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wildestlogs2022-03-30 06:50 pm
wildestmods) wrote in wildestlogs2022-03-30 06:50 pm
Entry tags:
- agent connecticut,
- aiden price,
- alloran semitur corrass,
- ange ushiromiya,
- aziraphale,
- bob laughs-at-the-storm,
- bumblebee,
- bunnymund,
- cammie maccloud,
- dan sagittarius,
- dick grayson,
- doreen green,
- elle bryant,
- filbo fiddlepie,
- holly short,
- kaworu nagisa,
- kon-el,
- michelangelo,
- miles morales,
- mio amakura,
- need,
- nog,
- sarah kerrigan,
- stacia novik,
- tim drake
MEMORY SHARE ※ 1
MEMORY SHARE
It's during a pause in their day. A nap. An idle moment looking out from the gardens at the landscape passing by below. Taking a moment to catch their breath after a jog in one of the castle's larger magic rooms.
The squad is suddenly connected. Mental pathways locking together, they're forced into one another's innermost beings. Thrust into one another's memory palaces where the mind collects and stores everything that makes them who they are. The core of their beings are only a few steps away and no one can prevent the link.
To make matters worse, it comes with no explanation or no ability to pull out and stop. Once they're through the first memory, perhaps they can find a way out, but they're already witnessing some event from their host's past. And, if they left, who knows whether or not they'd end up accidentally invading another memory palace?
And if they were there, who was in theirs?
[ooc: So, how this works: the memories can either be viewed in spectator mode or the guest can be experiencing everything themselves. The person whose memories are being shown, the host, can watch as their current self or take the form they had of their past self. They can also be invisible until the memory is finished. They can talk about the memory with the "guest" that's visiting.
They cannot control the first memory shown, the player decides that, but they can sometimes control any other memories they'd like to show people after. Of course, there's also always the option of an extreme emotional reaction bringing up other memories unbidden.]
no subject
Bunny's smelled this blood before, and he would already have tears in his eyes for the immediate aftermath of any of Dan's siblings, but he's smelled this one's blood before.
He pulls Dan into a hug, thinks about asking It was Tab, wasn't it, and thinks better of voicing that question at all.
no subject
"It's okay," Dan whispers into Bunny's fur. "She's alive. She's alive out there."
Dan's brave, reckless, good-hearted, wild little sister, out there somewhere corralling bloodmares or flushing out cryptcrawlers, living the life she always wanted. Dan has to remember how much this story has a happy ending. They undid this, and Tab's out there thriving, and he even got to talk to her for two minutes to tell her how this version of the story went and how badly it broke his heart.
Over in the memory, Danny and Kitty seem to cry themselves out for the moment.
"This ain't the life she might should have had," Danny says, watching the sun starting to transition from dawn to just morning. "Should we...?"
Kitty barks a humorless laugh. "If we said a prayer for her, she'd come back and haunt our asses so hard."
"Christ, can you imagine her as a poltergeist?" Danny gets up and walks to the van, pulls a battered medical kit out of the door. "We'd be so fucked."
"We are so fucked." Kitty lets her hair down, now that she isn't scrubbing the van.
"She was ready to go, at the end, I mean, since Zack...that's the worst part. She told me she just wanted it over with."
They spend some time in silence.
"I don't think I believe in that shit anymore anyway. Praying." Kitty says, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her shirt pocket. She holds it out to Danny.
"Me neither. It just...I don't know. It made me think of mom and dad." Danny crouches down next to Kitty with the medical kit and takes a cigarette, letting Kitty light it for him. "Now it just makes me think of graves."
"Your roadside grave technique's getting way better," Kitty says, swallowing back tears and lighting a smoke. "Here, let me see your arms. I'm pretty sure some of these burns from her blood are second degree."
"Nah, my clothing got most of it. Ate a hole right through my sleeves, but, uh." Danny cracks open the medical kit and gets a bottle of witch hazel out.
"But her clothes fit you," Kitty says quietly, holding her arms out for Danny to start disinfecting.
"Yeah." Danny starts to dab at Kitty's wounds, and she hardly even winces.
no subject
It feels like such a toothless thing to finish on, that the only comfort Dan can have, the only confirmation he ever got that they changed the world, that Tab and the other Sartoris kids are still alive, and never endured what Dan had to, was a two minute conversation. With a version of his sister he will never get to meet, but who Bunny will probably see again.
But she's really alive, and Dan really is the only one now who ever lived through all this. But he did live through it. No amount of saving the Sartoris family could make Dan un-live this, could make this never have happened at all. They fixed this as much as anyone can fix the past, and Dan still has to live with the hurt of it.
The idea of Tab wanting it over with brings tears to Bunny's eyes too, and he wipes them quietly away to center Dan's grief. That Tab is the one Dan knows so much better than he will ever know the girl who's out hunting because it's fun for her, because she lived and gets to do with her life whatever she wants - not because it was something that might could have brought them all closer to breaking the curse, and in the end, didn't.
"Dan, I'm -" sorry I can't do more, sorry I could fix this for everyone but you, sorry you still have to live with this. There's nothing to apologize for that Dan doesn't already know is in his heart. He just squeezes tighter, trying to block out the memory with his hug.
Maybe it's this effort, this desperation to do anything to shield Dan from his own memories, that shifts the scene away from the van to the sort of small room that speaks to an underfunded medical institution, flourescent lighting and bare linoleum and bars on the windows. Outside it's snowing heavily on a leafless forest. Inside, a ring of patients in medical scrubs sit on folding chairs, and one of the patients is mocking the others to the psychiatrist taking notes regarding the group therapy session.
"- not like these guys, I'm not crazy. I mean, they need to be here, look at these lunatics. That one thinks he's Santa."
The mountain of a man whose beard is only recently starting to go unkempt looks at the petite, pixie-cut girl beside him, and she fidgets restlessly in her chair while giving him a look of such sympathy that she might be about to cry. A brown-haired teenage boy sitting next to her reaches out to hold her hand -
"Jackson, you know there's no physical contact between patients," the psychiatrist admonishes, her voice only clinically professional, not unkind yet.
But the man's ribbing of his fellow inmates is getting him what he wants, as the other two who don't appear to be wrapped up in quiet solidarity snicker, prompting the man to go on, focusing in on the grey-haired, green eyed man with his arms crossed, glaring darkly around the circle, recognizable to Dan alone - "And what are you supposed to be, the Easter Bunny?"
Bunny, back in the first time he was brought down to a mortal level, glares. "Yes."
The other three patients in the group session devolve into snickers.
no subject
Everyone always says time makes things easier, but Dan doesn't feel like that's true. He feels like all of this happened yesterday, like every terrible thing that happened to his family and happened to him and happened to Ellie came back-to-back and happened yesterday. The world moves forward and it doesn't feel like Dan can, even with the deaths undone, the blood unspilled.
He doesn't look up from where he's folded into Bunny until he hears a voice that definitely isn't his sister's, and he sees a familiar setting - bars on windows, folding chairs. At first, Dan assumes it's his own memory, one of his many stints in substance counseling that they dump jail inmates into to keep them occupied, until he sees Bunny in his human form and realizes no one's in jail khakis or blues.
What Bunny's told him about this time in his life is enough to make him wince, because this was the time that taught Bunny that that body was a cage, a half-deaf clumsy restraint he was shoved into, instead of the beautiful, sensual, easy-to-love form that Dan always saw it as. This was the time that taught Bunny to need to meditate to take this shape, to not want to take this shape, to wear it like an uncomfortable garment he couldn't wait to get off until Dan took the time to teach him what it really was.
"We don't got to do this memory- maybe if we think about something happy, or- let's think of Monterey or something," he says, gripping Bunny's paw hard enough that it might hurt.
no subject
Bunny tries so hard to shift the memory again, but it stays in the hospital - Jack and Bunny in their same shared room, quiet, the night dark outside their window, the orderly locking their door behind her and her footsteps echoing down the hall. Jack spits a pill out from beneath his tongue and flicks it at Bunny, beaning him in the temple. Bunny exclaims in short term surprise and annoyance, but laughs once he realizes what Jack has done, his laugh breaking the tension and giving Jack the room he needs to crack up too.
Another shift, and an alarm makes Bunny flatten his ears back as he and Jack run through the snow, away from the hospital, layered in stolen jackets and insulating layers of newspaper wrapped around their feet and beneath their scrubs, but Jack is smaller and slower than Bunny without the wind to lift him and the orderlies catch him, dragging him back to the open door of the institution.
"Go!" Jack shouts, but it didn't make it easier then to make the choice he did. It doesn't make it any easier to watch. "I'll be fine! Keep going!"
Bunny paused in the snow, watched them drag Jack back to torture and confinement, and he did turn and run. He did keep going.
Thank goodness it's Dan, who won't judge him for that. Thank goodness he succeeded, he got the help that revived Tooth and North's own belief in themselves and freed them from their prisons, the one of stone and the ones of flesh, but that doesn't make it easier to watch himself let Jack be captured, and leave him.
"I didn't like doing it," he mutters, pointlessly, because Dan will understand. Maybe not pointlessly, because maybe he needed to say this, maybe he needed to remind himself that he didn't run because he was choosing his own freedom over the possibility of helping Jack, he ran because a prisoner of war's best chance to help his fellow inmates is to get free and get that help for them. That's what he did.
But he still left Jack to be hurt, worse, and now it's being thrown in his face again.
But that doesn't hurt nearly as much as the next shift of the memory, back in the Tooth Palace, with Tooth all herself and lovely in her green and purple and gold feathers again, and Bunny himself again with his coat, so warm against the snow, in the body he knows how to run and hide and fight and survive so well in, but Jack still dark haired and dying slowly, dying slowly because perhaps he doesn't want to be undead after all.
"-it's my second chance," Jack is saying, his expression serious and a little sad, but looking for understanding.
Bunny, tense and staring with an expression that Dan has seen at the start of their every argument, doesn't give him understanding. "Your second chance to get old and sick and die and stay gone?" Bunny scoffs, like it's a funny joke. When Jack doesn't laugh, his pretense of humor drops. "You're joking."
"Oh strewth," Bunny, observing the memory, swears.
Of all the things he didn't want to revisit with Dan, he never even considered this as a possibility, and yet -
"I can have the life I didn't get to have the first time," Jack says, so gently, wanting clearly to be understood but realizing with every word that Bunny will refuse to. "I think I want to try having it."
"Oh, sure, you want to stick around for a handful of decades, getting slower and sicker and tireder and more in pain the whole time just to die at the end of it," Bunny says, his tone snide, seeking to wound. "That's the logical choice, sure, that's loads better than living forever with the powers of nature at your disposal to make the world a better place. Why don't we all just get old and die? Oh wait! Almost everyone else does do that! How many old sick mortals have you talked to who love that that's how their time is ending?"
"Bunny -" Jack, who grew so much over the last decade, is gentle as he speaks, sympathetic, too soft to be listened to.
"This is the stupidest thing you've ever said. This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You - I can't - you're out of your mind. Take a nap on it. Wake up and make some sense because that's the stupidest mistake -" It's a hard argument, it's such a hard argument to make that Bunny, who can argue with the best of them, chokes on his words, on tears he's not letting fall yet. "You can't just pick dying because it's something you haven't done yet!"
"I'm not picking dying. I'm picking having a life -"
"A mortal life? Those end in a fraction of the time you've been alive! You'll be as good as dying tomorrow and regretting it. What's so great about dying anyway?" Bunny snaps it out, like it's been festering, like it's always been below the surface. "What do you think is on the other side of life that's so much better than being alive forever here, being a guardian, being -"
Being my friend he stopped himself from saying. He is trying so hard to shift the memory, and it isn't shifting.
"What do you think is waiting for you after you die? Your family?" Bunny lets the taunt hang. It is a taunt - that's all it is. Jack is silent, his sympathy still too awful for Bunny to bear. "Who told you they're waiting for you there? Who?" Jack's silence drags on, as he lets Bunny have his anger, and Bunny takes it. "There could be nothing! There could be nothing waiting for you, and you want to pick that, instead of what you know exists for you here?"
"Bunny -" Jack takes a deep breath. "I know this is hard to understand -"
"I understand you're out of your mind. I understand - you call me back when you find it again."
Jack just continues to look sad as Bunny drops a tunnel out from the platform of the Tooth Palace, disappears down it, running fueled on rage, so much of it. By the time he's reached the Warren, unfortunately, his rage has run out, has converted into pre-emptive grief, and by the time he emerges onto the grass of his home he is already sobbing as if Jack has already lived and died and gone where he can't follow -
Bunny is tense beside Dan, desperate that the scene change, that it not transition to the memory of Gaia and Terra telling him how important it is that he, with the weight of the world on his shoulders, never die.
[cw: suicide talk]
That doesn't mean it won't haunt Bunny, but Dan certainly isn't about to add to whatever frustrations Bunny may have lingering over the way that escape played out. He rests his head on Bunny's shoulder, giving little squeezes at every particularly painful sob he hears from Jack, every moment that seems like it might sting extra hard, keeping an eye out for Bunny's balance in case the next memory is something so heavy and violent that it would be better weathered sitting down.
But the next memory isn't violent like that. It isn't death or kidnap or torture. It's the brutality of a fight Bunny's had with Dan before, played out with Jack, played out with how many people throughout Bunny's long life?
Bunny in this memory isn't fighting with Dan, isn't saying these things to Dan, but it still hits as if he is, because these sentiments were there in the shadows of every word Bunny said when they fought in that hotel room, in the forest, in the bathroom of their crappy apartment, in the fights they'll probably have about this going forward because they'll never see eye-to-eye on something this raw and this closely-held.
Dan doesn't know how to explain that on good days, resisting death feels like staying awake late into the early morning after an exhausting, frustrating day; on bad days, it feels like turning away food as a starving man. He doesn't know how to explain that spiritual exhaustion, that overwhelming desire that blocks out all other wants, that wish to just not have to keep doing this, to someone who's been through the worst thing someone can survive and yet still never felt that exhaustion.
And how often must Bunny look at Dan, the man he loves, and only see a handful of decades, getting slower and sicker and tireder and more in pain the whole time just to die at the end of it wrapped in the shape of a lover? It makes Dan flinch, and he unwraps his arms from Bunny, trying not to feel like Bunny's attacking him, trying to remember that this is a memory and not the present day, but I don't know why you love me at all and you can never apologize enough that it'll be okay and why is the first opportunity to die that you see always the best? ricocheting around in his head.
Bunny is talking to Jack, not Dan, and yet it still stings as hard as if Bunny had turned to Dan and said it to his face.
Dan hopes that he'll be able to be with his family when he dies, hopes that somehow he'll be able to stretch across space and time to see the people he can never see again and just for a moment be in their presence one more time. So Bunny's taunt stings. It catches Dan with shrapnel even though the thrust of the force was aimed at Jack. But the next one hits harder, because Dan will take nothing, too.
Nothing sounds like such a relief, when the alternative is pain. Nothing sounds like bliss.
Back in that hotel room, during their worst fight - after their worst fight - Dan had asked if this was just about him, and Bunny had taken a breather. He didn't give Dan the context that this memory does.
And that context doesn't change anything except to make the weight heavier. Dan lowers himself down to sitting and wraps his arms around his knees, miserable with the way he hurts Bunny, miserable with how unable he is to change any of it.
no subject
It wasn't technically before Dan, it was after. After they'd met but before he knew that Dan was going to wrap his heart around his little finger and then break it by wanting to leave the world of the living anyway. Before he knew he was going to sign up, willingly, to have his heart broken as many times as it took to keep Dan from vaulting right over that edge. Before he knew how strangely, horribly intertwined Dan's willingness to die was with his enjoyment of his life.
It doesn't make a difference when he still feels every word he said to Jack. It doesn't make a difference when he's not sorry for believing everything he said. It doesn't even make a difference that he's sorry for the way he said it, for the way in the heat of the moment he defaults to exactly this anger, has done every time he and Dan have had this same fight.
He tries to pull Dan back when Dan settles down, his reaching out tentative, struggling to figure out what to say or do that isn't just can you please forget you saw that.
"I wasn't going to say that to you."
Bunny grasps at that straw, crouching down, paw on Dan's shoulder. The fact of Dan's acceptance that an afterlife would be nice, but nothing would be fine too is just a conversation they would never have had, if not for this. Dan isn't like Jack. Dan doesn't have the option of immortality. If Dan had the option, he'd turn it down, and more than anything, Bunny doesn't ever want to have to actually hear him say that in words.
This was temporary from the start and no amount of love is going to change that.
"I wasn't - please don't hold this against me." It's the argument they've had before, but it's not one of the fights they've had. "That was -"
It wasn't a long time ago. It wasn't remotely a long time ago, but it was before so many things happened in such a short amount of time, and it feels so unfair to have to be held accountable for it by the person he's done so much learning and growing from that time for.
no subject
He isn't angry at Bunny. He isn't going to take Bunny to task over things said to someone else, things Bunny wouldn't say to him. Even if Bunny feels them still - and Dan knows he does - he at least knows not to say those things out loud to Dan. They've reached enough understandings over this topic to know what things they just can't say to each other, what thoughts that won't do any good to air.
He can't be mad at Bunny for feeling pain at his loved ones for leaving. He can't be mad at Hepzibah or at his parents or at the thousand little things that wounded him along the way, because they all set him on the path to be the man Bunny loves. There's no one to be angry at but himself, and that's so unproductive and pointless that he'd have to work at it to keep it up, so Dan just lets the injustice of it all flow through him and away.
It leaves that exhaustion in his wake, but how can he say how tired he is to someone who doesn't have the luxury or the burden of ever tiring? He says it anyway, finally pressing into Bunny's paw and side. "I'm so tired."
Tired of this disconnect between them, tired of the way they fight about it, tired of hurting Bunny over things he can't change, tired of their memories getting smeared all over as if just to hurt them, tired of feeling like each day is just painfully dragging himself from one small oasis of distracting, fleeting happiness to the next, tired of everything.
He rests his head on Bunny's shoulder. "Did you get a chance to make it right with Jack?"
no subject
Dan is tired. Being tired is one of his least favorite aspects of being brought down to mortal in the way he has been too often in the last handful of years, and Dan isn't even talking about the sort of tiredness Bunny experiences.
"I'm sorry."
That Dan is tired, that he can't make the exhaustion go away, that even saving the Sartoris family, even making a soft place for Dan to have landed in his arms can't do the job of making that exhaustion go away.
"I'm trying to understand."
Dan knows he is. Dan has to know there's such a gulf between what he tried to understand back then - that he didn't try, really - versus what he has worked to understand now about that sort of weariness.
He wants to put his arm around Dan, hold him, but more, he wants Dan to hold him back, to stop wanting to escape this very conversation. He wants to escape it in a quiet understanding that they don't have to talk about this again, and that he wants to be there, and that Dan wants to be there, too. But there's the heart of it. That Dan would rather escape this conversation, and he would rather just forget it.
He does put his arm around Dan, trying to get that embrace by giving it, when Dan rests his head on his shoulder, and he breathes a sigh of relief to be leaned on.
"We haven't talked about it."
What would be the point? He got angry, Jack chose to embrace his life as a guardian all over again, and for him to say anything would have just been along the lines of 'I told you so,' since he meant every word, since he's not sorry that he made the points he did, since he's only now feeling regret at the way he made those points because having these arguments with Dan has made it too clear that his anger is a pattern. Defaulting to points made so unkindly they're mockery is a pattern. He meant what he said. It would have been better if he could make those points calmly, even kindly.
But how he can find calm and kindness in the face of this fundamental divide between the way he feels about death and the way the people he loves have been feeling about it in some kind of a pattern lately - how he can find calm and kindness when he is so confused and angry and poised to grieve loved ones who aren't even dead yet has felt, every time, like too much to ask of him.
He and Jack haven't talked about it. He doesn't want to talk about it now. Yet here it is, to be talked over.
no subject
"You know I wouldn't- I won't- I won't never try to..." Dan sighs and curls his fingers in Bunny's fur, because he knows to Bunny that's a distinction without difference, the idea that Dan won't try to kill himself for the sake of it but will still tempt fate, still wreck his body, still lean into options where death is a consequence, still just have a void where self-preservation should be, still never work to save his own life. Dan's leaned into death too many times already in a relationship that isn't that old, and dead is dead, whether it's from flirting with death or inviting it in. "I love you too much for that."
And that's a lodestar Dan can anchor himself to, now that there isn't the guilt of Kitty's death, now that Ellie's just feels tragic and gutting instead of motivating. He loves Bunny. That love is a cushion buffering him from just the sharpest edges of that bone-deep exhaustion.
And still there's something broken in him that can't be mended, he thinks. Like how some people can break their legs and have it heal and be running again in months, and others have limps that last their whole lives. He's in the latter category.
"You know it ain't about how much I love you, or about how good you love me. You know that."
But in the memory, Bunny kept comparing Jack's choices, incredulous that the risk of nothing could outweigh the joys of what existed for Jack in the realm of the living. And in the fights he and Bunny have had, that's been a question both spoken and unspoken, how Dan can feel so disinclined to living when his life is full of such intense and supportive love.
"I need to know you know that." He needs to know that whatever happens, whether he dies tomorrow or at the end of a long life, Bunny knows that their love was never in question. He's been trying to say it since that first fight they had, that first time he broke Bunny's heart while drugged and drunk out of his mind on ketamine and liquor, and the more he's said it the more it's felt distorted, like shouting through a speaker with the volume too high. But he can't rest easy until he knows Bunny understands and accepts it.
"It's just something that is. It'd be there no matter how happy I am." He exhales deep. "You make me happy. I don't want you doubting that."
no subject
It took him such a long time to get it. He took it so personally until taking it personally just became too painful to sustain.
There are some things he can't fix. Dan's depression is one of them. It doesn't feel good, admitting it, but not admitting it any longer just feels like repeatedly throwing himself against a wall that won't break.
He just hugs Dan back, and tries to let you make me happy seem louder than I'm tired.
"You make me happy, too."
When they have a conflict like this, maybe Dan needs to hear it too. Neither of them sound happy right now, but they're holding each other, and they're not shouting past each other the way they did earlier when they were newer to each other, and it's the truth. When he looks back into his memories, all the ways that Dan makes him happy so drastically outweigh all the times they've come to conflict out of this fundamental, deep misunderstanding of what it is to navigate the world in or out of pain.
no subject
He knows how far Bunny's had to come to accept that this is a problem that can't be fixed, only weathered. He's grateful. He knows he's easy to love and often hard to be in love with. "That- that eases my mind."
He does need to hear it, though, because over the sounds of Bunny saying those words to him, he can still hear Bunny in the memory sobbing over Jack and can hear, preemptively, the crying he won't be around to hear when he dies and Bunny has to grieve him. Whenever this wound gets opened, it's hard for Dan to ignore the pain he piles on Bunny, the sadness both present and future tense, and so he does need to hear the reminder that the sorrow is offset by joy upon joy.
Bunny's memory starts to fall away, and Dan isn't sure which of the two of them is the source of the next one, but they're back on the Rig, in the garden, under the oak tree. Stealing a little bit of joy from under the Jorg's nose again. Bunny's got a paperback book in his lap, and Dan's got his head rested on Bunny's knee, listening and gazing up at Bunny with adoration as Bunny reads.
It's a nice respite from fights with friends and burying siblings, and that's what being in love with Bunny is like. A respite. A break in the clouds in an overcast life, an oasis in the desert.
He wants to give Bunny so many more of those moments.
"Don't think I don't see the work you done put in for me."