(D2 - LE) Honeycomb Home (Closed)

[Cyprian Kircheis]

"Before meeting you I never thought about it. Never cared to know what lies beyond this life." He smiles warmly, softly tracing her finger with his thumb. "You're the best influence I've had in my life since I was a child, Akh."

"I'm not exactly a good person," he thinks of how he's lived, "I'm not evil but I've done things that I'm not altogether proud of." He frowns, "I've certainly still got hedonistic tendencies and poor influences in my life. My pride still rears its head on occasion. But..." he struggles for a moment, "... when I sit here with you I- I start to think that this is fine. That maybe a simple life is just what the doctor ordered."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

"This thought probably needs to gestate for a bit before you can tell whether it is true for you, Cyprian. After all, it has something to do with my influence, and influences tend not to last." She reached out with her fingers to his cheek, stroking it gently. "You know, this statement about being or not being good, it's a misleading figure of speech. Goodness is not a quality you possess, but a behaviour you can choose, and keep choosing. In the past, I also did foul things to survive and the fact that I did them mostly mindlessly, giving in to the curse, without recollection of the harm I had done and so without ways to atone, keeps excruciating me. But at some point I resolved not to, and the philosophy of the Dead has helped me to give sense to choosing kindness, empathy and trust even though the universe isn't too keen on appreciation or reciprocity. My goal to reunify my soul may never be fulfilled, so the least I can do to give some merit to my continued existence in the form is to make the path toward it something better than a cruel, selfish romp."

[Cyprian Kircheis]

He listens with soft eyes, leaning into her touch.

"There's so much about you that I wish to understand." HIs hands caress and trace her form. "When you... you know." He grins. "What do I taste like? Is it different from how I enjoy blood? Or is it simply a feral desire overriding your sense of taste?" He moves in closer. "Is there a name for what you are? Do you have a way of tracing the scattered parts of yourself? Can you feel what they feel, or know how much of you there is left?"

His hands find her cheek.

"Where are you from? Who were you before? I want to know it all."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

"All, you say? Then let it be all."

After a heavy pause pressing her eyelids shut, she started talking...

[PM incoming]

[Cyprian Kircheis]

He listened thoughtfully. Words like Illumian, and all the places and locations mentioned didn't exactly register. They were foreign words with foreign meanings, and as a consequence he simply nodded. But hearing her plight with the rogue, and that whore-son Rahadin's name again, well that definitely registered emotion. He held her when the telling delved into the darkened horror of her circumstances. His hatred towards Strahd was rekindled, and his fury burned brightly as Strahd's crimes became opaque.

And then the rest of it. A clearer understanding of her worries, of concepts that he still couldn't fathom. The fate of the other one, the other her. The missing fragment? It didn't make sense. He listened, and consoled, and waited. Then she finished.

For a brief time he sat with her in silence. All he could do was process it all. And not just what he'd heard here and now. But all of it. Things that Akh's body had told him during their time together. Their earlier conversations. It all made a dreadful sort of sense. "I'm-" He swallowed, "-I've never wished to be something other than I am more fiercely than I do now." He winced. "I feel as though I'm a grim irony sent to plague you. And yet all I wish to do is hold you and give you all the kindness you've been denied."

He lowered his eyes.

"I'm so sorry Akh. If you would be rid of me you need only say it and I'll go."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

She arrived from her numbness she had fallen into having finished unfurling the scroll of her life

"And why would I want that, Cyprian? Is anything that befell me your responsibility? For you to think I have told you all that to incite your pity and remorse, to victimise? If there is any residue of anger in me, it is at the Convent which had shaped me to be oh so knowledgeable and yet so patently stupid."

Her hands indeed balled.

"It is weird to have told you all that. This is actually a first... You have yet to harm me, Cyprian. It is your choice if you will. But it may be really hard to impose any greater torment on me than I have already been through. Also because there is very little in me that can be diminshed more, nor anything I would not give up for a prospect of True Death for the whole of me."

She opened the translucent mist of her eyes before him for him to see everything, nothing, anything.

[Cyprian Kircheis]

To the first question. "Umm...
To the second question. "Well, no..."
To the third question. "No, no of course not. I-"

He listened and felt numb himself. "Akh... my point is I would never willfully hurt you, ever. But I... even though you say I haven't. I fear that I may have, and continue to do so, without ever actually meaning to." His eyes did something that visibly shocked him. They started leaking fluid. "Oh, forgive me." His face contorted in agony but he really tried to make it stop. "Well this is annoying." He said attempting to stem the tide with his sleave.

"This whole thing is frustrating." He said giving up. "All of it. I want to help but feel unable to. I want to understand these concepts but I just can't. How is a person broken into pieces and scattered? How do these pieces wind up in other people? And can be reabsorbed?"

He sniffed.

"This is annoying." He said, tears still flowing for the first time in his memory. "And this concept of true death. I wish I truly understood it but I don't, and that's likely the problem." He wiped his eyes with his hands. "I can't articulate how I feel with adequate cohesion. My schooling was insufficient. I even read your books but still- dammit!" He said exasperated. "This is annoying."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

She reached out to embrace him and kiss his head in gentle intermissions. She could imagine having certain emotions now but she was incapable of feeling them.

"I am sorry I have made you partake in my own helplessness. You are absolutely right, Cyprian. What happened to me is incomprehensible, frustrating, and annoying, among other things. I've been trying to address it for a long time but it looks less and less like a problem I can solve and more and more like a curse I must accept. It's a bleak unlife, Cyprian. Perhaps you should consider not stepping into it to deeply by following a shadow of a woman who is too husked out to give you what you seek."

[Cyprian Kircheis]

The average listener might find his tone of voice confusing. Except for the irritation he was speaking pretty normally. He wasn't sobbing the way a human might. Of course he didn't understand why he was being affected this way either. Regarding emotions - In the past he'd known heartbreak, he'd felt helpless, he'd been furious. He'd known agony, grief, frustration, embarrassment, fear. All of these emotions and more. He'd known them but never had them hit him all at once like this. And only his face or voice had ever registered them then. But this is new...

"Crying is uncomfortable. I don't like it." He griped, "It's getting in the way of what I want to say. Which is..."

And what did he want to say? I love you? I don't care that you're a shadow of the woman you were once? How would he know? It's not like he understands what love is. Did he care that she's a husk now? No, but at some point he might. And what if she regained her soul, would she grow to hate him? What of the time he'd invest? The feelings? Could he bear it?

These thoughts bounced around in his mind as he spoke, and then the pause. "...which is."

'Which is? Which is? Is? What? What do I want to say? To say? I want to say...'

"That I don't care." He said finally. "I don't care if you never love me. I don't care about those animals in your past. They're dead and we're mostly alive. May the soil lie light upon them." He shrugged as the tears began to ebb. "I don't care how long it takes, even if it takes all eternity and I wither and die before you achieve reunification." He dried his eyes. "Stupid tears." He sniffed. "If you'll let me I'll stay by your side. Though I imagine if we did enter into something more formal than casual feasting. Well you've seen my memories. You know what you'd be getting."

He heaved a sigh.

"You don't even have to answer right now. Or at all, just tell me to leave and I'll go." He trembled a little as the goosebumps set in. "That's all I want to say really." He adds with a grin. "And who knows. Maybe if you're attracted to me, your other selves are too. Perhaps I can act as Akh bait."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

She listened to him intently, employing all her empathy to understand his emotions, and tried to find a way to respond to them. His display of what she thought was affection tugged at her senses and made her lean into him even before he'd finish speaking.

"I won't tell you to leave even though I am unsure what it means that you stay, Cyprian. Your commitment may become insufferable for you at some point if you don't receive from me what you expect of such a... bond? I don't know if I can be your joy, but I know I don't want to be your regret."

She bit her lip slightly, something she hadn't done in a very long time.

"Is it fine how it is now? You and me here, every day?"