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xp_logsKevin finally remembers to talk to Davey about his newest enemy.
Life, and even a whole mansion of interesting people, could in fact be incredibly boring if you didn't understand anything.
Kevin "sat" on the couch of Davey's room, although was it really sitting if he had his legs propped up over the back of the couch while his head and shoulders dangled off the cushion, practically touching the floor? He found he liked the sensation of the blood rushing to his head, it wasn't exactly pleasant, but he'd spent so long with no blood or body at all that now it was simply interesting. Idle feet knocked against the wall as he waited for his friend.
That too was new, well, Davey wasn't new, but the reality of a friend was. He'd gotten a few more since he got here! He just...couldn't remember their names....or where they were. He did however remember some others he'd met.
He groaned loudly, waiting for Davey to come find him. He needed to talk about his new enemy. Could it still be new if it happened...not right now? He groaned again, impatient.
A whiff of cigarette smoke driven before the closing door heralded Jim's arrival. It was especially intense after spending his commute to and from the city in a private vehicle with no restriction on his smoking habits but courtesy for anyone else using the motor pool. The other man's inverted posture barely got a second glance; considering Kevin's very limited experience with furniture prior to the mansion, Jim reasoned he could utilize it whichever way he liked. The telepath raised a brown paper bag in a sort of salute.
"Oh, hey. I picked us up some sandwiches. There's a salad, too, if you can try some of that . . . we can split it," Jim sighed, acknowledging the hypocrisy of asking that Kevin adhere to any kind of nutritional guidelines when the most that could be said of Jim's own efforts was that he usually managed at least one meal per day.
"Whit's salad?" Kevin said the word with all the suspicion that most foods Davey asked him to try and split had earned. He had not liked 'broccoli' which he still thought should be called 'wee trees.' "Also I made an enemy....not...today. It was at ....a before today time."
He was getting better at time, before and after had meaning to him now which was very impressive, the concept of quantifying it however...that still eluded him.
Jim paused in retrieving a pair of plates from the kitchenette. "An enemy?" he asked, wondering if Kevin was using the word correctly. That seemed more pressing than explaining salad, which Jim had not had high hopes for. "What happened?"
Kevin knew enemies. He’d had nothing but enemies where he came from.
“Some wee fucker with hair like mine got mad cos I was outside the….the….” He gestured broadly towards the door. “That thing the - the door!”
Kevin clumsily rolled around on the couch until he could sit up. “I didnae do anything! I followed all yer fucking ‘rules’ and didnae break or eat anyone!”
Not that he hadn’t been tempted but the old pull wasn’t there anymore. He could sense the power but he’d grown less hungry for it than for chocolate.
"Wait, someone gave you a hard time because you were standing outside my door?" Surely there was missing context here, although sometimes the filter of Kevin's own limited experience made it difficult to tell. The specter of his incident with Emily and the couch loomed large in Jim's mind.
"I was..." Kevin paused, unsure of the word he needed, and then used his fingers to mime pacing. "But I didnae do anything to him first! I tried to go not through him and he kept moving!"
Jim the conversation back a few seconds. This would be easier if he could narrow down who Kevin was talking about. 'Hair like mine . . .' oh.
"Did he have a mark on his face, here?" Jim guessed, gesturing to his left eye.
Kevin nodded. "He's...he hates me because you're my friend....I didnae do anything bad. I was good. I was trying to be good. I waited!"
"That's Shatterstar, and you didn't do anything wrong. He doesn't hate you" I hope "I just don't have as much time as I used to, and I think that adjustment hasn't been easy for him. I'm sorry, I should have checked in on him before it got to that point. When was this? Do you think he's still around?"
"Not...today. Before. Uh....before the trees inside? And the- day with all the foods you made me eat? I think?" He'd been sitting on it for a while, but also time was hard to manage when each day looked pretty much the same.
Jim's brow creased. "Before the . . . do you mean the Christmas trees?"
Kevin nodded. "A different man with my hair talked to me about trees."
He frowned. "And before that there was the day with all the food you made me eat."
Jim accomplished the superhuman feat of performing a spit-take without the benefit of a drink. "This was before Thanksgiving?"
Kevin shrugged. "Is that whit it's called?"
Oh dear God. Kevin's fuzzy grasp of time wasn't new; in many ways it mirrored a child's development of temporal awareness. He had 'before' and 'after' down, for the most part, but his sense of duration seemed to still be developing. Perhaps it was because time was an abstract concept for which Kevin'd had no use for, but considering how much of the man's life had been nothing but the same four walls Jim had to wonder if it wasn't also a way to preserve his sanity.
Jim had a similarly tenuous relationship with time, though for different reasons; his services were in demand over the holidays, both at Muir and the community center, and the days had a tendency to blur together. The dissociative disorder was hardly necessary. Still, even for him this was a galling oversight. He just couldn't seem to get himself together lately.
"I'll see if I can talk to him," Jim said at last. "Don't worry about it. Oh, um . . ." He returned to his bag and fished out a separate plastic-wrapped bundle, which he handed off to Kevin. "I forgot, I got you this, too."
"Whit's this?" Kevin asked after tearing through the plastic, staring at the colored pencils and coloring book in his hands.
"It's a coloring book," said Jim. He'd had the vague idea of using it as a reward for trying the salad, but Jim was easily enough of a coward to utilize an emergency distraction. It was a good-quality "adult" coloring book, predominantly filled with images of plants, animals, and other nature scenes. He'd been concerned abstract shapes would prove too monotonous, and Kevin seemed to like the outdoors. "The pictures in here are black and white so you can fill them with whatever colors you want, or add your own doodles or designs. Dave- I like them, so I thought maybe you'd like to try, too. It's nice because there's no right or wrong way to do them."
Kevin thought for a moment and then pushed the materials back towards his friend. "Show me." He demanded, although there was some excitement to it. This was something new that was not A. Food or B. Another person. And more than that, it was something Davey liked. "Show me, how does it work?"
Obligingly, Jim lay out the materials on the countertop and cracked the box of colored pencils. "Not much too it," he remarked, selecting a color at random and opening to the first page. It presented a trio of mushrooms against an ornately rendered swamp.
"Usually people try to stay inside the lines," the telepath explained as he began to shade one of the caps blue, "but if you can't, or don't want to -- see?" Jim dragged the pencil beyond the boundaries of the outline and terminated the stroke in a neat curlicue. "Nothing happens. You can't make a mistake because there aren't any rules. You can do whatever you want." He turned the book back towards Kevin and offered him the pencil. "Want to try?"
Kevin's eyes practically lit up as he watched. "Are there- are there these without lines?"
"You mean just blank paper? Sure." Jim ducked into his room and emerged again with an empty sketchbook. He always had a few lying around; like many artists, his supply of materials was more aspirational than feasible.
"I usually draw in these with pencil," he explained as he handed the book over to Kevin, "but you can also use things like pastels, charcoal, ink . . . I've got some markers around here, too. Some things can smear and bleed through the pages, but you can always use a fixative or tear out a page if you think you might make a mess."
The usually dim light behind Kevin's eyes had finally come alive. It was something to do- and he didn't have to talk to anyone else to do it. He was struck by an impulse, pure and childish and one that had been beaten out of him years ago- but Davey was his friend, he wouldn't hurt him.
Kevin clumsily rushed to his feet, head still pounding from being upside down for so long, and wrapped Davey in a tight, bone crushing hug.
Jim stiffened in surprise at the unexpected contact. Kevin wasn't big on touch besides tolerating basic assistance with clothing or hygiene, and the images he'd imparted during their first encounter still brought an acrid taste to Jim's mouth. This time, though, the contact brought no memories of abuse and neglect: there was only the pure, uncomplicated affection of Now.
Wordlessly the telepath returned the embrace, and held it until the other man was done.
Kevin sank into the embrace like a man starved, and for all intents and purposes he was. He'd never had this before, and he found that he quite liked it when it was paired with the safety of knowing that it was Davey, and that Davey wouldn't hurt him. All of the love Kevin had ever wanted from Moira had only resulted in pain- but Davey was here and had given him back what Moira had taken from him and was hugging him.
Finally he came back to himself and pulled away, stiff and awkward and altogether unsure of if he even wanted to. He wished he could go back in time to tell himself that hugs were nice, even if it would have only resulted in more pain from Moira when he'd have tried for it over and over again... "I- thank you."
He'd remembered the words. He was doing so much better. He was doing good.
"You're welcome," Jim replied, completing the social ritual. Instinctively, he gave Kevin's shoulder the briefest of squeezes before backing off. Nothing insistent, simply a confirmation that Kevin's efforts had not gone unnoticed -- or unappreciated.
"Come on. Let's try that salad, and then I'll see if I can dig out my pastels."
Life, and even a whole mansion of interesting people, could in fact be incredibly boring if you didn't understand anything.
Kevin "sat" on the couch of Davey's room, although was it really sitting if he had his legs propped up over the back of the couch while his head and shoulders dangled off the cushion, practically touching the floor? He found he liked the sensation of the blood rushing to his head, it wasn't exactly pleasant, but he'd spent so long with no blood or body at all that now it was simply interesting. Idle feet knocked against the wall as he waited for his friend.
That too was new, well, Davey wasn't new, but the reality of a friend was. He'd gotten a few more since he got here! He just...couldn't remember their names....or where they were. He did however remember some others he'd met.
He groaned loudly, waiting for Davey to come find him. He needed to talk about his new enemy. Could it still be new if it happened...not right now? He groaned again, impatient.
A whiff of cigarette smoke driven before the closing door heralded Jim's arrival. It was especially intense after spending his commute to and from the city in a private vehicle with no restriction on his smoking habits but courtesy for anyone else using the motor pool. The other man's inverted posture barely got a second glance; considering Kevin's very limited experience with furniture prior to the mansion, Jim reasoned he could utilize it whichever way he liked. The telepath raised a brown paper bag in a sort of salute.
"Oh, hey. I picked us up some sandwiches. There's a salad, too, if you can try some of that . . . we can split it," Jim sighed, acknowledging the hypocrisy of asking that Kevin adhere to any kind of nutritional guidelines when the most that could be said of Jim's own efforts was that he usually managed at least one meal per day.
"Whit's salad?" Kevin said the word with all the suspicion that most foods Davey asked him to try and split had earned. He had not liked 'broccoli' which he still thought should be called 'wee trees.' "Also I made an enemy....not...today. It was at ....a before today time."
He was getting better at time, before and after had meaning to him now which was very impressive, the concept of quantifying it however...that still eluded him.
Jim paused in retrieving a pair of plates from the kitchenette. "An enemy?" he asked, wondering if Kevin was using the word correctly. That seemed more pressing than explaining salad, which Jim had not had high hopes for. "What happened?"
Kevin knew enemies. He’d had nothing but enemies where he came from.
“Some wee fucker with hair like mine got mad cos I was outside the….the….” He gestured broadly towards the door. “That thing the - the door!”
Kevin clumsily rolled around on the couch until he could sit up. “I didnae do anything! I followed all yer fucking ‘rules’ and didnae break or eat anyone!”
Not that he hadn’t been tempted but the old pull wasn’t there anymore. He could sense the power but he’d grown less hungry for it than for chocolate.
"Wait, someone gave you a hard time because you were standing outside my door?" Surely there was missing context here, although sometimes the filter of Kevin's own limited experience made it difficult to tell. The specter of his incident with Emily and the couch loomed large in Jim's mind.
"I was..." Kevin paused, unsure of the word he needed, and then used his fingers to mime pacing. "But I didnae do anything to him first! I tried to go not through him and he kept moving!"
Jim the conversation back a few seconds. This would be easier if he could narrow down who Kevin was talking about. 'Hair like mine . . .' oh.
"Did he have a mark on his face, here?" Jim guessed, gesturing to his left eye.
Kevin nodded. "He's...he hates me because you're my friend....I didnae do anything bad. I was good. I was trying to be good. I waited!"
"That's Shatterstar, and you didn't do anything wrong. He doesn't hate you" I hope "I just don't have as much time as I used to, and I think that adjustment hasn't been easy for him. I'm sorry, I should have checked in on him before it got to that point. When was this? Do you think he's still around?"
"Not...today. Before. Uh....before the trees inside? And the- day with all the foods you made me eat? I think?" He'd been sitting on it for a while, but also time was hard to manage when each day looked pretty much the same.
Jim's brow creased. "Before the . . . do you mean the Christmas trees?"
Kevin nodded. "A different man with my hair talked to me about trees."
He frowned. "And before that there was the day with all the food you made me eat."
Jim accomplished the superhuman feat of performing a spit-take without the benefit of a drink. "This was before Thanksgiving?"
Kevin shrugged. "Is that whit it's called?"
Oh dear God. Kevin's fuzzy grasp of time wasn't new; in many ways it mirrored a child's development of temporal awareness. He had 'before' and 'after' down, for the most part, but his sense of duration seemed to still be developing. Perhaps it was because time was an abstract concept for which Kevin'd had no use for, but considering how much of the man's life had been nothing but the same four walls Jim had to wonder if it wasn't also a way to preserve his sanity.
Jim had a similarly tenuous relationship with time, though for different reasons; his services were in demand over the holidays, both at Muir and the community center, and the days had a tendency to blur together. The dissociative disorder was hardly necessary. Still, even for him this was a galling oversight. He just couldn't seem to get himself together lately.
"I'll see if I can talk to him," Jim said at last. "Don't worry about it. Oh, um . . ." He returned to his bag and fished out a separate plastic-wrapped bundle, which he handed off to Kevin. "I forgot, I got you this, too."
"Whit's this?" Kevin asked after tearing through the plastic, staring at the colored pencils and coloring book in his hands.
"It's a coloring book," said Jim. He'd had the vague idea of using it as a reward for trying the salad, but Jim was easily enough of a coward to utilize an emergency distraction. It was a good-quality "adult" coloring book, predominantly filled with images of plants, animals, and other nature scenes. He'd been concerned abstract shapes would prove too monotonous, and Kevin seemed to like the outdoors. "The pictures in here are black and white so you can fill them with whatever colors you want, or add your own doodles or designs. Dave- I like them, so I thought maybe you'd like to try, too. It's nice because there's no right or wrong way to do them."
Kevin thought for a moment and then pushed the materials back towards his friend. "Show me." He demanded, although there was some excitement to it. This was something new that was not A. Food or B. Another person. And more than that, it was something Davey liked. "Show me, how does it work?"
Obligingly, Jim lay out the materials on the countertop and cracked the box of colored pencils. "Not much too it," he remarked, selecting a color at random and opening to the first page. It presented a trio of mushrooms against an ornately rendered swamp.
"Usually people try to stay inside the lines," the telepath explained as he began to shade one of the caps blue, "but if you can't, or don't want to -- see?" Jim dragged the pencil beyond the boundaries of the outline and terminated the stroke in a neat curlicue. "Nothing happens. You can't make a mistake because there aren't any rules. You can do whatever you want." He turned the book back towards Kevin and offered him the pencil. "Want to try?"
Kevin's eyes practically lit up as he watched. "Are there- are there these without lines?"
"You mean just blank paper? Sure." Jim ducked into his room and emerged again with an empty sketchbook. He always had a few lying around; like many artists, his supply of materials was more aspirational than feasible.
"I usually draw in these with pencil," he explained as he handed the book over to Kevin, "but you can also use things like pastels, charcoal, ink . . . I've got some markers around here, too. Some things can smear and bleed through the pages, but you can always use a fixative or tear out a page if you think you might make a mess."
The usually dim light behind Kevin's eyes had finally come alive. It was something to do- and he didn't have to talk to anyone else to do it. He was struck by an impulse, pure and childish and one that had been beaten out of him years ago- but Davey was his friend, he wouldn't hurt him.
Kevin clumsily rushed to his feet, head still pounding from being upside down for so long, and wrapped Davey in a tight, bone crushing hug.
Jim stiffened in surprise at the unexpected contact. Kevin wasn't big on touch besides tolerating basic assistance with clothing or hygiene, and the images he'd imparted during their first encounter still brought an acrid taste to Jim's mouth. This time, though, the contact brought no memories of abuse and neglect: there was only the pure, uncomplicated affection of Now.
Wordlessly the telepath returned the embrace, and held it until the other man was done.
Kevin sank into the embrace like a man starved, and for all intents and purposes he was. He'd never had this before, and he found that he quite liked it when it was paired with the safety of knowing that it was Davey, and that Davey wouldn't hurt him. All of the love Kevin had ever wanted from Moira had only resulted in pain- but Davey was here and had given him back what Moira had taken from him and was hugging him.
Finally he came back to himself and pulled away, stiff and awkward and altogether unsure of if he even wanted to. He wished he could go back in time to tell himself that hugs were nice, even if it would have only resulted in more pain from Moira when he'd have tried for it over and over again... "I- thank you."
He'd remembered the words. He was doing so much better. He was doing good.
"You're welcome," Jim replied, completing the social ritual. Instinctively, he gave Kevin's shoulder the briefest of squeezes before backing off. Nothing insistent, simply a confirmation that Kevin's efforts had not gone unnoticed -- or unappreciated.
"Come on. Let's try that salad, and then I'll see if I can dig out my pastels."
