come_sailaway | [OPEN + CLOSED] And sooner or later, it's over

Entry tags:

[OPEN + CLOSED] And sooner or later, it's over

When: Post-Carnival February
Where: Chatterbox, Tauva, etc.
Summary: Bash is not doing well. But he's coping?
Warnings:

1. And I don't want the world to see me [Closed to Ossie]
Erin and Giles have both suggested that maybe Bash talk to Ossie, but he's been a little shy, a little chickenshit about it, but like. He's finally worked up the courage to send a text. Like, nothing huge, nothing that's going to rock his or Ossie's world. In fact, it's only three words. Eight letters and a punctuation mark.

hey u busy?

This is what an act of bravery looks like.

2. 'Cause I don't think that they'd understand [Chatterbox]
Of course, there's another thing someone can do when they're upset. They can sing about it.

Bash has been hyperaware of the fact that his boyfriend's a whole bard, so he didn't really tell Jeff where he was going on this particular night before sneaking out to Chatterbox and occupying the stage. He's, uh. He's sure doing some feeling-y songs, from Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" to MCR's "I'm Not Okay (I Promise) to some early Linkin Park. Look, he's just laying it all out on the stage while he's alone. Because he is alone, right? There's no one about to walk in and see him pouring his guts out.

Right?

3. When everything's made to be broken [Sand Dollars]
Some things are a constant. Bash taking time to make coffee for people is one of them. In some other universe, he might have had a cafe, but in this one, all he has is Sand Dollars, and the time he gets with anyone who wants a cuppa.

Come say hi, he's brewing the good shit today.

4. I just want you to know who I am [Wildcard]

darkersolstice or darkersolstice#9463 to plot

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"Ffff..." His expression darkens instantly when she mentions the mirrors, and he doesn't answer right away.

"This ain't a hypothetical, huh? Okay. So you're talking about something that wants-needs-craves flesh. It's taking real flesh shit, not draining life out. And it got a taste, it might start wanting more, that's bad."

"Yeah," Ava breathes out heavily in resignation. "But it seemed unable to get beyond the counter. So I think it's contained...? But..." yes, she sounds doubtful.

"How do you. I don't know, fix something like that?"

"I don't know. I'd know how to begin to handle a matter like that in my own world, but my methods don't work with the ghosts here, because there's no Underworld here. I'm a psychopomp, I used to take stuck souls on to their afterlife. That's not a thing that I can help with here, because there's no afterlife, and no Underworld, and I don't got the juice to change either of those facts."

And the one time he tried, he got eaten by a mirror, and like. Part of him wants to tell her what he learned from that, but telling her the whole story would kinda suck.

A small nod of defeat, and Ava looks away again. No afterlife has been an unfortunate snag in reality she has no idea how to overcome. The Captain's lack of belief, nothing she can convince him otherwise when she's never had any concept of it either. How do you make something out of nothing? How do you change the fundamental design of existence that hinges upon secrets too dangerous to tell?

"I'm not sure who else to go to at this point..." Ava admits, staring into her mug. "Could you... at least check it out?"

Nothing hurts like being the only one who can handle a thing when you know you can't handle a thing. Bash closes his eyes, feeling very, very, very alone and very, very, very heavy right now.

"Sure. I'll check it out. Where, how?"

He's needed. He has power and knowledge and he's needed, and so he'll do whatever is required of him. Fuck his own needs. He's a demigod, and Fates know he's here for a purpose, so it may as well be this.

Ava bites her bottom lip sharply, and immediately regrets asking. She knows the look of somebody that feels obligated, unable to say no. She knows because she's fought back the urge to scream time and again at every new assignment. And she can't put someone else in that position. Bash owes her nothing. And this is her mess to clean up, no matter how terrified she is.

"It's..." she flickers nervously, a glance back over her shoulder while simultaneously holding his gaze.

"Sorry, nevermind," she backs away. "Thanks for the coffee."

"Ava. I will do it. Just tell me what you need from me."

Because now he's committed, he can't back out, can't say no. He feels like there's ice in his veins.

"I... I don't know..." she shakes her head with a blur of motion and another nervous step backward. "I messed up, messing around with things I don't understand. And now it's all going to be my fault when everyone gets hurt..." More than hurt, if what Valdis was talking about was true...

Deep breath.

"Sweetheart, I tried to create an underworld and woke something up behind the mirror and then got eaten by it. The hard life-drainy way. You're not the only one messing up here, I promise."

That's a whole lot to process at once, and Ava stills, holding the coffee cup closer to her body. It'd be hypocritical to get upset, for him to attempt such an act of godhood when it wasn't his realm to do so. When she had expressed to Bash before how much it pained her to know the suffering the vanished experienced in the Nothing. Told him it was that way due to the Captain's lack of belief that she lacked hope to change. "Was it... because of what I told you?"

And she's surprised it hadn't resulted in worse.

"Woke what up? Did it... come out? Or pull you in?"

"Something with eyes like gold flames. And...I tried to step past the mirror like a normal wall, because I was curious, and it just. Mh. Like I said, the life-drainy way. I didn't die right away, though. I was just. I died, but I didn't end dead, not until something or someone came in and cracked my skull so my body could really-really die."

Thinking back on it, he frowns deeply.

"It was terrible, being trapped and not dying. I felt nothing. Saw nothing. Knew nothing, until I was cracked open."

"Gold... flames..." Ava repeats, her own eyes going wide. It's too specific of a description, not just glowing, like any number of creepy things in the dark might do. Aligns too perfectly with everything else that she's been worriedly obsessing over while trying to sleep. Something that Friday keeps hidden away, that Fio has befriended in her dreams, that Ava has no idea what to do about other than keep quiet.

Sparkles. The name almost escapes her lips, but her hand covers her mouth instead. She wobbles slightly.

"Oh. Oh. That's... you went into the Nothing. And you found... fuck."

He lets out a heavy breath. "Other order. I found whatever you're thinking about, and ended up in the Nothing. Though. Though, that...if being drained by the mirror led to the Nothing, and having my body killed led me back to waking up in the morning..."

He drains his coffee in a gulp before finishing the thought. "...where's the bodies of the passengers of the previous voyages?"

She nods along numbly to his retelling, trying to trace through the steps, but her mind is still reeling. "I... I don't know." She had once asked with what she now knows was not Friday at all. "Somebody reminded me that plenty were repurposed, reanimated back in the desert. Zombies..." She hadn't spent much time out there once they began emerging from the ground, since Maximilien had rushed them back to the safety of the diner and the portals. But somebody mentioned that they hadn't actually eaten anyone, not the way she witnessed.

"But a girl found one out in the water. Ebalon's. I brought him to... a place... that I knew a soul was trapped."

“Do we know for sure what type of zombies they was in the desert?” It’s a topic he can speak on with some authority, given he’s done the raise corpse thing twice in the past six months.

“And who was this trapped soul you just totally fe…” another of those thinking pauses. “Okay, so like. What if the soul was trying to free Ebalon to wake up in the morning like whoever kill-killed me when I was drained?”

A small sip as she remembers the purpose of her coffee rather than just something to cling to. "Not... the brain eating kind?" And that's as much expertise she has on zombies. If she can't tell a spirit from a ghost from a soul, there's no way she'd be able to differentiate the walking undead.

"Hu-rakane." She takes a seat in the nearest cozy armchair, hunched over in thought. "That's a very kind interpretation... Do you think... that's where the bodies are kept. Inside the Nothing?" That they were never actually separated, but stored together? That would explain why they seemingly vanish all at once without a trace. And that it was her own bias at the concept of what a ghost was that made her assume they were literally disembodied.

But where was Ebalon's soul? Why was his body perfectly intact yet obviously devoid of life? Why did the ghosts in October need new bodies to inhabit if they still had their own? "Why... do you think they let you go?"

"No, I don't think the bodies are kept in the Nothing, because I don't think, now, that the Nothing is a place. I think it's the state of a soul being kept trapped, contained in a body that has been drained down to nothing, one that's not alive, but not properly dead. I think maybe in the crew quarters, maybe in worlds he's made like the deserts, maybe other places, there's a whole lot of people who are stuck."

And if that is the case, well. That's something he can wrap his head around doing something about.

Ava isn't quite sure conceptually how she thought of the Nothing and how it overlapped with their own physical space. Just an intangible unreachable expanse that surrounded them, but not quite a location in the traditional sense. "But how do... they prepare the drinks?" Ava asks, because this issue of where the dead are kept is a conversation she had with Rita in this very same spot.

Suspended in a state of unbeing makes sense, or stored in the inaccessible crew quarters, but... "I know where three of them specifically are, Jenny's brothers. And those gems in the display cases. I think those are too. But then there's the ones we see in the mirrors, and what's making our beds?" Ava sounds distressed, because this is far beyond her expertise. There's so many pieces of information, things she's been told and things she's observed, and too many things she's assumed that she probably shouldn't have. Just a vague idea that if the ghosts could come back to possess living passengers, that death itself was reversible if only they had bodies to shove them into.

"But... I'm worried maybe I unstuck one somehow, and it wasn't much of a person anymore. Something else, something warped. It said it wanted... to play."

"I'm sorry I don't know how to give you answers, sweetheart. I can share notes, and I can make guesses, but I'm...well. Not one of the smart ones. Never have been. Back in Boston, I hung around with a son of Thoth, and he did my thinking for me, and I did his charming talking for him. It worked out, then. Now, though, I don't know what to do."

Her worry, her despair, her uncertainty, it's all infectious and mingling with his natural assumption that he's a fucking idiot to make the most toxic cocktail possible.

She used to think she was reasonably intelligent, with her love of puzzles and untangling mysteries. Now she's certain that she's never known anything at all but delusions and illusions. Her notebook full of bad data and the paranoid theories that she's constructed and deconstructed and reconstructed, desperately trying to figure out what she's missing or where it all went wrong.

The glaring common denominator is herself. She's the corruption in the system, her own mind warping every hypothetical into an unsolvable paradox. The disequilibrium has spread into her very thoughts, a glitching behind her eyes.

"I... don't either. But to give up. Before I make everything worse."

"I'm not entirely sure giving up is an option, on the path we're on. We've already started shit, the only way to go might be forward."

This is meant as encouragement, but it's also...he's including himself there. He's poked shit and now he needs to involve himself in the cleanup for that.

A small nod, as she tries to calm herself down. Latch onto his statement. Forward.

"Bash... I know things that apparently might destroy reality, if the information ends up being heard by the wrong person," she says vaguely as possible. "Because I thought if I knew more and was smart enough to figure it out, how this all works, maybe I could use that information to... solve all this."

She presses the coffee cup to her mouth but does not drink. "So I hope maybe you could... check and make sure that spirit is still... stuck... and that the sigils being smudged didn't somehow allow it to wiggle loose so it could go on some feast..."

It's not a prayer, but it is a moment where someone human is beseeching him for his aid, and that feels binding as a rope to the divinity within him, heavy and tight.

"I will try. Where is it stuck, and how did you get to it?"

"The bar. Hurikane. You go up and you... order the soul. Of Hu-rakane. I... It's disturbingly easy. Hopefully there's no soul of Sand Dollars."

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[OPEN + CLOSED] And sooner or later, it's over

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