orderfromchaos | 23. the creatures in tide pools

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23. the creatures in tide pools

[Open spam in the chapel, since the kid flood, whenever.]

[When he isn't on shift at the infirmary, or trailing after Abigail like a concerned ginger puppy, Dillon is spending a lot of time in the chapel. Just - sitting, in the very front pew or the very back, wishing for saints and stained glass and stone, for something gaudy and familiar, the smell of sand and wood polish. But the chapel resists his homesickness, neat white plaster, well kept, effusively inoffensive. He tries kneeling, a couple times. But it doesn't feel right, and neither does prayer. So he sits, quiet, eyes forward on the Unitarian nondenominational emptiness, for an hour or two, watches the shadows from the little candles, tries to think about his mistakes, about his options, about nothing at all.]

[Private to Arthas]

I want to see you. Anywhere you'd rather meet?

[Spam for Jerry, backdated to after Allison's post, early the next morning on the tenth.]

[He's just sitting in the hallway, across from Jerry's door. He's not impatient. He's not even angry, really, just calm and steady. He was sloppy, he was absorbed with his own messes. But he made a promise. Allison's rambling plea for understanding as revenge didn't change that. Jerry made his choice, and now he has to face the consequences.]

[Private to Arkin, backdated to after the above]

I've turned Jerry human. I promised him he would, if he hurt anyone else outside self-defense, before you were assigned to him.

[Filtered to Abigail, Scott, Chris, Bucky, Gene, Helena, and Iris, backdated to after the above]

I turned Jerry human, and now he's threatening to leave my friends' corpses at my door like the worst cat in the world.

[He doesn't sound scared. He doesn't even sound mad. He is irritated, and a little disgusted. It was one thing with Okoya and Carter - there were actual stakes there. This is just Jerry being petulant.]

All of you could probably take him in a fair fight, but he's sneaky and mean, so keep an eye out, and kick him in the balls for me if he tries anything.

[Gift List]

Abigail - a print of Starry Night. Some clever board games - like, the kind that are actually interesting and thoughtful? Wise and Otherwise, Ticket to Ride, things like that. I don't think she got to play much as a kid. And some kind of meditative geometry game she could use for like - calm without emptiness, when she needs that. And some pretty dresses.

Bucky - a pineapple upside-down cake, and like, kevlar insert panels that work with the jacket he already has.

Bush - another pineapple upside-down cake, and good boots. Better boots? Like, comfy and insulating, modern REI science stuff, but looking period on the outside. And with the one weighted to make balancing on the fake leg easier.

Cambridge - the collected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Chris - ridiculous Motherfucker merch. Like, a bobblehead. And T-shirts with golden-age style onomatopoeia impact balloons. A pez dispenser!

Gene - a St. George Medallion. Silver, and a strong chain.

Helena - one of those little personal fold-out cabinet altars, with an old style painting of a bible story she always liked in the panels.

Iris - a tinsel crown, the Al Green christmas album, and tickets to all past and future black-and-white Harry Hunsacker plays.

Scott - The True Story of the Three Little Pigs

Simon - myrrh incense

Snafu - altoids, warm socks with good wicking layers or whatever, and a couple collections of Far Side comics.

Steve - some really good lamps? With flexible necks so he can position lighting how he wants for drawing. Bright and not too harsh, full sun spectrum.

And give all the forties guys a bunch of girl scout cookies.

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[Gene spends a fair amount of time in the chapel, too. Not hours, not every day, maybe a little less now that he's got a buddy from back home around and an inmate he really wants to try and help, but he still comes in pretty frequently. Sometimes he prays (or tries to), sometimes he just tries to sit and turn his thoughts off (or tries to), and sometimes he thumbs through the tattered Bible he's still carrying around with him everywhere, like its muddy, stained pages are the only physical proof that he hadn't just hallucinated

So it's really only a matter of time before he runs into Dillon. He pauses awkwardly when he enters the chapel and realizes someone else is here, but then the pause turns into one of either curiosity or vague concern, or maybe both, so he lingers instead of just turning around and leaving.]

It's alright.

[His voice rasps, dry and unused, more than he meant it to. He lets himself be raw, here.]

Not like I own the place.

[A soft singed edge to that, brittle-black like burned paper. The longer he is away from his cult, the more it feels like he is being forced to admit they weren't entirely wrong.]

Why?

[It's undeniably strange, to hear a version of your own voice sound about as brittle and miserable as you feel. Gene hesitates a moment longer, still unsure, but eventually he does come over to sit down next to Dillon, not crowding, but close enough for conversation.]

You alright? [He's almost not sure why he asks. First of all, the answer's obvious, and second, he's not sure he'd be able to answer a question like that if someone asked him. But, well. He asked.]

[Simon isn't sure he'll be visiting the chapel regularly -- the makeshift altar in his bedroom has suited his needs thus far -- but he at least wants to see it before abandoning it to the living. Whatever holy power keeps some undead away from the place, it clearly doesn't work on Simon's kind: he strolls right in like it's his own neighborhood parish, hands in the pockets of his chinos as he looks around.

As a born and bred Catholic, it's a little disappointing: the blank secularism of it, the lack of the cross or the iconography he's so used to. He takes a pew in the front and kneels anyway, bloodless hands folded, praying in a quiet murmur: First Corinthians.]

For I am least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.

[Just siiigh.]

Kinda figured something like this would happen. I warned him too. That he was gonna piss off the wrong person sooner or later.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll take care of him.

Guess he didn't believe us.

Take care of him how?

I'm your temporary warden. I should try to help you.

Humor me.

Fine. The CES.

[Because he does owe Dillon.

Not so much that he won't hold the meeting in his own territory, though.]

Well, he's gonna be fucked up. It's what happens when you get humanity back after being a killing machine for so long.

A couple hundred years of guilt come crashing down. So I gotta figure out what to do about that.

[It's nice, to be in the presence of real faith. Like catching a hint of Deanna's perfume in the crowd, if she'd ever been the kind of girl who wore perfume. Nice to hear words he can't make himself say, anymore, because they always feel hollow and cheap and ill-fitting, like a man trying to get warm under a baby blanket.

Not that he's outgrown God. Nothing like that. But the shape of the church. Too many people have called him the second coming or the antichrist for him come forward in humility without making a mockery of it. It's the connection with God that's gone, strained to the breaking point by his own weakness and fear, the pieces abandoned in self-serving hunger, and he doesn't know how to rebuild it.

But now he is listening to a dead man recite Corinthians, the way the resurrected people who gathered around him used to whisper his name, and it feels like - a good sign, somehow, disparate pieces of his history welded together in new ways. He waits for a pause in the smooth flow of words, not wanting to interrupt.]

I could make you live again. But you don't want me to, do you?

[That's comforting in a way Dillon doesn't really know how to articulate, even to himself; it just is.]

I got tortured for a couple weeks. Two months ago.

[His voice is very far away. It's like he's talking about someone else, like there's glass between him and the memory, clear and silent and cold. Like the blankness inside the chapel doesn't count, or like Gene doesn't count as telling someone else, with the face that looks just like his.

But of course Gene is not him; Gene is human and hurt and far from home. Dillon looks away.]

I've been through worse. It'll be okay.

[There's a long moment of silence, because Gene isn't sure what to say to that. What can you say to that? Especially coming from that familiar-but-not face and voice.]

I'm sorry. [It's not worth much. He knows how useless it is to say something like that.] I can leave.

[If it would help. He'll stay if that would help, and there isn't much of a preference, there. Honestly, Gene's uncomfortable, but he's so used to being uncomfortable that it barely registers with him. This is just how things are.]

No. You should stay.

Might not find what you're looking for, but sometimes the looking is what gets you by.

Now alright?

Fine.

[He doesn't say it - doesn't even really consider vocalizing it - but he's not sure what he's looking for in the first place. So that's fine.

Gene slips his hand into his breast pocket and pulls out his battered Bible, just holding it in his hands like he expects it to help him figure it out, either with the words printed in there or the ones scribbled into the margins.]

That what you're doing in here?

[To look at Simon Monroe with eyes like Dillon's, one might see two different people: the wild, sad-eyed youth, seen hazily as through a fogged window, lingering only in the black track-mark scars on Simon's arms; and the sober, solemn man that rose from the grave to be torn apart and put together a few dozen times, the one kneeling here now. The one praying like he believes the words apply to him personally, which is in fact true.

He noticed Dillon there, of course, but he hasn't been paying him any mind, focused as he is on his prayers. When he chimes in, though, Simon turns and looks up sharply. He doesn't get up from his knees just yet, but his eyes are immediately hardened. Defensive or territorial or both, maybe.]

I'm already living again.

[Dillon's mouth quirks, just a little, a crisp exhale too quiet to be a snort - just air, surprised but not surprised.]

It's a word with various criterion.

You've got the important bits.

I do.

[He's skeptical that Dillon really can do what he claims and bridge the gap that the neurotriptyline failed to, but even if he could, Simon is long past the time when he might have wanted a cure for so-called Partially Deceased Syndrome. The man who had wanted that is almost yet another version of himself. A transitional state. An imago. Now--]

So why would I want to change anything?

You know why other people would. You've heard it all, probably.

There's no in-between where I come from. But everybody has parents, kids, friends, historical heroes. Lists and lists. It's nice, you not being interested.

[Parents; the part of Simon's constantly medicated mind that can process emotions again gives a sharp throb of pain that he manages to ignore. He tries not to think about what he can't remember: the fact that his mother's death almost certainly rests on him.

He shakes it off, thinks instead of Kieren's family sitting down to Sunday lunch together whether or not their son can eat it. He stands.]

We have friends and families, same as you.

[He looks down at his hand. Not like me, he thinks, except that grief is one of the least exceptional things about him. That's nice, too, a kinship, even if Simon doesn't see it that way.]

I didn't bring my own parents back, actually. It seemed selfish.

Edited 2014-12-14 05:45 (UTC)

[More selfish not to, he thinks, if he really could have: how does he know they wouldn't want to be living a second life? But then, he's realizing belatedly that Dillon doesn't mean it the way he does.]

There's back and there's back.

[And being dead, undead, and alive again are all very different things.]

And gone and gone.

[He scrubs a hand through his hair.]

Sorry. I'm - maudlin, lately.

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23. the creatures in tide pools

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[spam] cw: depression, drug use, medical torture

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