deercountry | Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

[Paul's fingers twitch mid-air at Oscar's disappointment at the missed opportunity, and the question that follows it with the weight of stayed judgment.]

They're all right.

[Paul shifts further down the truck bed, surreptitiously. It's not as though he doesn't have reason to desire distance, or as if anyone wants him too close to them in spite of that.]

What is this?

[The way Oscar is behaving (assuming this is as it seems) isn't like someone shocked by their circumstances. ]

[A certain exhausted weariness bled through with the question despite Oscar's best efforts to withhold then. It wasn't the exhausting of someone who had died, however; it was the weary resignation of someone ordered to push a boulder uphill for eternity. ]

Sorry. I expected this to happen if I died. You remember my story about body hopping wizards?

I wasn't exaggerating.

This happened to Ozpin when he died in the dream. Both times. It resolved itself in a day.

He's not my teacher, Paul. He's my...

I guess you could use the word 'predecessor'.

[The boundaries between their emotions run thin as Oscar explains himself. They're both so tired, so - and Paul jolts away from the blurring like the illusion of falling at the boundary of sleep, a noticeable external flinch.

He recomposes himself and swallows, concentrating on shoring up the distinction between these thoughts even as he tries to map where it lies.]

So this is temporary.

[His pulse of alarm at the concept of body hopping wizards will be palpable to Oscar within the shared confines of Paul's skull. He grasps at the concept of reprieve to banish it.]

One day.

[The flinch was palpable in their close space. The ripples of it stung at Oscar's lack-of-body, as if a coldblood lance had been thrust forth. It was an icy burn, with hoarfrost rippling like lightning on his non-existant nerves that only reignited an old fear:

That of rejection when someone finally understood his truth.

Pulling himself inward on reflex, he wondered how it was that Ozpin had secreted himself away in their shared space for months.

Unwittingly, an image was shared-- that of the painted dawn above the tundra, the warmth of the hues distracting from the icy winds that tore at his clothes while he plummeted through the sky.]

One day.

[He confirmed quietly.]

That's how it was in the Dream.

...I'll be out of your way soon.

[Paul's capacity for caring for anyone outside of himself is scraped down to the bone, in this particular isolated hour, so it's fortunate that Oscar exists inside of him. Paul reaches out with a quieting pulse of assurance at Oscar's flinch and fall, the mechanism that he uses to calm his own fears activating at the sensation of someone else's.

It's still disorienting. The feedback loop is distorted and slowed, the milliseconds long difference between the response he expects and the one he receives just enough to throw him, but he can adjust. He can always adjust.]

It's not -

[He swallows, shaking his head, and focuses inward. He constructs a blackboard, like the ones in the Archive, and on it he imagines lines of chalk forming.]

It's not like that.

Isn't it?

[The words were right, but already he was starting to calm. It was the switch in communication method that caught his attention first. When did Paul learn-- ?

Willing himself to calm, Oscar started again?]

Everything bad that could have happened just did. There's people we can't account for, others running around making things worse--

I'm in your space exactly when you don't need me to be. I need to be Home, making sure that everyone's okay.

[Part of Paul's ability to manifest an internal voice comes down to simply not being aware that it's meant to be a challenge. He may not be able to fully rely on his mind, but he's never doubted its capacity for performance. Visualization is never difficult.]

I'll get you back there. [The words appear, then, after a hesitance, are amended.] We'll get you back there.

[Remembering the lessons he's been learning about relying on others now has an aftertaste of the bitterest salt, but he swallows it.]

There are worse places you could be.

[Oscar read the words quietly, the doubts and fears in his own heart settling but not dissipating with every letter and correction as written. There were many things he wanted to say, but he kept his formless tongue still.

Keeping his thoughts to himself was going to be the bigger challenge.]

I know.

[The intonation was oddly grave for a teenager younger than Paul. He was at once a mere farmlad, but also something-- someone-- more. Any similarities between them would surely be laid bare given time, but for the moment he needed to be something-- someone-- else. ]

Julia Sodder only arranged for my mentor to be with people he knew,

[He explained, his words clipped and precise like that certain someone else. Oscar didn't want to invoke Ozpin's name too much, but references to the towering man with an infinite shadow were impossible to avoid.

He continued:]

But, we're not in her dream anymore, so the original conditions that the gods put on us are likely back in play.

On death, we'll be united with a like-minded soul.

[Mentor. Predecessor. Paul notices the shift in language that people use, whether or not they mean anything. Things that matter eventually form a pattern, like the solemnity of Oscar's unspoken voice.]

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

[Paul remembers the sea. He would do a great deal not to go back to it, even with the memory of cool, slender hands cupping his face in the deep. He sits up a little straighter in the truck bed, rubbing the bridge of his nose absently.]

Do you think Mariana had anything to do with this?

[He's almost certain she does, but he is striving for collaboration.]

[If it was at all possible-- Oscar froze. There were multiple variables involved, and he suspected that all of them had intermingled to contribute to this problem.

He didn't know where to begin.]

... I'm not sure,

[He admitted, finally.]

Maybe she did... Because she's retaliating against John and messing with everything he touched. I'm not sure I told you this, Paul, but he Knows Everything about what I am.

I needed his help getting back into my body after his trap melted my hand off. But, I had a problem Then, too.

[He didn't quite sigh, but there was a noticeable release of tension and a wave of tired defeat. ]

I think it's because of the choices we had to make when the Dream fell apart. There were multiple... Tokens we had to deal with, each one of then representing the Pthumerians, the Sodder family, the first Sleeper... Ourselves.

Paul. Ozpin and I both broke the token that represented ourselves. I think Everything we've had to struggle with in Trench is because of that.

Edited 2022-07-21 19:13 (UTC)

[Paul has heard of the sacrifice of Julia Sodder, of the end of her Dream. He's known the vague outline of who was involved, and how. It's another thing to hear it confessed by a participant. He thinks of his conversation with Chara, all those months ago, and their shared, bitter sympathy for a little girl who died a monster.

He didn't know that Oscar and his predecessor both sought to destroy themselves with her.]

So what do we do?

[The words have a rougher quality in their scrawling, letters less perfectly shaped.]

How do we unbreak it?

[The world itself, Oscar's place in it. The churning sea and the furious sky. The bonds that Paul wove himself over months and severed in a single breath. They could pick any of them, and he still wouldn't have an answer.]

[It wasn't a bid to destroy themselves, but to preserve the little that the Dream had offered them. The chance to live as themselves as individuals with a little bit of privacy was more than Remnant could offer them-- and, after hearing about the possible fates of half their team...

Trench was the only place for them. ]

I don't know, [He admitted, feeling very small.] I'm not sure there even is a way to fix it... Or do anything.

[Severing yourself from the place you come from is nearly dying, in the universe Paul comes from. It's why his family choose peril over safety, the uncertainty of conflict over the refuge of Tupile. He can't understand it any other way - at least not yet.]

We have to try.

[It's the first time he's put it in so many words, this growing comprehension of what he has to do. Or try to do, a shift in his thinking that he's still not sure how to process.]

Start somewhere. [The invisible hand pauses on a dot, unreal chalk wavering.] What else do you remember from when you smashed your token?

... Everything.

Do you really want all that?

[The whole process of coming to those decisions had been a drama. Plenty of people had ways of gaining further information-- otherworldly dreams and visions within the nightmare, their own conversations with Ramona, the Dog Keeper, and the broken man they had come to learn was Roderick Sodder. Among those possibilities... ]

Ozpin held onto a relic he had received from Julia that he used to help him get information on how to release the both of us from our circumstances. He received two bits of information: release Cynthia so that she could attain her true calling, and preserve the Dog Keeper.

... That meant breaking Cynthia's egg, but nurturing the Dog Keeper's until the end.

[He fell quiet for a heartbeat that felt like eternity before continuing. That had been a chaotic time-- his leg was recently lost, Salem was in the midst of being corraled in the most brutal way possible, and the dream itself was fragmenting to a hollow husk of what it had been. ]

He and I reached the same conclusions. We thought that breaking Julia's egg would also release her... And breaking our own would similarly release us from the bindings of a God that abandoned my world.

... Ozpin died for this info, and he asked me to share it on the network. Ruby and I did-- and we hoped that he hadn't died for something that would hurt everyone.

[Paul remains quiet and still as Oscar explains, outlining some things he understood, recontextualizing others, and revealing previous unknowns. It is a heavy weight, but he shoulders it readily.]

I don't ask questions I don't want answers to.

[Unvoiced, the tone is lost, but Paul doesn't mean it to be short. He knows that he's unusual for that, among a host of other things he's unusual for. Another one of those things whirs into life at the edges of perception, the processing engines of his mind taking the story apart and putting it back together with nearly mechanical efficiency.]

Why was Cynthia different from you two, and Julia? Theories and facts.

[He should be gentler. He should pay more attention to the tragedy of this story. He doesn't know if he has anything like that left in him.]

[silence answered.

Oscar hung in the ether, feeling bombarded by question after question after he had spent the afternoon watching Paul act as of driven by unconscious directive. It was surreal-- not too unlike the moments when he had relinquished control of his body to Ozpin.

The only difference was that he didn't have a body.]

It was a dream, Paul. Dreams don't operate the way normal things do.

[Even if he still felt chained to those memories and the decisions he had made.]

Cynthia, released from the bindings of a role she didn't ask for, was free to become her true self.

She became the Moon Presence we know here.

Ozpin and I wanted to believe that the same would happen with Julia... And with us.

[Paul takes a deep, expansive breath in, one conspicuous enough to draw attention. He shakes his head slightly, and absurdly wonders if it might make Oscar dizzy.]

But it was different.

[Being unable to change in a world that offers that promise in so many forms; that's a story that touches too close to the bone, which is enough to push him out of the rut of efficiency.]

We'll work on that later. One thing at a time.

What's next?

... Nothing.

We wait a day, and I won't be a problem for you.

That's how it worked in the Dream.

[It was cold, and matter of fact, but he didn't know what to do. Anna's words so haunted him, and he knew that Paul played a hand somehow in what went down.

Distance was the best he could offer: he just wanted to be with Ozpin. ]

[Paul lapses into silence. His mental scrawl stills. He can sense Oscar’s withdrawal, close enough to his own feelings he has to suppress the instinctive buck of his defensive conditioning against planted emotion, but he doesn’t know what to do about it.

Oscar isn’t a guest. He’s a shipwrecked soul cast up on an unsuitable beach, and there is no pleasantry that can erase the circumstances of how he came to be here. Paul worked too much havoc to pretend at being a good host now.]

You’re not a problem.

[That’s the only other thing he writes. There’s nothing else to say.]

Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

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