[Milliways: Fred's Room]
Jun. 24th, 2006 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
supersymmetryIt had been a while.
Fred didn't even know what that meant. Why she'd been keeping to herself so much more of late, why she'd been so oddly quiet since (and during, if she was honest with herself) Faith's wedding.
Getting out had been a relief, even if it was getting out to some place that was equally strange as this one. And this place had never stopped being strange. Even after so many months - over half a year, and she still hadn't started to regard this place as home. This room whose walls she'd never written on, the downstairs full of strange people and strange not-people... it shouldn't have been so different from home. Shouldn't have been that much stranger than the Hyperion had been when she'd arrived there. It had taken her months to start considering that place home, too. But it was different there. There she'd had a purpose, and a center, and ...
Something this place lacked.
Plenty of people found happiness here. Plenty of people she knew, people from her own world, had found something to make this place click.
And she hadn't.
All she'd found were myriad impossibilities. She felt a pang of guilt at thinking that, of counting that as a negative when she was one such impossibility and Wesley was another. But that was part of the problem. Words like death had so little meaning here. How was she supposed to reconcile the fact that back in their own world, Wesley was dead, and so was she? That latter part was a little easier, except how could it be? What was dead when the so-called proof was walking around and occasionally looking and acting just like her?
So many questions, and no answers forthcoming, not in all the months she'd spent going through every book she could get her hands on to try to explain the physics of it all.
And in all that time she'd never really talked about it, not in the kind of depth she needed to to understand. Partially because she didn't want to burden people with the difficult questions, and partially because the one person who might have given her answers wasn't someone she could bring herself to ask. Not when they both worked so hard at pretending to be normal, at ignoring the facts because the facts didn't make sense.
So if she hadn't seen Wesley much since they'd gotten back from Faith's wedding, if she'd been purposefully distant, it was no different than how willfully distant he'd been all along.
All the same, she finds herself contemplating the door, wondering if maybe tonight she should just go upstairs and knock on his door and ask some of the difficult questions after all.
Fred didn't even know what that meant. Why she'd been keeping to herself so much more of late, why she'd been so oddly quiet since (and during, if she was honest with herself) Faith's wedding.
Getting out had been a relief, even if it was getting out to some place that was equally strange as this one. And this place had never stopped being strange. Even after so many months - over half a year, and she still hadn't started to regard this place as home. This room whose walls she'd never written on, the downstairs full of strange people and strange not-people... it shouldn't have been so different from home. Shouldn't have been that much stranger than the Hyperion had been when she'd arrived there. It had taken her months to start considering that place home, too. But it was different there. There she'd had a purpose, and a center, and ...
Something this place lacked.
Plenty of people found happiness here. Plenty of people she knew, people from her own world, had found something to make this place click.
And she hadn't.
All she'd found were myriad impossibilities. She felt a pang of guilt at thinking that, of counting that as a negative when she was one such impossibility and Wesley was another. But that was part of the problem. Words like death had so little meaning here. How was she supposed to reconcile the fact that back in their own world, Wesley was dead, and so was she? That latter part was a little easier, except how could it be? What was dead when the so-called proof was walking around and occasionally looking and acting just like her?
So many questions, and no answers forthcoming, not in all the months she'd spent going through every book she could get her hands on to try to explain the physics of it all.
And in all that time she'd never really talked about it, not in the kind of depth she needed to to understand. Partially because she didn't want to burden people with the difficult questions, and partially because the one person who might have given her answers wasn't someone she could bring herself to ask. Not when they both worked so hard at pretending to be normal, at ignoring the facts because the facts didn't make sense.
So if she hadn't seen Wesley much since they'd gotten back from Faith's wedding, if she'd been purposefully distant, it was no different than how willfully distant he'd been all along.
All the same, she finds herself contemplating the door, wondering if maybe tonight she should just go upstairs and knock on his door and ask some of the difficult questions after all.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 06:43 am (UTC)But this time she thinks she has to say it. That there needs to be clarity here where there hasn't been all along.
"So. I guess, this feels like..." as much as she wants to say it, the words keep tripping her up.
"You and I. Are we... not us any more? Together, I mean?"
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 07:01 am (UTC)"Have we ever been?"
"Really?"
Saying it seems to scar his soul anew.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 07:10 am (UTC)No.
They'd never really been able to reach each other through the walls they'd kept in place. Whatever spark was there -- and it still was there, whatever genuine feeling had drawn her to him -- had been smothered by the weight of all that had been left unsaid.
There's a part of her that wonders, still. That asks a silent question.
(Would you have loved me?)
But a bigger part of her is saying no. That whatever might have been, couldn't be.
Through no fault of their own, the answer was still no.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 07:17 am (UTC)But it was much too late for different paths. It had been too late before he had ever come to this place.
They hadn't even been able to make it a convincing illusion, which seemed especially unfair to them. But, as more than one person here had reminded him, Milliways had never claimed to be Utopia.
"So what will you do now?" he asks quietly.
Because he has no idea what he will do.
And there never was a "we."
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 07:27 am (UTC)"What I always do. Whatever I can. This doesn't change... it's not like I'm going anywhere."
Not yet, anyway. One day that door would open, but she didn't think it would do so before she was ready. Whatever ready meant, whether she would be walking out to freedom or to... something else.
"I'm still here. And there are still a lot of things I need to find out. Those lost memories, whether or not there's a way for me to get out of here without undoing things that've already been done. Lots of things. Lots of work to be done."
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 07:38 am (UTC)Well, after all, wasn't it their similarities that had made people think they belonged together? Ignoring the real possibility that those similiarities had not been enough to carry a relationship.
But that was all useless speculation now.
"Well. Perhaps I should go."
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 07:54 am (UTC)She feels like she missed the mark somehow, that she failed to communicate what she meant underneath the words. That she was still here. Whatever else they weren't, there was still room for them to find out what they were.
As much as she hates to see him just leave like that, it's something of a relief that she has that way out, that she can just let him go, and that's okay. That she can have time to sort this through alone.
"Goodnight, Wesley." she says, with genuine warmth underneath the sadness. It didn't say half of what she wanted to, but maybe it said enough.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 08:04 am (UTC)"Goodnight, Fred."
And there is warmth there too. Of friendship only? Perhaps, but like hers, genuine, and maybe for that reason, more meaningful than groundless dreams of something more.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 04:58 pm (UTC)Because that can't be how it was supposed to go.
Can it?
She's still wondering when she gets up to turn off the light, and when she falls asleep counting digits of Pi (never anything so ordinary as sheep) she thinks maybe that it's going to have to join the list of problems she'll never be able to answer.