For a second, he wonders if Fever hung up on him -- or, worse, if she can't hear him anymore.
(Nobody could hear anything he said while he was a ghost. He's had nightmares like that sometimes, too. Choppers, he'll yell, or the front's moving, while the whole camp laughs and keeps playing football.)
"Huh?" Bewildered. "I guess -- wait at the station for me? You don't gotta come all the way up to the springs and back. You sure nobody's gonna be mad if I'm not in today?"
"I'll take care of it. No one will be mad. Promise you that."
Yorick dies and has to go back to work, but he's Yorick. He's not Radar, who by the sound of it has never has a temporary death before. He's allowed a sick day for it, and if anyone has issues, Fever will make sure she catches hell over it and not him. It's very simple.
"And I know I don't have to go up there. The question is if you want me to."
"Okay," he says, still sounding deeply uncertain. "I, uh. I think I'll be okay if I just ride the train the whole way round. We can meet up at the south station."
A pause.
"Hey, you didn't find my glasses by any chance while you were looking for me, didja?"
"I didn't, no. Did they perhaps fall off on the train? If not, I'll loop my path past that place again before getting to the south station, see if I missed something."
That really does it for that place, if it stole his glasses on top of everything else.
"Maybe, but I didn't see 'em." He lets out a tired, dejected sigh before muttering, mostly to himself: "Not like I can see much right now anyway, though."
Radar isn't as blind as a bat without his glasses. He's worse. At least bats have excellent night vision; his is crummy no matter what time of day it is.
"And I'll check by that shack again. But I'll be there at the station when you pull in."
And no, the glasses aren't going to be there, much as she's hunting around for them. Which is deeply annoying, as she's not going in to retrace her path and let the skeleton get her again, but it tells her to start thinking about replacements. What an untouchable skeleton wants with Radar's glasses, she doesn't know. Maybe some sort of weird trophy.
But she has a deadline to keep, and if she gets there early, she's just going to end up disconnected for a while. Sitting, half in her body and half without, only jolted back to herself when the train actually stops. Pulled back abruptly from any and all thoughts about trophies from the dead, feeling an ache at the back of her skull and stubbornly ignoring it.
They're not anywhere on the train, either. Radar checks the whole length of it, cautiously moving from car to car, squinting and patting at the seats as he tries to spot a glint of light where there shouldn't be one. He asks the other passengers whenever he bumps into them (sometimes literally). Nothing.
So he just goes back to his seat and curls up again to not-watch the scenery.
It's a long ride. Even with a search for his missing glasses thrown in, he's got plenty of time to think, plus a little extra to try and pull himself all the way together before he meets up with Fever. He... doesn't quite manage it. When Radar steps off the train, blinking owlishly up and down the platform to figure out if any of the fuzzy blobs milling around are Fever, he still looks a bit shellshocked.
Oh, there she is! ...Well, there's a blob a couple inches taller than him with a grayish halo around its maybe-head that's probably Fever's hair. Radar immediately veers to follow her voice.
"Hey Miss Fever. No luck," he confirms glumly. "You think the eye doctor's still open today?"
Normally he'd know that kind of thing right off the top of his head, but his sense of time's all scrambled.
"I can't actually remember, thinking on this. The first place we can go that has a telephone, we can call. Or, well, wherever you want to go, phone or not."
She pauses, and there's a murmured here before her touch brushes his arm lightly. An offer of a guide, but not a presumption. Such she had learned with Arthur, that one warned and offered but did not forcibly direct unless it was something like yanking him physically out of harm's way.
"Thanks," he mumbles. "I can see big stuff okay, I just dunno what it is sometimes."
He makes an aborted gesture toward the bridge of his nose, like he's trying to adjust his glasses before remembering they're not there. The train chugs away, so loud it takes Radar a couple seconds to reorient himself.
"I think I just wanna go home. I gotta check on Tiger Junior and Treble, I tried to when I was, um..." He swallows. "Anyway they couldn't see me. Or hear me, neither. So I gotta let 'em know I'm okay."
She loops her arm through his for properly escorting, and will head in the closest direction to what he indicates. Her sense of direction isn't perfect, but it shouldn't be that hard, right?
"336 Briar Road," he says. He locks his arm firmly with hers, but keeps blinking around as if he can bring the world into focus by sheer force of will. "It's kinda close to the edge of town? If you hang a left out of the Oak & Iron you'll get there in ten minutes if you're walking kinda fast."
"But you were right," he insists, "there was nothing to be scared about. Those stupid headstones weren't even real. Maybe I coulda handled seeing the skeleton if I wasn't already running around like a ninny over a dumb piece of rock with my name on it. And then maybe we could've found a door that wasn't a trap."
Fever's glad he can't see her face, that the way her expression falters won't be at any risk for discovery.
"...It cut me down, in the end. Neither magic nor weapon could do anything to it. I couldn't stop it - and then I was in an empty room, with a door that led out to the festival. I don't...really know what was supposed to happen afterwards. Maybe I broke it, somehow."
Or maybe, terrifyingly, being cut down was the answer. She doesn't know.
Oh, he was hoping that wasn't what happened. Now he feels even worse about running. Not like he could've stopped the skeleton, either, but at least Fever wouldn't've had to try alone.
"...You sure you're doing okay? I mean even before that, when we were in that room with the scales -- " He hesitates. "You didn't look so good. Especially when the whole place changed for a second."
"What do you mean? I didn't see the place change. Not before we stepped out the door."
It's sidestepping the real question, but what is she supposed to do, turn around and say that such a room only reminded her of what kind of a person she is? If she even gets to use that word, at present. No, no, she has to seek refuge in another direction.
"Really?" His brow knits. Uneasily, he looks down at his feet, under the pretense of trying to watch his step, and mumbles half to himself, "Guess it was just me. Never mind."
It had felt a little like hearing the choppers. Just -- stronger. He's not used to seeing stuff instead of just hearing it, though; he doesn't know what he can file away as I wasn't supposed to see that, like he absentmindedly does whenever he hears things it turns out nobody said out loud.
(He never realized how often he did that until he met Brownyn. Maybe he oughta see if he can talk to them again.)
Someone comes up the street in the opposite direction, close enough that they're in danger of shoulder-checking Radar. Without looking up, and barely thinking about it besides a tiny tilt of his head, he sidesteps them.
She sees it, wrestles with the desire to know and not know. It's dipping close to what she was trying to avoid, but...if he saw something, she has the right to know what it was, since clearly her mind is engaging in an open door policy she never consented to. Or it's a side effect of the spores. One of them.
Radar hunches his shoulders almost up to his ears. "Gee, I don't think I was supposed to see it, but it wasn't anything bad, Miss Fever, honest. It was just you and a bunch of other people around a campfire."
"...was one a woman with long, dark hair? And another a pale man? And another woman, unlike any human you've ever seen?"
She means to be stoic. But there's a wistfulness in her tone that comes when some people talk about home, and seeing them again - why couldn't it have been her, blessed with such a vision?
He finally looks back up at Fever, blinking. The last little spark that wondered was it nothing, was the room just messing with me? snuffs out.
It's a little terrifying. He's got that same half-scared half-exhilarated swoop in his stomach as when Bronwyn told him what they were; what he was. Realizing there really is a whole new layer of stuff to the world that most people can't see, but he might be able to sometimes... oh, boy, it's a lot.
"Yeah, that was them," he says. A bit more tentative, "Are those your friends? Back home?"
"Yes. Some of my companions, back where I'm from. I don't know how you were able to glimpse them, in that moment, but if it was me and others around the fire...likely it was just my turn to keep watch."
Because if she looked like how she felt, they had to all be asleep. Which meant she was either on watch, or woken from a nightmare, and only one of those is a socially acceptable answer. Gods, she's so close to fleeing to Paradesium, asking the Worm in the depths what she must do to shield her thoughts in such a way that they become harder to grasp, instead of the wearying conscious effort of veiling her mind.
"The rest of them were probably in their tents, but the weather was fair enough to sleep under the stars, mostly." A pause. "You mentioned psychic powers the other day. Is that what this is about?"
"I think so? I -- gee, I dunno." He heaves a sigh. "It didn't used to feel like this big a deal. Sometimes I just know stuff. Ever since I was little. Or..." How did he put it to Bronwyn? "When I hear something it's like I'm hearing it back here first -- " he touches the back of his head, "-- even before it gets to my ears, or, or I think somebody said something out loud but it turns out they didn't. And that's what Bronwyn said I was. Psychic, like them."
There's that little moth-flutter in his stomach again when he names it. Maybe that's why it feels so much bigger now. His mom and Uncle Ed always told him not to name the animals they planned to sell, because as soon as he did he'd get too attached to let them go. (Naturally, Radar did anyway, and naturally, he got way too attached to them.) When you name something, it's not just a thing anymore. It's real.
"But I never really saw stuff like I did in there before. Mostly I always just heard it. I woulda completely thought it was just that lady with the scales messing with me if it hadn't kinda felt like the choppers coming, too."
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(Nobody could hear anything he said while he was a ghost. He's had nightmares like that sometimes, too. Choppers, he'll yell, or the front's moving, while the whole camp laughs and keeps playing football.)
"Huh?" Bewildered. "I guess -- wait at the station for me? You don't gotta come all the way up to the springs and back. You sure nobody's gonna be mad if I'm not in today?"
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Yorick dies and has to go back to work, but he's Yorick. He's not Radar, who by the sound of it has never has a temporary death before. He's allowed a sick day for it, and if anyone has issues, Fever will make sure she catches hell over it and not him. It's very simple.
"And I know I don't have to go up there. The question is if you want me to."
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A pause.
"Hey, you didn't find my glasses by any chance while you were looking for me, didja?"
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That really does it for that place, if it stole his glasses on top of everything else.
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Radar isn't as blind as a bat without his glasses. He's worse. At least bats have excellent night vision; his is crummy no matter what time of day it is.
"I'll look again. I got time."
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And no, the glasses aren't going to be there, much as she's hunting around for them. Which is deeply annoying, as she's not going in to retrace her path and let the skeleton get her again, but it tells her to start thinking about replacements. What an untouchable skeleton wants with Radar's glasses, she doesn't know. Maybe some sort of weird trophy.
But she has a deadline to keep, and if she gets there early, she's just going to end up disconnected for a while. Sitting, half in her body and half without, only jolted back to herself when the train actually stops. Pulled back abruptly from any and all thoughts about trophies from the dead, feeling an ache at the back of her skull and stubbornly ignoring it.
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So he just goes back to his seat and curls up again to not-watch the scenery.
It's a long ride. Even with a search for his missing glasses thrown in, he's got plenty of time to think, plus a little extra to try and pull himself all the way together before he meets up with Fever. He... doesn't quite manage it. When Radar steps off the train, blinking owlishly up and down the platform to figure out if any of the fuzzy blobs milling around are Fever, he still looks a bit shellshocked.
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Fortunately, she sees him, and calls out before she comes over. Wow, he really looks lost - and so different without his glasses.
"No luck, huh. None on my end either. Guess we'll have to get them replaced."
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"Hey Miss Fever. No luck," he confirms glumly. "You think the eye doctor's still open today?"
Normally he'd know that kind of thing right off the top of his head, but his sense of time's all scrambled.
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She pauses, and there's a murmured here before her touch brushes his arm lightly. An offer of a guide, but not a presumption. Such she had learned with Arthur, that one warned and offered but did not forcibly direct unless it was something like yanking him physically out of harm's way.
"...Don't worry. I won't walk too fast."
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He makes an aborted gesture toward the bridge of his nose, like he's trying to adjust his glasses before remembering they're not there. The train chugs away, so loud it takes Radar a couple seconds to reorient himself.
"I think I just wanna go home. I gotta check on Tiger Junior and Treble, I tried to when I was, um..." He swallows. "Anyway they couldn't see me. Or hear me, neither. So I gotta let 'em know I'm okay."
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She loops her arm through his for properly escorting, and will head in the closest direction to what he indicates. Her sense of direction isn't perfect, but it shouldn't be that hard, right?
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Radar falls silent for a beat.
"...Sorry I ran off and left you behind, ma'am."
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"Actually, I was glad you ran, Radar. If you hadn't, I would have told you to. Get out, get yourself to safety."
Even if that safety was a lie for them both.
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He hesitates.
A little smaller, "How'd you get out?"
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"...It cut me down, in the end. Neither magic nor weapon could do anything to it. I couldn't stop it - and then I was in an empty room, with a door that led out to the festival. I don't...really know what was supposed to happen afterwards. Maybe I broke it, somehow."
Or maybe, terrifyingly, being cut down was the answer. She doesn't know.
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Oh, he was hoping that wasn't what happened. Now he feels even worse about running. Not like he could've stopped the skeleton, either, but at least Fever wouldn't've had to try alone.
"...You sure you're doing okay? I mean even before that, when we were in that room with the scales -- " He hesitates. "You didn't look so good. Especially when the whole place changed for a second."
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It's sidestepping the real question, but what is she supposed to do, turn around and say that such a room only reminded her of what kind of a person she is? If she even gets to use that word, at present. No, no, she has to seek refuge in another direction.
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It had felt a little like hearing the choppers. Just -- stronger. He's not used to seeing stuff instead of just hearing it, though; he doesn't know what he can file away as I wasn't supposed to see that, like he absentmindedly does whenever he hears things it turns out nobody said out loud.
(He never realized how often he did that until he met Brownyn. Maybe he oughta see if he can talk to them again.)
Someone comes up the street in the opposite direction, close enough that they're in danger of shoulder-checking Radar. Without looking up, and barely thinking about it besides a tiny tilt of his head, he sidesteps them.
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"What did you see, Radar?"
The regret is already setting in.
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He hesitates.
"And you just looked real sad, that's all."
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She means to be stoic. But there's a wistfulness in her tone that comes when some people talk about home, and seeing them again - why couldn't it have been her, blessed with such a vision?
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It's a little terrifying. He's got that same half-scared half-exhilarated swoop in his stomach as when Bronwyn told him what they were; what he was. Realizing there really is a whole new layer of stuff to the world that most people can't see, but he might be able to sometimes... oh, boy, it's a lot.
"Yeah, that was them," he says. A bit more tentative, "Are those your friends? Back home?"
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Because if she looked like how she felt, they had to all be asleep. Which meant she was either on watch, or woken from a nightmare, and only one of those is a socially acceptable answer. Gods, she's so close to fleeing to Paradesium, asking the Worm in the depths what she must do to shield her thoughts in such a way that they become harder to grasp, instead of the wearying conscious effort of veiling her mind.
"The rest of them were probably in their tents, but the weather was fair enough to sleep under the stars, mostly." A pause. "You mentioned psychic powers the other day. Is that what this is about?"
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"I think so? I -- gee, I dunno." He heaves a sigh. "It didn't used to feel like this big a deal. Sometimes I just know stuff. Ever since I was little. Or..." How did he put it to Bronwyn? "When I hear something it's like I'm hearing it back here first -- " he touches the back of his head, "-- even before it gets to my ears, or, or I think somebody said something out loud but it turns out they didn't. And that's what Bronwyn said I was. Psychic, like them."
There's that little moth-flutter in his stomach again when he names it. Maybe that's why it feels so much bigger now. His mom and Uncle Ed always told him not to name the animals they planned to sell, because as soon as he did he'd get too attached to let them go. (Naturally, Radar did anyway, and naturally, he got way too attached to them.) When you name something, it's not just a thing anymore. It's real.
"But I never really saw stuff like I did in there before. Mostly I always just heard it. I woulda completely thought it was just that lady with the scales messing with me if it hadn't kinda felt like the choppers coming, too."
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