faderift | [open & closed] and when that day comes

"A brick, Barrow..."

She doesn't keep touching the lump for any longer than she has to; once she's confirmed that it's there, and is huge, she retracts her hand. It's fine and Clarisse will be fine. Demigods have thick skulls and heal quick — she takes her spot with a sigh, clearing her throat with a grimace. Her mouth tastes real bad. It's going to be good to get the blood off her face, and swirl water around her teeth and tongue.

"What's the worst injury you've ever had? ... Not counting anything here." Death was the worst injury here. Hard to top that one.

Clarisse twists her lip, thinking, and starts to wipe away the blood on Abby's face. She starts at her chin, working her way up slowly so she doesn't bump her hand against Abby's nose.

"Once I was near the top of the lava wall at camp and a boulder clipped my shoulder. I fell off and broke like four ribs and smashed the shit out of my face on the way down." As far as injury stories go, it's kind of lame, because it wasn't like it happened while she was doing something heroic, but the thing is, if a Greek monster hurts you badly enough for it to become your "worst injury ever" story you're probably dead anyway.

She dabs the gauze under Abby's nose, trying her best to be gentle. "What's yours?"

"Fuck," Abby says in sympathy, wincing — then adding, soft, "Not you." Not her hand or gentle daubing with the gauze to get the blood off her skin, because in that Clarisse is completely gentle and attentive. She reacted to thinking about having four broken ribs. Most Abby has ever broken was two.

"Uhhh..." Then she's quiet, thinking for a moment. Broken bones are bad but not worst, and she's had some gnarly gym-related injuries before but nothing that kept her off her feet for too long.

Eventually, shrugging as if it isn't that big a deal, she says, "Got caught by the Seraphites while I was in their territory — I told you about them, right? The death cult freaks. Anyway, they knocked me out and tried to hang me. And gut me. In that order."

Uhh... "You've mentioned them," Clarisse says, before adding, "Isn't gutting someone after you hang them kind of overkill?"

Like, she's into overkill as a general concept, just not when it pertains to hurting people she cares about. Doesn't matter that it was however many years ago now, she's still frowning as she wipes at the last of the blood under Abby's nose.

"How'd you get away?"

"Yeah," Abby deadpans, "I think it was a sex thing for them."

Kind of a flippant reply in the face of the actual number of bodies she saw blood and gutless, dangling from ceilings, but sometimes jokes are the only way forward through it. She rubs her neck without realising, around the spot where the rope had bit in. Clarisse is pretty much done mopping her up and she has a little fucked up wish then, that there had been more blood and Clarisse's hands would have a reason to keep moving across her face all gentle like that, but — alas.

"That's when Lev and Yara showed up. They got me down. Well — Yara did, Lev didn't want to at first. Thankfully she convinced him."

A snort, even though it feels like it vibrates right through her already achy brain. "You're funny."

Clarisse remembers Lev. Abby's brought him up before, talked about him like he was a friend. Yara is a name she can't place. She doesn't think Abby's talked about her yet, but it's not necessarily strange for that to be the case. Live in Thedas for a while and it sometimes feels impossible to describe people and places from home. Not because they aren't important. They're just not relevant anymore.

The realization makes her feel a little sad—there are all these people and places and things from home that they'll never talk about here. "Is Yara another friend of yours?"

"Yeah," Abby says, her tone light and even. Her hand closes up on her own knee in a gentle fist. She says, "She was Lev's older sister. She died, she — was killed by the leader of my old group."

And it still hurts. Still feels like she failed Yara, or like she could only choose one of them to help and she picked Lev so that meant Yara couldn't make it in turn. Abby doesn't know if it's ever gonna stop feeling like that but at least she can finally talk about it to people she thinks should know.

"Oh, shit." Clarisse places the bloody rag aside, intending to deal with it later, and hoists herself up onto the bed beside Abby, letting their legs brush each other.

She still doesn't know the whole story around Abby's situation back home. That there was some kind of turf war happening is clear, but there are lots of smaller details that have never come up. She supposes they don't really matter much in the end, and Abby clearly wanted out.

"She was just a kid, huh." What else is she supposed to say? Sorry? Like that would make it better, or something.

"Yeah."

Yara was basically his guardian in lieu of their mother but that didn't change the facts: she was a kid, and Lev was even younger. Abby shrugs her shoulder. "I didn't even really know her that well."

Not that that really matters in the apocalypse but it's hard to explain — not that she thinks Clarisse won't get it but that she can't really find the words. You're close because you have to be, you need back-up and to be able to count on each other in the moment. You might not even really know each other's names. It makes her smile a little, remembering. "Her and Lev called me 'wolf' for ages. They had funny names for everything — they called the infected 'demons'. And Lev called my flame thrower a dragon weapon."

Clarisse reaches up and scratches gently at the side of her neck, thoughtful. The flame thrower thing makes sense. And the infected? "They were pretty demonic. I think in Greek we would call them vrykolakas. But they're undead, and kind of similar to vampires, so it wouldn't exactly fit."

Not that it matters. She's just thinking out loud.

"It sucks we can't like... bring people with us, when we come here," she says after a minute. "If we're just dreams, or whatever, and we brought stuff here with us, what's the difference?"

"Vrykolakas," Abby repeats under her breath, mimicking Clarisse's pronunciation as best she can. She actually enjoys it whenever she takes a moment to throw random Greek into her sentences.

"Yeah," she says after a moment, one she spends wanting to reach out and touch the spot where Clarisse was scratching at her neck. She wants to slide her hand up and cradle the back of her head, be gentle with her, but she doesn't want to bother the big lump on it either so it's probably better if she keeps to herself right now... Then, as if compromising, she puts a hand on Clarisse's knee and leaves it there, thumb brushing a little half circle up and down. "It doesn't make sense. And it's — weird. When I got here and found Ellie, it felt like it wasn't fair."

That she got to be in Thedas. That Lev didn't. She looks at Clarisse. "Who would you bring, if you could?"

"Makes sense." It would be like showing up here and finding... Luke, or somebody. Clarisse wasn't around when Ellie and Abby arrived, she missed all that, but she doubts she would've handled that any better than they did.

Abby's hand on her knee is nice. The warmth is a distraction from the pain in her head, and the way Abby's thumb brushes a C into the fabric is weirdly soothing. Or maybe she's just concussed, whatever.

"My friend Silena," she says, in answer to the question. "She died, though, a couple years before I came here." And if she came to Thedas now, there would be even more time separating them. Silena would show up seventeen, but Clarisse would be in her twenties. It's weird to think about it like that.

Abby makes a little sound in response, some quiet understanding. She squeezes Clarisse's knee. Silena hasn't ever come up in conversation before and that omission says everything, really, but Abby lets the answer sit for a moment between them before she asks. "What was she like?"

She's got a picture in her head of another young demi-god. Not a daughter of Ares', because Clarisse would have called her a sister, so a daughter of somebody else.

The first thing most people said about Silena was that she was beautiful, and it was true. She was stunning, and everyone had a crush on her, but Clarisse doesn't want that to be the first thing Abby hears, because it really has nothing to do with her friend, everything to do with her friend's mother.

Instead, she says, "She was a total neat freak. Everyone would whine when she got picked for cabin inspection because she paid attention to all the little details everyone missed." Like Clarisse, who'd barely stick her head in the doorway to check whether beds were made before moving on. "She liked... girly stuff, like flowers and hot chocolate and painting her nails. And she was the best pegasus rider at camp. She used to teach new campers how to ride."

Now that she's talking about Silena it almost feels like she can't stop, like she's going to word vomit every little thing that pops into her head, because it's been so long since she's really stopped and let herself remember these things. Abby's hand is a warm weight on her knee, squeezing. "She was really fucking nice. Not like me at all. Like... when you told her things she actually paid attention to what you said, even if it was stupid and boring. She was nice, and smart, and she was going to go to NYU with her boyfriend and she was really excited about it. She told me I should go to college too. She—"

She died because of me.

[open & closed] and when that day comes

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cw discussion of hanging

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cw discussion of hanging/cult murder

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