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
...Mm, pretty much.
[He lets out a tired breath.]
Remember when I told you about having apocalypse bullshit? Right before we took shelter in that place, we'd just found out the person trying to end the world couldn't be killed. That the power struggle between her and the other immortal I told you about, the one who got pulled outta his afterlife to save humanity? Had been going on thousands of years, and would keep going thousands more after we were all dead and buried. We weren't saving the world, we were stalling the inevitable.
[The weight of it all is something he's tried to bury. He told Winter it would eat her alive if she weren't able to do the same, but times like this, it comes back for him. Even after scraping himself out of that hole, everything in Atlas had gone to shit so aggressively that by the time the dream crumbled, there was truly nothing left for him in Remnant. Just thinking about having to face those losses threatens to swallow him in despair even now, even building this new life in this new world with Ruby and Oscar and Ozpin at his side.]
no subject
[Even hearing Qrow sound so dejected, Break can't quite believe there's no ending to that story at all. But, that's because he himself is one such fool and always has been, and he knows himself as such perfectly well. And who knows? Even if there is a way to fix things, it may well be after Qrow and the others are all dead and buried; there's no getting around that. It's not like Break lived to see the happy ending either, such as it was.
No, he'll keep the full extent of that sentiment to himself. You don't say that sort of nonsense to a man as deep into it as Qrow is, or has been. When you're that low, it doesn't help. It just hurts.]
I see, then, why...you lot prefer this world over that one. For all its faults, it does at least move.
no subject
[Raven would probably say they all fit in the former category too, including him. In his darkest, most bitter moments, he'd wondered if she had been right. Even now, he dares not risk letting himself sink too deeply into it, lest it poison this chance at a new life. Let yourself be something new, Cynthia Sodder had said to the Sleepers, as the dream crumbled, and by the Gods he hates is he trying.]
With Ruby and Yang being some of 'em, though, I couldn't keep...wallowing in it. They were going to keep fighting no matter what I thought about it, you know? It was either watch their backs or let them throw themselves into danger by themselves. Realized it didn't even matter if I still thought we could win--I just had to help keep the world going a bit longer while they were in it.
[He shrugs a shoulder, idly picking up one of the scattered books on the ground and putting it back onto the nearest pile.]
So I definitely couldn't let any of that shit happen again.
no subject
...do you remember the night we first met? Properly, anyway. Anything if it's for the kids. We agreed on that right away.
[This conversation they're having now feels like a sequel to that, in a way. Back then, neither of them had been especially open. They'd been awkward and halting, Qrow uncertain of him and Break without his eyesight, but it had taken them all of two seconds for them to find that common ground and set up camp there. To think, if Qrow hadn't been hurt enough to ask to come home with him, everything that has followed would never have come to pass. They might have simply bid one another goodnight and moved along, and never bothered to find out just how close they could become.
How wretched, to think of not having Qrow about.]
To be able to make that sort of decision for yourself...that's a good and strong thing.
no subject
Instead of rejecting the compliment outright, then, he lets out a sigh. He doesn't quite smile back, but his expression is soft.]
For the longest time, I didn't think so. Seemed obnoxious to pat myself on the back for pulling myself up to the level most people were at, right?
[He still feels like that, a little, because that's how he feels about his Semblance, too. Just because he has to work harder than others to be at a baseline doesn't make him any less responsible for that baseline.]
...But then it got easier. And it's weird to think that just a couple years ago I couldn't imagine being here. I didn't even want to be.
[There was a time when the alcohol felt like the only thing holding him together. There is a certain sense of grim pride in knowing he can do it on his own, even when he feels like he's drowning.]
So I guess that is something.
no subject
He's thinking of Gilbert, honestly. How he'd worried about that boy, for so many years. So many warnings of "you have to remember your priorities" and "you can't ever get back what you've lost" and other more cryptic admonishments that he couldn't explain properly without risking everything...but once Gil had that breakthrough at last and decided once and for all who he'd be, oh, how incredible he'd become. Break isn't going to bring him up. Not right now. The way Qrow is speaking about this, it's still much too tender an issue, and so this moment needs to be a small and precious one just for the two of them. But seeing the echo of his other black bird in Qrow is like a promise, and Qrow rises even further in his esteem for the similarity.]
...I think, perhaps, you see all this through the shadow of a demon you don't think you ought to have had in the first place. Setting aside just what form that demon took for you...what I see is a man who came to understand his priorities and found his reason to stand up again, and did it. Regardless of what exactly knocked you over in the first place, that's what's at the core, and it's no small thing.
[Break's smile is genuine, and also, completely unrepentant.]
Sorry, but that's something I really respect you for, so I'm afraid you'll just have to tolerate it.
no subject
He ducks his head, just faintly, to hide the hint of a smile that tugs at the corner of his mouth until it reforms itself into a properly casual, irreverent grin.]
I'll survive somehow, I guess.
shall we wrap here?
The omen is definitely thinking it, though. And as the other two get back to sorting out the books and the discussion winds its way back to their favorite subject -- their next meal -- Baltus keeps his head on Break's leg and smiles very carefully, in a way that does not show all of his many teeth. From time to time, his tail thumps leisurely against the floor, a calm and steady heartbeat of sorts running underneath much more pleasant conversation.
Yes. Good.]