shine_again | (no subject)

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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"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."