blindwatchersees | The Madgod's Mailbox/Sending Stone

"Okay, um."

Radar picks up the tea, wrapping both hands around the cup without drinking from it quite yet.

"So... so like I said, I got real good ears. I always have ever since I was little. I could hear a cow gettin' mad all the way on the other side of the farm or rain coming in when it was twenty miles out. And some of the stuff I heard, well, it wasn't always with my ears, y'know? Sometimes it was more like -- " Just as he's done almost every time he's tried to explain it, Radar taps the back of his head. "Like it starts back here first and then makes it to my ears. I hear stuff that's gonna happen before it happens, or what people're gonna say before they say it. Or even if they never say it at all, if they just stick with thinking it, I can still hear everything."

He falters a little. Rotates the cup between his hands as he studies the surface of the tea.

"Anyway, it's never bothered me too bad. I'm good at knowing what I oughta pay attention to and what I shouldn't be hearing. But... sometimes it gets scrambled. Like if I'm real drunk, I get it all mixed up and everything's louder than it should be. Which is fine 'cause it's me doing it and not somebody else, but, but then you've got what happened at Dahlia's party, or what some of the other guys have been saying about Gnarly-thotep scrambling their brains, and -- and gee, I been worrying a lot."

He shoves his glasses further up his nose and meets Sheo's eyes. "If I'm just a receiver, then somebody else who's better at all this than me can mess with the dials like Mendel did. I don't want that to happen again."

"You're not the first person to come to me about something like this. Though that's as much as I can reveal."

He's keeping his promise to Erin, Divines help him not. The most unpredictable thing a mad god can do is be steadfast about a matter.

"Tell me, the name Radar... that means something, doesn't it? Is it a character from a book?"

Radar finally takes a sip of his tea while Sheo's talking, and hastily swallows as soon as the question arrives.

"Oh, no sir," he says, "it's a kind of machine where I'm from. It bounces radio waves off things so you can see 'em before they show up. My unit started calling me that three weeks after I got to Korea 'cause I could hear the choppers coming in before anybody else did. My, um, my real name's Walter."

"I see. Are you good with these machines?"

Radar shrugs and makes a noncommittal noise. "Not really. Honestly I don't got much call to use 'em -- we're a MASH unit, not combat, and even if we were I don't think they'd give us one without a whole lotta dealing. It's hard enough getting the stuff we do need."

"A... MASH unit? Now, you don't look like a bowl of porridge to me, so I'm assuming that means something else than what I'm thinking."

He breaks into a brief laugh.

"Yes, sir. It means Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. I'm the company clerk at the 4077th."

"Ah, so it's not just handsome Hawkeye. Your whole unit is made up of healers?"

...oh, jeez, please don't tell him Hawkeye's flirted with the old god guy who looks like his grandpa, too. Not that Radar would be surprised, but: jeez.

"Yessir," he says, a little quicker. "I mean we're not all doctors and nurses, like I said I'm the clerk, and we got a lot of other enlisted guys that help keep the place running too. But we're all trying to make sure the wounded get out of Korea alive."

“Which you do with your keen ears- the ones on the sides of your head, and the ones in the back of your brain.”

He pauses, thinking.

“Can you hear the sound of other people turning your knobs?”

"No." Radar sighs, and drinks a little more tea. "I just hear what happens after, when everything gets loud or I start seeing stuff that ain't there."

Maybe the hallucinations were a completely different thing Mendel did to him, but... it's also sort of what happened when he was near Edgar, wasn't it? Everything he was thinking got so loud that it was like Radar was right there on the train next to him.

"But you know the dials are there. Do you think, if we practiced a little, you could listen for the sound of someone turning the knobs. And then, perhaps, we could figure out a way to play a little joke on them?"

A pause.

And then Radar smiles -- with astonishing slyness, considering how jittery he's been the whole conversation -- and says, "Yeah, I bet we could figure that out."

He spent almost two years wrangling, tricking, and sneaking around the brass in Korea, and not always just because Hawkeye asked him to. Pulling one over on any gods who wanna mess with his head? Radar is in.

“Excellent! Oh, this is going to be fun!” he claps.

“Now, here’s what I think we’ll do. For as long as you’re able to, I’m going to take rounds of sneaking around your mind, and you’re going to try to catch me. We don’t need to do this all today. So long as you’re willing, we can keep having these lessons. And once you’re able to catch me a few times in a row, I can teach you the next part.”

“Oh, there is one little snag. Obliviously, having a mad god sneak around inside your skull has the potential to move all of your furniture half an inch to the left, so to speak. After our sessions, you may have your ears turned up so high that you start seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. A temporary side effect… hopefully.”

Hopefully. Radar's smile fades.

Because that's why he's asking for help in the first place, isn't it? He doesn't ever want his brain and his ears getting that messed up again. Before Radar arrived on Marrow Isle, he could always count on his senses to tell him the truth, even when they told him stuff nobody else thought was real. The idea that his ears or eyes might get screwed up permanent like that --

A cold lump forms in his stomach, and he has to take another gulp of tea to try and heat it up. It doesn't work too good.

Smaller, he asks, "Am I gonna know what's real and what's not? If that happens?"

“I don’t know. It differs, from person to person.”

He leans in.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Radar. I think you’re rather the pleasant sort, and I tend to like that more often than I don’t. But I’m a Daedric Prince. I don’t get what I want, I get what I am, and what I am is madness. With me, there will always be risks. But sometimes those risks are for things you would be much better with than without. Am I clear?”

...He's right. Isn't he? You take risks all the time if it'll mean something better. Maybe it's just easier to take those risks when it's somebody else's life in danger; maybe if this weren't gonna possibly destroy the only thing Radar truly likes about himself, it'd be easier still.

But sometimes, months after meeting him at Mr. Rambo's barbecue, Radar still catches himself humming the eerie song Nyarlathotep played in Dr. de Kuiper's head. He stops whenever he notices what he's doing, but not before his stomach does a nauseous swoop. I think if he was gonna notice me, he would've already, he said at the time. Maybe he has.

And if one of the demons or Nyarlathotep gets ahold of him and Radar can't protect himself, well, then his head's definitely gonna be screwed up permanently.

So he drains the last of the tea, sets his cup back on the table with a decisive clink, and says, steady as he can, "Yes, sir."

A deep breath.

"I'm ready."

He doesn't so much as get a chance to put the cup down before butterflies swallow his vision and he's plunged into darkness.

There's something following him in the darkness, something flipping switches, turning knobs, pressing buttons while the music plays. Something daring him to follow it through the darkness, if he's got the courage. Something that cackles and mocks him.

(Author's note: Wear headphones and close your eyes for best results)

Edited 2024-11-27 03:04 (UTC)

Radar gasps, whirling around. Squinting doesn't do a darn thing in a darkness this absolute, but he squints anyway, puts out a hand like he's fumbling toward the latrine during a blackout. The music warps around his head and tunnels through his ears. It's so distorted that it's no help at all -- he thinks he's going to put his foot down in one spot, and stumbles suddenly when his foot doesn't connect with the floor for another three inches.

goodnight, i rene goodnight
ʇɥƃıupooƃ 'ǝuǝɹı 'ʇɥƃıupooƃ

Where does he go? Who's following who?

Where do you want to be? Fever murmurs in his memory.

He doesn't know any of it yet. Radar tries to listen, head spinning with each sideways yank of the dials, before he squares his shoulders and wobbles toward what he thinks is the sound of laughter.

His eyes gradually adjust to the darkness, and slowly but surely, a series of arched hallways come dimly into view. His vision swims like he’s seeing it through water, depths unpredictable and shapes distorting, but it still provides more clues than the initial blackout.

In addition to the laughter, he keeps catching the sound of footsteps, sometimes echoing from places where it shouldn’t be possible for footsteps to be. Is… is the sound coming from the ceiling?

The visuals disorient him, but it's not as bad as the sounds skewing and skipping in weird places. Radar's used to his eyes misbehaving ever since he got his first pair of glasses as a toddler; sometimes, he thinks, that's why he got such good ears to compensate.

But now that he can sorta see where he's going, Radar touches a palm to where one of the walls ought to be. He misses the first time, corrects on the second, inches along in anticipation of the wall or the floor dropping out from underneath him at any second. He stops when he hears the footsteps above him. Holds his breath. Cocks his head, just a little.

Where do you want to be?

It's a crazy idea, but the whole point of talking to a madgod is that he makes you go a little crazy, right?

Cautiously, Radar lifts a foot and plants it against the wall to see if he can walk straight up toward the footsteps.

Wait, has the gravity been pointing downward all this time? A step or two along the length of the wall and he’s skidding down along it, only barely managing to arrest his fall by the friction of his feet. He still hits the ground rather unceremoniously, but things are clearer down here, the music a little less distorted. It still echoes through the halls like a bad dream, though.

Radar yelps, flails as he skids down the wall, and thumps against the ground with his left shoulder taking the brunt of the tumble. Groaning, he pushes himself upright. His glasses got knocked askew in the fall; quickly, he straightens them and clambers to his feet, absently kneading his shoulder as he readjusts his bearings.

Okay. Okay. He gives his head a brief, violent shake like he's trying to shoo away a fly. Now what?

sometim
es i live in th
e country
some
times i l
ive in town

The nightmare of the gala started to change, he realizes, when he thought about home. When he decided that was where he wanted to be. The hospital faded and grass started to grow. So... so maybe...

"I want more light," he whispers. "I want to be home."

Grass begins to grow through the cracks in the stone. The ceiling begins to crumble, showing patches of blue sky. The music shifts and gains a new hum, coming from somewhere beyond the now-ruined walls.

...

It worked.

Radar laughs, a quick, giddy sound that blends with one of the crackly ruptures in the music. He tips his head back and closes his eyes against the sun. Listens harder to the new swoop in the melody. He swears he can even hear the grass growing as it rises and rises through the stone.

And then he sprints straight for one of the biggest cracks in the wall.

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cw: mindheckery, link contains brief mention of suicidal ideation

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