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let's share

Date & Time: 1/7, some.....TIME!!!
Location: Wherever Bariyan's gross dead filthy butt is perched atm
Characters: Dad and Junior
Summary: IT HAS JUST DAWNED UPON ME THAT MY EMOTIONAL CONSTIPATION HAS BEEN EFFICIENTLY DRAINO'D BY BEING DEAD N BORN AGAIN HEY DAD WANNA HEAR SOME COOL STORIES ABOUT LIFE IN A MISERABLE CULT?? SURE YOU DO YOU DRINK MISERY FOR BREAKFAST!!
Warnings: ugly zombie snot tears idk that's usually the m.o. of these things

The thought had struck him late that night not long ago, that talk he'd had with Collette, the mention of a particular name, particular times...and then, like dreams do, it faded in the daytime and left him to the mundane. Left him and didn't resurface until just then, walking alone, watching his foggy reflection in display windows.

He couldn't make much of his own image, distorted as it was, but it brought to mind another. And then another. And then–

That urgent feeling – having suddenly remembered something forgotten just a second ago, something critical...it stopped him and completely dismissed what other plans he'd had, set his feet to scuffling in little, undecided turns. Which way–?

The apartment was empty, as he expected it to be. The clenched, tight feeling in his chest, a mix of anticipation and unease, pushed him to hustle on his way, as though his chance would be gone if he wasted too much time. Not true, truly, but all the same. He was still a child in that way: Impatience, excitement, unknowing...and the longer he lingered in the flesh, the more raw and real it was. Those things he had been so certain of before were becoming as mysterious as they ought to have been to any child. Young man. Somewhere in those strange in-betweens he'd never had the chance to experience before.

He was racing himself, skidding around corners and trotting down open corridors in the Hold, looking for that familiar slouch, listening for familiar murmurs and sighs. The longer it took, the more anxious he became, and for little good reason, at that. There was no reason to fear, but there were impulses in him that all that rushing goaded along.

Soon, he was panting, skin prickling with the chill air mixed with sweat sticking to his shirt and coat. At the top of a stairwell leading into the dark, a dark he wasn't certain he knew, he stopped to catch his breath.

The dark had been as much a familiar comfort as a troubling inevitability before, but Martin's eyes strained to see through its pitch now. Human eyes, not a hunter's. Humans knew to fear the dark and unseen, and it kept a little twinge of unease in his gut as his feet clopped down the steps.

The human fear collided with an unwavering notion he could no longer describe. It emerged at the most troubling of times, enveloping him like warm water. Certainty. A trust in an instinct he was hardly aware of.

Somehow, he knew if he went this way, he would find him. There were no scents or feelings about it, just certainty.

Body and chain had to be nearby. No need to worry; he would find him.

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When Bariyan sat down, so did Martin. Down on the floor, his back against the bed...it was more comfortable, somehow, shifting the eye-level back to where he had to look up and the other down. Anything different felt strange. He watched just as carefully, chewing thoughtlessly on the inside of his lip while silence stretched. He was very quick to answer, however.

"Yes." More automatic than sincere, he had to hesitate the second he said it. "Well, more of...me because of him. It's all mixed up together."

Would rehearsing have helped at all? Not really in Martin's case, but the thought did tease him as he tried to get some bearing straight.

"Because..." Because... "Because what happened to him is why I was...the way I was."

Sitting on his knees wasn't very comfortable, so he shifted, drawing them up, letting his fingers curl and rest against his ankles before he opened his mouth again; they squeezed around his legs, as though the little pressure was somehow stabilizing.

"I couldn't really tell you because I was so unhappy about it. I was so sure I'd killed him when I watched him die. I believed with all my heart that I was a horrible thing." His mouth tugged for a second. "I knew I was horrible, but I was scared to let anyone know just how bad it was, even though I was sure I deserved it. Because, no matter what anyone had told me before, I was the one that killed him even if it was just...because I simply existed."

"Ah," Bariyan breathed, eyes closing briefly. "I thought it was something like that."

He sounded oddly relieved; and he was, strange as it was to say. Martin hadn't talked about his father at all, other than that outburst -- and back then, all he could say (all he would say) was that it was his fault. As if he'd been the one wielding the blade.

Bariyan had always doubted that.

He wanted to press for more details right away -- what happened to him? how did he die? -- but he assumed that Martin would get to the details, in good time. If they were relevant. If he thought they were important. Otherwise, well, otherwise it wasn't important, then, and Bariyan would therefore have no business asking. Curiosity in gory details was something best suppressed.

Did he? Martin watched him a little closer for a few seconds, wondering. For as much as he thought about Bariyan, he seldom knew what he could really be thinking. Sometimes the things he did or said were so contradictory to what they meant or were intended for...and there was a lot about him Martin simply didn't know. Perhaps why he would think that was part of it.

"I..." Where to start was hard enough, but keeping everything in place was just as bad. He swallowed, fidgeting a little, letting his fingers drum a couple times on his ankle.

"Well, when it did happen, it was the first time I had ever been outside of the compound. My first hunt, first...lot of things. And I got scared. Something jumped at me and I didn't move, but he did. So...thinking that way...my hunt. My, my not moving...My father, my fault. A lot of people didn't agree with me, but...some did. And that seemed enough to make it true."

Alex.

"So I didn't treat it for...what it was. That he was letting me live, not letting himself to die. And everything afterward, just..." Exhale. "Forgetting what he really wanted for me, just imagining that none of it mattered...that I didn't deserve anything good, ever. That I'd squander it."

Martin smiled painfully. "So I did in a lot of ways."

That was the thing about believing in something – even the bad things. Self-fulfilling prophecies and all that.

Bariyan listened, intently, as if he meant to carve each word into his memory. It was hard for him to take this all as reflection, things seen in hindsight. His natural reaction was to interrupt, to try and persuade otherwise -- as if he had to, at this point. But he had to remind himself that there was no reason for that now. There was no longer anything he could say that Martin didn't already know.

And now, his own questions were slowly being answered. Little by little.

"Do you regret that?" Bariyan asked. "All the time you spent. The way you were."

Regret?

"The way I was..." All that time? Frozen in an endless loop of misery and fear?

"There's parts of it...I do regret." That, particularly. But... "But I don't think...I mean, I don't know if I would've every known any better. How to do be anything else. That's the part I should regret. Not understanding. Thinking...thinking everything my father did for me was a waste. That he'd made a mistake."

Martin's gaze flickered down, and his head followed, chin settling on his knees. Recall was...fluid, hazy sometimes, clear as day in others. Thinking hard on his father didn't make some facets any easier to find, but there was much, in sudden flashes of insight, that stuck with him tightly. Things he, living, didn't recall before. He'd been too young to understand or simply...not there.

But a lot of things had come to light after that life passed. Much had flickered and dimmed out of memory as time passed in new flesh, but some still lingered. Things he tried to give to Bariyan.

"Back home...back before. The way things were for my family...you didn't...want children. Not often. Sometimes, I guess, I..." His shoulders shrugged up quickly. "I don't really know that for sure, but. But it was always more...a job. You had to, and...and after that, you didn't get to be with your kids until years later. So that there wouldn't be any bonds. It'd make things tricky.

But my father...he. He, I remember..." Whether it was a real memory or a later discovery, well... "He wanted to know who I was and...who I was going to be. I wasn't an obligation, I was..."

Why was it suddenly so hard to say? To think? Martin's voice had gotten thick, his throat tight. He swallowed, licking his lips.

"I didn't...I didn't understand that. That I mattered at all. I didn't understand what I really meant to him, to..." He breathed in, out. "A lot of people."

He lifted his eyes, looking up at Bariyan.

"A lot of people."

Worth running into shrieking teeth and claws. Worth chasing down in the wilderness for, as a stranger. Worth weeping over, calling back.

"None of this would've happened if...that hadn't."

Bariyan carefully eased off the chair, pushing it back to make room to sit on the ground, in front of Martin. He crossed his legs, clasped his hands together, leaned forwards.

"It wouldn't have," he agreed, solemnly. "So, you can't regret too much. You always will regret some, a little bit, that's the way things are. But we all only live one life... even in our case." A wry smile, at that. One life, regardless of the number of deaths. "We move on."

Bariyan reached out, putting his own hands over one of Martin's.

"You understand what you mean now. Your father would be happy with that. And..." He exhaled, having to think hard. "I'm sure he'd be proud of who you've become."

Perhaps. Even with the journey being what it had been.

With just a little fidgeting, smaller fingers curled around a pair of Bariyan's own. Smaller hands, used to the rough, unfeeling size of them. A habit, holding on. Something formed out of some mixture of feeling and understanding Martin didn't wholly grasp anymore. It didn't register right away that he didn't do that before – that he'd have recoiled, apologized, and probably fled. That sort of thing was all just part of the big, hazy sense of the old self he had, flecked here and here by sharper memories. A lot of bad blended into bad, but the awful things...and the good things stood out to their own degrees.

His head tilted to drag against his knee a little, squeezing an eye shut to get it dry.

Maybe.

No, surely. Somehow. Again, that odd sense of certainty. Even in trying to contest it or pretend it wasn't there, it remained unchanged. Like knowing there was air to breathe or ground to stand on.

Martin's view ahead was still tilted.

"It's better now," he said. "Since I stopped trying to...to be him. Or what I thought was him. That's what I wanted. I thought that was going to be the answer. He seemed so good about everything all at once."

In hindsight, though. "But I was just...making him sadder, trying to be like that."

Normally Bariyan would be all over himself trying to comfort Martin in this condition, but he knew here there was no reason for that. The only sadness and upset here was long established, here to stay; the sort of grief that threaded itself through time. The same sort of grief that he might feel for his own son, for example. And there was nothing to be done about it. It was right, and in its own way, it was good. It was certainly unavoidable.

So he merely squeezed Martin's hand back, and nodded.

"Your father sounds like he was a good man," he murmurs. Martin's father... the man whose footsteps he was now following in, willingly or otherwise.

He had to think about it. A good man. To Martin, he was good, of course. It was almost as natural to think as thinking...the sky was blue or there was air to breathe. Explaining why took a lot more than simple compulsion.

"He..." He what? What is good? Trying to recall precise memories on command was difficult somehow; he had to follow feelings and hope they led him the right way.

"I don't remember it all, but...but I don't remember any time he wasn't there when I was sad. Or hurt, or...sick, things like that. I know there had to be, but I don't remember those. I think that's why I was so bad afterward...afterward, without him."

His mouth tugged, eyes dropping to their hands.

"I thought...I spoiled everything, so that was that. When you or Martin–" Septim. "Or...or anyone here. Lea, Ico...Anyone was nice to me, like that. I thought it would all end the same way."

And then, with a sudden thought, his breath wavers into a bit of a laugh. "It's why I got so upset...do you remember?" He looked up. It was a lot clearer, speaking about it. "You were only trying to help, but I got so upset...He used to do that, too. Touch my head? That's what he'd do when I was unhappy. That...and say...'Well, that was something, wasn't it? It's done now.'"

Almost unconsciously, Bariyan reached to make the same gesture -- one that he'd made multiple times now, without incident. Now that Martin was changed. He hesitated, though, and the action shifted with that pause. He brushed Martin's bangs out of his eyes instead and withdrew his hands again.

"I think it's a natural instinct for fathers, to do that," Bariyan said, wryly, referring to the hair-ruffling. "It helps that you're short, too."

Are? Were? Martin had grown since then... or maybe it was just that he carried himself with far more self-assurance now.

And then, less lightly: "It's sad that you thought that-- that you lived that way. It hurt to see you so unhappy, all the time." Bariyan looked away. "As I'm sure it would have hurt your own father to see. But we are past that-- it is done, now."

Martin squinted, nose crinkling, as strands of hair grazed past his eyes and then were gone. And his mouth, too, pinched and quirked a little at short; it used to be a bigger problem before, but now it was simply...something of note? Something he couldn't help. Something that still made him feel a strange twinge, particularly when certain people pointed out. Not Bariyan, though; it didn't sound luck such a bad thing when he said it.

That expression sobered as Bariyan's words did, lifting his eyes up once more to watch, to scan the tilt of his head as his own gaze drifted. He watched for a length, quiet, turning the words over in his head, trying to pin words to the feelings fluttering in his gut and his chest. Little pangs, some strains. Familiar, somehow, but...he wasn't sure if defining them the way he used to was even right. He'd been wrong about so much, so why not that? Didn't it mean something else when one was really human?

(Thinking that way, though...was he really human?)

Hurt his father, hurt Bariyan. The natural instinct for fathers...Martin's skin prickled a little, setting off some kind of anxious, excited feeling. It fit how he saw him – father-like. It sounded good to hear aloud. It was the it is done that gave him doubt.

Is that done, too?

"Yes," he said, his voice a little lost in trying to find a tone. "So it's different..." And so am I. And everyone else, too?

His hand lifted, scratching at his forehead, clear of bangs. "And I won't be unhappy like that anymore. It'll be better, right?"

"Yes. That it will be."

Gods. Did he know that? Could he keep that promise? He recognized, now, how closely Martin's happiness was tied to his very own, and he knew that if it were to be true he might have to change himself. Something that had never been a concern before, something that he had never worried about up until this point.

And he would have to live up to Martin's memories of his father, too. Of this man that Bariyan had never met, who....

Gently, now: "Martin. What was your father's name?"

He stared blankly a moment, searching for it. When it wasn't father, in his voice, it was...

"Peter." In others' voices. Uncles and Grandfather. Peter. Martin nodded vaguely. "Peter...and Anya. My mother." Though there was much less of her in his mind than the other. "And Regina." And so much more of her than either of them.

"You saw her. My sister." A shade of her, anyway. But it had been as real as the present moment for Martin.

"Ah." Yes. "I did." And that hadn't been a pleasant experience. That wasn't a happy memory, that Martin had lived in.

He fell silent to think, briefly, on his own siblings. A topic that he spent decidedly less time reviewing in his head compared to his son, or even compared to Catsovi. His own brothers were... distant memories, now. Voices in his head. Flashes of emotion, few of them positive. Alas. It could not have been helped. He did what he had to do, and that was all long past, anyway....

Not that he'd done much better by the rest of his family, either.

"She was different," he said, is head beginning to turn with his gaze. His tone, too, became more absent and distant. "Like a different person than the one I knew. I never saw her fight until then. I never imagined what it would be like to see her kill something."

Martin looked back, a bland smile on his face. "Me, either. I couldn't imagine it."

But that was done now – like Bariyan said. That thought stirred him a little and he blinked, twitching a little out of his daze. He felt his face warm up a little, as if rambling that way were something to be embarrassed by.

"But she was very good to me," he said quickly, his eyes bigger. "Believe that. I wasn't surrounded by bad things. She worked very hard. So did my father. I only didn't...think about it that way very much. Much at all."

Bariyan honestly had a hard time believing it, given what he'd seen, what he'd heard, what he'd seen of Martin Darkov in earlier months. And that showed on his face, in the helpless twist of his frown, the set of his shoulders. Though that tension only lasted a moment before he sighed and reached to scratch at the back of his neck.

There had to be good there. There had to be, because it showed in Martin. Even in what he'd been before. The boy had hardly lived in a void; someone had influenced him to become the way he was. His world had let the bad take root, yes, encouraged it, but it was just as responsible for the good in him as well. And Bariyan believed in that over all else.

He nodded. "I will believe."

Then, gently, not knowing whether it was a good time to breach the topic-- "Your sister, then. Is she all right?"

Is she? Martin's eyebrows lifted, not having the answer right away. It brought a flutter of unease, actually, not knowing. Having not thought so directly on those events...he had been left with an ease and security he would have little means to explain then and there.

He had to squint, go through the memory pace by pace.

"I...yes." He nodded a little. "The monster is gone. I took it away. Made her better."

After a blank set of seconds, he looked back at Bariyan. "I don't know what she could be doing now, but I know I was there for that."

"That's good." Bariyan lowered his head, smiled. "I'm glad. I'm glad-- that it worked out, for her."

He sighed and looked up, towards the ceiling, mulling the conversation over. He wasn't sure why he felt so relieved, not right away. But the answer came to him easily enough, because it always came down to Martin's own well-being, in the end.

"I'm glad... that you had a good family." He was still speaking to the ceiling, but now he lowered his head to look at Martin again. "Even if it was just for a while. But a while is better than no time at all."

Martin smiled, broad despite an effort to be otherwise. But it was good to be praised, even for something he thought he had little control over, one way or the other. He didn't pick his family, after all. Good to be able to say those things without fear, though...perhaps with a bit of uncertainty. Some things he thought clear and plain were in fact not as sharp in his mind as he first thought. He didn't want to say anything false, even on accident.

But he was happy. Relieved. Grateful. And, in those things, excited again. Alive, he thought. Here. That wonderful sensation, quelled and forgotten during the monotony, toil, or strain of passing time, never left, but may as well have been a new thing.

"I think it'll be good here, too," he said, feeling convinced. "Just different. But it should be."

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