nightlogs | I Had Nothing to Say on Christmas Day When You Threw All Your Clothes in the Snow [Closed]

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I Had Nothing to Say on Christmas Day When You Threw All Your Clothes in the Snow [Closed]

Who: Dan and Miguel
What: Miguel finds out something concerning about Dan.
Where: The workshop.
When: After Christmas.
Warnings/Notes: Dan's crazy politics in the forefront; probable references to dead kids and substance abuse.

Miguel did, in fact, get a sky-blue and white puzzle box for Christmas, wrapped with corresponding paper and left outside his door on the morning of the holiday itself. The locking mechanism is different than the one he observed Dan making. Dan has, as the march of time has inevitably drawn him closer to the time of year he struggles with the most, been doing everything he can to stay busy, and that means each box has been individualized and has been a grounds for experimentation. Such intensive work brought Dan right up to Christmas Eve making and wrapping gifts, which was perfect; in stressing about getting boxes in hands, he didn't have much time for gloominess or panic or working himself up in hypotheticals about how everything's going to go wrong somehow.

But now the holiday's over, and aside from New Year's Eve, there isn't anything to distract him. He's taken back to chewing on his hands, and after he accidentally bites hard enough on one of his fingers to leave a blue moon-shaped bruise under his nail, he decides to do something about it.

He's noticed, of course, that there are some people here at the Pole who don't fit into standard-sized clothing, and that that limits their options for warm clothing. The myth powers may buffer people a little bit, but Dan's seen enough people have their powers dampened or switched up on them to think it's wise to entirely eschew a wardrobe of layers. And he's been intending to talk to Miguel ever since he somewhat rudely ignored the hell out of that last attempt Miguel made to rally the new myths into organizing.

After having asked around and gotten a sense of when Miguel might be available - when Dan won't be interrupting some important Work, which he knows is important to Miguel - Dan knocks on Miguel's bedroom door with a messenger's bag over his shoulder.

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Miguel does pay attention, keeping his grooming to the front of the Horse's body, but there's a fourth element in the midst of all this that's distracting him as Dan speaks. He does his best to supress it, but he was too outside his element to really succeed.

With little warning, a loud sneeze is muffled into his sleeve. The undignified grimace betrays the long points of the upper canines. It doesn't have the nearly same effect as when they're bared to attack. When his eyes dart to Concrete Blonde's head, expecting the worst, he finds the horse unbothered. Aware that he was the one making noise, if the pointed ears were any indication. This settles his nerves, some.

“Field medicine- ” he starts, covering his nose and working through unhappy sinuses as he regains the usual confidence in his voice. He could catch the hints of floating strands of fur in the light… he will have to get used to it.

“Then, no veterinarians or doctors nearby. It sounds like the farm was pretty isolated.”

He resumes combing when the discomfort fades.

"Salud." Dan smiles at how unbothered Concrete Blonde is. He gives her another slice of apple to reinforce the calm behavior. He doesn't point out that he thinks it's cute when Miguel's fangs pop out. "Yeah, real isolated. I saw folks I wasn't related to once, twice a year at most, when my dad needed an extra set of hands to go get supplies in town that we couldn't rustle up on our own, equipment and sugar and the like."

Dan's a little hesitant to share this with people, because usually people default straight to telling him that his upbringing sounds terrible and depriving. Dan doesn't want to hear that. That was the happiest Dan's ever been, and now that his mind has been permanently mangled by trauma and violence, he thinks it's by far the happiest he'll ever have been.

"We were trying to stay off the grid and out of the clutches of the federal government. Up until we got caught out when I was a teenager, weren't no one but a few folks the town over who even knew we existed."

And maybe if Dan gives all this context, people won't need to ask him why he responds to authority as strongly as he does. He didn't grow up taking orders or following any rules besides the common-sense ones his parents implemented for safety, which he was always free to question. He never benefited from the protections of law enforcement or the social safety net. He was free and happy and one day a man in uniform held a gun to his face and told him he wasn't allowed to be anymore, for the good of society.

Dan's a social person. He cares about others. He cares about and tends to his community. But "society" - he doesn't believe that concept has anything to offer him. That's for other people, made by other people, like a religion he doesn't share but keeps getting evangelized about to.

"...Gracias." he mumbles it out automatically while he had hand over nose, not incapable of a nicety here or there.

By nature of a lot of things, Miguel tends not to really voice his opinion about upbringings. His wasn't great, and it would quickly become grating to receive Remarks about it. The events are in the past, anyway. Not like whatever it is Dan went through that left him traumatized and illiterate could be changed retroactively.

"Hiding from the government? I'm going to assume to stay that out of sights it had to be related to the supernatural."

The former half of the equation doesn't phase him at all. There are plenty of reasons to want to remain off-grid (or to hide in plain sight). It's why he had his alter-ego, it's why rebellions formed in secret. But he was starting to put two-and-two together - so Dan's family was out there somewhere, and lost that small world of comfort when they were found. And it seemed to have upended the trajectory of his life altogether.

He glances over Concrete Blonde's withers, tone light: "Could be my bias. My encounters with magic and its practicioners are usually out of sight to the world at large."

"Yes and no. We didn't need nothing supernatural to want to keep the law off us."

The tragedies that drove Allie and Lewis Sartoris underground were petty and mundane: a drafted sibling lost to an unjust war; a shootout with the police; abuse left unchecked because the perpetrator was a friend of the sheriff; carcinogens leeching off the Air Force base into the water supply; the goddamn local theater getting torn down and turned into an off-ramp for the highway. These unremarkable injustices just kept piling up until Lewis and his new bride decided that the only way to protect the baby growing inside her was to go off the grid and throw off the society they'd come to see as shackles. So they did. So that's what Dan grew up with.

Dan sees these injustices all the time. He doesn't understand why no one else seems to see them, why they see prisons and borders and armies and taxes as things that just are, laws as natural as that of gravity, not the creations of man. They're fictions that people breathe life into and they fail to see their own role in it. They can't think of a world without those things they've been tricked into thinking are necessities.

So Dan holds his tongue and thinks very carefully about how to explain his situation to Miguel. To be too fiery will be to squander the goodwill they've built together; to be too tender will be to get sucked into the heartache. He braids another lock of Concrete Blonde's mane, and as if she could sense his heaviness - maybe she can - she presses the side of her neck into his shoulder to maximize physical contact.

"We just wanted to be left alone and free. That's all. We weren't bothering nobody, didn't never hurt no one, but we did get caught out, and that's when my folks started dabbling in dark magic, and then everything just went to shit." He almost swallows the last four words, because he doesn't want to explain the details of how awful things got. They've both seen so much death. No need to summon it to the surface of this conversation. "Anyway. I can't do magic. No one in my family could. Can. Well, my middle sister can, but she's the only one of a family of nine."

He's still getting used to the idea that they're alive out there, that he and Bunny rewrote time itself to spare them. They're past-tense in his head, present-tense in reality.

"We did some messing with the timeline to prevent most of that, though. I'm just getting used to remembering it's real."

He is patient as Dan wrestles with and comes to share the details of his life and his family. Despite his stern demeanor, Miguel seemed relatively tolerant and accepting of it. Even the mention of ‘dark magic’. He monitored an entire network of dimensions - one man with a bone to pick with the society he grew up in wasn’t such a strange story to hear. In fact, it tended to come with the territory the moment you had to work around and undermine the systems one existed in by pure chance.

That is, until the last detail. The idle brushing stops, the handle caught in a tense grip.

It’s hard. Miguel had to adjust so much of his standards and expectations on arrival to fit this new world. And it tested his patience more than he’d ever tolerate back home, but he’d managed to keep it relatively put together. He’d managed.

With this, he can’t stop his voice from rising with what feels like hot coals lodged in his chest.

“What do you mean ‘messing with the timeline’? You don’t just mess with time.”

Unlike society, ‘the timeline’ did have its physical laws and forces, ones he had painfully suffered under. Dan didn’t seem to catch the horrifying implication of what he just admitted.

Miguel just… wants to give it a chance. One desperate chance to somehow amend what was just said.

Dan's eyes are on Concrete Blonde, but he hears the rise in Miguel's voice so clearly that he doesn't need to look at Miguel's face. He knows he tripped some sort of wire. He keeps his own body language calm, wondering if this is about to escalate and, if so, if the horse will be a buffering factor.

He looks over at Miguel, but his hands continue braiding. "We used a time travel device and went back and gave them the warning to clear out before a curse kicked into effect."

A dim sort of horror lurks at the back of his mind as he thinks back over the experts they consulted, a wage worker on the Rig and an evil witch herself. Hardly reliable, but at the time Dan believed the risk was his alone to incur, his or the already-dead of his family.

"The original option was to erase myself from time entirely. That was the deal the witch put on the table for me. Bunny didn't accept that option, so we did it our way."

“Your way.”

The words are repeated, slowly. It was probably good that Dan was looking at Concrete Blonde’s mane instead of catching the look of disgust on his face.

He can’t do this. The emotion in his throat was going to quickly reach its boiling point, and he knows he isn’t going to be stopped by a horse, if properly motivated.

Expression dark, he storms out of the stall. The brush is dropped somewhere by the doorframe. He was making space, back turned, keeping his gaze on a crack in the wooden door instead of on Dan. He soothes himself with a slow, ineffective rub of the temple.

“Neither of you considered just leaving it well enough alone?”

He tries not to growl out the question. The last thing he wanted was a repeat of the last time he had this conversation.

“You didn’t think about what would happen if sticking your hand in could have disastrous consequences outside of just your existence?”

A dull voice in his head floats the idea of just leaving. Leaving altogether. If he keeps speaking, he’s going to start to say harsher things that he’ll regret later.

"I-I didn't-" Dan places a hand to Concrete Blonde's snout as Miguel storms out, as she snorts and flicks her tail in dislike for the sudden movement of another large, living thing around her.

He doesn't speak immediately. He holds back on what leaving well enough alone meant, when for Dan it was never "well enough" - it was the better part of a decade on the run, burying loved ones in shallow graves, watching the people he loved die in unspeakably cruel ways, it was the tragedy that uprooted Dan's brain like a kitchen drawer full of silverware being dumped onto the floor, it was the sort of evil and unfairness that shouldn't exist in a just world - because it's sinking in what Miguel means.

"What kind of consequences? The technician we talked to said the worst that'd happen was I'd get erased." Dan makes sure Concrete Blonde is calm before he steps out of the stall, but he gives Miguel as much space as the stables allows without running over to the other end of them. After a moment, he crouches down to pick up the brush. "What risk did I run?"

It isn't a rhetorical question. It's one step shy of what have I done?. Dan didn't know there were disastrous consequences for other people that he was flirting with. He didn't know, but he also didn't push hard to find out; the idea of having hope dangled in front of him just to watch it burn up was too painful to investigate, so when Gretchen told him he had nothing to worry about, he was eager to believe it. He isn't a scientist or a magician. Why would he turn down the best news he's ever heard over a possibility no one told him was a possibility?

And yet the idea that he rolled the dice with people besides him and his family and Bunny feels like ice water in his blood. He feels himself short of breath and counts beats on his inhale-and-exhale to regulate himself back.

"If that's all they said, then they were an idiot." he almost spits out the words, allowing a little cruelty to fly over to another target other than Dan.

He didn't want to do this. Miguel didn't want to be in the position again of needing to explain why someone shouldn't have saved the ones they love. The tragedy had to happen, because the alternative would end up in them dying anyway. It doesn't occur to him that this might be an example of the opposite being possible. He had seen the catastrophe born of being selfish like this, and nothing was worth risking that again, in his eyes.

Dan's quick breaths ring in his ears, and he reminds himself to exhale and not let the poison build. Outside his suit, he lacked the sharp blades and lines that added more menace to his appearance. More evident danger. A coat was a softer thing, but he was still quite tall and broad, and he was standing very, very still.

"What do you think happens when you start taking scissors to spacetime, the fabric of your reality?"

He didn't want to retread his own memory again, he's certain he wouldn't be able to remain calm, so he goes for the metaphor. The tranquil maroons of his eyes had brightened to an upset, imperious red when his head darts to glance at Dan at his fair distance.

"If you're lucky, it's just a hole that frays at the edges - fixable with the right tools which you don't have. Maybe you hit a seam, and rupture something fundamental that's impossible to repair."

And he turns to face him.

"Or maybe the fabric is less stable then you thought, and all the threads unravel before you even realize it. And once the cascade begins, it can never be reversed. Am I making the point clear enough?"

Dan, always so aware of body language, doesn't miss that he's emphasized the physical power difference between them by crouching down to get the brush. He doesn't take Miguel's anger personally. Hurt at Miguel's response can't really penetrate through the horror that's overwhelmed him, that settles into him like a dark choking fog.

"I didn't know. I wouldn't have risked- I would have-" He would have let his family die a second time. That sentiment sits heavy and cold in his throat, but it's true, and what's more, it feels like a truth, like he's already let his family die, like they're still dead, like to save them was a good dream he has to wake up from. Like he knew all along that he never saved them and this is just some sort of confirmation, like it's a spell he's speaking into life. "I didn't know."

Part of him is trying to absolve himself to Miguel, to demonstrate that he's just an uneducated rube who barely understands that oil and water don't mix, much less temporal physics; part of him is trying to absolve himself of this crushing weight, internally, of the fact that he could have hurt so many people so lethally and permanently that no one would have ever been the wiser, that his penchant for taking risks spread like blood from a body and stained his whole universe. It's one thing for him to risk his own well-being. He does that casually, unthinkingly. It's another to drag others, unwitting and unwilling, into it.

Around them, the reindeer seem agitated, picking up on the distress and anger in the stables. They snort and wag their heads to clack their antlers against the stall doors, disturbing the hay on the ground with their hooves.

"No one got hurt. It's been years and that world ain't gone nowhere." But Dan doesn't know if that makes a difference, if maybe he's just created a time bomb in his world. "It can't- it can't have a delayed reaction, can it?"

"It can."

He didn't have enough information to give a definitive yes or no. He sees Dan crouched, shrunken, but he only glowers on down unsympathetically. The hawkish glare makes it particularly scathing. On any other topic of conversation, he'd want to offer a hand. Try to turn this into a conversation rather than a lecture. But Miguel wasn't interested in an equal interplay here. He wanted the words to land proper, and it looks like the severity of the situation was sinking in. Good. He should feel bad about this.

"You gambled the stability of this universe because you couldn't swallow your own losses. Whatever damage inflicted because of that is already done."

It wasn't fair, not really. Dan wasn't an individual with an Important Destiny interlocking with some grander network outside his own world. There was no way he could know. He was just some sod tempted by an offer too good to pass up. Still, excuses were of no interest to Miguel. And somewhere along the line, it may become obvious it's because he fell for the exact same thing.

He crosses his arms and keeps his distance, shooting a look at one of rustled animals that won't stop scraping antlers on wood in an irritating way. It... doesn't help. It's like he's closed himself off behind the crenulations of an unreachably high tower, sharp projectiles pointed in all directions.

Dan looks, and is, heartbroken. This event in his life that felt like such a victory - a qualified victory, a clumsy victory, but such a victory nonetheless, a righting of such a personal and painful wrong - now feels like it's been ripped away and replaced by a sword of Damocles resting over his world.

"How can we know? How can we find out if everything's alright over there?" Miguel has all sorts of technology and knowledge of this that Dan can't even wrap his head around, and there are other brilliant technology whizzes in the Pole. Surely someone can find a way to check.

That's when it starts to click for Dan why this is Miguel's response, and somehow empathy finds a crack in Dan's shell of horror and shame. Dan can't ignore the sense of sadness for Miguel, who must think he's looking at a reprise to his own losses, and he knows there's no winning for Miguel here. Either a universe dies, or a universe was saved and Miguel's loved ones weren't a part of it. Relief is the best Miguel can hope for, and relief is far short of happiness.

Dan gets to his feet and goes over to the noisiest reindeer, gently shushing her and petting her until she settles.

"We? There's no we involved in fixing this."

He throws his hands up in exasperation, the joyless chuff sharpened by scorn and a glint of sharp teeth. He's not expecting anything helpful from Dan in this regard.

"If I had my usual equipment, I could check on the mess now and assess the damage. Unfortunately for both of us, I'm stranded here."

He's fuming. Not a single day passes before someone else knocks over the proverbial glassware all over the floor. Again. And to top that off, Dan wanted the help while caught up in his own unproductive hangups. It was infuriating and crushingly lonely to feel like he couldn't rely on anyone he might consider a friend. And despite his anger with Dan, his status in this regard hadn't changed.

"Until then, you will just have to sit and wait."

Miguel paces forward restlessly, full of frustrated energy and no way to expend it properly. He was in no state of mind to be patient with Concrete Blonde or any of the reindeer, and at least recognizes that enough to keep away. Light warbles at his fingertips and collar as the suit materializes beneath his clothes. It had appeared with barely a thought.

A red tether jumps from the top of his wrist to crack open the door and provide him with a sliver of cold, fresh draft. He seemed to prefer standing there in the icy breeze to the stuffy, hay-strewn air of the stables. He probably won't be there for long.

Dan stops himself short of asking what he can do, except Miguel's sit and wait is so definitive. To ask for more guidance seems like it would be interpreted as an ungrateful, ignorant demand. But how is he supposed to sit and wait when Miguel's telling him he might have doomed billions, and that he has no idea when they'll be able to confirm?

If it's been okay for years, it'll be okay for now. It'll be okay until we can check on it.

It might be self-serving to convince himself of that, but it wouldn't be productive to catastrophize. Falling apart right now wouldn't do anything to undo the damage Dan might have caused, and it strikes him as a bitter irony that he apparently held so much worse destructive, world-ending power than he could ever imagine without realizing it and yet, now, is entirely helpless to do anything about it.

"I'll leave you be," Dan says, stepping into one of the stalls to settle another reindeer. He's figuring there's nothing he can do that won't just make Miguel more upset, and it's been established there's nothing he can do about the tragic situation, so the only thing he can do at all is tend the livestock.

And he needs space. He needs a moment to process all of this without also having to worry about Miguel's rage and hurt.

Dan wasn't the only one who needed space. There are worse ways that this conversation could have gone. Much worse. But it still was a sensitive subject that weighed heavily on him, and Miguel had run out of whatever patience he had built up for Dan in the moment. He didn't want to see his face for a while.

So he disappears out the door in a blink, silent and quick despite his size. The door creaks shut on its own, tugged by an unseen web from the other side. Despite the display of rage, the gesture was measured enough to only disturb some dust and snow. Appropriately spiderlike, perhaps. Either way - just like that, he was gone.

Edited 2024-01-20 02:08 (UTC)

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I Had Nothing to Say on Christmas Day When You Threw All Your Clothes in the Snow [Closed]

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