hunter "great social skills" mackenna. (detections) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2012-12-07 15:55:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, daisy hughes, hunter mackenna |
WHO: Daisy Hughes and Hunter MacKenna.
WHEN: Friday evening.
WHERE: Daisy (and Jodi's) room.
WHAT: Apologies and making up, to the extent that they're able when Hunter's still not sure what's real.
STATUS: Complete log.
HUNTER: Top at the list of Hunter's priorities had been Vic. He was far and away the most important person in Hunter's life, so it stood to reason that he'd gone to speak to Vic first. But no one challenged Daisy for the position of second, and once he'd poured out his heart to Vic, he knew that he had to make things right with her too. Soon. He'd just...needed a little time to recover and steel himself. He'd fucked Daisy over. He hadn't meant to, he wished he hadn't needed to, but he'd still screwed it all up, and she'd made it painfully clear that she had needed him more than ever during the time when he'd avoided confrontation with her. Hell, Carter had made it clear. He had to fix it. He needed her, too. After that conversation with Vic, he felt like he should have gotten a lot of things off of his chest, but he was more worried than ever. He missed having Daisy to lean on -- if she would let her lean on him after everything. After practice, he followed her out. He wasn't sure where she was going, but he wanted to head her off before she disappeared. Catching her arm, he tugged Daisy's elbow to get her attention. "Can we go back to your room and talk...?" DAISY: Daisy jumped at his touch. She hadn't heard him approaching, the phone in her pocket was filling her mind with noise as she fought to control the feed of information. She was failing. It took all of her concentration now just to sort through the network for what she wanted to hear, and doing so tended to block out all other noise around her. She hadn't expected Hunter to follow. Daisy gasped as she spun around to face him, recognition dawning in an instant. "Sorry," she said, apologizing for the startled reaction. She was glad to see Hunter, even happier that he was reaching out (quite literally) for her. "I didn't mean to -- I mean... yeah, of course we can." She exhaled, trying to smile. It wasn't something she'd been doing much of lately. She crossed her arms nervously, looking at him. HUNTER: Why was she apologizing? He was the one who had startled her, he was the one who had all the apologizing to do. He owed her, and yet here Daisy was, trying to make him feel less bad for surprising her. Forcing a smile back at her, he nodded and led the way across the grounds back towards the girls' dorm -- but he held the doors open for her, and let her go through them first before he assumed the lead again. Jodi didn't seem to be back from practice yet either. With any luck, she would go to Ethan's or something instead of coming to her and Daisy's room. Once she'd let him inside, Hunter closed the door behind them. He felt like it had been forever since he'd been in Daisy's room. He used to drop by fairly often, to chat or hang out or even just to say hi sometimes, but it really had been a month or even more since the last time he'd felt comfortable doing that. This time, he was the one who took the computer chair rather than the bed, and he turned it around to rest his arms against the high back. Then he took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Daisy. I'm really fucking sorry about...everything. How I've been acting since we got back." DAISY: She looked at him, blinking once as she leaned back against her bedframe. Her arms were still crossed defensively against her stomach as she attempted to calm the growing nervous feeling inside. Hunter's words sank in, and her expression changed from worry to slight confusion. "Hunter, you don't have to... I mean, you're like --" she shook her head in frustration, trying to find the right words. "I just want you to be okay." She bit her lip. "Are you?" HUNTER: He was biting the corner of his lip too, though he didn't notice the similarities in their nervous tics at the moment. "I...guess," he said slowly, then shook his head. "I mean, I'm not. I know I'm not." Every time he went over this, he felt helpless again, and that was a frustrating feeling. He wanted to grab onto something, to hold something real and tangible. The last time he felt like he'd been able to do that was with Edwin, and even then a part of him wasn't sure about that. Were things he did in this delusion real, or was it all in their heads...? "It's...it's really hard. I know from where you're sitting, you and Vic -- it's so obvious to you that I'm wrong. But you have to understand that you guys arguing with me about it seems like exactly the kind of thing a delusion would do. People don't just have delusions for fun, or because they feel like it, it's something they need for whatever fucking reason. So it stands to reason that even attempting to challenge this, act like I know it's not real, would make the delusion fight back." His shoulders were hunched, and he ducked his curly head. Hearing this wouldn't help Daisy. He hadn't come here to tell her how useless she was, how impossible this battle against his mind might be, but at least she might understand where he stood now. "I'm just -- I'm so fucking tired of this, Dais. I don't know what to do, I miss you, I missed Vic, it all feels pointless because I don't even know if anything I do here matters or if it's just all in my head, it's like --" He caught himself before he said it's like a nightmare. That's what they kept telling him. But it wasn't a bad dream: it was real. "I didn't want to get involved again," he went on quietly. "I thought maybe it'd be easier if I didn't feel so connected this time, if I wake up and I'm back in an insane asylum without you guys. But it's not easier, it fucking sucks. And I can't stand hurting you anymore." Even if you're not real. DAISY: Hunter's words hit her hard. Daisy had been craving Hunter's attention so desperately for so long, she nearly had to fight to believe that he was finally giving her some kind of an allowance. For weeks, she had hardly even allowed herself to feel sad, opting instead for a generic sort of numbness that allowed her to get through each day. "Hunter, I'm..." Daisy's face scrunched up as she battled the sudden wave of emotion that was threatening to wash over her. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that he did this to you, and that like, you've had to basically go through it like, totally alone. And I just..." Daisy's voice caught in her throat. She felt like she couldn't breathe, but the words eventually tumbled out, seeming to break some kind of mental wall as they did so. "I just like, missed you so much." Tears spilled over onto her face and she looked toward the window, wiping them away. It wasn't much of a help. They kept coming. Daisy covered her eyes with one of her hands, not wanting to look back at Hunter. It wasn't fair for her to do this to him. She hated herself for not being able to keep it together, for his sake. HUNTER: At first he sat there, silently watching her. Daisy was crying. Usually when she cried, he felt helpless -- like a failure, standing there unsure of what to do or what to say to make her stop -- but he already felt helpless, he already felt like a failure. Instead, that sense of exhaustion weighed on him so heavily that he felt like he could barely move. He lifted a hand to press against his face, rubbing his burning eyes and dragging across his mouth, and he drew a ragged breath of his own. No one had said to him yet that they were simply sorry that this happened to him, and that he'd gone through all of this alone. He hadn't thought of it like that until then -- he'd had the other Asylum people, sort of, hadn't he? -- but it wasn't the same as having Vic and Daisy. Obviously. Because they could comfort him unlike anyone else, because he'd made them up for that very purpose. His throat was tight, too. Pushing up from the chair, though he felt like he'd just sat down, he stepped closer to put his arms around her shoulders. She wasn't that much shorter than him, and just like the last time Daisy had cried on him when he'd emerged from solitary, in shock and trying to brace himself against the onslaught of the world returned, he buried his face against her blonde hair. The doctor had said that he'd made her in the image of his mother, but she didn't smell like his mother, some heavy perfume that had never entirely hid the stentch of cigarettes. "I missed you too," he whispered, unable to speak any louder. "I wish I knew how to fix this. I wish I wasn't crazy, I wish I could trust myself when I feel you here and I hear you and see you and I'd just know you're real. But..." DAISY: "You're not crazy," she managed to say. Daisy's arms had found their way around Hunter's torso and she held him tightly. Her sobs were ugly and broken against him; Daisy had never been a particularly pretty crier. "I know I can't like, convince you of anything, but like -- I promise you, I'm real, and this is real -- you're not going to wake up or anything. And I'm not going anywhere, ever." She pulled back slightly so that she could look at him. Her vision was blurry and she blinked hard, trying to clear the tears from her eyes. Daisy felt an overwhelming sense of tiredness, like a weight that she'd been holding up for weeks had suddenly been dropped. She took one arm off of where it was resting against Hunter's side and brought it to the side of his head, brushing her fingers lightly through his curly hair. It just felt nice to touch him and to be affectionate with him, after all of this time. "I mean, I'm never gonna leave you because like... I kind of need you." Daisy tried to smile at him, but her chin trembled and she felt more tears coming. She took her hand back, using it to wipe at her eyes. HUNTER: He knew Daisy would never purposefully leave him, not without a good reason that he could probably understand and respect. She'd never just up and disappear of her own volition. But no one outside of the Asylum group seemed to be able to comprehend how terrifyingly simple it seemed to be to slip from a world where people like her existed to one where they did not. It didn't matter. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. There wasn't anything he could do about it, it seemed, except live with that fear in the back of his mind and try to find some peace with it. Little things like Daisy's fingers playing with his hair helped. "Okay," he said quietly, affirming that he understood. She wanted to try for him, at least. "I know." Rubbing at his eye with the heel of his hand to try and assuage the burning threat of tears, he took a deep breath. "I mean, I need you too." Obviously, he wanted to add, or he wouldn't have made her up -- but he kept that to himself this time. "The only other person I've ever talked to like I talk to you is Vic, and there's just some things I...I can't, you know." Which reminded him of their last conversation, and Hunter shook his head, lowering his chin. "I kind of did. I talked to him the other day and I...said some things about how I feel. And he basically said okay and left." He shrugged, helplessly. There was more that he felt like he should add, something summarizing that he should say in conclusion about why he needed Daisy to talk to about things like this or why he should never have opened his goddamn mouth, but words were failing him again, it all sounded pathetic and hopeless in his mind. DAISY: Daisy looked at him curiously, her face folding into a kind of understanding as Hunter's words sunk in. She had never really considered that Hunter might actually tell Vic about the feelings he held for his best friend. Maybe that was silly, maybe it had always been an inevitable course of events -- but the truth was, she had always assumed that it would be an unspoken truth, something that Hunter was destined to bear so long as he wanted to continue his friendship with Vic. "Hunter." There was sympathy in Daisy's voice as she said his name. Her hand found his; she felt pained that he hadn't been able to come to her immediately. A few days ago, he'd said. It was a major life event, and she hadn't been there for him. Daisy squeezed his hand. "Have you talked to him since then?" HUNTER: That was how it was supposed to be, yes -- the unspoken truth, something never brought to light. Whether Vic knew and said nothing about it or remained oblivious forever wasn't important as long as Hunter understood that Vic was always going to be his best friend, his closest ally, someone who should be more like a brother than a lover. That's what he'd always told himself. But feeling the pain of losing the person he loved -- and not just some half-assed idea of love, something watered down and sterilized to a PC level that a straight guy could tolerate, but the kind of love that he'd almost rather die than live without -- had shocked him to his core, and when he'd come to talk to Vic and try to explain to him how hard it had been to recover from that, it felt like there was no other way to make him understand besides just unloading everything. Telling the fucking truth, no holds barred. And yes, he wished he'd been able to come to Daisy once he'd said those words, so she could put her arms around him and tell him he did the right thing, everything would be okay. But if he'd tried to have this conversation with her then, right afterward, he would have utterly fallen apart at the seams, and he couldn't have handled that. Hunter squeezed her hand briefly back, but he didn't meet her gaze again. "I mean, we've talked, but...not about this. He said we'd talk about it later, then, and he walked out and I didn't see him again. And since then it's been friendly, I guess, it's just --" He winced. "He's definitely putting space between us. Like finding dumb excuses not to come to my room, or let me come to his, it's just...it's not like before." When he glanced up at her face, his eyes were cloudy. "Everything's so fucked up, Dais... I really fucked it up, with you, with him, I just like...this is what I always do." DAISY: "Hey, no," she tried to assure him. "It's gonna be okay, I promise." It wasn't really her place to promise such things, but Daisy couldn't help herself. It was in her nature to try and assure Hunter that everything would be all right, to try and comfort him. She was an eternal optimist, and maybe if she believed that things would turn out right in the end, they would. Maybe. Daisy wiped a bit of lingering moisture from her eyes. She was starting to regain an ounce of stability -- she knew that Hunter needed it from her, and that was more than enough. "Seriously. He'll come around. He needs you too, you know? And you didn't mess things up with me." She attempted a smile. "I'm right here." HUNTER: This wasn't the first time he'd watched Daisy pull herself together in order to be his rock. She dried her tears and stood up a little straighter and tried to smile for him, and she'd say all the right things, hold his hand and hug onto him. He didn't know if it was good for her to put aside her feelings like that for him, but it seemed to give her strength and purpose, knowing that he needed her. This was what she wanted, wasn't it? To have him back so that she could be here for him again? So he gave her a weak smile in return. She was right there. He was looking right at her, and she felt real. "I know," he repeated. "I know." Weaving his fingers through her hair, he tugged Daisy's head close to lean his forehead against hers, and closed his eyes. "He doesn't need me the way I need him." He knew Vic needed him, she wasn't wrong. But Vic could go on without him. Vic didn't obsess over every detail, every time they were together, every tiny thing about him that could be memorized. "If this ruins things, Daisy, if I lose him now, I don't know what the fuck I'll do." His voice was small and tight again, crushed down to size by strong emotions. "I tried to tell him what it did to me but...I don't know if he'll be afraid, if it's too much, how can he look at me every day and not think about how I feel...?" DAISY: "You won't," she assured him. Daisy's eyes were closed too. She was comforted by the warmth of having Hunter so close, and she felt herself start to relax. "You won't lose him. He loves you, he's been like, so worried about you. He couldn't just leave you anymore than I could, y'know?" Truthfully, Daisy knew that it was even more than that, that Vic and Hunter's friendship spanned years beyond that of her own. And if she couldn't imagine leaving Hunter, Daisy knew that Vic certainly wouldn't. He might feel awkward, he might even need some space -- but he would never leave him. She felt confident in that knowledge. Her arm found its way back around Hunter's waist, although Daisy's eyes remained firmly shut. "It's gonna be okay." |