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Entry tags:
Aftermath: open
Who: Prior Walter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
priorly) & OPEN
What: Event Aftermath: Small angry woodland creature refuses to Sit Down.
When: 24th+
Where: Sanctuary & around
Warning(s): language, mentions of torture/death, TBA
Notes: OPEN - tag in, wildcard, or get me at![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
shewokeup or shewokeup#4794 to plot anything.
Sanct.
[Prior wakes at the sanctuary with bare arms and a voice in his head. of course, of course it's screaming.
Somehow the heavy metal bracelets all the captives in his camp had been accessorized with had done the one thing he'd thought impossible and cut off communications with the firmament. His head had felt heavy and strange and silent the whole way through, the one bar of relief in a symphony of terror and pain.
But, as promised, she only stopped down the road and waited for him. Now she's back and and announcing herself. For a moment, the recovery room fills with the sound of beating wings. Prior throws himself out of the bed and, when his leg immediately folds under him, against a wall for support.]
No. No, I will not- [Hand thrown up in a universal 'talk to this' gesture, he grabs the back of a chair and starts using it to clatter across the room.] I have been through too much shit for this shit. Fuck off.
[Find him exiting the room in this makeshift style, skin bruised and rainbow-scarred, the hollows under his eyes deep enough to have hosted excavations. Or catch up a little later, when he's acquired a wooden cane from who knows where and is still roaming the hallways in defiance of orders of bed rest and his body's own aching demands. He will not lie back in white sheets and stare at the ceiling. He'll die there.]
City Visits.
[Later on, he even manages to bully someone into getting him clothes. Black pants, black t-shirt, uncommonly plain and stark enough to make him look like a specter haunting the hallways. He's slowly piecing together what happened, who it happened to. Even the details of his own little cluster of captives got lost amid the chaos of the rescue. And the more he finds out the more his skin roils with a fury it's getting hard to tamp back down.
But first. There are visits to be made. Rooms in the sanctuary (they held people here, he hears, he can't imagine why this is considered a place for healing anymore). Apartments in the city. He waits for news from Thesa station, not going up there himself - not yet.
Catch him in a room, or making his way between them, learning to use the cane to navigate the shitty cakewalk that counts for a sidewalk. Just don't expect him to slow down.
He'll be in Byerly's room often, pacing by the window or catching the only sleep he allows himself in the chair or bed beside him.]
Solitude.
[The problem with playing host to an angelic prophecy that has for longer than it likes been denied access to its best vessel, is that once it has hold of him again he finds his prophecies going haywire. Talk about overcompensating. The world shifts around him, possible futures playing out superimposed over the mundanities of the present.
Life goes on as normal, in ways that shouldn't be allowed when his own life and so many others have been upended and emptied out everywhere. And that's hard enough to cope with, but it's a new degree of impossible when the same shopping street erupts into blue flame one minute, and sweeps through with a flood the next, before reverting to reality: old women buying their baguettes and looking askance at the man clutching a streetlight in an effort not to be swept away to drowning death.
It happens with people, too. Asking after him. He's always hated that, and he hates it more now that the thin line between past and future keeps breaking and he can barely tell the two apart.
After snapping at more than one friend, and a stranger in the street (I was just trying to say I'm sorry for what happened. / Well I'm sorry your husband screwed your sister but I'm not trying to console you for that.) Prior seeks out places he can be alone. Parks, back offices at Shades, even dark corner tables in little cafes. Find him there, but don't expect him to approach.]
priorly) & OPENWhat: Event Aftermath: Small angry woodland creature refuses to Sit Down.
When: 24th+
Where: Sanctuary & around
Warning(s): language, mentions of torture/death, TBA
Notes: OPEN - tag in, wildcard, or get me at
Sanct.
[Prior wakes at the sanctuary with bare arms and a voice in his head. of course, of course it's screaming.
Somehow the heavy metal bracelets all the captives in his camp had been accessorized with had done the one thing he'd thought impossible and cut off communications with the firmament. His head had felt heavy and strange and silent the whole way through, the one bar of relief in a symphony of terror and pain.
But, as promised, she only stopped down the road and waited for him. Now she's back and and announcing herself. For a moment, the recovery room fills with the sound of beating wings. Prior throws himself out of the bed and, when his leg immediately folds under him, against a wall for support.]
No. No, I will not- [Hand thrown up in a universal 'talk to this' gesture, he grabs the back of a chair and starts using it to clatter across the room.] I have been through too much shit for this shit. Fuck off.
[Find him exiting the room in this makeshift style, skin bruised and rainbow-scarred, the hollows under his eyes deep enough to have hosted excavations. Or catch up a little later, when he's acquired a wooden cane from who knows where and is still roaming the hallways in defiance of orders of bed rest and his body's own aching demands. He will not lie back in white sheets and stare at the ceiling. He'll die there.]
City Visits.
[Later on, he even manages to bully someone into getting him clothes. Black pants, black t-shirt, uncommonly plain and stark enough to make him look like a specter haunting the hallways. He's slowly piecing together what happened, who it happened to. Even the details of his own little cluster of captives got lost amid the chaos of the rescue. And the more he finds out the more his skin roils with a fury it's getting hard to tamp back down.
But first. There are visits to be made. Rooms in the sanctuary (they held people here, he hears, he can't imagine why this is considered a place for healing anymore). Apartments in the city. He waits for news from Thesa station, not going up there himself - not yet.
Catch him in a room, or making his way between them, learning to use the cane to navigate the shitty cakewalk that counts for a sidewalk. Just don't expect him to slow down.
He'll be in Byerly's room often, pacing by the window or catching the only sleep he allows himself in the chair or bed beside him.]
Solitude.
[The problem with playing host to an angelic prophecy that has for longer than it likes been denied access to its best vessel, is that once it has hold of him again he finds his prophecies going haywire. Talk about overcompensating. The world shifts around him, possible futures playing out superimposed over the mundanities of the present.
Life goes on as normal, in ways that shouldn't be allowed when his own life and so many others have been upended and emptied out everywhere. And that's hard enough to cope with, but it's a new degree of impossible when the same shopping street erupts into blue flame one minute, and sweeps through with a flood the next, before reverting to reality: old women buying their baguettes and looking askance at the man clutching a streetlight in an effort not to be swept away to drowning death.
It happens with people, too. Asking after him. He's always hated that, and he hates it more now that the thin line between past and future keeps breaking and he can barely tell the two apart.
After snapping at more than one friend, and a stranger in the street (I was just trying to say I'm sorry for what happened. / Well I'm sorry your husband screwed your sister but I'm not trying to console you for that.) Prior seeks out places he can be alone. Parks, back offices at Shades, even dark corner tables in little cafes. Find him there, but don't expect him to approach.]
no subject
There were too many teenagers stuck in there with him. A girl with red hair. It haunts him. A lot of things do. And he's heard that Peter died: they all could have. Now the least-lucky few of them are upstairs being rebuilt and how the fuck does that work when they tell him they can't even get him a cure?
Prior knows people supposedly being regenerated too. How's anyone supposed to know it's the same person when they come back? God knows Prior doesn't feel the same person he was a week ago.
He finds a smile for her, but it's tight, a muscle strain on a face not currently built for such things.]
You, too. Do you know they wouldn't even let us send postcards? Of everything, that might have been the greatest injustice.
[The attempt at humor falls flat, even to him. He dips his head away as he passes her, turning to the window.]
I keep thinking I ought to get drunk. Or stoned. You'd think I'd sell my mother for a quaalude after all that but I-
[He's even refusing painkillers.]
I can't do it.
no subject
The problem with quaalude is it eventually wears off and then you're back where you started. Might as well not even tempt oneself with the blissful nothing of medication.
[ Cheryl softly rests a hand on his back. ] Have you been sleeping?
no subject
[He leans back a little into her touch. Not too much, can't relax too much or he might fall completely.]
It's been screwed with enough. My head is loud enough, I don't want anything else in there that isn't me, even if it's supposed to quiet it. I'm scared. Of that.
[He turns his head and the answer to her other question's as clear as if he had NO in permanent marker across his nose. He's caught the odd scrap of sleep, an hour here and there at other people's bedsides.]
If you mean that like have you been skiing then yes, at some point I dimly remember. Recently, not really, no.
no subject
[ Cheryl would have been surprised if he had been sleeping. she's been alternating between not sleeping and sleeping for long stretches of hours filled with odd and often frightening dreams. ]
It isn't fair, what happened to you. How they could pull us from our homes and drop us into their own wars. Maybe we were all better off in those pods.
no subject
[Not the great popsicle counter in the sky, there's too much indignity in being propped up like a mannequin while your loved ones weep against the glass and accept whole new levels of blackmail to keep the bright hope burning that you'll wake. No, not there. But he'd have gone out with his own world, maybe, given the chance. One blink of a cosmic eye and then gone.
If any of that storm bullshit's true to begin with.
He draws himself back from expressing that sentiment, too much to go into now, and with someone so young. It's a weary look he gives her, noting how weary she looks, too.]
I'm sorry, I'm not the chirpiest of company presently, more of a canary in a mine. I wanted to see that you were holding up.
no subject
[ still, it hasn't been easy. being among the rescuers hasn't made her feel strong. it's made her feel of afraid of everything yet to come. her eyes well with tears. ] I wish Peter was here. Peter would know what to do.
no subject
[Of course he's heard about Peter, it's part of why he came, and part of why wearing this face has been all the trickier the last few days.]
Nobody's going to know what to do. There isn't a what to do, not after something like this. There's just... living. Still waking up every day, still being here, and you can be sad, or you can be pissed off - God knows I'm pissed off, I'm so angry I don't know how I open my mouth without screaming, but the living's just the same. And don't you dare try to make it sound like you're better off than anyone else, you went through something terrible too. It's not less, it's just yours. Yours to live with.
no subject
I'm tired of being angry. And sad. It's exhausting. I had plenty of that at home and things here were starting to get better... [ she shrugs. ] But now what? We've all been kicked while we're down. We need to get back up.