bookofnope | [IC Contact -- Snowblind]

[He's spent the night avoiding sleep for fear of that awful drowning dream recurring. How long will the thought of Beckett keep him alive in these dreams? How long before his subconscious tells him to let go - of everything? To finally go under, sink under all his failures?

No. He can't. Beckett is still alive to fight for.

To stay awake, to keep perspective, he plays centuries-old videos, files exchanged like letters after another terrible incident that he thought would threaten their friendship, but only strengthened their bond more than ever. And therein he finds his answer.

He doesn't even know if Beckett is watching this. It's hurt so badly, this avoidance of him. But it's proof there's something left of his friend in there. A true beast would have no reason to avoid someone who cared for him. And Beckett himself, centuries past, has reminded him he is not the first one to see the humanity buried under bestial behavior, and to have faith in it.]

Beckett- I know you're in there. I don't know how much you can understand, but I know you're in there.

[His voice is strained, his eyes are wet. But his head is up and his gaze is focused. He hurts, but he's standing strong.]

I just- I want you to know I still love you. I love you. [The emphasis is soft, subtle, a hint of reflexive hesitance he understands now.] ...whatever that means. I don't know, really- my heart hides things from me at a certain intensity, trying to protect itself I think. And you are in this hidden space. I don't know what kind of love I mean. I should have told you before, you know, but I didn't think it was important. The love itself was what mattered, and however it was expressed - friendship or otherwise - would be equally treasured. It didn't matter, as long as we were together. I didn't think-... I should have said something...

[His voice breaks, he blinks out a new round of tears and turns his face away from the camera, remembering Beckett's decline before his eyes. Is he likely to check his tablet again today, after whatever pain watching his own death dredged up?]

What I'm trying to say is- a devotion like this, I can only compare to my love for Lucifel. And even then, I think there's something closer than even that-...you're closer in experience, closer in everything-

...That devotion doesn't die easily. And it doesn't lessen because of something like this. I love you. Even as you are, I love you. And I'll keep fighting, because of my love for you. You are my strength. So even if you can't come back to your senses, you don't need to run.

I hope you can understand all this soon, if only for a moment. I hope this works, even if for only a moment.

But the hope is strong. I have faith in you, Beckett. I know you, you have all the stubbornness of a human. I can see it. And so did Anatole. Do you remember that name? I have no powers, no madness but my own, and can't touch you. I can't be as certain. But as he did-

[He takes a deep breath, steeling himself. His tears clear from his eyes, leaving only their tracks on his face as he looks on in anxiety and determination. He still doubts. But he must try. For Beckett - and for Anatole, whose work on his wonderful friend he cannot let go undone without a fight.]

-I implore you, Beckett, wake up. Wake up!

[It doesn't have an excess of force. It isn't a yell. But it takes all the air out of him anyway, and he sags, watching the screen tiredly as he repeats, hoping Beckett has been brought to lucidity and will hear it. This, after all, is the important part:]

...But remember I will always love you, awake or dormant. I fight on in your name, my friend, always.

Edited (internal consistency edit. sorry for the spam!) 2017-10-28 03:54 (UTC)

You've made it.

[It's been a little while longer than.. whatever passes for usual. He'd been waiting with painful tension. It flows out with the breath of the words, a relieved smile sounding in the final syllable.]

We've done a circuit of the area. Haven't gone too far, didn't know when - where - do you want to come back here?

*There is a reply but nothing in it? That can't be right...a quick check verifies his death loss. He can't hear. So it takes a bit longer than usual for the response to come. He knows voice-to-text is a thing but has never used it before.*

iam at
cha pel

iwill come
back

[This being Brian, Beckett has no reason to think the text is because hearing loss is involved. He continues; speaking out loud is a good outlet for him, too.]

You can head right back to the high school. Don't worry about supplies - we've stocked up. And I've been filming.

[Here Brian have a filmdump of the days you've missed. ~~There may be interesting things in them but idk yet search requests.~~]

*Things are quicker now that he knows how to use the function, at least!*

o kay
iam meet
zell
he al so
died

then i ?we? will come

*He's thankful for the video of the days he missed. It'll give him something to do before lockdown ends.*

Yes, I've heard about Zell - didn't know he was back. Tell him I'll be glad to see him, it's been a while.

he doesnot re mem ber
any one

*So he'll tell him sometime later.*

No one? Not even - bloody hell, Hawkins is going to pitch a fit. You have to get Zell to talk to Kunsel.

[Not to Jim directly. Not under poor Brian's watch. Kunsel is just the responsible adult they need right now.]

iwill
try

Tell Kunsel, anyway. Just make sure he knows, since Zell won't tell him. Don't keep them waiting.

o kay

[The wake of many events leave only trauma behind for many of the residents of this town, Enoch included. This time, it's different. Not to say there wasn't trauma, of course. He remembered too well what it felt like to truly lose all hope, to give up even the last scraps of will to fight the urge to give up.

But it only made what the other distinct alternate timeline had taught him clearer. Groggy from sleep, a lingering phantom prickle at the injection sites on his arm, he leans against the wall and delivers a final message to a man he correctly remembers now as dead.

Goodbye, he says, and he leans back on his knees, face raised as a soft sigh carries a weight from his heart. He feels raw, but...strangely calm.

He needs to speak to Beckett. He braces against the wall to push himself to his feet to go find him.]

For Beckett, most of the ups and downs of the event as eclipsed by one particular memory, and the last day had all been slow processing of that - the memory, true or false, of killing Angel and Rhys in a frenzy. He'd been quiet all day, unnervingly quiet, the depth of his internal deliberations obvious. Whenever anyone reached out he'd refused them gently but firmly. As soon as they stopped he'd gone off alone. All his thoughts were of blood and violence and control.

Thankfully, though, he'd gotten better at regaining his balance on these matters over him - better than he'd learned in many years when limited by the facts of his nature. When Enoch finds him, he's almost feeling stable again, at least while on his own. Other memories have been floating up to seek attention, and as he looks up at his friend one of them crystalizes for a moment's clear image: running with Enoch through a landscape of books.

For a split-second he's lost to that memory, gaping dumbly. Then he gives his head a wild shake, hair flying, and chases it off.

"I'm sorry, for a moment there - do you need anything?"

He almost reaches out to push away any stray hair that falls over Beckett's face, affection and stability in the face of obvious discomfort, before catching himself and folding his arms awkwardly instead, a lingering feeling of being unwelcome in memories that didn't happen.

"I..."

But they didn't happen. They didn't, and that's why he needs to speak to Beckett now. To tell him the difference their bond has made. That he has made.

"I wanted to talk about...what happened. The false memories. Mine taught me something about myself, and-..." He stops himself. As badly as this thought needs to be voiced, he won't make Beckett uncomfortable. "I'm sorry. If you'd rather not think of it at all..."

His had clearly weighed on him, after all. Enoch didn't want to bring up anything unpleasant, even if his only goal here was to thank him.

It's not a comfortable conversation exactly, Beckett isn't about to deny, but he hardly considers that a reason to just drop anything. Nonetheless, he lingers a moment rather than at once dismissing Enoch's concerns, looking at his friend curiously. The odd calm about him is welcome, definitely, but in context unexpected. He looks the opposite of what Beckett is feeling: as though the memories have given him not questions, but insight.

As Enoch may be aware, Beckett loves insights.

"I'm afraid I've never been good at only thinking about what I'd like to." A habitual wry grin pulls at one corner of his lips. "Tell me. If you've gotten anything out of that beyond the usual extra trauma with trauma on top, I'd very much like to hear about it."

Enoch's own expression relaxes at the sight of Beckett's uneven grin.

"I hope you'll like it all the more on hearing it."

He pauses a moment, wondering where to begin. The insight spanned a couple of different threads of memory. He supposes the most striking contrast would be against the man he was when he believed Clayton had never died. The man clinging to regained mortality, the one who had - in their reality - told Beckett after they had teamed up against Jack that immortality had not been a good life for him.

"You- you may recall I had forgotten Clayton died." The first clue is in the minimal hesitation on this mention of this pivotal loss. A weight that is no longer there. "He was like a brother to me, the first man I'd called 'brother' in centuries. It had always seemed too mortal for me, claiming another to belong to my generation. What use did I have for it when I was the only one?

"When I learned my aging had resumed here, I- I thought it could be an opportunity to reclaim something I'd lost. I thought I could find comfort in mortality. But the truth is that I only thought I wanted it. Immortality had been unkind to me, yes, but...it's who I am. And you-"

He can't keep himself from approaching to lay a hand on Beckett's shoulder, and there's a definite sense of something not followed through in the energy left over as his fingers close in a firm grip, a sense of hovering over a decision. Saying it now, giving it voice, he wants to hug him, but he also needs to look him in the eyes, needs all of the sincerity that comes of that.

"You gave me a reason to accept it. To love it as a part of myself. I had to come thank you for-...for being the reason I look forward to forever."

Beckett nods, silent, as he parses the story. He remembers rather a lot when he puts his mind to it, a talent born of a lot of practice committing to mind memories and knowledge that a plethora of others have not wanted him to retain. Not just his own false memories, but the responses of those around him to theirs, in that confusing, nightmarish day. Clayton's loss had taken so much out of Enoch, had almost... hollowed him out, in a way that had lingered. And Beckett had understood that, from this perspective exactly, the immortal losing a mortal companion. He'd been there, when he'd been very young for an immortal - he'd been there and he'd learned better very, very fast.

But this is one of those places where Enoch isn't like him. Unsurprising - very few are. He'd told Angel as much. His own mortal life had been at best a dry shell to shrug out of. Enoch had lived.

So when his friend puts the hand on his shoulder, Beckett almost braces, strangely, to hear something that would put more distance between them rather than the other way around. Not out of fear of losing something, but almost as though Enoch is about to reveal another one of those marvelous lights inside him that Beckett feels like he's constantly striving for, climbing and stumbling and falling, towards a different state of grace but one nonetheless so very real. What Enoch says instead is deeply unexpected, and rattling. It feels like it shifts something heavy in him. I've done this. I've moved him. Given him a kind of peace. On - this.

This is not something he'll be able to process in just a moment. He might need a few months.

"I've - " he swallows. It feels like awe, what is thickening the words in his mouth. "You think I've - I don't know what I've done, to have earned this. To me, this has always been - " he glances down at his hands. His look is the fleeting one Enoch had seen before: open, boyish, the look of wonder flashing across a much lighter heart. "It always has been part of what I am. I've never had doubts."

Earned. For all that he feels his emotional neediness is a burden on others, this impact, for Beckett, was earned. Despite his caught breath of surprise, he manages a joke, albeit one whose tone is filled with fondness, weighted with respect.

"I suppose you know how I feel when you tell me the good I've done for you."

The impulse takes him before he can consciously process it - he leans down to brush a quick, chaste kiss over the top of Beckett's forehead, much as he had with Clayton, that night after rescuing Angel and Rhys from Jack, that night when he had told Clayton what he meant to him.

Perhaps it's only appropriate, to mirror the gesture now. It had been a mistake, after all, this attempt to cling to mortality, this belief that he wanted it. His friendship with Clayton was important, but he had been lying to himself, and the pain of his death took so much more than it might have. It took with it any security in himself he believed he had. It left him with nothing - a mortality he could not identify with, and immortality that left him nothing but pain. Being the person he truly was had seemed untenable.

Until Beckett.

Beckett was right - he had been hollowed out. But their friendship had led him to exactly what he needed, just as he believed Clayton's had shown him. For the truth of it, the real one, this time, it was only right to let the show of affirmation be the same.

"I don't think it's quite the same - " Beckett begins to argue, because of course he does, it's what he does. He picks things apart, and this is -

The kiss stops him, leaves him mildly stunned. Blinking owlishly in the murk of the house, washed over by a hundred memories - the Embrace itself, and the touch of mortal skin and lips after, the few times that he and Lucita had breached through cold undeath to true tenderness, the touch of Serena the White freeing him from madness, and the final brushes of those he, himself, had freed as he went recording histories, saving lost voices; Anatole's last kiss, and then Angel's. And this. As though to say, something still continues, there is still something for you to do.

He thinks he's going to cry. It is a sudden and very embarrassing realization. He is definitely going to cry.

He pulls away with a faint hitch in his breath, sniffling back the first tears. But though he turns from Enoch the gesture is obvious for what it is, a last-ditch endearing attempt to preserve old dignity. The tears are not tears of pain; they are the exact opposite.

It's fortunate he's moved him to tears. Otherwise he'd have to bring up feeling especially like an emotional leech in the wake of the rest of it and that...no, he likes the mood exactly the way it is.

It is, after all, focused on a bond that seems, more and more, to be overwhelmingly good for both of them. It's so heartening, to have a relationship that feels more equal than any he can ever remember having. Fulfilling. He keeps having to remind himself that is the reality of it - he really has found this. He really is that fortunate.

He looks on as Beckett turns away, the warmth of fondness like the glow of a much-needed fire on his weary heart. It eases the strain of their time in the cult's territory.

And Enoch, when he has something wonderful like this warmth, is wont to try to share it. He gives Beckett a moment before reaching out to take his shoulder again, this time gently pulling to suggest he move closer, to wrap him up in a warm embrace.

This - having this and feeling this, after all the both of them have been through, in Norfinbury and before - it's important beyond words.

"That we bring one another such happiness..."

wanna help me get a heat suit and lug it to the hospital morgue
coat it in rubble dust
and see if it can withstand the anomaly in there long enough to get through the lockers to the nima controls?
i mean
if you're not busy or anything

Aren't you relentlessly creative. I'm game. Do you think two people would be enough, or are you just unable to find anyone else quite as mad?

i've got graham and lecter on board to help
don't worry your pretty little undead head

Four whole madmen. We're practically a posse.

but not a clan
never a clan

[IC Contact -- Snowblind]

@Enoch; video; Night 294 (cw: (very brief) suicidal ideation)

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action; morning 302 (up to you whether or not Beckett heard the message to Clayton)

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@hotstud_xxx; text; Night 327

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