Room 412, the Arms Hotel, Friday Evening
Sep. 29th, 2023 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
suitably_heroicFor months, the Temple had been-- outside of Atton's usual rounds. He had wanted to put some distance between himself and that place, between himself and everything that it meant for him, his life, his place in the world. Mical had remained an occasional voice on the comm, left on read more out of habit than the genuine resentment that had once colored their friendship– he could call it that now– for so many years.
Yet now a little piece of the Temple had come here. Sitting in one of the comically-large chairs in Atton's hotel room, that genuine earnest interest in his eyes that had always wound Atton up something rotten. And yet: with the first sign of crow’s feet at the edges of his eyes, the weight of the position of Grand Master resting visibly on his shoulders.
Was it the first sign? Or had two years of therapy finally scrubbed some of the scales from Atton's eyes?
He felt tired, as he often felt tired, as he had started to feel tired more and more often even before everything blew up on him and left him spinning in the wind.
Nowadays, he knew where the tired came from. That had changed much.
“We miss you at the Temple,” Mical said.
See. That was just too tempting, like a red flag on the stubborn terentatek of Atton’s sarcasm. Atton chose to indulge it only as a slight laugh, a sag into his chair. “I’m sure you do,” he said. “But I can’t be there right now. I have to be here.”
“So you’ve said,” Mical said. “Therapist's orders, was it?”
“Yeah,” Atton said. “Except he doesn’t really give orders. He just gives me suggestions and then lets me tire myself out objecting to them until I realize he’s got a point. It’s annoying.”
A laugh from Mical, this time. Or maybe 'laugh' was too big of a word: a chuckle. “Perhaps I should see if he teaches classes. It sounds like a deeply useful technique.”
Atton huffed. “Not sure you’d be good at it. You have to learn how to keep a straight face,” he said. “Anyway. It was a good idea. I do need to be here. Maybe not for the reasons I initially thought, but…” He waved an idle hand, as if to say it didn’t matter.
“I know better than to ask you to tell me about it,” Mical said, “But if you ever wished to share–”
“I’ll share.” Atton surprised himself more with the softness than with the swiftness. “I get defensive. I know. I’m trying to work on it.” And aw, poodoo, was Mical giving him cow eyes? “Don’t give me that look, you’re making it real hard on me, okay? Just stop. Pull a pillowcase over your head or something if you can’t stop gawping.”
Mical sighed. “I can stop gawping.”
“Sure.”
Every old muscle in Atton’s body wanted to protest, look down, and let the shitty jokes rip. ‘I have decades of backed-up bullshit in me’, he’d told his therapist, ‘and I can’t seem to stop flushing more of it down my system’.
You’re going to have to, he’d said. ‘I can’t’, Atton had told him. Well, you’re going to have to, and I can either help you learn, or you can spend the next twenty years of your life feeling bad about it. It’s your call.
He rubbed his forehead. Yanked his metaphorical fingers away from the chain.
“I thought I had to come back here because one of the worst things that ever happened to me happened here,” he said. “And that was rough, and looking it in the eye wasn’t great, but I managed.”
He had the diagnosis now to back him up. It had helped put some things in perspective, let him take the space that he'd needed. Didn't want to talk about it, though. Least of all to Mical.
No one needed to know about the hissy fit Atton had thrown at the time because he didn’t like being explicable, didn’t like this person he’d told things to he hadn’t told anybody looking him in the eye and saying things like, your resistance to deepening relationships makes sense within the context of–.
“But then I realized that, uh, actually, the bad stuff started before it went down. That maybe, in some ways, the bad thing was, uh, good, because at least it meant everything was quiet for a while. Because everything hadn’t been.”
Because his ‘dissociative episode’ had likely been building for months before Sparkle disappeared on him. Because apparently he hadn’t felt safe in his own body since he was 17 years old, no matter how hard he trained and how many fighting styles he picked up, and the amount of triggers surrounding what small safe space he’d eked out for himself at Fandom were considerable, and–
Well. ‘Dissociative episode’ was a term that was in his life now.
…
‘Dissociative episodes’.
Mical made an inquisitive noise.
Atton considered just shoving the whole pillow down his throat.
“I’ve never been good at sticking with one thing. I’ve always tried to leave before it could leave me,” he said. “But I was starting to believe that maybe, just maybe, this time around... Well, if maybe I didn’t ditch everything and just stayed where I was, then the future waiting for me at the end of the line was something I could live with. That maybe it’d be okay. And I didn’t realize that while I was working my way up to accepting that, the people around me got sick of waiting on me to get there.”
He tapped his fingers against the arm of the chair. “Not consciously, I mean. But things started changing around me and I wasn’t ready. The future I was working myself up to accepting was suddenly no longer on the table. For about a year I felt like I was struggling to keep up and when I finally realized what was going on it felt like it was too late to do anything about it.” He looked at the window. “Then everything stopped, and I was devastated, but I was also relieved. I’m used to losing everything in one solid swing. It was familiar, you know?”
Mical nodded slowly. “Instead you had felt as if everything had slipped out of your fingers very slowly, yet you were helpless to do anything about it.”
Space, Atton really wanted to take a swing at him. Just for old time’s sake. To indulge every cell in him screaming for him to get out of this conversation before he let too much of himself show. “What I realized at the end of this summer is that I hadn’t dealt with everything that came right before the swing,” he said. “That fear. That helplessness. The realization that I’d had a crack at something happy for years and didn’t take it. And not just because I felt obligated to people too dead to care about it, not just because I don't know how to be a person instead of an instrument, but because I can’t let me have nice things. So if I ever want to have nice things, I have to come to terms with what happens when I don’t let myself.”
“You know you’re always welcome at the Temple,” Mical said gently. “We really do miss you.”
Atton snorted. “I’m not sure throwing myself right back into trouble is the best way to–”
“I don’t mean as a field agent,” Mical replied. “You were always a good leader, Atton. I have seen it every single time you found yourself in charge of any team. But when a conflict or an issue came to an end, when the quiet set in, I would watch you and see this same mechanism drive you away from it, back into a solitary existence. And it is such a shame. We have plenty of young Knights working in the field now, but we have precious few elders willing to lead.”
Elders. Funny, Atton felt both very old and very young at the same time at the best of times. He allowed a single crack to roll out of him– “Elder? Oh, thanks.” –and sat up. “...But maybe.”
“Maybe?” Mical said. Funny: he apparently hadn’t lost his ability to sound like a hopeful child.
“I have to think about it,” he said. “You’re not the only one who’s put in an offer, you know.”
And honestly... honestly, it was tempting. The same way going back to war every month had seemed tempting after he lost Meetra. But he'd been talking to his therapist about that, too, and his therapist had floated the idea that... well.
That maybe even when he thought he was picking up the fight for the right reasons, he wasn't. Not really. Maybe something like Si's offer, the Imperial Knights, would be less terrible, less self-...
...
Mical wasn’t the only one whose crow’s feet showed these days, metaphorical or otherwise. Are you happy, he’d asked Si. Happy’s complicated. I’m all right, she’d said.
And for the first time he’d thought that maybe he was the lucky one, because he had never rooted himself so deeply that he couldn’t leave, couldn’t escape, if he ever decided to. (He wouldn’t leave her, though, even if he cut off everything and everyone else. Not after everything. Maybe he was starting to realize he’d taken her for granted, and that she deserved whatever smiles he could reasonably summon to her face.)
“The only thing I know is, I can’t go back to spending my life aimlessly hanging around this island, doing a little of deadly, a little of domestic,” he said. “I have to figure out what life is going to make me happy and go for it, because if I don’t this will just keep going, and I’m going to be cranky and miserable and sad and tired for the rest of my life.”
“I had started to assume that might be what makes you happy,” Mical admitted, with soft, attempted humor. “Being miserable at the rest of us.”
“It’s not,” Atton said, and space, did he sound tired. “It’s just always been easier.” He settled his hand down on his jumping knee, and added: “I am a deserter, after all.”
“I’ve seen you struggling for years not to be,” Mical’s eyes had certainly gotten older, hadn’t they? “Thank you for sharing all this. I know it hasn’t been easy.”
Oh, for– Atton’s eyes rolled towards the ceiling. “Stop making me regret it.”
“Sorry,” Mical said earnestly.
“Don’t be. I just–” Atton sighed. “My friend Dane says this song called ‘I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer’ is my friendship soundtrack. He might be on to something.”
“He might,” Mical agreed. “How are your new friends?”
“Fine,” Atton said. “Jill doesn't hate me as much as she used to. Trent's between jobs and won't stop bugging me for vid tips. And Dane wants us to be a ‘real band’, quote-unquote, writing our own songs.”
“But you don’t?”
“I’m happiest singing other people’s tunes,” Atton said. “I always have been.” It was easier, at least. (The way cobbling together some other guy to be when things got too painful was easier, he thought, and then tried to dispel the thought, and found that he couldn’t, and instead thought about instruments again, about how at 39 he was facing the daunting task of learning how to actually be present in his own skin.)
Mical eyed him thoughtfully. “Perhaps that is another one of those deeply-held beliefs that might need challenging,” he said. “I’d be happy to come listen, one of these days.”
That laugh was ugly, and freeing, and got somewhere less ugly somewhere along the line and Atton wasn’t sure where.
“What?” Mical said, frowning.
“Just picturing you in a mosh pit,” Atton said. “It’s funny.”
“I’m not going to ask.”
“Aw, look. You’re learning.” Those crow’s feet really had taken root, hadn’t they? He examined Mical’s face within the span of this brief silence. It wasn’t quite comfortable. Thoughtful, though. Maybe. “How’s Temple business, anyway?”
And oh, hey. He recognized that flicker in Mical’s eyes. The start of a lie, covering up something else. Something deeper. Something tired. “It’s complicated, but it’s all right.”
Atton really didn't know whether he preferred this, or the days he could ignore all that, rag on Mical. Go home, snark about him, crack open a drink, sink down in front of the TV and ignore the depression-divot in the living room.
But it didn't really matter what he preferred. It was a time for new patterns, fresh choices.
He got up.
“Never mind,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I’m tired of sitting around like we’re having a miniature Council meeting or something.”
It really was funny. Atton had always thought of himself as an observant guy, and yet for years he’d put everything that he didn’t really want to know over there, in that pile, so at least he wouldn’t have to deal with it. All those details about himself, about the few friends he had, and even about Mical, who had almost single-handedly carried the rebirth of the Order on his back for so long.
He’d been giving it all space, lately. To breathe, to settle, to be dealt with, if it wasn't too late, if they could still be dealt with. And this once, he gave that same space to his old rival, as they walked quietly into the night; two men far too old for the faces they carried, one in black and one in tan, wrapped in the tattered remains of Meetra Surik’s strange, broken legacy.
[[ establishy. TW for talk of various mental health issues related to trauma under the cut ]]
Yet now a little piece of the Temple had come here. Sitting in one of the comically-large chairs in Atton's hotel room, that genuine earnest interest in his eyes that had always wound Atton up something rotten. And yet: with the first sign of crow’s feet at the edges of his eyes, the weight of the position of Grand Master resting visibly on his shoulders.
Was it the first sign? Or had two years of therapy finally scrubbed some of the scales from Atton's eyes?
He felt tired, as he often felt tired, as he had started to feel tired more and more often even before everything blew up on him and left him spinning in the wind.
Nowadays, he knew where the tired came from. That had changed much.
“We miss you at the Temple,” Mical said.
See. That was just too tempting, like a red flag on the stubborn terentatek of Atton’s sarcasm. Atton chose to indulge it only as a slight laugh, a sag into his chair. “I’m sure you do,” he said. “But I can’t be there right now. I have to be here.”
“So you’ve said,” Mical said. “Therapist's orders, was it?”
“Yeah,” Atton said. “Except he doesn’t really give orders. He just gives me suggestions and then lets me tire myself out objecting to them until I realize he’s got a point. It’s annoying.”
A laugh from Mical, this time. Or maybe 'laugh' was too big of a word: a chuckle. “Perhaps I should see if he teaches classes. It sounds like a deeply useful technique.”
Atton huffed. “Not sure you’d be good at it. You have to learn how to keep a straight face,” he said. “Anyway. It was a good idea. I do need to be here. Maybe not for the reasons I initially thought, but…” He waved an idle hand, as if to say it didn’t matter.
“I know better than to ask you to tell me about it,” Mical said, “But if you ever wished to share–”
“I’ll share.” Atton surprised himself more with the softness than with the swiftness. “I get defensive. I know. I’m trying to work on it.” And aw, poodoo, was Mical giving him cow eyes? “Don’t give me that look, you’re making it real hard on me, okay? Just stop. Pull a pillowcase over your head or something if you can’t stop gawping.”
Mical sighed. “I can stop gawping.”
“Sure.”
Every old muscle in Atton’s body wanted to protest, look down, and let the shitty jokes rip. ‘I have decades of backed-up bullshit in me’, he’d told his therapist, ‘and I can’t seem to stop flushing more of it down my system’.
You’re going to have to, he’d said. ‘I can’t’, Atton had told him. Well, you’re going to have to, and I can either help you learn, or you can spend the next twenty years of your life feeling bad about it. It’s your call.
He rubbed his forehead. Yanked his metaphorical fingers away from the chain.
“I thought I had to come back here because one of the worst things that ever happened to me happened here,” he said. “And that was rough, and looking it in the eye wasn’t great, but I managed.”
He had the diagnosis now to back him up. It had helped put some things in perspective, let him take the space that he'd needed. Didn't want to talk about it, though. Least of all to Mical.
No one needed to know about the hissy fit Atton had thrown at the time because he didn’t like being explicable, didn’t like this person he’d told things to he hadn’t told anybody looking him in the eye and saying things like, your resistance to deepening relationships makes sense within the context of–.
“But then I realized that, uh, actually, the bad stuff started before it went down. That maybe, in some ways, the bad thing was, uh, good, because at least it meant everything was quiet for a while. Because everything hadn’t been.”
Because his ‘dissociative episode’ had likely been building for months before Sparkle disappeared on him. Because apparently he hadn’t felt safe in his own body since he was 17 years old, no matter how hard he trained and how many fighting styles he picked up, and the amount of triggers surrounding what small safe space he’d eked out for himself at Fandom were considerable, and–
Well. ‘Dissociative episode’ was a term that was in his life now.
…
‘Dissociative episodes’.
Mical made an inquisitive noise.
Atton considered just shoving the whole pillow down his throat.
“I’ve never been good at sticking with one thing. I’ve always tried to leave before it could leave me,” he said. “But I was starting to believe that maybe, just maybe, this time around... Well, if maybe I didn’t ditch everything and just stayed where I was, then the future waiting for me at the end of the line was something I could live with. That maybe it’d be okay. And I didn’t realize that while I was working my way up to accepting that, the people around me got sick of waiting on me to get there.”
He tapped his fingers against the arm of the chair. “Not consciously, I mean. But things started changing around me and I wasn’t ready. The future I was working myself up to accepting was suddenly no longer on the table. For about a year I felt like I was struggling to keep up and when I finally realized what was going on it felt like it was too late to do anything about it.” He looked at the window. “Then everything stopped, and I was devastated, but I was also relieved. I’m used to losing everything in one solid swing. It was familiar, you know?”
Mical nodded slowly. “Instead you had felt as if everything had slipped out of your fingers very slowly, yet you were helpless to do anything about it.”
Space, Atton really wanted to take a swing at him. Just for old time’s sake. To indulge every cell in him screaming for him to get out of this conversation before he let too much of himself show. “What I realized at the end of this summer is that I hadn’t dealt with everything that came right before the swing,” he said. “That fear. That helplessness. The realization that I’d had a crack at something happy for years and didn’t take it. And not just because I felt obligated to people too dead to care about it, not just because I don't know how to be a person instead of an instrument, but because I can’t let me have nice things. So if I ever want to have nice things, I have to come to terms with what happens when I don’t let myself.”
“You know you’re always welcome at the Temple,” Mical said gently. “We really do miss you.”
Atton snorted. “I’m not sure throwing myself right back into trouble is the best way to–”
“I don’t mean as a field agent,” Mical replied. “You were always a good leader, Atton. I have seen it every single time you found yourself in charge of any team. But when a conflict or an issue came to an end, when the quiet set in, I would watch you and see this same mechanism drive you away from it, back into a solitary existence. And it is such a shame. We have plenty of young Knights working in the field now, but we have precious few elders willing to lead.”
Elders. Funny, Atton felt both very old and very young at the same time at the best of times. He allowed a single crack to roll out of him– “Elder? Oh, thanks.” –and sat up. “...But maybe.”
“Maybe?” Mical said. Funny: he apparently hadn’t lost his ability to sound like a hopeful child.
“I have to think about it,” he said. “You’re not the only one who’s put in an offer, you know.”
And honestly... honestly, it was tempting. The same way going back to war every month had seemed tempting after he lost Meetra. But he'd been talking to his therapist about that, too, and his therapist had floated the idea that... well.
That maybe even when he thought he was picking up the fight for the right reasons, he wasn't. Not really. Maybe something like Si's offer, the Imperial Knights, would be less terrible, less self-...
...
Mical wasn’t the only one whose crow’s feet showed these days, metaphorical or otherwise. Are you happy, he’d asked Si. Happy’s complicated. I’m all right, she’d said.
And for the first time he’d thought that maybe he was the lucky one, because he had never rooted himself so deeply that he couldn’t leave, couldn’t escape, if he ever decided to. (He wouldn’t leave her, though, even if he cut off everything and everyone else. Not after everything. Maybe he was starting to realize he’d taken her for granted, and that she deserved whatever smiles he could reasonably summon to her face.)
“The only thing I know is, I can’t go back to spending my life aimlessly hanging around this island, doing a little of deadly, a little of domestic,” he said. “I have to figure out what life is going to make me happy and go for it, because if I don’t this will just keep going, and I’m going to be cranky and miserable and sad and tired for the rest of my life.”
“I had started to assume that might be what makes you happy,” Mical admitted, with soft, attempted humor. “Being miserable at the rest of us.”
“It’s not,” Atton said, and space, did he sound tired. “It’s just always been easier.” He settled his hand down on his jumping knee, and added: “I am a deserter, after all.”
“I’ve seen you struggling for years not to be,” Mical’s eyes had certainly gotten older, hadn’t they? “Thank you for sharing all this. I know it hasn’t been easy.”
Oh, for– Atton’s eyes rolled towards the ceiling. “Stop making me regret it.”
“Sorry,” Mical said earnestly.
“Don’t be. I just–” Atton sighed. “My friend Dane says this song called ‘I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer’ is my friendship soundtrack. He might be on to something.”
“He might,” Mical agreed. “How are your new friends?”
“Fine,” Atton said. “Jill doesn't hate me as much as she used to. Trent's between jobs and won't stop bugging me for vid tips. And Dane wants us to be a ‘real band’, quote-unquote, writing our own songs.”
“But you don’t?”
“I’m happiest singing other people’s tunes,” Atton said. “I always have been.” It was easier, at least. (The way cobbling together some other guy to be when things got too painful was easier, he thought, and then tried to dispel the thought, and found that he couldn’t, and instead thought about instruments again, about how at 39 he was facing the daunting task of learning how to actually be present in his own skin.)
Mical eyed him thoughtfully. “Perhaps that is another one of those deeply-held beliefs that might need challenging,” he said. “I’d be happy to come listen, one of these days.”
That laugh was ugly, and freeing, and got somewhere less ugly somewhere along the line and Atton wasn’t sure where.
“What?” Mical said, frowning.
“Just picturing you in a mosh pit,” Atton said. “It’s funny.”
“I’m not going to ask.”
“Aw, look. You’re learning.” Those crow’s feet really had taken root, hadn’t they? He examined Mical’s face within the span of this brief silence. It wasn’t quite comfortable. Thoughtful, though. Maybe. “How’s Temple business, anyway?”
And oh, hey. He recognized that flicker in Mical’s eyes. The start of a lie, covering up something else. Something deeper. Something tired. “It’s complicated, but it’s all right.”
Atton really didn't know whether he preferred this, or the days he could ignore all that, rag on Mical. Go home, snark about him, crack open a drink, sink down in front of the TV and ignore the depression-divot in the living room.
But it didn't really matter what he preferred. It was a time for new patterns, fresh choices.
He got up.
“Never mind,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. I’m tired of sitting around like we’re having a miniature Council meeting or something.”
It really was funny. Atton had always thought of himself as an observant guy, and yet for years he’d put everything that he didn’t really want to know over there, in that pile, so at least he wouldn’t have to deal with it. All those details about himself, about the few friends he had, and even about Mical, who had almost single-handedly carried the rebirth of the Order on his back for so long.
He’d been giving it all space, lately. To breathe, to settle, to be dealt with, if it wasn't too late, if they could still be dealt with. And this once, he gave that same space to his old rival, as they walked quietly into the night; two men far too old for the faces they carried, one in black and one in tan, wrapped in the tattered remains of Meetra Surik’s strange, broken legacy.
[[ establishy. TW for talk of various mental health issues related to trauma under the cut ]]
