driftfleet | [snuggle up real close everyone]

You don't have to be smart. You just have to not be dumb. [It totally makes sense in her head.]

[Like hell she's copping to the real problem here; too much to explain.] Yeah, I can sit. [Which she does, on her bed, though she does lean on him to do so. Having something to do, even if it's just grabbing her pillows and getting settled, helps get her evened out.] I'm okay, Kurt. You get yourself comfortable.

[You can't fuss over her as a way of avoiding this conversation.]

[It makes sense to him, though the devil if he could figure out how to vocalize it. He also has the sinking feeling that he is being an idiot; scratch that, he knows he is about some of it. Erik is a smart man with good instincts; better than his, when it comes to women. Lovers. Rogue was dangerous too, but never to him.]

Alright. [He still fusses a little, mostly just helping her sit and adjust pillows until its clear she has that part under control. He settles into a sitting position, bare feet dangling off the bed until he's brushed the dirt off with his tail. Then he tucks his legs under him and proceeds to stare at said tail as it twitches on the bed, as though the thing doesn't belong to him.] ..I have no idea how to have this conversation.

[Wrath settles comfortably and watches him. She stretched out her legs to rest one foot lightly against his knee.]

Okay.

You can probably start by figuring out if your problem is with gay people in general, with Erik being gay or bi, or with Erik being gay or bi with Charles.

[This woman does not fuck around.]

Or maybe all of them.

[No she doesn't. Kurt closes his eyes and tilts his head back, ignoring the tiny voice in the back of his head that screams at leaving his throat exposed. This is Wrath; if she didn't outright kill the Stalker for threatening one of their own, she won't tear out his throat before he's even spoken.]

Charles. [That's the easy part to untangle.] In his world, my mother is his adopted sister, and that doesn't incite a vast amount of trust. My mother was.. she fought to save humanity in our world, but in at least two others she's taken the opposite side. In every world she's primarily concerned with the well being of herself and the few she considers family, and to hell with anything or anyone that stands in her way. [Which is why he immediately proposed security measures against the one in the Fleet.]

He grew up with her.

[She listens carefully.]

I can understand that would make you paranoid. But this isn't the Charles you know, and being around someone a lot doesn't mean that you are going to be just like them either.

I think before you do anything dumb, maybe you should get to know him.

I didn't know him at all in our world. My world is the way it is because he died young; I've only heard about him from my Erik and Xavier's step-brother, Cain. [His mouth tightens when he mentions Avalon's pacifist monk.] Strange thing about that brother; he told us himself that he used to be a terror of a man. But when we met him, he'd developed such an aversion to violence that he had a fatal stroke when Avalon was attacked and I tried to goad him to fight. Maybe just coincidence.

[Kurt opens his eyes, staring up at the ceiling.] Maybe not. I know that people aren't that different between worlds; I recognize my mother in the Mystique that's here. I recognized my Erik in this one, and myself in all the other versions of me that I've met. I don't recognize my world's McCoy in the one that's here, and that makes me suspicious most of all.

[Level look.] If you're trying to say something Kurt, fucking say it. I get confused when people don't say what they actually mean.

I think you're making a mistake in looking for the similarities. Because you'll see what you think is there and ignore what's different because you think you know what to expect.

Let people be who they are instead of who you expect them to be.

I'm confused, darling. I don't know what to think, and I can't trust my guts because my instinctive reaction is.. not fair. Not right, and not who I want to be. [Which is him trying to ease into a 'yes' answer for the first part of her primary question, because its a difficult thing to admit. He's ashamed of the fear reaction he'd learned over the years, because he should have known better.]

I don't know that I can do that with--Anyone who had a counterpart in my world. They're too powerful, and I didn't outlive the rest of my team by being a trusting man. [There's a pause between 'out' and 'live' in which Kurt twitches slightly, just enough for his leg to tense under her foot.] Looking for what I know will keep me safe, as well as the rest of us.

[That's an important thing for him to acknowledge. She nods.] It's hard to get over your gut reaction, because in the battle line, that's what keeps you alive. But it keeps trying to work when you're not on the line. When it doesn't help. But you know it's not fair, so that's good. It sucks having to fight yourself, but it's important.

[She pokes him lightly with one toe.] At least on this ship, it's my job to keep everyone safe, not yours.

But... It's natural to be paranoid when you've been in the shit for a long time. PTSD. Battle fatigue. It'll fuck you up.

[He finally lowers his head to look at Wrath when she pokes him, a soft smile flitting across his face.] I know. I trust you to. That doesn't mean I can shut off the idea that its my job too.

[His tail brushes her ankle before he realizes and starts pulling the limb back toward himself, curling in a semicircle. He's tempted to pull his legs out from under himself, draw his knees to his chest, but that would be too obvious. So would skittering up onto the ceiling, and he doesn't particularly want to be alone. He just wants to run.] Wade used that word once, when he was psychoanalyzing the team. I never did get him to shut up long enough to explain it, and after.. well, I didn't want to look like an idiot.

I get that. [She offers him a small smile.] But it's something that can maybe help, if you catch yourself thinking in circles.

Yeah, well, I'm not a shrink. But I know the terms cause... Cause it's stuff that was really common in my soldiers after we closed the dome. [It's something she is pretty sure she has, too. They were supposed to treat it. Make it better. She can't trust a fucking thing anyone told her, and that leads to a confusing mental conflict that she doesn't have time to think about right now.]

PTSD means post traumatic stress disorder. It's a thing you can get after something really bad has happened, and you get stuck on it, reliving it sometimes, hyper aware of threats and stuff at others. It's that fear and stress coming around again and again and again. And it means you're gonna react to some things badly because your brain relates it to the bad thing that happened, and your brain is just trying to keep you alive even if it's not actually reacting in a way appropriate to your current situation.

Battle fatigue was a thing that came up because... The final battle of my war lasted 422 days. After you've been on for that long, you lose your ability to turn back off, if that makes sense. It fucks you up.

[She looks at him levelly.] And none of that means there's anything actually bad wrong with you, like nothing you should be ashamed about. Any more than you should be ashamed of like... Having a broken leg after getting in a really bad hovercycle wreck. It means you got hurt. It happens.

[She knows intellectually that she had these problems herself. Which helps, in a way. But there's something fucked around in her head, like maybe it's something Compliance tried to fix by just erasing stuff, but the fear and trauma is still there. That's why she clings to her routines, to things that make sense and done mess with her head.]

[This time Kurt's the one who listens, shoving aside all the crap running through his head about Charles and Erik and learned fear reactions to pay attention. About halfway through he gives in to the urge to pull his legs out from under him, actually sitting cross-legged like a normal person.

When she starts talking about battle fatigue and being unable to turn off is when the end of his tail vanishes under a knee. He considers, briefly, asking if there's a word for not having anything else to be when you turn off, just a ghost whose body hasn't caught on yet. He doesn't, because the conversation they're having now is more than Wrath signed on for. She took to bed a handsome man with a pretty smile, not the hollow parts underneath.

So he smiles instead, strained and weary because she's too smart to believe anything else and he's too tired to manage anyway.] You realize the only reason I'm not feeling guilty of it anyway is because I think you described most of my world? Even the ones who didn't fight, the baseline humans who had to hide, they were all tired of war by the end. We all of us were living like a firefight by the end of things.

Yeah, your world is fucked.

[But she's looking at him like she can see through skin and muscle and down into his bones.]

I know what it's like, Kurt. Not exactly, because we're from different places and the details of the shit we were up to our necks in are different. But I know what it's like when you spend all your time being tough as hell and then everything goes tits up in your brain and you have to figure out what in there is real and something you need to worry about and what no longer applies.

They take you out of the shit and don't even wipe you off before they dump you somewhere nice and clean and expect you to know how to act and how to deal with real people like you're a people too. It's hard.

But figuring stuff like this out is a start.

Edited 2016-06-07 21:03 (UTC)

[Wrath does not, as a rule, frighten Kurt.

That isn't to say that he underestimates her capability to cause him grievous injury even with her back the way it is. Part of what's kept him with her past that first night is the comfort of knowing that she's as much a soldier as he is, maybe more. She's not a civilian, he won't have to protect her (and he'll surely never bury her.)

But that look there, like his secrets are laid bare for her to peruse, terrifies him right down to his bones. Knowing intellectually that she's not a telepath is the only thing that keeps him still like a mouse instead of bolting. She's too damn accurate, even though the implication of him not being a person makes his jaw tighten against the urge to shout, because he is. He's a man goddammit, not a demon or a pet! (He used to be a man. Now he's just a ghost that breathes and forgets he's dead from time to time.)

Darkholmes, he and his mother both, are secrets kept and lies spun. Shapeshifters are liars to everyone but themselves, and his mother expected him to be one like her. When in another world Margali Szardos was teaching her adopted son to tell the truth, Raven Darkholme was teaching him how to deceive. Then he became a teleporter instead, but being able to spin a pretty tale and keep the X-Men's secrets was still valuable. And then he met a beautiful broken woman who thought he could be her bloody co-conspirator, and he was. After her he met a good woman just as stunning who saw a hero and a husband in him, and he was for her too. And then Logan, after him Meggan, and now?

Now Kurt releases in a slow sigh the breath he'd not been aware of holding until his lungs began to ache, and brings a hand up to rub at his eyes. He can't look at Wrath or he will run, or lash out to piss her off. Why was it so much easier to let those observations slide off his fur when it was Xavier making them?] Wrath, this is my somewhere clean and nice. I.. once before, I had somewhere nice. Pretty home, pretty wife. But the world was in pieces from the first war, all the dying and the dead. And then it broke again.

[Kurt makes himself stop, because that's not what she asked and his throat is tightening anyway. What happened to the man who laughed in the face of horrors that came stumbling out of McCoy's labs? (Dead, all his nerves on the outside, and even back then those abominations showed up in his nightmares.)]

I know. [That this is his somewhere clean and nice. Just like it's hers, more even than the sudden shock of civilian life in Proles.] And I'm sorry. [It doesn't bother her in the slightest to hear that Kurt had a wife, any of it.]

The past doesn't just go away. [Not unless they excise it from your mind and leave nothing but holes that smell like honey behind. No. Stop that, Wrath. This isn't about you.] And pain sticks harder than happiness, because pain is more important to just surviving than happiness is. That's why this stuff keeps fucking us up. We expect the pain and the shit to keep coming because it's better to be prepared.

And then when it doesn't, what do you do?

[In a way, this has answered her question. Because Kurt has some very specific baggage about Charles, obviously, yes. But it's the endless wellspring of paranoia that fuels it.

Softly:] You keep looking til you find it.

[Maybe Compliance has done her a favor, by leaving her less than ten years of memories from a 42 year life. She understands things on an emotional level, and yes she still has the occasional fear and paranoia response that makes even less sense because she can't directly relate it to an experience. But it means she can't remember all the things she should be scared of, can't go looking for them until they've already hit her and it's too late.

Maybe it's not force of personality that's saved her, after all, or helped her maintain her positive attitude. Maybe she's been stupid and egotistical to even entertain that thought. She just doesn't know what to be afraid of, so she doesn't hesitate.

Maybe she really is a thing created artificially, shaped by mental surgery after surgery, and this (her stupid pink hair, her glittery shoes, her love of fluffy skirts when it's not uniform time) isn't her combating it--it's her being exactly what she was created to be.

No, she tells herself firmly again. Even if that's all true, this isn't the time for her to have some kind of stupid crisis about something that can't be fixed and isn't actually hurting anyone. There's no time for confusion. Focus on Kurt. He's the actual person.]

[Kurt huffs out a mirthless laugh.] You apologizing to me, after I tell you like this that I've been married. [He doesn't know if it matters to Wrath; some women, it matters the world to. There's too much on everyone's backs, a dead wife is just more weight to deal with, someone else in their bed even when there are only two bodies. The prospect shouldn't make him sad; for so many reasons, he doesn't deserve the comfort and companionship Wrath offers.

But because he is a selfish man, he accepts it. He sits here and listens to Wrath try to work through his problems when she has so many of her own, instead of pulling himself back together and reassuring her that he'll be fine. Why is it suddenly so difficult?

Kurt draws in a slow breath, not quite as steady as he'd like it to be.] I don't know how else to live. I don't--I've mentioned meeting other versions of myself, ja? Or being told about them? [Kurt raises his head to look at her, the dim glow of his eyes brighter for being overly wet] None of them have lived as long as me. Kurt Wagner--the priest, not the one here--was in his late twenties when he died. Kurt Waggoner was fourteen. They were both from good worlds, at least Wagner was. So why?

All I can think is that they both weren't expecting it. Maybe because their world was good and gave them little reason to believe tomorrow wasn't a guarantee. Maybe because they weren't raised by my mother, who taught me how to look for the lies when I was small. I don't know, all I know is that the last time I let my guard down, I buried my wife.

Edited 2016-06-14 08:14 (UTC)

Do you think that matters to me? [Little miss casual-sex-and-polyamory? Besides. It's not like they're in a relationship or something, so it's not even her business.] You're my friend and I care about you a lot. So of course I'm sorry that you've lost someone you cared about so much.

[She listens intently. Everything he says makes sense, but she expected it to. You don't build up things in your head in a way that don't make sense, not if you're mostly sane. But.]

Sometimes there isn't a reason. You might be right. I don't know, but you don't either, and sometimes there just isn't a reason. And that's the scariest thing to contemplate. It's easier to believe that there's something you could have done when bad things happen, even if it hurts because it comes with all that guilt. [Because it makes you feel like you at least have some power over your own life, and that you can keep it from happening again. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don't.]

You have to do what you have to do to survive and do your job. But you're in a different place and these are different people. [She tilts her head.] And some of the things you think helped you survive might not be what actually did the job, and you have to be willing to think about that too.

[Maybe she really does have it easier because she has comparatively so few memories. Maybe she has it easier because her brain's been carved up to specification and she lacks these particular paranoias.]

[snuggle up real close everyone]

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There was supposed to be a 'not' between 'you're' and 'being', oy.

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