numenviscera (numenviscera) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2019-09-01 02:31:00 |
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Entry tags: | #december 2017, lem, lem x vex, vex |
Who: Lem & Vex
Where: Ludlow
When: Saturday morning 12/30
Status: Complete
When Vex woke up he felt elated. At first. There was energy thrumming through him that reminded him of attending a punk rock concert in his early twenties, slamming into other bodies on the dance floor, jumping around like a mad man, grabbing someone by the collar and shaking them while screaming and getting screamed at back until he and whoever the hell the other guy was had been laughing, covered in spit and sweat, both his own and that of others. It wasn't really a feeling he was used to waking up with but for a solid ten minutes he was delighted. After he'd taken his morning piss and stalked downstairs for food, the high of the feeling started to wear off. It became more of an irritation, like his happiness was a violent one, veering dangerously into mania. To fuel that irritated feeling, the wound on his back itched like a son of a bitch and he knew he wasn't allowed to scratch it.
There was cake in the fridge and he ate more than half of it right off the plate with his hands, then tossed the plate on the table. No, this wasn't enough, he needed... something. Music. Action. He wanted to punch someone or something. Break bones - his own even. He washed his hands in the kitchen sink, jaw set as he looked around for something to do.
Lem slept in her own bed that night, but not super well. She kept dreaming about mysterious hulking shadow gods that were speaking in languages she didn’t understand before they tore her to shreds with claws and teeth. They didn’t always feel like bad dreams, but Lem kept waking up. She’d crept down the hall to peek in on Vex a few times, just to make sure he was still there and still breathing. And he had been, every time. She was in another fitful bout of sleep when some noise from downstairs woke her up with a start. Heart pounding high in her chest, Lem got up and pulled Nic’s sweater-coat gift over her boxers and tank top, and headed down the steps. She was thirsty anyway. She spotted Vex in the kitchen and got a shot of relief. “Hey,” she greeted, her voice a bit rusty as she padded toward the fridge. “How you feeling?”
"Lem," Vex murmured, spinning around to hug her even if his hands were still wet. She was so little, it was so easy to pick her up and squeeze the life out of her but Vex refrained as best he could from that urge. Lem hated that shit. "I'm... energized," he said, clenching his jaw as he pulled back, the muscles in his neck tight for a second as he leaned his head back to try to stretch out whatever this irritation was, buzzing in his body like electricity. "I need something to do. Something... I think I might fix up the basement some more or knock down a wall. You want more room down here? We could rip down that wall over there or make a window." He was talking fast and for a second he wondered if he had somehow accidentally taken amphetamines.
The tight hug was a bit of a surprise, and Lem was careful with how tight she hugged him back. Not that it lasted that long anyway. She was still groggy and sluggish herself, and Vex was practically vibrating energy, so it all was a little jarring. Definitely not what she’d expected, considering how badly he’d been hurt. Lem looked at the wall he indicated, not really sure if that kind of renovation was a good idea or even possible. Didn’t the walls hold up the ceiling? “Um ... I mean, whatever you wanna do,” she said, her eyes a little wide. “A window would be pretty cool ... do you know how to do that?” There was the question of whether he should be doing that with his injury, but she didn’t get to that one yet.
"Yeah I know how to do that," Vex scoffed. "It's a little tricky if you don't want to take down the whole wall, windows are trickier. I'll think on it, I'll think on it. We definitely need to make this place more ours though, I think we're staying here a while. So much work to do, we're gonna have guests and right now it's still auntie's place." He was vaguely aware that he was rambling and even with how fast he was talking he couldn't quite seem to keep up with his own thoughts. "Let's make pancakes for breakfast." That seemed like a solid place to start and he was already on it, spinning around to find what they needed in the cupboards.
From home renovations to pancakes seemed like a hard turn to Lem, but maybe she was just still too sleepy. Vex had his manic days, when his brain was just moving too fast and a lot of things came tumbling out, but she couldn’t remember him ever wanting to knock down walls during those times. “We’ll have guests?” she asked as she moved out of his way, toward the fridge to get the eggs and milk and other pancake stuff they would need. She was hungry, so making breakfast was much more appealing than pulling out the sledgehammers. “All the people you’ve seen so far, you mean? Or new ones?”
"All the people I've found, all the people I will find," Vex said. He moved fast, as he gathered the ingredients and tools he needed though some time got lost as he spun around himself trying to decide where to start. "The people of AIR, the god's chosen, who knows who else. There's so much we don't understand yet, Lem. How do the werewolves fit in? Telepathy, dreams, visions, werewolves, witches. So many things. There's bound to be more and it's all linked somehow, like we're all just little microscopic flakes of reality flowing through the artery of some giant creature." He slammed the steel bowl on the table and let out a little laugh. "Oh fuck, how many arteries are there in a body, Lem? Not just arteries, veins. Like little highways and we're all just... rushing along. Maybe - maybe running into each other."
Lem was kind of used to fast complicated rants from Vex, but this sounded on another level entirely. Either he was super fast today or she was slower than usual because she could barely keep up. She looked at what he’d pulled out of the cabinets, only half of it good for making pancakes, and moved in closer to him, putting a hand on his arm for a second. “Slow down, take a breath,” Lem murmured before she reached for the pancake mix box. “There’s a lot of veins and capillaries and all that, people are straight up bloodbags. We’ll figure it all out. We’ve all been funneled here for a reason.” They just didn’t have to get the answer right then this morning, especially not before breakfast.
"Capillaries," Vex echoed, narrowing his eyes and grinning faintly at her. "Those are important too, even if they're small." He bopped her nose pointedly but he couldn't really slow down, even if he wanted to now. "Why was I talking about that?" he muttered then, narrowing his eyes again and looking to the ceiling. "Yes! House... arrangements. We should get another couch - or a bigger dining room table, like a proper conference like table so we can all meet up and pool our resources. I wonder if everyone has a gift..."
The idea of this place becoming like a flophouse for weirdos, or some kind of home base for whatever mission they ended up being on, wasn’t a shocking one to Lem. She’d been expecting it, more or less, and they were already a werewolf hotel, so why not? Vex was right, everything seemed too connected. There was a purpose behind it all, and now a god had shown up to mark his people and get them started. She just hadn’t given much thought to modifying the house itself to accommodate. Lem started to mix up the stuff for pancakes, also not surprised about having to take over the cooking. “Like a war room table? Sounds good, we’ll start looking. And for anything else we need,” she said, giving Vex room to verbally roam around wherever he wanted. She was there for support.
"I want to make another cage too," Vex said. "So we need to get those barrels out soon. In case, you know, in case there's another wolf." They'd find out soon enough, the full moon was almost upon them again, but he couldn't seem to stick to one topic for long because already his mind was going elsewhere. "What can I do right now, Lem. Rearrange the living room, maybe. I think I'll clean." He started digging around in the drawers for a rag and luckily his aunt had been the sort to have lots of cleaning supplies whereas Lem and Vex hadn't really put them to use so there was plenty to work with now.
He was jumping around a lot. Lem felt a little overwhelmed whenever she thought about the barrels in the basement, the evidence that she was a killer. It still wasn’t something she felt guilty about, just regretful that it had to happen. She wanted them gone too. Trying to wrangle two werewolves and making sure they were tranq-dosed correctly and nobody got hurt sounded like a tall order. Lem didn’t try to question it all in the moment though, just let Vex rummage around until he found what he wanted while she started to mix up the pancake batter. She almost asked him if he was sure he was still hungry, but she knew better. He wouldn’t really know. It was better just to put food in front of him. “Okay, just don’t spray anything in here while I’m cooking,” she told him.
"Why would I spray-" Vex started and immediately started thinking about painting before remembering he was now quite literally holding a spray can in his hand, full of cleaning liquid. He didn't even remember picking it up but he was on auto-pilot for the most part right now. "Oh... Yeah. Yeah I won't - I won't clean in here." He let out a little laugh before stalking out of the kitchen. It was good for a few minutes, putting his focus on cleaning but he kind of ended up leaving things worse than he'd found them since he started clearing the shelves so he could properly clean them and then absolutely did not have the patience to put things back the way they were. And why should he? Weren't they redecorating? He managed to clean a couple of shelves, his back burning and his nose itching from the smell of the strong cleaning supplies. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes later he came back to the kitchen to wash his hands. The smell of pancakes had a part in drawing him in too, he wouldn't lie, but mostly he just had an overwhelming feeling of nothing being enough. "Smells good," he told Lem and grabbed a bottle of Vodka from one of the cupboards. It was the last of it so they needed to go shopping. Maybe that would do him good - getting out of the house and going somewhere. At the same time that didn't feel like enough either.
Lem glanced over her shoulder toward the entry to the living room every so often as she cooked and listened to Vex ‘clean.’ It sounded like everything was just becoming more of a disaster, but that was okay. She didn’t much care about preserving anything in this house, but it hadn’t belonged to anyone in her family either. Lem was just taking her cues from Vex. Those cues seemed to be all over the place this morning, much more so than usual, but Lem figured that was just god-inspiration with nowhere to go. Things would settle inside him, and then he would know what they had to do next. She found some chocolate chips to add into the pancake batter, figuring it would be a nice little treat, and started stacking the finished ones onto a big plate. Lem smiled when Vex came back. “They’re gonna taste good too,” she told him as she flipped the next pancake. That would make five, probably enough to fill them both up. “Can you pull some drinks out? Almost done here.”
Vex looked at the bottle of Vodka in his hand and that was... that was drinks, wasn't it? Maybe it was just his drink, they should probably drink something else with pancakes, so he nodded and opened the bottle, drinking what remained of it in a long swig before tossing it in the sink. It broke with a loud, jarring noise, which was both immensely satisfying and nerve wracking all at once, and Vex winced, then laughed and went to find something else to drink. "Coffee? Juice? Milk?"
The shattering glass made Lem jump a little and she squeezed her eyes shut briefly. She was all in favor of making a mess, she was perhaps just still feeling a little jumpy about ... everything. The presence of the flesh god, what it had done to Vex. his current mood wasn’t completely foreign, they both had their manic days, but there was something about this one that set her on edge. She hadn’t wanted any vodka with her breakfast, so she wasn’t upset that he finished it off. They could always get more. “Just juice works for me,” she told him as she doled the pancakes out onto two plates. Lem turned the stove off and took the food to the table, then went back to grab forks. “And grab the syrup if you want any,” she added.
For a good ten minutes or so Vex managed to sit still and eat. It sated that restlessness in him - until suddenly it didn't. There was an overwhelming feeling that no matter how much he ate, no matter how much he moved, no matter how many things he broke - the urge for more would just keep getting stronger. "Whatever god's emissary gave me, it's a little too big for me," he said, inhaling sharply through his nose and rocking himself a little as he pushed the now empty plate away. "I don't know what to do with it. Maybe I'm supposed to share it with you but I don't know how."
Lem’s nerves were somewhat settled by eating delicious pancakes in mostly silence, but then Vex was practically vibrating again. She looked concerned at what he said, her eyes still on him as she finished off her orange juice. It was at least some sort of explanation, and she thought he must be feeling even worse inside than he was showing if he was saying anything about it. Lem put her glass and fork down and scooted her chair in closer to Vex. “Come here, lemme try and see,” she said. She took hold of his hand and closed her eyes to concentrate, tuning in to what he was feeling. It was definitely a strong sense of restlessness and agitation -- the kind that made her want to break stuff too. Lem tried to absorb some of it from him, to relieve the holy burden.
Apparently agitation didn't work like fluid where you poured some out and were left with less. If anything, sharing it felt like it compounded the crazy and Vex eventually yanked his hands back with an irritated growl. "That's not working," he said and almost pulled his plate back to load more food on it. But he knew that wouldn't help either, he wasn't hungry, he just needed something. He had the fleeting thought that maybe he should ask Lem to fuck him or kick him but he was pretty sure that too would just amplify his irritation. "I'm gonna go clean the cage," he said and maybe if he checked every bolt and cleaned every bar, he'd wear himself out eventually.
It was working, just not in a good way. Lem’s small body filled with tension and aggravation, and she glared at Vex when he snatched his hands away from hers. Even knowing it wasn’t her own genuine emotion didn’t help, something that could usually re-center her. She just wanted to break stuff. Lem pushed her pancakes away as Vex got even more food, her appetite completely soured. She was on her feet by the time he was headed for the basement stairs, and the idea of pushing him down them flashed through her mind. He was just going to ignore her, hadn’t even said thank you to her for trying to help, and now she wanted to hurt something. “Fucking men,” she muttered through her teeth. Tiny fists balling up at her sides, Lem stomped out of the kitchen to go find something to occupy herself with.