sir rictor cassul, korporal. (templars) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-05-26 16:29:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !complete, !log, almalexia lliryn, rictor cassul |
it's in dark rooms we explain ourselves.
Who: Rictor Cassul & Almalexia Lliryn
What: Comfort.
Where: His room at the Grande Cathedral.
When: Late April, after this.
Rating: Some swearing.
Status: Complete.
The Korporal had been an automaton over the last few days, his movements jerky and disoriented: he followed orders like a marionette leaping and twitching to attention, taking the two days’ appointed rest, then immediately turning to the patrol rosters and spending hours monitoring the damaged Necrohol. He stood at the back of the room during Mass, hands folded behind his back and eyes staying clear of Aspel; his spine was rigid as if it had been knotted around a tree, a grand oak towering over the rest of the penitents. He followed Violet Black, a shadow dogging the Feldwebel’s footsteps and nodding when she nodded, listening when she listened, his mouth sealed shut from respect or grief or anger or some combination of all the above. The Grande Cathedral buzzed with activity again, its rooms still overflowing with the displaced and wounded: it was a good sort of activity, kept him moving, kept him on his feet. A great reckoning may soon be at hand, Rictor thought. The words were bleak and had stopped making sense the more he thought about them, the more he examined zoologists’ sketches of the Babil, trying to make sense of the situation. Tonight, he sat staring at his communicator and his feeble attempts at conversation. Caspar hadn’t answered. He wondered if the other man had woken up yet. Wondered, idly, what the sentinel might make of the situation. Vaux was always a perpetual sense check, a barometer to test the world with. Rictor had withdrawn back to his dormitory after the entry, and with each step into the cell he became less the machine, more the man, his posture loosening and sinking in on himself, strings cut. When the knock sounded at his door, a staccato rhythm that he recognised immediately—the exact person he needed to see—then Rictor lurched back to his feet. When he opened the door, he ended up leaning against the doorway as if for support, looking down. A mumbled, relieved “thank Faram” slipped out, and he hardly even realised he’d said it. Intellectually knowing she was alright was one thing—seeing it with his own eyes was quite another. Within this time, Lex had already reached out and taken Rictor’s hand with her own. And so it was, that the days and distance that stretched between them became as nothing once again, and the blonde had once again found her way to his side. Though Lex was self-aware enough in that moment to not confess such similar thanks, the sentiment was clear in her heart. Memories were still fresh in her mind of the knight, and his dire wounds only recently healed, that she wished for no such mirror to them now—and fortunately enough to her eyes, Rictor remained whole and standing before her, and she could only nod her head in relief. “And good evening to you as well, of course,” she said, moving inside with the hint of force and purpose, tugging Rictor along with her. Lex saw no merit in lingering in the hall, after all, however much their actions had shifted while in the audience of others. For here, and for now, the mage was of mind to have him to herself—to know and to understand all the great and terrible events which had transpired, those which seemed to weigh heavy on the knight’s mind. Lex looked up, her eyes searching, as if to ask a multitude of questions. “Rictor,” she began slowly, thoughtfully, attempting to pry out the most vital and important of the lot. He’d rarely been at a loss for words around her—Rictor was a fount of chatter, even back when they were trading sly witticisms and jokes that left him flustered, at a disadvantage—but this time, his jaw kept working and yet nothing came out. A wellspring run dry. So he sat down heavily instead, planting himself on the edge of the bed, leaning forward onto his knees as if for prayer. (Perhaps it was.) “It’s a fucking mess,” he finally managed to say, his voice tight. “You always expect something could go wrong, I mean, that’s what we do, it’s our job, and yet.” Lex watched him sitting there and felt a swelling tide of dread rise inside her chest—observant as she was, each line of Rictor’s body which she had, quite naturally, memorized throughout the time she had known him, seemed now to her written wrongly, the hand of sorrow and loss drawing here another form instead. Her reaction to him was instinctive, and she strained against the impulse to draw up her own arms across her chest, an effort to fend of the reaction to his current state (her reactions to him had grown stronger of late, she realized, comparing how she had felt to see him gravely wounded not very long ago). Instead, careful and deliberate effort was made to reach out instead (and here, another difference to note, from who she had once been), and Lex sat down beside him on the bed. There was little space between them, as ever, their knees bumping as she shifted her weight, and soon enough her hand found its way on his forearm--a gentle weight, a gesture of comfort. “Of course,” she began to say, her usual thoughtful tone giving only a small hint to her own concern and uncertainty, “we at times consider ourselves invincible in many ways.” Lex held her breath for a moment, considerate. The room around them seemed shadowed and still to her, a reflection perhaps of current sorrows and offering little aid in the way of solace. “I am sorry,” she said slowly, “for those you have lost, Rictor.” (A sudden feeling then, a need to say more—but the words were unknown to her and would not come.) “Thanks.” The man didn’t seem to know what to say either, tripping over his words: the holy knight was unaccustomed to baring his emotions outside the protective walls of the confessional, draped in shadow, directing his speech to a shuttered window and the dim shape of a priest in profile. Lex wasn’t the Kaplan—but she was here nonetheless, and she was the best he’d ever have for this. Rictor was physically healthy and hale (some bruises, some still-healing bones, a pittance beside what he usually weathered), but this time, something looked wrecked and gouged inside him instead. His hand turned over and instinctively found hers, their fingers lacing together. After a moment, he realised this was so much like a day in her room, some year hence—something that had once been uncomfortable and tense, skin prickling with the awareness of each others’ proximity (and with the benefit of hindsight, Rictor was able to recognise it for what it was, that it hadn’t been the contempt it seemed at first). He breathed out. And then tackled the next hurdle, with the reassuring weight of Lex’s presence beside him: “Aspel is a fucking fell knight.” “Ah—” Lex stumbled over her own immediate reaction of shock and surprise, allowing a momentary silence to replace the words that had suddenly failed her. She held Rictor’s hand with no lesser amount of reassurance, but her expression turned, as if the truth of a long-held mystery had finally been laid out before her—the results, this final piece of a most complicated puzzle, were nothing as she had ever suspected before. The mage quickly recalled her own interactions with Aspel Cassul, attempting to align the information with the image Lex had concocted in her mind after so much time being acquainted, and coming to the aid of, this particular woman (and certainly there was no reason for her to doubt Rictor’s words on this, for he had always tread along the topic of his family far differently than so many other topics they discussed). “I see,” she said carefully, looking up to Rictor and trying to deduce his many thoughts and fears, for now she seemed to be accumulating many of her own. “What...will you do?” “I don’t know.” Anywhere else, he might have put on a mask of bravado, something thinly cobbled-together to protect himself: swaggering bravura, a few profanities sprinkled here and there. Instead, Rictor sounded lost. He finally turned his gaze up, meeting hers. “I’ve been keeping busy—not like there’s a shortage of things to do now, in the city—and not speaking to her. That’s what I’ve been doing.” “Eventually,” she began, and without as much confidence as Lex would have preferred, “you must. Certainly Aspel must have an explanation for her actions.” And she is your sister, she refrained from saying—for what did an orphan know of familial troubles? However connected she found herself to these events, the mage reminded herself that she was still but an observer. She shook her head, dissatisfied without a clear and immediate solution to anything (as if such a thing was even possible to obtain, but her pride would hardly hear of it). Her hair fell down her shoulders as she did so, covering a portion of her current expression. Solemn and considerate, she leaned against Rictor’s shoulder without thinking of it, the action itself becoming wholly natural—a desire for physical reassurance that Lex, perhaps at another distant time, hadn’t considered herself in possession of. He made a grumbling noise of assent as she leaned into him: wordless and reluctant, but it was assent nonetheless. Eventually. “For now, however,” she continued, attempting to repurpose the conversation slightly, “there are more immediate concerns, I suppose.” Lex looked Rictor over slowly, noting the hints of scrapes and bruises, wondering how well he had slept or eaten. “Aye,” he said. As Lex drifted back into his space, he absentmindedly reached out and brushed the curtain of hair back from her face, gently tucking it behind her ear, his touch feather-light. “Rest, recuperation, rebuilding. Guess we’ve got that.” (Unlike the ones who didn’t—the ones who had fallen, who wouldn’t be climbing back up to their feet, the ones in the ground. The thought of his friends was another barbed hook into his heart, a bleeding wound that could rip you right open if you let it.) Pushing it aside, Ric then gave her a sidelong look, bone-weary but still struggling to reach for some levity. “Also, trusting that you probably won’t go fucking batshit and try to murder me. According to all the gossip about mages.” The dry, moribund humour laced into the words made it clear how much disdain he held for this new view. Rictor simply couldn’t see mages as a universal threat; they were the backbone of the Silver Blades, the fire to their sword, Amos Luscini’s voice and hands patching up his motley group of pious men and women. One half of the whole. There was something else waiting on his tongue, a thought he had half a mind to express, but Rictor stalled out once more. Lex, however, carried their familiar banter right along—a comfortable territory for the both of them, an easy habit to fall into even when the weight of the world grew heavy on their shoulders. “Were I of mind to do such things,” she said, though her voice retained much of its prior softness, “I believe I would have accomplished your demise quite some time ago.” Lex offered Rictor a look that gave much hint to how she felt about such words, as similar mutterings hadn’t escaped her own ears. Gossip and rumors were, as they often were, frivolous and without much in the way of useful substance—especially in this regard. She had, in some manner, faced off against the Sage after all, and she understood that whatever had transpired had little to do with mages as a whole. “It would not suit my current purposes at all, rest assured,” she murmured, whatever those might’ve been, save for those most obvious. Those words finally made a feeble smile crack on Rictor’s face, and his heart shudder and shake in his chest—a warmth that stood at stark odds to the death and loss that had been haunting them since the attack, a dark cloud resting over the entire cathedral. Each minute Lex spent in Rictor’s company seemed to drag him back from the brink, the stubborn lines softening, humanity creeping back out from behind the shield. It was easy to fall back on belief, orders, and direction (and he was still seeking it, even now: what should I do? tell me what I should do)—yet infinitely harder to allow oneself to be a hume, to feel. Faram was convenient; Faram was inhuman. The opposite of Rictor, in short. “Nor mine,” the knight admitted. Then he added, “Look, Lex, you know that I...” It sputtered back to nothing again, but now he looked at her—truly looked—and what he saw was so very different from the quiet student first encountered in the stacks years ago, something which looked like shyness at first glance but obviously wasn’t. His first attempts to dig past that shell, then her claws sinking in, a stubborn thorn in his side he hadn’t been able to be rid of or banish from his head since. Her layers peeling back over the months until he saw silent strength and resolve, the iron waiting beneath layers of thin parchment and ink. His chest was pounding, a military tattoo in his skull. Rather than continue fumbling for the right words (his weakness, far from his strong suit), Rictor kissed her instead, again, again. His sudden show of ardency was met in kind, as Lex allowed herself to be drawn to him—an unstoppable force this was, she knew, and something that she had learned, in time, to fight for instead of against. She raised her hands to rest gently against his face and neck, and in this, she discovered, so simple a gesture and far easier than the words they often fought with and danced around, a different sort of solace. His breath mingled with hers, the strength of his pulse and the warmth of his skin against her palm—these were their own truths, a comfort provided by simple touch. Lex returned his kisses, again, and again, a response that did not require words. Some factor in the equation seemed to tip, scales hanging in the balance, before a shared understanding starting creeping up on them. They’d come close to it before, like skirting their way around a soft spot in the terrain, a place where one might trip and lose their footing—and they’d always skittered back, cautious even as she grew accustomed to his touch and vice versa. But the tables had long-since turned and she was now confident, unquestioning, demanding (just like she’d been the first to make the first move back in Gokama). Rictor drew back, just enough to catch his ragged breath. He met Lex’s eyes once more, a thought and consideration weighing between them. “Do you—” one of them said, just as the other managed “Are you,” and then the smile broadened. A mutual understanding reached, an accord agreed upon, as “Yes” was drowned in another kiss and then another, tentative exploration as roving hands started slipping under shirts, before, behind, between, above, below, a development months in the making. |