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revunant · 7 months

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THE BUILDING THAT HOUSES AZARI'S LITTLE OFFICE is under new management. Management by a different kind of person, who sees nothing but unnecessity and unprofessionalism in frivolous things (in a medical setting, no less!). The room smells like paint, the shelves are empty, the floor is bare. Even the curtains are Venetian blinds now. Cold and white. Jean can’t speak for the entirety of her clientele, but he knows it brings peace to at least one among them.

“You say you’ve had a breakthrough?”

Breakthrough seems like too grand a word; let alone that a breakthrough isn’t something he should be able to have for himself. Pieter had breakthroughs. Teddy speaks of his hope for them. Azari hopes for them too, he's sure.

Jean looks into his lap and begins to curl his fingers between the tendons of his right wrist. It’s the third time this session that Azari has had to reach over the coffee table to press a stress toy into his grip - a small ball covered in firm spikes, designed for him to cup into the palm of his hand and squeeze, to chase the same sensations with less risk of doing damage. Compliant, he does just that, but he can’t help but cling to the sharper, slightly more feverish sensation of the welts streaking his arm.

Shameful. Stop that.

“...My son found an old gear a few weeks ago."

It's a slow start, as he tries to assure Azari without words that he's not trying to change the subject. "I put it in my wallet. I never ended up taking it out, and now, by accident, it comes everywhere with me.” He reaches into his pocket to drive the point home, pulling the ‘treasure’ out of the slot where cash should be, laying it on the coffee table - brass, gleaming, but scratched and gouged and eroded by age and duress. “I’ve taken to using it as a bottle opener, or to pry things apart. It works well. And it doesn’t complain when I use it for those things.”

Azari has been very good at entertaining him, his spiels, his thought processes, the warped, twisting ways in which he’s so very wrong about the world, about other people, about himself. But this makes even Azari raise her eyebrow, egging him to continue without having to use the words - a silent, trepidatious go on.

“It's being used for something it wasn't made for. Maybe it was better at what it was made for, but it does just fine now. And it…” There’s a frustrated pause, in which he wrestles with how best to get his point across. This point that he’s been turning over in his mind all damn week, pacing around it in circles like an animal maddened by hunger - because he tends to need to practice his logic to stand a chance of it being understood, and it brings with it a kind of manic desperation. Sometimes it’s like he has to translate every thought he has into a language he doesn't speak. “It doesn’t ask me why I don’t treat it like any of its owners before me. It doesn’t ask me why it’s not still part of a machine. It certainly won’t punish itself for its inadequacy. The only one who can do that is me.”

He shudders at the absolute wrongness of comparing himself to something absolutely above him, even in a scenario as abstract as this one.

“One day it’ll probably run its course. Be worn too thin in the places it’s useful, and not be useful anymore. I’ll probably throw it out. It won’t care. If it could think, it would probably wonder what it could have done better, and thank me for a time well-served. It won’t anguish over not having been good enough, and it won’t bargain for another chance.”

Azari, still quiet, giving him ample space to drive his point home, watches as he picks the gear up and slots it back into his wallet, and in turn slots his wallet back into his jacket’s lining.

Suddenly Jean is aware that he’s spoken for too long, made stark by their usual arrangement being the exact opposite; Azari asks him questions, and then usually asks him clarifying questions, and then re-phrases her questions in a way that doesn’t make him feel threatened, and then tells him what he needs to do. The only reason he’s stuck this therapy thing out for so long, other than probation hanging a threat of imprisonment over his head like a piano on a rope, is that he’s been mostly successful in re-framing it as such;

a new set of orders, a new way of following them.

It’s led him here. Even the harmless spike-ball in his fist is being gripped so tightly that he can feel the points beginning to bruise into the flesh of his palm, leaving a bone-deep ache that’ll still be there tomorrow.

“...I’ve been unfair.” He sounds so much less sure of himself now, no longer reciting something rehearsed. Vulnerability, even in small amounts, has been such a novel kind of terrifying; not just a nakedness, but a woundedness, a vivisection, carved open and peeled apart and just begging for parts of him to be ripped away by the handful. “To Teddy. In expecting him to be this…amalgamation of everyone who’s ever-”

well-practiced, well-trained, he skips over the word owned, and then the word handled, conversation as a minefield. conversation as a dance,

“-had me before him.”

Recognition passes over Azari’s features like a cloud revealing the sun. “It’s not uncommon to expect, or even crave, mistreatment from non-abusive partners after having been mistreated for so long. I’m not surprised that-”

She’s interrupted not by Jean talking over her - he tries to keep that to a minimum - but by him shaking his head and frowning as though in some kind of pain. “It’s not about mistreatment." I thought you knew. I've told you this. "Nobody’s mistreated me, there was no- It was about purpose. It is about purpose. But it’s clicked. The gear can't just be put back in a machine. I couldn’t do the job I did before, either. But I’m doing this one now, so I need to be good at it. Instead of trying to be good at the old one.”

Azari bundles away the urge to re-assert that he’s not an object, and therein is where this analogy begins to unravel, in favour of pursuing another, less futile, thread. “What is the job you’re doing now?”

It’s not a difficult question, but it’s difficult to gauge which answer to give. Jean is all filter. When he says things that are poorly received, it’s because his concept of right and wrong and good and bad and harmful and benign are so warped that no amount of wrangling with consequences and contingencies could have predicted the poor reception. Every cruelty laid into him had, until the moment he’d divulged them, seemed so normal, so innocuous - and now, only ever met with disgust, with outrage. It’s okay. He’s a quick learner when it counts, and one by one, he learns the things that need to be kept un-divulged.

The only thing is- Azari is an outlier. Jean can tell when she disapproves of the things he says, when she thinks he’s wrong, or mistaken, or being dishonest; but there’s never disgust, never outrage. She may think of him the way the world outside this office thinks of him, but she certainly expresses it differently.

She listens. The lack of reprobation cuts just as sharply with her as it does with anyone else - always, always, this heavy throbbing pain in his chest, waiting for bad news that these days never seems to come - but at least she can always muster the courage to look him in the eye, and at least she so rarely hurts on his behalf. He can’t trust her with everything, far from it, but there’s an inkling, there, that she knows what he is, and how he must be handled.

“Whatever’s wanted of me,” he says simply. “I just don’t always know what that is.”

“Your husband loves you.” She’s looking down at her notes, but Jean can tell from the stillness of her eyes that she’s not reading anything. “What’s wanted of you is for you to be happy and healthy, and for you to treat yourself less like a machine, and more like a human being.”

They’ve been over this. They’ve been over this.

But Jean grows weary of trying to correct what has been left so blatantly crooked. Maybe if he keeps righting it, it'll stick in place eventually - but while Pieter instilled in him the resilience, the endurance, the determination to do just about anything over and over and over forever until it works or the sun itself goes cold and dark (whichever comes first), Jean can’t bear to be looked at like some small, broken, weeping thing any longer. It’s always felt wrong. But it’s rasped at his skin for too long, and the bleeding is heavy, and the bones are exposed, and every time someone does it, it feels a little bit like they’re actually, earnestly trying to kill him.

“So I’ve been told.”

Azari sighs. She tries not to sigh at her clients, but sometimes it’s just so hard.

“You, in your head - you’re the gear.” Long has she been aware that in his winding analogies, he’s always an it - a thing, not a human, never even an animal. His husband, when comparing him to things, has always at least done him the service of imagining him as something living. “You’ve been repurposed for something new. And like the gear, you’ve accepted it, because you think you’re incapable of complaining, or protesting.”

Solemn, he shakes his head. “That’s the problem. I’ve been protesting this whole time.”

Of course- she’s seen it herself- his heels being dug in, while his frayed, sparse support system tries to wrench things from his grip that have only ever caused him unfathomable harm, only sometimes succeeding, but always leaving claw marks behind. Like a dog having poison pried from its jaws, heedless to the fact that it is poison. And she only sees him for an hour a week.

“He asks things of me, sometimes, and I have to decline, because it conflicts with something someone else asked of me, years ago. And this was what always made sense to me. But his orders-” Azari’s eyes practically flash at him from over the coffee table, urging him to course-correct- “-his wishes are more important, because they’re now. I should be pleasing him. Not someone who's been dead for fifteen years.”

There’s a tricky precipice. Azari is at war with what to tell him, as she often is when he stumbles upon the right conclusion for all the wrong reasons. It’s not this that’s the issue; it’s the real risk of him shying away from the revelation if he’s asked to rework his approach to it. If she had known she’d be this stumped, this often, she’d have tried to shrug his case onto someone else’s shoulders.

Not that she’d abandon him now that she knows him, and his family. Jean winds up to try something new.

“Have you ever had something that belongs in the kitchen just end up in the shed one day? A knife, maybe. It’s got oil and paint and all kinds of stuff on it now, and it’s rusty, so you can’t possibly put it back where it came from. It’s not good enough for that anymore. But maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t just want to throw things away, so you put it in an empty plant pot and only ever use it when you need to pry something open.”

He is the knife in this one, too - Azari sees the pattern before it's even conceived. She’s not quiet by choice now, and she keeps her eyes stubbornly on her notebook, knowing how much Jean squirms under a sympathetic gaze.

“Maybe you tell yourself you’ll clean it up and sharpen it and put it back in the kitchen where it belongs.” He’s trailing again, fettered by that fear of being opened up, torn away in handfuls, by fingers less kind than hers. “But it’s never going to happen. It’s easier to get a new one.”

When the silence stretches long enough that Azari’s sure there’s nothing else he wants to say, she leans forward and places her hand palm-up on the table between them, offering contact without expressly asking for it, the only way she’s found Jean’s able to refuse something unwanted. He refuses it now, as he often does, but she still dares speak, despite the ache in her throat.

“And would you rather be thrown away?”

A pause. She’s almost scared he’s sensed it for a moment, sharp and perceptive and crushingly vigilant as he can be - the pity wringing her dry. It's how he'd see it, but it's not pity. Unbeknownst to Jean, unimaginably to Jean, she doesn’t see him as small or broken or a thing, but as another person in need of help. She’s doing her best to offer it, as is her job, but a little bit beyond that, too. She goes a little bit beyond for everyone who needs it.

“I used to.” The spike ball has been abandoned, his forearm the target of his tension once more. “And if it happens, I’ll let it. But I think what my family needs from me is to stay in the plant pot and occasionally be used to pry something open. That I embrace the purpose I have now, even if it’s not what I was meant for. What I was supposed to be wouldn’t punish itself for that. I won’t, either.”

It’s not music to Azari’s ears. Far from it; an unsteady, discordant heaving and screeching, a whole orchestra tuning their instruments at once. But it’s something, and god help her, something often feels like everything with this one. She withdraws her hand. Together, they reflect, wrap up, and say goodbye.

What goes unsaid is what endures; the unrelenting expectation of that punishment coming from elsewhere. Of that punishment being, unshakeably, the right thing to do. Of her, of his husband, of everyone who has touched his life, being morally wretched in their choice not to strike him down for taking things unowed to him, doing things unowed to him, parading as something, anything, other than a knife in a hand or in a drawer or in an empty plant pot.

They can, must, see it as clearly as he can. They choose to do nothing about it. As is their right.

But the onus to act on it can be his no longer; perhaps never was his. His punishment is to be carried out by those who command him. He is not to receive what he deserves at his own hand. Perhaps the self-flagellation, marks scored into his back as punishment in the absence of all else, had always been an order misinterpreted, and perhaps he’ll see justice for that too. Perhaps the real punishment was the lack thereof, leaving the knowledge of having done wrong to fester.

Still festering, all the worse for the unrelenting softness of the hands that now hold his.

#exhales #umn. idk if this is the longest drabble ive done LMAO i always get self conscious and cut them short #┆entries.

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