come_sailaway | he gives his harness bells a shake [open]

WHO: Phil, friends, and you
WHEN: Nov 2nd and onwards
WHERE: Around
WHAT: moping about like a loser (November catchall)
WARNINGS: Aftermath of Halloween, contains some references to the carnage

i. the only other sound's the sweep (tauva, night of nov 1st/morning of nov 2nd)

Besides speaking with Erin and Darcy, Phil doesn't leave his room on November 1st. He doesn't answer the door, except for those he knows well enough. Most texts are similarly ignored. He just wants to... sleep is the wrong word. Turn off, maybe. Thankfully there's piles of breakfast outside for him to filch, but even if there wasn't, he doesn't think that the hunger pangs would overpower the exhausting prospect of having to talk to someone.

(And they may well want to, if they see any of him in Photos at Sea. Bloodied and beaten, Maeve standing over his corpse.)

But then it's 2 AM. Normally he's down by midnight, and he's not lacking in fatigue, but sleeping doesn't feel right. Not after what's happened. What, just rest, after all that? Just sleep?

So it's in the night when the owl finally flies his nest, down to Tauva, and pours himself a drink.

ii. of easy wind and downy flake (around, early november)

He's not done sulking, but he's done with doing it in his cabin. After a while it starts getting cramped and stuffy, so instead he'll do it in places like the library or the lounge or the shadows of the pool deck, and hope that he looks dour enough for people to leave him alone. Yes, he wants to be around people, and no, he doesn't want them to talk to him. (Not that he'll turn them away if they do.)

He fills his time with hobbies. Where before he'd just done things for the sake of it, now they're distractions, filling time before he starts doing something stupid, keeping himself from getting too mired in misery. He shreds napkins to pieces as small as he can get them and scatters the bits into the sea like shitty snow. He sits on the deck with an empty stare at the sunset. Sometimes he just lays about.

And sometimes he steals ice cubes from the bars to make tiny ice sculptures, with his minimal ice powers and his newfound talons.

iii. the woods are lovely, dark, and deep (john's, mid november)

Phil had previously been a regular at John's; most evenings, the ship could hear him practicing on its piano for at least an hour, often more. This was unfailing routine for the past four months.

After Halloween, it goes silent. He isn't even at the bar. He isn't there at all.

It's two weeks before he even shows up there again, and he hardly plays when he does; he just dances a single hand around the keys for about a half hour. It takes a bit of adjusting to account for the talons, but he manages.

The second day, Phil seems to be gaining his momentum back. He puts a book on the music stand. It's a slow start, one hand at a time, running the parts slowly, so it goes for about an hour and a half... then he puts both of his hands on the keys and plays.

iv. but i have promises to keep (wildcard)

[ Other things to note: Phil will not be seen flying at all for most of November, not that he did much of that before.

but otherwise? you got something, just hit me! available for plotting here at this journal or you can find me on the discord @ dongpuncher#7741 :] ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's the impression she gets from many of her dreams, but she can't pinpoint exactly when any of them take place. Only the fact that they came from somewhere in the past. Another passenger on the ship provided her some sort of happy conclusion to one of her other cliffhanger dreams. Maybe it's possible for the Phil that she saw in her vision too. Maybe there was one rare, unseen instance that he finally stopped.

"I didn't really understand it all... it was confusing. But I really hope so." Because all Fio ever sees in her sleep is turmoil. She breathes out a sigh, "I want him to be happy."

"Me too," he murmurs. He lays his hands on her knee, one folded over the other; the one on top wears his wedding band, plain and gold. (He did not have it in that memory.)

"Maybe he is."

Even the smallest physical touch is reassuring. Not only she worries about painful dreams, but there's still the thought about slipping back into the nothingness from last month. The gold shine from the wedding band catches her eye.

"...Was it a beautiful wedding?" She asks, after a moment. The question might sound out of the blue, a sudden change of subject from the nightmare she had.

But Phil is perceptive, his sense for other people as honed as his real eyesight, and this seemingly incongruous ask is all the confirmation he needs that his suspicions were right.

He doesn't... know what to make of that. That somehow the most terrible part of his life, which he'd made no mention of to her, had appeared in her dreams. Magic, he guesses. Magic seems to be the answer to everything these days. He's just sorry that she had to see that. There's a part of him that turns cold as he thinks of little Fio watching him become the worst of himself.

So he'll have to distract them both.

"We had it in August," he hums. "In Punxsutawney, a little rural town, outdoors but covered. With lots of sunlight and shade. My wife Rita had a lot of family to bring to the wedding. I... didn't, really. It was just my mom and my sister who came from my side.

"But I had a lot of friends in Punxsutawney, and a lot of them came." Phil pulls out his wallet and unfolds the line of photos inside. Most of them are of him and Rita together, which he points out, and others are of him and other coworkers at his station, but a lot of them--folded beneath other pictures in the accordion sleeves--are also of his friends in Punx. He pulls some of them out to show her.

"It was honestly really difficult to arrange, since there aren't any actual wedding venues in Punx. But we really wanted the wedding to be in the town itself, not just near it, so we made it work, and we had a lot of help. It ended up being a very beautiful wedding, and everyone had a lot of fun, I think. I know we did."

Part of her reason for asking is both to confirm the fate of the Phil repeatedly shown in her nightmare. To confirm he really found happiness. Another part of it is to sate her curiosity, since she's never seen a truly happy wedding before. Where she came from, the nobility often threw beautiful outdoor weddings. She has an especially strong memory of one noble girl getting married, who seemed like she was screaming on the inside while everyone else around her smiled during the ceremony.

...That girl showed up in her dreams once, with a gown that turned into a sad color of red. On the following day, word around town said that the girl ran off and killed herself. Back then, Fio denied that ever happened. Not just that instance, but she often denied the happenings in her nightmares as being connected to anyone she knew. Much like how she almost tried to reject the idea of the Phil in her vision being the same one right now.

That was back then though. And she knows for certain now, that what she sees is someone's memory. She doesn't know why or how exactly. Calling it magic seems to be the easiest way to explain it, though none of the denizens of The Cage ever referred to it as that.

The distraction is a welcome one and Fio doesn't seem to easily pick up that Phil's already found her out, despite how obvious she's being. She was never a very good liar. She leans forward with genuine interest as he pulls out the wallet, tilting her head slightly as she observes every little detail of the photos.

"It does look like a beautiful wedding. I'm glad everyone had a lot of fun. I've never been part of a wedding before." Always witnessing celebrations from a distance. "I... hope the one coming up soon is going to be just as beautiful as yours."

he gives his harness bells a shake [open]

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cw: suicide mention... oops maybe i should've put this earlier but there's no explicit detail...