Lavi Bookman (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
inksplashes) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
overjoyed_logs2016-12-15 03:23 pm
inksplashes) wrote in overjoyed_logs2016-12-15 03:23 pm
Entry tags:
closed | hell had you by the throat
Who: Kanda & Lavi
Where: Their ship, Leith
When: Week 2, Day 1
Summary: Lavi gets permission to bring Kanda to his next visit to the monastery and they finally have to talk like real humans rather than avoiding each other. But they'll probably still try to avoid each other.
Restrictions/Warnings: Language, will update as necessary.
The night before
[ They talk but they don't say anything that matters. When conversations begin to veer into something too close for comfort--into something close at all, really--he's there with a joke, a smile, evasive maneuvers beneath a jester's mask.
He doesn't let the worry show, and with the insanity of the past week, he can almost push the anxiety out of his mind entirely.
But eventually, time begins to slow, and the breakneck pace of the week's events wear down his capacity to keep running away. ]
[ Lavi is half asleep in the cockpit when he gets the call from the monastery, drowsily greeting an uncle and discussing the terms of his visitation in hushed tones. When the call finishes, he gives his thanks, then buries his face between his scratched up hands and sighs.
No more avoidance tactics for him, it seems. He's been given permission to bring an outsider in and granted an audience with the more senior monks there--a feat that has cost him dearly in time and resources spent this week.
And will, he suspects, cost him even more going forward.
He slides from the seat, papers falling loosely from his lap, bare skin and cold floor briefly jarring his senses. ]
Noah, is Yu asl--
[ A hand waves dismissively, cutting himself off. He knows the answer. Yu barely sleeps anymore, and when he does, it doesn't qualify as rest.
(Better, Lavi decides, to focus on Yu, and not the persistent ache in the back of his head, or the way he keeps seeing flashes of things that aren't there in his peripheral. When things are better, when things are calmer, he'll sort himself out. Take a nice, real vacation somewhere, let his overworked head rest and diffuse its complicated mess of identities.)
He pads silently down the hallway to Kanda's door, then hesitates, hand lifted and frozen midair.
No way back if I do this. If he knocks, if he has this conversation and brings Yu into his world as a bookman, he'll never recover the precious distance between his identities.
But that barrier is already broken, even if he's done his damnedest to pretend otherwise. Steeling himself, he reaches forward, lightly rapping his knuckles across the smooth surface. ]
Where: Their ship, Leith
When: Week 2, Day 1
Summary: Lavi gets permission to bring Kanda to his next visit to the monastery and they finally have to talk like real humans rather than avoiding each other. But they'll probably still try to avoid each other.
Restrictions/Warnings: Language, will update as necessary.
The night before
[ They talk but they don't say anything that matters. When conversations begin to veer into something too close for comfort--into something close at all, really--he's there with a joke, a smile, evasive maneuvers beneath a jester's mask.
He doesn't let the worry show, and with the insanity of the past week, he can almost push the anxiety out of his mind entirely.
But eventually, time begins to slow, and the breakneck pace of the week's events wear down his capacity to keep running away. ]
--
[ Lavi is half asleep in the cockpit when he gets the call from the monastery, drowsily greeting an uncle and discussing the terms of his visitation in hushed tones. When the call finishes, he gives his thanks, then buries his face between his scratched up hands and sighs.
No more avoidance tactics for him, it seems. He's been given permission to bring an outsider in and granted an audience with the more senior monks there--a feat that has cost him dearly in time and resources spent this week.
And will, he suspects, cost him even more going forward.
He slides from the seat, papers falling loosely from his lap, bare skin and cold floor briefly jarring his senses. ]
Noah, is Yu asl--
[ A hand waves dismissively, cutting himself off. He knows the answer. Yu barely sleeps anymore, and when he does, it doesn't qualify as rest.
(Better, Lavi decides, to focus on Yu, and not the persistent ache in the back of his head, or the way he keeps seeing flashes of things that aren't there in his peripheral. When things are better, when things are calmer, he'll sort himself out. Take a nice, real vacation somewhere, let his overworked head rest and diffuse its complicated mess of identities.)
He pads silently down the hallway to Kanda's door, then hesitates, hand lifted and frozen midair.
No way back if I do this. If he knocks, if he has this conversation and brings Yu into his world as a bookman, he'll never recover the precious distance between his identities.
But that barrier is already broken, even if he's done his damnedest to pretend otherwise. Steeling himself, he reaches forward, lightly rapping his knuckles across the smooth surface. ]
no subject
Surprising, all things considered. The worst that would really come for failing to heed Lavi's words is broken trust, but that.. seems to mean more to Yu than he gives it credit for.
Or maybe he's just plotting, the young bookman considers as an afterthought, laughter warmed that much more to a bad joke whispered into his ear.
It's some time before he returns to the place he'd left Yu, to find the man now centered on a stone like a new fixture in the garden. He considers saying something to alert the other of his presence, strolling to the well-worn jacket on the bench..
.. but really, why interrupt the perfect opportunity for a nap? Meditation is probably as close to sleep as Yu gets these days, and Lavi just need like.. four..five... twenty-seven more hours of sleep to be right as rain himself.
So that's how the attendant uncle finds them later, one deep in meditation, the other thoroughly and stubbornly asleep with a rolled up jacket under his arm. Evidently certain he can't wake the redhead (Lavi has a reputation for taking up a certain window in the library), he smiles warmly, clearing his throat softly and calling out to Kanda from the base of the boulder.
"Ah, young man, they're ready for you two now, if the bookman is ready?"]
no subject
Lavi's warning still fresh in his memory, he lets out a final breath and lets this, too, go.
Instead, he nods and offers a quiet thanks before standing to stretch slightly stiff muscles. Guessing by the way the sun has shifted and the shade now offered (not to mention the way his shirt sticks slightly to his back), they've been there for quite a few hours.
Another hard jump has him landing neatly on the stone walk beside the sand before he crosses to the bench to watch Lavi.
Waking his partner is something that Kanda, at least, has years worth of experience with. Unfortunately, that experience usually involves a few choice words and a firm smack to feet on tables or knees blocking the pay away from the couch and since he's supposed to play nicer here...
He leans in, long hair sliding over a shoulder, the ends pooling slightly on Lavi's chest as he reaches out, gives the man's shoulder a firm shake.]
Lavi.
[Refrain from cursing, right? So just a name in a firm voice... hopefully (for once) that'll get through.]
no subject
When they're "home", on their ship, he sleeps differently. He sleeps so deeply that noises in the night don't stir his paranoia or make him reach for anything sharp or with a safety.
In this place, this second "home", Lavi wakes easily because his sleep is dreamless, surface-level. His eye opens at the summons with the sharpness of a soldier, focused and cold.
Just a blink and he's the jester, smiling wide, yawning and stretching as he rolls his head to glance at the uncle standing at Kanda's side. He's been asleep for a while, he's guessing, despite the still bone-deep exhaustion in him.
Ah well. Nothing to be done about it.
Popping up and sweeping Kanda's jacket as he does so, Lavi puts on his usual brand of morning-cheer (even if it is, in fact, far from the morning), offering the coat to its owner and bowing his head politely to the uncle. ]
Ready for us then? Great.
[ But there's a clear lack of need for direction here as well, hands sliding into pockets, strolling behind the leading uncle without much attention paid to where the man intends to take them. He knows the way. Beaming at Yu with entirely too much cheer for someone still quite tired, he locks his fingers behind his head as they walk, laughing to himself without any offer or explanation as to what he finds so amusing. ]
So how do you feel about the color gold?
no subject
The ruthless pragmatist watching from behind the fool's mask.
There and gone, before the pleasant joker settles back into place, and all Kanda can do is shake his head as he drapes the jacket over his forearm. Following the monk and the scholar, he tries not to lose his hard won calm of moments before.
And yet.
He still isn't sure what Lavi had told these people about his 'problem', doesn't know what to expect.
Frowning faintly to himself, he busies both mind and hands with the task of simply rolling his sleeves up to his elbows as he follows them through the labyrinth of corridors, up stairs, until that question. At the sight of the only scars on him, however, he hesitates. Two large crosses cut deep into his forearms, not even something the nanites flowing in his veins have ever tried to heal. They're not something he, strangely enough, wants to reveal to these people, doesn't want them to misconstrue the meaning of his scars (even if he, himself, doesn't know what that meaning even is) and then begins to roll the sleeves back down just enough to cover them. As he does so, he cuts Lavi a sidelong glance, the frown deepens as their guide slows to a stop before a door.]
...Why would I care about a da--some stupid color?
[Granted, the monks he seems throughout the J wore yellowish robes, but they aren't usually what he would classify as gold, necessarily...]
--> timeskip/end
Like most people who claim to act altruistically, the Scarbacks feed on his expertly crafted concern, use his nervous energy to supplement their own calm. The meeting itself is disappointingly uneventful--gratitude is shared on both sides of the table, laughter and gentle words, but the solutions offered are as old as the Order itself.
Tried and true, perhaps, but where they suggest meditation and spiritual reprieve in supplement to their inability to mend the physical, Lavi hears only empty claims at peace.
If the demons of this world were so easily rebuked by meditation, Yu would be the last person to suffer them, and Lavi among the first.
Still he is polite, respectful. His ordinarily informal tone traded for something cool and reverent, the pangs of irritation and guilt locked up behind a wall in his mind. The mental partition proves invaluable, even if weaker than he'd like, for the conversation itself ends on another note of gratitude, another offering of meaningless well wishes. They suggest doctors within the Company, those highly-trained and well-moneyed hands surely capable of tending to a fractured mind, but he returns only another word of thanks and polite dismissal.
They understand his trepidation, at least on a surface level. The same doctors they recommend are those that they would shun from the robes for a distinct lack of altruism, self-serving or otherwise.
But while they offer no true solutions to their problem, they grant Yu passage to the temple as needed to aid his recovery, swear themselves to secrecy about what little they do know.
And just like that, Lavi's two worlds bleed together a little more. The lines get blurrier, harder to redraw.
Not that he won't keep trying. ]