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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It's probably a good thing that Vincent decides against it, because if he's getting annoyed imagining having to answer questions, you know Irahl couldn't be convinced to help in that regard for anything in the world.

And it's a good sign that their brunch adventure can finally be allowed to come to an end when Irahl's mood doesn't begin to tank at the mere thought of returning to the confines of their room. He's even beginning to wonder (very distantly) if it was a good idea for his still-healing and apparently still-bleeding body to have spent so many hours today wandering and drinking. So, he doesn't mind when the call is finally made and they turn toward the stairs.

Not before one final distraction, of course. Vincent may have apologized to the doorframe, but as Irahl passes by, he doesn't let it get off so easily.

Knowing that his friend will catch it, Irahl mutters a quiet but dire warning to the inanimate object before he follows up the stairs.

"Watch it."

Huh. Vincent turns his head to listen better, gets halfway through asking who Irahl is talking to, and then the joke hits him and thoroughly demolishes the rest of the sentence.

It starts with a real snort of a laugh and ends with him leaning helplessly on the railing of the stairs, trying to catch his breath. This may not even be the alcohol talking, that joke may have just been a perfect strike directly to the center of his sense of humor.

Okay, after struggling to breathe and swearing a little, they can get going again.

Wow, he hadn't expected to get much of a reaction at all, so he's a little startled to see what a sucker-punch his stupid joke ends up being.

Vincent's reaction is just as stupid as the joke had been, to the point that it can't help but become contagious. Irahl's surprised and almost-disappointed scoff quickly cracks into lazy and definitely-disappointed chuckling.

Ambling up behind Vincent on the stairs, he only half-jokingly puts a hand on his back and sort of braces his elbow, both encouraging him to continue up the stairs and making sure he doesn't stumble and fall back down them.

"Don't fall. Stupid way to die."

While their mutual acquaintance and roommate would probably burst a blood vessel at the thought of such a kind and intimate gesture coming from this particular dragon... It doesn't feel very romantic at the moment. Vincent probably does need it, especially as he coughs to clear something out of his windpipe.

"Shit," he wheezes, "That's a fuckin'... Assassination attempt..."

But the light brush with death might clear his head a little bit. He continues up, complaining about how he doesn't want to have to tell his brother that he died because he thought a joke was too funny (and he does phrase it that way, despite it being technically impossible to tell anyone anything when you're dead). By the time they reach their floor, he's got things under control again and goes fishing through his large pants pockets for their key.

"I guess there's booze in the room..." He pulls out a receipt from the brunch place, crunches it uselessly in his hand until he realizes it's not a key, and goes back to looking, "But I dunno, I might be good... What time is it, anyway...?"

You know, with the weird connection between the twins and Vincent's bizarre belief in ghosts, if there is anyone who would be able to get a pointless message across after death, it would be Vincent telling his brother the absurd way he'd died.

This is what Irahl is idly thinking about as he leans against the wall next to the door and watches Vincent struggle. He knows very well that he has his own key to the room with him right now, but he is unmoved to help.

And then Vincent asks him that question.

"Dark."

Who does he think he's asking?? Does he think Irahl brought his work watch with him or something? Ridiculous.

It's a question that Vincent has been idly asking Irahl since... Probably the day they met, and it's a question he will likely continue to ask him no matter how many times he gets a pointless and unhelpful answer back. At least he's gotten pretty used to never hearing a number out of the other guy.

"Eh, dark o'clock... 'Splains why it's so cold in here..."

It's not that cold. The interior of the hotel actually has a pretty stable temperature. He means it more in the sense of 'in here' being 'inside the Capitol', where the freezing cold vacuum of night had been easier to feel out on the glass-covered streets.

He finally procures a key. He feels around for the lock, and blindly navigates said key into said lock after several failed attempts. This is not helped by the fact that he's distracted by the time thing, still.

"Y'remember when I used to ask you what time it was an' you'd always just say 'dark', 'cause there was never a sun or nothin'? Least now I might get a 'bright' every once in a while..."

"Fine. Half past Dark."

There. Vincent has successfully gotten a more specific time-related answer out of Irahl. It's late.

He continues to slouch there, drunkenly watching the drama of Vincent and the Door until the ordeal finally concludes. Only once Vincent gets the thing open and successfully navigates his way through the doorway does Irahl finally uproot himself and shuffle into the room as well.

The specificity does get a chuckle out of Vincent. What a time to be alive. It's a shame that out of everything that's happened during today's tipsy escapades, he's probably not actually going to remember this historic moment come tomorrow.

Once he figures out which way to turn the key, he does finally open the door and stumble inside. The only illumination in the room is the pale, twilight-like haze of the city streets leaking in through their open window. This could be easily fixed if either of them ever bothered to turn on a light, but Vincent doesn't notice and doesn't need it.

Seconds after entering, Vincent gives the air a sniff and sounds a little nauseated.

"Man, we gotta..."

The upside of not allowing housekeeping is that the room stays secure. No one's gone through Irahl's stuff, and no one's moved the things Vincent was getting used to finding in specific places. The downside is that there's still a bunch of old blood on the bedding that's only gotten older since they left this morning.

Vincent doesn't really say anything about it to explain, he just heads over and starts tugging everything clumsily off the bed.

Living the life of a hunter-for-hire who camps out in ruined buildings with a barebones amount of belongings means that limping home while injured, bleeding all over the only bedding to be had, and then not being able to do much about it for a while, is a pretty frequent occurrence.

So, Irahl has to watch Vincent for a minute to even figure out what the problem is, and once he figures it out, he doesn't care. Vincent is left to his work while Irahl moves to poke around in the fridge.

Vincent isn't exactly a stranger to leaving pools of blood around the house, and he's become far less sensitive to the scent of Irahl's blood in particular... But something about the smell of it after stagnating in this little room for hours and hours is way too much for him right now. It smells thick and sticky and sickly-sweet, in the way that food sometimes smells kind of sweet while it's rotting.

The blood itself is all dry now, of course. It's not that hard for him to wad everything up in a ball and chuck it into a corner of their absurdly large bathroom. Maybe he's finally found a use for that huge bathtub they'll never touch.

And then it's just a matter of fumbling around for that cabinet he found earlier. There's not a chance in any reality that he'd get the bed made up to hotel standards, but he puts something down on the mattress and kind-of tucks it in. Another sheet goes on top. Another blanket goes on top. They have extra pillows. It's fine. It works.

At first, Irahl just kind of watches the proceedings while he picks at a container of tiny sweet rolls that he found in the fridge. He's not much of a dessert person though, and is too lazy to look for something more filling, so his attention wanders easily.

Watching Vincent put together a makeshift version of the bed makes him think of setting up a ramshackle infirmary in the belly of their little ship, and some part of him is surprised that the memory strikes him as a nice one. The rest of him however is busy remembering the fact that he may still have an open wound on his body somewhere.

So, during the second half of Vincent's project, Irahl is in the bathroom, looking at his wounds in the mirror and slapping a piece of gauze on the opened stitches on his abdomen. Don't want to mess up Vincent's good work by immediately bleeding on it.

In turn, at the tail-end of Irahl's project, Vincent finishes up his work and has a chance to go raiding the fridge himself. The old blood smell has taken the edge off of his appetite, but he still did a lot of walking today.

So Irahl comes back to find Vincent leaning against the counter, zoning out, and eating some sort of a flatbread wrap he found. He doesn't say anything at first--mostly on account of the zoning out and eating and the fact that he's still mostly drunk.

When he finally comes back to his body, he remembers the question he'd meant to ask minutes ago.

"Oh, yeah, how's the..." He can't remember the word for 'wounds' right now, so he gestures over his own torso and says, "...Stabs?"

Irahl is autopiloting around on an intoxicated cushion, wandering out of the bathroom, spotting the tiny cream-filled rolls he'd abandoned on the table, picking them up and dropping them off on the counter by Vincent's elbow, then meandering over to the bed so he can sit down and start the task of fumbling his boots off.

He glances down at his 'stabs' for a moment, as if he needs to check before he answers.

"Patched."

It's a serviceable answer. Vincent shrugs his shoulders.

"Patched ain't bad."

That seems to be enough for him; he finishes the last of his flatbread thing in a couple of bites. He eats the cream-filled rolls next, though he doesn't remember how they got there. He barely remembers starting to eat them. And then they're gone, and he feels good enough to do something other than mindlessly shove calories into his face.

Obviously, the next thing to do is take his shirt off and throw it on the 'Vincent's stuff' pile in the designated 'Vincent's stuff' corner.

"Y'think...?" He muses idly while doing this, "...Think Robin'll believe me when I tell him I had brunch?"

Irahl's boots get summarily tossed into the slightly-more-tidy-than-Vincent's-pile-but-it's-still-a-pile pile near his side of the bed. After that, he takes a minute to sit there and run Vincent's question through his mental eye.

He still doesn't quite understand all of the implications and associations with this new brunch concept, but he has picked up a sort of vibe throughout the day. He has at least gathered that it seems to be something that the upper half of the city would partake in and the lower half wouldn't bother.

"...Going to tell him how pink your drink was?"

Vincent chuckles at the thought.

"Fuckin' yeah I am."

He wanders his way to his side of the bed, where he begins the laborious process of getting out of his own shoes. He talks while doing it, which means it will take three times longer than usual. He keeps forgetting he's in the middle of a task.

"Think it's kinda like... I survived somethin', right? Like I ain't growin' frills or ruffles or nothin'."

In this moment, Irahl is at that place where even though he is definitively drunk, he is even more aware of how drunk his friend is. He just... watches Vincent fumble with shoes and words at the same time, his amusement growing with every word that the other man cobbles onto what he's trying to say.

At the end of it, there are several follow-up questions that Irahl could ask. Such as whether it's the drink itself that would cause some sort of frilly transformation, or just surviving brunch in general. For all he knows, there's some kind of superstition about eating so many flowers down in Vincent's mushroom-based home city.

Instead of asking anything specific, Irahl leaves it open-ended with an amused-sounding, "...Yeah?"

Irahl may not be the more socially-minded of the two of them, but this? This moment is masterful work. The rare situation where withholding one's comments is the strongest move one could make.

"Yeah, s'like... One of those life or death experiences?" Vincent will do absolutely nothing to make his story any more sensible, "'Cause I dunno what stuff that pink does to people. Ain't never had one. Y'know?"

Gods help him, he's managed to get one of his shoes untied and is moving to the second one, but forgot he actually needs to take the first shoe off as well.

"So I didn't die of a ruffle disease or nothin'. An' I don't think he's gonna believe me."

Yeah, that was pretty much the best decision he has ever made. It's hard to watch this show from where he's seated at the edge of the bed though, so he turns to sit back against the headboard.

He's only following the broad strokes of Vincent's logic, but that's hardly a fault of the alcohol. He is much more concerned with appreciating the inane and endearing details of this tableau before him.

The earnest slurring. The half-forgotten shoe. The fact that Vincent thought to put the words 'ruffle' and 'disease' together in a way that he is sure no one in history has ever done before.

"You had a witness." Don't worry, buddy. He'll back you up.

"I had a witness," Vincent repeats back at him. He speaks a bit slowly because of the alcohol and a misplaced need to lean towards Irahl as he says it, but he seems kind of delighted so it mostly just comes off as very cute, "You gotta tell him. Along with all that other stuff, the... Sugar... And the cake thing..."

In gesturing to try and recall his memories of the spun sugar nightmare they'd consumed earlier that day, he scrapes his fingers against his shoe and remembers that he's still wearing shoes. He starts back in on that second set of laces.

"...Not in a million years..." He mumbles in wonder, as if the total sum of their breakfast adventure is only just starting to sink in now.

To be fair, their breakfast adventure hasn't sunk in as reality to Irahl either. It's almost impossible to think of it having happened earlier this same day. Brunch, the dive bar, tormenting Finn... did they crash a garden party or something? Today feels like several separate day's worth of gallivanting to him, existing as delirious little islands in his mind.

Trying to think of it all happening in the same day is almost as difficult as imagining that he'll actually have to go back to Skeleton City sometime. In his tipsiness, it takes him a few seconds to recall what Vincent's little apartment even looks like.

"Tell him it's because you hid from the cops. He'll believe that."

Vincent laughs quietly to himself when it's pointed out that all this started from one of his usual bullshit adventures. He gets his second shoe off of his foot and sends it rolling about halfway towards his stuff pile.

"Yeah... Yeah, he'd believe that. That's the kinda shit that starts all kinda stuff..."

He tries to crawl up into the bed, but quickly realizes one of his feet still has a shoe on it. Thankfully he's at least still got the presence of mind to reach back and fumble his first shoe off instead of just trying to 'make it work' or something.

"There you go," Irahl encourages when that sneaky shoe get caught before it can reach the bed.

Everything is funny right now, and that occupies the majority of his limited, fuzzy attention. A tiny part of his mind however skips ahead several seconds in time to note the reality of Vincent finishing his climb onto the bed.

That little part of his mind suddenly becomes aware of the fact that he hadn't put on so much as a tank top after he'd patched up his chest. While Vincent is figuring himself out, Irahl glances over to where he'd stashed his clothes and starts thinking through the drunken effort of maybe hopping up and putting on a shirt...

With both shoes finally off his feet and no idea that Irahl is considering being somewhere else for a moment, Vincent finally flops around onto his back and lets his arms fall to either side. He's laying somewhere between sideways and upside-down--and while the bed is comically huge, so is he, so it's kind of wonder he doesn't accidentally bump into Irahl while he's doing all of it.

Gods, it's a good bed. He really is considering trying to take a mattress like this back with him, somehow, whether legally or not. But that's a plot for tomorrow--for right now, he mentally traces where he thinks the outlines of Irahl might be, based on what he can hear and smell and feel, and smiles.

"Man..." he says, slowly forming an enraptured thought as it all washes over him, "I had... A good day."

It feels... Important, the way he says it. And it's not that hard to imagine why. Both of them know it hasn't been easy. He lifts an arm vaguely, blindly, in Irahl's direction, though he doesn't quite reach him at this weird angle. Another thought comes drifting out of his mouth as his hand hovers in the air between them.

"...Hey, which one's the bad shoulder again...?"

Irahl's distant hopes of hunting down a shirt become considerably more distant as most of Vincent's body bonelessly pours across the mattress. He is in fact surprised when he isn't flopped into in the process.

He isn't a particularly empathetic person, but there's something about Vincent's sigh that resonates with him. Maybe one of those stunted, unacknowledged things hiding in his blood flickers to life a little bit, recognizing and reflecting the sense of peace that he is supposed to be attached to. Whatever it is, seeing Vincent so purely contented pulls at him.

As tipsy as he is, it's hard not to smile to himself over it. He hardly even minds that there's a hand kind of aimlessly reaching toward him.

"Left," he says, with Vincent on his right.

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