singillatim | 🎵whistle while you work🎶(closed)

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.

"I haven't really tried to measure it...but I caught up with a deer before. That's how I realized something was definitely different."

Raju starts to pace again, nodding, rubbing one hand over and around the other, switching hands, doing it again. He can hear the fire flickering, see its movement in the shadows on the floor in front of him, even when he isn't looking at it. There's no reason to think about it right now. Not when there are questions about something else.

"How many had... strange dreams, on that one night? Do you know? And how to tell what's only a dream and what's... It can't be just you."

"I don't know. I haven't asked about it. But I'm pretty sure other people have these...powers too."

"Pretty sure?" Raju's frown as he looks over this time is disapproving. But Levi is only a boy, he reminds himself as he looks up at the rafters, paces, rubs his hands over and around one another. Old enough to drink back in... wherever it is he'd come from, and Raju himself had started a man's work, learning, working, training, younger than that. But that doesn't mean he isn't young. He can't be expected to approach any of this in a scientific way. If that's what Raju needs, he should be doing it himself.

"I need to find out more," he decides. Light at the end of the tunnel, if Levi allows him to reach it. All of this dealt with... later. Where no one will see the impossible thing that might be inside him, and later. "There's no point in trying to come to conclusions from a single case. I have to ask more people before we do anything here."

Levi rolls his eyes, "I haven't exactly been polling people on if they can do something new or not. But I've heard people talking."

He sighs a bit at Raju's mention of 'a single case' but doesn't push it. Finding out you can do magic when you were certain it couldn't be a thing had to be hard. Karin had never really accepted what was happening in Prehevil, after all. And he was at least as stubborn as her.

Raju nods, keeps nodding absently, gaze absent. His eye catches a spot on the floor, soot in the shape of a footprint. His shoe now is just a few inches misaligned from it, stepping over the same spot. He takes a slow breath, staring down at it. In the fireplace the fire grows in a sudden movement that makes Raju twitch, a jerking whole body twitch, and then he forces himself still. At attention, back straight, arms straight down at his sides, fingers curling and then curling further to keep themselves still, pressing hard against his palms.

"Well..." Raju looks over at Levi again, tries for a polite, friendly smile. It starts out as a sorry thing, twitching out over his face instead of growing naturally, but after a moment he settles it onto his face. "Let me know if you find anything out. I, ah—"

He glances over toward the fire. It's dangerous like this, isn't it? Something is dangerous. He can't understand it yet. And without being able to understand, inside like this, in a building made of wood, where people feel safe, and sleep—

"I'm going to take a walk." His smile grows a determined little inch. People take walks. There doesn't need to be anything strange about that. He hadn't even taken the blanket off before it— well. To all appearances, he could have come in intending to go right back out again anyway. It's alright. It's fine.

"Good luck with your..." His eyes move to Levi, then over to Levi's bottle. The polite smile stays. "...relaxing. I'll see you back here later, I'm sure."

"Yeah...you too."

Levi sighs and leans back against the wall. He peers at his bottle, debating if he should finish it off or not.

And with that Raju goes back out into the snow, hunching his shoulders, pulling his mittens on, scowling at nothing as he pulls the door of the Community Hall closed. The cold is bitter on his face, bitter and hateful. And a relief. And he doesn't know where he's going.

He'll figure it out. He'll figure all of it out, eventually.

He will.

What a damned awful day.

🎵whistle while you work🎶(closed)

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