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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Two things happen very nearly simultaneously: the blade rips into Anders's moving body, missing the artery but dealing a heavy wound.

And fairly nearby, still concealed but aware that the time for concealment is over, Cassandra gives a shrill piercing scream.

Anders swears viciously under his breath, and lashes out in return -- first feinting at Phil's throat, then striking low at his thigh, scoring a line of blood along it. In the same motion, he turns to bolt down the corridor, staggering badly until he's able to slap a quick healing spell on himself.

The feint works. Phil grunts as he’s slashed in the leg and then Anders slips out of range before he can react; and before he can even attempt to catch up, the man’s already healed himself. Fuck. God, he loathes magic. He’s never going to get him at this rate. Maybe if he flew, but these corridors would never accommodate that.

He has to turn back. It’ll be far more productive that way.

He goes staggering down the hall. ”Traitor!” he wails, again and again, utterly incandescent with rage and alarm. ”Anders is a traitor!”

Edited 2023-10-12 07:13 (UTC)

With Anders gone, Cassandra hurries up to Phil's side -- the side with his injured leg, trying to help support him.

Even before they reach the great hall, his shouts have sparked a rising commotion: guards on duty and other functionaries spilling out into the corridor, a babble of shocked outcry and denials and demands for explanations, too loud and overlapping to permit answering them. Cassandra is trying to answer anyway, insisting "It's true, I saw him, let us through!"

Just visible through the double doors, at the high table, Lord de Rolo is rising from his chair -- no one, not even he himself, really notices how he sways just slightly on his feet. Nearby, Lady Briarwood is still seated but looking out with fixed intensity, one hand half-lifted in the tiniest arcane gesture, one that neither Phil nor Cassandra is equipped to recognize as Sending.

At a side gate, one man in de Rolo livery quietly pulls another into the shadows, as Anders, teeth gritted in pain from his only partially healed wounds, releases the bolt and swings the door wide.

Phil pushes past, forces his way into the hall. "My Lord, my Lady, Anders has betrayed us, he--"

And so nearby is the Lady Briarwood, and like the hand over his mouth and the knife in his back, he remembers the ice that burst open his chest.

"--let them in," he gasps, breathless. And then picking up his volume again: "He's let them in! The Briarwoods and their soldiers!"

Glances flicker around the high table -- confusion, alarm, the very beginnings of understanding, a deep dismay. "Master Connors," says Lady Johanna, "please, slow down and tell us what's happened. Are you injured?"

"Let us in?" says Lord Briarwood in the same moment, his voice pitched to carry, frowning in practiced bemusement. "My good man, whatever can you mean by that? You let us in, Lord de Rolo," and he turns to the head of the table with a smile and a sweeping gesture, "and you have our gratitude for that, of course ..."

And the weight of his gaze bears down on his host, already off balance from the effects of the drugged wine.

"No!" screams Cassandra, and she seizes a half-full glass from the low table beside her and flings it, with all the strength in her arm, to shatter against Sylas Briarwood's head.

He crosses in front of Cassandra immediately, sword drawn defensively to defend against any possible retaliation--here, the openly bleeding wound across his leg must be evident, surely the Lady can see it from here--

"Anders let in the Briarwood soldiers! They'll kill us!" he shouts again, and then turns to find the first man who ever spoke to him here. "Captain Holbrook, please!"

Cries of shock go up around the room -- but it's more than half the shock of offended sensibilities, not that of true alarm. Gone mad, says someone in the hubbub, and has he a fever?, and what's he said to her? Cassandra shrinks back behind him, avoiding the stares of her own people as well as that of their enemies.

Vesper is on her feet, hurrying around the table toward her youngest sister -- until Lord Briarwood's hand falls on her shoulder to forestall her, as his other hand brushes away fragments of glass. He doesn't look shocked, not in the slightest.

And it may be that, or the way Lord de Rolo is putting a hand to his own head, or it may be the years in which he's come to know and trust Master Connors, that causes Captain Holbrook to nod to him firmly, draw his shortsword, and give a direct look to his two men by the doors. They nod back, stepping forward, pushing the doors shut; one reaches for the mechanism that will bar them.

"Well," sighs Lady Briarwood, rising from her chair, "this has turned into rather a mess already, hasn't it. Very well --"

This gesture is different from the one that's leapt up in Phil's memory, and the result is different too. Instead of ice, a tiny mote of fire leaps from her hand and streaks for the door.

Where it explodes, a ball of fire demolishing the entire doorframe and hurling the two guards in opposite directions, leaving the room open to the corridor -- down which the sound of double-time marching boots is rapidly growing closer.

Well.

Now they simply have to believe him, won't they.

"Go," he says to Cassandra, and with one wing-beat sends himself up towards the high table where he puts himself and his blade as much between the Briarwoods and the de Rolos--especially the children--as he can. What else can he possibly do?

Go, he says -- and she might correctly interpret that as run, as get away, but there's nowhere to run to. Fleeing out of the ruined front doors will send her directly into the arms of the Briarwoods' soldiers. Fleeing out of either of the servants' entrances means going past the high table, where Lady Briarwood is still on her feet with one hand raised for another spell, and Lord Briarwood is drawing an enormous greatsword as the illusion concealing it dissipates.

Everything seems to be happening at once. Lord Frederick de Rolo has started to his feet and now lurches forward, eyes wide with two distinct levels of horror, catching himself on the table. His hand knocks against his green-stemmed wineglass and it topples, shattering with a pure ringing sound; pale dessert wine splatters on the floor, carrying the faintest trail of something darker.

Lady Johanna, fumbling for her dress rapier with one hand, braces on the back of her heavy chair with the other. Percy pulls back from the table, falls to one knee and clutches at his head. Vesper screams for her father as he struggles to rise. Whitney freezes in her chair; Oliver pulls at her arm futilely. Julius lifts the heavy fruit platter and throws it at Lord Briarwood's face, and a contemptuous sweep of that greatsword sends it spinning aside, slices of citrus and melon and berries scattering over the floor.

And Cassandra is running, not away but toward the high table, screaming high-pitched terror and rage.

Noise and chaos cascades across the room. Phil does not flinch. Phil looks, for all purposes, utterly unsurprised; this is the first time he’s been up at the table during all this, and he has none of the grace he earns from having done this no less than a hundred times, but there’s no surprise, and in fact he seems to find his footing in the rhythm of it.

Cassandra’s approach is startling though, but only for a shred of a second; at more or less the same time Phil feints towards the Lord Briarwood before he swings for the Lady. (It’s become so easy to die.)

With two all-out attacks at the same time, even if one is only a shrieking child, Lady Briarwood seems ever so briefly caught off guard.

Only briefly, though. The hand she stretches out isn't casting a killing spell, this time; it catches Cassandra in midair, lifting her off the floor like a struggling kitten in a mastiff's jaws.

"Cass!" screams Vesper, and "Stand down, all of you," shouts Lady Briarwood, "or --"

Phil never hears what comes after or this time around; it's lost in the blinding boom of Lord Briarwood's greatsword pommel meeting his temple.

It's so easy to die. Waking is harder.

There's cold damp stone under his cheek, and pain in his head and wrists and shoulders, and the smells of smoke and blood and vomit and worse, and the sound of exhausted sobbing somewhere nearby. And the sound of metal scraping on stone, if he tries to move.

His wrists are manacled together, weighted down too heavily to tell just yet if they're fastened to anything else. It may take him some time to realize that in addition, his wings have been hobbled: wrenched backward and chained together, cuffs somehow forced through the webbing of each wing to close around the limb.

Pain layers on pain layers on nausea layers on pain. It's just everywhere, a mire he lies in, so it isn't until he tries to move and all of his wing nerves try to shoot themselves that he notices that anything's been done.

His mouth is dry and metallic-tasting. Phil just lies there as he tries to shore up the strength to even so much as sit up, which is a much more difficult task when you have two massive, wounded limbs of dead weight dragging behind your back, there's something in his wings, there's something in his fucking wings and the clank of metal means chains they, well, okay, that's expected actually. But it still sucks. Familiarity with pain (and the dream rings potently with his familiarity) doesn't make it suck any less.

Lying on stone did nothing for his joints either. It's a Herculean effort to drag himself to sitting, which he does mostly by slowly rolling over and then pushing off of the floor (hands only chained together and not to a wall, count your blessings). Phil reaches out with his senses. Tries to see what his hearing can pick up.

This is new.

He hopes this is the same day, but something tells him it's not. But it's not over. It can't be over. This can't be where they're let out, where their stop is. Maybe he has to die for it to roll back.

Don't panic, Phil. All you have to do is die.

... His talons are blunt.

Better look for something to sharpen them on.

"Look at you, Connors," he rasps to the air. "Moving up in the world. Big step up from a two-cop jail."

"Master Connors?" The voice is high and shaky, a boy's voice, either Oliver or Ludwig; the sound of weeping doesn't stop when it speaks. Both are coming from -- somewhere out of his line of sight; there are bars on his cell, and nothing visible through them but another stone wall a few feet away. "Is that you?"

"Don't try to talk," says another voice, hoarse, further away, older: Vesper. "They don't allow it --"

"Master Connors," and this one's a whisper, much closer to him: Cassandra.

The kids. Oh, the kids. He wishes he could see them and maybe it's a blessing that he can't. To the air again, hushed and quick: "I can hear the heartbeats of mice in the snow. As long as you're louder than that, I'll hear you." It's a one-way street, but it's a street nonetheless, of no magic whatsoever.

And then he turns to wherever he'd heard Cassandra, grimacing as he does when his long, limp wings are jostled to drag along the stone ground. (She can see it then: the clinking manacles flashing in the dim light, the section of feathers ripped out to make room for their clasp, and the dark blood that stains the ones that remain.)

"My lady," he whispers back, grinning. "Some real five-star service you've got down here, I gotta say. Suppose it's too much to ask if the coffee is free?"

Edited 2023-10-30 05:21 (UTC)

Her fingers are curled around one of the bars of the cell next to his, tiny and cold, two knuckles scraped raw.

(She shouldn't be able to see what they've done to his wings; there's a wall between them. She can see it even so, and that doesn't seem in any way strange, lost in the buffeting currents of grief and rage and terrible fear.)

"They killed Papa," she whispers, small and shaky as the heartbeat of a mouse in the snow. "And Julius, and -- they took Mama away, and Percy --"

The thin shell of derisive humor that protects the last threads of his stability butts up against Cassandra’s desperation, jagged and painful and so so raw. Does she remember? Can she? Even in the midst of—this, all of this, the dance that Phil dances is colored with a sense of endurance and grim confidence though the song has changed, but Cassandra is new to it, on top of the repetition of the worst instance of her life. Maybe she doesn’t remember that they have another shot, but even if she did, who could fault her for breaking anyway? Look at where they’ve ended up.

But if he knows anything about a cycle, it’s that it doesn’t give you a choice. Time whispers, do it again.

”Hey, hey, hey, shhh,” he whispers back, inching closer, trying not to grit his teeth. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m sorry, it’s my fault—but we’re not done here, okay? It’s not over.”

"We have to --" Halting; she's trying to articulate something she doesn't understand, and to do it in the face of overwhelming pain. "We have to go back. I don't, I don't remember this, we didn't -- I wasn't here, we have to go back and I don't know how --"

There's a distant sound, too far away for any ears but Phil's to pick up yet: two sets of heavy boots approaching down a corridor, and something dragging on the stone floor between them.

“We will, I promise, just give it time. There’s a clock ticking somewhere. A loop is all patience—”

It’s a promise he can’t be confident in, but what else is there to do?

And then— “They’re coming. I—I’m sorry. If they do anything to me, don’t be afraid, I won’t be afraid.” And another oh-so gentle lie, but more of a truth than it should be: “There’s nothing they can do to me I haven’t felt before.”

A heavy door swings open; the heavy air stirs. More smoke in the air, and the mingled stink of burnt hair and burnt meat.

Two heavyset figures in leather and chain mail, helms concealing their faces, march down the hall between the cells. A third figure slumps supported between them, head hanging low and loose as though barely conscious, bare feet dragging on the stone. The prisoner's face isn't visible either, but it's not hard to identify her by the long dark hair that falls across it -- even with the patches that are blackened and half missing.

"Mother," says Vesper in a voice that sounds even younger than Cassandra, and with shocking suddenness bursts into tears.

It takes so much for him not to gag. The last time he smelled that was—

— (the dream blinks) (it’s funny, he didn’t think you’d feel dehydrated but it makes sense) (maybe if he goes slow this time) (fuck this, he’s not doing it more than twice) —

— was

he
pushes down the urge to retch (not in front of the kids not when there’s already) and retreats from the bars, clinking as he goes, his breath coming out white.

In the cell beside his, Cassandra's breath sucks inward with a tiny sharp sound, barely to be heard.

The unconscious Lady Johanna is dragged out of their line of sight. The door of an empty cell scrapes open, something heavy is dropped onto the floor, the door clangs shut, a key turns in a lock.

"They want the two little brothers next," says a harsh flat voice, and the exhausted weeping that's been going on all this time suddenly has words in it: no, no, no.

No, god, no. He has to end this right now. No more. His talons are--blunt, too blunt, but right outside his door are two heavily armed men, and maybe they can do him a favor.

Phil spent over forty years pissing everybody off. Time to see if he's still got it.

They want fear. He won't give it to them.

"For what," he grumbles from the back of his cell, "the Whitestone Little League? I gotta say, this doesn't feel like tryouts."

"No talking," says that same flat voice, sounding ... more bored than anything else. There's a metallic rattling; more keys being picked through.

"Maybe he wants a turn," says another, sneering. "That's Connors, isn't it? I hear the Professor wants a word with him soon enough."

"Be careful," Cassandra whispers, no louder than the sound of her own breathing. "Please, please, be so careful --"

(If only he could tell her how sorry he is for what he's about to do.)

He shifts a bit in his cell ow ow ow ow, chains clinking, doing his very best impression of sudden repressed panic. Anticipation makes a good mimic. "Oh sure, put me in, coach. I've got a--I've got a mean track record in taking credit for doing the bare minimum."

He'll save the real wheedling for Anders. They're calling him "the Professor," god, myeh myeh myeh myeh. What was his first name? Byron?

"Not to worry," sneers the more talkative guard, "you'll get your turn, bird-man. Bet Doctor Ripley would love to see how those wings go on --"

"Shut up, Heth," says the other, with an almost audible eyeroll. "Come on, you take the smaller one, I'll get the twin."

"No," cries the voice that's been weeping; it's Whitney. "Leave us alone, leave my brothers alone --"

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cw: more injury/mild gore

cw suicide reference & ideation

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cw suicide implication, self immolation, emeto ref

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