From being an Abandoned who had rarely left the Hollowed Grounds, to embracing the call of adventure, to dying and being reborn first as an Ascended and then as an Ancient, Maea has gone through quite the amount of changes in her life. One thing remains common, though, in her attempts to find out just where she belongs; she’s always had a craving for knowledge which has brought her to so many places and to meet so many people here in Caido. We can’t wait to see what else is in store for her!
Congratulations, Maea!
Credits
Court of the Fallen was created in October of 2018 by Odd, Honey, and Crooked.
Skinning and hosting by the epically talented Kaons, and functionality fanciness by the coding magic of Neowulf. If you ever see either of them around, make sure to show them some love!
we don't even ask for happiness; just a little less pain
The silence is both a boon and a curse, giving Finn the space to think, to say it out loud, but also making it real in ways that were easy to brush off back when it had just been in his dreams. He doesn’t look at Tobi throughout, though he does nod as she speaks. Yes, she can sit closer. It isn’t as though Finn can get much more out of his comfort zone - and that’s probably why he’s here now.
But then she says he’s not crazy, and he smiles a warbling sort of smile down at the blanket in his lap. ”That is kind of you to say,” he murmurs, his tone the soft, patient sort that says with sincerity, you’re wrong. ”I don’t think any of this could have happened if I weren’t,” he confesses. ”It is more than Remi. He just... triggers things that are already there. Things that I did, or that I shouldn’t have done. Everything that has let me here, to this point.”
Tobi moves closer. Her movements aren't tentative or presumptuous, but gentle and calm. Her legs are crossed, and as she shifts, she lets her knee rest against Finn's thigh. She knows well from her own equine-instincts what it is to be embroiled in flight-instincts.
Tobi snorts playfully under her breath; the moment calls for far more serious of a response, but there is already far too much serious in this room. "Finn, you aren't the only one with skeletons in your closet, you know? Everyone has secrets. But...it's more than that. Remi is the demigod of Ludo. Of course he's able to trick and warp your mind. Of course he's able to make you feel mad, look at where his magic comes from." Softly Tobi shakes her head, her small unwavering.
"What he's done to you is horrible, Finn. But it's what he's done. None of this is your fault."
Don't make it bad take a sad song and make it b e t t e r
we don't even ask for happiness; just a little less pain
Tobi means to be playful, means to reassure, but Finn can't help the way he winces as she reminds him that everyone has problems. He is hardly the only person in Stormbreak with problems with issues. How had he gotten here? He had once been a man with a few particulars, nothing more... and now he barges into a doctor's office without a thought. His lips part to apologise, but the words die on his tongue with the warm feel of her knee against his thigh.
The contact is something so bold and unexpected that it takes Finn out of himself, if only for a second. "How do you know?" he asks. How does she know that this isn't his fault? Smiling sadly down at his hands, the fingers knitting together around the blanket, he forces himself to sit back and relax a bit into the couch. His mind screams at the idea of it, but his body insists on rest. "I don't even know myself any more."
02-03-2021, 05:20 PM (This post was last modified: 02-03-2021, 05:20 PM by October.)
Tobi
Tobi interprets Finn's wince as her minimizing what has happened to him, and immediately she rushes in to reassure. "I'm not saying you've had it easy. I know...things have been worse for you than I can almost imagine." This is said in a low voice, sombre and respectful. Reaching out for Finn's cup of tea, Tobi holds it out to him before reaching for her own. "All I meant is that sometimes it seems like you think you're alone in all you have to deal with. I just wanted you to know you aren't."
As for how she knows? Tobi just smiles, resisting the urge to chuckle lest it be taken condescendingly. "You are one of the cleverest people I know. Maybe the cleverest...but how can it be your fault against a demigod? A demigod of trickery and death, who seems to take particular delight in making you miserable?" Tobi frowns into her mug, her thumb tracing the handle. "That's how I know. The scales aren't even close to being balanced." Finn was like a child blaming himself for his parents' divorce, caught up in something that he's forced to endure despite having no control over.
Don't make it bad take a sad song and make it b e t t e r
we don't even ask for happiness; just a little less pain
"I'm not so sure," he murmurs before he can stop himself. Finn has always felt alone, and it is normally his preference. Only these past few hours have thrown him into disarray - where the idea of slinking back up to his apartments, by himself, is more horrifying than being around people. It's a new development, and he can't quite make it fit. All he knows is that the spot of warmth against his leg is not unpleasant, and it draws attention away from the phantom pains in his body.
Scoffing - one of the cleverest people, next to a doctor? - Finn gently shakes his head and finally, warily raises his eyes toward her face. "What if it isn't on purpose?" he asks. "What if he doesn't mean to do it? I know that I don't. But... it doesn't change anything, I suppose. I'm just tired, Tobi."
"Well, I am." Tobi says, her knee nudging softly against him to add emphasis as she smiles brightly.
It's easy for Tobi to meet Finn's stormy and troubled gaze. Her own stare is bright and warm; all that she is has been perfectly crafted to be a safe place during a storm. The Spyglass's question is a bit of a surprise, if only because it occurs to Tobi that he might be so thoroughly under this demigod's charm as to be trying to defend him. Falke might even call it a sort of Stockholm syndrome. Tobi doesn't have that sort of vocabulary, and so merely shrugs. "Even if that's the case, I'm not so sure it matters...it still doesn't make it your fault. It doesn't mean you should have to endure him. Tornados don't mean the destruction they cause, but we still put up defences against them.
Don't make it bad take a sad song and make it b e t t e r
we don't even ask for happiness; just a little less pain
Finn smiles at that - or as close to something like a smile as he can manage right now. The walls don't feel so close, and the world doesn't feel quite as dark. "Thank you," he whispers, and it's for more than just her kind words. It's for everything, for this port in a storm she's provided him, for patience he doesn't deserve and a sweetness he can't fathom. His eyes dropping away again, Finn reaches up to rub at the scruff on his chin, inhaling deeply and letting it out again.
"A tornado," he echoes. He has never seen a tornado, but he understands the nature of that sort of devestation. "...I think you are right," he says eventually, the Spyglass closing his eyes, pressing his fingers against them as if to dispel any flashbacks that try to emerge. "I haven't been able to take care of myself for a long time. I don't know how. But I... I think I want to learn."
Tobi just lets Finn exist as long as he needs to in that fractured place that exists between the bones of his mind and the real world. She sits silently at his side like any good dog might, waiting for his attention to once again be upon her.
'Like I said,' One of Tobi's hands falls upon her knee, her palm upturned. A dog would know instantly what to do: paw. -one of the cleverest men I know." And he is. He really is. Tobi might be smart, but she's never been clever. Not like Finn, whose mind works so intricately you can almost always hear the mechanisms of it if you're quiet.
"I have a suggestion...of where to start, if you like?"
Don't make it bad take a sad song and make it b e t t e r
we don't even ask for happiness; just a little less pain
Finn's hand falls from his eyes a few moments later, and when it does he sees her palm upturned, an offer that he's been waiting for and quite suddenly doesn't know what to do with. Only he does know, and something in his shoulders unspools and relaxes as he reaches out, slipping his hand into Tobi's. His fingers are cold, still, and there are hardly any callouses on his fingertips for her to feel out this time.
"I am always open to suggestions. Now more than ever," he says with a gentle nod, aware all of a sudden of the tea in his free hand, the mug steaming and radiating heat. Taking a sip of sweetness and warmth, it floods Finn's body in further redirection of the sensations that plague him. He sits on a small couch in a doctor's office, and he begins to grow roots there.
Unlike fever-drunk Finn who warmly held her hand and invited her presence, Tobi can feel the reservation from the Spylgass now. And that was okay. It would always be okay. Her fingers close around his, soft and warm, her grip tight enough not to feel awkward, but not so tight that he couldn't pull away at any moment.
'Well, I'm not Falke by any stretch of the imagination, but...maybe it would help to divide all these things up into two sorts of categories: things you can deal with now, and things to deal with later." From Tobi's perspective, everything was big for Finn. Every monster in his closet latched on to everything else, making both seem proportionally larger and more terrifying. But it didn't have to be that way.
'Your mind seems so full...' Tobi says almost sadly, her fingers pulsing a beat of reassurance against his. '..but maybe if some of the smaller things are out of the way, it would be easier to focus on the bigger things.'
Don't make it bad take a sad song and make it b e t t e r
we don't even ask for happiness; just a little less pain
He hears her out, sipping his tea and trying both to ignore the feel of their fingers wrapped together, but also imprint it in his mind to draw off when he next feels so desperately alone. "I haven't been going to see Falke for a while," he confesses, unconsciously drawing out one of the things he can deal with now. "He disappeared, and I... I suppose I just didn't pick it back up. I should make an appointment to see him." He squeezes her hand in return, a sad smile directed at the blanket in their laps.
"It is very full," he admits, peeling back the layers he's grown around himself that he might be a little more candid with Tobi. Even if it's just for now. Just for as long as she's here, anchoring him to the present with the warmth of her touch. "It's like a boiling pot, with the lid fixed on tight. Nothing to let the pressure out." He exhales deeply. "I've stopped playing," he says suddenly, obviously referring to his music. "Safrin made me strings, for my guitar. But I don't feel right about them."
"I don't go and see him as often as I should either." Tobi admits, a touch conspiratorily. "Falke is...well. Just like his name implies, a fixer. Sometimes I don't want to be fixed, just listened to. And he can do that if you ask him, but...sometimes asking is the problem." Tobi shrugs. She might be all innocence and rainbows, but carrying around a secret as she has for all these years, and trying to toe the line between Cian's orders and doing what's right wasn't always easy.
"Well that's no surprise. You hardly sleep, I've seen the things you eat, and thanks to where you work, you're fairly vitamin D deficient." Tobi grins are friend as she candidly lists off just some of the things wrong with him. But she says them like it's no big deal. That it's all easily fixed; because it is.
"So use your old ones." Tobi replies, drawing up the knee not against Finn so that she might rest her mug on it. "Or...I'll teach you piano. Or we can learn something new together. Or...toss them into the sea. Right over the Falling."
Don't make it bad take a sad song and make it b e t t e r
we don't even ask for happiness; just a little less pain
"Mm... for me it's more that whenever he fixes something, it accidentally uncovers three more problems." It's a confession that Finn hasn't even admitted to himself, let alone anyone else, and he feels a strange warmth come over him, to say it out loud. Still, he glances back across at Tobi, as she draws her knee up to her chest, the Spyglass offering a smile that, in the right light, might just pass as friendly. "I am terrible at being sociable," he tells her. "But I can listen, if you need it."
Then Tobi really ups the ante. "How dare you, Doctor Hart," Finn informs her. "I had the Articifer put a window into my office. I am able to tell when the sun rises, these days." Or he would, if he'd been keeping to any sort of schedule. Another point to Tobi.
She makes it sound so simple - and it is, Finn, he tells himself suddenly; the realisation has a rough laugh leaving his throat. "I prefer what I already know," he says, unsurprisingly. "But I... perhaps I will. Throw them away, that is."
"They aren't problems." Tobi argues in a gentle voice. "Just things that need to be healed." Part of what she thought Finn needed most was a shift in how he thought about himself. He wasn't some broken thing to be fixed. He'd been wounded in the past to be sure, but he wasn't wrong. 'Well that's certainly true.' Flashing Finn a warm smile, having never minded at all his lack of social intuitiveness, she bites the inside of her cheek and nods. "I appreciate that." But I won't burden you with my secrets, her eyes seem to say.
Raising a brow, Tobi lets her gaze scour over him, from his cheeks to his hands and then back up again. "Mmmhmm. And how much time do you spend back turned to this window, huh?" She counters with a playful smirk.
'I bet you're just saying that because you know you'd be better than me if we took up a new instrument.' Tobi jokes, before shrugging. "Thanks, but no thanks Safrin. Problem solved."
Don't make it bad take a sad song and make it b e t t e r
