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[ Blood has scabbed black in the threads of Erik’s jumpsuit beneath Charles’ hands, seams and patches saturated, glimpses of metal plate tacky with old splatter. It’s dried like tar in his beard, matted in runs from his nose and ears, smeared, scruffed in his hair and eyebrows and flaking crusty under his collar. He’s filthy with it.

And unscathed.

His bones all settle where and how they should. The scars in his armor are all familiar.

Diagrēgoreōn, though.

A deeper swell of breath sees him opening his eyes, shocky disorientation grappled onto Charles with a ferocity that’s hard-pressed to wind down into relief. He’d been trying to get away and something in the jungle brought him back, black robes all too easily muddied in with a black figure scratching and pulling at the edges of his vision, broad strokes of thought sweeping across a seismic readout that crushes at what little blood pressure he has left. His heart squeezes for his throat like a spooked octopus, breath agitating into a froth behind his teeth.

All of this frantic telepathic tattling and he hasn’t realized she’s still looming right there, seven paces away, like a rug thrown over a lamp. ]

[ Iezabel watches the exchange from her calculated remove, not requiring telepathy or even her auracular vision to know that even if some portion of Erik's panic is not precisely her doing, then certainly she's done little to help it. For all that the kick she delivered was pointless and stupid, it was probably the least frightening thing she's done since approaching the stranded man.

She is, however, quite innocent of any knowledge of properly eldritch figures. Sure, she's a revenant of an exceptional breed, if she does say so herself, but that still makes her a distinctly terrestrial sort of haunt. She does not concern herself with any such potential conflations, instead patiently waiting for Erik to come to his senses sufficiently to convey the facts of the matter- or for Charles to ask her directly for clarification.

Otherwise, she'll not interrupt the reunion. Even someone with her limited social skills knows when not to interfere. And surely, surely, the gratitude will be forthcoming. Soon. ]

[ Forgetting -- only for the moment -- the masked figure standing by, Charles places what he aims to be a calming palm flat on Erik's chest, eye contact met and trying to hold steady. ]

It's alright.

[ Except he can see fresh memory, and the tic at his jaw betrays his own tension at the things he's seeing, blue eyes searching, reading. There's only a subtle nudge that attempts to divert Erik's mind away from panic, influence kept minimal, maybe too much so, not wishing to simply roll him over but helping forge his own path away from panic.

There aren't any injuries that he can see or sense, save for the psychic trauma that's rioted through blood vessels, other neural pathways.

His hand goes out to lock his fingers over Erik's knuckles.

A part of Charles is a little angry. Maybe more than a little. It would be unhelpful, to say the least, if he were to express it right now. Instead, he looks up towards the thing standing several feet away. The-- woman, he wants to say. ]

Thank you, [ isn't utterly devoid of wariness. ] Do you know what happened?

[ Is it.

Erik’s good pupil pins out of focus through the back of Charles’ skull, breath caught and chuffed out in an undignified shudder that glosses wet at his eyes. His zen has been punched through with ballistic force, exposing razor edges, reflections of memory erratic and distorted.

But he’s listening, leashing upset and stifling a sense of stripped wire exposure. Parched tears wick into the creases of crow’s feet at contact, wetting the blood smudged at his temples a sickly red-brown. Something that feels very much like anger at how intensely personal all of this has become is squeezing into his chest cavity after his heart octopus.

This is an important moment for them all around, really, 8.5/10 drama at least. Ieza is no doubt already formulating the plot of an award-winning erotic fan fiction.

He’s still wrestling to feel a little bit less of everything when Charles asks what happened, dizziness included.

The realization that he isn’t the one being asked is very slow to dawn. Furrows bunch in between his brows by a matter of degrees, dumb distraction while he struggles to do the math. He tries to sit himself up to see, a bit like a worm cut in half and left in the sun a while. One with hostility already warming at its gut. ]

[ Surely it would be the hottest of eroticas, a bit of fic fit to warm the blood of even the most dusty of magical mummies. Particularly with all the sordid context, all the guilt and the shame and the torrid, displaced rage and passion.

But Ieza possesses none of that context, only the growing sense that she chose correctly when she sought out Charles. And the intuition that she's better off banking on his gratitude than that of the person whose life she actually spared/saved. She can perceive the ill will brewing in Erik's frustratingly humdrum aura. ]

From what I saw of his memories, he tried to pass some boundary. It caused him great pain, and eventually unconsciousness. He bled extensive from the nose. I could not discern precisely what caused this condition, but I know he had nearly killed himself in the attempt.

[ And since it's better to be out with it before Erik's mind works it up into more than it was: ]

During the trek you friend caused me to trip. I lost my temper, and I kicked him in anger. As you can see- [ she gestures at Erik's as-already-established-whole form ] -no harm was done.

[ She deems it peevish to mention that he broke a fair number of her bones in retaliation, particularly since her skeleton seems in sufficiently good shape right this moment. ]

I gathered you were important to him. I presume he is important to you. So I brought him back, and... here we are.

[ The silence she lets hang after this is somewhat expectant. ]

Edited 2015-09-27 06:23 (UTC)

[ Charles' hand keeps a grip on Erik's. That's nice. His other hand kind of firms up and applies pressure at Erik's shoulder to keep him still, which is less nice, but edged in the aforementioned anger is the determination to take authority over the situation. ]

She isn't going to hurt you,

[ he insists in Erik's mind alone. Equal parts plea to relax and force of will.

A little distracted, too. There are strange associations happening in the woman's mind, such as omission as to the harm that came to her own body, and what that means. Or doesn't mean. ]

Thank you, really, [ he says, again, maybe betraying his own nerve in echo, the hollow quality of his tone, but none of these things make it disingenuous. Fraught, mainly. Aware of physical and mental damage, of saline streaks cutting through drying blood, of the growing ill-will latching onto consciousness in Erik's skull. Here we are. He can sense she wants something, and that it probably isn't dismissal. Nonetheless; ] I can take it from here, and-- and let you recover.

[ The stoked ember flare of Erik’s temper ebbs as he follows the frame of Ieza’s narrative, which is accurate, to the best of his knowledge. His memory is moth-eaten, sinus passages and the folds of his brian claggy with blood.

But she had kicked him. ]

I killed her.

[ His throat is raw, dry, delivery straining urgent, voice a rattle scraped from the seat of his lungs. This is suspicious, she is suspicious. She shouldn’t have brought him back. She stopped him. She has ulterior motives. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams. Erik insists from his position laid out on the ground, breastplate shuddering with the effort he’s making to push back. Not afraid, exactly, but electrified by paranoia.

Charles are you listening. ]

Edited 2015-09-28 04:48 (UTC)

[ For a moment, Ieza was concerned that Erik might cause real trouble. For a moment, she regretted waking him up, regretted the danger of permitting a competing narrative to the one of selfless labor and unasked-for heroism. But his frank confession serves as a nice segue to her essentially selfish, unheroic motives. ]

You certainly tried. As it happens, though, I am already dead.

[ And rather than leave any question on the matter, she unfastens her mask, and draws back her hood.

What lies beneath is less monstrous than simply tragic, frightening only in that death is always frightening to beings capable of conceiving it. What lies beneath is the visage of a young woman who died before her time, but who was carefully preserved, not in the name of open-casket cosmetic prettiness, but rather through pragmatic mummification: withered face, sunken eyes, livid lips and hair like brittle straw. ]

I was, however, hoping you might help me reverse my condition.

[ It is a touch more genuinely frightening when the corpse begins to speak. Her lips move, black tongue shifts behind teeth to form each word, but the process is far, far more deliberate than it might be coming from someone with blood in their veins- the operation of a machine rather than the natural expression of a body. ]

I have the means, I simply lack the material.

I'm handling it,

[ Charles lies.

If not all the way an intentional lie, just more in the spirit of getting Erik to calm the fuck down for a moment and stop thinking so loud than that of any confidence that this is being truly handled. He's certainly trying, listening, the hand attempting to keep Erik pinned to the ground finally slacking off by the time he shoots a glance downwards at Erik, eyebrow twitching upwards.

A shared experience of weirdness, rather than accusation.

When he looks back up, he drinks in more her appearance, his expression quite impressively neutral but unable to stow away his discomfort completely. It shades behind his eyes and is tense along his jaw. ]

Material, [ he repeats.

By now, he's physically withdrawn a fraction from his defensive crouch over Erik, allowing the other man to try to sit up, but a hand remains hovered sort of like when you let a dog off a leash and you don't all the way trust it not to go running off. Into traffic. ]

[ Repeated reassurance eventually permeates the thick of Erik’s skull, wearing his adrenaline shock down into a more manageable depth of thought. Exhaustion fills in the low places left behind, weighing at his sides, settling warm in his bones. It saps chemical fervor back through the roots of his circulatory system and takes the strength in his arms with it.

He’s increasingly drowsy despite himself.

This makes it harder to listen, and easier to trust. Taking Charles’ word for it feels like a luxury, even when it’s hedged by the eye he’s working to keep on him. His heart has coiled up into a cooling knot in his chest.

His opinion on the sinister strangeness about Ieza doesn’t waver, the underlying sentiment dumb in his eye, a steady no, no, no. That he doesn’t have any better ideas than to find a way to double kill her times infinity goes without saying. ]

[ She could try and put this delicately, but euphemism has a bad way of suggesting that what it hides sound worse than it is. Better a justificatory honesty, she judges. ]

Life eats life, [ she says, with the cadence of proverb. ] Even the trees feast on the worms that will feast on us. [ Not true in the way she means it, but forgive her a limited understanding of ecological science. ]

I need a living being. Something of appreciable size and complexity. Still living. Unbutchered. [ A steak, no matter how rare, will not do.

That this will entail larger problems of logistics, that she will want the delivery to be discreet, that she will be happiest given a steady supply- these are matters for future discussion. The sense she gets now, from that defensive posture, is that this interview might progress more smoothly when Charles is less... distracted. ]

We can discuss minutia and appendecta when the sun is risen. [ As if his help were assured, her request a settled matter. ] Please, tend to your friend.

[ She replaces her mask, fastening it with a silk ribbon behind her head, and raises her cowl. ]

He looks nearly as poor as I do.

[ She makes another of those bows, hand on belly, fingers on forehead, and then drifts into the darkness, shading away. ]

[ Charles doesn't offer correction with regard to her ecological science. He is listening, instead, obvious though it is that he is paying equal parts attention to what the cat dragged in. Her meaning is clear, and the solution is not, or how he can help -- but already niggling curiousity is feeding on itself.

Just not enough to waylay her when she finally withdraws.

Like she's an event passing by rather than a whole person -- or, more accurately, a problem he can deal with later -- Charles doesn't say a word, dropping his focus more completely to Erik. There is a conflictedness bringing tension to his expression, like he is on the verge of igniting some kind of argument, but he swallows instead. Words go as smoothly down as sand.

But, gentler; ]

Can you stand?

[ With help, evidently, a hand lifting. ]

[ Erik breaks the death grip of his stare from Charles to crane a look after the direction he last heard Ieza’s voice. His eyes are still glossy, wild around the whites.

It’s been a lifetime since he’s seen a dessicated corpse. Her hooded eyes and sunken jaw are viscerally familiar.

But she’s gone, and Charles is offering a hand. Erik reaches across himself for it, right over left, which will be the last thing he remembers -- whether Charles is able to help him up six feet or six inches, low blood pressure spins him into nigh immediate blackout. Still breathing, fast and shallow. His tongue sticks dry to the roof of his mouth, blood thickened hair damp at the nape of his neck where tears have soaked in.

Friendship can be difficult. ]

[ The sink of Erik's consciousness tiding under feels like something slipping from Charles' grasp and vanishing. Maybe Erik hears his own name startled out loud, but neither it nor the sudden tightening of warm hands prevent black out.

Meanwhile, in the land of the living.

They hadn't gotten far, but far enough that Charles feels obliged to grip and fold back down the rest of the way, one hand splayed starfish-style on the side of Erik's face in an effort not to cause further damage to that specific body part. The last lingering memories before blackness closes over echo like a light trick, and feel like cold poison. Personal irritation and its festered hurt at being Abandoned!! back at camp for whatever self-destructive exercise Erik was embarking on subsides, despite himself.

For a minute, Charles just sort of stays there, still, holding on to Erik and feeling the only somewhat unrelated existential panic at being stranded on this planet that he's been doing pretty well at keeping at bay all this time, before finally, he reaches out a psychic tether to the nearest helpful brain to help him drag Erik back to shelter. ]

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