nishka//loki (nishka) wrote in paxletalelogs, @ 2017-04-16 12:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | loki, tyr |
I'm gonna fight 'em off
Who: Nish and Gus
What: Nish is freaking out about possible secrets being spread around. Again.
Where: Pax, 6th floor
When: Sunday , April 16, 2017
What: gdoc complete!
Nish rushed up the stairs, barefoot, still in her pajamas from last night, her phone clutched in a white-knuckled grip. This wasn't happening. Not again. last time nearly killed her. This time..
She'd been so caught up in her fears she hadn't realized how strange everything was. She'd been bent on one purpose only- to see what fresh hell Abel had done to her now. But as soon as she arrived in the sixth floor, she stopped in her tracks, staring around herself in awe.
All Gus wanted was a bowl of cereal. Sadly, nothing but crumbs remained in the bottom of his cereal boxes, and they produced a meager pile of cereal dust in his bowl. It was hardly enough to feed a mouse, let alone a young man with a black hole of a stomach. Frustrated, he had decided to take a trip down to the local Trader Joe’s for more cereal--and discounted Easter candy.
Yet when he’d left his apartment, he was in for a bold surprise. A score of secrets hung from an odd device near the elevator, and hesitant to study it further, he’d gone back to his apartment. Along the way, he’d tried to ignore the various items dropped along the corridor floors, completely confused. As far as Gus knew, he was the only person who lived on the sixth floor--and this was the kind of prank that was too big for even BB.
It hadn’t taken long for others to reach out to him on the forum, and when the tenant from the fifth floor announced she was taking a stroll up to the sixth, Gus reluctantly went back out into the hallway to wait for her. The sound of footsteps alerted him to her presence, the hallway otherwise quiet--this hadn’t been eerie to Gus until precisely thirty minutes ago.
“Hey uh, it’s me. From the forum. My name’s Gus.” He stepped around the secret holding device to greet the woman. “Are these like…your secrets? ‘Cause if they are, I get why you’re upset.”
Nish spun around, her eyes widening and fearful, her heart pounding hard against her ribs. Then her eyes slid to the pillar next to him and she rushed towards it, her eyes sliding over the different messages on it. “Who did this??” she demanded, her voice shaking, her hands fluttering over the different plates with writing on them. “Who. Did. This.” She turned her eyes on his, tears glistening in them.
Shit. She was crying. Gus had never been good with crying women. Or crying anyone, really. It wasn’t as if crying was a big thing in his family--BB had always been too tough to let herself cry in public, and Gus had tried to follow both hers and his older brother’s suit. He moved slightly away from his fifth floor neighbor--it wasn’t as if he’d read all of the secrets, he’d just skimmed a few of them before the heebie jeebies made him flee back to his apartment.
“I don’t know,” Gus offered as means of a weak explanation. “Like. That was the whole point of that forum post I made. It sure as hell wasn’t me. Gossip’s a waste of time. But like, whoever did it probably left this weird crap on the ground. Plus, it smells funny…” He doubted she cared about the odd fragrance wafting through the floor, or the leavings of a mysterious prankster. But the obvious needed to be mentioned anyway. Maybe it’d distract her from her crying.
Nish was frantically scanning the messages on the pillar in front of her, none of what any of the things were saying seeming to make sense to her. But then some of them sounded...like they might be her. Some were too close to home. She touched one in particular, that sounded more like her inner voice than the others, swallowing back the fear that suddenly arose in the back of her throat.
“This can’t happen again,” she murmured, staring at them, and then turning to the guy next to her, as if only just noticing him. “I can’t...I can’t go through this again,” she said, frowning, looking at him closer. “I know you,” she said hesitantly, knowing it as true once she heard her own voice saying the words, but not knowing how she knew.
Gus blinked, startled at the woman’s declaration. He peered back at her, confusion evident on his face. “What? No, I don’t even know your name. Maybe you just like. You know my sister or something. She’s more social than me.” His gaze traversed over the score of secrets, as if one of them might hold the clue to why this woman thought she knew him outside of their brief forum interaction. While he couldn’t deny there was a certain sense of familiarity about her, Gus was only too happy to wave it off as having seen her in passing. “Why’re you so scared of these secrets, anyway?” he asked, a frown etched onto his face.
She swallowed, her eyes not leaving his at first, as if trying to puzzle something out about him, but coming up empty. She looked back at the pillar, and then sighed out a bit of tension, some of her earlier panic starting to dissipate, but only slightly. “It’s just...earlier...someone stole secrets about me and put them up. In the lobby...everyone saw…” she trailed off, ending with a sigh. “This isn’t the same. It’s something...else. These aren’t about me...or at least, not that I can see yet.” Though her eyes lingered on one that sounded...a bit like her...but there was nothing there that tied it to her.
“Wow, that's...that's like. Really shitty,” Gus said lowly, frowning. Not that he was some kind of paragon of humanity, but even he didn't like the sound of thievery. Especially when it involved revealed secrets. It just wasn't right.
Nish tore her eyes away from the writing, looking at him. “But I do know you. I think. You’re...familiar somehow.” She turned away from him, finally taking in the room around them. “What have they done? This is all wrong...My floor is different...it’s...grass and sky. Even in my apartment. Are all the floors like this?” she asked him, as if he’d know better than she did. She crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly aware that she was still wearing only pajamas.
“Uh, well. I'm at UCLA like four times a week for classes. Maybe you've seen me around there?” He studied her, the sense of familiarity flickering in the back of his mind. She could've been a professor for all he knew, the campus was huge. “And who are they?” Gus walked over to the large fountain that had appeared this morning, looking down into it. The water seemed normal and clear, unlike everything else that was happening. “I don't know, I haven't left my floor yet. Kinda don't want to, ‘cause all this,” Gus turned around and motioned to the odd gates, the secrets, even the fountain behind him, “is weird as fuck. But uh, you’re growing grass on your floor?” He was pretty sure she didn't mean what he was inferring, but it couldn't hurt to ask. Maybe she'd been the one who'd given him the cookie jar.
She was still somewhat lost in her own thoughts, but his joke about grass wasn’t lost on her. A slight smirk tugged at her lips and she turned her eyes on his. “Not that kind of grass. It’s...just growing everywhere instead of carpet. Tall grass for walls. It’s strange, but...oddly peaceful.” She could definitely think of worse places to live, and the gentle breeze, while at the time when she saw the message on her phone hadn’t even reached her radar, now came to her memory as soothing. She took a deep breath and then focused back on Gus.
“I haven’t been to UCLA,” she admitted, “I went to college in Chicago. No...it’s not your face I recognize, it’s...something else.” She peered at him, as if trying to figure it out, but then grimaced and shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. As strange as everything else around here, I think,” she finished with a shrug. She was starting to calm down a little. The ‘secrets’ weren’t anything like her diary, and Gus was just as at a loss as she was. Her guard, which had slammed up the moment she saw the message online, was starting to come down just a little, her panicked heartrate starting to slow, if only just.
Actual grass? Okay, he had thought Alice dreaming of being a grassy woman was weird, but this lady's floor took the cake. He attempted to not scoff at her story, slightly worried that she'd get upset and start crying again.
“I kinda know what you mean. I think. I sorta met this other dude here and like. I've never seen him before, but he seemed almost familiar.” His mind went back to the odd run-in with Abel, and for a moment he remembered his short meeting with Rafael. Though he'd never met either man before, each had seemed familiar in their own way. “There's probably an explanation for it,” he said in an attempt to be reassuring. “Like how many times can you be in a crowd before every face starts looking the same?”
But that wasn't it, and deep down, Gus knew this to be true. He knew it as well as he recognized the slight feeling of distrust he felt toward this woman.
More than slight. It was a warning.
He chose not to heed it. “I just can't wait till things are normal again.” Walking back over to where she stood, he touched a few of the written secrets, eyes glancing over them but not fully comprehending the gravitas--weren't they just made up nonsense? “Look, like I don't wanna offend you or anything, but you should probably not worry about these things. Maybe I can take them down if you'll feel better. It isn't like anyone else lives on this floor.”
Nish had been nodding at his explanation, but something he said caught her attention, about meeting a guy who also felt oddly familiar. She could think of two people who fit that description, and both troubled her for very different reasons. She swallowed, and then he drew her attention again, touching the posted secrets in front of her. She bit her lip and turned back to them, reaching out a hand to take the one that sounded somewhat like her, proclaiming her inner struggle. ’feels like a walking timebomb; terrified that something else will happen and that her desire for chemical release will overcome her desire to keep living.’ Her hand shook the closer it got to the plate, and then she recoiled. “I don’t...I don’t know if we’re supposed to,” she said, hesitating, though not pulling her hand away completely.
“If we're not, no one is gonna say anything,” Gus replied carelessly. He'd made up his mind to get rid of the secrets, justifying the damaging of someone else's property if it meant the woman would stop being so scared of words. “Besides,” he added, gripping one of the more embarrassing secrets with both hands, careful to lead with his left, “I wasn't asked if I minded all this weird crap on my floor. You'd think they'd ask the only person that lives up here.” And with that, he tugged at the offensive secret, hoping to dislodge it.
She watched him for a second, and then joined in, fingers scrabbling at the edges of the plate under them, digging, clawing, pulling, but it wouldn’t budge. It was too firmly attached and wouldn’t come free, her efforts only succeeding in making her fingers hurt. She sighed in frustration, stepping back a little, looking around them for some sort of tools. “Do you have a hammer? A crowbar?” she asked, eyeing the plates and how they were joined to the pillar. “Or a sander...we don’t have to get them off, just destroy the words…”
“Dammit,” he swore, exasperated. No matter how hard he yanked on the secret, it wouldn’t come loose. Gus tried another but the result remained the same; resisting the urge to hit the secret, he stood back from the wall of words, scowling at it. “I carry a crowbar with me at all times,” he said dryly, glancing at his neighbor with little to no amusement. “But like. I do have a hammer. And Sharpies. What if we just, you know. Draw over the words?” It seemed like a dumb idea, even to him. However, it didn’t seem like normal methods would work, as if the secrets were....enchanted, or some kind of other magical phrase.
Nish let out a sound, somewhere between a sigh and a whimper of frustration, looking at the pillar in front of them as if it was an insurmountable obstacle they had to climb. “I don’t know if that would work...but none of these have names on them, it’s not like...it’s not like everyone would know which belonged to...who…” she said hopefully. There were others there she knew for a fact weren’t about her, but didn’t know whose they were. Maybe it would be the same with hers.
It seemed like she was giving up the fight--which was well enough with Gus, as he was beginning to doubt the secrets could be affected by the power of an ordinary Sharpie marker. If they couldn’t be physically budged, what was to say they hadn’t been coated in some type of special veneer or paint, too? “It’s not like I’m gonna tell anyone which secret you were looking at, anyway,” he said by means of agreement, looking at his neighbor to judge her reaction. “It’s not my business.” With a shrug, he motioned to the otherwise empty floor. “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about, ma’am.” Hell, no one else probably even cared about a bunch of weird secrets crammed onto the wall.
Nish nodded, still eyeing the wall of secrets, but now letting her eyes roam further away from the one that she’d been studying, spotting another that caught her eye, this one with Rafe’s name on it. “Yeah,” she said distractedly, reading the new plate a few times and then tearing her eyes away from it, looking at Gus instead. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right...at least, no more than anyone else.”
Appeased, at least for now, she stepped away. “I...guess I should go back to my apartment,” she said with a shrug, “get dressed at least. Looks like we’re all in for a hell of a week.” A weak smile followed the statement, as it seemed to be quite the understatement to her.
“Yeah, uh. Should be interesting. I'll see you around,” he said with a half-smile. Gus turned and stalked back to his apartment. Something told him that he would see her again, and it had nothing to do with them being neighbors.