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ask-tmaph-hunan-slovakia · 3 years

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😔👻

[ thanks to @ask-tmaph-2pdenmark for the drawing !! love you char <3 ] With a short exhale, Jaroslav ghosts his hand over the door knob, hesitating slightly as he opens it, only to be greeted by the tiny smile of a porcelain face. His small, genuine smile turns into a grimace yet again.

"Hey, hi, hi! We're gonna go to bed now—okay! Cool catching up!"

He pulls Yilin along with him, hard, between the tiny journey from the bathroom and the bedroom, and shuts the door in the doll's face.

Yilin's thoughts flash back to stomping the doll again; alarmed at his own first concept of a plan in action, he looks away from the doll's face.

He quickly wishes the doll a good night, sticking close to Jaroslav, almost bumping into him. Being yanked along is something he doesn't mind, since it’s away from that thing.

"Hey, um, do you want to share my bunk? Or yours? Either works!"

"Yeah! 'Course! Let's— yours works!"

Already close to Yilin, Jaroslav inches nearer so that his free hand brushes the side of Yilin's face as if telling him a secret, leaning to whisper an, "in case we need to run" into his ear as they stand before the bunk-bed.

It’s great to hear Jaroslav agree. Being alone is the last thing Yilin wanted.

The phrase about possibly needing to run away from their own home is not one that inspires any sort of positive emotion. He bites his lip, slightly pulling Jaroslav down as he moves to pull up the blanket and lay on the bed while trying to preserve their linked arms.

Jaroslav squeezes Yilin's arm with his own, grasping at the comfort that comes with the contact as he lies down, tugging his side of the blanket up to his chin with his free hand. He feels the blanket tighten just slightly, closing snugly but not uncomfortably towards the neckline of his t-shirt. Confused, he looks away from his roommate, then back at him, and then towards the sound of tiny footsteps, dampened by the sound of cloth against hardwood floors.

And then it peaks over, climbing onto the bed with them. Paralyzed, looking between Yilin and the doll, he watches the puppet crawl towards them, watches it climb across the surface of the blankets, and watches it close in towards his face.

He feels cool porcelain against his forehead. He doesn't breathe. He feels its mouth move somehow, feels its lips puckering even though its face is merely painted on. He watches it do the same to Yilin, only gripping his roommate's hand and arm for dear life, holding them flush side-by-side.

"Goodnight Nezha! Goodnight Jaro!" It says in its sing-song voice, a perfect blend between both of their own. The footsteps cease as it climbs out of the bed and waddles out of view, leaving the room and closing the door behind it.

Yilin doesn't bring it up. He does not want to talk about it. Perhaps, it’s better not to talk about it. It moves differently than how he thought is the only way possible, which is an observation he wishes to erase from his mind. How can it move like that? It’s too fluid, too uncannily smooth.

The eye contact he makes with Jaroslav in the longest couple seconds of his life only comforts him in how they’re right next to each other, experiencing the same thing. After the puppet gets up off of them and leaves, he moves impossibly closer to Jaroslav, grasping the other's hand and arm with the same strength.

Jaroslav doesn't blink for a while. He barely breathes either. He stares up at the top bunk, mouthing 'what the fuck, holy shit, monkas' over and over again to himself, and even then is too nervous to so much as move his face in any dramatic sense. Right now, between fight or flight he's choosing to play dead, and hoping to a higher power that their switch to kindness towards the doll is at the very least redirecting some of the damage that would've been caused in a horror movie scenario.

There seems to be a recent (recent as in the past six hours) trend where every minute only gets longer. Every second doubles then triples then further on. So the next five hours spent doing nothing but looking up at the ceiling are interesting! It's thankfully a tad bit more physically restful than mentally exhausting.

By the end of that one-sided staring contest, Yilin has enough confidence to pull out his phone. He sends a few more texts to his parents upon seeing no response. Spotting Rigel's name, a thought comes to mind about that place he had said he’s going to intern at. Yilin is able to get the address pretty easily. He turns the screen to Jaroslav, whispering about a plan to go.

"Oh— shit, yeah, okay, let's," Jaroslav hovers his hand over Yilin's screen, a silent question of permission, before lightly tapping at its screen searching for directions. Half an hour. That's not so bad at all, considering the last however many they just spent in complete, terrified silence. "Yeah. Okay. Okay."

The next minute is a grab at anything that looks necessary: jackets, keys, wallets, oyster cards hastily left out on the counter before beating the doll into the ground; definitely not the doll, considering the debacle at the police station. They can worry about actually getting rid of the thing after reporting it to someone who'll actually listen.

This time, for Yilin, bringing along the phone was a definite. He doesn’t mind using Jaroslav's phone obviously, but it does feel kind of a burden. He knows Jaroslav would never mind, but it’s more so for his own peace of mind. It isn't like Yilin doesn't have his own. Leaving, he takes everything else he saw on the way out he thought he'd need.

Hands locked tightly together, just as before, the two make their way out of the building, towards the stop, and onto the bus. It’s more crowded than before, considering the time, and the two stand awkwardly, crowding around a single pole.

"So we're agreeing we need the— the, um, paranormal investigators? On this one?" Jaroslav asks, raising his voice over the low hum of the crowd.

Yilin responds with an agreeing statement and a slow nod, leading into a conversation between the two of them about the archives.

Off the bus, Yilin is the first to get out, pulling Jaroslav along all the way up and into the opening doors.

The sun's starting to set. It's nice, the way the light filters into the musty little building as they enter, breaths held and story corroborated. Much like in the police station, a very tired looking worker—this time a man simply dressed down in a polo and jeans—sits at a front desk as they enter, the general area looking swamped with paperwork. It's really depressing, honestly, but considering how Jaroslav and Yilin have absolutely no desire to be here, Jaro can really only assume the same of the staff.

"Hey! Hey, you guys are, um, paranormal people? Right? We need to talk to someone about a doll that we think is, uh, haunted," he states the last word in a pretty loud whisper-shout, "There's something seriously wrong, how do we go about doing, like, a report?"

Ngọc isn’t one to openly complain about his work, despite the massive to-do list he has to keep track of every single day. There should really be some sort of recruiting event or something. Hearing some person speak to him, he lifts his head off the palm of his hand. "Yeah, we are. If you want to provide a statement," He picks up a pen and clicks it. "What's your names? Are you two going to go in together and do you want to do it in writing or by audio recording?"

Yilin fires off responses; as soon as he processes a question, he answers. "Yilin Zhao and Jaroslav Novák. We'd like to go in together, yeah. Audio recording, maybe?" He looks to Jaroslav, who nods back. "Yeah, audio recording."

Scribbling it down on a clipboard, Ngọc gets up. "I'll take you right now. There's no one in at the moment."

Jaroslav nods, first at the receptionist and then back at his roommate. He falls behind Yilin, still linking with his hand as the three of them cross through the narrow hallway.

"Okay," Jaroslav whispers, stretching to reach Yilin's ear from over his shoulder as they walk, "This place is so creepy, and also old looking, not really what I expected— I think I expected Ghostbusters?"

Led into a room, the two sit before an impatient-looking man with glasses, giving the departing receptionist polite waves goodbye before turning to the matter at hand.

"So," Jaroslav pipes up, trying to grimace through his nerves, "there's this doll."

#aph #hetalia #hws #aph china #hws china #aph hunan #hws hunan #aph slovakia #hws slovakia #yilin #jaroslav #1st arc

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ask-tmaph-hunan-slovakia · 3 years

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😔🍕

Jaroslav's jaw drops. For a second, he’s at a loss for words: there's no pretending anymore. No crazy stalker fan, no weird twitter conspiracy, no troll computer-scientist-engineer guy. It’s him, Yilin, and the doll. An indestructible doll that they've been trying to get rid of throughout the entire day.

But immediately following the awful thoughts, Jaroslav feels a level-headed calm. It's weird: normally, others freaking out around him only spikes his nerves. He has the tendency to feed off of the energy in a room that way. But Yilin looking up at him, shell-shocked after having beaten the thing into the ground for a couple of minutes without break, is so unpredictably strange that it has the opposite effect.

"Yeah, I think we both definitely did a number on it," he gently puts it, "Augh... Hey, little guy, um..." He picks it up by its neck, giving it an absolute grimace of a smile.

Fear drenches Yilin. What’s the doll going to do now? It isn't going to go away, clearly. The doll doesn't look mad. Mad? The face is porcelain though, so it most likely can't move like the rest of it. Could it? No. No way. That’s paint on a face, not an actual limb on a body. He doesn't know if the doll could get worse in behavior. It hasn't hurt them so far, but things can easily take a huge poor turn. They don't even know why it’s here in the first place other than to mess with them.

Yilin gets up to stand next to Jaroslav, his own smile not much better. It is absolutely a smile, but with so much strain that he looks uncomfortable. "Hello..."

"Okay! Sorry about that," Jaroslav clears his throat, giving an extremely uncomfortable-sounding laugh. "Um, we're gonna order dinner now! We're gonna get food. Are you hungry? Do you eat? Sorry, probably not, right? You're a doll. Doll's don't eat. Unless you want to! Then you can. Um, Yilin, what're you feeling? Pizza? Maybe?"

Upon receiving a strained nod from the other, he calls the closest pizza place to the flat, his fake-cheery voice kicking into double gear.

"Hey! Can me and my friend get a pizza? And my other friend? We're all friends here! Um— yeah! Delivery. Yeah, number's—"

Jaroslav and Yilin make direct eye contact as Yilin gestures towards him with a cutting-hand motion towards his throat, and Jaroslav cuts himself off to instead state that he's paying in cash.

While Jaroslav finishes up their order, Yilin looks nervously between the doll and his roommate, eventually landing on the doll. "Hey, so, um... I'm really, really, really sorry about earlier. Really." He rubs his palms together, a thumb curled on top of the other. "I get it if you don't, y'know, want to like, forgive me. What I did was awful. But I'm really, really sorry." The smile of the doll and the glint coming off its porcelain face makes him feel so silly, but it still comes off as ominous all the same.

The way Jaroslav suspends the doll in the air by its neck does feel a little worrying if it’s mad. Yilin leaves the area and comes back with some large textbooks, placing them on the couch. He goes back up to Jaroslav, lightly tugging on the doll.

Jaroslav passes the toy off to Yilin, hanging up the phone.

"Yeah, I'm sorry too," he adds, frantically, "that was really mean. We didn't mean to, we promise, we were just a little scared— but you're not hurt. Right? You didn't crack at all! That's pretty cool! And now we're gonna all eat together! Wait— Yilin, should we, uh, eat out here? So it— he? Can eat with us? We can, um, drag out the table."

Upon receiving a nod, the two stood, tense eye contact as they pulled the small dining table from their kitchen into the living room, in front of the couch. The doll just continued to smile at them from the stack of books. Jesus Christ.

Yilin normally enjoys guests. It’s fun to eat with other people! The key word is people. The puppet is not a person. It can't even hold a conversation—at least not one that would be nice. The only idea of a conversation he can think of is the doll speaking in voice clips. He doesn't know the full capabilities of the doll, but he thinks he could at the very least try to push that possibility to the back of his mind. He doesn't know whether or not the doll having its own voice is a better alternative to it speaking in theirs. What is better is not to think too hard about it.

He goes back into the kitchen and brings two chairs over to face opposite the puppet, just to leave again and come back with napkins.

The pizza comes pretty quickly, thankfully. Jaroslav excuses himself from the uncomfortable scene in their living room to exchange the payment and tip with the delivery driver in the doorway, his hands shaking. Holding the box of food, he takes a second to himself in front of their now-closed door, his smile falling. Eleven in the morning and he and Yilin are eating pizza for dinner with a sentient clown doll that they'd just finished beating into the floor of their living room. Well, all that can really be done now is taking everything one step after the other.

"Alright! Food's here!" He says as he walks in, as if it isn't already obvious.

He sets the box down on the table, settling into the chair next to Yilin's, and one-handedly pulls a greasy slice from the pie, eating it over a napkin.

"Thanks!" Yilin yanks the ends of his mouth up into a grin. He would be lying if he said he’s hungry. Despite how he hadn't taken a stop for breakfast the entire day, he has no appetite. However, he does just want anything to do with his hands, and since he hasn't eaten, might as well while there’s a pizza in front of him.

"Uh..." Yilin pulls a slice from the pizza, setting it on top of time napkins in front of the doll. "For if, if you want any!" A pause. "Oh, uh, wait, wait a moment." He stands up, bending over the table. He grabs a napkin and tucked it into the doll's collar. "There you, uh, go." He sits back down, pulling a slice for himself and raising it to his lips, but not taking a bite. His eyes are shifting from the puppet and Jaroslav.

Jaroslav shrugs, half of the slice of pizza he's gripping already in his mouth.

Right now, stuffing his face sort of feels like the best solution. Jaroslav's last meal was about twelve hours ago, between one of his classes and starting his stream. He could definitely eat. Plus, if his mouth is completely full, he doesn't have to make conversation with the thing sitting across from them. Which seems like a win-win to him. He hooks his free hand with Yilin's, trying to be encouraging without his words.

And then Jaroslav hears his own voice. "Thank you Nezha," the doll says, completely unmoving.

Yilin pauses, frozen. The smile on his face drops. He doesn’t look distressed, just a confused sort of shock. His eyes land on Jaroslav while the doll speaks, but snap over as soon as the first syllable leaves its mouth. There’s no way it could have been Jaroslav. Beyond the fact Yilin is pretty sure Jaroslav doesn't have the ability to say that, there is no reason Jaroslav would call him that. There is no reason anyone he talks to now would call him that. There’s no way a record of that nickname being his exists online. How could the doll know that? How much does it know about him if it knows that; why does it know? Jaroslav is the one who picked it up; it even looks like Jaroslav. Has it targeted him since the beginning too? What did he do?

His hand grips Jaroslav's tightly. "No problem!" Picking up his previous expression, he smiles and takes a bite of his pizza.

Jaroslav looks between Yilin and the doll quizzically before nearly swallowing down the rest of the slice. He isn't sure why his roommate paused, but considering the quick bounce-back, it couldn't have been that big of a deal. Maybe just a piece of slang he doesn't know or something, or a middle name, he's not going to bother asking.

While Jaroslav is halfway through his second slice, Yilin excuses himself, already standing up as he states with the same grimace he's been wearing all dinner-breakfast that he's going to go take a shower. Jaroslav nods, not loving being left alone with the doll, but wanting to finish his second slice of pizza.

Yilin had picked up his phone while he was in the kitchen, and after so long being parted with it, he feels like keeping it with him for longer. Plus, maybe he'll need it. After he leaves the table to head to his room, as he collects his clothing to change into, an uneasiness creeps up on him. If he’s in the bathroom and Jaroslav is inside the bedroom, it doesn't seem far-fetched that the doll might play a prank or maybe worse while he showers. With what he had done to it, the prospect of that shot up. There’s no public knowledge about how forgiving it is. Adding onto it, maybe leaving Jaroslav alone in its presence is not a great idea.

So, he texts Jaroslav with a request to stay outside the door. Jaroslav can keep an eye out while sticking close.

[Yilin]: Hey can you sit outside the door when i shower???

[jaroslavsquat]: yea ofc!! let me let the doll know :monkas:

"Hey, we're gonna be right back, okay?" Jaroslav prompts the doll, rising from his seat. He isn't sure if he expects a response or not, but hearing none, he does as he's asked, walking to the end of the hallway to fulfill his promise to Yilin.

When Yilin sees Jaroslav’s answer, he’s still in the bedroom, in front of the dresser. He quickly picks up the rest of what he needs, and then enters the hallway. Seeing Jaroslav, he waves a hand, turning the corner into the bathroom. Jaroslav waves back at Yilin, his strained smile turning genuine for a quick second before he releases the grimace completely, exhaling a loud sigh as he sinks down onto the floor, his shoulder nestled in the crook of the doorway as Yilin shuts the door behind him. He hears the shower start and leans back, trying to focus his fuzzy thoughts on the soothing rush of water.

Hyper-aware of his surroundings, he tries to will his eyes to shut like they did on the bus. He's a restless kind of tired: his heart’s racing, and his hands are shaking, but he's more than a little excited to get into bed, despite the day having only just begun. It's not like the two of them have ever had a very good sleep schedule to begin with.

The honk of a car horn outside pulls him from his thoughts, and he jumps at least a couple of inches off of the ground with a yelp.

Yilin just showers as normal. As much as he wants to sit down and let the water run for a while in an attempt to avoid going back outside for as long as he can, Jaroslav is outside. Yes, he is close by, but he’s still outside. He’s outside with the doll. The doll that has been living with them since Halloween, and before the sun even had a chance to reveal itself to the world for the day, decided to cause problems. But the doll is only a part of it. What did that person from the groupchat mean by Jaroslav having the chance to meet that weird orange suit thing with the person? He hopes he won't find out. But that person from the chat has to be still controlling the doll. But how? No matter how he'd find solace in it being torn apart, that isn't going to happen. The police didn't even try to help them. The day feels unreal.

A yelp ceases the gears in his mind turning, and he turns the shower off. "Jaro?" He calls out, concern clear in his voice. "Are you okay?"

“Yeah! All good, car outside,” he calls back, stiffly, “um, when do you think we need to touch up your hair again? I think it’s been a week and a half already, maybe I’m counting wrong— are your roots growing in?”

It’s a really easy grab at conversation, absolutely irrelevant to everything that has happened so far in the day, but right now Jaroslav needs it more than anything. It’s only a few feet of distance, but with the openness of the hallway, and the closed bathroom door, he feels closer to the doll than to Yilin.

Yilin raises a brow, perplexed as to why all of a sudden Jaroslav is talking about his hair. Yeah, it has been a week and a half, but what do his roots have to do with what’s going on right now? Oh. He gets why.

"Oh, um, yeah, it has been." He confirms, making his voice audibly louder. "Can you help me with them actually? Since I'm... already in the shower and everything, so, uh, might as well?" The increase in volume is specifically done for the doll to hear. Hopefully, it won't see Jaroslav leaving to help Yilin with his hair as rude. His voice wavers throughout the offer.

"The door's open!" The way he says it sounds almost like a chime.

As soon as Jaroslav hears the invitation, a clear out of this situation while still not flaking on his friend, he springs to his feet, rushing to enter the room and lock the door behind him.

“Thanks,” he whisper-shouts, competing with the volume of the rushing water.

He sits down onto the toilet, his knees hugged into his chest. Even though it’s a relief to be in the same room as Yilin again, the silence still looms uncomfortably. It doesn’t take long for staring at the wall to get old, so Jaroslav pipes up, still trying to keep his voice low-but-audible.

“You really went at it, earlier, with the hammer,” he says, gently, “you good? That was crazy.”

For Yilin honestly, the quiet is alright. Hearing the water droplets splash onto the floor is a nice break from whatever that was with the doll and the voices and whatever. It’s even better as a background to his thoughts. Since Jaroslav is in the bathroom, it isn't like he feels the need to hurry anymore anyways. He can take his time. Maybe it would be better if he does try to keep him and Jaroslav inside for longer. He doesn't know if Jaroslav had brought his phone or anything to play games on, but he supposes Jaroslav will find something in the bathroom to do.

Jaroslav asking him if he’s alright after the scene he made is embarrassing. "Oh, yeah, I'm, I'm alright! I was just trying to get the doll." Sliding the curtain a tad bit, he peeks out with a soft smile and a thumbs up.

“Oh. Okay!” Jaroslav smiles back, again, returning the gesture. It’s not like this is really something to dwell on anyways—they have bigger problems, and being alone right now is an extremely welcome intermission.

Tapping his feet on the edge of the toilet’s lid, he pops in an earbud, shuffling the first playlist he can find in his library. Deciding to make use of their time effectively, since he hasn’t gotten to yet today, he grabs at his toothbrush and steps to the sink, beginning to brush his teeth.

“Hey, when you’re done— when it’s my turn, can you stay here? Still don’t wanna be alone,” he asks, his mouth full of toothpaste.

"Yeah, okay!" Yilin's reply overlaps with the end of Jaroslav's question. Absolutely he wants to stay with Jaroslav and not out there. Perhaps the doll would be alright with having the rest of the pizza to itself. With his experience with it so far, he guesses it’s going to be right in front of the bathroom door when they leave.

Yilin finishes off his shower and gets dressed behind the curtain, draping his towel across his shoulders as he steps out of the bathtub. He looks around himself in a circle. It isn't likely the doll is going to be there, since Jaroslav (where did he go?) doesn't say anything, but he just needs to have a fast scan around him. He grabs the sections of his towel closest to his head and resumes drying his hair.

Jaroslav's sudden absence does alarm him. Stepping to the bathroom door, he looks around the space outside. "Uh, hey, Jaro?"

What he doesn’t know is that when the water stopped, Jaroslav had gotten the bright idea of leaving to grab his own pajamas, figuring that by the time he’d be back, Yilin would already be dried off.

So standing up again from the toilet, and pocketing his phone, still blasting music through his earbuds, Jaroslav never bothers to let Yilin know he’s leaving as he cautiously makes his way to their shared bedroom, peeking into it before shuffling in. He hums along to the song playing, not really listening to the words, just trying to create as much noise around him as possible. Quiet right now would be terrible.

Upon opening his closet, and pulling open a drawer, he screams, pretty loudly, leaping backwards. There’s the doll, again, this time in his underwear drawer. Awful.

“Hey! Hi! Sorry, that was a little while, not done yet, hope you liked dinner,” he says to it, pulling the first t-shirt, underwear, and shorts combination he can get his hands on. “I’m, um— we’re not done yet, actually, with— yeah, we’re gonna get back to it. Bye!”

When the scream rings out, Yilin begins to move towards the bedroom. But, when he sees Jaroslav exit the bedroom, his feet carry him backwards back into the bathroom. Jaroslav looks frazzled. What made him scream like that? If it wasn't vicious enough to keep him there and instead scared him off, most likely it was the doll. So it had gone into the bedroom? Oh, Yilin hates the thought of it. He doesn't want the doll to be able to pop up wherever it wants in the same room he and Jaroslav sleep in. Between the bedroom and the bathroom though, right now, he’d rather give the bedroom up to the doll. It can stay there. Or honestly wherever it wants to go in the apartment as long as it isn't the bathroom. It making itself at home isn't something Yilin is going to fight against, but definitely not for a lack of trying.

Jaroslav leaves the door open to the bedroom, not wanting to anger it by leaving it alone in the dark confined space, and jogs back to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him when the two are alone in the bathroom again.

“It’s so freaky!” He whispers into Yilin’s ear in passing as he steps into the tub, drawing the curtain closed.

Yilin locks the door behind them. He follows Jaroslav up until the toilet, where he sits. Hearing Jaroslav's whisper confirms his guess as to what happened, but there’s no way he can be sure without hearing it from Jaroslav. "Are you okay? Was it, uh... in the... the room?" He looks to the curtain, forgetting for a second that Jaroslav's eyes can't meet his. Small embarrassment creeps up his neck, though ignored due to the much more prominent feeling of dread from anticipating an answer to the second question he knows he won’t not like.

“Yeah,” Jaroslav responds loudly, his voice still pitchy from fear, plopping his clothes down onto the sink with a hand reached from the side of the curtain, “In the closet—my underwear drawer. I left it open after. In case it gets mad I left it in the dark, or something.”

He turns the shower on, leaning his head back, and scrunching his fingers into his dye-fried hair. Just then, he’s reminded of an awful thought.

“The hair looks a lot like mine, right? D’you think, maybe, y’know, with everything...”

It went inside the drawer? Other than the glaring confirmation of how the doll really does whatever it wants and neither Jaroslav or Yilin can control it in any capacity, the surface level strangeness of the doll deciding the best place to pop up being a drawer meant for clothing takes his attention away from the conversation for a moment. Yilin understands it did most likely what it set out to do, but it’s just so odd.

His thumbs are set on his phone screen, tapping away until Jaroslav brings up the hair. In truth, he hasn't been thinking much about how the doll looks other than it’s overall very bad to look at. "Do you, uh, think that it's... yours?" He lowers his voice saying the last word.

"Maybe," Jaroslav responds, matching Yilin's volume, "It looks a lot like mine. But I never saw it before it showed up—the doll, I mean—so I don't know how it got its hands on my hair? So that's—yeah. Maybe."

There’s a brief pause as Yilin tries to work it out in his head. "Maybe it's that guy from before? In the group chat? Like they... they were the one who started everything there--maybe it's them?"

"Yeah, maybe."

Jaroslav tries to imagine someone cutting off a piece of their own hair and dyeing it to match his. It's not really a nice thought, and the rest of the shower is spent in silence mulling over it. When he stops the water, he pulls his towel through the curtain, haphazardly drying his hair and body and getting dressed as quickly as humanly possible.

"It'll be okay." Nothing Yilin can think of seems to be worth adding onto what’s already a pretty gloomy exchange. Time would be better spent attempting to get in contact with his parents than stretching the topic out.

Tapping away at his screen, he sends messages reaching out, but not explaining his current predicament. The goal is just to hear anything from either of them.

Jaroslav pushes open the shower curtain, stepping out of the tub and aggressively shaking the remaining moisture clinging to his hair out like a dog. He links his arm with Yilin's, holding his breath.

"Ready? Sleep?"

Yilin doesn’t even flinch at the water, casually wiping it off his screen.

He looks up at Jaroslav when their arms link with a pleasant smile. "Yeah." Lifting himself off the toilet, he puts his phone up in his pocket. Hopefully there'll be a response later.

#aph #hetalia #hws #aph china #hws china #aph hunan #hws hunan #aph slovakia #hws slovakia #yilin #jaroslav #1st arc

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ask-tmaph-hunan-slovakia · 3 years

Text

😔⚾

Jaroslav chews hard on his bottom lip as they near the front door, holding his breath. It opens slowly, creaking slightly as he unlocks it, and the two move in rapid unison, scoping out the apartment from their doorway for any signs of the doll. They first look into the living room, seeing nothing, the kitchen, seeing nothing, and the hallway, seeing nothing.

Thinking the coast clear, Jaroslav takes a step inside, only again to be faced with the same rub of loose fabric and tightly stretched cloth against his foot that Yilin had felt earlier. God.

At the same time, the two look up to face each other, an unspoken agreement as the front door still hangs open.

With all of his weight, Jaroslav stomps down on the porcelain face of the doll, jumping slightly as he does so for the extra downward momentum.

Yilin hadn’t expected the doll to be right there at the doorway. But if it chose to be, that’s a problem it’s created for itself. The only person he has to justify attempting to stomp a puppet to is himself, and this is perhaps the action most worthy to be taken in his entire twenty-two years of living. Everything in his life has led up to this. The door of attending his classes for the day has closed but this literal door to pummeling a puppet with the sole of his sandal has opened.

He lets his foot down on the doll with the greatest force he’s ever put down in his entire life, digging his heel into it to convince the doll's stitches to tear. He lifts his foot up. He puts it back down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up.

"Wai— I'll be, I'll be right back. I'm gonna get a hammer."

Jaroslav nods, continuing to jump onto its face with one foot. Once, twice, three times, and he starts to grow genuinely frustrated: vouching with the knowledge of an individual who has probably broken upwards of dozens of plates in the last couple of years, porcelain should not be this hard to break. Lifting his foot away from its still perfectly-painted face, he can't spot a single crack.

Naturally, it's time to move on to more desperate measures. He yanks the thing up by its foot, testing his grasp on the cloth, and cocking back his entire body like a baseball pitcher would, he cracks the object hard against the wall. The sound resonates throughout the apartment as he goes again and again, loud enough for their neighbors to raise questions about construction next door.

Back in the kitchen, where the entire debacle had begun, Yilin's right hand clutches the hammer's handle. Squatting in front of the sink's lower cabinet, he allows the other end of the hammer's handle to swing down from gravity a couple times onto his other palm. The weight feels good. He releases the hammer down one last time, but instead of flicking his right wrist up again, he clenches the upper half of the hammer with his right palm facing up and the lower half with his left palm facing down. It’s game time.

Coming down the hallway, the look in Jaroslav's eyes is not a threat, not a warning, but a promise. A doll comes flying, and years of learning American baseball ensures that the apartment soon echoes with a whack. He jogs to where the doll had landed, eventually bending so that he had his knees on the ground. Thwack! Pop! Wham! Crack! In short, the head of the hammer became familiar with the porcelain face.

Jaroslav's eyes follow every one of Yilin's downward cracks, cheering him on loudly.

For the first thirty seconds, it feels good to watch. Jaroslav isn't a Christian, but if anything could be described as holy retribution, this definitely makes the cut. Yilin's look of determination, cracking the hammer down with ridiculous precision, feels like the perfect way to end the several-hour long ordeal between the streaming room and the police station, not to mention the months spent being tormented by the stupid camera-doll and not even knowing it.

It stops being entertaining shortly after that mark. Yilin's face shifts into an expression Jaroslav has never seen on his roommate in their four long years of knowing each other, and honestly, maybe on any person's face he's ever met. Jaroslav grimaces, his eyebrows furrowing, watching the precision of the hammer to grow almost machine-like.

"Um, Yilin?"

Maybe it's the quiet shock in Jaroslav's voice, or the distance between them, but the other doesn't even hear him. The beating goes on, in total, for about two minutes before it slows. Jaroslav gingerly steps behind Yilin, slowly placing a hand on one of his shoulders.

Yilin pauses, catching his breath, eyes wide. "What the fuck?"

"Wh— oh my god, oh my fucking god, holy shit, it— oh my god."

The doll stares back up at them, fully intact.

Yilin's head feels a mess. His entire body is burning. There’s so much energy coursing through him, and yet he’s so tired. Maybe he’s gone too far? To be fair, he doesn't have the best work-out schedule, so perhaps he just went too far with the physical activity this time. Then again, the reason doesn't really matter at the moment. The doll is still okay. He had tried with an approach that’s frankly too aggressive even for the doll that has a stalker camera in it and harassed him, and that doll is just doing dandy.

It dawns on him. He and Jaroslav have just teamed up to destroy a doll that seems indestructible, but lives in their house and has an appalling penchant for the type of mischievousness that is malicious. This was a bad choice. But how was he or Jaroslav supposed to know?

Yilin lets go of the hammer, resting one of his hands on the hand Jaroslav placed on his shoulder. He turns to Jaroslav with a rattled expression. "What if, what if it gets mad?"

#aph #hetalia #hws #aph china #hws china #aph hunan #hws hunan #aph slovakia #hws slovakia #yilin #jaroslav #1st arc

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ask-tmaph-hunan-slovakia · 3 years

Text

😔🚨

When the bus arrives, Yilin leaps onto the first step.

Jaroslav follows, keeping in step with the other shoulder-to-shoulder. Trying to pull some sort of levity from the situation, Jaroslav matches Yilin’s footsteps, copying their rhythm so that their feet fall in sync. It’s a strange distraction, sure, but he desperately needs something to focus on besides the coy smile painted on the doll’s porcelain face.

It’s a small victory that the two beat rush hour, greeted with the mostly empty bus that accompanies commuting way too early.

Even the thought of standing for the duration of the trip to the police station feels too much at the moment. Five minutes on the bus is usually no time at all; Yilin prefers to stand up just in case someone else needs to sit down, but right now, that someone is truthfully him. He takes the opportunity to shuffle into the first row of seats he sees open, resting his head on the window with a sigh. When the vehicle starts back up, he lifts his head from the window and sits up straight. He doesn't stop looking at the doll, afraid that somehow it'd up and leave the container again. It’s almost as if he can't tear his eyes from it: there’s no point in trying to hide from the doll or the person behind it now.

Jaroslav takes the seat beside Yilin, enjoying the comfort of having another person beside him right now. With the other’s gaze fixed on the container, he seizes the opportunity to close his eyes momentarily, his head against Yilin’s shoulder. He hasn’t slept yet besides a short nap, awake from streaming through most of the night.

A thought flashes in Yilin’s mind, his eyes widening open as he turns to Jaroslav.

"Hey, uh, Jaro, do you have your phone? I think I forgot mine at home."

Jaroslav jolts awake.

“Oh— yeah! Here, hold on.”

He fishes the device out, passing it to Yilin and shifting his gaze to watch the doll.

“Password’s still victoryroyale.”

"Thanks!"

The first thing Yilin thinks to do with a moment’s rest is to tell his professors that he won't be able to make their classes today. He one-handedly types in the device's password, his other hand splayed with his palm on top of the box to secure it in place, and swipes to his email already logged into the app. He has a hard time typing each email out with only one hand, obvious with how long he takes to write them all. They’re all just different variations of, ’Unfortunately I will not be able to make it to class today due to personal circumstances.’ Going into details doesn't seem like a smart idea.

Yilin thinks of the process of writing out the emails like a preview of what is to come when they reach the station. What are they going to say exactly? That one day on Halloween last year there was a doll and they just took it in to later find out some stalker on the public texting groupchat had been looking at them through it after talking about some guy who lives in a fursuit? He hopes that the authorities will be understanding about it all; he isn't sure if he would be if he hadn't lived it.

Done with the emails, he hands the phone back to Jaroslav, and immediately his eyes shift back to the doll.

"Thanks again."

“Yeah, ‘course.”

Jaroslav leans back against him, head upturned towards the ceiling of the bus, bouncing his leg. As hard as he’s trying to think of anything else, the image of the corner of the couch still haunts him. The feeling of being watched, being told that none of it is real in the first place: it’s not something he ever thought he would have to experience firsthand, nevermind drag his roommate into. It’s fucking creepy. The doll’s been up and moving since before Yilin had closed the box on it: they’ve had it for a while, too. How long has it been messing with them? It isn’t a question he wants to raise, but considering that they’ll need to get their stories together at the station anyways, he might as well.

“We had it for like, since Halloween? Right?” He tries to count the bumps in the road as the bus moves along, exhaling a shuddered breath. “Do you think it was ever, like, up? Before? Maybe? And we didn’t know because the guy from the chatroom didn’t say anything?”

Yilin's ears perk up at the mention of Halloween. He wants to face Jaroslav but decides against it. If it moves, he wants to see it. Something about knowing what it looks like in motion, with what he assumes is a metal skeleton, he feels, would set him at ease. He hadn't felt a skeleton when moving the doll both times, but maybe he’d been moving it too fast to get a good handle on what kind of technology is inside. Watching it move would be creepy, absolutely! But at least he'd see it function mechanically and be able to take it apart in his mind.

He thinks for a couple of seconds about what Jaroslav had said. He’s completely correct.

"Yeah, you're right." The last word is breathy as he takes a deep breath while finishing it. "Hey, a couple months ago, around January, actually? I was using the bathroom and I heard banging on the door. I saw the doll outside the door when I opened it, but I, I thought it was just you?"

“You saw the doll? Wait, what? That’s so scary, wait, that’s really scary.”

Jaroslav sits up, looking Yilin in the eyes in terrified disbelief. Wow. If anything it’s—good, to get confirmation that they’re not alone, not either of them, but still that doesn’t do much to improve the situation.

“I was— I told you I was live that night. I, uh,” He takes a couple of breaths, “Okay, yeah, because like, I don’t remember when, maybe a month or two ago, sorry, but I think you were asleep, or something? It was really late and you said my name a few times, and then I looked down at your bunk and you were sleeping. And I thought that was kinda weird because you don’t really joke around like that? And then when I got back in bed, you said it again. One time. And then— and then when it was morning, and you just acted like, like everything was normal.”

"I know, but, I didn't think it could, like, move by itself. It just made more sense, sorry." Feeling Jaroslav's eyes on him, he gives a quick glance to make eye contact before breaking it. He doesn't like the expression Jaroslav is wearing, but upon hearing his story, he makes the same one. "That was, that was the doll, yeah."

This is an abysmal situation. It had been recording them too? What if there are clips of them that they don't know about on the internet? They never do anything super illegal, but the possibility that people have not only watched but recorded them is terrifying. They had been recorded then messed with.

Yilin, spotting the station, tugs on the cord and waits for the bus to slow at the stop.

“No, it’s fine,” Jaroslav says, just out of habit in response to such a dispirited apology, “I mean, it’s not fine, but you’re good, I— we didn’t know! That’s all. It’s...” Jaroslav casts another glance at the toy in the box, not sure if he’s relieved or not that it’s still there. “Fine. It's gonna be. We’re gonna get rid of it.”

As the bus halts, Jaroslav shakily rises from his aisle seat, his eyes darting back to the container. The police station is just around the corner, and then they’ll be rid of it. As they descend the steps, he again takes Yilin’s hand for only a second to squeeze it, before opening twitter so that they can have the evidence at easy-access.

Yilin follows Jaroslav off the bus, reciprocating the comfort. He overtakes the other, putting himself at the front of the two. This should be over with in not even an hour, even faster the sooner they get there, if the station isn't particularly busy.

He passes the box from both of his hands to his right, shifting it so that his thumb sits on top and the rest of his fingers on the bottom with his palm against the side. Almost swinging open the door with his left hand, he takes a long stride into the station. Taking a couple of brisk steps in, he grabs for Jaroslav's open hand, pulling him in with.

Jaroslav grips Yilin's hand tightly, holding up his phone over his head in his other hand. As soon as the door shuts behind them, he begins to ramble at break-neck speed at the bored woman behind the front desk.

"Hi, hey, we have a problem, um," He keeps holding his phone up, moving it forward so that the woman can see it. "This is, there's somebody watching us. This was inside our apartment. OP sent this picture in a chatroom but, like, again, this is not my account. That's our couch. And then they sort of— ok, so we have this doll, and it’s, like— we found it on Halloween.” He gestures to the box Yilin is holding. “And it looks like me, it has my hair, it was left on our door, and— and it’s watching us. And it started playing music, and this is a tweet it made when it started playing music, and it— it moves. It moves around. Can you help?”

Yilin opens his mouth about halfway through every phrase Jaroslav spoke, interjecting with things like ‘It's really bad’, slightly shaking the box, and other small actions at a volume and energy level a smidgen bit less than Jaroslav so not to distract from him.

The lady purses her lips and furrows her eyebrows, looking the two up and down with a maybe-amused gaze. Two men, old enough to be attending college, probably got to the station by public transit, definitely in a state of panic. Her eyes moved from Jaroslav to Yilin to the doll to Jaroslav's phone with the sway of a drawl. "Here." She slides a clipboard and pen over to Jaroslav. "Fill this out."

Jaroslav grabs at it frantically, holding it between himself and Yilin. Stepping backwards, with his eyes still on the box, he sits down in the nearest chair. Yilin sits down beside him, the box in his lap. Clicking the pen a few times, and fidgeting it hard between his middle and index fingers, Jaroslav tries to remember the order of the story in his head. Halloween, the doll, the weird happenings, the groupchat, the music, the tweet factcheck.... And then the doll, right under Yilin’s feet...

After plotting the events as small bullet points on the back of his hand, he begins to scrawl their names and contact information above the allotted space.

Full names, home address, phone numbers, place of incidence, time of incidence... nature of incidence?

“Yilin, Yilin—“ Jaroslav taps the pen against Yilin’s knee, holding the document up for him to see. “What kind of incident even was this? Do I just put, like, stalking?”

Yilin knits his eyebrows together and smiles, not really in a frustrated manner, just more in the way a parent looks at their kid's drawing while straining to compliment it. Jaroslav is an amazing friend, a best friend, even. Yilin is grateful that if he’s going to have an atrocious, terrible experience like this, it’s at least with Jaroslav. However, just maybe the police would need to be able to easily read the form if they want this to be done soon.

"Uh, wait, I'll do it," Yilin reaches for the clipboard, right index finger and thumb tugging on it gently. His left hand goes for the pen. "You can talk and I'll just write everything down-- I'm gonna put stalking slash harassment for nature of incidence."

“Oh, yeah, okay, that works! Um,” Jaroslav lets go, opting instead to take the box so that Yilin could write the report comfortably—as comfortably as possible, anyways, with everything going on right now. He splays his hand over the box, eyes glancing between the toy and the borderline-hieroglyphic writing on his skin.

“Yeah, okay! Halloween, doll showed up at our door. It was just— there, so I took it inside and I put it in the streaming room. And then, today, earlier— groupchat, weird person wanted to sell me a fursuit and it had, like, a guy inside of it. And then they were like, we’re your friends, and it was like, ‘we’? And then they said something about a doll. And then I texted you, and I was like monkas what the fuck and then they sent a picture of our couch to the chatroom and then we went to get the doll and it started playing music and you put it in a box and it tweeted about it, and it broke the app? It messed up the— like, the little fact checker thing. So that was super bad and weird, and then you put it in the cabinet and then we left the room and it was outside the room and you tripped on it. Wait, the weird stuff between sounds kinda important now—can you also squeeze in the thing about the knocking on the bathroom and recording your voice?”

Yilin, luckily, writes fast and neat thanks to the way he takes notes for academics. But, the way he translates Jaroslav's version of events into something more formal hinders his speed a little bit, causing him to lag behind. He repeats what he had done earlier when he did little things behind Jaroslav, this time in the form of adding approximate times and details he can remember off the top of his head. Jaroslav's request at the end finds itself addressed by a nod and granted in the form of suddenly short, cramped words that barely fit on the leftover printed lines. Whatever he doesn't remember to add in the moment gets added after he reads over the report a couple of times. In the end, the report isn't super neat, but it has all the details he thought could help on top of what Jaroslav mentions.

"Does this sound good?" He reads what he had written out decently loud for Jaroslav to hear in consideration of not taking Jaroslav's eyes from the doll.

Jaroslav bounces his leg rapidly as he listens, poking and smudging the writing on his hand. The story sounds— wow. Even he can feel how it’s going to be received. At least he and Yilin know it’s real, and can lean on each other, which is already a step up from the alternative. So when Yilin stops talking, he just nods, buzzing with nervous energy, still not looking up.

“Yeah! Yep, that covers it, I think,” he says, and makes a grabby hand for the clipboard and pen.

Hearing the report read aloud isn't something that boosts Yilin's confidence about how the police are going to deal with the news of the doll. Maybe he should have tried to dress a little nicer or look less frantic before coming in. But despite how the story sounds and how he and Jaroslav arrived, the police have to take it as seriously as every other report, right? It’s filled out as nicely as he could manage.

Jaroslav places the box on his seat as he stands and Yilin crosses his forelegs, using the leg on the bottom to lift up a couple inches off and down the top leg back to the ground. It’s a conscious choice to not touch the box again. It can stay there on the chair. They’re in the station.

Jaroslav knocks on the desk as he approaches it, and slides the objects back towards the lady. He bites his lower lip, looking back at Yilin nervously, teetering back and forth on his toes as she reads it over. When he makes eye contact with her again, her expression is absolutely bewildered, and he doesn’t exactly blame her.

“We— we can prove that it moved when you look away for too long,” he says, shooting Yilin a thumbs-up.

The sight of Jaroslav giving a thumbs-up cues Yilin into discontinuing his constant loop of looking between Jaroslav and the doll. He gives a thumbs-up back. Jaroslav beams at his roommate in reaction to the returned gesture, looking at the lady again.

"Ms..." He trails off, looking for a name tag and finding none, again just met with a puzzled expression from the woman. "Ms. police lady, can you turn around? Like, don't look in the direction of the box. And— okay, anyone looking in this direction, look away for like a minute! Uh, Yilin, you wanna— um— maybe put the box out? So it can... Do its thing? I'll set a timer?"

"Yeah, okay!" Yilin grabs the box from the chair and places it on the floor, sliding it out so that it’s a decent bit in front of his own chair.

Jaroslav pulls out his phone again, deciding that two minutes sounds about right. He moves away from the counter, back next to Yilin, and again grabs his hand to squeeze it.

"Okay, cool, everyone look away for... until the thing beeps. Three, two, one."

The pause, as Yilin holds onto Jaroslav's hand, feels like it's for nothing when there’s no accompanying sound. The tension is so tight it feels like his chest is being pulled apart. The doll manages to dismay, disappoint, and dishearten him by not doing anything at all. At best, the person behind it has knocked it off, perhaps afraid of the police presence. At worst, they’re messing around again, perchance as a warm-up for something worse later.

A couple of members of the station’s staff wear perplexed expressions walking in and out of the area but move on to their duties. The policewoman sighs, bringing the clipboard off the upper-level of the desk.

Jaroslav’s face falls. It has to be messing with them, it has to be! He feels the woman’s eyes on him, as well as the eyes of a few of the other policeworkers, and still with Yilin’s hand in his he begins gesticulating wildly, scrambling to explain.

“No, like— okay earlier I swear it did! It tripped him! It got out of the box! The thing was open, and, and the picture was from— the angle of the picture! The thing on twitter and it was playing music! It’s— we were there! There’s a picture! If it was on the couch how’d it take this picture, I...” He trails off, breathing fast, beyond disappointed when the woman only looks at him even more quizzically.

“Erm...” she starts, looking between the two of them, “I think it’s time for you two to leave. We’ll be in touch if anything comes up.”

“Wh— Come on, wait, I’m being serious!”

“...Uh-huh, we’ll call if anything comes up.”

Dejected, Jaroslav turns to Yilin, lips parted but unable to say anything.

Yilin wants to say a lot, but there isn't anything he could say that Jaroslav isn't already trying to get across. It’s not like he can do any better, so his silence persists. Even from just reading aloud the report, he knew the police weren't going to take their issue with the utmost gravity, but with every second, he feels the chance of them even picking up the doll problem dropping. The only thing he feels he can do in the moment is bite his lip.

As it is, maybe it is better to leave the station. The looks they’re getting are cluing him into that possibility. The policewoman's exchange with Jaroslav only confirms it.

When Jaroslav turns to Yilin, Yilin only smiles and speaks encouragingly. "They'll call if anything comes up."

“They won’t,” Jaroslav can only respond, his voice unconsciously dropping to barely a whisper.

This sucks. Of course no one believes them. Jaroslav knows, firsthand, that he wouldn’t either. So, with even Yilin agreeing that they should probably just leave, he glances around the room, disconnects his hand from his roommates’, tucks the box under one of his arms, and quietly slips through the station door. As soon as they’re halfway down the block, he looks up from his feet back at Yilin.

“So what now? We wait? We live with it? There’s no other way to throw it out?”

"No, we, we have to get rid of it." Yilin looks up to the sky to think for a second. "It'll just come back if we throw it out. Maybe we can just... break it?" His voice raises pitch at the end, unsure.

Yilin raises his finger to point at the box and froze. Where'd it go? Probably back home. Not that it has ever produced a chuckle from either him or Jaroslav, but it floors him just how unfunny this doll is. How much longer is this going to go on for?

"Oh my god." The expression is out of surprise, but there’s not even a note of disbelief. It makes sense it did that, awfully enough. "Jaro, look, oh my god." Yilin takes a step closer, rapidly tapping the lid to draw attention to a doll-less box.

"It's messing with us!" Jaroslav exclaims, his arms shooting out in front of him, dropping the tupperware container in the gesture, "I knew it. I knew it!"

As it clatters to the ground, he pinches the bridge of his nose, considering Yilin's words. Yeah, destroying it is definitely the best way to go. Part of him is also, secretly, a little excited to see the machinery necessary to make the thing work: after the futile attempt to spot its camera, there was definitely more than a bit of desperation to see the thing eradicated. It's not like the police'll need it anyways.

"Yeah, as soon as we get home we should break it," he agrees.

The tupperware on the ground feels like a bad omen. It isn't like Jaroslav had shattered a mirror or brought another mysterious doll home, but watching the box settle onto the ground brings about a feeling of almost nauseous trepidation. Feeling that way about some tupperware is a little pathetic even in the moment, Yilin is fully aware. On the walk to the stop, he picks up the tupperware and throws it away in a bin. The doll is going to be at home. If he thinks positively, it’s going to be on the couch. His multiple handling interactions with the doll come to mind. It doesn't feel like there’s anything in it. It needs to have a skeleton, motors for it to move, especially for how fast it did. Those components aren't the type that are unnoticeable under just some stuffing. He knows that for sure. Whatever though, he'll see later on.

The bus ride home is spent in tense silence: Yilin watches the street pass by, and Jaroslav leans onto Yilin's shoulder again, clicking around on his phone to find a distraction in some flashy mobile pay-for-plays. He can barely play with his normal precision, considering his shaking fingers, but he isn't exactly playing to win right now either way.

#aph #hetalia #hws #aph china #hws china #aph hunan #hws hunan #aph slovakia #hws slovakia #yilin #jaroslav #1st arc

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ask-tmaph-hunan-slovakia · 3 years

Text

😔📦

Jaroslav squeezes a kitchen knife in his right hand, tightly wringing his hoodie pocket with his left. Mentally, he traces over every joke, every recent tweet, and every interaction he’s had with another content creator in the last month. He’s always been so careful too; drawing boundaries, steering clear of drama, interacting with fans. This’ll make an awful thread in a couple of hours. The last thing he wants is any division amongst his community.

He grimaces as he hears Yilin’s footsteps near towards him, gesturing a ‘come here’ with a swinging arm before freezing, a chill creeping down his spine.

Music. Low quality, soft, and distorted.

“What the fuck,” Jaroslav whisper-shouts, eyes wide as he looks rapidly between the door and his roommate.

Yilin, with his phone in one of his hands and a precision knife in the other, wears a face obviously expressing a panicked sort of worry. He hasn't blinked in a short while but doesn't feel it, eyes stuck wide open. He stops close enough to Jaroslav to brush shoulders.

"Wait—wait here a second. Or come with me?"

Slipping past Jaroslav, Yilin disappears into the kitchen for not even a full minute, reappearing with a Tupperware container and lid in his left hand. His phone is gone, but the knife is still present in his right hand. Lips pressed into a line, he gestures the container towards Jaroslav, then towards the door in a nonverbal suggestion.

Jaroslav winces hard, nodding back at Yilin. He pockets his phone, barely feeling the clammy fingerprints he leaves on the screen. The music is distracting, and he scrunches his nose, distressed with every flip between campy game show music and carnival jingles.

With a deep breath, Jaroslav clears his throat and counts down.

“Three, two..” he pauses minutely before latching a hand onto the knob. “One.”

He pushes the door open, holding the knife up awkwardly. The dark room is a little cooler than the hallway, but he still feels sweat under his sweatshirt collar. Yilin's right arm shoots out to the right side in the empty space between Jaroslav and the doorway, flailing around to look for the lightswitch. He needs to light up the room. The dark is normally calming, but there’s no way he can bear it right now.

After fumbling around for what feels like an eon, Yilin finds the switch and retracts his arm back with the rest of his body, springing behind Jaroslav as fast as he can when he feels the toggle flip down.

Jaroslav jumps, startled by the change, shoulders shooting up to his ears.

This is better. This is fine! He looks at Yilin in the corner of his eye and presses his lips together in brief, wordless, thanks, before turning forward to the matter at hand. He points a knife at the doll as he takes tiny steps forward.

“Okay, hi, hi, uhh.. Hi.” Jaroslav announces to the silent room, his voice somewhere between forcedly-excited and shitless-scared. He swallows hard, the sound mixing with the distorted music in his brain. “This is so weird and gross,” he chokes out, “and bad and awful and definitely against the law. Why are you recording us? Are you recording this? Can you see me? Groupchat guy? Person? What did we do? What did I do?”

Yilin has to keep himself from flicking the plastic box back and forth; he feels an intense urge to make a fanning motion just to have any part of his body move with enough energy to counter the heavy atmosphere. No matter how slowly he takes his breaths, his heart won’t calm down, beating almost to the point of being louder in his head than the music.

He keeps his back to the wall as he leaves the doorway. He tries his best to avoid being seen by what he thought was a camera in the doll, for not really any reason other than how badly he does not want to be seen by the creep that has been watching him and Jaroslav. What a weirdo, seriously. That weirdo has him on his toes though.

His feet never actually leave the ground. He’s more so sliding, one foot at a time, slowly making his way towards the doll’s backside, eyebrows furrowing in concentration.

He places the knife in his pocket and removes the lid so that it can be used as a makeshift broom. As he approaches the doll’s side, he holds the container in his left hand and its cover in his right with the form of a person attempting to catch a rat.

Jaroslav’s eyes follow Yilin’s movements, again moving back and forth between the source of the music and his friend.

He looks the thing over again. A yellow, frilly get-up; a chunk of hair, which he now realizes may possibly be human, maybe even his; and beady, painted eyes. He looks for a camera and he knows, he knows, he just isn’t looking hard enough, but there’s nothing in sight that passes as one. The angle at which it took the picture was strange too, now that he thinks of it. How did it get the corner of the couch if it was on the couch?

He leaves the question alone. He doesn’t want to think about it, not when he’s just a few feet from the stupid thing and it’s playing the world’s worst internetwave track. Not sure of how he could possibly be of any other help at the moment, he continues to wave his knife in its face, asking it nonsensical questions.

Yilin honestly feels kind of silly for taking such extreme precautions against a doll, but it’s clear that the toy was created for malicious purposes. He doesn't want to inspect it for any hints of a lead or find out why it’s here in specifics; he just wants it out of his home and somewhere where other people could deal with it.

He holds the box on its side, the opening facing the doll's left arm. The lid first only lightly grazes the doll, as Yilin pulls back too early. The next attempt is successful, as he hurriedly stuffs the doll into the container with the lid, doing a full sweeping movement, opposed to his pathetic try before. He doesn’t even attempt to reposition the thing before snapping the lid on top, even running his palms around the borders multiple times.

Yilin releases a huge sigh of relief, his hands pushing his bangs back, visibly relaxed.

Jaroslav lets out a breath as well, his free hand immediately finding his hoodie pocket yet again. There’s really nothing the doll could physically do while the two gingerly interacted with it, he sort of knows, but the barrier of tinted plastic still calms him down.

He finally pulls his eyes away from the thing after a second longer of inspection. No point in trying to find the camera now, considering it’d be in the hands of the police soon.

“I can take your knife back while you.... put it out? Or to the side?” Jaroslav asks, lifting his own up and gesturing in the general direction of the hallway, and by extension, the kitchen.

"Oh, okay! That sounds good, yeah."

Yilin's voice sounds like it’s being forced above a whisper, and the little slow nod he does doesn’t make him seem any more confident. He carefully takes his knife from his pants to twirl it around in his fingers so that the handle faces Jaroslav when he places it on the top of the couch's back.

"Wait—wait, I think I'll come too," Yilin adds quickly.

Jaroslav nods, picking up the precision knife, and gripping it precariously between his middle and ring fingers beside the kitchen knife between his thumb and index. He sticks close to Yilin as they walk towards the kitchen, his rapid pulse in his ears slowly beginning to level out.

Gripping the Tupperware so that the lid squeezes against the container, Yilin holds it out as far away from his body as he can. It stays like that in his hands as he travels to the kitchen, eventually opening a cabinet to put the container all the way to the back of the shelf. Jaroslav moves around the other to deposit the utensils in their proper drawers, stopping behind his roommate to observe as Yilin closes the shelf as if he’s pressing velcro together, fingers lining the inside edge of the cabinet door as if he’s willing it to seal shut.

With this out of the way, Jaroslav unlocks and opens his phone while pacing towards the bedroom, Yilin so close behind him that he’s practically stepping on his heels, and rushes to open the twitter app to scour for any sort of doxx being spread. Jaroslav doesn't normally check his notifications, as they're usually flooded by random fans for all sorts of reasons, but right now he just wants some sort of explanation.

His jaw drops at what he finds, a mention from user @clown.

where is that music coming from?

Whoever's responsible for the doll, he knows, is definitely out to mess with them; but the combination of the incredibly rare username, the profile picture, the fact check tick... The only thing he can think to do is to QRT with a mix of 'wtf's and 'monkas', before turning the device so that Yilin can see it.

"What the fuck? What the fuck? The fact check? Device name? Um?"

In the midst of Yilin figuring out the exact wording of how he’s going to excuse himself from classes in an email, the sudden screen in his face causes him to flinch. He really only catches the couple last words Jaroslav speaks, but the tone is enough to set dread in Yilin's gut.

What catches his eyes first is the profile picture. Candidly, Yilin doesn't have the same twitter savvy as Jaroslav, so things like the fact check or the fact that the username ‘clown’ is rare doesn't amplify any previous fear in the pit of his stomach. The profile picture and text are all that are needed anyways.

Yilin moves to the process of making a mental checklist; they have just put the doll away, so what now? It’s obvious they’re going to the cops after this, but they need money, some sort of proof, and the doll, no matter how Yilin just did not want to face it again.

"Hey, hey, may—maybe we should go to the police right now. They'll be open by the time we get there." His hand reaches for the doorknob behind himself.

"Yep. Yes. Yeah. Let's do that. Holy shit, holy shit, what the fuck, what the fuck," Jaroslav rambles, breathy, and with shaking fingers he begins to type out a brief tweet explaining that he won't be able to go live today, maybe for the next few days. He makes another, ready to vaguely allude to the events of the day, before deciding to leave his audience with a simple message to be nice and reach out to him directly if there's ever a problem that requires his addressing.

The troll is definitely not a fan, probably, maybe, and the verification tick, the angle of the picture... It's so fucking sinister. The whole thing. He clicks the account to be faced with a ‘you're blocked’ screen. No help at all.

Resigned to not being able to figure out anything else, he closes the app and starts typing "stalking" into safari's search bar (less, admittedly, for information and more as a distraction from the situation at hand) as he swivels around to follow Yilin out of the room, bumping him slightly in the process.

Yilin doesn’t particularly mind; it’s actually kind of comforting as a reminder that Jaroslav is right behind him. However, the recovery from the bump combined with something in the way of his foot causes him to stumble. He manages to keep himself from fully falling by doing a skip-hop forwards. It’s a bit strange, since he didn't remember anything on the floor right in front of the door when he had been out only a couple of minutes before. Turning his head around to discover what had tripped him, he wishes that he hadn't.

Jaroslav reaches out towards Yilin on instinct as he trips, pulling away quickly when the man catches himself. He follows Yilin's eyes down towards the offending object on the floor and jumps, the shock pulling a small yelp from his lips.

"Oh, what the fuck. Oh my god, what the fuck," Yilin shoves himself off of the wall, instantly stepping back a couple of steps.

“Are you okay?!” The other asks on instinct, too freaked out to think up the obvious answer.

"Watch--watch the doll, we need to get it to the, the police." The shock is what powers his pivot in the kitchen's direction to the cabinet from before. There’s no way it’s out of the box, but the doll is right there, and he remembers that there’s only one doll!

"Wow, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck..."

Jaroslav steps back from the toy, giving it about a foot of space as he stares down at it.

The image of the open cabinet is a genuinely awful sight that Yilin knows is probably going to stick in his mind for a little while. But Jaroslav is back with the doll, so he can't linger in the kitchen. He grabs the container and lid once more, taking quick steps up to the puppet. His third attempt to catch it is a lot less meticulous than his previous attempts, but it does do the job.

He stands upright after scooping the doll into the box, firmly holding it away from himself. "Okay, let's, let's just go."

Jaroslav hates the implications of this. He shivers, remembering the angle of the picture again. How long has the doll been at it? Has it done this before? There's no way we wouldn't've noticed. Right? God, this is so weird, this is so weird this is so weird! And all questions aside, because he really, really, wants to put the questions aside, just getting this thing to the police station is going to be a fucking feat. Fully conscious of this, he keeps his eyes locked on the box as he makes his way to the door, as he slides on a pair of velcro shoes, and as he feels around for his keys and wallet.

Yilin doesn't bother to get a pair of shoes, opting for a pair of sandals. He doesn't think he has the time to get into either his boots or his sneakers. Wearing shoes meant for inside of the house outside was an issue laughably small compared to the bigger issue of a doll with a camera that could move on its own that had been living in his home for half a year.

Noticing that Jaroslav has his keys and wallet, Yilin swipes for his own wallet, neglecting to take his own keys. Jaroslav has the keys part covered, as far as Yilin thinks. All they need is the ability to get back in the house after they drop off the doll, and that’s covered.

Shuffling to still watch the container, Jaroslav clicks the door open, and as he stuffs his keys into his pocket he gently knocks his knuckle against Yilin's free hand as a silent offer.

As Yilin feels Jaroslav's hand bump into his, he grabs onto Jaroslav's hand in quiet acceptance. With Jaroslav's hand locked with his, he takes Jaroslav and the doll down the flight of stairs, onto the sidewalk, then to the bus stop without a word.

#aph #hetalia #hws #aph china #hws china #aph hunan #hws hunan #aph slovakia #hws slovakia #yilin #jaroslav #1st arc

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