logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

characters: everyone.
location: around town.
date/time: october 9-17.
content: the hallucinations begin...
warnings: psychological horror. please cw tags appropriately.

it's probably something that shouldn't be said out loud

October 9 feels like a normal day at first, save for the red lighthouse beam cutting through the darkness overhead. You know by now—or you've heard—that the lighthouse is only active during ferry arrivals and events... And there's definitely no ferry docked at the, er. Beach. The town is quiet, the forest spirits behave business-as-usual, Rastus doesn't know what's up. Whatever's going on, you'll have to figure it out for yourself.

And you will, though the hallucinations are subtle at first: objects moving when they shouldn't, people's proportions looking just a bit off, voices in an empty room, and so on. Is it just your mind playing tricks in the darkness? Might be! Will did warn you all about the effects of living without a sun and a proper day/night cycle.

As the days go on, the hallucinations are harder to ignore, no matter how much you may wish to wave them off as flukes. What's wrong with everyone's faces? When did all the howling start? Who do you hold onto when the world drops out from under you? And those hands...

While you might know it can't be real, it certainly feels real. But at least it can't last forever!

...Right?

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[ That's exactly what it feels like, like the world stopped breathing for a minute. And then it moved on while Riku felt the same, a slow strangulation. Grief is a box he lives in, its insides lined with a thousand jagged little edges, right now he's huge with it, blundering around in a space that continuously cuts him.

They say it's supposed to get better. That it becomes smaller, so the times you bump up against the pain happens a little less and the spaces between those moments grows longer. They say nothing about complicated grief, and how everything Riku has let go of has only ever been done with great and often violent reluctance. ]

Something he'd want..?

[ Riku sounds a little like he's holding his breath as he thinks. It doesn't even take long. ]

Yeah. It is. Because he wouldn't want anyone to lose hope.

[ To give up. Not just because it would deprive him of a heart connected to his own, a tether he could follow back here, but because they're friends, and Sora - strong as he is all on his own - has always found strength in those particular numbers. ]

...Well, for one? It's cold.

[ The tension breaks as he shudders out a short laugh. He doesn't know how these guys handle it, the temperature starts to drop a little and he can't get over it, knowing it's only going to get colder. Why couldn't the fairies have given him a coat? ]

Even I'd go for a drink, but not alone.

Is it?

[Quentin stopped feeling hot or cold days ago, somewhere around the time that Julia's voice started to come from the drains around the cabin and Alice's hands reached for him from the walls, even when he wasn't doing anything more important than making tea he didn't even want.

And she's still there, at the edge of his vision, like blue fire and hissing insults. She never was kind, as a Niffin. And maybe that's the problem, that Quentin kept expecting her to be, even as a woman and she wasn't. Not the kind of kind that he needed and he was never as honest as she needed him to be.

Every step of the way, they kept hurting each other and still tried to fit all their jagged edges together.

There's nothing but razor sharp ones left, and Alice pushing him up against all of them now. Slicing his soul to ribbons and Julia's pleading isn't helping. Isn't doing anything but making Quentin want to jump in to the river and catch the pretty swirling lights in his hands.]

I didn't think there was anything left? To drink?

[As if the flashes of wanting fire in people's eyes could be ignored if only Quentin was drunk enough. The monster was never going to go away, it was going to keep following him, keep finding him until the end of time and after that-- there would be an eternity of nothing but the two of them.

He screws his eyes shut, mouth turned down in a hard line.

Maybe if he was drunk enough, he'd stop overthinking this and just go. Leave his lantern on the bank and just go, instead of beating around the bush, waiting for this to adjust. For this to be the new normal.]

Yeah, okay. Fine, that's-- yeah. That's fine.

[ Quentin hasn't felt hot or cold, but Riku's bare arms have been pebbling over with goosebumps regardless of whether the wind is blowing. He may have spent much of the last few years visiting a whole bunch of other worlds, but his blood is still an islander's. Too thin for the colder weather.

The cold and the dark reminds him of another place where time became a meaningless and fluid nothing term that slipped through one's increasingly numb fingers. Continuing to see and hear the same man who stole his body and brought ruin and suffering to so many worlds and hearts isn't helping.

If it's an "event", then it's temporary. He just hopes it ends soon. ]

Already? I keep forgetting how much everybody drinks.

[ But that's how Riku's been - any time there's a party, he allows himself no more than one drink. And, inevitably, he passes water around to those who have gone to excess, or escorts people back to their rooms. He's absolutely been that guy stoically holding someone's hair back for them. Riku doesn't get in the way of how others choose to celebrate, he just tends to try to mitigate the eventual damage when it goes too far.

Riku stares at Quentin, at the way he shuts his eyes tight, at the hard curve of his mouth.

He looks like he's hanging by a thread. Perhaps all Riku's managed to do is give them both a few more minutes. He could hope that might give Quentin - or someone better qualified than Riku - those crucial minutes to buy him another hour, maybe a day. However long until this thing, this event passes and things return to the new normal that's been living in perpetual night. ]

I'm asking a lot. [ To hang on when he's so wrung dry from years of this harrowing crap. ] It's hard to hope it'll get better when you're that short on proof it does.

[The darkness almost has a weight, like something slick and invasive pressing against his skin and against his mind. It’s not just the low, whispering voices, the disembodied hands or the flashes of spell-fire that Quentin can still see at the edge of his vision.

It’s the darkness itself, like it’s alive somehow, and it’s hungry.

Quentin still has one arm wrapped around Riku, and he has his fingers wrapped around Riku’s cold ones and every shiver that goes through the other man, echoes through him, too. Riku’s bare skin is ice cold under Quentin’s hand even if it barely registers.]

I think there’s a bottle of something that tastes like toothpaste in the general store? It— it really doesn’t taste like something you’d want in your mouth? But also, it hits like a slap in the face. If- we could, maybe, go get that?

[See if it’s possible to drown out Julia under a sickly sweet layer of alcohol and companionship, to drive Alice away when there’s only Quentin to yell at, and he gives Riku a tiny squeeze around the shoulder.]

That’s fine. I— it’s— I never really expected anything else. We can go? Now?

[Before the monster catches up, before his brain breaks wide open and spills everything out on the cold, hard ground. Before the hands catch them or worms themselves in to places they shouldn’t be.]

EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

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