closed; in dread i looked up once more

[sarcophage]

WHO: Ilias + Leander
WHAT: !!!!!
WHEN: right the heck now
WHERE: The Gallows
NOTES: these characters tend to go real dark real fast. will add warnings as needed.

As far as either of them are concerned, it's been just another day in a sequence of days, all equally unremarkable in their shared undercurrent of suspense. Of anxiety. Awareness of proximity, indecision, avoidance. Secrets pressing at thinning seams. Just another day of the same.

A phylactery could prevent this. Even a homemade phylactery produced in secret by a couple of clever young men (idiot boys) at the height of their romance (hormones) could prevent this. But unless Ilias has made a habit of carrying it around with him, and unless he has decided—unwisely, and very coincidentally—to observe it while he travels through populated common spaces on his way to the kitchen, he'll have no way of knowing.

Leander has made no such habit, himself. And that is why, instead of a precision encounter, he wanders straight into an accident. It's as easy as walking through a doorway. Just one doorway, and there he is, same height (but somehow taller), same shape (only stronger), same colours (dark and tan and grey), same face and eyes and No, no no no, this isn't how it's meant to be, there are too many people here, it's too fucking early—

Absurdly, ridiculously, he does precisely the opposite of what he intended to do all along, and might have done in any other circumstance:

He runs.

Not literally. No flurry of fabric or clattering footsteps. Just Leander, a familiar silhouette in a doorway, thinner and paler than before, but very alive, very there—and gone again before either brain can fire a rational impulse.

Comments

[sarcophage]

[For Leander, forgiveness has always been a certainty, won easily by softened features and sorrowful eyes, or a few shyly spoken words. It's a tool. A weapon. A game, bait to be dangled, to delight in the way a person's face changes when finally they see the void where mercy should be. It isn't something he's had to cultivate for himself.

At a glance, knee-jerk, the directive is unappealing. If you were anyone else—he'd turn his back on the door and the glimpse of what lay beyond it.

But this isn't anyone else.

Still,]

I'll consider it, if you'll do the same.