Someone Kick Me Out of My Mind [L Lawliet, Open]

[hearthebell]

Who: Lazarus Sauveterre (L Lawliet) and YOU
What: Dreamwalking!
When: Following the events of Fated Leviathan, where most of the people he's on good terms with perished. He's playing the odds and trying to find a way, in dreams, it all could have turned out better, or at least with a lower death count.
Where: His body is technically in Cassandra, but for roughly the first week in March, your dreams are fair game. Either that or choose one of my starters, no harm no foul. I worked hard on them!
Content Warnings: Drug use to induce sleep, intentional evasion from detection while on sleep drugs. Various probable types of dream-violence and disturbing scenarios, including tiger attacks, environmental exposure, and nuclear detonation and fallout. If new prompts bring new content I'll update this.



[It was astonishing. It was visceral, and horrific, and then it was over. The carnage and receding waves were quiet enough, but there was a roaring in the ears of the survivors, or maybe it just sounded that way to the man who was perfect at his job in every way and still failed to keep those he tried to protect from death.

He leaves his things, taking only the clothes on his back and his anxiously bobbing orca whale omen with him when he starts off at a brisk pace toward Trench from the ruined aftermath of the beach's battle. He wants distance from it, and his steps take him to Cassandra, where he takes care to ensure that he's able to sneak into the Pale Sanctuary and conceal himself to swallow a fistful of herbs, and fall, and slumber and brace and dream in the way that he can take hold of the power he couldn't, there on the beach when the fighters were falling.

The tents are in their rows, the waves rear toward the sand. The players are arranged like chess pieces before him, and he can nudge Paul one way, Chara another, playing with Palamedes or Kaworu. They are just pieces, just pawns, but the arrangement could make all the difference, in the end.

The waves crash; the pawns die. L scrabbles in the sands of the dream, forgiving and elastic, rearranging them and bringing everyone back.]

Again!

[And there they are, back, affable and fierce in different measures. Yuri has made cake; Gideon is training by the waves.

More die, this time, including those that L saw alive and well when he left. Among them, a certain orange-haired and cheerful volleyball player is lying motionless and pale on the blood-stained sand.]

Again!

[This time, he moves his position. This time, many of the same die, and he does, as well, a casualty to shrapnel piercing through the tent.]

Again...

[And so it goes, for a hundred, a thousand iterations. L is tireless and determined, but some resource is waning, and his omen tugs at him, concerned for his sanity.]

No, Lycka, I...!

[She knows better, as she tends to in cases like these. Her jaws pull him by his jacket from his own dream into another, and this is where his fixations end, and something else entirely begins.

Who are you? What are your dreams like? If this Paleblooded, lost soul has chanced into your unconscious visions, what might he find, as his body languishes in Cassandra and his omen picks up the pieces of his fragmented mind?]

1. The Wild Jungle

[The air around you is heavy and humid. Unseen in the dense bush, the circle of life is rapid and repellent. Thrums and screeches announce the arrival of swift death, in various measures that one might or might not notice. A jaguar's kill, the soft extinguishment of a beetle, and they all weave themselves into the teeming tapestry that surrounds you in this quintessential rainforest.

You might be standing to fight, or running away. It doesn't matter, because a thin man with shaggy, dark hair who looks wide-eyed and younger than he should is beside you, closer than either of you want. He hands you a blunderbuss, an old weapon with a flared muzzle.]

The infrasound is what does it; the tiger is the voice darker than night.

[And, in fact, a growl chills and freezes you, splitting your chest asunder with a sound so low that your ears don't register it, but the atoms of your body react with cold, foreboding dread.]

2. The Stormy Desert

[A crack of thunder splits the sky above you before you've managed to recognize your dream's locale. You might hope for rain; so do the scorpions and long-tailed mice, the snakes in their dens and the cacti in their proud and stoic stature.

It won't rain. You can wish, and cry, and curse, but only the thunder will growl and thrash. The lightning may strike, so watch your head; stay low to the sand and find shelter if you can.

If you do, along the side of a cliff facing the west where the sun set rosy before the clouds rolled in, there is a young man with sunburned cheeks. His eyes are red, as though he's been staring at the sun, or it's been raining somewhere private and inward.]

I've been collecting scorpion venom. What for, I don't remember. But I have so much. What's the point of finding a cure when everyone is already dead?

3.The Grimy City

[The crowds are mostly faceless; when they aren't, they're grotesque, likely to sport the visages of rats or roaches rather than anything remotely humanlike. They actively shove you and trip you, doing their best to jostle you toward the entrance of a subway, and no matter how strong you are the impulse is incredibly difficult to resist.

You walk (or tumble) down the subway stairs. The tollbooth is manned by a young man with unruly dark hair, who seems determined to hear his headphones in spite of your desire to gather the attention of the one human-seeming creature in this dream.]

What? No, I can't hear you. Speak louder, please, I'm losing you!

4.The Nuclear Wasteland

[A brilliant flash lights the daytime sky; you might be blinded, or perhaps you had the good fortune to blink at the time. A roiling cloud rises in the sky, top-heavy and triumphant, blossoming into boiling and dusty vapor that will fall back to earth and condemn everything still living.

Perhaps you're staggering. Perhaps you're already feeling the fallout on your hair and shoulders. Perhaps you are sitting, forlorn and accepting, as the sirens blare and the screams fade. Regardless, someone has seized you bodily by your upper arms, hauling you into a shelter, spinning the vault's circular lock and wrapping you in a desperate embrace.]

I'm so glad. I thought you were lost... I thought I was the only one left.

[And he holds you, and holds you, with those frail and thin arms that clutch with the strength that only a dying or very guilty man might possess.]

V. Wildcard

[What did you dream about? If L is there, let me know and prompt this option to the moon and stars!]

Comments

[hearthebell]

[It's strange for L to be so close to someone else, unprecedented and alien. The clinging is some phantom impulse, stunned so soundly by the apocalyptic flash that he has grasped, and reached, and held.

He's found, too. It would seem so; the arms that hold him back are sinewy and strong for their mass, the nails biting and real. His body, somewhere, has indentations from the tense ferocity of his nails.

The self-possessed black-eyed man, appearing fearful and driftless, is almost as jarring as the detonation itself. L's own eyes are wide and piercing as he processes the new information (he can be fearful and driftless?), and withdraws, giving Tisketkenchak-Folgraboto his space. He reaches for his own opposite elbows, hunching his shoulders, breathing shallow and talking low.]

What do you think it is?

[It's a rookie mistake to give away too much information at once. He won't make it with someone who could yet prove to be not only formidable, but fatal.]

[necrolord]

[ John looks at him. He looks as though cataloguing every inch of the boy before him, every cell; there is still a furrow of uncertainty to his brow, but his stare is heavy and intense. The fear isn't enough to choke him, anymore. It shows only in the tension of his neck and shoulders, and somewhere behind those endlessly heavy eyes.

He says, slowly: ]

The end.

[ God looks down at himself. There are ashes on his shoulders, in his hair. (Should there be? Was it there a moment ago?) He drags the bare pads of his fingers through the fallout and holds it up to inspect like dust from a lintel. He breathes a soft little hah.

Then he turns away— polite, rote, almost cursory— and dusts himself off, scrubbing it out of his hair like dandruff. ]

But not for you and me.

[hearthebell]

[God, worried about the end of the world? Perish the thought. L peers back, all dark eyes and bird-boned frame, the muscle of his omen nowhere in sight. The disorganization (disorientation) of dreamwalking has shaken her from his side, and he's dazed and adrift without his own self-preservation incarnate.

His steely resolve remains; his mental constitution always eclipsed his physical abilities by far. In a dream, the former has more of an edge as a general rule. As perilous as dreamwalking can be, L is at more of an advantage than most.

The problem is that he's far from his own dream, and wandering tetherless. He periodically forgets that he is dreaming, at all, and then scrambles to accommodate when it all floods back in a rush of harried memory.]

The first hour is critical, you know. If you can survive that long... the odds favor you, moving forward.

[His own fingers go to his own hair. So far, he's not doubled over vomiting, and that's a good sign... but the same flakes, of course, found his shaggy head just as well as the Emperor's.]

[necrolord]

[ He turns back, and there's a shudder of the same confusion across his face: he looks at Lazarus as though he expects someone else. It keeps catching him off-guard, like a missed step in a staircase. It passes over his face in odd little waves, rising and subsiding. ]

Here.

[ God steps forward. So gently, he reaches out. He smooths his fingers across Lazarus's bony shoulders, cards them through his hair. He brushes the poisoning dust away. Through all of it he looks at Lazarus with a searching intensity, a tenderness that doesn't belong.

There is a half-step of hesitation behind every movement, that same wound tension. He does not look fearfully at the door, or the dust. The man seems more afraid of whatever he'll find in Lazarus's eyes. ]

The first hour. [ He echoes it in a low murmur, and drops his hands. (He can't get all the dust away. It lingers in invisible fragments; it clings. There is no clean from this.) ] And what comes next?

[hearthebell]

[Something isn't adding up; the various parts of this are forming a picture dissonant from what should be understood by both of them. While L isn't 100% positive that his own view is the objectively right one, he's also in possession of the disquieting awareness that this man, who had waved away his ailment with the effortlessness of a true god, is offering a rare and perhaps unique opportunity.

Though L doesn't know it, he'd once killed a true god. Writing his name had resulted in the Shinigami's death just as much as his own. Perhaps his subconscious cues him in, now, to the notion that he may at least be capable of god-killing (not that he's entertaining the notion that Tisketkenchak- Folgraboto is a true god. He still won't; aren't they both here quailing under the might of splintered atoms?

All of this is running through his mind as he's reached for like one cherished, and not some crooked, opportunistic and shabby thing who has always been at arm's length, both held and holding others of his hugely flawed race. At once, he understands how a man like this could make Paul feel not just cherished, but chosen and appointed. As well as others; there must be others if every god has disciples and worshipers, because to be seen by a deity is to be honored. Anything more is to be exalted, as much as a mere human can be.

Does he want that, too, in some secret shameful place that put ego above the beauty and purity of his craft? If he does, he decides that it can stay secret, and here, now, he will just go on continuing to worship and practice that craft. He draws away, not too suddenly, just two intentional steps back as he turns to survey the shelter. It's well-stocked with thick plastic crates of supplies, stacked to the the ceiling in places.]

It might not be immediately obvious, but there is always a way out. I'll find it, and you'll be alright.

[He sets the intention with the kind of authority that comes with being uncommonly good at what he does. The first case he opens is filled with plastic bottles of water, and he snatches up two, pushing them immediately into Tisketkenchak-Folgraboto's hands and breaking open two for himself to pour over his own hands and rinse through the sediment in his hair. A drain in the floor conveniently collects the runoff.

There may not be getting clean from this, but L is grimly amused to think of this as a sort of heretic baptism, should God follow suit.]

[necrolord]

[ It hits like a slap. He recoils from that tone of authority, and for a moment again he is clear-eyed with some incredulity, some clean surprise. He looks at Lazarus as though parsing for the first time who he's seeing.

He sets the water bottles down, unopened. ]

No.

[ There is fallout on his shoulders. (Didn't he wipe it away?) He ignores it. He steps forward again, reaches for Lazarus again, just as gently but with a feverish intensity. The soft confusion has gone, and the look on God's face now is distant and inhuman. His eyes are twin black holes. Lazarus would be forgiven thinking he's about to be murdered. ]

There is no way out from this.

[ He takes the water bottles from the Lazarus's hands. He smooths the wet hair back out of the boy's face, combs it firmly away from his eyes. His fingers linger there at one temple, warm brown against black and flakes of sickly white. ]

I'll always be alright. [ What he does next is supposed to be a smile. It isn't, really. It's a miserable twist of the mouth, a setting of the shoulders, like a man resigning himself to war. ] And so will you, if you want to be. If you stay with me.

[ He gathers up Lazarus's clammy wet hands, and clasps them in his. At this stage he doesn't seem to know what to do with them. He pats them, absently, almost awkwardly. ]

We'll rest here a little while. Then— then we can go back out. It won't hurt you. [ It's horrible, his attempt at a smile. He corrects: ] It won't kill you. I won't let it.

cw: mention of a suicide cult

[hearthebell]

[L's sopping a bit, the drips absorbed by his sleeves and his collar as he continues to take action, or at least... he tries to take action.

For a moment, he does think that he'll be murdered. Knowing what God is capable of, how he could surely unravel a molecule just as easily as mend it, he doesn't even tense. There's just a sudden rush of endorphins and a strange descending haze of preternatural calm. It's what happens to people in accidents, or rabbits ripped open by foxes. It is, in short, the body saying release your burden, because hope has already fled with it.

He tries to overcome it with will alone. God's touch is both hateful and sorely craved, and the paradox fidgets in the back of his mind as hair is smoothed away from a damp and ugly face, that not even a mother could love, in the end.

He closes his hands as the black-eyed man takes them, so they will tremble less noticeably. Loose fists at the end of scrawny wrists, half-hearted and conflicted symbols of resistance. They're just as easy to interpret as the Emperor's awful not-smile.

On the cusp of Heaven's Gate, did Applewhite wear that same smile? L reevaluates, regroups, and arranges his sharp and pale features into his closest facsimile of foreboding concern.]

It's human nature to strive... and to fight, when there's a better way.

[I'll fight you.]

Let me try, while we're resting. If I don't find what I'm looking for... I'll trust you.

[I'll let you.]

Like... Paul trusts you.

[He does trust you, in some way, though he might not choose that word.]

Is he out there, right now, with something you're owed?

[This is like defusing a bomb, he thinks. Maybe one like the one they fled; maybe one worse.]

[necrolord]

[ His expression slants into disappointment. He drops Lazarus's hands. God steps away; he runs a damp hand over his face, scrubs it again through his hair; he blows out all the breath in his body, like a weary dog. For a moment again he is harried, human, alive. For a moment he genuinely looks like some guy having a difficult day, incongruous with the weight of fear and concrete all around them. His crown of fallout is still in his hair.

God says: ]

Alright. Yeah, alright.

[ Then Lazarus says Paul, and his expression sharpens into alarm. He turns back to the bunker door as though he can see through it to the dead and dying city beyond. ]

He's out there. [ This he says slowly, as though deciding it as he goes. ] He'll be alright. We'll go and find him. If he's with me, he'll be alright.

[hearthebell]

[L's associations with parents and the things they are supposed to do are fraught. No one's ever really done entirely right by him; he was neglected and abandoned as a child, found and indulged to ruin by a later caretaker, however well-meaning his intentions might have been.

The Emperor withdrawing is painful in the way reversing an entry wound is painful; one might not even feel the blade going in, but they certainly feel it being removed, once the weight of its meaning starts to sink in.

Paul is susceptible to this, too. Paul is a fish in a barrel, for this...]

He'll be alright.

[He affirms, in a voice stronger than he feels or looks.]

Sit. This is the rest, that you proposed, while I use my way to get us out. Paul's clever, and subject to prophecies; my guess is that he knew about the detonation already, and if you know him as well as I do, you also surmised that.

[He picks up another water bottle, for there's no shortage.]

Can you rinse your hair, or shall I do it? The radiation will be strongest right now, and decrease, but the faster you can get it away from your skin and scalp, the better.

[necrolord]

[ Lazarus chides him with sit, with rinse your hair, and God smooths a hand across his eyes. It is the posture of a man trying for patience. The pretense feels crude; the fallout doesn't matter. Not to him. (There's something right about it, that crown of horrible white. For a moment they are flakes of bone, then phalanges, irradiated and unbearable.)

He relents. He picks up the water bottles, the two he'd refused. ]

If I can't manage showering, we're really in trouble.

[ It's the first thing he's said that hasn't sounded shellshocked or dire. It's the first thing he's said that's almost more wry than desperate. There is still a deep, cracked pain here, just at the edge of spilling over: but Lazarus is treated to the sight of God scraping himself back together.

He turns away again. He uncaps a water bottle. Here in the concrete bunker— details blank at the edges, nothing really real to it but the impression of dead grey walls— he conducts his own horrible baptism, scrubbing fallout from his hair.

(It stays gone, this time.) ]

[hearthebell]

[Come on, some niggling voice in the back of L's thoughts eggs on. Feel what it is to be merely a human being, for once.]

We both know that this is no indicator of what you can typically manage... and there's no shame in asking for assistance.

[L is a man conditioned, above all, to put together pictures that are in some way ruined or incomplete. The Emperor is just another one of those, clearly faltering, and he has no reason to strike.

If he did, this would be a different story, very much so. Instead, he reaches out his thin hands. Either to scrub, or to take the bottles, whichever John will permit.]

Botecelli... ribosome. Gentle medley... crepuscule.

[The words are spoken lower than a whisper, but true to his word, he's doing his part, figuring out the puzzle of the bunker so they can leave safely.]

[necrolord]

Typically.

[ He breathes it like a laugh, like a curse. He stares at the fallout and the drain. God stays like that, watching poisoned water collect and drip away, until Lazarus reaches out to comb skinny fingers through his short and holy hair. He shuts his eyes and allows it; he submits.

When Lazarus lifts his hands away to continue his puzzle-solving, God draws back to gather himself. He wipes water out of his eyes, and even rinses his hands with a splash from the bottles: rote, mechanical. He scrubs his fingers through each other and then is left staring at his own wet palms.

Lazarus has never seen him this way, but he cannot presently remember why that should matter. They are here under the shadow of the bomb; Lazarus is his, just as Paul is his; (this isn't how—) it almost makes sense. This vulnerability stretches bare and uninterrupted. He says, in a murmur: ]

I establish my covenant with you... So much for that.

[hearthebell]

[The derision is practically dripping from the black-eyed man's tone, so withering that it shakes L's focus for the barest of seconds. He's thinking about the puzzle even as he cards his delicate, tapered fingers through hair that doesn't resemble his own overgrown mess at all. He's still careful not to snag, thorough about making sure that no square inch of scalp goes unscrubbed, a manual task while he considers the crates lining the walls and climbing toward the ceiling.

The all have labels, unrelated to their contents, and there's some anagram, some cipher, some secret here, not unlike his absurd methods for navigating the archives that Palamedes had found utterly ridiculous, while being unable to deny the effectiveness.

Sometimes, intuition just defies logic. It's a paradox for a person to be adept in both, but L inhabits a lot of paradoxes just be existing. When he's satisfied that the particles are washed out of God's hair, he withdraws a gentle and comforting touch that doesn't quite seem to fit someone so emotionally distant and at-odds with other humans.

A cipher, he decides, noticing a new way the boxes fit together and read in a way that makes sense to a mind either very shrewd and clever, or one that's quite mad, or maybe just a dash of both... but he can't help but turn back to Tisketkenchak-Folgraboto at his murmured words.]

You seem to take your covenants seriously, and I can respect that, but unless you caused that detonation, this one's not on you. You've broken nothing, forfeited nothing, and nullified... nothing.

[He thinks it might be a time he can pry for more information. Red wire, green wire. Should he risk it?

Who is he? Who has he become if he fails to nudge and prod just a little further than most people would? Dead, maybe, if he manages to wake a dragon, but if he fails to wake up from this dream within the next couple of days, he's that, anyway.]

I don't suppose you've failed before, in a situation like this one.

1/2

[necrolord]

[ It's nice, letting someone wash him. Less like worship, more like camaraderie; for a moment he forgets they aren't two dogs in a cage. For a moment he forgets which version this is supposed to be. He forgets disciple, protected; he thinks, as he always does, of her.

Then Lazarus says unless you caused that detonation, and John looks at him.

John just looks at him.

His crown is gone. His hair is wet and rumpled by gentle hands. For the barest moment, there is nothing in him but the great heaving grief of that first embrace— the clenched desperation of a dying or very guilty man— for the barest moment, his eyes are yellow.

Then he rises (had he been sitting?) and he is taller than he ought to be. He is somehow more. The bunker is less real than his body, and his body is less real than his black-hole eyes. The universe bends around the gravity of God.

He says: ]

There won't be a lot of rainbows from here on out, mate.

2/2

[necrolord]

[ The scene changes. The bunker shifts from half-imagined puzzle room to a facility in hard, clinical greys. The ceiling is a grille over pipes and fluorescents. Their sealed vault is a great steel blast door, blazed all over with caution striping. God steps forward among the sudden forest of metal benches and spray heads. (The latter are a little funny, because there is no more fallout in Lazarus's hair.)

His crown is back. But this time it's a laurel wreath of iridescent leaves, twined with delicate, bleached-clean baby's bones.

God says: ]

I'm up one-oh on apocalypses, actually. But we all have bad dreams.

[hearthebell]

[Trained to see subtle changes and minutes cracks in composure and conviction, something like a defining feature completely changing color won't escape L's notice. His own eyes wide in his own pale face, for a moment he is not the only one just looking.]

Don't...!

[The bunker is gone, dissolved like a communion wafer in wine, and L's dread is at a higher and tenser peak than it's yet been in all his wanderings. He's well and truly off the map, now, separated from his omen and cut off from his sleeping body. If he was gradually getting closer to his home dream, someone has spun his boat around in a storm, left him to wait anxiously for the next clear night to reorient himself with the stars so he can at least determine the direction he should be heading.

The facility has no stars, no boat, no numbers or patterns. This is not for him, and therefore, it's more of a prison than any bunker or jungle or hostile city.

He's seen the Emperor's crown before, he thinks, his mind whirring along. It's louder, like a computer that's overheating but continuing operations, as it must, and so it does. He's just seen it in pieces, excavated and bagged and numbered. Evidence, of what strong things do to weak things, sometimes.

The precedent, it seems, is set. So is L's jaw. Dirty beaten shoes scuff and squeak against the cold, hard floor; he's never in his life expected rainbows, learning in fact to appreciate the rain, but a window, something, would be even more appreciated at this juncture.

There's one thing, always, that L considers most-appreciated. It's just the truth, a confirmation, knowing that he was right. Everything else, he thinks he can live with... or, on at least one notable all-in occasion, die with.]

Then it's happened, for you. "The End." Or... at least, it's happened for others.

[And in L's strange clash of features, his large gray eyes hold a question that teeters on the brink of an accusation.

Is your guilt a survivor's, or an instigator's?]

[necrolord]

[ He sees the accusation in those eyes. After all that— the trembling embrace, fingers carding through his hair, his pleading bid for company— it's almost enough to hurt. There is a bite to that stare.

But God is lucid, now; he knows what path he's walking. This kid is not one of his. This kid is a remarkably ballsy, remarkably curious, genuinely brilliant nobody—

—except to Paul. To Paul he is someone, and so God checks his anger. He exhales through his nose. ]

Bit of both, really. We all went down in flames... I just have a talent for getting up again.

[ There is no more guilt in his face or posture; he does not look young anymore. He does not look much like a man at all. The leaves in his hair shiver with a constant, impossible breeze, as though those children's bones are forever slowly flexing. ]

To what do I owe the pleasure?

[ Read as: You trespass. ]

[hearthebell]

[It's not the first time L's led someone through the paces of something akin to friendship, or at least a mockery of it just sad enough to seem earnest. Yesterday, he might have assumed those same paces might be painful, but it's a driving sort of flare, burning him from the inside, lighting up his dark eyes and giving them that bite.]

Quite a talent.

[One he shares. He doesn't say so; he shouldn't need to, for it to be true. Mentally, he divides the room into a grid, trying to make sense of the black-eyed man's features, in fearsome, foreboding motion even when he's standing still.]

You jumped the gun. My way was working.

[And then you stopped me, because I struck a nerve.]

You owe me another door, for the one you took away. Produce it.

[Worth the lip, probably, to see if he can. A paleblood can mold and influence a dream, reading secret meaning into its turns and bends; who is more powerful, here?]

[necrolord]

That wasn't the question.

[ He is genuinely impressed at the nerve! You have to give the kid that. God's tone is neatly polite, a thin skin of stillness over some great and building tension. ]

Did you come around just for a look at the scenery?

[ This is his third time meeting Paul's friend. With each, he has noticed the tenacity, the frankly unhinged pursuit of knowledge— like a boy wedging his fingers through the cracks to some dark cave, prodding for secrets, heedless of the bear that lives inside.

Sometimes his metaphors could use some work. It's a fun little distraction from cataloguing all he might have given away, and what a pain it'll be to manage. He is trying to keep a leash on the feeling that he has been spied upon; strung along through false intimacies; that he might, in fact, be pretty mad about it. ]

[hearthebell]

[That's because it was the wrong question, actually, the man with nerve catches himself before shooting back. Right now, his intrigue and the dawning, disturbing comprehensions surrounding the Emperor are pertinent, but may pale, just slight, in comparison to the true priority of actually getting out of this sane and alive.]

The scenery.

[His features don't shift much with the words, but his tone certainly does. Just a twist sour; a bit of a sneer.

Maybe it's enough to mask the fact that L fully grasps that the true "scenery" is hardly so many showerheads. He'll have his own cataloguing to do, regarding what he's learned here, and what he might yet so long as his nerve endures.]

Some craters have good reputations, for scenery. The Grand Canyon, for one... but not being partial to dry heat, I wouldn't go there on purpose. Not without an exit strategy.

[Where's the door to your crater, Tisketkenchak?]

Foolish thing to do, really.

[Does "all going down in flames" count as "dry heat", Tisketkenchak?]

[necrolord]

[ It's an unpleasant note to his voice, that sneer. It doesn't suit those gentle, thorough hands; he'd like to say it doesn't suit the wide and staring eyes, but that's not true. This kid is a burning filament, a white-hot beacon of intensity, and the disdainful twist in his voice comes sharp and natural.

Echoed back at him, it sounds like: your scenery. Your wasteland, your horror, this ruin you've made and hidden.

God is unmoved. ]

If you want to see the crater, I'm happy to give you a tour. [ Watch it. ] So, what: you just came for a quick poke around, to see what you could see? Maybe figured we'd have better weather?

[ If this is a whim of Trench, he wants to hear it admitted aloud. If this is something Lazarus can do, a secret weapon, a way to pry: well, he'd like to hear that admitted, too. They can have a chat about it. ]

[hearthebell]

[L is in his element, confronted with hidden and ruined things. More so, by far, than he is when confronted with whole and healthy ones. With no gaps to fill and no flaws or fallacies to exploit, it's not like his existence has any sort of purpose or meaning.

How much he likes flaws and fallacies is, on any given day, roughly equivalent to how much he likes existing. In other words, it's somewhat variable, depending on whether inner drive or inner darkness happens to be winning that day.

They can feel the same to a hungry orphan heart, as riddled with cavities as sugar-sore teeth.]

Hm.

[Whatever a suspect offers, whether it's information or a service or some sort of demonstration, should probably be disregarded, or at least taken with a crushing boulder of salt. L's rejected it before on those grounds... but in this case, his curiosity wins out, pulling at him, bargaining that he's the Paleblood and has a gift for control over keeping dreams in check.

He decides to keep with the banter, toeing the line, seeing what he can prod and push into showing itself while still hedging his most risky bets.]

I came to see what the overfed and oblivious tourists overlook, of course. One misses things, when one's posing for that perfect family photo on a ledge.

[The obligatory jab, before he adds]

I’m trying to make it back to my home dream. We’re here because you interrupted my process; this is off the map. I don’t suppose there’s a gift shop with a selection of maps.

[necrolord]

[ Full marks for stubborn bravery, here. Full marks for sass. He loves the effort to be a pain in the ass, he won't even riff off this skeleton of a boy calling anybody overfed. He could really give Harrow a run for her money, and she is the most distilled necromancer he's ever met. She's nothing but bird bones and willpower.

He really shouldn't let them meet. Good to know that, now. ]

So I'm not even the destination... just a pit stop along the way. Wrong turn, in this case.

[ It's getting less cute, the kid's insistence that God is inconveniencing him by being too thoroughly trespassed upon. This room is sacred, showerheads and all: this place is the cradle of a civilization. It shouldn't get trampled through for a gift shop. ]

It's polite to give a guy a heads-up before you drop in for a visit, you know.

[hearthebell]

[He stares, bewildered, at the Emperor, as though the notion of coming to find him is truly absurd.

Though L's pale, somewhat blank features can have a difficult time affecting emotions and expressions, "bewildered" is all wide eyes and raised brows. He can manage it just fine.]

You're not disappointed, are you?

[It's flattering that a burglar would target one's vault. It's even sort of an honor to be the object of an attempted murder, especially one of passion, because who would try to kill one if they didn't really care, if they weren't really fired up and incensed and obsessed with their rage and their snarling, spiteful affection?

He won't give Tisketkenchak-Folgraboto that. Earning that should be more difficult.

He cants his head, stretches his already-round eyes as wide as they can go. He affects a parody of the child Tisketkenchak-Folgraboto thinks of him as.]

I can be so polite when I try. May I please have the time, in this...

[Crater. This grotesque, nasty, sterile-but-stained place]

...vicinity... to show myself out? It might take longer. I might need more, than I had, if you had not interrupted my process and my extremely vital solution.

[He has a nice voice, smooth and soothing and dark, when he wants to make it that way. It drips with poisoned honey now, a put-upon effort to adhere to tedious rules of etiquette that he could give less than a shit about, but abides because others are stupid enough to care.]

[necrolord]

[ He wonders what might happen if he woke up. If he snapped awake now, would Lazarus be left driftless on an incomplete map— marooned in the dark? Or would it give him the freedom to roam this holy landscape unsupervised? ]

For a minute there I felt a little important.

[ This is a hilarious joke, and they both know it. The magic of Deer Country is too unknown to him, too unreliable; he will not take his chances. He says, pleasantly: ]

Take your time, then. But show some respect. I am the final guardian of this place... even its memory. [ His smile is sharp and cold; his crown of children's bones is still flexing, a slow constant writhe. ] Especially its memory. Try not to break anything.

[ He turns, then, to that door blazed up and down with hazard striping. It opens for him because it always has; because he knows it will. Beyond is a hallway in the same stark metal and fluorescents, with darkened doorways beyond. ]