003: Seems to me quite clear, now — now that you are here — how easily I could begin again

[payingfordeliverance]

Who: Break + various
What: Catchall log; closed starters, event overflows, etc. No open prompts.
When: January through February, perhaps into March
Where: Various

Content Warnings: Use of the heartstrings prompt from the January TDM (injury, body horror, burning, melting), and one bond pact (blood ceremony, bodily ceremony, telepathic/empathetic connections). One Mother's Mercy thread (intense guilt and shame, talk of grieving your own death, forced confession), and one using the really evil magic chocolate where you cough up an organ. Threads will be marked accordingly and further warnings added here as they come up.

Comments

[entreats]

What an emotional flow, Ange thinks. It's like watching the tides. One moments it's suddenly there in all its intensity, and then it all recedes like this, leaving only a shadow of its former self.

"What annoying and cruel people, to assume all of these things about you, without even bothering to get to know the real you." But they have discussed this. They know that it's just in people's nature, that it's something that can't be stopped.

Some people just suck.

So Ange shakes her head. "After all, to me, you seem like.."

It's there where her voice trails off, realising that this is a moment that Break might just remember later, once he is himself once more. It makes her a little more cautious, trying to balance being nice to a seemingly unfortunate 'kid' like Kevin with not seeming totally embarrassing later.

".. like a fine person to know. I don't dislike our meeting, even though it happened totally by chance."

[heart_beatings]

Kevin gives her a long, thoughtful look. Break does this to people often with a similar intensity, and so even though this version has both eyes and much more of a baby face, it's obvious that it's him. Hell, Break himself still doesn't actually look as old as he is when he's in an especially cheerful mood. Having made his Contract with the Hatter at the ripe old age of twenty-five and gotten stuck there for the next fifteen years, the bulk of his maturity is still in his expressions, and a light heart will shave a solid decade off of his appearance. The matter is complicated by his darkblood, which has apparently given him the ability to warp his own body to meet his expectations.

(Subconsciously, he'll wind up mirroring Qrow, with lines just settling in at his eyes and his hair shot through with gray. Break has never actually seen what his own face "should" be now and can't imagine it, but the notion of growing old together in any sense after losing so many loved ones is something his heart can latch on to. There's nothing to be done about his own snowy head, but their inevitable wrinkles can match.)

All that is to say, the most obvious difference between Break's expressions and the one Kevin is making now is that Break's long looks tend to be calculating and clever. Kevin's is much more of a war. He's entirely too cynical to accept a perfect stranger declaring him to be just fine after only a few minutes of knowing him. But oh, there's an idealistic streak in him still that does wish things could be like that for real, that life wasn't an endless string of gauging just who is rejecting him in only a few moments, that the social groups around him that seem to form so easily and quickly might include him, too.

It will happen for him in time. For the moment, staring down the very real risk of ruining his entire family just by existing yet again, it seems much too unrealistic to hold onto. Never mind the fact that Ange has literally just done it. Even if it is for her own reasons.

"...milady is too kind," he murmurs at last. It seems best to leave the matter at that.