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rapturefree2015-09-15 09:36 pm
rapturemod) wrote in rapturefree2015-09-15 09:36 pm
Entry tags:
baby you can drive my car
It's anticipated. It's expected. We're all about expectations, aren't we? Sort of? Maybe? Regardless, it's the first official
You probably know the drill by now. If you don't, here's a quick rundown: test drive memes are a game's way of gauging interest and such. It's a way to play around in the environment without the commitment of apping, maybe see how well that character you're considering gels with the setting. This one will be open indefinitely, or at least until further notice. You don't need to be apped to the game to test drive a character, or even reserved, or even want to reserve. However, if your interest is indeed piqued, reserves are thisaway, applications thataway.
As of this writing, we don't consider anything that happens in the TDM canon unless you'd like to transfer any threads that happen here to the main comms (provided they don't interfere with pre-established game events, of course). TDM threads are just a way to get a feel for a game, or in case you need that pesky writing sample for an app in progress. We don't recommend you do a standard intro post, however - save that for the game proper!
We don't have a set entry date for the game proper just yet. Once we accumulate some interest, we'll be sure to let you know!
Some resources we recommend that you check out if interest continues to abound:
PROMPTS:
TEST DRIVE MEME
As of this writing, we don't consider anything that happens in the TDM canon unless you'd like to transfer any threads that happen here to the main comms (provided they don't interfere with pre-established game events, of course). TDM threads are just a way to get a feel for a game, or in case you need that pesky writing sample for an app in progress. We don't recommend you do a standard intro post, however - save that for the game proper!
We don't have a set entry date for the game proper just yet. Once we accumulate some interest, we'll be sure to let you know!
Some resources we recommend that you check out if interest continues to abound:
PROMPTS:
i. do you hear the people sing?
You've heard the rumors circulating about Atlas and his bandits for months. Even the upper echelons of Rapture's high society were having trouble burying their concern under the careful veneer of professionalism. What you didn't expect was an open attack. You'd just been passing by, but the poor souls who lived and shopped and made their living on this street have just found their entire livelihood set aflame. People are saying it's a bombing, while others protest that it must have been something down in maintenance.
Right now, it doesn't really matter one way or the other. The homes and storefronts have been reduced to sheeting flame as hairline cracks go cobwebbing up the glass, the only thing separating the city from a watery grave. Whether you choose to get the hell out of dodge or help the wailing survivors is up to you, but regardless of what you choose to do, this section of Rapture is rapidly coming apart at the seams.
You've heard the rumors circulating about Atlas and his bandits for months. Even the upper echelons of Rapture's high society were having trouble burying their concern under the careful veneer of professionalism. What you didn't expect was an open attack. You'd just been passing by, but the poor souls who lived and shopped and made their living on this street have just found their entire livelihood set aflame. People are saying it's a bombing, while others protest that it must have been something down in maintenance.
Right now, it doesn't really matter one way or the other. The homes and storefronts have been reduced to sheeting flame as hairline cracks go cobwebbing up the glass, the only thing separating the city from a watery grave. Whether you choose to get the hell out of dodge or help the wailing survivors is up to you, but regardless of what you choose to do, this section of Rapture is rapidly coming apart at the seams.
ii. who's your daddy?
You've no clue whose bright idea it was to tail the Little Sister. It might have been some gang of spliced-up nobodies thirsty for some extra ADAM. It might have been your best friend's idiot plan. Hell, it might have even been yours. All you know is that no matter how appealing the thought seemed at the time, you and yours are in for a world of hurt. The Little Sister just had to shriek once and her armored protector came barreling into the scene, drill humming to life with a sinister whine. Guilty as charged or caught in the crossfire, you're in for the fight of your life with a Big Daddy, one of the most dangerous things in Rapture. Good luck.
You've no clue whose bright idea it was to tail the Little Sister. It might have been some gang of spliced-up nobodies thirsty for some extra ADAM. It might have been your best friend's idiot plan. Hell, it might have even been yours. All you know is that no matter how appealing the thought seemed at the time, you and yours are in for a world of hurt. The Little Sister just had to shriek once and her armored protector came barreling into the scene, drill humming to life with a sinister whine. Guilty as charged or caught in the crossfire, you're in for the fight of your life with a Big Daddy, one of the most dangerous things in Rapture. Good luck.
iii. a part of the masterpiece
Fort Frolic, they say, is the hub for creative artistry. Sander Cohen is either a wildly inspired artistic genius or a madman depending on who you ask, but the alcohol runs the same no matter how you slice it. For tonight, the Fort is yours to enjoy at your leisure. Take a gander, gamble everything you've got, have a drink, maybe sit in for a show. The only thing Cohen loves more than his exclusivity is rampant attention, and tonight he's on full display. He's even torturing - er, entertaining a lucky pair of dancers in Fleet Hall! Don't mind the wires threaded in and out of their clothing, doubtless unspooled over all those important parts of the nervous system and ready to unleash a burst of fatal electricity at a moment's notice. They've got to be just for show.
One thing is certain about the possibly-deranged Sander Cohen, after all: he certainly keeps you on your toes!
One thing is certain about the possibly-deranged Sander Cohen, after all: he certainly keeps you on your toes!
iv. wild card! make up your own scenario
We prefer third-person, present tense prose, but if you're just in it for the fun you can write in whatever floats your pontoon. Have fun!
.*･｡ﾟ₍₍ ᕕ(´◔⌓◔)ᕗ⁾⁾*:･ﾟ✧
He didn't leave after all, he's right there and-
"Hey," he calls out, his voice completely demolished by smoke and the exertion of clinging to the ladder. One foot dangles down below him. The leg of his slacks is singed. He hauls himself back up a step, tries again. "Hey, I thought you left," inappropriately casual. He laughs, it turns into a dry hack.
- maybe he's going to get out of this after all. He hates the desperate feeling fluttering in his chest.
Coughing makes everything spin a little. He waits for it to stop before he hauls himself up another rung, throws the top half of his body across the grate once he can reach it, slotting his fingers through like claws. He crawls toward the figure. His hands don't sting so much anymore but he's not sure that's a great thing.
"No offense, but-" he curls in on himself, choking, drags himself half-upright against the brick, "What the fuck are you doing?"
٩(๏̯͡๏)۶
But there's no shavings taken from the back of his head, nothing wavering in the corners of his vision. Despite the black and the orange and the smoke and the building crumbling from beneath them both - nothing tall and impossible and faceless looms in his periphery, reaching for him, whispering at him, burning its blank face into the back of his closed lids.
There's nothing there. Just another guy. Another stupid guy.
And coughing.
And fire.
It's fine. It'll be fine.
Tim staggers forward. He forces himself to. He can't not.
"Uh," he ekes out through clenched teeth, his voice dry and rusty with the smoke. One corner of his mouth twitches in a wry, self-deprecating slant. "I thought maybe I'd save your life, or, you know. Something."
Yeah, because one look at Tim just screams hero. Especially now - soot-blackened and nearly doubled over and hacking his lungs out.
"There's a way out." He jabs a thumb over one shoulder, pointing back the way he came. "It's hot, but gotta be better than jumping, yeah?"
this_is_fine_dog.png
He just walked into a burning building for you, so you'd better fucking move.
Question it later, just move.
Eliot wipes at his face, streaked with sweat and ash and tears, and makes a sound that could be a snort but ends up somewhere around a wheeze.
"Sounds like a terrible choice to me, man." There's a tension around his mouth that's trying really hard to be a grin as he shuffles his way back toward the guy from the alley and the open window and the burning shitheap he just stepped out of.
"But. Uh. Lucky for me, you make terrible choices. I don't exactly feel like jumping today. So." He swallows and jerks his head at the window. A sagging mouth belching smoke. He raises his brows, his lips twitch.
"Ready?"
He's not ready. There's no getting ready for this.
The smoke is thicker inside, more concentrated. Every movement aches, makes him feel like he's wound too tight to move inside, like he's a clockwork winding down. He's pretty sure he's going to quit smoking if he makes it out of this. He's pretty sure he's going to owe this guy for a good, long time, too. He just hopes he hasn't just gotten this poor, dumb bleeding-heart bastard killed.
Think about that later.
Right now, one step at a time. Literally. He picks his way through the flaming hull of a hallway over floorboards that jut ragged and black, chewed through by the blaze.
EVERYTHING IS FINE
But, hell, if he's going to pick a side in this stupid political conflict, he's not gonna land with Atlas or with Ryan. He's gonna land on the side of people like him, fucked over by this absurd backwards system.
"I gotta soft spot for head cases," he deadpans. Then, casual, like he's just inviting him out for a drink and not braving a raging inferno, he jerks his chin. "Let's get outta here."
The wood's creaking beneath his feet but he doesn't dare lean against any part of the room for support. Maybe it's for the best this guy's built like Jay, ragged and skinny and small - smaller than Tim, in any case. He'll let him go first. That's just common sense, and it's safer.
He drags the collar of his shirt over his mouth, which doesn't do a whole lot to block out the smoke but it's something. He points, just to the side of the part of the floor that's begun to degrade completely.
"Stairs," he grunts, the word muffled through his shirt but obvious in intent.
A+ coping skills
He doesn’t want to idle too long when the floorboards under his feet are rotten-soft and it’s getting harder by the moment to breathe. He crosses his arms over his head, glances back over his shoulder, squinting into the flame for the familiar hunch of Alley Guy’s shoulders before folding himself in half and ducking under, chin tucked hard against his chest.
He keeps moving forward, looking back. He’s still there. They’re still moving. Good. This is good. No one’s dead yet and this is good.
Until Alley Guy stops moving and he points and he’s yelling and the sound is demolished by the roar of the blaze but his meaning’s clear enough. Everything transitions quickly from surmountable bullshit to fuck this bullshit.
Stairs. The word is stairs. This should be even better, this should feel like home stretch, but the floor between him and the stairs is skeletal, bits of floorboards and fallen ruins of the floor above clinging to support beams over several stories of flame. Who even knows if there are stairs left on the other side.
“No. Hell no. No.” Eliot shouts at the situation more than anything, immediately regrets it. His throat clutches up tight like someone’s got a fist around his windpipe, gets him gasping into his shirtsleeve.
The debris is solid but likely to slip under the weight of one moving person, no less two. The support beams are thickest near the wall, where they bracket in, but his head’s already sloshing from lack of oxygen, and he wouldn’t consider himself particularly coordinated on a good day. He freezes, heads to where Alley Guy is standing.
“Hey. So, we’re about to fucking die. But I never thought anyone’d run into a burning building for me. It’s been real,” Eliot yells into his sleeve. What do people say when they’re about to tightrope walk an inferno with a perfect stranger? Probably not that. Oh. Gratitude.
“I mean thanks,” he screams before he toes out onto the first beam. He wobbles backwards, the wall at his back is hot as a brand through his clothes. The wall is a bad plan. Without support, he reels a little and settles a foot at the second. Moving slowly is a bad plan. He gets both feet on the beam and steps to the next quickly, sways so precariously he needs to bend deep at the knees to balance. Standing up is terrifying, his head rushing. Moving quickly is a bad plan. This is a bad plan.
tw for suicide ideation and some mild finger trauma oh boy oh boy
So he goes down trying to save some doomed bastard from a burning building. Given his grand life's story, that's not such a bad way to go.
He refrains from venturing immediately after, barely resisting the urge to reach out and steady the guy as he shuffles his way across.
The wood is groaning beneath his feet, and then with a high, sharp, splintering sound -
- his foot plunges through the paper-fragile wood.
His palms scrape over wood as he snatches out desperately for a handhold, fingernails raking over the ashen matchwood until the pads of his fingers are wet and slippery with red but he's slipping further, further, sinking into the softening wood and shit. That's at least a full story drop, but the impact will bring him right through the floor to the next, and the next, and that's - that's not something you just walk off. Shit.
"Go, go," he pants, breathless, the words choked and taut in his throat between each rasping cough. "Go go go go go go go - !"
And then he's falling.
CW: emetophobia, dissociation, suicidal ideation, hand trauma
The moment drags something sick.
The break wasn’t under his feet. Eliot thinks he’s going to vomit. He’s so nauseous he can’t even scream, just prying his hands away from the wall to clutch at his mouth, shaking so hard he thinks for a wild moment he might lose balance. No. No, no, no. He moves, doesn’t stop moving, all rush and momentum and haze until he’s slamming into a railing, it gives with a crack, he lurches back, feels his heels hit open air, drops to his knees to feel solid concrete. Stairs.
There’s a voice at the back of Eliot’s head like an eye opening. Go. You’re better off without him. No one to distract you from the goal. No looking back over your shoulder for him. No checking up. Nothing to check up on. Nothing but forward motion, now. He got you as far as you needed him to get you, now do the rest. Go. Move. Get the fuck up, move. Get out of here. He gave you his blessing didn’t he? What more do you want. Hand-embossed invitations are not forthcoming. Are you going to waste that? Get the fuck up and go.
He staggers until he reaches the stairwell, drops, making himself as small as he can, gagging, taking in too much smoke, gagging and hacking, scrubbing at his face with blunt hands.
Maybe he wasn’t real. Maybe you just needed something to get you up, get you headed in the right direction. Now get back up. You still have what you need to get out of here alive. Eliot knows he’d still be on that fire escape waiting to die if it weren’t for the guy in the alley. He also knows it wouldn’t be the first time he’s-
No. How the fuck do you plan to walk out of this and live with yourself not knowing whether or not you left someone who walked into a burning building for your sorry ass to die there?
Only one choice then.
Eliot runs, feet slapping cement, chest tight. He misses the landing, has to double back. The door handle is hot, too hot for him to hold, but the wood crumbles against the point of his shoulder when he plows himself into it, skidding and stumbling over broken furniture, flame gusting around him as it tears into the air in the stairwell. He can’t get back up, the smoke is too thick here, stinging his eyes closed, his throat. He crawls.
His hands push through glass and downed beams, greasy ash thick as snow.
“Hey! Hey. Is anyone alive here?”
tw: flashbacking, drowning, physical trauma, suicide ideation, intense self-loathing
He hits the second floor and the wood is eggshell-thin and it cracks under his body like glass. Like hitting water. Hitting water and sinking and straining to breach the surface but it's holding you down and silver bubbles stream from parted lips and you scream on and on as it holds you, watching arms twitch and spasm and cleave uselessly through water.
Wait, what?
No. No, not water. Just wood. Or ash, more specifically. Soon-to-be ash.
He's looking at the ceiling, watching soot waft lazily from the roughly Tim-sized hole he doesn't remember punching through the story above him. Maybe he should be aching. That seems like something that should be happening.
Is anyone alive in there?
Good question.
Tim tries to roll over, and that's when his senses to decide to tune back in. He sucks in a sharp, pained breath and immediately chokes on a mouthful of hot ash. Whatever the hell crude delusion of drowning came from, it's bitterly apt - he's suffocating under the layers of heat and the steady consolidation of cinders raining from the crumbling ceiling, the whole of his back and ribs practically vibrating from their recent abuse.
"Help," he tries to croak, pathetically, but the word dies before it can form into so much as a rasp in the back of his throat. Help, help. He always needs help. Can't ever stand on his own. Go his own way, and what happens? People die. Not friends, you have to have friends before you can doom them, but people, probably people a hell of a lot more important than him.
Just lie here. Lie here, die. It's not hard. He already feels half-asleep, woozy from the smoke and the dull, rattling ache in his skull. It could be as simple as closing his eyes and just letting the flames do the work.
Not even strong enough for that, is he. It hurts to breathe, it sends agony knifing down his throat and in his lungs and especially in his ribs, but he tries again and hisses out a low, panicked yelp of, "help."
CW: injuries, descriptions of a dead body in P7&8 here is a real party
He hears an answer to his question, small, strangled, but there. Someone here is alive. He thumps his way around a toppled dresser, an avalanche of shattered plates. It’s hard to place the sound. There’s an echoing roar in his ears that’s either the fire or his heartbeat making everything sound distant and small, even the gunshot-cracks of rafters snapping.
“Hey, keep talking. I – " his voice tightens up to a gasp, he waits it out, tucking chin to chest as he breathes, tries to get his bearings.
It strikes him that he doesn’t know which direction the door is anymore.
You are not a hero.
It’s not a revelation. Just an uneasy reckoning with something he’d always suspected but never stopped hoping he could fight.
“You gotta say something,” he says and it sounds like begging and maybe it is. He doesn’t want to think about that too hard. He feels tile under his palms, slippery with soot, then something soft. Someone. No. Body. This person is dead. Their arm rolls out of his hand, heavy, no resistance. He shakes them, tells himself he needs to stop, keep moving, there’s nothing he can do to help here, keeps shaking them.
He doesn’t want to open his eyes. This isn’t something he wants to see. But he has to know. He looks. They’re not the guy from the alley. He says sorry to this person, their wide, shocked eyes that his hands are trembling too hard to close. It feels stupid, something that people only do in movies, playing at being respectful. Asking for forgiveness from someone who can’t say no.
He knows he needs to move. There’s someone in this building he still has a fractional chance of being able to do something for.
"Please," he calls out, voice cracking and not quite managing to pull back together, "just tell me you're still there?"
tw: hella suicide ideation
He can still hear the voice curling in his head.
"If you don't do the right thing, and burn to death - "
It'd be right. It'd be more than right. It'd be just. Poetic. Deserved. He knows it. Aches for it - or maybe that's just his back. It'd be better, that way, if he could just be strong enough, powerful enough to let himself burn to dust and ash like he should have - weeks ago? days ago? how long as has it been? Maybe time doesn't matter here so much. Everything's already slowed down, the smoke clotting in his throat and turning his mind dull and soft and edgeless.
The words begin as little more than a formless groan, raw and whispered with the effort to carve them out with a tongue that's too thick and too heavy.
"Here." He has to move. He tries, and immediately regrets it. His fingers brush hot embers. He recoils, and his spine arches at the strain. He thinks he cries out - maybe it's him, maybe it's the other guy, maybe it's someone else, anyone else trapped in this hellhole with them, get them out get them out get them out get him out oh god oh god oh god, and he realizes it has to be him yelling, because there's no one else.
CW: oh haha injuries, implied blood, implied broken bones, dissociation, hopelessness
He jerks upright, a stitch in his side doubling him back over as he stumbles over ruined plaster and wood, before he loses sight of him in the smoke, before he loses his bearings again. Big, heavy, steps like he's wading out, the melted soles of his shoes slipping on debris. His head pulses, making his vision swim, he tries to focus but right now making his body do the things he fucking needs it to do feels like listening to a radio as you drive out of town. Things fading in and out, warping. He fiddles with it to tune back in and gets a wash of noise.
He keeps drifting further out of his body, hauling himself back in by the fistful. Clenched hands and he’s falling down, almost forgetting to open them to break his fall. Hauling himself forward on his elbows to let the guy know he’s here, like he couldn’t possibly have missed Eliot crashing down next to him, rasping out breaths that don’t make it even halfway to words. Some hero. Some rescue.
His ankle feels wrong. He reaches down. His hand comes up wet. Oh. It doesn’t even register as pain. His head feels like it’s full of static now. Out of range of signal. He wants to laugh but he just chokes.
He rolls onto his back and he can see the hole the guy punched through the floor on his way down. He can see the broken balustrade where he hit next. He knows which direction the stairs are now, but it doesn’t matter. He’s pretty damn sure he’s not going to get there. He actually manages to laugh this time.
“Stairs,” he says pointing
“Back, over…” he waves, sucks in a tight breath “there’s tile, then plates, broken, on the ground, I mean. Then…” he doesn’t remember, “Go. Keep going. Then the door to the stairwell.”
“I’m gonna,” he shakes his head, “But I don’t think I’m getting out.”
He gets a good look at the way the guy is holding himself, he looks back up at the ceiling, thinks about it for half a goddamn second. Shame hits him like a fist. “Oh, fuck. Can you— can you move?”
no subject
It's like hearing someone else speak through water. The other guy's beside him now - how did that happen? When? How could he have missed something like that? God, stupid, stupid.
"Can you?" Tim says, and he can't even pull himself together enough to make the words sound wry before they stagger into a ragged cough. Maybe that thing skittering around in the back of his skull would be strong enough - hell, it probably is. But there's no way it's bubbling up now. They're fucked. He's fucked.
"I think I broke something," he admits hazily. Something important, probably. He landed right on his back, smashed straight through the wood.
He thinks, dryly, dully, absurdly, of lighting a last cigarette. But with this kind of fire, what would be the point? He'll die of smoke inhalation one way or another, he was always going to - this just speeds it up some.
He laughs, brittle and forced, a low huff of mirthless irony.
"Sorry about this."
CW: this is all abt death ok. suicide ment., badthink abt untreated mental illness, abuse ment.
“’S find out,” he manages on the exhale.
He feels heavy. He’s not sure anymore. He’s heavy and tired and when he bends his knee to get his feet back under him, his leg just slides back to the floor.
“Oh.” There’s a wet sound that comes from somewhere in his chest before he sputters out a laugh. Oh, how embarrassing “I guess not.” He lets his head roll back against the floor. The grin edging up at the corner of his lips is wild and sudden and entirely inappropriate.
“Dunno why you’re apologizing.” His smile drops like a handful of change. I just got you killed, I fuck everyone over, especially the people I try to help, especially the people who think they can help me. “Always figured I’d… you know. Die alone. Didn’t bother me. Just.” He loses the thought, reaches back for it.
“This is okay.”
And in all the ways he’d considered himself dying, this hadn’t even charted. Overdose, intentional, accidental, cops, one of the million people he’d fucked over shows up on his doorstep with a gun or some nastier ideas, maybe someday his head would get the best of him, maybe he’d forget everything, maybe no one would help. This isn’t so bad. Senseless, almost easy. He’s tired. It’s easy. It’ll be easy. In a selfish, awful way, he’s glad he won't have to go alone.
Something surges up inside him, hisses you child, so much like him - weak, he knows whose voice it is but she’s garbled, lost under his heartbeat, the hollow, wringing heaves of his breathing.
tw: MORE DEATH AND SUICIDE IDEATION isn't this thread just a laugh and a half
"Not a bad way to go," Tim agrees hoarsely. "Didn't really save you and you didn't really save me but - there're worse ways."
Like being run through with a knife to the throat by a man who's shrieking and sobbing and breathless and helpless, or pitched over a balcony by your old best friend, or shot in the gut by the one person you fought for years to save, or having your mind torn clean from skull while the rest of you snaps evenly under the pressure of a thing you'll never understand. Yeah, being burned alive isn't so bad. It's painful, sure, but he's earned that. More than earned it.
The easiest lesson he ever learned was knowing how to lie down and die. How, and when.
"Tim," he blurts, as the thought occurs to him. "Gonna die one way or another. But, uh, I figure you should know. Tim. That's my name."
CW: death, self-worth issues, guilt, A REAL COOL PARTY
Oh. A ripcord sound dislodges itself from his chest. Breathing is hard, making words is harder. "Think I've fucked up worse. But. I'm still s-"
Sorry for what? Sorry I'm letting you die? Sorry I'm dying too, so we're both dying for nothing. Sorry you thought I was someone worth saving? He lets it go.
Tim. Alley Guy is Tim. He considers what he knows about Tim. Tim runs into burning buildings for luckless bastards he doesn't know. Tim is absurdly cavalier about his own impending death. What was it he said. Soft spot for headcases. Tim is saving the wrong person. Probably. Probably, he doesn't know shit about Tim.
"Eliot. I'm Eliot. My name is, I mean," No point in wasting your possible last breath on semantics, "What do people say when they're doing this? Pleased to meet you, Tim. Was that out loud?" Not like that was a better choice
tw: self-loathing, suicide ideation, and DROWNING
It's hard, awfully damn hard, to visualize anything anyone could do that would be fucking up more than what he's already wrung out of his hands. There's no faceless specter flickering at him in the fringes of his vision, but maybe there should be. He was never religious - heaven and hell never meant a damn thing. But he believes in anything, he believes in it. And if that's his hell, then that's where he's going. That's where he's always been going.
Burn it to ash.
It's what he deserves.
He closes his eyes and tries to suck in the last breath that'll choke him into nothing.
He holds it.
And holds it.
And with a rending creak, something far above his head shatters, and the explosive impact of saltwater hitting heavily against the blackened skeletons of half-burned buildings jars him heavily awake.
He's caught in a current
He's caught in a current, and it's taking him -
probably a claustrophobia warn?? immobilization, body horror, injuries, drowning
He begs for it. Maybe he's talking out loud now. It doesn't matter. He doesn't know who he's talking to, anyway. It's not the guy dying next to him and it's certainly not God.
Grating washes of noise and sensation keep pulling him back into his body, not mapping right. Everything jumbled, the sound of something grinding and giving that he feels in his molars, jangling down his back.
And then there's water. A lot of water moving fast. It's so cold he feels his stomach clench once, hard and-
And -
There's the pain that wasn't there before, a sudden throb echoing through his limbs, pounding in his hands, his head. His skin feels ill-fitting, tight to bursting with him, every movement feels like it pulls all the way up to his scalp and-
He's pinned between what's left of a wall and the remains of fallen rafters, caught by the current. His muscles tremble and tremble but he's pretty sure he's not moving, not until he's sliding under.
He watches his hands float up above him, clutch uselessly at the debris that's slipping out of view.
flashbacking and suicide ideation and moooore drowning
It held him down. It held him down beneath the water, choking him, and he thrashed and clawed at it and it wouldn't let him go. It held him until he was tired enough to go shuddering and limp, tired enough to die, and then, and then it released him, let him haul himself out of the laughably shallow stretch of muddy water, sopping and gasping and wanting nothing more than to have had been held down just a little bit longer.
The temptation to cede to that old instinct is still guttering and there and beyond his capacity to ignore, but it's the presence of the other poor bastard caught in this alongside him that forces him to push forward, both hands scything through the water as he tries to break the surface.
He never learned to swim. He never even learned to tread water.
With an almighty crash of water, Tim slams into the ashen remains of what used to be the building's rafters. He glimpses something sodden just beneath, but he can't breathe and he needs to kick out, lashing out desperately to breach the surface and gulp down a relieved gasp of air and breathe.
claustrophobia warn! dissociation, panic attacks, drowning, hand/nail horror a lil
It's never felt less like it belonged to him, his body. Always needing and rotting and breaking down, showing critical failure points when it's least convenient.
He fights to keep sight of surface. How horribly easy it would be to just forget which way is out, again. No milemarkers here. Just nothing, nothing and wreckage and him. The tightness in his chest twists one tighter, a spike of pain wrings a gasp out of him and he's sucking water, sucking water and he feels hands at his throat, at his mouth. They're his hands.
They're his hands and he can move them. He hauls himself toward surface. Every motion burns, slow and dragging and his head reels. And he's coughing and he's sucking more water and he thrashes, clawing at the water until he feels wood, splinters coming up under his nails. Then air.
emetophobia warning
It doesn't take more than a cursory sweep of his surroundings to conclude that this part of Rapture is as good as lost. The fires are out, the crowds no longer spilling for the bulkheads, the fierce rushing current having scattered them.
He kicks out clumsily, shoulders still shuddering with each racking cough, and hooks one hand around a charred husk of wood that's managed to stay afloat. All he has to do is steer himself for one of the bulkheads. All he has to do. All he has to do. All he has to do all he has
Tim propels himself forward numbly, mechanically, riding the current where he can. The abrupt shift from hot to freezing leaves him shivering. God, but don't let that mean convulsions. Please don't.
emetophobia warn, hand trauma, self-loathing
It feels like too much to keep in his head at once. Keep hold of this, keep your head above water, keep breathing, keep moving. Aching lungs can’t take in enough air to keep everything from lurching around him, to keep the dark from creeping in at the corners. The current pulls at his legs, wreckage flows around him, constant, dizzying motion.
He needs something to focus on, a fixed point.
Scanning for Tim makes his eyes ache, but it’s not hard to pick out the splashes of water kicking up around him as he cuts a jagged path through the floating debris. He follows, big messy kicks that move him forward in short jerks and leave his trembling legs numb. He counts kicks, it helps until he loses track, but he hasn’t lost sight of Tim. Just ahead of him now, the spray from his strokes stinging his face.
He’s so fucking tired. Tim looks tired too, shoulders shaking with coughs. He wonders if what he’s hanging on to would hold them both. It’d be easier for both of them if it would. Or he could end up drowning both of them. Deadweight. All this for nothing. He keeps kicking. Chickenshit. There’s no winning like this.
no subject
Not out of the woods yet. Not ever, not really. He'll always be snarled in one thing or another. He braces his feet against the floor with the water sloshing up to his chest and pulls, throwing all of his weight onto the wheel that groans and shrills as it resists his attempts to turn it.
"C'mon," says Tim, whispered desperately from between clenched teeth. "Come on, come on, come on - "
But it won't give and he can't keep straining to crack the damn thing open. He casts about wildly for something, any kind of tool, anything, and with a sick lurch of guilt to his gut his eyes land on Elliot.
He left him behind.
He didn't mean to, really, he didn't, he just assumed he hadn't made it or that they'd been separated but instead of stopping to look he'd just forged mindlessly ahead and he left him. No better than Jay. No better than any of the self-interested bastards here under the sea.
He tightens his grip on the wheel and reaches out, fingers outstretched as far as they can go.
"Grab," he calls. "Come on."