East Exploration Mingle (CLOSED)

[equinoctials]

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!

Comments

[darkeyed]

<sub>[This must be a first--he's surprised Riku into silence. The reverse has happened enough times (with a tad more spluttering) just in the span of this conversation that he's a little amusedly vindicated to see Riku on his back foot.

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.]</sub>

Not anymore. All of that was gone before I came here.

<sub>[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.]</sub>

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.

[equinoctials]

[ They're like two different stories written with the same ink. Through long toil and loss they've struggled to accept themselves, darkness and all, to come out on the other side of it grown up from the people they were when it started. He could really claim that he kept the tenderness in his heart. For a while, he let himself grow hard and ruthless, afraid to lose and to lose those important to him.

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?

[darkeyed]

<sub>[Try as he might to ignore them, drown them, scar them to the point of feeling nothing through the callouses, the unbearable reality is he still has his soft parts as well. Only they bleed and bleed and bleed, flowing like the trickle of a mountain stream into the river of his anger so that the current never runs dry.

The more it hurts, the more those parts bleed, the hotter his anger burns.]</sub>

Like I said, it's all I have.

<sub>[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.]</sub>

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.

[equinoctials]

[ The firelight and the close proximity make it easier to see how M.K. struggles around the tightness in his throat. Riku regrets asking so much of him, not because of the answer to come but because he thinks M.K. may have hurt quite enough already without anyone adding to the weight on his shoulders.

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?

[darkeyed]

_{[He shakes his head with a thin, bitter sort of smile. It doesn't escape him how much time he'd wasted asking the same questions when all along Sunny had been to blame for this, too.]}

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.]}

[equinoctials]

...

[ 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.

[darkeyed]

<sub>[No, it's nothing words can change. It's nothing coating his hands in the blood of a new Azra could change. It's nothing, he knows deep down, getting revenge on Sunny would have changed. He lost a mother and a mentor, the happy memories of one forever welded to the loss of the other.

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.]</sub>

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?]}