psychoshenanigans | Skeleton City // PSL

It rolls and rolls until it bumps into one of Robin's very nice shoes. He looks down at it, and then at Phalanx's feet, and then back up to their (currently) blue eyes.

And now that it's just him and them again, there's room for the cute moment to seep in and make him happy. So he shrugs off some of his irritation with Vincent and with knots--both literal and figurative--and walks back up to give it another try.

"You look like you haven't had a bath in a long time," he mentions with a little smile. He tries to find something less threatening to cut first, like something on their upper arm, where the skin is less sensitive. He doesn't plan on hurting them, but he doesn't want to make them worry either way.

And with the added comfort that Vincent has bestowed upon the homeless pile of souls, Robin can feel even more totally free to enjoy this moment as something cute. He doesn't have to pretend that Phalanx is doing alright with this whole thing, they actually are. At least adequately enough, anyway.

Phalanx even moves an arm away from their body a little bit, so they're not hugging the blanket quite so close and Robin can snip away the remaining rags there.

Well, if there's one thing for sure about Robin, it's that he doesn't actually need participation from the other person to keep talking.

"I think it'll feel nice, when you're all done." Cutting is much faster than untangling. He tries to do it in such a way that the majority of the scraps will be saved--because that's a commodity, even higher up in the tunnels. "Your hair will feel soft, and your fingers, too..."

Something else falls to the floor, joining the small mountain of old fabric and junk.

"And I'll wash your clothes, so they'll be soft too..."

"Soft, soft. Soft," said presumably in response to the three soft things that Robin had just mentioned. Phalanx seems to be pleased with the thought--at least in the fact that things will be made soft afterward. It's a pretty good selling point.

Thinking about it, Phalanx hugs the blanket up high on their chest so they can duck their head down into the fabric around their folded arms. It's okay though, since Robin has pretty much solved the fabric puzzle in the areas that are now tightly blanketed. Push things around a little bit, maybe take one of Phalanx's arms back momentarily to free one last makeshift sleeve, and Robin should be able to finish up the much-less-complicated lower half fairly easily after that.

The lower half is startlingly easy, compared to the gauntlet of confusion he's been dealing with. It's enough to get a sound of mild surprise out of him, when he realizes it isn't many layers until his new friend will simply be wearing nothing at all.

He looks, while he's there. It's true that Robin is hardly a prude--weird shit like this is kind of how he gets his kicks--but now that he's seen the lay of the land, he also knows that Phalanx is not damaged, infected, or otherwise disfigured. Honestly, it feels like momentous progress to know that they have genitalia at all. He'd been half-expecting to pull back the curtain and find some featureless flat form, like what you'd see on a doll.

But he barely dwells on it enough to be noticeable, especially not to someone like Phalanx. With everything out of the way, Robin shoots them another one of his wide smiles and pets the top of their hair.

"Okay, finally ready. Let's get you in the tub."

Phalanx doesn't seem to notice when the last shred of clothing falls to the floor, let alone any inspection that may have followed. Whatever the little mob of spirits is thinking about, it has to do with the walls and tub and junk on the floor. Their attentions all wander until Robin focuses them again.

It takes them a moment of looking at the tub, maybe remembering back to how these things work, before they finally step in and sit down--blanket and all.

If Robin shrieks internally at the sight of Phalanx stepping into the tub with an entire blanket still wrapped around their shoulders, he doesn't show it, save for the raising of his eyebrows and a momentary pause.

But he isn't about to take it back, now that it's all wet. In the cosmic vastness of time and space, this particular moment isn't one worth fighting for. It's probably better that Phalanx have something to keep themselves wrapped up in anyway.

"That'll work," he concedes, shaking his head with a smile and kneeling down at the edge of the tub. "Is it warm enough for you?"

Phalanx nods at Robin's question, but the dry part of the blanket is still anxiously looped up and over to form a makeshift hood and hugged close. The creature is settling down comfortably in the warm water, but they're still watching with vague concern as the fabric floats on the surface of the bathwater--turning wet and dark and sinking as it absorbs.

Yeah, the water is warm enough, but Phalanx is already beginning to wonder if there is maybe going to be a blanket problem here soon. Right now, it's just a guess.

The blanket problem doesn't seem to be of any concern to Robin; there are a variety of soaps and things in labeled bottles in a small box next to the tub, and he's busy sifting through them to find something to use on Phalanx.

He brings up a bar of soap and a washcloth, pausing only to roll up his (fairly expensive) sleeves before lathering them together.

"Ever had someone give you a bath before?" He asks this in an off-handed way, though he hopes that jarring a memory or two might remind the strange collection of spirits what a bath is and how it normally goes.

Robin is catching on. Phalanx's attention is wrangled and focused on the soap and bubbles, their head lolls to the side within the blanket hood, and the memories start floating up. It's something to look at, something easy to scan bits of lifetimes for.

Information comes together in a very roundabout way, but it still makes a picture that Phalanx can understand.

"Small ones. Small, like... small bowl, small water, small... me? And-- what is it?"

Phalanx lifts their hand under the waterlogged blanket--probably intending for a gesture while they think--but the resulting slosh of water is distracting. The rest of the thought is immediately gone.

Probably when some part of them was a child, then. Robin thinks he gets where this is going, and only laughs amicably when Phalanx surprises themselves by sploshing their blanket in the water.

"Bigger bowl, bigger you, but the principles of this will be pretty much the same. Here."

He then reaches out to take the arm that is partly out of the water, tugging back some of the soggy fabric and running that soapy washcloth over their forearm.

When in whatever someone might call Phalanx's "focused" state, with features showing some variety of color and life and individuality, it seems as though at least a little of that is reflected in their skin as well. There still isn't anything identifying like scars or freckles, or even skin with enough pigment to hint at the sort of variety that humanity tends to have, but Phalanx at least looks alive now. There's at least some warmth there, instead of the washed-out, unhealthy pallor of a corpse.

And Phalanx watches Robin slosh layers of dirt off of their arm with the detached curiosity of someone who isn't actually attached to the limb. Phalanx might as well be watching some completely unrelated, but still marginally interesting, project that just happens to be occurring in the vicinity.

This seems less like giving someone a bath and more like cleaning off an old toy--the joy of it comes from revealing the priceless porcelain doll that is hidden beneath. Phalanx has a beautiful paleness, he thinks, and it will be nice to see it on more than just their face.

But this will take a while. He's not out to get every speck of dirt, but he would like to take them out in public and pass them for more than a pile of walking laundry. He wrings out the cloth, he scrubs in more soap, and he draws on of his oldest conversational time-wasters.

"Phalanx, would you like it if I told you a story?"

Phalanx's attention returns from their fingers (where the real scrubbing is going to be needed) and drifts eagerly up to Robin's face. The smile is a little delayed, but it's a big one.

"Yes. Listening is easy."

There's probably more to it than that, but that's the only one that Phalanx manages to put into words.

"Oh, perfect," he smiles back, just as wide, "You are a good listener."

So while he starts to scrub the grime from Phalanx's fingers, he begins a story. He's a very good storyteller, having a lot of experience over many thousands of years talking to all manner of audience. This particular tale is about a young brother and sister who lived in a cave very, very far away. Their mother died of sickness and their father remarried, but the woman he married was secretly very cruel and despised the children.

As Robin reaches for Phalanx's other hand, he begins to tell of how one day, the stepmother killed the boy by cutting off his head, and then cooked the rest of him into soups and pies. The father ate of it, not realizing it was his own son. The sister would have as well, had she not had a dream where her brother's head appeared to her and warned her not to believe their stepmother for a second.

As Robin moves on to the rest of Phalanx's arms and shoulders, the mood of the story lightens somewhat. The sister is sad and lonely, yes, but she is visited by more dreams that tell her to gather and burn the bones of her brother so that his spirit may rest peacefully. Robin carefully wipes dirt away from Phalanx's face, explaining that she does so, and that that night, she was visited by a large, beautiful bat with soft, red fur.

By the time Robin is lathering up something to go into Phalanx's hair, he is telling them all about how, because of the sister's bravery and kindness in giving him a proper funeral, the brother's spirit was able to come back into the world as a bat. Once there, it was even able to surprise their stepmother--by dropping a large rock on her head and killing her.

The father, who had at this point found out what had happened, was happy to be free of the evil stepmother. Robin finishes up rinsing Phalanx's hair (shielding his eyes from soapy water, of course) by telling them that the father and the daughter, and the bat, all lived together happily ever after.

The creature seems to be listening attentively to the whole thing, appropriately distracted from all the bathing going on. Phalanx even weathers the hair-washing without a fuss... though rinsing inexplicably leaves behind tighter brunette ringlets instead of washing out the slight waves that had been there before, as should have happened.

Phalanx doesn't notice the change, of course. The swamp of blanket, water, and suds all around is far more interesting. With mostly-clean hands, they squeeze handfuls of soaked cloth until the bubbles are wrung out, then they dunk it and do it again.

"Ever after? ...Ever, ever. Until they died, probably."

"Probably," Robin agrees, chuckling quietly. All things die eventually, unless they're him. The next part comes naturally and easily, as if it was actually a part of the story, "But they were very happy up until then, and their spirits were at peace when it was time to go."

That's the ending he would have wanted. Humans rarely phase him, but unsettled ghosts always leave a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach--one of the many reasons he intends to keep this nest of them until he can find out why they are here in the first place.

"The last thing is your feet," he says, dunking his arm in the water and fishing around for an ankle. "Are you ticklish?"

Right then, there are either too many things to think about, or there is something about the topic itself that does it, but Phalanx trips up a little.

"Ticklish. Ticklish..."

They're thinking about the question, but an answer isn't happening, and they move around in the tub while they work on it. The water and blanket slosh while the creature rearranges, until they're finally sitting on their feet. It's probably more of an unconscious response to the word 'feet' being mentioned than it is a protective measure, but it's still going to make things more inconvenient.

And at the same time, at least half of whatever constitutes as Phalanx's mind is still hooked back on the story.

"What about the bird?" Phalanx manages to ask, but immediately realizes the error they've made with one of the words. The mistake makes them frown, and they try again, but the result doesn't sound easy. "Bird. B--ird. ...Bir--bat. The bat."

Robin frowns a little as well, at the repeat mention of a bird... Though, honestly, his frown could just as well be because he has paused elbow-deep in dirty bathwater and his subject is hiding their feet.

"It used to be a bird, in the old stories."

Maybe that's It. Maybe they're struggling with conflicting accounts. Robin remembers all of those tangled souls bumping around, knocking clumsily into each other.

"So both are right. Sometimes a bird, sometimes a bat."

He tilts his head. "You want to know what happened to it?"

Robin still can't get to the dirty little feet he wants, but he can at least ease Phalanx' mind a little bit. The creature looks relieved when Robin translates things correctly, and they nod.

Ah, there. He's cracked the code. It puts him at ease too, knowing that this particular insight wasn't some crack at Robin's own fortune.

"Well..." He swirls his arm around in the bath a little. The water is cooling, becoming more lukewarm than anything. "I think it lives too, until it dies again. But the spirit is a lot happier about it that time. No coming back as a severed head in people's dreams, or anything."

He reaches ineffectually in the direction of Phalanx's legs, not intending to grab so much as to suggest. "Can I have one of your feet?"

Surprisingly competently, Phalanx slumps back until they can unfold one leg out from under them and poke a few toes above the surface of the water. A knee clunks loudly into one wall of the tub along the way, but it's just another thing that Phalanx doesn't seem to notice.

And of course that's what the creature had meant. What else could it have been?

"...Am I a bird?"

The offered foot gets covered in a soapy washcloth and scrubbed. Robin wonders if he can get Phalanx some shoes, and how long they would continue to wear them if he did.

That pondering goes sideways as they ask him another question, something much more abstract. Or is it? Robin assumes, at first, that they're speaking in metaphor--but he doesn't actually know if Phalanx is capable of metaphor.

But he can't mean literally, right? The demigod goes quiet while he tries to think of an answer, sifting through layers upon layers of connotations that only he (and maybe a semi-omniscient pack of ghosts) would have.

"I think you're a person," he finally states. "At least, you're in the shape of a person."

But that is a very boring answer, one he finds vaguely distasteful, so he expands on the thought with a growing smirk: "But maybe in some stories, you're a bird. Do you know what a magpie is?"

Those fingers and toes might never lose some of their charcoal stain, no matter how clean they are. Normally half a lifetime of working with gears and oil or digging in black soil is needed for that kind of that kind of dedication embedded under fingernails, but Phalanx has somehow managed it (presumably) without that kind of work.

"...Something that drops rocks on people's heads?"

It's a guess. At least all the words are in the right order.

He shows his teeth again, a sliver of a grin. Guess or not, he likes the answer.

"If it tries hard enough, sure. It's a kind of bird. Magpies collect shiny and colorful things and bring them back to their nests."

He lifts his arm entirely out of the water, pausing for a moment to rest on the rim of the tub, propped on his elbows.

"Though I've heard of myna birds, who also gather up little shiny things... And have a habit of repeating what other people say." Pleasantly, he adds, "Sounds a lot like you."

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