Knox (knoxinator) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2020-06-03 19:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | #january 2018, aya, aya x knox, knox |
Who: Aya & Knox
Where: O'Reilly household
When: 4am or thereabouts, Monday morning 01/22
Status: complete
Aidan was fast asleep, looking weirdly fragile in that way sick humans usually did and Aya had watched him for a while before she left to do her own thing. She tried not to worry about him or his family, ignoring her ties to him as best as she could but it was in the back of her head no matter what she did to distract herself. She found a place to dance in Portland but it was hard to have fun and dance when she kept thinking about her stupid human possibly dying alone in his bed. It was about four in the morning when she dragged herself back to the house and checked in on him, stupidly relieved to find him still breathing. Out of curiosity she checked on his dad and sister too, both of them sleeping, Patrick O'Reilly looking far worse for wear than his kids.
Aya frowned and closed the door to Patrick's room before peeking into Shayna Mae's bedroom. Yeah, they were all sick, that much was obvious, but it didn't feel like any sort of normal sickness so Aya decided to find the one presence currently in the house who seemed unaffected: Knox. Aidan had mentioned she should talk to him and while she hadn't liked the idea, well, she was worried. She was loath to admit it, but that's what she was. She closed the door and re-opened it, this time into the hallway where Knox was standing. "What's wrong with them?" she asked simply as she closed the door behind her. She didn't think she could stir Aidan out of his slumber but he needed the sleep so it wasn't a risk she was going to take.
Knox was doing another round of family check-ins. He’d been doing that for a while now, as well as taking care of them as best he could, but it didn’t feel like enough. Something was really wrong with his witch family, and he was pretty sure now that he knew where it was coming from. The human sibling, of all people. Knox loved Max like he loved the others, he was blood family, but he couldn’t stand by and allow him to harm the rest of them, however inadvertently it was happening. Knox couldn’t tell what exactly was going on, only that Max felt like the Greer woman had, and the more he was at home, the worse the witches got. So he’d decided to take action, even if he didn’t want to.
He was contemplating how he was going to do that when there was the sound of a door and a voice behind him. Something that wasn’t happening much these days. Knox half-turned to see Aya. If he hadn’t felt what he’d felt with Greer and her boyfriends, he might’ve blamed all of this on her, but Knox knew it wasn’t her. “I don’t know exactly,” he answered, glancing back in at Patrick’s sleeping form before he closed the door quietly and faced the woman-thing. “But it’s coming from Max. He’s ... draining them, somehow. They’re slowly dying.” As many people as he’d lost over the decades and centuries, that thought still made Knox’s chest feel tight. This wasn’t some inevitable plague this time. He had to stop it.
Aya felt a little stupid for not connecting those dots but she'd been stuck in the theory that this was some kind of a magic related illness and that was why the only non-witch wasn't affected. It clicked into place as soon as Knox said it though. Max had been manic and weird and while Aya didn't know him well enough to say that was out of character, it fit with what Knox was saying. "But he's human," she said with a little frown, leaning back against the door, her hands behind her back. "Isn't he?" She couldn't feel him in the house at the moment and that was a relief, maybe her witch was safe for now if he stayed gone.
Knox didn’t expect this creature to know anything about anything that was going on. He was still very uncomfortable with her presence in the house, even though she hadn’t caused any outright trouble yet. He was very suspicious of her and where she’d come from and what influence she might have on Aidan. But she hadn’t caused this, and it was the priority for him to worry about. “He is,” Knox confirmed, giving Aya a small nod. “But I think he’s been infected with something inhuman. It’s not a magic I recognize, I could feel it in him when I tried. Whatever’s happening, I don’t think he’s controlling it, but ... I can’t let him stay.” He eyed her closer for a second. “Can you sense anything?” The question came out a little wary, as he wasn’t sure if she would lie to him even if she could, but Knox just still wasn’t sure what she was.
Aya shrugged but was quiet and still for a moment as she thought about it. "He's not in the house," she said quietly. "If he stays, I'm taking Aidan away." She raised her chin almost defiantly as she spoke, as if daring him to try to stop her, her eyes slightly narrowed as she sized him up. If Max was the reason Aidan was sick then taking him to another city should help, she could find somewhere to hole up until this was over but in looking at Knox, she suspected he meant what he said. There was pain there and history she knew nothing about, that much was obvious.
He had meant the question to ask more about whether Aya could sense anything otherworldly-wrong with Max, but apparently she didn’t. Maybe that was just beyond her capabilities, or she didn’t want to share, he didn’t know. What she did say made his spine stiffen though, and Knox’s jaw clenched. His first instinct was to insist that she would not be taking Aidan anywhere, but that butted up against his instinct to keep the family safe, and if Aidan was safer somewhere else ... “He won’t be staying,” he said flatly. “It’s my duty to handle it, so I’ll handle it.” Knox knew about Aya’s door-powers, which meant she could take Aidan halfway across the world if she wanted, and that made him profoundly uncomfortable.
Aya wondered if Knox would kill Max if he had to. People were usually boring for months after someone died so it was preferable to find some better solution for the problem but she still wondered if he was capable of something like that. It'd take a lot and she didn't know if a familiar could hurt his witch's family and even if he could, he seemed to care so much. "So I'm guessing he's not usually this manic," she mused even as the other question gnawed at her and she watched Knox intently before blurting out, "If you need to kill him, will you?" If Max was infected with some other worldly evil, he might turn into something Other. Aya had seen it happen and it wasn't pretty.
For a moment Knox didn’t know what she meant by ‘manic,’ but then the word came to him and it felt accurate. Max had been ... off, lately. Talking too much, not moping enough to seem like himself. But Knox wasn’t around him all the time, and he hadn’t connected the behavior to anything else. Not until he started to feel the difference in Max like what he’d felt in Greer. Then it had all fallen into place ... or at least as much as he had so far. Aya’s abrupt question didn’t shock him -- he’d asked himself the same thing as he’d mulled over all of this. He didn’t much like the answer he kept coming to. “I don't know if I can, myself ... but I would try. It might kill me too. It’s been so long since I was bound, and I’ve never had to even think about it before,” he admitted. Not harming any of the O’Reillys might have been built into the magic that held him to them, Knox didn’t know for sure. But was it even really Max? There were too many unknowns.
Aya wondered if she could kill him, if she had it in her to willingly and purposefully take someone's life. A human expiring because she made a silly mistake was one thing but murder was a messy affair and she wasn't so sure she wanted any part in it. "I can trap him, stop him from coming home," she said and maybe that was better than taking Aidan away. He'd mope forever if his sister and father died and Aya would have to listen to him whining about it. No, this might be easier, simpler. "If he won't go I can make sure every time he walks through the front door he ends up in a hotel room far away from here." She smiled suddenly, the thought of it delighting her. There was nothing really quite as funny as humans trapped in a maze of her making and she really didn't indulge herself often enough these days.
Knox hated that that solution was actually kind of appealing. He knew he was going to ask Max to leave for a while -- going to do what he could to force Max to leave, that was. He already knew the human wouldn’t want to do it. But what if Max, or whatever was inside of Max, truly resisted it? Knox didn’t have a solid plan for that. As much as he didn’t want to ask Aya for anything, he would exploit all options before killing Max. “I might take you up on that if he refuses to vacate,” Knox said grudgingly. “It’s better than putting him down.” It would be maddening for him and probably wouldn’t help relations when this was solved, but that was a small price to pay to save lives in the family. “I’m going to tell him he has to leave, and put him up in a hotel for now. Just to see if they get better. He won’t like it, but I hope he’ll understand.”
Oh he hated accepting her help and that didn't escape Aya's notice, nor did it bother her, if anything it amused her. It made her want to prance up to him and bop him on the nose and tell him, see? I can be useful. It was a terrible idea and she wasn't even sure she could reach his nose without stretching and maneuvering awkwardly. The O'Reilly familiar was quite large. She knew that if Knox was right, the people at the hotel would suffer but she didn't much care about strangers so that really was somebody else's problem. "If you had to kill him, how would you do it?" she asked, purely out of curiosity. There were so many ways for humans to die and she couldn't really think of any that were painless which was probably what Knox would go for.
The safety of anyone staying at the hotel hadn’t even crossed Knox’s mind. All he cared about was getting the source of danger away from the rest of his ailing family. And he’d done that for now, and he hoped it would help. Anything else was secondary. Aya’s question made him get stiff again and put a bad feeling in his stomach. He’d answered her question already about whether he could kill him if he had to, and he didn’t want to dwell there, especially not with her. He just wanted to go on hoping that he would never have to do something like that. “I’m not discussing that with you,” Knox told her, his tone flat. He definitely would try to make it painless, if he was forced into something like that, but it wasn’t something he was going to talk out and plan with an entity he didn’t trust in the slightest. “It won’t come to that.” He started to walk past her, feeling Done with this conversation and ready to be doing something else.
Aya wasn't so sure he was right about that and she wasn't at all sure he could do it if it came to it, he seemed too sentimental. He'd have no problem ripping her to shreds, that she didn't doubt in the least, but one of his family? Nah. So he had to kick Max out or she would step in and get him lost in random corridors in random cities. She almost hoped it'd come to that if only because it'd be hilarious. "Boo," she said softly without any real disappointment attached, then turned to open the door she was leaning against. It didn't lead to Aidan's room this time, she wanted to go out into the woods for a little bit, breathe in the winter air while she decided what to do next so the moment she opened it, a cool breeze wafted down the corridor. Aidan wanted her to be close while he slept but she had tried that and it was boring. She could check in on him every now and then instead.