Edwin Seabeck is a killer in potentia (elusive_control) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-02-25 08:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, ! plot: vol of the flies, edwin seabeck, hunter mackenna |
WHO: Edwin Seabeck and Hunter MacKenna
WHAT: Edwin, age 9, has night terrors. Guess who finds him in the common area
WHEN: very late night Feb 24th
WHERE: 3rd floor common area
WARNINGS: little kids cry
STATUS: Log Complete
EDWIN: Edwin woke up violently, small body shivering and his eyes wound up in the usual way before he remembered that his powers weren’t back and he didn’t have to worry about the fear ravaging through him. He peered out into the darkness and saw his roommate collapsed in bed, dreadlocks the only thing visible tumbling over the bed. Biting his lips tight, he spun in bed and looked over at the closet. It was instinct to go there, even though he didn’t share a wall with his parents anymore, and let the clothes and the distance muffle his misery. But Understanding was here and he couldn’t just lie here in bed, curled up and trying not to sniffle. What if he woke up? Just to punctuate the fear, a sniffle found it’s way out of his tight frame and Edwin covered his mouth with both hands, waiting. He’d be in a different room and if he brought his blanket - yes, that would work. He poked his head up when he was sure enough that Understanding was still asleep, then hopped out of bed. As silently as he could, he pulled the nightstand drawer open wide enough to claw out his button, then dragged the top cover off the bed as he walked over to the door. It wasn’t until he was curled up into corner of the couch, his blanket over his head and face turned into the cushion, that he let some of the shaking become tears and the occasional sniffle. HUNTER: The hallways of the boy's dorm were dark and quiet this time of night. There was just enough moonlight filtering through the windows to guide Hunter's path as he made his way barefoot from his room. Edwin wasn't the only one to have woken up violently; exhausted as he was, Hunter had jolted awake gasping for air and sweating, and his pulse was still racing even now. He hadn't wanted to bother Vic once he realized that he hadn't woken his friend up, so he'd slipped into clothes and gone out to splash his face with water, pace the hallways in quiet for a while until his heartrate slowed and he felt entirely certain that he was still at IVI. The problem with those nightmares is that a part of him never knew if he should be grateful to wake up from them. Lost in thought, his fingers tracing across the self-inflicted scar on his forearm, the last thing he expected to hear was tears and sniffling. No -- not entirely the last thing -- Kody had done it plenty of times, though mostly his tears were crocodile, so there was no point if no one was around to feel pity. It was late, though. Maybe a girlfriend was exiled on one of the common room couches because of problems with powers...? His first instinct was to turn around and head the opposite direction, but he felt a strange surge of frustration when he realized he couldn't tell who it was from a distance, not without his ability. Taking a few steps closer, he reached for the edge of the blanket, hesitated instead of touching, and sighed. "Are you okay?" he asked quietly after a moment. Turning into a fucking bleeding heart, Hunter scolded himself, internally. Whatever happens next, serves you right, moron. EDWIN: There was the sound of a door opening and it made Edwin gasp under his covers. His hands still knitted around his button, he tried not to move or breathe because maybe whoever it was wouldn't notice him and just think he was a pillow. But they came again, his mind turning over the dream again, and an elbow moved under the covers so Edwin could rub a sleeved hand over his eyes. He didn't want to be found but he did a little because it meant he was real but then it meant he was weak. When he heard the voice belonging to the person that had found him, it made him wind up his eyes tightly. "I'm," Edwin interrupted himself with a sniffle, voice pitched in youth with the slight blur of speech incidental to Essex and a stuffy nose, "I'm okay, Hunter." HUNTER: ...Well, that was unexpected. Blinking, he rubbed his palms down his thighs once or twice before finally sinking down on the couch next to the blanket bundle. Tired though he was, late though it was, he didn't need a full explanation to figure this one out. "Edwin." Edwin at...what size or age? He wasn't sure which it was, but the familiar voice definitely sounded en miniature, and there was no way his friend who was usually several inches taller than him could fit under that blanket and only make a lump the size of a large dog. He was no fucking good with kids. Kody-obnoxious or otherwise. "...Well, yeah, you say that, but I could hear you in the hall," he pointed out. "So...not okay, seems like." Hunter leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, studying his hands rather than staring through the darkness at the wall. Best if he kept his eyes to himself for now. He'd been learning that for most of the day. "I can't sleep, either." EDWIN: "Oh," he said softly, trying to dry up his red-worn eyes a bit better before poking his head out of the covers. It was indeed Hunter who was sitting next to him but staring at the wall instead of looking at him. Looking at worst cross and at best disinterested. He sniffled and tried to pull himself back together a little bit before unwinding himself from the corner of the couch. "I'll go upstairs. Sorry for waking you up," Edwin apologized in a small voice, gathering up his blanket around him like some English Linus. HUNTER: "No --" Jesus, he really was bad at this. Trying to pitch his voice to sound mild rather than frustrated, he reached out to rest his hand on the blanket. "That's not what I meant. I mean, I couldn't sleep either." He risked glancing sidelong at Edwin, wanting to see what he was up against, exactly...and felt a jolt of honest fondness mixed with amusement when he caught a glimpse of Edwin's young face. Edwin hadn't been lying about that haircut. He remembered back in the day when his own mother used to inflict him with something similar and resisted the urge to reach up and mess with the strands, but a bit of a wry smile rose on his lips before he looked away again. "It's okay. You don't have to go. You were here first." Patting the blanket lightly -- and Edwin's shoulder, he assumed -- he fished around in his mind for what came next. "...What's wrong, kid? C'mon. It's me. You can talk to me." Like older Edwin, like younger Edwin, r...ight? EDWIN: After a moment of deliberation, Edwin hunkered back into the corner of the cushions, bunching the blanket under his chin. It was hard to have impulse control; Older Him would probably still be in bed, just waiting for the feelings to pass, trying to think or do something monotonous to wash the dream out of his head. He’d never do this because he was a grown up and grown ups were independent and took care of themselves and were just fine even when they weren’t because... because. But even if he could remind himself that he was 22, he couldn’t remind himself of that. “Bad dreams,” he finally said, looking down at where his knees poked the blanket up. “I have them a lot. Had them.” Tangible terrors that felt just as real as the Asylum had; he’d never grown out of having them really, but the strength of them had been softened by age and experience. He knew what to do with them now except he didn’t know what to do with them right now except... this. Be sad, be scared, be everything. “I know they aren’t real,” he piped up in his defense. “But they are real when I have them and... they feel real after until they don’t,” Edwin tried to explain in what nine year-old logic he could assemble. “I can’t go back to sleep until they don’t, cause I’ll just have it again and it’ll be real all over.” HUNTER: Everything sounded so much more ridiculous in a nine-year-old's voice, even though the words themselves made sense. He definitely knew that feeling. He himself wouldn't be out there that moment if he didn't. So he nodded, also surveying the blanket space where Edwin's knees made knobby hills. "Yeah...me too." They were far from the only ones. Daisy still liked to wake up with a gasp of surprise, and there were some nights when it was bad enough that he had to get out his phone and text Vic just to make sure he was there. They were never quite Cooper level nightmares, but they held shades of the original thing, echos that resonated and wouldn't quite go away. Before this place, if he'd had nightmares, he rarely remembered them when he woke up. He felt like he should do something more. He'd pulled his hand back after patting Edwin's shoulder (it was kind of uncouth to be touching nine-year-olds a lot, right? Even if he'd slept with this one before, when he wasn't fucking nine?) but with Daisy, sometimes the only way to calm her down was to just hold onto her and stroke her hair. It had worked on Vic the other night, too. He just couldn't think of a subtle, non-creepy way to put his arm around Edwin right now. "...Asylum dreams, or something else?" he asked instead, stalling for time while he tried to conjure up a good course of action. This was a friend of his; he didn't want to leave Edwin in distress. Whatever tension they had between them as adults didn't apply here. EDWIN: “Something else,” he said solemnly, unaware of the battle for contact going on in Hunter. Contact was the sort of thing that Edwin craved but, even young, rarely received; some English stereotypes held true to form. His body heat was starting to make the plastic on the button slick, the metal on the underside warm instead of bracingly cool. Little touchstones couldn’t replace humans, but they could make it a little better. Captured memories, captured angels that battled dream demons back into the black. “I was in court.” The memory bloomed at the words, the dream recirculating back to the start. It was strange in dreams how there were no words really but the impression of them. He couldn’t remember anything the judge said except he knew that he was the wrong Edwin and they wanted the new Edwin he’d been playing at. It wasn’t even the real court of his memories but an Alice in Wonderland one where the punishment wasn’t ‘off with his head’. “I made a new me yesterday and they wanted that one,” he finally said, breath shuddering a little. He couldn’t remember what he said in his defense - his mouth had just been open and thought bubbles with emotions in them had come out: sad sad scared scared sad. And then the gavel had come down and it was over and the world had rushed around him, pulling him away, away, away into nothingness. Thrown away. The words alone jump-started his tears again. “I dunno. It’s stupid,” Edwin added, trying to save face a little and sounding a bit more like his older self in the moment. He turned his attention from his memories back to Hunter. “What did you dream about?” HUNTER: It's stupid, Edwin said, and he did sound a little older in that moment, but he also sounded eerily like Hunter himself. Or at least Hunter heard himself in the echo of those words, and he glanced up with a bit of a frown, struck by the similarity. He, too, could see those images in his head -- hell, he'd had similar nightmares of his own. Looking up at the judge and having sentence passed on him, his character, everything he'd worked so hard to build. Knowing they were going to lock him up and throw away the key and nothing he said could stop it. It struck him, suddenly, that Edwin had been nine when his mother had died and his father sent away for it. About the same age he looked now, in fact. His lower lip caught on a canine, his frown deepened; he felt a rush of rather unexpected anger flooding through him. Nine-year-old Edwin, whose father was a murderer and whose mother was gone, looked like his world had just been broken all over again, though it had happened thirteen years ago. His worries and concerns about how to handle the situation had been devoured by the anger. Shifting around on the couch, he reached out and wrapped his arms around the young boy's shoulders, pulling him (awkwardly, but purposefully) into an embrace against his chest. "It's not fucking stupid," he said fiercely. "Trust me. I don't think it's stupid." EDWIN: It was so sudden that it left him blinking surprisedly into the fabric of Hunter’s shirt, body stiffening slightly. No, he wasn’t used to this, but it wasn’t a difficult thing to become accustomed to it. His small, blanket-covered frame slackened as he relaxed against Hunter’s chest and closed his eyes. Maybe it was their more intimate familiarity that it made it more reassuring, maybe it was just trust and neediness. Maybe the blue eyes and the curl to his hair reminded him of Peter. He didn’t think about it, just took a couple of deep, steady breaths. “Maybe there could be a million of me and none of them will ever be right,” he mused quietly. It was a strange thought. “Even if I could go back in time. This is the only me.” There was only ever this ending, only ever what had happened. He peered up at Hunter. “Do you think it’s bad to pretend? You don’t ever.” HUNTER: It was sort of a new experience for him, hugging a kid. He didn't even have younger cousins. It wasn't as uncomfortable as he expected, once Edwin relaxed, but it wasn't as natural as holding onto Daisy or embracing Vic -- there was still an edge of anxiety associated with holding onto someone so much smaller than him, fragile. Hunter felt like he'd done the right thing, though. He wasn't sure that there was anything he could have said that would have had the same effect, that would have made a real difference -- not to a nine-year-old. There were times when words just weren't sufficient. He took a deep breath, though his chest felt constricted by the anger, still. More sentiments he understood. Didn't every kid imagine what would happen if their lives were different? If they were really adopted, maybe, and their actual parents came to take them away to a happier home, somewhere they were cared for and listened to and made to feel special? At what point did a child stop feeling like that possibility existed? He could remember, even when he was young, bleakly observing that he deserved the life he had -- of course his family was a wreck, his house unwelcoming, every facet of his reality a disappointment, like it couldn't possibly be any other way. He just didn't remember when he'd stopped imagining otherwise. But. "I do, though," he insisted, quiet enough that his voice was barely more than a low rumble in his throat. "I have to pretend there's a way out of here or I'll give up. I don't really know if there is, I just imagine possibilities and try to make them true." Hunter sighed slowly. "Sometimes I just close my eyes and pretend I'm on my island for a while. On the beach. We might not be right now, but I have to pretend there's a way we'll end up right, eventually, so it's worth trying." They weren't finished yet. There was more to their lives than just this. EDWIN: The rhythmic lull of Hunter’s breathing was like listening to the tide. “You don’t pretend about you. You are always you. Even if you’re on an island or something. It’s...” Edwin didn’t know how to finish that sentence immediately and finally concluded with a “...nice.” This was so different than being told he was blowing things out of proportion or not having things in the proper perspective or in need of winding it back. Life had seemingly always been a maze of a kind and everyone had always told him how to get back to the main path when he’d run into a dead end or in circles. But Hunter, slow rumble under his ear in the part of the night that was heaviest and most oppressive because you were alone with only your thoughts, was a different sort of energy. He didn’t know what he was doing either but they were at least in the dead ends together. It was funny because in stories, you always had a character and he had a very understanding companion except they weren’t ever people. Pooh Bear and Christopher Robin, Calvin and Hobbes, Wallace and Grommit and that was sort of how he felt except Hunter was a person instead of a tiger or something. “You’ll find it though,” Edwin finally said, thinking that sometimes you were the main character and sometimes you were the stuffed support to someone else’s main character. “It’s not pretend to think of an escape, it’s a mystery. There’s already an answer for finding.” HUNTER: "Maybe." Maybe there was an answer, maybe not. Life didn't always present clean-cut solutions, even with the most creative, open-minded detection skills. Usually, he'd found, it just uncovered more questions. The asylum was still on his mind; Edwin wasn't wrong, given that even in the nightmare scenario of his life, Hunter had only created new people around him rather than re-writing his own identity, aside from the made-up ability. Most people would have conjured up new versions of themselves. Most of them had, Edwin included. He was quiet for a long time before he spoke up again, hoping young Edwin hadn't fallen asleep in the silence. "What do you pretend about you?" This wasn't the first time Edwin had mentioned it, he realized. They'd had conversations before where Edwin had hinted at putting up a front, comments he'd made in his letter about the disparity between how he felt and how he was perceived. He'd been curious about it then, but Edwin slid away from answers often, and he'd learned to pick and choose his battles, focus on the things he really wanted to know. "What do you think is wrong with you that you don't want people to see?" EDWIN: Edwin was indeed starting to drift, long lashes resting on cheeks, encased in a cocoon of warmth. He’d spent part of the day enamored with how bright and colorful everything was and now he was focused on that internally, imagining Hunter’s beach - sand the color of eggshells, waving green palm trees with fuzzy coconuts, water that blended into the sky on the horizon. Hunter’s question drew him back, both mentally and physically, his slight frame pulling back from Hunter’s chest to look up at him. He could feel it, the press of experience and time trying to click an internal dial and send him forward into his own present. He didn’t know if it was his own feelings on Hunter’s question or just the end of Dani’s spell trying to shift him, but he held onto what was clear and present right now. “Lots of things,” he said finally, shyly. “I think too much in circles. And I don’t come from a very good place. And... I scare people.” The dream pulled him back somewhat at the admission, but it felt distant and if he held his button tight, he could remember easily that it wasn’t real. Peter was both the Gepetto and the Jiminy Cricket to his Pinocchio, carving out the edges of a man from a very sad and very angry and very perceptive piece of wood until he learned how to do it himself. He’d already done it, he’d already picked him, he couldn’t bang the gavel and go with another version of Edwin. This was real and the dream was just a dream. “I think I’m going to grow up soon. And then this will be weird,” he admitted with a frown. “I guess we should go to bed.” HUNTER: He was hesitant to loosen his arms, but he did anyway, reluctant inch by inch as Edwin pulled back and finally suggested bed for them both. Old or young, it was typical of Edwin to start to put distance between them as soon as their serious conversation extended too long. Maybe it was just a British sense of reserve, maybe his own defensiveness, but Hunter rarely felt like he had a choice besides to let him go. He was too scientific, or just too stubborn: he had no instincts for where these invisible boundaries lay, would sink his teeth into a hard topic and shake it like a dog with a bone until he'd gotten every last bit of meat off, given half the chance. Even if the topic was himself. Edwin was right, though. They couldn't really sit there in the dark, his arms around Edwin's shoulders and the blanket, with Edwin at his normal age. He knew better, and it was true that there was no point pretending like it would be okay. Down one flight of stairs, Vic was asleep, waiting for him, and in all honesty, that was where he belonged. Where he had to go back to, if he wanted to have any hope of going back to sleep and feeling safe. Vic who was to him what he was being to Edwin right now. Releasing the little boy, he rose slowly to his bare feet and tried not to question his sanity, looking down at that nine-year-old's head and batting aside wild wonder at himself for managing to sit all of five minutes with a kid without ruining everything horribly. Another few minutes and he'd probably do something wrong, screw it up somehow; best to leave now, anyway. "You don't scare me," he said at last, and gave into that stupid urge to reach out and ruffle Edwin's bowlcut hair. "Try to get some sleep, kid." Turning without another word, he let himself back out into the silent hall. |