(no subject)
People leave.
Deitmar knows it. The woman who first left? He never can remember her face, just her arms and her voice and a song in the night by his bed; and then a day with confusion and tears and goodbye so many times and then silence. And then the next, my boy and gentle hands on his hair and encouraging words and then one day they had to travel and she couldn't come. And then the next one, and the next. . .
People leave. They say goodbye and then there's a hole, a torn gap in trust, a silence where there used to be an exchange. He sits in the bar across from the door, reading a book on his lap, forcing his eyes to travel over the words again and again until something in his brain used to acquiring information fires and catches the words and he actually follows a page or two, sometimes four before he remembers there's still time and he looks up and there's still just his door on the wall. And then he starts over, scanning from the top of the page to the opposite corner.
People say admittedly nice things, like I am not going to die and not going anywhere and in less than a year they're about to die or gone. He can admit he set himself up for Suzi's threatened departure, and he set himself up for this one. The only one who wasn't going to leave was Birkin. . . and Birkin was stuck in time like a fly in amber, eternally waiting for him to finish healing and come back. He glances at the torn pages he's laid aside from the book, and then puts the thought aside and tries to read again.
They say things that are nice to hear. And then they leave. And the thing he's smart enough to have realized long before is that nothing he can do will stop it. He exhausted everything he could think of, ranging from crying, screaming, bargaining, pleading, trying to go with them, and setting things on fire, by the time he was five. Now he's more dignified: he waits to see if they come back. If they put him through a farewell sequence, he doesn't bother.
Ryan never said goodbye. It's been seventy-two hours since the puppy found him. To him as he understands time, more like a week; all this time for Ryan to come back in which he has not. There's a small chance he's stepped into an eddy of time where it goes more slowly; however (a month for him and Suzi. Six months. Two years. . .) it's gone more quickly for the other accounts he's heard. For all he knows, it's been a week and more and Ryan's quietly etherealized. But he chooses to believe three days needs to pass in the bar before Ryan's time is up; and in that case, the man has two more hours to find the way home.
It has always helped to observe his thoughts as though they were someone else's; it helps now. Thoughts count as a behavior, and the process of an unrewarded behavior dying out is extinction; thinking of a person is a behavior; without the presence of that person the thoughts eventually go away. What he feels in the meantime is irrelevant. Eventually, it will not hurt. If he's not back in two hours, Deitmar will simply close the book on his time with Ryan, shelve it in a closed cabinet, and not hope he's improbably wandered somewhere time goes more slowly. That's really just the same as being a small child huddled under the covers, listening for a song that will take the fear from the dark; it's foolish.
Instead, he reads. Work is not emotion, and he understands intellect. It's good to think of how to engineer a better knee, of how many organisms should go in a food web--and how many rows of teeth should a decent apex predator have? He can't be angry, really, because he did the same thing; he was snatched by an angel; he left. He didn't intend to. It didn't matter. If he hadn't done the same thing, he probably wouldn't forgive Ryan for this; but rationality is his armor and he will be rational.
Two hours are more like half a day, to him, and he finishes the book and works through three different bacterial mechanisms to produce oxygen before he glances at his watch, wordlessly closes the book and notebook, and gets up and goes to the stairs.
Ryan never said goodbye. He's nearly grateful.