mental link | morning of day :039

[perroquet]

[ The ever present mental music that plays from the bard's end of the connection grows invasively louder sometime after breakfast, and it is rather anxious. The morning has been heavy enough already with packing getting underway, but this is due to something different. While the music in him is clear as ever, his thoughts stumble across the connection sloppily and desperately. ]

( I require a detective... I think. Oh dear, this is quite dire… )

[ He knows of several, but with the situation being as dire as he claims, well... he may need as much help as possible. All hands on deck. ]

( I believe someone has discovered that I am not Carbauschian, and... has poisoned me. )

[ The pauses between coherent thought are more than a bit dramatic, but he's being quite serious. ]

Comments

[aluminumandash]

( Sleep it off. )

[perroquet]

( Really? You choose now to try and have a sense of humor? )

[ You can't cure poison with sleep or sarcasm, Detective. ]

( It feels like I am dying, Rust. ) [ Again with the dramatics, but he breaks out the first name to emphasize his seriousness. ]

[aluminumandash]

[ Tension, like the coiling of muscle, at the use of his name. His mental voice hard and flat: the floor you wake up on. ] ( Yeah, I've been hungover too. )

[ A pause, then with ill-concealed impatience: ] ( Nobody here's been poisoned, alright? Stabbings all round. )

[perroquet]

[ He knows hangover. He's been thoroughly acquainted with that hard floor and all the forms it takes. Cold wood and damp hay and slimy cobblestone. ]

( I know my hangover symptoms, and this isn't them. You already made certain I wouldn't be visiting them again. )

[ It's not a thank you. If he is dying, Rust has denied him one final drink by taking what he had. Impatience is met with impatience, because he may be arguing on limited time. ]

( It certainly feels like there's a knife in my gut. )

[aluminumandash]

[ A flash of derision. Rust suddenly more present, leaning in. ] ( If you care at all about Keya or catching whoever did this, you'll cut that shit out. I can't do my job with one-tenth my brain dozed off in a puddle of drool. )

[ Or maybe it'd make it easier, in the long run. Dangle a bottle in front of him, lead him around that way. Addiction was a pretty fucking simple business.

He lets the thought pass. An attempt to cover it up as much as anything: ] ( You seriously think you've been poisoned, you're gonna want to induce vomiting. )

[perroquet]

( Already done. ) [ At least he had the decency to purge before making the call, but that decency is running thin. ] ( Though if you don't start taking this seriously, I may just have another go. )

[ He remains silent to the jab at his bad habit. No response is formed into audible thought, however - one of the cellos in his mental orchestra stops with the sound of a string snapping.

Instead of allowing himself to be picked apart, he decides it's time to make Rust induce vomiting with magic talk: ] ( I've also already cast spells to slow the effects of whatever is left in me, but I can only delay poison. My magic cannot cure it. )

[aluminumandash]

( Can't hurt. ) [ Not unless he's swallowed something corrosive, in which case the damage is done.

Low-grade irritation at the mention of magic. Any concern vanishes with the thought of Gildor waving a wand around while allegedly in the throes of death.

Slow, inexorable: ] ( You hear what I said? )

[perroquet]

( Indeed. ) [ Short, curt. But then, in a lighter tone forced against his own pain- ] ( Do I really take up an entire tenth of your thoughts? How generous. )

[ And Gildor means it. With as many hosts as there are, and brood taking up such a hefty mental residence, ten percent really is a lot of brain space to him. ]

( I didn't know you cared so much. ) [ Prodding. ]

[aluminumandash]

[ He doesn't bother with the first question. A musician ought to know a flourish when he hears one. ]

( About you or about her? ) [ The image he has of Keya is rendered in painstaking detail: the skin agape at her throat, the narrow span of her wrist, the hue of her blood in the dark.

With it, a kind of emotional texture—viscous, almost enough to choke on. ]

[perroquet]

[perroquet]

[ Gildor wasn't quite sure what to expect, prodding Rust the way he did, but it certainly wasn't... this. He takes time with the image in his newly formed mind's eye, examining with a sense of puzzlement as he works out what he's being shown. ]

( This is... her? ) [ A pause. A breath, and then finally the music in him fades to silence. ]

( Oh- )

[ The smell of blood floods his memory as he pieces together what he's seeing. Actually seeing for the first time. He tenses with that heightened sense of an imprint being made upon the mind. It's one thing to know the dead, but another to experience it in an entirely new way. It's shocking. It's completely sobering. It's-

making him get up and crawl and grope for something to vomit into. One of the Collector's vases will have to do. ]

[aluminumandash]

[ Rust doesn't go anywhere; it'd be a disservice to her. He smells her blood and feels the ensuing silence, the desolation that's Gildor's mind in the absence of music. He inflicts on himself the memory of the boy's horror at finding her dead, the sensation of something ruptured, something forsaken.

The ghostly feel of her hands in his.

He retches, sourness at the back of his throat. Spits. ] ( Better? ) [ A sincere question. ]

[perroquet]

[ Gildor wipes the side of his mouth on the back of one hand from where he sits, kneeling and folded over. He no longer needs Rust to hold the memory of Keya across the link - she is there and bloody and made real in his mind.

He keeps her at the forefront of his thoughts and goes through the motions. Fear, sadness, and anger that shifts to a rarely felt rage. It is silently desolate as his mind, but no less impassioned as his music. While condensed, everything is felt without hesitation, without temptation to drink and drown it all away. And though he didn't ask for this sudden onrush, he allows it.

It is a stark contrast to Rust. Gildor processes what was forced on him, but Rust drags up and inflicts pain upon himself. It draws the bard from his own processing and makes him scrutinize the detective. ]

( You are sick. )

[ Not an answer. A statement made on observation, plain and honest. No ill intent or bite behind it, though it is still cruel to say. One sick mess to another.

A pause before he offers a real answer, also sincere. ]

( Yes. )

[aluminumandash]

[ When the anger comes he's there to meet it—to cling to it, find consolation in it, this evidence that at least one of their number can experience outrage that isn't collective. Know wrong for what it is. ]

( Yeah. ) [ He doesn't know in what sense the elf means it. Regardless: yeah. A precarious feeling, nerves and magnetic repulsion. Rust grimly reviewing his every brush with another mind, as though expecting bloody handprints.

Better. Yellow air, a book with a broken spine. Light writhing in front of his eyes. ] ( Doesn't mean she deserved this. ) [ The link between them goes abruptly slack. His next words are mechanical: ]

( Get some rest. )

[perroquet]

( You're one to speak of rest. ) [ A reactionary thought that may have never been uttered if not for the connection. A snide whisper under the breath. Between that and all his other thoughts there's a tinge of regret, an unspoken apology that would just taste like more bile coming up.

Instead he tries to calm, to make their shared nausea ease. Meanwhile, rage sharpens to resolve. Whether it's all his isn't clear. The image of her still so profoundly imprinted in his mind, fixated. ]

( Find the knife and bring it to me. )

[aluminumandash]

[ That's more of a tonic than any apology could be; a reminder to focus. Leave his own shit out of this. ] ( Be sober when I do. )