come_sailaway | Do you think that there’s a way I could ever get too far?

Entry tags:

Do you think that there’s a way I could ever get too far?

CHARACTERS: Darcy and superfriends
DATE: Nov 1
LOCATION: Darcy’s cabin, sports deck.
SITUATION: Darcy reviving, and a memorial for the ghosts.
WARNINGS: Aftermath of Halloween event, so references to blood/violence/etc

come visit me in the back of an ambulance

The last thing she remembers is the fall. Darcy wakes up in bed, in her dented armour, with dried blood spattered all the way down her front. No Calcite. Fuck. She’s got to-
No pain. She’s been healed. A glance down at her hands reveals that the ‘Hold Fast’ Izzy had tapped into her knuckles is gone, as are the curling lines over her veins where the gauntlet had burned into her.
…

No time for feeling sorry for herself. She extracts herself from her armour and showers for… honestly an hour. It’s not like she has to worry about a water bill. Every now and again the memory of her hand inside Natsuno and around Fio’s neck flashes back into her mind, and she scrubs harder, until her now-unadorned hands are red and raw. It doesn’t help.

Eventually she drags herself back into her room, gets into her pyjamas- because she’s not going fucking anywhere- and fires off texts to basically everyone whose number she has.

you okay?

A saline communion that I held like a séance

That night, as she’d planned before everything went to hell, she makes her way up to the sports deck. Finds a quiet corner, sets up a sheet and a pillow on the ground. Whatever paper flowers she’s managed to scrounge go on it- as does some bread and bottles of water. Some perfume, a couple of candles she’d saved from the Spirit Halloween… it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. She sits at the foot of the bed and tries her best to remember what she’d written down.

“Dead of this ship. There are too many of you to name and honour individually. I’ve laid out this grave for you to rest in tonight, for all of you. Receive these offerings; if you hear this, it’s for you. I’m… sorry we can’t do more right now. Believe me that we are fighting for you. And… I’m sorry it turned out like this.”

Darcy will hold vigil here all night, until the sun comes up.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Darcy watches with some impish amusement as Rita struggles to actually say what she's saying as a compliment and not just a backhanded insult. Rita gets there eventually, and Darcy briefly takes her hand off her sword to rest near her mouth.

"Thanks. Don't worry, I won't. But you know I'm like, not woo about this shit, yeah? Ghosts are this real in my world-"

She pulls up her sleeve to reveal one of the scars on her arm, long and jagged like the claws of a great animal.

"-and not every case we investigated was an actual haunting. One time it was just a bunch of rats. I knew what I was doing enough to do it, yeah?"

She huffs a little at Darcy's amusement, biting back the urge to demand if the other girl is laughing at her--stupidly embarrassing or not, she did finally get where she meant to go, and they're not fighting over something trivial. Which, after yesterday, she can admit...is important.

Her annoyance ebbs away at the sight of the scar--huh. "Oh...so the 'hunting' part wasn't always just metaphorical." And, well--the corner of her mouth twitches up despite herself at the rat thing.

"But, anyway... Compared to plenty of others, you have a better idea what you're doing here." Others like...herself. All this soul business was really out of her league, and her faint amusement drops. "I didn't know what to do yesterday..."

"Nope. Metaphorical and literal. Usually it just meant seeing what we could do to help the ghost pass on, but that one... was a real hunt."

If Rita's interested she can ask, but no point launching into a whole story if she's not.

"It kinda went into a free for all right away, didn't it? I just... set my sights on taking down the possessed, went from there. It wasn't perfect. Lots of people still ended up getting hurt. Next time we need plans, I think. Solid ones. For the next time something like this happens. What to do, where people who aren't fighters can go."

Rita hums thoughtfully, looking at the makeshift grave again. "Taking down the possessed," she echoes quietly. She'd panicked, with the hypnosis suddenly wearing off. Could she have been able to take down something wearing her friend's face if her head had been clearer?

...She doesn't want to think about a next time. Not yet. Not with the now deeply-rooted worry that next time, they could be joining the ghosts permanently.

"Do ghosts possess people in your world?" she asks instead.

"Sometimes. Not very often. It depends on the ghost. Culture influences a lot of how they act; most of the ghosts in my city haunted places, not people. But there was one of us in-"

Ah, Rita is probably from the same world as Jade, that means she doesn't know anything about Earth geography.

"-the capital city of my country who specialized in that sort of thing. I know how to do an exorcism, but that's... it's complicated. We- ghost hunters- are kind of a secret in my world, so we aren't like... the last word on the supernatural or anything. There's churches and shit with their own rituals and everything."

That's a lot of words about things and Darcy rubs the back of her neck nervously.

"Sorry, long way to answer that."

She turns fully to look at Darcy once more, lifting her hands in a slight, tired shrug. "That's fine. Most things in life aren't that simple. Or unlife too, I guess." It's weird, how quickly things turned--she finally admitted there were ghosts on the ship and they became a very real problem almost immediately. Or...maybe it was that she'd been ignoring the potential problem all along.

She considers the exorcism topic a moment, hand raising to her chin in thought. "So...I guess exorcisms aren't something you can just do at a moment's notice, right? Or else you would've gone for that last night."

Denial certainly is a coping strategy that works all the way up until you have to face what you're avoiding. Darcy makes a small affirming noise and then... chews for a bit on how to phrase it.

"I used part of an exorcising prayer against the ghost inside a friend of mine. And it... looked like it worked. But then someone wrote that exorcisms don't work and... when shit went down, I figured we didn't have time for me to wonder too much about it. Every second they were up was another second they could be hurting people. I wish there had been another way."

One of these days she might even need to stop denying that this isn't her first time on a haunted ship. Today is not that day, though, and at this point that very short exploration of the Atherum feels like a lifetime ago.

Anyway...she gets what Darcy means. Once all hell broke loose, it wasn't like anyone had the time to test what would work and what wouldn't. So, all Rita can do tilt her head in a slight nod. "Yeah...me too."

She lets a moment of silence pass. "...Hey, you said before that you can see ghosts, right? Including the ones on the ship?"

"Yeah, sort of. Back home it was much clearer, here it's just sort of... glimpses. Nothing specific, no faces or anything."

Just in case Rita was getting her hopes up.

"Why?"

"Hm," Rita hums in acknowledgement, before lifting her hands in a tired shrug at the question. "Just wondering. I just like to know how things work." Not that she ever expects to become an expert--she'll leave that to the ghost hunter here. It's just...in her nature to learn, study, think.

"So...you see them around the ship, but they're in that...place too, right?" The nothingness. It'd be enough to make someone go crazy, that's for sure. "How do you suppose that works? Unless that's not even a place..."

Ah, maybe Darcy's misjudged Rita. This whole time she's just been an especially feisty nerd.

"I don't really know. Back home... there was this thing called the twilight, right? It wasn't the underworld, but it wasn't the real world either. It's technically where ghosts exist, but it was sort of... how to put it- it was like an overlay on top of our world. Like if you draped a veil over a fruit bowl, the twilight was the veil in the shape of the fruit and the bowl. I guess it was less of a place and more a... state of being? Maybe? I should ask Palamedes for that book back, Terre Mére- one of my Krewemates- used to have really good ways to explain it."

Darcy's explanation starts out making perfect sense to this nerd, who does work with substances and forces that can't be seen with the naked eye but are there all the same--until near the end, when she describes it as a state of being, at which point Rita's brows furrow in confusion and the comparison stops making sense.

...Putting aside Palamedes, who despite being a fellow nerd she doesn't get along with at all, studying from a book is always welcome. "If you don't mind me borrowing it. I mean, I was with you until the not a place, but a state of being part." After a moment's consideration, though, she hazards a hypothesis, "Unless you mean it's not...a physical place?"

"That's probably closer to what I meant. Like- you can't plan a road trip to the Twilight, it's just everywhere, things can phase in and out of it."

She dismisses Rita's concern with a wave of her hand, "so long as you're careful with it, yeah, go ahead. I'll give you the same warning I have Palamedes in that... Terre Mére might have been a little nuts. And don't expect anything super scientific."

"I think I get the general idea." And what Darcy meant by a state of being. Even if she still has plenty she doesn't understand about how the Twilight and real world intersect--of course, how applicable all that is here would be another matter entirely.

Still...learning more is never a bad thing. "If it's about ghosts, I think we've established that it's not gonna be all that scientific," she says with a matching hand gesture. "I'll be careful, though. It sounds important to you and all." Which honestly makes it surprising that she's lending it out.

"It's kind of scientific. She was a cardiologist."

Past tense, because it's not like she's here now.

"But... Yeah, I guess it is. I don't know, it's complicated. It's not like it's much use to me anyway. 'M kind of an idiot."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Do you think that there’s a way I could ever get too far?

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject