etoileobscure

[etoileobscure]

✧ psa: going on a trip until August 15th so will be mobile only until then! sadly, I don't plan on doing much writing on mobile. but find me on disco or chat with me here. I'll be around !

[etoileobscure]

the portal's chroma flickers in his peripheral vision like blood in water, and the shape of the nevron stepping through sends every instinct in his marrow thrumming like a war drum - until he clocks its gait, the two figures that slide from its back. (not a threat.) he watches from the shadowed incline where he had been resting, hunched and massive, the tension rolls off him like heat, and his one remaining hand flexes, chroma pulsing dully along the seams.

the air does not change when rook enters; that is how he knows something is wrong - no bloom of warmth that dares the abyss to lift its head, no flicker in the stale chroma that once responded to rook's presence like a plant to sun. rook is not running to him, not smiling, not babbling some irreverent story or tugging a journal free from his coat with a laugh that cut through the abyss like breath through fog. simon has memorised that pulse, how rook would come bearing journals, paintings and seeds, with the foolish idea that you could coax a ghost back to life with sound and soil and care; and he had let him, had allowed the voice to echo, allowed himself to be touched, to be seen - had been remade not by paint or fire but by rook's relentless belief in something gentle beneath the monster. rook had walked into the abyss and carved a clearing in the dark for him.

simon rises, slow and towering, the glint of gold tracing old scars across his pallid skin. he casts no shadow in the abyss - he is the shadow - and yet something inside him trembles as the gestral speaks, and it is not fear that simon feels, but futility.

(he died. and I wasn't there.)

he stares at rook now, tucked behind flocon's flank like a stranger behind a curtain, and the ache in simon's chest is not poetic - it is ugly, bitter, shot through with shame. the abyss inside him roils; he could have torn the creature apart that did it - he would have. something inside him flares - hope, yes, but sharp-edged and violent with grief; because the rook who once touched him like he wasn't a weapon had died - and simon had not been there to protect him, hadn't known. and now, whatever the river returned was not whole.

his glowing eyes shift back to trouble, and his expression is darker now, hollowed by guilt; there is no anger there, only the dim ache of knowing what it is lose someone precious.

"I will help." he says at last, though his voice nearly fractures on the vow, scraped raw by agonising silence.

"--but he may not come back the way you knew him."

(I didn't.)

his voice gentles by degrees; "I know you did what you could. I know you brought him back. and I'm-- grateful. truly."

but it sounds like grief.

when he finally moves towards rook, it is not fast nor looming, but like a man still catching his breath. the great titan of the abyss comes to kneel, and reaches out to offer his help as rook once offered his. "rook." he says, trying not to falter, "do you remember me? simon. the one you kept a garden for here."

and still, his heart pounds: if he doesn't remember - if he never does - what is he supposed to do with everything he's awakened in him?

Starter for @etoileobscure

There's a ripple in the Abyss, a swirl of chroma, before a familiar Nevron bursts through the portal and skitters to a stop. Flocon settled by it as the two figures on their back slide off, Trouble and Rook, but even without approaching Simon it is clear something is different; wrong. Whenever Rook had entered previously there would be a slight shift in the very air of the Abyss, the storm inside him almost like it would breathe fresh life into a space that never saw it.

That was absent now.

Trouble is the one to approach Simon's large figure, dwarfed by it but the gestral showed no fear as was common with his kind. He knew Simon, not as well as Rook as the journey here was perilous, but he knew that Rook trusted him and cared for him. Rook remained by Flocon, practically hiding behind his friend when usually he'd be bouncing right up to Simon excitedly with some gift or another.

"Hi, Simon!" Trouble greeted him warmly though there was an obvious jitter to his nerves, able to speak their language after years of being with Rook. "Before you freak out Rook is okay. He wasn't but he is now! Well, sort of. He died but the Sacred River brought him back! He's just maybe kinda of forgotten a lot but that's normal! I thought bringing him here would help, he talks about you a lot so I was thinking maybe..."

Trouble looked down, a break in his exuberance. "I need help. I'm not... Humans think very differently to gestrals. He's scared. I'm not used to him being scared."

[etoileobscure]

✧ 5 to go! sorry I'm being slow, I'm also trying to keep on top of my inbox lmao

✧ if we haven't interacted yet, like this post and I will send you a pre-fracture lumière or expedition 0 starter !!

[etoileobscure]

it lands on him like ash - light, and then smothering. I love you. it is not the first time he's heard those words from him, but it is the first time he's heard them with time's rust clinging to their edges, spoken across a chasm carved by corruption and years. something inside him heaves and then splinters, something brittle and dry that has not moved in decades, that might have once been a heart.

the touch sears through him with the unbearable gentleness of memory made flesh, and simon shudders, breath caught, as if his undeserving skin had forgotten softness, as if his very bones flinched from that old familiarity after so many years of being untouched and untethered. the hand on his face is warm, living - it does not recoil from the ravaged terrain of him, the molten gold of his chroma scars, the torn seams of what remains of his once handsome features, glinting like a cracked reliquary in the half-light. verso touches him as though he is worth mourning. his jaw tenses beneath the palm, and he watches verso speak. it's like looking through stained glass underwater, a vision he cannot hold in his hands. the man before him is not a stranger, but simon feels as though he's peering at him across a vast and haunted distance, the kind grief carves. and still, he loves him, like ghosts love the bodies they once had - with terrible hunger and no tongue to speak it.

love is a language he remembers only by the echo it left in him - as though once, long ago, he had been built entirely of it, and it were the very first thing the abyss tried to strip from him, and failed. because when everything else had dissolved - even his own name - it was verso's voice that lingered faintly in the murk of his mind: not as sound, but as tether, a light glimpsed once behind his eyes before the void flooded in again. and simon clung to it like driftwood in a storm - not because it promised rescue, but because it meant he had been someone once, somewhere.

the void does not permit softness. it stripped it from him and left behind only murderous duty. and yet-- here is verso, and now he's flesh and voice, speaking like orpheus at the mouth of hell, begging nothing of him but giving everything, trembling and furious and still desperately, barely alive. simon feels unmoored all over again, he does not know what to do with love when it is given back to him unearned and undeserved. he is a ruin razed by dark fire, smoke rising, the still embers burning - but beneath all that, the foundation holds. love, for simon, has always been almost violent in its constancy. he would die for verso again, and again, and again, and it would never be enough.

his eclipsed gaze drifts over his face - that beloved wreckage of a man, weary of life but still burning with the same impossible light, even after everything.

"… je t’ai aimé, même dans le noir." (I loved you ... even in the dark.)

(you were the one thing that stayed. the weight of you inside my chest.)

he says at last. with a shuddering breath, simon rests his forehead gently against verso's, and for the first time in sixty-seven years, he lets himself trust something other than his own sword.

"'mon âme est un tombeau que, mauvais cénobite, depuis l’éternité je parcours et j'habite.'" (my soul is a tomb and I, a wicked anchorite, have paced its corridors and lived within its blight.)

baudelaire understood what it meant to be damned, to be patched together by sorrow and kept alive only by the memory of a name; he fears he cannot yet return gently what was offered; but he can carry it, he can let it rest against his breast like the vestiges of the man he used to be.

"I don't know if I'm still the man you loved. but if any part of him remains ..." his voice catches, raw and breathless; "--and if you stay here, then ... I am ever yours."

simon lifts his trembling, chroma-scarred hand and lays it gently over verso's.

The hand on his shoulder feels like it may break him, and not because of the weight or grip of it. The idea of what it means, a touch he’d grieved so long ago: a lifetime ago, by any measure. A touch that was once equal parts fierce and sure, careful and tending, relentless and powerul, guiding and steady. A touch that he still remembers with a sharp clarity, and in a thousand contexts: teaching, guiding in swordplay; the brush of fingers against him as a book or drink was passed his way; bruising, deliciously relentless in bed, taking him to dizzying heights and bringing him back again; the softer care of after; the strength wrapped in Expedition golds and charcoal. 

But now it’s so light as to barely touch, and he’s not the same man he was then, either. That light touch falls on him and he simultaneously feels like something enduring, something already broken. 

You’re here. Those words startle him, snap pale, pale eyes up to search those shadowed depths for something, something, anything. They look for a shadow of the man he knew, a shade of anything left, and those words make his heart hammer so hard in his chest he can hear it in his ears. 

What does hope feel like? He’s forgotten. The only hope he’s felt in years has been the hope of his own oblivion, and that’s the kind of hope that doesn’t feel like hope at all. 

" I am. " And his voice rasps thick in his throat, tight, as though filtered through gravel and years of grief. His own hand lifts: knuckles creased, grime and dirt so buried in the age-old cracks in his skin as to have become part of him. Nails blunt and ragged. Bruised knuckles, but no scars, because his immortality heals them all aside from the ones he refuses to heal because he keeps them as reminder.

He lays his hand on Simon’s chest, then, and they should by any right quiver with uncertainty but they’re steady, so steady, a thumb tracing the very edge of the Expedition jacket that he had memorized every corner of. It matched his own, once, for however patched and piecemeal his is now. 

" I didn’t want to be. " The admission comes sudden, his chest burning. " Merde, I didn’t want to be. After so many fucking years, I’m so —— "  But he grits his teeth, swallowing the words. His gaze ducks, and finds —— his arm. The wreckage there, the flowing gold of the armband, the rippling chroma, and he feels dizzy. He’s long lost the ability to be surprised by injury, by the horrors that happen here — numb to it all, passing death and disfigurement and all kinds of horrors between with only that numb understanding. 

But the sight of what was made of his lover makes bile raise in his throat. His hand slides, and — he’s still bold, still unafraid, like some part of him has slid back sixty seven years to when he knew every part of Simon’s body like he had painted it himself. It stops just at the crest of the zero 'pon that golden band, a zero that he’s sick of seeing because it heralded the end of everything for him, a zero that brings him back with such dizzying memory that he wishes he could go back. 

" But I’m here, " he breathes, and his chest feels like it’s on fire. " And you’re here, and, " his teeth grit, and he’s too fucking proud to weep, isn't he? It burns in his eyes but he’s furious at it, furious at himself, because he’s not the one who was torn apart here. 

Breathe, breathe, air like fire. 

His hand curls into a fist, and he presses it against Simon’s chest again; grounding, grounding. " It’s not fair. What she did to you. What he did —— " A shaky breath inhaled, let out slow; he fights his emotion like a war, and a war he’s losing. " I, " and he forces his gaze steady, this man who has always worn so many masks to hide behind but right now he’s so stripped bare, just like he’s ever always been with them, " love you. " And his voice cracks under the edges, and his teeth grit in response. " I always did. I always have. Merde, I always will. " 

And so: he sets a hand on the side of Simon’s face, cautious against the horrific damage he’s endured. " So I didn’t want to be here. " He smiles, then, crooked and brittle and still yet containing an old whisper of who he used to be, " But you being here makes me glad I am. "

[etoileobscure]

[etoileobscure]

✧ stop me from reblogging and sending in memes until I've caught up

[etoileobscure]

art by alan reynaud

[etoileobscure]

❛ Even monsters need love. ❜ (here's my verse link to make it easier!)

✧ what, if not a monster? - accepting

the manor breathes with the memory opulence, its halls steeped in candlelight and memory - where even the walls remember grief in gold leaf. he's watching the amber-soft fire, or perhaps just the shadows it casts - brittle things, dancing like ghosts around them. his one arm rests over a raised knee, the other nothing now but a decaying memory swaddled in linen. her words reach him like a muffled echo, and something in him flinches in recognition. he knows the cadence of kindness when he hears it, it always feels like drowning.

for a long time, he says nothing - he finds no response to mercy. beneath the quiet, thoughts churn - slow, black tides of tar in the hollow of his chest. monsters. yes, that word fits him too well, slides neatly into the groove the abyss left behind. he remembers how to kill, how to forget, how to survive until survival becomes its own cage. he remembers his hands slowly deteriorating beneath the drying, matted paint, the shape of remorse swallowed whole. and now, she speaks plainly to him - not in fear nor in pity, it seems - just … truth, raw. and he doesn't know what to do with that.

"monsters devour what loves them." he murmurs at last, his voice a low rasp.

(they forget how to hold without breaking. how to be held without recoiling.)

his eyes remain fixed on the firelight, old mimicry of stars, gliding over the wreckage of the present. the imagery comes to mind, unbidden - not just his, not wholly. once, in another life, he had read poetry in the darkest hours, tracing each line delicately, like a blade's edge. in those days, before tragedy and madness swallowed him whole, he'd written too - scrawled in margins and scrap, little offerings to no one in particular. he'd read keats under scaffolding, let dante's ghosts climb his spine, whispered baudelaire to bricks cooling under the sun. he had marvelled at blake's dark symmetry, how even angels could be monstrous in the right light. he knew how poetry moved, how it breathed - a kind of magic that didn't need chroma to reshape a soul. it had shown him how to see, how express how he felt.

but now he fears what might still live inside him, fears that everything tender has been excised from his jagged memories. he used to think poetry could make anything beautiful - even the broken, the hideous, the beasts.

(but he doesn't know if any stanza could hold him now.)

he turns then, finally, gaze catching her expression - warmth in the gloom; it scorches him more than any sun ever could.

"but-- thank you, ros. perhaps there is a reason I am still here, after all. not ... love, but usefulness."

[etoileobscure]

she speaks like someone laying flowers on a grave - reverent, yet stubborn in her belief that something beautiful still lives beneath the cold soil. too gentle for the ruin he has become. her voice trickles through the cracks in him, unafraid, as though it might fill the hollow marrow if it lingers long enough. he doesn't interrupt her - just stands there, one arm still braced against the dead archway as if it might collapse without him.

his face is half-shadow, the gold seams catch the light as she talks of kintsugi, and something in his chest tightens, slow and serrated. he has never heard of japan or kintsugi - foreign words, like dreams he was never meant to have - but he listens all the same, as he always does when maelle speaks; her voice reminds him of before the abyss reshaped him into a thing of violence, before memory was a wound he walked around bleeding out. and while the names mean nothing to him, he understands the tender respect with which she speaks of broken things made beautiful again.

but even so, it feels like a story for someone else. maelle talks of pottery made precious by damage, and all he can think of is how the abyss did not gild him - it flayed him raw and filled the gaps with rot; he does not feel repaired, he feels rigged together, still thrumming with the directive to kill echoing at the base of his skull like a second heartbeat. the only thing the abyss has taught him is to forget what he was made for before the breaking, that the fissures are all that ever were. he remembers the long silence beneath the world, where time and colour collapsed, where he became nothing more than an eclipsed blade. how many times had he struck down shades wearing the faces of those he failed to save? how many times had he let himself believe that if he just kept killing, he might finally undo it all?

and yet - her hand in his is so small, so soft - insistent and grounding; the way alicia's once was when she would reach up, asking him to lift her on his shoulders. it fits in his like a leaf falling into a crater. instinct would bid him to crush it, to shatter this whole moment like porcelain; but he does not, for she holds him with the strength of hope - that terrifying, sacred thing that he thought had been cauterised out of him.

(he was made for war. and when the war ends, things like him don't get put back on shelves.)

his throat works slowly. "alicia ... would have liked that." he mutters, voice almost lost to the wind, a sound barely human anymore. "always had a kind word, no matter what." but her name, it echoes too loud in his fractured mind.

he closes his glowing eyes, not because he is comforted, but because he fears what might slip through if he looks at maelle too long. but she remains, carrying light between their palms like it might not burn. he wants to tell her she's wrong, that molten gold won't make him whole, that he is not something special, only something left. instead, he lets her keep her story.

(maybe if he lets her believe it, it might find a home in him yet.)

"thank you, for your words. for believing I ---deserve to exist."

(for all that you do for this doomed world.)

@etoileobscure II Continued from here: xXXx

Being a Paintress had never been a dream of Alicia's, back when she had been at home under the guidance of her family though she participated in her Maman's lessons and sat at the easel with a brush in hand just like her siblings had it hadn't been her calling. The youngest Dessendre loved art in different ways, choosing to admire the writings about the great sculptors, weavers, and crafters that inhabited her world. History and its lessons had enchanted the young teen and gave light to her imagination to teach her about how new perspectives could offer greater insights than just taking inspiration from one source, but also how stories of the past could teach them to move forward into the future.

When Maelle looked upon Simon she is reminded of the history she had read, one that was all too fitting for the once-lost man of Expedition 0 who thought of himself as broken and could only view his appearance as the damage that had been inflicted on him. "But you will, you are finding it." Gentle insistence said through a soft smile as her hand carefully grasped his, hers being so petit that it is dwarfed by Simon's but it does not bother nor frighten her.

The man's pallor skin had been pieced together with veins of gold overtime by many a Dessendre hand, her own work lies among the tapestry of his skin along with Clea's. The eldest of the Paintress sisters that had inflicted such cruelty upon a soul Maelle knew was filled with a kindness that shined brighter than the darkness which threatened to seep through the cracks in his hardened exterior.

"Have you ever heard of Kintsugi?" Inquiry is accompanied with a tilt of her head as curiosity laced her tone, "It's a concept from a country called Japan where they would repair broken pottery with precious metals, usually gold." For a moment she wonders if the names of these otherworldly places sound as foreign and magical to the Lumierans as Wonderland and Camelot had when she read about them in fairytales, but that was a question for another time.

"The history of the technique is very fascinating and I always thought it was cool how they would repurpose old pieces but the most wonderful thing about it is the lesson it can teach us about life." Warmth fills her gaze as her eyes meet the old warrior's stare, hoping that he'll understand what she sees in him as Maelle wants him to feel as brave and brilliant as she knows he can be.

"It teaches us that our history and imperfections are not things we need to hide but rather that they make us unique. The gold filling the cracks highlights our hardships and flaws and embraces them as something that makes us special." Scars of her own fill her memories, recalling the impression and wounds the flames had imprinted on her. Alicia too had found solace in the pottery based metaphor.

"There's something wonderful to see in how we renew and repair ourselves, that we learn to love those damaged parts of ourselves and how resilience wins out in the end." A gesture of her head is made towards the city they both stand in, one that was rebuilding and though it would never be the same it was healing and showing strength in the face of adversity. "There's beauty in the broken, and I think you've shown that you too can embrace both your resilience and your past to become something special and new."

[etoileobscure]

simon's breath stutters, the way an organ forgets how to function after too long submerged, as gustave's voice ripples through him, enough to stir the decay that coils inside him. the question hangs in the air like a snare not yet sprung, catching somewhere in the cage of his ribs. he stares at his own hand, fingers splayed, chroma scars pulsing in and out of coherence - cruel paintstrokes, burned into corrupted flesh. where his left arm once was, the linen binds sag, stiff with dried ichor, the stump beneath necrotic and half-sealed; sometimes he thinks he can still feel it - phantom aches that curl like claws. his body is now an archive of agony: veins that burn with leaking chroma, skin webbed in craquelure like porcelain glued with gold that won't stay still. he is beautiful in the way ruins are - haunting, vast and crumbling.

(he may be out of the abyss, but the rot festers still.)

he doesn't remember the last time someone asked him what he wanted. the abyss has taught him the anatomy of want: he wants silence, and the warmth of bodies nearby. he wants to be left alone, and also not - he wants someone to touch his shoulder and promise he's real; he wants gustave to go, and he wants them to stay. the contradiction gnaws at him like wire pulled tight against bone. but want is a luxury half-forgotten: for sixty-seven years he obeyed and fought savagely. and now that directive has shifted, somehow, rerouted by the fragile grace of those who pulled him up from the void.

he watches gustave in silence for a spell, eyes like twin eclipses ringed with fever-glow, sharp and glassy, studying them. "no." he says at last, raw-edged. "don't go." and then, the voice quietens to something almost human: "--not unless you want to."

the fire dances somewhere behind them, casting their shadows long and fractured. simon doesn't look away from gustave, he sees the way they brace, the way their weight shifts with caution masked as calm; they expect violence, and the fact that they're right makes something in simon twist. the abyss has left its watermark in him, still claws at the base of his skull like hunger, whispering algorithms of annihilation - fight, break, silence; not out of rage but ritual that could pass for purpose. there's a cruel logic to it, and he fears that next time it will make sense; gustave standing there, weathered yet calm, speaking of something so mundane and forgotten as settling in - feels like both like a temptation and a test.

"perhaps I do deserve it. but I'm trying." he mutters, though he doesn't know if it's a confession or a warning. "and if you see me slipping … just do it. blade to throat."

a grim expression drapes across his mien, an oath passed in reverse; "you've got the hand for it." and even as the abyss grasps at the edges of him, he thinks that perhaps gustave might be able to see more than what the abyss made - to understand that request.

the chatter of camp behind them is too much, sometimes. after days of recovery, of solstice, of teetering near death like a balancing act on the gestral beaches. but there's no laughter, there's no clamor hum chatter of salt spray when they fall and tumble and drag each other out again. no, this is — this is finality. a wrong foothold and down down down into darkness. gustave remembers stories of the sea being so black and dark at the bottom where light does not touch.

( gustave knows that, the claws of it, the temptation to sleep forever only to be jostled awake by a stranger's hand on the flat of their chest. not a stranger, verso, but a stranger then and less now. )

"to what? suffer in the black until you rot?" gustave asks, paces away, a careful distance. enough to prepare to swing should simon lash out. gustave knows better, now, than to trust right away. "no one deserves that." fingers clasp behind back, metal around flesh, cold against cool skin.

gustave doesn't remember becoming flint, becoming that steel, steadfast, and inmoving. grief does funny things, they suppose.

"would you, ah..." a pause, the bravo faltering, posture fleeting under the reminder of clashing blades and singing metal. "... like me to leave? i just wanted to ensure you were settling well."

[etoileobscure]

you were shorter then.

✧ established connection - accepting

the crates were heavier than they had any right to be - lumièrien stock, lacquered wood reinforced with chroma-blended metal. simon hoisted one without much ceremony, arms flexing as he adjusted the grip. beside him, verso wrestled with the latch on another, until it finally gave with a sharp snap and a puff of dust. they thudded into the dirt one by one, weightier with dread than supplies, yet simon set them down with the ease of someone used to burden, muscles shifting beneath the worn linen of his sleeves, breath slow and even. he dried the sweat off his brow and unstuck strands of his black hair with the back of his glove, his exhale briefly misting the early dusk air. the continent out there felt wrong - too stretched, warped, like all the rules they'd ever known had been mercilessly rewritten.

he rubbed his palms against his trousers, straightened, and caught verso watching him with pale eyes that recalled memory; the younger man's quip broke through the hopeless tension, suddenly and blessedly ordinary, and simon felt infinitely grateful for it - he blinked then laughed, a quiet and genuine huff of it. it was comforting to find they could still remember the good, simpler days, despite everything that followed that cursed fracture.

"--or maybe you were just taller in your dreams." he replied, brushing a smudge of dirt from his expedition armband as his sharp gaze swept over the camp they were setting up on their commander's orders. "I seem to recall having to carry you halfway down the academy stairs when you sprained your ankle that one winter."

he turned back to the next crate, but there was a warmth spreading at the back of his neck - just the soft echo of an old friendship, unexpected and a little tender, more so in those dire times they were living. his lips curled, unguarded, as he muttered, "--besides, if I remember right, I still had to bend down to hear you."

the plumbeous skies above them fractured with distant veins of ominous stormlight, but here on the ground, there was just dust, effort, banter; for a moment it almost felt like home, though they were they furthest from it they'd ever been.

[etoileobscure]

d, n, y ;)

✧ nsfw alphabet - accepting.

✧ D - dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

pre - abyss simon secretly fantasises about being worshipped - not necessarily praise, but being touched thoroughly. he'd never ask for it, but the idea of being slowly undressed, guided to lie back, and taken care of, every inch of his body kissed, every groan drawn out with exquisite care - will drive him wild. he imagines it when he's alone, face flushed and breath caught in his throat, ashamed of how badly he wants to be wanted. he's spent so long being in control, holding himself like a blade, that he sometimes imagines the gasp, the sting of surrender, someone else's hand in his hair, voice in his ear, making him submit to pleasure.

post - abyss he gets off on the idea of dragging someone over the edge until they break for him - until they're shaking, begging, overstimulated and marked; not just claiming - branding. he'll pull out last second just to finish all over them, anywhere it'll show - watch it drip, smear it with his hand. he doesn't always recognise this part of himself until it's too late, when he's pressing his weight down and growling into their skin, watching their eyes go hazy under him - but he needs it because it's proof he's still real, that they're real.

✧ N - no (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

pre - abyss simon refuses anything that feels mocking or performative. he dislikes the idea of it especially in vulnerable moments. he does not tolerate humiliation - receiving or inflicting it. degradation or cruelty are not his cup of tea, he will shut it down at once, no matter how tempting the offer. even at his most dominant, intimacy is rooted in reverence - he wants them to tremble because they're overstimulated and cherished. he also avoids group sex or public exposure - physical closeness is private for him; he wouldn't share it with someone unless he trusted them with everything.

post - abyss he doesn't have many turn-offs, once he gets going. but even if he's desperate and starved for connection, feral and broken, if a partner is emotionally absent or treats him like a monster on purpose, he'll shut down - he might still finish, quick and rough, but it'll be a cold act, and that emptiness echoes too close to the abyss. he needs presence, or he'll spiral.

✧ Y - yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

pre - abyss he has a strong and steady sex drive, deep and always simmering. but for simon it's not just about physical need - it's about connection, and when he loves someone, he craves them like a rhythm he can't stop listening to. he won't initiate constantly, but when the moment feels right, he's intensely present, full of heat and intention.

post - abyss it surges like a flood, unpredictable and sometimes overwhelming; he'll go days unbothered by desire, then suddenly crave touch like oxygen. he'll tear someone's clothes off in a fit of desperation, panting, grinding, chasing sensation like it's the only thing that anchors him. sometimes he feels monstrous for it, but often, it's one of the few times he feels alive, capable of anything other than killing.

[etoileobscure]

a thing for @decapitr !

paris had grown gaunt with unrest, its bones creaking under ink-soaked proclamations and shuttered ateliers. the café was dim, its lamps clouded with smoke and cheap perfume - an absinthe den more than a brasserie, tucked behind montmartre's better-known addresses. the pianist was three drinks deep and playing something vaguely like chopin, though the keys often stuck and the tempo wandered. simon nursed a glass of watered down wine, boots heavy on the cracked tile, coat still damp from the late march rain. it wasn't his usual haunt, but he'd heeded a sculptor friend on a whim; (come on, simon, you look like a ghost, you need a drink or two and a nice girl with an empty ring finger.)

the drink he found easily - the girl simply wasn't on the menu for him. he'd just leaned back into the shadowed corner when the door creaked again, and in came the shape of a man who moved like he didn't expect to be noticed - tall, slim, straight-backed, perhaps a little too clean for the place. simon almost dismissed him until he caught the profile in the flicker of gaslight - that unmistakable split gaze: one eye a piercing blue, the other warm brown. no one else had eyes like that - not then, not now.

"alan?"

the name slipped out before he could temper it. recognition bloomed across his face like warmth returning to frost-bitten fingers, and for a breath it felt like the years folded in on themselves. simon rose and crossed the room, smoke curling at his heels; he slowed just before reaching him, meeting him in the middle. his hand found alan's shoulder with quiet certainty, the way one might greet an old friend who had nearly slipped from memory. it was him, beyond a doubt - older and haunted at the eyes, a veteran trying not to be seen, civility hanging loose on him like a borrowed coat; but the eyes were the same, even if the rest wasn't: in a flash, he saw the boy who once grinned at him and whispered silly jokes during fencing lessons, when their mentor wasn't looking.

his voice was low but warm, threaded with disbelief. "it is you. come on - sit with me."

then simon offered him a drink, a seat, and half of his bread roll.

"you look like hell." simon noted, and somehow it sounded like affection. "but it's good to see you still standing."

they had trained under the same swordmaster once, sparred until their arms ached, fingers littered with blisters and callouses, and the distant hope that art could defend a soul. then, simon had gone to the builder's guild, alan had gone to war; behind the strength and the discipline, simon had stayed soft in the places alan had to sharpen. he'd grown far stronger in the years since, thick with muscle from stone and scaffold, but this strength felt borrowed from another life, never meant for killing.

they slid into a corner booth where the lamplight was suffused and forgiving, old shadows curling like cats around their feet; there they were just two men weathered by years and conflict, blinking like the past had just wandered in. and the bar faded for a while until all that remained was the miracle of having found one another again, in a city neither of them truly belonged to anymore.

simon ordered another round with a glance, and for a while, they spoke of anything but the years between, like their old fencing master and the way he used to shout in italian, and that night they'd climbed the opera scaffolding on a dare. simon watched alan carefully as he spoke, gauging the tension in his jaw, the tired edge around his eye - he didn't press, not yet. after a pause, quiet but not uncomfortable, he turned slightly, forearms braced on the table, and asked gently, "when did you get back?"

and then, with something like concern disguised in nonchalance, "where are you staying?"

[etoileobscure]

a thing for @liensfamiliaux !

the first one went down hard, buckling with a scream like glass shearing through iron, chroma still sizzling from its fractured body. simon moved before thought again - unstable pictos igniting in violent arpeggio as he fell into forme sans faille, though nothing of it was flawless anymore, corrupted by his time in the abyss; a sequence of motions honed not for elegance, but for complete annihilation. the impact shook the earth as the final strike ruptured the second nevron, torqueing the blade and carving up through sinew and plates with a grunt, black ichor fountaining hot across his ruined coat, hissing where it met chroma-seared steel.

simon didn't lower his gigantic blade immediately, but he stood over the corpse - breath ragged, eyes aglow with a fury too primal for comfort , watching for motion, the way one watches a dwindling flame; only when it stilled completely did he let the tension drip from his limbs like blood.

but the madness -- oh, that never left, just coiled tighter, deeper, waiting; the fathoms-depths of the abyss still clawed from within, whispering with the teeth of a directive he hadn't given himself: kill kill kill, until silence. 67 years of nothing but the rhythm of eradication under the guise of protection; and now that instinct hadn't exactly died, it had only changed faces: now it wore the names of expedition 33, but the repainted sickness remained - every time he killed, it nearly pulled him back in.

simon turned, chest heaving, eyes darkened and not entirely human, like metal left in fire and smoke too long. he loomed, towering over gustave without meaning to, white hair unbound, the gilded seams of old chroma scars gleaming like solder around the ashen craquelure of his face. his voice was a rasp, cracked like stone giving way to pressure, low and hollow with too many echoes.

"you ... froze." he said, tone free of accusation or even cruelty - just the fact of it, observed with the same precision he gave to death. and then, after a pause that stretched too long, his broad hand touched gustave's shoulder, almost clumsy in its weight, as if simon had to remember how to reassure without crushing.

but even as he looked at him, the unsettling hunger of the abyss whispered at his heels;

(and what if next time, you don't stop?)

[etoileobscure]

That nonsexual intimacy of just being in each other's spaces, of gravitating towards each other, always subconsciously reaching out to each other. Finding comfort and satisfaction in being close to each other, breathing each other in, existing together.

[etoileobscure]

i, o, & p ! (both ouo)

✧ nsfw alphabet - accepting.

✧ I - intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect) pre-abyss in moments of intimacy he is breathtakingly present, he treats their partner's body like something to study and cherish. kisses are sensual and slow and brimming with unsaid intimacy; he makes sure to memorise every noise and shiver, touching like he's writing a sonnet into their skin. amid slow thrusts, he'll murmur sweet nothings between confession and poetry. he enjoys holding hands, he buries his face in their neck and breathes in. when they come undone beneath him, he holds them through it. he makes love like a man who doesn't take love for granted. and true intimacy begins when the tension finally breaks; at first he may be composed, all deliberate touches, every movement measured and crafted to bring ecstasy. but when he's with someone he truly trusts that veneer of control loosens; he kisses with his whole mouth, he grips too tightly, he lets out sounds he never meant to - hoarse, ragged and shameless. he lets himself be held, lets his head fall back when they press their mouth to his body. the sharp angles of his discipline soften and the man beneath reveals himself, all gasps and needy want. ultimately, intimacy is not just the physical act, it's the rare gift of losing composure without fear, and letting someone see him in that unguarded state, that is the greatest surrender of all.

post abyss intimacy after the abyss becomes a paradox - simon aches for connection but it terrifies him. his body remembers how to move, how to give, how to take, but his heart misfires; sometimes he kisses like a man starving, other times he avoids eye contact entirely until the high breaks and he's forced to look. he clings more than he admits, palm around the back of their neck, hip to hip, holding tighter the closer they get. every now and then something will shake loose from him, a broken whisper into skin like "don't look at me like this" or "say my name again." afterward, he's quiet and withdrawn, haunted.

✧ O - answered here.

✧ P - pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.) pre-abyss simon is sensually confident and exquisitely patient with pacing. he likes to hear his partner beg, he'll drag the tip along slick skin just to feel them twitch; it depends on what the mood & partner call for, but as a preference his thrusts are often deep and rolling, sometimes shallow and quick, following various rhythms and paces like he's playing them, until he finds the perfect one for them; he usually starts slow then quickens, marking when their breath breaks, when their body arches, when they say his name. his favourite thing is getting them to come on his fingers, then again around him, pushing them to the edge just to show them they can fall over and over.

post-abyss his pace is often frenzied and at times brutal, instinct taking over. even if the initial touch is slow, even tender, once he starts moving it's like he can't stop; he fucks like it's the only way to silence the voices in his head, hips snapping, teeth bared, forehead pressed hard against their shoulder as he drives in again and again. sometimes he finishes too fast, and sometimes he doesn't stop after he does. and sometimes, if they really beg, he slows just enough to feel something again, and that's when he trembles from a frisson of guilt and memory.