paradisalogs | Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts

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Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts

Who: Felix and Mark
What: A talk
When: Monday, March 25
Where: Room 428
Rating: Pg-13, most likely, for Felix's past

Weeks after having his brother come to the castle and he can't quite put a name on anything he's feeling. It's been two years. It seems like a distant memory, the day he and Mildmay left Mélusine. He knew he'd been angry - with himself rather than his brother, though his sibling bore the brunt of it anyway, for lack of any better target. The last in a long line of injustices the other man bore for him. It felt unfair that it had to continue here in the castle. That things had been relatively quiet for the time being meant little in the long run.

He couldn't hide from it either. Mildmay's loss made it so he had to keep him close and therefore never far from his mind. That the obligation d‘âme was part of this was impossible to explain. The only one who knew of it was Mark. Not even Ashura, privy to much of the details of his past, knew of that arrangement. And when his lover had turned up missing, it only seemed press down on him even further.

And while it seems ridiculous to be seeking council from a teenager, there's no one else left to go to. Mark sees something of value in him, or at least is willing to try. He needs to know if that optimism will hold up when given more of the story. Thus it's later that evening, shortly before the usual broadcast time, that Felix knocks on Mark's door.

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Nora had gone out for the evening, to hang out with some of her new "gal pals", as Mark jokingly called them. He'd tease Nora about gossip and nail polish mercilessly, sometimes, but he was glad she'd found them: he remembered how she'd seemed to know everyone, back home, always laughing and joking with them. She hadn't said as much to him, but he'd been able to tell how much she'd missed having that sort of rapport with people in the castle. Now that she finally had it again, he was hardly going to be one to honestly begrudge her that, even if he was still a little jealous of the ease with which that sort of thing came to her.

After a week of being locked into the theatre, after all, the company of more than one or two other people was the last thing he wanted. The whole thing had left him pretty tapped out on extrovert fumes, and in severe need of a recharge. Having had the weekend to themselves had helped, but he was still comfortable keeping to himself in their room. So when there was a knock on the door, he was surprised: first of all, Nora never knocked, she just breezed on in - and so did Ino and Zelos, usually. Only a handful of their usual visitors knocked, and he found himself trying to guess which it was as he stretched and got up from his chair, leaving a pile of CDs and cassettes scattered in neglect across his desk.

Cohen the iguana, disturbed from his snoozing by the noise, poked his head out from inside his bit of hollow log and blinked, blearily. "Y'got me, buddy," Mark mumbled to him with a smile, threading a hand through his hair to make it halfway presentable before making his way to the door.

"Felix!" Pleasant surprise spread over his face as he stepped aside to let his old friend in. "Hey, man. C'mon in." Even as he smiled, though, he was assessing the damage, seeing if anything looked outwardly wrong.

Felix smiled, though it was a strained ghost of a thing, compared to the usual force of the charisma he could summon up when he was trying. It was barely even there, at the moment. Not that that was overly usual, where the teen was concerned. Maybe early on he'd felt the need to impress, but Mark seemed to prefer the opposite. In that sense there was an absence of pressure to be all together and perfect, though sometimes the blind optimism hiding under the surface was an easy trap to trigger when things inevitably weren't. He wasn't sure which of those things he'd find tonight.

He stepped into the room, glancing around uncertainly. It was immediately obvious something was off, from the slump in his usual immaculate posture and the awkward way his hands danced over his vest buttons.

"I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

"Nope, nothin' that can't wait. Nora's off hangin' out with her girlfriends, so it's just me an' Cohen. Have a seat. C'I get you a drink?"

He led Felix further inside, toward the gathering of bright bean-bag chairs clustered at the back of the room, near the mini-fridge where he and Nora kept their caffeine stash. Felix' nervousness was hard to miss, and it was even harder for him to miss what was likely the reason why. The trick would be bringing the subject up - whether he'd need to, or whether Felix would bridge it on his own was the important question. But for now, he knew, he needed to make his friend comfortable, first. Experience had taught him that was the easiest way to get him to speak freely, without the sarcasm that was his almost constant suit of armor.

He stared at the chairs but didn't take the invitation, settling up against the nearest piece of furniture instead, not quite willing to make his position more vulnerable than it was just yet.

"I don't suppose my choices are anything other than Pepsi?" he answered, softly teasing, knowing Mark's preferences even if he didn't entirely understand them.

Mark reached for a wooden box on top of the fridge and brought it over for Felix's perusal. "Nora's got about five billion different kinds of tea. And there's juice, too."

Seeing that his friend wasn't comfortable enough to sit, yet, he bit his lip a little and thought. Clearly, something was going wrong, and he was willing to put money on Mildmay's arrival being a factor. Felix had been worried, but mostly close-lipped about him since he'd shown up, and with what little Mark had to go on, it was still clear that thongs had the potential to turn full on clusterfuck pretty quickly. On second thought....

"But we've got some amaretto that goes really good in the Cherry Pepsi."

"You know how to appeal to my sensibilities. Very well," he said, with a wry but slightly drawn smile. Mostly it was to appease Mark, rather than his own nerves.

"And I will overlook the fact that you have that in your room in the first place."

He grabbed a plastic cup from the stack on top of the mini-fridge and poured out most of a can of soda, then added a generous yet sensibly-sized shot of liqueur before handing it out to his friend.

"What, the booze? It's not like I go getting smashed. The first New Year's I was here, that happened, and I don't plan on letting it happen again. That was fuckin' hell."

Felix took it, cradling it carefully in both hands as it were something to cling to at the moment, though he doesn't seem to be in a hurry to actually drink it, dubious as he is. He gives Mark a wry smile.

"Not that I am encouraging you in the practice, but it some amount of tolerance helps with that sort of thing. Generally. Sometimes the castle prefers you be ill either way."

"Yeah, I guess that's true. I'm still not in any hurry to puke my guts out any time soon, though." He's never understood why people would willingly get that intoxicated and still be able to call it a good time. He can understand why people drink so much if they're upset - because Lord knows he's seen enough people in the castle drink away their problems - but recreational binges still baffle him. Thinking about people drinking to forget brings his mind back around, though, and he realizes that Felix may be subtly trying to change the subject.

Sorry, Felix, not in his room. If he came to talk, they're going to talk. He settled against the wall, holding his own can. Normally, he would have sat down in a bean-bag chair and sprawled, but he doesn't want Felix to feel awkward having to look down at him to talk. Cracking open the soda, he held it up in a toast. "Here's to not ralphing."

It wasn't much of a toast, but maybe it'd make him smile. And that was another crucial step in making his friend comfortable enough to talk.

He laughed, softly, and raised his own drink in unison before raising it up his lips. He immediately coughed, clearing his throat as gently as he could manage.

"Well, it's definitely not going to become a regular thing, but it will do," he said, feeling marginally more at ease, despite how ridiculous the situation felt. He'd come here on his own, after all.

Voicing those worries, however, was not an easy segue to make.

"You and Zelos, man, I will never get either of you used to soda." He smirked. "F'it makes you feel any better, the booze makes it go flat pretty fast." In his mind, that was a downpoint of putting alcohol in a perfectly good can of soda, but ... well ... such was life.

"What do you usually go for, wine or something?" He was well aware that he was vaguely stereotyping, but - come on, seriously, all the wizards in his books from back home drank wine or mead or something like that. You never saw any of them order a martini or a Long Island Iced Tea. Now that he thought about it, most of them didn't even really drink, because it was 'bad for their concentration'. Except for that one in the epic trilogy of doom he'd read once, he drank and smoked fantasy-world-weed and everything. He figured Felix was maybe more that sort of wizard, only ... a lot less zen. Maybe it was the lack of fantasy-world-weed.

Felix's only experience with such a thing was through the drug phoenix, which had a vaguely similar side effect of making a person not care overmuch about anything, with the downside and completely dissimilar effect of being incredibly addictive. Consequently, it'd been quite a few years since he'd had any, and was not in a hurry to resume the habit.

He rolled the can back and forth in his fingers, smiling bemusedly. "Depends on the occasion, but my favored drink of choice is usually bourbon. But yes, I do like wine. I'm also perfectly fine with tea or coffee, in case you were wondering if I was a drunk."

"Nah, I don't judge. I mean, I see people over the journal gettin' drunk all the time, it's not like anyone really gives them hell about it." He shrugged - just because he couldn't understand the appeal didn't mean he was going to begrudge those who could.

"But I don't think you came here t' talk beverage choices, didja..."

"No," he admitted, faintly embarrassed by the observation, but not about to lie about his purposes, as nebulous at those seemed even to himself at that particular moment. What was it that he needed? Sympathy? Solace? Counsel? There was so little they had in common, when he stopped to think about it, and yet it had never stood in their way. No reason it should now.

Felix considered what he would say first. There were still a lot of secrets he had to step around, uneasy to give them up all at once, and now not all of them were his.

"I never did tell you the rest of it. What happened just before I came here, I mean..."

Mark shook his head, glad that Felix wasn't going to try and shy away from it, glad he trusted him. At the same time, he knew this wasn't going to exactly be light and happy conversation. He took a slow sip of his soda and felt the bubbles make their way down his throat, consciously rooting himself in the moment, in their conversation. This was important: he wanted to be sure that he was there, that he was truly listening. It wasn't often that someone genuinely took him up on his offer to be an ear, a venting ground - and when they did, it was a responsibility he took seriously ... even more so with the people who knew his reasons for it.

"No, the last thing I think you told me was about going to get him back from that other wizard." He paused, trying to recall the name of the bastard. "...M'sorry, it's - you told me such a long time ago, I can't remember his name."

"Malkar," Felix said, swallowing a bit around the word, the man a physical impediment to his existence even still.

"Though it may not have actually been his name. Mildmay knows him as Brinvillier Strych, the wizard who assassinated our current Lord Protector's grandmother many years before, though I wonder if maybe he might have been something before even that..." he trailed off and smiled thinly, "but that isn't what I came here to say. Actually there wasn't much that occurred immediately after that. A fairly uneventful two years passed after we returned to the Mirador. I had a steady lover then, too, for most it. But I started, very slowly, to become obsessed with the notion that Malkar might find a way to come back. He'd clearly done it once, after being defeated as Strych. But Cabalines, strictly speaking, do not believe in ghosts or anything of that nature, and I couldn't quite confess such an irrational fear to anyone else that might have been able to help me. It was wasn't only that, though. There were other things, or maybe it's just the way I am. I was blind, partially deliberately, to a lot of things I should have otherwise heeded, and I drove Gideon away, which led to what happened next."

Throat suddenly dry, he paused to take a drink. It would never be an easy thing to remember.

"Gideon." He echoed the unfamiliar name, mostly to commit it to memory and link it to the story. "I'm guessin' he was the boyfriend, yeah?"

With a frown, he moved from his leaning post against the wall to perch on the edge of his bed, and took a sip of his soda. He knew what it was to be paranoid - he'd been afraid of getting caught every night he'd done his broadcast, back home, despite all the precautions he took. He knew what it was to be part of something large, and put your blinders on and keep walking, hoping it would solve itself, too. And even more, he knew what it was to want to drive people away. He'd tried to do it to Nora, too, after all, and he still felt lucky every single day that it hadn't worked. As much as he wanted to voice all those things, to reassure him, he knew the story wasn't over yet, so it wasn't his turn to talk. So he held all his reassurances in, and simply listened.

Felix nodded, solemnly. "Gideon was a defector from the Bastion - our political and thaumaturgical rivals, in a sense. A large part of what Cabaline wizards like myself are responsible for is maintaining the wards that prevent them from attempting a coup. By taking the oaths and the tattoos," he held up an arm where the vines blazed in resplendant glory along the back of his hand and disappeared into his sleeve, "you are protected by those wards. And while it's possible for a defector to be allowed in, the Curia was stalling on Gideon. Essentially, it was only being my lover that protected him, and when he left..."

He had to pause again, pressing a hand against his forehead, both against the pain and guilt he felt.

"He was murdered...by a spy from the Bastion. It wasn't even about him. He was killed in order to frame me, under some misguided assertion - propagated by Malkar, I assure you - that I was like a keystone to the structure of the Mirador."

A lot of the terminology was as good as Greek to Mark, and went sailing over his head, but the gist wasn't hard to grasp. Not only did Felix have the guilt of being tied to Mildmay, but now this ... he winced, suddenly wishing he could do more than just stand here and listen.

"That's ... that's awful. Jesus. What ..." He sighed, trying to pull his thoughts together more sufficiently so that he could say something that sounded remotely supportive.

"... so ..."

But then the implications of what Felix was saying settled on him completely, and he paled. "They didn't really think that you--"

He didn't look at Mark directly as he nodded again, minutely, and licked his lips before taking another drink, which he was at least finding was helpful in keeping his throat from going dry as he spoke.

"I had enough enemies in the Mirador that they would not have searched very hard for another explanation, and I had..." he cleared his throat, "...something of a notorious temper. Isaac had planted sufficient evidence to lay the blame at my feet. Luckily for me, if the adjective can be used, Mildmay and a friend of ours, Mehitabel, discovered the crime before the Protectorate Guard was conveniently alerted to it, and in turn they came to warn me. Un-luckily...for all of us, probably...I was with Isaac at the time, and what they told me helped me realize that it was him that had done it. I probably don't have to tell you that I was angry. More than I have been in my entire life. But what I did..."

It's funny, Mark can't help but think: how it's one thing to kill someone for revenge in the movies or in books, as an eye-for-an-eye, but how hearing about someone actually doing it is terrible and makes his skin crawl. He's not sure he could do it, even now, even as he's being trained to defend himself almost every morning.

"You killed him, right?"

He feels himself wither a little at the question. Though Mark assuredly doesn't mean it to be accusatory, the horror at least is evident. And perhaps he should be, though what Mark doesn't know is that while Isaac isn't dead by his hand, he had already killed once before then. When he'd rescued Mildmay, he'd done it by incinerating Malkar. But at the very least it hadn't been just for his own sake.

"Worse, maybe, but it's not--" he stops himself from saying 'not the point', because he doesn't want to sound like doesn't at all care about what he did, though he would not say he wished it hadn't happened.

"I ordered Mildmay to do it, via the binding-by-forms. But even the binding-by-forms isn't complete control. It's a push...a strong one, granted...in a certain direction...that can be resisted for a time. And he fought it then."

He ran a hand over his face and looked up at last, waiting for the judgement he expected as he continued with the last of it. "The Protectorate Guard found us then. I wanted him to suffer, the way he'd make Gideon suffer, and I had no time to consider it. So I did it. No, I didn't kill him. I sent him mad instead."

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Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts

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