october catch-all [ota]

[laruetheday]

Who: Clarisse + anyone!
What: October catch-all
When: Throughout the month
Where: Two prompts that are out in town + one for just the house

Content Warnings: Just The Depression™



01 | loneliness kills [ota]

[ At first, Clarisse thinks she's hallucinating. It seems like the natural progression to whatever's been happening to her head since she came to Trench. First the unbearable tense energy, and then the onset of migraines and the whispy white figures she can sometimes catch in the corner of her vision, and now... walking corpses. Sure, makes sense. Except the corpse doesn't go away. It walks steadily behind whoever's approaching her, glassy eyed and silent.

The corpse doesn't seem violent, which is the only thing that keeps her from attacking it, but her entire body tenses up like a cat waiting to pounce, and she's staring at whoever is making their way toward her. Or, more accurately, she's staring at the dead thing behind whoever is making their way toward her. ]

You... there's... [ Finally, lacking the right words to explain what she's seeing, she resorts to pointing a finger. ] Dead person.

02 | welcome to the black parade [ota]

[ Even misanthropic migraine sufferers need to leave the house every once in a while.

Clarisse is standing near the shop window of Shape of Blood, where she's been ogling a set of knives, and trying to avoid taking a strange mask in the shape of a monster's face from a native. They've clearly just explained something to her, because she's shaking her head. ]

I don't need protection. Ugh—seriously, I don't—back off!

[ Looks like someone isn't planning on showing up for the parade this month. ]

03 [closed to housemates]

[ Clarisse is lying on the couch, curled up and facing inward, her back to the room. At first she might seem to be asleep, but if someone enters the room, she twists the slightest bit so she can see who's there, before turning back to press her pale face against the cushion.

Her head hurts, all the time. Last month, Luna's potions had eased some of her restless energy, and talking with Bella had helped her feel less crazy, but it's abundantly clear that things have gotten much worse with the onset of October. The pounding behind her eyes, the crushing loneliness of everyone around her. She's suffocating under the weight of it. All she wants to do is sleep and forget about this place, but even when she sleeps, she has a headache. Even in other people's dreams, she's sad.

After a few seconds, when she doesn't hear the person exit the room, Clarisse's shoulders tense. She doesn't lift her face from the cushion, and her voice is muffled when she says, sounding almost defensive, ] What?

04 | wildcard!

[ Wildcard option! Feel free to have your character show up at the house looking for Clarisse (or anyone she lives with, if you'd like her to just be the one to answer the door or something). She'll be pretty much AWOL aside from some very rare appearances this month, but this is one way to catch her. ]

Comments

[armd]

(he knew he deserved it.

abby's never thought of it like that before. the notion tears through her.

it's impossible to speak for a wild, trembling moment, but she swallows, and shoves it to one side. she doesn't want to lose herself in that right now. this isn't about joel. she's tired of everything being about joel in one roundabout, fucked up way or another; this place is somewhere he hasn't touched, where abby won't let him exist. trench, love it or leave it, is hers.)

I don't regret it, (she says, finally realises she's squeezing clarisse's hand too tight, and releases her.) But it wasn't worth what I lost to get it.

(it wouldn't have been worth even one of her people, let alone all of them. that's something she's realised far too late.)

I miss them.

[laruetheday]

[ Clarisse tucks her chin against her knees and watches Abby for a bit without saying anything. There doesn't seem to be anything right to say, and she'd rather be quiet than say the stupid bullshit people always do—"you'll see them again," or something. She believes in the afterlife, she's known people who've been there and back. But it's not that simple. Especially not here. ]

I know you do, [ she says after a minute, her voice sad. ] It's... okay if you feel that way. That you don't regret it, but that it wasn't worth it. [ She's struggling to find the right words. This has never been what she's good at. In the end, she has to steal from someone who helped her—what feels like forever ago, back in Deerington, before she'd ever even met Abby. The specifics of the conversation are mostly lost to her, given everything, but not everything. ] People are complicated, and... you made a choice that you thought was the best one at the time. It caused pain. But you can't hold onto what happened like it happened in a vacuum. Wars are complicated, and... [ Her breath hisses out of her, shaky and slow. ] We were just kids.

[ All of them. Different worlds, but war never changes, war never cares. War chews kids up and spits out their bodies, and not just the ones who never make it home. ]

[armd]

(her eyes burn while clarisse speaks, so she closes them to let the tears roll down her face in silence. it still hurts. it's mostly dull and barely-there, embers in her stomach until something stokes it into fire and suddenly torches her from the inside out.

she wasn't a kid when she chose to murder joel, but she was when he decided to murder her father, and that left scars on her, in her. you don't recover from something like that. you just learn to live around it. or at least, you try. abby doesn't think she's been doing a very good job lately, but letting clarisse have this horrible, screwed up part of her to hold in her hands feels like it could be a step in the right direction. it lessens the burn.)

Yeah. (she doesn't know what else to say. yeah.

she's right, and it fucking sucks.)

[laruetheday]

[ Her speech is done, and there isn't anything left to say about it. Nothing else that would make it better, no other absolution she can lay in front of Abby. Sometimes there isn't anything left to do but keep breathing.

Clarisse scoots forward until she can rest her chin on Abby's shoulder. She puts a hand on the back of Abby's neck, fingertips curling lightly in her hair, and just sits that way for a while. Closes her eyes. ]

Sorry, [ she says after a couple minutes. ] That I was such a bitch.

[armd]

(she buries her face into clarisse's neck as she comes close, and folds into her.)

You had a good reason for it.

(abby gets it. what happened on the river was awful, and hindsight grants her a glimpse of the whole sorry thing from clarisse's perspective. if she had been in her position, it would have made her angry too. she would have been sad, and scared, and confused.)

... Thanks for letting me take so long to talk to you. (she finds clarisse's hand between the two of them again, and takes it, and gives it a sober little squeeze. her voice sounds really wet. she sniffs, hard.)

Lev doesn't know the whole story. (hard to tell him, too.) Can you keep it between us?

[laruetheday]

[ Clarisse just shrugs. She can't tell what a good reason to act like a bitch would be, anymore. This place has her so fucked up, her emotions swinging wildly all over the map, and in the moment they seem perfectly justified. Afterwards, not so much.

On the bright side, there's no risk of her talking to Lev about this. Or anything, really, but especially not this. First, she'd have to be talking to People, in the general sense, at all. She doesn't want to bring that up, though. It sounds so melodramatic and attention seeking, and that's the last thing she wants. ]

Yeah. Don't worry about it.

[armd]

(don't worry about it, huh. well she might, a bit. clarisse is important enough to warrant that extra care, and attention.

abby sighs. she leans back to give her eyes a good wipe, and lets all of her breath out at once, like a deflating balloon. it takes her a moment to realise: that weight on her chest that was pressing all the breath out, it isn't there. she feels so much lighter than she did before.

she sits with that for a moment before she opens her mouth.)

That's everything.

(well. almost everything.

that night on the boat, with owen... abby thinks she'd like to talk about that, but she'd rather be drunk, or high. something, anything, it isn't a memory she feels comfortable reliving while she's sober, so terrible and embarrassing. it weighs on her all the same though, and clarisse would probably give her a hard enough time that it would make her feel better.

but until then,) Do you... have any questions? (she'd answer them.)