singillatim | 🎵whistle while you work🎶(closed)

Raju's step slows. His frown deepens for a moment as he looks over the bottle. He's thinking more about what he smells just now, the details that he hadn't noticed absent in that house during the fire that wasn't one, and whatever's in the bottle smells strong. For a moment, he considers it.

"Best not," he decides, strides a couple steps away and then turns and paces back, stops again, eyes the boy as he keeps rubbing at his fingers. He tries to remember if this is something Levi does usually; ignoring the others living near or not, there are some habits Raju would notice. "Aren't you a little young for that?"

Old enough, at least, that it's a question, instead of something certain. Not that it matters on a day like this, but it comes out of him anyway.

"You sure? I find it helps, just don't drink too much." He's not sure where the line between sanity restored and getting drunk is, but he's passed it before. "I'm 18. That's old enough where I come from."

Not to say that he never drank before then, it was just harder to get.

Raju hums in acknowledgement, starting to pace again. "Helps what?" he asks after a moment, impatiently. "There's no... no reason for anything that happens in this place. There's no clues. They just happen. Is that going to help me figure it out?"

The hand that'd just flung itself out in the direction of the bottle pauses, drops. Raju rubs at his palm. He closes his eyes with a sigh. The boy's done nothing but offer a drink. "I'm sorry, I... It's been an odd day."

"Not with figuring it out, no. I wish anything did. With relaxing, with easing the strain on your mind when things get to be too much." He looks down at the bottle, "Doesn't always work so great though. But its the best thing I've found here."

It was important to keep your sanity meter from getting too low. This place seemed to drain it pretty easily.

He nods to the 'odd day' comment. His had been odder than usual too. "The lights, or the fire?"

"The—" Raju starts, surprised that Levi might have seen the same fire he did. But he stops himself, takes a moment, answers the question first. "All of it. All of it. But... the fire."

Raju turns toward him, takes a couple steps closer. "What fire do you mean? The..." No. It wouldn't do to tell the answer he's looking for before he's even asked the question. He has to be patient. Even now, even today. "Where was it? When did you see?"

Levi takes a deep breath. "There's a house out there that burned down or something. Except when we went to explore it, it was suddenly on fire again. Except I guess it wasn't? Because I'm not actually hurt. But it felt like it at the time. A..ghost fire or something? I-I don't know."

The actual ghosts in there shook him up more than the fire, though.

"I think its happened to other people too."

"Of course," he murmurs, frustrated. More than frustrated. "Of course it was all of us. Again. Did you..."

He doesn't want to ask, doesn't want to hear anything else about the damned visions, or boys who were never in danger at all. Or who might have been, once, further away than Raju could reach. He doesn't want to think about it any more. But he has to know. "...see anything else? Other than the fire?"

He frowns and takes a swig of the vodka before responding. "There were...ghosts or something. Of the people who died in the fire I guess. T-they...they weren't like the other ghosts."

His grip on the bottle tightens. He does not like ghosts, especially ones who could interact with him.

"The other ghosts." Raju presses his fingers to the top of his nose, between his eyes. He casts his gaze up at the ceiling. He sighs. "Of course. Of course the other ghosts. Visions. Hallucinations. Sent by..."

He grimaces up at the rafters. Then he straightens, looks over at the boy, feels his gaze flicker down to the bottle. He considers, again. "Is that helping at all? Has it helped you any yet?"

"The ones during early aurora nights, but they were like a film strip playing in the world. It was...it was a shock at first. I think they're gone now.

"These ones were different. They spoke. Called me--" He cuts himself off, taking a long swig instead of finishing that sentence. He then peers at the bottle.

"It helps some. Nothing makes it go away, but it makes it easier. I'm not so tense. Things don't seem as dark." They still seemed dark, because it always was, but the more immediate issues of the ghosts and the fire didn't hit do hard."

Raju walks over to the boy, drops down beside him with one knee upraised, elbow resting on it. He holds out his hand toward the bottle. "They called you dad? Father? Something like it. That's what mine said, anyway."

He grimaces, not liking the ownership in his own words there. "The one I saw," he corrects. "At first it seemed like he was calling for his father, somewhere else in the house."

He holds the bottle out so Raju can take it if he wants. "Yeah. I think they thought I was their father, but..." well, he never would have called to his father for help. It'd be more likely that his father started the fire than would come help anyone.

He's silent for a moment, then just adds, "I hate ghosts."

Raju makes a grim noise of agreement, gaze distant. "I thought he didn't want to admit his father was..."

He trails off, takes the bottle, watches his thumb rub over the glass. "It might not be a ghost anyway. It was a hallucination. It could have been caused by anything. It could have been, ah—"

Raju tries to think of what it could have been. He digs for something. He huffs and gives up and takes a drink, instantly leans forward again with the back of his forearm over his mouth.

"Ooh. Tastes like it smells," he says after a moment, hoarsely, and holds the bottle back out to Levi with a look that's either judgement or concern, that the boy'd been swallowing it like water. Maybe it's both.

"They were ghosts. Everything felt too real to be a hallucination. And there wasn't anything to cause one anyway. Let alone one multiple people had." They seemed a lot more like living people than the ghosts he'd seen in his world, but he's certain they're ghosts. He hates ghosts. They freak him out like nothing else does.

"Oh, sorry. I only stashed away a few of the stronger bottles."

"Mhm," Raju says, still with that expression on his face, in the tones of one who hasn't had his question answered at all. But he shakes his head, looks up again, rubs at his fingers as he focuses on what matters. "If it wasn't a hallucination, how do you know? It certainly wasn't real. The boy disappeared, the fire was gone. You weren't even hurt, you said that yourself. What else would you call that?"

"How often have you had the exact same hallucination as someone else? Drugs don't do that sort of thing." Or, at least, Daan had sounded pretty confident when he said that back during Termina. The man was a doctor(sort of), after all. "I told you what I'd call it."

"It's not ghosts," Raju says stubbornly. He looks down at his hands, runs one fingernail under another, then starts rapidly tapping his thumb against the side of his hand. The alcohol, finished burning his throat, is burning in his stomach now. It had been a risk, drinking anything, feeling the way he does; he certainly isn't going to be eating anything for a while, not until his stomach settles. But if the drink really is going to start helping, he could use it. Any minute now. "And it isn't drugs. Probably. I don't know what it is yet. But we can't start assuming we know why all this is happening. We don't have any proof of anything at all."

Levi sighs and takes another swig from the bottle. "I don't care if there weren't ghosts in your world, but this isn't any of our worlds. Things work differently here. Unless you've come up with a logical, scientific reason we just woke up here and can understand everyone. Even the lady from thousands of years ago or whatever."

Raju frowns as he watches the boy drink. He bends his other leg too, knees up in front of his chest, his thumb tapping faster. "None of those words really mean anything," he complains, meaning it in the most straightforward sense. Our worlds? Lady from a thousand years ago? He can't make sense of any of that. He doesn't know what any of it means. The last thing he needs right now is more of that, more confusion, no explanations.

"Look, there's no reason to start that up again, about the magic. I know that you can't understand any of this, and that's frightening. But you can't just call all of it magic and stop looking. There's some kind of sense here. Some cause. Just because it's, it's— There's something here that we can explain and understand. Just... not yet. We need to wait."

"You need to stop insisting things work like you're expecting. There was magic where I came from, I even learned some myself. And gods that were at least sort of active. I met one.
"Just because it's not the sense you're used to, doesn't mean its not sense. It's how this place works, even if we don't understand it. Working yourself up over how it 'should be' isn't helping anything."

At the word gods Raju huffs a frustrated breath, rolling his head back against the wall. Meeting gods, from Hickey first, and now the boy too. Assuming a god where there's only something powerful, inexplicable. Power on its own isn't enough. But it is, for those who've decided they would rather know than find out. Than think.

In the fireplace next to him the fire pops and grows just a little, probably as some log inside it shifts closer to the flames. Raju doesn't pay it much mind. "Then tell me how it works. Tell me how I think this place 'should be'. We both saw that fire out there. We saw the boy, the way this place lies to our senses. You can't assume 'ghost' off the strength only of what you saw. We can't trust that. We can't trust anything we see, here."

"Why not? Why can't we trust what we see, what we feel? I don't trust anything here and I don't understand it, but I know what I see. I know how it feels to be burnt, even if there's no scar afterwards why should I think it never happened? All you can give me is 'hallucinations' and what it can't be. Eventually you just have to accept things are impossible."

Granted the whole Termina thing during the last few days in his world had already primed him for this.

Edited 2024-02-07 19:20 (UTC)

"It's not impossible if it happened!" He shifts to face Levi directly, thumping his fist on his knee, and the fire flares again in the fireplace behind him, larger this time. "There's some cause, some explanation. It happened somehow! Are you really so ready to give up on trying and wait to die here, or for the next disaster to crash into us without even trying to understand why?"

Raju leans forward, gripping his thigh, intent as he tries to hold the boy's gaze. "You sit here and drink and give up on thinking, but you can't. You can't just stop and accept the way things are. We can't afford to give up that way."

"I told you what I though the explanation was. You just laughed at me and told me it can't be that. I don't see you offering anything but how 'oh it can't be magic cause I don't have that were I come from' and 'ghosts aren't really it's just some unexplainable hallucination.'
"If all you do is say what it can't be you're hardly thinking. Just whining that this place doesn't fit the rules you already think you know.
"I'm not giving up saying it fits in the boxes I know. And I'm certainly not giving up if I focus more on how to survive that how shit works."

"But how will you survive if you don't understand any of it? You have to start with what you do know. What it can't be. Eliminate everything else to find whatever made us see what we saw in that house. The boy, the way he..." Raju pauses, expression flickering. Harder to tell, now, if the churning in his stomach is from the boy and the older memories that he'd stirred up or from whatever had been in Levi's bottle. It doesn't matter. Raju leans forward, fists clenched on his knees.

"It meant something. What he lost. There's a reason we saw it. We'll never know what that reason was if we decide we already understand just so we don't have to think about it. We need more than to survive, we need to know. Survival isn't enough!" Raju's fist pounds at his thigh and in the same moment fire grows on the floor next to his leg. He leaps up, startled, and starts stepping on it to put it out.

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cw: domestic abuse

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