Xerxes Break (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
payingfordeliverance) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
deercountry2021-12-05 09:55 pm
payingfordeliverance) wrote in deercountry2021-12-05 09:55 pm
Entry tags:
002: Regrets collect like old friends, here to relive your darkest moments
Who: Xerxes Break and you
What: A catchall, including event threads! Open prompts in the post, closed ones in the comments. As usual the open prompts are very "here's where to find him, make something up," so if you'd like to plot out something more specific feel free to PM me here or at![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
blithering
When: November and December!
Where: All over the place
Content Warnings: Consuming magic mushrooms for great mental health justice in prompt one, loads of anxiety and references to verbal child abuse in prompt three. Other warnings added into threads as necessary!
Mid-November Mushroom Funtimes
Probably the least surprising habit Break acquires as he learns to cook is eating whatever he's working on at every stage from start to finish. He has no idea what half the spices he's squirreled into the house even are and can't tell the difference between a great many of these onions and things either, and makes dinner happen mostly by having some idea of what should be in this or that and tossing things in and deciding on the fly whether that was a poor decision or not. It's fine, he's only poisoned someone once and it turned out to be an annoying vileblood fluke. We won't worry about it.
Anyway, that's how he comes to be chewing idly on a weeper mushroom Black Alice found and abruptly acquires mental health.
This is not to say he turns into a sparkly pastel version of himself and goes trotting about like a horrid pretty pony or anything, a fate he will conveniently avoid in a couple weeks. No, he still misses his home and his people terribly, still worries about the ones he's met here and this "farm" thing he keeps hearing about, frets about his kids and frets about winter's swift approach. It's just that these things don't feel like such a burden anymore, and he has no trouble convincing himself to get out of bed or leave the house or speak to other people. Things don't set him off into fits as they usually do, and the challenges he knows are coming don't feel insurmountable, as though the slightest oversight on his part will bring some horrid disaster down on the lot of them.
And, most importantly, for some reason his eyesight restores itself. His morning cough vanishes and his usual aches and pains recede, and Xerxes Break honestly feels better than he has in a year or three. He feels almost young.
Given how annoying Trench is, he doesn't really question it. Magic mushrooms. Sure, why not. The next few days are a flurry of productivity, as he tracks down people to help seal the windows and various drafty places in their ramshackle old house, ousts whatever "the hissing thing" is from the root cellar and gets it all spruced up, dutifully allows White Alice to haul him all over town, badgers the other kids pretty much every time he runs across one, and perhaps even beats up a blood zealot or two. He's easy to cross paths with as he's out and about most every day, and while he sometimes pretends he is still blind just to mess with people, it's pretty obvious given the way he slows down to stare at everything from the canals to the architecture to the ocean itself during one of his walks on the beach that Break can see. With no idea how long it will last, he needs to commit as much of the place as he can to memory.
Late November Boat Loot
The eventual permanent restoration of Break's sight brings with it the likewise permanent feeling that he ought to be doing more, somehow, and his restlessness only worsens when people he knows -- Lysithea among them -- turn up with injuries. The arrival of the eery frozen boats gives him an outlet for this. The boats have supplies, and both his household and the bakery always need supplies. So, clearly, slithering around in these things with no one on hand beyond his omen to save his bum if things go sideways is a fantastic idea, and he will not run into any trouble at all.
Break has managed to swallow several lessons from the last bits of his life back home. Unfortunately it seems that asking for help rather than doing whatever the hell he wants on account of being invincible was not one of them.
December Misfortunes
Break has no idea what a Blessed Day is and therefore no idea that he has one on December 21st. From his perspective, a rabbit's foot keychain turns up in his house one day for absolutely no reason, and Break panics and stuffs it into his coat pocket before the kids see it because half of them either love or were rabbits at some point and most of them are experiencing darkblood stressbasketry and really just no one needs to be dealing with a disembodied rabbit's foot lying around in this family.
He then forgets about it in favor of various other things that have him anxious and paranoid, and goes about his business.
What follows is multiple days of bad luck following Break around everywhere he goes, ranging from minor annoyances like slipping on ice all the way up to the stove in a favorite restaurant bursting into flame the second he walks in the door. It takes him a while to catch on, given that these unlucky things are happening to the people around him, rather than Break himself. But a fun fact about Break is that in his own world, his red eyes mark him as something called a "Child of Misfortune", and while he spent the bulk of his life dismissing it as nothing but a superstition, being told repeatedly that you cause bad luck simply by existing tends to mess a kid up.
In Break, this has manifested in a habit of blaming himself for things he is only barely connected to. Already feeling weirdly guilty about not getting abducted to the Sleeper Farm where he absolutely would have saved people he likes from being tortured which obviously means their injuries are his fault for having...not been around at the time...it does eventually cross his mind that the same darkblood powers that were giving him health problems have now turned outwards instead, and he is the source of all this bad luck.
This does not help his anxiety.
After a few days he will rediscover the rabbit's foot and notice the bad luck magically clears up when he hides it somewhere else. In the meantime, regardless of where one encounters him, he can be found skittish and hypervigilant, ready to jump into other people's bouts of bad luck almost before they have even realized it's happening. After all, if these things are his fault somehow, it's his responsibility to fix things until he can get things under control again.
What: A catchall, including event threads! Open prompts in the post, closed ones in the comments. As usual the open prompts are very "here's where to find him, make something up," so if you'd like to plot out something more specific feel free to PM me here or at
When: November and December!
Where: All over the place
Content Warnings: Consuming magic mushrooms for great mental health justice in prompt one, loads of anxiety and references to verbal child abuse in prompt three. Other warnings added into threads as necessary!
Mid-November Mushroom Funtimes
Probably the least surprising habit Break acquires as he learns to cook is eating whatever he's working on at every stage from start to finish. He has no idea what half the spices he's squirreled into the house even are and can't tell the difference between a great many of these onions and things either, and makes dinner happen mostly by having some idea of what should be in this or that and tossing things in and deciding on the fly whether that was a poor decision or not. It's fine, he's only poisoned someone once and it turned out to be an annoying vileblood fluke. We won't worry about it.
Anyway, that's how he comes to be chewing idly on a weeper mushroom Black Alice found and abruptly acquires mental health.
This is not to say he turns into a sparkly pastel version of himself and goes trotting about like a horrid pretty pony or anything, a fate he will conveniently avoid in a couple weeks. No, he still misses his home and his people terribly, still worries about the ones he's met here and this "farm" thing he keeps hearing about, frets about his kids and frets about winter's swift approach. It's just that these things don't feel like such a burden anymore, and he has no trouble convincing himself to get out of bed or leave the house or speak to other people. Things don't set him off into fits as they usually do, and the challenges he knows are coming don't feel insurmountable, as though the slightest oversight on his part will bring some horrid disaster down on the lot of them.
And, most importantly, for some reason his eyesight restores itself. His morning cough vanishes and his usual aches and pains recede, and Xerxes Break honestly feels better than he has in a year or three. He feels almost young.
Given how annoying Trench is, he doesn't really question it. Magic mushrooms. Sure, why not. The next few days are a flurry of productivity, as he tracks down people to help seal the windows and various drafty places in their ramshackle old house, ousts whatever "the hissing thing" is from the root cellar and gets it all spruced up, dutifully allows White Alice to haul him all over town, badgers the other kids pretty much every time he runs across one, and perhaps even beats up a blood zealot or two. He's easy to cross paths with as he's out and about most every day, and while he sometimes pretends he is still blind just to mess with people, it's pretty obvious given the way he slows down to stare at everything from the canals to the architecture to the ocean itself during one of his walks on the beach that Break can see. With no idea how long it will last, he needs to commit as much of the place as he can to memory.
Late November Boat Loot
The eventual permanent restoration of Break's sight brings with it the likewise permanent feeling that he ought to be doing more, somehow, and his restlessness only worsens when people he knows -- Lysithea among them -- turn up with injuries. The arrival of the eery frozen boats gives him an outlet for this. The boats have supplies, and both his household and the bakery always need supplies. So, clearly, slithering around in these things with no one on hand beyond his omen to save his bum if things go sideways is a fantastic idea, and he will not run into any trouble at all.
Break has managed to swallow several lessons from the last bits of his life back home. Unfortunately it seems that asking for help rather than doing whatever the hell he wants on account of being invincible was not one of them.
December Misfortunes
Break has no idea what a Blessed Day is and therefore no idea that he has one on December 21st. From his perspective, a rabbit's foot keychain turns up in his house one day for absolutely no reason, and Break panics and stuffs it into his coat pocket before the kids see it because half of them either love or were rabbits at some point and most of them are experiencing darkblood stressbasketry and really just no one needs to be dealing with a disembodied rabbit's foot lying around in this family.
He then forgets about it in favor of various other things that have him anxious and paranoid, and goes about his business.
What follows is multiple days of bad luck following Break around everywhere he goes, ranging from minor annoyances like slipping on ice all the way up to the stove in a favorite restaurant bursting into flame the second he walks in the door. It takes him a while to catch on, given that these unlucky things are happening to the people around him, rather than Break himself. But a fun fact about Break is that in his own world, his red eyes mark him as something called a "Child of Misfortune", and while he spent the bulk of his life dismissing it as nothing but a superstition, being told repeatedly that you cause bad luck simply by existing tends to mess a kid up.
In Break, this has manifested in a habit of blaming himself for things he is only barely connected to. Already feeling weirdly guilty about not getting abducted to the Sleeper Farm where he absolutely would have saved people he likes from being tortured which obviously means their injuries are his fault for having...not been around at the time...it does eventually cross his mind that the same darkblood powers that were giving him health problems have now turned outwards instead, and he is the source of all this bad luck.
This does not help his anxiety.
After a few days he will rediscover the rabbit's foot and notice the bad luck magically clears up when he hides it somewhere else. In the meantime, regardless of where one encounters him, he can be found skittish and hypervigilant, ready to jump into other people's bouts of bad luck almost before they have even realized it's happening. After all, if these things are his fault somehow, it's his responsibility to fix things until he can get things under control again.
no subject
Break, for his part, makes it a point to plop into his chair instead of sitting gracefully, bringing his legs up to rest his knees against the table. He is thinking of Gilbert again, but not in a positive way this time. He's reminded of moments like the one right after Sablier, this time, when Break collapsed after their fight and Gil took it into his head that he was responsible. The feeling here is much the same.
Hn.]
That's rather a gloomy atmosphere you've got over "just a glass", isn't it?
[His tone is mild, but deliberately so, and he stares straight at Qrow, watching for reactions.]
no subject
After a moment, he swallows and tries a shrug.]
I'm fine. Hey, wanna go for a spar outside?
[Let's see if Qrow wins a medal or even gets a participation trophy in the deflection olympics.]
no subject
...sure.
[On another day, Break might have left it at that, tucked this incident into his back pocket to watch out for later. Just now, he's been stressed for the vast majority of the month and is thoroughly worn out, and also, Qrow has effectively just used one of his own battle tactics on him. Unfortunately for him, Break knows that the only way to defeat such a thing is to metaphorically or literally pin him down and sit on him, and he is not really in the mood to accept his own nonsense coming from somebody else.]
Hey, hey, did I ever tell you? Where I'm from, those of us born with red eyes are known as "Children of Misfortune."
[He knows damn well he has not because that was deliberate on his part. And hurling it at Qrow now is just as deliberate. If Qrow looks up, he'll find Break smiling pleasantly at him from across the table, his gaze steady and direct.]
no subject
Give him a second to sort out his airways here, loading, loading. Okay. So, what did Break say again? Something about ... children of misfortune ....and eyes? 404 error, page not found. Qrow just kind of stares at Break with his own red eyes, freezing like a deer in the headlights. He can't even pretend to have an intelligent response here.]
...What?
[Was his voice always so faint? He feels like he's hearing himself from underwater.]
no subject
Break, for his part, gentles somewhat when he sees Qrow's reaction. His goal here isn't actually to really upset him, or ruin his day. But...mmm. There's a secret here, and it already does routinely upset Qrow or ruin his day, Break thinks.
He is equally disinclined to let that keep happening.]
...I told you, once, that now and again, in my world...someone is born who can reach the Abyss all on their own, and I am one such person. I did not tell you that red eyes were the mark of such a thing.
[He'd been surprised when he'd seen Qrow's, last month, and commented on it being a "once in a generation" sort of thing. Now Qrow knows why it caught his attention. It wasn't his first time ever seeing someone else with them, given Vincent, but, well. Striking, all the same.]
To those who knew nothing of how real the Abyss was, we were known as Children of Misfortune...and the attached superstition was that we caused bad luck.
no subject
Qrow, honestly, feels a bit like he's been socked in the gut. He's never...met anyone else, who even had a vague idea what it was like. Their situations are different, of course. Break does not literally cause misfortune; his powers were different. There's several moments where Qrow doesn't respond at all, numbed out from the shock of Break's life being defined by misfortune in a more literal way than he'd anticipated, and from being called out so directly. He knows he telegraphed something was wrong, but he honestly hadn't thought the other man had been paying close enough attention to notice a pattern of it. Most people don't. He makes himself easy enough not to pay attention to, with his casually irreverent "don't give a single fuck" persona.
There's still a part of him, the part that was terrified to tell even his beloved niece the truth, that hesitates, here. He doesn't have to admit to it. He could leave it at the fact that Remnant had a similar superstition about crows, make up some bullshit story about how he became associated with them and get away with it, maybe. But lying to Break feels undefinably wrong, like a betrayal of their friendship. He can't expect honesty from those he loves and not be willing to offer it in turn himself. And anyway, the situation has already changed. From now on, even if he manages to brush this off, Break will be watching for similar reactions. He can't hide the truth forever. He should've told him sooner, frankly.
He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, trying to steel himself. Wherever this goes, things will change from here, as much as he doesn't want them to.]
...Remnant has a superstition like that. Crows are supposed to be bad luck too. I was named after it.
[. . .]
When I told you about Aura, I kind of left out an important part. Aura is standard across the board, but...each Aura user can have a unique ability too, a Semblance. Ruby's lets her turn into rose petals and move rapidly from one place to another. My other niece, Yang, can take the damage dealt to her and turn it back on someone twice as hard. Or you can absorb electricity, or control magnetism, or amplify other people's Auras, or....
[He closes his eyes, gritting his teeth against the words he doesn't want to let escape and reach Break's ears and change everything, permanently.]
...Literally bring misfortune, to yourself and everyone around you.
no subject
Rather, the notion that someone who carries this sort of burden -- a burden that Break understands intimately, even if he hasn't had to hold it in quite the same way -- would turn himself into the person who's been at Break's side all these months...it's striking to a part of Break's heart he's long done his damnedest to suppress. Oh, how young Kevin Regnard wanted to prove he was good. How he wanted people to look at him without revulsion and fear the instant they saw his eyes, and to earn the faith the Sinclairs had in him simply by allowing him in the house --]
...Qrow. [Break very, very rarely drops the "mister".] Whenever something heavy comes up between us...we have a good talk, and things are better for it, right...?
[This feels important to get out of the way first, so that he isn't just waiting for the axe to fall and sever everything. Break wouldn't necessarily be able to articulate it if asked, but projecting his own pains, he assumes that Qrow is expecting judgement, now. It's how Kevin always felt, waiting to see if whoever he was speaking to believed in the superstition or not, and how they'd treat him if they did. If they'd hurl abuse at him over it, or simply shut him out. It's how Break felt when his past was forcibly revealed to the kids, and he told them they should hate him for it, and then they didn't, and the relief then was so...
He sighs, leaning back in his chair.]
I wasn't sure exactly what I was seeing in you. I caught on because...it turns out I've a thing called a "blessed day" this month, for some reason, and that my patron Pthumerian is a brat. A rabbit's foot turned up in my bedroom and I stuffed it into my coat pocket before the kids could see it, as a couple of them have been rabbits. Then I forgot about it, and --
[Break finds himself obliged to pause and swallow, hard. He hasn't actually come down fully from the way this whole episode of Trench's nonsense shredded his nerves.]
...it wound up being a bad luck charm. For days I was walking around with the damned thing forgotten in my pocket and all these awful incidents happening all around me, and -- because my blood powers had manifested first in a way that hurt me, I began to worry that they'd turned outward, and brought that old curse to life. The darkblood power set isn't all that different from what I -- learned a Child of Misfortune could do, by the end, so -- I was thinking, 'of course it's me. This is all too much. It can't be coincidence.'
However, when such an incident happened around you...you simply sighed and dealt with it before I could collect myself. I realized I'd seen you do such things many times before, and...it made me think.
[Here, he pauses to take a sip of his water, but he speaks again before Qrow can answer.]
Having nearly lost my mind over it in only a few days, worrying endlessly about how I might hurt everyone just by daring to get out of bed, I imagine that...you won't believe me when I tell you I don't care.
no subject
Even the others in Deerington had generally only learned about his Semblance under duress, because something forced him to tell it or because their own supernatural abilities were able to sense that something was off when his misfortunes happened. Here he has the opportunity to talk about it on his own terms, to someone who might actually understand in some way that nobody else ever could.]
...Hah. A literal bad luck charm. How about that.
[He can't quite help the bitter chuckle that bubbles up out of his throat. Distantly, he registers something ironic in that this man with whom he has shared so many experiences using the same choice of words that he did, the first time he told it to Ruby.
Qrow scrubs at his face with a hand, letting it rake through his hair next. He hates this, honestly. It never gets easier to have this conversation, even if nobody's been unkind to him about it in a long time. His heart feels like it's thundering in his ears. At last, he sighs.]
It's not that I don't believe you.
[He lets those red eyes flutter closed a moment, trying to collect his thoughts.]
...Oz believed in me even back when I didn't believe in me. Even when I thought nobody could ever want someone cursed like me around. The kids didn't care, either, when they found out.
[He doesn't really think everyone in his life secretly hates him. His life has changed a lot since the days he grew up with the bandits. But that's not really the point, is it?]
I just...I didn't want you to know.
[Brothers, he sounds stupid. Qrow fiddles idly with the clover pin that hangs down from the chain at his neck.]
Everyone else, maybe they don't blame me, maybe nobody says anything, but we all know the accidents that happen when I'm around are probably my fault. I can't ever escape what I am, but with you...for a while I could pretend, you know? That I was just--normal.
[There's a pained note to his voice, there, and he looks away. It's selfish of him, he knows. Qrow is the sort of man who would abandon anything for his loved ones, but this is one weakness in his heart that he's always struggled with. There's another sigh, and it's more tired. He has lived with being what he is for as long as he can remember. He'd just wanted to be normal and free with one person, but it's still dishonest. He still hears Ruby in the back of his mind, asking why he couldn't trust her enough to travel alongside her, why he'd chosen to try to protect her from the shadows, instead.]
I should've told you sooner, but I wanted to keep that as long as I could.
no subject
Break's eye narrows at the word. He does understand, but this time, it's not quite because of his own experiences. Not totally, at least. It's a combination of hindsight and the general existence of Vincent Nightray, who he'd have been delighted to never waste another thought on ever again. He springs to mind now not as an adult, fully-fledged piece of disgusting slime, but as the weird little kid Break saw in the Abyss, doing his damnedest to tear into the Will and ranting in delight when his success caused the dimension to crumble around them.
Yes, that's it...keep breaking just like that... If all the people break, and the world breaks, and everyone and everything goes mad...then I can be normal just like everyone else, right...?
He's reminded of what Reim told him of that awful little Baskerville girl, too, how she'd been driven from her village and her undying loyalty to Glen and the rest had come from finally being taken in, accepted, given a family. It was true of the lot of them, from what he's heard. Every last one of them, Vincent included, unwanted and cursed. Qrow could have become that little girl, vicious and violent and warped. He could have become any of the other Baskervilles, with such a mindless, unquestioning loyalty that he'd run off to commit massacres on orders alone. He wouldn't have had a chance to, because even that beloved place of refuge was still doing things like tossing the red-eyed kids into the Abyss to die. So, he could have become Vincent, narrowly escaping that fate and taking a nasty glee in clawing everyone around him to shreds as he slowly cultivated his own plans. Breaking them all.
Qrow had Ozpin instead, and it was Ozpin who inspired him to want to be better than he was. Qrow has said as much himself. And yet, still, the eery echo of that awful little child, who Break understands a great deal better, now. He'd just wanted to be normal. And when he'd landed in the future, he'd been tossed into Nightray, where he'd have been rejected outside of his use to them as a pawn. What might have happened if...?]
...no one in my household is "normal".
[It's wrong to say Break feels compassion for Vincent, in much the same way that he can't feel compassion for other illegal contractors. Even with how much he's come to understand, Break hates him. To have literally any of Vincent's words influence anything he would say to Qrow feels disgusting. Even so, Break is always looking for reasons why he's here, despite himself. Maybe this is one of them. Just as Shelly said, maybe it matters that Break would hear a traumatized little boy say that word all those years ago and now find himself here, in front of a grown man he's come to respect very much expressing a much more wistful, longing version of that same sentiment. A man with red, red eyes.]
No one in this house...is fully human, save for Elliot. And even he wound up being rather more than he bargained for, in a way he never would have chosen. No one in this house has had a normal life; those who believed they did found their existences to be illusions built on lies. That's why...it doesn't matter to me what anyone here is. What matters to me is what they choose to do, and in that sense you've already proven over and over that the person you've decided to be is exactly the sort of person I want at my side.
[In contrast to the wounded sighing coming from Qrow, Break's voice is devoid of its usual lilt, and instead his tone is gentle and certain. This is what comes of his long, thoughtful silence as he rearranged this and that in his head.]
I regret that -- you feel as though you've lost something, admitting this to me. I can't give that back to you. However, you are welcome in my house, where having a weirdness about you only means you'll fit in just fine, and...where every last one of us has already lived through at least one "worst day of our lives", and the odd accident doesn't even compare. If the Will of the Abyss herself can go floating about in here pleased to be "just Alice", I see no reason why you can't continue to be "just Qrow".