Magnus Chase (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summerdude) wrote2024-06-11 02:33 pm
summerdude) wrote2024-06-11 02:33 pm
Entry tags:
Just Call Me Interiority Guy [interlude]
cw: nondescript references to Shen Yuan's death
It's different now.
Magnus isn't ignorant of the facts. He knows his own M.O. when the stuff hits the fan: run, focusing just on the next step he needs to take at every turn to keep from tripping and falling flat on his face, with a great and amorphous fear of what the future might hold looming above it all. When he was homeless, he focused on what he needed to do for his next meal, for his next park bench, to dodge the next cop who would like nothing better than to be a dick to a homeless kid with a record. He wanted to survive, but what life would look like in five, ten, fifteen years... that was never something he had the time or wherewithal to consider. His first three years in Valhalla were just battle after battle, quest after quest, an exercise in learning to trust other people again, in learning to let himself rely on them. In learning to actually live for the moment, instead of being laser-focused on each small next step forward. In not just running away to save his own skin, but to also know when to knuckle down and stand his ground and fight.
He hadn't had the time to process his mom's death until he got to Valhalla and had to process his own at the same time, and even then, the processing was curtailed by the fact that he was thrust immediately into escalating and desperate attempts to prevent Ragnarok. And even after they managed to circumvent it for at least a good few decades, there were still daily Battle Practice, and strange little smaller quests, and managing the Chase Space. Life in Valhalla -- at least for an einherji who also ran a shelter for homeless youth -- wasn't exactly slow.
That's one thing Magnus has had to adapt to, here: the slowness and openness of time. He can spend a week just teaching himself how to fix up busted old bikes. He can use his powers, not just for survival, but to grow vegetables and fruits and bodies. He's really, really enjoying learning to grow things even without alf seidr -- to just let them do their thing naturally while he tends to them the way that regular gardeners do. But with all that unstructured time, there's so much space for processing. He knows he's had grumpier spells here than he would back in Valhalla, that he's been more emotionally volatile and clingy than has typically been usual for him, or at least not since - well. Not since middle school at least. He's not ignorant of that. It's weird. It's nothing like the panic attacks that would intersperse his asthma as a kid, but it's still like something burbling up and breaking through: an off-gassing of feelings he thought he knew what to deal with.
In a way -- just like after he, himself, almost died, in those weeks when he was in the greenhouse every day just growing, growing, growing -- it's been a relief lately to have so many next steps to focus on. It's allowed him to tighten up, to keep focused and busy. There's Uncle D's garden, there's Hanguang-jun's garden, there's his own secret training with Lancelot, there's babysitting. And then, of course, there's Shen Yuan's mushroom-fruit-herb-thing body, where he spends every moment of free time, meditating and trying to share the 'summer qi' Shen Yuan had talked about as being particularly good for the bodies. He's also, honestly, been leaning a lot on Alex, spending significantly more time with him every day than they really have since he recovered from that falling sword, feeling a little guilty that he's eating into the time that Alex (and Magnus, too) likes to have to bop around and do his own thing, even though he knows Alex is more than willing to be there for him, with him. And, like, he knows that if Alex never showed up here, he could handle all of this, but...
It's one of the things that are different here, actually. Magnus doesn't have to handle it all on his own. Back in Valhalla, he had friends, and he had people he decided were family, like Hearth and Blitz and Sam. Here, too, he has friends, and people he's decided are family, like Galahad and Hanguang-jun and... well. It's a long list. He's known for years that his strength is his community, and that the best thing he can do for the world is make friends and enable those friends to shine in what they do best. The best way to save the world is as a team, working in concert.
But back in Valhalla, everyone had the same frame of reference, even if they had different attitudes and experiences and beliefs. It was normal to die and to have the trajectory of your life arcing toward the knowledge of your final death. The point was to get to a place of accepting it without letting it -- or the passage of time -- overwhelm you enough that you faded into Ginnungagap. The gods were a necessary and predictable annoyance, like Battle Practice and making sure the Chase Space didn't run out of toilet paper. Magnus knew where he stood in that world. He knew what was expected of him, and he didn't particularly care if he met or exceeded or even fell short of those expectations, as long as Ragnarok was kept at bay and he was true to himself and his people.
He still hasn't figured out where, exactly, he fits into this world. It's not a bad thing — it might even be a good one — but it is different. And not just because there's actual adults here who don't all suck, and who genuinely seem interested in making sure Magnus doesn't have everything on his plate for the first time since his mom died. There are also so many different perspectives and frames of reference and attitudes, enough that it's not really clear to Magnus what people are bent toward here. If there is a shared goal, or if everyone here is also just taking each next small step. There's no Ragnarok here to prevent, no definitive conclusion to work toward or to try and move away from, no concrete clear enemy to fight. It's destabilizing for a guy used to worrying about the future, even if most of his attention is focused on carefully making sure that the ground is solid for each next step forward but not being able to attend to whether it's taking you closer to or further from your final destination. Something is happening, but why? How do they stop it? How does Magnus hype up his community so they can save the day? What is there even to do to save the day? He can help bring Shen Yuan back, but what if more people get attacked? Magnus really, really doesn't want to be right about being the only person who can survive that kind of thing.
Also, it's too small to effectively just run from the danger and keep running. Not that he wants to. He likes the community he has here, likes that — even though sometimes he forgets — there are people here he trusts completely. But sitting with it,with the uncertainty and danger, is hard. And the more people challenge his assumptions — about what he's responsible for, about how the world works, about when he should set down his own load and trust himself to rely on others — the harder it is to know which next step to take.
It was like that when he first got here, too, when he kept trying to pray to Frey. He can't remember when he stopped doing that. Since Easter, maybe? And even before that he was praying less and less, and turning to the people here more and more. Things here are different. He's known that for months as he's tried to search for meaning, some endpoint, in the wake of deliberately giving up on Valhalla, but he's really feeling it lately. Running, one step at a time, might not work anymore.
He doesn't know the right play, though. And so he leans on Alex. He grits his teeth and grimly trains, harder than he ever has before, with Lancelot. He ripens Shen Yuan's body, sometimes with Luo Binghe there (usually in silence), sometimes alone. He works in the greenhouses with Claudius and the garden with Uncle D. He hangs out with Sunny. He watches Galahad and Hanguang-jun train as he takes Drosera out to try and teach her how to hunt. It's still the cool part of spring, but the best part is teaching Dro to fish — he can stick his feet in the frigid water and calm down enough to catch his breath, and laugh at the way she splashes in the shallows of the lake. He tries to picture what the future might look like.
It's different here. So many people are mortal; so few people look at him as a final bulwark against the crumbling of the world. The strength of Alex's sensitive clay-working fingers is the same; so is the sparkling, teasing light in her eyes as she ribs Magnus into getting out of his own head. The belief he has in the strength of his community hasn't changed — his greatest talent is, he thinks, still being a good friend to his friends.
"So maybe that's the next step," he tells Drosera as she stumbles out of the lake, beak dripping, a squirming fish caught tight in one talon. "Maybe I work on being a better friend."
baby kill!!! she tells him, proudly, utterly unconcerned with his inner turmoil as she bites the head off of the fish.
Magnus takes a deep breath and lets it go slowly. The amorphous fear that swirls around him and inside him loosens for just a moment, and he stands in place, watching Drosera eat the fish, watching Galahad and Hanguang-jun train up the hill, watching Laertes and Sagramore make their way into the woods and Mothwing come out of the foliage on the other side of the lake and Susan bustle past with her bow and quiver and the flash of color in Grantaire's window that means he's setting up his easel. It's a chilly morning, but the sunlight is getting warmer and warmer. He can feel it on his hair, trimmed again by Alex just that morning.
He wraps his hand around Jack and Hanguang-jun's jade token alike, closes his eyes, and breathes.
It's different now.
Magnus isn't ignorant of the facts. He knows his own M.O. when the stuff hits the fan: run, focusing just on the next step he needs to take at every turn to keep from tripping and falling flat on his face, with a great and amorphous fear of what the future might hold looming above it all. When he was homeless, he focused on what he needed to do for his next meal, for his next park bench, to dodge the next cop who would like nothing better than to be a dick to a homeless kid with a record. He wanted to survive, but what life would look like in five, ten, fifteen years... that was never something he had the time or wherewithal to consider. His first three years in Valhalla were just battle after battle, quest after quest, an exercise in learning to trust other people again, in learning to let himself rely on them. In learning to actually live for the moment, instead of being laser-focused on each small next step forward. In not just running away to save his own skin, but to also know when to knuckle down and stand his ground and fight.
He hadn't had the time to process his mom's death until he got to Valhalla and had to process his own at the same time, and even then, the processing was curtailed by the fact that he was thrust immediately into escalating and desperate attempts to prevent Ragnarok. And even after they managed to circumvent it for at least a good few decades, there were still daily Battle Practice, and strange little smaller quests, and managing the Chase Space. Life in Valhalla -- at least for an einherji who also ran a shelter for homeless youth -- wasn't exactly slow.
That's one thing Magnus has had to adapt to, here: the slowness and openness of time. He can spend a week just teaching himself how to fix up busted old bikes. He can use his powers, not just for survival, but to grow vegetables and fruits and bodies. He's really, really enjoying learning to grow things even without alf seidr -- to just let them do their thing naturally while he tends to them the way that regular gardeners do. But with all that unstructured time, there's so much space for processing. He knows he's had grumpier spells here than he would back in Valhalla, that he's been more emotionally volatile and clingy than has typically been usual for him, or at least not since - well. Not since middle school at least. He's not ignorant of that. It's weird. It's nothing like the panic attacks that would intersperse his asthma as a kid, but it's still like something burbling up and breaking through: an off-gassing of feelings he thought he knew what to deal with.
In a way -- just like after he, himself, almost died, in those weeks when he was in the greenhouse every day just growing, growing, growing -- it's been a relief lately to have so many next steps to focus on. It's allowed him to tighten up, to keep focused and busy. There's Uncle D's garden, there's Hanguang-jun's garden, there's his own secret training with Lancelot, there's babysitting. And then, of course, there's Shen Yuan's mushroom-fruit-herb-thing body, where he spends every moment of free time, meditating and trying to share the 'summer qi' Shen Yuan had talked about as being particularly good for the bodies. He's also, honestly, been leaning a lot on Alex, spending significantly more time with him every day than they really have since he recovered from that falling sword, feeling a little guilty that he's eating into the time that Alex (and Magnus, too) likes to have to bop around and do his own thing, even though he knows Alex is more than willing to be there for him, with him. And, like, he knows that if Alex never showed up here, he could handle all of this, but...
It's one of the things that are different here, actually. Magnus doesn't have to handle it all on his own. Back in Valhalla, he had friends, and he had people he decided were family, like Hearth and Blitz and Sam. Here, too, he has friends, and people he's decided are family, like Galahad and Hanguang-jun and... well. It's a long list. He's known for years that his strength is his community, and that the best thing he can do for the world is make friends and enable those friends to shine in what they do best. The best way to save the world is as a team, working in concert.
But back in Valhalla, everyone had the same frame of reference, even if they had different attitudes and experiences and beliefs. It was normal to die and to have the trajectory of your life arcing toward the knowledge of your final death. The point was to get to a place of accepting it without letting it -- or the passage of time -- overwhelm you enough that you faded into Ginnungagap. The gods were a necessary and predictable annoyance, like Battle Practice and making sure the Chase Space didn't run out of toilet paper. Magnus knew where he stood in that world. He knew what was expected of him, and he didn't particularly care if he met or exceeded or even fell short of those expectations, as long as Ragnarok was kept at bay and he was true to himself and his people.
He still hasn't figured out where, exactly, he fits into this world. It's not a bad thing — it might even be a good one — but it is different. And not just because there's actual adults here who don't all suck, and who genuinely seem interested in making sure Magnus doesn't have everything on his plate for the first time since his mom died. There are also so many different perspectives and frames of reference and attitudes, enough that it's not really clear to Magnus what people are bent toward here. If there is a shared goal, or if everyone here is also just taking each next small step. There's no Ragnarok here to prevent, no definitive conclusion to work toward or to try and move away from, no concrete clear enemy to fight. It's destabilizing for a guy used to worrying about the future, even if most of his attention is focused on carefully making sure that the ground is solid for each next step forward but not being able to attend to whether it's taking you closer to or further from your final destination. Something is happening, but why? How do they stop it? How does Magnus hype up his community so they can save the day? What is there even to do to save the day? He can help bring Shen Yuan back, but what if more people get attacked? Magnus really, really doesn't want to be right about being the only person who can survive that kind of thing.
Also, it's too small to effectively just run from the danger and keep running. Not that he wants to. He likes the community he has here, likes that — even though sometimes he forgets — there are people here he trusts completely. But sitting with it,with the uncertainty and danger, is hard. And the more people challenge his assumptions — about what he's responsible for, about how the world works, about when he should set down his own load and trust himself to rely on others — the harder it is to know which next step to take.
It was like that when he first got here, too, when he kept trying to pray to Frey. He can't remember when he stopped doing that. Since Easter, maybe? And even before that he was praying less and less, and turning to the people here more and more. Things here are different. He's known that for months as he's tried to search for meaning, some endpoint, in the wake of deliberately giving up on Valhalla, but he's really feeling it lately. Running, one step at a time, might not work anymore.
He doesn't know the right play, though. And so he leans on Alex. He grits his teeth and grimly trains, harder than he ever has before, with Lancelot. He ripens Shen Yuan's body, sometimes with Luo Binghe there (usually in silence), sometimes alone. He works in the greenhouses with Claudius and the garden with Uncle D. He hangs out with Sunny. He watches Galahad and Hanguang-jun train as he takes Drosera out to try and teach her how to hunt. It's still the cool part of spring, but the best part is teaching Dro to fish — he can stick his feet in the frigid water and calm down enough to catch his breath, and laugh at the way she splashes in the shallows of the lake. He tries to picture what the future might look like.
It's different here. So many people are mortal; so few people look at him as a final bulwark against the crumbling of the world. The strength of Alex's sensitive clay-working fingers is the same; so is the sparkling, teasing light in her eyes as she ribs Magnus into getting out of his own head. The belief he has in the strength of his community hasn't changed — his greatest talent is, he thinks, still being a good friend to his friends.
"So maybe that's the next step," he tells Drosera as she stumbles out of the lake, beak dripping, a squirming fish caught tight in one talon. "Maybe I work on being a better friend."
baby kill!!! she tells him, proudly, utterly unconcerned with his inner turmoil as she bites the head off of the fish.
Magnus takes a deep breath and lets it go slowly. The amorphous fear that swirls around him and inside him loosens for just a moment, and he stands in place, watching Drosera eat the fish, watching Galahad and Hanguang-jun train up the hill, watching Laertes and Sagramore make their way into the woods and Mothwing come out of the foliage on the other side of the lake and Susan bustle past with her bow and quiver and the flash of color in Grantaire's window that means he's setting up his easel. It's a chilly morning, but the sunlight is getting warmer and warmer. He can feel it on his hair, trimmed again by Alex just that morning.
He wraps his hand around Jack and Hanguang-jun's jade token alike, closes his eyes, and breathes.