Dani Moonstar's a survivor (ms_moonstar) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2013-12-17 20:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, charlie pace, dani moonstar (mirage) |
"Everyone’s hands hurt when they start…"
Who: Charlie Pace, Dani Moonstar
What: A guitar lesson and a heart-to-heart
When: A week or so ago, while Dani was in the hospital.
Where: Hospital Room.
Ratings/Warnings: R for language, glossy mentions of drug use/alcoholism/cancer/relationship woes
Status: Complete!
By Charlie’s calculation, he was spending much more time with Dani now than he ever had when he worked for the Old Man and the two of them had actually been dating. And, to be honest, there was something kinda weird about that. After all, he’d worked with Obi for a long time, but the guy’s private life was like a locked box. Or a safe. Charlie wasn’t an open book, but he wasn’t a huge fan of secrecy, to put it mildly.
So he was pretty impressed that Dani was being so upfront about fighting cancer. Impressed enough that he was making the extra effort to keep in touch at a time when he wanted to hide his head in the sand. First the Verity mess, then the idiocy of giving heroin a try after everything his brother had been through and dragged him through… Charlie’s opinion of himself was at an all time low. But maybe that was why he was attempting to bond with Dani over music. He was unquestionably awesome at it. It was what God had put him on this earth to do. So, if everything else was a mess… well, at least he hadn’t missed his calling.
There were a lot of things about Dani's past that she wished she could change. Like her own bout of dabbling in drug use, the way she'd let alcohol mess her life up, some of the other choices she made. Mainly, she didn't like how she'd handled what life threw at her. Obi-wan wasn't the only person who'd become a closed book.
So it only made sense to her to be as open as she could be, now. She had cancer. She couldn't hide it behind closed doors like she'd done everything else. And in a time like this, it was the worst thing she could do for herself.
Sometimes it was hard to be so brave and cheerful about it. It was pretty exhausting. But it was better than giving up. Dani never wanted to give up again. So she'd set her hospital room up like it was a makeshift living space. She made an effort to get dressed in real clothing, and had one of her colorful beanie caps on. When Charlie came by with his guitar, she was sitting cross-legged on her bed, squinting at an array of paint chips. She held up one in a warm orange, "Does this say 'comfy reading space' to you?"
“Thinking of painting your room?” he asked, although he was pretty sure she was referring to another location. There was a little smile on his lips to suggest he was joking. Still, after passing room after room of the same, pastry-cream walls, a pop of orange was welcome. “I think it says… ‘tropical getaway’ more than ‘comfy reading space’, but I’m no interior decorator.”
Charlie himself was dressed all in black, as usual, though several key elements of his presentation were absent. No nail polish, no jewelry of any sort, his hair was a little longer than what he wore well, as though he’d forgone cosmetic maintenance for a few weeks, which he had. Those were lost weeks. It was like he was only just waking up.
"If they'd let me... I doubt that's one I'd get away with, though," Dani replied, with a bit of a smirk. The walls were definitely boring and slightly unsettling. She was glad that the walls back at Lara's place were painted other colors.
She scrunched her nose a bit and put the color chip back down, "Yeah, you're probably right about that. I'm just trying to figure out what color to paint the library back at the ranch. I want something comfortable and inviting. Obviously 'Hospital Wall White' won't be my first choice."
"How are you?" Dani asked him, as she picked the tiles up to put aside somewhere. He didn't look like he was doing that well.
“Can’t go wrong with blue,” Charlie replied off the cuff as he sat down in one of the free chairs. True, he was no interior decorator, but back when the band still existed, he painted a lot of things in peaceful, sea-shades of blue to counteract his hectic life on the road. It was as much advice has he could possibly give on the subject.
He started to unlock one of the two acoustic guitar cases he was carrying. Flip flip flip went the little metallic latches. “Meh…” Charlie shrugged. He didn’t feel like complaining about his life when there was a woman with cancer a few feet away from him. Still, he couldn’t say everything had been peaches and cream lately. “We’ve all got our troubles.”
Were there even any blue chips in her collection? Dani paused in her cleaning to quickly scan the samples she'd been picking up. She'd been going for 'inside a starbucks' colors, but there were a few samples that weren't in autumn colors.
She made a quick note on a notepad about it - chemo was hell on her short term memory - and then put everything in a binder she'd been keeping nearby. It was clear something was going on that he didn't want to talk about. She wasn't sure if she was supposed to try and cajole it out of him or just let it drop.
"Tell me about it," she finally remarked, jokingly, as she leaned back against her pillows, "Do you know how hard it is to get good takeout to deliver here?"
Even Charlie wasn’t sure if he didn’t want to talk about things or if he did. He’d sorted out his differences with Roland, he was trying to make things better with Verity; still, he couldn’t say it didn’t feel like someone had taken a baseball bat to his ego.
“I assume you’re going to tell me it’s impossible,” he replied, picking up one of the guitars--not Old Dusty--and carrying it over to Dani. It was a sturdy Ibanez: great for learning and pretty decent for everything else, too. “Here. You can use this. We can stick to the Uke, but I want to show you how the skills transfer.”
"It's not impossible, it just costs a fortune and you have to get a takeout place that's brave enough to give it a try."
Which left Dani with one local pizza place and a chinese delivery place twenty minutes away, but it was enough. She liked pretending she could still eat solid food and the smell of it was always delicious, even if she couldn't really eat it. It made her feel a little more human.
Her hands took hold of the guitar and she set it up against her the way she figured a guitar was supposed to be handled. Of course, it was bigger than a Uke, but she liked the sound she got when she lightly strummed her fingers against the strings, "This is really nice."
Charlie sat back down in his chair and picked up Old Dusty, his trusty twelve-string Gibson, which he’d had since the days of Drive Shaft, even though he’d been confined to the bass ninety-percent of the time. Liam was the front man for reasons “Baby Brother” couldn’t argue with; and when you were tall, dark, and handsome, you typically got what you wanted.
“Yeah, Ibanez makes good acoustics at reasonable prices, if you’re ever looking to buy one,” he said, closing the guitar case and resting his foot on top, so it was easier to balance the weight of the instrument. “I mean, you can borrow that one for a little while, if you really want to test it out.”
"I'm already borrowing your Ukulele, I think it should probably be like... a one instrument at a time policy or something." Dani replied, with a bit of a chuckle. She adjusted the instrument in her lap, trying to find a comfortable position to play it in while dealing with the extra weight of it.
"Ibanez isn't a name I'm familiar with. I thought all guitars were Gibsons, that's the only name I've ever heard. But this one sounds pretty good. I might pick one up eventually, if I stick to this."
She tested out some finger positions, then lightly strummed the strings again. It was clear she needed to practice more.
Charlie watched her hands work. Dani had a good instinct for how a guitar player’s hands ought to behave, which probably carried over from her work with archery. Obi used to talk a lot about that, back when they were working together. Seemed like a lifetime ago. Now Obi’s only reasons to call seemed to be related to getting Charlie to Verity’s house. The Old Man needed to mind his own business, even when he was right.
He started going over simple chords, showing Dani that the method behind the two stringed instruments was basically the same. It wasn’t one-to-one, but it was close. “It doesn’t hurt to play, does it?” he asked, a little abruptly. After all, it was her hand that had put her in the hospital in the first place.
Dani's eyebrows raised a bit. She'd been in the middle of trying to pluck another chord out after adjusting her hands a bit, but had only struck one of the strings when he'd spoken. The singular note rippled through the air a bit, and she tilted her head to the side.
"You know, I think you're the first person who's ever asked."
It was a common policy in the Croft manor to either joke about her shiny bald head or simply talk about the other things going on in their lives. She was forthright about her condition when she needed to be, but she hadn't wanted it to take over her life, "It hurts, yeah... I just... Can't let that stop me. It had actually been aching for a while before we caught it, but I have a pretty high pain tolerance and I usually shove stuff like that aside if I can. That mentality probably would have screwed me over if Faiza hadn't noticed it."
Charlie recognized the name Faiza. He wondered if there was any awkwardness among the trio, since Obi seemed to be communicating with both women pretty openly. In his opinion that was... kinda risky… but he didn’t want to get involved. Although it did cause him to think about Verity, yet again. She was like a piece of tape he couldn’t shake off from his fingers. There were images in his mind he’d never be able erase from the night when he’d found her in Roland’s bed. “Yeah…” he began to say, trying to remain present. “The physical pain doesn’t matter. Everyone’s hands hurt when they start…”
Even he wasn’t entirely sure what he was trying to say. His best guess was that he was suggesting Dani was no worse off than any other person starting on guitar. Maybe she wasn’t. Charlie wrinkled his nose and stopped plucking out notes for a moment. He shook his head at himself. “I mean… It’s a trade-off. You let some pain in, you let some pain go.”
From the look on Dani's face, there was a lot of pain left inside there somewhere that she needed to let go, though she was looking down at her own hands and the guitar in them as he spoke.
A smirk returned to her face, and she went back to trying to strum out a chord she'd learned previously for the Ukelele, "Yeah. Sounds like a good trade off, to me. And you don't gain anything without a little pain, too. Every physical trainer will tell you that. Playing an instrument needs different muscle movements, so it makes sense that it'd hurt at first."
She glanced over at Charlie, "Has it helped you? The guitar playing?"
Charlie felt a sense of relief, realizing he hadn’t lost Dani completely on his runaway train of thought. He finally looked up from his lap and the guitar atop it. “It always has. It’s the only consistent thing that has. When things are really rough, I’ll play some Doc Watson until my fingers bleed.” He smirked back, tapping the calluses on his fingertips. He was mostly serious about the blood and, to some extent, it was a point of pride.
And then, at last, Charlie sighed. He looked Dani in the eye. “Things have… kinda sucked, lately.”
It was definitely something Dani understood. She had various callouses from bow usage and horseback riding, and she was proud of those, too. If she did pick up the guitar she wouldn't mind playing it until her fingers bled or callouses decided to form there, either.
If it helped at all, it was worth it.
Her eyes were still reading over his face, and she nodded a bit, "Do you want to talk about it? I'm pretty good at listening. Most of the time."
Charlie picked out a line of notes that sounded like the intro to some old timey blues song. He scrunched up his face, wrinkling his nose as he thought. There hadn’t been much talking about what had happened. There were acknowledgements, attempts to set it aside and move forward, but that wasn’t the same thing. He thought some more and chewed on the tip of his tongue before finally speaking.
“I caught this bird I really liked in bed with my best friend. I mean, I hadn’t made a move, yet, and she didn’t know he and I live together. So no one’s to blame… which sucks cos I think I’d feel a lot better if I could yell at someone for it.” He chuckled grimly, because it all felt like some kind of sick joke. “Anyway… she just had a baby and I think I was the stupid one for trying to make her my girlfriend when she was clearly dealing with more shit than she could handle. I have a history... of being an idiot with girls.”
"I don't think it's idiocy," Dani replied, wrinkling her brow a bit, "I mean. You can't help how you feel about a person. And you can't really... I mean... you waited to make your move for whatever reason, but it probably wasn't a bad reason. Maybe you just didn't want to ask too much of her with a baby on the way, or maybe you weren't really sure how you felt. Have you talked to her about it at all?"
Of course, talking it out wasn't exactly advice that Dani took that often, but in this case, she thought she'd have said something, "At least enough for her to know how you feel. So she can make her choices with all the information available. The guy's your best friend, too, isn't there some kind of like... Bro code?"
"There would have been, if anyone of us knew the others were involved. It was riotously Shakespearean, when you break it down." Charlie sighed. It did feel good to finally let out what he'd been holding in. "I've been giving Verity some space since she had the baby."
"But is that what she wants?" Dani asked, while plucking out a few notes on her guitar. She wasn't sure what she was trying to play, and the instrument sounded as confused as the entire situation Charlie was in at the moment.
"I think if a friend of mine gave me space right now without my asking them to... well, I'd wonder what I did to upset them. Or if they just couldn't stand being around me in this state. Something like that."
Truthfully, Charlie didn’t think Verity had any idea what she wanted. To lead on two so diametrically opposed chaps such as himself and Roland didn’t bespeak a whole lot of sense. The only thing she clearly seemed to want was comfort, and the easy way out. What bothered him most right now was that he had taken the same route with the heroin. He couldn’t say a whole lot now without feeling like a hypocrite.
“But doesn’t she deserve to be gutted? I mean, she’s acting like I have a chance, we’re actually going out, and all the while she’s getting regularly banged on the side by someone else.” Some of his anger was beginning to really show. He had quite a temper, for a little guy. He sighed and attempted to collect himself. “So, even if I do say, ‘She’s had it rough. Some dream guy knocked her up and she’s confused…’ Understanding isn’t forgetting.”
Dani took her hands off the guitar and held them up in front of her a bit, as if they were a shield that could ward off his anger. Clearly this issue bothered him a lot more than he'd previously let on. She could understand why he'd be angry about it, too, though when he'd first spoken about it, she hadn't understood the other woman's part in everything.
"Well I didn't realise that part, I admit. That she'd been leading you both on. So you're right in that understanding isn't forgetting. I mean... I think... for a while, Obi probably understood why I had to leave, but that didn't erase his anger about it. I don't think even me apologising really helped. And I'm not sure her saying sorry would make you hurt less, because it doesn't undo the hurt. It's there, and whatever happened to cause it has already happened. But..."
She paused as she searched for the wording she wanted, then waved one of her hands in the air, "I just think that wanting her to hurt in return isn't the way to go about it. It starts a cycle that's hard to undo."
Charlie’s head dropped again, with another sigh. The anger had drained out of him. “I know…” He was well aware of his slowness to forgive and need for revenge that so many years of Catholic school hadn’t been able to set right. “The Old Man keeps telling me that, too. Er, Obi.”
His hands found the strings again. Charlie had short fingers, but they were nimble. The right tune was never too far from his grasp. It was just a matter of allowing his fingers to find it. “Why did you have to leave, by the way? I mean, as someone who occasionally wants to skip out himself...”
"I had a thing..." Dani started to reply, then shook her head and corrected herself, "I STILL have a thing, really, about the people in my life dying and leaving me behind. My parents, then my grandfather. My teenage crush, James, took off to join the military. I never really got over it. Last November I found out that he'd been killed in action."
She wanted to tug on one of her braids or tuck some hair behind her ear, but had no hair to do any of that with. Instead, one of her hands twitched nervously at the guitar in her lap, "Me and Obi had been kind of shaky, and I think neither of us was fully able to let the other one in. He's got a thing, too, but that's his business. We'll just say I was already doing a really shitty job at living. Running away from my problems, self-destructive, hiding from the world. He did his best to help me but when I found out about James I just broke. I had to get out. I had to deal with everything in a place where I could just deal with it on my own. And there was his funeral and settling his affairs, too."
“You had to take care of all that? God...” Charlie quietly gasped. It wasn’t really a question, more of a spongey, ‘soaking it in’ noise that came from his gut. He chewed on his lip. “My brother and I… we were all we had for years. Our parents didn’t like the whole rock star thing. Cut us off. We probably deserved it. But we had us and it was great, for a while. Someone turned Liam onto drugs. Everything fell apart. He bolted. So I… guess I have a thing, too, about people leaving me behind.”
Sometimes Charlie wondered if he chased after ‘damaged’ girls because he thought they’d have a better chance of sticking around. Verity with the unplanned pregnancy, Claire before her, and Mia with her crippling dreams. If that was really the case, it was pretty messed up of him. Also, it didn’t really seem to be working...
"And I just couldn't lean on Obi anymore. I realised I was doing it, after yelling at him about how we should be fighting side by side, together. We weren't really fighting as equals because I was leaning on him all that time," Dani added, as if Charlie had never spoken at all. It was a half realisation for her, something she could recognize and appreciate now that she'd never fully understood before.
But she turned to him after, and nodded her head, "James didn't have anyone else to take care of it. He put me on all of his paperwork before he shipped out. But I... well, I don't totally get how you're feeling because it's a little different. I mean... It wasn't a sibling that turned to drugs, it was me. I can't imagine what it was like to watch that happen and be helpless to stop it."
"I just..." Dani sighed, and shook her head, "I understand being really fucking broken inside, I guess."
He nodded silently. The truth was that Charlie didn’t spend that much time with Obi himself these days. He had no idea how the Old Man felt about anything Dani was talking about and he was pretty sure that if he asked, he’d get little more than a stern glare. He’d left to search for Liam and when he came back, everything was different back home--including who the guy was dating… and he’d never gotten any of the story until now.
He played a few more notes on his guitar. He and Dani had swapped enough secrets to write a damn good song. “You should channel all that into your playing,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be music, even if that’s how I stay sane. Fucking broken people are hands down the best artists.”
"I used to channel it into my archery and sword fighting and all of that, but I think channeling it into my playing is a great idea, too," Dani replied, with a nod.
She smiled a bit at Charlie, and motioned to the guitar, "Let's pretend I know what I'm doing and... what's the word. Jam. You start and I'll try to follow along."