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.]

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"... 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.

Dimitri can't deny Darcy for so many reasons. Because she's his friend. Because she just did the same for him. Because, even if he doesn't know what he said, this is his fault. Because debt and duty compel him. Because it's in his nature. But most of all, even if none of that was true --

-- he has to comfort her, because he has to be the kind of person who would.

Dimitri would rather die than twist the knife. But he finds his grip on the handle, and so he has to move carefully. It's alright would be a bald-faced lie; so would any other platitude. It's not alright. Nothing's alright. It may never be alright again.

While he still knows he can be honest, he squeezes Darcy's shoulder and says, "I'm here. I'll be here as long as you need me to be." It's the only promise he knows he can keep.

Slowly -- still giving Darcy time to shake him off, if she wants -- Dimitri scoops her up; folds her against his shoulder, and buries his face in hers, one hand threading into her hair. He's shaking again, his own tears welling up, but his grip is immovable and solid as steel. True to his word, he's going nowhere unless and until Darcy wants him to. And nothing's getting through him, either.

Edited (feeling nitpicky) 2022-07-30 03:59 (UTC)

Of the many things that are comforting about Dimitri, his strength ranks among the highest. Darcy allows herself to be moved without struggle, limp as a kitten held by the scruff of its neck, a strange mix of some deep-rooted panic at the vulnerability and a feeling of relief coursing through her.

Grief is big. Grief is everything when you're feeling it. All the fighting and suppressing and struggle to keep it down was, in Darcy's mind, the only way to keep functional and to stay useful, as she'd said. Because in the grip of grief, she's a tiny mote of dust skimming the surface of the ocean, unfathomably tiny and liable to be swallowed at any moment.

But here, with Dimitri's words and grip grounding her... she lets herself float. The frantic sobs come and go, and just as with Dimitri, sometimes she grips tighter, and sometimes she just leans on him, letting his presence comfort her.

"I'm sorry," she creaks at length, "I didn't mean to- I'm sorry."

It's not the first time Dimitri's done this. He knows better than to hope it'll be the last.

He hugs Darcy close, comfort for the both of them. Mentioning Dedue might have been a mistake -- he's remembered his own hollow ache, the missing half of his heart, the alien absence of someone who's been with him every day for the past four and a half years ... but he isn't alone here. And he'd missed this as much as anything; space to just be honest with someone about how much, in Darcy's words, it sucks. Time to hold someone, and be held, without needing to pretend or be strong. The ship's torn open old wounds, but the relief hurts almost as much.

Just as Darcy had for him, Dimitri rides it out with her: holds her, and rubs circles between her shoulderblades, and rocks them both; makes soothing noises, because there's nothing to be said even if he trusted the ship not to warp his words. Follows the ebb and flow of her grief like a harbor wall, stable and steady against the tides and the storm alike, until it calms.

"Don't apologize," he says. That should be safe, right? If he sticks to the imperative, and facts where it'll be immediately obvious if they're false. "You did the same for me."

In her idle dreamings about what it would have been like to have someone to comfort her after her death, Darcy had envisioned something like this. A hug, soothing words.

She hadn't envisioned how much it was still going to suck.

For different reasons, too. Now that she'd weathered the worst of it, her brain was working again, jabbing herself with cruel comments about how this was going to diminish her toughness in his eyes, a growing mortification at needing comfort like a fucking child, his steady hold quickly shifting from supportive to constricting in her panic.

But then Dimitri reminds her that she'd done the same, and her hackles ease back down again. This wasn't a hand-down from someone steadier and stronger and more in control of his own shit. It was a mutual support. A real, genuine friendship between equal parties. No pitying, no superiority, no ties or tethers except what they chose to uphold, not seeking to replace a loss or fill a void like she feared she was doing with some of her other relationships. Two broken pillars, each holding the other up.

Darcy relinquishes her grip on Dimitri's shirt and reaches up to ruffle his hair again.

"Yeah, I did. Thanks and I'm sorry and... yeah. I sort of... i don't think there's a good way to put it, but the thing that saved me... didn't come with me here. Him gone is a hole in my heart and my head, and you just... reminded me that he's not here."

That's the way these things go. The worst part isn't the happening; it's the aftermath, when the dust has settled and the tide receded and you're left in the ash and mud with all the awkward, uncomfortable consequences. We have stories upon stories about tragedies. Not so many about what happens once you're left behind.

Dimitri winces at Darcy's explanation. That would do it. "I'm sorry. I can't imagine what that must be like." (At least Dedue is his own person. As awful as it feels to be apart from him, Dimitri has to wonder if it's not for the best. Like being stripped of his Crest, maybe, but even that would feel like a twisted blessing.) This whole scenario has been precisely tailored to recall the worst for each of them.

... perhaps not by coincidence, Dimitri thinks, recalling his conversation with Ossie. 'Hurt people hurt people,' the saying goes, but that's usually meant for wilful acts of harm -- not this, the incidental casualties of overlapping pain. Dimitri's tone darkens, and his body tenses. "You told me the Captain would torture us. Now I understand what you meant."

A severed limb still twitches in his peripheral vision, but it's not attached to anyone. Steadier, now, it's easier for him to ignore.

"Mhm," she affirms, not moving to separate for the moment, "he fucks with your head. Doesn't matter if it's people who are alive and here, or dead and back home. He uses them against us."

Which makes this entire endeavour about as sensible as cuddling a bomb, frankly.

"I sort of... I thought I could avoid it if I just didn't care about people, for a bit. But I don't know if I can not care about people. I think I just..."

Darcy sighs, "I don't know. It's probably going to bite me in the ass. But I'm just not that scared of him. Not scared enough that having friends and shit isn't still worth it."

"I have to care," Dimitri says quietly. "I don't think I'm capable of doing otherwise." When so many lives ride on his own, on his decisions and his judgment, he has to care about each and every one. But even otherwise ... Dimitri can't help but care. He has never been able to hold himself separate, cannot help but imagine behind every face the unseen web of blood, debt, circumstance, affection, lives touched and changed, that binds every person to countless others. He can't help but love, abstractly if not personally, the beauty in those webs; can't help but hate their destruction.

He's not pulling away either. He needs the anchor; needs to know that Darcy, and this conversation, is real, so the doubts and the guilt can't start prying into his head again. Each and every passenger has been plucked from their web like a spider by a bird, left to fall amidst torn and tattered strands ... but here they are, catching each other, forging webs anew through sheer will.

It's easier said than done, and Dimitri's hardly an exemplar, but he's saying it anyway. "We're not meant to be alone. We have to offer each other our hands. We can't survive without each other; certainly none of us could face the Captain alone. I care about you, and Rich, and everyone else on this ship, and everyone at home, and -- if that leaves me at the Captain's mercy, that's the price I'll pay."

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TEST DRIVE MEME #5

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