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 ]]

Threaded | Flat

Gwenaëlle can't help herself but to start righting what's overturned—pick up pieces of crockery, straighten a book. She says, “I'd sort of be impressed with myself in a kind of a sick way if it were,” probably because there are things wrong with her, that seems like the kind of thing it's slightly insensitive to actually say to him, to his face.

But: “I mean, everything you might possibly have to deal with, but somehow I've cut through it all to be the most pressing problem you've got.”

It'd be kind of an accomplishment. She straightens—

“I brought you some shirts that should fit better. I altered them a bit.” More for comfort's sake than because she thinks he's very concerned with keeping up appearances, presently, although if he bursts a seam in frustration he will look more insane to any Chantry that do get past their potentially somewhat ineffective barriers.

“Casimir.”

Here was the list of things Casimir was not: a plant, a pet, a bird with a broken wing. Thranduil had always struggled with the idea of tranquility, had snagged on what he might do to put the man at ease, but he had faced similar things with other men, all of whom were unknowable and foreign to him simple for being men, and had padded along anyway. And it had worked, splendidly, until those who had known Casimir before had wanted him back, and now here they were, with Casimir both himself—

and, also, inconveniently, yet another slap in the face to the Chantry.

Head cocked just-so, in his sleeping robes bundled tight about his face to keep out the cold, venturing out of his rooms in the middle of the night for— elfy nefarious things, probably.

“Did you misplace something?”

Julius is not, technically, supposed to be out of bed yet.

He's been given a pair of crutches for emergencies, but he is prepared to attest with a straight face that he will set his room on fire if he's not allowed to leave it, and then it will become an emergency, so that's almost the same thing.

Since he's up, he thinks he's overdue to check in. (Should have talked to Myr, he'd meant to, it was all just...)

From the doorway, he says, "I'll go if you want, I just wanted to... I intended to help, with the ritual. Before my foot was..." No good verbs for that one. "Do you need anything?" Send the temporarily lame man to fetch it, go on.

He's not vain enough—in this specific way, at this particular time—to think that the plate was aimed at him, though he also wouldn't be especially surprised if it had been. He's also not unshakeable enough that he doesn't flinch away from the shattering sound, arms a quarter of the way up to shield his face before he registers that it's both too late and largely unnecessary. The worst damage is a spray of ceramic dust on the shoulder of his clothes.

But he preferred his clothes without any white dust on them, so he gives Casimir a tetchy look that isn't even slightly tempered by sympathy. Or self-aware empathy. Punching people is clearly superior to throwing plates. The plate didn't do anything wrong.

He plucks the cloth at his shoulder to jolt the pottery loose, and says, "Are you done?"

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."

He looks at the position of the moon in the sky as he approaches the Gallows, frowning. It's late. Darktown had kept him for longer than he'd wanted, and now he's hoping it's not too late for him to check on Casimir. Any worries about waking up the man are dashed away at the sight of the man already partly out the window. He freezes, breath catching as he tries to figure out what to say as he reaches for the staff on his back, wondering if he has enough energy to cast enough ice to keep Casimir from falling to his death.

"Casimir?" His voice is higher-pitched than usual; he's a little afraid. It's a long fall down and reasons to step out are everywhere in Thedas. "Can you take a step back? I'm here to talk, or be quiet company, whatever you'd like."