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I can hear them screaming; Dione Castel (audiomorbid) wrote in nosuchplace,
@ 2008-12-30 21:02:00

Entry tags:

dione castel, max doyle

Friday, November 2, 2007
Who: Dione Castel & Max Doyle
When: Evening.
Where: The shores of Lake Alata'elen
What: Dione is celebrating the deaths of those she cares for.

It had taken Dione a while to walk to Helicharis and return because she was very tired lately. However, she had decided that since she had missed the day of All Saints and honestly there were no graves here for her to visit, at least not the graves of anyone that she knew, that she would find a new way to celebrate what her family considered a holiday.

Why anyone would consider a day devoted to cleaning the tombstones and markers of dead people a holiday was a question that many an American friend of hers had asked. After all, she was an American and such things as All Saints were hardly American holidays like Halloween and Easter had become with their cards and candy. Dione didn't understand how it couldn't be considered a holiday, but that was because while she had been born in America, her family was distinctly French and saw the day as one that was not to be missed.

Her first year in a new place and she had missed it. That bothered her. Curled up in her bed, blankets pulled up to her chin against the slight chill. While she had considered her costume a bit skimpy, she hadn't realized how easily she could get sick from it. However, it had passed after 24 hours, so she wasn't too worried about it. Now she was just a little tired from the whole thing. Either way, she had walked all the way to Helicharis for one express purpose, to get a bottle of wine.

Now what exactly was a woman who didn't drink on a regular basis going to do with a bottle of wine? Well, toast those who had gone before her, including her brother, despite the fact that she didn't want to accept that Dexter was dead. Maybe this would make it easier, if she would include him in those that she celebrated All Saints for? Either way, she had walked all the way to the Wine Bar because it was the place that she knew and walked back with a bottle of red wine. Red wine that would look like blood against the glass.

Blood on glass, a maroon sky with silver stars, the way the cafe looked as Dexter bled out on the floor. Not that Dione remembered what that looked like. Her mind had long since blocked that thought away. No, it would only appear in her nightmares which only made things worse. All Dione could see was memories and many of the memories closest to the surface that had pictures to them were the pictures of her brother's death as her eyes were giving in to the damage and she crawled across the floor to be near to him. Unconscious as his heart stopped, all unaware.

All the way back to her bungalow, alone and quiet. Dexter didn't want to talk though she could feel him there right at her elbow, trying to figure out what exactly she was doing. They were upsettingly separate at the moment. Though he was close to her, Dione was being tight lipped about her plans. One thing he did know quite completely though was the fact that she should not be drinking. Dione was already considered impaired. Why on Earth would she want to make that worse by dropping a bottle of wine on top of it? Yet he didn't question, keeping his own council. Maybe if he didn't start a fight with her, he could convince her later that it would be best not to drink the whole thing? Best not to excite her stubborn streak unnecessarily.

Instead of going back to the bungalow, she went past it to the edge of Lake Alata'elen where she sat down in the sand. Dione had on long pants, a long shirt, and even what might be considered a jacket though it seemed to be a odd thing. Dexter stood looking out onto the lake beyond her, seeing the way the water moved on its own with the moon shining just a sliver of its light down onto things. All they had left was each other.

Two people had died. There was talk of the death while they were in town, it had been hard to miss. A buzz like only town gossip could make. It invaded the head and stayed. Two people had died. Two people who were nice, sweet, friendly, and lovely had been killed. They lived together, yet that hadn't protected them. Dione lived alone. What would stop someone from hurting her? A sickening thought that Dexter did not wish to entertain. Unfortunately, he needed to alert her to the possible problem. Dione wouldn't see it. She was blind to it, literally. Still, he said nothing, choosing instead only to watch her as she sat in the sand, her cane off to one side and the bottle between her crossed legs.

Why are we here? He finally broke the silence between them.

"Because it feels right." The pyres had probably burned out by the time she reached the lake. The souls might have been gone for all she knew.

What does? He sat down next to her, leaving no indention in the sand though he was there with her.

"This place, this time, this action," as vague as one could get. At least she had let someone open the wine for her before leaving town, so that made it easy enough to open again. "I toast to those who have gone before. To those who have prepared away and wait." Dione was not a pagan, but maybe for just a moment she could be one.

italics = French. Dexter uses no quotation marks and cannot be heard by most characters.

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etaequitas
2008-12-31 06:19 pm UTC (link)

There was only one word to describe how Max was currently feeling that night, and it was pissed. Twice he had tried to break into people's houses since he arrived here, and twice he had been caught and managed to escape. The first time it was because he was a good liar, and the second time was because he ran into someone as odd as fuck. Apparently, everyone here had superhuman hearing and could detect all sounds from a mile away. If he ran into one more person who had fucking amazing hearing, he was going to snap.

As for the funeral going on today, Max didn't give a shit about the two women who died. Everyone seemed to be making a big fuss over it, even people who never knew them personally. That wasn't how things worked in the real world. Who gave a shit about two women they didn't even know getting offed in the middle of the night? What was so new about murder, and why was it a big deal to these people? Obviously, none of them ever lived anywhere in the real world before. They wouldn't last a second where Max came from with attitudes like this stinking up the place.

With a beer bottle in hand, which he had lifted from some empty joint nearby, he made his way across the beach. He wore a long black coat to shut out the cold, not that it this was cold weather to him. This was a soft chill, if anything. He took a swig from the bottle in his hand, not watching where his feet were heading or noticing the woman not too far off from him.

The bottle became empty soon enough, and Max swore underneath his breath. There were some waist-high wooden poles sticking out of the ground as if part of some fence, though there wasn't any fence there, and Max slammed his bottle against one of the wooden poles. The glass shattered and spread over the sand, likely to pierce some unsuspecting walker's feet in the morning or sometime tonight as people were coming back from the funeral. Max really didn't care as he threw the rest of the bottle off to the side somewhere.

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audiomorbid
2009-01-01 11:27 am UTC (link)

The ears were to the blind what eyes were to everyone else. They were the first ones to tell there was trouble. So the sound of something smashing got Dione's attention if only because glass had a somewhat distinct sound when it went crash that other objects didn't. It was one thing to drop a beer bottle, another to drop crystal, and a third to drop something ceramic. If you were really listening, most people weren't, you could easily tell the difference. So Dione heard the sound of a bottle breaking.

Instead of calling out and drawing attention to herself, Dione held her breath, subrtracting the sound of her own breathing from the equation of what she could hear. What was out there in the dark beyond the range of her ears?

Dex reacted to her behavior by looking around, but his eyesight wasn't quite good enough to catch the figure in the dark as anything more than that. No facial features nothing, like a shadow moving, or one of those things from the other place that he went to when he faded away from Dione for a few minutes at a time. If he had been breathing and his heart beating, he'd be holding his breath too while his heart raced into a runner's frantic thud. Should he get up and go investigate? Did he want to leave Dione for long enough to do that? If it was something from his side of the line, she wasn't in any danger. She wasn't like Irei, they could frighten her with noises, phantom touches, but not actually enter her body and doing anything worse. However, there was always the chance that this was the killer....

The two were sharing the same basic thoughts, brother and sister in synch as they had been for most of their lives. Dione shifted, carefully, trying not to upset the wine in the process, fingers questing for her cane just inches beyond the edge of her fingertips.

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etaequitas
2009-01-01 03:11 pm UTC (link)

If someone mistook him for a murderer, it wouldn't have been the first time within the last two days since the murders were announced to the public. His attitude wasn't giving anyone some sort of doubt to this assumption, and he stuck out like a sore thumb around all of these happy, shiny people. Though familiar with a life of violence, it wasn't like him to be that way himself. Max only used force when he needed it. Erupting into a tirade or acting out frustrations were normal courses of action for someone who was upset, and these were the only things Max was guilty of committing.

If he had the power of fire, he would burn down the nearest thing he could find on the beach. Stalking to a halt, Max held out his hands and tried to summon as much heat around himself as he could muster. Maybe he could make the air hot enough that he could cause a fire. It wasn't a very likely thing to happen, but Max was just stupid enough to try it at this point.

The heat spread out around him, and he began to walk again, carrying the heat wave with him. It reached such high temperatures that visible water vapor, like thick fog, started to flood the air. The heat wasn't affecting him, but it would affect anyone nearby. They might even think a fire had been unleashed, even if there weren't any flames to witness.

When nothing happened in terms of burning, Max finally dropped his hands, the heat dispersing outward and fading away. "Goddammit!" he yelled, a gust of wind propelling forward away from his form and into the darkness ahead. It wasn't a natural occurrence; it had been something created by Max himself in his disappointment. He wanted to possess something stronger, something strong enough to get back at that asshole, that elemental.

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audiomorbid
2009-01-02 06:48 pm UTC (link)

Well, at the moment, Dione was most certainly thinking of him as the murderer. Dexter was thinking the same as his sibling, though he was starting to wonder since the person didn't seem to notice them. Maybe they could get lucky and escape before he or it noticed what was going on. That would be a wonderful turn of events there. Unfortunately, this apparition was moving in their direction, so whether it had noticed them or not, there was a great chance that it was going to notice them, fairly soon.

Dione, he whispered to her while watching as she tried to reach her cane which had managed to get just out of reach. We need to go.

They both heard the -Goddammit- that was screamed out from whoever that was. Dione cringed, fingertips dragging in the sand to make tiny trenches.

That was when the wind went past. It didn't effect Dexter at all since he didn't quite exist on the human plane and thus couldn't feel hot or cold. Dione however put her hands up to her face in an attempt to stave off the sand that was blowing in her direction, spraying her face, hair, and clothes. If there had been any doubt in her mind as to being in danger previously, those were gone now, blown away by that blast which had to come from somewhere.

Shifting to protect her face, Dione lost where her cane was. Terrified, she finally got up, forgetting about her cane in a moment. Instead, she had the wine bottle in one hand, her other empty but still held up to protect her face.

Dexter had taken to hovering along behind her, waiting for her to start moving. They needed to leave before it noticed them, before things got any worse.

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etaequitas
2009-01-03 02:37 am UTC (link)

Max was so caught up in his own little world that he hadn't noticed the woman sitting in the sand up ahead, not until he saw her getting up from her spot. She looked like she was in hurry, and Max's curiosity sparked as he turned to face her direction. The thought hadn't crossed his mind she was running because of him, and Max reached one of his hands out even though she was far away. "Hey!" Max called out a little forcefully, but not for any bad reason. He was just wondering why she was in such a hurry.

He started walking with a sprint in his step, which broke out into stalking towards her. It didn't take too long for Max to notice the cane in Dione's hand, which he hadn't seen at first. Not many people used canes, except for people who couldn't walk or people couldn't see. From where he stood, Max couldn't make out whether it was a walking problem or a seeing problem. She looked a bit too young for either one, but an accident was always possible, so he quickened his steps towards her to the point that he was almost running but not quite. "Hey, wait up!"

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audiomorbid
2009-01-03 05:45 pm UTC (link)

Dione certainly didn't have a walking problem or even a running problem. Her legs worked perfectly fine. It was her eyesight that was a problem. Either way, when he yelled 'Hey' at her, she finally just bolted. To anyone who knew her, it would have been quite odd to see, as Dione did not run as a general rule. Not being able to see the terrain in front of her made it a patently bad idea. However, when one was scared half to death, bad ideas could suddenly seem like the best ones in the world.

The cane and even the wine bottle were abandoned where she had been, just left to make indentions in the sand as if she cared for them not at all.

Dexter was with her the whole way, hoping to heaven that she didn't step in a hole or something similar on the way back. He'd remember that she had left her cane behind once they were safe behind closed doors, if they made it that far.

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etaequitas
2009-01-04 04:55 pm UTC (link)

Max grew even more confused as he watched her bolt across the sand all of a sudden, leaving the cane behind in the sand. He hurried up to the cane and stooped over to snatch it up, looking it over for a only a minute before his gaze rose to stare out at her figure running up ahead. Who walked with a cane and suddenly dropped it to run? "Hey!" Max yelled, starting to dash again after her. "HEY!"

He might as well return the cane to her, but he had to catch up with her first. Second of all, he wanted to figure out why the hell she was running like this at night.

Just as he was about to yell out that she had dropped her cane, Max saw a dip ahead on the beach steep enough to cause someone to fall if they didn't notice it and just ran into it. His eyesight was good enough to notice it in the darkness, but he wasn't too sure about hers since she was running right towards it. Then again, Max didn't know she couldn't see it and maybe this was all part of some plan. After all, people just didn't leave canes behind unless they didn't need them.

Maybe she was up to something, and the second that popped into Max's head, he wanted to figure out just what was going on. "HEY, STOP!" Max yelled.

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audiomorbid
2009-01-04 10:51 pm UTC (link)

Few people dropped a cane to run. Blind people needed them to see, gimpy people needed them to walk. So dropping a cane was usually something fairly drastic. In Dione's case, she was just following the first thought that had solidified in her head.

That thought was: Run.

Blind people shouldn't run over terrain that they don't know all that well. She didn't see the dip and while Dexter did see it, it was already too late as she was stepping into it and sliding, tumbling forward headlong into the dirt with an exceedingly inarticulate squawk like the sound a bird would make when startled.

She obviously hadn't broken anything as she started to get up almost immediately, shaking sand out of her hair.

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etaequitas
2009-01-08 05:10 am UTC (link)

The moment she slipped and fell out of his sight in an ungraceful manner, Max lost all suspicions about exactly what she was up to before he entered the picture. She couldn't have been up to anything suspicious, or she wouldn't have made an error like that in her getaway. Max knew something about professionals, and the way she was acting definitely wasn't professional. If that was the case, Max wasn't sure what was going on with her.

Either way, he reached the edge of the slope and skidded his way down the sand to arrive by the girl's side. He dropped the cane as he approached her, even as she was moving to get up, and grasped her by the forearms to look her in the face somehow. His eyes briefly roamed to see if there were any sort of injuries on her, but he didn't see anything. "Why are you running?" Max asked, confusion etched across his features as he stared incredulously at her. The look on his face was reflected in the tone of his voice as well, and it may have come off as threatening, even if he didn't mean it that way. He basically just thought she was crazy.

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audiomorbid
2009-01-08 09:30 am UTC (link)

Dione was a professional piano player, not a sneak, not a thief or anything else of the kind. In truth, the very idea of stealing made her stomach flutter a bit because she simply was too good of a person. One of those good moral fiber types that mothers always wanted their sons to marry and make good wives out of. Aside from her rather obvious flaws, of course.

To her credit, she didn't scream. Dione took being snatched up by the arms fairly well considering how fast her heart was going, which could be explained by the running. That didn't help her being able to keep herself upright though as she struggled to breath through the thudding in her chest and the fear in her veins.

He thought she was crazy. She thought he was a killer. Such a night for misconceptions. "P-p-pl-lease d-d-d-don't hhhhhuurrrt me." It came out slurred toward the end as she started to faint. It wasn't unusual for her to faint. After all, she'd fainted in Dr. Wyatt's arms when they met.

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etaequitas
2009-01-09 07:18 am UTC (link)

Her stuttering, and what she said to him during that time, caused Max to immediately let go of her in such a way that he pushed her arms away from him. "What are you talking about?" Max shot out, maybe just a little scared of what he was supposed to be in her thoughts. Since Max wasn't that type of person and he didn't like people making assumptions about him, offense might have even been taken as well. Even if they had a right to assume the worst in certain situations, it didn't make Max feel any better about it all. "Why the hell would I hurt you?" he asked, one of his hands moving to brush the sand off of his pants after he had knelt in it.

The cane caught his attention a few feet away, and Max walked over to it and picked up the discarded object. He walked back over to the woman, who really did look scared shitless, and Max started to feel guilty. That look was his fault, and he didn't even know how bad she was feeling it. "Look. I don't hurt people," Max said. He held out the cane. "You dropped your cane."

Yeah, Max wasn't very good in these types of situations. If she needed someone to lean on, Max wasn't the guy.

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audiomorbid
2009-01-09 10:34 am UTC (link)

He let her go and she sat back in the sand, the shock of sitting waking her up again. Thankfully she hadn't surrendered completely to the feeling of passing out. That meant little, but at least she was still awake and capable of even trying to understand what he was saying.

His tone however did not make her inclined to answer his question. For all she knew, the question was some kind of trigger that would cause him to actually hurt her. She'd heard things like that before, that some people were totally normal until something triggered them off and then they hacked people into little pieces and tossed them to the fishes. This wasn't really a bad place for that, the sand would soak up the blood and the lake wasn't even a stone's throw away.

Instead, she kept her mouth shut and waited, trying to get her breathing and heartbeat back under control. Then he was holding out her cane and while he said that she had dropped it, she didn't have the faintest idea where he was holding the cane out to. She did put her hands out in front of her, the universal sign of please put it in my hands.

Dexter was being quiet. He didn't want to draw Dione's attention away from Max in fear that if Dione's attention wandered Max might actually snap. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and hovered at the edge of the dip waiting for Max to go away or for Dione to pull herself up and walk away.

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etaequitas
2009-01-09 06:38 pm UTC (link)

Max noticed the way in which she held out her hands and glanced down at them. Slowly, he stepped forward until the cane neared her fingers and touched down on her palms. He let go of it once she had a grip on the cane, and he understood now she was blind. She couldn't see him or the cane he held out to her. The way she moved her head indicated that, and the way her eyes never met him properly, even though they were looking up, was another.

His mouth twitched at the corner. He thought only for a moment of apologizing for possibly scaring her, but then he figured it wasn't such a big deal after all. Without a word, Max turned around and left the beach. He was going to head back home and leave her in peace. If she could get out to the beach by herself, she didn't need his help getting back home. It suited him just fine since he wasn't in the mood to help anyone.

He didn't even bother saying goodbye. Max just left until the beach was no longer in sight.

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END

audiomorbid
2009-01-10 05:45 pm UTC (link)

She waited until she couldn't hear him walking anymore before she said to Dexter,

"Is he still there?" Even if the onlooker didn't know the language, they could pick out that this was a question.

He's gone, her brother assured her. Can we please go in now?

"Oui, we'll go in now." The fear was starting to drain out of her veins. If he had truly been someone who could hurt her, no one would have heard a thing because her first reaction wasn't to scream. It wouldn't matter to anyone anyway. She had few people who would even notice that she was gone. That was a depressing thought.

Still she pulled herself up and the two started back toward her bungalow. It was quite likely that she could have picked out the voice that had spoken to her if she heard it again, though why would she need to know?

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