[closed] dancing in the dark in the pale moonlight

[theintercessor]

WHO: Jude Sullivan
WHERE: 6I Woods and paths
WHEN: September 23rd, after dark
OPEN TO: Bodhi Rook
WARNINGS: Usual warnings for mentions of epilepsy symptoms, specifically hallucinations.

---

Sometimes you have to steer into the slide. Sometimes you let circumstances take you by the hand and lead. Jude’s used to being led: by Parker, by his dad, by a tug in his center of gravity that just told him to go. He’d drop everything to drive out to whatever field Parker woke up in on a given Wednesday; he’d quit a job that hurt his hand under Charlie’s orders, or he’d go find another one when the stuffy summer days in the trailer started to suffocate.

The illness is a little different.

Given a choice, he wouldn’t bow to it at all, but maybe that’s why he rolls over so easy in the day to day. If the strings can cut at any moment, if something can spark a nightmare, if something can take over his head and launch him at a given target--what’s control anyway? What’s its weight, what’s its worth?

The things he sees, the ones that aren’t really there--a lot of them are easy to ignore. It’s just a bad smell no one else notices. It’s just bugs that dart between one crack and another. Tonight a creature of pure shadow sat a physical, choking weight on his chest, looking at him with baleful eyes, breathing sulfur across his face. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t anything: he could close his eyes and breath through his mouth against the stink. But it sat so heavy, pressed down on his chest until it felt like the burn of water in his lungs, and he’d shoved up, tangled in a curtain, torn the hooks off the rod rolling onto the dining room floor.

That had knocked the weight off his chest.

The air outside is clean and fresh, cold enough to warrant his new jacket. There will be dew in the morning, and he might stay up to feel it on his ankles. He puts his feet on the path and starts walking, no destination in mind. Nothing better to do when he blinks white butterflies against the dark than follow their lead.

When next he looks up, he’s in a moonlit field, probably south of the village proper. Shoving his hands deeper into his pockets, he tilts his head back, wondering if all the stars in the dark sky are really there, or--projected, imagined. The best part of being alone, he thinks, is having no one to tell you the difference.

Comments

[theintercessor]

Jude could sit there and try to explain what he knows about animals: their habits and their uses, how to live alongside them in relative harmony. But that would require a great deal of talking, and leading, and he doesn't think he's asked very much about Bodhi's side of things. If only by virtue of rarely asking much at all.

"What's a bantha," he asks; "or--what are you used to? You seem to do fine with her." Even if it's only Aurora's particularly forgiving nature--she likes Bodhi well enough to stick by his side in the open expanse of the canyon, given literally every other option.

[onlyeverdoubted]

Jude's lack of insight isn't exactly accidental. Bodhi doesn't mind volunteering basic information--what home was, what he did for a living, cool facts about engines--but it's so easy to veer too close to the horrid and intolerable and secret. He already let slip to Jude that he's dead where he belongs. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Animals are probably safe, but he'd have much preferred listening to Jude talk. "Bulky meat animal, mostly, I think. I, well, I barely even saw them. Was up in--in the cockpit. About the biggest thing native to Jedha were subterranean worms. You didn't usually see those unless you farmed them or they were wrapped up at a market stall for you." Good, all safe, all normal.

[theintercessor]

A planet full of worms and people flying cargo around in spaceships. Sounds like a book Charlie was reading once, a little too dense for Jude's attention. He might like a copy of it now. Bodhi makes it hard to regret wandering out here this late, but it would be nice to have some alternative, when he couldn't get back to sleep.

"Did you have a pet rock," he asks, wondering how Bodhi will contextualize the question, to know it for the joke it is. "I guess animals just weren't interesting, in the same way."

[onlyeverdoubted]

A pet rock just sounds like a joke, and he does smirk a bit at the thought. "Well, you couldn't really... I never heard of anyone keeping native pets, and anything from offworld would have been really expensive to take care of. Even back in the Republic days we had to, um, to import a lot, and water was rationed." His family was comfortable back then, but a pet would have been a pretty specific luxury no one had had very strong inclinations for.

[theintercessor]

Jude nods, barely a shift of his head in the dark. Whatever the gap of experience between their--planets, galaxies, eras--Bodhi's always slotted easily into Jude's idea of class. Not being able to afford something is a concept he readily understands, even as he railed against it in his teens. His want for a job had directly clashed with Charlie's want for a happy son, a boy who got to grow up and get away--or just Charlie's desire to martyr himself and live vicariously.

For Jude, a job was--buying the beer for the party he wanted to get Parker invited to, because he thought it would be good for him. It was the dog he wanted to keep, instead of take to the pound another city over. It was his father with a day off for something short of pneumonia. But he'd never been allowed to do more than bag groceries for a summer.

"We didn't have space for a dog," he says eventually, skipping over the first dog, the first--excuses. Even people Jude liked well enough to talk about himself might think he was born age nine, fully formed, in the trailer with Charlie. "Or money, or--I think my dad figured I'd never talk to another person again if he gave me one to run around with."

[onlyeverdoubted]

"If Rora's what they're usually like, that makes sense," he admits. He wasn't at all antisocial as a child. The neighborhood was busy and full of young families and there was always something to get into. But he hadn't had the easiest time, even back when his memory worked and his head was on straight and he didn't have to worry about losing his grip in reality if someone bumped him too hard. Uncomplicated devotion would have been a hell of a temptation away from trying to figure out what was just teasing and what was mean and why he had to distinguish between the two and who was generally safe to follow around even if it meant being ignored.

[theintercessor]

"Rora," he echoes quietly, it's own agreement as he roughs up and smooths down the fur at her cheeks. Normally, he might not be so openly taken with her--even if he likes dogs, even if they're a bit of a private want. He might not have to wander out of the house if it felt like a place anything else came back to.

Real things, not the creatures in his dreams, and the black of his periphery. They've softened him to her presence, and Bodhi did the rest. Dark as it is, he still resists that private impulse: if he could just lean a little weight in and make the world very small, breathing into dark fur, he thinks he could deal with the thing in the dining room. But she isn't his, and he isn't sure he could handle even Bodhi seeing a moment like that. He bears out a tired moment, things like I miss my dad standing at the gate in his throat, looking to the dark world for permission to be said, but he's said so much already.

Jude makes himself stand up instead, a little distance from what the dog offers. "Where do you usually take her, out here?"

[onlyeverdoubted]

The moment goes on a while and seems heavy with things unsaid. Moments like that are fine with him. They happen, and no one should pry in a place where half the people arrive by dying and most everyone else seems like that might not have been the worst thing to happen to them. He just waits quietly, and follows Jude with his eyes under the protection of darkness. He doesn't have to worry about staring when Jude can't see him, right? It's just... important to know where everyone is. And they're standing a bit closer again now. That's fine.

"I don't always bring her? I, uh, I usually head into the trees, but I don't think she trusts me in there." This isn't his usual stomping grounds, a fact that clearly doesn't perturb Aurora. She doesn't seem to think her odd charge is in danger here, so... whatever. If dogs are capable of the thought whatever.

[theintercessor]

Even in the dark, it's not a moment he can look at Bodhi during. He wants--he wonders why he can't. Why he can't say he had a nightmare, or that he's afraid to go home. That he might feel better to be escorted, a pair of eyes he can trust better than his own and a dog's keen senses to tell him the house is safe. He'd told Bodhi about forgetting things, and it had brought them, in some way, to this point.

But it was one thing to try to explain: I forget things, and another to say, I'm scared. In any capacity. Jude hadn't said anything like that since the move to Hollow Creek. He hadn't said or done a lot of things. It seems strange to even want the company, or to want someone to know. Like going to college all over again, he's different now than he was when he arrived.

Or maybe he's the same, and he's just filling the hole of Parker with Bodhi, someone to keep close and never really say things to. He still can't imagine asking Bodhi to check for the monster over his bed. "Why don't you see where she lets us go then," he says instead, prepared to wander until sunrise pushed the nightmare from his mind.

[onlyeverdoubted]

"I... that's probably a good idea." The words themselves are a bit more tepid than he wanted them to sound. He means it. Though given Jude's enthusiasm (relative enthusiasm) about their current location... "If you think you'll be warm enough? She has fur, so, um, if we put her in charge, I think I might be set for the cold better than you." He's really perfectly comfortable, but he doesn't like the idea of Jude cold, and given an in, he is an incommensurate fusser.

[theintercessor]

"I'll be fine if we keep moving." It's only the nights starting to freeze them out, and he's used to this kind of weather in the mountains. They had their springs and summers, but there was always grey fog, always a chill somewhere in the air.

Whether or not he'll be cold, well. He'll be fine, and that's as high as Jude ever sets the bar. What was Bodhi going to do, give him his scarf? As if to press the issue, having even less intent than he imagines Bodhi would to actually dip a single toe in the spring, Jude kicks a rock toward its edge and snorts. "Unless you wanted to stay and have a soak."

[onlyeverdoubted]

He wrinkles his nose invisibly. "I've never understood that. Why is feeling slightly cooked supposed to be a good thing?" Though Jude was right about it making the air a bit milder right there. He'll just have to... What, steer their way back in this direction if Jude seems chilly? He has no idea what his method would even be in that case.

[theintercessor]

That at least makes him smile, a private thing in the dark, behind his hair. Someone must be able to manage a trim, considering Bodhi's transformation, but Jude could just as easily let it keep going: at this point it curves all the way down to his mouth in a tumble of humid curls.

"I never understood it either." Aurora seems to understand their intent, and he has a hand ready for her head and ears when she walks up to his side. "Lead the way."