stag⋅nate - [stag-neyt] ; verb - to stop developing, growing, progressing, or advancing.
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--in which Derek and Casey stagnate--
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Ever since the whole prank gone half wrong (unknown to Derek) and the sudden confessional (known to Casey) things between them have exist in limbo. It's a polite give and take because there's so much fear about what will happen if they make one wrong move and step out of the ordinary and mundane. It's not like they are expecting major fireworks but it's just a fear of the unknown which has them in it's vice grip.
She talks , he listens ( never insults), she listens when he talks ( and there are no snide remarks) and the whole family sitting at the dinner table watches these exchanges with trepidation, half expecting one or the other to cave and return to their normal selves. They don't expect it; they want it, even if it's like asking judgment day and the apocalypse to come all at once.
But that's the problem.
They have never been normal. They are Derek and Casey, and they are abnormal and it's their thing.
And for the first time, normal is not what they need, it's the abnormal to balance this awkward give and take, which is really to bland and dreary, so unlike them.
It's almost like they are not living and have been replaced by pod people.
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In the night she lies on her bed, forcefully closing her eyes and everything that he said replays itself, automatically. She picks everything apart and dissects every word, trying to find meaning in something she feels she'll never be able to comprehend, the dynamic of being them.
It's always like this. She plots revenge and that too of the dastardly kind and then he comes traipsing along and reveals everything in that heart wrenchingly vulnerable manner of his and all her plans go down the drain, up in smoke, whichever metaphor tickles your fancy. (And he's even making her doubt if she knows her metaphors well!)
But sitting in that cupboard, she heard everything she always though would come from someone else's mouth. And though she secretly did hope that someday it might come from his mouth, now that it has come, she does not know what to do.
It's like getting all the ingredients for a crème brulee and then not knowing how to make it.
(Now he has her spewing lame food metaphors. Will this torture never end?)
She wipes out all thoughts of him or at least tries too because there's never a moment when Derek is not in her thoughts and tries to go to sleep because the night is the mother of council or so said Tsarvena Maria, wife of Andrei the Archer, who by the way is a Russian fairytale character.
Is it a sign of madness that she's quoting Russian fairy-tales?
If so, then she blames Derek.
Because when in doubt blame Derek.
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Things have never been this bad. How so one might ask. Well for starters he's finds himself unable to hijack the bathroom. It's a tragedy of truly epic proportions that he just cant stride in there in his pajamas and then sit on the toilet seat and pretend not to squint through the not very see through shower curtains.
Once again one might ask, albeit rhetorically, why?
It's not because the sky is so high (god, his humor has sunk to god-awful levels, somebody smite him in the heart.) It's because he's afraid the moment he see's her, he'll deliver a confession that will shame him for the rest of his life, cause haven't you got the memo? Derek Venturi does not do sentimentality in any form, verbal or physical. Sometimes there's the mental but that's reserved for Smarti purposes only okay and maybe Casey.
Screw it all, okay he does the mental sentimentality thing for Casey but letting her know of that is the equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb.
The scars will forever stay.
Also he can't even bring himself to barge into her room. He thinks of – gasp – knocking. Damn that stupid David for asking him stupid questions and making him lay out everything and drawing him out of a shit load of denial.
Because in his head, Casey was in the department of 'never gonna happen'. A person has to be blind not to see the amount of animosity she has for him. It can be calculated in truckloads. She hates him pure and simple. And she keeps harping on how he's not a brother.
Well, he's fucking trying, but it's kind of hard when he's hijacking her bathroom just to look at her through the shower curtains, half boiled with drops of water running down her body and hair plastered to her head.
(It's the stuff of fantasies and daydreams.)
Cause how fucked up is that he likes her and she wants him as a brother? Very much. So much so that even he with his sometimes hazy morals knows this is not the way things are supposed to be.
And it's in moments like these that he hates her so much that he loves her. Because she makes him question himself and fills him with a self-loathing that nothing will dispel, not even Marti's sweet assertions that he's the best person of the world.
He hates her so much that he loves her and he hates himself so much that he wishes she would love him.
(He even asked Santa and he even was a good boy. Do you know how hard that was? Of course the wish not being granted taught him that wishes never come true, fairytales don't exist and reality sucks.
Welcome to the real world.)
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She can't sleep. She tried really hard. But it's a little difficult when Derek plays in her head in glorious Technicolor, complete with that wonderful head of hair, which is always artfully mussed to look like it just happened by accident.
And contrary to what Tsarvena Maria says, the night isn't the mother of council. Screw her, she probably never had to deal with someone like Derek, what with having a nice husband and magic at her fingertips and all.
His confession, it strikes a chord in her. Because all these years she's been thinking she's the one that's wrong, because he treats her like she doesn't even exist and she thinks that at least if she can ask him to act like a brother, maybe he'll just talk to her more and like her and treat her as someone who he see's and maybe then she can think that is' finally okay to like him.
Because it's easier and it's less heartache to like someone when they at least know that you exist right?
Because pining, that darling is so over-rated.
(But doesn't change that fact that she still pines, every single fucking moment of her life. That she has been pining for the past four years ever since she saw him in a tuxedo at the wedding, of her mother and his father, making them step-siblings.
And finally because she's always been a little behind the times.)
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They are still in limbo and they know that each won't make the move because they are waiting for the other and because courage is on a low because vulnerability is on a high.
They talk, they live – but not really – and they exist and all the time, there's a sound of something cracking and it's not their hearts.
That's the sound of fragile glass like hope breaking, little by little.
I'm in limbo about this, just like they are. This is the half part where I don't know what to do know but I know where I'm going. Does that make sense? Please don't kill me. By next chapter, I will make sure I'm out of this frakking limbo.
Oh and the quote comes from the Russian fairytale, 'Go I Know Not Where, Fetch I Know Not What.' It's a nice tale if you have the time or inclination to read it. :)