[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

[onlyeverdoubted]

Bodhi isn't moved tonight by any spike in his usual levels of personal crises. This is just his usual way of coping when there's nothing to keep him dutifully at home, squinting at chores around moonlight and guttering candles. He actually did try to sleep this time, after he finished folding the laundry. Stretched out on the sofa to wait for dawn and couldn't keep his eyes closed. Couldn't lie there and stare at the ceiling without the ghosts getting after him, couldn't even bear the weight of a blanket on him. Trying seemed like a waste of time.

He'd rather walk, anyway. He does it whenever he can justify it in daylight, too, but it's better at night, alone with cool air that feels nothing at all like home, too soft and wet. He has actually pulled his cloak on over the tunics and sash and properly fastened his headscarf in deference, though. Cold is cold.

Usually he wanders into the trees. Stays close to home, aware of potential dangers and also of unfamiliar paths, but it's in the alien calm of the forest that he seems best able to slow his head down and get it to follow the paths he wants it to. Tonight is an exception mainly because he remembered about the foxes, and thought it might be best to do his wandering somewhere with a bit more visibility. In the same spirit, he has Aurora with him. She doesn't interfere with being alone, somehow, and she does seem concerned when he slips out alone sometimes.

He almost turns around when he spots a silhouette in the field. There's somewhere else to be, certainly. He's halfway through spinning on his heel, perfectly incurious about what would bring out a second wanderer, when he recognizes the fall of Jude's hair. There's not a lot to distinguish one shadow from another, especially in a town where everyone is a human, but he... apparently knows that gravity-noncompliant tumble well enough to spot it in even an outline as faint as this.

Also Aurora wants to say hi. He has no idea what Jude's feelings are in dog terms, so he catches her collar gently before she can go introduce herself. Starting Jude up close would be worse than bothering him now and being told to fuck off, so, voice still low, he ventures, "Come here often?" Because apparently some terrible jokes survived into space-faring civilizations.