Lead into gold

Two years ago

An hotel room in a city, somewhere in the U.S ( ft @quantumbullshit )

Understand: there is not a Duke Midan yet, but there is a man who shifts the base components of reality sitting on a hotel bed, watching a metronome tick. He is wearing gloves and they itch because they are new and because he has been wearing them all day, but he doesn’t dare take them off. 

In the bathroom, a nondescript man is dying his hair purple in the sink and talking, though his voice is soft enough that it ought to be barely heard over the water. ( it will take him three weeks to realize that the purple-haired man always sounds like that, clearly audible but always soft enough to make you feel like you should to be straining to hear him ) The man is saying, “King Midas turned everything he touched into gold. You’re more of a duke.”

It is a joke, maybe. He doesn’t feel like joking ( he feels like crying, but what else is new? ). The man, at least, does not seem to need his input. He is talking still, about research and development, and the man on the bed wants to scream, tell him that nothing is normal or alright and if he is anything he is a geologist and-- doesn’t. He is numb, still, but not enough to forget who is in a room with, or how much he owes to the other man already.

Eventually, the purple-haired man comes out of the bathroom with a faintly violet towel around his shoulders, and watches the man on the bed watch the metronome. He  reaches out to stop it metronome and---blurs, too many bodies in one space. When he tuns back to face the man on the bed, six copies of him keep turning, splitting off to examine the room, and the other man understands why it is he seems so calm about marvelous, extraordinary things. Thompson leans his back against the dresser and smiles at the man who will be Duke Midan, already thinking about the possibilities of a man who can bend reality.

@thcpure/ @lcgisticsTell Duke weird shit, John Mulaney edition

“--What?” It’s the utter certainly in her voice that gets him. Louise is good and kind and friendly, and she says ‘not if, when’ with all the calm assurance of the dawn. 

( he does, you know. get kidnapped and call her, that first time; listen to her shame her father and her friend for stealing him away without so much as asking how he felt about it. he could have killed someone, and he wakes up thinking about it for weeks

The second time is different. )

here. | @notapartytrick

Be careful, Louise. Monsters never look like monsters.

It was something STUPID, too. Some stupid worry, something she now has forgotten as she stares down to her itching burning searing arm. ( Gosh, GOD, it’s HOT OUTSIDE. she’s normally in a cardigan or long sleeves but it’s HOT in New York already and her windows are open and she’s just in a HARVARD LAW teeshirt unironically. a friend over, talking, no danger, nothing to worry about. )

Duke is EXTRAORDINARY. She knew that. ( she was extraordinary, once. she knows, knew, how it feels, she thought. ) Duke can do the impossible, has done it for her, for her stupid ideas. It doesn’t need to be life and death always, right? It shouldn’t be.

He isn’t SCARY. He doesn’t wear a gun and show her that he’s armed. He doesn’t threaten international action. He doesn’t talk about her sister like he wants something. 

He just. Is.

Louise was making lunch. ( Sunday, after Mass, the sun is high in the sky and glinting off of the precious metal brand on her upper arm. ) She has enough of her wits to reach with her non-injured arm to turn her stove off. 

“Duke.” Throat tight, she’s looking at him now, tears welling. Scared, panicking, still, genius brain piecing together the disparate bits he had left around. She’s not moving, won’t move. He did this, he’s the one who needs to fix it. 

( at least, fix it before it spreads to the rest of her. )

Duke doesn’t talk to many people, because they alarm him or ask too many questions or just want his secrets. Lou is, was, soft and quiet and kind. He didn’t mind working on her projects, or leaving the lab to have lunch, and he wanted so much to reassure her that for a moment he forgot what a terror he’d become.

Duke is extraordinary and he tries so hard not to be. There are the exotic materials, of course, and trade secrets. There are the gloves, the glasses, quirks he thought would keep himself and others safe. They didn’t help, and he doesn’t know why he thought they would, and he is so sorry.

She looks at him and he looks--down, away, to the mark on her arm. He can’t quite face her, not with panic on both of their faces, not with the fact that he should have known better.

He can hear the tears threatening in Lou’s voice, and it is enough to tip him over the edge. Tears creep down his face--Gold, Gold, isn’t that extraordinary- even as he lifts his hand to hover over the mark on her arm. He will not be able to see, shortly, for the tears and the strangeness; but he isn’t using his eyes for this anyway. He doesn’t-- know, exactly, how to do this; but he can feel the minute shifts as the elements in her arm go from one thing to another.

( there is something to be said for genetic memory. Duke doesn’t Know how to do this like he Knows how to make other things into what they are not, but he can do it all the same )

In those first few terrible weeks, he could pull the gold entirely off himself. ( But then, Duke Midan isn’t entirely human, is he? Not like poor Louise Bauer ) Here, he moves his fingers and the edges pulse and contract, sharpening down from where they had already begun to blur and spread, but the hand print stays clear. It’s stable for now, but something in his blood tells him the not-quite-gold will not stay that way forever.

He can’t see her face, not with the swirls of gold that tune his vision to an elemental level, but his gaze flickers upwards anyway, because she at least deserves that much from him. 

@thcpure/ @lcgisticsTell Duke weird shit, John Mulaney edition

There is a reason Duke Midan does not touch people, and it is written in the golden handprint on Louise Bauer’s arm.

He didn’t-- he thought to would be alright to set a hand on her arm, just for a moment, just to reassure her. Duke has been wearing gloves for two years now, and he is wearing them still, and it did not help. He could feel the elements shift under his hand, knew even as he snatched his hand away that he has done something terrible, terrible.

He is-- he has worked so hard, you know, not to be noticed, not to hurt anyone. Duke is breathing fast and shallow, gaze fixed firmly on Lou’s arm even as she stares above his head. He is--

“Sorry. So-- Sorry, I’m sorry. Please don’t--” Run, scream, tell anyone. He can’t ask that of her any more than he can stop the tears welling up in his eyes. “Please, I can fix this.”

@spiderlingmanTell Duke weird shit, John Mulaney edition

“It uh, it is?”

@spiderlingmanTell Duke weird shit, John Mulaney edition

“There’s a lot to be mad about.” Alien invasions, robots trying to kill you, Hydra-- the list goes on. That’s getting a little heavy, though, especially for the kind of thing they’re here for. Duke lifts one shoulder in a shrug, trying to lighten the mood.

“I’m not, though. Mad. About anything in, ah....particular.” His voice fades out as he gets farther into the sentence, until the last word is hardly above a murmur. A stellar conversationalist, our Duke.

@spiderlingmanTell Duke weird shit, John Mulaney edition

“I don’t uh--I don’t think they hate you.”

Duke drinks a lot of caffeine and sleeps very little, but at least he’s been lucky enough to avoid that particular side effect of sleep deprivation. Not that he really has that many people who’s opinion of him he might be concerned about, these days, but it’s always best to think on the positives.

There’s a few hours left on this project, but it’d certainly go faster if he didn’t have to be so careful about keeping an eye on the young man. He furrows his brow in thought for a moment, before turning slightly to indicate the rear of the lab.

“There’s a ah, cot in the back, if you wanted to try laying down?”

@spiderlingmanGet your hands on Duke’s stuff

“That’s ah….mine.”

Duke looks– mildly alarmed, perhaps, but he generally looks mildly alarmed when people decide to take a closer look at his shelves while they wait. Not that he has anything to hide but all the things he has to hide, of course, just like anyone else.

The “that” in question is an attempt to apply superconducting wiring and chips to mimic virtual intelligence in simple robotics ( namely, to a insect-like ‘bot roughly the size of a deck of cards, and already squirming in Peter’s grip at the sudden movement )

“Whoa.” Soft, the lawyer’s focus not yet pulled back to the specialist before her. “Just. I mean. Wow.” How difficult would that be to get this installed as a window panel somewhere? How expensive? Even if it wasn’t completely transparent– they probably wouldn’t mind the expense if it meant more sunshine— 

She knew- heard from trusted sources, or sources of sources that were credible enough to check out on her own, which is a rarity in its own right- that he was worth checking out. She’ll get in trouble for this, if it’s found out, but Louise is good at weighing the pros and cons and risks and rewards and— well, this is worth it. 

Seconds have passed and Louise looks up with a surprised “oh” as if she had forgotten Duke was there. “I’m sorry.” She’s about his height, and she meets his eyes with a small, embarrassed smile before looking around the lab wide eyed once again. “This sort of thing makes what I had in mind seem pretty basic.”

It’s refreshing to not be dealing with someone who thinks they have to act as if every amazing thing is only what they expected. Not that he minds the others so much, seeing as they pay so many of his bills with their arms race to have the most exotic thing to hand wave as regular. It’s just-- nice.

Following her gaze around the room, he considers how it must look. The lab is--big, mostly because big impresses the kind of people who give Duke a lot of money to make them fancy toys. Truthfully, the equipment sees more use in testing the latest exotic blend than it does actually creating them, but none of it is purely for show. A few projects in progress-- things explicitly intended to be seen and generate interest, and the rest of them safely stowed. ( his collection, of course, on the back shelves; but not quite relevant to most )

There is a castle on a sharp and jagged rock near the sea. The castle’s name is Midan, and it has a Duke, though for how much longer no one can say. He has held the castle for two years now, and he has been out of favor for both of them. 

The rumor goes: the Duke of Midan is a bastard son ( no one had heard of him before that lonely castle was occupied, and he has no family )

The rumor goes: the Duke of Midan is a vampire ( the shadow of Midan is long and cold, and the Duke has never been seen outside of it before dusk. and beside— )

The rumor goes: the Duke of Midan is an alchemist ( his halls are filled with gold, and the people do not go hungry for the lack of grain in the fields )

The rumor goes: birds do not sing in the air near that place, there are no rabbits in the grass, no fish in the stream, and even the sea is made of gold ( the Duke goes to the sea at dusk, and certainly it is gold, and certainly it is as dead as the fields around the castle )