【 Thank you for choosing the Golden Peacock, 5-star resort and casino. You are currently registered as a WILDCARD in our system.
Due to a high volume of check-ins, temporary accommodations have been made in our parking garage for all new arrivals. We aim to have all guests moved into their reserved rooms as soon as possible. We deeply apologize for any inconvenience!
All are invited to There Is No Tomorrow, a Phoenix Casino soiree to celebrate our beloved guests. The festivities will begin at 1800 hours on January 20th and end at 1800 hours on January 27th. Please look forward to 168 hours of delight.
In an effort to raise happiness and encourage better guest relationships, attendance is required. The house will assist guests that are too shy to appear of their own accord. Please note that black tie attire is mandatory. As always, we hope you enjoy your stay! 】
PARKING GARAGE
ANY CAR IN A STORM
PHOENIX CASINO HALL
WELCOME TO THE NEXT 168 HOURS
Phoenix Casino is a-flutter with activity and packed to the beak with guests. As a famously ever-changing space, the staff would be remiss if they didn't deck the crown jewel of the Golden Peacock out. The casino glitters from top to bottom, shining brighter than diamonds, rubies, sapphires, opals! Party-goers are shiny and glamorous with picture perfect makeup, fluttering gowns, and sharp suits. Card tables are packed and the slot machines are a-ringing as guests play, play, play! Prizes, luxury, booze, attractive people, it's the place that everyone wants to be at.
Those people being dragged inside by some invisible force...? Silly, they were so excited to come that their bodies moved before they realized what was happening. Those are struggles of joy and definitely not the casino's infamous ghost hands dragging unwilling guests to the party at the behest of the house. Look, they're literally hurling their bodies at the card tables with unrestrained glee!
All clocks indicating day hours and night hours have been removed from the casino. Once a guest has entered, their Watch will jam, making it impossible to keep track of the time. You don't need to worry about that tonight.
▶ All characters on the TDM are WILDCARDS, which means they have not yet been assigned a card value. Suits will not manifest until characters are accepted into the game.
▶ All TDMs are game canon. This TDM acts as the game's January event.
▶ Current characters may top level on the TDM. Any current characters posting to the TDM should note they are current in their subject header.
▶ The top level directory is for new characters only. We want to make sure new characters are prioritized and receive attention! If you would be interested in a game invitation, you can note that in your comment header. This month we also have an ongoing ATP / EMP where players can connect. Please feel free to utilize this for all of your peafowl needs!
▶ If you aren't satisfied with these prompts, please feel free to check out our LOCATIONS to explore more of the resort!
▶ Smut threads that take place on this TDM can be used for rewards. If both parties in the smut thread join the game, you may retroactively apply the character's initial card values to your 52 bank. If one character does not join the game the thread will not be applicable toward rewards (as that character would not have a card value). The character that does join would still receive a small payout for the encounter. Hopefully it was a fun thread regardless!
▶ We ask you to kindly add content warnings to your threads as appropriate.
▶ If you do not currently have permissions and kinks listed in your character’s journal we suggest leaving a note in your top level of any limits or boundaries for other players to reference.
( it sounds like a joke: an empath willingly throwing himself into the parking garage with the emotions of all these newfound captives let loose. the dealers should reward him generously for the grand way he's about to screw himself over for putting himself right at the epicenter of fuck. the ground zero of spinning on it.
but the narrative digresses.
fair enough — this limousine seems like a decent choice in the line of vehicles he could experimentally jimmy to his heart's desire. the same tumult of human emotions that radiates from every newcomer is also present here: confusion, scandal, heartache, but therein lies the strangest rub...
by the time kizuna gets a passenger door open, there's just a single girl inside, scantily clad in a silken robe and holding her head and blinking owlishly as a mellowed peace saturates her in a glimmering vision of oscillating color. and thus, him too. )
Oh. Hello, good evening. Thank you for your assistance.
( —a frequency only interjected when another woman's speaking from... the driver's seat of the limo, the screen partition lowered enough for robin to peer in and smile congenially at the two passengers in the back. something practiced for the camera.
it's hard to tell with the barrier: there must be feathers lining the robe she wears. why else would there be so many of them lining the sides of her throat too?
... but it must pinprick something awful to kizuna's feelings if he stares at them too long, a little like the mortifying ordeal of being known. )
Rather than helping myself to the amenities, I don't suppose you can point me in the direction of the exit?
[ Trying to keep him from impaling his delicate sensibilities on the toothy maw of whatever feathered beast might be waiting for him in the underground is an exercise in futility. Mostly for himself.
That the feathered beast is a pretty girl with soft eyes, well. The way his gaze flashes to her and sticks is damning enough. ]
...you — [ the word escapes from his mouth with an uncharacteristic honesty, almost as if he'd needed to breathe it out from the sudden vacuous height of his lungs to get them working again. And again, in implication of him: ] There you are.
[ Because that was the first instinct of an empathy forced through the glass by something it longs to compare itself to, mirrored in a way that scatters it like light. Where and who. Her, evidently, though the momentary slitting of his pupils forces him to look away before he's too consumed by what lies beyond the limousine's partition. Tension going into flux with some effort on his part, Kizuna smiles and leans against the car door frame. Hard reset — let him try that again.
Though his skin is still humming with the refracted colors of that beautiful run off. ]
Aha. I'd love to, in a simpler situation. But I'm afraid if you're looking for a way out, there isn't one.
[ Idly, he extends his hand to the other girl in the back seat. ]
(there you are. what a thing to say to a stranger. it could've been made playful — what are you doing in the driver's seat? do you even know how to drive? — but the open, candid look on this handsome man's face, how she feels thoroughly, uncomfortably seen in that moment, dashes that impression away at once.
maybe it's a fair exchange: the moment robin had arrived, unknowing and panicked, she'd taken more than a few liberties. the privacy she normally affords to others was laid promptly to the wayside. in exchange, she would get slivers of proximity thoughts, pent-up emotions, anything that might help her to figure out the extent of this kidnapping, what they wanted for ransom, if the family and her brother have already been informed—
all of that to say, there's nothing to read in the cacophony of similar confusion from the other girl in the car with her... and no real ill-intent from anyone. nothing more than a playful kindness from room service as he had first approached.
and how it had all hollowed out.
and that was before her resonance and the rebounding harmony she exerted to offer the other woman a preternatural calm. the nacre of it shines back into her eyes when she looks at him, an iridescence that seems to fold in on itself, trapped in the expanding event horizon of this man's sudden presence, his impossible gravity. reading his emotions feels like interference: a too similar wavelength, but discordant enough to know she's hit the wrong chord.
how interesting. )
I see... You're right. If it were as easy as driving a car through a window, someone else might have tried by now.
( —so much for that preternatural calm. the resident npc goes pale at once at the suggestion, registering that robin, who is saying all of this very calmly, is sitting in the driver's seat for a reason. she leaps into kizuna's offered... well, hand, possibly hoping he'd also lend the rest of his arm and the other to help her get out of the limousine right now, preferably immediately. )
I'm joking. ( *she isn't ) There were some others before you that mentioned getting rooms ready. They were in such a rush, I didn't get much of an opportunity to inquire further.
[ Two forces so similar that they repel, an energy that collapses in on itself with such momentum that it swallows its own light. Echoes are what's left, even understandably so. ]
I assure you that someone likely has. However! ☆ [ a tick of his index finger and a wink, somewhat mellowed from his usual flippancy. ] Property damage isn't a small thing to have to settle here, especially for a new arrival.
[ Much to his new charge's anxiety. There is an apologetic downturn in his lashes as Kizuna helps the shaken npc up and out of the limousine with a few fortifying tuts and platitudes of encouragement — There, there, of course your esteemed driver was just kidding (*he knows she wasn't) and Look, someone's coming to help, you'll be alright~ He pats her arm and sends her on her way with one of the attendants now pulling new arrivals out of the vehicles. This esteemed driver, though...
He's too curious to let her go. And so, he climbs into the back of the limo instead, primly clicking the door shut behind him. It's an atmosphere subdued by dissonance, its friction a fading note. Still, Kizuna isn't typically a sensible enough person to shy from that noise. He indulges his curiosity far too much to not endure it.
A glimpse upwards yields a soft jawline hemmed in feathers and the same eyes looking back at him, though divested of their harmonic glow. It burns in his chest, the want to understand. However, there are questions he has to answer first, shoulders squaring lightly against new car leather. ]
Not all, no. Rooms are the staple of any resort, so you'll find plenty, but there's an impossible amount of other places to go, too.
[ Just not out. Whether by crashing car or a flourishing exit stage. ]
( how helpful he is in earnest. selfless and effortlessly charismatic. robin has talked to show hosts with a similar stage presence, although she supposes those motives are likely geared towards entertainment than a complete disavowal of ulterior circumstance. funny how that grounds her — she's an actress, her smile proper and her speech polished, prepping for the blinding lights and the leading interview. let's get this show on the road.
only this time, she feels like she's the one stationed behind the camera, watching this man cater to another stranger until help's been duly secured by way of the hotel staff. reading him like this reverberates warmth, the evocative sound she sometimes hears when she's amidst volunteers in some far-off corner of the universe, finding peace in like-minded company.
but the car door clicks shut with some kind of finality, his attention trained on her in this enclosed space. and ah — there it is again. )
As the map on this handcuff of mine describes?
( as she lifts her wrist and the watch wrapped around it, red streaky marks on the skin where she must have tried to wrench it off to no avail. it isn't this conversation she wants, she supposes, when she's still blinking stars out of her vision. that impossible tide of light washing back over her like harmony's refraction. the paradisaical strokes of infinite color, not flashes of a warning, but still fit enough to swallow her whole—
it's her own tuning reflected back at her. but it also isn't. less jarring the second time around, somehow, when they both must want the same thing and find it curious. but a mirror will reflect a mirror will reflect a mirror... and an echo will only inevitably repeat the same sound.
and where there is an echo, there must also be vast, empty space. but the reality is, she's still here, sitting in that silent beat before resonance with the warmest stranger she's ever met. )
How gracious of our hosts. And so creative too.
If it's that kind of show they're after, usually directors only offer a cold bed and at least one other paid body. ( that's... pretty glib when all is said and done. the feathers along each ear unfurl with her bad humor, ruffled, a little, and unruly from washes of emotion she doesn't seem to know what to do with. ) Fifty-two... seems a bit much for the price of a check-out to a stay I don't recall signing up for.
[ There's a slow shift to his expression as reality cords itself within the certainty of those words. It must have taken ages of practice for them to sound as pretty as they do while cradling the inherent cruelty of the situation. Acknowledgement has a certain cadence, a timbre; it makes him fast realize it could've been any other cruelty, any other situation. Another reflection, he senses, slightly aslant of the one he's trying to focus on. To blink the stars away would be a waste, and so they must be strengthened instead, studded and preserved as a measure of defense. Dressed up and turned back out on the world, unprepared to meet one of its own.
Idolatry, he thinks. A sweetness burnt to cauterization. How alike and yet so rifted, the schism aching with a longing that still doesn't quite feel like it belongs to him. It is... irony, he's sure. Always playing the game as intended and yet feeling cowed by such balletic desensitization.
Gaze drawing along the slope of ruffled feathers in polite interest, Kizuna's eyes have since returned to normal, the rounds of his pupils tightened slightly; around them, the auric color is watery at the edges, overbright. ]
Our benefactors enjoy dealing in excess. [ An agreement, however pale. ] But you can still make their stage yours with a little know-how... so that when the time comes, the beds might not be as cold.
[ Therein lies the truth of it: there isn't a way out of the steep price physically marked on them. He could sugarcoat that reality but finds himself shying from doing so, constitution thrumming with a thousand nameless colors. Sifting out the stardust to get at the foundation, the honesty, beneath.
A moment passes and he pushes up from his seat, crossing the limousine's length to kneel closer to the partition between the back and the driver's cab. ]
May I?
[ He gestures for her wrist that hosts the resort's handcuff, the one scored by redness. ]
( it doesn't help that this moment's still stretching, one long dream spiraling sluggishly into suspended eternity. part of her — and robin doesn't like it, but she doesn't have to — has already jumped from denial to acceptance, and from there to damage control, but that had been before that sea of aurora shining back into her eyes. the aureole of a golden-green halo. and that hadn't been the harmony.
she realizes after that moment, blinking again, that he's suddenly close enough to see it in his eyes: ink-blot pupils and a steady gaze — glinting brighter but not as bright as she feels it could be, like veins of newly minted gold. if it weren't for this hum of resonance beneath her skin, the way she can almost feel the color still working steadily between them both, then she might feel her hackles raising.
they should still. it's too easy to feel like this, as if they're speaking from some shared codex or secret language every time she commits the grave trespass of trying to glean his thoughts. not a single word shared in that brief link at the beginning. she's barely saying anything now. )
Mm.
( even if she is smiling in that same starry way, pulling the trailing sleeve of her robe back so she can present her streaky wrist and stuck watch through the open partition for his perusal.
she doesn't even shift when something in the limousine stirs to life, some tiny disco ball dropping from some false velvet ceiling and strobe lights casting about blue and red and yellow lights in the wrong kind of spectrum. whatever malfunction's at fault in this vehicle... hardly even fazes her, when she hasn't looked away once.
so it's not the disco lights when she offers, quietly, )
[ Light flickers in his vision, droplets of it here and there, glaring and gleaming in plastic oscillation. Festive, false. And still when he looks up, automatically heralding the appearance of a dainty wrist through the partition with the smooth palm of his hand, he can't think of anything other than honesty: ]
...thank you.
[ Atypical of him, but all of his defenses have been left burning like sun-shapes would burn on the backs of his eyelids. The ash of it, at the very least, is soft.
Untroubled fingers trace a few of the welts leading up to the band of the watch. Kizuna focuses on it a moment even if his peripherals are full of things that don't belong to him. Even more unnerving is how those things still feel like his own. He'd be hard pressed to think of a similar situation, a similar feeling. Not in the vast, constellate network of all the things he has ever felt. Instead of letting himself go adrift, he gravitates towards her; self-preservation has never been his strong suit. Tapping the surface of the watch, he peruses as much as it'll let him with a little more than cursory interest — she's still a wildcard.
Acceptance radiates from her as a wound might, the white-hot itch of losing something that simply can't be put back. And then the urge to defend it, its ghost in the way she thinks about exercising caution. That much he can still sense and he doesn't dare venture further. Slowly, he moves through the aftermath, the blotted out indistinctness of a detonation still ringing in his ears.
He hears the sounds, but doesn't understand the words. ]
That's quite the compliment. [ Kizuna hesitates, but not for long. ] I've never been unable to link with someone like that before.
[ One long year later, and so few people know what that even is. ]
(oh, she thinks, uncomprehending and understanding at once what exactly has been done to her.
it should be unnerving if she's left to think about it: an abduction with all the sweetness of a lasting dream. it should sharpen her focus and keep her wary, but it's difficult to perceive anything beyond the feeling of drifting in some milky tendril of the galaxy — looking at the cosmos of this stranger's eyes and feeling it expanding faster than the speed of light into her empty spaces. it must be harmony's doing that she thinks it familiar, or the dissolution of a link which she thinks more familiar still. she should wonder, maybe, how she could know what he means. but here and now, in the shared blast radius of some otherwise distant star, unmoored in the undertow of each other's reflected feelings, it's harder to imagine how she couldn't.
still. even with robin's acceptance, even with whatever it is that they shared, her body is still flesh and blood and her pulse hiccups, thumping against kizuna's fingertips along her inner wrist. )
My name is Robin.
( because, they are strangers, after all. the speckling of artificial lights and the tinny, hushed sound of the radio playing could almost ground her as her eyes flicker down, watching his hand for some kind of tell, some reason for the casual touch.
not that she would pull away. not after all of that. whatever he could want, she would want also — a thought with no basis except for the fact that it seems so dangerously true. )
... I didn't think that resonance could ever work in that manner, either.
And you?
( his name? or the way he had felt alongside her? too many questions all wrapped up in the one. )
vroom vroom;
but the narrative digresses.
fair enough — this limousine seems like a decent choice in the line of vehicles he could experimentally jimmy to his heart's desire. the same tumult of human emotions that radiates from every newcomer is also present here: confusion, scandal, heartache, but therein lies the strangest rub...
by the time kizuna gets a passenger door open, there's just a single girl inside, scantily clad in a silken robe and holding her head and blinking owlishly as a mellowed peace saturates her in a glimmering vision of oscillating color. and thus, him too. )
Oh. Hello, good evening. Thank you for your assistance.
( —a frequency only interjected when another woman's speaking from... the driver's seat of the limo, the screen partition lowered enough for robin to peer in and smile congenially at the two passengers in the back. something practiced for the camera.
it's hard to tell with the barrier: there must be feathers lining the robe she wears. why else would there be so many of them lining the sides of her throat too?
... but it must pinprick something awful to kizuna's feelings if he stares at them too long, a little like the mortifying ordeal of being known. )
Rather than helping myself to the amenities, I don't suppose you can point me in the direction of the exit?
no subject
That the feathered beast is a pretty girl with soft eyes, well. The way his gaze flashes to her and sticks is damning enough. ]
...you — [ the word escapes from his mouth with an uncharacteristic honesty, almost as if he'd needed to breathe it out from the sudden vacuous height of his lungs to get them working again. And again, in implication of him: ] There you are.
[ Because that was the first instinct of an empathy forced through the glass by something it longs to compare itself to, mirrored in a way that scatters it like light. Where and who. Her, evidently, though the momentary slitting of his pupils forces him to look away before he's too consumed by what lies beyond the limousine's partition. Tension going into flux with some effort on his part, Kizuna smiles and leans against the car door frame. Hard reset — let him try that again.
Though his skin is still humming with the refracted colors of that beautiful run off. ]
Aha. I'd love to, in a simpler situation. But I'm afraid if you're looking for a way out, there isn't one.
[ Idly, he extends his hand to the other girl in the back seat. ]
You can go up, though.
no subject
maybe it's a fair exchange: the moment robin had arrived, unknowing and panicked, she'd taken more than a few liberties. the privacy she normally affords to others was laid promptly to the wayside. in exchange, she would get slivers of proximity thoughts, pent-up emotions, anything that might help her to figure out the extent of this kidnapping, what they wanted for ransom, if the family and her brother have already been informed—
all of that to say, there's nothing to read in the cacophony of similar confusion from the other girl in the car with her... and no real ill-intent from anyone. nothing more than a playful kindness from room service as he had first approached.
and how it had all hollowed out.
and that was before her resonance and the rebounding harmony she exerted to offer the other woman a preternatural calm. the nacre of it shines back into her eyes when she looks at him, an iridescence that seems to fold in on itself, trapped in the expanding event horizon of this man's sudden presence, his impossible gravity. reading his emotions feels like interference: a too similar wavelength, but discordant enough to know she's hit the wrong chord.
how interesting. )
I see... You're right. If it were as easy as driving a car through a window, someone else might have tried by now.
( —so much for that preternatural calm. the resident npc goes pale at once at the suggestion, registering that robin, who is saying all of this very calmly, is sitting in the driver's seat for a reason. she leaps into kizuna's offered... well, hand, possibly hoping he'd also lend the rest of his arm and the other to help her get out of the limousine right now, preferably immediately. )
I'm joking. ( *she isn't ) There were some others before you that mentioned getting rooms ready. They were in such a rush, I didn't get much of an opportunity to inquire further.
Is that all that's "up" there?
no subject
I assure you that someone likely has. However! ☆ [ a tick of his index finger and a wink, somewhat mellowed from his usual flippancy. ] Property damage isn't a small thing to have to settle here, especially for a new arrival.
[ Much to his new charge's anxiety. There is an apologetic downturn in his lashes as Kizuna helps the shaken npc up and out of the limousine with a few fortifying tuts and platitudes of encouragement — There, there, of course your esteemed driver was just kidding (*he knows she wasn't) and Look, someone's coming to help, you'll be alright~ He pats her arm and sends her on her way with one of the attendants now pulling new arrivals out of the vehicles. This esteemed driver, though...
He's too curious to let her go. And so, he climbs into the back of the limo instead, primly clicking the door shut behind him. It's an atmosphere subdued by dissonance, its friction a fading note. Still, Kizuna isn't typically a sensible enough person to shy from that noise. He indulges his curiosity far too much to not endure it.
A glimpse upwards yields a soft jawline hemmed in feathers and the same eyes looking back at him, though divested of their harmonic glow. It burns in his chest, the want to understand. However, there are questions he has to answer first, shoulders squaring lightly against new car leather. ]
Not all, no. Rooms are the staple of any resort, so you'll find plenty, but there's an impossible amount of other places to go, too.
[ Just not out. Whether by crashing car or a flourishing exit stage. ]
no subject
only this time, she feels like she's the one stationed behind the camera, watching this man cater to another stranger until help's been duly secured by way of the hotel staff. reading him like this reverberates warmth, the evocative sound she sometimes hears when she's amidst volunteers in some far-off corner of the universe, finding peace in like-minded company.
but the car door clicks shut with some kind of finality, his attention trained on her in this enclosed space. and ah — there it is again. )
As the map on this handcuff of mine describes?
( as she lifts her wrist and the watch wrapped around it, red streaky marks on the skin where she must have tried to wrench it off to no avail. it isn't this conversation she wants, she supposes, when she's still blinking stars out of her vision. that impossible tide of light washing back over her like harmony's refraction. the paradisaical strokes of infinite color, not flashes of a warning, but still fit enough to swallow her whole—
it's her own tuning reflected back at her. but it also isn't. less jarring the second time around, somehow, when they both must want the same thing and find it curious. but a mirror will reflect a mirror will reflect a mirror... and an echo will only inevitably repeat the same sound.
and where there is an echo, there must also be vast, empty space. but the reality is, she's still here, sitting in that silent beat before resonance with the warmest stranger she's ever met. )
How gracious of our hosts. And so creative too.
If it's that kind of show they're after, usually directors only offer a cold bed and at least one other paid body. ( that's... pretty glib when all is said and done. the feathers along each ear unfurl with her bad humor, ruffled, a little, and unruly from washes of emotion she doesn't seem to know what to do with. ) Fifty-two... seems a bit much for the price of a check-out to a stay I don't recall signing up for.
no subject
Idolatry, he thinks. A sweetness burnt to cauterization. How alike and yet so rifted, the schism aching with a longing that still doesn't quite feel like it belongs to him. It is... irony, he's sure. Always playing the game as intended and yet feeling cowed by such balletic desensitization.
Gaze drawing along the slope of ruffled feathers in polite interest, Kizuna's eyes have since returned to normal, the rounds of his pupils tightened slightly; around them, the auric color is watery at the edges, overbright. ]
Our benefactors enjoy dealing in excess. [ An agreement, however pale. ] But you can still make their stage yours with a little know-how... so that when the time comes, the beds might not be as cold.
[ Therein lies the truth of it: there isn't a way out of the steep price physically marked on them. He could sugarcoat that reality but finds himself shying from doing so, constitution thrumming with a thousand nameless colors. Sifting out the stardust to get at the foundation, the honesty, beneath.
A moment passes and he pushes up from his seat, crossing the limousine's length to kneel closer to the partition between the back and the driver's cab. ]
May I?
[ He gestures for her wrist that hosts the resort's handcuff, the one scored by redness. ]
no subject
she realizes after that moment, blinking again, that he's suddenly close enough to see it in his eyes: ink-blot pupils and a steady gaze — glinting brighter but not as bright as she feels it could be, like veins of newly minted gold. if it weren't for this hum of resonance beneath her skin, the way she can almost feel the color still working steadily between them both, then she might feel her hackles raising.
they should still. it's too easy to feel like this, as if they're speaking from some shared codex or secret language every time she commits the grave trespass of trying to glean his thoughts. not a single word shared in that brief link at the beginning. she's barely saying anything now. )
Mm.
( even if she is smiling in that same starry way, pulling the trailing sleeve of her robe back so she can present her streaky wrist and stuck watch through the open partition for his perusal.
she doesn't even shift when something in the limousine stirs to life, some tiny disco ball dropping from some false velvet ceiling and strobe lights casting about blue and red and yellow lights in the wrong kind of spectrum. whatever malfunction's at fault in this vehicle... hardly even fazes her, when she hasn't looked away once.
so it's not the disco lights when she offers, quietly, )
... They're very beautiful.
no subject
...thank you.
[ Atypical of him, but all of his defenses have been left burning like sun-shapes would burn on the backs of his eyelids. The ash of it, at the very least, is soft.
Untroubled fingers trace a few of the welts leading up to the band of the watch. Kizuna focuses on it a moment even if his peripherals are full of things that don't belong to him. Even more unnerving is how those things still feel like his own. He'd be hard pressed to think of a similar situation, a similar feeling. Not in the vast, constellate network of all the things he has ever felt. Instead of letting himself go adrift, he gravitates towards her; self-preservation has never been his strong suit. Tapping the surface of the watch, he peruses as much as it'll let him with a little more than cursory interest — she's still a wildcard.
Acceptance radiates from her as a wound might, the white-hot itch of losing something that simply can't be put back. And then the urge to defend it, its ghost in the way she thinks about exercising caution. That much he can still sense and he doesn't dare venture further. Slowly, he moves through the aftermath, the blotted out indistinctness of a detonation still ringing in his ears.
He hears the sounds, but doesn't understand the words. ]
That's quite the compliment. [ Kizuna hesitates, but not for long. ] I've never been unable to link with someone like that before.
[ One long year later, and so few people know what that even is. ]
What's your name?
no subject
it should be unnerving if she's left to think about it: an abduction with all the sweetness of a lasting dream. it should sharpen her focus and keep her wary, but it's difficult to perceive anything beyond the feeling of drifting in some milky tendril of the galaxy — looking at the cosmos of this stranger's eyes and feeling it expanding faster than the speed of light into her empty spaces. it must be harmony's doing that she thinks it familiar, or the dissolution of a link which she thinks more familiar still. she should wonder, maybe, how she could know what he means. but here and now, in the shared blast radius of some otherwise distant star, unmoored in the undertow of each other's reflected feelings, it's harder to imagine how she couldn't.
still. even with robin's acceptance, even with whatever it is that they shared, her body is still flesh and blood and her pulse hiccups, thumping against kizuna's fingertips along her inner wrist. )
My name is Robin.
( because, they are strangers, after all. the speckling of artificial lights and the tinny, hushed sound of the radio playing could almost ground her as her eyes flicker down, watching his hand for some kind of tell, some reason for the casual touch.
not that she would pull away. not after all of that. whatever he could want, she would want also — a thought with no basis except for the fact that it seems so dangerously true. )
... I didn't think that resonance could ever work in that manner, either.
And you?
( his name? or the way he had felt alongside her? too many questions all wrapped up in the one. )
no subject