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. ]
--> 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. ]