not_every_mage | Room 322, Tuesday Afternoon

Room 322, Tuesday Afternoon

If Anders was being honest, he'd have to admit that the tall box from Kathy that Ringo had given him some months before had fallen completely out of his mind.

It had started with good intentions: He'd dragged the parcel back to his room and stuck it in the closet so he could save it for his actual birthday and feel like Kathy was there, just for a moment. And then there had been the madness of trying to summon a demon, and the dull terror of the Circle, and by the time he was home again his birthday was some weeks past and the tall package entirely forgotten in a back corner of his closet. The fact thinking about Kathy hurt and he avoided it when he could had only added to his amnesia.

It might have stayed there forever, if Lachlan hadn't managed to hit one of his toy mice deep into the closet. Anders went digging through a mess of discarded paper to find it, and ended up bumping into the box. The tall, slender package wobbled worryingly for a moment before he was able to catch it.

And then there was nothing to do but open it. Lachlan's mouse was forgotten as he pried the paper off and found --

A damned fine staff. The kind he'd never expect to afford on his own. He could feel its power singing to him as he held it in his lap. Some part of him couldn't wait to get to a space where he could test it safely.

The rest of him mainly wanted to cry.

"Dammit, Kathy," he muttered. "Just ... damn it."

[OOC: Cracked door, open post.]

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"Use it, I suppose," Anders said, as if it were the first time he'd considered the issue. "It's nice. Too nice to keep in a corner somewhere."

"Right. Makes sense." It did. And in that capacity, it'd been a stupid fucking question.

Dante scooted a few inches closer and felt like a fucking seven-year-old doing it. He had his own hurts about Kathy, but he just-- dealt with it when he was drunk and he had his phone in hand and he could leave stupid voicemails and not make it public.

Watching Anders hurt with it hurt, and he wasn't sure how to fix it.

Anders shot him a sly, sad half-smile. "Part of me would love to smash it over a rock somewhere and burn the pieces, but that wouldn't help anything, would it?" he said.

"It's just -- I think I'm doing all right without her and then I find something like this and it wrecks me." He could see Dante was struggling for something to say; in his clumsy way, he was hoping to let Dante know talking about how much this hurt was all right.

"... I know," Dante settled on.

Finally.

"I know," he repeated. And finally gave in, crossing enough distance to slide an arm around Anders' shoulders. "I just. Wish. She couldn't. Like that."

Fuck words right up the ear, that was what.

"There can't be too many more surprises," Anders said, hoping he was right. "I just have to -- give it time."

He knew time helped. But it wasn't coming close to erasing this scar.

Dante sighed. "Yeah," he said. He'd decided a long time ago he wasn't going to cry about anything, but fuck if sometimes this shit didn't-- whatever.

He looked aside, at Anders's face. "But that's gonna be a while," he said quietly. "You don't need to use it right away."

Hey, sentences. Good thing to know he could still do those.

Anders shook his head. "Not until the next time somebody attacks the island, anyhow," he said. "I should practice with it before then. But it doesn't have to be tonight."

He leaned against Dante, head on his shoulders. It was comforting, somehow.

"What did her note for you say?" he asked, curious.

"I don't remember," Dante said, leaning his head against the side of Anders's. It felt right. "Something something follow your dreams I know you can do it, blah. She gave me some money. Used it to buy a trailer back home."

After drinking away some of it out of spite.

"At least you got something nice out of it," Anders said. The physical contact was calming him; he snaked a hand up to play with the short hairs at the nape of Dante's neck. "But, Follow your dreams. That's so much like her."

"I know," Dante said, with a soft snort. "A big pile of pretty bullshit."

He let out a sigh. "What'd she write you?"

Anders winced, trying to pull up the memory.

"All I remember is that she said she loved me," he finally said softly. "More bullshit, isn't it? Considering."

It was relieving to be talking to Dante about this, he realized. With anyone else he would have felt obligated to at least weakly defend Kathy's choice to put her duty at home over lovers, happiness, even her own life. With Dante there was no need.

"Well, she meant it," Dante said, "But that didn't fucking matter in the end, did it?"

Getting pissed at Kathy on his own behalf had gotten increasingly harder over the months. Doing so on Anders', not so much. "It's why I threw the note out," he said, as quietly as Anders had. "She had a lot of pretty words, but none of that means shit when she wasn't willing to back 'em up."

And Anders hadn't been angry until he opened the staff and had a reminder of both Kathy's thoughtfulness and her utter stupidity lying across his lap.

"No," he said. "What she said didn't matter. All I care about is that she's not here. It's easier some days, but --"

But today wasn't some days.

Dante sighed, and hugged him closer. "Yeah," he said. "I know."

He was good at burying shit. He had to be. That was why he never let the but come out until he was drunk on his own late at night and he could let a torrent of whatever loose on a dead phone's voicemail that no one would ever listen to anyway.

"You wanna talk more about it?"

Anders smiled, shook his head. "I don't know what else to say," he admitted. "I just -- miss her. And I'm angry. And we just have to get past it, don't we? All the powers we have, and nothing we can do about this."

"Powered but powerless," Dante said. Thoughtfully. And-- a little halting, as he tried to keep talking. Doing so to another human being who was listening wasn't something he really knew how to do, and he knew it'd been showing already. "It's... not like that was new to either of us, even before."

It'd just been their own seperate little tragedies, instead of the one they shared.

"Keeping going right past it's... not hard for me," he said. "I get reminded about her all the time, but... Stopping and thinking about it is harder. You know?"

"I know," Anders said. "I think about her every time I order takeout, or play on the internet, or see a picture of ~~meta~~ Iron Man. Sometimes it's nice, but sometimes --"

He shrugged, also halting. "Sometimes I wish I hadn't known her so well. Especially since it's different for her to be gone completely than it is for Nathan or Karl to be alive but not with me, you know?"

Dante was silent for a second. Two. Three. Maybe longer, he didn't know. "I do and I don't," he said finally. "I didn't have friends like you guys before I came here. Before that, if people gave a shit at all, they were there, and then one day they just-- weren't."

A beat.

"Here wasn't supposed to be like that."

"It is, though," Anders said softly. "Maybe everyplace is like that."

There was a depressing thought.

"Probably," Dante said quietly. "Guess I let her get my hopes up about something anyway. Fucking Kathy."

Anders sighed in agreement instead of answering, swaying against Dante.

This was just hard, was what it was. He didn't know what more to say about it.

Sometimes there wasn't a whole lot to say. This just hurt. He knew Anders didn't hurt quite the same, but it was close enough.

Dante turned to kiss Anders firmly on the cheek. Brought his hand up to undo Anders' hairtie so he could run a hand through his hair too.

Fuck.

Fuck. This was stupid. But they were better at it than they were at talking about feelings, so ...

Anders turned his mouth to return a warmer kiss, pressing his lips to Dante's.

That wasn't what Dante'd been going for. ...Or maybe it had been.

He slid his other arm over Anders' shoulders, too, sighed, and kissed him back. Slow, with no real purpose in mind.

Maybe he was just starting to discover he had a real problem saying no to Anders.

Anders would have said he understood, that he knew he was hard to say no to.

He relaxed into the kissing, taking a cue from Anders to keep it slow. Light. Even as he leaned back onto the bed, it was more about comfort than lust.

Probably there were arguments against having this kind of comfortable physical relationship with Dante, especially after the man had made it so clear that he might have to leave someday too. But right then, Anders couldn't think of any.

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