RP:Behind Closed Doors

This is a Warrior's Guild RP.

Part of the Township Troopers Arc

Part of the Hour of Wolves Arc

Part of the The Day I Tried To Live Arc

Summary:Lionel seeks out Brand to discuss Khitti's predicament and what to do about her in the future, as well as how to explain things to the guild. She wakes up and overhears them. She's not happy, tbh.

Frostmaw Tavern

Lionel has watched the street for hours. Well into the night, now, and he’s seen the addicts come and go, bloodshot and mystified. They’ve walked like zombies, bringing to mind any number of combat encounters in the Catalian’s vivid life -- most recently, Amarrah’s latest turnabout.

He sighs. Try as he might, Lionel has not been able to stop thinking about Khatherine von Schreier. He cannot suppress the belief that what happened in the colony was his fault, continues to be his fault, and something must be done about it. Soon, the others will awaken from their medical treatments, and there will be questions galore. Questions Lionel will need answers for. Questions of trust, and security breached, and lives imperiled. As a dusted ‘zombie’ shambles past him, within eight inches of Lionel’s very out-of-place chair by the road and yet seemingly oblivious, Lionel’s nostrils protest the stench. None of these people have bathed in days, at best. Drugs here. Balgruufian loudness and posturing elsewhere. Lithrydel is on the brink. A dozen solid, distinguishable problems simultaneously, all threatening to burst, and it’s been eight months and counting since the Hero of Hellfire has been convinced he and his are all being played like fiddles. Once again, thoughts of Khitti bubble and boil to the surface. “Enough!” He shouts, so close he can damn near taste the addict’s breath, but they pay him no heed. Embarrassed, somehow, Lionel straightens his silk shirt at the collar and clears his throat. The stroll across town takes him the better part of an hour, and he spends that time in vain. He dwells on how best to approach the things he will soon ask, either of Khitti or of Brand, or of both. He reaches no consensus with himself. Not even close.

Lionel’s anxiety rises with each passing step, and as he swings open the door of the tavern and steps past a flamboyant game of knives to his left, he ascends the creaky wooden staircase with a sharp fever pitch’s worth of frustration. A deep breath is taken, and a willful return to the void to clear his mind and lower his heart rate. Before he knows it, he’s knocking. Downstairs, a shriek. It sounds like one of the knivers has gone and injured themselves in the drunken display. Whoever should open the door, the thought of backstabbing flashes through Lionel's scattered brain in tandem with that action.

Rented Room (Frostmaw Tavern)

A single emerald eye greets Lionel first, followed by the rest of Brand as he opens the door wider than that first initial crack. “Heh. A house call? Thought for sure you’d be Drargon again,” says Brand lowly. He doesn’t elaborate, but instead opens the door wider still, finally enough to accomodate entry. Jerking his head back into the rented space and towards a small washroom off to the side, Brand adds, “Quickly, now, if you’re wantin’ a word. The rabble downstairs’ll wake her, if I leave this open too long.” He doesn’t have to say who ‘she’ is, not to Lionel. Even if he did, Khitti’s light snoring and that red hair peeking out from under a mountain of blankets says so well enough. Whatever sleeping aid Pilar recommended, it seems to have done the trick. For now.

Lionel takes another breath before entering, and when he does, he has to double back a bit to shut the door despite Brand’s statement. He paces, too. It’s clear he’s distracted, but by what? “Brand,” he starts with a sigh, throwing his hands up to his cheeks in frustration. Then he slows himself, suddenly conscious of the fact that he ought to keep quieter in present company. His next words are closer to a whisper. “How is she?”

The door to the washroom is barely shut when Brand begins filling the cracks between door and frame with a film of water magic. Convenient, sound-reducing plugging. One learns these sorts of things in mage school… okay, no, that’s a lie. Brand never got none of that fancy book-learnin’. He picked it up from someone back in his days with the Daggers, obviously. “Oh, y’know, just peachy,” replies Brand, once that’s done. The statement’s ten percent pun and ninety percent sarcasm. Or something like that. Anyway, Brand’s just as frustrated as Lionel is, though perhaps not all for the same reasons. The stares of drunken onlookers lately have him on edge. They’ve stayed here too long, and Khitti’s become a bit… infamous. And then there’s the zombies of the drug-addled variety. All-in-all, it’s high time they found somewhere more private to live, but there’s nothing to be done about it just now with everything else that’s going on. But Lionel is none of those busybodies and so, issuing a sigh, Brand tries again. “I dunno what you want me to say. She’s got a gorram shadow creature in her head that’s at the point of takin’ over her frakkin’ body and pretendin’ to be her. Badly, but still.”

Lionel leans against the wall, then finds himself sliding steadily downward until he’s seated on the cold floor. “Heh.” His hands are back up to his forehead, and then one’s perched beneath his chin, and he’s staring off into the magic. “If you’d been born in or around Cata Lagar, things might have been different. Children who were magically-inclined were sent to a strict academy at a very young age,” he remarks, referencing their fallen country’s capital rather abruptly. “For nearly a thousand years, the Republic maintained a tight grip on its belief that magic of any kind is too dangerous to be handled elsewise. Sure, we had apostates. But how many wars started as a result? The system didn’t work. Right idea, maybe, but Catal could never get its head out of its ass long enough to realize a simple universal truth: what doesn’t bend tends to break.” Lionel’s blue eyes dart over to Brand, now. “The world’s too frakked-up for such rigidity.” He swallows, pausing. Where is he even going with this? “Black and white. Frak it. We live in greyscale. We’re all three-dimensional characters, ain’t we? And that’s what I’ll tell ‘em. Tomorrow, you and I both know I’m gonna hear it from the guild. Maybe even the queen herself, I don’t know.” It’s a struggle, but he lifts his index finger to point beyond the door. “And I’m gonna tell ‘em I’ll not refrain from standing by her, or you for that matter, because of what happened in those tunnels.” His voice cracks. “But I’m gonna need a damn good reason if they force me to back that up. And all I’ve got, man, is my heart. I told her we’ll find a cure. I told her she’s Briar’s successor. I’ve told her all sorts of things, and I’ll be damned if Amarrah, or Macon, or, or a ten-ton insect queen, or, or Khasad himself is gonna get between us. I’ll be -damned.-” His eyes dart back to the door, and he stares numbly as if he hasn’t just dropped a monologue on Brand.

“Eh. From a certain point of view, forced enrollment into some magic academy makes more sense than lettin’ untrained kids run ‘round all willy-nilly. Might accidentally fry your eyeballs with their brain or somethin’.” That’s a fun thought. Brand’s never actually tried that on anyone, yet. Some not-insignificant portion of his brain is reserved for figuring out the logistics of eyeball-frying for the duration of his response. “S’not -my- point of view, but I’m sure it’s out there.” Of course it isn’t. Brand might well be allergic to formal organization, the way he’s avoided joining any. Even Lionel’s. Even under Queen Hildegarde, respectable enough boss-lady though she is. And speaking of bosses… “Maybe your reason’s that you’re the boss, an’ if they don’t like it, they can get frakked.” A beat; Brand’s gaze falls to the tile floor, still wet in patches from an earlier bath. “But then, I’m as biased as you.”

Lionel snickers and smirks. “Aye. I guess I haven’t considered that angle before.” He’s quiet for a moment, soaking in the simplicity. “Same time, though. I can’t blame ‘em for worrying they’ll get toasted. I can’t blame them, but I don’t want them leaving, either. Dark times, Brand. I told you about them before -- my suspicions that someone’s been pulling strings on us all along -- and now, with all those addicts in the streets, and no one any closer to figuring out Macon and that quake, and with the rising tide of Balgruufian sentiment, and what the heck at all these bugs, and…” He trails off. “Fact is, the realm needs the guild, maybe as surely as it needs Frostmaw. I’ve gotta do something to keep it all glued together, but… not at the cost of losing her.” He cants his head toward the door. “You need to know, whatever we do about this, I’m with you 100%. We’re -going- to solve this. All of it. The bugs, the bleakness, all that realmwide tomfoolery, it’s important, it’s dire, it’s urgent, but she’s family to me. You’re family to me. Maybe that sounds crazy to you, but there it is, out on the table. Every card. Takes the cake.”

Family. Brand furrows his eyebrows at that. ‘Family’ is one of the reasons Khitti so vehemently wants to discard her vampirism. It’s the biggest difference between his anemic excuse for a childhood and hers. ‘Family’ is the dream they shared of another life, with another Khitti and another Dominic (as their kid! Seven hells, so awkward) and definitely a way less frakked-up version of Brand than the one shifting uncomfortably before Lionel now. Brand doesn’t know what family’s like; how can he? But there’s one part of Lionel’s monologue he -can- understand, and it’s the sentiment of unwavering loyalty, even when it seems mad to everyone else. An irrational urge to protect -- he might know a thing or two about that, too. “Yeah,” Brand breathes, the first word he’s uttered in what feels to him to be an eternity. There’s too many thoughts colliding upon one another in that head of his. Without being fully aware of it, he’s spawned a coin-sized shard of ice and begun rolling it back and forth across his knuckles. “Yeah,” he repeats, with more conviction this time. “It -is- crazy. But I getcha well enough, I think. You say what you need to say, I s’pose, but if you think me comin’ along in the future to play babysitter might help, you can offer that as a stopgap. She’s likely gonna need it regardless of what she’s doin’ or where she’s at, long as that damned butterfly’s in her.” A gorram -butterfly- is causing this trouble, of all things. Who’d have thought?

Lionel observes Brand’s coin-sized ice shard out of the corner of his eye. “Damn.” He doesn’t add context, instead just rolling along into the next train of thought. “Heh, to be honest I’d welcome your company on these latest missions even without an expressed purpose for it. That was crazy back there, and not -just- because of Amarrah. But I’ll gladly welcome your aid right now, yes. We’ll both stand beside Khitti, hell or high water.” He hmms audibly, leaning upward against the wall in a slide back to a stand. “Hell or high water,” he repeats. There. He’s made up his mind. Nothing’s going to stand in his way; he knew it before he ever even knocked tonight, but he needed it to return to the forefront of his mind. No matter how much grief he gets from the guild tomorrow, Khitti isn’t going anywhere. They’re in this ‘til the end.

Khitti had been awake for awhile now. I mean, despite Brand’s attempt at soundproofing the room, they might as well have been traipsing about like a couple of elephants--Lionel having to walk right past her to get into side room didn’t help the Catalians’ much either. She can tell the difference between Brand and Dominic and Lionel’s scents, you know. There unfortunately was only one elephant in the room now and that was her. Carefully, and quietly, she’d shifted out from underneath the covers, and put her ear to the wall, listening closely. Once again, they made her out to be the damsel in distress...sort of. She was getting real tired of it, to be quite honest, and this thought prompted her to get out of bed and try the doorknob. Oh look, neither of them decided to lock the door. “You clods do realize I can hear you, yeah? Did you honestly forget about vampiric hearing?” She sighed and wiped away whatever sleep remained on her face, “Look. I told you. I told both of you...how many times? Amarrah’s been a damned liability since I got here. If it vasn’t for zhe fact zhat ‘she vould vin’ if I just sat around doing nothing, I’d’ve had you lock me up in Hildegarde’s dungeon--or vhatever zhe hell she’s got--a long time ago. Now--” She paused, taking a step into the room, a hand jutting out and pointing at the other room, “--get zhe hell out of my frakking bathroom.”

Brand’s hand freezes in the air, mid-roll of that ice coin of his. He’s suddenly aware he’s been doing that, and promptly both the ice at his fingers and the water clinging around the edges of the door fade. “Well, yeah, kinda,” Brand confesses to Khitti, shrugging. Honestly, he probably forgets the fact that she’s a vampire at all more often than he’d willingly admit. Even now, with almost her every thought on ridding herself of her vampirism. To him, she’s just… Khitti. The particulars of her condition would have stopped mattering to him a while ago, if she weren’t so bothered by it. It’s one more thought to clang around in his skull like bees in a metal can. Unpleasant and dangerous and entirely too loud. “Guess you’d better mosey,” he says to Lionel, unabashedly stealing his word. “I think we’ve about figured what needs doin’, yeah?” Brand will stay in the frakking bathroom, thank you very much. He’s got a can of bees for a brain and it’s probably best he’s by himself for a while in case one of them breaks free.