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
["Xerx, dear. Are you ready?" calls the old woman suddenly, her voice firm, but also terribly fond. "I won't be able to buy you much time...but it should be...more than enough for you, right?"
Even as his past self perks up and declares that of course he can do it, Break smiles back at the soft look on Sheryl's face, her unshakeable belief in him. There's just something so empowering in having someone around who knows exactly what you can do, and how to help you do it. Once again, he takes Ange's elbow.]
There's a scary bit next. Please stay at my side.
[Abruptly, the entire memory is plunged into darkness.
There is nothing in the darkness. No sound, no sense of anything that would allow someone to anchor themselves in space or reality, save that Break's grip on Ange's arm remains solid. Blessedly, it only lasts a few moments, and when the darkness dissipates Break is clear across the room, having left a pile of corpses in his wake.
"Owl can conjure up a soundless darkness. Scary, isn't it?" Sheryl notes serenely, as her own Chain -- a shadowy, black-winged owl -- lands elegantly on her outstretched hand. "Right now, that darkness is a valuable ally to a blind man."
Said blind man is presently gasping as though he'll never get enough air in his lungs ever again.]
...although, if you want to know something really stupid -- once we got to the bottom of all the lies we'd all been told, it came to light that we all wanted...the same thing. To preserve the world as it was. [He sounds almost wistful as Sheryl apologizes for being unable to help him further, and Sharon hikes up her skirts to hoof it back to his side, tottering through the grisly mess he's left behind.] I am told that, after my death...my best friend was able to convince those who were left to join our side, and they fought together.
[The memory begins to flicker, voices blurring. There's more drama to come before the scene ends, but the fight itself is finished.]
Ah. I suppose that's what the place wanted to taunt me about, this time. Had we sorted things out earlier, perhaps I might have lived.
[Break's smile is dark and wretched. Good grief, he hates Trench.]
no subject
.. what a macabre world, she thinks, though Ange isn't blaming Break for it in the slightest. This is how reality often is, isn't it? It's either kill or be killed, no matter how much you might dislike it.
At first her gaze is still trained on the scene in front of them, but then Ange finally looks at Break near the end of what he's saying, when she catches a certain tone in his voice. Looking at his face, seeing that smile - it's as if she can somehow read that final thought on his hand that goes technically unvoiced in it.
And it's not that she doesn't get it. Ange also thinks Trench is awful. But after having chosen to go there, even if the end result wasn't exactly what she experienced-- she's determined to not let that dumb place drag anyone down in such a way. ]
You could see it as a taunt. [ She won't deny that. ] But that's not what I'm seeing. I'm seeing a guy who, even when the circumstances are totally turned against him, is still giving everything he's got to protect the people he cares about.
[ Isn't that what she eventually learned back home? It took so long, but.. "without love, it can't be seen." She could see this as yet another awful thing this place is doing to them.
Or she could twist it into having a good edge to it instead. The past can't be changed, but the future can be. And though it's a sentiment Ange would never dare say it out, she refuses to get anyone in this place she knows go uncared for. ]
I'm seeing something that's making me think, "ah, that old man's got a good quality or two after all."
[ There's obviously a bit more to it than that, but Ange is - as she always does - downplaying it a little before it gets too utterly embarrassing. ]
no subject
But right as he's about to grumble that she needn't say it in such a disgusting way, she saves it with her customary grouchiness. Break fidgets like a bird with ruffled feathers for a moment, and settles down.]
You needn't worry. I promise you I'm a properly wretched human being otherwise.
[He was a knight once, long ago, which is the real explanation. Even here, though, where it isn't so terrible to be a little chatty about the past, using the kn-word in relation to himself feels a lot like blasphemy. White Alice claimed he still is her knight, when they first arrived in this place. But it made him uncomfortable enough that she offered to knock it off herself, without being asked.
The memory begins to fade out properly, going dim in places. It's refreshing to see it go black, honestly, like ink spilling and spreading. It wouldn't have been a shock if the imagery had crumbled around them instead, like various other dimensions have done around him in the past.]
We have reached a conclusion, I think. Then -- shall I bid you goodnight, Miss Ange?
no subject
It still wouldn't change a thing that he's putting his own life at stake, just to save those other people.
Nothing he says otherwise right now could convince her. So those words about him being a properly wreched human being otherwise - they go right into Ange's one ear, and then right out the other, not being retained by her brain in the slightest. It doesn't feel important, when it instead feels like she's slowly piecing together an image of him from all the bits she's seen from this old man so far. ]
.. hm. [ Ange softly says, nodding as the darkness starts to set in around them. There's a very tiny pause, but then she glances over at him, the one thing still fully visible. ]
Sorry for intruding.
[ It's genuinely meant, even though it wasn't on purpose. She can sense that it must be awkward for him in some way, having someone unexpected see this, being able to tell things about him that he'd rather not admit to. Ange is big enough to at least say this much.
But it's not like she regrets it. She's glad to have seen this, if not just for the confirmation that Break truly is a good person. (Look, Ange won't condemn a little bit of murder when he was protecting someone.) It's good to know she didn't have a dumb emotional outburst before in front of someone she can't trust with it.
There's another slight dip of her head, and then just a: ]
Good night.
no subject
[-- and then he's back in his own bedroom, staring up at the canopy of his bed. When he doesn't move for too long, Baltus helpfully sticks his snoot into his face, and that's enough to get Break to roll over and settle in properly.
He got what he wanted. His thoughts are calm, and he doesn't have any trouble falling asleep. But what a price. Now Ange is going to have questions, no doubt, and while Break doesn't mind telling people what his world was like, the extent of the part he played in it is something he keeps a little closer to his chest.
Well. It's a problem for tomorrow.]