[Seasonal Event] This mess I've made

WESSEX out of the night that covers me As the first sun of Flowerbirth sinks beyond the horizon, Wessex emerges from her cottage and heads towards Rory’s place. The path is familiar; her senses tell her that there are more animals out and about - the wind smells different too. Magrethe loved Flowerbirth. This will be the first one without her, the first Festival… No, she pushes the emotions from her mind. There are things to do, no time to dwell on what is gone and what cannot be changed. She reaches into a pocket of her cloak and makes sure the bag of shiny new nails are there. A gift, of sorts. The nails that came out of the floorboards were old, rusty, and should probably be replaced anyway. Luckily for Rory, Wessex knows a guy. Well, they both do, but that’s beside the point. She knocks on the blond man’s door, hearing the bark of of one of the dogs announce her presence before she could. Like any good Caidonite, she’s here to help clean up the LongNight mess, nevermind that she’s the one mostly responsible for it. Mostly. Ah, well, though she’d been short on the details at the Perch, it’ll probably be a good idea to get a second opinion on the matter. black as the pit from pole to pole i thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul

Amalia is welcome too, if she wants to pop in. For chats.

RORY

Rory had been—somewhat—warned of the fact that all his floorboards were loose.

Knowing that did not make the fact any less bizarre, and he had had other, more immediate concerns to take care of when the sun had finally risen and he had abandoned the partially-wrecked Settlement with his heart beating in his throat. Going on foot was slow, but the horses had, of course, abandoned the little town. Not much food there. Too much noise. Too much otherness.

But finally he had come back to his farm, finding it mostly intact. He had found the living house in the suspect condition Wessex had warned him of, the dogs hungry and happy but otherwise alright. A quick peek in the barn showed that not much had happened there. There were no signs of the Luxere, as they had left halfway through, but there was something else: fresh horse tracks.

Rory wasn't in a position to go hunt down his stray ponies in the forest, nor was he in a position to fix his floorboards, really. Between Vervain and Isla most of his injuries had been healed, but it was not complete: his shoulders still ached, his face still marred by the burns he had suffered at Edy's hands. So he had fed the dogs and then just looked sort of sadly at the floor, before spending more or less the entire day going over the goats and Bakshi and then turning them out in the pen. In an agonizingly slow process he had put hay in for them in the pen, and left some outside, if his ponies decided to come back and look for food.

And then just waiting.

He wasn't rewarded on the first day, so eventually, as the shadows lengthened and the darkness grew compact, he retreated into the house.

It was a mess he did not want to touch. It was a task he did not want to begin. Feeling like a ghost in his own home he drifted into his bedroom, sitting on the bed and feeling sorry for himself.

Until Vaya gave her warning bark and a fist knocked on his door. Rory felt nothing: he toyed with the idea of ignoring it. Of sitting there upon his bed until his blood froze.

It was very cold inside. He hadn't made a fire.

With a sigh he finally moved himself off the bed, and cautiously stepped over the loose floorboards to the door. Feeling like being murdered wouldn't be too bad he simply opened it, and found

Wessex

He looked blankly at her for a moment, then he said: "Oh."

He looked blankly at her for a moment longer. "Hello."

Looking lost, he drifted back and to the side, allowing her to step into the house if she so wished.

as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.

WESSEX out of the night that covers me While Wessex may not feel the cold, personally, the majority of her life has been dependent on keeping warm. It is the first thing she notices. The second is that Rory isn’t… quite himself. Rather than comment on his strange behavior, she gives him a half-smile and enters the house. The bag of nails hits the counter and after quickly finding the wood again (there had been plenty stockpiled in the house for LongNight), she starts to build a fire. Kindling on the bottom, three logs on top, and then she stands back and, risking rather a lot, strikes the flint he has by the hearth. Sparks fly. The dry stuff catches, and soon she is nursing a happy, flickering fire. That done, Wessex rises and fixes Rory with a critical eye. Vacant gaze. Kind of lost look, like he’s recently been orphaned, or is secretly an abandoned puppy. She sees the scars on his face and the scars. The slow way he shuffles around his own house. Multiple things are wrong, and she’s not sure where to begin.  “Right. You look like shit, Rory. Have you eaten?” Does she need to make him some food? It won’t be gourmet, but it will be filling and nutritious. Should she ask what happened? Are these the marks of serious trauma? Nah. Better dance around everything emotional for awhile. It is the Theskyra way. black as the pit from pole to pole i thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul

RORY

Wessex—capable, ferocious, lonely Wessex—stepped over the threshold and past him into his house. For a couple of seconds he was left where he was, looking questioningly at the door, as if wondering why it wasn't closing by itself. Something was shifting inside of him, waking up in a very undignified way, more like goring your eyes out by accident rather than rubbing them sleepily.

Reaching out to close the door was the simplest thing in the world, but he knew that the moment he moved to do it, he would be pulled back from the edge, back into the light. Ceasing to function when you were alone wasn't hard.

Ceasing to function with someone else around you was.

He stayed in his misery for a couple of seconds longer, staring abjectly at the familiar wood grains and patterns. He heard Wessex bustle around behind him. And he thought of how Long Night should've gone: him and Wessex and Amalia, safe behind their blackout panels, talking in hushed voices in front of a flickering fire. Sharing the apple cakes he and Amalia had made. Finding out all the little things, how badly they fit together, but how friendship could make it work.

Instead .. all of this—

Rory reached out. His hand, paler than usual from the cold, pressed against the wood. It closed without a groan, without a creak, testament of how this was the first night since Long Night.

And thus, his spell was broken. He was acutely aware of everything that was wrong with him, everything he had not done, the ghosts in his eyes.

Wessex had a small, happy fire on the way. He drifted closer to her, but said nothing. Merely watched as she fed the thing, until it was big enough to lick along the logs and take hold and not be discouraged into fading out.

He looked at her, surprisingly steadily, though there wasn't much of him behind his gaze. He seemed tired; forlorn; less, somehow, as if his colors had washed out. When she spoke, his gaze gravitated away, and he contemplated what to do. What to say. It had been a long time since anyone took care of him in such a hands-on way, and he felt ashamed that he even needed it.

"No," he finally admitted, his voice brittle. Slowly, he began to head towards.. somewhere, a door perhaps. "I might have some cured meat around..." His voice trailed off and his fingers hovered over the counter as he stopped. Gods, did he really not know what he had in his own house?

He knew that he had meat and apple cake in the cold storage, but that was frozen.

He touched the tips of his fingers to the counter, and bowed his head.

'Before Long Night' seemed like a lifetime ago.

as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.

WESSEX out of the night that covers me Lonely Wessex - always lonely Wessex. None of them ever considered that she might like being alone, that she might prefer having a choice, that she was entirely too picky for her own good when it came to people. She’d loved Magrethe from day one. It was all she ever needed - her sister was her world. And then her world broke, and Wessex had to put it all back together again, except this time, she added two more colors: Rory and Amalia. More Rory than Amalia, if she’s being honest with herself. But the mechanics, the specifics of their relationship don’t matter, only that it is, and he is hers now. And Wessex takes care of her people. Gently, as if she were handling a songbird’s egg, she reaches out for Rory’s shoulder; using her hands to guide him away from the counter, she applies persistent pressure to guide him towards the rocking chair by the fire, if he’ll allow it. She grabs a blanket on the way and a cushion, throwing the second on to the seat, and then guiding the man into the chair. It is followed by the blanket, tucked in around his hips. She would have moved him to the bed, but it's in another room, and she’d rather have him in an easy sightline. “Stay here,” she says, as if Rory were a child. “It’s going to be alright. I’ll make some food, yeah?” And then with an absent pat to one of his hands, she moves towards the cooking area to take stock of what’s around. After opening various cupboards and doors, she’s assembled some dried herbs and spices, potatoes, turnips, carrots, pickled tomatoes and long beans, and lots of dried beans. In they all go to a pot of hot water, to simmer and soak and well - who knows if it will be any good, but it can’t be terrible either, so long as the dried beans soak long enough. When the clean up is done and all she has to do is keep an eye on her concoction, Wessex returns to the hearth and where Rory is. Settling herself down, she looks at the leatherworker and makes a decision. Even if he isn't truly awake, she will ask him - “Do you want to hear what happened here during LongNight?” black as the pit from pole to pole i thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul

RORY

It wasn't that he was tired—

(He was, but it was all in his soul)

It was just the cold. The long hours of today. The pain. The physical labor. The worry. The emptiness. They were little monsters, all of them, and they carved his soul out and ate it and he was left a husk. Hollow and confused. The excitement at having done it, at having summoned the Spark Bird, was gone. All he had was an empty house, missing ponies, and the dangerous, definite feeling that things could never, truly, go back to what they had been.

And he couldn't so quickly forget the way his mind had turned him against his friends; and how easily they had been turned against him, too.

He was staring through the floor when a hand fell upon his shoulder. An echo of another time, when more people had lived in this haunted house, when his sister would've knocked on his back and asked what was wrong, or his mother would've enveloped him in a tight, silent hug—

All he wants to do is fall back against her, against someone solid, and be held.

But he didn't. Instead, he walked like a sleepwalker, steered back towards the fire he had gravitated aimlessly away from, and he soon found himself in the rocking chair, underneath a blanket. Warmth radiated from the hearth, seeping into the wool fibers. And he just felt so useless as he nodded to her words, absently folding his hands into his lap after she had left.

His hand and shoulder still felt strange where she had touched him. Some distant part of him was surprised, and deeply, deeply moved by her care.

He was left to stare pensively at the flames while she raided his kitchen, but not much of actual substance passed through his mind. Mostly, he thought about how fucked-up everything had become, how empty he felt, and how worried he was about his missing ponies and his missing sister. She hadn't come by today.

But the warmth slowly did its job, and by the time Wessex returned to him, he looked slightly more alert and was absently rubbing the knuckles on one hand. He inhaled, preparing to thank her, to apologize for his state, but her voice beat his and she was the one who chased the silence away.

He looked at her steadily, a flicker of something that was hard to place passing through his heart. Slowly, he nodded.

as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.

WESSEX out of the night that covers me Leaning back on her hands, Wessex takes a moment to survey the cabin, remembering viscerally that it wasn’t always this neat and tidy. She swallows before starting. “I came back from the perimeter check to find you guys gone and the door open. Everything seemed normal until I closed and latched the door, and that was when the rocker started moving. On it’s own.” She looks up at Rory, remembering the mixture of fear and resolve that coursed through her body, the determination to survive. “Except it didn’t kill me. Obviously, I’m -” a vague gesture indicates that’s she’s still here, and not dead. Again. “It - them - I’m not sure if it was singular or many - but they seemed more interested in me than anything else. They broke everything that was remotely fragile in this place to try and get me to talk… took the nails out of the floorboards and levelled them at my head. When I finally agreed to answer their questions about being reborn, it was conditional. And Rory - they actually put this place back together because I asked them to." Wessex sits up, wraps her elbows around her knees and shakes her head a little from side to side. “It was surreal. I’ve never heard of that happening before. I promised to ask The Voice if they could be reborn, but really I just want to know what they are. Why they can kill us.” What she doesn’t need to know, however, is why her. The Ascended knows why. She also knows that they either need to get rid of them before the next LongNight or she needs to barricade herself up in a sealed tomb for a week, cause if she doesn’t show up, those Monsters are going to want vengeance. “And then they left. So it seems like multiple miracles happened this LongNight. The SparkBird?” she asks gently, prodding him for a little more information. The stew begins to bubble, and she gives it a couple of swirls while she waits to see if he’s up for talking about what happened to him. black as the pit from pole to pole i thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul

RORY

He wasn't proud of how they had left Wessex during the night, and even though his facial expressions were washed out—like the rest of him, drained of color and exuberance—it was clear on his face. It was the ghost of a self-conscious grimace. He had looked for her, but he hadn't wanted to shout in the pressing dark, and it had.. it had seemed urgent. They had rushed, young and heedless and drunk on it, and they didn't deserve the amount of luck they had had in staying alive.

His breath caught in his throat when she launched into her tale. He was so sure they had closed the door properly.. but perhaps the monsters had hands—

and the rocking chair had moved

—he was moving gently, back and forth, listening to the peculiar not-quite-sound it made. Like everything else, it had been sound-checked and sound-proofed before Long Night.

He couldn't imagine what it was like, to find the monsters in your house. To have failed and face death. He felt nauseous just imagining what it would've been like. Heart pounding. Mouth dry. Seeing furniture move without anyone there to move it. Nails—so that was how they had come loose, all of them? But nothing else was broken...

.. because she had asked them to fix it. He was .. touched, that she would think of such a thing—that she'd ask for such a thing, even if it was just as leverage against the monsters. He blinked rapidly a few times, his hands twisting in his lap.

The monsters had been in his house.

The monsters had touched his rocking chair.

He felt, briefly, oddly violated, as if something indecent had taken place—something filthy, something dirty, and he frowned as he stopped his rocking.

"The Spark Bird," he echoed, swallowing. The steam wafting from whatever it was she'd put together was mouth-watering. "I.. really don't know what possessed us to ride out. And I looked for you, I did, but..." He shrugged vaguely. It was such a strange blur to think back on. "It ended up being me, Amalia, Jigano, and some woman called Edy. Big floofy hair, fire hands?" Maybe Wessex knew who it was. "Turns out something had destroyed the top beam of the perch. On paper, it looked simple—get it down, remove the useless bit of it, hoist it up and secure it again. In reality..."

Briefly, he glanced aside, away from the flames. They roared in his memory anyway, coming towards his face. "Something evil got into our minds," he went on, quietly. "Poisoning our thoughts. Such distrust and suspicion, such anger... Edy threw fire at me-" His pale, cold hand touched the almost-healed scars. "-and Jigano bit me. I tried to hit Amalia when she tried to help me. She had those red antlers, if you've seen them? I think they helped keep the evil at bay. I don't really remember much. I think Edy pulled the beam down, we removed the broken bit, and hauled it back up again. That's.. that's when..."

Something had happened; his memory was hazy from pain and fear and the specific sort of strain intense agony puts you under. They had dropped the antlers, somehow. And it had been so, so bad...

"Edy must've done something to Amalia, for she just collapsed. I was mad again at the time, so Jigano practically tackled me with the antler, and by the time I was sane again, Edy had already carried Amalia off. She took her to the Rathskeller, where Vai managed to fix her. So, yeah. Jigano and I finished up at the perch. Then.. the Spark Bird arrived."

He spread his hands in a helpless gesture, shrugging slightly, before clasping them again and putting them between his trembling knees.

It had been one strange Long Night indeed.

"And.. thanks, for asking them to fix my house. So, uh.. what's your plan, monster whisperer?"

as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.

WESSEX out of the night that covers me Wessex listens and holds space for Rory, allowing herself to be a mooring in the dark, murky waters of his memory. She shrugs to indicate she’s forgiven him for leaving her behind. As the tale unravels, it is clear it might have been for the best. Madness, violence at each other’s hands. Her toys could kill him, easily. Or Amalia. And she’s worked so hard to cast herself as the stoic, crotchety, bitterly blunt protector of a select few. “Yeah, I know her,” she says when he comes to the part about Edy (though she’s just now learning the girl’s name), but refuses to elaborate on how she knows her. Fire seems like an apt weapon for her. Fire is… exciting. But enough of that, this isn’t the time to start daydreaming about sexual relations in the shadow of the Spire.   Back to the story. “Well, that explains the feather, then,” she says with a crooked grin, reaching out again to stir the pot. Smell and texture tell her it’s probably ready, but Rory’s better off tasting it himself. “You saved everyone, Rory. It was bad this year… Worse than ever before. And I don't think it was just because the Outlanders were fucking stupid.” She sighs and looks towards the window, to the things they shattered and replaced, and to the damage that was done to others, that was not so easily fixed. In the grand scheme of things, fixing his cabin was a drop in her bucket of good deeds. And there aren’t a lot of them, or rather, the bad far far far outweigh the good. It is nothing. She doesn’t acknowledge it. “I don’t know what I’ll do, other than try and find out what they are. How they came to be. How to defeat them, or stop them, or… something.” She shrugs again, the goes to get a bowl and a spoon and ladles out some of the bubbling stew.“I’m not a great cook and don’t need to eat anymore, so if it sucks, just do me a favor and pretend and wolf this bit down, ok?” Her mind whirling, Wessex picks at her fingernails and muses in silence until Rory chooses to speak again. Silence is easy. Silence is safe. You can be friends and exist in silence, even when deep down, the bubbles are boiling. black as the pit from pole to pole i thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul

RORY

Her reaction was not one that he had anticipated, not in his wildest dreams: “You saved everyone, Rory.” The words, coming from her, not exactly one to coddle or sugarcoat, stunned him deeper into the silence. Sluggish and sad and scared and mournful, he wanted to doubt his mind, his ears, his memory, but it was engraved there.

He hadn't thought of it before, not like that, of all the deaths. The many at the Rathskeller. The Palmer family. The Valair, all except Maea. And who knew who else had disappeared in the dark? Those who had none to look for them, none to mourn them, the dark figure death count.

How would the rest of the night had gone, had not the Spark Bird come to bless them with its light and safety? His eyes fell to his pale hands. He didn't feel like a savior; he made for a poor hero.

The fire had licked every ounce of pride out of him.

"Let me know if there's anything I can do to help," he offered quietly, sincerely, perplexed and worried. She was more than capable of taking care of herself, and in most cases.. well, he'd be more of a hindrance than a help, but now it was out there. If she needed, she had but ask.

Then he laughed, gently, lightly, as she went to ladle soup into the bowl. "Wessex, please, I'd eat it even if it was wood shavings and rawhide." What he didn't say was that even if it would taste bland and badly balanced, he knew it would be nutritious. It would be warm. And more so, she had made it for him. Everything that had happened since the Festival of Lights when it came to the pair of them left him oddly touched, in ways he didn't know how to express, so he didn't say any of it.

Instead he began to eat the stew, more or less inhaling it, while knowing that he would regret it later when his body caught up with it. But for now, he was content to give in to the urge and just stuff his face with it.

as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.

WESSEX out of the night that covers me Perhaps Rory should start thinking of himself like that - more reluctant hero than anti-hero, because unlike Wessex, he probably could inspire others out of love. If Wessex’s power is in her strength and ability to command respect through fear, Rory’s might be in his ability to persuade through mutual respect. If they teamed up, they might be quite formidable. But therein lies the true draw to Rory - he wouldn’t team up with her because he doesn’t want power. And that’s exactly why he should have it. Funny how that works. It would end up being a punishment of sorts and in the end, Wessex is not so mean as to put him through that kind of hell. Not for her own selfish reasons, for all that she does think the Naturals need a leader.   In an attempt to lighten the mood, Wessex pushes herself to standing and looks for the nails she brought in. Ah yes, still on the counter. Now for a hammer… the woman rummages while her patient eats and muses back at him, “I’m sure that one day I’ll do something rash again and need your help. Might be Monsters or Outlanders or… fuck, I don’t know. Fall in love.” The very idea of an older woman like herself in romantic love seems outrageous, and she allows a rich, throaty laugh to fill the air. It’s funny ‘cause it’s true: if Wessex were to fall in love with someone, she wouldn’t know what to do with herself: how to flirt, how to court, how not to be anything other than the blunt, selfish, night crawler that she is. “There it is,” she says, spying the tool by the door. Having all she needs now, hands and mouth keep busy by setting new nails into old nail holes and hammering them back down, testing each board for stability, and then doing the same on the other end. Silence falls and it beings to feel like they might be a very bizarre set of siblings. I mean, they’re both blonde orphans, right? black as the pit from pole to pole i thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul

RORY

He hadn't noticed what she'd been doing when she came in the door, really, so it was with curious eyes that he twisted in his rocking chair to watch her when she left his side. Still the spoon went between the lifted bowl and his mouth at a significant speed, especially now that it had begun to cool off slightly. Wessex looked to a small pouch sitting on the counter. He hadn't noticed it in his state, but whatever it was she needed, it wasn't that.

"Hah," he laughed, taken by surprise by her musing. Fall in love? He wasn't going to be an idiot and laugh about it as a concept, or say that it couldn't happen, that he didn't believe she had a heart—he knew that she could love. He felt it, in the blanket tucked around him, the soup warming his gut, her presence in his house at all. No; it was more the idea of how she would react to it, and.. to be fair, Rory wasn't a romantic guru. He had stayed out of courting since Evie Wordsworth. She wouldn't have much for his advice. "That'd have you more challenged than any monster."

Then it all became clear: she had brought new nails for his loose floorboards, and had merely been looking for a hammer. Unexpectedly, Rory's throat began to close with emotion, and he returned to the fire to eat the rest of his bowlful of soup in silence. He blinked a couple of tears away, then finally put the empty bowl aside. His stomach was hurting a little, and he was still rather cold, but he wriggled out of the rocking chair anyway. He thought he'd probably end up in Wessex's way if he tried to help with the floorboards, so instead he busied himself doing what he hadn't all day: sweeping up the old nails and otherwise cleaning up the Long Night crime scene.

as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.