[OPEN] i've never seen such high hopes

[paladingus]

WHO: Simon Ashlock and OPEN
WHAT: NO IT'S COOL I'LL JUST WALK IT OFF. FOREVER
WHEN: Over the course of the next week and a half
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: Illness, etc.

Early Stage

"Why don't we talk more?"

A question like that could be redolent of sarcasm, could drip with irony--but Simon looks nothing but absolutely earnest as he asks it.

"We're all Inquisition, aren't we? Isn't that what counts?"

Intermediate Stage

Never again, he'd told himself, after escaping the drudgery of the Ansburg laundry rooms. It had only taken a full-scale uprising to free him from that miserable duty, and he's never yet seen a reason to go back to it of his own accord.

But what else is he supposed to do right now? There are only so many model ships a man can hole up in his room and build, and that task is now verging on impossible when every surface in his room is strewn with bits and bobs and nuts and bolts and gears--these last from a half-baked idea on how to improve the wooden frames, pursued a third of the way to its logical conclusion and then forgotten. The room is no longer big enough to pace around, and too many of the pieces he'd need are now crushed beneath his feet.

Hauling and boiling and stirring keeps him well enough occupied for a while, but when they set him to folding, it's too much to ask focus of him. Half-realizing, mind seething like the great vats of bleached water, he carries the basket right out of the room, folding one-handed as he goes.

Is that your shirt? Why does he have your shirt?

Later Stage

How long Simon's been out in the frozen training yard is probably difficult to discern. Five hours, perhaps, or six, oblivious to anyone who might have occasion to notice or worry. It feels like feeding a hunger, like shoveling food into a bottomless maw; it's not enough, can never be enough, but he can push harder and harder and harder and it feels almost like it will make a dent if he just tries that little bit more.

Does frantic pacing and jogging count as a warmup, if one has been doing it for two straight and sleepless days? It wouldn't seem to, if the degree to which he's favoring his right leg is any indication, but even that hasn't slowed him and isn't going to.

He hasn't registered the color of his skin as cause for concern. That's what happens when you're out in the cold, isn't it? Not that it feels cold; he never really feels cold, he thinks, but not now, especially not now, when even stripping down to his shirtsleeves in the frosty air hadn't helped, when the sweat drenching his shirt has iced over and he still feels like he's boiling out of his skin. He has only the most distant idea that his perception of the temperature could be anything other than accurate. Recognizing the cognitive dissonance is beyond him.

Wildcard

Just come up to him at any point during this whole roller-coaster ride, I'm down for anything!

Comments

[paladingus]

Fern's voice doesn't immediately filter through that curtain of steely determination. Only when she's close enough to appear in his peripheral vision does he register that she's there, startling a little at the approach. It's difficult to tell whether his hair or his eyes are wilder, his lips even bluer than the rest of him, all whiskered over with ten days' completely untended growth of beard.

"Oh--"

He is starving. He can't pretend he's not; he feels like he's been gnawingly hungry for days. But the prospect of standing still long enough to eat anything feels unbearable--and still, he doesn't quite connect the strangeness of the sensation with the heartbreakingly worried look on her face. What could have happened to make her look at him like that? Has he done something?

"That would be splendid, really it would, it's very kind of you, I just--I wasn't finished, but--all right, I could try to set it aside just for a few moments, not too long, just enough to--" To what? He's forgotten the train of thought.

To eat something, yes, that was it. He's trying to stand still long enough to hold the conversation politely, and it's maddening.

"Is everything all right? Are you?"

[wheretheferngrows]

"Am I all right?" Baffled, Fern steps closer to Simon, though she still keeps her arms folded snugly over her chest. (Holy buckets, but it's cold out here--)

"Look at you!" she exclaims and comes close enough to give his sweaty and disheveled arm a little poke. (Just a little one. She still likes him.) "When was the last time you slept? You're turning blue."

Her needling tone aside, there's real worry for him in her large, expressive blue eyes. Fern reaches out again to touch his arm. "Please, come inside, won't you?"

[paladingus]

He flinches away from the poke, more of a twitchy reflex than an expression of pain, sore though his muscles are when he stops moving them for a second. (If he had the time or clarity to think about it, he'd wonder at how he could manage to swing a greatsword around for this long and still have feeling in his arms at all.)

"The last time I slept?" It seems an odd question, until he actually tries to remember and realizes with some bafflement that he can't. "It wasn't last night, and I don't think it was the night before..." What he's thinking of as 'last night' was, in fact, the night before last. He shakes his head, losing that train of thought as well once it doesn't come to a definitive conclusion.

It still tugs right at his heartstrings to see how concerned she looks, even if he's not fully cognizant of the reason for it, and he reaches up with his other hand to pat the one she lays on his arm and give it a reassuring squeeze with fingers so cold they ought to be immovable.

"I will," he says, "if it'll make you feel better, but--only for a bit, all right? It's too warm in there; I've been sweating like mad every time I'm shut up in a room. And the walls just feel--too small, do you notice it too? Is that just me? Are all the rooms really as big as they were before?"

[wheretheferngrows]

"...And the walls just feel--too small, do you notice it too? Is that just me? Are all the rooms really as big as they were before?"

This is really quite out of her pay grade, or ability to manage--but Fern still has the warm meat pastry in one hand and is determined to make Simon sit still long enough to eat it. "Well--let's just... let's just sit near the door, then. Out of the wind." It's a compromise, right?

As gently as she can, she takes hold of one of his very large arms and tries to coax him away from the training grounds, holding the meat pastry out a bit like a carrot in front of a mule. ...okay, this is the only way she knows how to make stubborn creatures cooperate, please don't take it personally Simon.