nightlogs | talking to ghosts

Dan laughs. "I'll let my mama know she raised me right."

As if his mother is still part of his life and not one of those ghosts haunting the holidays. He's silent a moment, considering Miguel's suggestion. He compares his balsam plank to a sketch he made of his idea for the puzzle box, then redraws part of his sketch.

"Maybe. Bunny's not around often enough to mind if I bogart the armoire for an ofrenda. I just don't got much to put on it." No photos, no keepsakes. Just flowers and sugar and other offerings that Dan knows in his heart Ellie isn't actually receiving because she isn't still here, not really, not in any capacity. "Reckon I could make something right now for it, though."

He raises an eyebrow and watches Miguel, considering if he thinks that's what Miguel is doing right now with his carved turtles and other members of his wooden menagerie.

"Well, you won't be alone." he says drearily. "The dimension collapsed, and there wasn't time to grab anything."

His voice remains even only because he's had to explain this particular fuck-up of his a dozen times over. It is a performance well-practiced at this point, though he allows himself a vacant stare at the work bench. It felt worse when he didn't have second part of the speech. The part that made it seem less pointless and completely avoidable.

"Whatever can be made now will have to do."

Miguel really wasn't the type to stumble through things. He was rigid and well-prepared and reliable. Most of the time. Right now, an action to latch on to was exactly what he wanted. So of the bunch, he picks the a vaguely bird-shaped piece of wood in a loose cage of talons and mulls over it. This one will be next.

Dan doesn't even pause in his sketching, because he was expecting something like this to come to the surface eventually. People generally don't become workaholics just for the love of their projects. They do it when their home lives have become intolerable or unsurvivable.

"Anything I can do to help you make what you want, you let me know. I know my way around woodworking tools." He figures Miguel already knows that, based on Dan's work station and all the well-made projects. That isn't as far as Dan's willing to go to offer some comfort to Miguel, but it's as far as he thinks Miguel would be receptive to. "Ain't no going home to my dimension either."

Dan and Bunny reworked the timeline, which meant that the deaths that defined Dan's youth didn't happen, but Dan will never see that, never get to go home, never get to be with those loved ones again. The fact that they lived is academic; the visceral memory is of how they died, and that can't be erased just by knowing it was undone. The way their deaths morphed Dan's brain forever, stamped the bloodshed and the gravedigging in like a penny-press, that can't be changed.

But it means that Dan only has to think of one person to make an ofrenda to and not a whole family.

There are details lost in translation: The dimension wasn't originally his, that it was a cowardly attempt to escape an already miserable state of affairs in his home universe. The bizarre surreality of seeing (another version of) himself snuffed out by something utterly mundane. Looking at the body. Lying to Gabriella, even though he loved her more than anything else. Realizing his selfish intervening had been the reason for the collapse. It was his fault. It was all his fault.

His teeth are clenched together as the guilt surges up like a geyser, masseter tensed at the jaw. There is a little copper taste on his tongue from the fangs. He decides he prefers the blood to having any of the words reach his mouth. Dan seemed to understand, but at the same time, seemed impossibly distant.

"I didn't plan anything out." His voice is quiet, like he was admitting something shameful. "I'll have to see what would be best to put together. They deserve to be remembered."

Miguel opens his hand, releasing the wooden birdshape from chitin talons. He turns it around with his fingertips, and gets to work shaving out a very basic wing shape. In TRN-660, Mourning Doves thrived in the parks of Nueva York after they were reintroduced.

"What are the boxes for?" he asks idly.

"Yeah, they do."

Dan doesn't know anything about who Miguel's talking about, but he's firm in that determination. Whomever they were, they deserve to be remembered. They deserve to be preserved as well as Miguel can preserve them, for his sake if nothing else.

He gives Miguel the dignity of not watching him and instead turns his attention to a small box of screws and hinges, deciding on the right one for this type of wood and size and shape of box.

"Gifts. Impersonal gifts for folks. I was going to make you one too."

"Impersonal in my world would be a gift card to a department store." he remarks, finding it strange that he'd call it that. Dan was crafting something handmade. Taking the time to measure and carve everything himself. That inherently made it personal.

Maybe he simply didn't want the giftee to read into it too much.

"You don't have to do that. But... thank you."

It could apply to either offer.

Edited 2023-12-06 15:22 (UTC)

"I'm a rube. Didn't have no gift cards or department stores where I'm from." Dan smiles, but there's something sad about it. It's the weight of the conversation they aren't having, the permeating sorrow they share.

"You're welcome. You got any preferences? Color, size, lining, anything like that?" Dan wonders if Miguel has anything so rustic in his room here at the Pole. Handmade pine boxes seem to clash with the technocratic aesthetic. "Working with my hands keeps me too busy to get down in the dumps over the holidays."

And drinking, which is evident when Dan pulls a bottle of Jack and a glass out of under the work station and pours some for himself.

For a while, he says nothing. He focuses on the task in his hands, internally debating the answer. He catches the whiskey’s scent before he sees it, and if he weren’t mired under a mountain of his own problems, he probably would have said something.

Miguel didn’t have much of anything in his room. All of the things that he cared to lock away were stored in his lab - a growing mass of assembled machinery all related to his research. He considers where he’d even put the box, when half-finished engineering projects were already starting to take up all the free space.

“I’d prefer blue and white.” he says, carving the wing feathers of the dove with three or four simple lines. He steals a glance at Dan, nostalgic and wistful.

“They were the colors of Gabriella’s school team. It was a sky blue.”

Their comparatively mundane life as ordinary people was still a nice thing to remember in pleasant dreams. Even if he had lived it as a half-truth.

This time Dan does pause what he's doing, which is putting his glass back down after taking a drink. He swallows and focuses his gaze on some meaningless whorl on the wood in front of him.

"Was she a Gabby or an Ellie or neither?" He sighs and tries to get back into the groove of marking the wood for carving. "Mine was an Ellie. My daughter."

It's been easier to talk about her these days, but even so, talking about her mostly just means acknowledging she existed at all to other people. He wonders if it's the same way for Miguel, how they danced around this commonality.

"Gabri." Dan was fluent enough to pronounce it right.

Miguel was used to talking about his daughter in abstract terms and replaying old footage, getting lost in the golden days of the past. Saying her name out loud felt like he was invoking a ghost.

He didn't really try to personally comfort his squad, nor indulge his feelings beyond what was needed for the mission. There were other, warmer personalities for that, and it was the way he preferred. Sitting in the dark and thinking about anything else had become a comfortable place.

"If the request brings up bad memories, I can think of something else."

It's all he can think to offer.

"Gabri," Dan repeats, getting it right. "My daughter's full name was Eliora, but she mostly went by Ellie or just El."

Which was an invention of her life with Dan, not her life with her family that predated him by so long. She didn't talk about her life before she met Dan, and he didn't talk about his. They bonded quickly when their lives collided in their shared present and an understanding that they were both running from something, and somewhere along the line she nestled herself into his heart in a way where she could never be fully removed. Somewhere in those years he started thinking of himself not just as her companion but as her guardian, then as her parent.

"You ain't bringing up bad memories. The memories are just there." He stops short of saying they're good memories, because good memories are even more painful than bad ones, he finds. Good memories are taunts. To him, when someone dies, their memory becomes an inverted photo, a negative, all the highlights turned into deep crevices to get lost in. "And it's been a few years."

It's not that that's a lie, technically, but to Dan it doesn't feel like it's been that long. Sometimes his grief sneaks up on him so quickly and furiously that he feels like he lost her just minutes ago, like he's still in shock, like he's waking up from dreaming the last few years only to find himself back at the moment she died.

The memories are just there. For whatever reason, that seems to sit with him.

"It's reaching about a year since the collapse." he admits. "Give or take."

His life as Gabri's father felt so distant compared to the hole he'd plunged himself into. Months of spiraling and winding tighter and tighter, shouldering the impossible, until he finally snapped. Until all he could see was red, and he nearly did something he couldn't take back. And then he ended up here.

Idly, Miguel wonders what Sims would call all this on the journey of processing loss. He refused to sit in his cohort's office for more than a few minutes to know for sure. Sharing this much with Dan was already veering into uncharted waters.

"Did it get any better after more time?"

It was only human to want to know.

“Yes and no.” He takes another drink. Dan’s dishonest by nature, but it feels cruel to lie about something like this. “I fell apart pretty bad in the immediate aftermath, couldn’t function at all for months, danger to myself and others, in and out of jail, that kind of thing, so I reckon it ain’t as bad as that anymore, at least. I’m coexisting with it.”

He goes back to scratching marks in the wood. He isn’t at peace with it. He thinks he never will be. He thinks losing a child is something impossible to ever be at peace with.

This is more than he’s said to anyone, really, even Bunny. Bunny lost like this too, but millennia before he and Dan met. Miguel seems the same tightly-wound ball curled around his grief, as if to loosen his grip would be to let the memory slip out and away, that Dan so identifies with.

“A year is really recent. Too recent. Is this the first Day of the Dead since?”

From that rather honest description, Miguel finds himself perplexed by the contradictions of Dan's kindness and the less flattering patchwork picture he was getting of his self-destructive habits. He's unsure if he should just accept it or judge the flaws more harshly. 'Danger to others' means there was a victim involved.

Still, there was an odd sort of kinship he was feeling with Dan. Miguel decides that today wasn't the day to push the other point.

"Yes." he answers back. "I was desperate to find out what caused the dimension to destabilize after it happened. Once we got our answer, preventing a repeat incident is what took up the bulk of the time. Holding things together."

A cold frustration makes his expression sink, because that obsession was always there, lurking. The smooth wooden facets of the carving are nicked by claws.

"It was the closest thing that felt like coexisting, if you can call it that."

The first one's always hard. It's so hard that Dan feels like his mental picture of Miguel takes on a starker shading, higher contrast, deeper darks. Dan's first Christmas without Ellie came so soon after her death that it barely registered, and that seems to be the only blessing of it. It got lost, like most things from that time period, in a blur of substance abuse and everything that came with that.

"There's a reason they call folks 'workaholics.' The job's medicine, same as anything else. Especially the life-saving hero sort of work."

Or atoner work. Dan isn't seeking a way to balance the scales, but, as he glances at Miguel's claws as he hears the nik of keratin on wood, he's starting to circle around the idea that maybe Miguel is and has some means to feel guilt along with the grief. Dan just knows he got his kid killed and can never get her back; any good he does in this life, and he does a lot, is a completely separate matter that can't change that.

"That sounds about right, it being enough to coexist. How are you holding up with a different work project than the one you had?" Dan wonders if a project that isn't so directly related to the thing that stole Gabri away engenders the same obsession.

“I ripped up a store sign out of frustration when I first got here.”

He rubs his forehead, not sounding particularly proud of that. But Dan sharing his imperfect qualities has a way of enticing a little honesty the other way.

“It was a bad time to get brought over. I was trying to catch this kid. Not a bad kid, just about to do something stupid that could upend his world.”

Despite everything, he didn’t hate Miles. Not really. He’d just gotten so enraged that the kid was going to get people killed and based on what? A hunch? Teenage bravado? It was completely inexcusable to him.

Just thinking about how things might be progressing back home does bad things to his blood pressure.

“There is nothing that can be done about that now. I’m who-knows-how-many universes away.” He says grimly. “All I can do is work on getting back and fighting the threat here. Kuk would’ve eventually become my problem one way or another.”

So, he hadn’t really abandoned his obsession. Just sublimated it with the work he was doing here.

"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."

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