(Open) Don't you dare say his name...

[summertimeblues]

Who: Richie Tozier (summertimeblues) & you lucky guys
What: Dealing very poorly with torture, dying, and coming back to life. He didn't sign up to be Jesus
When: Mar. 25th-27th
Where: Olympia, Thesa Station, Flona Cove
Warning(s): Drug and alcohol use and abuse, mentions of gore/death/suicide, sad pod crying, icky feelings.



I: Thesa Station

[There's a relative quiet among the sleeping. It is, in effect, a graveyard. People are here to show their respects, to mourn and to yearn. Today though, wherever you might be, there's a serenade rattling the air between the glass chambers. A guitar thrum mimicked through slaps on the metal to support the rollicking vocals of Elvis Presley. Back from the dead and ready to slide and shake in those blue suede shoes.]

Spider Murphy played the tenor saxophone
Little Joe was blowin' on the slide trombone
The drummer boy from Illinois went crash, boom, bang
The whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang

Let's rock! Everybody let's rock!

[If you round the right corner, you won't find the King. But you'll find Richie Tozier, seated between in a row of about five pods: there's a handsome man in cowboy boots, a black man cut and battered and bandaged to bits, a thin mousy type with a jerry-rigged cast on his arm and rounded specs, a stunning woman whose red hair spills around her in a halo of curls, and a balding man who, even while sleeping, belies a unquantifiable charm and steadiness. He's having the time of his life with a half-finished gin bottle in one hand as the other busies itself playing drums and beats. He's pale, poorly slept if the purple punch bags under his eyes are any indication, and there's a still smoking cigarette butt laying its ash on the floor next to him. But he's seemingly in good spirits, high on the music.]

Everybody in the whole cell block
Was dancin' to the Jailhouse Ro—hey! Hey you! You know this next part, get in on it!


II: Friends in Low Places.

[The bars are that sweet shade of not-too-busy-not-too-slow. Richie slips in and out of the crowds with no difficulty and no recognition. He avoids Shades Darker (hasn't gone back to work yet), avoids places he knows. Sticking clean to the unfamiliar. This place wasn't home and even months later it was failing to pick up any kind of coziness to wilt back on.

But as determined as he is to stay solo and shrug into shadows, he can't help that rising sense of panic. Of emptiness. If he shuts his eyes too long he can hear those howling voices again. He's no man of god but those three days suspended in some ghastly in-between place have left him with doubts. There doesn't have to be a god for there to be a hell.

He doesn't want to keep marinating on it. Desperate and suddenly shaking in the hands, he moves to take a seat at the bar. Someone's just settled in and made an order. Richie slips coins on the counter.]

Make it two. Put 'em both on my tab.


III: Take out your trash

[It would have done to exercise a touch of caution. Sadly he's long since parted ways with the word for the evening. Still frightened, still angry, still too squeamish to go see the people he used to know, Richie's spent the night skipping from bar to bar. To back hall. To alley. He's had a hell of a lot to drink. Smoked something he didn't know the name of, took a couple pills that were offered with glitzy promises for whatever coin he could spare. He'd had a fair bit to spare and lord, it all flew out of his hands like your Auntie's cockatiel making a break for the open window. And he got his party, his fun and his romp and his blissful cloud of forgetfulness. For a few hours, he wasn't Richie Tozier at all. He'd drifted and wandered and basked in the blank beauty of a world he didn't comprehend.

And the journey ended with him folded up in a cobblestone alley. His head lies knocked back against the building's side, legs crooked to the side as he sleeps deep. It's frigid cold, he has the coat and gloves and boots, but passing out sometime around four am with no hurry for shelter leaves him as cold and stiff as a statue. A nasty shock for anyone taking a nighttime stroll or hustling about in the break of dawn.]


IV: Flona Cove- wildcard-ish

[Eventually, even the city itself seems to press in around him like a vice. He'd made the trip out to the Cove a few times, once with the herd for that festival and again with the two girls to check on those dead birds. The train ride over makes him smile, thinking of the way Ann and Haru had gossiped and giggled. The spark is fleeting. He exits the train in the same silent stupor he'd boarded it with.

He'll spend the day exploring. At the beach, he might take out a boat just for kicks, pretend it's January in California and he's got to hit the water before he forgets which coast he's living on. He might check out the tourist traps. Wind up in a gambling hall for shits and giggles. Or he might drift to that little cave with the cool pool, just to sit and think and fill the air with swilling smoke as he works through yet another pack for the day.]


V: Homecoming - closed to previous cr

[It takes a lot longer than he'd be proud to admit. Richie wasn't brave by nature, particularly not when it came to making the big breaks and mends. He was better at playing shit off like nothing mattered and all he cared for was getting his chucks in before meeting his Maker.

Well he went to do it didn't he? And that fucker hadn't showed. Now he's back on soil, and he's wasted a lot of time skirting the small issue of his miraculous return.

Eventually, he figures he ought to make a few rounds. House calls, then.

The knock at the door only comes after two minutes of fussing and a near abandoment of the whole plan. He'd slinked about five steps away before the guilt got the better of him and he finally could raise knuckles to the wood of that door. When it opens, he stands in the frame of it stiffly. His smile is wan and his hands stick doggedly to his pockets. He can't even use his own voice to say hello, coward that he is.]

Howdy partner.

Comments

this will not stand

[summertimeblues]

[Jimi Hendrix might be wailing on about a Voodoo Child, voice booming from the grave and out into the hall as the door blows wide for Boxer, but the sight inside is anything but groovy. The shiner is wet (there's a pack of ice clutched in one white knuckled hand) and rosy red, swelling up over the bone of his slender cheek. He's looking like he crawled out of the coffin just yesterday. Waxen skin and blackened eyes, blinking bleary at the figure in the hall.]

...Boxer. [The specter cuts a lazy grin and leans hard on that hand nailed to the door frame. The smell releases into the hall same as the tunes, burnt leaves and something bitter. He's essentially reliving college. Throw a couple of hardcovers on the table, get a girl in gogo boots on the couch, and baby you'd have one for the yearbooks.] No time's a bad time when it's spent in good company. Isn't that right?

[He evacuates the doorway, waving the larger man in. His gait is strange. There's the lumber of a zombie to it, and yet also the floating listlessness of a ghost. Richie's pressing the ice to his head as he goes, clapping a hand to the man's shoulder.]

Real glad to see you, cuz. I'm...Jesus, your lady wasn't so sweet on me earlier. I think I spooked her. Should I have sent a card? What do you do, what's the custom when you gotta slink back to life after the funeral's done? I think I fucked it all up.

(ง •̀_•́)ง

[desistor]

[What a...mess. Place doesn't have the same post-kidnapping clutter anymore, but it's been overwritten wholesale by the haze of the self-pity bender. Can't say it seems out of character, though all things considered, the lazy smile in the loose welcome is more than a little jarring.]

I'll let you know when I figure it out.

[(Still kind of working on the alive thing, sort of. But even as he is...asking your lover to wrench the thing that killed you out of your cooling body probably wasn't the best angle, either.)

Richie invites him in, so he closes the door carefully behind him and turns the lock. Follows into the familiar space to get a better look at the man and the state of him but doesn't move to make himself comfortable. (In the back of his attention the Transistor is running little readouts on BAC and THC and an >air quality: low that almost feels kind of passive aggressive, but mostly he ignores them in favor of studying Richie's bruised eyes and zombie walk.) It's a pretty pitiful look on him all around, even if it's a sight better than the one he'd had rattled into him last. Someone needed to cut you off ages ago, bud. Maybe that was the point.

He's as guilty as anyone can be of making light of your own untimely death. But still, the little trickle of impatience that he'd resisted in regard to Richie's own brand of avoidance gains, just a bit, as he turns over the casual question. Mildly, if pointedly—]

Head's up seems like a good start.

">air quality: low" is my new favourite tag line

[summertimeblues]

[Richie does slow at the backhanded advice. He has enough werewithal to look ashamed there, turning to face the larger man with the sad sack of ice still cradled to his cheek.]

...I don't think I would have made it through "Hello."

[And how. He wasn't sure he'd been ready to come back even now. Hence the stub-ended blunt dying in his ashtray, the loud music and the liquor bottles emptied by the recycling bin.

Richie drops into an armchair. He looks rather like a ragdoll, limp limbed and thin. Haphazard. Boxer's got the whole couch to himself if he wants to take it.]

This is nonsense, but I want to ask if you need anything. Are you sure you can't...I feel like a crappy host if I don't try to accommodate you. [Richie winces. Worrying his lip. He draws the pack away and drops it into an emptied candy dish on the end table.]

I'll be honest, I'm glad you came by. I wanted to...ask you. A few things. [He leans forward, fingers interlaced and pressed against his mouth. Pensive. Fearful even.] Outside of the other guys that woke up, you might be the only one I know that's been through this. Different edition, different deal, maybe, but that body's not your own, is it?

[His eyes slide over Boxer's face. Rough and tumble bloke, he'd thought it from the beginning. Scar over his nose. Bandages over the knuckles. Richie unfurls his own hand. There's a long scar over the palm. It's his babyhood blood pact, cut up your hands and vow to return, you're all bleeding so you know it's for serious. Richie runs a finger down the line, methodical and distant.]

It looks like mine. I've got what I came in with. Surgical stuff. Old scrapes and such. But I wasn't looking so clean when I went. Was I?

I'm pretty pleased with it, ngl.

[desistor]

[Sorry, bud. He's honestly happy to see him alive, really does understand the impulses that took him so long to show his face. (He gets it. Really does. Not wanting to rush through the working your shit out. Even the selfish hesitance that comes with showing your face if you can't keep from showing your hand at the same time. But if you can't do the latter without the former, then it just becomes a matter of what you're going to be prioritizing. When he remembers the pall it cast over the place, the rattle it put in Yusuke, the angry way Red regretted their arguments—well, he can be a little selfish, too. Nothing more frustrating to deal with than your own flaws mirrored back at you.)

But it's a shortlived jab. He takes the invitation to settle in with an ironic little cant of his head that's mostly just charmed that Richie still bothers worrying about doing the host thing on his account. With a clear don't-bother-I'm-good in his voice—]

You could pour me a drink if it would make you feel better.

[Even if it wouldn't do him much good to try and drink it. Maybe it would make the hazy smoke air and the muted mood a little less awkward. Like this was never a life and death visit at all. The cloth Rich is cut from is Cloudbank enough that it could even feel a little more like home. (Like any minute and they'll ease onto more familiar topics. Kicking back in Goldwalk and talking about the Channel climbing unexpectedly in the polls (largely, they say, by an unexpected showing of habitual nonvoters.) Placing bets on who's going to take the pennant game. The precinct announcing that Henter Jallaford's retired to the Country.)

He takes the corner of the couch that's closest to where Richie's gone and sprawled himself out and sets the Transistor to lean beside him on the arm of it. The navigation of it is near-thoughtless, by now—even when he's not watching from inside the thing (still a sizable and not always predictable fraction of his day, though he tries not to make that obvious to anyone who doesn't need to know it,) he has to keep it close at hand, lest he risk a premature overload and a prolonged stay inside. So it's not something he has the luxury of not addressing at all, not once someone hangs around him long enough to ask the right questions, or happens on him at the wrong time or when he's had the right kind of bad luck. Still, he avoids talking too close to it. Defers the explanations, offers them in wry and vague and self-effacing fragments. And mostly people are fine to let that lie. Either because they can't be bothered to remember to call him out on it, or they like him well enough to respect his privacy.

This is neither, because it's not really about him in the end. Which is, perhaps, part of what makes it easier to answer. He leans over to brace his elbows against his knees and watch Richie fidget.]

...not so much, no.

[On either account. His body is where they left it. Processed into a neat pile of stark white blocks, the last he'd seen it. Whatever temporary substitution the Transistor cobbles up for him, rendering in and blinking out these days with equal impermanence, it's...something else. And Richie's, at the end... He can't know for sure if Rich knows that Yusuke had roped him in to help with the unfortunate business of his untimely death. But that seems like a pretty pointed question. After a moment to let that settle—]

Sounds like it bothers you.

[Right? Honest leading question. He won't be offended, promise.]