Necromantic (Joss, Kenzie, Teagan) [backdated August 2013]

[officiallybeige.insanejournal.com]

Joss still wasn’t sleeping much and this was a problem.

Teagan slept loads. Teagan was out for eight or nine hours at a time. Teagan was asleep every night, as well as the occasional nap during the day. There were nights Joss only got to sleep before dawn, and as soon as Teagan woke up she accidentally woke him up too. She couldn’t help it – they were sleeping in a van.

And then when Teagan was awake, Joss had to be. Because Kenzie.

The day after Cameron’s gig they started playing music together. Joss had bought his guitar, which Teagan wrapped herself around and was an enchantment to watch. She played Marianne Faithful and Mumford and Sons and Ani DiFranco and Simon and Garfunkel, and though her voice was clear and sweet in the van, it was lost when she tried to play on the street. Teagan’s voice was the kind that was perfect for a rapt audience, but it didn’t stand a chance in hooking the crowd that had somewhere else to be.

It helped that she was cute, but after a couple of weeks of living out of a van, she did look a little bit homeless. And though they were both clean, they were also easily ignorable.

Teagan didn’t seem to be too bothered by it, but it pissed off Joss. “You’re so good,” he growled, kicking out at one of the rubbish bins at tonight’s camping ground. Unable to find a place to stay in Manchester, they'd driven out of the city a little way and were in a camping ground near Botany Bay wood. “How can people just walk past you? Goddamn sheep. I hate people.”

“I did get fourteen pounds?” Teagan said, eyeing the dent Joss had left in the bin.

He shook his head violently, his face hidden in his hands. His eyes felt hot and dry and rough.

“It’s fine,” Teagan told him. “I’ll get better, don’t be too mad.”

“I’m not mad,” snapped Joss, then a frustrated “guuh,” because he did hear how he sounded. He pushed his fingers into his eyes for a moment, creating bursts of light behind his lids. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I’m just – gonna go for a walk, for a minute.”

I’m going with him, said Kenzie, and Teagan felt the strange push of her cousin leaving her mind.

Teagan shook her head a little, turning her attention back to her guitar. She wasn’t really bothered by his short temper, she’d been snapped at so many times in the Llewellyn household, mostly by people (April and May, specifically) who didn’t apologise straight away, if at all. And she wasn’t really bothered by the fact that she hadn’t been miraculously discovered on her first day of busking in a new city, either. She was pretty happy just to play, and fourteen pounds was still a handful of coffees, even a lunch.

It wasn’t ideal, obviously, but in the grand scheme of things, it certainly wasn’t the worst way the day could have gone. She started to play again, so drawn into the creation of music that she didn't, at first, notice the flicker of movement in the corner of her vision.

~

Joss stomped off past the edge of the camping ground, where the grass ended and the ground dropped down till it reached a little brook. He felt like an absolute cockhead, snapping at Teagan, who was the picture of harmlessness. He wished she’d be angry at the unfairness of the world with him, though. He thought Kenzie would have been.

God he missed her. He missed her even though most of the time she was right there.

Something hit him then, something rough and deep and awful, squeezing his chest. Grief at the similarity of his journey with Teagan to his journey with Kenzie, but with different camping grounds, a different destination, a different girl… and the same one.

He hurt. He ached, as he had in the early days after her death, as if he’d lost something miraculous – but that was a stupid thing to be feeling now. When he’d gained something miraculous instead of losing it.

“You are so fucking stupid,” Joss growled at himself, kicking at a fallen tree. It was rotten and hollow; his foot went right through the dead wood, causing him to swear in surprise. He stared, panting, at the tree, lying on its side for how many years, covered in moss and insect holes. “Fuck it,” he said, and kicked it again, cracking the hole even wider. He kicked it a third time then sat down suddenly in the damp tree litter beside the tree. The damp slowly soaked up through his jeans but he didn’t care. “Fuck.”

What was wrong with him? He pressed his forehead against his knees, his hands linked behind his head. Kenzie was here; her lifeforce, her spirit, her self. She was here and he should be fucking overjoyed that he had this chance because how many people on earth ever got a chance at something like this?

And yet he was sulking in the forest like a stupid baby.

He just felt tired. And he kind of missed his own bed in the crazy church house. And Leon. And personal space. (And how do you think Teagan feels? he snapped at himself, on the topic of personal space. Ug.)

But they couldn’t go home, could they? Not unless they worked out a way to fit back into their old lives and still keep Kenzie’s. It was the start of the second week of August, and school would be starting up again in a few weeks.

Fuck.

He didn’t want to think about it.

Better to concentrate on music. Music and discovery and love. Dedicate his mind to finding a new place to camp each night, finding a place to cook or a place to eat every few hours. Finding things that made Teagan laugh and things that made Kenzie feel more alive and things that made the pressure of the real world recede for a little while. Keep his phone turned off because it was a link to home he couldn’t deal with; Leon sent him innocuous texts every now and then, and Merry kept trying to call.

Merry was in Aberdeen, or had been when she’d sent her last voice mail. Joss had laughed, not out of any kind of mirth but because… well, he wasn’t sure why he’d laughed. Finding out she was looking for him had put a pressure on his chest and laughing seemed to be a way to try and shake it off. It hadn’t worked. He turned his phone off and ignored it. He was almost out of credit, anyway. And he had to keep buying petrol.

A splash in the brook nearby caught his attention, and he lifted his head from his knees and looked over, expecting to see a fish or an eel or a bird, but there was no wildlife there. A piece of the dead tree was floating in the water, though.

He took a deep breath as he watched it being sucked downstream by the current. There was no natural way the wood could have leapt off the bank and hit the middle of the water. “Ken?” he asked, and was rewarded with a ripple across the water that had nothing to do with the wind. The ripple rolled toward him, a little wave breaking on the mossy bank, and a moment later he felt something cold and tingly on his forehead.

“Aw, Ken,” he said, leaning into the feeling. It was odd that something that felt so physically uncomfortable could feel so emotionally comforting. How icy pins and needles meant that he wasn’t alone. “You’re a revelation.” The feeling travelled down his cheek, onto his neck. He felt his own hair brush against his skin. Joss closed his eyes and smiled sadly. The feeling – the one that the world was too heavy and too unfair and too impossible to win – receded, replaced with something else. Camaraderie, maybe. Whatever else he had to deal with he had one ally who wasn’t going to give up on him.

So there was no way he could give up on her.

Kenzie knelt in front of him, her face pressed into his neck, her hands on or a little through his arms, saying his name over and over, though of course he didn’t hear her. “Joss, Joss, I wish I could be here, Joss, really here. Alive here. Solid here. Not sharing, not sharing but solid and real. I always hated sharing. Only child, you know? Oh Joss.” She pulled back a little, her hands on both his cheeks. He flinched, just a little. Like someone might walking out in the cold night. Enough to make Kenzie hate her death with a vengeance. “Joss, I’m going to try and possess you,” she told him. “Maybe, maybe I can talk to you in your head. Maybe I won’t put you in hospital! I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t… Just don’t freak out, okay?”

He showed no indication that he’d heard her, but Kenzie kept talking because Kenzie kept hoping. She geared herself up, and leaned forward into him, trying not to be solid, trying not to cause any shift or movement because she’d be shifting and moving him and that was how he’d ended up in hospital and she really really hadn’t meant it to hurt him she just wanted to badly to touch him.

It was nothing like possessing Teagan. Teagan she could slip into like a glove; a little awkwardly too small or too large in some place, but something that had been designed to fit her like a glove was designed to fit a human hand. Joss was nothing like that. Trying to fit into Joss was like trying to push her hand into a gumboot. It technically fit, but there was no subtlety or comfort to it.

Kenzie had only possessed one other person besides Teagan before; Flick. But that was in the heat of the moment, and even a hand can fit into a gumboot well enough to fling it across a room.

Joss could feel something going on. His whole body had tingled sharply and cold but was replaced quickly by heat, heat and weakness like he had a bad fever. He shuddered all over, and watched in shock as his hands and arms rose in front of his face, through no will of his own.

His mouth didn’t feel like his own, like he was too tired or stoned to speak, but he thought as loud as he could: Kenzie?

Joss? JOSS? JOSS?! Kenzie was shouting as loud as she could, but she couldn’t connect with him. She couldn’t sense him inside his own body in the way she could with Teagan. She curled his hands around his head, though, because she could still move him but what was the point if she couldn’t talk to him.

She pulled back out of him, and he slumped backwards to lie in the leaf mulch in shock, in shaken surprise. “GodDAMMIT!” Kenzie screamed in frustration, and the rotten log beside Joss exploded in a shower of rotten bark. Joss yelped and covered his face with his arm as wood splinters rained down on the ground around him, though not a single piece landed on him.

He took a moment to catch his breath, as if he’d just fallen from a great height and screamed most of the way down. Disorientation made him dizzy, and his hands were shaking, though (he clenched them into fists and relaxed his fingers again) they were his hands again.

He really really hoped that wasn’t what Teagan went through every day. It couldn’t be, right?

Splinters were still tumbling onto the moss and into the stream when he heard Teagan’s voice, shouting his name and Kenzie’s. He sat up, his body feeling like a tonne of bricks. For a moment it sounded like her voice was coming from everywhere, echoing out of the water and out of the ground and out of his own bones. She screamed for him again, and Joss heard footsteps crashing toward him before he managed to heave himself up off the ground.

Teagan was pale (as a ghost), her eyes shot with panic, Joss scrambled toward her, and she cried “Kenzie help!” just before he reached her and she grabbed onto his arms. “We have to get out of here,” she gasped, a little of the panic disappearing as she felt Kenzie with her once again.

“What’s wrong? What’s happened?” Joss said, his mind going straight to Teagan’s grandmother, who must have found them through Cameron and Micah and was here to get rid of Kenzie.

Teagan wrapped her arms around Joss’s body, clinging to his solidness and his warmth. “There’s ghosts,” she said, her voice and body trembling. “There’s ghosts everywhere.”