#who wrote down basically What Would Convince Hob

[setaripendragon]

Cress - Part 2

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 Happy Halloween everyone! This isn't exactly spoopy, but it is something =D I think this is the part I'm least pleased with, mostly because I think it has pacing issues, but I honestly have no idea how to fix it =/ I really like writing from Hob's PoV though. Hob gets a gift in the middle of the night.

Hob wakes with a start at an ungodly hour, heart racing, absolutely certain that just a moment ago he’d been standing over Robyn’s cradle. Which is very strange, and a little disorienting, because Hob hasn’t actually dreamt since the Great War.

Then a baby wails, again, and Hob jolts upright, eyes wide in alarm. He is very definitely awake right now, and he can still very definitely hear a baby crying. He’s pretty sure he didn’t leave his window open last night – four hours ago, god’s wounds – so it’s far too loud to be outside. In fact, it sounds like it’s coming from his living room.

“Shit,” he whispered, swinging his legs out of bed and standing. He’s… pretty sure robbers or murderers or witch-hunters wouldn’t bring a baby with them to break into someone’s house, but all the same, he’s cautious as he pads to the door and peers out.

There is a portable baby-seat sitting on his coffee table, and no one else.

Hob flips the light on just to be sure, not quite stepping all the way out from behind the doorway as he reaches around and flicks the switch – so convenient, these electric lights! He’s a huge fan, honestly. Better than chimneys – but the light only reveals what he already knew. He and the now outright crying baby are the only ones in the room. In the whole apartment, probably, unless someone’s hiding in his shower or something.

That still leaves the question of how the baby got in, cause it sure as hell didn’t do it itself. Warily, he crosses the living room – grabbing his dressing gown off the back of his bedroom door as he goes – to peer down into the carrier. The baby is entirely occupied by its own distress, and doesn’t really notice him until he makes a small shushing noise, its upset tugging on his heartstrings. Then its crying takes on a more confused, needy note.

Hob really can’t do anything but reach down and pick it up. It startles at his touch, flailing, and a scrap of paper flutters out of the folds of its swaddling to land on the table. Hob ignores it like one ignores a rearing viper, while he gets the baby settled in his arms.

It’s a newborn, or close enough as makes no difference. Tiny, and still all red and wrinkled, and very upset about all this air and light business. The instinct, Hob discovers then, never really goes away. It comes back to him startlingly quickly, and after a little while of pacing and rocking and singing four hundred year old lullabies, the baby settles and goes to sleep, leaving Hob free to deal with the… note.

God, he hopes its a note. He’d really like a fucking explanation right now.

Holding the baby in one arm, he reaches down with the other and scrabbles it up into his palm, lifting it and then flipping it, to find a short note in a very old-fashioned cursive.

Your life is as ever yours to live as you choose, it begins, and Hob feels a strange frisson go through him. A strange mixture of terror and relief, because that phrasing is… it’s familiar. It takes him back to 1789, and the first bit of… of anything his… his stranger had ever given him. Relief, because a note is some kind of communication, where he’s spent the last ninety years thinking he’s mucked it all up and he’ll never see his stranger again. Terror, because…

Well, a note is new. A note suggests things that can’t or wouldn’t be said in person, eight years from now.

A note, and a baby, Hob reminds himself, which is a terror in its own right. A child delivered in the witching hour by an unseen hand, along with a note from an entity who is neither mortal nor devil and beyond that could be fucking anything. That’s the start to a cautionary tale straight out of Hob’s youth, that is.

Swallowing hard, he steadies himself, and reads the rest:

Your life is as ever yours to live as you choose.

However, if your words ere last we parted still hold true,

I would dare to entrust this duty to you, my friend.

Hob has to reread it several times for the meaning to sink in. Then he sits down perhaps a bit too heavily, and starts to laugh. He fights to keep it quiet, and the baby isn’t too disturbed by his chest shaking, so that’s okay.

Just like his friend – his friend! – to leave a note that very succinctly explains absolutely fucking nothing. Just like his friend to make a request without ever actually asking a god damned question or saying please. Proud as a cat and twice as haughty. Which… Hob sobers slowly as the thought occurs to him, but it’s very unlike his stranger to make a request at all. And to call the kid – he’s assuming it’s about the kid – a duty is pretty fucking telling. And worrying.

What’s going on that his friend can’t watch the kid himself?

Dread sinks slow and solid into his gut. Something has to be wrong, doesn’t it? For his friend to reach out like this, breaking habit and conceding to being friends and- and humbling himself, it means something’s gone to absolute shit and he’s, what? Putting the kid somewhere safe so it doesn’t get caught in the crossfire?

Hob finds himself torn. On the one hand, his first impulse is to leap up and go looking for his friend. To make sure he’s okay, to offer to help. But then, on the other hand, his friend has already asked for his help, and what he asked for was for Hob to take care of the kid. Which by necessity means Hob can’t go looking for the exact trouble his friend wants him to keep it safe from.

“Well, shit,” Hob tells the baby sleeping in his arms. The baby, of course, doesn’t answer. “Nothing for it, really,” he sighs, getting back to his feet. “Not like I’m going to say no, when it’s the first and only thing he’s ever asked of me, you know? Be kind of churlish, that.” He shakes his head to himself and looks down at the child, feeling momentarily overwhelmed and softly melancholy.

“Guess I have a baby now. Not that I know how long that’s going to last, or… Damn, he didn’t even think to tell me your name. I can’t just keep calling you ‘baby’. Are you a boy or a girl? Is that a stupid question? I mean, are you even human? I know your- your dad isn’t. Well, I think he’s not human. He’s never really told me one way or the other. Maybe you’ll be able to help me figure it out, eh?”

Hob paces as he chatters, rocking the kid absently. He honestly isn’t sure what he’s going to do when the kid wakes up. Babies need things, he remembers that much. Things like food, and clothes, and toys and- And he hasn’t even thought about any of this for four hundred years. He wonders what one has to do to hire a wet nurse in this day and age. Maybe he can buy a nanny goat? It’s not like there’s local farms just down the road any more, and people don’t really live alongside animals quite the same any more, so that’s probably not the done thing these days.

“It’s been a goodly long while since I last had to take care of a baby,” he tells the one in his arms. It slumbers on, unheeding. “I bet they’ve come up with some clever things since then, anyway. That’ll be an adventure, won’t it? We’ll go to a store and see what they recommend,” he decides, and goes to get dressed.

He does just that, and a very helpful worker shows him to the baby aisle, and even recommends some brands for him. Supermarkets. Amazing things. Used to be you had to go to half a dozen different stores to get your weekly shopping done. Now it’s all in one building. And department stores! Which is where he heads to next, because while the supermarket is great for formula – they’ve learned to make and bottle mother’s milk! – and nappies and such, it’s not so good for clothes and toys and furniture.

He feels a little bad about the simple plastic crib he buys. “Feels like you ought to be sleeping in something a bit nobler than this. Pretty sure your dad is some kind of royalty,” he tells the still slumbering baby. “He’s got that air about him, you know? I met the Queen, once. Not this one, the first Lizzie, and she had the same sort of… affect.” Honestly, it’s probably just because his first look at the guy had been of him dressed in black with that great big fuck-off ruby on his chest like the notion of brigands and thieves was utterly alien to him. Sheltered nobility, Hob had pegged him as, and nothing he’d done since had quite erased that first impression.

Maybe Hob’ll commission a proper wooden crib from a proper artisan, like he had for Robyn. Or maybe he’ll wait to see if the baby is even still here next month before he starts worrying about that sort of thing. The baby wakes up – to his slight relief; he knows babies sleep a lot, but… well, there’s sleepy sickness to worry about these days – before he gets home, so he has to make the drive with it whining unhappily the whole way.

Then he figures out how to mix and heat the formula and… Well. Feeding Robyn had always been Elanor’s job. He’s never done this bit before. It… goes, at least, even if he can’t say it goes well. Then the baby sicks up on him. Which is lovely. They’ll try again in a bit, he decides, laughing at himself and his own exhaustion.

Then he finally sets about removing the swaddling, which he realises as he unwraps it is less a silk baby blanket, like he’d assumed, but more… torn scraps of something else. Going by the fabric and colour… a lady’s nightgown. The sexy kind.

It unnerves Hob for reasons he can’t quite pin down. Just… that’s not the usual thing to swaddle a baby in if you have any other choice, right? It’s not right. But the baby is whinging, presumably about the cold, so Hob wraps her up again, this time in a disposable nappy and a little black onsie. In the process of doing so, he discovers the baby is, in fact, a girl.

“A little princess, huh?” he asks, lifting her back into his arms. “Do you think your dad’ll be offended if I give you a name? Not forever, of course. I’m sure he can pick a better one, if he wants, when he comes back for you, but I can’t just go around calling you ‘baby,’ now can I?” He frowns, and the baby burbles and kicks. “Should I be getting you a proper birth certificate?” he wonders, and then scoffs at himself. “Oh, that’d go great, Hobsie. ‘And the father’s name?’ Uh… he never told me? ‘Okay, and the mother’s?’ Never met her! I’d get arrested for baby snatching or something.”

He shakes the thought off. If she’s still here in a month, he’ll revisit the idea. But either way, she needs a name. And he’s at a bit of a loss. Even if it’s only going to be temporary, he still doesn’t want to pick a name his stranger would hate. But he’s not exactly got a lot to go off, trying to pick something he’d like.

His stranger is neither human nor devil, some form of immortal, probably nobility, has some kind of magic ghost-summoning – or hallucination-causing – dust, can know someone’s life story just by looking at them, has a poor view on slavery – rightly so – and once abandoned him on their one night in a century to fuck about with that poncy twink Shaxberd.

Hob groans. “No!” he protests to no one in particular. “No, I won’t do it. Shan’t!”

But he knows he’s going to.

He just needs to get the frustration and – okay, yes, fine – his jealousy out of his system first. So he grumps and grouches, and then smiles reluctantly, when it makes the baby coo back at him. “Ah, fine. What about… Cordelia? Since you’re probably a princess, too? Ah, no, don’t want to wish ill on your dad that way. Ophelia? No. Don’t want to wish ill on you either. Titania? You could be fairy princess, after all. You dad does have that fae elegance to him, doesn’t he?”

Hob seriously considers it for a long moment, and then winces. “Unless… if you are, and he is, then what’s to say that Titania isn’t real? And I wouldn’t want to offend her by taking her name and giving it to someone else. Faeries have a thing about names, don’t they? You think that’s why your dad never introduced himself to me?”

The baby doesn’t appear to have an opinion on this one way or the other. She seems to be getting sleepy again, actually. “You know what?” Hob asks her, keeping his voice low and soothing, starting to pace and sway. “I’m not above being petty. What was his worst play, do you think? One of the histories? Taming of the Shrew? Measure for Measure?” He pauses, humming thoughtfully. “No, I’m not giving you a name out of one of those, Shaxberd was absolutely rotten about women in them.”

That sparks a thought, though. “He was pretty rotten about Cressida, too, but Chaucer was a lot nicer about her. Had a lot more nuance in his poem, much more sympathetic and thought-provoking than Shaxberd’s rubbish. You’d probably get teased if I called you Criseyde, though, and I don’t mind modernising.”

He pauses his pacing and looks down at the baby in his arms. She blinks back up at him slowly, eyes drifting ever closer to being shut. “What do you think? Does Cressida suit your highness?”

Her answer is to fall asleep on him. But since that’s about her only other option besides crying, Hob decides to take it as an agreement. “Cressida. Cressida Golding, I suppose you’ll be, what with this decade’s alias. That is, if your dad doesn’t come to get you any time soon.”

With that sorted, Hob starts making plans for the short-term. He can get a week or so off work while he figures out how he’s going to handle this, but then his plans to go to the library after he’s called in with a family emergency are interrupted by a jaw-cracking yawn. He shoots a startled glance at the clock, only to discover it’s nearly midday, and he only got a bare handful of hours of sleep. “Think I’d better join you in taking a nap, huh, princess?” he asks with good humour, and goes to do just that.

[yeahivebeensearchin]

Shortly after that, just as the turmoil with Sculley was beginning to build at Apple in early 1985, Jobs was heading to a meeting when he stopped at the office of a guy who was working with the Apple Foundation, which helped get computers to nonprofit organizations.Sitting in his office was a lithe, very blond woman, her name was Tina Redse. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen” Jobs recalled.

He called her the nest day and asked het to dinner. She said no that she was living with her boyfriend.A few days later he took her on a walk to a nearby park and again asked her out, and this time she told her boyfriend that she wanted to go. She was very honest and open. After dinner she started to cry because she knew her life was about to be disrupted. And it was. Within a few months she had moved into the unfurnished mansion in Woodside. “She was the first person I was truly in love with” Jobs later said. “We had a very deep connection. I don’t know that anyone will understand me better than she did”. Redse came from a troubled family, and Jobs shared with her his own pain about being put up for adoption. “We were both wounded from our childhood” Redse recalled. “He said to me that we were misfits, which is why we belonged together.” They were physically passionate and prone to public displays of affection; their make-out sessions in the NeXT lobby are well remembered by employees. So too were their fights, which occurred at movie theaters and in front of visitors to Woodside. Yet he constantly praised her purity and naturalness. As the well grounded Joanna Hoffman pointed our discussing Jobs’s infatuation with the otherworldly Redse, “ Steve had a tendency to look at vulnerabilities and neuroses and turn them into spiritual attributes.’

When he was being eased out at Apple in 1985, Redse traveled with him in Europe, where he was salving his wounds. Stnading on a bridge over the Seine one evening, they bandied about the idea, moreroantic than serious, of just staying in France, maybe settling down,perhaps indefinitely. Redse was eager, but Jobs didn’t want to. He was burned out but still ambitious. “ I am a reflection of what I do,” he told her. She recalled their Paris moment in a poignant email she sent to him twenty-five years later, after they had gone their separate ways but retained their spiritual connection:

“We were on a  bridge in Paris in the summer of 1985. It was overcast.

We leaned against the smooth stone rail and stared at the green water rolling on below. Your world had cleaved and then it paused, waiting to rearrange itself around whatever you chose next. i wanted to run away from what had come before. I tried to convince you to being a new life with me in Paris, to shed our former selves and let something new course through us. I wanted us to crawl through that black chasm of your broken world and emerge, anonymous and new, in simple lives where I could cook you simple dinners and we could be together every day, like children playing a sweet game with no purpose save the game itself. I like to think you considered it before you laughed and said “What could I do? I’ve made myself unemployable.” I like to think that in that moment’s hesitation before our bold futures reclaimed us, we lived that simple life together all the way into our peaceful old ages, with a brood of grandchildren around us on a farm in the south of France, quietly going about our days, warm and complete like loaves of fresh bread, our small world filled with the aroma of patience and familiarity.”

The relationship lurched up and down for five ears. Redse hated living in his sparsely furnished Woodside house. Jobs had hired a hip young couple, who had once worked at Chez Panisse, as housekeepers and vegetarian cooks, and they made her feel like an interloper. She would occasionally move out to an apartment of her own in Palo Alto, specially after one of her torrential arguments with Jobs “Neglect is a form of abuse,” she once scrawled on the wall of the hallway to their bedroom. She was entranced by him, but she was also baffled by how uncaring he could be. She would later recall how incredibly painful it was to be in love with someone so self-centered. Caring deeply about someone who seemed incapable of caring was a particular kind of hell that she wouldn’t wish on anyone, she said.

They were different in so many ways. “On the spectrum of cruel to kind, they are close to the opposite poles,” Hertzfeld later said. Redse’s kindness was manifest in ways large and small; she always gave money to street people, she volunteered to help those who (life her father) were afflicted with mental illness. More than anyone, she helped persuade Jobs to spend more time with Lisa (Steve’s daughter). But she lacked Job’s ambition and drive. The ethereal quality that made her seem spiritual to Jobs also made it hard for them to stay on the same wavelength. “Their relationship was incredibly tempestuous,” said Hertzfeld. “Because of both their characters, they would have lots and lots of fights”

They also had a basic philosophical  differences about whiter aesthetic tastes were fundamentally individual, as Redse believed, or universal and could be taught, Jobs believed. She caused him go being too influenced by the Bauhaus movement. “Steve believed it was our hob to teach people aesthetics, to teach people what they should like,” she recalled. “I don’t share that perspective. I believe when we listen deeply,both within ourselves and to each other, we are able to allow what’s innate and true emerge.”

When they were together for along strength, things did not work out well. But when they were apart, Jobs would pine for her. Finally, in the summer of 1989, he asked he to marry him. She couldn’t do it. It would driver her crazy , she told her friends. She had grown up in a volatile household, and her relationship with Jobs bore too many similarities to that environment. They we’re opposites who attracted, she said, but the combination was too combustible. “I could bot have been a good wife to “Steve Jobs” the icon,” she later explained. “I would have sucked at it on many levels. In our personal interactions, I couldn’t abide his unkindness. I didn’t want to hurt him, yet I didn’t want to stand by and watch him hurt other people either. It was painful and exhausting.”

After they broke up, Redse helped found the OpenMind, a mental health resource network in California. She happened to read in a psychiatric manual about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and decided that Jobs perfectly met the criteria. “It fits so well and explained so much of what we had struggled with , that I realized explicating him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see,” she said. “It also explained some of the voices he”d made about his daughter Lisa at the time. i think the issue is empathy- the capacity for empathy is lacking.”

Redse later married , had two children, and then divorced. Every now and then Jobs would openly pine for he, even after he was happily married. And when he began his battle with cancer, she got in touch again to give support. She became very emotional whenever she recalled their relationship. “Though our values clashed and made it impossible for us to have the relationship we hoped for” she told me, “the care and love I felt from him decided ago has continued.” Similarly, Jobs suddenly sorted to cry one afternoon as he sat in his living room reminiscing about her. “She was one of the purest people I’ve ever known,” he said, tears rolling town his cheeks. “There was something spiritual about her and spiritual about the connection we had.” He said he always regretted that they could not make it work, and he knew that she had such regret as well.

One dating adviser agreed that love is risky, and wrote that "There is truly only one real danger that we must concern ourselves with and that is closing our hearts to the possibility that love exists."[55]