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[It's a welcome swap, and Prior lets the cane clatter in flavor of Dorian's arm without second thought.]

An hour and I'll be fine.

[In some version of the universe. He presses into Dorian's side, a warmer prop than the stick he's been toting around, and could probably fall asleep where he stands.]

But see? All that worry over nothing. [A hand extends, gracefully twisted in demonstration.] Not so much as a light frost.

[No return to cryofreeze for him]

[Dorian doesn't really do embraces of any kind. It just isn't something anyone does—not even his own family—unless they wanted to look vulnerable and show off that people can ruin them. Back home, in a rare instance where a young girl flung herself on him, he suddenly forgot his entire vocabulary. And how to move. And how to remove himself.

And yet taking a moment to put his arms around Prior and hug him as tightly (without hurting the poor man) as he can is one of the easiest things that's come to him. Maybe the past months here have made him lose his mind, or maybe he should have been doing more of this from the beginning. He doesn't know.]

I'm glad to hear it.

[Prior's family, likewise, weren't of the kind who considered emotion an appropriate thing to show. His father was gone and his mother hired various staff to touch him and save her the effort, so Prior grew up defiantly tactile and reaching for affection like a flower reaches toward the sun. Oh, he knows how to withhold it but it takes valid cause.

He's always thought the inability to show affection is more a display of vulnerability anyway. How to show easily what might make you crack. There's no such intent to damage Dorian as he takes the invitation and wraps round him like a boa.]

I fucked up, didn't I. Upset everybody - worried... and burned myself 'til I'm practically burned out, but I didn't know how else to make it stop.

Sometimes... Sometimes we have to burnt ourselves out to start anew. Sometimes that's all we can do. Of course we worried, but we understood. I understood.

[However brief these things are supposed to be to appropriate, he doesn't really care. He leans his head against Prior's and runs his thumb in soothing circles against his back, tuning out anything but how nice it feels to have another human so close. How grateful he is that he's still here.]

I think you're very brave, Prior.

[Oh screw appropriate, everyone's been to hell and back quite literally, there's no such thing anymore.]

I'm reckless, and I'm an idiot. But at least I know that.

[And there are ways in which it feels good to have done it. He's tired of how weak he's always taken to be, just because his body lets him down on every count. Of course, there are also ways in which he feels terrible. Mostly muscular. On that topic - without disentangling himself, he asks-]

Could we... horizontally?

[Yes, he's asking for a horizontal cuddle. If he can just lay down a little, Dorian - but also, don't go away.]

[At least he knows that. Dorian chuckles at that, but he won't dispute it as nonsense. There's no argument that bravery and stupidity are often the same difference.]

Only if you promise to stay longer than an hour. If you think I'd ever accept that, you really are an idiot.

[Said lightly, and teasingly. He disentangles himself enough to walk them to bed, pulling back the covers and lying back to make himself a makeshift pillow. Thank goodness he's not clad in his leather—it'd make for a terrible cuddling session.]

... Do you want to talk about it?

[At the very least an uncomfortably squeaky one. Prior's not really sure how Dorian walks in some of his clothes, but remains suitably impressed that he can.

He sits on the edge of the bed for a moment, making a slow and awkward job of at least taking his shoes off before crawling further onto the mattress. Dignity's a fickle dame thesedays, he hasn't seen her for weeks. If he doesn't sleep soon he won't make it back tonight, but there's only so long he can allow himself. Promises to keep, and miles to go before he - well, etc.

Though a little more than an hour, perhaps.]

I think I'll have to do nothing but talk about it with the next ten people I talk to. In short, Darma wouldn't want to put the poor torturers at any unfair disadvantage. It's a board game they're playing, and their rules are strict.

[He drapes an arm over him as he begins to settle, urging him back to the closeness of a moment ago, but much more comfortable. It isn't exactly silk sheets and a enough layers to battle the cold of the space station, but he finds it comfortable enough to keep from complaining. Especially with his current company.]

Oh, those poor torturers. They must have at least a few days time before I eviscerate them. [Well, he wouldn't go that far, but he's always been one for exaggerations.] It's like a rigged game of chess. We're all pawns, and everyone else are all queens.

I object to that description. Even a queen can be down on her luck - some would say it only makes us stronger.

[It takes him a moment to find a comfortable spot with an unfamiliar body - too aware of his own, all its sharp angles. But he settles eventually, head against Dorian's chest, his frustration audible in the catch of his breath.]

Their logic doesn't make sense. It's thwarting their own cause. They say they want peace down there, but they have all this power and they're using it to watch home movies. Horror movies. All they can see is what might go wrong under their interventions, so they'll watch everything burn, too afraid of flooding to turn on a hose.

[Dorian bends the elbow of the arm Prior's head enough to run his fingers through his hair, looking up at the ceiling. Prior uses so many words he just doesn't know, and it feels silly to try to know them. But maybe...]

Horror movies... [He repeats, then a sly grin comes across his face. Tozier was good for something after all, giving him the one reference he can make.] Like Alien? Is that how this is turning out?

[Tozier also has a strikingly similar frame of reference, where popular culture's involved. Not only a movie, but one that had hit at the perfect, early-twenties time to get just a little obsessed with it's mega-butch lead. Oh, Ripley.

He's tired enough to talk without tailoring his speech for one of the planet's ren faire folk, and it takes him a good twenty seconds to parse that something in the reply isn't quite adding up.

Like Alien. Well who knows, the way things are going. Prior narrows his eyes at Dorian.]

...Exactly like Alien. [His hand lifts, hovers ominously above them.] Why, any minute something terrible's going to attach itself to your face.

[Dorian’s eyes widen in turn, and he places his free hand where the creature would burst from in mock mortification. He glances between the suspensed hand and Prior’s face, as if actually pleading, but it’s evident he’s having a difficult time not laughing with the rise and fall of his chest.]

No, it can’t! It’ll rob you of my beautiful voice, and you won’t have a pillow when it bursts from my sternum.

[Oh so he knows about chestbursters too. That was a scene Prior might have moved on to later, but since it's where Dorian's begun -

His hand drops, sudden, fingertips walking up the seam of Dorian's ribs to where his own palm rests, catching loosely over the top.] Oh but there's worse. When the things hatch? They attach to your face and they won't let go. By the time someone carved one of those off you you'd never want a mirror again.

[Macabre, maybe, to be playing at this when he's seen people carved into by some flesh peeling induced sickness but it's almost a relief to play at horror and know it's not real. He pushes onto an elbow, enough to examine that well-sculpted silhouette Dorian's so proud of, and leans in close.]

Wait. I think I see something now. Hold still. [Still enough not to duck as Prior presses a kiss just to the corner of his mouth, drawing back with the slightest of satisfied smiles before starting to settle down again.] Who told you about Alien? I thought it was all mummers and folk dancing where you come from.

[It's difficult, holding still. It's abundantly clear where it's going from the start, and while Dorian certainly isn't opposed, he's a bit at a loss at how easy the entire exchange is. He's continuously in awe of the way Prior carries himself, even at the littlest of things. It's embarrassing, feeling like a schoolboy that doesn't know where to put his hands and say his words.

He doesn't find them right away (for once), opting to feign his shock with a soft gasp and fanning his poor, would-be marred face. Eventually he drops his head and turns his attention back to Prior, smiling despite himself, but only after he's certain there's no tell-tale color left in his face.]

My dear Prior, first, it is not all folk dancing. I did not live in the barbarous south—we had class, with our dancers in silk in the streets. Secondly, Richie told me the creatures slipped in with smooth jazz. I still haven't figured out what that means.

Still folk dancing, just a different folk. [He's sure it was all very cultured, really. With the dragons and the massacres, nothing Dorian's told him's ever sounded barbarous at all.] And don't let Ritchie play you jazz, it's music for people who enjoy suffering.

[He's smiling as he lays back, but the smile and the sentiment's a thin veneer and fades faster than he'd intended. Maybe it's the spent adrenaline dying in his system that gives way to a low-level dread, but there's a point where he can't lay in silence with it anymore.]

All this, and I don't think I can sleep.

Edited (Who the fuck is Jim ) 2018-04-03 05:57 (UTC)

[He laughs, entertaining the question of what the hell music for people who enjoy suffering would sound like for a moment. But like Prior's smile, it comes and goes far too quickly to say he's truly enjoying himself. Prior's company, of course, is a joy, but...

But the reason he's here—the reason they're both still on the station—still hangs in the air and makes it feel like the thing's trying to suffocate him. It's nearly on the level of discomfort of first arriving, being suspended in a moment that shouldn't be real but doesn't change when you shut your eyes and wait for things to go back to normal.]

Of course. Why would you sleep, when the man of your dreams is right here? [He starts, unable to resist a reflex to avoiding broaching anything else.] ... We'll make this work, somehow. It's what we do.

Do we? It's been months and I haven't seen much working yet. But that's not it. It is but.

[He hides his face against Dorian's shoulder, nudging out a small dark hollow where there's room to breathe.]

I've upset people. With this.

[Well, now it's hard to hold still because he wants Prior to be comfortable. At least that's significantly less complicated than marveling at a kiss. He shifts slightly, leaning his head against the top of his.]

I can imagine so. All those people who spoke to you care about you. But they won't be angry forever.

Care, but don't understand. Do you know, almost everybody I know here has come close to getting themselves killed one way or another. I wasn't even doing it intentionally. But because I'm – dying, there's an assumption I should take greater care. I've thought about it and I can't see how the opposite isn't true.

[It's far easier to spill this wrapped in the heat and scent and company of Dorian, but without looking him in the eye.]

I don't want to go back and be told I should have stayed still all along. Like I don't hear that from her every time I close my eyes.

[The her in question has yet to be introduced, at least directly. But she's tangled up in Prior all the time.]

[The mysterious She still terrifies Dorian, as much as he'd like to be over it. It's a stigma he'll get over eventually, he's sure, but he's witnessed the dangers of demons so many times that he has no idea to grasp the concept of equally shitty angels.

So instead, gently:]

There is a difference between parading off nobly after working out your intentions, and being a shit. I went off to save the world once, but it worried my father so terribly that he came down from his ivory tower to come see me since I hadn't explained myself. [Ahem.] ... It was out of nowhere. Prior. They can't understand if you slap them in the face with it and wander off. I saw the state of Byerly during it all, he... they're all still fragile.

And you think I was being a shit.

[Somewhat flat. Not that he has illusions of it being a noble quest (not coming from a world where such things are commonplace). But the number of people who seem to think he went into it for kicks is beginning to become wearying. It was hardly out of nowhere, the source at least must have been clear. People process trauma in different ways. Some sink low, Prior looks for a way to climb out. 'They're all still fragile' includes him too and he couldn't bear it without doing something.

He twitches a little, half decided on just leaving now, but then Dorian opens the door on a question that's been itching under his skin for days.]

You brought him out, didn't you? What had they done to him?

[Dorian feels the shift into discomfort, but he holds his tongue on correcting himself for the sake of Prior staying. It wasn't in his plan to get into the subject, because then he has to think about it, and it isn't so much of a door than it is a floodgate of screaming and death and wondering what all they did to them that he doesn't know. He has to focus or else he'll forget to say anything at all and look like a sad, pathetic idiot—]

I don't think you were being a shit, Prior, I just meant it comes off that way easily when they don't know any better. [He says first, to try and reign himself in. His voice is far too brittle for his liking.] They kept them awake for days. They cut, burned, broke them in all the ways they could, and when they finally were able to sleep it was the same thing all over again by some creature in the dark.

And we couldn't protect them from it, there. We couldn't wake them from the inside. [When he thinks the expression Byerly wore, his hands clench into fists. He didn't do enough to make sure they knew hell.] He... I've never seen him look like that. I never want to see him look like that again, it's not fair.

[Prior listens with his head tipped into the dark. He knows enough about the result: bandages wrapping Byerly's hands, bloodied and bad enough to need more than human healing could achieve. He knows about the days laying pale and unnaturally still, for all the world like he'd been tucked into an open coffin. It was enough to make him wonder if he'd been rescued from his own kidnappers at all, or if this was just another poison-tipped arrow to their bow.]

It had wings. The creature. Wings and claws and it moved like a hawk in the dark. [He'd caught glimpses not just from Byerly but others in the sanctuary who found the thing waiting again in sleep when they should have been safe. At first he'd taken it for another visitation of his own: wingbeats and screeching in the dark.] I woke him. Well, both of us really. It was either that or get stuck there too. So I woke him, but I don't know if I chased it off.

I watched a boy die to those claws. [He tries to say it casually, like talking about the weather that day. That was his philosophy when he cut down the perpetrators, wasn't it? Everyone dies? It feels silly, having such a difficult time talking about it. He had no great qualms about the wounds he sustained from the thing—great long marks down his back—and most of them had lived, so it should be fine.] One of the other gentleman carried him off, but his wound...

[He trails off, his eyes unfocused as he stares out toward the ceiling.] I don't know what I would have done, if he'd remained there. You... You saved Byerly better than any of us did.

I don't think anybody's saved yet.

[Prior surfaces, his chin on Dorian's shoulder probably a little sharp to be comfortable. He's reddened his eyes with rubbing at them, but that's all.]

He'll wake up, too. The boy who - they told me they'll all wake up. Like it's a compensation clause: one free vehicle if the old one's beyond repair.

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why would you use that icon against me.

idk what you're talking about.

blocked and reported.

you don’t deserve him ig

sad but true

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who the fuck IS jim

Damn my true identity revealed

first catgate... now this... my heart can't handle it...

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