|: 014. Video : When the Music's Over, But the Song Stays in Your Head :|

[andyougoleft]

     [ Public ]

     So, I've seen how these sorts of questions go over around here.  I know I'm opening myself up to a lot of troll answers, and angry defensiveness, and cagey suspicion, and this is me saying I'm okay with whatever comes my way.  Bring it on.  Because at least one of you is going to give me a straight answer, and I guess...

     [Slevin is sitting in his room talking to the communicator, toying with something in his hands.  It flashes gold just at the edge of the view screen when he hesitates to look down at it, takes a breath, continues anyway:]

     I guess that's what I need.  Just one.  So: what was the worst thing you ever lost?

     And how did you decide to handle it?  


     [ Private : Chris D'Amico ]

     You were right.  I'm an asshole, but I can at least admit when I made a mistake.

Comments

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[versusnurture]

Does it have to be a physical, tangible thing?

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[andyougoleft]

No.

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[versusnurture]

Then I guess . . . my mind.

It sounds like I'm trying to be cute but I'm not. I was - brainwashed, I guess. So that was the biggest thing I ever lost.

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[andyougoleft]

[He doesn't thinks he's trying to be cute. He's sat across the room and stared at her and watched her stare back, and he's seen her other places since, seen her smile and laugh and charm, seen her quiet and cruel and hurt, seen her vicious. There's a reason he's stayed away from her, and that's because even he knows better than to approach a rabid creature without a way to put it down permanently.

So it isn't doubt that flavors his voice when he replies, but earnestness.]

But doesn't the fact that you're even aware of that mean you've got at least some of it back?

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[versusnurture]

[The way he says it makes it sound more like progress than it feels. She doesn't feel like she's accomplished much, just clung to sanity, for the most part, and even that's been difficult.]

[Gnawing her lip, she shrugs tightly, radiating insecurity so violently it might as well be contagious.]

Some of it. Yeah, I guess. I know that it happened, I know I don't remember everything, I know it made me - it helped me do crazy things. But I don't feel any more in control.

Whenever I start trying to "handle" it, it just seems like I hurt people.

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[andyougoleft]

[Slevin doesn't believe in her like her friends do; he has no reason to, and no ability to even if that were the case. They're not friends. They are similar creatures coated in the same disguise, with varying degrees of success. He knows he's sane.

Well. He thinks he's sane. It occurs to him for the first time since he was in middle school and put it solidly, definitively out of his consideration that maybe he went a little insane, back then. Maybe he went a lot insane. Maybe this is where it's lead him.

He doesn't feel insane. He's pretty sure that's not a disqualifying fact, though.]

People hurt other people dealing with anything. That's why some people don't want to engage at all. It's the human condition.

You mean a little more literally than that, though, don't you.

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[versusnurture]

[Abigail, most of the time, feels insane. Even on her stable days, she feels crazy. Sometimes more so, those days, because she can see the horizon of 'normal' more clearly and so reaches for it more desperately.]

[But the most insane people, she thinks, don't realize they are. Hannibal thinks he's sane.]

I don't mean hurting someone's feelings. I mean hurting someone so badly you can feel them die. You can feel them bleed to death all over your hands.

[This she says matter-of-factly, if a little distantly. It still hurts to think about, even if not as much as it should, if she were normal.]