Logs:Agony and Ecstasy

Agony and Ecstasy
Dramatis Personae Jax, Matt, Ryan
In Absentia	2023-08-22 This is grave matter
Location phones, and Georgia
(Matt --> Ryan): Hello, darling, how are you holding up? There's no answer to this except Signal's subtle indication Matt has been blocked, but when he texts again the following week, it does go through. (Matt --> Ryan): I hate to trouble you so, but I need a picture of a door (Matt --> Ryan): A closet door in a little-used room, ideally (Matt --> Ryan): One that you don't expect to need for a while A picture comes first -- what door is this? It's very pink and impeccably organized with an extraordinarily bland White Girl type of wardrobe that definitely does not belong to Ryan. Very possibly he simply just searched "closet door" on Google. There's a short delay after this before a follow-up text: (Ryan --> Matt): What the fuck (Matt --> Ryan): A door in your house (Matt --> Ryan): Well, the Hollands' house (Matt --> Ryan): I suppose I oughtn't to assume you are there! (Matt --> Ryan): But if you are, be a dear and find me a door no one's like to need (Matt --> Ryan): Pretty please? (Ryan --> Matt): what the fuck (Ryan --> Matt): Wherefth fuck daaa you think I have been all mont (Ryan --> Matt): Asask jax s ma ashe's home (Matt --> Ryan): I imagine she's probably busy preparing you a feast (Matt --> Ryan): It spoils the dramatic entrance somewhat if I explain, but I guess not having an entrance also spoils it (Matt --> Ryan): I cut a deal with a gifted youngster who can open a door from my house to yours, but they need to see the farther door (Ryan --> Matt): what the fuck (Ryan --> Matt): goaway (Matt --> Ryan): Just humor me, please (Matt --> Ryan): Send me a picture of the nearest closet door (Matt --> Ryan): Oh, and close it if it's open (Matt --> Ryan): You have leave to slam it in my face It takes considerably longer than the last texts, but after a time another text comes: (Ryan --> Matt): wtf It is, at least, soon followed by a picture. (Ryan --> Matt): (Matt --> Ryan): And here I was worrying you didn't love me anymore (Matt --> Ryan): I am dead serious, though (Matt --> Ryan): This is grave matter Perhaps this last is a bridge too far. At least, Ryan has promptly blocked Matt again; his pained groan will have to be taken as read. <GA> ??? - ??? Is that mausoleum door supposed to open? Well, it sure is opening, and from the inside, no less. It's just a crack, at first, the complaint of disused hinges perhaps more noticeable than the narrow strip of light or the shadow that interrupts it. When it pushes the rest of the way open, disgorging not some undead creature but Matt. He's wearing a green tee on which a giant wave with a tall ship riding at its crest spills from a teacup beneath a stormy sky, gray cargo shorts and no shoes, threadbare Blue Suns satchel slung over one shoulder. Behind him, the inside of the mausoleum looks startlingly like his own bedroom in Greenwich, but from the unexpected angle of his closet. He has a hefty doorstop in one hand which he, after a moment of puzzling at the raised threshold, just wiggles into the margin of the hinge-side jamb. Straightening up, he casts around for signs of life. Mostly there are signs of death, quite a number of other ornate mausoleums and tombstones spreading out wide beneath a beautifully upkept interweaving of trees and flowers. There are some people wandering the grounds; fewer perhaps than there might be if it weren't sweltering near a hundred degrees in the muggy Atlanta sun; this particular mausoleum is in a quiet corner, few enough people nearby. And a good thing that there are few people there too, because alongside a small fountain under the shade of a magnolia, the dead have come back to very surreal life. One of the figures lounging at the fountainside is corpse-pale, emaciated, uncanny blue light shining from eye sockets that never quite stay settled where they should be on its face; the other... is barely recognizable as human at all, really, an odd shifting mass of flesh with too many and too few limbs by turns. To Matt's senses, the fierce blaze of Jax's power is evident clear enough, though it's Ryan's that whirls on him with bafflement and outrage. "What the fuck," the shifting mass of flesh is saying. "I blocked you." "Shhh," says the wight beside him, soothingly. "We're doing calm, remember, honey-honey?" Perhaps in service of the effort to Do Calm, Matt has abruptly become -- kind of invisible. Mostly invisible. It's rippling, distorted, really not Jax's best work, but so it goes. For all his love of spookiness, Matt gives a startled, half-hissed "Ostie--" before he, presumably, puts together who the monsters are. "That only works on the texts, darling." Beneath his calm and matter-of-fact tone, there's a weak stir of hurt and rejection. Not surprise, though. When the cloak of invisibility falls he opens his mouth again, but closes it this time without speaking. His power curls through Jax's and steadies his illusing as he leans back against the side of mausoleum. "I blocked him," Ryan is saying again, a little petulantly. He does get mollified easily enough -- maybe at Jax's reminder of Calm but maybe at Matt's sudden disappearance. Either way he's subsiding lumpily back onto the fountain; something that is probably an arm but looks more like a floppy tentacle digging around until he retrieves a very ordinary-looking phone. Making a small disgruntled huff as he tries to send a text -- which fails, since Matt is still blocked. He drapes himself back half over the lip of the fountain and half over Jax's lap, and the mix of feelings rolling off him melts back into just a fuzzy heady warmth. "I can still see you." "Wait, that's real?" Suddenly Jax sounds a bit alarmed. The illusion melts away from them and Matt both; over on the fountain lip he's -- well, still looking corpse-pale but that's kind of normal for him. He's otherwise bright in rainbow tie-dyed shortalls, only one shoulder strap snapped, over top of a loose black tank dotted with silver stars, his sandals kicked off on the ground near where he sits, hair a little overgrown in its natural very-dark-brown. His huge mirrored sunglasses cover much of his expression but when he turns towards Matt he is definitely peering. "... you real?" Matt opens his mouth, blinks, and shuts it again, frowning. "Am I?" This doesn't sound mocking or rhetorical, but there's no attending existential terror, either, not even the odd remove of derealization. There's nothing behind it but a flat, weary uncertainty, but he does seem to be giving the question serious thought. His conclusion, when it comes, is almost completely devoid of empathic accompaniment: "I think I am." He pushes off of the mausoleum's stone wall and walks toward the fountain, stopping just outside of easy punching distance. "You did block me, and I probably deserved it this time. But that was on Signal, this is..." He looks around at the cemetery, his words leavened with the barest flutter of joy when he turns back to his friends. "...a spooktacular place to get high. My compliments. And my regrets, for coming here sober." There isn't a lot of regret; it isn't a lot of anything. He tilts his head from side to side, as if using the motion to gauge something. "...mostly sober." Ryan's been working on a deep tan in contrast to Jax's habitual pallor. His chair is abandoned to the other side of Jax's sandals and he's in soft faded old jeans that are more hole than denim at this point paired with a tight and sparkly black and green muscle shirt, his own sunglasses pushed up to the top of his head. For a second he tries to focus on Matt, but this just makes his eyes slightly vibrate, a tic that eases off when he relaxes his gaze. "Jax," he confirms, with a deeper flush of affection mingling in with the warmth already radiating off him, "is so damn good at doing drugs you have not done drugs until you've done drugs with --" His brow furrows. "Why are you here." And then, after this, "-- why are you sober." "Ohhhh wow ssssorry I would -- not have disappeared you if I knew you were real." Jax wrinkles his nose, reconsiders, "Maybe. Maybe -- maybe I would have I'm a little -- oh!" His phone is buzzing, and he pats at it (and entirely fails to silence its alarm) before leaning down to pick up a water bottle. "Drink time. Pills time." There's not much coming from him, hasn't been much coming from him for a while; under the quiet buzzy chemical euphoria there's only an odd flatness that for a very brief moment toys with getting irritated or with getting pleased and discards both of these options. "-- you have the drugs is why." "Oh, I've been disappeared worse." Matt feels even more nonchalant than he sounds as he sinks down heavily to sit in the grass beside the fountain. "See, I'd fancied myself rather brilliant at doing drugs until I did drugs with Ryan," he confides to Jax, sotto voce, as if Ryan were not sitting right there and also did not have superhuman hearing. "Mm. It's a long story, but suffice to say I did a great boon for a capricious fairy, who offered to conjure me a doorway wheresoever my heart desired." Here a stir of something bright that sinks again without resolving into any identifiable feeling. "Besides I thought it long past time I come out of the closet." He flourishes one hand at the door that opens into his bedroom from where his closet should be, then tips his head back to twitch a faint smile at Ryan. "And obviously I'm sober because you have the drugs." "What the fuck," Ryan is groaning again, a faint flicker of irritability in his words though it's soon eclipsed again. He takes the water bottle, obligingly takes a long swig before tearing open a small packet of pills to down them all in a second gulp. "Why did your heart..." He's frowning somewhere past Matt's shoulder, then looking aside to his wheelchair. Then abruptly back down to the ground; there's a creeping sense of shame and grief lending a jarringly sharp edge to his previous fuzzy-warmth. "Did you come... for drugs. I didn't say I had drugs." "There's different ways at being good at drugs," Jax assures Matt very seriously. He's taking the water bottle back, swallowing down his own handful of pills with a large swig. "Y'all get lots of practice. I think drugs is like sex for me. I don't do it much at all but when I do --" His smile is kind of vague. He rests a hand on Ryan's head, lightly nudging the other man's sunglasses back down over his eyes so that he can curl his fingers idly through Ryan's hair. "It's your birthday, of course you had drugs. -- you," he sounds a little bit more stern, now, "should be careful when you're makin' deals with fairies. Hearts are tricksy things." Matt isn't looking at the other men now, his gaze fixed up at the magnolia's canopy. "Maybe I've been too careful..." There's a muffled grief tugging feeble and ineffectual at his words. "Well. You're quite right about fairies, and I ought to know better. Only, I missed the both of you so, and." He doesn't trail off, just stops when that bright, brittle thing starts to struggle through again. It hasn't gone when he resumes with "I wanted to say happy birthday," but cracks and blossoms into a strange, frightened longing. The next twitch of his smile is rueful, the next words slumping exhausted back to his vacant baseline. "Not an excuse, mind. Hearts are tricksy things. I'd love to do drugs with you..." He rolls his head aside regards his friends in turn. "...but it's your birthday, and you're the highest authority present on getting high. Despite my immense ego I know my presence isn't always a gift. If you still want me to go away, I will." "Ohshit," is Ryan's surprised reply to the mention of his birthday, "it is." He starts to push himself back upright -- but stops this struggle halfway there, that flush of grief returning as he settles back down where he'd been slumped. "-- go away," comes swiftly after this, and though it's picked up and amplified that longing the shame is amplified, too. "Didn't ask for any gifts." "Ryan..." Jax's tone sounds halfway to a warning, soft but firm, but Ryan alone can feel the guilty relief that lies beneath it. He curls an arm beneath Ryan's shoulders, an ease in his movements, anyway, when he helps his friend to sit back up. "They're gifts, you don't gotta ask." His arm stays around Ryan in careful support. "I'm sorry," he tells Matt, and beneath his quiet sincerity of tone, this feels true and dishonest all at once. "He ain't -- s'been -- you should prob'ly get back." Matt turns away to look out across the cemetery, quiet for the space of one slightly uneven breath, then another. "Yeah." It's not clear what he's agreeing with, or even if he's agreeing, hurt and despair subsided into apathy again when he adds, very softly, "You haven't been, either. I don't just miss you--" He starts to gather himself as if he means to leave it at that but then, shoulders tensing, ventures, "--I need you. I think you need me, too." There's fear in this, dull and distant, but the smile he offers when he glances back at the others is as bright as ever. "That might be the immense ego talking, though." He rises slowly and slowly, too, goes back the way he came. Pausing on the uncanny threshold between Georgia and New York, he almost turns, almost says something more, but ultimately just closes the mausoleum door gently behind him.