wrong baby cedric (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dissolving) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
therookery2024-08-14 12:26 pm
dissolving) wrote in therookery2024-08-14 12:26 pm
Entry tags:
crystals | step one cut a hole in a box
Hey – 's Cedric.
Heard we used to have a box for, uh. Feedback. Set up a new one outside the Mediation office.
If there's aught been bugging you, can put it in there. Won't promise you the moons, but reckon we can at least talk it out. And if there's something gone good, or you seen someone really putting in the work, 's a fine place to say that too. I'll let folks know.
Won't read it for a bit. So if you got a pressing problem, talk to me direct.
Ah. Yeah. That’s all, thanks.
[ muffled: ]
How d'you even say Pizzicagnolo –
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Oh good, I thought so! I was so confident until I said it.
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[ fuck ]
'S Antivan, yeah?
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I think so! They have a lot of those fluid ns, and I haven't seen them elsewhere, anyway.
Your accentβI'm still learning, but it's Nevarran, I think? Did I get it right?
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Reminds me a little of my father, actually. He had somewhere around a hundred years to perfect his surfacer accent, so it was barely there, but I suspect he'd have sounded something like you when he first came up from the Underdark. Maybe a bit more hissing and angry-sounding, but that's just Undercommon for you.
1/2
2/2
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Yes! Vazeirosβmy father, that's his nameβhe's drow, a dark elf. I don't think you have them here? I could give a whole long explanation but I don't know that you'd be interested.
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Sure, anything you'd care to.
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[ well now she's self-conscious. ]
Ah... Well, drow are mostly subterranean, they live in what's called the Underdark. Lolth-sworn drow like my father mostly live in Menzoberranzan, but that's a whole... Really, I don't need to give you a history lesson on a people that don't even really exist here. Um.
[ this is rapidly falling apart, oh gods... ]
Drow are various shades of purple, mostly. Vazeiros is kind of a deep amethyst, but you'd never know it to look at me. Or, you'd never have known it, I don't even look like a proper half-elf here at allβ
Sorry, I'm rambling. I've never really explained any of this to anyone before, I don't know how to do it.
-> private
[ which is why it's a moment's debate before he decides to switch the channel private. if neither of them's a secret, this still isn't a conversation he wants before the peanut gallery.
purple elves, living underground. outlandish, but that's not the point; she feels, knows something's gone wrong. gone strange. not only the magic, then. ]
What were you expecting to see?
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Oh, [ surprised, like she hadn't expected him to keep asking. ] Well, in FaerΓ»n, half-elves take the traits of both their parents, to varying degrees. That usually means pointier ears, if not as pointy as the elf parent.
[ her hand raises, unconscious, toward her own blunted cartilage, then drops once she realizes what she's doing. ]
For me, you could tell I was a half-elf from my ears and eye color, they were purple. [ lavender. not important. ] My skin was, I mean it was more purple than a human's could ever be, but it wasn't terribly obvious. I think my mother's elf coloring canceled out Vazeiros' and the human bits kind of just took over.
Looking in the mirror has been [ nightmarish ] strange. But I know that's just how it is, here. Elfblooded mother with elf father, no matter how many elves are involved you still just look a human.
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[ hard enough to land here without looking a stranger. like getting picked up, dropped in some other life. someone else's eyes.
(another piece of it, written in word and fade: that the smallest sliver of humanity, beset on three sides, still bleeds true. not an elf, half) ]
There any bit feels familiar?
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Not really, [ feels a sad admission, but she's not one to lie when it's not needful. ] I keep looking. The technology here is about the same asβas FaerΓ»n, [ not home, anymore, and she's been so careful not to say it, not once, ] the clothes. Magic isn't the same, but we have it too.
But nothing about me is the same. Nothing about elves. I suppose, I wasn't made taller or shorter. I probably weigh the same. But it's as if...
[ she bites her lip, scrubs a hand through her hair as she considers her next words. after a moment, a false-bright voice, pushing down whatever wanted to come next. ]
Sorry. I'm sure this is all a bit much for a random afternoon chat. You're very kind to indulge me.
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[ rests there a moment, wrestling over how much to offer. he was born in this body, and if it ever sits ill, strange β
cedric can write his letters for either hand, outrun any knight in his squad. knows how high he can jump, how hard he can punch, how long he tends to bleed. he's learned what kind of pain you can push through; that you can make anything that kind, for a little while. if you have to. he knows the smell of his skin burning, and the shiny colour of scar, he knows this shape.
and he knows that no mastery will ever really be enough. one way or another, your body betrays you. theirs, maybe more than some. ]
When my beard started in, I'd do anything t'rip it out. Real hack job. Cut my cheeks seven ways for sixpence. Most kids, y'know, they were excited. Trying these awful wispy mustaches β but I hated it. Couldn't see myself under there. Couldn't see my uncles' faces no more.
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[ there's no dramatic oh of realization, no audibly shocked breath. ness thinks of gwenaΓ«lle, and her mother's portrait in the houseboat. thinks of the child of two worlds, belonging in neither.
that quiet despair and fellow feeling colors her voice. ]
It seems so lonely. [ living with people who have every reason to hold you at arm's length. looking your closest kin in the eyes and realizing you don't really look all that much like them. you might as well have sprung from the earth fully formed, for all you have anything to anchor you to a people, a place, a home.
at least in ness' case, here, it's true. cedric shouldn't have to know what that feels like.
who did he have to teach him to shave his face? ]
In FaerΓ»n, being halfβit never mattered much to me. Vazeiros didn't care about teaching me his culture, and I never knew my mother to learn about hers. Now that I'm here... I'm in mourning, it feels like. For myself. The me I was, or that I didn't have the chance to be.
Do you... know what I mean?
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[ he knows what she means. but alone β something in him bristles for that, that vazeiros didn't care, left her set apart. without connection. he has always had the alienage; even gone, he has always its had its memory.
(hasn't he?) ]
What d'you do for grief, where you're from? You got any traditions for it?
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Prayers and candles, on the deathday. The Feast of the Moon marks the start of winter, but it's for honoring the dead, too. We bless graves and, it varies, a lot of deities have their own rituals, but a lot of us in Candlekeep follow Oghma, our god of knowledge. It's not a formal tradition, but some use the day to record their memories of the dead. It's usually a very solitary practice.
[ ness had a book, in candlekeep, a small journal in which she'd started writing down her memories of imithren and the other people she knew who'd died in the netherese attack. it's nothing she can't start over, but she does feel a pang of loss for it all the sameβwhat if she's forgotten something? what if those memories are lost forever?
should she start recording her memories of faerΓ»n? what do you do when you're the one who died? ]
What about you? I've read about Nevarran burial customs, but there's not much said about mourning rites, or elven traditions.
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[ a pause. that's not mourning, not exactly. what do you do for grief, where you're from? what does anyone do?
gwen and her little hairpiece. herian's flowers. he has what he has, he has the grief. branches to tend. ]
All those people you were gonna be, or β thought y'might be. Maybe 's worth writing them down too. Remembering them.
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[ that cedric is the one who suggests it means ness doesn't discount the idea out of hand for self-indulgence. spend valuable time thinking about what might have been, if vazeiros had ever loved her, if her mother had loved her more, if she had made it to baldur's gate or got waylaid on the way and joined the circus, or something. plenty of things might have happened, but they didn't, and now she's here, and that's all there is to it. no point dwelling. don't get stuck.
don't think about it too hard. no one cares, there's a war on.
but cedric said he wouldn't be asking if he didn't think it mattered, so maybe it does. at least to one person. ]
It's a lot to write down, [ comes slow, wrestling with herself, the warring urge not to say too much and the need for validation. ] But it's not a bad way to... memorialize a life half-lived, I suppose. One-eighth-lived.
[ she'll hit old age here before she'd have been even halfway through her lifespan in faerΓ»nβshe hadn't even thought of that yet. ]
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Work of a lifetime, [ he agrees. ] Always gonna be new paths you pass by. Tells you, maybe, where y'want to go now. What matters in th'going.
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[ where she wants to go, what matters in getting there... hm. ]
It's a weird kind of... nostalgia, almost, isn't it, for those paths unwalked? Not regret, exactly, but a... wistfulness.
What have your missed paths taught you about where you want to go?
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Been at war longer than I done anything else. But,
[ hesitation. it always sounds childish, but he trusts ness with that ]
Being here, y'know. Makes me hope that's not forever, that I can find something after. Just hope whatever I do matters. Been given a lot, [ he says, and means i have taken, ] And don't want that t'be for nothing.
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That whatever you do, you'll do any less than your best, or that your best could be insufficient. You'll find your purpose when this is over.
[ it's her turn to hesitate, chewing a little on her bottom lip over whether she should just leave it there. ]
I hope that you can find that purpose away from a fight, though. I think you deserve to see what kind of person you are without a sword in your hand. I hope that's alright to say.
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