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

“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

no subject

sorry 4 short tag

you come into my house

and take your nz netflix so i can finally watch disco

its so good