come_sailaway | You must fix your heart

Entry tags:

You must fix your heart

CHARACTERS: Darcy and probably someone
DATE: it's (already) May
LOCATION: Various
SITUATION: Depressed teenager has a normal time
WARNINGS: None yet!

Let our bodies lay, mark our hearts with shame (Skulduggery)

In this moment, after Fio’s hugged Sparkles and everyone seems to be wrapping up the arguments and the… frankly inexplicable tea table (??? who does that?) Darcy is reminded of how badly she had wanted a threat to be able to punch. Sparkles, another undeserved recipient of begrudging mercy, was not that. All she’s got is adrenaline and pain and potentially some more bruised relationships than she had at the start of the day. So y’know. Tuesday.

She’s already back at her room by the time Skulduggery messages, at her limit of human contact before she disembowels someone, and by the time he arrives she’s doing what she was doing when he texted; which is to say, biting into her arm through her hoodie sleeve to muffle her screaming.

Let our blood in vain, you find God in pain (Meta + Ruby)

Darcy had been expecting some sort of sense of real triumph when all was said and done. But as it always goes, there's no ticker-tape parade when it's over. The Captain's back, Sparkles is somewhere, her friends are safe, she's… fine. The ship will just go back to business as usual. And she will too, eventually; back to the endless loop of training and more training and different training and finding ways to pass the time in between waiting for… something. What is she even waiting for, now? The excursions aren’t lethal anymore, the most recent threat to the ship has been dealt with, and they still can’t leave and... She’ll get back to it, honestly, it’ll all go back to the way things were, into the comforting rhythm of routine. She just… needs a minute.

Darcy passes out for about a day.

When she drags herself back to consciousness through drool and the pattern of pillow crease pressed into her face, she suddenly remembers her discussion with Ruby; and if she’s lying around feeling bad for herself, she has the time to do it to benefit someone else, so Ruby gets a text that is valiantly attempting to not seem frantic.

you still up for depression day?

Now, if your convictions were a passing phase (Kitchens + OTA)

Honestly, Darcy kind of worries she’s dreaming when she spots them for the first time. Just like December: the bright gleam of industrial steel, the smell of a kitchen freshly cleaned, a good array of knives. Not amazingly well-stocked, she’ll have to hope the Easter-Erda delivers her some of ingredients or equipment she notices are lacking (seriously, what sort of kitchen doesn’t have a rice cooker or orange oil), but literally anything is better than nothing, and it irritates her to no end that she’s going to have to thank the Captain for it.

So find her;

A) Making a batch of bread-rolls to test out the oven with: in the process of kneading, proofing, or waiting for them to finish baking.

B) Throwing together lunch for herself: cutting up vegetables, kneading pasta dough, reading a book of Christina Rosetti’s poetry while waiting for pasta to finish cooking, whisking a sauce together, and eating by herself on the floor in the corner.

C) Making a bigger meal at dinner to share: peeling potatoes, cooking off onions and garlic, browning meat, doing stretches on the floor while waiting for the food to finish cooking in the oven.

D) Or most commonly between meals: cleaning. Sharpening and washing the knives, wiping down the benchtops, doing the dishes, mopping the floors while levitating a few inches above it. It’s the first taste of real sanity she’s been able to find in… definitely since the labyrinth, probably since she arrived. Do not step on her clean floors or risk getting the mop shoved somewhere delicate.

May your ashes feed the river in the morning rays (Gym + OTA)

She imagines that a caged bird being freed feels the same way as she does setting up the treadmill. Darcy is a well-tuned machine that needs to be in motion, which is sufficient motivation to ignore the risk of getting cornered by someone in the gym again (thanks for that anxiety, Clarke,) and actually go to train during the day. Like some sort of animal.

Between the treadmill, deadlifts, one-armed push-ups, rowing machine, and the intensity with which she’s hitting the punching bag, an observer might come to the conclusion that she’s either trying to push past her limits, or run herself ragged. Either way, stay out of her way and off the machine she’s about to use or risk getting scowled at.

Get up, coward. (wildcard)

(For anything else)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Before I answer that, I'm going to say that it smells delicious anyway. It being something different holds far more than its own weight here."

Darcy might be critical of the ingredients, but that she makes it at all, that's worth noting, and Helena finds a place where she can stand out of the way, still listening to the sounds.

"But really...are you asking to be polite? I can give you the nice answer then, instead of the full." An offer to avoid the true amount of whatever's on her mind, but Raven's words are still in her head. Those laid low not merely by their own fear but by being so scared, or so proud, as to refuse support.

"Thanks, Lena."

She'll accept the compliment instead of being a whiny baby about the meat quality, because it's Helena and Helena makes her want to be less of a shitheel all the time.

"I mean, it's up to you. If you're not doing okay that's fine, most people aren't. But if you don't want to tell me, you don't have to, either. 'm not your priest, you don't have to spill your guts."

"That's very true, but if I tried to tell you that I'm fine I have a strong suspicion you'd call it for the lie it is."

Her tone is light even though she's completely serious.

"I feel as though I made a fool of myself in public and potentially set a number of people against me, and I'm merely waiting for that to come back and cause problems. And beyond that, I feel like I can hardly remember what day it is anymore, which is less than ideal."

"You can join the club on that. I ended up arguing with people I care about, and giving people who already hate me even more chances to hate me. And for what. To rescue some little shit that didn't want rescuing."

There's a hiss of steam as Darcy pours the stock cube mixture into the pot.

"And yeah. Same here. Seemed like I had an okay grip on the months and then I didn't. I don't even know if it's been Easter yet. I can't tell if he's risen or not. Schrodingers Jesus."

"We can always say we're calling it Easter to hold up the spirit if nothing else. I don't think he'd mind if we were a little late. But..."

She leans back against one of the unused counters, cane in her hands, running her thumb along the familiar smooth surface.

"I was keeping track. Every single day, I could count, could tell you how long since I woke up here, how many days since I last died, how long since some great upset occurred among us. Now...I can't." It upsets her more than she wants to admit. How long, then, before her memory is dragged and smeared all over like wet paint again?

"The only comparison I can give to you is if you walked into your own house and someone rearranged all the furniture, and you no longer remember where it was meant to go. Only that it's wrong."

"I mean, it's all kind of theoretical anyway," she shakes the sad dried herbs into the pot, "We don't have a priest here, we couldn't do a mass. I just... like keeping track of what time of year it is."

She actually looks up from her cooking this time, even if Helena can't see it.

"That... sucks. 'M sorry. It sounds like that was important to you. Maybe the Captain or someone knows how long it's been? But- you've probably already thought of that."

Darcy reaches to pull the tea towel from her shoulder, advising-

"Take like- two steps back, I'm about to put this in the oven, don't want you to get burnt."

She steps back obligingly, allowing Darcy her space.

"Miss Friday, perhaps, when she's not running about fixing a thousand things at once. I have to consider what I want to ask the Captain, when he feels up to visitors after being kidnapped by his own fragment. If he ever will be." Helena shrugs, because Darcy knows - she considers the Captain someone who needs his space and courtesy, same as any other passenger.

"The short of it is that it was difficult to track time before I arrived here. It's why I can't say how long all of that was going on. I don't want to forget what day it is and miss someone's birthday, to forget something important again."

Because getting run about in the same maze, dying different ways, what is up and down got confused frequently. Of course, now at least half the ship knows her secrets, if they had bothered to listen. She's banking on them forgetting, or being too distracted.

"He'll bounce back," Darcy states, pausing for a second to open the oven and slide the pot in, lid on, "I don't think he knows what to do with himself if he doesn't have the chance to dunk on us. So."

Oven closed and tea towel draped over the handle, Darcy sets the timer and leans her hip against the countertop.

"Because of the ehnnn... your thing with the guys trying to kill you."

...

"Did you... really have to live with them?"

"...Yes and no. I gave a very simplified version of events to Dimitri, and...I almost wish I hadn't exposed so much. But, there was no other way to explain it to them, why I don't consider living with your killer to be the end of the world. "

Darcy knows how painful that part of her history is. How she'd barely wanted to talk about it firsthand, how it took tears and shouting and force to get through.

"They had their side of things, and we had ours, and we could have tried to keep to that though we shared the same land. But it was common for people to mix, to mingle, to get to know each other outside of the bloodshed. Really, even if I'd been bound and determined to hate them, my curiosity would have inevitably won out. And...they were in a tangled position as well - bound to the game by the same rules. We run, they hunt. There is not a question of wanting to."

Tucking her cane under her chin, the rounded top feels cool on her skin.

"I'm afraid that makes me sympathetic in ways that other people are justifiably not."

"Sparkles was pretty clear about wanting to," she muses, rubbing the back of her neck. She made her decision back at the bridge, but that doesn't mean she's free from doubts and concerns.

"But it's a good perspective to have, I think. I'm... sorry that everything went to shit so much you had to share it. It wasn't... You should've been able to choose if you wanted people to know."

"Thank you," she says softly, eyes closing. "But they had to know, lest my words get dismissed out of hand as ignorant at best and cruel at worst. It's not as though trust me would have been enough for them to understand why I believed and believe there is another path."

And it felt like carving her own chest open, the entire time. She's glad none of the Lost were too close, because she knows they would have felt the fear, the agony of vulnerability that was pouring off her in waves.

"Now I just hope that enough of them either didn't hear it, or that they forget it under the flow of their own immediate concerns and recovery so that it can fade from memory."

"Dimitri won't repeat it. I know him, and it... sucks you didn't get to meet the Dimitri I know. But he won't pass it on. He gets how important keeping this sort of thing close is."

Hell, nobody was their best selves at that confrontation, she can't imagine Helena's going to be holding it against him.

"As for anyone else, anyone passes it on and they get punched. So."

"I won't ask you to hold to it. Gossip on this ship spreads like wildfire."

She knows, she asks Erin on the regular to inform her. But she appreciates Darcy getting defensive.

"But I know that's not how Dimitri is on a regular basis. If I didn't trust him, he wouldn't have gotten anything. Ordinarily, I'd say he's something of a friend, a man with a good heart."

"Yeah, usually he is. He just... I don't blame him for it, but he gets a certain kind of..."

She clicks her tongue, trying to find a way to phrase it without digging into his shit too much.

"I don't think anyone hates evil more than him. Really, honestly fucking hates it. Which is usually good. Usually amazing, you should've seen him tear apart zombies at the diner, he's a force of nature. But... here... It's just messy. It's all messy and nobody's winning, and we all feel like shit, and even if we had torn Sparkles' head off, we wouldn't be feeling better. It'd just be a different kind of shit. But he's... he's so... pig-headed about it all, ehn?" she's not repeating what Felix called him, but she can't say it's not applicable, "we're the same sort of animal when we see what has to be done. What should be done. If I wasn't already in the Captain's camp, I probably would've tried to help him kill it."

"I don't think he's wrong for it. I don't think any of them are wrong for wanting to strike back when they're hurt. Even though I didn't choose retaliation, it doesn't mean I don't understand the feeling. Their dedication to fighting what's wrong, your dedication, it's truly brilliant and admirable. But like you said, killing it wouldn't have solved anything. It had such a strong chance of just...making everything worse."

What if reality had been stuck like that?

"My friend Wayne - he looks like the moon, you can't miss him - he said something to me, when I had to make sure he wasn't dying in my arms. He said that it felt like the rules kept changing, that he felt lost. Like there was nothing he could do but die. And I just felt like if we committed to violence, like every other voyage before us...we'd all be lost. Nothing to do, but to commit the same mistakes as before, and die until we stopped having enough to die with. Maybe that makes me a coward, but I want to try peace, until we really don't have a choice, because I don't think someone's tried it before."

There's that shiver again, when Helena compliments her convictions, her dedication. Like it's anything next to Helena's endurance, like a dwarf star beside the sun. She can't help but reflexively wonder how many deaths it would take to break Darcy herself. How long she could've gone before giving up into despair.

A quiet huff, before Darcy admits- "I know Wayne. Gil's friend He went into one of my memories, I spoke to him a bit. Then he... tried to get in between me and Ava."

Helena doesn't need to be a magic empath to guess at how Darcy feels about that.

"About a year ago I interrogated the Captain on some shit, with Clarke. And he told me that nobody had ever tried to help him. Ever. Not once in the thousand years he'd been doing it. 'Who would be stupid enough to'. That's... when I knew that's what I had to do. You can't make change by doing the same shit and expecting it to work. I still believe that. I just wish I was... better at it."

"You're trying in the first place, aren't you? Then you're already doing better than the thousand years beforehand."

Wayne, and his condition, can be set aside for the most immediate thing.

"What is being better at it beyond just that? We're not God, Darcy. We're meant to try, and try again, and keep trying until we eventually figure it out. And I don't think any of us have personal experience with helping beings many times our age through a millennia of being let down, so it's not as though we have a map."

"Helena, I really appreciate you trying to psych me up, but like, I fucked up with him beyond just not knowing what I was doing. Apparently I'm really good at that, so."

Talking about Wayne might have been able to wait, but that doesn't mean Darcy isn't still thinking about it, and about the fight with Ava.

"Then tell me what happened. All I can know is what you tell me about it."

And she is tired of not knowing things. There's a whole spiraling web she doesn't know about, and she wants to uncover it - to be able to plan and chart a path for the future.

"I tried to insult the Captain into making the ship start working again back in October by poking at his fear of being bound back into service again."

Sort of. Splays her hands out like 'what else is there to say'.

There's a pointed sort of silence between them, for a long moment. Not out of an absence of things to say - it's the sensation that Helena's trying not to say something and instead let the admission be its own weight of guilt. If Darcy had tried to hide this, justify it, she would have walked out of the kitchen entirely.

Finally:

"As I said, try and try again. I believe he's owed a better attempt from you than that."

"I know, okay, I already tried to apologize," she explains during the silence. But it trails off, eventually.

"I know," again, but quieter.

"It's not... easy for me. I thought I was helping at the time. I just- I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to do what everyone else just seems to be able to do. I don't- I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Do you want my honest advice, or do you want to be upset at yourself for longer? I won't scold you, either way."

It's hard, when you're used to life being one way and one way only. It's hard to make those choices, even when that's not the case.

"I'm going to be mad at myself until the final trumpets blow. So. Plenty of time for me to do that on my own."

Which feels easier than admitting she only said anything to hear Helena's thoughts on it. Could be dangerous, getting used to prying herself open just for Helena to hold each piece in her hands.

She rearranges herself, adjusting against the counter. She wants to push herself up on it, but thinks better of the idea, and instead just tucks her cane next to herself so she can fold her arms instead.

"The truth is, it's not something anyone's born knowing how to do. You have to learn it, and some people learn it early, and some people never learn. Then, once you learn, you have to choose to do it. The good part of that is that you can choose to begin at any point."

Helena breathes in deep, exhaling slow.

"People aren't plants. We don't have proper seasons to lay seeds, to grow, and to be sheltered from frost. There's no right time to try except when you do."

They aren't her words, she knows. Something she read, or something her father said. But they feel right, so she's borrowing them.

"Forgive me if I presume too much - did you try to use fear as a push because it'd work on you, if time called for it?"

Edited 2023-05-12 08:56 (UTC)

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