2019-09-24 - Resonance

Sparrow doesn't usually leave her bedroom door open, but it's open tonight, cracked enough to see that there's a light on farther in, to hear her humming and intermittently muttering lyrics, to catch the quiet scratch of pencil against paper once close enough. All the other lights in the house are off. All the other bedroom doors are closed. Everything seems peaceful, like it should be in the middle of the night. Doesn't she have class in the morning? She should almost certainly be sleeping. Instead, she's in her pajamas in the bathtub, empty of water but rendered comfortable with pillows, with her favorite quilt, while she sits with her earbuds in and her knees up, sketching something. Erasing, sketching. Trying to get the details right.

Alfie stands at the door frame, dressed in a white button-up and black slacks. His feet are bare - they stick to the floors just a little; humidity, or the expectation thereof. He steps through, a gentle smile on his lips for the peace around him and for the amusement of how he finds Sparrow when he approaches the bathroom and knocks upon the door frame, regardless of whether or not she'll hear him with the earbuds in. But he stays for awhile, all the same, waving his hand as if the movement might draw the attention that his knocked announcement does not.

Sparrow perks immediately at the knocking, dark brows arched as she looks up, curiosity quickly melting into warmth. When she pulls the earbud free, it falls against her chest, spilling an odd dreampop with ethereal vocals that her own half-humming could only crudely imitate. It's the sort of music one could readily melt into, well-suited to a chemically altered state of mind. Her pupils seem no more dilated than they should given the bright light of the bathroom, neither pins nor saucers. "Hey," carries a faintly manic edge to it, not quite as casual as she meant it to be. All too earnestly, she asks, "What do the wolf and the dog mean to you?"

Alfie's brow furrows a moment, as he catches wisps of music that he can't quite place. But he sets it aside to answer the strange delivery of her greeting. "Interrupting?" he asks. And he walks up to the tub all the same. There, he descends to one knee, then the other, and folds his forearms on the edge of the tub. Companionable. Opting for the closeness rather than leaning on the sink or sitting on the toilet. He searches her eyes, a little confused but intrigued at the question she shoots his way. He tries to get a good look at what she's sketching. "Different end results. Growing into different people. I know that's not right, like, zoologically, but two paths for a pup to follow." He shrugs. "That help at all?"

Sparrow's brows knit faintly at the first question, like she doesn't quite get what he's asking. Did she lose a thread somewhere? But then he's sinking in close, and her smile goes all warm again. Not that she moves to greet him more intimately, maintaining that little distance between the artist within the tub and the observer without. Closer now, the music seems farther away, a trick of acoustics which makes that otherworldly melody travel at a different, less effective angle. It's easier, too, to see what she's been working on. Sort of. It's easier to look at her notebook, at least. Pale grey lines mark the page here or there, a suggestion of a figure in the center which has been erased so many times that the usually thick sketch paper is wearing worryingly thin. That doesn't keep her from starting all over again, this time seemingly using Alfie as a reference, gaze intermittently flitting his way while she works. "Which path did you choose?"

Sparrow pauses, head-tilts, corrects: "Follow."

Alfie traces eraser marks with his eyes until the follow-up question. Then he looks to Sparrow. He searches the warmth in her expression and he sets his cheek down onto his forearms, head tilted to face her as he lounges just so. "The dog, at first. Loyal. Obedient. Well trained," he says. A reference to the Alfie that was. But he pauses there as he continues to think. "Am I a wolf?" He flashes his teeth. White. Not fanged. He shakes his head, gently, without lifting it from his arm. "Probably a stray or something. Bandana around my neck. Name like Roscoe or Bandit." He chuckles, but only just as soft as the earlier shake of his head.

The music changes with Alfie's quiet laughter, a seamless shift from major key to minor. Sparrow pays it no mind at all, as if it were the expected transition from one track to the next, but it feels different for him. Like his stomach has sunk with the melody, suddenly heavy, knotted, complicated. Something in this new song grates, unease creeping into his shoulders. Doubt. Maybe he's always been the wolf, the way he broke free of his prison, teeth first. Maybe he's still the well-trained dog, obediently falling back into the life someone else scripted for him.

"Scamp," Sparrow jokes with a playful crinkle of her nose which grows serious, creases crossing her forehead as she sets to erasing again. One detail, at first, just the angle of his left shoulder. But after one attempt at fixing it, she erases more. Then more until that outline is gone as well, a ghost upon a ghost upon a ghost, all of it fading toward grey translucence. "Maybe this isn't the right metaphor. Maybe--" Her lips purse as her pencil stills for a second. When she peeks up at Alfie, she asks, "How about... what's in the box?"

Alfie sinks back. He sits on his heels and lifts his cheek from his arms, distancing himself slightly from the music and the associations that lurch into play. Restless, but caught in Sparrow's orbit, he only glances back through the doorframe behind him before his regard his back onto her and her sketchbook.

"Scamp," Alfie repeats as an affirmative, nodding. Trying to put more complicated feelings aside and fall back into the more surface layers of the associations playing out. He watches his left shoulder disappear from the page. He lifts a brow and shifts his attention to her expression as she suggests alternative metaphors. "What box?" is his more specific question, asked first, as a foray into the literal. But he follows it up with the figurative, "Memories, I guess. Keepsakes. Photographs. Things that are supposed to remind us of times we don't trust ourselves to recall."

The music grows no softer, no louder, indifferent to Alfie's positioning. Neither does the song change, the words almost clear enough to be caught, a syllable here or there recognized, but nothing that forms whole words, full thoughts. Close, but not close enough. It drones on, but the itch at the back of his brain dulls, fading to the sort of uncertainty one easily ignores every day.

Sparrow looks mildly frustrated, like she's trying to solve a puzzle and not having any luck. It seems she can't even get the edges right, the way she keeps erasing them. She makes a face when he asks about the box itself, though the annoyance doesn't seem precisely pointed his way. Her hand sweeps across the page, brushing aside... well, nothing. The erasing doesn't seem to have left any residue aside from the greyish glow where the paper has worn thin, where the phantoms of previous failures reside. Sinking lower into the tub after staring at that not-quite-blank page for a second or three, she eventually looks to Alfie, frowning faintly at him. "That's the bad stuff. What's left behind. All the possibility gone, leaving only the leftovers inside. All the things you don't want." Her gaze flicks past him, to the door he never closed which clearly stands closed now. "Is that what you want?"

Alfie doesn't retreat any further from the music than he already has. But neither does he strain to hear the words. He keeps his unease at bay inefficiently by trying to ignore it. The dulling of the itch does a better job of dealing with itself than he does of dealing with it. But that's just true to form - restless, but seeing which way the river will take him.

Had he closed the door? He doesn't remember that. Or the slam, if it were a gust of wind through an open window that did it in. But his memory isn't exactly his closest ally. He focuses on Sparrow's frustration, his concern knitting into his eyebrows as they hunch low over bright blue irises. "I don't know," he answers before he's thought it through - but his instinct lands true. He repeats it. "I don't know. I wish I could believe that I'd never forget the things we said sitting over Thor's Well. I'd feel better if I wrote them down."

"I love you." The words sound so soft and sure on Sparrow's lips, and yet... It feels wrong. Like nails-on-chalkboard wrong. Like a record scratch. But maybe that was just the song, ill-timed artistic dissonance sending mixed signals to an already uncertain brain. Undaunted, the redhead says, "I know," and sets to work again. This time, however, when she sets pencil to thin, silver page, it is not to attempt another drawing. Instead, she writes: Stars and dust and nothing with nowhere left to go. Emptied out my savings with nothing left to show. Except this little token, boxed up and hidden low. Too wild to be broken, my love is yours, and so...

It's hard to say for certain when the music changed again, but it has, noticeable most in the silence when her pencil falls still after writing that last word. There should be a refrain here, and she hums it, matching the melody coming through the earbud hanging loose against her chest. It's almost like she's transcribing what's coming through, all those unintelligible words put to paper, but she doesn't record the chorus, lost in her own thoughts for the moment.

Alfie doesn't say it back right away. The wrongness of it sets tension into his jaw and clenches his teeth. It's like he's trying to keep his unease from showing up in his face. It's something he's usually quite good about. But here, thinking about it and avoiding showing it provides a magnifying effect. "I love you too," he tags on late, like it's sour on his tongue - like it only feels worse having replied with it while ignoring the sensation of wrongness.

He drums his fingertips on the edge of the bath before he even recognizes that he's miming a piano, playing along to what Sparrow hums as a distortion of his usual habitual mirroring. He takes a breath - the first step in a breathing exercise taught to him in his years away. Ignore the thread. Don't follow it. Don't acknowledge delusional obsession, get past it. He doesn't. He reaches for the loose earbud as he chooses to pick the scab rather than ignore it. He puts in his ear and listens.

Only the barest twitch of Sparrow's eyebrows indicates any awareness of the offness of Alfie's answer, out of step and strangely said. Maybe she'll ask about it later, when she's not trying to get this itch out of her head. Or the next itch. The one that starts to take shape as she watches his fingers move against the edge of the tub, head tilted curiously, an idea dancing in her bright brown eyes. When he reaches for the earbud, she starts to explain, "Oh, that's just--"

Her lips move, but Alfie can't hear what comes out. He can see her. When her brow furrows with confusion. When her eyes go wide with panic. When she drops her pencil and sketchpad and, for the first time since he showed up, moves toward him, lunging, reaching, calling out something without any sound.

All Alfie hears is that low bass note resonating through his skull, down through his bones, and the intricate shadow song below it. The sound hardly seems to change at all, and yet there is a profound complexity to it, layered and woven together, a textured darkness he can feel everywhere inside himself. No, no. It's outside, too. All around. Swallowing him. When did he start to move? Where did the floor go? Why is the air so thick? How long has he been falling?

This pit is a
Sound
The boy falls
Through it
The darkness
Thrums

It's filled with feelings Alfie no longer has, buried between the layers of dream and reality, the stages between where the head hits the pillow and fantasy takes hold - hallucination. The sensation of falling no distance at all to shudder back awake without having even entered the realm of sleep. Is this where he keeps his jealousy? Is this the moment of distrust that lurches up into his chest when she warns him away from putting the earbud in his ear? That bass note rattles his spine like a desert chime crafted from animal bone - a dangling jackalope antler twists in the wind. He reaches for the edges as he topples. He screams, trying to keep the darkness from swallowing him - trying to drown out its sound.

The darkness
Thrums

The darkness consumes, claims, creates.

Sparrow's hands pound against the vast nothing above Alfie, an impossible presence growing increasingly distant, but the darkness swallows the sound of her shouting, of fists against vinyl. It takes that cadence and absorbs it, makes it part of its own story, all that was frantic and desperate in the initiator's expression eased into existing rhythms, softened and soothed into perfect place. Even his own unsteady terror dulls around its jagged edges and is drawn into the tenebrous melody, another thread compounding the complexity.

He can feel it in his fingers as he reaches out for anything, so soft at first that it splits under his touch, a glitch integrated into the symphony. As the bathroom light above narrows into a distant star, vaguely red, like Mars, the song grows ever more solid, like rope, handholds for the taking. The air feels so dry down here. No, it's definitely wet. It's like dust sticking to sweat, every breath vaguely unpleasant.

Alfie means to keep screaming when he has to stop to breath. But sucking in the dusty, sticky air seems to quiet that need. He doesn't submit to his descent. Not right away. He reaches up toward the light. Hand and leg down beneath him, like he means to brace against or boost up from a foothold that isn't there. It's a panicked action. His screams replaced by the whine-grunt effort of someone desperately trying to crawl to freedom. If this is where his jealousy lives, are his memories far behind?

"Hello?" he says into the black - like he's lost at sea, treading water and not falling into an ever-expanding abyss of sound. Is he speaking to the music or the musician? His voice is a trembling thing, pathetic before the surety of the song. He breathes shallow and quick, like the disconcerting air is somehow thin. "Are you there?" he adds, louder. He draws his limbs in toward himself. No longer reaching for nothing.

No longer falling into nothing.

Gravity feels different when not in endless descent. Like Alfie has caught up with himself. Like he caught himself on himself, self-contained and small in the droning depths of an impossible song all bound up in one ceaseless note. He can even feel his distinctness, how he is here and not a part of this place. The vibration is in his bones, but his bones are his own. He is not all that is here. The answer resonates with direction, a serene and ominous promise. It's right in front of him, that rectangular shape etching itself into the noise, but there's no mistaking that this is backwards. Memory. Singular. He sees the door handle first. What did it feel like in his hand that first time? That lost time?

This is a terrible idea.

Alfie sucks the air through his teeth and feels the vibrations of the note in both his teeth and the air. It's in himself and in everything like it's a basic building block on the atomic level. Where he ends and it begins is the philosophical question to breach his desperate terror before he recognizes that he's standing - having transitioned from his limb withdrawing hunch in the moment between frames of film. He looks up for the distant red light when he's answered with direction - like he means to defy order with intent until it's clear that he's not in control here.

The door. He traces a shape in his arm through the button-up shirt as he steps forward, feet bare against the ground here. Alfie lifts his arm, his wrist, his hand. His intent or its, he's hovering over the scab and wanting to know - wanting to give clarity for disorder. He draws a shaky breath and reaches for the handle.

The darkness feels like soft carpet beneath bare feet, the steady resonance lending texture to the emptiness underfoot. Sleeker edges await where murk gives way to memory, where the black-on-black emptiness promises substance. Each sticky breath carries the vaguely floral scent of the hotel hallway, disinfectants and air fresheners covering up the stench of burnt coffee, stale bacon and leftover eggs from room service breakfasts. He can practically feel the metal beneath his fingers. Cool, smooth. Cool and smooth. Cool.

The song changes as he reaches, vibrating slightly higher, pitched toward anticipation as the darkness waits. Wants. Yes. Yes! Open! Open! What terrible hope rises up around him, through him, shaking nerves and guts until everything is lurching upward, outward. This is going to be messy.

The overwhelming urge to retch does a damned fine job of bringing Alfie back into his body, wrenching his senses away from the abyss and into--Where? Distant thunder rumbles. The world feels hard and cold and unsettlingly still, a jarring contrast from the ever-buzzing blackness he's leaving. Somewhere, someone calls his name. Is that Mars overhead?