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]

"Are you?"

He wheels from place, fists clenched. Was never much for anger. Let it curdle into small revenges, sour asides.

This isn't that. This is just pissed.

"Why did you even start?"

An ink bottle begins to rattle. His eyes cut away, involuntary; nerves flashing undisguised. It shifts again in a moment, furious.

(Hates that. How much easier that must make this on him. Kostos, who can't abide a bared throat, can't manage anything that he can't despise or deck.)

[exequy]

Kostos watches Casimir's face (save a corner-of-the-eye glance at the ink bottle that's a mix of wary and don't you dare, as if the bottle might obey him the way a wisp would) and he can remember the moment they decided, him and Myrobalan. Not to do this, but to take a step. To ask the first necessary questions.

The Divine had wanted to know if it could be done. The Lord Seeker interfered. That's why he started.

But every step forward after the first one—

"I had time to kill," he says, which is not true, in general, nor the reason he did anything. But it will take more than this to make gentleness with anyone's feelings his first instinct. Or his second. In this case, his second instinct is that of an instructor with a child who can't stop knocking books off the shelves. "For fuck's sake. Focus."

Not a good instructor.

[aestivation]

His mouth works into empty retort, turns loose with frustration. Get out threatens the edge of volume. One of them is old enough to remember the other a boy.

(There's a bit of cloth in the office, wyverns and stitches. There's a thing or two to owe, debt on monstrous scales --)

He raises a hand. The bottle steadies,

Glass implodes onto blue. Casimir shakes his fist loose.

(-- And Kostos can still go fuck himself.)

[exequy]

It’s a half-hearted barrier, a flash of light that reflects some of the glass and not half of the ink, leaving him spotted blue-black in an arc on one side of his face and in possession of overall less dignified than he’d like. He tries scraping together whatever is left with straighter shoulders and a raised chin.

“Temper tantrums,” he says. “I’ll make a note.”

—he did come here for a reason. It wasn’t to make digs at a vulnerable and questionably stable old friend. Maybe he’ll remember what it was in a second, or maybe he’ll leave.

For now, he only says, “We asked you.”

[aestivation]

There are comparisons he could make. The way that a drowning man, given air, will do nothing but shout for more. But it’s imperfect — but they asked again, on stable land. But he doesn’t truly want water in his lungs.

Words elude.

His chest heaves. Blue drips; he finally seizes a cloth, swipes it out in offering. Maybe it would be courteous, to invite Kostos across that distance. Maybe it would only be an annoyance. Here, through the debris,

He would rather break only glass. Morose: "I know."

Casimir paces. Plants a hand to cold stone, and feels seasick.

"Everyone just wants to help." As if that erases the whos and whats they want it for. "You don’t need to change anything."