11 . clockhouse rebuilding!

[clocktowers]

Who: Those who have offered to help rebuild the Clockhouse, and anyone else who'd like to pitch in!
What: An open mingle log to repair after fires and floods.
When: Throughout September, precise dates not specified.
Where: In Gaze, at the forest's edge.

[ When the weather and chaos dies down, work on the Clockhouse picks up. The building was once an old Deerington mansion, luridly green and eccentric; age faded it into half a ruin, and July's fire did the rest. August's flooding came fast and hard, and now there's very little left to salvage.

The first step has been a damage assessment, with volunteers picking through the structurally unstable ruins, finding singed fiction novels, crisped houseplants, and a weird number of melted grandfather clocks. Demolition goes quickly, while Ozpin stands by and does not even try to control the situation.

Volunteers are needed to design the new structure, carry in materials, and build... and then to decorate and enchant what they've created. The few Sleepers with genuine construction experience provide direction, Ozpin sometimes among them, but things are largely chaotic. A few Sleepers provide snacks and cheerleading.

This is a mingle log. Please feel free to make a toplevel, and comment with your character's contributions below! ]

Comments

[martyrofduty]

Though Duty doesn't know the details, Paimon clearly does and ponders them. Each failure is frustrating, a piece that can build a narrative of pessimism instead of hope. They aren't a book but people. The end isn't written, preordained, just as their choices aren't either.

"Something this big, starting this bad," Duty says, "Focus on steps. When 'worked' is 'we have the relationship I want,' nothing is ever going to work. No step is that big. Set smaller goals, signposts for progress."

"All you can do is the work," he says.

He doesn't smile exactly, but his eyes warm, matching his brown skin and red hair shaven clean. "Yes," he answers, "That made it hard. We had to give up our relationship." The opposite trajectory.

[possessum]

It is strange and difficult, what exists between them. There are Truths that have been yet to be uncovered. There are pieces to the puzzle that are so frayed that they can never be put back into place, a picture never made whole. And both of them have been made.... wrong. They have been broken; Paimon can see that now. At the root of what has forced them together, perhaps he and Peter can never truly be on favourable terms.

They are both, after all, the reason each other has lost everything.

But it does give him some... hope, perhaps, though the demon would not know to use that word specifically. Talking to Duty again, reiterating the concept of Togetherness, however it may be. It is time for them to exist as more than what they have been, the demon knows that. Yes... he will do the work. He will meet his Vessel in a new way; already he is forming ideas for it.

And there is a strange hollowness to think of the opposite — to think of being pulled from the safety of an existence alongside another when it is more aligned. The demon frowns softly, the gesture strangely alien against Peter's human features. Always an imitation of them.

"I am..... sorry." He is capable of empathy, sympathy, for others. Sensitive to it; what he is must always be. "Perhaps some day... you will have them back."

[martyrofduty]

"Thank you," Duty says. He means it. That loss is enormous and threatens to swallow him whole sometimes. Sometimes it's easier to be himself, an identity formed after they were separated, even if he lived in the back of Gideon's mind, even if he felt that distance between them, than to be Pyrrha Dve, whose pain is closer to the loss. It's a small step, barely anything, but sometimes it's enough to breath.

"Doubtful," he says. After a small pause, he adds, "He deserves rest—to be at peace." It means Gideon's continued loss, for Duty. However, as much as Gideon would crawl out of the sea to be with him, as good as it would be to be together again, it would come with all the rest of this place and the people here. Gideon deserves better.

[possessum]

Paimon stares, wide and open. His vessel will not know peace, not truly. Not for long. Not while something so restless and wrong lives within him; even now, the boy's body is beginning to face the consequences of the demon being dominant and active so long. A limb twitches, and a soft, convulsive shudder ripples through dark skin. There is a clicking sound within his throat, soft and fluttering, like a trapped insect. Paimon will have to go, soon.

...But there are moments of peace, however short-lived. The boy will sleep for awhile, unconscious and unknowing of those strange ways his body moves and clicks and chirps and flutters.

"I will let my vessel rest, now." Paimon says softly, looking up to the other being, intentional. Yes, part of it is because of this conversation, because of Duty's words.

"....Will you watch over him? While he sleeps."

[martyrofduty]

Duty nods in approval of Paimon's decision. Doing right by Peter trumps his interest in the demon. It trumps building Clockhouse. "Yes," Duty says. "He will be safe." As safe as Duty can make him, even should The Reckoning show up for some reason.