if you go chasing rabbits and you know you're going to fall

[gramarye]

Who: Wolfgang & Felicia, + OPEN
What: Creepy drunk witch anarcho-socialist Snow White has feelings and also terrible dreams.
Where: He can be anywhere but is especially likely to be found in Badside, the Chimer area, Flag Hill, Aspic, Griss Twist, Kinken, and Brock Marsh.
When: Second week of Kavadry
Notes: holy shit im sorry i have so many tl;dr words oh god oh man oh god...
Warnings: None in the post, in the comments: violence, especially directed at children, death, gore.

Wolfgang is not an ambitious person -- his goals mostly revolve around surviving the day. Since he got out of jail, he's spent much of his time trying to balance food, shelter, and pills -- and not always being able to afford all three. The city finally came through with steady work in the way of sewer maintenance, which... it's, okay, probably the worst job he's ever had, but he's not going to complain about it lest they manage to find him something worse. With that and his job at the radio station -- which he's not counting on lasting long -- he's getting his feet back under him, but the constant anxiety every time he looks in his wallet is wearing on him.

It would help if he stopped drinking, probably.

Since he finally bit the bullet and ventured out towards the beaches, he's been spending more time there, because they remind him of home. The weather's all wrong, it's just the smell of the sea that takes him back. He's never going to be able to afford to live out here and it's a long train ride away, but it's worth making the trip. Anyway, sometimes he's up there for work. He has contacts all over the city and usually finds himself going on hours-long wild goose chases trying to find a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who can get him the pills he needs and then it's 3 AM in the middle of nowhere and he finds himself crawling into the nearest bar to try to drink the voices out of his head and all he wants to do is throw himself into the river and take a nap maybe.

He is not taking care of himself.

It took a good deal of self-control to actually buy food today rather than go without, reasoning that one day won't hurt, when he knows perfectly well that not eating is just going to make him sicker. Still, he's having a hard time getting through the small loaf of bread he bought. He's never had much of an appetite and now he has none at all. Instead he's preoccupied with smoking one of his last cigarettes and staring off into the distance, not thinking about anything; he welcomes silence gladly, like an old friend he hasn't seen in years.

He is angry, of course. Angry with the Militia -- not personally, although yes, a bit of that, too -- and angry with himself for not being able to do anything about it. What can he do, what can any of them do? Protest? They'd have no problem gunning them down in the street, and he still panics every time he thinks about going back to one of those cells. Write strongly-worded letters? Laughable. They can't even gather to talk about it without looking over their shoulders, afraid of who might be listening. Everyone knows they plant plainclothes agents in meetings like that. It's how they're so swift about crushing any potential radical political action -- they swept through Badside almost immediately after, as soon as they could spare the manpower. They pulled down all the posters and made a big deal about their presence there, although it was only tension in the wake of that, not further violence. Just a reminder about who they are. How do you fight back against that?

The last time, there was an easy answer -- just leave. So he did; he turned his back on his country, his people, his family, and his God to walk away to nothing. It may not have solved anything, but refusing to be a participant in a war neither side could ever win was still an option. Here, though... there is nowhere to run to, nowhere that is completely separate from the politics of the city, short of surrendering oneself to the Fog.

So many people here have power, real power, and it doesn't make it better to think about how helpless they all are, too, it just makes him feel inadequate. Being some guy in a city where other people can lift buildings with their bare hands and blow things up with their mind is pretty nerve-wracking in addition to making him feel extra useless. He's not even very good at anything. Not for the first time, he wonders why he is here.

On a nearby fence, a long row of crows has begun to form, all staring at him -- a murder that begins to grow to alarming proportions the longer he sits here. He doesn't notice them, lost in his head as he is, roused only when the ash of his cigarette grows so long it breaks off and lands, hot, on his hand. He makes a face, flicks it off, and takes a drag.

A single, brave crow flies down streetward and hops up towards his feet, where he's sitting on a public bench. Without thinking he says, "Hello," and holds out his hand for it to examine. Then, mildly, "Stop that," when it starts pecking at his fingers. Glancing behind him, he notices the whole flock of them, perched there staring at him with blatant expectation that he would prefer to pretend has to do with the food he isn't eating. "Rude," he tells them but there's no bite to it. He breaks the bread into little pieces and tosses it out into the street, and the crows all immediately descend on it.

When he whistles at the first one, his friend, it comes hopping back and tries to untie his shoes with its beak, which makes him smile. He should probably be frightened by the sheer number of them; in a post-Hitchcock world, most people are cautious around birds, but he likes crows, clever, funny little things that they are. They're pretty much the same everywhere. Even if some of them have three eyes.

He crooks his fingers -- on a good day, he can coax them to get close enough to touch.

Comments

☽ dreaming.

[gramarye]

Sleep is inescapable. It finds him at the most inopportune times, little brief kidnappings on the train, or the longer hostage situations in his room. No matter what he does, he can't ever really outrun it.

-- It starts all at once, in a city by the sea. More accurately, a camp by the sea, surrounded by desert. The hastily-constructed buildings are largely made of stone and brick and in poor condition. It's a large camp, but not large enough to contain its population -- some eighty thousand Palestinians, packed to the walls in tattered clothes and with haunted eyes. Somewhat incongruous are the beautiful water murals on the sides of some of the buildings -- the largest among them being about a thousand square feet. A thousand square foot appeal to humanity is pretty depressing. It's just light enough to see by but it's rapidly getting dark and electricity here is not always reliable.

It is behind one of these wall murals that that small, high keening originates -- the sound of a child crying.

There's a fence surrounding the other side, broken in some places and rusted in others as if no one's bothered to ever repair it, rendering it totally useless. The area encloses a playground, a thick layer of sand covering the ground, presumably to protect little feet. The dearth of real play equipment makes it a little sad, and what is there is poorly maintained.

Tucked into the corner is a little blond child. His knees, with the half-healed scrapes on them, are curled up to his chest and he has his face pressed between them, like he can hide that way. His age and gender a little hard to guess, but he's maybe seven or eight years old and either a boy or a tomboy, judging from what he's wearing. He can't possibly live here; he looks nothing like any of the people who do. He's the one crying; he must be, there's no one else there.