Qia

What Are You Listening To?

Today's Guild inflicted ear worm.

@Ruby

What I'm listening to today:

Reign of the Usurper

He had almost said something. It wouldn’t have been a reprimand exactly, because he had never been the type to reprimand, and certainly not here, in a crowded hall with every house in the Ninefold watching. But something. A sort of redirection, maybe. Or a reminder that the person his sister was pulling away from had also just spent the last few minutes holding things together, and that winning a room was not the same as deserving to be left behind in one. But she had cut him off before the thought could fully form, and he had let her. She was right: this was not the place. And her grip on his arm, he thought, was desperate, and he would not be the one to pry it loose when she needed it. So Raelan gave Saphira his arm and walked forward. But not before he looked back. Just once. A brief, unobtrusive check. In that sliver of time before the crowd sealed the gap, he found Zahara. Her posture remained impeccable, her expression composed. Both statements were certainly true. And to anyone who did not know her, they would have been sufficient, even reassuring. But Raelan knew her. He had known her since he was small enough that she seemed impossibly tall, back in the years when she would sit with him in the shade of the oasis palms and read from whatever scroll she had borrowed from their mother’s collection that week. Her voice was patient then, rendering even the most arid passages worth listening to. He had learned to read her face long before he learned to read a room in those moments, and what he saw there now was not composure. It was a rose in wilting, still forever lovely but trembling at the beginnings of its own decline. His sisters had always squabbled. That much was not new. When he was very young, he understood their conflicts as sudden and loud and then gone, leaving everything fine yet strangely unsettled in their wake. But as he grew, he began to perceive the fault lines more clearly, in particular the rifts that ran between two women who had been compared to each other since birth. Some of their quarrels were trifling, while others involving these comparisons left marks. And this, he suspected, was the latter kind. What he could not quite grasp exactly, as Saphira's arm pulled him forward, was why. The situation, as he understood it, was not without hardship, true, but neither was it without logic. One sister might yet become royal. The other would return to the Sunderlands with a genuine inheritance, their father’s lordship waiting like a patient thing. He was not naive enough to think either of them had chosen this freely. But it was not a zero-sum game, either. There was enough for both. And yet. He looked at Zahara's face one last moment before the crowd swallowed the distance between them and thought that perhaps the accounting of enough was more complicated than he had understood. Nonetheless, the ballroom opened before them, and Raelan let it all register in his head before moving on. The tables came next, stretching the length of the hall like rivers dividing suitors from the pursued. He found his name without difficulty amongst the former, far down at the opposite end from where Saphira was likely seated. He leaned toward his sister. "Try to enjoy yourself." She did not look at him. "I always enjoy myself." "I meant without drawing blood." That earned him one of her looks, this particular one being among his favourites for its hidden affections. "Play nice, Saphi." He nodded toward the far end of the table, where her name no doubt waited. "I presume your name is somewhere along here. I can walk you to—" But Saphira declined graciously and firmly, and he watched her go for a moment before turning around. Zahara was still behind them, her hands clasped loosely before her and her gaze fixed on the flowing water of the mountain-like wall. Raelan crossed back to her, simply appearing at her side, and proffered his arm. "Shall we?" Zahara looked at his offered arm and then something in her shoulders released. She took his arm. "Thank you," she said, and they fell into step together, moving through the current of lords and ladies who were finding their places. The ballroom arranged itself around them in warm candlelight and the distant sound of strings, and for a while neither of them said anything. This wasn’t strange for either of them, however; Raelan had always been comfortable with silence in a way that made it feel inhabited rather than empty, and Zahara had always known how to move inside it. But it was she who eventually spoke first. "She did well today" Zahara said, her voice low enough that it carried no further than him. "Whatever she may think." Raelan said nothing immediately. He had learned that Zahara's observations about Saphira were rarely as simple as they sounded and that they tended to carry something in the neighbourhood of guilt and grief underneath them. "She knows that," he said finally. "She just needs time to…figure it out herself. That is all." "I suppose so…It is only…" She paused, a slight furrow appearing between her brows, then gone. "I worry sometimes that the distance between us has become the natural state of things. That I have grown so accustomed to managing it that I have forgotten how to close it." Her gaze remained ahead, moving over the room while her mind seemed far away in the past. "And I cannot always tell whether I am the cause of it or simply… unable to stop it." Raelan considered this with a light frown before responding."I don't think those are as different as you believe," he said at last. "But I also think you are treating this as though you have already run out of time to find out which one it is." He paused, choosing his next words with care. "We are here for six months, Zahara. A great deal can change in six months. A great deal can be lost in it, too. You should not wait until you are certain before you try." Zahara was quiet for a moment after that, and then the corner of her mouth curved in a way that was both fond and reproachful. "You know," she said, " for someone who has just dispensed rather sensible advice, you have a remarkable talent for exempting yourself from it." He opened his mouth, but she continued before he could form a reply. "You are here, Raelan. Truly here, in a place none of us have been before, surrounded by people none of us have met. And you are spending the evening steadying the rest of us as though that is the only function available to you." Her voice remained gentle, but there was something underneath it that was less gentle but no less true."The desert will still be there when we return. The people who have named you their own will still be there. But you are also four and twenty, and whatever Father may need you to believe about yourself, this will not come again." A small pause, punctuated by a nearby servant filling a flagon of spiced wine. "Be present in it. All of it. Including," she added, with the lightest possible emphasis, "the parts that have nothing to do with duty." Raelen said nothing to that until– "Are you telling me to find a wife?" Zahara rolled her eyes, a gesture so familiar with exasperation that it could have belonged to any of a hundred childhood afternoons."I am telling you to keep yourself open to the possibility that something here might matter to you personally, and if a wife happens to be part of that, then I shall not complain." "Well," Raelan said, after another moment's deliberation, "I imagine it would not matter much if you did. You are not the wife." Zahara turned to look at him, her expression teetering between disbelief and reluctant amusement. "You," she said, with great dignity, "are a complete lackwit." "So I have been told," Raelan replied, apparently at peace with this assessment. Some truths were not worth the dispute anyhow. Zahara shook her head before she collected herself, releasing his arm at last, her card found and her seat waiting with it. "Go and sit down, Raelan," she said, which was almost exactly what Saphira had said to him not ten minutes ago. Such bossy sisters he had. Raelan inclined his head, something warm in his expression that he did not put into words, and left her to it after helping her into her seat. He made his way back through the room alone, people finding their footing with one another around him. Not that he truly noticed any of it, with his thoughts filled with everything that had been said. Be present in it. All of it. Including the parts that have nothing to do with duty. Zahara was not wrong, exactly (not that he’d ever admit this, but she rarely was). But his circumstances were practical in a way that she perhaps did not fully account for or had chosen, in her sisterly generosity, to overlook. He was four and twenty, yes. Old enough, by the standards of most holds, to have already had a wife. In the Sunderlands, men of his station were often matched well before his age, and yet here he stood, the question still open for reasons that had seemed, until very recently, entirely sufficient. The frontier had come first. Years of it, building something out of nothing in a region the capital had all but abandoned, and he had not begrudged a single day of it. Then his father's summons, framed as counsel sought, which he had understood for what it actually was: a leash, gently applied, to keep the Sirocco placid and close. There had been no room in any of that for the kind of presence Zahara was describing. No room, or so he had told himself, for the parts of life that had nothing to do with duty. The frontier had demanded everything he had, and he had given it without complaint. His father's summons had demanded his compliance, and he had framed it as wisdom. Tonight, standing in a crowded hall with every house in the Ninefold watching, he had almost said something true and necessary about what Saphira's reach for his arm had cost the person she had reached away from — and he had swallowed it, because the moment was wrong and she had needed the ground beneath her to hold, and he had told himself that was the right call. But he was not certain, walking back through the ballroom now, that it truly had been. He was beginning to suspect, in fact, that he had been making the same call for a very long time. That which he had named patience was sometimes avoidance. That which he had named duty was sometimes the simpler thing of making himself useful so that no one, including himself, ever had to ask what he actually wanted. Especially if what he wanted would cost someone else their wants, their needs. He reached his seat and pulled himself out of his own head just in time to catch the tail end of something he had not been present for. The Járnbjørn heir — Elrik, the elder one — was settling beside Princess Maeve with a measured bow and a voice smoothed into court register. And then there was the small instruction to the servant to serve the princess first, as though even this minor courtesy deserved to be done properly. Raelan sat. And then, because Zahara had told him to be present and he had decided, somewhere between her card and his own, that he was going to try, he looked. Princess Maeve sat directly across from him. The first thing he noted, with the precision of a man who had spent years assessing things that could kill him, was that she was extraordinary to look at. The second, following hard on its heels, was that she could, without exaggeration, kill him. Not figuratively. Literally. In a dozen ways he could imagine and probably several he could not. Every line of her was intentional. Every detail considered. She wore her beauty the way experienced soldiers wore their armour: as the first and most important line of defence, a carapace of poise and perfection that warned others away before they could draw close enough to test whatever hid beneath. He had watched her in the Great Hall, so this all made sense to him. He had seen the curtsy that was barely a curtsy, and he had watched her tear her arm free from Rhea’s grasp and retreat to Valenya’s side as though the world owed her a different standard than it offered everyone else. He had noted it all then without conclusion. But now, with this closer vantage, he thought he could make out the full topography of her. And what he found was this: Across the table sat a woman holding herself very straight, her attention moving along its length with a quality of assessment so practiced it had become invisible to anyone not looking for it. She was not performing ease. She was performing something far more demanding: the appearance of someone to whom ease was irrelevant, because she had already surpassed the need for it. And underneath that, so far down that he almost missed it entirely, was the faint outline of a person who had been performing for a very long time. Someone who had perhaps forgotten, in the way one forgets things one has not used in years, what it felt like to simply… stop. Or perhaps he was reading into it. He had been known to do that, lackwit that he sometimes was. Raelan reached for his wine. ..............................................................................................

_{Location: Ballroom
Interactions: Saphira, Zahara
Mentions: Elrik
#2f5e58...|...outfit}

What Lies Below

Hazel Miller | The Outsider

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Hazel Miller...

.................................................... __________________________________________ H A Z E L . M I L L E R ________________________________________________________ 36 | female | heterosexual __________________________________________ ..................▹ hair color | dark brown ..................▹ eye color | brown ..................▹ height | 5' 4" ..................▹ build | slight, athletic ..................▹ species | human ..................▹ faction | the citizens ..................▹ role | diner worker

. S T R E N G T H S perceptive - Years of reading rooms and anticipating needs before they became heavy demands have made Hazel unnervingly attuned to the people around her. She notices the shift in someone's tone before they finish the sentence, tracks tension in a jaw, and feels the temperature of a conversation change before anyone else in the room does. It is not a gift so much as a survival skill worn smooth by long use, and in Pine Ridge it will prove far more significant than she yet understands. adaptable - She has rebuilt herself from scratch before. So, when a situation demands something new, Hazel steps into it without drama or resistance. She adjusts her posture, her vocabulary, and her small habits, all to belong somewhere she has never been. Most people never need to develop such chameleonic flexibility. Hazel had no choice but to. And that lack of choice has made her quietly formidable, though she would never think to claim it. resilient - She has endured things that would have unmade stronger people. Yet here she stands. Whatever has been taken from Hazel Miller, it has not taken her tenderness. W E A K N E S S E S self-abandoning - Her people-pleasing runs bone deep. Her own needs and safety will consistently come last in any equation involving someone else’s comfort. conflict averse - She will absorb an enormous amount before she pushes back. Disagreement feels dangerous in her body even when her mind knows better, and so she smooths, deflects, accommodates, and smiles until the moment passes. It is a reflex honed over years, and unlearning it is slow, painful work she has barely begun. deeply distrustful - Beneath the warmth she projects, Hazel lets almost nobody actually close. She will listen to anyone who sits across from her in a booth. But real intimacy she has learned to treat as a threat. __________________________________________________________________________________ P E R S O N A L I T Y observant .... | .... accommodating .... | .... resilient .... | .... guarded .... | .... tenacious H I S T O R Y Hazel Miller arrived in Pine Ridge with two bags, a car that had seen better decades, and a name that was not entirely her own. She told the woman at the motel desk she was passing through in search of somewhere quiet. That was six weeks ago. She is still here. She found the diner on her second morning, ordered coffee she did not need just to have somewhere to sit, and by the end of the week, she had asked about the help-wanted sign taped inside the window. The owner did not ask many questions either, which was good because Hazel did not offer many answers. What Pine Ridge knows about Hazel Miller is exactly what she has allowed it to know. That she is from somewhere out west. That she does not talk about family. That she remembers how everyone takes their coffee by the third visit and never makes anyone feel like an inconvenience. She is, essentially, the kind of woman a small town absorbs without much friction, which is precisely what she needed it to do. What Pine Ridge does not know is that her name is Soleil Villanueva, that she grew up in Denver, and that she left behind a life she is not yet ready to talk about if ever. The shape of what happened lives in the way she flinches at certain tones of voice and in the excuse that surfaces too quickly when someone asks a question too personal. She is not hiding so much as she is healing, though she would not use that word either. Either way, she chose Pine Ridge because it was far enough and small enough and, she reasoned, dull enough. A restored ghost town and a place where people minded their own. But what she did not know about was the thing beneath the mountain. She did not know about the tunnels, or the coven, or the old blood feud burning between the pack and something far older and colder that moves through the dark without a sound. And while she is already beginning to suspect that Pine Ridge is not quite what it appears to be, she does not yet know how right she truly is. __________________________________________________________________________________ hexcode . | . #a04535 ........ faceclaim . | . lindsey morgan ........ creator . | . qia

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Hazel's Relationships

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W A R R E N . B O O N E.....

relationship . | . guarded appreciation

brief description . | "Came in the first week, remembered my name by the second visit. Tipped well, laughed loud, and made the whole diner feel a little brighter just by being in it. Pine Ridge clearly loves him. Me? I'm...just trying to get used to it all still."

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H A R L A N . B O O N E.....

relationship . | . familiar stranger

brief description . | ."Same stool, same order, same time most mornings. Black coffee, no conversation unless I start it. In Denver, I might have found it a little boring, but you know what? There's something...restful about that kind of predictability. I’m grateful for it ‘cus there are way worse things. He's good people, I think. Him and his brother."

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V A L E R I A . C A R R I N G T O N.....

relationship . | . polite unease

brief description . | ."I go to Wells Market twice a week, sometimes more. She's almost always there and always seems to know exactly what's happening in every corner of that store. I don’t think there's anything wrong with her. She's never been anything but professional. I just feel slightly…underdressed for the occasion? Yeah. That’s it."

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D R A V I A N . F O R S C Y T H E.....

relationship . | . guarded wariness

brief description . | ."He came in for coffee once and talked like he'd known me for years, so clearly, he’s the charming type. I used to find that kind of thing really appealing once. Now? I remind myself that easy charm is just that. Easy."

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S A M U E L . H O L T.....

relationship . | . grateful unease

brief description . | ."The mayor. He's only come in twice since I started, but both times he left a crisp hundred on the table. I thanked him both times and meant it because Lord knows I needed it. But a tip like that from a man like him doesn't feel like nothing. Actually…I don't know what it feels like exactly. Just...not nothing."

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W I L L O W . H Y D E.....

relationship . | . admiring distance

brief description . | ."Everyone in Pine Ridge seems to love Dr. Hyde. Harv mentioned she even does house calls sometimes, which in a town this size makes sense. I've been meaning to register as a patient, but I keep finding reasons not to. It's nothing personal…."

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S U T T O N . L O C K W O O D.....

relationship . | . uncertain fondness

brief description . | "She comes in pretty regularly, always friendly and always has something nice to say about Pine Ridge. She told me about the Halloween festival, too, and I said I'd think about it. She seems...happy here, at least."

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C H A R L O T T E . M C C O Y.....

relationship . | . disarming warmth

brief description . | ."She showed up at my door with lasagna and a hand-drawn map of the town about a week after I arrived. I ended up eating the whole thing in one sitting and felt pretty guilty about it. She doesn’t even know my real name."

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S A B L E . P R I T C H A R D.....

relationship . | . passing acquaintance

brief description . | ."She owns the apothecary on Main Street. I went in once just to browse. Nice shop. I bought a small amethyst because she said it was supposed to have a calming effect. I keep it in my apron pocket during shifts. I don't know if it works, but it doesn't hurt to have it."

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D E V . S A R K A R.....

relationship . | . guarded cordiality

brief description . | ."He comes in most mornings. Good tipper, doesn't talk much, which I appreciate. I'm always a little more careful when he's at the counter, though. He hasn’t done anything. Just because…you know."

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C L I N T . W E S T O N.....

relationship . | . familiar stranger

brief description . | ."He’s sort of hard to miss with that horse of his, which I suppose is a pretty normal thing around here. He’s friendly enough and seems to have this old-fashioned kind of charm about him."

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Hazel's Place + The Tank

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Rafael Fontenelle | The Bereft

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Rafael Fontenelle...

.................................................... __________________________________________ R A F A E L . F O N T E N E L L E ________________________________________________________ 210 | male | pansexual __________________________________________ ..................▹ hair color | dark, close cropped ..................▹ eye color | dark brown ..................▹ height | 6' 1" ..................▹ build | lean, athletic ..................▹ species | vampire ..................▹ faction | the coven ..................▹ role | antique dealer

. S T R E N G T H S composure - Rafael is a locked room; you may rattle the handle, but you will never find the key. Two centuries of existing with something unresolved have given him a stillness that borders on the unnerving. He does not react usually and only responds precisely when he chooses to. Which isn't to say that emotion does not exist in him, but it is kept behind a facade so practiced and impenetrable that most people spend years in his presence without glimpsing what lies beneath. Within a coven built on ambition and fractured loyalty, that kind of self-assurance makes him extraordinarily difficult to manipulate or read. authority - He carries decades upon decades in his bones, and it shows in the way he occupies a room. Without a raised voice or overt threats, people find themselves taking him seriously before they have consciously decided to do so. patience - Impatience is for those who believe time is running out. Rafael knows better. Time is the one resource he has in excess. W E A K N E S S E S haunted - Beneath the composure lives something that has never healed and never will. The child. The choice he made. The face of whoever took them during the chaos of those early years — a face he never clearly saw, a name he never learned. It could have been anyone. That is perhaps the most corrosive part of it since not knowing has made everyone a suspect, his own kind included. This is the one place his control fractures, the single wound that bypasses every defence he has built. Anyone who discovers it holds something genuinely dangerous over him. ruthless - He does what needs doing. He has made peace with that about himself and feels no particular need to revisit it. But ruthlessness without the tempering influence of real human connection has made him capable of decisions that most people, human or otherwise, would recoil from. He no longer always recognizes where the line is because he crossed it so long ago. imperious - He has outlived generations and watched Pine Ridge remake itself from the ground up more than once. The consequence of that survival is an immovable conviction that he understands things better than those around him and an inability to genuinely entertain the possibility that he might be wrong. It has cost him before. It will cost him again. There is a thin and treacherous border between wisdom and arrogance after all, and Rafael has forgotten where it lies. __________________________________________________________________________________ P E R S O N A L I T Y composed .... | .... imperious .... | .... patient .... | .... haunted .... | .... ruthless H I S T O R Y Trinidad held its contradictions close, beauty and brutality breathing the same air, their roots tangled so deep beneath the surface that you could not pull one free without disturbing the other. Rafael Fontenelle was born into that very beauty and that darkness as the eldest son of a family that had learned generations ago how to survive a world not built with their survival in mind. You see, that world exacted a price. First, colonial mercilessness claimed his father. Rafael was mercifully young enough that the grief arrived before the full understanding. But by the time the understanding came, the grief had already calcified into something smaller and more permanent. He was a boy becoming a man in a cruel world, and he could not afford to fall apart. Then la fièvre jaune consumed his mother some years later, and she left the world in the same breath that brought the child into it; his infant sibling, whose name he no longer speaks aloud. From that moment on, Rafael found himself holding her absence and the child's existence as one inseparable thing: Grief and Responsibility, so indistinguishable from each other that he stopped trying to tell them apart. He could not say he was ready, but he had no other option but to become so. From then on, the child became the architect of his life. Everything he built and every decision he made were structured around that small, singular fact. Unfortunately, he was not a remarkable man in any way the world around him would have recognized or rewarded, and yet the hunger for such gratification had always been there, even in childhood. Trinidad breathed with it, too, in the songs sung after midnight, in the hands of the healing women who read dreams, and in the understanding carried by those who had managed to cross oceans that the world the colonizers described was never the whole of what existed. So you see, that liminal caché of hidden hierarchies had called to Rafael long before he knew why. Gold, ultimately, was what brought him to America. Or rather, the simple promise of it. Rafael was not naive enough to believe the streets were paved with the thing, but he was practical enough to recognize opportunity and restless enough to cross an ocean toward one. He did not make the journey alone; few sensible men who looked like him did in those years. Instead, he travelled with a group, mostly other Trinidadians drawn by the same rumours and the same restlessness. Among them was a man he had known from home, someone who offered the kind of companionship that forms quickly between people who share a history. At the height of the gold rush, they arrived in the Black Hills with the child beside them, six years old and largely unbothered by the enormity of what they had left behind. Rafael had made certain of that. Given all this, he does not speak of what happened next to anyone, not even after all the centuries have passed.   The child was taken, rendering a human life purposeless for the second time. What Rafael will say is this: something broke open beneath Pine Ridge during those early days. A pall of dark energy that flooded the town, changing everything it touched, indiscriminate and vast and entirely without mercy. It was the man from Trinidad who changed first while Rafael watched it all happen. What moved through his companion was monstrous... and extraordinary. So he made the ask, understanding the risk or believing that he did. Rafael was lucky. Luckier than most. He came through the other side of it changed and alive, which in those early days was not something anyone could truly guarantee. The man from Trinidad survived, too. At least for a time. It was long enough for the two of them to navigate those first bewildering years together, to figure out by trial and catastrophic error what they had become and what that meant. Long enough to know the whole of Rafael's story: the child, Trinidad, all of it. He was eventually one of the vampires who did not endure across the decades, claimed by something Rafael has never fully accounted for and does not discuss. Another absence added to the ledger. Another name he no longer speaks aloud. The decades since exist in his memory with the uneven texture of a life lived too long in one place. He did not leave Pine Ridge, or rather, when he did, he always made sure to return. What he had found beneath the town was the loose collection of changed and confused individuals that would eventually become the coven. He has since watched Pine Ridge above him breathe and fracture and slowly rebuild itself across decades. He was here in 1987 when the mountain swallowed half the town whole, when the tunnels groaned with the sound of a buried thing turning in its sleep. He is here now as whatever survived that collapse begins to wake, stretching limbs that have not moved in a generation. __________________________________________________________________________________ hexcode . | . #94260e ........ faceclaim . | . damson idris ........ creator . | . qia

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Rafael's Relationships

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W A R R E N . B O O N E.....

relationship . | . cautious respect

brief description . | ."The Alpha. Young for it too, I think. He run that garage, run his pack, make the whole town feel like everything under control. People like him. Really like him. But he's a wolf, and I've been here long enough to know what wolves are capable of, the ones who smile just as much as the ones who don't. I don't hold it against him personally. I just don't forget it either."

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H A R L A N . B O O N E.....

relationship . | . mutual distance

brief description . | ."Quieter than his brother. Doesn't mean I trust him. But I notice him. In my experience, the quiet ones always worth noticing."

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V I N C E N T . B A U E R.....

relationship . | . quiet contempt

brief description . | ."Wajang. That's the word for guys like this. Come back to town smelling like desperation and bad decisions, weaker than when he left. I've seen men like him before with all that energy with nowhere useful to go. They're unpredictable, and unpredictable men make me uncomfortable."

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V A L E R I A . C A R R I N G T O N.....

relationship . | . detached observation

brief description . | ."Smart woman. Capable. But I've been around long enough to see Samuel's fingerprints on everything she does, even when she think she acting on her own. That's not an insult. It's just what it is. She's finding her feet. Whether she ever fully finds them, away from him... that I don't know yet."

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D R A V I A N . F O R S C Y T H E.....

relationship . | . useful arrangement

brief description . | "Showed up about six months ago offering to source inventory at a cut rate. I asked only one question: Can you be discreet? He said yes, and so far he's been right. I don't ask where things come from, and he doesn't ask why I need them. Things have worked best that way."

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S A M U E L . H O L T.....

relationship . | . uneasy allies

brief description . | "Samuel I understand. Maybe that's the problem. I see what he built and I know why he built it. A man who survived what he survived? You think he was ever going to be comfortable being at anyone's mercy again? No. Neither was I. We just chose different ways to make sure of it. His way make him mayor. Mine make me...careful. I don't trust him. But I respect what's underneath the not trusting."

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W I L L O W . H Y D E.....

relationship . | . quiet respect

brief description . | ."She been here her whole life, which should tell you something about her. People who stay in Pine Ridge either can't leave or choose not to, and with her I think it's the latter. She pour herself into this town like it's something worth caring for. Maybe it is….The town sure does trust her, and I find myself...not disagreeing with that."

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S U T T O N . L O C K W O O D.....

relationship . | . wary sympathy

brief description . | ."The Lockwood name been part of this town longer than most. Good family, from what I've watched across the years. This one's smart too, you can see it. But she's never far from Samuel, and I've already told you what I think about Samuel."

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C H A R L O T T E . M C C O Y.....

relationship . | . unwitting kinship

brief description . | ."McCoy family been in these woods longer than most. Her father before her, and his people before him. Her mother disappeared a long time ago. I remember that. Pine Ridge has a way of taking people and not explaining itself. She's still looking…. I recognize that too."

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S A B L E . P R I T C H A R D.....

relationship . | . mutual distance

brief description . | ."The Pritchard women have been here as long as I have. This one is no different from the ones before her, with the same annoying quality of making you feel like she already knows what you're going to say before you say it. I respect the Circle's work even when I don't trust their motives. From a distance, that is, which is exactly where she prefers me and I her."

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D E V . S A R K A R.....

relationship . | . cautious assessment

brief description . | ."New sheriff in town. Came from somewhere bigger than Pine Ridge and brought his habits with him (you can smell the whiskey from across the diner). But don't let that fool you. Man like that, with eyes like that? That's the kind of sheriff this town hasn't had in a while, nothing against old Hawthorne. I'm still deciding if that's good or bad for the rest of us."

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C L I N T . W E S T O N.....

relationship . | . complicated respect

brief description . | "Strange thing, Clint Weston. He's a good man, and I don't say that easy. But men who look like him... I grew up knowing what men who look like him could do. What they did. My father could tell you, if he was still here to tell anything. So yes, it take time. Two centuries, if I'm being honest. But the man is what he is and I can't hold his face against him when his actions never gave me reason to."

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Rafael's place

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Harper Baxter | The Free Spirit

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Harper Baxter...

.................................................... __________________________________________ H A R P E R . B A X T E R ________________________________________________________ 25 | female | pansexual __________________________________________ ..................▹ hair color | dark brown ..................▹ eye color | hazel ..................▹ height | 5' 8" ..................▹ build | lean and athletic ..................▹ species | werewolf ..................▹ faction | the pack ..................▹ role | bartender

. S T R E N G T H S resourceful - Harper grew up with very little in the conventional sense, given she had no parents and a guardian who would freely admit she had no idea what she was doing half the time. Still, she learned early to make things work with what she had. courageous - It is not that Harper doesn't feel fear. She does. She simply has never found it particularly convincing as a reason not to do something. Growing up the way she did, losing what she lost as young as she lost it, recalibrated her sense of what actually constitutes danger, and most things don't make the cut. genuine - What you see with Harper Baxter is what you get, completely and without revision. Cece raised her without patience for pretense, and it stuck. People tend to trust her quickly and sometimes more than they mean to because of this. W E A K N E S S E S recklessness - Harper operates on instinct and feeling in a way that serves her well right up until it doesn't, and it has gotten her into situations she couldn't laugh her way out of more than once. The recklessness lives in the same place her courage does, and sometimes she can't tell the difference. loyalty blindness - The pack is everything to Harper in a way that is non-negotiable. This love is real to her, and it’s one of her finest qualities. But it is also the thing most likely to undo her. Harper is slow to see clearly when the person causing a problem is someone she loves, for instance, and slower still to act on what she sees. naive - Harper's genuine nature, like her courage, has a shadow side. She extends good faith readily. Too readily. She assumes people mean what they say because she means what she says, and this has burned her more than once. Harper knows she is not stupid either. She just wants to believe in people and wants the world to be a little kinder than it is. And that wanting, more than any lack of intelligence, is what makes her naive. __________________________________________________________________________________ P E R S O N A L I T Y candid.... | .... earnest .... | .... steadfast .... | .... spirited .... | .... cheeky H I S T O R Y For Harper Baxter, the scent of Pine Ridge is the scent of before and after all mixed into one. The bite of mountain pine and the loamy smell of the forest floor are the smells of her mother’s fur and of her father’s breathy laugh. But they are also the smells of the night when everything changed. She was four, and her wolf had not yet fully formed, but the animal inside her had somehow been aware. It had felt the tearing of the pack bond, a sudden, howling silence where two bright presences once had been. Still, while she’d been old enough to understand the significance of their absence, she had not been old enough to remember the details of exactly who or what took them. What she knows, she only knows in fragments. Something about a vampire skirmish: Cece had filled in what she could and left the rest alone, and Harper, somewhere along the way, decided that was all she needed to know. The full story lives somewhere in buried pack history she has never asked to be told, and she has made a quiet peace with letting it remain unknown to her. Cecelia Blythe was not built for motherhood. She’d even tell you that herself if you asked, usually while pouring herself a glass of something strong and pointing out that she once forgot to water a cactus for six months and it still fucking died even though…weren’t those fuckers supposed to take care of themselves anyway? Well, shit. So, one could say that at thirty-two, she was much more comfortable with other things, such as having most of her time for herself and knowing exactly where her belongings were at all times. Nothing at all to do with a child’s sticky fingers and ever bottomless need for the kind of love that couldn’t clock out at five. But the pack had looked at a four-year-old girl with her mother's eyes and her father's stubborn chin, and then they had looked at Cece and somehow that had been that. She would tell you she didn't volunteer for the thing, either. She would also tell you that nobody else was going to do it properly, so really, what choice did she have but to take the little shit in? None, that's what. And yet, Harper has heard this story enough times with the same words and the same gruff delivery to know it is Cece's way of saying she would do it all again without hesitation. That she has, in fact, done it every single day since. That isn't to say that the puberty years were easy. Grief in a wolf runs deeper than thought, roots itself into the marrow and grows there. Harper had carried her parents' absence in a human body for nearly a decade before the wolf finally surfaced, and when it did, everything she had learned to manage came flooding back with it. She shifted without warning, without control, chasing the feeling of her parents in the only form that still carried their scent in her memory. Through these experiences, Cece quickly learned to keep the back door unlocked. She learned other things too, like how sometimes Harper needed the forest more than she needed walls, that running helped where sitting still only made things worse, and that a child who had lost everything needed to know with absolute certainty that the people still standing weren't going anywhere. Cece was not soft about any of it. She was the kind of hard that keeps a kid alive. But she was also present. Relentlessly, exhaustingly, present. Which turned out to be exactly what Harper had needed. Now at 25, she tends the bar at the Pine Ridge Saloon most nights. She likes people. Specifically, she likes being the person a stranger tells their whole life story to over two drinks and a bowl of peanuts. She likes that by the time they leave, they feel a little lighter than when they walked in, as if she has taken something heavy from them and hidden it under the counter with the dirty glasses. Pine Ridge is her town, and its people are her people, every last complicated one of them. Even the vampires. Well…sorta. __________________________________________________________________________________ hexcode . | . #fcb04d ........ faceclaim . | . hailee steinfeld ........ creator . | . Qia

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Qia's Stuff

Very much WIP lol

CHARACTER NAME

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FIRST LAST...

.................................................... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ F I R S T . ✦ . L A S T ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ AGE | GENDER | PRONOUNS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ▹ nationality | — ▹ ethnicity | — ▹ occupation | — ▹ hair | — ▹ eyes | — ▹ height | — ▹ build | — ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

. ▸▸ C O N N E C T I O N . T O . T H E . G R O U P ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ How does your character know at least one other member of the group, and what circumstances led them to this trip? Every character should arrive with at least one established relationship. You need not over-explain. A sentence or two about the dynamic and its history is enough. If your character has a private reason for being here beyond the stated one, you can hint at it without spelling it out. ▸▸ S T R E N G T H S ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Two or three things your character is genuinely good at (not necessarily physical) More so, think about what they bring to a group under pressure. For example, a clear head, an ability to read people, etc. List each with a brief explanation of how it manifests. ▸▸ W E A K N E S S E S ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Two or three genuine vulnerabilities. Try to avoid flaws that are secretly strengths. Think about what could get your character or someone else hurt: a blind spot, a trigger, a tendency under stress that works against them. List each with a brief explanation. ▸▸ H I S T O R Y ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Who is your character and how did they get here. Not just to the lodge, but to this point in their life. Focus on what shaped them and what they have to lose. If there is something in their past they have not made peace with, this is where it lives. Things left unresolved are welcome. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ hexcode . | . #000000 ........ faceclaim . | . NAME ........ played by . | . USER

small town urban fantasy; vampires, witches, werewolves.

Fashionably Late: A Crime Thriller Roleplay

Now that Elly's no longer on her phone, does anyone want to collab?

@Mole

Camp Athens - Closed

^{#c9bef3 ....|..... outfit .....|..... blair's cabin ........................................................................ #5a3e85 ....|..... outfit .....|..... blair's cabin}

Blair’s cabin was warm despite the harsh bite of winter that blew outside her door and the snow that gathered along the windowsills. She had taken the time to start a fire in her small hearth, which consisted of a light switch beside the fireplace, propane, gotta love it. She let Anissa get settled on the couch, fetched some blankets for them both, and even managed to muster enough energy to make them both hot chocolate—a feat not to be taken lightly because she didn’t have a culinary bone in her body.

With a mug in each hand, steaming and topped with more mini marshmallows than anyone would deem necessary, Blair made her way across the living room. She handed off one drink to Anissa before settling onto the opposite side of the sofa with her back resting against the armrest and her full attention turned toward her friend. She gave them both a moment to settle and steal a sip or two before attempting to continue their conversation in the arena. "So…" Her voice was quiet in the empty space, warm and sympathetic like the hot cocoa in their hands. "These… proverbial skeletons in your closet…" She plucked a marshmallow from her drink and chewed it as she tried to find what exactly she wanted to say or ask. "You don’t think he’d understand?"

Anissa looked down at her mug and at the small mountain of marshmallows piled high enough that they'd begun to melt into each other, creating a white, sugary archipelago across the surface of the hot chocolate. Admittedly, they were a little excessive, but she appreciated that. Blair had probably just kept adding them without counting, the way you did for someone without stopping to calculate the appropriate amount. Anissa wasn't sure anyone had ever done that for her before.

"It's not that. I actually think he might," she replied before pausing, turning the mug slowly in her hands and watching the marshmallows drift. "He already knows some of it. Not everything, but..." The words caught, briefly, before she pushed through. "We talked on the way to the party, and I…told him some things."

She told Blair about the letter then, leaving out the pomegranate dream because it was something she couldn't even explain to herself. But she told her about the rest: the fact that her mother had always been in the dark about all this god stuff, the envelope that had arrived without a name, the things it had known about her that it had no business knowing, the way it had opened doors she'd spent years trying to find without success. Lastly, she told her she didn't know her father and had no real framework for her abilities because of it, leaving the implications unsaid—the years of fumbling in the dark while other demigods grew up with warnings and training and some sense of what they were becoming. Not that she imagined her situation was unique. She was under no illusions that the gods were reliably present parents, or that everyone at camp had arrived with a clear map and a head start. But there was a difference, she'd come to understand, between growing up with difficult knowledge and growing up with none at all.

But most of all, Anissa explained all this in the way she usually said the hardest things: flatly, with her eyes somewhere else.

"He doesn't know everything. Not what I can actually..." She stopped, and then started again. "There's something I can do. Something that's…it's hard to explain without sounding like..." A crazy person. The words completed themselves inside her head, where they'd always been safest.

She took a breath. Let it out. Watched the steam rise from her mug and disappear into the air.

"I can see things. When people die. How they might die…" She said it to her hands. Couldn't quite manage Blair's face for that one either.

Blair was quiet, listening intently as she slowly sipped on her hot chocolate and slipped her bare feet beneath the shared throw blanket that stretched across the couch between them. She cataloged every piece of information like a framework or puzzle she was tasked with solving, even if Anissa didn’t ask her to. It was obviously insanely ridiculous that she was sent to camp without even knowing her parent was. Like, who does that? Gods, that’s who. The mention of her connection to death definitely raised some flags, but she didn’t comment on it, not yet. This conversation was about River and Anissa, not her friend’s magical sperm donor.

She clicked her tongue quietly, resting her warm mug against her bent knees while tapping her thumb lightly against the handle. "We’re demigods," Blair replied plainly with a gentleness of someone sharing the obvious, like Anissa needed to be reminded. "I can walk through walls and have this like… internal lie detector." She shrugged her shoulders. "Granted, knowing when someone is going to die is… rough. But I don’t see why that should change anything."

"It's not just the seeing," Anissa said, and then sighed a long, slow exhale that seemed to carry something out of her that she'd been holding for too long. "It's….what I saw." She set her mug down carefully on the table in front of the couch, her hands staying there for a moment before she pulled them away. The warmth it had provided already began to fade as she continued.

"I got one of those visions last night." She paused. "I saw River in it, and he was underwater. So I dove to try and pull him out, and there was this light over his heart when I got closer. I thought it meant he was alive at first. That it was a good sign." She didn't look at Blair, her eyes fixed on her hands, on the table, on the mug with its cooling dregs of hot chocolate, and anything but her friend's face.

"It wasn't. It was being pulled out of him. By me."

Anissa finally looked up, meeting Blair's eyes for the first time since she'd started speaking.

"I've never been wrong about these. Not once. But I don't always understand them correctly either." She held Blair's gaze, letting her see whatever was there without trying to hide it. "So if you see something in it that I don't…I'd rather know."

Blair sighed, pressing the tip of her tongue against her cheek as the pieces were slowly brought to light one at a time. Premonitions and prophecies, while common within the Greek pantheon, were not something in her wheelhouse. She knew her brother had some control in that area, but she had never been the type to be tempted by knowing her fate or what path her life would lead. Logic, facts, social cues… Those were her proficiencies. Anissa was coming to her for clarity, but she didn’t know how much comfort her words would give. It was like a conversation between a skeptic and a believer; either the shared thoughts would be enlightening or immediately discarded.

She slowly set aside her drink on the coffee table, then sat a little upright, pinning her hands between her knees as she tried to find the threads of logic and understanding she could through prophetic dreams. "Well…" Blair exhaled softly as her head tilted slightly to the side. "River can’t drown," she rectified with a quiet laugh, as if that solved one of the hurdles, even if she knew it wasn’t helpful in the slightest.

"I… don’t know." She shrugged. "We all die eventually. Your vision could come true in an hour or fifty years. It’s hard knowing. But you said it yourself that you don’t always see it correctly." Her lips pursed as she tried to find some poetic or hidden meaning behind it all. "I don’t see how you could kill him. Maybe… I don’t know, maybe he dies protecting you? The water and drowning could symbolize Poseidon and his dying beneath the burden of his father?"

Blair lightly tapped her thumb against her leg in silence for a minute or two, trying to find some silver lining or something that could enlighten her but came up empty-handed. "You know, people believe in that whole ‘seize the day’ thing because life is fleeting. We’re not guaranteed tomorrow. So it’s about making every moment count and matter." She looked across the space between them on the couch until her gaze lifted to meet Anissa’s, even if she wouldn’t look back. "River will die. So will I. So will you… I guess you have to decide if knowing him and getting closer to him is worth the pain of losing him. But you can’t let fear dictate your life either."

"Yea…I guess you have a point." Blair had given Anissa what she'd hoped for. Yes, they both knew what River was. Knew his nature the way she was beginning to understand her own—which was to say imperfectly and partially. A son of Poseidon didn't drown. Water was his domain, his inheritance in the same way death seemed to be hers. The vision, filtered through that knowledge, looked different. Less inevitable and a little more interpretable. The underwater setting shifted from threat to context, from danger to something closer to home.

So, Blair had given Anissa what she'd hoped for.
And not.

Her friend's logic held everywhere it touched, and yet it still didn't touch the part that mattered the most. River couldn't drown. Fine. Anissa believed that. But the vision hadn't been about drowning exactly. It had been about the light. The silver-blue light over his heart that she'd thought meant life until she understood it was being drawn out, dimming with every beat, turning violet before it disappeared entirely. Her colour. Her power. Her.

Blair meant loss in the ordinary sense. The human sense. The sense where loving someone mortal meant accepting their eventual absence, whether you wanted to or not. That wasn't what Anissa was afraid of. It wasn't the when of losing him but the how and the by whom. And maybe…the why. Why would her father send her that letter to come here? The letter had stated that he’d wanted her to be amongst those like herself, and perhaps she had taken that at face value because it was easier than the alternative. That her father had not only known what she was but had known what she might become capable of–and had sent her anyway.

"Thank you," she said either way. There was no point in trying to lie when it would just be detected, but she truly was grateful for her friend trying her best.

Anissa pulled her knees up to her chest, tucking her feet beneath her on the cushion. "I guess I'll figure out the rest when I actually talk to him about it." She said it lightly, like it was a small thing. Like she was already halfway there with River. But, to be honest, what little she told him, how could any of it compare to this? At best, he would understand the lack of control she had over her powers, given she’d told him about the letter and her parents. But his death? How in the world was she supposed to bring that up?

Anissa picked up her mug to take a sip of her hot chocolate.

"After I figure out what the hell I’m gonna wear, of course."

Blair’s brows furrowed slightly at the sneaking suspicion she was missing pieces or perhaps didn’t interpret everything the way it was intended. She didn’t know. Something felt off, just slightly, like a painting hanging on a wall one degree askew. But she didn’t ask or pry. If Anissa wanted to tell her more, then she would, and if not, that was fine too. One drunken night of friendship wasn’t enough for blind trust. She understood that. All she could do was try to be there and be supportive in whatever ways she knew.

Her smile softened as the conversation diverted down a lighter and far more manageable path. She sank back against the armrest, settling a little more comfortably into the cushions and beneath the blanket. Blair’s gaze swept up to the loft that overlooked the common area of her cabin where her bedroom, and closet, lived. She hummed quietly and tilted her head to the side slightly. "You’re welcome to raid my closet," she offered with a small lift of her chin up toward her room. "I don’t know what kind of… vibe you’re going for, but as long as you aren’t trying to look innocent or overtly modest then you might be able to find something."

Anissa looked up at the loft with an expression of mild apprehension. "Innocent and overtly modest weren't really on the table," she said. If she were anything like that, she wouldn't be in this situation with River in the first place. Besides, it had never been her aesthetic. She had always gravitated toward dark colours when she needed to move through the world unnoticed — deep plums, charcoal, dark reds, midnight blacks. Camouflage, essentially, though she would never have called it that. And when she truly dressed for herself, the palette changed to richer colours and details that did something interesting without announcing themselves, like cut-outs and cold shoulders that showed just enough skin.

Or like that dress.

The thought arrived uninvited, the way most things did lately. The dress in her colour that had been left in her cabin, as though whoever chose it had known exactly what they were doing. Anissa still wasn't sure how she felt about this implication that someone had been watching her closely, but still didn’t feel the need to leave their name.

She unfolded herself from the cushions with considerably more grace than she felt, the blanket sliding away, and glanced at Blair. "Lead the way."

Blair’s smile widened as she lightly patted her legs enthusiastically before pulling the blanket off her lap and swinging her legs over the couch. She went to stand and all of her joints and muscles that had been relishing at the reprieve screamed all at once in protest. Her face scrunched and contorted with every groan as she forced herself to straighten like she had aged eighty years in a matter of hours. "It’s really unfair, Nipple boy should be making it hard for you to walk… not me," she teased with a playful snort and a small wink.

Anissa opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "I hate you," she said, picking up Blair’s abandoned mug and bringing both their mugs to the kitchen without being asked.

Begrudgingly, with no small amount of sharp breaths and quiet hisses through clenched teeth, Blair led them to the stairs that curved around the fireplace, connecting to the bedroom above. After a slow ascent, the stairwell opened to the cozy A-frame loft. There was a narrow walkway with doors on either side, one leading to the bathroom and the other to a walk-in closet of the same size. Beyond the hallway rested her bedroom which was fairly modest inside, just big enough for her queen-sized bed and a small end table on either side. Instead of a headboard, her bed was accented by a large window overlooking the snow-dusted forest, framed by soft fairy lights.

Anissa followed her, taking everything in without a word. It wasn't what she'd expected. Actually, she wasn't entirely sure what she had expected. Something that was louder and matched the Blair who had dragged her onto an ice rink and made nipple and sex jokes without blushing, maybe. But the room was soft and modest in a way that felt ironic. The fairy lights framing the window, the forest beyond, snow-dusted and still. It all told the story of someone who needed warmth the way most people needed air, even if Blair would probably rather die than frame it that way.

Blair didn’t venture further into her room though, stopping in the hall and turning to the right. She slowly opened the door and flipped on the lightswitch revealing a walk-in closet that felt far too luxurious for the cabin it lived within. The walls were lined with drawers, racks, and shelves filled with more clothes than any sane person would own in one lifetime, along with enough shoes to match. It wasn’t the largest closet by any means, but whoever crafted it optimized every inch for maximum utility. She moved through the space, showing how the rotating shoe rack worked, or where one set of slender doors opened to reveal another shelf behind it. Every nook, cranny, and little hidden crevice revealed before she lowered herself onto the poofy ottoman in the center with a quiet oof. "Go crazy," she mused with a pleased smile and a small wave toward everything on display.

Anissa's fingers moved along the nearest rack with the attention of someone who knew what they were touching. Growing up in her mother's boutique had seen to that. Her mother's hands had been the first teachers, guiding her fingers across weaves and seams, teaching her to read quality the way other children learned to read books. She paused at a cream silk blouse, fingertips registering how it settled against her palm in a way that marked it as genuine silk. Her mother would have known exactly who made this and when, too, and whether the cut had been adjusted from the original pattern. She would have run her thumb along the seam allowances and made a small sound of approval or disappointment, depending on what she found. Anissa found herself making the same sound now, a soft hum of approval she hadn't realized she'd inherited.

She moved on to the next rack containing shoes, her fingers trailing lightly over the rows of leather and fabric. "You have more shoes than a small country," she said, not looking up. Which wasn’t to say she was completely ignorant. In fact, Anissa knew this world well enough to navigate it thanks to her mother's boutique, which had put her in proximity to luxury her whole life. Still, the few genuinely expensive things she owned she could count on one hand. A pair of earrings her mother had set aside after a client returned them, their stones catching light in a way that made her feel like someone else when she wore them. A silk scarf acquired the same way, folded carefully in a drawer back in Vancouver, too precious to travel with. Things that had found their way to her rather than been purchased outright. She wore them sparingly and well, the way you understand that some things are meant to be saved for occasions that never quite arrive.

She recognized a pair of boots on the rack and paused, fingers brushing the leather. They were good boots, the kind that would last years if cared for properly. They looked new, too, which meant either Blair had barely worn them or she'd replaced them recently, and Anissa couldn't decide which said more about Blair. "Was this just…here when you got to camp by chance?" She glanced over her shoulder at her friend. "Like, in your closet? Already in your size?" Again, Anissa found herself struck by how little she knew of any of this.

"I believe there is a shoe for every occasion," Blair mused with a pleased smile as her gaze followed Anissa’s attention, curious to see what would draw her attention. She slowly crossed her legs beneath her with a quiet groan as her muscles ached and protested from the movement. Her closet was deceptively spacious and every inch of it was filled with clothing, so in an attempt to get a little more comfortable, she leaned back against her vanity, letting the edge of the small table support some of her weight.

Her head cocked to the side, lips pursing slightly as she pondered Anissa’s question for a second. "No, I don’t think there was anything here when I moved in." Blair’s gaze scanned the racks of clothes and shoes for anything that stood out as new that she didn’t specifically remember packing, but nothing stood out. "I packed an obscene number of suitcases and made my brother carry most of them," she mused with a guilty laugh and a small shrug. "I think I’m too particular for the Gods to get my fashion right… Unless it was Aphrodite or something, but she has her own children to worry about."

"That makes sense," Anissa replied, though the words felt insufficient. Deep down, she knew she had more questions, but Blair had already given more of herself today than Anissa had any right to ask for. Best to move on.

Her fingers moved through the rack with more purpose now, pausing here and there, passing over the things that were too Blair and not enough her. Then she stopped. She pulled the hanger free — a red miniskirt, fitted— and held it up. Turned it once. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly before she could stop it. "Legs in the shoes," she murmured, mostly to herself. Of course, this offered way more legs than her thigh-highs had and was sure to make River flustered in the way she couldn’t help but enjoy.

Anissa placed the skirt back where she found it.

Then stood there for a second.

Then took it back out.

Then put it back.

All the while, she was aware, distantly, of Blair watching her from the ottoman. "It's a lot," she said, by way of explanation. Which was not an explanation at all, and they both knew it. Nonetheless, she turned back to the rack and resumed looking, her fingers moving with slightly less purpose than before. The skirt stayed where she'd put it. She was not thinking about it.

Blair watched with a bemused sort of curiosity as clothing was pulled in and out of the closet like Anissa’s thoughts made tangible, uncertain and unable to make a single solid decision. Her brows rose as she watched the red mini skirt going back and forth. It was a good skirt and definitely made her ass look spectacular whenever she wore it. She couldn’t help but chuckle softly at the indecision and the explanation that followed it. "Unfortunately subtlety isn’t really my strong suit. ‘A lot’ is all I really know how to do," Blair mused with a small shrug. Her wardrobe was great, if the goal was temptation or seduction, but otherwise, she didn’t know if she’d have anything… helpful.

"Hmm, well, I'm not trying to seduce anyone," Anissa replied to the rack rather than to Blair. "I just want to look like myself. Whatever that means right now." The problem was that she wasn't entirely sure which self she meant. There was the version of her that had taken off her gloves on the ice without overthinking it and that had leaned in at midnight without permission or apology. That version of herself felt easy and almost unfamiliar, like a room she hadn't known existed in a house she'd lived in her whole life.

And then there was the other one. The one who wore gloves for a reason.

Anissa wasn't sure an outfit could bridge the distance between those two people, but she had to wear something. She couldn’t very well go naked.

"I'm looking for something that says..." Anissa trailed off, her hand stilling on a hanger. "I don't know what I want it to say." Or it was more like she wanted the clothes to speak for her, to do the work of communication, so she didn't have to. She wanted to walk into whatever room River was in later and have her outfit say I'm fine, this is fine, nothing has changed while also saying I've been thinking about you and I'm still afraid and please don't look at me any differently after this .

She wanted too many things at once, and none of them fit into a single outfit.

Blair pursed her lips, scanning the racks of clothes before looking back toward Anissa. "Well…" She inhaled slowly and ran her hands along her thighs. "If you’re wanting to forget everything and just stay friends, I’d suggest jeans and an oversized sweater… comfy, unassuming, and too casual for a post almost sex conversation. If you’re wanting to have sex, then the sky is the limit: short skirts, obvious lingerie… or no lingerie at all." Her grin grew a little devious as she wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. That would have likely been her route a day ago, but with this whole… whatever she was doing, she would probably overthink it as much as Anissa was.

"If it’s somewhere in the middle?" Her head rocked back and forth as she weighed the options and squinted her eyes at the wide range of clothing. "I don’t know… Maybe a mix? Somewhere between practical or cozy and sexy? Like… thigh high stockings, a short skirt, and a cardigan over a bustier?" Blair shrugged her shoulders a little lost for a solution or answers. "Usually I was on one end of the spectrum or the other… fucking or ‘friends.’ I never really got far into the relationship or legitimate feelings sort of thing." Her hands alternated between left and right as they softly patted her legs. "So maybe you shouldn’t take my advice," she mused with a quiet, self-deprecating laugh.

"Well, you just described my New Year's outfit. Roughly." Anissa admitted after. She turned back to the rack, her fingers finding the cardigan section immediately as though the garments had been waiting for her to acknowledge them the entire time.

"Well... That was boots and a dress, so not entirely the same," Blair mused with a quiet chuckle. "I don’t know," she added with a soft sigh and a pensive glance that swept across her closet. "Hard to say what I’d wear in your situation… pleather mini skirt and a tight turtleneck that made my tits look great?" Her smirk curled playfully as she shrugged her shoulders innocently.

"Of course you would," Anissa said, without heat. Then, with Blair’s previous comment, she thought about her room with the fairy lights and the forest beyond the window. Maybe Blair's advice wasn't the problem. Maybe she just hadn't found the person yet who made the somewhere-in-the-middle worth figuring out. The person who made her want to stand in someone else's closet for twenty minutes, trying to communicate six contradictory things through a single outfit.

"I think you're better at this than you're giving yourself credit for," Anissa said quietly, still facing the rack. The words were meant for Blair, but they landed somewhere closer to her own chest as well. "You just haven't had the right reason to use it yet, like say, hmm…"

She pulled a cream cardigan free. Held it up. Considered it. She glanced over her shoulder at Blair with a small, teasing smile.

"Cowboy Ken?" And before Blair could protest, "I know, I know. I’m just fucking with you."

Blair’s lips parted to argue, but luckily Anissa’s words quickly followed before she could scoff, huff, or make whatever incredulous sound that would have fallen from her lips. She shook her head softly while running her fingers back through her hair, feeling the gross of sand and sweat that clung to her scalp. Gods, I need a shower. She leaned back slightly, propping one elbow against her vanity while letting her attention drift to the various makeup scattered about it. "I’ll make you a deal if the moment comes where a man makes me overthink my outfit for the better part of the afternoon and daydream about holding his hand… You’ll be the first to know." Her fingers swept across the table top, scooping up a shade of lipstick that lived in the perfect balance of rouge and burgundy. "Here." She looked over the golden tube once before tossing it across the small room towards her. "It’s the perfect shade of ‘kiss me.’"

"Deal," Anissa said, glancing back at Blair with something approaching a real smile. She caught the tube she threw, her fingers closing around it on instinct before she uncapped it to glance at its shade. Blair was right. It was exactly that. She capped it again and set it on the vanity’s edge.

Her eyes went back to the rack. The cardigan was still over her arm, and the red skirt was still where she'd left it. She moved to it and pulled it back out because her mother would have seen it immediately, too: the way the cream and the red worked against each other, each doing something the other couldn't. She'd learned that early, watching Adrianna lay combinations out on the boutique counter before committing, always finding the detail that made everything cohere. The contrast that wasn't competing but completing. The boots were the easiest decision she'd made all afternoon, though. They were black, knee-highs that seemed to carry the same energy as New Year's Eve but with more legs to them and without the emphasis the thigh-highs had given somehow.

She held the full picture in her mind for a moment: the red skirt, the cream cardigan, the boots, the lipstick. Checked it against the six contradictory things she needed it to say. Close enough.

"Thank you for all of this," Anissa said then, genuinely meaning it. While it wasn’t exactly the greatest sacrifice here, it surely was one given the heavy morning Blair had experienced. It was doubtless that all she probably wanted to do was get out of her used clothes and take a nap or something. "You can go shower if you want. I'm not going anywhere with your clothes without you here." Anissa sniffed, feigning disgust, her nose wrinkling. "You smell like obstacle course, anyway."

Blair waved off the gratitude lazily, with a warm smile. "It’s no problem. I have more clothes than I know what to do with, some of it should see the light of day," she mused as her gaze drifted along the collection of clothing Anissa had started gathering. She honestly couldn’t even remember if she had ever worn the skirt or boots. Knowing her she likely bought them with her father’s credit card at an exorbitant price one day when he pissed her off. Half of her wardrobe could fall under that category.

Her jaw dropped dramatically, offended at the suggestion of a shower, but more specifically the insinuation that she smelled. Blair’s brows knitted together as she raised her arm slowly and dipped her head to check. One sniff was enough to make her grimace. Then she quickly scooped a decorative silk throw pillow off the ground beside the ottoman and tossed it across the closet, smacking Anissa square in the back with a pathetic squish before falling to the ground. "And I’m sure you smell like roses," she teased in response while mockingly tilting her head back and forth.

Anissa felt the faint impact of the pillow against her back and listened to it slide pathetically to the floor. "Oh, I wouldn’t know," she said, to the rack before turning to face Blair with a smirk. "It’s never really come up."

She nodded toward the bathroom.

"Now, go."

Blair snorted a weak, half-assed laugh at how the pillow did little to nothing to elicit a response. "Once I disappear into that bathroom," she began, pointing in the general direction of where her large clawfoot bathtub was calling her name, "you won’t be seeing me for the rest of the day." She shrugged with the sort of guilt that she didn’t try to hide, but wore proudly. She then started counting on her fingers while propping her elbow against the tabletop of her vanity. "It's scalding hot water, far more bubbles than necessary, and then I’m dying in bed for twelve hours… minimum."

A smile that was part exhaustion and part pure Blair mischievousness curled at the edges of her lips as her head lulled to the side. "Sorry, cupcake. You’re stuck dealing with my stinky ass."

"Peyeww, no. I'm—" Anissa stopped mid-protest, her words snagging on an unwelcome realization. She looked down at the clothes in her arms. The cream cardigan. The red skirt. Both of them were chosen. Both of them were perfect. And neither of them was going anywhere near her body while she still felt like the walking, sweating aftermath of an obstacle course she hadn't even had to run twice.

Her nose wrinkled. "...what about my apparently stinky ass, then???"

Blair’s brows rose slightly, followed by a laugh of quiet disbelief. "Well, I’m not going to scrub your back," she mused. She had seen it several times before, the way that boys turned logic into bumbling mush and confusion. Even the simplest solutions became a mountain where the clear path seemed to be hidden beneath a dense mental fog of how to look, how to act, or what to say. Anissa’s face showed the confusion plain as day as the new hurdle of body odor became her only concern and every simple solution slipped away just as quickly.

She inhaled a deep breath that turned sharp as she pushed off the ottoman, forcing her weak and sore muscles to heed her commands and lift her to her feet. After taking a step towards Anissa, she rested her hand gently upon her shoulder, being sure not to taint or soil the selected clothing with her own stink in the process. "I recommend a hot shower or bath of your own… to clear your head," she clarified with a small squeeze. "Perfume on your wrists, neck, hair… and cleavage." She nodded toward her friend’s chest with the hint of a mischievous smile.

Her hand slowly lifted from Anissa’s shoulder and motioned toward the bathroom opposite the door. "You’re welcome to use mine if you want help or… just a second set of eyes telling you that you look pretty. But you don’t have to worry about leaving me alone either." Blair shrugged her shoulders as her expression softened and warmed in acceptance knowing that her evening was destined to be far less exciting. No one was waiting with bated breath to talk to her.

Anissa rolled her eyes. "My cleavage?" she repeated flatly. "Blair, what exactly do you think is gonna happen?"

Then she paused, her brain, helpfully and entirely without permission, supplying an image.

"Nope," she said immediately, the word a door slamming on a room she had no intention of entering. "Don’t answer that. We’re moving on." She turned toward the bathroom with great purpose, the clothes still in her arms, only stopping at the bathroom’s entrance to glance back at Blair.

"Don't go anywhere. I like being called pretty."

"It’s my cabin… Where would I go?" Blair mused, exhaustion creeping in at the edges of her words as she stepped out of the closet. As she wandered into her bedroom, she muffled a quiet sigh as her gaze found her clock resting on the nightstand beside her bed. Shower, hair, makeup, the proper amount of more reassurances, followed by her own bath… Blair would be lucky if she actually ended up in bed by a regular bedtime at that rate.

"I’m not lending you underwear," she called out toward the bathroom as she lowered herself into a white fluffy butterfly chair nestled in the corner. Her bed was far more enticing, but Blair also knew if she let herself sit there, she’d likely be sound asleep by the time Anissa finished. Gods did she want to sleep, but bubble bath first. She promised herself that, and even told Colton that was what she was going to do. She owed it to herself after tackling the course twice. "And you better not steal all the hot water," she added as her head lulled back against one of the wings of the chair.

"I wasn't going to," Anissa called back, which covered both the underwear and the hot water and was technically only true about one of them. She stood there for a moment, clothes still in her arms, and considered her options.

First, she could put her own underwear back on, but she immediately dismissed this because she had run an obstacle course in them. There was a line between functional and feral, and crossing it would require her to ignore every lesson her mother had ever imparted about self-respect. So no. Absolutely not. Second, she could go without it, she supposed. Anissa looked at the red mini skirt in her arms and dismissed that idea even faster.

That left really only one option. One slightly inconvenient, mildly annoying, eminently survivable option.

"I'll need to stop at my cabin first," she called through the door.

Blair shrugged, although the motion went unnoticed when the girls were in different rooms. Perhaps she was getting irritable in her exhaustion and stinkiness, but she was having a difficult time understanding why someone would choose showering at another person’s place when they had to go home anyway. The logic wasn’t logicing for her, but she didn’t question it and chalked it up to Anissa being overly anxious or paranoid or something along those lines about the whole River thing. It was the only reason that made any sense.

With nothing but time to waste, Blair sank further into her chair, bringing her knees up to her chest while resting her feet on the edge of the seat. Her head slowly lulled back as her gaze drifted up toward the ceiling. She started by counting slats of wood but only made it about halfway down the A framed wall when her eyes got heavy and her thoughts started drifting. At first she thought about training and having to run the course a second time when she was already the literal worst performer… As if barfing in front of the entirety of camp wasn’t bad enough. But then a southern twang and a face far too handsome than it had any right to be crept back in around the edges. She couldn’t begin to imagine how much worse it all would have been if Colton didn’t help her. Knowing her luck she could have still been in the arena, struggling up the final ladder.

She sighed softly, pinning her hands between her knees. While he had explained it rather simply that he saw she needed help and that was enough, Blair still didn’t quite understand, no matter how much she dwelled on it. Either way, she needed to repay him somehow. But in her experiences that usually revolved around sexual favors… which she explicitly said she wasn’t doing. Plus that’d probably give the poor cowboy a heart attack if she even tried. But there had to be some way… somehow that she could pay him back. She just had to figure out how. If nothing else, she had at least fifteen minutes of sitting around and trying not to fall asleep to try and think of a solution.

Anissa set the clothes down on the edge of the counter and leaned her back against the bathroom door. The tap was running. She could hear the soft, steady sound of water filling the tub, which she had turned on with every intention of getting into it. That had been the plan. Bathe quickly so she didn’t keep Blair waiting, get dressed, stop at her cabin, and go to River's. Simple. It was the kind of plan that made sense when you were standing in someone else's closet holding a cardigan and a tube of lipstick in the perfect shade of kiss me.

But, alone with her thoughts, it made considerably less sense now.

She looked at the clothes on the counter. The thing was, she would look good in them. That wasn't the issue and had never been the issue. It was simply that showing up looking like that said something: I'm comfortable here, and yes, let's absolutely revisit the part where we kissed at midnight, and please don't talk about anything serious or complicated or involving the word death. It said all of that before she opened her mouth, and she hadn't decided yet if any of it was true. Or maybe it was all true, and maybe that was the problem. Because she had never—and she meant never, not like when people said never when they actually meant rarely—wanted something she knew she could actually have.

Although…hadn’t Blair said it, too? That she couldn’t let fear dictate her life?

Well. Anissa was distantly aware that she was standing in a bathroom, letting fear dictate her bath. And yet the tap kept running, the water rising in the tub, steam curling toward the ceiling.
Just get in the damn tub, she told herself. Wash your hair quickly. Put on the skirt. Knock on his door after grabbing your stupid underwear so you don’t accidentally fucking flash him.

Her feet didn’t move at first. Instead, Anissa stared at the ceiling for a long moment, counting the small imperfections she hadn’t thought would be there before she eventually pushed off the door, crossed to the tub, and turned the tap off. The sudden silence was violent, the absence of running water louder than its presence had been.

"Okay," she sighed. Then she picked up the clothes and opened the bathroom door. Blair was in the butterfly chair, somewhere between awake and not, eyes at half mast.

"I didn't shower," Anissa said. The words came out confessional and stripped of the irony she usually wrapped around her small surrenders. "Sorry."

She held up a hand before Blair could respond. "I'll go back to my cabin and get dressed there. I think I was being stupid before anyway. I have more perfectly good makeup products of my own that I’d packed." She said it like that was the reason. Like it had always been the reason.

Anissa cleared her throat, already moving toward the way they’d come in as she spoke without giving Blair the chance to object or ask follow-up questions.

"I filled the tub though, so you know…you're welcome."

It took Blair considerably more effort to lift her head from the back of the chair and open her eyes to stare across the room toward her retreating friend. Her brows tugged downward in a confused expression that she wasn’t given a chance to voice as Anissa kept filling the silence and stepping away before her own mind could catch up. "Oooook…" was all that she managed, dragging the word out to an exaggerated length that voiced all of her questions without actually saying them.

She just sort of… sat there, in a dazed bewilderment, watching and listening to Anissa retreating down the stairs and toward the exit while trying to find her own strength to rise to her feet again. Blair blinked once, then twice, before bracing her hands against the side of the chair and forcing herself to stand with a sharp breath. Her bare feet scuffed along the floor as she trudged toward the bathroom. As her hand curled around the doorknob, she leaned to the side, peeking over the balcony railing down toward Anissa. "You should take a shot before you leave. Might make you less… spazzy," she offered with a tired chuckle. "Cabinet next to the fridge," she added with a lazy gesture toward the kitchen before disappearing into the bathroom.

Anissa paused at the bottom of the stairs, the borrowed clothes draped over one arm and the boots swinging from her fingers like the pendulums of indecision. She tilted her head toward the cabinet beside the fridge, and for approximately two seconds, she considered the merits of an evening spent sober and, therefore, fully present to her own anxiety.

The two seconds elapsed.

She hung the clothes on the railing with care, placed the boots on the floor with a decisive thunk, and crossed to the kitchen. The cabinet yielded on the second try, her fingers brushing past a bottle of something amber and a smaller one of something cloudy before settling on a colourless glass. Vodka. Expensive, probably, given Blair’s tastes, but that wasn't the point. She found a glass and poured herself two fingers without looking too closely at the measure. Then she stood at Blair's counter, the laminate cool under her palms, and took the shot.

It burned on the way down, a clarifying fire that briefly eclipsed everything from the vision to the napkin. Anissa set the glass down with a soft click after, exhaling once through parted lips, and felt something in her chest loosen sufficiently enough to remind her that her body was still capable of simple, physical responses.

"Thanks," she said, to the empty kitchen and to the closed bathroom door upstairs, behind which Blair was probably already submerged in the bath Anissa had started and abandoned. And perhaps also to the universe in general for any small mercies it was willing to send her way.

She stood there for one more heartbeat, letting the last of the vodka settle, then gathered her things: the red skirt draped over her forearm, the cream cardigan folded atop it, the boots tucked under her arm. Then she let herself out, the door clicking shut behind her with a sound that felt like the end of one conversation and the beginning of another.

End of Part 2

^{interactions ....|.... none............... mentions ....|.... colton, river............... collabs ....|.... @Mjolnir}

Camp Athens - Closed

You first, English

Admittedly, she had been called worse. Considerably worse, in fact. Ice queen had been a particular favourite in certain circles, usually uttered sotto voce by people who lacked the spine for open confrontation. Frigid was another, though it always struck her as lazy and as an insult that revealed more about the insulter's limitations than her own. There was even one memorable evening in Cannes when a French diplomat's son—a young man whose surname she had already forgotten and whose face she had taken care to—had called her something in Provençal that required a dictionary to fully appreciate. Garce, she believed, although she couldn't quite recall it now and frankly hadn't thought it worth retaining.

So, by comparison, "English" was practically an endearment. Practically a kiss on both cheeks.

"Maylisse Beaumont." The name emerged fully this time, carrying as it always did the implicit suggestion that it ought to mean something. Perhaps it didn't here, in this rustic place of half-bloods, but she had learned long ago that reputation travelled further than one might expect, and she had no intention of devaluing her own. "Daughter of Poseidon. Half-sister to your current leader, which I imagine answers several questions simultaneously and raises several more, none of which I feel particularly obliged to answer." And several of which she did not care to examine too closely herself.

Maylisse’s gaze settled on Nelly next, though she kept it brief partly out of consideration and partly because the catsuit was beginning to feel like a personal affront. "I don't believe guessing will be necessary," she said, "Hermes. Unless I am very much mistaken." Maylisse was very much not mistaken. The way Nelly's gaze had begun its rounds of the hall rather confirmed it. Comprehensively curious, then. It was the more diplomatic phrasing, certainly, and she had never claimed to be above using diplomacy when it suited her.

Then her attention moved to Fiona. "And your grandfather sounds like a sensible man," she added, her tone carrying nothing so crude as warmth but something adjacent to it. "Though I would note that I did go first. So. Your turn."

Ice queen. Garce. Wholly uncharitable, both of them. She had just gone first, hadn't she? Entirely of her own volition, too, and practically genial by any reasonable standard.

Maylisse reached for her tea and found it already lukewarm. Irritating, but not worth remarking upon.

---

_{Location: Main Hall
Interactions: Nelly @Pristine1281, Fiona @Fabricator
Mentions: N/A}

^{#a9c9eb...|...outfit}

Pines Holler [Not Accepting]

^{#4DBDB5 ....|..... outfit.....|..... anna lou's trailer}

The heat is the first thing that registers. Not the light through the curtains nor Gerald's weight on her feet. Just the heat, thick and immediate, pressing down on her like a second blanket she didn't ask for. Anna Lou opens her eyes and stares at the water-stained ceiling of her room and knows, before she's fully conscious enough to reason it out, that the power is out.

Gerald confirms this by standing up, walking the full length of her body, and sitting directly on her chest.

"Yeah," she tells him. "I know."

He blinks at her slowly, deeply unimpressed, and she lifts him off with both hands and sets him beside her on the mattress, where he immediately begins grooming himself. She lies there for another minute, maybe two, listening to the silence and the way everything sounds slightly more present without the AC running. Somewhere down the hall, a cabinet closes. The smell of coffee drifts under her door, which means Lorraine is already up and has somehow produced coffee without electricity.

Anna Lou sits up slowly. The sheet has left a crease along her cheek, and her hair is doing something she doesn't have the energy to investigate. She finds her phone on the nightstand — 9:30 AM, no signal, forty-two percent battery — and sets it back down. She pulls on yesterday's plaid shorts and the first shirt her hand finds in the drawer over her bra and underwear, something faded and soft that used to have text on it before the washing machine took care of that. She doesn't look in the mirror because she has learned over the years that mirrors on bad hair days during summer heat outages are an entirely optional experience, one she is more than willing to forgo.

The hallway is narrow and warm, the air thick with last night's fried chicken and the faint, dusty scent of old carpet. She passes the bathroom, passes the small cluttered shelf where Lorraine keeps her collection of decorative roosters for reasons Anna Lou has never fully understood, and emerges into the kitchen to find her mother standing at the counter with a mug in each hand.

"Coffee's from the thermos," Lorraine says, by way of greeting. "Made it last night."

"Good morning to you, too," Anna Lou says, and accepts the mug.

The ceramic is warm against her palms. She takes a sip—black, a little stale, but hot, caffeinated, and therefore perfect. They stand together in the kitchen for a moment, the way they often do, the morning not requiring much of either of them yet. Through the window above the sink, Anna Lou can see the yard: the patchy grass, the fence that leans slightly to the left, the pale, bleached-blue sky already suggesting the kind of heat that will only get worse by noon. She can also see the edge of number fifteen's porch. It is empty. Delia has not surfaced yet, which could mean anything, really, but probably nothing all that great.

"Your father's out front," Lorraine says, nodding towards the door.

Anna Lou takes her coffee and goes to find him.

Dennis is on the porch step, his own mug cradled in both hands, when the squeaky second step announces Anna Lou before she can say a word. He shifts slightly to make room without looking up, and she lowers herself beside him. For a while, neither of them speaks. They just watch the street in an easy silence.

A kid goes past on a bicycle, standing up on the pedals the way she used to at that age, his shirt billowing behind him. A dog barks a few times somewhere down the row of trailers and then stops.

"Husker'll have his generator going," Dennis says eventually.

"Yeah."

He takes a slow sip of his coffee while down the street, a screen door bangs shut with a loud thud.

"Hot one today," he says next, as if the thought occurred to him only just now, though Anna Lou suspects he has been sitting with it for a while.

"Supposed to hit eighty-five." She'd checked yesterday, so she knows this to be a fact.

He nods slowly, like this confirms something he already knows as well. A truck idles past—an old Ford going nowhere in particular with the windows rolled all the way down. The driver, a man Anna Lou recognizes but cannot name, raises two fingers off the steering wheel in a lazy salute. Dennis raises his mug slightly in return.

They sit with that for a while as the heat presses in, and Anna Lou can feel the sweat beginning to gather at the back of her neck because of it. She glances at her father's profile, at the gray threading through his stubble and the way his shoulders seem to slope a little more than they used to. Then, she does the thing Dennis hates but has probably come to expect by now.

"You eat yet?"

"Your mother's working on something." His answer is a perfunctory redirection that has worked on her before. It will not work today.

"That's not what I asked."

The corner of his mouth moves until it forms the barest beginning of a smile."I'll eat. Don’t you worry now," he says. He reaches over and ruffles her already messy hair the way he has been doing since she barely came up to his shoulder, and she ducks away from it on instinct, making the corner of his mouth move a little further.

The thing is, though, Anna Lou does worry. She has noticed over the past few months the way he sometimes sits down to a full plate and stands up, having moved most of it around without actually eating much of it at all. She hasn't said this out loud because Dennis wouldn't want her to (he has never been the kind of man who accepts concern gracefully), and besides, she wouldn't know how to say it without it sounding like an accusation. Which it isn’t. It's just that…she notices.

She lets the silence settle between them again. A fly buzzes somewhere near the screen door. The kid on the bicycle has long since disappeared around the bend. Anna Lou takes a final sip of her coffee, which has gone tepid and bitter, and makes a decision.

"I'm gonna head over to Husker's," she says. "See if they need the help." It is, technically, her day off. She is aware of this. She is also aware that the trailer has no power, that the heat is only going to get worse, and that Husker's will be pulling in half the town before noon, whether they're staffed for it or not. The extra hours would not go unappreciated either, not with the rent having gone up three hundred dollars and Dennis's Dollar General shifts being what they are. So it isn't entirely selfless, the impulse to go. It rarely is, if she's being honest, which she tries to be, at least with herself, at least some of the time.

Dennis nods once and lifts his mug again as Anna Lou stands up. The porch boards creak beneath her, and she pauses for half a second with her hand on the screen door, looking back at him. She wants to say something else. Maybe an I love you. But the words stick in her throat, too heavy and too light all at once, and so she pushes through the door instead, the screen whining shut behind her.

^{interactions ....|.... none ............... mentions ....|.... delia............... collabs ....|.... none}

Reign of the Usurper

Saphira watched the king’s hands. They were calloused, and he made no effort to conceal them as a deliberate message to every lord and lady in the hall: I have not forgotten where I came from. The gesture stirred something in her chest, a queer amalgam of grudging appreciation and prickling suspicion. It was a performance, surely, like everything else in this place. A warmer one than most, perhaps, but performance nonetheless. She had spent enough years watching her father work a room to recognize the mechanics beneath the warmth. The self-deprecating collar, the jovial deflection of tension, the careful framing of a political maneuver as an evening of simple pleasures. Put the politics aside as if politics were a cloak one removed at the door rather than the very integument of every soul in attendance. Still, the hall breathed differently when Rowan Storvane spoke. She had to grant him that. Her own lungs had not yet fully relearned their rhythm. The moment replayed itself: her father's first bow, shallow and proud as desert stone, and then the Queen's voice: "You should bow before your King." A silence that had lasted perhaps four seconds but felt considerably longer in the moment. Saphira's fingers had found Zahara's arm before she had consciously decided to move, nails biting into fabric as the fury crested in her chest. Not at the correction itself, but at the public humiliation of it, delivered before every house in the Ninefold, every rival, every potential future they had come here to negotiate. She had kept her face still. She was adept at that very thing. But then her father had bowed, and the King had descended from the dais to meet him, and the moment had dissolved like salt surrendering to water. All of it folded away, replaced with laughter, with warmth, with Rowan Storvane’s peculiar brand of grace that seemed to forgive everything it touched. Then came Zahara. Saphira had felt the bait before she recognized it for what it was, and she had answered before she could stop herself. The flush that followed was the worst part because her sister had guided her by the hand to exactly the spot she needed her to stand. All while the King, his golden son, and the laughing princess watched, charmed by the family from the Sunderlands and their delightful candour. And so, as always, her sister had won the room. Not decisively, perhaps. Not permanently, certainly. But in the way that mattered here, in the opening phase of a game that would span months, Zahara had been the one who looked poised while Saphira had been the one with colour bleeding into her cheeks. She kept her expression placid as the hall began to move around her, the formal current of the evening carrying them toward the ballroom doors. Her father’s hand settled briefly at her mother’s back—the familiar shorthand of their partnership—and her mother moved with him. In turn, Saphira looped her arm through Raelan’s, pulling him forward, a decision made and executed before anyone could remark upon it. "Saphira..." he said, by way of acknowledging that he knew precisely what she was doing. "Don't," she replied pleasantly. He did not. He had always been the wisest of the siblings in that particular respect, despite being the youngest. His arm was steady beneath hers, soldier-solid, and she was grateful for it. The ballroom doors opened ahead of them, and the warmth of candlelight spilled outward, carrying with it the scent of roasted meat and something underneath, clean and cold and faintly sweet, mountain water, she realized, threading through everything else like a reminder that this place was built into living rock. She stepped through and let her gaze move. It was the kind of room that wanted to be admired, and she obliged it briefly because, if she had to admit, it was quite remarkable. But then came the tables. Two long runs of dark oak stretched the length of the hall, their surfaces gleaming with lambent candlelight that caught the silver fittings and the place cards arranged with the Queen’s invisible hand. Saphira’s gaze travelled the length of them before Raelan’s voice arrived at her ear, low enough that it carried no further than her. "Try to enjoy yourself." "I always enjoy myself." "I meant without drawing blood." She turned to look at him. He was wearing the expression she most wanted to wipe off his face. That particular blend of affection and amusement that he had apparently decided was his permanent contribution to every occasion. "I have no idea what you're implying," Saphira said, with great dignity. "Play nice, Saphi." He said it the way one might say it to a child who had bitten other children before and showed every indication of doing so again. Then he nodded down the length of the table toward the far end, the very opposite of where his own name undoubtedly waited. "I presume your name is somewhere along here. I can walk you to—" "I see it from here," she said, already stepping away, her hand sliding from the crook of his arm with a pressure that was gentle enough to be gracious and firm enough to be final."Go and sit down, Raelan." He held his ground for exactly one moment, then conceded with the pragmatism of a man who had learned which hills were worth dying on. Saphira heard his steps recede behind her as she turned, and she covered the remaining length of the table alone. She passed name after name without interest until her gaze snagged on one that stopped her entirely. Zahara Al'Seren. And beside it, placed with a neatness that felt almost architectural in its intention: Prince Dorian Storvane. Saphira's eyes moved to find her own card. A few seats further. The very end of the table. The frown arrived before she could prevent it with the faintest pull between her brows and a slight compression at the corners of her mouth. She managed to smooth it away almost immediately and told herself, with some firmness, that she was not surprised. She wasn't. The logic was cruel but clear enough: Zahara was the elder, if only by the margin of minutes that had apparently determined the entire rest of both their lives, and so Zahara received the more advantageous placement. It was not personal. It was understandable. The kind of cold yet efficient understanding that had been applied to them since birth, parcelling out precedence and expectation while pretending the division was completely natural. And it was not as though she had been seated poorly. She was at the table. She was present. The distance between her card and Dorian’s was not so vast that it precluded conversation or notice or any of the dozen small maneuvers a determined woman could execute over the course of a long feast. She was simply not the one beside him. Zahara was. Saphira reached her chair and extended a hand toward the back of it, her mind still half a step behind her body. The sound of approaching steps was lost beneath the rising commotion of the Lords and Ladies filling the ballroom beneath the gentle cadence of the musicians playing an airy tune along strings. Before she was able to take hold of the chair’s back a hand slipped between like a quiet intrusion, catching her fingers gently in the warmth of his palm. "A lady should not have to seat herself," Prince Dorian’s voice was gentle like a shared confidence, not chivalrous for attention’s sake. His attention fell to the name card that had stolen her attention, seated at the edge of the table like a last thought. There was a pensive sound that hummed from behind his pressed lips as he guided her one step to the side without any rush and a light touch she could be free of at any moment she wished. "My mother’s doing," was his only comment, simple and plain with a warmth of understanding that laced his words as his thumb swept across her knuckles before releasing his hold. Saphira did not visibly still as she was far too well trained for that, but there was a fraction of a second where every thought she had been running went quiet, interrupted by the warmth of a hand she had not heard coming. She let him guide her the single step without resistance, which was its own small concession she chose not to examine too closely until– My mother's doing. She turned her head to look at him then, and up close he was….well. She had not been wrong, exactly. The mouth was still too soft for a man who was supposed to know how to swing a sword, and there was something about the symmetry of his features that belonged more to a painter’s imagination than to any battlefield. A girl’s face, she had said in the hall, and she stood by the assessment. Though, she conceded privately, it was a very fine girl’s face indeed. "Of course it was," she replied. Her tone contained nothing that could be called impolite and nothing that could be called warm, either. "How gracious of you to say so." She watched his face as the words landed, alert for the particular flicker she had learned to read in powerful men when they felt themselves dismissed. If he were anything like his mother, that imperious, thin-lipped harpy of a woman, then graciousness would only extend so far. Dorian chuckled, the coldness of her indifference not unsettling him, but landing somewhere strangely familiar after spending a lifetime in the same halls as his mother and Maeve. He moved slowly around her, being sure not to step on her long skirts of black and gold as he circled around to stand behind her seat. His hands curled around the polished wooden posts at the top of the chair’s back as his gaze drifted back over to her. "Before my brother joined the guard, I too was sat amongst the second sons and daughters like an afterthought," he commented as he slowly pulled the chair out for her, never one to let someone’s guarded disposition deter him. "Although that usually entailed getting lost somewhere in the middle like my sister." His gaze drifted down the table to where Rhea had already been seated, surrounded by the place cards of other second sons whom their mother found unworthy of Maeve’s time. The tension in Saphira’s shoulders eased somewhat as Dorian had done something interesting: make himself briefly equal to her, a prince who had once been an afterthought at his own mother's table. She was not certain whether to believe it as genuine or calculated charm, and perhaps it was a little of both, given she had no idea of his character. Nonetheless, her gaze followed his own down the table to where Princess Rhea sat, and Saphira studied her for a moment with something that lay uncomfortably between sympathy and recognition. "Your view is far better," he countered as his gaze found its way back to Saphira before nodding his head toward the falls. Dorian’s smile was sincere, tinged with an almost juvenile mischief as that one stray curl bounced softly against his temple like its own quiet act of defiance. While he could see multiple advantages to being seated at the edge of the table—a quick getaway or significantly lighter social burden—the true benefit was having an uninterrupted view of the cavern and the crystalline waters that cascaded from the ceiling. "Or perhaps it shall make my view better seeing you framed in moonlight," he added with a directness that no doubt would have infuriated his mother if she heard. "Far better," Saphira repeated, turning to follow his nod toward the falls. The water caught the moonlight as it descended, fracturing it into an ethereal spectacle that had no business being as beautiful as it was. She regarded it for a moment with the expression of someone who had not expected to be moved and was mildly annoyed to find herself so. Where she came from, water did not fall freely into pools for the pleasure of a ballroom. It was rationed, negotiated, withheld and dispensed like every other resource the Sunderlands produced. Its scarcity was the very source of their power, some might argue. But here it simply ran. Spilled out of the living rock, caught the light, and was apparently considered a mere decorative feature, such as a sconce or a rug. Then his last words registered fully. She turned back to look at him with the sort of regard she reserved for things that had surprised her and had earned no outward indication of it. "You are very forthcoming for a first evening, Your Grace," she said, walking the line between a rebuke and invitation. The corner of her mouth did not quite curve. "It seems I shall have to watch myself." "How fortunate that we already share something in common, for I too will be watching you." Dorian’s brow lifted with quiet curiosity with the air of a challenge to see if he’d be met with more distance, or perhaps—if he was lucky—a smile. A woman’s smile truly was the greatest gift and he would consider himself lucky indeed if he could manage one from Saphira, if for no other reason than because she seemed reluctant to let herself. The corner of her mouth moved. It was not a smile, not quite, but it was the closest thing to one Saphira had produced since setting foot in this place. She suspected they both knew it. "Life is fleeting," Dorian continued with a casual innocence, as if he knew no other way to exist beyond honestly, whether for good or ill. "Far too fleeting to be anything other than forthcoming." Lies, deceit, or the courtly games his mother and sister like to spin were exhausting and took far too much effort—and intelligence—than he possessed. He released his hold on the chair, stepping around it to hold out his hand, palm turned upwards in a gentle offering to assist her into her seat, one she could accept or decline and his smile would not falter either way. Saphira watched him, considering the upturned palm for a moment. Then she placed her hand in his and allowed herself to be guided into the chair. He had not yet said anything she could fault, which was itself a kind of fault. Men who said nothing faultable were either very good or very careful, and she had not yet determined which applied here. But then–– "Beauty should be cherished, not merely regarded." He held her gaze, studying the darkness of her eyes like a bitter chocolate with a sweetness hidden beneath, almost too decadent for the likes of him. "Especially a desert rose that has lived in the shadow of her sister." The surprise arrived and departed in the space of a single breath, though it wasn’t so much at the compliment; she had received those before in various registers of sincerity and had long since developed the means to receive them without being particularly moved. No, it was the second half of the sentence that reached somewhere the first half could not, causing her to look at him with something unguarded moving just beneath the surface of her expression before her composure settled back into place like a drawn curtain. "You are either very perceptive," Saphira said quietly, "or very well informed, and I find I cannot decide which concerns me more." Dorian helped scoot her chair in as she settled. A warm smile permanently graced his lips as he stepped around to the unoccupied head of the table, being sure to give her space but still remain close enough until the conclusion of their conversation. His eyes sparkled like the falls behind him as he chuckled with quiet amusement. "I promise I am not wise enough to be perceptive nor patient enough to be properly informed." While his words did not lack self-deprecation, he seemed to have accepted those truths about himself without embarrassment. Before he could overstay his welcome, Dorian pressed his right palm to his chest and bowed deeply, low enough that his head fell lower than Saphira’s where she sat. He held her gaze for a beat or two then slowly stood back upright. "I do not wish to keep you from your meal any further, but I hope you would consider saving me a dance when the feast has ended." His smile grew, just a fraction, curling slightly higher on one side as he flashed her a quick, almost missable wink before drifting back around the table toward his seat. She watched him go, though her chin did not swivel to make it obvious. It was at most a glance from the corner of her eye, nothing more. But she watched him all the same. A dance. Such a small thing on the surface of it. The kind of offer that was bound to be exchanged a dozen times over the course of an evening like this between people who meant nothing by it and people who meant everything. She was not yet certain which category applied to Dorian, and that uncertainty was itself an answer of a kind. Not that it mattered. He had asked and then removed himself before she could respond, which was either very good manners or very good tactics. There was something a little irritating about that. But only a little. In any case, the alternative—being made to answer on the spot with half the table in peripheral view—would have been considerably worse. So, in a way, he had given her the gift of time to decide without making a show of giving it. Saphira was not sure she was grateful for that either, despite having spent the entire evening reading performances in every gesture. Her fingers found, without her permission, the back of her own hand. The exact spot where his palm had rested. Saphira stilled them immediately. Not wise enough to be perceptive. Not patient enough to be properly informed. At least one of those things was a lie. The question was…which one? She turned the thought over like a sedulous examiner, looking for the tell, the small tear in the blindfold of his honesty. Because no one was that guileless, surely. Not in this room. Not in this game. And yet, for a single moment, she almost wished he were. ..............................................................................................

_{Location: Ballroom
Interactions: Raelan, Dorian (@Mjolnir)
Mentions: Rowan, Valenya, Kaelan, Zahara, Samira, Declan, Maeve, Rhea
#A34261...|...outfit}