(no subject)

[katallison]

OK, so you want to know the scariest thing about homo sapiens as a species? It's not our capacity for violence and horribleness, though that is scary; rather, it's our ability to adapt to the most godawful situations, to accommodate to circumstances that are really, honestly, just hell.

As in. For example. Case in point. If I could somehow go back, say, 32 years, to when my dad was my age, and track him down, and do a whole Ghost of Christmas Future thing and say to him, "Look, 32 years from now, when you're 83, you'll be in a nursing home, basically bedridden, catheterized, tube-fed, mentally wandery and vague but just intact enough to know the awfulness of your situation, with no prospect of ever getting out of there--would you want to go on in that state?" And I god-damn guarantee you his answer would be "Not just no--HELL no." Except that it's been such a long slow slide over the years, he's failed so gradually and yet so totally, that at each point along the way he's come to accommodate his status as something normal, as OK.

I find myself this evening tempted to write the God-Awful dS AU, the one in which yes, Robert Fraser gets shot, but you know what? He doesn't die--instead, he survives, incapacitated, maybe paraplegic or quadriplegic, never again the man he was, stuck in a nursing home in Ass-End, Canada, cranky and bored and mentally fading. And he guilts Fraser regularly about not visiting him more, about not doing more for him, about not getting him out of there, and Fraser, god knows, visits as often as he can, and if he uses the excuse of the job from time to time, we won't fault him for that when for chrissake he's hauling miscreants over the pass in a blizzard--except he faults himself, he feels regularly hammered with guilt for not somehow managing to patrol the entire northwest quadrant of Canada and also make it in to the nursing home on a regular basis, and when he does visit, Bob is all wandering and incoherent and helpless, and Fraser does what he can to settle the old man down and help him remember stories of the old days, and he talks to the staff about being more attentive, and when he does finally leave, he strides down the corridor with the stink of piss and shit in his nostrils and the sound of the demented patients shrieking over and over in his ears, and he's full of resentment, and hating himself for the resentment, and ...

Yeah. I'm not writing that one, but I'm thinking it. And please, whatever gods there be, let me die fast and clean.

Comments

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

I am so sorry. *hugs* And it is scary, that adaptability to the unbearable, but it's also probably the only thing that's kept us from mass extinction.