zoomingupthathill | RYSLIG; ic inbox

Ho ho ho! Your Secret Santa giftee is LUSAMINE, who I'm mostly sure is also "Aether" on the network. If not, sue me, I guess.

Buy or make Lusamine a gift by December 26, or Santa will come down your chimney and box your ears.

If you need more information, contact me C/O Hawkeye Pierce at Crowe Clinic, and I'll delegate him to tell you to do your own research.

i thought santa was supposed to be kind and helpful
can’t even give a basic description?? come on man wheres your christmas spirit

84 people. 84 people I have to send these messages to. Where's your goodwill and forgiveness?

She's blonde.

technically speaking you dont have to do anything kris but you asked for volunteers so here we are

Technically speaking, none of us have to do anything, ever, but we still keep getting up and walking around.

Also, I don't have her address. The reindeer usually take care of that.

wow i didnt know santa was philosophical i thought you just went ho ho ho and ate cookies and hung around malls

cant poll any of those "reindeer" can you? or is that going against the meaning of the holiday suddenly

A guy can't do all those things AND consider the deeper meaning of life? Very reductive of you, honestly. There's a lot of waiting around in this job, it gets a guy thinking.

Listen, if you can't find her, drop off the present at the Lighthouse or the Clinic or somewhere and we'll see what we can do. But you could at least give it a shot.

now santa assumes too? wow i never said i wasnt going to try just that its hard to get something for someone when you have literally never met them once before
you know secret santa stuff is usually for people who at least have a passing familiarity like classmates or coworkers?

whatever
ill use the network
surely the sanest place to learn about anyone with no possible issues whatsoever right

It's not my fault if people sign up without giving me a full dossier.

[...Or are signed up by other people without their consent. Either way.]

I feel like you're giving Santa an awful lot of attitude for someone who presumably doesn't want a stocking full of coal.

look mr kringle
kris
you know and i know that this isnt for real
i can buy hideous monsters from another dimension
i can buy government experiments that turn innocent kids into psychic weapons
i can buy curses and gods and getting back up again even with no heartbeat

but i draw the line at santa claus

i know this is all a game so dont treat me like a little kid alright?

Wow. That's pretty depressing, you know that?

Didn't you ever watch "Miracle on 34th Street"? I'm not completely sure what the moral of that story was, but I'm ninety, ninety-five percent sure it was "trust jolly old elves who come bearing the true meaning of Christmas, even if they're probably homeless men with severe psychiatric disorders".

[A significant pause.]

Life's full of crap that doesn't make sense and can't possibly be real, but we've all got to live with it anyway. Is it that bad to pretend for a bit that one of the fun delusions is real?

that was just a movie kris
those movies are never the ones that turn out to be true

just cut the crap okay
ill do the stupid secret santa cause otherwise wills gonna give me that face and nag me
and maybe just maybe itll shut you up
i dont need someone else trying to tell me it gets better
i get it enough from the people i DO know and even believe in like forty percent of the time

I'm not trying to tell you it gets better.

I'm trying to tell you it goes from bad to worse to somehow worse than worst, and the only way you survive without going completely screaming insane is to play pretend. Otherwise you end up locked in a padded room five thousand miles from home crying over a chicken that wasn't a chicken, thinking it's the worst thing that you could ever do or see, and then you wake up and you realise that was years ago and it's only been downhill from here, and you can't even die your way out of it, and you're a doctor in a place that won't let anyone get healed, and the only thing, the only thing you can do to try and make this bearable for anyone including yourself is to put on the clown suit and ho-ho-ho your way into a nice little bubble of Christmas cheer. Because it doesn't get better, and being in the reality we're in sucks, so is it really that goddamn hard to play along with a better one?

There. That cynical enough for you?

[ A response doesn't come for a good several minutes. Maybe she won't say anything. Maybe— ]

almost

the other realities suck too

your life goes to shit in an instant
the people you love leave or die
the people who are supposed to take care of you leave or check out

and even when you stop thinking you deserve to be dead too its too late
just thinking its enough to get you cursed
even when miracles do work they dont really
and you end up dead
again

so yeah you almost covered it st nick
sorry about your life

Edited 2022-12-12 01:51 (UTC)

[His heart is buried in a drawer in his office. It still aches, reading that.]

[He's committed this far, so changing the username seems... fair, somehow. Like paying back his outburst by doing what she was asking in the first place.]

I'm a doctor. I don't believe in miracles. "Miracle" is, in my experience, the word people use when they don't want to admit that the aortic transplant that got Private Smith through the night had to come from Corporal Jones.

It's funny. I already didn't believe in miracles, but sometimes I think magic being real makes them even less likely.

What I'm saying is, it's not miracles, and it's not being cursed. Reality doesn't give a crap whether you think you deserve it or not. It just keeps grinding away.

I don't know. I'm not trying to give you a lecture, believe it or not. I just

I tried despair. A whole lot of it. And optimism, and denial, and anger, and once or twice I even tried believing in miracles. None of it made a blind bit of difference. So now I just try to do whatever might make things bearable for now, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I don't know if it's the best way to do it. I just know that things haven't let up for most of a decade now, and if I don't live now, I'm never going to.

But I'll stop treating you like a little kid. It's fine. I can go and annoy Javert instead, he's usually fun to irritate.

[ Oh, hey. Look at that. ]

mask off huh
ok

id agree with a lot you said here believe it or not
except when i say i was cursed i mean actually for real
and when i say miracles i mean it
or like
thats what everyone else said
i dont know i wasnt awake for it

"oh wow she didnt have a heartbeat for over a minute thats not possible" jokes on them i havent had one for over a month now

[ She blinks, after she sends that. That's...okay, weird. She doesn't want to tell anything to this guy. But for just a moment, it felt really good to vent. ]

youre right this is weird
you should just screw off
annoy the cop instead

[Maybe he should. But he's never been good at shutting up, especially not when it kind of seems like someone might need to talk.]

I've got you beat there. I haven't had a regular heartbeat for, oh, five years?

But I don't mean
It's not about whether the curse or the miracle was for real. A lot of the miracles we did at the M.A.S.H. were real miracles, by anyone's measure. Scientific, not magic, sure, but we had a 95% survival rate, and if you ask anyone in the field, that's a goddamn miracle. But then you see the kids you stitch up trying to learn how to walk with one leg and half their guts gone, or you see them pack the ambulance back to the front, and even the most bona fide miracles just don't feel that miraculous.

Does that make any sense? It's been a long day. Long few years, I guess.

What I'm trying to say, the thing with miracles, is that they don't get you very far. And they don't care what happens after the miracle, or what you did to get there. And if you do 95% of a miracle, you didn't do crap.

But the way you're talking about it, it's like you think you got cursed BECAUSE you decided it was worth being alive, and, I don't know, maybe you did. I'm not a wizard. I'm just a meatcutter. But I've seen a lot of people who got less "cursed" and more "shot in the belly and doused with napalm", and it's pretty striking how much you sound like some of the kids I did miracles on back in the day.

Christ.
I don't know. I'm not a goddamn shrink, either, even when I try to be. And I didn't mean to tell you my life story, either. I'm going to go annoy the cop and leave you alone.

[Another long pause, before the need to say something gets too much, and he grabs his computer and quickly types one more thing.]

Tea and empathy. I know chaplains can be full of crap but Mulcahy was right about that one. And I know you probably don't want to talk but if you ever do I'm pretty good at keeping schtum

[...Against all the evidence of him continuing to type.]

[ There's things she could say.

That it was taking too long to believe she could live again, that was the problem.

That it was a miracle, had to be a miracle, if it's what she thinks happened—of course El could make a miracle, El could—really happened.

That if he doesn't have a heartbeat, does that make him like her? Is there a way to stop feeling cold all the time? To stop feeling empty?

But she's snapped back to attention and wizened up to whatever bullshit about this laptop's goading her to open up. It's like those letters. Easier to put down your feelings when you aren't looking someone in the face. She'll have to be careful about that. ]

you kinda suck at this
you know that right?

Yeah. I know.

[Really, honestly, what else is there to say? He's painfully aware that he sucks at this. He's even more painfully aware that nobody else is going to do it.]

[Helplessness is the worst part of this place, he's decided. It's worse than Korea. At least there, he was useful. He could be a surgeon, and that could be, if not enough, at least something. Sometimes, he saved people. Sometimes, he managed a miracle, even if they all came with strings attached. Here...]

[They don't need a surgeon, in Ryslig. They need psychiatrists, and counsellors, and care workers, and teachers, and most of all, they need someone who can change... anything, for anyone, make this whole mad reality stop grinding everyone into mulch. And he can't do any of that right, let alone all of it. He's just playing pretend: pretend therapist, pretend teacher, pretend administrator, pretend boss, pretend Santa.]

[So, yeah. He knows.]

[ Nothing else comes.

She's expecting it to. He's been talking up- no, typing up a storm, after all. So that kind of response... It's a surprise.

Is it a welcome one? She'd been the one telling him to fuck off. She knows only what he's told her, which almost seems like everything—but it's not, it's never everything. She knows his name is probably Hawkeye Pierce, which is a cooler name than she'd like to consider, and she knows he's been here for a long, long time. Is that enough to reach her hand back to someone who may very well be in the same boat as she is?

Max stares at those three words for longer than she cares to admit.

But in the end, she closes her laptop, and she goes to see if her legs will put up with her making a trip to the skatepark today. ]

RYSLIG; ic inbox

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<MADMAX> cw: suicidal ideation

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WELCOME TO YOUR PRIVATE CHANNEL, MADMAX. FOR SECURE COMMUNICATION, USE 005.08.019.85 * MADMAX has joined 005.08.019.85 <MADMAX> do your thing or whatever <MADMAX>** don't be dumb