Work Text:
Rob sat quietly at home, a can of beer in one hand, staring into the flames of the fireplace. He was suddenly snapped out of his reverie when a knock came at the door.
He went up to get it, only to find that there was no one there; just an empty porch, and beyond that, the quiet woods in which his mountain cabin was situated beneath a gray clouded sky, silent but for a slight breeze that blew through the trees and a few intermittent bird chirps heard off in the distance.
He began to close the door, when a figure appeared, leaning against the wall where the door was covering him from view a moment earlier. His skin was stark white, eyes blood red, and his dark goatee framed a toothy smile.
“Hi!” the visitor said.
Rob nearly jumped out of his skin. “Centromere!” he said between breaths, laying one hand on his chest, the other on the edge of the door. “What are you doing here?”
“What’s the matter?” Centromere asked. “Not happy to see me?”
Rob gave him an annoyed look. He knew Centromere wasn’t the kind of Chumick who would show up just for a social call. “What do you want?”
“So,” Rob said, returning from the kitchen with two mugs of hot cocoa. “Whatever happened to your original plan? The one that involved squatting at the Mannix place all these years? Weren’t you out to discover all their magical secrets?”
He set one mug down in front of Centromere, then sat down across from him at the table. Even though Chumicks didn’t need to eat or drink like humans, it only seemed appropriate to at least try to be a good host via standard convention.
“That’s old news,” Centromere said, taking the warm mug and holding it in both hands. “The source of the Mannix family’s magic is too thinly dispersed across the globe. The fact that so much of it used to be concentrated in one place was just a fluke. It was unsustainable, even I knew that. The Mannix family was simply greedy. Well, it’s all gone now. There’s nothing left inside that house.”
“And yet,” Rob said, pausing to take a sip of the hot beverage in his hand, “you stayed there for so long. What’s changed? Someone finally figure out how to boot you out of there?”
Centromere took a sip of his cocoa, but didn’t answer.
“I see.” Rob set his mug down. “And let me guess. You’ve come to ask if you can squat here next.”
“Aw, come on, Robbie!” Centromere said pleadingly. “You know I won’t be a bother!”
The human stared down into his mug, smirking. Robbie, he thought, chuckling softly to himself. Haven’t been called that in a while.
“Oh, sure,” Robbie said, running a hand through his messy mop of reddish brown hair. “Lurking in the shadows, endlessly biding your time…”
“I can be quiet. You know I can.”
“‘Can’ isn’t the same as ‘will’. I know you’ve got some scheme up your sleeve that I’m gonna get roped into no matter how hard I try not to.”
“Well,” Centromere said, “if you’re already resigned to it...”
“How are you even here without a guise?”
The Chumick waved his hand dismissively. “ Guise ," he said with a scoff. "I can work around that. As long as I limit the stretches of time I spend out of the house, I can go without a guise in the mortal world pretty much indefinitely.” He frowned slightly. “At least in theory. That’s why I need you to agree to it. What do you say?” He extended his hand forward.
Robbie stared at the Chumick’s white hand impassively, his eyelids drooping from the relaxed feeling imparted by the hot cocoa, combined with the two beers he drank before Centromere arrived.
He shrugged. “What the hell? Might liven things up around here.” He shook Centromere’s hand. “Welcome home, roomie.”
“So then this twerp whips out a fire extinguisher,” Centromere said while pawing through some vinyl records spread out on the living room floor, “and bam!” He hit the palm of his hand with the other fist. “My flame goes out.”
“Ouch,” Robbie said. “And it never came back?”
“It’s like blowing out a pilot light. Once it's gone, you can’t bring it back with just any old fire. The only way I know how to bring it back is by going through the Tunnel of Fire again, and you know no Chumick wants to do that.”
“The absolute nerve,” Robbie said flatly, followed by an emphatic hiccup. He was on his fourth beer.
Centromere stared wistfully into the flaming fireplace. “You know I’m all talk, Robbie. If you’re a Chumick and you can’t convince mortals that you’re something to be feared, you’ve got nothing. This guy was different than most. He was an Outlier.”
“An Outlier?” Robbie blinked a few times, rapidly. “You mean...like me?”
Centromere shrugged. “Pretty much, except this guy had to be the one to completely screw everything up. When I attacked the Mannix house, they were completely convinced that I was a threat, which is why they left. After that, I staked the house as my own territory, and any time someone so much as set foot in the house, all I had to do was hide somewhere dark and moan loudly enough to make them think the place was haunted, and it always worked. Their fear kept them away. But this guy...he wasn’t afraid. He even knew about the expanding darkness.”
Robbie set the needle down on the turntable gently, then went and sank into his reclining armchair across from the fireplace, popping open another beer as he did so, his fifth.
“What is this music?” Centromere asked after a few minutes had gone by.
“It’s the Bee Gees, you uncultured nutsack!”
Centromere reached for the beer in his hand. “I think you’ve had enough.”
Robbie jerked it away, spilling a few drops onto the upholstery and carpet. “I’m fine. Look...It’s all well and good that you’re here, but...if all you had to do to go guise... guisssseless …” (He stretched out the ‘s’ sound.) “...in the mortal world was stake your territory in an empty house…”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Guiseless,” Robbie said, laughing. “What a weird word. It’s like you’re gonna say, ‘Guys, listen,’ but then you...you dont.”
“It can’t just be any empty house,” Centromere continued. “And I can’t subsist on residual mortal fear in my current state. I’ve got nothing. I’m wiped. That’s why I appealed to your generous hospitality.”
“You don’t say…”
“And now that you’ve agreed to let me stay here, in this house, this cabin, it’s sort of like...a dimension within a dimension. A safe haven, where I don’t have to worry about being pulled into the Tunnel of Fire.”
“You don’t say, ‘Guys, listen,’ because there are no guys around to listen to you, because you don’t have any friends…”
Centromere frowned. Had Robbie even listened to a word he’d said?
“You’re just a loser,” Robbie continued on his drunken tangent. “A loser living in the sticks with a…” He choked on a sob as the last few words ejected from him. “ ...a Chumick for a roommate! ”
Centromere wondered if he was about to break down completely, but then Robbie’s eyes opened fully, his facial features relaxed, and he stared at the fireplace with a neutral expression for almost a full minute.
Centromere was unsure of how to proceed. “So, uh. What made you decide to move back home, anyway? Weren’t you running your own business in the city, or something like that?”
Robbie took a long swig of beer. “Yeah, and it folded. I lost everything, my boyfriend broke up with me, and I had to move back in with Mom. Now Mom’s in the ground next to Dad, and it’s just me. Just me and my Chumick roommate.”
Centromere gingerly removed the beer can from Robbie’s hand, and this time he actually let him. “Maybe you’d better go to bed. We can talk more about the mess our lives have turned into tomorrow.”
But there was no going to bed, not for Robbie. He was already passed out in the chair and beginning to snore.
Centromere turned off the lights and the record player, then curled up in front of the fireplace. Every so often, he’d stoke the fire to bring it back up to a roaring flame, adding a log when necessary. He kept it going all night long.