WEEK 8

[grimgrinningghosts]

[Two months. Two months of being trapped in this mansion. Two months of heartbreak and despair. Two months of wondering if you are all going to die here.

You finally have a real ray of hope thanks to Mr. Walt, but even he claims that it will be a hard journey ahead. You all have to be strong, physically, emotionally, any kind of strength will work against what you're up against. Maybe take the next few days to rest before the long journey, or prepare for the dangers that await, the choice is yours, but...

Will you be able to escape?

8 guests remain]

[ SUNDAY MONDAY TUESDAY ]

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SUNDAY

[grimgrinningghosts]

[toogoodforhim]

[It's hard for LeFou to wake up. To bring himself around in a world that's a little darker, a little colder without his partner in it. But he does, and for the first part of the morning he shuts himself in room 116, sorting through Maui's belongings.

He finds five pieces of paper torn from Maui's notebook, reads the one with his name on it and, alone in the room where they kept both of their belongings, to make room for both of their beds across the hall, he cries.

When he recovers he leaves the room, his eyes and nose red from crying, still drying the tears on his cheeks with his ruffled sleeves. He has the other four notes in his hand, unopened, and he slips them under Wendy, Elsa, Ford, and Namine's doors.

After that he rips a strip from one of their sheets - his sheets, now, but every time he corrects himself it drives a new, sharp knife into him - and fashions it into a harness and lead, slipping it around Heihei and carrying the chicken into the kitchen. He finds something that'll work for feed for his new stepchicken, but Heihei isn't interested in eating.]

...You miss him too, don't you, Heihei?

[The bantam cocks his head at him, and then pecks at the countertop. LeFou sighs and nudges his head over toward the feed, but more of the feed ends up scattering onto the floor than actually being eaten.

After he's relatively sure that his special needs stepchicken isn't going to starve to death, he puts Heihei back in their room (his room) and goes out to the foyer. Where he sees Maui's portrait smiling cockily at him from the wall and he just. Stops.

He stands up on his tiptoes to press his forehead against the painting of his partner's, closing his eyes and willing himself not to break down.

His hand brushes the button next to Maui's portrait, and he jumps clear out of his skin at the deep, rumbling laugh.

Okay, okay. I see what's happening here~

The look of shock on Lefou's face crumbles inward into the purest, concentrated despair.

You're face to face with greatness and it's strange. You don't even know how you feel- it's adorable! Well it's nice to see that humans never change...]

[chainbroke]

[ It takes a while for her to wake up. Friday had been such a long, difficult day, she wants to pretend it didn't happen. She wants to pretend that Maui--hero to all, her hero--isn't gone, wants to pretend that Fiddleford--he'd braided her hair, told her about his sisters, accepted her, too, despite what she'd told him--isn't gone. She wants to wake up and leave her room and talk to Maui, hear his booming laugh and...

She sees the note. She can hear his voice as he tells her she's not a mistake. Naminé's hands tighten on the note, to the point where it crinkles and it's in danger of ripping. ]

Oh, Maui... You tried to keep us safe.

[ Until the very end, he'd tried. Naminé reads it over, again and again, until she doesn't have to read it to know what it says.

And besides... now, the words are too blurry and smudge to read. Naminé lets herself cry for a while, and then she folds up the note and puts it in her pocket. She'll keep it with her forever, until they find their friends again.

Now, though. Now, she needs to find LeFou. It's not too difficult, and when she sees him, she clears her throat very softly. Her eyes are a little red, but for now, she's cried enough... she hopes. She's not the one who needs comfort now. ]

Papa?

[sixfingeredstan]

[Ford doesn't notice the slip of paper under his door until he gets up during the morning to find food; when he does, he bends and scoops it up, reading it with grief painting every line on his face all over again.

I can write this becauze of you. Thank you. Please protect Leefou when I can't.

It hurts. It hurts to know that he touched someone's life like that, and now he's just gone. They're all gone, and there's such a heavy burden on Ford's broad shoulders to carry now. To protect his remaining friends. To get the rest of them back, somehow. But he has hope, and they have an ally in Walt.

Eventually, he goes to find Lefou, holding up the slip of paper wordlessly when he finds him. He doesn't have to say much.]

[aboyandhiscar]

[Mike's wandering back inside through the Foyer when he spots Lefou, and the familiar voice ringing from the recording. He remembers listening to every song their first week here, and at the time, he didn't realize it was actually Maui singing. The big guy had a surprisingly good voice.

He quietly watches Lefou just...standing there, listening. He's still in mourning, Mike thinks, that's normal. But...dang. He shouldn't torture himself like that. Mike frowns to himself, wondering if he should say something, and then, finally, lets out a quick whistle to catch his attention.]

You know. . .I bet he'd like it if. Well, if you learned his song. Yeah?

[kindaruledatit]

[Wendy's been spending a lot of time in her room, laying on the bed, messing around with what things she'd held onto from the slot machine. The last few days were... difficult to say the least, and it was hard not to think about it. Fiddleford, Maui, and Jiminy's slow confession - topping it all off with a dream visit with a guy who says he can help them escape? She'll take that.

She spots the note though, right as it's slid under the door, though she only chooses to pick it up a minute or two later.

Her grip tightens, face set as she learns that Maui trusts her to keep the others safe. Heh, good job she's done so far, that's for sure. But the more she reads it, over and over again, the more she becomes set in making sure that proves true. She'd rather die herself then see another of her friends get murdered.

But then it comes back to the note, and whoever chose to slide it under her door. It wills Wendy out of her bed and sends her out to find whoever sent it in the first place.

And that leads her to Lefou... eventually. She'll find him, and when she does, she gives him a simple wave, note in hand.]

Yo.

[amadeusrockette]

[Julia comes up to Lefou hesitantly, some papers in her hands. She doesn't really want to, like. Make things worse? But also she feels like it's probably better to do this now? She doesn't know. She really doesn't.]

. . . Do you know how to read music? I, um. [She holds out the papers, which are the music for a song. Which is theoretically written in French but I don't speak French.] I'm sorry I didn't finish earlier.

[chainbroke]

[ After speaking with LeFou, Naminé decides what they all need is food. She spends a while, then, in the kitchen (she tries not to think too hard about what happened) making breakfast. She's still learning, so it's not nearly as fancy as anything, say, LeFou could make... but gosh darnit, she is trying. There are pancakes with blueberries and sprinkles, toast with jam and butter, bacon, lots of scrambled eggs. There's juice, coffee, and tea.

Afterward, she puts all the food out in the lounge, and she spends a little time hanging around to make sure people have eaten.

In the afternoon, she's in and out of her room, just to get food. But aside from that, she spends quite a lot of time there.

Later at night, much later, she goes to the foyer again to put up the single sketch she's done. It's everyone, all together. For a while, she just looks at it. She doesn't think it's anywhere near the skill Ford has, but there's a lot of heart behind it. ]

[sixfingeredstan]

[Truth be told, Ford is tempted to spend the day locked up, mourning. He wants nothing more than to shut himself away for a little while and let himself grieve. Let himself process the previous day in his own good time. But he's only human, after all, and he didn't exactly eat anything yesterday, so eventually a mixture of hunger and his guilt over shutting out his remaining, ragged little family brings him out of his and Fiddleford's room. He's still got those melted, twisted wire-rimmed glasses tucked in his pocket, and he's clutching Fiddleford's notebook, too, as he makes his way into the lounge, following the smell of food.

He looks tired and haggard as hell, his eyes swollen from grief and lack of sleep, but he still has a ghost of a smile to spare for Naminé.]

Smells good, kiddo. Looks like you went with my pancake recipe.

[aboyandhiscar]

[Mike wanders through the lounge likely at the tail end of meal time, but even he has to stop and marvel at the spread. He didn't expect anyone to still be working so hard to cook anything--what with Maui gone and Ford grieving and all. When he spots Namine, he looks surprised.]

Woah. Did you make all this?

[kindaruledatit]

[No matter what happened to Wendy, her appetite was surprisingly good for a depressed teenage girl. At the first whiff of Namine's food, Wendy shows up fairly quickly in the lounge.

She looks rather tired, her hair frayed. But she's smiling.]

Whoa, dude. Did you make all of this?

[outsidethecircle]

[She's about to place her own final sketches in the foyer and she stops.]

Wow...

[She looks down at her own sketches and swallows. How could she match that? Then she pushes those thoughts aside.]

You did a good job there. I like how you did the shading.

[aboyandhiscar]

[Wow weird night amirite guys.

Mike actually sleeps in for once, rising a little later than usual. When he does, he beelines straight for the kitchen and then the casino. The clattering of glasses may clue people in that he's trying to dump all the moonshine and other alcohol. Whoops. Catch him in the act or help him out--at least the casino will probably magically restock itself.

Later in the afternoon, he's outside, just doing his usual thing of trying to get some excess energy out. This time he's practicing with his staff near some graves, knocking away emptied liquor bottles or stacked rocks. He's on edge more than ever now.

Finally, early in the evening, he's looking around for Stanford. Eventually, he'll just lightly knock at his door, hoping he's in there.]

[sixfingeredstan]

[Ford's spent much of the day in his room, aside from a brief excursion out in the morning to feed himself. He's been reading over Fiddleford's journal for most of that time, his fingertips tracing each handwritten page almost like he's trying to reach the hand that made each mark. It hurts, reading things about himself that are less than flattering from the beginning of their time here, but seeing that tiny heart at the end bolsters him. He spends a long time just rereading those last few words, only stopping when he hears a knock at his door.

Ford clears his throat and sets the journal aside.]

...Come in.

kitchen

[defyingfrigidity]

[Elsa can hear the clinking of glasses as he's lugging a bunch of the bottles out of the casino, so before he can continue on to... wherever he's going, she stops him in the hall.]

Mike...? What are you doing?

[kindaruledatit]

[Wendy had also chosen to sleep in today, though for probably different reasons then Mike. She was tired, worn out to her last nerve by the events of friday. To top it all off, she had been spending the night fashioning a certain golden badge into something else. A little project, if you will.

Much like Mike, Wendy wanders outside for the sake of fresh air and getting rid of some of this restlessness. She's spent almost two months inside one building and frankly it sucks.

She spots Mike practicing and gives a couple coughs to draw his attention.]

Getting some work in?

[defyingfrigidity]

[Like Lefou, like the others, it had taken longer than usual for Elsa to get up and leave her room - which isn't new, considering how she'd been isolating herself since Anna's death. But this latest round of murders, hit her harder than the last few, as hard as Sophie's death had been. Fiddleford had been a good man, a man so dear to Ford, and Maui... Maui had tried to help her so much. He'd tried to give her confidence in a way not even her own father had done (his encouragement clashed so hard with her father's stern, frustrated demands that she need to learn how to control it! and rang so much louder....) and that... that had helped.

So to lose him, to lose the both of them... it was a hard blow. So hard it was almost noontime before she left her room, and as usual, she headed straight for the memorial. And as usual, she starts with the names first:

Fiddleford McGucket
Maui

... She hesitates, but in letters much smaller than the others, spaced far below (but not far enough that it would cover the elegant icy details she gave the paper after Sophie's death) she writes Jiminy Cricket as well. She almost didn't want to, but... she put Tadashi and Demyx's names on the list. She might as well add his.

For the sculptures, once again they're little replicas of the victims. Maui's is, of course, full of his usual pride; his head thrown back and chest puffed up and arms flexing, as much of a showoff as Maui himself had been in real life. It's a little incomplete, since Elsa didn't know all the details of all his tattoos, but there's at least a tiny etching in the ice of mini-Maui, in the same pose as the statue itself.

And for Fiddleford... she hesitates, because she's not sure if she would be making things better or worse. She knows how much these things can hurt (god, every time she looks at the one she made of her and Anna after her sister's death, that wound inside of her is ripped open just a little wider) but... he and Ford deserved so much more. So with Ford's words at the trial ringing in her ears, the way he called Fiddleford my husband, she crafts a small sculpture of the two of them; both wearing tuxedos, one set of hands clasped together and the others on each others' shoulders, as if caught in the middle of a dance, smiling the brightest smiles Elsa can imagine on both men.

She's definitely a little misty eyed by the time she finishes that one, and when she sets it down and looks at the others, she realizes... well. She kind of made things uneven, didn't she? Some people had little things that reminded her of them, but others had their own statues. So maybe.... maybe she should fix that too.

So she makes more. Sophie, Karolina, and Mulan all smiling and waving. Star, laughing as she sits atop a running (and also laughing) Kiara as Tip runs close beside them. Lea, a mischievous grin on his face as he flashes double thumbs-up. Wander and Wall-E, dancing together as Sylvia watches close by with a smile on her face. It's a little cluster of all their friends, smiling and laughing as they should be now, not dead and buried...

Her tears are absolutely falling by now, and when she sets the final figure down, she'll just. Bury her face in her hands and focuses on steadying her breathing before she just loses it and outright cries.]

[chainbroke]

[ It's one of those times when she's in and out of her room, and when she sees Elsa so distraught, she panics. ]

Elsa?

[ The worry in her voice is sharp, and her eyes are wide. It's a good thing she's not carrying anything, because she would've dropped it as she runs over to Elsa. Elsa's already been through so much, what could...?

Oh. For a long time, she's quiet. And then... she starts to cry, too. It's a while before she can gather herself to say anything, and even then, her voice is trembling. ]

Elsa, they're... they're beautiful.

[toogoodforhim]

[Lefou panics briefly when he sees Elsa sobbing in the foyer, but when he comes closer and sees what she's been working on, he stops.

He doesn't fall to his knees, but he does kneel down and scoot closer to her. His voice is thick with tears that are threatening once again to fall.]

...They're perfect.

[He wants to hug her, but instead he reaches out and puts his hand on her back, rubbing her back comfortingly.]

MONDAY

[grimgrinningghosts]

TUESDAY

[grimgrinningghosts]

[No motive this week...?]

[toogoodforhim]

[Tuesday. The final day, according to Walt, but despite the fact that with no further contact from the enigmatic man Lefou's suspicion is beginning to return, they have no choice but to believe him... right?

So after spending two days effectively grieving and feeling sorry for himself, there's an almost familiar routine in the way that he sorts through the things he's amassed. The door to room 116 is open; it doesn't lock anymore, not since Maui died. And Lefou sits in the middle of the floor, sorting through his and Maui's things. There's a pile for his black and gold waistcoat and the two tuxedos, never worn (except for Maui's trousers), and a pile for the rest of the random items that he never got rid of. Propped against the wall sits an unlit torch, and next to Lefou on the floor is Maui's oar.

Heihei is pecking at some of the gold coins that had scattered across the floor, his practical little harness tied at the other end to Lefou's wrist.

Mulan's armor is laid out in pieces on top of the dressers and on top of his trunk.

Later, after he's done with packing his kit up, Lefou retreats back to room 103 for a while and when he comes out it's clear he's decided to deal with grief by returning to pure, military routine. His hair is cut from the two months of growth that had been making it downright unreasonably long, although it's longer in the back than in the front for lack of a barber. His face is shaved completely and his sideburns brought down to manageable levels, and he is Clean.

Which makes his shirt look even dingier in response, but what do you do when you have no lye and don't know what bleach is. He's wearing the waistcoat that Elsa made for him, with his wet hair pulled back into a ponytail, and he's feeling out the weight of the oar like it's a sword.

Not that he's practiced at swordfighting, either, but swing thing, hit thing, repeat isn't too hard. In theory.

In practice, he ends up panting for breath with grunts and yowls of frustration while he wails on a pillow that he'd brought out from his room.

There are now feathers all over the foyer. Heihei eats one. It's fine. He's fine. His wet hair starts coming out of his ponytail and sticks to his forehead, and he has to stop his rampage to wipe it out of his face. He's eaten nothing but four slices of bread over the last two days and spent three times as much time in bed crying than he has sleeping.]

[kindaruledatit]

[You had better believe that Wendy's still nervous today. Tuesday, of all days, why did their supposed last day have to be a tuesday? That's when the motives came out, which were either utterly inane, like last weeks, or... terrible.

Eh, who cares anymore. Wendy's routine is about the same as its been, with a few differences. She spends a small amount of time in the bathing room this morning, appearing to just be trying to enjoy the hot water one last time, humming a strange tune for a minute or two, until-]

Ugh! Come on! I thought I forgot about that.

[Later, It's entirely possible that you may catch her rummaging in Jiminy's room. Why? Well she's searching under the bed and seems to find what she's looking for when she pulls out a large, golden gauntlet.

It's going to be one of those days.

After she's done that, Wendy sets herself up in the lounge on a couch with a coffee table before her stacked with a pile of just about everything she has amassed from the slot machine, that hasn't been given away/eaten/thrown away, plus the gauntlet she snatched from Jiminy's.]

Hmm... Okay, yeah... [She murmurs to herself, currently caught up in inspecting the grooves where gems seemed to fit in the gauntlet, which already had a couple gems in it already.]

[sixfingeredstan]

[Tuesday brings with it a renewed sense of determination; a few days is not long enough to assuage Ford's grief, but he has a sense of purpose, now, and if Walt is to be trusted, the end is in sight, now. He's no longer barring himself in his room, at least, though it does appear as if he's given up shaving burning off his facial hair for the time being. There are more important things at hand, which means his five o'clock shadow is well on its way to being an actual beard.

He downs a cup of coffee in the kitchen first thing, what must be his fifth or sixth since last night, because he certainly hasn't been sleeping. He's been far too busy poring over his deceased husband's notebook, looking over each potential design, deciding which of them is feasible with the materials he has available to him. WALL-E isn't going to be resurrected, not without Fiddleford's computer engineering brain, but Ford fully intends to bring his damaged motherboard along for the ride, wherever they end up.

After he's refueled for the day, he begins to go through his amassed belongings, sorting through them with a keen eye for what's useful and what can stay behind—as well as what might belong to someone else. With that in mind, he seeks out Naminé with a white bundle draped over one arm, and after some deliberation, Wendy with a large, old book in tow.

Later, he settles in the Study, Fiddleford's notebook spread out in front of him along with his own, his old journal, and several other books. He's hunched over a writing desk, muttering to himself as he scribbles furiously in his notebook, every so often cross-referencing another text as he works out what seems to be a series of increasingly-complicated mathematical equations. Feel free to bother him...it just might take you a few tries to get his attention.]

[chainbroke]

[ On Monday, Naminé is scarce. She's spent the day gathering materials, and then retreating to her room. While she isn't sure how good at arts and crafts she is, this is something she has to do. No regrets, after all--and if she doesn't do something for everyone, she'll most certainly regret it.

So. On Tuesday, she isn't up to much other than deliveries. She has in hand star-shaped charms attached to pieces of string. Each has its own pattern, unique to the person receiving it. They've been made with stationary, but she's asked Elsa to freeze them over so they're sturdier and a little bit thicker.

For LeFou, it's red, with small hearts and paopu fruits. For Wendy, green with small badges on it--like the one Jiminy gave her (and there's an axe here and there, because of course). For Julia, blue with music notes and tiny keyboards. For Elsa, pale blue with snowflakes, suns, and crowns. For Ford, it's gold with stacks of pancakes, little ghosts, and banjos; his has a paopu in the middle. For Anna, it's light purple, with sketchbooks and pencils. For Mike, it's orange, with stars and little skulls. Naminé has one of her own. It's pale pink, with elements of everyone's charms on them.

After all, she wouldn't be who she is without everyone else.

She spends time delivering the charms, no matter where people are. And later at night, she has dinner in the lounge. It's nothing too complicated, just soup (she'd found noodles in the shape of stars, so she's added that into a vegetable broth) and bread with a cup of tea. She's made enough for anyone who'd like some. ]