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 Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013 5:38 pm
Everything was gingerbread. Every ******** thing. And snow, bona fide snow, like in the Arctic. It would have been ******** wonderful if not for two factors, one - he was stuck in a wheelchair, two - he was still not sure at all where he stood with the guys. One of the two he could fix, given half a chance.
As it was he was just glad to be back in the room - reindeer or not - since it was away from the rabble of other hunters and a bit of peace and quiet after the seasonally bustling infirmary. He needed it badly, he'd not been afforded a single fraction of peace or safety in weeks and weeks.
"Love the ******** interior design." he said, taking in the gingerbread walls as they went. "Like Hansel and Gretel found a ******** Ikea."
Their room didn't look too different to negate his relief.
"Can you help me get to the bed? If I like, won't cover it in ******** fur. Help me to the floor if that's the case, I don't care."
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Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013 6:44 pm
Harrison rolled Rep to a stop, before leaving his post to get a look at their room.
Everything wasn't snow, so there was that.
The beanbag had been transformed into a big fat gumdrop. The zebra chair was mint humbugs strapped together with licorice. The bookshelves were solid chocolate, with his designs molded cheerily into the sides.
He put one icy hand on the bed, pressing into it.
"Fruitcake," he grumbled.
Harrison's robe almost gave the impression he was floating around the room. He looked like a life-sized decoration in the middle of a sugar wonderland. And if he had been in better spirits it would seem more wonder, less Candy Hell.
"Here," he went back over, putting the wheelchair next to the bed and taking Rep's hoof. "Lean on me."
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Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013 6:52 pm
Rep did so carefully, with all the ungainliness of an unfamiliar body that hurt in places he hadn't even been sure he had before. He made the short hop to the bed with a snort of pain, flopping down on the fruitcake bed like a much too leggy throw rug. Horns were awkward to position without laying flat on his chest and he ended up on his back with his hooves in the air, propped up on his antlers.
He probably couldn't roll over if he tried.
He wasn't sure deer could eat fruit cake either.
"Thanks." he said, uselessly, giving Harrison a forlorn and upside down cervid stare. "I'm glad. To be away from everyone man. I've no had room to breathe, or to talk to you proper since I got up." What he had managed had been often interrupted.
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Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013 7:09 pm
Harrison eased and slowed Rep's situating on what was left of their bed, where he could.
He looked back a moment, before helping Rep over on his side, the one that hadn't gotten a hole punched in it. After he was comfortable, or as comfortable as he was going to get, Harrison sat on the edge of the bed. It didn't crumble. On the contrary, it was pleasantly springy, and the colored candy fruit glistened determinedly. The comforter looked like it was some kind of cushy fondant.
"What'd you want to talk about?" he asked quietly.
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Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013 7:18 pm
Rep was happier on his side, it didn't upset him as much as being on his back had and it alleviated the usual pain of breathing enough to be acceptable. It would do for the time being. He rotated an ear to face Harrison and wiggled his tail in what he hoped was a grateful gesture. He just didn't even ******** know.
He did try licking the sheets though - he couldn't help himself. They tasted ******** good.
Still, there were more important things than delicious candy, which for him was ******** saying something frankly.
He gave Harrison a worried look. "Well. Right, there's s**t. Things that have been hanging over me like a ******** cloud since I woke up, ********, since the fight. I can't take it any longer, I can't handle the weird awkwardness that's there all the ******** time. You have to be able to feel it as well."
He sighed, his chest rising and falling visibly as he did so. "I know what I did was wrong. It was ******** up. I should have listened to you. I know it, Blue knows it, Dakota knows it, everyone ******** knows it. I know it. But I can't go back and make myself ******** listen to sense. And you seem mad about the whole thing, understandably so, and that fine. But like. I don't know where I stand, if you want rid of me, if you want something from me." He curled his hooves closer to his body and flicked his ears back as much as he could. "I just want to know where we stand right now. Because every time I get close to you or want to just hug you or be around you, I feel like I'm ******** stealing, like you are just allowing it for the sake of allowing it. Do you even get anything from it any more, do you get anything from having me here short of an obligation and just a run of the mill friend?"
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Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 5:43 am
"Yeah. I just didn't want to get into it until your heart was better," Harrison acknowledged.
He listened to the long burst of apologies and questions.
"It was wrong. I am mad. But I don't want rid of you."
Harrison was making a visible effort to keep the tone of the conversation calm.
"I want to stand in the same place, beside you. I just don't know where you're standing anymore."
He'd been important to Rep in the past. But things changed.
"Obligation's the wrong word. I'm committed to us, all three of us, no matter what, but I can't do anything about your or Jordan's feelings."
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Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 5:57 am
Committed. Like to a contract or a mental institution. The word was practically synonymous with madness. It made Rep think of effort without certainty of return and that in itself, even through the manic happiness of the ice cream high, made him despair.
"Damn ******** right you can't do anything about my feelings. I don't ******** care if you've decided I'm some kind of traitor or whatever the ******** you've drawn as a conclusion from me not listening to you one single time, but I still love you the same as I did before that fight."
He slowed again and exhaled, letting the artificial happiness hold him away from the precipice of sadness he knew was there. "I still trust you the same and everything I have is yours. I'd still die for you, if you asked me to give up Tracey tomorrow for you so I couldn't ******** up that way ever again, I would. I'd take a ******** desk job. I don't have any other reason to be alive other than you and Jordan and I figured you knew that. If you decided tomorrow that you didn't want me around anymore, I wouldn't walk away to find someone else or go on with my life, I'd just find somewhere to die. Dramatic, right? But I've built my life around you at this point, if that's not trust with everything I am I don't know what is anymore. If there was anything I could do to prove what I'm saying, I'd do it."
He sighed and shook his head, despite the effort it took with the heavy horns. "I just don't understand at all what changed. I remember both of you telling me one time it didn't matter what I did or what I said to other people, that it wouldn't change anything between us, yet here we are where I don't even know if I'm needed any longer and with both of you having come to some agreement that if I ******** up again that it's Jordan who'll be the one to finish me off."
He put a hoof over his nose. "I'm more scared than I've ever been, I feel like I'm losing both of you, and I can't stand on my own."
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Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 8:51 am
"If I told you I'd give you anything, and then you asked me to hand over, I dunno, the keys to my car and I told you that wasn't going to happen, what would you think? What's got more value, you or the car? It's not about one question, or one ******** up. It's about what you value. And I don't have a magic gauge that's going to show me. I just have what's in front of me. I have the decisions you make when everything's on the line."
One minute Rep was like, I know what I did was wrong, and the next he was saying, I don't understand what I did wrong. It was a scattershot of apologies, promises, guilt, fear, feeling. Words didn't change fact.
But the last revelation, the resolution to carry out some sort of death pact, left Harrison completely off-guard.
"Finish you off? I didn't- I ******** ever agree to that."
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Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 9:11 am
"Something like that I would assume that you just didn't want me ******** up your stuff the way I ******** everything up. I wouldn't be offended, I wouldn't see it as the car having more value than me. Because I have a lot of other times to go by where I asked you for things and you gave them to me without a problem. If it was some c**t I didn't know and I asked them for their car keys and they didn't give them, of course I'd think they didn't give a ******** about me, only their car." He gave Harrison a slightly puzzled look. "Intentions aren't just one ******** action taken separate from everything else that's gone before. Just living in instant snap decisions - what you have in front of you, like you say. And nothing else. Doesn't that just disregard every ******** thing before and after that? When you do something I interpret it to all the things you've ever done for me because I know you. Or I thought I did. I figured that was how you operated too, that you could see that I have everything invested in you and value you more than ******** anything. I never thought one ******** would kill it all. You are my other half, my ******** lover, my fiancee, my king, the reason multiple ******** times over I'm still alive. It was a mistake no tae listen to you but its no one I'll make again."
He was trying to wrap his head around Harrison's perspective, that him disobeying his request meant that he wasn't important in the grand scheme of things, that Rep's enemies were more important. But he couldn't understand it really, he couldn't see how that single moment would be all that mattered when a relationship wasn't a moment at all but a shifting sequence of moments all interconnected and threaded with intentions and meaning which were only forged more definite and stronger as time went on.
He was derailed from his protests and confusion by Harrison's denial of his compliance in the ultimatum Jordan had laid down. "Well I thought you did, it makes as much sense as anything else lately. He said he would, I figured he'd asked you and it was just an agreement."
Again he folded his hooves over his muzzle and resented the delicious smell of the fruitcake bed. "Why does everything need to be complicated suddenly? I'm tired, I have this ******** evil weapon in my head, I hurt all over, I'm a reindeer. I just want to be next to the people I love and - whether they ******** believe me or not - trust completely, without feeling like I'm stealing, without feeling like I'm inconveniencing them." He curled up as small as he was able, given the injury and the leggy nature of this form. "It feels simple. But its not."
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Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013 9:06 pm
"Well. I ******** didn't. s**t, man."
Harrison rubbed the back of his neck. Jordan had said that? Why? Knowing Jordan, it had to be a gambit of some kind, so he could get Rep out of it. Leave the island if they had to. Harrison didn't have the brains for it, but Jordan would. He said so, but quiet.
"He couldn't have meant that. I bet he said it when cameras were around. If anybody could get you... off-island, it'd be him."
And it wasn't like the other stuff didn't count. Harrison was still here. It just...mattered, until it didn't matter. Until you were left holding what you thought was something good, that you'd built up together and put everything into, and the other person was gone.
Harrison lay on his side uncertainly in the fondue. The snow robes didn't hike up, at least. Still, it was weird to be semi-spooning a deer. He touched Rep's back, very lightly. He knew Rep's ribs were still giving him hell.
"Before I met you and Jordan, surviving, getting more stuff, that was all I had. But, at the end of the day nobody cared if anything shitty happened to me. I told myself I could do it on my own, because when I needed them, nobody was coming. I've always known what I wanted. I didn't mind working hard or using low tactics to get it, either. If I had to tunnel on my gut through the mud for 10 years to hit gold, I would have. But, when it's just me out there, I don't have, you know, I got one set of equipment. I'm not ******** clever or good with words or people, the way Jordan is. And when we're up against, hell, any kind of monster, I'm cowardly as ********. You...you know what it is, what it's like. The difference, between being solo and being part of an Eclipse, being a triumvirate," and Harrison didn't know the word, but the Boss did.
It's- all that. Partner, lover, queen," and that word, too, was said with soft respect, "protector. Sword. My hands and eyes. I don't want to lose you."
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Posted: Sun Dec 15, 2013 5:11 am
Rep wasn't so sure. Jordan was smart and cunning but it had seemed earnest and in some ways had made sense at the time. He couldn't articulate it though, not when he didn't fully understand why it made sense in the first place. Still, he wanted to believe Harrison and set his trust in him, putting aside the fears for the time being.
Even the light contact on his back was a relief, he'd been dying for physical contact since the pods and any compromise was better than nothing, he didn't even care about the pain, it paled in importance to what he wanted. He uncovered his face and swivelled a fuzzy ear just to listen.
Hearing it aloud - that he was still considered the things that mattered to Harrison, that he hadn't been friendzoned or rejected - meant everything to him. The thrill of approval at the word queen was not fully his own but lifted him up just the same. "As long as you want me here, you'll never be alone." he said. "Even if I attract trouble like a lightning rod and ******** up everything I touch, even if I'm too much of a ******** idiot to do the right thing when I should. And I'll prove to you that you can trust me same as you always did if you just give me this one more chance to do it. I ask you as all those things man, I won't hurt you again. I need you to get through this, to deal with this b***h in my head without going off the deep end."
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