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alfvaen · 11 months ago

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Novel Score

It's sometime around the beginning of a month, which apparently means these days that it's time for me to do a roundup post of the books I read in the preceding month--in this case, January 2024. Once again have been keeping on top of it during the month which helps me actually produce it in a timely manner. Because I started this back in November/December, doing monthly book posts isn't a New Year's resolution, unless the resolution was just "keep doing it". I'm keeping doing it.

Book list under the cut, book-related ramblings may include spoilers for Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, Martha Wells's Murderbot series, Kelly Meding's Dreg City series, and maybe others. You have been warned.

Ashok Banker: Siege of Mithila, completed January 6

As mentioned previously, I am rapidly running out of books by male "diversity" slot authors in my collection. I read the first Ashok Banker book, Prince of Ayodhya, a few years earlier, and was kind of meh on it, so I wasn't sure if I would continue. But I did pick up the other one as a library discard (ah, the days when I got books and CDs as library discards…back when they used to have a sale rack in the local branch all the time, instead of saving them up for periodic bulk sales…) so I hadn't entirely given up on it. So, in not quite desperation, I turned to Siege of Mithila as my next diversity read.

The series is apparently a retelling of the Ramayana, which is some kind of important epic in India, though I can't judge if it's like "the Bible" or "King Arthur" or "The Iliad" or what, but I assume it's somewhere on that level, at least among certain cultures. My brief skimming of the Wikipedia article on the Ramayana implies that Banker is following the story pretty closely, which means that sometimes it gets a little weird plotwise, but is perhaps more revealing culturally or something. And sometimes it's a wee bit problematic…like the way that the main adversary for the first two books is Ravana, lord of the Asuras (basically demons), who rules over the southern island kingdom of Lanka (like…"Sri Lanka"?), which is populated entirely by Asuras. Which is about like if there was a fantasy series set in England where they had to fight evil demons from the western island kingdom of Eire or something. (Wait…do they have those?) One wonders if this series (or the original Ramayana) are quite as popular in Sri Lanka, then…

Anyway, we mostly follow Rama, the titular Prince of Ayodhya from the first book, and his half-brother Lakshman, but a lot of this book is also set back in the palace in Ayodhya following Rama's father the Maharaja, his three wives, and the evil (and hunchbacked--oh look, it's equating deformity with wickedness, that's awesome) witch Manthara as she and Ravana try to sabotage the kingdom from within. Rama and Lakshman end up going to Mithila instead of back to Ayodhya, and foiling a big Asura attack on the city, which comes unbelievably close to the end of the book and is not quite solved by deus ex machina, but doesn't feel particularly satisfying.

One element of the series is that some of the characters are just like ridiculously powerful sages who were like "I've been meditating for 5000 years so I'm really wise and can do anything, though I guess I should let Rama solve a few things on his own to gain some of his own wisdom". Not that this is all that different from, say, Gandalf or Merlin, of course... There are also some odd storytelling choices, like switching to a different set of characters just at a dramatic point in a different storyline, or, in one major side-quest, just skipping the ending of it and coming back to it a couple of chapters later in flashbacks. Also, one character is given important advice by a ghost which he then completely ignores (luckily other people overrule him, but it bugged me).

The book kind of feels like the second book of a trilogy, but not quite, which makes sense because apparently there are eight other books in the series, so it's not just about fighting Ravana and the Asuras. I'm on the bubble about the series, as you may have gathered, so I don't know offhand if I'll be going on.

T. Kingfisher: Clockwork Boys, completed January 9

I paced myself going through Siege of Mithila, taking seven days for it (I started on December 31st to get a little head start), so it put me a bit behind on my Goodreads challenge (100 books for the year, again). This means, time to read some shorter things! I haven't read any T. Kingfisher yet (though I have read, like, the webcomic "Digger" under her real name, Ursula Vernon, if nothing else), so I let my wife, who has read a lot of them, suggest which one I should start with, and this was the one she chose (at the time; it may have been a couple of years ago). We have it as an ebook from Kobo, which sometimes makes it a little hard to tell how long the book actually is in pages, but Goodreads claimed it was under 300 pages, so it seemed a possible three-day read.

I was, I guess, vaguely expecting a steampunk story involving two boys who were made of clockwork or something, but apparently it's more straight fantasy (not too similar to the Ramayana was far as I can tell, though, which is good because I like consecutive reads to vary in genre if at all possible) where the Clockwork Boys are the bad guys. Also, apparently this is the first of a duology, a "long book split in two" duology as opposed to "book and a sequel featuring the same characters" duology.

The characters seem somewhat interesting, though I'm not sure I'm 100% won over. Sir Caliban for some reason reminds me of both Sanderson's Kaladin and Bujold's Cazaril, but maybe it's just the similarity of names enhancing certain similarities of character. And the demons also made me think of Bujold's Penric books. Maybe the tone is a little light for me on this one. We've got the second one as an ebook too, so I'll finish it off at some point and then maybe take a look at Nettle & Bone or something.

Kelly Meding: The Night Before Dead, completed January 12

As I may have also mentioned previously, I've tried a whole lot of urban fantasy series. Many of them, my wife has enjoyed more than I have, and is all caught up on them, but most of those I'm only a few books in. (I've given up on relatively few--Jennifer Estep and Jess Haines, among others.) For whatever reason, my wife didn't like the first book in Kelly Meding's "Dreg City" series, Three Days To Dead, and this time, to be actually clever about it, I decided to read the book myself and decide if I wanted to continue on in the series before it went out of print. As it turned out, I did like the first book, and I kept reading it on my own. When the series got dropped by the publisher after four books, I even went and bought the last two books (self-published, probably print on demand) to finish the series.

So this is the last one, which is supposed to wrap up the main conflict. Our main character, Evy Stone, started out the series waking up after death in a newly-vacated body; she was part of a group that worked to deal with paranormal threats. This world has beast-form shapeshifters named "Theria", vampires, and lots of types of fey--mostly pretty usual when it comes to urban fantasy--and their existence is unknown to world at large, etc.

Thie book does seem to wrap things up well enough, at least for the main characters, though it's hard to say if all the resolutions are satisfying. Still, it was enjoyable enough. She does have a couple of other, shorter series which I can try next, since we do actually own them. (And maybe some stuff under a different name?)

Lois McMaster Bujold: Brothers In Arms, completed January 15

Next (chronologically) in the reread order, this is the one where Miles goes to Earth and discovers the existence of his clone-brother Mark (spoilers). It starts up with a level of frustration--why does Miles have to stay at the embassy, and why aren't his mercenaries getting paid?--but things mostly work out in the end. Ivan shows up again (by authorial fiat--it's a bit too much of a coincidence, really), we meet recurring character Duv Galeni, and of course Mark, as mentioned already. It's not a particular favourite, but it's pretty good. And without it, how would we get Mirror Dance, and thus Memory?

I feel like I should be able to say more about it, but I've already talked about the Vorkosigan series a lot in previous posts, and, like I said, it's not a particular favourite. I guess I could mention how the first time through the series I read them in publication order, and so this was before The Vor Game and Cetaganda… Also, although we don't see much of Earth outside of London, we do get a good look at the gigantic dikes being used to hold back the ocean, because in the intervening mumble-mumble centuries the sea levels have risen. So presumably the icecaps have melted or something, though it doesn't seem like the Gulf Stream has shut down or anything, so maybe they have managed to mitigate things somewhat. An interesting view of future Earth, anyway, without going too overboard on covering the vast majority of the planet not relevant to our immediate plot.

Seth Dickinson: The Traitor Baru Cormorant, completed January 20

Taking another book from my list of authors to try (currently stored on my pool table); I picked this one because apparently the author has a new book coming out, and I do see people talking about the character from time to time, so clearly this is a book/series that has had some staying power and cultural impact, as opposed to something obscure that apparently sank without a trace. But this is a book that my wife tried, and either didn't finish or didn't want to continue the series.

And, having finished it, I can see why. I wouldn't say that it's a bad book…but I didn't, in the end, like it. I read it all the way to the end, and I've decided I'll leave it there and not try to continue the series. And probably I won't look for other books by Dickinson either. Like Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, which I read last year, I felt, as I was reading it, that this was a book I would have liked a lot better when I was younger, but these days it just doesn't do it for me.

It has the feeling of fantasy, in that it's set in a different world from our own, and there is none of the futuristic technology that would explain this as being a colony world…but there is also little or nothing in the way of magic. A little alchemy, maybe, but I don't know that it's out of line with what you could achieve with actual drugs. No wizards, and I don't think there were supernatural creatures either. But it's fantasy-coded, and maybe there's some minor thing I'm forgetting. It's not about magic, though. It's really about colonialism, and what happens when you're sucked into the colonizer's system so far that you think that the only way to help your people is by going along with that system. And Baru Cormorant is somewhat autistic-coded, perhaps--not only is she a savant, but she seems to have trouble figuring out the motives and feelings of others. Puts too much confidence in the ability to explain everything using economics (the character and possibly also the author, quite frankly), in a way which reminds me mostly of Dave Sim's deconstruction of faith and fantasy in Cerebus: Church And State. Not sure if it counts as grimdark, but it feels like the honorable are punished for their naivety like in "A Song of Ice And Fire". I lost sympathy for the main character partway through, and never got much for anyone else either. One character I liked and hoped to see more of was (gratuitously?) killed in the middle of the book. I was forewarned of the existence of a plot twist at the end of the book, and when it came, although I wasn't completely surprised, I was disappointed, and I didn't feel that it worked.

So, yeah. Your mileage may vary, but this book did not win me over.

Charles Stross: The Annihilation Score, completed January 25

I wanted something a bit more light-hearted after the previous book, but not, apparently, too much so. Charles Stross's "Laundry Files" series is set against a backdrop of cosmic horror and the looming end of the world, but also of British governmental bureaucracy, out of which he can usually pull of a fair amount of humour, as well as humanity. The main protagonist of the series is Bob Howard (named in honour of Robert E. Howard, inventor of Conan and friend of Lovecraft), computational demonologist, and the books in turn have paid tribute to a lot of different sources--James Bond, vampires, American evangelical megachurches, and--in this book--superheroes. But also, in this book, Bob is not our narrator; instead, we get his wife, Mo, in the fallout of a scene in the previous book (which we get from her POV here) with dire implications for their relationship…which has always been kind of a three-way between Bob, Mo, and Mo's soul-eating sentient violin, and this triangle has now come to a crisis. Plus there's superheroes.

Stross notes in the introduction that he never really read American superhero comics, so he had to pick a few brains about them, but the book really isn't about American superheroes either; he references the British superhero anthology series "Temps" (which I never did manage to read, since I only managed to find the second book, but now I feel like I should check out) as contrasted with the "Wild Cards" series.

All in all it's pretty decent, with lots of witty read-aloud bits, but the pacing is odd; there's a lot of plotlines, and some of them don't seem to progress for a long time. Some of them turn out to be red herrings, I guess, but overall it doesn't gel as well as it could. We don't see much of Bob (which makes sense since this isn't his book), though Mo is a perfectly fine protagonist. I'll be fine going back to Bob for the next book. If I can ever find it.

See, apparently this is the last book in the series I own right now, and probably the next one, The Nightmare Stacks, came and went while I was behind on reading it, and now it's out of print (and possibly never had a mass-market release at all, which is still my preferred format) and seems like it'll be hard to find in any physical format. I mean, I went on a site which allows you to search indie and second-hand bookstores, and the title didn't even come up on search. I have long been resisting switching wholeheartedly over to ebooks (a transition my wife has already made), but I can see that at some point I may have to get used to the fact that ebooks are just replacing mass-market paperbacks for the cheap release format. (I still can't manage to bring myself to spend as much as $8, let alone $12 or more, for an ebook, though. Like…what am I paying for? The publishing costs are minuscule compared to physical copies, and I expect that saving to be passed on to me. I guess I don't know if the extra is being passed on to the author in a non-self-published situation, but given our current corporate hellscape I'm gonna say probably not. Note: if you think this makes me a horrible person who hates writers to make money, please remember that I am married to a writer who I would love to make enough money that I don't have to work, but the publishing industry is horrible and they're the ones that actually have the capability to allow writers to make enough money to make a living, and they're not doing it, so I don't know what to tell you. I've bought thousands of books in my life, even if I don't go out of my way to buy the most expensive ones, because that's a good way to go broke. Get off my back, person I made up for this parenthetical aside.)

Martha Wells: System Collapse, completed January 28

I may be the last person in my house to have read Murderbot. My wife had already read some of Martha Wells earlier books (Raksura series, I want to say) before she read the Murderbot novells, and she loved them and read them to/got our kids to read them too. I eventually scheduled one in (novellas are good when I'm behind on my Goodreads challenge) and…it was okay, I guess? And I kept reading them because, well, more novellas. Last year I read the first novel-length story, Network Effect, and I liked it somewhat better than the novellas, for whatever reason.

I had been putting off the latest one for a little while, though, partly because of my Vorkosigan reread--I generally don't like books that are too close in genre too close together, and they're both kinda space opera-ish, though quite different kinds (Murderbot's future is more corporate-dominated), but next up I'm taking a break for a Dick Francis reread, so I thought I might as well put it in now. Though I've got to say that, since we have it as a physical hardcover as opposed to the digital novella ebooks, I'm really not a big fan of the texture of the dust jacket. Like, it is physically unpleasant to touch, being just a little bit rough. But not as bad as some I'd run across in the past few years, so I don't have to, like, take off the dust jacket to read it.

In the end I didn't like it as well as Network Effect, though I did like the middle bit where Murderbot becomes a Youtube influencer. The early part of the book, Murderbot is in a bit of a depressive state and not fun to read, like the first part of "Order of The Phoenix" or something. I guess if a character is too hypercompetent then nothing challenges them, but I wasn't a big fan of the emotional arc.

Dick Francis: Forfeit, completed January 31

I remember precisely where I was when I first heard of Dick Francis. See, I went to this convention in Edmonton in the summer of 1989, "ConText '89". It was an important convention--a reader-oriented rather than media-dominated SF/Fantasy convention, for one thing, and also it resulted in the formation of the first SF/Fantasy writer's organization in Canada, currently named SF Canada. Oh, and also, I met a cute girl there (Nicole, a YA author guest from northern Alberta), started dating, fell in love, got married, had three kids, and we're still married today.

I also saw this posting for a writing course out at a place called the Black Cat Guest Ranch, in the Rockies near Hinton, and decided to go. There I met Candas Jane Dorsey (who was the instructor for the course) and several other writers, and we later formed a writers' group called The Cult of Pain which is still going to this day. Anyway, I went out for a second course there, with Nicole coming along this time (though we may not have technically been dating and didn't share a room)--I think it was in mid-February sometime--and one evening we were all hanging out in the outdoor hot tub, watching snowflakes melt over our heads, and talking about books. And Candas and Nicole started rhapsodizing about this guy named Dick Francis. I said, "Who?" And they both told me I had to go read him, like, right away.

Dick Francis, apparently, was a former steeplechase jockey turned mystery/thriller writer. Now, mysteries and thrillers were not really my thing--I was into the SF & fantasy--but I supposed I was willing to try it. I was in university and trying to read other stuff outside my comfort zone, like Thomas Hardy and The Brothers Karamazov and William S. Burroughs, so why not. Plus, I wanted my girlfriend to like me. And the first one I picked up was one that one of my roommates had lying around, called Forfeit. It was pretty decent, and I went on to others--Nicole had a copy of Nerve, and I soon started to pick up more--and eventually read almost all of them (a few proved elusive, but I tracked down a copy of Smokescreen not long ago…).

Every book was concerned in some way with horse racing, but there was a wide variety--sometimes the main character was a jockey, but sometimes that was just their side hustle, and they had another profession, or sometimes they did something else like train horses or transport horses, or paint pictures of horses, or they didn't do anything about horses but the romantic interest did… He covered a lot of different professions over his books, they were usually quite interesting, and his characters were always very well-drawn. After his wife Mary (apparently an uncredited frequent collaborator and researcher) died, there was a gap of a few years before he started writing them with his son Felix. I think I read all of those ones, but after he died and Felix started writing solo novels, I haven't really kept up on those ones.

Instead, a few years ago I decided I was going to reread all the books, in publication order, interspersed with my series rereads as I was already doing with Discworld and Star Trek books. Forfeit is his seventh published book…and when I went to look for it on my shelf, I discovered that I actually didn't own a copy, and probably never had. I had just borrowed it from my roommate, and then given it back (a rookie mistake). Was it in print? Of course not, don't be silly. I had managed to find a used copy of Smokescreen online, as I mentioned, but for Forfeit there was only more expensive trade paperbacks, or $8 ebooks. They didn't even have it at the library! Except, well, they did…but I'd have to interlibrary loan it. I went back on forth on which to try to do, and eventually went ILL, and it came in for me at the library on the 20th. So there, overpriced ebooks. (And person I made up for the earlier parenthetical aside.)

Dick Francis novels have turned to be pretty rereadable, because they're not primarily mysteries of the sort where you don't remember which of the suspects is guilty; they're mysteries where the main character has to figure out who's behind the crimes and then avoid getting killed by them. Some of it is competency porn as they use their special skills to solve problems. And some of it just because of the engaging characters, which are maybe not quite all the way there in the earlier books (the ones I've reread so far are still books from the 60s, so the female characters could be more nuanced). In Forfeit what I recalled from that first read (some 34 years ago) was that the main character was a sportswriter, it started with one of his colleagues killing himself, and his wife was disabled and bedridden. (And one exciting scene in the middle of the book in which spoilers.) Though it turned out I was conflating two suicide openings (Nerve also starts with one, a gunshot suicide on the first page, whereas Forfeit's is more falling out of a window), and the exciting scene is missing an element I was sure was there.

So that's eight books in one month, which is basically enough to keep up on my Goodreads challenge, but I also managed to squeeze in a couple more on the side track. First of all, there was my brother's book, Paths of Pollen, which came out last year; my mom went to the book launch in Toronto and brought back a signed copy for me. As one might expect, it talks about honeybees (and the time he was working on our stepfather's apiary), but covers a lot of pollen details I didn't know, about all the other bees, beetles, butterflies, insects, and other animals that also do pollination. It's a sobering look at how plants reproduce and how we're screwing it up in a lot of cases. (I hadn't realized before how much insects use pollen as food…somehow I thought they were nectar-eaters and they just picked up pollen because the plants forced them too, but I guess it makes sense that they also eat it.)

Then there was another one of the Love & Rockets ebook bundle that I've been going through. This volume, Esperanza, is around the latest stuff I read in the Love & Rockets Vol. 2 comics (which I have only read once or twice), so it's fairly unfamiliar to me. Despite it being named after Esperanza "Hopey" Glass, most of the book seems to revolve around Vivian, a.k.a. Frogmouth, a hot, buxom woman with an unfortunate voice, who both Maggie and Ray are lusting after, despite her problematic relationships with some violent criminals. Ray and Maggie do meet up again briefly; Maggie's working as an apartment superintendent, Hopey's working in a bar but trying to get into a teaching assistant job, surreal things happen with Izzy, Doyle's around as well, and we see brief glimpses of Maggie's sister Esther. It was interesting but I didn't find it altogether compelling.

With ten books for January, that means I'm really read up to 36.5 days into the year, or February 5th, so I'm a little bit ahead. I'll be taking advantage of this to start off February with a longer book, for my female diversity slot--Fonda Lee's Jade Legacy, to wrap up that series. More about that next month, of course…

#books #Ashok Banker #Martha Wells #T. Kingfisher #Kelly Meding #Lois McMaster Bujold #Seth Dickinson #Charles Stross #Dick Francis #Vorkosigan #Murderbot

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agenthemingway · 1 year ago

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the answer doesn't come immediately and hemingway starts wondering if he should just repeat everything he's just said—he wouldn't mind and he wouldn't be surprised if he had to. they're all tired and distracted at this point, their workdays ( probably unnecessarily ) extended past their regular working hours. hemingway's been meaning to go home for a while now, knowing full well that he needs to get some rest, but the obsessive, fixer part of him kept him busy anyway. well, busy might be a stretch—useless work probably, most of it. if he sees the words restricted access anywhere else, he might just go insane.

"no, it's fine. i get it," he says as he watches dickinson displaying just how all over the place he is. hemingway wonders if this is already the time to drop his favorite question—the how are you, how are you doing, are you alright. it's been easy to just know when to ask with everyone else but he finds it difficult, borderline impossible, when it comes to gael because ... well, that's the thing. hemingway doesn't even know.

somewhere between dickinson coming back and london disappearing, hemingway's lost the ability to read gael, to figure out what he's thinking. and these days, it seems like something got reversed and now jj feels like gael's the one who's always trying to get a read on him. for once in his life, hemingway chooses to be careful with his words around someone—not that he has anything to hide but because he wants to make a good impression, make it look like he's got everything under control.

which probably makes it seem like he has something to hide.

this is probably not the time to ask yet; it's a larger conversation hemingway would rather have outside the office because with gael, london's not the only thing jj wants to ask about. dickinson's return, considering the timing and circumstances, is also a hot topic hemingway would love to dig into—for genuine and strictly personal reasons. he just wants his friends to be fine.

"i don't know that place but you got me interested. ready to inhale my weight in toni's pizza," he says as he clasps his hands and rubs them together, a bright grin splitting his face in half. he follows in gael's footsteps and moves to his desk, mimics his teammate's actions while putting his desk in order—which ends up looking just as messy as it did in the beginning. hemingway's good with mess, though. as long as he's got it under control.

"my treat, man, no problem," he says, waves it off like it's nothing—and it is. he could probably buy gael lunch everyday for the rest of his life and barely make a dent in the money the bureau's thrown at him in the last decade. the money's just sort of there because it's not like hemingway has anything to spend it on. maybe he should get into some expensive hobby. or buy another house. for what? he'll probably just end up visiting it once a year and that will be it. "i'll poke at them tomorrow, get your money right," he tells dickinson, adds the promise to the to-do list that seems to be neverending these days. good. better to keep busy than end up overthinking everything. which hemingway probably subconsciously does while busy anyway.

"i can drive us. you get dj privileges and i hope you understand how big of an honor this is," hemingway says as the head out, taking the elevator down to the parking lot. he's joking—or half-joking because he does take his music very seriously—to keep the atmosphere light. he's decided to save the questions poking at dickinson's wellbeing for later, after they've been fed and as far from the office as tonight will allow them for.

"managed anything productive tonight?" he asks on the way down, fully expecting a big no, similar to what he would've said if asked the same question. maybe he shouldn't have asked—he'll just get himself riled up all over again about these stupid restrictions and nobody telling them anything. hemingway's been trying not to think about it too much these past few hours. he's running around in circles, no wonder. "you know what—don't even have to answer that. i said turn off our brains and that's ... definitely not gonna help," he says, makes a face that pretty much sums up this entire day—annoying, exhausting, and complicated for no reason. "how's gomita doing?" he tries instead.

In the near silence of the virtually empty bullpen, the hypnotic ticking of an office clock slowly dulled the hotly simmering fury inside Agent Dickinson’s heart into a sedated, detached placidity. He had been staring blankly at the small handful of documents fanned out on his desk for the better half of an hour, give or take. It was hard to tell, but since no one had bothered him about going home yet, it was unlikely he had been doing it for too long.

Under normal circumstances, Dickinson would have never been caught dead wasting valuable time like this, but as it stood, zoning out was as good of a use of his time as anything else. The bureau might as well have given him a folder full of black construction paper and told him to go fuck himself. The few documents deemed safe enough for him to have could offer little insight into Agent London’s intentions, the vast majority of the information stricken out with bars of black ink. He was an agent only in name; his clearance basically level reduced to that of an entry-level position upon his reinstatement.

Dickinson wasn’t sure why he had expected anything different, wishful thinking perhaps, the foolish notion that all his years of loyalty to the cause would amount to anything despite ”The Incident” six months ago. He should have known better, had known better the moment he was ushered away to that cute little mandatory ‘welcome home’ interview. The conclusion had been obvious.

The only reason he had been brought back in the first place was because the bureau needed to check all their bases and ensure their last problem child wasn't involved with the current one. Logically, it made sense that the higher-ups might think he was sympathetic to London, but the very thought that the dignitaries would dare to insinuate that Dickinson would ally himself with the lunatic actively destroying years of his own hard work burned Dickinson up inside. But it was his own fault, in the end. He had trusted the wrong people and ended up being the fool left holding the bag.

“That’s just how the cookie crumbles,” he thought bitterly. There was nothing he could do about it now, though; the hindsight was meaningless when the Dickinson from six months ago didn’t envision ever coming back to the bureau (alive, at least). All he could do now was prove himself again.

Dickinson's eyes dipped down to scan the last file he had been looking over, searching for absolution in the face of his own miscalculations.

MISSION FILE #█████ 𝙳𝙰𝚃𝙴 : ███████████ 𝚃𝙸𝙼𝙴 : █████ 𝙿𝙻𝙰𝙲𝙴 : ███████████ TEXAS 𝚃𝚈𝙿𝙴 : ███████████████ 𝙲𝙰𝚂𝚄𝙰𝙻𝚃𝙸𝙴𝚂 : ONE █████████████████ 𝙱𝚁𝙸𝙴𝙵 : 𝚄𝙽𝙰𝚅𝙰𝙸𝙻𝙰𝙱𝙻𝙴

But he could find no salvation in the fragmented annals, it was just a wild goose chase. A puzzle with the majority of the pieces purposely hidden by the very people asking him to solve it. Dickinson clicked his tongue, irritation boiling over. What the hell did the Temporal Bureau, in all their “infinite wisdom,” expect him to do with granules of information? Happily sit around twiddling his thumbs while London was running loose and ruining the timeline? It was unbearable. The forced inaction was slowly driving him insane. The fact that everyone else seemed all too willing to comply and continue with the facade that their leadership had their shit together only agitated him further.

While sure, there had been murmurs of disapproval and a couple of pairs of eyes found his in the meeting room after the pencil pushers went over their lackluster game plan, none had stepped up to openly object. While Dickinson had expected blind obedience from the likes of Faulkner and Stein, he found the lack of pushback from the others demoralizing. But Dickinson wasn’t stupid, he could read the writing on the wall that kept everyone’s tongue in check, the reason why this overly cautious approach was necessary.

There was no way of knowing if there were any more traitors in their midst. And once the focus was off of him, and if Baldwin was cleared as well, the others would not be spared from suspicion.

The sound of shoes on the tile floor pulled Dickinson out of his thoughts. Looking up, he matched gazes with Agent Hemingway, the other man smiling down at him with an expression Dickinson used to find charming. He found it distinctly obnoxious at that very moment as he watched the other man prop himself against the desk.

In the back of his mind, Dickinson realized he was being unfair. He’d known the other agent for years, and knew mediation came second nature to JJ; so it must have been hard watching one of the longest-running partnerships in the bureau fall apart to the point where Dickinson and Faulkner wouldn’t speak anymore. And in classic JJ fashion, and like the proverbial moth to the flame, Hemingway had showed up where there was a problem. Dickinson might have found comfort in it in the past, but now he was finding it increasingly difficult to view JJ’s natural inclinations with nothing less than cold cynicism.

Perhaps it was the way Hemingway had worded the question, open-ended enough to give JJ room to pivot depending on how Dickinson answered. Or maybe it was the way Hemingway’s mannerisms felt so practiced, so formulaic; just another performance for the sake of keeping up the veneer of normalcy. Whatever the case, the sympathetic look in the other agent’s eyes felt condescending; it made Dickinson feel like some pitiful, wounded animal, cornered and baring his teeth. Like he was someone who had to be handled with kid gloves lest he have a public meltdown.

Dickinson wondered if that was exactly how JJ saw him these days. Though it annoyed Dickinson to admit, it would only make sense when he had come back to the bureau a completely different man. But he wasn’t a problem to fix, or at least he wasn’t JJ’s problem to fix. There was nothing that a third party could do to change what had happened between Dickinson and Faulkner, and so nothing anyone could do for Gael. His partnership with In-su had just reached its natural, doomed, unavoidable, pathetic end after Gael had thrown them both over the event horizon. The gravitational collapse caused by the shock of Faulkner’s dereliction after years of mutual adoration devouring everything they had built as their relationship imploded, leaving nothing but a supermassive black hole in its wake.

The only thing that could change things would be if Gael had been born in the U.S. instead of Guatemala and he and In-su had met in the military as comrades, like In-su and JJ did. Maybe if they had an established rapport when they ran into each other as trainees at the bureau, Gael would be privy to the secret that In-su held the closest, the one only JJ seemed to know, for some reason. If he and In-su had known each other sooner, for longer, then maybe—

Dickinson’s eyebrows furrowed as his thoughts came to an abrupt stop, his face felt hot. His right hand flew up to press against his forehead. Belatedly, he realized he had taken way too long to answer Hemingway’s questions. Ducking his head slightly to look up at the other man from around his fingers, Dickinson gave him what he hoped was a passable friendly smile.

“Sorry, Waymie, I feel like I just got r—,” Dickinson clamped his mouth shut so quickly he almost bit off his own tongue. His left hand joined the other to cover his face as he let out a muffled groan. Dragging his palms down his face, he tried again, weakly muttering, “...Put through the wringer.”

Sighing deeply, Dickinson removed his hands from his face and leaned back in his desk chair. “Actually, turning off my brain sounds great right about now. You know the pizza place on Fifth and Oak?” he asked, shooting the other man a warm, tired smile. "Well, it's not really a place, more like a stall on the side of the road, but I promise the food is fantastic. I know the guy there, Toni with an 'i'. He's great, you'll love Toni."

Yawning, Dickinson slowly got up and went through the motions of his usual tidying routine before stuffing the files back into the manila folder he had gotten them in and placing them in his satchel. He then began patting himself down, making sure his keys and wallet were in one of his multiple pockets.

"Ah, wait... I just remembered. The bigwigs haven’t cleared my budget for personal spending yet." Dickinson said, pointing a finger gun at Hemingway, a rueful smile slowly stretching across his face. "You don’t mind paying for me, right?"

#& dickinson.#this took FOREVER im so sorry!!!!!!!!!#dick my best friend dick<3 obsessed with him<3

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