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Entry tags:
the needle's in hand but I cannot sew
Who: Ned and Meyer
What:SAD CHALLAH Charlie is still missing; Ned decides to distract Meyer with baking lessons.
Where: House 19
When: Day 99
Warning: Will update as necessary
Ned might have spent most of the previous day in Meyer's company, but he isn't sure they said more than a handful of words to one another. What words they did say were only the polite requisites. Part of that, he's sure, had been down to the clearly intolerable hangover under which Meyer was languishing. But part was also a kind of shock and embarrassment over their own behavior and disclosures. At the very least, they were equally mortified by their uncharacteristic frankness, the night before. They were reeling from it, walking on eggshells around one another, both seeing one another doing it, both too cautious to comment on the fact.
If he were a different sort of person, he might not come by today. Might tell himself that Meyer would be fine on his own for a little while, even if Charlie is gone for a third day and the likelihood of him coming back is starting to feel fainter and more desperate with every passing hour. He could do that. He could save face, give himself a little time to recover. After all, it's hard, just being around Meyer, knowing that he knows what he does.
But Ned isn't the sort to run out on his friends. He doesn't abandon people - especially not in times of need like this. So, around late morning he is knocking on the door, awkwardly, his arms full of baking supplies
What:
Where: House 19
When: Day 99
Warning: Will update as necessary
Ned might have spent most of the previous day in Meyer's company, but he isn't sure they said more than a handful of words to one another. What words they did say were only the polite requisites. Part of that, he's sure, had been down to the clearly intolerable hangover under which Meyer was languishing. But part was also a kind of shock and embarrassment over their own behavior and disclosures. At the very least, they were equally mortified by their uncharacteristic frankness, the night before. They were reeling from it, walking on eggshells around one another, both seeing one another doing it, both too cautious to comment on the fact.
If he were a different sort of person, he might not come by today. Might tell himself that Meyer would be fine on his own for a little while, even if Charlie is gone for a third day and the likelihood of him coming back is starting to feel fainter and more desperate with every passing hour. He could do that. He could save face, give himself a little time to recover. After all, it's hard, just being around Meyer, knowing that he knows what he does.
But Ned isn't the sort to run out on his friends. He doesn't abandon people - especially not in times of need like this. So, around late morning he is knocking on the door, awkwardly, his arms full of baking supplies
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Ned has to admit he's not all that fond of questions that start 'When you were a kid-', and he gives Meyer a quick, wary glance before he finishes. What he's actually asking is not dangerous territory, though. At least not on the surface of it. It's not really possible for him to navigate around the painful parts of his past: they are interwoven into everything else, permeating the whole. But that is a question he can answer without any particularly difficult explanations. In a way, it's easier, now that Meyer has some sense of the shape his early life took. He can say less about it and still be understood.
"No, that wasn't always the plan. I only decided that a little while after I started boarding school." After, in other words, his mother died and his father left him on his own.
"Before it was... oh, the usual stupid things boys want to be when they grow up. For years I wanted to be a cowboy." He smiles lopsidedly, shakes his head at his childish folly. "An astronaut. A, uh- a stage magician." It comes out easily enough. According to whatever vicissitudes there are that govern his moods, he finds it not all that hard, talking about his father in this context and at this moment, so he adds, "When he was around, my dad used to put on little magic shows. Coins behind your ear, rabbits out of hats, that kind of thing."
Strange, really; he's never talked to anyone about this kind of thing. "I also wanted to be a blue beret, like him and like Chuck's dad, only-" he hesitates, buries his hands in his pockets, not sure how to put this, to Meyer in particular "-what I didn't really get back then was that they weren't exactly just peace-keeping. I'm not... certain exactly what it was, but looking back I'm pretty sure he was, uh. Breaking more laws than he was enforcing. I'm pretty sure he was a smuggler, at the very least. It's not like he told me, exactly, but... kids notice more than people give them credit for. I just didn't understand it, until I got older."
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"I have to say, I'm glad you ended up as a piemaker." It's partially selfish, since he gets to reap the benefits of Ned's work, but also partially pragmatic. It seems to make Ned happy. Ned doesn't strike him as the kind of person who's happy, in general. He can't imagine Ned as a stage magician, or as an astronaut (although, at the very least, he's begun to understand what an astronaut is, from his time here) and certainly not as a cowboy.
"The way I see it," he says, shrugging a little, "people in positions like that -- 'peace-keeping', anything to do with the law -- are crooked, more often than not. He probably was breaking quite a few laws."
It's a cynical viewpoint, but it's held true, in his experience. He's never met someone with any kind of governmental job that isn't solely out for themselves, that isn't just as bad as the criminals they say they're catching, that isn't breaking the laws they claim to enforce. It makes for good business, on his end, but he can imagine, that for people who live on the right side of the law more often than not, like Ned, realizing that about one's own father might be difficult.
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It is, after all, the one thing Ned truly, unreservedly likes about himself. The one thing he's sure he's good at, the one way he knows he can make a difference in the world. He's had a limited opportunity to do that, in this place, and it eats away at him more than anyone other than River probably knows.
Though he's been quite candid with Meyer, there is more that he chooses not to say. He'd said that when he was very young he had wanted to grow up to be like his father. What he didn't say was that he revered the man in part (he realizes now) because he was so unpredictable: there one minute and gone the next, adoring and then indifferent by turns. He'd only just started to notice, but only later fully comprehend, the loneliness that it caused his mother.
Once he was at school, spending all his free time looking back, turning the memories over and over in his mind just to survive, he realized that his father was rarely there for her, or for him. His mother was the one who had raised him, done the thousand little things he wasn't properly aware of until they were gone. She'd loved him, fed him, clothed him, watched over him, corrected his mistakes and reprimanded him when she had to, answered his questions and taught him.
His father, he'd realized gradually as the years stretched on, was a bad person, who didn't deserve his love. If he wanted to grow up to be good, and try to atone a little for the bad things he'd done, he should make it his goal to be in every particular as much like his mother as he possibly could.
"More often than not," Ned agrees. His cynicism is not quite equal to Meyer's, but then again he's had less personal experience with the type. No reason to come across crooked politicians and law enforcers in his line of work, and if he did, he only knew them as customers. He also has a stronger sense of right and wrong than Meyer, even if it doesn't always correspond to the actual law. By the time he'd realized that his father must be some kind of criminal, he already despised him enough for other reasons that it didn't affect him much, one way or another.
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He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans, still obviously uncomfortable with the whole ensemble -- and the fact that the only shoes he has here are the ones he'd been wearing at home, and they're incredibly formal doesn't help -- and shrugs, trying to quell the desire to reach for a cigarette. That's gotten a bit better, over time, but as long as people keep providing him with cigarettes every so often, he knows the cravings won't abate entirely. "My mother thought I should be an accountant."
That's probably a logical thought, really, and in some ways, he is an accountant, though perhaps not in the way his mother had desired. "Max--" and he still seems constitutionally incapable of saying ''my father," even if there's no venom behind his words when he speaks about him, "--wanted me to be a rabbi." Now that's utterly laughable, and it does make him laugh, quietly. His father had obviously never spent much time truly getting to know him, if he thought that would have been at all an appropriate calling.
"I think I would have been a mechanic." There's an unspoken "if" there, just as there probably is in Ned's life story. If things had been different, then perhaps the two of them would have embarked on entirely different lives. They might not be stuck here, trying to distract themselves, trying to ignore their own demons.
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"Why a mechanic?" Ned has to admit, it wasn't really what he was expecting. Like Meyer's mother, he would have thought accountant would be more appropriate. Perhaps mechanics had a slightly different social connotation, in Meyer's own time. Ned knows, in a vague way, that cars and other machines were far different in the 20s, that it would probably take a different sort of person to want to repair them.
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He takes Ned's seeming surprise for the same reaction his parents had given him, when he'd discussed that future career path as a child. They'd thought it was beneath him, somehow, a waste of the intelligence he so obviously possessed. Of course, he hadn't gone that route anyway, so perhaps it was all a moot point.
"I like to take things apart and figure out how they work. I like to put things back together and make them work better than they did before. I like cars, machines, that kind of thing. It's just a hobby, as it is."
It didn't matter, in the end. He hadn't become what his parents had wanted him to be, and he hadn't become what he'd once dreamed about as a child. But then, who did? He thought it was probably a very rare individual who truly lived out their childhood dreams, if they'd ever been allowed to have childhood dreams at all.
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When Meyer talks about why he thinks he would enjoy being a mechanic, however, it makes sense to Ned. He had never really thought of it in that light. It never occurred to him that it would be anything more than rote, boring maintenance, swapping out old parts for new ones, seeing the same problems over and over again until the tedium was unbearable. Then again, people might see his own job that way - to make pie after pie after pie, only to have them be eaten and start afresh the next day. But it's never been tedious, for Ned. So he may have been too quick to judge.
"I understand," he says, "I like cars and machines and that kind of thing, too. As a hobby." That wasn't the sort of thing they taught, at the Longborough School. There, anything that involved working with your hands was considered somewhat vulgar. But Ned had his own particular, somewhat neurotic reasons for always wanting to know how things worked, to take things apart and find out the way they worked. It had always been a bit of a substitute for being unable to do the same thing for himself: he'd found out how his powers worked, but never why. So to be able to solve other, simpler, tangible things was a substitute.
As they are making their way through the center of town, Ned says, "I've always liked making little gadgets. Last thing I was working on before I came here was a kind of hand at the end of a pole, with articulated fingers you can control with strings, for petting Digby." He realizes, with considerable surprise, that while he's spoken to Meyer about Digby, and while Meyer had seen him as a puppy in Ned's memory of learning to swim, he's not mentioned the fact that Digby isn't quite like other dogs. That detail had gotten wrapped up in Ned's general reticence about what happened on that day.
"He got hit by a truck, when I was a kid. He's the first one I ever brought back. That was-" he pauses, remembers as vividly as ever his shock, his confusion, his delight, "-a bit of a surprise. But it means that I can't actually touch him, so..." Thus the need for a mechanical hand at the end of a pole.
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If he does, Meyer thinks, it goes without saying that he'd like to see them. Things have been so strange here, though, so very unlike what he's used to, that he hasn't had time to work on much of anything, and he doubts Ned has, either. It's been frustrating; fixing things or making things had been one of his surefire ways to quiet his mind and calm down, but around here, there simply aren't the resources to do it the way he'd like to. Back home, he could preoccupy himself for hours, just tinkering with any car he could get his hands on. It didn't matter whether he was trying to fix it or improve it, sometimes simply taking it apart and putting it back together was enough to quiet his mind.
"You've got a dog you can't touch that's been alive for, what, twenty years?"
If his tone sounds somewhere between amused and somewhat baffled, it is. He understands Ned's powers, or at least, he does in an abstract fashion. He knows, of course, that, assuming Ned doesn't touch Digby again, the dog could theoretically live forever. But it's difficult to imagine the measures Ned must go to to avoid touching the dog -- Meyer doesn't much care for dogs, himself, but he assumes that if he had a pet, there would be some amount of touching involved, even perfunctorily, when taking care of it. That Ned has managed to keep Digby around for so long without carelessly touching him and returning him to the dead is, he thinks, impressive. It shows how very meticulous and careful Ned is, something he's always instinctively recognized, but never been quite able to put his finger on.
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"Pretty much, yes." Ned can hear the disbelief in Meyer's voice; he shrugs, smiling a little as he thinks about Digby, missing him with sudden fierceness. "It... takes a bit of work, but it's better than the alternative. He's been with me since the beginning. He found his way to the school all by himself, just to be with me." With a touch of sadness showing now, in his expression, in his voice, he adds, "He's the only thing I really miss."