waiting for the front door to splinter | OTA

[aestivation]

WHO: Casimir + Open.
WHAT: Feels.
WHEN: Post-Ghislain.
WHERE: The Gallows, Research offices.
NOTES: General CW bad brains, specific stuff will be tagged. If your character visits, probably someone on the team took note.

i. not fine

To wake is to rise underwater, head broken between one moment and the next. The surface disturbed, ripples before a hand of terrible light. Remembers thinking with sudden clarity: Petty,

It's been a day since the candles were blown out, and the water poured away. A few days, more; time stretches strange about seven years' memory and so many watching eyes. His skin crawls with it, the very stones do. There’s a sense of life so vivid in the walls —

A plate smashes into one, sends sharp shards of pottery spraying beside your head.



ii. more fine

This room is an intermittent mess — what's picked up, placed away, simply refuses to stay put. He's given up moving the toppled books and bits of crockery. Sits in the middle of the dull little bed with its well-intentioned blankets, and knows that down the hall are waiting clever little people with intentions of their own, and,

The door isn't locked. But he doesn't intend to leave.

He doesn’t look well, but he looks different; the changes as obvious as they’re impromptu, cheap. Curls soaked down in the vain effort to smooth a scar, grey robes traded for some Inquisition tunic (too tight about the shoulders), eyes that search the corners for pattern. He hasn’t shaved.

Upon a visitor, his expression flickers. Tries to still itself only to pull again in abrupt dismay.

"It isn’t you,"

He begins, before anything’s quite begun.



iii. probably that's fine


He doesn’t sleep.

Not since he’d first awoken, nerves pooling slick as lamp oil. He doesn’t sleep, but he eats — ravenously — and asks after tea, coffee, anything to keep awake.

It can't last.

His friends are attentive, if that's what he ought to call them (attentive, friends). But the hour's late, and the Central Tower swells with shadow. He's made it to one of the windows by the stair, hand lingering in the hollow where bars once stood. Reaches out, farther, until his arm's through, his shoulder —

His eyes are open, slack; expression dead as ever before.



iii. wildcardDDD

[[ hmu on plurk if you have any questions about limitations or specific prompts u want ]]
 

Comments

[aestivation]

"No, please." He fumbles up, eyes torn to the ground. "Julius."

Enchanter, glyphs, history; the certain kindness of efficiency. Abstract pieces smashed to fit. He's not gone mad, hasn't forgotten anything.

But what a hollow shape.

Casimir steps closer, holds the door clear of a crutch. A candlestick crunches underfoot, free hand twisting itself by his side.

"Perhaps," This isn't terrain for the wounded. "In the office."

Adjoining; less a wreckage, pages and shelves untouched. He glances down the hall to suggest it — and if his smile looked fake before, this is a new low.

(They can't keep him from work forever, can they?)

[overharrowed]

"The office, then," he agrees, easily enough. They're in uncharted territory, which is never Julius' favorite place to be, but this is also not about Julius' comfort and he knows it. Steady he can do, if called upon. "I hope you'll forgive me the slow transit. Someone was rude enough to drop," 'drop' "a battleaxe on my foot a few weeks ago."

It's not a joke, but it's also light enough to suggest he's in less pain than he was right after it happened. (He was making jokes then too, but they were certainly more strained.)

[aestivation]

There’s a joke buried in there; something about an Imperial march. He doesn’t make it. Doesn't laugh, either: The bob of a head that signals someone's heard perfectly well that you meant to be funny, and can't summon the will to fake it.

"Nothing to forgive."

We're happy to have you back, but there's plenty buried in that, too. Under thick mud and pyre wood.

He waits to take his own seat, fingers scratching invisible keys into the surface of the desk. An idle pressure. Avoids looking, deliberate, to the mirror behind him (a pressure of its own). Should Julius stare too long, the fearling will twist itself — as ever — to shape. It shifts itself at Casimir's back. No longer so empty.

"I am," This bit used to be easier. Nails tense. "Grateful."

If that's what Julius came for. Casimir chances a glance up.

[overharrowed]

It doesn't seem to be; at a minimum, there's a brief flash of surprise and... something in response to that. But it doesn't linger, as Julius has always been good at control. "Are you?" he asks, after a moment. "I imagine that's probably complicated."

It's franker than Julius usually permits himself to be. If not now, though, when? It's a situation without precedent, at least for either of the two men in it.

[aestivation]

Is he?

Does laugh then — looks startled by himself, a moment of brief, childish surprise. A moment. It falls away bleak.

You will mean something to the rest of us.

"I don't know what I am," He admits, grinds against pronoun. "But I know what it means, if I am not."

Drags a nail along the wood, watching the it curl and splinter. The spirit coalesces, becomes something hard and white.

"And I know that you didn't need to help."

Doesn't narrow why Julius did. There are reasons enough: Attachment, indignance; to get ahead of a secret bound to hatch.

[overharrowed]

"Lots of us make do with things because they're better than the alternative, or because there aren't viable alternatives. It's not a situation with which I'm unfamiliar." Which is to say, he can think of reasons why gratitude may not be foremost, especially at the moment. He shifts a bit in the chair, but the discomfort is physical, not conversational.

"You're here now, and some choices ahead of you. I'll be interested to see what they are, and I won't be the only one. That's not altruism, and I doubt it is in anyone except possibly Myrobalan, but on the other hand I can offer you honesty, if you've any use for it. If you want me to tell you why I helped, I think you're owed that."

[aestivation]

Making do is just life; there's always a worse option, a choice to make —

Which is which, more muddled. The pause stretches awkward, overlong; becomes an absence. Silent save for the scratching of varnish, the click of clock-wheels. It would be pleasant to leave it there.

Well. Not pleasant. It'd be something.

"It's not altruism." In Myrobalan. They could put this back, fix it; rather: They could try. They won't. The promises that he (he?) wore out of Kostos are flimsy in shade. Fix this, and they'd lose the meaning. "Go ahead."

Please, dies unspoken. There are always alternatives, he isn't used to taking them for a crowd. I'm interested to see what you think it is you owe.

[overharrowed]

"A combination, which I expect is common. Curiosity; to see if it could be done, after all. Wanting to get out in front of it, if it could -- it's not impossible that it could be hushed up, but the more of us know, the less likely that becomes. Guilt," he adds, frankly. "I expect every Circle mages knew people who who took Tranquility under varying levels of duress. Some of them were apprentices I taught. It's hard not to feel that I failed them, both before and after the Rite itself."

He's not a man to let on that he second-guesses himself, nearly ever. But he'd told Casimir he thought he owed him honesty. He can do his best.

[aestivation]

To see if it could be done.

Motion stutters, knuckles ease. Guilt and curiousity are the measures of a life, black-bound and laid in neat row. For long as he can remember, or can remember their absence.

He thinks to be suspicious of it. Wants, too badly, to take someone at their fucking word.

"It can be done," He agrees, looks away; less unable to confront the rest than consumed by it. Duress is written in the walls. "Do you think it should be?"

Again, or Julius wouldn't have made it this far. It's an irrelevant question — better: What is he judging this venture by? Guilt and curiousity. Hardly the measure of success.

[overharrowed]

"I think that you're in a better position to answer that than anyone I know, frankly," he returns, not startled but... assessing. Unsure to what degree any of these questions are tests. "Clearly, I thought it should be the once, or I wouldn't have participated. But I think it would be foolhardy to venture whether it should be done again so soon. Or without your input."

The politics of it were going to be a complicated mess, but it isn't as if mage politics had been anything else prior. Julius had been there, at Skyhold, had gotten a closer glimpse than many at what the Inquisition was and was not in a position to promise.

If you asked him, he still might say he was a loyalist. It might have been wise to then ask him to define the term.