capeandcowllogs | oh no notto this shitto again

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oh no notto this shitto again

WHO: Next on SOAPNET is the Terra and Zelgadis show...
WHERE: MAC
WHEN: Tonight is fine
WARNINGS: this shitto again
SUMMARY: nobody in this log can communicate in a sane and rational way that can alleviate confusion
FORMAT: screaming

Sometimes people remembered dreams, plain as that. Sometimes people remembered dreams...vividly...sometimes. Seers and such, sure. And maybe the occasional post-traumatic stress-induced nightmare. Logical. The mind sometimes did that, be it as an omen or just as an after-effect of...

What the hell effect of what and why?!

If Lina bothered to ask him what was eating him one more time, Zelgadis was liable to throw himself off the building. Instead, he'd stormed out in his not-unusual, over-dramatic huff for whenever something wasn't to his liking and he couldn't fix it. Straight to the roof. To throw himself off if need be, sure, but mostly just to get a clear head without any further prodding. Because it was just a stupid dream. Weird dreams weren't new around the City, after all, so...

So he had to try and rationalize that if it had been one of those weird dreams, either she was busy hiding out of sheer revulsion or she'd already gotten around to chucking herself off the roof. Possible. Morbid, but possible.

"Grrughh." He dug the heels of his palms into his eyes, slowly dragging his hands down the sides of his face. Sleep wasn't easy anymore. Nothing was easy anymore. What the hell was up with that? It was as if the universe realized he'd gotten the one thing he'd longed for after so many years and decided that rather than let him live and be happy, he'd have to suffer sevenfold over matters entirely unrelated. It was one thing after the other, getting more and more...just...just...!

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There were some days where Terra wanted nothing more than to throw herself off a tall building and go splattering along the concrete. She'd never managed to will herself to do it, of course — she was still in one piece, after all — but the option was always there. There were also days where Terra just preferred the illusion of open space granted by sitting along the ledge atop any given building, better able to see sky and ground without being jostled in this or that crowd.

Instances of the former were long since gone; these days, Terra just loitered on roofs because she preferred them. No inklings of suicide in her heart, despite Zelgadis's irrational expectations.

Tonight, despite the temperatures dipping past freezing in the dark, Terra sat comfortably on the eastern ledge of the MAC roof. She heard the door open, of course, but didn't need to turn around to know precisely who it was. Maybe he'd misplaced his books again.

Open was putting it lightly. He might as well've just fireballed the thing off and spared himself the wasted energy in slamming it open with a huff. Future huffiness was to be put on a temporary pause, though, because the second he was aware he wasn't alone, there was distaste. The second he realized who he wasn't alone with, there was a dread and the near-unshakable desire to flee.

Of course, the only things to be read off of his face were red and frazzled. Double-triple emphasis on both, because the magnitude of mortification that could be reached within the next few moments was even too high for Zelgadis to even fathom, let alone consider for too long before going cross-eyed and blacking out. Doing so was probably not the best idea for several reasons.

Instead, he seemed partial to simply standing there, clinging to the doorknob for support lest the aforementioned activity take place. Or he threw up. Whichever came first.

It was really hard to separate hallucination-Terra with currently-there-Terra.

It was the distinct lack of any sound or movement after said opening that caught her attention. More than a little confused, Terra turned where she sat, bracing gloved hands on the cold ledge. With the blue and orange casting of light, it was difficult to read the expression on his face.

It was probably a divine mercy she couldn't pick out the hue of it, either. Mildly worried (this was Zelgadis, after all), Terra tilted her head to the side and skipped straight from salutations to concern.

"Zelgadis?"

Part of him was braced for violence. Really. That's what all the other long-term female presences in his life had resorted to in a time of mortification or drama. Of course, Zelgadis had been mainly stone for previous occurrences, so he really ought to've been wholly braced if that thinking was true. Instead of rock, he was apparently some kind of jelly-based life form without bones, liable to wobble and drop to the ground at any second.

It was pretty unsettling to witness.

He apparently realized that at a point, between the burning of his palms as he relied on them for support and Terra's expression, because he started to straighten up as though his joints were wooden. He got there, though, and managed to be upright...still looked utterly flustered and out of sorts nonetheless. His mouth opened a little, but sounds didn't come out because there were no pre-thought words at the ready.

Well, none that he could utter and live, that is...

Unsettling was just the start of it. When Zelgadis hit the ground Terra was to her feet, unsteady from the speed and worry. Had something happened? Was he hurt? This wasn't like him at all... the shock of his fall, though prompting her up, kept her feet frozen in place. He was looking up at her again, dazed and gaping and silent, and only that thawed her path.

In the dim light her eyes searched for any sign of injury. He didn't look to be bleeding, and all his limbs were in place. Maybe he was ill? Maybe he was dying? With the violence of his arrival and the suddenness of his weakness, her mind raced down frantic paths. Maybe something had happened, and he'd been pushing at his limits just to find her? Even in her head Terra thought it didn't make much sense, but it wasn't like Zelgadis was providing any answers.

Kneeling where Zelgadis collapsed, Terra's expression was pulled tight with concern. He looked sick. "What's wrong?"

Surely nothing worse could happen with the object of Zelgadis' extraordinarily vivid (and not altogether horrible but nobody heard that from him) hallucinations in his personal space and breathing his air. Except for the dizziness and the dire need to throw up out of sheer mortification for every single millisecond he'd allowed his afflicted mind to stray. Perhaps it was just better to let her set him on fire and make it a faster death. A death with less vomiting.

But he couldn't just sit there forever and expect anything to solve itself. Had he truly been in trouble right away, she could've just kicked him down the stairs and seen what bones'd break and then finish off the rest of him or...something perhaps a bit less gruesome. Why was he imagining such horrible deaths for himself?

In any case, far as he could tell, her expression was rather devoid of any of the knowledge he had, which confirmed even moreso that yes. Yes, he was subject to a horrifyingly sensory dream (and how). And that uttering such aloud would probably result in spontaneous combustion.

"Nuh," he said, still dizzy and reeling with a million different trains of thought at once all set to collide. "Nothing." He cleared his throat, slowly trying to force himself to be marginally coherent. "Nothing, I just..." Uh. "Tripped...?"

"... Tripped."

That... was probably the most transparent lie Terra had ever heard. He'd been standing still, for one. For two through a hundred, it explained absolutely nothing. The concern momentarily ebbed back to show the full strength of her deadpan disbelief, but returned full force at the realization that he still looked awful.

"You look like you have something..." she offered tentatively, moving to press the flats of her knuckles against his forehead to gauge temperature.

Zelgadis wasn't exactly on the top of his game right then and there (obviously), and was slow to react to both her words and the incoming hand. When he did register said incoming hand, it was a little too late to do any dodging that didn't result in tumbling backwards or smacking his head against the door or otherwise making things entirely worse and more confusing on levels he couldn't begin to reckon for. Of course, there was absolutely no way he could allow said hand to succeed and pander to his entirely fictitious and overindulgent dreaming because that, too, opened up more outlets for confusion. On his part. And dammit, he was the one who had to live with himself!

So, emergency option. Zelgadis managed to lift up his hand fast enough for knuckles to graze his palm; he closed his hand over them and slowly lowered them, finding that his success wasn't exactly helping much, since his face was only redder for it. "N'it'sokay," he sputtered, a bit frantic. His mouth twitched, as if he was going to do something weird like smile it off, but his nature couldn't allow it and it just made him look even crazier. He didn't reflect on that much, however; he had to deal with the whole hand contact thing first, pushing her hand back to herself in an almost-not-quite fluid motion and releasing, fingers twitching and hovering in place for moments thereafter. Like they knew what the hell to do.

"I'm..." UH. "I'm just gonna...Gonna gHKK!" Rising to his feet was delayed by the uncomfortable CLANK of his head hitting the doorknob, sending him back down on his backside. "GAHGH! Dammit!" It hurt!

The more Zelgadis talked and reacted, the weirder and weirder the whole thing got. He was completely bonkers. It had long passed the point where he could deny something was wrong and have Terra believe him. Deflection did nothing more than one, confirm something was wrong, and two, refute her earlier idea that he'd been seeking her in the first place. Why had he come to the roof in the first place, she wondered, considering his condition.

CLANK and fall; Terra dropped the second knee to the ground, clamping one hand firmly on his shoulder to keep him from falling further (or backwards, down the staircase). Her other hand was aglow with power, and the hot pale light cast Zelgadis's red-painted and pain-skewed face into relief. Terra frowned, eyebrows knitting together.

"It's not okay." Her eyes and her stare were hard and unyielding, like stones condensed from pressure; unwavering.

Humiliated and mortified. Zelgadis wasn't doing very good at all in such a short period of time. Records were probably being broken that were better left to other inept teenagers. More and more, as Terra continued just being normal Terra, Zelgadis felt a fool. There was no way at all that he was the only one to dream up something like that, but he was probably the only one to have reacted and dealt with it so poorly. The fact that he'd never done so in his life wasn't an excuse, since never didn't really count. It was just...different than times before. Terrifyingly so.

He couldn't even look at her, grimacing miserably down at the ground as his head was gradually being freed from the dull throb of his stupidity-made-physical. The spell's effect did alleviate enough of his panic- and embarrassment-induced flush that he could actually think without having a minor meltdown, but he wasn't exactly mellowed out by any stretch. Just less partial to flailing.

"Thanks," he muttered, about as cheerful as a funeral.

With that done, Terra released his shoulder and pulled back, pressing both palms to the cold ground. Zelgadis didn't like being touched in general (or else couldn't stand it when it was her specifically), so she always felt guilty when situation forced it.

He seemed to have calmed down some, which was a relief. Less chance that he'd go tumbling down the stairwell, at least. But even cure hadn't wiped out whatever was causing his current inexplicable malady. As one of her only friends, strained though that status frequently was, she couldn't help but worry. It was heavy in her voice in her quiet "Sure," but beyond that she didn't say anything else. She wanted to know what was wrong, but... it seemed decreasingly likely that she'd get an honest answer.

The tone of her voice was another twenty-ton weight unceremoniously dropped on his shoulders, and Zelgadis visibly sagged with a sigh before beginning to get up again, much more aware of any overhead obstacles. "Sorry," was murmured on the way up.

Terra stayed put while Zelgadis climbed to his feet. Someone had to make sure he wouldn't just tumble back to the ground. At his apology though, Terra's expression changed; her eyebrows knitted down once again as she looked up. When he seemed to be standing fine on his own two feet, she went to push herself up.

"... why?"

Good question. After a few seconds of silence, Zelgadis shrugs, still averting his gaze elsewhere. "For interrupting something, I guess," he settles on, walking around her and folding his arms against the chill as he does so. No fair; he came up to get a cool head, not a frozen one. And it wasn't making him feel any better.

Hand against the door frame, Terra shook her head easily. "You didn't." She had a much higher tolerance to cold than Zelgadis did; even after that godawful party, she still didn't mind it much.

Even if he didn't feel it, he looked a little better. Terra continued to watch, just as confused as ever. He wasn't ever going to explain anything on his own, was he?

Corrected, he let the apology stand for itself (however futile) and continued pacing away, sucking in air through gritted teeth. At least he could stop feeling how hot his face was if it went numb. Maybe that would let him feel a bit normal, which would maybe let him seem a bit normal, because he was sure as hell aware of eyes following him and probably assuming he'd lost his damn mind. Maybe he had. Immature, stupid, ridiculous...

Edited 2011-01-07 20:41 (UTC)

The wordless quiet stretched between them as he paced, forward and back. There were no answers in his shuffled footfalls, nor in the hunch of his shoulders or the impending chatter of his teeth. Terra tried to let it go, but worry continued gnawing at her, tightening her throat and twisting her stomach around in anxious bends.

"... do you... want to talk about it?"

And cause another disaster? Probably not a good idea. His breath huffed out in a puff of steam, but his self-depreciating smirk was his alone at the direction he stood.

"It doesn't matter."

It wasn't exactly the answer she was expecting, and, if anything, just made things more confusing. Terra was going to need to cast cure on herself for the headache she was getting from all this.

"If it didn't matter, you wouldn't be... so......" Out of it, for one, and ... defensive? Terra crossed her arms over her chest, tucking cold fingers against her ribs, and shook her head.

"'So' what?" He turned his his head and looked back over at her, eyebrows lifted. Most of her opinions of him were just things he inferred, truth be told. If she said annoying or bothersome herself, then he had good reason to feel like a jackass instead of just assuming he did.

"... Out of it? Or..." She pulled out one hand to roll her wrist indicatively of something, though it wasn't entirely clear what. "Like you were sick and someone cast muddle on you." His relatively quick almost-recovery indicated it at the very least wasn't illness, but Zelgadis wasn't the type to just... fall over. Or stumble as badly over speaking as he'd been, or so clumsily hurt himself. If it had been muddle, the smack to the doorknob would have been enough to break it, though...

"Did something happen?"

So...deranged, then. Zelgadis grimaced a little before turning away, frozen in place now that simply moving about made him odd in her eyes.

"I'd been confused about something," he said at length, folding his arms tighter and shrugging his shoulders up higher. It was cold. "But I guess I'm not anymore. Or...that something doesn't really matter as much as I thought it did. Or something."

She didn't entirely believe him — how could she? the answer hardly made sense — but it seemed more honest than that whole trip story. If it had been the other way around, ... actually, she had no idea what would happen. Whether he'd push for answers or dismiss them as being nothing, that is. Terra tended to confess everything to Zelgadis eventually anyway; did she even have any secrets remaining? She didn't think so... but the realization of this in conjunction with how very little she truly knew about him was disheartening.

"... it must have been something big," she offered in return, though in her head the likelihood he'd actually explain seemed to hover around zero.

"I don't really know," he said, and that much was true. His stomach was still a mess of knots, uncomfortable and not altogether helpful for much of anything, especially when it came to trying to pin down his mood. Zelgadis wasn't really mad or annoyed or...much of anything he could default to without stepping out of his usual norms. Aside from embarrassed for himself, of course. He was kind of sad.

The silence lingered long enough to seem like the end of all discussion, but Zelgadis glanced back eventually with a pensive, somewhat-wary look, his mouth a thin line for a moment longer. "Remember when we were stuck down south?" he prompted, a bit more than uneasily by the time the last syllable was sounded out.

She hadn't been expecting him to continue, so with the sudden continuation and subject change, she was taken a little off guard. That was... pretty long ago, and completely out of nowhere. Right?

She didn't say anything, but she nodded in response. Yes, she remembered.

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WOW TENSES COME ON NOW

NO WE DON'T WANNA BE CONSISTENT

Reading about technical writing is ruining my creative writing *holds head

nooooo *holds your head*

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nooooo holds your head