When I Could Fly

[merryeccentricities]

Cubefall was--

Cubefall had been--

Well.

Joly had been a robot. A very pleased robot. And it hadn't occurred to him before he decided to be a robot that it would be...

well. If he had words for what he hadn't expected that would be something at least. But all he has are questions; and the questions he has, about sensation and spirit and change and desire, are not the sort of questions he's used to considering. He doesn't even know how to start.

But he has friends who are used to such questions, or something like them. And that's why he's pushing open the ever-unlocked door to the red-painted room.

"Bahorel? Prouvaire?"

Comments

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan is sprawled on the couch with Marguerite perched on his chest. He's idly petting her, and she's investigating his shirt buttons.

"Say good afternoon to Joly, Marguerite. He's our guest." Marguerite gives a dubious mew.

[merryeccentricities]

"Oh-!"Joly smiles and bows to the little cat. "Hello, Mademoiselle. Is it just the two of you here right now?"

..All right, he's stalling a little. But he's also honestly making his hellos to Marguerite. It's good to have a little cat to watch for this sort of conversation.

[vive_lavenir]

Marguerite hops down from Jehan's chest and trots over to investigate Joly's pant-leg.

"Oh, yes," says Jehan. "Bahorel is out. Wreaking some sort of mayhem. I fear Feuilly may be the victim."

Jehan doesn't sound particularly scared by this. In fact, he looks forward to a rousing battle of the harmless variety.

[merryeccentricities]

"Oh? Well, that's good. I know he's been bored." And there's only so far Bahorel will take mischief against any of their friends. "I had thought--but I can talk to him later." Joly has an uneasy sense that he's not going to clear his head of this in one conversation.

Or at all, if he doesn't start actually talking about it. "Prouvaire-- you took a new body for Cubefall, right?" He hasn't actually asked his friends about it yet; it's the door to too much... this. Whatever this is.

[vive_lavenir]

"Yes." Jehan looks mournful and fond at the same time. "A phoenix."

He pauses before adding, somewhat unnecessarily, "I could fly."

[merryeccentricities]

Joly nods, and kicks over one of the pillows to sit down next to the sofa. "So could I. I mean, I was a robot, not a phoenix." Though it makes a certain sense even to Joly that Prouvaire would rather be a Phoenix. "But I could fly. And--and fall without hurting myself. And I was much stronger. And the sensory information--! Oh, it was wonderful."

[vive_lavenir]

"I was also much stronger." Jehan scoops up Marguerite, who's made her way back to him, and pulls her close to his face. "I could sing. I could hear music in everything. And I could see many things I can't any more. I could see--life, and heat, and--souls."

He holds Marguerite out Joly-wards, letting her bat at Joly with her paws. "But I wasn't invulnerable, not like you seem to have been?" The upward lilt in Jehan's voice signals that it's a question. "I wasn't metal and ceramic. I was magical, perhaps, but I was still soft flesh."

[merryeccentricities]

"Not-- invulnerable, exactly. I could be damaged. I was, a few times, but I repaired myself right off without any pain." He'd put an arm back on. A whole arm! And now his finger smarts--mildly but noticeably-- from MArgeurite's little kitten-swats. He doesn't wince, but he sighs, and scritches under her chin. "I had such-- such total awareness of myself. I can't tell you my pulse right now without checking, but I knew what all my systems were doing to the least measure as a robot. But nothing hurt."

[vive_lavenir]

"Nothing hurt." Jehan repeats this with wonder. And some revulsion, too. "You could be damaged, but nothing hurt. You knew all your systems, but experienced none of them?"

Marguerite softly butts her head against Joly's shoulder.

"I had the opposite situation, I believe. I had constant information, if you'd like to call it that, but I felt all of it--it all imprinted on me. And yet this didn't make me weak. I had powers beyond anything I have now."

[merryeccentricities]

"Yes! Well-- no." Joly rubs his nose. "I mean-- I suspect a being born to that body would have considered what he felt, when he had his arm knocked off as I did once, as pain. And--and touch, I could tell that I was touching--was holding--but it wasn't--it was all feeling. But none of it...oh, it's no good, I don't have the words! It was real, I felt it all, I felt--" He tugs at his hair. "It's like trying to describe flying, now, in the senses this body has. I can say, that felt like flying; people do say that! But in that form it was natural and it was--it was just something so entirely different. The body doesn't translate it, even if I remember it. And that body didn't translate my ideas of--of touch, pain,dizziness, all those things. Even when I could tell there was some sort of equivalent...word?"

All right, so metaphor isn't how he thought his English lessons would help. But here they are!

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan nods, still appalled. "You felt," he said. "But you weren't--wounded? Bruised?"

He had half sat up while speaking to Joly, but now he lets himself fall again. "I also felt all of those things differently--though not, perhaps, as differently as you. But--wings. I had wings, and feathers. Was what I felt with my feathers akin to what I feel with skin? Yes, and yet--it was so very alien."

[merryeccentricities]

"Do you think--" Joly frowns. The question sounds absurd. But then he's talking to Prouvaire, so it might be understood that he's being serious. "--Do you think, when we were in those different forms-- could that have still been entirely, well, us? The same as we are in these bodies? I mean of course we were--somewhat-- but I felt-- when I decided to change back it--somehow it felt like if I didn't, I wouldn't still be, exactly. Human."


He's suddenly very glad it's only Prouvaire here right now, who will understand some of the weight of that admission. even if Joly's made a total hash of the rest of his question.

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan stares at the ceiling. "The soul, or some spark of it, must remain. This is how we thought and felt and recognized our friends and carried the same concerns, the same spirit. So yes--those other forms were us."

He stretches up an arm to trace an imaginary constellation of nonexistent stars. "But not entirely. No, not entirely us. The body is part of us...and perhaps it's what makes us human, in our flesh and blood and bone, and not simply souls that could inhabit other bodies. It's what gives us shared sensations and pleasures and pain. The body, not the soul."

[merryeccentricities]

" Yes-- yes, exactly!" He had been right to think Prouvaire would have the right words for this. "And oh, I suppose I really should have thought of it long before, there are people here who aren't human, but the difference-- the difference a body makes, in how the world is -- and then, doesn't that change who we are, a little, if we're each living with a different world--" this sort of thing is still really not his field. " --but we were still ourselves, yes. I remember, the way I felt about things, about people, especially, that was the same."

"...But I was different." The thought won't go away, and it won't get comfortable.

" .. with more power, yes." That's not all of it, but a strange and sobering idea, still. "For me, I could fly, I was stronger, I saw-- so much more. I--well." I was better, he doesn't say, because he doesn't really believe it, but it's the closest he can get to a feeling he still can quite explain. "How was it for you? You could fly-- did you have some sort of powers to do with fire, as a phoenix?"

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan nods. "Yes, the sights, the tastes, the motion--all that was different."

He frowns at the question of powers. "Yes! Fire could burn me but not hurt me. It--it rejuvenated me. I flew far out into the forest, farther than Combeferre, and there was a small fire in a dry spot. I flew straight into it, and I felt...stronger, livelier."

[merryeccentricities]

Joly smiles. Even to his less-than-poetic perceptions, that seems a very Prouvaire sort of experience. "Did you-- need any other sort of sustenance? Did you eat, or need sleep, while you were a Phoenix, or was it all fire?"

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan frowns. "I did fall asleep! But no, no eating. I never felt hungry. I'd just eaten before I transformed, and somehow I never felt the need to eat until I became human again. But I'd imagine, if I'd continued like that, I'd have eaten what birds eat? Worms? Fish? I found it natural to soar and swoop like a bird."

Joly may be asking the wrong person about physical comforts.

[merryeccentricities]

He might be, but on the other hand Prouvaire notices how things feel, and he needs to hear about that experience in comparison to Prouvaire's regular way of living, not his own. He thinks of asking more about the food, but instead asks "When you slept- do you remember if you had any dreams?"

[vive_lavenir]

"Oh, yes," says Jehan, quietly. "Dreams of fire, and of green growing out of ash...of apocalypse and rebirth. Unlike any dream I've had as a human." He hesitates before saying, "You didn't sleep, did you? As a robot?"

[merryeccentricities]

Joly shakes his head. " It's -- it was one of the reasons I decided to change back, at the end. And a very notable difference. Dreams are, they're very central, you know? Well, of course you know." Joly has to admit that Prouvaire's sense of the importance of dreams is probably closer to accurate than that of many doctors over the decades.

"It's just-- I realize how physically based it is! So of course dreams would be different with another sort of brain, but to have no dreams at all was-- strange? And it's..oh, I don't know. It's part of how people, how humans, at least, sort of create ourselves... I mean, it's incredibly complicated."

He laughs a little. " I make it sound so grand, and my dreams are the most useless things! Boxes of penguins--But still. I don't know how much I'd have kept being myself, over time, without it."

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan's eyes fill with tears. This is so like Joly, to hit upon a profound truth and then try to lighten it with a joke. It's somehow very touching. "Oh, my dear Joly. Boxes of penguins! It sounds utterly absurd, and utterly charming, and you're wholly right. You wouldn't be you, did you not spend your nights dreaming of boxes of penguins. Everything from your science to your friendship with Bossuet would be different without that time spent in dreams, when your mind runs free of logic and immediate perceptions."

[merryeccentricities]

Joly nods, and falls quiet for a while. He's not sure what else he actually needs to say.

"I almost didn't change back." he says, eventually.

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan slides down next to Joly, and slips his arm around him.

"I understand," he says. "But I'm glad you did."

It would be odd to hug a robot Joly, for one thing.

[merryeccentricities]

That was something Joly considered, yes. Though less than people who know him might expect. But he's not sure he's ready to explain that yet. He leans against Prouvaire.

"Did you think of staying as a phoenix?"

[vive_lavenir]

"Yes," Jehan says, in a low voice. "I did. But I knew I wouldn't. I don't know if I could create anything, as a phoenix. And--it would have felt like I was abandoning people. All of you. Somehow."

[merryeccentricities]

Joly hugs Prouvaire back, hard. "Of course you couldn't give up that part of you. And-- I am glad you chose to keep this form."

He sighs. "I almost stayed. I half-planned to, I think, almost by the end of the first day. It was so easy. And what I do-- everything I want to do would have been easier. I could have learned faster, and still done careful work, and lifted injured people without shaking them if I had to-- it all would have been simpler."

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan nods. "Yes, for a doctor--you would have so many abilities as a robot, and it would be so hard to give up...but Joly, consider this also: as a human, you can feel what other humans feel. And your relation to them as a human doctor will be different than a robot's." He pauses to reflect. "I don't say better. But different, and...perhaps you were wise not to give that up."

[merryeccentricities]

He nods, his head still on Prouvaire's shoulder. "That's what I thought, when I decided I'd better not. It was very easy, that other form, and...it's not, being a human." He laughs a little. "I can't say 'being alive', I'm still not sure how that is for us, but-- human. It hurts, and it's hard, even for comfortable people, and frightening, and...it seemed choosing to leave those things, and then continuing to treat the people who endure them, would be a, a sort of betrayal. A dangerous thing, at least."

[vive_lavenir]

Jehan wraps his arms more fully around Joly. "Yes--it would be choosing to stand above them, remote and invulnerable, rather than treating them as an equal. A bourgeois doctor might be healthier and stronger than a poor woman screaming in childbirth, but at least he bleeds and sweats and weeps with her." His hand comes up too ruffle Joly's hair. "As I said. I'm glad you're still you--completely you."