Week Six

[stagemanagers]

[Last week, in It's Curtains, the weather changed, and with it your fortune in Dads. Discord took Salieri out - or perhaps Salieri took Discord out - and left the survivors with that much less impulse control. Nonetheless, a visit from a new friend might have provided a little bit of much-needed hope?

On Sunday morning, you'll find that the other side of the second floor has opened up - as well as the actual intended path to reach the roof garden. You can finally stop climbing up that rope every time you want to have a picnic or secret lover's rendezvous!

Outside, the weather seems to have calmed down. It's sunny again, with rather a lot of clouds. Though it's warm, the atmosphere seems very...still.]


Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday

(( Be sure to submit your memory regain and your AC for this week! As always, Hester's office hours and the merch booth remain available. ))

Comments

[barberic]

[He remains where he is, unmoving except for the shuddering breaths he takes that rattle in his whole, broken chest.]

...Leave me. I beg of you.

[mayavericks]

Please do not ask me to do that.

[She kneels beside him, hand on his back.]

You have been so strong for me. Please let me extend the courtesy to you.

[barberic]

[He doesn't flinch, but goes still when she puts her hand on his back.]

I don't deserve it.

What have I become?
How could I know?
That who I thought I was
Died so long, long ago...

It was never my intent to deceive you, Miss Tendo. [It kills him not to call her Maya. But it's for her own good that he push her away. Being around him is only fit to get you killed.]

Whatever kind of monster I am, know that I never meant to lie.

[mayavericks]

Benjamin. Whatever you think you are, whatever this monster of a Wizard has shown you, I don't believe that to be you.

[She strokes her fingers through his hair, then down the span of his neck. She keeps her fingers working against his shoulders.]

A monster would not have held any one of us as we cried. As we mourned. He would not have helped us honor our dead.

[barberic]

I took my revenge on the man who sent me away. But that isn't what makes me a monster, no.

[He raises himself up from his practically supplicant position, though his head and shoulders remain bowed low.]

No, it's the dozens of men I butchered along the way. It's my own wife's bl--

[He has to take a breath, squeeze his eyes shut.]

Lucy didn't die when I was in Australia. Oh, she poisoned herself and it destroyed her mind, but God, help her, she didn't die... [The last word a wretched moan, he breaks off in a sob, his hands squeezed tight into fists on the earth in front of his knees.]

'Don't I know you?' she said. And I was too caught up in my fantasies of revenge to recognize her until she lay dead at my feet!

[mayavericks]

How could you have known?

[Maya... doesn't know what he'd experienced, or how different Lucy must have been. But if her mind had been destroyed then surely there would have been no trace of the woman he loved. It hardly would have been on him.

But that didn't excuse the fact that his hands were stained with blood. That he had killed anyway.]

Why did you -- I can understand the man who ruined your life. [Not really, but -- ] Why the others?

[barberic]

[Ruining his life was only the first of the Judge's crimes, but he wants to protect Maya from knowing about the Judge's intentions with Johanna, if he can.

He shakes his head, still not looking up.]

The Judge escaped me once - he locked Johanna in an asylum, where neither I nor her young suitor could find her for months, and for months I... was possessed--

No, I was consumed. Even now with it fresh in my mind I remember little, like I was dreaming the whole time while awake, but I vowed...

[Not one man, no nor ten men,
Nor a hundred can assuage me
I will have you!!

And I will get him back even as he gloats,
In the meantime I'll practice on less honorable throats]

I vowed to slit every throat in London if that's what it took to get another chance at his.

[He goes silent, then, his head bowed, a convict awaiting judgment.]

[mayavericks]

You were a man that was wounded and left to rot, Benjamin. Any wounded creature, left cornered, will lash out until it can feel safe again.

[She reaches up, fingers coaxing through his hair, careful as can be.]

I want to ask you something. Will you answer me? [She doesn't wait, won't keep him in suspense.]

If the cards were laid out on the table once more, if you had the opportunity to begin anew, would you make the same decision?

[barberic]

...Start over from here?

[How could he possibly? The thought that he could have a life after this place, well, it's been the furthest thing from his mind for going on three weeks, now.]

Or go back, with the Judge still alive and in possession of my daughter, and my beautiful wife, wandering the streets like a ghost.

It feels like the actions of another man, still. I want to believe that I would choose differently, that I wouldn't let revenge drive me completely mad.

But to save Johanna from her mother's fate, or worse... I would still go after the Judge. What father wouldn't? When a man older than he is confesses his desires for his sixteen-year-old daughter?

[And who may it be said is your intended, sir?
"My ward... Oh, and pretty as a rosebud!"
As pretty as her mother?]

I would do the same for you or Farrah. Or any other girl here. If a man old enough to be your father wanted to have you like that.

[mayavericks]

I do not condemn you for what you did to that man. Anyone who would dare desire a child in such a way --

[It's clear by the lines of her face, the way her brows tighten and how her mouth pulls into a deep line, that she means it. Just as the SQUIP had gotten what it deserved for its crime, so to would this Judge. She feels no remorse for believing in that.]

I only intend to ask if you would shed the rest of the blood you did along the way.

[barberic]

[Even though he isn't looking at her, he can hear it clear in her voice. After all, he's felt the same.

He's silent for a long moment. The Beadle? Complicit, if not an outright accomplice. Part and parcel with the Judge, certainly.]

...I want to say that I wouldn't. I wish I could be sure of that, but... I did, once, I can't... I can't shake that. I can't undo it.

I wish I could. I wish...

[His words break off in a soft, almost inaudible whimper.]

[mayavericks]

[Maya only nods. She allows her body to drape over his, while her arms encircle his neck. She sighs against his shoulder delicately, while a thumb begins to circle at whatever bit of muscle or skin she can get at.]

That is all I need to hear.

I trust you.

[barberic]

[He doesn't expect it to be enough. Who would accept 'hopefully not' as an answer to 'would you kill again?' In an academy that deals in death weekly, with a harsher and harsher toll?

He doesn't expect her acceptance, and therefore he's blindsided completely when she wraps her arms around his neck, her body draped over his back. He tenses, holding his breath, until she speaks.

And then his body shudders, and he softly begins to sob.]

[mayavericks]

[It's a strange thing, trying to comfort an adult. Every stroke of her hand down his back, every caress leveled to his hair, feels entirely wrong. Juvenile, comparatively. But she's certain Benjamin would offer a similar gesture to her, and so she wants to repay it back in full.]

I'm here. I'm not going anywhere.