abraxaslogs | If I think too hard about what we're doing I'll feel really bad about it (Open/Closed)

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If I think too hard about what we're doing I'll feel really bad about it (Open/Closed)

Who: Abby or Bay + Guests.
When: August/September
What: Catch-All for various things.
Warnings: Abby swears, Bay is occasionally casually naked. Individual threads will get warning as they happen.

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As recognition trickles in, filling the gaps in his understanding, the knot between his eyebrows slackens into surprise. He looks away, feeling like a door left wide open for everyone to step through. When he looks back, he's closed his expression up, but the edges of his discomfort poke through, a jumble of embarrassment, hurt, and regret. Wilhelm stares at the mask that confirms she's the "boy" he met that night at the Vermillion Palace.

He has revisited that night a dozen times, cringing at his desperation, questioning if his attraction went deeper than the disguise, revising his words and actions until they're unrecognizable. In all of the emotions tangled around the evening, though, anger is absent. It burned off before the night ended.

"Okay," is all he says for a long moment. His shoulders slope into a sigh and he shakes his head. His hands fly out of his pockets to fuss with his hair instead, smoothing it back only for it to flop into his eyes again. "I should apologize too. I...shouldn't have flipped out like that. And I shouldn't have...touched you without making sure it was okay first. I just got carried away, and that's my fault. So I'm sorry."

Finally, he looks right at Abby. Not at the mask, not over her shoulder somewhere.

"So why did you...?"

The wait between him grasping what this is, and him speaking felt way too long and way too fucking tense. It just kept going and she wasn't sure where the road lead. But the tension breaks, he apologizes for his part in that garbage fire, and her shoulders let go of that tension she's been holding since she started talking.

"If it wasn't for the fact that you're gay, and you acted like I had a cactus under my shirt, I wouldn't have minded a little attention like that. Just- you're not really the guy for it." Stupid sexy fox guy and his stupid sexy words. Probably part of why Abby didn't think that far ahead, also that she's met more bi people than straight people since her arrival.

Of course, how she had to explain, she let a small sigh out as she dropped into a beach chair. No, it wasn't there a second ago, Abby has just fully taken to the Loony Tunes nature of this world and chairs exist when she needs them. "I did try to find a dress for the party, do the whole fairytale princess shit. There were two problems that kept coming up. Well- fuck, one problem. Just in two different ways. It looked like me."

"Practically, going to a party where the game is not to be recognized looking like yourself is stupid." She tucked her legs up against herself in her seat. There's a muted nature to the way Abby's talking, like she's taken a step back from herself, as her only defense to explain what was in her head. "And I could stop there and say 'and I had the great idea to dress as a boy.' But this is me explaining myself, and ending there is a fucking lie. I hated- seeing myself, trying to be that girl. Who I've never been good at being. I felt so fucking weird at my Bat Mitzva in a dress, and this was just the same. Only worse. Because thirteen year old me was a lot less insecure than I am now."

"I'm not a boy, I liked some of the ways Maxwell handled things. Which I am trying to be a bit better at as me. But I picked that costume because it wasn't me, if I was just me I couldn't have really enjoyed myself. All the shit I hate about how I look, didn't fucking matter if I didn't recognize the person in the mirror. My tiny tits and flabby thighs didn't matter, people seeing them didn't matter."

She hopes it's relatable enough, he's not a girl. He doesn't have the same weight on him she does, he has different weights, different concerns. The kind a gay kid gets in the same systems she was in. The same rules to play by, the same rigged fucking game. Which she hoped was enough that he could see that, just maybe, she could get whatever the fuck drove him to attack himself that night, both at the start with his shadows and the end with his words, and talk about it. "So I gave Maxwell a name, and a backstory, and I decided to go out, flirt with anyone cute and see where the night took me."

"We know how that went."

She cracks a joke about cacti under her shirt, and his expression gets caught between amusement and embarrassment. But it cuts the tension pulling between them. When Abby sits, Wilhelm imagines his own chair into existence next to her and tucks himself into it. As he listens, tilted toward her, hands knotted between his knees, his face softens with sympathy.

"I think I get it," he says quietly. "I was never very good at being who everyone else wanted me to be either."

He's trying to figure out how to explain without getting into the title that never fit him right and the crown he never wanted, because he prefers to leave those things in his old life. But after she's poured out the dark, sludgy feelings clogging her, he feels that he owes her some of his own. Eyes in his lap, he fingers the band of his watch, which once belonged to his brother Erik.

"Like...I wasn't even out back home. I didn't think I could be. Then I came here, and...I realized all those expectations I had on me were gone." He flicks a look her way. "I'm a lot more comfortable with it now. Being myself, not caring what other people think."

Rolling his eyes skyward, corners of his mouth quirking up, he adds, "Well, obviously. Comfortable enough to make out with a boy I just met at a party."

While he doesn't ever refer to himself as gay, he doesn't think it has to do with discomfort. Though, it might have something to do with the label being slapped on him in all capital letters, followed by endless exclamation points and emojis, in online comment sections. Labels are something other people wield, he thinks. He doesn't much feel the need to quantify and categorize himself. He blows out a sigh.

"I still wanted to be someone else at the masquerade. Or maybe, like, a different version of myself. I'd be better at talking to people. More confident, less..." He swallows; it's still a difficult admission and the word sticks in his throat. "Less lonely. It worked for a little while, I guess, but...putting on a mask doesn't change all that."

"Our world is really good at just piling on one shitty expectation after another." It felt like someone had to say it, no matter how obvious it was. Naming the monster that fucked them over. Him for his orientation, her for her appearance.

"We may not be in our world, but our world still kinda keeps fucking with us. There's no heavily shopped influencers here, instead people are just naturally airbrushed and fucking naked." She couldn't speak to how his manifested, other than maybe it was the reason he called himself stupid over and over again after making out with someone he just met thinking it might be something. "And no amount of being told otherwise really puts away that voice? The voice of a million faceless assholes telling you what you are. Jesper and his friends can't really get that, so I haven't tried to explain it."

"Putting on a mask maybe let you forget the little parts of yourself holding you back. I wasn't worried about all the ways I wasn't good enough at being a lady. My swearing, my drinking, my-" Abby looks down at herself, eyes not quite landing on any one part of her. "Me. So I could just walk up to people and flirt."

"I also wasn't worried about how I'm so fucked up I can't ever see myself in love," She rocked a little in her seat eventually leaning back to stare at whatever passed for a sky out here. "Sorry about that too, even if I was a boy I wouldn't be boyfriend material. My parents fucked me up way too good for that ship to sail. You should hang onto thinking love is out there though."

She assumed, to feel the betrayal that he did over it meant he felt there was some future denied him. Which she'd never considered, because there was no romance in her future. She was, at best, a regular fuck and nothing past that. One of her was more than enough sadsacks for this place.

As she scorns all the impossible standards they're held to, and all the voices that tell you you're not good enough, Wilhelm nods along sympathetically. There's a weariness to it, like his head is heavier just by thinking about all those things. Like it's holding every unflattering headline, every sharp internet criticism, every disappointed look from his mom. He could say a lot about the weight of expectations, but Abby is doing a fine job ripping into it on her own so he lets her go.

Then she talks about love and her incompatibility with it, like her jagged edges could never line up with somebody else's, and his mouth pinches into a frown.

"You don't think there's anybody out there that would want to be with you?"

After a series of disasters in his embattled love life, he has held the same worry. It's not starry-eyed naivete that keeps him hoping that he'll find somebody who can help piece him together and keep him together, somebody who sees all of him and likes him anyway, somebody he can have all to himself. It's loneliness, an ache that the rest of him stretches thin around.

That's a complicated question, she's gotten over some of it. Not- for herself, but she accepts some people have weird tastes and think this is attractive. But her bar for what people want in a partner is set by people she can't compare herself to. She lets the question linger, face a blank wall of consideration.

"Even if there was, I don't think I could trust it. Not- the way I've seen my friends trust it." As much as it felt great when 'Leif' tugged at her heartstrings, or when Jesper and Mat pulled at her other strings a little lower. She never contemplated they loved her. Not romantically. It wasn't an idea she considered. She didn't see herself tied in knots like Max, or staring across the street longingly like Ginny.

"At home, the only relationship that mattered to me was my friends. More than any guy could hope for, more than even my fucking parents. I had three people and they mostly kept me together. And without them I was a fucking disaster." Abby flopped backward, letting out a long breath, "Here I have new friends, I hope they get to that point. For my fucking sanity. I even sorta have a parent now, and I actually care what she thinks of me. But if any guy came at me with romance in mind, I'd assume there was something wrong with him."

She's being a downer, but that's on Wilhelm asking her a downer question. He really should have known better after all of the shit that got them here that she was a fucked up girl. She didn't apologize for this honesty, it was what he asked for, maybe he can use it for a better answer for himself.

She shouldn't have to apologize. She's entitled to every last one of her raw, messy emotions. It does leave Wilhelm wondering what to say for a moment. He's on the verge of reassuring Abby that she's cute and funny, and you never know — but then he considers that sometimes you're not really looking for solutions. Sometimes you just need to dump out all your problems, like a little kid upending a bucket of shells and rocks on the beach once it gets too heavy to carry around.

"It's really nice," he finally says, head sagging against the back of the chair, "when someone sees the best in you, even after you've given them every reason to see the worst instead."

The way he says it, he's not trying to persuade her of anything. He's just floating some thoughts up to the fake sky. Distance and time have eroded his love for Simon and dulled the ache of losing him, but just because you've gotten over someone doesn't mean you're not allowed to look back and miss what you had.

"It's almost worse, like, finding the right person and feeling everything just—" In his lap, his fingers slot together. "—fall into place, but then losing them. I'm going crazy trying to get that feeling back."

"Was it here, or back home?"

He has, unlike her, found love. That's pretty clear, the fact that he's still looking. Because finding it and losing it is a lot different than having never found it at all. Which, to Abby, makes her want to find it less, not more. She thinks that 'loved and lost' crap is just that- crap. She can't miss what she's never had.

The thing is, how you lost it changes the game, significantly. See, if he lost it here, that's a little easier. Summoned do just- go. It sucks, but there's not much you can do about an angry reality shattering hole in the universe. Sometimes it cockblocks you. If it was at home that's... complicated. Because home is complicated. Loves run hard and shatter, the run hot and freeze. If he lost his love there, well.

It'll just be pain, won't it?

"Back home."

Despite the fact that they're already wading knee-deep in emotions, it takes him a moment to work up to an explanation. Even now, talking about Simon feels like prodding at a wound. It's no longer the raw, gaping thing it used to be, but he's surprised to find that it remains tender.

"We broke up before I got here. It was...really complicated. He didn't want to have to keep the relationship a secret, but I wasn't ready to be out."

That was the simplified version, because he doesn't want to get into how he was outed by a viral sex tape and how he crammed himself back into the closet with a statement curated by his mom to deny his involvement in the video. Or how he promised Simon he'd stand by his side only to abandon him to shoulder the aftermath alone.

"This all happened over a year ago. I've moved on. But I don't know — I think if I ever saw him again, I'd feel the same way I did back then."

He would fall in love all over again. His heart would already know the path.

Edited 2023-09-04 22:25 (UTC)

"I think the problem is that the world broke you up, rather than you chose to. Meaning you're still in love with him, but can't be with him." It was the easiest way to phrase it. The simplest way to put it together. Abby's never dated, so she can't break-up. The closest she has is Max and Norah excommunicating her for a month. If Wilhelm's mystery boy cheated, or fell for someone else, or turned out to be a girl in elaborate and excellent drag, it'd be Wilhelm's choice to end it. He'd sever that link and it'd suck.

Choice isn't in this equation.

"If he was here, with us, in a world that doesn't have our bullshit, what would you honestly do?" Abby's got an answer in her head. She's made it clear what she feels the answer is. But Wilhelm made his answer clear too in how he spoke about this. The question was would he confirm or deny, and would Abby believe it.

The question isn't easy to answer. It forces him to crack open a door he thought he'd finally shut for good. Dig his fingernails into a wound he thought had scabbed over.

"I don't know..." Wilhelm drags his hands down his face with a groan. "I guess I'd want to try to make up with him. If he was willing to give me a chance."

Take all the time you need, Simon had said. But you need to figure it out on your own. Since then, he has figured out a few things about the way he wants to live his life. He's done with pretending to be something he's not.

But getting over Simon was also one of the hardest things he's had to do. For nearly a year, Simon's pet goldfish stuck around in his Horizon, leftovers of Wilhelm's desire for things he should've known he couldn't have. It was only a few months ago that he finally brought himself to let them go. He doesn't want to open himself to that hurt all over again.

Abby will just- move to sit next to Wilhelm, and casually fall over so she's leaning against him. It's a hug-like move, Abby's not the best at showing connection the 'right ways' whatever the fuck that meant. Her move is made complicated by the height difference even sitting down. She picked up that she'd pried open an old wound, but to her, it was the sort of wound that needed examining to really ever close. She's seen what happens if you don't fix something, and let it fester.

Still, last thing she wanted right now was to open old wounds. Other than the ones she already opened at the paty.

"In spite of knowing the guy I was hooking up with at home is a piece of shit, I'd probably give him a chance if he showed up here. Provided Jesper doesn't murder him first." Which was a fun sentence to say out loud. Made more fun by knowing that between Jesper, Inej, Julie, and Nadine that one of them (or using Geralt as their proxy) would absolutely murder Press if he arrived in Abraxas. She'll process how she feels about that later. "Can't imagine it's easier if the guy is worth anything."

"Being fucked up over it just means you're human."

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