14. marmoreal

[exnihilo]

[Private to Iris and Simon, text]

thank you for trying


[Private to Mal, text]

What happened to you?

[After you saw me.]


[Private to Luna, voice]

Do you like pancakes?


[Spam for Mickey, Helena, Cassel, and Stephen]

[Sometime in the night, she breaks into their cabins, quietly. She just wants to watch for a while. Just wants to see that they're okay. If they wake, they might find her perched nearby, scribbling in a notebook. Or maybe just staring, small and still, chin on her knees.]

Comments

[exnihilo]

[She turns the book, holds up the page for him. It's not words. It's a series of sketches of him the largest maybe two inches across, not separated neatly by panel but sliding into each other, curling and spiraling around the page, odd spare patches of space filled with a close-up of his face, or his fingers, or his ankle. Some of the sketches are just a lump and the swish-drape of blankets and a scrawl of black hair. But they're all neatly rendered, moment-to-moment as he tossed around, a deeper message to some potentially amnesiac future self, something beyond what he looked like in the dark, that says: this is worth looking at, paying attention to. Even doing nothing, even obscured from view. Notice.]

[patheticvillain]

[Sitting up a little straighter in the bed, he squints at the pictures.]

That's really cool. And deeply creepy. You know that, right?

[It's said in a very approving voice, though. He likes it, for all that it's super weird.]

[exnihilo]

Oh. Yes, I. Suppose?

[She. Doesn't think about that sort of thing much, despite Mickey's repeated protests.]

[patheticvillain]

[He grins, pushing the notebook back towards her.]

What're you doing in here, Mira? Besides drawing.

[exnihilo]

Looking. Seeing.

You're still here.

[She wanted to be sure.]

[patheticvillain]

I'm still here.

[An echo, confirmation. He hugs his pillow.]

I don't think I'm ever going to leave.

[exnihilo]

Why not?

[There's no surprise. She can understand wanting to put down roots; she can understand not fitting in the outside worlds. Maybe it's something she can't imagine - her theory of mind is stronger when it comes to him than it is for most people. For Cassel, she considers, imagines, cares enough to ask rather than assuming.]

[patheticvillain]

Because last time I went somewhere . . .

[He shrugs, a little helpless.]

It never works out right.

[exnihilo]

I remember.

[She hadn't had any idea what to say, if her presence would be welcome at all. But she was paying attention.]

I don't understand her.

[She looks away.]

[patheticvillain]

She wouldn't understand you either. [Firmly, ferociously:] She's nothing like you.

[exnihilo]

[Quietly,]

I'd be a very bad mother, I think. I'd hide a baby on a roof and then forget about it.

But I don't understand how anyone could want you to be different.

[patheticvillain]

She's not . . . bad. She's just not good, either. She doesn't know what she's doing. She got us ready for a life that not all of us wanted to live in the end.

Like, Mira, I always wanted to be part of them. Always. I wanted to be the bad guy. And she got me ready to be a villain. That's how she thought mothers were supposed to act. She never had to want anything. She never got consequences. She's -- She could use this place more than anybody else. I want her here. Even though I'm sc-- I'm scared of her. Even though . . .

Just, what if you could help someone you love become a better person? And then maybe you could be normal with them, just like any other family? Wouldn't you want that?

[exnihilo]

I wish -

[She wishes Darling had loved her enough to want her to be a better person, or more of a person, or at all. She chokes on it, looks away. Maybe you just weren't enough to love, Zane told her once. She is - fuller, now, if not full.]

I thought I would never have any consequences. But part of me knew I always did.

[Losing whatever scraps of herself she had accumulated, over and over, every time.

Unlike so many of the people who are protective of Cassel, Mira doesn't hate Shandra. She is wildly jealous, feels young and awkward and stupid in comparison, utterly fails to comprehend her. She is as capable of hating Shandra as she is of hating the pocket universes that make warp engines go.]

I don't know. I want - family. I always did, even when I couldn't know that about myself. I - but everyone I've loved has always been so much better at being a person than me. I wouldn't know how to imagine them better.

Except Helena, maybe, we're almost - she understands not understanding normal things. But she still knows more about being sisters.

[patheticvillain]

[He looks at her with big, wide eyes, his nose still scrunched-up and confused from sleep, and he looks at her and he loves her in an impossibly huge way, his heart feeling too big for his chest, his head to small for his brain. He wishes he could show her how to be normal, but he doesn't know, and the blind leading the blind never got anywhere at all.]

Do you want to be my family? [Please, he doesn't add, please, please.]

[exnihilo]

[But she says it for him, almost too stunned to be hopeful, all tremulous.]

Your - please?

[Coul I really stalling hard in her throat, trammeling it like an impatient horse pawing at the ground, but she keeps it yanked back in its crossties, because he didn't actually offer. But she wants it so badly, so deeply, has more depth now to want it with than she ever wanted anything with Darling, when all her wants were wild and consuming and shallow, like prairie fire; this is the ocean, just as wild but slow and inexorable with tides, frothed with turmoil on the surface, largely a terrifying and inscrutable mystery even to her.

She has wanted to be his family since their first conversation in the chapel, when the only way she knew how to want it was wishing she could be someone else, when she had even less idea than she does now what it could mean, when it was a transparent, wistful, windy thing, when he was an impish idea more than a boy, when she wanted to be anyone's family - and she has that, now, has a mother and a sister and maybe a distant cousin/packmate in Riddick. Now she wants his kinship for himself.]

Please, I. People say 'more than anything' but I - do.

[patheticvillain]

[Now he smiles at her, a sunny little-boy smile, the kind he didn't know how to make before he came here to the Barge and met the people on it and learned how to be a real boy, the kind of real boy who offers family to a woman like Mira Hidalgo. He doesn't regret it, not in the least. He'd thought maybe there'd be something - a sinking in his stomach, a twisting sour feeling of uncertainty - but no. This feels right.]

I get to choose my family, now. I choose you.

[exnihilo]

[Her face hurts, and she doesn't care, breath caught in her throat, beaming. It feels like she's trying to pour too much happiness through too small a face.]

Me too.

[Iris told her that, that she could do that, that it was real. She gets to choose, and she has.]

I - me too.

[patheticvillain]

[It should, he thinks, take more effort to reach out his hand to her, to lay it on her shoulder, to squeeze, to reassure. It should be harder to be good to her, because she look exactly the same as his mother, but she is so impossibly different that Cassel thinks he might die from it.]

[He loves her. She's family. She will leave soon, and he will love her all the same.]

[Sitting up, he leans against her shoulder and wraps his arm around her waist, a half-hug from equal to equal, cousin to cousin. Between family.]

[exnihilo]

You said I couldn't.

[A whisper, sort of shocked and confused, the confusion itself muddling through the elation, even as she leans into it, eager as a needy cat. Logically, it's been a year, a year and a million changes since that first talk in the chapel, but the rule had nestled in her and taken root, somehow, that she didn't get to touch him.]

[patheticvillain]

[A soft smile, hidden away as he ducks his head.]

You couldn't. Now you can.

[The rules change. People change. He didn't know before he got to the Barge, either. Now he can show other people, like Mira, what touch means, what it does for love.]

[exnihilo]

Oh.

Thank you?

[She's hugging him back already though, enthusiastic and tight, just like she's wanted to for a long time.]

[patheticvillain]

You're welcome.

[This he says into her shoulder, his face buried in the soft cloth of her shirt. She smells good - not like his mom at all. He hugs her tighter for it.]