eliotwaugh | Call Off Your Ghost (for Martin)

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Call Off Your Ghost (for Martin)

He'd heard that weird things tend to happen in the city, and that Halloween is one of those times where things tend to happen, so he shouldn't be surprised. And yet.

At 9:05 p.m. on an unremarkable Tuesday Eliot feels a sudden and intense wave of vertigo, which is odd in that he hadn't been drinking and he's also sprawled more or less comfortably on his couch. He sits up, wincing, but the feeling is gone as quickly as it came on. There's no other immediate effect, and Eliot frowns. It could be some effect of large-scale magic, but he has no way of knowing where it came from, or what might occur. He goes to the fridge for a St. Crosse (mandarina almost tastes like a childhood dream about a tangerine, and they're good for a sour stomach besides), cracks it open, and thankfully hasn't yet taken a sip when he turns and sees the ghost standing directly in front of him.

"Motherfucker!" Eliot shrieks. He's not proud of it, but there it is. And then he throws the can of seltzer, which of course passes clean through the apparition, who frowns and looks perturbed. It's the figure of a man, his features seeming to shift and warp like sunlight underwater. Well whatever the fuck he looks like he's can't just turn up unannounced in someone's apartment. Eliot doesn't even think about it; he thrusts his arms out and wills the thing the fuck away from him.

It's raw magic, messy and instinctive, but it gets the job done. In an instant the force of the spell shunts the specter about twenty feet backwards; it passes through the kitchen window with a horrible squelch and Eliot can see it, hovering outside in the air like a puff of smoke. The window is covered with a smear of what he can only assume is ectoplasm, in the shape of a human head and torso.

"Oh for fuck's sake," Eliot grumbles, shaking his hands out and rummaging in the drawer of the coffee table for some chalk.

He spends the next fifteen minutes muttering and scribbling wards on the windowsills, and when he's done Eliot's reasonably certain he won't have any more uninvited guests. He looks out the window to check on the ghost, now bumping against the glass, a grumpy little stray balloon. "Sorry compadre," Eliot says in the ghost's general direction as he checks his phone and starts composing a text. "I'm not in the market for a fucking roommate."

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Martin hasn't kept in very good habits of answering his phone lately, so by the time he sees Eliot's messages and manages a response, there's already a knock at the door. He lowers his phone, still not fully wrapped around the word ghost, and stares somewhat balefully at the door before sighing, pocketing his phone and going over to answer it.

"Eliot, what-" He cuts himself off at the sight of Eliot looking just shy of hysterical, a satchel slung over his shoulder and his sword belted once again at his hip.

He had definitely considered that this might be some sort of elaborate well-intentioned ruse to force him to interact - like Kat's efforts, but both more aggressive and less direct - but this is really pushing it.

"A ghost," he says with a rather pointed look at the sword, like what on earth is that going to do. He holds his door open a bit wider to admit him, if coming in is in fact what he wants. "Halloween's not for another two days, you know."

"Oh I am wildly aware of that, Martin, but try telling them about their poor timing." Eliot huffs, even as he looks over his shoulder to check that he hasn't been followed downstairs.

He hurries into the apartment and immediately closes the door behind him. "Listen I know you're going through a depressive episode or whatever this is right now but I'm being serious." He takes out a piece of chalk and starts applying the warding glyph on the back of the door. Once the shape's complete it glows for a moment and then fades to invisibility.

"Something happened tonight," Eliot says, looking at Martin seriously. "I felt-something, a shockwave, I don't know, and then there was a ghost and I feel like this is the exact sort of thing we need to be keeping a record of. I'm going to secure your place at least, and if you want to come with me to figure out what's going on, the more the merrier. If you don't believe me I cordially invite you to look the fuck outside, they're all over the place."

He shudders. While he was warding his windows he saw one, a misty white shape twitching in the middle of the street.

A depressive episode or whatever has Martin opening his mouth to object, a little affronted, but he's stalled out immediately by the sight of Eliot making some sort of sigil on his door, which glows and disappears as soon as it's finished.

"What-" he starts to demand, but Eliot's carrying on, looking at him with an alarmingly serious expression. The last time he saw Eliot this intense was when he threatened Peter in the hallway. As ridiculous as the whole thing is, he's inclined to take it at face value.

Which isn't to say he feels good about it. For all the weird things he's witnessed, something as straightforward as ghosts have never been among them, and he'd kind of like to keep it that way. He almost wishes Eliot was just messing with him, but the point about them keeping a record of these events is well taken. At the very least, it could be something Statement-worthy.

He's only just started to allow himself to think of such things again. Christ, he can't decide if this timing is actually awful or just horribly perfect.

"Okay, just - okay." He tugs nervously at his collar and moves gingerly toward the nearest window, peering outside. Even with the street lamps, it's hard to see much of anything, but then - there's a shape, just a faint hint of movement crossing through the light and back into shadows.

"Ohhhkay," he says, and steps back sharply. "I - I believe you. What are you... is this going to keep them out?" He looks back at Eliot, trying to follow along with whatever he's doing to 'secure' the place. The Bishop, his curiosity having evidently been sufficiently evoked to pull him from his nap on Martin's bed, wanders out to join them, approaching Eliot with a little trill to greet him.

Edited 2019-11-03 23:49 (UTC)

"It should," Eliot mutters as he starts work on one of the windows. "It's a general-purpose warding but I don't know what these things want, if this is a permanent thing where we're just living next to the dead forever or simply the city being...festive." He really hopes this doesn't last. The first one nearly gave him a fucking heart attack, he's not prepared to deal with ghosts on the regular.

Eliot finishes work on the window and is about to start on the one Martin's looking out of when a little chirp draws his attention. He looks down to see a grey and white tuxedo cat trotting up. "Oh! Hello there," he says, crouching to offer the cat a hand to sniff. He probably smells mostly of chalk. "Martin, when did you get a cat?"

He wants to ask more, like is it a boy or a girl cat, does it have a name, is this some bizarre cry for help after having cared for John in his feline troubles. Eliot does almost start to ask, but the cat, instead of greeting him, puffs up with an arched back, its pupils going huge and dark. It's not looking at him, Eliot realizes with a chill. He can't move. It's looking at something behind him.

The Bishop investigates Eliot's hand briefly, and Martin braces for uncomfortable questions, but they're pulled from whatever that conversation might become when the Bishop reacts very oddly indeed. Martin fully expects him to just shove his head under Eliot's hand and demand immediate affection, but instead he pulls back and puffs up, his ears flattening. Martin's never seen him like that, and he suffers a moment of outright confusion before he realizes, with a prickling sensation on the back of his neck, what he must be seeing. Whatever it is, both he and Eliot have their backs to it.

Eliot seems frozen, and it's left to Martin to turn around, very, very slowly.

It's somehow like both a shadow and a shadowless mist, forming a shape that towers over him, a gaunt, ghastly sort of face formed in smoke and bent down to peer at him.

"Oh, Christ!" he shrieks and reels back, clutching on hard to Eliot's arm. The apparition does not make a move to follow him, but it does stare, and its stare is horrible.

Eliot does turn when Martin yells, and he makes a horrible choking sound when he sees the thing's amorphous shape. It doesn't look anything like the one in his apartment, which had just been...a person. That had been bad enough and now they're fully in arthouse horror film territory.

"Fuck," he whispers.

Martin's grip on his arm is surprisingly strong, but fear is a powerful motivator. Eliot's yanked to his feet as Martin staggers back away from the specter. He tries to both avoid the cat and keep an eye on the ghost and as he turns to see a gray blur bolting away he trips and falls to the floor with a yelp.

Martin doesn't even think about what he's doing; there isn't time. Instinct takes over as he tries to run, no sense to it, just a pure prey response to get to the bedroom. The Bishop is already on the move, bolting around the corner, and he makes to follow, dragging Eliot along with him.

Except Eliot falls, tripping over his own feet with the sudden burst of momentum, and Martin unbalances and staggers down with him, both of them landing on the floor.

He twists back to see the spectre still looming, the dark hollows of its eyes following them, and then, to his abject horror, it begins to bend down slowly, as if it wants to get a better look at them.

"Oh God, oh shit," Martin hisses in a panic, scrambling to get back to his feet and haul Eliot up with him. He's done enough bloody running from horrors in his time, and he's a bit sick of it, but he knows one thing and that's that he's never leaving someone behind again. "Come on!"

There is a part of Eliot's psyche, the part that isn't completely frozen and scared shitless, that feels a deep and abiding irritation at the very idea that this is what's happening. Of all the things he's done in his life, all the nonsense he's endured, fantastical and otherwise, here he is about to get murdered by a fucking ghost. It's offensive, really, the gall of this awful city to do this to him. A ghost, really? Eliot's better than this, he shouldn't be laid low by an evil shadow creature like an amateur.

He frowns, the anger giving him some small bit of momentum, and if Martin weren't recovered enough to get up and haul him back, if he didn't need two hands to cast the spell, he'd be ready to magic missile this fucking thing's amorphous face off.

But instead he is tugged to his feet, and scrambles back with Martin into another room--the bedroom, he realizes, once Martin slams the door shut. For whatever reason the little bit of wood is enough to make him feel somewhat safe, even though he knows logically if the thing wanted to, it could probably come straight through. But it didn't seem to follow them as they retreated, and it might only move slowly. They might have time to come up with...something.

"So," Eliot says, panting for breath as he braces against the door, "I love what you've done with the place."

Martin lets out a slightly hysterical guffaw at that, still leaning against the door. It only just occurs to him how pointless a shut door is as a line of defense, but it makes him feel a bit better at least. He steps back a little shakily and looks around before he spots The Bishop just under the bed, and he bends down to scoop him up, holding him close and comforting.

"Okay," he says, making a concerted effort to slow his breathing as The Bishop pushes his head up under his chin. "Okay. You - Whatever you were doing, did you finish? Did it get in here before you were done, or - or did it just not work?" These seem like important things to establish first off. A third option strikes him - that the ghost has simply been here all along - but that's too horrible to even consider.

"I don't-" Eliot grunts in frustration. He can't just say he doesn't know. "I hadn't finished the full fucking...perimeter sweep of your apartment, no," he starts to explain. "It's the same process I used upstairs so it will work once it's done but..." he sighs. "It's supposed to keep hostile shit out and I don't know if that...thing being in your living room means it snuck in and just decided to turn visible or if it had been there since the beginning." He can only offer Martin an apologetic shrug.

He doesn't want to open the door and check on it, because he doesn't know if it would be worse to see it still standing there or just right up against the door, since they're apparently living by film rules tonight. Well. Eliot's not keen on dying.

"Well, okay I'm going to need a bit to...scrape together some kind of plan here, erm. I am really sorry about this, it can't be how you'd planned to spend your evening." Eliot offers his hand to the cat, fingers loosely curled for it to sniff. "So anyway Martin, how about you introduce me to your adorable friend?"

Martin frowns, struggling to settle his thoughts enough to consider what their next step is. Something in Eliot's explanation bothers him, but he can't place it before the conversation is turning, absurdly, to his cat.

"O-oh." He looks down stupidly at The Bishop, still a little too stressed to purr, and plants a comforting little kiss on his head. "This is The Bishop."

He desperately doesn't want to say anything more about it, to get into the ins and outs of why a cat, for a multitude of reasons; he doesn't want to be doing any of this, this close-quarters socializing, when he's not ready yet, he's only just started to poke his head above ground and he can't... He hasn't even spoken to John yet, not properly. He wants to focus on the task at hand, not his cat, not his absent personal life, if he can just figure out what it is that's—

"Wait," he blurts out. "Is it just meant for hostile things? Your spell, I mean?"

As terrifying as the apparition is, he can't say it actually made any aggressive moves toward them, and unless it's very slow, there's no real explanation for why it hasn't followed them here, either.

"That's a very dignified name, my goodness." Eliot manages a bit of a grin at The Bishop. He'll cling to whatever levity he can find in this situation. "Does this imply the existence of a cat Pope?"

But Martin's moving on, gone all quiet and pensive, and when he asks about the spell Eliot frowns.

"You mean..." He looks toward the door and rubs his neck. Shit. "No, yeah, it's...it's to eject and deter whatever means the occupant harm, so it'd probably keep Peter out but...fuck. Fuck, I assumed a whole slew of ghosts meant a spectral invasion but what if they're just...people?"

Eliot feels a terrible gnawing guilt for shunting the one through his window, and winces. "I think I fucked up."

Martin snorts a little at the idea of warding Peter out of his flat, more than a little tempted to follow up on that, but he softens at once when Eliot's face falls with evident guilt.

"Hey," he says, a bit awkwardly—if he were in a better place for all this, he might reach out to touch Eliot's arm, or something, but as it is he just keeps hold of The Bishop and continues, "you didn't know."

He looks at the door, considering the theory, and decides they won't get any progress on it just standing here. He sets his cat down and says, "I'm going to have a look," opening the door without waiting for a response. He leans out cautiously, peering down the hall, feeling a mixture of nervous energy and stubborn bravery, not unlike the feeling that had driven him down into the tunnels beneath the Institute, going after John. "Nothing here," he says, and picks his way slowly and carefully to the living room.

He's expecting it, but he still nearly jumps out of his skin at the sight of that awful spectre just hovering there. It immediately turns its hollow gaze on him, but it doesn't make any moves toward him, and Martin stands there with his hand pressed over his heart, willing it to stop hammering quite so hard. The ghost is terrifying to look at, but if they're right... if it's just a lost soul, meaning no harm, then... then he doesn't want to hurt its feelings, per se.

"H-hullo," he ventures, lifting a hand in an uncertain wave. The ghost stares at him.

Martin's reassurance is cold comfort, and another uncomfortable reminder that as well as Eliot thought he'd been adjusting to Darrow, his perspective on magic and the supernatural might not be as applicable as he'd like.

He doesn't have time to get properly moody, though, because Martin abruptly announces that he's leaving and sets The Bishop down and just does it, making his way down the hall like it's second nature. For a moment Eliot cannot think of what it is he ought to do, and he crouches down and lets the cat rub against his knuckles. After a brief hesitation he texts Jack, hoping he's not having as miserable time with this as they are, and then straightens up.

"All right, your Excellency," he says, giving The Bishop a final scritch, "hold down the fort, I'm going to make sure your dad doesn't get eaten by Zuul out there."

But as he makes his way back to the living room it's clear that Martin is...fine, actually, and the horrible looming figure has made no hostile moves toward him. It turns to look at Eliot, who reminds himself that he has faced much worse things than a creepy ghost.

"I apologize," he says to the ghost, doing his best to sound diplomatic. "I believe there might be some kind of confusion, do--can you understand us?"

Edited 2019-12-13 15:52 (UTC)

When Eliot speaks, the ghost turns to stare at him, instead. It just... stares, which is horrible, but Martin forces his fear back down. There's no way to know if it understands them, but at the very least it is responsive to them, and it is continuing to demonstrate that it is rather... passive, actually, not malicious.

Martin frowns for a moment, wondering where that leaves them, what they do about it, when he supposes they might be going about it the wrong way. It may not be able to answer, but there are other ways to see if it undertands. He clears his throat and takes a faltering step forward.

"You don't really want to be here, do you?" he says, chasing a whim and hoping desperately that he's right about it. "Are you stuck? I mean... can you move at all?"

The ghost turns his gaping stare on him again for what feels like far too long before it drifts slowly back. It doesn't turn, just keeping its gaze on him while it floats away, inching toward the door.

Martin breathes out. "Okay," he says. "Well." So that's something. He could ask it to leave, but that would just put it in the hallway. And he's not certain it can leave the building, so...

"You know," he says as a thought strikes him suddenly. It's a bit terrible, actually, but he can't find the capacity to care just now. "If you have a complaint to register, I suppose you could approach the building manager about it." He faces the ghost, meeting its stare steadily. "He's down on the first floor. First flat on the left from the lobby, you really can't miss it. I can't promise he'll be very polite or helpful, but..." He shrugs. "He's technically in charge here."

The ghost just looks at him for another long span of seconds, having no expression to change or judge. Then, just as Martin's growing a bit worried this is too complex or ridiculous a suggestion, it turns around fully and drifts out through the closed door.

Martin stares at the door, then at Eliot, then hustles over to step out into the hall. He can't believe that actually worked, and he's going to follow it to make sure.

Engaging with the ghost is utterly nerve-wracking, all the more because it doesn't actually do anything, despite all Eliot's adrenaline telling him he needs to be prepared for a threat. It only stares at him and doesn't answer, but when Martin steps up the ghost responds as if it understands. So that's something.

Eliot can breathe a bit easier, watching it float towards the door, but he has to cover his mouth to stop himself from laughing at the suggestion that the ghost take up its grievances with Peter.

"Holy shit," he whispers, looking at Martin with a slightly hysterical grin. "That was brilliant, you think it's just going to go...hover in his place instead?" Eliot follows him out, making sure that The Bishop doesn't sneak through the door before he closes it. A thought occurs to him. Not a terribly kind thought, but he voices it nonetheless. "...You think that would work on the rest of them?"

Eliot's delight is distantly gratifying, and Martin allows himself the tiniest of smirks as he proceeds to into the hall, keeping a healthy distance between himself and the ghost as it drifts on over to the end of the hall.

"No reason not to try," he says a bit too cheerfully, and then stops when he realizes the ghost has stopped and appears to be staring at them again.

"Wh... oh." He hesitates, glancing at the door to the stairwell. "You... you want me to get that for you?"

It seems ridiculous. This ghost is either terribly unfamiliar with its own noncorporeal abilities, or it's more bound by physical constraints than Martin realizes. Or perhaps it's just very polite. As frightening as it is, it seems very polite, as far as he can tell.

So, he swallows his trepidation and reaches out to open the door. Sure enough, the ghost drifts in and begins making its slow way down the stairs. Martin wonders if it's less about physical barriers and more an emotional one; it remembers interacting with the world as a living person, and is continuing to do so as much as it can.

In any case, he follows it, down the stairs to the first floor where, stepping out into the hall, he's able to watch it hover outside Peter's door, looking almost thoughtful, before finally breaking its own habit and passing through the door.

It worked. Martin hesitates, waiting for something to happen, but nothing does, at least nothing audible. It doesn't matter. He grins, small but satisfied, and looks at Eliot. "Shall we see about the others?"

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Call Off Your Ghost (for Martin)

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