#luminarm

[krohft]

STARTER : @luminarm !

From her vantage point at the edge of the cliff , Lara could almost make out the edge of the barrier . It felt surreal , still — seeing the godlike figure of the Paintress sitting at the foot of the monolith , bent over as if sleeping . The painted number above her head gave off enough light to read by , though Lara couldn’t exactly bring herself to focus on any one page of her journal . Not that it mattered ; without a way back to her own reality , her notes were hardly useful .

❝ How does it work , exactly ? ❞ Not bothering to comment on Gustave’s approach , the tomb raider dropped her journal on the grass beside her .    ❝ Is she sentient at all? ❞

Experience had taught her that things were rarely that easy , but then she wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this world either . Perhaps she had to shift her viewpoint . ❝ And your … lumina converter , was it ? What does it do ? ❞

[vtriol]

[ offer ], sender offers their arm for receiver to join them somewhere.

with a healthy amount of sketchy alcohol in their body, thana swivels their stool to face @luminarm, standing by the bar with his arm outstretched. a gentlemanly gesture, one that garners a short giggle and a hop from their stool. landing awkwardly on their heel, thana not-so-gracefully falls against him with a “ whoa! ” the brief rush of adrenaline is mildly sobering, and they straighten up to adjust their hold to something, hopefully, more elegant.

turning to face the girls still working, thana waves broadly and blows kisses in farewell. “ have a fun night, ladies! ” a number of girls give a courteous wave, some return the kiss, and a select few notice thana attached to gustave's arm and whistle in approval. thana winks in response, allowing themself to be pulled along when gustave tires of the attention and endless goodbyes.

“ don'cha jus' love them girls? darlin's, and tha's not jus' 'cause the free drinks! ” though their slur has cleared up from earlier, their accent is out in full force, as if thana had arrived in night city that day. leaning their head on his shoulder as they strolled down the street, content with the distance to the metro station that'll reach the glen, they murmur, “ how's th' girl you took a gander at? she gon' be okay? ”

[cleameur]

@luminarm: you've barely said two words to me.

LIKE AN UNMOORED BOAT, flitting in and out of the tide with no hope of being salvaged, her sense of self feels fragmentary, splintering in its existence. ready to sink into the seafloor at any given moment. foreign hands she doesn’t recognize lay palm up in her lap, marmoreal grey tarnished with gold, still itching with the phantom urge to carve those same familiar patterns, painting destruction out of nothing. OVER AND OVER AGAIN. it rings painfully in her skull, the low susurrus of a command that could be her own, but it isn’t. she can see her now, as memory flashes behind her eyes, the other clea. no, not other, that would be herself. the real clea, the person in whose image she was made, a static copy, frozen in time. it all happened so fast. one second she was there and the next, she wasn’t. why? a noise registers nearby, but it sounds distant, underwater. is someone talking to her? the thought is plucked loose in an instant, blotted out like a dying star, when another violent stab bludgeons through the far reaches of her mind, decanting shadows every which way, a labyrinthine mire filled with smog.

it’s only once she’s forced in a few lungfuls of air, deep and shuddering, that the gossamer begins to unspool slowly, the darkness retreating back into its burrow. for now. gustave’s sudden appearance takes her by surprise, though, perhaps it shouldn’t. he seems to have been standing there for quite a while, after all. a flurry of blinks. she straightens up, lax shoulders growing cautiously tense. apart from her brother, she hasn’t spoken much to the others since the events at the flying manor, too distraught for any lengthy conversation. maybe some normalcy is in order. ❝ i promise it’s not personal. ❞ her voice is raspy, hoarse from disuse, but she pushes forward regardless. ❝ i’m just… still trying to readjust to being here again. alive, i suppose. ❞

[shad0wbringer]

@luminarm's ♡ | currently accepting.

sciel moves quietly ; seems an ghost. in front of her , the figure of gustave seems to be checking supplies before tomorrow's expedition. tries to not make any type of sound just for her softly but clear speak. " boo "

[inkflowd]

i don't worry, i ruminate. they're distinct actions. @luminarm

she SNORTED. honest to god, terribly unladylike (not that that's ever stopped her in the past), stupid sounding snort. eyes looked over at him incredulously from across the campfire, lips twitching into a smile because for a moment lune couldn't tell if he was being SERIOUS or not.

"you BROOD," she countered with a point of her finger in his direction, a laugh escaping her lips for the first time in... when did she last ACTUALLY laugh? probably right after they fought, after he had the audacity to try to say 'fuck the mission' to her. he always had a way of being able to wrestle a laugh out of her even in the moment where she thought it would be impossible to even smile.

"you worry and you brood and all you need is a small raincloud following you around." the image gave her a small giggle before it tapered off, eyes flickering back to the flames. "and i understand. i get WHY you're worried. but maelle is strong and already one of the best fighters the expedition had..." you know, BEFORE 90% of them were killed. "she's going to be alright. we'll find her. but we won't find her if YOU don't rest."

[mkoshi]

if i'm wrong, just say it, and i'll never ask again. | for soline!

“ you are right, mon ami. i wasn’t sure if anyone would recognize me at this point, ” she grins, admiring the many flowers within the hanging gardens.

“ for many years, i performed for the lumiére opera house. not anymore, considering … ” she trails off, referring to their impending doom of the gommage, as there weren’t nearly as people to watch theatre anymore. soline did appreciate the fact there were still people that appreciated musicality even as the world came crashing down on them. petals whiz past them as the breeze goes by, it’s at least a nice day. one of the last few, she supposes.

“ do you sing? you look the type. you have a certain … feel. ”

[karezaru]

what color does your love feel like?

warm burnt orange. riding off into the sunset, the hope of a happy ending, the bitter aftertaste that still in its own way smells kinda great. your love is all bitter hopefulness, all about a broken heart that refuses to quit, all about the unshakeable knowledge that a burning fire has a great comforting warm and soft glowing light, all about the way when the sun comes down there's a beautiful starry night. it's stubbornness, it's the refusal to give up, the clutching of broken shards despite the searing pain and being adamant that dammit you can still make a beautiful stained glass window out of it. yours is a screaming heart, a pleading love, a bitter and almost belligerent hopefulness that things will still work out even if you have to roll up your sleeves and make them. and god, aren't you tired? isn't your heart heavy? is all your hard work worth it? don't you just want to curl up and let it be? let the fire turn to ashes and the sky turn dark and let love die down and watch people leave? but you don't, do you? you're the bravest out of all of us, so you pick up the pieces and you keep going, you keep believing and you keep your heart full of hope because some day... some day you know you'll get it. you keep riding off into the sunset and you keep filling my heart with hope as you go because god, how do i wish you finally get it too.

tagged by: @kavanschosen. ehe thank uuu<3 tagging: @vtriol, @adamanteine, @sarastuss, @luminarm (or for isaak), @avichor (caitlyn or lenore ehe), @ninkaku, and whoever else wants to!

[krohft]

90, gus helping lara patch up a wound.

There was a sense of uncertainty there,  Lara noted,  lingering in the gentle brush of his hand against her thigh.  It was distracting in the way a minor burn might have been  — not something one would rush to get treated,  but a small source of irritation nonetheless.  Her mind snagged on it,  slipping past the gentle crease forming between his brows and the light pressure he put on her injury,  always this side of restrained.  She wasn’t sure what to make of it;  how to respond.  Whether she should take note of it at all or let the matter drop entirely.

❝There’s a needle and thread in my kit,❞   the tomb raider offered,  resting her fingers in the spaces between his own.  The gauze felt damp underneath her hand,  blood seeping out of the fabric as she pressed down.  Not an arterial bleed,  at least —she’d checked before coming here,  not wishing to turn Gustave’s apartment into a genuine crime scene— but a steady one nonetheless.  Not something she could simply ignore for once.  ❝In the inside pocket, all the way at the bottom.❞

She hadn’t expected to need it.  There had been no reported Trinity activity in the area,  and she hadn’t gone in looking for trouble.  A quick in-and-out;  trying to fill some holes in her own research,  understand where she had gone wrong in Syria.  Worse,  she’d been entirely distracted when she’d felt the blade sink into her upper thigh — causing her to take the blow head-on, barely missing her femoral artery as she’d flinched back.  A costly mistake,  and one she couldn’t stop reprising in her head.  Had she been distracted by the mechanism of the door?  Deafened by the shot she’d fired in the hallway,  half an hour earlier?  Could things have gone differently?

Empty questions,  she supposed,  with no perspective for answers.  Perhaps she should focus on the present instead;  make sure Trinity would never get the drop on her again.  ❝I’m… sorry. I suppose I should have called ahead.❞

[vtriol]

strangely, i've been craving something sweet lately. do you want to eat?

thana's head snaps up from the hunched-over position at their desk, pencil pressed against the blueprint mid-scrawl. their chicken scratch is becoming unintelligible at this hour, but still, they note on every detail of @luminarm's designs as soon as he's finished a prototype. blinking away the blur of their vision, they focus on gustave and tap their pencil lightly on their lips.

“ is mathilde's open this late? i tried an incredible fruit tart the other day. i thought you weren't a sweets person, though? ” already, they're tidying their space for the evening and collecting their jacket. and ushering gustave out the door, eager to make the trek across the city. “ i was just about to give you my notes back, but i'll tell you my thoughts on the way. ”

[krohft]

@luminarm

damn this crush i have on u is kinda giving me brain damage

[inkflowd]

"i'm coming in. try to stop me." | lune stop being a workaholic challenge. @luminarm

merde. a scowl made its way onto lune's face as eyes refused to lift from the map. she considered IGNORING him, pretending as though she wasn't there... which would've been an impossibility considering the fact that they were currently camped on the continent and there was nowhere else she could possibly be. she weighed her options, decided she didn't like ANY of them, and let out a sigh.

"i'm FINE, gustave," came her voice from inside of the tent, just slightly muffled due to the fabric between them. she knew she had been in a bit of a sour mood, more obsessed with their path than usual (which was saying something). but this was her fault, even if the others haven't said anything. she was their navigator, she decided where they were going to land. and she wanted the beach -- lune specifically wanted THAT beach. well, look where it got them. most of them dead or missing, the survivors left with more questions than answers. if only she had been less rigid in her choice, if only she had KNOWN... a small shake of her head, as though she were trying shake her thoughts away.

"i need to find a way through these bodies of water -- the ships around us are battered and broken and i don't think we have enough time to try to salvage enough parts to make a boat ourselves. if only we could find a floatation device or a raft -- do you think any of the previous expeditions might have tried to make any RAFTS?"

[krohft]

“ That's the second one I've put up. ” he's pointing to the half - full shelf on the corner of the living room, right next to the window, while the kettle comes to a boil. [ Gustave hasn't admitted to not minding the ever - growing collection, but he gives Lara a hard time anyway. It's a habit, as steady as her visits to his smaller, much more quaint apartment. ] “ How many more souvenirs should I expect you to get me, eh? And from where, next time? ”

There was an exasperated sort of warmth there, Lara realized, hiding beneath the mild cadence of his voice. Irritation that lacked any real fire, no matter how hard he tried to make it so. She valued it as much as his wordless hospitality, the way he continued to provide a safe haven for her whenever she needed it; whether she called in advance or showed up unannounced.  ❝Whatever you do, do not tell anyone these are real.❞ Her voice sounded foreign in the small space, strained as she carefully added another aryballos to the shelf. It was hard not to notice how much care had gone into them, the consideration he’d put into displaying the artifacts. ❝Owning them is, technically, a felony.❞

She hesitated a moment longer, studying the polished wood, before rejoining him in the kitchen. Her skin felt tighter, somehow, stretching uncomfortably with every breath. A fragment of her fatigue more than anything, she wagered — something she couldn’t entirely place, but didn’t feel particularly inclined to dismantle at two in the morning. ❝I’m not sure yet — Egypt, perhaps.❞ Until the Manor was officially habitable, she felt rather unmoored; a ship passing in the night, forever moving from one shore to the next. The only home she regularly passed through, realistically, was Gustave’s — and even then, her visits rarely exceeded a day or two.

The more reclusive part of her recoiled at the notion, the lack of boundaries existing in the space between them. She had forgotten what is was like, almost — since Jonah had gotten married and moved away, leaving her without a friend to confide in. But then this felt different, too; she just couldn't pinpoint why. ❝If you’d prefer postcards—…❞

[cleameur]

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF HER PSYCHE is a never-ending marsh, the terrain too murky to be mapped, let alone traversed. her head swims, fighting a losing battle against her sluggish cognizance, as it turns every thought into a slurry. ❝ it feels… ❞ the barest of pauses. lips part again as if to speak, but the words die on her tongue, extinguished. how does one even begin to explain this? he means well, she knows that. they all do, in their own ways. while she appreciates gustave’s gentle optimism, the careful encouragements meant to bolster her resolve, she can’t help but find them to be a waste of breath, better saved for someone else. someone who could benefit from them. not her. no, SHE IS A LOST CAUSE, has been so since the moment the flying manor became her prison. perhaps before that, too. maybe she’s always been one. ❝ …surreal. ❞ the answer pulls free with some reluctance, knowingly insufficient in describing the enormity of her experience.

clea can’t admit that how she really feels, is utterly disembodied. AN INHERITED LIFE IN TATTERS, cut haphazardly with a pair of rusted shears. little more than a passenger existing on borrowed time. a mere spectator, watching as she attempts in vain to hide the shakiness of her hands, knuckles blanched a sickly ashen colour. she can’t tell gustave that she longs for oblivion, not when he and the rest of the expedition so clearly want to live. but there is nothing left here for her. not anymore. the only family she’s ever known is gone, as is the man she’d once thought would be her happy ending, if such things could even be afforded to their ilk. and verso… verso is still as adept at wearing his masks as she remembers, but he’s hardly present himself. it’s possible that the only reason she sees through his façade, that faraway, glazed look, is because she recognises it in herself, a twisted mirror image. it’d be cruel, then, to burden another with the unbridled despair that rises up in her windpipe. as though this world isn’t merciless enough already.

so when she meets his gaze at last, clea offers a listless smile, a little wobbly, not entirely sincere. ❝ what will you do? when this is all over, i mean. will you go back? to lumière? i hear it’s quite different now, since the fracture. most things are. ❞ a deflection, plain as day. she makes no effort to conceal it. anything to course correct the direction of her musings, to distract from the long-hanging darkness that threatens to engulf her whole.

suffering is like a swatch of colors: near endless in its myriad shades and intensities, its forms near unfathomable in its variations. Of course there are fates worse than death, there always have been, but to have understood what it's like to be birthed, undone and replaced, two images twisted into one single person ... Mortifying is as close as Gustave can get to describe it, but even that word falls short of how it truly feels to him. There's a newly born dread in him with its origin in understanding, in knowledge, but he pushes past it. Right now, in this very instant, he is far from the priority. It's why he extends Clea the same courtesy and care as he has to every person under his unofficial care.

“ It's okay, ” he says, placating her explanation by raising his hands. There's common ground between them, in some oddly twisted sense: his own journey to readjustment didn't involve undoing damage to his conscience, but he and Clea have experienced death in similar ways. There's something awful in needing to reacquaint oneself with something as dear and familiar as life, as the breath in one's lungs. The people they once were seem so close and yet so far all of a sudden. Gustave still isn't used to it, least of all now after being ... repainted. It takes him a great deal of effort to suppress a shudder in front of Clea. “ Death has a way of making a stranger out of everything when you survive it. It's sort of well, it's definitely happened to me twice now. But readjusting is all about repetition; it'll ... it'll all settle, eventually. Won't feel as strange. ” Gustave chances a look at her. “ What's it feel like to you now? Being alive again? ”

[krohft]

[ 29. ] sender wakes receiver in the throes of a nightmare, reassuring them, "it's okay, it's not real." | hey so what if modern

The smell of death clung to her skin like perfume , heavy as it settled at the base of her throat . She didn’t flinch away ; merely turned her head at the acidity of it , the cloying sweetness that threatened to overpower her senses . It was a familiar sight by now : the degraded gates of Croft Manor , the overgrown cemetery in front of it . The names of her friends and loved ones  engraved in stone or scratched into wood , constant reminders of how she’d failed them when they’d needed her most . 

And then there was her . A facsimile — a shadow , born out of guilt and grief . She flinched away from her , scrambling to find purchase against the slippery gravel before the woman could remember she had a gun . Pointless , really ; there was nowhere to run to , nowhere to hide from the ghost of her past .  You’re a black thumb Lara , incapable of keeping life . 

She knew the words by heart , had repeated them to herself ad nauseam . It didn’t take away from their bitterness , of course , but there was comfort in knowing what to expect . The grief always remained , but the body grew around it ; burying the pain in every crevice , every nook , every cell of itself . She processed what she could , and left the rest here , to rot .

The ground shifted underneath her as she moved further away from the ghost , reaching for a bow that wasn’t there . It almost felt like her dream was burning at the edges , spilling out into her conscious mind — she could hear the crunch of the gravel under her feet , but felt her body shift , her shoulders squeezed so hard it hurt . Her elbow connected with something … someone as she twisted in his grasp , panicked breaths burning in the back of her throat .

❝ It’s okay . ❞ Somewhere between the grief and panic , she recognized his voice . Recognized the tinge of pain in it , too . Had she been any more awake , she might have jumped to apologies . ❝ It’s not real . ❞

It was , though — the guilt never quite left her . Sometimes it was a steady hum in the back of her mind , other times it burned so hot she could barely function around it . One way or the other , the pain she’d caused remained real .  ❝ Gustave . ❞ Shaking her head to regain some sort of decorum , Lara let her shoulders drop . She recalled crashing on his couch , falling asleep mid-sentence . Three guesses as to what woke him up . ❝ I— crap . Sorry for … all this . ❞

[shad0wbringer]

her esmerald eyes seem to grin by his reaction. true that she's been drinking with the rest of them - sciel knew how to party and enjoy a big crowd. also knew most of her image or reputation as this easy-going teacher - was one of her best impressions of herself. but gustave seems to be able to see through her. " yeah . " her voice is soft as looks down. doesn't stop smiling but - something bothers her mind. it could be the waves and the though of the ocean again. her body seems to tremble a little bit but remembers to herself that - not now. " aren't you tired of checking things? tomorrow - everything will be alright. you'll see.. "

at a time like this, it doesn't hurt to double - check ... or even triple - check what's already been packed, if only to account for anything that might be missing. The festival is drawing to a close, the attendees are dwindling, and he's

[ boo. ] Gustave straightens with a sharp inhale, Sciel's soft tone cutting all but yanking him back to reality. A hell of a start to things, and it's not even dawn yet. (He clearly hasn't drank enough for this, either). “ Sciel! What, tired of mingling? Thought you'd send to bed with a heart attack? ”

[krohft]

by the way, secret shoutout for @luminarm and @fantombe for being the absolute coolest, most amazing and awesomest people ever, pass it on