driftfleet | Let's all hold hands and sing Kumbaya

The people you love are meant to be insufferable. That's how you know they love you.

[ Relaxing, she blinks back her emotions before she smiles, stepping forward and reaching to touch his hand, only touching her fingers to his knuckle. ]

I know. I mean - I can see it, I saw. I'm just still worried about pushing too hard.

I have noticed that trend.

[ He turns his palm to clasp her hand. A memory flits by of Charles in a wheelchair and a woman with pointed ears talking together. She's appreciative of his beard. ]

If I ever felt that way, I'd let you know.

It's a good thing I'm used to it.

[ Hermione presses her hand against his, and she doesn't pause - she just closes her eyes, drinking in the memory before she tilts her head up to look back over at him. ]

I'm glad. I've done so many things that people hated me for and they never said a thing... I don't think I could bear it here.

I'm still ruled by old fears. I've made some steps . . . but Hank reminded me that I'm far from healed. My sense of trust is broken. My sense of family is broken too.

But I am mending. It's slow but it can be accomplished.

My best friend once told me I was far too trusting.

[ And then she hesitates, pausing, before she tilts her head up. ]

Can I show you something? I mean - a memory.

I've been told that many times.

[ He nods, not bothered. ] Certainly.

[ She hesitates, but then... Her fingers press into his.

It's a memory about how much trust can hurt, and, really, she thinks that's the message she wants to give Charles; that she does trust too much, but she thinks she's stronger for it. She offers him Gilgamesh, explaining why he proposed, why he wanted her, and the emotions that are tangled up with them are almost horrific.

Hurt, pain, anger. Most importantly, most noticeably? Betrayal, and self-hatred - hatred that it's her power that someone wanter, her power that someone was trying to take, not her.

She thinks, maybe, Charles can understand. ]

[ Charles can understand that. His power is a gift. It's limitless, it's deadly and it is insidious in nature. Humans - People fear it while ungodly powers wish to possess. Even now, he remembers the crawl of Eris' touch as she waited for him to break and now this strange oracular Bill that wandered into his dreams. His fascinating, controlling gift.

His own memories bleed through, of Lucciola. His favourite team member. A shy boy, whom Charles had encouraged and supported. He had wandered into his heart - an effect from the omnipotent agencies that kept them in play. And there, Lucciola had shied away from him. Had quaked at the sight of Charles.

No. Lucciola had shied away from his power. Because Lucciola was a good person. Charles knew it. ]

[ Knowing how people see you because of your powers is terrifying; they could either love you too much or hate you for everything you had. Harry had started to hate her, and the memory of that prickles in her mind like some kind of burn - You swore to me, you swore and betrayed me. You swore and I, like a damned fool, loved and believed you, and now, look - and she had hated herself for the power she'd had and the strength she had given up, for all the pain and hurt she'd caused.

She also hated herself for what she couldn't do; she was Marchioness, she was leader, she was everything, but she was weak. At the end, she was weak, and she hated it. She was even weak when Gilgamesh offered her ultimate power; she could have saved or ended the world and all she wanted was his smile.

Leaning forward, she shifts and wraps her arms around Charles, holding him gently, trying to smother back her own memories and her own feelings of suffering and uncertainty to bask in Charles, pressing her emotions towards him - her love, her concern, her tenderness. The things she feels for him that she can't hide.

She supports him and she loves him and most of all she isn't afraid of him. ]

[ Don't hold back, he murmurs, I'm fine. And he is, in a way. He's certainly much improved. The past is in the past and for the first time, he truly believes that. He wraps his arms around her, soothing. ]

[ The problem is that thinking of home, thinking of the Drabwurld and the people - it brings up more than just her happiness. The emotions are buried together, twisted up like some kind of shrapnel in her heart, and Hermione doesn't want to bare it all to Charles. She doesn't want to make him suffer all the things that her mind goes through, because it isn't fair. There's so much pain and hurt that she tries to hide - and it just feels wrong.

It feels wrong to put that on his shoulders, even now.

You don't have to. It comes before she can do anything else, her fear and her worry prickling at her and most obvious through their connection. I'll find some better ones, some happier ones. ]

[ I know that, his reply comes, touched with genuine amusement. It's a sentiment he's heard before. It's certainly one he repeats often enough.

Good and bad are often linked together. You can't separate it. That's what made your time there so special. Even when it hurt. ]

[ It would be easier if I could. I know how to use my memories, I learned, but it's not the same. It's harder to pick the good ones from the bad. That's what gets her the most; she feels oddly powerless with something that she should be good at, and it's frustrating. It makes her want to stamp her feet and get dramatic, and that - well, that makes her think of one Dorian Gray.

It's a tangled web of feelings, but the most prominent one is love - overwhelming, desperate love, the kind that's borne of true concern and affection strangled with the fear of loss, and it's mixed in with memories of tea and cakes and jam, the sharp taste of sugar in her mouth. It's tied up with dancing at a theatre opening, of making potions together, and of seeing the most foul portrait known to man, twisting with her heartbeat and the way she's desperate to hold herself back, the fear of doing to Charles what she did to Dorian prickling at her senses.

She felt like she overwhelmed Dorian with her love, and she's still a little afraid she might do the same here, too. ]

Edited 2016-07-03 02:11 (UTC)

[ That part isn't as hard as it sounds. Our control over our feelings can mete out what kind of memory passes through, he replies. That's his theory and he's seen it at work with the locals and other people. He should probably inform the Fleet, he thinks distantly.

Charles could never be overwhelmed by love. He's starved for it. Even now, with the little help he has provided Bucky and Bucky's reaction to him is like water to a thirsty man in a desert.

You deserve good things, he had said, I can't remember when someone did something good for my mind.

And Charles was hopelessly lost in that sentiment, clung to it with a fervor that surprised him even now. ]

[ With the connection building between the two of them Hermione can feel Charles' emotions nudging at her own, and instead of fighting them she simply relaxes into it, letting them... Share. She basks in it, tilting her head up and to one side, no fear in how she leaves her mind open and bare for Charles to look at, to see. She knows that this man is different to the one in the Drabwurld, not just because of time but because of the fact that he's a little shakier with his telepathy - and she isn't afraid to give him all parts of herself.

She literally opens her mind to him, as if opening the door, and the only thing she can focus on is how much she loves him, and how much she missed him before they got to this point. Memories of the moments she shared with the man she knew, different from this one but no less loved, are passed to him because she's controlling her emotions, doing her best to swallow down the pain and focus on the good, the happy.

She thinks of his comfort when she came back, broken and scarred and lost in the wake of her own bad choices. Charles calling her 'darling' and 'dear girl' and it's all just love, so much love that she feels a little drunk on it, because that affection had kept her going when she had wanted to fall apart. Calling him dad as a joke. Literally fighting side by side, checking on each other, caring more and more with each passing day. She's reminded of the moment that Charles trusted her enough to share his memories with her, and that's when she leans forward, touching her forehead to his.

It's hard not to feel exhausted in the wake of so much memory and so much exhaustion, but she feels lighter, too. Focussing on Charles means she can focus on love and push all the loneliness and guilt to one side, and it brightens her from the inside out. ]

[ His breath stutters. It was too much and it wasn't. Charles' mind and heart can weather the heaviest of storms without blinking. That was his strength. That was his burden. To shelter and carry everyone's pain. But not everything was pain and the love that filtered through made his heart ache. How long has it been since someone outside his family had shown him this kind of easy affection. His eyes prick with tears.

He brushes her hair back, gentle. I think this is still half of the story, he says. Because he knows by now, the scars that litter their path, their past. He knows what these places do to people. Eventually, it will need to come out. Don't be afraid of it. ]

[ Charles might never have been seen as her brother, or her uncle, or her father, or been formally adopted like she did with Nico and John, but he had been family to her. There had never been a word for it; they had been close, they had cared about each other and Hermione had loved him in her own way just as she knows that he had loved her. There was no point trying to hide the fact that she was utterly devoted to him, no matter what changed; a part of her was his, and she can't take it back.

Still, her hands shake a little and she breathes out, not wanting to overwhelm him again but feeling as though she's gone passed the point of no return already. She feels like she might have already drowned him in all the things she felt and she couldn't reel it back in.

What do you want to see? She asks it because she doesn't know, still trying to hide the worst parts. What is there? ]

[ I'll leave that to you, he says, but I know that speaking of the good and not the bad can often make the memories harder to bear.

He hesitates and reveals a memory he had not spoken to anyone, except Erik. After one terrible game, Erik had vanished. The team Fawn was reeling. Raven, under the effect of depression took a knife with her to her room and that's how Charles found her, a few hours later. Auriga, their new addition was a cannibal and her cravings drove her to the point of extreme self-loathing.

And it was just Charles, trying to patch everything together, trying to make it work. He dragged Raven's body away to revive her. He took Auriga to get the flesh she needed to survive. He searched far and wide, asking door to door for any mention of Erik. A week. One bloody week with Charles fraying at the seams. But Erik had come back, from his time with Systems and Charles quietly broke under his touch.

Fawn was the strongest time Charles felt he belonged. Even when they slowly vanished before their eyes, even when Erik and Charles marked their names on a wall so they wouldn't forget. Even when they died and hurt all over, when Charles' friends killed him and turned on him. It was a bright spot that Charles could never completely forego, but he remembers the sharp edges of the knife.

That's how memories were. Choosing and picking what they felt ultimately turned against them. ]

[ You can't have one without the other.

And Hermione listens. Every thing that Charles shows her she drinks in, and she has to breathe in sharply as it sweeps over her, digging into her heart and leaving fresh little scars there, opening old, salt-broken wounds. She knows what it's like, to try and hold things together, to try and push everything into one piece, and sometimes it's impossible - sometimes you just want to break. She can empathise and she feels it even now, wanting to reach out and wrap herself around Charles because she understands. It might not be identical, their situations might not directly mirror each other, but it doesn't stop the flow of empathy.

Slowly, her mind opens.

Instead of the good things, Charles can witness the bad, the evil. He sees a picture of a tower falling apart, hundreds of dead bodies, the feelings of guilt in her heart tied without any doubt to it; that the deaths were a result of her own actions. Hermione shares the memories of offending a native and being cursed, unable to eat or sleep, only surviving on water and biscuits and almost dying from it. Memories of a giant, winged monster, like a dragon but worse, haunting her in visionary nightmares before it became a reality, causing her skin to rot and her hair to fall out. There's a towering image of Gilgamesh and the love-hate-idiot-why emotions that come with it and how he had come so close to murdering her in cold blood, as a lesson, to teach her to be brave.

It doesn't stop. There's the memory of the first time she killed someone, of Dorian dying for her and the sword through his stomach touching her own, her body transforming into a lion before she literally ate someone alive. Memories of her heartbreak, of losing people, of the weight of power as she rose up to become Marchioness - the knowledge that people hated her, the fights she had with Katsa, learning that her best friend intended to murder people in her court because she felt it was right. Losing Harry to some kind of darkness she couldn't understand, ending up isolated because she couldn't bear to be around people anymore.

She knows she's crying now, but she leans against Charles all the same, afraid and freed all at once.

That's who I am. That's what I've done. ]

[ He kisses her forehead, gentle. I'm not bothered. It's hard to be, when he has done similar things or had similar things done to him. In the end, they are all people, scraping by through the alien worlds they've been placed in.

( and charles' fury, his bitterness was saved for one place only. for the people who pardoned the woman that murdered his team single-handedly while damning his family for their perceived sins.

everything else is easily forgiven. )

It's better to see a full picture and we can move forward from there. ]

[ I think you should be, but I'm glad you're not. Hermione still fears the loss of the people she loves the most; she's used to waking up each morning wondering if this is the day that Morla will have cut their ties to their shards and left them to fly free and abandoned throughout the world. She wonders that here, too - if when she wakes up she'll hear news that someone has gone home, somehow.

She'd be glad for them, but she'd miss them fiercely, with everything she has.

Careful, Hermione nods her head, tilting closer to Charles - because she can't avoid it. It's the connection, of course, sharing being close to one another, but at the same time there's nothing she can do but brace herself and let herself bask in being at his side. It feels silly, to think 'at least she has him', but it's true - no matter what happens she has someone she loves and something daringly familiar.

And he'll have her, too, the unwavering support that she knows she can offer.

Slowly, she smiles, her eyes softening - they're not squeezed shut anymore, just gently closed, as if she's asleep. Where would you like to move forward to? ]

[ He speaks verbally for this. He needs to put his emphasis in his words. The connection remains active. ]

I'm not sure. I have the school to think about. Beyond that - [ He raises his hands as if to say "what else?" ]

( boop )

Let's all hold hands and sing Kumbaya

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cw: suicide

cw: gore, death

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