The filmy darkness of the after hours had managed to stimulate Hospes Compleo out of a comatose state five minutes before his tall, pleasantly antique telephone chirruped coquettishly at him. As he retracted from his desk - which had been his bed for nigh a prep week - his elbow almost bumped against skyscraper of forms, documents, envelopes, the work, the foot of the almost ivory tower being a squat bin with a label on its face, the label's presence marking the bin "finished." There was another bin opposite of the table, its label marking it otherwise to its mate; it was completely clean, almost sparkling, and, most importantly, empty.
He had to maneuver his chair a little so as to scoot himself towards his pleasant ebony phone. He took it in his hands in a manner-of-fact fashion. "Hospes Compleo speaking?"
"Hello. You're Eve's son, aren't you?" The voice on the other end was a little nasal around the edges, implying a lineage from the northern area of the Capitol where the government officials skulked and lavished, and grizzly feminine. She sounded like the most humorless person in the world, each syllable being dropped precisely, coldly, yet pleasantly, like the female voice encoded into machines.
Hospes tensed; his fingers curled into little tight balls as he hesitated to answer. "Unfortunately," he groveled a little. "Why? Who is this?"
"This is Sappho. Eve's partner." She dropped it like a bomb; the explosion made Hospes flinch slightly. "We wanted to tell you, but you never answered her calls. Anyway-"
"What happened to Iphis?"
"Who?"
Suddenly, Eve Compleo didn't matter anymore. Hospes felt betrayed now. For an entire decade, he had believed that there was at least one person back in his childhood home that he could rely on - and for no apparent good reason, his bitch of a mother had the gall to throw this robotic - robotic - robotic...
whatever at his face! "Iphis! Iphis Ladonna - she was going to be my step-mother. They would have been engaged for ten years by now - I..." The futility of his urgent inquiry slapped him silent. He withered a little, rubbed his temples to get the feeling back in his skull, then found himself again. "May I ask why you're calling?"
"Your mother's gone out." She paused. Hospes paled; his eyes sank down to his stiff fist, curled and shivering on his desk. "Do you know what I mean?"
"Yes. I know."
"She won't listen to me."
"She won't listen to me either."
"Well, I don't know. She talks of you..." There was a brief cut off, preceded by a trailing of a suffix, as if Sappho was trying to think of the right word. "She talks of you fondly. You're the only person on her emergency contact list." For the first time, real emotion slithered into her voice, low and muffled, but still there: "Guess I'm not worthy enough to-" The lamentation felt beaten off her lips.
Hospes scowled, and rushed to save her from further embarrassment. "Where is she? Do you know?"
"I was hoping you'd know."
"I have an idea," he murmured. "You'll know if I find anything."
That was the farewell. The receiver went back into its cradle like a hammer beating at its anvil. He glared at his hand, still wrapped about the bell-shaped receiver as if it was curled about a throat.
Again, damn you - damn yamn damn you! He shook with each ordinance of damnation; rage was in him - it soon became him, and it was not love the lifted him from his chair, but the obligation of keeping face. The yellowed pages and clinging news reporters would thrive with a lumped-up monster of a pill-popper like his mother, and he wasn't going to let them shame him into black-mail because Eve Compleo needed more than a pharmaceutical dose.
This never happened when Iphis was around, he thought bitterly as he lifted his coat from its draped position on his chair. He wrapped himself up in it in a rage, his only balm being that he had completed all of his escorting duties for that night.
*
Iphis Ladonna had been rather like a neon sign. She was bright, she was strikingly giddy, and though most giddy people stood for all Hospes hated in humanity, Iphis was different. She was curt; she only said what was needed to be said - like a sign. Most importantly, she could tell you all that you needed to hear. If you were happy, she would make you happier. If you were depressed, she'd stick a spoon of laughter down your throat - and if that didn't work, then a pill of companionship would always ease the pain. Iphis and Hospes were never close - Eve's frustrating habits, silent demand for control, and past scars kept Hospes as far from home as possible - but she had proven herself willingly available whether he needed her or not, and he considered her one among few that he had grown attached to. And though they hadn't spoken in years, he found Eve's sudden replacement of her with that machine-like
thing to lie beyond the boundaries of cruelty.
Neon signs flashed and laughed at him from all nooks and all crannies as he forced his way through his will, his stiff and skinny legs marching angrily through the night of the nearest adult-preferred sections. It was usually sectioned off for sponsors, so Hospes knew the area relatively well. He assumed that his mother more-or-less had a map in mind, but she could get so feverish he could never be certain. Fortunately, she wasn't a curious or experimental person; if she could help it, she only went to her favorite bars, joints, et cetera, making it easier for her son to track him down. He was aware that he was nearing one right now.
He didn't know what he would do when he found her - if he found her. He honestly hoped he wouldn't. A deep, but honest and almost light part of him prayed that she would just walk out into the night and never return, and this would be the last of a long list of nuisances, of lies, of hurt. But if his luck ran out, and he had to lay eyes on her face again -
Hospes didn't know if he could take anymore of her. Of either of his parents. But he was bolder around his mother, and after hanging around with her and her imprinted femininity, expressing feelings and subduing logic whenever she was around had become second nature to him.
Shadow-like figures appeared before him, in the dimness of the neon light's giddiness and the pale depression of the lights of street lamps. They were the first sign of human life that Hospes had noticed; this was an unpopular part of the adult-preferred section, the public (all excluding his mother) having found displeasure with the attempted businesses that dotted the curbs and streets. And they were only a curb away from one little joint Eve had a preference towards; perhaps they had seen her?
He approached them with no attempt at hope. As it was his way to be abnormally quiet around strangers (simply an instinct of his) and because he walked up behind them, they didn't notice his approach. To get their attention, he laid a palm on a shoulder each, and began: "Excuse me, would anyone of you would have noticed a lady of about fifty or so stagger by-"
Hospes was very slow on the cues of body language when he was distracted - which, if anyone should crawl into his mind, one should be aware that he was almost always distracted by the plagues of the day. It took him a full five seconds to remember what it meant when one was slumped, having to essentially be dragged by another. (His ability to recognize who the slumped form was took even slower - in fact, it was nonexistent
until the next post, due to a wanting ability to keep up with celebrities or to care about drunks he might have attempted to form conversation with.) He pulled back sharply, and grimaced in disgust and partially in embarrassment. "What - is he drunk or hurt?" he asked sharply, not because he wanted to, but by some old instinct that reminded him to sometimes care about the random human being.
(ooc: Welp, now the world knows that Hospes's mom had gone lesbian. And has some issues, kinda-sorta like her kid. Let's just go on the record to say that everyone in the Compleo family, living or dead, is/is going to be/was pretty effed up.)
