shine_again | (no subject)

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Dan spends his time in captivity finding out what it might have been like if the Overlook had been a medieval dungeon run by fucking goblins. He feels precisely as helpless as he had in the worst of it there, at the beginning, when he's aware of everything. They beat him, of course, because it's a goblin dungeon, and one of them is sneering about tenderized meat. His coat and flannel and t-shirt are taken, though he's left with his jeans and boots. Something about foot-rot, they say. Not very appetizing.

He tries to frighten them, spits more of that strange language at them, and it earns him a cell of his very own, it seems. Now, this has nothing on the Overlook, cramped and slightly wet and cold; he's held to the wall with an honest to god chain, and all he can see from the gaps in the bars is a passageway, and a door on the other side, and fire beyond that door.

Dan thinks he might honestly have been dragged to hell.

The shining is of no use; all he feels is the terror and despair and angry helplessness of others in other cells. And then the dark waves again, which drag him down for hours at a time, and leave him shaking and gagging against his bonds.

He can't think, he can't think for all of the noise of everyone else's thoughts. Oh, but he tries. He thinks of Abra's light shining so brightly, that even across worlds, it might give him something to see by, he thinks of his mother fighting with everything to keep them alive. He thinks of the moment when he'd thought he was safe, his arms around Marcus and Marcus holding him so tight, the warmth of his breath, the little flicker of light kindling in Dan's chest.

He tries to get it back.

He's just so cold, and it's so loud inside his head.

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"Don't worry, I'll put you to work," Marcus answers with a little grin for Dan, tilting his head to look over at him. He needs to get out of this bed and he needs to do it soon or risk doing something foolish, but at the same time, he certainly doesn't want Dan to think he's leaping to his feet because the thought of sharing a bed has gotten to be too much.

It's the very opposite in fact. It's the knowledge that he could sink back down into this so easily.

"You should stick around here," he says as he eases himself out from under the covers, then stretches his legs out carefully. His injured knee he bends and straightens a few times, wincing at the stiffness, but already the swelling feels like it's gone down. "I don't like the idea of you going back out there until this is all over."

Dan is someone who can, at least, appreciate the idea that there's work to be done, and he's at least more mobile than Marcus. "I hope you do. I suppose finding actual employment might be in order soon. I'm not used to not keeping myself business."

He gets out of the bed as well, and spends some time stretching, pleased to feel the effects of good rest on some of the aches from yesterday. Or is it yesterday? He doesn't know for certain.

Dan's not quick enough, however, to hide the bright smile at being invited to stay until the winter is done. Beyond the obvious peace he's found here, he likes Kat and Trass, and no small part of him is curious what Marcus's ward is up to out there. "Yeah, thanks. I'd like to stay."

Marcus has to work hard not to smile too broadly in return, then passes one hand over his short hair. They probably both ought to shower, but he feels like coffee and breakfast are required before anything else and so he opens the bedroom door finally, even though he wants to stay closed up in here for as long as possible.

"There's coffee in the cupboard over the sink if you want to start there," he suggests as he slowly makes his way down the hall to the kitchen. "Or if you'd rather shower first, there are towels in the closet right here. You can take whatever clothes of mine will fit you from the drawers."

Dan's a bit shorter than he is, but not by much, and they share the same wiry sort of frame. He anticipates Dan fitting into most of what he owns.

"I would really like to shower," Dan admits, because he feels like he could use about twenty more of them to feel like all the grime is truly gone. He also thinks a chance to try and figure out the tangle of feelings he'd woken up in would be supremely useful.

"Better be careful," he says, and if his smile is a little wistful, he's not sure he can control that. "You'll never get rid of me at this rate."

It's not until he's actually scrubbing his skin pink that he realizes it'd been a way to say I don't want to leave.

Marcus doesn't want to get rid of him, but he manages to not say anything too foolish as Dan goes off to shower. Once the water is running, Marcus sinks carefully into a chair in the kitchen and beckons Trass over. The wolf pads across the room and yawns before resting his chin on Marcus's knee. He puts up with the checkup, Marcus's hands running over him, looking for any blood or wounds, but the only stains in Trass's fur seem to be dirt or that sticky black blood that had come from the creatures.

He gets impatient after a few minutes of this and shoves Marcus's hand away with his nose before going to curl up in front of the fire in the living room.

"Glad to see you're safe, too," he says with a soft laugh and a roll of his eyes, then gets back to his feet to begin brewing coffee. It's just finishing up when he hears the bathroom door open again. He's sure Dan will smell the coffee and come straight here once he's ready, so Marcus begins making eggs and toast for the three of them.

Dan, for his part, has plenty of practice in compartmentalizing-- has learned it for survival's sake, and while he doesn't need to make any more lockboxes any time soon, he still focuses on each task until he's clean and dressed and heading into the kitchen.

The feeling of something missing rises for a moment, at the sight of Marcus cooking, at the way it would be easy to have this be every day. He takes a breath, pushing his thoughts to the smell of the coffee instead, and then walks over to pour some. "You too?" he asks, even as he's pulling down another mug. "And is Kat up? Trass is back safe too?"

The shine doesn't appear to really give a damn about boxes and the right times for things, but he can try to divert it, maybe.

"Thanks," Marcus agrees with a nod when Dan asks about coffee. "Kat's still in the guest room. I think she's awake, but I'm going to let her rest. As for Trass..." He nods over toward the fire where the wolf is still curled, his snout resting on his paws. At the sound of his name, his eyes open and look toward the kitchen, but he doesn't move from where he's settled himself. He huffs out a breath, then closes his eyes again.

"I think he did some good things up there," he says, but he doesn't elaborate. He doesn't think he can. Whatever Trassel did in Kagura, he won't be able to tell anyone. "And I suspect he'll go back once he's rested."

Because whatever is happening up there isn't over yet. Marcus can still feel it hovering over them, over the entire city. He doesn't need to leave the safety of the house to feel it.

Dan smiles fondly at the wolf, and then just as fondly back at Marcus, though he's not quite aware of the heat in the look he gives his friend.

"Here," he says, gently sliding a cup of coffee Marcus's way, picking up his own for a sip-- only to wince a little. "Yeah, that's going to take a couple days to really start healing up." The raw patches on his neck still look a bit angry too, but he's doing his best to ignore it.

"I meant to ask before, but-- how did you meet Kat?"

A distraction from his throat, at least.

"Ah," Marcus says, then laughs a little as he smiles his thanks for the coffee. Taking two eggs, he breaks them into the pan, then begins to scramble them before adding two more. It's the easiest way to serve everyone at the same time, he figures.

"She and I met in Chicago," he tells Dan. "Her younger sister was, unfortunately, the victim of a possession. A particularly strong and vengeful demon. Kat- well, you've met her, she has a rather strong will. She wanted to protect her sister." He stirs the eggs in the pan, then looks back at Dan. "She called the police on me for performing the exorcism."

Dan sits down at the table, half because he wants to watch Marcus, and half because he doubts he'll convince the other man to let him take over and ice his knee.

"You knew her from before you were here?" he asks, surprised even though he supposes it's entirely possible. "I didn't consider it, but I guess there's no reason there's certain number of people from one-- what are we calling them? Realities? Dimensions?" The rest of the story catch up and Dan laughs in spite of his sore throat. "And were you arrested? Does the Church pay bail on things like that, or do you submit receipts?"

“Well, they had in the past, but I had already been excommunicated at that point and they were no longer interested in saving my ass,” he admits. It’s hard not to see a bit of humour in the situation now that it’s so far in the past. “I was bailed out by another priest. The one I was excommunicated for pointing a gun at, actually. He wasn’t doing me any favours, really, he sent me away right after. He needed me to investigate some people and since I was no longer a priest, I was innocuous in ways he wasn’t.”

As he finishes with the eggs and toast, Marcus prepares two plates and brings them over to the table. Once Kat comes out, he’ll make a plate for her as well, but for now, it’s good to be off his injured leg.

“But, yes, I knew her from before,” he says. “Her mother was here, too, for a time.” He misses Angela even now. She had become a good friend over her time here and he wishes she was still here. For Kat’s sake more than his own.

"That's all it takes to get excommunicated?" Dan frowns. "I'm honestly surprised. Unless it was more than that." He's aware of how much he's watching Marcus, but he hasn't quite figured out how to stop. "I have a very hard time believing you could do something that would deserve it."

Food is set out and Dan resolves to be angry at the Catholic Church later. He's hungry, despite the care he'll have to take in eating.

"I think I would wish for people I knew back home," he says, making a pleased sound around his eggs, though swallowing brings a wince. "Except the person I would want the most is my niece, and Abra is-- what I can do, I'm a flashlight. She's a lighthouse."

"Well, it wasn't only that," Marcus admits as he takes a mouthful of eggs. "I had a long history of doing whatever the hell I wanted, orders from the Church be damned. They were concerned about my mental state, between the threat, my tendency to disappear and- well, I'd lost someone not long before. A young boy. The first one I'd ever lost and I wasn't taking it well."

St. Aquinas, the home for broken priests. That's where they'd sent him and where he'd stayed for months on end, drawing and dwelling and sinking into a blacker and blacker hole inside his heart.

He tries not to think about the sound Dan makes when he begins to eat and instead asks, "She's powerful? A girl like that..." He imagines she might be in danger. "How old is she?"

"Yeah, I have to admit that I have a hard time seeing you be very-- obedient to a system that didn't let you do what you needed, to save people," Dan answers, working more slowly on his own food. He realizes how long Marcus had done what he did without a loss, and he wants to reach for him again, rest a hand on his.

He tries to resist it, for now.

"She's thirteen and one of the most stubborn, caring, brilliant people I've known. She really is special. The reason I was so trashed when I showed up here was that I'd just gotten back from Colorado, where--" He exhales with sheepish amusement. "There was this group called the True Knot. Like vampires, only they fed on something called steam, and the way they got steam was through torturing kids like Abra. They're gone now, but they wanted her."

Dan's hit it on the head exactly, why he had a tendency to go off on his own and do what he wanted. He was better than anyone else the Church had at its disposal and they all knew it, which is why he got away with it for such a long time. Unlike a lot of exorcists, he was willing to bend and even break the rules if that's what it took to bring someone back.

"Only children?" he asks. That's horrible, of course, but he doesn't know any of these children. He does know Dan and he thinks by now they have a pretty good idea of what that monster wanted with Dan. What he wants with everyone he has.

Dan says they're gone, but Marcus knows there are other things that exist in this world who would probably want him just as bad.

"Yeah, they specifically hunted children. As you get older, you're supposed to... shine less, I suppose. I don't think I'm as strong as I was when I was a kid, but I don't think it faded as much as it should have. I don't think Abra's will. But the True Knot, they'd take steam from anyone, if they really needed it and they could get it. But they had a plan, a plan for Abra."

Around careful bites of breakfast, Dan tells him a little more, about how he'd met Abra, and the baseball boy, about how he had traveled with Billy back to the site of the Overlook with Abra's momo's cancerous steam eating away at him.

"It probably won't be safe forever there, but those particular monsters will fade away, any that fled."

All his life, Marcus has thought demons were the worst of the worst. They were a plague on this earth, send to destroy innocence and peace, but it seems like these things Dan is telling him about are just as bad. Not the same, entirely, but similar enough that he thinks what Dan and Abra had done isn’t entirely unlike an exorcism.

“I’m glad she was safe,” he says, then pauses. “I’m glad you were. Are.”

Even after all his time in Darrow, Marcus still struggles with how to speak about the world back there. He often thinks of it as another life, something that’s continuing to happen to someone else. Someone not him.

“There was someone else here, too,” he says. “A girl whose father I was helping, but... it happened after I came here. I didn’t know her at all, but she knew so much about me. The timing... it was months after the last thing I remember before I came here.”

"If it's true that I'm also still back there, then I'm not worried about her. And as for here, seems I have someone interested in keeping me safe, which is... new." Dan's eyes, soft and blue in what light they have left, settle on Marcus with significance.

But he leaves it at that for now. So many things about this are new, and he keeps reminding himself that this strange winter will pass, and bring a better time for new things.

"Was she able to tell you things about what happened? I don't know if I'd want to know. Not if I couldn't do anything about it."

Marcus laughs softly and he doesn't quite look away immediately, but he does have to avert his gaze after a moment or two, or risk Dan seeing and reading everything, even without his special talents. He doesn't want to tell Dan he would have done all this for just anyone, because that's simply not true. There are people in this city he loves, people he absolutely would have marched straight up that mountain to save, but it certainly isn't everyone. Marcus helps people, but he's also learned that sometimes helping people means keeping himself safe, too.

"Should probably get used to it," he says, his eyes creasing as he smiles and takes another bite of his breakfast.

At Dan's question, he shakes his head. "She told me a little, who she was, how we'd met. She told me Tomas and I were helping her foster father. Tomas was another priest, this one not excommunicated, although probably only because they couldn't find him to give him the papers. She knew a lot, but not how the exorcism turned out, though I'm not... well, based on some things she said, I suspect we were losing."

It's not as if Dan thinks Marcus is about to up and leave him to his own devices, after all of this is over and whatever 'normal' life in Darrow might be resumes. But he has been preparing himself for having to leave the safety and warmth, both of which have nothing to do with fireplaces and spells, of this place.

The way Marcus says it, though, Dan wonders.

He realizes that Marcus has perhaps the loveliest eyes he's ever seen.

Focusing on the conversation, on finishing his food, Dan nods. "Renegade priests helping the possessed," he murmurs. "I don't think I'm even surprised. I'm glad you weren't you there alone, at least. And I'm sure this girl, however it turns out back there, she had you, at least."

There's a feeling he'd almost classify as nerves in his stomach, and it's no doubt related to all the things he's going to think about later. After the snow.

"Surprised I let him tag along, honestly," Marcus says, laughing softly. "He was a talented exorcist, but a pain in my ass."

But he had seen something in Tomas, that's the truth. Tomas had help from Angela, from her family, but Marcus knows first hand how angry and vengeful that demon had been. How difficult it had been to pry it from Casey and then it hadn't even really been him doing the work. The damn thing had just jumped, wanting Angela all along. Even with Angela's help, Marcus knows what Tomas did was a hell of a thing.

"She did, though," he says. "She had me and others who cared about her. Her foster siblings. A social worker, as far as she was able to tell me. Her foster father seemed to love them all a great deal, too. He'd lost his wife recently, though, she died by suicide and I think... well. Sometimes there are things the mind doesn't recover from."

"Yeah," agrees Dan, thinking of his mother, who had never been the same, who had tried so hard not to wonder if she could have done it differently, if the monsters would have wanted them without her son's shine. "Saw it plenty myself, wherever I went. I suppose that at times in my life, that could have been easily said of me."

Except that it was the opposite, or something more like. The drinking had started to keep his brain quiet, and he'd always felt that if it meant perhaps breaking something, maybe he needed it broken.

He blinks back from that distant place, and rises to take his plate to the sink. "I think I mostly managed not to bleed on any of your clothes when I took the bandages off this morning."

Marcus thinks of Gabriel, of his failure to save that boy, and silently agrees. The Church had sent him to St. Aquinas to recover from that, but he had known he never would and he never had. The man he is now -- and the exorcist he is now -- is very different from the man he had been before Gabriel's death.

"S'fine," he answers. "I've washed worse things out of my clothes than a bit of blood."

For a moment he hesitates, considering his next words carefully before he says then. They've spoken a bit about Dan's life before Darrow and Marcus knows he doesn't drink, which is why he's been careful never to offer him a beer, something he tends to do easily and casually. But he doesn't know all the details of why. He'd like to know, though. He'd like to know more about Dan.

"Is that part of why you were drinking?" he asks.

"That depends on who you ask," Dan says, turning to lean against the counter, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "My sponsor would have said it's because we're drunks. Just who we are. I'm sure there would have been a line-up of shrinks to give any number of reasons. Genetics-- my father was a drunk. Trauma. Grief. Inability to deal with reality."

He shoves his hands in his pockets, but he's looking at Marcus, not flinching away.

only sick as your secrets

"When I drank, I didn't shine. It went away. Thought I killed it off a few times, but it always came back when I sobered up. Most of the time, I could stay numb. People are fine with just five senses. Less than. I didn't need it. Didn't have to deal with ghosts, with what other people were thinking or feeling. I tried coming over here that night because it was so fucking loud at the Bramford that I wanted a drink."

Marcus wants so badly to get up and go to Dan, though he's not sure how welcome that will be, so for the moment he stays where he is and just listens. It's not something he has any real experience with; his only addiction had been more of an obsession, just finding a way to help the possessed, and he had been doing it for more of the strange connection inside of his head, not to silence it. He'd needed more of God, more of His grace, more of His direction and His commands, not less.

But he still thinks he understands in a way.

Then Dan continues and something in Marcus's chest swells and then breaks open. He gets to his feet painfully and while it's under the guise of bringing his plate to the sink, once he's there and he's set the plate down, he turns to Dan and places both his hands on his shoulders.

"You can come," he says. "Or call and I'll come get you. Whenever you need." He would do the same for Kat or Neil or Molly. That's what he tells himself and it's probably true, but at the same time, he knows it's different. "What I hear... it isn't the same and I don't mean to compare, but there are times when it can be so- so loud. So if you need to come, I'll understand."

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