“… Right.” All of that to say nothing in answer of her question. Fancy or no, every dish goes with some draughts better than others; she’d hardly deem Syr Adelard’s chowder to be haut cuisine, for example — but that still doesn’t mean she’d want chase it down with a big glass of orange juice.

Osytha decides to just move them along rather than give Safya any more trouble over it. “Sorry,” she murmurs, and her eyes alight on Rois’ own choice of beverage. “I’ll just have water as well, then, thank you.”

At least she’s won’t be getting drunk. Osytha picks up her knife and fork, gazing greedily down at her plate—

“... I am keen to keep your judgement making skills in check, especially when I’m about to tell you about the Lucero incident.”​

—and goes still with her cutlery poised awkwardly in the air, her face now glum as it regards the fattet djaj. Osytha releases a small, weary sigh.

“One bite,” she tells Rois. “Let me get one bite in me before we start on any of that, alright?”

She doesn’t wait for his response either way. Maybe she knows better than that, after how he reacted when she asked to make some tea during their first encounter (is she still salty about that?). Osytha ploughs ahead to fill her fork up with allium-sauced rice and toasted almonds, spearing a little grilled chicken onto the prongs along with it, caps off with a couple crowning pomegranate jewels… and then it’s down the hatch.

But, not to be gulped down before it can even hit the sides; it is evident that Osytha has a whole process to go through. First, she lays her cutlery down against the plate. Then, chewing carefully, her eyes close. A hand comes up in front of her mouth, forming a polite sort of screen.

“Mm,” she states. Her brow furrows ever so slightly, and she nods; a small but vigorous gesture. “Mm-hmm.” Most emphatic confirmation of her initial findings. Osytha opens her eyes. “Oh, that’s good.”

Better than panzerplatten soaked in a few drops of precious water. Better than dried strips of beef, tough as sinew. Better than dried everything, day in and day out, or the otherwise ‘non-perishible’ foodstuffs which had beleaguered the caravan on its way here. That was just stuff they ate to keep alive. This is food. And Rois is right that it’s not fancy. Osytha has tried ‘fancy’, or at least the upper crust’s current idea of fine dining, and she was decidedly unimpressed. But Safya’s fattet djaj hits her stomach in all the right places. Funnily enough, Rois is right about something else: despite how different the flavours and ingredients are, it nonetheless reminds Osytha of her own mother’s cooking. Maybe because it’s the kind of food you form good memories around, the sort of food to lend you comfort when you need some. The kind of meal which helps make a home.

“… There.” Osytha picks her cutlery back up again, and starts loading another forkfull. “S’pose I’m ready as I’ll ever be to hear about Syr Lucero, now.”
 
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He allows her the demanded bite, but the butcher honestly has no idea what she’s doing.

He’d never been in any real fine dining establishment (of the western kind) and knew only the basics, their culture was rugs with thread-counts in the thousands hand woven by an elder in the tent fleeing the sun, the whipping canopies overhead in a blaze of brilliant colours, hands against clay plates that had seen so many dishes their lightning-fork cracks had their own history. Rois decides in that moment to stare (uncomfortably so) at Osytha with half-lidded eyes, as if he were curiously observing an animal. Some sort of pleasing ritual that he ultimately decided did not matter, but to Safya, it did-- she’d been waiting with her little cart and had been mid-turn when the soft exclamations of enjoyment are sounded, causing her to whip about with bottles jingling like wind-chimes--

“... Really?” Starry eyes, the cart is briefly abandoned for silent-wing claps that stir the emerald feathers of her throat, “You are being my first westerner to try… so I was a little nervous.”

That’s right, no visitors stayed, and since she had had the responsibilities of cook unjustifiably thrust upon her plumed head she’d only been cooking for them. If birdkin could brush the pretty pinks of people her head would be the colours of a peach-field, their tell-tale sign of sweet joy is the puffing of their feathers, all frizzy. An accomplishment.

“Thank you, syr!” A trilled exclamation comprised of lofty notes, “I am feeling like a good cook already!”

… Rois is watching and eating with the vacancy of someone who did not quite feel the love sparked between the two… but he does not stop it, either. It is… nice to see Safya happy, after all that has happened, after the blows they had taken, the red-head takes a mental picture in his mind of the fluffed-up beastkin and the skip-skipping way she skedaddles to the kitchen to fetch his hungry companion some water. The sort of food you form good memories around… a slight squint, an internal thought that’d never be spoken aloud, Rois’s face is strict lines and a half-puffed cheek as he tests the fork edge against his teeth gently,

… Cute.

Cute bird in her little ruffled bib and matching socks, placing the water down so gently as if the glass would shatter upon stone at the slightest jolt, somehow narrowed eyes get narrower, he’d forgotten what drew her to him in the first place. The little sticky-up bits upon her head felt like waves of new-grass tickling the fingers, she’d been so battered in that tiny cage, big old eyes like forests you could get lost in-- and these thoughts aren’t sexual. They aren’t insidious in the slightest.

Deep down, the serial killer, half-monster cannibal just really liked cute things.

“... Close the door behind you.” … This is not reflected in his tone or anything outwardly otherwise, the peahen takes a swift curtsy and exits the scene with her cart and the kitchen door coming to a smooth shut behind her; cleaning time, and the clanking of pots and pans did well to trample over the noise from anywhere else.

“...”

… But he doesn’t start talking, not yet. There is a brief moment in time with this sort of suspended ‘waiting’ period that felt akin to an actual weight suddenly settling against shoulders, with the beastkin’s exit all happiness seemed to be swept away with her; and they are eating in silence. The pair of them, strangers, Osytha would possibly regard it awkwardly but to her large companion, this sort of quiet did not phase him. It was thinking time. Half a plate gone, a piece of chicken is toyed with by way of silver prongs, oh, maybe it hadn’t been enough time, a few hours had gone by like the burning of a candle wick and now the flames of anger and spite and violence had all but gone with the sun itself, leaving only… something. Something more human, something more tender, something that stung somewhere deep in his chest. Rois had been plotting this conversation for hours and now that it is here he suddenly loses the ability to speak, letting pretty, thick curls ghost the bridge of his nose as he rests a chin against a propped up claw with black nails catching the light.

“... I want you to know, what I am about to say warrants no ‘I’m sorry’s’ or sympathy. I do not want to be pitied, likewise, I cannot omit certain factors in the story because then it will not make sense. I just want to explain why what happened happened.”

In the quiet, with such breathy tones, the persistent effect of his double-voice could be heard like white noise laying beneath every single word, a gentle, rolling growl. Rois never looked at people when he felt the stirrings of strong emotion clutch at his chest that were not of the horrid kind, as if the ruby-red depths of his eyes would betray something more, the man wants to be stoic, as cold as he can be about the subject… but the thmp-thmping of his heart coming slightly faster regrettably reminds him that he is bad at it. Squaring a jaw against rigid fingers,

“I have… a medical condition. It cannot be seen on the outside… but it is unfortunately rather… severe.” And though the statement is the softest the butcher had ever spoken in her presence they are forced through grinded teeth, swallowing becomes hard and so he has simply stopped eating. It was ok. It was vague, she’d never know, it would never be used against him, it could be anything, it was a weakness but as long as it was never unveiled they wouldn’t-- they couldn’t hurt him--

“... Lucero is blind, but she has special eyes… or something. So she could see… it. Walked right up to me, a stranger, and began to show off how great she was at healing. All of her… achievements, what she could fix with her amazing magicks. And she said to me, ‘I can see something is wrong. I can help you, too’.”

Anger. It had to be anger or else it’d be something else that caused tense shoulders to rise, a long, long exhale, something familiar… steam. Just barely there, returned with rage, Rois had said those words with such utter contempt it was crystal clear that hatred came far too easy and far too hot, cracks appear in the stoicism. Teeth clack, he does not wish for them to do so but the statement has to be bitten out,

“... ‘I can see something is wrong’. How can somebody walk up to someone they know is sick and say something like that so easily… ?”

That is what they all said. Something wrong, there is something wrong with you. You’re too violent, you’re too dangerous, you’re barely human, there is something wrong with you. Bystanders and medics, customers and herbswomen, traders and spiritualists, you are wrong. If it wasn’t an outside observation it was an internal one, why, it wasn’t his fault he’d be born that way-- it wasn’t his fault he had to do what he had to do-- how could someone walk up to another stranger and say aloud with arrogance shining in their voice that they could fix you because they knew you were wrong…? He knew, so many aspects of the man were wrong and there was nothing to be done about it, it wasn’t fair that people kept being so cruel… when all he had done was exist before them. They could hate him when he was actively being horrible, that was justified, the anger at the crimes was justified, but when he was doing nothing at all...?

“I didn’t ask, I was just standing there… the way she talked to me… I’m still human…”

It had to be anger, or it would be something else. Sadness. Genuine and pure it threatens to shake the deep tone of his gravelly voice, threatens to steal him away to someplace else, someplace where he could sit in the dark and try to rebuild walls, words can’t hurt me. Words can never hurt me, he’d repeat like a mantra, such silly things, voices. They were not blades or ropes or bolts but they came like water drop-by-drop and rose the well he stood at the bottom of till breathing bubbled and drowning became the business of thinking, hands on his head, thinking, words cannot hurt me. And yet… they did. And he had been chained to a wall and had been burnt, had been paraded through a street high on herbs, had turned into a Hell-beast and back and it could not phase him, but Taani died. But, Lucero had said to him with shining eyes of hope, bright shades of grey, I can help you, too.

… And she couldn’t.

Rois’s heart seeks to bruise his ribs, he cannot turn any further away from her without making it obvious he is doing so, swiftly fwips one leg over another and leans back in his chair in an attempt to regain composure… once again, he is bad at it. Hands link at his stomach and nails touch the skin of the other hand, drag themselves, thumb against palm, distracted itching. Fidgeting. Mouth opens and closes, he swallows harshly and attempts to hack the words up from somewhere, they are underpinned with the lightest whine of forced air,

“She… she didn’t… even consider my feelings. I… have feelings. I’m still a person, she… looked at me as some thing that had to be fixed.” Heavy lashes framing gleaming eyes turned downwards, he speaks to someone at the end of the table, it’s easier than looking at her, “And I’ve spent-- my whole life people have been trying to fix things-- the condition can’t be fixed, she tried. I… can’t be fixed. So I hurt her and I knew it didn’t matter, because at the end of it all she’d just-- healed herself right back up, right as rain-- and what about me?!”

She’d ran into the arms of Syr Silas and no doubt wept starry tears at him and oh, all the sympathy, poor Lucero; he’d gone home and pretended with a cracked smile that everything was just fine, because he had to be strong. There was no choice in the matter, he had to be able to take hits, had to be able to sit there and be told by a hundred unfamiliar voices, no, we cannot help you-- suddenly Rois stands with a hand working at his mouth, turning sharply upon his heel to face any direction but the table with the chair clattering loudly as it struggled to stay upon four legs, and now he’s in the wrong. And now he’s the one who did something ‘bad’. And now he’s the villain, and people did not care for those who did not walk the path of sunlight and goodness and those people could walk up to others and say with voices like angels that they have saved the hopeless, the suicidal, the mortally wounded, the actively dead, the violent and the wrong.

“I didn't deserve... she didn't care... ”

And still… they could not fix him.

A foot bounces upon the floor haphazardly, a repetitive tapping noise, hurried, distracting, Rois drags a hand up his bandaged face and presses it to his brow in stress because Osytha probably still would not understand. All this emotion was pointless, it's why he never bothered letting it loose. No-one ever did, and no-one ever cared, and he had feelings, he was a person, but none wept for monsters with a record like his… once broken, always broken, and not even the holiest magicks in the world would come to soften the edges of a soul so scarred it barely held a real form any more. The chorus of people against the ears of a child, sitting in the same spot fearful as they bought everything they could in the way of bells and rites and herbs and concoctions that tasted like bile and blessings from churches he had never heard of. I’ll help you, too. Liars… liars. Just as sick as ever, just as fucked as ever, a joke of an existance, just as horrid and violent and cruel and nothing changed, nothing got better, why bother, why keep going at all when all anyone was ever going to see was something wrong--

“-- I’m just-- I’m gonna’ go get my cigarettes. I’ll be back.”

Robotic tones, blunt and empty and forced. No glance to Osytha sitting here, breezing past with feigned calmness, desperation to escape, if only for a moment. Just a moment… just to recompose, just to breathe, just to settle down in the shadowy confinements of a room where nothing was looking and all was still and a wayward door is gently opened and the room is stepped into; darkness. Rough panting, a slight dizziness, it was difficult and all too much and Rois would not allow the beginnings of tears to hug black lashes with a hand rubbing erratically at his face, no, words could not hurt that harshly. They couldn’t.

… But they did.

They hurt… so… much.
 
That dark aperture waxes, welcoming Rois’ eager flight into its arms. It swallows up the big man’s agitated frame and he’s gone, leaving Osytha alone at the dinner table. She only watches the suggestion from her periphery, staring down into the bowl of ruby-dotted almonds; quite soon after Rois began his fractured account of the ‘Lucero incident’, her utensils had stilled in her hands and she’d begun eating Safya’s dish with her eyes alone. Rather that than setting her ever-curious blue gaze upon Mr Crodocile, to corner him even more than he already was.

Doesn’t mean she missed the restless tease of his fingers against the other hand, though, nor the twist of his head searching for some way to hide even as the words all come spilling out. Osytha still caught the tactile distraction of hands pressed to his weary face, and how his foot rattled in place over the hard stone floor after he’d clattered out of his seat. A smorgasbord of displacement activities.

Most certainly, she heard the stilted discomfit growing in Rois’ voice as it all gets more and more jumbled. A man into whose words one could normally sink like they’re hot tar, for how rich and dark and smooth they flow, and how terrible for it. This man is a far cry from the midnight devil she’d first met back at their crossroads of sorts.

It all sits leaden in Osytha’s mind, pinning her to her seat at the dining table. Slowly, she resumes working her way through the fattet djaj. Chews thoughtfully on a few mouthfuls of chicken, but mostly focusing on digesting the much heavier portion she’s just been served. That’s how Rois finds her when he re-emerges with his durries. Still planted to her seat, wearing a thousand-yard stare and a certain ‘either contemplating unfathomable cosmic mysteries or perfectly devoid of any and all conscious thought’ expression upon her face.

“… I want you to know, what I am about to say warrants no ‘I’m sorry’s’ or sympathy. I do not want to be pitied…”

No condolences or the like, then. Osytha listens to Rois shuffling back in, a little sequential soundscape that suffocates under the greater, unresolved silence which has opened up between them.

“Aye. You are.” She lets that very open starter hang in the air while she gulps down a little water, before picking back up with: “A person, I mean. Earlier downstairs, when you said that you weren’t… that honestly rubbed me the wrong way.”

Osytha continues to tackle her dinner. Eyes chasing chicken and rice around her plate, packing smaller morsels onto her fork, spacing them out, but slowly still demolishing her plate. Speaking in this slightly stop-start way around each mouthful, perhaps that makes it feel more casual. Less confronting.

“I think that’s part of why I wasn’t all that scared after seein’ you transform. Not because I think that’ll always keep your Shroudfiend in check, mind. More like…” Osytha pokes absently at some rice as though the right words are simply hiding between the grains, “… more like if it does go pear-shaped, at least I’ll know you’ve tried. People fuck up or lose control all the time, Sinclair. You’re not any less human for it because the stakes are higher, or because there’s more workin’ against you. But the more I learn about you, the more I believe you’re tryin’ as best you know how. And no one can ask for more than that.”

Where has she said these words before? That’s right… spoken up at a night sky, watching archers loose their guiding arrows. The first time she’d truly looked at the sadness there in Faramund’s eyes, and no matter what sins of his she imagined, couldn’t find any point in condemning a man trying to be better than he was yesterday. She’d seen it in Hector, too. Different failures, different ghosts. But he keeps trying to find a path forward while learning from the hard lessons he’s been taught. Isn’t that what Rois is doing, in his own way? Is he any less deserving of a little grace?

Osytha knows, too: if her own mistakes seem smaller in comparison, it may well only be because she hasn’t had the chance to match them.

“… Sorry. Guess I wanted to get that off my chest first.” She grasps her glass of water, though, doesn’t lift it from the table. It’s cold, by some means; a welcome sort of chill bites at Osytha’s hand, as condensation slinks between her fingers. “But we were talkin’ about Lucero.”

A pale digit draws patterns through bulging, swollen droplets. Familiar little Pursuits, chasing one another round and round the frosting glass. Flame. Loch. Life. Death. Wyld. The lens through which Knights of Anathaeum are taught to understand the universe. Useful tools at the best of times. Shackles at the worst.

“You make it sound a bit like, well — like when Lucero healed herself, she left you behind.” Stroke, squiggle, dot; and now there’s Syr Steven locking eyes with her. “Hurtin’ her… was that a way to make her understand something?”

Osytha stares into that frigid gaze from her glass. The mysteries of Loch, awaiting. Daring her to dive in.

“And me. Clueless as I keep provin’ to be, as much as you say you don’t want me learnin’ too much, I can’t help but notice you keep on sharin’. I’m grateful for it, don’t get me wrong. I want to understand, and it feels like I’m gettin’ there the more we talk. But I wonder, if it’s… enough. Or if you want more from me.”
 
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Wishes for hands with the ability to strangle down all the emotion that kept rising within the well, people found the strength to do it every day and he did not know where from. A secret reserve that the normal folks had tucked away in their un-addled skull that could be accessed in times of crisis, a fire blanket to come and dampen the rolling smoke of memory manifest? It did not exist, not with him, two things are taken from the room as Osytha’s voice echos about the stone in a manner pretty despite her accent, like the the trickling of a stream; water, water, if only one could reach out and douse themselves in its minor glory and feel its heavenly coolness against the pain… it is too far away. Even when Rois unceremoniously regains his position beside her reprieve is too far away to find any comfort in her gentle queries. She’s right there, all glimmering water-shine and melancholic eyes beneath way-ward strands of umber that looked black in the night, saying gentle things drip-dropping against the fires of his heart and they feel good and if he just reached out, maybe, maybe Filly did not even really care, maybe this was all falsehoods and she was placating, but maybe not, maybe she really is just… trying.

Rois hasn’t really looked at her before. People are monitored facially by expressions alone and body language is important, but for a few seconds there he is really looking at her. Not as stern-faced as her accent, either. Gently sloping brows and moonlit skin, hair that only insinuated at curls and heavy eyes, was something knowing etched into the gentle lines of her cheeks or the weak kiss of tired purples beneath her eyes? He wished he knew. Peoples faces when they were not overtly reacting confused him, as if they were a puzzle composed of a variety of shapes eyes like his could never comprehend. A silver box and a coin pouched are placed statically upon the table to be addressed at some nearing time,

“... I try. I… do try.” The truth was always so easy to admit even as a scratchy mumble, the emotion still thrives there in the gaps between breaths but the brief moment away to put himself together felt purposeful, needing that darkness to heal. Reassurance was there, no-one can ask for more than that, yet why when words floated so precariously between them could they not be gently snatched from the space and held against the chest? What sort of invisible snare, the walls, peering over and seeing a hand stretching up…

“I… yeah. Than… ks.”

It isn’t awkwardly said because he feels awkward, in fact the man sounds a little surprised he said those words and it shows faintly as a slight stiffening... maybe the slightest closing of the gap. Her experienced, wanting hand could ever be taken by his ugly, horrid claws in full, after all; he cowers behind those walls. Here came the usual thoughts; this could be a trap (but was it?). A lulling into a vulnerable place that he himself formed, Gods, it was just like Lucero again, this was the fault of women and their sweet tones and their liquid eyes and their innate ability to gaze upon the threshold and bypass it by just their fingertips alone, it is frightening. Very scary. What if Filly forgot he was a large, scary man capable of terrible things, unspeakable things, a vagrant and unlawful blight upon society? That would not do, then she’d really know, and knowing was not allowed. As she speaks of Lucero Rois is eating, but it's the static, toneless eating one would do when they weren’t hungry but wasting food was bad, it barely tastes of anything now, just sand against his tongue as glowering eyes are kept upon the few remaining scraps of chicken left-- forkfull by forkfull disappearing. Keep forcing it. The bridge of his nose is flushed red with emotions, the butcher aims to keep his face in shadows by keeping that heavy head hung, as if the darkness would do him any favors,

I did it again.

It’s easier keeping the damned demon under control than it is his own emotions. And that needs to be addressed first--

“I don’t mean to share-- I didn’t want to.” A sudden jolt, Rois snaps to attention and faces her with a very human emotion, shame, it is scribbled across his expression as a wobbly lined-mouth, startled eyes, a bead of sweat against his cheek and a slightly open mouth, “I don’t want anything from you.”

But it is nice that you listened.

Then why did it feel so much better to have let it all out instead of keeping it inside? A man with no-one to confide in explodes periodically with emotion, it bursts at the seams, creates holes in his being from being kept away for too long; and if only a noose existed that could be tightened about the throat to catch words alone before they reached the mouth, he’d have yanked it so tight by now the man would never speak again. Unconscious movement, a hand to his skull to splay red curls, stupid, you couldn’t even, not this one time, not freak the hell out. Always freaking out, always jumping too high, always being so loud, Osytha didn’t ask for any of that. She did not need any of that, she did not deserve any of that-- even if it might be a trap-- but isn’t she trying-- nails against the skull, briefly clasping,

“I didn’t mean, the basement room.” The words clamber out of him sloppily (the repetitive speech pattern that was him essentially cutting off his own statements always made things sound more askew than they were), distraction is the last mouthful of basely swallowed down food he wanted to choke on, Safya would be happy the plate was clear. That was all that matters. Immediately (with comical speed) a frantic reach to the tin, its lifted lid displays a plethora of hand-rolled cigarettes with silver bands at the cotton filters, it is unceremoniously stuffed into his mouth and lit with a finger, “I was crazy, and I said and did stupid shit, hunger is dangerous for me, messes with my head, it messes with my head, it’s why I need the chains, shouldn’t have gotten other people involved, it was a careless move and I regret it and want to pretend like that segment of the day did not exist.”

All at once in a rushed flurry admitted, finished by a deep breath in of sweet nicotine that almost halves the cig in a single action. The lid is used as an ash tray and smoke is blown away from her, the burning in battered lungs doesn’t feel strong enough, not at that moment. After anger came sadness, and now came panic, raw and unfiltered it made his skin crawl, she knew. Knew something, Rois doesn’t know what, he is aware he is acting suddenly like a crazed person but isn’t quite sure to what extent or how to stop, shame. So weak. But a plan is hatched, just shift the attention, just talk about the actual subject, just ignore the nausea of forceful eating and attempting to keep everything locked in,

“And Lucero apologized and is now stalking me because she wants to be my 'friend', and Silas is just mad because he doesn’t like that Lucero likes the company of another man, and everything is fine, and she did not write a report and I do not want one written, it’s between us two, thats all.”

Running away again, run away words at a lightning pace. The cigarette smoke rolls from grey to black as the filter burns, it’s already gone so quickly, immediately stubbed out against the tin he picks up another one and adds in a silted tone the moment it’s lit,

“I was... trying to teach her this lesson, that everyone is a plate or a bowl or a mug and when smashed you can glue it back together but it’s still broken. Once something is broken that’s how it’ll always be, she could heal herself up all she liked but there would be this splinter in her mind, what happened, a memory, bad feelings, there isn’t a cure for that. There will never be a cure for that, no amount of medicine or introspection or love or magick can seal those cracks because they’ll be there till the day you die, and even if no-one else can see them... you can.”
 
“There will never be a cure for that, no amount of medicine or introspection or love or magick can seal those cracks because they’ll be there till the day you die, and even if no-one else can see them... you can.”​

Only you. And probably that’s by design. Osytha thinks of a white-haired exorcist who would open up to her about anything, almost anything, only to skirt around just exactly how all those curses he’d absorbed into himself were affecting him. She thinks about that big man, Rois-sized, who couldn’t bring himself to name his sins for her, even if another part of him wanted to. And she thinks about the one into whose arms she knows she’ll race once this long, long journey is over. The man who’d been in one moment an unassailable wall of iron, but after seeing into each other’s minds, four words she’d spoken to him and he had crumbled. People hide their seams and fractures, can do such a good job of it — and why wouldn’t they? Show your hurt to the wrong person, at the wrong time, and you might just break all over again. Maybe even worse than before.

Osytha takes up the glass at last, allowing herself a measured sip while she turns that lens inward. Because what about her? Maybe Osytha hasn’t quite broken yet, herself — but nor can she deny the cracks are spreading. Nearly three years on and the questions keep coming, the doubts, growing. Every time she’s tested as a knight, it doesn’t make her stronger, like a tree which grows steadfast against the wind. She’s more like metal fatigue; microscopic fractures spreading permanently along her faults. The question isn’t if she will break. It’s when, and how.

Is that what this is? She sees so much of them in Rois. Is that why making this work is so important to her? Maybe she should step back a little after all. It’s not fair on the man to pin so much on him, to try and approach this as a second chance for her own conscience. And it definitely isn’t doing her objectivity any favours.

Maybe. But maybe objective and impersonal isn’t what Rois needs. Maybe he’s had one too many cold strangers in his life already.

“And I suppose no two folks’ damage is exactly the same,” Osytha remarks, while her nose fills up from the smell of second-hand smoke. She doesn’t mind it, though. “What it’s done to one man I know, he’d insist he doesn’t deserve to be seen as human. My lo— I mean, er, another man I know… I fear that sometimes he can’t see there’s more to himself than just his failures. I guess in both their cases, it’s guilt that’s glued them back together. And now it’s just a part of them. To accept them is to accept those pieces just as much as all the others.”

The melancholic gaze she’s giving the last few scraps of dinner suddenly lifts, and Osytha smiles faintly as she finally does turn her head to look at Rois. The man’s puffing away like it’s a competitive sport, with deep long drags making for an impressive rate of attrition to the local dart population. Still a little on edge, she notes of the uneasy, scarlet-slashed eyes which seem to be mostly avoiding hers. And yet, still here with her.

“That does sound like our Lucero by the by,” she observes, before going back to her plate. “There are worse friends for a body to have, I’ll give you that.” Lift, bite, savour, swallow. “I’ll keep that out of my report as well, in that case. No need to get the poor girl in trouble because the higher-ups had to hear it second-hand from me. And all this, too, I’m assuming you’ll want scrubbed from the official record. Actually, maybe I ought to have a draft ready for you to review before I leave. But I suspect it’s going to be a light read.”
 

“... Interesting.”

This isn’t a quip. It isn’t a remark of boredom, something that could of and has fallen from his toothy mouth in regards to the personal sentiments of others, but something else, something akin to minor revelation. Like the jagged pieces of her puzzle had finally started to make some sense. The second sizzling cigarette is not pointed at her, but rather across the table to that invisible person across the table the man keeps addressing, a stilted voice of suppressed wonderment,

“You… understand to some degree, but you cannot relate.”

And this might seem like it is coming out of nowhere, unless the poor woman had been aware the entire time that he’s been trying to catch her out in something. A stagger of words, an implication of weakness, she faced the beast unafraid and had minor annoyance towards the man in the basement, spared a measure of sadness for Taani and Vitri and expressed the fact she would probably lash out if something terrible happened to her loved ones in turn, but every single emotion has been controlled. Calm, or professional, or unknowing? Even the deliberate mentioning of scalping her fellow knight had drawn simple emotion from her, gentle emotion, always attempting to relate and now turning the question outwards, yes, I know others that can relate to what you’re saying, but not me. Filly’s normalcy might not be a mask.

She might just be normal.

In that case all that searching to make her break and expose an inkling of a weakness was pointless, because there wasn’t anything to expose. Even when Rois had been a hurricane she was but stone like the mountains above, careful, no doubt thinking, but unshaken none-the-less, un-phaseable, in the presence of physical and verbal threats alike-- it couldn’t be a mask. People did not just wander through life with beats of such casual emotion, as if their soul was not burning, as if they had never encountered a strife bad enough to turn them dizzy from terror and malice, what would make her crack? The genericness of something like rape? The actual death of those unknown beloveds? Did it really take such extremities;

Is this what happens when you don’t live a life of real hardship?

The silence between them has turned a touch ominous considering the frantic bout of emotion before. The second cigarette is gone, laid gently to rest with the stub of the other as smoke rolls from his nose like the day-time forges did so effortlessly, and one might be amiss if thinking that for a second he had calmed down into a likewise sense of normalcy. A whimsical notion. Idle and he did not belong in the same sentence even if outwardly the stillness of thought makes the red-head appear as if hes doing nothing but pondering Osytha’s words about the report review, a sweet promise, you’ll be fine, I’ll take care of it, it’s just between us--

That kindness is not immediately rewarded-- it happens all of a sudden. Like a flash of lightning comes his splayed claws to catch her hand against the weary tips of blunt nails, this is not a hand-hold, this is the follow through of movement as she is dragged sharply with the chair howling in protest in its movement, just a little closer, the side of the knights pearly white hand… is stuffed into his jagged mouth. Teeth against the stark, fine bones there, a damp heat, the softness of a still tongue, a hunting dog and its duck limply hanging from its mouth. Hot breath ghosts her palmy skin with the lingering of tobacco smoke, the pointing of fangs do not cross the threshold of the knights skin but they threaten it, as if the most minute of movements could cause them to delve against flesh upwards and below--

Rois watches her closely with hooded eyes, unblinking.
 
Complacent. She’s done it before; thought she’s reached some sort of equilibrium with Rois, allowed her guard to come down — and suddenly found him leaping over the boundary she’d simply imagined there. Baleful eyes, butcher’s cleaver, sharp teeth.

He takes Osytha completely by surprise. Chair legs screeching, her body suddenly tipping. That drinking glass and all its dissolving scribbles tips over heavy, teeming out a chill puddle across stone countertop. A hard gasp, heart ramming against ribs, eyes flying wide open, in an instant of shock.

Surprised… but not frozen by it. Not a Knight of Anathaeum.

Osytha stops when he does, paused with her hand cinched between the firm press of enamel. Her mind races to catch up with this sharp new tableau: her own body leant precariously off-balance toward Rois, and he, his broad hand wrapped easily around her wrist with the palm disappearing into his maw. Those dark lips peeled back to bare the glimmer of fangs. Whorls of crimson-black hair slipping out around the warding bandages draped haphazardly around his head, though, not enough to hide the resting incline of his brows, nor softly burning eyes staring down at her. Heavy and collected is that gaze, where her own jitters with flight.

And she feels the press of his tongue, and saliva hot with his breath against her palm. That, as well as the warning dig of his teeth, she feels most of all.

Might explain why it takes Osytha a moment to realise what her other hand is doing. But then her confused eyes find themselves flicking down to where she’s brought her table knife up and pointed at his throat. She blinks at in near-puzzlement — she hadn’t even thought about it, her body had simply reacted in the way it’s been conditioned to over long years of hard training and even harder experience.

Somehow she manages to let go. Those reflexes are fighting back, making her fingers feel stiff and trembling, but Osytha overrules them. The knife clatters to the floor with a bright metallic retort. It made for a pretty laughable weapon anyway, save perhaps against the butter dish.

Her gaze rises back up to the Butcher’s. Holding, and watching her. “You… understand to some degree, but you cannot relate.”

Another test…?

“I don’t know if it’ll be enough.” when Osytha finds her voice, it’s strangely flat and even. Moreso than she feels it deserves to be, given the uncertainty still coursing through her. “If this is— if you want me to relate. It’s going to have to hurt so much that it… that it changes me, won’t it?”

Osytha knows it’s going to hurt. The bite of sharp steel is bad enough, but teeth, humanoid teeth, are so much worse. They don’t cut clean in like a surgeon’s scalpel; they grind, rend, and tear before they puncture, making a ruin of the flesh all around as well. She knows it’s going to hurt like absolute buggery. But by itself, is that pain enough to leave those sorts of scars?

She can’t offer it up. Anything she can afford to give, well, that defeats the purpose. If Rois wants her to see, she knows he’s going to have to take more than that from her. And there’s no way of knowing who Osytha will be when the pieces are put back together.

Or is this something else? If he doesn’t care whether she can relate or not, then what…?
 
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Reaction.

Glass clattering, icy hues overtaken by surprise quickly melted, the flashing of a knife in the night tipped upwards; its blunt edge holds a threat that could never be delivered upon. For a moment there she had been all wayward locks loosened and wide eyes, the staticness of muscles betrayed uncertainty, all wound up tight against the cutlery and between his teeth like prey bracing for an impact, the feeling did not wane with the passing moments. And there was confusion. Maybe she herself had not expected to react the way she did, but Rois was used to knives being swung in his direction the moment he did things that were by design done with the explicit purpose of throwing people off guard.

If you could not gain vulnerability, then you could force it.

Oh, those eyes were burning alright, now they were not as squinted in the dark the reds are feverish with the sparklings of emotion toppling over emotion, manic, he is a maniac and maybe her shock in the moment was because Osytha had somehow forgotten all of this in their talks, in their little moments haunted by the memory but fifteen minutes before where the butcher had looked and seemed so… open. When it had seemed like those gentle words could well and truly be turning the tide of an unseen battle, aloe to open wounds, precious and soft and sincere and healing. There is no flinching at the repetitive ringing of a dull bell, the knife hitting the floor as gravity greedily pulled it down, just, watching. Not it. Her. The way the wrangled-in harshness of her breath gave way to a slight tautness at her throat, worried lines grew deeper shadows. Was the knights heart racing…? Rois wished, with dark delight, that he knew its uncertainty against his teeth.

But the threat of the bite isn’t enough, it causes a laugh to roll about in his throat, makes her hand shake as teeth quiver against reddened skin, Oh, Filly! The woman had wanted to know so badly, and now on the precipice of discovery Osytha taunts him, a normal person would be caught between fluster and panic at the idea of a jaw collapsing against frail bone to birth blood between spacious gaps in flesh, but not her! She needed more! Still she speaks with that dulled voice, Rois’s eyes widen with the prospect, the horrid notion that a cliff is nearing the two, something that had been but an idea now manifest as a thing drawing closer, below sits a dark abyss that threatens to swallow her up-- a darkness he had a home in--

Her hand is taken by his and removed before he slobbers over it in desperation to swallow, she is tasteless, hints of dirt and wood and the metallic twang that all people possessed when exposed to warmth, the faintest licks of heat. The limb is held close for a few moments, lips moving against knuckles, a decision,

“... I won’t be the one you teach you the lesson. Not like her.” Murmured, low words, they feel in their depth like they come to sit against finger-bones, they tremble past skin, “When it happens to you it ought to be from a true stranger, someone you can really lash out against. Someone you could kill.”

Because it hurts more that way. Because you are burdened with what you’ve done when you’ve lashed out in violence, you have to confront the darkness you did not know you had, you have to find reason in the shards of broken porcelain, why, why, why… and it needed to hurt beyond belief, beyond words, beyond understanding. That is when change occurred.

But this was not the end. Osytha’s actions have sparked a question in the confusing labyrinths of Rois’s mind that needed to be answered, something proposed by the lifting of the knife that needed to be explored, her hand is being moved. Lowered, pressed against the side of his exposed throat palm down against golden skin, fingers run against the bump of cartilage and her thumb is devoured by wild red curls come softly like drapes to dance about the digit. Acting very calm, acting, in their tense silence claws come to very slowly take theother hand that had threatened to quake with trained violence to join its lifelong friend upon his neck with fingers curled, the lightest strangle imaginable. One born of forced contact, beneath the thin lengths of Osytha’s moon-lit skin the man’s pulse surges hotly, the reason for its uneven speed could be anything. His motivations aren’t clear.

Because if they were, then it couldn’t be a test.

“Heh… heh…”

A toying chuckle, absolutely empty of all humor and joy. A glint of ruby madness in the listless dusk, delivering onto the knights reluctant hands the mechanical shifting of chords strung up halfly by the ever-present growl, all beneath the aberrant tap-tap-tap-taping, she has control, she has power, she could-- if she wanted to she could coil those fingers so strongly against the pillars of his neck it’d spawn blood if not render him unconscious in time-- there is purpose to it all. A quick fanged smile flashed, it’s so casual… before a blur of speedy movement.

Suddenly and without warning a large hand comes firmly against her closer knee, and with tremendous pressure slips itself against the upper-inner length of a thigh beneath the rolls of skirt where it is run without ceremony forward and downward almost to the base of the woman's leg----
 
She doesn’t understand.

Her eyes are still large with that confusion when Rois takes her hand away from his teeth and, almost tenderly, places it against the flesh of his neck instead. Osytha stares at it there, alabaster in the moonlight against the rippling contours of his dusky throat. With every shift of his body, every word tapped up its well, muscles and tendons rise and fall in their complex gradients of shadowplay.

“… I won’t be the one you teach you the lesson.” So what is this, then? She lifts her gaze back up, but there’s no real answer to be found in Rois’ malice-bright eyes. Just an expression Osytha has come to recognise means he’s found some fresh way to turn everything on its head.

He takes her other hand. She doesn’t fight it. Not after the knife, mistake as it was. Whatever this is, she just needs to trust him. Whatever he does — she learnt this the first time they met, that nothing is as it seems, that is the point, but if Osytha can just trust him… then she’ll see in the aftermath that there was never any need for knives.

Slowly, so slowly, Rois wraps her other fingers about his neck as well, and lets his own hands fall away. He’s given her good purchase with thumbs to the cartilage, ready to crush that trachea in. A relatively slow and traumatic way to go, in the grand scheme of things. If Osytha’s having to use her hands, she prefers to constrict the carotids instead. Much quicker and less painful, more like a lullaby in the fingers. She can feel that blood drumming under her touch, Rois’ pulse like improvised jazz past the skin which grips to hers from the residue of day’s sweat.

“Rois?” Voice soft with unease, all the more to have him chuckling and bobbing his Adam’s apple against her thumbs.

All her questions rolled into that one. But his answer isn’t the spoken kind.

Her face reacts first; new depths of shock and confusion wracking her features. The rest of her follows soon after, once some cognitive process, primitive yet all the faster for it, understands the shape of that hand, where it is, and where it’s going.

Osytha flies backwards out of her chair. She almost trips over it in the manoeuvre, and the thing clatters noisily over. Her hands reflexively dart low, covering, reclaiming the layers of fabric for herself and securing them in place. Somehow, she looks to have gone even paler than before.

“You—” another step backwards, “—no. No, don’t…”

“It’s going to have to hurt so much that it… that it changes me, won’t it?” And certainly, this could be what it takes. This, or something else that’s no less awful. She can’t offer such a thing. But then, what does that tell Rois? How sincere can she really be, if she refuses to learn what it’s like to be broken? When she’d practically invited him?

“… You said you weren’t, weren’t that. You told me. You’re not a rapist.” Osytha stares at the floor, her hands trembling as they bunch the fabric of her skirts in their fists. Why? Why does she feel ashamed? “I know I don’t need to fight you, because you told me. And I believe you. So…”
 
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A different lesson.

Interesting, interesting!

The man’s face is briefly possessed of nought but steadfast shadow in all black with pinprick pupils, eerie, her rapid movement renders him as a blur, something wearing the skin of a human but composed internally of something far more frightful. It is fleeting however, as fleeting as her footwork that sends her dancing backwards away, away from the terrible warmth of his palm. She is all flurried-fabric and nervous hands, atrocity has driven her into a corner of explicit fear for her flesh, as drained of red as it could be. Osytha has, all at once, become a ghost of the woman's previous resolve, and it is a shame the state came from the common unfastening of strength that came to most women the moment a man turned their nails against them in want, consumed by desperate, unfettered desire. They were all the same.

A weakness as impersonal as the kind that could be gleaned from violence.

Annoying.

And Rois doesn’t get closer, unphased by the racket of the chair still echoing in ears as he calmly lights another cigarette and takes a few moments to think over the response gained from his little experiment, the action is a little cold. How can someone go from almost fondling another-- he had purposefully and notably stopped short of the actual act-- to suddenly being so absent of heat, knowing he was made of fire? It licks at his fingers, turns brown tobacco iridescent orange, a breath in--

“... Yes, you’re right. I’m not a rapist, and never will be.” Comes that droll voice like poison rolling from the tip of that pointed tongue, he was the person who had stated he would not seek to break the glass of her being, after all. Eyes stay on her, what will you do next? The mania has not faded, it still wavers in that blood-rose gaze like the smoke rolling about his lips, it is evident in the tight, strangled way the butcher comments, “I was, sadly, born without any sexual desire for others at all. Maybe that is for the best, the innate desire to want is a dangerous trait to have.”

Almost as dangerous as toying with the feelings of others to conjure up some sort of unspoken thesis you were writing upon them within your head. Tongue flick about teeth, ash flicked into the tin and a lean back against the chairs back with a leg flipping over another, the opposite side now from before.

“But I was thinking to myself, when you raised that knife… it has happened to me before, actually. Lots of times. It isn’t something you thought about, you just did it-- I wondered, if I gave you an opening… would you go further?”

Against the most tender, exposed part of a person, would fingers delve against cartilage and send breathing into a spluttered, bloody mess, would fingers snare his skin till it ran red and beneath the moonlight would she hold till the pulse against her palms slowed and stuttered and death knocked upon the door? More options, take a fist to the skull at any number of points to bruise and batter, high pitched wailing would come, ‘let me go!’, Osytha’s voice would not be so calm then. And now, even now she tries to speak with the calmness of before failed by short huffs of air and shaking hands and the fidgeting of fabric and she tries, but for the briefest moment there, the knight had cut herself off in exclamation… a reaction, but a strange one. There is no rage. There is no anger. There is bargaining, there is attempts to understand, but it is not hatred the woman burns with-- it is indignity. The man does not try to understand that specific emotion. He’d lost the idea of being shy ages ago as a child, when he himself had been brutalized for others in exchange for coin.

“... But even with the threat of sexual violence, you simply chose to create distance. Why?”

Why? Because she had every right to be angry, if Rois had really gotten hurt in the moment then the man thinks that he deserves it-- and any normal person would feel pity for the shadow of a woman brought down to earth by a single action, but not he. The butcher seems thoughtful, but Osytha would never phantom the darkness of those thoughts nor ever wish to-- she is just a woman. If he actually did wish to force himself upon her then the knight had skidded in the wrong direction, she was strong, but he was stronger. He could catch her. Take her on the floor and would do so with the roughness that Rois gave everything, taking pleasure in every ounce of struggle she’d give… that fool, standing there with that expression he’d seen on the faces of young men and women alike in brothel halls, she had no taste for violence against him but also did not run, either.

Had she known he’d stop?

Did she think he’d really do it?

Why wasn't she angry?​

“It baffles me, honestly, truly. I am not like you, I cannot understand things with words, because while I do not engage in bouts of lying others do-- I like to see how people really feel, deep down. Action always proves to be fruitful.”

Talking about peoples lives as if they are notes on a study paper, generalized and emotionless, someone who cannot ever believe in people’s words and instead seeks action to understand how they really work; it is involuntary. No-one would actively choose the harder route of doing things like this to peer into the depths of peoples souls when things could just be asked, but as a beast of emotion emotion is key… and Osytha, resolute and steadfast, had only given the dog scraps. Scraps couldn’t be worked with. Now, now he hears the shortness of her sentences, sees the glimmering of wild-eyes beneath her half-toned fringe, that meant something,

"I think I understand you a little more, now.” … That voice is dangerous because it is soft, but the gentleness is blatantly false. Cotton baring its thorns, “Could it be… even if your head doesn’t, that some small part of your heart trusts me?”

An elbow meets the wet table… a heavy head is cradled against the heel of his palm, ever so innocently. The cigarette hangs, the bastard dares to allow the corner of his lips to curl so minutely it could be a smile or it couldn’t be, a trick of the light, an illusion in the dark-- and these words aren't mocking, a genuine question,

“Do you trust me, Filly?”

Because her reaction said she did.
 
“I… I do. I know I can. But—” tortured wool almost squeaks between her white-knuckled fingers; “—but it’s also…”

Osytha lifts her eyes from the utilitarian grey stone floor, back up to the table. The way he’s watching back, eased against the headrest of his propped-up palm, Rois is the embodiment of languid; looking all the world like a lion taking shade from the midday sun. So deceptively calm. So seemingly at ease now it’s her turn to sputter and stumble and trip over herself.

But the man had asked her a question.

“… I think it’s the other way around.” Osytha meets his inquiring eyes for a few seconds, but no longer than that. Then they slide away toward the pool of her spilt drink instead, watching a very slow trickle of water drip, drip… drip off the table’s ledge. “I know I can trust you. You keep proving that over again. In my mind, I trust you. It’s my heart that’s, that’s not so…”

This time when the words bleed off, it seems like everything else goes with it. All the anxiety and hurt, the uncertainty. Osytha’s face just — falls. Goes blank. The fingers at her sides slowly uncurl, and scrunched up ripples of orange-pink and burgundy wool gently whisper down. It’s neutrality again, but, not the thoughtful, guarded kind of impassiveness which has so stymied Rois to this point. Mostly she just looks tired.

“I’m not a good person.” Her eyes flicker to follow another bud of water as it drops away, sparkling for a moment in captured moonlight. “Last time we met, I told you I was ‘trying something different’. I still am. I’m trying like blazes, to be better. But that other Osytha, the real Osytha… she’s still there. She’s arrogant, and callous, and angry for no good reason, and so— so stupid. And I’m scared of her. Terrified. Because she’s alway hurting other people without thinking about it.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone.” And there have been so many. Little hurts. Big hurts. Unspeakable ones. So many faces she can’t forget… like the very first, weeping red into the snow. “I’m tired of it.”

The woman blinks. More droplets are twinkling in the moonlight; Osytha can taste their salt. Her eyes rove toward the shape of a knife still there on the ground, its image swimming ever so slightly in her vision. She walks slowly over, crouches, scoops it up. Rights the chair with her other hand as she stands, this time with its pine legs making softer groans as they drag before clacking gently into place. She seats herself back down into the spot beside Rois, and lays her knife upon the table.

“I think she would. If you gave her the chance, she would hurt you.” Osytha’s hand moves away from the blade. She rests both of them in her lap, one folded atop the other. “That’s why— why I just moved away. I just needed a second to think before I did something stupid. Just a second to remind myself. Because you deserve better than that piece of me. I’m sorry.”
 

And there it is.

Scrambling to pick up fallen stone to reconstruct a shattered mask, when given an inch an inch was just enough to get the tip of a knife in and pry, the cracking of an open crate with nails pinging off in all directions. Other people did not understand, they could not understand that the exchanging of words and the hopefulness of the spirit conjured up a mirage, you think you know someone, you do not. Obscurity was the death of true connection, drip-fed little pieces of someones life were nothing, there were beings skulking around in the worlds underbelly with lives completely fabricated from thin air; and they could be dragged close. They could be whispered to, soft exchanges amidst tender feelings, and still they lied through their teeth over and over again and you’d find out at the last second, the fractured moment before the collision of a train upon the tracks of your complacent life, that they are not who you think they are.

That was the tragedy of friendship.

How could friendship be when someone was nought but mountain-side and its sparse patches of evergreen grass, infallible, faultless against the storms that raged upon heaven-bound peaks? How could people connect when they existed upon different levels of Dante’s inferno, up and down, never-ending levels stretching to the horizon, the same view, different places? And how could a woman wander about the torrid downpour of fragmented lives at the foot of the world, un-blustered by smoke or fire or blood or insinuation with the same pale smile, the same blank smile, thin-lipped and guarded and she reached out first. She wanted to know, she wanted to pry, she wanted to understand, and look where they were now…? Rois had almost shed tears in the murky depths of the quiet room but they had been born of anger, the feeling of rejection, the notion that he’d been wronged… and there she moved, step after weary step, to sit before him with eyes like stars shedding their ethereal skins as they ran perilously on through the night upon a swath of the darkest shades of sapphire.

There is no attempt to interrupt her, these words come from somewhere cavernous behind her ribs and he feels it like a palpable thrum in the air, the electricity of something sincere and honest and true. Osytha is captured by feeling for the first time since they had met, riddled with it, burdened by it, like weights shackled to her limbs causing that once-sure voice to quiver: and it sounds so much better. Like music freed from the sheets before it-- her accent is still ugly, but-- it is a symphony conducted by introspection; and so it sounds to him… like a violin faultlessly singing a tale of woe. A song of struggle, a novella of thought, his head stays against his hand until she is finished, all low-shouldered and apologizing to him with a sincerity that could have caused him to laugh if he did not know better. Rois has laughed at inappropriate moments (see: sad moments) too many times to know that people do not like it. So instead the poor woman is greeted with a hazy chuff, a cloud of smoke,

“... Do not be an idiot, Filly. You’re smart, so don’t say stupid things.”

… And it is somewhat pathetic that even in his attempts to uplift someone he manages to sound a little offensive, but it isn’t shocking, it is just how he is. It is how he has always presented himself, how he has time and time again acted in the face of every emotion dragged before him because that was the truth. Rois briefly ponders the cigarette stub for a moment amongst the white noise, they burned so quickly… nothing good was meant to last long. It is completely unsurprising to Osytha that the man has stopped talking to observe the put-out stub, people new to the butchers general presence often found him wholly unpredictable but it was not true, the red-head simply acted differently to other people and once observed for any amount of time patterns started to emerge… just thinking. The quietness of thought, as easy and as unawkward as it always is. When he begins again his voice is adamant,

“... It doesn’t make you a bad person to act human. Those are all feelings that people have, everyone has them no matter if they are felt a lot or just a little.” A raised eyebrow, finally relieving his palm of his chin in order to scratch at his neck in a dog-like manner, casual-seeming, but now she knows, it’s the fidgeting of feelings. “If it was a sin to feel arrogant or callous or angry for ‘no good reason’, then people like me would be in Hell by now. And I’m not in Hell. I’m right here.”

The way he extends his arms out to cement the idea that he exists is eccentric!

"Being 'better' means working on what already exists... instead of running away from it."

And he knew a little something about that. Long legs, its why the man is always flipping one over the other, he uses the moment to begin to balance upon the back set like a child in school with a gentle rock and the bouncing of a foot, pause, think, eyes rolled up to the ceiling in contemplation as if something fanatical was happening there upon the rocky surface that had to be glimpsed at. Poor thing isn’t good at this, I try, I do try, he is trying despite it all, despite the rushed, quiet way words leave him. He hated crying women. Hated them with a prickly passion, but, ah, at the end of it all he was just a man (and unfortunately, the caretaker of two young women) and thus found them tediously effective at drawing some constantly squashed emotion out of him. Jump, jump, jump. He was a hare upon a hill, thudding feet trying to not sympathise, the curse of the female gender once again coming to haunt that bandaged adorn head like a long lost lover…!

“If you would have actually hurt me then, I would have deserved it.” A dramatic shrug, suddenly the outside is interesting again in all its half-light and kicked up dust, “You should stop fighting yourself so much. Soon you’ll find out that there is this glorious middle ground where you get to be yourself and only sometimes hurt people.”

WHAT. He breaks out into a devious smile, glinting fangs and wild eyes beneath flame-kissed curls, leans forward and presses hands against the table with the minor scraping of claws,

“Now, I’m a bad person, and I’ve seen actual bad people. Not… your definition of ‘bad’ or 'hurt', oh no, I’ve hurt someones feelings! Surely we’ll never make up again,” That was Rois’s impression of a woman, the idiots voice is far too deep for it and he ends up sounding a little bit strangled in the stupid attempt, “Oh no, I’ve killed someone that probably deserved it. Oh no, I hit someone who was shoving their hand up my skirt. It is actually incredible, is this what normal people think ‘bad’ is?”

Normal people, normal Osytha and her normal feelings, at war with herself like he was, like everyone else was, it was laughable, the notion that such a thing could warrant someone thinking they are ‘bad’, that they need drastic change, that they had to shear the flight feathers from their wings and devolve into stoicism lest they trip over the edge into some sort of insanity, no, it did not work like that! The internal monologue makes him a little giddy seeming, snorting and snuffling against a raised hand in an attempt not to bark out genuine laughter,

“Honestly, don’t make me laugh. You probably aren’t aware that you’re as animated as a corpse and I dislike it, it is creepy and it isn’t natural. I’m always myself whether people like it or not, and if they don’t like it… I never bar the way to the exit.”

They can simply leave, who has time for people who would rather hang about the neutered version of themselves, the false version, even creatures as lowly as he wore a mask often but it was simply to deal with customers and to bag deals, had he ever pretended to be something he wasn’t? The man is glass and greatly preferred the people around him to be glass so there did not need to be guessing games, little thought puzzles leading to an eventual backstabbing. A hand appears; Rois is… holding out a cigarette to her, even if the tearful woman would not take it at least it was a physical gesture, it was an action, it was real and maybe from down below the walls of his sanctuary she expected the hand of a softer man who was better at this emotional bullshit but no, she is sitting there with him, a slate table, flickering candles and a puddle of drying water below between them… it reflects their faces back upwards like a speckled mirror.

Two… not-strangers.

“You should just be yourself.” The slightest curving upwards of semi-hidden eyebrows, “I won’t mind.”
 
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Osytha stares down at the table as Rois speaks… up until he treats her to his caricature impression of a certain yokel knight, and then she finds herself involuntarily turning her head to gawp as his strangled tones claw across the chalkboard of her eardrums. It’s bad. It is so bad; not just that awful falsetto typical to a lot of men’s attempts to sound like the opposite sex, but the accent, too. Off comed ’uns rarely have any idea what they’re doing when they try to imitate it, but that doesn’t stop them trying. Usually as a form of mockery (case in point).

It’s such a terrible performance that she’s honestly quite impressed when Rois commits to the bit and sees it through.

“You probably aren’t aware that you’re as animated as a corpse and I dislike it, it is creepy and it isn’t natural. I’m always myself whether people like it or not, and if they don’t like it… I never bar the way to the exit. You should just be yourself. I won’t mind.”​

She blinks again, and the last vestiges of tears make their escape. Not that they were that heavy to begin with; enough to make some shimmering trails and be cause for a few sniffles. And enough to give the weak laugh that emerges now that choked sort of quality people get when they perform a 180° pivot from crying to cackling.

“Amazin’ pep talk,” she chuffs, picking out a durry from the proffered tin. “Especially that ‘as animated as a corpse’ bit, that really filled me with confidence. Gosh. Ta muchly.”

Alas, so goes the woman’s curse. Try to be calm and collected, and you get called a frigid bitch. But if you show genuine emotion, apparently it’s ‘hysterics’. Supposedly some reasonable middle ground exists, populated entirely by men, or so you’d think to hear some of them speak. Such men have found better, more enlightened ways to regulate their feelings. You know — like punching holes in walls and their family, or getting rowdily shit-faced at the pub instead of helping make dinner and look after the kids.

Osytha inspects the hand-rolled curiously, as an anthropologist might examine a significant cultural artifact. “You won’t mind if I’m myself,” she repeats… and gives Rois some side-eye while she grins an impish little grin. “I should’ve known, given how much you’ve loved all my jokes. And my accent. And my nosiness. And my bein’ too friendly with your employees. And the whole ‘knight’ thing in general… silly of me, really.”

She pops the cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “You can tell me to go back to my again-walker routine whenever,” Osytha tells him. Speaking a little clumsily around the thin white roll wobbling past her lips. “… Thanks, though. And I ain’t bein’ facetious this time. I appreciate it. But I’m at least goin’ to try and stick to the whole ‘not hurting you’ thing, if it’s all the same. Deserved or no.”

Another night, another place. Grunting under the toppling weight of a conspicuously-person-shaped load bundled up in her ruined dress. “I don’t know about ‘deserve’, mind you. That’s not my place to say.” Shame; the teal really had looked much better on her.

The chair creaks as Osytha leans over toward Rois so he can light her up. “This is the right way around, aye?” she asks, her eyes flitting up to his. “With the— wossname, um,” clicks her fingers a couple of times, “filter, yeah?”
 
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