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ph_logs2025-05-21 07:05 pm
pumpkinhollow) wrote in ph_logs2025-05-21 07:05 pm
Entry tags:
May Event - All Too Familiar
May Event - All Too Familiar
Content Warnings: Walking dead, character deaths, potential for gore | Special Thanks to Meghan and Kalineh
It was a fine spring day when mysterious letters began cropping up all over Pumpkin Hollow. Letters whose apparent senders do not remember writing them, whose recipients or discoverers were harmed by reading them. Eventually these mysteries, though still unsolved, come to a quiet halt as stealthily as they began, but not before a mail carrier in a cowboy hat trots out to Elsie’s tree with a letter in hand, unmarked aside from being addressed to her.
Elsie,
River la Croix has been hiding something in her forge for a while now. It is called the Book of the Dead. In its pages are hundreds of spells from across time and space with the power to give life to those no longer with us.
Your father is doing his best to revive your mother. But this island’s barrier is blocking his will, resisting his magic. I can no longer watch you suffer in solitude when a solution exists. All you have to do is decipher the text, and its powers are yours. Your mother will be returned to you.
River does not want to part with it. She will become suspicious of you if you ask, and it will become harder to acquire it. You will have to take it without her notice by levitating it out of her forge. She, like many others, is fearful of the Book’s power. This fear isn’t entirely unwarranted for them, but for you, your connection to the Feywilds’ magic will be enough to grant you access to that otherworldly power.
Good luck, and all my love to your dear mother when she returns.
Fond regards,
A friend
Could this be it? Could this be the miracle she's been waiting for? Hope swells painfully in her chest as she clutches the note close. She mustn't celebrate too early. She still needs to get the book. At least her mysterious friend has already told her where to find it. Her jaw sets in a look of determination, and she speeds away into the dusk.
It doesn't take long to reach the forge. River has defended it well, but Elsie slips into her own shadow and sneaks beneath the door without so much as a whisper of sound. Only her hand extends from the puddle of shadow on the floor inside, like a disembodied arm hovering before the flames. Mustering her will, she reaches out to the ancient book and commands the winds to lift it. Sweat beads her shadowy brow while she concentrates, the flames flicker and dance around the slowly levitating book. Just a little more, a little more… There!
It's heavy in her hand, and remarkably cool to the touch despite having been pulled from the fire. She retracts her arm and the book back into her shadow and slips out the way she came. Her heart thumps in her chest as she races back to the safety of her tree. To her mother, who will soon be able to wrap flesh and blood arms around her like she once did. All that's left now is to read. Her friends have been teaching her how. Her mother will be so proud of her.
Carefully now, she opens the book, feeling her skin crawl as a sudden unease grips her very core. No, she will not be deterred. The language is unlike any she's ever seen. The letters, if indeed they can be called that, feel jagged and painful to her mind. Still, she will Not Give Up. She screws her eyes shut, thinks of her mother, and holds tight to her desperate hope to be reunited.
When her eyes reopen to behold the page before her, understanding strikes like lightning. Suddenly, she knows she can speak the words. As they escape her mouth, an unknown magic swells into the space around her, then beyond her. The ground shakes. The air turns foul. And as the trinkets in Elsie’s tree chime together in the unsettling breeze, ringing out with notes more sour than usual, it quickly becomes clear that the advice she received was not from any friend.
The forms of people begin to pry themselves loose from the ground all over town, as if emerging from water, leaving the ground unbroken as they lift themselves out of the ground. They bear horrid injuries, shambling along grotesquely, telling a story of death. However, these are not skeletons from the graveyard, housing the souls of long-dead locals. These are things of flesh and blood, however exposed they might be, wearing newer faces.
Much newer.
Since the barrier went up, many people have died, only to have their bodies vanish and replaced by a new one. Those bodies now walk the town, seeking to unleash a wrath brought on by the corrupted magic of the Necronomicon. Anyone who has died inside the barrier will have a violent, undead copy of themself representing each death wandering the island looking to increase their ranks. Which means that there will be many, many, many Yoricks.
Destroyed copies will remain destroyed for the standard overnight period of any other person. But there are too many of them to defeat this way, and their destruction is impermanent. Thankfully, help is on the way!
In the midst of the undead and their attack on the citizens of Pumpkin Hollow, tiny glimmers of hope appear in the form of folded paper birds. The little gold birds flit from fighter to fighter, small whispers promising that if enough enemies can be felled then the High Priestess can intervene. The necessary number is unknown, but if a bird alights upon someone, they will feel their weariness vanish for a short time, and perhaps, should she feel like it, they may receive a temporary boon to use against the undead.
Eventually the High Priestess will show herself, making good on the promises of the little birds. With a smile, her magic will wrap around the remaining undead, returning them to the unseen graves and binding them into Death once more, leaving the living to pick up the pieces.
She gleefully rips open that letter, hoping it's another message from her father. It isn't and, at first, she's crushed. But only until she starts to actually read it.
Elsie,
River la Croix has been hiding something in her forge for a while now. It is called the Book of the Dead. In its pages are hundreds of spells from across time and space with the power to give life to those no longer with us.
Your father is doing his best to revive your mother. But this island’s barrier is blocking his will, resisting his magic. I can no longer watch you suffer in solitude when a solution exists. All you have to do is decipher the text, and its powers are yours. Your mother will be returned to you.
River does not want to part with it. She will become suspicious of you if you ask, and it will become harder to acquire it. You will have to take it without her notice by levitating it out of her forge. She, like many others, is fearful of the Book’s power. This fear isn’t entirely unwarranted for them, but for you, your connection to the Feywilds’ magic will be enough to grant you access to that otherworldly power.
Good luck, and all my love to your dear mother when she returns.
Fond regards,
A friend
Could this be it? Could this be the miracle she's been waiting for? Hope swells painfully in her chest as she clutches the note close. She mustn't celebrate too early. She still needs to get the book. At least her mysterious friend has already told her where to find it. Her jaw sets in a look of determination, and she speeds away into the dusk.
It doesn't take long to reach the forge. River has defended it well, but Elsie slips into her own shadow and sneaks beneath the door without so much as a whisper of sound. Only her hand extends from the puddle of shadow on the floor inside, like a disembodied arm hovering before the flames. Mustering her will, she reaches out to the ancient book and commands the winds to lift it. Sweat beads her shadowy brow while she concentrates, the flames flicker and dance around the slowly levitating book. Just a little more, a little more… There!
It's heavy in her hand, and remarkably cool to the touch despite having been pulled from the fire. She retracts her arm and the book back into her shadow and slips out the way she came. Her heart thumps in her chest as she races back to the safety of her tree. To her mother, who will soon be able to wrap flesh and blood arms around her like she once did. All that's left now is to read. Her friends have been teaching her how. Her mother will be so proud of her.
Carefully now, she opens the book, feeling her skin crawl as a sudden unease grips her very core. No, she will not be deterred. The language is unlike any she's ever seen. The letters, if indeed they can be called that, feel jagged and painful to her mind. Still, she will Not Give Up. She screws her eyes shut, thinks of her mother, and holds tight to her desperate hope to be reunited.
When her eyes reopen to behold the page before her, understanding strikes like lightning. Suddenly, she knows she can speak the words. As they escape her mouth, an unknown magic swells into the space around her, then beyond her. The ground shakes. The air turns foul. And as the trinkets in Elsie’s tree chime together in the unsettling breeze, ringing out with notes more sour than usual, it quickly becomes clear that the advice she received was not from any friend.
The forms of people begin to pry themselves loose from the ground all over town, as if emerging from water, leaving the ground unbroken as they lift themselves out of the ground. They bear horrid injuries, shambling along grotesquely, telling a story of death. However, these are not skeletons from the graveyard, housing the souls of long-dead locals. These are things of flesh and blood, however exposed they might be, wearing newer faces.
Much newer.
Since the barrier went up, many people have died, only to have their bodies vanish and replaced by a new one. Those bodies now walk the town, seeking to unleash a wrath brought on by the corrupted magic of the Necronomicon. Anyone who has died inside the barrier will have a violent, undead copy of themself representing each death wandering the island looking to increase their ranks. Which means that there will be many, many, many Yoricks.
Destroyed copies will remain destroyed for the standard overnight period of any other person. But there are too many of them to defeat this way, and their destruction is impermanent. Thankfully, help is on the way!
In the midst of the undead and their attack on the citizens of Pumpkin Hollow, tiny glimmers of hope appear in the form of folded paper birds. The little gold birds flit from fighter to fighter, small whispers promising that if enough enemies can be felled then the High Priestess can intervene. The necessary number is unknown, but if a bird alights upon someone, they will feel their weariness vanish for a short time, and perhaps, should she feel like it, they may receive a temporary boon to use against the undead.
Eventually the High Priestess will show herself, making good on the promises of the little birds. With a smile, her magic will wrap around the remaining undead, returning them to the unseen graves and binding them into Death once more, leaving the living to pick up the pieces.
no subject
Of course. What a simple, natural thing. If Mulcahy knew of Pyotr before he’d seen what his work does to a person, he can’t say he wouldn’t have turned it down. He still might not. He remembers the temporary relief granted by Mortanne and Zivia, the lifting of his burdens and the tempering—but not removing—of his emotions. But. Oh, Gaeta. Look at him. Mulcahy doesn’t know how the power of a disheveled painter matches up to the work of the divine.
(His paranoid heart whispers, someone else did it better. No wonder he stopped coming.)
He places a hand softly on Gaeta’s shoulder. “Does it hurt?”
no subject
But though his heart can't respond very well to Mulcahy's touch, his body can. It's... nice. Comforting. A body can remember the two of them side by side on Mulcahy's couch, or Gaeta's, or in the green room of Efrain's pocket dimension. He leans into it with a quiet sigh of something almost like relief.
"It's uncomfortable," he says, "but not painful. Either way, it doesn't take very long. And then..." A slight shrug. "I can sleep. And exist."
no subject
“Of course. I understand.” He raises his head again. “I’ve met Mortanne. The Lady of Death. We spoke, and when we did, I allowed her to lift my burdens for a time. It felt like I could breathe again all of a sudden; like… like I had been screaming for years, and could finally catch my breath.”
A pause.
“… What are you left with, after Pyotr… takes your emotions?”
no subject
He looks down at his hands. Rubs away a smear of blood.
Quieter, and still thoughtful, "I don't know if it feels like catching my breath, but it does feel like I'm capable of existing again. Like I used to before the Colonies fell."
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He inverts the wet washcloth to its clean side. Carefully, he takes Gaeta’s hand, and wipes away at the blood.
“I’ll admit, I’m still not quite sure about how I feel about this. But. I’m… very glad, that you’ve found something that works for you.”
He just wishes he were a part of it.
no subject
"I'm not sure how sustainable it is, is the problem," he admits quietly. "When the emotions come back, they're... worse. Panic attacks for hours. Nightmares that're more vivid than usual. It was like that with the morpha sometimes, too. I think..." Another soft sigh. "I'd seek it out sometimes even when I didn't strictly need it for my leg. The pain wasn't only physical."
How easy it is to be forthright about that. The words slip out with so little hesitation, none of his usual quiet agonizing over how much to say. Shame is not even a seedling yet: Gaeta feels no need to hold his tongue for worry of someone turning their back on him. Or upsetting whoever he's talking to; spurring grief or pity just by virtue of his existence.
"Anyway," vaguely, "what does it say that I only feel like I can live if I'm not feeling anything at all?"
no subject
“Of course you can think when the emotions are gone, if that’s all that’s left. But you were not made with only half of you in mind.“
He reaches up with the cloth, gently blotting the blood from Gaeta’s face.
“When Mortanne gave my burdens back to me, I did not stagger under the weight; having caught my breath, I felt better suited to carry them again. But I’m not sure if I can be said to be truly living, either. Not well. I pantomime it, on my best days. But I… I’m trying.”
He wipes Gaeta’s forehead, thumb brushing over his hairline. “I don’t know the answer to your question. But. If neither of us know how to live, I think… well. I would like to figure it out with you. If. If you would have me.”
no subject
When he feels the washcloth lift away next, he wraps his hand around Mulcahy's fingers before they can move again. Gently, he lowers their hands. Clasps Mulcahy's between both of his.
If you'll have me. Of course I will, he wants to say, but how can he say it like a self-evident fact when he left Mulcahy alone for two months? Gods, he asked him to wait and then he didn't come back. Yet here the man is, waiting still, with the same soft patience that would wreck Gaeta's heart. And so often he has called Gaeta the stalwart one.
"Yes." Very soft. "I will." And another unsteady breath. "I do want that. I'm... I'm sorry I didn't come back."
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Is it that Gaeta is not as empty as he claims, or is it--? Is it because even with those few dregs, so little can do so much? Does he still love him so much?
(When the emotions come back, they're worse. Are they worse, or are they more? Does the love rise too?)
"You know now. It's alright." He reaches up to gently kiss his forehead. A little blessing for the repentant. "When this mess is over, come on out to me. I want to see you, in whatever light your heart is cast in and whatever shadows that torment you. I did not come to love only half of you."
no subject
Still, their roots are weak. When Gaeta pushes himself closer to rest his head on Mulcahy's shoulder -- ignoring the pop of dizzying pain at his temple, biting his tongue until it fades -- it's less like their moment in Efrain's domain than one of the nights, very, very early on, when Mulcahy woke him from a nightmare and Gaeta was simply too exhausted to keep his head up. But: he is here. He doesn't let go of Mulcahy's hand.
He's quiet for a while before he speaks: measured, but distant, as if he's only partly aware he's saying any of it aloud. "I've only been half a person for a while, I think. Even before I died. Maybe I wasn't made that way originally, but I was made that way eventually. I don't think I know how to live anymore. Just survive." His mouth twitches. "It's a pantomime, like you said. Doesn't feel like I'm holding up my end of the deal with Mortanne if this is my second chance. I thought I might have a different second chance back home, but, no, this is it. This. This is what she meant, not..."
Gaeta trails off.
"...I still haven't told you how I died."
no subject
Gaeta leans on him. Gaeta holds his hand, and it as much a balm now as it was the first time. He reminds himself to trust him.
"No. I don't believe you did."
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Simply said, with no change in tone.
"My commanding officer proposed allying with a Cylon faction and grafting some of their technology onto Galactica. You have to understand. One of the only reasons we survived the initial attacks is because she's an antique. We weren't able to install a system upgrade that the Cylons used as a backdoor to disable every other ship in the Fleet. And now..." He makes a loose gesture with the hand not holding Mulcahy's. "This. I'd just come back from the Raptor. I was trying to explain. But nobody would listen. It was... hypoxia, they said. In a condition like that, I couldn't trust my senses, anything I heard or saw."
A bitter snort.
"Because that would jeopardize the alliance, you see. If anyone else found out a Cylon they trusted had killed two hundred people and then slaughtered everyone except me onboard a Fleet shuttle. So... I spoke with someone on the civilian side who had experience with leading rebellions. We worked together. He targeted the president, I targeted the Admiral."
Gaeta examines their clasped hands. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders when Mulcahy will pull away. Probably soon, he thinks. If only he'd told him sooner, before the complication of love joined the equation.
"Obviously it failed. I really didn't think it would, at first. I thought we had a chance; it's a chance I'd take again if I had to. The final charges, once they regained control of the Fleet, were mutiny and treason -- and I've always said I'll allow the first, but not the second." He shrugs. "Anyway... that was that. I got here tied up at the end of a launch tube in front of a firing squad. That's where I'll go whenever we can go back."
no subject
We. As he settles against where Gaeta folds into his form, hands clutched, turning to place a kiss feather-light to the top of his head of handsome curled hair. He does this expecting little to nothing back. It is not his first act of devotion to no response. We.
“It’s not the same. But if I go back, it’ll be to Korea, to the war hospital, and… there is just no possibility that I will not receive a Section 8. Er. A discharge, on grounds of insanity. And when I am sent home, it will be a world of electricity and noise, and people who… simply don’t know what it’s like. I’ve seen what will happen to me; the wars of my world have created hundreds of thousands of veterans who just do not make it after they go home. It’s not their fault, but they can’t. I have few friends and even fewer family back home, and without being able to consistently work, I’ll… well.”
He breathes. “It has been a decade since last I was home. I have seen far too much to go back. I am lost to it, I know.”
Mulcahy’s other hand comes to lie on Gaeta’s. “So it appears that would make two of us.”
no subject
Yet Mulcahy does not pull away, but says we. In the face of desolation waiting for them both on the other side of the barrier -- and it does not matter if Mulcahy's isn't quite the same when it's still a world lost and a life in ruin -- he takes Gaeta's hand. Two months of abandonment, a confession that Gaeta's a mutineer, and still: we.
"Oh, gods," he sighs on a long, tired breath. "I'm such an idiot."
no subject
...
"Why do you say so?"
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That's a tangent, he realizes. He's starting to ramble. (Has been rambling.) With effort, and another small wince as he shifts his head again, he tries to pull himself back on track.
"I've never been great with people, but I got worse after she left, I think. Except with you. You..." He taps Mulcahy's hand. "You're always there. I've always known I can trust you even when I can't trust anybody else. If I lost you, it wouldn't have been because the worlds ended, or you died, or left on the ferry, or anything else. It would've just been because I'm a frakking idiot who's always convinced I am and will be alone, even when someone I love is right there."
Godsdammit.
no subject
Maybe he should be more of a lover in this moment, but he cannot help the teacher in him. Quietly, still leaning against him, still holding his hands, the lonely priest speaks.
“Remember this moment, then. The answer to losing someone is not to prevent it from happening again; it will always happen again. You must love more people even harder. When they go, they will go loved, and those left behind will survive with each other. And you can always find someone. You’re still very young, Gaeta, and there are bounds of new and strange people to meet; there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And mine.”
no subject
Always, that seems to be Mulcahy's solution: to greet a loss with abundance. More mercy. More love. More life. He looks up at the universe and sees its vastness as something to celebrate, because there is possibility there. And maybe there is. Living half a life has made Gaeta's world so small; deliberately excising pieces of himself has crushed it smaller yet.
But Gaeta can remember looking up at the stars in their shared nightmare and whispering, it's beautiful.
"I don't know how you do it." Very soft; almost marveling, under that blunted veil. "Keep putting that kind of hope into the universe. I used to be able to. But now it's like everything... sensitized too much. I couldn't handle doing that over and over again."
no subject
His gaze is far away, over the lobby of the library. “Even in Korea, where one body was enough to leave a man with a lifetime’s worth of nightmares, and we processed thousands… we laughed. Quite a lot. We had no shortage of pranksters and jokesters, and I marveled at them. I marveled at the stories of the soldiers who passed through our unit, the lives so different from mine that they lead… language teachers, dam engineers, florists. And all the moments they were so… kind. Even here. Even when everyone was suffering their own battles. Over and over again, I saw people unable to do anything but be kind to another person. It doesn’t feel like hoping when I see beauty right in front of me.”
…
“And there were the insects,” he says, “and the sun, and the rain, and the plants that grew around us, even after the Army razed it with herbicides and pesticides. Each creature a precious child of—“ not Creation, Gaeta’s not Christian, “—of the Earth. The universe. Even in Korea, it rained.”
And then he points. He gestures to the people moving about, to those doing first aid, to those speaking softly to panicked voices, to those running about asking what else, what else can I do?
“Pay attention, Gaeta. Now that you’ve seen the very worst of what the world has to offer, watch the way in which we also choose, over and over again, to offer relief. Hope is the opposite to despair, but the cure to despair is not hope, just like the cure for sick is not healthy. You may fight to hold onto it, but if you’ve lost it, you can’t simply will it into existence; you have to find something else that will get you there. From what I can tell, I believe that the cure to despair is awe.”
no subject
With everyone scarred and strained to breaking, the small kindnesses on Galactica never quite felt like this. Not deliberate acts -- just desperate grasps at normalcy like the reflexive spasms of something dying. Still, he thinks of Triad games in the rec room; Dee and him shooting the shit on a closed comm line when they were both on duty, talking about old TV shows, Dee inventing terrible new plot lines just to make Gaeta groan; stolen moments with Louis in the rare private corners of the battlestar. Little gifts passed between soldiers from the scrap: where are you from? I found this magazine with an article about your hometown. Ishay holding his hand the whole way through his amputation. How incredible, in hindsight, that anyone could be kind at all after such devastation.
"I never thought of it like that," he whispers. Curiosity is a close cousin of awe, and Gaeta has always had a scientist's curiosity for the universe. Just like any scientific breakthrough, it seems the most obvious, natural thing in the worlds, now that he's heard Mulcahy say it. "Of course. I remember -- " A small, self-deprecating huff. "I remember crying when I got on the ferry and could smell the ocean. I felt like that all the time when I first got here. Awe," he repeats, like he's tasting the word. "We're on a whole, living planet. And we're in a frakked-up little town where no matter how frakked up it gets, people still..."
They still smile and say hello. They extend a hand. They shield one another.
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Mulcahy watches them go.
"It's impossible for them not to," he remarks quietly. "Even in the Village, in the smallest ways we tried to offer each other a little relief. And a little relief has a remarkable resemblance to a lot."
no subject
"I wouldn't say it's impossible." No louder than Mulcahy. "But... I guess that makes it even more remarkable it happens at all. It didn't feel like relief on Galactica most of the time -- it felt like desperation, you know? Trying to pretend we were still a society. There were too many calculations to keep humanity alive and no margin for error."
cw blood/gore mention
Wisecracking as they were while the ambulances spilled blood off their floors when the doors opened. Counting how many double-dutch jumpropes you can get as you wait to hear back about a patient whose stomach they took out. Gaeta knows that only half of his nightmares are still about the Village.
"It just makes it all the more important, to be able to do such things when the world tries to make it that much harder."
no subject
"How rare and beautiful it is to even exist." He whispers it, too soft to have much of a melody; a filmy shadow of what he sang in the nightmare. (But still, he sings.) "I'm glad I met you. If there was no chance someone like you would ever be in the Fleet -- at least I met you here."
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"I'm simply glad to have met you at all. Certainly these are the best circumstances I could have done it under. There was... no helping anything that happened in Korea or after."
He squeezes Gaeta's hand back. "Sometimes here isn't much better. I'll have to leave soon, you know. There are others who need help. And I need to close the cemetery."
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wrapping