[OPEN] The Stars, The Moon, They Have All Been Blown Out

[hearthebell]

Who: L Lawliet and YOU (some open prompts, some semi-open)
When: Octeuril 21 through the end of the month
Where: Around Geardagas
What: Waking up to find that he doesn't have permanent severe brain damage is tempered by realizing and processing that his Bonded actually does.
Warnings: References to violent events, angst, will update if necessary



A. Octeuril 21, The Cottage (Open to residents, visitors and healers)

[It's been a week since Myr's desperate attack had thrown blackout curtains over L's senses and thoughts, further complicated by the violent fundamental alteration of his Bonded. He'd received prompt healing to his head and ribs that made the overall prognosis hopeful, and has been cared for and kept comfortable enough, but the fact of the matter is that Connor woke up, and then the SQUIP, but trailing behind them, L just didn't. Frequent doses of healing magic can help, but not change, the fact that the brain is complex and fragile, and rebuilding and repairing it can take time with even skilled and careful intervention.

For seven days and nights, he's been sleeping it off, recuperating in the quiet and subtle ways that make the biggest collective difference. Eventually, the culmination amounts to "enough", and with no trigger, catalyst or warning, he sits up in bed with no memory of how he got there.

So, start from the beginning.

Who? The SQUIP. Rich. Niles, Michael, Jeremy, Connor and Justine. Myr.

What? The Bond is different. The Bond has changed. The SQUIP has changed.

Where? Just outside. There was blood on the pavement.

When? Too long ago. So much has happened.

Why? It had to be stopped.

How? Fingertips explore the tender place where a skull was broken, has begun to mend in earnest. Clear enough, somehow... with no small measure of disquietment, L understands that he should probably be a vegetable. Someone, or several someones, have been working on ensuring that he woke up with the one thing he couldn't live without intact. How long is the list of names? How many people does L theoretically owe his life to, now?]

Is someone there?

[A week in bed has him anxious to get to his feet again, but... oh, slow, it's a head rush just to put them on the floor while he remains seated. He's hungry, and though either magic or gentle attentive hands have been keeping his body free of grime, he wants to bathe badly.]

Please tell me what's happened.

[He'll settle for anyone, the first person he lays eyes on. Friend or foe, he has to know; he isn't usually the last, this way.]

B. The Coven (Open)

[Getting back to some semblance of an ordinary life means returning to old familiar habits. The things that L's grey matter remembers so well it's second nature are, quite simply, folding into the sanctuary of committed study, and while the new and far more human SQUIP needs him in ways it didn't used to, that's still overwhelming. Latching onto L as a fellow human who can guide it through this transition is a mistake; whether or not it's a birthright, L was never very good at being human. It's the reason he considered a machine safe, and now that it's distraught and tormented and volatile, all on account of its reaction to his injury.

Books and scrolls are stacked high at his side, and he's working on a new set of runes. A jeweler's magnifying lens is held against his eye as he carefully etches them into pieces of scrap metal bent into the crude shape of a ring. These are just practice goes, of course, but some of them are promising. He places them in one pile; a far larger pile of rejects is littering the floor around the legs of his chair.

He glances your way, shoulders curling, seeming to grow a touch more protective of his work. Lately, he can only assume that others want to take things from him that bring him some small semblance of happiness.]

C. The Sly Seadog- Samuin (Open)

[Then, of course, there are the things that are not familiar at all. A mind is more than just a collection of memories and compiled facts; it has to adapt and respond and arrange data into solutions, and while working in a controlled and quiet environment is one way to test that, L can't think of a better scenario than this one to put himself through his paces.

The SQUIP can't help him the way it used to. He feels, in many ways, like a child about to cross the street for the first time without holding his caretaker's hand.]

Buy me a shot of liquor.

[He's addressing you. Maybe you know each other and he genuinely feels you owe it to him; maybe you're strangers and he is just testing the baseline for any kind of natural charisma he may possess in this capacity. Either way, he's getting some looks from a few of the bar's rowdier-looking individuals, and deigns to add]

...please.

D. WILDCARD

[Don't see it? Want it? Well, COOL, in all likelihood I do too but just didn't think to include it. Write your own prompt and I'll roll with it, or hit me up on plurk at lexil or on discord at ladylazarus#2235!]

Comments

[hearthebell]

[Patterns and logic can be the cruelest world's safest refuge. It was one of the earliest lessons L learned, and he speaks like someone who's unambiguously telling truth, though necessity dictates it can't always be his habit.

Everyone, he believes, is mad and broken and uniquely miserable. It's just a matter of who hides it the most artfully. He considers himself skilled, passing all of it off as mere eccentricity when there's some devouring beast hidden at the bottom of a black pit... but maybe he's biased. Maybe these things come in degrees and gradients, and he doesn't wear a disguise nearly as clever as he believes he does.

Does Myr ever feel the weight of that disguise? Is it a relief to finally let the mask fall away, even if he seems overcome in a way that L is in no way equipped to comfort with true and graceful compassion?

He's silent for several heavy, thoughtful seconds. Enough time to take another drink, and really give proper thought to how he wants to continue this conversation.]

Why did you have to?

[The assumption, without question, is that it was utterly necessary under Myr's circumstances.]

[faithlikeaseed]

[Compassion would only shatter Myr right now, as a parent's sudden concern can reduce a child to tears over an injury she'd otherwise ignore. Perhaps that shattering would be for the better, or the worse; perhaps there would be something healing in it, or perhaps the knowledge he'd broken down so completely in front of Linden would eat holes in his heart beside those left by how his Circle had soured on him.

But that's a counterfactual, a future that won't happen--yet--not if he can keep walking this slender thread over the Void with his internal gaze averted from its memory of blood and pain and the things that brought him to that point.

(The mask is weighty, but weightier still is being seen for himself and bearing the consequences of it. This is not the place, a part of him dimly realizes; these are not things that can be revealed in a common dockside bar where anyone might hear. And yet...)]

I didn't know how else to stop seeing them.

[It had felt utterly necessary. It had felt logical, well-considered, perfectly rational despite the terror that was otherwise devouring his mind.

He was seeing things no one should have. They wouldn't go away when he closed his eyes, and as eternity expanded to fill the space of heartbeats, he didn't know if they would ever go away.

But without eyes, he couldn't see them anymore. So he'd chosen the simplest way out.

He makes a choked noise to recall it, bending over the bar with his head in his hands and fingers tangled now in his hair. Breathe--breathe, keep breathing, Maker and Andraste, only keep breathing and cling with every bruised fingertip to the here-and-now and not what reaches out to strangle you from the past behind you.]

[hearthebell]

[L's response certainly isn't devoid of compassion, entirely; it's just careful, buttoned-up, controlled. He reins in most of his emotions this way, as well as his responses to emotions, because once one has lost control of that, hasn't he functionally lost control of everything else? He knows that while Myr likely doesn't feel that willful deadening to the extent the detective does, this partial breakdown can't be a source of pride for him. He listens, as neutrally as possible, withholding his judgment, because they've had so many conversations. It's taken this long for even the topic of Myr's blindness and its cause to be broached at all. Therefore, it must be a significant burden, one that Myr was strong to carry so long and so silently.

Maybe it's brave, to take off the mask to this extent. Perhaps its courage that L does not, in fact, possess himself.]

Was the sight of them so much more terrible than the knowledge that they existed?

[It's not a challenge, but a sincere question.]

There are theoretical creatures... Eldritch horrors, ancient and terrifying gods that are supposed to be beyond the comprehension of a human, to the point where just looking at them provokes madness. Is... was that what you're referring to? Or something like it?

[I'm trying to understand, as someone who would look.]

[faithlikeaseed]

[It takes Myr a long, grinding moment to understand what he's being asked and relate it to his experience. Linden's explanation, well-meant, does not help him instantly parse it.

Because he hadn't gone looking. He didn't know they existed, wasn't even sure now they did exist as more than the first and most horrifying symptom of his mind coming apart entirely. Which (he struggles for a fingerhold, a toehold on an incline become increasingly slippery, the abyss yawning wide at his back, his consciousness of it as acute as it is of his pulse in his ears,) perhaps lent some credence to the idea they did exist, somewhere and somehow, because they were so far beyond his own imagining.

Which meant they could come back. Or he could go looking, if he wanted, if he wished so dearly to lose his mind entirely. Maybe this time he'd cut his own throat and that would be kinder, far kinder...]

I didn't know, [all in a rush,] I didn't know they existed. I didn't know they could, I didn't go looking, Maker, I wasn't like that. [True and not; curiosity had led him to worse places. But he could not be seen to have sought them, not when a Templar with a blade waited for mages with that kind of incaution.]

I didn't want to know--Linden, [his voice pitches up, suddenly, distressed and strained,]

I can't, I c--can't do this. [I want so dearly to tell someone and I trust you to hear it, I do, but I'm drowning, Maker save me; I'm drowning and this is holding my head beneath the waves.]

[hearthebell]

[L flinches in a moment of rigid panic, because moments of intense emotion are where he freezes and anesthetizes. He can't engage productively or meaningfully, often, because nothing betrays an inherent hollowness more swiftly than cracking it open and parading it about as exhibit A.

He swallows, weighs his options and moves and ways to not hurt or distress Myr further in these moments. It shouldn't be as difficult as it is... and yet for L, it doesn't even begin to come naturally.]

Finding out that way must have been...

[He's an eloquent man, having a difficult time finding the right word. It's frustrating.]

...terrible? You... don't have to say more. If dwelling is causing you pain.

[L's actually caught off guard by the extent he does not want to cause Myr pain.]