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

[saltwaterlungs]

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.

Comments

[saltwaterlungs]

"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?"

[myagic]

"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..."

[saltwaterlungs]

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."

[myagic]

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?"

[saltwaterlungs]

"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."

[myagic]

"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.

[saltwaterlungs]

"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."