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!

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[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?]}