That's the problem, isn't it. I don't think I'll be any good at taking care of you. Emotionally, anyway.
[ There's always that. He can work magic on the body, sometimes as literally as that phrase can possibly get, but he's got bad faith in his abilities to do any more than that.
He hasn't met her eyes, picking at the cuff of his sleeve. It's a nice shirt. It's been a while since he got to wear something half-decent, since he stopped feeling like he did as a kid, making the rare occasional nice fabrics last. The war field didn't offer much more than scratchy fabrics that ghosted over his skin, scratching at his mind too with the sensation. He came back home to a hell house, and left with a set of nice clothes that got ruined pretty quick. And then here, whatever he could nab on the island and make it last. Anything nice enough to cover up, keep that hum and crawl over his skin quieter.
He drops playing with his cuff button. ]
I won't look away unless it's things you don't want me to see. I haven't, not intentionally at least.
But... it really depends on what your idea of solving solitude is, what "staying" means.
So what is it? I'd rather you be clear.
cw: Sexual assault references, including with minors, child murder
Can't say I'd be much better taking care of you, either. Seems all I've ever done is press on your bruises.
[Which should be proof positive: this shouldn't happen.
That's not how love works though. If this is love. She has a hard time telling what is. Every man she went to bed with either came along as a transaction or a tryst. With time she'd come to wonder if some weren't worse. Even her first time hadn't been tender. Thirteen and passed down the line of rowdy high school seniors, one, two, three, and four. Later lovers asked for favors, to put things inside of her, play out fantasies better women were too good to sully with. John Keene had been sweet. He'd also been a wretched mistake. Drunken, devastated, certain he was about to be convicted for his sister's murder, looking to her as she shot back bourbon and seeing a fellow in grief.
Was that the best she could do? Really? Maybe Daan could use a good tumble but it wouldn't serve as anything more than a distraction. Effervescent, there and gone again.
She wants more. Fears it. Would she come at love with a smothering addiction, as Adora did to her children? Or would she be more like Amma, obsessive and possessive, jealous to the core? Slipping into her room in the dead of night in what must have been a self-induced fever, trying to provoke her into caring for her as their mother did. "You like Lily better than me." Goodbye to Lily, found dead by the dumpsters shortly after, strangled and missing six teeth.
She's nervous. She doesn't know how long she's been silent for. Drawing air to say something takes the same effort it had to slash the scissors across his neck. What is she supposed to say? Don't leave, oh please oh please?]
I can't promise I'll be good for you. But I want to try. You make me... [There's a rattle in her hands. She clenches them over her knees to still them.] I want to make you happy. Or at least give you a safe place to rest. I'd like to be with you, Daan.
[In the most childish words possible. Fuck. Camille sighs and shakes her head.]
Odds are we're fucked, one way or another. You're a goddamn ghost, for one, and who knows what's coming at the end of all this. But that hasn't changed how I feel. It's insane and I still want to give it a shot. Will you let me try? Whatever pace you need, space you want. You've got it. I'll do what it takes.
[Her heart is thumping like a battering ram, her gut clenched like its gripping the blade of a newly plunged knife. This is hell. And the only one to blame for the mess is herself. She could have just kept her stupid mouth shut. Camille swallows, and carries on.]
And if not, then I won't push you. I want you to be happy. With or without me. That's...really, that's what I hope for most.
[Enough. Her jaw locks and she lets the curtain of her hair fall forward. A shield in the face of her foolishness.]
Edited (indecision....) 2024-07-26 13:47 (UTC)
cw also for similar content, exposure to minors, implications, etc...
[ His breath catches a little at the phrase, a dull pulse somewhere behind his eyes. Pressing on bruises, yeah. Maybe. He learned early on that nothing in life ever comes for free, that something always has to be given first. His body, his mind, whatever is demanded of him. He remembers being a kid, watching his parents strip naked and put on lagomorphic masks, wander off to the meadows and worship Sylvian in the oldest way. Everything he knew was determined by their wishes, how they saw Her as something glorious, goddess of love and fertility and healing. They tried to pass off the gift to him too, learning how to channel Her whispers, be a vessel for Her healing touch.
Miracle kid in the eyes of common Rondon streets. It served him well on occasions after his parents fully lost their minds to that wild pleasure and bliss, never coming back. He was loathe to use it openly, but it was a clutch talent when he was just a street urchin looking for quick coin who could heal through untraceable means, who wouldn't run his mouth to the authorities. All it cost was a little bit of his sanity and autonomy each time.
And the Baron, too. Daan is near-certain that had he not had his occult talents, the man wouldn't have spared him nearly as much of his time of day, let him marry his precious daughter. Permitted him to sift through his tomes of anatomia in exchange for teaching how Sylvian magic works, showing him how he could give a little bit of his mind to murmur vile promises, telling him how in the most primal form, fucking could restore entire lost limbs. And Elise... his sweetest love, but curious just like her father, not above prodding him then and again in her sweet way, just to see, to know.
The dull pulse only gets stronger, the familiar purr still always in his periphery, settled in his blind spot. If it follows you wherever you go, maybe you're the problem? You're the dirty one, degenerate filth, for how after everything, you can still manage to want. Emotionally, he's a guilty widow. Mentally, he's a car crash, burning, an ever-present murmur in his brain tempting him to baseness. What Camille wants for him feels like a distant dream. ]
...I don't want you to feel responsible for my happiness. That's a pretty big burden and you... don't deserve to have to shoulder that.
If you're looking for an honest relationship, I'm afraid I'll likely do you more harm than good. My mind's a wreck, Camille. Prehevil's fucked me up in unimaginable ways, I've got -- bad thoughts. Hell, maybe I was always this way. I'd give you my body, but I... I do care about you. Which is why. I don't want to be another one of those people in your life that've done worse.
[ He doesn't want to promise her some kind of relationship, dangle that thing in front of her when he doesn't know where he's headed, always clawing on the brink of distortion. ]
[The chokehold on her insides hardly loosens. It just shifts, squeezes and pops in different places.
He says so much in far less words than she. Doesn't need the filter of a keyboard and a blinking cursor to gather his thoughts. He takes a few things off the table and puts a surprise offer on. Frankly, if all she wanted was his body she'd have blown him by the end of the first week.
Maybe knocked on his door the day after the barrier set her free, when Aqua was put down and Camille was left waiting for her own noose. She'd considered it. Went to what she thought was a less tumultuous bet, someone who wouldn't give a shit before or after. Safer to drag to bed and forget reality with. Instead, she'd been marched to the pyre and talked out of a bad impulse by a two hundred year old vampire. That's the comedic side of this place. Astarion, who'd had infinitely more time and reason to go insane, was of sounder mind and body than either of them.]
...I know you do. [Have bad thoughts. A decimated mind. She nods, daring to look up again.] I've heard a few already. And I'm still here.
[The rest is no easier to broach. To hear him admit sparing her a second glance, well. Forgive her stomach for doing a flip. It's back in the squeeze right after, they're no further to a conclusion than they started.]
I don't want to be another one of your regrets, either. Someone new to lose.
[Which is a guarantee neither can make. She wets her lips, turning more fully to him this time.]
But I know what it's like. We don't come from the same place, and the shitty things in our heads don't match up perfectly. But you can bring yours to me. I won't judge you. I won't be afraid. I can listen, or help you put them aside for a while.
We could start there? [Her fingers crook over her knees. Then she lifts a hand. Puts it soft atop one of his, knowing it's futile. Mist and nothing but.] Just trust me. I won't turn away from you. No part of you. Let me be there for you.
[ It's probably, funnily, for the better. The body is much easier to give than love for someone like him, trudging around hidden wounds on his torso for his first and still-only love, not yet fully healed. He's not immune to his body's demands, but his senses, guilt, and indignity had a good chance of overpowering it then.
The fourth week (KNOWN COLLOQUIALLY AS W3) had been a bit of a tipping point, with Camille's assassination by the hands of people who thought they were doing right, and the fifth... strangely put his heart at ease in some ways regarding Elise, but it came with him finally breaking under the weight of his two monsters' whispers.
Except, that's the thing. It didn't start in that week -- he'd wrestled intrusive murmurs for a while, about killing this person or that, because it'd be a mercy, right? The moonlight's taint on his mind, that cat closer than ever right behind his eyes.
He'd have done it if only she'd asked that night they spoke after she was released from the pyre, instead of tearing herself away from his foul promises and snapping him out of it too. She can't keep doing that, he can't expect her to keep doing that. ]
I'm going to hurt you.
[ He says, thickly. It's his expression of fear rather than a promise, but it almost feels like it to him. ]
When I say Prehevil changed me for the worse, I mean it. I've practically engaged in bloodbath compared to what my father-in-law had done. It's still there in my head, an ugly desire to... I don't know what exactly it is. See them for their worst.
[ Confide in him darkness and the strange want to love them in turn. He shouldn't. He should want them to step out of that sort of thing. Camille's hand will feel awfully cold. Funnily to him, it feels so warm. But loathe to make it all about what he wants, despite it all being concerns for her. ]
Oh, yes he will. One way or another, they'll be coming out bleeding. Neither one of them is safe. Camille's hand is hovering over self-destruct at all times and Daan is one bad day away from gifting his body to the devil. No one could come near either without taking hits, no matter how stable.
It's the fear though. That's the difference for her. Amma loved to hurt, squealing about it in a drugged up bliss as she spun around their lawn. Her mother loved hurt things, loved the control she had over them. Camille loves the kiss of a knife, cooling her fits and foul thoughts as she annotated them into spare spaces of her body.
Daan loathes it. There's a part of him that revels in it, but it's parasitic. Unnatural. Maybe it's gotten hooks in him, perverted more corners of his mind, but it's not finished. He's afraid of what he might do, he feels the pain he inflicts on others and feels wracking shame for it.
It may not hold him back. But it makes a world of difference. Her hand feels it's hovering over frostbitten meat, a deep freezer with the door closed and the chill threatening to creep up her bones. It's clumsy to keep the hold up. She sticks to it though. Won't leave.]
Maybe. [Her expression is unmoving. Voice soft, impossible to hear from outside the thin space they've carved for themselves.] We've got a lot of sharp edges between us Daan. I won't pretend it'll be easy.
But, from what I've seen, what you and Marina have given me...I don't know who could come out of that place with their hands clean. Coming from where you have and landing where you did. I can't blame you.
So it's okay. If the urge hasn't gone away. Things like these are...They're not fixed. Just managed.
It's easier to do when you've got people who give a damn.
[ Sharp edges... he wonders. Less like reaching for a pile of shards, and more like a flytrap. Or perhaps more like drosera -- sundew. Ros solis. Glittering brightest when reflecting the shining light of others near him, like a moon, drawing the unwitting in to the sweetness they all think they see of him.
A reflection of the world in the morning dew, the way it loves him like hands scoop up an injured rabbit, a bird with a broken wing, hands that place themselves on wounds to pry them open, see the disgusting fester within before they can kiss it better. The way there always has to be a twist, because there's always a price to pay. It's so baseline for him that it doesn't even come to mind that it doesn't have to be that way.
Manage his madness. Just as mad of a concept on its own, and she'd volunteer with scarred arm raised high in the grey and faceless crowd. He could almost laugh, but he's still in control for now. That semi-freshly carved out nihilist in him, deep in that pit of despair, cruelly wonders how many days it'll take until she leaves him with his labyrinthine desires and cocytus heart. Or worse yet, that she won't. ]
...Best revisited if... when we meet on the same side again. I think.
[ He can't promise anything, most of all when he's a ghost whose hands only pass through her like an icy wind, unable to hold onto any part of her. ]
[A yes was was far off a dream as a pot of gold. Just about as stupid, too. She didn't expect him to agree. Wants him to. Desperately. Wishes he were corporeal enough to coax along, not a mystical visitation. As if there weren't enough odds stacked against her.
But she said she wouldn't push, so she won't.
She lets his hand go then, flexing hers and running the fingers over her palm, plying for warmth. Then just as gingerly, runs the back of two fingers through that rogue flop of hair. The one covering his lost eye. Another wasted gesture that means too much to her and too little to the bitter world dooming them.]
[ He permits this, even as meaningless as it may seem. It's the little things, attempts. That 'flop of hair' used to be better-kept once upon a time, but now it hangs loose on the regular. All the better to see less of his marred face, unpleasant. ]
I should be telling you that, don't you think?
[ The living have it so hard rn. God bless. Camilles Georg who went through the entire fucking gauntlet is an outlier and is suffering extra for it.
He goes silent. To say this would be weird, and maybe even seemingly a bit disingenuine given what they'd just talked about, but his time is limited and this breach into the living side is quite significant in the grand scheme of things. ]
...Anything else I can do for you, talk about? With the caveat that it seems I fade if I try to explain much of anything I've been up to in detail.
[Incredible that tomorrow she will be sent to hell and receive 902348 burn damage but neither of them know that yet.
Practical as always, her motion is tabled and he opens the floor for more urgent matters. Camille clucks her tongue, looking around. Tucking her own hair behind her ear.]
I've been wracking my brains on what to ask without cutting the connection. Seems impossible to avoid. Boothill nearly wiped out just admitting that you could see us. Watch us on...something. Happy to hear you've got smoothie access but otherwise I couldn't wrangle an inch of copy out of you all.
[She thinks a moment.]
We've been trying to look for what you asked for. Hasn't shown up yet. Maybe someone else will pop in tomorrow with a new gift that fits the bill. Otherwise...any oblique hints about astronomy you could drop?
Ah. The Jamba Juice. [ Beat pause as if waiting to fade away, but he doesn't. ] That's funny, given the name of the place was censored out in Karma's first letter to me.
[ WHY!!! ]
You can afford to be more direct with your questions. I can hear you out, just that my answers might not be so clear, I think.
With your vague hint though, nothing immediately comes to mind...
[I would love if he vanished invoking smoothies tbh.]
Really? God forbid we hear about the forbidden fruit blend.
[but hm.]
All right. The moon phases and the colours of the stars. I've been hearing that they might be important but I'm not sure how. The moon phases seem regular but the colours are a jumble. Any idea what's going on there?
[I know the march of time and plot revelations is killing me.]
God. I wish. Nothing to do with the nervous system has surfaced yet, and we're still muddling around with how the scriptures are supposed to fit together. It's a work in progress. Just not great progress.
[and at this point Camilles Georg doesn't know enough yet to say anything insightful or new i'm so sorry lowe]
[ I'm sorry also this is so funny. Granted he wouldn't have been able to say anything anyway. ]
Mm. That's fine. Even if it feels like we have no time... any time is still time.
[ He had three days. Even just one more day, maybe, and things could've been much different. Maybe. He hopes. Wonders? Can't hope about a reality that doesn't exist. ]
...Frankly, I don't like having to run to them for petty favors. I never feel like it's worth their time. I spent too long not trusting them, full stop.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
[ There's always that. He can work magic on the body, sometimes as literally as that phrase can possibly get, but he's got bad faith in his abilities to do any more than that.
He hasn't met her eyes, picking at the cuff of his sleeve. It's a nice shirt. It's been a while since he got to wear something half-decent, since he stopped feeling like he did as a kid, making the rare occasional nice fabrics last. The war field didn't offer much more than scratchy fabrics that ghosted over his skin, scratching at his mind too with the sensation. He came back home to a hell house, and left with a set of nice clothes that got ruined pretty quick. And then here, whatever he could nab on the island and make it last. Anything nice enough to cover up, keep that hum and crawl over his skin quieter.
He drops playing with his cuff button. ]
I won't look away unless it's things you don't want me to see. I haven't, not intentionally at least.
But... it really depends on what your idea of solving solitude is, what "staying" means.
So what is it? I'd rather you be clear.
cw: Sexual assault references, including with minors, child murder
[Which should be proof positive: this shouldn't happen.
That's not how love works though. If this is love. She has a hard time telling what is. Every man she went to bed with either came along as a transaction or a tryst. With time she'd come to wonder if some weren't worse. Even her first time hadn't been tender. Thirteen and passed down the line of rowdy high school seniors, one, two, three, and four. Later lovers asked for favors, to put things inside of her, play out fantasies better women were too good to sully with. John Keene had been sweet. He'd also been a wretched mistake. Drunken, devastated, certain he was about to be convicted for his sister's murder, looking to her as she shot back bourbon and seeing a fellow in grief.
Was that the best she could do? Really? Maybe Daan could use a good tumble but it wouldn't serve as anything more than a distraction. Effervescent, there and gone again.
She wants more. Fears it. Would she come at love with a smothering addiction, as Adora did to her children? Or would she be more like Amma, obsessive and possessive, jealous to the core? Slipping into her room in the dead of night in what must have been a self-induced fever, trying to provoke her into caring for her as their mother did. "You like Lily better than me." Goodbye to Lily, found dead by the dumpsters shortly after, strangled and missing six teeth.
She's nervous. She doesn't know how long she's been silent for. Drawing air to say something takes the same effort it had to slash the scissors across his neck. What is she supposed to say? Don't leave, oh please oh please?]
I can't promise I'll be good for you. But I want to try. You make me... [There's a rattle in her hands. She clenches them over her knees to still them.] I want to make you happy. Or at least give you a safe place to rest. I'd like to be with you, Daan.
[In the most childish words possible. Fuck. Camille sighs and shakes her head.]
Odds are we're fucked, one way or another. You're a goddamn ghost, for one, and who knows what's coming at the end of all this. But that hasn't changed how I feel. It's insane and I still want to give it a shot. Will you let me try? Whatever pace you need, space you want. You've got it. I'll do what it takes.
[Her heart is thumping like a battering ram, her gut clenched like its gripping the blade of a newly plunged knife. This is hell. And the only one to blame for the mess is herself. She could have just kept her stupid mouth shut. Camille swallows, and carries on.]
And if not, then I won't push you. I want you to be happy. With or without me. That's...really, that's what I hope for most.
[Enough. Her jaw locks and she lets the curtain of her hair fall forward. A shield in the face of her foolishness.]
cw also for similar content, exposure to minors, implications, etc...
Miracle kid in the eyes of common Rondon streets. It served him well on occasions after his parents fully lost their minds to that wild pleasure and bliss, never coming back. He was loathe to use it openly, but it was a clutch talent when he was just a street urchin looking for quick coin who could heal through untraceable means, who wouldn't run his mouth to the authorities. All it cost was a little bit of his sanity and autonomy each time.
And the Baron, too. Daan is near-certain that had he not had his occult talents, the man wouldn't have spared him nearly as much of his time of day, let him marry his precious daughter. Permitted him to sift through his tomes of anatomia in exchange for teaching how Sylvian magic works, showing him how he could give a little bit of his mind to murmur vile promises, telling him how in the most primal form, fucking could restore entire lost limbs. And Elise... his sweetest love, but curious just like her father, not above prodding him then and again in her sweet way, just to see, to know.
The dull pulse only gets stronger, the familiar purr still always in his periphery, settled in his blind spot. If it follows you wherever you go, maybe you're the problem? You're the dirty one, degenerate filth, for how after everything, you can still manage to want. Emotionally, he's a guilty widow. Mentally, he's a car crash, burning, an ever-present murmur in his brain tempting him to baseness. What Camille wants for him feels like a distant dream. ]
...I don't want you to feel responsible for my happiness. That's a pretty big burden and you... don't deserve to have to shoulder that.
If you're looking for an honest relationship, I'm afraid I'll likely do you more harm than good. My mind's a wreck, Camille. Prehevil's fucked me up in unimaginable ways, I've got -- bad thoughts. Hell, maybe I was always this way. I'd give you my body, but I... I do care about you. Which is why. I don't want to be another one of those people in your life that've done worse.
[ He doesn't want to promise her some kind of relationship, dangle that thing in front of her when he doesn't know where he's headed, always clawing on the brink of distortion. ]
they are a consumate mess
He says so much in far less words than she. Doesn't need the filter of a keyboard and a blinking cursor to gather his thoughts. He takes a few things off the table and puts a surprise offer on. Frankly, if all she wanted was his body she'd have blown him by the end of the first week.
Maybe knocked on his door the day after the barrier set her free, when Aqua was put down and Camille was left waiting for her own noose. She'd considered it. Went to what she thought was a less tumultuous bet, someone who wouldn't give a shit before or after. Safer to drag to bed and forget reality with. Instead, she'd been marched to the pyre and talked out of a bad impulse by a two hundred year old vampire. That's the comedic side of this place. Astarion, who'd had infinitely more time and reason to go insane, was of sounder mind and body than either of them.]
...I know you do. [Have bad thoughts. A decimated mind. She nods, daring to look up again.] I've heard a few already. And I'm still here.
[The rest is no easier to broach. To hear him admit sparing her a second glance, well. Forgive her stomach for doing a flip. It's back in the squeeze right after, they're no further to a conclusion than they started.]
I don't want to be another one of your regrets, either. Someone new to lose.
[Which is a guarantee neither can make. She wets her lips, turning more fully to him this time.]
But I know what it's like. We don't come from the same place, and the shitty things in our heads don't match up perfectly. But you can bring yours to me. I won't judge you. I won't be afraid. I can listen, or help you put them aside for a while.
We could start there? [Her fingers crook over her knees. Then she lifts a hand. Puts it soft atop one of his, knowing it's futile. Mist and nothing but.] Just trust me. I won't turn away from you. No part of you. Let me be there for you.
no subject
The fourth week (KNOWN COLLOQUIALLY AS W3) had been a bit of a tipping point, with Camille's assassination by the hands of people who thought they were doing right, and the fifth... strangely put his heart at ease in some ways regarding Elise, but it came with him finally breaking under the weight of his two monsters' whispers.
Except, that's the thing. It didn't start in that week -- he'd wrestled intrusive murmurs for a while, about killing this person or that, because it'd be a mercy, right? The moonlight's taint on his mind, that cat closer than ever right behind his eyes.
He'd have done it if only she'd asked that night they spoke after she was released from the pyre, instead of tearing herself away from his foul promises and snapping him out of it too. She can't keep doing that, he can't expect her to keep doing that. ]
I'm going to hurt you.
[ He says, thickly. It's his expression of fear rather than a promise, but it almost feels like it to him. ]
When I say Prehevil changed me for the worse, I mean it. I've practically engaged in bloodbath compared to what my father-in-law had done. It's still there in my head, an ugly desire to... I don't know what exactly it is. See them for their worst.
[ Confide in him darkness and the strange want to love them in turn. He shouldn't. He should want them to step out of that sort of thing. Camille's hand will feel awfully cold. Funnily to him, it feels so warm. But loathe to make it all about what he wants, despite it all being concerns for her. ]
Is that really what you want?
no subject
Oh, yes he will. One way or another, they'll be coming out bleeding. Neither one of them is safe. Camille's hand is hovering over self-destruct at all times and Daan is one bad day away from gifting his body to the devil. No one could come near either without taking hits, no matter how stable.
It's the fear though. That's the difference for her. Amma loved to hurt, squealing about it in a drugged up bliss as she spun around their lawn. Her mother loved hurt things, loved the control she had over them. Camille loves the kiss of a knife, cooling her fits and foul thoughts as she annotated them into spare spaces of her body.
Daan loathes it. There's a part of him that revels in it, but it's parasitic. Unnatural. Maybe it's gotten hooks in him, perverted more corners of his mind, but it's not finished. He's afraid of what he might do, he feels the pain he inflicts on others and feels wracking shame for it.
It may not hold him back. But it makes a world of difference. Her hand feels it's hovering over frostbitten meat, a deep freezer with the door closed and the chill threatening to creep up her bones. It's clumsy to keep the hold up. She sticks to it though. Won't leave.]
Maybe. [Her expression is unmoving. Voice soft, impossible to hear from outside the thin space they've carved for themselves.] We've got a lot of sharp edges between us Daan. I won't pretend it'll be easy.
But, from what I've seen, what you and Marina have given me...I don't know who could come out of that place with their hands clean. Coming from where you have and landing where you did. I can't blame you.
So it's okay. If the urge hasn't gone away. Things like these are...They're not fixed. Just managed.
It's easier to do when you've got people who give a damn.
no subject
A reflection of the world in the morning dew, the way it loves him like hands scoop up an injured rabbit, a bird with a broken wing, hands that place themselves on wounds to pry them open, see the disgusting fester within before they can kiss it better. The way there always has to be a twist, because there's always a price to pay. It's so baseline for him that it doesn't even come to mind that it doesn't have to be that way.
Manage his madness. Just as mad of a concept on its own, and she'd volunteer with scarred arm raised high in the grey and faceless crowd. He could almost laugh, but he's still in control for now. That semi-freshly carved out nihilist in him, deep in that pit of despair, cruelly wonders how many days it'll take until she leaves him with his labyrinthine desires and cocytus heart. Or worse yet, that she won't. ]
...Best revisited if... when we meet on the same side again. I think.
[ He can't promise anything, most of all when he's a ghost whose hands only pass through her like an icy wind, unable to hold onto any part of her. ]
no subject
Fair enough.
[A yes was was far off a dream as a pot of gold. Just about as stupid, too. She didn't expect him to agree. Wants him to. Desperately. Wishes he were corporeal enough to coax along, not a mystical visitation. As if there weren't enough odds stacked against her.
But she said she wouldn't push, so she won't.
She lets his hand go then, flexing hers and running the fingers over her palm, plying for warmth. Then just as gingerly, runs the back of two fingers through that rogue flop of hair. The one covering his lost eye. Another wasted gesture that means too much to her and too little to the bitter world dooming them.]
Until then, doc. Stay out of trouble, will you?
no subject
I should be telling you that, don't you think?
[ The living have it so hard rn. God bless. Camilles Georg who went through the entire fucking gauntlet is an outlier and is suffering extra for it.
He goes silent. To say this would be weird, and maybe even seemingly a bit disingenuine given what they'd just talked about, but his time is limited and this breach into the living side is quite significant in the grand scheme of things. ]
...Anything else I can do for you, talk about? With the caveat that it seems I fade if I try to explain much of anything I've been up to in detail.
no subject
I'll do my best.
[Incredible that tomorrow she will be sent to hell and receive 902348 burn damage but neither of them know that yet.
Practical as always, her motion is tabled and he opens the floor for more urgent matters. Camille clucks her tongue, looking around. Tucking her own hair behind her ear.]
I've been wracking my brains on what to ask without cutting the connection. Seems impossible to avoid. Boothill nearly wiped out just admitting that you could see us. Watch us on...something. Happy to hear you've got smoothie access but otherwise I couldn't wrangle an inch of copy out of you all.
[She thinks a moment.]
We've been trying to look for what you asked for. Hasn't shown up yet. Maybe someone else will pop in tomorrow with a new gift that fits the bill. Otherwise...any oblique hints about astronomy you could drop?
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[ WHY!!! ]
You can afford to be more direct with your questions. I can hear you out, just that my answers might not be so clear, I think.
With your vague hint though, nothing immediately comes to mind...
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Really? God forbid we hear about the forbidden fruit blend.
[but hm.]
All right. The moon phases and the colours of the stars. I've been hearing that they might be important but I'm not sure how. The moon phases seem regular but the colours are a jumble. Any idea what's going on there?
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[ Hm... ]
What were they all again? I don't think the thing I'm considering is related...
Green, purple, blue, orange...
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[But hmm. Enters moon mind palace and bends time a little to give more shits about it—]
Green, magenta, blue, orange, red, and then...light blue? Periwinkle, for some reason. Breaks any kind of pattern I was thinking to make with it.
Not that I'm good with symbolism or astronomy in the first place. I only know a few things about colour theory, too. Layman's knowledge.
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[ He'd say more, but he's watching his opacity. ]
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Thank. Much appreciated.
What about you? No inquiries? I guess we're the less mysterious bunch, but I'd be remiss not to ask.
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...Made any progress on finding out what to do with the components and disrupting the ritual?
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God. I wish. Nothing to do with the nervous system has surfaced yet, and we're still muddling around with how the scriptures are supposed to fit together. It's a work in progress. Just not great progress.
[and at this point Camilles Georg doesn't know enough yet to say anything insightful or new i'm so sorry lowe]
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Mm. That's fine. Even if it feels like we have no time... any time is still time.
[ He had three days. Even just one more day, maybe, and things could've been much different. Maybe. He hopes. Wonders? Can't hope about a reality that doesn't exist. ]
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[She pats at her pocket. Remembers, swearing under her breath.]
Like cigarette access. Damn.
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...Frankly, I don't like having to run to them for petty favors. I never feel like it's worth their time. I spent too long not trusting them, full stop.
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[ Soon to be one......... ]
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I've uh...never been great at chatter. Much less being good company. I don't think they're too fond of me either.
We can't all be Karlach.
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You're all you've got on this side. I wouldn't write yourself out because it's just what you think.
Be sad if you want to, but it's easier to not do it alone.
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