psychoshenanigans | GRATIA // PSL

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GRATIA // PSL

So, here's what Irahl knows.

He's alone in a dark, cold cave. He has most, if not all, of his gear. No one is guarding his location. As he heads away from the spot where he came to consciousness, no one tries to stop him, and no one gets in his way. The few people he finds down there seem human, and not about to approach the nearly-seven-foot man that comes stalking out of the lower tunnels. Honestly, everyone here seems a surprised and a little astonished about his... Entire scene.

There is a way up. It's a maze of twisting corridors and confusing passageways, half of which feel too small for him. It's bigger and bigger groups of people, some of which scatter like schools of fish, and some of which have to be pushed through to get anywhere. It's climbing up into streets lit with dingy lights, graffiti-covered hallways, warehouses, weird holes in stone walls that may or may not be windows. It's alarm bells, it's people yelling at each other down the street. It's just an absurd number of stairs. A couple of people make an attempt to stop him somewhere, and it goes poorly for them.

Elsewhere, events are being set in motion where Irahl cannot see. But he's on his way out.

Eventually, more people try to stop him. At the end of another long stretch of Underground city, a group of official-looking folks are putting a real effort into blocking off the obvious exit, and some of them have weapons.

Down a side alley, into another tunnel, and then the space opens up into a... Plaza, of some sort? The floor is made of stone. The buildings surrounding it are made of stone and are hard to distinguish from one another. At at least the ceiling (also made of stone) is a lot higher than before. Cavernous. There's some kind of sculpture in the middle of it, some impressive feat of geometric stonework that gives the illusion of defying gravity despite weighing literal tons.

This is where someone finally catches him. Sounds have been echoing unhelpfully down every passageway, making it hard to tell if people are coming or going - but this series of quick footsteps comes from an upward direction before someone hits the ground about five feet in front of Irahl.

His clothes are different. His hair is better-kept. Maybe if the situation wasn't quite so tense, there'd be time to see the ways in which his face is different, the way his eyes don't have quite as vicious and sharp a gleam as they used to. But whatever Irahl can take in of him, there is Robin, having hopped down from a rooftop to put himself between him and the exit again.

"...Holy shit."

Kind of weird that he looks absolutely shocked to see the person in front of him, though.

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"...Fine..."

Vincent takes a great big breath in, just to steel himself, before taking the plunge. Not literally, he actually sits down very slowly and carefully, the same way he's been doing everything else. Just when his lower body was starting to acclimate to the cold water, too...

Robin resurfaces quietly at the tail end of Irahl's instructions and watches Vincent's efforts with curiosity. He wouldn't sabotage this for the world--at least, not while someone's feelings could get hurt. No, he's far more interested in watching this city boy try to figure out a lake.

"And it helps if you relax," he calls over. Vincent only grunts in response, but he'll try to keep this in mind as he awkwardly bobs through a couple first (and failed) attempts at floating instead of sinking.

Irahl has inhuman reserves of patience, so he could watch Vincent's attempts all day if he thought that would be an effective strategy, but he doesn't want Vincent to lose patience. So, when he sees those first attempts flounder, he begins gliding over.

He's even quieter when swimming than he is while moving around on land, so his voice pops up unexpectedly right next to Vincent when he speaks again.

"You have to relax so your lungs can fill up with air."

Vincent startles a little when Irahl is suddenly closer, which sinks him like a rock. Thankfully, he doesn't have far to go before he's basically just sitting on the lake floor.

"Oh, breathing," he says, once his mouth is above the water, "S'that what I'm missin'..."

Thankfully, Vincent has had plenty of practice being bad at stuff, especially in the last couple of years, so he'll struggle and complain for a long time before he actually throws in the towel. He'll give it another go, and this time he tries to forget whatever his oversized limbs are doing and just... Find whatever "relaxed" is, here.

To his credit, he manages to float a little this time! His body rises and stays buoyant for several seconds longer than he was expecting.

"Is this it...?" Though as soon as he turns his head to ask, he starts sinking again.

If Robin is watching, he'll see the smirk that Irahl carefully lets happen around speaking, so that Vincent can't hear the combination of both being proud of and laughing at the giant man bobbing like a cork.

"Getting there. Take a big breath and then relax. Like you're dead."

If he can coax Vincent into learning how to corpse-float, that will solve all of his swimming woes. Irahl remembers that specifically--his mother teaching the kids to float like dead bodies (or logs) if they start panicking or getting tired while swimming.

"...What?" Vincent says, landing back on the bottom of the lake. He's not entirely sure he heard the guy right. Maybe there's water in his ears.

"Yeah, pretend you're dead," calls Robin from further out in the lake, "Like you're playing hide-the-body with your kids. The lake will pick up the dead weight."

This sounds pretty counter-intuitive to Vincent, but these two assholes know how to swim and he doesn't... So he gives it a try, almost jokingly leaning back and making a little sound like he's been shot or stabbed or something. He doesn't really expect this trick of theirs to work.

Surprisingly, it works really well. Once he abandons his limbs and detaches from his mortal body, he stays on the surface and doesn't drift back downward. He is hesitant to say anything and ruin what he thinks might be a success, but...

"...Holy shit, did that actually work...?"

Irahl gives Robin a sideways glance when he chimes in, but it's not over the fact that he's contributing to the effort of teaching Vincent how to float. It's entirely over the mention of 'hide-the-body,' and he holds Robin's gaze long enough to say that he wants that one explained once they're done here.

Then, attention is back on Vincent and the very good job he's doing.

Irahl floats closer, swimming around him a little like someone checking for strings in a magic trick.

"Seems like it," he says, even though Vincent does start to sink when he contracts his ribs to speak. "So, if you ever feel like you're drowning, just pretend it's already happened."

Vincent has to chuckle at the dark humor, which makes him sink even more... But he takes in a big breath of air and achieves a little bit of uneven buoyancy again. He's learning, even if he's clumsy about it. Maybe some of what he used to do as a kid will eventually come back to him.

Robin, meanwhile, had met Irahl's gaze and looked subtly delighted, eyes bright while his face was still half-submerged in the water. Part of it is that it's nice to find something Irahl doesn't already know about Vincent that he does--the total reverse of how he's been feeling these last couple of days.

But he won't explain himself, because it'll be much better from the man himself. In light of some success on the floating front, Robin swims up closer so that he doesn't have to call quite as far.

"Vince, tell him about hide-the-body."

"Huh?" Vincent asks, trying to now un-float and get back to the bottom. "Man, I can't believe you remember that..."

"Of course, I was paying attention." Robin smiles, treading water, "Tell him, it's cute."

"Uh... Well," Vincent finds something of a crouch on the lake floor, pointing his face more towards where he... Thinks... Irahl is... The guy moves so quietly in water that it's a little hard to tell, "It's not a story or anythin', I just watch some kids every few weeks at a spot on Fifth, an' for some reason they've decided their favorite game is pretendin' they've killed me an' then tryin' to roll my 'dead' body around the livin' room. 'Specially the little ones, you squish 'em a little while they're tryin' to lever you over 'an they'll just laugh an' laugh..."

Delightfully, Irahl had been in the middle of gliding like a crocodile after a butterfly-stroke of his arms, so his mouth and nose are just below the waterline when he scoffs at the mental image so suddenly planted in his brain. He can picture it vividly, so there's the burble of a short underwater chuckle.

He stops gliding so that he bob up higher in the water and speak (and wipe off the droplets of water he kind of splashed into his eyes).

"Way better than our version. And a good team-building exercise."

Between hearing what he thinks was an underwater laugh and the guy's continuing grim humor, Vincent can't help but smile back.

"Yeah, ain't bad for me either. They tire themselves out an' I get to take a nap."

"See, there you go," Robin says, practically grinning, "Just pretend the water is a pack of tiny violent children attempting to roll you down the stairs."

"Yeah. Both just get more powerful if you fight them."

It's both words of wisdom and a subtle warning. Any time that Irahl agrees with Robin in any way should be taken as a bad omen, so hopefully Vincent won't be catastrophically caught off guard when Irahl then reaches out to give Vincent a gentle shove toward deeper water.

It's still not deep enough to go over his head if he touches down, and it's not all the way to the big drop-off, but it's the first nudge toward getting Vincent to go from floating (barely) to swimming.

"Ominous," is all Vincent has time to say before he's pointedly nudged in the direction of deeper water. His mood's improved a little with some amount of success under his belt, so he gets awkwardly half-walking, half-floating slowly in that direction without too much fuss...

But there is a little fuss.

"Now, just 'cause I kinda did it once don't mean I'm exactly confident..." He slows to a stop when he finds himself actually standing, the water about halfway up his chest, "You'll warn me if I'm gettin' too far out there, yeah?"

It's Robin's turn to glance at Irahl to see what he says, rather than offer any words of support or assurance to his good friend himself.

"Yeah," Irahl says in the same tone that he uses for when he's in either a comfortable mood or in a shady one.

What he doesn't say is that Vincent will probably discover that for himself first if his feet dangle down and hit the creepy pond weeds that grow in deeper water.

Then Irahl swooshes his arms in the water and easily glides away from his friend, swimming in the pretty-safe direction of running parallel to the shore. Vincent can putter around in place all he wants, but he's going to be left behind.

"--C'mon."

Vincent doesn't exactly feel comforted, but the simple instruction gets him going again either way. Now that he's substantially in the water, he's momentarily more concerned with being left alone than he is with anything in the depths trying to eat him.

So he follows. And at this point there's enough water resistance to fight through that he starts doing sort of a half-swimming, half-walking thing just to keep from falling too far behind.

"There are nice things in the water too, you know," Robin says conversationally, again doing a very lazy backstroke in a manner that would be infuriating to Vincent if he could see, "Beautiful fish. Some ducks. They mostly don't bite."

"What are... Ducks?" Vincent asks, feeling like he's being pranked.

"...What?" Robin looks astonished, "Have I seriously never told you about ducks before?"

Well he's about to tell him about ducks now.

The nice thing about having a second person out here to help shepherd around the guy who can't swim yet, is that Irahl doesn't need to feel completely tethered to that same faltering pace. Sure, he'd already spent hours swimming around earlier this morning, but that doesn't stop him from feeling both the call of deeper water and the encroaching pressure of the fact that their little vacation is going to have to end sometime soon.

So, as the other two begin talking, Irahl takes a detour in the direction of the drop-off and the forest of pondweed.

He dives down just as Robin begins to explain ducks. By the time that he resurfaces again, Robin seems to be in his closing duck-related statements.

"Don't tell him about geese," Irahl warns as he floats in their direction again.

Honestly, with Robin there to distract him, Vincent may not even notice that Irahl is gone. The dragon is free to swim around in deeper waters while the two other boys splash around in the proverbial kiddy pool for a bit.

It's probably good that Vincent gets some practice figuring out how his body moves in this much water anyway. Irahl doesn't have to watch him slip and accidentally dunk his head before righting himself, nor does he need to sit through his trying to figure out floating and talking at the same time.

And Robin, well... He's always had a weird fixation on birds, so. He won't cause trouble while he's entertaining himself explaining weirdly-shaped bills and the way some birds are waterproof enough to float like little boats.

When Irahl comes up, Robin's hanging around closer to Vincent, who is doing a decent job of pretending to be dead in the water. The demigod looks over at Irahl with a mischievous glint in his eye.

"Oh, I told him about geese."

"...Wait, are those here?" Vincent asks, suddenly less keen on floating defenselessly in the water.

"They're everywhere my good man," replies Robin, unhelpfully.

Irahl shows no signs of having received Robin's glance, as he still does a pretty good job of giving the demigod only the minimal amount of attention needed at any given moment. His tone also doesn't give any indication of shared mischief. He just idly does a much more coordinated take on Vincent's dead-body float, his throat scales shimmering in the sun as he goes belly-up.

His words, however, are a different story.

"Don't worry. You'll definitely hear them coming if they show up."

Vincent gets his feet back on the lake floor, frowning. He can't decide if his friends are fucking with him or being deadly serious, and he doesn't like it. Robin told him some pretty wild stuff about geese.

"What, do they like... Scream or somethin'?" He cautiously asks, hunching a little.

"No, no," Robin shakes his head, doing his best to keep his spreading smirk out of his voice, "They honk."

"...They honk?" Vincent furrows his brows.

"With reckless abandon, yeah," Robin says.

While it's always fun to mess with Vincent a little, Robin's far more delighted in the fact that Irahl's contributing to this mess at all. He got to see this side of Irahl a little bit during their time in the dark, but it was usually directed at him, and often not as benign as this.

This level of camaraderie--interacting sort of laterally at the expense of their mutual friend--is apparently comfortable enough for Irahl to float around on the surface nearby without any signs of stress. He's letting his scales show, he's not subtly clamming up or acting avoidant, and there's a successful back-and-forth going on. He even takes on a correcting tone in Robin's direction.

"They also hiss."

Got to get the facts straight.

Well, he can't not glance at the man's beautiful scales... But to Robin's credit, he really is trying to behave. The glance is brief and he goes back to focusing on ruining Vincent's life instead of imagining any number of things his current company would not find particularly entertaining.

Besides, with how good a mood Irahl seems to be in, he wouldn't be surprised if the man was showing off his scales in-part to be mean to him. Stunted or not, he is a dragon.

"...Y'all sure this is a bird?" Vincent says with rising incredulity, "Sounds more like some kinda flying nightmare snake..."

That gets a hearty (though odd, in the usual way) laugh out of Robin, which also helps distract him.

"That's not a terrible way to describe them! Their necks are a bit snakelike..." Robin makes a wave with his hand that... Literally could only be for Irahl's or his own benefit, since Vincent can't see. "But snakes only bite if they have to. Geese will bite if you look at them funny."

There is something of a resemblance to a cat lounging with its stomach exposed purely as a tempting trap in the way that Irahl is lazily drifting nearby. And from their antics yesterday, Robin has a good idea of exactly what will happen if he decides to fall for it.

For now, things are peaceful, and there's a good chance that nearly committing Robin to a watery grave the day before has contributed to it.

"And they're heavy."

Just what you want in a bird that will try to drown you.

Things are peaceful for some. Vincent finally pipes up in a way other than vague complaining.

"All right, all right. I get it. I'm done with floatin', what comes after?"

Vincent is frowning, still not exactly thrilled with the idea of moving to something more advanced, but if he has to listen to his friends describe one more thing about this bird that he already thought was buck wild and kind of evil, he's going to lose it.

"Hah, getting brave now!" Robin cackles, looking to Irahl to see whatever it is he thinks is next.

Irahl has rolled over and gone back to being a crocodile low in the water during Vincent's outburst, but Robin is cheating by having eyeballs, so he can tell by the part of Irahl's face that is still visible above the waterline that he's delighted by his friend succumbing to psychological torture.

"Swimming," he answers plainly. "Underwater is easier. Got a straight shot in front of you."

No boulders or big dead logs in the immediate vicinity. Vincent is free to flounder without worrying about obstacles, for the time being.

"Ah, sensible," Robin agrees with Irahl to give validity to this rather brief instruction, and perhaps to signal that he's enjoying what's happening here. This is a game they can both play where no one gets upset. Except Vincent.

The demigod drifts back out a little bit, but he doesn't leave the scene entirely just yet. He's watching Vincent, who now has the frown of a man who'd really been hoping there was some step between floating and swimming he could coast on for a while.

"...'Kay. Simple," he says, clearly not thinking this will be simple, "Any... Tips? Like on the part where I gotta breathe?"

Ah. Robin takes this opportunity to move forward again, coming up alongside Vincent.

"Depends on how you're swimming. For now? Practice taking a breath, ducking under, propelling yourself forward a little, then coming back up for air..."

He will glance very briefly in Irahl's direction to make sure he isn't overstepping, but as a fellow air-breathing mammal, he thinks he can relate a couple things to Vincent that Irahl may not be keeping top-of-mind.

It's not in Irahl's nature to hover, nor to use more words than he deems necessary--especially for trivial matters such as breathing--so he seems perfectly content to let Robin step in and handle the minutia.

Besides, it gives him another moment to swim around. He can duck under and do a little more scouting of the vicinity to make sure that they really do have as much safe space underwater as he'd guessed.

He's trying not to get too optimistic about things, but he's already looking forward to Vincent getting the hang of things enough to swim on his own at least slightly. Teaching Vincent how to not drown is genuinely great, but he's holding out a hope of also swimming with his friend a little before the day is out.

Robin is a bit of a useless fuckup in many ways, but he can be a pretty decent teacher when he puts his mind to it. He's already taught Vincent how to use that fancy sword of his, so teaching him how to use his legs to kick himself forward isn't that far of a stretch.

With a little help from his friends, Vincent eventually gets the hang of a little basic propulsion. More importantly, he starts getting more comfortable with holding his breath, and figures out about how long he can actually stay underwater before things start getting dicey. As the day starts warming up, Vincent almost starts to enjoy himself.

Which means it's time to strike. At some point when Irahl on the surface and paying attention, Robin glides just a little further out into the lake, just after where it dips down past the point of someone Vincent's height being able to stand, and calls back to him.

"Come on out here, grab my arm. I'll show you how to tread water properly. Just be careful, there's a slight dip."

What Robin does not mention is what's growing out of that dip. Vincent, having been lulled into a false sense of security at this point, does as he's told and follows. He manages to reach Robin with a bit of halfway-competent swimming and blindly grabs onto the guy while he lets his feet sink under him.

"So how far down's the botto--" Vincent starts to ask, but he interrupts himself with a startled yelp and splashing as something slides past his foot. Absolute chaos follows as he tries to scramble up Robin to get away from it, and Robin nearly drowns himself cackling as a giant man shoves him halfway underwater in a desperate attempt to use his body like some kind of life raft.

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