[Owls] /valentine's day gifts

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

All it was was a card with an equation. The answer was a certain room in Hogwarts. Enclosed was a request to solve the equation, then go to the room.

Matt was in there covered in ice cream toppings and waiting.<




I figured you'd want something more brutal than chocolate.
So Ofdensen got him sugar skulls and a digital recorder.



In the end, she was too shy to give the cake to him herself, so she just owled it.

Comments

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

Mio still felt too much guilt. "Are you starting to get something on your body too?"

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

He looked at her sharply. "What do you mean?"

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

"Inside." Mio pushed him into his room and shut the door. Making sure it was locked, she lifted her shirt up, still leaving her in the camisole that she wore under it, but it showed enough of her shoulder that the beginnings of the snake and holly tattoo could be seen.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

He was too tired, and too overwrought, to feel desire when she lifted her shirt. Still, being what he was, there had to be an element of prurience when he demanded: "Show me all of it."

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

Biting her lip, she took off her camisole. Now wearing only her bra on her upper body, the tattoo was very visible.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

((fighting off earworm of "Red Dragon Tattoo" ... which I associate with a guy running around headless in the subterranean corridors of Kingdom Hospital ...)

Lezard took off his glasses. Wiped them on the cuff of his shirt. Put them back on.

Stared.

Cursed elaborately in three languages, two infernal and one aethereal.

"You should have told me," he said, finally. And yawned.

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

[[I read that as Kingdom Hearts and thought, man that would've been an awesome boss fight.]]

"Was too tired." Just like Mio was getting now. "And when I was awake you were gone." Not even bothering putting them back on she headed to the bed.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

(( Only if it had Antubis (http://www.youtube.com/user/smilez1999a#p/u/59/4mY4zeL2H7k) as a summon monster ... actually that song is a recurring theme through a lot of wacky stuff in Kingdom Hospital, come to think of it ))

The time for courtesy and chivalry, even mock-chivalry, had passed. She'd infected him with some kind of curse, and now he needed to sleep, and he had no intention of giving up his bed for her. Nor did he have the energy to evict her, short of teleporting her away.

He needed to sleep. Now.

He followed her mutely to the bed and pitched forward, face-first, into the pillows.

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

Mio barely noticed, so far gone she was that she had drifted off.

Sleep did not provide the comfort she had wanted.

She kept running through rooms and rooms, looking for something that was on the tip of her tongue, finding herself going further and further into the manor-no, underground? Mio didn't even know where she was anymore. It actually looked like the path to the Hellish Abyss. But that was impossible.

Wasn't it?

Mio ran down the pathway, ignoring every ghost, until she stopped at the last torii gate.

A lone crimson butterfly was fluttering around the abyss.

"MAYU!"

Mio shot up, her cry of "MAYU!" on her lips, for anyone to hear. She bent over almost double as her back hurt, the tattoo spreading across her back.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

The cry did not bring him out of sleep, precisely. He perceived it still in the halls of the otherworldly manor, a shriek that pierced the air. Mayu, echoed the walls. Mayu... the echo took on a note the initial cry did not have, a sort of gloating amusement.

In the dream world, Lezard's sorcery had no power. (Why?) He could not teleport away, could not silence the voice or voices, could not set the halls aflame or bring the walls down. He sensed ... certain presences. Inimical presences. He had killed, and felt no remorse, but he could understand that his victims might harbor enmity for this. He had always relied on the unending law: when a soul cycled through rebirth, it forgot the experiences of its past bodies in joining with the new. To be safe, he preferred to obliterate the souls of his victims, but sometimes this was impossible, for tactical or other reasons.

Luring Lenneth by committing the murder of Lorenta, for example -- for that, Lorenta's soul had to remain intact.

The especially infuriating thing about the dream manor was that he could not identify just who these beings were. They hid; they delighted in teasing, mocking, lurking just beyond his ability to discern, and he could not draw them out, powerless as he was.

Who were they, and how could they dare to stand against him? And what were they going to do when they tired of toying with him ...

Sleep released Lezard as suddenly as it had claimed him, as though there were some hidden and mindless timer dictating the length of these fugues. The skin of his arm burned beneath layers of shirt; gasping, he struggled to free himself from the garment entirely, to rid himself of the irritation of cloth rasping against branded flesh. Mio might as well have been somewhere else entirely, for all the attention he paid. He might not even be noticing her presence, at this moment.

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

Mio whimpered as the tattoo spread. Based solely on the pain, it was almost entirely covering he back now. If this didn't stop soon, it would cover her entire body.

When Mio opened her eyes after the pain subsided, she found herself clutching Mayu's charm.

"Mayu," she sniffed.

She had even forgotten that Lezard was in bed with her.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

Mio's sniveling presented a minor yet welcome distraction from pain. Lezard turned his face toward her. With his glasses off -- they had been shed at some point, likely mashed somewhere under the pillows -- his eyes would appear larger than usual, though their focus would be unaffected.

He stared at her back. Was this going to happen to him, spreading from the first marks outward ... ?

"Mayu is dead," he reminded her, dully.

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

"But I saw her! In the abyss! She was fluttering around waiting for me!" Mio began sobbing in earnest.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

"A ghost, an apparition. You killed Mayu and she is dead." Lezard had no mercy. The spreading tattoo on Mio's back simultaneously fascinated and horrified him -- fascinated him, because under other circumstances he would have appreciated the effect; horrified him, because he felt its twin growing upon his own hide, albeit more slowly and with less visible stain. "Whom will you kill next, my lady?"

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

"I don't want to kill anymore!" It was a familiar cry from the lost village, and now Mio fully understood the meaning. Curling up in a ball, Mio said, "I don't want to."

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

"You 'don't want to'?" Lezard laughed aloud. "Look what you are doing even now."

He held out his arm, showing her where the bare skin bore the snake-and-holly tattoo.

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

Mio looked up and her eyes widened.

"I don't know how I'm doing that! I never asked for you to get cursed!"

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

"Are you entirely certain? Be certain, before you offer such assurances." Lezard was not well. This much would have to be obvious. "And does it really matter what you want?"

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

"I don't know, I don't know!" And she genuinely didn't. She had no clue that dreaming about Lezard one time passed the curse on to him.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

"Don't you?" His jaw clenched. "What do you know, my lady? What purpose do you serve?" Certainly not much of a purpose in his bed, thus far. He had had other preoccupations; he had not devoted time to seducing her, and she spent so much time sleeping, and to tell the truth, she could be rather boring for a person like Lezard. The spark of bitter wit that enlivened Steff was utterly absent from Mio.

He had kissed her, once, for his amusement. Look where it got him.

"Would you like to have a purpose?"

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

"I stopped the Repentance..." Mio whispered. Even if she did kill Mayu, it did have a purpose. She nodded again at Lezard's question.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

"That was your purpose; it is fulfilled; you are finished. You have not much time remaining, I think. Each time you sleep, you remain asleep longer; soon there will be nothing but sleep, unwaking. I doubt that Hogwarts' enchantment will bar that. It will merely keep your body alive."

There was a certain grim satisfaction in saying this to her, making her understand it. He refused to accept that he too could now be doomed; the contamination was indirect, surely, since he had not been involved himself in Mayu's death. There had to be a way out for him. At the same time, his ire at Mio was undiminished by the likelier possibility of his own survival. She had no way of knowing he had better chances than she. She knew nothing.

"How can you help me at all? What use can you be to me? In what time remains to us, I think, you owe me whatever you can offer."

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

"I don't know. I just keep sleeping, and following Mayu in my sleep, and...and..." Mio hid her face, ashamed at admitting this. "I just want to forget."

Mayu's memory wasn't worth it if she haunted her dreams.

[arrogantmage.livejournal.com]

Her shame meant nothing to him, if shame was what caused her to hide her face that way. "Forgetting would not change your fate," he said, cruelly -- and incorrectly. "Do you think only of yourself? Do you care at all for what you have done to me?"

[mio-remaining.livejournal.com]

"I don't know what to do! You're the mage!" Still tearing up, Mio got out of bed and picked up her shirt, putting it on.