2019-11-18 - It's a War

August doesn't mean to take a long shower, but he's swimming around in old memories and the habits that he formed at those times. Long, hot showers were a way he made himself feel better after a bad spell. So he stands there in the hot water, thinking about anything except killing a guy (it was just one of their constructs, wasn't it? so did that mean it counted less, or more?) and how utterly easy it had been.

Alexander's warning to not be afraid of their Gifts looms in the background of all of this. He's not sure how to not be afraid of killing people by just willing it into being. That seems like the number one thing to be afraid of.

It's been a lovely trip so far. A nice bed and breakfast, dinner with August's family which went much better than she could have expected, and a helpful if chilly meeting with the Glimmering folks of Portland. Eleanor was heavily asleep which is why she didn't wake immediately when August did but, eventually the extended sound of the shower rouses her. She looks to where he should be and finds him missing, notes the time and the dust and debris in the bed, and sits bolt upright.

Was he Taken? She gets out of bed in her nightshirt (his flannel) and pads to the bathroom, knocking once before opening it a crack. "August, you ok in there?" she asks, the concern audible in her voice.

August hears the knock, shudders. He'd known Eleanor would wake up, though. Maybe he'd wanted her to. He almost replies with an automatic, 'yeah', realizes this is a ludicrous response, stops himself from doing that. Also reigns in a hysterical laugh. "No," he says, voice low. His fingers are getting wrinkly. He turns off the water, gets out. The bruises are starting to color up; nothing serious, nothing that won't heal up in a few days. His eyes are red, and he looks exhausted and unhappy. "Sorry, just...got yanked into one of those things." He pulls a towel off the rack, starts drying off. Okay, the shower did make him feel better. A little.

Eleanor comes in at the No and she moves to him immediately to look him over for injuries. "Damn them," she mutters. "Damn them all to Hell. I should have been with you." She frowns, covering a shiver of fear, fear for him. "Tell me what happened. I'll turn on the little coffee maker we have in the other room." She strokes a hand through his wet hair and cups his bearded cheek.

August smiles at the curses, sad and tired. But then he shakes his head. "No, no not--not this one." He swallows, utterly refusing to imagine her in that place. "Not this one," he repeats. His eyes stay on her in his shirt. What was so different, about that apocalyptic wasteland and the prison?

Oh. Of course. She'd have seen him kill someone.

He leans into her touch. "I think it was Itzhak's. Not mine." He nods, at the idea of coffee or tea. It'll be a bit before he can sleep again.

Eleanor leans up to kiss his cheek gently, looking him in the eyes. "I don't care how bad it was. I wish I was there with you. No matter what, I have your back, August Roen," she insists. Then she lets him go to go start a small pot of coffee in the little machine in the other room.

"Itzhak's dream? If it was bad I'm guessing there weren't any unicorns in it this time," she calls out, though mindfully quiet enough not to wake any of the others staying in the other rooms.

August winces when Eleanor says that, turns his face into her hand and kisses it. He swallows. "No matter what," he echoes. He sighs. Well. They can get to 'no matter what' in a second.

He watches her head into the room in his shirt (hers now, who's he kidding?), towels off. Everything feels raw, everything feels like twenty years ago. Fresh out of his first real shower after coming out of the hospital. Instead of a twenty three year old with angry red scars, he's a forty-five year old with old white ones and a mass of bruises and a lot more gray.

He shakes his head, comes back out and sits on the edge of the bed. He manages a small laugh. "No unicorns," he confirms. He has to make himself say it. "It was a prison."

When he emerges from the bathroom she sits beside him on the bed and lays her hands gently on his chest where the first signs of bruising can be seen. She's not strong enough to heal him outright, but she can speed up his healing considerably. She closes her eyes and her hands glow faintly with an inner light and warmth, which eases into his body to encourage it to fix itself.

Her eyes open again and meet his. "A prison? It was a Dream then I take it, not them coming and pulling you into the Veil proper. I don't think they could right here anyway, too far from the thin spot. So it was a construct, most likely, orchestrated to cause Itzhak pain and trauma, and for you as his friend."

August sighs as the bruising eases and the pulled muscles in his arm throb less readily. He sets his hands on Eleanor's, looks down at where she's touching him. "Yeah. I didn't think..." He sighs. "I guess we're close enough to Old Town, though."

He snorts, nods. "It was definitely that." He's not sure he wants to tell her and yet he knows he should. This little war wages inside him for a few more seconds. Then, "There were guards. They were threatening to extend Itzhak's setence. And he was having trouble understanding it wasn't real. And then..."

He lets out a long, slow breath. "Then they came for us. To kill us."

"Oh no," Eleanor says softly. "I'm so sorry. Is Itzhak all right? Not just physically, that had to be incredibly traumatic for him, being back inside, threatened like that. You made it out though, which is good," she notes. She pulls him in for a tight hug, mindful of his injuries. "Can't they give us one damn holiday to enjoy without their interference?"

August settles against Eleanor, stares out across the room. "We've both been busy. And that must have been a particularly, ah, flush harvest for them." He winces. "So we might wind up there again."

He slips an arm around her, sighs. "He's not...we didn't get hurt much. Physically. Because we killed two of them." We. He closes his eyes. He's not going to cry about it. He's not. It was just one of their Dreams, one of their little experiements. A swing of the metaphysical scythe, nothing more.

And yet he'd felt it, could still feel it now. Pieces of that guard's heart collapsing because he willed it to be so. Did it matter if here, in their world, no one was dead?

Eleanor has been getting stronger, both in Glimmer and in the Mental Aspect of it. She unwittingly scans August's emotional state and picks up on his distress. She puts her hands to either side of his face and looks him in the eyes. "August, look at me. You didn't kill people. It was a Dream. They were fabrications, illusions, constructs at best. And they were designed to make you feel horror and terror and grief. And even if they were real people..."

She takes in a breath. "This is a war, August. This is good versus evil, and they are not going to blink once if it comes to killing you, or Itzhak, or any of us. You're a good man. The fact you are so torn up about this is proof of that. The fact it hurts you to hurt people, the fact you heal others in spite of the fact it gets their attention pointed at you. You are good."

Under that distress there's more, so much more, whirling into a tornado that's set to wreck things. And worse, August has been here before, knows how this works, and yet can't get it to stop. Revulsion is whipping him up into a frenzy of self-hatred: at himself, at what he can do, at his lack of conviction to stay hiding in the woods where he belongs, away from people he could hurt.

The touch from Eleanor's mind brings him out of it, at least a fraction. The storm in his mind slows. He looks at her, watching while she talks. He blinks, unable to not cry in the face of all that.

God, he didn't want a war. He had one already, his own personal piece. And she was right; they would do it to her, to Itzhak, to everyone he loved, without hesitation. So why should he hesitate?

He starts talking without realizing he's doing it. His voice is rough and harsh. "I killed him. Not with a gun or a knife but with, with the Gift. So I felt it happen. Felt the--" He swallows back bile. Felt the heart seize as blood spilled into chambers out of order. Felt the lungs spasm. Felt the hemorrhaging. Felt that carefully orchestrated song of a body going about the business of living stutter and grind to a halt in a handful of seconds. Watched it unravel before his eyes, his hand pulling the leading thread.

He's never thought of himself as a killer, as truly dangerous. Joke's on him.

He covers his face with a hand, breathes in and out, shaking. "Are you sure you want--are you sure you should be with a guy who can just think someone to death? That sounds like a deal breaker."

Eleanor sends her own sense of calm, of compassion, and more than anything else, of her love for him into his being. "I am sorry you had to go through that. I am not sorry you did what you had to, though. I will never be sorry that you protect the people you care about, by whatever means necessary, August."

She chews her lower lip, and she is resolute in her feelings. "I'm more sure about you now than anything. I love you. I know this is a lousy time to say that to you, I'd have preferred something more romantic, but I love you. I really do. That scares me, but not you, not what you can do. Because I don't think that Gift could have been given to a better person. Someone who will use it to save others. Someone who will mourn needing to use it, and feel terrible for it after. Someone who does the right thing, at his own expense."

August's face screws up in a confused frown. He's been preparing himself for a pretty solid rejection for a good ten minutes, not the exact opposite. Relief makes him nauseated and dizzy, then those gently ebb as Eleanor's emotions wash the uglier things away.

He lowers his hand, studies her. His face is a mess; his eyes are red, there's tear streaks clear down to his beard, he's a little flushed. It's not a becoming look. "Oh," he says, eloquently, and rests his forehead on hers. After a second he swallows, murmurs, "It's not a lousy time. Romance is overrated." He manages to smile, slips his arms around her and pulls her close so he can hold her tight against him and bury his face in her neck. "I'm pretty sure I haven't earned anything like that. But I want to." His breath is warm on her skin. "I love you. I want to be worth you loving me."

Eleanor's eyes begin to leak as well, damn them. She sniffles and buries her fingers in his hair as he buries his face in her neck. "And that is one of the many reasons I love you. Because you're a man who wants to earn it, and who has no idea he does so, every second of every day, just by being himself with all his wonderous qualities and quirks. You make me want to be a better person, to grow, and to be brave. You make me want to be worthy of you, too."

"Pretty sure you're entitled to more than a used-up wreck like me," August says, laughing. He feels her tears and it startles him, gives him a jolt of panic. He rocks her back and forth in response. "See? I made you cry." He sighs, heavily. "You don't need to be a better person for me. I'm in love with who you are right now. You don't need to change that, unless you want to." He shakes with a chuckle. "Anyways, you're brave already. You did that all on your own."

He eases his hold on her, straightens, brushes some hair from her face. "Let me clean up real quick," he says. Probably meaning the part where his face is a sight. He kisses her forehead and retreats to the bathroom.

Eleanor chuckles at him. "You really don't realize how damned hot you are, do you?" she calls after him. She grabs a tissue to wipe her own eyes and blow her nose while he's cleaning himself up, then gets up to pour their coffee from the little brewer in the room. The L-word. It has been exchanged. Definitely a first for her. There's a giddiness there now, fluttering around her stomach.

"Yeah, all these scars and gray and white hair," August says, dry. "Incredibly attractive." He scrubs his face good and clean, uses some eye drops. He looks at himself in the mirror now: exhausted, but not no longer haunted. Tired but not tearing himself up with self-hate. Well, it's a start.

He comes back into the room, walks up behind Eleanor as she prepares the coffee, slipping his arms around her waist and ducking his head next to hers. "I mean it," he says, voice low. "I'm not saying it just because I'm feeling vulnerable and raw from...that." He kisses her neck, gentle and lingering.

Eleanor grins at the feel of his arms and the kiss on her neck, trying not to spill the coffee with the very distracting act. "I mean it too. I even told Hannah after dinner. She seems to think we're really good for each other. I think I agree with her one-hundred percent. I thought sisters were supposed to haze the girls their brother brings home," she teases.

"You did, huh?" Eleanor can feel August smile by the way it makes his beard rub her neck. His voice a little muffled against her skin. "Not in my family. They mostly just want to make sure anyone I bring home understands what they're getting into." The war vet part, he means; they don't know about the rest. "The rest, well. We're adults, we can make our own mistakes. Or not."

August's interest in the coffee is waning compared to Eleanor herself. He slides his hands down to her hips, from there to her long legs, past the edge of his shirt that she's wearing. Back up under the plaid flannel to the crease where her thigh meets her abdomen, from there to her belly. He kisses her collarbone. "Coffee smells good."

"I really like your family. All of them. They're just genuinely good people and seeing you interact with your parents and siblings and nieces was really nice. We'll have to do Christmas dinner with my folks. They'll be coming up from Florida and staying with me a few days, God help me," she chuckles. The retired firefighter and the seamstress. "They're a little like your parents. They reminded me of them."

Then he's making conversation terribly difficult, and coffee seem all the less appealing. "Keep doing that and I'm just gonna let it all go cold," she quips, before tilting her head back on his shoulder for a proper kiss.

"I'd love to meet them," August murmurs. He's a little heartsore at the prospect; her father's a fire fighter. He saves lives. August has just proven to himself he's ready and willing to do the opposite. But that's something to worry over at another time, when she's not in his arms and hasn't just informed him that she loves him. So he sets it aside, a splinter to pick at and maybe remove in the future.

He smiles, one hand trailing up to her stomach, then down past her belly button. "You can always get them a B&B if you really can't handle them being under the same roof." No shame in it--that's how his family does things, after all.

He makes a low sound and kisses her, bringing one hand up to stroke her neck. "We can reheat it." He kisses his way to the hollow of her throat. "You want to come back to bed with me? You can bite my shoulder so the whole place doesn't know how much I love you."

Ellie makes a little feral sound in the back of her throat and turns to push him back to bed with a feisty gleam in her green eyes and a clacking of her teeth in a hilariously bad attempt at a sexy air bite. Sorry neighbors. You might be woken up.

August oofs, surprised, and sits down heavily on the bed. He laughs at the bite, beckoning Eleanor over to him. Probably not 'might'.