One of Darius' old clients is back and Darius - Darius can't kill him, can't do anything, he's talking to Swain and he's smiling and Darius just has to watch. That ugly frozen sensation in nightmares, when you know what's happening but you can't move to stop it even as your world crumbles down around you.
send darius an anonymous nightmare accepting.
darius doesn’t wake in a start this time, though his eyes snap open far too fast for someone who had been in deep sleep not long ago; the dream alone sends him into a flurry of memories he’d rather not revisit, and yet cannot seem to evade. pulling himself up from the bed to sit up, he halts himself mid-motion as he sees swain’s sillhouete by his side, this time real and tangible as he sleeps a deep and seemingly undisturbed sleep. he’d envy him for that alone if the sight didn’t get him to wonder, briefly, what the man he now shares bed with would think of him if he knew of his past.
he’s at peace with what he’s done, he knows himself to be no lesser for it, but he too knows other people’s view on the subject could certainly vary. a highborne as jericho, that as a child tasted none of the bitterness of starvation and orphanhood--- would he ever understand how deep in despair he had been at youth to resort to what he did? he holds no shame for what kept both his brother and himself alive, but the seed of doubt is planted with ease as the concept rises in his paranoid mind. regardless of whether he loves him or not, darius doesn’t deceive himself about the nature of men and he cannot trust what he hasn’t witnessed, he cannot think he knows swain better than he does.
to be aware of that is to prevent greater disappointment if proven wrong about his assumptions.
a scowl reaching over his features as his thoughts turn sourer, he slips out of bed and into his plain shirt on before leaving the room. it’s routine for him to ease his mind from disrupted sleep with nightly walks such as these, but this time, it seems that not even walking miles would suffice.
