[PRP] I can still remember how (Lawr/America)

[Baneful]

Lawrence wasn't even certain what impulse had drawn him to send the DM to America, and it was not a sensation he enjoyed. Actions for him were generally speaking traceable to their source, one thread of logic after the other, part of a framework of action and reaction. But when it came to her there was an element of chaos which he might have feared if he was able but which instead he simply observed with blank confusion, unable to even begin to comprehend the leap his thoughts had made from living out the domestic rut he inhabited at the moment to asking to see her again.

The room was spotless, uncannily so, scrubbed clean of every imperfection and as a consequence every lingering memory that for a time there had been three of them inhabiting this space and not two. He could not even grudge Melvin the impulse, aware that it was illogical to hoard possessions and artefacts of a life - and she had not even been afforded a life - but there was still part of him that in his repetitive and photographic way could map out every inch of how she had lay on the bed.

She had been part of America he was allowed to possess, able to swim out into thoughts calm and level without the disturbance her absence caused and to plot out a future where he got everything that he wanted without the possibility - as things were now - that he might never have even a fraction of what he truly desired.

He waited, and he was good at it, making certain that Melvin would be busy for an hour or so with other tasks and he wouldn't be disturbed before settling down on the couch with his book he had read innumerable times to wait. He had made some small snacks out of a practised hospitality but he did not expect America to want to eat anything he had made - of all the people on the island, she knew better - but sometimes even in spite of it, she dared.

From within the snowglobe of his own mind he was oblivious to the changes to his outward appearance, but he hardly looked like Jan at all these days, lapsing back into someone else from long before the island or Wonder Park, his manner of dress a softer and less severe version of the crisp white shirts he wore when he was trying to be no one in particular, his hair long now, well cared for and perfectly blonde. His mannerisms too were somehow softer and less severe, even alone he did not lapse back into anything other than this unwitting version of himself.

He had even found himself answering to Lawrence again.

Now and then he would check his phone, but he did not harass her further.

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[lizbot]

America knocked on his door, appearance more pristine and together than he'd ever seen her. Not a stray piece of disorder was allowed upon her person. She doesn't even look irritated or tired or angry to see him, eyes glancing him over. "Is this your domestic look?"

She glanced around for Melvin and there's a certain relief in not seeing him there. There wasn't enough patience left in her to deal with one of Lawrence's wilfully blind defenders.  

[Baneful]

Lawr looked her over briefly and raised a brow as he opened the door, holding it open for her to let her in.

"This is my Lawrence look missy." he said with an easy smile, having gradually made his peace with the fact that he was slipping back into a useless persona, one that was part of a failed experiment in affection and humanity. It wasn't something he was happy about, but it was not something he could help either.

Lawr was not very perceptive in many ways, tuned primarily to the vulnerability in others, but even he could not miss the sense that something was off with the other hunter, a fact he wasn't sure what to do with, of no inclination to try to fix or change anything. He left it as a note and nothing more.

"Something is wrong with me you see." he said, voice void of the farcical American accent he often used, yet equally far from the icy cold received pronunciation he lapsed into when he was between personas. His voice had an almost cheerful Swedish twang tangled in polite English. "And I should like to understand what it is, if you will do me the pleasure."

He gestured with his hand to the snacks laid out before moving to sit on the impeccably clean couch. "Make yourself at home."

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[lizbot]

Sitting down she ignored the food and for once it wasn't because she didn't want eat anything provided by Lawrence Weiman. It simply wasn't time to eat.

"There's a lot wrong with you." Not an accusation, just a fact as much the color of his eyes and lacking hand. "But this is about her, right?"  

[Baneful]

"Yes. Her." and it felt strange talking about someone who had looked so much the same as the woman before him, leaving him feeling as if he was speaking with someone else wearing her face, he wondered if this was how it felt when people spoke to him while he was Chantelle or Jan or any of the other faces he wore and then saw him as someone else, the feeling that things just didn't sit right. It simply made him more aware that there had been an iteration of her which had let him sit by her without hatred or the feeling he was somehow inanimate and that that version was now gone forever, along with any future it had held.

"I.." and there was a moment where he was at a loss for words or how to begin, something which didn't happen to him often. "Look, there aren't many people I can speak to with any degree of frankness, and it just so happens that you are one of those few individuals. Even if ..." and he gestured between them both in a vague gesture of the complexity of the relationship - if one could by any stretch of contorted imagination deem it that - between them. "Anyway, I, it's about you too. Everything is at its essence about you too. I. " and he slipped into a repetition he could not help. "I. I, erm. I don't understand why what happened, happened and what it means."

And he felt vulnerable in the moment, his pride rankled and irritation rising at the frustration vulnerability brought with it. He blamed this persona, this front he had discarded for exactly these reasons.

"I am finding it difficult to process the thought that destruction is the only viable end for people." and for once there was an element of the cold sarcasm people brought to the table of late in the way he said people. "like me."

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[lizbot]

"Destruction is the only ******** end for anyone. Feelings and morals and s**t don't make a damn bit of difference." America leans forward, meeting his gaze with an even one of her own.

"I saw into your forever nightmare," she continues, voice thoughtful. "You grow old and fall apart, persisting while everyone, everything around you is already wasted away. You get pissy when you're reminded 'bout your age and you get passive when someone's doing her damnedest to choke you and hurt you."  

[Baneful]

Lawr seemed to consider this with the sort of robotic blankness with which he processed most interesting information, mistaken at times for him not listening at all. "That depends on how one defines destruction, there are things which persist and in our line of work there are doubtless ways to endure even beyond the normal physical limits. I suppose it was the idea that it was deserved and that somehow her only solution to the conundrum of living and feeling was to sacrifice herself for those deemed better. If in pursuit of how to understand emotion and to understand people I find some unavoidable answer which results in my ultimate death, I do not want to pursue the knowledge any longer. I have no desire to die."

At the mention of his nightmare, the easy demeanour faded away into a rictus and closed off fixed expression, his jaw set. "I do not want to fade and decline." he said when he finally spoke, and with that thought came the concept of his age, ever increasing, tick tick ticking relentlessly onwards, but now there was hope to change it somehow. "But if I was killed, that would be acceptable to me, it would have some lasting effect on the one who did it, I would persist in the ripples in the world in a way which could not be erased."

He smirked grimly. "Perhaps it is a good thing I ended up here on the island, more and more I start to think that left out there I might have done something truly horrible for the sake of something enduring and to feed the cycles of repetition I get locked in. Here the only person I have hurt is you, and you are still here."

Rising from where he sat he retrieved one of the snacks he had made and ate it thoughtfully. "Plus." he said, licking his finger when the food was gone. "Becoming passive is all I know how to do when I am faced with something like that, am I supposed to be afraid? Of what? Of becoming nothing?"

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[lizbot]

"After you're dead it's not a matter of your emotions," America reasons, crossing her legs as she leans back once more. "It's everyone else's ability to feel. You seem to attract the sort that get all worked up over you, so there's your ******** death existence." And here she rolls her eyes, the first glimpse of real emotion from her.

"For what it's worth, her dying wasn't deserved or undeserved or anything like that. She had a choice, a few actually, and..."

America doesn't sigh in the pause, but the weight of it is there as she continues, "She didn't love herself. Couldn't. She was selfish but not like that. Not like me."  

[Baneful]

Lawr sat down again and his expression was grim.

"I attract a sort which does not get worked up over me but instead over whatever concept or idea they project onto me. I just give them what they want, to get some modicum of what I want." he shrugged his shoulders. "My death would barely be a speed bump on their delusions, they would not remember me and I do not bank on that. I would become some grand delusion like Melvin with Rin or would become some hated and loved figure like I presently am with Horace."

He looked concerned about the idea once again that the clone had had other options but chose what she had. It made him feel restless to think of it, the weight of that ever ticking time seeming to draw his thoughts again.

"That was the part I could not understand." and there was a pause when he sought for the words for what to say. A normal person would feel distress at such contravention of the rules they lived by and he was tempted to emulate it for a moment. But America wouldn't buy it, he knew, so he tried instead to more honestly explain himself. "Choices are simple." he said. "Gain is always a yes, profit is always a yes, want is always a yes. Those are fundamental truths and even animals live by them in that way. It is when people diverge from this I cannot understand, altruism makes no sense."

"I wanted her to stay." he said. "Because I want to feel normal, I wanted to be able to think without the only thing I can think about being you or her. I wanted that and she would not even give me it. She left despite her staying being something that I wanted." He clenched his hand and it was an outward expression of the growing frustration and incredulity at the disregard for his wishes and the cold blame he had placed on Dawson for all of it. "Every time I think that I have found something stable, something that I can work from, it turns out that I knew nothing at all and all the constructs I had built need to be reassessed and restructured. I find myself back at the start, more irritated by my limitations and the slight to my pride and less willing to try again. And this time I feel I have regressed back to beyond even the progress I had made since Maja."

He gave her an intent stare, aware that it was probably perceptibly arrogant of him to even expect her to discuss any this with him in the first place. "Your love for yourself is what keeps you from me so I cannot be glad about it, but like a double edged sword, it is what keeps you from leaving the way she did, of making those choices."

"And I do not want you to leave."
 

[lizbot]

Shifting in her seat, something tensed in America's posture.

"I will, one way or the other. It's what people do, I've told you before they either die or leave you." There's a quiet huff of unhappy laughter that follows, "You talk about these things like they're something special and unique 'cause of your ******** condition. But fact is, you're the same as anybody else. Same as me, I guess."

They weren't, she was forced to admit, so very different after all.

"Congratulations," America adds, the bitterness now clear in her voice.

baneful

 

[Baneful]

Lawrence seemed to think about all of this, wanting to blindly believe her assertion that they were the same but knowing that in some fundamental way they were not. He struggled to define the feeling, to pin down why he felt this was the case, seeking for what essential feature of her personality's landscape made her so fascinating to him, unable to explain why the mystery remained. If they were the same, she would be uninteresting. If he was honest he found himself uninteresting, simultaneously perfect and dull, a god who found himself unable to be a part of creation. He wanted nothing more than to believe her, to enter those words like a door back to humanity, to feeling the same as anybody else.

"Speaking like that is death already." he said. "Momentum is the single most important thing." and for once he was being as sincere as it was possible for him to be. "It is like dying simply because death is an inevitability. I would have stopped, I would have stayed in that place where inertia was simplest if I did not feel or at very least deduce that there is something essentially important to pursue."

He set his jaw, his expression still cold and far away. "I have not entirely found out what it is, but I get close at times, I have the strongest instinct that I shall know it when I see it, that I see glimmers of it in facets of the world and I do not purport to be special or unique in this at least, noted by so very many before me. I see it in music, in innocence, in death." He sighed shallowly. "I see it in you."

And once again that emptiness - the vacant space that was like the void when seeking out a newly extracted tooth or a chair pulled away when one motioned to sit - loomed large in his mind and he found himself irritated by it, in an animal fashion wishing to move away from it, almost fear but not quite.

"Even if people leave or die, does it always need to be quite so very soon?"

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[lizbot]

"There's momentum, it's just pretending I won't die or that I'll be ******** immortal in people's memories isn't going to change the fact that one day I'll be gone."

She doesn't, honestly, understand what he sees in her. She never has except for the vague notion that she was something shiny to his jackdaw heart.

"What's the situation," she asks eventually, "where it wouldn't seem too soon? The longer you have someone, the greater the hole they'll leave in your life."

baneful

 

[Baneful]

"There are various shapes of immortality." he said with a shrug of his shoulders. "We deal with fundamentally immortal creatures most days of the week, why is the concept so alien that one could become like them?" he raised a brow. "For instance, there are creatures who can give back years of one's life, there are likely artifacts capable of the same. It is not pretending or delusion if there is a genuine goal and genuine possibility that one may well reach it."

"And regardless, one day is not now, for as long as you permit it to be the case."

She did get another quizzical look at her concept of loss, in such stark contrast to his own. "The hole is already there." he said. "At least for me. What is the issue with filling it for however long one can with life and richness? It doesn't get bigger, you simply become more aware of the edges and where they lie when and if it resumes being what it was, there is no damage, only temporary repair."

lizbot

 

[lizbot]

"Every time I start thinking that you're a person, you open your mouth and prove me wrong." The comment is wry and lacking any particular venom. "For folks capable of growing and changing, it does get bigger, and yeah, more defined. But you change and that potential hole just grows and grows, 'cause they're part of what changes you. You start wrapping your days around them a little more, bit by bit, and if you give it enough time, they're everything. They're home and the best part of tomorrow."

She pauses that train of though abruptly and then carefully turns it back. "Do you think you'd be the way you are about her now, if she'd only been around a couple days, instead of living with you for weeks?"

baneful

 

[Baneful]

And once again he was demoted back to where he was used to being, it felt more factual and sensible to be a non-person when he was only a scholar of people in many ways. "Growing and changing." he repeated, copying even the inflection of the words. "How would one define that? I learn new things certainly, I learn how to be new people in fact. Sometimes parts resurface to my surprise. Is that change?"

He did not seem convinced. "My entire life was wrapped around Maja, but even with that she was capable of tearing herself out of that hole and presumably lost nothing of herself. I was still who I am afterwards too. Familiarity simply breeds routine, the value of the individual is apparent from the beginning."

He couldn't seem to understand why she asked him the question she did. "Of course." he said. "Like I say the value is apparent, one simply knows the value of another human being. Like a name badge. I saw the vivacity in you from the beginning, the fixation as far as I am aware was nigh immediate. She was you, or a facet of you, much as Jan is a facet of me. The routine merely bred familiarity and habit. I enjoy repetition."

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