Tragedy

 "Give me a hero and I'll give you a tragedy" is a very accurate summary of who Tristan is currently.  We went hot-tubbing last night at his adoptive family's home, and got into some meaningful conversations about whatever we could think up.  And then we got into the subject of water bending.

"I think I know why you can't water bend,"  I said, holding my hands to pretend I was making it flow and bubble and not the jet streams beneath the surface.

"I can, it's just..."

Okay here we go, I thought.  "Ooo!  Can you show me?"

Tristan waded very close to me until his face was inches from mine.  "How...many...times...do I have to say it?"

As he swam back to his side of the tub I remembered what he meant.  He doesn't bend anymore.  What happened in the past stays in the past.  Sorry, I just don't take that as a valid reason for letting go of everything you are.  "I get it, you don't bend anymore."  I sighed and gave it a try myself, but as he reminds me, being able to move a speck of pepper is a major feat in itself, a first in many steps towards being able to lift an entire body into the air.  Secretly I want to learn how to lift a man twice my size so the next time certain individuals feel insistent on being dumbasses, they would think twice after being pinned by an invisible force.  Then I wake up from this wishful thinking and wonder if it's best for me to just not know how to do any of that, and then I remember all the shit my family has gone through and continues to go through, being almost strangled by Tristan in an "episode", subduing a very unstable and clinically mental former friend who loves to smash things with his fists.... I don't know.  It could be useful.

Tristan was deep in thought, the blue light of the pool illuminating his expression.  Have you ever heard of the term "tragically beautiful"?  Well, that's what he looks like when his hair has that mussed up look and his eyes are far off in some memory.  Once in the Chicago Field Museum I saw this bust of a Greco-Roman man beloved by his emperor, and his face was tragically beautiful.  Now I'm not about to say Tristan resembles a marble bust from the ancient days of unrealistic artistry, but there is something not quite human in his expressions.  Something almost angelic, and in times like these, I would dare to say one could accurately paint a picture of a fallen angel and use his face as a muse.  Sad, pained, angry.... It's an interesting mixture.

"I couldn't save him," Tristan said. "The one time I actually needed to use...this," he held up his hand, "and I couldn't.  I couldn't do anything to save him."

No matter how well my mind can travel to places I've never been and see things I would otherwise not see, I cannot imagine the horror Tristan went through as the waves of the tsunami in Indonesia swept over him and his companions.  Truth be told, their location and timing was just so very bad.  The waters came in, and not even the Goran prince could save one of his protectors from drowning.

"You say it's a feat to make so much as a bubble of water," I replied, attempting to comfort him with reason.  "No one would expect you to be able to hold back a tsunami wave."

"I didn't want to hold back the whole wave!  Just..."  He shook his head.  "Just to save him.  So no, I don't bend water anymore."

"That's it?"  What I meant was, is that the only event that has caused this aversion from element-moving?  But the only words that came out were, again, "That's it?"

"That's it?!?"  Tristan couldn't believe me, and I couldn't find accurate words to correct my badly chosen inquiry. "That's it?!?"  He calmed down and gentled his expression, and I said a silent prayer of thanks that he didn't try to kill me over something as stupid as my lack of explanation.  "Believe it or not, Mira, but Gorans are very emotional people-"

I burst out laughing, one of those inappropriate yet uncontrollable fits of laughter that get me into trouble more often than not.

"I'm serious."  He looked a bit hurt, and I immediately sobered.

"I know, I'm sorry, just let me get it out.  I'm sorry," I said as I took a breath to calm the weird nerves.

"As I was saying, Gorans are very emotional people, but they express it differently.  It's outer, it's physical, they express emotion through...well, bending.  And when we think of something related that pains us, or makes us sad, then we can't do that one thing anymore.  Whenever I try to bend water I think of that moment when I couldn't and....I can't."  Tristan shrugged slightly and ran his fingers through the water.

Between fight and flight, I am a fighter all the way.  So is Tristan, which is why I instinctively push him back up when he feels like sitting on the side bench after being winded.  And I mean, full-out shoving.  "That's...well, that's kind of...ridiculous."

He did not like that.

"Look, what happened was horrible," I explained, "but you can't let something, one event, hold you back from doing so much more!"  My mind flashed with phrases like "if he was meant to live he would have lived", "if you were meant to save him you would have saved him", "sometimes we have to be reminded of how powerless we really are in order to become greater in ourselves"...but all of it seemed useless to someone hell-bent on blaming himself for another's death.  "I just think that it's foolish to run from what can make you stronger."

I like to think his deep decent into thought was over that phrase, which to my ears sounded wiser than I intended to be.  Weird, is how it sounded in that sense.  But again, many things will make him go into the "tragically beautiful" mode so I let it be.

One of the many subjects I had thought about getting a degree in was psychology, mainly so I could help Tristan recover from his years of, well, absolute hell.  The more I thought about the assignment I was given by CO and Jake, the more it occurred to me that while I am to make sure Tristan lives and is looked after, my main part of being his protector is the care and keeping of his mind.  His greatest enemy is himself, because no one can bring him to his knees in surrender faster than he can.  Two entire civilizations, both occupying entire planets (or a ship the size of one), depend on him to bring "peace and prosperity".  Prophecy and expectations aside, I can't just sit by and watch someone as great of a person as he is fold in on themselves and disintegrate into nothing.

Tristan was a bit skeptical of this theory when I shared it with him in the hot tub, but more in a joking way than actual flat-out "hell no".  And I admit, I haven't handled him as well as he deserves, and it's taken some work on myself to get past the many obstacles that flew in my face upon finding out who he was in the minimal sense.  Before I could be any help to him I had to get over the fact that Jake was really gone, that Tristan is someone entirely different, and that he tried to destroy every bit of my sanity so I would be committed and forever imprisoned in a padded room.  That last part kind of makes me laugh just a little.  His one mistake was sending Jake to do the job, for instead of destroying me Jake taught me how to be stronger, how to fight back.  But then by returning home Tristan forced Jake to leave (which is up for debate because Jake didn't have to leave the state entirely, he could have assumed a new identity and stuck around), and that is what cracked my self-control.  I told/yelled at Tristan repeatedly that he now succeeded in his goal to make me insane because he took away the last bit holding me together.

After about a year of dealing with that, I somehow got it together and numbed myself to the capitulation that is Tristan.  He swears he never uttered anything close to the words, but about three months ago after taking me by surprise and thoroughly kissing me, he told me he loved me and even though his primal sexual attraction was to men, I had his heart.  We established that even though we weren't dating and probably wouldn't for a long while, we loved each other very much.  Heck, he even told my best friend he still loved me, always has always will, days before he told me himself.  Some time later we discussed having children together, something we'd wanted for a long while; events that threatened to send him away again made us seriously look at developing a more intimate relationship and having children or at least a child.

Two months later he denied the entire thing ever happened, except for the kissing part.  When I'd asked him at the time it happened why he did it, he said it just felt like the right thing to do.  When I asked him two months later why he did it, he said it was because I wanted it and he just kissed me to give me what I wanted so I wouldn't bug him.  I highly protested that, since at the time I had zero intentions or expectations especially after he'd declared his hatred for me only a few months before THAT.  I don't remember what his response was, and frankly I couldn't care.  This was just typical.  I don't even bother to ask why the hell did he want to have kids with me because I know the response would be something along the lines of "I want to do it with someone I actually know", "you're genetically compatible", "at least that way if something happened to either one of us our kid would have a parent who could train him as a Goran"...all reasons I'd come up with when we were discussing the matter.

I was "forced" to tell his new friend Alex about who we are.  Nicks ordered it, and after a week of protesting Tristan tricked me into doing it.  So yay, yet another person who doesn't need to know now knows we're not entirely normal humans.  My family is excluded from that list, by the way, because haha we all happen to have the same genes.  The only person aside from Alex who doesn't need to know, but does, is Tristan's old roommate who we've mused could be Goran but is a 100% waste of a perfectly good person.  You can't do much with a highly impressionable personality and completely repressed Goran mind.  Alex, however nice she is, has a dark shadow hovering by her that I can't put my finger on.

But apparently I suck as a therapist and since she's studying psychology Tristan can talk to her about his problems.  He says I judge him and she doesn't.  He says it's easier for him to tell her things because she doesn't get on him for being stupid and selfish (okay that's my own wording).  I said ya she's easy to talk to because she doesn't care about anything at all, just like he doesn't care.  Unfortunately he agreed.

You know, everyone is so freaking worried about the Goran prince and not once, ever, has anyone offered routes of support for his guardian.  Nicks emails me and I email him, and the interim CO that stepped in after our CO's death was super nice and offered her support since her brother had similar mental conditions, and I am grateful.  But seriously people, am I invisible?  Had no one noticed that I might actually be someone to watch out for?  Well, yes, but those people tried to kill me.

I bury myself in human studies to get away from my own pain.  Tristan knows how much I hate being a half-breed but no condolences there.  To feel pain and loss and heartache, hopelessness and despair, on the INSIDE where it grips your lungs in an iron clasp and drives you to lash out so fiercely at the people you love.... I hate it.  And I just can't let Tristan waste himself away because we need him, I need him, to be something more.  To be a reassurance, to be a leader, to be everything he once was and even greater.  I'm a lost and confused half-breed living with my own species' prince and waiting for resolution, for vindication, for something to make this all worth it.  I used to think just being loved would make it all worth something, but now that I don't even have that, I don't know what to do.

God is my everything, He is my salvation, my Advocate, my Father, my all.  I was raised to make Him so, and we have a real, deep relationship going all the way back to my birth.  This loneliness I feel is what makes me realize why He would come to Earth as a human.  To say it's not enough just to be fulfilled on a spiritual level would get me lectured by my parents and church leaders, but there's something to be said for physical human contact.  We are beings who need it.  Who crave it.  And to even shake hands with God Himself as you stand in a furniture store looking at tables he made, well, words cannot suffice.  I see His smile and I feel reassured, vindicated, appreciated, loved.

And then I get nudged back to Tristan to continue what God has chosen for us and I feel abandoned, betrayed, and so utterly lost.  Which parts of the past have we not remembered?  The part where he hated me, the part where he tried to kill me, the many parts where he shattered my heart to pieces and stomped all over them?  How about the fact that he refuses to be who he is?  Or that he's wasting his life surrendering to temptation and giving in to weakness?

God turns my head back to see Tristan and I hate what I feel inside.  It's what destroys me, it's what kills me slowly but surely from the inside out.  I try to fight and seal myself from the pain but I can't, it's not who I am, I cannot shut off compassion and empathy which always leads to that horrid state of being that, again, is the most destructive thing of all.  I used to think that Jonah was an idiot for not wanting to go to Ninevah, but nowadays I can understand him.  Why go to a place where you know you will die?

Because we don't know we will die.  Because God always has surprises in store, like when Ninevah suddenly listened and turned around their ways and became amazing.  I keep trying to run and God keeps reminding me that there's always a surprise coming and if I run, I'll miss it.  And I grumble that it better be good, and He just laughs and smiles and makes me watch Tristan for that glorious surprise.

So that's why I believe in him, in the Goran prince.  Because I have to, because he needs to somehow, someway, someday just snap out of it and became who he is.  I shy away from saying "who he/she is meant to be" because if they were meant to be, then they already are.

He just has to realize it.