The way Deerington reshapes his ability to heal has, in some ways, reshaped his worth. If he's not safe to someone as a shield they can carry with them, he's content, at least, to be their canary in a coal mine.
I don't know if that's the right word. I'm no magician. But that's what folks call it right? Like we're livin' in someone else's dream. Some place conjured up by Sodder's head. He shrugs. Maybe that was true once. But I wonder if it's... you know.. taken root. He hopes that metaphor lands, but without resorting to poetic comparisons he wouldn't know how else to describe this place and it's various phenomenon.
Just like I told you. You hallucinate something. Things other people see in you. It only lasts a little while. Probably less still in slow doses.
Strange to think of hallucinating inside of a hallucination, Wes remarks. While the man may be more clever than he lets on, he's no philosopher. His own search for God or meaning has not been an extensive one. He's never felt particularly tortured by ideas beyond the scope of his comprehension. Instead, he's found a philosophy that's workable to him and mostly let himself stand there, embracing futility as a comfort to his own actions. But the why and how of their being here in Deerington and what separates truth from illusion in a place like this is enough that it could easily undo those lines he's guarded himself with.
Instead, he shifts in his seat and wags his hand to dismiss Logan's words. No, you're avoiding my question. What did you see? He points an insistent finger at the other man, drawing the point from the tip of his gesture. By now they've all seen different sides of one another. They've dealt with child forms, doppelgangers, and idealized visions. But to imagine what Logan saw differently when he faced himself as others know him is a curiosity to Wes.
He throws Wes a sharp look out of the corner of his eye. The younger man's no fool. Logan knows well what he's looking for. And it's not the question that irritates him so much as the way he finds his own throat still restricts defensively around something he'd probably have explained more easily some weeks ago. He reaches across the dash and flips down the passenger side visor.
You tell me, he says. Anything seem different? Of course, maybe dried and powdered and every so faintly inhaled or absorbed through the skin isn't enough to to anything and the question doesn't have an answer to satisfy either of them.
With a gruff sigh, he leans an elbow out the window. It was Kurt, he says. Who I saw first. So. You can imagine what I saw.
Some weeks ago, Logan's expression would not have met Wes with the same kind of venom it carries now. In better times, the younger man might've met it with a grin or hopeful insistence. Now, he lets his leg slide from the bench seat and into the footwell, and corrects his posture to face forward. Some amount of openness fades from him at the action, along with a sense of hope that feels at once almost naive. He sets his jaw and pays a glance in the small rectangle or a mirror, but what he sees isn't the question that he asked. Wes is sure now that his eyes are too green, his face too youthful. Something about where he's been seems forgotten in the arc of his lips, and he flips the visor back up with an air of distaste.
Right, he agrees, but doesn't push the point. He doesn't know what Kurt might see that he himself can't perceive. The other man has known Logan for years, and Wes has only gotten the barest glimpses at the ways their lives have intersected and shaped one another's since long before this place. But he doesn't have to imagine very hard what Kurt might see when he looks at anyone: possibility, potential, hope. Their partner's admiration is fierce and earnest, and if that changes anything about the planes of Logan's face or the expression he wears, Wes thinks he can imagine it easily. It can't be so very different from the memory of the man sat back on his knees in the clearing beside the cabin, or the way he seemed when he held Wes on the Titanic on his birthday.
The taste of the memory sours in his mouth like stolen sugar, and he watches buildings pass.
What Kurt saw of him wasn't uncomplimentary. He should be flattered, he supposes. But instead what he sees in the mirror now is just the void between what the younger man wants him to be and what Logan knows he is.
Passing through the town they don't head south towards the lake and the woods. They don't even turn off towards the parks department. Instead they head north east towards the church. Passing the same vast fields the two of them one trod in the desperate, futile search for Kurt.
He can almost feel that shared memory hanging over the both of them when he pulls into the church road and kills the engine. Handing Wes the empty jar he kept from the kitchen he climbs out of the truck and heads up the grave yard path. C'mon. he says, taking a cigar between his teeth. Those things only grow in one place around here
Some months ago, the church carried a very different set of memories. Wes could have almost found the old, dilapidated building calming for what it called to mind. It's still the first place he encountered Kurt, and while that chance meeting could have ended so poorly, it set him on a trajectory here that he's grateful for. He thinks of the afternoons spent at his partner's side cleaning it up, only to return the next day and find their work entirely undone. The Sisyphean task was never one he minded undertaking, for the time spent with Kurt. He remembers the way the three of them hunt down the nest of doppelgangers, and the rush he felt even as they risked themselves to expunge them from that place.
But now, Wes feels a familiar shiver as they get close. Now, it's just another place that he's tried and failed to do what was right. That he's come up lacking for the lot of them. He feels his stomach turn as he takes the bottle from Logan and slowly climbs out of the truck. If you say it's around Kurt's statue, I'm leaving, his hands grumble, more towards himself than to the man who is already traipsing down that path.
Logically, he knows that Kurt is safe and secure back with them, and that his death is no more permanent than any in this place. But Wes remembers the terror, the way he and Logan raced to rescue a man they reached too late. A broken and battered body they found too far gone.
He can hear the movement of the younger man's hands. The telltale muffles claps and swish of palms against palms, but he knows he's too late to catch whatever Wes might be mumbling at him, and if the man isn't dragging him around for attention, it's probably not something the younger man actually intends to be known.
All of which puts a surprising little smile on Logan's face when he thinks about how familiar their habits have become in the span of so little time.
This place has a way of expediting how well you know a person. Condensing years into moments through the application of pressure.
It's a short, but slow walk through the overgrown paths of the graveyard as he scans the ground for something that finally stops him. The little silver buttons in the grass look like a few scattered coins. Slicker and wetter with some kind of silvery jelly than the dried specimens Logan kept in the fridge. "They only grow where a grave stone casts a shadow," he says like he knows there's something unnatural and morbid about that.
By light of day, the graveyard that pushes up against the dilapidated church has a quality of near-absurdity. It's like something out of a horror film, Wes thinks to himself. And it's only gotten less ominous and more ridiculous as months pass and the number of those he's known to have died and come back increases with time. He can count himself among those ranks by now, so whose final resting place is here in this patch of earth? His boots squish through the perpetually-damp earth and he makes a point not to look in the direction he knows Kurt's statue lies. Instead, Wes sticks near Logan. Perhaps a little more near than his own internal monologue can explain, when he tries to convince himself the place is purely ridiculous.
He starts at the headstone alongside Logan, unscrewing the jar and stooping in the muck. The man's comment about skin to skin contact makes Wes hesitate and level a glance at his partner, momentarily calculating his own method against the other man's. Do you want me to dig it up, or cut it at the base?
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I don't know if that's the right word. I'm no magician. But that's what folks call it right? Like we're livin' in someone else's dream. Some place conjured up by Sodder's head. He shrugs. Maybe that was true once. But I wonder if it's... you know.. taken root. He hopes that metaphor lands, but without resorting to poetic comparisons he wouldn't know how else to describe this place and it's various phenomenon.
Just like I told you. You hallucinate something. Things other people see in you. It only lasts a little while. Probably less still in slow doses.
no subject
Instead, he shifts in his seat and wags his hand to dismiss Logan's words. No, you're avoiding my question. What did you see? He points an insistent finger at the other man, drawing the point from the tip of his gesture. By now they've all seen different sides of one another. They've dealt with child forms, doppelgangers, and idealized visions. But to imagine what Logan saw differently when he faced himself as others know him is a curiosity to Wes.
no subject
You tell me, he says. Anything seem different? Of course, maybe dried and powdered and every so faintly inhaled or absorbed through the skin isn't enough to to anything and the question doesn't have an answer to satisfy either of them.
With a gruff sigh, he leans an elbow out the window. It was Kurt, he says. Who I saw first. So. You can imagine what I saw.
no subject
Right, he agrees, but doesn't push the point. He doesn't know what Kurt might see that he himself can't perceive. The other man has known Logan for years, and Wes has only gotten the barest glimpses at the ways their lives have intersected and shaped one another's since long before this place. But he doesn't have to imagine very hard what Kurt might see when he looks at anyone: possibility, potential, hope. Their partner's admiration is fierce and earnest, and if that changes anything about the planes of Logan's face or the expression he wears, Wes thinks he can imagine it easily. It can't be so very different from the memory of the man sat back on his knees in the clearing beside the cabin, or the way he seemed when he held Wes on the Titanic on his birthday.
The taste of the memory sours in his mouth like stolen sugar, and he watches buildings pass.
no subject
Passing through the town they don't head south towards the lake and the woods. They don't even turn off towards the parks department. Instead they head north east towards the church. Passing the same vast fields the two of them one trod in the desperate, futile search for Kurt.
He can almost feel that shared memory hanging over the both of them when he pulls into the church road and kills the engine. Handing Wes the empty jar he kept from the kitchen he climbs out of the truck and heads up the grave yard path. C'mon. he says, taking a cigar between his teeth. Those things only grow in one place around here
no subject
But now, Wes feels a familiar shiver as they get close. Now, it's just another place that he's tried and failed to do what was right. That he's come up lacking for the lot of them. He feels his stomach turn as he takes the bottle from Logan and slowly climbs out of the truck. If you say it's around Kurt's statue, I'm leaving, his hands grumble, more towards himself than to the man who is already traipsing down that path.
Logically, he knows that Kurt is safe and secure back with them, and that his death is no more permanent than any in this place. But Wes remembers the terror, the way he and Logan raced to rescue a man they reached too late. A broken and battered body they found too far gone.
no subject
All of which puts a surprising little smile on Logan's face when he thinks about how familiar their habits have become in the span of so little time.
This place has a way of expediting how well you know a person. Condensing years into moments through the application of pressure.
It's a short, but slow walk through the overgrown paths of the graveyard as he scans the ground for something that finally stops him. The little silver buttons in the grass look like a few scattered coins. Slicker and wetter with some kind of silvery jelly than the dried specimens Logan kept in the fridge. "They only grow where a grave stone casts a shadow," he says like he knows there's something unnatural and morbid about that.
no subject
He starts at the headstone alongside Logan, unscrewing the jar and stooping in the muck. The man's comment about skin to skin contact makes Wes hesitate and level a glance at his partner, momentarily calculating his own method against the other man's. Do you want me to dig it up, or cut it at the base?