"It isn't a competition, no. But... there's others ahead of you in the soup queue, so to speak. Aren't there? Even if it's a constant inconvenience, one you are still adapting to, one that impacts your every waking moment, one you are unsure of how to manage, how to even complain about the ruddy thing in the right way. Rather like moving into a new apartment and struggling to sort the annoyances from the issues."
Funny, isn't it. He used to talk to so many entirely average people back in London, and how many of them shimmered with the same colours as he weaves here. Not just Changelings- they don't have a monopoly on pain- but people working out how to welcome in arthritis for the first time, accepting the change in their dreams that comes from injury.
"I used to be a gambling man, Phil, and I don't think I ever placed a surer bet than that the very people who would decapitate you for thinking so... are feeling precisely the same thing, at times."
It's like magic. Well, it probably is magic, but he just marvels at the way Ossie so deftly untangles the briar of his thoughts, this frayed snarl of frustration and stress and split ends. Because yeah. Yeah.
There is really something about it, when you realize you are just never going to be someone going through life with ease now. And he doesn't even know how to complain about it. Which sucks, because complaining is how he copes. Frankly he also doesn't even know if he has forty years left of this or two hundred.
"Yeah... yeah," he nods, sighing. And then puts his face in his hands and just, breathes a very long-suffering groan.
Phil just kind of waves a hand at him without looking up. “I’m fine, I just need to be dramatic for sec.”
He luxuriates in the abject misery of being a guy in a chair with his face in his hands for a little bit, then sits up again with a sigh, straightening out his shirt.
“Sorry about that. It’s just… relieving to hear that, someone who’s getting where I’m coming from. Putting stuff to words that I couldn’t figure out myself. And that I’m not just being, I don’t know, prissy or something.” It’s always been tricky to sift his petty and unsympathetic grievances from the justified ones, even if the success rate is higher these days.
“It’s also nice to have someone telling me this is something I can be upset about without also sliding in the message that I need to learn to be more mad more often in general.”
"Take your time," he offers, being someone who knows the virtue of being a bit dramatic from time to time.
"Please, no need. Just as long as I'm wearing this brooch, you can say what you like. If I need a break, I can always take it off again, wot? Nothing wrong with a little prissiness from time to time, especially when you need it."
He leans back over to his side of the table.
"To be perfectly blunt, who on earth am I to be telling you what to feel? Just as irksome as telling someone they ought to be happier more often. One can't force these things."
He glances at that brooch. He wonders, vaguely, what it really does beside give the man talons and a title, but… Ossie is responsible enough to handle himself, surely. He shouldn’t worry.
“No, but it was more like… allowing myself to be upset with people when stuff happens even if it’s understandable why they might not have… ugh, nevermind.” He’s doing it again.
"I want to be kind," he not-growls. "I want to understand. I want--to, to be a guy who maybe you don't want to piss off but you're not afraid of pissing off, right? But I also don't want to get angry. I won't think right when I'm angry. But Demona--"
And then a real growl as the freshest anger bubbles up again, "--god, I wish I could just be mad at her! But no, not only does she have all this damage, one of my close friends who I like much better is in kind of the same boat as her and is really sympathetic to her situation, and I can't just..."
"We all have damage. Many of it rhymes with each other's. If you want my permission to be angry, in here, where it can't hurt her or anyone else, you have it. Throw a teacup or two if you like. While I'm at it, have every permission- I'm not going to tell you to be angry or not to be angry, but if you want to be conflicted about it, if you want to feel one way and act another, you may."
That expression doesn't waver, even when he growls.
"What outcome do you want from this whole mess? With Demona, I mean."
Oh, he wants to do more than throw a teacup. But he won't do that to Ossie's nice place.
"I'm not gonna be wanting the same thing I got with Daisy. I want us to be able to live on this ship without her attacking one of mine at the bare minimum. She can hang around my friends if she behaves, but unless we're being forced to cooperate, she stays away from me and my family."
He angrily forks at his food and eats some. Maybe that will make him feel better.
"I was saying to Johnny this very issue. That if someone were to behave in a truly antisocial manner, we have little recourse for them. Still- you've sounded the horn, so to speak, and I've no doubt that if you or yours were in need again, people would come to your defense."
Ossie leans back in his chair again, "and what of what you can control, in this situation? How do you want to move forward?"
“The only thing you can control is yourself, right?” he scoffs. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Like you said, I already put out the word, and I’m not in the mood for planning apologies.”
Wow, they’re really running the gamut here. That’s one hell of a transition, which is to say none at all.
“I—give a guy a minute, ehn?”
He sips at his coffee while he tries to switch gears. When he does, he sighs, the rage boiling off, leaving room for regret to settle in like a shroud.
“Yeah, I… I did. Stupid of me, honestly, it was… after the July excursion. We met up again. I’d… gotten injured. Pretty badly. They weren’t there to see it, but after we revived, I was in too much of a hurry to clean up, and Darcy didn’t…” sigh, “take seeing it very well. And later they asked if I was okay, and they’re not someone you hide stuff from, so I said no, and I told them why.”
He’s sort of just staring off at a spot somewhere to the left of Ossie. “It was way too much. I didn’t have to explain it the way I did. Somehow I didn’t… expect them to care that much. Which isn’t on them, they always care, but for some reason I…”
Darcy’s nausea. Cass’ tears. Grace’s fury.
“Somehow it’s strange to see people care about me. Them reacting that badly didn’t feel like a possibility at all.”
"That was a 'would you like', Phil. I can take a no. I'm an expert at graceful rejections, in fact," he teases, allowing Phil his moment to recover.
...
Christ, what is it with people aboard this ship and making baffling decisions with teenagers. Darcy specifically, now he thinks of it. He shifts a little, to be closer to where Phil is staring.
"They do often try and posture more sophisticated and sturdy than they are. Children, I do mean. And often we don't know what we mean to people until that sort of thing happens. Injury, illness, et cetera. Especially here, where we have grown quite used to death being a non-permanent thing, wot? Tch-" Ossie clicks his tongue- "I do wish we had non-fiction aboard this ship. Have you happened to have read any Didion?"
“The answer was yes, I just thought the proverbial sidewalk had a bit more to go before it cut off into someone’s lawn.”
Here, like this, he can taste the bitterness of his own convictions. Any comfort at all on the topic of his eye was one he’d taken easily, but doing the same now feels… unsavory. Unfair. It shouldn’t matter how Darcy postures if he’s the one who’s supposed to know better. It shouldn’t matter how used he is to dying if he’s supposed to be better. And it isn’t fair to Ossie either, who doesn’t know anything about the loop or his reservations around being a dad. It’s his own fault, really, just as the rest of this is.
“A little. I can’t claim familiarity with her work, though. Why?”
"Back home, I was given an essay of hers to read. 'On self respect'," and he makes a point of wincing because it was not one he was given as a fun beach read.
"Wish I had it here, she writes terribly eloquently. The key to it was that fostering a healthy self respect means acknowledging your mistakes, living with them, and assigning them their appropriate weight. Understanding that you are not uniquely flawed, that your loved ones aren't irredeemably blind for failing to notice your defects, nor are they uniquely generous or empathetic for forgiving you for them. Much prettier out of her mouth, I'm afraid. You know back when the memory portals were opened, I aided in torturing Dimitri for a frankly allegoric amount of time?"
He takes a long sip of his tea. Just to take a moment.
"Myself in the past did, in any case. And worse, he met a version of me before all of my nasty unseemly damage. Gah. Dreadful. Worst case scenario. The very worst version of me, and the version I am certain everyone would prefer. Terribly charming fellow, that one. But... even so. Seeing the worst of what I am capable of, and seeing my best days long behind me, he prefers to know me as I am. To consider me his friend. He's not an unintelligent boy, his judgement is usually better than most. So I suppose if I am to continue to trust in him, I must simply trust that there are reasons he cares for me now. Does that make sense? Terribly sorry, still getting used to the whole-" vague wavy hand-gesture, "telling the truth about things. Awful. Like pulling teeth. Utterly uncharming."
Phil wonders how much of this--not the whole thing of what they're doing, but this bit right here--is more for Ossie. At the same time, it is very much for Phil, to admit all of this. None of it is light. Phil saw it himself, those red eyes, the perfect skin, the graceful hands. Remembers the joy that Dimitri got to shed that touch.
He listens. Tries not to misunderstand. He's very still.
"I don't think I'm uniquely bad or that they're uniquely blind. I don't have to be unique to just... be someone with issues sometimes." He wishes people would trust that he's smarter than that. He wasn't unique before. He certainly isn't now.
...
Darcy saw him at his worst. Darcy's tolerance for bad is also much, much deeper than that.
"Darcy's. Not that stupid. But."
But.
"They're so loyal. When they think you're worthy of it, they swear fealty, and then that's it. I..." a hand swipes down his face over an inhale, "they're just... an adult they trusted in their life tried to turn them into just, some, some attack dog. And they trusted him and followed that. And then Skulduggery killed them in his negligence and yeah, Darcy actually got pissed at him for it and Skuls was regretful, and Darcy bullied me in a memory where I was just, the worst, I figured out how to end myself before I figured out how to make a single friend, but I... I know what I did isn't some, some apocalypse on our relationship. But I--"
...
"I don't know that I really figured out what it meant until then. How much they were willing to do for me. How much they were willing to justify. Hurting each other is one thing. Even my wife and I hurt each other. Deeply, sometimes. But I. I wish... I wish I could trust--"
That if I were making them worse, they would leave.
That's not fair to Ossie or Dimitri's decisions though, is it? Even what Ossie described, it's not that. It's not.
"That," Ossie says softly, "is the very reason why the training of child soldiers are abhorrent. Adults are one thing, but children rely on us for safety, love, comfort. They will starve themselves before they let go of it."
Wire mother, cloth mother.
"I wish I had something more comforting for you than that... you have to be the adult. You need not be perfect, of course, but. You have to be the adult. You have to manage your behaviour, you need to ensure that you're safe to be around. I've every faith you won't make the same mistake again."
"I know," he grumbles, and as though he's reciting it, "A dad doesn't have to be perfect. He just has to be there."
He'd made that vow already. That if Darcy can't leave, then he has to make staying worth it. It doesn't get any easier. They've run this topic in a circle, but maybe it's done something to hear it outside of his own head.
...
"Sorry about the, uh. Memory stuff with you and him."
"That's my line," he demures, "and in any case, if I must spend my days petrified of cocking up the whole bloody thing, don't think I'm letting you get away any easier."
A small dip of the head, "I can't say it's anything I was inviting, but having the worst thing you could possibly imagine actually occur is... well, it certainly has a way of putting things into perspective, wot? Rather like surviving a train wreck, I should imagine."
Eventually, that is. After he spent a month as goop. And had to be forced out of it by being literally teleported into a death labyrinth. You know how it is.
He lapses into a bit of silence then. God. Parenting. He never thought he’d end up doing it, much less alone. … Well. Skulduggery is co-parenting. But it’s still not the same; still not what he had in mind, not what the plan was. He misses her so much.
This time, having been appropriately chastised, he gives Phil a moment. As many as he needs, before he speaks again. Even if he feels longing shivering off him, a kind of desire for what cannot be attained.
He'll be waiting a bit of a while. Phil simmers in it, is suffused with it, bleeding his longing from the chest until saturates the rest of his whole self, the way watercolor fills a soaked page or smoke fills a room.
He picks himself back up, straightening his posture and his shirt, looking calmer now to all the world. The longing hasn't gone anywhere.
"Okay. Well. What next, if we're going down the list?"
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2023-10-22 09:20 am (UTC)Funny, isn't it. He used to talk to so many entirely average people back in London, and how many of them shimmered with the same colours as he weaves here. Not just Changelings- they don't have a monopoly on pain- but people working out how to welcome in arthritis for the first time, accepting the change in their dreams that comes from injury.
"I used to be a gambling man, Phil, and I don't think I ever placed a surer bet than that the very people who would decapitate you for thinking so... are feeling precisely the same thing, at times."
no subject
Date: 2023-10-23 07:18 am (UTC)There is really something about it, when you realize you are just never going to be someone going through life with ease now. And he doesn't even know how to complain about it. Which sucks, because complaining is how he copes. Frankly he also doesn't even know if he has forty years left of this or two hundred.
"Yeah... yeah," he nods, sighing. And then puts his face in his hands and just, breathes a very long-suffering groan.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-23 08:29 am (UTC)"Glad I wasn't overreaching. Are you alright? Do you need a moment?"
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Date: 2023-10-23 09:05 am (UTC)He luxuriates in the abject misery of being a guy in a chair with his face in his hands for a little bit, then sits up again with a sigh, straightening out his shirt.
“Sorry about that. It’s just… relieving to hear that, someone who’s getting where I’m coming from. Putting stuff to words that I couldn’t figure out myself. And that I’m not just being, I don’t know, prissy or something.” It’s always been tricky to sift his petty and unsympathetic grievances from the justified ones, even if the success rate is higher these days.
“It’s also nice to have someone telling me this is something I can be upset about without also sliding in the message that I need to learn to be more mad more often in general.”
no subject
Date: 2023-10-23 09:13 am (UTC)"Please, no need. Just as long as I'm wearing this brooch, you can say what you like. If I need a break, I can always take it off again, wot? Nothing wrong with a little prissiness from time to time, especially when you need it."
He leans back over to his side of the table.
"To be perfectly blunt, who on earth am I to be telling you what to feel? Just as irksome as telling someone they ought to be happier more often. One can't force these things."
no subject
Date: 2023-10-23 05:39 pm (UTC)“No, but it was more like… allowing myself to be upset with people when stuff happens even if it’s understandable why they might not have… ugh, nevermind.” He’s doing it again.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 02:31 am (UTC)He leans his cheek on his hand, eyeing him with warmth and some mild amusement.
"Do you want to be upset?"
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Date: 2023-10-25 05:12 am (UTC)And then a real growl as the freshest anger bubbles up again, "--god, I wish I could just be mad at her! But no, not only does she have all this damage, one of my close friends who I like much better is in kind of the same boat as her and is really sympathetic to her situation, and I can't just..."
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 05:30 am (UTC)That expression doesn't waver, even when he growls.
"What outcome do you want from this whole mess? With Demona, I mean."
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 05:48 am (UTC)"I'm not gonna be wanting the same thing I got with Daisy. I want us to be able to live on this ship without her attacking one of mine at the bare minimum. She can hang around my friends if she behaves, but unless we're being forced to cooperate, she stays away from me and my family."
He angrily forks at his food and eats some. Maybe that will make him feel better.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 06:04 am (UTC)"I was saying to Johnny this very issue. That if someone were to behave in a truly antisocial manner, we have little recourse for them. Still- you've sounded the horn, so to speak, and I've no doubt that if you or yours were in need again, people would come to your defense."
Ossie leans back in his chair again, "and what of what you can control, in this situation? How do you want to move forward?"
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 06:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 06:30 am (UTC)So Ossie nods, happy to move on from that line of thinking for now.
"You mentioned that you erred with one of your children a few months ago? Would you like to talk about that?"
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 06:46 am (UTC)“I—give a guy a minute, ehn?”
He sips at his coffee while he tries to switch gears. When he does, he sighs, the rage boiling off, leaving room for regret to settle in like a shroud.
“Yeah, I… I did. Stupid of me, honestly, it was… after the July excursion. We met up again. I’d… gotten injured. Pretty badly. They weren’t there to see it, but after we revived, I was in too much of a hurry to clean up, and Darcy didn’t…” sigh, “take seeing it very well. And later they asked if I was okay, and they’re not someone you hide stuff from, so I said no, and I told them why.”
He’s sort of just staring off at a spot somewhere to the left of Ossie. “It was way too much. I didn’t have to explain it the way I did. Somehow I didn’t… expect them to care that much. Which isn’t on them, they always care, but for some reason I…”
Darcy’s nausea. Cass’ tears. Grace’s fury.
“Somehow it’s strange to see people care about me. Them reacting that badly didn’t feel like a possibility at all.”
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 06:57 am (UTC)...
Christ, what is it with people aboard this ship and making baffling decisions with teenagers. Darcy specifically, now he thinks of it. He shifts a little, to be closer to where Phil is staring.
"They do often try and posture more sophisticated and sturdy than they are. Children, I do mean. And often we don't know what we mean to people until that sort of thing happens. Injury, illness, et cetera. Especially here, where we have grown quite used to death being a non-permanent thing, wot? Tch-" Ossie clicks his tongue- "I do wish we had non-fiction aboard this ship. Have you happened to have read any Didion?"
no subject
Date: 2023-10-25 01:01 pm (UTC)Here, like this, he can taste the bitterness of his own convictions. Any comfort at all on the topic of his eye was one he’d taken easily, but doing the same now feels… unsavory. Unfair. It shouldn’t matter how Darcy postures if he’s the one who’s supposed to know better. It shouldn’t matter how used he is to dying if he’s supposed to be better. And it isn’t fair to Ossie either, who doesn’t know anything about the loop or his reservations around being a dad. It’s his own fault, really, just as the rest of this is.
“A little. I can’t claim familiarity with her work, though. Why?”
no subject
Date: 2023-10-26 04:45 am (UTC)"Wish I had it here, she writes terribly eloquently. The key to it was that fostering a healthy self respect means acknowledging your mistakes, living with them, and assigning them their appropriate weight. Understanding that you are not uniquely flawed, that your loved ones aren't irredeemably blind for failing to notice your defects, nor are they uniquely generous or empathetic for forgiving you for them. Much prettier out of her mouth, I'm afraid. You know back when the memory portals were opened, I aided in torturing Dimitri for a frankly allegoric amount of time?"
He takes a long sip of his tea. Just to take a moment.
"Myself in the past did, in any case. And worse, he met a version of me before all of my nasty unseemly damage. Gah. Dreadful. Worst case scenario. The very worst version of me, and the version I am certain everyone would prefer. Terribly charming fellow, that one. But... even so. Seeing the worst of what I am capable of, and seeing my best days long behind me, he prefers to know me as I am. To consider me his friend. He's not an unintelligent boy, his judgement is usually better than most. So I suppose if I am to continue to trust in him, I must simply trust that there are reasons he cares for me now. Does that make sense? Terribly sorry, still getting used to the whole-" vague wavy hand-gesture, "telling the truth about things. Awful. Like pulling teeth. Utterly uncharming."
no subject
Date: 2023-10-26 07:56 am (UTC)He listens. Tries not to misunderstand. He's very still.
"I don't think I'm uniquely bad or that they're uniquely blind. I don't have to be unique to just... be someone with issues sometimes." He wishes people would trust that he's smarter than that. He wasn't unique before. He certainly isn't now.
...
Darcy saw him at his worst. Darcy's tolerance for bad is also much, much deeper than that.
"Darcy's. Not that stupid. But."
But.
"They're so loyal. When they think you're worthy of it, they swear fealty, and then that's it. I..." a hand swipes down his face over an inhale, "they're just... an adult they trusted in their life tried to turn them into just, some, some attack dog. And they trusted him and followed that. And then Skulduggery killed them in his negligence and yeah, Darcy actually got pissed at him for it and Skuls was regretful, and Darcy bullied me in a memory where I was just, the worst, I figured out how to end myself before I figured out how to make a single friend, but I... I know what I did isn't some, some apocalypse on our relationship. But I--"
...
"I don't know that I really figured out what it meant until then. How much they were willing to do for me. How much they were willing to justify. Hurting each other is one thing. Even my wife and I hurt each other. Deeply, sometimes. But I. I wish... I wish I could trust--"
That if I were making them worse, they would leave.
That's not fair to Ossie or Dimitri's decisions though, is it? Even what Ossie described, it's not that. It's not.
...
no subject
Date: 2023-10-27 04:37 am (UTC)Wire mother, cloth mother.
"I wish I had something more comforting for you than that... you have to be the adult. You need not be perfect, of course, but. You have to be the adult. You have to manage your behaviour, you need to ensure that you're safe to be around. I've every faith you won't make the same mistake again."
no subject
Date: 2023-10-27 06:58 am (UTC)He'd made that vow already. That if Darcy can't leave, then he has to make staying worth it. It doesn't get any easier. They've run this topic in a circle, but maybe it's done something to hear it outside of his own head.
...
"Sorry about the, uh. Memory stuff with you and him."
no subject
Date: 2023-10-27 07:10 am (UTC)A small dip of the head, "I can't say it's anything I was inviting, but having the worst thing you could possibly imagine actually occur is... well, it certainly has a way of putting things into perspective, wot? Rather like surviving a train wreck, I should imagine."
Eventually, that is. After he spent a month as goop. And had to be forced out of it by being literally teleported into a death labyrinth. You know how it is.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-27 08:14 am (UTC)He lapses into a bit of silence then. God. Parenting. He never thought he’d end up doing it, much less alone. … Well. Skulduggery is co-parenting. But it’s still not the same; still not what he had in mind, not what the plan was. He misses her so much.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-29 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-30 08:49 am (UTC)He picks himself back up, straightening his posture and his shirt, looking calmer now to all the world. The longing hasn't gone anywhere.
"Okay. Well. What next, if we're going down the list?"
no subject
Date: 2023-10-31 07:31 am (UTC)Another sip of his tea. Surely the cup should be finished by now, but somehow there's still liquid in it.
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