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 Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 6:18 pm
Lawrence gave Malkam a long suffering look for his outburst. Everything with the boy was energy, constant bristly hostility where there should have been calm. It exhausted him just dealing with it, he couldn't imagine what it was like to be Malkam himself. "You are delivering things from other people, and I appreciate you being here, obviously."
He sighed. "I just wish .. I don't know. That you could perhaps not treat me like a tremendous burden on your life for five minutes. Less about the gifts, more about the tone. But forget it."
He carefully bundled up his things and put them away and wandered over to retrieve his wetsuit and everything else, hoping he could remember exactly how it all worked again. "If this is you being nice then I would hate to be your enemy."
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 7:37 am
Malkam gave Lawrence a long look.
"I'm trying to be nice," he said finally, "because Mik wants me to. Because you're Mik's dad. And maybe I could forgive what you did to me. But I will never forget about what you did to Melody or my mom."
He hunched his shoulders.
Lawrence's list of crimes was longer than that. He wasn't nice to Mik either. He still called him fat, and was clipped and cold with him. What he did to Mik's mom was bad. Letting Melvin live in their house after what happened with Mik, and being down here now was bad.
It wasn't stuff Malkam could just let go of.
"If you want me to say you're a good person for running back to help your creepy, cheating, abusive ex, I won't. And your husband is just another guy you cheated with. I don't have any respect for that either. Mik likes you. Mik's important to me. That's as far as it goes. I'm trying to be nice, and I know I'm not any good at it."
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 8:47 am
Lawrence's expression became more and more flat as Malkam rhymed off the reasons why he wouldn't ever be forgiven. It wasn't a sad expression, it just wasn't an expression at all.
His immediate impulse was to argue with him, to say that he hadn't wanted what happened to Melody, that it had been an ill-judged mistake. But Malkam wouldn't want to hear it or to listen. "Your mother was better off without me." he said, "I did her a favour in the grand scheme of things, though not at that time."
He shrugged. "You'd never have met your grandfather if I'd stayed." he said.
"But no. I don't want you to say I'm a good person, I don't care about being a good person outside of meeting Rodney's criteria for that sort of thing. Family is important certainly, but beyond that no, I'm not a good person. Melvin, in spite of everything you might think about him, is still family to me."
He set his lips in a cold judgemental line. "Maybe Mikael would like you more if you had a backbone of your own."
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 9:05 am
"Oh, so now you're saying I should be less nice?" Malkam sneered.
"If you'd done the right thing ever in your stupid life, I wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be here. My mom would have been fine and happy. Mik would have been with his mom and Granda and you. Neither of you would be stuck here forever. None of it would have happened."
He looked hard at the floor.
"It would be you, and Mik, and Mala, and everybody."
Not him. But everybody else.
"Everybody you...you killed and slept with and messed up would be okay too. Melvin would still be here. He'd be the only one. And you know what, he wouldn't be as messed up as you made him either. But you...you did. You messed up, and we're all stuck here. It's not hard, Lawrence. Not cheating on somebody. You...like, if it's not working out, you break up with them. And if you'd broken up with Melvin like a normal person, he wouldn't be such a psycho. Or if you'd ever broken up with any of your ten thousand exes, instead of threatening them, or beating them up, and disappearing. But..."
His fists trembled.
"But Mel being dead, that's the worst thing you've ever, ever done. And I'm really tired of you saying you didn't mean it. It's like if someone said, if you feed this dog chocolate, it'll die. And so you give it a whole chocolate bar just because you want to see what will happen. Only it wasn't a dog. It was my sister, and she never did anything wrong to anybody."
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 9:25 am
Lawrence narrowed his eyes at him properly this time.
"No. It would in fact be like someone saying if you took your dog for a walk - something you'd done hundreds of times before - that your dog would be killed by demons. I had just arrived on the island, I found a lot of what I was being told completely ridiculous. I assumed that the warnings about going home were simply a story told to keep us all well behaved. Like a cult telling their followers they will go to hell should they ever leave."
He sighed. "I don't know what I expected, I mostly thought that I would go back, see her and return simply to tell them I told you so, that I was right and they were wrong and to state that I was better than they were, even if they had kidnapped me." He shrugged. "I still have nightmares about the moths actually." he said, and it wasn't untrue, they represented something simultaneously horrifying and facinating. "All of it. But certainly it's simpler to imagine it all as black and white, that I just wanted her dead so I did that, that I'm just the hollow boogeyman you seem to so badly want me to be."
"But I will certainly give you the fact that the world would be better in general if I had never existed or if I'd simply lived a false life for ever, being what good old dad wanted me to be, keeping out of his hair, keeping out of everyone's hair. I spent most of my childhood just watching television and I created a life made of perfect sitcoms, of happy perfect families, only it didn't work out that way in the end because this is real life isn't it where you can't control how people react."
"It's so easy for you to judge I bet, to stand there and tell me how I should have lived my life, how everything should have been, as if it was something straightforward. But that's fine, you are just a child and you've got the world all figured out like every child ever."
"You look down on me from your perfect pedestal, blaming me for not being there, for being the root of all your troubles. Have you ever looked at yourself? You say family matters but you have been nothing but vicious to me since I met you again, even when I have been nothing but tolerant and generous towards you. You say Mikael is all that matters but you turn him into a weapon, an excuse to benefit from me while never having to give anything back that is genuinely from you. You have no momentum. You even exclude yourself from your perfect and ideal world, you have so much fight on the surface but there is no fight inside."
He waved a hand vaguely in his direction.
"You snarl and bark at the world like a scared dog, but it's just a scared pup, there's nothing to back it up. You don't know what you believe, you just want to be whatever Mikael is, to fall into the shape that he wants you to be, and yet you can't because you are all sharp edges, all bitterness and cold fury, resentments and looking backwards. You want to be part of something and yet you just aren't, you are broken, fractured and angry. You remind me of me. And one day you'll look at yourself and a long long list of broken dreams and people, without Mikael and without me and you'll wonder how you got there, and maybe someone younger will stand there and tell you its your own fault, you didn't try hard enough, and maybe that will be fine."
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 9:53 am
"I don't think you wanted...what happened, to happen. I think you just cared more about proving a point than if she got hurt. And yeah, okay, I wish you'd picked me to visit instead of her. Mik..." And this broke him a little to say, "he would have forgiven you for it, probably. And Mel wouldn't have followed you around like some stupid spectre of your bad decisions either. But, I'm not going away. I am what I am. I feel how I feel, and if that's such a burden on you, it's because everything you chose to do has put me here. If I...go and do half of what you've done, and I have somebody chew my ear off for it, I'll deserve it. I'm not you."
Malkam wouldn't ever be him.
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 10:04 am
"If you think Mikael has forgiven me for anything then you don't really know Mikael. What he says and what is the case are two seperate things I've found. At most you get glimpses."
He shrugged. "Well I do so love lectures." and he added. "It all feels so pointless, telling me again and again and again that I've done bad things and that is all I will ever be. It's pointless, it serves no purpose. Those things are gone, they are past and what actually matters is now and how things are done from this point. Nothing else can be changed. You can spend a hundred years coming up with things you think would have happened and making it all very tragic indeed. For all you know Melody could have had something else happen to her, Mikael might be a different person, he might get himself killed the minute he got here. Maybe they'd have killed me for making that misake in that world, maybe maybe maybe."
He shrugged. "I'm here and I chose to try and save someone important to me, that's the situation, but as always you can make it about Melody, you can make it about Mikael, you can tell me I'm the worst person in the world but it won't change anything other than once again reiterating that..."
He shook his head. "Whatever. Never mind. Let's get out of here, I want a proper shower with warm non salt water and all the trimmings. I'm wasting my breath on you, I'm never going to get what I want and you are never going to get what you want either."
He strapped on the last of the gear and donned the flippers by the pool, already feeling the strange twisted nausea start to build in him just looking at the water. He wished it had been Rodney, at least Rodney would have been reassuring.
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:31 pm
"You don't get to say when it's over. You don't get to say when it stops hurting. You don't get to say when she doesn't matter to me anymore."
Malkam peeled off his shoes.
"But, it doesn't make...Mik matter less, or anything. So nothing better happen to him. That's what matters now."
He had thought it mattered to Lawrence too, sometimes, maybe. He thought Lawrence had been mad that Melvin had...done what he did, to Mik. And for a short time, he'd thought maybe Lawrence was actually starting to be a dad. Of caring about and protecting at least one of his kids.
It had never mattered to Lawrence. Malk's forgiveness meter was extremely low.
He dropped his legs into the portal.
"The feeling's mutual, I guess. I don't know what to say to you either. You don't regret anything. You're strong, so right now, we have to count on you.
But it's stupid to count on you."
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:43 pm
"I'm acutely aware that I don't, and of course she will never stop mattering to you." he rolled his eyes, his patience with arguing with someone who was impossible to reason with at its end. Malkam had made his mind up somewhere long ago, long before he was even back in his life and everything had been closed off. He was stupid, absolutely stupid to think that it would ever be possible to get through to him or make him understand even for a moment.
"If I could regret things I would love to. I would love to understand why people can look at choices they've made and say I shouldn't have done that rather than simply reasoning that it happened and that's it. Regret seems pointless to me, its backwards looking and I can't do it."
He bitterly felt himself reach out for Butch and mentally hold the slavering, eager precence close to him for reassurance. "And I suppose it is stupid, just like it is stupid for me to ever hope for anything other than resentment from you."
His hand was shaking already at just the prospect of going back out there, his heart kicking up till it hammered in his chest, anxiety jangling in his veins. He wanted to pull away from the portal and from the prospect of going back out there. Once again he found himself longing for Rodney, unwilling to show vulnerability to someone so judgemental and vicious but left with no alternative.
"I need to hold onto you." he said. "Or I will.." and he waved his hand. Drown, pull you under, get lost, kill us both. His voice wasn't as level as usual either, his normally cold blue eyes a bit wild. "I'd pr...prefer you didn't make some song and dance out of it."
And there it was, that involuntary need to be somewhere else, anywhere else but in the water, the feeling as if he had a hook behind his ribs yanking him away. But he stayed, stayed only because of sheer force of will. "I don't get like this with anything else." he said.
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 1:01 pm
"It's so they don't do it again," Malkam said. "Somebody who regrets something doesn't do it over and over."
Malk sighed. "Yeah, I know. Why would I be weird about it? I told you I came down here to get you. It's like...getting a stupid cat out of a stupid tree, only backwards. I don't even know how you got down here in the first place."
And he was too bitter to think very long about the why.
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 1:23 pm
"I don't intend to do things again. I don't need regret to make decisions."
Finally dressed, he moved over to hold onto Malkam, opting to cling to his back where his claws would do minimal damage to both of them if he summoned Butch in a panic again.
He pressed his forehead to the back of Malkam's neck, trying to rein in the shivering. "Jump whenever." he said in a very small voice. "Lets get this over with." And he put in his breathing apparatus.
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 3:50 pm
Mik stood at the pool, asking before they jumped, "Why are you so weird about water, anyway? If we ran into a monster you'd have a better shot at taking it than me. And we've got tanks to breath with. Mik doesn't like it either."
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 4:14 pm
Lawrence paused and took out the breathing tube. "I don't know." he said. "I don't understand it fully. It's a kneejerk thing I can't help."
He looked at the water, looking nauseous.
"Mikael can swim. I know because I taught him as a boy, I'm not sure when he started telling everyone he couldn't though or who convinced him that he couldn't. I wasn't afraid of swimming pools. Swimming pools you can see the bottom, it's lit, it's honest."
He closed his eyes.
"I almost died coming to Deus. I was swimming for help, the island being ultimately prepped for complete destruction behind me. They killed everyone. Everyone the loose monsters didn't get they just wiped out with a flick of a switch. There was a helicopter I was trying to get the attention of and it went down, most of the people on board died, so I just had to swim to a boat way off shore. I was exhausted, I'd been running for my very life all day, taking a car down to the docks. There was nothing left in me but I had to swim, swim in the knowledge that there was a tentacle creature out there somewhere which had taken out other attempts to leave. I didn't think I'd make it honestly, I'd drown and no one would even really know I was gone because I'd cut everyone off so thoroughly. I had eighteen cats, that was my company when I wasn't scamming people, they wouldn't miss me really. I could just feel it, the cold and vastness of it pulling me down, just waiting for me to sink, to go under and never come up again. I almost died and I got hauled out on a fluke. "
He sighed. "And so many times since then I've almost perished in water, I was thrown into acid and water by someone who thought I was trying to stab him and lost my hair, I almost drowned in a whirlpool off a cruise ship and was hurled I don't know how many feet into the ocean by an explosion, that time I almost didn't make it to the surface. I have nightmares about it, it does something to me, it's a phobia. I just.. On land I feel safe and in control but on the ocean the rules are different, I'm small and weak and nothing I can do can protect me from it. It's asphyxiation but not the kind I can tame." And he absently rubbed his neck. " don't know. I can't fight, I can't function, I can't do anything when I'm down there and even when I'm out I'm a wreck afterwards."
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Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2017 8:08 pm
"Maybe just try thinking of it as really thick air," Malkam suggested helpfully.
"Plus, to me it sounds like water has basically...saved your life like, all of those times you described? I mean, it's the only reason you survived out of everybody on that island. If you were just thrown in acid without water then you would have melted. If you landed on the ground when you got thrown that far, instead of the water, you just would have died. If water was a person, which it wasn't, it would have saved your life like...a hundred times by now and you'd get scared every time it came over because you associate it with near-death experiences. Water got you that stupid...whatever you like so much, the one we had to swim to get."
Malkam ended the treatise determinedly.
"Water is trying to help you."
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Posted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 8:52 am
Lawrence gave Malkam a very deadpan look. "Have you ever tried telling someone with a spider phobia that spiders are just eight legged friends? Or someone with a snake phobia that they are just big noodles? Because it would have the same effect, that is to say, none at all. For me there is a visceral repulsion when it comes to dealing with open water, regardless of facts or anything else."
He shook his head.
"Water is one of the few things which can kill me with one hit so to speak."
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