closed | you're a lost soul

[castitas]

Who: Kate Marsh + You!
What: February catch-all for Kate: Goodsir's disappearance, Kate running off in search of him and that going so well + her getting sick / Frozen Hearts prompt.
When: The month of February.
Where: Various, Milton area.

Content Warnings: likely to come up in threads are discussions of suicide, discussions of cannibalism; discussions of character death; instances of hypothermia; supernatural afflictions and body horror. More TBA.



closed starters | please contact heolstor / _heolstor on discord for plotting

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[castitas]

[ Kate wants to ask why he's awake too, why he's wandering around at this time of night. If maybe she'd woken him when she'd come downstairs herself. But the words fall away and she opts for silence, simply nodding at his words. It's not the first time, she knows. There's been plenty of nights when she's heard creaking in the house. Nights where she can't sleep herself and spends hours staring at the ceiling.

It's like none of them can sleep in this place. Even when Tim Drake comes sneaking in through her bedroom window and silently throws himself into Merry's bed on the floor, she'll listen to him gently snore into the night for a while until she finally finds sleep herself. It'd be funny, if it weren't so awful.

Small talk feels like such... bullshit. But the silence is much worse. ]

... I get it now. [ It's so quiet. She knew it in the first place, but she just didn't want to believe it. She knows what it means. And she knows, she realises, of all people, John Irving might know it too. ] He's gone.

I can't hear him anymore, and he can't hear me either. There's just... nothing.

[ Not the thread between them. In whatever connection they shared through their powers to speak to one another in their minds — there's only empty, endless silence. ]

[extramuralise]

[ It takes Irving a moment to understand what Kate's saying, but then the realization hits him with such force it's like being knocked overboard during a storm: she must mean Dr. Goodsir. After all, his disappearance is still quite fresh, and by far — at least to Irving's knowledge — the most recent one, as well.

He slowly lets out a breath, at a loss of what to do or what to say now. Although he hadn't known Goodsir all that well, the absence hits hard, even for him. Knowing what a genuinely good, kind man Goodsir is, and had been, and then the blood-chilling terror of the wretched unknown, the not knowing what's to become of him or his soul now.

Perhaps God forgave him after all, he thinks. And he's begun his ascent upward towards Paradise Eternal. ]

I... wasn't aware that the two of you had been quite so closely acquainted, [ he says finally, softly. ] My condolences, Miss Marsh.

[castitas]

He was— [ She starts and then stops. There's a short pause and she inhales and then exhales sharply. As if she could really put into words such a brilliant and kind man. The world feels so much dimmer without him in it. And it's not fair, of all the people— he was supposed to do so many things. He was supposed to go home, see his family and do brilliant things.]

He felt like family. We arrived in this place the same day.

[ The second thing he says makes her pause again, and she sits with it, mulling it over. She wrings her hands. They feel cold, not even helped by blankets or the fire. ]

... Condolences are for the dead. [ Her voice is quiet as she says it. ] You know what happens to him, right?

[extramuralise]

[ Irving can understand, he knows the kind of man Goodsir was— how patient and generous and full of passionate, curious wonder he could be. They didn't need to be close, or even crewing aboard the same ship, for that much, at least, to have been perfectly clear.

The loss is devastating beyond words, almost beyond comprehension, a tragedy compounded by the pure wrongness of Irving having apparently somehow... survived the other man now, something that is not only deeply, profoundly wrong, but also impossible in nearly every sense of the word. Life keeps happening out of order in this place, like a train moving in all directions without any regard to either tracks nor schedule.

He hesitates, but then solemnly bows his head in a nod. ]

I was there when he confessed it.

[ At the meeting Crozier had organized, that is. Irving breathes out slowly, a pounding ache beginning to build and throb at his temples. More quietly, he adds: ]

Not one of us survived what happened in the end, Miss Marsh.

[castitas]

[ It gives her pause. He confessed it. And she feels a swell of something— fresh heartache, but pride, of a sort. To speak of what he'd done, done to himself. Kate knows only too well the ramifications of such an act in so many ways, and the desperation of having no other alternative. ]

... I found out by accident. He didn't mean for me to find out. [ Both of them had gotten the same power. The one where they can speak their thoughts without speaking. It was so new to them both, neither of them had meant for them to reveal their horrible ends to one another. ] He was so sorry. Mamianaq.

[ She doesn't realise she's crying, tears pooling at her eyes and making tracks down her cheeks — soft glints in the low fire light. Not one of us survived what happened in the end. Maybe some part of her's always known, as much as she didn't want to believe it. That's the reality of it. Starving men, poisoned and sick and marching through a part of the world without mercy. She still... held out on hope that maybe there was a way, maybe some of them would make it home again. That even though the situation was so dire, maybe by some miracle some of them would survive it. ]

Not even Lieutenant Little?

[ It's hushed and she inhales through her nose — sniffling a little. She nods, the pain of it makes her sick. She wants to scream, but she doesn't think any sound would come out even if she did.

Her head shifts, and she looks up to him. Not, not even Edward Little. Not John Irving, either. ]

Those marks. The ones I couldn't fix, last year. That's what happened to you. That's how you died.

[extramuralise]

[ Having the strength to publicly admit what he'd done to a roomful of his peers makes Goodsir a far braver man than Irving's ever been, up to and including now; he shamefully still has yet to even properly acknowledge his own fate, if only to himself, but especially not to anyone else. Not aloud. To speak the words aloud...

Or even to just merely think them makes it suddenly all too overwhelmingly, apocalyptically real, as if by ever allowing himself to at last truly accept what happened to him will be what finally seals his fate with a permanent finality.

Avoidance, yes, if not quite denial, exactly... but the fact is, certain truths can simply be ruinous beyond all belief to finally consider confronting for good. ]

I... can't rightfully say what became of Lieutenant Little.

[ Other than the obvious, that is, which is that he ended up dead like all the rest of them. Irving hadn't been there, obviously he couldn't have been there, although in this case he nonetheless still feels like he should have been; simply knowing the outcome is different from having actually lived it, but without living it, any attempts to process either the information or the emotional turbulence that goes hand-in-hand with it ring hollow, like a sour piano note.

He falls quiet again, then reluctantly he nods. ]

They've all gone now, though, if it's of any consolation— the, er... t-the markings.

[castitas]

[ Maybe he can't, but the truth of it is there anyway. Even Lieutenant Little is dead. She just doesn't know how, of it. And if Harry Goodsir has gone back to his own world and time to die by his own hands, then the same will be for John Irving and Edward Little, too. ]

But they still happened. Someone did that to you. [ And she knows what that means. Those kinds of injuries aren't the kind you recover from. Not in his time, not in his circumstances. Maybe not even in her time either. ]

People didn't just die of Lead Poisoning or Scurvy or starvation. They didn't just die because of the fire. [ Hickey had told her about that one, back at the party they had for the last sunset of the year. He told her there's been a fire. People die in fires, she's not so naïve enough to think otherwise. ]

Someone did that to you on purpose.

[extramuralise]

[ Someone did that to you.

So strange to actually hear someone put it to him so plainly at last, when the majority of Irving's cohort seems to have intuited for themselves his desperate avoidance of the subject— and in doing so, also become complicit in his silent refusal to truly accept all that's happened in order to stop it from feeling any more real.

But it is real, and perhaps now it's high-time for him to finally stop putting off having to face it. Hearing Kate list out the more common causes of expedition deaths and then finish with, 'Someone did that to you on purpose' make him realize that, yes, his death was different from most of the rest; unique, opportunistic, and personal. Before now he'd never really thought about it in those terms, exactly, even when he couldn't avoid thinking about it at all. ]

Yes, [ he acknowledges finally, speaking softly and slowly. ] Desperation is yet another killer of men just as much as disease can be.

[ Although he doesn't really believe that's completely true of Hickey... that it would require desperation to make him kill, that is. However, Kate is probably better off being spared the details; if he named Hickey as his killer, God only knows what she might want to do with that information— and, in turn, what Hickey might then want to do to either of them. ]

Though disease is a much slower and more painful way to end.