minecraft is unrealistic

[vagabone]

Who: Héctor, anyone
What: His spirit is as dead as he is.
When: July 25th
Where: Enso
Warnings: Mild injury, and a truckload of d e s p a i r to start with.

It's mid afternoon, one year and then some after he first arrived on the beaches of the island. The thirteenth month. Thirteen's been said to be an unlucky number. Certainly it's not doing him any favors.

As good and kind as everyone is... it's just not enough. Not every day. There's only one thing that ever will be, one thing which he always seems to be denied, one way or another. Granted, not much about his situation is new, when it comes down to it, but then neither are these deep black moods. There were no failures this year. No bridge. Nothing to try. Everything's perfectly fine until he can't fake it anymore, because everything is not fine.

He had four pleasant days with his family, after so long dreaming of them. Was that it? Is that all he'll ever have? And there's no reason for it, seeing as there's very little he can do someone else can't do better. Of course, if he hadn't been so stupid, he would have had many years with them before being drawn to this world, not only four days... stupid, stupid, stupid. He's always been stupid. It explodes outwards as anger first, for a few minutes, but that's hard to sustain for him. So...

He's just lying on the ground, in the leaves underneath a tree, no smile on his face and cracks spiderwebbing through all the bones of one hand. Don't punch trees if you have no padding on your hands, you won't like the results. He doesn't want to get up, he doesn't want to goof off, joke around, play games, none of that. There's... nothing. No point at all.

Comments

[postictal]

"Oh, so anytime someone takes a vacation it's their fault if their plane crashes and they die and don't come home?" He hasn't had to do that before. Not really. But he'd been living out of suitcases for the past several years of his life, until he wound up here and was forced to stay in one place.

"You didn't know what was gonna happen. You went out to do something you wanted to do and it ended badly."

[vagabone]

"It wasn't a vacation. It was 1921, travel was hard. I meant to be gone a year with a four year old daughter. A whole year, that's eternity to someone that young."

He sucks in a breath and... sighs. Yep. Broken record. Tim's going to snap if he keeps it up.

"Look, I understand what you're trying to say and it's kind. And they forgive me. But... I don't. It was wrong. If it was unforgivable when I died of 'food poisoning', it's still unforgivable now that we know it was murder."

[postictal]

"So what's sitting around and feeling bad about it doing for you?"

Look, he gets it. He gets guilt. He gets feeling that you're responsible for every shitty thing in someone else's life, and he gets feeling like nothing you do will ever make up for it. But then he ended up in a world that didn't allow him to stew in that, and it's at a point where it doesn't matter how bad he feels about it.

It won't change what it is.

"Is feeling like shit about it gonna fix anything?"

[vagabone]

"...no, not really."

The sickly grin makes its return. Yes, Héctor, stop hiding in the woods and stewing in self-loathing. Make this horrible dark mood pass, not simply wait it out.

"Lo siento, I know, I shouldn't... go down that road. Better things I should be doing."

[postictal]

Tim sighs, and resists the urge to dig around in the pockets of his jeans for another smoke.

"Look. I get it. I mean, I get feeling...like that. Like nothing you do is ever gonna fix what you fucked up. But if you just let it eat at you, it's never gonna get better." It's easier for someone else to forgive you than it is for you to forgive yourself. He knows that.

He's lucky that he's never had to worry about forgiveness. No one from his history has ever made it far enough in his direction to bother.

"It's always gonna hold you back."

[vagabone]

"It doesn't. Most of the time. This isn't new." It's been there the whole time, since the moment he awoke on a beach with a possessed elevator chasing him down.

"Sometimes I'm..." Unable to do much but lie down and wish it were over. "Tired. For a day or two, no more than a week. It always passes. I'm... just an old dead guy, these things happen."

[postictal]

"Tired, or depressed?"

That sounds like Depression, buddy. Just because you don't, technically, have a brain anymore doesn't mean you can't get suffer from the same sort of problems that would plague a brain.

[vagabone]

"Oh. I don't know. Both?"

Who wouldn't be in the dumps, honestly, every time another year passes and he is still not home? There's nothing to try. He'd very much prefer to try and fail than to have nothing to do. No bridge. No petals. Nothing to cross. Somehow he's only found himself farther away from Santa Cecilia than ever.

[postictal]

"You can be both," says Tim. "...sorry. I know I'm not the best guy to be talking to about this. If this place had a therapist, they'd make bank."

In this economy-less island, sure. They'd be making theoretical bank.

[vagabone]

"Or a curandero." he says, with a ghost of a smile. Some people are old fashioned and always will be, don't mind him.

"But... no, don't be sorry. It's not your responsibility to talk out my problems. I came out here so no one would have to deal with it. I'll be okay, once I get back to being dead." Someday. Please say it'll be so. "Things were turning around. They really were."

[postictal]

"You know that's not a given, right?"

Tim's been here two years. Two years and change, given the time he spent in the Castle, and then the time he spent dead but not really going anywhere. Just time he lost, which is fine and good for someone like him. Loses time all the time.

"You can't know if you're ever going back."

[vagabone]

"Don't say that. Please don't say that."

His voice has gone hollow again, empty of everything but despair. No. Not that. It can't be forever. Because it could be forever, decades and decades of not aging, not fading. He hunches in on himself, fingers clenched.

"Not that. I can handle a lot, anything else, but... not that. Not again. I don't think I can."

[postictal]

"It's not like you have a choice in it." Tim shrugs, very slightly, a small jerk of his shoulders. "I don't have a choice in whether I stay here or not. No one here does. Some people just disappear and head home, I guess. Some people die, and we don't know what happens to them. Some people are just...stuck here."

The reality of that possibility has never bothered him. But then, he's not the one with anything to go back to.

[vagabone]

Just stuck. Just. Nothing just about it. He's far from well remembered, but he isn't being forgotten now. He'll go on. He has a future. A long one, he's sure. It could be another century.

One hundred more years, further from home than ever.

"I can't do it." Doesn't matter that it's his own fault he didn't spent the first hundred with his family. Doesn't lessen the pain. "I won't last. There has to be another way."

[postictal]

"It's not really something you can control. You just have to consider what you'd end up doing with yourself if that happens. 'Cause lying down and giving up is probably something you could do, but it's probably not gonna take you very far."

Tim's lucky. His emotional budget is limited as it is. The low-grade despair that always sits in the back of his head and marinates his brain in a constant slow-burn is basically a numbing agent for the soul. He doesn't have worry about blows hitting hard, unless they're big ones.

Really big ones.

"Just...you have to keep yourself ready for the worst. Have a plan, if it comes to that."

[vagabone]

"Wouldn't be lying here if I had a plan. I've got nothing. Used up all my best plans decades ago."

He's empty. So, so empty. So tired. And it's easier to follow than lead. His plans always were garbage. More likely to get himself or innocent bystanders hurt than do any good.

"But hey, if you have any ideas... speak up, I'm listening."

[postictal]

"Some people might figure a way outta here. You never know. But unless they do? You just..." He shrugs, incrementally, and squints up at the little triangles of sky visible through the canopies.

"You try and make a home outta this place, if you can."

[vagabone]

"...it's not a home for me, don't say that." He's hunching in on himself, unconsciously. How could a tattered thing like himself ache so badly and still exist?

"I get what you mean and I've done the best I can, far as that goes. Just... just not that word. It's a place to stay. And wait. Not a home without my girls."

[postictal]

"And what if you can't go back?" He's good at this, isn't he. Asking hard questions that no one wants to answer. He asks them of himself, he'd like to think, but he never answers them either, so maybe he's a fucking hypocrite. He's always known he's a fucking hypocrite.

"What if this is where it all stops?"

cw implied suicidal ideation or something like it

[vagabone]

"I don't know."

He doesn't have any good answers for you, Tim. He never will. He's just thinking out loud, it seems like, voice raw with pain.

"Forever really is forever for me. I'm dead. I won't grow old or fade away, no matter how long it takes."

[postictal]

"No one really dies here."

He's watched two kids walk straight into nonexistence with no intention of return, and that didn't even stick. Something about this place, maybe. Or something about them. But they're not the only ones to be thwarted by a set of islands that refuse to let them die.

[vagabone]

"No. I guess it's forever for everyone." And not a thing he can do about it. They're all so helpless. He clasps his fingers together, holding his own hands. "It's funny. I was only with them for four years. Without them for most of my... existence without them. You'd think I'd be better at it."

[postictal]

"Don't think it's the time that matters. It's the people."

There's those two kids again. And not just them, either. There are people who, in the grand scheme, should mean objectively less than they do. But he's hung up on them anyway, no matter how briefly they knew each other.

A hoodie packed away in a shack. A locket under his shirt. A notebook he regrets lending.

[vagabone]

"They were everything. My whole world. I've known a lot of good people, people I miss... but nobody like them."

His girls. The very best girls. Everything else, everyone else, no one and nothing can measure up to the people he loved when he was alive. "But then, I'm dead. It only makes sense. They were my life. I wouldn't want eternity without them. Good or bad."

So, what, he'll sit in the dirt and complain about it to a guy who can't help him? He hunches in on himself, but looks up, not exactly smiling. No, he has the self awareness to realize how wrong what he's doing to Tim is. "...you really don't have to listen to me."

[postictal]

"Is it helping?" He doesn't imagine that he really is helping all that much, but he's got no idea. Mostly he just feels the way he always does - like he's trying to smother someone else's fire with gasoline. Making things worse, the way he knows best.

"...talking about it, I mean. Is it helping?"