Arthur Lester (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theotherright) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
come_sailaway2022-09-20 05:31 pm
theotherright) wrote in come_sailaway2022-09-20 05:31 pm
[OPEN] the labour and the wounds are vain
Who: Arthur Lester and YOU
What: The walk of shame after rafting with two other idiots off the edge of the world
Where: Around the ship
When: The day after the beach party
Warnings: The normal Arthur stuff. Traumatised man hours. Death happened. Sad about blind. Also, the thread with Bash eventually contains a couple references to 1930s homophobia, plus displays of ignorance about queer people.
Mistakes were made. Big ones. For those sensitive to that kind of thing, an invisible death counter has ticked up in Arthur from zero to one.
i. scoops
It's a big ship, but unless you count Tommy Bahamas, it's not infinitely big. Why the hell can't he find Smith or Steve? Particularly Steve-- you know, the teenager he just helped kill?
In truth, Steve is hiding in his cabin and he happens to keep missing 6, but Arthur's brain is pleased to conjure some more unpleasant scenarios, and the effort of talking it down is exhausting. Looking for people while fucking blind only compounds his frustrations, and he's already feeling a few SAN points down after the whole 'fell into the fucking void' fiasco, and he's currently searching on the promenade which is already fucking overwhelming, and so his reaction when he collides with a fucking stool that's sitting outside of Scoops is, as soon as he's regained his balance, to pick it up and toss it as hard as he fucking can across the fucking ground.
"Fuck!"
ii. tauva
...not long after that, Arthur realises that he needs to calm the hell down.
He forces himself to stop pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing. And once he stops, it's like the energy leeches right out of him, both physically and mentally. Part of his mind is still just spiralling down that invisible void, screaming.
The whole raft thing is a part of it, but it's far from the whole. He's so far out of his depth and he doesn't even know which way up is, and he's been holding his breath for as long as he can, focused on the possibility of escape, but now escape has put him right back on the ship and it feels like he tried to take a breath and instead filled his lungs with salt water.
He ends up in Tauva. It's not consciously planned. But he has been thinking about someone else who frequents the place: someone to whom he once again owes an apology.
Arthur's slumped back in one of the leather armchairs, his useless eyes closed. Until now he's perched on the edges of chairs, sat with his feet beneath him, ready to move if he needed to. This time he's just... folded into it. Head tilted down. As still as if he was asleep, or even more so, because even sleeping people murmur or turn over once in a while. The only parts of him stirring are his lips, which move as if silently singing to himself, and his hands, whose long fingers bat restlessly against one another and against the soft arms of the chair.
He is not super okay.
What: The walk of shame after rafting with two other idiots off the edge of the world
Where: Around the ship
When: The day after the beach party
Warnings: The normal Arthur stuff. Traumatised man hours. Death happened. Sad about blind. Also, the thread with Bash eventually contains a couple references to 1930s homophobia, plus displays of ignorance about queer people.
Mistakes were made. Big ones. For those sensitive to that kind of thing, an invisible death counter has ticked up in Arthur from zero to one.
i. scoops
It's a big ship, but unless you count Tommy Bahamas, it's not infinitely big. Why the hell can't he find Smith or Steve? Particularly Steve-- you know, the teenager he just helped kill?
In truth, Steve is hiding in his cabin and he happens to keep missing 6, but Arthur's brain is pleased to conjure some more unpleasant scenarios, and the effort of talking it down is exhausting. Looking for people while fucking blind only compounds his frustrations, and he's already feeling a few SAN points down after the whole 'fell into the fucking void' fiasco, and he's currently searching on the promenade which is already fucking overwhelming, and so his reaction when he collides with a fucking stool that's sitting outside of Scoops is, as soon as he's regained his balance, to pick it up and toss it as hard as he fucking can across the fucking ground.
"Fuck!"
ii. tauva
...not long after that, Arthur realises that he needs to calm the hell down.
He forces himself to stop pacing and pacing and pacing and pacing. And once he stops, it's like the energy leeches right out of him, both physically and mentally. Part of his mind is still just spiralling down that invisible void, screaming.
The whole raft thing is a part of it, but it's far from the whole. He's so far out of his depth and he doesn't even know which way up is, and he's been holding his breath for as long as he can, focused on the possibility of escape, but now escape has put him right back on the ship and it feels like he tried to take a breath and instead filled his lungs with salt water.
He ends up in Tauva. It's not consciously planned. But he has been thinking about someone else who frequents the place: someone to whom he once again owes an apology.
Arthur's slumped back in one of the leather armchairs, his useless eyes closed. Until now he's perched on the edges of chairs, sat with his feet beneath him, ready to move if he needed to. This time he's just... folded into it. Head tilted down. As still as if he was asleep, or even more so, because even sleeping people murmur or turn over once in a while. The only parts of him stirring are his lips, which move as if silently singing to himself, and his hands, whose long fingers bat restlessly against one another and against the soft arms of the chair.
He is not super okay.
no subject
"Sounds like it went well at first? I'm guessing whatever you tell me next is about to go completely off the rails."
no subject
Jesus, Arthur, get over yourself and get it together. You know what people want when they have a hangover, and Pratt sounds like his throat could use a spell in the humidor. Get the man a goddamn glass of water.
By now he has Tauva fairly mapped out in his head, so he knows that if he came in and went this way for a chair, then that way must be the bar. But he doesn't strike out towards it straight away. First, his next words have been shaken loose.
"I died. All the way, this time, I think." He doesn't elaborate on that statement, but his voice has that 'you gotta laugh or else you'll cry' shakiness to it. "A small handful of us attempted to escape by raft, a-and, and, and it didn't work. It was just a-a-a scenic detour back onto this ship." Oh there's that unhappy laugh! "Stupid plan. Worse than my idea to stay on the island."
no subject
He'd whine some more about his unending suffering that's entirely his own fault, but Arthur keeps talking and uh... well it's not unexpected, but he'd feel like an ass continuing to mope about himself.
"You.. wait wait. You made a raft, and tried to sail away?" Pratt is going to let all that laughing go because unhinged laughter is better than his stress response of stabbing people and/or screaming so Arthur here is pretty well adjusted in Pratt's book.
"What if it was the actual ocean and land was two hundred miles away? I... that's not a great plan." He's trying to remember what the ocean around the island even looked like since he spent his beach time getting laid and digging for treasure and paid no attention to the water. "Did you guys drown?"
no subject
He starts walking, navigating round chairs in his recollection of a bar-ish direction.
A sharp sigh. "No. We didn't drown." He can't even imagine how fucked up he would feel if they had drowned. The possibility was bad enough. "I'm not... I'm not sure what happened."
Which makes it ripe for examination, right? And out loud is the only way Arthur knows how to think. "It was a sort of-- drop. Like the edge of a waterfall. But more than that, it was a- a sort of cacophonous, a- a, a cutting- a--"
ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT MOVING ON, "Anyway, ah. W-well, I- I would have guessed it was the, the edge of the pocket world we're apparently in, but -- but that island was so clearly a different place that it..." Soft thud. "Is that- no, no, that's a table. That it- either we somehow sailed unknowingly back into the pocket, or- or maybe the Captain placed a sort of wall, a-an artillery line, around the island, to prevent exactly what we tried?"
no subject
He finally opens his eyes when he hears that thud, tilting his head to see where the hell he's gotten off to and immediately groaning because his brain doesn't appreciate the slight angle and feels like it might have come loose and is sloshing around inside his skull.
"I guess at least you tried. Maybe you pissed him off? That'd be cool."
no subject
And with that question put out into the room without passing through any kind of brain-mouth filter, he reaches the bar. "A glass, and a jug of water," he tells the ghost brusquely, "and some salted peanuts." Things begin to rattle about and fly around as the order is put together.
"If I've pissed him off enough then maybe I'll start to consider it a win after all." He won't, but boy would it take the edge off. God he'd love to think that the Captain is fuming right now.
no subject
Pratt has absolutely not processed that Arthur is up there getting something for him, so he's going to continue his important mission of holding down the carpeting so it doesn't escape. He takes this job very seriously.
"I wonder why he put an edge on the world anyway. The other place just looped back in on itself, you didn't die if you went too far. Shits fucked yo." As if Arthur doesn't know that.
no subject
His reference to past events makes Arthur's ears prick up. "Looped? Like a... a roundabout? Wait, was this landfall? Bash made it sound like the ship hadn't made landfall in months." To be fair, he didn't say that, just didn't correct Arthur when he hypothesised it.
Some water, a glass, and a little bowl of peanuts on a tray land smoothly on the bar. The ghost is kind enough to push the tray so that it touches Arthur's hand.
no subject
"Uh roundabout..." Give him a sec, they only have about ten roads in Fall's End and a roundabout is not one of them. "OH. No it was uhm. Hold on. There was a magic word for it and uh...Wait wait."
He is way too hungover to try and remember what the fuck he was told by... Rita maybe? He doesn't even remember which is pretty normal for him but way worse right now when he doesn't know how he got to Tauva in the first place.
"A recursive something. If you drove far enough it kind of teleported you out the other side like in Ze--" Yeah Zelda is a reference Arthur will definitely get. "It just made you suddenly appear on the other side and you didn't even realize it. It wasn't like you even felt like you were getting zapped or something. Which it.. should have right?"
That should be how magic works.