Camille Preaker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scrapdraught) wrote2024-06-09 08:28 pm
scrapdraught) wrote2024-06-09 08:28 pmAstarion Ancunin
omg she's a reporter
it's Interview with a Vampire
it's Interview with a Vampire
scrapdraught) wrote2024-06-09 08:28 pm
no subject
[He isn't letting go. Camille's too stunned to stop him, even as the indignation hits her more forcefully.]
For god's sake, what happened to not babysitting me? [They are marching. To where, she does not know. Thank god everyone seems to have stayed inside tonight.] You think I have bad reasons? Then fuck you, I can walk myself home.
no subject
[ please. he’s being pestered by that annoying conscience he has nowadays but he’s not nice enough to pat her on the shoulder, wrap a blanket around her shoulders and tell her there, there don’t cry.
he does bring them over to the pyre though and points at one of the seats. ]
After this weekend? Yes. I do. [ blunt as fuck. maybe a little below the belt, but he’s not cruel in how he says it. ] Talk to me.
1/2
Caught. Can't. Duplicitous. Cherry. Ripe. Wrong.
Vanish vanish vanish vanish.]
2/2 (cw self harm, allusions to suicide/death )
I don't plan to spend my last week on Earth in amateur group therapy, Astarion. All of you — I can't keep talking—
[Her hands are trembling. Weak sings to her from her ankle, down where the letters turn illegible as they curve over bones. Very little space down there.]
I don't want to think. I don't want to think anymore. I don't want to be anything.
no subject
[ this man is not a therapist. ]
For now, you are.
[ she is here, and she is still camille. whether this lasts? they don't know. they won't know until something happens. but he is not interested in being a part of someone else's destructive coping methods -- not now, not after everything. ]
...
[ the flames from the pyre crackle in the background. it's soothing, in its own way. ] If you don't want to be alone, that's something I can help with-- but not like that. I'm more than aware of the damage that can cause.
no subject
Camille wilts into a seat, hand to her face. Silent now, after that erroneous outburst. Why couldn't they have killed her after voting for Aqua? Did you have to be a teenage girl to get an ounce of mercy around here?
Yet she's here now. She has to persist. Even through sandpaper scrapes across her ego.]
...Speaking from experience?
[He probably had wished he was dead, after 200 years with that man. She's only done a sixth of that time without him and she's had enough herself.]
cw: suicidal ideation references/vague unpleasant assault implications
… Yes, actually.
[ he had. back when he’d failed to bring someone home and cazador and isolated him, trapped him, shut him away in a tomb and left him there until he’d deemed him sufficiently punished enough. three hundred and sixty five days.
when you are punished in that sort of way, you do not care who you lure back with you or how you do it. you just do because the alternative is unbearable and there is nobody you would go through that for again. whether they were kind to you, or whether they are decidedly unkind and deeply cruel. ]
Famine keeps bluntly telling me I need therapy. [ which like. wtf is therapy he’s an olde. ] Not that I know what that actually is. But I assume it’s a sign I’m somewhat of a walking mess.
no subject
[Rondo, maybe. Most everyone else was lying, or they carried their wounds honestly.
Astarion lied by omission. She's certain he'd say nothing if he'd had a choice. But here they are. Linked by uninvited peeks into their sad little lives. By their sad little fates.]
Cazador?
[As a cause. Not the well adjusted example.]
no subject
[ rondo is a disaster when you get him talking about anything slightly raunchy. ]
A lot of issues in my life can be traced to fucking Cazador, yes.
[ cazador would not be a well adjusted example. something something the circle of abuse and breaking it. ]
no subject
She doesn't dispute him. Maybe the degrees to which any person was a mess varied, but they were all sloppy, sputtering souls. Cars on quarter tanks of gas with a blown out tire.]
...I guess, speaking generally, "family" will do that to you. [That was the thing with vampires, right? It got a little incestual, who bit who. She'll assume he's to blame for the state Astarion is in.]
Mine did. [She thinks a moment. Are they really doing this? Fine. All right. She'll bite.] Hometown didn't help. Girls in Wind Gap have to find a way to play the game. Losing isn't a pretty option.
no subject
[ they sure are just chatting about trauma by the pyre while i learn camille is dead. ]
Everyone out for themselves is a fairly common way to live. More fool you if you're the one falling behind, usually.
no subject
[Blood bonds are sticky things, born or bitten. But they don't have to be the only thing that defines you. No one has to be tied to them forever.
It's a mantra repeated ad nauseum to herself, when the sun sets and she needs the extra glimmer of faith.]
Some people don't ever have to play it that way. Sometimes I envy them. [She pauses. Dare she press on the bruise?] What did he do? That put you off sex?
If you don't want to answer that's all right. I've got my own stories, I don't need to know anything you don't care to share.
cw: some assault references
he tilts his head back a little. ]
Darling, I didn't lure people back to his mansion with promises of good conversation. [ the rest he doesn't want to talk about, even with gentle prodding. the people he lured were not always kind. nor was cazador. ] But "put off" is a strong phrase. It was more a realisation I was still willing to grit my teeth and do something I didn't want long after I was out from under his thumb, somewhere he couldn't hurt me.
[ that realisation that something went so deep that even though he was "free", he was still dangling himself from cazador's puppet strings, moving the threads with his own hands where his old master could not. ]
cw: assualt references, self harm, alcholism references
...Makes sense. [The methods. She hadn't given a terrible amount of thought to the mechanics of Cazador's sacrificial coven. There's been too much fuckery in every direction. But following the logic, if Astarion had to play manservant and fetch dog alike, what better way to draw in unsuspecting souls? It's the age old vampire lure.
It's the same bait she used to keep the heat off her. Better to take a little humiliation than to end up a real target. Like Faye Murray. Like so many other girls before or since her. Being different or standing just close enough next to it, both crimes punishable by improvised methods, by anyone who cares to mete out punishment.]
I think...once? Maybe twice in the last ten years, I've fucked someone with feeling. Not just to dodge something worse. [Facing a void. Facing violence. Facing judgment. Most matters with men can be easy out-manoeuvred if you opened wide.] It gets to be a habit.
I don't much anymore. Some guys put up with you keeping your clothes on for it. Others not so much.
[Her scars have spooked some men. She's careful. There are those intrigued by them, and it's those men she fears the most.]
no subject
It certainly does. [ ... he's not really talked about this too much. it's easy to pick up on little hints and things layered in his conversation and the topic when it arises, but it's... different to talk to someone who has perhaps experienced something similar in their own way.
he's not sure what he thinks about that. ]
Ah. The scarring? I've never really bothered about whether mine have been seen. People either think it's decorative, or simply don't get answers to their questions.
[ it's easier to hide infernal runes than common tongue waters, he imagines. ]
no subject
This, though. Murky waters, for her and for Astarion. Maybe less for him, since he was ready to call bullshit the minute her mouth was on his. Thinking about her exploits as exploitative is still tender territory. A year ago she'd contested Richard on it, called it sexist that he'd defend her juvenile honour. Now she wonders herself, debates in silent stretches at night. Sometimes she's on her own side. Others, on every side but her own.]
So it's not something they'd recognize. [She does wonder if Gale clocked it, egghead that he is. Then again, she has to assume their world as as vast as any other. Can't just be one cryptic spell-crafting language kicking around.] I think most people take mine as a warning. "Don't stick your dick in crazy."
[Sad is cute, sad is sexy, but only to a point. Richard hadn't been able to look her in the eye after he'd seen them. He never got in touch. He'd been so keen to save her up until that moment, too.]
...What'll you do now?
cw: scarification again. there are so many cws aaa.
seeing where they overlap, and fall in line. what did one of them do that the others didn't? what did they all do that was the same? if astarion thinks about what he knows of them, and the quieter more personal moments shared when they'd looked to him as the leader for some kind of guidance, he can take guesses at what gale and karlach might know about him.
the moments where his rage against cazador had come to the surface. had he gone to them with questions about his own back, and shown them the marks there directly? anything was possible. once he realised it could be something more than just sadistic poetry caved into his back for fun, and for the power trip that came with it. ] As for anyone else? Well. They can ask, but I don't have to tell them about it. Not if I don't want to.
[ Not if I don't want to.
now. that's a phrase. something he'd had to step back and realised he had no real concept of. something he'd had to step back and grab onto with both hands, squeezing tightly until he understood the meaning of it. what it meant to choose for yourself, for real. ]
Other than try not to die here? I don't really know. If you mean on a personal level, like this-- well. I'm better than I was when I realised I had a problem I needed to figure out. So that's something.
... And you?
when will this end CW: self harm mention
But then Gale was already dead before he got here, and living in Astarion's memory. So what the hell was the implication here?
No matter. When the question comes back around to her she has no better answer than he does. Camille shrugs.]
I was already on the mend from a total breakdown. [Which he'd seen. Discovering the teeth, Amma's arrest, her rendez-vous with the knife in the bathroom.] Cut out the liquor, the sharp objects. Hadn't touched a man in a year, really.
So. Keep floating I guess. Hope I hit land eventually. Or maybe a nice log to buoy me along.
[Camille wipes at her face. It's getting late. Her mind's still running but her body feels sluggish, lulled in by the crackling heat of the Pyre.]
I won't bother you again, though. You're not that pretty.
bans them from cw
... [ he hmms slightly. ] Well, in the nicest way possible my dear, I won't apologise for not letting you break your streak.
[ it would probably have been a very bad, very messy thing. for her and for him.
and then he scoffs. ]
I'm lovely actually. How rude. [ there's a little lilt there though. playing along. ]
finally free
[PROBABLY BAD. Emotionally and morally speaking.
She smiles, scrunches her nose and waggles a hand.]
Eh.
yahoo
[ both of you stop. and then he just snorts. ]
There's no accounting for taste.