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speaksoftlylove2014-05-16 12:07 am
dalicious) wrote in speaksoftlylove2014-05-16 12:07 am
FIC - You Can't Get Back From Here
He's always disliked the word "accident."
It's the implications of it that make him prickly - as though what you meant to do and didn't mean to do changes the outcome of what you did; most of the time, "accidents" can be traced back to at least one intentional behavior that, had it not been taken, would have averted the situation altogether. Paying closer attention to what you're doing at the chopping block generally ensures that your fingers remain unsliced by a careless stroke of the knife; not sitting behind the wheel of a car while drunk or half-asleep or sufficiently distracted would mean that family of three would still be perfectly fine, instead of one parent dead and their teenaged daughter in traction.
He hates the word "accident" almost as much as he hates the phrase "everything happens for a reason," because of course everything happens for a reason and that reason is cause and effect – the attempt to make everything an act of God just makes it plain that everyone around him believes in a God that's all-knowing, all-powerful and all-sadistic. He'd heard it more than enough after his wife had died; again after his daughter had followed shortly after. And he'd smiled then, and he'd agreed because it was polite to do so, and he'd managed to keep his gloved hands casually in his pockets to keep the way his fingers curled inward sharply and bit into his palms well out of view because his life was just like that nowadays.
Granted, his life is a lot of things nowadays, silver pocketwatches and black-market explosives and too much money for his own good, and at night he's alone with his dreams. They were stupid at first, the obvious result of not enough sleep and the memory of that one night in lockup after he'd managed to rather splendidly take out that car downtown with the front of his own (not because he was drunk or half-asleep or even all that distracted, mind, but rather because he'd always been a hideously jumpy driver who often wished he was drunk simply because his nerves would stop jangling and maybe then he wouldn't overcorrect directly into stationary objects); it'd all come together in a way that his mind hadn't liked one night, and mentally speaking he'd spent the night awake in a cell with wooden braces on his hands, keeping them apart and ensuring he couldn't move very well. And the explosions had started and he'd laughed a little even though they probably should have been alarming since there was no getting away from them in here, but against all reason he'd just been told to shut up by the man stationed outside and when he'd replied it had been in a voice not his own and he'd apologized for his rudeness and it had just been...
Well, it had been very, very surreal.
But the dream had been dismissed as easily as it had come, and several cups of tea later he'd managed to get his nerves to stop jangling, and he'd slept well when he'd returned to bed. The next evening he'd gone out with his late wife's brother – always a horribly awkward affair, socially speaking, but the man was fascinating in his own right if you knew how to talk to him, which was something that he'd never had any difficulty working out. It was like working on watches, all delicate movements and tight attentiveness and careful corrections when tension started building, and it'd been a good evening overall, all things considered.
He's been dreaming about that man from the prison ever since; not every night, as that would be egregious, but just every once in a while. Just when he thought he was rid of them.
Most of the dreams are disjointed and some of them are very brief, and almost all of them are terrible; some of them aren't, and those are the ones that never stay with him very long – watching The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca with a sister he doesn't have, drinking entirely too much with men he doesn't recognize, taking a girl out on Friday night when he's finally back in the city (after…what? he never really knows, and he never really questions it, either) for the sake of dinner and dancing and he makes casual comments about feeling human like he doesn't usually.
If he didn't know any better, he'd think the terrible ones were the result of guilt over his creations. After all, the symbolism is hardly subtle: explosions feature heavily, usually in a desert city he doesn't recognize, but instead of bombs the blasts come from his own body, energy crackling from his hands and spreading outward once he touches the ground, cutting swathes through the landscape that reach for miles. Sometimes he's hunting down one of the men from the desert, one he happened to see in the crowd (one he made a point of seeing, one he made sure to look in the face even if that face was split open from the force of the blast); the one time that man hunted him is the first time he can think of that he's physically jolted awake in the middle of a dream, and the left side of his abdomen hadn't felt right for hours.
There's another in which he tricks an entire army into believing he's something he's not and every single one of them dies for it while he taunts the commander, and that's the one that he keeps coming back to; he tells himself that it's just unpleasant business, that his mind won't let it go because it's one of those rare nightmares that manages to be both physically and psychologically brutal, and he tries not to be unsettled by the way that he always wakes up from them feeling about to choke from the feeling of red stones in his throat.
It's the memory of those stones in his throat, in his stomach, that makes him buy the box - sand-colored wood and inset with intricate carvings like a high-class coffin; it's his father's gun that he buries in it. Once in a while he exhumes it just to stare, to turn it over in his hands until he realizes what he's doing and puts the distasteful thing away; the first time he caught himself at it had been after hearing news reports of some tragedy or another, a mass death in a compound thousands of miles away, and he'd caught himself converting how many had survived into "how many did they miss."
(Because even one was entirely too many; the symphony of destruction remained incomplete.)
It's almost always things like that nowadays: mental conversions that aren't quite right, a marked inability to be alone in dark hallways because of the paranoid feeling that he's never alone in them, the irrational thought that struck him one day while standing out on a cliffside balcony - that he could quite simply throw himself off at any point, and there was literally nothing stopping him.
There are things stopping him now, of course, but there weren't then; there was nothing stopping him from throwing himself from the balcony, there was nothing stopping him from taking his gun and several others and opening fire as he saw fit (much in the same way that electricity had rained down into a crowd he just barely remembers, that energy likewise flowing from his hands, and the one person who had tried to stop him had nearly died for his effort), there was nothing stopping him from taking whatever lives he pleased, and there was no way to shake the feeling that he'd been here before. That he'd made that choice, that he'd stood at this particular junction even though he'd done nothing of the sort (and he'd convinced an army that it was his choice to make, and they'd all died while he'd taunted them) - he only half-remembers any of it, and he never, never forgets.
It had been freeing in the most terrifying way possible; what spurred him on was the knowledge that even if he had, in some ludicrous and mind-bending way, made that choice in the past, there was also nothing stopping him from changing it. From acting in a way that the man from prison wouldn't have; from embracing the ability to alter fate.
He suspects the man in white would have appreciated that logic; it's something he still has difficulty shaking off.
But either way, it's a moot point now; if he believed that everything happens for a reason, he'd take her presence in his residence that night as a sign from God. As it stands, the reason is something he's willing to dismiss as sheer coincidence - though not an accident, as he doesn't believe in those either, and she'd made the conscious choice to be there, to speak to him and to say exactly the right things to him and to keep coming back on a fortnightly basis. It continues for years, and that's a conscious choice too; when they become lovers it's not so much a conscious choice as it is a logical extension, even if somehow they both know that they aren't going to discuss exactly what it is that they've become or acknowledge that anything has changed at all.
The daughter that inevitably results complicates things, but she's not accidental, either; entirely unintended, but a risk they'd deemed acceptable in some way, and so they name her Ekaterina and between them, she'll be entirely provided for. They're rather well-known between them; granted, they aren't well-known among the best of crowds, and that's another factor to take into account.
As such, he spends his weekends ensuring that he's no longer a terrible shot, and that he knows how to get blood out of his clothes; the fact that he can't afford any seven-year interruptions in his life aside, he's always hated getting his clothing dirty.
It's the implications of it that make him prickly - as though what you meant to do and didn't mean to do changes the outcome of what you did; most of the time, "accidents" can be traced back to at least one intentional behavior that, had it not been taken, would have averted the situation altogether. Paying closer attention to what you're doing at the chopping block generally ensures that your fingers remain unsliced by a careless stroke of the knife; not sitting behind the wheel of a car while drunk or half-asleep or sufficiently distracted would mean that family of three would still be perfectly fine, instead of one parent dead and their teenaged daughter in traction.
He hates the word "accident" almost as much as he hates the phrase "everything happens for a reason," because of course everything happens for a reason and that reason is cause and effect – the attempt to make everything an act of God just makes it plain that everyone around him believes in a God that's all-knowing, all-powerful and all-sadistic. He'd heard it more than enough after his wife had died; again after his daughter had followed shortly after. And he'd smiled then, and he'd agreed because it was polite to do so, and he'd managed to keep his gloved hands casually in his pockets to keep the way his fingers curled inward sharply and bit into his palms well out of view because his life was just like that nowadays.
Granted, his life is a lot of things nowadays, silver pocketwatches and black-market explosives and too much money for his own good, and at night he's alone with his dreams. They were stupid at first, the obvious result of not enough sleep and the memory of that one night in lockup after he'd managed to rather splendidly take out that car downtown with the front of his own (not because he was drunk or half-asleep or even all that distracted, mind, but rather because he'd always been a hideously jumpy driver who often wished he was drunk simply because his nerves would stop jangling and maybe then he wouldn't overcorrect directly into stationary objects); it'd all come together in a way that his mind hadn't liked one night, and mentally speaking he'd spent the night awake in a cell with wooden braces on his hands, keeping them apart and ensuring he couldn't move very well. And the explosions had started and he'd laughed a little even though they probably should have been alarming since there was no getting away from them in here, but against all reason he'd just been told to shut up by the man stationed outside and when he'd replied it had been in a voice not his own and he'd apologized for his rudeness and it had just been...
Well, it had been very, very surreal.
But the dream had been dismissed as easily as it had come, and several cups of tea later he'd managed to get his nerves to stop jangling, and he'd slept well when he'd returned to bed. The next evening he'd gone out with his late wife's brother – always a horribly awkward affair, socially speaking, but the man was fascinating in his own right if you knew how to talk to him, which was something that he'd never had any difficulty working out. It was like working on watches, all delicate movements and tight attentiveness and careful corrections when tension started building, and it'd been a good evening overall, all things considered.
He's been dreaming about that man from the prison ever since; not every night, as that would be egregious, but just every once in a while. Just when he thought he was rid of them.
Most of the dreams are disjointed and some of them are very brief, and almost all of them are terrible; some of them aren't, and those are the ones that never stay with him very long – watching The Wizard of Oz and Casablanca with a sister he doesn't have, drinking entirely too much with men he doesn't recognize, taking a girl out on Friday night when he's finally back in the city (after…what? he never really knows, and he never really questions it, either) for the sake of dinner and dancing and he makes casual comments about feeling human like he doesn't usually.
If he didn't know any better, he'd think the terrible ones were the result of guilt over his creations. After all, the symbolism is hardly subtle: explosions feature heavily, usually in a desert city he doesn't recognize, but instead of bombs the blasts come from his own body, energy crackling from his hands and spreading outward once he touches the ground, cutting swathes through the landscape that reach for miles. Sometimes he's hunting down one of the men from the desert, one he happened to see in the crowd (one he made a point of seeing, one he made sure to look in the face even if that face was split open from the force of the blast); the one time that man hunted him is the first time he can think of that he's physically jolted awake in the middle of a dream, and the left side of his abdomen hadn't felt right for hours.
There's another in which he tricks an entire army into believing he's something he's not and every single one of them dies for it while he taunts the commander, and that's the one that he keeps coming back to; he tells himself that it's just unpleasant business, that his mind won't let it go because it's one of those rare nightmares that manages to be both physically and psychologically brutal, and he tries not to be unsettled by the way that he always wakes up from them feeling about to choke from the feeling of red stones in his throat.
It's the memory of those stones in his throat, in his stomach, that makes him buy the box - sand-colored wood and inset with intricate carvings like a high-class coffin; it's his father's gun that he buries in it. Once in a while he exhumes it just to stare, to turn it over in his hands until he realizes what he's doing and puts the distasteful thing away; the first time he caught himself at it had been after hearing news reports of some tragedy or another, a mass death in a compound thousands of miles away, and he'd caught himself converting how many had survived into "how many did they miss."
(Because even one was entirely too many; the symphony of destruction remained incomplete.)
It's almost always things like that nowadays: mental conversions that aren't quite right, a marked inability to be alone in dark hallways because of the paranoid feeling that he's never alone in them, the irrational thought that struck him one day while standing out on a cliffside balcony - that he could quite simply throw himself off at any point, and there was literally nothing stopping him.
There are things stopping him now, of course, but there weren't then; there was nothing stopping him from throwing himself from the balcony, there was nothing stopping him from taking his gun and several others and opening fire as he saw fit (much in the same way that electricity had rained down into a crowd he just barely remembers, that energy likewise flowing from his hands, and the one person who had tried to stop him had nearly died for his effort), there was nothing stopping him from taking whatever lives he pleased, and there was no way to shake the feeling that he'd been here before. That he'd made that choice, that he'd stood at this particular junction even though he'd done nothing of the sort (and he'd convinced an army that it was his choice to make, and they'd all died while he'd taunted them) - he only half-remembers any of it, and he never, never forgets.
It had been freeing in the most terrifying way possible; what spurred him on was the knowledge that even if he had, in some ludicrous and mind-bending way, made that choice in the past, there was also nothing stopping him from changing it. From acting in a way that the man from prison wouldn't have; from embracing the ability to alter fate.
He suspects the man in white would have appreciated that logic; it's something he still has difficulty shaking off.
But either way, it's a moot point now; if he believed that everything happens for a reason, he'd take her presence in his residence that night as a sign from God. As it stands, the reason is something he's willing to dismiss as sheer coincidence - though not an accident, as he doesn't believe in those either, and she'd made the conscious choice to be there, to speak to him and to say exactly the right things to him and to keep coming back on a fortnightly basis. It continues for years, and that's a conscious choice too; when they become lovers it's not so much a conscious choice as it is a logical extension, even if somehow they both know that they aren't going to discuss exactly what it is that they've become or acknowledge that anything has changed at all.
The daughter that inevitably results complicates things, but she's not accidental, either; entirely unintended, but a risk they'd deemed acceptable in some way, and so they name her Ekaterina and between them, she'll be entirely provided for. They're rather well-known between them; granted, they aren't well-known among the best of crowds, and that's another factor to take into account.
As such, he spends his weekends ensuring that he's no longer a terrible shot, and that he knows how to get blood out of his clothes; the fact that he can't afford any seven-year interruptions in his life aside, he's always hated getting his clothing dirty.