sir rictor cassul, korporal. (templars) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-06-02 14:39:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !complete, !log, rictor cassul, siri d'albis |
i'm up in the woods, i'm down on my mind. i'm building a still to slow down the time.
Who: Siri D’Albis & Rictor Cassul
What: The Kerwonian trio ain’t doing so well.
Where: A private moment on the steps.
When: Backdated to about mid-May, before Caspar woke.
Rating: PG-ish
Status: Complete
The city still smells like death and ash, dust crawling inside the cracks (within people, travelling in their bloodstream and getting stuck in the heart, the painful throbbing sensation as it makes sorrow palpable). She is nothing but another thin layer of dust beneath the rubble of the city, setting foot in shadows and finding her way. Navigating now is far easier for her, destruction another part of her (cracked city, fractured mind). Siri doesn’t speak of Caspar. She knows what happened. She was there. She remembers. Instead she leans against Rictor, allowing him to seep into the cracks, his thoughts (hers). The sharp edges, a sword with its cool blade and leather hilt. Siri thinks of swords, curved and thin. Broad, heavy iron smashing down, wolf teeth shattering it in one bite. You cannot piece broken things back together, the lines always remain. What is Siri but a Voice of Faram? She hums with her cheek against his back and listens. “Speak.” (To Him or him.) When he does, the voice reverberates through his ribcage and she can feel it against her cheek, the words settling into her skin. Rictor’s words ripple up and down his spine. “Forgive our unworthiness,” he says. “Forgive the many times we have disappointed those who love us, have failed them, wearied them, saddened them.” He’s latched onto the prayers over the last few weeks, and they strike Rictor and Siri like stones dropped into a pool. He recites from memory, his voice a low rumble directed at the cobblestones, his whole body bowed over from the weight: “Look in pity on our small and tarnished loving, protect, foster and strengthen it, that it may be less unworthy to be offered to You and to Your children.” The entreaty sputters out, spent. He doesn’t have any more words to offer. After a pause: “It’s not enough,” he says. She feels his prayers as if they were her own, humming quietly and unobtrusively — the two making one (but there is a splintered side where a third is meant to go but missing). It’s not enough. The words break the silence, Siri takes each one (tidies it up, cutting the words and letter apart, mouthing each one). “Never is, He is not listening today.” “I wonder if He will abandon this city to its fate, do you think that would be deserved? He’s not listening today, you know?” That didn’t mean Rictor was alone though, far from it (second skin, second shadow). “I’m listening, though.” “You always are. To me, to him, to Him.” He knows that Siri hears things others can’t, her head attuned to something different and not quite normal. He’s never been entirely able to understand it, however: what sort of thing crept out of the Feywood and lodged between her ears, winding around her cortex, knotting its tendrils around her heart. Ric sighs. “Faram can’t abandon us,” he says stubbornly, now reaching for that ironclad reassurance, the unshakeable pillars of belief that have kept him functioning over the past few weeks, kept his heart ticking and blood pumping. “If anything, this is—” He fumbles for the right description, can’t find it, eventually lands on: “A test. This must be a test.” Because what else could it be, with Vaux in the clinic, Zacheus and Cressida dead in the ground, his sister an unholy knight? This is a test, and he is losing. Her tiny fingers tightened around him, an unspoken message; perhaps disagreement with him or agreement — Siri listens but she does not always understand His will. She knows one thing about Rictor, down to the centre of her being: he is a good man and worthy. Siri doesn’t think of Caspar (she can’t, she doesn’t want to). “You will pass it.” Because he is Rictor and he is good, brave (and the flaws never register for her). “And so will he.” Caspar, because the thought of him leaving them makes Siri want to throw up. She doesn’t want to speak of him, however, pushing the thoughts that haunt her and cause her to remain around the cathedral like a ghost. “What do you need, Rictor?” I’ll find it, I’ll see it, I’ll tell you whatever he could need, if Siri could hear the answers he sought, she would pry them no matter the cost. “Can you tell me that it’ll all turn out okay?” But even as he says it with a weak smile, Rictor knows that that small admission is a failure of its own, doubt creeping in with its sticky tendrils. He shouldn’t have to ask for this: he should have the reassurance nonetheless. That’s what faith is, after all, belief without proof. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting, Rictor thinks. So he shifts, and leans against her. “Hope he gets out soon,” he says. It’s easier to think of Vaux than the other wounds he’s currently tiptoeing around—but only marginally. While her fingers rest on the edges of said wounds, aware but unwilling to pry them open and watching them bleed red across his templar’s robes. Siri holds her breath and thinks of answers. There are none. “If I could see that far, I would tell you the truth.” Nothing but the truth. She lets out the breath she held and there are no rings of smoke in it- no winter cold to make it visible to all. “Will you get out soon?” An oblique question to the issue at hand; Rictor isn’t physically restrained by anything, but the mind can be kept in invisible rooms, behind unbreakable locks. His mouth curls into a thin line, though she can’t see it. “I hope so.” Rictor knows he feels like he’s wandering in the woods and struggling to find his way out—Hanz and Greta from the tales, lost in a twisting labyrinth of trees and shadows, mired. He almost says so, but immediately bites it back instead. Rictor always tiptoes around any reminder of the Feywood; it isn’t a mythical place of monsters and magic to Siri, but a very real memory. “We’ll get there,” he says. “Eventually.” She presses her head a little harder against his back, a quiet sign of comfort before she released her firm hold and drew back, coiling quietly at his side (not her own person, but a part of his, his mind pounding over her own thoughts - diluted, faded). “What do you require to find your way out? Directions? Two wrongs, one right.” Her finger traced a number in the air. Two, three. Two, three. Siri does not think of woods, just labyrinths — the woods are voracious and devour you whole. Stumble through them with your torn dress and tangled curls, your skin made of gashes and mud. His hand reached around to pat her shoulder, the touch drawing her back into herself and out of her head. “Directions would be nice,” Ric said. Violet had been giving him enough of that, after all, a skeleton and structure to clothe in flesh and blood. “But failing that, I’ll just do with some fucking company.” Something to keep him distracted from the aching void that had once been occupied by Zacheus and Cressida, something to stop him worrying at that emptiness like a dog gnawing at its wounds, breaking the flesh anew. “Can do both.” And Siri would reach out to that void, her fingertips palpating and assessing the depth; then she would think of what to put inside to fill it. Prayers, dreams, time, all made to fit inside infinity. “I’ll whisper them to you and they will take root inside of you and grow outwards.” The conversation had taken another turn, “The dark stretches only as far as the light does, beyond that there is everything else. If we delay, we shall miss mass.” He’s good at untangling her meaning and ciphering significance from riddles, but Siri’s gibberish is starting to sink back into that place, the one where he can’t follow. So Rictor just makes a noise, a sigh, an exhalation of breath, and they sink back into silence instead. There’s nothing else to do but wait. |