#etho asking bdubs if he should step back and watch the master at work

[lorephobic]

oh man im so excited to see what bdubs and etho put together for a base. them on a team and getting to build together is literally such a dream come true i cant wait to see their building styles coming together

[cobble-stone]

broadripple is burning- chapter 5

broadripple is burning- chapter 5

Talking with a ghost always leaves an elephant in the room, specifically on the topic of death.

(TW this chapter: death, brief mention of suicide)

ao3 link

previous chapters: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Keyboards and wires scattered the floor, originally the floor of the bedroom but the project eventually migrated back into the living room, due to lack of space. And in the center, sat Etho, hunched over the computer which he moved to the center of it all. Right by Etho sat Bdubs who occasionally tossed the ring at his corporeal counterpart, to signify that he wanted attention.

Etho talked while he worked whenever he remembered to, mainly just to himself. He talked about what he was working on as he worked through bugs and errors, some sort of fancy communication device for Bdubs, using many keyboards and text-to-speech bots and such. It was all too technical for Bdubs’ interest, and he couldn’t even really respond too well yet, so for the most part, Bdubs just watched.

“You see, the hard part about this is trying to make sure every shared key has a different output. It’s not really difficult necessarily, just tedious,” Etho explained, staring into space as if he was trying to make eye contact with Bdubs, though missing him by about twenty degrees. “Cause K on this keyboard means “That,” and K on this one is just K, but the computer just wants to register both of them as K or as That, so I have to manually provide that distinction by—”

Bdubs tossed the ring at him, which got Etho to be quiet and turn his attention away.

“What’s up?” Etho asked, looking towards the piece of paper.

N-e-r-d.

Etho chuckled, “Listen, I’m the one getting you a voice, you better be nice to me or you’ll be stuck with the sheets of papers.”

I. W-o-u-l-d. B. F-a-s-t-e-r

Etho thought for a second, glancing down at the paper like he was trying to decipher what Bdubs said with his limited letters. “You would have done this faster?”

Yes.

He gave a small laugh, “Mmh-hmm, sure. I’ll let you come over here and possess this computer, then you can do all the hard work and I can sit back and watch,” he remarked. “As you are obviously so much more skilled in coding than I am, code master Bdubs.” His tone was sarcastic, a sarcasm that Bdubs could only fight with more of his playful arrogance.

I. A-m.

Etho rolled his eyes, “You haven’t changed a bit.” He turned back to the project, typing more and more, “What should we call this, do you think? Every good project needs a name.”

B-d-u-b-s. M-o-s-t. W-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l. V-o-i-c-e. I-s. G-o-n-e. S-o. I. U-s-e. A. S-t-u-p-i-d. C-o-m-p-u-t-e-r.

Etho sighed, looking at the paper. “Come on. Really? I don’t even think I could figure out what you were trying to say if I wrote it all out.”

T-h-a-t-s. O-n. U.

Etho ignored Bdubs. He was wrong earlier when he thought the bad part of being stuck like this was how lonely or eternal it all was or whatever, all of that sad depressing shit. The real tragedy of this situation is that all Etho needed to do to ignore him was slightly look the other way.

D-u-m-m-y.

No response. He tossed the ring at Etho’s face.

“Come on, Bdubs, you almost hit the monitor.”

B-o-r-e-d.

“Well I’m almost done, if you let me finish, you’ll be significantly less bored.” He glanced back at the project. “You know, in hindsight I didn’t even have to set all this up. I could have had you just use the standard keyboard to type everything by hand, but that’d be a lot slower since you can only press one key at a time. That would basically have just been one step above what we have now, and this is at least two steps up.”

That’s such an Etho thing to do, Bdubs thought. He doesn’t know why, exactly, it felt like it was something Etho would do, but it just did.

Etho moved out of the way, giving Bdubs a chance to fully observe the setup. “Alright. Just put the ring onto the corresponding keys, just like earlier.”

There were three keyboards, connected to the main computer. The center keyboard had all of the standard letters and numbers as usual, but the other two on the side were rigged up to type out full words in one press, complete with a small sticky note taped to each indicating which word was each key. Most were some of the more common words in English, and others were more specific to Bdubs’ scenario, with words such as his own name, Etho, ghost, dead, et cetera, et cetera.

Bdubs looked around the keys, trying to think of a sentence to compose. He pushed the ring into a various assortment of keys, watching as the words showed up on the screen, and then hit Enter.

“Hello Etho. I can talk now. Took you long enough.” spoke a robotic voice, emitting from the computer. It was so monotone and felt so fake, but at this point, he was just happy to have something that could talk again.

“I did all this work just for you to complain about it, huh,” Etho said, but he was smiling wide.

A couple moments of typing later, the voice emitted from the computer again, “You do the same to me. We’re even.”

“I do not!”

“You do.” 

Etho rolled his eyes playfully, “I do have to admit, it isn’t as nice as your usual voice. I’m gonna miss that. If I had more recordings of your voice, and more time, I could’ve figured out how to set up your voice as the text-to-speech.”

“Always told you to take more videos.” He had to type out the word ‘videos’ letter by letter, which was admittedly kind of tedious, but Bdubs already had practice from using that piece of paper for about five hours.

“I know, I know, you were right, I was wrong, you’re pretty, I’m ugly, you’re smart, I’m stupid, all that stuff.” Etho almost sang it like a little song, a bit mockingly if anything.

Bdubs laughed at the stupid little tune, “I don’t know that. I like it.”

Etho smiled, “Right, you probably wouldn’t remember it, it’s just a stupid little song you introduced me to.” 

Etho went silent for a couple minutes, looking hesitant to say what was on his mind. “Do you...mind if I bring up the topic of your death?” he asked.

Bdubs took a second to think about it. It was a strange thing to consider, the fact that he was, well, dead. He adjusted to the ghost aspect, but the fact that he has technically died was still strange to him, especially since he didn’t know how, or really anything about it.

Did he even want to know? He thought he wanted memories of his past life back originally, but once he got them back, it made things worse. Curiosity killed the cat, and he was fairly certain satisfaction would not be enough to bring him back.

But he had Etho now. Plus, he could tell Etho to shut up at any moment, and Etho would drop it. Etho even made him a specific shut up button for this purpose.

“Sure.”

Etho nodded, and stood up for a second, walking towards the couch and bringing back a plain black journal. Bdubs recognized it as the one Etho was reviewing yesterday. “You were going to a party with some of our friends from college, and well, you never came back. Nobody really gave me a good answer on how you died, so I tried to take matters into my own hands,” he said, opening up the journal and setting it on the floor.

Bdubs started glancing over the journal on the floor.

Last seen 10/28. Declared missing 10/30. Body found 11/2. Death could have occurred at any point in those five days. The body was found in the woods, roughly a mile from his last known location. Manner of death was declared suicide. No further investigation was deemed necessary.

He looked back over at Etho and said, “Really? That’s- I don’t think I died that way.” He was pretty certain he was happy when he was alive, even if he only had one memory and a couple photos to prove it. But he can’t say for sure, he had no idea what he was dealing with when he was alive, and he probably never would know, unless those memories came back to him. It doesn’t feel like something he would do.

Etho didn’t respond, and it took Bdubs a second to remember that he had to use the computer to talk to Etho. “I don’t think that was right.”

“I didn’t think so either. You didn’t show any of the warning signs of someone who was about to...do that, but nobody ever listened to me when I tried to say that. They all wrote me off as some crazy widow, I started to think I was one,” he said, chuckling a little bit as if that was enough to cover up the pained look on his face.

“They said it was from a drug overdose, but couldn’t identify what, it was probably a mix of things,” Etho explained, “Does that sound...familiar at all?”

A bitter taste filled his mouth, the burning of alcohol but complete by being combined with something even worse. Whatever it was, it made him want to vomit. “Yes. Kind of.”

Etho thought for a second. “Do you think someone drugged you? Or some sort of poison, maybe?”

The bitter taste still had not left his mouth, if anything it grew stronger. It was starting to make him feel like he was going to pass out, whatever subconscious memories Etho was bringing up were not pleasant ones. “Yes. Shut up.”

The fact that there was a note made him curious, but Bdubs didn’t care at this point, he just didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He’d ask Etho about that later.

Etho blinked, sitting up and looking a little surprised, “Alright, we can move on.”

Tango and Skizz had gone missing on the same night. They are still missing. Jimmy was declared missing as of 6/1, five months ago. Other official disappearances include Elizabeth “Lizzie” Shadow, who went missing three months ago. There were a few side notes scrawled in the margins, written in blue instead of black pen. Lizzie and Jimmy are cousins, I think. Lizzie was trying to find Jimmy but disappeared before she could, and a bit further down, Grian also missing? Maybe. Don’t know.

“Who are T and S?” Bdubs asked, not bothering to spell out their full names. They were on the tip of his tongue, the names felt so familiar but he couldn’t quite tell why. His mind flashed back to the photos in the bedroom, they were probably on there somewhere.

Etho grimaced a little, which was enough to tell Bdubs all he needed to know.

“They were friends of ours, junior and senior year of college. But about a year ago, we had a big argument, and things kind of fell apart. I had just gotten surgery, and you got in a car crash, and seeing as we were both kind of broke to begin with, we couldn’t pay the medical bills. I asked Tango for help, since he comes from a richer family than ours. He felt like he was being used. We got into this big fight, and I don’t think he ever really forgave us.”

“That’s why you wanted to go to the party,” Etho continued, “You wanted me to go too, so we could both try to reconnect to Tango and Skizz. But it didn’t work out that way, I guess.” His face fell as he talked, and a hand reached to fidget with a necklace that he was no longer wearing.

Bdubs took a moment to try and think how he was going to phrase this, especially with the limited options he had for communication. “Did they kill me?”

Etho frowned, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Tango’s the type to hold a grudge, but I don’t think it would have been that bad, Skizz would have talked him down. But the two of them might be related to the other disappearances, in some way.”

“So maybe.”

He nodded, “A maybe. The alternative is they...also died or went missing at the same party, or it was all a big coincidence.” His nose scrunched up a little in disgust, like he was sickened at the thought of Tango and Skizz also dying. 

It made sense, even if the two of them had a falling out, Tango and Skizz dying would mean Etho had lost his other two closest friends. Bdubs wanted to give him a comforting hug, though he was fairly certain his hugs were the opposite of comforting.

He decided to change the subject instead. “I know Jimmy. He was here, also a ghost.” He had to spell out Jimmy letter by letter due to there not being a quick button to press and get his name.

“So Jimmy’s dead?”

“That is how ghosts work.”

Etho stayed silent for a moment, and let out a sigh. “I know that. Do- I should ask Scott if he knew anything about Jimmy’s ghost- but also, I don’t really know the guy that well, I feel like it’d be awkward to ask him ‘Hey, you know how Bdubs is dead, yeah well I met his ghost and Jimmy’s also a dead ghost now.’”

“Do it.”

He frowned, “Yeah, I know, just- he’s basically the one person who I’ve kept in touch with throughout this, don’t want to think I’m being weird. I’ve tried keeping in touch with Cleo too, but just- wound is too fresh for both of us, I think. You dying kinda messed with her, from what I’ve heard.”

Cleo. He knew that name. Again, much like Tango and Skizz, it was one of those things that were just on the tip of his tongue, something felt so familiar about her but once again, Bdubs couldn’t figure it out. Feelings with no memories attached came back to him, the same warmth of a strong bond, like the same joy he gets with poking fun at Etho. “ I want to meet her.”

Etho looked back at the computer, “Cleo? I mean, it makes sense, you two were pretty close when you were alive. You want me to invite her over or something?”

“Yes.”

He glanced at his phone, lying down on the ground, “I guess I can make that work. Fair warning, it’ll probably take her longer to wrap her mind around the whole ghost thing than I did.” Etho grabbed his phone, and started messaging someone.

“Don’t care.” Bdubs responded, and set the ring down on the ground. He backed away from the computer to glance over Etho’s shoulder, standing close enough that had he not been intangible, he’d be able to lean on him.

Etho swatted behind him, his hand passing through Bdubs’ face a couple times, “Back off, don’t look over my shoulder,” he said, a hint of a laugh in his voice. “You know I don’t like it when people do that— well, you probably don’t know, but here I am reminding you.”

Bdubs rolled his eyes in defeat, but didn’t bother to move back over to the computer to protest. It was too much effort, and he was starting to get tired. Well, that was a lie, ghosts didn’t get tired, he was just lazy.

Something was so peaceful about all this, even if it was a mess. Sure, this was probably nothing like being alive. If he had any concept of what his life was, he was sure it wouldn’t be anywhere nearly as complicated as this. But it felt right, to be laying here on the floor of Etho’s apartment, as the two made plans to meet up with a friend, teasing each other and joking and getting into playful arguments. It wasn’t living, he’s lost that, but it was the second closest thing. He’ll compromise, just this once.