Phil Connors (
goodweather) wrote in
come_sailaway2024-01-06 08:01 pm
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beaufort wind scale [open]
Who: Phil and you!
What: January open; having a bad one, having a decent one, and Bird Monster Time
When: through January
Where: bellona theatre, library, sports deck, bobby b's, the sky, pool bar, around
Warnings: non-suicidal self-harm thoughts, compulsiveness, probably prior Village stuff will come up
smoke drift indicates wind direction, wind vanes still (cw: avoiding self harm) [rooftop]
wind felt on face, leaves rustle, vanes begin to move [bellona theatre, library]
small trees in leaf begin to sway [sports deck]
twigs breaking off trees, generally impedes progress [around]
whole trees moving, resistance felt walking against wind [bobby b's]
slight structural damage occurs, slate blows off roofs (cw: compulsive behavior) [around, in quiet places]
seldom experienced on land, trees broken or uprooted, considerable structural damage [around]
very rarely experienced; accompanied by widespread damage [after the probe launch; rooftop]
devastation [wildcard]
What: January open; having a bad one, having a decent one, and Bird Monster Time
When: through January
Where: bellona theatre, library, sports deck, bobby b's, the sky, pool bar, around
Warnings: non-suicidal self-harm thoughts, compulsiveness, probably prior Village stuff will come up
smoke drift indicates wind direction, wind vanes still (cw: avoiding self harm) [rooftop]
This can't be good.
It's the first thing his mind jumps to, when his heart starts racing or the stress builds in his gut, that need to hurt something, but he can't let himself do that. He couldn't before and he especially can't now. He won't. He won't. Too many people care about him. Too many people depend on him. He'll do anything before he relapses like that. The idea is terrifying.
In his cabin he takes a sharpie and draws on himself. As many species of swirling plants and darting animals as he can remember, tangles of geometry, cold fronts, polar coordinates and bad math equations that would probably crash a calculator, as many numbers of the Fibonacci sequence as he can remember; all of it traces up his wrists and his thighs, though no one will see the latter. He can't ruin something like that. He rips a notebook from the bric-a-brac to shreds and painstakingly colors it all red in marker. Tape, too--there's tape in the bric-a-brac and the Sundries, and that he lays on his skin, especially where there's body hair, and tears it off. It doesn't take up hair that much, but the sting is there. That satisfies. That sates. That's safe.
And he runs too. Falls into a dead sprint until his legs burn, then takes off into the sky until his wings and his whole torso does too. It's good cardio, he may as well be productive. Some might spot him soaring in circles above the deck. When he lands, it's onto a familiar rooftop perch, and his legs dangle as he sits to take some weather measurements.
wind felt on face, leaves rustle, vanes begin to move [bellona theatre, library]
In the library, or occasoinally alone in the theatre, a voice can be heard, quiet and low.
"When I heard the learn'd astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; when I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured wh--when--"
A soft but vicious swear. And then he starts again.
Phil sits with pages and books of literature and poetry in front of him, reciting carefully. He... seems stuck.
small trees in leaf begin to sway [sports deck]
It's not at all unusual to see Phil up on the sports deck; he works out regularly, he keeps up diligently with his sword and combat training, has for over a year by now. And he's a strong sort of guy; the impacts he make aren't without force.
But he starts showing up more often, and for longer. Phil goes at the dummy with a dull training blade with an unusual aggression and speed; the impacts are vicious, and the drills are repetitive, and there comes a point when he strikes and the blade snaps apart, the shattered pieces flying.
Phil stops, breathing hard, and goes to sit and take a water break.
twigs breaking off trees, generally impedes progress [around]
Sometimes he has his earplugs in; often he doesn't, because despite how much he hates the noise, he hates being vulnerable more. As Phil passes through the ship he keeps tabs on his surroundings, carefully avoiding any eye contact so as not to be caught glowering at anybody. No one deserves that from him, but he's not willing to tamp it down, either.
But if someone seems to keep his eyes on him for too long, he'll look right back at them and grumble, "Is there something you need?"
whole trees moving, resistance felt walking against wind [bobby b's]
The routines the same. He drags himself into the bar. Sometimes he gets a cigar, but he always grabs a whiskey. Never by the bottle, though, and for each new drink he gets a new glass. He. Needs to keep track.
He's here more often than he was before, and for longer. But... he has water, and food from the Drunken Sailor, so...
slight structural damage occurs, slate blows off roofs (cw: compulsive behavior) [around, in quiet places]
Preening while he does other things is routine. Usually while he reads, which could be in the library or the lounge or the cafe, or while he's just sitting around in a restaurant or a bar or the pool deck. But these days, sometimes he just--he gets stuck. He'd meant to get up and do something else half an hour ago, maybe even an hour, but his talons still run through his feathers, running and running and digging and pulling and--he's breaking barbs, snapping quills, running his feathers torn and ragged, but that's just as well. That's how he knows it's real. Ugly, but real, and the mistakes he makes stay.
... This is probably an issue, though, isn't it.
seldom experienced on land, trees broken or uprooted, considerable structural damage [around]
Phil takes a deep breath. And--
... There's something new slinking around the cruise. It's bigger than a polar bear and twice as vicious-looking, taller than most people at the shoulder, but it only seems to be winding carefully around the library shelves, or up and down the stairwells, or poking through the Tommy Bahama. It's not thrashing, or making a racket, or attacking people. The most it's doing is trying to use a register with its giant bird hands. Or sleeping on the roof of the pool bar. Or struggling to get out of some Bahama clothing racks that he got stuck in without breaking anything.
(Those who are even passingly observant might see why: those wings are familiar. So are the eyes: the left one clear, the right one slashed and cloudy with cataracts. And perhaps even the sallow white light is familiar, and the cool breeze that blows about it.)
very rarely experienced; accompanied by widespread damage [after the probe launch; rooftop]
Phil slowed down on his weather tracking a lot. Once every other day, maybe every three days. Nothing has changed since July of last year, after all.
But now he thinks it'll be much more useful than not to have someone keeping tabs on the atmosphere. So. He'll be there on the same rooftop spot he always takes. New paper on the clipboard, neatly dated and partitioned. At nearly all hours of the day and much of the night, he's taking readings as close together as 15 minutes and no further than two hours apart. Sometimes he'll fly out over the sea just to scan the horizon. He's made a real nest up there to make the long haul tolerable; cushions, blankets, food and drink, books... plus Erin's sword and the cursed dagger close at hand, and the antimagic ring on his finger. And always wearing his lei. (It's invisible in the daylight, but in the evenings, there's... a strange fluorescent cast of light on him. Like most white fluorescents, it doesn't do him any favors, only serving to make him look more sallow and pale, as though he was ill.)
Sometimes he's up there in that big bird monster shape too, struggling to manipulate the pen in his weirdly dexterous bird hands. It'll be useful to get used to this shape now that he understands what it is. It came to him so close to the eve of potential disaster. It's the same thing as when he got these wings two months before the apocalypse happened on Prismatica, and he used them to race through the collapsing city to rescue and evacuate civilians with Henry.
It's a Hail Mary.
It also means they might live.
devastation [wildcard]
(( hit me on discord or here. ))
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But suddenly--Fever's words--Phil's words, in Fever's mouth--split the dark sky like a chain of lightning, like a lead cast down from heaven.
She says it's in the opposite direction. When he realizes he does not hate or fear her for it, Phil gently shuts his eyes and takes a moment.
Skulduggery apparently expected it to be a nonissue but anyway told a select trusted few to execute him in the case it happened. They couldn't, and Skulduggery murdered one of his closest friends and his own child and fourteen more people in some kind of possessed necromantic rage. Phil woke up to find fifteen people dead and Darcy's head at his feet, and they had to stumble into a courtroom and fucking investigate and make some guesses and have a whole god damn proceeding and party about it because the Captain could not bring himself to do the work without lashing himself to his own rules. Skulduggery regrets, of course, but that stupid fucking trial and waking up to their murdered kid sticks in his craw. Phil thinks about Darcy, about her teeth around his throat, and how in the moment before his skin broke, he had never felt so loved.
Daisy was starving; had hardly a choice in the matter, would have died for it if she could, especially as a retired serial killer. What she left on him was more permanent than any death and yet he doesn't condemn her the same way. The simple and raw need for the Hunt, the absence of real death. Especially after their last conversation, he finds himself mostly content.
Fever's threat of violence is, so far, something he can stomach. Look at her now.
...
"And it's scary," he continues, voice quiet and tight. "It's tiring and exhausting to manage, and the things you've tried before don't always work again. And it just happens. And it's..." swallows, "it's so fucking scary."
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Except he doesn't. Except, what he says is different. What he says is, it happens.
And it feels like her hands are bloodied, but they might not stain his. She remembers what he said about a loop, about living more of his life there than out. did you speak, and did anyone listen? could they listen? did they believe you? Begin again, again, again. Will the boundaries hold? Do you wake up with your hands being your own?
A new day. Begin again. A slow nod, because she doesn't trust herself to move fast right now.
"It's terrifying."
She doesn't fear the Captain, or some goddess of destruction, or the rulers of the realms. But gods, does she fear herself.
Deep breath, slowly. Steady. Anchoring in the other.
"...there's enough in my head to offer glimpses of what the alternative is. If I don't keep fighting. And I think, sometimes, maybe losing everything was the only way I could try my hand at being anything else."
She wants to know. She doesn't want to know. She needs to know to avoid it. She needs to avoid it entirely. A past that could be a future that would leave her with dreams made reality. Standing in a silent and dead world, and only the sound of her own breathing.
gods, how lonely that would be
"If that makes any sense at all."
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Hand on hand, both calloused with the tools of war; one old, one new. How ever did they get here.
"To sum up who I was before--I'm not some... I'm just a... a civilian. But to sum it up, I hadn't made a single real friend for over twenty years, and it was entirely my fault. The loop trapped me in a town away from almost everyone and everything I loved and knew. And I was ruined. Ruined myself, honestly. I killed myself over and over. Probably more times than there are days in the year, I can't actually... remember. And then--and then, I could become somebody people actually liked."
Nadir. That's what they call it, right?
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Whether it happened because the gods said they deserved it, or that fate twisted in a specific way - oh, she'll go to her true grave believing she herself deserved it, but it is the most painful kind of gratitude, that the worst thing to ever befall you is the only reason people can bear to be near you.
"Rebuilding yourself."
Enough threads yanked out, that it all falls apart. And then begin to weave again, in a different pattern, until life is restored. There will always be scars. There will always be marks. Tangled patches.
His exact life, she hasn't lived, but when she casts out a rope, there's enough to say that he is understood in a way that all the sympathy in the world can't reach.
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"You rebuild yourself," he repeats. "Into someone better, and you come back. You reemerge. You return, and you find the people who knew you before, and they--flinch."
A hand reaches up and closes around the lead, the lightning.
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"They're waiting for who they remember to reemerge from your skin. And you think, was I really like this, was I this fucking terrible? But you know the answer is yes."
Phil, at least, didn't need to take up arms against those that knew him. One by one, Fever consigns hers to the earth with her memories.
(A voice in her head, smooth and confident and proud, dark eyes searching for the few remnants left, trying to gouge into her head for salvage. So unlike the ones before her.)
She has to believe she's changed. The old her would never have sat here, and spoken quietly, and be unguarded. Too many exposed points to kill by. Too many points to die by. That her could not have borne this moment in time without bloodshed involved.
"And here you are, exhausted and scared and scarred, and somehow, you'll sort it out. Manage it. Keep it under control. Because you have to."
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Darcy can understand suicide and depression, but not being so comfortable and so far in it that disappearing altogether still means so little, and can’t comprehend the timescale of it. Cassandra can understand imprisonment and force and homesickness, but not planting your feet where you are, the worst thing that ever happened to you making you someone unequivocally better. Erin understands being stolen and the Spring and the specter of your past and so much else, truly so much, but as far as he can remember she has not scored her own bones past splitting and poisoned her body so much as him. (No one has.) Security understands the suicide and the need for comfort and the uncomfortable process of becoming and the threat of who you were (are) but still not the longevity of him. Peter understands the Village, Christ does he know, and being in an impossible situation; Grace and Ava understand isolation and loneliness and social struggle and bodily violation in a way few others here do; Dimitri understands a need for vengeance and protectiveness and a very different kind of existing impossibly, the change forced on your body; but none of them will ever understand the violent way he became their friend. Or the depth of the urge.
Fever…
“But you have to manage.” He swallows thickly. “You have to just… do it. You have to go, and hold it all together with, with tape and string, and… your loved ones are great, they’re kind, trying to help, oh there is so much damn advice and wisdom out there and you do need that, but you just want… want—you are just waiting for…”
Phil inhales shakily, eyes glassy. The air about them grows damp. “For… one, one message. One transmission out of the dark. Just, one person, who finds and sees you, who says…” His voice goes choked, and high.
“… I understand how you feel.”
(Erin’s sparking Mantle could escalate to gunshots, twist shapes in its smoke; Ossie’s, change perfume. So far Phil’s has mostly fluctuated in atmospheric qualities and light.
It is a phantom feeling—not real water. But somehow, here in the bar, it just begins to rain.)
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Sometimes, all the advice in the world isn't what you want, when none of it touches the now. Reaching, striving for a solution, and getting back we all have thoughts like that or trying to redirect you somewhere else. And Fever loves her friends, she does, she misses them every day, but all their well-intentioned words couldn't stop her hands from needing to be bound. It's eyes in the dark through shadow and red, it's being allowed to feel what she does, it's a box full of enough blood to drown in, it's waking up alone and checking her hands to ensure they grip no weapons, that the door is still locked. It's being dead and yet not because to ignore the past runs the risk of repeating its mistakes. The Fool in more ways than one.
And still, she keeps reaching towards others. Because somewhere, somehow, someone has to understand.
The rain is only a feeling, and yet. And yet. It reminds her of her magic, weeping for her when she could not, cannot do it for herself. It makes her ache for a real downpour, enough to soak to the skin, to make the air breathable again.
Rain cleanses. Rain veils. Rain makes the flowers grow.
She still hasn't let go of his hand. Not a force in this realm could make her, apart from his own choice.
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What he does is he still holds that gaze, that unbelievable gaze until his eyes spill over and he has to look away and scrub at them with his free hand. The other still grips hers.
He will not do Fever the disservice of making her his savior—they are not each other’s saviors, they are hands clasped in the cold, shared body heat—but God. God, it is so much easier being so much less alone.
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It's sheer impulse that has her lay her hand on his cheek, brushing away what of his tears he missed. Despite all the horrors she can imagine, she can still do this. Can still touch someone gently, and offer what she can.
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Fresh tears spill over, and he leans into her hand.
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Breathe. Keep breathing. That's all they can do, right now. It's the simplest thing. It's the hardest thing in the world. It's not like they have to pretend about any of it.
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His wings come around, too, feathers brushing up against skin and cloth, the solidness of flesh and bone beneath the softness. He wraps her gently in them and breathes.
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The eternal flickering of violence in her soul is quiet for the moment, and Fever knows enough to count her mercies when they pass by. Bowing her head, her face in his hair, she closes her eyes for a second. Breathes in the scent of his cologne, and hopes this is enough. They're here. They made it this far. Tomorrow will be another series of choices, but right now, there is no obligation to pack it all away and be fine for someone else's eyes. He's allowed to feel everything that he does, the same as her.
Storms are power and chaos, but they know an ebb and flow. They exist in the same cycles as do the spring rains, gentle on everything newly born. Under his hands, she minutely relaxes - not enough to not be ready to defend them if needed, but enough to say, she needed this too.
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They intertwine both inside and out, in this embrace and in their struggle and selves. Phil has no shame for moments like this after all the work he put in to be able to have them--if one does not need to defend themselves then they cannot be attacked--but Fever, she will have a fierce guardian in him. But he can't hear anything nearby except some folks milling about in other stores and bars, and the shuffling of the Bahama's creatures.
He feels her body against his. The solidity of it, the weight, the features of being real. The last time he was this bad, a wall began to go up between him and the world. It stopped being real. How could it be? He was trapped in something absolutely impossible. Everyone around him stopped being real. Just a bunch of actors playing sickeningly cheerful parts, and nobody could see him or wanted to see him, not unless he made them see. ... It wasn't true, of course. He knows it isn't. Even spent a couple decades working to prove himself wrong. Still, there's relief in this. Fever cannot be anything but harrowingly and unflinchingly real; no pretenders could bear something like her.
Eventually. Eventually, the rain subsides, leaving a feeling of fresh humidity and the idea of petrichor.
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The phantom rain soaks their souls, she imagines, pain and cleansing all at once. When it finally subsides, when the air feels like it's taken a breath itself, she shifts. Lifts his head so carefully, until she can look into his face, until she can see him.
"Phil."
His name, to let him know who she sees.
Still here, despite everything.
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A hand so carefully moves to cup the back of her neck. "Fever," he responds, near breathless. Her name, who he sees.
Despite everything, still here.
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What can be said? What words would be enough? How could it be caged into such shape? It could not, it will not be. Perhaps she lost whatever memory others acquire that gives them the ability to convey this sort of thing into eloquence, into poetry and sense. But she can still show it.
When she kisses him, it is a soft thing. Just feeling, instead of thinking. Not asking him to move farther than he wants to, not wanting to press and pry and tear apart. Only that she's wanted to for a while, and they are so close, and something in the color of both of his eyes reminds her of the sky.
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... He doesn't know what to make of it. Maybe he doesn't have to, though. Phil is often so deliberate in his actions, so watchful of himself, but that's not what they've been doing here. This has been storm, this has been rain, all the same kind of instinctual improv along familiar lines that dictates (and predicts) the collision of winds or the sprawl of clouds.
Fever kisses him. Phil shuts his eyes. When it breaks, he leans in again, chasing another.
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He's too good for her, but even so, even so, she won't deny herself. This has already taken so many turns, gone to places unexpected, that one more might as well be chanced. One more cloudburst of emotion let fall. And instead of being discouraged, she finds herself allowed to continue. Her turn to be surprised, when he seeks another, but it quickly fades in favor of simply giving him all of her attention.
Maybe it's grasping outwards, finding that commonality and wanting to sink into it, wanting to hold onto understanding in whatever way her mind can latch onto. Admitting the misery and the fear and wanting to push it aside for a bit. It might not solve anything, but does it need to? Does it need to fix anything to occur?
She doesn't know the answer. What she does know is that her arms hold him near, while she kisses him back, giving as good as she gets.
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Phil returns her efforts in kind. (Thankfully they've both got plenty of practice; or at least, he does.) His wings keep them close. And after a bit, cautiously, gentle as they've both been, he moves down towards her jaw.
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A silent wish, to whatever grants them. Let her not fuck this moment up.
If there is the most minute hesitance before she moves with him, it is only because it goes against every habit to leave one's neck vulnerable. Yet, it is minute, cast away because no harm will come, none will be done. The hand that cradled his face moves, seeking its way into his hair, to touch and twine, still careful. Yes, she knows he's not fragile, and neither is she, but that's not what this is about right now.
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Phil sighs against Fever's neck as he feels fingers in his hair, chasing his own path down her jaw. The hand he has cradling her neck reaches up and tucks her hair behind a pointed ear; and he kisses there, too. A bit of teeth makes its way in, but it's only a brush of it.
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Fever's caught between the desire to murmur that she doesn't have a roommate and the opposing one of not wanting to forsake the shelter of his wings sooner than she has to. So far, the second is winning out, if only because she'd have to speak for the first, and words require thought outside of here and now.
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He dips his head, lips to the side of her neck.
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cw allusion to self harm
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