darker_london | Entries tagged with cai finch

Alex and Indigo spent a lot of time talking about what life would be like if things were fair. It was a game they played, a what-if, like what-would-you-do-if-there-were-aliens.

Fairness was a bit of a foreign concept to the pair of them, but an interesting one. When they were alone together they’d compare their lives now with the way their lives would be if fairness was a thing, if the universe was a just place, if God really existed.

Indigo was a total atheist; Alex was not, but she knew that God and Indigo could not occupy the same space; they were like oil and water. She didn’t mind Indigo ragging on God and his believers, not really.

( ... )

For as long as she could remember, Indigo had known as much as she needed to about her family.

When she was very little, she lived with a big group of them, a few other cousins older than she was, a few aunts and uncles who were also cousins. It was one of them – it must have been one of them who told her that her parents were cousins, and two of her grandparents were half-brother and sister. She’d known that, and known that it was a shameful secret, for as long as she could remember.

( ... )

Cai needed a moment, leaning against his bedroom door like he could keep the rest of the world out. It was safe in his bedroom, comforting, familiar. It wasn’t Dom on the floor of the living room. It wasn’t Nonnie in a rain coat bent over his body.

Cai doubled over, close to throwing up again and only fighting it back because he’d promised Zoe he’d get to Rachel. He managed to keep it inside, but he did burst into tears again; they were too close to the surface to fight. Dom… Dom… Jesus Christ this couldn’t be happening.

( ... )

Zoe was in her room, yes, but there was no way she would have been able to notice the phone, even if it was in her room, unharmed and whole. Zoe was too busy, too far away.

Her body seizing on her floor.

( ... )

Kids saw so much more than grown ups thought they did, Faye knew that. Faye had known this for years.

Like the woman who lived on the corner called Mrs Wishhart who tried to entice Roe and Faye over with cakes then grabbed Roe's hair and started screaming horrible things about her. Faye had seen that or something like it coming for weeks. Mrs Wishhart was weird, the kind of weird adult that kids had to avoid. Faye didn't know why she was like that, though. That was the problem. Faye knew there were secrets, but she didn't know what they were.

Like when she lived with her birth parents, she could always tell when her Dad had started using drugs again. She didn't know what to do about it, though. How to stop it, or what to tell her mother, who seemed to know but not care that much. She knew what to do now, of course. She has a social worker, and they all had a family counselor they saw twice a month, and she had Nonnie and Dom. But none of those things had helped her the first time it happened. That was the problem with being a kid, you had to suffer and blunder through the times where you knew absolutely nothing in order to learn anything.

Like right now. Faye did not know what was happening between Cai and Nonnie right now but she knew she wasn't supposed to be seeing it. She just knew it was big and bad.

They were just outside Dom's shed, and Cai was covered in sawdust as usual. Faye was watching from the kitchen window that looked out over the back yard; she'd stepped up to the sink to get a drink of water and looked out and seen them. Seen Cai step sharply backwards from Nonnie, his face distraught.

Distraught, shocked, angry; Cai burst into tears.

She'd never seen Cai cry before. Faye stared from the kitchen window, looking out at her foster family like she didn't recognise either one of them.

Considering how horrified Danny had been after his nightmare, Cai's attempts to cheer him up with his antics were much appreciated. It hadn't made him smile like it might have on a normal day, but it had made him feel a little less panicky about the world in general.

Still, by the time fifteen minutes had passed, Danny was waiting outside for Cai's car, his arms wrapped around his chest as he paced the footpath. What he hadn't expected, and what froze his blood in his veins for a moment, was hearing his name called by a voice he didn't immediately recognise.

( Shit )

With her nerves so high, Rachel was feeling like an electric witch again. She chewed her fingers as she waited for her friends to show up at her house, running up and down the stairs whenever a car drove past in case it was Cai or a dog bark in case Danny had Wolf or a knock on the door which could have been any of them but she thought she'd heard a few different knocks now and it was never them. Right up until the point that it was.

Cai arrived first, his hair a mad tangle as he pulled off his bike helmet. "Couldn't get the car," he said with a grin. "Dom's taking Roe to her specialist. Hey, do you know what the hardest part of learning to ride a bike is?"

( ... )

Cai came to, though a weighty sickness hung over him, so he kind of wished he hadn’t. He felt like if he moved he might throw up, and if he stayed as still and as quiet as possible he might be able to crawl pathetically back into unconsciousness again. But there was a whispering, a frantic whispering near his face and a thick smell of girl – perfume or just intense shampoos – and a faint movement of air against his face.

Rachel was sitting on the bed very close to him, flapping her hands near him like the wind would make him better. “Cai did I break you? Cai wake up!” There was a fear in her eyes he’d seen before, other times when he woke after gripping her hand and opening his eyes.

( ... )

Ever since Cai didn’t have to go to proper classes and was supposed to study by himself at home, Faye spent a lot of time creeping about. She still had to go to school and this miffed her, since reading at home sounded way better. ‘Specially since Cai seemed to mostly spent lots of time in the shed playing with tools and make a lot of sawdust and swears.

But after school Faye and Roe crept about doing a lot of spying.

( ... )

“ELAINE!” Imogene’s voice from the hallway shocked her out of her post-alarm doze. “If you’re not down here eating your delicious macrobiotic breakfast in FIVE MINUTES!”

Rachel sat up, grimacing. The extra fifteen minutes after her alarm had gone off hadn’t done anything to help her wake up. She'd set her alarm as well as her phone, to avoid sleeping in again. She couldn't afford to, today.

She had a feeling she’d had bad dreams, some images of something nasty lingering in the back of her head. Yanking her curtains open and letting in the pale light of morning helped banish the thoughts back into the night where they belonged. It was morning, a new day, time to set her gaze strictly forward and never look back.

This summed up most of her life philosophy; look forward, not back. Nothing good happens when you look back.

( ... )

On Saturday night, as the rain poured down outside, Rachel couldn't sleep. It wasn't bad - not as bad as a couple of weeks ago when she'd 'totally skitzed out', as Indigo had put it - but she was restless, and worried. Worries crowded in her head and none would let any of the others dominate. She her had final dance recital at the end of the week. That was worrying, although she was less worried about the performance than the written. The written was more worrying. But the pressure of getting on stage and dancing in front of everyone, with Joshua backstage, Joshua who kept making lewd faces at her in class, was - ak.

Aak.

On top of that, she was worried about her final exams for her other classes. They were going to be bad.

( ... )

“I don’t know, Cai,” said Zoe’s voice through Cai's phone. “I’m not good company right now.”

“I can be good enough for the both of us,” Cai said. “I can, I’m super good at company. Is this because of the lockdown?”

( ... )

Cai sat near the back of his history class, paying cursory attention to the lecture while his mind was really poking and prodding at the vision of the funeral. Danny was going to come to church with him this weekend, and he was planning to tell Danny about the vision afterwards. It didn’t seem right, leaving him out of it.

He better talk to Zoe about it first, though. As a heads up, and to see if she’d told Rachel yet. He didn’t think she had.

( ... )

Cai woke one morning to the sound of rain beating down on the roof above him. He was warm in his cocoon of blankets, sleepy but no longer tired, and content to just lie there and listen to the rain for a few minutes before hunger dragged him up.

He even considered a lazy morning wank, which he didn’t do very often. Mostly because it just made him think about how unlikely it was that anyone else would ever touch him there, without him getting fired off into another vision. This train of thought was painfully depressing, so he tried to avoid it, and often tried to just blatantly deny the fact he was sexual at all. But sometimes in the morning, before he was properly awake, he could ignore all the emotional fallout.

( ... )

Danny waited outside the school on Monday afternoon, the sleeves of his jumper pulled down over his hands. He really wanted to talk to someone about what had happened with Rachel, but he had no idea who else he could talk to. Cai had seen the things he had been through, and he might even had felt them. It beat talking to someone else who had just been told about it. He knew he could talk to his mum and he should talk to his therapist, but this thing with Rachel felt more personal. Like it wasn't their business. Cai knew Rachel and he wouldn't judge her.

( Talks and bullies )

Three weeks of school to go, Cai thought. Three weeks, then exams.

It was Thursday, and Cai sat upstairs in the Year 12 common room that overlooked the quad. He was lost in thought, staring out the window which had fogged up, and was covered in finger drawings of tits and dicks.

( ... )

“I had an idea,” Cai said, walking with Zoe between classes. “I was trying to work out why focusing on the vision we had at the pool wasn’t working, but when you focused on your own past we were both able to see the same thing.”

“I’ve been thinking about that too.” Zoe said, her voice quiet in case of walls with ears. He raised his brows, letting her speak first. “I am guessing,” she said, “that sharing a memory is a lot easier than sharing a vision, since the memory has already happened, and the vision is more… transient.” She waved her hand, as if transient wasn’t quite the word she was looking for.

( ... )

Zoe spent the afternoon in the library with the rest of her Critical Thinking class, silently going over past examination papers. The class across the hall from their regular room were doing dramatic readings of some play and it sounded like they were throwing furniture around, and because Zoe’s teacher had feelings for the drama teacher (so the rumour went) he’d shifted their class to the library rather than ask the other class to quiet down.

Zoe didn’t mind. There was more space in the library, and she could sit by herself near the window and get on with writing her short essay. She’d chosen the statement ‘Why bother wasting time trying to understand dreams when there is so much we have yet to learn about the real world?’ which felt annoyingly relevant to her own life. If she’d been able to use examples of her own life she would have killed it, but as it was she was attacking the assumption that the ‘real world’ couldn’t have important reflections in the subconscious. She had to mention Freud. Zoe hated Freud. Her pen was digging into her paper and her hand was starting to cramp.

( ... )

Danny had stubbornly stayed home from school until Friday, even though he started to feel better near the middle of the week. Rachel's visit on Monday had gotten him to a point where he didn't feel the need to self-harm in order to sleep, but he was too nervous to see anyone else.

Or he was too nervous to see Cai.

( So...hi... )

Cai did sleep, the night after he’d touched Danny and seen far too much. He slept, but only because he’d found himself at the point of exhaustion and could not physically keep himself conscious.

He probably shouldn’t have driven home from Zoe’s, but he’d promised to get the groceries in.

Even as he slept he was plagued with nightmares, and the waking hours between sleep were just as bad. He spent the night just waiting for dawn, like the return of the light could possibly help.

( ... )

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Darker London-Uncover what is underneath...

An Original RPG

Entries tagged with cai finch

Fair (Alex, Cai)

Reinforcements (Indigo, Cai, Alex, Danny etc)

Circle the wagons (Cai, Indigo)

As Elaine's phone rang... (Zoe, Cai, Danny)

What is seen (Faye, Cai)

Suspicions (Danny, Cai, and a little of Peter and Thomas)

She looked into the eye of a passing storm (Rachel, Cai, Danny, Zoe)

Don't tell me where we're going (Cai, Rachel)

Sekrets? (Faye, Cai)

Thursday's child has far to go (Zoe, Rachel, Danny, Cai maaaybe)

With a devil on your back (Rachel, Indigo, Danny, Zoe, Cai)

Know you're enough to use me for good (Zoe, Cai)

We have dug our foxholes here (Cai, Zoe, Nia)

In the morning (Cai)

Just need to talk (Danny, Cai)

Between your heart and mine (Cai, Zoe)

The things I can change (Zoe, Cai, Liz, Peter! Thomas!)

Friday afternoon (Zoe, Rachel, Danny, Cai, Merry)

School (Danny, Rachel, Cai?, Zoe?)

Your voice is stronger than most (Cai)