come_sailaway | wake me up when September ends [OTA + closed prompts]

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wake me up when September ends [OTA + closed prompts]

Who: Cassandra de Rolo, OTA + closed prompts
When: September
Where: Around the Serena Eterna
What: Flowers and their curious effects
Warnings: Game-typical angst; further content warnings in headers as they come up. The prompts below are occurring in no particular order over the course of the month.

1. summer has come and passed; the innocent can never last

Vivid purple-blue and yellow pansies nod at her from where they've twined up the banister along the stairwell, almost brushing her shoulder as she hurries by.

Later -- well, Cassandra isn't in large crowds very often these days, is she? But someone at the buffet on this particular morning may overhear the murmur you don't need more than one slice; someone in just the right part of the Promenade a little later may overhear there's a clear path to the stairwell if he comes this way; someone passing by Sundries in the next five minutes may overhear still need to talk to Valdis about the gun.

2. ring out the bells again, like we did when spring began

In a corner of the library there's a spreading cluster of the tiny white flowers of baby's breath, looking sweet and harmless.

On a comfortable chair not very far from that point is a pile of cloth that might, on closer study, resolve itself into a dark grey skirt, a white blouse, a blue and grey patterned waistcoat, and a leather belt with a bag attached on one side and a sheathed rapier on the other. The pile is oddly arranged, as though the person wearing the clothes had vanished from inside them while still sitting there; as though to support this image, a pair of sturdy brown boots is on the floor in front of the chair.

On top of the pile is a two-inch-tall Cassandra, bundled in in the stiff and voluminous folds of a dainty silk handkerchief, struggling to press buttons on a phone that is now bigger than she is.

(The screen currently reads ERIN ITS CA)

[Note: this prompt is not closed to Erin! Anyone is welcome to happen upon tiny Cass while she's trying to text.]

3. drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are [closed to Phil]

A patch of poppies has sprung up on the rooftop that's one of the Serena's highest points, where few can climb. With the number of passengers that can fly, that's less a guarantee than it might be, but Cassandra still seeks solitude up there every so often -- and today, that means she falls asleep there, with vivid red petals pooled around her dark head.

In the dream she's twelve again, lined up with her brothers and sisters in their finery, excited about the visiting strangers and the welcome feast that's about to begin.

4. seven years have gone so fast

Wildcard! If you want to talk to Cassandra at a point where she is not affected by flower nonsense, feel free. Message me here or on discord if you'd like an individual prompt.

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Cassandra hurries along with him, her small cold hand clutching his.

There are footsteps spreading all through the upper corridors of the castle by now: marching, limping, charging, frantically fleeing. They pass two corpses, both house servants, before they run smack into the group of soldiers still searching for the missing de Rolo child.

There are three ways that encounter ends: the one where Phil is cut down, the one where they're both taken alive, and the one where he manages to dodge around them long enough to crash through a window with Cassandra in his arms.

It takes him several tries to find the angle that gets them out into the air without injuring his wings too badly to carry them.

If Cassandra ever died in those falls, he wouldn’t know. It was always his spine that broke first.

The wind blasts them in frost as they crash through the window and enter freefall, cutting through his clothing. He twists, his muscle responds, and the wind catches. He pulls them up. With great strain, he pulls them up, just as he did when he caught Darcy from the sky, when he caught Henry in the end of the world. Guards holler after them, unable to pursue. No one below with a bow has spotted them against the darkening sky.

He can tell something is wrong in the barracks even before they close in.

Those aren't shadows, spreading out around the low building snugged up against the outer wall of the castle; the snow on the ground has been churned up by more than just footfalls, stained by more than just mud. A body, half obscured by kicked drifts, lies face down half in and half out of the building's front door. Wind stirs up a ragged scarf of snow, whirls it about in the barracks yard, the only thing moving there.

(For a moment you might almost think you were seeing a ghost: sundered from the living too quickly to have realized, casting about in desperate circles, searching frantically for survivors, for a way to help, for what to do next.)

He lands. Only briefly, without putting Cassandra down, so that he can listen for something, anything still in the barracks without the wind of both the weather and his flight wicking every scrap of heat left in him. And not very close, so that Cassandra cannot see the worst of it through the gloom, so she doesn't have to whiff more of the slaughter than she has to. But the Briarwoods were here. They got here first.

... Not for long, if he has his way.

(It's a little strange. He's seen what it looks like before, blood in the snow, the way it stains it, melts just a bit, the steam of heat wicking off in the cold. Somehow he hadn't thought that other people's would look just the same.)

"There's still," her voice says from under his arm, tiny and shaky, "the guardhouse. Down in the city. There's the people there, they, they could help us ..."

Something indefinable shifts, in the timbre of her voice, in the feel of the air around them. Something stirs, like an uneasy sleeper.

"I never made it this far. I hid."

"... What?"

He looks down at her in his arms, then back at the barracks. It takes a few moments before some part of his mind registers the white streaks (streaks, not the ribbons) in her hair as odd. And it is odd, because she's still so little, she shouldn't--

There are shouts; men with spears, with bows, pointed at them. He doesn't dwell on it any further before he takes off again. To the city if they can, but if they can't...

They can't; there are archers, mages, shadowy undead giants, something. There's nowhere to flee but the snowy Parchwood.

Cassandra's wearing two layers, but neither is suitable for the cold, and her feet are bare. She's already shivering by the time they land.

(Percy should be here, she thinks distantly, and Crichton --)

(Who?)

This is cold. Phil knows cold, and he knows a killing cold. The trouble with many men who wander into the snow underclothed and unprepared is that they have trouble imagining; if it is ten or fifteen degrees below zero, these facts tell them that it is a cold that is uncomfortable, and that is a frost that ought to be guarded against with furs and jackets, boots, hoods, cloaks. They don't consider that it is forty degrees of frost, or their weaknesses as an animal. They hear that it is ten or fifteen below zero, even fifty, and do not consider that it should mean anything more than that. Phil does. Phil knows the narrow limits between which he can be allowed to live.

This cold is no time for traveling. The wind has wicked every sense of heat from him; when he lands, it's because his blood has gone so sluggish that he cannot move his wings enough to fly anymore. He also does not feel the ground hit his feet, or Cassandra in his hands, of which he can barely move his wrists, much less his fingers. He hasn't a match to strike. It's far too late to attempt anything approaching a fire, even if he knew how.

He stumbles to a place beneath a tree, more empty of snow than others. This does not free him from the cold. The only mercy is that they are not also wet. Here he sets down, Cassandra bundled in his lap and swaddled in his feathers, his own back to the wind, quaking.

(Unfortunately for dreaming Cassandra, Phil knows a killing cold too well, and the dream stretches through every agonizing minute of it.)

Edited 2023-09-26 19:41 (UTC)

Snow adds yet another layer of white to her hair. She tries more than once to wake him, when he stops responding.

There are hot tears on her face, and then cold tears, and then hardening smears of ice.

Everyone's dead. Everyone's dead and I don't want to die.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

This isn't what happened --

The main dining hall is bright with banners and evergreen boughs and countless lit candles. Lord Frederick and Lady Johanna are seated at the high table, with all seven children -- the smallest of which twists around in her seat, heedless of her finery, to stare directly at Master Phil Connors with wide shocked eyes.

"You all right, Connors?" asks Bekah from the seat next to him; her tone's casual, but the look she's giving him is keen.

"Hm? Oh--yes, a bit distracted, but that's all. Just feeling thoughtful."

Phil comes back to himself with no fanfare and no fear except for the red-not-red, the chill that touches him that feels so warm. The way he went was far too familiar for there to be any shock in it, or in his return. Of course he came back. What choice does he have?

... Why is little Cassandra looking at him like that? That wasn't there before. (What?) Something's wrong. And why does looking at Professor Anders seem to burn a hole in the veil of Whitestone's warmth? He never seemed like that before. (What?)

The look in her eyes says what he's feeling: Something's wrong.

Whitney hisses at her to straighten up and sit properly, and she almost subsides in the indignity of being scolded by an older sister, but --

But something's wrong. The guests, Lord and Lady Briarwood, glittering and foreign and enthralling up until this moment -- they're part of it, somehow, that feeling of wrongness. Too solid, too much here, as though outlined in black; everything around them feels horribly fragile by comparison. Her parents, her brothers and sisters, the castle itself, the solid foundations of her life ... looking at them is suddenly like looking at one of the crystal wineglasses on the table, sitting too close to the edge: the slightest wrong move and they'll shatter.

A steaming bowl of soup is placed in front of her; blink and instead it's a slice of rare roast beef in wine sauce, thick dark-red liquid spreading slowly across the pale gold porcelain. It's colder in the hall suddenly, darker, no one at the table but herself and --

Something's wrong.

"Excuse me," she says abruptly, her voice small and tight. And then, to the look of startlement (and mild reproof) on her mother's face: "Mama, may I please be excused? I'm sorry, I don't feel well."

“Actually, ah—something in the air is being unkind to me,” he says at the very same time, standing up. “I think I’ll retire early. I’d hate to miss the dinner, but I’d hate to spoil it too.”

He has no appetite for the meat on the table.

He leaves first. Waits in the hall (the hall, the whisper of metal). After Cassandra is finally excused, he finds her. Stands there when their eyes lock. Says, “Lady Cassandra. There’s something wrong. It’s the Briarwoods, isn’t it? You feel it too, right?”

Edited 2023-09-27 04:38 (UTC)

"Yes. I don't know what it is but something's wrong." She looks more alarmed than truly frightened, wide-eyed and tense like a high-strung colt. "What is it? Why doesn't anyone else feel it?"

He plods closer. “I, I don’t—I don’t know. It’s Professor Anders too. I don’t feel well about him either.”

He feels awful saying it when they’ve been colleagues for years and he’s been under the de Rolo’s
employ for longer—why should they trust Phil over him? But…

“We should tell someone. The Lord and Lady? Captain Holbrook?”

"Captain Holbrook," she echoes, "maybe -- he's off duty, he's at the feast ... maybe Captain Addisleigh? She's on the night watch this month, but --"

She shakes her head, shudders all over, eyes squeezing shut. "He lets them in. Professor Anders. After Ludwig and I go to bed, he -- he lets in the soldiers --"

Her eyes spring open and she stares at him, alarm redoubled. "It happened. It happened already."

"What?" His alarm matches hers, hand going to the hilt of his sword. "What do you mean?"

Already as in it's happening, right now, he let them in earlier than he should have it's too early, or this has all happened before, and she knows, how does she know, nobody knows when loops happen he's always supposed to be alone he is alone?

"It -- it happened before." The alarm in her face is shifting to a combination of horror and frustrated urgency, as she realizes she doesn't have any words for this that make sense. "Last night. But it was tonight. It's tonight again now. Ugh, no, that's not -- I remember it, it hasn't happened yet but I remember it --"

"--Like it was yesterday. Yesterday is today, and there is no tomorrow, tomorrow."

No horror from him. Just dawning familiarity.

"I'm--you're--we're caught in a loop. We're unstuck in time. This has all happened before. I've done this before. But I've never..."

He pauses. Looks at her. "I've never had someone else get stuck too."

"If it keeps happening ..."

She swallows; her eyes are enormous, fixed on his. "Does that mean we can stop it? Before it happens this time? Can we change it?"

(Stop what? Red behind his eyes, a hand over his mouth and a knife in his back--)
(Doors open and close when you're not looking. Doors open and close. Doors open--)

"We can do almost anything." His voice is so steady. "Eventually. We just have to figure out how."

Her face, her whole bearing, steadies in response to both the tone and the words.

"All right," she says, and then again, "all right. Where do we start?"

---

He lets them in, she said, barely understanding her own words. If Professor Anders is a necessary part of tonight's ruinous work, then perhaps they should start with him.

They wait in a shadowed alcove and watch. The clock strikes half past the hour; Ludwig emerges, heading for the main stairway to the children's rooms; not long after, Anders emerges, with the barely concealed stride of a busy man with work to do.

He asks Cassandra to stay, to keep vigil from where she can't be seen. Phil slips out from their hiding place to silently trail behind Anders for a moment. Only for a moment.

"Professor," he calls out. "You look hurried. Where are you going?"

The older man turns, startled and -- oh, by now Phil knows well that flicker of irritation in his face, in the split second before he smooths it over.

"Why, to my chambers, Master Connors. Is something wrong?"

“Yeah,” Phil says lowly, stepping closer. “Something’s wrong.”

He looks at him for a few pensive moments.

“You seem to be in an awful hurry for someone who’s going to retire for the night.”

The smallest hesitation, then Anders's eyes narrow in carefully measured suspicion.

"Weren't you going to retire for the night? That was quite some time ago, as I recall. What are you doing still here?"

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cw reference to suicide and self-harm

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