eyemind | Who or what are you (and why am I the way I am?)

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Who or what are you (and why am I the way I am?)

Who?: Mur and Richard Strand
What?: Richard has to confront a terrifying reality on the ship
When?: Monday-ish
Warnings?: Probably a lot of swearing. A lot of violence.
Notes: Rated T for teen

Richard Strand is troubled.

Alex is here, and Alex believes this place is good. Alex is a reasonable woman and it hurts him to think of her like this. Believing in this.

Still in it's own way it is pleasant to be here and he managed to acquire other clothing - a second suit, and a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt he has done his best not to let Alex see him in. He has never let his guard down around her. He can't. She thinks - or thought - that he had something to offer and here...

Being alone with his thoughts is difficult mostly because the longer he's here the more he has a headache. He dreams and it's like he's standing in a crowded room. It's a room full of whispering and he can't stand it because the longer he's here the worse it gets.

Case in point. Here he is in the cafeteria and the whispering is getting worse until -

There's something like a sun nearby.

It's blinding. No whispering just a gentle murmur and when he looks over there's that strange man that he saw earlier.

He blinks, and stares.

and blinks.

And stares.

He can't help it, staring at the man blankly while - awkwardly - holding a hand over his eyes like he's looking at the sun. As far as him - there is a loud sound of crashing waves roaring whenever looks at his mind.

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"No."

But there's a hard edge to his voice as he browses before settling on a space, "Do you have any books I can borrow? Or I could edit any notes you have. I put myself through grad school and taking care of -"

Pause.

"Well." His voice is thin there, tired and human, "I made money editing papers and doing copy for my fellow professors while Charlie was a newborn. I've obviously pushed books I could do my own. I still can."

Does he start seeing through her stuff? Maybe. Possibly.

Alex just meets his eyes for a moment and debates pushing but in the end decides not to do it. At least not yet anyway, it’s not worth the fighting that it would cause and she doesn’t feel up to another one right now.

Digging out the books that she’d mentioned before, Alex hands them to him. “I don’t have anything written down, not really. I mostly do everything by audio and then transcribe it later. It’s how I did my sleep notes and stuff for the show and everything.” But then Alex looks at him curiously, with her head tilting to one side as she does it.

“Did you listen to it yet? The whole show I mean.”

Did you listen to all of it. Like it's easy, it feeds into the fact that he can't distract himself, pull himself away it's all tied to her, "...How much of it do you actually believe."

He doesn't look at her as he speaks, "About me in particular and my...rather dramatic impulses as a child?"

Well, so much for avoiding that whole fight thing. Alex lets out a soft sigh for a moment, and she drops onto her bed, drawing her legs up to sit cross-legged as she watches him. Trying to untangle the threads of Richard Strand are difficult at the best of times, and here in space with whatever happened to him to send him running towards her is definitely not anything close to the best of times.

So, she just considers before she says softly, confessing to him something that Alex knows that she'd probably should have confessed to him the night when he'd arrived and drunkenly passed out on the floor of this very bedroom. It's not easy, because it's not something that Alex likes to think about--more than that, it's something that she's been trying to actively avoid thinking about since it happened. There's a reason she's not spoken of it to anyone, not even to Murmur when he'd helped her, and placing it into Richard Strand's hands feels more than a little bit like offering him a dagger with a stunning view of her chest with a bullseye on it.

But she does it anyway, because Alex always tries to be brave. "When I first came aboard, several months ago now"--it feels like lifetimes in some ways-- "there was a thing with Navi where people kind of shared our nightmares with one another. Nightmares, and memories both especially where they intersected for some of us." That was too general, and Alex knows it, but she's having more difficulty than she'd like to put words to it. "They did for me, anyway." A pause and a breath. "So yes, I believe that you experienced things with a Tall Paul of your own, and I believe that you're psychic. I believed that back home. I'm not psychic myself or anything like that but I remembered having a shadowy tall friend called Paul, and he interacted with other people in my nightmare too."

Richard's features slowly focused on the floor and then on her, his eyes kept firmly on the ground beneath his feet. Words like nightmares, and Tall Paul of my own and psychic, psychic, psychic

"Do it again Richie!"

"Ok." He pressed a hand against his temple, "I predict your card shall be...A red heart!"

"Right! Always right!" She clapped her hands, "I-Daddy!"

"Can you do it again Richard?" His father's voice is dark, "Can you?"

"Jesus fucking Christ I'm not psychic!" the words are snarled, "I'm not."

He stares at his feet, "I'm not."

Alex flinches when he snarls. She doesn't mean to do it, but she does it anyway. The nightmare is like a raw nerve in the back of her head, and it makes her more hyper aware than anything else that she'd remembered from back home, and Alex can't help but to remember that Murmur had said that she'd been touched by demons and how much better she'd felt after he'd blessed her. Those are things that Alex can't deny and she's not going to. Richard could be the king of it all he wanted to but she doesn't want to keep doing this with him.

She can't.

So, Alex rises to her feet and crosses her arms at him even though he's looking at his own shoes. "That's fine. You can keep telling yourself that, Richard. But I'm not going to let you keep making me feel like I'm losing my mind. I know what my experiences are, and I'm looking at them very clearly and it's the best that I've felt in ages. I'm sorry, I know how difficult this is for you," Alex takes a step towards him with one hand out in front of her but she doesn't actually touch him. "I really do but that doesn't change what the evidence is. That doesn't change my experiences. All this is doing is hurting you more as time goes on, Richard."

Her voice goes even softer, and Alex does reach out her hand in the air above his arm without touching him. "Was that what happened? That you ran into someone who could prove that you are?"

He remembered how badly he wanted Alex when confronting that being. Twisted eyes and wings and glowing warm light. Alex at least offered him comfort. Here she was panicking and stressed out and staring at him like he was this thing that he wasn't.

He wasn't.

"...The past few nights there have been whispers." He rubs a hand over the back of his neck, making sure not to touch hers, "They are dreams. Or they should be dreams. Every night since I was a child I avoided whispering by reading until I passed out at night. Drinking in college and High School... carousing with my friends. Charlie was-"

He lowers his gaze, "Charlie was perfect. A perfect being, the most important thing I've ever done - and a perfect distraction. I could push out the whispers, the voices. Bad dreams and my- When I was married." He's not going to be cruel enough to do that, "I had a family. I didn't have time for whispers and nightmares. I was normal. Then I'm here. And All of these things are being dragged back into the light. That's what I saw. A being that was all eyes and light and I thought - stupidly - was an extraterrestrial. They were not."

Alex doesn’t flinch at the mention of his family not at all really. She might have before but this Richard doesn’t have the same way to wound her as he would later on and she’s met Coralee so she knows what the woman is like and frankly if Alex didn’t dislike her so much then she might have had a thing for her too.

It’s hard to like someone when you wanted to punch them in the face for destroying someone you care about so much.

But the mention of eyes makes Alex immediately know who he’s talking about and Alex just nods for a moment. “Murmur. He’s an Angel. Like a literal celestial one and it just someone who’s like a good person. He’s a friend. He helped me get some sleep finally after like two years of not doing it.”

But when Richard is careful to avoid touching her, Alex steps back and fixes him the cup of tea the way he likes it and she gestures to the table. “Sit down and have some tea, okay Richard? It might help a little. Something familiar.”

"You always make my tea perfectly."

He will sit and wait until she has tea before he looks at her, sincere, features calm, "...What do I do for you? I have to do something for you." He pauses, "...I really hope so."

“I thought I make it too sweet?” It just slips out a bit after the last time she’d made him tea the exact same way and she shakes her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be an asshole. This whole thing is just a weird situation.” Which is actually probably selling the whole thing exceptionally short, but that is neither here nor there.

“Could you lay off of Jon? Please. I’m fine and I don’t need anything.” Not even for him to lay off of her—Alex is well and truly used to going round for round with him but Jon isn’t. Especially when it’s over something that Jon didn’t even have anything to do with.

He looks interested at her and he's about to speak before she mentions Jon and his mouth sets.

"All I did was ask him questions." He frowns,"I...apologize. You and he are good friends. I just..." He presses his lips together, "I apologize. It's none of my business who you associate with. I barely know you."

But I'd like to. He stares at his tea, "...You do make tea well."

“It’s so weird for you to say that you don’t know me, you know. Cause you do. I’d like to think that we’re at the very least friends if nothing else. I mean that was one of the things that I was really like. Hopeful that you would have gotten listening to the show anyway. But as before if there’s something that you’d like to know, I’m an open book okay?”

He sips at his tea with an air of quiet, tasting it, before he raises his gaze to hers, "I mean personally. You understand that correct? You know all of my secrets and that...is disconcerting."

He sighs, "...Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway may be something Mother Theresa said but I'm not her."

He stares at the tea and then at her, "What do you think of the fact I'm -" he draws quotation marks with a free hand, "Psychic?"

"I mean personally too, you know." Alex just lets out a little sigh as she shifts in her chair and debates what to say to that. No, he doesn't know her as well as Alex knows him, but he does know her personally at this point. But then again she doesn't even know if Richard wanted to know her that well. Everything had been so frayed and fractured at the end before Warren's and Coralee and everything that had come after that that the two of them had been on tenterhooks.

"And that's easy. Bobby Maimes for one, and you going into the woods to try and find Coralee for another. I mean, I know you couldn't," because Alex wants to get that in before he protest as a way of denial of it. "But I also wonder if it's because someone, either Coralee herself or someone else may have blocked you from being able to do it."

Edited 2021-03-03 22:39 (UTC)

Coralee.

His mouth sets in a hard line, "...She wouldn't do that." He frowns, "I know it sounds trite but she wouldn't. She forgave me my sins and transgressions. And even if she did-"

Like with her affair when they first got together.

"It was ...hard to deal with me I was provocative." He gestures, "She wouldn't do that. If I believed in this sort of thing. Why are you so against her?"

Alex just stares at him with a look that very clearly asks: are you fucking kidding me? Because she honestly cannot believe what is coming out of his mouth at the moment and honestly it makes her want to scream. Thankfully (or perhaps not thankfully depending on what side you’re on) Alex wanting to scream at Richard Strand is definitely not a new emotion and she knows how to bite it down. Unfortunately it also means that Alex’s voice is more than a little bit bitey and sharp in return. “Were you so drunk that you forgot that I played you that recording that first night? Because you were the one who told me those things. Not me.”

"I-"

He had been drunk. Sticking his head in his hands suddenly, the air going out of him, his shoulders shake, "I do not get that drunk unless I'm really panic stricken."

Fuck.

"I was a very provocative child when it came to this topic. You can't blame me for being hesitant."

"I don't blame you for being hesitant about this, Dr. Strand." Alex reverts to using his full name because she wants to make sure that he'd actually meant that he wants her to call him 'Richard' considering he'd also said that when he was drunk. Everything seems suspect now, and she feels like she's done something wrong letting him get so drunk when she was trying to tell him something that was so important. Just because that was how he'd handled Coralee's betrayal (or rather her explaining just how much of a betrayal it had been back then) didn't mean that it's how the Richard Strand of two years ago would have handled it.

God, she's tired of not knowing where she stands where him, especially considering everything always seems to be one step forward and two steps back with Richard. Even back home it had been.

"I think you really need to listen to the show, Dr. Strand. All of it. Otherwise you're just going to keep being blindsided by this stuff, and I know that it's exhausting for me, and it must be exhausting for you too."

Exhausting for him. Yes.

"...Fine." He hesitates, "...Fine. I'm not unreasonable Alex Reagan. You might think I am."

Oh god. He could know if he so chose to know. Swallowing swear words his father beat out of him that he still used as a sign of rebellion he shakes his head, "But I'm not. There's nothing wrong with hesitancy. When I last saw you you were showing me how to edit music."

His lips pressed together, "It just seemed...useful."

“That’s the thing, Dr. Strand, I don’t think you were being unreasonable back then. But I do think you are now. It’s had to like reconcile the two different versions of you who I know, you know? It’s been a long time and a lot of stuff has happened since that moment in Jeff Wendt’s garage.” Alex lets out a soft sigh and closes her eyes for a second.

“I’m just not sure how to act around all of these bombshells that you don’t know.”

"Tell me about Coralee."

He pauses, "How was she? Did she look-" Did she look good? Was she happy? except she left him, not just left him but framed him for murder and hurt him deeply.

"Like the bitch she is?"

Complicated feelings are go.

For a moment, Alex doesn't know what to say. In her head, she can hear the conversation that she and this man (well, the later version of this man, anyway) had. Well, if it’s any consolation, I could tell she still loves you. Alex had said. And Strand had replied: It’s not. Somehow she doesn't think that's what he wants to hear at this point. It's hard, trying to gauge him when she doesn't know him nearly as well as she would given time and shared experience between them. So, she sighs softly, and then replies.

"She looked...kind of like a weapon, honestly. The way that she'd shown up in a squeal of brakes and told us to come in if we want to live. You told me to get into the van and introduced her. She didn't talk to me very much. I don't know what she said to you while the two of you were inside that bedroom exactly, but you came out to watch her go. I told you later that it looked like she still loved you, if it was any consolation and you told me that it wasn't. But she looked strong, and was clearly in charge of the people she was with."

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