A or B?

A is winning at the moment, due to the fact that "blood and bits of skin won't collect in the knotwork as easily" or something.

Men...

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note: my former squire will be knighted today before i leave. that is all.
-agravaine

...i'm sorry?
to start, its turning thirty seven with the realization that i'm still alone, probably always going to be alone and that much closer to old age and the realization that my life's gone nowhere and by this stage probably never will.

it's the Anwas thing too, watching him self destruct and destroy everything and knowing this time that i can't do a goddamned thing about it, mixed with the guilty voice in my head that says to take care of it when i've done everything i can and it obviously hasn't WORKED.

then add in the fact that i'm supposed to be the one helping everyone else deal with their problems, and managing the teenagers alone, and the goths that my clone worked with and knowing i can't handle it, but not being able to say it because if i do i just look like a selfish bastard with too much time on his hands for himself and knowing that anyone else would do it better and Gawain would do it all twenty times better...not that it's Gawain's fault, after all, he didn't asked to be best loved and perfect...

and the fact that when i die, i'm leaving nothing of importance behind me and no one will even remember my name or that i happened to exist.

of course the minute you start saying things like this everyone starts going on and on about how you need therapy, how you're obviously derranged and they aren't going to talk to you/be near you/let you do anything until you've had 'help' so i haven't said it outloud to anyone.

not that everybody doesn't think i need to just leave after the stuff the other night with Gawain and Lancelot, and i'm weird and obsessive and a freak and since i can't let it go i shouldn't even be here at all until i'm magically fixed by someone who is obviously a better therapist than i am. well the other night sort of cinched that in your heads didn't it? i must need help because i'm not perfect like my brother.

i've always needed help because i'm not Gawain, i've always needed ways to try and hide that fact so someone someday might look at me and see something that vaguely looks like him and then think its okay. i've tried to be the well adjusted sane one and that didn't work, i've tried to be the one who helps people and that one failed too and since i've obviously failed again, you're all going to want to have me have help, which means you think so little of me than to imagine i can get things back together on my own. obviously if there's a problem that anyone dares to indicate instead of hide away you people just leap on it and shut that person away until they do exactly what you deem right to fix it and even then you're always looked at like a lunatic.

fuck it, i don't care about that anymore. none of you have done anything but humor me anyway. i might as well solve my own problems too. anything else would make me crazy or a clone or somehow something's wrong with me that isn't 'natural'....

i give up on you people.

-agravaine

"It's harder to see brilliance in an adolescent or adult who makes mistakes, and harder still to deal with them when they tell us something we don't want to hear-especially if they are right."
-Peter Elbow.
Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard

-Agravaine

I hate it being this way. There's so much I still want to do but can't. If I even tried to attempt going back there, talking with all of them, it's closing a door on everything that's happened isn't it? If I don't keep it with me forever, that's good as saying that it didn't happen and that everything was always fine. I hate having to deny everything, and that I can't even talk to some of them anymore as well as what it made me do to them.

But I can't...I don't know how to...

Forget I put this here, I'm going to try that now.

-Will Scarlett(transcribed by Sar)

i dont know that it'll fix anything but i'm extending an olive branch to the little monster anyway...
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there's also the part where sar thinks im fey or something......weird
-agravaine

"why is it that even my secret plans that only he and i know about get pushed back by the drama in this place?"
"well. don't let it. do it anyway, in spite of it. prove that they can't win"
***
"i think i see your point about that place"
"when i said we could fix this, i didn't expect for you to seriously consider leaving it, even though i did before"
"i know. ...this is what it feels like to be you, isn't it?"
"sometimes. but at least we can fix what's going on here, can't we?"
"definitely. i'm glad you're back. i love you. besides that, you're my knight.
***
she also said that she was sorry, and asked me to forgive her, then acknowledged that she knew how hard it was to do that to me and so she realized how much i'd been hurt by her. she also said she'd work on Anwas and her professor is going to try it with Will again and...there's a thing to fix the other parts too. maybe...

i think i'm fucking bipolar or something. but she asked me to be there, to stand up with her when the secret thing occurs at the time i don't know about yet really, and that...ought to be that.

merry christmas? maybe.
i'm off to church with Sar now, more to be there with her than anything else. she said she missed my voice.

-agravaine

what the hell is the turnaround like these days?
damn it all, i can't even have THIS one thing i wish.
i meant it when i said what i did about what's happened here and what has been done. not that it helps me any now.

-agravaine

arguments today: 3
arguments won: 2
times thrown up on: 2
sedatives administered: 1
relative insanity: rising
-agravaine

this day was technically supposed to happen ten years/many centuries ago, depending on how you read it and where you were then. it's sort of weird to think that i ought to be twenty six right now if my squire's actually eighteen. otherwise if life were fair, Anwas would be twenty eight and most definitely a full knight by now. yet on the other hand, i wouldn't still have him around to play mind games with and mentally fuck up so it all evens out i guess.

happy birthday squire and all of that. no i will not be coercing Sar into cakes for you, even though i'm really not the person to make remarks about anything being squicky. since everyone's busy today we'll come up with something for after midnight and into tomorrow which does not involve our mun wearing cake really.

also, finally, my nephew is back at last, after almost all of us had stopped hoping that it would happen. that sense of timing is bizare, considering i'm from a time and place when we didn't have any officially established feasts to mark just being glad for shit. irony in all it's forms is really weird sometimes.

and Sar's changed my icon on top of other things, due to certain people's urging and a need to reclaim Sir Bowen as someone she can look at or something weird and driven by That Man. i don't mind it too much, his hair's a little unkempt for me but the body change is just as well, it's like a new start somehow. i guess she finds it symbolic given the film that it's from and i'll take symbolic hope now.

Henry Jones has been hanging around a bit talking to us all about that sort of thing and i see where its been kindled in us and around us, and how it was really true what he said about ressurecting Camelot but not Arthur in body being what was important. he says that the spirit of Arthur, the real Arthur none of us seem to have known is what we're working with now and that we've settled on important things at last.

i think that's maybe true. Elboron says we'll be ready to start moving people into our new center soon and then that's when the work is going to start. i may not be as young as i'm supposed to be, but i have the energy and i'm determined enough to make it work when there's more than just me at stake.

and...everything.

it's actually okay for once. i guess i'm happy about that today. it seems like when even i can find that thing that means its going to be okay. i like it when things are like that.

-agravaine

but it was nessecary and i think might change things now.
i hate myself a bit anyway, but guilt's going to fade like it always has before,in light of the greater issue at hand.

i've done it once, i can do it again. and this time? i've got backup.

-agravaine

being pissed off at someone is no excuse for beating them half to death and then stabbing them. honnestly? i don't know what i was doing half the time i was doing it i was so angry. it was like a giant haze over my vision...sort of like it always was before.

that doesn't make it right but i wanted to say it anyway. i am not sorry that i dueled Lancelot or that i stabbed him really. i am just sorry i took it to the extremes that i did and was so relatively childish about it.

there's a lot of stuff i've done that when i think about it, is relatively childish lately. and yet Sar says i am still the person who acted with the highest degree of sense the other night when everything happened as it did. she says that although i was not exactly rational, what i did can make sense.

i suppose the fact that i was accused of such a horrible thing by a person supposed to be my friend is what set it off, if we are looking for reasons but not justifications.

i have never done what he suggests i did to Anwas or to anyone either here or in Camelot. the Anwas bit did happen and i think i made a mistake in letting it, so many years ago, but it was never coerced, it was never forced, it was never rape as Lancelot would have had it be when he said those words to me the other night.

i've not seen him since i stabbed him, though they tell me he is still alive as well. or was brought back to life by Seth as i was. at this point i am not sure what happened, but even the fact that it was fixed makes my life and my mistakes none the more acceptable or pardonable.

i'll ask you for that pardon anyway, it has been a long strange year full of so much that i don't even know how to start talking about it, but if possible? i'd like very much to forget that the bulk of this happened. not the good parts like Anwas finally coming here of course, or that for a time we were all closer together, but those things which drove us apart maybe.

can we all just sort of, i don't know, ignore that we were ever driven away and maybe come back together again?

something Anwas said to Sar about me and my behavior has started making me reconsider everything and not in a bad way. so just in case someone's willing to listen, i'm sorry for it all, to all of you. maybe it's not enough, but it's out there, i've expressed it, and maybe i can make it better somehow.

want to take it?

-agravaine

In one shop, there were a great many crowns of laurel and myrtle, which soldiers, authors, statesmen, and various other people, pressed eagerly to buy; some purchased these paltry wreaths with their lives; others by a toilsome servitude of years; and many sacrificed whatever was most valuable, yet finally slunk away without the crown. There was a sort of stock or scrip, called Conscience, which seemed to be in great demand, and would purchase almost anything. Indeed, few rich commodities were to be obtained without paying a heavy sum in this particular stock, and a man's business was seldom very lucrative, unless he knew precisely when and how to throw his hoard of Conscience into the market. Yet as this stock was the only thing of permanent value, whoever parted with it was sure to find himself a loser, in the long run.

-Hawthorne, The Celestial Railway

-agravaine

i haven't said anything about what's going on. there's nothing to say i guess where no one wants me either so i've gradually been getting used to that idea. it hurts but it was inevitable that someone people come out on top of others and i'll be here if anyone needs me or cares to want me to do anything. i dont know what that'll be if anything, but lets pretend it, yeah.

-agravaine

Friedrich Nietzsche:
Battle not with monsters
lest ye become a monster
and if you gaze into the abyss
the abyss gazes into you.

-agravaine

what if i fixed it so that you didn't remember Anwas...would that help?
no. something would always be missing.
so what if i made it so that he didn't remember what happened when you were gone?
he's got Tim now. Tim's probably better *sigh* and Tim needs to stay here.
Tim needs to go back to the home he left burning. is that the kind of person you want raising your squire?
what are you saying? whose side are you on in this?
i'm saying i care more about what's in your best interests than Tim's.
...

well.

-Agravaine

why have even you replaced me? back to the vodka i think.
-agravaine

if you keep on telling yourself that it was the right thing and all for the best...that it was the right thing because of who it helped, that it's worth all the crap you're personally feeling but you never quite believe it...will you ever?
-Agravaine

In my dreams I've always seen you soar above the sky,
In my heart there'll always be a place for you,
For all my life...

today together we made what was possibly the hardest decision i have had to make since...i am not exactly sure how long or if there was a harder one. don't get me wrong, i don't deny it's for the best, i'm not intending to come down as saying that any part of this is in any way displeasing to me.

it is just so very odd, this feeling that, while i am relieved that Anwas will be taken better care of than could be managed with the past we had, relieved too by this reminder that i'm still sticking around regardless to finish with what i began so many years ago when he was twelve and i barely twenty three it is mixed with the sense that he has started to move on from me.

i guess it was those months alone that did it most, but its strange how someone fails to notice just how much someone has changed, how much they've grown when you have not been with them. i repeat and mean with all my heart that i am not unhappy, and yes, i really believe that too, i am just overwhelmed with something else...that sense that things will never quite go back to as they were.

i don't fear changes, i embrace them, yet its still completely utterly bizare to look at someone that you care for and suddenly to realize just how much he has grown. it's the sort of thing that makes your eyes get blurred a little, even in that happiness, that moment where they're growing up and nothing will ever be the same.

i didn't get to see this moment last time, and i find that i am glad that i could be here for it now. for Anwas nothing else would do. the boy he was is all but gone. i'm glad i've had a hand in the shaping of the man and i know i trust Timothy implicitly or i'd have never agreed with Anwas that it was a good idea.

the next few years are going to be interesting. full of flux. but then again, when wasn't that a part of life?

-Agravaine

This day just got much worse.

Anyone i offended? i'm issuing a general apology. Life's too short otherwise.

...Guys? ...Tomos? I'm around.

-Agravaine