singillatim | 🎵whistle while you work🎶(closed)

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.

He sighs, "I don't need to know how a gun works to survive being shot at."

Levi opens his mouth to protest that Raju discarding answers isn't solving anything, but then the floor catches fire. His eyebrows raise and he looks to it briefly before looking back to Raju. That was...weirdly timed.

After a second it dawns on him that he should help, so he puts the bottle down and tries to help stomp out the fire.

The fire isn't large; it doesn't take long to put it out, especially with two pairs of shoes. Once it's gone, for a moment, Raju frowns down at the stain on the floor. Then he frowns over at the fireplace, close, but not close enough for a spark to leap the distance. Even if a spark would have grown that quickly.

It must have been the fireplace.

Raju closes his eyes. He rubs at his eyelids, taking a slow breath. "It's been a long day," he mutters. "I know you..."

I know you're doing your best? Levi isn't. If he's old enough to sit and drink as much as he has here he's old enough to stand up sober and face the problem. In Raju's other life — his life, the life he's going back to, the life of an officer meaning to climb the ranks — charming, insincere niceties to smooth a situation over come easy. But this place is meaningless and inexplicable and dark, Raju can't remember how long it's been since he's properly seen the sun, he knows with bone-deep certainty that tonight he is going to dream about his father, and he can't get any of the meaningless half-apologies to come out of his mouth now.

"Why don't we go to bed? If the fireplace..." He gestures helplessly toward it, frowns at the thing. If it does what, exactly? Better not to wonder too long. "If that happens again, I'll wake up. You don't have to worry about it."

Raju will probably be awake anyway. Along with everyone else who wandered into that house tonight. Except the ones who decided to drink themselves insensate, anyway.

He didn't see any fire jumping from the fireplace that might have caused that...strange things had been happening lately. More fire than just the ghost-fire in the building.
He'd felt different too, but not in a fire-starting way. Hmm.

Levi sits back down against the wall. "Really weird that fire just appeared there, huh. Its been more, uh, active since we started talking."

Edited (hope this works) 2024-02-11 21:43 (UTC)

Raju frowns at him, not thrilled that Levi is mentioning it. He turns his back on the fireplace, on Levi, walks a couple steps away and looks up at the ceiling, rubbing at his hand. "Mhm. Fires tend to do that as the logs burn. The wood shifts."

Does he sound a little short, a little dismissive? Not very, at least. That might be as much of a victory as he's going to win himself today. He can feel, remember, the way the boy's, the hallucination's, clothing had burned to hold onto. The way he'd tried to hold onto it anyway, because the boy's terror had been so desperate. The way Raju had thought that it had helped. His thumb moves across the unburnt skin of his palm, and it doesn't hurt.

"That fire— the one in the house. It may not have been a true fire, but it'll have us all jumping at shadows. Best to try not to worry about what isn't here, hm?"

"Maybe. But they don't tend to move around without any sparks being see. Or people starting them." Possibly with the minds.

He sighs, "You can't go from 'we need to understand it' to 'let's not worry about things like that.' Either you want to understand it, you accept that it happened or you pretend it didn't. You can't understand it if you ignore it. Or anything else that doesn't fit with how you think things work."

When Raju looks over toward Levi, he's glaring. Then he starts to pace. "It wasn't anything," he insists after a second, one hand thumping in a rhythm against his thigh while the other curls loosely into itself.

For another second, he only keeps pacing.

He can't do anything else, can he? So: "Fine," he says, jaw and voice tight, frowning ahead of him as he moves. "Have it your way. Explain it to me. Prove there's something... strange happening in here, too. We'll all be seeing hallucinations next."

The stress on the word is pointed. There are reasons it's a more accurate term than ghost, and if Levi gets worked up enough about that instead... Well, it would be better for him to focus on what actually is worth paying attention to, wouldn't it? Better for both of them.

"I would think that we're both here right now with no idea how that happened would count as something strange but you're just going to be stubborn and insist we were drugged or something." He takes a drink from the bottle. "I could also point that we're having no trouble communicating despite the fact that I've never even heard of English or whatever language you're speaking is. How about that I'm from a world with countries no one has ever heard of? The Eastern Union, the Bremen Empire, Rodan or even, hell even Europa--not Europe--I'll bet my share of food for a month you've never heard of them. But then you'll just say I'm lying, right?"

Raju doesn’t look over as Levi talks, keeps moving, but his frown changes, expression shifting from determined anger to something more strained. He remembers this, that insistence when they’d first met that the two of them understood one another because of a spell. Raju had dismissed it then, the fantasies of a boy, overwhelmed and looking for a boy’s explanations.

He’s gotten to know Levi since then, a little. He doesn’t seem like the fanciful type.

And then he follows it with a list, one there’s no way to prove one way or the other, and Levi is right, Raju can’t just take the easy way out and say that Levi is lying, can’t dismiss all of that out of hand, can he?

Can he?

Raju presses the heels of his hands against his temples, the aborted gesture of a man who’s long since trained himself not to run his hands through his hair and for whom the habitual restraint remains, even when the hair product hasn’t.

The house, the flames. The smell of nothing but rot inside the house after. The boy and his father. Arriving in this place at all. The creature, the dreams. All of the dreams. The damned fire, the spell, the way he can’t remember anything close to the places Levi’s named no matter how he scrapes through his memory. The pressure of his hands against the sides of his head. The pressure inside his chest. Raju closes his eyes and moves his hands in front of them, and the hard, frantic movement of his feet leaves imprints in fire behind in the shapes of the soles of his shoes.

“Europa is a moon,” he tries, voice insistent and strained thin, and only just steady through a lifetime of habit and practice. “Jupiter’s.”

"Not where I come from." He doesn't even know what Jupiter is, but that's more a poor education issue. He'd go into listing more places in his world but he can't help but notice Raju seems to be trailing...fire?

"Um. Did you, ah, step in something?"

"What?"

That question sounds as strained as the rest of it, surprised. It's such a strange question, such a normal question, in the middle of, of...

And an odd time to ask it. Which doesn't mean anything good, does it? Raju's step slows, the grim thing wrapping itself around his insides squeezing a little. He drops his hands off of his eyes. He turns.

He swallows. He swallows again. He smells a hint of burning rubber and jerks backward, almost stumbling to move out from the flames. He could lift his shoe and look, couldn't he, because real damage to the rubber there would separate this from that imagined fire inside that house. His feet stay on the ground. The flames on the floor tremble in time with the slow, shaking breath he takes. He watches them eating at the floorboards. He clenches his jaw.

Levi rolls his eyes and stands back up. "If you aren't going to put it out at least move so I can."

Raju looks over, still looking wild around the eyes but chastened now, and he moves quickly to start stamping them out himself. Then he stops, still again, and stares at the spot where they were. His hands clench and release and clench again at his sides.

"How can you be so..." He stops there. His jaw tightens. He redirects himself, from so calm to: "...so incurious about this? Or have you drank too much of that to be curious about anything?"

He gestures toward Levi's bottle, and can't help but notice in the instants after the way the fire in the fireplace had flared up a little bit with the movement. His eyes move to that instead, stick on it. He swallows again, dropping his hand, curls his fingers.

"Forgive me for focusing on the more immediate concern of not letting the building burn down."

He sighs and shakes his head. "...have you had any weird dreams lately. Not the one with Gro-Goroth--the three headed thing--but more recent."

Because he sure did and woke up feeling different.

Raju looks sharply over at him, eyes wide for an instant before he looks back to the fireplace, jaw clenched. He closes his eyes, swallows. Opens them again and stares at the fire.

“The one with that creature was shared between all of us,” he tries, voice determined but no stronger, still strained and thin. “But I haven’t heard of anyone having… any of my dreams. It was obvious when that happened last time.” ”

"Nothing during the extra long aurora night?" He considers just trying to get Raju to answer without any input from him, but decides he won't get anywhere with that. "Maybe with a woman's voice? Saying something about how things were changing?"

He's actually pretty sure he was awake for that part, but he didn't remember going to sleep before the Darkwalker dream well either.

His eyes move back toward Levi's. For a moment he's quiet.

"I was awake for that. She said we could go back. That she didn't know how I could go back. I wrote all of it down."

If this were an interrogation, it would be a sloppy one, on Raju's part. There are ways to keep Levi from finding out what he wants. But what he wants, this one time in this one way, is truth. This is the time the boy's decided to push for finding the truth.

"She told me to sleep. Us. Us to sleep." He swallows. The flames in the fireplace grow and change in a pattern that, now he's paying attention — can't stop paying attention — is oddly sudden in its little shifts and movements, unnatural. He stares at it. His voice comes out rough. He forces the words out anyway. "You... you had an odd dream too, that night. I can tell. What was it."

It doesn't come out sounding like a question. He can't make himself sound like he wants to know.

"I wasn't sure if I was awake or not for that part. It was weird. But, yeah, I had a weird dream. I turned into a deer or something and I was just running. And after I woke up I could run faster and further without needing to stop." He got real damn hungry afterwards, though.

Raju's eyebrows pull together, confusion a distraction from the dread. "It is different than last time," he murmurs, turning toward Levi, his clenched fists loosening as he takes hold of the distraction in both hands. Evidence, evidence of anything, he's spent so much empty time here waiting for it — for any kind of clue — that focusing on it now almost isn't a choice. He'd expected to hear a dream of fire. Hearing something so different from what he'd expected instead, that's something, isn't it? That's worth noting. Not a shared dream in the way the last one had been. Raju's fingers itch already for his journal and his awful, badly constructed pens.

"How much farther, compared to what you ran before? Have you measured the difference yet?" This question is easier to ask than the last one. This one isn't pulling anything out of Raju, or forcing any cruel knowledge in the answer in.

A deer. He'd been dreading something so different from a dream about a deer.

🎵whistle while you work🎶(closed)

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