@xremusx location: Mojo Dojo Casa de Remus' House notes: sleeping in dad's bed (remus isn't in there too don't make it weird)
The Eye had found Renfield first; there had been a hush that fell upon everything when the world was transported back through time. A silence that couldn’t be kept that way for long, not when the screaming had started. Renfield couldn’t contain his form, he couldn’t do anything but lash out as countless memories and thoughts came screaming into his mind. Madness was the drawback to his ability, physically strong in form but his appendages made him incredibly vulnerable. Sensitive, that’s what Remus had first said about them, delicate was another word that the original terror had used. As useful as they were, a cut or a sting was amplified tenfold, and the same could be said for the hollowborn’s mind. It wasn’t as if Renfield felt nothing, he felt everything, he just chose to suppress it and push it all down. For fifteen years though, The Great Old One that had inhabited his mind had gradually expanded, entwining into the bodies of millions, implicating itself into technologies and environments that Renfield had never considered possible. That Elder Evil had wished to consume the world, then when he was done with the mortal realm, he’d have grown further and used Renfield every inch of the way until the entire continent was nothing but a mass of organic, enthralled limbs.
Broken. That’s what Renfield was when The Eye’s research team scraped him off the floor of the control room. He’d be told later that it was Remus who’d all but torn him out of their arms. He’s my son! Whenever the original terror said that there was never any room for argument, not enough people took Remus seriously, Renfield always had. That unbridled potential and that great capacity for destruction, that was only some of what the hollowborn had emulated, but it was still a part of it. Days blurred together wrapped in the jacket he’d given to Remus years ago, he’d been laid in the other’s bed as Remus and Marius slept elsewhere. Meals that Renfield didn’t eat, water that the hollowborn wouldn’t take. Eventually someone came, a doctor that the hollowborn had worked with, and then little by little the pills closed off the rampant doors in Renfield’s mind that had been forced open. One by one, then dozens, hundreds, thousands, maybe more.
Three weeks in, and Renfield managed to take a shower on his own before he moved from the en suite to the door to the master. Takeout containers littered the kitchen, the state of a place that looked like someone had been pacing the floor for weeks. Clothes in piles, a tired look in Remus’ eyes when Renfield managed to meet them with his own. For the first time in his life things had gone quiet, he couldn’t change his shape, he couldn’t dilute his mind, he knew the suppressants he’d been given because five decades ago he’d helped develop them. An immortal hollowborn still, but for all intents and purposes he was human. There was no running away from his feelings, no burying them or hiding behind them. Not now.
“I’m sorry.”
