middaeg | [closed]

Entry tags:

[closed]

Who: Henry

morbide & Soren

silentsavant
When: Noveuer 28th
Where: Shopping District
What: It's a quest log

It's a promise for 1,000 cunes per hour... and for a bodily function! But as Henry stabs himself for the umpteenth time with a needle and thread, sewing gems and jewels onto the surface of a crisp jacket, he thinks about how hard that simple demand really is — both for to perform, and for him to witness in earnest.

Attaching gems is only half the price promised for genuine tears, and Henry's in a bit of a financial bind. After finding himself ill and stuck behind the Coven's doors for the better portion of the month, he's hurting for money. (If only he were literally hurting, he thinks to himself with a chuckle. Maybe that'd get him to cry! ...Probably not.) The illness was with poor timing: earlier in Noveuer, he'd promised a ("perfectly legitimate") vendor a large sum of money for an excessive purchase. Naturally, he failed to follow through.

And failing to follow through has promise of consequences, he found.

He glances out the window with a sigh. Makes a sloppy effort to attach another gem. Stabs his bloodied finger again. This time, he feels nothing — unfortunately. Feeling the pinprick of the needle is really hit or miss with his nerve sensitivity, dulled and destroyed after years of routine torture. If he hadn't gotten sick, he might've been able to amass the funds to pay off his latest dubious purchase in a timely manner! Now, if he could only just cry for a few hours...!

There must be a way to earn that 1,000. Henry turns his attention back to the interior of the shop, scanning the tops of the heads belonging to other dedicated workers. While some embellished hats and sashes with feathers, others dutifully sobbed into glass beakers. The shop's full of perfect strangers save for one exception. He makes out someone with a familiar hairstyle, though he can't quite remember where he's seen it before...

Henry shifts from his bench with resolution and approaches with stealth, a mischievous smile on his lips. When Soren's shoulder is just within reach, he gives him a light tap.

"Heya, stranger. You having any luck with those waterworks?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Yeah, but neither did you." He peels the papery husk off of the onion in pieces. "I bet taking a bite out of it would make you cry..."

Yeah, no way will Soren eat a raw onion. Henry places it on the work table between them, just in case. Even as he spills his thoughts, Henry's forced to consider why he's still here — but it remains the same reason as why he came over in the first place. He doesn't think Soren would like to hear his answer, though, so he avoids it still.

"When's the last time you cried?" he asks, a sudden shift in tone from joking to light and curious.

"It hardly matters," blurts Soren before he has time to seriously consider the answer, eyes falling to his lap. With that said, his mind sinks into the recent past to discover that there had been a number of times he had succumbed to tears. Most of them revolved around the possibility of never seeing Ike again, influenced by a variety of other variables that worked with that longing in tandem: full moon consequences; extreme pain; the Looking-Glass House on a lonely night; waking from a nightmare or a wonderful dream. In truth, he can fathom why Henry would pose this question. That doesn't mean he won't be guarded about such personal information.

"..."

Feeling simultaneously frustrated and played into his hands, he procures his knife from within the layers of his clothes and snatches the onion from Henry's hand to carve a pattern of slits all around the diameter of it, holding it close to his face while he does with irritated focus drawn into his features. If he's going to bring himself to tears before anybody, he'd rather it be blamed on a vegetable and not excavated by playing into his emotional vulnerabilities.

"Fine. I'll demonstrate what I mean. If I'm proven wrong today, at least I will be normal."

Henry grins, balling his fist against his cheek while he leans into the table to watch Soren's face with rapt attention.

"Yay! He's got knives!" he cheers. It's hard to tell with his smiling, but he studies Soren's knife for a moment, satisfied that he took Soren for a knife-wielding type correctly. He himself's a knife-wielding type, but not in the name of combat or anything. Knives are handy.

"Well until you prove it to me, I just wanna say that I think it DOES matter. I notice that people who cry more are more in touch with their emotions... And stuff. Maybe if you want to cry, you need to be in touch with how you're feeling."

The onion's a diversion. Henry maintains a smile.

A startled sob discharges from the throat of a faun in the midst of a good cry. She gapes in fright at the white-haired witch. This helps provoke the attention of other workers to swarm in the direction she stares, as well as the chipper youth who proclaimed someone "had knives". No one really understands whether they should be curious or alarmed as they catch onto one another's nonverbal cues like a dragon catches the Cwyld. All save the fashion designer, of course, whose rising dudgeon is quite legible on his otherwise smooth and graceful features. He swerves to gather their attention up by doling out loud and insincere compliments to the shimmering beauty of the faun's tears.

"I don't cry well in front of other people," reminds Soren. Which is false, of course, because he's cried all over his best friend before, and it was one of his best memories, actually, and remembering that moment of unrestrained tears surging down his hot cheeks like broken gutters in a rainstorm while Ike's arms sheltered him digs into his chest right where it hurts most. Oh, and he couldn't forget the waterworks show he gave Yako the first time they met during his inaugural full-moon metamorphosis. They'd only really just gotten started acquainting themselves with each other, and Soren found himself drawn to her inner strengths, her natural curiosity, her willingness to play a part in helping others on her journey to solve the problems plaguing this world, and she'd been so generous in her pity just like Ike had been the first time they met in a cruel and scary world, and this world had been cruel and scary in its own ways and Soren had felt similarly alone and resented and she'd been the first hand that reached out to save him from that fate. But she's gone now. A pillar collapsed. He'd been foolish, then.

The emptiness carves into him. It's more tangible than any emotional pain; it's the fresh loss of a Bond and it aches like a healing wound. The painkillers must be wearing down, he realizes as a sharp pang seizes him. His concentration bores too deep just like the pain. He drops his onion. The knife slits his hand, the skin too tough to break.

His eyes gleam as he winces. "Oof... My fingers slipped." He sniffles and bends down to collect it from its sad plummet.

Even for someone like Henry, it's clear to him when to clam up and let Soren do his thinking. He becomes a quiet observer, one who has a handicap compared to the likes of Olivia or Ricken in that he feels like he's not observing anything at all, not with his eyes anyway. Instead, it feels like he's privy only to the ghosts of Soren's emotional turbulence. He wishes he had the ability to read people like some of the Shepherds do.

But for what he lacks in visual reading, he can feel in ways he can't describe. It's so fleeting that Henry thinks he's imagined the emptiness out of his own heart. The two might have enough of it to create a black hole, sitting next to each other like this.

Though there is no blood, Henry hums at the slip-up. He was expecting to see red.

"You didn't hurt yourself?" he asks, tilting his head. He could have sworn he did: if Henry saw anything, it was pain. "Oh, it's those hardy scales to the rescue. Can I see?"

He thrusts his hand out brusquely to show its unmarred surface. The skin is tough, though the surface of his palms more tender and ashen toward the center. It was the side of his thumb that should have wept a deep, metal-reeking red, but the back of his digits are plated like midnight-black gauntlets.

"There's nothing to see," he replies on a thick voice. "Hand me the beaker, please. Be quick."

"Right-o," mumbles Henry, soundlessly sliding the glass of crystalline fluid into Soren's outstretched palm. In the process he gets a look at his thumb: sure enough, it's Soren's transformation as a Monster that protected him from his own distraction. It's unscathed. No blood, no cuts.

(Then why the pain...?)

To carry a knife like that, Henry doesn't think Soren should have made the slip-up for any other reason than a distraction. What really went on in his head that he wouldn't share? But he keeps that question to himself, for the time being. He's a lot less interested in Soren's actual crying, though he knows that's the reason for his demand.

The incomplete monster takes the vial and presses it beneath his eye socket to catch the single tear rolling out. He can practically feel the spike of enthusiasm in the room as their employer rejoices over the production of a fresh dragon's tear. The salty fluid oozes down the side of the glass on a patient journey to the solution below.

"As it turns out, onions do make me cry," he whispers. He thinks of what Mist might say to that if she were present. She wasn't as important to him as Ike, but she certainly mattered to him, mattered the world to Ike as his little sister, the last of his family after the night the Black Knight stole his father from him. She'd been woven into the tapestry of his life, featured on the relief of his mirror in the Looking-Glass House, and wishing he could hear her singsong-voice carry the shock of this 'discovery' somehow encouraged another tear to slip from the other eye. Grooves appear on his expression as he bears the burden of painful emotions on top of the ailment that arose from losing Yako.

"They sure do," agrees Henry, his voice a lot less enthusiastic than the congregation behind them. It's not the same cheery cawing that comes from him usually, but something subdued enough that it could be carried away with the wind. He sits in silence once more, his mind exploring the pitch-black caverns of Soren's dismay — Henry, without a lantern to navigate with. He closes his eyes.

"You didn't hurt yourself with that knife... But I'm pretty much a seasoned veteran when it comes to pain. ...You winced before you cut yourself."

For now, he leaves it as a comment.

Soren's penetrating reptilian eyes bore into Henry's blithe and unassuming ones that squint in perpetual mirth, uncanny and unchanging as a statue even though a nuanced life surely beats within. Those eyes may be squeezed almost shut, but they are keen as a vulture's trained on carrion. It is moments like these that outline the true insight of the sorcerer. No matter is too grave to joke about. He laughs in the face of death and suffering, dons the impression that he is immune to the effects of mortal concerns such as loss, and his childish comportment might belie that sharp eye of his. Here it is communicated to Soren quite clearly that Henry knows his tears have little if anything to do with the onion. The look he flashes Henry suggests he knows that he knows. Then, he sweeps his gaze to the desk cluttered by remnants and patterns and tucks the dissected vegetable behind a mound of textiles.

He's on guard; the witch's curiosity unsettles him. And yet, he feels exposed and appraised as his humanity is cut open in front of him. He collects the other tear from the corner of his eye before it can dampen his cheek. In the solution, a brilliant gem is born. It scintillates in the dark like a dancer's sequins catch and flirt with the scant light of the night and leaves behind an obsidian speckle dusted by a starry finish. His sadness, rendered like the boundless sky that separates him from his whole meaning.

"..."

What does he have to hide? He's human. He hurts, too. That's all his tears reveal: what should be obvious to anyone. Whether he has scales or not will never take that quality away from him.

When Soren doesn't say anything but gives him a look that bores into him, Henry can't quite tell what it all means. He readjusts his legs, uncomfortable with the situation he's in and he thinks, hard, trying to come up with something that might cheer Soren up. Something that might reassure him, or something that might comfort him. Something that might get him to stop looking at him like he's his enemy when he just wants to understand.

Something that might express his own feelings, perhaps.

The only thing that comes to mind is something that makes him uncomfortable. But he opens his mouth before he thinks it through, finding it relevant.

"Somebody once told me... that it's the split-second expressions that people make that betray their truest feelings," repeats Henry carefully, like he's speaking a foreign language. His smile is frozen when he laughs airily. "People like you who can't cry are probably the people who need to cry the most. More than that, in front of somebody to tell you that it's okay. You'll torture yourself to death in your own head if you only cry all by yourself! So I'm glad."

A pause.

"That the onion worked."

Soren got so emotional just then thunking bout the ONE time he hugged ike and cried all his repressed feefees out that he bbroke out into a disney song called, "Let It Go" and started spinning around doing ice bitch shit, which made their employer mad so he paid both henry and soren loads of cunes and told them to leave

just kidding that's, idiotic,

here's the real tag

What the fuck is all of this

Being told that doesn't make it any easier to open up; it only makes him want to push Henry away more. Nevertheless, it cuts away at the stitches holding more of his tightly-contained feelings inside. He doesn't have anyone he can cry in front of here. Not anyone he can come out of it feeling fully resolved. When his tears are done being shed, nothing about his situation will have changed. The universe scarcely takes pity on him. This is his conviction.

"I don't need someone to tell me it's okay," he contests on a wet voice, another tear rolling down his cheek that he moves to capture. "I already know it's okay. But crying won't solve anything... Not really."

Henry pauses, unsure of what to say. Because he's not as equipped as others might be for a situation like this, truthfully, especially when it doesn't pan out as easily as many of the people he's ever talked to. Reassuring Maribelle was a piece of cake when he did it with his own tools, and he was always perfectly fine with grappling with Cordelia's problems...

This is just awkward and uncomfortable. He tried stepping into someone else's approach, someone with more empathetic abilities, and it just made Soren cry harder. Henry huffs. He gives up on trying to be sympathetic. It's too hard, so he'll go back to something more comfortable.

"Nope! It won't," he says simply. "But hey, you're here to make money, right? Maybe you'll get a bonus!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[closed]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject