[OPEN] A Tale Told By an Idiot

[therevanchist]

Who: Revan and Whoever
What: Misled by the badass title, Revan attempts to read The Sound and the Fury
Where: Philly library
When: Towards the end of the Philly stay
Warnings/Notes: The Sound and the Fury is basically a nonstop parade of awful, so if you want, we can just stick to Revan not knowing what golf is or whatever to avoid dealing with early/mid-20th century race and gender issues and horrid people being horrid to each other.

[Anyone less stubborn would have given up days ago. Revan, on the other hand, is seated at a table in the reference section, surrounded by books pulled from all over the library, none of which seem to have any relationship to each other. A copy of the Concise Oxford, still large enough to brain livestock. A single-volume history of Germany and another one about the state of Mississippi. The official rules of golf. A biography of Thomas Jefferson and a history of Cambridge, England, both pushed off to one side. Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, published of course by Harvard University Press. Several slim books about Easter, all obviously for children. And so forth.

Directly in front of her, stuffed full of flimsy paper bookmarks printed with the library's hours pilfered from the circulation desk, lies the cause of all the trouble: an unassuming paperback copy of The Sound and the Fury, with all the terrible stock photo cover design a cheap reprint of a classic entails. Revan herself is scribbling something in a spiral-bound notebook with a ballpoint, her surprise at the sheer amount of paper in the city long subsumed by irritation over this maddeningly incomprehensible book she's found.]

Why does it even matter?

Comments

[awfulcer]

The burns? Nah, Robbie healed them up pretty good. [He knows that’s not what she’s talking about.]

[therevanchist]

[Revan just looks at him, letting the silence grow awkward...for Dixon, anyway. She can handle discomfort. Revan will meet him on his level, or try to, but he doesn't get to come to her for advice, immediately ignore it, and expect her to play along.]

[awfulcer]

[It doesn’t take him long to cave. It rarely does.

He doesn’t just want her to tell him what to do, he wants her to fix his problems. Even if he has clear instructions on what to do, somehow he can’t just do it. It’s like running into a wall.]

Yeah. It does.

[therevanchist]

[Revan is used to having people's personal problems dumped in her lap, but they generally involve more long-lost estranged family and galactic wars than they do quiet internal despair over a wasted life.]

Here's a trick for you: pain shared is pain lessened.

[She reaches out to take his hand, for no reason other than thinking Dixon doesn't get a lot of friendly touch.]

You can't force someone to carry your burdens...but you can ask for help.

[awfulcer]

[He's glad she doesn't ask him to define what it is that hurts precisely. It feels like a tangled mass, like if he tied to tease out something between fucking up on the network and throwing a guy out a window and leaving his mom with tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills for burn treatment and all this unresolved grief, like if he goes in there it'll grab him by the ankles and suck him under.

All his life he's shuffled people into place to fill the black hole inside him, the empty gravity to orbit around, indulged a reflex straddling the worlds of please help me, please fix me and please let me adore you, please let me lay myself at your feet.

Why not her? Why not her or Hiccup or Trance or any of the other people here? Why not fix other people like stars to reorient the galaxy around? Why not cast her as a sun? He realizes he barely knows her beyond the surface, has jotted in her features with conjecture and theories instead of fact, but that doesn't matter. That just means he has work to do.]

Thanks. [He takes her hand back; the gesture is needy. Revan's suspicion is correct, and the absence of friendly touch hurts, because Dixon comes from a family of affectionate people, huggers and shoulder-patters and people who rest on each other's arms, and he's starved of it.] I just figure at the speed I'm going soon I won't have nobody to ask help from.

[therevanchist]

You're not a crashing shuttlecraft, Dixon.

[She squeezes his hand, leaning in both physically and with the full weight of her personality. It's overkill on Dixon, sure, but he's not the only one in this conversation who needs convincing that the past doesn't have to overshadow the future.]

You can change course. Not overnight, not without trying, not without making mistakes, but you're not predestined to fail. No one is.

[awfulcer]

[He nods. He listens. His eyes are welled up, and he takes a deep breath to get that under control.

She speaks with enough authority that he can believe, wants to believe that she knows exactly what she's talking about. He doesn't find it overbearing. He wants her to press it further until she just inhabits his life and does all the thinking and decision-making and living for him, as if he could check himself out of his body and give the keys to someone else.]

I should go get something for my back. It's hurting like hell. [He hasn't just sat with misery sober for a while. It's taxing, and at some point he's just going to buckle under it. He doesn't want that to be in front of Revan. Either way, he feels he's going to disappoint her, either by collapsing or by retreating again from this dark place.

He pauses a good moment before taking his hand back.] I'll see you around. You want my advice, ditch that book and get one that don't have the word "classic" anywhere on the jacket.