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TennyoCeres84
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Post by TennyoCeres84 »

Given your extended time away from Meris, how did you readjust to being with her again? I imagine it probably took a certain amount to familiarize yourselves with one another, right?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"If anything, I'd imagine the adjustment required was larger on her side than mine, honestly. Even when I'd convinced myself I'd given up hope, I hadn't entirely given up on her. Realizing I was safe again, and with the one woman I'd ever have felt at ease with, allowed me to bring several defense mechanisms down. For the first week, I'd be crying when I wasn't sleeping. When I didn't do either of those things, I'd either cook up schemes to try and live it up with my newfound friends and allies or I'd vent centuries of frustration by playing the mastermind on my own end of things. I did my best to be aware of her needs throughout all this, but I still had to heal. Heal, and act out thanks to the lifetimes of abuse I'd endured by Chambers' side.

I know Meris probably would've preferred it if I'd stepped on her offered set of train tracks and followed her course from Day One, but I had centuries of pent-up petulant contrarian behavior to expel in a few weeks. I ate what I felt like eating, slept when and how I felt like sleeping - I gained ten more pounds and rediscovered normal sleep schedules, but at least left my previously ruinous psyche behind and set myself on the path to actual improvement. I was almost back to how Meris had first met me, minus the crippling injury - but the scales had been reset. I was ready to move on and to build our conjoined future with her.

I suppose I offered a fairly alien side of myself for that first week - alternating between crippling despair and sudden determination, wanting to sock one on Chambers' arrogant face while still preferring to wine-and-dine my saviors over grandiose plans of resurfaced land masses and of a new nation every noble and progressive Void Weaver could call home... On the other hand, I'd needed that kind of constructive exhaustion for centuries, slipping in bed with my mind buzzing with hope for the future. I wanted to check in on her more often, but part of me argued that our being safe was enough for now. I could afford to spend a week or two as an absent-minded partner, only ever really around to cadge a kiss after breakfast and drape an arm over her shoulders after dark.

I didn't really need to know the newer shades of my wife for that first week - I'd been craving that lost tedium of ours in the Darkhallow. A week of its close cousin was more of an effective panacea than anything Meris could've worked up as a Cantor. A week later, I was shedding these ten extra pounds and sufficiently reinvigorated to really pay attention. What I found made me fall in love with her a second time and made those enthusiastic pipe dreams of mine all the more tangible. All that strength, that selflessness, that wisdom of hers - and how gentle she could be...

Everything had changed, but everything was still functionally the same as we'd left it. Her, my strongwoman and sounding board - and me, too sensitive for my own good and still possessed of a kind of strength I preferred to ignore. The one difference is that I have some catching-up to do to match her strength, and I'm now back to the early resistance's days of fierce optimism.

One of those days, I'll be right beside her on the battlefield - or preferably, on the construction site. She's laid the sickly Augur to rest, as far as I'm concerned; she deserves a lively architect by her side." 
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