I know I have 0 followers who play this game, but I need everyone to see the absolutely insane skin my fave character from Reverse 1999 is getting, based on the Death tarot.
Psyche moves through the crowd of mortals going about their daily lives. Despite their stature—you can only compact divinity so much—the people don't pay them much mind. It wonders if they can somehow sense the emptiness inside, like a cheaply made statue crumbling apart.
{Oh, shut up.} {You're so depressing.} {So mean.} {You shut up too.}
It digs its nails into its palms as it continues down the sidewalk, trying their best to ignore the dissonant whispers inside of them. Like the name suggests, the restless souls are hardly ever still. Some of them quiet when seeing the world they remember, comforted by the scenery, but others only get angrier. Her head pounds—
And then it pounds again, this time onto the concrete below.
"Fuck—Holy shit, I'm so sorry—"
Another voice—one outside of itself, it realizes—rings out over the others. In front of Psyche, sitting on the pavement too, is a mortal. Her hair is frizzy, her jeans are tattered, and there's a name tag on her jacket—Harmonia.
"It, um..." Psyche fumbles {in a very undignified way for a god}. "It's alright, really. I wasn't paying attention."
Harmonia frowns and runs a hand through his hair, freckled nose scrunching up when he hits a snag.
"No, I—it's my fault, I'm late for work and totally rushing. Here, uh..." He stands up and extends a hand out to Psyche. "Are you hurt? I have a first aid kit if you need it—I trip a lot, hah, always have one on me—Oh, but no pressure! I mean, we just met after all, and—Wait, what am I saying? I'm just offering bandages. Um, still but no pressure, y'know?"
As the mortal stumbles through her offer of help—something thoroughly unnecessary, considering its godhood—Psyche can't help but stare. Harmonia doesn't have to take the time to help them. Human lives are short and precious. Why waste them like that? And besides, it would just make her more late for work. There's no reason to be so kind, and every reason to not be, and yet...
And yet he is. Offering out a hand, still anxiously stuttering apologies. Choosing to help. The gift of choice that it gave her. What a beautiful thing.
{Her or humanity?} {You're staring.} {Holy shit, yeah, you haven't said anything.} {Why are we even helping?} {...Good point.}
The souls come back in full force as blush rises to its cheeks {embarassed or flattered?}. It should really say something. A thank you, an apology, anything—but it's all so loud, and she's so kind, and their chest aches from the joy and the stress. It has to go. Now.
-
And that's how Psyche found itself sitting at the edge of the sea of souls, knees to its chest, watching the waves.
"Damn, you look miserable." A hoof kicks the sand beside them. "Well, more miserable than you usually look."
Psyche grits its teeth. "Thank you, Charon."
It can't see him, but it knows he raises his hands in mock surrender.
"Alright, alright, I get the memo. You want time alone?"
It's a stupid question, and they both know it. Psyche never has any time alone. Still, the company of others is better than the company of the dead.
"...No."
Charon plops themselves down on the sand beside her. "Gotcha, I'll just be quiet then—and you know how hard that is for me! So be grateful, yeah?"
Psyche can't help but snort, earning a grin from its ferryman.
PSYYYYYYYYYYCHEEEEEEE! THE GUY YOU RAN INTO AND TOTALLY HAVE SOME SORT OF CRUSH ON IS PANICKING AND THINKS YOUR GONNA SMITE HER OR SOMETHING FOR DISRESPECTING YOU SOMEHOW!!!!
also hi charon how ya doing mate?
-@circles-n-spirals-alike
{Oh no, oh no... Oh, I didn't mean to offend! Oh dear, poor thing, she must be so stressed out—}
■ hey what's up, i'm just chillin' ■
{CHARON, A LITTLE HELP HERE??}
■ fuck, i don't know—can't you just, like... send a vision or something? so she knows you're chill? ■
{That—It's an... unconventional use of divination, but I could? Maybe... Okay. I can fix this.}
Cliches remain cliche for a reason, and that’s because as soon as humanity gives a name to a pattern that pattern clings to them in turn like a bad burn. So even after nuclear fallout had left its own caustic burn marks on humanity, still did it survive and stumble back onto its own wobbling feet with them, and so did it’s close relatives. The most notorious being romanticism, which haunted mankind in its own sinister and self-perpetuating fashion, sinking deep into the spirit of those who were disillusioned, or desperate, or both, and sent them out on the rose-colored road to Hell in their best, marching happily along to the war drum.
It was for this reason Charon Lennox was really quite afraid of cliches and romanticism, as much as he used both, though he told himself with a disciplined mind. It could be worked out, he told himself, whipped into shape. It was supposed to be the sugar that coated the pill, the gloved hand that held your arm in place, not the lethal injection; but at times he was really unsure. He fell in love fast, hard, and often, and with each time it was all thanks to looking back on simple and regular acts of kindness through the blurry lense that romanticism offered him, and more often than not what he found to be reciprocated feelings was really just a script written to get him into his place in bed. Looking for love nowadays made him feel like an anglerfish, both as a pair of accessory gonads and as a hungry creature waving a pretty lure in front of its face.
And it was so much worse in the workplace, so when he came to realize he was starting to get butterflies in his stomach around his closest “co-worker”, Dove, he recoiled in on himself and put aside a vacation day to lament over the fact. Then when it showed no signs of stopping (the opposite, actually), he tried to cushion the inevitable blow by reasoning with himself that they were employees, and coworkers, sure, but informally. The set up that ANTEATER, the international string-pulling organization that most were luckily ignorant to, had provided for both of them was built upon beams of an offer neither of them could refuse. Charon hated to think of his set up that way, and tried to convince himself that his work was done solely in the name of humanitarianism and not because he was afraid of the indirect threat of being taken apart of like an old mechanical pencil. And Dove, who was afraid of nothing it seemed, was confronted with going home or going into a cryogenically induced coma for who knew how long, to have who knew what done with him, unless he do some humanitarianism of his own.
And Dove- Dove, without any family, with literally anybody who knew who he was left literally thousands of years in the past- was in a spot worse than being a non-person, as most ANTEATER employees were. For all anyone knew, which is to say nobody any time soon, Dove was non-existent, somebody who had and would never exist. A similar thought used to keep Charon up like the boogeyman, but Dove prefered it this way. To not even enter anyone’s thoughts, to not even be a concept in the back of their mind, to leave the smallest shadow imaginable on Earth, if one at all; that was peace, the real kind of peace philosophers and acolytes alike spent their whole lives looking for. That’s what he’d said, anyways.
So it stood to reason that Charon felt that guilty twist in his gut when he pictured Dove and himself in the back of his car necking and cooing over each other, or when he heard Dove’s laugh even hours after the rare event had occurred, or really when Dove entered his thoughts at all. Who was he to disturb the peace? Who was he to selfishly vocalize it either, put them both in a place neither could ever get back from with something as silly as a cliched proclamation of love?
Charon had been looking for the right time and place to really agonize over this and torment himself accordingly, and for some reason the little devil that pulled on all the levers and pushed all the buttons in his brain decided now- perhaps the worst time- was when it was going to get done. When he was pinned to an alley wall by a piece of loose pipe that had run through his stomach, a little to the left, watching with the usual blood-loss wooziness as Dove drove his sword through the head of the big ugly mutant they were supposed to be bringing back (alive, as it was requested). Dove shoved his foot into the thing’s neck while it was pinned, which cracked like a gunshot, and then left the thing to wheeze out its final and most agonizing breaths as he retrieved his sword and rushed immediately to Charon. He jerked and choked when he felt Dove’s grip on the pipe, trying to jar it out of him.
“No- no, no, no,” He hissed, still trying to sound calm. “Don’t pull it out, Dove. The car. Go to the car. Go call the medic- and Polly, call Polly.”
Dove nods, slowly, then in much more frantic understanding. He takes his hands off the pipe, and before he clenches them back into resolved fists Charon can see what he thinks is a tremor in them. Thinks he hears it far away in his voice when he calls, tells the medic to get here now, immediately, telling Polly on the other line that Charon’s hurt, and then tells her again that he’s hurt, he has to get back to him now. And in one heavy blink he’s back by Charon’s side, eyes wide and jaw set, sweaty hair clumped and matted to his face.
“I- Charon, you- y-you, guhh,” His words are coming out choked, strained, tongue and lips moving heavily to try to accommodate his uncooperative throat. “Guhh- got… hurt, I-”
“Dove, shh,” Charon tries to say. He knows what’s happening, having suffered from the same thing over much less.
“My fault,” He forces out, trembling in full now- clawing at his face. “My fault, my fault, my fault- it was my fault! It was my fault… my... my-”
Charon can only grasp at him so much, still stuck in his spot, but he manages to swat at Dove’s elbow in the effort to get his hands away from his face. “Shh… it’s not, listen to me. It’s not.” The pain is bad now, having moved so much, dotting his vision with fireflies; but he can’t take the guilt on Dove’s face, when he himself knows he’ll make it out of this just fine. So he thinks out loud, assuring, “It’s just a sign that everything’s working. It means I haven’t- lost anything yet, like my stomach- thank heavens too because I- I do need that.” He coughs, a little wetly, poshness of his accent beginning to slur together. “And I’m not paralyzed! Which means it’s probably not so bad. Won’t die from bleeding out- even if I did, what would that take to come back from? An hour? Two? Hah. Nothing. That’s nothing, it’s like a nap.”
Dove is breathing harshly, and shuddering still, but he’s left his face alone- wet with tears and drool, but more or less unscathed. There’s a guilt in his still-wide eyes, clamped tight over his jaw; Charon’s been speared by old rusty metal and here he is trying to comfort him. He looks like he wants to say as much, offer his own comfort, but Charon finds the need to keep talking, babbling in the one does when they haven’t slept enough the previous night.
“A you know what’s- what’s a little nap? How about this… After this why don’t we take a day? Just,” He coughs again. “You and me. Why don’t we go bowling? Or maybe I could just- What if I just, put an old record on, we could both just… Sit together… Have a listen…” Distantly, he is aware of the sounds of feet scuffling towards him and doors being slammed shut, but he is so caught up in the image to put much substance towards the noise. Dove is curled around him with a heavy blanket over both of them, nose just barely nudged at his temple and eyes just barely visible through his heavy lids as he dozes off, music crooning around them. And then Charon realizes he’s had his eyes closed, because when he opens them he sees Dove struggling against three ANTEATER employees who have “DAMAGE CONTROL” printed in comically large font across their chests.
He moves to say something, but then a glistening, white metal arm cuts through them, and suddenly Polly is there with her hand on Dove’s shoulders. “Alright, meatheads, back off- I got this,” She says, tugging at Dove. He writhes against her, but less violently, letting her pull him away towards the car with quiet promises of, “He’ll be fine, when isn’t he?”
Charon moves again to open his mouth and murmurs something thickly unintelligible, and then promptly blacks out.
When he wakes up later the pipe is gone, and he’s folded in by crisp, white walls and even crisper white sheets. A monitor beeps in his ear, fluttering by like a horsefly, before Charon rattles his eyes inside of his skull and then forces them to focus. Medical wards and hospitals are beginning to become instantly recognizable to him, and he turns his head to see Polly in the cranny of a chair dozing off. She blinks, meets eyes with him, and then blinks again, proclaiming, “Oh, finally, you’re up.”
Charon cranes his head when he hears rustling, seeing Dove at the other side of his bed, snort to attentiveness, cheek still slightly pressed to the small of his palm as he straightens up. Something about his posture and his groggy face tries to impart that he was definitely not sleeping a moment ago, but nonetheless, Charon is touched both of them would wait for so long to greet him. The thought that Dove had dozed off still sitting up is cute, but then in remembering the strife he’s caused and Dove’s preferences he strikes that and re-settles on touching.
He notices now Dove has stripped out of his chainmail and leather, leaving only his moth-bitten undershirt on, and so the splashes of vitiligo that embellish his light brown skin are visible all along his neck. They look at each other for a while, wordlessly, though in Dove’s face there isn’t any hostility- just the tired relief of a thank god you made it out of there. Charon himself can’t place what his face is doing, hopefully nothing too embarrassing, when Polly takes it upon herself to cut through the silence of the room.
“His frontal lobe’s still blown out, by the way,” She says, pointing to her temple with an easy smile. It’s well known of course that Dove doesn’t really know what a frontal lobe is, but he nods regardless, because the real meaning is understood by all three; sometimes when the world, external or internal, becomes too much, speech is simply too Herculean of a task to pursue for a while.
“I understand. Things got a little tense back there,” He moves his covers back, trying to inspect his would. As he had expected, under the bandage, it’s already beginning to recede to the flaky skin of a mostly-healed scab. “Doesn’t seem like I lost any major organs, though, so no harm done.”
When he looks back up Dove is frowning, a less frantic version of the guilt he had been wearing earlier. He reaches out and wordlessly takes Charon’s hand, gives it a gentle squeeze before bringing it to the curve of his nose and lips. He nudges it gently, eyes downcast, a silent, I’m sorry that had to happen, I’m sorry I made it harder on you he can offer while his voice still escapes him. Charon feels something in his chest swell, hot and thick like magma but dizzy like air, and looks back to Dove with some kind of smile on his face that he wants to call forgiving, but that he knows is nowhere near as formal.
Polly is still in the room of course, eyes darting between them with a disbelievingly amused smile quietly spreading out her face. Charon feels her eyes just barely, and he clears his throat; and while Dove moves the hand from his face, he does not release it.
“Weeell,” Polly says, getting to her feet. “I’ve got a colony of bacteria left on my coffee table that’s calling my name. Gonna head out. Glad to see you’re still in one piece,” She offers him a peck on the cheek and then a harsh ruffling of his hair on the way out.
Charon and Dove remain, Charon recalling his previous torture in the fight. Workplace romance, even if coerced into a workplace, don’t ever end well. Doomed to fail, like reunion tours and pyramid schemes. He wants to be alone in his sterile, adjustable bed before how he has to think about Dove sabotaging their mission over one tiny mistake that got him hurt makes him feel, how he’s acted in such a way again and again that shows Charn must have some kind of weight in his heart- how it makes him feel about that, to have his own little corner in anyone’s heart. Let alone Dove’s. So he clears his throat, says, “It wasn’t your fault. So a little bit of pipe got loose- not your fault, you had bigger fish to fry, and-”
Dove cuts him off by letting go of his hand and, in the short-lived fear Charon thinks he might be going, decides to clamber into bed with him. He settles down as Charon gapes at him, comfortably on his side, taking up more than enough room in the little one-person fold out. He tries to move his mouth to protest, but then Dove reaches over and drags him close and up against him, and Charon forgets what he was going to say to begin with. He does stare bug-eyed at Dove for an answer.
He shrugs noncommittally to do so, trying to think of how to explain his reasoning while he still can’t talk, and instead puts his pointer finger to his own lips. Stop apologizing, maybe, is what it means, or perhaps stop trying to coddle him, because Charon doesn’t think Dove would be so blunt or cruel as to just tell him to stop talking. So Charon sighs and decides it probably would be better to discuss the whole thing when Dove can say something back to him in full, but right now he also really needs to distract himself from how solid and comforting Dove is pressed so close against him.
“You.. comfortable up here?” Dove nods. “Any reason you’ve taken up the bed? Fancy a nap or something?” To his surprise, Dove nods again, accenting his answer with a quiet yawn. “Oh. Well, God, Dove, couldn’t you have waited to go back to your chambers? You don’t need me nearby to sleep, do you?”
Dove fixes him with a look, something he can’t- or is maybe too blindly excited- to decipher, and Charon tries not to see it as a positive affirmation to the question, because he isn’t sure if that would be better or worse. But all the same Dove puts his fingers to his lips, and then folds his hands together like he’s sleeping, and then ruffles his hair much like Polly had before she left. And really, looking at the sleepy contentment on Dove’s face, he’s powerless to stop him, so he sighs and makes a big show out of rolling his eyes and mumbles, “Fine, just don’t push me off.”
It feels inappropriate to think about his romantic conflict of interest with Dove right there, so he mentally schedules an HR meeting in the meantime instead, and tries his best to focus on the ceiling with his mind totally blank. If he can keep himself from viewing this through the lens of romanticism in the future than he can make it through the two-or-so hours Dove chooses to rest, and if he can do that just this once then maybe he can keep at it for the rest of his life. Because if romanticism can’t have him dramatics can, and he’s more than willing to torment himself than to make himself out to be a fool.
