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sylphidine · 1 year

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[Fic] Call Signs, Chapter 30

Fandom: Deltarune

‘Verse: Human AU

Pairing: Swatch/Spamton [Swatchton]

Characters: Spamton Addison [flashback], Mike Cowley [flashback], the "Serif brothers", as in those two skeletons from UNDERTALE [flashback]

Rating: Mature

Chapter title: Trash Landing, Part One

Chapter summary: Heights and lows.

Author notes:

So much gaslighting that Mike dishes out.

So much whump that Spamton goes through.

[So much Deltarune canon lore and meta references, mixed with my own AU trappings. PLEASE, dear readers, tell me you see some of the Easter eggs I've tossed in here.]

Spamton's first person past tense POV continues straight from the end of the previous chapter as he's trying to explain the last few years to Swatch. Take it as read that Spamton is stuttering away like mad, but he's getting his points across to Swatch while reliving these horrible memories. [Yes, the author's cheating a bit and using a weird narrative device.]

____________________

Mike does his best to cheer me up over the week between Christmas and New Year's.

We'd already discussed neither of us doing a lick of work while I was scheduled to be with my family. Mike had said, while I was packing, that he'd be catching up on some of his hobbies during the downtime, like practicing card tricks and other kinds of sleight of hand.

I had thought he was joking at the time, like a sad clown, but it turns out he's really good at stage magic. We end up at Tannen's Magic Shop after one of our dates.

We go out every afternoon that week, even though it’s cold and windy. No bars. No networking. Just real, honest-to-goodness, down-to-earth dates.

A hole-in-the-wall all-you-can-eat buffet.

Window shopping on Canal Street.

Tea and scones at The Potbelly Stove.

Dance Dance Revolution at an underground arcade.

Jazz at The Blue Note.

On New Year's Eve the wind is much too strong and I’m tired of getting bundled up to fight the bitterly freezing weather, so we stay in to watch the ball drop on television rather than braving the crowds in Times Square and getting frostbite.

I admire our afternoon’s decorating handiwork. Somehow Mike has acquired six or seven canisters of Silly String, and now the living room is festooned with multicolored silicon tangles.

To me… It looks…. Well, silly. Not something two full-grown men would admit to enjoying, but definitely a unique stay-at-home date to wrap up our vacation week.

The tendrils sway in the air coming from our heating vents like wacky wires, or vines. They remind me of the strings on the marionettes we saw yesterday at FAO Schwartz.

Mike comments on my unconscious frown. I mention the accusation about puppets I'd yelled at Ballew; he “hmmms” thoughtfully in response and then changes the subject.

The champagne gets poured at midnight and for the first time in a long time I drink too much. I wake up with a headache to end all headaches, half-dressed in my office, with my arms wrapped around the black rotary phone.

I can see my reflection in its waxy surface.

I can feel fingertip-shaped bruises on my hips.

There are long, long strands of bright green Silly String trailing off both my wrists.

There’s also a note on my desk from Mike that says he tried to talk me out of brainstorming my great new idea for a new advertising campaign until we both went back to work on the 2nd, but that I was very insistent. He ends the message by asking if I want to go out to the neighborhood hangover brunch.

To my sodden brain, that sounds like the best plan ever.

My great new idea, as it turns out, is a slogan I’d written on a cocktail napkin while we were both lifting a toast to a successful 2018 and beyond. In sloppy, blocky, straggling capital letters, it spells out “HAVE YOUR HOME RUN LIKE CLOCKWORK”, accompanied by a stick figure drawing that could either be a robot or a scarecrow.

I’ve never made any claims to be an artist, but even I have to laugh at how crappy it looks.

Mike says that the idea has good bones and we can rough it out over the next few months. He teasingly tells me I was raving for hours about a book I’d read as a kid about a clockwork man.

I vaguely remember the title after a few minutes, including the movie that was made from the book, and I blame the rest of my amnesia from last night on too much bubbly.

We each polish off a huge plateful of greasy scrambled eggs and clink our coffee cups together.

It feels like a great start to a better year, and like I can stop looking in the rear view mirror.

---------------

We hit the ground running in January.

Mike is either constantly in my office when he’s home, or on the phone with me when he has to work long hours with the science team, whom I’ve never met.

The receiver of the black rotary phone never cools from the heat of my hand, and I feel like I’m never alone.

I desperately, desperately need to NOT BE ALONE.

If I’m not alone, there’s no room in my mind to think about what or who I've left behind.

My New Year’s Eve brilliance inspires Mike to show me a whole series of articles on “mechanical men” built between the 1700s and the 1800s. We pore over them together on my laptop, sitting practically in each other’s laps, his hand always on my shoulder or my thigh.

The automaton that strikes both of us as the most incredible is the Draughtsman-Writer. Mike points out that it even looks like me, if my cheeks were a little rosier. Dark hair, a pointed chin, and a dreamy gaze in its eyes.

It’s a short leap to the next idea. I practice with makeup and a selfie stick before Mike and I storyboard the next GASTER commercial together. His hands guide mine and make me feel like a priceless musical instrument.

And thus “Spamton G. Spamton”, the mechanical salesman, is born.

I’m a bit uncomfortable at first with the look of the hinged jawlines, but I get used to it. I start practicing a new kind of vocal patter that has barely perceptible stops and starts.

In the meantime, I still have sales outreach work to do. I’m back to nineteen-hour workdays, much of which is spent immersed in nightlife, but I’m so energized that I don’t care.

Over the next few months, we shoot four more GASTER commercials that are in constant rotation on the airwaves. I voice the opinion to Mike that maybe the red suit is getting stale after more than a year, and that it might be time to change up my image again. He agrees, but he wants to keep the “mechanical man” look. So I compromise; the makeup can stay, but I want something that’s sharp and memorable.

Tallulah has closed up her Chelsea apartment for the summer and gone to France, so she’s not around to consult with. Not in person, at least. But I start looking at some of her past fashion collections in a retrospective issue of a magazine, and there’s one season’s looks that really grab me, even though I don’t really know why. All the pieces seem to be some variation on tuxedos, but they’re each paired with what I guess Tallulah would call “accessories”, in hot pink and yellow-green.

I lay my hands on some good old-fashioned tracing paper and some colored pencils, and I start sketching. I’ve never done something like this before. It’s like something or someone else is guiding my hand. But when it’s done, I’ve got the look I want. A black single-breasted swallowtail coat with lapels in hot pink and neon yellow, and a pink-and-yellow satin lining. Tailored white suit pants. Crisp white high-collared shirt like the old Leyendecker ads.

Mike… doesn’t hate the new suit, but doesn’t love it, either. It does gradually grow on him, especially when I add a Cungadero-red bowtie, the same shade as his favorite of the red suits, and a pair of sunglasses that are sort of like his eyeglasses… round instead of diamond-shaped, pink and yellow instead of orange and gold. An unspoken compliment and an apology all in one.

It hangs on the closet door in my bedroom and remains undisturbed by probing hands.

________________

The SUIT (I've come to think of it in Capital Letters) gets its debut at my 21st birthday party on the third of May, in The Bellecour Room at Restaurant Daniel.

Twenty of GASTER's biggest corporate sponsors send representatives; the rest of the group of fifty are assorted hangers-on that I've met here and there over time.

I sip on my Merlot; the bitter wine fits my mood tonight.

In my mind's eye the glitterati at the tables around me fade out, and in their places are my old friends.

Gazlay showing off her gorgeous gams in a high kick worthy of a Rockette.

Vazzana tittering behind his ostrich-plumed fan that someday he'll be Queen.

Pitch and Coz engaging good-tempered barbs with one another.

Winkelsas playing one of his toddler sister's compositions on kazoo and passing along the message that she wants me to be in her band.

Jack Sickle reciting Poe's " The Raven '' without a single stammered word when he doesn't know any of us are watching.

And of course I mentally summon the images of my brothers and my sister… and yes, even Saffron.

The images of the past dissolve like burning film, and the sight of the room full of happy strangers returns me to the present.

I’m a stranger here myself, as the saying goes. Might as well put on the mask of a happy one.

The party finally breaks up somewhere around 2am, and Mike doesn't protest when I ask if we can just head straight home.

During the limo ride back to the Pandora Palace, I make the comment that this shindig will be hard to top, but he's got four more years to plan for the next big milestone.

He asks me in seemingly idle curiosity what's more special about being 25 versus being 21.

When I bring up how I'll finally be financially independent by then because of my trust fund, he gets very quiet.

The multicolored glow of street lamps and neon signs shines through the limo windows. The garish light plays over Mike's angular face and casts pockets of shadow. Offset by his black blazer and white turtleneck, his head almost looks like a floating skull.

Then he smiles. It's a soft, fond look.

I'm almost expecting him to propose marriage, with how thick the tension in the air gets, but the moment passes.

-----------------------

Spring turns into summer. Summer turns into autumn.

For months we’ve been discussing registering to exhibit GASTER at some of the technological trade shows around the country, and I start looking into travel arrangements for two.

Until Mike yanks me up short by casually mentioning that he’ll be staying behind to run things while I’m on the road.

And he already has an itinerary mapped out for me.

And it’s going to keep me on the road for weeks at a time, over the course of the next year.

My first reaction is that he’s putting me on. My second reaction is panic.

Chicago. Denver. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Seattle. Minneapolis. San Antonio. New Orleans. Nashville. Atlanta. Washington DC. Philadelphia. Finally back in New York in late September of next year.

It doesn't matter what I say, how many logical arguments I try to make. For the first time since I've known him, Mike actually gets visibly angry.

No, it's the second time. The first time was when he chased off Werewolf Guy, way back when.

But it's the first time he's been angry with ME.

It's a cold rage, delivered with the same dry voice he used to use in the classroom. He counters my reasoned protests with logic of his own that I can't fight.

How many people under the age of thirty, he tells me, can say that they've achieved the success I have? It takes work to KEEP the success happening, and if I don't want to do the work, he won't know what to think, other than to be gravely disappointed.

Those are the magic words. With everything Mike has done for me… a home, luxuries, connections… I can't disappoint him. I just can't. I'll be nothing but a sponge, or the lowest kind of worm, if I don't go along with this plan.

So I give in, and tell him I'll do the trade show tour.

Mike practically purrs and lets me know how pleased he is, as he backs me up against my office desk.

------------------------

The itinerary has me traveling the entire country by train. A few weeks in each city, booked into different extended stay suites in the Mansion Hotels chain. The trade shows are each a week long, and the rest of the time, when I'm not on a train, I'm supposed to be schmoozing and glad-handing with the locals.

And I’m traveling with a pair of boneheads.

I should probably be kinder in my thoughts about them; at heart, both the Serif brothers seem to be decent guys. They're along to do the booth set-ups and breakdowns, as well as to make sure I get where I'm supposed to go. They've done this tour before, they both say, with other "heroes", and they know all the weird routes.

But I get very tired, very quickly, of one brother's non-stop puns and the other brother's exaggerated sense of his own importance. Wherever Mike dug these two up, it seems a long way from my old hometown.

Any excitement I might have had about visiting new places gets ground into nothingness pretty quickly. One city feels the same as any other.

The exhibit halls could be interchangeable backlots on a soundstage, for all the individuality they have, which is none. Concrete floors covered in paper-thin carpeting that does nothing to muffle the sound of foot traffic or the voices of the other vendors and attendees. I come back to my hotel room every day with a headache from the stagnant air and the endless noise.

The views from the hotel windows all look the same. And the hotel rooms themselves are so uniform, as befits a national chain, that it really feels like Time is standing still. The windows are always sealed. No sound rises from the streets, unlike the cacophony of the trade show venues.

But even when I’m back in my “home on the road” accommodations after leaving the exhibit halls behind for the day, the constant sound of a phone ringing shatters any peace and quiet I might hope for.

You see, there's one thing that's particularly disturbing about the sameness of each successive Mansion Hotels room I stay in.

They each have the exact same waxy-finish black rotary phone on the room's desk as the one that Mike set up on MY desk in my office, back at the Pandora Palace.

The ringtone is exactly the same, too.

When I unlock the door of my hotel room, the phone always sits in a pool of light from an overhead lamp, just like mine does back in New York.

It doesn’t matter if I’ve turned off the room lights before I head out for the day. The phone has its own spotlight, like Yorick’s skull in a production of HAMLET.

It feels like it never stops ringing.

I almost want to ask the front desk at each hotel whether I can swap out the phone for a more modern model, but I can't think of any way to do so without sounding like a lunatic.

Mike calls frequently, never at consistent times. His calls keep me off-kilter, to the point where I think I'm hearing the phone ring when I'm nowhere near the hotel room. It gets so bad that I have a doctor check me out for tinnitus.

It gives me bad dreams at night.

One of the recurring nightmares has a monstrous version of Proto, telling me to "beware the man who speaks in hands", while pointing to the phone which has no cord and isn't plugged in and shouldn't be able to ring.

It's an unreal life.

Every time I put my makeup on, I feel more and more like a puppet. I am afraid to look too long in any mirror in case I find that I've actually become one.

------------------------

The frequency of the phone calls from Mike slows down noticeably between the San Antonio and Nashville legs of the trade show tour.

The incoming calls stop completely while I'm in DC.

My frantic outgoing calls are not answered.

My sales, which had been stable if not as stellar as when I first started with GASTER, take a sudden nosedive.

I stumble through the DC and Philadelphia trade shows feeling like a corpse. I don't go out painting the town red every night, the way I used to. I get room service when my body reminds me that I need fuel, and I spend the rest of my time just staring at the ubiquitous black rotary phone.

Willing it to ring.

Dialing and hoping to get an answer.

Nothing.

I'm alone.

In my solitude and the fear that solitude inspires, I do some hard thinking.

I'm twenty-two years old, going on twenty-three, yet I have the responsibilities of a middle-aged person, for a company that should have taken fifteen years to get where it is with its market share.

nstead, it's only taken three.

The math doesn't add up.

Could Eos have been right, that GASTER is too good to be true?

I may loathe the name of Addison, but I've picked up enough from the family business that I start having some nasty suspicions.

If those suspicions are true, then my current career track isn't on the up-and-up.

A huge wave of homesickness hits me. I want to see my siblings.

All of them.

Any of them.

And I almost get my wish.

As the saying goes… Be careful what you wish for.

----------------------

At the end of the four weeks in Philadelphia, the Serif brothers give me an unpleasant surprise; they tell me they're not joining me in New York. They've heard from "our boss" that they're supposed to work some other job, and they're taking all the demo devices with them.

When I ask, rather snappishly, what I'm supposed to show off at the Javits Center without the gizmos and gadgets to wow the crowd, the shorter, stockier brother just smiles and hands me the rolled-up booth banner, as though he's passing along a torch to me. Then he walks off whistling.

The taller, lankier brother claps my shoulder, tells me it's a puzzle all right and he wishes he could be the one to solve it, and ambles off to catch up with his kin.

Leaving me to retrieve my own luggage and find my own way from Philly to Penn Station.

I'll be damned if I spend another night in another hotel. I want to go to the Pandora Palace and have it out with Mike and DEMAND to know why he's abandoned me.

And to demand to know what's really up with GASTER.

Of course, when I drag my bags up to the apartment, Mike's not there.

But at least my keys still work. I was afraid for more than a few seconds that they wouldn't.

The apartment seems antiseptic, impersonal, dingy. Mike has probably had a cleaning service in while he's been away, but I'm struck yet again by the perception that this is a workspace, not a home.

I look aimlessly into all the rooms on the lower floor. Mike's office is locked; his bedroom is not, but it's tidy and doesn't look like it's much used.

There's a pile of newspapers stacked on the kitchen floor. The top one has a folded-back page showing photos of my sister's wedding in the society column.

My sister's wedding.

In June.

When I would have been in Atlanta.

Near enough to have flown to New York and back again in a 36-hour turnaround time, and not missed much of anything business-wise.

I wander out of the kitchen in more of a daze than I walked into it.

Mike has left me a long, long, handwritten letter on the coffee table in the living room, which feels as big as a stadium or a skating rink after so many dinky little hotel rooms.

The letter is a strange mix of praise and recriminations. It goes on for five double-sided pages, and leaves me no clearer in my mind at the end than it does at the beginning.

Does he care about me? Does he hate me? Are we partners, or enemies, or just two tired old horses stuck in harness together?

I haven't a clue.

I also haven't got the energy to climb the spiral stairs to my bedroom on the second floor. And I'm too conflicted to just use Mike's bed when he's not here.

So I crash on the couch in the cavernous living room, and curl up into the tiniest ball I can manage.

----------------------------

I head to the Electronics Expo at the Javits Center via taxi the next day.

It’s an unmitigated disaster.

All I have to adorn my booth is the now-tired-looking banner with Penniman's clockwork boy as a logo, with the now-faded caption "Have Your Home Run Like Clockwork!".

All I have to display are some ratty business cards and some dog-eared brochures.

Some Big Shot I am.

Billy Joel's lyrics taunt me as an earworm I can't escape.

I don't have to exaggerate my "mechanical man" movements; my limbs feel like lead. And the stilted speech I've been cultivating through this whole tour has taken on a life of its own; I now have a genuine stutter that I can't shake.

People walk past my booth to get to other booths with more enticing setups.

Like I’m invisible.

So it doesn't surprise me that, when I'm feeling at my lowest and least confident, my brother Ballew shows up.

His hair is freshly cut. When he stops in front of my booth, I get a fleeting whiff of his cologne. I don't recognize the scent; it's not the British Sterling that I give him every Christmas.

Used to give him, that is.

He looks so tailored.

So polished.

So disapproving.

The suit that I was so proud of designing all on my own, once upon a time, feels like a cheap Halloween costume now.

He reluctantly takes the business card I reluctantly and silently hand to him.

His bitter comment about my enjoying being a puppet is excruciating and painful. I can't blame him, and I can't dismiss the truth of his words.

I've been Mike's puppet.

I *am* Mike's puppet.

I don't know how to stop being Mike's puppet.

-------------------------

The rest of the week at the trade show passes in a blur. I don’t even care about the sales I'm not making. Take a taxi to the Javits Center every morning, take a taxi back to Chelsea every evening. Each day I go through the motions and plaster on the dummy’s grin. Each night I pray for an end to it all.

I feel like I’m coming down with some kind of flu bug. Maybe a delayed reaction to everything. My heart is constantly pounding. I can actually feel my pulse in my ears. My brain is full of cobwebs.

Finally the time comes when I can pack up and go…

Home?

Mike’s apartment isn’t home.

But it’s the only place I’ve got left to go.

So I head there in yet another cab, and have a nasty shock.

My credit card gets declined by the cab driver’s swipe machine. I apologetically give him what cash I have, which pays for the ride but precious little for a tip. The driver yells at me like I'm some annoying dog and zooms off before I realize I’ve left my laptop bag and the trade show banner in the back seat.

Fortunately I still have my wallet and keys, and I’m wearing The SUIT. But everything else I’ve been carting around to do work for Mike for the last year is gone.

I'm feeling hollow as I nod to the doorman, who tilts his head in a birdlike fashion and asks if I'm alright.

The elevator operator gives me a quick look of pity as she takes me up to the fourth floor.

Wait a minute.

Doorman? Elevator operator?

Why don't I remember them? They have to have always been here, right? This is the Pandora Palace, with amenities fit for royalty.

My memory from a week ago, of having to carry my own bags up the stairs of a rodent-infested four-story walk-up, gets overlaid by this current reality.

I must be running a fever. It’s hot behind my eyes. I shakily let myself into the apartment and barely make it to the little bathroom off the foyer before I collapse onto the cold tile floor.

The sound of footsteps approaching registers in my mind, but I keep my eyes tightly shut. Then I feel bony fingers threading themselves through my hair before I’m yanked up into a sitting position.

I have to look at him now.

Mike bends over me, impossibly tall, and says in a hissing whisper that I would be nothing without him, that I owe him everything, and he’s going to get his money’s worth.

And then he picks me up off the floor and cradles me to his chest. As though I were his most cherished possession.

I don’t know how to cope with any of this anymore.

My body does me a kindness and shuts down into unconsciousness.

#deltarune chapter 2 #deltarune fanfiction #spamton g spamton #swatchton #swatchton au #fic: call signs #sylph writes

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