Trash Panda

Let Me Steal Your Heart [BuzzingBee + Dagger]

As soon as the agreement left Penelope’s lips, Crow felt an immediate wave of relief wash over him. He was still disappointed that the only way he could see his companions was by parting ways with the person he most enjoyed talking with during the ride, but he was grateful that she was willing to go along with it. Besides, they would be able to make up for lost time when he got back from Younis. It was only a two-week trip or so. Once the war was officially over, they would be able to spend more time together at the castle, and it wouldn’t even matter that they’d lost one day on their way to the border. They would survive being apart one more time. It wasn’t like they had never been separated before.

When she made it clear that this would have to count as his favor from their wager in Bellmare, the viceroy clicked his tongue. “I was hoping you wouldn’t remember that,” he sighed, though an amused smile played on his lip. “Pity. I was going to make you go skinny dipping in the river.” He winked at her jokingly. Of course, he wouldn’t have actually done anything that cruel, especially when the water would have been frigid at this time of year. He probably would have cashed in the favor for something simpler like a back massage or another trip to her hometown—to hear more embarrassing stories about her from Letitia, of course—but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to rile her up a little.

With the dour mood lifted, at least for a while, the rest of the ride was more bearable to Crow. He passed the time by talking idly with Penelope and occasionally Preston, who kept pace on his other side. When they weren’t speaking, he looked over his surroundings, keeping watch for movement but also admiring the view. The ground beneath the trees was still covered with a thin layer of snow from the last storm, and he could see the tracks of wild animals like foxes and deer. At one point, he even caught sight of a herd of deer in the distance, which caused his thoughts to wander to venison and then to lunch. Naturally, he had to pester Otto with a request to stop, so they could eat, but the baron was determined to keep moving. They went back and forth for a few minutes until they agreed to slow their pace enough for everyone to have food while they rode. It wasn’t as relaxing as it would have been to stop and rest, but as long as his stomach was filled, the former thief couldn’t complain too much.

Eventually, they arrived at Wellspring, and Crow slid down from Baine’s back with a weary exhale. Otto and his son were already on their way to the inn to secure a room for the group, while Preston and Percival were gathering the horses to put up in the stables for the night. Naida stood nearby, practically swaying on her feet with exhaustion after spending the majority of the day bored as usual. “I never thought I’d say it, but being a guard at the castle is more interesting than being given an assignment,” she groaned.

“Really?” Crow casted her a bemused look. “when you’re guarding the castle aren’t you supposed to be standing watch all day, not talking to anyone like you are on this trip?”

“Supposed to,” his sister echoed, making quotations in the air with her fingers.

The viceroy smirked and rolled his eyes, turning to Penelope. “We got here pretty early. Maybe you’ll get your own bed this time.”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

The thought would definitely cross his mind, but I think he'd be a little more willing to trust her when he realizes she just saved his life. Also, he wouldn't know his way around xD Seeing a bird's eye view of the country on a map is completely different from actually navigating the streets

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

As Iris left the basement without answering his question, Cas sighed to himself and resumed eating the bread she had left for him. It was probably for the best that he didn’t know the answer anyway. He didn’t know why he’d even bothered to ask. Maybe he was just a glutton for punishment, because he already knew she didn’t actually care about him. She was just playing an angle like she had been in the capital, and he was letting her get away with it. He had to stop asking her about her motives when all he was going to get were more lies as she tried to coax him to let down his guard around her.

When she returned, he tried to hold fast to his resolution by not speaking to her, but his eyes still wandered compulsively to the glasses of water in her hands. He’d only expected her to bring one, so the second cup came as a surprise. As soon as she reached inside his cell to set them down, he shifted closer to grab one and then paused. The sleeve of her shirt had pulled away from her wrist, revealing a dark bruise that looked like it had formed recently. He wondered where it had come from. Probably her father, he thought with a pang of frustration. After seeing the rebel leader strike her across the face earlier, he wouldn’t put it past him to do something like that.

He picked up one of the glasses and lifted it to his lips to drink as she settled down in her chair again. To his further surprise, she belatedly answered his question. The sincerity in her voice made his resolve waver, but he hid it behind the second cup of water, having finished off the first. The cool liquid felt heavenly in his dry mouth, and it brought some psychological comfort as well, since he was no longer concerned about succumbing to the effects of severe dehydration. Now, he only had two options: He would either succeed at escaping from the rebels or he would fail and be killed in two days. At least now his chance of surviving had increased from thirty-three percent to fifty. It was better than nothing.

Draining the second glass, he set it back down with a relieved exhale and scooted back over to the wall to lean back. Pretending that his feet were still bound with the rope he’d draped over his ankles was uncomfortable, but he didn’t trust Iris enough to let her know he was halfway free from his bonds. If she was still tricking him—and he was sure she was—she could tell Regis or Ethan that he’d slipped out of the ties, and one of them would bind his legs again. If the leader found out, he’d probably rough him up too. He shuddered at the thought.

“Hindsight’s a bitch, huh?” was all he said when Iris finished speaking. He purposefully avoided looking at her, knowing he would be swayed by the pain on her face if he saw it. Instead, he drew his knees to his chest and gazed up at the window, trying to see if he could distinguish any buildings outside that might give him a clue as to where he was.

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Cas is starting to get to the point of asking Iris more questions, at least. He'll still be reluctant to trust her, but he's being more observant.

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

His question seemed to have caught Iris off guard. Cas watched her mull over the inquiry quietly while he nursed the cut on the back of his head, ready for whatever bullshit she was about to throw his way. He didn’t know why he’d even bothered to ask. She was probably just trying to win back his trust and make him believe that the lies the Scourge had been spreading about quality of life outside the capital were true. It had been a waste of breath to press her for details in the first place, so he looked away to continue studying the room he was locked in, resuming work on his plan to escape.

However, when she spoke, he found his eyes wandering back to her face. He was still leery of believing her, but every word sounded genuine. If nothing else, he felt fairly confident that she was being honest when she said that his death would solve nothing. It wasn’t entirely true though. If he died, the Maydestone line would die with him, so the Scourge would have succeeded in destroying the monarchy. The biggest downside for them would be that his father would rain fire on the rebellion before he breathed his last breath. Whether or not they thought that ending his life was the right move depended on how badly they wanted to end the crown.

Apparently, Iris cared more about her fellow rebels than she did about usurping power.

As she said she wouldn’t let him die, he stared at her guardedly, unsure what to think. He knew she was a smooth liar since she had tricked him, but he couldn’t think of any reason why she would tell him something like that. Unless she was trying to get him to relax and trust that he didn’t have to get out on his own, because he could rely on her. The thought made him stiffen slightly with apprehension. Whether she was telling the truth or not, he couldn’t give up on escaping alone until he ran out of time.

So, I’ve been here for at least one whole day, he mused, reflecting on what she had said about two days. That explained why he’d been feeling so dizzy. In twenty-four hours or more, he’d only had one small glass of water to drink. Well, now two, but it still wasn’t enough to replenish the amount he was losing with each passing day. Vaguely, he thought he remembered something about prolonged dehydration causing seizures. He hoped it would take more than just a day for that to happen if it was true.

Concerned by his own train of thought, Cas didn’t even hesitate when Iris asked if he wanted more water. “God yes,” he said and then immediately bit his tongue. He hadn’t meant to give away how thirsty he was, but he supposed she could have made the connection on her own. She was the only one who had brought him anything to drink, so she would have already known he was running on empty.

With a sigh, he removed the makeshift compress from his head, resting his arms in his lap to give them a break. “If you don’t want me to die, then why did you bring me here in the first place?” he asked with a frown, still skeptical. “You could have just left me in the woods after you knocked me out.” As he spoke, his gaze wandered back to the bread she’d left for him, and he picked up a slice to take a bite.

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

As Iris revealed a rag and a bottle of some kind of liquid Cas couldn’t make out in the dark, he stared up at her in surprise. Briefly, he felt a familiar surge of fondness for her, appreciative of the effort, but the emotion was quickly squashed by the reminder that she wasn’t the person he’d thought she was in the capital. She was probably still just trying to trick him into trusting her again, and he wasn’t going to fall for that again. He had to remember that he had no friends in this place. The only one he could truly rely on was himself until he managed to get back to the capital or the soldiers found him first.

Regardless, he wasn’t going to pass up medicine if she was offering it. Once she’d set the bottle down, he picked it up and opened the top, bringing it to his nose to sniff the contents before he touched the liquid to any part of his body. To his further bemusement, it smelled like vodka. Now I know why she said I could drink it, he mused, setting it down again to get the rag. As tempting as the offer was to drink away his problems right now, he wasn’t going to do it. For one thing, he was so severely dehydrated that he would give himself the mother of all hangovers and waste the little amount of water he had drunk. For another, he needed to keep his wits about him at all times, so he could run. The cons vastly outweighed the pros, so he poured the liquor onto the cloth and pressed it against his headwound, sucking in a breath as the cut stung sharply in response.

In the next moment, he flinched again but for an entirely different reason. After he’d spent so much time in total darkness, the light that filtered through the window that Iris had uncovered was blinding. He squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds before he risked opening them again, his eyelids fluttering while his vision adjusted. As it did, he realized a few different things about his cell. The first of which was that he wasn’t in a prison, but in what appeared to be a makeshift dungeon in someone’s house. The second thing he noticed was that he was probably in a basement, as was evident by the fact that the window was situated at the top of the wall, as if the rest of the room was underground.

Taking in the small space, he turned his head to the side, already analyzing it as fast as he could while he had the chance. The sight gave him hope that he would be able to escape. He’d thought he was in a secure location, probably surrounded by guards or even other prisoners of war. Instead, he was in a pieced-together cell that didn’t look nearly as secure as he’d pictured it in his head. The grainy shapes that he’d seen in the dark were just boxes for storage and an empty chair, any of which he could prop underneath the window to crawl up and out of the room. His heartbeat quickened as he strung the idea together in his mind’s eye.

Iris’s voice grounded him, and he glanced at her, wondering what she had been about to say. “Why do you care if I eat?” he asked. The question was less hostile this time and more genuinely curious instead. “Regis already told me you’re all planning to kill me in three days… or so.” He furrowed his brows, remembering that he didn’t actually know how much time he had left before the rebels would take his life. “It’s not like I’ll starve to death that fast, so why bother giving me even a couple slices of bread?”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Sometime between the end of his last nap and the time he finished looking around his cell, Caspian had completely lost track of the passage of time. He wasn’t sure if he’d been locked up for a half day or thirty-six hours or somewhere in middle. The perpetual darkness was both disorienting and anxiety-inducing. He couldn’t use his body to clue him in either, because he wasn’t given regular meals, and he slept at odd intervals. The perpetual hunger and thirst just made him more confused, and every time he woke up, he was struck with a brief flash of panic, worrying that he’d slept for too long and had run out the clock. He wished he had a way to tell how many hours he had left until the rebels decided to kill him, because as it was now, he had no idea how much more time he had to come up with a way to escape. It was by far the most stressful situation he’d ever been in.

As the day—or night—dragged on, he laid on his back with his eyes closed, trying to calm his racing heart after he’d woken up from another nap that could have lasted five minutes or five hours. His head ached relentlessly from dehydration, and he was starting to feel weaker from the lack of food even though his stomach had stopped growling a long time ago. In spite of these things, he still forced himself to sit up and feel around the corner of his cell with one hand, where he’d stashed the few things he’d managed to find in his last searches: a tiny, torn piece of paper, a dried piece of gum that had been stuck to the bottom of his shoe, and a screw. He still didn’t know if any of the trash would be helpful to him in escaping, but he held onto it anyway, just in case.

At the very least, he’d found a use for the screw. When he located it, he picked it up and maneuvered it in his hand, so the pointed end was aimed at the rope that bound his wrists. In the hours—or what he thought had been hours—since he’d found it, he’d been using the metal bit to slowly saw away at his bindings. It was slow going, but he was seeing some progress in the form of fraying strands as he worked on it, so he kept trying, hopeful that he could get out of the ties without enough time to spare to come up with a plan to get out.

It was while he was cutting the rope that the door opened, startling him out of focus. “Shit,” he hissed under his breath, fumbling to quickly hide the screw in his trouser pocket, so whoever had come by wouldn’t know what he’d been up to. Regis had already threatened to kill him sooner once, and he was pretty sure that trying to escape would earn him a one-way ticket to whatever horrible execution the rebels had come up with for him.

To his relief, it wasn’t Regis who had come to see him, but his daughter, Iris. The prince’s eyes widened at the sight of the dishes in her hands. More food and water. He swallowed hard, forcing himself to sit still while she placed the plate and cup inside his cell. Even though he was desperate for something to drink, he couldn’t just pounce on it like some kind of caged animal. He still had enough self-respect to behave with more dignity than that, so he waited for her to set the containers down before he inched closer to reach for the glass with his still-bound hands.

“Thanks,” he murmured, the word escaping his lips before he could stop it. All pretenses of remaining aloof had fled from his features as he downed the water without restraint. He still hadn’t forgiven her for lying to him and taking him away from the capital, but he could still give gratitude where gratitude was due, he supposed.

~Bonsoir~

James’s response to his declaration was pleasantly mixed to Vail. It was vaguely accusative, not enough to raise hackles, but he’d grown so used to his family’s poor reactions that he didn’t mind the confusion in the half-breed’s voice. It was better than scorn. Although, he did raise a brow when James brought up the way vampires looked down on humans. If he wasn’t mistaken, Victoria’s brother was the product of an affair between a human and a vampire, so he should know better than anyone that there were times when the immortals laid their vanity aside to take up mortal lovers. Of course, the majority still looked down on him for taking interest in Lady Crest, but he had realized that there had been plenty of other cases before him. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a need for the strict rules against getting involved with humans in the first place.

“I’ve never shared that belief,” he asserted calmly. “Our kind may be physically superior, but I can’t name a single vampire who has come up with a world-changing invention or who has been resilient enough to overcome an obstacle against all odds. Humans’ tenacity is admirable, no matter what the rest of our kind thinks about them.” He pointedly ignored the inquiry about his interest in Victoria’s blood. It would have been a lie to say that her unique condition hadn’t been a factor in his initial fascination with her, but he had a feeling that if he admitted that, James would be inclined to distrust him. The half-breed was surprisingly protective of a woman he had just met minutes ago. In Vail’s opinion, his quickness to protect her was rather presumptuous. James hadn’t been part of his sister’s life at all before now, so he didn’t know who her allies or her enemies were. If he snapped at the throat of everyone who got close to her, he would be more of a hinderance than an asset to her.

However, the half-vampire’s confrontational demeanor was replaced with polite congeniality as soon as Victoria explained that Vail wasn’t a threat. Lord Hygrace fought the urge to roll his eyes. The Moncourier heir’s youth was evident in his hotheadedness. He was quick to jump to conclusions and seemed eager to prove himself. The qualities reminded him a bit of himself when he was still just a fledgling adjusting to his place in the world. James struck him as reckless, but as long as he didn’t let his temper get in the way of their plans—and wasn’t too proud to take orders from someone with more experience—he would be a useful addition to their ranks.

At least he appeared to have enough foresight not to take up his sister’s offer of strengthening the clan with her blood. Vail casted her a sideways glance. It was a generous but risky gift. Opening one of her veins in front of so many vampires could easily instigate a frenzy, and even if they didn’t kill each other in their desperation to drink from her neck, he knew from experience just how addicting her blood could be. She didn’t understand the position she would be putting herself in by voluntarily letting a whole family have a taste of the same substance that kept him coming back every few days for more. The less other vampires fed from her, the better.

Once Lady Crest was strong enough to stand on her own, the Hygrace stood at her side in wait for her to part ways with her brother. “I’ve brought a pair,” he informed her when she advised him to wear gloves, glancing down at his hands. Enough time had passed that the red marks on his palms had disappeared, leaving his pale skin just as flawless as it had been when he’d first arrived. Gloves would help to avoid injuring himself again, but even close proximity to silver could be painful. It was the reason why he’d injured his shoulder in Gerald’s basement through his jacket and why he needed a rag in addition to a glove to hold a silver gun in his hand. The metal was extremely effective when purified and used as a weapon against his kind. However, her armor wouldn’t hurt him as long as he didn’t get close enough to touch it, so he decided it wasn’t an important enough issue to bring up.

Trailing after Victoria as she assisted the Saints in making preparations, he helped with what he could to hasten the process. As the hours passed, he kept closer to the shaded areas outside and preferred to offer his aid indoors, where the sun wouldn’t beat down on his head as constantly. He could only tolerate standing in direct sunlight for so long before it started to wear him down. While the heat caused humans to sweat, it sapped the energy from vampires with prolonged exposure, and he didn’t want to show up to the fight against the Wynters already exhausted before the battle began.

So, when Victoria returned to her room to pack up her things, he reclined languidly on a chair with his head tilted back against the backrest and his eyes closed as he recovered from the strain of assisting the Saints with their duties for the duration of the morning. Although he didn’t nap, he paid little attention to what she was doing until he heard the jostling of metal plates. Cracking one hazel eye open, he watched her put on a set of armor that would protect her against the Wynter clan. In the confines of her bedroom, the powerful scent of silver was nearly eye-watering, so he got up from his seat and opened a window to let some fresh air in.

“Jesus, Victoria, if you’re going out with that much silver on your body, I hardly think you’ll need my protection,” he shook his head, leaning his shoulders against the wall as he kept his distance from the dangerous suit. The remark was only somewhat serious, since he still intended to stay close to her until the fighting was over, but an amused smile played on his lip and he looked her up and down. “You look like a regular vampire slayer.”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

That's fine with me! The only things Cas can do when he's alone are sleep and search the cell (and he won't find much of anything)

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

He's going to be gaining a lot of fortitude during all this though, which he really needed after he lived such a cushy life in the capital, haha