[open] 004 † i cried out heaven save me, but i'm down to one last breath

[ottimismo]

WHO: Sonny Carisi
WHERE: The Fountain, the Inn, other places in the village
WHEN: September 4th
OPEN TO: OTA
WARNINGS: Sonny trying to drown himself, mentions of religion

---

Fountain

Sonny bounces back. He always bounces back. He did in high school, after years of relentless bullying, and in law school, when he thought the course load was going to be enough to kill him. He's bounced back from every single case he's ever had, even the toughest ones. Even the ones where the victim didn't make it. Coming back from a hard time has never been difficult for him. It's only ever taken some quality time with his siblings and his niece and a little bit of church.

Those are all things he doesn't have here. No sisters, no family. He has his little makeshift church, but it doesn't make much of a difference. It's been weeks since he's felt God in the village.

And now, Queenie's gone. He's spent the last two days searching high and low for her, but nobody else has seen her around, either. A lot of people have left lately, with no pattern or rhyme or reason. There's no telling who's next, or when it'll happen. if it will happen. They don't know how it happens, or if the people who leave are safe, if they go back home. There's too many questions and not enough answers and Sonny is so tired. He's never felt so tired in his life.

He wants to go back home. Back where things make sense, and he can connect the dots and solve the case and nobody is going to stumble upon any strange pods or discover weird rooms with blood vials.

Probably, anyway.

It's late in the afternoon now, and his feet hurt from trekking across the village looking for Queenie. It's hopeless, he decides as he sits on the edge of the fountain. She's gone from this God forsaken place, and he wants to be gone from it, too. The water ripples, showing him his wobbly reflection in its surface. This is where they all crawl out of, somehow, without fail. It's the only sure thing that happens in this place. Everyone comes out of the fountain. That never changes.

Sonny kicks off his boots, peels off his socks. He doesn't bother with anything else as he slips over the edge of the fountain, into the cool water. A single breath, and he slips beneath the surface, heading straight for the bottom.


Inn

There's no fire in the fireplace, but Sonny sits in front of it anyway, wrapped in a spare blanket from the storeroom. Since being dragged out of the fountain, he's eaten some food and dried off a bit, though his white scrubs are still damp and unchanged.

In retrospect, it was obviously a stupid idea. He's always encouraged victims to get help, find someone to talk to, be open about what they're feeling and going through. He never realized until now that he's terrible at taking his own advice.

He probably needs to apologize to some people. He needs to pray and get some sleep and figure out how he's going to pull himself back together.

For now, he sits, sipping on a cup of now luke-warm tea.

[ Stella will be pulling Sonny out of the fountain, but other than that, interaction is entirely open! Feel free to find him wandering the village before, or sitting at the fountain immediately after almost drowning himself, or chilling at the inn!

Also to be noted, Sonny has been pretty withdrawn and absent the last month or so. ]

Comments

fountain;

[ex_assertiveness90]

It might surprise Sonny to know that Stella, too, has had to fight to keep from giving in to despair. The foundation for carefully constructed coping mechanisms had been laid after two years of therapy when she'd lost her father at fourteen, and over fifteen years of working in law enforcement and seeing the worst dregs of human behavior had built something reasonably steady on that foundation. She considers herself fairly good at compartmentalizing, at taking the feelings she can't allow herself to be occupied with and putting them aside until she has the time or the mental wherewithal to cope properly. There's been a lot of that in the village, except for the fact that she never really has time to cope. She's been using the few pages left in her diary more and more as an outlet for her feelings, rather than just a place to write down the content of her dreams or take notes on things she thinks might be important later, and if nothing else, she has Peggy to support her — though she's never liked relying on other people, even good friends, too used to carrying her own weight. Somehow, despite everything, she's managed to keep herself from the edge of total collapse. She hasn't been in a place that ugly since she was young, and she's not about to start now.

Sooner or later, though, Stella knows someone in the village won't be able to handle it anymore. Not everyone is practiced at dealing with these kinds of stressors — even people trained to cope with stress aren't trained to cope with it day in and day out for months on end — and the daily uncertainty, the fear, the worry, the sheer longing to get out of here and go home is going to overwhelm someone eventually. It's almost a guarantee. They're all human here, and human beings aren't designed to deal with something like this for too long without cracking under the pressure in some way, shape or form.

(Maybe — and it's not the first time she's thought this — the observers really just want to see how long they can last before someone completely loses it. Stress testing. Torture, honestly.)

She sees Sonny sitting on the edge of the fountain, and at first, doesn't think anything of it other than that she hasn't seen or spoken to him in a while. There's a flicker of concern when he takes off his boots, but again, that's not exceptionally unusual; she's seen people do that just to put their bare feet in the water. It's when he dives into the fountain that the concern starts to develop into a full-blown sense of alarm. About a minute or so passes, long enough that a person who's not trained in diving would feel the instinctive urge to come up for air — except he doesn't come back up.

Shit.

Stella is an extremely strong swimmer; she's been in and out of water in some form or another since she was five, and she's been swimming almost every day without fail for more than twenty years, otherwise she wouldn't even consider doing what she does next unassisted. She crosses the several feet to the fountain at a run, kicks off her shoes — later she'll be grateful she wore her dress flats rather than her boots, that she didn't need to waste precious seconds untying the laces — and pauses for just a moment at the edge of the fountain to see if she can see Sonny in the water. She can just barely make him out, and he's not getting any closer — he probably doesn't have enough air to come back up on his own. Stella takes a couple of deep breaths, filling her lungs completely on each inhalation; the third breath she holds as she dives right in after him.

It's deeper than a fountain ought to be, she'd known that coming out of it all those months ago, and it feels like half an eternity before she can clearly see him in the semi-dark. The water is clear, but this near to the bottom the sunlight from above only helps so much. He's mostly just hanging there in the water; Stella knows from experience that the kind of panicked flailing one thinks of as a visual for a drowning person from films and television isn't the reality, that someone who's in this state in fact doesn't move much at all. On the other hand, she has to be very careful about how she approaches him, because the minute she touches him he could very well panic instinctively and drag her down. Stella swims around behind him and grabs him with one of her arms hooked beneath his arm and across his chest, more or less dragging him as she kicks her way back towards the surface, trying not to cut off his airway but otherwise heedless of whether or not she's hurting him. She breaks the surface, pulls herself out of the fountain first and then drags him out with her. He's larger and heavier than she is, but Stella's strong for being so petite.

Sonny's mostly conscious now, she realizes, which saves her needing to do CPR after all that. She lets him cough and sputter, focused on catching her breath as she sits in the grass next to him and just stares at him for a minute. He's all right, physically, for a man who's just nearly drowned; he's breathing, he's not coughing up blood with any water he might have aspirated, he's dazed but, she thinks, mostly aware of his surroundings. There are a lot of things she could and probably should say here, starting with are you all right?, but now that Stella's not focused on trying to save his life she's a little overcome with the awareness of how bloody stupid what he just did was. She doesn't think he was deliberately trying to drown himself; maybe she's wrong, but from the little she knows of him she doesn't think he's that easily suicidal. All of them get here through the fountain. Maybe all he was trying to do was just go home.

"For fuck's sake," is what comes out first, bypassing everything else that's running through her head, sharp and incredulous.

[ottimismo]

Underwater, Sonny opens his eyes. It's a blurry mess of water and stone, blue melting into gray, but he kicks further down regardless. He uses one hand against the side of the fountain, pushing himself down further, faster, sure that if he can just reach the bottom, it means he can go home. At the bottom of this fountain is his family and his home, everything he holds dear. His sisters, his friends, New York's cracked sidewalks and irritated traffic. His job, his coworkers, his sense of purpose. He misses Central Park and the Italian bakery down the block from his apartment building.

He misses it all so much, it hurts, leaving his chest tight and constricted.

Or maybe those are his lungs, and the burning need to breathe. He should've started back up for air long before now. He probably won't be able to make it back to the surface in time now, but the surface is the opposite direction of where he wants to go, anyway.

He doesn't realize he's stopped moving all together until an arm loops around him. He didn't even realize that somebody else had jumped into the water with him, actually. His vision has already started to darken at the edges, his thoughts becoming fuzzy and slow. They haven't quite broken the surface when he pulls in a breath, dragging water into his lungs. It's a sweet, sweet feeling, not how he imagined drowning would feel like. There's no panic, no flailing. He relaxes, and his eyes close.

When they open again, he's staring up at the sky, the sun beating down on him. He breathes, then sputters, sitting up abruptly to cough up water. His throat and lungs ache and burn, his head throbs, his fingertips are raw and pink from scraping against the side of the fountain to drag himself down further. He looks up at Stella, flinching at the sharp sound of her voice.

He didn't make it home. He's not in New York, but in the village still. But at least he didn't die, he supposes.

"I... I just wanted to go home." He coughs again, grimacing at how rough it feels, how much it hurts.

[ex_assertiveness90]

She notes the flinch with some sense of satisfaction — not because she likes being harsh to him, but because it means he is at least listening. "And you thought you could get to the bottom of the fountain without needing to breathe? If you'd been down there only a minute or two more, you'd have drowned."

Stella's not angry with him, not really, but there is a degree of frustration there that shows through in her tone, in the way she looks at him for a long moment, hard-edged, before glancing away, muttering Jesus Christ under her breath as she rakes her wet hair away from her face with her fingers. She's slightly regretting having worn one of her silk blouses today, the fabric soaked through and sticking to her now, an uncomfortable sensation she has to force herself to ignore. In a little while, she'll go for a change of clothes, but right now she thinks she needs to keep an eye on Sonny so he doesn't do anything else equally stupid.

Then again, maybe the near-drowning shocked it out of him. She hopes so, because he's one of the few people here she can relate to in a professional sense, and she doesn't think he's actually a complete idiot. "I'd like you to go to the hospital in a while, have a doctor listen to your lungs," and if that sounds like an order, well, she thinks she can get away with talking to him like he's one of her subordinates right now. Secondary drowning is very real and very dangerous, and if there's any sign that his lungs are filling up with fluid — even a tiny amount of water can irritate the delicate tissues — then they can at least try to treat it.

She stands up, holding out a hand to help him to his feet, still watching him a bit dubiously — but the concern underlying that look has become a bit more obvious now. "We'd all like to go home," she says, slightly softer now. "But it's not going to do anyone any good if you get yourself killed trying to get there."

Stella misses London so much it hurts, sometimes. She misses her work, and the quiet of her flat after a long day, and being able to sit on her sofa with a cup of tea or a glass of whisky on her rare days off — the kind she can have whenever she likes, rather than because it was gifted to her by the observers' twisted generosity. She's never stopped trying to find a way out of here, in her own way. But she also realizes there's no point in dying in the process.

inn

[underpinnings]

While the inn on the other side of the divide has the same access to the roof that this one does, he doesn't want to know if the new pests can climb that high. His own roof certainly won't protect him, as much stuff as he's tried to hide in the attic while he's away. Best thing to do is head across the gap, see to his errands, and take his journal and whiskey up topside in the waning light.

He hasn't polished it all off in one go this time: that takes help, from someone who doesn't mind spending the night on a fur robe with a downward slope threatening to take them both.

Where Luc's gone off to, he hasn't quite figured, but he'll get around to it.

Maybe not tonight.

When he passes through the pub, he mistakes the man for another new arrival: damp clothes, clutching at a blanket, looking somewhere between lost and unable to care. The bottle isn't really meant for this--it's meant for his own ability to sleep tonight, maybe the making of an important enough ally--but it's not like he paid for the shit. He just took it off a shelf, a lot more put together than this poor sap.

"Hey," he says, coming up easy to the left and slipping his pack down to rummage through it. "This'll do you a lot better'n tea, sometimes." He holds the whiskey out by the neck of the bottle, contents sloshing slightly against the glass.

[ottimismo]

Sonny hasn't seen this guy before.

That, more than anything else, drives home how absent he's been lately. Obviously, the stranger standing in front of him isn't new. He's not dressed like he's just rolled out of the fountain, and there's a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He holds himself like he's been here just long enough to settle into something and accept that, just maybe, he's going to be here a little while.

At least he probably won't drown himself in the fountain trying to get home like Sonny did.

The tea has cooled in his hands, not providing much comfort at all anymore. Not that it provided much to begin with. He's not much of a drinker, and when he is, it's usually wine or beer, not whiskey. But he finds himself reaching for the bottle anyway, pouring it into his cup and mixing it with what's left of his tea without much care for how it'll taste.

Drinking probably isn't the best next step forward, but at least he's not scrambling up the canyon walls or something.

"Thank you." He hands the bottle back before taking a drink from his cup. It burns all the way down, and he can't help the faint grimace he pulls, or the cough that follows it. "How long have you been here?"

[underpinnings]

Owen's eyes roll up, the ceiling helping him count back. "Ten, eleven days?" He's been marking them in the front of his journal, and--clearly--packing so much into each one of them that he's surprised at how few it's been. Not even two weeks, and he's picked a house, started fishing for his supper, and gotten roped into carving boats.

Maybe that's why he hasn't finished the second bottle of whiskey and gone hunting a third in the cupboards. He'll add that to his welcome to paradise speech. Find something to do.

First day drinking is still on the table, though. "It gets--" better isn't quite the word, though when you look like this guy, better is very relative and upwards from your position. Owen leans against the stone facade of the fireplace, considering the words. "Some of the weight disappears when you start moving," he decides. "Not really enough alcohol lying around for you to go the other route."

One hand crosses the gap in greeting, the other holds the bottle out by the neck to offer another shot. "Owen, by the way."

Inn;

[chosenbytheocean]

It had been some time since Moana had seen Sonny. Even so, he cut a familiar shadow against the backdrop of the inn. Her dark eyes studied him for a few moments, unsure what to make of the dip in his shoulders or the way his eyes stared into his cup or maybe he was looking at the empty fire place? It was difficult for Moana to tell.

She realized that she had been staring too long when Itiiti ran into her ankle. She looked down at the pig before pushing him away with the heel of her foot. Itiiti and Moana had a short lived staring contest before Itiiti snorted and waddled off to find someone in the common room of the inn willing to feed him.

Moana stepped up next to Sonny, approaching like he might turn to water and vanish between the cracks in the floorboards. "Hey." The word didn't express what she had meant to say but Moana found that to be the nature of greetings. Her tone was tentative, it was easy to sense that something was wrong but Moana didn't know what it was.

"Do you want me to start a fire?" Someone had gathered firewood next to the hearth and Moana didn't need more than a rock and some dried leaves to get a fire started.

inn

[elderflowermacarons]

Not a great time for introductions, but Taako's new enough that most of his interactions are first times, and he's not a one for tact anyhow. The one thing he has managed to establish for himself is a general right to haunt the inn for culinary purposes, and that was mostly by assuming this was already the case. He's just here for the kitchen, has certainly never fancied himself as the trustworthy and inviting barkeep, but the idea of just putting up with tepid tea bugs him. There's brooding and there's brooding, honestly.

"I'm about to put water on if you want a top-off on that." No polite attempt at introduction or even a greeting. He's a little curious, sure, but without a real target for information gathering, he finds it's better to let people talk or not as the spirit moves them. He has to get to know these disparate weirdos at least a little bit, somehow.