refiningspacetime: (Default)
refiningspacetime ([personal profile] refiningspacetime) wrote in [community profile] fleetlogs2014-11-25 01:55 pm

=> PHERES: Abscond.

=> PHERES: Abscond.
SUMMARY: Taking drinks from strangers is generally a bad idea. Pheres needs to be picked up from a party, but life is hard when your moirail is out of town and all of your friends are terrible. Luckily, there's always Fleetbound!

WARNINGS: None! Except for Pheres being thoroughly depressing in Lead him home.

THIS HAS BEEN FINALLY EDITED. For like the third time. Due to POV-switching shenanigans, you may occasionally encounter weird shifts / incorrect verb pluralisation at points that I missed in switching from 3rd person to 2nd person POV. Sorry! :c

For the most part, though, typoes should be fixed and continuity is now more accurate!

ALSO:
  Follow the story through the links above to ensure you're reading the correct, edited threads, please and thank youu
postalprestidigitation: (happy)

[personal profile] postalprestidigitation 2014-12-04 07:14 pm (UTC)(link)
Castor isn't responding, and Hinnom's starting to worry. Pheres was able to jump both of them, but they're flesh. What if he left Castor?

Ze isn't even sure how far the leash stretches. What if it broke? What if --

The leash tugs back. Castor's too far to hear, too far to see, but he tugged back, and Hinnom can sense the direction. Up.

Oh! He's at the hive already.
postalprestidigitation: (disconcerted)

[personal profile] postalprestidigitation 2014-12-04 07:54 pm (UTC)(link)
Now that ze's noticed it, Hinnom can feel the gentle tug of the leash even as ze turns away. Ze's still got to go retrieve Pheres, and then they'll go.

How they'll avoid the dead, without Castor there to guide them - and why Castor isn't there, with them - ze's not sure. But they'll figure it out. Pheres got them here, right?

Backstepping is easy as anything. Hinnom knows the sewers like the back of zir hand, and it's not like ze went far: into a wall-niche, across the bridge and down the hall. Not even a five minute walk!

So ze're a little baffled to find Pheres has followed them.

He's walking across the bridge, his hands braced on the railing and his body curled up like he's about to drop down and die. Maybe he is! There's bile all over his face, but there's maroon, too, dripping from his snout and all the way down his shirt front.

It's blood. There's blood on his face and his shirt, and his eyes are white as the dead roaming the sewers around them, and everything in Hinnom's pan screams that being seen by him is a terribad idea.

Ze never did make sure he wasn't dead, did they? Zir lusus can't see anything more than light, but she knows there's only one source of light that bright down in the sewers, and she's chittering her mouthpiece together in a quiet demand.

Hinnom can't refuse it. Ze backs up, quiet as a mouse, and presses zimself tight against the stone wall, until ze's squashed flat up against a pipe.

Maybe he'll look less scary when he's closer. But just in case, they yank the leash again: not a request, like the previous times, but a demand that Castor get down here.

(Ze should've kept more ghosts leashed, and not just him. Stupid. So stupid.)
postalprestidigitation: (disconcerted)

1/2

[personal profile] postalprestidigitation 2014-12-05 01:40 am (UTC)(link)
Pheres makes it as far as the end of the walkway before he staggers, and falls. The room is silent save for the rushing of the river and the sound of his ragged breathes, high and desperate in the empty air.

Hinnom's pityglands are working overtime now, and there's an unfamiliar crawling feeling deep in their gut as they listen to Pheres gasp, but breathing doesn't mean anything: even Castor does it, when he's not thinking. Habit is a hard thing to break, even after you're dead.

It's horrible to listen to, though!

Maybe instead of waiting for Castor, they'll just... go?
postalprestidigitation: (ghosts)

2/2

[personal profile] postalprestidigitation 2014-12-05 05:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Here's the thing about ghosts:

They can move as quickly as a thought, in theory. There's no flesh weighing them down, no breath to make them slow, and while it takes them awhile to forget the rules and just do it, older ghosts can pour through physical matter like walls and dirt and stone like water through a crack.

In reality, most ghosts simply can't. There's no gizzards left to stop them, but they remember there should be, and forgetting is an art that takes practice. Even Castor drags his feet, sometimes, when he's feeling especially corporeal, and on days like that, Hinnom has to dawdle, zir steps until they match a blueblood's heavy stride.

Perhaps the fear has made him remember he's dead, though. The walk from the hive to the sewers is a fifteen minute walk, but it only must be five minutes before the room lights with Castor's familiar off-blue as he slips and slides down through the ceiling, heels first.

He's barely corporeal: somewhere between an imprint and a real troll, his features worn away to the impression of eyes, a nasal hole, the gaping mouth. But ze can't doubt it's Castor, not when the leash is tied around his waist so firmly, the doubled strand of zir maroon psionic aura stretching from him to zim.

And ze'd recognise Castor's voice anywhere.

"Putain - enfin fini!" he growls. "Vous disparutes! Et j'retourne chez moi, et -" He flings up his hands. "Vous absentâtes! Que? Tu es un gosse à la con: à cause de ça, vous devez être prudent, tu dois rester près de moi!"

Even when he goes off on his crazy gibberish.

"I don't understand you," ze snaps, keeping zir voice low. Ze knows a few words, enough pidgin to keep track when Castor goes off in one of his fits - but not when he's spitting words like acid, one after another until the pronunciation is slurred. "J.. j'ne parle! Shhh."

It'd be so much easier if ze didn't have to speak aloud.

"Merde," he snaps. "Vous parlez français, pourquoi tu mens?

"Shhh!"

"Que? Qu’est-ce qu’il y a -- ahh."

Castor follows zir gaze to Pheres: at the sound of zir piping voice, he's started to stir, and pressing zimself flat against the pipe, Hinnom tries not to breathe.
Edited 2014-12-05 17:25 (UTC)
postalprestidigitation: (disconcerted)

[personal profile] postalprestidigitation 2014-12-05 06:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Castor stares.

The way that Pheres's eyes are lit up was less noticeable up above, where the light of the day and the glare of the sun had washed it out to the point of near invisibility. Down here, with only the dimmergrubs high above, it's glaring. He looks like a ghoul.

He sounds like one, too.

"He's not dead," Castor says, slowly, like he's questioning it. He's lapsed back into standard, thank fuck. "So..."

Hinnom waits. Sometimes it takes him a moment to think up a plan. But he always comes up with good ones.

"We have to take him back to the hive."

He usually comes up with good ones. Ze shakes zir head furiously, and hisses, as low as they can: "No!"

"If he's not dead already," ze continues, all in a rush, "then he's gonna die, and then he'll turn, and it'll be awful, 'cause not like shit we can do 'gainst a revenant --"

"My god. You're a little angel." Hinnom doesn't know jack about religion, though Castor's tried to teach them, but ze knows that isn't a compliment just by the way he says it. "He saved you from the drones. We can't just leave him to die."

Ze doesn't see why not. Their mom clacks her mandibles, unsure: she can't see Castor, ze doesn't think, but she really doesn't like when they argue, so ze zips it.

(And.. okay, because he does have a point. When someone does something for you, you gotta pay it back: good or bad, that's just a rule!)

(No one ever said it had to be a good pay-back. Leaving someone to be eaten by ghouls is still a reward, 'cause they're more likely to end up as a ghost that way, instead of just fading. But. It's a pretty shitty one.)

When ze doesn't say anything else, just huffs, Castor takes it as agreement, and pulls himself together. As he spoke, he materialised more: rattlereeds and a speechwaddle for sound and lips to form them, but now he forces the rest, until he's less of a blur and more of a person, with clothes and horn-stubs and a body all between them.

And, wrapping zir telekinesis around him like a shroud, he approaches Pheres.
Edited 2014-12-05 18:12 (UTC)
postalprestidigitation: (bluh)

[personal profile] postalprestidigitation 2014-12-05 06:40 pm (UTC)(link)
Pheres has curled into a ball, like a grub ready to die. By the time Castor gets to him, his breathing has slowed, but he's not dead. Just asleep, on the concrete floor splattered with his fluids.

Ze tries not to gag as Castor bends down next to him and picks him up, careful as he sometimes carries Hinnom. Ze can feel the rasp and slide of Pheres's weight against his telekinesis as Castor returns, but thankfully, not too well: it's Castor controlling it with the ease of sweeps of practice, and the sensation is like touching bone through flesh.

"You'll have to play look-out today," Castor warns zim. "But we won't go deep, just to the pipe."

Hinnom bobs their head in a nod, but they can't help the dubious look they shoot towards Pheres's horns. He might be able to fit, even with his dumbo shoulders, but his rack is kinda huge.

Oh, well. If they won't fit, Castor can always snap one off.
Edited 2014-12-05 18:40 (UTC)
postalprestidigitation: (hey boo)

[personal profile] postalprestidigitation 2014-12-05 06:51 pm (UTC)(link)
In the end, Pheres gets to keep his horns. Going up the pipe takes the velvet off the sides of his bottom set, leaving maroon streaks on the metal behind, but Hinnom goes up first, and between zir pulling and Castor's pushing, they manage to get him into the hive proper.

Hinnom's hive is the old catacomb where they first found Castor, back when ze'd been nameless and small and fresh from the caverns. They'd thought it safe, because his presence had kept away ghost and the walking dead alike, and ze'd never expected to find the source.

His presence still keeps the dead away, and sweeps and sweeps of work have replaced doors, set locks, and made it thoroughly impenetrable to the living, as well. The walls are padded with fabric, and anything and everything ze's salvaged from the catacombs over the years: a few things from the culling pits, where the bodies used to be dumped and burned, but mostly gifts left behind for the ghosts in the sweeps after.

Recently, ze's set up a ruperacoon that Castor found above-ground, and helped zim haul down. Hinnom doesn't like to use it, after sweeps of sleeping dry, but the slime helps when ze's injured or sick, and so it only makes sense to dump Pheres in.

Ze curls up around the outside. Castor's use of zir telekinesis always makes zim tired, and now that ze's in the safety of zir hive, it's turned into outright exhaustion.

"Gonna sleep," Hinnom tells Castor, and ze doesn't even have to ask: he drapes them with one of the shrouds off of the wall, a nice, thick one they stole from a seadweller's bonerest, and that tiny use of telekinesis uses what feels like zir last drop of energy.

Ze sleeps.




> PHERES: WAKE UP.
Edited 2015-03-31 01:43 (UTC)