ext_75387 (
locked-holmes.livejournal.com) wrote in
milliways_bar2005-08-13 07:14 pm
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Holmes is looking far better than yesterday, settled at a table near the center of the room with a glass of brandy and--perhaps not entirely suprisingly--a chess board, all simplistic white and black, with a long and rectangular box to one side. In any case, his gaze seems clearer, sharp again, and his admittedly tenuous patience with the world has been largely restored by some thirteen hours of sleep.
He may well be waiting for someone specific, writing a brief letter on a sheet of paper in the interim with precise script.
[OOC: Locked largely to Raven for chess. Characters already well acquainted with Holmes may also tag, of course.]
He may well be waiting for someone specific, writing a brief letter on a sheet of paper in the interim with precise script.
[OOC: Locked largely to Raven for chess. Characters already well acquainted with Holmes may also tag, of course.]
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I will turn on nothing.
Between one breath and the next, the world burns.
I will take my walk in the fire.
Again.
I will sing the song I hear
coming from the fire where I walk.
And again.
I will not look into the fire.
And again.
I will stay in my room,
singing a song I can barely remember.
Made anew and destroyed by the same hand, in an almost endless cycle. Hundreds upon thousands of them go up in flames.
I will turn into the fire.
And through it all, Raven laughs—high and wild and desperate.
I will sing a song I can barely remember.
This is how it always ends.
I will bury my room in my bed
and carry my bed into the fire.
In fire.
I will not hear the song at all.
The only difference this time is the hand.
There will be my voice,
just my voice,
And then he dies.
and words that could never have been
in the song
And it is quiet.
Never again
Raven learns.
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This is inhuman and harsh, and powerful enough that even the darkest corners built by thought and careful logic cannot protect him. He could scream, he could shatter, and in such a moment of breaking control, he could commit the sort of murder of which he has always feared himself capable. Senseless and brutal, restoring power with the price of blood.
The noose tightens; he cannot draw breath. Raven's madness sings to his own, all cacophony, promising complete and sweet surrender. The destructive half of his nature twists in on itself, and barely resists.
But his mind is not weak, after all. The strands of his madness strike like fissures through crystal, flawed but still capable, still geometrically sound.
His pattern does not change, but it adjusts. It expands, adapts, and twists in and out along its own edges, making the new tears that Raven's Power has inflicted into a part of its own rhythms. In this moment, his mind shows a beauty beyond any aesthetics, mathematical but human at the heart.
Passion, and survival, and skill.
Outside the battle of nature to nature, he has surged forward, upsetting the chess board. His fingers have wrapped tight enough around Raven's throat to cut off breath in anyone else.
"Goddamn you," he hisses, eyes as ferociously bright as Raven's are black. "I did not say that you could change me."
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"Oh, Holmes. To think that I ask for permission."
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His fingers tighten again, and just as abruptly he realizes what he is doing, willing and wanting to hurt. He snaps himself back, chess pieces clattering against the floor. The last time his hands had trembled anything near so badly, he had faced a subtly horrible death in the house of Grimesby Roylott. Serpents in the dark.
"Damn you," he growls again.
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"You asked, and I answered."
A breath.
"I told you before--you can see the world as I do, but it will change you, and it will hurt."
He is still quiet, and watchful.
"I gave you fair warning, and you chose. I can ask no forgiveness for what I am."
Change is a difficult thing to love.
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They do not, however, prevent him from gathering Holmes' chess set, and leaving it with Bar.
The black king, however, has been replaced by one of Raven's feathers.
There is a new weight in Raven's pocket.