closed.

[exequy]

WHO: Caspar, Kostos, Lakshmi, Lexie, Marisol, Nell, Nikos, Petrana
WHAT: Coming into a Merchant Prince's house, on the day his daughter is to be married, and asking him and all his friends to quit with their stupid neutrality. Plus Truth or Dare.
WHEN: Mid-Harvestmere
WHERE: Antiva City
NOTES: Will update with CWs if needed.

Comments

[exsecutus]

Caught up in his anger, Nikos is too late to twitch away from his aunt's cool capable hands. She adjusts his collar; he barely suppresses the urge to mess it up again. At least he's grown up a little since childhood. As a child, he squirmed away from kisses, ran around corners to avoid embraces, mussed his hair with his fingers, growled like an animal, declarative in his independence. The stage is different, the cast has changed, but she is still his aunt and he is still her nephew, their roles cemented by time.

"I prefer to move straight to destruction."

He's heard lines just like hers, before. Aunt Constanze's approach is more Caspar's, and at the thought of him, Nikos' attention jumps to the room around them, scanning the crowd for Caspar.

"If you burn a building down, you can build on the ashes. The earth is often improved by it: a controlled burn, to eradicate the withered and the dead and the dying, and build anew. Instead of inhabiting the corpse, and building inside it."

[champions]

"Maybe that is why you failed in your Nevarran efforts," she replies, rather bluntly. For all the bluntness, her gaze is affectionate, sympathetic.

"Then take a place within to lay down more fuel for the fire, and then depart." Constanze's head tilts, a gesture very similar to Marisol. "Are you too proud to see the merits in what I say?"

[exsecutus]

Familial love is often obligatory, habit, a grudging alliance. Marisol is the exception. Nikos would do anything for Marisol. And Aunt Constanze is too much of Marisol for him to get as angry as he would like, though her strike hits true and deep. His hands curl into fists--one at his side, one around the stem of his wineglass.

This is where Caspar would differ with her, a divergence toward the destruction that Nikos craves quicker. Convince them. Talk to them. Reason with them. And then, if it fails, destroy them. A boulder can be ground down by a steady drip of water, over the course of a hundred years. But if you wanted the boulder out of your fucking way, and you had access to a torrent of water that could eradicate the boulder, wouldn't you do it?

"We failed," he says, stiffly, "in Nevarra because we were fucking betrayed. Because our honest hope for true change was corrupted by human greed. Because Nevarra was not interested in revolution. And making nice speeches, and smiling, and simpering, would not have gotten our cause any farther."

So fuck you, he implies, but does not say outright--because she is his aunt, because she so resembles Marisol. Especially when she tips her head, just so, and gives him that look.