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]

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.