equinoctials (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
equinoctials) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
logsinthenight2019-09-15 04:48 pm
equinoctials) wrote in logsinthenight2019-09-15 04:48 pm
East Exploration Mingle (CLOSED)
characters: Aziraphale, Bucky, Crowley, Hopper, Jason Todd, Kol, Ignis, Kakyoin, M.K., Noctis, Riku
location: East of Beacon
date/time: September 9-12
content: Mingle log for various interactions happening during the expedition to explore east of Beacon.
warnings: Please put warnings in your threads if you need to warn for something!
location: East of Beacon
date/time: September 9-12
content: Mingle log for various interactions happening during the expedition to explore east of Beacon.
warnings: Please put warnings in your threads if you need to warn for something!
no subject
They both got their hands dirty, he thinks, for reasons that are entirely their own.
No, the part that's as much surprise as it is compelling is his choice of words that echo Riku's own, that driving goal: fight for what's important. Protect what and who matter the most.
The firelight glints off the polished metal and Riku's gaze is drawn to it. He's reminded of how they all had their little charms, their keepsakes, how to touch them like M.K. strokes that compass seems a universal language for contemplation of something important, something uniquely their own and significant.
The person corrupts the power.
Riku's exhale is short and abrupt and might sound like laughter, but he looks seriously at the other boy. ]
The Darkness appeals to those things in our hearts that we don't like shedding light on. In the end, it's what we choose to do with it. The feelings themselves aren't wrong.
[ Like M.K., he turns his gaze to the firelight. ]
They're us.
no subject
[The distinction--new, and fresh, and achingly sore--is everything. It's not a desire for privacy that saps the strength from his voice and turns it faint, but how small he feels next to a lifetime of grappling with the very ideas Riku summarizes so neatly.]
I've hurt more people than I can remember with this power. I've done things that can't ever be forgiven. I used to blame it before I could control it, and then when I could, I convinced myself I was using it for the right reasons. But it was me. It was always me. It was my anger I couldn't... can't control.
[Riku's right--he doesn't like shedding light on this. Each word is a struggle, bitten off until the bitter picture is exposed. But he has to say it out loud. He'd stepped off the ferry two and a half months ago, and the fruit of two and a half months' of contemplation and internal warring is admitting what he knows is true but didn't want to see until it was much too late to matter. He has to say it out loud, or Tilda's life meant nothing. Nix's, too--even Castor's. People he could've helped but hadn't. The reason he's here, dead--entirely his own doing. Deserved, after wounding the Widow so deeply he woke her sleeping gift up.
He is the thing that is wrong. It's why he has nothing to hide when it comes to those in Beacon knowing what he is. It's not the dark gift they should mistrust him for, but what he became when he gave up what was important.
M.K. looks straight on all the while he speaks; only when he's finished does he return the favor, allowing himself to steal a glance at the other boy's profile.]
I guess the reason I'm surprised about you is that it's hard enough for people who inherit it. I've seen people take it on and... [Though he might struggle or deliberate, he doesn't usually hesitate with his words, but he hesitates now.] Most of them get sick not long after. Their bodies can't handle it. But you seem...
[Sane. Stable. Kind.]
You seem fine.
no subject
Riku hears his admission and still finds himself unprepared for it.
No - more that he knows what he should be doing and finds himself unprepared to do it. Knows that what he should be doing is acknowledging it, accepting it, expressing a mutual understanding of some truth that lies between the two of them, a relatable point of reference.
He knows what he would have wanted, himself. And yet--
Yet he finds himself hesitating, poised on the edge of a decision, like reaching out and drawing M.K. into his own vulnerable personal space was some event horizon, from which there was no return.
M.K. looks straight ahead, and all Riku can see is his profile, limned in firelight.
Riku gets his arm beneath him, uses it to push himself upright. ]
M.K., that's-
[ He stops and exhales, uncertain of how he could answer, whether he should. ]
-if it seems that way, it's only because I've accepted this as a part of me. It doesn't make me immune to the consequences. To the results. I'm still... just some guy.
no subject
Riku sits up, and so out of some answering sense of manners, M.K. does, too. He's sure Riku's probably trying to make a serious point, impart some clearer idea of himself, but he can't help but smile, a sudden and light thing like the other had made some unintentional joke.]
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
[In part, anyway. Riku also doesn't seem to be coughing blood or bleeding black from his eyes that he knows about, which suggests his health's held up better these weeks than Pilgrim's had. But just the small act of trying to point out his own flaws is ultimately what pushes him further from the image of Pilgrim in his mind. Pilgrim would have never said that.]
You don't have to think of a dark gift as dangerous, but you do. You don't have to worry about what the others think of you, but you are. You don't have to worry about them at all, but I see the way you are with them. I think you care.
You said so yourself--you have something to protect.
[Not to destroy. That makes all the difference.]
no subject
He cares, of course he does.
Riku just hasn't figured out how to express that, so there are plenty of times when his manner is misunderstood for indifference. There are times when he puts that on like a mask, when he pretends to be callous, in some backwards attempt to protect others by pushing them away. But he cares.
Again Riku is struck by the dichotomy of feelings when he's understood, seen by somebody else who gets it. A little pleasant, a little uncomfortable.
He's been silent too long, he realizes. Lest the tip of his chin down might be taken for bashfulness, he asks: ]
What keeps you going, M.K.?
[ Is there something he's trying to protect, or is there something or someone he cares about, too? Or has he even figured that out, yet? Is he as adrift here as Riku feels, without the people most important to him? ]
There's gotta be something.
no subject
He means it as a compliment, not to deride the other. M.K. knows true indifference, and Riku isn't that. Even now, in death, after losing what Riku's lost, to want to use his darkness in the service of other people, genuinely, without the reward of power or prestige or even a guarantee of acceptance... Once he'd called it weakness to Nix, but knowing what he knows now, he has to reconsider.
A heart that's kept its soft spots throughout all of that without taking the easy way out and hardening takes a will M.K. can't totally fathom. He shifts into a more comfortable position, folding his legs cross-legged.]
Not anymore. All of that was gone before I came here.
[There's no self-pity in his voice to be found; for his honest opinion on Riku, he offers an honest truth in return.
Family. People to care for. Home. Peace. All things lost over time, one-by-one. If there are gods and they do have a grand design, maybe they intend these things for other people--not for him. What peace he's made is in thinking he should have accepted that sooner, in the Widow's sanctuary, back when he could still recognize himself. Before he stopped caring about anything but his own pain. Of his regrets, letting his darkness convince him to carry on rests near the top.
That's why... it's good if Riku has something to either go back to or move forward for. To have nothing but your darkness... It's not a state M.K. would wish on anyone, least of all someone whose darkness can come alive in a real, tangible way.]
Except for this. It followed me all the way here. [He lifts the tarnished metal compass to show.] It belonged to the man who killed my mother.
no subject
It's more accurate to say he returned to those soft parts in him, that his closest friends coaxed them to heal until he felt it safe to let down the walls he'd put up.
Guess it says something that he's opened up a little to M.K., too. ]
Of all the keepsakes to have...
[ He doesn't pity M.K., that's not the sadness he feels as he looks at that tarnished compass, knowing what it means to him. A reminder of significant loss, a trophy, perhaps, of revenge. ]
What do you keep it for? To remind you of what you lost?
no subject
The more it hurts, the more those parts bleed, the hotter his anger burns.]
Like I said, it's all I have.
[Had.
It's not just one loss, is the thing. The compass represents several, all woven together in a falsehood spanning his entire life, nestled in a bit of metal no bigger than his palm. His mother, yes, who had lied to him but who'd also been the only person to love him. And it represents the loss of the man himself. Oh... there'd been some kind of feeling there once, hadn't there? Something close to a kind of love. One-sided, he sees now, but he can no more forget that he'd once called the man family than he can forget the wound he'd slit in his most vulnerable areas.
Just thinking about it makes rage burn incandescently bright in his chest. For several beats he can only swallow, cords moving in his neck, until he's not choking on it.
For all that, his voice and hand are steady holding it aloft. There's a third loss attached to this compass, the loss of a home, and he focuses on that one.]
Holding onto it means I remember how I got here. Heh... you might even say following this compass led me to Beacon.
[He flicks it open so that the ornamental overlay stands upright, displaying the outline of a city.]
I used to have a pendant like this. This is Azra, where I... we come from. For centuries dark ones called it home. It was a paradise. They weren't monsters there or tools for other people to use, like they are in the outside world. They could live free.
You know, if you and Vanitas were dark ones in my world, you would've come from Azra, too. Before we found the way to give it to people, the gift was passed down through bloodlines.
I grew up wanting to see it. You wanted to know what kept me going? I guess it was wondering if the towers were as tall in real life as I always imagined they were.
no subject
His curiosity, his hunger to know him better comes with a cost.
Still he speaks, and the glint of metal draws Riku's gaze back to the compass and its now emerged ornamental image. Its silhouette is made clearer for the firelight just on the other side.
It reminds him of the Bastion, grand and beautiful.
The thought that the three of them might have come from a place like this if they had been born on a different world doesn't strike him as strange, it's the thought that Vanitas might have had some place to call home, somewhere he wasn't used or a monster for his power.
He knows so little about Vanitas. So why does he trouble himself?
All M.K. wanted was to get to this place. His home. For a time, all Riku wanted was to get away from his own. Different stories, same ink. ]
Why did you leave? Or was that not your choice?
no subject
Azra was destroyed a long time ago. Nobody lives there anymore.
[Riku may be beginning to suspect that stories to do with Azra are not stories with happy endings. There are no heroes and villains in history--just villains, and they'd spent it slaughtering each other century after century, war after war.]
My mother used to tell me we'd go back and make a home there some day, but I think she knew the truth. I don't blame her. Once you're in the Badlands, all you can do is think about a way out of them. Maybe it brought her comfort.
[And maybe she had lied to a son too young to remember the truth for himself, filling his head with stories, to let him believe there was a place he belonged somewhere in the world where they wouldn't have to run from what he was all of the time. Well. It's a blessing she hadn't lived long enough to see the actual ending to the story.]
no subject
[ Riku's exhale speaks the regret he doesn't put into words, he doesn't bother to tell him he's sorry to hear it, it's obvious it's a tragedy but it's nothing words can change. He was lucky. When the islands fell to the darkness, that could have easily been it. All those lives lost to the dark or scattered across the sea of shared sky, all those happy memories playing with his friends, drenched in sunshine, gone.
They were able to get their home back. Not all worlds, not all people, are so lucky. ]
It might have. It sounds like you two were close.
[ This is dangerously vulnerable territory and Riku feels like this is prying, or at the very least opening up an opportunity to talk about stuff he isn't sure is all that appropriate. But then... they've shared some pretty personal things with each other already. Isn't the worry here less about the subject, the content, and more about how he feels that might change this thing between them? To make them less like friendly acquaintances and more like... friends. ]
It probably helped her to imagine something better for you.
no subject
He'd thought her weak once--but to see him at his absolute worst again and again and not turn away from him? No one else had stayed by his side for so long. Now that he's seen himself at his absolute worst, he's a thousand times humbled she hadn't just drowned him or abandoned him.]
It feels like forever ago. I was a different person back then. But she was a good person. She didn't deserve what happened to her.
[He briefly turns his face away, but there are no tears to hide. The last of them had dried up in the fever of Pilgrim's crusade. Is it wrong? Is it wrong to miss the way that fire had burned the chill out of his grief?]