onepassingnight | Which Habits to Keep and Which Habits to Break [Open]

Just because Howard knows he's dreaming doesn't mean he can wake up. He tries, reminds himself, this is a dream, pinches himself in the dark, but he stays where he is, kneeling in someone's backyard at sunset. Dirt up to his elbows, and he's burying human body parts, except they aren't really body parts. They're more like pieces of oversized dolls than anything else, no blood or anything. But definitely flesh. Clean flesh.

He sits back on his heels and starts to dig the dirt from under his fingernails. His hands hurt, his shoulders are tense, and there are still so many pieces left to bury. He can't quite explain why he's doing it, except that there is some oppressive sense of dread if he stops. It's starting to soak in now, so he picks up a disembodied hand and tosses it into the shallow pit.

There are all sorts of things in the pit; alcohol bottles, baby toys, a t-shirt with a spatter of blood down the front. He squints and tries to remember how all these things got here, then figures it's irrelevant and tosses an anklebone in. The sun's setting, and he has to get all of these covered or else he starts over; the strange logic of the dream dictates this.

It's hard work, and seems an unfair task for someone of his meager stature, and in the dream he's exhausted and starving again. His skin hangs away like the sails of a ship. He sits back on the dried, yellow grass and runs dirty hands over his face - he can feel all too clearly the sockets of his eyes.

But there isn't time to waste energy stressing out about what he can't change (the task, the hunger, the fact that he's not yet awake) and so he gets back to digging.

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"She dead?"

Mercury's lack of horror regarding him burying a child leads him to believe that she comes from a life or death sort of place too. But then, if she's his subconscious, or a figment of it, that's to be expected, right? His subconscious isn't a pretty place.

He leans back again and slides his legs out from under him, so he's sitting cross-legged on the ground. Absentmindedly, he tugs at the dried grass.

Before she gets a chance to answer, he adds, "you guilty?"

Is she dead. Are you guilty. They're such simple questions, but nothing simple is ever easy.

"Not her," Mercury says finally. The one who's dead didn't have a bracelet. She had a locket instead.

Are you guilty when the person you killed would have destroyed the entire planet if she'd lived? When it had to happen, no matter how fate changed, because that battle wouldn't change (except to leave you the one dead instead)? Are you innocent when that has nothing to do with what started you down that path?

Are you guilty when the blood on your hands comes from monsters, creatures with minds bent on tearing apart even more people, creating more victims, and destruction in their path? Are you innocent when they were nothing but victims used by the true enemy?

"Innocent or guilty, it's already done." This is an unsatisfactory answer, but it's the best one she has for herself, too.

"Beautiful non-answers, Blue." Howard crosses his arms and stares out at the yard, all those body parts and toys. The setting sun gives everything long shadows.

"I didn't ask if you were innocent. I asked if you felt guilty."

Blue, huh? A part of her thinks they're not close enough for him to use a nickname with her, and that he certainly doesn't have any business asking those types of impossible questions.

But they've already come a bit too far to say that now. Instead, she introduces herself. "I'm Mercury; call me by that."

"Whether I'm guilty or not, does it matter? I wouldn't change what I've done." Maybe that means no, she doesn't feel guilty. The things she may not like to look at would have still happened. And thinking too much about that is a path to madness.

She turns it back on him. "Are you guilty?"

He's not feeling especially creative now. 'Blue' it is, although he may test-run 'Snowcone' as a nickname later.

"No. I'll call you what I want." Politeness never got him nowhere. He's not about to extend it to a stranger needling in his affairs. He raises an eyebrow at her assertion that she wouldn't change what she did. "Doesn't matter if you wouldn't change it, you can still be guilty."

He stares down at his hands and wipes the dirt on his knees. "What do you think?"

"By hiding it for him, you're also part of it," Mercury points out. Howard shares in whatever guilt exists here. "And even if you call it an accident, someone is still dead."

This may seem like a somewhat harsh analysis, or certainly a moral one, but really it's just her own guilt: whatever her reasons, those events still happened. She can tell herself the reason makes a difference, but maybe it doesn't, especially when the motives are all mixed up.

"I'm always a part of it. That's what you get for having your fingers in everything." As if to punctuate, he starts chewing on his index finger.

"At least I'm admitting it." While Mercury isn't denying anything, she's also dodging around taking any sort of verbal responsibility, at least so it seems.

To Mercury, it's the opposite: She's said plainly what she's done, and she knows what she is.

But she doesn't shrink from it. It doesn't overwhelm her and leave her paralyzed like it would have a few years ago, or if she'd been stopped sooner.

It's something far more buried than even this pit could accommodate, something deeper and best left unexplored, something rationalized away a thousand times to keep her on her path forward.

"And so?" she challenges Howard. Admitting it, words, all that means so much less. "What will you do?"

"I'll keep burying it. And then I'll forget about it." He casts a hand out at the backyard. "We don't exactly got a lot of choices here, do we?"

There is no flourishing in this parched landscape. There is only survival. You don't get to live without guilt, and should be lucky to be living at all. Lucky to still have his friend, murderer or not.

Nothing to do but force the guilt down, with no hope of washing it away.

"Then you should already understand what I said." It's not a matter of passing responsibility, of shirking it. She claims that much. It's the simple fact that no guilt, none of that vague feeling that she doesn't like how things turned out, will change any of it.

So there's no use asking those questions.

"Then maybe it's time for you to go, if you're not going to help." He gestures to all the pieces in the field. "I've got a lot of work to do."

A second passes, during which she might refuse. Instead, as the moment passes, she treats the dismissal flippantly.

"Good luck to you, then!" she calls over her shoulder as she turns to go. He'll need it, to cover all of this.

Which Habits to Keep and Which Habits to Break [Open]

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