multiversallogs | i am hung with graveyard flowers;

Entry tags:

i am hung with graveyard flowers;

Who: Ilde Decima and Hasi; OPEN
What: The water helps her.
Where: The Gross Tar; initially near her waterfall territory in Raven's Gate, after that various areas.
When: Givdi with Hasi; open after that through Shundi.
Notes: Specify time/place (if not Raven's Gate) if you tag in, please!
Warnings: Descriptions of LM:A-related horrors to follow in the thread with Hasi; discussion of rape & related fall out in thread with Jae.

When she finally goes down to the water, it feels so good that she hates herself for a moment sliding in, her clothes on the bank under an illusion. It soaks into her skin like she belongs there and she's glad that she got there first, that Hasi isn't there yet, because sinking into it hurts a little and it's-- not anybody's business what internal conflicts she's having. She just died. She's allowed to feel...whatever this is that she's feeling, and whatever it is she's going to feel it at the bottom of the river for a while, her tail catching light as it flicks up before she dives.

She'll surface, eventually.

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The Gross Tar is... n...ot the prettiest landscape option, but at least it's interesting. And in a way, sure, it has its own kind of beauty, if you squint and tilt your head, and let it never be said that Wolfgang is incapable of finding beauty in unlikely places. He really did like Bonetown.

At the very least, it's a good place to be alone -- people don't tend to get too close, so they leave him alone for the most part. He's thought a few times about fishing in it, but what he's seen watching others indicates that takes a bit of equipment, and also he's aware that people-slash-things live in there and it strikes him as maybe a little impolite. Also, he's dealt with both the Broad Arrow and the Militia before, and he'd rather not have his legs broken.

His head still feels foggy and it's hard for him to focus on anything for very long, another reason why he's come here to sit close to the bank, his arms resting on his knees and looking intently at something that isn't there -- he doesn't have to think too hard about anything. He's a little drunk, just enough so that he feels somewhat awful instead of complete shit, result being that he's lost track of time a little.

But it's not like he has anywhere to be.

Badside is further than she meant to go; she'd just started moving and she wasn't thinking about anything and that had been good, not thinking. Sooner or later, though, everything comes back and there's stillness and then there's something under the water where Wolfgang is staring. Eyes, blue-black and wide, staring right back at him, and then--

She doesn't surface, actually, not quite yet.

When he realises he's actually looking at something -- it takes a while for his eyes to actually focus and for his brain to get around processing that sensory information -- he startles visibly. He hadn't expected anything to be in there this far out of the way. Up north, close to the beaches? In East and West Gidd, where it's lovely? Sure. Here? What is there here, except a bunch of sad, angry poor people.

He can't quite make out what it is, so instead of getting up and walking away on the off-chance it's something unfriendly, he leans forward and peers at it again, trying to see what's down there.

He's had the fear of death just about beaten out of him, and has yet to hear of anything bursting from the river to grab people with tentacles and drag them down to its silty depths. This week, anyway. Hi, Ilde, he sees you creepin' there.

'Unfriendly' depends on a lot of things, but for the moment all that matters is that she recognizes him and that takes drowning him out of the equation; she liked Wolfgang, she remembers. It had been odd, that he didn't remember her, but not the oddest thing here. Stranger things happen all the time. She's one of them, after all.

Just on a whim, she drifts closer to what light there is here and tries signing This is Bad-side isn't it? in case he understands, and in case she's going to be able to have a conversation without actually coming up. She thinks about just pretending she didn't notice him and drifting away, but he looks about as good as she feels and she remembers worrying about him, weeks ago.

Oh. It's Ilde. That's all right, then; she seems nice, from the few occasions they've spoken. He relaxes, pretty confident she's not going to eat his face -- in Baedal, of course, that's always a possibility, either because that's just the way things are or because someone has been, say, infected with a zombie virus, rendering them a mindless killing machine. Facts of life.

He gives a helpless gesture and a shrug in response -- he recognises that it's sign language but that's all. He does move further down the bank, so if she wants to come up, she doesn't have to come up on the bank; she can stay in the water. Or they can just hang out and be quiet, whichever.

Ilde thinks about it for a few moments before she follows up, surfacing to the shoulders once he's near enough that she doesn't really have to come any further.

"You look like shit," she says, not unsympathetically; she's heard some things about what she missed, but she hasn't gone sifting through network backlog, not yet. She's had, probably understandably, other things on her mind for a while.

"Then I look better than I feel," he says, dryly. He's a little uncomfortable being seen by someone he knows -- he's been avoiding this, staying off the Network unless necessary, not going back to the neighbourhoods he used to frequent, staying indoors until it gets too bad and he needs something -- but whatever, there's nothing he can do about it now. It's a little bit vanity, but more a desire to avoid pity or disgust. He's still sorting out who's still willing to be seen with him.

"Hi." He hasn't noticed her absence -- also other things on his mind -- but he would care, if he knew.

Her absence was brief enough that she isn't surprised by how many people didn't register it; it's surreal, when it was so much longer for her, but at least it means it'll be less complicated to pick up with her students and to keep the bills paid on time. (Ivan would've taken care of Orion- that's odd in itself, though.) Practical things like that...don't actually make anything easier, but at least they're something else to think about.

"Hi," she says, quieter. Their moods suit, and it's the cold kind of comfort she doesn't really want. It never made her feel better, the idea of other people feeling the way she does. It always just made her feel like they'd all been obscurely betrayed by a world that could try reassuring people with the idea that misery is normal.

At least it's honest. There's that.

"We're in Badside, I think?"

If misery is normal, at least it's reliable. He's really over Baedal, but is it any better than home? How exactly does one make a judgment call between citizen of a police state egalitarian in its brutality as opposed to exiled and widely hated minority? He's fleeing the police either way, it's almost comforting. Some things don't change. Maybe he'll get good at it.

He needs to stop thinking about this, it's fucking with his head.

Wolfgang glances over his shoulder, as if he's checking (this... is a concern, yes, it wouldn't be the first time this week that he wandered off somewhere and forgot where he was going and why), but he turns back before he speaks so she doesn't have to strain to hear him. "Yeah. Lost track?" That's not teasing, no, it's the most likely conclusion.

"A little," she admits, her tail turning circles in the water; sometimes if she dives deep enough she can pretend that she never has to come up. She supposes it's habit that keeps her leading the life she does-- deep enough in the water and she wouldn't really have to. If she just left everything behind and gave herself to the river, it's not out of the question.

It's not what she wants, though; she grew up in a world that said and instead of or.

"I was swimming." Purposefully. Sort of.

"I can see that." The corner of his mouth tilts upwards in what is not quite a smile, but it sort of relaxes his face from its usual expression of vague melancholy. It's a little calculated, in that the effort to not look so damn sad all the time has to be deliberate for him. "Anywhere in particular? People don't come here on purpose, I think. If they can help it."

"Away." Not from anything in particular; maybe from herself. From her thoughts. From the continued absence of Sonja, which she is trying and failing to deal with well-- she keeps reminding herself of what Remy said and it helps, it does, but Sonja's still not here and she's starting to not care that it's selfish to want otherwise.

(Sonja always comes for her.)

"Just. Away."

"Fair enough," he says -- he can tell there's a lot on her mind, she's more distant than he's known her to be, which -- this is Ilde, so that's fairly alarming. He doesn't know her all that well, but knows enough, probably.

He rests his chin on his arms, watching her without staring at her. "Do you want to talk about it?" It's a gentle offer, not a demand, no expectation that she must, or should, or ought, or whatever else. Sometimes it helps but sometimes it doesn't.

It's too dark for anyone to tell, unless you can taste the copper on the current, but when Deacon plunges his hands into the cold water, red lifts off into the inkiness like smoke, and vanishes again just like it. He brings his hands up again and palms the wet along his throat and beneath his jaw, smearing away the crimson in a sort of hack job of cleaning up a little.

The river seems less filthy here, with exception to this recent contamination. Cobblestone makes a harder divide than soft foreshore would allow and lets the vampire crouch to touch the river just inches beneath. His backdrop is the dim firefly sparkle of city, distanced and vague, a little bit of Howl Barrow on the upsides slope from the winding river that cuts through Baedal's heart at a fork. This particular patch is silent save for wind rustling the trees. This patch is probably a nice picnic spot. During the day.

It sort of makes for a good one at night, too, incidentally. That's with regard to the cooling body that Deacon grabs the ankle of, and unless given any reason to pause, the recently deceased young man, with his throat practically removed, will be tumbled carelessly into the river.

"I'm not very good at that." Which is a more truthful answer than yes or no; neither of them seem to quite work, and that's fair, since they don't seem to quite work for most questions she's being asked lately. The answer always seems more complicated than allowed for, except she's not sure by what she defines 'allowed', so there's that, too.

She rests her elbows on a rock and her chin on one arm, lazy almost; not quite. Sometimes motion is like yawning-- one person starts, and another follows. It's something to do with empathy, maybe.

"I was-- away, from Baedal. And then I arrived back again."

Ilde is not in the mood.

It irritates her when they do this; there are various people in Baedal who've already learned the hard way not to toss their trash into the river, and while she's slightly warier about people whose trash is corpses, she's not any less irritable. Moreso, in fact. Living water is not a fucking graveyard--

--and maybe she's a little sensitive about that, this week. Maybe she can't be blamed.

The body slides into the water just as anticipated; a few moments later it's forcibly expelled, like it was levered out against something, and...yes, that's something remarkably like a crowbar that she found down there in the water in her hands when she surfaces.

"Don't do that."

"And you remember it?" He sounds surprised -- he's reluctantly come to the conclusion that that must have happened to him (he's too clever to entirely discount Occam's razor for the sake of his own mental health -- too clever, then, definitely, yeah) but remembers nothing of it, and that bothers him. It must be worse, to be yanked out of the city and pulled back in and remember the whole thing. That sense of helplessness instead of blissful ignorance.

He immediately starts wondering why and how, but ignores that for now, makes a note to do more research on the subject. (Nerd.)

"All of it." The whole time, and this is a little easier to go into - the nerdy little details of what did and did not happen in this case as opposed to another, because there are different cases and it is complicated and it means things and she wants to know what it means, especially if one of those things is 'Ilde never leaves again' - even if it comes out a little more hollowly than she intends. "I remembered when I was there."

As discussed, there aren't mermaids, or fairies, where Deacon was from. The presence of other supernatural beings may be a thing it takes more than a few months to grow accustomed to, and he's had enough negative hunting experiences that the concept of a corpse violently reanimating and talking in a new voice isn't entirely out of the question. He's half risen out of his crouch when the body splashes to the surface, startling and automatically gripping a handful of now water-logged shirt and hauling the great, loose-limbed thing off and away from him with a soft, animal-sounding snarl of annoyance.

Deacon's dressed darkly to disguise the run off from his feeding, but smears of red remain on his face, neck, his hands, though the most of it is washed clean. In comparison, Deacon is never in the mood to tolerate the bullshit of others, but he is at least having an okay night.

"It's a free river."

"If we can leave by accident, there has to be a way to do it on purpose, then," he muses, idly. It's moot for him, entirely out of his power, but probably someone more talented than him and with supernatural powers he doesn't have will eventually figure something out. It's taken 500 years, sure, but who knows, this could be their lucky year.

"I take it was rough?" So, there's an understatement for you.

To which her incredibly droll response is: "Blow me, Deacon, it's not your rubbish bin."

...well. On the incredibly unsurprising upside, it's not the murder part of the equation that she evidently objects to.

There has to be; Ilde had been looking, but maybe not as hard as she could've been. And maybe it doesn't matter for her, now, because there's no going back-- but it's still important. There are still others, and the way this city works is still unspeakably shit.

After a moment she says, "A little," again, with the thin smile of understatement. "But it's over." How very final. They don't know each other so well that she's willing to drop the hideous death bomb on him, but there's not really any tiptoeing around the fact that it was a hell of a thing.

That turns the twist of a sneer into a wider smile, a small huff of laughter - both from amusement at the sentiment delivered back to him, along with recognition. The night transforms people, and Ilde's change is slightly more literal. Smile melts away again quick enough, as it usually does, but he does relent;

"Fine. It's your turf." And he has his, and she respects his rules enough.

"Well, there's that." It's hopelessly inadequate, but there's not much he can do, and nothing he can say that would make it any better. The best he has to offer is empathy, sympathy's less patronizing cousin. Then, with intense irony: "Maybe everyone's luck will turn around, and things will be better here."

Bonding over being hideously traumatized isn't actually something he's super keen on. Thanks, Baedal.

"Thank you," she says, primly, satisfied; the river is where she's most dangerous, but even in the mood she's in (the mood where 'biting everything' feels like such a tempting solution to, well, everything) she's not really interested in starting something with someone she ordinarily gets along with. For several reasons, not limited to the fact that she really does quite like his aforementioned turf and it wouldn't suit her to have to stop going.

Of course, now that that's currently off the table, tension lingers. She's wound tighter than she usually is, more opaque and more apart; it would be easy to think that maybe in the river it's just more evident that she's something different. After all, that's true, so far as it goes. All the little things that mark her out for otherworldly, they fit here, they make sense because the water is what she is.

So maybe that's all it is.

"You should wash your face." While he's here.

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i am hung with graveyard flowers;

the following coardi; badside area?

the following coardi; badside area;

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vaguely near howl barrow; at the river bend

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