[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.

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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]

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."