How Green Becomes Wood

As the questions about his school life furthered, he was able to talk a bit about what it was like to fall in love with Daizi before knowing what love was like, and how they refused to admit it to each other. He spoke about how nice it was to have this trio of himself, Daizi, and Cooger but how it didn't cure him. With Cooger he still sometimes felt like an outsider and with Daizi, they were just two traumatized kids trying to weather a storm.

He discussed doing well in school, how hard he had to work to get caught back up, but how glad he was to get to learn again and how unceasing his depression was. Eventually, he began to speak before glancing hesitantly at his children again before, in answer to one of Madeline's questions said, "I... I self-harmed frequently. For a time almost daily, if not more often. Most of the scars have faded, now, and you really need to know where to look, especially because I tattooed over them, and I have not relapsed in a number of years. There was just so much pain inside me, it felt like the only way I could get some of it out. I was my own Medieval Doctor." He chuckled grimly at his own joke, "I did my best to keep it secret."

"His best wasn't very good," Daizi spoke up, "Cooger and I knew about it pretty quickly."

At this interjection, Madeline looked at Daizi curiously, "You have to forgive me, I have a question I want to ask but I'm worried it'll sound accusatory. I promise I don't mean it that way."

"I did try to get him help," Daizi answered, correctly inferring what that question would be, "but I didn't have many resources either. I was a scared kid too, I wanted him to stop, I wanted to help him, and so did Cooger, but we didn't know what we know now. So Ghalib kept making promises to me he'd stop, but he didn't have many other coping mechanisms, so he'd fall back into it, and then feel guilty, which would make him do it more, and the cycle continued."

"I needed more intensive help than I had access to," Dark explained, "and strong anti-depressants. Most of all, I needed to know I was worth being helped. These days I always say a person needs to be complicit in their own rescue because it does not matter how many ropes they are tossed if they are unwilling or unable to grab onto it. For a long while I was both."
 
Alec whimpered softly at Dark's admission. He reached out and grabbed Xander's hand tightly, clinging to him tightly as an anchor. A part of him had known about the self-inflicted damage, but he hadn't wanted to think about it. He hadn't wanted to accept it. He didn't want to think about Dark hurting. Not that deeply. Not that badly. He didn't want to think about Dark being anything but what he was now. Anyone but who he was now. He couldn't comprehend his father being anything or anyone else.

Xander sat unmoved and stone-faced. He'd known, but it was hard to hear. It made it real again. Refreshed the pain of what he'd already known to be true.
 
"What do you think made you finally accept help?" Madeline asked.

Dark thought about this for a few moments, "I do not think I had a choice not to. When I was seventeen, things... I lost..." He shifted uncomfortably, once more taking a look at his sons from the corner of his eye, "I was not coping. I wanted to, by then, I wanted so desperately to simply wake up and be normal, but that is not how it works, and resultingly I was so angry at myself. I could see how I hurt the people around me, I hated it, I hated myself, I heard my parents' voices in my ear and I wondered if they had been right. I thought I never should have survived that night. I thought I did not deserve it." He paused for a long while, trying to figure out how to phrase this part of his story without further upsetting his twins. Really, he wished he had told them to stay away, but he wanted to trust them when they said they wanted to be with him, "There is this Franz Kafka quote: I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it. Then one day the thought came into my mind that... if I stopped resisting, then the people I cared about..." Now he looked at his wife, seeing the shadows in her face as she recalled those days, "I thought, and I was wrong, that it would be easier on them. That they would be able to move on and ultimately be relieved they were not being dragged down by me anymore. In my mind, I thought we would all get what we wanted, and I was helping them."

"So you...?" Madeline gently finished, leaving off the end of her sentence.

"Yes," Dark nodded, "but Daizi and Cooger saved me. And then I had a two week hold in a mental hospital, at which point I was transferred to a longer stay program out in the woods in the middle of nowhere. It wasn't the end of it, for me, and that facility was in its own ways awful... But it was the start. The true start. It was the first time I was given medication to help, and even though getting the dosages right was a nightmare, it was a positive change. But most of all," He squeezed Daizi's hand firmly, looking again at her, "I did not want to upset the people I loved like that again."
 
Xander had to bite his tongue to keep from yelping in pain as Alec's nails dug into his arm. Alec was pale, paler than a redhead usually was, and he gripped Xander's arm unthinkingly tight. Xander was almost grateful as the pain of Alec's grip gave him something else to think about other than what his father was talking about. He honestly didn't know which was worse: the kind of pain to lead to that conclusion, or a forced seclusion in a hospital for crazy. There was no doubt in his mind that Daizi had dealt with the worst part of all.
 
"What was the facility like?"

"The short term or the long term one?"

Madeline thought about this, "Both."

"Well, at the short term one, I spent a lot of time on fairly intense drugs because I was healing physically," Dark answered, "I was briefly dead. I do not remember much about it besides being confused to still be alive and feeling regretful about how deeply I had scared the people I care most about. But it was mostly... Yes, it was primarily hospital care. I remember the hospital gown did not fit well, I was glad when they let me wear a t-shirt and sweat pants. The longer one though... It was... annoying?" He chuckled slightly at the memory, "I was kept in this group of boys, they segregated us by sex, and most of them in my cabin hated each other, but refused to leave each other alone. I tried to stay out of it, until they decided to pick on me. I got into a lot of fights, both in boarding school and there once I had my strength back. I did not really want to, but I could only take so much. By then I had made it to my current height, with stretchmarks all up and down my back, and I had these boys who were chest height on me trying to bother me. They would take us to what was called Activity Therapy to play sports or make beaded bracelets, I liked that well enough. I would guess I could still make the beaded lizard or snake, if I had the supplies. It was just frustrating because I did not want anything to do with the drama and I did not really want to have anything to do with the staff either. I kept trying to convince the facility to let Daizi and Cooger visit because other kids got to have their parents and siblings visit, but I kept pointing out my parents were dead. It struck me as unfair. Other people at the facility would get to go off campus with their families, I wanted to do so with the people I loved. Instead they made me go with a staff member, but I was able to choose the staff member at least."

"I would send you letters, though, and we'd talk on the phone," Daizi mentioned.

"Yes, that is true," Dark nodded, "and I would get in trouble for speaking at you in Arabic. I would teach the other people in my cabin curse words in Arabic, they all thought they were saying truly heinous things, those boys loved to scream slurs, but they did not know I was having them say words like 'flower' and 'sparkle.' I would lie to staff too, because in Arabic, a lot of our insults and swear words are flowery, so I could say yakhsaf allah bih al'ard, which means 'may God swallow the Earth beneath you', and nobody realized what I was saying. I was able to lie and say I was praying and the staff did not want to step on religious customs they did not understand. I did what I could to be discharged as quickly as possible and luckily it was over the summer so nobody at my boarding school really knew what had happened."

​

 
Xander smiled a little at Dark's story of teaching the others to swear and slipping in curses. That sounded exactly like the kind of thing he would do. He never wanted to be in that kind of situation. Never. He didn't know if he could handle it. It sounded like an institution that was meant to help keep you alive made you want to die just to get away from the people. Not exactly the greatest place to be.

Alec still clung to Xander's arm. He wasn't really listening anymore. He felt overloaded. Burdened by the horror that he was hearing. His father had died! By his own hand! That wasn't... that wasn't right! He didn't want to think about that. He didn't want to believe it! It made him remember. Remember the times where he'd felt the same. He'd never wanted to actively harm himself, but there were times, so many times, when he had wished it could just all be over. That he wouldn't wake up. He remembered Daizi on the floor with him telling him not to make her lose someone else. Another son. The memory wracked him with guilt. He didn't want to think of Dark feeling that way! Dark was Dark. Untouchable. Brilliant. Strong. Powerful. Clever. Always and ever there. Able to carry the entire family. How could Alec ever think of him as anything else?
 
Dark went on to talk about how after his stay at the facility, leaving out a lot of the more difficult details there because they weren't relevant, and if he talked too long on his memories from then they'd be there all day ("Frankly, it was a surreal experience," he explained), he went back it school, and he was surprised at how glad he was to be there. He was still depressed, but it was better than the facility, and he was back with Daizi and Cooger. That year they went to prom, he graduated high school, he made his scrapbook, which he got up to show to Madeline. By all means, he was still angry, depressed, and hurting, but things seemed a bit better. Just a bit, even though he was in trouble all of the time. "Sometimes it was a fun trouble. Not something I would recommend emulating," he said this pointedly, for the first time taking a glance at his children which was not to check they were okay, "but my senior year of high school was both horrible and sort of fun. I got my first tattoo while still in high school because I could grow a full beard and I am this tall so nobody checked my ID."

But then, as questions progressed, he had to explain how Daizi's father Saladin fell ill, so she had to return to Egypt, and they broke up. He talked about how hard it was, and how afterwards he sort of found himself floundering. There were still troubles with figuring out the best treatments for him, so in the few years following it he had relapses with self-harm. He tried dating others, both men and women, but nobody really filled the wounds inside of him. He openly admitted he didn't treat them very well, describing--although not in detail--how he often, but not always, cheated on his partners. It was something he very much regretted, truthfully, but in the moment he was just seeking serotonin and dopamine however he could because his brain gave him so little.

He also described at length how hard it was to know what he wanted to do with his life and how many things he tried. Cooger knew exactly what his path was, so for a time he tried to do some of that work too, but it didn't suit. Painting he liked well enough, of course he liked building things, but he had no interest in most of it. He tried training to be a tattoo artist, he worked as a waiter. He worked about a hundred other odd jobs, from what he recalled. Some of which he was good at, one he was fired from ("I failed a drug test because of weed brownies."), and many were just too boring to care about, like his month in a call center where he learned to fake an American accent so they'd stop accusing him of being overseas. For a long time, he explained, he really just floundered, somewhat chasing hobbies, but the problem he had was he spent his entire life expecting to die. He had absolutely no idea what to do with the future, "I wish I had taken years in high school to consider the possibility of life."
 
When Dark glanced at them with the remark to not emulate making or getting into trouble, Xander dared to smirk a little, meeting his eyes. Sure, sure, he'd stay out of trouble. Or at least not go looking for it.

Alec had trouble paying attention, but he did come back into the conversation shortly before Dark started listing all of his jobs. He listened in some bewilderment. Really? He had gone through all of that? He'd bounced around that radically? Another thing he couldn't imagine, but it had to be true, right?
 
Undergrad he finished while Daizi was away, although originally he had dropped out, and ultimately he had only majored in history because he did not know what else to pick. It was something which now he appreciated and was truly grateful for because he loved it dearly, but at the time it we a decision made purely based on well, I suppose. It wasn't until Daizi came back to the United States and they were back together when he decided on teaching.

"How did that come about?" Madeline asked, "Did you decide to come back to the US to study?"

After a pause, Dark and Daizi turned to each other, a sly smile pulling at Daizi's face. Then they turned back and gave a somewhat abbreviated telling of the dramatic story of how they ended up back together.
 
Xander rolled his eyes at the story, though there wasn't much heart behind it. It was more for show than anything else. He was used to the story by now, but it was a wild, good story to tell! He hoped these reporter people knew to believe it was true.
 
The rest of the interview finished with catching up to what Dark was doing now, which was much less eventful and it was primarily just talk about how he learned to settle in. The stories weren't insane and wild, but it helped illustrate how Dark relaxed and was able to get to today. Of course he talked about adopting the twins and having Ivy, briefly mentioning the fertility issues but not in detail. Overall, it was a picture of how he had this chaotic, difficult, traumatizing beginning to his life and then... it genuinely gave way to tentative peace, although there were still serious rough patches.
 
Xander nodded slightly without realizing it as he listened to Dark finish his story. There had been a lot he'd known, some he'd guessed, and so much he hadn't known. So much to take in. So much pain. He was proud of Dark for talking it all out and telling the full story. He doubted the article would print the whole thing, but it was out now. It was known. The lady who'd helped Young Dark finally got to know what had happened with all her hard work.
 
"Would you like to go back?" Madeline asked.

"Go where?" Dark asked in return.

"Iraq."

"Yes." He didn't hesitate.

"After all the pain you suffered?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it was my home. The very first home I ever knew. And I know it was, and is, troubled. My formative years were shaped by a dictator, abuse, and war. And I know I will never get to live there again, and that leaving is what gave me all of this. And I know I would not trade any part of it. But do you know what else?"

"What?"

"I have never tasted a sweeter pomegranate." Dark said simply, the far-away look back in his eyes, like his heart was breaking inside his chest all over again. "Not anywhere else in the world."

"Really?"

Dark shook his head, "Not in Greece. Not in Egypt. Certainly not here. And my neighbors could not protect me but they fed me. They taught me to play chess. I do not consider myself an optimist and I am misanthropic by nature, but even I can see there is goodness there in Iraq. So I would like to see it again, and leave on my own terms."

Madeline looked at him for a few moments and then smiled, "And taste the pomegranates again."

"And taste the pomegranates again."
 
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To be able to leave on his own terms... That was something the twins could understand. Neither of them had fully been able to understand why Dark wanted to go back so badly - for very different reasons - but they could understand wanting to leave on their own terms. And.. pomegranates.
 
"One thing I have enjoyed asking as I've conducted these various interviews," Madeline began, looking up from her notebook, "I know there is not... What you have been through in your life is not a morality play, and if there is some grand design, it is not one we get to see the meaning of. But... do you think there is anything to be learned from your experiences? Or any... message, you want to get across."

This was a question that Dark was not expecting and he sat there in silence for a long while, spinning his wedding ring around his finger and feeling Daizi's hand on his back. Then finally he just said, "Nothing which does not sound like a cliche. I suppose... I spent a very long time wondering what was the point of living if I was just going to suffer more. If the suffering was unavoidable, if life would always be pain, I did not understand the point then."

"But you do now?"

"No," He replied, sad, resigned, and peaceful, "but I understand it better than I used to. Because in between all of the agony is staying up too late and eating way too much with the boy who became the man who became my brother, and getting to wake up every morning in bed with my wife who is the woman who was once the girl I had a crush on, and getting to raise my children, even though they vex me. And it means I will get to see who they are, one day, when they are grown. And there will still be suffering, maybe not like it was but life is cruel and unkind and teaches you about kinds of suffering you did not know existed. And you feel guilty about the anguish because it is not really as bad as how you used to hurt but that old, dull pain is rubbed back open by the new, sharp pain. But in between all of that?"

"Pomegranates?"

"And tea." He stared down at the cups again, squeezing Daizi's hand when he felt her cheek press against his shoulder, "My children tease me because I do not get out much. But this peaceful life we have precariously balanced is all I have ever wanted. So there will be blood. And there will be wonders. That is what I learned."

Madeline, Jacob, and Belinda all sat there in silence for a few moments while Dark shut his eyes, just feeling everything all at once. Somehow he both felt like his skin had been peeled off and the open wounds salted and in balance with himself. After letting the moment had a chance to rest, Madeline took a breath, said that was her last question, thanked him for his time, apologized again, and shut off the tape recorder.

Then, Dark and Daizi stood to show them out. As they left, Belinda stopped, lightly touching Dark on the forearm. Her voice a bit tight, she smiled a very long way up at him and said, "I am very proud of you. And I am sorry we could not do more. I wish we had been able to get you the resources you needed. I wish we could have moved you somewhere safer."

Looking down at the woman who had taken him from Iraq and, pierced to the core, he took her hands into his and said, "No. You saved my life, Mrs. Barret. And it is because of you I met my wife. It is because of you I became a father. You keep your apologies, at least until I can find a way to thank you."

Without asking for permission, she reached up to hug him, her head only reaching his chest. When they parted, she squeezed his hand one last time and said, just as she had when she first stepped inside, "You have certainly grown."

Just like that, the three of them left. As he often did in times like these, Dark shut the door behind them, locked it tightly, and leaned against it. Once they were gone, and he didn't need to be strong anymore, the colour drained from his face again and he stood there, leaning against the wall, his internal tides rushing back in and being pulled back to see all at once. And still he could not cry.
 
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Alec felt as though he'd been pierced through. He sat in utter stillness and silence as the words rushed around him again and again like a whirlpool. There was no up. No down. Only directionless tides sweeping around him as he tried and failed to sort through his feelings and the meaning behind all of Darks words. Blood and pomegranates. Blood and pomegranates. No reasons. No rhymes. Beauty and joy mixed with pain.

As Dark showed the reporters out, Alec stood and walked away, quietly going upstairs to his room. He couldn't face Dark. Not right now. He had a feeling Dark wasn't in a position to deal with him, either. He stripped down to his boxers and undershirt and crawled into bed, seeking safety between the sheets.

Xander stayed downstairs, barely noticing Alec leaving at first. He knew where his brother was going and would deal with that later. For now, he needed to be strong and try to support Daizi as she supported Dark. And Dark? He'd leave Dark to his wife.
 
Despite how emotional she typically was, despite how much she ached at the sounds of her husband's grief and her children's shock, Daizi hadn't cried during the interview, although she had come close at the very end. She walked towards him, arms outstretched, "Goose... You did it."

He didn't know what to say. He only watched her with those same eyes he must have had his entire life and dimly pondered if she knew how brightly she glowed. But her arms were stretched towards him, and his body moved before his mind did, pushed himself up off the locked door and fell into her, much of his tension dissipating when her scent enveloped his trembling form. He mumbled something but it was lost against her shoulder.

"You are not alone, Goose," She promised, okay with standing there in the foyer for as long as he needed, "I love you so, so much. You're the strongest man I know."

"I do not think I have ever been this tired in my life," He said, and by the sound of his voice, he may well have been correct in his claim.
 
Xander watched them for a bit and then began cleaning up the tea he'd brought out. There wasn't anything he could do to help Dark directly, but maybe he could help by getting things clean and tidy so that it would seem like nothing happened.

When he walked into the kitchen, he set down the first load of cups carefully and then leaned on the counter. He turned, putting his back to it, and braced himself with his hands as he took a deep breath and let it out shakily. When he closed his eyes, he could hear snatches of what Dark had said playing through his mind. Some of the good, but mostly the bad. The worst of it. The heavy parts. The things that he honestly didn't know how to handle. Now that he knew all of this, what should he do with it? What could he do with it? What was he supposed to do with it? Now that he knew, he regretted knowing because it didn't feel like there was any point in knowing it except for the sake of knowing. What good was that?

He took two more breaths, steadying himself, and went back to the living room where he conscientiously cleaned every square inch so that it looked like the visitors had never come. Everything was exactly how Dark had left it right down to the proper creases in the pillows.
 
Daizi stood in the foyer holding Dark tightly and the pair of them didn't speak much. Occasionally Daizi would murmur how she loved him, or she praised him for how brave he was to open up like that.

Gradually, Cooger began creeping downstairs since Ivy was napping. From upstairs, he couldn't hear most of the conversations, but he heard Alec go up and downstairs a few times and he knew what the discussion was about. He wasn't sure how to interrupt them, or if he should, but he cared about his friend and needed to check on him.
 
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