tell me that part of it.”

“When we said we weren’t going to fight without a strategy, no one said anything, Mama,” Medusa looked confused.  “Even Razz.  They all were silent and stared at Chategris.”  Her tongue flicked out.  “I thought they were our friends,” she said, “but they would have followed him in there and they all would have died.”

“Every last one of them,” Arcos muttered.

“I thought they were our friends,” Medusa said again.

“No, Curly Que,” Phoenix shook her head emphatically.  “They are not our friends.  We are their friends.”

“What’s the difference?” Aries asked.

“The difference is, we care about them.  They don’t care about us.”

“But,” Medusa shook her head.  “They bring you gifts, and they spend time with us.  They want to be with us.  They say so!”

“None of that makes them our friends,” she answered gently.  “That makes them our allies.  Chategris is a warlord.”  She leaned against the arm of the couch, and reached out to stroke Aires between his horns.  “All of his people are expendable.  Every one of them.  They all know this.”

“Nobody’s got anybody’s back,” Arcos rolled his shoulders.

“No, Teddy Bear,” Phoenix sounded sad.  “They don’t.  They don’t have each other’s, and they don’t have ours.”

“Then why do we have theirs?” Medusa raised her voice.

Phoenix took a deep breath.   “Because it is the kind thing to do.”

“This is what people do to you when you’re kind?”  Medusa raised herself up, towering over the three of them.  “They use you, and lull you into thinking they care, and then throw you to the wolves?”

Phoenix looked hurt.  “Sometimes, Curly Que,” she told her.

“Then why do we do it?” she demanded.

“Because being kind is important,” Phoenix’s voice was soft.

“What good is being kind when you get used?”

“No one can use you unless you let them,” Phoenix told her.  “I am not used by Chategris or any of the Grey Cats.  Whatever happens between them and I is all under my control.  At any time, I can tell them no.”  She spread her arms wide, “I am doing right now.”

Medusa glared at her. 

“I can say no, because they are not our friends,” she explained.  “What I do for them is out of kindness.”

Medusa turned away from her and began to circle the warehouse slowly again.

 

***

 

Aries would doze, and then be started awake by a sound or a touch, thinking it was Myra.  The look on her face when Chategris had ordered her away hung on the back of his eyelids whenever they closed.  She had obeyed him without question.  He had offered to take her with him.  He had all but asked her to come, and she’d decided to follow Chategris to certain death. 

He hadn’t gone to find her when they came back to the rooftop to speak with the leader of the Grey Cats.  She had woven her way through, to try to get back to him, but he didn’t turn around, even after seeing her out of the corner of his eye.  Someone had sent her back, he wasn’t sure who.  I couldn’t have been near her then, he said to himself.  Not after knowing…knowing what? 

He wasn’t even sure what it was.  Whatever it was, it made him immensely sad, almost to the point of tears.  He had to knit his brows on more than one occasion to dry his eyes.  Had he genuinely thought she would come with him?  Why would he not?  She had encouraged him to take Chategris up on his invitation of joining the Grey Cats.  If he had done so, would that mean he would follow him to his certain demise?  He had never thought of Chategris as a warlord, but now…The leader of the Grey Cats was going to hear none of their arguments.  Now that Aries thought about it, he couldn’t recall anyone, except his mother, ever arguing with Chategris.

Even his own mother, who ruled her household with an iron fist, did not expect explicit obedience to her commands without any type of argument.  Of course, all the other mothers he knew were on the TV, but surely TV mothers couldn’t be that different from real mothers.  They argued all the time, just as his family argued all the time; over curfews, over chores, over dinner, over training, over privileges, over punishments, over recompense, over forgiveness.  As The Children of the Phoenix had gotten older, they had won more and more of the arguments, not by brute force, but by the logic of the argument given.  If their reasons were better than her reasons, the children usually won.  There were no hard feelings.  There were no snarls.  There were no…nothing.  After the argument, it was over.  And that was that.

Now, he would concede that his mother would claim that there is a time and place for arguing, but would right before a battle not be a place to argue?  If, within one move that the group made, everyone’s lives were in danger, would that not be the time to argue?  He tried to think back to their playing superhero, had they argued?  Had she let them argue?

He couldn’t recall any arguments.  But then, he didn’t recall her giving orders, not the same way as Chategris.  The Phoenix, the vigilante, the healer, conceded to a better plan immediately.  There was simply no argument.  One of them said, “X!” and it was better than her “Y!” they did it.   It hadn’t occurred to him that life could happen any other way.

Myra’s face came to his mind again, soft, golden brown fur, ears on the side of her head, coming down like hair and resting on her shoulders, soft, large brown eyes, soft, large…he sighed.  What was the incentive of staying with The Grey Cats?  If one had no autonomy, if one could not put one’s thoughts into words, because there was no reason to do so, why would one live that way?  He had been with Myra longer than he had ever been with anyone else.  He had been loyal to Myra, and she…he closed his eyes and took several deep breaths through his nose to keep the tears away.

 

***

 

Arcos drew. It gave him something to concentrate on, and it gave his mind a place to put all of his conflicting ideas and feelings.  He pulled his piece of pastels across the paper, making a rendering of the medicinal garden in a past year.   He always started with the juniper bush at the back, and had to resist putting the frosted blue berries on it.  It only bore fruit in the winter, when it was the only thing in the garden that produced anything.

The garden was a stark contrast to the battle they’d fought at the pretty building.  He wanted to call it bank, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to do so.  The building was very pretty, so that was its name.   The garden was full of light, and green, growing things.  In the middle of summer it bore fruits and vegetables that they wouldn’t have been able to obtain any other way.  It gave them medicine that healed their hurts and their bodies.  And it gave them a connection to their brother and sister, even if Aetos was not in any of their memories. 

The catnip patch was next in his work, tall stalks of dark green filled to the brim with tiny leaves, whose essence brought calm or sleep to those who knew how to draw it out.  He’d never really cared for catnip tea, which was how his mother usually administered it.  It always seemed a little too close to cannibalism, even if the medicinal patch of catnip was on the other side of the garden for Ailurosa’s grave.

He’d been taken by surprise by Chategris’ fighting tactics.  Go in and kill people?  Who did that?  Is that really how he went in to all of his fights?  He pulled the dark green pastel crayon to make the ivy wall across his paper.  Splashes of lighter greens, of yellow-green, and yellow were spotted on to show the light shining through the leaves.

Arcos had fought for his life in the battle.  A battle.  A real battle, like the kind they have in a war.  But then, they were at war, weren’t they?  They were guerilla soldiers, fighting an alien invasion. 

 

***

 

You shouldn’t be tired, Phoenix derided herself.  You came out of that fiasco without a scratch. 

But she was tired, and she knew why.  Every night since the battle, she’d awoke in a cold sweat, her heart thumping from a nightmare.  She dreamt of breakdancing fish stomping on her children like turning grapes to wine.  She dreamt of skeleton dogs with great claws cutting them up into little tiny pieces, and then eating them.  She dreamt of girls with bad haircuts decapitating them.  She dreamt of bug eyed black ninja robots with four arms stabbing them over and over and over again, until they bled out on the floor.  She dreamt of turtles doing all three things, along with being clubbed to death with nun chucks.

In each of these dreams, she was unable to get to her children.  Sometimes she would be in a cage.  Sometimes she was a window or glass door and could not figure out how to get into the room.   Sometimes the fight was in a cage, and she had no weapons, or no ammo, and couldn’t figure out how to get the cage open. 

She awoke from each one with a sense of a mother’s helplessness.  She would get up from her bed in the dark of night, now too awake to sleep, and creep to her children’s bedrooms.  Slowly opening each door, she checked on them, to make sure they were still there, to make sure they were breathing, like babies who have just moved from their parents’ bed to their own crib.

After checking up on them, she would still be unable to sleep, so she tossed and turned in her bed and her thoughts would drift to the Turtles.  They weren’t at the building with the stained glass windows and the large clock.  They were somewhere else.  There was more than one headquarters for these ninjas, ninjas made by aliens to do…who knew what?

When she caught herself thinking in such way, she would consciously think about the voice.  She laid in bed and tried to hear it, to stretch out her sense of sound as far as she could to catch it.  Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t.  It would be far away, as if taunting her.  She would reach for it, with a psychic hand trying to draw it closer to her ear.  If she managed to hook it, it would rush in on her in an instant, and the deep, melody would give her something to concentrate on.  She would try to make out the words, but none ever became clear, it was only a murmur that eventually she fell asleep to. If she didn’t hook it, it would fade away, as if the owner was walking away from her.

After a week of being at home, and becoming tired of nightmares and turtles, and voices, she decided it was time to check on the Grey Cats.  She hadn’t gotten any word that Chategris had expired, so she guessed he was still alive.

When she got there, she found that he was, sitting on a large, throne-like armchair, his fur thin and scraggly.  “You have come to check on your patients, finally, eh ma Cherie?” he asked in a poor humor.

“Yes,” she answered, as if he had said it pleasantly.  “And you are my first one.”  She checked him over, and was quite surprised at how well he was doing.  “You are obviously following my directions.”

“Why would I not?” he asked.  He shifted his position and winced.  “When will I be better?”

“When you’re better,” she replied, laying her hands on one of his larger wounds and sending the warm, tingly light into it.

“That’s not an answer,” he snapped.

“It is the only answer I can give you,” she took her hands off of him.  “I can do many things, Chategris.  Telling the future isn’t one of them.”

He turned his head and gave her a sidelong look.  “I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe me?” she laughed.

He just looked at her.

 Had she heard him right?  “If I could tell the future, do you think I would have let anyone into that fiasco that got us all in this state?!”  She could feel her face turning red with anger.

The leader of the Grey Cats stared at her, his face in a snarl, and said nothing.

“We were slaughtered out there,” she continued, her voice almost cracking.  “We didn’t take down one living creature.  And how many of you did they take down?”

“What you see here,” he answered through gritted teeth, “is what is left of my people.”

It was a paltry number.  Where the cargo bay used to be brimming with people, both on the inside and the outside, there were now wide open spaces.  The smell of animal, of barnyard, was now stale and old, even after only a week.  The mutants about her lay in various states of healing or dying, depending on their wounds.  She wondered where they put the ones who died, and then shoved the thought out of her mind.

“Do you not think,” she turned back to him from looking around, “that I would have done something more if I could have?”

“You could have!” his voice echoed through the empty bay, and he leaned forward in the chair.  Phoenix had never heard him raise his voice, and the thought that he would do so to her shook her.  “You could have helped us to win!”

“I did what I could!” she thundered back, leaning forward toward him in what she hoped was a brave manner.

“You are a witchdoctor!” he yelled.  “There is something more you could have done than throw pebbles at robots!”

She took a step back, and her eyes went wide.  “You think I’m a witchdoctor?”

“I know what a mamba can do!” he cried.  “You could have done something, something to cause us to win!”

“You think I’m a witchdoctor?” she said again, shaking her head.  “That is how you think of me?”

“I know what a mamba is,” his voice lowered.  “I know what a mamba can do.”

She stood up straight, putting on the most snide face she consciously could.  “I hope you can do what a mamba can do, then,” she vented.  “Because this witchdoctor isn’t doing it anymore.”

She turned on her heel, and without looking back, walked calmly out of the cargo bay.