o5 . bone house mingle!

[necrolord]

Who: necrolord and CR!
What: Several teens move into the horrible necromancy mansion, and sometimes they bring their friends.
When: Early March.
Where: Bone House in Gaze.

Content Warnings: Skeletons, discussions of death and grief, violence where marked, vomit where marked. Note all the usual warnings of this character.

Comments

[wannasmash]

There's a very potent vulnerability in being honest and holding out one's shivering heart to another. He watches Paul's gesture (sign?) and commits it to memory.

He knows the difference between being told they will fight together, as when joining or being born into something, and choosing it for themselves. It's part of what scares him, so soon after the battle, that people Midoriya cares about agree to fight by his side so readily. Paul might relate. A small but more genuine smile trembles into existence.

"Thank you, Paul-kun. I know. I've known for a while," he says more softly than one should when talking shop.

He knew it when they clasped hands by the firelight after Paul's vision. He felt it when Paul rushed to him as they defeated that Unsnakely. He traces this inkling back to when he told Paul, the first time, that he was kind, and Paul looked like Midoriya had struck him.

It's this that Midoriya admires most in Paul, a stubborn firelight in a dark storm. He looks at his friend who stares at his tea. He can feel the soft press, so similar to his own, of Paul wanting to help more. There are things Midoriya will not tell even his closest friends. There are things he has told no one.

"I'm hoping these precautions won't really end up being needed."

[terriblepurpose]

Paul should be glad that Midoriya doesn't question him. He is, for the most part. There's further relief in being understood, in having his commitment recognized.

But it's like his friend says. He hopes these precautions won't be necessary, but as he glances up from the unintelligible swirl of tea leaves at the bottom of his half-empty cup he cannot help but feel they will be. He smiles back, crooked and mild, with too much knowing held between them.

If it's not whatever Midoriya fears now, it will be something else. The world outside this house churns on, a blood-soaked engine winding down towards devastation and taking them all with it regardless of what they might want, or the promises they make to each other.

"So do I," he says, with the palest trace of wryness, "But that's what precautions are for. Thank you for trusting me to be one of them. May you never have to ask."

(He wonders if this is what Gurney and Duncan and Thufir felt like, sometimes. He wonders how much he ever understood of the way his teachers would talk to each other, or the vows they made to him, or how fragile they understood them to be in ways that he did not.)