( he doesn't message quentin straight away. it's a little while later — not long enough that it's completely out of the blue, but enough time that it's clear he's spent SOME TIME thinking about whether to reach out or not.
(if daphne had still been here, he'd have reached out to her instead, said something cryptic about how quentin hadn't seemed like himself and he needs checking on, but she's not. he doesn't know anyone else that quentin's friends with — or if he does, he doesn't know they know quentin.)
so— )
Hey.
( first message: sent. then the tricky part: what the fuck to actually say.
"want to tell me why you strung me up, upside down?" "feel like elaborating on why you were talking to me like I was you?" "what the fuck was that about?" )
Normally I have dibs on hallucinations.
( #nailedit??? )
Edited (I CANNOT type tonight ) 2023-11-14 20:11 (UTC)
[Marc is not the only person this happened with, is the thing. He can still see his own hands around Eliot's neck, he can remember trying to mentally transpose his own face over Eliot's. Eliot had taken it with grace, realizing quickly what was going on and reassuring Quentin once it was over. His neck was fine, it didn't even bruise.]
[The thing is it didn't really feel like a hallucination? He's hallucinated before, thanks to drugs. It felt more like...a game of pretend he couldn't make himself stop. Like he was just so deep into it that he couldn't shake it off. Not, honestly, entirely unlike subspace. An altered headspace that was too powerful to break on his own.]
I wasn't hallucinating
[long pause]
I don't think.
[another long pause]
I don't really know how to describe what was happening. How it felt
I'm not hiding from it like a little kid, that's what it's called, that's its name. The monster.
The Old Gods are the parents of the gods we know. They made some mistakes. The monster was one of them. It's too powerful, ten times as powerful as a god, and all it does is want. It's a personification of wanting
They tried destroying its body but it can't die. It's outside death. So it has to possess other bodies. It had Eliot's
( marc has no idea who eliot is, but contextually he guesses FRIEND. someone from home.
(had quentin mentioned an eliot before? marc has no fucking clue. though who eliot is, he thinks, isn't particularly important to the immediate conversation.)
the rest of it — marc's not really sure what to do with any of it. it begs a few questions, given quentin's assertion that it was a memory but also that it — "monster" — can possess bodies. it could have just been a memory, but is that all? )
I'm not about to judge you over what you call it. A monster's a monster. Any chance it's here?
( no, wait—. "personification of wanting"? HMM. he'll come back to that (maybe). )
I mean, you're sure it was just a memory?
Edited (so my laptop autocorrects words and i need to figure out how to turn it off WHEEZE i am so sorry) 2023-11-14 20:49 (UTC)
I'm sure. If it was here I'd know. We'd all fucking know
It was...fixated on me
Basically the way it was kept under control for a long time, millennia, is that they built a prison for it and gave it a jailer. The jailer can't do anything to actually keep it there by force, so the jailer has to make sure it doesn't want to leave. He or she does that by loving it. Caring for it like a child, playing games
I was supposed to be the new jailer but it escaped instead
I'd ask 'and then what', but if it's not here, it's irrelevant. But its idea of games is pretty fucked up.
( then, eventually— )
I encountered (what had wong called it—? ) an abomination of space-time that took the form of a house a while ago. The House of Shadows. It was banished time and time again, but kept coming back.
It's honestly hard to tell if it was malicious? It got really upset when it thought I might have any kind of positive feelings toward anyone but it, especially Eliot
I've parented a toddler and this thing's emotional sophistication was below that of a three-year-old
In the scene we sort of reenacted it didn't have to hold me down, I knew I couldn't do anything to get away. We were on a boat, that didn't help, but it could find me anywhere I went
I basically sat there and was quiet until the guy died and then the monster weighed the body down with rocks and dropped it in the ocean
It was jealous. Guess that's one side of 'wanting' down pat.
( there are asides he could add in — things about khonshu, about how he missed his daughter's toddler years, and how he's missed more-or-less every other fucking year too.
remarks about how unpleasant that sounds, how marc knows what it's like to feel like you can't escape a being, an anything you're desperate to break free from. but he doesn't know how to say any of that, so—. )
Now? Sometimes. A little. In a PTSD kind of way. It's not that bad anymore
I died locking it away again
I did that thing where sometimes people go into a coma and get memories from home. I got memories of this time, with the monster, and came back to Duplicity in really bad shape. Both physically and emotionally. I had injuries, I was sleep deprived and malnourished because the monster doesn't understand that people need those things, not just want them, and I'd spent months living the type of shit you saw with that memory almost every day. It lied to me and said Eliot was dead because it thought that if I believed that I'd start loving it instead of him, but then Eliot managed to get out for a minute and tell me he was alive in there, he said something that wouldn't mean anything to anyone but us
Steven Grant was the only person who managed to make me feel safe for a long time after I got back.
[aaaaaand there it is. Quentin mentioned the whole autism thing as a bonding element, and while that's somewhat true, what's a lot truer is that while he was in the absolute fucking grips of PTSD -- hypervigilance, nightmares, flashbacks, the whole 9 -- Steven was the only person who managed to make it go away for a minute. Steven was the person who, without really understanding what he was doing or grasping the gravity of it, picked up the shattered pieces Quentin was in and started putting them back together.]
( there had been a whole other place marc had been planning on going with that question, but then quentin mentions ptsd (that's fine); then, he mentions dying (better, marc can handle conversations about dying, it's just ONE OF THOSE THINGS that happens (to him) and he comes back, it's not exactly a big deal—); but then there's the rest of it.
if asked — immediately and without any real time to think about the answer, marc would state that it's oversharing, he doesn't need to know any of that. it's the sort of THIS IS HOW I FEEL conversation that he'd avoided time and time again with marlene, the sort of openness that makes marc intrinsically, inherently uncomfortable. there are aspects he can relate to, details that he could take and carve out something from, a back-and-forth that isn't whatever their previous conversations had held the shape of.
but then he mentions steven, and he knows it's not steven in the sense of steven, but it's still—. )
I don't blame myself for latching onto whatever was making me feel okay. I don't blame him for not understanding what that...really was, to me, at that point
I know you don't like to talk about it so I'm not going to ask any questions but just, FYI, the Marc who was here before, Steven wasn't, like, a NEW development but him being out long enough to have his own whole life going on was. I actually thought Steven was...like, the original owner for awhile.
So he had no experience with any of this. It was a shitty situation for everyone
( it's A WHILE before marc's reply comes through, because — that's weird? it's a nugget of information that sits all at once as an 'oh!' but also an 'oh?'.
it sits weirdly — no, uncomfortably — because it's an awkward reminder of what life had been like with marlene in the earlyish days, the ones where none of them had spoken about what was going on with marc-slash-steven-slash-jake; where they had all pretended that each one was a disguise to be shrugged on and off at will as circumstances dictated. that steven was the one with the life worth living — the job, the girlfriend, the house, the riches, the everything. jake had his uses, his friends, his ear to the ground; and marc—
—marc was a ghost. moon knight, occasionally, and nothing more.
steven had had it all, and he'd still been terrible at it — the relationship, that is. listening to marlene, recognising when she needed hearing and support and everything else that's supposed to go into a partnership. marc had been even worse. )
You thought he was the 'original owner' or you wanted him to be?
( perhaps not a fair question given quentin has just acknowledged marc's lack of comfort in talking about any of it. a concession of sorts, then— )
Should I have not said anything? Let you go around not knowing? Would that have been better?
[It's a genuine question. He wonders if it would have been better to just shut up. He has no idea what that would have looked like, he doesn't think he'd have been able to stay away entirely. But it's hard to imagine it going worse.]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
text, un: mk
(if daphne had still been here, he'd have reached out to her instead, said something cryptic about how quentin hadn't seemed like himself and he needs checking on, but she's not. he doesn't know anyone else that quentin's friends with — or if he does, he doesn't know they know quentin.)
so— )
( first message: sent. then the tricky part: what the fuck to actually say.
"want to tell me why you strung me up, upside down?"
"feel like elaborating on why you were talking to me like I was you?"
"what the fuck was that about?" )
( #nailedit??? )
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[Marc is not the only person this happened with, is the thing. He can still see his own hands around Eliot's neck, he can remember trying to mentally transpose his own face over Eliot's. Eliot had taken it with grace, realizing quickly what was going on and reassuring Quentin once it was over. His neck was fine, it didn't even bruise.]
[The thing is it didn't really feel like a hallucination? He's hallucinated before, thanks to drugs. It felt more like...a game of pretend he couldn't make himself stop. Like he was just so deep into it that he couldn't shake it off. Not, honestly, entirely unlike subspace. An altered headspace that was too powerful to break on his own.]
I wasn't hallucinating
[long pause]
I don't think.
[another long pause]
I don't really know how to describe what was happening. How it felt
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But you were torturing a trash bag you definitely didn't think was a trash bag.
If it wasn't a hallucination, what was it?
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Roleplay? I guess? Except I either couldn't or didn't want to stop, I'm not sure
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It didn't play the upside down game with me as far as I remember but I watched it play it with other people
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That's not some, like
I'm not hiding from it like a little kid, that's what it's called, that's its name. The monster.
The Old Gods are the parents of the gods we know. They made some mistakes. The monster was one of them. It's too powerful, ten times as powerful as a god, and all it does is want. It's a personification of wanting
They tried destroying its body but it can't die. It's outside death. So it has to possess other bodies. It had Eliot's
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(had quentin mentioned an eliot before? marc has no fucking clue. though who eliot is, he thinks, isn't particularly important to the immediate conversation.)
the rest of it — marc's not really sure what to do with any of it. it begs a few questions, given quentin's assertion that it was a memory but also that it — "monster" — can possess bodies. it could have just been a memory, but is that all? )
I'm not about to judge you over what you call it. A monster's a monster. Any chance it's here?
( no, wait—. "personification of wanting"? HMM. he'll come back to that (maybe). )
I mean, you're sure it was just a memory?
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It was...fixated on me
Basically the way it was kept under control for a long time, millennia, is that they built a prison for it and gave it a jailer. The jailer can't do anything to actually keep it there by force, so the jailer has to make sure it doesn't want to leave. He or she does that by loving it. Caring for it like a child, playing games
I was supposed to be the new jailer but it escaped instead
no subject
I'd ask 'and then what', but if it's not here, it's irrelevant.
But its idea of games is pretty fucked up.
( then, eventually— )
I encountered ( what had wong called it—? ) an abomination of space-time that took the form of a house a while ago. The House of Shadows. It was banished time and time again, but kept coming back.
It ate people.
Turns out it just wanted to be an actual house.
Non-human entities can be weird to comprehend.
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It's honestly hard to tell if it was malicious? It got really upset when it thought I might have any kind of positive feelings toward anyone but it, especially Eliot
I've parented a toddler and this thing's emotional sophistication was below that of a three-year-old
In the scene we sort of reenacted it didn't have to hold me down, I knew I couldn't do anything to get away. We were on a boat, that didn't help, but it could find me anywhere I went
I basically sat there and was quiet until the guy died and then the monster weighed the body down with rocks and dropped it in the ocean
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Guess that's one side of 'wanting' down pat.
( there are asides he could add in — things about khonshu, about how he missed his daughter's toddler years, and how he's missed more-or-less every other fucking year too.
remarks about how unpleasant that sounds, how marc knows what it's like to feel like you can't escape a being, an anything you're desperate to break free from. but he doesn't know how to say any of that, so—. )
Does it weigh on you?
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I died locking it away again
I did that thing where sometimes people go into a coma and get memories from home. I got memories of this time, with the monster, and came back to Duplicity in really bad shape. Both physically and emotionally. I had injuries, I was sleep deprived and malnourished because the monster doesn't understand that people need those things, not just want them, and I'd spent months living the type of shit you saw with that memory almost every day. It lied to me and said Eliot was dead because it thought that if I believed that I'd start loving it instead of him, but then Eliot managed to get out for a minute and tell me he was alive in there, he said something that wouldn't mean anything to anyone but us
Steven Grant was the only person who managed to make me feel safe for a long time after I got back.
[aaaaaand there it is. Quentin mentioned the whole autism thing as a bonding element, and while that's somewhat true, what's a lot truer is that while he was in the absolute fucking grips of PTSD -- hypervigilance, nightmares, flashbacks, the whole 9 -- Steven was the only person who managed to make it go away for a minute. Steven was the person who, without really understanding what he was doing or grasping the gravity of it, picked up the shattered pieces Quentin was in and started putting them back together.]
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if asked — immediately and without any real time to think about the answer, marc would state that it's oversharing, he doesn't need to know any of that. it's the sort of THIS IS HOW I FEEL conversation that he'd avoided time and time again with marlene, the sort of openness that makes marc intrinsically, inherently uncomfortable. there are aspects he can relate to, details that he could take and carve out something from, a back-and-forth that isn't whatever their previous conversations had held the shape of.
but then he mentions steven, and he knows it's not steven in the sense of steven, but it's still—. )
I'm sorry.
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I don't blame myself for latching onto whatever was making me feel okay. I don't blame him for not understanding what that...really was, to me, at that point
I know you don't like to talk about it so I'm not going to ask any questions but just, FYI, the Marc who was here before, Steven wasn't, like, a NEW development but him being out long enough to have his own whole life going on was. I actually thought Steven was...like, the original owner for awhile.
So he had no experience with any of this. It was a shitty situation for everyone
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it sits weirdly — no, uncomfortably — because it's an awkward reminder of what life had been like with marlene in the earlyish days, the ones where none of them had spoken about what was going on with marc-slash-steven-slash-jake; where they had all pretended that each one was a disguise to be shrugged on and off at will as circumstances dictated. that steven was the one with the life worth living — the job, the girlfriend, the house, the riches, the everything. jake had his uses, his friends, his ear to the ground; and marc—
—marc was a ghost. moon knight, occasionally, and nothing more.
steven had had it all, and he'd still been terrible at it — the relationship, that is. listening to marlene, recognising when she needed hearing and support and everything else that's supposed to go into a partnership. marc had been even worse. )
You thought he was the 'original owner' or you wanted him to be?
( perhaps not a fair question given quentin has just acknowledged marc's lack of comfort in talking about any of it. a concession of sorts, then— )
Or did Marc?
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Marc wanted to protect him.
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let him just ignore that last part of the reply. )
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( marc: reading what he wants to read into that response. )
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The other one was basically an awkward nerd like me. Also he was British
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Don't undersell yourself.
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I'm sorry I handled telling you poorly. I'm sorry I made it weird
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Don't.
I'd never have taken it well.
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[It's a genuine question. He wonders if it would have been better to just shut up. He has no idea what that would have looked like, he doesn't think he'd have been able to stay away entirely. But it's hard to imagine it going worse.]
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cw: oblique references to suicide
1/2 ( cw: mostly vague references to DID, anti-semitism, institutionalisation )
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cw: less oblique references/discussion of suicide, low self-esteem/negative self-talk
cw: second verse same as the first, talk of death + dying, passive suicidalism
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