open + closed;

[grindset]

WHO: Viktor + Abby + Bastien + Edgard + Ellis + Mobius + Richard + Stephen + Tony
WHAT: catch-all for November
WHEN: now, kind of, but also whenever
WHERE: around the Gallows, particularly the library and Research division workroom
NOTES: Open to all/any, wildcards and tweaks welcome. Will match tag format. Content warning for terminal illness in some threads; will avoid on request. Also!! Hit me up if you want to share a job.

Nighttime cracks an eye to gloaming dawn, to a fog moving at a steady crawl between the Gallows and Kirkwall proper, like it's a huge vessel passing by, like it's going somewhere. Fleeing the sun, maybe. A futile effort.

Viktor likewise cracks an eye, two eyes, squints through a fog receding. He raises his head, wipes his mouth, drags a little reading glass on a chain into the gutter and shuts the book around it. On Astrariums, the cover says. Has he ever put his head down 'just to rest' and not ended up warping at least one page with biological humidity?


Since no one's kicked him out of it—or at least had any success to date, should they have tried—this single side room on the lowest floor of the library has fully evolved into a combination office and living space. From it Viktor emerges with crazy hair and an armful of other books, squinting and snuffling and stiff, taps over to the return cart stationed nearby, and adds them to his prior deposits. He then leaves with the cart; his crutch, leaned out of the way, stays behind.

From there he moves slowly between aisles, stopping here and there to slide a book into place, or to leave it out conspicuously so someone who climbs ladders can put it back where it lives. Once in a while he'll pause with a hand on the shelf to yield to a coughing fit, or else to wait for some other silent thing to pass, before moving on.

No one asks him to do this, he just does it.

Other times, he may be found on any library floor, or back in his ('his') little side room, either busy at the table, or asleep on the settee. (Or asleep at the table. Again.) The door is often open, sometimes left unlatched and open a crack.

On rare occasions he may be found on the library's stone balcony, either sitting alone on a bench (also stone), or leaning on the balustrade (is anything not made of stone here) to look out over the sea, nursing some private melancholy.


Later, when the tower begins to sound like it's waking up, Viktor makes the climb to the seventh floor and assumes his spot in the Research workroom. Settles his bony backside on the stool. Spins a dry pen around his thumb while he thinks.

It looks like he's pondering some deep mystery; what he's thinking, really, is that it's annoying that no one exists here who can check his work on this page or the pages beneath it. (Annoying, upsetting, a constant low ache.) No one needs to check that half of his work. It's fine. He knows it's fine. Still—

Should any be present, he might ask of someone he knows has worked with local runes,

"Can I run something past you?"

Or, of a rifter, or else anyone he's hardly spoken to,

"How well versed are you in the native runic system?"

Or it's any other day and he's just toiling away in here like anyone else might be. Coworkers will have found he tends to respond at least lukewarmly to working chatter, and that if he doesn't want to be interrupted, they won't have to guess—they'll know.


The sound of coughing follows him everywhere: a herald of his arrival, a sign of his otherwise quiet presence, a dry barking down the hall.

Comments

[nonvenomous]

“Much of our understanding comes from the first person accounts of Rifters the Venatori tortured with lyrium.”

So this research has already done some running.

Richard closes his eyes.

He breathes in.

The hiss of his exhale is sibilant with prayer, recognizable for its rhythm, barely given voice and in a language only he knows. Warmth radiates from his touch, buzzy, numb, smoothing some of the crunch out of chapped lungs. It’s subtle, a rise and ebb.

“What did she tell you?”

[grindset]

That little nugget of information doesn't appear to disturb him. No, he knew. And there are more immediate concerns deserving of his excitement, the flicking of his widening eyes, the way his jaw goes slack behind his lips. Wait is an absurd thing to want to say, but he didn't know they'd started. Hardly any visible preparation, just a long whisper, and—

"Sh- she,"

The heat now blooming into his body softens his thoughts, pulls the rest of that sentence apart in a long taffy string. His focus is dancing somewhere in the middle distance; if he could turn his gaze physically inward and watch it move through him, he would.

"Everything," is soft with the care he's taking not to move overmuch—even his lungs, which push and pull in stuttering puffs in spite of the strange, subtle crackling that urges him to fill them deeply. In case it matters. "She told me everything, I've read everything."

[nonvenomous]

Everything.

Pat pat. The flat of Richard’s hand echoes the thud of Viktor’s heart for just a beat, reassurance well-timed to follow healing he had to have felt taking hold.

“I can push further if you like.”

It’s been a quiet day. It’s been a quiet week. Dickerson's been healing nugs. The odds of him needing a reserve for an unforeseen assault seem low.

“If nothing else, relieving your symptoms will give you an opportunity to rebuild your strength while we assess the rate of their return.”

props this thread up in a beach chair with sunglasses on

[grindset]

That Dickerson's been healing nugs might excuse him for patting his patient like a small creature. One does take on reflective habits.

Too caught up to register something so petty, Viktor nearly treads on the explanation with his answer:

"Yes." Restrained, then—if hardly less breathless— "As far as you can."

Not as far as comfort would dictate, or experience, or reason. This is what he was working for. It stole sleep from him, it steadily shrunk his life, condensed the entire world down to a single room, a single workbench, a single faceted construct. In his mind he sees the shape of it, the moving facets, the gentle bobbing, calm as a swimmer on the sea, throwing wispy streams of light. In a silent room he can hear its chiming and whispering, its soft axial clicks.

As his aches ease, as his joints seem to swell with warmth and then bleed relief, his knuckles grow white on the crutch and the stool's edge. His heart is hammering. He's seized in the sense of building, rising, in increasingly urgent anticipation of a fall—even after witnessing the little miracle minutes ago, he's attended the cycle of bloom and wither too many times to shed that fear entirely.

And yet, if this were being meted to him in sips, he would snatch it from the healer's hand and drink it all.