dǫçţǫŗ şɭęęƥ (shone) wrote in valloic, @ 2020-02-15 10:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | !: action/thread/log, ₴ inactive: dan torrance |
WHO: Dan & Stan
WHAT: Meeting for the first time, it's only slightly awkward
WHERE: Near the Morningside building
WHEN: Early this week
WARNINGS: Just talk of trauma and stuff
STATUS: Complete
Stan just needed to get out of the apartment, since apparently all of his friends were completely insane. Well, all of his friends except Bev, who was having the correct reaction to a demon Pomeranian in their closet. Unlike Eddie and Richie, who wanted to adopt the monster, and Bill who probably wanted to fight it one on one like an utter moron. He just needed a break from the entire mess. Seriously, why did Eddie and Richie want to keep the thing? It came from Pennywise and nothing good could come from that. They could probably find a dog that wasn't going to murder them if they looked around enough, if it was that important to them. They didn’t have to settle for a murder puppy. Besides, he needed his space in a more general sense, especially after the whole mess with Eddie the other night. And he wanted to explore this place. Figure it out, at least a little. Eddie has told him there were weird birds here, so maybe if he kept an eye out he might see one. Sure, the others might not appreciate his nerdier pastimes, but Stan liked birdwatching. He was walking along when he felt it. It was different than the usual things he felt, almost familiar. There was a sense of kinship to the sensation, something Stan had never really expected to feel. Stopping, he looked around, trying to find whatever it was that was making him feel like that. He was aware he probably looked ridiculous to anyone who might notice him, but he didn't care. He just wanted to figure this out. There were a lot of people in this city - that was a fact. And after he had succumbed to the swing of Death’s scythe (he wasn’t afraid, he had his mother with him), smoke curling through the hazy air, billowing, shifting like ghosts in the breeze (like the ghosts in his head), he expected that to be the end. At the very least, his mind going dark meant that he couldn’t hear anyone else. But then he awakened and - he heard people. Lots of them. It all came at once, and the walls he built couldn’t keep up with the rapidly expanding field of telepathy he was casting because he was overwhelmed and it was noise noise noise. Then someone from the Department of Whatever found him, tried to explain, but it was still noise and he wished he could have a drink to combat the earsplitting barrage of thoughts. However, he forced himself to focus and went double ply with his own head, creating a space for silence and that was - better. Yet, he still sensed certain things - he sensed the Shine, it was always a glow he couldn’t exactly look away from. He could tell it was the same with the kid who had stopped in the middle of the road - probably exploring like Dan was, trying to make sense of the impossible. Everyone else became a blur, the Shine was what he saw. “It’s me,” he spoke up, since obviously that was the mystery of the moment. May as well cut to the chase. “If you were expecting something else. Sorry to disappoint.” Not like he was much of - well, anything, really. Stan stared at the man for a long moment, unsure of what to say. He felt nervous, the low level of panic that seemed ever present rising slightly. He didn't understand why this man felt like this, why he felt this kinship with someone he had never met. He had never trusted this thing inside of him, too scared of what it might say about him. "What-" He hesitated before moving closer to the man, even though he knew that could be a terrible idea. People weren't generally trustworthy, he knew that much. But this man seemed to have some idea of what was going on and Stan desperately needed to know what was wrong with him. "Why do you...why do you feel like me?" Dan stayed where he was, hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat. He didn’t make any effort to move away, though denim-blue eyes tracked the kid as he came nearer - he really didn’t know, did he? Guy was like a baby doe learning to walk, all wobbly knees and uncertainty. “Probably because we both have the Shining,” he replied. “Some people have it and don’t ever really notice. Some do, if they have enough of it.” Apparently, this one had enough of it - it was new too, Dan could tell. He didn’t have the luxury of trying to suss it out as a kid, being told he was autistic or mute or brain-damaged or whatever, then choosing to blot it out with booze and drugs. Freshly blossomed, this Shine - a present with the bow fallen off. “I’m Dan.” "The...what?" There was a word for it? A name for this thing that terrified him? Stan wasn't sure what to think of that. The idea that it was something people knew about. Something other people experienced. He had always thought there was something wrong with him. It wasn't that he was new to this thing, though the way it had grown was a recent development. It was just that there had never been anyone to explain it to him, not in Derry. "You...you're like me?" He couldn’t help but be baffled by that. "You mean…I'm not…there isn't something wrong with me?" He realized he was being rude. "Um...I'm Stan." “Nice to meet you, Stan. No, there isn’t anything wrong with you.” May as well get that out of the way - in case anyone had ever told him otherwise. Dan sure had been told that enough, by adults who didn’t believe him - thank everything he had Dick though, or at least, he did. Sometimes Dan still heard him - when we were gone, we weren’t ever really gone. We went on, and on and on. In fact, he could almost hear Dick now - could almost see his Crest whitestrips smile, brighter than Jesus. He’d have been delighted Dan found yet another lost kid to take under his wing - and Dan would have told him to shut the hell up. He motioned toward a bench, in case sitting was an option. “Most everyone has a little bit of the Shine,” he said. “Some people just have it stronger than others, is all. It’s just the way you were put together.” "It’s nice to meet you too." The words were said more out of habit than anything. Stan was far too stuck on what the man had said. There wasn't anything wrong with him. Some people were just born like this. It was hard for Stan to wrap his head around the idea after spending so long thinking he was somehow broken. That this was some sick joke by Pennywise, something the clown had done to him. Just another way of hurting him that had never gone away. But deep down he'd always known that wasn't true, even if he hadn't been willing to admit it. This had always been inside him, even if it hadn’t been quite so strong before he'd brushed against something evil. It was so strange to think there might be other people like him. People who felt these things. Who saw these things. "I thought..." He shook his head. "I always thought there was something wrong with me. That it was something bad..." Dan sat on the bench, leaving room for Stan. He wondered if sacrificing his life for the only person he considered family had been enough to repay the huge debt he’d been saddled with - brought about by his own shitty choices, over a period of years that were all stormclouds and jagged streaks of lightning, people caught in the crossfire. Innocent people. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he still had more debt to work off, which was why he didn’t even get the luxury of being dead. “It’s not bad,” he said, fingers scratching his scruffy cheek. “Sometimes - we don’t always understand it. Sometimes we’re not safe to the world around us and it can be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use it for good. You learn to work with it, instead of hiding from it.” That’s what he would encourage, anyway - it’s what he should have done, instead of snuffing it out, wet fingers on a candle’s flame, by using illicit substances. But he’d been scared - of himself, of the ghost of his father that still lived in him. Silencing it had been the only way out, at the time. Stan sat down next to Dan, leaving as much space between them as he could, because he was still hesitant to let anyone too close. The things he felt hurt more often than not, and he was so tired of constantly hurting. Tired of worrying that he would hurt everyone else. "There was something...when I was younger," he said. "Something...evil. It hurt me. It hurt my friends too." His hand came up almost unconsciously to the scars on the side of his face from the woman in the painting. "And then I kept having dreams and seeing things and..I guess I had always been like this but...I always thought it made me this way. And that meant that there was something evil in me. That I was going to hurt people." He glanced over at Dan. "I want to be better," he said. "I don't want to feel so broken all the time. I'm so tired of feeling like this." He knew what it was like, to be faced with an evil so pervasive, so dark - that nothing else was ever needed. What use would a kid have for scary campfire stories, of fantastical things like poison pinpricks or bad blood? Nothing. Not when they came face-to-face with an evil recycled through the sewers of time, sailing from nightmare to nightmare. An evil that endured. “Something evil hurt me too,” Dan replied. “My father wasn’t great to begin with - “ He still remembered the snap of his arm, thrown into a wall because he was in the way. A toddler. In the way. “But whatever this was, it twisted him and - well, it’s a long story. But trust me, I understand.” A sigh escaped him, a slow exhale. “I’ve used the Shining to help people. It’s possible. I can teach you too, if you want.” Stan listened as Dan spoke, feeling a sort of connection. A kinship. Dan understood, in a way that maybe nobody else would. He’d faced something evil when he was a child and he’d had to live with this thing inside of him. It sounded horrifying, that the monster was his own father, but Stan could understand that. He thought of Bev and Eddie and their parents. Of how Bill's parents had turned away from him after Georgie died. Richie's parents and their neglect. Ben's mother’s smothering. His own father and his need for perfection. The way it had felt stifling and overwhelming and how he had never felt good enough. Maybe all parents were monsters in their own ways. "In Derry," he said, "there was something...wrong. Kids would go missing and nobody would care. They would forget about it and move on like it was nothing. My friend's brother disappeared. We looked for him and we found...it instead. And it hunted us. We fought it and we thought we stopped it, but we didn't. So we had to go back and finish the job...and it did something to me." He looked up at Dan. "It had this thing..." He spoke haltingly. "The Deadlights. If you looked at them, it trapped you. It did that to my friend Bev when we were younger. And...to me, when we fought it again. Even before that...I've always been like this, but it was quieter. And then, after the first time, I started having dreams about things that were going to happen. And feeling things. And now. It's like it tore open something inside me. Like it's a wound and I can't get it to heal..." He took a shaky breath. "I want to help people," he said. "I want to do something good with this. But more than that, I just want...I can't touch people. It hurts. And I want to be able to...I have friends and I know that it hurts them that there's this distance. That I can't be what they want me to be. That I can't give them what they need. And I don't want to be like this. I'm so tired of being like this. Can you really help me?" The touch thing was interesting - admittedly, Dan never had that problem. Perhaps he would have, if he didn’t dull his Shine with alcohol, pills, snow-white powder in a plastic baggie. Nowadays, he didn’t really touch anyone - but that was because he just didn’t want to, even if he could. He wasn’t about to suggest that Stan go down the same road he did - no one should go down that particular road. “I can really help you,” he assured. “There’s no getting rid of the Shine - because the power of the mind is infinite, and as long as you exist, your Shine does too. But I can teach you to work with it, to control it.” He didn’t have a business card or anything. However, they were presumably on the same network. From the way this whole situation was explained, he wasn’t the only one here from another universe, which was difficult to wrap one’s mind around anyway. Stan almost couldn't believe there was someone willing to help him. That there was someone who understood his power and wanted to make it easier for him. He had thought that it would just always be like this, that it would never get better. Just knowing it could change helped a lot. "Thank you," he said, quiet but full of too much emotion. "Thank you so much, Dan. And if you ever need anything, just ask. If I can help...I promise I will." He looked around. "So...how many other people like us have you met?" he asked, curious now that he knew he wasn't alone in the world. "What were they like?" “I’ve met a few others - they tended to find me though,” Dan replied, thinking first and foremost of Dick. Him and his spicy recipes - the gumbo could burn a hole in your mouth if you weren’t careful and, hell, sometimes he really missed Dick. “When I was a kid, the head chef at the hotel my family and I stayed in for awhile - he was the first adult to believe me about the Shining.” Maybe it was meant to be. Fate worked in weird ways sometimes - maybe Dan was always meant to defeat the ghosts of the Overlook in the way his father never did, sacrificing his life for his family. Life is like a wheel - it always comes back around. “Then there’s - well, she called me Uncle Dan. We weren’t related by blood, though she was family as much as blood was,” he continued. “Her name’s Abra. She shined really, really bright. Brave kid. You’d like her.” It was hard not to like Abra though - she certainly had no problem taking a sandblaster to the barriers around Dan’s creaky heart, that was for sure. She slipped in quickly. Not everyone was good, however. They weren’t like Abra or Dick. “There’s also - there are people, creatures, I guess - “ He couldn’t think of Rose or her ilk as people; they were nightmares swathed in human-looking guises, seemingly innocent hippies traveling the dusty highways searching for prey. “Who feed off the essence of those with the Shining. You have to make sure to stay away from the ones like that. I don’t think any are here now, but just in case. They’d hurt you.” Stan wondered what his life would have been like if he had found someone like Dan when he was young. Someone who understood and could help him come to terms with this. Would he still be as anxious and terrified as he was now? Would he still struggle with simple things like letting people close? Would life still hurt? Maybe he would have been better if there had been someone there. Or maybe it would have changed nothing. There was no point in dwelling on it. His life was what it was and he couldn’t change it. And now Dan was here and maybe he could help. "Abra sounds really nice," he said. "I'd like to meet her. And I'm glad you had someone to help you. Sometimes this can get so lonely." He frowned at the mention of the people who weren’t people. Monsters who hurt people like him. He went pale, his expression going distant with memories of Pennywise. He didn't want to go through that again. Not ever if he could help it. Once had been more than enough. He had a sudden flash of a beautiful woman with too bright eyes and a palpable air of malice. The taste of blood and the feeling of too many hands. Something evil. He shook it off. That was Dan's not his. "I'll keep away from them," he said. "I promise." “Good,” Dan exhaled, cornflower eyes caught somewhere far off too - his last moments, that confrontation at the Overlook. He wasn’t sure what this city was meant to be, a second chance or what, but he didn’t want to get too bogged down in the past. Especially if he was meant to be helping someone else fight off the monsters that still lingered. He pulled out his phone, passing it over to Stan. “Go on and put your number in there, and I’ll send you a text so you have mine. Then we can set up times to get together, whenever you’re ready.” Stan took the offered phone, hesitant and all too careful not to touch Dan as he did so. It was instinct at this point, an ingrained habit, so much so that he didn't even think about the fact that he had gone out of his way to avoid any sort of contact. He had to think for a moment to remember his number - he had listed his own number and all the Losers' in tiny, neat script in a little book he kept on hand just in case he lost his phone and he would do the same with Dan's as soon as he had it - and then carefully entered it into the phone. After a moment's hesitation, he added a little bird emoji beside his name. "I like birds," he explained. "They're less complicated than people. Nicer too." The bird emoji was kind of funny - in a aw, that’s sweet sort of way. “Guess I can’t argue with that,” Dan chuckled a little. People were infinitely complicated - even without being able to see the intricacies of their heads, or taking a ride through neurons and surfing synapses. After all, he’d spent a lot of nights with only a cat as company. The presence of Azzie, and the thoughts of the dying slipping through - memories of lands traveled and many birthdays of grandchildren, regrets, aches and pains, bursts of happiness. All the things you contemplated when the death toll sounded, and you moved on. “It was really good to meet you, Stan.” Normally Dan would have offered his hand for a shake, but, well. They’d get to that. All in due time. "It was nice to meet you too, Dan." Stan breathed a sigh of relief that Dan didn't try to shake his hand or touch him in any way, all too used to people - outside of his friends - ignoring his boundaries. It was nice that Dan didn't. "I should probably go," he said. "I can't avoid the apartment all day and I probably need to make sure my friends weren't eaten by the eldritch Pomeranian they decided to adopt. But I'll definitely get in touch with you soon. And thank you. Again. I know I've said that a lot, but I mean it." Eldritch Pomeranian? That was a big ol’ what the fuck but Dan wouldn’t ask any questions. He was good at that - not asking questions if it wasn’t something to stick his nose into. Abiding by boundaries. After all, he had his own set of boundaries - walls more like, ones that he tried his best to maintain but people tended to slip under or around anyway. Certain people. “You’re welcome,” he chuckled a little, standing up from the bench, trying not to creak like the old man he was. Jesus. “And, you know - good luck with the Eldritch thing.” Whatever that meant. |