Ryslig: IC Inbox

[thegreatmysterio]

WELCOME TO YOUR PRIVATE CHANNEL, DISILLUSIONED. FOR SECURE COMMUNICATION, USE 072.19.136.64 *** DISILLUSIONED has joined 072.19.136.64 <DISILLUSIONED> It's Beck. Yadda yadda, leave a message at the beep, I assume you know the drill. <DISILLUSIONED> Currently afk, will respond as promptly as possible or within three business days, etc etc. <DISILLUSIONED> For emergencies, oh you are *so* in the wrong place.

Comments

[thegreatmysterio]

The first time he lost somebody was bad luck. The second... wasn't. It was just fate looking and laughing wildly as everything crumbled apart.

Quentin doesn't expect much of an answer from Norman as he watches the other man blankly. Even if the kid's told the guy plenty, he'd be surprised in the Snap ever got brought up. It's a footnote for Peter. For Quentin, it was five long years of his life.

"Survive-? Not get put through the grinder anymore? I don't know what you want me to say here." Quentin shrugs, eyes shifting towards Norman's glass. "My knowledge is useless here. I'm useless. I can't do half of what I want without reinventing the wheel. My work's gone, Mysterio's finished. What's left after that?"

[certaininequities]

"I may not understand completely, but I sure do know what you mean about reinventing the wheel. It's tough. I've had so many people tell me to pick up a hobby, and sometimes it makes me so frustrated." His nose crinkles, but there's no threat of escalating anger, just his own disgruntled feelings. "People like you and I with skill sets rooted so deep in progress that isn't here yet- we had one and now - poof."

He sighs. "I'm gonna try to make do with what I've got. ... You made holographic stuff, though, that's ... well." He makes another face, one that says he knows Quentin doesn't need HIM to tell him how hard that would be.

"Never know, though. Might run into a type of alloy or crystal that'd do the trick for a good laser array."

[thegreatmysterio]

"And what if I...don't, anymore? Maybe I should shut the door and call it done." Quentin replies, barely moving his shoulders in a small shrug. It weirdly feels safer to stay small, unnoticed. "I got fired over it. I apparently died for it, if what the kid said is true."

He laughs mirthlessly, drawing himself up to scrub a hand down his face. He doesn't touch the drink again. "Quit while I'm ahead, right? Seems like a sign by now."

[certaininequities]

Norman sighs slowly, but it's not frustration, just the sound of someone thinking over a complex puzzle. He lets his gaze wander around the simulation, considerate in not wanting to stare at Quentin.

He died for his own project, too, according to Octavius and Marko - or would have? could still? It was hard to say. But he knows that losing the Goblin along with May and his own Peter's belief in him, that he could be better, were what was largely driving him to start on a new track here on the peninsula. Beck needed something like that, but the moment of penance, of realization that he'd done wrong, hadn't happened yet. He was still hurt, still angry. Pushing him in a different direction now could make it worse - something he'd learned from so many arguments with Caroline and Harry both. Maybe laying the rest on the table was a good idea, he decided.

"I know ... he told you that Octavius dies. But so do I. You're not alone in having to wrap your mind around that, around another chance. What you do with that is up to you, and I'm not going to try to tell you otherwise. Just ... think on it for a little while. Something will come to you. And when it does, if you do need my help, you have it: not as a hand-out. As an offer, an act of good faith and support."

Because his biggest failing as the Goblin lay in thinking he was the only smart one in the room, the only capable one. He didn't trust enough to let anyone support him, to be concerned enough to pull him off the path of self-destruction. He considers adding that, but keeps it to himself for the moment.

cw: vague disregard for his own health-? iffy mental health on display

[thegreatmysterio]

Quentin grimaces, leaning back in his chair. He feels more exhausted than anything else. Unsure of how to even phrase the shit coiling in his chest at the moment. His tongue is still loose enough the inclination to cough something up is- there.

It's unsettling. If he tries to ignore it he'll be back where he started, though.

"...It's not the death that gets me." Quentin begins slowly, trying to unwind things in a way that could make sense to Osborn. Cuts to the point as cleanly as he can without spilling too much. "I lived with that what-if for five years. I also lived with... Mysterio for that long, but that's not like- him. All I had was my work and that role, for that period. Neither apply anymore."

It's on the tip of his tongue to say something like I just want to go home, but that's too much. Nothing Norman needs to hear, as he glances at the other man. He doesn't need pity. "They were everything I had. Now I can't have either, even if I'm stuck in this goddamn costume the rest of my life. What if nothing ever comes, and I'm just- this?"

Just the bug that'll get squashed, again and again, because everything he's ever hid behind is gone. Just... a washed up has-been, and that's being generous.

[certaininequities]

For the briefest moment, when Quentin says 'that's not like- him', he wonders if Mysterio was something like the Goblin, but that's ridiculous. He immediately realizes he's trying to put too much of himself into the read and tries to listen more objectively. Five years - that was how long that Snap thing had lasted. So Quentin had done a lot of 'what if it had been me' thinking, by the sound of things. Norman knows the feeling of being trapped with one's own darker thoughts - he'd chased enough of them down with bourbon back home, hadn't he? About Caroline, about his parents, Harry, school, all of it. What If It Happened Differently.

But what if nothing ever comes... wasn't that the question hanging over all of them, their own Swords of Damocles in one way or another? But Quentin was asking it as though he didn't still have several good decades ahead of him, as Norman himself did. As though all that was left to do was sit around.

"You created Mysterio when you didn't think you had anything, too, didn't you? You never know. There could be something else between your ears waiting to shake loose."