faderift | waiting for the front door to splinter

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 ]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He doesn't shift to greet her — still and stilted in place —

Hasn't tried to break anything in here, hadn't meant to; but none of it precious before, and Maker if it hadn't sunk in how young she must be, the volume of words exchanged prior. Why were you so interested?

"Thank you." It's what you say. He's practiced the words often enough to find them now (to find the gratitude strange, a stutter in routine). A hand into hair, tugging self-conscious as some miniature lever. Stand. Do something. "You are a talented needler."

He's lost the knack for deadpan. Steps forward, hesitates out of reach. Fingers find the edge of a cabinet, curl until the pause grinds free:

"I'm not your most pressing problem."

It's an out, if she chooses; one he can't force himself to push. He knows damn well why.

“You're not one of my problems at all,” she says, ignoring the implied open door entirely and setting down the shirts on the end of his bed and regarding him with a patient lack of awkwardness that's akin to but not the same as the way she did, before. It's different, this is different from any possible thing a person has done before, but still: she knows something about wreckage, and rebuilding.

Something new always means something broken. Nothing ever just snaps into place.

“Which makes you sort of unique. You know, more. I thought I'd just see if there was anything else...if there's anything practical that you could do with.”

She knows where she is, with practical. Anything else feels dangerously like expecting someone else to handhold her inability to help them, so: shirts. Maybe he needs something for his hair and beard. She's still tidying, sort of absently, like she hasn't entirely noticed her own occupation.

Relief is absurd, embarrassing: A wash of clammy heat.

He's been clamouring (silent) all day to be left alone — terrified, then, to imagine he'd be taken up on it. He's been alone. Another thing, to be lonely.

"A friend." He says, and it sounds cheap to him as it must the air. He's not the poet. Thumbs lift, as much acknowledgment of that as he'll pry his grip loose to afford. "Someone else's problems."

It's not generosity or recognition. If he doesn't think about something other than himself, and this room, and all the other lives, other rooms, the bones of this place —

His head is going to split. She's still tidying, and there's a story he heard once, about a rock and a hill. He doesn't tell it.

“I have so many,” she says, and the laugh is so lightweight and barely there that it's hard to see the unsteadiness in it, which is just as well. She looks down at her hands full of—untidiness, and finally sits on the edge of his bed, automatically tucking one foot underneath herself, brushing her hair back behind her ear.

A friend. With other things to think about. She can do that, she thinks; if he wanted to talk about his then she would have listened, but she knows she isn't good at it, experiences some relief that...not that she's being spared, but that it isn't what he needs, that he asks for something she thinks she won't fuck up.

“My father died,” is a hell of a thing to lead with, but she isn't looking for even compassion—she says it like it's something she's still turning over in her hands, that she hasn't settled on. She had liked you can put it away best of the options Thranduil had proposed, had dismissed firmly and out of hand the notion of ever wanting to speak of him, but this is...different. Casimir just wants for distraction. It doesn't have to be a thing that matters. “I don't usually call him that, actually, but it's factually accurate. A friend of mine was with him when he passed—at Ghislain. It was strange, in the healing tent, looking at his body afterwards, because I was with both of my mothers when they did, but I don't know if I would have wanted to be there or if it just feels...asymmetrical.”

Something unfinished, pressing at her.

He’s sorry, maybe —

Or at least, he thinks to say it. But there’s a lot to be sorry for, too much: The sum of strangers, and what significance to that? Someone carved a name once into the underside of this table. For all he knows, it spells dad.

"It’s not how someone would’ve written it." Not for her story — but another, maybe, that friend. Significance stripped and transferred (it's not a name, that's not what it spells). "It’s strange, isn’t it. You think you’ll be ready for it. You prepare."

To find the body an empty vessel, still as wood; but he’s rarely seen corpses so hollow as that. Revived for the touch of Fade,

"And the days keep happening."

“It looked as if it hurt, at least.”

As if that's a comfort to her, the assurance that at the end of his life, Emeric had been surrounded by only strangers, and in pain. And then,

“It doesn't feel as good as I imagined it would.”

No satisfaction in it, no finality. It's done and all she feels is...tired, mainly, exhausted by the new awareness that his absence undoes nothing, changes less. He is gone, leaving her to carry the tangle that they were by herself, as if she hadn't been already; as if that's anything new. All that time she'd imagined being free of him only to find that if anything he looms larger in death than he had in life.

Now, she can't pretend his death closes that door. She's alone with it, and so faced with what it is—

she doesn't miss him. He barely feels gone.

"How did you think it would?"

Feel — as if he's any more equipped to describe that. How does anything feel, other than too much; not at all.

Better.

“Different.”

She tilts her hands. Looks at them, for a time, then puts it away.

“I am getting married, also, which is a different problem entirely.” One Emeric might have liked, after a fashion, some evidence that her entanglement with Thranduil is—while not so easily dissolved as he might have hoped—at least not a total loss. And then he'd have hated it, anyway, so does it matter?

“Not the marriage, just the pantomime.”

"I don't think I'll be there."

No shit. Isn't certain it matters, isn't certain of a lot where weddings are concerned — doesn't know anyone who's done it. One hand pries free of the desk entirely, a step that carries him just far enough to slide open a drawer. It's in there somewhere, the ring (a distraction).

"It's not usual," Is it? "To have a second?"

Less usual, perhaps, to string so neatly to it from a funeral.

“Not to the same husband,” is a little arch, but in this moment perhaps more by habit than anything else. Like maybe that's just a thing her face does, without requiring a great deal of input from her on the matter. Reliable.

She curls her fingers in the covers of his bed.

“The first one had personal weight. Not...legal. Or any other kind. Here, anyway.” Or anywhere else, really, because Thranduil has never in truth been anywhere else; the man (elf) that he was there remains there, and never knew her, and has married only once.

It's a strange thought.

“So we're putting on a show. Look how normal rifters are. Look how they have families, and give a fuck.”

waiting for the front door to splinter | OTA

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sorry 4 short tag

you come into my house

and take your nz netflix so i can finally watch disco

its so good