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Ashton respects gentleness. Someone gently pulling the hurt out of you like porcupine quills after an endless cycle of new accidents. Reassuring you that this too will heal with time. That you aren’t alone, and you’ll be cared for. Someone who doesn’t flinch when you curse it all out. Who doesn’t hit the bruises. Gentleness eases a lot of people’s pain, and they deserve to be loved that way.
Ashton is not one of those people.
He’s beyond the point where his pain can be taken away. Physical or emotional. A lot of people are so terrified of a life with no relief that they deny it could be possible. They make you try to denounce ‘forever’ as a heresy. Surely there must be some limit to it. He hasn’t found it yet. After a while it just is what it is, the memory of not being in pain is erased, and there’s no point wasting energy trying to imagine something so foreign.
There are people who don’t give a shit about you, people that give a shit but won’t listen and make it worse, and people who figured out the shit you need and make themselves useful. He has to teach people to hug him hard. Gentleness just adds a new sensation to the overwhelming number he’s already juggling. It just makes it harder to deal with. If you’re going to hug, hug hard and overwhelm all the other sensations. If the music’s always going to be too loud and straining the amps, just play one note for a while and make the never-silence just a drone underneath. Like post-rock dragging through the mud only to find some connection that changes you and drag yourself up to sour over it. When people are gentle there’s this expectation that he will feel relief from it and he can only disappoint.
Their heart hurts as much as their body. Gentleness is not familiar. Their people weren’t good to them and anyway they lost them horribly. They were put with new ones who tore them down every day for everything. Who cared more about policing than nurturing for the crime of being born to people who didn’t take care of him. For being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Over and over again. They don’t treat themselves with gentleness. It doesn’t get through anymore. Like a callus that makes rough fabric bearable, at the cost of feeling silkiness. It’s not a great way to live, it always hurts, but it’s the only thing that’s stuck so far. At least when it really counted.
He tried not tearing himself down anymore. He imagined a world where he was special and had just been waiting for his chance. Maybe everything was just leading to him being in this place at this time. To do what his parents started and fulfill his destiny. He’s been broken and rebuilt of scars so he could withstand this thing that no one was supposed to. Too broken to break.
But taking in the shard of Rau’shan wasn’t his trial to overcome. Everyone telling him it was a bad idea knew what they were talking about, and he didn’t listen. Fearne trusted him and instead of being a hero he shattered in front of her and their friends. It was a big fuck up. It all made so much sense until it didn’t. Suddenly that confidence was shown to be hubris and folly. He wasn’t different. None of his suffering made any difference to the indifference of these forces. His parents thought they were special, and they weren’t. He made the same mistake.
Their friends were not gentle. They were mad. Fearn kicked him and tried to destroy their hammer. Most of them yelled at him. Orym wouldn’t even talk to them, which felt worse. It was coming from concern. They had terrified their friends. But it’s never easy to realize they made the wrong choice, just did something stupidly dangerous, and were paying the price for now. It hurts to realize the bad thing that happened is entirely their fault. They did feel like they needed to hear it. They were saying it to themselves.
Sometimes gentleness is just denial. When you know how bad it was and people keep lying to you about it like that’s going to comfort you. It doesn’t make them feel better, it just makes him feel gaslit by people they need to be truthful with them. They felt like shit about what happened, but this felt so much more genuine. Really meeting them on their own level. Sometimes hugs need to hurt.
His friends listened. They let him reflect and talk about what happened. What led him to think this was a good idea. Every step was so reasonable until it wasn’t. Go big or go home but he almost didn’t get to go home either. Not to excuse it, but so they know if they see him start to go down this path, they can check him back in place. Keep it from getting out of hand. Because it’s so obvious now but wasn’t at all obvious then. He needs someone else to see it if he doesn’t.
That seemed like the love language of this group. That’s why they had started to open up. They’re all fuck ups. All ticking time bombs. They keep each other in line. The gentleness is to have someone redirect them when their actions are going to lead to a bad place. No one unlearns that overnight. They already have a library of rationalizations for those bad choices all lined up as reference material to support the next choice. They can’t always trust themselves. But they trust each other. They got so used to yelling at themselves in their head they could only hear it coming from outside.
It sucked hearing his friends yell at him. For something they did wrong. But it wasn’t indifference. He didn’t leave when Chetney told him to because then it would be his fault that it all fell apart when it counted. That they couldn’t handle who he really was. But they didn’t leave. They did stick around and welcome him back. They were going to get through this together. He didn’t want to be trusted right now. He couldn’t trust himself. But there was a way forward after everyone got everything out of their system. They needed to hear it. It hurts but sometimes they just need to be dragged through the pain to remember what’s real and what’s all bullshit in their head.
It didn’t make sense to be loved when he knew he was unlovable. When he just hurt the people closest to them over and over. And in return his friends hurt them. But it made sense when they did and the damage that broke them in that moment. They understood and forgave it because they needed help and who else would step in if they didn’t. Maybe love is just the capacity to put up with other people’s bullshit. Find the bullshit they resonate with. That doesn’t always last forever, but it was good while it did.
It was terrifying having this understanding that he was leaning on other people for support, they could drop him, and they could all get really hurt. It’s like crowd surfing. It’s dangerous but there’s nothing like that rush of being held and moved by others. He fucked it up and fell this time and kicked them all in the face on the way down. But they were still pulling him up out of the crush of the mosh pit. He needed the wake-up call that he was endangering himself. In order to give people autonomy, you have to let them fuck up.
Just before he took the shard, he told Fearne that if he exploded it would at least make a good story. Maybe one he’ll be forced to tell many times now that his broken arm was made of lava rock. Mostly the story was "I got really arrogant and fucked up." The problem with being a martyr is you can’t save the world when you’re dead. It’s a cop out to let himself stop fighting. However mad at him his friends were, they had things to do and places to be or everything would get even more fucked and fast. It didn’t really matter if he figured his shit out right now as long as he got it together enough to do this mission.
This was a kind of hug that just hits them, and it hurts, but it cuts through everything. It’s grounding. It keeps them here in reality where they need to survive instead of dangerous fantasies. They keep telling people not to be gentle. This wasn’t gentle. The sting would linger for a while reminding them that there were people who loved them enough to be mad at how they hurt themselves just to prove they were worth something. Maybe they’d been worth something just as they were the whole time.