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Rita prided herself on being the most sensible person living under the roof of Chief's mansion, a fact that she took very highly, so she honestly had no idea what she was expecting she would accomplish when Baby Doll tugged on her shirt as she was fixing herself a gin and tonic. "Rita?" She asked in a small voice.
"Yes, Baby Doll?"
"Cliff asked me to come and get you. He's trying to carry Larry to bed but the lightning man won't let him hear him."
Sighing, Rita took a sip of her drink and wondered idly if she would just be better off going back to the lounge room to watch another one of her pictures, but Baby Doll was tugging at her clothes that she had only just pressed and she could hear Cliff shouting from the other end of the house, so really the best thing to do was just deal with it immediately and carry on with their lives. "Tell Cliff I'll be there in a moment." The swift pattering of feet, and Baby Doll disappeared down the hall.
Reluctantly, Rita made her way towards the staircase, one arm across her chest and the other swirling her glass. She came across Cliff, who was at the bottom of the stairs trying to inch his way towards Larry, Baby Doll, who was hiding behind a banister at the top of the stairs, the negative spirit that was crackling with lightning as it hovered over Larry's prone body, crumpled and twisted in the middle of the staircase as if the spirit had left him as he was descending them. "Go away you overgrown cell tower," Cliff was saying as he tried to grab at Larry again. The spirit swooped forward and growled in his face. "Fuck off Caspar, you don't scare me, stop it!"
"Would someone like to tell me what on earth is going on here?" Rita called from the top of the stairs. If she was being honest with herself, the fear of seeing Larry collapsed on the stairs was almost too much for her to handle. If she wasn't Rita Farr, award winning actress, she would have lost her composure and went screaming down the stairs to make sure Larry's neck wasn't broken from the fall.
Cliff looked up at her then as if he hadn't realized she'd arrived. "Oh Rita, thank fuck you're here." He waved his hands at the spirit. "I'm trying to get Larry to his room but the fucking ghost won't let me anywhere near him."
"And what are you expecting me to do about that?"
"I don't fucking know. You've been dealing with this much longer than I have so maybe I just thought that you knew how to talk to it!"
Rita dropped her head to her hand and pinched the bridge of her nose. She held out her hand and Baby Doll diligently grabbed her glass from her outstretched hand as if she was used to the routine and placed it on the coffee table that held those ugly flowers. "Baby Doll, Cliff would you please excuse us?"
Baby Doll immediately stood up from where she was rocking on the floor and left the landing in the direction of Jane's room. Cliff however didn't move and he looked up at Rita with a tilt of his head. "Why? How the fuck are you going to be able to carry him to his room?"
Rolling up her sleeves, Rita descended the stairs slightly and glared at the spirit. "Because if you would like me to speak with this... creature then I would much rather do it alone. I'll call you when I need you to do the heavy lifting but until then, go play with your trains."
Grumbling under his breath, Cliff stood with the creaking of metallic joints and the grinding of metal on metal and only when he had turned around and walked away did Rita face the spirit hovering above her friend. With her hands on her hips, Rita made her way down the staircase and the spirit turned to look at her.
Rita prided herself on being the most sensible person living under the roof of Chief's mansion, so she had no idea why she was having a stand off with a space ghost made out of electricity that she wasn't even sure could understand her or if it'll do any good. "Right, you." Dear god, now she was talking to the thing. "You've had your fun. Time for you to get back into your host and stay there for the rest of the night."
Unsurprisingly, the spirit didn't move and Rita wondered if it would be better to just abandon the situation. But Larry was still crumbled on the stairs like a puppet with its stings cut and she realized that she couldn't do that to him, no matter how much she longed for her gin and tonic. "Or," she reasoned. "You can still float about and visit whoever you'd like, but just let us get dear Larry to bed. How does that sound?" In return she was met with a sound that was a snarl mixed with a wail and Rita resisted taking a step back.
She waved her hand at Larry. It hurt her to see him like that, abandoned like a child's doll and with no decision on when it would happen. "Larry is being generous enough to house you so the least you could do is leave him somewhere comfortable. Like a bed or a couch instead of dropping him on whatever hard surface you feel like."
Larry looked more broken than he usually did and Rita despised how much this damn ghost ruined him, inside and out, and if she wasn't so sensible or worried about the radiation, she would reach out and try to wrap her hands around its neck and squeeze until all the lightning died. But she knew better than that. She wasn't violent. She wasn't a killer. She wasn't foolish.
Although, she was trying to reason with a being made out of radiation from space, so maybe she was just a little bit foolish.
"You really should be more gentle with him," Rita said "He's been through enough, lost enough. He doesn't need to be reminded of what he's become and what he's lost every time you leave him." It didn't react and Rita felt like she would accomplish more by having this chat with a brick wall. She tried not to stomp her foot.
In the other room, he could hear a very confused Vic trying to comfort a wailing Baby Doll and just hoped he would be too preoccupied to come out and interrupt.
"And those dreams," Rita hissed, hands gripped tightly in her shirt. "You don't need to hurt him with those too- dropping him down the stairs is bad enough. He's in pain just remembering and you think it's funny to make him go through it all again? His biggest regrets? His strongest failures? Huh?"
It didn't care, probably wasn't even listening to a word she said, but for some strange reason, Rita felt like it was looking at her in a way it never had before. Larry was still there, discarded like yesterdays rubbish, and probably in a great deal of pain even before he woke up with cricks in his neck. Steeling herself, Rita lifted her chin high and took a step down the stairs. The spirit swooped at her and snarled in her face and Rita was almost overwhelmed by the smell of ozone. "Move," she demanded and took another step down. Surprisingly, the spirit moved away but followed close beside her. When Rita reached Larry, she carefully dragged him down the stairs, wincing every time a limp part of his body hit a stair particularly hard, and managed to spread him out on the floor. She glared up at the hovering spirit. "That was incredibly rude of you," she said and the being recoiled as if she'd slapped it. "You should know better than that. How long have you known me? How many years? You should be very well aware by now that I would never do anything to intentionally hurt Larry. Unlike you."
It was circling her now, like how a lion would stalk it's prey, but she stood her ground. "Now you have two choices." She held up two fingers. "One- you return to Larry's body and let him walk himself back to bed. Two- we let you roam about here for a bit and you can return to Larry when you're ready, but Cliff will be carrying him back to bed. Those are your options. What will it be?"
There was a tense moment between them where the spirit hovered too close for comfort and Rita refused to back down, a sour twist of her lips targeted at the being, but eventually it bowed his head to her and stepped back, evidently choosing option two. If Rita thought about it, she hadn't expected to listen to her at all, so she should shut up and take her blessings.
"Cliff!" She hollered down the hall and after a moment she could hear the creaking of a chair and heavy footsteps down the hall.
"Get lost Cliff," he was mumbling to himself. "I'll call you when I need you Cliff. As soon as you find something interesting to watch I'll give you a shout, Cliff."
"What are you blabbering about?" Rita asked exasperatedly when he turned the corner.
"Nothing Rita." Cliff made a robotic sound that might have been a very heavy sigh but only sounded like screws rattling around in an empty metal container. "What do you need?"
She waved a hand absently at Larry's body, spread eagle on the polished hardwood floor. "Would you please carry Larry to his room? I'd do it but I feel as though you'd be the only one who wouldn't be fried to a crisp from the radiation the moment you entered. Please don't remove his bandages, he gets very self-conscious."
Cliff turned his head to her with a clicking of metal. "How did you get through to it? I was trying for half an hour and all I got was a whole heap of snarling."
Honestly, Rita had no idea why or how it listened to her. But she wasn't about to tell Cliff that. "I asked it nicely." And she turned away with a swish of her skirts and then he heard Cliff swearing as the spirit followed after her. When they were gone, she would go back up the stairs to collect her gin and tonic, but until then she'd just find another one of her pictures to watch.
Jane found her sometime in the late hours of the night -Jane, not Baby Doll, which was some sort of a blessing- and whacked her none too gently on the shoulder. "What was that all about today?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about. Also please refrain from slapping me in the future."
"You know," Jane continued, entirely ignoring Rita's request. "Baby Doll said Larry passed out on the stairs. What happened- did he have too many hard ones?" She joked, raising her hands to her mouth to mimic drinking.
"No no, it was nothing like that," Rita dismissed as she continued her knitting. "His little house guest just thought that it would be funny to deposit him wherever it saw fit."
Jane shivered, all humour forgotten. "I hate that thing. So do most of the others. How's he feeling?"
"I haven't spoken to him yet but I doubt he's all that well. Falling down the stairs isn't intended to be fun." Rita glared at the spirit as it lazily passed her and floated through the wall. "It's just teasing me. Trying to get on my nerves."
"You'll wear it out," Jane laughed. "You always do. If you can somehow get it to listen to you, I'm sure you can get it bored of you." And then Jane was gone, walking down the hall towards the kitchen and as the door closed behind her, a light bulb went off in Rita's head.
Discarding her knitting, Rita stood up, smoothed down her skirt and followed after the floating spirit.
When she came face to face with it, she stopped with one hand on her hip and the other waving a finger at it menacingly. For some reason, Rita realized that she didn't fear it as much as she used to. "Listen here you," she said and the spirit actually reared back in what Rita was taking as surprise. "You are going to stop your dilly-dallying and go straight back to Larry right this second."
There was a suspicious lack of reaction from the sizzling spirit and Rita pointed her finger towards the direction of Larry's room. "Did I stutter? Off you go. I will not ask again."
There was a low moan that sounded like a regretful sigh before the being turned, head bowed, and returned to Larry's room. "And none of those dreams!" She called out after it. Satisfied, Rita nodded once and went back to the lounge room to return to her knitting. If only she'd known it was that simple, she would have done it decades ago.
Rita came across Larry the next morning with his head in his hands and a steaming cup of coffee placed before him. "Hello dear," Rita greeted cheerfully (maybe too cheerfully) and Larry groaned in response. "How are you feeling this morning?"
"I feel like I got run over by a train," he mumbled. "Why are you in such a good mood? You hate waking up in the mornings almost as much as you hate leaving your room in the first place."
"Well," Rita busied herself making a cup of tea with her back turned to him. "I believe your friend and I have come to a... mutual understanding."
Larry looked up at her and Rita wondered what the expression under his bandages would be. Surprise? Excitement? Incredulity? "Really?" He sounded doubtful. Rita tried not to frown.
"It's true," Cliff agreed as he entered the room holding a whole heap of Jane's clothes. Rita wasn't sure who bullied him into doing it, but she thought it was probably Baby Doll or Hammerhead. "I watched it happen. She put it in its fucking place and got it to listen to her. I've never seen anything like it."
"Really?" Larry repeated as Cliff left the room and this time he sounded impressed. Rita nodded and hid her smile behind her cup. "Wow, Rita. Do you think you can teach me how you did that? I haven't been having any luck."
Maybe Rita was just a little bit foolish, but sometimes being foolish could turn out to be just a little bit grand.