( one impossible task at a time )
Right, so.
In Xanadu, there's this garden - quiet, a little apart from the daily grind of the rest of the city. It's a memorial garden and as such it has its fair share of statues, some notable and some less so. The name of one of these reads Gates Enfys Keel Eddings above a simple inscription and two dates, and this isn't the way Enfys imagined ( Read more... )
"'Tis," she agrees, studying him like she's trying to puzzle him out - a physical attraction is no trouble to imagine, though the knowledge that he's her dead alternate's widower (she thinks) dowses that before it can even exist, but connecting herself (or some other self) to the concept of marriage is a little bit too out of this world for her. All the way out of it into his- no, really, was it magic? Did he use magic? Is he an Enfys-charmer? Like with snakes? Is that even a thing? That's not a thing.
She wants to know about the woman they're sitting beside, but she doesn't; she wants to know how he can seem to love her without seeming to hate her, but she doesn't; she wants to turn this moment upside down and shake it like a snowglobe until the parts that actually make sense fall out. There are always parts that make sense, it's just a matter of finding them. He seems both scarred and softened in ways that she just can't relate to, and she can't help but push.
"...I live in Gotham," she says, apropos of nothing. "With this bloke, T...om," because she's still a bad fucking liar and he probably won't be surprised that 'can't stay in her own bloody universe' is the trait that bleeds true, along with an ability to zero in on Garion's childhood heroes, "so I'm a bit out of reach of my ridiculous family, most of the time. Lived in New Zealand since my mum, before that."
She figures if he's calling her Enfys, he knows what 'since' that is.
"Anyway, I never met any Garys here or there - actually I met lots of Garys, because everyone knows a couple, don't they, but not Garions - so you should tell me about yourself. You're godawful tall, you know what? I would definitely remember a huge blond that goes around blotting out the sun."
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Childhood respect stays his hand from asking the question. The Batman does not have his secret identity outed lightly, not even to - not even with - anyway, it's ... he can't approach that idea without his brain making a pained screeching noise, like a record player trying to play an iPod that's been thrown under a steamroller a few times, so he just slides past it.
"We met in high school," he says, his mouth quirking - he doesn't even have to pretend the memories are funny and well-loved, because they are, even now, but they have the weight of thirty years on them now and that lends the words he speaks a perspective they might not have, before. Life has never dulled his confusion from that first day. "To be ... perfectly honest, I think ... she liked me at first because I had more interesting reactions to her biting me than most of the boys she knew."
It's a bit of story, he's telling - a true one, but there is a sense he's told it somewhere before, like he'd been used to "you and her? How did that happen?", once upon a time.
"You didn't stay in New Zealand after, in ... I guess what's my world," he says, with a helpless, slightly overwhelmed laugh. "You were living in Minneapolis when I met you. I came later. I lost my family to a fire -" he doesn't mention the part he'd only learned about much later - much later - "so my aunt, she lent me -" yes, lent, what an interesting word choice - "to my grandfather - who happened to work at the school in question. Which is kind of why I was there at St. Jude's, because it was easier that way."
Telling her this much wasn't intentional - it's just ... coming out anyway, like this half-grown (all grown, but there's lines in her face that aren't, yet, and may never will be, so she'll never be full enough, not to him) echo in front of him - this goodbye he never made - is just the catalyst he was looking for, to put some of his mental affairs in order outwardly as well as in. It's easier to speak to an almost-stranger like this than the family and friends who've known everything so well he's never needed to say them aloud.
He pauses, resting his head back against this cold stone carving of the restless woman he loved (still loves, still). "You can't really call it love at first sight, not when you're that young. But ..." He lolls his head along the rock. "You know what she's like. She never did anything by half." He's completely aware he's commiserating on the inexplicableness of Enfys with an Enfys, thank you very much, and he's owning it okay. "And I -" He smiles again, eyes shuttered. "I never knew how not to love her, once I met her."
If this were a movie, he'd be crying right now, he thinks, but he isn't and strangely he doesn't feel like he needs to. He just shrugs. "We just fell in love," he says, and there's more there than he's saying, but he doesn't know how to say all that to her, not yet. "It happens."
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"Pulled your pigtails, huh. I'm not even going to imagine what Anders would say about my style." It'd probably be graphic, from her tone - affectionate, but deep and dark and wrong in ways that this man and his wife mercifully never managed. (Their wounds were never intentional; Anders and Enfys handle each other with scalpels.)
She can just about hear the echoes of everything else underneath the words Garion actually says, but Enfys has never been - in this life or any other - the most intuitive of women in most ways. Insightful, sometimes, but those moments of clarity abandon her times like these, and she has the frustrated feeling of absolutely definitely missing something, something that must've been important-
-to someone else. She tells herself to let it go, because she fucking has to, it's just that it's always been so hard to not know. And to accept not knowing. People aren't puzzle pieces, don't come with decoder rings, and if they were or if they did, she still wouldn't be entitled to unravel them at will. (She'd probably still manage to be bad at it, anyway.)
Enfys clasps her hands loose in her lap, and then- "Want to take a picture with me and her? Don't pretend your day can get any more fucked up than it already is."
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(Anders wouldn't have been a good match for his Enfys, he knows that, but - sometimes he feels perversely like his honesty did something to her, broke her in some way the universe never meant to allow for, and it made her softer than she should've been. He loved the woman she became, never could stop loving her, but he can't shake the feeling that somehow her being healthier with him and him feeling likewise was an accident any other universe could have course-corrected. Maybe sharper edges would've been better, for her, in the end. He can think these things because she's dead now.)
He stops short, and then considers her question with sincerity and honest to god deliberation - before shrugging, lifting his hands up in a "what-do?" gesture, and shaking his head. "Sure, why not. She'd enjoy that."
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"Knew it," she mutters, because ... well, she'd enjoy it, if she were dead and a statue and purely theoretical because fuck only knows if she'd even have the slightest clue someone was up to something as ridiculous as this- the point is, she thought so, too. "Here, handsome, lean in-" because apparently we're going to do this in the style of pictures-that-later-turn-up-on-facebook-just-in-case-you-thought-that-was-part-of-the-hallucination. It's a digital camera, so she offers it to him after the first shot so he can page through, if he likes.
She's got some already (a more or less serious shot, one where she's got bunny ears behind the statue, one with some other bloke and she's sitting on the statue's lap), and if he accidentally goes any further he'll find a picture of Enfys's feet against the headboard of Bruce's bed, in the process of being painted shocking pink. She's a good roommate. (Which is, still, the best description for that she can think of.)
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