Ry talking to Rhea, then Renee at Dantes; PG

[http://users.livejournal.com/epithet_/]

"Again, I'm sorry for last week," Ry apologised over the phone.

"No, that's fine. We both understand the importance of life thing and how they get in the way." Ry could hear the smile in Kate's voice on the other end of the line. He didn't understand how she could always be so nice and good natured. Unlike anybody else he knew. "Bring Rhea back say about 5pm and we'll do dinner over here like we planned for last time. Is there anything you don't like eating?"

*

Rhea looked at her older brother adoringly. Ry couldn't help but smile as he ducked his head. "Will you stop doing that?" he asked, raising an ironic eyebrow.

"Stop doing what, Ry?" Rhea asked him. He honestly didn't think that there was anybody on god's green earth with eyes wider than hers.

"Staring." Ry chuckled. "Didn't you mother ever tell you it's not polite?"

"My mum tells me lots of things. She reads different books to me every night to get me to sleep." Rhea was an open fount of knowledge for anything. One only had to ask one question to get a whole mass of an answer. "Did your mum read to you when you were little?" she added curiously.

Ry eyed her strangely as the waiter came up to serve them. "Uh, yeah, a double shot latte for me," Ry said, looking up at the guy, "And a chocolate milkshake for you, was it?" he asked his little sister. She bounced in her chair and nodded her head quickly a couple of times at the waiter.

"He was nice," Rhea said with a big grin that showed off a couple of the gaps where teeth were missed.

"Oooh, that's a big smile," Ry said, glancing at the gaps. "Hope you got money from the tooth fairy for those."

"The tooth fairy doesn't come to our house," Rhea said, woefully.

Ry adopted a shocked expression. "She doesn't?"

Rhea giggled a little bit. "Mum says that only babies see the tooth fairy," Rhea confided. "But it's okay! Mum gives me money herself to reward me for growing up."

Not a bad system, Ry considered. "Well isn't mum nice," he asked.

"My mum's the best!" Rhea exclaimed. Well, she was certainly coming close to it, Ry thought.

*

"Won't you stay longer?" Kate asked. "Rhea doesn't have to go to bed for another half hour. You're more than welcome to stay over the night."

"Oh no, I couldn't," Ry said, but smiled to show her the thought was appreciated. "Perhaps another night? I said I'd meet up with a friend of mine this evening," he explained.

Rhea looked disappointed, but she came out from behind her mother and held to Ry's hand. He looked down at her. "What is it, pipsqueak?"

She giggled at the name. "Thank you for taking me out today, Ry," she said with a huge smile.

Ry rubbed her hair and smiled up at Kate. "Hey, I had a good time. We'll have to do it again some time, okay?"

"Definitely!" Rhea bounced.

*

Ry sat in Dantes. He had ordered himself a shot of absinthe while he waited for Renee to show up. He was sipping it and working on a piece that had started in his mind since Deirdre had decided to encourage him on his film director whim. It was just a little piece of nothing, really. More something to pass the time till Renee got there than anything else.

"Considering my difficulties over the linear time patterns required in writing a novel, I wonder at the idea of passing through delusions, watching as reality recognised goes shit-faced. Transcendence indicates whether or not events experienced actually occurred is irrelevant. What is important is the experience itself. Time is no longer linear."

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Renee stepped back into Dante's for the second time in a few days. It was getting to be like old times, the way she frequented this place. There wasn't quite so much of a spring in her step this time, though. After all of the drinking, she had been violently ill. She was still looking a little pale, not feeling a hundred percent. But if Ry was finally going to be nice again, she was hardly going to cancel on the get-together.

"Hello, Ry," she smiled, sitting down across from him. "How are you?"

She hoped the simple question didn't elicit a harsh response...

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Ry glanced up at her, and grunted a reply, quickly scrawling down the finishing of what he had been writing.

History itself is filled with many characters of infinite power and wisdom, whose stories only exist but to tell the fall of such great entities by way of their own fatal flaws.

Breathing out sharply, Ry put aside his pen and paper and gave a lopsided smile up at Renee. "You're late."

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Renee gave an expression of mock-pain... well, mostly mock. "I think I am lucky to be alive, let alone on time. I had the most Hellish hangover this morning... I honestly thought it was the Apocalypse."

Her eyes flicked down to Ry's writing. "Is that a new opus, dear?"

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"Or something," Ry murmured. "But it's... missing something. I'm displeased by it. Were I to show it to anyone, I do not think I would get the pleased responces of the parts before it."

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"Missing?" Renee eyed the papers, partially hidden beneath his wrist. Probably on purpose. "Perhaps you simply do not realise what is embedded within... may I?"

She shifted her hand to the papers, almost touching his.

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Ry looked at her ironically. "I don't know," he said, keeping a hand over his 'opus'. "I always seem to get terribly sarcastic responces from you when I allow you to read my work."

He sighed dramatically. "Although, I suppose, considering that you have on occassion offered worth-while responces... and I'm having such difficulty..." With another smaller sigh, he pushed the book her way with no small amount of resignation.

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Renee turned the papers towards her with a grin, and began to peruse them. "On occasion? I have contributed enough to be quoted. You had better dedicate this to me when all is said and done."

MAKING GODS OUT OF FLESH – CHAPTER FOUR, she read. This alone brought a smile to her face. It was something she might know something about.


It could be argued that the birth of Jesus was a god borne out of flesh. He was a man, but also a god. He is the ‘son’ out of ‘the father, the son, the holy spirits’.

We are all manifestations of God. God is fragmented. It is through us that his sentience is achieved. We what God we have with the power of our belief. Or take away from it with our disbelief.

It is because of this that only when we achieve transcendence ourselves can our Gods achieve the same. In that, we all must achieve transcendence in the same moment of enlightening.


Renee leaned back, digesting what she had read. There was indeed something missing, something left out... but something he had spoken of before.

"You split God into three... but I would contest the point. There must be four. You are missing Mother."

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Ry only just kept himself from scoffing aloud, but Renee knew him well enough that it would not have gone unnoticed. He forced himself to take on a straight face and said, "The 'Mother' has no place in this."

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"You cannot divorce yourself from the feminine Ry, no matter how hard you may try. You will only end with emasculated male figures. But then, that does seem to be a theme of your 'Father' figure. If something is missing, then, perhaps it should remain so."

She read over the work again, considering all that he had written.

"I wonder... do you attribute a gender to the Holy Spirit? Or Spirits?"

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"Divorce myself from the feminine? Have it escaped your notice that near all of my friends are female? What I wouldn't do for some male interaction other than Jocelin from time to time."

He glanced down at the work again. "They are merely a passing mention," he replied.

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Renee gave a small sound of amusement. "Most of the women you associate with only sleep with other women. That makes us deviant, another matter altogether."

Her voice and expression were tinged with a strange darkness. Not malevolent, but not entirely wholesome.

"There is little of normality in our spirits. Gender distinctions seem to apply best in your world of non-non-fiction."

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Ry smirked at her 'non-non-fiction' statement. "It is another world entirely in the book I write. That it bears direct relevance to this one is negligent. Of this world, I am a god, and I have the final say." Ry smiled again. "Which to an extent, I share with you in the reading. In that, I suppose that, no, there is little normality in our spirits."

He paused and sat back, interested to see how she would take up his words.

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"So you take this world and make it your own, creating a new mythology. As if Homer were present at the Battle of Troy, and rather than write an honest, dry history, instead created a legend."

She smiled. "Remember what you said about academics discussing your work for the next hundred years? Think if you did create a new Odyssey. You would be spoken of for millenia."

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Ry backed off from the point marginally at her first words. "It is, though, just a position I'm still playing with the idea of," he explained.

Even he was taken aback by the strength of though that came in her latter words. "Okay, I'm a good writer, but not that good," he said with a little chuckle he invited her to join.

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"Perhaps," Renee mused, joining in his mirth. She leaned forward conspiratorially. "But what if we are that good?"

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Ry's smile never left his face. "What if we are?" he asked.

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"Then we would be the King and Queen," she spoke earnestly. "Father and Mother of our own Creation. Eternal."

She took his hand. "We could be brother and sister, you and I. Prince and Princess. Destined to ascend to the thrones of our parents and become those who will rule, and beget Creation in the incest of Gods."

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For the first time, Ry's smile dropped slightly and he shook his head. "Renee, you were ever one of the most ambitious people I ever met. But what you are talking is madness. Let us bring back into perspective that I am bringing into creation a novel, not a created world for ruling."

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Renee's smile only grew. "You fear that I shall become some sort of Lady Macbeth? Perhaps I will bring you to ruin, my dear. But can I be she, and yet still be one of the witches? Myself, Slink and Jude, your Fates, perhaps rather the witches to your Macbeth. Beware Del, then, if she is to be your lady."

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At the mention of Macbeth, Ry laughed out loud in actual enjoyment. "My dear, if any one of us would turn into a Shakespearean character," he gave a little flair, "It would most definitely be me. And it would not be Macbeth. Now, it is not ruin I speak of, but rather disappointment. This conversation we speak, it has no proof, nothing more than the hot wind that it rides upon. What of that?"

Surreptitiously, he drew his writing book back to him in order to stop her quoting sections of it he had allowed her to read.

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"Life is but a passing shadow, a tale told by idiot: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And yet life has passed you by not yet, you are still young and beginning your journey in this dark and troubled land. There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

"Your work's trouble lies in family, I think. Macbeth had none, save his lady. Hamlet's troubles, however, stemmed directly from his father, and the circumstances of his death. And the response of the Mother. Do not underestimate her influence."

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"Stop quoting my inspirations. I know what I myself have written," Ry told her, now at the beginnings of getting annoyed. She always did this, sort of a know it all additude that he was much more used to seeing from an only child like Jocelin. With her little sister Lizzy, there should be no reason Renee was like this as well.

He calmed down as she gave him constructive critisism. Yes. He could identify with Hamlet. "What would you have me do with the 'mother figure' then?" he asked, dragging them back to the contents of his story and using inverted comma signs with his fingers to do so.

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Renee considered Ry's question for a moment. There was no doubt that, at this stage in his work, it was The Question.

"Create one," she finally answered. "The current mother is clearly unsatisfactory. I suggest that one of your princesses should usurp her place. Her absence up until this point is telling, but it is a void that must be filled for your story to be complete. Unless you wish to deny completion... in which case we start down a new path entirely."

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He didn't appreciate what he saw as her sarcasm, but he did see her point and mulled over it momentarily. A waiter came around to see if they wanted anything further. He shook his head once and pushed his empty glass to the edge of the table to be taken away. "Do you want anything else?" he asked, but his mind wasn't really on that. One of his girls - he refused to use the word 'princess' for anyone who was not Jude, and she would surely not be the one usurping the mother's place. Nor would it be Slink. Nope, that was just too weird to contemplate. Not that that left him with many options.

"I've gone too far now to just stay down a new path entirely," Ry murmured. "In which case, your personality seems the most likely to emerge itself as the 'satisfactory mother figure'." Again, the inverted comma fingers as he inserted some of his own sarcasm into their conversation.

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Despite Ry's sarcasm, Renee had to smile. "I agree." Oh, how arrogant it sounded. But it was Ry who had said it first, and he knew it to be true.

"Given our relationship, this may become somewhat Oedipal. But then, I would assume you are prepared for that. Incest seems to be a staple of myth, from pre-Christianity to Star Wars."

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"Indeed." Ry breathed in deep and looked aside from the table. He needed to get out of here. To stretch his legs and actually give some active thought to what had been said here today. As he'd known would happen, Renee's imput had greatly helped his creative process - regardless of its sharp delivery. He knew he should be used to that and block it out by now, but it was still too easy to take it personally. Writing was the one passion he really had care over.

"Look, I'm going to bail," he said. "Do you want me to cover this?" Looking at her face, he knew, as ever, the answer would be no. "Which way are you heading after this?" he asked.

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"I think I shall simply bathe and take my leave of the waking world," Renee replied with a tired smile. "There are plans for another big night tomorrow, so I would like to not feel quite so ill."

"I'll cover my own drinks," she smiled, producing the necessary quid to cover it and placing the money beneath her glass. "But thank you for the offer. You are a gentleman at heart."

She rose from her seat and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek. "It was nice doing this again, Ry."