hunter "great social skills" mackenna. (detections) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-28 01:22:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | ! narrative, hunter mackenna |
WHO: Hunter MacKenna.
WHEN: Friday evening (backdated).
WHERE: Hunter's room.
WHAT: Hunter tries to figure out how he feels and what to do about Edwin's letter.
WARNINGS: This is so long that I will give you a prize if you reach the end. Angst, etc.
STATUS: Complete.
Hunter paced. The room seemed incredibly small, even without Hugo. It was no smaller than his shitty bedroom in their old shitty apartment in LA. But there was no force field outside their old apartment. Just the city, the ocean, freeways, and a million strangers. He felt like the walls were shrinking in on him, crushing the air around him, like in the asylum in his nightmare -- but it still took the same amount of steps to go from the door to the wall and back again every time. It was all in his mind. He paced and then it was back to the desk, to smooth his hands over the sheet of paper and its printed type, press down on the folds. He'd read it over so many times that he had parts memorized. Could recite them out loud, if he tried. He kept pacing. Back home, this never would have happened. Vic was the person he talked to. His best friend knew him so well that there were times when he didn't have to say anything at all. And when there were things that he couldn't say, he went out on the prowl and found someone to drag his mind away from those things, distractions to hammer home the knowledge that he could survive this way. He could take care of himself through anything. He was self-sufficient, independent, untethered. There is a habit of certain people to feel as if their opinion is the most reliable, most solidly and evidence-based, and that all others are merely incomplete guesses. You are one of those people. When had that changed? He couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when he'd began to relax the white-knuckled grip he kept on his raised defenses. Solitary, maybe: that experience had shaken him to his back teeth, a painful reminder of what real loneliness felt like, jogging older memories. Maybe then, when he'd come back and let Daisy hold him, finally posted on the network for to introduce himself. Or maybe it had started earlier than that, somewhere in the midst of six months in a holding facility, feeling the life he'd built for himself and Vic being slowly choked off by time until his only remaining relevant identity was Vol. He'd become one of them without meaning to. No one can tell you anything. Not until you already half-believe it yourself. He kept pacing. The old Hunter hadn't wanted anything from anyone. When people freely offered him things, he invariably rejected them; he didn't need charity or empathy. He owed no one. He had everything he could possibly require, a perfectly functional symbiosis that he refused to disrupt. Rarely had someone orbited close enough to threaten that balance, and when they did, Hunter had always acted swiftly and mercilessly. If a guy called him more than once in a week, he blocked their number. If a guy offered to take him to dinner, he laughed and walked away. If a guy told him that he thought Hunter was amazing, smart, funny -- any compliments that surpassed the physical, anything he couldn't accept with a smirk -- he froze them out. He'd pretended not to know guys the next day if they tried to get him to cuddle. The last thing he wanted was a relationship with any of them, intimacy, a hint of permanence. It didn't matter if he had no chance at getting what he really desired, or if there might have been potential in those tiny connections for something that could grow into the stable and beneficial partnership that he needed. He didn't want it. I like being friends with you, or whatever this is you want to call it. I like talking with you. I don't want to fuck this up because I don't know how to keep things casual with boys I legitimately care about. The old Hunter wouldn't have hesitated. Caution or not, the first sign of affection was the dotted line on which to cut. Compliments -- he didn't trust them, didn't need them, didn't care to see where they might lead. If I knew the truth of you, I wouldn't think those things of you - surely. Now, he had a real chance with Vic. If he could just not fuck it up, if he could be patient, if he could be everything that Vic needed him to be without distraction -- maybe, just maybe, things would work out for the best. All the more reason to avoid complications. All the more reason to try to preserve the balance, detach from distractions, stop thinking about anything other than the goal ahead of him. Make it work like the old days. You’re going to look back at all of this and, even if it’s maddening to live it now, you probably won’t care very much for how you felt in these moments. All that will matter is the reality of the outcome. He paced. If he was being unflinchingly honest with himself -- and who was stopping him now that he'd gotten started? -- he knew that it had always been best for him to keep a safe distance from everyone. His defenses weren't just arrogance and distrust, a philosophy about the morally grey and selfish nature of mankind, the need to separate himself from the simplistic masses. He didn't require a counselor or a shrink or a social worker's expertise to tell him his own vulnerabilities. Words he'd spoken before -- I'm not pathetic, I don't fucking need it -- were easy lies off his tongue. He couldn't risk these connections because there was an endless well of need in him, guarded by a ravenous beast of insecurity that fed on anything, especially himself. Vic was the only one who had seen it until this place, and even then, he wasn't sure Vic fully understood its depth. Letting others get close courted disaster. It was an ugly feeling, being eaten alive by something as base as the selfish desire to know that he was vitally important to someone, indispensable, no matter the cost to them. He smoothed his hands across the paper and he felt it gnawing at him, snarling for more, to never give it up. To make sure Edwin was really hooked. He could have Vic and he could have Daisy and he could have Edwin, too, these people who didn't want to lose him or see him suffer, these people who saw more in him than he could rationally account for. The ins and outs of some people just fit alongside you sometimes, like a puzzle piece. It had been easy for him to believe that he could make up people in his imagination to satisfy his starved need; it was that intensely crucial that he have someone, anyone. It was a kind of insanity of its own. He was just so used to it that it hummed in the background without disturbing him, typically satisfied with Vic and Vic alone, up until recently. He thought he'd lost everything for a little while there, and it had roared manically to life, compensating for every rough patch since. That was when he'd let Edwin in. He kept pacing. Someone rational to talk to -- that's all he had been at first. Edwin had a mind worth delving into, furnished by informed opinions and plenty of considered philosophies. Even if he was as lost as Hunter, he attacked their confusing predicament with reason, and Hunter had realized very quickly that he was the only person in the group who he could count on to have the patience to discuss their existential crisis with him. He needed to understand it all, and so had Edwin. It had taken him a while to start saying the kind of things that he didn't expect to be able to share with someone he barely knew. Maybe their strangeness was why he could be so blunt -- what real preconceptions were there, what was there to lose? The respect of someone who hadn't collected much in the first place? He could be honest, he could say what he really thought and sketch out parts of his life in words as he explained why the hell he was the way he was, what he wanted. If Edwin judged him for it, who fucking cared? He hadn't expected to find things in common between them. The details weren't always clear, didn't exactly match up, but somehow the results were familiar enough to him that he felt sometimes like he was talking to a kindred soul, the kind of person who had been through enough of the same experiences to understand him. And it didn't make him snarl in defensive agitation. He hadn't felt the urge to condescend to Edwin the way he usually did with people who tried to pick him apart, empathize with him. Trying to understand why this was so different had sparked his curiosity. If Edwin could understand him, he could understand Edwin. Bringing sex into it might have been stupid, but it seemed simple at the time. Virgin or otherwise, Edwin knew him: he knew Hunter had slept with more men than he'd bothered to count, that it was a release for him, not an act of intimacy. You stated afterward our little tryst that it was an impulse fulfilled and that, while not meaningless, wasn't something you were inclined to inject a whole lot of meaning into. Being able to give himself to a friend had, for once, seemed like a kind of gift, an offering from him. It had meant something to him. He was so selfish about sex usually; it was all about needing to get lost in the experience, rattling himself loose from the restraints of intellect until he was past the point of piecing together thoughts from the sheer overwhelming physical sensations. He'd wanted to have that again if he could. He'd thought that maybe it would help with everything else. Yet for once he cared if Edwin enjoyed it, not out of vanity. He'd paid attention. And afterward, it hadn't changed anything -- they were still friends, and he'd been relieved to be able to keep treating Edwin that way, to talk to him as though they were okay. He hadn't lost Edwin's respect or felt like it was all too much, they were getting too close, time to cut at that dotted line. He hadn't counted on the need. He hadn't started expecting to want more, to crave the crumbs of compliments when they came his way, to start digging for them when they didn't come easily -- he hadn't expected to feel so fucking desperate for some small admittance that his gift hadn't been given in vain. But then again, he hadn't expected Vic to kiss him. Or for Elsa to leave without saying au revoir. Or for Benjie to snap at him when he'd come so close, or for Mason to try to use him as a blockade to an oncoming relationship. These little cliffs had become yawning precipices and he felt unbalanced at the edge of them. Not knowing what he was worth. Not being certain whether the next thing -- Vic, it was always back to Vic -- would push him off into the depths. He smoothed his hands across the letter. Also, for the sake of all involved, burn this missive. The last thing I want is this to be misconstrued by parties that’d mistake it for something more than it is. It was something he still needed to do, yet he hesitated. Aside from Vic's tenuous I miss you, Daisy's promises to not abandon him, it felt like the only shred of evidence he had that he was...he didn't know. Not the kind of person who could be left at a playground for three hours, waiting for his mother to remember and come back to get him. Edwin couldn't fix him. Maybe, judging from the recounting of the ways that he spun castles made out of brick and mortar instead of sand and temporary whim, he would want to try, but Hunter knew with dull certainty that he could not. He would always need more, devour Edwin's happiness and potential in the belly of the beast and keep feeding until Edwin had nothing left to give. The only person who had ever been truly capable of making him feel at peace was Vic, and that's why he loved him, beyond his looks or his humor or even his power. He wanted that time in the motel room back more than anything in the world, more than recognition, more than his capabilities as an intelligent human being, more than the feeling of having a few people care about him. No matter what his life had been before, it was the only time when he'd truly felt free: he wasn't some stunted boy with authority issues and damaged trust who kept trying to live life on the edge of security in hopes that he might successfully be able to destroy himself and all the things he couldn't escape, if Vic didn't save him first. Vic had. Or could, truly and honestly, not just in his hopeful, twisted imagination. On occasion, I’ve been told that when you have already become emotionally invested in something, pessimism does nothing to protect you from failure so you might as well be optimistic about the outcome. He wanted Edwin to keep telling him he was fantastic, brilliant, challenging, opinionated, forthright, confident. He wanted Edwin to kiss him, to get to know every part of him. He wanted Edwin to write him more beautiful letters like this, painstakingly typed on a fucking analog machine and scanned and printed before being delivered in an envelope. He wanted to be able to make Edwin fucking happy, to feel like he could trust Hunter, like he wouldn't spend the rest of his life trapped in the cage of his body with his powers padlocking the door. But wanting those things wouldn't change him. It wouldn't bring him peace or freedom. He would crush himself into smaller pieces knowing that he was inadequate for what Edwin truly needed, forever feel torn knowing that what he truly needed existed in someone else. He knew Edwin wasn't asking him to choose, wasn't even asking at all -- Edwin fucking understood it, which somehow made him feel worse. All Edwin had wanted to do was see him feel a little less alone with his fears while he stood on the edge of this terrifying cliff with Vic. Throw him a rope to cling to. He was the one who was turning this into a choice. He was the one who made everything into a fucking confrontation. There was a spot on the paper. He stared at it for a long time before he realized it was blurring the ink and brushed hastily at it. When he bit his lip, he tasted salt. Furious at himself, he straightened up and scrubbed his fingers across his eyes until he saw white spots floating behind his lids. Crying never solved shit. Maybe if he read it again, he would know what he had to say to keep himself in check, give someone he cared about more than just the sting of rejection, not lose a friend, and not lose sight of the truth. He paced. |