EVENT LOG: ENTER MR SANDMAN (DEFENDERS)

[inthenightmods]

EVENT LOG:
ENTER MR. SANDMAN (DEFENDERS)

characters: those who signed up as defenders for the event
location: all around Beacon
date/time: november 16-29
content: the defenders attempt to drive off a spirit invasion
warnings: lots of horror! body horror, psychological horror, gore, violence, etc.. please cw all threads where appropriate! mods will do the same

in your closet, in your head.

It all happens in a matter of moments. Your friends, your companions, and even some people you aren't all that fond of; everyone who took so much as a bite of the spirits' feast suddenly collapses into a comatose heap. Which is bad enough already, but the worst, by far, is yet to come.

Before anyone can really figure out what's happened to the sleepers, the woods surrounding the town come alive with sound. Rustling, screeching, clicking, howling, and under it all, the characteristic hoots and whistles of the forest spirit tongue. But these aren't the friendly creatures that set up the banquet in the first place, and they aren't the familiar faces (or masks) from around Beacon. As they begin to emerge, bursting forth from the trees, these spirits reveal themselves as a horrifying army of terrors. And sprinkled among them, distinguishable by the emerald glint in their sockets, are the infamous "green eyes", the dangerous spirits that appeared once before.

Attempting to talk to these spirits is a moot point, made obvious by their immediate assault on anyone they get close to. They attack with claws and teeth, with limbs far stronger than they have any right to be, and the green eyes, as they are wont to do, will try to get into your head. Somehow, they seem to know what it is that scares you most, and they don't seem too hesitant to use it. It's not clear what they want— are they here to eradicate you? To frighten you? To send a message?

Whatever the case, one thing is very clear: you and everyone else, sleeping or waking, are in serious danger. Are you ready to defend Beacon?

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Comments

[darkeyed]

"What? What are you talking about?" He cuts in almost immediately, allowing no time for anything to sink in. Confusion of Riku's sudden appearance makes the shaking of his head vehement. It's far from the same thing. As far as he's aware, most of them, with the exception of Clarke and Riku, had remained accounted for. Had remained in contact. "That doesn't explain where you've been all this time!"

Clarke... Well. He thinks now Clarke has joined the ranks of the permanently missing, wherever they go.

But Riku had been different from the outset, both in that his trail had been lukewarm instead of cold and the strange, withholding behavior of the others regarding him. And, admittedly, in how much more acutely M.K. had felt his absence. And now he's here, looking like he's merely in the middle of another day in this dark place. How? Who is Bruce?

Maybe later, much later, he'll let himself be nettled by the insinuation. "Freaked out" implies an overreaction--unfounded hysterics--when M.K. wonders why more people aren't 'freaked out' given the circumstances. For now, though, there's just the crash of relief against Riku's slow and uncertain account of his whereabouts.

"We've been looking for you!"

[equinoctials]

His silent stare holds for a long moment and then drops away from him, his expression complicated, the feelings behind it moreso. Riku struggled with Bruce's selfless charity, feeling undeserving after he had not just seriously injured him, but was prepared to end his life for stopping him from protecting what he had believed was Sora. In the weeks that followed... Riku can't say he understands everything Bruce intended, planned, or wanted out of this, but he believes that his trust is a gift, and not one to squander.

He also learned that he values privacy. Not just his own, either. Riku doesn't doubt that his responses had been out of that same desire, to protect the privacy of those he had taken into his care. There's one vital detail that's been lost in translation, however - to Riku, it had only felt like a week, because his sense of time has slipped without a tablet around to dictate time and schedule.

"I heard," Riku says, "I wasn't gone that long," sounds like an excuse, maybe it is, because it takes very little to make Riku uncomfortable when he feels like he's on the back foot. History shows he isn't the best when it comes to looking out for his own best interests, unless that interest is one of his friends (and Sora in particular), when it inconveniences or worries someone he cares about, that compounds the issue.

"...And I wasn't kidnapped."

[darkeyed]

Maybe it feels to Riku like time had passed quickly because he'd needed to spend it looking inward. Because he'd made the choice to live in secrecy apart from the town proper of his own free will, and had the comfort of that information at his disposal.

But to be on the other side, with half-assed breadcrumbs to go off of, it hadn't felt that way at all. It had felt like plodding, dragging days of toil. Days of grappling with the anxiety of not knowing when or how Riku had fallen out of the periphery of public awareness, or what had befell him. Days of searching, of making agreements and exchanging favors with people he wouldn't normally agree or exchange with. Of wondering if his own losing fight with the phantoms in his mind had somehow played a part in the other boy's failure to appear.

Riku hadn't been the only one tempted by visions of those close to the heart and now lost. M.K.'s tired of losing people. It's hard to know what's worse: losing them by your own negligence, or by not knowing if you could have ever helped.

But even now, with Riku standing right in front of him, looking off in that way of his when he's thinking through his words, things are no clearer than when the person on the network told him not to bother looking.

Incredulous, M.K.'s eyebrows scale the mast of his forehead to the point of being in danger of leaping off. "Then what? In case you hadn't noticed, no one's heard from you since those visions were at their worst." No one except two people that he knows of, and neither of them had been forthcoming. "That was weeks ago. Everyone's been looking for you since then."

Kidnapped. It's not a word M.K. had ever used, not wanting to lend credence to the notion by invoking the sort of a tactic a real threat would employ, as they would in the Badlands. Having it protested draws unpleasant focus to part of what Riku says.

"When did you have time to hear about any of this?" His eyebrows descend to knot themselves. "How long have you been here?"

[equinoctials]

"Weeks?"

All he says is one word and his expression fills in the rest. Riku knew he was away for a little while, but to him it felt like less time than weeks. A lot less. It makes sense now, why M.K. would worry, why even he would reach out on the network when he's never really ever seen him show the slightest amount of interest in it.

His initial, knee-jerk reaction is shock, but what follows on its heels is guilt. That he'd taken so much time, that he put others out. Everyone's been looking.

Except he thinks about Mickey and all those times he told him it's okay if he doesn't have the answer right away, to take the time he needs. Bruce's patient silence, his I'll be back later and We can talk then. As he thinks back on it, he did need that time, and he took it. It's startling that it was as long as weeks, long enough for a sprain to mend and ribs to begin to knit, for deep bruises to fade, but he doesn't regret taking it to claw his way back to a kind of normal.

After a moment in his own thoughts, Riku looks up, reaches to take him by one shoulder.

"M.K. ...you were worried and with good reason. When people go missing, it's usually forever. I'm sorry."

It doesn't answer his question about how long he's been back, where he was or what he was doing, but one thing at a time.

"I'm not sorry for doing what I had to do. As for what that was, I'm not ready to talk about it."

[darkeyed]

"Did you not know that?" And yet, puzzlingly, Riku's confusion seems to rival his own. "It's been weeks since we last saw each other."

A small stretch of time, by normal standards, and one that would not normally raise his alarm, but this is an abnormal place. Anything could happen inside an hour, let alone a month.

Trying to decipher what plays over Riku's face--surprise? Regret? Display--while waiting through another moment of silence feels like a lifetime in and of itself. Waiting, waiting, waiting--he's been waiting for a sign of Riku all this time that he feels fit to burst with all the questions piling up behind his teeth, but Riku's hand on his shoulder forestalls him. Baffled, he looks at it like he's never seen the like of it before. Consolation for the cause without a reason only fans his mounting confusion.

"You're not making any sense," he insists. "What did you do? Where'd you go?"

[equinoctials]

When one's own recollection is so very different from another's, trying to reconcile the two is dizzying. Riku doesn't know what to make of it, what his mind and heart say while the bruises and other injuries once carried by his body tell different stories, and M.K., another.

Riku has made a habit of keeping M.K. waiting. For a straight answer, for him to return, to satisfy his concerned curiosity. Part of the problem there is that there are a lot of things he prefers to keep to himself, and what he does share isn't given up easily. Everything he ends up telling has the marks of deliberation all over it.

"..." Riku exhales slowly, he can't blame him for wanting to know, neither can he cross over the line he just drew for himself. He said he isn't ready to talk about it, and he means it.

"I needed some time. I wasn't far. Once I could," once his injuries were mostly recovered, it was less about the physical ones than the resiliency on the inside. He needed to be ready to trust himself not to undo everything they had done to put themselves back together, "I came back."

[darkeyed]

He blinks, halfway to another uncomprehending shake of his head. He doesn't understand. How could he have been close but not say where? But the truth starts to sink in with that exhale--the patient exhale of someone waiting for a slow child to grasp at the straws in front of him.

The facts are there, waiting to be assembled in drips and drabs: Riku hadn't been in extended danger this whole time. He hadn't been prevented from reaching out and telling anyone where he was. He'd chosen not to. Is choosing. And therein lies the missing link, the root of the discrepancy that's kept M.K. from connecting all the dots, because through all the sweat and searching, it hadn't once occurred to him Riku would purposely leave him in the dark. The rest of the town, maybe--but not him. Riku would've asked for help if he'd needed it or outlined his plan if he hadn't.

Confusion begins to fade under the gradual, leaden revelation.

I hoped I'd run into you, he'd said. But only after. After he'd returned. After M.K. had... freaked out.

Oh, now the pieces are coming together. He'd run straight up to that line that can't be crossed assuming he would be invited across it, not seeing the invisible wall that was actually there. The collision is jarring, stealing his questions from his mouth. He'd thought, after the discovery they were more alike than dissimilar the time they'd found the armory... Maybe they hadn't bridged a gap to trust, exactly, maybe not even a friendship Riku felt was worth building onto, but a seeding camaraderie. Enough to be trusted to know Riku hadn't simply vanished.

The silence stretches, awkward and stilted, broken up only by the soft pop and flicker of the torch flame.

Somehow, despite his best intentions not to repeat his mistakes, he's done it again. Misjudged. Overstepped. Let wishful thinking spin a web of unfair expectations, as he's done with so many people before. Pilgrim had said those with darkness are family. That they owe one another more loyalty than others. How desperately he's clung to that false notion, wanting to believe it for his own sake, as if wanting made it true. As if finding common ground is currency with which to buy intimacy in a new world between strange people.

He hadn't felt foolish until this moment, and he has only himself to blame. Vanitas' mockery makes more sense now. He'd made a mistake in making it personal.

"I see." No, not really, but what else is there to say? He licks his lips. "Well, I guess you didn't need my help."

[equinoctials]

Someone doesn't challenge himself as often, as consistently as Riku does without a keen awareness of his own limits and shortcomings. He knows the temptation to put his own healing aside for the sake of another - for a friend - would have easily outpaced the need for that time to recover. He knows he wasn't ready, didn't have what it took, he would have spent up what little he needed to spend on himself at best, he would have self-destructed at worst. He very nearly did, at the very beginning, when Bruce tied him up for his own good.

Riku, who has never been very good at putting into words the things kept closest to his heart, is used to his motives and priorities being misunderstood - even his best, dearest friends found his actions mysterious and questionable sometimes, when the answer was typically as simple as this: everything he did was for them.

He's been trying to get better.
Some of it is to fulfill his promise to Sora. To survive. To be the lighthouse that brings him back.
Some of it is an obligation to not burden his friends with the consequences of his own habitual neglect.
A little is out of recognizing that strength can come from vulnerability, too.

Except Riku bucks against the requirement to lay bare his heart, to show how near a miss it had been, how sick the place his thoughts had been in when he was convinced that some cruel twist of fate and his own failings to protect had torn from him everything that ever mattered.

He just can't do it. He won't. M.K. says I see and Riku does. He knows he's burned a bridge with this. It feels terrible. Riku is also poor when it comes to reconciling with loss, unwilling to explain and unable to clarify his position, he instead gets angry, defensive.

His temper has ever been a stumbling block.

"Why do I have to spell it out for you? What makes you more special than anyone else?!"

[darkeyed]

What a curious role reversal they find themselves in. Riku, often presenting himself the more level-headed, the more unflappable of them, explodes like a cat with its tail pinched in a trap. And M.K., not usually half so caring of what he wears out in the open, takes it in with an unreadable, silent scrutiny. There are times he does care what others see, and he makes a point to tuck the feelings ill-timed discoveries stir out of view.

"I'm not," he agrees gently. "You don't have to tell me anything."

He has two choices, each unfurling ahead of him in diverging paths. He could take the clear rebuff personally, let himself feel the sting of it. Hadn't he said as much, that people are inevitably disappointing? How is this different from any other time he's held someone in higher esteem than they do him? It's a sadly familiar pattern by now. Getting his memories back had come at a cost--it had seemed to flay off a layer of skin from him, leaving him raw, hurting, everything since colored with that hurt. It would be so easy to let it drown out everything else.

But he'd done that once. And it had led him here.

Maybe it's time he be the one to break out of the pattern and take the other, less trodden path. The one where he takes a step back and doesn't let his wants overshadow the good news: that Riku is here, and if not well, then on the mend. It can be enough for him, if he makes it enough.

But enough for anyone else?

"If you needed to figure things out, then that's all you had to say from the beginning. I would've understood. I don't need all the details. But when you talk to the others," a nod in the direction of the Invincible, "do them a favor and come up with a better reason for why you didn't tell them you were all right. You're the one who's always saying we need to rely on each other, and they went out on a limb for you. A kid like Mary's not going to understand."

[equinoctials]

Perhaps that's what provokes Riku further, that M.K., for once, is so stone-faced and unaffected while Riku feels affronted, invaded, and judged for whatever he thinks he finds there. The truth is, it doesn't take much to fan the flames of Riku's temper. Once sparked, he has to work hard to rein himself in.

He's not, he says, his voice gentle in a way Riku's not used to, not from him, "Aren't you?"

Riku, who has sparred with him, who never - not once - intentionally put hands on M.K. in a way that wasn't harmless rough-housing, aims to push at him with both gloved palms, a shove he seeks to follow up immediately with another as his forward stride eats up any distance he creates.

"What did I do? Where did I go? I just said I didn't wanna talk about it!" This is galloping away on him like a chariot pulled by horses gone wild with fury or fear, and Riku, still working with the dregs when he spent up everything else just trying to survive the depths of his grief and despair, doesn't have enough to bother reining it in.

"A better reason. So who decides that for me, huh? Who decides what's best for me now! You? Oh, like that's fair!"

[darkeyed]

He allows the shove, and the one that comes after, setting his jaw and shifting his weight with each step back, because there's nothing Riku can do to him that's crueler than the things he's done, or say to him that's worse than the things he's said. Or lash out in ways any more selfish ways than all the ways he's lashed out. Or even make him the target of whatever had happened with his hallucinations with a harder head leading the charge.

He's done it all before, and some might arguer with spectacularly worse shows of restraint. Riku couldn't have picked a better opponent to square off with in a battle of heated wills.

But he doesn't heat. He stays almost flinty in his refusal to rise to the bait of an arguement, keeping his stare locked steadily on the other, almost as if the more Riku attemps to provoke him, the more he resists.

"No, you didn't," he counters in the same soft, matter-of-fact manner when Riku parrots his questions and displays them like some kind of nefarious evidence of him holding his secrets at knifepoint. "You haven't said anything in weeks, that's the point. You want an apology for the rest of us not being able to read your mind? Grow up."

He doesn't need to scream, or shout, or even be angry to use the facts to cut to the quick like a knife, even so. Maybe it's appropriate that it's him standing here--he can say what needs saying with the ring of hard truth that personal experience lends him.

"Stop acting like it's a burden they want to help you." He lowers his chin. "When you have no one left because they're dead or you pushed them away, come back and tell me how hard it was people cared enough to notice you went missing and set aside what those hallucinations did to them to check on you. How unfair it was they tried to get to know you. You're hurting, and maybe it feels like that'll never stop or get better, but you're not alone. That's not nothing--that's a lot."

[equinoctials]

There is, almost inevitably, a moment when Riku's temper results in a thrown punch. Usually it comes hot on the heels of a line being crossed and the delay, in this case, is because Riku does try to pull himself back, his knuckles white and fingernails pressing crescents into the heel of his gloved palm. What happens first is he grimaces, when he says when you have no one left, stung because that's something he trusted M.K. with, the graves on the hill and who he's lost.

He says because they're dead or you pushed them away and Riku feels like kicking him in the gut would've been kinder.

They say you hurt the ones you love. Riku's not sure he could say he more than likes M.K., there's an attachment there, a connection strong enough to share secrets with, not all of them. The potential to slot in besides friends he had to bury, but on the right side of the ground.

M.K. believes he is right, because his own experiences tell him there are certain inevitable truths about the world. They're similar in some areas, Riku and he, but they are not the same.

With him are a lot of experiences to reiterate bleak thoughts like that - that he's selfish, that he only hurts his friends, that he doesn't deserve the friends he still has - but he's grown. He's made great strides to accept his shortcomings and his strengths, to care about himself enough to stand his ground on the lines he draws for himself. That lesson was harder learned and harder to practice. Bruce had to tie him down, at first, just to make him rest.

All that growth doesn't mean the guilt has disappeared - it's still manifest in the way he can't move on from the friends he's lost, the countless sleepless nights, the sense of misguided responsibility that leads him to spend himself up for others without a thought to himself, the very thing he dropped off the figurative grid to address. It isn't fair to expect M.K. to understand because he hasn't told him everything, but it isn't fair what he's doing, either. To demand he relinquish his own privacy and lay it down for all of them to see - M.K. and everyone else, even a young child - to call it selfish and immature not to.

"Got it all figured out, don't you?" he shouts. Riku hates how wheezy his voice sounds, not caring if his swing hit, and how could it have? His eyes shimmer in the lantern light, they burn, he can barely see, "Screw you!"

[darkeyed]

They're hard words for a hard truth for a hard lesson he hopes the other never has to learn at the bottom of this slippery slope--and Riku has every right to take offense at them. No matter how necessary, he has his thumb on a bruise as he shoves an unkind and uncomfortable reality back at him. Riku is already hurting and he's hurting him that much more.

To that end, M.K. can forgive what he's wrought. The blow does land, glancing off his cheekbone--mostly because he keeps on holding his torch aloft and doesn't do a thing to prevent it from finding his face. It may not be at full force, but the punch is no love tap, either; his step backward is longer and slightly off-center from the force. For a moment the world condenses to jangling white noise in his ears. He shakes his head slightly to relieve it, straightening without a word. He can take pain; that's no problem. Becoming the focus of Riku's rage and heartache is a small price to pay.

If it helps purge the poison, takes the edge off some of that darkness by making him the outlet instead of the other boy turning it inward, it's a small price to pay indeed.

"Not even a little bit," he confesses, glancing back over as he rubs the side of his jaw. "But that's why I'm saying this. Because I think you can do better than me."

Seeing him cutting himself on the pieces he's putting back together is the hardest part of all of this, and sadness slips through him for his role in summoning up someone of that pain to reflect in the sheen in his eyes and the stone of grief in his throat. Maybe it had solidified when Riku had talked about his darkness, but it had started before that: the other boy had begun to matter to him.

That hasn't changed, even now suspecting one day he'll walk away without a word again just like this because that's just who he is and what he needs to do. M.K. will forgive that, too. He knows it already.

"I'm sorry you have to be here in this place," he says very quietly, scarcely above a murmur. "I'm sorry for what it's doing to you. For what it's taken from you." He reaches out his hand to touch the arm that had landed the blow, returning the gesture Riku had made taking his shoulder. "If I could take your pain away, I would."

[equinoctials]

Riku's knuckles throb, scarcely felt under the thunder of his blood in his ears, the anger and hurt writ large around a great big hole that hasn't ever closed. It's true; Riku is difficult and closed off, he keeps secrets from even his closest friends, not just once or twice but for years, he's reluctant to let people in and when he does, he's slow to let them see more than he allows.

Some can handle it. But it demands a lot from a person, it puts a strain on relationships when and if the other person needs greater access than he's willing to give.

The fear of losing someone precious is greater than that of being powerless to protect them, but not by much. He remembers the despair, the horror and bottomless fury of being alone and lost, constantly harried and whittled down by the gnawing emptiness. This fear, invoked just now, changes how he looks at this situation, it casts a shadow that's hard for him to ignore.

M.K. straightens, he tells him he thinks Riku can do better than him, and, as if offended, Riku draws back up, eyes wide and bright in muted shock. When he reaches for Riku, his arm sweeps up sharply, trying to deflect the contact as he starts to seethe.

"Don't," he shakes his head, "Don't you dare pity me!"

[darkeyed]

Pity! He could laugh in disbelief, and very nearly does, his breath leaving him in a mirthless huff that flexes the aching parts of his face. If that's true, then the reverse must also be true--Riku must pity him a great deal. "I'm not. You think I'm here because I pity you? That I looked for you because I feel sorry for you?"

If anyone would think that, they're a hypocrite. He's beginning to understand that anyone who's endured the pain of the wounds the spirits reopen, anyone who's truly faced down the visions they reflect in the mind, wouldn't possibly--can't possibly--pity someone else for the same.

Riku's a bit of a hypocrite himself, falling short of practicing what he preaches each time he's bullied and browbeat and teased him into giving alliances here a chance. Friendships, even. Honestly, he could punch the other boy right back out of a fed up fondness just for that, if not for the urge to reach out and comfort. Sometimes it catches him off guard--that he's still capable of the latter when he's been living so near the former.

"I envy you. Admire, maybe. Sometimes I think I understand you. You were there when the spirits got to me and you didn't hold it against me. I'm not about to hold the same against you," he levels back. "Go on, take it out on me if it keeps you from taking it out on yourself."