This is Halloween, everybody make a scene!

[lucetimods]

Who: Everyone
What: HALLOWEENIES
When: Halloween day, 8AM onward
Where: Luceti?
Summary: Everyone wakes up from their Moon!Coma and oh by the way, it's Halloween
Rating: Fluffy

Comments

house seven; waking up horrors

[slaying]

[ it is a crash of thunder that wakes her up -- or almost wakes her up. buffy fights against consciousness with a newly entrenched guilt that wants to keep her deep asleep. waking up brings realization. realization brings coping. she doesn't want to cope again. not yet.

the slayer, tucked in tight amongst a crumbling couch-cushion fort, reaches for the pirate that she fell asleep with. no. not with. after. jack had been asleep for a brief piece of time before archie and horatio had come and she had...

there had been a mask. why had she put it on? it had seemed so...comforting, at the time. as she had watched the moon through the window, she had felt drawn to the queen's mask. anything to to try and solve the problem at hand. and then she had...

jilly. buffy screws her eyes shut; she doesn't want to face the reality. not yet. ]

HORRORS. FLUFFY, FLUFFY HORRORS

[lists_to_port]

"Mornin', Annielove," Jack mumbled. The pirate was still in that warm place between sleeping and waking where dreams began to flit into the background with little bare footsteps and reality blossomed. Or something.

Totally, completely unaware of any late-night hijinks, the pirate smiled and stretched, not opening his eyes.

"We're alive. I'm sore. Jilly asleep? What's for breakfast?"

the kitten of horrors.

[slaying]

There wasn't much room left for lying to herself and staying 'asleep'. And so, as Jack stretched, Buffy rolled away and shoved aside pillows and cushions. Freeing herself. They'd survived. Was the moon...?

She took air in through her nose -- sharp but deep -- and pushed up onto her feet. Leaving Jack behind and not yet saying anything. She went first to the front window and twitched the curtain aside. Alive. They were alive. Everyone else would be alive. Which made last night's choice...

No. It wasn't a choice. How could that have ever counted as a choice?

Her voice felt sticky in her throat: "...Jack. I need to -- Jack, about last night."

[lists_to_port]

It was that stickiness that struck him fully awake, in the end. He sat up, all at once. The pillows had fallen down around them, but the house was still standing, safe as ever. Standing around himself and Buffy and...

"WHERE IS SHE?"

Panic. Black-hole falling, chest-freezing, blood-pumping panic.

[slaying]

Looking at him -- looking in his eyes -- might as well have been impossible. Unachievable. Buffy turned back towards the window and worried the curtains in her hands. Tearing. Fraying. She wasn't even aware that she was doing them damage.

"There was a mask." Her voice was low; either party would be hard-pressed to a remember the last time she sounded so abjectly penitent. It was an ugly kind of weakness on her. She didn't wear it well. Buffy's voice remained thick. "Archie and Horatio came. They wanted to take her down to the tunnels. Last night.

There was a..." One of those destructive hands stopped its tearing. She touched her own cheek. A mask. She could still feel it, cold and impersonal on her skin...although it had fallen off hours ago. Disappeared.

[lists_to_port]

He was trying to process all this even as he was leaping to his feet and strapping on his sword and searching for his boots. Mask. A mask. Hornblower. Kennedy. Tunnels. The pieces were not quite fitting yet--but...Kennedy.

"What's this about tunnels and masks?"

[slaying]

"Jilly. She went to the tunnels, last night. With them."

Buffy did not pick back up on the mask thread. Not for the moment, at least.

[lists_to_port]

The pirate slumped back against a handy wall and slid down to the floor, knees tucked up in a seated position, palms clenched against his sides.

"Thank God."

Relief drove out indignation and anger. She was alright. Jilly was okay.

[slaying]

Buffy didn't move from her post. She was shocked by his sudden relief -- she was still expecting and waiting upon his anger. Didn't she deserve it, now?

"I'm sorry," she stammered after the silence was allowed to live for too long.

[lists_to_port]

"Aye. Well." Jack was quickly putting what had most likely happened together, staring at her long and hard. A mask had somehow shifted her? Or Kennedy? NO one had thought to wake him?!

"And I slept straight through it."

He climbed back to his feet.

[slaying]

"...You were pretty much exhausted. You looked exhausted. You don't often look exhausted."

[lists_to_port]

There had been so much strain with the moon's approach. Worries about the ship, the girl, the woman; his friends. And finally, those masks that seemed to mock him and betray him so to his closest associates.

Jack pulled on one boot, then the other.

[slaying]

At the sight of his preparations, Buffy was quick to cross her arms. One loose fist lifted to the base of her neck -- her fingers wrapped around the heavy ring weighing down a gold chain. Dwarfing delicate, little gold cross. Watching him put his boots on felt like the most natural thing in the world -- after all, shouldn't it be his turn to leave her, now? Her guilt and self-criticism managed to warp just about every thought that touched her mind.

It had been the Shift, right? But that didn't seem like a fair enough excuse. It was so very much like the guilt she could manage back home. Spell-related guilt.

Instead of try and stop him, Buffy eventually uncrossed her arms and reached out for the coat that he had draped over a chair the day before. She shook it out, standing ready to help it onto his shoulders.

[lists_to_port]

"Obliged, lovely." With her help, he shrugged into the garment, buttoning it up to his neck. All that strange fog outside? Thunder? It was warranted.

[slaying]

This done, she stood back and took a moment to bite anxiously on the side of one thumb. There are other things that should be said...so, mumbled around her hand: "I never would've..."

She shouldn't take this morning so passively -- hadn't she resented his passivity on more than one occasion? "You'll come back?"

[lists_to_port]

"Aaaaand you are asking that...for what reason?"

That passivity was just starting to ring some warning bells for Jack Sparrow, coupled as it was with the anxious body language. These signs cut through his preoccupations with what must be done now that they were, officially, alive. He could not celebrate that fact properly until he knew the fate of his Joanna.