closed.

[mund]

WHO: Percival Graves, Credence Barebone
WHERE: Their home
WHEN: 22 September
OPEN TO: closed
WARNINGS: Nothing, really. At least not yet.

---

( locking your heart away is never easy. )

[closed] nothing scares me anymore

[3ofswords]

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: House 19
WHEN: September 17
OPEN TO: Credence Barebone
WARNINGS: Usual warnings for Credence and his history; abuse, etc

---

Credence is still here.

He knows as much from Bodhi. If he just stays on the porch, Credence will either come out the door, or come home. The day he spent waiting for Tim to come home had just gotten him an armful of distressed goat, some new shirts for her to chew on as he carried her to the pens. It’s a thing that hovers overhead, the surprising weight of that loss. He’s going to lie to himself a little longer, however long it takes to keep it crashing down.

When he went to the church, someone else had taken it over. Sonny had--done something stupid, while he was gone, and no one’s really seen him since.

Everyone’s going to leave you.

He hadn’t needed it said aloud: he knew. Maybe that’s why he'd left first, dragged himself across the gap in the wall and taken care of himself, by himself. It’s going to be like that sometimes. It’s going to be like that a lot of the time, probably. If he’d stayed, the only difference would be the note he’d left people on.

Kira isn’t going to let that be the case with Credence.

The sun climbs higher in the sky, and he winds up dozing, back to the post, body strewn across the top step for someone to trip over. He’ll go three verbal rounds with Graves if he has to: he’s not going anywhere until he sees Credence with his own eyes. Until he gets to explain.

Maybe it’s a shift in the air, maybe it’s a shadow across his waist--it isn’t anything else when Hoshi ruffles up against his jaw, and Kira blinks all the way awake for someone’s approach. “Credence,” he asks, voice soft and drowned in sleep. Lifting a hand against the slant of the sun, he squints at the sloping silhouette. “Credence,” he affirms, pulling himself to sit forward with his feet on the steps below. “You’re home.”

The sigh pushing through the words is entirely relieved.

[closed] i’m feeling electric tonight

[3ofswords]

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: House 42
WHEN: September 23rd
OPEN TO: Mark Watney
WARNINGS: N/A

---

The longer he stays in the main village, the more it feels like a mistake. He should be running again, he should be fending for himself against the foxes--and if he loses everyone he knows in the meantime, so be it. From the sound of Margaery’s panicked prediction, he has worse things to worry about.

Margaery’s prediction is its own problem.

Kira walks up the porch, leafy plants brushing at his knees. For a moment he tries to focus on that: the itch and slide, the wood with its slight give beneath his feet, the grain against his heels. The world has a texture and a scent, is firm beneath him, is sharp and real around him. Mark and Helen live about as far removed from the village as he does, and this long after the sun goes down, it’s quiet. He isn’t standing saturated in the panic of a gathering, or trying to cook through the hunger of a dozen early risers.

He’s alone enough on the porch that it’s just his own fear, his own exhaustion. In one hand is the folded pages of notes, Mark’s name across the outer edge, and he stoops down to shove it under the door. It’s been more than a month since the ability came back, but for ever brief reprieve, it’s gotten worse, not better. He’s done his best to track the timing in the notes, explain the severity, own up to the fact that Margaery’s new burden might be from a vial with his name on it.

He doesn’t expect Mark to fix it, but someone needs to know. If only to excuse Kira’s desire to hibernate under the dog until it’s all over.

When he gets up, he stumbles enough to catch himself on the door with a dull thud. It doesn’t seem loud enough to warrant a hasty retreat, he takes another moment at the bottom of the steps. There will be quiet and calm at home, but it won’t smell this green, and there’s another walk through occupied houses between him and his bed.

[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.