#th nocturne

[caeloservare]

@th-nocturne sent: "It can be hard to tell who or what a man is if he's got a mind to convince you otherwise." - Clark

Assorted media starters

James frowned. It needed more thought than he was planning to engage today. Overall, he preferred to keep his mind empty these days.

"Do you mean... me?" He didn't like this thought. It called out things that he was doing, but he never wanted to name them. "Someone else? People in general?"

[etruatcaelum]

[ @th-nocturne | vanitas // salem ]

"power demands ruthlessness. what did you expect me to do?"

Salem hums, deep in the back of her throat, and studies the boy before her in unmoving, inscrutable silence.

Resentment smolders behind his eyes, laced with contemptuous defiance—but… brittle, she thinks. The knife-edged look of a wild thing whipped into submission but never tamed. His soul gapes open: a cauterized pit in the skin of the world.

What is he?

Clawing life out of the vitrified scraps of the last fall maiden's heart had not been her intent. She wanted to understand what had happened in the bowels of Ozma's monumental fortress on the night Beacon Academy fell. To pry answers from the utter ruin that machine had made of the girl's body and soul before Cinder interrupted. Salem had hoped to learn why the eruption of Ruby Rose's silver eyes had nearly killed her protégée.

She didn't expect… him.

Vanitas is—an enigma. Neither grimm nor human; something new. Her creation, perhaps, although she dislikes how proprietary it feels to think of him that way.

"Power," she echoes at last, silken, "chases pride to its own defeat. I expect you to remember that."

[wintereign-archived]

@th-nocturne cont. from here

She stayed silent, eyes casting downward as he focused on the base of her neck line. Where the bee had embedded its stinger into her flesh. Weiss hadn't expected Qrow to blurt out the question she had been avoiding to talk about.

Even now, she wasn't sure if she wanted to talk about them. "I," She started. "It's nothing." A phrase used often, when people ask about the bruises, the occasional sneak peek of what she bore on her back. It was a topic she tried to avoid at all cost and the only person who truly know how she got them had been Winter.

She could still feel the way the belt came lashing down on her back, reopening wounds that he had inflicted. It was a memory she was still trying to forget. But she knew, eventually, that she would have to talk about it. "My father." That's all she said, all she was willing to say, and even saying that made her want to vomit.

[etruatcaelum]

[ @th-nocturne | vanitas // cinder ]

"if i could kill you and wear your skin, i would."

Oh, the little freak feels emboldened now.

Joy.

Cinder spares him an indifferent glance as she emerges from the bridge, heels clicking down the shallow steps cut into the behemothic jawbone of Salem's whale. Bound up in that violent promise is an unspoken acknowledgment that he can't; no matter Salem's displeasure over the setbacks at Haven, Cinder still—how had the witch put it?—holds the key to her victory.

Even apart from that, really, his leash of obedience to Salem protects him from Cinder. She'd like to see him try to take her down.

"If you're cold," she drawls, "I know a spell that'll keep you warm for the rest of your life."

Then she's swept past him, stride unbroken. If Vanitas wants to waste his breath on empty threats, he can heel like a collared hound.

[wintereign-archived]

@th-nocturne cont. from here.

She shook her head, arms wrapping around her in as a response to the cold weather they were having. She'd never seen anything like it before, never knew something like it existed. But then again, that wasn't any surprise given how she grew up. High classed, rich, never having to lift a finger to do anything herself. The servants her father had hired did everything, including handling the fireplace when it got cold.

The idea of needing something other than Dust to light fires seemed unreal to her, and perhaps that had shown on her face, because Qrow had asked if she wanted to see how it worked. "I do." She had said, surprising even herself. However, Weiss has noticed the little things that began to piqued her curiosities. The small things that she was never expected to learn, things that other people solved for her. That had been her father's motto: why do it yourself, when you had people to do it for you?

But now, she felt incompetent, felt like she was missing out on a bunch of different things that are naturally taught by parents to their children.

[wintereign-archived]

@th-nocturne cont. from here

She winced the medicine being used to fix her wounds stung. "Well, at least I can stand up for myself." She mumbled, and look at what it got her. Scrapes and bruises coating her body from a physical altercation. When she first got to Patch, she had gotten herself into a load of trouble with the other local teens. And now? It was only the occasional bullies who want to get a rise out of her, especially now that her father has openly admitted to disowning her.

And a rise they did and this time, she threw the first punch. "It was about you." She closed her eyes, taking a breath as Qrow continued to poke and prod at the scrapes. "About how I could stoop so low to live with a drunk despite having everything and everything I could have wanted. But they don't know you. You care in so many ways my father could never. And it means a lot to me."

[mythunderlegion]

@th-nocturne continued from here

"Usually when someone helps us, we thank them, Qrow," the blond huntsman pointed out, an airy laugh leaving his throat as he dusted himself off, quickly moving to hit the beast standing menacingly in their way. "Come on, let's get this big mean bear outta the way!"

[mythunderlegion]

"everyone seems to have found their happy ever after and i don't even know if i'm made for that." - Qrow to Willow // @th-nocturne

"Is anyone?"

Looking around, she doesn't see what Qrow seems to be seeing. Maybe she's just being pessimistic, but the people around them don't look particularly happy to her.

"I don't think it's even possible. Life is made of ups and downs. Sometimes one more than the other, but a happy ever after... I'm not sure about that."