tushanshu_logs | [Midnight Hotel] June catch-all

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[Midnight Hotel] June catch-all

Characters: Anyone, everyone.
Date: Month of June, 2016.
Location: The Midnight Hotel.
Situation: Catch-all post! Feel free to use this post for anything that happens within the Midnight Hotel during the month, using the subject header to label specific rooms or for specific people. See also the OOC note at the bottom.
Warnings/Rating: Mark your threads if content warnings become applicable, please!

The Hotel’s numbers have dwindled slightly since last month, but there are some new additions of note – firstly, Jintou, an ex-Snake kedan brought there by Aqua and Akito’s Chihuelan mugger Marcil, the one with a noticeable scar on his cheek, who was recently bargained out of the Snakes’ imprisonment. Jintou, while still skittish, has relaxed enough to start getting bored by being limited to the Hotel, as he’s not allowed out unless escorted. Malcil, on the other hand, is lean and bruised like he came out the worst in a fight and has no desire to leave at all—he barely leaves his room, in fact. Any interrogation will make him clam up and back away.

For the most part both are given a decently wide berth by the other kedan in the Hotel, though the kedan are more likely to recognise Malcil as Chihuelan than Jintou as a Snake and he, therefore, bears the brunt of both dirty looks and intense curiosity.

Another notable newcomer is the unfairly gorgeous man who has been making himself known on the network recently. He can be seen around the Hotel, wearing a frilly maid’s apron and doing some cleaning, with varying degrees of skill but with a magical talent people may recognise as the same discipline as Skulduggery Pleasant – using air to lift furniture to vacuum underneath, conjuring water in his mopping bucket, and so on.

If anyone asks, Anton will just say he summoned a cleaning faerie.

It’s notable that this unfairly gorgeous man doesn’t have a room of his own – he can be seen coming in and out of Anton’s private bedroom. They obviously know each other well, since Erskine has a habit of stroking Anton’s hair given the opportunity. Several times throughout the month Anton will be slightly late for his shifts and emerge with his hair still damp and unbound, only for Erskine to come by a bit later and sheepishly plait it for him while he’s working at the desk.

While there isn’t much physically different about the Hotel this month, aside from the newly settled exit into Sky Sector, Anton himself is more protective. He’s more watchful, more inclined to look up even at minor signs of tension – though he’s no more likely to interfere than before. He will also regularly scout the Hotel's entrance for anyone who seems to be paying undue attention, thanks to Sokka's mugging right outside its door.

Anton's alert, and no wonder given the Hotel is now housing two essential fugitives.

[ooc: The Midnight Hotel’s status page is available here, with the rules at the top and ongoing status at the bottom. PLEASE POST TO THE STATUS PAGE IF YOUR CHARACTER WOULD LIKE A ROOM, JOB OR AREA IN THE GARAGE, OR ARE MOVING OUT. Anton will manufacture means of payment until Foreigners are able to properly offer recompense or choose to move out.

[Both Jintou and Malcil can be threaded with by request to the mod account, though Jintou will be more open; however, any new information will need to be bought with reward requests.]

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Anton could tell when the memory snapped. Erskine stopped struggling and while the tension didn't go away, it became focussed on clinging. On needing someone there. Erskine always had slept terribly.

"You're safe," Anton repeated in a low voice, because he had nothing else to say, and stroked Erskine's hair. Part of him wished he'd punched Skulduggery a little more during their talk the other day. "You're safe, and you have another chance at life. As do I."

For a long while Erskine didn't even acknowledge that Anton had said anything, or at least anything beyond the repetition of the word safe. He sobbed against the other sorcerer's shirt, taking comfort in the fact that there was someone else there at all. Darquesse's torture had driven home, amongst other things, the knowledge of how very alone he was. Abandoned by anyone he might've had left. That Anton was still here, still willing to let him cling and be a stupid wreck, was a miracle unto itself.

Another chance at life. The words sunk in, in between sobs, but for the life of him Ravel couldn't understand them. A chance for what? Anton had the Hotel. He had friends, people willing to die for him. A second chance for him then, absolutely. But for Ravel?

A chance to pay, maybe. Not atone, because no amount of cleaning the Hotel was ever going to be enough for that, but at least to pay.

But it was enough to get him thinking, and gradually the sobbing subsided. For a while afterward he simply left his head against Anton, breathing deeply, not in any danger of falling asleep again but selfishly not wanting to break contact just yet.

Anton couldn't deny he was relieved when the sobs eased. It ... had been a long time since Anton was in this position. Caring for people, yes, he was familiar with that on a practical and domestic level. But being active comforter ... that had usually been Hopeless's position. He didn't put himself in such intimate positions unless he absolutely had to. Anton was good at it, but Hopeless was better, and Erskine had always been Hopeless's to comfort besides.

He'd been trying to avoid drawing those parallels. Now, he thought on a spur of the moment, maybe it would help. Which was why his thumb went back to Erskine's temple to rub it.

"Tell me what happened?" he asked quietly, and left it up to the air what, exactly, he meant by 'what'.

Anton was, quite possibly, the only person alive (dead?) who could've used Hopeless's little gesture without provoking a negative reaction from Erskine--well, aside from the sobbing fit a few moments ago. Still, Erskine tensed at first, awake and aware this time and knowing full well that it was Anton and not Hopeless tracing circles against his skin.

How strange that a simple motion--rubbing someone's temple--could feel so intimate. It was physical contact, but so much less than clinging to someone while sobbing. Even Anton rubbing his thumb along Erskine's shoulder after he'd first arrived hadn't been quite like this. That had been almost unconscious, the need for motion and repetition. This was deliberate, the deliberate adoption of a ritual that had belonged to Hopeless and Ravel.

And then gradually the tension faded, and Erskine found himself staring at the ceiling and not knowing what to say but grateful that Anton was apparently willing to listen anyway. "You'll have to be more specific than that," he croaked, aiming somewhere around "jovial" and falling a fair bit short. "Darquesse. Mevolent. Larrikin. Hopeless. The Children. Take your pick."

When Erskine tensed Anton almost stopped the gesture altogether. He couldn't even begin to imagine the sorts of things Erskine and Hopeless had shared in such similar circumstances. Whatever aspersions Larrikin liked to cast on the physicality of their relationship--and to be fair, Larrikin cast the same aspersions on everyone's physical relationships--Anton suspected the truth was in many ways far more intimate.

Not everyone had mind-reader to share their trauma.

Regardless, Anton didn't want to take Hopeless's place. He only hoped the familiarity of the gesture might help. So when Erskine didn't verbally object, he continued, and eventually the tension faded. He waited until Erskine had spoken, but Erskine's words made him frown. "What do the Children have to do with anything?"

Ah yes, the trouble with trying to talk about things like this with someone who wasn't a mind reader--they didn't actually know anything. Not that he could blame Anton. He hadn't really been forthcoming with information about the Children after he'd returned to the fold, reclaimed his place in the Dead Men. He'd divulged this information to China only recently, just after murdering Anton and Ghastly.

He tensed again, fighting a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He shouldn't have said anything. He should have mumbled something apologetic and rolled over, faked falling asleep.

But it was out there now, and Anton had an endearingly annoying habit of not letting go of a subject once he'd taken hold of it. Even if he let it drop now, it would come up again tomorrow, or the day after.

"I spent a year living with the Children of the Spider. The year I was gone. 'Recovering'." Just the barest amount of bitterness in his voice there. "The Torment was the one who got me away from Mevolent."

Anton had always known there were things he didn't know about the others. All of them knew they were each keeping some of their secrets, except of course from Hopeless. But until now it had never struck Anton just how deeply those secrets ran.

Or the guilt. Even knowing there was nothing he could do in retrospect, the bitterness in Erskine's tone still makes Anton's grip just a bit tighter, as if it could reach into the past and hold Erskine back when the Dead Men had failed him most.

"Then we owe him thanks," said Anton quietly, "for the rescue, at least. What did they ... tell you?"

What did they do to you, to make you believe their bitterness towards mortals is justified?

Erskine didn't answer for a long time, turning the question over and over in his head, examining it. It would be so easy to give in to that bitterness again, let it consume him. He'd done it before.

But Anton of all people deserved a better answer--not least because he'd laid there patiently while Erskine sobbed on him. So Erskine took his time and collected his thoughts, scattered as they were, before answering.

"Do you remember the tenements in Dublin, back then? The slums, the famine? Block upon block of families all living out of one room. Babies dying. Disease. Sewage in the streets.

"That's how the Children lived, Anton. Squalor. And not because they couldn't do better for themselves, because the mortals wouldn't let them. The Children can't pass for long amongst mortals without revealing themselves. I remember being so angry... at everything. The mortals. Mevolent. Myself. There was so much wrong. There had to be a way to make it right."

Anton digested that, letting the gist coil and uncoil in his chest, and the heat felt weirdly soothing. Vindicating. It was possibly a bad sign. Or possibly it was because he had an answer beyond stubborn refusal to vindicate Erskine's hatred of himself.

Fool. Such a fool. And even though Anton knew he shouldn't, he so much did want to break some part of Erskine's thinking to bits.

"Have you forgotten that I was born into that same squalor?" he asked. "That my family was one such living out of one room, shoveling refuse into the marsh instead of our house? Poverty isn't something experienced only by one demographic or another. Mortals barely even knew sorcerers existed half the time; they could barely help themselves most of the time. How could they possibly make anyone do anything?"

He shook his head and took a breath, and then another. "You don't make things right on a pile of bodies, you idiot. Especially when you yourself have no concept of what it's like to live in those conditions. How dare you take their banner and make it your own, and act as though you're righteous."

The longer Anton spoke the tenser Ravel became. He shouldn't have said anything. He knew he shouldn't have said anything. The others--Skulduggery, Saracen, Dexter--they hadn't understood. What could have possibly led him to believe that Shudder would?

Finally he sat up, pulling away from Anton, folding his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around his legs. "So it wasn't my place to help, even though I saw the need and knew I could do something about it? How the hell is anything ever supposed to change then, Anton? The poor are supposed to drag themselves out of misery by their bootstraps while the rest of us fortunates stand on the sidelines and cheer?"

The bitterness was back in his voice, and more than just an edge now. Why couldn't any of the other Dead Men understand such a simple concept?

"You're right--poverty doesn't care who you are. My point is that it shouldn't exist at all. Why should sorcerers, or magical creatures, or even mortals have to live like that? Why should we sit back and let a bunch of idiots ruin our planet with pollution and nuclear weapons? Why should we sit back and hide from the people 'in charge' when they're so obviously inept at running the show? They slaughter each other for no bloody reason, Anton. We can do better than that. We deserve better than that."

Never, in the century since Anton had built the Hotel, had he felt such an urge to knock someone over the head. His fist clenched by his side to make sure he didn't. "You aren't listening," he said, very quietly. "Did I say you should do nothing? The point isn't that you felt driven to make a change, Erskine. It's that you did so without any true understanding of what they experienced, and continue to feel as though you alone can make the difference, your way and no other."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, his gaze locked on Erskine's face. "Are you really so stupid as to think you're the only one who's ever looked at poverty and wanted to do away with it? Do you think you're the only one who's ever done anything about it?"

Another breath. "Millions of mortals go hungry and shelterless. Millions of them dedicate time and money to ease that pain. And yet here you sit, trying to have me believe that the only right and just thing to do is to make them subject to magical authority? When was the last time you gave food to the starving, Erskine? When was the last time you actually went in amongst the dying and the ill, and looked them in the eye, and saw them as people?"

"I never said I was the only one who could do it," Ravel countered. "But I was the only one who even came close. A hundred years, Anton. A hundred years I waited, and planned, and nothing changed. If there were other people trying they were doing a piss-poor job of it."

He lifted his hands to scrub at his face, wound up cradling his forehead in them. The bitterness drained from his words, leaving only sadness and resignation. "I would have given anything for someone to come up with a better plan. For something to get better. I would have abandoned everything in a heartbeat. But millions of people giving a few hours here and there is a band-aid on a bullet wound, Anton, and you know it. Real, lasting change is drastic, and no one ever wants to be the one to step forward and start it. People want peace and prosperity but no one wants to change."

"Poverty is only a part of it. Why should we be the ones forced into the shadows when mortals are the ones so hell-bent on destroying themselves and everything around them? I know it's our policy, not theirs, but that doesn't make it right. Not anymore. We shouldn't have to hide."

Erskine disentangled himself from the sheets of the bed and stood, barely able to meet Anton's gaze. "It's late, I've kept you up long enough. I'll see you in the morning."

"No." If Erskine hadn't pulled away so fast, he might well have been the cause of Anton breaking his own rule for the first time in the Hotel's history. As it was, Anton's hand was shaking as he rose and locked the door, and turned around facing, his face hard. "You've been having this conversation without anybody knowing it was being had for a century. You don't get to decide when it ends because you dislike what people have to say about it now they finally know the conversation is there."

He took a step, crossed his arms over his chest. In anyone else it was a belligerent act, but for Anton, it was an assurance for the both of them that nothing was going to happen. "You say you waited and planned and wanted things to change. Did you ever once go to the other people who were trying and tell them you had a plan, and ask for their help? Did you do anything other than sit and wallow in your own bitterness because no one else was seeing what you were seeing, when you never bothered to engage them to point it out? How are they meant to do anything to your standards when you don't bother to communicate with them? The world is not full of mind-readers, Erskine."

Anton took another step, and his face grew stonier. "Hopeless is dead, Erskine. Hopeless is dead and instead of mourning him as he deserves you seek to selfishly assuage your own guilt for his death, and all the while you blame the world for not being him."

The locked door didn't mean anything good, no matter how steadfast Anton was trying to be about not breaking his own rules. Erskine had seen that look on Shudder's face before but he'd very rarely had it directed toward him. His heart seized, his step faltered.

None of them understood. None of the Dead Men agreed with him, none of them would have backed him. It was at least confirmation of what he'd already suspected so long ago when he'd first started forming his plans--he was alone. It also meant that he was alienating Anton, the one person who'd actually been willing to give him a second chance despite everything. He shouldn't have said anything.

Ravel shook his head, sputtered out words that suddenly wouldn't come fast enough, wouldn't arrange themselves in his mouth in a way that made sense, in a way that would keep Anton from getting angrier. "That's not... I was only-"

Hopeless. It felt like he'd been doused with cold water.

Still raw from the crying jag only minutes before, Erskine folded in on himself, aiming for a chair behind him and somehow winding up curled on the floor in front of it instead, arms wrapped around his knees, still shaking his head. "I was fixing it," he choked out. "It was going to be better. It had to be better."

The way Erskine crumbled served to soothe a lot of Anton's tension, remind him that for all Erskine was able to pretend at being a well-adjusted man, he wasn't. He was broken. More broken than he'd let anyone but Hopeless see, because no one could hide anything from Hopeless, except perhaps Skulduggery. And Anton had his doubts about that.

Bit by bit Anton managed to relax, until he moved forward to sit by Erskine, put a hand on his shoulder. "No," he said quietly, "you were making it worse. You just don't see that. If you did, you would have come to us for help. You would have been able to accept us telling you that you were wrong."

Maybe Erskine had, early on, waited for them to tell him he was wrong. But none of them were mind-readers. None of them were Hopeless. "None of us are Hopeless, Erskine. We can't know your hurts unless you tell us. But we'd have helped you if you had, even if we'd had to do so in ways you didn't want or didn't expect. That's what Hopeless always did, too. He gave people what they needed, not what they wanted. Can you say you're doing the same, giving the Children and sorcerers the power they want at the expense of the respect and self-worth they need?"

Erskine shook his head, silently trying to refute Anton's claim that he'd been making things worse. No, that wasn't possible. It couldn't be worse. Not with the mortals practically vying with each other for the rights to destroy the planet. Not with the violence and the hatred and the stupid, simple minds running every country in the world into the ground.

Not with Hopeless dead.

Not with Anton and Ghastly dead, killed in the belief that their deaths would make a difference.

If I was making things worse, they died for nothing. I killed them for nothing. I killed them...

By the time Anton mentioned Hopeless again, Erskine was shaking. And then Anton kept talking about him. Erskine closed his eyes and pressed the heel of his palm, hand closed into a fist, to his forehead. None of the rest of the words made any sense. Hopeless was still dead, and he'd killed Anton and Ghastly for nothing. That couldn't be right. It wasn't what he'd wanted.

"I tried." The words came out haltingly. He was trying not to cry again. "I tried to find another way. I didn't want to ki-" It caught in his throat. "I couldn't... I couldn't find another way."

They weren't even talking about the same thing anymore, not really. Erskine didn't notice.

Whether they were or not, Anton shifted to wrap his arms properly around Erskine, to pull him gently but firmly to his chest. Anton wasn't a cuddler, but he could put that aside at great need. Erskine falling apart in his bedroom was one of them.

"But you didn't ask someone who could see better than you," said Anton quietly. "Because you couldn't even see well enough to know you should have. That's what the pain you've suffered does, Erskine. It blinds you. It even blinds you to the fact that you took the wrong path, because admitting you could have done something else, and didn't, means letting in the pain."

He knew that. He did. With the gist, every time he let it out, and even when he was young, murdering for the sake of his family and believing he was helping them. And maybe that was what Erskine needed to hear. "You know that my family turned me out, after the gist. But you don't know that I followed them and watched them from afar." He rested his chin on Erskine's head. "When I saw what I felt were threats against them, I removed the threats. Young men who made lascivious comments about Sadh. A dockworker who followed Betha for just a few too many streets. Thieves who threatened Ruadhan. Customers who cheated Brin. I didn't wait to ask why they did, what they meant, whether they would do anything else. I followed them, and waited until they were alone, and then I murdered them, because that was what the gist told me I should do."

For the second time that night Erskine found himself curling up against Shudder's chest, his own need to be held apparently greater than Shudder's natural inclination to shy away from such things. Erskine had never been in the habit of breaking down in front of other people, save Hopeless. Even after Mevolent, when he'd come back to the Dead Men still suffering, he'd fought off falling apart around any of the others.

A need for control, Hopeless had explained. A desperate need to keep control of oneself, of one's surroundings, to prevent the trauma from recurring. To keep the pain away.

Maybe they'd broken through that somehow when he'd arrived in the Hotel in this dimension, when Shudder had seen him at his absolute worst. Or maybe, as Erskine had begun to suspect, he'd unconsciously transferred Hopeless's role to Anton. Anton the protector. Anton, the only one he trusted enough to relinquish any amount of control to.

Ravel curled against Shudder and cried, though these tears were quieter and less forceful than the ones earlier in the night. Having at least one of the Dead Men left who cared, who hadn't turned his back on him...

Erskine wasn't quite sure what he would do without that. It probably wouldn't be pretty.

"What changed?" he asked, voice cracking. He tried to ignore the parallels in the story, no matter how badly Anton probably wanted him to see them. Seeing the parallels meant seeing that he was falling into the same trap as Anton had, long ago--without the influence of a demon in his chest. No, he'd managed the same sort of things all on his own.

And what the hell did that mean?

"Ruadhan," said Anton. He didn't stroke Erskine's hair, but he rested his hand on the back of his head and held him. It wasn't an active cuddle, but close enough that talking about his siblings like this ... he hadn't always been averse to such things. Fifty years without it, without anyone, had stomped the inclination of the first twenty years into the ground.

"He was the only one of my siblings willing to admit I existed. He would pay for my meals every morning. One day he came to me and told me to stop. To go away, and not come near any of them again. The city thought they were haunted. The young man courting Sadh had backed off. People said the family was cursed." No one wanted anything to do with a cursed family. "He told me to go away," Anton repeated. "So I did. The gist didn't."

Active cuddle or not, any contact at this point was welcome. Over the last century he'd allowed himself to forget how nice it felt to be close to someone in a platonic capacity, just for the sheer comfort of it. He'd allowed himself to forget what it felt like to be comforted at all, or how badly he needed it. And though Hopeless wasn't here anymore, Anton was a close second. Anton knew as much as there was to know short of being a mind reader. Anton, for some unfathomable reason, didn't seem to care about things that other people couldn't get past. Ravel closed his eyes and enjoyed the feeling of the hand on his hair and tried not to think about the fact that he was probably soaking poor Shudder's shirt.

Shudder's family... Erskine had very little to compare it to, no real frame of reference. He'd had his adopted parents but no siblings. How different life must be with people of your own blood in the world... and how painful had it been to lose them? Erskine could only compare it to the Dead Men. They had been his brothers--were his brothers. And he knew far too much about losing them.

"What happened?"

"I managed to control it," Anton said simply. "Not always well, but I stopped killing people. It was the only thing I could do to help them, to remove the shame from the family. Ruadhan agreed to meet me, to give me updates, but after a few years he was stabbed in the street. After that, I had no contact at all--until Sadh sent her major-domo looking for me. She was dying, and wanted to make a bargain with a demon to save her children and grandchildren the weight of the curse."

Of course, by that point Anton hadn't known any of his kin. He hadn't known nephews or nieces or cousins. It was possible the gist would have taken their like blood as encouragement. It was possible Sadh ahd done the right thing, sending him away.

"She wanted to know the demon's name," said Anton quietly, and he hadn't meant to say it. He'd barely talked about his family. The only time Sadh had come up was because the others wondered about his aversion to Cork during the war, and even then all he'd said was he made a promise. "But I got my name from her. When I told it to her she went into shock. She died thinking she'd summoned a demon on me. That's when I left Cork, and after that--well, you've heard the story of the Werewolf of Ballinasloe."

It was a tale of the area, but moreover it was story Anton and Larrikin had told back when they were all still getting to know each other.

Erskine had never heard Shudder talk about his family like this, not once in over two hundred years. He knew he should be encouraging it somehow. That he and his problems had been hogging the spotlight, but all of the Dead Men had come to the unit with their own unique set of baggage. They wouldn't have volunteered for that suicide mission without some sort of baggage--and even if they had, not one of them had escaped the war completely unscathed. Anton, like Erskine, had lost his closest friend.

They were what was left, Shudder and Ravel. The left-behinds.

"What were they like?" he asked quietly, after an appropriate pause. "Your brothers and sisters. You lot were the closest I ever had."

Still huddled up to Anton, Erkine felt the tension in his muscles release by degrees, stifled a yawn with his fist. It was hard to believe that only ten minutes ago, maybe fifteen, they'd both been asleep. Not sleeping well, on Erskine's part, but asleep.

He had a lot to think about. Shudder had caused him to question the entire direction of his life for the last hundred years. Everything he'd done since Hopeless had died.

For right now? He just wanted to hear Anton speak some more. To let the terror and the heartache fade for a while. "Tell me about them?"

Tell me about them?

Anton took a breath and let it out. He hadn't spoken of his siblings in years. Never to this depth. Not even to the Dead Men.

"There were ten of us," he said. "Betha was the oldest, then me. The youngest were Sadh and Ruadhan ..."

There was a lot Anton could say about them. He just hadn't before. But he did now, not really thinking, until his voice soothed Erskine's heartache back into sleep.

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[Midnight Hotel] June catch-all

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