milliways_bar | (no subject)

"Thanks," Steph says, absently.

She sits in silence for a moment before remembering she wanted to talk.

"...so. What's up?"

"...Stars. See the Seven, there?"

If she thinks he sounds melancholy, she would be correct. But he flashes her a slight smile. "What's 'up' with you?"

"We call that the Big Dipper," Steph says. "Or the Gourd. There are these myths about the slaves following it home, or something, I'm not very clear on that..."

She didn't pay much attention at school. Or, y'know, live to graduate.

"I'm okay. I. Well. I just ... I just found out a friend died."

He stills himself. "I'm sorry." His voice is low, sad, sincere. He has known loss in his life. "Someone you knew well?"

"Yeah." Steph's not really taking it very well; she's not sure she can even understand it yet. A world without Kon is ... just wrong.

"He was ... he was a hero. I used to - I used to be in his fanclub, I had a poster... and then we met, and he came here for a while, and he - helped me through some really tough times..."

Fanclub?

Faramir would wonder about that one later.

"How did he die?"

The world of DC Comics is really a special sort of place.

"Saving the world," Steph says, hugging her knees. "Bart said he was fighting a - a villain from another world. But he did it."

He rests a hand, very lightly, on her shoulder.

"To die a hero is an enviable thing, if death is ever enviable. You must be proud to have known him."

"I wish I still knew him," Steph says softly, blinking fast. "He - I can't imagine how awful that must have been. He never asked to be a hero. Not like I did, or Robin, or Batman. He was just ... born like that. And ... now it doesn't even matter." She peels her mask off and brushes quickly at her eyes.

Mopety mope mope. ... At least it's taken her thoughts off breaking up with Zuko?

"It always matters," he says quietly, squeezing her shoulder. "I have seen here that death is no ending. My own brother found me here after his death, and has found love... Death does not undo the acts of a life lived well." Or lived badly, he thinks, an image of his father's face coming unbidden to his mind, a vision of... flame... the scent of oil and embers...

He shakes his head clear. "Heros are the choices they make. In a sense, he did ask for it -- by acting rightly. If the world were clearer, perhaps all people would be heroes. All we can ever do is try."

"He hasn't come here, though," Steph says in a wobbly little voice. "I thought - the door had just stopped appearing for him, or something. But - Bart says it's been a year. I didn't even know."

"Hope," Faramir whispers without feeling it, and cringing at having to council anoter with falseness. "Or... grieve. Perhaps... one allows the other."

Yet the words on his tongue taste like sandpaper, and say as little. They are empty.

But he means it when he rubs her back under the cloak.

His words may lack heart, but his intentions are good.

Steph's more comforted by the intentions, really, anyway.

"I'll be okay. I'm just ... it's just ... kind of a shock, I guess." Finding out that one of your friends has been dead for a year. Yeah. "I'm ... I just wish I'd ... I don't know. Done something. I should have. I should have not fucked up in the first place, maybe I could have saved him if I hadn't been - dead myself..."

Oh, woe.

"No one can prevent an unknown future, and it is folly to regret..."

But the words trail off as he realizes, even as he whispers them, that they are hypocracy of the deepest kind. He sighs and says, as quiet as the white noise in the snow, "I'm sorry."

Steph is quiet for a little. It's hard to talk, anyway. Eventually, she controls her breathing with an effort of will, and puts her mask carefully back on. Night-vision, plus, warm eyebrows. Warm eyebrows are so very underrated.

"So ... yeah. That's my story. How 'bout you?"

"My story..." He laughs a little too harshly. "Why is it something that should be shadowing me now? Why now, of all times? It was two years ago. My story can be found in a book. Ask Bar for it."

Which is why he's never actually told it to anyone but his brother. Never since the anniversary of his father's death almost two years ago (though it had been only months for him, then...) had he spoken of what had happened.

"I," he says to Stephanie, "am a fool, and plagued by occasional bouts of foolish melancholy. I have no excuse for it but foolishness."

Steph looks over at him, anxious.

"I don't think you're a fool," she says, earnestly. "There's - Two years isn't a very long time."

Two years is not long enough for Steph's nightmares to stop haunting her. Why should it be different for Faramir?

"If - if you do want to talk, I'm always around."

He looks at her, but his eyes are far away. Light a fire in my flesh... the White City is falling, the White Wizard rides, and in the end, even my death is not a great enough sacrifice.

"You wish I had gone..."

Had he ever even pretended to love his second son?

"It is... not an easy thing to speak of."

Finduilas...

He blamed me for her death.

"And it is... very complicated. I should not burden you with ancient memories."

She'll understand daddy issues, if no more than that.

"I understand." Now it's her turn to reach out to him. "Really, though. Sometimes it helps to talk about it."

Faramir is quiet for some time, staring at the stars. When at last he speaks, it is... hesitantly, and softly, as if he hopes the wind will muddle his words or tell him which ones ar the right ones.

"In two years, it seems I should have forgotten... but there are things that seem to have happened only yesterday. A month before I came here..." He takes a deep breath, steadying himself. "My father died. It was the worst days of a war whose ending would decide the fate of all men in my world. The tide had seemed to turn against us. I... I had been struck by a poisoned dart while leading a suicide charge at my father's bidding. He in his madness ordered that a pyre be built in the place where the dead are laid to rest. I was saved, by valiant and treasonous efforts by a hobbot and a guard named Beregond. My father was not."

There is more to the story. Much more. The way his eyes die when he speaks of his father... the way he sits stiff as a statue and stares seeing nothing... there is more to the story.

Steph waits, quietly, hand steady on his shoulder. She'll wait until he's talked it out.

And then she'll let loose on his dad. Fucking parents. Never get it right.

"Do not misunderstand me -- I loved my father." Oh, more than she can comprehend. "It was not returned. I think... I think he blamed me... in a sense... for my mother's death. He thought my birth weakened her somehow. Weakened the whole of our bloodline. He never tired of reminding me of my own weaknesses. But my mother... he loved her. I can remember them together, though I was but five years of age when she passed on." He sighs. "She loved the sea..."

The Prince turns to Steph. "I talk too much. I am sorry."

"No - no, it's fine."

She hitches herslef a little closer, so she can lean gently against his side. (Steph has very little concept of others' personal space.)

"I know what it's like. Fathers. I mean." Well, her father didn't love her mother, or Steph, much, but Steph loved him. When she didn't hate him. It's not the same situation, but she understands daddy angst.

He frowns and absently puts an arm around her shoulders, the cloak still covering them both. If it is possible to touch another person with no more romantic or emotional undertones than if they were a stone wall, he very nearly manages.

Nearly, but not completely. A part of him is starved for some kind of closeness. A part of him he doesn't often admit to himself.

"Your father was... difficult?"

"Well... he never set me on fire," Steph admits, sighing. "But he ... he was my father."

So that made it okay when he tried to push her off the roof, or let a pedophile babysit her, or gave her to his friends to use as a hostage.

No, he didn't think much of her. But Steph's never been able to sort out whether she hated him or loved him.

"I ... I used to hover between thinking he was evil and thinking he was weak. It's like my whole life, I was torn between those two. Evil, or just weak. And then he died, and I ... gave up, I guess."

Then she came here, and the men of Security have, often without knowing it, substituted as father figures - and done a much better job than Arthur Brown could have dreamed of. Or Batman.