come_sailaway | Pack it up, pack it in,

Entry tags:

Pack it up, pack it in,

CHARACTERS: Darcy, and YOU?!
DATE: First half of September prior to the event
LOCATION: Sports deck
SITUATION: A pirate-sponsored fight club for the sake of ~~beating the shit out of each other~~ bettering each other
WARNINGS: It’s a fight club. Violence is to be expected.

I came to win

Fliers go up around the ship, as they so often do. This time put up with a reasonable amount of tape and written in a much less flowery hand than people would expect, the announcement ‘FIGHT CLUB TUESDAY EVENINGS SPORTS DECK: MAKE FRIENDS AND THEN HIT THEM’.
Anyone going to the sport’s deck after 7pm for the Tuesdays before the excursion will find tennis court set up for an impromptu fight club. There’s a notebook with a pen off to one side as a sign-in sheet, and a small list of rules written in the same handwriting as the fliers.
-No killing or dying
-Respect tapping out
-If you’re learning, respect your teacher/s
-If you’re teaching, respect your student/s
-Cause problems, get kicked out

Off to the sidelines, Darcy can be found supervising, keeping an eye out for any issues.

Battle me that's a sin

In one corner is supplies for fencing and swordplay. Three protective jackets, mesh masks, and blunt training sabers in a loose pile, plus whatever weaponry people themselves supply. There’s a circular arena drawn out on the ground, with a narrower fencing piste drawn through the middle of it.

I won't ever slack up

For those more inclined to hand-to-hand combat, a couple of the punching bags from the gym have been dragged out onto the court, along with focus-pads and a couple of long strips of bandages bandages to wrap one’s hands with. An arena has been drawn out, about the right dimensions for a boxing ring.

Punk you better back up

Over on the furthest side- deliberately angled to face off the ship- there’s a makeshift shooting range consisting of a bunch of water bottles and some mannequins from the Tommy Bahama laid out as targets to shoot at. A line has been drawn on the ground, presumably to stand behind when shooting.

Try and play the role and yo the whole crew'll act up

Right in the middle of everything is an arena marked out for no clear purpose, with no equipment nearby. It can probably be presumed that this is somewhere for people to spar, or more likely, show off in front of everyone.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"No, it's not okay, but no one's ever gonna fix it or help you so you can deal or you can die," he says, raising his voice.

Yeah, they're both dead. He knows.

"And then everyone here would know that I take orders from little kids. I wasn't gonna hurt her, but I'm not making myself a target just to spare her feelings, either."

"You really think you can just show up and start saying how this place works, don't you?"

Darcy lowers her voice, "I'm fixing it. I'm helping people. Since the day I fucking got here I've been breaking my back to sort this out, and because I'm not a little fucking bitch who just decides everything's hopeless and you've just got to get used to it, we've been making progress. You can do whatever you want, dude, but you can't say nobody will, because I'm somebody. And I'm not the only one helping and fixing shit."

She folds her arms, "and now everyone knows you're an asshole and a bully. Hope you're happy."

"I know how life works," says Vance, age 15, "I know how the world works. And you're the one who was telling me it was hopeless to attack the captain. I want to kill the bastard. I want to get us out of here."

And violence is the only thing he's good for, so if he can't use that then he's got nothing. He clenches his teeth, and dips his head low, his hair falling in front of his face.

"People leave assholes and bullies alone. That's the best that some of us can get."

"Because killing him isn't the way out of here. There's so many fucking other ways to help, and you haven't asked what else needs to be fucking done."

Once again, she feels the need to make apologies to people for what she was like when she first arrived.

"They don't. Not here. People here are the fucking worst. They never leave you alone, no matter how hard you hit or how much of an asshole you are. You're never alone. And it fucking sucks, but that's life here. I was a bitch back home and I'm a bitch here, and now I have people who care about me, and you're just not that fucking special that it won't happen to you too."

"What're you gonna do, ask him nicely to please let you go? Ha!"

He assumes that anyone who'd hold people hostage and torment them is like the bastard he already dealt with, and all he can think of is how many times The Grabber gave him false hope only to take it away.

And he was desperate, so he fell for it every time.

"Yeah, well, they're wasting their fucking time if they do. I'm a ghost. I'm here to get revenge and then go to hell or wherever you end up."

"No, we're not. You don't get it and you don't want to get it."

Why did she even bother? Darcy huffs and casts her gaze over to the rest of the court, checking to see if anyone else needed her help.

... And then Vance reminds her why, because of the oath she swore. Because this kid is dead and needs to be taken care of in the way he wasn't in life. The way she wasn't.

"You don't go to hell. And maybe it is a waste of time, but they're still going to do it. I'm still going to do it. It's not like anyone here has anywhere else to go or anything else to be doing. And the dead should stick together."

"And what if I can't appreciate it anymore? What if the only part of me that lingered after death is the angry, hateful part?" he says, "What if the rest of me's deader than dead?"

After he died he only felt rage for the longest time. Then one moment of relief, and then he was here and full of rage again, and any respite from it is short-lived because other emotions make him ache for the life that was taken from him.

Anger, at least, feels just as good dead as it did alive. Maybe even a little better.

"...the angry hateful part that likes comics and Led Zeppelin?" she asks, "I've seen what happens to ghosts that have nothing left dude. You're... surprisingly lucid. You remember things about yourself, about your life. I think you're just... used to being an asshole and nobody liking you, and you're looking for any reason not to move on from it and try something new."

Darcy somewhat pointedly looks away again, scanning the court, "it's hard trying anything else. But being actually strong means not just staying in place because you're too scared to do something different. You know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and hoping for different results, ehn? You don't have to keep playing the bad guy."

"There is nothing else," he mumbles to himself.

Not that he can think of, anyway. He's a fighter and that's all. If he's outclassed here, then he's nothing, unless he's persistent enough to keep going when everyone else has quit, which just so happens to be his current plan.

"But you're not the boss of who's strong and who isn't. You barely even know me."

"I know enough."

Yet more wasted fucking effort. If she hadn't burned through her vitriol already it'd be enough to arc her up into biting again, that out of everything she said, he's choosing to focus on that fucking pecking order 'you're not the boss of me' bullshit. Alright then, two can play this game. She gives the court a final scan, and then looks him dead in the eyes.

"Prove it then. You think I shouldn't get to decide what's strong and what isn't? Show me why. You think you're hot shit, then fucking prove it."

"I bet your girlfriend, didn't I?" he says, "If I'm weak, then that means she's weak, too. You willing to say that?"

Darcy's gaze narrows. Congratulations, Vance, you've hit a spot so sensitive that Darcy has been willing to kill over it previously.

"I was going to let you get the first hit in for free."

And Darcy swings for his face.

He takes the hit, and it hurts, but he doesn't mind it. This kind of pain distracts him from the other kind and that's good enough. That's what he's here at fight club for.

"Yeah! About fucking time!"

And he throws a punch of his own, aiming for her face in turn.

This is a terrible idea. Darcy's still incredibly sore from the excursion and her hand is still bruised from punching Izzy. But he wears the punch and the catharsis of just hitting this asshole makes it worth it. Darcy's trained in boxing, so she has more of a strategy than just wearing the punch, and she manages to slip the hit, it passes above her shoulder and she steps closer, aiming another hit at his face.

He dodges this one; all his technique is from experience rather than training, a guy like Vance is hard to train, but he does have experience.

He strikes again, going for a fake-out with his left before throwing the actual punch with his right.

She isn't expecting him to know what a feint is, so she wears the hit with a yelp, having dodged in the wrong direction. She hisses, a hand immediately going to where he's reopened her still-healing split lip.

"You're so fucking dead-" and Darcy tries to grab the front of his shirt, pulling up just a little short.

"Yeah, I fucking am," he says, teeth clenched, blood pooling in his mouth from the earlier punch.

Dead. He is dead. And he clearly hasn't come to real terms with it because now he's enraged, seeing red, at nothing more specific than 'everything' right now. But especially at the people who keep trying to help him out and tell him he can do better, for reasons he can't quite put his finger on.

Although he's putting more real force behind his punches in his rage-driven state, he's also sloppier and less coordinated. He takes a nice, big swing. If he misses, his fist'll hit the wall.

It's very easy to stay angry around your own death. About anything bad that happens to you, really, but death is the big one. It's never fair and rarely earned and there's a reason that most ghosts are creatures of rage and terror. Usually when distressed the Shroud or Caul activate on their own before anything else, magical reactions to a flight instinct, but Darcy feels the Rage bubbling up under the surface as she dodges the punch. Like electricity in the air, or the taste of metal in her mouth, it's so close and she could reach for it if she wanted.

But she won't.

Instead she tries to grab the back of his head and make it follow his fist, intending on smacking his forehead into the wall.

His fist hits the wall, followed by his head, and he sees stars as he falls down to his knees. In the moments that follow it's hard to remember where he is, or who he's fighting, or what he's so angry about.

He does remember hitting the wall over and over again when he was trapped in the basement. Just a little further and he's free, if he can only break through a little more.

So when he swings his fists again he's aiming for the wall this time. And again. And again. Except these walls don't give, and all he gets are bloody knuckles until he realizes he's not in the Grabber's basement. He's still on the Serena Eterna, in the middle of a fight and now his hands are in no condition for punching.

Judging by the ringing in his ears, he already lost anyway. He stands up slowly and spits a bloody gob out onto the floor. Although he doesn't concede verbally, he doesn't raise his fists again, either.

Vance collapses and Darcy squats down to deliver her final verbal blow- when he ignores her entirely and starts hitting the wall. Over and over, the sickening noise of flesh hitting something solid, and the hatchet scars on her back itch. Ghost are always stuck somewhere and somewhen else, and some part of her that isn't still fuming with rage wonders who or what he's hitting.

Then he stands up again, and she follows suit, wiping the blood off her chin and licking off her bottom lip.

"She isn't weak. You got lucky," Darcy sniffs, "and if you want to keep doing this bullshit pecking order thing, I'll keep kicking your ass. But I don't want to. I left that shit back home where it belongs."

"I didn't say she was weak. I said she's weak if I'm weak," he says, "And I'm not."

Which he is still going to insist on, despite just getting his ass kicked. If his stupid memory hadn't acted up again he could still be fighting anyway, he reasons with himself to spare his pride.

A pause, and then he speaks again.

"I didn't move on. I thought I must have because I did what I set out to do, but I just went straight from there to here."

He's not sure why he thinks of that now, other than the fact that Darcy seemed surprised when he said he moved on the first time they met, and maybe it explains something even if he's not sure of what.

"She's not weak if you're weak either. Undine just isn't weak."

Fucking semantics. Darcy restrains the urge to roll her eyes.

"Yeah, no shit. You're probably still just as angry as you were when you died," she gingerly feels over the developing bruise on her face with the back of her fingers.

"Probably would've stayed angry until you forgot everything else, if you hadn't been brought here."

"Yeah, well, at least anger still feels good," he says, "Everything else fucking sucks now."

He can enjoy comics and music for a little while, but inevitably all the rage and grief and horrible emptiness come creeping back soon enough. Even his beloved pinball doesn't make him that happy anymore.

It's like having a buffet table of all his favorite food that he can smell just enough to crave it, but it turns to dirt in his mouth. He misses when his death wasn't hanging over everything he did. And, he realizes, he's starting to hate the people who keep inviting him to the table, even if their intentions are good.

"Fighting and revenge and anger are the only things that feel like they did before I died. You said I should try something new, but if I give that up, what's fucking left?"

It's not totally a ghost thing. But it's less frightening to dismiss it as such and say that he needs to act like a jerk all the time than it is to work through his emotions and accept that even if he heals he won't be the same boy he was before.

Maybe it's not fair on him to keep treating him like just a ghost. Because firstly, he's too much like a person to resemble any of the ghosts she dealt with back home. And secondly, even if he were to let that anger go, there's no way he'd be able to move on here. In many ways, he resembles her state between life and death more than he does the truly dead. Which means that unlike her convenient answers for dealing with ghosts, she's got to wade into the weeds of her own experience.

"I don't know," she admits.

"When I came back, I was the same. I was... so fucking angry that nobody had come to help me. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't talk to anyone without snapping. The only thing that helped was... meeting other people who went through the same thing, and finding something better to put my anger into than picking fights. I've been undead for more than a year now- I'm still angry," since clearly he doesn't want to talk about the sadness that permeates death, "but... eventually things got okay again. Not perfect, not great, not even good, but... okay."

"There's nothing better to fucking put it into here, if you're right about not killing the captain," he says, "At least back home I had a reason for sticking around. Now I'm just supposed to, what, sit around and hope you guys have it all figured out?"

As miserable as being a full ghost was, at least his anger was good for something and eventually served a purpose. Now he's (mostly) tangible and yet pretty useless, most people won't even pick a fight with him until he pushes them over the edge and attacking the captain is an exercise in futility.

"Believe it or not I'd rather fight over something important than start shit with the rest of you, but there's nothing to fight for."

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