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Who: Julien and Ravi
Where: A high-rise office building, completely unaffected by the various city disasters
When: Friday the 20th, late afternoon.
What: Ravi in the dark with a feathery monster he's scared of and ghosts? What fun!

The lights died not long after they'd wrapped up. Looking up, Julien sighed theatrically. "Really?" He winced as he felt his heartbeat pick up - but it didn't seem to be a pulse. He hoped.

With the elevators out, their little group trooped to the stairwell. His friends were conscientious, but Julien really did not want to head down that many flights of stairs made for humans in the dark. It was easier to climb stairs than descend them and he wasn't far from the top. If he could get up to the roof he could just launch himself off, it would mean being stared at but he'd just deal.

Silently, testing most steps with his great clawed toes and keeping his head ducked, Julien climbed. He could see the EXIT signs, alive with backup power, but nothing else was clear. It was just too dark. He wondered as he went if there were more ghosts in this, but so far he wasn't unusually cold and felt only the effort of climbing while digigrade and unable to firmly grasp handrails.

Well, whatever. If Bohemian had been any sort of example of its kind, they wouldn't hurt him if they were here.

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Ravi's therapist was in this building, unfortunately very near the top floor. He was waiting by the elevators after his appointment, checking his e-mail on his phone, when the power went out. He looked up, confirmed the power outage, and heaved a sigh. He didn't really feel like waiting anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours for the power to come back on, so stairs it was, then. Hopefully they had emergency lights, or at least those glow-in-the-dark runners on the steps so you could see where you were walking.

He kept his eyes down in the stairwell, both out of habit because that was just how he walked around normally, and because it was easier to see where he was going in the dark that way. Which meant that he got a very nasty surprise when he nearly walked into Julien on a landing and looked up to see the shadowy form of a fucking harpy in the dark.

A short cry of surprise and fear escaped unbidden as he backed himself defensively into the corner of the landing. His heart raced, his breaths came too deep and too fast. He squeezed his eyes shut, cupped his hands over his face, and made a conscious effort to slow his breathing back to something resembling normal.

A few seconds later, he managed a quiet, strained, "Julien?" He knew it was Julien. Who else could it be? He wasn't asking to confirm the who, but whether he was still there.

Over the past few months Julien had grown to hate stairs. They were just built on too small a scale! Steps were never long enough for the load-bearing part of his foot and putting all his weight on his toes started to hurt after a few floors. He could turn sideways and sidle, tail raised so it didn't just brush the wall. That didn't leave any space for people to pass him. Every day Julien dreaded the four story climb of his apartment.

Before long he started to hear heavy footsteps. Close footsteps, that was; with his ears sensitive to lower frequencies, he could hear plenty of the people on the stairwell. He pressed his lips together and considered ducking into the next floor and waiting rather than passing them on the stair, thinking a first response to him in an enclosed space and the dark wouldn't be good. The idea rankled at him, and anyway it turned out they were too close to do that.

And it wasn't a first response, but it sounded just as bad. He flinched at the yelp, instinctively starting to flare his wings and stopping himself just in time. The stairs were too small for him, too tight, and it was far too dark. Julien was lucky, he realized, that this hadn't happened when he was on the stairs themselves or he might well have fallen down them.

"Suil, Ravi." His voice was easy, a little resigned, not betraying how his enormous heart was beating fast. "Didn't know you'd be here."

It was so casual. Too casual. This was a giant fucking bird-monster and they both knew it and they both knew Ravi's issues with it, and yet they were just going to be casual about it and play it off like it wasn't a big deal. He wanted to scream.

But it was dark, and if he closed his eyes he could pretend it was just Julien, the old Julien, the human with dyed blue hair and nary a feather in sight. Deep breaths. Hadn't he just talked to his therapist about this not ten minutes ago? He knew what she'd say. This was an opportunity to practice what they'd discussed.

He sank against the wall and tried not to think about what was standing in the stairwell with him. "My therapist's office is in here." He was going to try to match the casual tone, play it off, pretend it wasn't a big deal for him either. But his voice was just a little too shaky for a convincing charade.

There had been a glint that Julien thought was dim light off one of Ravi's eyes. He couldn't see it anymore. Were they closed? Was he praying? Why do I have to be the reasonable one, Julien asked himself, and shook it off as whining.

"I didn't know that! Sorry, man. I guess I should put more work into coordinating things." These days he did his best not to be where Ravi was, which mostly meant limiting his rare clinic visits to days and times the other wasn't there. "I'm not usually out over here, but I'm going to be part of an ad campaign, unless they go and fold on me. Modeling is weird, Ravi."

Calm could be as infectious as anything else. He hoped. He'd like it if it was. Julien always felt deflated when reminded that people could be afraid of him now.

"It's fine. Don't worry about it." Not what he wanted to say, but he was being very careful about his words and about evaluating his feelings right now. He would've preferred if he never had to risk running into Julien out in the world, but that wasn't reasonable. He couldn't control where Julien was, and he couldn't expect Julien to give him constant location updates for the purpose of avoiding him. It was on Ravi to control his reaction, not on Julien to coddle him.

"What kind of ad campaign?" he asked, unable to keep the undercurrent of trepidation out of his voice. 'Where am I going to have to avoid seeing you?' was pretty much what that translated to.

Julien winced a little at the obvious caution in Ravi's voice. He rubbed a scaly finger along his jaw to scratch it, creating a short-lived movement in the air as his wing moved, and wished that the air here wasn't so still. Wished the whole situation was different, really, but better circulation would have been a start.

"Designer blue jeans! It's pretty ridiculous, they have to sew me into the things, but I test well with moms and preeteens, apparently." He smiled dryly, not that it was visible, and put that into his voice. "They're already planning back to school stuff. I'm not sure my novelty will last the summer, I can already go out without reporter entourages. How about you, they still following you?"

It was pretty unreal to be here, talking like this, in the dark and the still air with someone who was terrified of him. He felt a little disoriented or unwell, but chalked it up to the situation.

He was handling this. He was sharing space with Julien and talking to him and not freaking out. The conversation was stupid and mundane and that was perfectly alright with him because it made it that much easier to pretend everything was okay, nothing was amiss, and that he wasn't standing next to something that terrified him on a visceral level.

"Ah--yes, a few. Not as many, now. Most of them learned I won't answer questions, I think." He didn't actually want to say anything about the ad campaign stuff, because the only responses he had were the sorts of things he knew he shouldn't say. It was hard enough just to focus on answering what was asked of him while keeping calm, he just didn't have the energy to spare for making proper conversation.

"They can learn. Good to know." Awkwardness didn't affect Julien's speech much, it just didn't really bother him in the normal course of events. But here he had to fight past grief and dismay, and an increasing discomfort.

He thought he could hear someone trotting down the stairs from the roof, just a few floors above. Couldn't feel the vibration in his feet though. As much surface as his toes covered, that wasn't right. Julien shook his head briskly, trying to rid it of sudden wooziness. "Hey, Ravi, you were at the clinic on the eleventh, right? Did it get covered by that blackout?"

Ravi had been consciously regulating his breathing this whole time, but it slowly began to even out until he was breathing normally without needing to think about it anymore. His chest still felt tight, but that was a start. He dropped his hands, palms flattened against his thighs, but didn't advance to opening his eyes just yet.

"Mmhmm," he answered, his voice slightly clearer, a sign that it had been muffled and not just the usual mumble seconds before. "Why?"

Ravi had moved. Good sign? Maybe? He wasn't running or cringing away. Good sign, Julien hoped.

"I was in that one too. I actually went and had to have Gabriel fetch me, I got lost in the dark and spooked by one of those ghost things." He makes sure to sound amused, in a distant way. "Did you see any? I wonder if this is the same sort of thing. I didn't get a pulse at the start of this one, though."

Julien getting lost in the dark during a blackout seemed far-fetched. Wasn't he smarter than that? And then he remembered. "Ah, you can't see in the dark now, yes?" But it was one of those things that came out before running through his mental filter, and he immediately regretted it. It was kind of a stupid thing to say, he should've just assumed that was the case and let it go without comment.

The odd thing was, even that simple little familiar anxiety was smoothed away and quickly dismissed as not something to feel anxious over. It was strange. He'd lived with his anxieties long enough that they were, in a way, a sort of familiarity that he could take comfort in. No matter what happened, they were there, always a constant. And that was definitely the kind of thing he should continue beating himself up over, but it just...didn't seem to matter all that much, suddenly.

Which, strangely, left him feeling a bit concerned.

He opened his eyes finally, cautiously looking up into the darkness of the stairs in front of him. "I saw one, yes. You did, too?"

Certainly Julien didn't find it a noteworthy thing to say. "Very little! Even here, it's too dark for me. I don't think I'd have recognized you without your voice." He shrugged, wings shifting. "I'm at least pretty good about not knocking into things or falling over. Good thing too - nothing's quite as embarrassing as falling down stairs."

He felt better. Cooler, despite the lack of moving air. Someone was still going down the stairs. It sounded like they were just above his head - Julien looked up, though of course it was useless.

"Yeah, I went and named it Bohemian, since it turned out to really like the sadder sort of poems. I hope... I'd like to think they're all harmless like it was, but I know an anemic kid who fainted." He was reluctant to go and say it. Saying something always made it more real - but that was a pretty stupid idea to hold. "You think there's one here now?"

That was a good question. Ravi could hear what sounded like footsteps on the stairs, and he too was looking for the source of them but seeing nothing. Like the whispering at the clinic that had led him to the exam room with the ghost.

And there was the strange lack of anxiety, and the way his panic over Julien had subsided more than being pushed aside.

It clicked.

"Yes, I think so. I remember this."

"Fun." His voice was dry. Was that a glow? He blinked his nictitating membranes rapidly. Still there, faint for now. "Ravi, are you all right?"

Definitely a glow. Ravi's eyes honed in on it. "Fine," he answered, not glancing toward Julien but holding a steady line of sight on the faint glow from around the corner of the landing above them. "Too fine. The ghost at the clinic, it was the same. Pushing feelings at us."

"Mmmm." This time he managed to hold on to that sound and not turn it into birdnoise, as happened sometimes lately. "I'd kind of wondered! You were doing all right before, though."

He's not just being kind, Ravi had been admirably not having a full fledged panic attack. Though Julien supposed a dark landing was better than the inside of a car, it wasn't by much.

"We could head downstairs," he offered blandly. "I can split off and hide out on the next floor - I'm looking to go jump off the roof, stairs are that big a pain."

He didn't know what to say to that. It was embarrassing to be complimented on something most people would have no problem with, actually. But even that was quickly smoothed over and ceased to bother him. Which, well, bothered him. It wasn't that he liked his stupid anxieties, but they were his, and he had never been comfortable with the idea of something external being able to control how he felt or thought.

It made him angry. Not angry, the unnatural external calm smoothed that over too, but it stayed on as targeted determination. "Will you be alright for a few minutes? I want to talk to it."

"I'm fine either way - hmm, that's kinda creepy." He'd wanted to get away from Bohemian even as the spirit came to seem more and more harmless, but he'd been afraid it would follow him. "Go ahead."

With Julien's go-ahead, Ravi pulled away from the wall and moved forward. His arm brushed some of Julien's feathers, eliciting a new spike of panic, which was smoothed out by the ghost's emotional effect, followed by mild indignation at the unnatural stifling of his regular feelings.

It was a convenient idea, something that could calm him out of his anxieties like this, but it was happening without his permission and he was stubborn enough to take offense to that. They were his feelings. Nobody got to mess with them without his approval.

He crept up the stairs, one hand on the railing, eyes ahead on the glow. He could see the edge of something definite around the corner now. In his other hand, he shaped his magic into the form of a knife, holding the golden glow ready to throw.

Julien sensed Ravi flinch and shifted in place. It didn't seem to matter much, though. Lots of people were unnerved by him, and that well-worn thought came without its usual flavor, like it wasn't his anymore.

The ghost, if that's what it was, was small and had just a suggestion of green eyes. Nearer to it the sound of feet on the stairs was clearer. Gently undulating, it exuded a kind of detached calm into the ambience.

Edited 2014-06-25 06:47 (UTC)

A calm which was, in this case, actively dangerous. Ravi could think clearly when he was calm. He could be cold and calculated. Focused. His goal was to make the thing go away, and he was going to make sure that happened. Nothing was going to stop him.

He got one good look at the ghost but tossed the knife before it had a chance to really process. The knife, incorporeal itself, sank into the ghost like both were solid, up to the hilt. The ghost let out a piercing, otherworldly wail. The knife dissipated as the ghost's body dissolving starting from where the knife had hit and spreading out until the entire figure was gone.

And then he realized--small. The eyes. Together they gave the impression of a child.

But that realization brought with it the familiar twist of anxiety and regret in his gut, which was something of a relief, and not, at the same time.

At the cry Julien winced and reflexively tried to cover his ears, which didn't work out well but did shove some air around. The light faded, and with it the calm. He could feel his enormous heart pick up its pace just enough to notice.

Really, Ravi? The first impulse was to attack it? Julien swallowed his own first impulse, which was cutting, and stripped what he did say down to a statement in utterly neutral tones. "That didn't sound like talking to me."

He'd never actually intended to talk to it, but being called on it gave him a spike of guilt, which spun itself into a grim satisfaction because being able to have that guilt was also a sign of his success.

"Talk through action." It was muttered, cold but not confident. He waited another moment, steeling himself before turning to rejoin Julien at the landing. He couldn't completely quash the fear and anxiety his phobia threw at him, but by mentally preparing himself for it, he could at least contain it for now.

"You were headed to the roof, yes? Would you like me to help you?" He was offering not just because it seemed like part of the friendship obligation, but also because he wanted to redeem himself for (or distract from) attacking the ghost.

That wasn't going to work as Ravi hoped. Julien didn't move except to cross his wings, folding one across his chest and the other over it. The ghost's calm had been a lot like something he'd pulsed back months ago, an ability to think coolly and clearly when things were dangerous. He was not afraid - he was angry, in a displaced way.

"Why? Are you planning to stab me?"

He'd taken acceptance as a forgone conclusion, so getting that instead made him stop and stare, with a genuinely bewildered, "What?"

"You heard me, Savarna." Using that name instead of Ravi almost tripped Julien up. He shook his head and went on. "I've met these things. They talk. They're kind of space cadets, but I can name two dozen people like that. You get away from them, that whole effect fades away. Finding out about that didn't even cross your mind, you went I don't like this, I'll kill it."

So much for swallowing his first reaction. Pupils blown in the darkness, Julien glared. "So, what, are you planning to stab me?"

He couldn't believe what he was hearing. For a long moment he just stared, too taken aback by Julien's words to remember he was supposed to be afraid of him.

It was that cold and calculating part of him, he realized. The same part of him that had led to Proud's death. Realizing that made him feel sick, which made him resent Julien for pointing it out. Ravi's own natural non-Echoed stubbornness kicked in and kept him from reacting how he probably should have.

Instead, he lashed out, fighting back against Julien's accusation. "No, you idiot, because I am your friend. Or I thought I was. Apparently not, because who fucking asks a friend something like that?"

The crossed-wings position wasn't something he could easily keep up. His wings slid back to his sides, partially spread in reaction to the sudden tension.

"Someone who doesn't think murder is a good idea." Some part of him, removed from the scene and the heat of controlled anger, didn't recognize his own voice. He never spoke like this! "I don't care who does it. My friends don't have a magic pass that makes it okay to kill someone in cold blood. What's wrong with you?"

"I didn't kill anything, Julien, it is a ghost for god's sake." But, truthfully, the accusation made him uncomfortable, because there was no way he could prove that. He'd done it thinking that an attack would drive the thing away, not because he'd wanted to permanently destroy it. But there was no way to prove that wasn't what he'd done unless the ghost reappeared.

"It may be a ghost. You don't know what that did to it any more than I do. It was here, it screamed, now it's gone." Julien didn't know if the Apostle had experience fighting ghosts - he'd fought the undead king of some kind of netherworld, did that count? - and had no notion of how it worked. He was going onto shakier ground here. Still, there was another point where he felt absolutely certain. "It was the first thing you did! You knew I wouldn't like it too, or you wouldn't have fed me that line about talking."

Seriously? Were they seriously going to have a fight about this? Why couldn't Julien be a more convenient friend who just accepted that sometimes Ravi was stone fucking cold when he wanted something done, instead of raising a fuss and calling him out on being an asshole?

"Fine," he snapped, but with the tone of passive-aggressive concession that isn't actually conceding. "I killed it. I said 'talk' and meant 'kill.' I am a murderer. Is that what you want me to say?"

Julien was usually completely easygoing, finding that most things weren't worth getting worked up over. This - it was different. He had the unpleasant suspicion that this had been a pulse, that usually he'd stay quiet and just avoid the hell out of the casual killer who'd seemed reasonable before. Now...

"And that doesn't strike you as disturbing, or something reasonable people would be disturbed about... why?" His own tone had just the barest hint of sarcasm.

The fact that it was not actually a concession meant he also didn't believe it was true. He was just saying what he thought he needed to say to get out of this argument. So the fact that it didn't work, and the additional bonus of Julien's return remark hitting him straight in the doubts he was trying to avoid confronting, made him angry enough to shoot back something heated. "Maybe it does, and I don't want to talk about it because I am trapped in a dark stairwell with a fucking harpy!"

That had been exactly the wrong thing to say.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he froze, sucking in a sharp breath. Regret slammed into him like a truck, absorbing into the mass of anxiety already tangled in his guts, weighing him down, making it even denser and harder to ignore. He hadn't even gone for Julien's sensitivities intentionally, but that just made it worse. He'd fucked up. He'd fucked up and there was no way to fix it and all he wanted to do at that moment was run up the stairs and duck out onto the nearest floor and hide somewhere and never talk to Julien again.

Julien flinched and drew himself up, wings folded more tightly to make a narrower profile. So why don't you try and kill me, then! rose up in his chest and he throttled it down into an inarticulate sound.

Had the stress of being around Julien made Ravi kill that thing? - No, of course not. The man was responsible for his own actions and he'd seemed perfectly steady there.

The silence was stretching on. He had to say something. He had to think of something to say, something that wouldn't entice an attack but wouldn't burn at him forever like just letting it go-

"Yeah, well. Then we both get to be monsters, is that it?"

The way Julien's silhouette shifted was so alien and inhuman that Ravi instinctively recoiled from it, backing himself against the wall with a quick, sharp intake of breath that couldn't quite be called a gasp. The anxiety twisted up in his stomach rose to become a panic in his throat. He swallowed it back, squeezed his eyes shut and forced in a deep, shaky breath to push it down and hold it at bay.

The silence was too much. He had to look out again just to make sure Julien hadn't advanced on him, to calm an overactive and distressing imagination. He waited, on edge, for whatever he had coming from Julien.

He didn't want to call himself a monster. He didn't want to call Julien a monster. He didn't want to turn into the kind of person that would hurt people for being in the way, but he couldn't deny that he was. Just as he couldn't deny that the mere act of Julien shifting his stance had frightened him enough to put him on the verge of a panic attack. So, he didn't want to call themselves monsters, but in the moment he couldn't think of anything else to say but a quiet, resigned, "I guess so."

When was the last time Julien had been this angry? He couldn't remember, he hardly even got angry. Here it was a painful seething pressure half-submerged in grief, and he wanted to lash out, or spit on the floor, or weep. Instead he held himself quite still, his lip curled, what was left of his hands as close to fisted as they would go anymore.

Again he was aware that he was too large for this space, that his breath and body heat reflected back at him from the walls and he could feel Ravi's, less of either. He'd misjudged Ravi, or the person Ravi had been had changed too much. - he must have changed, Julien thought with anguish, he could remember a Ravi distressed by someone he couldn't save. Or even then, had he been ready to kill without a second thought? His eyes were burning, and in a sullen way Julien was glad now of the darkness, of anatomy that kept his breathing smooth.

"Stay away from Gabriel West." Right now he couldn't grip both halves of his syrinx properly and so his voice was twinned, but hard beneath the distortion. "He gives off a light that alters how you feel." Julien couldn't have known that his friend's Elven spirit only had that effect on animals and people who were good.

It was that the person Ravi had been had changed. He cared more deeply--more obsessively--about his friends, but no longer cared about people. He saw obstacles and solutions and considered the human aspects irrelevant. It was very different from the person he'd been when he'd first met Julien.

And he realized that. He realized he'd changed. But part of how he'd changed had also kept him from caring that he'd changed. You need to care about people to be bothered by the fact that you've stopped caring about people. Somewhere deep down he'd been afraid of the way his Echoes were changing him, but he mostly tried not to think about it, since there really wasn't anything he could do about it without packing up his life and leaving Locke.

But he was being forced to confront it now, and he didn't like it. The only way he could cope was with the ridiculous self-pity spiral that was, unfortunately, comfortably well-trod ground. It was easy. Confronting himself was hard.

"Maybe I just should stay away from everyone," he muttered bitterly. Lately it certainly seemed all he could do was drive people away. Might as well spare everyone the trouble of finding out the hard way that he'd turned into an awful person that nobody could like anymore.

Julien had to abandon keeping still. He rocked from the toes of one foot to those of the next and let his tail twist and fan, wishing there was enough room to pace instead of fidget, wishing Ravi was just gone.

"You're just going to bathe in self-pity? Are you twelve? How any one person feels is never more important than the effect they have on people." He might have to accept being a monster himself, but he worried about people, cared about them. It was... liberating to think of that. "And if you're killing people when you had the choice not to - no. You can't just lean back on aww poor me."

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