nightlogs | talking to ghosts

"A store sign? Well, I'll be. Straight to the penitentiary with you." Dan's chuckle is gentle. He pulls out a carving tool and starts to commit to certain angles by adding grooves to the marks he's made with chalk as a guide. He's certain Miguel's done worse than ruin some property, but he isn't about to force Miguel to share more.

Dan was lucky. He got picked up for the Rig when he had absolutely nothing worth staying in his universe for and didn't know there were other options to start fresh, and he's been paired with Bunny ever since, the only thing he cares about taking with him universe to universe.

He gets a little more serious as Miguel explains a little more and then downplays his ongoing commitment, determination. "I guess that solicits the question of if the folks here are doing a good job supporting your work to get home, if this kid's so badly in need of stopping."

"Of course not." The answer comes out sharp and a little cruel. "What I need is a call to get through to Lyla and a portal back to my headquarters. But it's not like I can blame Jack or Phil for that."

Phil had too much of a reliable personality to lash out at. And Jack's carefree nature could be irritating, but he had a mountain of responsibility on his shoulders and Miguel of all people could respect him for that. So all that was left was to be pissed off at the situation and find some way to channel that into something productive.

"Not that sitting around is being of much use against Kuk."

He sighs, setting the dove down next to the others. His mood had plummeted so sharply with the change in season that it was an obvious choice not to have him attempt delicate diplomacy. He could always fight, of course. His body was completely whole, and his ability to flip cars at deserving parties hadn't been diminished that much. But that was more a bandaid than addressing the problem.

He wasn't sure how to do the latter.

Dan hears the sharpness, the almost-desire to wound, and he lets it slide by. He isn't taking it personally. Miguel isn't the first person to take out their frustration and anger on Dan, and certainly not the worst.

"A little sitting around is necessary. That's why they call it clearing your head. Getting some air." Dan makes a slightly frustrated noise and opens the work station drawer to pull out some reading glasses, although he doesn't use them for that. He just wants to be more precise in his sketch for this box. "Sleeping on it and coming back fresh."

It's easier for Dan to internalize since he doesn't have one big cause he's working towards, only cases patchworked together to fill the days.

His sigh evolves into a tired groan when he gets no bite back. Once again, Dan is far too polite. He leans forward, the table creaking a little from the extra weight slumped onto its other corner. The pretense of being busy is given up when he turns his head to watch pencil marks get drawn on paper. Red eyes fix on the pencil tip, like he was tracking a darty little prey creature.

"The mind doesn't feel any fresher than it did yesterday." he admits, the vocal spines deflating. "Or the day before that."

Or the day before, or the day before, going back to his arrival and the realization that he was ripped from something so urgent. Well, okay, he did feel a little calmer since his arrival. He hasn't done any significant property damage to the Pole. But the lurking emotion was always there, no matter how busy he made himself.

"I'm not sure how to fix this."

The admission feels particularly pathetic out loud.

"When I find that out, you'll be the first to know."

Dan doodles some cross-hatching along the side of one of the edges of the sketched box, to clarify to himself the sort of bevel he wants to give it. He hates that he isn't able to actually give Miguel any sort of advice or encouragement; he would have thought that at least, after somehow pulling himself a little further in time from the awful sort of tragedy they share, that he'd have something to offer. A consolation prize.

He spent a long time defiant in the face of losing Ellie, thinking how he didn't want to learn anything from her death, didn't want a single good thing to come from it because he thought that if he let his grief feel like anything besides a black hole it would somehow be sullying her memory. He felt he had to feed himself to that black hole again and again, and it's become muscle memory, the only thing he knows how to do when he notices it there in his chest.

Now he wishes he could take something out from that black hole and offer it to Miguel and yet instead, here, thinking of her, he finds himself getting sucked back into it. Feeding himself back to his own grief again and again.

"I got another glass if you drink whiskey," he says, pouring himself more.

"It's too early for a drink." he says, brows knit but voice weary and sympathetic. He disapproves, of course, but it's not like he doesn't understand the temptation to want to numb everything.

Perhaps it's to be expected, but he had his reasons to be so straight-laced. Structure and rules were the only things that made sense when the rest of the world was chaotic. It was the only way he kept going. Miguel is softened by his own grief, though, and he doesn't keep up the dour expression for very long. The creases on his face ease over as he begins to mull over what to do now. No easy answers lie ahead for them. He's never felt more lost.

"You haven't said much about Ellie." he says. "What would you make for her?"

That's where the conversation began, after all. Remembering them.

"Ain't never too early for a drink where I'm from." Dan screws the cap back on the bottle, but he puts it away next to his ankle, not back in the drawer. If they continue this round of conversation, he'll end up drinking until a few hours from now he's napping it off in the Pole bedroom all day.

He doesn't answer for a moment. There's so much to say about Ellie, so much he tries to just not think about each day because then he feels so overwhelmed with how much he doesn't have in his life anymore, how much she took away from it.

"She was eleven. She came on cases with me. I was stupid to let her but she threatened to get in worse trouble if I left her alone and I didn't have the spine to call her bluff."

And Dan will never forgive himself for that. He'll never forgive himself for any of the times he left her alone because he was drunk or in jail or hooking up with a stranger, either, even with the clarity of knowing the two of them were barely scraping by, that he was the only person capable of parenting her at all.

"She liked darkness and creepy things. She loved animals more than people. She was smart and witty and curious about the world. She wasn't, you know, mine by blood. But she called me Dad when she was trying to be sweet or get me to do things for her." And he took that title with honor.

"Well, it's hard to be stern when they insist."

He says it in an attempt at levity, but ends up just sounding atypically tender. Miguel seems to sink as he lets the silence drag. Although he had asked first, it was a struggle to unscrew his own figurative bottle to meet Dan where he is.

"Gabriella was... similar. She was from a different world." he begins. "Her real father was an alternate of mine. No powers or anything. They lived a much different life."

That short-lived version of him seemed happier with his life than he'd ever be.

"He was killed in a robbery, so I took care of her in his stead. I was hoping to explain all that when she was a little older, but I have a feeling that she could already tell. She had a sharp eye."

There would be natural differences between her parent and the man-shaped monster he felt like after the metamorphosis. He'd worked so hard to conceal it all then. Try to leave as little a trace of a disruption in the girl's life as he could.

"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."

"...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."

"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."

"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."

"You're not that old."

One of the many similarities between them was age, he's pretty sure. His flavor of healing factor has a notable lagging effect, but it didn't delete its external traces. He found a little comforting humanity in that.

He could say more here: that he had unfinished business, that he wasn't satisfied with just himself knowing better, when there were others that could repeat his mistake. That it simply felt inadequate to just continue to live his life when so many countless others had lost theirs because of him. That exerting that control to make things right is the only thing that felt close to atoning. It was messy and complicated.

He mulls it over with his eyes closed.

"I took my lessons, Dan. But that doesn't erase holding myself accountable. It won't undo the past, but the least I can do is put in the effort to prevent it in the future."

Great power, and all that. The anger and guilt was a fuel tank - or he was trying to convince himself it was. Take all the hurtful feelings and turn it into something for a greater purpose. At least it wouldn't all be meaningless, then.

"I just turned forty, but honestly, I been too old to hold onto anger since I was seventeen."

He sets his tools down for a second. It's important that he be clear about this. Sometimes Dan's permissiveness gets confused for irresponsibility or being undisciplined when, in fact, it's hard-earned and considered, just unorthodox.

"I ain't talking about a lack of accountability or about not doing better in the future. I'm talking about how I don't get no benefit from blame and shame and remorse. It's paralyzing. It's selfish, even, spending all that capacity beating myself up."

He doesn't say 'beating yourself up' because it's not his job to judge or diagnose or even proselytize to Miguel.

"We all make shitty decisions every day, even when we try not to. We got flaws and imperfect knowledge and temptation and weakness. Even saints do. But some of us make mistakes and blow up our lives and the lives of folks around us, and some of us make mistakes and get away with it, so to me, in the absence of malice, I want to work on making a world that's forgiving enough that mistakes don't turn into tragedies. Better circumstances. Better options. Less fallout."

He sighs and gets back to lining up his balsam. "I'm just too old to spend my life trying to get folks to act perfect when they can't never will. Myself included."

“I can’t fault you for having noble goals.” He says it morosely. Miguel has had similar discussions a dozen times over with other Spiders with delusions of going against the flow of fate, and it never ends well.

“There are some things that just worsen the more you fight against the current. Sometimes the best option is damage control, and having the will to come to terms with that. How I personally feel about it really doesn’t matter, either way.”

And that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Erasing imperfections. Maintaining the web, preserving the flow of the canon as best as he could. In the end, it was just patching up what was already there, and the hope for actually improving things had all but extinguished. How could he even think to toy with that when the stakes were so high?

Along with the guilt, the blame, and the anger, the sense of resignation had all concocted a noxious cocktail of misery that floated him from day to day.

He sits there, expression blank, feeling it all wash over him unpleasantly. Where was he going with this, anyway?

“It’s not how I wish things worked, but it’s how they are.”

Edited 2023-12-20 05:30 (UTC)

"I ain't talking about method."

He thinks that's where he and Miguel are talking past one another. Dan's not making any sort of statement about whether Miguel's right or wrong about however he's managing all this technology and dimension-hopping or any of that. He doesn't understand it enough to say anything meaningful about it.

He's speaking of just how to process and interpret what is, and how he does it.

"I'm just talking about how I let go of anger, now that I know it don't help me none. Once I get the hang of letting go of sadness and fear, I'll be set for life."

His attention flicks from the ambivalent empty space ahead back to Dan. The eyeshine adds extra force to the motion - it could either be like a sunset or the harsh glare of a laser scope with a waiting trigger. He might have found something caustic to respond with at the indirect advice floating there in between them, if he had more energy.

His empathy and ground-down tiredness win in the moment. He takes time to digest the words, at least, rather than having them bounce off. Dan was incredibly thoughtful and patient. Miguel didn't resent him for it, but he was unused to it.

"You've figured that out, at least." he says. "I think we might just be wired differently."

He can't imagine a future for himself where he just lets it go. Ever. And maybe that just makes him a worse person in that regard.

Dan appreciates that Miguel takes the time to listen instead of immediately shooting him down. He can't speculate as to what it was that compelled Miguel to give him that open-mindedness, but he appreciates it, as he pretends not to notice Miguel's gaze by getting his detail glasses out of his workstation to protect his eyes.

He hears the opportunity to gracefully exit the hard part of the conversation and takes that off-ramp.

"I been told I'm wired different than a lot of people, so that wouldn't might surprise me." He slips his glasses on, then tries to slowly nudge the mood towards a bit of tired humor. "I'm one in a trillion."

Perhaps his most frustrating quality were those glimpses of being reachable before he shuts himself off. For now, at least, Miguel was receptive. He could blame the emotional vulnerability on the season, how much he and Dan turned out to share in common, or all the work that was done to crack that door open at all in this entire conversation. But it was a lot of consideration he'd put off.

"You're certainly something." he says, lighter and a little less gloomy. "Even if I don't agree with all of it."

There is a little room for unexpected things from unexpected sources. That was also part of the dimension-hopping.

"Do you want help with the boxes?"

He figures he may as well offer. Engineering was closer to what he usually did, compared to the more free-flowing carvings.

"You don't got to. That's the beauty of it." Dan wishes more people were on the same page as him. He gets lonely sometimes, thinking of himself as someone on the far end of an extreme with so few people in sight. Without the family that raised him up with these values, he's alone. But he does appreciate a diversity of viewpoints, and he's made his peace with his pacifism being an outlier.

He isn't surprised Miguel finds some of it objectionable. He's just pleasantly surprised that Miguel finds the grace to agree to disagree with Dan in such a gentle way.

"I might could use some assistance, yeah. You got as good a mind for engineering with mechanics as you do technology? I might could benefit from someone double-checking my design for the lock mechanism to make sure I ain't about to make a labor-intensive paperweight."

talking to ghosts

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