Light of May ::: an original roleplay

Who: Nico.
Where: A hotel in town.
When: Morning.

It was like something clicked in his brain, a release under a sudden pressure, and it was as simple as being asleep one moment and awake the next. Air caught in his throat as he pushed up reflexively beneath the sheets and blankets of a bed that was not his own, a fact he knew immediately and did not particularly care for, and his dark keen eyes scanned the room. The shades were drawn but not securely covered, on the wrong side of the room from where they normally were. The furniture was not that which had picked out for him. Items were missing, nowhere to be seen. The scent was all wrong. Something was missing.

Someone was missing.

Nico removed himself from the bed with light easy movements, pushing his dishevelled hair from his face with steady hands as he studied his surroundings quickly but with a small, simmering sense of disquiet. This was not his room. When he glanced past the shades to the world beyond he was too high up to be in the house that he belonged in. This was wrong. All wrong.

There were his clothes, draped over the back of an armchair that he did not recognise beyond the faintest recollection that told him he must have consciously entered the room and as he stood gazing at it scraps and shards of memory came back to him: fear and panic and confusion, leaving the house without a word, coming here to this hotel, buying a phone. That phone was on the desk against the wall, connected to the wall by a cable obviously meant to charge the battery.

Nico shook his head, turning his eyes from it and looking around the room again. This made no sense. This wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Was it?

His hands found their way to his head, either side, his fingers burying in his thick hair as his eyes closed and he tried to put the pieces together but they wouldn’t fit, misshapen sections of mismatched puzzles that had no business going together. Nico didn’t know what he was doing here, where to go or what to do, whether the phone needed to be destroyed or if he should keep it. Was he sorry he was alone or quietly glad?

With a strangled sound of frustration in the base of his throat he moved to the door leading into the bathroom and shut it behind him, breathing with increasing speed in his building confusion and distress as he stepped into the shower, of all places, and turned on the water. That made no sense either, he hadn’t paused to take off the shorts he had worn to bed, but the water that streamed down from the shower head and run through his hair and over his skin helped to shut out some of the questions that were filling his skull and threatening to either deafen him or just drive him mad.

It was a temporary solution though, a Band-Aid on a bullet wound, and there was only one thing Nico could think to do, something he went on to do as reflexively as someone might perform a basic task, something they had done hundreds or thousands of times before.

Without letting himself pause to think about it first he took a deep breath and opened his mind to reach out for that of another. Whatever was going on he couldn’t do it alone.

Who: Rebekah and Nico
Where: A cell phone store
When: Mid-morning

Not having a phone made absolutely no sense to Rebekah. She didn't even want to begin wondering how she had managed on her trip without it, mostly because whenever she tried her head got fuzzy and eventually, it would start to ache. She had tried. At this point Rebekah could only attribute it all to a weeks long bender somewhere exotic - maybe Cabo? definitely somewhere warm. It was her type of place, and it would explain why she hadn't taken her favorite boots with her. There was no need for boots in Cabo. Not to mention, she knew how to play as hard as she worked...and she worked quite hard. Perhaps she had even lost her phone on said bender. She sure seemed to have lost everything else, given how little she had brought back. That only made sense. She hadn't checked in with work yet, assuming she had also taken a leave of absence, maybe to wait for the results of the grant she had asked for to fund her own research. At least she could distinctly remembering that having been a goal some time ago. In any case, now that she was back there was no reason not to have a phone.

So here she was, looking through the window of the store where she thought she might have had a contract already. At least it sounded more familiar than the others. Instead of talking to shop assistants Rebekah much preferred to compare specifications on leaflets, so she went in, grabbed one and moved out of the way to stand in front of a demo shelf no one was looking at at the moment.

Who: Nico and Zoie
Where: Local playground
When: Afternoon

( There was something about the playground that just called out to her; like something that she had always wanted to do but had never been able to. )

Who: Nico.
Where: His and Gerlinde’s house.
When: Morning.

When he awoke it was with a start, sucking in a lungful of air that felt at the same time too little and too much, his chest heaving for the first few seconds before the rhythm eased and returned to something akin to normal. It was like coming up for air after being held underwater. Disorienting and a little overwhelming, a relief in the purest sense. With dark eyes he scanned the room to find the threat where there was none, the sense of vague foreboding hanging over his head like an ominous storm cloud. There was something nearby that could harm him, something at an uncomfortable proximity that he would do better to have greater distance from, but nothing in the room indicated what. Alone as he was in the room it was impossible to figure out why he felt the tightness of anxiety at the top of his abdomen, a tense discomfort that had him pulling himself from the bed and up onto his feet.

Nico pushed his hair from his face as he moved from the room, his footfalls so quiet they were almost silent. The house was hushed, gloomy for the dark shades closed over every window, his eyes narrowing at the sight of them. Had they always been like that? Was that what was making him feel so disoriented? The clock on his nightstand had said it was morning but there was next to no light in the house. It wasn’t natural for a person to wake up when it was dark, that went against what most people called a body clock, but before he could reach the window and open the dark shutter to let in some light he noticed the door that was ajar, alongside the same side of the house as his own room.

There was someone in there. Though there was no sound coming from within Nico knew there was someone else in there.

With one hand he gingerly eased the door open a little more to look through, his body poised to jump back and away. When the door was wide enough so that he could see through the gap it was easy enough to pick out the shape of someone beneath the sheets of a bed within. A woman, small and light.

Gerlinde. The name was provided in a whisper from the back of his brain along with a low humming sense of biting disapproval. Dislike. Distaste. Nico felt his expression shift accordingly and stepped back from the door just as silently as he had approached it, looking around at the house's interior. Gerlinde was someone he didn’t like, didn’t trust. How long had they been sharing a house? Why? ( Had she done something to make up for the mistakes of the past? )