Re: [log: antique store - daniel/claire/louis]
Louis cast a glance at Daniel when he heard his sidelong noise of distaste for modern historians. "Not all of us can have lived it," he said, drily, unintentionally anticipating his thoughts. "Though I'm sure they would take the opportunity, if it was offered to them. It isn't perfect, but it does offer a level of scholarship some of the older historians lacked, and it's the best we have. I don't think you could tell me anything more insightful about Mesopotamia than they can. But it's all I have to go on."
He watched as Daniel circled back toward him, and as something like recognition breached Claire's grateful calm. He took a sip of his tea as Daniel repeated him. "Plagues," he said, looking up. "In New York, when...after I was attacked, when this all started, people died. Before it had cut itself loose from the cult that summoned it. The deaths were like plagues from the bible. I saw one of the dead, at work. I was assigned to the case." He had gone with Cris to see the body, and his revulsion at its desiccated state was then wholly detached from anything like understanding. "The corpse had been eaten alive by insects. There was another. A drowning, I think, a couple, their apartment flooded to the ceiling. And another. A family. Their house was filled with frogs. They suffocated."
He swallowed, thickly, and stopped. He had seen dead bodies many times over the years, throughout his brief career in London and after he came to America. Imagining the dead didn't upset him in isolation, but that year in New York had been a special hell of forgetting and not sleeping, of unknowns and a deep, psychic terror. He clutched the mug of tea a little tighter. "Apologies. I've tried...not to think about it, as much as I can. I've never tried voluntarily getting anything from it. Things bleed through, purposefully or not, but I've never tried. I think I was too worried what it might mean. It talks about this...thing, this whatever it is, the connection it has with me, as something typical, something that's happened before and is meant to go a certain way, and it has always experienced a degree of willingness with it. To not have that now, I don't think it's accustomed to it. So it cajoles and tries to convince me of the benefits of cooperation." He set the mug of tea down, finally. "I've been afraid of what might happen if I try to get any closer to it."
Claire held up the mace, and he looked at it, studying its contours. "It's...familiar. Possibly." He reached out to take it from her. "May I?"