Nightingale PV Rowan Bane Finished

Ad libitum.

Agony rippled through her once, broken knives using her nerves as whetstones, pulsing for two seconds before ebbing away into duller throbs in sync with her heartbeat. Her nails, chipped on some fingers and too long from lack of time for cutting, dug into her palm, imprinting little crescent moons of scarlet into the skin, and her jaw clamped down hard, aching when she let go of the tension. Her shoulders rose, then fell, as she calmed herself, concentrating on the contraction and relaxation of her diaphragm. Breathe with your stomach, not your chest, she recalled someone advising her so many years ago, when she could barely control what register her voice was coming out of.

"He obliviated me."

Those first words that she uttered—a response, a grappling hook thrown out from her fall in the chasm of her own mind, catching on Rowan's words, on the presence of another human being. This was something she had done many times, using someone else as a handhold to climb back out, although it had almost always been her brother—someone she already knew well, at the very least. But this was the only hold she had, even if it was a pinch, and she would have to use it. "He—got drunk... threw his bottle at me... chased me out. Obliviated me. I spent some days, I don't know how many, in the streets—California, in America—before Parker found me." Her voice had become stronger now, and she'd managed to straighten herself; this was something less difficult to talk about.

"He brought me to Oxford University. Raised me for four years before I got here. The obliviation started wearing off... that's what this," the girl gestured toward her head, "is. I only found out last summer, and we generally know what happened, but nobody can figure out how to get rid of the obliviation itself... I haven't—haven't talked to him since that night." The acid in her voice as she referred to him was enough of an indication of who, exactly, she was talking about. This was insane, honestly—spilling her entire story, albeit with half of it left out, to someone she met ten minutes ago. Really quite strange.

"Thank you," Cel muttered, wincing slightly as another sharp pulse of pain hit her. "Can I...? Just for few seconds?" She hovered a hand over the arm of Rowan's wheelchair, about to put some of her weight on it, but uncertain if the action would be appropriate.

Ad libitum = With free rhythm/expression, a Latin term used in music

Shite. All he could think of was the simple swear word as he heard obliviate. It was a topic to never be taken lightly. He knew that much. 

Though talking seemed to help her. His words of encouragement something to hold onto. He was like that too, he simply latched onto constants. So breathing, heartbeat, all that. Underlying beats of music. Her binding point seemed to be contact of some sort. So he would talk. 

“Go ahead. Do whatever you need to feel comfortable. Though I would prefer you held onto the back of the chair, er, leaned on it if thats what you’re looking for. I don’t mind. Besides, I get your point by now.”

He would keep the stream of words going, damn it.

“I know what it’s like- terrible father figures and no mother. I was nine when she passed, older than you, but... I was taking care of her when she passed. My father, my mother, my uncle, and one of my aunts went down all at the same time, and the rest of the family was too much of a coward to-“

He sucked in a breath, dispersing that anger back out, forcing it not to ball up in his gut. 

“Sorry. They were afraid to catch whatever illness they had. I was immune. So i was tending to my mother and father at once. I knew minimal cooking skills, because when we weren’t out of the house, I was home alone. We also had a large garden, at the time. Though... it ended up being not worth much. My uncle and my mother passed. Satadori- my uncle- he fell first.”

He shrugged slightly, pushing away the fact that it really did hurt him. He could cry later. 

Tempora, filia veritas.

Cel's hand moved from the wheelchair's arm to the back, gripping the metal, letting the coolness shock her into reality.  Rowan's words were comforting, yes, but she used them as less of a comfort and more of a tether—to keep herself above water, at least until the water drained away. It was not so much the meaning behind his words as the sound of someone else's voice, although a glimmer of curiosity curled its way out of hiding as he began to tell his story.

Another story of a mother lost, a parent unlike one. "I never  got the chance to grieve." Her voice had faded into a husk now, words quieter and quieter—not only near inaudible this time  but truly silent if one was not listening for a response intently. But indeed there had been no time to mourn for her loss, only a strange, empty feeling as she wandered California that something was lost—she simply couldn't remember what that was, exactly. Or who.

Still, relating to another story didn't make the other any less difficult. "I'm sorry." She winced at her own words—an apology, although appreciated, was not the very most helpful nor desired response. It was often the best people could come up with—but probably not the best that Cel could come up with, right? What she really wanted to say was a simple thank you, or even a you must be stronger than me to get through that without breaking like I did, but it was more difficult to slide that into a conversation smoothly, so instead the young Ravenclaw settled for a dazed replacement, and an input of her own.

"It's hard, isn't it?" the girl remarked, words full of melancholy. "You lose a parent, someone to depend on... and the other one is right there, but he's far from a father. I found my real father this summer, but he's... distant. More in touch with my brother. His wife, my stepmother... well, doesn't like Dorian much, started out all right with me, but." She took a shaky breath. "Turns out all she wanted was a porcelain doll to display in a glass case." And it took her a long time to realize that, the battle with doubt still warring on inside of her head, but what was there to do about it? She almost wished she didn't know, almost wished that she didn't understand. But she did. And that made it very difficult to hate her stepmother.

ex exitus