[Thread - Curious and Horrified]

[gone_native]

Who: Henry (h_townshend) & Crowley (gone_native)
What: drinking and swapping stories
When: after this & this
Where: Henry's room (1420)
Rating: PG13?

Comments

[gone_native]

Crowley raised his eyebrow a bit at Henry's response to his absolutely clean room. The guy was probably compulsive about it. Or just a neat-freak. If Aziraphale did somehow end up in Paradisa again, he might have to introduce the two after all. Maybe some of Henry's cleaning habits would rub off onto the angel.

"So, Mr. Mom. Do you do windows as well?"

He couldn't help asking as he grabbed the chair from the desk and, after pulling it a little more closer to the other, sat in it backwards.

"This is fine, by the way. I don't know what impressions you have about angels, Henry, but a solid chair beats small, busted old furniture in the back of a very, very dusty bookshop anyday."

Following this reassurance, the demon undid the top of his bottle. Why was it an easy open bottle, but such a nice year? This castle was crazy. Crowley almost felt bad for drinking the stuff without a nice glass. Not that he wouldn't. Oh, no. If he was going to be in the company of a drunk, especially a human, he himself was going to be as well. He swallowed a good amount of the liquid and nodded.

"Thank you, although I admit...I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with a slave for an entire week. But I'm sure I'll come up with something...Unless you yourself have any ideas?"

[h_townshend]

He must be talking about his associate again. What had he said the guy's name was? Az...Az something? Aziraphale? Henry considered asking, but Crowley seemed to have moved on. Noting this, Henry decided to bring it up another time. Maybe some time when he didn't feel so...stifled, was that the word for it? Confined? He didn't know what was causing the feeling more--the room, the topic(s) of converation at hand, or something else entirely.

"Unless you yourself have any ideas?"

The thought made Henry's head hurt. In fact, this whole situation was giving him quite the headache. He sighed and dropped his head a little, massaging his temples with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand (since the wine bottle was currently occupying the left). Aspirin might've been a good idea, except he would need to swallow such massive amounts that chasing the pills with liquor might not be the wisest plan of action.

He'd seen that movie. They sent people to mental institutions for that sort of thing.

Besides, before long it wouldn't matter anyway. First he'd be too blissfully drunk to care, and then he'd be in too much pain for aspirin to do any good anyway.

"I have no idea," the man confessed after a moment, raising his head again to look at the demon. "I'm sure you'll come up with something though." Henry paused for a moment, lost in thought, and then took another long gulp from the wine bottle in his left hand. By this point a good third of the bottle was gone.

"So," he began after lowering the wine bottle. "Who goes first?"

[gone_native]

'Something on your mind?' Crowley almost asked. Henry seemed, well, not so much out of it, but more so...distracted? It was possibly because they would be telling stories now. All about their lives before coming here and the things they'd seen and been through in the worlds they'd lived in. The demon knew that Henry was apprehensive, perhaps, about sharing his own tale so...

"I'll go first, for a bit." he replied, and took another little drink before pulling himself out of the chair and sitting on the floor next to the man. He hated the feeling of being cramped up though, when there was so much space, so he let his rest out in front of him.

"Should I start at the very beginning? Well, that might take a bit too much time. How about I just tell you about Eden then, like I said? It's something people think to be easy to imagine, or to reproduce in works of art, but the real thing? Not that simple."

And so Crowley began his little narrative, stopping every now and then to take small drinks to wet his mouth.

"Some humans seem to think that all they have to do to visualize Eden is imagine a forest, or a jungle, and then add in a man and a women barely concealing their 'shame'. Let me tell you know - it's not that easy. Maybe I've got some words for it though. Aziraphale would be better than me at this." A short sigh. "First thing I should mention is that, well, I didn't always have this kind of body. And I don't just mean a man-shaped one either. For awhile way back then I was a snake. 'Crawly'. Doesn't have that ring to it that 'Crowley' does though. I like this much, much better."

He stopped here to think for a second, and took a quick sip before moving on in the story.

[h_townshend]

...did I just hear what I think I just heard?

He had to have heard it right. What the hell else would Crowley be saying?

...and yet, talking to the guy on his floor--who had pretty much just admitted to being the Serpent in the Garden--was still a whole lot less scary than so many of the other things he'd been through. Henry didn't honestly know if he had a scrap of fear in himself for the demon. Maybe it was that he felt so removed from the events in Crowley's life, on Crowley's version of Earth?

Or maybe it was simply a bit of a stretch to fear someone you'd recently pelted with gelatin. Either way.

Sitting up on the bed, perched on the edge, was making Henry uncomfortable. Crowley, despite his close proximity, was having to speak up to him, and he didn't really want to have to speak down to the demon either. Without a word Henry slid down from the foot of the bed and took a seat on the floor near Crowley, keeping a short distance between them for comfort's sake, and leaned his back against the bed.

[gone_native]

Crowley waited a second for Henry to find his seat again before continuing.

"Anyway. I don't know if you can imagine, but try thinking like you'd never seen green before, ever in your life. You're looking around at this...this absolute ball of nothing, and then...Green. It's everywhere, and every thing you can think of is just bursting and coming alive and begging to be looked at, or touched, or smelt. The leaves have this sheen to them, sort of like after it's rained, you know? But it hasn't. It never has. This outrageously beautiful, popping color is just there and for no reason other than He wanted it to be so."

He paused to take a sizable drink.

"And then there was the flowers. Have you ever walked into a supermarket and seen something, an apple, say, that just seemed like it knew the color red and everything else that wanted to call itself red didn't even come close? It was like that. These flowers, Henry? They knew what color they were, although the color had never existed before until they'd been created. Marigold's that knew more about being sun-colored than the sun. Lilies that had more a business being white than did snow...Well, I'm sure you get the picture. Colors. Everywhere. It was hard to any kind of job the first few days or so. It was too hard to resist smelling this, tasting that, or being awed by whatever-Man-will-eventually-name-that. He called it 'Lion', by the way."

Crowley stopped for another short drink, and nearly turned to Henry while he continued with his story, but stopped. He was being a bit long-winded, and wasn't very good at this sort of thing anyway.

"And then I did my job. And then the Fruit was eaten, and that was that. No more Garden. But you know what was really interesting? Smelling rain for the first time. That's a trip. But that's that. Your turn now, Henry."

[h_townshend]

Henry's face took on a blank look as Crowley described the colors of Eden. He could still imagine colors, somewhere in the back of his mind, but already the cold, monochrome world he'd been living in for the past few weeks had dulled his memory of them somewhat. Not that he couldn't remember what red looked like--if he saw a red suddenly he'd know exactly what it was--it just took a little more imagination than he'd previously had to expend to do so. A tiny ball of bitterness began to well in his chest, but he quickly found that the cure for that was simply to upend his wine bottle again.

And then suddenly it was his turn. He hadn't been expecting it quite so soon....

"Um...well," the man began hesitantly, "it's kind of a long story. I don't think I can start at the beginning, chronologically, so I'm going to have to start at the point I came into the story and fill the gaps in backward, if that's okay."

Without waiting for an answer he continued. "I lived in a little town called Ashfield, in Pennsylvania. A couple years ago I was looking for a new apartment, and this old run down complex just seemed to kind of...I don't know, call to me. I ended up renting the place, and I lived there up until the time I came here."

He paused briefly to take another drink. "My life was pretty boring for most of those two years. I didn't have many friends, and I wasn't dating at the time. I barely ever left my apartment, except when I had to go out on assignment to take pictures."

"I started having these nightmares a short time ago. Every night the same nightmares. And then, one morning, I woke up and there were chains across the door. On the inside."

Henry barely concealed the shudder that went through his body at this point. "I couldn't open the door, even a crack. The windows were all stuck too. And I couldn't make anyone outside my door hear me, even when I pounded on it and screamed at them. I was completely isolated."

[gone_native]

'Crowley, you are a damn genius.'

It had taken him awhile to notice it, taken him 'til the end of his story, in fact, but his mind finally caught onto his mistake right before Henry began. Colors? He'd been sitting there, for however many minutes now, talking about colors...and the guy sitting next to him had been rendered colorblind by whatever force ran the castle they were drinking in. He might've apologized, but Henry had already started talking.

Crowley nodded at the question, not that it was needed, and set his bottle down while the narrative began. It sort of made him wonder what the States were like in the other's world. Maybe not all that bad. Or maybe they were.

He wasn't sure what to expect from this story but, in comparison to horror stories he'd been told, or himself read, it already had a good beginning. Loner guy, doesn't know many people and rarely leaves home, begins having unexplainable nightmares. Crowley wanted to interrupt briefly, just to ask about the chains (from the inside?) but he caught the others involuntary reaction and figured it best to keep quiet. It wouldn't be any good, after all, if he went through the trouble of getting Henry to the point of telling the thing, and then stopped him from finishing it.

"Go on." he settled for, encouraging the man in a quiet sort of voice.

[h_townshend]

Henry took another swig of alcohol, then pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his right arm around them. After a brief pause he continued, at Crowley's urging. If he didn't keep going now he was going to panic and then he'd never get the rest of his story out.

"Eventually something changed. I heard a crash at one point coming from the bathroom, and when I went to check it out there was this huge...portal, I guess, cut into the wall." Henry laughed, but it was a mirthless sort of laugh. "I know we're always told not to go into strange holes we find in our bathroom walls, but at that point there was no food left in the kitchen and I'd been stuck in my apartment for almost a week. So I went through." He sighed.

"Somehow it lead to the subway, of all places. Only...it wasn't really the subway. I couldn't leave, because all of the exits had collapsed, and there were these...things, there. They looked like dogs, but--" He didn't finish the thought, simply shook his head. "And there was only one person there, some lady named Cynthia. She asked me to help her find a way out, so I told her I would. I wanted out just as badly, after all. Only she seemed to think I was part of some kind of dream she was having."

He had to take another drink at this point. Everything in the story just got worse from here on out. "There were...ghosts there, too. I know it sounds stupid, but there were honest-to-God ghosts. Gave me such a headache to get anywhere near them. Cynthia and I ended up running at several points to get away from them, and at one point we lost each other...."

"And then I found her, dying in one of the offices, with numbers carved into her chest. '16121.' I...I held her while she died." Henry shivered again, wrapping his arm tighter around his knees. At least the story would go faster from this point, now that he'd established what kind of crazy, fucked up world he'd been thrown into.

[gone_native]

Holy shit. Now Crowley understood exactly what Henry had meant when he'd said that there would have to be liquor involved for him to talk. The nightmares, the getting locked in your own house...stuff like that happened in any number of stories, but holes in bathroom walls that lead to not-subways, not-dogs, and murdered women? Henry's world was creative.

It wasn't that Crowley didn't believe Henry, not at all. The man didn't seem like the type that would lie about even mundane things, much less about something as gruesome as this was quickly becoming. It was just...hard to take in, but at the same time, not. Crowley knew what people were capable of - he'd been around long enough to see the atrocities. But to someone like Henry? Things like that didn't happen to people like him. People like him lived ordinary, boring lives and, for the most part, were happy that way. Whatever the case, Crowley didn't envy the man. Not one bit.

Before the demon could encourage the other to continue on again (he was almost certain now that stops longer than a moment or so would turn permanent) there was a sound at the door. It resembled the sond of bottles clanking- Oh. The rest of the drink.

"Hold tight a second, Henry." Crowley said, giving him a bit of a smile. "The rest of the fun's arrived."

Rising from his seat and opening the door, Crowley collected the various this-and-thats, accomplishing the task in two trips. Once the bottles were lined up and laid out around the two's seats, the demon nodded at it. It was a gesture that read 'Feel free. Just because I'm not opening anything now shouldn't stop you in the least.'

"When you're ready."

[h_townshend]

Henry paused while Crowley went to fetch the rest of the alcohol, waiting patiently and watching in silence as the demon collected the various bottles. He glanced down at the wine bottle inhis hand, nearly gone, and set it aside, reaching instead for a bottle of Jack Daniels. Jack and Coke, hold the Coke.

He curled up in his place next to the bed again. "I passed out after that, and woke up in my apartment again. I didn't want to go back, after that, but...my options hadn't really changed since the last time I'd been there. Only the next time I went through the portal it lead somewhere else. Several somewhere elses, actually, over the course of the next few days. Everywhere I went I met another person, usually only one at a time though. And each person died."

"Jasper, burned alive. Andrew, drowned. Richard, electrocuted." He could still remember the pain that had shot through his arm when he'd grabbed for Richard, on the makeshift electric chair. "And each had numbers carved into them. 17121, 18121, et cetera."

"I found out, along the way, that everything had to do with a ritual. 'The Twenty-One Sacraments.' A man named Walter Sullivan, a serial killer, he...he'd been part of a cult, over in Silent Hill. He was trying to use the ritual to resurrect his dead mother. Only somehow he'd gotten it into his head that his mother was still in my apartment, since that's where his parents had abandoned them. I think...I think he thought my apartment was his mother, after a while."

Henry laughed bitterly, breaking open the bottle of Jack and taking a drink of it. He made a face at the taste but it didn't appear to stop him from drinking more. "I realize how strange this all sounds, but...." The man shrugged.

"After a while my neighbor got involved. Eileen. She was supposed to be number 20--the Mother Reborn. Only Walter didn't kill her at first. Something...stopped him." There was no point in mentioning Little Walter. Not only was it just more confusing, but there was no reason to humanize that bastard in any way. "He hurt her...really badly, though. I don't think she would've survived on her own in the Other World. So...I took her along with me, and tried to protect her as best I could."

"I was looking for Walter, by the end. Not that I hadn't already found him...or rather, not that he hadn't already found me." Henry moved his right hand up to his left shoulder, carefully, and pulled his t-shirt to the side, revealing a large, nasty looking scar running straight over his shoulder and down onto his chest. A souvenir from Walter's favorite toy, the chainsaw.

[gone_native]

Crowley understood why Henry was drinking, but now he was in on it too. It was almost like an exceedingly twisted version of that drinking game, the one where you take a shot every time something happens. He'd finished off the last of his wine bottle, and eventually picked up a flavored Rum. Every time something awful, traumatizing, or just plain horrifying happened to Henry, Crowley drank.

"Jasper, burned alive."
A sip.
"Andrew, drowned."
A drink.
"Richard, electrocuted."
A sizable swallow.

When Henry showed off his scar, however, the demon almost spit out the drink. He managed not to, before he could make a proper mess of things, but he set the Rum down afterwards. He'd had enough...for a few minutes, anyway. He kept his eyes on the bottle though. Even through his sunglasses, which he was, of course, still wearing, it was hard to watch Henry so casually show off a marker of a wound of that magnitude. It seemed mousy little Henry had more fight in him than this 'Walter' apparently thought. But he wouldn't get into that. It could do a mind a nasty trick, trying to wonder how people like the man next to him, and fucking madhouse cases like that 'Walter' could coexist in the same world. A world quite like the one he'd left, no less.

Crowley fidgeted with the bottle with his thumb.

"Go ahead." he whispered. Anything louder would have been somehow wrong.

[h_townshend]

A warmth had begun to spread through Henry's body as he spoke, signalling that he was very close to being drunk now. He'd certainly had enough alcohol to do the trick, but he'd drunk it all in so short a time that his body was just beginning to catch up with him. If he didn't finish his story soon he might not get the chance--if he waited too much longer he might simply degenerate into crying as he'd done with Lana.

And he really, really didn't want to cry in front of another guy. Especially the one sitting next to him.

He let the neck of his t-shirt go and straightened it back up again. "Eileen and I...started running into the other Victims again," he continued, green eyes unfocused as he recalled the experience. "They'd become ghosts like the others. Cynthia, Andrew...Jasper was still on fire. He...if Eileen hadn't been there, he might've ripped my heart right out of my chest. I still remember the feeling of his fingers going through my skin. Even though he was still burning it was cold. So damn cold."

"We learned bits and pieces about the ritual, here and there. I found out that I...I was number twenty-one. The Receiver of Wisdom. The Final Sign." Unconsciously a hand reached back and rubbed at the garish carvings on the back of his neck. 21121. 21/21.

"We found him, eventually. Walter. We knew we had to kill him to stop everything. But that world...the Other World, it had infected Eileen, I think when Walter failed to kill her. She would say the most random, bizarre things. She started whimpering and crying almost all the time. And when we finally found Walter...."

This was the part he hadn't fully explained to Lana. "Down in the center of the Other World, his world, there was this big machine thing, like big rings spinning around an axis. And blood...so much blood...." Henry paused and closed his eyes for a moment, his breathing ragged. He could still see the blood--even though he'd had trouble envisioning Crowley's colors earlier. Blood was so much easier.

"Eileen was completely out of it by this point," he started again, his voice more strained than before. His eyes opened again, staring down at the floor. "She started walking toward the machine like she was possessed, and Walter was right there. He attacked me, and I couldn't protect myself and run after Eileen at the same time...so...so I hoped maybe that if I killed him...."

He closed his eyes tightly, hoping that he could manage to spit out the last few words without breaking down again. Not like last time, please not like last time. "I failed. She...she didn't know what she was doing, she couldn't have. She...walked right into it. It tore her apart. So much blood...."

((ooc: ARGH SO LONG XD ~ I will try to get online at some point this weekend, but if I can't, would you mind puppetmastering Henry for the weekend for me? *puppy dog eyes* There's no Wonderweiss to take care of anymore, so unless you envision something totally pretty and happy and rainbow-y happening at the end of this log, he'll most likely just spend the whole time in his room drinking and being morose. XD ))

[gone_native]

There probably wasn't enough alcohol in the room to actually drink in accordance to the shit Henry had put up with, and certainly not in the rest of this bottle. ...When had the bottle gotten so empty anyway? It didn’t matter; there were others.

When Henry started talking about Eileen and the machine, Crowley thought he had a pretty good grasp on what would be coming next. As his suspicions were confirmed, the demon closed his eyes. It was almost painful to imagine the sort of things being described as having actually happened...He couldn't imagine what it was like for Henry, having to come from there and knowing that, if the castle ever spat them back out, that macabre little world was where he would return to.

Crowley opened his eyes and hesitated. He'd been about to reach out a hand, to grab Henry's shoulder, remind him to breathe, all that jazz. On a second thought, that may not have been the best thing to do. Not in the state the man was in. So Crowley grabbed another a bottle, another whatever, and held it out to him instead. When in doubt, or pain, or fear, or utter misery...drink.

Not the most sound logic in the world, no, but as this whole deal was Crowley's fault, it was the least he could do.

[[[ooc; SO SHORT. XD ~ Sorry to not have this up sooner - we lost power. Also, I've Crowley'd in the journals. It's just him trying to get Henry to come out of his room, to explain his absence. I hope that works? ♥]]

[h_townshend]

Henry's eyes opened again, after he was fairly certain that he wouldn't be bursting into tears, and he smiled weakly at the demon. "Thanks," he sighed, taking the bottle and cracking it open without even looking at it. He took a deep drink of it--ugh, flavored vodka--and shook his head.

"That's pretty much the end of the story," he said. "Eileen died, and I finally killed Walter. Only it wasn't enough--I wasn't fast enough I guess. I didn't do enough. I blacked out, and the last thing I remember--"

He paused briefly, then shuddered. "The last thing I remember is feeling the numbers being cut into my neck. And then I...I think I was dying. It felt sort of like I was falling apart, being ripped away, or out of my body or something. It was...I can't even explain it." He managed to relate all of this with a decent amount of calm, as compared to the part about Eileen's demise.

"And then I was here."

The man stared glumly down at the bottle in his hand for a long while, then eventually turned to Crowley. "I think I liked your story better."

[gone_native]

"Taking into consideration your description..."

That sentence had been harder than it needed to be to pronounce. Oh joy. And there would be no 'sobering up' this time either. Night as well go with it then. There was first time for everything, after all. Even hangovers.

"Taking that, yeah. Yeah, it sounds a lot like you were dying. Or your physical body, at any rate. I have no idea-" A pause. "I have no idea how religion works in your world." Another. "After how utterly insane your cultists are, I wouldn't take a shot at guessing anything."

The demon shook his head.

"It's nicer because there's no people in it. Or at least, not any people who did anything...Anything like that." he gestured vaguely to indicate that he was referring to the people from Henry's home, like Walter.

"For the record, I'm glad it wasn't you, Henry."

[h_townshend]

Henry sighed deeply. "I think...I think I would've become another one of the ghosts. Wandering around his world forever. Although I don't know what would've happened if the Mother had actually been reborn...maybe the whole world would've ended up like Walter's world." The man couldn't help but shiver a bit at the idea.

"Who knows, maybe...maybe since the numbers are there...." Maybe it had already happened, he wanted to say. Maybe he'd failed so utterly that the ritual had actually succeeded, despite his being whisked away at the last second. He couldn't really know, but the thought was enough to chill him to the bone.

"But it should have been me," Henry insisted quietly, shaking his head. "Why did all of the rest of them have to die while I got brought here? Why am I comfortable and safe and...and...." Happy? Was that what he was? "It should have been me, not Eileen. I was supposed to protect her. I was supposed to save her from him...."

A tear finally slid down Henry's stubbled cheek, but he was past caring at this point. He simply let his head fall back and rest on the side of the bed.