[closed] Na-chaered palan-díriel

[lumenrelegandus]

Who: supercilious and lumenrelegandus
When: Nowadays
Where: Circuitous route to Duncan's pub, stopping at the Memorial Tree
Format: Prose, then…?
What: Bye, Shirley.
Warnings: Men dealing with grief. (Like watching a whale knit. …No, no, these are sensitive new age guys. Maybe.)

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[supercilious]

Here is a short list of the ways to regret:

One: fiercely, hurting. Everything clenched tight and eyes burning and something sharp and brittle caught at the back of your throat, unspoken.

Two: with distance. Looking nostalgically back across the echoing chasm of the years, to patchy memories that are more a collection of still pictures than a reel of video. From there, you can reach, gently, after ghosts, turn what ifs over like smooth stones in the palm, well-worn and easy, slightly warm from the heat of your own body.

Three: through drinking.

Arthur lifts the glass to his lips for the dozenth time: he hasn't bothered to wait for Lupin, who doesn't always show, though in fairness neither does Arthur. They're busy men. So busy that Arthur should have other things on his mind. Death and his own ghosts, Merlin who is very much alive, a hundred other people who have disappeared whose names stand testament. But unlike Remus, who seems to reopen all his old scars with each new wound, Arthur has put aside his burdens for tonight. Each time the bartender pours another glass of blood red it is a libation, and each time Arthur toasts the air before drinking: to Shirley.

Some part of him is quite certain that there is no chance here, none of Lupin's greater forces. Shirley found a way through the Door, and she took it, and didn't wait for the rest of them. Why would she? There was no-one who meant anything to her here.

When Lupin walks through the door of the bar, Arthur hails him uneccesarially with a loud gesture, hand briefly in the air. And he grins, bright-eyed, a little vicious around the edges but he's always been a cheerful drunk. "Always" as though it's a frequent occurrence, as though his control issues aren't so tightly wound. Truth told Arthur rarely drinks to excess, but tonight, ah, tonight feels like an exception.

[lumenrelegandus]

It's a familiar situation with Arthur of feeling improbably comfortable. The improbable being an important part of the comfort. As Lupin winds his way to the table, he's a little out of phase; overthinking, not uncharacteristic, but mismatched, as if he's about to meet someone new. He's not much of a drinker. Historically he's preferred to blend into a sobriety continuum. In such cases, need about two other people in the gathering to balance it properly. But here's his version of abandon: let's not compare or try to plan anything.

"To what," says Lupin, grabbing a glass en route and keeping it held toward Arthur as he takes a seat, "are we drinking?"

(Redundant, rhetorical, or seeking simpler articulation.)

[supercilious]

"To women," Arthur raises the glass, slanted but not spilling. That toast alone could almost be enough, when Shirley was so much woman in Arthur's eyes: mother, maiden, crone. But he continues. "Who take a piece of one's heart, or are given such... and then leave."

He drinks. The sound of the stem on the table as he puts the glass down is softer than the restrained violence of his movements would suggest. Not totally drunk, not yet. But getting there.

JUST LEAVING THIS FOR YOU HERE WITH NO EXPECTATION OF CONTINUATION, A MONTH LATE! We'll talk!!

[lumenrelegandus]

Murmurs as follows, "Women," and drinks. Though Arthur's phrasing makes Lupin's toast about Io.

Maybe that's some reason why he dives headfirst rather than hazarding the customary toe. But need there be a reason?

"I lived under the same roof as Shirley for months. But I don't think I ever lived in quite the same world. I wasn't even aware you two knew each other until recently."

[supercilious]

Arthur gives a quiet, deprecatory snort.

"Did I know her? Never well enough." He shakes his head, looks across at Lupin, studying him. His own face is hardly unreadable: for all he likes to pretend at blankness, Arthur wears his heart on his sleeve. The shift of a jaw, an overbrightness in those leonine blue eyes, it all speaks of loss that he's uncomfortable with.

His toast isn't just for Shirley, but at least with, say, Sakura, he'd known where the hell he stood.

"She looked after me when we were all running around as teenagers." A slight, embarrassed cough, a grin. "I may have, er, proposed to her."

And boyhood loves die hard. Even if that hadn't really been his childhood, the memories lingered, distantly, looked at through the wrong end of a telescope.

"And then when she lost all her memories..." And he falters, not sure how to explain what had happened then, the ways he had identified with her and how crushingly disappointing it was not to fail or succeed at her reintegration and their friendship but be forced into a kind of stalemate by the whims of fate and the Door.

[lumenrelegandus]

'Proposed' prompts Lupin to splutter a bit into his cup and come up smiling. "Don't suppose a forge caught that?" he asked drily. (…Metaphorically dry. As he reaches for a napkin.) Not that Lupin would have wanted his own teenage interactions recorded for posterity. Nor really intrude on anyone else's. But clearly, this piece of information doesn't seem even slightly inconsequential, or silly, or to be embarrassed about; makes perfect sense for him and clicks everything else into shape.

At the last, Lupin can only nod. He speaks because it's his turn, to give Arthur a break and fair trade, not because he thinks there's anything really good he can conjure to say.

"I could never forget the fact that she was… dead. In a different way than… well, than many of us, like myself, may or may not be. I think if I returned to my world I'd be dead-but in this place, whatever or whyever it is, I function and conceptualise and experience lags and drives that are indistinguishable, so for all intents and purposes I consider myself alive. Shirley was on a different plane all along. Call it death or divinity or… When she came back, it seemed to me… ironically, perhaps, she was closer to what we call and experience as 'alive'. And the place she had occupied in this world, as dead, was no longer sufficient. She couldn't fit back into it… and I like to think, she decided to seek a different one elsewhere."

Smiles ruefully down into his drink again.

"Ah, but there fly those words out of my mouth. The ones everyone say when someone leaves and I find absolutely useless and euphemistic and unquantifiable. The formula you fall back on when you don't know anything at all.

"But in Shirley's case, it strikes a ring of probability. For me."