Work Text:
He had tried to picture a long, sandy beach full of leaning palm trees and calm waves and just enough of a breeze to keep him cool. Rincewind found it hard to focus on creating the image in his mind because the little nagging voice that told him that this was ridiculous was just powerful enough to interrupt him every time he got down to the nitty gritty of what palm trees actually looked like. He’d remembered that they had wide leaves, good for catching rainwater. But that angry little voice told him that imagining a memory of a palm leaf wasn’t going to do him any good. The breathing made sense, Rincewind had always thought that taking a deep breath, or several, had a calming effect, but besides that this meditation practice just didn’t feel practical. He could picture that he was on a warm, friendly beach all day long but it wouldn’t change the fact that he was really inside of a stuffy little bedroom crammed to the corners full of papers and books and boxes that he wasn’t sure were even there the day before. Every time he blinked, it seemed, there was something new in his bedroom that was taking up space.
At least, he considered, I am in my bedroom. When the idea of practicing meditation had first been proposed to him, he pictured a sweaty room with mats on the floor and people bending in uncomfortable positions, chanting, kneeling, speaking in tongues. None of which seemed to accomplish serenity, or whatever it was that meditation was all about. The Librarian explained to him, in ooks and some similar sounds, that meditation didn’t have to be a public performance. The Librarian had become a bit free-range lately. It made sense at least, an orangutan was probably more likely to experiment with the getting in touch with nature kind of stuff, Rincewind assumed.
He uncrossed his legs and a charlie horse gripped the bottom of his foot as he stretched out. After the pain had faded, Rincewind sprawled out into his floor, fitting in the self-made grooves between his piles of things, the only space that allowed him to stretch out fully. It was like a chalk outline of a murder scene but the chalk was executive dysfunction. His fireplace coughed out a meager heat and on his back, through the thin fabric of his robe, he could feel the draft through the cracks in the floorboards. There wasn’t a warm, cozy beach like the one in his mind’s eye for hundreds miles, and real beaches had gulls and seaweed and large spiders. The beach of the world was very different from the beach of the mind, in the beach of the mind, Rincewind thought, he could be where he wanted to be and surrounded by all he wanted to be surrounded by. He closed his eyes.
There’s the waves, he thought. They’re blue in the sunlight, and they’re scattered with collars of foam at the tips. The sand is warm, I can feel it between my toes. There are no gulls, no large spiders, no seaweed. I can feel the sun, he thought forcefully, I can feel the breeze at my back. I’m surrounded by all that I want to be surrounded by, and nothing else. I’m where I’d like to be. He repeated the phrase over and over again, I’m where I’d like to be.
The palm leaves hung over him, gently swaying in the breeze that he’d imagined. The sea that he’d imagined lapped the shore with speckles of shells, and on the beach the little crabs popped in and out of their holes as the waves came over them. Life crawled all around, the clouds moved slowly, and the sun beamed in a restrained kind of way. The light only touched where he’d imagined that it would. Hmm, Rincewind hummed, his eyes still closed, I think I’m getting the hang of this.
There was a sound, like a snapping wire, in the near distance. Rincewind bolted upright. The bright daylight caught him and he stumbled upright, rubbing his eyes. The beach of the mind was sprawled out before him, with the palm leaves that he’d imagined and still ocean that he’d dreamed and the light breeze that he’d wished. He turned around. Maybe, he thought, I should have imagined more than one tree. The island was about ten paces across from any angle, with a single tree in the middle, and ocean everywhere else. Below him, a figure leaning over a stick with a bit of string on it was sulking.
“It snapped again, I don’t think this string is really strong enough for fishing wire,” Said the figure, who was cross legged and dressed in familiar clothes.
“Ah,” Said Rincewind, pretending that he had heard. Rincewind had instead been listening to the ringing in his ears which was finally starting to quiet down as the white noise of the breeze over the ocean came rolling in.
“Oh well,” The figure continued, staking his stick into the sand beside him. “I was never any good at fishing anyway, didn’t you say you used to go fishing when you were little?” Rincewind, still entranced by the intensity of his vision, answered uninhibitedly.
“Yes, but it was in the Ankh. You throw the hook out and it takes a full hour for it to sink just through the surface layer of congealed gunk.” Then suddenly, things started catching up to him, “Did I fall asleep?”
“Only for a few minutes.”
“I didn’t die, correct?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And—wait, are you fucking kidding me?” Twoflower turned around, squinting against the sun, his big round glasses gleaming.
“Kidding about what?” Rincewind opened and closed his mouth a few times without making any noise, twisting his face into various expressions of scandal. Twoflower shook his head, “I told you not to drink seawater.”
“I have not! What are you doing here?” Twoflower shrugged, his colorful floral shirt collar catching the breeze. There wasn’t a sound between them for a while but the rolling waves in the distant horizon. Rincewind turned around, walked all of eleven paces, fell into the ocean which met the shore of the beach immediately and was of seemingly infinite depth, scrambled back to the surface, then stood under his palm tree with his head leaned against it.
“I just wanted to be on a nice little beach,” He said to the world.
“Are you feeling alright?” Twoflower found his way to his feet and brushed off his khaki shorts. “It’s a bit sandy.”
“It’s the sand,” Said Rincewind. “And in answer to your question, probably not.” Twoflower kept his hands in his pockets innocently.
“You don’t know?” Rincewind scowled. Somewhere very close by, a hermit crab sensed tension in the air and threw itself into the ocean. “Come on,” Twoflower inched closer to the tree, “It’s a lovely day. The sun is out, the breeze is good, the tree is looking very vibrant. We might even get a coconut at some point, granted I don’t really know how trees make coconuts. I always kind of assumed they just showed up overnight.”
“They do not.”
“How do they show up then?” Rincewind tested a glance upward and met Twoflower’s eyes.
“You want me to explain how trees make seeds?”
“They’re seeds? I thought they were nuts.”
“Nuts are seeds.”
“See!” Twoflower slapped him on the shoulder playfully, “You do know about trees! Classic wizard knowledge.” Rincewind groaned and stepped away from the palm tree, skulking out onto what little beach there was, and kicked a sand dollar into the ocean with a plop.
“I really just tried to think of a beach,” He started, “Like the one I was on for so long before that whole,” He gestured vaguely with his hands, making a kind of ball of mashed up fingers, “Civil war thing in the Agatean Empire.”
“Yeah, I was there for that.”
Rincewind continued unabated, “I thought that focusing like this, you know, on an image and,” His tone of voice shifted to mockery, “Creating my bliss, I thought it would make me better?” It wasn’t really a question, or if it was it wasn’t one that he’d intended to ask of himself. “All this breathing and sitting with your legs crossed and daydreaming, that’s what it is really, it’s just daydreaming.”
“Rincewind,” Twoflower spoke clearly in a voice of concern, “What are you talking about?” Rincewind found that Twoflower’s hand had made it to his shoulder.
“I mean,” He started, after a breath, “You’re not real, clearly. And neither is this beach. I’ve created this vision and it’s not even what I wanted.” The clouds gathered over the sun briefly and then slinked past it, a momentary shadow passing over the little island and then following under the cloud over the hips and hills of the waves into the distance. Twoflower coughed. Rincewind knew him as the kind of person who tried his best to keep negative emotions at bay for as long as possible. They fit him uncomfortably like a backwards shirt, he never knew how to really get them right again. Rincewind was different in that way, he knew exactly what to do about his negative emotions and it was usually to exacerbate them, but at least he did something . Twoflower’s hand fell from Rincewind’s shoulder down to his arm, and then a bit lower. He coughed again.
“Yes,” Said Rincewind, “That about sums it up.”
“There’s some things we should probably talk about.” Rincewind considered scoffing, but something about the way Twoflower fluttered around the tension of what he was trying to say appealed to his empathy. “I want to apologize.” Rincewind held Twoflower’s hand loosely. It certainly felt like his hand, it had chubby fingers and soft knuckles and clean nails. In his mind, or maybe in his liver or his kidneys or his heart, Rincewind wanted it to be real, on a secret kind of level that he kept hidden from himself, except in those very embarrassing vulnerable kind of moments in the middle of the night. Twoflower continued, “I didn’t get the chance to say it, but I’m sorry.”
Rincewind let go and knelt down to the sand. This was exactly what he wanted to hear, which was only further proof that it wasn’t real.
“It doesn’t matter,” He said, “I’ll wake up soon anyway. I’ll lock this whole thing away somewhere and refuse to think about it again.”
“Excuse me,” Twoflower crouched beside him, a rare stone expression on his face, “I’m trying to take this seriously.” A gull appeared out of thin air and landed atop the swaying palm tree and shrieked. Rincewind said nothing, instead he tried to focus on the image of his Bedroom. Dangerously stacked books, boxes of rocks, creaky floorboards. “It’s important to me,” Twoflower continued, undisturbed by the silence, “That you understand I never considered our arrangement superfluous. I mean, I really took it seriously, for what it’s worth.” Rincewind’s demeanor cracked.
“You took it so seriously that you didn’t tell me you had children.” Twoflower made an incredulous noise.
“Now I absolutely did tell you that I had children, you just weren’t listening to me!”
“Pardon me if I find it hard to believe that I somehow missed out on that small detail.” Twoflower turned to face him and put an accusatory finger in the air.
“The first night I was in Ankh-Morpork I told you that I had two daughters.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, and I also told you about my wife, but that was after several beers, so maybe you weren’t paying attention.” Twoflower’s expression lightened, “Actually, that was after a lot of b eers.” He stared vacantly for a moment at the line where the sea and the sky met. It really was a beautiful imaginary sight. Rincewind mulled it over.
“If you are really here, that is, if you’re somehow in my imagination but not just as a f igment, then you would know things that I don’t, correct?”
“That makes sense, yes.”
“Alright, what is the difference between toward and towards?”
“Morporkian is my second language, I have no idea.”
“Ah, well that’s fair. It’s my first language and I have no idea either.” They both watched a little wave carry what looked like a camel clinging to log in the distance. The gull behind them screeched some more.
“You know,” Said Twoflower, “You’re very good at that.”
“No, that wasn’t me, that was the gull.”
“I was referring to what you were saying before the gull. Diffusing tension is what I meant, you’ve always been good at making jokes in less than ideal situations.” Rincewind puzzled at t hat. He hadn’t been joking, but he decided that maybe it was best to let the world believe he had been.
“Yes,” He agreed cautiously. “Thanks.” His empathy kicked him in the shin, it was his turn to be genuine and vulnerable, as much as his disposition would allow. Well, he thought, as long as I’m fairly certain that this is a dream, I’ve got nothing to lose but some imagined dignity.
“I really appreciate you.” He said it in a sputtering way, he was trying to get all of the words out of his mouth without having to taste them. Then he nodded, slowly and reassuringly to himself. Twoflower pulled Rincewind into a hug, an abrupt kind of embrace that left Rincewind patting the other man on the back with what little of his arms were free. The embrace lasted a while between the two of them, long enough for the camel in the distance to have floated off into the horizon. Rincewind leaned his head on Twoflower’s shoulder. Things smelled real, He could smell Twoflower’s hair and the ocean, but then again, Rincewind knew that all the senses were l iars. Lies, in a cosmic kind of sense, weren’t all inherently negative though. In Rincewind’s mind, sometimes a good lie could keep you going. Spite was one of them, a very effective kind of lie where he told himself that one day they would see him truly. They weren’t any particular body of people, just the continuity of people who seemed to best fit whatever context was needed to best motivate him, and the truth of who he was wasn’t always clear even to him, but it wasn’t really the language of the lie that mattered anyway. Language was another abstraction, like the senses, it was another part of the lie. The truth of it was that, like all people, he needed others to see value in him the way he tried to see it in himself.
The truth about Twoflower still never quite took shape for him. Memories are unreliable and they only get worse with age, there are new feelings and new perspectives that got applied to them, you see them through different lenses. A relationship with a weird little foreign man that made you happy for a while means whatever you want it to, when you choose to think about it. He’d just given himself his own closure, he thought, homebrew, h and-crafted. Artisanal closure. Life is strange enough as it is, if you can’t get what you need from the world then perhaps it's well enough to make it yourself.