[closed] if I could put it back, fill in all the cracks, nothing there I wouldn't change

[libratus]

WHO: Ilias, Kostos, other threads later.
WHAT: This will be a catch-all, starting with Nevarrans being sad-mad about Agathe.
WHEN: Bloomingtide, the night Agathe's assassination is announced, and then continuing through the month.
WHERE: The Gallows, mostly.
NOTES: They might fight

Comments

kostos;

[libratus]

[ Some strife is to be expected. Words to choke on, to push back through bared teeth and less dignified twists of the mouth, but when his voice turns sharp across the crystals, Ilias sweeps his into a drawer and starts to walk instead.

Somewhere along the way, he finds a bottle. Farther, he finds Kostos.

Glass clinks against stone as he slumps down on a bench in the courtyard beside the other mage, a little like he's daring Kostos to object to his right to this half of it. His jaw is tight, the wine barely beginning to do its work, and if he has to ask anyone's permission about anything right now-- well. He won't be.

After a beat, he manages instead: ]

If they allow wine in the Circles, do you think it will be better or worse than this?

[exequy]

[ Kostos is considering taking that dare, but while he's considering, he says, ]

Better.

[ The Circles were a lot of things, but they weren't poor. The carrots that accompanied all of the sticks were Orlesian cut and well-seasoned. In his experience. ]

What do you want?

[ Done considering, then. He's not currently drinking, because he's already drunk as much as he's willing to drink and left his bottle, half-full, on the ground beside his feet. ]

[libratus]

A place to sit.

[ --is more petulant than necessary only if necessary doesn't include feeding the restlessness that's brought him out here in the first place.

Lifting the bottle again, with a sharp sort of quirk of the mouth, ] Why, are you the arbiter of proper wallowing now?

[exequy]

I'm the arbiter of fuck you, [ Kostos says—look, debates aren't his strength, even fully sober, ] and fuck your opinions, and I was fucking here first.

[ Is that enough fucks. Maybe it should have been fuck your fucking opinions. ]

[libratus]

Because you know so much about me and my fucking opinions, is that it?

[ Adding that extra fuck in for you, yw. For good measure: ]

Maker forbid you stop being an ass for five minutes and consider we might have anything in fucking common.

[exequy]

[ Kostos doesn't say anything.

It isn't a mature choice, because it's accompanied by what's probably one of his more insufferable asymmetrical eyebrow raises and an air of skeptical expectation, like go on, dazzle him with their commonalities.

Not that it actually counts as stopping being an ass, but if it did, it definitely wouldn't last five minutes. ]

[libratus]

[ Ilias— falters.

Considers, for about a tenth of a second, how he would even explain this. The roiling in veins. The stupid hope for a world that made sense again and the way its sudden but inevitable evaporation makes him want to crawl out of skin, or bruise it trying. How if he has to spend another minute listening to the opinions of people who've never so much as set foot in Nevarra, he might scream — and if anyone else tries to be gentle with his barely earned feelings about it, he definitely will.

None of which he imagines Kostos gives a fuck about. (That, too, is the point.) ]

Don't give me that look. [ is what he says instead. ] If I wanted sympathy, I would have sat next to someone else.

[ Misery, though — something to bite at that'll bite back, is it so much to hope they both want that? ]

[exequy]

[ That’s what I thought, says the flash of smug satisfaction in his face—something in common his ass, unless the war was being fought in Nevarra all that time and no one told him—which might have been more than a flash if it hadn’t been required to immediately make room for choler when Ilias keeps talking. ]

Of course, Speaker. Whatever you want. [ He’s reconsidering how much he’s willing to drink, and he bends down to retrieve his bottle without otherwise moving from the bench, because it’s his. He was here first. ] I’ve been sitting here for an hour hoping an entitled fuckhead [ technical term ] would come tell me what to do.

buries timestamps in the dirt

[libratus]

[ The hiss of air between teeth is too stung for a laugh, mouth too sharp for a smile. Entitled fuckhead might not even be terribly inaccurate, if he's honest, but more importantly, it lands true enough to bruise an ego, and right now, there's a certain terrible satisfaction to be found in that. ]

If that is what interests you, Enchanter, you only have to ask.

[exequy]

[ Inneundo is frequently a quick way to his good side, if not quite his heart, but where Ilias is concerned the distance is to great to cross, and his snort doesn't contain any traces of good humor. ]

I almost want to see you try, [ he says, more confident than warranted that Ilias wouldn't be able to handle him, exactly as confident as warranted that the suggestion isn't genuine, ] but not half as much as I want you take your mysterious smug fucking opinions and go fuck yourself with them— [ a pause to drink, but he continues with half a mouthful ] —somewhere else.

[libratus]

[ It isn't genuine, nor meant to earn him any affection; more the opposite, in some reckless, haphazard sort of way, and it occurs to Ilias he might get what he wants out of Kostos's temper all the same if he just keeps pushing -- but this hardly seems to be helping Kostos the way it's helping him. And it's barely helping him.

So he takes one last stubborn sip of his own bottle, then moves to push himself from the bench.

Pauses, before he quite leaves. ]

It's not a mystery, Kostos. The people I love are just as fucking likely to live to see the inside of a Circle as the ones you do.

[ Which is to say: not very. He sounds tired. They might not have a lot in common, but neither of them is out here mourning their own fate. ]

[exequy]

[ Maybe Ilias is a better person than he is—a thought he doesn’t entertain explicitly, half-informed and half-drunk, but one that wouldn’t surprise him exactly, like finding a bruise in the morning where he fully expected a bruise to be, just maybe not so startlingly dark. Of course Ilias is a better person than he is, fuck.

Because he is mourning his own fate, among a dozen other things. They aren’t going back to the Circle, they’re going back to war, and after five years of it, the only kind of freedom he’s known, he still can’t watch a man die without feeling like the Maker has broken His silence just to reach down a great, invisible fist to try to press his soul out of his lungs in recompense and let it run through His fingers into the void, and he’d only wanted to go home.

—anyway, that stokes a flare-up, an old anger for anyone who didn’t show up, who had their own plan, where the fuck were you when they were running us through in the desert. It’s half-hearted and blunted with misery but still severe enough that he throws his quarter-full bottle sideways to clunk against the edge of the bench and slosh uselessly near Ilias’s feet. ]

Then do something about it.

[ He never swears in Nevarran. What would his grandfather say. But you fucking asshole is implied by the tone. ]