Re: carriage house - michael and atticus
Carver. "Good point." He looked up. "Thank you." It was good of Atticus to offer, when there was no guarantee that this wouldn't reflect back on him, even if he wasn't here at the time. "I'll try Carver first. But it would be good, for...her family, for everyone, if it was official." As he'd promised, he would find a way.
His feelings for Clem were difficult to quantify, and he honestly didn't think his friend wanted to hear them. With Atticus, Michael wasn't sure where convenient quiet ended and a willingness to listen started.
"I should have said no when she said we had to get married," he said, taking the beer from Atticus, looking up. He was wistful. It had been the wrong choice, and it was righteous torture to think about what could have been. Should have, should have. Maybe Clem would still be alive, if - maybe everything would be different, if - "I was in love with her," he said, numb around the edges. "So I said, sure, let's get married. People get into arranged marriages all the time, and I thought it was a step up from that, at least. At least she was interested in me, and I was crazy about her."
He downed about half the beer in a few short swallows without sputtering. He didn't seem like the sort of man who'd be able to, but he finished, knocked the bottle against his knee, and swiped the back of one eye roughly with his free hand. "It was really stupid," he said, in summary. "No, nothing stronger, thanks."
He leaned back into the chair and let loose a long breath. "You know, I used to stay away from drinking because I got it into my head that my father must have been drunk to do what he did to my mother. No clue why, just one of those things you fixate on. I was a teenager when I got the whole story. Looking for reasons, I guess." Still, he shook his head. No blue fire.
He stood, knelt by the sidetable, close to Atticus, and opened the door to hunt for something to listen to. He kept the beer curled close to his chest, sliding out 8-tracks with his other hand to check the titles. "Dane Blake, our ex-CEO. He thought it would be a good idea to open alien tech untested in a closed facility." He glanced up. His eyes were getting red. "Didn't work out so well." He ducked his head, trying to read the lettering on the side of the slim cd cases and chunky 8-tracks in the shadowed light from the lamps.
"Whatever was inside was...alien. Not our kind of thing, from back in the day. Technological. It tried to fix people when they were dead. Brought them back, built them new nodules and extra bits and pieces, hooked up to their nervous systems and puppeted them to kill more people and make more puppets." A rarity for him, Michael visibly shuddered, head still half-in the sidetable cabinet. "It was a nightmare," he said, bleakly. "I can't think of a lot of things that would have been worse."
He lifted his head. "There has to be something we can talk about that isn't death, right? Aren't there parts of our lives that haven't been all about that?" He sat back on his heels. "Or is it all just that?"