OPEN - You are broken and callow, cautious and safe

[loversinverted]

WHO: Diabhall and YOU
WHAT: Catch-all - what Diabhall has been up to throughout October. The first layer of the stone mask seems to be eroding....
WHEN: Backdated to span the month of October. What is time, anyway?
WHERE: The Gallows offices and dining hall, a tavern in Kirkwall, and wherever else anyone wants him!
NOTES: Will edit with content warnings as I go - thread starters below. Please let me know if you want something custom for one of your characters!

Starters below!

Comments

[arkitect]

"Wasn't there?"

Mild, but very clearly rhetorical. Running from one's emotions, as opposed to dealing with them, living with them-- he can't really consider it to be anything else besides taking the easy route.

"But if it does fail to remain intact-- well. If you could not handle it then, I doubt you would handle it now, so I suppose at least there will be some awareness of the liability... though it may do you some good in the end, regardless, particularly if you need not fear your patron.

Surely you realize you disregard the memory of whoever you've done this for, to exist in such a state."

[loversinverted]

Diabhall listens, expression still for all its exhaustion, appearing to take no issue with the way he is being spoken about. There is no shame, none at all. He is as he is, and he did what he did, and his only concern now is what to do with what is happening now.

At least, that's how he would like to be...but that last comment visibly needles him, something awfully like a flinch crossing his expression. He shakes his head as if to clear it before sliding his rosy gaze back to Emet-Selch again.

"I am aware. He would not have liked it. But I imagine he would have disliked my death more greatly."

[arkitect]

He observes that shift in expression, idly. It would be easy to leave it alone. To choose not to push.

But how deep does it truly run, he wonders?

"Mayhap so," he says, with a shrug. "They do say none are truly gone until no one is left to remember them... but then one might question whether thinking of someone and feeling nothing at the memory is truly remembering them at all. Certainly it cannot be called mourning, nor love."

[loversinverted]

Another twitch crosses the tired mask of Diabhall's face - like something inside him twisted around in his chest at the word 'love.' There is dissonance, plain to see, between the placid expression and the twitch of Feeling something, anything at all, and it disquiets him.

He isn't acting. He isn't putting up a brave face. The hurt stabs in and then stays stuck in the wound, healed over amongst all the other pins and needles in his heart.

A broken machine who can't fix himself.

"Perhaps it can't. I have only the echoes of sentimentality left in me in the first place."

[arkitect]

Hm. Enough to stir, it seems, but not to fully spark more of a reaction; Emet-Selch watches, he files that away, and once that moment has passed, he doesn't quite linger on it.

There's more he could likely do to try to pick the man apart, but honestly-- he's tired, on the whole. Given no reason for it, he isn't exactly motivated to do so, when the whole situation sparks distaste.

"Then I shall simply hope they had others to remember in your place," he says, with a wave of one hand. "They will have need of it."

[loversinverted]

Dimly, he aches at that statement, somewhere deep inside, but there is only the barest hint of it in his voice.

"He did. But not for a long time, now."

Diabhall breathes in, then out, a slow, shuddering thing as he tries to check in with himself. About what the point of this conversation is in the first place.

"From an outside perspective, Emet-Selch, are you...seeing reactions in me, as we have been talking?"