sail_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME #5

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TEST DRIVE MEME #5

1. not subtle revealings

[you wake up.

it doesn't matter where you were before. going to bed? dying? opening the door to face a great evil? same result. you wake up in a soft bed with starched sheets in a cool, darkened room, sunlight peeking out from behind thick curtains. maybe you're alone; maybe you aren't. maybe you immediately notice the folded paper on the bedside table near your head. if you don't, you better fix that real quick: you won't be able to even open the door before you read it.

the note itself is written in a neat hand on white card stock; there is a stylized logo of a ship with the words SERENA ETERNA printed underneath. the note reads as follows:

Dear Passenger(s),

As your cruise director, it is my great honor to welcome you aboard the Serena Eterna, your destination for fun and adventure! We know you could have chosen any cruise line for your vacation, and we're very grateful you chose ours! On behalf of the Captain, I would like to assure each and every passenger that will we do whatever it takes to fulfill all your needs and desires during your journey with us.

At your earliest possible convenience, please attend the mandatory lifeboat drill by the end of the day. I'm sure everyone is very eager to get started on all the fun and sun, but safety always comes first! You can find your life jacket in your cabin's closet; carry it to your assigned muster station on deck one, where I will take you through the drill. If you can't find me in the crowd, just look for the gal with the winning smile!

See You Real Soon!

Sincerely,
Gal Friday

you walk to deck one. you have no other choice: every time you try to step in a direction some unseen being considers "not towards deck one," you find your legs no longer move, staying stock still, frozen. whether compelled quickly by curiosity, or delayed by pure stubbornness, the result is the same, and you are left milling around with other similarly curious or stubborn people.

you see someone in uniform near the front of the crowd. she seems to be a gal, but is missing the winning smile, along with most of her other features. she seems to see you, though, rushing to your side and placing a lei around your neck with great formality. a voice, cheery but artificial, sees to come from nowhere and everywhere.]

Welcome! I'm very glad to have you aboard!

[you touch the lei. rooster feathers, lotus seeds, and a carved circle of something white and hard, linked onto a silk string.

after the drill is completed, you are seemingly free to go. or, well, your legs work, now. and maybe that's as good as it's gonna get.]

2. a permanent reminder of a temporary feeling

[the reflections are missing. all of them. in mirrors. in television screens. on the backs of spoons. nothing looks back at you.

then, figures do show up. not your own, like you'd expect. thin, wispy apparitions, people with pleading eyes and hands, reaching out to place their palms against the surface, from their own end. faces familiar and not, beckoning, mouthing words you just can't quite make out. help me, it might be. get me out, perhaps. just until you're close enough, until your skin warms the surface of whatever it is you're peering into. and then, those same hands wrap, all too real, burning-cold against your flesh, and pull, trying to drag you through the surface, making up for their lack of strength with desperation. any flesh unlucky enough to enter the reflection comes back bone-white and cold, all sensation dead, though it will fade within a few hours.

in retrospect, it looks a bit more like they were saying something different. something more like, better you than me. or maybe it's not even words at all. they look a bit more like they're laughing.]

3. complex mementos

[but, hey. sometimes changes are good! like, today, in Playback, there's a brand-new game available for all the children to play! it's an old-fashioned sort of claw machine, the type that's so large, a particularly dedicated kindergartner could wriggle their way inside. the prizes vary, and sit loose: bags of candy, stuffed toys, firearms, painfully early-00s electronics, actually that one just looks like a dead iguana, tiny ship-branded knickknacks... like all the other games in the arcade, the game starts up automatically upon being touched; lack of quarters shouldn't keep you from having fun! pro tip: they are loaded, and they will go off if you suck at claw games and let it fall.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ah. Guilt. The underpinnings are as familiar as the guard stances that the two of them have discussed in swordplay; different names, but the same essential motion. In the same funny way that this ship has a habit of doing, it's like a mirror to her own feelings, the own damn weight that only a forced-confession had managed to pry out of her chest.

Which means she needs to get him out of here.

Darcy hefts Dimitri up in an attempt at something like a fireman's carry- unsuccessfully, damn his long legs- but the intent is clear. If need be, she'll drag him out of here literally kicking and screaming.

"C'mon- it's not real, it's the Captain fucking with us. They're not real, whoever they are, and it's not your fault."

Darcy won't need to drag him. Well, she won't have to fight him, anyway. The shades are out of reach now, consigned once again to the back of Dimitri's mind and whatever hell has taken them in this hot, bright, frostless world. Dimitri pleads with them under his breath, alternately mutters and sobbing, but he takes what weight he can on the leg with a knee he can still bend, and staggers with Darcy out of the room, and away from the mirrors.

He crumples to the ground wherever they stop, unable to support himself or even try. He only registers that their surroundings are free of reflective surfaces, and that they're not under the searing abovedecks sun.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles, hunched over himself. To Darcy, to the dead, to the pounding pain in his skull, he doesn't know. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

What is there to say?

Whoever he was seeing in the reflection, he felt responsible for. To the point of trying to throw himself in there after them. Darcy's time in a psych ward was punctuated similarly, with hunger strikes for no cause and the constant desire to atone with blood. She knew why now, even if at the time it had been a whirlwind of anger and terror and very literal hauntings. It didn't make the situation any less complicated.

She knew remarkably little about Dimitri's actual life back home, just vague bits and pieces. Where could she start? There weren't even any safe bets or assumptions she could make about why this had hit him so hard. Darcy wasn't exactly known for her comforting presence, either.

When Dimitri collapses, she sort of goes down with him. He's heavier than Rich or her teammates, even with him assisting, and he was an awkward dead weight to bear. But one she'd carry as far as needed. Trying to soothe him right this moment was a kind of carrying, too.

Darcy scoops up what she can of him, holding him tight in steady arms, her hands trying to warm up his hand for want of anything else to do.

"Hey- shhh, shhh. Take some deep breaths. It's okay."

As a rule, the more comfort Dimitri needs, the more loath he is to accept it. Darcy isn't, in his experience, the hugging type, and he only feels worse about that -- Dimitri's the one who can't control himself, the one who's failed. and it's not Darcy's job to pick up his pieces -- but with his limbs out of commission, he can't exactly resist. He can't even try to pull himself together, let alone crawl off to lick his wounds and paste the shards back together. The harder he cries into Darcy's shoulder, the more festered and feverish he feels, and the harder he cries.

He tries to breathe. He does. But any time he starts to steady, starts to surface, he realizes all over again that he can't move, and lurches back into another spiral of panic and shame. He can't feel Darcy's hands on his. He can't even twitch his fingers, to return her grip or to pull away. He can feel her arms around his back, though, warm and solid, and the soothing litany of her voice, and -- it does help. A little, it helps.

It is a long, long, bad hour until heat starts to bleed back into his limbs.

And it hurts like hellfire, more forks and knives than pins and needles, and even then his legs barely respond when he hisses and tries to curl up. But he feels a little less helpless, and any change at all at least soothes the terror that what he's done to himself is permanent (if he can't fight, if he can't kill, what else is he good for?) It's enough to grasp some fragile equilibrium.

" ... I'm sorry," he croaks, with more intention than the frantic babbling from before. "I'm ... sorry you had to see that." He sniffles, wipes his face on his shoulder, and tries to collect his legs again; it doesn't work. "T-thank you. If you hadn't stopped me, I ... "

It's a long hour. Really long, without the spiral of panic and steadying, Darcy feels every minute that goes past. But it's not like the girl is incapable of patience, and there's a rhythm to it too. Holding tighter when the babbling worsens, relaxing when he relaxes, like the ebb and flow of the tides.

And the couple of incidents where she needs to flip off someone going past and indicate very pointedly 'not now' and 'go literally anywhere else'.

She feels him starting to calm down again properly, and she ruffles his hair, trying not to make a big deal out of it.

"It's cool. You're fine. This is part of my job. Sort of."

Darcy thumps him gently on the back a couple of times and asks- "Do you want to go somewhere less public to... talk about it? Or not talk about it? Pretend like it didn't happen?"

Dimitri can't feel bad about how much he appreciates the hair ruffling, because all his 'feeling bad' capacity is otherwise occupied.

"How is this your job?" He means -- sitting here and holding him while he gets tears and snot on Darcy's shirt, all over something that she has nothing to do with. It's not real distress, at least, not the start of another meltdown; just a last spurt of water pressure from a broken main.

Once again, Dimitri tries to get his legs back under him. This time he sort of succeeds, at least enough to sit up under his own power. He scrubs his face. " ... somewhere less public. Yes." Once he can actually stand up, anyway. The second half of the question is harder; he would love to pretend this never happened, but it did, and Darcy knows, and he knows Darcy knows, and that might actually be worse in the long run.

"I'm a ghost-hunter back home," Darcy explains, standing up along with him to help him up, "a Sin-Eater. Part of the oath I swore is keeping the living and the dead from hurting each other. I don't know what you saw in the mirrors, but they weren't real. I saw one of my Krewe from back home in them, and I know for a fact that no Sin-Eater leaves behind a ghost."

Trust her. She went looking.

Darcy's more than happy to lead them back towards the cabins, aiming for hers so she can very quickly get into a shirt that doesn't have snot on it. She doesn't try and stoke the conversation, happy to leave it to more private quarters.

Ghost and hunter aren't words that go together in Dimitri's concept of the world. The dead haunt the living, but not in any form that could be hunted. He's too exhausted and hazy to question metaphysics.

By the time they make it to Darcy's room, he's got most of his feeling back, apart from a few burning prickles in his extremities like the world's worst case of frostbite. He's about to stagger into the bathroom to wash his face and let Darcy change, when he remembers a key feature of the Serena Eterna's bathrooms. He freezes, staring at the door-handle, and then looks away from the door-handle, because it's shiny, and in its curved, golden surface he has no reflection.

"Um. I -- bathroom. Mirror," he says articulately. And, on second thought, if they do end up talking about it, he'd rather be able to choose to be honest.

"Right," Darcy affirms, "and the thing-" were... tears a kind of water? Obviously, but did it count for the magic? Dimitri hadn't been confused at anything she'd said, so maybe it didn't count?

Darcy indicates for him to turn around for the couple of seconds it takes her to change shirts, then pats him on the shoulder and sits herself down where she usually holds court at the corner of the couch.

"Sooo..." a vague gesture. He can start wherever he cares to.

"Wait, first -- " It's easy and tempting to seize on a practical question, and delay a conversation he really wishes he didn't have to have. But if they're going to have it, he wants Darcy to be able to choose honesty, too.

Assuming neither of them's been compelled to lie, which will just make things even more confusing.

"Tell me something we both know is true, and something false."

Of course Dimitri had the same thought, and Darcy's just a little annoyed by his considerateness for the moment.

"Okay- I fence sabre and my favourite colour-" 'is pink', she thinks she says, actually saying- "used to be black, but it's blue since I started dating Undine. Your turn."

"Both true. Damn." Actually, the bit about Undine is both novel, and very endearing, but Dimitri's not going to comment on it. He sighs. "As for me ... I was born in Fhirdiad, and I love sewing."

Is he stalling? He's absolutely stalling.

"True and a lie. So you're fine, I'll just try and keep my mouth shut."

Annoying, yes, but not insurmountable.

"Whenever you're ready."

Dimitri's explained it before. But ... that had been in Fódlan, where everyone had a passing familiarity with the Tragedy of Duscur; Dimitri had only needed to fill in the gaps. Darcy has none of that context. Here on the Serena Eterna, Dimitri had hoped ... hoped, however vainly, that it might not have to define him.

Foolish of him. Faithless. In the end, he can't escape being himself.

He settles himself on the couch, squares his shoulders and straightens his spine; fixes his gaze somewhere dead ahead, in the middle distance, and draws a deep breath.

"My father was murdered," he says dully. "We were travelling. Our convoy was attacked. My father, and my best friend at the time ... others ... t-they died protecting me. It's only because of them that I survived." His hands bunch in the fabric of his pants, crooked knuckles white and trembling. He does not look at Darcy. "Only I survived."

Now it gets tricky, but to be honest, he's already thought about how to explain this without giving away more than he needs to. If he hesitates, let Darcy think it's because the memories are difficult -- which they are. "The attack was blamed on the people living nearby. There was ... retaliation. I was a witness -- I knew the truth -- but no one would listen. I could do nothing. I -- "

He shakes his head, shoulders bunched, fists balled on his knees. "In Faerghus," he goes on more steadily, a little hoarse, "those who are killed unjustly, whose deaths go unavenged ... their souls are trapped in a frozen, lightless realm beneath the earth, unable to move on, unable to find peace. I'm the only one left. The only one who can save them. So when they called out to me from the mirror -- " Finally, he turns to Darcy, pleading for ... something. Understanding. Mercy. Judgement. " -- I had to try."

What is there to say?

What can she say.

Her mother lost most of one of her legs and Darcy's world stopped for a span of months. Drove her half nuts. It's what her father had said before he left- 'I can nurse a cripple wife or a batshit daughter but not both'. She'd witnessed how the world stops when someone who people care about gets hurt. Not herself, of course, but she's chewed on that bitterness long enough.

Darcy cannot fathom what it must be like losing so many. And then to be rendered helpless in stopping the deaths of others, forced to let the actual killers go free...

It's bitter in her throat. Darcy finds herself outraged on his behalf, her usual protective instincts forming phantom images of shaking sense into someone into her head. But it's not... helpful. It's the kind of impotent anger that achieves nothing.

"I'm sorry," she croaks at last, her expression grim.

"I... don't know how the afterlife works where you're from. I barely know how it works back home. But I know you need to be alive to be able to avenge them."

She huffs, makes her way over to where he's sat to rest her chin on his head.

"I'd be a hypocrite if I asked you to be careful, or not... try. It's important, and I know you had to. Just... don't. Don't be stupid. For their sake and mine."

It's not what Dimitri expected. Not the contact, nor the quiet, accepting sympathy. People usually argue with him, when he bares this much -- try to tell him it's not his fault, or that the dead are gone, or that they wouldn't want this, or some such. It's ... nice. It's nice to feel like someone understands.

His forehead drops onto Darcy's collarbone. All the tension uncoils from his shoulders, and he only holds back the wet sting around his lashes with his reluctance to reset Darcy's honesty timer. "I'll try," he says. It's all he can promise. "If I can avoid mirrors, I ... should be alright."

He swallows. "I know. Both the living and the dead ... I need to live on to do them any good. But it's hard to ... it's hard."

There's more he could say -- more that churns, and festers, and burrows into the cracks and crevices of his mind -- but it won't do either of them any good to dwell on. Darcy's already gone above and beyond for him. Dimitri should -- he wants to, really he wants to -- sit up, and tear himself away, and reassure Darcy that he's fine; it was a momentary lapse, but he'll be alright -- but it would be a lie, and he'sso starved for comfort, and he should know better but it can't hurt, how much can it hurt? To sit here with his eyes closed, and breathe, and let Darcy be the one to step away.

" ... I'm sorry," he says quietly. This time, it's not an apology. "If you understand where I'm coming from ... I'm sorry. No one comes to understand these things for any happy reason."

"I know," she affirms in turn.

"Life sucks and then you die. I get it."

Darcy's still not really sure she's doing this 'comforting' thing right. But if she's fucking this up royally, Dimitri isn't saying anything or trying to pull away.

"It's fine. I-" she frees up a hand to rub at her face, "sometimes you do things because it's more important to be the kind of person who would. I don't... think I believe in good people anymore- if anyone were actually good, someone would've rescued me when I died. But I believe in making the choice to try and do good. If I didn't already know how ghosts work, and that not every ghost you see is real, I would've done the same thing."

Edited (vestigal line from a previous iteration of the tag) 2022-07-25 02:01 (UTC)

"It does. Suck." Dimitri's shoulders twitch, with what might be a hysterical little giggle if his throat wasn't clogged with tears. It sucks! Life is absurd and unfair and miserable and death is its ugly, ignoble, indiscriminate end. And this conversation is massively more comforting than any attempt to claim it's nicer.

" ... but we have to try," Dimitri agrees. "There has to be some reason we're here. Even if it's one we create for ourselves. If the world is cruel, we have to be better. We -- we can't just let it be. I have to believe that."

He pauses. " ... did you say you died?" Was it figurative? Sometimes Dimitri almost believes he'd died, but ... Darcy didn't sound like she was being figurative. Another, more worried pause. "Did you mean to say that?"

"... no, I didn't," Darcy wrinkles her face in displeasure, "but I probably had to tell you at some point."

Finally breaking the contact, because she knows she's going to need to be sitting down for this, Darcy moves to put herself back on the couch.

"Back home, about a year before when I last remember being there, I... was walking home one night from training, and some guy pushed me off a bridge into a river. I drowned. After my Geist brought me back to life, I must've been sitting on the riverbank for hours. And when I... finally got myself up again, I had to walk myself home. Let myself back into the apartment. Reheat my own dinner. I hate having to think about it- it just... sucks, and I always feel like I'm just pitying myself if I chew on it."

It's Dimitri's turn to feel angry -- angry at his friend's suffering, angry at a stranger's cruelty, angry at an unfair world and angry because it's easier to feel rage on someone else's behalf than grief on his own. But anger is a motive force, and there's nothing he can do here. Darcy's murderer is long gone, unidentifiable, not even on this plane of reality, and thinking about tying the man's spine into as-yet-uninvented knots doesn't do anything to help the Darcy who is here, right now, on the couch next to him.

"I'm ... sorry," says Dimitri, feeling pathetic even as he says it. What good is 'I'm sorry' in the face of such an atrocity? Still ... it needs to be said.

Wanting to return the contact, unsure how, he settles a hand on Darcy's shoulder, lightly enough that she can shrug him off if she wants. "I can't tell you how to feel, but ... it's alright to feel strongly about it. Whatever that feeling is. What happened to you was unforgivable. Someone should have been there for you -- it should never have happened at all. I'm sorry you had to endure it."

"It's not okay. And I shouldn't keep saying it is, but it just... if I open the floodgates, I don't trust that I won't just be a mess for the rest of forever, and then I won't be any use to anyone."

Darcy rests her head on Dimitri's shoulder in turn. It's a kind of sacred misery they're sharing, something raw and very real and without the usual masks of pleasantness and normality that they both of them are so used to wearing. They've both experienced an atrocity. There's no attempt at hiding that, for the moment.

"It's like, if I think about it, I just... get so fucking mad at everyone in my life. And- mum was sorry that she wasn't awake to worry about me, and obviously like, people were sad for me or whatever. But I'd still be dead if it weren't for my Geist. They can't be fucking sorry enough for it. Nobody even knows that I died from it- they all think it was just... an accident, and that eventually I'll be fine. Nobody gets it. God- I probably sound so fucking whiny."

No tears, the last thing she needs is to get Dimitri stuck in truth-telling, or worse.

"You're not whining," he says firmly. "No more so than I just was." In an inverted ouroboros of caring -- Darcy would never let Dimitri belittle himself like that. And he still wants to, and he wouldn't be able to believe her, either, but maybe he can turn indignation on his behalf into compassion on her own. "You died. No one could take such a thing lightly."

Dimitri tucks his arm more securely around Darcy's shoulders. What can he say? He knows all too well the need to stay present, stay moving, stay functional to stave off collapse. Like runaway wheels, their own momentum keeps them upright. If it ever runs out, they'll fall, and who can say if they'll ever pick themselves up again. On the Serena Eterna, so far removed from any context he knows, anything that's given his life meaning or purpose since that day, Dimitri is grimly aware of his own momentum wobbling. He wonders if it's the same for Darcy.

"Well, if you do fall apart," he says more quietly, "I'll do my best to pick you up. And if you need time -- space where you don't need to be useful to anyone -- I'll carve it with my own hands. It's not okay." He huffs. " ... and if you need to cry, I can keep my mouth shut for an hour. It's only fair."

It's not his first time holding someone who needs, who can't afford to feel the weight of everything they've been through. A different time, a different place, a different person, but ... the memories stir, all the same.

"Other people did. The rest of my Krewe, other Bound in other cities, they all seemed to be doing fine. They saw it as a gift and not just... putting off the inevitable."

Or at least, she assumed they did. She never spoke about it with her Krewe. They were all still moving, so they had to have been doing alright, surely.

Darcy wants to keep fighting him on it, to keep arguing as to why she's a unique case and their situations are different. But she's not expecting the... kindness that Dimitri shows her. It's as if he'd just revealed that the earth goes around the sun, both incredibly novel and blisteringly difficult to swallow. Darcy was the one who held people up. Who took the hits, who kept moving, who was independent and self-sufficient and strong enough to carry every damn person who needed her, because there was no other option. Kael had told her once that to save the people you loved, you had to be willing to do anything. If someone wanted them dead, the only way to save them was to kill their aggressor first. That action was love and safety all wrapped into one. For other people, not for people like herself and her Krewe.

In the firmness of his arm, the runaway wheel wobbles.

"It doesn't solve anything," she rasps, her voice choked on tears she's still swallowing, "even if I do cry for an hour, then what? We're still on this fucking ship and I'm still half dead and-"

Darcy forces herself to take a breath. The wheel is toppling, and she slides from his shoulder to curl up on herself, her head next to his leg, the pit in her stomach consuming itself.

Dimitri's hand stays on Darcy's shoulder as she slides down, just shifting so it's more on her bicep. She's right: it doesn't solve anything. Whenever they leave this room, they'll still be on the ship; Darcy will still be a living ghost, and Dimitri will still be a monster. Goddess knows his own crying fit just left him feeling hollowed-out and headachey. And yet ... somehow, something is a little better. A little less cracked. A little more whole.

It's because Darcy's with him. Because she talked to him; because she listened, and offered up her own feelings in return. Because, at its root, crying is a social behavior with a social purpose, the first and most profound human instinct: help me!

"If I hadn't had Dedue, after it happened," he says, throat knotted painfully, "if he hadn't had me ... I think we both would have gone mad." Or, in Dimitri's case, madder than he already has. He's already hoarse from crying; his rallied composure slips away, leaving his voice raw, plaintive. "Does it have to solve anything? Can't it be enough just to hurt a little less?"

His own guilt would cry, no, it's not enough. The only relief he deserves is victory; anything less is a betrayal of those who've suffered, those who depend on him, who have no other choice. But Darcy is hurting. His friend is in pain. The wheel turns; the ouroboros swallows itself; a pair of broken pillars can lean on each other, and for Darcy's sake, Dimitri has to afford them both the compassion he denies himself.

She had been telling the truth in her explanation. Darcy really did die alone, she did have to let herself back into the house, the sheer overwhelming misery of her unfortunate demise is all real.

But the mention of Dedue, of someone being there to stop each other from going mad...

Darcy was alone after her death. Alone with a new part of herself, a part of herself that was steady and stable, a presence both alien and intrinsic. There was no way to map their relationship onto anything human; it was the bond between a person and their soul, a lichen and an algae, a ghost and a corpse. There are times when Darcy forgets herself and believes for a moment that this, the girl, is all she is. Being reminded of that tangible absence, like a missing tooth in her mouth, is what finally brings her crashing down. Not merely the loss, but the fact she was able to forget what had been taken from her.

Darcy stuffs her sleeve into her mouth to dampen a howl, reminded once again of how alone she truly was here, of the grief of losing part of herself.

But... not alone, at the same time. Alone in the way that drove Avery mad, yes, but not in the way he isolated himself, keeping his loss from others. Maybe she's weaker than Avery was in his last days, but maybe she's stronger. More willing to show her wounds in the valiant hopes that someone would support her through it and not just twist the knife in. When she grasps at Dimitri's pant leg, it's a childish desire to seek comfort, one she cannot deny herself any longer, her strong fingers pulling at him like a demand for it. Help me, the action says just as loudly as her muffled sobs, help me.

TEST DRIVE MEME #5

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Cw more explicit suicide mention

i should've put a CW at the top of this thread huh. oops.

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cw mention of family death, mass murder

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