Morgana's Gift Pt. 17

Interregnum One - Presto

Three days later, early in the morning, Miriam was out jogging on the beaches and found a leather wrapped package left for Kevin up behind some rocks, to prevent it from washing back out again. Inside was a large necklace made of some kind of seashells that Kevin couldn't recognize along with a note in large, slowly written letters, as if the King was unaccustomed to writing in English.

Kevin Bishop. In accordance with our wager, I am hereby presenting you with the Ancestor's Gaze, a talisman which imbues the wearer with the ability to see magicks. It has often been the purview of those Kings and Queens who are unable to pierce the veil with their own vision, something I am able to do, as I have studied the teachings of our finest mages and learned from their ways, as I will do to my own children. Still, considering your dealings with both the Merlin and the Morgana, I think you will find it a useful addition to your arsenal. Perhaps we shall see each other again, Kevin of Clan Bishop, but based on our last encounter... I rather hope not. May the tide ever be in your favor.

The sea lord didn't sign it, because, well, why would he?

Kevin tried the necklace on a few times, and each time he could see an amber floating cord between his ring and each of the pendants and necklaces his partners wore, almost linking them together, the color a nice pleasant warm shade, like a tropical sunset. It was too large and unwieldy to have on day-to-day, but he hung it up in his studio, so he would always have it at hand should he need it, and it became something of a conversation piece for the next few weeks.

It didn't give him any idea of what to do about Midas Day, but halfway to the next one, in the middle of the night, inspiration struck him, and he hopped out of bed and ran down the hall, heading into his office before grabbing a large sheet of paper and a pencil.

And then he began drawing.

After about half an hour, he went back to bed, but everything he thought he needed to beat Midas Day was on that sheet of paper. The start of it, anyway.

The next morning, over breakfast, he explained to Ashley what he'd need from her, giving her the paper, telling her it was a high priority. Ashley understood, and as amusing as she found Midas Days, she completely understood why Kevin didn't want to have to endure it any further.

He was starting to have to do interviews with music channels, magazines, and radio shows about having produced Christy Zen's new album, and it was a surprising amount of people calling what she was doing a departure from her previous work and asking if he'd had a hand in getting her to experiment. Kevin was adamant that she'd come to him with the new sound already mapped out ahead and that she'd picked him because she felt he could help her deliver on that. He didn't want to take any credit where it wasn't due and went out of his way to just say he was helping her pull that sound of out of her team and her songs, although the critics all seemed to be delighted when he admitted he'd played guitar on almost half the tracks on the album.

There were also starting to be more inquiries about other projects he could start scoring, with the Robert Rodriguez project starting to move along very quickly, and it seemed like the score he'd done for Emily Rouchard was generating more than a little bit of buzz. Between that and the Christy Zen album, it felt like nearly everything was happening all at once, even though he'd been working on it all for month and months.

The list of film pitches he needed to consider was growing bigger and bigger. The number of demos he had to review and listen to grew higher and higher. But it was a good thing, being busy, knowing there was something always on the schedule for the next day.

Elizabeth hadn't found the final person to bring into his group, so the seventh pendant, the last in the box, was still there, waiting for someone to claim it. Kevin had been worried about that at first - ending projects was often as hard, if not harder, than starting them - and sticking the landing was something he wasn't entirely certain he was going to be able to do. But Elizabeth assured him things were going well in her search, and that she wanted to be sure to give him the absolute perfect person to close out the house, and she had Fatima's complete and total confidence in taking her time.

And the people in Kevin's world weren't stagnant either. Fatima's bodyguard, Jackson, had proposed to his girlfriend, even though he'd yet to bring her around the house, which was slowly driving Fatima mad. The decision had been made that Jackson would bring her by the house within the next month or two, or Fatima was going to demand they drive straight to the hospital where she worked and refuse to leave until they'd broken bread.

It was a good life.

Two days before the next Midas Day, he was sitting out in the back yard with an acoustic guitar, playing Tom Petty songs around the pool when Ashley came to join him with a giant smile on her face. "You think you're going to be ready for this?" she asked him.

"Dunno," Kevin said. "You ready to live up to your end?"

"Think so. We've got your phone set up so I can track you wherever your mind seems to want to take you, and I think we should be able to head you off at the pass enough to make sure we get to try and see if you're right about this. Can I ask what made you think about it?"

Kevin tilted his head with a sly little smile. "I started thinking about the way he said it, how it was something I'd never done before... and I kept remembering thinking to myself, 'You don't know me, man... you don't know what kind of life I have or haven't lived...' So how would he know it was something I'd never done before, unless it was something I couldn't have done before I met him? From there, the list of options shrinks rather dramatically. And I could still be wrong about this. While the list shrinks, it's not just one or two things."

"So why this one?" she said, moving to sit down on the deck chair next to him, so she could snuggle up against him, setting the guitar aside for him.

"Let's just say it feels like proper Merlin sneaky, and even if I'm wrong, it's one thing off the list," he said, wrapping his arms around her. "Your end wasn't hard?"

"Nah, although getting past the initial hurdle would've been much easier if I'd have taken Strazo with me," she giggled.

"Strazo goes where Miriam goes, and Miriam doesn't like leaving my side," Kevin sighed. "So, no joy if I can't leave the house, and we're trying to keep this as quiet and on the down low as we possibly can. I don't want Merlin to know I've got a thought about how to beat his silly game."

"I'm glad you trusted me with all this," Ashley said, leaning her head back against his chest, nuzzling into him as the sun was slowly setting. "I'm so used to everyone treating me like a child because I'm still a teenager, that it's nice to be treated like I'm an adult."

"You'll be twenty-one before you know it, and then you'll spend the rest of your life bitching about how much you miss being a teenager," Kevin said with a chuckle. "Everyone thinks they're 21 and invincible until they wake up one morning and realize that they aren't. Sometimes the reminder's subtle and sometimes--"

"Sometimes it's a former bandmate's death being announced in a newspaper article before anyone's called you personally to tell you about it?" Ashley said. "I saw the article on the counter. 'Former Truth Knife vocalist found dead in homeless shelter; drug overdose suspected.' That why you're out here playing Tom Petty songs?"

Kevin sighed. "Yeah. Danny and I were at each other's throats a lot of the time, and yeah, he absolutely was the misogynist prick that Kerry makes him out to be, at least when he was drunk or stoned, but back when I first met him, he was just a waiter at a shitty Mexican restaurant, living paycheck to paycheck while doing any karaoke or vocalist audition he could, trying to get somebody to take a chance on him. I'm a little surprised nobody's called to ask me to comment."

"They have," Ashley said, taking his hand and holding it within her own. "Elizabeth's told them all to call back in a couple of days, so you can have time to grieve and come to terms with it. She knew you wouldn't want to say anything right away, otherwise it might be something you'd regret."

"Like, 'I've been expecting his junkie ass to OD as long as I've known him' kind of regret?" Kevin said, hissing out the air. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm pissed off enough that I might've said some shit like that. I tried to get him into rehab, into treatment, into admitting he has a huge fucking problem, but that's the thing about guys like that - you can't make them do anything they don't want to do, and he didn't want to do anything but get high all the time. Making music became just a way to fuel his drug habit, and when I caught him pawning off one of my amps... MY amps... he wasn't even pawning off his own gear, he was stealing from the rest of the band to try and fucking fuel his addiction, that was when I broke up Truth Knife. Kelly was almost as bad, but at least he wasn't fucking stealing from the rest of us. Maybe this'll be a wakeup call for him, and he'll check himself into rehab."

"Hey. Hey hey hey," Ashley said, as Kevin was starting to tear up a little bit. "Danny was a fucking adult, okay, and you were not his fucking keeper. You weren't supposed to force him to do anything he didn't want to do, because it wasn't going to take. If you'd tried to stage an intervention--"

"He'd have jumped out of a window and run off into the night," Kevin said. "There's a reason I never even considered bringing him up here - he'd have been looking to see what he could steal and pawn off easily to use for drugs the moment he got here. It was extremely bad towards the end. It was affecting his singing, which had always been the one thing I could count on him to deliver on. But he was slurring words, forgetting lyrics, dropping in and out of songs, trying to convince the audience to do singalongs for sections he just couldn't remember the words for... he was a fucking mess. But there's some part of me that just remembers that scrawny ass waiter who auditioned for us singing Tom Petty's 'Free Fallin' desperate for someone to give him a chance and it still fucking hurts, you know?"

"Of course it hurts, Kevin," Ashley said, looking up at him. "He was your friend, and maybe 'was' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but you don't just forget about somebody who played an important part of your life, especially in the band you had that broke and got some recognition. You're allowed to grieve and for it to hurt, as long as you don't blame yourself for his decisions and you don't get so caught up in the grief that it affects the rest of your life."

"Fucking heroin," Kevin sighed. "Whole fucking generation of singers just gone to that shit. Ain't never gonna be me."

"And we're all very glad for that," she said. "Whole generation?"

"Heroin figures into the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Andrew Wood, Shannon Hoon, Layne Staley, Dee Dee Ramone, Scott Weiland, maybe Chris Cornell and/or Chester Bennington... that's a whole lot of fucking good singers... It's heartbreaking how many of them just OD'ed on that shit, or did just enough to impair their judgment and take their own lives."

"You never got tempted?"

"I danced with the bottle a bit," Kevin sighed. "Booze can be a cruel mistress by itself, but I sort of knew that if I let it take control, I wasn't going to get it back, so I kept it in check. Besides, we were never enough of a big success that the temptation was all around us. But now..."

"But now..." she echoed.

"I've got all of you to help keep me on the straight and narrow," he chuckled. "Even if I am getting dragged to parties where there's endless booze on tap and the doorman's offering me a bump of cocaine any time I want it."

"I've never done coke--"

"Don't," Kevin said sharply. "I did it once, and I've never been so fucking paranoid in my entire goddamn life. I didn't trust anyone for hours and felt like I was operating on live electricity. My hands were shaking, my head hurt and I nearly put my fist through a goddamn wall. I haven't gone back to it since, and I don't think I ever will."

"Anything you are cool with?" she said.

"Oh, sure," Kevin laughed. "Mostly the natural stuff like peyote and pot and whatnot, but even then, you do that shit in moderation and don't let it get out of control. Same for alcohol. You want to get blitzed drunk every now and then, that's fine. But when you start thinking 'I need a drink to get through this day,' that's when you know it's time to start cutting down, because it's gone from a thing you enjoy to a thing you need."

"That sounds like a lesson learned from experience."

"Dad died a drunk," Kevin said. "He could've stopped drinking any time, but instead he just let shit slide further and further into his own pit of misery, until one night he was driving home drunk from a bar, and wrapped himself around a telephone pole."

"Jesus. Kevin."

He raised a hand up. "I'm... I'm mostly over it, because you never totally get over something like that, but I vowed that was never going to be me, no matter how good or bad shit ever got. So I've had to make a lot of key decisions that way, and remind myself that no matter how much of my father is in me, I am not my father."

"How old were you when he died?"

"Sixteen," Kevin said. "Total kick in the head. Mom sort of fell to pieces after that, and I had to hold her together, but after I went off to college, she fell ill anyway. Ovarian cancer. Insanely aggressive. She was dead before I even graduated."

Ashley's hand clung to his firmly. "Why have you never talked about any of this, Kev?"

"Because it's foundational stuff," he sighed. "It's the past, and nothing ever changes the past. It's just part of who you are, and talking about it doesn't fix it, doesn't adjust it, doesn't repair the damage done. Those holes that my father dug out of my soul, they're going to be there for the rest of my life, and there's nothing I can do about that other than try and grow things out around the edges. There's no such thing as half a hole, Ashley. But I consider those bumps in the road behind me, and I'm not driving in reverse - when it comes to the story of a person's life, the only direction is forward."

She giggled a little. "I remember that song of yours. 'Only Forward.' I really like that one, especially how it feels like it's sort of dancing on the edge of steep cliff, twirling around a bit before Kerry's drums come crashing in and it goes rampaging down the hill like a skier trying to outrun an avalanche."

"Danny's vocals on that one..." He sighed. "I mean, I wrote all the lyrics, but he brought them to life. I'm only an okay singer, but damn did that kid have some pipes on him." He reached up and wiped a tear from his cheek. "Aaaand I'm back where I started."

"It's okay to mourn him, Kevin," Ashley said, turning over to make sure she could snuggle up against him as hard as she could. "You're human. You lost someone, and even if he wasn't part of your life anymore, for a time, he was right there in front of you, helping you make that music that's always been running around inside of your head. And any time you go back to listen to the album, you'll still have a part of him there with you."

"I may have to steal that for my next song," he said, running his hand over her arm.

"It's not like I came up with it, Kev. It's wisdom as old as time."

Two days later, when Kevin woke up early in the morning and started heading for the car, he had at least enough control to make sure he grabbed his phone. When he got to the SUV, Miriam was there waiting for him. "Fucking Midas Day," she said. She was dressed in her morning workout gear, clearly having hoped to get her morning run in before the day started, but the biggest problem with Midas Day was that there was never really any exact moment when it started. "I feel like I'm driving us into downtown again, but I won't really know until I'm behind the wheel."

Kevin climbed into the back seat of the Escalade as Miriam hopped into the beginning. "Fuck it. Let's do it." He had just enough control of his body to lift his phone and send the text message to Ashley. -It's GO time.-

The Escalade pulled out of the driveway and started rolling down into downtown Los Angeles, it still early enough that traffic hadn't gotten heavy or was threatening to slow them down. If anything, Merlin liked to make sure they were exactly where he wanted them for their little game and didn't want traffic to impede them. It was all about motion and movement.

As they kept moving, it felt clear they were heading towards Santa Monica, and Kevin almost wondered if they were heading for the pier, or maybe Marina Del Rey. But they started moving down Venice Boulevard, their final destination seemed obvious - they were heading for Venice Beach.

Obviously.

There wasn't really a time day or night where Venice Beach was empty, which meant it was going to be a challenge, even knowing what he did. They brought the car to park at 1613 Speedway Parking, and both hopped out, heading towards the beach.

Kevin, thankfully, had enough control to bring his phone with him.

"I think it's gonna be another runner, Miriam," Kevin sighed. "Why does the goddamn wizard want me to run so much?"

"Maybe it's his way of telling you to lose weight."

"Are you calling me fat?" Kevin laughed with a mock offended look on his face.

"Am I a fucking wizard?" she countered with a laugh of her own.

They were in good spirits, at least, as they made their way to "Declaration," a piece of public art that was right up against the beach itself, and Kevin could feel his pace starting to slow. There was generally some kind of 'go' flag, whether it was a dozen heads turning to look at him all at once, or the sign of someone chasing in his direction.

-Where are you?-

-Think you can make the restrooms to the north?- came back the reply to his phone.

-Maybe, but we'll be running.-

-Do it. Meet you there.-

He could see a couple of people over at the police substation starting to walk his direction, and he looked at Miriam. "We go north. Quick. If anyone gets in between me and the restrooms there, cover me and make sure I get there."

"You need to piss now?" she shot back as they started lightly jogging, hoping not to draw too much attention to themselves, but after a minute or so, it was clear that the game was on, and Kevin could see women starting to sprint in his direction.

At this point, having been through a number of Midas Days, he could at least see the humor in it, as if they were recreating that scene from Monty Python's Meaning Of Life, where the guy had been allowed to choose the manner of his death. He wondered if that was where Merlin had gotten the idea from, or if maybe he'd done this before and that had inspired the movie.

The problem with the park was they were running past part of a skate park, and a couple of women on skateboards were trying to make a go after Kevin along the sidewalk, so him and Miriam cut across through the grass, each of them running as fast as they could now.

For a moment or two, Kevin wasn't entirely sure they were going to make it, but eventually he could see the Public Restrooms just ahead of them, and there was a single woman running out of them towards them. But it wasn't who they were looking for - just a random blonde in a string bikini that was barely holding on for dear life.