doodilydoo: (Default)
Pickles (the Drummer) ([personal profile] doodilydoo) wrote2022-10-01 09:13 pm

[sail] tonight, i'm gonna burn down the garage.

Who: "Sharky" and...
Where: ???
What: Wouldn't you like to know, weather boy?
When: October 5th - ???

[OCTOBER FIFTH.]
[Sharky wakes up an hour after Pratt leaves, still fucked up, nauseous, and reeling from what feels like a decade's worth of good memories crammed into one night. It's almost enough to make him throw up when he sees the room bedecked the room with lights. Is it possible to be so overcome with emotion that you vomit? It definitely feels that way, as Sharky lurches out of bed and staggers into the bathroom to deal with the immediate nausea.

Mistake number one is not falling back asleep after he's done booting. But as he stumbles back to bed, he finds himself reaching for the shoe-box of pictures for a little goodnight nostalgia. The box isn't where it should be, and a quick look around tells him that it's nowhere Pratt would leave it. He remembers shoving it aside at one point, maybe throwing his shirt on top of it? Which means it's probably still sitting up there in the club, abandoned and possibly thrown out with the trash.

Mistake number two is not texting Pratt to go and get the photos for him. The dude's already done enough, Sharky figures, and besides, walking is supposed to help sober you up. He's starting to think that, you know, maybe carrying water around and limiting his drinking to the latter eight hours of the day... was a really fucking good idea, and why the fuck isn't he doing more of that? Right now, he feels fucking awful. How did he do this every day before the camping trip? Holy shit. Is he an alcoholic??? He thought that it skipped a generation, though!

Sharky takes the elevator up to the promenade, bleary-eyed and chugging down water in a frankly reckless manner. It's that weird, empty hour before sunrise, too early for the early-risers and too late for most of the night-owls, and so the whole place is almost completely dead. Rischie is the worst of them all, bland dance music echoing in the empty club, and Sharky quickly picks the shoe-box out of the leftover garbage lying around. The creepy, all-eyes-on-me vibe follows him the whole way out.

The elevator makes a weird noise when he pushes the call button, the grinding, squealing sound of an unmaintained piece of machinery. Sharky knows the ship isn't repairing itself, so he decides to be smart and avoid the potential death drop. It would suck to die in what amounts to a bad trip to Disneyland.

And so, we arrive at mistake number three: the stairs.

Sharky gets from deck five to deck three with no problem. The stairwell is even emptier and stranger than the promenade had been, so he finds himself singing to himself under his breath as he goes. "Mmm-mm-hmm, woman's man, no time to talk; music loud and women warm, I've been kicked around since I was born..."

Singing leads to dancing, and dancing leads to him gleefully stepping off the landing, singing, "Life goin' nooo-where, somebody help me--!"

And it's about then that he realizes he missed the next step in the staircase. His ankle buckles as he goes down too hard, too fast, and he pitches forward. In the half-second before his head hits the landing, he laments the fact that his first death on the ship is going to be falling down the stairs. The thought that he might not die immediately when his neck snaps doesn't occur to him until it happens, leaving him momentarily gasping in white-hot pain and searing panic.

And then, something fucking spooky happens.

Pickles could not for the life of him tell you what the fuck just happened, but he knows for a fact it was spooky as shit. In the endless, yawning chasm of nothingness that had been his existence for as long as... forever... he had felt something. Or seen something. Or -- he can't remember, can't remember anything other than the dizzying giddiness of blinding bright lights and a rattling respiratory system, gasping for air in some stranger's body until, at last, he found himself sitting up.

And now he's here, slumped against the stairs, one side of his face a bright-hot flare of agonizing, delicious pain, a tooth laying out among the scattered photographs around him. He feels like he just got hit by a truck, and then he laughs because fuck, it feels so good. It takes him a solid five minutes before he can finally gather enough awareness to gather up the pictures, staggering to the feet he's wearing -- his feet. And then he makes his teetering, hungover way back to the room that he knows, somehow, belongs to this body. He needs time to think, and if he sits here too long, Friday's gonna show up and ruin everything.]
brightlostthing: (neutral)

[personal profile] brightlostthing 2022-10-04 12:23 pm (UTC)(link)
Maybe it is? That is to say, something- something changed, didn't it? People die here or come very close to it all the time and this hasn't happened before, has it? Or I don't think it has. Though I suppose no-one would know if they were a good enough actor.

[ He shakes his head, frowning like just trying to connect the dots is taking all the power of every braincell he ever had ]

Doesn't matter. The point is, darling, that I certainly never had the chance to get out before, so maybe whatever let that happen, also means we won't get put back any time soon.

So if we just... Try not to get caught maybe it'll be okay?

[...]

You should try again to get your Toki back, darling. There's got to be other people you could take down just as easily with that big strong body of yours. [ wink ]
brightlostthing: (dead stare)

[personal profile] brightlostthing 2022-10-05 09:04 am (UTC)(link)
[ To be fair, Ginger had meant "your" as in "your friend". Well. Maybe a little bit the other thing too. But mostly as in friend. ]

So try it as many times as it takes, darling. Not a single ruddy one of us deserves that- that nothingness and I think it's about time these... People [ he all but spits it ] had their turn at it. Don't you think, darling?
brightlostthing: (sideways smile?)

[personal profile] brightlostthing 2022-10-05 11:23 am (UTC)(link)
No more than that certainly. Barely any time at all. It's the perfect crime, darling.

[ Ginger's formed a sum total of One (1) deep interpersonal bond in his entire life, and all it taught him was that they're pointless and only cause more pain in the long run. So as far as he's concerned it's not possible for anyone on the boat to know or care enough about someone to notice anything wrong. ]

So long as we keep Friday busy, darling, it'll be delightfully simple
brightlostthing: (thoughtful?)

[personal profile] brightlostthing 2022-10-07 03:29 am (UTC)(link)
Precisely!

[ Ginger finally pulls himself onto his feet, and- good god he does not remember Ernest Giles being so tremendously tall. That's going to take some getting used to. How does he not bash his head on doorways constantly?

Right. Focus. What were they talking about?
Doesn't matter because would you look at that face. Ouch. ]


Darling, what on earth have you done to yourself? If anything's going to get us caught it's that, you look like you've been in the wars.
brightlostthing: (dead stare)

[personal profile] brightlostthing 2022-10-07 07:33 am (UTC)(link)
[ Ginger frowns and pokes a little at Pickles's - Sharky's? - face. The swelling isn't going to go down anytime soon. Not soon enough to not get questioned anyway, and Ginger isn't going to go down because of a simple question with a really stupid answer. He just isn't.

He doesn't have his own contracts, can't make a hangover cookie or heal small injuries in the way he used to, but he does have- Oh. Gross.
Fiiiine.

Never let it be said that Ginger D'Abernon doesn't help people in need. Even if it's wholly for his own benefit. It's just a shame it comes at cost to him that he hates almost as much.

Convenient how there's plenty of sharp ceramic shards around, because Ginger picks one of the larger ones from the floor, and what precisely he does with it, well, that doesn't matter. What matters is the few drops of blood he smears over Pickles's cheek with his thumb, and the way the swelling and any pain there is drawn out and fades away almost instantly. In fact, all the injuries disappear as if they'd had weeks or months to heal, rather than mere moments. ]


There, darling, that's better. Don't do it again, or I'll make it worse instead.

[ And please, please pay no mind to the absolutely abysmal job he's doing of hiding the pain from his own newly injured arm.
It will pass.
Eventually. ]
Edited 2022-10-07 07:40 (UTC)
brightlostthing: (neutral)

[personal profile] brightlostthing 2022-10-09 12:40 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh you owe me darling, don't you dare think you don't.

[ Some might argue that the scales of debt are entirely equal, given that Ginger wouldn't even have been able to heal Pickles if he hadn't brained Giles first. But Ginger is not one of those people. He fucking hates pain, so that rather tips the scales in his favour as he sees it.

Still, Pickles is right, he's going to need to do something about it. The wound won't heal with anything other than time, but he can stop the bleeding and get it hidden away. Ossie's the only one who's likely to see it after that, and it won't take much doctoring of the truth to allay his concern.

So of to the infirmary with him, for bandages and some of the really good painkillers. Preferably before Pickles sees him cry. Not that Pickles hasn't likely seen him cry a thousand times already, that's well and truly beside the point, and anyway, that was before they got new bodies. That resets the count. Right? ]