Roman (nephilims) wrote in saveatlantisic, @ 2017-11-02 18:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, *hannah, *maxi, claire callahan, roman smith |
OCTOBER 19
Roman Smith ✦ Claire Callahan
Roman evaluates his life thanks to Atlantis Some talk of murdery events Complete |
Why was he here? What was really going on between him and Georgina? How long did he think that he would be able to go without following through with one of his natural instincts of revenge? Should he have spend hundreds and hundreds of years seeking revenge on angels, demons, and lower demons? Did he deserve a second chance being here rather than spending an eternity in hell? How much sugary cereal could he really eat before it became too much for his system? Those were just a few of the questions that were plaguing Roman not longer after he’d woken up that morning. He’d had some of those same questions plenty of times before during his long life, but they’d never come all at once like this. They’d also rarely ever stuck with him this long either. He was becoming borderline depressed just thinking about all of the questions swimming around in his mind, and it was shortly after lunch that he decided to see if he could do something about it. Talk to someone about what was wrong with him. It couldn’t be Georgina. She was too close to this. No, it had to be a professional, and thankfully Atlantis had just the person for that. Roman had never talked to anyone about his problems except for Georgie’s cats, and they usually just ignored him or swatted at his face until he fed them. The little bastards. He found himself in Dr. Callahan’s office asking to see her, and thankfully she wasn’t seeing anyone right in that moment because he might have forced himself inside and that wouldn’t have been good for anyone. Knocking on the door, he only waited a second before he entered and sighed when she looked up at him. “Are you free?” He asked. Spotting the chair in front of her desk and then the couch over to the side, he decided on the couch and plopped down. “Because this might take a while.” The conversation with McCoy was still bothering her, and she was starting to wonder if maybe she should disengage from her position for a while, probably from patients in general but Claire knew that was being dramatic and unfair to the other people who she could help. She was sipping her coffee and writing down a few notes when she heard the knock on the door. "Come," she paused as the door opened. "In." She finished, well this could be very interesting. "You're in luck, my schedule is open today," that wasn't completely true, but Claire could tell when someone was in real need of talking and she never wanted to turn someone away, especially someone who she got the feeling didn't do this kind of thing normally. She looked down as if double-checking her schedule to ask one of the schedulers in medical to clear her day. Standing up she moved to the chair by the couch and smiled softly, "can I get you anything? I just made some coffee." “Yes, a cup would be nice. Two sugars.” Thinking on that again, Roman changed his mind. “No, wait. Do you think that’s a good idea?” He asked and looked back at her. “The sugar? The caffeine? I think maybe I should pass. I’m already questioning too much today.” Roman leaned back against the pillow on the couch. This was what he was supposed to during a therapy session right? Lay back and just let out your feelings. Talk about what was bothering him. “They have files on us here, right? Like, you already probably know some of my history. And what a long and colorful history it is. Too colorful. I mean, I can’t even imagine how thick the file might be. Though they might not know everything. I looked at the books I’m supposedly in. They’re all about Georgina and her stupid writer boyfriend. I sacrificed everything for her just so she could be happy with him. Did they put that in my file? Probably. Not that she remembers any of that. I told her, but she still doesn’t remember.” Taking a breath, Roman just drummed his fingers against his chest as he thought. “I’ve killed a lot of people. Well, not really people. Angels, demons, lesser demons. I was pretty good at it too over the years. Ended up getting my sister killed because I was too ambitious to go after the next power player. They all deserved it though. Not my sister - Helena - she just wanted to live her life, but I pulled her in. I just couldn’t let it go.” Stopping himself, he looked over at Claire. “Am I going too fast? Talking too much? I’m doing therapy wrong, aren’t I?” Well, this didn't sound good. That much confusion on a cup of coffee threw up warning signs for Claire. She got Roman the coffee all the same, with the two sugars and poured him a glass of water. "Just in case you decide you'd like some." She smiled softly. Claire opened her mouth to answer his question on the files but didn't get a chance to get a word out because he was talking again and about killing angels and demons of all things. Claire put the pieces together as quickly as she could, but she still felt like there was lot she was missing. "There is no right or wrong way to go about this, it's about what you need and however I might be able to help you." Claire didn't miss a beat as she spoke, but she sure as hell was trying her best to keep up. "So, Tell me about Helena." Even though he’d just questioned himself about the coffee, Roman still picked it up to drink when Claire sat the cup in front of him without much hesitation. He was a little relieved to find out he wasn’t totally screwing this yet, but he was kind of surprised that she’d latched onto the part about his sister out of everything he’d just said. Including the whole killing a lot of people thing. Helena was someone he still struggled to talk about with anyone because no one else understood. “Oh. Well, we’re twins. We were there with each other our entire lives after our mother died and we were on the run for hundreds of years. Eventually, we learned how to mask ourselves from whichever angel or demon that decided to come after our kind, and we mixed in with humankind. She didn’t have the same… need for vengeance that I did. It wasn’t all the time, but every half a century or so, I needed to quench this bloodlust to just wipe one of them out. Angel or demon - didn’t matter. They all hated us regardless just because we existed.” He paused to drink more of the coffee as he mentally went through many of his old memories. “We didn’t live side by side, but we were always within the same general area or we could get a hold of each other easily enough. She preferred to do her own thing and leave me to it, but eventually I needed her help with my latest target. There was, well, there was a girl I didn’t anticipate getting in the way.” Specifically, a succubus named Georgina that he fell for, but he didn’t say that out loud yet. “I got her killed because I couldn’t let the vengeance go. Helena. Not the girl.” One thing Claire had learned from the Troubles and from being here, there were a lot of people that had killed more than she probably wanted to know about, but she often heard it. He gave her a lot more information than she was expecting. Usually, she had to work harder to get that kind of painful history. There were so many things Claire could ask, but she went for the one that she found would help her the most figure out what he really needed. "I'm sorry about your sister, how long has it been?" She wanted to get a better timeframe. She knew the loss of a sibling, especially a twin was devastating, especially as it seemed Roman blamed himself for her death. Roman thought a bit about how long it had been. Given his time spent down in hell, it probably seemed a lot longer than it really had been. And it had been shorter for Georgina because of her coming from his past. “Before I came here, it had maybe been a year. Probably less. I’ve been in Atlantis since around February or so.” It was weird to think that he’d been here that long. He sat up on the couch and held the cup of coffee in his hands, staring down into it. “I woke up this morning with so many questions about my life and the decisions I’ve made. Should I have given up my vengeance centuries ago? I tried a few times. Sort of. I mean, I tried to resist that itching feeling that came around every so often, but it always won out in the end. Yes, I enjoyed it, but it was more than that. I’d taken it on as my duty.” He made a face and looked up at her. “That’s probably not the best admission, is it, Doc?” "You're examining your choices and working out how you feel about them, and there is nothing wrong with that," Claire assured him. "If we hide from our past we can't learn and grow in our future." Shifting slightly in her seat to get more comfortable she took a sip of her coffee. "You mentioned your father was a powerful angel, did he have a specialty? Or was he known for something?" Claire couldn't be sure but the way he talked about the need for vengeance she wondered if it might have something to do with who his father was. What she said about his choices made sense, but he just couldn’t figure out why he was suddenly questioning everything. After all these years - why now? He shrugged it off though and went for the water instead of the coffee this time in order to delay answering her next question for a few seconds. “Was a powerful angel, yeah. Thanks to his indiscretion also known as me and my sister - he fell and became a demon. An archdemon. I don’t know much about his time as an angel, but when I knew him, he’d become the Archdemon over the Seattle, Washington, area. Georgina - the succubus here from my world - she was under his command. But angel or demon, it doesn’t really matter. They both view us - their kids, the nephilim - all the same. Angels see us as the abominations of what could happen to them if they allow themselves to slip, and to demons we’re a reminder of their mistake that caused them to fall. So, they try to destroy us because of it. It’s the one thing both sides actually agree on.” It all sounded much too complicated to Claire and frankly a little mad, especially given the fact that it wasn’t the kid's faults that they ended up in the world. How two sides could blame them, hate them or hunt them for something they had no control over wasn’t something she liked at all. Georgina was a succubus? That sounded mildly dangerous to her but she didn’t show any of those thoughts, she had learned long ago here that there were different kinds of pretty much every single supernatural creature that was out there. “And I assume Archdemons are among the more powerful?” Claire asked she wanted to make sure she understood it correctly. It was difficult to help when she didn’t fully understand how everything worked. “I can see where spending your life with two powerful sides wanting you to die could lead to anger.” “Hell is a lot more like a bureaucracy than you might think. Lots of red tape, chains of command, soul quotas to rack up for the side of evil…. it’s not really my thing even if most of hell didn’t want me dead. But archdemons are powerful, some more than others. Jerome - my father - was a heavy hitter. Then you had the lesser demons. Incubi and succubi, vampires, imps.” Anger.. .yeah, Roman had lived with a lot of anger, but it was in a way that he could compartmentalize it until the time came around again where he started itching to kill one of them again. During the in between times, you might say he lived a fairly normal life. “Then along comes a succubus who screwed it all up. I thought I had it under control. I got close to her to figure out how to make my move, but I got too close. And she’s damn smart, too, because she figured it all out eventually. She figured out who and what I was, and I actually said I’d walk away and we could disappear together. Me give up on taking out the angel and getting her out from under Jerome and hell’s thumb. But not before she called in the troops when she found out what I’d been planning. Then Helena got mixed in since I’d asked her to help me this one time, but it got her killed. And it ended up being all for nothing.” "Minus the number of different kinds of demons, I always pictured hell with bad decor and a lot of lines and red tape," Claire really did, she just couldn't stand red tape, and the image worked for her. Minus the insane number of demons, he was talking about. "You have feelings for Georgina," well, that was clear, but sometimes stating the obvious was important and she got the impression that Roman needed to talk and let it out rather than keeping it all in. "What happened?" Roman hadn’t really kept his feeling for Georgie a secret, so he didn’t try to deny it. His feelings for her were complicated at best, but they were as real as he’d ever felt about most anyone in the last couple of centuries. Sometimes he wished he could get past her since she clearly didn’t know if she wanted to ever let herself give into anything she felt for him, and he didn’t want to live in the ‘possibility zone’ for another few decades or however long they were in Atlantis and before he got sent back to Hell. “I ran off after everything happened but eventually came back. One minute I wanted to kill her and the next the feelings I had for her would come back. Eventually, I struck a deal with Jerome, and he left me stay in his district without fear of anyone coming after me. In exchange, I helped him out from time to time which included helping Georgina out too - and living with her much to her dismay.” There was a lot that happened in the interim, but there was no need to get into all that here. None of that was the point. “There was this glitch with her contract - the one that made her immortal. A loophole that would give her her humanity back. And, yeah, there was this other guy - a writer with stupid t-shirts - who she was with off and on. Long story short, I helped her win her humanity back but was locked up in Hell for my troubles. It was my choice to help her, and I knew the consequences for revealing myself. However long later and I end up here as does she. Only she doesn’t remember everything. She’s from shortly after I moved in with her in Seattle and before she got her happily ever after with the writer.” It was a lot to try and keep track of for Claire, and it sounded all a little complicated, and to her, it sounded like roman got the short end of a lot of things in life, but she wasn't going to say that out loud. "You were locked up in hell?" That just sounded horrible, even if it wasn't what most people pictured and more the bureaucratic hell he'd mentioned before. "And how do you feel about her now? Now that you're both here and she doesn't remember what you've done for her?" Claire didn't want to talk about the stupid t-shirt guy at this stage, that did not seem like it would help him. “Sounds like a fun family reunion, doesn’t it?” Yep, that was loaded with sarcasm. “I don’t put that on anyone but me though. Well, maybe the demon assholes, but I still made the decision myself to do what I did.” Sometimes it was hard to understand exactly why he did what he did, but ultimately he’d wanted her to have a happy ending even if it wasn’t with him. He didn’t really like the next question because it was a complicated one. Or he made it too complicated. Roman leaned forward against his knees and rubbed his forehead with his fingers for a moment. “She knows a little about it because I told her, but she doesn’t know everything. About Mortensen - her writer. Sometimes I hate her; when I was in hiding, I even used to imagine the ways I’d kill her. For what she did and how it all turned out the night Helena died, but I can’t get her out of my head. Now… now I know I could never do anything like that no matter how she does or doesn’t feel about me. When we were met, it was borderline obsession with her because I tend to do that with people or ideas or missions I set for myself. It’s different now, yet I don’t think anything will ever come of it because she can’t seem to get past some sort of wall she’s put up. I get it, I guess. I’ve put up plenty of those over the years.” Claire wasn't going to even touch his comment about a family reunion, and there wasn't much she could do to help him with his family just yet, especially when it seemed there were things here he could do to help himself. She did note how he put it on himself and seemed not to have plans for revenge after his actions. "Have you told her how you feel about her? Without trying to explain or tie it to any one situation or past event?" Claire wasn't sure she thought a relationship with Georgina was healthy for him, but she wasn't going to offer that opinion up, the obsession, the past, the indication of conflicted feelings. There were a lot of red flags, but she knew that when it came to matters of the heart, it could always be more difficult. “She knows,” Roman said but instead of looking up at Claire, he busied himself with another drink of the coffee until the cup was finished up. He didn’t ask for a refill or move to get one as he probably didn’t need it. “During the whole thing that happened a little while ago where several people couldn’t lie for a day or so? We had a talk. I figured it was the best way to get the truth out of her, but I didn’t want to push too much. I know she has some sort of feelings for me, but she doesn’t know if it’s anything she wants to actually pursue. That it was ‘complicated.’” He even used air quotes around the word for emphasis and to show that those were her words. “I’m not going to ask her to dive into something she doesn’t want to do, but it’s the back and forth. The not knowing and waiting to see if she changes her mind. It’s fucking exhausting.” Roman drummed his fingers on the side of his leg. Something was weird about all of this sharing. “I’m over a thousand years old, and I’ve never really questioned all of my life choices. Why the hell am I doing it now?” “It might not be bad to take a step back from her, if she isn’t sure what she wants, it isn’t fair to torture yourself over it either, you could take a step back and give her some space to figure it out.” Claire hated listening to people go through the maybe’s and back and forths. “It could simply be something to do with Atlantis, or being here is giving you another look at your life and what you want your life to be going forward, although if I were going to place a bet on it, something to do with Atlantis, after all some of us have made other people’s beds for no logical reason at all other than we felt a compulsion to do so.” Roman didn’t exactly like what he was hearing from the good doctor, but he knew that it was most likely sound advice. He just wasn’t always the greatest at listening to advice given when it came to Georgina Kincaid. “One of the quirks of Atlantis.” He sighed. “That sounds about right. Though, I guess I should have probably tried to wait it out at home instead of giving you my family history and the inner-workings of my not so love life.” Roman smiled. It was technically her job to listen to his issues, but he still had talked a lot about himself. “I feel like I should ask you about how you are now after laying all of that on you.” It was always easy to tell when someone was interested in the advice she gave or not, but she never let on that she could tell, most of the time. "It's what I'm here for, to listen, to try and help, if it's an Atlantis quirk or if you do ever want to talk again, I'm here." laughing slightly she nodded. "It's normal to feel a little weird doing all the talking and to feel like you should ask me something, and I'm okay, you certainly have a messy background with a lot of ups and downs it sounds like, and a few things I'd be remiss not to tell you that you might want to work through some of it." Roman nodded. He got what she was saying, but putting that into practice was easier said than done. It was hard to change habits after living as long as he had, but he’d changed a few of those lately. Maybe he could try to do so again. Who knew. He’d actually seen a pig fly once. It was thanks to some demonic meddling, but still. The old saying never had an anti-magic stipulation. “Alright. I appreciate the chat.” He stood to leave, but paused before heading towards the door. “Who knows if I’ll be back, but it’s good to know that the door is always open.” Roman gave Claire a bit of a nod and left her office. Once he was gone, he let out a long sigh. Damn, Atlantis. You sure do know how to shake things up with a little bit of cathartic therapy. |