Brian Campo (briancampo) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-01-05 19:30:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | brian campo, marsh grey |
The Unexplainable
Who: Marsh & Brian
What: Advice and some personal disclosures
When: Evening
Where: Lucky's, Searchlight
Ratings: Low
Marsh hadn’t told anyone yet, about the fact that he had made an appointment with a therapist and he was still feeling raw, unraveled. His emotion was still unstable but that didn’t mean he didn’t need to work. He showed up to Lucky’s for his shift and saw Brian behind the bar, the look on his face said everything. Brian could tell something was up with Marsh, he had to.
“Hey Brian.” He tried his best not to sound defeated but there was no hiding behind his feelings, not anymore. He was lucky to work with someone like Brian, when he needed a shift covered, the other man accepted without a guilt trip. He made his way to the back room to get ready for his shift, running a hand through his hair once he was back there alone. He hoped he didn’t run into anyone who might notice his mood.
Brian was halfway through filling someone’s pint glass with a seasonal ale when Marsh came in and spoke. “Hey!” had come his automatic answer, casual but friendly, spoken with his attention divided between tasks. The melancholy edge of Chris Cornell’s vocals floated out of the jukebox on an otherwise mellow evening at the bar. Something about Marsh’s posture or the timbre of his voice made Brian double back. Could’ve just been a bad mood, could’ve been his truck again. He wiped his hands on a towel. “Ruby, can you stay a few minutes?” When the curly-haired bartender nodded and said she was good (always a fan of extra money in her pocket), Brian cut past her and went into the back room.
The door closed on his heels and muted some of the noise. “What’s up? How’ve you been?” Brian tried to keep it even-keeled by going into his own locker for any reason whatsoever. There was a fresh shirt and a stick of deodorant. He could work with that.
Pulling his shirt off his back, Marsh grabbed the Lucky’s shirt and pulled it over his head. He thought about it for a moment before he returned his attention back to Brian. “I woke up in the desert on New Years morning. I don’t even remember the last few hours of the night.” He hoped he’d just fallen asleep but there was no way to tell.
“I made an appointment with a therapist.” He’d never said that before, nor did he think he ever would but now was the time to admit that he wasn’t immune to declining mental health. He sighed as he told these things to Brian, aware of the fact that this might mean Marsh would be out of a job.
“Okay.” Brian frowned at the defeated way Marsh said it and pulled his Lucky’s shirt overhead. “What happened, you get drunk or something?” He was no stranger to waking up in strange places. During the first few years of being a wolf, it happened more than he liked to admit because he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Before being bitten it was down to poor choices: a guy in his twenties getting wasted at parties, or after break-ups, or crashing with girls he really had no business with. Either way, he worked in a bar surrounded by people making questionable decisions, some of whom didn’t remember entire conversations when he saw them in the gas station the next day. He wasn’t likely to judge.
Brian balled up the black tee and reached for another one.
Marsh nodded his head, leaning back against the lockers as he crossed his arms over his chest. “I was going to leave, leave my dog and all my things and just never come back.” He didn’t understand how he got to that point, why after all this time his past finally caught up with him but it was painful and confusing.
“I remember thinking it was a good idea, but I can’t connect to who that me was.” He recalled hearing a patient of his saying just that when describing his bipolar emotions. He shook his head and hung it. He hadn’t started his therapy yet but he knew that this would lay the groundwork for the work he’d be doing.
He looked up at Brian, the exhaustion clear in his eyes. “Seems I’m just prone to screwing up one good thing after another.”
Brian stuck his head through the hole of the shirt and tugged it down to meet the waistband of his jeans. “When you’re in a bad place it’s hard to think your way out of it. Whatever you’re feeling mucks up the gears.” He took his stick of deodorant out of the small shelf and uncapped it. “To be completely honest that’s how I wound up here. Packed my car full of everything that would fit and just hit the gas.” He applied the product and tossed it with his dirty shirt back into the locker. “What’d you screw up? It wasn’t this.” Brian nodded his head towards the bar that crawled with activity on the other side of the door.
To press the issue that they were okay on time, Brian took a load off at a small table and chairs.
Marsh remained standing and his hand went through his hair again. That was the tell tale sign, the subconscious urge to cut his hair short so he didn’t have to deal with this tangled mess anymore. “I was seeing someone, Nobu and he told me something about himself that I couldn’t accept because I was afraid that he was unstable.” It wasn’t often someone told you they were a 118 year old shapeshifter.
He looked down at his leg which began to throb just at the memory of where it came from. “Reason I limp is because someone highly unstable shot me.” And Marsh all but pulled the trigger. If he hadn’t had that gun in his office, he’d never be in the mess he was now.
“But I realized that there are things in this world that are unexplainable and just because I can’t understand his thoughts doesn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth.” It was intentionally vague but if Brian wanted more information, Marsh would be honest with him.
That surprised Brian. Not the part about being shot by an unstable person: instability and guns often went hand in hand in America. The rest of it made Brian half-smile, half give Marsh a look of confusion. “If believing in the unexplainable means you’re unstable, then three-quarters of the people who come into this bar are unstable. Including me.” Brian shook his head. “I mean, Lucky’s?” But that would take them way off topic so he tried to get back on track. “What’d he tell you, anyway? If you don’t want to get into it, it’s fine, but I’ll listen.”
Marsh finally found himself a seat across from Brian, a sad smile came to his face. “He told me he was this thing called a Tanuki which is sort of a shapeshifter raccoon dog sort of thing.” Nobu would have been offended by his retelling of this, considering how he reacted when he first showed Marsh the pin and he mistook the animal on it for a raccoon.
“And that he was 118.” Which shocked Marsh even more considering the fact that Nobu didn’t even know what a date was, let alone had ever gone on one before Marsh. He took a deep breath before the next part, the part of himself that he’d kept hidden from everyone for a long long time. “You see, I used to be a clinical psychologist. Had my own practice and I treated a lot of different patients with delusions.” It spanned over such a large number of disorders. “So I called him delusional.” Big mistake.
“You diagnosed him as delusional off one disclosure?” Brian couldn’t help it. The words were out faster than his brain operated. “Oh man.” He sat up straighter in his chair and found himself rubbing at the back of his neck. It was the kind of thing he didn’t take personally, exactly, but he couldn’t help immediately feeling bad for Nobu. One thing was fortunate about the way he was bitten; the pack didn’t leave him to fend for himself against the assumptions of normal people.
“Listen,” Brian said, starting again in what he hoped was the voice of a friend. “I don’t know if what I’m gonna tell you is going to make you feel better or worse. Not just about Nobu, but about what Psychology labels as ‘delusions.’ I get it. Sometimes people are sick. But a lot of times, they aren’t. You just can’t see what they see. Feel what they feel. Like me? I dunno what a tanuki is, but I do know what a shapeshifter is. Now. I didn’t use to.” Brian thought about being bitten, the scars on his elbow and side that he woke up to every day, the way it felt to run under a full moon and wake up next to a woman he called his mate.
“I can hear what they think.” Marsh replied, looking Brian right in the eye. He had never openly discussed his telepathy with Brian and had only just started to open up with people about it because it was a huge invasion of privacy and he thought they deserved to know.
“That’s why I knew to trust you, knew about how this bar worked, knew that you weren’t having delusions.” He wasn’t sure how Brian might react to this particular form of privacy invasion. He was a bigger man who could easily bring someone like Marsh down in a heartbeat. He’d seen it with his own eyes a few times.
“Okay.” Brian lifted his shoulders in a shrug. It was new information, but it wasn’t unheard of. Brianna had seen his packmate biting him when he bumped her arm by accident over beers. “You could’ve mentioned that when you realized the rest of us were a little off. I mean, I’m a wolf. Ruby was possessed by a demon when she was a kid. I dunno what the hell’s wrong with Nikk but there's gotta be something, right? That girl…” He shook his head. “You can tell me later why you thought it was fair to withhold what you can do. But what’s the deal, you can't hear him? Nobu?”
“He thinks in Japanese. I don’t speak his language. Works the same with anyone with a different native language, I just don’t understand it.” Marsh knew some Spanish from college but not enough to consider himself bilingual and he most definitely didn’t know any Japanese. Marsh had gathered Brian’s condition though this was the first time he’d ever explicitly mentioned it.
“It was how I used to treat people. Their thoughts tell a story that they ain’t ready to speak about and I could get to the root of the problem. I could see how their thoughts manifested unhealthy behavior. Suppose I just got frustrated when I couldn’t just know.” Brian was right about Marsh, he shouldn’t have been diagnosing anyone, especially since his license to practice had been revoked.
Brian crossed his arms. “Huh. So it’s always words. No pictures or sounds. I know someone who gets it the opposite way. All sensory memories.” When it came to anything extrasensory or supernatural, Brian was learning, anything really did go. As embarrassing as it was to have Marsh hearing his every waking thought—they weren’t all winners—it was better than Marsh seeing and hearing everything Brian had heard or seen, or knowing everything Brian imagined. Maybe this was the wrong thing to be worried about, and territorial, but he didn’t want anyone in on the intimate moments of his life, even by accident.
Brian tipped back on two legs of his chair, thinking. “So even if you could understand Japanese, how do you tell the difference between a delusional thought and a real one? ”
He realized it was fair for Brian to ask these questions though the idea of recounting what he used to do professionally was something of a discomfort for him. “Well, it’s not about the thought itself, but the surrounding thoughts. Delusional thoughts are often surrounded by other delusional thoughts to justify why that original thought was plausible. It’s often a point of fixation.”
Marsh clasped his hands together in his lap as he recounted the days of his practice. “When it’s true, the thoughts tend to be more nonchalant. As if it were just a fact. It wasn’t always easy, figuring this out. Situations would be different with certain traumas. I had to rely on behavioral cues for certain situations. If the person was gainfully employed, if they were able to maintain close personal relationships.”
“So, what if… what if you asked him to shift in front of you? Do you think he would do it?” Brian balanced his chair carefully. “Or if there was someone that could vouch for him. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to go to therapy if you think it would help you talk things out. You could do that, too. I should’ve gone a hundred times and I didn’t because, I mean, how many psychologists do you know who believe in this stuff? Hey, I think we just found your niche.” He smiled at Marsh.
His gaze shifted then, almost as if he were lost in thought. “Truth is I don’t think I’ve got that opportunity anymore. I doubt he’d even want to talk to me.” Marsh had left him messages and he hadn’t heard a single thing from him. While he knew he needed to let it be, it twisted his guts into knots.
Marsh scoffed. “Also not likely. My license to practice is revoked and to be honest, that chapter in my life needs to be closed once and for all.” He couldn’t ‘offer an ear’ to anyone anymore. Those consequences would follow him to his death should he screw up again.
“And I’m not even sure how I feel about it being the truth. How does that even work? I’m almost 40, and he’ll be forever young. Does he want to be in that form or does he want to be a human. I just can’t even fathom what goes on in his world.”
“Does it have to be forever to be worth something?” Brian held still a little longer and then slowly set his chair legs back on the floor. “You were sad when you got here, man. If being with him makes you happy, let the rest of it care of itself. Y’know? And if this isn’t it, then you just hope you got something from it that’ll help when you meet the next one.” That was how Brian processed what happened to him. After a while, it was pointless to regret a mistake or a bad time in his life. It made more sense to mine it for whatever was of value and keep going. “If he’s like me, he’ll go somewhere when he’s hurting and it’s too hard to be a man. For me, I can always be a wolf.”
He’d have to figure out a way to get in touch with Nobu, apologize for everything he said. Marsh wouldn’t ask Nobu to prove anything because it was beside the point. Marsh clearly got upset because he couldn’t invade Nobu’s privacy like he could anyone else and that logic wasn’t appropriate at all.
“Thanks man, I think I really needed to hear that. You can’t begin to believe the amount of pressure this takes off my load.” He had a resource now, someone he could bounce his feelings off of when it came to shapeshifters.
Brian said, “No worries. Just help me out the next time I can’t figure out Nes. Valentine’s Day is coming up. I’m already having stress dreams.” He laughed under his breath and stood up. “Come out when you’re ready. Ruby’s got your back.” He closed his locker door and gave Marsh a quick thump on the shoulder. “It’s gonna be alright.”