come_sailaway | ( catch all | october ☠ ) windows cracking, heart attacking, cryptic laughing

( anakin, start panikin, i don't have a planakin. which is to say it's 11am on october 2nd, and clarke's trying really hard to fight down the rising urge to go hysterical and fatalistic. this is fine, it could just be a misunderstanding, she just — )

I need your help.

Edited 2022-10-02 02:50 (UTC)

[ Well, Mizuki sucks with the plan bit, but he is pretty good at helping people? So, of course he's happy to respond to Clarke with a: ]

do u need me there? i can be omw r/n.

I don't even where

( you know that thing where your fingers type faster than you brain and then you accidentally hit enter when trying to delete it? yeah, that. )

Let me start with, have you seen or heard from Natsuno at all in the past, like, 15 hours?

i don't think so…?

[ Admittedly, things have been a little hectic since the info meeting. It was a fucking hot pot of emotions, that's for sure. Mizuki himself might have been happy and hopeful afterwards, but everyone else? Pretty sure the whole emotion wheel had been covered, really. ]

should i go start looking for him?

I've looked a few places already. Library, dining hall, club, even the damn casino. But not the arcade yet. Meet me there?

[ On the one hand, Natsuno doesn't seem like the type to be at the arcade for 15 hours and presumably ignore the texts that Clarke has probably sent (considering she's texting Mizuki now, he thinks that's likely), but Mizuki doesn't voice these concerns. Maybe he's lost his phone? Maybe he pulled a Mizuki and just got really invested in a game and forgot the time and suddenly 15 hours passed? One can only hope.

He can stay optimistic for now. ]

ofc! brt.

[ And with his own hop, skip and jump, he makes his way to the arcade to meet with her. ]

( plenty of theories have filtered through clarke's head in the last half day. she entertained that natsuno maybe climbed into a lifeboat to deal with digesting the meeting information as privately as possible, but that doesn't seem quite right. a) he's nowhere in any of the boats she checked, b) she trusts if he were to leave or truly panicking over their inescapable confinement, he'd let someone know, and c) even in thr midst of a crisis, clarke thinks natsuno would jump at the opportunity to investigate yesterday's late afternoon explosion.

losing his phone? it's possible, and would explain why jade hadn't seen him return to cabin 109. but not why he wouldn't have posted up in the library or pool area to pass time, and not why he wouldn't have shown up at rita's (they seem close) or her doorstep.

she's trying so, so hard not to start freaking out. not on the basis of radio silence alone, but it's incredibly difficult not to after bellamy had disappeared without a trace a few months ago. please don't be that again, please don't be that again.

in the end, she beats mizuki to the arcade, but only because she'd been halfway there when texting him. standing right at the entrance way, palms damp with nervous sweat hidden in the pockets of a hoodie, and mouth constantly flitting from pressed impassivity to tormented pout. smalltalk fails, all clarke can offer the blue haired boy on his approach is a jerk of the chin and a stiff: )

Hey.

[ Look, everything is fine? Everything has to be okay. He's not so sure he can handle bad news right now… Not when he's gotten such good news lately? It's the first time in a while he's been pretty happy! Thus, he does give Clarke a little smile. Something that hopefully conveys to her that she just needs to relax. He's sure that things will work out. Natsuno might just be, y'know, stuck in the washing machine or something. Hate it when that happens—

He gives a small wave. ] Any word? Did you already look without me? I can start moving aside machines and stuff if you'd like.

( you know, washing machines would be a good place to check next, add that to the list. it wasn't that long ago they'd all horrifically overflowed, right? and maybe he's stuck in one that won't stop running, cramped and underwater but unable to die, so just slowly drowning with soapy water in lungs he doesn't need to use and —

oh, stop that, clarke's doom brain. don't let it start, those thoughts are a fast track to being unable to keep a lid on your composure.

she tries to offer mizuki a smile back, but it come out mostly like a humorless flash of teeth. )

No, still nothing. And I haven't looked yet, I — ( am getting increasingly more and more scared of what i'll find: nothing, or something horrible. ) — wanted to wait for a second pair of eyes.

( but he's here now, and she must forcibly unglue the bottom of her feet from the carpet and sweep into the room of boxed video games. first step for clarke will be the jurassic park shooting game, which is a booth with a dark curtain obscuring the seat. and also an emotional wallops of a callback. )

[ Mizuki knows Clarke well enough to know that she's fretting over this pretty explicitly. She has every right of, of course, and Mizuki isn't going to tell her that everything is going to be okay just yet, but for now, he can be optimistic. He has to be. So long as he can keep smiling, maybe thing will continue to be okay for a little while longer, when Mizuki feels like this is the most normalcy he's going to get in a while.

He nods, though, and simply sweeps into the arcade behind her. He starts from the back to make his way though all the games. Any machine that feasibly has a person-sized gap at the back, he shifts aside to make sure Natsuno wasn't movie-highschool-bullied behind one of these. He doubts it, since he's seen the sorts of things Natsuno is capable of via the Battle Royale, but… he just has to make sure.

Once he's thoroughly poked through the machines, he heads for the indoor playground on the other side of Playback so he can rummage a few tentacles through the ball pit. Maybe Natsuno got dizzy by all the colorful, plastic orbs and passed out in here or something…? ]

( only half the fretting originates from a sparsely proven but continual inclination of dread, and the weird codependent reliance she's had on natsuno since they pillaged friday's desk together their very first week on board the ship. in it for the long haul, regularly bending heads, first on each other's speed dials when things went tits up or new information was dug up.

the other half is based entirely on how similar this is to when bellamy blake had disappeared. it'd started the same: his comfortable place at her side suddenly a vacant void, no response to her texts, not in his room when she'd gone calling... and all of that, for better or for worse, clarke had weathered alone. had only recently brought it up in conversation the night before the zombies converged on them, then again to gal friday who'd more or less assured her that while gone, bellamy's soul was still around; in the walls, serving drinks, cleaning up blood. that it'd been painless and he didn't feel anything anymore. and that'd hurt so incredibly badly — knowing he was there, and there was nothing she could do to help him — and when thought of natsuno experiencing the same thing poked it's unwelcome head into her panicked thoughts, she'd been set on a surefire spiral of losing it.

so, yes. lots of fretting.

and much appreciation for when it isn't directly called out or debated (rita). mizuki's all action and ready for it; she watches him occasionally, and hears the grating shift of game systems across carpet as they're moved. for her part, she's investigating the games that feature curtained booths, and even jumping up and down while craning her neck to see if he's somehow secreted himself on top of the systems just out of line of sight. then she's headed to the teen lounge with all it's couches and coffee tables, which is an immediately apparent waste of time.

so, tentacle deep in some plastic balls is when they'll inevitably reconvene. clarke drawing up to mizuki's shoulder, trying her hardest not to sound weepingly defeated and no longer even giving his extra appendages a second look, she's seen them so often now. )

Anything?

( catch all | october ☠ ) windows cracking, heart attacking, cryptic laughing

✝ to mizuki

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