nightlogs | talking to ghosts

Entry tags:

talking to ghosts

Who: Miggy & You??
What: Miguel stays behind to do dead honoring activities
Where: the Pole to start
When: Late October, Early November (Day of the Dead time)
Warnings/Notes: themes of mourning, though it can be lighthearted also

Miguel would be reluctantly absent during the action around Halloween. A strange enough decision, given his first instinct would be to throw himself into the fray as a distraction.

But as of late, he couldn’t hide that something was eating at him. The gloomy spell over his mood seemed more intense than months prior, burning away his patience and making short tempered remarks and the flashing of fangs more easy to let slip. He'd done okay keeping things somewhat under lock, but it was clear now something was definitely wrong.

And so, after some tense, but persuasive conversation just convincing enough to accept staying behind, Miguel finds himself idle on a quieter and lonelier Pole for a few days.

((prompts incoming - brackets or prose are fine))

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"I was never good at being stern."

Dan wonders if this is the most Miguel's talked about this with anyone. It's about the most he's talked about this with anyone. A few people know about Ellie, but Dan doesn't talk about her, and Miguel seems just about as repressed in his sadness as Dan is.

"How long were you with her?" It's not that Dan's trying to measure how legitimate Miguel's grief is - Dan was only with Ellie five years - but he wonders how long Miguel's life was arranged around the identity of being a parent to Gabriella. "Ellie...you know, sometimes kids need a parent to step up. And you got to be that person, even if you ain't quite the one who would be right for the job."

"Kid's counting on you. The only option is to make it work."

Even though his way of doing things was very different to Dan's, he understands this more than he could ever explain with words.

Miguel doesn't seem offended by the question, but a little furrow of thought appears on the bridge of his nose. Time moved oddly between dimensions. It grew easy to measure TRN-660's pace when he lived there on a more permanent basis: birthdays, school events and graduations, and other things he had to keep track of. But it's been a while since then.

"It was a few years on her Earth." he says. "We were coming up on four."

Less time than Dan, but enough for the new normal to feel real until the cracks in space-time started to show.

"Exactly."

Dan wishes all the time that he could have 'made it work' by getting sober and getting a steady job and renting an apartment, giving Ellie stability and normalcy. He wishes making it work hadn't been living in a car, intermittently on the run from the law, stealing and scamming food to fill their stomachs, and relying on Ellie to do any and all reading for him.

But the alternative couldn't be worth considering. Ellie's magic made her a resource people wanted to exploit and someone who couldn't participate in most of society. Dan was one of the only people who saw her as a little girl and not as a meal ticket. So he stayed with her and she stayed with him until their lives were so intertwined it was hard to remember being without her.

"Five years for me and Ellie. So close to around how long it was for you." Dan feels like he doesn't need to put too fine a point on how he and Miguel are, in many ways, very similar. He doesn't want to erode seeing Miguel as an individual by imputing assumptions based on his own life.

"I normally don't feel right going through the days. I'm just, you know." He's drinking hard liquor and it's before noon, so he's sure Miguel can catch his gist. "But things felt alright when I was living with her. Reckon there's something powerful about being able to love and care for a kid like that."

Gwen tilts her head to the side and pulls a 'thinking' face, "Mmm. Still can't picture it. I'll believe it when I see it."

Joking is still easier than treading back into vulnerable territory, a breather in what feels like walking on a conversational tightrope.

She stands up from the door frame and reaches back to pull her hood out from under the sweater. She doesn't even put it on, it's just needlessly uncomfortable having it bunched up under there when she's wearing this get-up for longer than originally planned.

"I uh— did a lot of the cooking for myself when dad was working, so."

"Aww, that's so kind of you to say!" Stacia says with every sign of sincerity, pressing a hand to her chest as though Miguel had said something sweet rather than agreeing that she is loud and bossy. To be fair, it's something she's proud of; the society she was raised in tries to train that out of little girls, especially those who want to be perceived as 'cute'.

She smiles sadly at Miguel's sympathy. "Thanks," she says. "Turns out that the people responsible had a long history of doing that sort of thing to people they thought were too uppity or interfering with their 'betters'." She sneers over that last word, putting it inside finger quotes like something dirty she doesn't want to touch with her bare skin. "They're not a problem now, and I have hopes that the youngest one can be taught why what they were doing was wrong. But all the people they killed are still dead."

She sighs, sitting back in her seat.

"I've been to too many funerals for someone who never had grandparents."

Dan, being a tobacco addict, doesn't smell the flowers, but he does notice them when he pops into one of the dens to try and find some spare ribbon. He's still there when Miguel and Boba turn the corner, looking through the cabinets for wrapping supplies.

"Oh, hey- sorry, was just looking around for some supplies. Miguel, good to see you." He pauses, looking as if he's being just casually normal, but upon seeing Boba intentionally adopting the least confrontational poise he can manage. It's not even anything particular about Boba so much as that the kids here tend to come in traumatized and damaged, and Dan doesn't want to intimidate them nor condescend to them.

"Sorry, we ain't met. I'm Dan."

The first thing Boba does when they enter the room is find all the exits, then positions himself so he has a clear path to as many as he can. The second is doing a quick threat assessment on the man already there. He doesn't look like he's here to hurt anyone, which could change any moment, but he does look like he's trying to get something out of them with that non-threatening act.

Boba's hackles are immediately up when he speaks. Why is this "Dan" apologizing? Who cares if they haven't met? He already knows Miguel, but Miguel is clearly a terrible judge of character. He's been spending all this time and energy on Boba, after all.

There's a slightly too-long pause before Boba remembers that he's supposed to respond.

"I'm Lucky."

There, interaction done. Now where are the flowers?

Miguel seems to be the least bothered in the room for once, though that's probably because he had no reason to feel any sort of physical threat from either of them. His mind was in other, more somber places.

"Dan."

The slouch in his shoulders straightens up on seeing him, though his body's reaction lags like the pushed stern of large ship. Slow and measured. There is a little awkwardness, realizing Dan has been getting a look at more of his softer emotional underbelly than most. Very different from the usual hard-assed persona he projects. But he was glad to see him.

"Kid wants to make his own ofrenda, so we were going on a flower run."

"...Right."

Aside from her father supposedly dodging his doom via the narrative, he still had some lingering conflicted opinions about George. Not that he felt like he had a right to express them, given he had kicked Gwen back to where she started. But it takes quite the debacle to get Miguel O'Hara to bend his own rules like he did.

Pancakes. They should get to making pancakes.

He gets moving and stops at the door, because - well, there is a Gwen-shaped obstacle there. But he's ready to leave.

"Then we can tag team... or something."

Midnight breakfast, here we go.

Edited 2023-12-13 03:26 (UTC)

"All right, you lied about the lecture being perfunctory."

Miguel is not incapable of snark even at this late hour. But he did listen with some interest in how things worked in her dimension, even if a temporary distraction with present company was all it was. Attemping a holiday by himself was rough. He'll even take the ghosts and their lectures on psychic radio channels. Now he is informed.

"Well, it can't be weirder than being sucked through a wormhole for the first time. " he decides this in the moment, finding his determination to be a grouchy island softened with the mood.

"I assume it comes with less nausea."

It is kind of a yes?

:Could have been worse. I could have showed you a memory of the academic debates on the topic. Don't assume that because I date back to when steel was an exciting new invention I don't know what science is,: she retorts, with her customary blend of amusement and irritation. Steel probably wasn't actually new when she was alive, she doesn't recall, but she does have a vague recollection of finding horseshoes deeply suspicious.

Good enough! Fiddling about consent still - always - feels a little obnoxious and perfunctory to Need, even if she's on the upswing of trying to take it into account right now. :Let's run an experiment, then.:

Even if she'd been so inclined, it's not as strong or distinct of a feeling as she can convey when to someone actually touching her sword. It's a phantom sensation that might be like someone coming up besides Miguel and putting one arm around his shoulders, as if he isn't in the upper percentile of tall, broad men. It might also be standing close to something large in the dark and the rain, close enough to feel its presence and the water diverted off it, only for it to unfurl a wing overhead and hold it open. A moment of shelter against something quiet and still.

Need savors the proximity of actual grief and pain to her dull, distant awareness. Her lack of feeling is a gift, but it's not how humans were meant to be. They're not supposed to just get over it, like what was lost wasn't important.

The complicated reality of Gwen's relationship with her father is that one conversation can't undo the damage of standing on opposites ends of a gun, let alone the years of unintentional hurt and very intentional lies that led to that moment...

And yet if she were to acknowledge that reality, stuck here in yet another universe and knowing that if they make it home, Miles has to be her first priority? She'd go insane. She was never meant to have this much time to think about it between that fateful conversation and fixing the mess she made.

So she doesn't dwell on it. Not even when it visibly bubbles up under the surface, at the tone of that single 'right'.

"Yeah. Or something," she says with a little shake of her head, finally stepping out of the doorway and heading down the hall towards the kitchen. He can keep up, his legs are long enough. "C'mon."

"Pleasure, Lucky." Dan's heard that name a few times around, but hasn't had an opportunity to lay eyes on the youth himself. Elle in particular seemed keen on getting the two of them in a room together.

Dan can figure why just from being a keen study of body language. Lucky's insecure - not in the self-esteem way, but in the way where even a big, competent ally standing next to him isn't enough to keep him from scouting the room for threats. It's what Elle intimated. It's what Dan observes.

"Wouldn't you might know it, I found some flowers some fellow just left behind up here." Dan gestures to the flowers on top of the shelf, then turns to point to them, allowing Lucky to see three quarters of his back. In Dan's experience, trust is never gained without trust being offered. "Sure are a lot of us paying respects to the dead these days."

"...Yeah." The point seems to hit him well enough.

Miguel says nothing for a while, the connection point feeling alien after so much time isolated. Half of the distance he kept from others was his own doing, of course, but the other half was in feeling the weight of his own mistake. A thing he thought he'd always carry alone. For a moment, it seems like they can share the burden for a little while. He sits there, deeply listless in the void of the silence. It was the most inert he's been in months.

It didn't help that Jess and Peter were going through similar stages in their lives. It's not that he wasn't happy for them - in truth, being a sort of odd uncle in the middle was the closest thing he felt to that - but it still made the wound all the more raw. All he'd wanted was one of his own to see grow up, in a better way than he did.

"There was nothing else like it." he says. "Nothing."

Not his work, nor his creations or his travels, nothing could compare to loving and being loved like that.

Edited 2023-12-14 18:20 (UTC)

"No, there ain't. Ain't nothing that can replace it."

And that's the horror of the matter. Dan's life is objectively better now. He's healthy as he can be, well-fed and nourished, in a loving relationship, surrounded by those who care about him, with a roof over his head - and he thinks he'd give it all up for one more day with Ellie. There's that black hole again, and he can keep feeding all the happiness into his life into it and it will still consume and destroy and devour and tarnish.

"I had a family curse placed on me when I was young. I always told myself she'd be safe from it because we didn't share a surname and we weren't blood relatives. Spent so much time worrying about that that it didn't never occur to me that I could might lose her any other way."

He selects his screws and hinges. "Reckon don't neither of us talk about this much with no one."

Boba glares at Miguel when he tells Dan what they're doing. It's none of his business!

"Sure," he says, doubtful. He doesn't think it's been anyone's pleasure to meet him for... cycles.

Boba grabs a stool from a table and moves it in front of the shelves. Unlike Dan, who must be stupid or something to show his back like that, he never lets Dan or Miguel out of his line of sight-- even as he climbs to stand on the stool in an attempt to reach the flowers. They're still barely out of reach. Now he's glaring at the marigolds.

"People die. It's what they do."

Sometimes they get killed. Sometimes you kill them.

Hm. Miguel picks up on the extra tension in the room, but with Lucky, that was almost every day ending in 'y'. Things could get a little more relaxed from time to time when it was just the two of them alone, but a third party always raised his hackles. It changed the dynamic entirely.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad for him to get used to hanging out with someone like Dan. He reaches out to pick up a large bushel off the shelf and plop it into the kid's arms. It was light, as it was all flowers, but it was very voluminous. Truly, he was ready for his spiderly duty of reaching top-shelf items for people who needed it.

"I'm looking for flowers in red, if you know where to get the color." he keeps it vague, leaving it up to the kid to reveal more if he liked.

The problem should be obvious enough: The flowers came in rich golds and yellows, and the gypsophilia and hoary stock supplementing them where white and purple.

“Death and taxes,” Dan says idly, as if he isn’t making a mental note of how Boba said that. He sees that Boba keeps his guard up in spite of Dan telegraphing that he’s letting his down. That’s fine. Dan figures the best he can do is remain warm and non-threatening. If Boba interprets that as Dan just being careless, that’s fine. Better to be read as incompetent than malicious.

“What about poinsettias? There’s plenty of them around here and we can repurpose them as offerings.”

"No, not really." He mulls for a moment. "Not like this."

Some explanation was required for his job. But it was the sort of cold, emotionally distant recitation of events related to the dimensional collapse that didn't hurt quite so bad.

"My mutation was different from the other Spiders. The change was more obvious and unstable. It made planning for a family out of the question. At the time, I thought I found a perfect loophole."

With a changed genome came a lot of questions on humanity and species and the nature of all that. These days, it doesn't quite haunt him except when the stabilizer stopped working and the side effects flared and he was reminded that tumbling into monstrosity was merely a few more doses away. And it scared him. And then he adjusted the dose to fix it, because he had to.

He supposes he could call it a curse, but that would feel a little insulting given what Dan just implied. Still, sometimes he wonders if he would trade it all away if he had the opportunity to.

"So where does that leave us? Doomed by fate?"

It wasn't the most depressing thought after a glimpsing a thousand timelines, including those with his own death.

Edited 2023-12-15 15:18 (UTC)

"Or everyone around us doomed by fate."

That's what gets under Dan's skin, the ever-present hum of paranoia that anyone he gets close to is about to get ripped away, that maybe it's because he gets close to them. Realistically, he knows that the curse was broken decades ago, but it's so hard to shake the feeling. It's hard to not be braced for the next loss, hard to not commit to the pareidolia. He feels like he let his guard down when he had Ellie in his life, and then it ripped out his innards harder than possibly anything ever has, and so this paranoia feels protective.

Asking himself to not be afraid that the people he loves are going to die horribly soon feels like being asked to jump from a plane without knowing how to deploy a parachute. It feels like speeding down the highway with his eyes closed.

"Sounds like we both got our own curses," he says, naming what Miguel's been too polite to say. He remembers the feeling Miguel's hinted at, the almost exhilaration at thinking he found some way to have what he wanted when he had convinced himself wanting a family at all was worse than foolish. "Do you reckon any of that changes, now that we're myths?"

Dan doesn't think it does.

"Nothing's changed." he agrees with steadfast conviction.

Neither his condition, nor his mission. For Miguel, this was a detour into one dimension that he'd have to find his way out of. That's all. The rules of the game had changed - and the powers at work in this world were different from what he was used to - but rules can be adapted.

"Feels a bit cheap to blame my mistakes on fate."

He rotates the dove in his hand, the guilt perhaps animating him from statue-like stillness. The canon did, on some level, absolve them of blame. But in his case, it didn't really apply, and it didn't feel that way either. It felt like his foolish wish for something better had crescendoed into one horrific universal lightshow, hollowing out his life of the one thing that really mattered. And he'd been desperately clawing at any way to amend it ever since.

"I'll take responsibility for that."

Now Boba's scowling at Miguel again. He could've gotten them by himself!

He hops down from the chair and looks between the two men. Taxes are something he knows about in the abstract, but considering his father was a bounty hunter and Boba's existence is a war crime, he hasn't has occasion to interact with them much. He definitely doesn't know the saying.

"Are they red?"

He wants to make sure since he doesn't know what poinsettias are. He's only been to a few planets that have flowers, and never got the chance to look at any for its own sake. There certainly weren't any flowers in the detention center.

"...Pretty deep shade of red."

It would look a little odd to him for its Christmas-y associations, but it was Boba's offering, so. If the kid approved, on the ofrenda it would go. He will support him along the way. Miguel seems not to mind the kid's surliness at all - he's accepted that Lucky is just someone who glares and scowls a lot.

He levels a silent glance at Dan, hoping he will pick up the ball next and show them where the flowers are.

Edited 2023-12-18 17:38 (UTC)

He picks up where Miguel leaves off. Boba's surliness reminds him of his own daughter. She was closed-off, withdrawn, defensive too, but underneath that she was affectionate and funny and clever and creative and lonely. Dan suspects if he invests time and patience in Boba, he might find similar treasures.

"Very red. Poisonous, too, so North keeps them out of reach of the elves because they ain't got the sense God gave a doorknob." Dan says that with the same sort of exasperated warmth he would use for a beloved puppy that chews on shoes or a toddler that throws food at the wall.

He puts his hands in his pockets, figuring he can repurpose some ribbon from elsewhere later, and gestures with his nose towards the doorway. He gives Boba plenty of time to avoid his personal space bubble as he telegraphs that he's going out that direction.

"I got a bunch of it in my room. Pop of color keeps me a little saner during the winter. Makes me forget we're on an iceberg with two hours of sunlight a day."

"I feel too old for blame."

Dan finds anger, even anger directed at himself, exhausting. He's never found it motivating the way some people do. He just finds it a toxic waste of energy, a destructive and useless emotion, and guilt and blame are so adjacent to it as to be included in that judgment. Dan feels regret and responsibility at taking Ellie on missions. He feels regret and responsibility at plenty of things in his life, but he doesn't blame himself, and that seems like a fine and important distinction.

So frequently, Dan thinks of people's mistakes not as emblematic of them as a person, but as the result of their circumstances. Maybe Miguel made mistakes. Maybe they were mistakes from pride or selfishness or greed or fear or any of the other reasons people have to indulge their worst impulses. But more often than not, Dan finds that what defines a mistake is the circumstances surrounding those mistakes, and that the difference between someone's mistake being a foible and being a catastrophe is luck. Just luck.

Miguel just seems like the sort of person whose mistake took place in a context where it went from an error to a tragedy.

Dan starts to set up the balsam with a clamp and vice, preparing to start actually carving. "I already took what I could from my mistakes, which was the lessons and the instructions not to do it again. Anything past that ain't productive."

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