faderift | [closed] all alone, as I've learned to be

Entry tags:

{ ruby "red" lucas }

[closed] all alone, as I've learned to be

WHO: Cade, Ruby, Beleth a bit later
WHAT: Cade has had about enough
WHEN: early-ish Solace, not long after the return from the Western Approach
WHERE: the battlements
NOTES: massive tw for suicide/ideation, severe depression, alcohol, possibly mention of child abuse, god it's a laundry list, if you're not sure just don't read it

It's the grey hours of the early morning, before the sun and easily after most sensible people have gone to bed. Even the night watch is idling, playing cards in the towers or stargazing to keep their minds occupied. They don't notice the solitary figure in his night clothes ascending the stairs to the battlements with a singular determination.
He carries a bottle of wine of no particular vintage, at least not one that he can identify, having never drunk any before. And his feet are bare, to avoid waste. His shoes could be given to a refugee, like the rest of his clothes.
Like his armor, repurposed and redistributed among the other Templars. Nothing could ever hurt more than that, not even losing chunks of actual flesh.
He makes his way toward one of the yawning gaps in the walkway, often guarded or blocked off so none of the builders get hurt. But it's easy enough to gain access to it now, and Cade approaches the edge with a soldier's conviction.

The wine he clutches comes open awkwardly; it's harder than it looks to get the cork out, and he hurts his teeth pulling at it. He's heard it called liquid courage, and courage is what he needs more than anything. He feels a twinge of guilt when he takes the first pull, then immediately hacks it back up again-- how do people drink this?-- and immediately worries that he's making too much noise.
He calms his throat and tries again, more slowly, eyeing the drop beneath him. All he has to do is take one step.

The pros outweigh the cons: he won't be tormented by stares and jeers anymore, or his own thoughts, or his existence as a perpetual failure. He won't have dreams anymore, he won't feel the dull aches all over his body from working too hard without enough rest. He won't have to take up space, or waste supplies that could be used for more worthwhile people. No more lyrium withdrawals when he's too anxious and ashamed to ask for his ration, no more feeling untouchable, dismissed, worth less consideration than an animal.

But he just.. can't.

And that in itself is maddening. That's what keeps him imbibing what he hopes will turn into courage, because if he can't at least do this, then he might as well accept that he isn't even a person anymore. He's never been able to make decisions without an authority's approval. This is his one chance to take back control.

But it's so... far.
And cold.
And if he doesn't die right away, someone might try to do something about it, and he'll be a nuisance again.

---

It's two hours later and Cade has dropped to a sitting position, leaning against the battlement wall, a mostly-drained bottle held loosely in one hand and his eyes red and tired from intermittent fruitless weeping. Going back inside is out of the question; if he doesn't go through with it, tomorrow will just begin worse than ever before.
There's no coming back from this decision. He's already betrayed the Maker just by thinking it, and now he continues his treachery by sitting here, making a pathetic drunken arse of himself.

The wine was supposed to work.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sharpened senses are terribly dangerous things. There's so much that you that you wish you could not. Taste and smell are heightened in ways that are useful and fascinating, but some days it feels more like being battered by an overload of information and cologne that was inescapable without Wolf senses. When you can sense far more than most, Ruby sometimes wonders - flippantly - whether she feels too much, too.

She tries to cut herself off before she gets too melancholy. Usually it works; so sometimes something like the Fade happens. Ruby wonders if she just needed a reminder to keep fighting.

It's the scent of wine in the air, faint even to her nose, that catches her attention as she wanders the ramparts, sleepless. Her cloak hangs from her shoulders, and Ruby's btow flickers. Wine and ramparts are not, traditionally, a solid combination. When she realises the presence of a man, drained and defeated, something raw and familiar and unnamed wrenches in her gut. It occurs to her to get help, and equally quickly occurs that help could come too late.

"Hey." Quiet, gentle. "Mind if I join you?"

Too absorbed in his own muzzy thoughts and, for what it's worth, fatigue, Cade doesn't even hear her approach. The voice behind him gives him a start, and he wrenches around to see that it is... someone he doesn't know. And therefore doesn't trust, not that it would be any different if he knew her.
He just stares at her for several long moments, at a total loss for words. Even in his darkest hour, he's too polite to tell a woman she can't do something, regardless of whether he really really doesn't want her to.
That, and... well, nobody was supposed to see him this way. Nobody was supposed to see him again.
Looking quickly from Ruby to the vast expanse of rock and snow beneath him, Cade wonders if he shouldn't just do it now, before anything can go wrong. But then... he wouldn't want to upset her, whoever she is. He's seen people die before, and each time he felt like a small piece of him died with them. It's not something he wishes on a stranger. Or on anyone, really.
He's still staring downward as he mulls it over, his thoughts a little slower thanks to his inebriated state.

"My name's Ruby," she continues, leaning against the wall and resisting the urge for any sudden lunges to grab him. That was the backup plan - she'd done it before, but it deemed to her that choosing either way was something that had to be done for yourself.

"What's on your mind? It's pretty cold, out here."

Only then does Cade realize he's shivering, and has been for hours. He's not even wearing a robe, just the thin shirt and trousers of linen that he sleeps in. He hadn't intended to be... well, around long enough to truly get cold, but the wind cuts through the fabric like it isn't there.
As he realizes this, it occurs to him that he's out in public underdressed. This woman is ruining everything.

"Nothing," he says, hoarse from hours of intermittent sobbing while trying not to make any noise. "You shouldn't be here." In truth she has much of a right as anyone, but he doesn't want her to be here, so he might as well.

She reaches up and undoes the tie at her throat, letting her cloak slide away, holding it in both hands. Slowly - carefully, more careful of him than the drop - Ruby leans over to hand Cade the cloak.

"Neither should you. I guess we're both being rebellious together, huh?"

She looks down at the abyss, and exhales slowly. "It can be kinda like that, huh? Sometimes there's so many thoughts it's easier to try drown them out."

With wine - with leaping.

Cade stares defeatedly at the cloak, and it's several long moments before he lifts a hand to take it. Then, instead of putting it on, he just holds it in his frozen hands, blinking wearily down at the rich fabric. It's strange to suddenly encounter something so bright and tactile after sitting in the cold and grey for so long, and for a while all he can do is look at it. Putting it on would be admitting that he needs it, and that he's willing to accept assistance from a stranger.
Never again.

"You don't have to do this," he says, so quietly it's almost a whisper.

"Oh, I know."

Gently. "But you're a person out here all alone. I know how... I know what it's like feeling hollowed out. And I don't want to leave another person feeling that way, so. I'm staying."

A smile, small as it is. "Talking can help."

She doesn't get it, he thinks-- all he wants is for her to go away, but she keeps coming back with more.
"No it can't," he mutters, curling the fingers of one hand into the cloak, wanting to make a fist but stopping himself. He doesn't want to ruin it. "It's just... prolonging what's already hopeless." He's tried talking. It could have worked, if he hadn't ruined it. He offers the cloak back to her suddenly, holding it out with a look that's trying to be hard and is instead just miserable. "You're wasting your time."

At that Ruby pauses for a moment, still leaning against the wall. She doesn't accept the cloak. "As long as you're still standing here, there's hope." Cheesy? Yeah, maybe. She's a fairy tale character, though, and she learned any skills she has in speechmaking from Snow White and Prince Charming, so she's going to cut herself a little slack. "No matter what's happened, or what you've done, there is always hope. When you're still breathing, there's a chance that things will get better, that you can make things better."

The only real reason she has to think that maybe he's done something he can't forgive is because that was what brought her down, what cut the legs from under Whale, was what Regina seemed to struggle with and even Emma, when she'd let the darkness inside herself. "You're not a waste of time." She remembers Adelaide in the Fade, and tilts her chin up just a little, determined. "I promise you that. You're alive. That means you're worth my time."

And a nod to her cloak. "If you want to give that to me, you're going to need to come back over her and do it."

"There was never hope," Cade murmurs, almost too quietly to be heard. He winces as Ruby talks, resisting his inclination to accept her kindness, to naively assume it will last for longer than it takes to get him off the battlements and stop making a scene. But this isn't because she cares about him, he reminds himself. She's just trying to resolve an inconvenience.

"I can't go back," he says, his voice shaking and, to his dull surprise, slurring a bit. "Nothing will change. It'll only get worse." As he imagines the reality of it, of being the subject of even more caution and disdain, he had to duck his head and hide his eyes.
"I have to finish what I started," he whimpers with a wet sniff, "...I'm such a fucking coward."

"You're in pain," Ruby protests, moving slowly so as not to jar him, and starting to climb out onto the ledge along from him. "Trying to fight your way through that isn't cowardice. It's hard, and it's-- it's exhausting. And sometimes giving up seems better."

Her mouth snags unhappily, the drag of something painful in it as she settles her feet on the ledge and looks towards Cade again. She is definitely not sure this is what you're meant to do in these scenarios, but she actually has no idea what you do in this kind of situation. The only thing she knows is that he's hurting, and even if their hurts are completely different, it's not like she doesn't have empathy.

"Living isn't cowardice. If you want o try and make things better? That's brave. It's hard, but it's brave." Ruby pauses a moment, the familiarity of this weighing heavily on her chest. They're strangers, here, but it feels familiar, the condemnation and the loss. And he has no reason to trust her, maybe no reason to trust anyone at all, if he's out here. Her throat feels dry and hot and sore, and she forces herself to swallow anyway, to brace herself for offering information that she doesn't share easily or lightly.

"I lost control of who I was, once, and I killed someone I loved. I killed a lot of people, and I live with that every day. No matter what you've done, this isn't the answer, and you can come back. What's done can't be undone, but you can dedicate everything you have to trying to make things better. And trying--" Her throat catches. "Trying is so much more than giving up."

All the while Ruby talks, Cade keeps his gaze lowered, staring into the abyss. A tear streams from one eye, then the other, and though he keeps his hands cupped over his eyes, there's not much else he can do to stem it.
He wishes the killing were the worst of his anxieties. He's felt more or less justified in every life he's taken, which, he realizes, may not be the best reaction. If only he were so confident with his own.

He sits there shivering and silent even after Ruby has finished speaking, finally lowering his hands to hug them around himself, his eyes still streaming. "Trying means inconveniencing everyone further," he murmurs, his voice shaking both from cold and from emotion, "it means... getting in the way. Forcing myself on people who can't stand me." He winces. "Which is everyone." Ruby is a stranger; if she sticks around, she'll find out soon enough.

Ruby is silent a few moments, settling down to sit with her back pressed to the wall. The stone is cold and leeches the warmth from her, as her gaze rests heavily on Cade. It's a mixture of concern and a desire not to let her own focus drop to the abyss, to the depths that feel so alarmingly familiar and inevitable, at times.

"It's pretty impossible to inconvenience everyone and rub every person out there up the wrong way. I mean, I know a woman who literally cast a curse on an entire realm, and...despite everything? She's actually turned out to be capable of doing some pretty great things, too. We gave her a chance and she took it. Ad that didn't even start with all of us, it started with one person believing in her, and... And encouraging her to try."

She smiles a little, then. "And I'm pretty sure you didn't do anything like what she did, and... And if some people can't stand you then... So what? There's always the people who can open their eyes, in time. And there's people that you're assuming the views of when you can't possibly know. Sometimes people are so stuck in their own heads they miss the misery of someone right in front of them, but it just means they're as flawed as you and me. Not that they can't stand you, and not that they wouldn't give you a chance."

A little exhale, and she watches her breath cloud the chilly air. "I mean, so far I just see a guy who's more concerned with the well-being of others than his own. It's not the full picture, but it's a good start."

"It's not impossible," Cade insists, his shivering increasing and his body hunching slightly with the tension of it. "No one," he says tremulously, "no one can stand me." He'd thought he had no tears left to shed, but he's also fairly inebriated and both figuratively and literally on the edge, and his face is slick with them.
"I..." he begins, and is cut off by another shudder, dropping his head and squeezing his eyes closed. "I wasn't always like this. I didn't... I wasn't interesting, I did what I was supposed to, and...." He takes in a deep breath, then knots one hand into his hair as he sinks even lower. "...nobody noticed me, and it was fine. It was fine, I liked it. ...it was fine."
Another deep breath, and he opens his eyes again, but all he sees is blurred half-darkness. "Everything went so wrong," he brokenly continues, "and I can't... I can't disappear anymore. Everyone sees me. But they... don't want to. Nobody wants to."
There's a bit of wine left, he can feel it sloshing when he picks up the bottle again. He downs the rest and makes a face, setting the empty bottle beside him on the ledge, careful to be neat even when he's ostensibly about to end himself. Wiping the back of his mouth, he glances at Ruby, then back at the bottle. "...I stole this," he says meekly. A hardened criminal.

When his head drops, Ruby tries to scoot herself a little closer, moving enough that went he looks up at her all sheepish, she can lean closer to rest a hand on his back and rub it across his shoulders. She doesn't know his name - that will have to come later. "We can figure out paying off the wine later," she offers, a smile warming her tone a little.

Assuming the hand at his back isn't unwelcome, she'll keep rubbing across his shoulders - otherwise her hand will drop away.

"I saw you. I'm glad I did, actually. And if I'm glad, I think there'll be other people who are glad or happy or relieved to see you. You..." Ruby stops and brushes back her hair. "Don't have any reason to believe me, but I don't have reason to lie to you, either. I think... There's a reason why we hesitate. And if in hesitating you can say without any doubt that you'll never have another good moment, and you'll never meet another person who cares, then... That's horrifying. But if there's even a tiny bit of hope that something in this world can make you smile, or anything like that at all, I think having faith in yourself is worth it."

She's not totally sure that made sense. "Knowing what this feels like gives you more empathy for others, I think. When you've felt this way you... You have a window, this whole different perspective that can help you fight harder."

He shudders when she touches him-- it's not that the gesture is completely unwelcome, he's just so unused to being touched that he can't help but be shocked by it. That, and... well, it has its associations that he'd rather not deal with.
He doesn't want to chime in to tell her that she has him pegged, that he can say with, at least, very little doubt that he'll never meet another person who cares. It would be disappointing for her to hear, and it might upset her. He can't stand to make even one more person upset with him, even under these circumstances.
He doesn't want to fight, not really. Not when it's been so fruitless for so long. What he wants is the courage not to, which is what he can't seem to gather. Instead he's stuck in an agonizing limbo between them, too complacent in his misery to do anything about it one way or the other.

"I'm sorry," he half-chokes, placing his hands over his face. She's trying to be kind, and she's wasting it on him. He wishes she would go away, if only to alleviate the guilt of it.

"Hey." He hasn't jerked away from the touch, and that's good. Ruby shifts a little closer, and the hand rubbing across Cade's shoulders continues, slow and steady.

"You don't have to apologise to me for anything. Okay?" She'd offer to just keep sitting here as long as Cade needed, but she's genuinely worried about the cold and the alcohol in his system and exhaustion, and how any two of those factors would be bad without being located on a ledge. Ruby pauses the contact only to drop her cloak over his shoulders, never mind that he handed it back to her once already, and when that is done continues the contact at his back.

Ruby's smile is bittersweet. "I tried to give myself over to a mob to tear me apart, one time. I wanted to pay for things I'd done, or... not done. But..."

A little sigh, and she tries to think of something, anything, that might help him. That had helped her, in the past. "Can you tell me something that made you happy, once? Like a good memory."

Cade only gives a shuddering sigh when the cloak is draped over him, probably because it's warm and he's so, so cold. That and he's just so, so sad.
He's silent for a long time after her question. He's never been asked that before. He's had it shown to him, by Cole, just once, but never had to actually think about it on his own volition. Depressingly, he finds that an answer doesn't come easily.
"...when I was made Lieutenant," he quietly decides, not that it's even a valid memory anymore, since he has since been betrayed and degraded and demoted. It's meaningless to dwell on what was once a brief happiness, because doing so only brings to mind what happened after.
"...I was proud then. But." He shakes his head with a miserable frown. "I ruined that."

"Lieutenant, huh? Like a... soldier? Templar?" Her fast thoughts are still army, navy but those don't really apply here in the same sense that she's used to. Yelling Semper Fi at the guy wasn't really going to help anyone. She sighs, looks ahead, and wonders just how much she should share and just how much you can share before you're making something about you instead of about someone else.

"Honestly, I'm not so sure. Maybe you messed up, really... really badly. But it takes a lot for things to be ruined beyond all hope."

Ruby slowly drags her teeth over her lower lip, and thinks. "I'm... not... I'm not totally human. I know you have the word 'werewolf' in this world, but I'm not that, exactly. I'm a rifter, and I'm a wolf as well as a human, and... I couldn't always control it? I lost control. And when I lost control..." Oh, God. This is hard to say. "I ate my boyfriend. I... I killed and ate a whole hunting party of people I'd known my entire life. I'm the monster that parents warn their children about. I'm the thing that goes bump in the night."

She looks at him, then, and she feels hollow. Even when she's got her peace, fragmented and imperfect and troubled as it sometimes is, this isn't easy to say. "What did you do?"

He nods when she gets to Templar. It used to be a thing of pride, but with the way things have gone, the Order has come to be regarded lower than mud. At least so it seems to him, and he's one of the reasons it's losing credibility.

Cade angles his head to look at Ruby when she tells her story, still morose but also vaguely horrified-- not because of the killing aspect, but because of the oddness of it, and the idea of consuming human flesh even as an animal. That he cannot say he has done.
But then, he's done everything just as himself. He's not sure which is worse.

"...I..." he begins, and winces, "I was with my men, hunting apostates in the Hinterlands. They... they went off. Never respected me, they turned on me. I had...." He swallows hard. "...I found each one and killed them all. They wouldn't stop."
Even this he can justify, thanks in part to Zevran. He understands a life or death situation all too well, and anyone who calls himself a soldier must be aware that sometimes he must kill or be killed.
But there were other incidents, times when he was more clearly in the wrong.
"I... I came to Skyhold. And I.. I haven't... been able to..." He isn't sure where his words are going, so he stops, shakes his head, and tries again. "...I've attacked people. For little things. And I... they've said they forgive me. Twisted Fate, Beleth, and..." River. But River's gone now, without a word of goodbye. Perhaps she didn't forgive him after all.
"...but I don't... I don't think anyone does. I don't..." His breath hitches, and he looks at the empty wine bottle, perhaps wishing there were more. He heard that being drunk was supposed to dull the senses and lower the inhibitions, but instead he just feels all that much more aware of himself while simultaneously saying more than he's ever wanted to.
"...I lost my rank, and my armor, and... everything. I'm worse than a mad dog, there's nothing to be done for me but this." He nods dully toward the chasm. "As long as I'm here, I have to be supervised. Overseen. By people who can barely stand to look at me."
As he speaks, his despair is slowly overtaken by resignation. This is what he has come to understand as truth, and saying it aloud again reminds him of why he's here. If he doesn't do this, they may just kill him anyway.
"...I've blown it for the last time," he says, more softly, "Zevran was... trying to help, I walked out on him. He was my last chance." Perhaps he'll just be exiled, and go off to die alone in the mountains. Or perhaps he can just save everyone the inconvenience and solve the problem for them.

Listening, she thinks, is meant to be helpful. Catharsis might be the word for it, giving a person a chance to open up a wound and drain it of all the necrosis and vile things keeping it from healing. Ruby, mind you, is not doctor, no healer. Hell, her solution to most injuries is to slap a bag of frozen peas on it, and they don't even have those, here. In this instance she wonders if listening helps her more than it helps him, because she gets context. All he gets is prodding at something raw and tender.

"We're in a war." Quietly, pensive. "In, um. In my world there's this thing, about the effect war and violence and... and trauma, basically, has on people. That seeing and doing violent things, even out of necessity and stuff can make it really hard to just go back to being normal." She exhales a quiet huff of breath. "I mean, I'm not an expert, I've never... I'm not an expert. But what you had to do? Killing other templars that you'd worked with, even when they were renegade? That's not easy. War isn't easy. It's traumatic, and everyone reacts differently. Far as I understand, anger and violence and stuff are kind of... they can be part of what happens when you're reeling from all this stuff."

She thinks? She thinks. She sounds more confident than she maybe feels, because Archie is the one that became a psychologist from the Curse, she just made the Psychologist a lot of coffee.

"You haven't blown it. Just because you're struggling now doesn't mean you'll struggle forever." Her hand stills on the shoulder farthest from her, resting there a moment, and it's like a sort of hug without being a hug actually. Ruby's voice is steady and urgent in the same moment. "You're going through something. It doesn't mean that you can't be a good Templar again, either, if you wanted to be. Hell, maybe you won't be a fighter for a while, or maybe you will, if that's what you want. I think knowing how this feels might just make you a better Templar than anyone else out there. You've got a painful, visceral understanding. You know better than anyone what war can do to you. And you can use that to help other Templars, or other Inquisition soldiers. Help yourself and help other people. Or you can... take a break from it completely and just give yourself a chance to recover from something really screwed up that happened, because just because other people can kill and just because it was necessary doesn't make it easy to get your head around. There's nothing wrong with you. You're injured, but injuries heal. They just need time. You can't expect yourself to run a freaking marathon with a broken leg."

Unless you're Adelaide, probably, but Adelaide's weird.

Before now, it's been difficult for Cade to focus on anything but his misery, and to resist being cheered up on account of it would be useless. But the things this woman is saying make... a strange kind of sense. Going back to being normal. What even is normal?

He looks at her again, blinking a few times before he speaks. "...the people..." he begins, hesitantly, "...that you knew. Know." He shakes his head and flinches, worried he'll offend her. "How did they..." He chews his lip a moment. "...get by?" It sounds like they weren't ostracized, at the very least.

She hums a little as she thinks about it. "I mean, a hundred years ago? They had a hard time. Not people I knew, obviously, but people from this massive world wide war that happened. People kind of struggled to understand and relate, you know?"

God, it's cold. She's a wolf, she's built for it, but the human form is a little less resilient. She ignores it and holds it together.

"In Storybrooke it varies." In Storybrooke they don't have any war veterans from the world without magic, but they have a lot of people who've lived with a lot of awful, terrible things. She's not sure if any of them that she knows are dealing with something like what he's contending with, and she's not sure if making the comparison is awful somehow, but right now that point doesn't matter so much. Getting him away from the edge is what matters.

"Some people have hobbies. Something creative and kinda therapeutic. Like wood carving and carpentry, or something. Other people dedicate themselves to helping people. It can take a while, but baby steps. You just kind of keep taking small steps, and then one day you look up and realise you've come a long way. I mean, at first it can be rough, but it gets easier."

They get by okay, she means. Technically Regina seemed to waver and struggle and has to fight for everything, but Regina is kind of... An intense example.

A massive worldwide war sounds a bit like what's happening now, in Thedas. It seems perhaps life can go on afterwards, at least if a rifter can fall through from a different dimension and talk about it. Months ago, he never would've thought that possible.
...hobbies. Every time he's heard that word, it has been spoken disdainfully, as though he's wrong to not have anything that could count as one. Once again, it seems the conversation is veering in that direction. He finds suddenly that he's as tired as he is cold, and actually shifts a bit to fit better under the cloak, accepting its warmth for the first time.
"I don't... really know how to do anything," he admits, abashed. This is what it always comes down to. He likes to read and he prays a lot and he walks a lot and he's kept busy by manual labor, and it's all done in relative solitude, and that's his entire life. "...and I can't be a woodcarver, because I can't have weapons." This is said with a small, defeated smirk, completely devoid of actual humor. "...I... if I'm not going to Zevran anymore, I'll have to be in someone's line of sight all the time again." For someone so shy as him, it was torture; he finds himself contemplating the drop again, but can't resist enjoying the cloak, at least a little bit. He's begun to ache from shivering, and his muscles being so tense for so long.

"I'm a prisoner here," he says quietly, lowering his head, "and it's my fault. I made it this way." Now he has to deal with it, or... you know, not. But the window for not dealing with it seems to be drifting away-- the sun has begun to rise, the faintest glow behind the mountains in the East.

A little sigh. "You're stuck now. Don't have to stay that way. I'm... I'm not sure what we'd need to do to change it. Still," Ruby reasons, "there's bound to be something. You're a Templar. A part of something bigger, right? I bet if I got ask around we can figure something out. You have experience and potential - we'll figure it out. You made it this way, maybe? But we can make something new, too."

And, onto less grave matters, "Mm, but-- what's the satisfaction in learning to do something if you're good at it right away?" She smiles s little, gentle. "Honestly? My main hobby here is annoying Adelaide, I'm pretty sure. You don't have to do anything. I think hobbies can be nice, though. Hey," she starts brightly, thinking on it. "We could start a hobby together. Pick something we both suck at and help each other along. Only if you want to, but it could be fun."

"No," Cade says quickly, his eyes darting toward Ruby as she begins to make plans-- even if she's just asking around about hobbies, that's still more information than he wants anyone to have.
"...don't tell anyone. Please." Things will already be worse just by virtue of his going back; the only thing that could ruin them further is if it becomes clear how Ruby reached this conclusion.

Her eyebrows raise, surprised by his haste, before the expression softens off. " You have my word. I won't do anything without your permission. This is private. Stays between you and me."

Bleh, though, because the wind just billowed her hair into her face, and her mouth. Excuse her fighting her hair for a second, before exhaling a breath.

"You want to head back? Or keep sitting here a while?"

Even though he specifically asked her to keep it a secret, the way she responds makes Cade's stomach wrench unhappily. He lowers his head with a furrowed brow, riding out the fleeting and inexplicable panic, and finds afterward that he's just... tired. It's dawn and he hasn't slept at all, yet he's also drunk and freezing and dehydrated and probably also hungry. He hadn't planned on continuing to exist for this long, so he hadn't provisioned for it.
Rather than answer with either or, he just gives a small nod and starts to rise stiffly to his feet. Being both drunk and numb from cold means his bearings are... not easily gathered, and he nearly falls over onto Ruby while learning this. He loses his grip on the bottle as well, and pauses to watch with consternation as it suffers a very long fall and shatters, very quietly, against an unseen rock below.

The bottle smashes, and Ruby has to do her best not to look down. She.... no. No looking down.

"Oh, boy." Hang on, she's just going to keep a careful grip across his shoulders, and its only now that the strength she possesses really shines through. "I got you. Come on." She is going to life and carry him back to safety if she has to, rather than risking going over herself first and either losing her grip on him, or him losing his grip on wanting to get back there.

"We'll get tea, and blankets. How's that sound?"

"Sorry," Cade whimpers as she catches him, partially because he just touched her like A Lot, and partially because he can tell she's going out of her way for him. "I'm sorry." Furious with himself for being unable to walk properly, he ducks his head and squeezes his eyes shut long enough to at least begin to berate himself before he has to open them again to see where he's going.
If the world weren't spinning around him, he'd try to pay attention to anything other than his own feet stepping one in front of the other.
"...I..." he weakly answers, "...I think I'd... better just go to bed." He has a lot to think about. And potentially a lot to vomit up, which he would prefer not to do in the presence of the fairer sex.

"Hey, it's okay." Sincere, and she hopes reassuring, flashing him a little smile even if his eyes are shut and he can't see it. Maybe he can catch it in her tone.

At least after an awkward scramble they've managed to make it back into The Safety Zone, and Ruby glances over to the ledge, just to see if they've left anything behind. "Bed is probably a good idea. Do you have any water in your quarters?"

No luck on aspirin, she imagines, but she'll swing by Adelaide's early - or maybe late, if there's a chance she's still awake - and pick up a hangover potion or whatever magical creations she might have. She leaves her cloak on him, for now. He's cold and he needs it, and it's not near Wolfstime. She can deal without it for a night. Gently, "I'll walk you there?"

Cade thinks and shakes his head to the question of water, shuffling along beside Ruby like a sick person. Back to his room, back to start everything over. He only hopes he can sleep. He hopes a little bit that he won't wake up, but that's less likely than him willingly throwing himself off a cliff.
All at once, he realizes he's too tired to think about it anymore. He just nods dully, letting Ruby lead him wherever she wants. If prompted, he shows her the way to his room.

"Come on, big guy." Ruby rubs his back and leads him along, and when she asks and he complies with guiding her to his room, she takes one of his arms and drops it over her shoulder, her arm around his waist to help steady him, through wine fog and cold-numbed limbs.

She's glad to steer him and help him down hallways and through door frames. The advantage of the Wolf? She's mighty strong for a lady. And the advantage of him showing her the way is that she'll know where to go to check up on him.

"You sure there's no one you want me to let know? They can check in on you." She'll be checking in anyway, but you know.

"I'm sorry," Cade says again as she drapes him over her-- considering one of the only things he wants out of life is a modicum of dignity, he's not doing great in retaining that.
He's as silent as she is as they go, and shakes his head once again at her question. "No," he miserably insists. No one.

"You've got nothing to be sorry about. I swear." There is nothing undignified about getting a little help from a friend, big guy. Just accept the Power of Friendship.

"All right." Rather than rambling on, she opts to give him a bit of a break. There's been a whole lot of emotional overload, and maybe he just needs some time to recharge and recover. That's one of the reasons she lapses into near silence as they wander to Cade's room.

"This it?"

Cade doesn't understand the Power of Friendship!! He's still stuck on Magic (he hates Magic).
He nods when they arrive at his door, and before going in, he turns to look at Ruby as though he's about to address her. Instead, he just stands there in silence for several seconds, nods shyly, and closes the door behind him. yep.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[closed] all alone, as I've learned to be

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phone tag 8|

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