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

i.

[faithlikeaseed]

The impact jars down nerves still jangling from Ghislain and Myr freezes like a startled deer, eyes as wide and one hand half-raised in warding. (Fast with a barrier but not always fast enough--he got lucky this time but the next one might hit him or someone on his flank--)

Mind catches up with body. There isn't a threat here. He lets his arm fall; studies Casimir with an eye fallen out of practice. Memory makes the subject easier to see--memory, and demons who never scrupled to wear a useful face.

Don't think too hard about that.

"Good morning." The words are rueful but not sarcastic. "You haven't slept."

[aestivation]

"So report me."

It hangs in the air, from the corner he’s backed himself into. I didn't mean it, maybe,

But they both know he does.

With palms pressed to the wall, shoulders hunched, he looks every inch a man in a box. Better than whatever knives are waiting for his back. Casimir knows the deal that he made. What will you do, if the meaning isn’t what you’d hoped?

A snapped quill lifts itself from the debris, hovers a moment. A gesture — it drops. When he speaks again, low and miserable, it's mostly to the floor. Won't look him in the face.

"No one will say you didn't try."

(Bizarre, how more easily a miracle sits for logic alone.)

[faithlikeaseed]

He’s been waiting for that blow for seven years—braced for it as long, the only reason he doesn’t flinch when it lands. Still a silence follows, like the lacuna in a room’s conversation after the crack of fist against flesh; Philomela taught him grace enough to acknowledge the well-placed hit.

“No one’s got the authority to hear it,” which is true both shallow and deep, and surprises Myr only a little in the uttering. Unpleasantly so; this is not the sort of progress he thought he’d make in a year with the Inquisition.

But then he’d already set foot on the path leading them all here last Wintermarch—maybe it’s not progress at all.

He notes the pen and the way Casimir won’t look at him in the same glance; moves to put himself against the wall to his friend’s left and out of arm’s reach. (Eyes turned toward the door: guarding the flank, not against Casimir’s escape.) “They could,” you could, “accuse me of fucking it all up by trying.”

[aestivation]

"And you do."

The authority to hear it, to decide? Myr's always run hot, a quickness to action hidden only by his speed in thought — in justification. They'd been smaller heresies, once. Hero, and they don't derive the same. They don't.

But to speak it aloud —

[faithlikeaseed]

"I," he begins, and denial sticks in his throat for the lie of it.

Someone had responsibility. Someone had started this, and it hadn't been Kostos, with his knowledge of the Divine's intent. It hadn't been Anders' bleeding heart.

Someone had started all of this when he'd gone to authority he trusted with He hasn't slept and I'm worried. It's worse than before. How much worse, exactly--

He looks back in Casimir's direction; no demurring, no downcast eyes. "Not alone. Not for wanting it. But if we've done wrong by you--"

A hesitation. A moment stretched out like a neck for the axe. "I began it."

[aestivation]

He laughs — sharp and startled, laughs to the ground, and doesn't sound amused. Braced hands tremble.

"You are so," He can't find the word. Can never find the word when he needs it. Nevarran: "Arrogant."

Used to find appeal in it, the confidence to do what's needed; to seem to know that at all. He doesn't want to care about that now. Turns his eyes to the ceiling,

"I had a life before Hasmal."

Nothing began there. So interminably long spent crawling into his own skin in search of kinder shape. An exile of his own making — or the Chantry's, or the Maker, or mortal sin, or whoever his mother fucked —

No one began this, or maybe he did, ten years old and blooming light.

[faithlikeaseed]

"And it would have come out the same regardless?" A flash of heat behind the words, frustration returned for what reads as fatalism. "You know what I meant."

Even if Casimir taking him at the expanded sense wasn't wrong and that stings to admit. Far more than the word he doesn't know (not melodramatic; Philomela used that one often enough he'd absorbed it) and parses too well by tone-- You aren't responsible for all the world's ills; you don't build a pyre of them to martyr yourself on in one glorious, selfish, useless gesture.

You don't demand your penance of a man trapped in a corner.

Breathe in, breathe out. "You deserve a life after." Myr glances upward himself--mirroring, entreaty. Maker help me, because this is and isn't familiar and what he knows doesn't tell him where to step.

"On your terms." More heresy. Followed by something quieter: "Why are you in the corner?"