and a little rain never hurt no one who: clyde (aeaeae) what: post-second death doings where: some ambiguous room in the library (carpeted), some marked but unremarkable little grave (marble). when: recently
She went to ground, after. Back to where it ended and began. But there's always the bit just before burial. It only seemed oddly still because she and the air are now standing alongside each other again instead of touching - because the familiar old unnatural has again overridden the normal. Flush-flare of adrenaline, hormonal reaction's mental holdover, dies down after the fray leaves her behind. She is left staring perplexedly at her own dead self. The tableau of body sprawled, angle and arch subtly but inexcusably wrong, hypnotized her briefly - Clyde had been too new at being dead the first time, had to get her chains and sheets and psyche in working order before she could get around to jaunting and haunting. She hadn't seen or heard in specifics for weeks after the spell's implosion, hadn't watched the grieving hustle bustle of immediate aftermath, had only even come around intermittently during the funeral (small blessings are blessings nonetheless, and her memory of her mother's breaking voice is padded with a certain lack of specificity, with the hazy feeling of having been told something wrenchingly important while underwater). In a way she had been reborn as a ghost, that first time. Washed clean by temporary rigor mortis of the mental faculties and then set soap-bubble free.
This was different. It was - disconcerting. To see herself, just after. Mirrors are useless to ghosts, and Clyde hadn't wasted any of her gasp at life on gazing (she had been buzzingly busy, preoccupied with hugging all comers and all the ice cream she could track down in a world gone mad - because there was something sickly sweet about bellyache, even - and lying down just to feel cold marble at her back). It had been decades since she'd settled down, teen-girl fashion, and gazed critically at herself in a mirror under bad lighting (not bad, she'd decided critically, but one of her eyes was a bit larger than the other. And her lips could be a bit more like Lucy Calkins in her bio class'). Self as sight-seen had faded away into a morass of self-as-projected and self-as-felt. Clyde gazed down at the body on the floor with the interest of a career bird-watcher glimpsing an impossibly rare specimen. Was that what she looked like, then? How peculiar. She had somehow thought she was. Bigger. Just more. But no. She was just herself, paused at sixteen and too big for her bones forever. Just a little girl-shape lying on the ground like a cocoon outgrown, like rubbish discarded - like a lighthouse without a light, somehow sunken in on itself for the lack of an intangible something (the lightness of being herself) rendered once again untouchable. And that was all it was. Something lost on the ground, useless.
Clyde was standing ankle deep in her own husk, what she was already reflexively disengaging from. The body. The dreamed-for heart-desire spilling red across the Library's floor. That stain was never going to come out, she noted reflexively to the now-empty room. Her voice only quavered a bit. There was no one to hear - it may as well not have wavered in the least. She might as well not have spoken at all. She paused. Stepped to the side, sank through the floor, leaned down - examined the mirror image she had owned until a scarce half hour previous. The lips were all right after all, she decided abruptly, little voice belling out cleanly without a hitch into her own ectoplasm-based version of the atmosphere. And then Clyde sank through floor and foundation and down into dirt, as if gravity had found a way to snake a demanding hand around her nonexistent little ankle.
A handful of minutes or hours later, she resurfaced in a manner of speaking (what is travel time to an immortal who can move at the speed of whimsy and desire?). Far from London. Far from the terminated false form. Surface is relative, when one can sink into the epicenter of the earth if one so chooses (Clyde rarely so chooses - fucking boring, innit?). A few feet from air is as good as a few feet above the ground. In a podunk little graveyard set alongside a nondescript little nowhere town, a ghost girl who couldn't be arsed to imagine her hair out of her eyes crawled back to her grave, back to the long-forfeited broken-down bones she had once called her own like a shaken child who suddenly needs the comfort of a long discarded teddy bear. And that was where she stayed. Just for a little while, just to get used to never catching her breath again. Down where everything was patient and a moment of weakness would go unnoticed. Down in the ground, where no one would hear the girl who wasn't there if she happened to wail a little, curled in on herself like something that could still feel corpse-cold setting in.